ABSTRACT
Like the early modern audience, the modern audience is ready to perceive and accept the cultural weight of crowns, rings, and swords because these props have not lost their power to evoke an unseen, and often powerful and symbolic, world outside the theater. One such object, deceivingly straightforward in its build and function, is the small wooden joint-stool. Needing no nails and few tools in its assembly, the joint-stool has either three or four legs that are joined to the seat. Drawing on Arden of Faversham and Macbeth, this chapter demonstrates how stools, in early modern drama, are frequently utilized as props that are directly connected with wives who have close associations with witchcraft and murder. To the characterizations of Alyce, the adulterous wife in Arden, and to Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, the joint-stools add subtexts of female sexual dominance and heresy.
