The stage life of props 9780472098392, 9780472026333, 9780472068395

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Introduction: Rematerializing the Prop (page 1)
1. Playing Host: The Prop as Temporal Contract on the Medieval Stage (page 31)
2. Absorbing Interests: The Bloody Handkerchief on the Elizabethan Stage (page 61)
3. Dropping the Subject: The Skull on the Jacobean Stage (page 89)
4. The Fan of Mode: Sexual Semaphore on the Restoration and Early-Eighteenth-Century Stage (page 117)
5. Killing Time: Guns and the Play of Predictability on the Modern Stage (page 167)
Notes (page 203)
Bibliography (page 251)
Index (page 269)

Citation preview

The Stage Life of Props

THEATER: Theory/Text/Performance Enoch Brater, Series Editor

Recent Titles: Trevor Griffiths: Politics, Drama, History by Stanton B. Garner Jr. Memory- Theater and Postmodern Drama by Jeanette R. Malkin Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater

edited by Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre by Gay McAuley Mirrors of Our Playing: Paradigms and Presences in Modern Drama

by Thomas R. Whitaker Brian Friel in Conversation edited by Paul Delaney Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett by Herbert Blau

On Drama: Boundaries of Genre, Borders of Self by Michael Goldman Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality

edited by James M. Harding The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett's Dialogue with Art

by Lois Oppenheim Performing Democracy: International Perspectives on Urban Community-Based Performance

edited by Susan C. Haedicke and Tobin Nellhaus A Beckett Canon by Ruby Cohn David Mamet in Conversation edited by Leslie Kane The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine

by Marvin Carlson Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind

by William W. Demastes Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty

by Anthony Kubiak Land/Scape/ Theater edited by Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri The Stage Life of Props by Andrew Sofer

4 The Stage Lite

of Props by Andrew Softer

ol ie Unites ok Michieapiess Ann Arbor

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2003 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America © Printed on acid-free paper

2006 2005 2004 2003 ae, co. se No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sofer, Andrew, 1964—

The stage life of props / Andrew Sofer.

D. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472-09839-X (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-472-06839-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Theaters—Stage-setting and scenery. 2. Stage props. 3. European drama—History and criticism. I. Title.

PN2091.S8 S616 2003

792'.025—dc21 2002154223

ISBN 13 978-0-472-02633-3 (electronic)

Preface: Appropriations Physical objects have received short shrift in the study of drama. Ever since Aristotle, the analysis of plays has focused on subjects rather

than objects, mimesis rather than the material stuff of the stage. Indeed, in what can be seen as the founding manifestation of the antitheatrical prejudice within dramatic criticism itself, Aristotle’s Poetics divorces “the power of Tragedy” from theatrical representa-

tion entirely. Aristotle dismisses “spectacle” (which presumably includes such elements as props, setting, and mechanical effects) as the least important element of tragedy: The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet. If spectacle, or mise-en-scéne, “depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet,” one would expect to find more attention paid to props by theater practitioners than by literary critics. A survey confirms that most books that mention stage properties in their title are manuals aimed at the aspiring stage designer or technical director, rather than studies aimed at the actor, director, playwright, or scholar.’ In the subject-oriented criticism inaugurated by Aristotle, stage objects either remain at the bottom of the hierarchy of theatrical elements deemed worthy of analysis (script, playwright, actor, director, lighting, design, etc.) or else drop out of critical sight altogether. But while props may seem tangential to written drama, any regu-

Preface

lar theatergoer knows that objects are often central in performance. This is especially evident in the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, whose absence of illusionistic scenery thrusts objects into unusual prominence. On the mostly bare stage of an Elizabethan playhouse, props are both searing visual emblems and vital partici-

pants in the stage action. A production of Richard II without the crown, or Othello without its handkerchief, or Hamlet without Yorick’s skull, is virtually unthinkable. Such props are more than just three-dimensional symbols; they are part of the material fabric of the play in performance. Enlivened by the actor’s touch, charged by the playwright’s dialogue, and quickened in the spectator’s imagination, they take on a life of their own as they weave in and out of the stage action. Often invisible on the page, props are vital on the stage. That vitality is the subject of this book. Until fairly recently, little critical attention has been paid to how

objects enliven actual theatrical performance. Part of the reason is that stage properties occupy an uneasy position between text and performance, the “fine abstraction” of reading championed by the notoriously antitheatrical Charles Lamb and the messily contingent business of putting on a play.’ On the one hand, props such as Desdemona’s handkerchief and Yorick’s skull are embedded in the text, where they exist in a kind of suspended animation, awaiting “concretization” by an individual reader.* Conversely, by mobilizing inanimate objects—literally putting them into play—actors translate these textual signifiers into physical properties that travel in concrete stage space and through linear stage time. As I will argue in more detail in my introduction, motion is the prop’s defining feature. Yet motion is precisely what slips from view when the prop is considered as a static symbol, whose meaning is frozen once and for all on the

page, rather than as an object that creates and sustains a dynamic relationship with the audience as a given performance unfolds. If we

are to recover the stage life of objects, we must attend to how the prop moves on stage for both actor and audience. Despite the critical tendency to ignore props as a vital component of the theatrical event, objects have not been entirely neglected by theater scholars. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Prague linguistic circle vi

Preface

focused on the “dynamics of the sign” in the theater and paved the way for several important semiotic analyses in the 1980s.’ Since then, scholars with a variety of methodological and ideological commitments have addressed props. Bert O. States and Stanton B. Garner

Jr. pursue a phenomenological approach to stage objects as a complement to purely semiotic analysis.° Performance-oriented Renaissance scholars such as David Bevington, Felix Bosonnet, Alan C. Dessen, Ann Slater, and Frances Teague treat the prop as an important element of the theatrical vocabulary exploited by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.’ Meanwhile, scholars interested in material culture investigate how stage props and costumes embody what Lena Cowen Orlin calls “the cultural project of things.”® The role of the

contemporary stage object within the postmodern “system of objects” has also received recent scrutiny.” Plainly, the stage property has come into its own as a legitimate object of critical analysis.

In this study, I wish to engage and refocus the emerging critical dialogue on the stage property by locating the prop squarely in the theatrical event. In a series of case studies, I will argue that in the hands of skilled playwrights, the prop becomes a concrete vehicle for confronting dramatic convention and revitalizing theatrical practice. By viewing the prop as an entity rather than as a symbol, tool as well as trope, I aim to make visible precisely what we as text-based critics

are trained not to see: the temporal and spatial dimensions of the material prop in performance. As I claim in my introduction, these dimensions tend to vanish when the prop is considered primarily as a static symbol (as in traditional drama criticism), synchronic lexeme (as in theater semiotics), sensory image (as in theater phenomenology), neurotic symptom (as in psychoanalysis), or placeholder for a particular ideological configuration (as in new historicism). Taking

up the questions that impel the editors of Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture—“What happens . . . once the object is brought into view? What new configurations will emerge when subject and object are kept in relation?”—I argue that we can parse the ideological ramifications of historical stage objects for their audience only once we have recovered their mobile, material life on the stage.'° By insisting on the prop’s “mobile, material life on the stage,” I vil

Preface

mean to emphasize two temporal processes that move in opposite directions simultaneously within a given performance. On the one hand, props are unidirectional: they are propelled through stage space and real time before historically specific audiences at a given perfor-

mance event. At the same time, props are retrospective: in Marvin Carlson’s apt expression, they are “ghosted” by their previous stage incarnations, and hence by a theatrical past they both embody and

critique.'' To borrow an example from chapter 2, in Beckett’s Endgame (1957) Hamm’s bloody handkerchief invokes a long line of stage cloths stretching back beyond Shakespeare’s Othello (ca. 1603)

and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587-92) all the way to the first known medieval liturgical drama, the tenth-century Visitatio Sepulchri. Just as we cannot account for the prop’s vitality without reference to the bounded theatrical event that contains it, so too must we acknowledge the prop’s intertextual resonance as one key to the uncanny pleasure—the shock of familiarity within the unfamiliar— that the prop provides in performance.

While useful in theory, a comprehensive poetics of the prop would no more convey the theatrical excitement of objects than a taxonomy of every joke known to humankind would explain humor.

In the playhouse, as opposed to the study, we are seduced by the specific and concrete and not the abstract and the general. Rather than produce a treatise on propology, I have chosen to reconstruct the stage lives of five exemplary props drawn from five pivotal periods of stage history: the eucharistic wafer on the medieval stage; the

bloody handkerchief on the Elizabethan stage; the skull on the Jacobean stage; the fan on the Restoration and early-eighteenth-century stage; and the gun on the modern stage. Each of these objects seized the imagination of playwrights in their time, and the freshness of their deployment opened up new theatrical terrain for subsequent dramatists.

It goes without saying that these objects’ stage careers often stretched beyond the periods in which I have situated them. Nevertheless these props spoke especially to their particular era, and part of my aim is to explain the timeliness of their appeal. I shall argue that each prop I have chosen addresses a “semiotic crisis”: a particuVill

Preface

lar issue or dilemma concerning theatrical representation faced by the drama of its period. Theater colonizes reality for its own ends, and in the case of the prop it does so by appropriating the object’s prior symbolic life. As a result of this theatrical appropriation, each prop I discuss revises (or attempts to revise) the way objects signify for spectators.

My first three chapters explore three instances in which the medieval and early modern theater appropriated and transformed familiar religious symbols whose orthodox meaning was implicitly or

explicitly contested in the wider culture of the time. In chapter 1, “Playing Host: The Prop as Temporal Contract on the Medieval Stage,” I discuss what might be called the ur-prop of postclassical western European drama: the eucharistic wafer (oble) that, once consecrated by a priest, became the divine Host. In late-fifteenth-century England, laity and clergy struggled for control of sacred symbols such as the Bible and the Host itself. In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, the Church’s most sacred symbol is literally abducted from the Church by skeptical Jews—an action that mirrors the appropriation

of the holy wafer by the lay miracle players who presumably performed the play. Despite the play’s didactic purpose in shoring up belief in the real presence of Christ in the Host, its theatrical form implicitly undermines its doctrinal message. The use of the holy wafer as a stage property substitutes the contract of theatrical representation (whereby an unconsecrated wafer represents the presence

of Christ in the Host) for the transubstantiation of the Mass (whereby Christ actually resides in the consecrated Host).

In short, whether the theatricalized Croxton wafer was understood as consecrated or unconsecrated, actual Host or stage property, seems to depend as much on the spectators’ angle of vision—on what it was they thought they saw—as on the priest’s unambiguous act of

transubstantiation. I take the range of possible perceptions of the walter by medieval spectators as models of recent critical understand-

ings of the theatrical sign before concluding that the prop is best understood as embodying a volatile “temporal contract” established

between actor and spectator for the duration of performance. Although the spectator is always free to take up a range of underix

Preface

standings of the prop’s meaning, the prop’s very fluidity as a theatrical sign encourages playwrights to use it as a concrete tool to subvert the symbolism previously embodied by the object it represents. In chapter 2, “Absorbing Interests: The Bloody Handkerchief on the Elizabethan Stage,” I take up the struggle of the Elizabethan public theaters to build an audience united not by common faith in the efficacy of devotional drama, but by the search for theatrical pleasure

in an age that looked back on the rituals of the old religion with a mixture of suspicion and nostalgia. Inaugurated by Thomas Kyd’s spectacularly successful The Spanish Tragedy, the theatrical vogue for

bloody handkerchiets illustrates how a newly commercial theater capitalized on the recent prohibition against placing images of holy objects, such as the Host, on the stage. I argue that sensational props such as Kyd’s handkerchief promoted a voyeuristic “contract of sensation” designed to draw patrons to the public playhouses again and

again. I thereby challenge the current argument that Elizabethan drama sought to demystify formerly sacred objects as spurious idols. If the Croxton play had celebrated Christ’s real presence in the sacrament, even as it paradoxically converted that presence into representation by using a theatrical property to represent the Host, the Eliza-

bethan stage appropriated the divinely efficacious magic of holy cloth and sacred blood for strictly commercial ends. In chapter 3, “Dropping the Subject: The Skull on the Jacobean Stage,” I turn to an iconic presence in the skeptical Jacobean theater: the memento mori skull. As part of the Christian technique of dying

well (ars moriendi), this cultural symbol had once held out the promise of eternal reward and reassured the faithful that they lived sub specie aeternitatis. Long a staple of the visual arts, by the early seventeenth century the skull had been appropriated by prostitutes and fashionable young men as an ambiguous symbol with a more mordant and disturbing message. Developing a dramatic equivalent of the trick image performed by the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, Jacobean playwrights conveyed the skull’s

oscillation between live subject and dead object. In plays such as Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy, the ironized skull mocks the familiar symbolism readily assigned to it by the plays’ protagonists. 5

Preface

The skull hollows out the rhetoric of the men who presume to master its meaning and, in so doing, drains them of substance and threatens to turn them into its mouthpieces. By asserting its material presence on the stage, the Jacobean skull repeatedly refuses to settle for the role of passive emblem and insists on its active role in the stage event.

My last two studies reconstruct how two culturally prominent objects were pressed into service as props in order to address crises

of theatrical representation (staging women) and dramatic form (ending plays). In chapter 4, “The Fan of Mode: Sexual Semaphore on the Restoration and Early-Eighteenth-Century Stage,” I analyze the relation of the property fan to the newly complex performance of gender on the licentious Restoration stage. Following the arrival of

the professional actress, both male and female playwrights were compelled to decide how women play women—in other words, whether women would become sexual subjects or sexual objects on stage. | argue that the fan became a weapon in the theater’s struggle to establish the extent of female sexual agency. By analyzing key scenes in which a woman is instructed in the correct use of the fan, |

show how Restoration and early-eighteenth-century playwrights attempted both to exploit and to constrain the thrilling but potentially subversive sexual semaphore wielded by actresses for the first time on the professional English stage. In chapter 5, “Killing Time: Guns and the Play of Predictability on the Modern Stage,” I turn to a formal crisis faced by modern playwrights: the rigid dramatic closure of nineteenth-century melodrama epitomized by the climactic pistol-shot. On the modern stage, play-

wrights such as Henrik Ibsen, Samuel Beckett, and Maria Irene Fornes revisit the melodrama of female suicide only to subvert its temporal expectations. I demonstrate that on the modern stage, guns ironize, dislocate, and ultimately transcend stage time. By “killing time,” guns liberate the spectator from the restrictive contracts of psychological causality and dramatic closure posited by realism. The stage gun exemplifies how modern-day props continue a long tradition of rejuvenating dramatic form and theatrical practice. Each of these case studies is designed to stand alone as an index1

Preface

pendent argument. While they appear in chronological order, there is no master narrative connecting them; my aim is not to posit an unfolding teleology or evolution of the prop, for these objects do not tell a single story. Rather, taken together these case studies illustrate a common mechanism of appropriation whereby props are enlisted to address a wider semiotic crisis in the theater (and often the culture) of the day.'* In any given historical period, objects drift toward center stage when they no longer quite mean what they used to say or say what they used to mean. As fluid, material signs that establish a dynamic temporal contract with the spectator, stage objects revitalize theatrical tradition. By refusing to “prop up” conventional symbolism, the wafer, handkerchief, skull, fan, and gun insist on the prop’s ability to keep theatrical meaning in motion. Why these props and not others? The potential range in a study of this kind is limitless, and I have been guided in my choice of props and periods by my own interest, familiarity, and curiosity. One of the

most rewarding aspects of this project is that it has allowed me to venture beyond my own primary areas of research, Renaissance and modern drama, in order to explore other periods through the lens of the stage object. At the risk of making specialists impatient, I try to

provide enough historical context to ground my argument and to make each chapter inviting and accessible to readers unfamiliar with the period in question. Certainly no chapter is intended as a balanced

introduction to the drama of the period. Rather, | emphasize those aspects (such as the relation of Elizabethan theater to the discourse of iconoclasm, or the extent to which Restoration actresses put their own stamp on their roles) that illuminate the life of the prop at hand as I believe it was experienced in the playhouse of the time. It may be objected that the view of the stage that opens out from

the perspective of the object is necessarily partial, selective, even quixotic. No doubt too, some readers will feel that by placing the prop center stage, I have distorted crucial aspects of theatrical or cultural history. It may be that a certain degree of overgeneralization, even tunnel vision, is the price paid for such a broad historical study;

my hope is that the prop has enabled me to say something fresh about drama in the periods I consider. In the spirit of keeping mean-

xi

Preface

ing in motion, I welcome attempts both to revise my account of how

these props lived in their own time and to extend my inquiry to other, equally resonant objects. Why the stage life of props—as opposed to their symbolic, psy-

chological, ideological, cultural, or figurative lives? To no small degree, my aim in this book parallels the job of a theater director, which was indeed my occupation in a previous stage life of my own. In bringing dead words to life, the director’s task is necessarily selective. She must pick particular moments and “beats” for emphasis and move swiftly past many potentially fruitful diversions in pursuit of the spine of her particular interpretation. The director’s job is not to realize all possibilities latent in the script, but to sculpt stage time so that it moves meaningfully for an audience. I have tried to do something similar in the chapters that follow. What I offer to the reader is therefore not the account of any one play, let alone any one prop. Like any contemporary production of a classic play, no matter how historically responsible, these case studies are reconstituted from a twenty-first-century perspective. While aiming toward as much accuracy as the evidence allows, my reconstructions of these props’ stage careers are colored by that perspective and can stake no claim to being definitive. Nevertheless, I hope that my study will encourage theater practitioners, cultural historians, and drama specialists alike to revisit these objects, and the plays that contain them, with a new appreciation for the temporal and spatial lite embedded there.

xi

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J cknowledgments I have benefited from the help of many scholars in pursuing this project. | owe especial thanks to Enoch Brater, without whose guidance

and encouragement this book would never have been completed. Bert Cardullo, Linda Gregerson, and P. A. Skantze each read early drafts and shaped the project in crucial ways. Andrew Von Hendy and Mary Thomas Crane offered comments on the entire manuscript. Others who have generously helped me think through the stage life of props include David Bevington, John Russell Brown, Marvin Carlson, Stanton B. Garner Jr., Stephen Greenblatt, JanLuder Hagens, Jonathan Gil Harris, William Hutchings, William Ingram, Ann Rosalind Jones, Charles Lyons, Natasha Korda, John Mahoney, Judith Milhous, Steven Mullaney, Brian Richardson, Joseph Roach, Angela Rosenthal, Peter Stallybrass, Bert O. States, Karla Taylor, Frances Teague, Grace Tiffany, Theresa Tinkle, Valerie Traub, Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, Chris Wilson, James Winn, and

Paul Yachnin. Friends, colleagues, and relatives whose voices informed this project include Gina Bloom, Elise Frasier, Sylvia Gimenez, Tobias Gregory, Atar Hadari, Kenneth Hodges, Judith Issroff, Robert Knopf, Steve and Ellen Levine, Joy Ochs, Mike Sell, Sondra Smith, Paul Sofer, Michael Sowder, Robert Stanton, and John Su. My editor at University of Michigan Press, LeAnn Fields, deserves special thanks, as do my anonymous readers for the Press. I extend my thanks to the University of Michigan’s Department of English and Rackham Graduate School for much needed financial and institutional support; to Boston College for a summer Research Incentive Grant; to the Mellon Foundation, with whose assistance major portions of the text were completed; and to my colleagues in

Boston College’s English Department, who have helped me in numerous ways. Annette Fern of the Harvard Theatre Collection and

Acknowledgments

Lisa Cherin, Jackie Dallen, and Stephen Vedder of Boston College provided invaluable assistance with the photographs, as did student actors Christopher Crocetti and David Mawhinney. My acting and directing teachers—Hilary Nicholls and Shai Bar Yaakov at Hebrew University, Jacques Cartier and Sidney Friedman at Boston University, Zelda Fichandler at Arena Stage, Robert Moss at

Playwrights Horizons Theater School, and Kaf Warman at Island Theatre Workshop—enabled me to explore theater in its many dimensions. I owe a special debt to the late Mary Payne of ITW, who bravely cast me as Hamlet and allowed me to inflict the results of my

Beckett obsession on a paying audience. My mother, Elaine Sofer, immediately grasped what excited me about props; her love of theater informs much of what follows. Last, my most especial thanks to Bonnie Tenneriello, for her unflagging emotional support, intellectual engagement, and faith that the prop would eventually come to rest. This book is for her. The Croxton Play of the Sacrament photograph is reproduced by permission of Tessa Musgrave; The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet photographs by permission of Stephen Vedder; and The Careless Husband

and Happy Days images by permission of the Harvard Theatre Collection, the Houghton Library. Earlier versions of chapters 2 and 3

originally appeared in Comparative Drama and English Literary Renaissance. | am grateful for the editors’ permission to reprint this material.

xvi

¢ ontents Introduction: Rematerializing the Prop 1

| Playing Host The Prop as Temporal Contract on the Medieval Stage 31

2 Absorbing Interests The Bloody Handkerchief on the

Elizabethan Stage 61

3 Dropping the Subject The Skull on the Jacobean Stage 89

4 The Fan of Mode Sexual Semaphore on the Restoration and Early-Eighteenth-Century Stage 117

o Killing Time Guns and the Play of Predictability on the

Modern Stage 167

Notes 203 Bibliography 251

Index 269

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ae, | “4 g ntroduction Rematerializing the Prop The fundamental concern of all theatre researchers is with the very “object” of theatre itself. —Willmar Sauter

A chair on the stage is a theatre chair. —Peter Handke

GJ consecrated wafer, stolen from a church by medieval Jews bent on disproving the real presence of Christ in the Host, bleeds when stabbed. A blood-soaked handkerchief mutates from a charmed talisman of love to a ghastly token of revenge as it passes from woman to man and from son to father. A dirt-encrusted skull, which inspires a Renaissance prince to strike a fashionable memento mori pose, suddenly invokes that prince’s beloved childhood companion and makes him gag. A fan that begins as an innocent birthday gift becomes devastating proof of infidelity. An unhappily married woman points her pistol offstage at her husband and shoots; defying logic, the bullet kills her onstage companion instead. These five theatrical objects are stage properties, or “props” for short, defined by the OED as “[a]ny portable article, as an article of costume or furniture, used in acting a play: a stage requisite, appurtenance, or accessory.” Yet when we think of the props that have most etched themselves into our theatrical memory, we are hardpressed to explain their grip on us in these terms. Is Yorick’s skull a “requisite,” an “appurtenance,” or a mere “accessory,” and from

whose point of view? Could the graveyard scene in Hamlet take place without it? Does the skull’s theatrical power emanate from Shakespeare’s dialogue, the actor’s gesture, the audience’s imagina-

The Stage Life of Props

tion, or the material object itself? Is Yorick trope or fact, absent or present? In this book I explore a peculiarly theatrical phenomenon: the power of stage objects to take on a life of their own in performance.' Text-based scholars, who tend to dismiss objects as at best embodied symbols or at worst as plot devices, have largely neglected this phenomenon—that is, when objects penetrate the critical radar at all.’ Invisible on the page except as textual signifiers, props seduce our attention in the playhouse as they become drawn into the stage action

and absorb complex and sometimes conflicting meanings. By definition, a prop is an object that goes on a journey; hence props trace spatial trajectories and create temporal narratives as they track through a given performance. My first aim in this study is to restore to

the prop those performance dimensions that literary critics are trained not to see. These include not only the three-dimensionality of

objects as material participants in the stage action, but the spatial dimension (how props move in concrete stage space) and the temporal dimension (how props move through linear stage time). Although

these are the dimensions that allow the object to mean in pertformance, they are precisely those liable to drop out of sight when the prop is treated as a textual rather than as a theatrical phenomenon.

