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Personal Properties: Stage Props and Self-Expression in British Drama, 1600-1707

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Personal Properties: Stage Props and Self-Expression in British Drama, 1600-1707 PERSONAL PROPERTIES: STAGE PROPS AND SELF-EXPRESSION IN BRITISH DRAMA, 1600-1707 Ashley Brookner Bender, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS December 2009 APPROVED: Alexander D. Pettit, Major Professor Deborah Needleman Armintor, Committee Member Jacqueline A. Vanhoutte, Committee Member David Holdeman, Chair of the Department of English Michael Monticino, Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Bender, Ashley Brookner, Personal Properties: Stage Props and Self-Expression in British Drama, 1600-1707, Doctor of Philosophy (English), December 2009, 166 pp., 119 titles. This dissertation examines the role of stage properties—props, slangily—in the construction and expression of characters’ identities. Through readings of both canonical and non-canonical drama written between 1600 and 1707—for example, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), Edward Ravenscroft’s adaptation of Titus Andronicus (1678), Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677), and William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (1677)—I demonstrate how props mediate relationships between people. The control of a character’s props often accords a person control of the character to whom the props belong. Props consequently make visual the relationships of power and subjugation that exist among characters. The severed body parts, bodies, miniature portraits, and containers of these plays are the mechanisms by which characters attempt to differentiate themselves from others. The characters deploy objects as proof of their identities—for example, when the women in Behn’s Rover circulate miniatures of themselves—yet other characters must also interpret these objects. The props, and therefore the characters’ identities, are at all times vulnerable to misinterpretation. Much as the props’ meanings are often disputed, so too are characters’ private identities often at odds with their public personae. The boundaries of selfhood that the characters wish to protect are made vulnerable by the objects that they use to shore up those boundaries. When read in relation to the characters who move them, props reveal the negotiated process of individuation. In doing so, they emphasize the correlation between extrinsic and intrinsic worth. They are a measure of how well characters perform gender and class rolls, thereby demonstrating the importance of external signifiers in the legitimation of England’s subjects, even as they expose “legitimacy” as a social construction. Copyright 2009 by Ashley Brookner Bender ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am truly grateful for the patience, guidance, and encouragement of Alexander Pettit, Deborah Needleman Armintor, and Jacqueline Vanhoutte. I would also like to thank the University of North Texas Office of the Provost, the Toulouse School of Graduate Studies, and English Department, whose funding facilitated my research and my writing. I owe thanks as well to Tanya Anderson Hooper, Laura Thomason, Rima Abunasser, and Kristen Polster. And, for their unwavering optimism and ceaseless generosity, I gratefully acknowledge my family—all of the Benders, the Bealls, the Kaplans, the Rosens, the Blevins, and the Andersons—and, most of all, Aaron Anderson. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………..……………………………………………..……iii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................1 2. MUTILATED MEMBERS AND SEPARATE SUBJECTS IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY REVENGE TRAGEDY………………………………………….....12 3. RHETORICAL BODIES: PRODUCING NATIONAL IDENTITY IN RESTORATION ADAPTATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE……………………...47 4. MOVING MINIATURES AND CIRCULATING BODIES IN APHRA BEHN’S THE ROVER… ………………………………………………………...86 5. CONTAINING IDENTITY IN THREE RESTORATION COMEDIES…………...117 6. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………152 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………156 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Among the many complaints about Shakespeare’s Othello (c. 1603) that Thomas Rymer addresses in his Short View of Tragedy (1693) is the play’s emphasis on Desdemona’s handkerchief: “So much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about an Handkerchief! Why was not this call’d the Tragedy of the Handkerchief ?”1 Rymer’s derision of this and other stage objects is in keeping with anti-theatrical polemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Stephen Gosson’s Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions (1576) and William Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix: The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragedie (1633). Publishing five years after Rymer, Jeremy Collier would echo these sentiments in his Short View of the Stage (1698). 2 These critics of the theater take to task the audience’s delight in and the playwrights’ dependence on spectacle. Rymer’s disdain for Othello stems in part from the prominence in the play of what he considers an insignificant object that detracts from the play’s “fable.” The complications in plot that arise as a result of the handkerchief’s circulation are not only “absurd,” but the handkerchief is, says Rymer, “so remote a trifle, no Booby, on this side of Mauritania , cou’d make any consequence from it.” 3 This dissertation makes much ado about the “trifles” that Rymer detested. Far from being insignificant, stage properties—props, slangily—are an integral part of dramatic productions. As the recent work of Frances Teague, Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, and Andrew Sofer 1 Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy; It’s Original, Excellency, and Corruption (1693), 135-[36]. 2 Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda and Douglas Bruster offer useful discussions of anti-theatrical criticism. See Harris and Korda, whose survey spans the late sixteenth century through nineteenth century (“Introduction: Towards a Materialist Account of Stage Properties,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama , ed. Harris and Korda [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 2-11); and see also Bruster’s comments on Aristotle, Gosson, and Rymer (“The Dramatic Life of Objects in the Early Modern Theatre,” in Staged Properties , 76-77). 3 Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy , 135, 136. 1 has shown, an appreciation of stage properties in dramatic criticism can, as Harris and Korda state, “furnish new and invaluable information about the institution of the early modern London public stage, its play-texts, its modes of cultural as well as theatrical production, and the larger social and economic contexts in which it was embedded.” 4 The critics have amply demonstrated the need to redress the paucity of criticism on stage properties.5 Yet with the exception of Sofer’s chapter on folding fans in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, no critics have addressed at length the props that circulate on the Restoration stage. 6 This dissertation does just that. Much recent criticism on stage properties defines what makes a stage object a prop. At what point, for example, is a sword no longer part of a soldier’s costume and a stage property instead? According to Teague, an object becomes a prop when “it functions differently from the way it functions offstage. At the moment when the audience notes its entry into the dramatic action a property has meaning.”7 For Sofer, however, motion constitutes an object’s status as a prop: “The prop must physically move or alter in some way as a result of the actor’s physical intervention.” 8 I agree with Sofer that a prop must be understood in terms of its kinetic qualities. And though I disagree with Teague that an object must “mean differently” in order to be considered a prop—as Sofer notes, “[s]ome props do fulfill a practical or normal function on stage”—both of these definitions insist on the importance of the actor in the transformation of an object into a prop. 9 Put another way, because objects become props (because they “function”) 4 Harris and Korda, Introduction, 2. For Teague, see Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1991); and for Sofer, see The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 5 See, e.g., Harris and Korda, Introduction, 1-19; and Teague, Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties , 9-11. 6 Sofer, “The Fan of Mode: Sexual Semaphore on the Restoration and Early-Eighteenth-Century Stage,” in The Stage Life of Props , 117-65. 7 Teague, Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties , 16. Teague calls this a prop’s “dislocated function” (17). 8 Sofer, Stage Life of Props , 13. See Sofer’s introduction (1-29) for a survey of criticism and theory about stage properties. 9Teague, Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties , 17; Sofer, Stage Life of Props , 13. 2 when they are put into motion by the force of an actor’s body, what props mean and how they mean are dependent on the bodies of the actors and actresses who move them. In this dissertation, I examine the relationship between objects and bodies. I show how characters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drama use stage properties as a means of self- expression. This is not to suggest, however, that objects were inconsequential to the formation and expression of identities prior to or after the seventeenth century. For example, sumptuary laws in England from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries associated particular fabrics and wearable objects with particular classes in an attempt, among other reasons, to keep rigid the distinctions between the social classes. This correlation between what one wore and who one was carries over as well to the basic indexical function of stage objects, for example the way
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