Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama

This collection of essays explores the material, economic and dramatic roles of stage properties in early modern English drama.

Jonathan Gil Harris (Edited by), Natasha Korda (Edited by)

9780521813228, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 January 2003

358 pages, 8 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.7 kg

'For anyone who thought the early modern actor stood in a 'wooden O', this book is a must.' Journal of New Theatre Quarterly

This collection of essays studies the material, economic and dramatic roles played by stage properties in early modern English drama. Often, the received wisdom about the commercial stage in Shakespeare's time is that it was a bare one, uncluttered by objects. Staged Properties offers a critique of this view. The volume offers valuable evidence and insight into the modes of production, circulation and exchange that brought such properties as sacred garments, household furnishings, pawned objects and even false beards on to the stage. Departing from previous scholarship which has mainly focused solely on the symbolic or iconographic aspects of props, these essays explore their material dimensions, and in particular, their status as a special form of property. The volume reflects upon what the material history of stage props may tell us about the changing demographics, modes of production and consumption, and notions of property that contributed to the rise of the commercial theatre in London.

List of illustrations
Notes on contributors
1. Introduction: towards a materialist account of stage properties Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda
Part I. Histories: 2. Properties of skill: product placement in early English artisanal drama Jonathan Gil Harris
3. The dramatic life of objects in the early modern theatre Douglas Bruster
Part II. Furniture: 4. Things with little social life (Henslowe's theatrical properties and Elizabethan household fittings) Lena Cowen Orlin
5. Properties of domestic life: the table in Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness Catherine Richardson
6. 'Let me the curtains draw': the dramatic and symbolic properties of the bed in Shakespearean tragedy Sasha Roberts
Part III. Costumes: 7. Properties in clothes: the materials of the Renaissance theatre Peter Stallybrass
8. Women's theatrical properties Natasha Korda
9. Staging the beard: masculinity in early modern English culture Will Fisher
Part IV. Hand Properties: 10. Properties of marriage: proprietary conflict and the calculus of gender in Epicoene Juana Green
11. The woman's parts of Cymbeline Valerie Wayne
12. Wonder-effects: Othello's handkerchief Paul Yachnin
Appendix
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB], Theatre studies [AN]