The stage life of props extends beyond their journey within a given play, moreover. As they move from play to play and from period to period, objects accrue intertextual resonance as they absorb and embody the theatrical past. When the title character of August Wilson’s King Hedley II (1999) plants seeds in his backyard dirt, he

not only expresses his yearning for roots. For the alert spectator, King’s seeds invoke those famous seeds planted by doomed salesman Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s classic Death of a Salesman (1949). They may also recall Mama’s feeble plant in Lorraine Hansberry’s A

Raisin in the Sun (1959), dying for lack of sun but rescued, like Mama’s family, from the Chicago slums at play’s end. Last, King’s seeds ironically memorialize those planted by the little girl, Raynell, in Wilson’s own earlier drama Fences (1985). In Fences, which concludes in 1965, the seeds represented the possibility of a better future for an African-American community still struggling to emerge from 2

Introduction

the traumas of northern migration and institutionalized racism. For the embittered King, trapped in a Pittsburgh slum in the 1970s and seeing his hopes literally trampled in the dirt, the promise glimpsed by Raynell in the earlier play has proved hollow. King’s seeds thus work on two levels simultaneously: they enliven the dramatic action in the present and revive the dead symbols of the theatrical past, offering them what director Jonathan Miller aptly calls an “afterlife.”? Even as the seeds convey the aridity of King’s hardscrabble existence, they embed Wilson’s play in the fertile soil of American family drama and enrich its resonance for the dramatically literate spectator. My second aim in this study is to demonstrate that props such as these are not mere accessories, but time machines. As

material ghosts, stage props become a concrete means for playwrights to animate stage action, interrogate theatrical practice, and revitalize dramatic form. Props are not static symbols but precision tools whose dramaturgical role in revising outmoded theatrical contracts with the audience has long been neglected. In this sense, the function of the stage property duplicates that of theater itself: to bring dead images back to life—but with a twist. That is why playwrights return again and again to superannuated objects (no less than to obsolete words, stories, characters, and genres) that have outlived their dramatic usefulness. As Marvin Carlson points out through his highly suggestive concept of theatrical “ghosting,” theater itself is a vast, self-reflexive recycling project. The same elements—stories, texts, actors, props, scenery, styles, even spectators—appear over

and over again.* Our pleasure in seeing the relic revived, the dead metaphor made to speak again, is the very reason we go to the theater to see a play we already know well. A prop exists textually only in a

state of suspended animation. It demands actual embodiment and motion on the stage in order to spring to imaginative life.°

Production Analysis and the Case Study Approach Thus the performance-oriented critic is faced with a paradox. If performance is necessary to animate the object, how can a text-based 3

The Stage Life of Props

study animate the prop for the reader—especially if the reader is not an inveterate theatergoer? The stage life of objects distant in time can only be recovered through a kind of contextual reanimation: a “thick description” of the stage event as best we can reconstruct it, using such cues as verbal and actual stage directions, visual records of his-

torical performances, and (where available) eyewitness accounts. Recent productions of the plays can offer important, although never definitive, clues to original staging choices. They can also indicate when an ingenious interpretation is incommunicable to an audience. Restoration theater historians Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume label this critical approach “production analysis,” which they define as follows:

By this term we mean interpretation of the text specifically aimed at understanding it as a performance vehicle—“reading with a directorial eye,” if you like. While heavily grounded in textual analysis, such criticism will be undertaken on the principle that what should emerge is a sense of multiple possibilities in actual performance. Production analysis should draw freely on theatre history and drama history. Particular productions will be studied for what they can tell us about the potentialities of the script, but the critic is in no way limited to what has been staged. The results will sometimes resemble instructions for

performance, but practically speaking they will be no more than a preliminary hint to the director, necessarily lacking the detail required for actual execution of a performance. A production analysis is a series of architect’s sketches, not the blueprints that would be necessary to bring any one of them to actuality. The

object is to clarify possible meanings and effects, primarily for readers, critics, and theatregoers, secondarily for the interested director. The result should be improved understanding of the performance potentialities of the play at issue.®

Milhous and Hume distinguish production analysis, which concentrates on visualization of performance possibilities, from the analysis of actual, historical productions of particular plays, which they label 4

Introduction

“performance analysis.” Only fully fledged performance analysis requires “precise determination of audience comprehension and response,” since the production analyst is more interested in the horizon of performance possibilities generated by the text than in the realization of those possibilities within a given production.’ For Milhous and Hume, then, “Dramatic criticism comprises two basic activities: analysis of the script (production analysis) and analysis of actual performance of the script (performance analysis). . . . Performance analysis enjoys the distinct advantage of dealing with actuality, with a production complete in all its details, with the experience of the real thing. Of course, the advantage is also a disadvantage: the critic is stuck with what the performance gives him. The production analyst is far freer to pursue hypothesis and speculation, to envision interpretive possibilities.”> While production analysis is inevitably more conjectural than performance analysis, we simply

lack sufficient historical evidence to produce a thorough performance analysis of (say) an Elizabethan or Restoration production. Failing the discovery of more detailed historical evidence, production analysis—sensitive to textual cues and to historical staging prac-

tices insofar as we understand them—must suffice the text-based performance critic. To put the prop imaginatively in motion once more, I have chosen a case study approach based on Milhous and Hume’s method of production analysis. In the chapters that follow, I reconstruct the stage careers of five singular props that haunt the western European theatrical imagination: the medieval eucharistic wafer, the Elizabethan

handkerchief, the Jacobean skull, the Restoration and early-eighteenth-century fan, and the modern-day gun. I am keenly aware of the pitfalls of such an approach. When writing about a particular piece of stage business, it is sometimes hard to draw the line between reasonable supposition and armchair fantasy. This is especially so in

the case of the Restoration fan, when so little hard evidence of just how the prop came alive in the hands of actresses survives. Thus chapter 4 relies heavily on evidence drawn from contemporary journalism, stage illustrations, and acting manuals, as well as on my own intuition as a theater practitioner and textual critic. »)

The Stage Life of Props

This book aims to show that, despite its limitations, the contextual

reanimation of material stage objects is a legitimate exercise for scholars as well as students—and surely no less conjectural than an analysis, say, of Hamlet’s unconscious life or of Lady Macbeth’s past. Just as psychoanalysis is no less useful an approach to drama for the fact that it reifies imaginary beings, so production analysis is no less

valuable for the fact that it materializes textual objects. The “cash value” of the production analysis of stage objects is that it offers new evidence of a vanished performance history even as it opens up a new held of inquiry. For by making visible what has been invisible in our readings of drama, we gain a much firmer sense of how a particular play moves in performance, as well as a tightly focused lens through

which to examine the dramatic energies of a specific theatrical period. We can also expose a playwright’s particular stamp on a genre or period by comparing what his or her contemporaries made of the same object. Perhaps most important, by attuning us to the

sheer material heft of what occupies the stage, together with its mobility in time and space, props invite us to read drama in five dimensions. The value of such an approach in the theater history or drama survey classroom as a method for enlivening the material (in both senses) goes without saying. This introduction presents a broader theoretical context and conceptual framework within which my individual case studies can be positioned, with special attention paid to the three dominant theoretical approaches to the study of stage objects thus far: the semiotic, phenomenological, and materialist.’ I will argue that as a prelude to reanimating the prop, we must first rematerialize it—an approach that challenges perhaps the most fundamental tenet of theater semiotics, namely the dematerialization of the stage sign.

“From Object to Sign: The Prague School Dilemma

From a semiotic perspective, it is hard to draw a firm distinction between subjects and objects on stage, since subject and object alike function as volatile theatrical signs. This has been a particular prob6

Introduction

lem for theorists who seek to isolate the stage object as a focus of semiotic inquiry, among them Shoshana Avigal and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Anne Ubersfeld, and Gay McAuley. These “second wave” theater semioticians build on the insights of the influential sroup of semioticians known as the Prague school. While much of the Prague school’s analysis focused on what it called “verbal art,” in the 1940s several members (some of whom were theater practitioners as well as critics) were drawn to the theater as a laboratory of analyzable signs and sign systems. The Prague critics’ analysis of the the-

atrical sign laid the theoretical foundation for subsequent work on theatrical objects and raised the fundamental questions with which any rigorous study of props must begin: what is a stage object, and how does it signify?!©

Fundamental to the Prague critics’ analysis is the principle of semiotization, according to which “[al]ll that is on the stage is a sign.”!! Simply by being placed on stage, a chair acquires an invisible set of quotation marks and becomes the sign “chair.” Umberto Eco calls this phenomenon ostension, which he defines as “de-realizing a given object in order to make it stand for an entire class.”'* On stage, the object’s signifying function eclipses its practical function, so that

in performance “things serve only to the extent that they mean.”! Semiotization obtains even in cases of what Keir Elam calls “iconic identity,” in which the stage object is identical to what it represents.'*

Prague school theorist Petr Bogatryev pushed the semiotization argument one step further by arguing that stage objects become “signs of a material object’s sign.”’? In performance, the material sign-vehicle absorbs the abstract connotations associated with the object it represents. These “real world” connotations (royalty, say, in the case of a throne) then replace that represented object in the mind of the spectator. For Bogatryev, the onstage throne is thus not merely

the sign of an object (throne) but the “sign of the [represented] object’s sign” (royalty). Any stage chair is thus doubly abstracted from a real chair: first, as a representative of the class of chairs (Eco’s ostension), and second, as a sign of the material chair’s abstract con-

notations. As proof, Bogatryev claims that it does not matter to an audience whether a diamond necklace on stage is in fact fake, since

/

The Stage Life of Props

that audience will imaginatively leap over both the material signvehicle (fake necklace) and its denotation (genuine necklace) to the “sign of the object’s sign” (fabulous wealth). For Bogatryev, all stage objects are thus “signs of signs.” In the late 1960s, theorist Tadeusz Kowzan extended the semioti-

zation principle still further. Kowzan argues that each connotation (signified) accrued by the stage object may in turn become a signifier

of a new connotation at the next level of meaning. Kowzan cites a famous prop, Chekhov’s eponymous seagull, as an example: The stuffed sea-gull, an accessory in Chekhov’s play, is the sign,

at the first degree, of a recently killed sea-gull; this is the sign, at the second degree (or symbol in the current language) of an abstract idea (failed aspiration to freedom) which is in turn the sign of the hero’s mood in the play. To be more precise, we can say that the signifié of the sign at the first degree, is linked to the signifiant of the sign at the second degree; the signifié of the latter is linked to the signifiant of the sign at the third degree and so on (the phenomenon of connotation).'®

In this way, writes Kowzan, “a simple prop, passing through intermediate stages, becomes the sign of the master-idea of the play.”'’ Whether one accepts Kowzan’s theory of what might be called semiotic bootstrapping, or even Bogatryev’s “signs of signs” argument, the principle of semiotization seems an unavoidable corollary of any theatrical event. However, if all that is on stage is a sign, it becomes very difficult to

decide what on stage isn’t an object. What about the body of the actor, for instance? What of a sound effect such as a doorbell, a visual effect such as fog, or an olfactory effect such as the smell of bacon?

According to the Prague school principle of “dynamism,” a single material sign-vehicle can convey an unlimited number of meanings in the course of a given performance: an umbrella can become a weapon, a walking stick, a toy, an emblem of middle-class conformity, and so on.'® Conversely, any material object can “play” a given role. Chekhov’s gull might be represented by a real bird, an old boot, 8

Introduction

a cardboard cutout, or conceivably by the mimed gesture of the actor. Iconic resemblance is not a prerequisite for signification; in nonillusionistic traditions, such as the Chinese theater, “A real object may be substituted on the set by a symbol if this symbol is able to transfer the object’s own signs to itself.”!° Moreover, as Jindrich Honzl points out, any given signified may be passed along a chain of material signifiers, and even relayed from one theatrical sign-system to another, within a performance.*? For example, a thunderstorm might be conveyed now by a prop umbrella, now by a lighting effect, now by a sound effect, now by a line of dialogue (“It’s raining cats and dogs out there”).7! But if anything on stage can in principle stand for anything else, and if any given signified can be

conveyed by any sign-vehicle on stage, including light and sound, the distinction between object and nonobject dissolves into a free play of signs.

In his landmark article “Man and Object in the Theater,” Prague school theorist Jiri Veltrusky acknowledged this difficulty of separat-

ing subject from object and instead posited a fluid continuum between subjects and objects on stage.”” In Elam’s gloss, objects are “promoted” up the scale “when they are raised from their ‘transparent’ functional roles to a position of unexpected prominence” and acquire “semiotic subjectivity” independent of the actor.?* To use Veltrusky’s own example, a stage dagger might move from being a passive emblem of the wearer’s status to participating in the action as an instrument of murder, and thence to a final independent association with the concept “murder.” Conversely, when the actor’s “action force” is reduced to zero, the actor takes on the status of a mere prop (e.g., a Spear-carrier or corpse). Actor and prop are dynamic sign-

vehicles that move up and down the subject-object continuum as they acquire and shed action force in the course of a given pertormance. For Veltrusky, an object becomes a prop when it begins to take part in the action overtly as a tool; and when props acquire independent signifying force, “we perceive them as spontaneous subjects, equivalent to the figure of the actor.”* Veltrusky’s intriguing concept of “action force” remains murky. If the dagger becomes a subject not when it directly participates in the 9

The Stage Life of Props

stage action (by stabbing somebody), but by signifying “murder,” then isn’t any object that conveys an abstract idea independent of an actor—the portrait of the general in Hedda Gabler, for instance, or the count’s boots in Miss Julie—a subject?” We recall that for Bogatryev, all theatrical “signs of signs” possess the connotative ability to stand for an abstract idea associated with the represented object

rather than for the object itself. The “semiotic subjectivity,” or “action force,” of objects seems as universal as semiotization itself.*° No sooner does an object arrogate attention to itself than it becomes a subject in its own right; thus Veltrusky’s examples of “semiotic subjectivity” include a ticking clock on an empty stage. But can such an object truly be said to become a “subject” equivalent to the actor in the minds of the audience?

Second-wave theater semioticians, who rediscovered and extended the Prague circle’s work on the theatrical sign in the late

1960s and early 1970s, tended to explore the dynamics of signification outlined by Bogatryev and Honzl rather than to pursue Veltrusky’s elusive concept of action force. Thus Kowzan developed his idea of levels of connotation, while Umberto Eco insisted that stage objects are not only signs of signs, but signs of the ideology behind the object’s sign.’ Such theoretical refinements threatened a bottomless mise-en-abime of theatrical signification (signs of signs of signs of .. .). The axiomatic leap from the stage object’s materiality to its sign function continued to risk theorizing the material object out of existence. The attempt to pin down the “object” of semiotic inquiry reached a plateau in 1981, with the arrival of two studies that acknowledged the

frustrations inherent in the Prague school account of the theatrical sign. In their ambitious attempt to outline a methodology for the semiotic study of theatrical objects, Shoshana Avigal and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan concede that “[t]he very word ‘object’ is problematic,

since it designates both a ‘thing’ and the functioning of this ‘thing’ within a system of interrelations with other components of the system ‘object’ in relation to ‘subject’).”*° Avigal and Rimmon-Kenan deal with this problem by provisionally locating the object solely through its function as a “lexeme,” a unit of theatrical meaning: 10

Introduction

In our opinion, a definition of an object as such cannot be given a priori, but only relative to its functioning as a lexeme, i-e., a sign which can be listed in the “dictionary” (lexicon) created by the specific performance. As a lexeme, the object can take part

in “sentences” which can be analyzed linguistically, although they are not completely verbal.”?

A consequence of this functional approach is that, as the authors admit, the list of potential stage objects “runs the risk of being infinite.”°°

In a similar way, semiotician Anne Ubersfeld categorizes both textual and scenic items as theatrical “objects” that overlap as lexemes,

even though they are not homologous.*! Ubersfeld argues that the theatrical object is “a crossroads, or rather a braiding (tressage) of semiotic functions, which is to say, properly speaking, a text.” Like Avigal and Rimmon-Kenan, Ubersfeld concedes that “from the moment a theatrical object is a text, it becomes hard to treat it as a discrete unit whose combinations can be studied.”** By the early 1980s, the semiotic study of the theatrical object had reached an impasse. If “in the theater there are only objects,” as Ubersfeld proclaimed, how can we distinguish material things from other signifying “objects” such as actors, gestures, or lighting effects???

From Sign to Prop: (Re)materializing the Stage Object The stage property offers a way to rescue the material object from the

ocean of signs limned by theater semiotics, and indeed, to distinguish the prop from other material objects on stage. As we have seen, the OED defines a prop as “|a]ny portable article, as an article of cos-

tume or furniture, used in acting a play: a stage requisite, appurtenance, or accessory.” But such a capacious definition fails to distingsuish between props and other onstage items. A prop can be more rigorously defined as a discrete, material, inanimate object that is visibly manipulated by an actor in the course of performance.

It follows that a stage object must be “triggered” by an actor in

I]

The Stage Life of Props

order to become a prop (objects shifted by stagehands between scenes do not qualify). Thus a hat or sword remains an article of costume until an actor removes or adjusts it, and a chair remains an item of furniture unless an actor shifts its position.°* When Lear sits on a stationary throne, the throne remains a set piece, but when Hamlet

knocks over the chair on seeing his father’s ghost in the “closet scene” (a piece of stage business invented by Thomas Betterton that became canonical in the seventeenth century), the chair becomes a prop. Such manipulation does not have to be manual; an actor might kick the chair, for example. If an actor stumbles over a chair unintentionally, the chair becomes for the nonce an unwitting prop.

The distinction between props and other kinds of stage object, then, is a matter neither of diminutive size nor potential portability but actual motion. The prop must physically move or alter in some way as a result of the actor’s physical intervention.’? Unlike other critics, | emphasize the criterion of manipulation rather than portability because for theater practitioners, stationary items such as radios

become props once an actor turns them on or otherwise adjusts them.°*° The criterion of manipulation also clarifies the fuzzy distinction between props and stage furniture: large items that are actually

shifted by an actor, such as Mother Courage’s wagon, qualify as props whatever their size. Smaller items that are potentially portable but never manipulated by actors do not, even if they play a significant symbolic role (like the general’s portrait in Hedda Gabler). To paraphrase British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s famous remark about

the baby, “[T]here is no such thing as a prop”; wherever a prop exists, an actor-object interaction exists. Irrespective of its signifying function(s), a prop is something an object becomes, rather than something an object is.

