Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama

Jonathan Gil Harris is Associate Professor of English at Ithaca College. He is the author of Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England, (1998), as well as numerous articles on Renaissance drama and culture. Natasha Korda is author of Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England, (2002) and numerous essays on early modern drama and stage history. She is Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan University.

'… splendid collection …' The Times Literary Supplement

• List of illustrations; Notes on contributors; 1. Introduction: towards a materialist account of stage properties Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda; Part I. Histories: 2. Properties of skill: product placement in early English artisanal drama Jonathan Gil Harris; 3. The dramatic life of objects in the early modern theatre Douglas Bruster; Part II. Furniture: 4. Things with little social life (Henslowe's theatrical properties and Elizabethan household fittings) Lena Cowen Orlin; 5. Properties of domestic life: the table in Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness Catherine Richardson; 6. 'Let me the curtains draw': the dramatic and symbolic properties of the bed in Shakespearean tragedy Sasha Roberts; Part III. Costumes: 7. Properties in clothes: the materials of the Renaissance theatre Peter Stallybrass; 8. Women's theatrical properties Natasha Korda; 9. Staging the beard: masculinity in early modern English culture Will Fisher; Part IV. Hand Properties: 10. Properties of marriage: proprietary conflict and the calculus of gender in Epicoene Juana Green; 11. The woman's parts of Cymbeline Valerie Wayne; 12. Wonder-effects: Othello's handkerchief Paul Yachnin; Appendix; Index.