Abstract
The early modern playhouse in England was a theater of easily held things. Hand-held objects figured centrally in plays of all genres there, not just the dramatic adventures of “amorous knight[s]” that Stephen Gosson derides. Indeed, one of the clearest departures that early modern playwrights made from Aristotle’s precepts came in the ready employment of those “lifeless things” that the Poetics goes on to criticize when used as a means of recognition.1 So common was this practice, in fact, that our memories of many early modern plays involve images of characters holding things. With Shakespeare, for example, Haimlet (1601) can suggest a man contemplating a skull; Antony and Cleopatra (1607), a woman with an asp; Romeo and Juliet (1596), a young woman with a dagger. Sometimes this link between character and prop is so strong that certain objects can gesture toward a drama, character, and scene: a severed finger may call to mind De Flores in the third act of The Changeling (1622); a skewered heart, Giovanni in the final scene of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1632). The endurance of such images—often aided by contemporary and subsequent printed illustrations—helps us to understand why Gosson would claim that, from a spectator’s point of view, the “soul” of many plays resided in their objects.
καὶ γὰρ πρὸς ἅψνχα καὶ τὰ τνχόντα ἕστιν ὥσπερ εἲρηται συμβαὶνει, καὶ ει πέπραγέ τις ἢ μὴ πέπραγεν ἕστιν άναγνωρίσαι
… for indeed, [recognition] may take place in this manner through lifeless things or chance events, and one may recognize whether someone has or has not done something.
—Aristotle, Poetics 1452a34–37
Sometime you shall see nothing but the adventures of an amorous knight, passing from country to country for the love of his lady, encountering many a terrible monster made of brown paper, and at his return, is so wonderfully changed, that he cannot be known but by some posie in his tablet, or by a broken ring, or a handkircher or a piece of a cockle shell, what learn you by that? When the soul of your plays is either mere trifles, or Italian bawdry, or cussing of gentlewomen, what are we taught?
—Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions
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Notes
See, for examples of criticism that relate stage objects to the traditions of iconography, Bridget Geliert, “The Iconography of Melancholy in the Graveyard Scene in Hamlet,” Studies in Philology 67 (1970): 57–66;
Katherine A. Rowe, “Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 279–303;
Michael Neill, “‘What Strange Riddle’s This?” Deciphering “Tis Pity She’s A Whore,” in John Ford: Critical Re-Visions, ed. Michael Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 153–81;
Houston Diehl, “Inversion, Parody, and Irony: The Visual Rhetoric of Renaissance English Tragedy,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 22 (1982): 197–209;
Samuel Schuman, “The Theatre of Fine Devices”: The Visual Drama of John Webster (Salzburg: Inst, fur Anglistik & Amerikanistik, Univ. Salzburg, 1982);
and Brownell Salomon, “Visual and Aural Signs in the Performed English Renaissance Play,” Renaissance Drama n.s. 5 (1972): 143–69. Stating that “Certain hand properties have a metaphoric value matching that used in Renaissance iconography,” Salomon goes on to discuss the bleeding heart in y Tis Pity and describes the human skull in revenge tragedy as a memento mori emblem (161).
Alan S. Downer, “The Life of Our Design: The Function of Imagery in the Poetic Drama,” The Hudson Review 2 (1949): 242–60;
reprinted in Leonard F. Dean, ed., Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 19–36; at 28. Downer’s lone example of this “language of props” involves Macbeth and his borrowed robes, which he relates to the imagery studies of Caroline Spurgeon and Cleanth Brooks, respectively. Downer’s connection of props to language has since found expression, of course, in semiotic analysis of the theater.
See, for example, Jin Veltrusky, “Man and Object in the Theater,” in Paul L. Garvin, trans, and ed., A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1964), 83–91; and Ruth Amossy’s relating of stage objects to verbal systems in “Toward a Rhetoric of the Stage: The Scenic Realization of Verbal Clichés,” Poetics Today 2.3 (1981): 49–63.
