Renaissance Play Things: The Making of Genre in Performance
Open Access
- Author:
- Smith, Joshua Sanford
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 31, 2014
- Committee Members:
- Garrett Sullivan Jr., Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Patrick G Cheney, Committee Member
Marcy Lynne North, Committee Member
Laura Lunger Knoppers, Committee Member
Dan Beaver, Special Member - Keywords:
- Renaissance
early modern
drama
theater
theatre
object
thing
prop
property
stage - Abstract:
- This dissertation focuses on stage properties—rings, crowns, skulls, and the philosopher’s stone—as potent actants in the creation of early modern theatrical genres. Western literary criticism has long assumed that dramatic genre stems solely from the text, but attending a play is a patently different experience than reading its script. While a dramatic script is obviously an important element to performance, that script is invisible to the spectator; determining a work’s genre from its script is akin to looking at a skeleton and deeming it a person. To the audience, the genre of a play is instead realized by an assemblage of performative components such as actors, sets, costumes, lights, and props. My dissertation utilizes concepts from object-oriented ontology to argue that theatrical genres are functions not of the page alone, but of all the various elements that come together in performance. Renaissance Play Things examines the cultural history and the theatrical presence of significant props in a range of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Middleton, Dekker, and Jonson. In doing so, the dissertation illustrates the fundamental problem with treating dramatic genre as a function of text alone and demonstrates how object-oriented concepts may be appropriated in order to more fully conceptualize theatrical genres. The dissertation’s introduction establishes the tendency to elide textual with performative genre, using A Warning for Faire Women to illustrate how theatrical genre was conceptualized in terms of props on the Renaissance stage. The first chapter scrutinizes the interplay of tragedy and comedy in Romeo and Juliet through the lens of the ring that Juliet sends to Romeo. In recalling both a wedding ring and memento mori token, this ring evokes comedy and tragedy—as well as distinct temporalities associated with each genre. The second chapter examines history plays by Shakespeare and Marlowe in the context of kingship. After the Reformation, the role of the crown in the English coronation rite was drastically modified from a source of power to a confirmer of innate majesty. Marlowe and Shakespeare blend these theories, simultaneously exposing the theatrical nature of the monarchy and undergirding its claims to divine right through the depiction of kingship as a relationship between the king’s body and the crown. This relationship is taken up more explicitly in the third chapter, which focuses on skulls in Hamlet, The Patient Man and the Honest Whore, and The Revenger’s Tragedy. While in the danse macabre, memento mori, and ars moriendi traditions the skull is commonly associated with the anonymity of death, in onstage tragedy it serves as the locus for examining relations between subject and object, identity and anonymity. As such, the onstage skull has not only come to mark tragedy; it helps to create the genre through its evocation of the individual’s role in the face of annihilation. The last chapter argues that the role of the philosopher’s stone in The Alchemist is the vehicle through which Jonson expresses his own ambivalence towards comedy and theatrical performance. In folklore, scientific tradition, and the play, though the stone is a catalyst capable of perfecting matter and benefitting mankind, it is always intended for more corrupt purposes. The stone’s absence from the stage neatly parallels Jonson’s explicit belief that his scripts, though capable of perfecting their reader, are inevitably corrupted through performance. The dissertation thus brings together New Historicism and elements of object-oriented ontology to argue that props are at once both representations of literary genres and active elements of tragedy, comedy, and history on the Renaissance stage.