Wall-Randell, Sarah. "What Is a Staged Book? Books As 'Actors' in the Early Modern English Theatre." Rethinking Th

Wall-Randell, Sarah. "What Is a Staged Book? Books as ‘Actors’ in the Early Modern English Theatre." Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England. Ed. Tiffany Stern. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2020. 128–152. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 30 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350051379.ch-007>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 30 September 2021, 04:23 UTC. Copyright © Tiffany Stern and contributors 2020. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 7 What Is a Staged Book? Books as ‘Actors’ in the Early Modern English Theatre Sarah Wall-Randell In his widely used textbook of theatrical props design, Thurston James begins the chapter on book- props with a brief comic scene: actor On my entrance, I’m to be carrying a Bible. Do you have it ready? prop crew head Sure, it’s there on the prop table. actor (Walking to the table, searching) You mean—this dictionary? prop crew head You and I know it’s a dictionary. But you’re an actor. You can make the audience think it’s a Bible. [. .] 128 WHAT IS A STAGED BOOK? 129 actor Here, look what this idiot is giving me to use for a Bible. stage manager It looks like a dictionary. prop crew head Aw, a book’s a book. 1 In this vignette, James contrasts the stereotype of the oversensitive, demanding actor with the utility-minded, quick- and-dirty technician. The actor’s view here, that a dictionary would be miscast in the role of a Bible onstage, turns out to be shared not only by the stage manager, but by the author as well, for the rest of James’s chapter offers detailed and painstaking instructions for sourcing, adapting, or constructing, using wood, leather, twine, and various papers, what James calls ‘character books’, or books playing specifi c parts, whose identities must be made legible to the audience. 2 Certainly, for the skilled designer as well as the actor and the discerning audience member, James implies, it is far from true that ‘a book’s a book’. What exactly are book- props, then, once we have granted that they are not uniform and interchangeable objects? Props overall are an especially signifi cant element in the early modern theatre because, in a stagecraft without illusionistic sets, the objects actors hold take on greater prominence. Tiffany Stern has noted the duality in the mimetic expression of early modern props: their ‘heavy realism’, in contrast to the more suggestive or sketched- in quality of scenery, and, on the other hand, the symbolic or metonymic way in which they are used. The nimbler, more effi cient medium of the prop, such as a crown or throne, can stand for what cannot, practically, be brought onstage, such as a castle. 3 The way that props enact theatrical representation, the relationship they effect between the object and what it represents, is variable. Some props are only approximations of, or stand- ins for, the objects they ‘play’ onstage, when the real thing would be too dangerous or too 130 RETHINKING THEATRICAL DOCUMENTS precious: a stage dagger is made of wood, or is blunted; a stage crown is made of base metal painted gold. Other, more quotidian objects, like cups or ropes, may straightforwardly play themselves. Books might be said to make up a distinct, third category of prop: at once a stand-in and the thing itself. When a book is required for a play, the precise title named in the text is not required; an existing book, of the right size and appearance, may be appropriated. 4 But all books have a specifi c identity, whether or not an observer can see it from the outside; even if the actor in Thurston James’ imaginary drama convinces the audience that the dictionary is a Bible, it is still a dictionary. What is the ontological status of a prop book, when it is, and when it isn’t, the book that the play says it is? The nature and provenance of book- props is a pressing question for the study of early modern drama, since late- sixteenth and early- seventeenth- century plays commonly require them. Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson count 130 examples of books and table- books called for in the stage directions they tabulate in printed plays from 1580 to 1642. 5 Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson, in their monumental British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue , survey not only props specifi ed in stage directions, but also props whose use is indicated or implied in characters’ lines. Using Wiggins’ and Richardson’s prop lists, limiting my count to plays performed in the public theatres, and not including letters, scrolls, or other documents, but only books that may be presumed to be codices, such as Bibles, prayer- books, law- books, school- books, magic books, and specifi c works like Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca, I fi nd 128 plays recorded by Wiggins between 1580 and 1623, fi rst performed by over a dozen different companies, that include books as props. 