Psychoanalytic readings of stage props include Lynda E. Boose, “Othello’s Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,’” English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 360–74;
Barbara Freedman, “Errors in Comedy: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Farce,” in Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Maurice Charney (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980), 233–43; and Edmund Wilson, “Morose Ben Jonson,” The Triple Thinkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 213–32, who remarks on the significant absence of a certain property in a Jonson play: “in Volpone, where real gold is involved, we are never allowed to see it” (227). Wilson’s insistence on the reality of this unseen stage gold speaks to the power of theatrical properties, even in their absence.
See, for example, Linda Austern, “‘Sing Againe Syren’: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature,” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 420–48;
Jean E. Howard, “Sex and Social Conflict: The Erotics of The Roaring Girl,’” in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 170–90; Douglas Bruster, chaps. 5 (“The Objects of Farce: Identity and Commodity, Elizabethan to Jacobean”) and 6 (“The Farce of Objects: Othello to Bartholomew Fair”) in Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 63–80, 81–96;
and Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 128–29. Mullaney suggests that Macbeth’s severed head “doubles the stage it bloodies” by reminding the viewer of the similarities between the platform stage and the scaffolding which authorities would erect for a public execution (129).
One of the most extensive studies of hand props in the early modern era focuses on Shakespeare. Frances Teague’s Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1991), to which this chapter later refers, provides valuable information on Shakespeare’s use of hand props but without placing his use in the context of others’ uses of hand props. See also Felix Bosonnet, The Function of Stage Properties in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays. The Cooper Monographs on English and American Language and Literature, “Theatrical Physiognomy Series,” vol. 27 (Bern: Francke, 1978).
Shoshana Avigal and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, “What Do Brook’s Bricks Mean? Toward a Theory of the ‘Mobility’ of Objects in Theatrical Discourse,” Poetics Today 2.3 (1981): 11–34, 12–13. Avigal and Rimmon-Kenan acknowledge this list’s debt to the approach of Anne Ubersfeld. See her Lire le Théâtre, 4th ed. (Paris: Messidor, 1982), esp. the appendix to chapter 4, “L’objet théâtral,” 177–85.
For the role of objects in certain dramatic constructions of the “human” in early modern England, see Margareta de Grazia, “The Ideology of Superfluous Things: King Lear as Period Piece,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17–42.
Brownell Salomon, “Visual and Aural Signs in the Performed English Renaissance Play,” Renaissance Drama n.s. 5 (1972): 143–69; at 160. Teague cites alternate definitions of property as well: “appurtenances worn or carried by actors” (David Bevington, Action Is Eloquence [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984], 35); “Any portable article of costume or furniture, used in acting a play” (Bosonnet, Function of Stage Properties, 10). See Teague, Shakespeare’s Speaking Objects, 15.
For exceptions to this, see Lena Cowen Orlin, “The Performance of Things in The Taming of the Shrew,” TES 23 (1993): 167–88;
and Natasha Korda, “Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly 4:7 (1996): 109–31.
Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 319–21. On Henslowe’s inventory, see Lena Cowen Orlin’s essay, “Things with Little Social Life,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Natasha Korda and Jonathan Gil Harris (forthcoming: Cambridge University Press).
See, for example, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Stallybrass’s “Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage,” in Subject and Object, 289–320; and Stallybrass’s “Properties in Clothes” in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Korda and Harris.
Neil Carson, A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 53.
I am indebted, for this reference, to Natasha Korda’s “Household Property/Stage Property: Henslowe as Pawnbroker,” Theatre Journal 48 (1996): 185–95.
A Warning for Fair Women (London: 1598). Quoted in Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), appendix 2, “References to Playgoing,” 213.
