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Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama
Edited by Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002
In their introduction, Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda draw attention to the long tradition of critics, dating back to Coleridge, who have conceived of the Elizabethan stage as a " 'wooden O' filled only by text and imagination" (9). Against this "prop-free Shakespeare," Staged Properties poses a diverse set of materialist approaches to the theatrical props of the early modern English stage. In its eleven essays, this volume brings to light the plenitude of "properties"-from costumes to fixtures to handheld objects-that were mobilized for performance in the wooden O's and halls of the early modern theater. Rather than a book about things, the collection aims to be about the production, exchange, consumption and presentation of the goods that made their way onto the stage as props. And one of the commendable achievements of this collection is its introduction. Noting the range of recent scholarly work on early modern material culture, the editors call for a renewed theoretical attention to materiality, arguing that a fully materialist criticism, far more than a fascination with objects, foregrounds social praxis.
Staged Properties does not, on the whole, isolate stage props as if they were a closed system of objects belonging exclusively to the theater. Rather, the book concentrates on how properties were translated (to use an early modern coinage) in and out of the playhouses. Peter Stallybrass makes the case for clothing and costumes, demonstrating that the public theaters were commercially intertwined with pawnbroking and the trade in secondhand clothing, a trade that, in Stallybrass's view, was an early modern form of banking. The implications of this argument are twofold: the early modern theater literally enacted the trade in cloth while it also played a functional role in developing systems of credit and commercial exchange. Natasha Korda's essay on pawnbroking, titled "Women's Theatrical Properties," shows that, when we consider the exchange of objects used for performance, the London theaters prove to be not only a more commercial, but also a more female, domain than previously imagined: though women were absent from the stage as actors, female labor was central to the enterprise of the theater, in everything from...