Shakespeare’s Stuff: The Properties of Early Modern Playing

1. Shakespeare’s Stuff:The Properties of Early Modern Playing

2. A World of Objects: House, Shop, Study, Cabinet of Curiosities

3. ‘Go to the Centaur, fetch our stuff from thence’ (The Comedy of Errors) ‘She [My wife] is…my household stuff, my field, my barn…’ (The Taming of the Shrew) ‘What stuff wilt have a kirtle made of?’(I Henry IV) ‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad…what stuff tis made of…’ (Merchant) ‘Ambition should be made of sterner stuff’ (Julius Caesar) ‘Nature wants stuff to vie strange forms with fantasy…’ (Antony and Cleopatra) ‘This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure’ (Twelfth Night) ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ (Tempest) ‘Is not a comonty / A Christmas gambol or a tumbling trick?’ ‘No my lord, it is more pleasing stuff.’ ‘What, household stuff?’ ‘It is a kind of history’ (The Taming of the Shrew)

4. property, n.Brit. /ˈprɒpəti/ , U.S. /ˈprɑpərdi/ • Etymology:  < Anglo-Norman properté, propertee, propertie, propretee, proprité, Anglo-Norman and Middle French propreté (c1225 in Old French, also as propritei ), variants (probably after propreproper adj.) of proprietépropriety n. Compare Middle French, French propreté decent dress and manners (1538), neatness (1671) < propreproper adj. + -té-ty suffix1. • †2. The quality of being proper or appropriate; fitness, fittingness, suitability; the proper use or sense of words. Cf. propriety n. 5b, 6. Obs. • 3.†a. Something belonging to a thing; an appurtenance; an adjunct. Obs. • 5.Theatre and Film. Any portable object (now usually other than an article of costume) used in a play, film, etc., as required by the action; a prop. Chiefly in pl. Cf. prop n.6a1450Castle Perseverance 132   Þeseparcell [readparcellys] in propyrtes we purpose us to playeÞis day seuenenyt. • 1578   in A. FeuilleratDocuments Office of Revels Queen Elizabeth (1908) 303   Furnished in this office with sondreygarmentes & properties. • 1600   Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dreami. ii. 98,   I will draw a bill of properties, such as our play wants. • 1629   P. Massinger Roman Actor iv. ii. sig. I,   This cloake, and hat without Wearing a beard, or other propertie Will fit the person. • 1748   Whitehall Evening Post No. 371,   To be Sold very cheap, Cloaths, Scenes, Properties, clean, and in very good Order.

5. Inventory of Properties belonging to the Admiral’s Men at the Rose, 1598 X X X X x

6. Yet sit and see, Minding true things by what their mock’ries be. (Henry V, 4.0.52-3) Falstaff: Well, thou wilt be horribly chid tomorrow when thou comest to thy father. If thou love me, practise an answer. Hal: Do thou stand for my father and examine me upon the particulars of my life. Falstaff: Shall I? Content. This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre and this cushion my crown. Hal: Thy state is taken for a joint-stool, thy golden sceptre for a leaden dagger and thy precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown. I Henry IV, 2.4.364-371

7. Carry him gently to my fairest chamber, And hang it round with all my wanton pictures; Balm his foul head in warm distillèd waters, And burn sweet wood to make the lodging sweet; Procure me music ready when he wakes To make a dulcet and a heavenly sound. And if he chance to speak, be ready straight And, with a low, submissive reverence, Say “What is it your Honor will command?” Let one attend him with a silver basin Full of rosewater and bestrewed with flowers, Another bear the ewer, the third a diaper, And say “Will ’t please your Lordship cool your hands?” Someone be ready with a costly suit, And ask him what apparel he will wear. Another tell him of his hounds and horse, And that his lady mourns at his disease. Persuade him that he hath been lunatic, And when he says he is, say that he dreams, For he is nothing but a mighty lord. The Taming of the Shrew Induction 1. 31-61 Sirs, I will practice on this drunken man. What think you, if he were conveyed to bed, Wrapped in sweet clothes, rings put upon his fingers, A most delicious banquet by his bed, And brave attendants near him when he wakes, Would not the beggar then forget himself? …

8. Let us think for a moment about how performance in itself vivifies objects…Theatre transforms objects of whatever sort into signs simply by presenting them on stage, to an audience; in that context, an ordinary object which we might hardly glance at in ‘real’ life can become weighty with meaning and charged with emotion. It is in the nature of theatre to effect such transformations, since everything shown to an audience carries the promise of something behind or beyond itself…[T]he theatre routinely invests the objects it shows with more than they carry in themselves. • Anthony Dawson, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England (CUP: 2001, pp. 137-38).

