Hamlet is a play notoriously concerned with issues of temporality. Hamlet’s delay – his deferral of vengeance – and his resulting feminisation have been the focus of a vast amount of scholarly analysis. Much of this work is reliant on the notion that gender on the early modern stage is temporally defined: that men and women are presented as existing at different ends of a temporal binary opposition which pits male action against female delay. In this paper, I suggest that Hamlet works to complicate that binary opposition through its engagement with the dual temporality which defines the prodigal’s transformational identity. The prodigal son both denies the delays of filial duty in order to enjoy the actions of unauthorised riotous living, and at the same time delays his own authorised social maturation through that transgressive enactment of rebellion. This paper explores the ways in which Hamlet’s gendered identity is constructed through the text’s negotiation of the contradictory imperatives to wait and to act which define the temporal identity of the prodigal son.

—Sarah Lewis, University College Dublin