Stage Matters

Props, Bodies, and Space in Shakespearean Performance

Contributions by Jim Casey, Sarah Enloe, Robert W. Jones, Catherine Loomis, Sarah Neville, Stephen Purcell, Sid Ray, Sara B. T. Thiel, Amanda Zoch Edited by Annalisa Castaldo associate professor of English, director of gender, women, and sexuality st, Rhonda Knight

Publication date:

13 March 2018

Length of book:

208 pages

Publisher

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Dimensions:

236x162mm
6x9"

The collection, edited by Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight, features essays by scholars interested in exploring how the material culture of sixteenth and early seventeenth English theatrical culture influenced the creation and presentation of drama and how understanding this culture can enrich scholars’ current interactions with these plays as well as offer insights to actors and directors. The essays include discussions of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton as well as lesser known works and playwrights. This collection is unique in that it includes the body of the actor as a material object that is encountered and manipulated by other actors on the stage. These essays demonstrate how props, bodies and the architectural dimensions of early modern stages have both practical and symbolic registers.

Acknowledgments
Preface: An Introduction and Primer to the American Shakespeare Center by Sarah Enloe
Introduction by Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight
Chapter 1: Whose Experiment is it Anyway?: Some Models for Practice-as-Research in Shakespeare Studies by Stephen Purcell
Chapter 2: Shakespeare’s Spirits: Staging the Supernatural on the Early Modern Stage by Jim Casey
Chapter 3: Staging Epilepsy in Othello by Sid Ray
Chapter 4: ’Sore hurt and bruised’: Visual Damage in Othello” by Catherine Loomis
Chapter 5: ’Heave Up!’: The ‘Wicked Weight’ of Shakespeare’s Antony and York’s Christ” by R. W. Jones
Chapter 6: Hiding in Plain Sight: Eavesdropping and the Physicality of the Stage by Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight
Chapter 6: The ‘Dead Body Problem’: The Dramaturgy of Coffins on the Renaissance Stage by Sarah Neville
Chapter 7: ’Cushion come forth’: Materializing Pregnancy on the Stuart Stage” by Sara B. T. Thiel
Chapter 8: Maternal Revision in Middleton’s More Dissemblers Besides Women by Amanda Zoch
Afterword: The Actors Speak
About the Contributors
Index