[andrew sofer] the stage life of props (theater t(bookos org)

The Stage Life of Props

Enoch Brater, Series Editor

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by William W. Demastes Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty

by Anthony Kubiak Land/Scape/Theater edited by Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri The Stage Life of Props by Andrew Sofer

The Stage Life of Props

by Andrew Sofer

The University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2003 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2006 2005 2004 2003

4 3 2 1

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sofer, Andrew, 1964– The stage life of props / Andrew Sofer. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-472-09839-X (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-472-06839-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Theaters—Stage-setting and scenery. 2. Stage props.

3. European drama—History and criticism. I. Title.

PN2091.S8 S616 2003 792'.025—dc21 2002154228

ISBN13 978-0-472-02633-3 (electronic)

Preface: Appropriations Physical objects have received short shrift in the study of drama. Ever since Aristotle, the analysis of plays has focused on subjects rather than objects, mimesis rather than the material stuff of the stage.

Indeed, in what can be seen as the founding manifestation of the antitheatrical prejudice within dramatic criticism itself, Aristotle’s Poetics divorces “the power of Tragedy” from theatrical representation entirely. Aristotle dismisses “spectacle” (which presumably includes such elements as props, setting, and mechanical effects) as the least important element of tragedy: The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.1 If spectacle, or mise-en-scène, “depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet,” one would expect to ‹nd more attention paid to props by theater practitioners than by literary critics. A survey con‹rms that most books that mention stage properties in their title are manuals aimed at the aspiring stage designer or technical director, rather than studies aimed at the actor, director, playwright, or scholar.2 In the subject-oriented criticism inaugurated by Aristotle, stage objects either remain at the bottom of the hierarchy of theatrical elements deemed worthy of analysis (script, playwright, actor, director, lighting, design, etc.) or else drop out of critical sight altogether.

But while props may seem tangential to written drama, any regu-

Preface lar theatergoer knows that objects are often central in performance.

This is especially evident in the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, whose absence of illusionistic scenery thrusts objects into unusual prominence. On the mostly bare stage of an Elizabethan playhouse, props are both searing visual emblems and vital participants in the stage action. A production of Richard II without the crown, or Othello without its handkerchief, or Hamlet without Yorick’s skull, is virtually unthinkable. Such props are more than just three-dimensional symbols; they are part of the material fabric of the play in performance. Enlivened by the actor’s touch, charged by the playwright’s dialogue, and quickened in the spectator’s imagination, they take on a life of their own as they weave in and out of the stage action. Often invisible on the page, props are vital on the stage. That vitality is the subject of this book.

Until fairly recently, little critical attention has been paid to how objects enliven actual theatrical performance. Part of the reason is that stage properties occupy an uneasy position between text and performance, the “‹ne abstraction” of reading championed by the notoriously antitheatrical Charles Lamb and the messily contingent business of putting on a play.3 On the one hand, props such as Desdemona’s handkerchief and Yorick’s skull are embedded in the text, where they exist in a kind of suspended animation, awaiting “concretization” by an individual reader.4 Conversely, by mobilizing inanimate objects—literally putting them into play—actors translate these textual signi‹ers into physical properties that travel in concrete stage space and through linear stage time. As I will argue in more detail in my introduction, motion is the prop’s de‹ning feature. Yet motion is precisely what slips from view when the prop is considered as a static symbol, whose meaning is frozen once and for all on the page, rather than as an object that creates and sustains a dynamic relationship with the audience as a given performance unfolds. If we are to recover the stage life of objects, we must attend to how the prop moves on stage for both actor and audience.

Despite the critical tendency to ignore props as a vital component of the theatrical event, objects have not been entirely neglected by theater scholars. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Prague linguistic circle vi

Preface

focused on the “dynamics of the sign” in the theater and paved the way for several important semiotic analyses in the 1980s.5 Since then, scholars with a variety of methodological and ideological commitments have addressed props. Bert O. States and Stanton B. Garner Jr. pursue a phenomenological approach to stage objects as a complement to purely semiotic analysis.6 Performance-oriented Renaissance scholars such as David Bevington, Felix Bosonnet, Alan C. Dessen, Ann Slater, and Frances Teague treat the prop as an important element of the theatrical vocabulary exploited by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.7 Meanwhile, scholars interested in material culture investigate how stage props and costumes embody what Lena Cowen Orlin calls “the cultural project of things.”8 The role of the contemporary stage object within the postmodern “system of objects” has also received recent scrutiny.9 Plainly, the stage property has come into its own as a legitimate object of critical analysis.

In this study, I wish to engage and refocus the emerging critical dialogue on the stage property by locating the prop squarely in the theatrical event. In a series of case studies, I will argue that in the hands of skilled playwrights, the prop becomes a concrete vehicle for confronting dramatic convention and revitalizing theatrical practice.

By viewing the prop as an entity rather than as a symbol, tool as well as trope, I aim to make visible precisely what we as text-based critics are trained not to see: the temporal and spatial dimensions of the material prop in performance. As I claim in my introduction, these dimensions tend to vanish when the prop is considered primarily as a static symbol (as in traditional drama criticism), synchronic lexeme (as in theater semiotics), sensory image (as in theater phenomenology), neurotic symptom (as in psychoanalysis), or placeholder for a particular ideological con‹guration (as in new historicism). Taking up the questions that impel the editors of Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture—“What happens . . . once the object is brought into view? What new con‹gurations will emerge when subject and object are kept in relation?”—I argue that we can parse the ideological rami‹cations of historical stage objects for their audience only once we have recovered their mobile, material life on the stage.10 By insisting on the prop’s “mobile, material life on the stage,” I vii

Preface mean to emphasize two temporal processes that move in opposite directions simultaneously within a given performance. On the one hand, props are unidirectional: they are propelled through stage space and real time before historically speci‹c audiences at a given performance event. At the same time, props are retrospective: in Marvin Carlson’s apt expression, they are “ghosted” by their previous stage incarnations, and hence by a theatrical past they both embody and critique.11 To borrow an example from chapter 2, in Beckett’s Endgame (1957) Hamm’s bloody handkerchief invokes a long line of stage cloths stretching back beyond Shakespeare’s Othello (ca. 1603) and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587–92) all the way to the ‹rst known medieval liturgical drama, the tenth-century Visitatio Sepulchri. Just as we cannot account for the prop’s vitality without reference to the bounded theatrical event that contains it, so too must we acknowledge the prop’s intertextual resonance as one key to the uncanny pleasure—the shock of familiarity within the unfamiliar— that the prop provides in performance.

While useful in theory, a comprehensive poetics of the prop would no more convey the theatrical excitement of objects than a taxonomy of every joke known to humankind would explain humor.

In the playhouse, as opposed to the study, we are seduced by the speci‹c and concrete and not the abstract and the general. Rather than produce a treatise on propology, I have chosen to reconstruct the stage lives of ‹ve exemplary props drawn from ‹ve pivotal periods of stage history: the eucharistic wafer on the medieval stage; the bloody handkerchief on the Elizabethan stage; the skull on the Jacobean stage; the fan on the Restoration and early-eighteenth-century stage; and the gun on the modern stage. Each of these objects seized the imagination of playwrights in their time, and the freshness of their deployment opened up new theatrical terrain for subsequent dramatists.

It goes without saying that these objects’ stage careers often stretched beyond the periods in which I have situated them. Nevertheless these props spoke especially to their particular era, and part of my aim is to explain the timeliness of their appeal. I shall argue that each prop I have chosen addresses a “semiotic crisis”: a particuviii

Preface

lar issue or dilemma concerning theatrical representation faced by the drama of its period. Theater colonizes reality for its own ends, and in the case of the prop it does so by appropriating the object’s prior symbolic life. As a result of this theatrical appropriation, each prop I discuss revises (or attempts to revise) the way objects signify for spectators.

My ‹rst three chapters explore three instances in which the medieval and early modern theater appropriated and transformed familiar religious symbols whose orthodox meaning was implicitly or explicitly contested in the wider culture of the time. In chapter 1, “Playing Host: The Prop as Temporal Contract on the Medieval Stage,” I discuss what might be called the ur-prop of postclassical western European drama: the eucharistic wafer (oble) that, once consecrated by a priest, became the divine Host. In late-‹fteenth-century England, laity and clergy struggled for control of sacred symbols such as the Bible and the Host itself. In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, the Church’s most sacred symbol is literally abducted from the Church by skeptical Jews—an action that mirrors the appropriation of the holy wafer by the lay miracle players who presumably performed the play. Despite the play’s didactic purpose in shoring up belief in the real presence of Christ in the Host, its theatrical form implicitly undermines its doctrinal message. The use of the holy wafer as a stage property substitutes the contract of theatrical representation (whereby an unconsecrated wafer represents the presence of Christ in the Host) for the transubstantiation of the Mass (whereby Christ actually resides in the consecrated Host).

In short, whether the theatricalized Croxton wafer was understood as consecrated or unconsecrated, actual Host or stage property, seems to depend as much on the spectators’ angle of vision—on what it was they thought they saw—as on the priest’s unambiguous act of transubstantiation. I take the range of possible perceptions of the wafer by medieval spectators as models of recent critical understandings of the theatrical sign before concluding that the prop is best understood as embodying a volatile “temporal contract” established between actor and spectator for the duration of performance.

Although the spectator is always free to take up a range of underix

Preface standings of the prop’s meaning, the prop’s very ›uidity as a theatrical sign encourages playwrights to use it as a concrete tool to subvert the symbolism previously embodied by the object it represents.

In chapter 2, “Absorbing Interests: The Bloody Handkerchief on the Elizabethan Stage,” I take up the struggle of the Elizabethan public theaters to build an audience united not by common faith in the ef‹cacy of devotional drama, but by the search for theatrical pleasure in an age that looked back on the rituals of the old religion with a mixture of suspicion and nostalgia. Inaugurated by Thomas Kyd’s spectacularly successful The Spanish Tragedy, the theatrical vogue for bloody handkerchiefs illustrates how a newly commercial theater capitalized on the recent prohibition against placing images of holy objects, such as the Host, on the stage. I argue that sensational props such as Kyd’s handkerchief promoted a voyeuristic “contract of sensation” designed to draw patrons to the public playhouses again and again. I thereby challenge the current argument that Elizabethan drama sought to demystify formerly sacred objects as spurious idols.

If the Croxton play had celebrated Christ’s real presence in the sacrament, even as it paradoxically converted that presence into representation by using a theatrical property to represent the Host, the Elizabethan stage appropriated the divinely ef‹cacious magic of holy cloth and sacred blood for strictly commercial ends.

In chapter 3, “Dropping the Subject: The Skull on the Jacobean Stage,” I turn to an iconic presence in the skeptical Jacobean theater: the memento mori skull. As part of the Christian technique of dying well (ars moriendi), this cultural symbol had once held out the promise of eternal reward and reassured the faithful that they lived sub specie aeternitatis. Long a staple of the visual arts, by the early seventeenth century the skull had been appropriated by prostitutes and fashionable young men as an ambiguous symbol with a more mordant and disturbing message. Developing a dramatic equivalent of the trick image performed by the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, Jacobean playwrights conveyed the skull’s oscillation between live subject and dead object. In plays such as Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy, the ironized skull mocks the familiar symbolism readily assigned to it by the plays’ protagonists. x

Preface

The skull hollows out the rhetoric of the men who presume to master its meaning and, in so doing, drains them of substance and threatens to turn them into its mouthpieces. By asserting its material presence on the stage, the Jacobean skull repeatedly refuses to settle for the role of passive emblem and insists on its active role in the stage event.

My last two studies reconstruct how two culturally prominent objects were pressed into service as props in order to address crises of theatrical representation (staging women) and dramatic form (ending plays). In chapter 4, “The Fan of Mode: Sexual Semaphore on the Restoration and Early-Eighteenth-Century Stage,” I analyze the relation of the property fan to the newly complex performance of gender on the licentious Restoration stage. Following the arrival of the professional actress, both male and female playwrights were compelled to decide how women play women—in other words, whether women would become sexual subjects or sexual objects on stage. I argue that the fan became a weapon in the theater’s struggle to establish the extent of female sexual agency. By analyzing key scenes in which a woman is instructed in the correct use of the fan, I show how Restoration and early-eighteenth-century playwrights attempted both to exploit and to constrain the thrilling but potentially subversive sexual semaphore wielded by actresses for the ‹rst time on the professional English stage.

In chapter 5, “Killing Time: Guns and the Play of Predictability on the Modern Stage,” I turn to a formal crisis faced by modern playwrights: the rigid dramatic closure of nineteenth-century melodrama epitomized by the climactic pistol-shot. On the modern stage, playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, Samuel Beckett, and Maria Irene Fornes revisit the melodrama of female suicide only to subvert its temporal expectations. I demonstrate that on the modern stage, guns ironize, dislocate, and ultimately transcend stage time. By “killing time,” guns liberate the spectator from the restrictive contracts of psychological causality and dramatic closure posited by realism. The stage gun exempli‹es how modern-day props continue a long tradition of rejuvenating dramatic form and theatrical practice.

Each of these case studies is designed to stand alone as an indexi

Preface pendent argument. While they appear in chronological order, there is no master narrative connecting them; my aim is not to posit an unfolding teleology or evolution of the prop, for these objects do not tell a single story. Rather, taken together these case studies illustrate a common mechanism of appropriation whereby props are enlisted to address a wider semiotic crisis in the theater (and often the culture) of the day.12 In any given historical period, objects drift toward center stage when they no longer quite mean what they used to say or say what they used to mean. As ›uid, material signs that establish a dynamic temporal contract with the spectator, stage objects revitalize theatrical tradition. By refusing to “prop up” conventional symbolism, the wafer, handkerchief, skull, fan, and gun insist on the prop’s ability to keep theatrical meaning in motion.

Why these props and not others? The potential range in a study of this kind is limitless, and I have been guided in my choice of props and periods by my own interest, familiarity, and curiosity. One of the most rewarding aspects of this project is that it has allowed me to venture beyond my own primary areas of research, Renaissance and modern drama, in order to explore other periods through the lens of the stage object. At the risk of making specialists impatient, I try to provide enough historical context to ground my argument and to make each chapter inviting and accessible to readers unfamiliar with the period in question. Certainly no chapter is intended as a balanced introduction to the drama of the period. Rather, I emphasize those aspects (such as the relation of Elizabethan theater to the discourse of iconoclasm, or the extent to which Restoration actresses put their own stamp on their roles) that illuminate the life of the prop at hand as I believe it was experienced in the playhouse of the time.

It may be objected that the view of the stage that opens out from the perspective of the object is necessarily partial, selective, even quixotic. No doubt too, some readers will feel that by placing the prop center stage, I have distorted crucial aspects of theatrical or cultural history. It may be that a certain degree of overgeneralization, even tunnel vision, is the price paid for such a broad historical study; my hope is that the prop has enabled me to say something fresh about drama in the periods I consider. In the spirit of keeping meanxii

Preface

ing in motion, I welcome attempts both to revise my account of how these props lived in their own time and to extend my inquiry to other, equally resonant objects.

Why the stage life of props—as opposed to their symbolic, psychological, ideological, cultural, or ‹gurative lives? To no small degree, my aim in this book parallels the job of a theater director, which was indeed my occupation in a previous stage life of my own.

In bringing dead words to life, the director’s task is necessarily selective. She must pick particular moments and “beats” for emphasis and move swiftly past many potentially fruitful diversions in pursuit of the spine of her particular interpretation. The director’s job is not to realize all possibilities latent in the script, but to sculpt stage time so that it moves meaningfully for an audience. I have tried to do something similar in the chapters that follow.

What I offer to the reader is therefore not the account of any one play, let alone any one prop. Like any contemporary production of a classic play, no matter how historically responsible, these case studies are reconstituted from a twenty-‹rst-century perspective. While aiming toward as much accuracy as the evidence allows, my reconstructions of these props’ stage careers are colored by that perspective and can stake no claim to being de‹nitive. Nevertheless, I hope that my study will encourage theater practitioners, cultural historians, and drama specialists alike to revisit these objects, and the plays that contain them, with a new appreciation for the temporal and spatial life embedded there.

xiii

Acknowledgments I have bene‹ted from the help of many scholars in pursuing this project. I owe especial thanks to Enoch Brater, without whose guidance and encouragement this book would never have been completed.

Bert Cardullo, Linda Gregerson, and P. A. Skantze each read early drafts and shaped the project in crucial ways. Andrew Von Hendy and Mary Thomas Crane offered comments on the entire manuscript. Others who have generously helped me think through the stage life of props include David Bevington, John Russell Brown, Marvin Carlson, Stanton B. Garner Jr., Stephen Greenblatt, JanLüder Hagens, Jonathan Gil Harris, William Hutchings, William Ingram, Ann Rosalind Jones, Charles Lyons, Natasha Korda, John Mahoney, Judith Milhous, Steven Mullaney, Brian Richardson, Joseph Roach, Angela Rosenthal, Peter Stallybrass, Bert O. States, Karla Taylor, Frances Teague, Grace Tiffany, Theresa Tinkle, Valerie Traub, Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, Chris Wilson, James Winn, and Paul Yachnin. Friends, colleagues, and relatives whose voices informed this project include Gina Bloom, Elise Frasier, Sylvia Gimenez, Tobias Gregory, Atar Hadari, Kenneth Hodges, Judith Issroff, Robert Knopf, Steve and Ellen Levine, Joy Ochs, Mike Sell, Sondra Smith, Paul Sofer, Michael Sowder, Robert Stanton, and John Su. My editor at University of Michigan Press, LeAnn Fields, deserves special thanks, as do my anonymous readers for the Press.

I extend my thanks to the University of Michigan’s Department of English and Rackham Graduate School for much needed ‹nancial and institutional support; to Boston College for a summer Research Incentive Grant; to the Mellon Foundation, with whose assistance major portions of the text were completed; and to my colleagues in Boston College’s English Department, who have helped me in numerous ways. Annette Fern of the Harvard Theatre Collection and

Acknowledgments Lisa Cherin, Jackie Dallen, and Stephen Vedder of Boston College provided invaluable assistance with the photographs, as did student actors Christopher Crocetti and David Mawhinney.

My acting and directing teachers—Hilary Nicholls and Shai Bar Ya’akov at Hebrew University, Jacques Cartier and Sidney Friedman at Boston University, Zelda Fichandler at Arena Stage, Robert Moss at Playwrights Horizons Theater School, and Kaf Warman at Island Theatre Workshop—enabled me to explore theater in its many dimensions. I owe a special debt to the late Mary Payne of ITW, who bravely cast me as Hamlet and allowed me to in›ict the results of my Beckett obsession on a paying audience. My mother, Elaine Sofer, immediately grasped what excited me about props; her love of theater informs much of what follows. Last, my most especial thanks to Bonnie Tenneriello, for her un›agging emotional support, intellectual engagement, and faith that the prop would eventually come to rest. This book is for her.

The Croxton Play of the Sacrament photograph is reproduced by permission of Tessa Musgrave; The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet photographs by permission of Stephen Vedder; and The Careless Husband and Happy Days images by permission of the Harvard Theatre Collection, the Houghton Library. Earlier versions of chapters 2 and 3 originally appeared in Comparative Drama and English Literary Renaissance. I am grateful for the editors’ permission to reprint this material.

xvi

Contents Introduction: Rematerializing the Prop 1

1 Playing Host The Prop as Temporal Contract on the Medieval Stage 31

2 Absorbing Interests The Bloody Handkerchief on the Elizabethan Stage 61

3 Dropping the Subject 4 The Fan of Mode

The Skull on the Jacobean Stage

89

Sexual Semaphore on the Restoration and Early-Eighteenth-Century Stage 117

5 Killing Time Guns and the Play of Predictability on the Modern Stage 167 Notes 203 Bibliography Index 269

251

Introduction Rematerializing the Prop The fundamental concern of all theatre researchers is with the very “object” of theatre itself.

—Willmar Sauter

A chair on the stage is a theatre chair.

—Peter Handke

A

consecrated wafer, stolen from a church by medieval Jews bent on disproving the real presence of Christ in the Host, bleeds when stabbed. A blood-soaked handkerchief mutates from a charmed talisman of love to a ghastly token of revenge as it passes from woman to man and from son to father. A dirt-encrusted skull, which inspires a Renaissance prince to strike a fashionable memento mori pose, suddenly invokes that prince’s beloved childhood companion and makes him gag. A fan that begins as an innocent birthday gift becomes devastating proof of in‹delity. An unhappily married woman points her pistol offstage at her husband and shoots; defying logic, the bullet kills her onstage companion instead.

These ‹ve theatrical objects are stage properties, or “props” for short, de‹ned by the OED as “[a]ny portable article, as an article of costume or furniture, used in acting a play: a stage requisite, appurtenance, or accessory.” Yet when we think of the props that have most etched themselves into our theatrical memory, we are hardpressed to explain their grip on us in these terms. Is Yorick’s skull a “requisite,” an “appurtenance,” or a mere “accessory,” and from whose point of view? Could the graveyard scene in Hamlet take place without it? Does the skull’s theatrical power emanate from Shakespeare’s dialogue, the actor’s gesture, the audience’s imagina-

The Stage Life of Props tion, or the material object itself? Is Yorick trope or fact, absent or present?

In this book I explore a peculiarly theatrical phenomenon: the power of stage objects to take on a life of their own in performance.1 Text-based scholars, who tend to dismiss objects as at best embodied symbols or at worst as plot devices, have largely neglected this phenomenon—that is, when objects penetrate the critical radar at all.2 Invisible on the page except as textual signi‹ers, props seduce our attention in the playhouse as they become drawn into the stage action and absorb complex and sometimes con›icting meanings. By de‹nition, a prop is an object that goes on a journey; hence props trace spatial trajectories and create temporal narratives as they track through a given performance. My ‹rst aim in this study is to restore to the prop those performance dimensions that literary critics are trained not to see. These include not only the three-dimensionality of objects as material participants in the stage action, but the spatial dimension (how props move in concrete stage space) and the temporal dimension (how props move through linear stage time). Although these are the dimensions that allow the object to mean in performance, they are precisely those liable to drop out of sight when the prop is treated as a textual rather than as a theatrical phenomenon.

The stage life of props extends beyond their journey within a given play, moreover. As they move from play to play and from period to period, objects accrue intertextual resonance as they absorb and embody the theatrical past. When the title character of August Wilson’s King Hedley II (1999) plants seeds in his backyard dirt, he not only expresses his yearning for roots. For the alert spectator, King’s seeds invoke those famous seeds planted by doomed salesman Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s classic Death of a Salesman (1949).

They may also recall Mama’s feeble plant in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), dying for lack of sun but rescued, like Mama’s family, from the Chicago slums at play’s end. Last, King’s seeds ironically memorialize those planted by the little girl, Raynell, in Wilson’s own earlier drama Fences (1985). In Fences, which concludes in 1965, the seeds represented the possibility of a better future for an African-American community still struggling to emerge from 2

Introduction

the traumas of northern migration and institutionalized racism. For the embittered King, trapped in a Pittsburgh slum in the 1970s and seeing his hopes literally trampled in the dirt, the promise glimpsed

by Raynell in the earlier play has proved hollow.

King’s seeds thus work on two levels simultaneously: they enliven the dramatic action in the present and revive the dead symbols of the theatrical past, offering them what director Jonathan Miller aptly calls an “afterlife.”3 Even as the seeds convey the aridity of King’s hardscrabble existence, they embed Wilson’s play in the fertile soil of American family drama and enrich its resonance for the dramatically literate spectator. My second aim in this study is to demonstrate that props such as these are not mere accessories, but time machines. As material ghosts, stage props become a concrete means for playwrights to animate stage action, interrogate theatrical practice, and revitalize dramatic form. Props are not static symbols but precision tools whose dramaturgical role in revising outmoded theatrical contracts with the audience has long been neglected.

In this sense, the function of the stage property duplicates that of theater itself: to bring dead images back to life—but with a twist. That is why playwrights return again and again to superannuated objects (no less than to obsolete words, stories, characters, and genres) that have outlived their dramatic usefulness. As Marvin Carlson points out through his highly suggestive concept of theatrical “ghosting,” theater itself is a vast, self-re›exive recycling project. The same elements—stories, texts, actors, props, scenery, styles, even spectators—appear over and over again.4 Our pleasure in seeing the relic revived, the dead metaphor made to speak again, is the very reason we go to the theater to see a play we already know well. A prop exists textually only in a state of suspended animation. It demands actual embodiment and motion on the stage in order to spring to imaginative life.5

Production Analysis and the Case Study Approach Thus the performance-oriented critic is faced with a paradox. If performance is necessary to animate the object, how can a text-based 3

The Stage Life of Props study animate the prop for the reader—especially if the reader is not an inveterate theatergoer? The stage life of objects distant in time can only be recovered through a kind of contextual reanimation: a “thick description” of the stage event as best we can reconstruct it, using such cues as verbal and actual stage directions, visual records of historical performances, and (where available) eyewitness accounts.

Recent productions of the plays can offer important, although never de‹nitive, clues to original staging choices. They can also indicate when an ingenious interpretation is incommunicable to an audience.

Restoration theater historians Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume label this critical approach “production analysis,” which they de‹ne as follows: By this term we mean interpretation of the text speci‹cally aimed at understanding it as a performance vehicle—“reading with a directorial eye,” if you like. While heavily grounded in textual analysis, such criticism will be undertaken on the principle that what should emerge is a sense of multiple possibilities in actual performance. Production analysis should draw freely on theatre history and drama history. Particular productions will be studied for what they can tell us about the potentialities of the script, but the critic is in no way limited to what has been staged. The results will sometimes resemble instructions for performance, but practically speaking they will be no more than a preliminary hint to the director, necessarily lacking the detail required for actual execution of a performance. A production analysis is a series of architect’s sketches, not the blueprints that would be necessary to bring any one of them to actuality. The object is to clarify possible meanings and effects, primarily for readers, critics, and theatregoers, secondarily for the interested director. The result should be improved understanding of the performance potentialities of the play at issue.6 Milhous and Hume distinguish production analysis, which concentrates on visualization of performance possibilities, from the analysis of actual, historical productions of particular plays, which they label 4

Introduction

“performance analysis.” Only fully ›edged performance analysis requires “precise determination of audience comprehension and response,” since the production analyst is more interested in the horizon of performance possibilities generated by the text than in the realization of those possibilities within a given production.7 For Milhous and Hume, then, “Dramatic criticism comprises two basic activities: analysis of the script (production analysis) and analysis of actual performance of the script (performance analysis). . . .

Performance analysis enjoys the distinct advantage of dealing with actuality, with a production complete in all its details, with the experience of the real thing. Of course, the advantage is also a disadvantage: the critic is stuck with what the performance gives him. The production analyst is far freer to pursue hypothesis and speculation, to envision interpretive possibilities.”8 While production analysis is inevitably more conjectural than performance analysis, we simply lack suf‹cient historical evidence to produce a thorough performance analysis of (say) an Elizabethan or Restoration production.

Failing the discovery of more detailed historical evidence, production analysis—sensitive to textual cues and to historical staging practices insofar as we understand them—must suf‹ce the text-based performance critic.

To put the prop imaginatively in motion once more, I have chosen a case study approach based on Milhous and Hume’s method of production analysis. In the chapters that follow, I reconstruct the stage careers of ‹ve singular props that haunt the western European theatrical imagination: the medieval eucharistic wafer, the Elizabethan handkerchief, the Jacobean skull, the Restoration and early-eighteenth-century fan, and the modern-day gun. I am keenly aware of the pitfalls of such an approach. When writing about a particular piece of stage business, it is sometimes hard to draw the line between reasonable supposition and armchair fantasy. This is especially so in the case of the Restoration fan, when so little hard evidence of just how the prop came alive in the hands of actresses survives. Thus chapter 4 relies heavily on evidence drawn from contemporary journalism, stage illustrations, and acting manuals, as well as on my own intuition as a theater practitioner and textual critic.

5

The Stage Life of Props This book aims to show that, despite its limitations, the contextual reanimation of material stage objects is a legitimate exercise for scholars as well as students—and surely no less conjectural than an analysis, say, of Hamlet’s unconscious life or of Lady Macbeth’s past.

Just as psychoanalysis is no less useful an approach to drama for the fact that it rei‹es imaginary beings, so production analysis is no less valuable for the fact that it materializes textual objects. The “cash value” of the production analysis of stage objects is that it offers new evidence of a vanished performance history even as it opens up a new ‹eld of inquiry. For by making visible what has been invisible in our readings of drama, we gain a much ‹rmer sense of how a particular play moves in performance, as well as a tightly focused lens through which to examine the dramatic energies of a speci‹c theatrical period. We can also expose a playwright’s particular stamp on a genre or period by comparing what his or her contemporaries made of the same object. Perhaps most important, by attuning us to the sheer material heft of what occupies the stage, together with its mobility in time and space, props invite us to read drama in ‹ve dimensions. The value of such an approach in the theater history or drama survey classroom as a method for enlivening the material (in both senses) goes without saying.

This introduction presents a broader theoretical context and conceptual framework within which my individual case studies can be positioned, with special attention paid to the three dominant theoretical approaches to the study of stage objects thus far: the semiotic, phenomenological, and materialist.9 I will argue that as a prelude to reanimating the prop, we must ‹rst rematerialize it—an approach that challenges perhaps the most fundamental tenet of theater semiotics, namely the dematerialization of the stage sign.

From Object to Sign: The Prague School Dilemma From a semiotic perspective, it is hard to draw a ‹rm distinction between subjects and objects on stage, since subject and object alike function as volatile theatrical signs. This has been a particular prob6

Introduction

lem for theorists who seek to isolate the stage object as a focus of semiotic inquiry, among them Shoshana Avigal and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Anne Ubersfeld, and Gay McAuley. These “second wave” theater semioticians build on the insights of the in›uential group of semioticians known as the Prague school. While much of the Prague school’s analysis focused on what it called “verbal art,” in the 1940s several members (some of whom were theater practitioners as well as critics) were drawn to the theater as a laboratory of analyzable signs and sign systems. The Prague critics’ analysis of the theatrical sign laid the theoretical foundation for subsequent work on theatrical objects and raised the fundamental questions with which any rigorous study of props must begin: what is a stage object, and how does it signify?10 Fundamental to the Prague critics’ analysis is the principle of semiotization, according to which “[a]ll that is on the stage is a sign.”11 Simply by being placed on stage, a chair acquires an invisible set of quotation marks and becomes the sign “chair.” Umberto Eco calls this phenomenon ostension, which he de‹nes as “de-realizing a given object in order to make it stand for an entire class.”12 On stage, the object’s signifying function eclipses its practical function, so that in performance “things serve only to the extent that they mean.”13 Semiotization obtains even in cases of what Keir Elam calls “iconic identity,” in which the stage object is identical to what it represents.14 Prague school theorist Petr Bogatryev pushed the semiotization argument one step further by arguing that stage objects become “signs of a material object’s sign.”15 In performance, the material sign-vehicle absorbs the abstract connotations associated with the object it represents. These “real world” connotations (royalty, say, in the case of a throne) then replace that represented object in the mind of the spectator. For Bogatryev, the onstage throne is thus not merely the sign of an object (throne) but the “sign of the [represented] object’s sign” (royalty). Any stage chair is thus doubly abstracted from a real chair: ‹rst, as a representative of the class of chairs (Eco’s ostension), and second, as a sign of the material chair’s abstract connotations. As proof, Bogatryev claims that it does not matter to an audience whether a diamond necklace on stage is in fact fake, since 7

The Stage Life of Props that audience will imaginatively leap over both the material signvehicle (fake necklace) and its denotation (genuine necklace) to the “sign of the object’s sign” (fabulous wealth). For Bogatryev, all stage objects are thus “signs of signs.”

In the late 1960s, theorist Tadeusz Kowzan extended the semiotization principle still further. Kowzan argues that each connotation (signi‹ed) accrued by the stage object may in turn become a signi‹er of a new connotation at the next level of meaning. Kowzan cites a famous prop, Chekhov’s eponymous seagull, as an example: The stuffed sea-gull, an accessory in Chekhov’s play, is the sign, at the ‹rst degree, of a recently killed sea-gull; this is the sign, at the second degree (or symbol in the current language) of an abstract idea (failed aspiration to freedom) which is in turn the sign of the hero’s mood in the play. To be more precise, we can say that the signi‹é of the sign at the ‹rst degree, is linked to the signi‹ant of the sign at the second degree; the signi‹é of the latter is linked to the signi‹ant of the sign at the third degree and so on (the phenomenon of connotation).16 In this way, writes Kowzan, “a simple prop, passing through intermediate stages, becomes the sign of the master-idea of the play.”17 Whether one accepts Kowzan’s theory of what might be called semiotic bootstrapping, or even Bogatryev’s “signs of signs” argument, the principle of semiotization seems an unavoidable corollary of any theatrical event.

However, if all that is on stage is a sign, it becomes very dif‹cult to decide what on stage isn’t an object. What about the body of the actor, for instance? What of a sound effect such as a doorbell, a visual effect such as fog, or an olfactory effect such as the smell of bacon?

According to the Prague school principle of “dynamism,” a single material sign-vehicle can convey an unlimited number of meanings in the course of a given performance: an umbrella can become a weapon, a walking stick, a toy, an emblem of middle-class conformity, and so on.18 Conversely, any material object can “play” a given role. Chekhov’s gull might be represented by a real bird, an old boot, 8

Introduction

a cardboard cutout, or conceivably by the mimed gesture of the actor.

Iconic resemblance is not a prerequisite for signi‹cation; in nonillusionistic traditions, such as the Chinese theater, “A real object may be substituted on the set by a symbol if this symbol is able to transfer the object’s own signs to itself.”19 ^ Moreover, as Jindrich Honzl points out, any given signi‹ed may be passed along a chain of material signi‹ers, and even relayed from one theatrical sign-system to another, within a performance.20 For example, a thunderstorm might be conveyed now by a prop umbrella, now by a lighting effect, now by a sound effect, now by a line of dialogue (“It’s raining cats and dogs out there”).21 But if anything on stage can in principle stand for anything else, and if any given signi‹ed can be conveyed by any sign-vehicle on stage, including light and sound, the distinction between object and nonobject dissolves into a free play of signs.

In his landmark article “Man and Object in the Theater,” Prague ^ school theorist Jirí Veltruský acknowledged this dif‹culty of separating subject from object and instead posited a ›uid continuum between subjects and objects on stage.22 In Elam’s gloss, objects are “promoted” up the scale “when they are raised from their ‘transparent’ functional roles to a position of unexpected prominence” and acquire “semiotic subjectivity” independent of the actor.23 To use Veltruský’s own example, a stage dagger might move from being a passive emblem of the wearer’s status to participating in the action as an instrument of murder, and thence to a ‹nal independent association with the concept “murder.” Conversely, when the actor’s “action force” is reduced to zero, the actor takes on the status of a mere prop (e.g., a spear-carrier or corpse). Actor and prop are dynamic signvehicles that move up and down the subject-object continuum as they acquire and shed action force in the course of a given performance. For Veltruský, an object becomes a prop when it begins to take part in the action overtly as a tool; and when props acquire independent signifying force, “we perceive them as spontaneous subjects, equivalent to the ‹gure of the actor.”24 Veltruský’s intriguing concept of “action force” remains murky. If the dagger becomes a subject not when it directly participates in the 9

The Stage Life of Props stage action (by stabbing somebody), but by signifying “murder,” then isn’t any object that conveys an abstract idea independent of an actor—the portrait of the general in Hedda Gabler, for instance, or the count’s boots in Miss Julie—a subject?25 We recall that for Bogatryev, all theatrical “signs of signs” possess the connotative ability to stand for an abstract idea associated with the represented object rather than for the object itself. The “semiotic subjectivity,” or “action force,” of objects seems as universal as semiotization itself.26 No sooner does an object arrogate attention to itself than it becomes a subject in its own right; thus Veltruský’s examples of “semiotic subjectivity” include a ticking clock on an empty stage. But can such an object truly be said to become a “subject” equivalent to the actor in the minds of the audience?

Second-wave theater semioticians, who rediscovered and extended the Prague circle’s work on the theatrical sign in the late 1960s and early 1970s, tended to explore the dynamics of signi‹cation outlined by Bogatryev and Honzl rather than to pursue Veltruský’s elusive concept of action force. Thus Kowzan developed his idea of levels of connotation, while Umberto Eco insisted that stage objects are not only signs of signs, but signs of the ideology behind the object’s sign.27 Such theoretical re‹nements threatened a bottomless mise-en-abîme of theatrical signi‹cation (signs of signs of signs of . . .). The axiomatic leap from the stage object’s materiality to its sign function continued to risk theorizing the material object out of existence.

The attempt to pin down the “object” of semiotic inquiry reached a plateau in 1981, with the arrival of two studies that acknowledged the frustrations inherent in the Prague school account of the theatrical sign. In their ambitious attempt to outline a methodology for the semiotic study of theatrical objects, Shoshana Avigal and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan concede that “[t]he very word ‘object’ is problematic, since it designates both a ‘thing’ and the functioning of this ‘thing’ within a system of interrelations with other components of the system (‘object’ in relation to ‘subject’).”28 Avigal and Rimmon-Kenan deal with this problem by provisionally locating the object solely through its function as a “lexeme,” a unit of theatrical meaning: 10

Introduction

In our opinion, a de‹nition of an object as such cannot be given a priori, but only relative to its functioning as a lexeme, i.e., a sign which can be listed in the “dictionary” (lexicon) created by the speci‹c performance. As a lexeme, the object can take part in “sentences” which can be analyzed linguistically, although they are not completely verbal.29 A consequence of this functional approach is that, as the authors admit, the list of potential stage objects “runs the risk of being in‹nite.”30 In a similar way, semiotician Anne Ubersfeld categorizes both textual and scenic items as theatrical “objects” that overlap as lexemes, even though they are not homologous.31 Ubersfeld argues that the theatrical object is “a crossroads, or rather a braiding (tressage) of semiotic functions, which is to say, properly speaking, a text.” Like Avigal and Rimmon-Kenan, Ubersfeld concedes that “from the moment a theatrical object is a text, it becomes hard to treat it as a discrete unit whose combinations can be studied.”32 By the early 1980s, the semiotic study of the theatrical object had reached an impasse. If “in the theater there are only objects,” as Ubersfeld proclaimed, how can we distinguish material things from other signifying “objects” such as actors, gestures, or lighting effects?33

From Sign to Prop: (Re)materializing the Stage Object The stage property offers a way to rescue the material object from the ocean of signs limned by theater semiotics, and indeed, to distinguish the prop from other material objects on stage. As we have seen, the OED de‹nes a prop as “[a]ny portable article, as an article of costume or furniture, used in acting a play: a stage requisite, appurtenance, or accessory.” But such a capacious de‹nition fails to distinguish between props and other onstage items. A prop can be more rigorously de‹ned as a discrete, material, inanimate object that is visibly manipulated by an actor in the course of performance.

It follows that a stage object must be “triggered” by an actor in 11

The Stage Life of Props order to become a prop (objects shifted by stagehands between scenes do not qualify). Thus a hat or sword remains an article of costume until an actor removes or adjusts it, and a chair remains an item of furniture unless an actor shifts its position.34 When Lear sits on a stationary throne, the throne remains a set piece, but when Hamlet knocks over the chair on seeing his father’s ghost in the “closet scene” (a piece of stage business invented by Thomas Betterton that became canonical in the seventeenth century), the chair becomes a prop. Such manipulation does not have to be manual; an actor might kick the chair, for example. If an actor stumbles over a chair unintentionally, the chair becomes for the nonce an unwitting prop.

The distinction between props and other kinds of stage object, then, is a matter neither of diminutive size nor potential portability but actual motion. The prop must physically move or alter in some way as a result of the actor’s physical intervention.35 Unlike other critics, I emphasize the criterion of manipulation rather than portability because for theater practitioners, stationary items such as radios become props once an actor turns them on or otherwise adjusts them.36 The criterion of manipulation also clari‹es the fuzzy distinction between props and stage furniture: large items that are actually shifted by an actor, such as Mother Courage’s wagon, qualify as props whatever their size. Smaller items that are potentially portable but never manipulated by actors do not, even if they play a signi‹cant symbolic role (like the general’s portrait in Hedda Gabler). To paraphrase British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s famous remark about the baby, “[T]here is no such thing as a prop”; wherever a prop exists, an actor-object interaction exists. Irrespective of its signifying function(s), a prop is something an object becomes, rather than something an object is.

In the most extensive analysis of Shakespeare’s props to date, Frances Teague offers a functional rather than descriptive de‹nition.

Teague claims that props are de‹ned by their “dislocated function”: A property is an object, mimed or tangible, that occurs onstage, where it functions differently from the way it functions offstage.

At the moment when the audience notes its entry into the dra12

Introduction

matic action a property has meaning; it may also have meaning as one of a class of objects. A property can carry multiple meanings, which may sometimes con›ict. Generally, a playwright uses a property to establish a character or to forward action. In production and analysis, properties speci‹ed by the playwright, rather than someone else, usually receive special attention.37 As an example of dislocated function, Teague cites Dapper’s gingerbread in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist: “The gingerbread is either a magical substance invoked to bring the goodwill of the fairy queen or a gag employed to silence a fool, depending on one’s point of view. It never functions as gingerbread usually does, however, as a substance one can eat for pleasure or nourishment.”38 Although Teague does not make this link explicit, her dislocated function is very close to the Russian formalist concept of ostranenie (making strange), which de‹nes the “poetic” function of language. For the formalists, language becomes “poetic” when it draws attention to itself through devices such as meter and rhyme, rather than acting as a transparent referential medium. For Teague, props are de‹ned by how they mean on stage, rather than what they are.39 While Teague’s claim that “[p]roperties do not operate in performance as they do in a nontheatrical context—they mean differently” does indeed suggest how props often estrange the quotidian behavior we come to expect from objects, at least one objection to Teague’s position can be made.40 Some props do ful‹ll a practical or normal function on stage: unlike Dapper’s gingerbread, Algy’s cucumber sandwiches in The Importance of Being Earnest are eaten, fencing foils are used to fence with, knives cut bread, and so on. Teague maintains that such props only imitate the object’s normal function (the knife’s “ordinary function of cutting is simply displaced onstage by the object’s function in performance—to seem to cut, to suggest passion or violence”).41 But this instance of “dislocation” relies upon semiotization, which as we have seen applies to everything on stage, so that the distinction between props and “undislocated” objects once more dissolves. If the function of all stage items is “dislocated” simply by virtue of semiotization, then “dislocated function” cannot distin13

The Stage Life of Props guish props from other stage items such as costume and furniture.42 The confusion between subject and object entailed by the Prague school’s insistence on the “dematerialization” of the stage sign dissolves once we adopt a descriptive de‹nition of the physical property rather than a functional de‹nition of the signifying “stage object” (as dislocated function, lexeme, tressage, etc.). If the semiotic account of the theatrical sign foundered on two related points—locating the object, and distinguishing objects from subjects—the stage property’s fundamental status as a material object rather than a lexical sign removes the dif‹culty. As a mobile, material fact, the prop enables us to develop the analysis of the theatrical sign begun by the Prague structuralists but largely shelved in the 1980s.43 The prop’s de‹ning characteristic—its actual onstage motion— means that we must avoid the temptation to freeze or “spatialize” the theatrical sign as a synchronous lexeme that functions solely according to its difference from other onstage signs. As I will show in more detail in chapter 1, while the prop itself is de‹ned as a discrete, material, inanimate object that is visibly manipulated by an actor, its meaning—those denotations and connotations for which it stands— is a temporal contract established between the actor and spectator for the duration of performance. In accordance with the “dynamism” of the material sign-vehicle ‹rst noted by the Prague school, this contract is tenuously constituted in time and subject to moment-bymoment renegotiation. More than any other factor, the dynamics of this temporal contract determine whether the object takes on a life of its own in performance.

Other scholars have protested the dematerialization of the stage sign entailed by the Prague school principle of semiotization. In an important rebuttal, Freddie Rokem insists that “the linguistic approach is not able to cope with the fact that even if the object becomes a sign, it never loses contact with its materiality as embodied by that particular object which is present on the stage.”44 Rokem reminds us that the material sign-vehicle does not disappear from the spectator’s consciousness, even when it stands for something vastly different from itself:

14

Introduction

To return to the chair, one could say that it is not merely a chair when used on the stage. What enables us to grasp it as such though is that even if the chair is distanced from its identity and function—to sit at a certain height from the ›oor—we will always be able to say about it: “Look, this is no longer a chair: as opposed to ‘not a table’ or ‘not a man.’ ” The fact that even in negating its identity and function through language and its manipulations, the object in itself does not change, points at an important issue in the philosophy of language, because when we name the chair something else, it apparently seems to become two additional things: the object named and a nonchair.45 Rokem restores the object’s affective physicality by arguing that “the palates of our mind are stimulated primarily by the chair as a material object and not only as some abstract linguistic food for thought.46 Rokem’s insistence on the object’s physicality echoes the position advanced by Bert O. States in his phenomenological study of theater, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms. For States, “The problem with semiotics is that in addressing theater as a system of codes it necessarily dissects the perceptual impression theater makes on the spectator. . . .

Thus the danger of the linguistic approach to theater is that one is apt to look past the site of our sensory engagement with its empirical objects.”47 States instead proposes a “binocular vision,” which views the stage object simultaneously as representing something else (the semiotic attitude) and as a thing-in-itself (the phenomenological attitude). States’s attempt to translate signs back into affective images recalls Samuel Beckett’s interest in representing “nonlogical” phenomena before they have been “distorted into intelligibility” by the perceiver. Beckett’s theater insists on the nauseating “thereness” of such things as boots, trees, and carrots—items that ›irt with but ultimately resist symbolism.48 More recently, other critics have resisted reading the stage object as merely a unit of meaning or lexeme. Emphasizing the role of objects in grounding both actor and spectator in a spatial ‹eld, Stan-

15

The Stage Life of Props ton B. Garner Jr. has demonstrated that a phenomenological approach illuminates the contemporary props of Shepard, Ionesco, Beckett, and Pinter.49 In a broad theoretical study, Jean Alter posits a “performant function” in which objects serve as vehicles for actorial virtuosity and hence spectatorial pleasure. By this logic, objects such as juggling balls are enjoyed in their own right rather than as signs.50 Although the debate over the extent to which semiotization obtains in the theater continues, in the light of these critiques it is hard to maintain that semiotics alone can fully account for the affective impact of props in performance. Props do “speak” in the theater— but they also perform.51 Like the play that contains it, then, the prop does not offer itself up to our gaze “all at once” as a digestible sign. The prop must mean in the moment, and that meaning is inextricably tied to such contingent circumstances as the physical dimensions of the performance space, the skill level of the individual actors, director, and designers, and the mood and makeup of the audience on a given night.52 As concrete synecdoches of that dynamic event we call performance, props remind us to keep theatrical meaning at once in our grasp and on the move.

The Cultural Project of Things: Materialism versus the Material In addition to rescuing the material object from the dematerialized sign on the one hand, and restoring diachronic motion to spatialized meaning on the other, my rematerialization of the prop has a further heuristic use. In recent years, there has been growing critical interest in the “materialist” analysis of the stage property’s ideological life within the culture as well as its theatrical life within the playhouse.53 Drawing variously on anthropology, new historicism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and cultural materialism, much important work has been done on what Lena Cowen Orlin has called “the cultural project of things.”54 Early modern scholars in particular have trained their sights on the various ways in which such objects as hair, gloves, and handkerchiefs circulate within a larger framework of cultural anxi16

Introduction

eties, ideological fault lines, and symbolic economies.55 Thus Stephen Greenblatt cites the traf‹c of vestments between church and stage as an example of “circulation of social energy” in the Elizabethan era, while Peter Stallybrass has linked the valence of stage costume to the “livery society” of early modern England.56 Natasha Korda has uncovered hitherto invisible connections between Philip Henslowe’s costume and pawnbroker businesses, and Paul Yachnin has linked the fetishized handkerchief in Othello to England’s textile trade.57 Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda’s collection, Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, highlights “the ways in which seemingly divergent materialisms can work together to broaden and deepen our understanding of stage properties, the plays in which they appear, the institutions and agents that own them, and the social, economic and cultural contexts in which they are embedded.”58 Nor is interest in props’ ideological project limited to the early modern period. For example, W. B. Worthen ‹nds complicity between the “transparent” objects of the contemporary stage and realism’s fetishization of bourgeois interiority.59 These scholars remind us that no recognizable object arrives on stage innocent. Objects bring their own historical, cultural, and ideological baggage on stage with them. New historicism, materialist feminism, and cultural materialism have taught us that the playhouse cannot be arti‹cially cordoned off from the symbolic economy of the culture that surrounds it.60 Just like the offstage objects they represent, props are circulated, fetishized, and commodi‹ed. Indeed, since the public theater is a commercial enterprise, everything that appears on its stages is not only a theatrical sign but a commodity offered for the consumer’s visual consumption. Even in the devotional mystery plays of medieval England, each play in the cycle was presented to the community by a particular trade guild that displayed its latest wares for potential customers. Civic obligation, religious devotion, and what can only be called advertising are all bound up with the stage life of the object. At its most extreme—the chandelier in The Phantom of the Opera or the helicopter in Miss Saigon—the object displaces the actor as the star of the show.

Materialist approaches sensibly insist that any analysis that seeks 17

The Stage Life of Props to comprehend the signifying impact of the stage object must take its historical and cultural contexts into account. However, a tension exists between the goals of restoring the prop’s “speci‹cally material [as opposed to functional and symbolic] dimensions” and recovering its social and economic “histories of production.”61 There is a strong risk that the material presence of the onstage object—its movement in concrete stage space and through linear stage time for spectators— will dissolve into the materialist analysis of the anxieties, fault lines, and ideologies that the object may or may not have embodied for the culture. In short, the danger is that we will lose sight of how objects worked, and continue to work, on stage as part of a discrete theatrical event. The stage object is a theatrical as well as a textual entity, an actual thing as well as a nexus of competing ideological codes.62 Moreover, we must remember that for actual spectators, objects (like plays) move in unidirectional stage time. There are no mental rewind, fast-forward, and pause buttons in the theater as there are in the study—a luxury that may tempt us, as text-based critics, to read more signi‹cance into a given object, moment, or gesture than a spectator could possibly have grasped consciously (and perhaps even unconsciously). For example, in his suggestive article on the ideological rami‹cations of Desdemona’s handkerchief, Paul Yachnin’s claim that Othello’s “stake in the handkerchief registers the theatre’s participation in English society’s fetishized trade in textiles” raises urgent questions for the performance-oriented critic.63 At what point(s) in the play does such “registering” take place? For whom does a connection between the handkerchief and England’s textile trade register—the Jacobean spectator at the playhouse, or the contemporary materialist critic? Could such registering occur in the heat of theatrical performance? If not, does that fact negate Yachnin’s claim?

If the ‹ve case studies that follow emphasize playhouse practice over cultural imagination, then, it is not to discount the latter as irrelevant or even separable. Rather, I seek to redress an imbalance in recent criticism. This imbalance stems, I believe, from the dif‹culty, for those who are not theater practitioners, of conceiving drama as a

18

Introduction

temporal event that takes place for audiences in real time, rather than as a spatialized ‹eld of meaning on the one hand or as a hermetic network of circulating social energy on the other. The phenomenon under scrutiny here—the power of stage properties to haunt the theatrical imagination of characters and audiences—can only be grasped once we shift our critical attention from ›attened symbols on the page to mobile, three-dimensional objects on the stage.

Part of what we risk losing sight of is the sheer charm of stage objects—what I earlier called their seductive power in performance.

We must remind ourselves that audiences pay for theatrical spectacle not because they wish to be interpellated, demysti‹ed, or decentered, but because they enjoy being entertained, titillated, and (occasionally) disturbed. As Bert O. States points out, we leave the study for the playhouse because we crave the sheer messiness of embodied theater. We want the mess along with the meaning, the thing along with the sign.64 Even that most articulate advocate of “laying bare the device,” Bertolt Brecht, recognized that if the performance failed to grab the audience, its ideological demolition work would founder.

Brecht’s analogy for the theatrical event was not a network of mutually deconstructing signs, but a boxing match.

I do not minimize the materialist insight that the object’s cultural and ideological life circulates within the walls of the playhouse as well as beyond it. Indeed, in my own readings, I have historicized the prop’s stage life whenever it has seemed relevant to my production analysis. Such contextualization can only enhance our understanding of these objects’ theatrical fascination. However, my analysis remains rooted in the stage life of props. Before we can hope to ascertain “the cultural project of [stage] things,” we must ‹rst recover their trajectories within the unfolding spatiotemporal event in the playhouse—even while acknowledging that such a reconstruction will always be provisional, if for no other reason than the fact that the historical spectator must to some extent remain a cipher.65 Just as performance-oriented critics have much to learn from the materialist analysis of ideological formations and cultural anxieties, so too can such an analysis make room for the material stage event.

19

The Stage Life of Props

The Stage Life of Props: Unpacking the Metaphor Thus far, I have de‹ned the prop as a mobile physical object rather than as a functional lexeme or ideological symptom; located the prop in the concrete stage space and linear stage time of performance; and extended the Prague school’s concept of the dynamism of the theatrical sign to suggest that the prop’s semiotic life unfolds not as a static symbol whose meaning can be gleaned “all at once,” but as an unstable temporal contract between actor and spectator. I now wish to examine the metaphor that gives rise to the title of this study.

What do we actually mean when we say that an inanimate object “takes on a life of its own” in performance?

From one perspective, the metaphor is misleading, since it implies (a) that the inanimate object becomes truly animate and (b) that the object becomes a subject in its own right, independent of the human actor’s manipulation of it. Neither implication is true. Although they can and do take on some of the functions and attributes of subjects, which accounts in part for their uncanny fascination on stage, props remain objects, not subjects.66 Stage props are “motivated”—literally put into play—by actors but are not themselves animate, although they are often said to “animate” the plot (as the handkerchief does in Othello). Even those anthropomorphic ‹gures de‹ned by Frank Proschan as “performing objects,” such as puppets and marionettes, are only ‹guratively alive, since they must be manipulated by a human presence either on or offstage.67 As puppet theorist Steve Tillis argues, the actor is always the producer, but not necessarily the site, of signi‹cation.68 We must therefore acknowledge the metaphor of the prop with a life of its own as a suggestive ‹gure of speech and seek to unpack its ‹gurative applications.

Objects take on a life of their own when they transcend their usual, “transparent” function and draw the spectator’s attention in their own right. Props’ most common function is to act as various kinds of visual shorthand. First, props signal the larger, offstage world beyond the playing space. A piano signi‹es “bourgeois drawing

20

Introduction

room,” while a striped towel and parasol indicate “beach.” Honzl calls such objects “scenic metonymies,” because they point to a larger scene with which they are conventionally associated.69 (To the extent that they are parts standing for wholes, they are more accurately labeled synecdoches, as Elam points out.)70 In addition to locale, props silently convey time period, socioeconomic milieu, time of day, and so on. In nonillusionistic theater (such as the Elizabethan stage), which largely dispenses with permanent scenery, props act as visual shorthand for a character’s occupation. Examples of some conventional “identity metonymies” include the soldier’s sword, the fop’s wig and snuffbox, the fool’s scepter and bauble, and (more recently) the chef’s hat and secret agent’s sunglasses.

But props do not just identify; they also characterize. The extravagant way that Capitano in the Italian commedia handles his sword tells us at once he is a puffed-up braggart; Osric’s fussiness over his hat conveys obsequiousness, and so on. Often props convey information of which the character himself may be unaware and become vehicles of dramatic irony. Brabantio’s nightgown reminds the early modern audience, watching the play in the middle of the afternoon, that act 1 of Othello takes place in the middle of the night (index of time), but the nightgown also serves to make the dyspeptic senator look ridiculous when he testi‹es against Othello in the witchcraft trial before the formally attired Venetian senate (index of character).71 All of these pointing (indexical) functions are metonymic. They suggest association between prop and referent through contiguity, or through conventional association, rather than through actual resemblance between object and referent. But props easily slide from metonymy to metaphor. Othello’s ›ickering taper metaphorically suggests Desdemona’s threatened life; Laura’s glass menagerie implies the fragility of her hold on reality; Treplev’s dead seagull conveys his penchant for melodrama. The most resonant props cement their identity through both metonymy and metaphor. Thus in Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, the central prop is associated with Lady Windermere both through contiguity (it is constantly in her

21

The Stage Life of Props possession, a birthday gift from her husband, etc.) and through resemblance (it is a delicate, expensive trinket designed for public display, which is how Lord Windermere sees his wife).

Yet props function conventionally as more than visual shorthand, for they are also actorial aids. Mary Douglas has indicated the importance of a well-chosen rehearsal prop in releasing a blocked performer: “One day some prop is passed to him, a hat or green umbrella, and with this symbol suddenly knowledge and intention are realised in the ›awless performance.”72 Theater phenomenologist Stanton B. Garner Jr. emphasizes the role of props in grounding the actor’s body in ‹ctive stage space: “Props establish points of contact between actor/character and mise-en-scène; they localize dramatic activity and materialize it in scenic terms. By extending and physicalizing the body’s operation on the material environment, props situate the body more ‹rmly within it.”73 Props thus enable playwrights and directors to anchor a scene. For example, Emilia’s undressing of Desdemona in Othello creates an extraordinary intimacy between the two women (even as it must have focused the audience’s attention on the male body beneath the female apparel).

Beyond characterization, props become drawn into the stage action in several ways. A key prop, like the tent in David Storey’s The Contractor, or the contents of Winnie’s bag in Beckett’s Happy Days, may even anchor an entire play.74 In such cases, stage business becomes promoted to the status of dramatic action. “Speaking” props, such as letters, can relay information to an audience that would otherwise require the presence of an actor-messenger (the outrageously expository radio bulletins in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound parody this function). Props are also devices for energizing a scene; more than one playwright has relied on the timely appearance of a gun to ratchet up the dramatic tension when the play threatens to sag. Props can pad a dramatic narrative: after the premature resolution of the main plot, the patent plot device of the lost rings motivates The Merchant of Venice’s entire ‹fth act. Conversely, the prop ex machina, such as the identifying token produced at the end of a Greek drama, is a convenient way to tie up loose ends.75 As this brief survey of the prop’s usual functions indicates, it is 22

Introduction

dif‹cult, if not impossible, to pinpoint just when a prop ceases to be passive and becomes active. Pace Veltruský, there is no single criterion for determining when (and if) an object achieves “semiotic subjectivity.” To paraphrase Sir Toby Belch, some props are born lively; some achieve liveliness; and some have liveliness thrust upon ’em.

When we claim that a prop takes on a life of its own in performance, then, we are not saying that a single phenomenon has occurred.

Rather, we are probably making one or more of the following claims.

Props motivate the stage action. Like Hitchcock’s famous McGuf‹ns (the micro‹lm, the suitcase full of cash), the prop is a convenient device for setting a plot in motion. While such usage is perhaps most evident in farce (Goldoni’s The Fan, Labiche’s An Italian Straw Hat), this plot device is adaptable to melodrama (Lady Windermere’s Fan), and tragedy (the handkerchief in Othello). Often a fateful object becomes an antagonist that threatens to expose some dreadful secret, as is true of my last two examples. Farce is the obvious example of a genre in which objects refuse to settle for a passive role and emerge to frustrate the character’s objectives.76 This plot function is the most common, and hence perhaps the least interesting, manifestation of a prop’s ability to draw attention to itself in performance, which is why I introduce it ‹rst.

Props are transformational puppets. In the hands of a skilled actor, the same prop can take on many roles in a given performance. Contemporary performance artist Sarah Jones plays eight international characters in her show Women Can’t Wait, signaling her transition through the use of a single prop: a diaphanous shawl. When Jones covers her head with the shawl, she becomes a woman from India; when she ties the shawl around her neck, a soignée Frenchwoman. In one incarnation, the balled-up shawl becomes a child’s doll.77 Jones’s transformation of the object illustrates that whenever the prop is unscripted by the playwright, the actor’s gesture alone breathes life into it. To this extent, the transformational prop becomes a puppet.

In contrast, the playwright’s dialogue is a crucial element in the life of the textually embedded props I discuss in the chapters that follow.

The same is true for Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1902), in which objects such as the doorkeeper’s shawl are recycled from scene to 23

The Stage Life of Props scene, taking on new connotations each time. Transformational props like Jones’s shawl, which are added in performance by actor or director, are a fascinating topic in their own right but lie outside the scope of my study.

Props appear to signify independently of the actor who handles them.

For Gay McAuley, echoing Veltruský, objects take on a life of their own when they are “capable of expressing or representing something independent of the actor’s activities.”78 McAuley’s own examples include the surreal props incorporated by contemporary playwrightdirectors Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson. Surreal or arbitrary objects have neither use-function nor construable plot function; they are just there, pointing to themselves rather than to an external referent. Found only on the stage (or in a museum exhibition), arbitrary objects sever the link between stage-world and real world. Because of this, they are semidecorative and often divorced from narrative altogether.

Another instance of the autonomy, or pseudoautonomy, of the object is when the prop goes awry and eludes (or seems to elude) the actor’s control. Such “recalcitrant props” may be intentional (the various items that refuse to work properly in Beckett’s plays) or unintentional (the gun that refuses to ‹re on cue). The actor who plays a Restoration fop must juggle a veritable arsenal of props that might include wig, snuffbox, cane, and sword. Playing a drunk or incompetent fop makes even more spectacular demands on the actor, since for the illusion to work, the actor can never signal his own incompetent grasp on things, merely the character’s. The drunken fop example illustrates that recalcitrant props only seem to signify independently of the actor; their independent life is an illusion. As I have argued, an object that is truly independent of an actor’s visible manipulation is not a prop.

Props absorb dramatic meaning and become complex symbols. In this mode of “semiotic subjectivity,” props transcend their customary roles as transparent scenic metonymies and expository signs. Objects like the eponymous lizard in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana and the skeleton in John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance become poetic symbols that elude obvious denotation but suggest 24

Introduction

something larger about the world or theme of the play. The capacity of objects to absorb overdetermined meanings encourages some poetically minded playwrights to promote them to title characters: The Seagull, The Glass Menagerie, and so forth.

Props are defamiliarized. On February 22, 1892, Oscar Wilde scandalized the ‹rst-night audience at London’s fashionable St. James’ Theatre by appearing in front of the curtain to commend the spectators on their good taste in applauding Lady Windermere’s Fan. Wilde brandished a lighted cigarette (an unforgivable solecism given that ladies were present) and wore a green carnation in his buttonhole.

What was the meaning of this mysterious affectation? Cecil Graham, the play’s dandy and presumed mouthpiece for Wilde, had worn an identical green carnation in the third act. When the puzzled spectators turned to their fellows, they were dealt another surprise: Wilde had planted impeccably dressed men throughout the audience, each of whom proudly sported a green carnation.79 On occasions such as this, the prop’s materiality as an object clashes with its conventional function as a sign or tool. When this happens, the tacit representational contract between performer and spectator may be threatened or even ruptured. “Look at this table,” says the actor, pointing to a chair. Dissonant props, like Wilde’s green carnation, thrust their own material strangeness at the audience. This phenomenon resembles the defamiliarization of the linguistic sign, in which a word’s referential function is trumped by its formal, sensory qualities, such as meter and rhyme. A defamiliarized sign or object is one that points to itself rather to an external referent.

