1. States, Bert O., Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 30Google Scholar.

2. On the move away from painted backdrops, wing and drop sets, and relatively bare stages, and toward three-dimensional, hyperrealistic stage settings, see Henderson, Mary C., “Scenography, Stagecraft, and Architecture,” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol. 2: 1870–1945, ed. Wilmeth, Don B. and Bigsby, Christopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 487–513CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 496.

3. On the distinction between an external “time obedience” at midcentury and the “internalized time discipline” of later in the century, see McCrossen, Alexis, Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. On the debut of national standard time, see McCrossen, 89–113.

5. Doane, Mary Ann, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 7Google Scholar; italics in original.

6. McCrossen (7–8) cites 1900 as the peak of this era. By the 1920s and 1930s, wireless communications had obviated the necessity of public clocks, and neon signs and electric lights eclipsed their faces.

7. The sense of a mismatch between representations of time and “real time” in this period is only one moment in a longer story. As E. P. Thompson notes, since the Industrial Revolution, each phase of capital has imposed a feeling of temporal disjunction upon workers, as owners force them to shift from task-oriented work to ever more minutely measured forms of clock-oriented work, increasingly expropriating the value of their labor. See Thompson, E. P, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present, no. 38 (1967): 56–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Doane, 4.

9. Ibid., 1–32.

10. Studies of time consciousness circa 1900 have generally credited cinema as the most important medium for fostering it. However, as Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs note, the stage influenced film at least as much as film influenced the stage in the early years. See Brewster, Ben and Jacobs, Lea, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford University Press, 1997), 12Google Scholar. As David Wiles points out, moreover, there is a notable absence of books on time and theatrical performance. See Wiles, David, Theatre & Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the ways in which “The history of theater is bound up with the history of time” more generally see also Wiles, 54–67, quote at 54.

11. States, 30.

12. See Richardson, Brian, “‘Time Is Out of Joint’: Narrative Models and the Temporality of the Drama,” Poetics Today 8.2 (1987): 299–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 308.

13. My account of melodrama is influenced by the contributions of theatre studies scholars who have argued for melodrama's wide cultural, historical, and even political significance in the nineteenth century, broadening the study of melodrama beyond Peter Brooks's text-based, influential study of the “melodramatic imagination,” to uncover continuities between melodrama and industrial modernity. In this work, melodrama emerges as less a discrete genre—as opposed to realism, for instance—than a broader “way of seeing” that, as Jim Davis puts it, “teaches its spectators how to look at the world around them and even how to behave in that world”; Davis, Jim, “Melodrama On and Off the Stage,” in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, ed. John, Juliet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 686–701Google Scholar, at 700. On the melodramatic imagination, see Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, 2d ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. On melodrama and modernity, see Daly, Nicholas, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Moody, Jane, “The Drama of Capital: Risk, Belief, and Liability on the Victorian Stage,” in Victorian Literature and Finance, ed. O'Gorman, Francis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 91–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Singer, Ben, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Bratton, Jacky, “The Contending Discourses of Melodrama,” in Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Bratton, Jacky, Cook, Jim, and Gledhill, Christine (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 38–49Google Scholar.

14. On the rituals of the pocket watch in daily life, see McCrossen, 85.

15. The uncle, Egbert Pettibone, is a panicked businessman and (he thinks) jilted spouse, who is himself continually checking his watch at the beginning of the play.

16. A foreign setting may have offered Gillette a safe cover for exploring issues closer to home. The play is set in London, and both Tom and Bender are Cockneys, whereas Struthers is evidently middle class.

17. Gillette, William, All the Comforts of Home: A Comedy in Four Acts (New York: Harold Roorbach, 1897), 74Google Scholar.

18. On the melodramatic situation, and its relationship to the stage picture, see Brewster, vi, and 1–33. On stage pictorialism more broadly, see Meisel, Martin, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Vardac, Nicholas A., Stage to Screen; Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (New York: B. Blom, 1968)Google Scholar; and Booth, Michael R., Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850–1910 (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)Google Scholar.

