Chapter 1 - Virtuous Delay: The Enduring Patient Wife

Summary

Chapter 1 focuses on the concept of patience and the figure of the patient wife, looking in detail at this identity of female delay in early modern conduct and religious literature, and in a group of plays from the turn of the century. I begin by thinking about the nature of performative endings in All’s Well that Ends Well (1603-4), going on to examine the figure of Patient Griselda as an exemplar of female virtuous inaction in medieval narratives and in Dekker, Chettle and Haughton’s The pleasant comodie of Patient Grissill (1600). I argue that patience is figured as a temporal framework of patriarchally authorised virtuous inaction (chastity, silence and obedience), and yet also that patience can be denigrated in order to define women as obstructing socially authorised male action on the early modern stage. This chapter also examines the temporality of characters defined as prostitutes and shrews, both in Patient Grissill and in Parts One and Two of The honest whore (1604, 1604-5) as well as the anomalous figure of the patient husband. It explores the ways in which a specific kind of active patience can complicate the binaries that set duration against the instant and passivity against agency.