Instead of paralyzing the drama, defamiliarization often reinvigorates it. When Chekhov’s Nina refuses to understand the dead seagull as a symbol and perceives a mere corpse, her refusal brings the tensions between her and Treplev to a head and paves the way for her relationship with Trigorin. The coin that always comes up heads in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead signals to the audience that the laws of causality are weirdly suspended. Removed from any context or history in which they make sense, the defamiliarized objects that appear in the plays of Beckett and Sam Shepard resist the characters’ attempts to make them bloom as symbols.

25

The Stage Life of Props The logical end-point of defamiliarization is the use of surreal objects discussed above, which jettison reference to objects outside the theater entirely. In Foreman’s and Wilson’s theaters of the mind, semiosis short-circuits: the “phenomenal” object is selected purely on aesthetic grounds (size, shape, texture, color, etc.) with an eye to its sensory impact as an image rather than as a decodable sign. These props are more like pictorial elements in a surrealist landscape, or the props used by such modern dance companies as Pilobilus or Momix, than participants in a dramatic action.

Props are fetishized. A fetishized prop is one endowed by the actor, character, or playwright with a special power and/or signi‹cance that thereafter seems to emanate from the object itself.80 No longer a transparent sign, a fetish takes on inordinate signi‹cance and becomes the focus of a character’s projected desire, fear, or anxiety.

By extension (contagion?), the object then serves the same function for the audience. As we might expect, Shakespeare is the master of the fetishized prop. In Richard II, for instance, the crown is so invested with symbolic power that it makes the king rather than vice versa.

Fetishized props come in several varieties. They may be talismans (Mary Tyrone’s wedding dress in Long Day’s Journey into Night), neurotic symptoms (Hedda Gabler’s pistols), or commodities (the check in A Raisin in the Sun, the piano in The Piano Lesson). Props may be fetishized through the actor’s gesture alone (as when Krapp fondles his banana in Krapp’s Last Tape), but more frequently the playwright’s language endows the mundane prop with danger and excitement. Othello’s “magic in the web” speech transforms a hitherto innocuous object into a magical charm and, in doing so, exposes theatrical fetishism in action. In Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, a glass of water becomes a pawn in a game of sexual chess (“If you take the glass . . . I’ll take you”).81 Jean Genet’s The Maids is surely the locus classicus of object fetishism on the modern stage.

Not only characters but actors themselves fetishize precious objects, especially those that transmit a theatrical lineage. On Broadway, the “gypsy coat” is passed from roving actor to actor, migrating between shows like the all-but-anonymous Gypsies themselves.

26

Introduction

Actor Rick Cluchey has described how Beckett’s own slippers provided the precise shuf›ing sound needed for Krapp’s Last Tape. As King Lear, Sir Donald Wol‹t ›amboyantly incorporated a cloak said to have belonged to Edmund Kean.82 In a profession devoted to the imaginative donning of others’ lives, clothes, and habits, it is obvious why such theatrical talismans should prove so potent in rehearsal and even transmit some of that magic to audiences in performance.

Props are haunted mediums. Especially on the modern, technological stage, props are possessed by the voices of the past. August Wilson’s piano in The Piano Lesson, Brian Friel’s radio in Dancing at Lughnasa, Krapp’s tape recorder in Krapp’s Last Tape, and Strindberg’s speaking tube in Miss Julie all ventriloquize an absent, offstage subject, which is the reason I label such objects mediums. Such technological “channeling” has its roots in the theatrical phenomenon of personi‹cation, in which the prop is treated as a mute stand-in for the absent subject. In perhaps the most famous example in English drama, Yorick’s skull is a mute object charged with dramatic meaning by Shakespeare’s dialogue and the actor’s gesture.

In their “felt absence,” mediums are at once disturbing and fascinating on stage. They are uncanny in the Freudian sense: we (mis)perceive something alive in a dead object. Indeed, part of the ghostly fascination of theater as an art form is that it satis‹es the audience’s need for what performance theorist Joseph Roach calls “surrogation.” According to Roach, surrogation is an omnipresent cultural drive to ‹ll recently created voids, often traumatic to that culture, with substitutes that are in turn often destroyed once they prove unsatisfactory. Roach calls such scapegoat ‹gures “ef‹gies.”83 What I call the medium and Roach calls the ef‹gy is central to the cultural work of performance, which Roach de‹nes as “the process of trying out various candidates in different situations—the doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand-ins.”84 Itself a kind of medium in these terms, theater allows us to retrieve, if only temporarily, things lost but still cherished. Even if we no longer believe in the literal afterlife once promised by the memento mori, there is something consoling in the fact that we can (in theory) return to encounter Yorick’s skull or Old Hamlet’s ghost 27

The Stage Life of Props night after night. There is an in-joke aspect to this game of theatrical recycling. Early modern spectators at the Globe must have enjoyed the reappearance of The Spanish Tragedy’s Spaniard costume in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (which includes a metatheatrical wink in the audience’s direction). If surrogation is the urge that drives theatrical pleasure (and, for Roach, cultural performance as a whole), then the prop becomes a crucial vehicle of its expression.

Last, props come to life on stage when they confound dramatic convention. A prop takes on a life of its own, we might say, when it refuses to act proppily. By refusing to prop up the drama, the object capsizes audience expectation. I canvas this phenomenon in detail in my discussion of the stage gun in chapter 5, but this metadramatic (dys)function is shared by several of the props that I have chosen to examine. The eucharistic wafer in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, among the earliest stage representations of the Host in English drama, becomes the object of knockabout farce as well as devotional attention to an extent that has puzzled contemporary scholars. The charmed handkerchiefs in The Spanish Tragedy and Othello go horribly awry and become death fetishes. The skull in Hamlet refuses its conventional memento mori function and, in so doing, threatens to dismantle the distinction between dead prop and live prince. Even the fan, that delightful ›irtation device enshrined by Joseph Addison in the pages of The Spectator, becomes sexually electri‹ed in alarming and potentially subversive ways on the Restoration stage.

From this brief survey of the various functions performed by theatrical objects it should be evident that no single overarching theory or underlying mechanism can fully account for the prop’s stage life.

As we shall see repeatedly, any or indeed all of these functions can overlap in performance. As a convenient analogy for summarizing this point, we can take the later Wittgenstein’s revision of his earlier philosophy. In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein maintained that meaningful language has a single, denotative function: to picture the world of actual and possible facts. But Wittgenstein later came to view this position as hopelessly reductive, since language as it is actually used does many other things as well. Wittgenstein came to see language as a motley collection of simultaneously operating language-games, 28

Introduction

each with its own rules. Similarly, the language of props eschews a unitary syntax and grammar. There is no underlying logic of props, merely a variety of “object-games” in circulation at a given time from which dramatists pick, choose, and combine. No recipe or DNA exists for bringing a prop to life. Rather, in their ability to haunt the spectator’s imagination, enlivened props share what Wittgenstein called a family resemblance. We can generalize only by observing that every lively prop transcends the default function of stage objects: to convey visual information about the world of the play in as unobtrusive a manner as possible. Such transcendence is a necessary, but not suf‹cient, requirement for a prop to take on a life of its own in performance.

Props have many lives—practical, referential, rhetorical, phenomenological, psychological, ideological—but each begins when an object is plucked from the world and placed upon a stage, where it uncannily becomes at once itself and other than itself. It is to the earliest, and most alarming, instance of such theatrical appropriation in postclassical western European drama that I now turn.

29

Playing Host The Prop as Temporal Contract on the Medieval Stage Hyt semes quite, and is red: Hyt is quike and semes dede: Hyt is ›eshe and semes bred: Hyt is on and semes too: Hyt is God body and no more.

—“Sacrament of the Altar” (ca. 1450)

I

have de‹ned a stage property as an inanimate object that is visibly manipulated by an actor in the course of performance. But it is not enough for an object to be handled by an actor; it must also be perceived by a spectator as a prop—in other words, as a sign. Indeed, theater can be de‹ned as that mode of perception in which spectators consent to see things as representing things other than themselves: an actor as King Lear, a chair as Lear’s throne, and so on. According to the Prague structuralists, “All that is on the stage is a sign.”1 Simply by virtue of being placed on stage before an audience, objects acquire a set of semiotic quotation marks, so that a table becomes a “table.”2 Thus the prop’s status as a prop does not depend on the actor alone. An object becomes a stage prop only when it is perceived as such by a spectator who is consciously observing an actor—in other words, when an act of theater is taking place.

The unconsecrated eucharistic wafer (oble) is the ur-prop of postclassical western European drama, but it became so in spite of itself.

For the medieval participants in the Catholic Mass, the consecrated wafer (Host) was not—could not have been—a prop, and it is the difference between the two objects, so outwardly similar, that drove a 31

The Stage Life of Props crucial wedge between the ritual action of the Mass and the theatrical representation of a play. Unlike its Jewish antecedent, the Passover matzo that represents the unleavened bread hurriedly consumed by Hebrew slaves before their Exodus from Egypt, to the communicants of the medieval church the consecrated wafer was no mere sign-vehicle standing in for an absent signi‹ed. According to the doctrine of “real presence,” Christ’s body and blood were actually present in the sacramental wafer and wine; the priest who conducted the Eucharist presided over not representation, but transubstantiation. “Hoc est corpus meum” (Matt. 26:26): Christ’s words indicated that the Host was no sign, but the very substance of Christ’s ›esh.

Yet by 1500, the image of the Host circulated beyond church walls. Staged by clergy in Easter liturgical drama, and paraded through town by the great Corpus Christi processions, the holy wafer migrated to the hands of lay actors in the Last Supper plays that formed a key part of the play-cycles surrounding the feast.3 The Host also appeared in miracle plays that were designed to demonstrate transubstantiation to a laity possibly ignorant of doctrine and thus apt (in the church’s view) to view the Host as symbol rather than as miracle. On occasion, such plays became the property of itinerant troupes of professional or semiprofessional lay actors, who performed them beyond the strict con‹nes of the church. Indeed, the late-‹fteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament calls for a Host, “sacred [consecrated] newe,” to be stolen from a church altar (l.

379).4 Was this a prop—an unconsecrated oble—or the Host itself?

More intriguingly, what was it the play’s spectators thought they saw, and how did they interpret this theft? Half a century before Luther’s theses launched the Reformation, the Church’s most sacred object appeared as a prop in the hands of actors, its ambiguous status seeming to hinge as much on the perception of spectators at a play as on the decisive words and actions of a priest of‹ciating at Mass.

The oble’s oscillation between sacred object and theatrical property concerns me here not only because of the paradox whereby an object whose physical essence after consecration confounded semiosis became, for a time, the Church’s most spectacular sign.5 Despite the Host’s of‹cial status as emblem of doctrinal orthodoxy, once 32

Playing Host

exposed to the gaze of a heterogeneous crowd at a lay theatrical performance the small, wheaten oble embodied a contingent contractual relationship between actor and spectator rather than an unambiguous sign of Christ’s presence in the sacrament. By examining three medieval stagings of the Host, I seek to trace the oble’s passage from sacred “non-sign” to a theatrical object that is at once sacred and a representation of the sacred.6 I then explore an analogy between three post-Reformation theological understandings of the Host and three ways of understanding how all props signify on stage. The Host is particularly useful for this purpose because the bloody eucharistic debates of the Reformation pre‹gure the current critical fault line between semiotic and phenomenological approaches to stage properties. I thus aim to clarify just how—and for whom—an object becomes a prop.

From Communal Bread to Priestly Wafer: Staging the Mass Sacred objects have been in use for thousands of years. According to one historian, ancient Egyptian gods were carried out of the temples in festival processions as early as 2600 B.C., while a surviving “production notebook” speci‹es properties needed to stage scenes performed for the Egyptian Jubilee of Senwosret I circa 1918–1875 B.C.7 Sacred objects are so ubiquitous in ritual drama as to defy attempts to pin down their temporal or geographical origins. Indeed, such an intimate connection exists between ritual objects and the sacred that it is virtually impossible for the scholar to tell where the sacred ends and the theatrical begins.

While recent scholarship has rejected the theory that drama evolved from liturgy into liturgical drama and thence into the Corpus Christi plays, moving from church to churchyard to marketplace in a Darwinian process of secularization, it is generally accepted that a key strand of western European drama, the drama of worship, derived from the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, and speci‹cally that of the Mass.8 At the root of the Mass lies the sacrament of transubstantiation, which became of‹cial church doctrine in 33

The Stage Life of Props 1215. In 1311, Pope Clement V instituted the feast of Corpus Christi to celebrate the miracle. The centerpiece of the festivities was a procession in which representatives of both temporal and spiritual realms accompanied the Host through the town to the church. Not a prop, the Host was nonetheless a portable object that displayed as well as embodied the miracle of Christ’s bodily presence.9 The popular Corpus Christi and Passion plays, which grew up around the festival of Corpus Christi, threatened to upstage the Host itself. Staged in the vernacular by lay actors (unlike the earlier liturgical drama), and featuring spectacular events such as Christ’s Passion and Harrowing of Hell, the Corpus Christi plays dramatized the Eucharist’s eternal signi‹cance for the human race. Instead of performing Host miracle plays, which dramatized the sacrament’s temporal power to work wonders, the guilds chose instead to present the history of the world from Creation to Judgment.10 Procession and pageant diverged and may even have competed for the townspeople’s attention; in at least one case, that of York in 1426, it was requested that the plays should be postponed to the Friday vigil of Corpus Christi so as not to disturb the feast, but by 1477 the reverse had taken place.11 If the Corpus Christi plays ›owered under the watchful eye of the church, the church no longer exclusively determined the meaning and use of its symbols, which often took on a secular cast as they were “translated” into the vernacular. As the plays ranged beyond the liturgy and even Scripture itself, apocryphal properties and ‹gures appeared, such as the “poll ax” borne by “Pilate’s son” in the Smiths’ pageant at Coventry.12 Moreover, each craft guild vied to display its most appealing wares on its pageant wagon. If the plays’ subject matter was still vetted by the church, the drama itself now delighted and advertised as well as instructed. Horseplay and special effects abounded; in the York Mercers’ play, nine small red angels “renne aboute in the heuen” when pulled by a cord, thus paving the way for a thoroughly irreverent use of props.13 In Russell A. Fraser’s apt summation of the two-way traf‹c between spiritual and secular concerns on the early modern stage, “the rude handling of sacred totems is what the drama is all about.”14 34

Playing Host

In the sixteenth century, the Host would become a crucible for the tension between “presence” and “representation” that has returned to haunt contemporary performance criticism. The Host had long occupied ambiguous terrain, however. As O. B. Hardison has demonstrated, by the time liturgical drama emerged in the tenth century, the Mass itself had become a “sacred drama” in two senses.15 First, the priest and other of‹ciating clergy took on an enhanced mimetic role by using gesture, movement, and tone of voice to reenact the key events of Jesus’ last days. If they were not fully “acting” in our modern sense, there were moments in the service when the clergy were clearly to be understood as imitating or representing Christ.16 Second, instead of participating in a ritual act in which no clear distinction existed between participant and priest, former communicants became passive spectators at an overwhelmingly visual event, which came eventually to be dominated by the priest’s Elevation of the Host. While the words (and hence the ostensible meaning) of the service did not change, the Mass itself began to look like a piece of theater in which the priest was more like the suffering Christ than the congregants, much to the dismay of antitheatrical clerics such as Aelred of Rievaulx. A brief survey of the Host’s transformation from communal bread to priestly wafer shows that the seeds of the church’s anxiety that the Host might be interpreted as a merely symbolic property were planted within the Mass itself, which carefully staged the Host in order to demonstrate the real presence of Christ in the sacrament to those who no longer understood the words of the liturgy.17 By the ‹fth century, the Latin Mass had replaced the more informal Greek “Eucharist” (thanksgiving), a celebratory re-creation of Christ’s Last Supper in which communicants shared bread and wine in a communal meal. At the close of the sixth century, Pope Gregory I standardized the form of the Mass and insisted that a union of visible and invisible realms took place within it. According to Gregory’s doctrine of the real presence, the living Christ was present in person when the bread and wine were consecrated. In part, this doctrine was a response to the heresy of Arianism, which held that Christ was not divine but merely an exceptional mortal—and thus implied that the 35

The Stage Life of Props Mass itself was a form of theatrical imitation, if not deliberate deception. Gregory wished to banish the specter of idolatry from the Mass once and for all.

Yet the visible traces of the bread and wine continued to haunt the church, whose pastoral mission increasingly stressed the reality of transubstantiation. In fact, the church’s efforts to deny that bread and wine remained after consecration as symbols of Christ’s body and blood only led the Mass further in the direction of theater by enabling communicants to view the ceremony as a form of sacred spectacle. Thus in the ninth century, Amalarius, bishop of Metz, encouraged of‹ciating clergy to dramatize each incident within the Mass for the populace, which had by then lost the ability to understand the classical Latin in which the service was conducted.18 Of‹ciants wore elaborate vestments that stressed their privileged intercessory function as they acted out Christ’s Passion. The symbolic act of giving communal thanks had become a priestly re-creation of Christ’s sacri‹ce.

As the meaning of the sacrament shifted, the physical dynamics of the Mass altered as well. Placed in the nave, celebrants were progressively distanced from their receding Host. In the Romanesque churches and basilicas of the early Middle Ages, the Mass had been staged so as to include the congregation. A clearly visible altar stood well forward of the semicircular apse, which closed off the eastern end of the church (the side which symbolically stood for Heaven and the Resurrection). The bishop’s chair and the choir were situated behind the altar and faced the congregation; the of‹ciant stood behind the altar in full view of the people. Standing or seated members of the congregation moved directly to the altar and received the bread into their hands and drank directly from the cup. The bread and wine used in the Mass were selected from offerings brought by the congregation itself, a tradition that stressed the communicants’ participation in the sacrament.

With the coming of Gothic church design, however, congregants were doubly separated from their Host by an altar rail (which prevented them from approaching the altar) and by a rood screen, which divided the profane nave from the holy choir. The screen’s lattice36

Playing Host

work now obstructed the congregation’s view of the chancel, the holy domain beyond the nave. The altar was moved back to the rear wall of the apse, and the choir placed in choir-stalls between the altar and the congregation. The of‹ciating priest now stood in front of the altar rather than behind it, with his back to the communicants and at a far greater distance from the congregation, symbolically mediating between Christ and his sinful people.

As be‹tted the newfound emphasis on the mystery of the sacrament, sacred “props” accumulated around the Mass. In England, housling-cloths were placed under the chins of communicants to prevent crumbs of the consecrated Host spilling from unworthy mouths. In France and Germany, a curtained canopy over the altar, known as a baldachin, veiled the holy Easter chalice until just before its Elevation and removed it from the eyes (and unconsecrated hands) of communicants. Reliquaries and decorated panels adorned the rear of the enlarged Gothic altar. To use a theatrical analogy, the thrust stage of the simple early church mensa was replaced by a canopied, miniproscenium stage, which shielded the Host from a people now starved for contact with their savior.

Most crucially, the visual appearance of the Host was transformed in the middle of the ninth century, when leavened bread was replaced by small circular wafers placed on the tongues of kneeling communicants. This avoided the risk of mold (and hence the unnerving suggestion of bread-ness after the consecration) and ensured that no consecrated crumbs would be spilled. The preconsecrated wafer was called an oble, while the consecrated bread and wine were now known as the “Host,” or “sacri‹cial victim.” A whole new set of regulations emerged dedicated to the proper creation, care, and handling of the fragile disk whose consecrated crumbs could easily be lost, and scholars debated what to do in cases where mice ate leftover crumbs or sick people vomited up the Host.19 The priest no longer shared his bread but placed it on a paten, or bread plate, and consigned his communicants’ wafers to a separate ciborium, or breadbasket. A straw, or ‹stula, was used to prevent profane lips from touching the sacred chalice until it was made super›uous in the twelfth century by the theological decision to have the priest 37

The Stage Life of Props alone drink the wine. This decision was justi‹ed by the new doctrine of concomitance, which taught that the total nature of Christ was present in each particle of the two “species.”

With the coming of the oble, the Host’s resemblance to daily bread vanished. An oble was white, round, thin, and made entirely from wheat. Contemporary visual depictions of the Elevation of the Host show a round, ›at disk that varies in size from that of an egg to that of a small dinner plate. It was usually inscribed with a cross, the letters IHS, and (from the twelfth century) a cruci‹xion scene or the lamb of God. In 1350 William Russell, bishop of Sodor, explained the symbolism behind the Host thus: “The wheaten host should be round and whole and without blemish, like the lamb without a blemish who has not had a bone removed from it. Hence the verse: Christ’s host should be clean, wheaten, thin, not large, round, unleavened. It is inscribed, not cooked in water but baked in ‹re.”20 Seeking to discourage the heretical view that consecrated bread was merely a sign, the church designed what Julia Houston has called a “non-sign”: an object whose material appearance was illusory after consecration, but whose every visible property was nevertheless symbolically codi‹ed.

By the end of the ninth century, then, a “new kind of theatricality” had developed in the Mass, which was increasingly treated as a priestly mystery rather than as a communal act.21 The miracle climaxed in the Elevation of the Host. For many, seeing the Host now became as or more important than actually consuming it; from the twelfth century, a bell announced consecration, enabling communicants to rush into church from outside to witness the Elevation.22 In short, the Mass itself now suspiciously resembled a dramatic performance, at least to such critics as Aelred of Rievaulx. Rievaulx complained that the gestures and emotional effects of the liturgy were “suitable not to the houses of prayer, but to the theater, not to praying, but to viewing.”23 Indeed, much of the Reformist passion, which began with Wycliffe’s attacks on transubstantiation in the 1370s and exploded in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, turned on the precise relationship between the Host, the of‹ciating priest, and the communicants. What did Jesus’ words, “Hoc est corpus meum,” 38

Playing Host

actually mean? Was the Eucharist real, or was it (as the Lollards asserted) the “feynid miracle of [th]e sacrament of bred”?24

Between Miracle and Spectacle: The Host in Liturgical Drama Once the Mass incorporated new sacred objects within its ritual, those objects emerged as important representational symbols in the liturgical drama. For example, the ever more elaborate Easter ritual led to the practice of “reserving” the Host, or temporarily withdrawing it from communion. By the ninth century, it had become the custom to place the Host in a special tower-shaped chalice on Good Friday, to represent Christ’s burial. The Host was then “rediscovered” on Easter Sunday, when it became the symbol of Christ’s Resurrection, and the empty cloth napkin in which the chalice had been wrapped signi‹ed Christ’s empty shroud. At Winchester, a cross was substituted for the Host and symbolically “buried” in a sepulcher. As David Bevington notes, “The place of reservation, or ‘sepulchre,’ and the empty ‘grave-clothes’ were thus prominently featured in liturgically mimetic ceremonials that could readily become more overtly dramatic when the propitious moment arrived.”25 That moment arrived when the practice of using objects surrounding the Host itself to help dramatize key moments in Christ’s life passed directly from the Mass into the earliest liturgical drama, the tenth-century Quem quaeritis (Whom do you seek?), at whose climax linen cloths were held up before the audience to represent Christ’s cerements. As this trope (an antiphonally chanted prose piece inserted into the liturgy) developed into a fully mounted dramatic re-creation of the three Marys’ discovery of Christ’s empty tomb, other proplike objects began to appear. In the of‹cial Visitatio Sepulchri script from the tenth-century Regularis Concordia as set down by St. Ethelwold, bishop of Winchester, the monks representing the three Marys wear copes and bear “thuribles with incense” representing spices to the tomb, while the priest representing the angel carries a palm branch to signify his benevolence.26 In the latetwelfth- or early-thirteenth-century Fleury playbook version, the Vis39

The Stage Life of Props itatio includes a bevy of properties: elaborate stage directions specify an angel “vested in a gilded white robe, head covered with a mitre albeit unadorned, holding a palm in the left hand, a branched candlestick full of tapers in the right hand.”27 And in some continental versions, the women buy spices on the way from an unguentarius (ointment seller)—the ‹rst medieval “property man” on record.28 Despite the use of physical characterization and “properties,” tropes such as the visit to the sepulcher remained tied to the liturgical service. An implicit distinction thus existed between the symbolic “props” surrounding the Host at Easter and the wafer itself, which might still be termed nonrepresentational, since after consecration it became that which it signi‹ed.29 But in the twelfth-century Vespers service on Easter Monday at Beauvais, the Eucharist is represented within a drama removed from the immediate liturgical context of the Mass. In this liturgical play, one of several surviving Peregrinus plays that dramatize Christ’s journey to Emmaus, Christ appears in the shape of a pilgrim to two disciples shortly after his Resurrection. The disciples invite the pilgrim to lodge with them and lead him to a table, asking him to “recount . . . the victory of our master.”30 The text then reads as follows: “Then let the pilgrim himself, at the table, say alone: And he went in with them, and it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them: Then let him take bread, and let him say: He took the bread, blessed it (let him make the sign of the cross), and broke it (let him break it), and gave it to them. And let him give to them, and withdraw.”31 Here a potential gap begins to open between bread as sacrament and bread as theatrical property. The play demands several levels of dramatic impersonation. An actor, possibly chosen from the upper rank in the choir (as speci‹ed in the later Rouen text of the play) represents Christ, who himself represents a pilgrim imitating Christ performing the original sacrament. On the narrative level the trick is played on the disciples, who do not at ‹rst realize that their companion is Christ offering them the tactile proof of his resurrection in the form of the sacrament. Or does he? The spoken text explicitly frames the stage business as retrospective narrative. The pilgrim recounts a past event; he does not perform a timeless miracle. Furthermore, 40

Playing Host

although the pilgrim hands the bread to the two disciples, no bread is actually consumed. Instead, the stage directions read, “Let the two arise looking at one another, and let them go through the church as if hunting for him and singing.”32 The play clearly intends to demonstrate proof of Christ’s Resurrection; indeed, Christ returns (played by another actor) to show the disciples his hands and feet. But the fact that the play is a liturgical drama, based on Luke 24:17–43, puts the play in the odd position of trying to distinguish real presence from mere representation by using the latter to demonstrate the former. In reality, the play’s Christ is presumably not a priest, and so the sacrament is represented only.

Instead of partaking in the body of Christ by consuming the bread, then, the two disciples are convinced by a purely visual phenomenon—akin to the Elevation of the Host that climaxes the Mass. Yet whereas the Elevation marks not a reenactment of the Passion but its actualization, the Beauvais disciple-actors request and witness a piece of story-theater complete with props. The disciples’ reaction to Christ-acting-as-pilgrim within the play thus models that of the spectators to the actor-as-Christ within the church. Neither disciples nor spectators partake of Christ’s body and blood; instead, all are to be visually swayed (rather than digestively transformed) by the holy bread.

Was a consecrated wafer used in performance? The question is crucial, for Hardison’s distinction between ritual “action” and theatrical “representation” hinges on the difference.33 Karl Young hedges on the status of the Host-property: “Although the rubrics are not generous in information concerning mise-en-scène, we may safely assume the use of appropriate costume and stage furnishings.”34 While we cannot determine what sort of object was used for the bread, Young notes that in an analogous Peregrinus play at Saintes, a rubric indicates that during the supper Christ distributes a wafer among those present. “It has been suggested [by E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage] that this wafer is the consecrated Host from Holy Thursday, previously used in a Depositio on Good Friday and in an Elevatio early Thursday morning. In weighing this suggestion, unfortunately, we have few facts to guide us.” Since any Host left after an 41

The Stage Life of Props Elevatio was used in a subsequent communion, Young infers that the Saintes “hostia” is “merely some sort of unconsecrated wafer.”35 In short, we cannot tell if the “panem” called for in the Beauvais text was a loaf, an oble, or the consecrated Host itself.

Perhaps the clerical audience would simply have accepted the business with the bread as a narrative ‹ction in the service of a higher truth and would have remained untroubled by what seems in retrospect a historic shift from transubstantiation to representation, a shift that in some later contexts would be perceived as idolatry. From the antitheatrical perspective exempli‹ed by the anonymous Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (ca. 1380–1425), for example, the staged “Mass” is a theatrical stunt performed by an actor that undermines the very authenticity of Christ’s Resurrection that the Beauvais play seeks to establish.36 Primed by the Mass, the contemporary Catholic audience may well have perceived no disjunction between stage symbolism and theological truth. But by nesting a symbolic consecration within a dramatic re-creation of Christ’s earthly return in disguise, this particular Easter drama hovers between transubstantiation and representation, miracle and spectacle.37 It is this suture that the Reformation debates over the Eucharist would in due time prize open.

“This Bred That Make Us Thus Blind”: The Oble as Stage Property The riddle of the true nature of the Host is thematized in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament (ca. 1461), which was probably performed by a small East Anglian touring company.38 In this sole surviving English Host miracle play, the wafer is entirely removed from liturgical context and functions as a stage property. The tension between the two possible views of the Host implicit in the Beauvais Vespers service is now made explicit in the dramatic action itself, which concerns the abduction of the Host by a group of Jews intent on debunking the “cake” that masquerades as Christ.

For the ‹rst time in an extant English text, an alternative to the orthodox view of the Host is dramatized on stage. As Cecilia Cutts has

42

Playing Host

demonstrated, heretical Lollard sentiments are placed in the mouths of Jews, a convenient Other onto which otherwise unacceptable heterodox attitudes could be projected.39 The play’s Jews manhandle the Host, only to be convinced of Christ’s real presence in the wafer by a series of miracles; their conversion to Christianity con‹rms the didactic purpose behind all Host miracle plays. However, the response of a late-‹fteenth-century spectator to the tortured Host-property is unknowable because it is contingent on his or her subjective response. For some audience members, the property-oble may have embodied the sacred qualities of the Host itself. Conversely, East Anglian Wycliffe sympathizers might (like the Jews in the play) have viewed the oble as no more than a stage property, in the Mass as well as on stage. In between these poles, some faithful might have distinguished between the sacred Host of the Mass and the oble-property of the stage but perceived no dissonance in the use of the latter to represent the former. These viewers would have understood the symbolic nature of the prop yet also accepted the doctrinal message of the play.

In a community shot through by diverse and sometimes idiosyncratic religious beliefs and practices, we cannot tell precisely to what extent the appropriation by the stage of an oble “stolen” from the church would have registered as powerfully transgressive.40 In the play, the wealthy merchant Aristorius steals the consecrated Host from church and sells it to Jonathas the Jew, who is skeptical of the doctrine of real presence and wishes to ridicule “Your God, that is full mythety, in a cake!” (l. 285). For Jonathas and his Jewish fellows, as for the followers of Wycliffe, transubstantiation is nothing but a trick in which a sign passes itself off as the thing it represents: The beleve of thes[e] Cristen men is false, as I wene, For the[y] beleve on a cake—me think it is onkind— And all they seye how the prest dothe it bind, And by the might of his word make it ›essh and blode— And thus by a conceite the[y] wolde make us blind— And how that it shud be He that deyed upon the rode. (ll. 199–204)

43

The Stage Life of Props The Jews subject the Host to a series of indignities designed to prove that it is just bread, but in each case a miracle occurs. When the Jews strike the Host with daggers, it bleeds; when the Host is placed in a cauldron of boiling oil, blood over›ows the cauldron; and, most spectacularly, when the Host is cast into an oven, “Here the ovyn must rive asundere and blede owt at the cranys, and an image [of Christ] appere owt with woundys bleeding” (l. 712 s.d.) in order to chastise the Jews for tormenting his body. There is no indication in the text as to how these miracles are to be staged, but since the play was designed to go on tour, the miracles must have been somewhat adaptable to various actor-audience con‹gurations.

What would a contemporary audience have made of the Jews’ manhandling of the Host-property? While Bevington acknowledges that “The Play of the Sacrament seems to demand a comparable leap of faith from things seen to things unseen,” he explains the play’s seemingly rude handling of the sacrament as devotionally ef‹cacious: “Even though a comparison of this play with the mass may strike us as risible, the similarity does reveal a continuing af‹nity between medieval religious drama and the ritual service from which it had originated.”41 Yet the play seems designed at times to provoke mirth rather than solemnity in the audience, for it paradoxically defends the doctrine of real presence by burlesquing the Mass itself. Before stealing the Host, for example, Aristorius drugs his foolish priest with “a drawte of Romney Red” and “a lofe of light bred” (ll. 340–41), an obvious parody of the communion bread and wine.

Moreover, each indignity to which the Host is subjected corresponds to an episode of Christ’s Passion. Like Judas, Aristorius is bribed with money; the Host is pierced ‹ve times and nailed to a “post,” just like Christ’s body wounded on the cross. Jonathas even performs a mock Eucharist at a table and repeats Christ’s crucial words: “Comedite, [hoc est] corpus meum” (l. 404). We are not that far from Marlowe’s blasphemous Doctor Faustus, who sprinkles holy water and makes the sign of the cross in order to conjure the devil Mephistopheles.42 More outrageously, when Jonathas grasps the Host, it sticks to his hand, and he runs mad. When the other Jews nail the sacrament to a post and try to pull Jonathas away, his hand comes off and remains 44

Playing Host

Skeptical Jews preparing to stab the Host in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, performed by the Medieval Players. (Photo: Tessa Musgrave.)

stuck to the Host. After a comic interlude featuring a quack doctor, the nails are plucked out and both hand and Host are wrapped in a cloth and boiled in a cauldron. In performance, the Host is somehow both holy sacrament and featured sight gag in a knockabout travesty of Christ’s Passion.43 Once the actor playing the “image” of Jesus appears from the oven and chides Jonathas and his cronies for tormenting him, the repentant Jews decide to convert to Christianity. Jonathas repairs to the bishop, who leads a procession (possibly including the audience) to the “Jewys howse.” The bishop, presumably an actor in full ecclesiastical regalia, now performs a transubstantiation in reverse. He prays to the image that “From this rufull sight thou wilt reverte!” (l.

817), and in the play’s next theatrical coup, “Here shall the im[a]ge change again into brede” (l. 825 s.d.). Once again, the text leaves 45

The Stage Life of Props open how this miracle is to be accomplished; perhaps another oble is substituted for the trick property, and the actor slips behind a curtain or through a trap door.

The bishop’s transubstantiation-in-reverse is an instance of pure theatricality that literalizes the notion of an unseen real presence by rendering it visible. Indeed, in the Play of the Sacrament, everything is made visible, and that is its point. Ocular proof is necessary in order for the Jews and Aristorius, along with the doubting Thomases in the audience, to mend their ways; thus the epilogue insists on the historical veracity of the play’s events. The emotional effect of the play on the audience is impossible to determine, but its didactic purpose is clear. To use a modern analogy, it is as if the entire Brechtian arsenal of stage techniques—pastiche, properties that announce their prop-ness, self-consciously theatrical effects—were to be harnessed in order to shore up an ideology rather than demystify it.44 Yet from the Lollard perspective, exempli‹ed by the initially skeptical Jews, the bishop’s act can be conceived as an act of idolatry.

There is no doctrinal precedent for this miracle, and the very presumptuousness of the actor turning Christ back into the wafer seems to travesty the sacrament even as it af‹rms the clergy’s exclusive right to control it. Like the “remedy” Puck applies to Lysander’s eye in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the turning of Christ back into bread reabsorbs the aberrant element into the hegemonic system (erotic in one play, ecclesiastic in the other), but at the price of exposing the “cure” to skeptics in the audience as yet another form of illusion. The original East Anglian audience may well have included Lollards like William Barrow of Walden in Essex, who right before his execution in 1467 (just around the time the Croxton play was written) scorned the attending priest: “Thys I wotte welle, that on Goode Fryday ye make many goddys to be putte in the sepukyr, but at Ester day they can not a ryse them selfe, but that ye moste lyfte them uppe and bere them forthe, or ellys they wylle ly stylle yn hyr gravys.”45 At the end of the play, the wafer “stolen” by the lay actors is returned to the secure haven of the church. Or is it? The contemporaneous struggle between clergy and laity for control over the Host’s meaning is thrown into relief by a surviving ambiguity in the play’s 46

Playing Host

staging. The play-action on the Jews’ scaffold results in an impromptu Corpus Christi procession. The bishop commands: Now will I take this holy sacrament With humble hart and great devocion, And all we will gon with on[e] consent And beare it to chirche with sole[m]pne procession.

Now folow me, all and summe!

And all tho that bene here, both more and lesse, This holy song, O sacrum convivium, Lett us sing all with grett swetnesse. (ll. 834–41) Here the bishop seems to include the spectators, “both more and lesse,” in his injunction to bear the Host to the church, and Bevington glosses the action accordingly: “A singing procession escorts the host toward the church.” But it is unclear from the text whether the spectators follow the actors to a third scaffold (as, earlier, the bishop had enjoined “all ye peple that here are” to follow him to the Jew’s house), or into an adjacent church. Since the “bishop” lays the Host upon the altar and proceeds to convert and baptize the Jews at a working baptismal font, the setting of the play’s ending is crucial.

Does the spectator, along with the Host, leave the realm of representation behind, or does the zone of theater extend into the church?

The text reads as follows: “Here shall the merchant and his prest go to the chirche, and the bisshop [attended by the procession] shall entre the chirche and lay the [h]ost u[p]on the autere” (l. 865 s.d.).

Faced with this crux, critics diverge. John M. Wasson suggests that the play was staged on a high embankment that still runs parallel to the street just across from the west front of the Croxton church, while Gail McMurray Gibson thinks it may originally have been performed in the open market square at Angel Hill, just in front of the parish church of St. James at Bury St. Edmunds.46 In either case, a church interior could have been used for the play’s climax.47 Conversely, William Tydeman seriously doubts whether the play as written could have culminated in a real church.48 And what of the fact 47

The Stage Life of Props that the preliminary banns indicate that the play was intended to go on tour, in which case a church might have been unavailable? Local clergy may understandably have balked at the spectacle of supposedly consecrated wafers being stolen from their church. It is therefore quite possible that the play was designed to conclude in a church, but that in towns in which the players were unable to secure access to a church, a simple scaffold containing prop versions of altar and font was substituted.49 In sum, for any given performance of the play we cannot determine whether the Host-property was reinstated on an actual church altar or merely placed on a scaffold representing the church interior.

The Play of the Sacrament thus ends with a religious ritual whose impact on its audience was heavily coded both by the site of performance and by “the charged religious climate of East Anglia, with its simultaneous censure and sympathy for the problem of Lollardry.”50 The bishop is an actor in borrowed robes, and the conversion of the Jews a mock-conversion, since the actors were Christian and Jews mostly unknown, having been of‹cially expelled from England in 1290. But what of the wafer itself, placed on altar or scaffold? Its ‹nal status (as property? as sacrament? as “unsubstantiated” oble?) is ambiguous. Orthodox spectators could understand the bishop’s miracle as the con‹rmation of the priest’s divinely inspired power—he can even turn the Sacrament back into bread!—while skeptical spectators could view the play as a demysti‹cation of real presence that exposed transubstantiation as a spectacular conjuring-trick performed by a lay actor pranked up in priestly garb.

The return of the Host to the church altar from whence it was stolen signals its reappropriation as ecclesiastical rather than theatrical property. But whether the altar is real or simulated, the rhetoric of the stage destabilizes the doctrinal message of the play. The audience’s awareness that it is watching a piece of theater performed by actors inexorably transforms the Host-property into a sign (albeit a sign of Christ’s real presence)—precisely the doctrinal mistake that the play itself is designed to refute. If the Host-property is placed on a genuine church altar rather than upon a scaffold, the irony whereby

48

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the spectator/participant is enjoined to deny the perception of the sacraments as signs simply becomes more apparent. In Sarah Beckwith’s words, “[R]itual and theatre hybridise each other, embarrassing the distinction between them.”51 As if acknowledging the uncertainty of the oble’s ‹nal status, the “bishop” cautions “yow creaturys and curatys that here be” to keep the vessels in which the bread of the sacrament is preserved (pyxis) securely locked, lest the sacrament once again devolve into a movable property beyond the secure ambit of the church.52 But given the centrality of the Last Supper to the fourteenth-century drama of worship, the appropriation of the oble by lay actors was perhaps inevitable. In hindsight, the bishop’s admonition at the close of the Play of the Sacrament serves more to expose the historical loosening of the church’s control over the wafer than to safeguard that control.

An unconsecrated oble is a key property in the ‹fteenth-century N-Town Passion Play I, for example. The actor playing Jesus takes an oble in his hands, looks up toward heaven, and intones: Bretheryn, by the virtu of these wordys that rehercyd be, This that sheweth as bred to your apparens Is mad[e] the very ›esche and blod of me— To the w[h]eche, they that wole be savyd must hive credens.53 The actor here arrogates the priestly role of elevating the Host before the laity, beyond the church service and as part of a civic celebration (albeit one perhaps still under the auspices of the church). And despite the N-Town actor’s “gostly interpretacion” of the sacrament, which like the bishop’s warning in the Play of the Sacrament cautions against losing track of the Host (“Of this lambe unete if owth be levith, iwis, / It shuld be cast in the clere ‹re and brent”), the play was designed for an itinerant company, as was the Play of the Sacrament.54 Once the unique property of the church, by the turn of the sixteenth century the oble (or something very much like it) was on tour as a stage property, where people may have paid for the privilege and enjoyment of deciding exactly what it was they were looking at.

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The Stage Life of Props

De‹ning the Host: Or, Where Is the Prop?

I have argued that, with the advent of nonliturgical religious drama, the oble came to inhabit a liminal zone both theologically and geographically. Thus in the Play of the Sacrament, the oble functions as both sacred object and trick property. Stolen from the church, the wafer is subjected to the rude handling of lay actors only to be returned to the altar, its miraculous status as the literal Body of Christ explicitly af‹rmed but implicitly undermined by the oble’s circulation beyond the church as a stage property open to a variety of interpretations held by a heterogeneous audience.55 What can the historical ambiguities of this one example teach us about the status of props in general?

In my introduction, I insisted that the stage property is ‹rst and foremost a material fact. Yet to register as a prop, the object must be perceived by a spectator as a sign, and it is to the ambiguity of the object’s reception—to the object’s horizon of semiotic possibilities, as it were—that I now wish to turn, using the contested Host as an example. Having established that a range of responses to the Host was possible by the time it had been put into theatrical circulation in the ‹fteenth century, I wish to claim that three con›icting theological attitudes toward the Host—attitudes that were available by the late ‹fteenth century but which were codi‹ed in the following century by reformers Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, and Richard Hooker respectively—model three dominant critical understandings of how all props signify on stage.

The gap between presence and representation of Christ’s body in the Host became a ‹ssure during the Reformation. The doctrine of real presence became a shibboleth in which the stakes could not have been higher: men lost their lives for failing to toe the appropriate line in any given year.56 Flouting orthodoxy, in 1520 Luther asserted his belief in the real presence but denied the doctrine of transubstantiation. Instead, Luther insisted on the related doctrine of consubstantiation, in which the body and blood of Christ coexisted “in, with, and under” the “accidents” of bread and wine. Luther explained his puz50

Playing Host

zling doctrine, which he learned from the Hussites (who themselves learned it from Wycliffe), using the famous analogy of the ‹re and the iron. When combined, the ‹re lends its heat and light to the iron, yet neither loses its original identity. In 1520, Luther wrote: “While both bread and wine continue there, it can be said with truth, This is My body; this wine is My blood, and conversely.”57 The French reformer John Calvin took the more extreme step of rejecting Christ’s bodily presence in the sacrament altogether. For Calvin, the bread and wine were symbols of Christ’s body and blood.

Calvin took Christ’s use of the term est (“Hoc est corpus meum”) to mean signi‹cat. As Stephen Greenblatt points out, Calvin interpreted the eucharistic formula as metonymy, a ‹gure of speech in which “the sign borrows the name of the truth that it ‹gures.”58 In this belief he joined the Swiss reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, and this view was to become increasingly in›uential as various treatises attempted to discredit and defend the real presence. Yet the two men’s positions were not identical. Whereas Calvin retained a belief in the “dynamic presence” of Christ’s heavenly body in the souls of communicants partaking of the Eucharist, Zwingli denied any connection between the bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ other than the fact that the former recalled the latter.59 What does this abstruse debate over the material status of the Host have to do with stage properties? The three attitudes toward the Host I have adumbrated—which for convenience I shall call the Catholic, the Lutheran, and the Zwinglian—correspond to three possible ways of answering the question, “Where is the prop?” If one thinks of the bread and wine as sign-vehicles, and the Body and Blood of Christ as their signi‹ed, then these three approaches offer three distinct models for understanding how objects become signs on stage without effacing their material being.

Let us take the example of a dramatic scene that requires a baby on stage. A director has two basic choices: she can either use a real baby or some other object impersonating a baby. In the ‹rst instance, which semioticians call “iconic identity,” the baby both represents a baby and is one.60 Alternatively, our director can choose an iconic object (a doll, say), a quasi-iconic object (a pillow hidden in a blan51

The Stage Life of Props ket) or a noniconic substitute (a visible water bottle). A “Catholic” view of stage properties would see the object as materially becoming its referent in performance. Just as the consecrated oble becomes the body and blood of Christ, so too the property (whether baby, doll, blanket, or bottle) becomes a substantive baby in performance. But theatrical performance is not a religious rite in which the actor stands in for the priest: no matter how effective the acting, objects on stage do not change their material substance (although ingested food may be an exception). It is true that if a real baby is used, the biological substance of object and referent are identical; nevertheless, unlike the Host, the infant playing Jesus does not become Jesus. It never ceases to be the child of Mr. and Mrs. X. One might say that the iconic identity of object and referent is coincidental, since a nonidentical property can be equally effective on stage. Paradoxically, a real baby may distract the audience by playing its part badly: crying, wriggling about, and so forth.

Occasionally, performers have tried to achieve the dramatic equivalent of pure presence. Suspicious of the representational strategies of traditional theater, in the 1960s the Living Theater’s Julian Beck and Judith Malina insisted that they were themselves on stage. Yet as Julia Houston has argued, “in theater the spectator’s own perception of the presence of signs will always mediate his understanding of the identity of whatever is presented on stage.”61 Since iconic identity (unlike eucharistic real presence) depends on the spectator’s perception, Judith Malina on stage becomes “Judith Malina” the sign. Outside of the church itself, whatever the circumstances of performance, the “Catholic” attitude is untenable.

Yet post-Reformation accounts of the Eucharist offer useful analogues to the temporal transaction between actor, object, and audience. My example of the water-bottle baby is drawn from Peter Brook, who notes that an “empty object” can be remarkably effective on stage in the hands of a skilled actor. “A great actress can make one believe that an ugly plastic water bottle held in her arms in a certain way is a beautiful child. One needs an actor of high quality to bring about the alchemy where one part of the brain sees a bottle, and the other part of the brain, without tension, but with joy, sees the baby, 52

Playing Host

the parent holding the child and the sacred nature of their relationship. This alchemy is possible if the object is so neutral and ordinary that it can re›ect the image that the actor gives to it.”62 Brook here describes an imaginative version of Lutheran consubstantiation, a second model for locating the prop. In the case of Brook’s empty object, the actor with the bottle invites the audience to share in a phenomenological transaction, “with the result that a banal object can be transformed into a magical one.”63 This takes the form of a “Lutheran” double vision: with one part of the brain, the audience perceives the bottle; with another, a baby. Adopting Luther’s analogy of the ‹re and the iron, we might say that the bottle is the iron and the baby the ‹re. In theological terms, while the baby’s “substance” is manifested, the bottle’s “accidence” remains: the baby is truly present but never loses its bottleness. A strictly Lutheran approach concedes the bottle’s materiality but insists on the baby’s real presence.

Yet Brook does not insist on the theatrical equivalent of transubstantiation, whereby the bottle becomes a baby. For this to take place, the bottle would have to cease being a material bottle entirely. Nor does Brook insist on literal consubstantiation, that the baby really coexists with the bottle at an ontological level. Even in Brook’s alchemical theater, we are not participating in a Mass. Rather, Brook describes something that happens at the level of imagination, and it is on this imaginative level that I wish to explore an analogy between theater phenomenology and Lutheran consubstantiation.

The attitude towards the property that I have been sketching, in which the object is not merely a sign for something absent but also the thing itself made imaginatively (if not ontologically) present, has been usefully characterized by Bert O. States as the “phenomenological” attitude.64 For States, it is not that the sacred object bodies forth the literal presence of “the God,” as in the Catholic sacrament.

Rather, it is that the God is made present to the imagination in a way that makes it unnecessary to refer elsewhere for the God. In other words, the bottle on stage does not refer to an absent baby “elsewhere,” but “discloses” the baby to the audience as a unique, affective experience. This is what States means by a phenomenological 53

The Stage Life of Props approach to the world, which sets out to describe “our sensory experience with empirical objects,” or phenomena.65 For the phenomenologist, the theater is not merely a semiotic enterprise, “a passageway for a cargo of meanings being carried back to society (after artistic re‹nement) via the language of signs,” but an enterprise that invites the spectator into a different mode of experience.66 Like Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes, which does not require any assimilation to “real” shoes outside the frame, theater is a site of disclosure as well as a site of reference.67 In the phenomenological attitude (as limned by Brook), it is not that the bottle becomes a real baby, but that the bottle offers us a tactile experience of “babyness” that includes but transcends the semiotic. Seeing the bottle in the hands of a great actress, we experience a double vision that parallels the Lutheran copresence of “substance” (baby) and “accidence” (bottle). Using terms redolent of the Mass itself, States writes: “In the image, a defamiliarized and desymbolized object is ‘uplifted to the view’ where we see it as being phenomenally heavy with itself.”68 As Brook would put it, the bottle remains a bottle—but it is not merely the sign of the baby. Something essential is made present through the material vehicle of the prop.

One can take a more skeptical view. A “Zwinglian” attitude toward the bottle would deny the baby’s “presence” altogether and insist that the bottle is a mere symbol, a signi‹er standing in for the signi‹ed (“baby”). For the duration of performance, the “Zwinglian” spectator may agree to accept the sign convention (bottle equals baby) but never confuses illusion with reality. The bottle is a fabrication that, far from disclosing genuine “babyness,” stands in for an absent, ‹ctional character. In the twentieth century, we have a new name for this skeptical, Zwinglian perspective: we call it semiotics, the science of signs.

In short, what I have called the Zwinglian and Lutheran attitudes are complementary frames of reference for looking at art objects.

From a semiotic perspective, the artwork is a site of reference that offers the thing’s meaning stripped of itself (sign); from a phenomenological perspective, the artwork is a site of disclosure, offering the thing-in-itself stripped of its sign functions (image). According to 54

Playing Host

States, neither attitude alone offers a full account of theatrical experience. Instead, performance can best be understood by shuttling between two frames of reference in what States calls “a kind of binocular vision” comprising “two modes of seeing.”69 It would seem at ‹rst glance that the “Lutheran” approach combines both phenomenological and semiotic modes of vision. Yet as we have seen, the Lutheran view, while acknowledging the ongoing material reality of the object, retains the Catholic insistence of the real presence of the referent (the baby Jesus, say) behind the property: the infant is both baby and Jesus. This insistence on pure presence is problematic. Baby Jesus is not literally present in a performance of the York Birth of Jesus, for example, even if a real baby is used instead of a doll. Plainly, when we move from the ritual artifact to the stage property, we are no longer in the realm of the real presence of the signi‹ed. What, then, is made present via the prop—and how?

The Prop as Temporal Contract Yet a fourth theological position toward the Eucharist suggests an answer. Under Edward VI, the Anglican Church reached a new compromise intended to put to rest the bloody doctrinal battles over the Host. Following the English martyr John Frith, the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker distinguished between spiritual and sacramental eating. Frith had written that “the spyrytuall and necessarye eatynge and drinkynge of [Christ’s] bodye and bloude . . . is not receyued with the teth and bellye, but wyth the eares and fayth.”70 Hooker’s contribution was to shift the sacrament from its physical location in the Host, the actualized body and blood of Christ, to the recipient of communion: “The real presence of Christ’s . . . body and blood is not therefore to be sought for in the sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the sacrament.”71 The body and blood of Christ are not localized in the sacrament itself but perceived and partaken by the believer through faith. The consecrated elements impart Christ, but without conversion of the substance of the bread and wine by transubstantiation or consubstantiation; the ingestion of 55

The Stage Life of Props Christ is spiritual, not material. This doctrine, whereby the ef‹cacy of the sacrament depends on the spiritual state of the communicant rather than on the formula recited by the priest, became known as receptionism or “participation.”

Anthony B. Dawson has linked the Anglican doctrine of participation to the way that theater spectators and actors contractually produce ‹ctional beings.72 For Dawson, the actor’s body becomes what Dawson calls a “person,” an amalgam of actor and character. In performance, the actor’s bodily presence combines with his discursive representation as a sign of the character to produce “personation.”

Like the body of Christ in Anglican doctrine, the character is both spiritually present and materially represented.

Stretching the analogy between Anglican Eucharist and bodily performance, Dawson argues that the character/actor’s personation allows the “participation” of the audience—Hooker’s term for the spiritual ingestion of Christ’s grace. By analogy to the Anglican belief that (in Joel Altman’s summary) “there is real presence in the sacrament only after it is partaken by the faithful communicant,” Dawson claims that the character is produced not by the actor alone but by those spectators who actively “participate” the ritual event.73 Dawson’s idea that presentation, in which the actor’s body is seen and felt by an audience, coexists with representation, in which the audience understands that the actor’s body represents something other than itself, recapitulates States’s opposition between phenomenological and semiotic attitudes to art objects. In this “Anglican” view, the actor’s body is both a site of reference and a site of disclosure: “Unlike for the Reformed Protestants . . . the sacrament is not simply representation. At the same time, ‘presence’ is no longer absolute and unquestioned, behind the appearances of bread and wine, but rather is itself troubled or mediated—unreal but also ef‹cacious.”74 Once we shift our focus from bodies to objects, Dawson’s appropriation of Anglican reception-theory answers the theoretical question with which I began: where to locate the prop. Like a character, a theatrical sign is not a semiotic given but a temporal contract between actors and audience, in which identity is superimposed on a material

56

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object. Such a contract is tenuously constituted in time and thus subject to moment-by-moment renegotiation for the duration of performance.

The notion of the property as a temporal contract embodied in and rati‹ed by a material object explains the theatrical ef‹cacy of unlimited sign-vehicles.75 A real baby, a pillow, a water bottle, or even a mimed baby will satisfy the most skeptical “Zwinglian” spectator as long as it is a “good-enough baby.” It is important to note that there is no such thing as a prop in isolation; where a property is, there an actor must be. In each case, the actor proposes an imaginative contract: accept X (baby / pillow / bottle) for Y (baby). For instance, if an actor decides that a property that has up until now been a walking stick suddenly represents a sword, the spectator will either eventually “get it” and accept the semiotic shift, or else refuse to suspend disbelief, thereby rejecting the contract.

If the idea of the prop as contract no longer seems a burning issue, the various attitudes to the Host that I have described serve as useful reminders that stage properties need not work in the same way for everyone in any given performance. Whatever the material nature of the object, the audience is in theory free to adopt any of the three “reformist” positions I have sketched out (since, as I have shown, the “Catholic” position, which denies representation, is untenable with regard to stage properties). Faced with a water bottle on stage, a “Lutheran” spectator fuses semiotic and phenomenological perspectives and perceives both the bottle and a real baby (Brook’s position); a “Zwinglian” spectator perceives a bottle that merely represents a baby, without getting swept up into the illusion; and an “Anglican” spectator accepts a virtual baby whose presence is (in Dawson’s phrase) “unreal but also ef‹cacious.” Any audience may contain a range of predispositions, but the actor and director can propose and encourage certain imaginative contracts (“Well, this is the forest of Arden”). Yet it is the individual spectator who ultimately determines what sort of imaginative contract is entered into, and it is only the spectator who walks out of the theater asking, “What was that bottle supposed to be?” who has failed to keep his end of the imaginative bargain. Figuratively speaking, he has not yet made it into the Church.

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The Stage Life of Props In short, the property’s location depends on our critical angle of vision. The place of the property may vary from spectator to spectator, and it is my intention here to argue for a pluralistic approach that refuses to ›atten the prop. Returning to our analogy of the Host, I have argued for the theatrical equivalent of what theologians term receptionism, “the doctrine that the ef‹cacy of the consecrated elements depends upon the spiritual state of the communicant” rather than upon the transformed material substance of the object.76 Such a contract cannot be legislated in advance, for the spectator’s “reception” of the material object on stage determines the nature of the property she perceives. However, the director and/or actor may encourage a speci‹c form of reception by manipulating conditions of performance such as distance, scale, visibility, and iconicity. Just as the church enforced a visual rather than a tactile experience of the Host by fencing off the chancel from the nave, so a spectator attending King Lear who is confronted with an elaborate simulacrum of the court of Louis XIV will be primed for a different theatrical experience, a different species of temporal contract, than a spectator faced with three cubes on an otherwise bare thrust stage. A performance of the Croxton play that culminates in a church will produce a quite different experience than one that culminates on a scaffold, even if the script remains unaltered.

I have lingered on the physical as well as the theological dynamics of the Host because although spectators may bring a range of predispositions to the theater, the conditions of performance directly affect the spectator’s reception of objects on stage. As we have seen, the sacred bread originally belonged to the mundane world of the celebrants but was gradually abstracted and obscured by church doctrine and architecture until, with the coming of the oble and the Elevation of the Host, all powers of transformation belonged to the priest. As church objects such as the Bible itself (which was being translated by Lollards) threatened to pass into the hands of the laity, raising concerns about who was ‹t to control religion, plays such as the Croxton sacrament play dramatically illustrated the possibility that actors could in›ect the meaning of the Host and wrest control of ritual away from the clergy. With the arrival of the Anglican compromise 58

Playing Host

between Catholic “real presence” and Zwinglian “real absence,” and the return of ordinary bread and wine to the English-language communion service (as of‹cially laid down in the Second Prayer Book of 1552), the Host came full circle. Responsibility for spiritual ingestion of the body and blood of Christ now rested with the communicant rather than the priest. Anglican communicants themselves “participated” the sacrament, for the bread and wine remained materially what they were before consecration, as in the original Greek Thanksgiving.

The history of postclassical western drama can be understood as a continual struggle to demystify the property on the one hand (by insisting on its ordinariness) and to resacralize it on the other (by insisting on its otherness). After wresting the wafer from the precincts of the church, vernacular drama has continued to struggle with the paradox that the object’s magic is somehow both external to and inherent within the object—that is, if the object is held to be magical at all. To return to Fraser’s dictum, “[T]he rude handling of sacred totems is what the drama is all about.” From Marlowe’s satanic parody of the Mass in Doctor Faustus to Mrs. Venable elevating her monstrous son’s poetry in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, theater alternately insists on the magical life of objects and relentlessly exposes that magic as a mere conjuring trick—just play.77 The tension between theater’s semiotic and phenomenological lives is captured in the ambiguity of what we call acting and the Elizabethans called playing. Each term connotes both feigning and performing, representation (mimesis) and action (kinesis). Like the theater, the Eucharist can be perceived either as an act of idolatrous imitation or as a rite in which the god himself is bodied forth. For late medieval audiences, the consecrated wafer was at once the material presence of Christ’s body and a sign of Christ’s body.78 The riddle of the Host rested on a paradox: the more the church insisted on the material fact of Christ’s presence in the Sacrament—‹rst by allegorizing the Mass, then by displaying the Host in Corpus Christi processions, and ‹nally by sponsoring the performance of doctrinally correct plays in the vernacular by lay actors—the more the Host 59

The Stage Life of Props resembled a prop. As concrete synecdoches of performance, all properties are embodied symbols, felt absences.79 Stage properties not only impersonate other objects but perform as objects. In order to understand their double life as sign and thing, we must derive “gostly sustenawns� from the shifting matrices of the stage as well as the legislation of the word.80

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Absorbing Interests The Bloody Handkerchief on the Elizabethan Stage Old stancher! (Pause.) You . . . remain.

—Hamm in ENDGAME

I

n my last chapter, I argued that the prop in performance is not a static or stable signi‹er whose meaning is predetermined by the playwright. Rather, the prop’s impact is mediated both by the gestures of the individual actor who handles the object, and by the horizon of interpretation available to historically situated spectators at a given time. Although we can speculate about what spectators at the original performance of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament thought they saw when the mysterious wafer appeared “sacred [consecrated] newe,” we will never know for certain. Yet the implications are radical, since the play could have been understood either as con‹rming the real presence of Christ in the Host (as its anonymous author or authors surely intended), or as undermining real presence by equating the Host itself with a prop and the Mass with a piece of theater. Closer to our own time, Declan Kiberd has pointed out the very different interpretation Irish and English audiences place on the revolver taken by an English engineer to Ireland in George Bernard Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Ireland (1904): whereas English audiences assume the gun is unloaded, Irish audiences assume the reverse.1 The prop springs to life as much in the imagination of spectators as in the hands of actors or the words of the playwright.

Precisely because of its radical instability as a theatrical signi‹er, playwrights have seized on the prop as a tool for destabilizing the 61

The Stage Life of Props conventional symbolism previously embodied by the now ambiguous object. Although they cannot legislate the prop’s impact, playwrights can seek to orchestrate the prop’s movement through concrete stage space and linear stage time. They can also shape the audience’s reception of the prop through dialogue and stage directions. The four case studies that follow in this book assume the playwright’s conscious use of the prop as a dramaturgical tool for shaping dramatic and theatrical signi‹cation. This is especially the case during periods of semiotic crisis, when the meaning of the object the prop represents is (quite literally) up for grabs.

I begin with Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Kyd, whose play The Spanish Tragedy was among the most in›uential of all Elizabethan dramas. I wish to show that in the course of launching revenge tragedy as a popular genre, Kyd appropriated and sensationalized a long theatrical tradition of staging sacred cloth in the devotional drama—and that he did so not in order to reform the stage, but for decisively commercial ends. Nor was Kyd alone; other, equally opportunistic playwrights followed in his wake, including Shakespeare. Othello’s mysterious strawberry-spotted handkerchief, dyed (we are told) in ›uid lovingly extracted from maidens’ hearts and possessed of magical powers, is a direct descendant of Hieronimo’s bloody napkin.

After the Reformation took hold in England, many stage properties familiar from the drama of worship performed by urban trade guilds became politically and religiously suspect. While Elizabethan society debated whether theatrical representation was acceptable on the one hand or idolatrous on the other, Elizabethan authorities sought to curb the theatrical use of Catholic symbolism through legislation. Thus a letter dated May 27, 1576, from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners of York to the bailiff and burgesses of Wake‹eld decreed that “no Pageant be used or set furth wherin the Ma[jes]tye of God the Father, God the Sonne, or God the Holie Ghoste or the administration of either the Sacramentes of baptisme or of the Lordes Supper be counterfeyted or represented, or anythinge plaied which tende to the maintenaunce of superstition and idolatrie or which be contrarie to the lawes of god [and] or of the realme.”2 The Corpus 62

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Christi plays fell victim to religious reform combined with the consolidation of royal over civic power.3 The reformed English church abolished all processions in 1547, and the feast of Corpus Christi was expunged from the church calendar in 1548. The play-cycles themselves were censored out of existence by 1580.4 The end of the mysteries set the stage for the spectacular rise of professional companies based in public playhouses, who turned formerly “popish” vestments to satirical ends. On the English stage, pandering to the audience’s presumed anti-Catholic sentiment, rather than instructing it in doctrinal orthodoxy, became the secular drama’s concern.

