3. Faustus’ books (again)
As objects-in-themselves:
Repositories of knowledge (between two covers)
Troping subject areas (‘stretch[ing] as far as doth the mind of
man’)
As objects-in-performance
‘settle thy studies’ v. the restless play of choosing
choosing right/choosing wrong
And Faustus’ ‘cover story’: ‘be a divine in show / But …’ =
costume
‘Stuff’ and ‘Stuff in Play’: ‘Stuff’ that ‘does stuff’. See Egeus in
Dream, ‘Thou Lysander … hast…stol’n the impression of her
fantasy / With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds, conceits, / Knacks,
4. ‘Go to the Centaur, fetch our stuff from thence’ (The Comedy of Errors)
‘She [My wife] is…my household stuff, my field, my barn…’ (The Taming
of the Shrew)
‘What stuff wilt have a kirtle made of?’ (I Henry IV)
‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad…what stuff tis made of…’ (The
Merchant of
Venice)
‘Ambition should be made of sterner stuff’ (Julius Caesar)
‘Nature wants stuff to vie strange forms with fantasy…’ (Antony and
Cleopatra)
‘This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure’ (Twelfth Night)
‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ (Tempest)
‘Is not a comonty / A Christmas gambol or a tumbling trick?’
‘No my lord, it is more pleasing stuff.’
5. property, n. Brit. /ˈprɒpəti/ , U.S. /ˈprɑpərdi/
Etymology: < Anglo-Norman properté, propertee, propertie, propretee, proprité,
Anglo-Norman and Middle French propreté (c1225 in Old French, also as propritei ),
variants (probably after propre proper adj.) of proprieté propriety n. Compare Middle
French, French propreté decent dress and manners (1538), neatness (1671) <
propre proper adj. + -té -ty suffix1.
†2. The quality of being proper or appropriate; fitness, fittingness, suitability; the
proper use or sense of words. Cf. propriety n. 5b, 6. Obs.
3.†a. Something belonging to a thing; an appurtenance; an adjunct. Obs.
5. Theatre and Film. Any portable object (now usually other than an article of
costume) used in a play, film, etc., as required by the action; a prop. Chiefly in pl. Cf.
prop n.6 a1450 Castle Perseverance 132 Þese parcell [read parcellys] in
propyrtes we purpose us to playe Þis day seuenenyt.
1578 in A. Feuillerat Documents Office of Revels Queen Elizabeth (1908)
303 Furnished in this office with sondrey garmentes & properties.
1600 Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dream i. ii. 98, I will draw a bill of
properties, such as our play wants.
1629 P. Massinger Roman Actor iv. ii. sig. I, This cloake, and hat without Wearing
a beard, or other propertie Will fit the person.
1748 Whitehall Evening Post No. 371, To be Sold very cheap, Cloaths, Scenes,
Properties, clean, and in very good Order.
7. Falstaff: Well, thou wilt be horribly chid
tomorrow when thou comest to thy father.
If thou love me, practise an answer.
Hal: Do thou stand for my father and
examine me upon the particulars of my life.
Falstaff: Shall I? Content. This chair shall
be my state, this dagger my sceptre and
this cushion my crown.
Hal: Thy state is taken for a joint-stool, thy
golden sceptre for a leaden dagger and thy
precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown.
I Henry IV, 2.4.364-371
Yet sit and se
Minding true things by what thei
mock’ries be.
(Henry V, 4.0.52-3)
8. Let us think for a moment about how performance in
itself vivifies objects…Theatre transforms objects of
whatever sort into signs simply by presenting them
on stage, to an audience; in that context, an ordinary
object which we might hardly glance at in ‘real’ life
can become weighty with meaning and charged with
emotion. It is in the nature of theatre to effect such
transformations, since everything shown to an
audience carries the promise of something behind or
beyond itself…[T]he theatre routinely invests the
objects it shows with more than they carry in
themselves.
Anthony Dawson, The Culture of Playgoing in
Shakespeare’s England (CUP: 2001, pp. 137-38).
9. ‘Things …, like persons, have social lives.’ Circulating ‘in
different regimes of value in space and time’ and moving
‘through different hands, contexts, and uses,’ objects
‘accumulate[] … biographies’, ‘become weighty’ with life
histories. Objects are ‘things in motion’ that follow ‘careers’
which start them off down specific paths – life journeys –
that regularly (certainly, in theatre, inevitably) get
interrupted, blocked, diverted, where diversion is always ‘a
sign of creativity or crisis’. Thus, an object that begins life
as a gift may be inherited, sold, lost, stolen, found,
sacramentalised as a relic, copied, faked, commodified,
each exchange marking a shift in value, but not every act
of exchange supposing ‘a complete cultural sharing of
assumptions’ about that value. For what is ‘priceless’– that
is, beyond price – in one pair of hands may be ‘priceless’ –
worthless – in another.
Objects, in short, function as ‘incarnated signs’. They
exhibit ‘semiotic virtuosity’.
See Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things:
Commodities in Cultural Perspective (CUP, 1986), pp. 3-34.
10. Snug’s Lion’s Head in Peter Brook’s Dream (1971)
Quince: I will draw a bill of properties, such as our play wants. (1.2.98)
Peter Quince! There are
things in this comedy of
Pyramus and Thisbe that will
never please. First, Pyramus
must draw a sword to kill
himself…
the lion…
moonlight…
we must have a wall …
‘I Pyramus am not Pyramus’
‘he is not a lion’’ ‘half his face
must be seen through the
lion’s neck…’
‘leave a casement…open;
and the moon may shine in at
the casement’ ‘or else one
must come in with a bush of
thorns and a lantern and say
he comes to disfigure or to
present the person of
12. Enter Ophelia distracted, playing on a lute,
and her hair down, singing (SD, Q1 4.5.21)
Laertes: Oh, heat dry up my brains…is’t
possible a young maid’s wits /Should be as
mortal as a poor man’s life?