In the most extensive analysis of Shakespeare’s props to date, Frances Teague offers a functional rather than descriptive definition. Teague claims that props are defined by their “dislocated function”: A property is an object, mimed or tangible, that occurs onstage, where it functions differently from the way it functions offstage. At the moment when the audience notes its entry into the dra12

Introduction

matic action a property has meaning; it may also have meaning as one of a class of objects. A property can carry multiple meanings, which may sometimes conflict. Generally, a playwright uses a property to establish a character or to forward action. In production and analysis, properties specified by the playwright, rather than someone else, usually receive special attention.*’ As an example of dislocated function, Teague cites Dapper’s gingerbread in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist: “The gingerbread is either a magical substance invoked to bring the goodwill of the fairy queen or a gag employed to silence a fool, depending on one’s point of view. It never functions as gingerbread usually does, however, as a substance one can eat for pleasure or nourishment.”’® Although Teague does not make this link explicit, her dislocated function is very close to the Russian formalist concept of ostranenie (making strange), which

defines the “poetic” function of language. For the formalists, language becomes “poetic” when it draws attention to itself through devices such as meter and rhyme, rather than acting as a transparent referential medium. For Teague, props are defined by how they mean on stage, rather than what they are.*” While Teague’s claim that “|p]roperties do not operate in performance as they do in a nontheatrical context—they mean differently” does indeed suggest how props often estrange the quotidian behavior

we come to expect from objects, at least one objection to Teague’s position can be made.*? Some props do fulfill a practical or normal function on stage: unlike Dapper’s gingerbread, Algy’s cucumber sandwiches in The Importance of Being Earnest are eaten, fencing foils are used to fence with, knives cut bread, and so on. Teague maintains that such props only imitate the object’s normal function (the knife’s

“ordinary function of cutting is simply displaced onstage by the object’s function in performance—to seem to cut, to suggest passion or violence”).*! But this instance of “dislocation” relies upon semiotization, which as we have seen applies to everything on stage, so that the distinction between props and “undislocated” objects once more dissolves. If the function of all stage items is “dislocated” simply by

virtue of semiotization, then “dislocated function” cannot distin13

The Stage Life of Props

guish props from other stage items such as costume and furniture.” The confusion between subject and object entailed by the Prague school’s insistence on the “dematerialization” of the stage sign dissolves once we adopt a descriptive definition of the physical property rather than a functional definition of the signifying “stage object” (as dislocated function, lexeme, tressage, etc.). If the semiotic account of the theatrical sign foundered on two related points—locating the object, and distinguishing objects from subjects—the stage propertys fundamental status as a material object rather than a lexical

sign removes the difficulty. As a mobile, material fact, the prop enables us to develop the analysis of the theatrical sign begun by the Prague structuralists but largely shelved in the 1980s.*? The prop’s defining characteristic—its actual onstage motion— means that we must avoid the temptation to freeze or “spatialize” the theatrical sign as a synchronous lexeme that functions solely according to its difference from other onstage signs. As I will show in more detail in chapter 1, while the prop itself is defined as a discrete, mate-

rial, inanimate object that is visibly manipulated by an actor, its meaning—those denotations and connotations for which it stands— is a temporal contract established between the actor and spectator for the duration of performance. In accordance with the “dynamism” of the material sign-vehicle first noted by the Prague school, this con-

tract is tenuously constituted in time and subject to moment-bymoment renegotiation. More than any other factor, the dynamics of this temporal contract determine whether the object takes on a life of its own in performance. Other scholars have protested the dematerialization of the stage sign entailed by the Prague school principle of semiotization. In an

important rebuttal, Freddie Rokem insists that “the linguistic approach is not able to cope with the fact that even if the object becomes a sign, it never loses contact with its materiality as embodied by that particular object which is present on the stage.”** Rokem reminds us that the material sign-vehicle does not disappear from the spectator’s consciousness, even when it stands for something vastly ditferent from itself:

14

Introduction

To return to the chair, one could say that it is not merely a chair

when used on the stage. What enables us to grasp it as such though is that even if the chair is distanced from its identity and

function—to sit at a certain height from the floor—we will always be able to say about it: “Look, this is no longer a chair: as opposed to ‘not a table’ or ‘not a man.’” The fact that even in

negating its identity and function through language and its manipulations, the object in itself does not change, points at an important issue in the philosophy of language, because when

we name the chair something else, it apparently seems to become two additional things: the object named and a non-

chair.

Rokem restores the object’s affective physicality by arguing that “the palates of our mind are stimulated primarily by the chair as a material object and not only as some abstract linguistic food for thought.*° Rokem’s insistence on the object’s physicality echoes the position advanced by Bert O. States in his phenomenological study of theater, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms. For States, “The problem with semiotics is that in addressing theater as a system of codes it necessarily dissects the perceptual impression theater makes on the spectator. . . . Thus the danger of the linguistic approach to theater is that one is apt

to look past the site of our sensory engagement with its empirical objects.”*” States instead proposes a “binocular vision,” which views the stage object simultaneously as representing something else (the semiotic attitude) and as a thing-in-itself (the phenomenological attitude). States’s attempt to translate signs back into affective images recalls Samuel Beckett’s interest in representing “nonlogical” phenomena before they have been “distorted into intelligibility” by the perceiver. Beckett’s theater insists on the nauseating “thereness” of such things as boots, trees, and carrots—items that flirt with but ultimately resist symbolism.*® More recently, other critics have resisted reading the stage object

as merely a unit of meaning or lexeme. Emphasizing the role of objects in grounding both actor and spectator in a spatial field, Stan-

I5

The Stage Life of Props

ton B. Garner Jr. has demonstrated that a phenomenological approach illuminates the contemporary props of Shepard, lonesco, Beckett, and Pinter.*? In a broad theoretical study, Jean Alter posits a “performant function” in which objects serve as vehicles for actorial virtuosity and hence spectatorial pleasure. By this logic, objects such as juggling balls are enjoyed in their own right rather than as signs.°° Although the debate over the extent to which semiotization obtains

in the theater continues, in the light of these critiques it is hard to maintain that semiotics alone can fully account for the affective impact of props in performance. Props do “speak” in the theater— but they also perform.??

Like the play that contains it, then, the prop does not offer itself up to our gaze “all at once” as a digestible sign. The prop must mean in the moment, and that meaning is inextricably tied to such contingent circumstances as the physical dimensions of the performance space, the skill level of the individual actors, director, and designers, and the mood and makeup of the audience on a given night.?* As concrete synecdoches of that dynamic event we call performance, props remind us to keep theatrical meaning at once in our grasp and on the move.

The Cultural Project of Things: Materialism versus the Material In addition to rescuing the material object from the dematerialized sign on the one hand, and restoring diachronic motion to spatialized meaning on the other, my rematerialization of the prop has a further heuristic use. In recent years, there has been growing critical interest in the “materialist” analysis of the stage property’s ideological life within the culture as well as its theatrical life within the playhouse.*° Drawing variously on anthropology, new historicism, psychoanaly-

sis, feminism, and cultural materialism, much important work has been done on what Lena Cowen Orlin has called “the cultural project of things.”?* Early modern scholars in particular have trained their sights on the various ways in which such objects as hair, gloves, and handkerchiefs circulate within a larger framework of cultural anxi16

Introduction

eties, ideological fault lines, and symbolic economies.?? Thus Stephen Greenblatt cites the traffic of vestments between church and stage as an example of “circulation of social energy” in the Elizabethan era, while Peter Stallybrass has linked the valence of stage costume to the “livery society” of early modern England.°® Natasha Korda has uncovered hitherto invisible connections between Philip Henslowe’s costume and pawnbroker businesses, and Paul Yachnin has linked the fetishized handkerchief in Othello to England’s textile trade.’ Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda’s collection, Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, highlights “the ways in

which seemingly divergent materialisms can work together to broaden and deepen our understanding of stage properties, the plays in which they appear, the institutions and agents that own them, and the social, economic and cultural contexts in which they are embed-

ded.” Nor is interest in props’ ideological project limited to the early modern period. For example, W. B. Worthen finds complicity between the “transparent” objects of the contemporary stage and realism’s fetishization of bourgeois interiority.°” These scholars remind us that no recognizable object arrives on stage innocent. Objects bring their own historical, cultural, and ideological baggage on stage with them. New historicism, materialist feminism, and cultural materialism have taught us that the playhouse cannot be artificially cordoned off from the symbolic economy of the culture that surrounds it.°? Just like the offstage objects they represent, props are circulated, fetishized, and commodified. Indeed, since the public theater is a commercial enterprise, everything that appears on its stages is not only a theatrical sign but a commodity offered for the consumer’s visual consumption. Even in the devotional mystery plays of medieval England, each play in the cycle was presented to the community by a particular trade guild that displayed its latest wares for potential customers. Civic obligation, religious devotion, and what can only be called advertising are all bound up with the stage life of the object. At its most extreme—the chandelier in The Phantom of the Opera or the helicopter in Miss Saigon—the object displaces the actor as the star of the show.

Materialist approaches sensibly insist that any analysis that seeks 17

The Stage Life of Props

to comprehend the signifying impact of the stage object must take its

historical and cultural contexts into account. However, a tension exists between the goals of restoring the prop’s “specifically material [as opposed to functional and symbolic] dimensions” and recovering its social and economic “histories of production.”°! There is a strong risk that the material presence of the onstage object—its movement in concrete stage space and through linear stage time for spectators— will dissolve into the materialist analysis of the anxieties, fault lines, and ideologies that the object may or may not have embodied for the culture. In short, the danger is that we will lose sight of how objects worked, and continue to work, on stage as part of a discrete theatrical event. The stage object is a theatrical as well as a textual entity, an actual thing as well as a nexus of competing ideological codes.

Moreover, we must remember that for actual spectators, objects (like plays) move in unidirectional stage time. There are no mental rewind, fast-forward, and pause buttons in the theater as there are in the study—a luxury that may tempt us, as text-based critics, to read more significance into a given object, moment, or gesture than a spectator could possibly have grasped consciously (and perhaps even

unconsciously). For example, in his suggestive article on the ideological ramifications of Desdemona’s handkerchief, Paul Yachnin’s claim that Othello’s “stake in the handkerchief registers the theatre’s participation in English society’s fetishized trade in textiles” raises

urgent questions for the performance-oriented critic.°? At what point(s) in the play does such “registering” take place? For whom does a connection between the handkerchief and England’s textile trade register—the Jacobean spectator at the playhouse, or the contemporary materialist critic? Could such registering occur in the heat of theatrical performance? If not, does that fact negate Yachnin’s claim?

If the five case studies that follow emphasize playhouse practice

over cultural imagination, then, it is not to discount the latter as irrelevant or even separable. Rather, I seek to redress an imbalance in recent criticism. This imbalance stems, I believe, from the difficulty, for those who are not theater practitioners, of conceiving drama as a

18

Introduction

temporal event that takes place for audiences in real time, rather than as a spatialized field of meaning on the one hand or as a hermetic net-

work of circulating social energy on the other. The phenomenon under scrutiny here—the power of stage properties to haunt the theatrical imagination of characters and audiences—can only be grasped once we shift our critical attention from flattened symbols on the page to mobile, three-dimensional objects on the stage. Part of what we risk losing sight of is the sheer charm of stage objects—what I earlier called their seductive power in performance. We must remind ourselves that audiences pay for theatrical spectacle not because they wish to be interpellated, demystified, or decentered, but because they enjoy being entertained, titillated, and (occasionally) disturbed. As Bert O. States points out, we leave the study for the playhouse because we crave the sheer messiness of embodied theater. We want the mess along with the meaning, the thing along with the sign.°t Even that most articulate advocate of “laying bare the device,” Bertolt Brecht, recognized that if the performance failed to grab the audience, its ideological demolition work would founder. Brecht’s analogy for the theatrical event was not a network of mutually deconstructing signs, but a boxing match. I do not minimize the materialist insight that the object’s cultural and ideological life circulates within the walls of the playhouse as well as beyond it. Indeed, in my own readings, I have historicized the prop’s stage life whenever it has seemed relevant to my production analysis. Such contextualization can only enhance our understanding of these objects’ theatrical fascination. However, my analysis remains rooted in the stage life of props. Before we can hope to ascertain “the cultural project of [stage] things,” we must first recover their trajectories within the unfolding spatiotemporal event in the playhouse—even while acknowledging that such a reconstruction will always be provisional, if for no other reason than the fact that the

historical spectator must to some extent remain a cipher. Just as performance-oriented critics have much to learn from the materialist analysis of ideological formations and cultural anxieties, so too can such an analysis make room for the material stage event.

19

The Stage Life of Props

The Stage Life of Props: Unpacking the Metaphor Thus far, I have defined the prop as a mobile physical object rather than as a functional lexeme or ideological symptom; located the prop in the concrete stage space and linear stage time of performance; and extended the Prague school’s concept of the dynamism of the theatrical sign to suggest that the prop’s semiotic life unfolds not as a static symbol whose meaning can be gleaned “all at once,” but as an unstable temporal contract between actor and spectator. | now wish

to examine the metaphor that gives rise to the title of this study. What do we actually mean when we say that an inanimate object “takes on a life of its own” in performance? From one perspective, the metaphor is misleading, since it implies (a) that the inanimate object becomes truly animate and (b) that the object becomes a subject in its own right, independent of the human actor’s manipulation of it. Neither implication is true. Although they can and do take on some of the functions and attributes of subjects, which accounts in part for their uncanny fascination on stage, props remain objects, not subjects. Stage props are “motivated”—literally

put into play—by actors but are not themselves animate, although they are often said to “animate” the plot (as the handkerchief does in Othello). Even those anthropomorphic figures defined by Frank Proschan as “performing objects,” such as puppets and marionettes, are only figuratively alive, since they must be manipulated by a human presence either on or offstage.°’ As puppet theorist Steve Tillis argues, the actor is always the producer, but not necessarily the site, of signification.°° We must therefore acknowledge the metaphor of the prop with a life of its own as a suggestive figure of speech and seek to unpack its figurative applications.

Objects take on a life of their own when they transcend their usual, “transparent” function and draw the spectator’s attention in their own right. Props’ most common function is to act as various kinds of visual shorthand. First, props signal the larger, offstage world

beyond the playing space. A piano signifies “bourgeois drawing

20

Introduction

room,” while a striped towel and parasol indicate “beach.” Honzl calls such objects “scenic metonymies,” because they point to a larger scene with which they are conventionally associated.°’ (To the

extent that they are parts standing for wholes, they are more accurately labeled synecdoches, as Elam points out.)’° In addition to locale, props silently convey time period, socioeconomic milieu, time of day, and so on. In nonillusionistic theater (such as the Elizabethan stage), which largely dispenses with permanent scenery, props act as visual shorthand for a character’s occupation. Examples of some conventional “identity metonymies” include the soldier’s sword, the fop’s wig and snuftbox, the fool’s scepter and bauble, and (more recently) the chef's hat and secret agent’s sunglasses. But props do not just identify; they also characterize. The extravagant way that Capitano in the Italian commedia handles his sword tells us at once he is a putfed-up braggart; Osric’s fussiness over his hat conveys obsequiousness, and so on. Often props convey information of which the character himself may be unaware and become vehicles of dramatic irony. Brabantio’s nightgown reminds the early modern audience, watching the play in the middle of the afternoon, that act 1 of Othello takes place in the middle of the night (index of time), but the nightgown also serves to make the dyspeptic senator look ridiculous when he testifies against Othello in the witchcraft trial before the formally attired Venetian senate (index of charac-

ter).

All of these pointing (indexical) functions are metonymic. They suggest association between prop and referent through contiguity, or through conventional association, rather than through actual resem-

blance between object and referent. But props easily slide from metonymy to metaphor. Othello’s flickering taper metaphorically suggests Desdemona’s threatened life; Laura’s glass menagerie implies the fragility of her hold on reality; Treplev’s dead seagull con-

veys his penchant for melodrama. The most resonant props cement

their identity through both metonymy and metaphor. Thus in Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, the central prop is associated with

Lady Windermere both through contiguity (it is constantly in her

21

The Stage Life of Props

possession, a birthday gift from her husband, etc.) and through resemblance (it is a delicate, expensive trinket designed for public display, which is how Lord Windermere sees his wife). Yet props function conventionally as more than visual shorthand, for they are also actorial aids. Mary Douglas has indicated the impor-

tance of a well-chosen rehearsal prop in releasing a blocked per-

former: “One day some prop is passed to him, a hat or green umbrella, and with this symbol suddenly knowledge and intention are realised in the flawless performance.” ’* Theater phenomenologist Stanton B. Garner Jr. emphasizes the role of props in grounding the actor’s body in fictive stage space: “Props establish points of contact

between actor/character and mise-en-scéne; they localize dramatic activity and materialize it in scenic terms. By extending and physicalizing the body’s operation on the material environment, props situate the body more firmly within it.”’° Props thus enable playwrights and directors to anchor a scene. For example, Emilia’s undressing of Desdemona in Othello creates an extraordinary intimacy between the two women (even as it must have focused the audience’s attention on the male body beneath the female apparel).

Beyond characterization, props become drawn into the stage action in several ways. A key prop, like the tent in David Storey’s The Contractor, or the contents of Winnie’s bag in Beckett’s Happy Days,

may even anchor an entire play.’* In such cases, stage business becomes promoted to the status of dramatic action. “Speaking” props, such as letters, can relay information to an audience that would otherwise require the presence of an actor-messenger (the outrageously expository radio bulletins in Tom Stoppard’s The Real

Inspector Hound parody this function). Props are also devices for energizing a scene; more than one playwright has relied on the timely appearance of a gun to ratchet up the dramatic tension when the play threatens to sag. Props can pad a dramatic narrative: after the prema-

ture resolution of the main plot, the patent plot device of the lost rings motivates The Merchant of Venice’s entire fifth act. Conversely,

the prop ex machina, such as the identifying token produced at the end of a Greek drama, is a convenient way to tie up loose ends.” As this brief survey of the prop’s usual functions indicates, it is ys

Introduction

difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint just when a prop ceases to be passive and becomes active. Pace Veltrusky, there is no single criterion for determining when (and if) an object achieves “semiotic subjectivity.” To paraphrase Sir Toby Belch, some props are born lively; some achieve liveliness; and some have liveliness thrust upon ’em. When we claim that a prop takes on a life of its own in performance,

then, we are not saying that a single phenomenon has occurred. Rather, we are probably making one or more of the following claims. Props motivate the stage action. Like Hitchcock’s famous McGutffins

(the microfilm, the suitcase full of cash), the prop is a convenient device for setting a plot in motion. While such usage is perhaps most evident in farce (Goldoni’s The Fan, Labiche’s An Italian Straw Hat), this plot device is adaptable to melodrama (Lady Windermere’s Fan),

and tragedy (the handkerchief in Othello). Often a fateful object becomes an antagonist that threatens to expose some dreadful secret, as is true of my last two examples. Farce is the obvious example of a genre in which objects refuse to settle for a passive role and emerge to frustrate the character’s objectives.’° This plot function is the most common, and hence perhaps the least interesting, manifestation of a prop’s ability to draw attention to itself in performance, which is why I introduce it first. Props are transformational puppets. In the hands of a skilled actor, the same prop can take on many roles in a given performance. Contemporary performance artist Sarah Jones plays eight international characters in her show Women Can’t Wait, signaling her transition through the use of a single prop: a diaphanous shawl. When Jones covers her head with the shawl, she becomes a woman from India; when she ties the shawl around her neck, a soignée Frenchwoman. In one incarnation, the balled-up shawl becomes a child’s doll.” Jones’s

transformation of the object illustrates that whenever the prop is unscripted by the playwright, the actor’s gesture alone breathes life into it. To this extent, the transformational prop becomes a puppet. In contrast, the playwright’s dialogue is a crucial element in the life of the textually embedded props I discuss in the chapters that follow. The same is true for Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1902), in which objects such as the doorkeeper’s shawl are recycled from scene to 23

The Stage Life of Props

scene, taking on new connotations each time. Transformational props like Jones’s shawl, which are added in performance by actor or director, are a fascinating topic in their own right but lie outside the scope of my study. Props appear to signify independently of the actor who handles them. For Gay McAuley, echoing Veltrusky, objects take on a life of their own when they are “capable of expressing or representing something

independent of the actor’s activities.”’* McAuley’s own examples include the surreal props incorporated by contemporary playwrightdirectors Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson. Surreal or arbitrary objects have neither use-function nor construable plot function; they are just there, pointing to themselves rather than to an external referent. Found only on the stage (or in a museum exhibition), arbitrary objects sever the link between stage-world and real world. Because of this, they are semidecorative and often divorced from narrative altogether.

Another instance of the autonomy, or pseudoautonomy, of the object is when the prop goes awry and eludes (or seems to elude) the actor’s control. Such “recalcitrant props” may be intentional (the various items that refuse to work properly in Beckett’s plays) or unintentional (the gun that refuses to fire on cue). The actor who plays a Restoration fop must juggle a veritable arsenal of props that might include wig, snutfbox, cane, and sword. Playing a drunk or incompetent fop makes even more spectacular demands on the actor, since for the illusion to work, the actor can never signal his own incompetent grasp on things, merely the character’s. The drunken fop example illustrates that recalcitrant props only seem to signify indepen-

dently of the actor; their independent life is an illusion. As I have argued, an object that is truly independent of an actor’s visible manipulation is not a prop. Props absorb dramatic meaning and become complex symbols. In this

mode of “semiotic subjectivity,” props transcend their customary roles as transparent scenic metonymies and expository signs. Objects like the eponymous lizard in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana and the skeleton in John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance

become poetic symbols that elude obvious denotation but suggest 24

Introduction

something larger about the world or theme of the play. The capacity

of objects to absorb overdetermined meanings encourages some poetically minded playwrights to promote them to title characters: The Seagull, The Glass Menagerie, and so forth. Props are defamiliarized. On February 22, 1892, Oscar Wilde scan-

dalized the first-night audience at London’s fashionable St. James’ Theatre by appearing in front of the curtain to commend the spectators on their good taste in applauding Lady Windermere’s Fan. Wilde brandished a lighted cigarette (an unforgivable solecism given that ladies were present) and wore a green carnation in his buttonhole. What was the meaning of this mysterious affectation? Cecil Graham, the play’s dandy and presumed mouthpiece for Wilde, had worn an identical green carnation in the third act. When the puzzled spectators turned to their fellows, they were dealt another surprise: Wilde had planted impeccably dressed men throughout the audience, each of whom proudly sported a green carnation.”