With the demise of the mysteries vanished such formerly central properties as the eucharistic wafer itself.5 Yet the Mass and its symbols did not fade from the awareness of early modern audiences once their overt representation was banished from the stage. The Elizabethan playwrights who wrote for a nascent commercial theater were eager to exploit the rituals of the old religion, although their aim was not necessarily the Reformist propaganda exempli‹ed by Cromwell’s aggressively polemical playwright, John Bale. The political space for expressions of dissent was restricted, but in the new economy of the sign developed by commercially minded playwrights, radically different imaginative contracts with spectators drawn from all levels of society became necessary in order to build an audience largely made up of individual, urban ticket-buyers rather than regional communities united by civic and devotional concerns.6 And while the new commercial drama risked provoking the authorities by presenting religious material in verbal form, it could smuggle religious imagery and content onto the stage by appealing to the spectators’ imagination and memory through gestures and physical objects.

Marvin Carlson’s concept of ghosting offers a useful way of understanding the mechanism whereby the commercial Elizabethan drama invoked religious symbols and ideas that could no longer be directly represented on stage with impunity. Carlson reminds us that spectators bring associations from previous productions with them to the theater, and that these “ghosts” color their experience of the current performance.7 When Elizabethan audiences saw Edward Alleyn play Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, for example, Alleyn’s perfor63

The Stage Life of Props mance would have been ghosted by his appearances as Marlovian overreachers such as Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus. According to Carlson: In semiotic terms, we might say that a signi‹er, already bonded to a signi‹ed in the creation of a stage sign, is moved in a different context to be attached to a different signi‹ed, but when that new bonding takes place, the receiver’s memory of the previous bonding remains, contaminating or “ghosting” the new sign.8 One concrete example of such ghosting was the Elizabethan players’ use of actual church vestments and properties for satiric ends. In one familiar example, Marlowe’s Mephistopheles wears the robes of a Franciscan friar (and thus con‹rms the audience’s presumed suspicion that all friars are devilish).

Another striking example, and the focus of this chapter, is the device of the bloody handkerchief popularized by Thomas Kyd’s spectacularly successful Spanish Tragedy (1587–92). As it moves through the play, Kyd’s bloody handkerchief invokes previous performances by bloody cloths, even as it weaves them into an original narrative. Indeed, at the play’s climax the ghost in the bloody handkerchief’s folds is the Host itself: the real presence of Christ’s body as it was embodied in the sacrament of the Eucharist and metonymically invoked by various sacred cloths on the late medieval stage. By the time of The Spanish Tragedy—set in a Catholic country loathed and feared by a great many in Kyd’s audience—the Protestant Lord’s Supper had replaced the Catholic Mass in the Anglican Church. The Host itself was of‹cially understood to be a commemorative symbol and sign of Christ’s spiritual presence in the sacrament rather than the transubstantiated body of Christ.9 Meanwhile, the commercial Elizabethan playhouses ‹lled a theatrical and spiritual void left by the suppression of the devotional Corpus Christi drama on the one hand and the rituals of the Catholic Church on the other.10 As Stephen Greenblatt remarks, the players were willing to invest large sums to purchase Catholic clerical garments because the acquisition 64

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of such garments “was a signi‹cant appropriation of symbolic power” that still resonated powerfully for audiences.11 “What happens when the piece of cloth [here, an ecclesiastic cloak] is passed from the church to the playhouse?” asks Greenblatt.

“A consecrated object is reclassi‹ed, assigned a cash value, transferred from a sacred to a profane setting, deemed suitable for the stage.”12 By analyzing Kyd’s subversion of the tradition linking holy cloths and sacred blood in medieval drama, I wish to demonstrate that the bloody napkin is a ghostly palimpsest that absorbs meaning through intertextual borrowing as well as through fresh symbolic resonance. Further, I wish to argue that Kyd’s appropriation of the handkerchief was not didactic, as has been argued by recent scholars of Reformation drama, but an opportunistic bid to recast the late medieval “contract of transformation” embodied by bloody cloth as an addictive “contract of sensation.” But to understand Kyd’s bold revision, we must ‹rst trace the property-cloth’s origins back to the very beginning of liturgical drama.

Holy Cloths and Sacred Blood: The Medieval Heritage He is not here, the sothe to say.

—Wake‹eld PLAY OF THE RESURRECTION

The ‹rst dramatic cloth on the English stage was the symbolic gravecloth (linteum) that provided ocular proof of Christ’s resurrection at the climax of the Visitatio Sepulchri, the tenth-century Easter liturgical drama that reenacted the visit of the three Marys to Christ’s tomb.

In the case of the Regularis Concordia, a liturgical script prepared at Winchester by Saint Ethelwold, bishop of Winchester, some time between 965 and 975 for Benedictine use in England, this propertycloth tangibly linked the Visitatio to three preceding ceremonies: the Adoratio, Depositio, and Elevatio. On Good Friday, a veiled cross or cruci‹x was gradually uncovered by two deacons before being laid on the altar and venerated by each member of the congregation in turn (Adoratio). The deacons then wrapped the cross in the linen 65

The Stage Life of Props cloth and “buried” it in an improvised “sepulchre,” a part of the altar with a curtain stretched around it (Depositio). A “watch” was then posted to “guard” the tomb until the night of the Lord’s resurrection; the cross was then “raised” on Easter Sunday before the congregation was admitted to Mass (Elevatio). After the Elevatio, the linen cloth was left behind on the altar for use in the drama that followed—possibly the earliest liturgical drama to be sung in English churches.13 According to the text of the Visitatio in the Regularis Concordia, as set down by Saint Ethelwold, the monk who represents the angel summons the three Marys to the altar by singing, “Come and see the place [where the Lord had been laid, alleluia].” The written instructions then read: “Saying this, let him rise, and lift the veil and show them the bare place of the cross, with nothing other than the shroud in which the cross had been wrapped. Seeing which, let them set down in that same sepulchre the thuribles which they had carried, and let them take up the shroud and spread it out before the clergy; and, as if demonstrating that the Lord has risen and is not now wrapped in it, let them sing this antiphon [‘The Lord has risen from the sepulchre’]. And let them lay the cloth upon the altar.”14 In this liturgical drama, sung by the clergy in Latin at the end of matins on Easter morning, the linen cloth represents Christ’s cerements. David Bevington notes that the ceremony is simple, dramatic only in the sense that it reenacts a biblical event: “[T]he costumes are clerical, the simple hand props are ecclesiastical artifacts, and the ‘stage’ is the choir and altar of the church.”15 Nevertheless, J. L. Styan highlights the dramatic importance of the shroud: “More than just to direct movement and gesture, Ethelwold’s business with the property cloth causes it to acquire a symbolic quality and intensity. The magic cloth makes its point ‹rst when it is seen to be cast away and then when it is ›ourished.”16 Christ’s presence is paradoxically demonstrated by his absence, which is symbolized by the metonymic piece of cloth.

Visual display of the cloth to the congregation is frequent in eleventh- and twelfth-century European versions of the Visitatio, although there are variations. In some eleventh-century versions,

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both shroud (linteum) and head-cloth (sudarium) are displayed as ocular proof. Thus in the Visitatio doubtfully ascribed to Aquileia, Italy, “two brethren [who represent John and Peter] display the shroud to the others, saying: ‘Behold, O companions, behold the shroud and head-cloth, and the body is not to be found in the sepulchre.’”17 Here the linen head-cloth may also represent Mary’s kerchief, the legendary cloth in which the Christ child was swaddled and later, according to tradition, in which Christ was buried.18 The twelfthcentury St. Lambrecht Visitatio calls for the Marys to remove from the sepulcher both the “sudarium quod fuerat super crucis caput” [the kerchief which had been over the head of the cross] and the “‹lacterium quo involuta crux fuerat” [the woven cloth in which the cross had been wrapped].19 As in the Aquileia play, both cloths are given equal forensic weight, the equivalent of Ethelwold’s single prop.20 The ‹rst substance absorbed by sacred cloth on the English stage is thus not the real presence but the felt absence of Christ’s resurrected body. The cloth is shown to the congregation as the culminating moment of a divine narrative known intimately by all present. It is a mnemonic device that reinforces a preexisting contract of revelation: a belief in Christ’s resurrection that is based on faith in the unseen. In a sense, the shroud is not proof at all. Rather, the shroud is the buffer between audience and player that signals the end of the story and the beginning of faith.21 By the time of the vernacular Corpus Christi cycles in the fourteenth and early ‹fteenth centuries, which current scholarship suggests developed alongside the liturgical drama rather than evolving out of it, another, more explicitly magical cloth had appeared. Freed from the verbal constraints of the liturgy, which may have limited the expansion of the sung Latin drama, the urban play cycles enthusiastically elaborated on Scripture by introducing apocryphal characters, properties, and dialogue. The Corpus Christi pageant of the Road to Calvary thus introduced the legendary ‹gure of Veronica, who placed a cloth against Christ’s face only to ‹nd it magically imprinted with Christ’s features.22 The image was of course prestained on the

67

The Stage Life of Props cloth, and in the Lucerne Passion play the Veronica actor repeats the action of visual display familiar from the liturgical drama by lifting the painted cloth toward the people.23 The Veronica cloth features in only two surviving English mystery cycle texts, York and N-Town, and Veronica herself appears only in the N-Town Passion Play II. On the way to Calvary, Jesus is met by Veronica, who admonishes the crowd: Ah! you sinful people, why fare thus?

For sweat and blood he may not see.

Alas! holy prophet, Christ Jesus, Careful is my heart for thee.

And she wipes his face with her kerchief.

Jesus responds: Veronica, thy wiping does me ease.

My face is clean that was black to see.

I shall them keep from all mis-ease That looken on thy kerchief and remember me.24 Here the sacred cloth is not ocular proof of the Resurrection, as in the Visitatio. Veronica’s napkin is a sacred relic, the very sight of which is said to ward off evil. Christ’s sweat, blood, and dirt magically transform the handkerchief into an apotropaic talisman. The symbolic cloth that once proposed a contract of revelation, based on the end of narrative and the beginning of faith, now proposes what may be called a “contract of transformation.” When Jesus claims, “I shall them keep from all mis-ease / That looken on thy kerchief and remember me,” he transforms the napkin from a representational prop to a supernatural relic worthy of veneration in its own right.

In the York Shearmen’s Road to Calvary play, it is the third Mary who bears the relic that becomes imprinted with Christ’s features: Ah lord, give leave to clean thy face. . . .

Behold! How he has shewed his grace, 68

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He that is most of main.

This sign shall bear witness Unto all people plain, How God’s Son here guiltless Is put to peerless pain.25 While the third Mary repeats the familiar gesture of displaying the prop to the audience, the dramatic emphasis here (as elsewhere in the York cycle) is on Christ’s human suffering as well as on the cosmic implications of his sacri‹ce. The precise substance the cloth “cleanses” is ambiguous (sweat? blood? dirt?) but clearly the residue of acute physical suffering. To the medieval spectator, of course, the tension between Christ’s humanity and his divinity may not have registered, and the napkin would still have been understood as a comforting symbol of divine grace. Yet in the York Shearmen’s play the handkerchief’s signi‹cance cannot be separated from the corporeal extrusions of a body in pain, the very sight of which may have been interpreted as salvi‹c.

Whether or not Kyd was aware of the Veronica cloth, which may have appeared in the York cycle as late as 1569, he was able to draw on the powerful religious implications of stage blood. Clifford Davidson has argued that in the late medieval vernacular plays, stage blood was not sensationalized, as it was on the Elizabethan stage. Rather, the spectacle of stage blood offered the spectator an opportunity for devotional “ocular experience” whose effects were understood to be spiritually transformative.26 “Such bloody and violent effects,” argues Davidson, “were . . . seen as indicative of the gift of grace to all humankind and as re›ective of the saving power of the beloved Christ; hence that which for men and women of a later time would be unendurable would potentially have precipitated a deeply spiritual experience.”27 Even the fourteenth-century author of the antitheatrical Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge admitted, “ofte sithis by siche miraclis pleyinge men and wymmen, seinge the passioun of Crist and of his seintis, ben movyd to compassion and devocion, wepinge bitere teris.”28 As a potentially transformative sight, blood was continually fore69

The Stage Life of Props grounded in the Corpus Christi plays. In York and N-Town, for example, Christ visibly sweats both water and blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the N-Town Passion Play II speci‹es that Christ should be stripped and beaten with whips “til he is all blody.”29 At one point in the Wake‹eld Scourging a torturer remarks, “Lett me rub on the rust, that the bloode down glide / As swythe.”30 By the time of his cruci‹xion, Christ’s body was covered not only with blood and sweat but often with spittle and mucus as well; “I shall spitt in his face, though it be fare shining,” remarks the same Wake‹eld torturer.31 According to Davidson, “[T]o devout viewers of the plays, or even to those less devout, the late medieval civic religious drama represented blood in these circumstances as sacred, not as the impure or polluted result of violence.”32 Christ’s white leather garment (or “wounded” shirt at York) was visibly imbued with the miraculous traces of his sacred blood and thus worthy of veneration.33 While recent scholars have drawn attention to the ambiguity of blood symbolism in the later Middle Ages, the historical evidence on the whole substantiates Davidson’s thesis that the mere sight of stage blood in late medieval Europe was understood by many to have curative and/or salvi‹c powers.34 The bloody corpse of Christ and the linen burial shroud literally come together in the Corpus Christi Play of the Death and Burial. In the York Butchers’ version, for example, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus remove Christ’s body “Nowe blemisght and bolned with bloode” from the cross, wrap it in the “sudarye” and entomb it in a sepulcher.35 (Whereas the liturgical Depositio ceremony had taken place in a church, Bevington speculates that the Butchers’ play may have been staged in a ‹xed location with a number of simultaneously visible scaffolds, since the action would have proved awkward if not impossible on a movable pageant wagon.)36 The wrapped body is anointed with ointments, and the kneeling men stress the salvi‹c power of God’s blood once more: “This Lorde so goode, / That schedde his bloode, / He mende youre moode, / And buske on this blis for to bide!”37 The Corpus Christi Play of the Resurrection, which follows the Harrowing of Hell, then incorporates the Visitatio playlet virtually 70

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unaltered from its tenth-century form (apart from its translation into English). Thus in the Wake‹eld version the three Marys approach the sepulcher and encounter two white-robed angels, one of whom informs the women: He is not here, the sothe to say.

The place is voide therin he lay; The sudary here se ye may Was on him laide.38 As in the original Visitatio, the cloth is displayed to the audience as ocular proof of Christ’s resurrection. This time, however, its folds have visibly contained not the metonymic substitutions of the Latin liturgical drama (the cross, the Host) but the actual blood-soaked body of the player-Christ, who rose from the sepulcher just before the arrival of the Marys and proclaimed: Behold my body, how Jues it dang With knottys of whippys and scorges strang!

As stremes of well, the bloode out-sprang On every side. . . .

The leste drope I for the[e] bled Might clens the[e] soyn— All the sin the warld within If thou had done.39 No longer a blank cloth displayed to and by monastic clergy as a symbol of Christ’s bodily absence, the Corpus Christi “sudarye” was a theatrical talisman elevated in the public gaze as a metonymic substitute for the longed-for Host. Like the sight of the elevated Host itself, the sight of the bloody cloth was now believed to “cleanse sin.”40 Unlike the Visitatio shroud, the miraculous Corpus Christi shroud heralded not only revelation but transformation, and this shift was re›ected in its changed appearance. The unstained cloth offered to monastic brethren as symbolic proof of the Resurrection had now visibly absorbed the magical substance of Christ’s blood.

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The Stage Life of Props For many spectators, denied communion with their savior except for once a year and starved for tactile evidence of salvation, the bloodstained cloth might well have seemed to possess redemptive powers. And once the Corpus Christi plays dwindled—only a decade or so before Kyd’s play packed the Rose playhouse—the comforting sight of “God’s blood” must indeed have been a painfully felt absence.

Demystifying the Handkerchief: From Drama of Devotion to Drama of Iconoclasm?

Wee bee blynd [unless God] open our eyes, and take away the kercheefe or veyle that is before them, yea and give us a newe sight.

—John Calvin

What happened to the long theatrical tradition linking holy cloth to sacred blood once the Protestant Reformation reached England?

Scholars have recently argued that in mid-sixteenth-century England, a newly commercial, Protestant drama severed the link between the stage and devotional “ocular experience.” Drama dealing explicitly with religious and political matters was banned by the Proclamation of May 16, 1559, and the Corpus Christi plays were defunct by 1580. While stage blood continued to ›ow liberally in the new Elizabethan playhouses as tragedians drew increasingly on Seneca (whose plays became newly available in complete English translation from 1581), by the time of The Spanish Tragedy, the sight of stage blood had apparently lost its devotional ef‹cacy as salvi‹c ocular experience for English spectators.

As has been often noted, Protestantism’s shift of emphasis from the priestly observance of the sacrament toward the spiritual state of the communicant led to a suspicion of the outer, material means of Christian ritual. In extreme cases, this meant the suspicion that all images—whether mental or physical—were idols.41 For the reformers, the idolatry of theatrical representation (worship of the image) was eclipsed by the new “logolatry” (worship of the word). Michael 72

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O’Connell summarizes this “sudden psychic revolution” against a complex of medieval religious practices (such as the cult of images, the sacraments, vestments, relics, and pilgrimage) as a shift from the “incarnationalism” of late medieval culture to “the textualization of God’s body, the turning of the incarnation (and the devotions and ritual practices associated with it) from expression in physical and material ways to predominantly textual and verbal modes.”42 The theater came under attack because, from a phenomenological perspective, “[t]heatrical presence is not mere sign but a use of corporeality to ‘body forth’ the ‹ction it portrays.”43 In other words, the very phenomenology of theater seemed to turn objects into idols, and a steady stream of antitheatricalist tracts accused the theater of doing just that.44 Paul Whit‹eld White concurs that debunking idolatry was a high priority for Puritan activists but conclusively demonstrates that, far from rejecting the drama outright, beginning with John Bale’s virulently anti-Catholic plays in the 1530s, Protestant zealots embraced the drama as a potent didactic weapon in the ‹ght against Papistry.

“Well into the 1570s, we ‹nd Protestant religious drama calling for further religious reform within the Church of England, and as recent theatrical criticism has demonstrated, the more activist Protestants of later years employed the London playhouses to advance their own ideological interests.”45 At least until around 1580, many reformers believed that the theater—the very temple of idolatry—could be harnessed as a weapon to expose idolatry itself.

In Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage, Huston Diehl picks up the historical thread of White’s argument and claims that London’s public playhouses continued to be just such a tool of reform after 1580.

She argues that Elizabethan playwrights such as Kyd and Shakespeare fomented a “drama of iconoclasm” that modeled new, Protestant ways of seeing for spectators still emotionally attached to the old religion.

Like O’Connell, Diehl discerns a shift from the “purely bodily seeing” of the late Middle Ages to a “transcendent [or intellectual] kind of seeing” encouraged by the reformed church.46 Diehl highlights this shift by contrasting the veneration of the Schöne Maria of Regensburg, an image believed to possess curative and salvi‹c powers, with the strip73

The Stage Life of Props ping of the altars under the Protestant king Edward VI, illustrated in the 1570 edition of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. For Diehl, Foxe’s hugely in›uential work “de‹nes an emerging Protestant aesthetics, one that restrains the power of the image to elicit awe and wonder by forcing the spectator to become conscious about how it signi‹es.”47 According to Diehl, Elizabethan plays worked in very much the same way, demystifying the power of idolatrous images by exposing their potential to deceive the credulous onlooker.

Among the formerly totemic objects to come under reformist scrutiny was the handkerchief itself.48 Reformation theologians debated whether such objects as Veronica’s napkin and the handkerchiefs sent forth by St. Paul to cure the sick (Acts 19:11–12) were magical totems or sacramental signs, and Calvin himself warned against fetishizing such handkerchiefs: “For which cause the Papists are more absurd, who wrest this place unto their relics; as if Paul sent his handkerchiefs that men might worship and kiss them in their honor; as in Papistry they worship Francis’ shoes and mantle, Rose’s girdle, St. Margaret’s comb and such like tri›es.”49 According to Diehl, Calvin’s project of demystifying sacred handkerchiefs found a theatrical parallel in plays such as The Spanish Tragedy and Othello, which dramatize the deceptiveness of supposedly magical handkerchiefs. For Diehl, the mutation of the handkerchief from magical totem to demysti‹ed sign recapitulates the story of holy objects in the ‹rst half of the sixteenth century. The “real presences” of the divine-made-visible in sacred images (the drama of devotion) are replaced by the “felt absences” of Protestant signs that deliberately rupture the medieval bond between the visible and the invisible (the drama of iconoclasm). In Diehl’s summary, “The handkerchief is thus a contested site in Reformation disputes about the nature, power, and validity of ocular proof. What is centrally at issue in the commentaries on Paul’s handkerchiefs, as well as in popular devotion to relics like Veronica’s and Abagarus’s napkins, is the role of sight in the practice of faith.”50 Without wishing to devalue Diehl’s and O’Connell’s provocative argument that a skeptical, Protestant mode of seeing purged an idol-

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atrous Catholic one within a quarter of a century, I believe it more useful to see the two attitudes to sacred objects—as totemic images on the one hand and representational signs on the other—as extreme points on a continuum of audience reception at the most turbulent stage in English religious history. Within a single lifetime, England had gone from Catholicism within the Roman Church, to Catholicism without the pope, to systematic reform under Edward VI, to Catholicism once more under Mary I, and ‹nally to a moderate Protestantism under the Anglican compromise reached by Elizabeth.

Indeed, the Lollard heresy demonstrated that con›icting understandings of the relationship between sign and signi‹ed were available to spectators at Mass, or at a miracle play, prior to the Reformation. This dissonance erupted into full-›edged semiotic crisis once Protestantism took hold in England.51 It therefore seems to me implausible to argue that an audience attending Othello or The Spanish Tragedy would have emerged pondering the theological distinction between a divinely ef‹cacious sign and an idolatrous fetish. Nor would instilling doctrinal correctness have been the primary intention of the playwright, whose continued employment by the company would largely depend on box-of‹ce receipts.

Instead, it is my argument here that Kyd exploited spectators’ residual faith in magical handkerchiefs and longing for ocular experience by transforming the handkerchief from a token of all believers’ salvation into a personalized fetish that embodies the principle of private vengeance (“Remember you must kill”). If by the late sixteenth century the holy sudarium of the Visitatio Sepulchri and the miracle-working Host of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament were long in the past, historical evidence suggests that many ordinary folk clung to their magical bits of cloth despite the inroads made by the reformed religion.52 By introducing a bloody handkerchief into his revenge drama, Kyd deliberately exploited the medieval association between holy cloth and sacred blood—not in order to foment a Protestant aesthetics, but to appropriate the object’s power on behalf of a newly invigorated professional theater freed from the orderly bureaucratic surveillance of a clerical hierarchy.

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Hieronimo (Christopher Crocetti) in The Spanish Tragedy, Boston College, 2002. Using his handkerchief as a bloody token, he vows to avenge his murdered son Horatio (David Mawhinney). (Photo: Stephen Vedder.)

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Dropping the Subject The Skull on the Jacobean Stage

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hether under the aegis of the church or seeking to emancipate itself from it, drama has continually appropriated the church’s holy symbols. On the medieval and early modern stage, as I have shown, both the eucharistic wafer and the bloody handkerchief contained a ghostly residue of the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Mass. But whereas the Croxton Play of the Sacrament sought to shore up belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, even as it asserted the right of lay actors to handle the holy wafer (or, at least, some visual equivalent of it), The Spanish Tragedy invoked Christ’s gravecloth only to twist its meaning from a token of shared salvation to one of personal revenge.

In this sense, eternal ritual—the doctrine that Christ’s sacri‹ce exists always and forever enshrined in the sacrament of the Eucharist—gives way to dramatic narrative. The story of Kyd’s eerie handkerchief unfolds at its own pace, surprising its audience as it goes. For paying Elizabethan spectators, the uneasy pleasures of dramatic suspense, along with what today we call shock value, replace the comforting assurances of a transparent token that could be “read” by all true believers. In the hands of Kyd’s Hieronimo, the bloody napkin is no universal symbol but a personal fetish, and the sensationalization of the prop continues in the Jacobean era. By the time it mutates into the notorious handkerchief “spotted with strawberries” in Othello, the bloody napkin has acquired a pagan “magic in the web” that features psychic Egyptian soothsayers, twohundred-year-old sibyls in the throes of prophetic ecstasy, and dye 89

The Stage Life of Props made from lovingly preserved hearts ripped from living virgins’ bodies (3.4.55–74).1 The bloody handkerchief was not the only lurid prop to bewitch early modern audiences. In this chapter I consider how another common religious symbol was subversively appropriated by Jacobean drama: the memento mori skull. Why, of all Jacobean props, seize on the skull? To begin with, it is worth stating the obvious: the skull is probably the most famous stage property in English drama. In part this is because it makes its ‹rst known stage appearance in arguably the most famous western European play. The image of a man talking to a held skull has become iconic, indeed postmodern, recently making its presence felt in such unlikely places as the movies The Last Action Hero and Space Jam. That Shakespeare’s Hamlet picks up a skull and says “Alas, poor Yorick,” is just something that everyone knows, whether or not they have ever read or seen Shakespeare’s play. The ubiquity of this most famous stage image begs analysis of its enduring fascination.

The skull’s fascination transcends what one might call “The Hamlet Effect,” or even “The Shakespeare Effect.” Skulls fascinate because of their sheer uncanniness, their disturbing ability to oscillate between subject and object.2 Unlike virtually any other prop, the skull is the physical remains of the deceased human subject. And since it is a universal human attribute, the skull insists on identi‹cation as well as fragmentation: the felt absence within the skull’s cavity is not Christ, but ourselves. In John Caird’s production of Hamlet mounted by the Royal National Theatre, featuring Simon Russell Beale as the prince, Yorick’s skull was out‹tted in a jaunty cap, a gag at once amusing and deeply unsettling. Neither quite person nor thing, the skull bore a unique charge on the stage, its mirthless grin only compounding its macabre effect.

In this chapter I consider what made the skull an object of such theatrical fascination once it burst onto the theatrical scene at the very beginning of the seventeenth century.3 For when Hamlet returns to Denmark from England, only to ‹nd a very English-seeming churchyard and sexton, he walks into a scene unprecedented on the Elizabethan stage. Act 5, scene 1 of Hamlet is apparently the ‹rst 90

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known scene in English Renaissance drama to be laid in a graveyard, and the ‹rst scene in which skulls are used as stage properties.4 Much ink has been spilled on this groundbreaking scene and, in particular, on Hamlet’s famous address to Yorick’s skull. It is a scene of such emblematic force (for, as Roland Mushat Frye has demonstrated, it is a scene with nearly a hundred years of memento mori tradition in the visual arts behind it) that it is hard to peel back the encrustations of time to uncover its original effect.5 Why insert at this crucial point in the play’s action such a stale motif, already so conventional by 1601 as to be more honored in the breach than the observance? The graveyard scene is hardly necessary to the plot, the gravediggers ancillary as can be; they are two extra mouths to feed, for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men no less than for the court of Elsinore. Is it simply that Shakespeare could not resist the temptation to bring Yorick’s skull, as it were, to life? Was throwing up a real skull on stage too thrilling an opportunity to miss, as in those 3-D movies of the 1950s in which the audience shrank back in horror from monsters that lunged out of the screen? And why did Shakespeare’s contemporaries then produce a rash of skulls on the stage in the following decades, only to consign them (for the most part) to the prop bin of stage history thereafter? Is there any way, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot on Webster, we can recover the skin around the skull?

The fascination of the skull for Shakespeare and his contemporaries went far beyond simply replicating in three dimensions the memento mori—an emblem enshrined in the visual arts to such a degree that, by the time of Hamlet, it already approached cliché. In asserting so, I am aware of going against the weight of critical consensus. Bridget Gellert, for instance, has explored the graveyard scene’s iconography of melancholy, while Harry Morris discerns within the entire structure of Shakespeare’s play that of a memento mori lyric.6 For Elizabeth Maslen, “Yorick plays the earthbound memento mori, a reminder of death the leveller.”7 For Jeffrey Alan Triggs, “the scene objecti‹es Hamlet’s resignation to the human condition through the vanitas motif of a man holding a skull.”8 Frye, too, approaches the scene in terms of its emblematic connotations, assert91

The Stage Life of Props ing that Hamlet’s address to Yorick’s skull “prepared the original audience for accepting and understanding the serenity of mind and conscience Hamlet displays in the following scene which concludes the play.”9 Given the overwhelming symbolic equation of skulls with death by the time of the late sixteenth century, it is hard to see how Hamlet and its contemporary skull plays could be warping the emblematic tradition from within. Yet this is precisely what the anamorphic skulls in Hamlet, The Honest Whore, Part 1 and The Revenger’s Tragedy achieve in performance.

All three plays invite the spectator to choose between a conventional memento mori tableau, in which a skull serves as a passive emblem re›ecting the protagonist’s mastery of its symbolism, and a second, “trick” perspective (or anamorphosis), in which the skull takes on an active role that undermines the very selfhood the protagonist seeks to establish.10 Moreover, this trick perspective alters the spectator’s relation to the action. Once we focus on it, the skull decenters our own “objective” grasp of its stage symbolism and our presumption of autonomous gazing from outside the emblem’s “frame.” In its oscillation between subject and object, the skull exposes the illusion that we can attain a God’s-eye view.

Phoebe Spinrad comes the closest to understanding these plays’ subversion of the memento mori tradition when she argues that the use of skulls on the Renaissance stage re›ects a growing secular uneasiness with that very tradition, de‹ned as “the meditation on death through the medium of a skull.”11 In Spinrad’s argument, between Hamlet and The Tragedy of Lodovick Sforza (1628) we witness an uncoupling of the signi‹er from the signi‹ed, the skull from its own symbolism, until by the time of Gomersall’s play, “We have reached the twentieth century . . . all we can see through the eyesockets of the skull is the bone at the back of the head” (p. 9).

According to Spinrad, “Like Chaucer’s Troilus looking down from heaven and laughing, the medieval and early Renaissance Christian laughed at the skull because he saw in it the absurdity of human pretensions before the throne of God” (p. 1), but by the time of Gomersall this “absurdity” is no longer Christian but nihilistic, for the moral of Sforza reverses Hamlet’s hopeful message. Contemplation of 92

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the skull now leads to the comfortless conclusion that “[a] hundred years from now, we will all be Yorick” (p. 10). While Spinrad insists Hamlet’s use of the memento mori tradition is still “orthodox” (p. 9), she notes that by the end of the sixteenth century (or thereabouts) the symbol no longer stands for anything beyond itself. The skull is simply an object; it has become a dead metaphor.12 But when does a stone cold metaphor become a hot property? If we wish to understand the work skulls were performing on the English stage at the turn of the seventeenth century, we would do well to cast our eyes back seventy years to the ‹rst known association of young men with a skull in English iconography. I refer to Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors, that is, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, who are depicted standing in Westminster Abbey during their visit to England in 1533.13 The young French nobles, exquisitely haughty in their ‹nely wrought robes, stand before a shelved table lavishly decked with props that re›ect the men’s power and mastery over the very latest in humanist learning: musical instruments, globes, clocks, books. The painting’s surface verisimilitude is breathtaking; yet on second glance a mysterious disk seems to slice through the very canvas, ›oating between the young men’s feet and casting its ominous shadow on the ornate mosaic ›oor—a shadow made more ominous by the fact that it falls in a different direction from those of the men.14 The phantasm’s presence in the painting only makes sense when one realizes the painting is one of the anamorphic “perspectives” so beloved of the Renaissance: viewed downwards from the right-hand side of the canvas, the shadow turns into a radically foreshortened skull. From this new perspective, the two young men, so full of themselves just a moment ago, are distorted beyond recognition.

They are as ›attened, in fact, as the objects that only a moment ago seemed to belong to another visual plane, that of the richly furnished table behind. The two men themselves thus collapse into their humanist property, that which in its very materiality de‹nes their place in and of the word. The anamorphic skull responds by seeming to spill out of the frame and in turn asserting its claims on what lies behind it. “I own you,” the skull seems to say to the nobles and, by 93

The Stage Life of Props extension, to the implied viewer outside the frame, himself (for it is presumably a he) so sure of his own dimensionality, his own visual possession of what is framed by and within the canvas.

But are we the possessors or possessed of this double image? The canvas initially offers us the illusion of frontal command of the perspective scene. Because of the divergence in vanishing points, however, the skull is so radically elongated as to be virtually absent. In order to see the skull as a skull, we are forced to go nearly to the plane of the painting, becoming all but embedded in the canvas ourselves. The painting’s execution is only completed when the viewer takes up this secondary position: we are framed in more ways than one, for in turning the two men into mere props and literally forcing us off-center, the skull exposes our illusion that the painting’s contents can be captured in a glance from a single perspective outside the frame. As Stephen Greenblatt writes, “To see the large death’shead requires a still more radical abandonment of what we take to be ‘normal’ vision; we must throw the entire painting out of perspective in order to bring into perspective what our usual mode of perception cannot comprehend.”15 We must “drop the subject” in order to see the object; and the object of our decentered gaze is death itself.16 It is just this anamorphic shift we must make in order to grasp the power of skulls on the Renaissance stage, for it is only by conceiving them as objects that take center stage in the act of performance that they can properly be understood. Marjorie Garber makes the link between Holbein’s anamorphosis and the “double take” of Shakespeare’s “pictorial irony,” whereby the viewer outside the frame (the audience) sees what those inside the frame (Hamlet, Gertrude) do not, in a sort of “tragic relief.”17 Garber here extends Rosalie Colie’s notion of “unmetaphoring,” in which “an author who treats a conventionalized ‹gure of speech as if it were a description of actuality is unmetaphoring that ‹gure.”18 For Garber, Yorick’s skull and Old Hamlet’s ghost are examples of “literalized” or “rei‹ed” memento mori ‹gures, dead metaphors resurrected. But Garber does not make the leap from the “literalization” of the memento mori skull as prop to its personi‹cation as character—its refusal to be rei‹ed into a dead thing—together with its insistence on turning others into its props.19 94

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She instead collapses Holbein’s double image back into the Christian paradox: “Earthly vanity and mortality occupy the same space and are, in essence, visual metaphors for one another.”20 The point of anamorphosis, however, is its either/or-ness.21 We can choose to see ambassadors or skull, but we cannot see both at once, as Garber tries to do (even though she accepts that anamorphosis collapses the distinction between tenor and vehicle, so that it is impossible to say in the case of skull and ambassador which is the metaphor and which is the literal fact). Garber thus tames the maddening duality of anamorphosis by collapsing the double perspective back into an emblem: “[T]he particular perspective embodied in the twinning of life and death . . . presents to the eye a visual emblem of the Christian paradox: we die to live.”22 Unfortunately, the eye must choose between skull and man—and handy-dandy, which is the person, and which is the prop?23 Thus, in Hamlet’s graveyard scene, we cannot simultaneously hold Hamlet and Yorick in focus. To see Yorick properly, we must search for his theatrical traces—his properties—in and through the text in which he lies embedded.

Flattening Hamlet: The Skull Unmetaphored The chief gravedigger throws up Hamlet’s ‹rst skull while cheerfully mauling Thomas Lord Vaux’s popular memento mori lyric, “The aged lover renounces his love.” The gravedigger alters Vaux’s lament to suit his present occupation: Vaux’s “house of claye” becomes the gravedigger’s “pit of clay” (5.1.94), about which he seems to feel quite proprietorial.24 According to Horatio, “Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness” (5.1.67). The term “property” oscillates intriguingly between object and attribute. While Horatio and Hamlet are concerned with the gravedigger’s “properties”—his appurtenances and characteristics—the gravedigger remains single-mindedly concerned with his pit of clay, for as Anne Barton remarks, “His riddles, his jokes, his small talk, and even his songs all end in the same place: a hole in the ground.”25 As the gravedigger disinters skull after skull, Hamlet begins to play with their symbolic 95

The Stage Life of Props signi‹cance. Piqued by class rather than by eschatological anxiety, Hamlet is prodded by the disturbing sight of a “knave” roughly “jowl[ing]” the remains of his superiors to the ground into trumpeting his own semiotic mastery of the situation (5.1.75).

Hamlet’s dialogue directs the audience’s attention to an ambiguous prop. The ‹rst skull is “Cain’s jawbone, that did the ‹rst murder” (5.1.75). There is an implicit pun in Hamlet’s slippery genitive, for “Cain’s jawbone” could refer to the ass’s jawbone with which Cain is proverbially said to have slain Abel, or it might be the bared jawbone of Cain itself. Is it metaphor (for Claudius’s primal sin of fratricide) or metonym (of Cain’s head); symbol or thing-in-itself (jawbone = jawbone)? Is “Yorick’s skull” Yorick’s, or Hamlet’s? Already the stage prop is arrogating con›icting properties.

The skull proves irresistible to Hamlet’s protean mind, and as the prince begins free-associating, it becomes a Rorschach skull: now a jawbone, now a politician’s pate, now a courtier’s, now a lord’s, now My Lady Worm’s. Hamlet makes the obligatory reference to the wheel of fortune—“Here’s ‹ne revolution and we had the trick to see’t” (5.1.89)—but the old verbal sparkle is missing, and we can sense that his heart is not in these conventional apothegms. Instead Hamlet teases the gravedigger for knocking the bones about, but already he is insidiously identi‹ed—and identifying—with them: “Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with ’em? Mine ache to think on’t” (5.1.90–91). What is theatrically important is that Hamlet’s language fails to do justice to the prop’s disturbing effect on the spectator, its sheer weirdness on the stage, whether it be a bleached dry laboratory specimen or a dirt-encrusted, wormy mess. Furthermore, Hamlet’s reference to “the trick to see’t” implies that, as participants in the action, Hamlet and Horatio lack our anamorphic perspective from outside the frame: our knowledge that the doomed Hamlet’s bones ache with proleptic sympathy, and that this tragic protagonist is himself subject to fortune’s wheel.

Most conspicuously missing from Hamlet’s reaction to the skull for a Jacobean audience would have been the expected acknowledgment of the skull’s double message. Glenda Conway points out that Jacobean audiences “would have been aware of the skull as a sign of 96

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the impermanence of earthly life, a memento mori. However, audiences simultaneously would have seen it as a sign of the relative insigni‹cance of the human soul’s brief stay in the ›esh, and hence, as a reminder of the everlasting glory that was promised by Christianity to those who lived their lives piously.” For an orthodox believer the skull’s grim slogan was ultimately consolatory, and this message was reinforced by a slew of popular sixteenth-century emblem books familiar to Shakespeare’s audience. For a Jacobean audience, then, skulls were “emblematic, meaning-laden, and fullyreadable signs.”26 It is just this legibility that Hamlet sets out to complicate and discredit.27 Whereas Jeffrey Alan Triggs insists that “the scene objecti‹es Hamlet’s resignation to the human condition through the vanitas motif of a man holding the skull,” Hamlet avoids the ‹rst-person singular, refusing to see himself re›ected in the death’s-head.28 The gravedigger throws up a second skull, but although outnumbered Hamlet continues his tiresome guessing game. In Hamlet’s imagination this skull is that of a lawyer, and Hamlet deconstructs the legal discourse of property, substituting absence for presence: “Where be his quiddities now, his quillities, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?” (5.1.97–98). Hamlet punningly mimics the memento mori clichés: “Is this the ‹ne of his ‹nes. . . ?” (5.1.104). Hamlet deploys the ubi sunt motif not to re›ect on his own mortality, but as the vehicle for social satire. This arriviste lawyer has expended considerable energy trying to establish himself as landed gentry, only to end up with a hole in the ground. Once again, the irony that this fate awaits Hamlet himself is lost on the prince.

In a sense, language bounces off the skull. Since Horatio refuses to rise to the bait, Hamlet must resort to the gravedigger, whose relentless literalism outsmarts the prince. Each of the latter’s verbal sallies is nulli‹ed one by one, and it is hard to ‹nd fault with Barton’s elegant gloss: “There can be no arguing, nor even any dialogue, with a literal-mindedness so absolute and perverse. In the face of death, the wings of language are clipped. Hamlet’s own verbal trick played back on him declares itself for what it is: a revelation of the essential meaninglessness, the nonsense of human existence beneath its metaphoric 97

The Stage Life of Props dress.”29 Whereas Hamlet implies that the skulls are properties whose metaphorical exchange-value is limitless, the gravedigger’s insistence over the skull’s singular identity makes no bones about it: “This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester” (5.1.175).

Naming the skull transforms the scene. It is a moment of unmetaphoring in which the conventionalized ‹gure of speech has suddenly become humanized. No longer can Hamlet ring the changes on the skull’s identity; he has come face to face with someone he once knew and cared about. After an instant of sheer physical revulsion—the prince actually gags on stage—he returns to the tired ubi sunt motif: “Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your ›ashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?”

(5.1.182–85). Hamlet’s little skull-game has turned sour; but, rather than accept the conventional memento mori admonition—seeing his own re›ection, in fact—Hamlet tries to remetaphor the skull as fast as possible. Hamlet displaces Yorick onto another familiar emblem: that of vanitas, a woman seeing a skull in a mirror instead of her own re›ection. “Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch think, to this favour she must come” (5.1.186–87).30 Hamlet regresses to an invective of the sort he earlier directed at Ophelia, whose paintings he had heard of well enough, and instead of accepting Yorick’s unique presence, he takes the easy way out by comparing the skull to Alexander and Caesar, both memento mori clichés.

Once Hamlet lets go the skull, he is on ‹rmer ground and can improvise until Ophelia’s maimed rites interrupt him, but even Hamlet must admit that Yorick is smellier than Alexander, and in refusing Yorick’s nauseating thingness Hamlet misses the point. To paraphrase Eliot again, he is Yorick, and is meant to be.31 Hamlet, in effect, takes possession of the skull the way Holbein’s ambassadors take possession of their props. For Hamlet, the value of Yorick’s skull is to occupy his mental powers in a pause between crises, an excuse to strike a pose and dash off a literary parody. But it is Yorick who has the last laugh; the gravedigger mentions that he began his job on the day Hamlet was born, and he will no doubt complete the prince’s progress by burying him tomorrow. The prince’s true identity is irrel98

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evant, for the gravedigger deals in corpses alone, and Hamlet is almost a corpse himself.

The skull in Hamlet thus performs precisely the same anamorphic function as the skull in Holbein’s painting.32 From Yorick’s (and his spokesman, the gravedigger’s) point of view, it is Hamlet who is the prop, and it is not coincidental that this scene ›attens out Hamlet’s verbal polydimensionality; for if Hamlet asserts his freedom to bend Yorick’s skull to his own poetic ends, so too does Yorick assert his own imitable presence on the English Renaissance stage. Yorick refuses the status of mere emblem, insisting on one last “live” cameo appearance, one last royal command performance. The old pro graciously vacates the grave where Ophelia will lie, but at the price of offering the prince a mirror in which the latter refuses to recognize that the last laugh is on him.

Critics intent on the scene’s emblematic function as a conventional memento mori tableau miss the irony of performance, whereby Yorick butts his way into the foreground. As Hamlet ›eshes out Yorick’s attributes, he himself is exposed as a skeleton clothed in words. This irony only becomes apparent in performance because on paper the word dominates over the image, so that the sheer theatrical presence of the skull—a prop that in Shakespeare’s day may well have been realistically encrusted with earth and worms—is effaced.33 Yet on stage Yorick becomes a remarkable character, eloquent in his grinning silence, holding a mirror up to nature. The purpose of Shakespeare’s scene is to divest Hamlet of his last defense against the inevitability of death: his incomparable way with words. By insisting (like the critics) on Yorick’s essentially emblematic function, Hamlet forestalls the inevitable and defers rather than confronts the truth of his own demise.

When Hamlet’s palliatives confront Ophelia’s funeral procession, Ophelia’s corpse proves only to be Yorick redux. Hamlet cannot bear being upstaged by Laertes’ windy rhetoric because it re›ects his own hyperbole, and so he explodes into the funeral canvas just as Yorick burst into the graveyard canvas. As the two men grapple in the grave for necrophilic possession of their now absurdly contested property (Ophelia), they perform a mordant dance of death, two skeletons in 99

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Hamlet (Christopher Crocetti) sharing a grin with Yorick, Boston College, 2002. (Photo: Stephen Vedder.)

the making trying out their new home. Ophelia herself has been used as an object throughout, by both Hamlet and her father. Even her corpse gets shoved in the earth while God’s back is turned, and the fact that she is upstaged at her own funeral is sadly appropriate.

Yorick is far more of a stage presence in the scene: like Holbein’s phantasmagoric skull, he holds the mirror up to the audience and rubs our face in the dirt—a trick Shakespeare used in Macbeth when the mirror (we speculate) was turned on James I to indicate Banquo’s continuing line. Only this time, the royal line comes to a dead end.

The Skull as Ventriloquist: The Honest Whore, Part 1 Dekker’s The Honest Whore, Part 1 (played at the Fortune by Prince Henry’s Men, formerly the Admiral’s Men, and printed in 1604) is an odd hybrid of city comedy and “repentant courtesan” morality tale.

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While the placid draper Candido becomes an undeserving Malvolio dragged off to Bedlam on suspicion of madness in the comic subplot, in the main plot the faithful courtier Hippolito mourns the apparent death of his beloved, Infelice, while resisting the charms of the lovesick whore Bellafront. Hippolito is a self-styled melancholiac in the Hamlet mode who locks himself away every Monday, complete with skull, to contemplate his dead love—much to the amusement of his servant.

According to Triggs, the play treats the memento mori theme “in a comically painless form,” but the reality is more ambiguous.34 Spinrad notes that Dekker appears to be both parodying and paying tribute to Hamlet and Yorick’s relationship here: “[S]ince Hippolito makes his usual rounds of town on days other than Monday, and since he will become a quasi-villain in Part II of the play, his memento mori exercise may seem less a religious devotion than a self-pitying and misogynistic sulk. On the other hand, the whore Bellafront is converted when she sees the skull, so the confusion may be less in Hippolito’s mind than in Dekker’s” (p. 4). It is as if Dekker cannot quite decide if he is parodying an emblem or emblematizing a parody, but the confusion dissolves under the anamorphic gaze of the spectator, for by treating the skull as a hollowly re›ective emblem in act 4, Hippolito misses the irony the skull embodies: he himself has already taken the place of the skull and become its mouthpiece in act 2.

Act 2 begins in an emblematic mode, but not with a memento mori. The opening stage directions read as follows: “Enter Roger [Bellafront’s servant] with a stoole, cushin, looking-glasse, and cha‹ng-dish. Those being set downe, he pulls out of his pocket, a violl with white cullor in it, and two boxes, one with white, another red painting. He places all things in order and a candle by them, singing with the ends of old Ballads as he does it. At last Bellafront (as he rubs his cheeke with the cullors) whistles within.”35 The phrase “at last” indicates that this dumbshow occupies a not inconsiderable amount of stage time. Act 2, scene 2 marks the ‹rst appearance of the play’s title character, so Roger’s comic rigmarole may be by way of prologue to whet the audience’s appetite. When Bellafront ‹nally enters, “not full ready, without a gowne, shee sits downe, with her 101

The Stage Life of Props bodkin curles her haire, cullers her lips.” In this glimpse behind the scenes (one that will eventually become a Restoration staple), we see the arti‹ce behind the whore’s trade, as all her backstage props are arrayed for the audience’s voyeuristic pleasure (Bellafront orders “all these bables” whisked away before the day’s ‹rst customers appear at 2.1.54). Dekker here plays on the vanitas emblem—a beautiful woman at her mirror confronted by the mocking face of the skull— but although Roger offers the conventional remark, “theres knavery in dawbing I hold my life” (2.1.11), the skull itself is strangely absent from the obvious tableau. This is all the stranger in that Roger underscores the scene’s emblematic signi‹cance a few lines later—“I looke like an old Prouerbe, Hold the Candle before the diuell” (2.1.35)— while Bellafront’s original seducer, Matheo, pointedly refers to her lodgings as “a house of vanity” (2.1.178).

The explanation for the skull’s mysterious absence requires an anamorphic shift on our part: the skull is not to be found within the looking glass but upon the mirror of the stage. When Hippolito reenters after walking out of the party, a crowded stage suddenly hollows out to the two principals.36 The play’s turning point is signaled by Bellafront’s shift from prose to verse in response to Hippolito’s question at 2.1.240—“Is the gentleman (my friend) departed mistresse?”—a verse she refuses to abandon for the rest of the play even though she has spent the last two hundred lines speaking prose. Here it is Hippolito, not Yorick, who proves to be the death of the party and provides the incomplete emblem’s missing link as he lashes Bellafront in a 104-line philippic against whores.37 In his un›agging verbal energy, Hippolito ventriloquizes the message of the skull, much as the gravedigger acts as Yorick’s mouthpiece. Indeed, Hippolito all but accuses Bellafront of copulating with skulls: “Be he a Moore, a Tartar, tho his face / Looke vglier then a dead mans scull, / Could the diuel put on a humane shape, / If his purse shake out crownes, vp then he gets” (2.1.339–42). But whereas Hamlet rejects the skull’s message, displacing it onto Ophelia, Bellafront internalizes it: “Would all whores were as honest now, as I” (2.1.456). The memento mori, it seems, still carries a charge.38 Where, then, is the ventriloquist behind the dummy? An actual 102

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skull does indeed appear at the beginning of act 4, whose stage directions offer an unmistakable visual echo of act 2: “Enter a seruant setting out a Table, on which he places a scull, a picture, a booke and a Taper.” Here we have a counterpoint to Bellafront’s candle and cosmetics, but while her accouterments ›esh out the body by disguising its decay, Hippolito’s props strip it down to the essentials. Not content with playing the skull, Hippolito has decided to put himself into the memento mori frame of mind by staging a miniperformance of Hamlet for himself. The servant’s commentary already indicates that the scene is a spoof of Hamlet (and, possibly, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus) by joking about what can only be termed the prop’s emblematic overkill: My master meanes sure to turne me into a student; for here’s my booke, here my deske, here my light; this my close chamber, and heere my Punck: so that this dull drowzy ‹rst day of the weeke, makes me halfe a Priest, halfe a Chandler, halfe a paynter, halfe a Sexton, I and halfe a Bawd: for (all this day) my of‹ce is to do nothing but keep the dore. To proue it, looke you, this good-face and yonder gentleman [Hippolito] (so soone as euer my back’s turnd) wilbe naught together.

(4.1.1–11) The servant underscores the parallel to the earlier “house of vanity” tableau. His function is to be the skull’s bawd and keep the door—for the skull and Hippolito will “be naught” together (a wicked pun)—and he thus de›ates Hippolito’s Hamletian pretensions before the latter even enters. The servant’s is a proto-Brechtian alienation effect that estranges us from the memento mori frame even as he assembles it on stage before our very eyes. Here we see the labored machinery behind the symbolism apparently so effortlessly achieved in Shakespeare’s earlier play, and when Hippolito does enter, he is more Orsino than Hamlet: Seru. What will your Lordship haue to breakfast?

Hip. Sighs.

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The Stage Life of Props Seru. What to dinner?

Hip. Teares. (4.1.21–24) It is remarkable that the parodic element so clearly marked in such an exchange has been overlooked. Theodore Spencer, for instance, writes: “A short time after the production of Hamlet, the ‹rst part of The Honest Whore appeared (1604), and we there have the skull used much in Shakespeare’s way. . . . The creation of an atmosphere of death is not really necessary; it is brought in because it has been proved to be theatrically successful.”39 Dekker’s tableau, though, effects a dramatic kenosis of Hamlet, de‹ned by Harold Bloom as an ebbing “so performed in relation to a precursor’s poem-of-ebbing that the precursor is emptied out also, and so the later poem of de›ation is not so absolute as it seems.”40 The Honest Whore de›ates both itself and its popular precursor, but the real kenosis occurs between the skulls and their respective properties, Hamlet and Hippolito, each of whom mistakenly believes he holds the skull in the palm of his hand. Hippolito and Hamlet are hollowed out to the extent that they refuse to confer humanity on a dead thing.

Hippolito does indeed “on a dead mans scull drawe out mine owne,” since he is willing to take the place of the skull in Bellafront’s vanitas conversion. The skull that ‹nds its way onto his desk freshly unearthed from Hamlet is, by contrast, set up as a joke, a vacuous symbol no one (especially not the audience) is invited to take seriously. Yet in Hippolito’s remarkable meditation on the relationship of props to mimesis, the skull ‹lls out again—not as symbol this time, but as object.

Hippolito addresses in turn a picture of his beloved Infelice and the skull: two representations, one of which is “alive” but a fabrication, the other of which is “dead” but authentic. Hippolito reads the portrait conventionally and emblematically, praising its lifelike qualities and linking it to the cosmetics we have seen earlier: “here ’tis read, / False coulours last after the true be dead” (4.1.41). But the factitiousness of the painting is ultimately at odds with the verisimilitude of the portrait:

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Of all the Roses grafted in her cheekes, Of all the graces dauncing in her eyes, Of all the Musick set vpon her tongue, Of all that was past womans excellence, In her white bosome, looke! a painted board, Circumscribes all: Earth can no blisse affoord.

(4.1.42–47) In the anaphoric triteness of his lines, Hippolito performs the work of the skull in Holbein’s Ambassadors, reading the painting anamorphically against itself. Instead of bringing Infelice to life it freezes her in death, its slice of life revealed as “a painted board.” Hippolito extracts the appropriate moral (“Earth can no blisse affoord”), but instead of following the memento mori logic to its conclusion—realizing that we live sub specie aeternitatis and must embrace the consolation of God’s eternity—Hippolito, like Hamlet, gets mired in details. Hippolito rejects the painting’s implied divine consolations: Nothing of her, but this? this cannot speake, It has no lap for me to rest vpon, No lip worth tasting: here the wormes will feed, As in her cof‹n: hence then idle Art, True loue’s best picturde in a true-loue’s heart.

Here art thou drawne sweet maid, till this be dead, So that thou liu’st twice, twice art buried.

Thou ‹gure of my friend, lye there.

(4.1.48–55) Here Hippolito internalizes Infelice’s living image, rejecting the picture as too morbid. The heart, not the board, will be Infelice’s reliquary; but there is a ghoulish echo in the line “Here art thou drawne sweet maid” of Hippolito’s urge “on a dead mans scull” to “drawe out mine own.” Biology dictates that Hippolito’s heart is a less lasting memorial than the picture, for the former only lasts “till this [i.e., Hippolito’s body] be dead” and Infelice buried a second time. Like a

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The Stage Life of Props vampire, Infelice keeps being brought back from the dead; art may be “idle,” but at least you can count on it to stay put.

Hippolito turns to the skull midline, as if temporarily nonplussed.

“Whats here? / Perhaps this shrewd pate was mine enimies: / Las! say it were: I need not feare him now” (4.1.55–57). Once again, Hippolito, like Hamlet, fails to make the connection to his own situation, preferring to see in the skull’s outlines (at least initially) the visage of the Other. In fact, Hippolito prefers the skull to the picture because it allows him to indulge his theatrical bent and launch into another set piece: What fooles are men to build a garish tombe, Onely to saue the carcasse whilst it rots, To maintein’t long in stincking, make good carion, But leaue no good deeds to preserve them sound, For good deedes keepe men sweet, long aboue ground.

And must all come to this; fooles, wise, all hether; Must all heads thus at last be laid together.

(4.1.71–77) Hippolito’s vapid moralizing falls as ›at as Hamlet’s desiccated puns.

Hippolito does at least concede the skull’s re›ective powers: Draw me my picture then, thou graue neate workeman, After this fashion, not like this; these coulours In time kissing but ayre, will be kist off, But heres a fellow; that which he layes on, Till doomes day, alters not complexion.

Death’s the best Painter then.

(4.1.78–83) Hippolito the patron completes his critique of the picture’s twodimensional naturalism by counterpoising it to the three-dimensional object on his desk. The skull is unaccommodated man; the picture, kitsch. In Spinrad’s words, Hippolito “has not accepted death; he has put himself in control of it” (p. 5).

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Why does Dekker introduce the skull into the scene in the ‹rst place? Is it simply a homage to his precursor? The skull troubles the very theatrical mimesis that frames the scene. Hippolito, Bellafront, and Infelice are characters played by actors, but whom is the skull impersonating? Is it not, rather, the thing itself? The more Hippolito tries to squeeze the skull into his mental framework as a prop, the more obdurately antisymbolic the skull becomes. It outstrips Hippolito by its very materiality, much as the gravedigger nulli‹es Hamlet’s verbiage. The skull ›attens out Hippolito’s language, showing him up as a performative caricature of an earlier man with a skull who was himself a performative caricature of other men with skulls, and so forth ad absurdum. We cease to take Hippolito seriously, in other words, at the very moment the memento mori emblem and Bellafront, who arrives unexpectedly dressed as a page, seem to authorize him.

Dekker cements this irony by restaging Hippolito’s repudiation of Bellafront, this time with props: Hippolito resurrects the painting in self-defense (“should I breake my bond, / This bord would riue in twaine, these wooden lippes / Call me most periurde villaine” [4.1.162–63]) and invites Bellafront to take his place in the memento mori tableau (“Stay and take Phisicke for it, read this booke, / Aske counsell of this head whats to be done” [4.1.172–73]). Hippolito has faith these props will support his thoroughly undermined symbolism. Bellafront, under his erotic sway, concedes; but Hippolito himself is under the erotic sway of picture and skull. Like Yorick, they refuse to stay dead and buried, bursting the inert frames that initially contained them.

Remember You Must Kill: The Revenger’s Tragedy The Revenger’s Tragedy takes its genre’s exhausted conventions and plays them as farce. In its unnamed city we no longer encounter characters, but roles. It is virtually impossible to particularize the cast in performance, as each character is de‹ned solely by relationship (“the Duchess’ younger son”), function (“the Duke”), or 107

The Stage Life of Props emblematic essence (“Vindice,” “Lussurioso,” and the rest). Names are consistently withheld from the audience, and even the characters cannot keep the royal brothers straight. The bumbling of‹cers misunderstand Ambitioso’s and Supervacuo’s order to kill “our brother the duke’s son” (3.3.3) and kill the wrong brother, while in one of the play’s many ironies of confusion and substitution, a disguised Vindice is hired to kill himself.41 We are in a heavily ironized world of commodi‹cation gone berserk, an economy of lust that relentlessly deadens people into exploited objects. As Glenda Conway notes, “Among the eleven members of the two key families in the play, nearly every repugnant act imaginable occurs—including murder, fratricide, torture, incest, rape, and pandering.”42 From the start these characters are virtual walking corpses—“Oh that marrowless age / Would stuff the hollow bones with damned desires,” exclaims Vindice (1.1.6)—and as fast as they use and discard each other as objects, they are themselves recycled into props. This is melodrama teetering on the edge of farce, a play in which being alive or dead at any given point seems arbitrary. Today’s doomed duke is merely a placeholder for tomorrow’s doomed duke.

The play opens with Vindice carrying the skull of his dead mistress Gloriana on stage in order to explain (to it?) that Gloriana was poisoned by the old duke “Because thy purer part would not consent / Unto his palsey-lust” (1.1.32–33). Vindice’s brother sees nothing odd in his behavior (“Still sighing o’er Death’s vizard?” [1.1.49]), and neither, apparently, should the audience; after all, the scene is a visual echo of Holbein’s woodcut series The Dance of Death, in which Death, unseen, watches a procession of nobles—as well as recalling the graveyard scene in Hamlet.43 If Vindice begins the play by turning the procession of corrupt nobles into a queasy morality tableau and Gloriana into a portable memento mori, he himself onomastically and visually completes the pictorial emblem as “Vengeance.”

Vindice treats the skull as a stand-in for Gloriana, but he seems unaware of his own symbolic implication in the scene. He is a revenger who believes himself pure, and at him, too, the skull is grinning.

As in Hamlet, the reality of the skull ›attens the very rhetoric Vin108

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dice uses to describe it. When Vindice tries to ‹ll out “Thou sallow picture of my poisoned love” (1.1.14), we get no sense of Gloriana as a living, breathing person. It is as if Vindice has lost all memory of the skin around the skull and can offer only metalepsis, the glossing of one rhetorical ‹gure through another: When two heaven-pointed diamonds were set In those unsightly rings—then ’twas a face So far beyond the arti‹cial shine Of any woman’s bought complexion That the uprightest man—if such there be, That sin but seven times a day—broke custom And made up eight with looking after her.

(1.1.19–25) Inset in the skull’s hollow “rings” are diamonds instead of eyes, polished gems that deconstruct the very naturalness Vindice is groping for (“So far beyond the arti‹cial shine . . .”). The diamonds’ implied value as commodity reinforces rather than counters the “bought complexion” Vindice wishes to repudiate. Far from establishing Gloriana’s chastity, Vindice’s language instead produces an illicit sexuality—her ability to excite an eighth erection in “the uprightest man.”

Vindice’s imagery turns Gloriana into a work of arti‹ce; in Laurie Finke’s words, she has been “killed into art.”44 Moreover, Vindice cannot keep the language of property and exchange at bay. Even in life, Gloriana was coveted solely as an object of desire: Oh she was able to ha’ made a usurer’s son Melt all his patrimony in a kiss, And what his father ‹fty years told To have consumed, and yet his suit been cold: . . .

Vengeance, thou Murder’s quit-rent, and whereby Thou show’st thyself Tenant to Tragedy, Oh keep thy day, hour, minute, I beseech, For those thou hast determined.

(1.1.26–42) 109

The Stage Life of Props Now reduced to a prop, Gloriana was in life it seems an avid consumer of wealth and property. Her kiss “melted” patrimony, a curious image that at once suggests commodity exchange (patrimony for kisses) and cashing in one’s assets, melting down ingots for gold. In this image ‹fty years of usury vanish in a twinkling; the “cold suit” is ambiguous, suggesting both father and son as potential suitors. Was Gloriana her own woman, able to pick and choose her suitors, or simply an object passed down a chain of men? Vindice does not say, and we must draw our own conclusions based on her posthumous activities.

Vindice himself, like Hamlet and Hippolito before him, seems to miss the memento mori message behind the skull. “By dehumanizing the skulls of the dead and stripping the ›esh off the living, Vindice becomes a puppeteer of death, untouched by any thought of his own mortality.”45 Instead of enjoining him to turn his eyes heavenward, it is as if Gloriana tells Vindice to get cracking and live up to his own name. Vengeance is “Murder’s quit-rent,” glossed by Gibbons as “rent paid by a freehold tenant in lieu of service to a landlord.”46 Here vengeance is not even a service to the deceased, but rendered as a sort of bastard feudalism—simply a cash payment to fob off potential eviction, in this case the death even Vindice cannot escape. But what master does vengeance serve? It is “Tragedy’s tenant,” making the metatheatrical point that we are all provisional tenants on this earth. For a ›eeting moment, Vindice recognizes his own appointment in Samarra, but he cannot escape the revenge economy that seeks to exploit both his mobility and expendability, his ability to turn people into things.

Gloriana returns to the stage as a painted lady in act 3, scene 5, when Vindice, relishing his role as pander to the duke, unmasks the hideously pranked-up skull to his brother Hippolito: Here’s an eye Able to tempt a great man—to serve God; A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble.

