Conclusion: Echoes

Summary

Joan W. Scott’s consideration of echo as a temporal construct suggests that it is dependent on the same dual temporality that, throughout this book, I have argued structures the concepts of patience, prodigality and revenge in early modern theatre and culture. The echo is active in that it charts a linear progression of meaning into the future away from an original source; as Scott suggests, ‘the return of partial phrases alters the original sense and comments on it as well’. Yet the echo is also passive – ‘incomplete, belated’ – in that it is fundamentally premised on repetition, on return and on cyclicality; it is born of a necessary delay, an inescapable in between time, which drags it back into the past. As my analysis of a range of plays from the early modern stage has shown, patience, prodigality and revenge are concepts which are similarly predicated on this kind of dual temporality; concepts defined simultaneously by waiting and not waiting, by action and delay. Furthermore, the concepts of action and delay are themselves premised on a kind of double-time: actions can delay and delays can be active. Scott suggests it is the dual temporality of the echo that exposes the ‘gaps of meaning and intelligibility’ in the ‘notion of enduring sameness that often attaches to identity’. Similarly, as I have argued throughout this book, the dual temporalities of patience, prodigality and revenge work to expose ‘gaps of meaning and intelligibility’ by multiplying and therefore deconstructing the simple binary oppositions of male/female on the early modern stage. To conclude, I would like to illustrate how this dual temporality, and the challenge to temporal and gendered binary distinctions I suggest it makes, is made evident by the echo as a specific dramatic device.