The Poetics of Time in Marlowe and Shakespeare: Hastening Time (Doctor Faustus) vs Delaying Action (Hamlet)

Abstract

This study examines how Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet embody radically different temporal poetics that shape their tragic forms and protagonists’ destinies. Drawing on close textual analysis and recent scholarship on early modern temporal experience, the paper argues that Doctor Faustus constructs a poetics of acceleration, where the protagonist’s impatience and pact with the demonic compresses time toward inevitable ruin, whereas Hamlet enacts a poetics of delay, where recursive reflection and hesitation expand dramatic time and postpone decisive action (Hamlet 3.1.56–89). In Faustus, the protagonist’s contracting timeline (notably the fixed twenty-four years of his demonic contract) becomes a structuring mechanism that intensifies his existential and spiritual crisis, a point underscored by contemporary work on temporal suspension in Marlowe’s verse (Dunston). Conversely, Hamlet’s famous soliloquies and its thematic exploration of indecision exemplify Shakespeare’s interest in stalled action and temporal suspension, reflecting early modern anxieties about agency, meaning, and state order (Hamlet). The major finding is that time functions not merely as backdrop but as active dramaturgical force: Marlowe accelerates toward catastrophe; Shakespeare dilates events through introspection and delay. This contrast reveals distinct temporal dynamics in early modern tragedy and underscores the plays’ differing engagements with theology, subjectivity, and agency.