Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (review)

Most scholars of early modern English drama today recognize what the editors of Staged Properties call "the myth of the bare 'Wooden O'" (2)—the uncluttered stage where auditors heard (rather than watched) plays in Elizabethan times. Yet even while we perceive such critical assumptions as outmoded, we may lack the tools to replace them. Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama moves beyond mere counterpoint to show why props matter(ed) in the theater and in early modern culture, and to present a welcome variety of critical tools with which to examine stage properties, machinery, and their evolution over time.

The introductory essay enriches the study of props in particular and materialist criticism in general by defining and contextualizing current critical practice. Harris and Korda use contemporary documents such as spectators' accounts, company inventories, and stage directions to evoke stages busy with objects; companies preoccupied with their acquisition and maintenance; and economies working to craft, trade, sell, value, and display them. Against this neutral tableau of stuV, the editors set their brief history of critical studies' "scorn . . . for the stage property" (10). Tracking the fate of the prop, Harris and Korda round up the usual suspects—from seventeenth-century Puritans, such as Stephen Gosson, to Alexander Pope to the Romantics Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and others—in order to show how critics have preferred the spirit or the "ideal" over the material, the intellectual over the spectacular. Harris and Korda see their book as opposing this tradition: "theatrical objects always potentially refuse to be subordinated to the logos of the play . . . and instead make visible, by virtue of their conspicuous fabricatedness alternate dramas of manufacture and the body" (11), calling critics to acknowledge the "power [of Elizabethan theatrical properties] to puncture dramatic illusion by pointing to alternate social dramas of economic production, exchange, and ownership" (15).

Original arguments do emerge on this well-worn topic; namely the pointedly economic nature of the aversion to props across eras, continents, and religious and political ideologies. So, we glimpse the centuries-long process that the editors call "dematerializations" (11): the seventeenth-century Puritan perspective that opposed not only the visual (icons and Romish excess, for example) but also the "extradramatic economic freight" (6) of theatrical production; subsequent laments of Shakespeare's participation in commercial theater (7-8); Pope's attempted rescue of Shakespeare from the taint of "artisanal culture and the stage clutter it produces" (8); and modernist "anxiety" (12) about the dissolving distinctions between machines and humans.

Though that history has merit, the argument outlined in the introduction misses the chance to shape some of its own contours. Some useful scholarship in the area of stage props has already been done, though admittedly not in the concerted (and collected) way of Staged Properties. Attention to historical theater reviews, for example, and theater history of the sort that Valerie Wayne employs in her essay for this volume (a richly detailed account of Cymbeline's props operating in text and in sources, onstage and in theater programs) might alter their picture of a totally neglected field. Another dimension might be added to this argument by more direct summary, analysis, and application of Arjun Appadurai's edited collection The Social Life of Things (1986), which informs most of the essays included here but receives only brief mention in the introduction. Although several contributors oVer their own sense of Appadurai along the way (see, e.g., 36, 145, 263, and 288-89), fuller initial discussions of his influence and of early modern studies would be useful. Another potential argumentative contour recedes when fascinating discussions of theater practitioners such as Peter Brook and important theorists such as Walter Benjamin transpire mainly in the chapter's endnotes (see, e.g., 27-28n).

The editors' introduction does contain a detailed review and critique of the "veritable flood" (15) of materialist studies in the field. Harris and Korda outline five types of criticism devoted to props: the...