Ophelia: There’s rosemary: that’s for
remembrance.
Pray you, love, remember. And there is
pansies:
that’s for thoughts.
Laertes: A document in madness – thoughts
and remembrance fitted!
Ophelia: There’s fennel for you, and
14. Gravedigger: Here’s a skull now. This skull has lain in the earth three-and-twenty
year. Hamlet: Whose was
it?
Gravedigger: A whoreson mad fellow’s it was. Whose do you think it was?
Hamlet: Nay, I know not.
Gravedigger: A pestilence on him for a mad rogue – a poured a flagon of Rhenish on
my head once! This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester.
Hamlet: This?
Gravedigger: E’en that.
Hamlet: Let me see. Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio – a fellow of infinite jest,
of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now,
how abhored my imagination is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I
have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your
songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now to mock your own grinning? Quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my lady’s
chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. Make
her laugh at that. Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing. Horatio: What’s
that, my lord? Hamlet: Dost
thou think Alexander looked o’this fashion i’th’earth? Horatio: E’en
so, my lord. Hamlet:
And smelt so? Pah! … To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not
imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till a find it stopping a bung-hole? …
Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
/ O, that that earth which kept the world in awe / Should patch a wall t’expel the
winter’s flaw! But soft, but soft; aside.
18. Titus: I can interpret all her martyred signs…
Speechless complainer, I will learn thy thought.
In thy dumb action will I be as perfect
As begging hermits in their holy prayers.
Thou shalt not sigh, nor hold thy stumps to heaven,
Nor wink, nor nod, nor kneel, nor make a sign,
But I of these will wrest an alphabet
And by still practice learn to know thy meaning.
Titus Andronicus 3.2.12, 35-45
Wreck of the body as
‘telling’ Roman
22. Sirs, I will practice on this drunken man.
What think you, if he were conveyed to
bed,
Wrapped in sweet clothes, rings put upon
his
fingers,
A most delicious banquet by his bed,
And brave attendants near him when he
wakes,
Would not the beggar then forget
himself? …
Carry him gently to my fairest chamber,
And hang it round with all my wanton
pictures;
Balm his foul head in warm distillèd waters,
And burn sweet wood to make the lodging
sweet;
Procure me music ready when he wakes
To make a dulcet and a heavenly sound.
And if he chance to speak, be ready
straight
And, with a low, submissive reverence,
Say “What is it your Honor will command?”
Let one attend him with a silver basin
Full of rosewater and bestrewed with
flowers,
Another bear the ewer, the third a diaper,
And say “Will ’t please your Lordship cool
your
hands?”
Someone be ready with a costly suit,
And ask him what apparel he will wear.
Another tell him of his hounds and horse,
And that his lady mourns at his disease.
Persuade him that he hath been lunatic,
23. Petruchio: I will unto Venice
To buy apparel ’gainst the wedding
day.—
Provide the feast, father, and bid the
guests.
I will be sure my Katherine shall be
fine…
I will to Venice. Sunday comes apace.
We will have rings, and things, and fine
array,
And kiss me, Kate. We will be married
o’ Sunday.
* * * * *
Biondello: Why, Petruchio is coming in a
new hat and an old jerkin, a pair of old
breeches thrice turned, a pair of boots that
have been candle-cases, onebuckled,
another laced; an old rusty sword ta’en out
of the town armory, with a broken hilt, and
chapeless; with two broken points; his
horse … his lackey … A monster, a very
monster in apparel…
* * * * *
Baptista:
Why, sir, you know this is your wedding
day.
First were we sad, fearing you would not
come,
Now sadder that you come so
unprovided.
Fie, doff this habit, shame to your estate,
An eyesore to our solemn festival….
Tranio:
See not your bride in these unreverent
robes.
Go to my chamber, put on clothes of
mine.
Petruchio: Not I, believe me. Thus I’ll visit
her.
Baptista:
But thus, I trust, you will not marry her.
Petruchio: Good sooth, even thus.
Therefore, ha’ done with words.
To me she’s married, not unto my clothes.
Could I repair what she will wear in me,
As I can change these poor
accoutrements,
24. PETRUCHIO
Thy gown? Why, ay. Come, tailor, let us
see ’t.
O mercy God, what masking-stuff is here?
What’s this? A sleeve? ’Tis like a demi-
cannon.
What, up and down carved like an apple
tart?
Here’s snip and nip and cut and slish and
slash,
Like to a censer in a barber’s shop.
Why, what a devil’s name, tailor, call’st thou
this? …
Go, hop me over every kennel home,
For you shall hop without my custom, sir.
I’ll none of it. Hence, make your best of
it…
Well, come, my Kate, we will unto your
father’s,
Even in these honest mean habiliments.
Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor,
For ’tis the mind that makes the body rich,
And as the sun breaks through the darkest
clouds,
So honor peereth in the meanest habit.
What, is the jay more precious than the lark
Because his feathers are more beautiful?
Or is the adder better than the eel
Because his painted skin contents the
eye?
O no, good Kate. Neither art thou the
worse
For this poor furniture and mean array.
If thou account’st it shame, lay it on
me…
![A World of
Objects:
House,
Shop,
Study,
Cabinet of
Curiosities
[but
fetishizing the
object? the
material world
v. the eternal
world?]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)