William C. Carroll

Genealogies have been termed ‘maps of time’ by Eviatar Zerubavel, who has usefully synthesized recent sociological and anthropological work that describes genealogy as, among other things, a structure of thought, a form of historical imagining, and a visualization of time and kinship. Perhaps the most compelling of human sensations and experiences, time is experienced primarily as it passes, which raises the question: How can time be represented? Many ways have been invented by which time is measured – hourglass, mechanical clock, sundial, water clock, lunar cycles, astronomical clock, digital watch, zodiac, atomic clock, calendars of all types, and so on – but that is a different question. Modern scholarship on early modern theories of time, and applications to Shakespeare’s plays and other literary works, have articulated much of the period’s rich discourse on the subject, and philosophical writers from Aristotle and Agamben to Serres and Latour have worried the subject. In this paper I will explore briefly how late medieval and early modern culture visually represented Time, rather than simply measured it, through modes such as allegory, emblems, and especially the genre of genealogical charts. My analysis will consider images such as Petrarch’s The Triumph of Time and other works influenced by it, and allegorical personifications such as those found in Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems, but the main focus will be on genealogical images. Some genealogical images represent the flow of time as descent: ‘lineage’ is, as the OED has it, ‘Lineal descent from an ancestor; ancestry, pedigree’ (n.1a). One problem with the concept of descent is that it also implies decline, as the originary blood of the founder of a family or nation is diluted generation by generation, so that by the 8th or 10th succeeding generation, there was scarcely any of the founder’s blood still flowing. In other charts, time flows upward from a founding ancestor – probably in imitation of the tradition of the Tree of Jesse, which originates in Jesse’s side as he sleeps, rising up to Jesus. I will offer a close reading of several of these genealogies in terms of their use of recurring tropes to indicate true and false children, the frequent erasure of undesirable kin, the multiple visual forms that come to represent lineage, and especially, the exclusion of women from visualizations of descent. Genealogy is primarily masculine discourse, and genealogical trees, as Mary Bouquet has observed, often “reflect a (patriarchal) vision of the present projected onto (and struggling with the vestiges of) a (matriarchal) past.” The paper will conclude with an examination of these issues as embodied in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, from the prophecies to the Show of Kings, with lineage – the line that stretches out to the crack of doom – as a central concern of the play.