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“Take up the Bodies” Shakespeare’s Body Parts, Babies, and Corpses Andrew Sofer The Oxford English Dictionary defines a stage property as “[a]ny portable article, as an article of costume or furniture, used in acting a play; a stage requisite, appurtenance, or accessory.”1 As I argued in The Stage Life of Props, a prop can be more rigorously defined as “a discrete, material, inanimate object that is visibly manipulated by an actor in the course of performance.”2 Irrespective of its signifying function, a prop is something an object becomes, rather than something an object is: an object must be “triggered” in some way by an actor (like Osric’s hat in Hamlet) in order to be a prop. But if any thing can become a prop, does this necessarily mean that anything can become a prop? What of the human body itself? From the perspective of semiotics, “All that is on the stage is a sign.”3 According to the principle of semiotization (which Umberto Eco calls ostension), a cup on the stage automatically becomes the sign “cup.”4 But if so, it becomes virtually impossible to decide what isn’t an object onstage, including the actor. Indeed, for Martin Esslin, the actor’s body is the “iconic sign par excellence: a real human being who has become a sign for a human being.”5 In his landmark 1940 article “Man and Object in the Theater,” Prague School structuralist Jiří Veltruský acknowledges the difficulty of separating subject from object onstage and instead posits a fluid continuum between them. In Keir Elam’s gloss of Veltruský’s argument, objects are “promoted” up the scale “when they are raised from their ‘transparent’ functional roles to a position of unexpected prominence” and acquire “semiotic subjectivity” independent of the actor .6 To use Veltruský’s own example, a stage dagger might move from 136      A n d r ew S o f e r being a passive emblem of the wearer’s status to participating in the action as an instrument of murder, and thence to a final independent association with the concept “murder.” Conversely, when the actor’s “action force” is reduced to zero, the actor takes on the status of a prop (for example, a spear carrier or corpse). From this semiotized point of view, actor and prop are dynamic sign-­ vehicles that move up and down the subject-­ object continuum as they acquire and shed action force in the course of a given performance. For Veltruský, an object becomes a prop when it begins to take part in the action overtly as a tool; and when props acquire independent signifying force, “we perceive them as spontaneous subjects, equivalent to the figure of the actor.”7 Veltruský’s concept of the subject-­ object continuum invites us to think more flexibly about under what circumstances human bodies—or parts of bodies—might become props. When I first considered whether the human body could become a prop, or whether props were by definition inanimate, I concurred with Gay McAuley, who in Space in Performance writes: “For some analysts the body of the actor is an object, indeed the primary object on stage. . . . but I would say that, although a part of the body, or even a whole body, can become an object if so treated (touched, carried) by another actor, it is unhelpful to assimilate the inanimate and animate, to place into the same category subject and object. The scandal of treating a person or animal as object is muted if all bodies are routinely classified as objects.”8 I commented: “If subjects can be objects on stage, then everything counts as an object, and the category of ‘object’ becomes meaningless.”9 This essay represents a rethinking of my own position. For if theatrically mobilized objects such as Yorick can take on a life of their own, cannot immobilized subjects become dead objects— taking on, as it were, a death of their own in performance? Motionless bodies crop up with some regularity onstage, fascinating us in their oscillation between dead character and counterfeiting ­ actor. Early modern tragedies tend to end with a frozen tableau of dead bodies , which we are invited...

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