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To suffer wet damnation to run through ’em.

Here’s a cheek keeps her colour, let the wind go whistle: Spout rain, we fear thee not, be hot or cold All’s one with us.

(3.5.54–62) Not only has Vindice dressed the skull up in borrowed robes in order to snare the duke, he has entirely forgotten that the skull was once his beloved, preferring to see her by turns as a reluctant wench coaxed into serving the duke’s lust (“I have took care / For a delicious lip, a sparkling eye” [3.5.31–32]) and as a grotesque memento occidere, whose “Remember (Dismember?) You Must Kill” dictum inverts the standard memento mori. When Hippolito reminds Vindice that the skull once belonged to his mistress, Vindice indicates that he has long since forgotten her, except as a spur to revenge: “And now methinks I could even chide myself / For doting on her beauty” (3.5.69–70). Like Hamlet, Vindice turns to preaching against cosmetics, conveniently forgetting that it is he who has travestied Gloriana’s memory by daubing her lips with poison, the equivalent of the poison the duke used to dispatch her nine years before. Vindice objecti‹es Gloriana into a memento mori that symbolizes both the dance of death (“It were ‹ne methinks / To have thee seen at revels, forgetful feasts / And unclean brothels” [3.5.89–91]) and the comfortably misogynistic vanitas emblem (“Here might a scornful and ambitious woman / Look through and through herself” [3.5.95–96]).

In Vindice’s mind, Gloriana now exists only to prop up “my tragic business” (3.5.98). The sex object has become a death fetish; the cranium is the message.

Yet Vindice himself admits that Gloriana is no mere prop. “I have not fashioned this only for show / And useless property, no—it shall bear a part / E’en in its own revenge” (3.5.99–101). In these crucial lines lies the ‹endish anamorphosis of the stage image, its insistence on the secret life of props. For if Vindice (to add insult to injury) refuses to stabilize the skull’s symbolic function, content to use it as bait for the duke and as warning against feminine wiles, by adopting a shift in perspective we may see that it is Gloriana who has engi111

The Stage Life of Props neered Vindice for her own devices. In effect, she out-emblematizes the emblematizer, enduring Vindice’s hollow mouthings simply as a means of taking center stage. Vindice may think he has transformed the skull into a “dreadful vizard” (5.3.149), a mask of its former self, but Gloriana herself arrogates the shape of bashful “country lady” for a lethally effective performance (3.5.132), using Vindice as her costumer, valet, and means of transportation to keep her fateful tryst with the duke, literally melting him with a kiss.

As self-styled arti‹cer and impresario of death, then, Vindice is literally staging corpses. He turns the duke, too, into a prop and stages a murderous danse macabre for the new duke’s investiture. But if Vindice turns the body into dismembered, metonymical ›esh, he himself is casually dispatched by Antonio. Vindice must ‹nally recognize that he, too, is a throwaway, Murder’s quitrent. In order for the tableau to be complete, the punisher must be punished. The Revenger’s Tragedy thus offers us two simultaneous perspectives on the play’s action. In the ‹rst, Vindice continues the Hamletian tradition of sucking the marrow from the memento mori emblem and throwing away the bones, displacing memento mori onto vanitas. But from the second perspective it is Gloriana who pulls the strings all along, manipulating Vindice for her own ends and discarding him when he no longer serves her turn. Conway, Spinrad, and Garber correctly take note of Vindice’s misreading of the skull, whereby what should be the reminder of death becomes the agent of death; they miss, however, the double irony whereby Gloriana transforms her lover, who has desecrated her wish to remain pure and intact by disinterring and mutilating her corpse, into the instrument of her own infernal revenge on the men who treat her like dirt.47 Unlike Browning’s or Webster’s duchess, Gloriana refuses to take her culture’s relentless emblematic de›ections lying down. With Vindice’s death, the skull’s triumph is complete. The skeleton crew of Jacobean skulls that follows in Gloriana’s wake adds little to what one might mischievously call The Revenger’s Tragedy’s prosopropeia.48 Renaissance playwrights were well aware of the potency of anamorphosis and its ability to make us perform a theatrical double

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take. Thus Bushy in Richard II invokes “perspectives, which rightly gaz’d upon / Show nothing but confusion; [but] ey’d awry / Distinguish form” (2.2.18–20). Rather than af‹rm the orthodox message of the memento mori, whose semiotic grip on the skull was already slipping by 1600, Jacobean stage skulls dislocate the skull’s rhetorical function and mock its former solace. From the anamorphic angle of performance, skulls insist on their own materiality, their uncanny oscillation between subject and object, person and prop.

In its refusal to become a (mere) prop, the Jacobean skull may gesture toward a larger cultural preoccupation with the uneasy reciprocity between man and thing. In this period the word property begins to hover between object and attribute; it is both something you own and something you are (or might become).49 One meaning of property, cited as early as 1598 by the OED, is “A mere means to an end; an instrument, a tool, a cat’s paw.” Thus Fenton in The Merry Wives of Windsor tells Anne Page (paraphrasing his father’s suspicion) that “’tis a thing impossible / I should love thee but as a property” (3.4.9–10), while in Julius Caesar Antony derides Lepidus’s importance to Octavius: “Do not talk of him / But as a property” (4.1.39–40). To be “propertied,” meanwhile, is to be turned into a mere thing: “They have here propertied me,” complains an imprisoned Malvolio to his tormentor Feste in Twelfth Night (4.2.91).

Jacobean drama continually re›ects people’s sense of being reduced to their use- and exchange-value, especially women. When Quarlous in Bartholemew Fair asks Grace Wellborn how she came to be Justice Overdo’s ward, she replies simply that “he bought me” of the king (3.5.289); during the trial of Vittoria Corombona in The White Devil, Cardinal Monticelso casually reveals that his nephew bought Vittoria from her father.50 The line between marriage and prostitution is thin, and in plays such as A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Bartholemew Fair, and The Revenger’s Tragedy no relationships seem to exist outside the bounds of economic self-interest. Women become properties to be conveyed between parties, forcibly if necessary. If the legal term alienation strictly referred only to the transfer of one’s “right, title, and interest” in real (i.e., royal) property, it is hard to see Grace or

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The Stage Life of Props Vittoria as any less “real”—or any less alienated—than the wealth they represent to the men who purchase use-interest in them through the habere et tenere of the marriage contract.

Closer to home, for actors in Jacobean playing companies, the skull might have suggested not only the very live possibility of being upstaged by a dead prop. In one sense, actors who were hirelings or apprentices rather than shareholders may have felt that they were the property of the company, along with its costumes and scripts (although not, obviously, in a legal sense). Scene-stealing skulls may re›ect a perceived lack of agency on the actor’s part, an acknowledgment that the prop makes and unmakes the man. We recall that a common term for a supernumerary in the seventeenth century was a property-boy, and to this day the stalwart spear-carrier becomes the prop’s prop. Indeed, the skull’s “live performance” may have been one way for the playwright to threaten the autonomy of actors.51 If according to Hamlet the responsible clown speaks no more than is set down for him, Shakespeare suggests that, unlike the improvisational comedian Richard Tarlton whom Yorick once resembled, the ideal jester is mute—literally empty-headed.

Whether or not we link the stage skull to wider discourses of subject-formation and dissolution in the period, the skulls exhumed in this discussion refuse to settle for the role of either living attribute or dead object. They are a kind of no-man’s land, a crucible for exploring the porous boundary between property and person. The very characters who would commodify them as objects (the duke, Vindice) or absorb them as attributes (Hamlet, Hippolito) ‹nd themselves eerily drained of their own vitality, even as the skulls in Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy take on “life” as Yorick and Gloriana—who administers her own posthumous revenge on the duke who wronged her, slyly using Vindice as both costumer and stagehand before making her ‹nal exit. Interestingly, none of these props seems to make it to the ‹nal tableau: it is as if they are consumed, willy-nilly, in the heat of performance. But their traces linger on in our uneasy imaginations as we ‹le out of the theater, unsure of just what it is we have glimpsed beneath the surface.

“What could there possibly be ‘behind’ Gloriana’s skull?” asks 114

Dropping the Subject

Peter Stallybrass.52 The paradox the skull embodies in Hamlet, The Honest Whore, and The Revenger’s Tragedy is precisely the paradox of “property,” its oscillation between live attribute and dead thing. The fascination of the skull for the Renaissance playwright lies less in its emblematic than in its anamorphic properties, its willingness to steal the show from under the noses of the brotoi, the “dying ones,” and to put the spectator literally on edge. If we wish to understand the appeal of skulls on the Renaissance stage, we must see them not merely as symbols, but as characters in their own right who may be less self-effacing than they seem.

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The Fan of Mode Sexual Semaphore on the Restoration and EarlyEighteenth-Century Stage The only thing you can’t do with a fan [on stage] is fan yourself.

—Dame Edith Evans

L

ike the eucharistic wafer, the bloody handkerchief, and the memento mori skull, the ladies’ folding fan helped reshape the cultural signi‹cation of the English stage, but with an important difference. The fan was devoid of the sacred associations that haunted the wafer, handkerchief, and skull and inspired their theatrical appropriation by medieval and early modern drama.

Despite the fact that liturgical fans had been used in the eastern Mediterranean Mass between the sixth and ‹fteenth centuries—the ›abellum, a circular fan with pleated leaves, whisked away insects from the precious Host during consecration—English drama provides no record that playwrights exploited the potential link between fans and church ritual.1 Evidently in use on the commercial pre-Commonwealth stage, the fan remained a resolutely secular prop once the theaters reopened, after an eighteen-year hiatus, following the restoration of Charles II in 1660. Nevertheless, like the earlier props I have considered, the fan was pressed into service to address a wider semiotic crisis: in this case, the degree to which the Restoration actress—a novelty on the professional English stage—could affect the theatrical representation of women’s sexuality. The fan’s grip on the imagination of Restora117

The Stage Life of Props tion and early-eighteenth-century playwrights must therefore be explained in terms of contemporary sexual politics rather than ghostly echoes of Catholic symbolism.2 How did that imagination ‹gure the fan? In his mock-heroic poem “The Fan” (1713) John Gay devises a creation myth for the “instrument of Love” that bewitched fashionable society.3 When the swain Strephon appeals to Venus for “some bright toy” to charm his beloved Corinna, Venus exhorts her smithy-Cupids to forge a delicate ›irtation device to her exact speci‹cations. The machine will unfurl after the peacock’s example, and its taper sticks will be fashioned from Cupid-darts. Tongue ‹rmly in cheek, the poet bemoans the new erotic power such a toy grants the female sex, even as he celebrates its piquancy: The peeping fan in modern times shall rise, Through which unseen the female ogle ›ies; This shall in temples the sly maid conceal, And shelter love beneath devotion’s veil. . . .

As learned Orators that touch the heart, With various action raise their soothing art, Both head and hand affect the list’ning throng, And humour each expression of the tongue.

So shall each passion by the fan be seen, From noisie anger to the sullen spleen.

The fan’s sexual semaphore, complains Gay, will hand women an unfair advantage: “How are the Sex improv’d in am’rous arts, / What new-found snares they bait for human hearts!”

As if acknowledging the dangers inherent in giving women a wordless yet eloquent language, Venus decrees that the fan must speak for itself as well. Her insistence that the fan’s folding paper bear a painted emblem spurs a fractious debate in Olympus over what fable the fan should illustrate. Seeking to even the sexual odds, Venus herself suggests the fan be graced with “unresisting nymphs, and am’rous swains . . . To melt slow virgins with the warm design.” Chaste Diana coun-

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ters that images of forsaken women and per‹dious men better suit the fan: “May some chast story from the pencil ›ow, / To speak the virgin’s joy, and Hymen’s woe.” Envisioning a gallery of erotica for male delectation, the cynical Momus proposes that the fan feature choice scenes of gods seducing mortals: “Let these amours adorn the new machine, / And [concupiscent] female nature on the piece be seen.”

Last, Minerva suggests that the fan depict a series of object lessons in “the follies of the female kind”: the pride of Niobe, the jealousy of Procris, and the vanity of Narcissus. The gods applaud Minerva’s conceit, and the painted fan imparts its chastening message to Corinna, who has strayed into a dalliance with Leander. When confronted with the fan’s admonitory images, Corinna duly repents and, in the poem’s ‹nal couplet, marries Strephon.

Gay’s comic fantasy is a textbook example of female subversion contained. Thanks to the fan’s painted images, what begins as an instrument of female erotic expression becomes a tool to put unruly women in their place. Notwithstanding its cheerfully sexist conclusion, Gay’s poem pinpoints the tension between two possible uses of the fan: as static emblem, whose didactic message is eternally ‹xed by the male poet/playwright, and as sexual semaphore, whose ›uid semiosis is controlled by the female performer/actress. That tension between frozen utterance and mobile signi‹cation, as it is embodied in the performance of fans in the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century playhouse, is the subject of this chapter.

On the Restoration stage, the sexual politics of the fan converged with perhaps the most revolutionary innovation in the history of English theater: the arrival of the ‹rst actresses on the licensed public stage.4 Between the opening of the commercial public playhouses in the 1570s and the closing of the theaters in 1642, boys or men played all female roles. In 1662, possibly at the suggestion of the patentees themselves, the royal patents to the two licensed theater companies con‹rmed that henceforward all female roles on the licensed London stage should be played by women.5 Until 1660, then, the natural way to play a woman was to have a boy impersonate her. But the Restoration stage’s “natural woman” literally looked

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The Stage Life of Props quite different, and in the process of assimilating the actress to English drama, Restoration playwrights were compelled to reassess an entire tradition of staged femininity.

While certainly a presence on the pre-Commonwealth stage, the fan became an archetypal female prop on the Restoration stage.6 Because of its metonymic association with femininity—an association that was of course entirely constructed—the fan soon ‹gured in the struggle over who would control how the actress signi‹ed on stage. More precisely, the sexual politics surrounding the Restoration actress explain the striking recurrence of a dramatic topos I call the fan lesson: a scene in which a young woman is instructed in the correct art of the fan. What object lesson might these fans have imparted to audiences, and who ultimately determined their message—actress, playwright, or spectator? Were these property-fans the aids to male seduction devised by Gay’s Venus; the bulwarks to keep predatory men at bay sought by Diana; the titillating stimuli envisioned by Momus; or the lessons in the containment of female subversion limned by Minerva?

Through a close examination of the key fan lessons extant in Restoration and early-eighteenth-century drama, I consider why the arti‹ce of the fan had to be repeatedly staged for an audience all too familiar with its erotic charm in the world beyond the playhouse. I shall argue that, like the actress herself, the eloquent fan embodied an unstable signifying excess—an excess that could never be entirely contained by the playwrights who, perhaps in response to the actresses’ penchant for improvisation, sought to script its sexual semaphore ever more narrowly.7 More broadly, as in other chapters, I claim that the prop can be an important key to reconstructing actual performance practice. While performance critics, actors, and movement specialists have speculated on how the Restoration fan might have been wielded in performance, such reconstructions tend to be highly generalized, ahistorical, and/or divorced from the ›esh-andblood actress.8 In contrast, I spotlight very precise moments of dramatic text that demand to be read as evidence of a vanished performance history. I am aware that the problem of what counts as evidence for the stage life of props is especially acute in the case of 120

The Fan of Mode

the fan. What I attempt is the contextual reanimation of a theatrically conspicuous but textually elusive prop that focuses as much on producible staging as on textual signi‹cation.9 Indeed, I shall claim that, in the case of the fan, actress’s gesture and playwright’s dialogue may even be at odds. But before I take up this argument, the popular notion that the fan spoke its own explicit language in late-seventeenth-century England needs to be addressed.

Arresting Gestures: Addison and the Mythical “Language of the Fan” Fashionable Restoration society, which is largely what the plays of the period re›ect, was characterized by rigid adherence to class- and gender-appropriate bodily codes of behavior. As Peter Holland notes, “The hundreds of seventeenth-century books describing the correct manner of comporting oneself in society, many translated from the French, point to a codi‹cation of social behaviour into consciously de‹ned patterns of conduct.”10 Nowhere is this more evident than in the various attempts to prescribe and codify a so-called language of the fan—a language that, as we shall see, was more mythical than real.

As the era’s most fashionable female accessory, the fan achieved a high level of cultural visibility. Poets apostrophized the fan in verse; journalists satirized its erotic dangers; manuals were eventually written purporting to reveal its secret lexicon. Once the pleated, or folding, fan was introduced into Europe from the East around 1500, following the opening of the sea route by Vasco de Gama in 1498, the fan became a ubiquitous female accouterment, a prosthetic extension of the woman’s arm and hand.11 Able to alter physical form, to expand and contract with a single motion, the folding fan paradoxically served as both shield and resonance chamber. The fan hid blushes and covert glances, but it also drew attention to them, even as it magni‹ed the slightest movement of the arm and wrist and thereby betrayed inner perturbation or arousal. In a revealing study of fan iconography in the work of Hogarth, Angela Rosenthal empha121

The Stage Life of Props sizes the fan’s ability to stage-manage encounters between the sexes by manipulating the male gaze: Although this highly contrived tool could be used to protect against light and heat—often necessary in overcrowded assemblies and for women who were bound up in tightly ‹tting bodices—these pragmatic services were subordinate to the primary function of the fan as a means of focusing the gaze and enhancing communication. Controlled by the hands and ‹ngers of women, the fan was mobile and subject to permanent transformation. It thus registered and betrayed in its dynamic deployment—and even via the sounds produced by its sudden unfolding, nervous ›uttering, or abrupt closure—the thoughts and emotions of its owner.12 As a ›irtation device, the fan placed a degree of sexual power (or, at least, sexual signi‹cation) directly in the hands of women.

The theatrical potential of the fan proved irresistible, and it became a staple of the Restoration stage. As in wider fashionable society, fans came in at least two varieties: the so-called matron’s fan, a bunch of ostrich feathers set in a heavy handle, and painted, semicircular folding fans.13 The latter was such a ubiquitous female accessory that it must have graced virtually every play. Just as playwrights took it for granted that an actress would stamp her own personality on a custom-written role, so they would expect her personal fan, from which she was inseparable, to underscore and amplify the “beats” of a given scene. Animated by the expert manipulation of living, breathing actresses, the fan must have electri‹ed the playhouse in a way that registers only dimly on the page.

Indeed, the surviving textual evidence shows the drama continually—almost obsessively—‹guring the fan as an eroticized, feminized weapon in the battle between the sexes. For instance, the widow in Richard Steele’s The Funeral; or, Grief A-la-Mode (Drury Lane, 1701) makes explicit the link between fans and gender politics: “Ay Tattleaid, [men] imagine themselves mighty things, but Govern-

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The Fan of Mode

ment founded on Force only, is a Brutal Power—We rule them by their Affections, which blinds them into a belief that they rule us, or at least are in the Government with us—But in this Nation our Power is Absolute; Thus, thus, we sway—(Playing her Fan). A Fan is both the Standard, and the Flag of England: I Laugh to see the Men, go our Errands, Strut in Great Of‹ces, Live in Cares, Hazards and Scandals to come home and be Fools to Us in Brags of their Dispatches, Negotiations, and their Wisdoms.”14 As an erotic weapon, however, the fan can back‹re. While occasionally used as a literal weapon for comic purposes, as when Lady Maggot “pummels Whachum with her Fan and Fist; then she strikes [her husband] Sir Humphrey with her fan and thrusts him out by the nape of the neck” in Thomas Shadwell’s 1690 play, The Scowrers (4.208 s.d.), more often the fan directs women’s anger inward. Thus Mrs. Loveit tears her fan in George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1667), while Lady Addle “strikes her fan on her hand passionately” to signal anger at the “frigid fop” Nincompoop in Thomas Durfey’s Love for Money (1691). Almost without exception, the lady’s fan is eroticized and feminized in order to render the woman who wields it an object of male sexual attention. Fans become a male target; rakes were known as “fan-tearers,” perhaps to express their ability to make women tear their own fans, or perhaps in order to suggest the association of fans with the female genitals. In the playhouse, the visual opposition between fan and sword (or pistol) helped the audience ‹x the sexes into separate spheres, especially once fans became the accouterments solely of women and effeminate fops.15 According to fan historian G. Woolliscroft Rhead, by the eighteenth century the folding fan had developed a codi‹ed language of its own. Rhead’s many examples of the “language of love” include placing the shut fan near the heart (“You have won my love”); pressing the half-opened fan to the lips (“You may kiss me”); and covering the left ear with the open fan (“Do not betray our secret”). Rhead then observes, “A shorter code has been published in England (duly copyrighted) by M. J. Duvelleroy. This, although the principle is the same, differs materially in the details; thus, ‘I love you’ in Spanish is

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The Stage Life of Props to hide the eyes behind the opened fan; in English, to draw the hand across the cheek. ‘I hate you,’ in the former instance, is to raise the shut fan to the shoulder in the right hand; in the latter, to draw the fan through the hand: either code being suf‹ciently expressive and acquired with tolerable ease.”16 Rhead fails to note that Duvelleroy was a manufacturer of fans, and his fan-code a commercial puff. Indeed, the whole notion that a codi‹ed language of the fan was in public circulation in eighteenthcentury England is almost certainly a fanciful myth.17 No less an authority than Charles Gildon, author (or rather editor-compilerplagiarist) of England’s ‹rst acting manual, found it dif‹cult to formalize strict rules for correct manual gestures in 1710: “We come now to the hands, which as they are the chief instruments of action, varying themselves as many ways as they are capable of expressing things, so is it a dif‹cult matter to give such rules as are without exception.”18 It is true that, according to at least one conduct book, the fan’s gestural lexicon had congealed into a rigid code of ›irtation by the Victorian era.19 But if “the fan actually developed a secret code of signals in the nineteenth century,” as J. L. Styan conjectures, its signals must have been less codi‹ed in the Restoration—to the extent they were codi‹ed at all.20 The struggle to pin down the fan’s expressive potential found its de‹nitive expression in Joseph Addison’s satire on the Academy of the Fan in The Spectator (June 27, 1711). Addison parodies the cultural anxiety surrounding the fan’s semiotic mobility by means of a fantasy of male instruction in its arts: Women are armed with Fans as Men with Swords, and sometimes do more Execution with them: To the End therefore that Ladies may be entire Mistresses of the Weapon which they bear, I have erected an Academy for the training up of young Women in the Exercise of the Fan, according to the most fashionable Airs and Motions that are now practised at Court. The Ladies who carry Fans under me are drawn up twice a Day in my great Hall, where they are instructed in the Use of their Arms, and exercised by the following Words of Command, 124

The Fan of Mode

Handle your Fans, Unfurl your fans, Discharge your fans, Ground your fans, Recover your fans, Flutter your fans.

By the right Observation of these few plain Words of Command, a Woman of a tolerable Genius who will apply her self diligently to her Exercise for the Space of but one half Year, shall be able to give her Fan all the Graces that can possibly enter into that little modish Machine.21 Addison claims that his purpose is to make the ladies “entire Mistresses of the Weapon which they bear.” But his monstrous regiment of fan-bearing women betrays the unspoken fear that women improperly schooled in the art of delighting men may choose to strike out on their own.

Addison wishes to naturalize the fan; in other words, women should learn to tie the precise internal emotion to the correct external gesture without thinking, in a one-to-one relationship. To borrow a distinction from philosopher Gilbert Ryle, the purpose of the academy is not so much training as drill.22 After enumerating the various kinds of ›utter (angry, modest, timorous, confused, merry, amorous), Addison observes that “there is scarce any Emotion in the Mind which does not produce a suitable Agitation in the Fan; insomuch, that if I only see the Fan of a disciplin’d Lady, I know very well whether she laughs, frowns, or blushes” (emphasis added).23 Disarming in more ways than one, Addison’s academy disciplines women to broadcast rather than veil their most intimate emotions, intentions, and desires. Like Gay, Addison bestows with one hand what he takes away with the other. In both cases, the male author’s playful impulse to control the fan’s feminine language betrays how potentially powerful that language is.

Despite its parodic exaggeration, Addison’s sweeping “exercise of the fan” probably bears more resemblance to Restoration fan-practice 125

The Stage Life of Props than the rigidly codi‹ed “language of the fan” described by Rhead.

Two pieces of theatrical criticism from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries echo Addison, which implies that a more elaborate semaphore would not have communicated itself even to the more au courant spectators. In 1757, critic Arthur Murphy marveled at David Garrick’s cross-dressed Sir John Brute in a revival of Vanbrugh’s comedy The Provoked Wife (1697). “When personating Lady Brute, you would swear he had often attended the toilet and there gleaned up the many various airs of the fair sex: he is perfectly versed in the exercise of the fan, the hips, the adjustment of the tucker and even the minutest conduct of the ‹nger.”24 J. Roberts’s much reproduced 1775 engraving of Garrick in drag as Sir John Brute shows Garrick’s arms demurely crossed, his limp right hand gently clasping a closed fan between thumb and fore‹nger. Rather than following the line of the forearm, the fan forms an elegantly drooping extension of Garrick’s hand and wrist, adding an incongruous note of fey delicacy that is all the more absurd when juxtaposed to his oversized headgear. Evidence thus suggests that Garrick’s gender mimicry owed much to Addison but proved more wickedly accurate in performance.

More than half a century later, Mrs. Jordan’s biographer James Boaden praised Frances Abington’s command of the fan. “She, I think, took more entire possession of the stage than any actress I have seen. . . . The ladies of her day wore the hoop and its concomitant train. The Spectator’s exercise of the fan was really no play of fancy. Shall I say that I have never seen it in a hand so dexterous as that of Mrs Abington?”25 Although Boaden leaves us guessing as to the precise nature of Mrs. Abington’s dexterity, several visual depictions of her fan-performances survive. A portrait of Abington as Aurelia in The Twin Rivals (1777) shows her using a shut fan, delicately balanced between thumb and fore‹nger, to extend the sweep of her right arm, which like her left appears rather stubby owing to her voluminous hoop dress and tiny, corseted torso. As Lady Teazle in the famous screen scene in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal in the same year, Abington once more tilts her head coyly aside, but this time stands with her legs pressed together and rigidly clasps an open fan in both hands over her genital area as a patent substitute for the 126

The Fan of Mode

screen that has tumbled at her feet. The fan turns Abington into a clothed Venus Pudica, at once modestly veiling and drawing attention to Lady Teazle’s sexual parts. (An anonymous engraving from the Theatre Museum of the same scene shows Lady Teazle veiling her face with her fan at the moment of discovery.)26 Last, a well-known portrait showing Abington delivering an aside as Lady Betty Modish in Cibber’s The Careless Husband (1704) suggests how integral the fan was to her performance.

If “The Spectator’s exercise of the fan was really no play of fancy,” as Boaden asserts, it may well be because Addison’s crude repertory of moves lent itself to endless re‹nement and variation in the hands of such skilled actors as Garrick and Abington, rather than congealing into a lexicon that actors were expected to reproduce on cue. No full›edged language of the fan existed in the Restoration, but Addison’s fanciful drill demonstrates that the fan’s potential capacity to speak for itself became a potent source of cultural anxiety nonetheless.

Semiotic Surplus and the Restoration Actress Who then controlled the fan’s eloquence? Of the props analyzed in this study, the fan is perhaps the most actor-dependent for its stage interest. After all, there is nothing inherently captivating about either the visual appearance of a fan or the sight of someone fanning herself on stage (compare the skulls in Hamlet or the pistols in Hedda Gabler). Indeed, in the hands of an unskilled actress there is a strong risk that the fan’s metronomic beat will regularize the rhythms of the scene and become sopori‹c. The fan’s stage life depends upon the transcendence of its mundane practical function—hence Edith Evans’s witty exaggeration that one can do anything with a fan on stage except fan oneself with it.

The theatrical possibilities of such a talking prop are apparent, since the fan ampli‹es those telling gestures that might otherwise be invisible or easily missed. Because the fan was usually held away from the body, it helped make the actress larger than life: along with her hoop skirt and tragedy train, the large folding fan meant that 127

The Careless Husband, ca. 1770. As Lady Betty Modish, Frances Abington ›irts her fan. (Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.)

The Fan of Mode

women literally took up more stage space than their male counterparts. Yet the fan’s very ubiquity on the Restoration and early-eighteenth-century stage threatens to render the prop invisible to the modern reader. Between 1660 and 1737 the fan is mentioned in a relatively small number of stage directions, presumably because the playwright would have expected the actress to incorporate her own fan business into virtually every scene.

Although the fan has occasionally featured as a central plot device (Goldoni’s The Fan, Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan), for the most part the fan depends upon the skill of the individual actress to vivify it. While companies seem to have supplied various costume props for most performers, male and female, evidently actresses provided their own fans and put their own stamp on both their appearance and use.27 Colley Cibber notes of Anne Old‹eld that “[t]he qualities she had acquired were the genteel and the elegant. The one in her air, and the other in her dress, never had her equal on the stage; and the ornaments she herself provided . . . seemed in all respects the paraphernalia of a woman of quality.”28 It is thus impossible to separate the dramatic impact of the fan from that of the actresses who revolutionized theatrical practice.

The extent to which the arrival of professional actresses on the commercial London stage transformed Restoration dramaturgy is debatable, but Restoration audiences soon became fascinated, even obsessed, with the sexuality of the actresses both on and offstage.29 The sexual availability of the actresses became a standing joke in prologues and epilogues. Spectators were allowed to visit the actresses in the tiring house in various stages of undress; on January 23, 1667, Pepys recorded that he and his wife both kissed Nell Gwyn on one such backstage visit, “and a mighty pretty soul she is.”30 Dramatists responded to the actresses’ erotic charge by foregrounding sexual politics in play after play, especially in the comedies of sexual manners that characterized late-seventeenth-century drama. Legitimated by royal patent, and buoyed by a core audience centered on the king and his court, the increasingly licentious theaters threw themselves with vigor into the sexual politics of the age.31 In a theatrical culture marked by the constant need for new plays 129

The Stage Life of Props by both male and female playwrights, and in which roles were tailored to speci‹c company members, a pressing issue became whether the new performing women would be presented as subjects or objects. Would actresses like Moll Davis, Mary Betterton, and Nell Gwyn inspire male playwrights to create more complex and realistic female roles, even as they invested lines previously set down for boys with their own powerful stage presence? Or would the new actresses reinforce the commonplace equation of actress and whore as sexual toys displayed for consumption at a price?32 For theater historians David Thomas and Arnold Hare, the work of Restoration actresses re›ected women’s greater self-con‹dence in society at large: “[F]or the ‹rst time ever, English playwrights could write women’s roles for women, giving them the same weight and complexity in the overall fabric of the plays as the male characters.”33 Conversely, John Harold Wilson concludes that the “chief effect” of the actresses on dramatic literature “was to push it steadily in the direction of sex and sensuality.”34 The truth may lie somewhere in between, but in his autobiography Restoration actor-playwright Colley Cibber emphasizes the impact of the actresses’ sex appeal at the box of‹ce (and beyond): “The additional objects then of real, beautiful women could not but draw a proportion of new admirers to the theatre. We may imagine too that these actresses were not ill-chosen, when it is well known that more than one of them had charms suf‹cient at their leisure hours to calm and mollify the cares of empire.”35 Although many actresses were sexually unavailable, Cibber’s coy allusion to the king’s mistresses, Nell Gwyn and Moll Davis, indicates how easily in the masculine imagination the work of pleasing men theatrically slid into pleasing them sexually.

Trickier still to determine is to what extent an accomplished actress might have been able to twist the fan’s message away from the patriarchal script set down by the playwrights who were, for the most part, bent on exploiting the actresses as sexual commodities.

Descriptions of actresses’ actual performances are frustratingly general and colored by the male gaze. Cibber’s description of Anne Bracegirdle’s Millamant in Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700) suggests that the actress used her considerable sexual charm to blunt 130

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the character’s potentially disturbing agency: “[A]ll the faults, follies and affectations of that agreeable tyrant were venially melted down into so many charms and attractions of a conscious beauty.”36 Behn herself adopts the objectifying male gaze in her dedication to Nell Gwyn in The Feigned Courtesans (1679): “[F]or besides, madam, all the charms and attractions and powers of your sex, you have beauties peculiar to yourself, an eternal sweetness, youth and air, which never dwelt in any face but yours, of which not one unimitable grace could be ever borrowed or assumed, though with never so much industry, to adorn another. They cannot steal a look or smile from you to enhance their own beauties’ price, but all the world will know it yours, so natural and so ‹tted are all your charms and excellencies to one another, so entirely designed and created to make up in you alone the most perfect lovely thing in the world.”37 Yet feminist scholars lend cautious assent to the notion that actresses colored roles with their own powerful stage presence— even if the agency they displayed was overwhelmingly limited to the sexual arena.38 Thus Elizabeth Howe claims, “Like many of the consequences of the arrival of the actress, their introduction was simultaneously radical—in allowing women a voice on the public stage for the ‹rst time—and conservative: within a predominantly courtly, coterie theatre the women were almost entirely controlled by male managers and playwrights and were exploited sexually on stage and off. . . . The actresses were perceived predominantly as sex objects and were required, with signi‹cant frequency, to represent rape victims and to enact explicit love scenes. Again, however, the consequences of such developments can be seen as both reactionary and subversive, questioning as well as reinforcing traditional dramatic female stereotypes.”39 Examining the wider ideological work the actress performed in the eighteenth century, Kristina Straub views the actress as “a site of ideological contradiction in the emergence of dominant notions of gender and sexuality. . . .The actresses’ transgressions tend to question more dangerously [than male actors] the construct of woman as man’s submissive opposite. . . . Whereas the discourse of professionalism helped to legitimate actors’ ‘feminine’ excesses, it intensi‹ed 131

The Stage Life of Props the contradiction between femininity as a public spectacle and emergent de‹nitions of the middle-class woman as domestic and private, veiled from the public eye. As a result, the actress ‹gures discursively as the site of an excessive sexuality that must be—but never fully is— contained or repressed.”40 The fact that these plays repeatedly stage moments in which femininity is constructed before our very eyes, such as the fan lesson and the lady’s toilet, suggests the need to contain sexual excess by presenting sexuality as a product rather than a prerequisite of gender identity. In the theater, at least, feminine sexuality is shown as manufactured for male consumption rather than springing naturally from biology.

In a study of gambling women on the eighteenth-century stage, Beth Kowaleski Wallace agrees with Straub that actresses produced a potentially disruptive “semiotic surplus” beyond the roles assigned to them. “As is often acknowledged, the minute a female actor plays, she opens up semiotically in ways that male actors do not. Most often this semiotic surplus works to her disadvantage—signaling she is sexually available, even if she is not, for example. Yet historically the presence of live actresses on the stage also thwarted patriarchal assumptions about feminine sexuality. . . . Live female performance can also confound male expectation in other ways, especially where a strong physical presence coincides with an otherwise controlling representation.”41 Wallace goes further than Straub, Maus, and Howe by positing a “double message” in women’s performance that audiences at live performances internalized in ways that readers of texts cannot.42 Although women’s playing was subject to male control in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, actresses nonetheless embodied powerful presences on stage that may well have undercut the textual insistence on women’s passivity and vulnerability: “While the text may work to construct one kind of female subject, it is equally possible that live female performance contests the very terms of that construct.” Wallace thus calls on feminist theater historians “to take performance history into account and to imagine the innumerable ways in which an actress’s actual, physical presence may have enhanced the scene.”43 Regrettably, very little evidence survives of just how actresses 132

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played the parts they were (literally) handed and subsequently owned. How then did the fan, that most concrete way in which an actress’ “actual, physical presence . . . enhanced the scene,” speak in the playhouse? In a brief but illuminating discussion, J. L. Styan offers his own account of Restoration fan-language: It was, indeed, a direct extension of a lady’s personality, and at all times signalled her mood. A slow wafting of air indicated her thoughtful assent, an energetic pumping her anger or embarrassment. A glance of the eyes along the line of the open fan could show her interest in a lucky mortal on the other side of the room or the stage; another inch and he could be excluded from all further communication. By a dexterous switching of the fan from one side of her face to the other, a lady could even conduct two intimate but independent conversations, spoken or silent, on either side of her at the same time.44 The theater was one public site where the semiosis of the fan was improvised, extended, and potentially stabilized by the Restoration actress. Just as musicians today attend concerts to pick up the latest “licks” from their peers, the theater might have been where those on the outskirts of fashionable society went to learn the latest modish ›ourish of the fan.45 But in the absence of eyewitness reports, recovering the Restoration fan’s speech has proved a challenge to theater practitioners and scholars alike and tends to be based as much on intuition as on evidence. In the 1940s, asked to provide some instruction to other “period” actors, actress Athene Seyler (who was touring in Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan at the time) speculated that “the use of a fan must have indicated and re›ected the same attitude towards life as shows in the style of the hairdressing, of the clothes and of the dances in any given age. The late seventeenth-century women wore a mass of shaking curls, bared their bosoms and evidently had ›ung themselves out of Puritanism with a gay vengeance. So what more reasonable than to suggest in a Restoration play that one should ›irt one’s fan and ›utter it gaily around one’s curls, or gaze archly over it?” By contrast, 133

The Stage Life of Props “In the next [eighteenth] century one would gather from its more formal and exaggerated character, from the grace and dignity of the minuet and the pomp of the hair styles, together with the idiosyncrasies of the huge hats, that fans were also larger in proportions and, as we know, exquisitely painted. So perhaps a more measured movement in their use—and a pose held with them at arm’s length, to display them to the fullest advantage—would be correct. . . . At least so I see it!”46 Seyler’s modest conclusion betrays how little actual textual or historical evidence supports her suppositions.

Contemporary actor Simon Callow, who once had a subspecialty playing Restoration fops, also rejects the notion of a rigid language as he imagines a fan lesson of his own: The use of the fan, far from being an arbitrary affectation, was part of the enormous repertory of a woman’s wiles. Their use was inherited wisdom; one can imagine a mother teaching her daughter, “Darling, never open your fan like that, let it out very gently.” It was not an accessory like a parasol or a muff. It was an indispensable adjunct to social life, because it spoke a language of its own. I don’t mean any sort of decorous Japaneselike “language of the fan,” where each position has attributed to it some precise meaning; but a subtext language, where the fan can improvise, sometimes faster than the tongue, sometimes merely saying a bit more than the tongue. It’s what provoked that interesting remark of Edith Evans that you can do almost anything with a fan except fan yourself with it.47 Callow goes on to quote Young Worthy’s speech to Narcissa from Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift (1696) to illustrate “how a fan reinforces a coquette’s weaponry”: Why, madam, I have observed several particular qualities in your ladyship that I have perfectly adored you for: as, the majestic toss of your head, your obliging bowed curtsy, your satirical smile, your blushing laugh, your demure look, the

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careless tie of your hood, the genteel ›irt of your fan, the designed accident in your letting fall, and your agreeable manner of receiving it from him that takes it up.

According to the play’s stage directions, “What he speaks, she imitates in dumb-show”; for Cibber, then, femininity itself is a kind of masquerade orchestrated by the fan.48 Intriguingly, each imaginative reconstruction of a Restoration fan-wielder I have cited—whether it be Styan’s lady, Seyler’s ›irt, or Callow’s ingenue—registers the abiding sexual politics of the fan, the struggle to control the fan’s unstable semiosis and essentialize Restoration femininity.

Women were, of course, complicit in transmitting the pedagogy of the fan. In act 4 of Mary Pix’s The Beau Defeated (1700), which contains the only Restoration fan lesson I have discovered in which a woman instructs another woman, the pretentious middle-class social climber Mrs. Rich tells her niece, “Give yourself airs, child, when I admit ye into my company: humph! Pluck up your head. What! No motion with your fan? Ah, ’tis awkward, but sure, by my example, she’ll learn.” Lucinda’s vexation dramatizes her budding desire to ape her superiors: “Oh la, I can’t make my fan do like my aunt’s.”49 The only other fan lesson involving two women that I have been able to trace dates from much later and appears in Robert Lloyd’s The Capricious Lovers (1765). Here the coquette Lisetta tempts innocent Phoebe with lessons in the art of ›irtation, and the air Lisetta sings betrays the Addisonian rigidity of the fan’s semaphore on the eighteenth-century stage: For various purpose serves the fan, As thus, a decent blind; Between the sticks to peep at man, Nor yet betray your mind.

Each action tells a meaning plain, Resentment’s in the snap; A ›irt expresses strong disdain, Consent a gentle tap.

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The Stage Life of Props All passions will the fan disclose, All modes of female art; And to advantage sweetly shews, The hand, if not the heart. ’Tis folly’s sceptre ‹rst design’d,

By Love’s capricious boy; Who knows how lightly all mankind, Are govern’d by a toy.50 Rather than accept as a given the prevalent view of fans as simply “the standard-issue artillery of coquetry,” I believe it is possible to glean a more nuanced understanding of the handling of the fan in performance, and by extension of the sexual stakes behind Restoration and eighteenth-century theater practice.51 To do so, we must move beyond the generalizations of Styan, Seyler, and Callow to more precise accounts of the fan’s play between motion and stillness.

The material prop’s implicit choreography reveals the performance potential of the actress’ semiotic surplus—a subversive counterpoint that moves alongside the text—and hence makes visible a vanished dimension of theater history that would otherwise be lost to the present-day reader. Lacking detailed accounts of individual performances, we can only recover the fan’s resistance to following established “lines of business” through the contextual reanimation of its textual traces.

Apt Pupils: The Man of Mode’s Object Lessons Beneath its surface sparkle, George Etherege’s popular The Man of Mode; or, Sir Fopling Flutter depicts a brutal world of male sexual predation.52 In the course of the play the rake Dorimant spurns one mistress (Mrs. Loveit), seduces another (Bellinda), and wins a country heiress (Harriet). The orange-selling bawd’s visit to Dorimant’s rooms in the play’s ‹rst scene underscores the fact that for men of Dorimant’s class women, like fruit, are commodities to be purchased, savored, and discarded. Under guise of selling Dorimant peaches, the 136

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orange-woman extols the virtues and attractions of Harriet Woodvill, who is monied, beautiful, and fresh from the country. The action revolves around how Dorimant juggles his two mistresses, jealous Mrs. Loveit and infatuated Bellinda, while courting the gimlet-eyed Harriet, who rails against Dorimant at every opportunity but secretly loves him nonetheless. The coplot revolves around the attempts of a comical senex, Old Bellair, to marry his son to Harriet and wed young Emilia, who is in love with Young Bellair and vice versa. One man of mode is Sir Fopling Flutter, a popinjay whom the desperate Loveit exploits in order to stir up Dorimant’s jealousy. More important, Sir Fopling’s risibly self-conscious attempts at sexual and sartorial sprezzatura counterpoint the lovers’ breathtaking mastery of the game of seduction and manipulation.

The Man of Mode is perhaps the most self-conscious comedy of manners: it aims to expose as well as celebrate just how the sexual game is best played. To this end Etherege provides the ingenues, Emilia and Young Bellair, with symmetrical examples of how to do it well (Dorimant and Harriet) and ill (Loveit and Sir Fopling).

Although Loveit and Sir Fopling remain at odds, the play implies that all three couples deserve each other—even as Dorimant’s ‹fth-act reform leaves open the possibility that his affair with Bellinda will continue following his marriage to Harriet and con‹nement in the country. The play’s relentless self-consciousness, its Berkeleyan insistence that in this world to be is to be perceived, strips away any notion of natural behavior. While the central trope circulating through the play is the plucking off of society’s vizard so as to expose the truth beneath the mask, the play’s central prop is not the vizard but the fan, whose arti‹ce visibly underscores the impossibility of there being any truth to reveal. Dorimant’s ‹fth-act conversion is merely another performance that, together with his levée, bookends the play.

The Man of Mode is structured around two fan-scenes, the ‹rst involving Mrs. Loveit and the second involving Harriet. Indeed, it is one of the most fan-busy plays of the Restoration; an unseen “Mr Wagfan” is even mentioned at one point (2.2.38).53 Like other Restoration rakes, Dorimant is an inveterate fan-tearer. As he com137

The Stage Life of Props plains to his friend Medley, “But the devil’s in’t, there has been such a calm in my affairs of late, I have not had the pleasure of making a woman so much as break her fan, to be sullen, or forswear herself, these three days” (1.1.191–4). Having grown tired of the possessive, jealous Loveit, Dorimant plots to send a “vizard” (his latest prey, Bellinda) to visit Loveit and raise her jealousy to such a pitch that Loveit will fly at Dorimant, who will appear on cue and use this action as an excuse to break off with her.54 As Medley informs Lady Townley and Emilia, the sadistic Dorimant has “made [Loveit] break a dozen or two of fans already, tear half a score points in pieces, and destroy hoods and knots without number” (2.1.118–20). The spectator is primed for a scene of fan tearing in which the weapon is turned back on its wielder.

Dorimant frames his confrontation with Loveit according to a prescripted scenario, just as Etherege frames the entire action through Dorimant’s desires. By choosing to begin the play in Dorimant’s lodgings, Etherege capitalizes on actor Thomas Betterton’s charisma and easy rapport with the audience. Etherege invites us to identify with Dorimant; to enjoy his erotic escapades; and to revel in his destructive campaign against the fan (clearly a metonym for womankind in general). We are taken as it were behind the scenes of rake-construction: not coincidentally, act 1, scene 1 takes place during Dorimant’s levée, and his costuming in the clothes of a gallant visually accompanies his erotic scheming and takes us into his con‹dence.

By contrast with Dorimant’s louche elegance in act 1, Mrs. Loveit is introduced in act 2 as a self-conscious actress who fusses over her props: “Enter Mrs Loveit and Pert; Mrs Loveit putting up a letter, then pulling out her pocket glass and looking in it” (2.2.1 s.d.). The emblematic vanitas gesture of staring at herself in the glass, combined with her trademark line, “I hate myself, I look so ill today,” shows that Dorimant’s letter has wounded her pride. If this moment formed Elizabeth Barry’s ‹rst stage appearance following her tutelage by John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, the actress’s own nervousness would have been appropriately channeled into Loveit’s jerkily handled fan.

In any case, it seems likely that the actress used her fan to magnify her agitation and gradually build up to the scene’s climactic moment.

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Both Loveit’s jealous nature and her fetishizing of the fan as site of sexual struggle are underscored by Pert, her insolent maid: “I little thought, madam, to see your spirit tamed to this degree, who banished poor Mr Lackwit but for taking up another lady’s fan in your presence” (2.2.18–20).55 By the time Loveit’s friend Bellinda arrives to set Dorimant’s plot in motion, Loveit is already jittery and primed to explode. Etherege provides both women with asides to the audience; one elegant staging choice would be for each actress to tilt her fan to cover the side of her face nearest the other woman so as to deliver her aside in private but without interrupting the ›ow of the scene. Bellinda plays her part and describes seeing Dorimant at the playhouse with a “mask” (Bellinda herself, of course). Loveit “[w]alks up and down with a distracted air,” probably fanning herself the while to quell the jealous ›ush of her cheeks. Loveit’s ranting suggests that the scene was played as a lampoon of arti‹cial and formalized tragic style, in which the extended rant was a main attraction. Loveit repeats the Renaissance convention of ‹guratively turning her anger inward rather than outward toward her tormentor: “Would I had daggers, darts, or poisoned arrows in my breast, so I could but remove the thoughts of him from thence!” (2.2.102–3). Loveit’s speech begs a correspondingly histrionic stab with her own fan straight out of Addison, especially since Bellinda chides, “Fie, ‹e, your transports are too violent, my dear” (2.2.105). Arriving pat on cue, Dorimant observes: “What, dancing the galloping nag [a country dance] without a ‹ddle?”

(2.2.127–28). Loveit’s grotesque caperings expose her as Dorimant’s puppet.

When, after provoking Loveit still further, Dorimant hints that he has slept with the unnamed vizard, Loveit cries “Hell and furies!” and the stage direction reads, “Tears her fan in pieces” (2.2.153).

Loveit’s disturbing fan-gesture, one of the most violent in Restoration drama, surely caps a sequence of “worrying” her fan that began much earlier. Dorimant’s cruel remark, “Spare your fan, madam. You are growing hot and will want it to cool you” (2.2.154–5), then reduces Loveit to tears. After Dorimant leaves, despite her begging him to stay, she rants: “Monster, barbarian! I could tear myself in 139

The Stage Life of Props pieces” (2.2.264–65; emphasis added). Here Loveit clearly identi‹es with her metonymic fan, translating Othello’s jealous rage (“I’ll tear her all to pieces”) into internalized misogyny. In a sense, by destroying her fan Etherege punishes Loveit for broadcasting her distress too nakedly on the one hand (by giving vent to her real feelings) and too extravagantly on the other (by gauchely pushing the fan over the brink of acceptable behavior).56 As Loveit’s torments increase, the scene takes on an unpleasantly sadistic edge for the modern reader, especially since Loveit’s disintegration is observed by the coolly detached trio of Bellinda, Pert, and Dorimant. To what extent do these observers model the spectator’s own attitude? From Loveit’s perspective the scene is tragic rather than comic, so it is hard to determine to what extent the actress playing Loveit is supposed to be in on the joke. If her fan-scene is played for emotional realism, as it might have been by the untried actress Elizabeth Barry, the play exposes Dorimant’s heartlessness at the risk of wrenching our sympathy toward Loveit (who as antagonist continues to be the chief obstacle to the union of Dorimant and Harriet).

If, as seems more likely, Mary Lee created Loveit, she must have burlesqued her own trademark tragic acting style to hilarious effect.57 Lee’s parodic imitation of her own extravagant gestures would have cued the audience that Loveit’s “outrageous passion” (2.2.269) is merely an extension of her histrionic personality and hence not to be taken seriously. In short, the fan’s impact cannot be detached from the personality of the actress who wielded it in a given production.

As the action shifts from a love affair gone stale to the younger characters’ attempts to hone their erotic skills, act 3 intensi‹es the play’s investigation of whether anything natural exists under the arti‹ce of social codes. The act’s opening, in which Harriet rejects her maid’s wish to “set that curl in order” (3.1.1), echoes Dorimant’s and Loveit’s ‹rst appearances, appearing to contrast Harriet’s country naturalness with Dorimant’s languid affectation and Loveit’s propdependent arti‹ciality. But although Harriet rails against “powdering, painting, and . . . patching” (3.1.15), the action soon reveals that what Harriet disdains is the visibility of feminine arti‹ce rather than the arti‹ce itself. The whole point of “doing gender” is to make it 140

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look natural. Harriet knows the conventions of city comedy backwards (she cites Jonson’s Bartholemew Fair), and her outward deference to her mother’s marriage plans is a studied act of hypocrisy designed to get her up to London.

No less than The Importance of Being Earnest, The Man of Mode undermines the standard distinction between corrupt town gallant and untutored country innocent. The fan vividly demonstrates that Harriet outclasses Loveit in the game of love (Loveit has after all gone far beyond ›irtation). Indeed, Harriet is more polished than Young Bellair, whom she patronizes as still caught up in the externals of gentility: “The man indeed wears his clothes fashionably and has a pretty, negligent way with him, very courtly and much affected” (3.1.39–41). Since Harriet is an arch mimic, it would be natural here for the actress to use her fan and curls to illustrate Young Bellair’s affectedness. Young Bellair’s entrance, using some of the same gestures, would then have elicited a laugh from the audience.

In the ensuing fan lesson, the country girl’s predictable instruction by the practiced young gallant is reversed. After joining hands in a mock vow to avoid marriage to each other at all costs, the couple agrees to pretend to be in love for their parents’ bene‹t, “if it be but for the dear pleasure of dissembling” (3.1.111). Styan aptly terms the dumb show that follows the “locus classicus for the use of the fan.”58 Harriet takes the lead in setting up the stage picture: “I will lean against this wall and look bashfully down upon my fan while you, like an amorous spark, modishly entertain me” (3.1.118–20).59 When Lady Woodvill and Old Bellair enter, the older couple decides to “keep back and observe” (3.1.134), thereby creating a split stage wherein the young lovers perform for both an onstage and offstage audience. Since they remain out of earshot of the older couple but not of the audience, Harriet and Young Bellair must be downstage of the others—presumably on the apron or forestage thrusting out in front of the proscenium.

At ‹rst, Harriet instructs Young Bellair on the proper deportment of a gallant: “Your head a little more on one side. Ease yourself on your left leg and play with your right hand” (3.1.137–38). After Young Bellair adjusts his posture accordingly, he returns the favor 141

The Stage Life of Props and offers Harriet a lesson of her own. “At one motion play your fan, roll your eyes, and then settle a kind look upon me” (3.1.145–7).

Harriet’s “so” is a verbal stage direction indicating her acquiescence.

Bellair’s next command is “Now spread your fan, look down upon it, and tell [count] the sticks with a ‹nger,” to which Harriet responds approvingly, “Very modish” (3.1.149–51). “Clap your hand up to your bosom, hold down your gown. Shrug a little, draw up your breasts and let ’em fall again, gently, with a sigh or two, etc.”

(3.1.152–54). Etherege’s “etc.” implies that the actors were free to improvise. Bellair caps the charade by returning to the fan: “Clap your fan then in both your hands, snatch it to your mouth, smile, and with a lively motion ›ing your body a little forwards. So! Now spread it, fall back on the sudden, cover your face with it, and break out into a loud laughter. Take up! Look grave and fall a-fanning of yourself.

Admirably well acted!” (3.1.162–67).

Etherege’s fan lesson thematizes the male attempt to script the fan’s eloquence—a situation that recurs, on a metatheatrical level, between the playwright’s script and the actress who is paid to perform it. In the Restoration playhouse, did Harriet’s fan resist Young Bellair’s attempt to make it act a part of his devising? The scene’s comedy depends on the contrast between the arti‹ce of the charade, which takes in the older couple, and the cool ratiocination of the dialogue to which only the audience is privileged: “By the good instructions you give, I suspect you for one of those malicious observers who watch people’s eyes, and from innocent looks make scandalous conclusions” (3.1.155–57). On one level, not just the fan but Harriet herself is a puppet, acting out the moves that the Bellair-actor (Mr. Jevon, according to prompter John Downes) improvises. That the fan’s gestures simulate rather than reveal emotional truths does not vitiate the fact that its deceptive gestures are scripted by a man. Harriet proves an able pupil (“I think I am pretty apt at these matters” [3.1.168]), and she does not use the fan as a weapon to deceive Bellair himself—unless her fan-performance visibly mocks him.60 But on another level, Wallace’s notion of semiotic surplus reminds us that the actress can make free with her fan and tell more than one story. If Harriet was originally played by Elizabeth Barry, as seems 142

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likely given the pairing of Betterton and Barry in similar lead roles a few months later in Aphra Behn’s The Rover, then Harriet’s instruction by Bellair would no doubt invoke the actress’s own instruction

by Rochester for the cognoscenti in pit, box, and gallery. At least some cognoscenti in the audience would have known that Barry was the protégée of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, the Restoration’s most notorious rake, and voyeurs would have eagerly searched for signs that Barry had been broken in sexually as well as theatrically.

Rochester reportedly bragged that he would teach the inept Barry in under six months to be “the ‹nest player on the Stage,” so it is quite likely that the fan-tearing Rochester himself initiated Barry into the arts of the stage fan.61 Barry’s handling of the fan-scene might have developed in the course of the play’s successful run. If so, her line, “I think I am pretty apt in these matters,” which may have raised a condescending titter at Barry’s expense on opening night, would soon have become an ironically understated declaration of Harriet/Barry’s freedom from male tutelage. After all, the script suggests that Harriet merely humors Young Bellair’s wish to instruct her, since she has earlier dismissed his gentility as a sham: “Varnished over with good breeding, many a blockhead makes a tolerable show” (3.1.44–45).62 The whole thrust of the scene suggests that in performance it is Harriet rather than Bellair who is master of the fan. The spectator is invited to compare Loveit’s fan tearing with Harriet’s fan ›irtation and to measure the distance between actresses and, through their gestures, between overwrought tragedy and sparkling comedy.

Loveit/Lee’s fan play burlesques tragic acting style, whereas Harriet/Barry’s fan lesson displays a mastery of the gestural conventions of comedy. In order to work on stage, the fan lesson must be not a robotic drill à la Addison, but a virtuoso turn in which the actress playing Harriet puts her own spin on the fan. Harriet’s charade may well have registered for the Restoration audience much as the “vogueing” brie›y popularized by the pop singer Madonna did for audiences in the 1980s—as a camp celebration of “striking a pose,” rather than as an ideological demysti‹cation of it.

While not called for in Etherege’s script, the fan can enliven several other scenes. Loveit’s ›irtation with Sir Fopling, which is 143

The Stage Life of Props designed to kindle Dorimant’s jealousy, begs an exaggerated use of the fan to match her “loud, affected” laugh (3.3.234 s.d.). By contrast, Harriet no doubt marshals her “vogueing” fan to support her smooth badinage with Dorimant in 4.1: “If it be on that idle subject [of love], I will put on my serious look, turn my head carelessly from you, drop my lip, let my eyelids fall and hang half o’er my eyes— thus, while you buzz a speech of an hour long in my ear and I answer never a word” (4.1.158–62). Less amusingly, the fan could magnify Bellinda’s nervous fear of exposure once she is carried by mistake from Dorimant’s lodging to Loveit’s in act 5, scene 1. Acting as a liedetector, the fan could ratchet up the dramatic tension as Loveit probes Bellinda’s whereabouts earlier that day.

Certainly, the fan once more reveals effeminacy as contrived performance in the person of Sir Fopling, the most self-conscious wielder of props in The Man of Mode. The play’s back-stabbing characters are united in disdain for this walking prop-closet (although a skilled actor can render him sympathetic). Dorimant’s snide description of fops “[p]laying with your fan, smelling to your gloves, commending your hair, and taking notice how ’tis cut and shaded after the new way” (5.1.122–24) probably echoes Sir Fopling’s earlier stage business, as well as providing an opportunity for Dorimant to mimic Fopling’s mincing affectation.

In the ‹nal scene, the fan may once more contrast Harriet and Loveit visually. Faced with the threat of impending marriage to Young Bellair and on the point of confessing her love, Harriet twice turns away from Dorimant, possibly using the fan as a buffer between audience and beloved: “My love springs with my blood into my face.

I dare not look upon him yet” (5.2.92–93).63 And when Loveit enters with Bellinda, her possibly fan-assisted aside similarly betrays her love: “I see him, (aside) and with him the face that has undone me.

Oh, that I were but where I might throw out the anguish of my heart!

Here it must rage within and break it” (5.2.219–21). The fan underscores two possible object lessons. Loveit is defeated in part by her lack of control over her props—by her fan’s refusal to act as a shield and its insistence on blazoning Loveit’s self-loathing. By contrast, Harriet can smoothly discard her fan—or put it away until the next 144

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occasion warrants—once it has served its purpose as a smokescreen.

In the stage-world of The Man of Mode, theater rewards theatricality: Loveit and Sir Fopling are punished for their inability to “do gender” correctly, while Dorimant, Harriet, and Young Bellair are rewarded with spouses for their appealing performances.64 As a machine for regulating the acceptable performance of gender, Etherege’s fan seems to offer circumscribed options to women, cautioning them to use its semaphore only as directed or else risk selfdestruction. Yet by revealing the fan as a ›uid theatrical sign, one moreover that can be ironically in›ected by the skill of the individual actress, the play simultaneously opens up an improvisational space for the apt pupil to make present subtle countermeanings of her own.

The Fan as Sexual Fetish: Farquhar’s The Inconstant If The Man of Mode brandishes the fan as an emblem of female independence in the face of male tutelage, George Farquhar’s The Inconstant; or, The Way to Win Him (Drury Lane, 1702) presents the fan lesson as a displaced form of rape.65 Adapted from Fletcher, the play is a ›irtation comedy set in Paris in which the resourceful, crossdressing Oriana schemes to trap a charming but commitment-shy rake, Young Mirabel, into matrimony. In a parallel courtship, Mirabel’s friend Captain Duretete, a bashful soldier, pursues the coquette Bisarre.

Not unlike the Beatrice and Benedick subplot of Much Ado about Nothing, the merry war between the ›amboyant Bisarre and the crusty Duretete became a chief attraction on the eighteenth-century stage, as evidenced by casting. Duretete was originated by the low comedian William Bullock but was later played by David Garrick among others, while actresses such as Kitty Clive and Frances Abington followed Susanna Verbruggen’s Bisarre. The play’s comedy exploits the common theme that men pursue sex whereas women pursue marriage; more unusually, the dramatic emphasis is on active female pursuit.

Unaccustomed to wooing but eager to play the cad, Duretete 145

The Stage Life of Props assures his rakish friend that his intentions toward Bisarre are purely dishonorable. Bisarre knows her Restoration comedy well, however, and sees through Duretete’s clumsily executed gallantry: “Your visit, Sir, was intended as a Prologue to a very scurvy Play, of which Mr Mirabel and you so handsomely laid the Plot” (2.2.99–101). Despite his protestations that he wishes only to converse, Bisarre refuses to let Duretete get a word in edgewise and instead humiliates the gruff captain by forcing him to dance and drink, then threatening to kick him. If Duretete’s principal weapon is seductive speech, Bisarre parries with ceaseless motion: Duretete. Good Madam let me sit down to answer you, for I am heartily tir’d.

Bisarre. Fye upon’t; a young man, and tir’d; up for shame, and walk about, action becomes us—a little faster, Sir. (2.2.66–69) Plainly Duretete must resort to other weapons besides speech in order to penetrate Bisarre’s defenses.

Certain he has become an object of public ridicule, Duretete ‹xes on revenge (despite a letter from Bisarre avowing her penitence): “farewell Gallantry, and welcome Revenge; ’tis my turn now to be upon the Sublime, I’ll take her off, I warrant her” (4.3.6–7). The audience is primed for a scene of sexual aggression—especially since when Bisarre enters, the couple is alone on stage. But instead of “taking her off,” Duretete insists that Bisarre act out a pantomime to prove the devotion professed in her letter. Once again a man trains a woman in the gestural language of love: Duretete. Con‹rm it then, by your Obedience stand there; and Ogle me now as if your Heart, Blood, and Soul, were like to ›y out at your eyes—First, the direct surprise. (She looks full upon him.) Right, next the Deux yeux par oblique. (She gives him the side Glance.) Right, now depart, and Languish. (She turns from him, and looks over her Shoulder.) Very well, now Sigh. (She Sighs.) Now drop your Fan a purpose. (She drops 146

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her Fan.) Now take it up again. Come now, confess your Faults, are not you a Proud—say after me.

Bisarre. Proud.

Duretete. Impertinent.

Bisarre. Impertinent.

Duretete. Ridiculous.

Bisarre. Ridiculous.

Duretete. Flirt.

Bisarre. Puppy.

Duretete. Soons Woman, don’t provoke me, we are alone, and you don’t know but the Devil may tempt me to do you a Mischief, ask my Pardon immediately.

Bisarre. I do, Sir, I only mistook the word.

Duretete. Cry, then, ha, you got e’re a Handkerchief?

Bisarre. Yes, Sir. Duretete. Cry then Hansomly, cry like a Queen in a Trajedy.

