Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (review)

Shakespeare's stage—that infamously barren, wooden O—was perhaps a bit more cluttered than previously thought. In Shakespeare's Domestic Economies, Korda analyzes the forgotten trifles of the early modern stage: the handkerchiefs, stools, and other props routinely used to stage domesticity. Arguing that such "household stuff" was constitutive of Elizabethan theatrical subjectivity, Korda empties the O and exposes the ideological, linguistic, and material baggage of Shakespeare on the Elizabethan stage. In doing so, Korda's work adds an important contribution to a growing field of women's history that explores the lives of early modern women through literary representations and material history of the domestic realm.

As critics such as Lena Orlin and Wendy Wall have recently argued, the proper production and, increasingly, consumption of domestic goods was of critical importance to Elizabethan theater audiences. Whereas these recent critical endeavors have analyzed theatrical representations of domesticity on the Elizabethan stage, Korda's claims extend the implications of such arguments through a careful linking of economic and literary histories of stage props to subsequent literary representations. Firmly situating Shakespeare within "broader historical shifts in modes of production and property relations," Korda refines our understanding of early modern English women's lives by analyzing the tools used to create such convincing theatrical representations of them on stage (8).

The importance of Korda's methodology is heightened when one considers that these domestic representations occurred on Shakespeare's stage, which was devoid of women players. Feminist and queer literary scholars have struggled to understand the role of the boy-actor in representing Shakespeare's women. Korda's analysis of stage props provides us with another approach to understanding the dearth of women's parts on the Elizabethan stage. The absence of women must be balanced against an excess of their domestic parts: the implements that surrounded and defined their existence in the home. For example, the multiplicity of domestic parts possibly used on stage is suggested by a copious visual catalog of household items that formed part of a nine-volume encyclopedia of heraldry published in the seventeenth century. The magnitude of the catalog clearly introduces Korda's two-pronged project: there was a superfluity of household goods introduced into early modern English markets during the late sixteenth and seventeenth century and a superfluity of systems of classification designed to order and manage domestic goods. The vast catalog of female domestic "parts" underscores Korda's broader point that our separation of theater history from other fields of inquiry has "calcified concepts such as the all-male stage" (198).

Rather than rely on ahistorical assumptions of what domesticity may have meant onstage or use contemporaneous published texts meant to instruct unruly women on proper housewifery for guidance, Korda interprets the early modern domestic through the history of movable property. Such a project demands a creative methodological approach. Citing Penelope Johnson's argument for a "theory of practice," Korda announces that new methodologies can complicate the overly broad conclusions about women's lack of agency in the past (7). These conclusions are comprised largely from an overemphasis of legal, medical, and print culture. Whereas such cultures certainly constitute a large part of the history of women's lives, they fail to capture "the complex history and dramatic representation of women as subjects, as well as objects, of property" (12). Citing feminist historians' recent claims that our understanding of coverture in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century is based soley on analyses of land and ignores the creation and expansion of the legal concept of movable property, Korda effectively demonstrates that household objects comprised a significant part of Elizabethan culture and, by extension, the Elizabethan stage. Such stuff may not have seemed so trifling to women playgoers, since women exerted greater control over movable objects than did men. These objects have been excised from canonical understandings of the early...