While Prince Escalus is not, strictly speaking, an emblematic figure like Heywood's Janus, he does exhibit a striking intellectual bifrontality as he reaches out from a fixed moment in time to embrace past and future events, and this bifrontality is in some respects emblematic. Shakespeare has gone behind the conventional image of prudence to the ethical concept which informs the image; and this concept he communicates not by explicit verbal reference, nor through a visual (i.e., theatrical) image, nor even by verbal imagery, but by means of a distinctive thought process prominently displayed at certain critical moments in the course of the play. This thought process is embodied in and revealed through spoken utterances, which are by nature temporal and discursive rather than spatial and static: we hear the Prince considering first the past and then the future, whereas we see the purely emblematic Janus figure, which enjoys an exclusively spatial mode of existence, attending to past and future simultaneously. Nevertheless, the Prince is at least partially emblematic. Even though he is physically time-bound and thus forced to express his ideas discursively, the intellectual activity embodied in his speech acquires an essentially atemporal mode of existence when it is considered as a completed process. In other words, the mental acts of examining first the past and then the future remain discrete elements in a temporal series only until they are viewed as components of the single intellectual activity known as prudence; at this moment the dynamic and discursive process is perceived as a completed and therefore static and self-contained entity, and to this extent it partakes of the emblematic. And it is this emblematic quality more than the Friar's aphorisms which reveals the full complexity of Shakespeare's interest in prudence. For the bifrontality which is the distinctive trait of the Prince is made to do double duty; it represents not simply prudence but also fortune. It is a vehicle with two tenors, and the interaction of the tenors helps to define the play's meaning.
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