She pretending to Cry, burst out a Laughing, and Enter two Ladies Laughing. (4.3.17–39) As stage manager, or what we would today call director, Duretete paradoxically directs his lover to demonstrate her sincerity by trotting out generic clichés: the ogling and fan play are drawn from Restoration comedy, the “tragedy handkerchief” from Restoration tragedy.66 How should the actress handle the sequence? We know from an earlier scene that the ›irtatious Bisarre dismisses the captain as a coxcomb but is genuinely attracted to him. Her fan play thus calls for delicately layered performance. The actress must prove convincing enough to stave off physical assault, yet the very staginess of Duretete’s commands reveals how arti‹cial the gestures must be in order to satisfy him. The actress must offer a fan lesson in quotation marks. Duretete claims that he wants con‹rmation of love, but what he really seeks is obedience—and, perhaps, evidence that all female passion is as arti‹cial as a comedic fan or a tragedy handkerchief.

Duretete brings Addison’s academy to life (and, given the dates, could partly have inspired it); for him, the actress is a marionette, her 147

The Stage Life of Props fan a prosthetic extension as the man pulls the strings. Indeed, Duretete’s humiliating games of sexual theater are designed to arouse him: “Soons Woman, don’t provoke me, we are alone, and you don’t know but the Devil may tempt me to do you a Mischief” (3.3.33–35).

Yet Duretete’s threat of sexual mischief proves empty, for the tables turn when “She pretending to Cry, burst out a Laughing, and Enter two Ladies Laughing.” Looming sexual danger dissolves into a nightmare of male sexual humiliation as the three women “lay hold on him” and threaten to expose his manhood: “Come Ladies, let’s examine him” (4.3.54–55). On the point of being stripped naked by the three “Furies,” Duretete begs for mercy: “If you please to let me get away with my Honour, I’d do any thing in the World” (4.3.61–62). Duretete manages to ›ee just before he is forced to swear he will marry Bisarre, and Farquhar blunts the edge of this disturbing scene of aborted female rape by restoring the “Furies” to the domestic sphere: “Ha, ha, ha, this Visit Ladies, was Critical for our Diversion, we’ll go make an end of our Tea” (4.3.67–68).

In this short scene, Farquhar rehearses the central riddle of the fan. Is it a male tool of intimidation and control—even a fetish for stimulating male sexual excitement—or a seductive weapon whose ›uid semiosis remains ‹rmly in female hands? Here again much depends on the actress. As Mrs. William Mountfort, Susanna Verbruggen (who originated Bisarre) may have played Harriet in The Man of Mode and thus reprised some aspects of her earlier fan lesson, to the delight of the crowd.67 Certainly Verbruggen was an accomplished and versatile comedienne skilled at witty breeches roles, and her pairing with William Bullock, who had a penchant for skirts roles, may well have reinforced the comic “woman on top” aspect of The Inconstant’s fan scenes.68 Whether or not the actress’s fan play blatantly mocks her wouldbe instructor in act 4, Bisarre turns the fan back to her own advantage in act 5. When she appears dressed as a soldier to inform Duretete that she intends to dog his steps abroad, even as far as the bawdy house, Duretete echoes his earlier sexual threat and his own subsequent humiliation: “Let me go Madam—or I shall think that you’re a Man and perhaps may examine you” (5.3.35–36). In a speech that 148

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echoes both The Tempest and The Merry Wives of Windsor, Bisarre forces Duretete to burlesque her own fan lesson in the previous act and “gallant” the fan accordingly: Bisarre. Stir if you dare, I have still Spirits to attend me, and can raise such a muster of Faries as shall punish you to death—come Sir, stand there now and Oggle me. (He frowns upon her.) Now a languishing sigh. (He groans.) Now run and take up my Fan, faster. (He runs and takes it up.) Now play with it handsomely.

Duretete. Ay, ay, (He tears it all in pieces.)

Bisarre. Hold, hold, dear humorous Coxcomb, Captain, spare my fan and I’ll—why you rude inhumane Monster, don’t you expect to pay for this.

Duretete. Yes Madam there’s twelve pence, for that’s the price on’t.

Bisarre. Sir, it cost a Guiney.

Duretete. Well Madam you shall have the sticks again.

Throws them to her, and Exit.

Bisarre. Ha, ha, ha, ridiculous below my concern. (5.4.37–52) Unwilling to play the woman’s part, Duretete refuses to follow his own earlier fan script. The Inconstant is a rare example of literal fan tearing by a man, and perhaps it is impossible to recover just how disturbing or indeed hilarious such a sight might have struck its original audience. As in The Man of Mode, the feminine prop is literally deconstructed on stage. But rather than channeling female rage inward—and hence suggesting that all female rage is ultimately selfdestructive—Bisarre’s fan is fetishized in another way: as a displaced act of male aggression against the female body. For Loveit, the fan is an extension of herself; for Duretete, it is a representation of those female parts he wishes to rend asunder.

But perhaps Farquhar’s lesson is that men are by nature clumsy, aggressive, and ill-equipped to handle the fan’s sexual semaphore.

Fan éclat is exclusively feminine; were Duretete to handle the fan properly, he would be revealed as something even worse than a cox149

The Stage Life of Props comb: effeminate. When the fan threatens to detach itself from the woman and attach itself to the man as an expression of his inner erotic life, it must quit the stage. The fact that Bisarre treats the torn object as a fungible commodity (“it cost a Guiney”), rather than identifying/collapsing with it (like Loveit), shows that she is immune to the sexual fetishization of the object, that is to say its ability to duplicate as well as orchestrate feminine allure. By contrast, Duretete’s act of violence against the fan is a gesture of male frustration and defeat that keeps the fan’s sexual mystique in motion for the frustrated man, even as it dismantles that mystique for the laughing woman.

Exit, Pursued by a Fan: Odingsells’s The Bath Unmask’d Farquhar’s preface to The Inconstant claims that the play ran six successive nights in February 1702, neither a triumph nor a defeat. Yet since the play was not revived until fourteen years later, when it ran for three nights, and only entered the repertory securely by the third decade of the century, one cannot claim that Farquhar’s fan lesson inspired his contemporaries. I have found no extant fan lessons in the drama between 1702 and 1725, but Addison’s 1711 piece in The Spectator, roughly midway through this period, suggests that a clear repertoire of fan moves had developed, if not congealed, in the playhouse.

Of course, stage fans are ubiquitous throughout this period; for instance, in what has become one of the most famous entrances in Restoration drama, Millamant sweeps into William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700) “full sail, with her fan spread and streamers out, and a shoal of fools for tenders.”69 But the ‹rst fan lesson proper after The Inconstant appears in Gabriel Odingsells’s comedy The Bath Unmask’d (Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1725). Although it did not prove a living play (to borrow John Downes’s expression), The Bath Unmask’d provides a virtual compendium of fan usage on the earlyeighteenth-century stage.70 More to the point, by associating the fan’s motion with feminine decadence and self-indulgence, and its 150

The Fan of Mode

signi‹cation with masculine rationality and self-control, the play recapitulates the central tension I have been exploring throughout this chapter.

As its title suggests, The Bath Unmask’d exposes England’s most fashionable middle-class resort town, a place of “idleness and pleasure” (1.2), as the epitome of male indulgence and female lewdness hidden under the mask of gentility.71 What The Man of Mode does for London, Odingsells’s play does for Bath: we are taken behind the scenes in order to see how the machinery of pleasure works. If the former play asks whether the country miss will succeed in reforming the town rake, the latter asks whether priggish Lord Wiseman will catch the “contagious Air” of Bath (1.1). The fan itself, “that little modish machine,” runs through the play as a leitmotif in the struggle for sexual dominance between men and women.

The play contrasts the two attitudes toward women exempli‹ed

by Lord Wiseman, who despite his “nice rigid honour” (1.2) courts ›ighty Liberia rather than her worthy sister Honoria, and by Mr. Sprightly, a libertine who delights in tormenting the love-smitten Cleora. Odingsells counterpoints male idealization (Wiseman) and male sadism (Sprightly) to various forms of female addiction. The sisters’ mother Lady Ambs-ace is addicted to gambling, while the Loveit-like Cleora craves the maltreatment dished out by her beloved Sprightly.

The play’s dominant perspective is male. By taking us into Sprightly’s con‹dence at the outset, Odingsells invites us to see Cleora through his eyes and to invest in his twin missions to corrupt Wiseman and to torment Cleora: Since her Perverseness is fed by my Love, I design it shall starve by my Indifference; and then by Degrees I shall either teaze her into a Sense of her Folly, and make her rationally renounce it; or at least she must grow good natur’d to be perverse. (1.1) Disturbingly, libertinism cloaks itself as rationalism. Sprightly’s designs on Cleora are nominally therapeutic, while the unsavory Mr. 151

The Stage Life of Props Pander exploits his position as tutor to take sexual advantage of his pupils. This is a world in which rational men of leisure train loveenslaved women for the delight and instruction of respectable onlookers like Wiseman and, by extension, ourselves.72 Underlying this sadistic fantasy of control is the suspicion that female love is mere performance. In the words of Sprightly’s unpleasant associate Pander, “among Ladies of Fire and Vivacity, the Art of making Love is acting it” (1.2). As we have seen, this suspicion has metatheatrical implications for the actress. Is she holding the mirror up to true female nature or just going through the motions?

As in earlier plays, the fan embodies the symbiotic relationship between male voyeurism and female arti‹ce. The constructed nature of the fan’s language emerges when the innocent Miss Whif›e, who is Pander’s prey, “Spreads her fan awkwardly before her Face” in an attempt to both hide and reveal a ›irtatious blush (2.9). Miss Whif›e’s unseasoned awkwardness with her prop contrasts with the extravagant fan game staged by star actress Jane Rogers Bullock, and her character Liberia’s male counterpart, the foppish French count Fripon (played by Thomas Walker, future Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera).73 Liberia responds to the count’s outrageous ›irting—he kisses her, and retreats dancing—by using her fan to feign English prudishness: I am so confounded at your Impudence, I don’t know which way to look. (Her Fan before her Face, blushing.) What do you mean, Sir? I never was so affronted by anyone who made the Appearance of a Gent in my Life before. (Walks about confus’d, and fanning her self.) (2.6) Liberia’s feigned modesty evaporates when Sprightly cuts in and kisses Liberia himself: “Fie upon you, Mr Sprightly, I vow you startle me. (Gives him a Pat with her Fan)” (2.6). This gentle remonstrance, rather than a resounding crack on the skull with the closed fan, suggests that Sprightly’s liberty is welcomed rather than resented. (The scene may contain a faint “ghosting” of an earlier fan lesson, for the

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The Fan of Mode

actor who created Sprightly, Lacy Ryan, had played Young Bellair in The Man of Mode between 1715 and 1718.)

The fan sexually hypnotizes all the men present, just as it focuses the audience’s attention on the exquisitely self-conscious actress.

The fan’s contrived charm is all the more apparent for being exposed in a public space (“before the Abbey”). Indeed, Liberia’s use of the fan is self-consciously parodic: she mocks prudish English manners even as she embraces the French extravagance epitomized by the count. Motion itself has nationalistic implications, since stiffness is associated with the English, unrestrained motion with the French: “You shall have an English Lady glide into an Assembly, as if she was afraid of waking the Company, with an Air as stiff as a Wax-baby that is incapable of changing its Posture” (2.6). In contrast to this description, the count all but compares Liberia to a fan: “Ah, Madam, when you make de Entrée you shew de grand Flutter to ‹ll de Compagnie vid de Surprize” (2.6). But from the disgusted Wiseman’s point of view, and by extension that of the audience, the fan’s frenchi‹ed decadence is directly linked to its mercurial motion. Liberia and the Count are always on the move and thus at risk of performing exhaustion; they exit the scene “singing and dancing” (4.6).

The fan remains the nodal point for the play’s linkage of female motion with feminine affectation and emotional duplicity. The fan itself becomes crucial, since Odingsells intimates that he who controls the fan controls the woman. Whereas Liberia’s coy fan-play disgusts Wiseman with its public display of mock modesty in act 2, Sprightly appropriates the fan as a weapon to keep Cleora in her place in act 3. Sprightly wins a fan in a raf›e and displays the trinket in turn to Cleora and Honoria, of whom Cleora has developed a raging jealousy. On whom will Sprightly bestow the trinket?

Unlike the other fans I have examined, Sprightly’s displays a conveniently apposite emblem, which he expounds for the bene‹t of Cleora, Honoria, and Wiseman: Sprightly. Observe that principal Figure in the Middle, with one Dart entering about the left Pap, and another at his right

153

The Stage Life of Props Ear. In his left Hand, you see a Heart which he is presenting to a scornful Fair, who stands exactly in your Posture, Madam, (To Cleora who turns round with a disdainful Air) kissing her Monkey, with his fore Paws about her Neck; she embracing him with one Hand, while the other is grasp’d by a Beau on one Knee, kissing the Monkey behind. Was the Beau design’d to represent you or me, my Lord?

Cleora. I think the Monkey hath the nearest Resemblance of you.

Sprightly. In Feature perhaps, but not in Fate. (3.4) In the scene depicted on the fan, the woman prefers the monkey to her lovelorn suitor, and the monkey prefers the woman’s beau. Several personi‹ed ‹gures hover over the scene. Sprightly identi‹es the ‹rst as “Vanity, the Guardian Goddess of the Fair; who usurp’d the Province of Love, and dispatch’d that Arrow to the left Pap. Our Hero looks with a Countenance of Concern, as if he was divided in his Mind, and turns his Head upon that agreeable Lady on the other Side, who with a graceful Modesty extends one Hand to receive the slighted Gift, and in the other shews a Heart for exchange.” Sprightly identi‹es the second as “Vertue display’d by her majestic Meen, [who] with one Hand holds a starry Crown over her Head, and with the other beckons our Hero. That upper Figure with a Bow in his Hand in form of an Angel mounted on an Eagle, must be good Sense, that let ›y that Arrow at his right Ear” (3.4).

The crucial point about this particular fan lesson is that, in Sprightly’s hands, the fan ceases to become a moving prop, as it has been up to this point, and instead becomes a speaking prop. The fan’s emblem is patently moral: Wiseman is a fool to offer his heart to scornful Liberia, who prefers her foppish French monkey, rather than to faithful Honoria, who would receive it with gratitude and affection. Like Minerva’s images in Gay’s poem, the misogynistic emblem drives home the fruits of female vanity in a static object lesson. But more important theatrically is the fact that the prop arrests the stage action while Sprightly interprets the picture. In male hands the fan is a hermeneutic riddle to be interpreted rather than a sema154

The Fan of Mode

phoric signal to be obeyed (like Pander’s snuff taking, which is Miss Whif›e’s cue to elope). Moreover, the fan is a sadistic weapon: the freely offered heart in the picture contrasts with the poisonous gift whose calculated purpose is to humiliate Cleora. The fan must have gained some gravitas in the hands of Lacy Ryan, who could temper levity where necessary; he played not only comic roles but Iago and Edgar, too.

Signi‹cantly, Cleora (played by Mrs. Parker) only “glances sideways at it,” as if reluctant to reveal her interest in the prize. When Sprightly promises a further retardation of stage action in the form of “a Speech, Ladies, to recommend my fan,” Cleora retorts, “I scorn it” and temporarily restores motion to the fan by ›inging it away.

Sprightly takes advantage of this impulsive action, which breaks up the stage tableau imposed by Sprightly’s exegesis, to bestow the fan on Honoria (played by Mrs. Vincent). In response to this crowning humiliation, Cleora quits the ‹eld: “I can bear no more!—perjur’d Monster. (Stamps, cries, and runs off)” (3.4).

In a sense, the fan has come full circle. What begins as a source of female sexual power mutates into a male weapon of sexual humiliation. Even Honoria, who connives with Sprightly’s “cure” of Cleora’s malady, uneasily regrets her quick acceptance of the fan: “Poor Cleora!—I wou’d give a thousand Fans to see thee thyself again.” But there is no question that, as with Loveit’s fan tearing in The Man of Mode, the audience is meant to enjoy and laugh at Cleora’s humiliation. In fact, the symmetry between the play’s two plots suggests that Cleora’s suffering is just recompense for Liberia’s mistreatment of Wiseman—even though Cleora’s crime is not vanity but masochistic desire. That female lovesickness is punished far more harshly than female coquetry may even indicate that the former is ultimately more threatening to eighteenth-century mores than the latter.

Thanks in part to the fan, Sprightly achieves his desired effect of humiliating Cleora, who in act 4 feigns illness to kindle Sprightly’s affections but is outsmarted by the man who sees through her deception and himself plays dead. Repenting both her deception of Sprightly and her jealousy of Honoria, Cleora forswears feminine pride in order to embrace masculine rationality: “Reason I’ll adore, / 155

The Stage Life of Props And being less than Woman, I’ll be more.” Like the ending of Gay’s poem on the fan, the resolution of the love plot is cheerfully sexist.

Ignoring the fact that Sprightly has mercilessly tormented her throughout the action, Cleora ‹guratively places her lover in the role of father-confessor: “Yet will I let him see I have a Soul that dares confess a Wrong, spight of the senseless Pride of my mistaken Sex” (4.20).

If Wiseman sees the error of his ways and transfers his affections to Honoria, Cleora learns that she cannot outwit Sprightly by resorting to Liberia-like wiles. At the close of comedy, masquerade is a male province: Sprightly burlesques Wiseman’s stif›y formal lovemaking and Honoria’s excessive modesty, enabling the play’s virtuous couple to laugh at themselves and woo with more ease. But it is Cleora’s repudiation of feminine hypocrisy, and her willingness to “submit” to “Correction,” that ‹nally melts Sprightly’s heart and forces a confession of love. Notably, the play does not require Sprightly himself to reform. When he apologizes for giving her pain, Cleora only bids him “resume your own natural, easy Humour.”

Odingsells seems to say that whereas Sprightly’s merry form of cruelty is natural, Liberia’s dizzying blend of vanity and hypocrisy is an infectious disease that must be purged from the social (and national) body. Masculine/English naturalness triumphs over feminine/French ›utters.

The fan’s Janus-faced role in stoking sexual tension on the one hand and orchestrating—even enforcing—the appropriate performance of gender on the other haunts the play’s ending. “Which of you, Ladies, tears the ‹rst fan?” jests Sprightly as he offers his arm to Honoria instead of Cleora on the way to attend Liberia’s wedding to Fripon—the bogus count who is exposed as a mercenary fake with a spouse ex machina (5.3). As if to underscore the extent to which the women have been disarmed, a pale threat of physical violence haunts the fan’s ‹nal appearance. When Sprightly threatens to reveal to Wiseman the true extent of Honoria’s devotion, she warns him: “Hold your Tongue, I beg you.—I’ll cram my Fan down your Throat else. . . . Dear Cleora, help me to beat him” (5.12). The line suggests that Honoria ›ails at Sprightly with her fan, in an effort to stem his 156

The Fan of Mode

gossip that only succeeds when she claps her fan before his face. But the fan proves a weak weapon indeed; “Ha, ha, ha!—I am afraid, my Dear, your Triumph will be as short as mine,” comments Cleora, who has learned the limits of female resistance and put her own fan away.

If The Bath Unmask’d offers the actress playing Liberia yet another opportunity to demonstrate the stage fan’s sexual electricity, Odingsells’s script seeks to foreclose the possibility that the fan can be reclaimed for the female characters’ sexual agency. Yet the lingering image of the two women using their props to beat the man who has taken so much pleasure in tormenting one of them suggests that the fan has not discharged its ammunition for the last time.

Odingsells’s sour comedy failed to capture the audience’s imagination; the play managed only twelve performances in 1725 before falling out of the repertory, so audiences literally did not “buy” the play as they had The Man of Mode and would The Inconstant. Moreover, the fact that Mrs. Bullock chose the play as a bene‹t showpiece three years later—and followed her reprise of Liberia with a Scottish dance—may indicate that actress rather than playwright wrested ultimate control of the play’s sexual semaphore.74

Welsted, the Exercise of the Fan, and the Male Gaze Jane Rogers Bullock, a versatile actress skilled in both comedy and tragedy, would have one more chance to in›ect a male-scripted fan lesson.75 On December 14, 1726, fourteen months after last appearing as Liberia in The Bath Unmask’d, she played the witty Emilia in Leonard Welsted’s The Dissembled Wanton; or, My Son Get Money (Lincoln’s Inn Fields). Not much is known about Welsted, who seems to have been a poet and minor Scriblerian. His play is undistinguished and ran for only ‹ve performances. Nevertheless, it embodies a male dramatist’s attempt to pin down the fan’s sexual semaphore once and for all.

If The Bath Unmask’d takes female motion to be the primary threat posed by the subversive fan, The Dissembled Wanton targets the fan’s 157

The Stage Life of Props potential control of male vision. Control of the male gaze was one of the eighteenth-century fan’s most powerful abilities. As Angela Rosenthal points out, “[W]omen armed with fans can be recast not only as targets but also as active participants in the visual ‹eld, for, with the ›ick of a wrist, a woman could transform eighteenth-century scopic hierarchies: the power of the gaze was, quite literally, in her hand.”76 Yet the ability to trap or de›ect the male gaze cut both ways; as Erin Mackie observes, obscuring the object of desire only in›ames male ardor. The fan thus produces the very desire it repudiates.77 Nearly two decades after Addison’s ‹ctional Academy of the Fan, Welsted seems to illustrate Rosenthal’s thesis by placing the fan’s scopic power squarely in female hands. But in fact, the play becomes a test case for whether actress or playwright orchestrates the gaze of the spectator, and whether the female form can ultimately elude voyeuristic capture by the male eye.

In act 4 of Welsted’s play, Toby, a coxcomb soldier emboldened by liquor, presumes to make love to the self-possessed Emilia. At the 1726 premiere William Bullock, third son of the William Bullock who had created Duretete in The Inconstant, played Toby opposite his sister-in-law Jane Rogers Bullock. Here there is no threat of rape; for one thing, Toby’s friend Wormwood (who provides the liquor) remains on stage to witness the fun as the audience’s surrogate.

Emilia has no dif‹culty teasing Toby under the guise of ›attering his clumsy advances. In what is by now a tradition of exchanging demonstrations of male and female martial arts, Toby vows to “shew my Wit, and Valour too.”78 Emilia wittily interprets this a sexual entendre, which goes over Toby’s head: “Your Valour, Mr Toby!

What against a Woman, your Valour! You are not going to draw upon me?” Toby responds by spinning around in a robotic paradeground movement that strains preposterously toward erotic gamesmanship: No, no, there’s no Danger in our Valour, Madam; we only Exercize; we never ‹ght in earnest: But when I was taught in the Artillery Ground, I have wish’d any Woman, that lov’d me, had seen me Exercise; for you must know, Madam, we are 158

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taught to turn about any manner of way, which Soldiers call our Facings; but which, I think, wou’d be a prettier Word, for making Love, than making War: as thus, To the Front—Present—to the Right—then I present again—to the Right—to the Right—to the Right—You see, Madam, you have me, and you have me not, every Moment.—Now, while you are looking at me, you quite lose me again—To the Right about— There’s nothing in it, Madam, but keeping ‹rm upon one Heel: Pr’ythee try it, Madam Emilia.

When Toby wittily “presents arms” by embracing Emilia, she must reach for her fan literally to turn the scene around in an extended fan lesson that moves from coquetry to violence: Hold! Hold, Mr Toby! We have our Artillery, and Instruments of War, as well as you. (She gives him a Rap with her Fan.) Come, Sir, I’ll shew the Exercise of the Fan, which is a Woman’s Valour. . . . Thus then, I handle my Fan—now I unfurl it gradually; you see, Sir, you have me, and you have me not; now you have lost me; but here have me again; now you see me, by a side Glance, and here I kill you, at full glare.

Consciously or not, Emilia follows the sequence of Addison’s academy almost exactly. Welsted must have known Addison’s piece well and simply dramatized it. According to Addison, When my female Regiment is drawn up in Array with every one her Weapon in her Hand, upon my giving the Word to handle their Fans, each of them shakes her Fan at me with a Smile, then gives her Right-hand woman a Tap upon the Shoulder, then presses her Lips with the Extremity of her Fan, then lets her arms Fall in an easy Motion, and stands in a Readiness to receive the next Word of Command. All this is done with a close Fan, and is generally learned in the ‹rst Week.

The next Motion is that of unfurling the Fan, in which are comprehended several little Flirts and Vibrations, as also grad159

The Stage Life of Props ual and deliberate Openings, with many voluntary Fallings asunder in the Fan it self, that are seldom learned under a Month’s Practice. This part of the Exercise pleases the Spectators more than any other, as it discovers on a Sudden an in‹nite Number of Cupids, Garlands, Altars, Birds, Beasts, Rainbows, and the like agreeable Figures, that display themselves to View, whilst every one in the Regiment holds a Picture in her Hand.79 In contrast to Toby’s absurd pirouette, the actress playing Emilia crisply shields and reveals her features with the help of her fan. The scene’s visual dynamic is quite complex, however, since there are two men on the stage: Toby and Wormwood. The latter (like the audience) is in on the joke: “He! He! I’m pleased with her Folly.” The gaze is triangulated between Toby (for whom Emilia oscillates between visibility and invisibility), Wormwood (who seems to have a privileged view of events, and who must be downstage of the couple to share his aside with us), and the audience. Depending on how the scene is staged, we may or may not share the now-you-see-hernow-you-don’t perspective of either of the two men.

Emilia caps the scene by moving from coquetry to violence. The fan mutates in her hand from toy to weapon: Emilia. Now, Mr Toby, be upon your Guard; now I discharge my Fan full at you. (She cracks it in his face.) There’s a Report for you, half as loud as a Gun—Courage, Courage, Sir! There is no Danger—Do you mind me Sir, I recover my Fan—I ground my Fan— Wormwood. Madam, Mr Toby can stand a lady’s Fire. He! He! Emilia. There is one more Action I wou’d show you, Mr Toby.

Toby. I an’t afraid to ask you, what it is.

Emilia. Why, that is, Mr Toby, the Flutter of the Fan. Now this, for Example, is the Indolent Flutter—this the Disdainful One—and this, Mr Toby, is the Furious—the Furious—the Furious Flutter. (She drives him about.) O! Sir, I assure you, the Fan is a formidable Weapon, and I understand the Menage [sic] of it, as well as any Coquette in London.

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This sequence might be subtitled “the triumph of the fan.” Toby is a pest, and Emilia’s fan puts him in his place, although he is too much the booby to realize he is being twitted from the stage. We laugh at Toby’s expense even as we applaud the actress’s execution of what seems an unalloyed example of the fan as improvised female weapon.

Yet this spontaneity is illusory. Not only are Emilia’s actions scripted by the playwright, but Emilia continues to follow Addison’s drill almost to the letter. Since his famous description remains the richest description of fan play in the Restoration, and is instructive on its own terms, I quote Addison at some length: Upon my giving the Word to discharge their Fans, they give one general Crack that may be heard at a considerable Distance when the Wind sits fair. This is one of the most dif‹cult Parts of the Exercise; but I have several Ladies with me, who at their ‹rst Entrance could not give a Pop loud enough to be heard at the further End of a Room, who can now discharge a Fan in such a Manner, that it shall make a Report like a Pocket-Pistol. . . .

When the Fans are thus discharged, the Word of Command in Course is to ground their Fans. This teaches a lady to Quit her Fan gracefully when she throws it aside in order to take up a Pack of Cards, adjust a Curl of Hair, replace a falling Pin, or apply herself to any other Matter of Importance. This Part of the Exercise, as it only consists in tossing a Fan with an Air upon a long Table (which stands by for that Purpose), may be learned in two Days’ Time as well as in a Twelvemonth.

When my Female Regiment is thus disarmed, I generally let them walk about the Room for some Time; when on a sudden (like Ladies that look upon their Watches after a long Visit) they all of them hasten to their Arms, catch them up in a Hurry, and place themselves in their proper Stations upon my calling out recover your Fans. This part of the Exercise is not dif‹cult, provided a Woman applies her Thoughts to it.

The Fluttering of the Fan is the last, and indeed the Masterpiece of the whole Exercise; but if a Lady does not misspend her Time, she may make herself Mistress of it in three Months. I 161

The Stage Life of Props generally lay aside the Dog-days and the hot Time of the Summer for the teaching this Part of the Exercise; for as soon as ever I pronounce Flutter your fans, the Place is ‹lled with so many Zephirs and gentle Breezes as are very refreshing in that Season of the Year, though they might be dangerous to Ladies of a tender Constitution in any other.

There is an in‹nite Variety of Motions to be made use of in the Flutter of a Fan: There is the angry Flutter, the modest Flutter, the timorous Flutter, the confused Flutter, the merry Flutter, and the amorous Flutter. Not to be tedious, there is scarce any Emotion in the Mind which does not produce a suitable Agitation in the Fan.80 Emilia departs from Addison’s script only in reversing the order of the grounding and recovery of the fan, and in her choice of the most apposite ›utters to deal with the matter at hand. Although Emilia’s fanfare routs Toby, it does so only thanks to the academy; and Emilia’s wiles prove no match for the lusty Colonel Severne, who chases her off toward the bedroom at the end of the scene.

To what extent, then, was Mrs. Bullock bound to follow Addison’s exercise point by point? The script suggests that Welsted expected the actress to improvise only within strict limits; there is no equivalent of Etherege’s casual “etc.” in The Man of Mode. Fifteen years after Addison’s piece appeared in The Spectator, it seems that the exercise of the fan has become a more or less ‹xed routine, at least for parodic purposes. Surely some, if not most, in the audience would have recognized Welsted’s dramatic quotation and taken pleasure in seeing Addison’s academy brought to life. If the fan remains a “formidable weapon,” as Emilia claims, it does so only within the strict limits set by the male imagination. In the half century between The Man of Mode and The Dissembled Wanton, the textual license for female fan improvisation seems to expire. The fan is the weapon not of the woman who resists rape (as in The Inconstant twenty-four years earlier) but of the coquette. Repelling the unwanted male gaze of the booby alone, Emilia’s fan draws the voyeuristic spectator on, whetting our appetite for the erotic chase that follows in earnest. Like 162

The Fan of Mode

Addison, Welsted invites us to admire the actress’s execution rather than her innovation. In The Dissembled Wanton, the fan becomes an instrument of pure voyeurism.

We cannot tell how well The Dissembled Wanton re›ects fan usage in the period either on or offstage. What we do know is that it achieved only ‹ve performances. While the play marks one last attempt by a male playwright of the period to dramatize Addison’s academy of the fan as a ‹xed repertory of moves designed to in›ame male desire, earlier, more ›exible fan lessons dominated the eighteenth-century stage.81 Whereas The Bath Unmask’d and The Dissembled Wanton faded into oblivion, The Man of Mode and The Inconstant went from strength to strength, suggesting that actress rather than playwright propelled the fan’s stage life. Perhaps actresses preferred not to be limited in their use of the fan; perhaps the trope of the fan lesson, while an amusing conceit in The Man of Mode, simply failed to persuade audiences subsequently. Whatever the case, eighteenthcentury audiences evidently paid to see plays in which the fan was kept mobile in female hands rather than pinned down by male dramatists as cautionary emblem (The Bath Unmask’d) or academic exercise (The Dissembled Wanton).

Conclusion: A Final Handle on the Fan? The property fan was both ally and antagonist of the Restoration actress. On the one hand, the fan’s limited semantic repertoire threatened to reduce the actress’s manual gestures to a series of codi‹ed moves whose meaning was determined by a theatrical culture overwhelmingly concerned to objectify the actress as a sexual commodity. Yet, on the other hand, I have argued that the fan’s theatrical energy derived not only from its male-scripted lexicon—a lexicon, moreover, that was considerably less codified than has sometimes been imagined—but from its incessant and continually improvised play in the hands of ›esh-and-blood actresses. On stage, fan and actress are locked in a struggle between meaning and motion, for the fan threatens to go dead as soon as the actress loses her grip. If it is 163

The Stage Life of Props not to become simply dead weight, an affected tic, the fan must be plied throughout the scene in which it appears.82 The fan constantly threatens to block the actress from view; to muf›e her speech; to slip from her control; and to mean something other than she intends, for, as Simon Trussler points out, its signals “variously af‹rm, contradict, or modulate the spoken word.”83 Yet at the same time the fan enlarges the actress’s physical command of the playing space, controls our visual access to her, underscores or ironizes particular speeches, and magni‹es her performance.

The fan’s oscillation between motion and stillness has undeniable consequences for the sexual politics of Restoration and eighteenthcentury theater. Like Harriet’s fan in The Man of Mode, the prop strives to demonstrate female agency and control; yet like Loveit’s fan in the same play, the prop always risks congealing into a symbol of female helplessness and panic.84 As a trope, the fan remains subject to the directions of those playwrights who seek to arrest, frame, and emblematize it. But as a dynamic prop, the fan orchestrates the male gaze and fends off unwanted male attention.

As I have shown, fans continually threaten to disrupt the sexual economies of the plays they traverse. The fan’s semiotic instability, its disturbing tendency never quite to mean what it says, explains the popularity of the fan lesson in Restoration and early-eighteenth-century drama. The very arti‹ce that enables the fan to speak in the ‹rst place undermines the sincerity of any given speech-act; hence the (paradoxical) Addisonian obsession with training women to speak its language ever more “naturally.”

“A useful thing a fan, isn’t it?” quips Lady Windermere in act 2 of Lady Windermere’s Fan—a late-nineteenth-century play whose central property, as in Othello, threatens to turn on its owner as an immobilizing badge of sexual shame.85 On the Restoration and earlyeighteenth-century stage, by contrast, the fan is no static symbol; or rather, the fan’s status as symbol is renegotiated by every actress who takes it up. In the struggle to turn women from theatrical objects into theatrical subjects, the fan’s contribution depends in large part on the semiotic surplus of the individual actress and her ability to shape meaning through motion.

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The impact of that surplus in performance remains an enigma. I have suggested that what we ‹nd in the scripted fan lesson may be the textual traces of a countermovement, an Addison-inspired attempt by male playwrights to circumscribe the actress’s freedom of expression and thus limit what the fan can say. To adjust the metaphor slightly, if the stage fan were already singing in tune, it wouldn’t need constant rehearsal. The fact that the chastening fan lesson returns like the repressed to the stage as late as 1800—“My dear ma’am, this is the way to maneuver a fan,” admonishes Handy Junior in Thomas Morton’s Speed the Plough—suggests that the prop’s unruly sexual semaphore eluded even Minerva’s control.86 Despite the best efforts of the period’s playwrights to tame it, the Restoration and early-eighteenth-century fan ›irts with the possibility that it will someday be freed from male instruction and learn to speak entirely for itself.

165

Killing Time Guns and the Play of Predictability on the Modern Stage I hate endings. You have to end it somehow. I like beginnings. Middles are tough, but endings are just a pain in the ass.

—Sam Shepard

First of all, when you’ve got a gun— Everybody pays attention.

—Stephen Sondheim, ASSASSINS

A

t the end of act 1 of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890), Hedda observes (in Una Ellis-Fermor’s translation) that she still has “one thing to kill time with”: her father’s pistols.1 Hedda speaks more truly than she knows, for she will use the pistols not only to pass the time but to end time—both the time of her life and, almost immediately following, the time of the play. Playwrights have often played with time by using objects to speed up, retard, or suspend the action, but the stage gun is unique because its appearance immediately raises the possibility of killing time altogether. The modern stage inherited the climactic pistol-shot from the pièce bien faite of Scribe and Sardou, and such diverse playwrights as Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard, Sam Shepard, and Suzan-Lori Parks have (with varying degrees of irony) obeyed Chekhov’s famous dictum that a gun shown in the ‹rst act should always go off in the last.

Unlike mere chronicity, de‹ned by Frank Kermode as “humanly uninteresting successiveness,” playgoing is a meaningful and funda167

The Stage Life of Props mentally metrical experience, with a beginning, middle, and end.2 As the action unfolds in performance, the spectator is at some level aware that the play itself is winding down, in the same way that a line of iambic pentameter exhausts itself after ‹ve stressed beats. This meter is shaped by the spectator’s expectation of dramatic closure, which, according to June Schlueter, “can occur only when the production of meaning intended and initiated by the beginning is complete.”3 Successful closure results when the audience feels that a play’s ending is a natural outcome of the plot rather than a necessary contrivance of the playwright; “rising” action and “falling” meter pleasingly converge as the action draws to a close. (This counterpoint is clearer on the page, where act and scene numbers serve as visual reminders of the underlying metrical beat over and against which the action unfolds.)

For the attentive spectator, a gun planted in the action early on underscores the unwinding meter of performance that counterpoints the rising action of any play. Marsha Norman’s successful ’night, Mother (1982) provides a modern example. In this meticulously crafted play, stage time and clock time synchronize.4 ’night, Mother begins at around eight o’clock on a Saturday night, precisely the time at which an audience might be settling down to watch a performance of the play. The action proper starts with Jessie Cates retrieving her father’s gun from the attic and announcing to her mother that she intends to shoot herself at the end of the evening. As Thelma Cates struggles to keep Jessie alive, the audience is made continuously aware that the gun behind the bedroom door is both a threat and a promise of dramatic closure; true to form, very shortly after Jessie locks herself behind the door and shoots herself, the play ends. ’night, Mother’s commercial success attests to the affective pleasure of the well-made play, which shapes undifferentiated clock time into linear, structured stage time. The aesthetic pleasure granted the audience reinforces the play’s theme: Jessie’s wish to impose a meaningful shape on her life is realized by means of the conclusive prop.

Despite ’night, Mother’s theatrical effectiveness, the playwright’s need to contrive dramatic closure is often a curse as much as a blessing. Henry J. Schmidt has observed that “as the moment of closure 168

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approaches, the [literary] work tends to become self-conscious, seemingly aware of the judgmental presence of the reader, who, having been captured, must be successfully released. . . . The resulting exertion renders art more arti‹cial, theater more theatrical, as the literary work builds to a ‹nal ›ourish before it disappears from view.”5 Although the gun provides a convenient ready-made ending, the price paid is predictability. “The ubiquitous second-act ‹rearm. Ever notice how frequently one is drawn at the climax of an unconvincing play?” laments theater critic Peter Marks. “In lesser works, the sudden appearance of a weapon often is a sign of dramatic desperation, an indication of the surrender of a less than sublime sensibility, the kind that resorts to force when imagination falls short.”6 This still popular trope was a staple of nineteenth-century melodrama, in which a gun proved a tried-and-true device not only for driving home the moral (the virtuous triumph, and the wicked are punished), but also for bringing down the curtain with a bang. Thus in the play that ends in the female protagonist’s suicide—a melodramatic genre that dates back at least to Friedrich Hebbel’s Maria Magdalene (1843)—a gun often kills protagonist and play with a single shot.7 Already by the mid–nineteenth century, the climactic gunshot was such a hackneyed means of dispatching a drama’s fallen woman that one ‹rst-night wag greeted the melodramatic ending of Olympe’s Marriage (a typical 1855 boulevard drame by Émile Augier) with the cry, “Voilà un coup de pistolet qui tuera la pièce!”8 But as the pièce bien faite of Scribe and Sardou mutated (via the pièce a thèse of Augier and Dumas ‹ls) into the realistic social drama of Ibsen, Shaw, and others, the melodramatic device persisted. Even such a sympathetic treatment of the fallen woman motif as Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893) resorts to the inevitable shot.

Modern dramatists recognized the staleness of the device. Shaw complained that “[t]here is an unwritten but perfectly well understood regulation that members of Mrs Warren’s profession [i.e., prostitution] shall be tolerated on the stage only when they are beautiful, exquisitely dressed, and sumptuously lodged and fed; also that they shall, at the end of the play, die of consumption to the sympathetic tears of the whole audience or step into the next room to commit sui169

The Stage Life of Props cide.”9 Yet dramatists remained unsure what could be put in the gun’s place. Chekhov once wrote in a letter that he knew of “only two ways to end a play,” to get his hero “married” or killed off at the curtain.10 And a century later, Cuban-American playwright Maria Irene Fornes echoed Chekhov’s frustration by confessing in an interview, “I don’t know how to end a play unless . . . who’s going to kill whom?”11 While the eucharistic wafer, the bloody handkerchief, the skull, and the fan have largely quit the stage, the gun still haunts the drama nearly four hundred years after a handheld ‹rearm ‹rst burst onto the scene.12 The modern stage inherited the climactic pistol shot as a dramatic cliché that required bold innovations in order to revitalize its theatrical life.

Playwrights soon discovered that guns could threaten, distort, or even rupture stage time in other ways besides killing it outright.

Sometimes this is simply a matter of ›outing convention, as when Stoppard begins as well as ends Jumpers (1972) with a pistol shot.

More subtly, guns may import the past into the present, like the deadly pistol shot that haunts Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).13 On occasion, guns are not only psychological but actual time machines: a repeated gunshot in J. B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner (1932) introduces two alternative sequences of events, one disastrous for the characters, the other benign.

Like the props considered earlier in this study, then, guns can either accelerate or decelerate the dramatic action. On the modern stage, guns both drive the plot forward (like the bloody handkerchief in The Spanish Tragedy) and plunge character and spectator back into the past (like Yorick’s skull in Hamlet). Besides ratcheting up dramatic tension, property-guns often retard the action by providing breathing spaces for actorial improvisation between lines of dialogue, as when Hoss silently appraises his gun collection in Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime (1972), or when Jessie cleans Daddy’s gun in ’night, Mother. Such moments are easy to skip over when reading the text, since they usually occupy only a line or two of stage directions, but in performance they become self-contained beats charged with dramatic meaning and power. During such “fondled moments” the plot is put on hold, and our attention is focused on the gun’s affective 170

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qualities as an object as well as on its semiotic properties as a sign.14 Sometimes this byplay between actor and gun is an excuse for virtuosity (as when an actor demonstrates his ability to sharpshoot), but more often the actor seizes on the prop as a tool for extended characterization, in the way that one might personalize a fan or a cigarette. At its most extreme, as in Beckett’s Happy Days (1961), such stage business displaces conventional plot altogether.

The gun’s lethal potential has broader thematic implications, moreover. As plays unfold in performance, guns can acquire a history and trajectory beyond human intention, a counterlife that mocks the characters’ efforts to kill time with them. As ironic emblems of mortality, guns recall the Jacobean stage skull, which, as I argued in chapter 3, undermines rather than reasserts the memento mori assurance that despite the transitory nature of our ›esh we all live sub specie aeternitatis. The gun counterpoints our subjective experience of being stranded in mortal time by adding to the skull’s traditional memento mori message (“Remember You Must Die”) the ironic coda: “And that I’ll go on regardless.”15 Like all props, guns are durational objects whose existence implicitly extends beyond any staged events; but unlike other props, their power to destroy human time is potentially limitless.

In this sense, the property-gun thematically opposes the property with which I began, the eucharistic wafer in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. Both props transcend mortal time: the ›esh of Christ embodied in the sacrament is immortal, the gun is unliving metal.

But whereas the real presence of Christ in the Host guarantees redemption of the faithful through Christ’s grace—a point driven home by the conversion of the Jews in the Croxton play—the gun extinguishes human lives without ever expending its own. Since the stage gun traditionally demonstrates a character’s control over temporal fate (even if that control is exerted only by bringing it to a full stop), the gun’s indifference to human life—which it can extinguish at a moment’s notice—is a potent dramatic irony. Ever since Ibsen, playwrights have been quick to exploit the gun’s implied insult to mortal time.

In this chapter, I demonstrate how three playwrights use guns to 171

The Stage Life of Props wrench characters out of what I shall call the play of predictability: the drama in which a gun in the ‹rst act always goes off in the last— usually by dispatching the protagonist. Each gun disrupts the traditional, well-made plot so as to kill time in a different way. I begin by analyzing the pistols in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, which at ‹rst sight follow the play of predictability’s conventional pattern. Seen from this perspective, General Gabler’s melodramatic pistols rigidly enforce the linear, causal trajectory of the well-made play as they drive Hedda to suicide. But seen from another perspective, the pistols assist Hedda’s aesthetic project of creating “[s]omething irradiated with spontaneous beauty” by transcending human time altogether (357).

If Hedda’s pistols appear to enforce linear stage time, in Beckett’s Happy Days the pistol is unmoored from any context in which time makes sense. On Beckett’s bleak, minimalist canvas, time is distorted as the furniture of realism disappears. Winnie’s props no longer embody a recoverable past, as in Ibsen, but taunt her with an interminable present. An ironic parody of Hedda’s fetishized pistols, Winnie’s revolver “Brownie” teases both Winnie and Willie with the promise of escape from mortal time but ultimately refuses to commute their life sentence and thereby con‹rm the linear metrics of the well-made play.

Last, I read Maria Irene Fornes’s Fefu and Her Friends (1977) as a feminist answer to Hedda’s overdetermined pistols. Fefu’s shotgun literally props up the furniture of realism in part 1, only to rupture the frame of realism through a burst of surreal logic in part 3.16 Fefu’s impossibly double-barreled shooting of both a rabbit and her friend Julia with a single shot is a liberatory act, one that shatters causal logic and (despite its violence) suggests the possibility of a transformative feminist dramaturgy that subverts the play of predictability altogether. If Ibsen uses Hedda’s pistols to kill time by transcending as well as ful‹lling the telos of the female suicide play, and Beckett deploys Brownie to prolong time and frustrate the spectators’ desire for closure, Fornes uses Fefu’s ‹nal shot to buy time—both for her protagonist and for her audience.

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The Double Life of Hedda Gabler’s Pistols Before writing Hedda Gabler, Ibsen had perfected his technique of representing time spatially by means of fateful props. Like other playwrights who limited the action to a single room and a discrete, successive time period, Ibsen needed to ‹nd a way to dramatize the past while avoiding lengthy exposition. Objects were his solution, and in Ibsen they both embody the past and propel the plot.17 While Ibsen’s dramatically charged objects—such as the incriminating letter in A Doll’s House (1879)—outwardly resemble the plot devices that crowd the well-made plays of Scribe and Sardou, Ibsen’s props embody the decisive in›uence of the past on the present: they externalize his characters’ internal (and hence ethical) characteristics, which emerge as damning evidence in the forensic anatomizing of the psyche that is Ibsen’s project. In Ibsen’s spatialized dramaturgy, no prop is innocent; his drawing rooms are symbolic mine‹elds in which virtually every item—a pile of books, a hat on a chair, a letter in a mailbox—is a depth-charge primed to explode into revelation at its allotted point in the action. Mrs. Alving’s books, Nora’s forged signature, and Hedda Gabler’s pistols are no mere plot devices, but windows into the soul.

Having experimented with more overt symbolism in his two previous plays, Rosmersholm (1886) and The Lady from the Sea (1888), in Hedda Gabler Ibsen returned to the realistic bourgeois interior of his earlier plays of social realism. Mimetic realism admirably suited Ibsen’s thematic ends: what better way to dramatize the crushing effects of Hedda’s sti›ing heredity and environment than to imprison Hedda in her drawing room?

Within this naturalistic environment, Hedda’s pistols perform a double function, for they seem to obey two time signatures in performance as we view them alternately from a synoptic perspective and from a processual perspective. At key moments, the pistols retard the action and demand to be read as elements that signify spatially in a pictorial mise-en-scène framed by the proscenium. But at other moments, Hedda’s pistols (or at least one of them) propel the

173

The Stage Life of Props plot toward its dénouement by becoming invisible instruments of blackmail and suicide. Hedda Gabler might be subtitled “The Revenge of the Prop,” since at every turn Hedda’s pistols frustrate her attempt to freeze time into an aesthetic image. Instead they insist upon the inexorable causal logic of female suicide exempli‹ed by Hedda’s contemporary, Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Hedda’s ‹nal act is tonally ambiguous, however. Is her suicide a capitulation to the play of predictability, or a sardonic parody of its melodramatic sentiment?

Hedda’s attitude toward her pistols exempli‹es their double life as pictorial emblem and plot device. As souvenirs of Hedda’s motherless life with the general, the phallic props become associated with Hedda’s yearnings for freedom and power.18 Each time her urge for agency is frustrated, Hedda reaches for her pistols, but like the child in Hedda’s womb, the pistols are a continual reminder that her options are running out. The pistols thus hover between two modes of killing time. On the one hand, Hedda mobilizes the pistols in a disastrous attempt to create “an element of beauty” by orchestrating Ejlert Lövborg’s death as an aesthetic triumph (355). On the other hand, the pistols resist Hedda’s attempt to harness them as weapons against time: Lövborg’s pistol goes off unexpectedly and falls into the hands of the police, leaving Hedda no means to avoid blackmail and scandal other than suicide. This tension between Hedda’s pictorial strategy and the play’s linear momentum becomes explicit when one pistol leaves the set in order to spring its melodramatic trap between acts 3 and 4, while its fellow remains behind on stage as Hedda’s ‹nal means of escape.

In act 1, spatial dramaturgy dominates over forward momentum (plot). In some sense, the set is the action, for the act limns Hedda’s feelings of claustrophobia and boredom in the cozy bourgeois sphere of the Tesman villa. Hedda’s desire for agency and freedom is displaced into the aesthetic sphere: she obsessively rearranges her environment, softening the light and remonstrating against any item whose presence she ‹nds offensive (Tesman’s slippers, Miss Tesman’s hat, the bouquets of ›owers). But these petty assertions of control cannot disguise the fact that she is trapped in a static frame: when Hedda, left alone on stage for the ‹rst time, “crosses the room, 174

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raising her arms and clenching her hands, as if in fury,” Ibsen stages a naturalistic equivalent of Edvard Munch’s expressionist painting The Scream (276). Hedda then pulls back the curtains from the glass door and stands there looking out at the withered autumn leaves.

These two portraitlike images—one dynamic, one static—are the ‹rst in a series of “animated pictures” that arrest the relentless forward motion of the plot. In the following acts, the pistols themselves brake the action and allow such emblematic moments to crystallize.

Act 1’s spatial dramaturgy introduces several fateful objects. The most prominent is the portrait of General Gabler, which hangs on the back wall of the inner room as a constant visual reminder of Hedda’s past (a link underscored by the play’s title).19 Further, emblematic properties highlight the incompatibility between Hedda and Tesman: Tesman has his beloved slippers, which repulse Hedda, while Hedda is devoted to her father’s pistols, which terrify Tesman. When Tesman refuses Hedda’s (crudely symbolic) requests for a manservant and saddle horse, Hedda taunts him with “those dangerous things!” (p. 295). But in addition to their patently phallic symbolism, which links Hedda retrospectively to her father, the pistols are already implicated in the play’s sluggishly emerging plot, since Mrs. Elvsted has mentioned Lövborg’s ongoing attachment to the mysterious woman who once threatened to shoot him.

When Hedda’s pistols ‹rst appear at the beginning of the next act, however, they arrest the action as part of an animated picture. Hedda stands alone in the inner room by the open glass door that leads to the garden, loading a pistol whose fellow lies in an open pistol case on the writing table (which has replaced the piano that stood there in act 1). Hedda is framed for the audience by the inner proscenium formed by the wide, curtained doorway of the inner room; her father’s portrait hangs above and behind her, thus forming a composite portrait of father and daughter. To borrow Henry James’s summation of the play, we see “the picture not of an action but of a condition.”20 Any stage business accompanying Hedda’s mime lies outside the rhythm determined by the dialogue. It is up to the actress how to kill the time allotted to the scene, which can expand or contract accord175

The Stage Life of Props ing to her wishes (and those of the director). Here, for example, is how Janet Suzman ‹lled out Ibsen’s brief stage directions: I thought perhaps I might not load the gun in full view. Gives the game away too soon. . . . If you are loading a gun it is pretty obvious that you will be using it sooner or later. And what about the piano? Why not play it? But she’s too unsettled to sit down. So, I ran the butt of the gun down the keys. An ugly sound. De‹ant. I wandered into the main room surveying the newly arranged furniture. It was better than it had been, but neither pleased me nor displeased me. I shoved the back of the rocking-chair as I passed. It rocked noisily on its own. Ghostly.

I stood, unsure of what to do, toying with time. Time toying with me? The clock ticked. I remembered the gun in my hand and began polishing it with a piece of lint. What a splendid gleaming weapon. I loved it. I checked the sights and turned to take mock aim at something. Daddy’s frozen glare caught my eye. I hated him. I nearly squeezed the trigger. Patricide! Don’t bother you fool—he’s well and truly dead. Ah, but what does it feel like to kill yourself, I thought. I slowly brought the gun to my own temple, interested by the feel of cold metal on warm skin. It felt good to me, and strangely desirable. I must investigate whether this looks as ferocious and beautiful as I think. I went to the mirror above the desk to look, and posed in front of it—as an actress might, I fancied. A stray wisp of hair annoyed me. Spoiled the picture. I smoothed it into place, diverted from morbidity by vanity. I wished ›eetingly I had hair like Thea’s. I heard the crackle of leaves from outside, and whirled around to see the ‹gure of the Judge picking his way towards my house.

The back way! How dare he, I thought. Too presumptuous by half. I shall give him a fright. So I did!

Now I expect the purist will tut. But I don’t mind. For me this one minute charade expanded her dilemma most explicitly.

Emptiness, boredom, pistols, vanity, death and dying, time creeping past. “Well, for God’s sake, what am I to do?” she cries to the Judge. What indeed?21 176

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For the actress, the pistol is no symbol but a concrete acting tool that successively releases feelings of sexual excitement, hatred, morbidity, and vanity. The mime allows each actress to characterize “her” Hedda. Thus for Elizabeth Robins, who ‹rst played Hedda in Britain, the pistols were “allies” that symbolized Hedda’s power of escape from sexual enslavement, whereas for Minnie Maddern Fiske they were mere toys and thus a sign of Hedda’s cowardice.22 For Hedda herself, the gun offers a “time out”—a temporary breathing space outside the relentless trajectory of the plot. This temporal freedom is mirrored spatially: the scene takes place in the liminal safety zone of the inner room, Hedda’s sanctum, which connects the Tesman area downstage to the invisible bedrooms to the rear.

In the next beat of the play, however, the animated picture dissolves into action as the play’s meter starts running again. Hedda sees Judge Brack approaching the house by the back way and shoots at him. (The gesture is a joke on Hedda’s part but establishes for the audience that the pistols are not just toys.) A ›ustered Brack appears and disarms Hedda, “taking the pistol gently out of her hand” (297).

Brack counters Hedda’s hold on the pistol’s meaning by literally taking it out of her hands, and in this exchange, we see the pistol reclaimed as a masculine prop.

Once more, the pistols arrest the action in a speaking picture, which this time juxtaposes man and prop. As Brack toys with Hedda’s pistol, it begins to ‹ll with additional meaning by acquiring a mysterious past. “Ah, this one. I know it well,” Brack remarks, before replacing it in its case (297); again, this beat can expand or contract in performance to suit the actor. Brack’s appraisal of the pistol is more erotic than practical. Brack ‹nds the idea of power over Hedda erotically stimulating, and his disarming action anticipates his eventual triumph over the pistol—and Hedda herself. Meanwhile, the creepy detail of his prior acquaintance with this particular pistol is never explained (although Brack’s ability to identify it proves crucial later). Evidently the prop’s history extends beyond Hedda to include a male circuit that may link Judge Brack to the general himself. The fondled moment ends when Brack replaces the pistol and shuts the case, and Hedda asserts her control once more by placing 177

The Stage Life of Props the case in the drawer of the writing desk. The pistols are dramatically primed, hidden but not forgotten.

By this point in the play, then, Ibsen’s fetishized pistols have acquired a good deal of dramatic weight. Psychologically, they suggest that Hedda’s frustration with her present circumstances stems from her desire for the sexual and social prerogatives of a man; her shooting “up into the blue” (296) literalizes her emotional aimlessness and her anger at having sold herself too cheaply. The pistols are a sexual talisman: they link Hedda to the dissolute but brilliant Ejlert Lövborg, but they also intrigue Judge Brack, who has his own mysterious connection to the pistols. Temporally, the pistols brake the action and produce arresting visual images that demand the spectator’s interpretation.

The fateful pistols are neglected until the end of act 3, but in the meantime Hedda’s frustration mounts, with disastrous results. The tension between the snowballing events of the plot and Hedda’s wish to arrest biological time (symbolized for her by the growing child in her womb) intensi‹es. Instead of turning to her pistols for relief, she decides to wrest Lövborg away from the redemptive in›uence of Thea Elvsted and mold him into a Dionysian ‹gure “[w]ith vineleaves in his hair” (324). Deprived of control over her own life, she states: “I want, for once in my life, to have power over a human being’s fate” (324). But Hedda can only exert that power in the aesthetic realm, seeking to transform Ejlert the man into a godlike icon.

The dissolute Lövborg is made out of recalcitrant clay, however; tempted by Hedda to drink, he accompanies Brack and Tesman to Brack’s bachelor party, after which he ends up arrested in a drunken brawl at Mademoiselle Diana’s brothel. The predatory Brack’s sudden visits unnervingly punctuate the action and remind us both that the play’s clock is ticking and that the pistols remain un‹red: “Oh, I don’t think people shoot their farmyard cocks” (338). Signi‹cantly, all of Hedda’s failed attempts to kill time according to her own aesthetic take place offstage; she herself remains trapped in Ibsen’s proscenium frame.

In act 3, Hedda’s favored pistol (Pistol A) and Lövborg’s manuscript are mobilized as tools for suicide and symbolic murder respec178

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tively. These fateful props become two ways for Hedda to kill time: she deploys the gun to orchestrate Lövborg’s suicide and then burns the manuscript that is Thea and Lövborg’s child (and an ef‹gy of her own). Hedda’s most dramatic bid for agency arrives at the close of act 3, when Lövborg confesses losing the manuscript during his drunken spree and announces to Hedda his intention to kill himself. Hedda faces a choice: both Lövborg’s manuscript and the pistol case are now locked in the same drawer of the writing desk. Should she return the manuscript, and thereby redeem Thea and Lövborg’s relationship, or give Lövborg the pistol and destroy her rival’s child? As Hedda goes to the writing table and opens the drawer, the play hovers between two possible outcomes; when she returns with the pistol, the past bleeds into the present and forms another animated picture in which the prop demands to be read by the audience.

This new picture might be subtitled, “Lövborg Confronts the Past in the Form of a Pistol”: Lövborg (looking at her). Is that the souvenir?

Hedda (nodding slowly). Do you recognize it? It was aimed at you once.

Lövborg. You should have used it then.

Hedda. There it is. Use it yourself now.

Lövborg (putting the pistol in his breast pocket). Thanks.

Hedda. And beautifully, Ejlert Lövborg. Promise me that.

Lövborg. Good-bye, Hedda Gabler. (He goes out by the hall door.) (344) This exchange visibly reverses that between Brack and Hedda in act 2, when Brack symbolically disarmed Hedda—indeed, it is the very same pistol. Here Hedda arms Lövborg with (as she thinks) the courage and the nobility to do something “beautiful” that she cannot accomplish herself. The prop creates another breathing space for the actors: the terse dialogue leaves open Lövborg’s precise attitude to the pistol—which may range anywhere from erotic attraction to sardonic resignation—as once again Ibsen gives the actor some leeway in terms of how to handle the prop. Hedda’s motivation is clear, how179

The Stage Life of Props ever. She rebels against time by seeking to remove Lövborg from time, just as she goes on to burn the manuscript in another animated picture (which might be subtitled “Killing the Child”).

For the ‹rst time, a pistol leaves the stage. Paradoxically, once Hedda’s pistols are separated, the play’s two time signatures— Hedda’s pictorial strategy of freezing time as art, and the linear trajectory of the well-made play—clash. A whole day passes between the end of act 3 and the beginning of act 4, and a weird foreshortening of stage time results. Ironically, Hedda’s bid to freeze stage time by means of Pistol A only telescopes the action: Brack arrives to tell Hedda that her pistol has discharged in Lövborg’s pocket at Mademoiselle Diana’s. Instead of killing Lövborg beautifully, the pistol has grotesquely unmanned him by shooting him in the genitals. The pistol is now in the hands of the police, and if Brack identi‹es it a scandal will ensue; the price of his silence is her sexual acquiescence to a triangular relationship. Loosened from Hedda’s grip, the pistol behaves exactly like any incriminating prop in a French Boulevard drame. Moreover, because of the act break, it seems to have done so in no time at all.

In a sense, the melodramatic pistol insists that Hedda is trapped by genre as much as by circumstance. Ibsen’s own notes comment, “Life for Hedda resolves itself as a farce that isn’t ‘worth seeing through to the end.’”23 Hedda’s attempt to create something beautiful by means of the prop back‹res: “The ridiculous and the sordid lies like a curse on everything I so much as touch” (359). Hedda’s “choice” between pistols turns out to be a choice between two modes of melodrama.

She can either succumb to the fate proposed by Pistol A—Brack’s sexual blackmail and the triangular relationship—or else obey the telos of the female suicide play by shooting herself with Pistol B—an act straight out of Scribe or Augier. “That is the kind of thing one says. One doesn’t do it,” scoffs Brack, implying that shooting oneself only happens in the bourgeois theater (361).

The invisible Pistol B dominates the last moments of the play. As her ‹nale, Hedda stages an alternative ending to the script she has been given, in which her remaining pistol becomes a central prop.

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Rather than being framed unconsciously, like her dramatic predecessors in suicide, Hedda deliberately constructs a speaking picture that demands to be read on her own terms. She begins by arranging the set to her speci‹cations. Under the guise of preparing her desk for Tesman and Mrs. Elvsted to work at, Hedda pulls the pistol case out of the drawer, covers it with music paper, and carries it into the inner room, where she places it on the piano in the wings. Now all of her scant precious objects—her piano, her pistols, and her portrait of her father—are sequestered in her sanctum, which becomes a stagewithin-stage framed by its own curtained proscenium.

As Hedda retires to the inner room and draws the curtains, the audience’s attention splits between the visible scene downstage, which consists of Mrs. Elvsted and Tesman working at the writing desk and Brack in the easy-chair, and the invisible room behind the curtain, in which Hedda puts the ‹nishing touches to her scene.24 There is a wildly inappropriate burst of dance music from the piano—an ironic overture—and then Hedda pops her head out between the curtains to assure Tesman, “I will be quiet in future” (363). A shot is heard within. Tesman pulls open the curtain to reveal a lifeless Hedda stretched out on the sofa with a bullet through her temple; the play ends with Brack’s famous line, “But, merciful God! One doesn’t do that kind of thing!” (364).

Hedda’s suicide is her last artwork, a self-consciously aesthetic, painterly act designed to rectify Lövborg’s botched attempt to kill himself beautifully. No sooner is the shocking spectacle of Hedda’s lifeless body revealed than Tesman supplies a caption: “Shot herself!

Shot herself in the temple! Think of it!” (364). The frozen image of woman, pistol, and portrait begs interpretation, however. As Charles Lyons indicates, “Hedda’s suicide is a suicide without a note, without an explanatory text. Whereas part of the spectator’s response may be to use the data of the text to construct a motive or explanatory narrative, the visual image itself—the display of Hedda’s body—both invites and frustrates interpretation.”25 Ibsen’s text leaves open whether Hedda succeeds in killing time on her own terms. Does the pistol become an instrument of aesthetic triumph that ironizes the

181

The Stage Life of Props telos of the female suicide play, or does it turn against her even at the last and con‹rm her sense that “The ridiculous and the sordid lies like a curse on everything I so much as touch” (359)?26 Much depends on the visual placement of the gun relative to the body in the ‹nal tableau once Tesman pulls the curtains aside.