On occasions such as this, the prop’s materiality as an object clashes with its conventional function as a sign or tool. When this happens, the tacit representational contract between performer and spectator may be threatened or even ruptured. “Look at this table,” says the actor, pointing to a chair. Dissonant props, like Wilde’s green carnation, thrust their own material strangeness at the audience. This phenomenon resembles the defamiliarization of the linguistic sign, in which a word’s referential function is trumped by its formal, sensory qualities, such as meter and rhyme. A defamiliarized sign or object is one that points to itself rather to an external referent. Instead of paralyzing the drama, defamiliarization often reinvigo-

rates it. When Chekhov’s Nina refuses to understand the dead seagull as a symbol and perceives a mere corpse, her refusal brings the tensions between her and Treplev to a head and paves the way for her relationship with Trigorin. The coin that always comes up heads in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead signals to the audience that the laws of causality are weirdly suspended. Removed from any context or history in which they make sense, the defamiliarized objects that appear in the plays of Beckett and Sam Shepard resist the characters’ attempts to make them bloom as symbols. 25

The Stage Life of Props

The logical end-point of defamiliarization is the use of surreal objects discussed above, which jettison reference to objects outside the theater entirely. In Foreman’s and Wilson’s theaters of the mind, semiosis short-circuits: the “phenomenal” object is selected purely on aesthetic grounds (size, shape, texture, color, etc.) with an eye to its sensory impact as an image rather than as a decodable sign. These props are more like pictorial elements in a surrealist landscape, or

the props used by such modern dance companies as Pilobilus or Momix, than participants in a dramatic action. Props are fetishized. A fetishized prop is one endowed by the actor, character, or playwright with a special power and/or significance that

thereafter seems to emanate from the object itself.°° No longer a

transparent sign, a fetish takes on inordinate significance and becomes the focus of a character’s projected desire, fear, or anxiety. By extension (contagion?), the object then serves the same function for the audience. As we might expect, Shakespeare is the master of

the fetishized prop. In Richard II, for instance, the crown is so invested with symbolic power that it makes the king rather than vice versa.

Fetishized props come in several varieties. They may be talismans (Mary Tyrone’s wedding dress in Long Day’s Journey into Night), neu-

rotic symptoms (Hedda Gabler’s pistols), or commodities (the check in A Raisin in the Sun, the piano in The Piano Lesson). Props may be fetishized through the actor’s gesture alone (as when Krapp fondles

his banana in Krapp’s Last Tape), but more frequently the playwright’s language endows the mundane prop with danger and excite-

ment. Othello’s “magic in the web” speech transforms a hitherto innocuous object into a magical charm and, in doing so, exposes theatrical fetishism in action. In Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, a glass of water becomes a pawn in a game of sexual chess (“If you take the glass... I'll take you”).®! Jean Genet’s The Maids is surely the locus classicus of object fetishism on the modern stage.

Not only characters but actors themselves fetishize precious objects, especially those that transmit a theatrical lineage. On Broadway, the “gypsy coat” is passed from roving actor to actor, migrating

between shows like the all-but-anonymous Gypsies themselves. 26

Introduction

Actor Rick Cluchey has described how Beckett’s own slippers provided the precise shuffling sound needed for Krapp’s Last Tape. As King Lear, Sir Donald Wolfit flamboyantly incorporated a cloak said to have belonged to Edmund Kean.* In a profession devoted to the imaginative donning of others’ lives, clothes, and habits, it is obvious why such theatrical talismans should prove so potent in rehearsal and even transmit some of that magic to audiences in performance. Props are haunted mediums. Especially on the modern, technological stage, props are possessed by the voices of the past. August Wilson’s piano in The Piano Lesson, Brian Friel’s radio in Dancing at Lughnasa, Krapp’s tape recorder in Krapp’s Last Tape, and Strindberg’s speaking tube in Miss Julie all ventriloquize an absent, offstage subject, which is the reason I label such objects mediums. Such technological “channeling” has its roots in the theatrical phenomenon of personification, in which the prop is treated as a mute stand-in for the

absent subject. In perhaps the most famous example in English drama, Yorick’s skull is a mute object charged with dramatic meaning by Shakespeare’s dialogue and the actor’s gesture. In their “felt absence,” mediums are at once disturbing and fasci-

nating on stage. They are uncanny in the Freudian sense: we (mis)perceive something alive in a dead object. Indeed, part of the ghostly fascination of theater as an art form is that it satisfies the audience’s need for what performance theorist Joseph Roach calls “surrogation.” According to Roach, surrogation is an omnipresent cultural drive to fill recently created voids, often traumatic to that culture, with substitutes that are in turn often destroyed once they prove unsatisfactory. Roach calls such scapegoat figures “effigies.”®°

What I call the medium and Roach calls the effigy is central to the cultural work of performance, which Roach defines as “the process of

trying out various candidates in different situations—the doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand-ins.”**

Itself a kind of medium in these terms, theater allows us to retrieve, if only temporarily, things lost but still cherished. Even if we

no longer believe in the literal afterlife once promised by the memento mori, there is something consoling in the fact that we can (in theory) return to encounter Yorick’s skull or Old Hamlet’s ghost 27

The Stage Life of Props

night after night. There is an in-joke aspect to this game of theatrical recycling. Early modern spectators at the Globe must have enjoyed the reappearance of The Spanish Tragedy’s Spaniard costume in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (which includes a metatheatrical wink in the audience’s direction). If surrogation is the urge that drives theatrical pleasure (and, for Roach, cultural performance as a whole), then the prop becomes a crucial vehicle of its expression. Last, props come to life on stage when they confound dramatic con-

vention. A prop takes on a life of its own, we might say, when it refuses to act proppily. By refusing to prop up the drama, the object capsizes audience expectation. I canvas this phenomenon in detail in my discussion of the stage gun in chapter 5, but this metadramatic (dys)function is shared by several of the props that I have chosen to examine. The eucharistic wafer in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,

among the earliest stage representations of the Host in English drama, becomes the object of knockabout farce as well as devotional attention to an extent that has puzzled contemporary scholars. The charmed handkerchiets in The Spanish Tragedy and Othello go horribly awry and become death fetishes. The skull in Hamlet refuses its conventional memento mori function and, in so doing, threatens to dismantle the distinction between dead prop and live prince. Even the fan, that delightful flirtation device enshrined by Joseph Addison in the pages of The Spectator, becomes sexually electrified in alarming and potentially subversive ways on the Restoration stage. From this brief survey of the various functions performed by theatrical objects it should be evident that no single overarching theory or underlying mechanism can fully account for the prop’s stage life. As we shall see repeatedly, any or indeed all of these functions can overlap in performance. As a convenient analogy for summarizing this point, we can take the later Wittgenstein’s revision of his earlier philosophy. In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein maintained that meaningful language has a single, denotative function: to picture the world of actual and possible facts. But Wittgenstein later came to view this position as hopelessly reductive, since language as it is actually used does many other things as well. Wittgenstein came to see language as

a motley collection of simultaneously operating language-games, 28

Introduction

each with its own rules. Similarly, the language of props eschews a unitary syntax and grammar. There is no underlying logic of props, merely a variety of “object-games” in circulation at a given time from

which dramatists pick, choose, and combine. No recipe or DNA exists for bringing a prop to life. Rather, in their ability to haunt the spectators imagination, enlivened props share what Wittgenstein called a family resemblance. We can generalize only by observing that every lively prop transcends the default function of stage objects: to convey visual information about the world of the play in as unobtrusive a manner as possible. Such transcendence is a necessary, but not

sufficient, requirement for a prop to take on a life of its own in performance. Props have many lives—practical, referential, rhetorical, phenom-

enological, psychological, ideological—but each begins when an object is plucked from the world and placed upon a stage, where it uncannily becomes at once itself and other than itself. It is to the earliest, and most alarming, instance of such theatrical appropriation in postclassical western European drama that I now turn.

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| T Pinte Host The Prop as Temporal Contract on the Medieval Stage Hyt semes quite, and is red: Hyt is quike and semes dede: Hyt is fleshe and semes bred: Hyt is on and semes too: Hyt is God body and no more.

} . —“Sacrament of the Altar” (ca. 1450)

9 have defined a stage property as an inanimate object that is visibly manipulated by an actor in the course of pertormance. But it is not enough for an object to be handled by an actor; it must also be perceived by a spectator as a prop—in other words, as a sign. Indeed, theater can be defined as that mode of perception in which spectators consent to see things as representing things other than themselves: an actor as King Lear, a chair as Lear’s throne, and so on. According to the Prague structuralists, “All that is on the stage is a sign.”! Simply by virtue of being placed on stage before an audience, objects acquire a set of semiotic quotation marks, so that a table becomes a “table.”* Thus the prop’s status as a prop does not depend on the actor alone. An object becomes a stage prop only when it is

perceived as such by a spectator who is consciously observing an actor—in other words, when an act of theater is taking place. The unconsecrated eucharistic wafer (oble) is the ur-prop of postclassical western European drama, but it became so in spite of itself. For the medieval participants in the Catholic Mass, the consecrated wafer (Host) was not—could not have been—a prop, and it is the difference between the two objects, so outwardly similar, that drove a od

The Stage Life of Props

crucial wedge between the ritual action of the Mass and the theatri-

cal representation of a play. Unlike its Jewish antecedent, the Passover matzo that represents the unleavened bread hurriedly con-

sumed by Hebrew slaves before their Exodus from Egypt, to the communicants of the medieval church the consecrated wafer was no mere sign-vehicle standing in for an absent signified. According to the doctrine of “real presence,” Christ’s body and blood were actually present in the sacramental wafer and wine; the priest who conducted the Eucharist presided over not representation, but transubstantiation. “Hoc est corpus meum” (Matt. 26:26): Christ’s words indicated that the Host was no sign, but the very substance of Christ’s flesh.

Yet by 1500, the image of the Host circulated beyond church walls. Staged by clergy in Easter liturgical drama, and paraded through town by the great Corpus Christi processions, the holy wafer migrated to the hands of lay actors in the Last Supper plays that formed a key part of the play-cycles surrounding the feast.’ The Host

also appeared in miracle plays that were designed to demonstrate transubstantiation to a laity possibly ignorant of doctrine and thus apt (in the church’s view) to view the Host as symbol rather than as miracle. On occasion, such plays became the property of itinerant troupes of professional or semiprofessional lay actors, who performed them beyond the strict confines of the church. Indeed, the late-fiftteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament calls for a Host,

“sacred [consecrated] newe,” to be stolen from a church altar (1. 379).* Was this a prop—an unconsecrated oble—or the Host itself? More intriguingly, what was it the play’s spectators thought they saw, and how did they interpret this theft? Half a century before Luther’s theses launched the Reformation, the Church’s most sacred object appeared as a prop in the hands of actors, its ambiguous status seeming to hinge as much on the perception of spectators at a play as on the decisive words and actions of a priest officiating at Mass. The oble’s oscillation between sacred object and theatrical property concerns me here not only because of the paradox whereby an object whose physical essence after consecration confounded semiosis became, for a time, the Church’s most spectacular sign.’ Despite

the Host’s official status as emblem of doctrinal orthodoxy, once 32

Playing Host

exposed to the gaze of a heterogeneous crowd at a lay theatrical performance the small, wheaten oble embodied a contingent contractual relationship between actor and spectator rather than an unambiguous sign of Christ’s presence in the sacrament. By examining three medieval stagings of the Host, I seek to trace the oble’s passage from sacred “non-sign” to a theatrical object that is at once sacred and a

representation of the sacred.° I then explore an analogy between three post-Reformation theological understandings of the Host and three ways of understanding how all props signify on stage. The Host is particularly useful for this purpose because the bloody eucharistic debates of the Reformation prefigure the current critical fault line between semiotic and phenomenological approaches to stage properties. I thus aim to clarify just how—and for whom—an object becomes a prop.

“From Communal Bread to Priestly Wafer: Staging the Mass Sacred objects have been in use for thousands of years. According to one historian, ancient Egyptian gods were carried out of the temples in festival processions as early as 2600 B.c., while a surviving “production notebook” specifies properties needed to stage scenes performed for the Egyptian Jubilee of Senwosret I circa 1918-1875 B.c.’ Sacred objects are so ubiquitous in ritual drama as to defy attempts to

pin down their temporal or geographical origins. Indeed, such an intimate connection exists between ritual objects and the sacred that it is virtually impossible for the scholar to tell where the sacred ends and the theatrical begins.

While recent scholarship has rejected the theory that drama evolved from liturgy into liturgical drama and thence into the Corpus Christi plays, moving from church to churchyard to marketplace in a Darwinian process of secularization, it is generally accepted that a key strand of western European drama, the drama of worship,

derived from the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, and specifically that of the Mass.® At the root of the Mass lies the sacrament of transubstantiation, which became official church doctrine in 33

The Stage Life of Props

1215. In 1311, Pope Clement V instituted the feast of Corpus Christi to celebrate the miracle. The centerpiece of the festivities was a pro-

cession in which representatives of both temporal and spiritual realms accompanied the Host through the town to the church. Nota prop, the Host was nonetheless a portable object that displayed as well as embodied the miracle of Christ’s bodily presence.” The popular Corpus Christi and Passion plays, which grew up around the festival of Corpus Christi, threatened to upstage the Host itself. Staged in the vernacular by lay actors (unlike the earlier liturgical drama), and featuring spectacular events such as Christ’s Passion and Harrowing of Hell, the Corpus Christi plays dramatized the Eucharist’s eternal significance for the human race. Instead of performing Host miracle plays, which dramatized the sacrament’s temporal power to work wonders, the guilds chose instead to present the history of the world from Creation to Judgment.!? Procession and pageant diverged and may even have competed for the townspeople’s attention; in at least one case, that of York in 1426, it was requested

that the plays should be postponed to the Friday vigil of Corpus Christi so as not to disturb the feast, but by 1477 the reverse had taken place.'! If the Corpus Christi plays flowered under the watchful eye of the church, the church no longer exclusively determined the meaning and use of its symbols, which often took on a secular cast as they were “translated” into the vernacular. As the plays ranged beyond the liturgy and even Scripture itself, apocryphal properties and figures appeared, such as the “poll ax” borne by “Pilate’s son” in the Smiths’ pageant at Coventry.'* Moreover, each craft guild vied to display its most appealing wares on its pageant wagon. If the plays’ subject matter was still vetted by the church, the drama itself now delighted and

advertised as well as instructed. Horseplay and special effects abounded; in the York Mercers’ play, nine small red angels “renne aboute in the heuen” when pulled by a cord, thus paving the way for a thoroughly irreverent use of props.'’ In Russell A. Fraser’s apt summation of the two-way traffic between spiritual and secular concerns on the early modern stage, “the rude handling of sacred totems is what the drama is all about.”!* 34

Playing Host

In the sixteenth century, the Host would become a crucible for the tension between “presence” and “representation” that has returned

to haunt contemporary performance criticism. The Host had long occupied ambiguous terrain, however. As O. B. Hardison has demon-

strated, by the time liturgical drama emerged in the tenth century, the Mass itself had become a “sacred drama” in two senses.!° First, the priest and other officiating clergy took on an enhanced mimetic role by using gesture, movement, and tone of voice to reenact the key events of Jesus’ last days. If they were not fully “acting” in our modern sense, there were moments in the service when the clergy were clearly to be understood as imitating or representing Christ.'® Second, instead of participating in a ritual act in which no clear distinc-

tion existed between participant and priest, former communicants became passive spectators at an overwhelmingly visual event, which came eventually to be dominated by the priest’s Elevation of the Host. While the words (and hence the ostensible meaning) of the service did not change, the Mass itself began to look like a piece of the-

ater in which the priest was more like the suffering Christ than the congregants, much to the dismay of antitheatrical clerics such as Aelred of Rievaulx. A brief survey of the Host’s transformation from

communal bread to priestly wafer shows that the seeds of the church’s anxiety that the Host might be interpreted as a merely symbolic property were planted within the Mass itself, which carefully staged the Host in order to demonstrate the real presence of Christ in the sacrament to those who no longer understood the words of the liturgy.!/ By the fifth century, the Latin Mass had replaced the more informal Greek “Eucharist” (thanksgiving), a celebratory re-creation of Christ’s Last Supper in which communicants shared bread and wine in a communal meal. At the close of the sixth century, Pope Gregory I standardized the form of the Mass and insisted that a union of visible and invisible realms took place within it. According to Gregory’s doctrine of the real presence, the living Christ was present in person when the bread and wine were consecrated. In part, this doctrine was a response to the heresy of Arianism, which held that Christ was not divine but merely an exceptional mortal—and thus implied that the 35

The Stage Life of Props

Mass itself was a form of theatrical imitation, if not deliberate deception. Gregory wished to banish the specter of idolatry from the Mass once and for all. Yet the visible traces of the bread and wine continued to haunt the

church, whose pastoral mission increasingly stressed the reality of transubstantiation. In fact, the church’s efforts to deny that bread and wine remained after consecration as symbols of Christ’s body and

blood only led the Mass further in the direction of theater by enabling communicants to view the ceremony as a form of sacred spectacle. Thus in the ninth century, Amalarius, bishop of Metz, encouraged officiating clergy to dramatize each incident within the Mass for the populace, which had by then lost the ability to under-

stand the classical Latin in which the service was conducted.'® Officiants wore elaborate vestments that stressed their privileged intercessory function as they acted out Christ’s Passion. The symbolic act of giving communal thanks had become a priestly re-creation of Christ’s sacrifice. As the meaning of the sacrament shifted, the physical dynamics of the Mass altered as well. Placed in the nave, celebrants were progres-

sively distanced from their receding Host. In the Romanesque churches and basilicas of the early Middle Ages, the Mass had been staged so as to include the congregation. A clearly visible altar stood well forward of the semicircular apse, which closed off the eastern end of the church (the side which symbolically stood for Heaven and the Resurrection). The bishop’s chair and the choir were situated

behind the altar and faced the congregation; the officiant stood behind the altar in full view of the people. Standing or seated members of the congregation moved directly to the altar and received the bread into their hands and drank directly from the cup. The bread and wine used in the Mass were selected from offerings brought by the congregation itself, a tradition that stressed the communicants’ participation in the sacrament. With the coming of Gothic church design, however, congregants were doubly separated from their Host by an altar rail (which prevented them from approaching the altar) and by a rood screen, which divided the protane nave from the holy choir. The screen’s lattice36

Playing Host

work now obstructed the congregation’s view of the chancel, the holy domain beyond the nave. The altar was moved back to the rear wall of the apse, and the choir placed in choir-stalls between the altar and the congregation. The officiating priest now stood in front of the altar rather than behind it, with his back to the communicants and at a far greater distance from the congregation, symbolically mediating between Christ and his sinful people. As befitted the newfound emphasis on the mystery of the sacra-

ment, sacred “props” accumulated around the Mass. In England, housling-cloths were placed under the chins of communicants to prevent crumbs of the consecrated Host spilling from unworthy mouths. In France and Germany, a curtained canopy over the altar, known as a baldachin, veiled the holy Easter chalice until just before

its Elevation and removed it from the eyes (and unconsecrated hands) of communicants. Reliquaries and decorated panels adorned the rear of the enlarged Gothic altar. To use a theatrical analogy, the

thrust stage of the simple early church mensa was replaced by a canopied, miniproscenium stage, which shielded the Host from a people now starved for contact with their savior. Most crucially, the visual appearance of the Host was transformed

in the middle of the ninth century, when leavened bread was replaced by small circular wafers placed on the tongues of kneeling

communicants. This avoided the risk of mold (and hence the unnerving suggestion of bread-ness after the consecration) and ensured that no consecrated crumbs would be spilled. The preconse-

crated wafer was called an oble, while the consecrated bread and wine were now known as the “Host,” or “sacrificial victim.” A whole

new set of regulations emerged dedicated to the proper creation, care, and handling of the fragile disk whose consecrated crumbs could easily be lost, and scholars debated what to do in cases where mice ate leftover crumbs or sick people vomited up the Host.!? The priest no longer shared his bread but placed it on a paten, or bread plate, and consigned his communicants’ wafers to a separate ciborium, or breadbasket. A straw, or fistula, was used to prevent profane lips from touching the sacred chalice until it was made superfluous in the twelfth century by the theological decision to have the priest 37

