ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author presents a stone’s agency among the prevailing ontological models that inform current conceptions of the nonhuman in medieval and early modern literary studies to explore Description William Shakespeare’s use of stones. The author focuses on Giddens’s greatest expression of the theory, The Constitution of Society, to focus on the moment when Macbeth makes his way to Duncan’s bedchamber in order to murder him. The blurring of the boundaries between human and stone evident through these examples loosens Giddens’s understanding of what constitutes an agent enough to accommodate stone. The author outlines his consideration of Shakespeare’s stones beyond Macbeth’s paving stones to survey the function of stone’s agency as a structuring influence on the behavior of characters across Shakespeare’s works. By shaming characters, Shakespeare’s stones are perceived as not only subject to prevailing social structures governing morality, but also as upholding and, consequently, reproducing those very social structures.
