In Act 4, Scene 1, Time is personified as the Chorus and addresses the audience directly in a monologue that summarizes the events that took place during the 16 years that elapsed between the end of Act 3 and the beginning of Act 4. This personification of time allows the play to make a smooth transition from one time period in the play to the next. Indeed, Time asks the audience to suspend their disbelief about the idea that such a long period of time can pass onstage: "Impute it not a crime / To me or my swift passage that I slide / O’er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried / Of that wide gap."
Time goes on to highlight the very fact that the audience is spending time watching a play:
Of this allow,
If ever you have spent time worse ere now. If never, yet that Time himself doth say
He wishes earnestly you never may.
Time, personified, thus presents himself as a mediator between the fictional world of the play and the audience. Moreover, the personification of a concept as abstract as time requires a suspension of disbelief in itself. In this way, the personification of Time contributes to the audience's awareness of the play itself as a form of artifice.