The Stage Life of Props

alone drink the wine. This decision was justified by the new doctrine

of concomitance, which taught that the total nature of Christ was present in each particle of the two “species.” With the coming of the oble, the Host’s resemblance to daily bread vanished. An oble was white, round, thin, and made entirely from wheat. Contemporary visual depictions of the Elevation of the Host show a round, flat disk that varies in size from that of an egg to that of a small dinner plate. It was usually inscribed with a cross, the letters IHS, and (from the twelfth century) a crucifixion scene or the lamb of God. In 1350 William Russell, bishop of Sodor, explained the

symbolism behind the Host thus: “The wheaten host should be round and whole and without blemish, like the lamb without a blem-

ish who has not had a bone removed from it. Hence the verse: Christ’s host should be clean, wheaten, thin, not large, round, unleavened. It is inscribed, not cooked in water but baked in fire.” 7° Seeking to discourage the heretical view that consecrated bread was merely a sign, the church designed what Julia Houston has called a “non-sign”: an object whose material appearance was illusory after

consecration, but whose every visible property was nevertheless symbolically codified. By the end of the ninth century, then, a “new kind of theatricality”

had developed in the Mass, which was increasingly treated as a priestly mystery rather than as a communal act.*! The miracle climaxed in the Elevation of the Host. For many, seeing the Host now became as or more important than actually consuming it; from the twelfth century, a bell announced consecration, enabling communicants to rush into church from outside to witness the Elevation.”” In short, the Mass itself now suspiciously resembled a dramatic performance, at least to such critics as Aelred of Rievaulx. Rievaulx complained that the gestures and emotional effects of the liturgy were “suitable not to the houses of prayer, but to the theater, not to praying, but to viewing.” Indeed, much of the Reformist passion, which began with Wycliffe’s attacks on transubstantiation in the 1370s and exploded in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, turned on the precise relationship between the Host, the officiating priest, and the communicants. What did Jesus’ words, “Hoc est corpus meum,” 38

Playing Host

actually mean? Was the Eucharist real, or was it (as the Lollards asserted) the “feynid miracle of [th]e sacrament of bred”?7*

{Setween Miracle and Spectacle: The Host in Liturgical Drama

Once the Mass incorporated new sacred objects within its ritual, those objects emerged as important representational symbols in the liturgical drama. For example, the ever more elaborate Easter ritual led to the practice of “reserving” the Host, or temporarily withdrawing it from communion. By the ninth century, it had become the custom to place the Host in a special tower-shaped chalice on Good Friday, to represent Christ’s burial. The Host was then “rediscovered” on Easter Sunday, when it became the symbol of Christ’s Resurrec-

tion, and the empty cloth napkin in which the chalice had been wrapped signified Christ’s empty shroud. At Winchester, a cross was substituted for the Host and symbolically “buried” in a sepulcher. As David Bevington notes, “The place of reservation, or ‘sepulchre, and the empty ‘grave-clothes’ were thus prominently featured in liturgi-

cally mimetic ceremonials that could readily become more overtly dramatic when the propitious moment arrived.”*°

That moment arrived when the practice of using objects surrounding the Host itself to help dramatize key moments in Christ’s life passed directly from the Mass into the earliest liturgical drama, the tenth-century Quem quaeritis (Whom do you seek?), at whose cli-

max linen cloths were held up before the audience to represent Christ’s cerements. As this trope (an antiphonally chanted prose piece inserted into the liturgy) developed into a fully mounted dramatic re-creation of the three Marys’ discovery of Christ’s empty tomb, other proplike objects began to appear. In the official Visitatio Sepulchri script from the tenth-century Regularis Concordia as set down by St. Ethelwold, bishop of Winchester, the monks representing the three Marys wear copes and bear “thuribles with incense” representing spices to the tomb, while the priest representing the angel carries a palm branch to signify his benevolence.’° In the latetwelfth- or early-thirteenth-century Fleury playbook version, the Vis39

The Stage Life of Props

itatio includes a bevy of properties: elaborate stage directions specity an angel “vested in a gilded white robe, head covered with a mitre albeit unadorned, holding a palm in the left hand, a branched candlestick full of tapers in the right hand.”*’ And in some continental

versions, the women buy spices on the way from an unguentarius (ointment seller)—the first medieval “property man” on record.”®

Despite the use of physical characterization and “properties,” tropes such as the visit to the sepulcher remained tied to the liturgical service. An implicit distinction thus existed between the symbolic “props” surrounding the Host at Easter and the wafer itself, which might still be termed nonrepresentational, since after consecration it became that which it signified.?? But in the twelfth-century Vespers service on Easter Monday at Beauvais, the Eucharist is represented within a drama removed from the immediate liturgical context of the Mass. In this liturgical play, one of several surviving Peregrinus plays that dramatize Christ’s journey to Emmaus, Christ appears in the shape of a pilgrim to two disciples shortly after his Resurrection. The

disciples invite the pilgrim to lodge with them and lead him to a table, asking him to “recount .. . the victory of our master.”*° The text then reads as follows: “Then let the pilgrim himself, at the table, say alone: And he went in with them, and it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them: Then let him take bread, and let him say: He took the bread, blessed it (let him make the sign of the cross), and broke it (let him break it), and gave it to them. And let him give to them, and withdraw.”>!

Here a potential gap begins to open between bread as sacrament and bread as theatrical property. The play demands several levels of dramatic impersonation. An actor, possibly chosen from the upper rank in the choir (as specified in the later Rouen text of the play) represents Christ, who himself represents a pilgrim imitating Christ per-

forming the original sacrament. On the narrative level the trick is played on the disciples, who do not at first realize that their companion is Christ offering them the tactile proof of his resurrection in the form of the sacrament. Or does he? The spoken text explicitly frames the stage business as retrospective narrative. The pilgrim recounts a

past event; he does not perform a timeless miracle. Furthermore, 40

Playing Host

although the pilgrim hands the bread to the two disciples, no bread is actually consumed. Instead, the stage directions read, “Let the two arise looking at one another, and let them go through the church as if hunting for him and singing.”°¢ The play clearly intends to demonstrate proof of Christ’s Resurrection; indeed, Christ returns (played by another actor) to show the disciples his hands and feet. But the fact that the play is a liturgical drama, based on Luke 24:17-43, puts the play in the odd position of trying to distinguish real presence from mere representation by using

the latter to demonstrate the former. In reality, the play’s Christ is presumably not a priest, and so the sacrament is represented only. Instead of partaking in the body of Christ by consuming the bread, then, the two disciples are convinced by a purely visual phenomenon—akin to the Elevation of the Host that climaxes the Mass. Yet whereas the Elevation marks not a reenactment of the Passion but its actualization, the Beauvais disciple-actors request and witness a piece of story-theater complete with props. The disciples’ reaction to Christ-acting-as-pilgrim within the play thus models that of the spectators to the actor-as-Christ within the church. Neither disciples nor spectators partake of Christ’s body and blood; instead, all are to be

visually swayed (rather than digestively transformed) by the holy bread.

Was a consecrated wafer used in performance? The question is crucial, for Hardison’s distinction between ritual “action” and theatrical “representation” hinges on the difference.*? Karl Young hedges on the status of the Host-property: “Although the rubrics are not generous in information concerning mise-en-scéne, we may safely

assume the use of appropriate costume and stage furnishings.”°* While we cannot determine what sort of object was used for the bread, Young notes that in an analogous Peregrinus play at Saintes, a

rubric indicates that during the supper Christ distributes a water among those present. “It has been suggested [by E. K. Chambers, The

Medieval Stage] that this wafer is the consecrated Host from Holy Thursday, previously used in a Depositio on Good Friday and in an Elevatio early Thursday morning. In weighing this suggestion, unfortunately, we have few facts to guide us.” Since any Host left after an 4]

The Stage Life of Props

Elevatio was used in a subsequent communion, Young infers that the Saintes “hostia” is “merely some sort of unconsecrated wafer.”*? In short, we cannot tell if the “panem” called for in the Beauvais text was a loaf, an oble, or the consecrated Host itself.

Perhaps the clerical audience would simply have accepted the business with the bread as a narrative fiction in the service of a higher truth and would have remained untroubled by what seems in retrospect a historic shift from transubstantiation to representation, a shift that in some later contexts would be perceived as idolatry. From the

antitheatrical perspective exemplified by the anonymous Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (ca. 1380-1425), for example, the staged “Mass” is

a theatrical stunt performed by an actor that undermines the very authenticity of Christ’s Resurrection that the Beauvais play seeks to establish.*° Primed by the Mass, the contemporary Catholic audience may well have perceived no disjunction between stage symbolism and theological truth. But by nesting a symbolic consecration within a dramatic re-creation of Christ’s earthly return in disguise, this particular Easter drama hovers between transubstantiation and representation, miracle and spectacle.’’ It is this suture that the Reformation debates over the Eucharist would in due time prize open.

«This Bred That Make Us Thus Blind”: The Oble as Stage Property The riddle of the true nature of the Host is thematized in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament (ca. 1461), which was probably performed by a small East Anglian touring company.’® In this sole surviving English Host miracle play, the wafer is entirely removed from liturgi-

cal context and functions as a stage property. The tension between the two possible views of the Host implicit in the Beauvais Vespers service is now made explicit in the dramatic action itself, which concerns the abduction of the Host by a group of Jews intent on debunking the “cake” that masquerades as Christ. For the first time in an extant English text, an alternative to the orthodox view of the Host is dramatized on stage. As Cecilia Cutts has

42

Playing Host

demonstrated, heretical Lollard sentiments are placed in the mouths of Jews, a convenient Other onto which otherwise unacceptable heterodox attitudes could be projected.°*” The play’s Jews manhandle the Host, only to be convinced of Christ’s real presence in the water by a series of miracles; their conversion to Christianity confirms the didactic purpose behind all Host miracle plays. However, the response of a

late-fifteenth-century spectator to the tortured Host-property is

unknowable because it is contingent on his or her subjective response. For some audience members, the property-oble may have embodied the sacred qualities of the Host itself. Conversely, East Anglian Wycliffe sympathizers might (like the Jews in the play) have viewed the oble as no more than a stage property, in the Mass as well as on stage. In between these poles, some faithful might have distinguished between the sacred Host of the Mass and the oble-property of the stage but perceived no dissonance in the use of the latter to represent the former. These viewers would have understood the symbolic nature of the prop yet also accepted the doctrinal message of the play. In a community shot through by diverse and sometimes idiosyncratic religious beliefs and practices, we cannot tell precisely to what extent the appropriation by the stage of an oble “stolen” from the church would have registered as powerfully transgressive."© In the play, the wealthy merchant Aristorius steals the consecrated Host from church and sells it to Jonathas the Jew, who is skeptical of

the doctrine of real presence and wishes to ridicule “Your God, that is full mythety, in a cake!” CL. 285). For Jonathas and his Jewish fellows, as for the followers of Wycliffe, transubstantiation is nothing but a trick in which a sign passes itself off as the thing it represents: The beleve of thes[e] Cristen men is false, as I wene, For the[y] beleve on a cake—me think it is onkind— And all they seye how the prest dothe it bind, And by the might of his word make it flessh and blode— And thus by a conceite the|y] wolde make us blind— And how that it shud be He that deyed upon the rode. (Il. 199-204)

43

The Stage Life of Props

The Jews subject the Host to a series of indignities designed to prove that it is just bread, but in each case a miracle occurs. When the Jews strike the Host with daggers, it bleeds; when the Host is placed in a

cauldron of boiling oil, blood overflows the cauldron; and, most spectacularly, when the Host is cast into an oven, “Here the ovyn must rive asundere and blede owt at the cranys, and an image [of Christ] appere owt with woundys bleeding” (1. 712 s.d.) in order to chastise the Jews for tormenting his body. There is no indication in the text as to how these miracles are to be staged, but since the play was designed to go on tour, the miracles must have been somewhat adaptable to various actor-audience configurations. What would a contemporary audience have made of the Jews’ manhandling of the Host-property? While Bevington acknowledges that “The Play of the Sacrament seems to demand a comparable leap of faith from things seen to things unseen,” he explains the play’s

seemingly rude handling of the sacrament as_ devotionally efficacious: “Even though a comparison of this play with the mass

may strike us as risible, the similarity does reveal a continuing affinity between medieval religious drama and the ritual service from which it had originated.”*! Yet the play seems designed at times to provoke mirth rather than solemnity in the audience, for it paradoxically defends the doctrine of real presence by burlesquing the Mass itself. Before stealing the Host, for example, Aristorius drugs his foolish priest with “a drawte of Romney Red” and “a lofe of light bred” (Il. 340-41), an obvious parody of the communion bread and wine. Moreover, each indignity to which the Host is subjected corresponds to an episode of Christ’s Passion. Like Judas, Aristorius is bribed with money; the Host is pierced five times and nailed to a “post,” just like Christ’s body wounded on the cross. Jonathas even performs a mock

Eucharist at a table and repeats Christ’s crucial words: “Comedite, [hoc est] corpus meum” (1. 404). We are not that far from Marlowe’s

blasphemous Doctor Faustus, who sprinkles holy water and makes the sign of the cross in order to conjure the devil Mephistopheles." More outrageously, when Jonathas grasps the Host, it sticks to his hand, and he runs mad. When the other Jews nail the sacrament to a post and try to pull Jonathas away, his hand comes off and remains 44

Playing Host

a Jews 4-i| 7” 1s) éF‘i% sf| |+a Bi< fi Mowst Ree 4 ‘} , | } y- _ | . ‘te | {y .: _— > | ; —~ » * , -_ oY, ‘ : f° ) i f 7 ; \ er & | ¢ ‘ , ¥ |

| ae » b ies ,! | ;7.:|2b%_|1

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Skeptical Jews preparing to stab the Host in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, performed by the Medieval Players. (Photo: Tessa Musgrave.)

stuck to the Host. After a comic interlude featuring a quack doctor, the nails are plucked out and both hand and Host are wrapped in a cloth and boiled in a cauldron. In performance, the Host is somehow both holy sacrament and featured sight gag in a knockabout travesty of Christ’s Passion.* Once the actor playing the “image” of Jesus appears from the oven and chides Jonathas and his cronies for tormenting him, the repentant Jews decide to convert to Christianity. Jonathas repairs to the bishop, who leads a procession (possibly including the audience) to the “Jewys howse.” The bishop, presumably an actor in full ecclesi-

astical regalia, now performs a transubstantiation in reverse. He prays to the image that “From this rufull sight thou wilt reverte!” CL. 817), and in the play’s next theatrical coup, “Here shall the im[a]ge

change again into brede” (1. 825 s.d.). Once again, the text leaves 45

The Stage Life of Props

open how this miracle is to be accomplished; perhaps another oble is substituted for the trick property, and the actor slips behind a curtain or through a trap door. The bishop’s transubstantiation-in-reverse is an instance of pure theatricality that literalizes the notion of an unseen real presence by rendering it visible. Indeed, in the Play of the Sacrament, everything

is made visible, and that is its point. Ocular proof is necessary in order for the Jews and Aristorius, along with the doubting Thomases in the audience, to mend their ways; thus the epilogue insists on the historical veracity of the play’s events. The emotional effect of the play on the audience is impossible to determine, but its didactic purpose is clear. To use a modern analogy, it is as if the entire Brechtian arsenal of stage techniques—pastiche, properties that announce their prop-ness, self-consciously theatrical effects—were to be harnessed in order to shore up an ideology rather than demystify it.** Yet from the Lollard perspective, exemplified by the initially skeptical Jews, the bishop’s act can be conceived as an act of idolatry.

There is no doctrinal precedent for this miracle, and the very presumptuousness of the actor turning Christ back into the wafer seems to travesty the sacrament even as it affirms the clergy’s exclusive right to control it. Like the “remedy” Puck applies to Lysander’s eye in A

Midsummer Night’s Dream, the turning of Christ back into bread reabsorbs the aberrant element into the hegemonic system (erotic in one play, ecclesiastic in the other), but at the price of exposing the “cure” to skeptics in the audience as yet another form of illusion. The original East Anglian audience may well have included Lollards like William Barrow of Walden in Essex, who right before his execution in 1467 (just around the time the Croxton play was written) scorned

the attending priest: “Thys I wotte welle, that on Goode Fryday ye make many goddys to be putte in the sepukyr, but at Ester day they can not a ryse them selfe, but that ye moste lyfte them uppe and bere them forthe, or ellys they wylle ly stylle yn hyr gravys.”*?

At the end of the play, the wafer “stolen” by the lay actors is returned to the secure haven of the church. Or is it? The contemporaneous struggle between clergy and laity for control over the Host’s meaning is thrown into relief by a surviving ambiguity in the play’s 46

Playing Host

staging. The play-action on the Jews’ scaffold results in an impromptu Corpus Christi procession. The bishop commands: Now will I take this holy sacrament With humble hart and great devocion, And all we will gon with on[e] consent And beare it to chirche with sole|m]|pne procession. Now folow me, all and summe! And all tho that bene here, both more and lesse, This holy song, O sacrum convivium, Lett us sing all with grett swetnesse. (ll. 834-41)

Here the bishop seems to include the spectators, “both more and lesse,” in his injunction to bear the Host to the church, and Bevington glosses the action accordingly: “A singing procession escorts the host toward the church.” But it is unclear from the text whether the spectators follow the actors to a third scaffold (as, earlier, the bishop had enjoined “all ye peple that here are” to follow him to the Jew’s house), or into an adjacent church. Since the “bishop” lays the Host

upon the altar and proceeds to convert and baptize the Jews at a working baptismal font, the setting of the play’s ending is crucial. Does the spectator, along with the Host, leave the realm of representation behind, or does the zone of theater extend into the church? The text reads as follows: “Here shall the merchant and his prest go to the chirche, and the bisshop [attended by the procession] shall entre the chirche and lay the [h]ost ul[p]on the autere” (1. 865 s.d.). Faced with this crux, critics diverge. John M. Wasson suggests that the play was staged on a high embankment that still runs parallel to

the street just across from the west front of the Croxton church, while Gail McMurray Gibson thinks it may originally have been performed in the open market square at Angel Hill, just in front of the parish church of St. James at Bury St. Edmunds.*° In either case, a

church interior could have been used for the play’s climax.t’ Conversely, William Tydeman seriously doubts whether the play as written could have culminated in a real church.*® And what of the fact 47

The Stage Life of Props

that the preliminary banns indicate that the play was intended to go on tour, in which case a church might have been unavailable? Local clergy may understandably have balked at the spectacle of supposedly consecrated wafers being stolen from their church. It is there-

fore quite possible that the play was designed to conclude in a church, but that in towns in which the players were unable to secure access to a church, a simple scaffold containing prop versions of altar and font was substituted.*? In sum, for any given performance of the play we cannot determine whether the Host-property was reinstated on an actual church altar or merely placed on a scaffold representing the church interior. The Play of the Sacrament thus ends with a religious ritual whose impact on its audience was heavily coded both by the site of performance and by “the charged religious climate of East Anglia, with its simultaneous censure and sympathy for the problem of Lollardry.”°° The bishop is an actor in borrowed robes, and the conversion of the Jews a mock-conversion, since the actors were Christian and Jews mostly unknown, having been officially expelled from England in 1290. But what of the wafer itself, placed on altar or scaffold? Its final

status (as property? as sacrament? as “unsubstantiated” oble?) is ambiguous. Orthodox spectators could understand the bishop’s miracle as the confirmation of the priest’s divinely inspired power—he can even turn the Sacrament back into bread!—while skeptical spectators could view the play as a demystification of real presence that

exposed transubstantiation as a spectacular conjuring-trick performed by a lay actor pranked up in priestly garb.

The return of the Host to the church altar from whence it was stolen signals its reappropriation as ecclesiastical rather than theatrical property. But whether the altar is real or simulated, the rhetoric of the stage destabilizes the doctrinal message of the play. The audience’s awareness that it is watching a piece of theater performed by actors inexorably transforms the Host-property into a sign (albeit a sign of Christ’s real presence)—precisely the doctrinal mistake that the play itself is designed to refute. If the Host-property is placed on a genuine church altar rather than upon a scaffold, the irony whereby

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Playing Host

the spectator/participant is enjoined to deny the perception of the sacraments as signs simply becomes more apparent. In Sarah Beckwith’s words, “[R]itual and theatre hybridise each other, embarrassing the distinction between them.”*! As if acknowledging the uncertainty of the oble’s final status, the “bishop” cautions “yow creaturys and curatys that here be” to keep the vessels in which the bread of the sacrament is preserved (pyxis) securely locked, lest the sacrament once again devolve into a movable property beyond the secure ambit of the church.’ But given the centrality of the Last Supper to the fourteenth-century drama of wor-

ship, the appropriation of the oble by lay actors was perhaps inevitable. In hindsight, the bishop’s admonition at the close of the Play of the Sacrament serves more to expose the historical loosening of the church’s control over the wafer than to safeguard that control. An unconsecrated oble is a key property in the fifteenth-century N-Town Passion Play I, for example. The actor playing Jesus takes an oble in his hands, looks up toward heaven, and intones: Bretheryn, by the virtu of these wordys that rehercyd be, This that sheweth as bred to your apparens Is mad|e] the very flesche and blod of me— To the w[h]eche, they that wole be savyd must hive credens.*° The actor here arrogates the priestly role of elevating the Host before the laity, beyond the church service and as part of a civic celebration

(albeit one perhaps still under the auspices of the church). And despite the N-Town actor’s “gostly interpretacion” of the sacrament, which like the bishop’s warning in the Play of the Sacrament cautions

against losing track of the Host (“Of this lambe unete if owth be levith, iwis, / It shuld be cast in the clere fire and brent”), the play was designed for an itinerant company, as was the Play of the Sacrament.°* Once the unique property of the church, by the turn of the sixteenth century the oble (or something very much like it) was on tour as a stage property, where people may have paid for the privilege and enjoyment of deciding exactly what it was they were looking at.

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Defining the Host: Or, Where Is the Prop? I have argued that, with the advent of nonliturgical religious drama, the oble came to inhabit a liminal zone both theologically and geographically. Thus in the Play of the Sacrament, the oble functions as both sacred object and trick property. Stolen from the church, the

wafer is subjected to the rude handling of lay actors only to be returned to the altar, its miraculous status as the literal Body of Christ explicitly affirmed but implicitly undermined by the oble’s cir-

culation beyond the church as a stage property open to a variety of interpretations held by a heterogeneous audience.?? What can the historical ambiguities of this one example teach us about the status of props in general?