6 Many plays call for one book; more than a few, like Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus , Munday et al. ’s Sir John Oldcastle , and Marston’s What You Will , call for a small library. So the early modern stage was a space regularly inhabited by books. Books on shelves or in stacks evoke scenes of study; in an actor’s hand, they offer an image of privacy or pretext for solitude (for instance, the book that Polonius presses on WHAT IS A STAGED BOOK? 131 Ophelia in Hamlet , ‘that show of such an exercise may colour / Your loneliness’ [3.1.44–45]); they give verisimilitude to the swearing of oaths. 7 Yet an assessment and analysis of book- props has lagged behind other exciting recent work both in the fi eld of early modern theatre history and in studies of the material book. In their landmark collection Staged Properties in Early Modern England , Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda and their contributors defi ne and advance the critical conversation about histories and theories of early modern stage- props, but the essays do not address books. 8 Early modern histories of books and reading, meanwhile, have tended to focus on the many ways in which books, including play- books, were conceived, produced, circulated, and used in ordinary life, to the neglect of those exceptional, spectacular appearances of books onstage. In considering prop-books, we must grapple with lacunae in the record. Even as they are graspable and portable by actors onstage, props are ephemeral within the archive, leaving only partial traces in stage- directions and references within play- texts. As scholars of early modern playing practices have made clear, surviving documentation of props – which includes Philip Henslowe’s famous inventory of costumes and properties owned by the Lord Admiral’s men in 1598 (as it survives in the transcription made by Edmond Malone for his 1790 edition), as well as some other documents of theatrical accounting and a handful of ‘plots’, or backstage outlines of entrances and exits – are, on the one hand, vivid evocations of the staging of plays both extant and lost, and on the other, incomplete documents (Knutson and McInnis have more to say on this in their chapter) that offer only a partial picture of early modern prop- use. Douglas Bruster notes that Henslowe’s inventory seems to select for ‘special things, objects related to particular characters and plays’, as well as inherently valuable or hard- to-replace objects, while passing over less ‘special’ items necessary for staging the plays in the Admiral’s Men’s repertory, such as cups, plates, bottles, letters, and books. 9 Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus , for instance, is specifi cally accommodated in 132 RETHINKING THEATRICAL DOCUMENTS the inventory by the ‘Hell mought’ and ‘j dragon in fostes’, but the multiple books called for by the play – at least four volumes, representing Aristotle, Galen, Justinian, and the Vulgate Bible, are required in Act 1, Scene 1 alone – are unaccounted for. Were these books held among the Admiral’s Men’s stock along with the hell- mouth and dragon, but left unmentioned, or did they come from somewhere else? Peter Thomson conjectures that actors could have made their own properties, while Neil Carson suggests that actors may have supplied small props out of their personal belongings. 10 Korda has proposed that Henslowe, who also operated as a pawnbroker, may have sold or rented to the players, for use as props, items that borrowers had pawned and failed to redeem. 11 In the surviving pawn accounts, the goods Henslowe accepted as collateral are mostly clothing, but on at least one occasion, he received a book in pawn, when, on 16 September 1594, he loaned ten shillings to a Goody Haryson ‘vpon a bybell & x peces of lynen’. 12 The accounts are partial; perhaps there were other, unrecorded books among Henslowe’s stock of pawned property, which could have supplied the multiple books needed in the opening scene of Doctor Faustus and in other plays. Tiffany Stern has suggested another theory of a source for book- props, besides the actors’ own possessions and items forfeited from Henslowe’s pawn business: a potential ‘company library’, a collection of reference books, such as the Bible, Holinshed’s Chronicle , Plutarch’s Lives , Ovid’s Metamorphoses , Painter’s Palace of Pleasure , and other key texts, that could have been owned by a playing company and made available to playwrights to mine as sources in the writing process.

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