Stanford Drama

How to account for the body of a performance in the text of a play has been a contentious question in the discourse of performance criticism. Recognizing the inadequacy of purely linguistic exegesis, Shakespeare's Enchanted Objects offers a hermeneutic response to this problem. I address the following questions: 1) how do objects participate in the formation of meaning in Shakespeare? 2) what do their connotative fields reveal about the text and the historical moment of its writing? I begin by arguing that the dramatic text has an ontological status different from other texts. Leaning from page into materiality, it annexes and transforms the worlds in radical modalities of performance. Its emergence into writing, on the other hand, is shaped by the already existing forms of material practice. This dialectical reversibility between realms of writing and praxis generates the primary semantic energy of drama. Viewing the objects as verbal/material constellations of meaning, I study the mode in which the text abides in the world, and how the world of social practice inheres in the text. The points of contact of the play with physical representation create rich sites for textual and cultural analysis. In that light, I examine the way in which Shakespeare's "word" turns "flesh" in the use of stage properties—daggers, skulls, rings, mirrors. I argue that Shakespearean objects behave like miniature cosmologies: created by the play's language, submerged in systems of resonances, correspondences and associations with the text, they enfold and refigure the central issues of the plays.

Chapter I (Merchant of Venice) examines Portia's caskets in relation to Renaissance episteme. I claim that these objects bring to light processes of apprehension and figuration of value as embeded in the practice and discourse of trade and alchemy.

In Chapter II (Tempest) Prospero's staff and book become metaphors of Renaissance techne, revelaing the dynamics of technological agency in the age of exploration. I argue that the melancholia haunting the Tempset arises from the crisis of intention in execution. The passage from complex and uncertain information systems represented by the magical book into concrete acts represented by the staff reflects the anxiety of encountering the unknown through colonial conquests, geographic explorations, and scientific and alchemical pursuits.

Chapter III focuses on communication through objects in Shakespeare. The practice of expressing meaning through things flourished in the mercantile and colonial ventures of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. The insignia of power, memorabilia of colonial exploits, participated in the creation and subversion of idelogical discourse. True to their poetic nature, however, the Shakespearen objects, like Holbein's anamorphic skull, cast their shadow upon the world of social exchange, delineating the realms of repression and play.

Like the dagger in Macbeth, the Shakespearen object often appears at the point of ultimate reckoning between the character and the world, bringing into focus the existential dimension of drama—the survival of an individual within a given world of praxis. In the Conclusion, I develop the philosophical contingencies raised in the previous chapters, and view drama as ontologically embedded in the passage of language into the materiality of action, at the site where words matter.