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Chapter 3 - Props

from Part II - Playhouse Structure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2023

Lauren Robertson
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
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Summary

Chapter 3 treats the staging of tiny props in both the Globe and Blackfriars theaters. In Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Antony and Cleopatra as well as Massinger’s The Picture, minuscule objects are deployed as metonymic evidence purporting to offer privileged, indubitable knowledge about a woman’s inscrutable body. The chapter demonstrates that the objects’ epistemological limitations, as detailed in the playtexts, became a phenomenological impasse in the playhouse. The very conditions of the props’ theatrical display in the large outdoor amphitheater and the small indoor hall would have variously exacerbated their narrative failures, undermining spectators’ attempts to see the objects clearly. At an historical moment when new empiricist methodologies promised to mitigate uncertainty, if not eradicate it entirely, the theater involved spectators in the failures of forensic investigation only to posit itself as a site for the capacious fulsomeness of spectacular display. The chapter ultimately argues that the very ephemerality of theatrical spectacle becomes, in all three plays, the alternative to the permanence of partial knowledge.

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Chapter
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Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater
Stage Spectacle and Audience Response
, pp. 113 - 147
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Props
  • Lauren Robertson, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater
  • Online publication: 02 February 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009225137.006
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  • Props
  • Lauren Robertson, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater
  • Online publication: 02 February 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009225137.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Props
  • Lauren Robertson, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater
  • Online publication: 02 February 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009225137.006
Available formats
×