Shakespeare's Props

About this book

"Shakespeare's most famous props have become transhistorical, transnational metonyms for their plays: a strawberry-spotted handkerchief instantly recalls Othello; a skull, Hamlet. This book reveals the cognitive impact of Shakespeare's props. Departing from the longstanding tendency to conceptualise props as detachable body parts, this monograph argues for props as detachable parts of the mind. Through props, Shakespeare's characters reveal their own cognition and intervene in the cognition of other characters, illuminating and extending their affect. Shakespeare's props are neither static icons nor substitutes for the body, but volatile, malleable, and dangerously exposed extensions of his characters' minds. Recognising them as such offers new readings of the plays, from the way memory becomes a weapon in Hamlet's Elsinore, to the pleasures and perils of Early Modern gift culture in Othello. The book illuminates Shakespeare's exploration of extended cognition, recollection and remembrance at a time when the growth of printing was forcing Renaissance culture to rethink the relationship between memory and the object. Readings in Shakespearean stage history, drawing on much unpublished archival material, reveal how props illuminate cultural priorities: while some props accrue cultural memories, others decay and are forgotten as detritus of the stage"--