2 Table of contents 3 Acknowledgements 5 Note on texts 6 Introduction The temporal gendering of early modern subjects i Gendering time in recent criticism ii Defining the ‘early modern temporal consciousness’ iii The temporalities of gender in medical and conduct literature iv Patience, prodigality and revenge: gender and delay in early modern theatre 7 11 20 34 56 Chapter 1 The delay’s the thing: patience, prodigality and revenge in Hamlet i ‘[C]ool patience’ and ‘wicked speed’: women waiting and not waiting ii ‘[D]rinking, fencing, swearing’: the delays of prodigal action iii ‘[S]wift’ yet ‘dull’: the prodigality and patience of revenge iv Thrifty prodigality, wasteful patience: Hamlet beyond binaries 61 64 77 87 95 Chapter 2 Virtuous delay: the long-suffering wife ‘armed with patience’ i ‘In your patience possess ye your souls’: patience as authorised delay ii ‘Delay breeds danger’: the denigration of patience iii ‘Women must have their longings, or they die’: whores and shrews iv The dual temporality of patience v The Patient Husband and the Honest Whore 101 104 122 128 138 144 Chapter 3 Subversive action: the prodigal husband as ‘[g]ood aged youth’ i ‘Ryot, Swearing, Drunkennes, and Pride’: prodigality as action ii ‘[T]hey that dye most vertuous, hath in their youth, liued most vicious’: prodigality as delay iii From prodigal son to prodigal husband iv ‘I have a project in my brain begot’: patience turns prodigal 151 153 169

Gender and delay in early modern theatre : patience, prodigality and revenge

This book analyses the cultural and theatrical intersections of early modern temporal concepts and gendered identities. Through close readings of the works of Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood and others, across the genres of domestic comedy, city comedy and revenge tragedy, Sarah Lewis shows how temporal tropes are used to delineate masculinity and femininity on the early modern stage, and vice versa. She sets out the ways in which the temporal constructs of patience, prodigality and revenge, as well as the dramatic identities that are built from those constructs, and the experience of playgoing itself, negotiate a fraught opposition between action in the moment and delay in the duration. This book argues that looking at time through the lens of gender, and gender through the lens of time, is crucial if we are to develop our understanding of the early modern cultural construction of both.

Time and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage

Introduction: The Actions and Delays of Gendered Temporalities

Virtuous Delay: The Enduring Patient Wife

What do contemporary audiences hear when they attend a performance of one of Shakespeare's plays, and how might this differ from the way it was received by an Elizabethan audience? This article examines how historical pronunciation can reveal new meanings in contemporary performance through the investigation of puns and double entrendre, and explores what modern practitioners might glean from an understanding of the listening practices of Elizabethans. As a culture that values literacy and attributes authority to the written word, to \"look with thine ears\" is not a practice with which we are readily familiar. How does one effectively communicate the more fluid understanding of words of Renaissance English, given that the modern audience is relatively unsophisticated in listening for wordplay in comparison to an early modern audience? And moreover, how might one communicate this in working with an audience used to a fixed meaning of words, and accustomed to the rules of standardization?

"Look with Thine Ears:" Puns, Wordplay, and Original Pronunciation in Performance

(2009). Homophonic Hamlet: Making Hamlet Ma(i)d. The Explicator: Vol. 67, No. 3, pp. 209-212.

Cameron Hunt

Papers

Homophonic Hamlet: Making Hamlet Ma(i)d

Jephthah's Daughter's Daughter: Ophelia