The Stage Life of Props

Abstract

Although a great deal has been written about stage objects as literary symbols, very little attention has been paid to their contribution to actual theatrical performance. My dissertation begins to redress this imbalance by reconstructing the careers of four exemplary stage properties: the late medieval eucharistic wafer; the early modern handkerchief and skull; and the gun on the modern stage. Shifting attention from the page to the stage, I claim that props take on a life of their own by disrupting the very conventions that audiences expect them to confirm. The prop thus becomes a practical tool for revitalizing dramatic convention. Using the example of the ambiguous Host-property in the late medieval Croxton Play, Chapter One argues that all props embody tenuous temporal contracts with the spectator that are subject to moment-by-moment renegotiation. Given that no contract can be legislated in advance, my remaining chapters discuss how playwrights have sought to channel audience response to a given prop by orchestrating its stage trajectory through embedded textual cues. Chapter Two argues that Thomas Kyd exploits Elizabethan spectators' residual faith in magical cloths by substituting the handkerchief for holy objects that could no longer legally be represented on stage. In The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd's subversive handkerchief invokes well-known performances by medieval property-cloths in order to replace a spiritual contract of transformation with a commercial contract of sensation. Chapter Three claims that Shakespeare's Othello refines Kyd's contract of sensation by endowing Desdemona's exotic handkerchief with a coercive magic of its own: a theatrical mechanism whereby an emotional response to an object, once aroused, proves self-validating and self-perpetuating. Chapter Four argues that the Jacobean stage skull refuses to ratify the familiar memento mori contract and instead embodies a troubling ambiguity within the concept of property itself that undermines our fundamental distinction between subject and object. Lastly, Chapter Five reveals how Ibsen, Beckett, and Maria Irene Fornes revitalize the melodramatic pistol shot in order to rupture the linear logic of the female suicide play, liberating the spectator from the restrictive contracts of psychological causality and dramatic closure posited by realism.