ABSTRACT
It is well documented that props associated with specific early modern rituals simultaneously supply iconic and realistic detail on both the early modern and the modern stage. One might easily conjure up images of Beatrice’s glove in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, Desdemona’s handkerchief in Shakespeare’s Othello, or the puppets in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. Indeed, skulls, swords, crowns, and rings, these universal properties with their enduring associations of death, war, power, and marriage, continue to materialize Yorick’s enigmatic relationship with death, Romeo’s rash youth, Richard II’s loss, and Portia’s control. Andrew Sofer, in his book The Stage Life of Props, highlights both the cultural and theatrical significance of everyday objects when he observes, “things do not arrive on the stage innocent.”1 Indeed, sometimes they even seem to take on “a life of [their] own.”2 In addition to reminding the audience about plot development or characterization, props that have “taken on” this kind of life actually seem to motivate action or replace (rather than simply represent) people. This refusal of props to stay in their proper empirical places and confine themselves to being gloves, handkerchiefs, or puppets, conveys a general, and often unsettling, impression that the boundaries between our bodies and our properties are not as clear-cut as we might imagine. Not only does this conflation of human body and iconic representation confound the border between the material and the symbolic on stage, but it also raises questions about how and why something moves from being simply a useful object to becoming a repository of cultural meaning. Teasing out the conflicting layers of identity, materiality, agency, and social construction as they are bound up in props of the early modern stage becomes even more complex when one considers the cultural differences in the two audiences (early modern and modern) as each bring their understandings and expectations into the theater.
