Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (review)

This collection of essays examines the multiple properties of stage props, both on and off the early modern English stage. It expands the common definition of stage properties to include not only all material, moveable objects used onstage (including costumes), but also the immaterial properties of artisanship, wealth, and social class; in so doing, it refines our understanding of theatre history, material culture, and scenic practice during that period.

To ease our appreciation of the polyvalent nature of stage properties, the coauthors have expanded the embrace of their investigation beyond the familiar, historical, literary, and philological approaches, to include cultural, sociopolitical, and economic lines of inquiry.

Divided into four sections (history, furniture, costumes, and hand props), the essays are directed primarily toward students of the long seventeenth century; nevertheless, there is also a wealth of information for researchers (and practitioners) in twentieth-century theatre. The sections on furniture and costumes, for example, are particularly relevant to contemporary notions of authentic practice on the Elizabethan or Jacobean stages.

In their clear and scholarly introduction, Harris and Korda review the reasons why stage properties have, in the past, received so little critical attention. The antitheatrical rhetoric of Protestant polemicists and their intellectual offspring, as well as a paucity of evidence, are contributing factors, but the editors also note that twentieth-century scholarship, from Granville-Barker through Walter Benjamin to Felix Bossonet and Frances Teague (and others), has tended to preserve the "Romantic opposition between subject and object, humans and mechanical things" (13). In the past, even resolute materialist critics have tended to privilege text and character over stage objects. Andrew Sofer's recent book The Stage Life of Props (2003) is a notable exception to the trend, but as the title indicates, it confines its investigation to the playhouse proper, and avoids the "larger material networks of property relationships off- as well as onstage" (15). Harris and Korda seek to place stage properties in a larger cultural context, through recognition of their material existence beyond the world of the drama; thus, these objects are shown to be "not simply static things, but points of intersection for myriad relations of property and power" (16).

The essays in this volume follow one (or more) of five "methodologically discrete yet overlapping materialist approaches" (16) to stage objects. The first, qualitative analysis, seeks to explore "the contours and faultlines of cultural formation through nuanced accounts of synecdochic microdetail" (16). Quantitative analysis of archival records has yielded some of this book's most illuminating entries. Peter Stallybrass's "Properties in clothes: the materials of the Renaissance theatre," for example, is a fascinating account of the circulation of second-hand clothing from the court and the church to the stage, often through the medium of pawnbrokers.

A third approach resists confusing the materiality of objects with their physicality and recognizes, as Marx did, that their materiality includes the labor to produce them and the consequent social relations of production; thus, Natasha Korda's essay "Women's theatrical properties" argues that "dramatic representations cannot be understood in isolation from the material conditions in which they were produced and consumed" (206), and calls for recognition of the critical role played by women in the production and exchange of properties of all types—but especially clothing, the most valuable of all stage properties at the time. When their contribution is taken into account, previous notions of an all-male early modern stage can no longer be entertained.

A fourth critical approach also uses a Marxian narrative to yield a diachronic materialism "to bring to visibility changing relations of economic and ideological production" (17). This approach is adopted in Jonathan Gil Harris's engaging essay "Properties of skill: product placement in early English artisanal drama."It looks at The Chandlers' Play of the Shepherds from the York Cycle and Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday through the lens of the modern mania for prominent display of consumer goods and services in the...