Curtain-raiser: Dr Faustus’s Study
Shakespeare’s Stuff:
The Properties of Early
Modern Playing
‘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)
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
x
x
x
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Inventory of Properties belonging to the Admiral’s Men at the
Rose, 1598
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 propre
proper adj.) of proprieté propriety n. Compare Middle French, French propreté decent dress and
manners (1538), neatness (1671) < propre proper 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.6 a1450 Castle
Perseverance 132 Þese parcell [read parcellys] in propyrtes we purpose us to playe Þis day
seuenenyt.
1578 in A. Feuillerat Documents Office of Revels Queen Elizabeth (1908) 303 Furnished in this
office with sondrey garmentes & properties.
1600 Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dream i. 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.
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).
‘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, sacramentalised as 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 Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in
Cultural Perspective (CUP, 1986), pp. 3-34.
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 …
Snug’s Lion’s Head in Brook’s Dream (1971)
‘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’.
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)
Hamlet Yorick Skulls
(left: Andre Tchaikovsky’s)
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]