In my introduction, I insisted that the stage property is first and foremost a material fact. Yet to register as a prop, the object must be perceived by a spectator as a sign, and it is to the ambiguity of the object’s reception—to the object’s horizon of semiotic possibilities, as it were—that | now wish to turn, using the contested Host as an example. Having established that a range of responses to the Host was possible by the time it had been put into theatrical circulation in the fifteenth century, I wish to claim that three conflicting theological attitudes toward the Host—attitudes that were available by the late fifteenth century but which were codified in the following century by reformers Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, and Richard Hooker respectively—model three dominant critical understandings of how all props signify on stage. The gap between presence and representation of Christ’s body in

the Host became a fissure during the Reformation. The doctrine of real presence became a shibboleth in which the stakes could not have been higher: men lost their lives for failing to toe the appropriate line in any given year.°° Flouting orthodoxy, in 1520 Luther asserted his belief in the real presence but denied the doctrine of transubstantiation. Instead, Luther insisted on the related doctrine of consubstantiation, in which the body and blood of Christ coexisted “in, with, and under” the “accidents” of bread and wine. Luther explained his puzSO

Playing Host

zling doctrine, which he learned from the Hussites (who themselves learned it from Wycliffe), using the famous analogy of the fire and the iron. When combined, the fire lends its heat and light to the iron, yet neither loses its original identity. In 1520, Luther wrote: “While both bread and wine continue there, it can be said with truth, This is My body; this wine is My blood, and conversely.”°’ The French reformer John Calvin took the more extreme step of rejecting Christ’s bodily presence in the sacrament altogether. For Calvin, the bread and wine were symbols of Christ’s body and blood. Calvin took Christ’s use of the term est (“Hoc est corpus meum”) to mean significat. As Stephen Greenblatt points out, Calvin interpreted

the eucharistic formula as metonymy, a figure of speech in which “the sign borrows the name of the truth that it figures.”°> In this belief he joined the Swiss reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, and this view was to become increasingly influential as various treatises attempted to discredit and defend the real presence. Yet the two men’s positions were not identical. Whereas Calvin retained a belief in the “dynamic presence” of Christ's heavenly body in the souls of communicants partaking of the Eucharist, Zwingli denied any connection between the bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ other than the fact that the former recalled the latter.°” What does this abstruse debate over the material status of the Host have to do with stage properties? The three attitudes toward the Host I have adumbrated—which for convenience I shall call the Catholic, the Lutheran, and the Zwinglian—correspond to three possible ways of answering the question, “Where is the prop?” If one thinks of the bread and wine as sign-vehicles, and the Body and Blood of Christ as their signified, then these three approaches offer three distinct mod-

els for understanding how objects become signs on stage without effacing their material being. Let us take the example of a dramatic scene that requires a baby on stage. A director has two basic choices: she can either use a real baby

or some other object impersonating a baby. In the first instance, which semioticians call “iconic identity,” the baby both represents a baby and is one.®° Alternatively, our director can choose an iconic object (a doll, say), a quasi-iconic object (a pillow hidden in a blan51

The Stage Life of Props

ket) or a noniconic substitute (a visible water bottle). A “Catholic” view of stage properties would see the object as materially becoming its referent in performance. Just as the consecrated oble becomes the body and blood of Christ, so too the property (whether baby, doll, blanket, or bottle) becomes a substantive baby in performance. But theatrical performance is not a religious rite in which the actor stands in for the priest: no matter how effective the acting, objects on stage do not change their material substance (although ingested food may be an exception). It is true that if a real baby is used, the biological substance of object and referent are identical; nevertheless, unlike the Host, the infant playing Jesus does not become Jesus. It never

ceases to be the child of Mr. and Mrs. X. One might say that the iconic identity of object and referent is coincidental, since a nonidentical property can be equally effective on stage. Paradoxically, a real baby may distract the audience by playing its part badly: crying, wriggling about, and so forth. Occasionally, performers have tried to achieve the dramatic equivalent of pure presence. Suspicious of the representational strategies of traditional theater, in the 1960s the Living Theater’s Julian Beck and Judith Malina insisted that they were themselves on stage. Yet as Julia Houston has argued, “in theater the spectator’s own perception of the presence of signs will always mediate his understanding of the identity of whatever is presented on stage.”°! Since iconic identity (unlike eucharistic real presence) depends on the spectator’s perception, Judith Malina on stage becomes “Judith Malina” the sign. Outside of the church itself, whatever the circumstances of performance, the “Catholic” attitude is untenable. Yet post-Reformation accounts of the Eucharist offer useful analogues to the temporal transaction between actor, object, and audi-

ence. My example of the water-bottle baby is drawn from Peter Brook, who notes that an “empty object” can be remarkably effective on stage in the hands of a skilled actor. “A great actress can make one believe that an ugly plastic water bottle held in her arms in a certain way is a beautiful child. One needs an actor of high quality to bring about the alchemy where one part of the brain sees a bottle, and the other part of the brain, without tension, but with joy, sees the baby, D2

Playing Host

the parent holding the child and the sacred nature of their relationship. This alchemy is possible if the object is so neutral and ordinary that it can reflect the image that the actor gives to it.”° Brook here describes an imaginative version of Lutheran consub-

stantiation, a second model for locating the prop. In the case of Brook’s empty object, the actor with the bottle invites the audience to

share in a phenomenological transaction, “with the result that a banal object can be transformed into a magical one.”® This takes the form of a “Lutheran” double vision: with one part of the brain, the

audience perceives the bottle; with another, a baby. Adopting Luther’s analogy of the fire and the iron, we might say that the bottle is the iron and the baby the fire. In theological terms, while the baby’s “substance” is manifested, the bottle’s “accidence” remains: the baby

is truly present but never loses its bottleness. A strictly Lutheran approach concedes the bottle’s materiality but insists on the baby’s real presence. Yet Brook does not insist on the theatrical equivalent of transubstantiation, whereby the bottle becomes a baby. For this to take place, the bottle would have to cease being a material bottle entirely. Nor does Brook insist on literal consubstantiation, that the baby really

coexists with the bottle at an ontological level. Even in Brook’s alchemical theater, we are not participating in a Mass. Rather, Brook describes something that happens at the level of imagination, and it is on this imaginative level that I wish to explore an analogy between theater phenomenology and Lutheran consubstantiation. The attitude towards the property that I have been sketching, in which the object is not merely a sign for something absent but also the thing itself made imaginatively Gif not ontologically) present, has been usefully characterized by Bert O. States as the “phenomenological” attitude.** For States, it is not that the sacred object bodies forth

the literal presence of “the God,” as in the Catholic sacrament. Rather, it is that the God is made present to the imagination in a way

that makes it unnecessary to refer elsewhere for the God. In other words, the bottle on stage does not refer to an absent baby “elsewhere,” but “discloses” the baby to the audience as a unique, affective experience. This is what States means by a phenomenological 53

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approach to the world, which sets out to describe “our sensory experience with empirical objects,” or phenomena.”

For the phenomenologist, the theater is not merely a semiotic enterprise, “a passageway for a cargo of meanings being carried back to society (after artistic refinement) via the language of signs,” but an enterprise that invites the spectator into a different mode of experience.°° Like Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes, which does not require any assimilation to “real” shoes outside the frame, theater is a site of disclosure as well as a site of reference.°’ In the phenomenological attitude (as limned by Brook), it is not that the bottle becomes a real baby, but that the bottle offers us a tactile experience of “babyness” that includes but transcends the semiotic. Seeing the bottle in the hands of a great actress, we experience a double vision that par-

allels the Lutheran copresence of “substance” (baby) and “accidence” (bottle). Using terms redolent of the Mass itself, States writes: “In the image, a defamiliarized and desymbolized object is ‘uplifted

to the view where we see it as being phenomenally heavy with itself.”°° As Brook would put it, the bottle remains a bottle—but it is not merely the sign of the baby. Something essential is made present through the material vehicle of the prop.

One can take a more skeptical view. A “Zwinglian” attitude toward the bottle would deny the baby’s “presence” altogether and insist that the bottle is a mere symbol, a signifier standing in for the signified (“baby”). For the duration of performance, the “Zwinglian”

spectator may agree to accept the sign convention (bottle equals baby) but never confuses illusion with reality. The bottle is a fabrica-

tion that, far from disclosing genuine “babyness,” stands in for an absent, fictional character. In the twentieth century, we have a new name for this skeptical, Zwinglian perspective: we call it semiotics, the science of signs. In short, what I have called the Zwinglian and Lutheran attitudes

are complementary frames of reference for looking at art objects. From a semiotic perspective, the artwork is a site of reference that offers the thing’s meaning stripped of itself (sign); from a phenomenological perspective, the artwork is a site of disclosure, offering the thing-in-itself stripped of its sign functions (image). According to 54

Playing Host

States, neither attitude alone offers a full account of theatrical expe-

rience. Instead, performance can best be understood by shuttling between two frames of reference in what States calls “a kind of binocular vision” comprising “two modes of seeing.”°”

It would seem at first glance that the “Lutheran” approach combines both phenomenological and semiotic modes of vision. Yet as we have seen, the Lutheran view, while acknowledging the ongoing material reality of the object, retains the Catholic insistence of the real presence of the referent (the baby Jesus, say) behind the property: the infant is both baby and Jesus. This insistence on pure presence is problematic. Baby Jesus is not literally present in a performance of the York Birth of Jesus, for example, even if a real baby is used instead of a doll. Plainly, when we move from the ritual artifact to the stage property, we are no longer in the realm of the real presence of the signified. What, then, is made present via the prop—and how?

The Prop as Temporal Contract Yet a fourth theological position toward the Eucharist suggests an answer. Under Edward VI, the Anglican Church reached a new compromise intended to put to rest the bloody doctrinal battles over the Host. Following the English martyr John Frith, the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker distinguished between spiritual and sacramen-

tal eating. Frith had written that “the spyrytuall and necessarye eatynge and drinkynge of [Christ’s] bodye and bloude . . . is not receyued with the teth and bellye, but wyth the eares and fayth.”” Hooker’s contribution was to shift the sacrament from its physical location in the Host, the actualized body and blood of Christ, to the recipient of communion: “The real presence of Christ’s . . . body and blood is not therefore to be sought for in the sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the sacrament.”’! The body and blood of Christ are not localized in the sacrament itself but perceived and partaken

by the believer through faith. The consecrated elements impart Christ, but without conversion of the substance of the bread and wine by transubstantiation or consubstantiation; the ingestion of D5

The Stage Life of Props

Christ is spiritual, not material. This doctrine, whereby the efficacy of the sacrament depends on the spiritual state of the communicant rather than on the formula recited by the priest, became known as receptionism or “participation.” Anthony B. Dawson has linked the Anglican doctrine of participation to the way that theater spectators and actors contractually produce fictional beings.’* For Dawson, the actor’s body becomes what Dawson calls a “person,” an amalgam of actor and character. In performance, the actor’s bodily presence combines with his discursive representation as a sign of the character to produce “personation.” Like the body of Christ in Anglican doctrine, the character is both spiritually present and materially represented. Stretching the analogy between Anglican Eucharist and bodily performance, Dawson argues that the character/actor’s personation allows the “participation” of the audience—Hooker’s term for the spiritual ingestion of Christ’s grace. By analogy to the Anglican belief that (in Joel Altman’s summary) “there is real presence in the sacrament only after it is partaken by the faithful communicant,” Dawson claims that the character is produced not by the actor alone but by those spectators who actively “participate” the ritual event.” Dawson’s idea that presentation, in which the actor’s body is seen and felt by an audience, coexists with representation, in which the audience understands that the actors body represents something other than itself, recapitulates States’s opposition between phenomenological and semiotic attitudes to art objects. In this “Anglican” view, the

actors body is both a site of reference and a site of disclosure: “Unlike for the Reformed Protestants . . . the sacrament is not simply representation. At the same time, ‘presence’ is no longer absolute and unquestioned, behind the appearances of bread and wine, but rather is itself troubled or mediated—unreal but also efficacious.” Once we shift our focus from bodies to objects, Dawson’s appropriation of Anglican reception-theory answers the theoretical question with which I began: where to locate the prop. Like a character, a theatrical sign is not a semiotic given but a temporal contract between actors and audience, in which identity is superimposed on a material

56

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object. Such a contract is tenuously constituted in time and thus subject to moment-by-moment renegotiation for the duration of performance. The notion of the property as a temporal contract embodied in and ratified by a material object explains the theatrical efficacy of unlim-

ited sign-vehicles.” A real baby, a pillow, a water bottle, or even a mimed baby will satisfy the most skeptical “Zwinglian” spectator as long as it is a “good-enough baby.” It is important to note that there is no such thing as a prop in isolation; where a property is, there an actor must be. In each case, the actor proposes an imaginative contract: accept X (baby / pillow / bottle) for Y (baby). For instance, if an

actor decides that a property that has up until now been a walking stick suddenly represents a sword, the spectator will either eventually “get it” and accept the semiotic shift, or else refuse to suspend disbelief, thereby rejecting the contract. If the idea of the prop as contract no longer seems a burning issue, the various attitudes to the Host that I have described serve as useful

reminders that stage properties need not work in the same way for everyone in any given performance. Whatever the material nature of the object, the audience is in theory free to adopt any of the three “reformist” positions I have sketched out (since, as I have shown, the “Catholic” position, which denies representation, is untenable with

regard to stage properties). Faced with a water bottle on stage, a “Lutheran” spectator fuses semiotic and phenomenological perspectives and perceives both the bottle and a real baby (Brook’s position); a “Zwinglian” spectator perceives a bottle that merely represents a baby, without getting swept up into the illusion; and an “Anglican”

spectator accepts a virtual baby whose presence is (in Dawson’s phrase) “unreal but also efficacious.” Any audience may contain a range of predispositions, but the actor and director can propose and encourage certain imaginative contracts (““Well, this is the forest of Arden”). Yet it is the individual spectator who ultimately determines what sort of imaginative contract is entered into, and it is only the spectator who walks out of the theater asking, “What was that bottle supposed to be?” who has failed to keep his end of the imaginative bargain. Figuratively speaking, he has not yet made it into the Church.

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The Stage Life of Props

In short, the property’s location depends on our critical angle of vision. The place of the property may vary from spectator to spectator, and it is my intention here to argue for a pluralistic approach that refuses to flatten the prop. Returning to our analogy of the Host, | have argued for the theatrical equivalent of what theologians term receptionism, “the doctrine that the efficacy of the consecrated elements depends upon the spiritual state of the communicant” rather than upon the transformed material substance of the object.’° Such a contract cannot be legislated in advance, for the spectator’s “reception” of the material object on stage determines the nature of the

property she perceives. However, the director and/or actor may encourage a specific form of reception by manipulating conditions of performance such as distance, scale, visibility, and iconicity. Just as the church enforced a visual rather than a tactile experience of the Host by fencing off the chancel from the nave, so a spectator attending King Lear who is confronted with an elaborate simulacrum of the court of Louis XIV will be primed for a different theatrical experience, a different species of temporal contract, than a spectator faced with three cubes on an otherwise bare thrust stage. A performance of the Croxton play that culminates in a church will produce a quite different experience than one that culminates on a scaffold, even if the script remains unaltered. | have lingered on the physical as well as the theological dynamics of the Host because although spectators may bring a range of predispositions to the theater, the conditions of performance directly affect the spectator’s reception of objects on stage. As we have seen, the sacred bread originally belonged to the mundane world of the celebrants but was gradually abstracted and obscured by church doctrine and architecture until, with the coming of the oble and the Elevation of the Host, all powers of transformation belonged to the priest. As church objects such as the Bible itself (which was being translated by Lollards) threatened to pass into the hands of the laity, raising concerns about who was fit to control religion, plays such as the Croxton sacrament play dramatically illustrated the possibility that actors could inflect the meaning of the Host and wrest control of ritual away

from the clergy. With the arrival of the Anglican compromise 58

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between Catholic “real presence” and Zwinglian “real absence,” and the return of ordinary bread and wine to the English-language communion service (as officially laid down in the Second Prayer Book of 1552), the Host came full circle. Responsibility for spiritual ingestion of the body and blood of Christ now rested with the communicant rather than the priest. Anglican communicants themselves “partici-

pated” the sacrament, for the bread and wine remained materially what they were before consecration, as in the original Greek Thanksgiving.

The history of postclassical western drama can be understood as a

continual struggle to demystify the property on the one hand (by insisting on its ordinariness) and to resacralize it on the other (by

insisting on its otherness). After wresting the wafer from the precincts of the church, vernacular drama has continued to struggle with the paradox that the object’s magic is somehow both external to and inherent within the object—that is, if the object is held to be magical at all. To return to Fraser’s dictum, “[T]he rude handling of

sacred totems is what the drama is all about.” From Marlowe’s satanic parody of the Mass in Doctor Faustus to Mrs. Venable elevat-

ing her monstrous son’s poetry in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, theater alternately insists on the magical life of objects and relentlessly exposes that magic as a mere conjuring trick—just play.“’

The tension between theater’s semiotic and phenomenological lives is captured in the ambiguity of what we call acting and the Elizabethans called playing. Each term connotes both feigning and performing, representation (mimesis) and action (kinesis). Like the the-

ater, the Eucharist can be perceived either as an act of idolatrous imitation or as a rite in which the god himself is bodied forth. For late medieval audiences, the consecrated wafer was at once the material presence of Christ’s body and a sign of Christ’s body.’® The riddle of

the Host rested on a paradox: the more the church insisted on the material fact of Christ’s presence in the Sacrament—first by allegorizing the Mass, then by displaying the Host in Corpus Christi processions, and finally by sponsoring the performance of doctrinally correct plays in the vernacular by lay actors—the more the Host 59

The Stage Life of Props

resembled a prop. As concrete synecdoches of performance, all prop-

erties are embodied symbols, felt absences.’’ Stage properties not only impersonate other objects but perform as objects. In order to understand their double life as sign and thing, we must derive “gostly sustenawns” from the shifting matrices of the stage as well as the legislation of the word.°°

60

—S | cf A incshies Interests The Bloody Handkerchief on the Elizabethan Stage Old stancher! (Pause.) You... remain. —Hamm in ENDGAME

9 n my last chapter, | argued that the prop in performance is not a static or stable signifier whose meaning is predetermined by the playwright. Rather, the prop’s impact is mediated both by the gestures of the individual actor who handles the object, and by the horizon of interpretation available to historically situated spectators at a given time. Although we can speculate about what spectators

at the original performance of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament thought they saw when the mysterious wafer appeared “sacred [consecrated| newe,” we will never know for certain. Yet the implications

are radical, since the play could have been understood either as confirming the real presence of Christ in the Host (as its anonymous author or authors surely intended), or as undermining real presence by equating the Host itself with a prop and the Mass with a piece of theater. Closer to our own time, Declan Kiberd has pointed out the very different interpretation Irish and English audiences place on the revolver taken by an English engineer to Ireland in George Bernard Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Ireland (1904): whereas English audiences assume the gun is unloaded, Irish audiences assume the reverse.' The prop springs to life as much in the imagination of spectators as in the hands of actors or the words of the playwright. Precisely because of its radical instability as a theatrical signifier, playwrights have seized on the prop as a tool for destabilizing the 61

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conventional symbolism previously embodied by the now ambiguous object. Although they cannot legislate the prop’s impact, playwrights can seek to orchestrate the prop’s movement through con-

crete stage space and linear stage time. They can also shape the audience’s reception of the prop through dialogue and stage directions. The four case studies that follow in this book assume the playwright’s conscious use of the prop as a dramaturgical tool for shaping dramatic and theatrical signification. This is especially the case dur-

ing periods of semiotic crisis, when the meaning of the object the prop represents is (quite literally) up for grabs. I begin with Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Kyd, whose play The Spanish Tragedy was among the most influential of all Elizabethan

dramas. I wish to show that in the course of launching revenge tragedy as a popular genre, Kyd appropriated and sensationalized a

long theatrical tradition of staging sacred cloth in the devotional drama—and that he did so not in order to reform the stage, but for decisively commercial ends. Nor was Kyd alone; other, equally opportunistic playwrights followed in his wake, including Shakespeare. Othello’s mysterious strawberry-spotted handkerchief, dyed (we are told) in fluid lovingly extracted from maidens’ hearts and possessed of magical powers, is a direct descendant of Hieronimo’s bloody napkin. After the Reformation took hold in England, many stage properties familiar from the drama of worship performed by urban trade guilds became politically and religiously suspect. While Elizabethan society debated whether theatrical representation was acceptable on

the one hand or idolatrous on the other, Elizabethan authorities sought to curb the theatrical use of Catholic symbolism through legislation. Thus a letter dated May 27, 1576, from the Ecclesiastical

Commissioners of York to the bailiff and burgesses of Wakefield decreed that “no Pageant be used or set furth wherin the Ma|jes|tye of God the Father, God the Sonne, or God the Holie Ghoste or the administration of either the Sacramentes of baptisme or of the Lordes

Supper be counterfeyted or represented, or anythinge plaied which tende to the maintenaunce of superstition and idolatrie or which be contrarie to the lawes of god [and] or of the realme.”* The Corpus 62

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Christi plays fell victim to religious reform combined with the consolidation of royal over civic power.’ The reformed English church abolished all processions in 1547, and the feast of Corpus Christi was expunged from the church calendar in 1548. The play-cycles themselves were censored out of existence by 1580.7 The end of the mysteries set the stage for the spectacular rise of professional companies based in public playhouses, who turned formerly “popish” vestments to satirical ends. On the English stage, pandering to the audience’s presumed anti-Catholic sentiment, rather than instructing it in doctrinal orthodoxy, became the secular drama’s concern. With the demise of the mysteries vanished such formerly central properties as the eucharistic wafer itself.? Yet the Mass and its symbols did not fade from the awareness of early modern audiences once their overt representation was banished from the stage. The Elizabethan playwrights who wrote for a nascent commercial theater were eager to exploit the rituals of the old religion, although their aim was not necessarily the Reformist propaganda exemplified by Cromwell’s ageressively polemical playwright, John Bale. The political space for expressions of dissent was restricted, but in the new economy of the sign developed by commercially minded playwrights, radically different imaginative contracts with spectators drawn from all levels of society became necessary in order to build an audience largely made up of individual, urban ticket-buyers rather than regional communities united by civic and devotional concerns.® And while the new commercial drama risked provoking the authorities by presenting religious material in verbal form, it could smuggle religious imagery and content onto the stage by appealing to the spectators’ imagination and memory through gestures and physical objects. Marvin Carlson’s concept of ghosting offers a useful way of understanding the mechanism whereby the commercial Elizabethan drama invoked religious symbols and ideas that could no longer be directly represented on stage with impunity. Carlson reminds us that spectators bring associations from previous productions with them to the theater, and that these “ghosts” color their experience of the current performance.’ When Elizabethan audiences saw Edward Alleyn play Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, for example, Alleyn’s perfor63

The Stage Life of Props

mance would have been ghosted by his appearances as Marlovian overreachers such as Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus. According to Carlson:

In semiotic terms, we might say that a signifier, already bonded to a signified in the creation of a stage sign, is moved in a different context to be attached to a different signified, but when that new bonding takes place, the receiver’s memory of the previous bonding remains, contaminating or “ghosting” the new sign.®

One concrete example of such ghosting was the Elizabethan players’ use of actual church vestments and properties for satiric ends. In one familiar example, Marlowe’s Mephistopheles wears the robes of a Franciscan friar (and thus confirms the audience’s presumed suspicion that all friars are devilish).

