This post was written by Hatchet staff writer Cailley LaPara.

For Rebecca Bushnell, timing is everything. And according to her research, Shakespeare would agree.

Bushnell, president of the Shakespeare Association of America, studied this summer the relationship between time, tragedy and comedy in Shakespeare’s plays, focusing on how the playwright speeds up or slows time to alter the audience’s perception.

Bushnell shared her findings in the Mount Vernon campus’s Post Hall Friday afternoon in her seminar, “What Is’t O’Clock: Comic and Tragic Temporality in Shakespeare.”

Check out the top five takeaways from her speech.

1. Time: tragedy’s enemy, comedy’s friend

Time seems to be out of the audience’s and characters’ control in Shakespearean tragedies, Bushnell explained, while the opposite is true for the famed playwright’s comedies.

Classic comedies, like The Comedy of Errors, offer a satisfying conclusion.

In tragedies, like the famous demise of Romeo and Juliet, the end can be frustrating for the audience, who are left wondering if disaster could have been averted if only there had been more time.

2. Medium matters.

But the viewing experience, like a live theater experience versus a film, can also affect a viewer’s perception of time.

While watching a play in a theater, time seems to always move forward, which Bushnell said is what Shakespeare originally intended.

But watching a movie version can change the experience, because viewers have more control over time, with the ability to pause, fast-forward and rewind footage.

3. Time is an invention.

While clocks are a part of daily life today, Bushnell explained that mechanical clocks were a relatively new phenomenon in Shakespeare’s time.

This invention, Bushnell said, changed the way people saw themselves and positioned themselves in their surroundings. As clock towers chimed in every hour in town centers, people’s lives became newly ruled by time, contributing to the idea that people were moving towards some end.

4. Shakespeare’s plays are timeless.

And though Shakespeare crafted his plays during the Elizebethan era,  Bushnell insisted that the themes and concepts of Shakespeare’s plays can be applied to any time period.

Modern movies like “10 Things I Hate About You” and “Kiss Me Kate,” Bushnell said, are modern adaptions of Shakespearian works.

“Shakespeare was already somewhere else,” Bushnell said.