For an extended study of the social and psychological valences of hands and manual agency in literature, see Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
R. A. Foakes, Illustrations of the English Stage 1580–1642 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985). As Foakes reminds us, we need to exercise considerable caution in evaluating visual records of the early modern stage (xvi). Illustrations published with dramatic texts do not necessarily represent the plays in question or any actual performance. Printers often used “stock” pictures to illustrate dramatic texts. So while the woodcut on the title page of Robert Wilson’s The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590), for instance, appears to represent a dramatic performance of some kind, the fact that it had appeared in a text published over two decades prior to Wilson’s play, and comes from an earlier illustration still, should give us pause (164). But such representations can nonetheless provide evidence relating to “stage practices, costumes and properties” that might otherwise escape us (xvi). Even illustrations of a non-theatrical origin, once selected to accompany a play text when printed, speak to contemporary notions of the appropriate. What does it mean, we could ask, that those responsible for bringing out Wilson’s play chose this illustration rather than another? And that readers of The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London had an illustration (in which one figure holds a pointing stick, appar-endy lecturing or directing another figure) that they might associate with the play? It is certainly not the case, as Foakes alleges, that the illustration “has no reference to Wilson’s play,” for the prominent position of the woodcut on the tide page makes it something like the primary visual reference to and of Wilson’s play as originally published. There is thus a literalism about “the” theater in Foakes’s collection that detracts from his analysis of the illustrations.
On the historical era of Falstaff’s costume in this illustration, see T. J. King, “The First Known Picture of Falstaff (1662). A Suggested Date for His Costume,” Theatre Research International 3 (1977–78): 20–23.
Thomas Rymer, “A Short View of Tragedy,” in The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt A. Zimansky (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956), 160.
Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. Lawrence J. Ross (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966).
Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” Literature and Psychoanalysis; The Question of Reading: Otherwise, Tale Trench Studies 55/56 (1977): 94–207; at 101 (emphasis in the original). The passage quoted is part of a larger argument about the relationship between the critical history of The Turn of the Screw and James’s text itself. On the notion of a “reading effect,”
see also Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), esp. chap. 6, “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd,” 79–109. Johnson describes two tendencies in criticism of Billy Budd and points out that the dichotomy they fall into is already contained within the story … it is obviously one of the things the story is abouf (85). Johnson expands on the concept further in her comments on a series of critical texts devolving from Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” where she remarks that “no analysis … can intervene without transforming and repeating other elements in the sequence, which is thus not a stable sequence, but which nevertheless produces certain regular effects. It is the functioning of this regularity, and the structure of these effects, which will provide the basis for the present study.”
Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,” in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Müller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 213–51; 213–14.
See T. J. King, Casting Shakespeare’s Plays: London Actors and Their Roles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 2, “Eight Playhouse Documents,” 27–49.
In addition to Peek’s The Battle of Alcazar—discussed later in this chapter—one might look to Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller for a parodic salute to the ostentation of neochivalric display. See his extended and loving mockery of the “lists” before the Duke of Florence. Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J. B. Steane (London: Penguin, 1985), 316–23.
See, for example, Jonathan Goldberg, “Rebel Letters: Postal Effects from Richard IIto Henry V,” Renaissance Drama 19 (1988): 3–28, and “Hamlet’s Hand,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 307–327. Even Teague’s index to Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties replicates this tendency, indexing pages dealing with documents in history plays and in tragedies but not in the comedies.
Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 93.
See Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 40, 43, 47, 48, 59–60;
David Bradley, From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the Play for the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
T. J. King, Casting Shakespeare’s Plays: London Actors and Their Roles, 1590–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
and Scott McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre and the “Book of Sir Thomas More” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 135.
Doctor Faustus from the A-text in Doctor Faustus, ed. David Beving-ton and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1992), 5.1.91–92. On the politics of the poetic blazon, see Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265–79, who explores Petrarch’s “legacy of fragmentation” and its relationship to “the development of a code of beauty, a code that causes us to view the fetishized body as a norm” (277).
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© 2003 Douglas Bruster
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Bruster, D. (2003). The Dramatic Life of Objects in the Early Modern Theater. In: Shakespeare and the Question of Culture. Early Modern Cultural Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05156-1_4
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