19. See Brewster, 25.

20. As Aronson points out, “A significant way in which we perceive and measure time is … through space.” See “Time and Space on the Stage,” Performance Research 18.3 (2013): 84–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 84.

21. Brewster, 27.

22. For instance, Brewster cites the fourteen-minute lighting transformation representing the dawning morning in Belasco's Madam Butterfly as exemplary of the situational aesthetic. Ibid., 29.

23. Thompson, 90.

24. The violence and exploitation of slavery is actively erased in these plays, particularly through the docile and loyal house slaves that were stock figures in Civil War melodramas. On the affective appeal of the church bell for nineteenth-century audiences, see Courbin, Alain, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside, trans. Thom, Martin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

25. For an overview of these techniques, see Altman, Rick, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 40–2Google Scholar.

26. For a discussion of the vogue for Civil War melodrama that began in the 1880s, see Robinson, Marc, The American Play: 1787–2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 65–105Google Scholar.

27. William C. de Mille, The Warrens of Virginia, in America's Lost Plays (gen. ed. Barrett H. Clark), vol. 16: “Monte Cristo” … & Other Plays, ed. Russak, J. B. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 287–360Google Scholar, at 344. The scene reminds us that soldiers popularized the pocket watch and that the Civil War in turn spurred the growth of the railway and telegraph systems that would lead to the establishment of the public clock era. On the Civil War and the watch, see McCrossen, 63–88.

28. Quoted in Marker, Lise-Lone, David Belasco: Naturalism in the American Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 71Google Scholar.

29. De Mille, 351.

30. Belasco, David, The Girl of the Golden West (New York: Samuel French, 1942), 59Google Scholar.

31. Ibid., 76. He also specifies that the scene begins at 1 a.m., so presumably we are to imagine that the clock's hands have moved forward during the scene. Stills of the production suggest its placement and size would have made it difficult to see moving hands.

32. Ibid., 78.

33. The play's signs have the potential to go far beyond their role as representations of historical milieus by appearing to refer to different characters, or by offering themselves to be decoded or consumed in ways that have nothing to do with the play. See Robinson, 140.

34. Belasco, David, The Girl of the Golden West, in Representative American Dramas, National and Local, ed. Moses, Montrose J., rev. Krutch, Joseph Wood (Boston: Little, Brown, 1941), 78Google Scholar. More detailed and technical stage directions pertaining to this scene can be found in the Samuel French edition (76).

35. At the risk of overburdening this scene, we could say that Belasco's play engages in the same project as early film here—to produce “contingency and ephemerality as graspable, representable, but nevertheless antisystematic.” By being reintegrated into the narrative, the chance movement captured by the stage picture—like a film still—becomes legible, while still testifying to the truth of “antisystematic” forces (Doane, 11–12). On the influence of melodramatic dramaturgy on early film during the transition to features, see Brewster, 29, 48–78, and 111–37. On chance and its representability in the public clock era, see Doane, 11–12.

36. Belasco, David, The Heart of Maryland, in America's Lost Plays, vol. 18: “The Heart of Maryland” and Other Plays, ed. Hughes, Glenn and Savage, George (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 169–250Google Scholar, at 235–6.

37. The scene is considerably more risqué than it might seem. Kim Marra notes that Belasco was likely inspired by pornographic imagery featuring women on swings. See Marra, Kim, Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865–1914 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 202Google Scholar.

38. Belasco, Heart of Maryland, 224.

39. Ibid.

40. Quoted in Marra, 198.

41. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, references to the human attributes of timepieces first appear during the mid-sixteenth century, when the mechanism of the medieval town and church clock was successfully miniaturized and timepieces became personal possessions (OED online, s.vv. “face” and “hand,” accessed 1 June 2018). On the miniaturization of the clock, the industry born from it, and its social effects, see Landes, David S., Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 90–8Google Scholar.

42. See Schechner, Richard, Public Domain: Essays on the Theater (Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill, 1969), 75Google Scholar.

