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

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

Homophonic Hamlet: Making Hamlet Ma(i)d

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

The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980

Shakespeare's Pronunciation

1. 'You speak a language that I understand not': myths and realities 2. 'Now, sir, what is your text?': knowing the sources 3. 'In print I found it': Shakespeare graphology 4. 'Know my stops': Shakespearean punctuation 5. 'Speak the speech': Shakespearean phonology 6. 'Trippingly upon the tongue': Shakespearean pronunciation 7. 'Think on my words': Shakespearean vocabulary 8. 'Talk of a noun and a verb': Shakespearean grammar 9. 'Hear sweet discourse': Shakespearean conversation Epilogue: 'Your daring tongue': Shakespearean creativity Appendix: an A-to-Z of Shakespeare's false friends.

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Think On My Words: Exploring Shakespeare's Language

Shakespeare's works and Elizabethan pronunciation

HE character of Ophelia seems to have been puzzling to many critics who have written about the play. As a minor personage of the tragedy, she has not received the careful analysis accorded Hamlet, Gertrude, or Claudius, or even Laertes, Horatio, or Polonius. Her role in the play is not clear to critical writers who have attempted to answer the many questions which arise about Ophelia's relations with her father and with Hamlet -questions which must be answered if her madness is to be explained. Is her madness occasioned by her father's death? by her rejected love for Hamlet? or by both, in varying degrees? The romantic critics apparently felt that the less said about Ophelia the better. "What shall be said of her? for eloquence is mute before her!" asks Mrs. Jameson. Hazlitt considers that she "is a character almost too exquisitely touching to be dwelt upon", and calls her a "flower too soon faded". Strachey writes, "There is more to be felt than to be said in the study of Ophelia's character just because she is a creation of such perfectly feminine proportions and beauty". And Bradley believes that in her fate we have "an element, not of deep tragedy,. but of pathetic beauty, which makes the analysis of her character seem almost a desecration".' Ophelia has received better treatment than this, of course, and she deserves better. She is not just the "poor wispy Ophelia" which Katherine Mansfield would make her, but a tenderhearted, delicate-minded young girl, well reared in proper obedience to her father, and experiencing what is apparently her first introduction to the bittersweet delights of love. And yet her tragedy seems to me to have been misinterpreted by a long array of critics, who have emphasized that her madness is due chiefly to the death of her father. According to John Draper, Ophelia's madness "comes about . . . because that father, whom she loved so dearly, came to a sudden and shocking end". L. L. Schficking, after remarking that "Grief at her father's sudden and unexplained death has unbalanced her mind", argues that any modern spectator who thinks that her madness is due to the broken relations with Hamlet is confuted by Shakespeare's making Claudius "expressly state that her madness is due to Polonius' death". Rebecca West goes so far as to say, "No line in the play suggests that she felt either passion or affection for Hamlet". In the last century, Roderick Benedix writes of Polonius' death as serving a dramatic purpose, "inasmuch as it is the cause of Ophelia's madness", but at the same time he perceives that

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