This introduction begins with a reading of Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, and with its evocation of Opportunity as a sexual temptress, which brings temporal concepts and gendered identities into conversation with each other in complex and revealing ways. The introduction goes on to set out the critical and conceptual foundations of the book as a whole, explaining how scholarly work which has focused on time, gender and performance has helped me to develop an understanding of the opposition of action and inaction, which I argue is central to the early modern temporal consciousness, to theatrical experience and to the early modern construction of gendered identity. In the second part of the introduction, I examine some of the ways in which early modern thinking about time and about gender developed in relation to classical ideas, religious and medical discourse and conduct literature, which workedboth to define and destabilise a conflicted binary opposition between waiting and not waiting. I then return to The Revenger’s Tragedy to illustrate how the play engaged with this supposed binary opposition, suggesting that its negotiation and complication were central to early modern performances of both gender and time on the early modern stage.