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What did Shakespeare's first audiences know about the objects they saw on stage in his plays? How would people have understood them and how many of those things would we still recognise today? In the highly gendered and class-conscious society in which Shakespeare lived, we find out who owned these things, and who used them along racialised and gendered lines.
This book provides compelling introductions to 50+ objects and offers an 'object biography' of each thing, exploring the important work it did in the houses, shops, streets and civic spaces of early modern England.
About the author
Catherine Richardson is Professor of Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent, UK. She is author of
Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England: The material life of the household (Manchester, 2006),
Shakespeare and Material Culture (OUP, 2011), and
A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life 1500-1700, and editor of
Clothing Culture 1350-1650 (Ashgate, 2004), with Tara Hamling,
Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings (Ashgate, 2010) and with Hamling and David Gaimster,
The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe (2016).