9. ‘Things …, like persons, have social lives.’ Circulating ‘in different regimes of value in space and time’ and moving ‘through different hands, contexts, and uses,’ objects ‘accumulate[] … biographies’, ‘become weighty’ with life histories. Objects are ‘things in motion’ that follow ‘careers’ which start them off down specific paths – life journeys – that regularly (certainly, in theatre, inevitably) get interrupted, blocked, diverted, where diversion is always ‘a sign of creativity or crisis’. Thus, an object that begins life as a gift may be inherited, sold, lost, stolen, found, sacramentalisedas a relic, copied, faked, commodified, each exchange marking a shift in value, but not every act of exchange supposing ‘a complete cultural sharing of assumptions’ about that value. For what is ‘priceless’– that is, beyond price – in one pair of hands may be ‘priceless’ – worthless – in another. • Objects, in short, function as ‘incarnated signs’. They exhibit ‘semiotic virtuosity’. See ArjunAppadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (CUP, 1986), pp. 3-34.

10. Peter Quince! There are things in this comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe that will never please. First, Pyramus must draw a sword to kill himself… the lion… moonlight… we must have a wall … ‘I Pyramus am not Pyramus’ ‘he is not a lion…half his face must be seen through the lion’s neck…’ ‘leave a casement…open; and the moon may shine in at the casement’ ‘or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern and say he comes to disfigure or to present the person of Moonshine’; ‘Some man or other must present Wall’. Snug’s Lion’s Head in Peter Brook’s Dream (1971)Quince: I will draw a bill of properties, such as our play wants. (1.2.98)

12. Enter Ophelia distracted, playing on a lute, and her hair down, singing (SD, Q1 4.5.21) Laertes: Oh, heat dry up my brains…is’t possible a young maid’s wits /Should be as mortal as a poor man’s life? Ophelia: There’s rosemary: that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies: that’s for thoughts. Laertes: A document in madness – thoughts and remembrance fitted! Ophelia: There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me… (4.5.155-178)

13. Hamlet YorickSkulls(left: Andre Tchaikovsky’s)

14. Gravedigger: Here’s a skull now. This skull has lain in the earth three-and-twenty year. Hamlet: Whose was it? Gravedigger: A whoreson mad fellow’s it was. Whose do you think it was? Hamlet: Nay, I know not. Gravedigger: A pestilence on him for a mad rogue – a poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once! This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester. Hamlet: This? Gravedigger: E’en that. Hamlet: Let me see. Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio – a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhored my imagination is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. Make her laugh at that. Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing. Horatio: What’s that, my lord? Hamlet: Dost thou think Alexander looked o’this fashion i’th’earth? Horatio: E’en so, my lord. Hamlet: And smelt so? Pah! … To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till a find it stopping a bung-hole? … Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. / O, that that earth which kept the world in awe / Should patch a wall t’expel the winter’s flaw! But soft, but soft; aside. [Enter Funeral]

15. Petruchio: I will unto Venice To buy apparel ’gainst the wedding day.— Provide the feast, father, and bid the guests. I will be sure my Katherine shall be fine… I will to Venice. Sunday comes apace. We will have rings, and things, and fine array, And kiss me, Kate. We will be married o’ Sunday. * * * * * Baptista: Why, sir, you know this is your wedding day. First were we sad, fearing you would not come, Now sadder that you come so unprovided. Fie, doff this habit, shame to your estate, An eyesore to our solemn festival…. Tranio: See not your bride in these unreverent robes. Go to my chamber, put on clothes of mine. Petruchio: Not I, believe me. Thus I’ll visit her. Baptista: But thus, I trust, you will not marry her. Petruchio: Good sooth, even thus. Therefore, ha’ done with words. To me she’s married, not unto my clothes. Could I repair what she will wear in me, As I can change these poor accoutrements, ’Twere well for Kate and better for myself. But what a fool am I to chat with you When I should bid good morrow to my bride And seal the title with a lovely kiss! … Tranio: He hath some meaning in this mad attire. Biondello: Why, Petruchio is coming in a new hat and an old jerkin, a pair of old breeches thrice turned, a pair of boots that have been candle-cases, onebuckled, another laced; an old rusty sword ta’en out of the town armory, with a broken hilt, and chapeless; with two broken points; his horse … his lackey … A monster, a very monster in apparel… * * * * *

16. PETRUCHIO Thy gown? Why, ay. Come, tailor, let us see ’t. O mercy God, what masking-stuff is here? What’s this? A sleeve? ’Tislike a demi-cannon. What, up and down carved like an apple tart? Here’s snip and nip and cut and slish and slash, Like to a censer in a barber’s shop. Why, what a devil’s name, tailor, call’st thou this? … Or is the adder better than the eel Because his painted skin contents the eye? O no, good Kate. Neither art thou the worse For this poor furniture and mean array. If thou account’st it shame, lay it on me… Go, hop me over every kennel home, For you shall hop without my custom, sir. I’ll none of it. Hence, make your best of it… Well, come, my Kate, we will unto your father’s, Even in these honest mean habiliments. Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor, For ’tis the mind that makes the body rich, And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, So honor peereth in the meanest habit. What, is the jay more precious than the lark Because his feathers are more beautiful?

18. The Taming of the Shrew Propeller