ABSTRACT
Although doll houses have loomed large as metaphors within theatre and performance historiography ever since Nora exited Ibsen’s A Doll House (Et Dukkehjem) in 1879, as material artefacts they have garnered scant attention. This chapter re-examines the cosmopoietic or world-making capacity of early-modern women’s doll houses as playable media technologies whose material and design affordances enabled imaginative and interactive play in the everyday lives of women for whom a grand exit such as Nora’s may not have been an option. By taking into account the ways in which scale shapes the social (re)production of gendered space, and the ideological division of labour and leisure in everyday life, it aims to make room in our historical and theoretical archives for gyno ludens. Continually reimagined, remade, reassembled, and restaged, early-modern women’s doll houses help to model a reconceptualisation of what counts as an “archive” or a “stage,” and how the forms of intellectual work and performative play they enable might transform the disciplinary parameters of theatre and performance historiography.
