In the revenge tragedies of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, the negotiation between the prodigal urge to act and, conversely, the necessity of patiently resisting action, is central to the presentation of the gendered identities of revenging characters and to the theatrical experience itself. In this chapter, I develop and complicate the ideas and arguments about patience and prodigality explored in Chapters 1 and 2 by analysing a number of revenge tragedies. The Spanish Tragedy (1585-89), Titus Andronicus (1590-92), Antonio’s Revenge (1600-1), The Tragedy of Hoffman (1602), Othello (1603-4), The Atheist’s Tragedy (1607-11), The Duchess of Malfi (1612-14) and The Changeling (1622) in different ways draw attention to both the patience and prodigality of the revenger. This chapter argues that male revengers are authorised whether they achieve vengeance (thus asserting their masculine authority and carrying out the filial duty which upholds patriarchal norms) or whether they delay revenge (and in doing so express a degree of Christian piety). Female revengers, on the other hand, seem to be denigrated whether they act to revenge (exposing themselves to accusations of sexual impropriety) or delay vengeance (therefore establishing their ineffectiveness and cruelty).

Chapter 2 examines the concept of prodigality and the impulse to seize the moment through the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prodigal son as a temporally subversive denier of delay. I begin with metatheatrical moments that define the prodigal’s denial of futurity in Shakespeare’s second tertralogy. I argue that the action of the prodigal’s riotous living, which challenges hierarchies of age, is paradoxically figured as a period of delay: it is a rejection of social maturation that threatens to feminise the prodigal as ineffectual. I go on to examine five Prodigal Husband plays that constitute a specific sub-genre of city comedy: Thomas Heywood’s How a man may chuse a good wife from a bad (1601-2) andThe Wise Woman of Hoxton (c.1604), the anonymous The London prodigall (1603-5) and The faire maide of Bristow (1603-4), and George Wilkins’ The miseries of inforst mariage (1605-6). In these plays, we see prodigality enforced by the older generation in order to disempower the young. However, when the prodigal son’s repentance is delayed, and he becomes a prodigal husband, he poses a threat to the stability of the marital unit, and potentially to systems of patriarchal control.

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.