According to Ibsen’s text, “Hedda is lying lifeless, stretched out on the sofa” (364). The pistol’s exact whereabouts are unspeci‹ed; the prop may dangle from Hedda’s lifeless hand, lie beside her on the sofa, or else lie on the ›oor nearby. At the English premiere of Hedda Gabler at the Vaudeville in 1891, “[Elizabeth] Robins’ posture demonstrated Hedda’s triumph: she lay with her head back and her face up but slightly averted, with the metal-white pistol (the Scribean ‘fateful prop’) in the hand that had fallen across her black dress.

Ambiguities were carefully ironed out: Hedda had de‹nitely ‘done it beautifully.’”27 Conversely, Ingmar Bergman, who has directed the play three times, comments: “The irony in all this is that she dies such an ugly death anyway—that she ends up lying there with her rump in the air.”28 In short, the tableau can be arranged to demonstrate either Hedda’s triumph over the pistol or the pistol’s triumph over Hedda.

If one pistol insists on what Ibsen called farce by discharging in Lövborg’s pocket, the other escapes into irony—although at whose expense the play refuses to say. Ibsen was accused of resorting to melodrama by at least one English critic.29 But such criticism fails to acknowledge Hedda’s own ironic awareness that she is playing a part—her willingness to go through the motions, together with her refusal to display the requisite affect associated with the dramatic ‹gure of the female suicide (compare Hedda’s insulting dance tune to Miss Julie’s narcoleptic acceptance of Jean’s razor in Strindberg’s Miss Julie). It is perhaps this coolness of affect that confused the play’s early audiences and critics, primed by the well-made play to feel superior to (and thus sympathy for) the ›awed beings on stage.30 In the end, Hedda’s pistols back‹re against the audience’s expectations by observing the letter rather than the spirit of the female suicide play. They both con‹rm the telos of the well-made play and ironize that telos by allowing Hedda to leave the play of predictabil182

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ity on her own terms—perhaps. The ‹nal irony may be left to Hedda, who ends two lives with one shot: Hedda’s suicide is also a child murder in which she ruthlessly stops two biological clocks. Hedda Gabler’s pistols alternate between spatial and linear time signatures; in performance, the disorienting effect is one of simultaneous motion and stillness. They change everything, and nothing. Frustrating the expectations of the female suicide play even as they outwardly ful‹ll it, the pistols refuse to divulge just on whose terms stage time is being killed.

The Revolver as Impasse in Happy Days If Hedda Gabler depicts a race against time, Happy Days dramatizes a marathon effort to ‹ll time. Beckett abandons mimetic realism in order to magnify Winnie’s struggle to get through her day. Winnie’s predicament of being buried up to her waist (and subsequently up to her neck) in earth literalizes Hedda Gabler’s feeling of claustrophobic entrapment in the Tesman villa. In fact, Winnie’s nightmarish environment is an expressionist version of Hedda’s, stripped as it is of the furniture of realism. Ibsen’s bourgeois drawing room is replaced by a harsh expanse of scorched grass; airlessness and autumnal ›owers by bright light and blazing heat; the fawning Tesman by the taciturn Willie. Most pertinently, Hedda’s principal weapon against boredom—her diverting pistols—is replaced by Winnie’s bag of props, which include her beloved revolver Brownie.

Just as Beckett rejects Ibsen’s mimetic use of spatial perspective in order to confront the spectator with an impossibly frontal image— that of a tiny head (and torso) of a woman engulfed by a huge expanse of earth stretching into the distance—so too Beckett rejects what Benjamin K. Bennett has usefully termed Ibsen’s “temporal perspectivism.” According to Bennett, “Just as the painter gives the impression of planes situated behind the place of his canvas—by using lines that are assumed to be parallel in reality but converge in his drawing—so the dramatist, by making his plot depend on events in the relatively distant past, gives the impression of a temporal continuum extending beyond the limits of what is performed.”31 As we 183

The Stage Life of Props have seen, Ibsen creates this illusion of temporal depth by smuggling the past onstage in the form of objects. In Bert O. States’s formula, General Gabler’s pistols are “both the relics of a causal past and omens of things to come.”32 As they move through the play, the pistols absorb psychological causality and fatal consequence, for events in Hedda Gabler are progressive, cumulative, and nonrepeating.

Incarnating the principle of causal logic, Hedda’s gift of Pistol A to Lövborg (event A) results in Lövborg’s death (event B) and in the recovery of the pistol by the police (event C), which itself enables Brack’s sexual blackmail (event D) and precipitates Hedda’s suicide with Pistol B (event E). One might say that Pistol B’s continuous presence on Ibsen’s set spatializes Hedda’s fate.

Beckett’s objects offer no such temporal key to the characters’ fate, for in Beckett’s plays subjective time belies the comforting contours of linear causality. Time is at once brief—“The light gleams an instant,” cries Pozzo, “then it’s night once more”33—and in‹nitely prolonged: “Yes, something seems to have occurred, something has seemed to occur, and nothing has occurred, nothing at all . . .” muses Winnie.34 For Winnie, time is shapeless, a succession of present moments to be endured rather than appreciated.

In Beckett’s own production of Happy Days at the Royal Court in 1979, with Billie Whitelaw as Winnie, Beckett exaggerated the quality of discontinuity in Winnie’s time-experience. “‘One of the clues of the play is interruption,’ Beckett stated at rehearsal. ‘Something begins; something else begins. She begins but doesn’t carry through with it. She’s constantly interrupted or interrupting herself. She’s an interrupted being. She’s a bit mad. Manic is not wrong, but too big.’”35 In his production notebook, Beckett reminded himself: “Relate frequency of broken speech and action to discontinuity of time. Winnie’s time experience incomprehensible transport from one inextricable present to the next, those past unremembered, those to come inconceivable.”36 In Bennett’s terms, Ibsen’s temporal perspectivism is replaced by “temporal expressionism”: time is at once distorted, discontinuous, and repetitive, and it seems to move at bewilderingly different velocities.37 The earth in Happy Days is both getting hotter and not getting hotter; day and night no longer exist, 184

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but a piercing bell signals the time for waking and the time for sleeping; Winnie’s sight is failing, yet the same as it ever was. At any given moment in the play, time can seem entropic, frozen, or repetitive.

Throughout the play, however, memory consistently fails to anchor Winnie in meaningful time: “Then . . . now . . . what dif‹culties here, for the mind” (161).

Like Winnie herself, Winnie’s props are jolted out of the frame of realism, together with realism’s reliance on spatial and temporal perspective. In contrast to Ibsen’s fateful objects, which demand to be “plotted” by the spectator, Beckett’s props are fragments of reality unmoored from history, memory, and function.38 Neither metonyms grounding the characters in a recognizable socioeconomic milieu, nor metaphors standing for ideas beyond themselves, they are just there. We are not told where they came from or how they got there, although tantalizing hints are occasionally dropped (we learn, for instance, that Winnie’s bag was a gift from Willie). In Russian formalist terms, Beckett’s props are defamiliarized: the signi‹er is estranged from its signi‹ed so that a pistol (for example) becomes a sensual object whose phenomenal properties are uplifted to the view of the audience. When Hedda toys with her pistols, she wields a compensatory phallic symbol; when Winnie kisses Brownie, she kisses a prop—one that cannot even take its own phallicism seriously.

If Hedda’s self-appointed task is to mobilize her pistols so as to freeze life into art, Winnie’s aims are more modest. She uses her props as distractions from her horri‹c situation, and as compensation for the loss of Willie, who has elected to live behind the mound.

Yet in both Hedda Gabler and Happy Days, the prop resists obeying the will of the subject. Winnie’s props adamantly refuse to play along, and their “defused vitality” mocks Winnie’s attempts to bring them to life.39 “Ah yes, things have their life, that is what I always say, things have a life,” Winnie reassures herself (162). But that very life consists in the object’s indifference to the human. Winnie marshals her props as ballast against psychic disintegration, but every attempt to do so only underscores their failure to console: “Take my looking glass. (Pause.) It doesn’t need me” (162). Winnie can mobilize her props, but she cannot animate them.

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The Stage Life of Props Confusingly, Winnie’s props seem to inhabit several temporalities at once. In the ‹rst place, things are running out (toothpaste, lipstick, music box). In the second place, things are going on (as Winnie removes each item from her bag, she arranges it on the mound beside her where it remains visible until Winnie replaces it at the end of act 1). Most mysteriously of all, things are coming back. Winnie announces that the mirror that she shatters on the mound will be in her bag tomorrow, and her parasol (which combusts in act 1 and is extinguished by the earth) reappears, phoenixlike and unreachable, beside her on the mound in act 2. The parasol’s reappearance marks it explicitly as a stage prop (things wear out; props return each night of the run).40 Perhaps the most horri‹c implication of this fact is that Winnie herself is caught in a loop of eternal repetition rather than organic decline.41 It is hard to say whether Winnie herself is running down, going on, or coming back: “Ah well, no worse . . . No better, no worse, no change,” is her motto in act 1, although by act 2 the strain is beginning to tell: “Then . . . now . . . what dif‹culties here, for the mind. (Pause.) To have been always what I am—and so changed from what I was” (161). In one sense at least, Winnie resembles her props: the audience knows that “Winnie” will be back, same time same place, tomorrow.

Within this prop-driven drama, which elevates stage business to the status of dramatic action, Brownie occupies a privileged position.

The revolver is the only prop that Winnie attempts to engage in dialogue, and it is her only named object. Once Winnie completes her ritual of praying, brushing her teeth, and rousing Willie with her parasol, she “[t]urns to bag, rummages in it, brings out revolver, holds it up, kisses it rapidly, puts it back” (141). The pistol’s presence in Winnie’s bag is an amusing visual joke, as is Winnie’s gesture of affection. The kiss ironizes the gun: Brownie is uplifted to our view as a prop and replaced in the bag before it can be “distorted into intelligibility” as a symbol.42 Yet it is hard not to detect an echo of Hedda’s erotically fetishized pistols, especially since Brownie offers a potential “Hedda solution” to Winnie’s plight of being stuck in mortal time. The incongruous gun is both fetishized and ironized (“no 186

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symbols where none intended,” as Beckett joked in his addendum to Watt).43 Later in the act, ignoring her own advice not to “overdo” the bag, Winnie allows herself “just one quick dip” with her eyes closed and is surprised by Brownie’s reappearance: “You again!” (151). As Winnie weighs the revolver in her palm, she muses, “You’d think the weight of this thing would bring it down among the . . . last rounds.

But no. It doesn’t. Ever uppermost, like Browning. (Pause.) Brownie . . .” (151).44 Brownie becomes an excuse for Winnie to address Willie, whose response she craves throughout the play. The revolver apparently once tempted him to suicide: Remember Brownie, Willie? (Pause.) Remember how you used to keep on at me to take it away from you? Take it away, Winnie, take it away, before I put myself out of my misery.

(Back front. Derisive.) Your misery! (To revolver.) Oh I suppose it’s a comfort to know you’re there, but I’m tired of you.

(Pause.) I’ll leave you out, that’s what I’ll do. (She lays revolver on ground to her right.) There, that’s your home from this day out. (151) James Knowlson comments, “The dramatic effectiveness of the moment at which Winnie takes the revolver out of her bag depends hardly at all on recognizing the word-play on Browning as both a gun and a poet (and the quotation from Browning’s poetry) but hinges rather on the incongruous presence of the gun among the other feminine articles and on the contrast between nostalgia and the actual threat of suicide.”45 For Winnie, Brownie is at once a prop with which to tease Willie, a potential Willie substitute should Willie fail in his role of interlocutor, and a talismanic guarantee that release from the “misery” of being is indeed possible.

As in Chekhov, a technical problem faced by the playwright is translated into an existential problem faced by the character, to which the pistol (suicide) seems to provide a neat solution. The pistol is introduced as a potential escape hatch that will resolve both the existential dilemma of the character (“How can I bear unhappi187

The Stage Life of Props ness?”) and the dramaturgical dilemma of the playwright (“How can I end this play?”). But while Chekhov’s early characters Ivanov and Treplev obey this logic, for Chekhov’s later protagonists, such as Uncle Vanya, the pistol is revealed as an inadequate solution to the problem of being in time. Thus in Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, the gun introduced early in the action fails to kill anyone, and the characters are left where they began, stranded in mortal time.

Chekhov dramatizes his repudiation of the melodramatic ending by having Vanya return Astrov’s morphia bottle. In just the same way, Beckett dangles the possibility of suicide before his characters—the poison pill in Eleuthéria, the tree in Waiting for Godot, Brownie in Happy Days—only to reject suicide as either an existential or a dramaturgical solution to the problem of durational existence in time.

Brownie embodies a conventional ending that the drama can no longer endorse.

Thus Winnie can never pull Brownie’s trigger, for should Brownie fail her (as her other props continually do), Winnie’s life sentence would be con‹rmed and Brownie exposed as comfortless metal. In the meantime, Brownie poses another threat to Winnie’s status quo.

She can use the revolver as a lure to draw Willie, but she must keep it away from him or risk an even worse fate: talking on alone into the void forever. In an evident break from her routine, Winnie elects to keep Brownie beside her on the mound where she can keep an eye on it while she turns to her other props for diversion. This change of heart is reemphasized at the end of the act, when Winnie arrests her gesture of replacing the revolver in the bag. By keeping the revolver squarely in view for the rest of the play, Beckett cunningly feeds our expectation that the revolver will indeed ‹re—even as he suggests that, like the arrival of Godot, this will never happen.

Brownie’s affective impact on the spectator alters in act 2. Instead of the periodic appearances that punctuate Winnie’s act 1 prop-play, the revolver continuously occupies the spectator’s visual ‹eld. Winnie is now buried up to her neck in earth and can no longer manipulate her objects. The items left visible on the mound—Winnie’s head, Brownie, the bag, and the parasol—form a composite still life iconographic in its starkness. Winnie’s bag tantalizes Winnie with means 188

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by which to make time pass more quickly; her combusted parasol, which has magically regenerated to appear beside her on the mound, illustrates the impossibility of extinguishment by the earth; and Brownie, “conspicuous to her right on mound,” playfully dangles the (im)possibility of killing time right before our eyes (160). The thread connecting the object to the subject’s intention, already frayed in Hedda Gabler, is now utterly severed—along with the object’s temporal and spatial depth. Lived, subjective time does not seep into the pistol but bounces off it. Instead of kairos, “a point in time ‹lled with signi‹cance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end,” Brownie’s mute presence on the mound partakes of chronos, “purely successive, disorganized time of the sort that we need to humanize.”46 The stage pistol, which conventionally turns chronos into kairos (as in ’night, Mother), is here displayed as a fossil left over from the play of predictability.

Deprived of the use and comfort of her props, Winnie tries to compensate for her temporal confusion and fear of loneliness by weaving narratives around her unreachable objects. But Winnie becomes increasingly disoriented and her speech more fragmented and discontinuous. Now lacking any evidence that Willie is listening, she reassures him that Brownie is still there beside her, as if to coax him to her side of the mound. Winnie’s repeated cry that “Brownie is there, Willie,” consequently acts as one of the slowest entrance cues in drama (162). After several minutes of agonizing monologue, in which a story built around an imaginary prop (Mildred’s waxen Dolly) climaxes in Winnie/Millie’s terri‹ed scream, Willie appears around the corner of the mound, suggestively “dressed to kill” (166), and begins to crawl up toward Winnie—and Brownie. Winnie seeks reassurance from Willie—“Is it me you’re after, Willie . . . or is it something else?”—but she is alarmed by his expression: “Don’t look at me like that!” (167). Willie never responds directly; his one sound is the ambiguous syllable “Win” after he has slid down the mound in defeat.

Winnie interprets Willie’s sound as an affectionate diminutive of her name, and she sings the Waltz Duet from The Merry Widow, blithely changing the last line from “I love you so” to “You love me 189

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Willie (John C. Becker) reaching toward Winnie (Ruth White) and Brownie in Happy Days, Cherry Lane Theatre, 1962. (Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.)

so!” But the play ends in impasse as Winnie and Willie look at each other over a long pause. The tableau represents a standoff in their marriage; it is as if Hedda Gabler’s curtain fell on Tesman walking in on Hedda with the gun to her head. We never learn whether Willie intended to shoot himself, or Winnie, or both.

In Happy Days, the revolver recalls not the breaking string in The Cherry Orchard, which marks the passing of a way of life, but the broken cord that declines to hang Didi and Gogo at the end of Waiting for Godot. As in his earlier play, Beckett refuses to release his characters from imprisonment in mortal time, even as he dangles that possibility before them and us. By failing to ‹re at the end, Brownie subverts the play of predictability with an irony at once hilarious and 190

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terrifying. Beckett rejects the alignment of rising action with falling meter and thus the contract of dramatic closure itself. In its ironic nonresponse to Winnie’s plight, Brownie exposes the bankruptcy of the revolver as a device to kill time.

The Double-Barreled Ending: Fefu and Her Friends Once Beckett’s Brownie decisively ruptured the linear metrics of the well-made play, it became hard for the stage to reclaim the pistol from irony.47 Although Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother demonstrates that the device can still be deployed effectively, many playwrights have followed Beckett’s lead in subjecting the climactic pistol to parody. In two of Sam Shepard’s plays, for example, a character’s attempt to resolve the action by means of a gun fails. Cowboy Mouth (1971) ends with the click of a hammer striking an empty chamber, and Seduced (1978) ends with the absurd image of one man repeatedly ‹ring a pistol at another, who refuses to die.48 After Brownie, it is hard to take Hedda and her portentous pistols seriously.

Yet Maria Irene Fornes’s Fefu and Her Friends (1977) represents a feminist attempt to come to terms with General Gabler’s legacy that is at once serious and playful.49 Indeed, Fornes has claimed in an interview that Hedda Gabler was the one play she had read before becoming a playwright (although her dramaturgy subsequently owed more to Chekhov and Beckett). She has also attested to the revelatory experience of seeing the premiere of Waiting for Godot in Paris, where she was overwhelmed by Beckett’s theatrical clarity: “Imagine a writer whose theatricality is so amazing and so important that you could see a play of his, not understand one word, and be shook up.”50 Fefu and Her Friends owes something to all three of Fornes’s male precursors. Like Chekhov’s drama, the play is a portrait of a group of people (in this case women) coping with unhappiness, and is built around a plotless series of lyrical, impressionistic moments (a water fight, a rehearsal, singing a song around a piano). Like Ibsen in Hedda Gabler, Fornes carefully frames a gun at the beginning that 191

The Stage Life of Props will go off at the end; like Beckett in Happy Days, however, Fornes wrenches the gun out of the context of the well-made play in order to frustrate predictability. But whereas Beckett implies that no mitigation of human suffering is possible, Fornes buys time for her suffering protagonist and thereby suggests to her audience “some kind of spiritual survival, a process of thought.”51 In reviving such a prominent role for the gun (and raising the stakes from a pistol to a shotgun at that), Fornes subverts the Hedda syndrome of female suicide by contriving an ending that critiques the implicitly “masculine” dramaturgy of the well-made play.52 Fornes translates her own confrontation with this male-centered dramaturgy into her characters’ experience of oppression. A recurrent theme in her plays is how patriarchal violence prevents women from establishing individual autonomy and forging community. Fornes’s work often features a vulnerable and self-destructive female protagonist, of whom Hedda Gabler is a prototype. In Mud (1983), Lloyd shoots Mae when she threatens to grow independent of him; in Sarita (1984), a spirited young woman stabs her feckless lover; and in The Conduct of Life (1985), Leticia shoots her abusive husband, then places the revolver in the hands of his twelve-year-old torture victim, Nena.

Fornes has spoken in interviews about the dif‹culty of ending a play satisfactorily, and of the violence that the need for dramatic closure forces on the playwright: Often, when you’ve become very involved in the life of a character, when you’re riveted, and the play ends, you have a feeling of rupture. This world has died. But maybe that feeling of rupture is deeper in me . . . after all, audiences are involved in it for an hour and a half or two hours. But I’ve been involved for one to three years. I don’t know how to end a play unless . . . who’s going to kill whom? It could be that it’s so violent for me that I transfer it to the stage.53 Fornes’s violent yet ambiguous conclusions, which David Savran has described as “not so much ending a situation as producing a shock 192

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wave directed at the spectators,” challenge the well-made play by suggesting the desirability of an alternative dramaturgy—even if that dramaturgy is, as yet, unstageable.54 Fornes’s plays are object lessons that instruct the audience by negative example. “Some people complain that my work doesn’t offer the solution,” Fornes comments.

“But the reason for that is that I feel that the characters don’t have to get out, it’s you who has to get out.”55 In Fefu, Fornes dramatizes the dif‹culty of creating an exclusively female space, which in this case happens also to be a space for theater.56 In 1935, eight women come together at a country house owned by Stephany (Fefu) to rehearse a fund-raising presentation on women’s education. No man appears on stage, although Fefu’s offstage husband, Phillip (together with her younger brother and a gardener), constantly threatens to impinge on this tenuous community of women. More perniciously, the forces of patriarchy have been internalized; each woman has been damaged in some way by men.

Trapped in an unhappy marriage, Fefu is in the early stages of clinical depression, while her friend Julia has been injured in a bizarre hunting accident. We are told that when a nearby hunter shot a deer, Julia suffered convulsions. She is now con‹ned to a wheelchair.

Julia’s disability literalizes the other women’s emotional paralysis, and it acquires an added symbolic dimension in the course of the play. Julia suffers from hallucinations in which she is tormented by invisible judges, who claim to have punished her refusal to accept a patriarchal prayer (which begins, “The human being is of the masculine gender”) by paralyzing her.57 The judges’ next victim will be Fefu, who has begun to chafe at the restrictions placed upon her by her gender.

Fornes’s subversion of masculine dramaturgy has both spatial and temporal dimensions. If Fefu depicts the tentative and risky effort to create a community of women around an act of theater, a female space outside the sphere of masculine interference and control, Fornes’s innovative use of space mirrors her theme. The audience begins seated in front of a paradigmatic realistic set: the living room of a country house in New England, whose decor is “a tasteful mixture of styles” (7). Part 1 of Fefu outwardly conforms to what W. B. 193

The Stage Life of Props Worthen has termed the rhetoric of realism, which “claims to stage an objective representation by integrating dramatic and performance style into the pictorial consistency of the material scene onstage.”58 There is none of the visual disorientation of Beckett, whose objects seem to ›oat weightlessly in space. Instead we are frontally placed observers of a naturalistic scene that, as in Ibsen, is anchored by pianos, liquor cabinets, and coffee tables. Unlike Beckett’s fragments, Fornes’s objects root the play in historical context, and the spectator observes the action in perspective through the conventional fourth wall. Yet in addition to the usual furniture of realism, “A double barrel shotgun leans on the wall near the French doors” (7).59 Before the action begins, the shotgun is displayed literally propping up the realistic frame of walls and doors.

Part 1 models several ways of relating to this interloper from a male-dominated dramatic tradition. When Fefu introduces her husband to her guest Christina in unconventional fashion, Fefu’s shotgun links the onstage world of women to the offstage world of men: Fefu. (Fefu gets the gun as Christina goes to the French doors.)

You haven’t met Phillip. Have you?

Christina. No. Fefu. That’s him.

Christina. Which one?

Fefu. (Aims and shoots.) That one!

(Christina and Cindy scream. Fefu smiles proudly. She blows on the mouth of the barrel. She puts down the gun and looks out again.) (10–11) Diane Lynn Moroff has interpreted Fefu’s shot as “an explicitly theatrical seizing of the drama” by Fefu, but Fefu’s act turns out to be a complex marital joke (as well as an echo of Hedda’s French-door shooting at Brack).60 Fefu explains, “It’s a game we play. I shoot and he falls. Whenever he hears the blast he falls. No matter where he is, he falls” (11). In fact it is Phillip who controls the game, since he loads the gun with blanks and only pretends to be hurt. At this stage in the play, the gun is arguably Phillip’s prop rather than Fefu’s.

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In fact, the shotgun is a barometer for registering the reach of patriarchy and the limits of female resistance. How dangerous, then, is the shotgun to this inchoate feminist drama and incipient female space? Fefu’s shot provokes different reactions in Christina and Cindy, who respectively model two modes of spectatorship: the naive spectator, for whom guns on stage are always loaded (unless proved otherwise), and the experienced spectator for whom guns are mere props. Cindy reassures Christina, “The gun is not loaded. . . .

That was just a blank” (12). For Cindy, the gun is a theatrical party trick (although in earlier versions of the play, Cindy is reluctant to touch the gun, in case it is loaded after all).61 For Christina, who, like us, is getting to know Fefu for the ‹rst time, the emotional impact of a blank and a bullet is the same: “The blast alone could kill you. One can die of fright, you know. . . . My heart is still beating” (12). The stage-wise Cindy pooh-poohs the threat of the gun: “Fefu won’t shoot you. She only shoots Phillip” (12). But Cindy’s words are dramatically ironic, for at the play’s end Fefu not only shoots a rabbit in place of Phillip, but the “blast alone” kills Julia simultaneously. Evidently there is more than one way to load a gun on stage.

Fefu reenters and complicates the picture by admitting that she herself is never sure if the gun is loaded: “He told me one day he’ll put real bullets in the guns. He likes to make me nervous. . . . That’s the way we are with each other” (13). The gun is a marital prop that maintains the status quo: “He won’t put bullets in the guns.—It suits our relationship . . . the game, I mean. If I didn’t shoot him with blanks, I might shoot him for real” (13). Fornes characterizes the game as a safety valve for Fefu’s repressed aggression against Phillip, a harmless way for Fefu to let off steam. Fefu’s seemingly liberating act of aggression is in fact a means for the patriarchal containment of female subversion.

Once the gun has been introduced, the women have a hard time getting rid of it. “I guess I was lucky I didn’t get shot,” says Christina with unconscious dramatic irony. “Put the gun away, I don’t like looking at it” (12). In one earlier version of the play, Christina then tries and fails to cover the gun with a shawl.62 In a second version, Christina succeeds in masking the gun by drawing a curtain in front 195

The Stage Life of Props of it, but she draws the curtain back when Fefu reenters.63 (Both versions emphasize the reluctance of Christina and Cindy to touch the gun.) In the ‹nal printed version, no attempt is made to hide the gun from the spectators’ view; Fefu appears on the landing at the rear of the stage just after Christina tells Cindy to put the gun away. The gun presumably remains in clear view for the remainder of part 1, which emphasizes Fefu’s wish to master masculine pursuits such as plumbing: “I still like men better than women.—I envy them. I like being like a man. Thinking like a man. Feeling like a man” (15).

Yet Fefu is in the early stages of what might be termed womanomie, the crippling af›iction that has paralyzed Julia. The link between the two women is made explicit through the prop. At the end of part 1, Julia wheels herself over to the shotgun and smells the mouth of the barrel. After Cindy af‹rms, “It’s a blank,” Julia takes the remaining slug out of the gun but lets it fall to the ›oor as she slips into a trance (22). In Julia’s hands, the gun symbolizes selfin›icted damage, and Julia becomes a psychic, Cassandra-like ‹gure: “She’s hurting herself. (Julia lets out a strange whimper)” (22). For Julia, the gun is an instrument by which the numinous judges control and punish women. As Cindy explains to Christina, “[She said] they tortured her. . . . That they had tried her and that the shot was her execution. That she recanted because she wanted to live. . . . That if she talked about it . . . to anyone . . . she would be tortured further and killed” (18). Once Cindy takes the gun away, Julia wakes from her trance, but the act ends with the promise of further violence.

Failing to understand Julia’s cryptic warning that Fefu is in danger, Cindy replaces the slug in the ri›e and locks it.

Part 1 of Fefu thus models four different ways of relating to the prop. For the duration of the scene we are not allowed to escape the various implications of the gun for the women on stage: exciting (and, according to Julia, harmful) for Fefu, benign for Cindy, scary for Christina, and traumatic for Julia. The women’s extended discussion of the shotgun underscores its symbolic role as a masculine prop, which has invaded the play’s female space and whose effects are unpredictable. The play establishes the shotgun as both threatening and guaranteeing the status quo. As long as the gun remains 196

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unloaded, it maintains Fefu’s marriage in unhealthy stasis; loaded with real bullets, however, the gun threatens to end the play in murder or suicide. Fefu’s double-barreled weapon is potentially able to kill time both by diverting Fefu and by extinguishing her. Further, the confusion over whether the gun is under Fefu’s or Phillip’s control implies its metatheatrical suspension between the “masculine” dramaturgy of Ibsen and early Chekhov (in which guns go off) and the more “feminine” dramaturgy of late Chekhov and Beckett (in which guns either mis‹re or fail to go off at all).64 Fornes plays with the spectator’s horizon of expectation by hinting that the play will end with a shot, but leaving open whether that shot will be a blank or a bullet.

Part 2 of Fefu suspends the melodramatic women-in-danger plot suggested by the gun’s prominence in part 1 by radically displacing the audience’s temporal and spatial perspectives. The spectators are divided into four groups, each of which is led into one of four rooms adjacent to part 1’s living-room set. Instead of peering frontally through an invisible fourth wall, each group sits along two sides of the room and watches a short chamber scene involving one or two characters (“”On the Lawn,” “In the Study,” “In the Bedroom,” “In the Kitchen”). At the end of the scene, the group moves into another room to watch the next scene, and so on until each scene has been played four times through.

In terms of stage time, the four scenes take place simultaneously: thus Fefu leaves the lawn and looks into the study where Christina and Cindy are talking, while Sue leaves Paula in the kitchen to bring a bowl of soup to Julia in the bedroom (these interruptions must be meticulously timed so as not to break the ›ow of the other scenes).

For the spectators, however, the result is the temporal equivalent of a cubist painting: the entire audience watches the same slice of space/time from four different angles, but each group experiences that slice in a different order. When the last cycle is complete, the audience returns to the living room in order to watch part 3, which like part 1 is framed by the rhetoric of realism. However, that rhetoric—which in recent feminist theater criticism has been interpreted as complicit with the male gaze—has now been decentered.65 197

The Stage Life of Props While the gun does not appear in any scene in part 2, each scene dramatizes the damage caused by patriarchy to the women’s psychic and spiritual lives. Fefu tells Emma, “I am in constant pain. . . . It is as if normally there is a lubricant . . . not in the body . . . a spiritual lubricant . . . it’s hard to describe . . . and without it, life is a nightmare, and everything is distorted” (29). Most dramatically, in the cramped bedroom we witness a violent hallucination of Julia’s in which she reexperiences her torture at the hands of the judges and announces, “They are after her [Fefu] too” (34). The audience is reminded that, should Julia try to warn Fefu of the judges’ impending wrath, her own life will again be put in jeopardy: “They killed me. I was dead. The bullet didn’t hit me. It hit the deer. But I died. He didn’t. Then I repented and the deer died and I lived. (With a gravelly voice.) They said, ‘Live but crippled. And if you tell . . .’ (She repeats the throat cutting gesture)” (34). Julia’s words suggest that the price of resisting ideology is unrelenting pain: “They say when I believe the prayer I will forget the judges. And when I forget the judges I will believe the prayer. They say both happen at once. And all women have done it. Why can’t I?” (35). Julia is the mouthpiece for the threat represented by the judges; in other words, she is part 2’s placeholder for the gun.

Although part 3 dispenses with conventional plot by dramatizing the women’s rehearsal for their fund-raiser, the linear arc of the wellmade play takes over as the action builds to a ‹nal confrontation between Julia and Fefu. A vision in which Fefu sees Julia walking in slow motion convinces her that Julia’s paralysis is psychosomatic, and with increasing urgency Fefu urges Julia to get up and walk. Julia insists, “I am contagious. I can’t be what I used to be,” and instead of obeying Fefu, she intones a spell of protection for her (59). When Christina enters and discovers Fefu pulling Julia out of her wheelchair, Fefu releases Julia and asks her forgiveness. But in frustration at Julia’s refusal to get up and walk, Fefu takes the gun and goes out onto the lawn. The play ends with a leap into surrealism: “There is the sound of a shot. Christina and Cecilia run out. Julia puts her hand to her forehead. Her hand goes down slowly. There is blood on her forehead. Her head falls back” (61). Fefu enters holding a dead 198

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rabbit and brokenly states, “I killed it . . . I just shot . . . and killed it . . . Julia . . .” (61). Fefu drops the rabbit, and the lights fade as the circle of women converges on Julia’s lifeless body.66 Like Hedda Gabler, Fefu ends with a visual tableau that demands interpretation by the spectator. Does Fefu kill Julia? Some critics have seen Fefu’s murder of Julia as a necessary step in her own emancipation. Thus Beverly Byers Pevitts argues that Julia “is the one who is symbolically killed in the end of the play so that the new image of herself can emerge,” while Helen Keyssar claims that “[s]ymbolically at least, and on stage where all things are possible, the woman-as-victim must be killed in her own terms in order to ignite the explosion of a community of women.”67 Similarly, Gayle Austin observes that “Julia acts out the repressed, angry side of Fefu by struggling with the ‘guardians,’ and perhaps her death frees Fefu at the end of the play.”68 Yet these critics miss the clear implication that Fefu’s sublimated rage against patriarchy has back‹red against Julia—“I’m never angry,” she tells Christina (14). Shooting the rabbit is a regressive act, since we are told that Fefu used to hunt but stopped because she loves animals.69 According to Fornes herself, it is the judges rather than Fefu who kill Julia—but had Fefu not shot the rabbit in frustration, Julia would not have died.70 Fefu’s killing of the rabbit/Julia is therefore an instructional moment for the audience. Fefu is left alive so that she can potentially avoid Julia’s fate by coming to terms with her act of destruction—and we, too, are meant to learn from Fefu’s mistake.71 Yet a tempting alternative is not to interpret the gunshot thematically (i.e., psychologically) at all, for like the gun, the play’s ending is double-barreled.72 The juxtaposition of Fefu’s offstage shot with Julia’s visible wounding ruptures causal logic and concludes the play with the surreal image of Fefu contemplating her twin victims. The last slug turns out not to be a blank after all, but the double-barreled gun de‹es temporal logic by killing two creatures with a single bullet. In an suggestive reading of the play’s ‹nal image, Toby Silverman Zinman argues that “Fefu’s shooting of the rabbit/Julia is Fornes’ rejection of the conventions of symbolic realism.”73 By “symbolic realism,” Zinman refers to the Freudian drama of psychological 199

The Stage Life of Props causality exempli‹ed by Hedda Gabler.74 For Zinman, Julia is a relic of this masculine dramaturgy, a version of Ibsen’s and Tennessee Williams’s hystericized heroines, who must be purged from the play (along with the clunky symbolism of the dead rabbit).75 According to Zinman’s logic, the gun itself is neither parodied (like the patently symbolic rabbit), nor ironized (like Winnie’s Brownie), but simply absurd.76 I would argue that the shotgun’s double-barreled murder participates in two theatrical modes at once. In the mode of symbolic realism, we can read the gun as an illustration that sublimated female rage tends to back‹re onto other women. But in the mode of absurdism, we do not have to read the shot at all; as in Sam Shepard’s Buried Child (1978) and A Lie of the Mind (1985), Fefu crystallizes in an image rather than a message. Modern playwrights such as Shepard and Fornes are drawn to surrealism by what Susan Sontag has called its “liberating anti-symbolic quality.”77 In the absurdist mode, we need not assimilate Fefu and her shotgun to the symbolically freighted landscape of phallic pistols, wild ducks, and dead seagulls. The play entertains the Ibsenite logic of psychological causality—what Zinman labels the Hedda syndrome—only to reject it as a dead end.

Fefu’s shotgun both af‹rms and confounds the play of predictability promised in part 1. It offers us the expected result (a dead female body) but denies us the smugness that comes from successfully diagnosing a psychological cause. We cannot say of Fefu, as we might say of Hedda, for example, “Her father brought her up to be a man, and look what happened to her.” Unlike Hedda’s pistols, Fefu’s shotgun refuses to settle into its role as a symbol of female hysteria. Rather, it ‹res a warning shot aimed at the well-made play form itself, to which Fefu succumbs only under duress. The play staves off its male judges (critics?) by portraying the threat they pose to an emergent female dramaturgy. Fefu’s shotgun buys time for “some kind of spiritual survival”—both for the characters Fornes cherishes and for the spectators, whom Fornes frees (at least temporarily) from the stage time and stage space of realism, as well as from the tyranny of the psychologically fateful prop.78

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Conclusion: Parting Shots Each playwright I have considered in this chapter deploys the property-gun to disrupt the relationship between rising action and unwinding meter in unexpected ways. In each case the prop resists subjection to human will—the desire to kill time on one’s own terms.

Hedda Gabler pits Hedda’s attempt to spatialize time in aesthetically pleasing images against the inexorable march of linear time represented by the pistols on the other. The two time signatures converge with Hedda’s ‹nal pistol shot, but Ibsen leaves open which triumphs over the other: the message of the gun can only be deciphered in the context of the staging of the ‹nal tableau.

In Beckett’s expressionist vision of tedium, the unreachable pistol literalizes Winnie’s (and, indeed, Hedda’s) predicament of being stuck in mortal time. Far from offering release, Brownie refuses to solace Winnie either by responding to her bids for affection or by ‹ring at the end. Its mute, insulting message is “Remember you can’t die,” for thematically as well as dramaturgically, the drama has outgrown the Hedda solution. Suicide offers no respite from the experience of being in time (as opposed to out of it altogether). The gun becomes an ironized relic from a discredited “old style” in which time could be meaningfully experienced rather than just endured (141).

Finally, Fornes’s assault on stage time is in some ways the boldest, for it aims to free the spectators as well as the characters from what Enoch Brater calls “the strict, logical construction of the dramatic trap . . . where the past is fetishized and essentialized as some sort of historical/psychological explanation for what takes place in the theatrical ‘now.’”79 Fefu toys with the play of predictability by introducing a loaded/unloaded gun in part 1, only to fracture linear dramaturgy in part 2’s four-sided, “cubist” action. Part 2 models an alternative, feminist dramaturgy by embedding us in a time frame which we enter into repeatedly rather than merely observe once. It is against this liminal experience of temporal freedom that we must measure Fefu and Julia’s experience in part 3, for if Julia is sacri‹ced

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The Stage Life of Props to the Hedda principle, Fefu (and the audience) must learn to escape the sphere of the male judges who call the shots. In Brechtian parlance, Fefu’s parting shot is epic rather than dramatic, a shocking gestus designed to force us out of our complacent acceptance that female suicide is “only natural.”80 If the nineteenth century bequeathed the pistol to the modern stage as a dramatic cliché in need of rejuvenation, Ibsen’s, Beckett’s, and Fornes’s guns prove that there is more than one way to kill time—and more than one time to kill—on stage.

As June Schlueter points out, all plays are suicidal in that a play’s “energies are directed toward its own destruction.”81 But if each play succeeds in killing time on its own terms, where does that leave the prop? As material ghosts, props continually escape the pressures of mortal time and return in a new guise or under new circumstances.

That is what makes them at once disturbing and comforting. Part of our pleasure in the theater is how certain familiar objects constantly reappear in new and surprising ways (“You again!”). We recognize the prop as having landed in this particular drama from somewhere else, on the way to somewhere else. The prop’s stage life springs not only from theater’s appropriation of contested cultural symbols, but from drama’s opportunistic reworking of its own past. The Host, the handkerchief, the skull, the fan, and the gun are not static symbols whose meaning is frozen on the page, ready to be extracted by the textual critic. Props are three-dimensional objects launched into performance time and stage space by the actor’s manipulation, and they come to life only by exciting the spectator’s imagination during that evanescent object lesson in human contingency we call theater.

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Notes PREFACE 1. Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), p.

64.

2. See, for example, Heather Conway, Stage Properties (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1959); Motley [pseud.], Theatre Props (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1975); Warren Kenton, Stage Properties and How to Make Them (London: Pitman House, 1978); and Thurston James, The What, Where, When of Theater Props (Cincinnati: Betterway Books, 1992).

3. Charles Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation,” in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 7 vols. (London: Methuen, 1903), 1:111.

4. The situation may be slightly more complicated. Virtual props, such as Ophelia’s lute and Brabantio’s nightgown, appear in some textual versions but not in others. Presumed props, like Lear’s crown, are not explicitly mentioned in the stage directions but must nonetheless be present on stage. I am excluding from consideration all directorial props introduced by a director or actor into performance but absent in the original text(s). Such objects are a fascinating topic in their own right but lie outside the parameters of this text-based study. I also exclude mimed, imaginary, and radio props from my discussion.

5. For an invaluable summary of the Prague circle’s treatment of the stage sign, see Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 5–31. I discuss the Prague critics in detail in my introduction.

6. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); Stanton B. Garner Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).

7. David Bevington, Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Felix Bosonnet, The Function of Stage Properties in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1978); Alan C. Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Ann Pasternak Slater, Shakespeare the Director (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982); Frances Teague, Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1991).

8. Lena Cowen Orlin, “The Performance of Things in The Taming of the Shrew,” Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993): 179. See also Stephen Greenblatt,

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Notes to Pages vii–2 “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Early Modern England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 94–128; Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and the essays in The Clothes That Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Jessica Munns and Penny Richards (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999). The collection Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), includes several essays that foreground stage objects, while the essays in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) focus on the material conditions in which early modern props were produced and exchanged.

9. Jon Erickson, The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art, and Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

10. De Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass, Subject and Object, p. 2.

11. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).

12. I follow Steven Mullaney’s insistence on appropriation as a key mode of cultural intervention in “After the New Historicism,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. Terence Hawkes, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 17–37.

INTRODUCTION The opening quotes are from the following: Willmar Sauter, “Approaching the Theatrical Event: The In›uence of Semiotics and Hermeneutics on European Theatre Studies,” Theatre Research International 22 (1997): 4; Peter Handke, “Nauseated by Language (Interview with Arthur Joseph),” Drama Review 15 (1970): 57, cited by Elam, Semiotics, p. 10.

1. Throughout the text, I use audience to refer to spectators of a given production considered as a group and spectator to refer to the individual audience member. So as not to confuse the two meanings of theater as event and locale, I use performance to refer to an act of theater and playhouse to refer to any indoor venue in which plays are staged. For the most part, I use theater to refer to any spectacle in which live performers perform for actual spectators in real time, and drama to refer to the corpus of written texts within the western European dramatic tradition.

2. Most such studies focus on a single object or playwright. See, for example, Thomas P. Adler, “The Mirror as Stage Prop in Modern Drama,” Comparative Drama 14 (1980–81): 355–73; Alain Benoist, “Étude sémiologique des accessoires dans trois pièces de Beckett: En attendant Godot, Fin de Partie, Oh les beaux jours,” Semiotica 110 (1996): 273–99; Marianne Boruch, “Miller and Things,” Literary Review 24 (1981): 548–61; Bosonnet, Function of Stage Properties; Douglas Cardwell, “The Role of Stage Properties in the Plays of Eugène Scribe,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 16 (1988): 290–309; Neil Carruthers, “Inanimate Objects on the Modern French Stage,” New Zealand Journal of French Studies 8 (1987): 29–39;

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Notes to Pages 3–5 and Robert C. Ketterer, “Stage Properties in Plautine Comedy,” part 1, Semiotica 58 (1986): 193–216, part 2, Semiotica 59 (1986): 93–135, and part 3, Semiotica 60 (1986): 29–72. Articles on Shakespeare’s objects are too numerous to list, but among book-length discussions Bevington’s Action Is Eloquence and Dessen’s Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary are especially useful. Teague’s Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties remains the best general discussion of props to date.

Scholars other than Benoist, Ketterer, and Teague who have proposed a taxonomy of the stage prop’s functions include Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Maryvonne Saison, “Les objets dans la création théâtrale,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 79 (1974): 253–68; and Anne Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur, vol. 2 of Lire Le Théâtre (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1981), pp. 125–52.

3. Jonathan Miller, The Afterlife of Plays (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1992).

4. Marvin Carlson, “The Haunted Stage: Recycling and Reception in the Theatre,” Theatre Survey 35 (1994): 5–18. Carlson de‹nes the phenomenon of “ghosting” in semiotic terms: “[W]e might say that a signi‹er, already bonded to a signi‹ed in the creation of a stage sign, is moved in a different context to be attached to a different signi‹ed, but when that new bonding takes place, the receiver’s memory of that previous bonding remains, contaminating or ‘ghosting’ the new sign” (p. 12). Carlson does not dwell on objects in this context, but notes that “every speci‹c production is composed in large part of elements already encountered elsewhere, that also bring with them as a necessary and inevitable part of reception certain ghosts of these previous encounters” (p. 17). See also Carlson’s “Invisible Presences—Performance Intertextuality,” Theatre Research International 19 (1994): 111–17, in which Carlson discusses three types of intertextual “ghosting”: celebrities who are haunted by the roles with which they are identi‹ed; costume and scenic elements; and the oeuvre of a director. I am grateful to Marvin Carlson for allowing me to read portions of his book The Haunted Stage prior to publication.

5. Sarah Boxer makes this point in her review of an exhibition of directordesigner Julie Taymor’s objects, “Can Props Have a Life outside the Theater?” New York Times, November 28, 1999, AR 43. For Boxer, it is Taymor’s choreography that brings her artifacts to life.

6. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, Producible Interpretation: Eight English Plays, 1675–1707 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), p.

10.

7. Ibid., p. 23. Milhous and Hume nevertheless acknowledge the problem posed by audience diversity for production analysts. “Serious study of audience composition and response [in the Restoration] is still in its infancy, and belongs more to performance analysis than to production analysis, but the critic should at least refrain from imposing false generalizations in defense of tidy interpretations.

The audience member with violent moral objections to adultery will respond to The Country-Wife quite differently from the earl of Rochester, or from someone able to treat stage adultery as a lark or a joke. For the objector, production choices

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Notes to Pages 5–8 are irrelevant and will not work: the subject automatically irritates or offends, regardless of how it is presented. We can analyze the affective response apparently sought by play or production; we can study whatever actual audience responses are available to us; we cannot claim to dictate a ‘correct’ response to the audience” (pp.

20–21). For an attempt to theorize full-›edged performance analysis, along with several examples, see Jacqueline Martin and Willmar Sauter, Understanding Theatre: Performance Analysis in Theory and Practice (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1995).

8. Ibid., p. 33.

9. Curiously, with the exception of a few key props (such as Desdemona’s handkerchief and Hedda Gabler’s pistols), stage objects seem not to have attracted the attention of psychoanalytic critics. Perhaps the fact that for many psychoanalysts (including the in›uential object-relations school) the term object refers to introjected subjects rather than to actual, external objects has de›ected what would seem a very fruitful approach for understanding the charm of inanimate objects in performance. Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object would seem a promising point of departure for a psychoanalytic account of the prop. I touch on this in my article “Felt Absences: The Stage Properties of Othello’s Handkerchief,” Comparative Drama 37 (1997): 367–93.

10. Useful overviews of the Prague school contribution to theater semiotics include Michael L. Quinn, The Semiotic Stage: Prague School Theater Theory (New York: Peter ^ Lang, 1995); and Elam, Semiotics, pp. 5–31.

11. Jirí Veltruský, “Man and Object in the Theater,” in A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, ed. and trans. Paul L. Garvin (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1964), p. 84.

12. Umberto Eco, “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance,” Drama Review 21 (1977): 110.

13. Elam, Semiotics, p. 12.

14. Ibid., p. 22. Marvin Carlson, “The Iconic Stage,” in Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 75–91, further distinguishes between “general iconic identity (a real forest representing a forest in a play) and speci‹c iconic identity (the actual forest mentioned in the script, if it exists, being utilized as a setting for that play)” (p. 84). One famous example of iconic identity is the actual litter belonging to the unpopular Spanish ambassador Gondomar, which apparently played itself in Thomas Middleton’s satirical A Game at Chess (1624).

15. Petr Bogatryev, “Semiotics in the Folk Theater,” in Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), pp. 33–50. Bruce Kochis translates Bogatryev’s key phrase as “signs of a sign of a material object” (34). Because there is much confusion in of, I render the identical phrase “signs of a material object’s sign.”

16. Tadeusz Kowzan, “The Sign in the Theater: An Introduction to the Semiology of the Art of the Spectacle,” trans. Simon Pleasance, Diogenes 61 (1968): 68–69.

17. Tadeusz Kowzan, Littérature et spectacle (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp.

197–98. My translation.

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Notes to Pages 8–10 ^

18. Jindrich Honzl, “Dynamics of the Sign in the Theater,” trans. Irwin Titunik, in Matejka and Titunik, Semiotics of Art, pp. 74–93.

19. Karel Brušák, “Signs in the Chinese Theater,” trans. Karel Brušák, in Matejka and Titunik, Semiotics of Art, p. 62.

20. Honzl, “Dynamics of the Sign.” Elam, Semiotics, pp. 14–15, calls the reciprocal substitution of sign-systems or codes (e.g., gesture, sound, and lighting) “transcodi‹cation.”

21. According to Honzl, “precisely this changeability, this versatility of theatrical sign, is its speci‹c property” (“Dynamics of the Sign,” p. 85).

22. Veltruský, “Man and Object,” p. 84.

23. Elam, Semiotics, p. 17.

24. Veltruský, “Man and Object,” p. 88. In contrast to Veltruský, puppet theorist Steve Tillis, Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Art (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), p. 79, freezes props at the bottom of the subject-object continuum. “The object of staging is given neither movement nor speech; although it might be moved or spoken to, it is not and cannot be accorded the pretense of moving or speaking for itself, and it is animated only by the action that takes place around it.” As soon as a prop is perceived to have “a life of its own,” it becomes a puppet; for Tillis, an animated prop is thus a contradiction in terms.

25. An interesting test case: Restoration actress Elizabeth Barry used a stage dagger to stab Mrs. Boutel during a performance of Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens after a quarrel over a veil (an action repeated in 1756 by Peg Wof‹ngton, who wounded her rival Anne Bellamy while performing in the same play). While this rupture of the dagger’s sign-function by its practical use as a weapon is an example of “action force” with a vengeance, presumably at least some spectators “read” the action as a gruesomely realistic sign. As in the fencing match in Hamlet, or any fencing match, for that matter, the distinction between “acting” as imitation (mimesis) and acting as doing (kinesis) is problematic. Here, as elsewhere, Shakespeare erases the line between presence and representation. Are the actors in Hamlet “really” fencing? To what extent can a stage foil be said to “act” its part?

26. McAuley, Space in Performance, interprets Veltruský’s action force to mean the expectation of action created by the object in the audience’s mind. But again, everything on stage may be said to create such an expectation, so “action force” is not a useful criterion for distinguishing stage objects from stage subjects.

27. Eco, “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance.” Eco uses the famous example of a drunken man placed on a Salvation Army platform, as opposed to under a revolutionary standard, to argue that “[a] semiotics of the mise-en-scène is constitutively a semiotics of the production of ideologies” (p. 117). Compare the claim of Ruth Amossy, “Toward a Rhetoric of the Stage: The Scenic Realization of Verbal Clichés,” Poetics Today 2 (1981): 49–63: “Stage scenery is not a truthful re›ection of reality; what looks like innocent reproduction (the analogical fallacy) is in fact a rhetorical construction massively informed by our language structures and the Weltanschauung they implicitly convey” (p. 57). For a useful summary of Kowzan’s shift in attitude toward the theatrical sign, see Grzegorz Sinko’s review article of Kowzan’s Spectacle et signi‹cation (1992), “Theory and Uses of Theater Semiotics,” Semiotica 110 (1996): 351–59.

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Notes to Pages 10–13 28. Shoshana Avigal and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, “What Do Brook’s Bricks Mean? Toward a Theory of the ‘Mobility’ of Objects in Theatrical Discourse,” Poetics Today 2 (1981): 13.

29. Ibid., p. 12.

30. Ibid., p. 14.

31. Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur, pp. 135–36.

32. Ibid., p. 133. My translation.

33. Ibid., p. 126. My translation.

34. This useful distinction between props, set pieces, and costumes is drawn by Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 107: “In other words, props can be classi‹ed, generally speaking, as those objects which an actor uses to perform actions: as such, they are to be de‹ned as the objects upon which A [the actor] focuses his intensional [sic] gestures.”

35. For McAuley, Space in Performance, p. 176, the crucial distinction is not between prop and object but between object and thing: “In general it can be said that the stage object is inanimate, and it is either brought into the presentational space by an actor, or is already present. Furthermore, it is of such a nature that it can be touched, moved, or displaced by an actor. The crucial factor in de‹ning the stage object is thus human intervention, as Abraham Moles has asserted in relation to objects more broadly considered. A thing on the stage becomes an object if it is touched, manipulated, or even simply looked at or spoken about by an actor.”

McAuley’s broad notion of human intervention would thus seem to include virtually everything on stage as a potential object. Like earlier semioticians, McAuley concedes that “[t]he distinction between object and nonobject is ›uid and unstable.” My distinction between prop and object removes this ambiguity.

36. Brownell Salomon, following Kowzan, claims that “[u]nanchored physical objects, light enough for a person to carry on stage for manual use there, de‹ne hand properties for semiological purposes” (“Visual and Aural Signs in the Performed English Renaissance Play,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 5 [1972]: 160–61). Presumably following the OED, Bosonnet, Function of Stage Properties, de‹nes props as “[a]ny portable article of costume and furniture, used in acting a play” (p. 10).

37. Teague, Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties, pp. 16–17.

38. Ibid., p. 17.

39. “Presumably,” argues Teague, “Yorick’s skull is a property in Hamlet whether it is tangible or not; if the actor wishes to mime picking up a skull, and if the audience is willing to accept that gesture and understand that it signi‹es an object, then the property exists, if only in the imaginations of the actor and the audience” (Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties, p. 16). But I agree with McAuley, Space in Performance, that the prop must be embodied in a physical object in order to affect the performance materially: “The object, being physically present in the space, necessarily serves to shape and de‹ne that space and, equally necessary, has an impact upon the human users of the space” (p. 173). I thus exclude from my de‹nition of the prop all invisible, mimed, and imaginary objects, since such borderline cases raise almost insurmountable veri‹cation problems (is the rabbit in Harvey a prop?). An important exception is radio props, which are material (audi-

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Notes to Pages 13–16 ble) but not corporeal. I am grateful to Frances Teague for pointing this out, and for generously helping me to work through where she and I part company.

40. Ibid., p. 17.

41. Ibid., p. 18.

42. Teague notes that “[c]ostumes and furniture differ from properties in that they usually retain their ordinary functions onstage” (Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties, p. 19). But elsewhere, Teague argues that although the prop always has a dislocated function, “[t]he ordinary function of the object does not disappear; an object has the same connotation that it has offstage, for example” (pp. 17–18). I would claim further that a knife on stage sometimes cuts as well as connotes.

43. Marvin Carlson’s review article, “Theatre and Performance,” Semiotica 92 (1992): 99–105, notes that in the 1980s the attention of theater semioticians shifted from the production of the stage sign to the audience’s reception of the stage event. Carlson also notes a shift since the early 1980s from semiotic to more phenomenological modes of analysis.

44. Freddie Rokem, “A chair is a Chair is a CHAIR: The Object as Sign in Theatrical Performance,” in The Prague School and Its Legacy in Linguistics, Literature, Semiotics, Folklore, and the Arts, ed. Yishai Tobin (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1988), p. 283.

45. Ibid., p. 278.

46. Ibid., p. 276.

47. States, Great Reckonings, p. 7.

48. See Andrew Sofer, “No Ideas but in Things: Beckett’s Uncanny Props,” Text and Presentation 19 (1998): 123–29.

49. Garner, Bodied Spaces.

50. Jean Alter, A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 32. Alter adds, “Such performances are not communicated with signs: they are experienced directly; they fall outside the operations of semiosis.”

51. Michael Kirby, “Nonsemiotic Performance,” Modern Drama 25 (1982): 105–11, argues for the possibility of transcending the principle of semiotization on stage. But for a compelling rebuttal, see Marvin Carlson, “Semiotics and Nonsemiotics in Performance,” in Theatre Semiotics, pp. 3–9. On the limitations of both semiotic and phenomenological approaches to real objects on stage, see Eli Rozik, “The Corporeality of the Actor’s Body: The Boundaries of Theatre and the Limitations of Semiotic Methodology,” Theatre Research International 24 (1999): 198–211.

52. Thus Chekhov’s seagull provoked derisive laughter, hissing, and catcalls at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg in October 1896 but received rapt attention at the Moscow Art Theatre in December 1898—and as a result became the theater’s mascot, even appearing on the stage curtain. Directing the play at Boston University in 1989, I found a similar spectrum of responses to the prop, depending on how broadly the student actors played Chekhov’s comedy.

53. I follow Ivo Kamps’s characterization of materialist approaches in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps (London: Verso, 1995), p. 2: “Materialist analysis, even at its most scienti‹c, remains ideological in nature, and relentlessly

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Notes to Pages 16–17 critiques the network of ideologies that obscures people’s real relation to the relations of production.” Further, Kamps notes that “[c]ultural materialists, feminist materialists, and new historicists unequivocally reject the myth of the subject as ‘The Individual’ . . . they also agree that the subject is—to use Althusser’s term again—interpellated, by a complex network of social, economic, ideological forces which, in its totality, extends beyond the subject’s intellectual grasp or command” (p. 7). For a recent critique of materialist approaches as insuf‹ciently concerned with actual matter, especially “the material determinants of the human mind/body” illuminated by cognitive science, see F. Elizabeth Hart, “Matter, System, and Early Modern Studies: Outlines for a Materialist Linguistics,” Con‹gurations 6 (1998): 311–43. My quotation is from p. 328.

54. Orlin, “Performance of Things.”

55. Jonathan Gil Harris, “Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 479–91; Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, “Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 114–32; Juana Green, “The Sempster’s Wares: Merchandising and Marrying in The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607),” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 1084–1118; Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

56. Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists”; Peter Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage,” in de Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass, Subject and Object, pp. 289–320.

57. Natasha Korda, “Household Property/Stage Property: Henslowe as Pawnbroker,” Theatre Journal 48 (1996): 185–95; Paul Yachnin, “Magical Properties: Vision, Possession, and Wonder in Othello,” Theatre Journal 48 (1996): 197–208.

See also Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing.

58. I quote from the as yet unpublished introduction to Harris and Korda, Staged Properties. I am grateful to the authors for sharing their work.

59. W. B. Worthen, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 54–98. Worthen claims that, by contrast, Edward Bond’s props “develop a public history, one that this theater asks us to learn to read” (92). See also Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and James Peck, “Anne Old‹eld’s Lady Townly: Consumption, Credit, and the Whig Hegemony of the 1720s,” Theatre Journal 49 (1997): 397–416. Unsurprisingly, materialist scholars disagree over the extent to which the “consumption” of theatrical objects resists or shores up hegemony.

Sponsler emphasizes that on the medieval stage “bodies and commodities were reassembled in deviant ways that countered authoritative models of subjectivity” (p. xv). For Peck, “Old‹eld’s authoritative grasp of fashion powerfully in›uenced roles written for her and contributed to the growing acceptance of [capitalistic] consumption as a legitimate social practice” (p. 406).

60. It is worth recalling that as early as 1977, Umberto Eco, “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance,” p. 117, insisted that “[a] semiotics of the mise-en-scène is constitutively a semiotics of the production of ideologies.”

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Notes to Pages 18–21 61. Harris and Korda, introduction to Staged Properties. The editors frame their materialist project as a reaction to “the widespread erasure of the visual dimensions of the public stage in modern theater criticism,” a prejudice they trace back to the Puritan antitheatrical writers’ disdain for “popish” ritual.

62. As Harris notes in “Shakespeare’s Hair,” p. 483, “the props of the Renaissance stage highlight the material object’s simultaneous participation in the synchronic and the diachronic, the aesthetic and the temporal.”

63. Yachnin, “Magical Properties,” p. 202. Yachnin has extended his argument in “Wonder-Effects: Othello’s Handkerchief,” forthcoming in Staged Properties. I am grateful to him for sharing this work.

64. States, Great Reckonings, pp. 28–29.

65. The problem of reconstructing the historical spectator is itself a thorny theoretical issue. See, for instance, Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Kenneth Krauss, Private Readings/Public Texts: Playreaders’ Constructs of Theatre Audiences (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993). Elin Diamond, “The Violence of ‘We’: Politicizing Identi‹cation,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed.

Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 390–98, argues that the “phenomenological spotlight” substitutes an essentialized, ahistorical subject for the “materialist subject.” Garner, Bodied Spaces, pp. 1–17, defends phenomenology as an approach that grounds the historical subject experientially.

66. In the matter of whether animate objects such as the human body can count as props, I concur with McAuley, Space in Performance, p. 176: “For some analysts the body of the actor is an object, indeed the primary object onstage . . . but I would say that, although a part of the body, or even a whole body, can become an object if so treated (touched, carried) by another actor, it is unhelpful to assimilate the inanimate and animate, to place into the same category subject and object. The scandal of treating a person or animal as object is muted if all bodies are routinely classi‹ed as objects.” If subjects can be objects on stage, then everything counts as an object and the category of “object” becomes meaningless.

67. Frank Proschan, “The Semiotic Study of Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects,” Semiotica 47 (1983): 3–46, de‹nes performing objects as “material images of humans, animals, or spirits that are created, displayed, or manipulated in narrative or dramatic performance” (p. 4). The literature on puppets, masks, and performing objects is extensive and fascinating but falls outside the purview of my own project. For crucial overviews, see Proschan’s essay and John Bell, “Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects at the End of the Century,” Drama Review 43 (1999): 15–27. These essays introduce special issues on the topic in Semiotica and TDR respectively.

68. Steve Tillis, “The Actor Occluded: Puppet Theatre and Acting Theory,” Theatre Topics 6 (1996): 109–19.

69. Honzl, “Dynamics of the Sign,” p. 77.

70. Elam, Semiotics, p. 28.

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Notes to Pages 21–26 71. This is a cunning move on Shakespeare’s part, since the information that Othello gave his ‹ancée a charmed handkerchief later con‹rms Brabantio’s charge that Othello used witchcraft to seduce his daughter. Ironically, the discredited senator whom Shakespeare sets up as a conventional senex iratus (and ridicules with the help of a prop) turns out to have been right all along. The deceptive prop communicates misinformation as well as information.

72. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 63. I am grateful to Judith Issroff for this reference.

73. Garner, Bodied Spaces, p. 89.

74. I am grateful to William Hutchings for reminding me that The Contractor’s entire stage action comprises the construction and dismantling of a prop. If play and prop are thus uniquely coterminous, he points out, this demonstrates a signi‹cant dramaturgical innovation.

75. Ketterer, “Stage Properties in Plautine Comedy,” part 1, p. 212, points out that the “birth token” is in use as early as Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers and cites the handbag in The Importance of Being Earnest as a recent example.

76. For a brief but intriguing discussion of the object as antagonist, see chapter 2 in Albert Bermel, Farce: A History from Aristophanes to Woody Allen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).

77. Barbara Crossette, “All Her Stage Is a World; Its Women Call for Justice,” New York Times, June 7, 2000, B1–8.

78. McAuley, Space in Performance, p. 183.

79. The green carnation became a coded symbol of homosexuality in the wider culture, a phenomenon traced back to this event. For an account of this incident, see Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 364–65.

80. The term fetish has become overdetermined, and I adopt it with some reluctance. I distinguish the peculiarly theatrical form of fetishism I describe here from other models, such as those of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. In the original, anthropological sense of fetishism coined by Charles de Brosses in Du culte des dieux fetiches (1760), actual material objects are endowed with supernatural powers and worshipped. In Capital, Marx appropriated fetishism as a metaphor: it is not the actual object but the commodity (exchange-value) that is fetishized, so that “the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves.” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, in The MarxEngels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 321.

