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Floating daggers, enchanted handkerchiefs, supernatural storms, and moving statues have tantalized Shakespeare's readers and audiences for centuries. The essays in Shakespeare's Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance renew attention to non-human influence and agency in the plays, exploring how Shakespeare anticipates new materialist thought, thing theory, and object studies while presenting accounts of intention, action, and expression that we have not yet noticed or named. By focusing on the things that populate the plays-from commodities to props, corpses to relics-they find that canonical Shakespeare, inventor of the human, gives way to a lesser-known figure, a chronicler of the ceaseless collaboration among persons, language, the stage, the object world, audiences, the weather, the earth, and the heavens.
List of contents
1 Introduction
BRETT GAMBOA AND LAWRENCE SWITZKY
PART I
History
2 Reviving Vitalism in King Lear
AARON GREENBERG
3 Understanding Shakespeare’s Shoes
NATASHA KORDA
4 Mirrors and Macbeth’s Queer Materialism
JOHN S. GARRISON
5 The Mirror and Age in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
HANH BUI
6 Shakespeare’s Babies: “Things to Come at Large”
MEGAN SNELL
PART II
Theory
7 Eliot and His Problems: Hamlet’s Correlative Objects
ANDREW SOFER
8 Shakespeare’s Virtuous Properties
JULIA REINHARD LUPTON
9 The Power to Die: Liveliness, Minor Agency, and Shakespeare’s Female Characters
KELSEY BLAIR
10 Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies: Rethinking the Environment in Macbeth and King Lear
GILES WHITELEY
PART III
Performance
11 Human Remains: Acting, Objects, and Belief in Performance
AOIFE MONKS
12 Shakespeare’s Puppets
KENNETH GROSS
13 Art, Objecthood, and the Extended Audience: Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works
LAWRENCE SWITZKY
14 “Newes from the Dead”: An Unnatural Moment in the History of Natural Philosophy
JANE TAYLOR
15 Tail-Piece: Shake That Thing
MARJORIE GARBER
About the author
Dr. Brett Gamboa is an Assistant Professor of English, Dartmouth College
Dr. Lawrence Switzky is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto
Summary
Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance invites new critical attention to non-human agents and influences, while aiming to revolutionize the interpretations of the uncanny, the supernatural, and the fantastic in Shakespeare’s plays.