Another striking example, and the focus of this chapter, is the device of the bloody handkerchief popularized by Thomas Kyd’s spectacularly successful Spanish Tragedy (1587-92). As it moves through the play, Kyd’s bloody handkerchief invokes previous performances by bloody cloths, even as it weaves them into an original narrative. Indeed, at the play’s climax the ghost in the bloody handkerchiel’s folds is the Host itself: the real presence of Christ’s body as it was embodied in the sacrament of the Eucharist and metonymically invoked by various sacred cloths on the late medieval stage. By the time of The Spanish Tragedy—set in a Catholic country loathed and feared by a great many in Kyd’s audience—the Protestant Lord’s Supper had replaced the Catholic Mass in the Anglican Church. The Host itself was officially understood to be a commemorative symbol and sign of Christ’s spiritual presence in the sacrament rather than the transubstantiated body of Christ.? Meanwhile, the commercial Elizabethan playhouses filled a theatrical and spiritual void left by the suppression of the devotional Corpus Christi drama on the one

hand and the rituals of the Catholic Church on the other.'? As Stephen Greenblatt remarks, the players were willing to invest large sums to purchase Catholic clerical garments because the acquisition 64

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of such garments “was a significant appropriation of symbolic power” that still resonated powerfully for audiences.!!

“What happens when the piece of cloth |here, an ecclesiastic cloak] is passed from the church to the playhouse?” asks Greenblatt. “A consecrated object is reclassified, assigned a cash value, trans-

ferred from a sacred to a profane setting, deemed suitable for the stage.”!? By analyzing Kyd’s subversion of the tradition linking holy cloths and sacred blood in medieval drama, I wish to demonstrate that the bloody napkin is a ghostly palimpsest that absorbs meaning

through intertextual borrowing as well as through fresh symbolic resonance. Further, I wish to argue that Kyd’s appropriation of the handkerchief was not didactic, as has been argued by recent scholars

of Reformation drama, but an opportunistic bid to recast the late medieval “contract of transformation” embodied by bloody cloth as an addictive “contract of sensation.” But to understand Kyd’s bold revision, we must first trace the property-cloth’s origins back to the very beginning of liturgical drama.

Holy Cloths and Sacred Blood: The Medieval Heritage He is not here, the sothe to say. —Wakefield PLAY OF THE RESURRECTION

The first dramatic cloth on the English stage was the symbolic gravecloth (linteum) that provided ocular proof of Christ’s resurrection at the climax of the Visitatio Sepulchri, the tenth-century Easter liturgical drama that reenacted the visit of the three Marys to Christ’s tomb. In the case of the Regularis Concordia, a liturgical script prepared at

Winchester by Saint Ethelwold, bishop of Winchester, some time between 965 and 975 for Benedictine use in England, this propertycloth tangibly linked the Visitatio to three preceding ceremonies: the Adoratio, Depositio, and Elevatio. On Good Friday, a veiled cross or crucifix was gradually uncovered by two deacons before being laid on the altar and venerated by each member of the congregation in

turn (Adoratio). The deacons then wrapped the cross in the linen 65

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cloth and “buried” it in an improvised “sepulchre,” a part of the altar with a curtain stretched around it (Depositio). A “watch” was then posted to “guard” the tomb until the night of the Lord’s resurrection; the cross was then “raised” on Easter Sunday before the congregation was admitted to Mass (Flevatio). After the Elevatio, the linen cloth was left behind on the altar for use in the drama that followed—possibly the earliest liturgical drama to be sung in English churches.’ According to the text of the Visitatio in the Regularis Concordia, as

set down by Saint Ethelwold, the monk who represents the angel summons the three Marys to the altar by singing, “Come and see the place [where the Lord had been laid, alleluia].” The written instructions then read: “Saying this, let him rise, and lift the veil and show them the bare place of the cross, with nothing other than the shroud

in which the cross had been wrapped. Seeing which, let them set down in that same sepulchre the thuribles which they had carried, and let them take up the shroud and spread it out before the clergy; and, as if demonstrating that the Lord has risen and is not now wrapped in it, let them sing this antiphon [‘The Lord has risen from the sepulchre’]. And let them lay the cloth upon the altar.”!* In this liturgical drama, sung by the clergy in Latin at the end of matins on Easter morning, the linen cloth represents Christ’s cerements. David Bevington notes that the ceremony is simple, dramatic only in the sense that it reenacts a biblical event: “[T]he costumes are

clerical, the simple hand props are ecclesiastical artifacts, and the ‘stage’ is the choir and altar of the church.”!? Nevertheless, J. L. Styan highlights the dramatic importance of the shroud: “More than just to direct movement and gesture, Ethelwold’s business with the property cloth causes it to acquire a symbolic quality and intensity. The magic

cloth makes its point first when it is seen to be cast away and then when it is flourished.”'° Christ’s presence is paradoxically demonstrated by his absence, which is symbolized by the metonymic piece of cloth.

Visual display of the cloth to the congregation is frequent in eleventh- and twelfth-century European versions of the Visitatio, although there are variations. In some eleventh-century versions,

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both shroud (linteum) and head-cloth (sudarium) are displayed as ocular proof. Thus in the Visitatio doubttully ascribed to Aquileia, Italy, “two brethren [who represent John and Peter] display the shroud to the others, saying: ‘Behold, O companions, behold the shroud and head-cloth, and the body is not to be found in the sepulchre.’”!” Here

the linen head-cloth may also represent Mary’s kerchietf, the legendary cloth in which the Christ child was swaddled and later, according to tradition, in which Christ was buried.'® The twelfthcentury St. Lambrecht Visitatio calls for the Marys to remove from the sepulcher both the “sudarium quod fuerat super crucis caput” [the kerchief which had been over the head of the cross] and the “filacterium quo involuta crux fuerat” [the woven cloth in which the cross had been wrapped].'? As in the Aquileia play, both cloths are

given equal forensic weight, the equivalent of Ethelwold’s single prop.7?

The first substance absorbed by sacred cloth on the English stage is thus not the real presence but the felt absence of Christ’s resurrected body. The cloth is shown to the congregation as the culminating moment of a divine narrative known intimately by all present. It is amnemonic device that reinforces a preexisting contract of revela-

tion: a belief in Christ’s resurrection that is based on faith in the unseen. In a sense, the shroud is not proof at all. Rather, the shroud is the buffer between audience and player that signals the end of the story and the beginning of faith.*! By the time of the vernacular Corpus Christi cycles in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, which current scholarship suggests developed alongside the liturgical drama rather than evolving out of it, another, more explicitly magical cloth had appeared. Freed from the verbal constraints of the liturgy, which may have limited the expansion of the sung Latin drama, the urban play cycles enthusiastically elaborated on Scripture by introducing apocryphal characters, properties, and dialogue. The Corpus Christi pageant of the Road to

Calvary thus introduced the legendary figure of Veronica, who placed a cloth against Christ’s face only to find it magically imprinted with Christ’s features.** The image was of course prestained on the

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cloth, and in the Lucerne Passion play the Veronica actor repeats the action of visual display familiar from the liturgical drama by lifting the painted cloth toward the people.” The Veronica cloth features in only two surviving English mystery cycle texts, York and N-Town, and Veronica herself appears only in the N-Town Passion Play II. On the way to Calvary, Jesus is met by Veronica, who admonishes the crowd: Ah! you sinful people, why fare thus? For sweat and blood he may not see. Alas! holy prophet, Christ Jesus, Careful is my heart for thee. And she wipes his face with her kerchief.

Jesus responds: Veronica, thy wiping does me ease. My face is clean that was black to see. I shall them keep from all mis-ease That looken on thy kerchief and remember me.** Here the sacred cloth is not ocular proof of the Resurrection, as in the Visitatio. Veronica’s napkin is a sacred relic, the very sight of which is said to ward off evil. Christ’s sweat, blood, and dirt magically trans-

form the handkerchief into an apotropaic talisman. The symbolic cloth that once proposed a contract of revelation, based on the end of

narrative and the beginning of faith, now proposes what may be called a “contract of transformation.” When Jesus claims, “I shall them keep from all mis-ease / That looken on thy kerchief and remember me,” he transforms the napkin from a representational prop to a supernatural relic worthy of veneration in its own right. In the York Shearmen’s Road to Calvary play, it is the third Mary who bears the relic that becomes imprinted with Christ’s features: Ah lord, give leave to clean thy face. ... Behold! How he has shewed his grace, 68

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He that is most of main. This sign shall bear witness Unto all people plain, How God’s Son here guiltless Is put to peerless pain.??

While the third Mary repeats the familiar gesture of displaying the prop to the audience, the dramatic emphasis here (as elsewhere in the York cycle) is on Christ’s human suffering as well as on the cosmic implications of his sacrifice. The precise substance the cloth “cleanses” is ambiguous (sweat? blood? dirt?) but clearly the residue of acute physical suffering. To the medieval spectator, of course, the tension between Christ’s humanity and his divinity may not have registered, and the napkin would still have been understood as a comforting symbol of divine grace. Yet in the York Shearmen’s play the handkerchiefs significance cannot be separated from the corporeal extrusions of a body in pain, the very sight of which may have been interpreted as salvific. Whether or not Kyd was aware of the Veronica cloth, which may have appeared in the York cycle as late as 1569, he was able to draw on the powerful religious implications of stage blood. Clifford Davidson has argued that in the late medieval vernacular plays, stage blood was not sensationalized, as it was on the Elizabethan stage. Rather, the spectacle of stage blood offered the spectator an opportunity for devotional “ocular experience” whose effects were understood to be

spiritually transformative.*° “Such bloody and violent effects,” argues Davidson, “were... seen as indicative of the gift of grace to all

humankind and as reflective of the saving power of the beloved Christ; hence that which for men and women of a later time would be unendurable would potentially have precipitated a deeply spiri-

tual experience.””’ Even the fourteenth-century author of the antitheatrical Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge admitted, “ofte sithis by siche miraclis pleyinge men and wymmen, seinge the passioun of Crist and of his seintis, ben movyd to compassion and devocion, wepinge bitere teris.”*®

As a potentially transformative sight, blood was continually fore69

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srounded in the Corpus Christi plays. In York and N-Town, for example, Christ visibly sweats both water and blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the N-Town Passion Play II specifies that Christ should be stripped and beaten with whips “til he is all blody.””? At one point in the Wakefield Scourging a torturer remarks, “Lett me rub on the rust, that the bloode down glide / As swythe.”’? By the

time of his crucifixion, Christ's body was covered not only with blood and sweat but often with spittle and mucus as well; “I shall

spitt in his face, though it be fare shining,” remarks the same Wakefield torturer.’?! According to Davidson, “[T]o devout viewers of the plays, or even to those less devout, the late medieval civic religious drama represented blood in these circumstances as sacred, not as the impure or polluted result of violence.”*’? Christ’s white leather garment (or “wounded” shirt at York) was visibly imbued with the

miraculous traces of his sacred blood and thus worthy of veneration.*? While recent scholars have drawn attention to the ambiguity of blood symbolism in the later Middle Ages, the historical evidence on the whole substantiates Davidson’s thesis that the mere sight of stage blood in late medieval Europe was understood by many to have curative and/or salvific powers.°* The bloody corpse of Christ and the linen burial shroud literally come together in the Corpus Christi Play of the Death and Burial. In the York Butchers’ version, for example, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus remove Christ’s body “Nowe blemisght and bolned with bloode” from the cross, wrap it in the “sudarye” and entomb it in a sepulcher.’? (Whereas the liturgical Depositio ceremony had taken place in a church, Bevington speculates that the Butchers’ play may have been staged in a fixed location with a number of simultaneously visible scaffolds, since the action would have proved awkward if not impossible on a movable pageant wagon.)*° The wrapped body is

anointed with ointments, and the kneeling men stress the salvific power of God’s blood once more: “This Lorde so goode, / That schedde his bloode, / He mende youre moode, / And buske on this blis for to bide!”?’

The Corpus Christi Play of the Resurrection, which follows the Harrowing of Hell, then incorporates the Visitatio playlet virtually 70

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unaltered from its tenth-century form (apart from its translation into English). Thus in the Wakefield version the three Marys approach the sepulcher and encounter two white-robed angels, one of whom informs the women: He is not here, the sothe to say. The place is voide therin he lay; The sudary here se ye may Was on him laide.’®

As in the original Visitatio, the cloth is displayed to the audience as ocular proof of Christ’s resurrection. This time, however, its folds have visibly contained not the metonymic substitutions of the Latin liturgical drama (the cross, the Host) but the actual blood-soaked body of the player-Christ, who rose from the sepulcher just before the arrival of the Marys and proclaimed: Behold my body, how Jues it dang With knottys of whippys and scorges strang! As stremes of well, the bloode out-sprang

On every side. ... The leste drope I for the[e] bled Might clens the[e] soyn— All the sin the warld within If thou had done.*”

No longer a blank cloth displayed to and by monastic clergy as a symbol of Christ’s bodily absence, the Corpus Christi “sudarye” was a theatrical talisman elevated in the public gaze as a metonymic substitute for the longed-for Host. Like the sight of the elevated Host itself, the sight of the bloody cloth was now believed to “cleanse sin.”*° Unlike the Visitatio shroud, the miraculous Corpus Christi

shroud heralded not only revelation but transformation, and this shift was reflected in its changed appearance. The unstained cloth offered to monastic brethren as symbolic proof of the Resurrection had now visibly absorbed the magical substance of Christ’s blood. /1

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For many spectators, denied communion with their savior except for once a year and starved for tactile evidence of salvation, the bloodstained cloth might well have seemed to possess redemptive

powers. And once the Corpus Christi plays dwindled—only a decade or so before Kyd’s play packed the Rose playhouse—the comforting sight of “God’s blood” must indeed have been a painfully felt absence.

Demystifying the Handkerchief: From Drama of Devotion to Drama of Iconoclasm? Wee bee blynd [unless God] open our eyes, and take away the kercheefe or veyle that is before them, yea and give us a newe sight. —John Calvin

What happened to the long theatrical tradition linking holy cloth to

sacred blood once the Protestant Reformation reached England? Scholars have recently argued that in mid-sixteenth-century England, a newly commercial, Protestant drama severed the link between the stage and devotional “ocular experience.” Drama dealing explicitly with religious and political matters was banned by the Proclamation of May 16, 1559, and the Corpus Christi plays were defunct by 1580. While stage blood continued to flow liberally in the

new Elizabethan playhouses as tragedians drew increasingly on Seneca (whose plays became newly available in complete English translation from 1581), by the time of The Spanish Tragedy, the sight of stage blood had apparently lost its devotional efficacy as salvific ocular experience for English spectators.

As has been often noted, Protestantism’s shift of emphasis from the priestly observance of the sacrament toward the spiritual state of the communicant led to a suspicion of the outer, material means of Christian ritual. In extreme cases, this meant the suspicion that all images—whether mental or physical—were idols.*' For the reformers, the idolatry of theatrical representation (worship of the image) was eclipsed by the new “logolatry” (worship of the word). Michael [2

Absorbing Interests

O’Connell summarizes this “sudden psychic revolution” against a complex of medieval religious practices (such as the cult of images, the sacraments, vestments, relics, and pilgrimage) as a shift from the “incarnationalism” of late medieval culture to “the textualization of God’s body, the turning of the incarnation (and the devotions and rit-

ual practices associated with it) from expression in physical and material ways to predominantly textual and verbal modes.”** The theater came under attack because, from a phenomenological perspective, “[t]heatrical presence is not mere sign but a use of corporeality to ‘body forth’ the fiction it portrays.”*? In other words, the very phenomenology of theater seemed to turn objects into idols, and a steady stream of antitheatricalist tracts accused the theater of doing just that.** Paul Whitfield White concurs that debunking idolatry was a high priority for Puritan activists but conclusively demonstrates that, far from rejecting the drama outright, beginning with John Bale’s virulently anti-Catholic plays in the 1530s, Protestant zealots embraced the drama as a potent didactic weapon in the fight against Papistry. “Well into the 1570s, we find Protestant religious drama calling for further religious reform within the Church of England, and as recent theatrical criticism has demonstrated, the more activist Protestants of later years employed the London playhouses to advance their own ideological interests.”*? At least until around 1580, many reformers believed that the theater—the very temple of idolatry—could be harnessed as a weapon to expose idolatry itself. In Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage, Huston Diehl picks up the historical thread of White’s argument and claims that London’s public playhouses continued to be just such a tool of reform after 1580. She argues that Elizabethan playwrights such as Kyd and Shakespeare fomented a “drama of iconoclasm” that modeled new, Protestant ways of seeing for spectators still emotionally attached to the old religion. Like O’Connell, Diehl discerns a shift from the “purely bodily seeing” of the late Middle Ages to a “transcendent [or intellectual] kind of seeing” encouraged by the reformed church.*° Diehl highlights this shift by contrasting the veneration of the Schone Maria of Regensburg, an image believed to possess curative and salvific powers, with the strip13

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ping of the altars under the Protestant king Edward VI, illustrated in the 1570 edition of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. For Diehl, Foxe’s hugely influential work “defines an emerging Protestant aesthetics, one that restrains the power of the image to elicit awe and wonder by forcing the spectator to become conscious about how it signifies.”*’ According to Diehl, Elizabethan plays worked in very much the same way, demystifying the power of idolatrous images by exposing their potential to deceive the credulous onlooker.

Among the formerly totemic objects to come under reformist scrutiny was the handkerchief itself.*° Reformation theologians debated whether such objects as Veronica’s napkin and the handkerchiefs sent forth by St. Paul to cure the sick (Acts 19:11-12) were

magical totems or sacramental signs, and Calvin himself warned against fetishizing such handkerchiefs: “For which cause the Papists are more absurd, who wrest this place unto their relics; as if Paul sent

his handkerchiefs that men might worship and kiss them in their honor; as in Papistry they worship Francis’ shoes and mantle, Rose’s girdle, St. Margaret’s comb and such like trifles.”*? According to Diehl, Calvin’s project of demystifying sacred handkerchiets found a theatrical parallel in plays such as The Spanish Tragedy and Othello, which dramatize the deceptiveness of supposedly magical handker-

chiefs. For Diehl, the mutation of the handkerchief from magical totem to demystified sign recapitulates the story of holy objects in the first half of the sixteenth century. The “real presences” of the divine-made-visible in sacred images (the drama of devotion) are replaced by the “felt absences” of Protestant signs that deliberately rupture the medieval bond between the visible and the invisible (the

drama of iconoclasm). In Diehl’s summary, “The handkerchief is

thus a contested site in Reformation disputes about the nature, power, and validity of ocular proof. What is centrally at issue in the commentaries on Paul’s handkerchiefs, as well as in popular devotion to relics like Veronica’s and Abagarus’s napkins, is the role of sight in the practice of faith.”?° Without wishing to devalue Diehl’s and O’Connell’s provocative argument that a skeptical, Protestant mode of seeing purged an idol-

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atrous Catholic one within a quarter of a century, I believe it more useful to see the two attitudes to sacred objects—as totemic images on the one hand and representational signs on the other—as extreme points on a continuum of audience reception at the most turbulent stage in English religious history. Within a single lifetime, England had gone from Catholicism within the Roman Church, to Catholicism without the pope, to systematic reform under Edward VI, to Catholicism once more under Mary I, and finally to a moderate Protestantism under the Anglican compromise reached by Elizabeth. Indeed, the Lollard heresy demonstrated that conflicting understandings of the relationship between sign and signified were available to spectators at Mass, or at a miracle play, prior to the Reformation. This dissonance erupted into full-fledged semiotic crisis once

Protestantism took hold in England.?! It therefore seems to me implausible to argue that an audience attending Othello or The Spanish Tragedy would have emerged pondering the theological distinction between a divinely efficacious sign and an idolatrous fetish. Nor would instilling doctrinal correctness have been the primary intention of the playwright, whose continued employment by the company would largely depend on box-office receipts.