Conversely, for Freud the fetish became a personal, idiosyncratic signi‹er of desire for something the subject lacks (e.g., the maternal phallus). Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” (1928), in Collected Papers, 5 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 5:198–204. The recent literature on the fetish has been enormous; a variety of approaches appears in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). For two recent accounts of the fetishized object on the early modern stage, see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Fetishisms and Renaissances,” in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (London: Routledge,

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Notes to Pages 26–33 2000), pp. 20–35; and, in the same volume, Eric Wilson, “Abel Drugger’s Sign and the Fetishes of Material Culture,” pp. 110–34.

81. Harold Pinter, The Homecoming, in Plays: Three (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978), p. 50.

82. I owe this anecdote to Ronald Harwood (like Harold Pinter, a sometime actor in Wol‹t’s touring company). Harwood immortalized Wol‹t as “Sir” in his play The Dresser.

83. “Normal usage employs the word ef‹gy as a noun meaning a sculpted or pictured likeness. More particularly it can suggest a crudely fabricated image of a person, commonly one that is destroyed in his or her stead, as in hanging or burning in ef‹gy. When ef‹gy appears as a verb, though that usage is rare, it means to evoke an absence, to body something forth, especially something from a distant past (OED). . . . Ef‹gy’s similarity to performance should be clear enough: it ‹lls by means of surrogation a vacancy created by the absence of an original.” Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 36.

84. Ibid., p. 3.

CHAPTER ONE The chapter epigraph is from an anonymous poem, cited by Rossell Hope Robbins, “Popular Prayers in Middle English Verse,” Modern Philology 36 (1939): 344.

1. Veltruský, “Man and Object,” p. 84.

2. Elam, Semiotics, p. 8.

3. See, for example, the N-Town Passion Play I, in Medieval Drama, ed. David Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mif›in, 1975), pp. 477–520. The classic account of the relation of the play-cycles to the feast of Corpus Christi is V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966).

4. The Play of the Sacrament (Croxton), in Bevington, Medieval Drama, pp.

754–88. All line references are cited parenthetically in my text. For the relation of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament to continental Host plays, see Lynette R. Muir, “The Mass on the Medieval Stage,” Comparative Drama 23 (1989–90): 314–30.

5. On the explicit designing of the Eucharist by the church as “a symbol of the utmost uniformity” in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 12–82. This quotation is from p. 12. Rubin’s article, “The Eucharist and the Construction of Late Medieval Identities,” in Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), pp. 43–64, provides an excellent summary of Rubin’s argument; see also J. Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200–1700,” Past and Present 100 (1983): 29–61.

6. Julia Houston, “Transubstantiation and the Sign: Cranmer’s Drama of the Lord’s Supper,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 118.

7. Leslie du S. Read, “Beginnings of Theatre in Africa and the Americas,” in

213

Notes to Pages 33–34 The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 94.

8. For the classic statement of this revisionist view, see O. B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), pp. 35–79. Hardison, pp. 1–35, refutes the “secularization” argument derived from E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903). Michal Kobialka summarizes this debate in his introduction to This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp.

1–33. See also C. Clifford Flanigan, “The Roman Rite and the Origins of the Liturgical Drama,” University of Toronto Quarterly 43 (1974): 263–84. Glynne Wickham, The Medieval Theatre, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), distinguishes the drama of worship from the drama of social recreation and courtly revels, both of which lack liturgical origin.

9. See Mervyn James, “Ritual, Drama, and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town,” Past and Present 98 (1983): 3–29; and Charles Zika, “Hosts, Processions, and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth-Century Germany,” Past and Present 118 (1988): 25–64.

10. Kolve, Play Called Corpus Christi, pp. 47–48. Kolve cites two pieces of evidence for the existence of such miracle plays: a 1389 record of an interludium performed by the guild of Corpus Christi at Bury St. Edmunds, and evidence that a play “sett forth by the clergye / In honor of the fest” was performed on Corpus Christi day at Chester alongside the Corpus Christi pageant-cycle. While miracle tales involving the Host were circulating freely by the fourteenth century, the late‹fteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament, discussed below, is unfortunately the sole surviving Host miracle play in English.

11. In 1426 the friar William Melton, citing the unruliness of the townspeople, petitioned the city of York that the procession and play should be performed on different days, and in either 1468 or 1476 the York Corpus Christi play displaced the actual procession of the Host from the of‹cial feast day onto the following day—ironically reversing Melton’s proposed order of events (which may or may not have been instituted following his request). For the presumed friction between the York guilds and ecclesiastical foundations that lay behind these events, as well as the disputed dates, see Anne Higgins, “Street and Markets,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 77–92, and Erik Paul Weissengruber, “The Corpus Christi Procession in Medieval York: A Symbolic Struggle in Public Space,” Theatre Survey 38 (1997): 117–38. Weissengruber notes that scholars disagree on the date of separation of procession and play.

12. The “poll ax” belonging to Pilate’s son is listed in the 1490 inventory of new or repaired items for the Coventry Smiths’ pageant of Corpus Christi. See Records of Early English Drama: Coventry, ed. R. W. Ingram (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), pp. 73–74. I am grateful for this reference to Clifford Davidson, Technologies, Guilds, and Early English Drama (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996), pp. 45–46. Davidson adds: “In 1451 Pilate is given a

214

Notes to Pages 34–39 pint of wine, which was probably merely refreshment for the actor but in fact could have been a prop.”

13. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., Records of Early English Drama: York (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 56. I owe this reference to Jean MacIntyre and Garrett P. J. Epp, “‘Cloathes Worth All the Rest’: Costumes and Properties,” in Cox and Kastan, New History, p. 279.

14. Russell A. Fraser, “Introduction: The English Drama from Its Beginnings to the Closing of the Theaters,” in Drama of the English Renaissance, vol. 1, The Tudor Period, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New York: Macmillan,1976), p.

3.

15. Hardison, “The Mass as Sacred Drama,” in Christian Rite, pp. 35–79.

16. John Wesley Harris, Medieval Theatre in Context: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 23–24.

17. For more detailed discussion of the theatrical properties of the Mass, see T. P. Dolan, “The Mass as Performance Text,” in From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama, ed. John A. Alford (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), pp. 13–24; Hardison, Christian Rite; Harris, Medieval Theatre in Context; Rubin, Corpus Christi; John M. Wasson, “The English Church as Theatrical Space,” in Cox and Kastan, New History, pp. 25–38; Wickham, The Medieval Theatre; and, especially, Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 1:15–43.

18. For the importance of Amalarius’s allegorical interpretation of the Mass to the history of drama, see Hardison, Christian Rite, pp. 37–79.

19. For a fascinating discussion of “the problem of the leftover,” see Stephen Greenblatt, “Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England,” in de Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass, Subject and Object, pp. 337–45.

20. Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae AD 446–1718 III, c. 2. Cited by Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 39. My description of the Host’s visual appearance is drawn from Rubin.

21. Harris, Medieval Theatre in Context, p. 73.

22. Ibid., p. 75; see also Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 49–63; and Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Signi‹cance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp.

48–69. Rubin points out that the twelfth-century emphasis on the Elevation of Host required theological consensus that Christ’s body was fully present after the priest’s consecration of the bread and before that of the wine. “The moment was all-important; before it, gazing and adoring matter was tantamount to idolatry, after it, spiritual gazing could convey great bene‹ts” (p. 54, footnote omitted).

23. Aelred of Rievaulx, Speculum Charitatis 2.33, as quoted in translation by Herbert M. Schueller, The Idea of Music: An Introduction to Musical Aesthetics in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Early Drama, Art, and Music, Monograph Ser., 9 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1988), p. 355.

24. “Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards,” in Selections from English Wyclif‹te Writings, ed. Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 25.

25. Bevington, Medieval Drama, p. 6.

215

Notes to Pages 39–42 26. The Visit to the Sepulchre, from the Regularis Concordia of St. Ethelwold, in Bevington, Medieval Drama, pp. 27–28. Wasson, “Church as Theatrical Space,” p.

28, notes that the two surviving versions of this text “were clearly to be performed before the clergy, not the laity, and apparently in the choir, not the nave.”

27. [The Service] for Representing the Scene at The Lord’s Sepulchre (Fleury), in Bevington, Medieval Drama, pp. 39–44.

28. The term property-man refers to the person who furnishes and is in charge of props in a theatrical production. He is not to be confused with the “property player,” a professional theater man imported from London to stage and/or assist with local productions of Corpus Christi plays. See John C. Coldeway, “That Enterprising Property Player: Semi-professional Drama in Sixteenth-Century England,” Theatre Notebook 31 (1977): 5–12. The ointment seller might also have been a “property-boy”—a person who appears in a scene but takes no direct part in the action. The OED cites John Dryden, Albion and Albanius 3.2: “The Saints advance, To ‹ll the Dance, And the Property Boys come in” (1685).

29. “The host is not a type similar to the body of Christ or a reproduction of Christ or a dimensionally limited appearance by Christ. It is Christ. This identity of Christ in the Eucharist, his real presence, allows the host to achieve things outside the realm of signs, namely the bestowing of grace, and sometimes the healing of the sick.” Houston, “Transubstantiation and the Sign,” p. 118.

30. The Service [for Representing] the Pilgrim, at Vespers of the Second Holy Day of Easter, in Bevington, Medieval Drama, p. 47.

31. Ibid., pp. 47–48.

32. Ibid., p. 48.

33. Hardison, Christian Rite, p. 271, argues that “[r]itual action occurs in the context of the timeless present and unlocalized space. At the moment of the Mass sacri‹ce, past, present and future are one, and the congregation is united with Christians everywhere in the mystical body of Christ. Liturgical drama represents the ‹rst sustained crossing of the boundary between ritual and representation in the Middle Ages. The effect of the shift to linear time and localized space is apparent in the clari‹ed sequence of events, consistency of character identity, verisimilitude, and elimination of ceremonial elements unrelated to the historical event represented. In no liturgical plays, however, is the ceremonial element entirely eliminated.”

34. Young, Drama of Medieval Church, 1:470.

35. Ibid., pp. 455–56.

36. A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993).

37. Robert Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), p. 198, summarizes recent scholarship on this point: “Many recent writers on the Eucharist observe that an important change in the concept of symbolism occurred in the transition between the Patristic period and the Middle Ages. For the Fathers of the Church and for the ancient world generally, a symbol did not only signify something; it also was thought to participate in that thing and to make it concretely present. The symbolic was not contrasted with the real. . . . In the Middle Ages,

216

Notes to Pages 42–45 however, the symbolic is said to have become distinguished from and even separated from the real; if something were taken as symbolic, it was to be considered merely symbolic and not real. . . . From that point on to the present day, we have been left with an unfortunate alternative: either a symbolic or a real presence.”

38. Darryll Grantley, “Saints’ Plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 272, notes: “The Play of the Sacrament is . . . clearly intended for touring, as is indicated not only by the declaration in the banns that the play is to be performed ‘at Croxton on Monday,’ but also the colophon at the end of the manuscript—‘Ix may play yt at ease’—and the play was probably the property of a large itinerant company.” However, Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 38, notes, “If the Croxton Play of the Sacrament was ‹rst performed at Bury St. Edmunds, then it would have been produced by one of the numerous religious guilds of the town, and probably one whose members included clergy.”

39. Cecilia Cutts, “The Croxton Play: An Anti-Lollard Piece,” Modern Language Quarterly 5 (1944): 45–60. Other scholars have con‹rmed that the Croxton play presumes the presence of Lollards in the audience; see Ann Eljenholm Nichols, “Lollard Language in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” Notes and Queries, n.s. 36 (1989): 23–25; and Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, pp. 34–42. Donnalee Dox argues, in “Medieval Drama as Documentation: ‘Real Presence’ in the Croxton Conversion of Ser Jonathas the Jewe by the Myracle of the Blissed Sacrament,” Theatre Survey 31 (1997): 97–115, that the play’s Jewish villains symbolize actual Jews. For the Eucharist as a locus for the construction of the Other, including Jews, children, and women, see Rubin, “Eucharist.”

40. Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, p. 31, summarizes the range and complexity of religious attitudes and beliefs in East Anglia at the time of the Croxton play: “The spiritual climate of ‹fteenth-century East Anglia, then, seems to have been much clouded by the troublesome presence of unorthodox religious attitudes, attitudes whose very presence may have discouraged of‹cial retaliation. It is also important, however, to emphasize that East Anglian Lollardry was far from a deliberate sectarianism and that Wyclif‹an attitudes toward vernacular scripture or the Eucharist were often accompanied by entirely reverent attitudes toward masses for the dead, the communal bene‹ts of monastic prayer, or the ef‹cacy of cult images and relics, attitudes that a modern historian would be quick to consider most un-Wyclif‹an.”

41. Bevington, Medieval Drama, p. 755.

42. Doctor Faustus A-Text, 1.3.20–23, in Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

43. Unfortunately, as in the case of the Beauvais Peregrinus play, we do not know what the oble looked like, nor if a single property was used in performance.

The miracle of the bleeding Host poses an interesting staging problem, for instance, in that it risks desecrating the very article whose sanctity the play champions. A trick weapon such as the sword that pierces the king’s side in Preston’s Cambyses (ca. 1561) may have been used, or else a bladder concealed within the

217

Notes to Pages 46–49 property itself. A trick oble could have been used so as to avoid desecrating the oble that is eventually placed on the church altar.

44. For a critical encounter between Brecht and medieval drama, see Martin Stevens, “Illusion and Reality in the Medieval Drama,” College English 32 (1970–71): 448–64.

45. Cited by John A. F. Thomson, The Later Lollards, 1414–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 134.

46. Wasson, “Church as Theatrical Space,” pp. 31–32; Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, p. 40.

47. Bevington, Medieval Drama, p. 755, concludes that “the action may actually conclude inside the church with a full procession and the performance of religious ceremonies.” Conversely, Sister Nicholas Maltman, “Meaning and Art in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” English Literary History 41 (1974): 159, assumes that the church was “represented . . . by altar and tabernacle.” Richard L. Homan, “Devotional Themes in the Violence and Humor of the Play of the Sacrament,” Comparative Drama 20 (1986–87): 327–40, is uncertain whether the audience in fact entered a real church.

48. William Tydeman, English Medieval Theatre, 1400–1500 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 53–77.

49. Grantley, “Saint’s Plays,” p. 272, cautions that we can never be certain that saints’ and miracle plays were always produced under the direct auspices of religious orders, craft guilds, or civic authorities. Rather, “[T]his type of play would probably have been produced in a variety of circumstances by different sorts of company and, by extension, for a range of different purposes.”

50. Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, p. 32.

51. Sarah Beckwith, “Ritual, Church, and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body,” in Aers, Culture and History, p. 79. Of course, we do not know the extent to which a medieval audience would have been jarred, let alone “embarrassed,” by the Play of the Sacrament.

52. Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 47, notes: “By the late Middle Ages in England the pyx was often kept hanging over the altar, and sometimes was controlled by a set of pulleys, and a fringed cloth such as was usually hung over it, known as a ‘kerchief,’ survives from Hessett (Suffolk)” (notes omitted). Rubin also notes that consecrated hosts were occasionally taken out of the church on visitations to the sick, when elaborate precautions were taken to protect and enhance its symbolic impact such as the use of special pyxes (p. 80). According to Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 55, “By the fourth century, the Eucharist was celebrated in graveyards, and the practice continued at least until the ‹fth century, despite some episcopal opposition.”

53. (N-Town) Passion Play I, p. 508.

54. Ibid., pp. 508, 509. That the play was taken on tour is evident from the proclamation, ll. 526–27: “At vj of [th]e belle we gynne oure play / In .N. town.” It is generally thought that the name (“N”) of the town in which the plays were to be performed would be inserted here. See Alan J. Fletcher, “The N-Town Plays,” in Beadle, Cambridge Companion, p. 165.

218

Notes to Pages 50–53 55. For a suggestive reading of the play in which the Host’s status as a transcendental signi‹er within an “economy of salvation” is compromised by its dramatic representation as a fungible commodity, see Alexandra Reid-Schwartz, “Economies of Salvation: Commerce and the Eucharist in The Profanation of the Host and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” Comitatus 25 (1994): 1–20. For the way in which “Croxton demands that we see the body of Christ as a dramatic process of relation and not a static object of perception,” see Beckwith, “Ritual, Church, and Theatre,” pp. 65–90.

56. Thus English Reformer John Frith was martyred in 1533 not for denying transubstantiation—although he wittily compared belief in the sacrament to a thirsty man sucking an alepole in order to get drink out of it—but because he counseled “that we make no necessary article of the faith of our part, but leave it indifferent for all men to judge therein, as God shall open their hearts, and no side to condemn or despise the other.” Letter cited by C. W. Dugmore, The Mass and the English Reformers (London: Macmillan, 1958), pp. 101–2. Under Henry VIII (1509–47), England remained Catholic in doctrine despite the break with Rome; under Edward VI (1547–53), doctrine was reformed in the new service books of 1549 and 1552; and under Mary I (1553–58), England temporarily reverted to Catholic doctrine and the persecution of Reformers until the accession of Protestant Elizabeth I in 1558.

57. Martin Luther, On the Babylonish Captivity of the Church (n.p.), cited by A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London: Fontana/Collins, 1967), p. 96.

58. John Calvin, Consensus Tigurinus (1549), trans. Stephen Greenblatt, cited in Greenblatt, “Remnants of the Sacred,” p. 340.

59. Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, vol. 1, From Cranmer to Hooker, 1534–1603 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), usefully distinguishes between Zwingli’s “Memorialism,” which views the Lord’s Supper as “a prop or aid to faith” (p. 82), and Calvin’s “Virtualism,” which Davies de‹nes as “the belief that while the bread and wine continue to exist unchanged after the Consecration, yet the faithful communicant receives together with the elements the virtue or power of the body and blood of Christ” (p. 83). Without wishing to con›ate Zwingli and Calvin, I subsequently adopt the term Zwinglian attitude to emphasize the view (held by both men) that the Eucharist is a sign rather than the thing represented. However, Zwingli’s view is closer than Calvin’s to the idea that the consecrated wafer is a mere “prop.” For more on this distinction, see Judith H. Anderson, “Language and History in the Reformation: Cranmer, Gardiner, and the Words of Institution,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 20–51.

60. From a semiotic perspective, of course, simply^ by being placed on stage any baby becomes a sign of a baby. Through what Jindrich Honzl terms “semiotization,” an infant on stage would automatically denote “baby,” even if no ‹ctional role were assigned to it. See Honzl, “Dynamics of the Sign.” One might say that on stage all props—even real babies—are changelings.

61. Houston, “Transubstantiation and the Sign,” p. 117. Carlson, “Semiotics and Nonsemiotics,” makes the same point.

62. Peter Brook, There Are No Secrets: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre (London: Methuen, 1993), p. 46.

219

Notes to Pages 53–61 63. Ibid., p. 46.

64. States, Great Reckonings, p. 8.

65. Ibid., p. 21.

66. Ibid., p. 6.

67. Ibid., p. 4.

68. Bert O. States, “The Dog on the Stage: Theater as Phenomenon,” New Literary History 14 (1983): 381–82. For an extended phenomenological reading of the Mass, see Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence.

69. States, Great Reckonings, p. 8.

70. Preface to A Boke made by Johan Fryth, cited by Dugmore, Mass and the English Reformers, p. 98.

71. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. A. S. McGrade and Brian Vickers (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1975), p. 291. Dugmore, Mass and the English Reformers, p. 246, notes: “Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity . . . marks the end of the direct in›uence of foreign systems upon the English Church, and the beginning of what we now call Anglicanism.”

72. Anthony B. Dawson, “Performance and Participation: Desdemona, Foucault, and the Actor’s Body,” in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 29–45.

73. Joel Altman, “‘Vile Participation’: The Ampli‹cation of Violence in the Theatre of Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 19.

74. Dawson, “Performance and Participation,” p. 38.

75. This principle of the dynamism of the sign was ‹rst put forward by Honzl, “Dynamics of the Sign.”

76. Dickens, The English Reformation, p. 41.

77. In 1610–11, this tension between theater as alchemy and theater as conjuring trick was embodied by the rival ‹gures of Shakespeare’s Prospero and Jonson’s alchemist. More recently, compare the attitudes in Antonin Artaud, “Oriental and Occidental Theatre,” in The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), pp. 68–73, and Bertolt Brecht, “Stage Design for the Epic Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 230–33. For Brecht, theater is a critique of the social; for Artaud, it is the gods made ›esh.

78. For a discussion of the effects of late medieval affective piety on the semiotic resonance of the Host, see Bynum, Holy Feast, pp. 54–55, 63–64, 255.

79. I borrow this useful phrase from Bianca in Othello. When confronted with Desdemona’s handkerchief, Bianca remarks, “To the felt absence now I feel a cause” (3.4.176). Bianca refers to Cassio’s neglect of her, but the handkerchief itself is also a “felt absence.” See Sofer, “Felt Absences.”

80. Petrus in N-Town Passion Play I, p. 510.

CHAPTER TWO The chapter epigraph is from Samuel Beckett, Endgame, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 134. Portions of this chapter are reprinted from Comparative Drama by permission of the editors.

220

Notes to Pages 61–66 1. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 56.

2. Cited in Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 25.

3. Ibid., pp. 19–29.

4. Higgins, “Streets and Markets,” p. 89; Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, p.

25.

5. Among the last recorded dramatic appearances of the Host was during a scurrilous “mock mass” performed for Queen Elizabeth at Hinchenbrook in 1564, in which a Cambridge student portrayed a Marian bishop as a dog with the Host in his mouth. On this occasion, the anti-Catholic satire back‹red: despite her Reformist sympathies, the Queen was so angry at the students’ temerity in presuming to instruct her that she stormed out. See Paul Whit‹eld White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 107. According to Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1606–1613 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 16, a ‹ne of one thousand pounds “was imposed in 1639 on the players at the Fortune Theater for performing a mock mass onstage.”

6. The “place” of Elizabethan public theater in relation to the marketplace has received a good deal of critical attention. Particularly in›uential are JeanChristophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-Saxon Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Bruster, Drama and the Market; and Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

7. Carlson, The Haunted Stage.

8. Carlson, “The Haunted Stage,” 12. The induction to Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels (1600) demonstrates that Elizabethan playwrights were keenly alert to the theatrical possibilities of ghosting: “They say, the umbrae, or ghosts, of some three or foure playes, departed a dozen yeeres since, have bin seene walking on your stage heere: take heed, boy, if your house bee haunted with such hobgoblins, ’twill fright away all your spectators quickly.” Ben Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 4:41.

9. According to John Stow’s Abridgement of the English Chronicle (1618), “The 24 of June [1559] the Book of Common Prayer was established, and the Mass clean suppressed in all Churches.” Cited in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 3365.

10. This argument is persuasively put forward by Louis Montrose, “The Purpose of Playing: Re›ections on a Shakespearean Anthropology,” Helios 7 (1980): 51–74, and by Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists.”

11. Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” p. 113.

12. Ibid.

13. According to Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), p. 7, these ceremonies originally involved burying and raising a consecrated Host instead of a cross and may have

221

Notes to Pages 66–69 evolved out of the custom of “reserving” the Host from Maundy Thursday for use in communion on Good Friday.

14. “The Visit to the Sepulchre (Visitatio Sepulchri),” in Bevington, Medieval Drama, p. 28.

15. Ibid., p. 24.

16. J. L. Styan, The English Stage: A History of Drama and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 12.

17. “The Visit to the Sepulchre (Visitatio Sepulchri) from Aquileia (?),” in Bevington, Medieval Drama, pp. 34–35.

18. On the tradition of Mary’s kerchief see Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, pp.

51–65.

19. “The Visit to the Sepulchre (Visitatio Sepulchri) from St. Lambrecht,” in Bevington, Medieval Drama, p. 38.

20. The cloth is not elevated in every extant Visitatio. In the late-twelfth-century or early-thirteenth-century Visitatio from Fleury, for instance, the shroud and head-cloth remain in the sepulcher, and the risen Christ appears to Mary Magdalene disguised as a gardener. Hardison, Christian Rite, p. 205, notes, “At Parma the Host is removed from the sepulcher before the ‘visit,’ and the linteamina in which it is wrapped becomes evidence of the fact of the Resurrection, although they are not ‘displayed’ like the linteum of the Regularis Concordia.”

21. I am grateful to P. A. Skantze for this observation.

22. Woolf, The English Mystery Plays, 403, notes: “The incident is included in the three great French Passions and [Émile] Mâle argues that these dramatic representations account for the sudden appearance of St Veronica in late medieval iconographic representations of the road to Calvary (L’art réligieux de la ‹n du moyen âge, 64). The handkerchief bearing the face of Christ appeared amongst the instruments of the Passion”; cf. Early English Text Society 46, Richard Morris, Legends of the Holy Rood; Symbols of the Passion and Cross-Poems, pp. 170–73.

23. “Then he [the actor playing Jesus] takes from her hand the cloth, on which a ‘veronica’ is to be painted, presses it to his face, and gives it back to her. Then Veronica lifts up the outspread cloth towards the people.” These stage directions are cited in The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages: Texts and Documents in English Translation, ed. Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1983), p. 124.

24. The Corpus Christi Play of the English Middle Ages, ed. Reginald Thorne Davies (New Jersey: Rowman and Little‹eld, 1972), p. 306.

25. The York Cycle of Mystery Plays: A Complete Version, ed. J. S. Purvis (New York: Macmillan, 1957), pp. 277–78. Davidson, Technology, Guilds, p. 73, offers a fascinating description of the “shearing” process perfected by the York guild, in which the trampled, stretched, and teasled cloth was clipped with cropping shears to produce a soft, even fabric. In their play, the Shearmen were not only dramatizing a historic miracle but advertising their latest technology. Davidson also notes that although Veronica does not appear in the play, the role is listed in the York Ordo Paginarum of 1415, which predates the extant text by about thirty years.

26. Clifford Davidson, “Sacred Blood and the Late Medieval Stage,” Comparative Drama 31 (1997): 436–58. Davidson borrows the phrase “ocular experience”

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Notes to Pages 69–73 from Peter Travis, Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 15–19.

27. Ibid., p. 448.

28. Davidson, A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, p. 98.

29. The Passion Play II (N-Town), in Bevington, Medieval Drama, p. 534.

30. The Scourging (Wake‹eld), in Bevington, Medieval Drama, p. 558.

31. Ibid., p. 556.

32. Davidson, “Sacred Blood,” p. 451.

33. Stevens, “Illusion and Reality,” 456, notes: “Jesus wears the conventional white robe until the Passion, when he is clad in purple. The stage direction in the Ludus Coventriae tells us speci‹cally that the torturers pull off ‘[t]he purpyl cloth and don on A-geyn his owyn clothis’ (31/677f.), which, in a previous stage direction, were identi‹ed as white (30/465f.).” Stevens quotes from Ludus Coventriae, ed. K. S. Block, Early English Text Society, extra series 120 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922).

34. See especially Bynum, Holy Feast, pp. 64–65; Jody Enders, “Emotion Memory and the Medieval Performance of Violence,” Theatre Survey 38 (1997): 139–60; John Spalding Gatton, “‘There Must Be Blood’: Mutilation and Martyrdom on the Medieval Stage,” in Violence in Drama, ed. James Redmond, Themes in Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 79–91; Victor I. Scherb, “Violence and the Social Body in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” in Violence in Drama, pp. 69–78; Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, pp. 136–60; and Peter W. Travis, “The Social Body of the Dramatic Christ in Medieval England,” in Early Drama to 1600 (Acta 13), ed. Albert H. Tricomi (Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1987), pp. 17–36.

35. Christ’s Death and Burial (York), in Bevington, Medieval Drama, pp. 591, 592.

36. Ibid., p. 580.

37. Ibid., p. 593.

38. The Resurrection of the Lord (Wake‹eld), in Bevington, Medieval Drama, p.

620.

39. Ibid., p. 617.

40. On the belief—widespread from the thirteenth century—that seeing the elevated Host was a “second sacrament,” alongside receiving, see Bynum, Holy Feast, pp. 54–55. See also chapter 1.

41. Thus the iconoclast William Perkins warns, “A thing fained in the mind by imagination is an idoll.” William Perkins, “A Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times,” in The Works of the Famous and Worthie Minister of Christ in the Universitie of Cambridge, M. William Perkins (Cambridge, 1612–13), 1:676. Cited by James R. Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), p. 45.

42. Michael O’Connell, “God’s Body: Incarnation, Physical Embodiment, and the Fate of Biblical Theater in the Sixteenth Century,” in Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), p. 63.

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Notes to Pages 73–77 O’Connell expands his argument in The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

43. O’Connell, “God’s Body,” p. 64.

44. “The consciousness of the Elizabethan Reformers had been formed by a deep anxiety about the possibility of seeing a god within the physical presence of a statue or painting; such a mode of seeing was for them the very essence of idolatry.

The suggestion that the creation of presence is precisely the work of theater thus raises the analogous possibility of idolatry, especially in the context of theater representing sacred narrative.” Ibid., p. 65.

45. White, Theatre and Reformation, p. 4.

46. Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 9–39.

47. Ibid., p. 38.

48. “It is in the discourse of the reformers that the magical becomes inextricably linked to the strange and the feminine, identi‹ed with error and superstition, and repudiated as witchcraft. And it is in the discourse of the reformers that holy images and sacred relics beloved and worshiped by the populace, including numerous well-known handkerchiefs, are systematically and relentlessly demysti‹ed.”

Ibid., p. 130.

49. John Calvin, Commentary on Acts, quoted by Diehl, Staging Reform, pp.

132–33.

50. Ibid., p. 133.

51. See Claire Sponsler, “The Culture of the Spectator: Conformity and Resistance to Medieval Performances,” Theatre Journal 44 (1992): 15–30.

52. See Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, pp. 51–65.

53. On the contested interpretation of the bloody handkerchief in Othello, see Sofer, “Felt Absences.”

54. Henslowe’s Diary indicates that a performance of The Spanish Tragedy was immediately or very closely preceded by a performance of “spanes comodye donne oracoe” on ‹ve occasions in 1592 (March 13, 14, 30, 31; April 10, 14, 22, 24; May 21, 22). See Andrew S. Cairncross, introduction, [The Spanish Comedy, or] The First Part of Hieronimo and The Spanish Tragedy [or Hieronimo is Mad Again] (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), pp. xiv–xv. All citations to both plays are to Cairncross’s edition and are cited parenthetically in my text.

55. Cairncross, p. xix, contends that “1 Hieronimo is a memorial version [of] a longer good text by Kyd, The Spanish Comedy, which preceded The Spanish Tragedy and combined with it to form a two-part play.” In his edition of The Spanish Tragedy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970), p. xv, editor J. M. Mulryne notes that 1 Hieronimo “may, in one form or another, be Kyd’s.” According to recent editor Emma Smith, however, “There is no reason to believe that Kyd had any part in the writing of The First Part of Jeronimo.” Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie, ed.

Emma Smith (London: Penguin, 1998), p. xxiv.

56. I accept J. R. Mulryne’s tentative identi‹cation of Bel-imperia’s “scarf” with Horatio’s bloody napkin in his edition of The Spanish Tragedy, p. 24. Mulryne glosses Hieronimo’s word “handkercher” as “handkerchief, small scarf.”

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Notes to Pages 77–85 57. In The Spanish Tragedy, Horatio will describe the comrades’ friendship in terms that suggest an Achilles-Patroclus relationship: I took him up and wound him in my arms, And welding him unto my private tent, There laid him down and dew’d him with my tears, And sighed and sorrowed as became a friend.

(1.4.34–37) 58. Since the handkerchief and Andrea himself are both present on stage for much of the time, Andrea’s blood and body are weirdly bifurcated yet simultaneously staged. Compare the play’s ‹nal, uneasy double focus on Horatio’s hanging corpse and the bloody handkerchief in his father’s hand.

59. Horatio’s explanation to Bel-imperia has the added explicatory function of ‹lling in those spectators at The Spanish Tragedy who may be unfamiliar with 1 Hieronimo. The scene thus implies two different yet simultaneous narrative contracts: one for those who know that the scarf was given to Andrea by Bel-imperia, and one for those (like Horatio himself) who do not. Presumably the pleasure of being in the know may have stimulated repeat attendance at the play.

60. Compare the sleeve offered by Troilus to Cressida and later given by Cressida to Diomedes in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. (Although Troilus determines to bloody the favor worn in Diomedes’ helmet, as with so much else in the play this threat is never realized.) The soiled handkerchief as an emblem of sexual consummation runs from The Spanish Tragedy through Othello all the way to August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888).

61. Styan, The English Stage, p. 113. Styan adds: “The property ‘arbour’ was probably an arch of lattice (decorated with leaves and looking a bit like the ‘tree’ referred to later in the play), sturdy yet portable for convenient hangings; it possibly did double duty when Pedringano was hanged in 3.6. Such a prop is sketched on the title-page of the edition of 1615, where Hieronimo from his bed ‹nds Horatio hanging, while Bel-imperia is pulled away by Lorenzo in a mask” (113–15).

62. In Bevington, Medieval Drama, pp. 572, 589.

63. In the 1997 production of The Spanish Tragedy by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, “Andrea’s scarf was the bloody napkin that Hieronimo took from Horatio’s body, and when he brandished it at Castile in the ‹nal act, the latter recoiled from the smell.” Emma Smith, introduction to The Spanish Tragedie, p. xxviii.

64. The arbor-property may double as a gallows to hang Pedringano in 3.6, cementing its association with death. It appears yet again as the “bower” in Hieronimo’s garden in 4.2, when Isabella strips its branches and leaves before she stabs herself; it is then moved into place behind the curtain Hieronimo knocks up at the top of the next scene, ready for the discovery of Horatio’s body at 4.4.88, where the stage direction reads, “Shows his dead son.”

65. Martin White, Renaissance Drama in Action: An Introduction to Aspects of Theatre Practice and Performance (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 120. Compare the moment in Titus Andronicus when Marcus presents Aaron the Moor’s illegitimate

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Notes to Pages 85–87 baby to a horri‹ed onstage audience, in what may also be an ironic echo (“Behold the child”) of the Elevation.

66. In my thinking about surrogation, I am indebted to Roach, Cities of the Dead. Roach’s notion of the ef‹gy, an object (or actor) that “‹lls by means of surrogation a vacancy created by the absence of an original” and “hold[s] open a place in memory into which many different people may step according to circumstances and occasions” (p. 36) applies beautifully to the bloody handkerchief. Robert N. Watson, The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1994), p. 60, views The Spanish Tragedy as “itself a metonymic substitution replacing the [Catholic] rituals of death erased by the Reformation.” According to Watson, “mourning symbols (such as the bloody scarf) . . conjure the dead into synecdochic presence” (p. 56). Cited

by Smith, introduction to The Spanish Tragedie, pp. xix–xx.

67. There is even a touch of Tourneuresque black humor: the fact that Hieronimo has “reserved” the “propitious” handkerchief recalls the liturgical practice of reserving the consecrated Host for Easter communion.

68. Greenblatt, “Remnants of the Sacred.” Greenblatt returns to the Eucharist in two fascinating chapters, “The Wound in the Wall” and “The Mousetrap,” in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

69. Diehl, Staging Reform, p. 117. Diehl quotes from Actes and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. Stephen Reed Cattley (London, 1837–41), 5:303.

70. In direct contrast, Diehl argues that “Kyd’s audiences have learned to distrust spectacles of blood” (ibid., p. 119). For an account of the play’s violence as politically subversive, see James Shapiro, “‘Tragedies Naturally Performed’: Kyd’s Representation of Violence,” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 99–113. Shapiro points out that “[w]e tend to speak of theater as a place where violence is merely represented, but it is well to remember that the Elizabethan stage doubled as a site of actual violent spectacle,” including execution (103).

71. Julia Lupton, Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 217, reads The Winter’s Tale in similar terms: “The Winter’s Tale smashes the Catholic idols in order to extract their fascinating power, or, to change the metaphor, in order to draw new wine from their own skins.” For Lupton, “[V]estigial thaumaturgy and iconographic redeployments animate Shakespearean drama” (218). By contrast, in his analysis of King Lear’s appropriation of Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare’s tragedy colludes with Harsnett’s aim to expose exorcism as a form of theater: “The of‹cial church dismantles and cedes to the players the powerful mechanisms of an unwanted and dangerous charisma; in return the players con‹rm the charge that those mechanisms are theatrical and hence illusory.” At the same time, Harsnett’s argument undergoes a sea-change, since “Shakespeare intensi‹es as a theatrical experience the need for exorcism, and his demysti‹cation of the practice is not

226

Notes to Pages 87–91 identical in its interests to Harsnett’s.” Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” pp. 120, 126.

72. A verbal echo of the “hollowing out” of magical cloth occurs in Henry Chettle’s bloody Tragedy of Hoffman (1631). Martha, duchess of Luninberg, gives her son Otho “apparrell that I bade him weare / Against the force of witches and their spells.” This apparel is (mistakenly) said to become a crude burial “shroude” once Otho is murdered by Clois Hoffman, who ›ays Otho’s body and hangs the skeleton on a tree alongside that of his father, whose corpse he has stolen from the gallows as a spur to vengeance. Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1951), ll. 2034–37. Like the handkerchief and corpse in The Spanish Tragedy and the skull in The Revenger’s Tragedy, the skeleton becomes the revenge hero’s memento occidere.

73. Bloody handkerchiefs subsequently appear in John Lyly’s The Woman in the Moon (1594–97), the anonymous A Warning for Fair Women (1596–1600), Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI (1590–91), As You Like It (1599–1600), Othello (ca. 1603), and Cymbeline (1609–10), Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge (1608), John Webster’s The Duchess of Mal‹ (1612), and Sir John Denham’s The Sophy (1641). On the Restoration stage, the bloody handkerchief featured in three gory tragedies, Nathaniel Lee’s Caesar Borgia (1679), John Banks’s Vertue Betray’d (1682), and Colley Cibber’s Xerxes (1699), before being mocked as a stage cliché in Sir John Vanbrugh’s The Mistake (1705). In the Georgian era, the handkerchief’s contract of sensation was eclipsed by a contract of sentiment: Georgian audiences evidently preferred their “tragedy handkerchiefs” drowned in tears rather than in blood.

74. John Pielmeier, Agnes of God (Garden City, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1982), cited by Gatton, “There Must Be Blood,” p. 89. I am grateful to Gatton’s article for bringing the play to my attention in this context.

CHAPTER THREE 1. For a full discussion see Sofer, “Felt Absences.” Portions of this chapter are reprinted from English Literary Renaissance by permission of the editors.

2. In his famous 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud (citing Jentsch) characterizes the uncanny as “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.”

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Studies in Parapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), p. 31.

3. We do not know the exact year in which Hamlet was written, nor when it was ‹rst performed. For the purposes of this chapter I refer to Hamlet as “Jacobean,” on the principle that the play’s skull would have had its greatest impact on Jacobean audiences and playwrights rather than on Elizabethan ones.

4. Theodore Spencer makes this claim in Death and Elizabethan Tragedy: A Study of Convention and Opinion in the Elizabethan Drama (1936; reprint, New York: Pageant Books, 1960), p. 185. Roland Mushat Frye states in The Renaissance

227

Notes to Pages 91–93 Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 206, that “Shakespeare’s presentation of that scene [of Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull] was, as far as we can now tell, a striking innovation on the London stage when he introduced it in or around 1600.” By contrast, in “Memento Mockery: Some Skulls on the English Renaissance Stage,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 10 (1984): 9, Phoebe S. Spinrad tantalizingly writes: “One of the last orthodox uses of the memento mori on the English Renaissance stage is the famous graveyard scene in Hamlet”—but Spinrad names no precursors. Failing further evidence, I am inclined to accept Spencer’s and Frye’s contention that Hamlet marks the ‹rst appearance of a fully dimensional skull on the Elizabethan stage (if one does not count the casketed death’s-head encountered by the prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice).

5. See Frye’s chapter “The Prince amid the Tombs,” in The Renaissance Hamlet, especially pp. 206–20. Frye, p. 214, points to Rogier van der Weyden’s triptych for Jean de Braque in 1450 as the ‹rst introduction of the skull as a visual symbol of death in Christian Europe, and to Lucas van Leyden’s Young Man with a Skull (ca. 1519) as “the earliest known example of the basic visual topos that Shakespeare gives us when Hamlet takes Yorick’s skull from the Gravedigger.” Frye cites several other skull portraits that predate Hamlet, including Jacob Binck’s Self-Portrait with Skull; anonymous portraits of Sir Thomas Gresham and William Clowes; Remigius Hogenberg’s English Gentleman; and Theodore de Bry’s Self-Portrait. In each of these canvases, a contemplative young man is ›anked by a skull, although the visual relation of man to skull varies in provocative ways.

6. Bridget Gellert, “The Iconography of Melancholy in the Graveyard Scene of Hamlet,” Studies in Philology 67 (1970): 57–66; Harry Morris, “Hamlet as a Memento Mori Poem,” PMLA 85 (1970): 1035–40.

7. Elizabeth Maslen, “Yorick’s Place in Hamlet,” Essays and Studies, n.s. 36 (1983): 3.

8. Jeffrey Alan Triggs, “A Mirror for Mankind: The Pose of Hamlet with the Skull of Yorick,” New Orleans Review 17 (1990): 73.

9. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet, p. 220.

10. In their introduction to Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass note the irony whereby objects in vanitas still lifes, including the skull, “perform the opposite of what they profess, richly and fully embodying things rather than emptying them out” (p. 1).

11. Spinrad, “Memento Mockery,” p. 1. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

12. “By the end of the sixteenth century, the inanimate skull was so common that it had become ‹rst an item of fashion and then an object of derision. All classes of society began wearing death’s head rings, much in the manner that people today wear religious symbols—some as a genuine aid to prayer; some as an outward show of faith; and some, no doubt, as a matter of fashion, because everyone else has one. As the fashion spread, prostitutes began wearing the rings as well, probably in an effort to appear ‘respectable’; but as the sign became almost universal among members of the profession, it eventually came to be regarded as an advertisement of the wearer’s trade. And over the years, the symbol thus became not a

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Notes to Pages 93–95 manifestation of the thing that it was meant to symbolize, but rather an object in itself: not a reminder of death, but a protection against it, a lucky charm that would allow the wearer to forget about death.” Spinrad, “Memento Mockery,” p. 8.

Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), p. 330, cites Jacobean author Philip Massinger’s mordant advice: “Sell some of your clothing and buy yourself a death’s head and wear it on your middle ‹nger.”

13. I am indebted here to Stephen Greenblatt’s discussion of Holbein’s painting in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 17–27. Frye discusses the painting in connection with the prince of Denmark in The Renaissance Hamlet, p. 214, as does Marjorie Garber, “‘Remember Me’: Memento Mori Figures in Shakespeare’s Plays,” Renaissance Drama 12 (1981): 6–7. Lisa Jardine, “Strains of Renaissance Reading,” English Literary Renaissance 25 (1995): 306, attempts to historicize the painting “away from the conventionally literary.”

14. For the picture’s use of shadow, see Mary F. S. Hervey, Holbein’s “Ambassadors”: The Picture and the Men (London: George Bell and Sons, 1900), p. 205.

15. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 19.

16. For Jacques Lacan’s in›uential reading of Holbein’s anamorphic skull as a way of “showing us that, as subjects, we are literally called into the picture, and represented here as caught,” see The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), pp. 79–104. For Lacan, the portrait is a trap or lure for the gaze that “re›ects our own nothingness, in the ‹gure of the death’s head” (p. 92).

17. Garber, “Remember Me,” p. 5.

18. Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 11.

19. Act 4 of The Atheist’s Tragedy contains a neat visual joke in this vein when Charlemont, on the run, takes refuge in a charnel house. He takes hold of a skull, which slips and causes him to stagger—a disagreeable prop here literally refusing to prop up a character. Charlemont comments wryly, “Death’s head, deceivest my hold? / Such is the trust to all mortality.” John Webster and Cyril Tourneur, Four Plays, ed. John Addington Symonds (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 277.

20. Garber, “Remember Me,” p. 6.

21. Garber, ibid., pp. 6–7, describes a (lost) anamorphic miniature by Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard in which the ‹gure of death lurks beneath the outward visage of a woman. Perhaps the closest we can get to the effect today is in the last second or two of Hitchcock’s Psycho, in which a frame or two of a skull is almost-subliminally interposed with the ‹lm’s ‹nal shot of Anthony Perkins.

22. Ibid., p. 7.

23. The paradox that propositions that con›ict cannot both be true, and that we must therefore live in permanent contradiction or face the madness of true experience, is a central theme in the magni‹cently anamorphic poetry of William Empson. See in particular, “Let It Go” in Collected Poems (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), p. 81.

24. All quotations from Hamlet are from the Arden edition, ed. Harold Jenkins

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Notes to Pages 95–101 (London: Methuen, 1982). Jenkins discusses the gravedigger’s alteration of Vaux’s poem on pp. 548–50. Morris, “Memento Mori Poem,” discusses the lyric pp.

1036–37, pointing out that “[t]he skull itself may be found in Vaux only in an ambiguity: ‘Loe here the bared scull, / By whose balde sign I know: / That stoupyng age away shall pull, / Which youthfull yeres did sowe’” (p. 1037).

25. Anne Barton, introduction to the New Penguin edition of Hamlet (London: Penguin, 1980), p. 45.

26. Glenda Conway, “The Presence of the Skull in Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy,” Kentucky Philological Review 7 (1992): 9.

27. I here concur with Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 234–35: “A skull, after all, as the deeply contemplative and enigmatic mood of Et in Arcadia Ego painting suggests—not least in Vesalius’s wicked parody of the topos—is at once the most eloquent and empty of human signs. Simultaneously recalling and travestying the head which is the source of all meanings, the seat of all interpretation, the skull acts as a peculiar and sinisterly attractive mirror for the gazer, drawing endless narratives into itself only to cancel them.” Neill adds, p. 236, that “the skull’s tale, like Ophelia’s document in madness, is one which is merely inscribed on its blankness by the horri‹ed imagination of the spectator. ‘Yorick’ himself has nothing to tell.”

28. Triggs, “A Mirror for Mankind,” p. 73.

29. Barton, introduction, p. 47.

30. “A common motif in the tradition of the danse macabre, in which a skull appears beside a woman at her toilet, here makes use of a hyperbole which seems to have been current in the satire of women,” notes Jenkins, Hamlet, p. 554.

31. Margaret W. Ferguson, “Hamlet: Letters and Spirits,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 303, comments: “I do not think Hamlet grasps the meaning of Yorick’s skull very completely because he so quickly forgets its implication for the fate of kings. . . . Paradoxically, the death drive in Hamlet seems too strong to allow him to understand either a graphic memento mori such as Yorick’s skull or the more unusual, ‹gurative one offered to the audience (but not to Hamlet) in the Lamord passage [4.7.80–93]. For truly to understand a memento mori, one must have at least some love of life—on earth or beyond.”

32. Marjorie Garber con‹rms this viewpoint in Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 136: “For there is a way in which Hamlet performs the same operation as Holbein’s painting upon the gaze and the trope of vanitas. Its ‹nal [sic] tableau of the death’s head in the graveyard scene is another critique of the subject” as, in Lacan’s terms, “annihilated.”

33. Shakespeare does not determine how the prop is to leave the stage, raising the intriguing possibility that Yorick may remain on stage to observe the ensuing action, visible from outside the frame of the stage action but invisible within it— thus cementing the anamorphic parallel with The Ambassadors.

34. Triggs, “A Mirror for Mankind,” p. 72.

35. All citations from The Honest Whore, Part 1 are taken from The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

230

Notes to Pages 102–12 versity Press, 1964), 2:1–130. Bowers assigns the play jointly to Dekker and Middleton, but as authorship is not at stake in my discussion I refer to “Dekker” as author throughout.

36. After Bellafront’s entrance at 2.1.12, the stage ‹lls up: Fluello, Castruchio, and Pioratto enter at 2.1.58, Fluello smoking tobacco; Roger brings in a candle at 2.1.68; Matheo and Hippolito enter at 2.1.18, and Roger brings in a pottle-pot behind them; “Tabacco” is called for at 2.1.54; and Roger is sent out for more wine at 2.1.145 and for larks and woodcocks at 2.1.239.

37. Webster plays the same visual trick in act 3 of The Duchess of Mal‹, when the duchess combs her graying hair in the mirror only to see by her murderous brother Ferdinand appear holding a poniard—yet another memento mori tableau come to murderous life.

38. Spinrad, “Memento Mockery,” p. 9: “The Honest Whore, then, is an uneasy compromise between the old and the new, still half-convinced that the old tradition ought to work, but no longer quite sure how it ought to work.”

39. Spencer, Death and Elizabethan Tragedy, pp. 185, 186.

40. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of In›uence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 15.

41. All citations are taken from Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed.

Brian Gibbons (London: A and C Black, 1989). Unlike Gibbons, who ascribes the play to Cyril Tourneur, I make no assumptions about the play’s authorship (which is tangential to my discussion).

42. Conway, “Presence of the Skull,” p. 8.

43. I am grateful to Sylvia Gimenez for pointing out this visual echo in her manuscript, “‘I Have a Conceit a-Coming in Picture upon This’: The Skull as Art in The Revenger’s Tragedy,” which traces Vindice’s use of the skull in staging various pictorial tropes associated with death.

44. Laurie A. Finke, “Painting Women: Images of Femininity in Jacobean Tragedy,” Theatre Journal 36 (1984): 361. Finke sees in the skull’s double function as both idealized object of adoration and loathed reminder of masculine mortality a projection of Vindice’s (and hence the Jacobeans’) split personality. She views the Elizabethan-Jacobean ambivalence to “painting” in a similarly misogynistic light, a dialectical “‹xing” of women “caught between male fantasies of idealization and exploitation” (p. 364). Despite Finke’s feminist perspective, she sees Gloriana as “silent and decapitated” (p. 358): a literalized fetish representing the lovingly dismembered love-objects of the Petrarchan blazon. By asserting her own subjectivity, however, I argue that Gloriana has a head start over the feminist critics who dismiss her macabre agency as mere “painting.”

45. Spinrad, “Memento Mockery,” p. 6.

46. The Revenger’s Tragedy, p. 6.

47. For a reading of the play as a parody of the body as object of scienti‹c inquiry, see Karin S. Coddin, “‘For Show or Useless Property’: Necrophilia and The Revenger’s Tragedy,” English Literary History 61 (1994): 71–88. Coddin, p. 81, links the skull’s simultaneous material “thingness” and semiotic “no-thingness” to the Renaissance trompe l’oeil, “wherein the seeming exactitude of mimesis actually serves to render imitation itself static and arti‹cial.” I would argue that anamor-

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Notes to Pages 112–18 phosis is a more precise analogy than trompe l’oeil, because I see two simultaneous but incompatible perspectives on the play’s action as opposed to the “semiotic anarchy” between props and persons descried by Coddin, p. 82.

48. According to Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 75–76, prosopopeia is the “‹ction of the voice-from-beyond-the grave,” “the ‹ction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply, and confers upon it the power of speech.” According to de Man, “[T]he latent threat that inhabits prosopopeia [is] that by making the dead speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death” (p. 78). Just this possibility, I have argued, is realized in anamorphic Jacobean skull plays. I am grateful to Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, pp. 124–76, for bringing de Man’s essay to my attention. For a brief survey of later Jacobean stage skulls, see Spinrad, “Memento Mockery.”

49. See Margreta de Grazia, “The Ideology of Super›uous Things: King Lear as Period Piece,” in de Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass, Subject and Object, pp.

17–42. For de Grazia, the ideology of “propertied individualism” maintains that “what one is depends on what one owns” (p. 34). In King Lear’s reactionary version of propertied individualism, “[T]he ideology of super›uous things holds the status quo in place by locking identity into property, the subject into the object” (p. 31).

On the legal distinction between object-property and attribute-property, see Margaret Jane Radin, Reinterpreting Property (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See also Jim Ellis, “Embodying Dislocation: A Mirror for Magistrates and Property Relations,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 1032–53, for “the subjective consequences of changing conceptions of property” in early modern England. I explore this line of thinking further in my article “The Skull on the Renaissance Stage: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Props,” English Literary Renaissance 28 (1998): 47–74, of which this chapter is an adaptation.

50. Ben Jonson, Bartholemew Fair, ed. Eugene M. Waith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).

51. I am grateful to Mary Thomas Crane for raising this point.

52. Peter Stallybrass, “Reading the Body: The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Jacobean Theater of Consumption,” Renaissance Drama 18 (1987): 142.

CHAPTER FOUR The opening quote is from Edith Evans, Plays and Players, December 1976, p. 39.

Quoted by J. L. Styan, Restoration Comedy in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 108.

1. For a brief history of the liturgical use of fans, see Nancy Armstrong, A Collector’s History of Fans (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1974), pp. 17–20.

2. In taking “Restoration and early-eighteenth-century drama” to cover the period between the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 and the Licensing Act of 1737, I follow J. Douglas Can‹eld, ed., The Broadview Anthology of Restora-

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Notes to Pages 118–20 tion and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2001). See his introduction, pp. xiii–xix.

3. John Gay, The Fan: A Poem in Three Volumes (London, 1713). I am grateful to James Gill for bringing the poem to my attention.

4. Women members of the Jacobean and Stuart courts took part in court entertainments, and foreign theater troupes featuring women had visited London in the pre-Commonwealth period, but no professional English actresses appeared on the licensed public stage before 1660. In 1656 Sir William Davenant cast a woman singer, Mrs. Coleman, in his opera The Siege of Rhodes at Rutland House.

The ‹rst recorded appearance of an actress on the public stage is December 8, 1660, when a woman played Desdemona in a production of Othello by Thomas Killigrew’s King’s Company. Samuel Pepys records seeing women on stage for the ‹rst time in January 1661. See T. S. Graves, “Women on the Pre-Restoration Stage,” Studies in Philology 22 (1925): 184–87; Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.

19; and Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

5. Presumably with his tongue ‹rmly in his cheek, Charles II added to Killigrew’s patent, April 25, 1662, the proviso: “so long as [the companies’] recreations, which by reason of the abuses aforesaid [i.e., transvestism and scurrility] were scandalous and offensive, may by such reformation be esteemed not only harmless delight, but useful and instructive representations of human life, to such of our good subjects as shall resort to the same.” Cited in Restoration and Georgian England, 1660–1788, ed. David Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 18.

6. For instance, references to fans appear in Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. However, there is no way to estimate just how ubiquitous fans were in performance prior to the closing of the theaters in 1642.

7. No evidence suggests that women playwrights handled the fan differently from their male counterparts. For example, Aphra Behn mentions fans in seven of her plays, but in each case its usage is conventional (e.g., as a device to attract male attention in The City-Heiress [1682]) or else exoticized: a stage direction in The Widow Ranter; or, The History of Bacon in Virginia (1690) reads, “Enter Sure-Love fan’d by two Negro’s, followed by Hazard.” For an intriguing discussion of Behn’s treatment of the actress’s sexuality, see Elin Diamond, “Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn’s The Rover,” English Literary History 56 (1989): 519–41.

8. For a typical example, see Douglas A. Russell, Period Style for the Theatre, second edition (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1987), p. 168: “The modern actress should begin with exaggerated movements and then, after mastering them, attempt more subtle and delicate gestures.” Rather than elaborating, however, Russell brie›y cites one very basic fan exercise from another textbook and moves on to discuss the curtsey. Compounding generalization with inaccuracy, Russell af‹rms that “There was no ›uttering of the fan as in the nineteenth century” (p. 169)—a statement contradicted by Joseph Addison’s detailed description of the ›utter in 1711, discussed below, as well as by numerous Restoration plays. See also Lyn

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Notes to Pages 121–24 Oxenford, Playing Period Plays (London: J. Garnet Miller Ltd., 1958), p. 185, and Joan Wildeblood and Peter Brinson, The Polite World: A Guide to English Manners and Deportment from the Thirteenth to the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 161–62, 220–22, 278–80.

9. My method of contextual reanimation, discussed more fully in my introduction, is inspired by the example of “producible interpretation” outlined in Milhous and Hume, Producible Interpretation. For a provisional reconstruction of how unscripted fans might have been used to augment the scene between Squeamish and Lady Fidget in Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), see Jocelyn Powell, Restoration Theatre Production (London, Boston, Melbourne, and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 135–36.

10. Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 56.

11. Folding fans were imported to Europe from Japan and China via Italy.

According to Armstrong, Collector’s History of Fans, p. 21, “The folding fan must have come into England from Italy via France through Catherine de Medici (1519–89) who made her ‹rst public entry into Paris as queen in 1549.” Catherine’s son, Henry III, made the fan a staple of court fashion. M. A. Flory, A Book about Fans: The History of Fans and Fan-Painting (New York: Macmillan, 1895), p.

28, notes that the earliest records of the fan in England date from 1307. Elizabeth I favored feather fans as her preferred gift from her subjects, and one appears in a 1575 royal portrait. Both rigid feather fans (or screens) and pleated folding fans coexisted in late-sixteenth-century England, with the latter perhaps eclipsing the former in popularity by the turn of the seventeenth century. A 1590 portrait depicts Elizabeth wielding a folding fan.

12. Angela Rosenthal, “Unfolding Gender: Women and the ‘Secret’ Sign Language of Fans in Hogarth’s Work,” in The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, ed. Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 122. I am grateful to Angela Rosenthal for letting me see her manuscript before publication. This chapter remains indebted to her research throughout.

13. Liza Picard, Restoration London (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997), p. 114.

14. Richard Steele, The Funeral; or, Grief A-la-Mode (London, 1702), 1.1.

15. Although in the seventeenth century Thomas Coryate observed both men and women using fans in Italy, “By the eighteenth century, we learn that ‘the Men are not expected to be furnished with them at all,’ and fans came to be used almost exclusively by women” (Rosenthal, “Unfolding Gender,” p. 122). Rosenthal cites “Of the MODERN FANS,” in the London Magazine and Monthly Chronologer, Universal Spectator no. 813 (May 5, 1744): 249–51. Rosenthal notes that Hogarth depicts at least one fop sporting a fan.

16. G. Woolliscroft Rhead, History of the Fan (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1910), pp. 136–37. Paragraphing omitted.

17. I am grateful to art historian Timothy Murray for the information about Duvelleroy. My query about the existence of a codi‹ed language of the fan,

234

Notes to Pages 124–26 addressed to a panel of experts at the Boston College symposium “The Incredible Commerce: The Art and Fashion of the Fan Trade in Eighteenth-Century France” on September 16, 2000, elicited a collective groan from a roomful of fanologists.

18. Charles Gildon, The life of Mr Thomas Betterton the late eminent tragedian (London: Robert Gosling, 1710), pp. 71–77, cited in Thomas, Restoration and Georgian England, p. 167. Thomas notes, “Much of the advice seems far removed from anything resembling actual stage practice” (p. 166). The oratorical system was never very much involved in comedy (although it was never completely absent).

19. The Mystery of Love, Courtship and Marriage Explained (London, 1890).

According to Matthew Towle, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Private Tutor (London, 1771), “the Fan is genteel and useful, therefore it is proper that young ladies should know how to make a genteel and proper Use of it; in order that they may do so, I have pointed out to them six Positions of the Fan, genteel and very becoming.” Cited in Wildeblood and Brinson, The Polite World, p. 222. Wildeblood and Brinson summarize Towle’s positions in an appendix, pp. 278–80.

20. Styan, Restoration Comedy in Performance, p. 109. Nancy Wandalie Henshaw, “Graphic Sources for the Teaching of Restoration Acting Style,” Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1967, pp. 244–45, summarizes: “[N]o speci‹c language of the fan was current in seventeenth-century England, nor, in that free and easy time, was any such secret language needed. The fan was a means of expressing character and emotion; it embellished and punctuated conversation, besides being a conversation piece; it provided lovers with intimate yet polite things to do with their hands; and in addition to all this, it was to its lady, cigarette, cocktail and worry-stone all in one. Neither her purpose, nor that of the modern director, could be served by the use of a speci‹c set of gestures for a speci‹c set of meanings.”

21. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:426–29. Tatler 52 (August 9, 1709) offers Delamira’s advice on the conduct of the fan—possibly also written by Addison.

22. “We build up habits by drill, but we build up intelligent capacities by training. Drill (or conditioning) consists in the imposition of repetitions. The recruit learns to slope arms by repeatedly going through just the same motions by numbers. . . . Training, on the other hand, though it embodies plenty of sheer drill, does not consist of drill. It involves the stimulation by criticism and example of the pupil’s own judgment. . . . The soldier who was merely drilled to slope arms correctly has to be trained to be pro‹cient in marksmanship and map-reading. Drill dispenses with intelligence, training develops it. We do not expect the soldier to be able to read maps ‘in his sleep.’” Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 42–43.

23. The Spectator, p. 428.

24. Arthur Murphy, The Theatre no. 19. London Chronicle, March 3, 1757, p.

223, cited in Thomas, Restoration and Georgian England, p. 424.

25. James Boaden, The Life of Mrs Jordan (London: Edward Bull, 1831), pp.

16–18, cited in Thomas, Restoration and Georgian England, p. 388. Thomas notes that Abington avoided breeches parts and “set an example of exquisite dressing on

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Notes to Pages 127–29 the stage that was intended to make her the envy of the town. She largely succeeded in this aim, charming the men, as one might expect, and becoming an arbiter of fashion to ladies of quality” (p. 387).

26. The Garrick and Abington prints are available for examination at the Harvard Theatre Collection. The illustrations from The School for Scandal are reproduced in Thomas, Restoration and Georgian England on p. 338; the illustration from The Twin Rivals appears on p. 389.

27. Howe, The First English Actresses, p. 10, notes that “Although the theatres possessed fairly extensive stage wardrobes, players seem to have had to provide personal items such as hats, periwigs, petticoats, shoes, stockings, gloves and scarves.” Presumably the same applied to fans, except where a scene calls for the destruction of one, as in The Man of Mode, in which case the company must have paid. Only two purchases of fans are recorded in the property bills that survive from Drury Lane between 1713 and 1716: one for Mrs. Old‹eld in The Man of Mode and one, a day later, for Mrs. Porter in The Funeral. Perhaps these actresses’ status was such that they could demand that the company pay for a fan, or else Mrs. Porter’s was just worn out. Either way, the short time interval between purchases—the second fan costing a penny less than the ‹rst—is intriguing. I am grateful to Judith Milhous for this information.

28. Colley Cibber, “To the Reader,” Preface to The Provoked Husband (London, 1728). Cited in Thomas, Restoration and Georgian England, p. 158.

29. The literature on Restoration actresses’ sexuality is enormous. See, for example, Howe, The First English Actresses; Cynthia Lowenthal, “Sticks and Rags, Bodies and Brocade: Essentializing Discourses and the Late Restoration Playhouse,” in Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama, ed.

Katherine M. Quinsey (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), pp.

219–31; Katharine Eisaman Maus, “‘Playhouse Flesh and Blood’: Sexual Ideology and the Restoration Actress,” English Literary History 46 (1979): 595–617; Deborah C. Payne, “Rei‹ed Object or Emergent Professional? Retheorizing the Restoration Actress,” in Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater, ed. J. Douglas Can‹eld and Deborah C. Payne (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995), pp. 13–38; Sandra Richards, The Rise of the English Actress (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 1–23; Laura J. Rosenthal, “Reading Masks: The Actress and the Spectatrix in Restoration Shakespeare,” in Quinsey, Broken Boundaries, pp. 201–18; and Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: EighteenthCentury Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).

30. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1974), 8:27.

31. Howe, The First English Actresses, argues that the unusually close links between court and theater from 1660 to about 1691 (when William chastised Mary for allowing herself to be made a spectacle at a court performance) were responsible for acceptance of actresses by the wider public (pp. 19–26). Howe convincingly challenges Maus’s contention that Restoration audiences accepted actresses because of wider shifts in sexual ideology, especially an emerging model of polar sexual difference that gradually displaced an older, hierarchical model predicated

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Notes to Pages 130–32 on female inferiority. Following E. L. Avery and others, Holland, The Ornament of Action, p. 4, cautions against “the myth of the Restoration audience as [purely] a court coterie.” The Restoration audience was not solely aristocratic, and by about 1710 there was almost no contact left with the court.

32. According to Maus, “Playhouse Flesh and Blood,” p. 602, “The connection in everybody’s mind between prostitution and the theater was so strong that ‘playhouse ›esh and blood’ translated effortlessly into sexual terms.” Here Maus cites Dryden’s prologue to Marriage A-La-Mode (ca. 1671): “But powerful Guinee cannot be withstood, / And [women] were made of Playhouse ›esh and blood.”

33. Thomas, Restoration and Georgian England, p. 138.

34. John Harold Wilson, All the King’s Ladies: Actresses of the Restoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 107. Richards, Rise of English Actress, p. 15, concurs: “In pandering to the jaded tastes of audiences . . . most of the Restoration plays in which actresses had to appear became increasingly smutty and immoral.” Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 63–72, questions this blanket characterization.

35. Colley Cibber, An apology for the life of Mr Colley Cibber, written by himself, ed. R. W. Lowe, 2 vols. (London, 1889; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1966), 1:90–91.

36. Cibber, An apology, 1:172–73.

37. Aphra Behn, Dedication to The Feigned Courtesans; or, A Night’s Intrigue, in The Rover and Other Plays, ed. Jane Spencer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p.

91.

38. “The actress is in a practically unique position [in Restoration society], since her claim to public notice and professional competence is based upon an inherited association of role-playing with female sexuality. And even in her case the kind of attention she can command is determined by these ideological constraints.” Maus, “‘Playhouse Flesh and Blood,’” p. 614.

39. Howe, The First English Actresses, p. xi.

40. Straub, Sexual Suspects, pp. 88–89.

41. Beth Kowaleski Wallace, “A Modest Defense of Gaming Women,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 31 (2002): 33. Kate Winslet’s commanding Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh’s ‹lm version of Hamlet comes to mind in this context. As Ophelia, Winslet’s semiotic surplus—her sheer physical presence—belies her scripted role as a young woman at the mercy of patriarchal forces beyond her control and (at least for this viewer) renders her collapse into madness unintelligible.

42. Ibid., p. 34. Compare Peter Holland’s insistence on “the double reality of the [Restoration] stage, the reality of the performance itself as well as that of the action represented” (The Ornament of Action, p. x). For Holland, “Theatricality and reality are interwoven. In a way that the eighteenth-century drama had to eschew, because of its concern with an honesty that is socially inept and idealistic, Restoration comedy accepts the theatrical and, in particular, acting as something outside morality, as a neutral process. Acting was not evil per se, but was at the centre of the absurdity of existence. For wits it could be social grace, for puritans social

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Notes to Pages 132–40 hypocrisy. Nonetheless, the awareness of acting as device results in an emphasis on the individual actor; his signi‹cance in the audience’s perception of the play is correspondingly increased” (p. 54). Of course many Restoration plays remained in the eighteenth-century repertory.

43. Wallace, “Modest Defense,” pp. 33–34.

44. Styan, Restoration Comedy in Performance, p. 111.

45. While Restoration actresses were mostly drawn from the ranks of the genteel poor, several rose to become the glass of fashion and the mold of form. When Crowne’s Calisto was chosen to be played at court in 1674, Mrs. Betterton was selected to coach Princesses Mary and Anne. She also taught Princess Anne the part of Semandra in Mithridates and was rewarded with a life pension for her work.

See Richards, Rise of English Actress, p. 11.

46. Athene Seyler, “Fans, Trains and Stays,” Theatre Arts 31 (1947): 22.

47. Simon Callow, Acting in Restoration Comedy (New York: Applause, 1991), pp. 82–84.

48. Colley Cibber, Love’s Last Shift; or, The Fool in Fashion, 2.1.368–77, in Can‹eld, Broadview Anthology, p. 726. I have given the full speech rather than Callow’s abbreviated version.

49. Mary Pix, The Beau Defeated; or, The Lucky Younger Brother, 4.2.25–33, in Can‹eld, Broadview Anthology, p. 838.

50. Robert Lloyd, The Capricious Lovers: A Musical Entertainment: Taken from the Opera of That Name (London, 1765).

51. The phrase comes from Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 186.

52. The earliest recorded performance of The Man of Mode; or, Sir Fopling Flutter was at the Duke’s Theatre in Dorset Garden on March 11, 1676. According to editor W. B. Carnochan, the performance was attended by the king. The play was an immediate success and was produced frequently until about 1730, then sporadically until 1755.

53. Sir George Etherege, The Man of Mode, ed. W. B. Carnochan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 2.2.38. All subsequent citations are cited parenthetically in my text.

54. “Vizard” or mask was a common Restoration term for a prostitute, especially those who plied their trade at the playhouse. But since fashionable women at times wore vizards at the theater, in the Mall, and elsewhere, it became impossible for men to distinguish prostitutes from others (a fact much exploited in the drama). “Vizard” thus became a derogatory term for women in general and reinforced the misogynistic suspicion that all women were potential whores.

55. When Pert accuses the inconstant Dorimant of going behind the scenes and “fawn[ing] upon those little insigni‹cant creatures, the players,” she becomes the mouthpiece for a metatheatrical joke at the actresses’ expense (2.12–13). Here Etherege panders to those in the audience (including the king) who saw the actresses as fair game.

56. According to Styan, Restoration Comedy in Performance, p. 112, “the innocent fan falls the victim of her wrath [sic] in a destructive gesture so violent that it

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Notes to Pages 140–44 discredits its owner forever in the eyes of the audience. In any case, by this time it has lost all its magic properties as a weapon of dissimulation.”

57. Wilson, All the King’s Ladies, p. 104, points out that while prompter John Downes’s Roscius Anglicanus credits Barry with Mrs. Loveit in the play’s 1676 premiere, “it is more likely that the role was created by Mary Lee and inherited by Mrs Barry after Mrs Lee’s retirement in 1685.” Lee, whom Wilson calls “the leading tragedienne and villainess of the Duke’s Company,” played Regan to her young rival Barry’s Cordelia in Nahum Tate’s King Lear (1681), a pairing that suggests Harriet/Barry would have been appropriate earlier as Loveit/Lee’s rival in The Man of Mode. Howe, The First English Actresses, p. 80, notes that “[a]lthough Downes names most of the comedy’s female cast, he most surprisingly omits all mention of Harriet. Betterton and Barry were paired together in similar lead roles a few months later in Aphra Behn’s The Rover. In no comedy of this period did Barry play a discarded mistress; she was invariably cast as mistress or wife. It would seem to have been far more natural for Mary Lee to play Mrs Loveit . . . The melodramatic histrionics of Mrs Loveit’s part seem very well suited to Lee’s style of acting.” The London Stage also hypothesizes that Mary Lee originated Loveit; but see Robert D. Hume, “Elizabeth Barry’s First Roles and the Cast of The Man of Mode,” Theatre History Studies 5 (1985): 16–19. The fact that Dorimant and Bellinda were played

by Mr. and Mrs. Betterton may have further reinforced the audience’s sympathy with the plotters.

58. Styan, Restoration Comedy in Performance, p. 111.

59. This may be a reference to the obscure male practice of gallanting the fan.

Henshaw, “Graphic Sources,” pp. 242–43, laments, “Although there are innumerable references to the gallanting of ladies’ fans by gentlemen, the precise nature of this activity seems to be nowhere described and never very clearly pictured in the plates.” In Peter Anthony Motteux’s comedy for the King’s Company, Love’s a Jest (London, 1696), which contains a scene of male fan-tearing, one character remarks: “Fie, Gallanting of Fans is as much out of fashion as Gallantry.”

60. Etherege’s “etc.” permits Young Bellair and Harriet to mimic the gestures of the older couple who watch them, a nice visual irony lost on the page.

61. Thomas Betterton, The History of the English Stage from the Restauration to the Present Time, Including the Lives, Characters and Amours of the most Eminent Actors and Actresses, a compilation by Edmund Curll and William Oldys, supposedly from the notes of Thomas Betterton (1741), p. 13. Cited by Howe, The First English Actresses, p. 10. Stephen Jeffreys’ play The Libertine (London: Nick Hern Books, 1994) imaginatively recreates Rochester’s training of Barry and includes a scene set backstage at The Man of Mode. In the 1996 Steppenwolf Theatre Company production in Chicago, with John Malkovich as Rochester, Martha Plimpton’s Barry played Loveit.

62. Once again, this line could have back‹red at the novice Barry’s expense if Harriet was her ‹rst major role. Barry was recruited to the Duke’s Company in 1675 at the age of twenty-three.

63. If this is an unguarded moment, Dorimant nonetheless interprets it as a pose: “What have we here—the picture of a celebrated beauty giving audience in public to a declared lover?” (5.2.94–95). Dorimant’s rather enigmatic

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Notes to Pages 145–52 description makes more sense if Barry, as Harriet, was instructed to direct her aside toward her real-life lover, the earl of Rochester, in the audience on opening night.

64. At the end of the anonymous rehearsal satire The Female Wits (1697), the overweening Marsilia (playwright Mary Delarivier Manley) is humiliated by breaking her fan, and the foppish Lord Whif›e has his wig pulled off. Signi‹cantly, their punishment is displaced onto their respective props.

65. The Inconstant opened sometime in February 1702 at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. The play was only performed a dozen known times in its ‹rst twentyeight years, but it ran every season from 1729 to 1737 and again from 1751 to 1758. All quotations in my text from The Inconstant are from The Works of George Farquhar, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 1:401–76. Kenny’s introduction notes: “According to the printed Preface, the première performance was ‹rst marred by shocking impromptu additions to the prologue by the performer and then disrupted by noisy expressions of contempt from some gentlemen in the pit. Nevertheless, the audience as a whole seems to have received the play favourably” (p. 390).

66. The actress presumably deploys the standard tragedy handkerchief parodied in Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (1671), The Female Wits (1697), and Cibber’s The Comical Lovers (1707).

67. A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, ed. Philip H. High‹ll, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, 16 vols. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93), 15:137. I can ‹nd no con‹rmation of this in The London Stage.

68. Howe, The First English Actresses, p. 82.

69. William Congreve, The Way of the World, in Restoration Plays, ed. Robert G. Lawrence (London: J. M. Dent, 1994), p. 516.

70. The Bath Unmask’d premiered February 27, 1725. It played seven times in March, and once each in the months of April, May, June, and October 1725. It was then revived March 21, 1728, as a bene‹t for Mrs. Bullock, who played the ›irtatious Liberia. For the modest ‹nancial success of the play, see Judith Milhous and Robert Hume, “Playwrights’ Remuneration in Eighteenth-Century London,” Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s. 10 (1999): 56. I am grateful to Tonya Howe for bringing this play to my attention.

71. Gabriel Odingsells, The Bath Unmask’d. A Comedy. Acted at the Theatre Royal in Lincolns-Inn-Fields. (London, 1725).

72. Later, Odingsells connects sadism and medicine when Sprightly implicitly compares his treatment to a doctor puncturing an abscess: “[A]nd since Perverseness rules the female mind, I’ll try what feign’d Indifference will move, / And swell her Anger till it burst with Love” (1.3).

73. Miss Whif›e was played by Mrs. Legar or Laguerre, chie›y a dancer, who played a number of minor roles, including Cherry in The Beaux Stratagem. According to the High‹ll, Burnim, and Langhans Biographical Dictionary, 2:402, Mrs. Bullock’s salary at this time was about one hundred pounds annually, the highest in

240

Notes to Pages 157–64 Christopher Rich’s troupe. In 3.15, the more seasoned Liberia repeats Miss Whif›e’s gesture of spreading a fan before her supposedly blushing face when ›irting with Count Fripon.

74. Mrs. Bullock’s choice of a three-year-old play as a bene‹t may indicate a special fondness for the role, or a feeling that the role showed her off to advantage.

75. In The Female Wits, produced by Christopher Rich’s company in 1696, Jane Rogers produced a wicked parody of leading actress Anne Bracegirdle, including Bracegirdle’s histrionic way with a tragedy handkerchief. Evidently Rogers was skilled in the parodic use of props as a tool of caricature; see Howe, The First English Actresses, p. 159. Howe, pp. 103–4, argues that Rogers could play pure women convincingly despite her offstage reputation for looseness. Her many roles included coquettes, sophisticated ladies, and tragic heroines. She married Christopher Bullock, older brother of William Bullock the younger, in 1717.

76. Rosenthal, “Unfolding Gender,” p. 123.

77. “Withholding and disclosing at the ›ip of a wrist, fans are perfectly suited to the double standard that governs female sexuality, at once modestly veiling and seductively advertising the blushing, sexually agitated face. Sister of the mask and the veil, the fan attracts by concealment; it produces desire by dissimulating and obscuring the signs of desire.” Mackie, Market à la Mode, p. 186.

78. Leonard Welsted, The Dissembled Wanton; or, My Son Get Money. A Comedy. As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Lincolns-Inn-Fields. (London, 1727), 4.1.

All quotations are from this scene.

79. The Spectator, p. 427.

80. Ibid., pp. 427–28.

81. I have traced subsequent fan lessons in Robert Lloyd’s The Capricious Lovers (1765), Hannah Cowley’s A Day in Turkey (1792), and Thomas Morton’s Speed the Plough (1800). While individually fascinating, these fan lessons lie outside the historical range of this chapter. The locus classicus for the nineteenth-century use of this prop remains Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), whose scripted constraints on the actress’s improvisation are, if anything, more formidable than ever. The stage life of the fan of course continues up through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, where it makes a notable appearance in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959).

82. That actors have largely forgotten how to speak the language of the fan became clear to me at The Pearl Theatre Company’s 1998 production of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. In this otherwise successful professional production, fans were decorative relics unintegrated into the life of the performance. Only Carol Schultz as Mrs. Candor made the prop speak successfully. Schultz underscored every punch line by unfurling her fan and closing it with a snap, then fanned herself indulgently between jests, as if the effort had been too much for her.

83. Simon Trussler, The Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 140.

84. In Beckett’s Happy Days (1961), Winnie’s parasol serves a similar function when it paralyzes her in the act of hoisting it. The arresting prop turns Winnie into a living caryatid.

241

Notes to Pages 164–69 85. Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, in The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 24–25.

86. Thomas Morton, Speed the Plough (Philadelphia, 1807).

CHAPTER FIVE The opening quotations are from the following: Sam Shepard, cited in Carol Rosen, “Silent Tongues: Sam Shepard’s Explorations of Emotional Territory” [interview], Village Voice, August 4, 1992, pp. 32–41; Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, Assassins (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1991), p. 46.

1. Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, in Hedda Gabler and Other Plays, trans. Una Ellis-Fermor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 295. Subsequent page references are cited parenthetically in my text. Brian Richardson has informed me that in Ibsen’s Norwegian, the term is “muntra mig,” which translates more exactly to “amuse” or “entertain” oneself. Nevertheless, I here retain Ellis-Fermor’s apt idiom, since it nicely captures the stakes of my argument.

2. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 46.

3. June Schlueter, Dramatic Closure: Reading the End (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), p. 23.

4. For an argument that “[i]n every play, three distinct clocks are set in motion,” see Brian Richardson, “‘Time Is Out of Joint’: Narrative Models and the Temporality of the Drama,” Poetics Today 8 (1987): 299–309. Richardson distinguishes between story time (the chronological sequence of the represented events), text time (the period said to pass onstage), and stage time (the time it takes to enact a scene or play). These are not aspects of a single chronology but “independent and often battling forms” (308). For my purposes here, “stage time” refers to the time that elapses for the characters on stage, “clock time” to the time that elapses for the audience in the playhouse.

5. Henry J. Schmidt, How Dramas End: Essays on the German Sturm und Drang, Büchner, Hauptmann, and Fleisser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 1.

6. Peter Marks, “Beware of the Survivor with a Grudge and a Gun,” review of Retribution, by Mark R. Shapiro, New York Times, October 30, 1998, p. B3.

7. Joan Templeton, Ibsen’s Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), traces the fallen woman tradition back to Hebbel. But see also Michael M. Metzger, “‘Kind, es ist keine Haaradel!’: On the Motif of Female Suicide in German Drama,” in Aufnahmen—Weitergabe: Literarische Impulse um Lessing und Goethe (Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag, 1982), pp. 91–106, which discusses Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s Ibrahim Sultan (1673) and Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (1772).

According to Margaret Higonnet, “Suicide: Representations of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century,” Poetics Today 6 (1985): 105, “At least since the eighteenth century, this performative utterance [i.e., suicide] has been interpreted as a set of increasingly feminine symptoms, whether of individual or social illness. Indeed, it is startling to realize the extent to which the nineteenth century feminized sui-

242

Notes to Pages 169–75 cide.” For the origins of this dramatic trope in Greek tragedy, see Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

8. “That pistol shot will kill the play!” Stephen S. Stanton, ed., Camille and Other Plays (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), p. xxxiii. Stanton adds, “This prediction seems to have been substantially accurate.”

9. George Bernard Shaw, “Author’s Apology to Mrs Warren’s Profession,” Complete Plays with Prefaces, 6 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963), 3:151–52.

10. Letters of Anton Chekhov, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 213. Cited in Richard Gilman, Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 134.

11. Maria Irene Fornes, interviewed by David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988), pp. 56–57.

12. The ‹rst handheld ‹rearm I have located on the English stage that actually ‹res appears in John Webster’s The White Devil (1612), when Vittoria and Zanche shoot and trample upon Flamineo. The shots turn out to be blanks. Firearms on the early modern stage were hazardous; on June 29, 1613, a cannon used at a Globe performance of Henry VIII set ‹re to the thatched roof and literally brought the house down.

13. The phantom pistol in Streetcar is the weapon that Blanche’s homosexual husband, Allan Grey, used to kill himself. One might call such ghost-props “mediums,” since their function is to ventriloquize a dead or absent subject whose ghostly presence is required on stage; in Hedda Gabler the portrait of the general that glowers down on the proceedings is another such medium, as are the captain’s boots in Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Sometimes these metonyms are metaphors as well: the captain’s boots “standing there so proud and stiff” and Hedda’s phallic pistols are both examples. August Strindberg, Miss Julie, in Six Plays of Strindberg, trans.

Elizabeth Sprigge (New York: Doubleday, 1955), p. 91.

14. States, Great Reckonings, p. 26. In this sense, the gun resembles the fans discussed in the previous chapter, which similarly provide fondled moments in which the actress can emphasize her semiotic surplus over and above—and even in contradistinction to—the dialogue provided by the playwright.

15. Sometimes this effect can be jarring, as when the murder weapon remains plainly in view during the curtain call.

16. Fornes’s textual division of Fefu and Her Friends into three “parts” rather than three acts itself suggests Fornes’s fragmenting of traditional, incremental dramaturgy.

17. This technique was ‹rst detailed by John Northam, Ibsen’s Dramatic Method: A Study of the Prose Dramas (London: Faber and Faber, 1953).

18. Janet Garton, “The Middle Plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, ed.

James McFarlane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 122, observes: “The fact that Hedda Gabler’s pistols are a Freudian phallic symbol seems so obvious in 1990 that Ibsen’s genius in inventing them in 1890 can all too easily be forgotten.”

19. “The title of the play is: Hedda Gabler. I intended to indicate thereby that as a personality she is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her hus-

243

Notes to Pages 175–83 band’s wife.” Letter of December 4, 1890, from Henrik Ibsen to Count Moritz Prozor, cited in The Oxford Ibsen, ed. James Walter McFarlane, 8 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960–77), 7:500.

20. Henry James, “On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler,” in Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, ed. Michael Egan (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 240.

21. Janet Suzman, “Hedda Gabler: The Play in Performance,” in Ibsen and the Theatre: Essays in Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of Henrik Ibsen’s Birth, ed.

Errol Durbach (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 93–94.

22. Elizabeth Robins, Ibsen and the Actress (New York: Haskell House, 1973), p. 30; Minnie Maddern Fiske, Mrs Fiske: Her Views on Actors, Acting, and the Problems of Production, recorded by Alexander Woolcott (New York: Century Company, 1917), p. 63.

23. The Oxford Ibsen, 7:486.

24. In Ingmar Bergman’s 1964 production at Kungliga Dramatiska teatern, Stockholm, Bergman divided the stage by means of a screen so that the inner room remained visible. Bergman also made effective use of a mirror: “Standing before the mirror at the end of the ‹rst act, staring at a reality that is already ‹xed forever, she coolly and dispassionately rehearsed the aesthetically pleasing suicide she had prepared for herself. She removed her high-heeled pumps carefully, both as a gesture of fastidiousness and as a practical measure that allowed her to stand more steadily when she ‹red. And she again stood before the mirror when, with the utmost composure, she actually pointed the pistol to her temple and squeezed the trigger at the end.” Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker, Ibsen’s Lively Art: A Performance Study of the Major Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 183.

25. Charles R. Lyons, “Word and Visual Image in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler: Framing the Tableau of the Suicide,” Nordic Theatre Studies 10 (1997): 20.

26. There has been a marked critical tendency to view Hedda’s act as hysterical and futile—in short, as a failure to slam the door like Nora in A Doll’s House. Thus (for example) Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 163, sees Hedda’s suicide as marking “Hedda’s failure to move from hysteria to feminism,” while Higonnet, “Suicide,” p. 111, claims that Hedda’s suicide is “not revolutionary but sterilely aesthetic.”

27. Tracy C. Davis, “Acting in Ibsen,” Theatre Notebook 39 (1985): 121.

28. Cited in Marker and Marker, Ibsen’s Lively Art, p. 191.

29. “Hedda’s melodramatic pistols and their use, ‹rst by Lövborg and then by Hedda herself, carry very little more conviction than does the fair suicide’s talk about the courage and the grandeur of a self-in›icted death. We do not believe in them any more than does Judge Brack, and we recognise in them nothing more than a modernised survival of the violent expedients whereby many an old-world playwright of no philosophical or didactic pretensions whatever has deliberately set about his ›esh-creeping task.” Unsigned review of Hedda Gabler (Vaudeville, 1891), Observer, April 6, 1891, p. 6, cited in Egan, Ibsen, p. 230.

30. I am grateful to P. A. Skantze for this observation.

31. Benjamin K. Bennett, “Strindberg and Ibsen: Toward a Cubism of Time in Drama,” Modern Drama 26 (1983): 262–81. My quotation is from p. 263.

244

Notes to Pages 184–87 32. States, Great Reckonings, p. 66.

33. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in Complete Dramatic Works, p. 83.

34. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, in Complete Dramatic Works, p. 154. Subsequent quotations appear parenthetically in my text.

35. Martha Fehsenfeld’s rehearsal diary, cited by James Knowlson, Introduction to Happy Days: The Production Notebook of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), pp. 15–16.

36. Cited by Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett’s Theatre (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 252.

37. Bennett, “Ibsen and Strindberg,” p. 265. Bennett neatly de‹nes expressionism as “the elaboration of the symbolic at the expense of the mimetic” (p. 267). Of course, Beckett rejected symbolism as well as mimetic realism in favor of what States, Great Reckonings, p. 109, aptly calls “a phenomenological theater (as opposed to semiological) in that it seeks to retrieve a naive perception of the thing—its ‘objective aspect’—before it was de‹ned out of sight by language.” Compare Beckett’s praise of Proust’s “non-logical statement of phenomena in the order and exactitude of their perception, before they have been distorted into intelligibility in order to be forced into a chain of cause and effect.” Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: John Calder, 1965), p. 86.

38. For an expanded discussion of this point, see Sofer, “No Ideas but in Things.”

39. I borrow this phrase from Michael Goldman, “Vitality and Deadness in Beckett’s Plays,” in Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context, ed. Enoch Brater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 70.

40. Compare Estragon’s boots, which mysteriously shift their location (as well as their color) between the acts of Waiting for Godot.

41. Such a fate is suggested by Mouth in Not I (1972), which may be the third act of Happy Days.

42. The moment also parodies the process known in semiotics as “ostension” or “semiotization,” in which an object is wordlessly shown to the audience as representing the class of objects of which it is a member. This process, by which “the thing is ‘de-realized’ so as to become a sign,” is the opposite of Victor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization, in which the palpability of the object trumps its referential transparency. See Elam, Semiotics, pp. 5–31.

43. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1970), p. 254.

44. S. E. Gontarski, Beckett’s “Happy Days”: A Manuscript Study (Columbus: Ohio State University Libraries, 1977), p. 69, points out that the Browning reference is to “Paracelsus”: “I say confusedly what comes uppermost” (“Paracelsus,” 3.372). Gontarski comments, “Browning’s name was ‹rst included in the H-2 version [of the play] to help the reader identify the allusion and establish the ironies surrounding the confusion of the poet with what is perhaps the brand name of the revolver and even, perhaps, the benevolent, el‹n spirits. The quotation suggests not only the possible failure of gravity (an occurrence as unnatural as Paracelsus’s rejection of love), a theme which Winnie develops shortly thereafter, but also the failure of human love. Paracelsus not only rejected authority and the traditional means of learning, but also human love in his pursuit of knowledge.”

245

Notes to Pages 187–94 45. James Knowlson, “Happy Days,” in James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1979), p. 106.

46. Kermode, Sense of an Ending, pp. 47, 45.

47. Beckett’s critique of the trope was playfully anticipated by the avant-garde.

In the ‹rst surrealist play, Apollinaire’s The Breasts of Tiresias (1917), two duelists sporting Brownings made of cardboard are repeatedly shot “for real” only to come back to life. As if going the play one better, at its premiere the anarchist, dandy, and poet Jacques Vaché threatened the audience with a (real?) gun.

48. Shepard’s attitude toward the pistol shot, as with so many other dramatic motifs, is ambivalent. Unlike Cowboy Mouth and Seduced, The Tooth of Crime (1972) ends with the suicide of the defeated rock and roll gunslinger, Hoss, who succeeds in “doing it beautifully.”

49. For a discussion of Fornes’s long-standing relationship with Hedda Gabler, which became the basis for her play The Summer in Gossensass, see Marc Robinson, “The Summer in Gossensass: Fornes and Criticism,” in The Theater of Maria Irene Fornes, ed. Marc Robinson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp.

109–29.

50. Scott Cummings, “Seeing with Clarity: The Visions of Maria Irene Fornes,” Theater 17 (1985): 52.

51. Bonnie Marranca, “Interview: Maria Irene Fornes,” Performing Arts Journal 2 (1978): 107.

52. See Una Chaudhuri, “Maria Irene Fornes” (interview), in Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, eds. Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), pp. 98–114.

53. Savran, “Maria Irene Fornes,” pp. 56–57.

54. Ibid., p. 56.

55. Ibid., p. 55.

56. “More than any of Fornes’ other plays, Fefu addresses the making of theater itself and the speci‹c efforts needed to reclaim, within this medium, a space for women’s performance. These characters collaborate on their presentation in a play that is itself an all-woman production; sharing their joys and their pains, their seriousness and their silliness during the even more tightly patriarchal world of 1935, they are themselves framed (as characters in Fornes’ play) in a historically male theatrical institution.” Garner, Bodied Spaces, p. 198.

57. Maria Irene Fornes, Fefu and Her Friends (New York: PAJ Publications, 1990), p. 35. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in my text. The play exists in two earlier published versions, each of which diverges intriguingly from the 1990 book edition. I have taken the most recent version as the basis of my discussion and refer to the earlier texts where relevant.

58. Worthen, Modern Drama, p. 17.

59. In the Performing Arts Journal and Wordplays texts, the speci‹cation “on the wall” is omitted.

60. Diane Lynn Moroff, Fornes: Theater in the Present Tense (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 39.

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Notes to Pages 195–99 61. In the earlier published versions of the play, the discussion about whether or not the gun is loaded occupies more stage time.

62. Maria Irene Fornes, Fefu and Her Friends, in Performing Arts Journal 2 (1978): 116.

63. Maria Irene Fornes, Fefu and Her Friends, in Wordplays: An Anthology of New American Drama, vol. 1 (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1980), p. 11.

64. This equation of Ibsen with a “masculine” and Chekhov with a more “feminine” dramaturgy is Fornes’s. In response to Una Chaudhuri’s question about whether a female aesthetic exists, Fornes replies: “Aesthetics is a feminine thing.

When a man has an aesthetic sense, that is thought of as the feminine side of him.

I’m trying to think of a male playwright who has a more of a female sensibility [sic].

I would say that Chekhov has more of a feminine sensibility than other playwrights. There is something about the way Chekhov looks at his characters and at the world, and the way he laughs at the whole sense of conventional structure, whereas others take conventional structure very seriously. Brilliant men like Ibsen have been quite satis‹ed to follow conventional structure, but Chekhov just laughed at it. You can see that he knows very well what he is doing—it isn’t as if he had never heard of it. He just laughs at it, and he structures his play in manners that are a lot more complex, and the structure is very solid.” Chaudhuri, “Maria Irene Fornes,” p. 107.

65. See, for instance, Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (London: Methuen, 1988); Elin Diamond, “Mimesis, Mimicry, and the ‘True-Real,’” Modern Drama 32 (1989): 58–72; and Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). But for a counterargument against the notion that “the traditional narrative structure of realism necessarily oppresses all female actors and spectators,” see Gail Gibson Cima, Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights, and the Modern Stage (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 8.

66. In the two earlier versions, Fefu enters holding the rabbit “in her arms” and stands behind Julia before delivering her ‹nal speech. Possibly Fornes adjusted the blocking in order to keep both the rabbit and Julia in plain sight of the audience.

67. Beverly Byers Pevitts, “Fefu and Her Friends,” in Women in American Theatre, ed. Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins (New York: Theater Communications Group, 1987), p. 316; Helen Keyssar, Feminist Theatre (New York: Grove Press, 1985), p. 125.

68. Gayle Austin, “The Madwoman in the Spotlight: Plays of Maria Irene Fornes,” in Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre, ed. Lynda Hart (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), p. 79.

69. The message that repressed female rage back‹res onto other women is also made clear at the end of The Conduct of Life, when Leticia places the revolver with which she has shot her husband in the hand of his innocent twelve-year-old victim.

70. “But Fefu doesn’t kill Julia; she kills a rabbit out of frustration and pain.

The judges use her violent act to kill Julia. In the same way that they used the violent act of the hunter as a physical medium to wound Julia. The judges have to use

247

Notes to Pages 199–200 an earthly physical violence to destroy someone, because they are not physical.”

Fornes, quoted in Chaudhuri, “Maria Irene Fornes,” p. 109.

71. As the vehicle for an instructional moment, Fefu’s gunshot resembles those shots that kill Swiss Cheese in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1941). Courage realizes that she has bargained too long but refuses to mend her ways and loses more children to the war by which she means to pro‹t.

72. Fornes herself has claimed that she set the play in 1935 partly so as to avoid a “Freudian” atmosphere of “people . . . constantly interpreting each other or themselves.” She also states, “The play is not ‹ghting anything, not negating anything. My intention has not been to confront anything. I felt as I wrote the play that I was surrounded by friends. I felt very happy to have such good and interesting friends.” Marranca, “Interview: Maria Irene Fornes,” p. 109.

73. Toby Silverman Zinman, “Hen in a Foxhouse: The Absurdist Plays of Maria Irene Fornes,” in Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama, ed.

Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), p.

213.

74. Zinman, ibid., p. 210, explicitly links Fefu’s shotgun to Fornes’s rejection of the “Hedda principle”: “It may be useful to note here that the only play Fornes had read before she started to write plays was Hedda Gabler, and one might see Fefu’s shotgun as an absurdist transmutation of Hedda’s pistol; Fefu is not about to shoot herself to escape male dominance, but she may, in the shooting of the rabbit/Julia at the end, have shot the Hedda principle. This is to suggest not only the feminist act of destroying that female character who symbolizes a yielding to male dominance (or the equally self-destructive suicidal refusal to yield to male dominance), but also the destruction of the Hedda principle in practical terms: the rejection of the well-made, realistic play replete with explanations and meaningful actions, the well-furnished house party revisited and revised.”

75. The visual juxtaposition of shotgun and rabbit inevitably recalls Chekhov’s juxtaposition of shotgun and seagull in act 2 of The Sea Gull. In both plays, the animal is an ironized symbol of innocent victimhood, and Fefu’s rabbit may be an intertextual nod to Fornes’s precursor (as well as to Ibsen’s sacri‹cial duck). As Elinor Fuchs notes in “Fefu and Her Friends: The View from the Stone,” in Robinson, Theater of Maria Irene Fornes, pp. 105–6, “[T]here is something vaguely disappointing, dare one say almost comic, about Julia’s ‘dying’ as a rabbit. One wonders whether Fornes is pulling a rabbit joke out of her playwriting hat. . . . Fornes may have administered the rabbit to the audience to counter its in›ationary appetite for symbols.”

76. Thus perhaps the most obvious precursor to Fefu’s “absurd” gun is the double-barreled shotgun in Witkiewicz’s surreal play The Water Hen, written in 1921 but not professionally produced until 1964. Like Fefu’s shooting of the rabbit/Julia, Edgar’s shooting of the Water Hen ruptures logic (the hen refuses to die).

Further, as in Ivanov, the protagonist’s suicide by revolver is heavily ironized. On seeing the pistol, Edgar’s father sardonically remarks, “You’d be an excellent actor, especially in those preposterous plays they write nowadays.” Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, The Water Hen, in Avant-Garde Drama: Major Plays and Documents

248

Notes to Pages 200–202 Post World War I, ed. Bernard F. Dukore and Daniel C. Gerould (New York: Bantam, 1969), p. 48.

77. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Anchor, 1990), p. 11.

78. Marranca, “Interview: Maria Irene Fornes,” p. 107.

79. Enoch Brater, “American Clocks: Sam Shepard’s Time Plays,” Modern Drama 37 (1994): 608–9.

80. Bertolt Brecht, “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” in Brecht on Theatre, p. 71.

81. Schlueter, Dramatic Closure, p. 22. In terming dramas “suicidal,” Schlueter borrows Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s term for the epigram in Poetic Closure: A Study in How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

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268

Index Abington, Frances, 126–27, 128, 145 action force, and distinction between subject and object, 9–10 actors: and arrival of actresses on Restoration stage, 119–20, 233n. 4; and fan on Restoration stage, 163–64; position of, in Restoration society, 236–37n. 31, 237n. 38, 238n. 45; and semiotics of actresses on Restoration stage, 127, 129–36; and skull in Jacobean theater, 114 Addison, Joseph, 28, 124–27, 159–60, 161–62, 163, 164, 233n. 8 Aelred of Rievaulx, 35, 38 Agnes of God (Pielmeier, 1982), 88 Alchemist, The ( Jonson, 1610), 13, 28 alienation, and property in Jacobean society, 113–14 Alleyn, Edward, 63–64 Alter, Jean, 16, 209n. 50 Amalarius, bishop of Metz, 36 Ambassadors, The (Holbein), 93–95, 99, 100, 105, 108 Amossy, Ruth, 207n. 27 anamorphosis, and skull as prop, 92–95, 96, 99, 102, 111, 112–13, 115 Arden, John, 24 Ariès, Philippe, 229n. 12 Aristotle, v Armstrong, Nancy, 232n. 1, 234n. 11 art: Ibsen and expressionist, 175; and iconography of skull in Jacobean England, 93–95, 99, 100, 105, 108; and women in Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, 231n. 44

Artaud, Antonin, 220n. 77 audience. See spectators Augier, Émile, 169 Austin, Gayle, 199 autonomy, and manipulation of stage objects, 24 Avigal, Shoshana, 7, 10 Bale, John, 63, 73 Barrow, William, 46 Barry, Elizabeth, 138, 140, 142–43, 207n. 24, 239n. 57, 239–40nn.

62–63 Bartholemew Fair ( Jonson, 1614), 113 Barton, Anne, 95, 97 Bath Unmask’d, The (Odingsells, 1725), 150–57, 240nn. 70, 72 Beau Defeated, The (Pix, 1700), 135 Beck, Julian, 52 Beckett, Samuel, 15, 22, 27, 171, 183–91, 201, 202, 241n. 84, 245n.

37, 246n. 47 Beckwith, Sarah, 49, 219n. 55 Behn, Aphra, 131, 143, 233n. 7 Bennett, Benjamin K., 183, 245n. 37 Bergman, Ingmar, 182, 244n. 24 Betterton, Thomas, 12, 138 Bevington, David, 39, 44, 66, 70, 218n.

47 blood: and cloth as sacred symbol, 69–70; and handkerchief as prop in The Spanish Tragedy, 76–88 Boaden, James, 126 body, as prop, 211n. 66 Bogatryev, Petr, 7–8, 206n. 15 Bond, Edward, 210n. 59

269

Index Bracegirdle, Anne, 130–31, 241n. 75 Brecht, Bertolt, 19, 220n. 77, 248n. 71 Brook, Peter, 52–53, 54 Brosses, Charles de, 212n. 79 Bullock, Jane Rogers, 152, 157, 158, 240–41nn. 73–75 Bullock, William, 145, 148 Bullock, William (son of William Bullock), 158 Buried Child (Shepard, 1978), 200 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 218n. 52 Caird, John, 90 Cairncross, Andrew S., 224n. 55 Callow, Simon, 134–35 Calvin, John, 50, 51, 74, 219n. 59 Capricious Lovers, The (Lloyd, 1765), 135–36 Careless Husband, The (Cibber, 1704), 127, 128 Carlson, Marvin, viii, 3, 63–64, 205n.

4, 209n. 43 case studies: as approach to production analysis, 3–6; and semiotic role of props in theatrical representation, viii–ix characterization: and skull on Renaissance stage, 115; and stage functions of props, 21–22 Charles II, king of England, 117, 233n.

5 Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A (Middleton, 1613), 113 Chaudhuri, Una, 247n. 64, 247–48n.

70 Chekhov, Anton, 8, 25, 167, 170, 187–88, 209n. 52, 247n. 64, 248n.

75 Cherry Orchard, The (Chekhov, 1903–4), 188, 190 Chettle, Henry, 227n. 72 Cibber, Colley, 127, 129, 130–31, 134–35. See also The Careless Husband Cima, Gail Gibson, 247n. 65

Clement V, Pope, 34 Clive, Kitty, 145 closure, and guns as props on modern stage, 168–70, 192–93 cloths, as religious symbols in medieval theater, 65–72. See also handkerchief Cluchey, Rick, 27 Coddin, Karin S., 231–32n. 47 Colie, Rosalie, 94 Conduct of Life, The (Fornes, 1985), 192, 247n. 69 Congreve, William, 130–31, 150 connotation, semiotics of props and levels of, 10 contextual reanimation, and production analysis, 4, 6 Contractor, The (Storey, 1969), 22, 212n. 74 Conway, Glenda, 96–97, 108, 112 Corpus Christi, and Passion plays, 34, 62–63, 67–68, 70–72, 80, 84, 214n.

11 Coryate, Thomas, 234n. 15 Cowboy Mouth (Shepard, 1971), 191 Croxton Play of the Sacrament (ca.

1461): and eucharistic wafer as prop, 32, 42–49, 50, 61, 171; props and confounding of dramatic conventions in, 28; and religious attitudes or beliefs, 217nn. 39–40 cultural symbols: and materialism vs. the material in props, 16–19; and semiotic role of props in theatrical representation, x–xi Cutts, Cecilia, 42–43 Dancing at Lughnasa (Friel, 1990), 27 Dangerous Corner (Priestley, 1932), 170 Davidson, Clifford, 69, 70, 222n. 25 Davies, Horton, 219n. 59 Davis, Moll, 130 Dawson, Anthony B., 56–57 death. See mortality; suicide

270

Index Death of a Salesman (Miller, 1949), 2 deconstruction, and skull as metaphor in Hamlet, 97 defamiliarization, and stage functions of props, 25–26, 245n. 42 Grazia, Margreta de, vii, 228n. 10, 232n. 49 Dekker, Thomas, 92, 100–107, 115 de Man, Paul, 232n. 48 dematerialization, and de‹nition of stage objects, 14. See also rematerialization Diamond, Elin, 211n. 65 Diehl, Huston, 73–74, 85–86, 224n.

48, 226n. 70 dislocated function, and de‹nition of props, 12–14 Dissembled Wanton; or, My Son Get Money, The (Welsted, 1726), 157–63 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe, ca.

1588–89), 59 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen, 1879), 173 Douglas, Mary, 22 dramatic conventions, and stage functions of props, 28 Dream Play, A (Strindberg, 1902), 23–24 Dugmore, C. W., 220n. 71 Durfey, Thomas, 123 Duvelleroy, M. J., 123–24 Eco, Umberto, 7, 10, 207n. 27, 210n.

60 Egypt, sacred objects in ancient, 33 Elam, Keir, 7, 21 Eleuthéria (Beckett, 1947), 188 Empson, William, 229n. 23 Endgame (Beckett, 1957), viii, 61 Ethelwold, St., bishop of Winchester, 39, 65, 66 Etherege, George, 123, 136–45, 162, 163, 164 eucharistic wafer (oble): and concept of symbolism in Middle Ages, 216–17n. 37; gun as prop compared

to, 171; and image of Host in medieval drama, 31–33; and liturgical drama, 39–42; as stage property, 42–49; and staging of Mass, 33–39; theological debate over status of, 50–60. See also religious symbols Evans, Edith, 127 fans, and stage functions of props in Restoration and early-eighteenthcentury theater, 117–65 farce, and plot functions of props, 23 Farquhar, George, 145–50, 163. See also The Twin Rivals Fefu and Her Friends (Fornes, 1977), 172, 191–200, 201–2 femininity, and actresses on Restoration stage, 120, 135. See also gender; sexuality feminism and feminist scholarship: and actresses on Restoration stage, 131, 132; play of predictability and transformative dramaturgy of, 172.

See also patriarchy; women Fences (Wilson, 1985), 2–3 Ferguson, Margaret W., 230n. 31 fetishes: and fan as prop on Restoration stage, 145–50; and handkerchiefs as religious symbols, 74, 85, 87; and stage functions of props, 26–27; use of term, 212n. 79 Finke, Laurie A., 109, 231n. 44 Finney, Gail, 244n. 26 First Part of Hieronimo, The (Kyd, 1605), 76–79 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 208n. 34 Fiske, Minnie Maddern, 177 Flory, M. A., 234n. 11 Foreman, Richard, 24 Fornes, Maria Irene, 170, 172, 191–200, 201–2, 243n. 16, 247n.

69, 248nn. 72, 74–76 Foxe, John, 74 Fraser, Russell A., 34, 59

271

Index Freud, Sigmund, 212n. 80, 227n. 2 Friel, Brian, 27 Frith, John, 55, 219n. 56 Frye, Roland Mushat, 91–92, 227–28nn. 4–5 Funeral; or, Grief A-la-Mode, The (Steele, 1701), 122–23 Garber, Marjorie, 94–95, 112, 230n. 32 Garner, Stanton B., Jr., vii, 15–16, 22, 211n. 65, 246n. 56 Garrick, David, 126, 145 Gay, John, 118–19, 125 gaze, control of, in Restoration theater, 158 Gellert, Bridget, 91 gender, fans on Restoration stage and performance of, 145, 150–57. See also femininity; sexuality; women Genet, Jean, 26 ghosting: concept of theatrical, 3, 63–64, 205n. 4; and Elizabethan playwrights, 221n. 8 Gibson, Gail McMurray, 47, 217n. 38 Gildon, Charles, 124 Gimenez, Sylvia, 231n. 43 Gomersall, Robert, 92 Gontarski, S. E., 245n. 44 Grantley, Darryll, 217n. 38, 218n. 49 Greenblatt, Stephen, 17, 51, 65, 85, 94, 226nn. 68, 71 Gregory I, Pope, 35–36 guns, and stage functions of props on modern stage, 167–202. See also weapons Gwyn, Nell, 129, 130, 131 Hamlet (Shakespeare): fencing match and distinction between mimesis and kinesis in, 207n. 25; and skull as prop, 1–2, 90–93, 95–100, 102–7, 108–9, 115 handkerchief, and stage functions of props in Elizabethan theater, 61–88, 89–90, 225–27nn. 57–73

Hansberry, Lorraine, 2, 241n. 81 Happy Days (Beckett, 1961), 22, 171, 183–91, 201, 202, 241n. 84 Hardison, O. B., 35, 41, 216n. 33, 222n. 20 Hare, Arnold, 130 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 17 haunted mediums, and stage functions of props, 27–28 Hebbel, Friedrich, 169 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen, 1890), and gun as prop, 167, 172, 173–86, 189, 190, 201, 202 Henshaw, Nancy Wandalie, 235n. 20, 239n. 59 heresy. See Lollards and Lollardy Higonnet, Margaret, 242–43n. 7 historical context: of case studies on role of props in theatrical representation, xii; cultural materialism and stage objects, 18; handkerchief as prop on Restoration stage compared to Georgian theater, 227n. 73; and reconstruction of performance practice, 120–21; and reconstruction of spectator, 211n. 65 Hitchcock, Alfred, 23, 229n. 21 Hogarth, William, 121–22 Holbein, Hans, 93–94, 99, 100, 105, 108 Holland, Peter, 121, 237n. 31, 237–38n. 42 Homan, Richard L., 218n. 47 Homecoming, The (Pinter, 1965), 26 Honest Whore, The, Part I (Dekker, 1604), and skull as prop, 92, 100–107,^115 Honzl, Jindrich, 9, 21, 219n. 60, 220n.

75 Hooker, Richard, 55, 56, 220n. 71 Host. See eucharistic wafer Houston, Julia, 38, 52, 216n. 29 Howe, Elizabeth, 131, 236n. 27, 236–37n. 31, 241n. 75

272

Index Hume, Robert D., 4–5, 205–6n. 7 Hutchings, William, 212n. 74

Kyd, Thomas, 62, 69, 75, 76–79, 89.

See also The Spanish Tragedy

Ibsen, Henrik, 167, 172, 173–86, 189, 190, 201, 202, 247n. 64 iconography: of fan on Restoration stage, 121–22; of skull in Jacobean England, 93–95. See also anamorphosis ideology: actresses on Restoration stage and issues of gender and sexuality, 131–32; and materialist analysis of stage objects, 18, 19, 209–10n.

53; and semiotics of stage objects, 10. See also property idolatry, and religious symbols in Elizabethan drama, 73, 87, 224n. 44 Importance of Being Earnest, The (Wilde, 1895), 13, 141 Inconstant; or, The Way to Win Him, The (Farquhar, 1702), 145–50, 163, 240n. 65 irony, and guns as props, 182, 190–91

Lacan, Jacques, 229n. 16 Lady from the Sea, The (Ibsen, 1888), 173 Lady Windermere’s Fan (Wilde, 1892), 21–22, 25, 164, 241n. 81 Lamb, Charles, vi language, and fan as prop, 121–27 Last Action Hero, The (‹lm), 90 Lee, Mary, 239n. 57 Lee, Nathaniel, 207n. 25 lexeme, and semiotics of stage objects, 10–11 Lie of the Mind, A (Shepard, 1985), 200 Living Theater, 52 Lloyd, Robert, 135–36 Lollards and Lollardy, 39, 46, 75, 217nn. 39–40 Love for Money (Durfey, 1691), 123 Love’s Last Shift (Cibber, 1696), 134–35 Lucerne Passion play, 68 Lupton, Julia, 226n. 71 Luther, Martin, 50–51, 53, 55, 57 Lyons, Charles, 181

James, Henry, 175 John Bull’s Other Ireland (Shaw, 1904), 61 Jones, Sarah, 23 Jonson, Ben, 13, 28, 221n. 8. See also Bartholemew Fair Jumpers (Stoppard, 1972), 170 Kamps, Ivo, 209–10n. 53 Kenny, Shirley Strum, 240n. 65 Kermode, Frank, 167 Kernan, Alvin, 221n. 5 Keyssar, Helen, 199 Kiberd, Declan, 61 King Hedley II (Wilson, 1999), 2–3 Kirby, Michael, 209n. 51 Knowlson, James, 187 Kolve, V. A., 214n. 10 Korda, Natasha, 17 Kowzan, Tadeusz, 8, 10 Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett, 1958), 27

Macbeth (Shakespeare), 100 Mackie, Erin, 158, 241n. 77 Madonna (pop singer), 143 magic, and handkerchief as prop, 77, 78, 87, 89–90, 212n. 71, 224n. 48 Maids, The (Genet, 1947), 26 Malina, Judith, 52 Maltman, Sister Nicholas, 218n. 47 manipulation, and distinction between props and stage objects, 12 Man of Mode, The (Etherege, 1667), 123, 136–45, 162, 163, 164 Maria Magdalene (Hebbel, 1843), 169 Marks, Peter, 169 Marlowe, Christopher, 59 Marx, Karl, 212n. 80 Maslen, Elizabeth, 91

273

Index Mass: parody of, in The Spanish Tragedy, 84–85, 86; sacred objects and staging of, 33–39. See also Roman Catholic Church Massinger, Philip, 229n. 12 materialism: and consumption of theatrical objects, 210n. 59; and ideology in criticism, 18, 19, 209–10n.

53; and props as cultural symbols, 16–19 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 237nn. 32, 38 McAuley, Gay, 24, 207n. 26, 208n. 35, 208–9n. 39, 211n. 66 McFarlane, James, 243n. 18 melodrama, guns as props in nineteenth-century, 169 memento mori. See skull Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 22 Merry Wives of Windsor, The (Shakespeare), 113 metaphor: and skull as prop in Hamlet, 95–100; and stage functions of props, 21–22 metonymy, and metaphor as function of props, 21–22 Middleton, Thomas, 206n. 14. See also A Chaste Maid in Cheapside Milhous, Judith, 4–5, 205–6n. 7 Miller, Arthur, 2 Miller, Jonathan, 3 miracle plays: and circumstances of production, 218n. 49; and eucharistic wafer as prop, 32, 214n. 10.

See also Croxton Play of the Sacrament Miss Julie (Strindberg, 1888), 27, 243n.

13 Moroff, Diane Lynn, 194 Morris, Harry, 91 mortality, guns and skulls as emblems of, 171. See also suicide Morton, Thomas, 165 motion, as de‹ning feature of props, vi

motivation, and stage functions of props, 23 Motteux, Peter Anthony, 239n. 59 Mud (Fornes, 1983), 192 Mulryne, J. M., 224nn. 55–56 Munch, Edvard, 175 Murphy, Arthur, 126 Neill, Michael, 230n. 27 ’night, Mother (Norman, 1982), 168, 170, 191 Night of the Iguana, The (Williams, 1961), 24 Norman, Marsha, 168, 170, 191 N-Town Passion Play, 49, 68, 70 objects: distinction between prop and, 208n. 35, 208–9n. 39; and fan as prop, 164; and psychoanalytic criticism, 206n. 9; and skull as prop, 90, 92; and subject as theatrical sign, 6–11. See also subjectivity oble. See eucharistic wafer O’Connell, Michael, 72–73, 224n. 44 Odingsells, Gabriel, 150–57, 240nn.

70, 72 Old‹eld, Anne, 129 Olympe’s Marriage (Augier, 1855), 169 Orlin, Lena Cowen, vii, 16 ostranenie, formalist concept of, 13 Othello (Shakespeare): and fetishized props, 26; and handkerchief as prop, viii, 18, 62, 89, 212n. 71, 220n. 79; props and characterization in, 21, 22; props and confounding of dramatic conventions in, 28 paganism, and Christianity in The Spanish Tragedy, 84 painting. See art Passion plays. See Corpus Christi patriarchy, and guns as props in Fefu, 192, 193, 195, 198, 199 Peck, James, 210n. 59 Pepys, Samuel, 129, 233n. 4

274

Index Peregrinus play (Beauvais), 40–42 performance: analogy between Anglican Eucharist and bodily, 56; centrality of props to, v–vi; and ef‹gy, 213n. 83, 226n. 66; and production analysis, 5; reconstruction of historical practices of, 120–21; use of term, 204n. 1 Perkins, William, 223n. 41 personi‹cation, props and theatrical phenomenon of, 27 Pevitts, Beverly Byers, 199 phallic symbols, and guns as props, 185, 243n. 18 phenomenology: and reconstruction of historical spectator, 211n. 65; and religious symbols in theater, 54; and theater semiotics, 59–60 Piano Lesson, The (Wilson, 1987), 27 Pielmeier, John, 88 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 169 Pinter, Harold, 26 Pix, Mary, 135 Play of the Death and Burial (Corpus Christi), 70, 80 Play of the Resurrection (Corpus Christi), 70–71 power, and control of gaze in Restoration theater, 158 Prague linguistic circle, and semiotics, vi–vii, 6–11, 14 Priestley, J. B., 170 production analysis: and audience diversity, 205–6n. 7; and case study approach, 3–6 property, meaning of, in Jacobean society and theater, 113–15, 232n. 49 props: centrality of, to performance, v–vi; cultural symbols and materialism, 16–19; de‹nition of, 1, 11, 20, 31, 208n. 36; distinction between set pieces, costumes, and, 208n. 34; and fans in Restoration and early-eighteenth-century theater, 117–65; and

guns on modern stage, 167–202; and handkerchief in Elizabethan drama, 61–88; motion as de‹ning feature of, vi; performance dimensions of, 2–3; and performing objects, 211n. 67; production analysis and case study approach, 3–6; and property-man or property player, 216n. 28; and psychoanalytic criticism, 206n. 9; and rematerialization, 11–16; in scholarly literature, vi–vii; and skull in Jacobean theater, 89–115; stage functions of, vii–xiii, 20–29; temporal contract and religious symbols in medieval theater, 31–60 Proschan, Frank, 20, 211n. 67 Protestant Reformation: and staging of Mass, 38; and theatrical link between holy cloth and sacred blood, 72–75; and theological debate on communion, 50. See also Wycliffe, John Provoked Wife, The (Vanbrugh, 1697), 126 Quem quaeritis (liturgical drama), 39 Quilligan, Maureen, vii, 228n. 10 Raisin in the Sun, A (Hansberry, 1959), 2, 241n. 81 Real Inspector Hound, The (Stoppard, 1968), 22 realism, and guns as props on modern stage, 173–74, 185, 194, 197, 199–200, 245n. 37 Regularis Concordia. See Visitatio Sepulchri Reid-Schwartz, Alexandra, 219n. 55 religious symbols: and cloth in medieval heritage, 65–72; in Elizabethan drama, 62–65; and prop as temporal contract in medieval theater, 31–60; Protestant Reformation and handkerchief as sacred symbol, 72–75; and semiotic role of props in

275

Index religious symbols: and cloth (continued) theatrical representation, ix–x. See also eucharistic wafer; Mass; paganism; Protestant Reformation; Roman Catholic Church; theology rematerialization, of stage objects, 11–16 Revenger’s Tragedy, The (Tourneur), 85, 92, 107–15 Rhead, G. Woolliscroft, 123–24, 126 Richard II (Shakespeare), 26, 113 Richards, Sandra, 237n. 34 Richardson, Brian, 242n. 4 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 10 Roach, Joseph, 27, 213n. 83, 226n. 66 Road to Calvary (Corpus Christi pageant), 67, 68–69 Roberts, J., 126 Robins, Elizabeth, 177 Rogers, Jane. See Bullock, Jane Rogers Rokem, Freddie, 14–15 Roman Catholic Church: and liturgical drama, 39–42; and staging of Mass, 33–39. See also eucharistic wafer Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard, 1966), 25 Rosenthal, Angela, 121–22, 158, 234n.

15 Rosmersholm (Ibsen, 1886), 173 Rover, The (Behn, 1677), 143 Rubin, Miri, 215n. 22, 218n. 52 Russell, Douglas A., 233n. 8 Russell, William, bishop of Sodor, 38 Ryan, Lacy, 153, 155 Ryle, Gilbert, 125, 235n. 22 Salomon, Brownell, 208n. 36 Sarita (Fornes, 1984), 192 Savran, David, 192–93 Schlueter, June, 168, 202 Schmidt, Henry J., 168–69 School for Scandal, The (Sheridan, 1777), 126–27, 241n. 82

Scowrers, The (Shadwell, 1690), 123 Seagull, The (Chekhov, 1896), 8, 25, 248n. 75 Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The (Pinero, 1893), 169 Seduced (Shepard, 1978), 191 semiotics: and actresses on Restoration stage, 127, 129–36; and distinction between object and subject, 14; and phenomenology of theater, 59–60; and Prague linguistic circle, 6–11; and process of ostension or semiotization, 7, 245n. 42; Protestantism and crisis of, 75; and role of props in theatrical representation, viii–ix Seneca, 72 Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (Arden, 1959), 24–25 sexuality: and fans as props in Restoration and early-eighteenth-century theater, 117–65; and handkerchief as prop in The Spanish Tragedy, 77, 78–79; homosexuality and coded symbols of, 212n. 79 Seyler, Athene, 133–34 Shadwell, Thomas, 123 Shakespeare, William, 26, 91–92, 100, 203n. 4, 207n. 25, 212n. 71, 225nn.

60, 71. See also Hamlet; The Merchant of Venice; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Othello; Richard II; Twelfth Night Shapiro, James, 226n. 70 Shaw, George Bernard, 61, 169–70 Shepard, Sam, 170, 191, 200, 246n. 48 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 126–27, 241n. 82 Shklovsky, Victor, 245n. 42 skull: and gun as prop in modern theater, 171; as prop in Hamlet, 1–2, 90–91; and stage functions of props in Jacobean theater, 89–115 Smith, Emma, 224n. 55 Sokolowski, Robert, 216–17n. 37 Sontag, Susan, 200

276

Index Space Jam (‹lm), 90 Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd, 1587–92): and handkerchief as prop, 62, 64, 76–88, 89, 225–27nn. 57–73; props and confounding of dramatic conventions in, 28 spatial dimension, of props, 2 spectacle, and Aristotle on elements of tragedy, v Spectator, The (magazine), 28, 124–27 spectators: and metrical experience of performance, 168; production analysis and diversity of, 205–6n. 7; and prop as temporal contract, 14, 20, 58; props and imagination of, 61; reaction of Elizabethan, to The Spanish Tragedy, 87–88; reconstruction of historical, 211n. 65; use of term, 204n. 1 Speed the Plough (Morton, 1800), 165 Spencer, Theodore, 102 Spinrad, Phoebe, 92–93, 101, 106, 112, 228n. 4, 228–29n. 12, 231n. 38 Sponsler, Claire, 210n. 59 Stallybrass, Peter, vii, 17, 115, 228n.

10 States, Bert O., vii, 15, 19, 53–54, 54–55, 56, 184 Steele, Richard, 122–23 Stoppard, Tom, 22, 25, 170 Storey, David, 22 Stow, John, 221n. 9 Straub, Kristina, 131–32 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams, 1947), 170, 243n. 13 Strindberg, August, 23–24, 27, 243n.

13 Styan, J. L., 66, 80, 124, 133, 141, 225n. 61, 238–39n. 56 subjectivity: and fan as prop, 164; and semiotics of stage objects, 10; and skull as prop, 90, 92. See also objects Suddenly Last Summer (Williams, 1958), 59 suicide, and guns as props on modern

stage, 169, 174, 178–79, 181–83, 187–88, 201, 242–43n. 7, 248n. 74 surrealism: and defamiliarization of stage objects, 25–26; and guns as props on modern stage, 199–200, 246n. 47 surrogation, and haunted medium, 27–28 Suzman, Janet, 176 symbols, and stage functions of props, 24–25. See also cultural symbols; religious symbols Tarlton, Richard, 114 Teague, Frances, 12–14, 208–9n. 39, 209n. 42 Templeton, Joan, 242n. 7 temporal contract: de‹nition of, 14, 20; and religious symbols as props in medieval theater, 31–60 temporal dimension: and guns as props on modern stage, 167–202; and stage functions of props, 2; and stage time vs. clock time, 242n. 4 theology, and debate over status of eucharistic wafer, 50–60. See also Lollards and Lollardy; paganism; Protestant Reformation; religious symbols; Roman Catholic Church; Wycliffe, John; Zwingli, Huldrych Thomas, David, 130, 235n. 18, 235–36n. 25 Tillis, Steve, 20, 207n. 24 Tooth of Crime, The (Shepard, 1972), 170 Tourneur, Cyril. See The Revenger’s Tragedy Towle, Matthew, 235n. 19 Tragedy of Lodovick Sforza, The (Gomersall, 1628), 92–93 transformational puppets, and stage function of props, 23–24 Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (ca.

1380–1425), 42, 69 Triggs, Jeffrey Alan, 91, 97, 101

277

Index Trussler, Simon, 164 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 113 Twin Rivals, The (Farquhar, 1777), 126 Tydeman, William, 47 Ubersfeld, Anne, 7, 11 Uncle Vanya (Chekhov, 1897), 188 Vanbrugh, John, 126 ^ Veltruský, Jirí, 9–10, 23, 24, 207n. 26 Verbruggen, Susanna, 145, 148 Veronica cloth, 67–69 Visitatio Sepulchri, viii, 39–40, 65–67, 222n. 20 visual shorthand, and stage functions of props, 20–21 Waiting for Godot (Beckett, 1953), 188, 190, 191 Wake‹eld Scourging, 70 Walker, Thomas, 152 Wallace, Beth Kowaleski, 132 Wasson, John M., 47, 216n. 26 Watson, Robert N., 226n. 66 Way of the World, The (Congreve, 1700), 130–31, 150 weapons, and fan in Restoration theater, 123, 160–61, 162. See also guns Webster, John, 243n. 12. See also The White Devil Welsted, Leonard, 157–63 White, Paul Whit‹eld, 73 White Devil, The (Webster, 1612), 113 Wilde, Oscar, 21–22, 25, 164, 241n.

81. See also The Importance of Being Earnest

Williams, Tennessee, 24, 59, 170, 200, 243n. 13 Wilmot, John, earl of Rochester, 138, 143 Wilson, August, 2, 27 Wilson, John Harold, 130, 239n. 57 Wilson, Robert, 24 Winnicott, D. W., 12, 206n. 9 Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy, 248n. 76 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 28–29 Wol‹t, Sir Donald, 27 women: community of, in Fefu, 193, 246n. 56; and concept of property in Jacobean England, 113; in Elizabethan and Jacobean art, 231n. 44; and guns as props in modern theater, 169; role of, in Restoration society, 130, 238n. 54. See also actors; femininity; feminism and feminist scholarship; gender; patriarchy; sexuality Women Can’t Wait ( Jones), 23 Woolf, Rosemary, 221–22n. 13, 222n.

22 Worthen, W. B., 17, 193–94, 210n. 59 Wycliffe, John, and Wyclif‹an theology, 38, 43 Yachnin, Paul, 17, 18 York Birth of Jesus, 55 Young, Karl, 41–42 Zinman, Toby Silverman, 199–200, 248n. 74 Zwingli, Huldrych, and Zwinglian theology, 50, 51, 54, 57, 59, 219n. 59

278