Introduction: The Actions and Delays of Gendered Temporalities

Abstract

In the first scene of Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (–), the opportune moment for Vindice to enact his revenge is figured as a disdainful and venereally diseased ‘madam’, or prostitute. Having waited nine years for the right moment to punish the Duke for the murder of his beloved Gloriana, Vindice impatiently enquires of his brother and coconspirator: ‘Has that bald madam, Opportunity | Yet thought upon’s?’ (..–). This female personification of the temporal concept of opportunity as sexually available yet simultaneously elusive and potentially destructive was common in the dramatic and emblematic culture of the period: seizing the moment was often imagined as seizing the fleeing or fleeting woman on the early modern stage and in early modern visual culture (see Figures  and ). I begin this book with Vindice’s evocation of Opportunity as a sexual temptress, and will return to it later in this introduction, because like many images and moments from the drama of England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it brings temporal concepts and gendered identities into conversation with each other in complex and revealing ways. This book argues that attending to time through the lens of gender, and gender through the lens of time, is crucial if we are to further develop our understanding of the early modern cultural construction of both, as well as our understanding of the sexual identities and behaviours that are often foundational to those constructions. It scrutinises the intersection of time and gender, and the identities and character types defined in relation to and as a result of that intersection, in both early modern culture and on the early modern stage. With Gloriana’s skull in hand, Vindice watches the Duke and his family process across the stage by torchlight at the beginning of The Revenger’s Tragedy. ‘[S]ighing o’er death’s visor’, he ruminates on the lost beauty of his ‘betrothed lady’, and on the challenge of identifying the right moment in the future – the right ‘day, hour, minute’ – in which to take action and achieve his revenge against the ‘royal lecher’ who poisoned her when she