Stage Matters : Props, Bodies, and Space in Shakespearean Performance.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (209 pages)
Cover -- Stage Matters -- Shakespeare and the Stage -- Stage Matters: Props, Bodies, and Space in Shakespearean Performance -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- Place -- Things -- Collaboration -- Notes -- Introduction -- Notes -- Chapter One -- Whose Experiment Is It, Anyway? -- The Expert and the Craftsperson -- The Witness and the Source -- The Coinvestigators -- Coda: The Academic-Practitioner -- Notes -- Chapter Two -- Shakespeare's Spirits -- Notes -- Chapter Three -- Staging Epilepsy in Othello -- Notes -- Chapter Four -- "Sore Hurt and Bruised" -- Notes -- Chapter Five -- "Heave Up!" -- "They Heave Antony Aloft to Cleopatra" (4.16.39 s.d.) -- "High Events as These" (5.2.358) -- "Is This Well Done?" (5.2.323) -- Notes -- Chapter Six -- Hiding in Plain Sight -- Notes -- Chapter Seven -- The "Dead Body Problem" -- Notes -- Chapter Eight -- "Cushion Come Forth" -- Staging the Pregnant Body: Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (1604) -- The "Great Belly" and Prosthetic Convention: Thomas May's The Heir (c. 1620) -- Resisting the Belly: The Magnetic Lady, Ben Jonson (1632) -- Notes -- Chapter Nine -- Maternal Revision in Middleton's More Dissemblers Besides Women -- Notes -- Afterword -- Index -- About the Contributors.
This collection features nine essays that explore how the material conditions of the early modern English stage shaped the theater. Topics range from the simulation of pregnant bodies by boy actors (and the effects of those simulations) to how bruises created by make-up might have been used on stage.