43. On the “affective politics” of the theatre that potentially emerges from this confrontation, see Ridout, Nicholas, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44. Baldwin, Peter C., In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 64–6Google Scholar.

45. On the rise of this “business-class theatre” see McConachie, Bruce A.. Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schwartz, Michael, Broadway and Corporate Capitalism: The Rise of the Professional-Managerial Class (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. On Gillette's understated acting—and the telegraph as the larger source for realist acting itself—see Grobe, Christopher, “‘Every Nerve Keyed Up’: Telegraph Plays and Networked Performance, 1850–1900,” Theater 46.2 (2016): 7–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 15.

47. There is also a working clock specified in Gillette's Electricity (1910). His other Civil War play, Held by the Enemy (1886), evinces the same interest in temporal exactitude as Secret Service.

48. Gillette, William, An American Drama Arranged in Four Acts and Entitled “Secret Service: A Romance of the Southern Confederacy” (New York: Samuel French, 1898), 10Google Scholar.

49. “Noises Off-Stage Aid Illusion of Gillette Plays,” Christian Science Monitor, 11 December 1915.

50. The telegraph scene in Boucicault's The Long Strike also featured a large stage clock, which was to be working throughout the scene. See Kember, Joe, “Popular Sensations: Institutional Modernity and the Textual History of The Long Strike,” in Visual Delights Two: Exhibition and Reception, ed. Toulmin, Vanessa and Popple, Simon (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2005), 46–59Google Scholar, at 53.

51. Grobe, 15.

52. Gillette, William, Secret Service: A Drama of “The Southern Confederacy” in Four Acts, in Representative American Plays from 1767 to the Present Day, 5th ed., ed. and intro. Quinn, Arthur Hobson (New York: Century, 1930), 545–620Google Scholar, at 587.

53. Ibid.

54. Howells—making the common mistake of attributing the unities of time and space to Aristotle—wrote of Secret Service that he was “vastly interested to see how closely, with or without knowing it, [Gillette] had observed” the “classical unities,” and found the most interesting of all his “quite Greek regard for the unity of time.” See Howells, W[illiam] D[ean], “Life & Letters,” Harper's Weekly 41 (30 January 1897): 106–7Google Scholar.

55. Gillette, Secret Service (Samuel French ed.), 68, 96, 146, and 183.

56. Robinson, 92.

57. Gillette, Secret Service, in Quinn, 569, 597.

58. Robinson (95) also describes both the sight and the sound of the dialogue in Secret Service as “telegraphic,” imbued with a “sputtering urgency.”

59. Gillette, William, The Illusion of the First Time in Acting, Publications of the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University, 2d ser., vol. 1 (New York: Dramatic Museum of Columbia University, 1915), 41Google Scholar.

60. Quinn, Arthur Hobson, A History of the American Drama, from the Beginning to the Civil War (London: Harper & Brothers, 1923), 237Google Scholar.

61. “Revives ‘Secret Service’: William Gillette Scores Again in Thrilling War Play,” Washington Post, 3 December 1915.

62. Robinson, 89.

63. On the Newtonian distinction between “absolute” time and “relative” time, and its significance for the theater–stage distinction, see Aronson, 86.

64. For a more extensive reading of time in Three Sisters see Wiles, 12-13.

65. Aronson, 92. On the way time becomes the “subject and center of the drama” for twentieth-century playwrights like Sartre and Beckett, see Schechner, 76.

66. Aronson, 92.

67. Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, trans. Zohn, Harry (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 247Google Scholar.

68. States, 30–1.

69. Veltruský, Jiri, “Man and Object in the Theater,” in A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, ed. Garvin, Paul L. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1964), 83–91Google Scholar, at 88.

70. See Stein, Gertrude, “Plays,” in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932–1946 (New York: Library of America, 1998), 244–69Google Scholar, at 259. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.

71. On the relationship between sensory experience and cognitive knowledge in Stein—which she called “acquaintance” and “description”—see Meyer, Steven, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

72. On Stein's aspiration to convey an accurate sense of her subject by rhythm and movement, see Chessman, Harriet Scott, The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.