Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama
Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama
£46.00
GBPThis 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.
- Offers a book-length history of stage properties
- Brings together a number of disciplines: theatre history, cultural history and literary criticism
- Includes work from team of senior scholars including Peter Stallybrass, Valerie Wayne and Lena Cowen Orlin
Reviews & endorsements
'… splendid collection …' The Times Literary Supplement
'For anyone who thought the early modern actor stood in a 'wooden O', this book is a must.' Journal of New Theatre Quarterly
Product details
November 2006Paperback
9780521032094
360 pages
228 × 154 × 21 mm
0.544kg
8 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- 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.
