This book is the first attempt to discuss systematically the properties in Shakespeare's plays, and analyzes the properties that Shakespeare specifies either explicitly in stage directions or implicitly in speeches. Property lists for all of Shakespeare's plays and frequency tables for various categories of property are included.

This collection of essays explores the material, economic and dramatic implications of stage properties in early modern English drama. The essays in this volume, written by a team of distinguished scholars in the field, offer valuable insights and historical evidence concerning the forms of production, circulation and exchange that brought such diverse properties as sacred garments, household furnishings, pawned objects, and even false beards onto the stage.

Shakespeare's Letters shows how and why Shakespeare put letters on stage in virtually all of his plays. Showing the very different uses to which letters were put in Shakespeare's time, this book throws new light on some of his most familiar dramas. Includes new readings of Hamlet, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice.

This study provides the first comprehensive examination of every prop in Shakespeare's plays, whether mentioned in stage directions, indicated in dialogue or implied by the action. Building on the latest scholarship and offering a witty treatment of the subject, the authors delve into numerous historical documents, the business of theater in Renaissance England, and the plays themselves to explain what audiences might have seen at the Globe, the Rose, the Curtain, or the Blackfriars Playhouse, and why it matters. Students of the plays will be able to read beyond Shakespeare's words and visualize the drama as it might have appeared on the stage. Scholars will find a wealth of previously unmined material for reconstructing Renaissance theatrical practices. School drama groups, amateur theaters and directors and prop masters of professional troupes will find help in mounting their own productions as the Bard's audiences would have seen them.

The last two decades have witnessed a profound change in the way we receive the literary texts of early modern England. One could call this a move from 'text' to 'culture'. Put briefly, earlier critics tended to focus on literary texts, strictly conceived: plays, poems, prose fictions, essays. Since the mid-1980s, however, it has been just as likely for critics to speak of the 'culture' of early modern England, even when they do so in conjunction with analysis of literary texts. This 'cultural turn' has clearly enriched the way in which we read the texts of early modern England, but the interdisciplinary practices involved have frequently led critics to make claims about materials - and about the 'culture' these materials appear to embody - that exceed those materials' representativeness. Shakespeare and the Question of Culture addresses the central issue of 'culture' in early modern studies through both literary history and disciplinary critique. Douglas Bruster argues that the 'culture' literary critiques investigate through the works of Shakespeare and other writers is largely a literary culture, and he examines what this necessary limitation of the scope of 'cultural studies' means for the discipline of early modern studies.

Under an alphabetical list of relevant terms, names and concepts, the book reviews current knowledge of the character and operation of theatres in Shakespeare's time, with an explanation of their origins>

Cognitive approaches to drama have enriched our understanding of Early Modern playtexts, acting and spectatorship. This monograph is the first full-length study of Shakespeare’s props and their cognitive impact. Shakespeare’s most iconic props have become transhistorical, transnational metonyms for their plays: a strawberry-spotted handkerchief instantly recalls Othello; a skull Hamlet. One reason for stage properties’ neglect by cognitive theorists may be the longstanding tendency to conceptualise props as detachable body parts: instead, this monograph argues for props as detachable parts of the mind. Through props, Shakespeare’s characters offload, reveal and intervene in each other’s cognition, illuminating and extending their affect. Shakespeare’s props are neither static icons nor substitutes for the body, but volatile, malleable, and dangerously exposed extensions of his characters’ minds. Recognising them as such offers new readings of the plays, from the way memory becomes a weapon in Hamlet’s Elsinore, to the pleasures and perils of Early Modern gift culture in Othello. The monograph illuminates Shakespeare’s exploration of extended cognition, recollection and remembrance at a time when the growth of printing was forcing Renaissance culture to rethink the relationship between memory and the object. Readings in Shakespearean stage history reveal how props both carry audience affect and reveal cultural priorities: some accrue cultural memories, while others decay and are forgotten as detritus of the stage.