Chapter 15 - Patience

Summary

Is “patience a virtue” in Shakespeare? Yes, this chapter argues—though Shakespeare also fully acknowledges how the word and the virtue itself can be abused. For an example of the more troubling ways in which patience is invoked by Shakespeare, consider Petruchio’s promise to see Katherine become “a second Grissel,” an icon of patient wifely submission. Or take the jarring way Prince Ferdinand, in The Tempest, reaps romantic rewards for “patient” labors of the same sort that the enslaved Caliban has long unwillingly and unprofitably endured. Such scandalous appeals to patience invite us to read into Shakespeare a modern critique of this virtue: a critique that has been prominent ever since Nietzsche called patience one of Western culture’s key “fabricated ideals,”a constraint on human potential. To show why the abuse of patience discourse is not the whole story in Shakespeare, this chapter recalls how classical and Christian traditions envision patience as not a loser’s but a winner’s virtue. In classical ethics it is a practice of acting deliberately rather than reactively. And in Christianity, patience not only builds confidence in a better world to come, but—as Marina’s perseverance in Pericles shows—can also further meaningful change in this one.