Chapter 4 - The Delay’s the Thing: Patience, Prodigality and Revenge in Hamlet

Summary

In this chapter I return to the concepts of patience, prodigality and revenge to explore how a more nuanced reading of the opposition between action and delay that moves beyond that binary gives us new ways to think about the construction of gendered and sexualised identities in Hamlet. I identify the ways in which the axes of time and of gender intersect through the dramatic identities of the patient virgin, the prodigal and the revenging son in Hamlet. By destabilising time, I suggest that Hamlet also destabilises gender categories. The discourses of patience and prodigality which drive that destablisation, and which I have charted in this chapter and in this book, give us new ways to understand Hamlet as procrastinating revenger.