Instead, it is my argument here that Kyd exploited spectators’ residual taith in magical handkerchiefs and longing for ocular experience by transforming the handkerchief from a token of all believers’ salvation into a personalized fetish that embodies the principle of private vengeance (“Remember you must kill”). If by the late sixteenth century the holy sudarium of the Visitatio Sepulchri and the miracle-working Host of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament were long

in the past, historical evidence suggests that many ordinary folk clung to their magical bits of cloth despite the inroads made by the reformed religion.?” By introducing a bloody handkerchief into his revenge drama, Kyd deliberately exploited the medieval association

between holy cloth and sacred blood—not in order to foment a Protestant aesthetics, but to appropriate the object’s power on behalf of a newly invigorated professional theater freed from the orderly bureaucratic surveillance of a clerical hierarchy.

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Kyd's Bloody Napkin as Transgressive Spectacle See here my show; look on this spectacle! —RHieronimo in THE SPANISH TRAGEDY

By comparison to its more famous cousin in Othello, the bloody handkerchief in The Spanish Tragedy has received very little critical attention, especially considering its originality.°* Perhaps the first bloody napkin on the commercial Elizabethan stage, Kyd’s handkerchief appears in a two-play sequence known to have been performed in repertory: The First Part of Hieronimo (printed in Quarto 1605) and The Spanish Tragedy (first printed in 1592).°* The relationship between the two plays is unclear; it is possible but by no means certain that Kyd wrote 1 Hieronimo as a prequel to capitalize on The Spanish Tragedy’s success.?? Whatever the case, the plays combine to

form a single narrative sequence. When the two parts were performed in repertory, presumably the same property appeared in both plays and was experienced as the same prop by the spectators who attended both performances. In 1 Hieronimo, the handkerchief appears as the “scarf” that passes from Bel-imperia to Andrea to Horatio, and in The Spanish Tragedy,

the scarf, now referred to as a “bloody napkin,” passes from Belimperia to Horatio to Hieronimo. By turns failed love-charm, martial

memento, and bloody revenge token, the property continually acquires new connotations for the spectator as it passes from hand to hand in performance. This cumulative absorption of meaning is aug-

mented by moments at which the handkerchief metonymically invokes its medieval predecessors: the Corpus Christi Veronica cloth, the liturgical sudarium, and the Host itself. Grasping how the handkerchief becomes a mobile object lesson intended to reshape the

spectators emotional response to a disturbingly familiar prop requires what I earlier termed contextual reanimation (or reading in five dimensions): imaginatively tracing the material handkerchiefs

movement in concrete stage space and through processual stage time.

In 1 Hieronimo, Bel-imperia gives a scarf to her beloved Don 70

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Andrea just before he joins battle with Portugal over its neglected tribute to Spain.*° As she ties the scarf around his arm, Bel-imperia’s stately couplets establish the silken scarf as a courtly love token and at the same time endow the favor with apotropaic powers:

Lend me thy loving and thy warlike arm, On which I knit this soft and silken charm Tied with an amorous knot: oh, may it prove Enchanted armor being charmed by love; That when it mounts up to thy warlike crest, It may put by the sword, and so be blest. (9.15-20)

Ironically, Bel-imperia’s “enchanted” talisman fails in its mission. Although the Portuguese are defeated in battle, Andrea himself is slain, and his final words are a confident statement of immortality that can also be interpreted as an ironic comment on the charm’s failed magic: “I keep her favor longer than my breath” (11.111). Andrea’s pun foreshadows the literal and figural transferal of Belimperia’s “favor” to his friend, Horatio. Each time the property changes hands, its meaning for the spectator shifts. When Horatio discovers Andrea’s body on the battlefield, he ties the now-bloody scarf about his own arm: This scarf Pll wear in memory of our souls, And of our mutual loves; here, here, [ll wind it, And full as often as I think on thee, Pll kiss this little ensign, this soft banner, Smear’d with foes’ blood, all for the master’s honor. (11.164—-68)

Horatio unwittingly appropriates Bel-imperia’s pledge of love as a memento of male comradeship, and his erotic affection for “this soft banner” revises its formerly heterosexual valence.?’ (Interestingly, Horatio refuses to acknowledge that the scarf may contain Andrea’s blood.) With the scarf attached to his own arm, Horatio visually

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The Stage Life of Props

becomes Andrea’s surrogate in the eyes of the audience. Presumably he wears the token in the play’s final scene when he is embraced by Andrea’s ghost at the latter’s funeral procession.

The two exchanges in 1 Hieronimo establish the scarf as an ambiguous prop whose meaning shifts according to the needs of the scene. In the first exchange, the unspotted scarf is an enchanted love token; in the second, the bloodied scarf is a homoerotic (or at least homosocial) memento. For the spectator the second meaning does

not erase the first; rather, the repeated action of tying the scarf increases the property’s dramatic interest. Further, the scarf perversely ironizes the meanings ascribed to it by the characters. Instead

of “[e]nchanted armor,” it becomes a bloody token of ignoble slaughter (Andrea is outnumbered and overrun). The scarf ominously absorbs blood instead of magic, and the repeated stage business of tying the scarf suggests that a similar fate awaits Horatio. Thus far, it would appear that the handkerchief is being stripped

of its prior thaumaturgic powers and hence (in Diehl’s terms) demystified. Certainly, the contract of enchantment proposed by Bel-

imperia’s spell is strikingly negated by Andrea’s death. Instead of being asked to reaffirm the eternal contract of grace offered to the community of the faithful by such cloths as Veronica’s napkin, we find ourselves caught up in an evolving narrative whose twists are unpredictable and whose outcome is uncertain. The result is both pleasurable dramatic irony (we know more than the characters about the fatal piece of cloth) and eager anticipation (we remain unsure how this napkin’s story will end). In The Spanish Tragedy the bloody sign on Horatio’s arm serves as

a constant visual reminder of Andrea, whose vengeful ghost (together with Revenge) acts as chorus throughout.?® The play repeats | Hieronimo’s courtly love exchange but with a significant difference: the prop is now stained with blood. Horatio explains to the bereaved Bel-imperia how Andrea’s scarf came into his possession: “This scart I pluck’d from off his lifeless arm, / And wear it in remembrance of my friend” (1.4.41—42).°’ As if aware of the erotic implications behind Horatio’s action, Bel-imperia denies the possibility that Andrea would have given up the love token voluntarily:

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I know the scarf, would he had kept it still! For had he lived, he would have kept it still, And worn it for his Bel-imperia’s sake; For ‘twas my favor at his last depart. (1.4.44-47) Bel-imperia then reappropriates the scarf as hers to give, offering the scar{ a second time: But now wear thou it both for him and me, For after him thou hast deserved it best. (1.4.44-49)

Despite her metrically awkward disclaimer (“wear thou it both for

him and me”), Bel-imperia elides the scarfs function as martial memento by inserting Horatio into the position of recipient formerly occupied by Andrea. Indeed, Bel-imperia has fallen recklessly in love with Horatio.

The staging of this scene, which closely parallels the exchange between Bel-imperia and Andrea in the earlier play, is ambiguous. Does Horatio merely point to the scarf on his arm, or does he try to hand it back to Bel-imperia, only to have her insist that he keep it? In either case, the token now becomes an unintentional emblem of Belimperia’s faithlessness to Andrea. The contrast between the scart’s spotlessness in 1 Hieronimo and its soiled appearance in The Spanish Tragedy may carry sexual connotations.°? Andrea’s ghost confirms

that his relationship with Bel-imperia was sexual (“In secret I possessd a worthy dame” [1.1.10]), thereby ironizing the king’s later reference to “Young virgins” (2.3.43) and Horatio’s comparison of Bel-imperia to the untaithful goddess Venus (2.4.33). In this scene, the bloodied, recycled scarf suggests that Bel-imperia herself is secondhand goods. Yet the bloody token symbolizes not only furtive sexuality but impending disaster. During his tryst with Bel-imperia, Horatio is strung up in his father Hieronimo’s arbor and stabbed by the jealous Balthazar, Bel-imperia’s brother Lorenzo, and two confederates. The 19

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scene is iconic in at least two ways. The lovers’ bower of bliss becomes a gibbet: J. L. Styan notes that “the rope and the knife used in that order [provide] a version of common hanging and drawing that anyone who paid a gruesome visit to Tyburn would recognize for its popular theatrical value.”°! Moreover, to a contemporary audience the hanging and stabbing of Horatio by four men, on an arborproperty designed to resemble a tree, may well have suggested the Crucifixion on the “tree” dramatized by the Corpus Christi Passion

plays. Thus in the York Crucifixion play, Christ is stretched with ropes to fit the incorrectly bored holes and crucified by four soldiers symmetrically arranged at the four points of the cross; later, in the York play Christ’s Death and Burial, “The blind Longeus goes to Jesus and pierces his side with the spear, and suddenly gains his sight.”° But whereas Christ’s blood in the Corpus Christi play is both curative and salvific—the centurion who witnesses the miracle instantly con-

verts—Horatio’s slaughter is merely a bloodbath. “These are the fruits of love,” quips Lorenzo as the four confederates stab Horatio again and again while the horrified Bel-imperia, like the spectators, is forced to look on (2.4.55). In the starkest terms possible, the spectacle of stage blood is revised from a vehicle of spiritual renewal (mod-

eled by the centurion’s conversion) to a vehicle of theatrical voyeurism (modeled by Bel-imperia’s mute and horrified witness). As we have seen, the Corpus Christi “sudarye” in which Christ’s body is wrapped becomes ocular proof of the Resurrection once it is discovered in the tomb. The Spanish Tragedy provides a parallel dis-

covery scene when Hieronimo and his wife Isabella discover the “murd’rous spectacle” of their son’s corpse hanging in the arbor (2.5.9). After cutting down his son’s body and weeping over it, Hieronimo seizes on the object still attached to Horatio’s lifeless arm:

Seest thou this handkercher besmear’d with blood? It shall not from me till I take revenge.

(2.5 1-52) It is just possible that Hieronimo refers not to Bel-imperia’s scarf but to some new property. Nevertheless, the description of the “handSO

Absorbing Interests

kercher” matches the silken scarf “Smeard with foes’ blood” in 1 Hieronimo (11.168), and it seems unlikely that a dramatist as savvy as Kyd would ignore the opportunity to ring the changes on a property already so resonant for the audience and visibly there for the taking.®

All Hieronimo must do is untie the freshly bloodied scarf from his son’s arm, just as Horatio untied it from Andrea’s in 1 Hieronimo—yet

another opportunity for ironic visual parallelism. Once again, the love-charm presages doom for the character that picks it up. If the Visitatio cloth suggested the “felt absence” of Christ’s body in the tomb, Kyd’s handkerchief is now literally imbued with the substance of Hieronimo’s dead son: Seest thou this handkercher besmear’d with blood? It shall not from me till I take revenge. Seest thou those wounds that yet are bleeding fresh? Pll not entomb them till I have reveng’d. Then will I joy amidst my discontent; Till then my sorrow never shall be spent. (2.5.51-56)

Here the scene hinges on yet another visual allusion. As at a public

execution, the actor playing Hieronimo dips the handkerchief in Horatio’s wounds as he intones these lines, while Hieronimo’s reference to the handkerchief together with a refusal to entomb his son’s

body suggests a new twist to the ancient cloth. On the one hand, Hieronimo’s virtual canonization of his son invites us to see Horatio as a Christ-figure: Hieronimo describes the “harmless blood” dishonored within “this sacred bower” (2.3.29-—27), and in the first textual addition to the play (1602) Hieronimo calls Horatio “pure and spotless” (2.5.[80]). On the other hand, we witness the knight marshal of Spain preparing to embark on a very un-Christian vendetta against those whom God should punish. Kyd deliberately invokes the sudarium motif in order to subvert it: instead of a sacred relic promising divine salvation, in Hieronimo’s hands the prop becomes a bloodthirsty revenge token that gives an unholy charge to the revenger’s intent. 81

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‘| a. eeab..Oef.——. \ “eo . a Hieronimo (Christopher Crocetti) in The Spanish Tragedy, Boston College, 2002. Using his handkerchief as a bloody token, he vows to avenge his murdered son Horatio (David Mawhinney). (Photo: Stephen Vedder.)

Absorbing Interests

Once Hieronimo dips the handkerchief in his son’s blood and con-

ceals it on his person in 2.5, the handkerchief makes no explicit appearance until 3.13. Pressed into hearing petitioners’ suits, includ-

ing that of an old man whose son has been murdered, Hieronimo identifies with the senex Bazulto and sees in the latter’s grief a mirror for magistrates:

Oh my son, my son, O my son Horatio! But mine, or thine, Bazulto, be content. Here, take my handkercher and wipe thine eyes, Whiles wretched I in thy mishaps may see The lively portrait of my dying self. He draweth out a bloody napkin.

Oh no, not this; Horatio, this was thine; And when I dyd it in thy dearest blood, This was a token ‘twixt thy soul and me That of thy death revenged I should be. (3.13.81-89)

Hieronimo seems surprised to discover the handkerchief in his own hand and takes the bloody token as a reproach: “See, see, oh see thy

shame, Hieronimo! / See here a loving father to his son!” (3.13.95-96). The handkerchief reminds the audience, as well as Hieronimo, that the motor of the play is Hieronimo’s thirst for vengeance; it is as if Hieronimo has forgotten the contract symbolized by the cloth. We cannot tell if the forgotten token is revitalized by Hieronimo’s passion or vice versa. In this scene, the handkerchief triggers a reversion from the Christian frame of the play thus far to the pagan cosmology of the play’s induction. Hieronimo envisages himself “[K]nock|ing] at the dismal

gates of Pluto’s court” to enlist Proserpine in his revenge cause (3.13.110), a cause Andrea’s ghost has already informed us she supports (1.1.78ff.). Hieronimo betrays his role as impersonal arbiter of

justice and hallucinates that Bazulto is Horatio returned from the underworld. He descends into an animal fury and tears the petition-

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ers’ bonds with his teeth, seeming almost disappointed when they refuse to bleed. As a hinge between Christian and pagan frames of reference, Hieronimo’s napkin anticipates Desdemona’s exotic handkerchief in Othello, which introduces an eerie pagan coloring into the familiar Christian landscapes of that play. Neither the magical totem conjured by Bel-imperia nor the ocular proof of divine grace embodied by the sudarium, Kyd’s handkerchief thus far is a failed love-charm and a stalled revenge token. But it is in the bloody finale to The Spanish Tragedy that Kyd’s subversion of

medieval tradition becomes most truly apparent. Hieronimo’s masque of Soliman and Perseda ends with a deliberate parody of the

traditional climax of the Mass: the Elevation of the Host. Having staged a murderous entertainment for the kings of Spain and Portugal that dispatches their heirs, Hieronimo unveils “a strange and wondrous show besides” (4.1.181). Drawing a stage curtain, Hieron-

imo reveals Horatio’s corpse hanging once again from the arborproperty: “See here my show; look on this spectacle!” (4.4.89).° Hieronimo’s “show” is a theatrical coup that forces his shocked audi-

ence to recognize that the murders in the masque of Soliman and Perseda were in earnest.

Turning his son’s corpse into an explicitly theatrical emblem, Hieronimo enacts a bloody parody of the Corpus Christi Passion play. Before his captive audience, he demonstrates how “hanging on a tree I found my son, / Through-girt with wounds, and slaughter’d

as you see” (4.4.111-12). Not content with displaying the body of the Son, Hieronimo also elevates his blood. Brandishing the bloody handkerchief, Hieronimo travesties the ritual gesture of visual display common to the Mass and the religious drama of the sudarium:

And here behold this bloody handkercher, Which at Horatio’s death I weeping dipp’d Within the river of his bleeding wounds: It as propitious, see I have reserved, And never hath it left my bloody heart, Soliciting remembrance of my vow

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With these, oh, these accursed murderers! Which now perform’d, my heart is satisfied. (4.4.122-29) In Hieronimo’s grasp the property becomes a fetish: the meaning of Horatio’s corpse is reduced to and in some way replaced by a bloody piece of cloth. If Hieronimo’s onstage audience watched the masque from the gallery situated above the doors in the tiring house wall (as

Martin White conjectures), Hieronimo must elevate the napkin toward the gallery with his back to the playhouse audience—just like

a Catholic priest officiating at Mass. Through Hieronimo, Kyd transfers our attention from the body itself to the absorbing property in the actor’s hand. Hieronimo thus arrogates to the theater the priest's power to orchestrate a spectacle in which the body is conjured by a metonymic object. In a theatrical sleight-of-hand, prop replaces corpse as our locus of visual and dramatic interest. Kyd implies that the power of the theater is the power of surrogation: the ability to spin out a potentially infinite chain of metonymic displacements that echo each other (Hieronimo’s/Horatio’s/Andrea’s/Bel-imperia’s handkerchief, Veronica cloth, sudarium,

linteum, Host, Christ).°° In the case of the handkerchief, the connecting thread is blood. Hieronimo’s sacrilegious perversion of the Mass no doubt played into Kyd’s spectators’ fear and loathing of Catholic Spain. Like Vindice’s use of Gloriana’s skull in The Revenger’s Tragedy, Hieronimo’s appropriation of his son’s corpse as a theatrical device is shocking, even repulsive.°’ Kyd’s transgressive emblem betokens neither salvation nor resurrection. Instead, the “buried” sudarium and Host of the liturgical ceremony are transmuted into a bloody prop and a rotting corpse, whose embarrassing material residue evokes what Stephen Greenblatt has called “the problem of the leftover, that is, the status of the material remainder” of bread and wine once the formula for consecration has been uttered.°® Huston Diehl also detects eucharistic satire in The Spanish Tragedy but locates it in the masque. For an Elizabethan audience, she argues,

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the play-within-the-play would have been an object lesson in the theatrical meretriciousness of Catholic ritual: “By mystifying and privi-

leging spectacle, literalizing mimetic action, and displaying ‘real’ bodies and blood, Kyd’s playlet ‘Soliman and Perseda’ manifests the very qualities of the Roman Mass that the Calvinist reformers condemn when they complain that ‘of the sacrament [the papists] make an idol; of commemoration make adoration; instead of receiving, make a deceiving; in place of showing forth Christ’s death, make new oblations of his death.’”®’ Yet aside from the fact that Hieronimo’s

deployment of his “props” provides a more blatant parody of Catholic ritual than his murderous playlet, Diehl’s belief that the masque models “true” Protestant seeing by dramatizing its opposite underestimates the shocking immediacy of Kyd’s bloody spectacle. The spectator is far more likely to be swept up in the deadly action of

the masque than to be busy deconstructing its theatricality. Moreover, instead of confronting the artificiality of the masque, through dramatic irony the offstage audience is made aware that the stage action is real. Lorenzo, Balthazar and the rest are murdered, even as

the courtly audience applauds the actors’ masterly execution. Whereas Diehl claims that Soliman and Perseda mimics the very qual-

ities of the Mass condemned by the reformers, it actually reverses them. For the reformers, the Mass passes off the sign (Host) as the thing itself (the Body of Christ), whereas Hieronimo disguises the thing itself (murder) as a sign (masque). A more likely index of Kyd’s intended effect on the spectator is the reaction of Andrea’s ghost. Rather than being purged by this tragedy of blood, he becomes addicted to its sensationalism. “Ay, these were spectacles to please my soul,” Andrea comments, after summarizing each murder with relish (4.5.11). Like any other spectator, the ghost has become swept up in the action; indeed, Andrea has discovered a taste for blood and forgotten that all he desired at first was revenge against Balthazar alone (just as the spectator may have forgotten this original impulse for revenge). Reveling in the deaths of the good as

well as the bad, Andrea appoints himself judge of the underworld and sadistically rehearses the various tortures drawn from pagan mythology that lie in store for Lorenzo, Balthazar, and the rest. No 86

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Christian redemption awaits these fallen creatures, only the “endless

tragedy” promised by Revenge in the play’s last line (4.5.48). Andrea’s response to tragedy is neither Aristotelian catharsis nor Senecan stoicism, but a thirst for more bloodshed. In presenting Andrea’s corruption by Revenge as his frame story, Kyd sardonically anticipates the reactions of his own spectators, who (judging by the genre’s ensuing popularity) left The Spanish Tragedy with an unrestrained appetite for revenge tragedy.’° The Spanish Tragedy’s handkerchief is no demystified idol, but a fetish endowed by Hieronimo with new and appalling life. Despite

the inroads against idolatry made by Protestant reformers, Kyd’s handkerchief—stripped of its prior thaumaturgic power, perhaps, but magic in a new way—celebrates the enduring capacity of theatrical objects to seduce audiences through an apparently limitless series of ghostly substitutions. Kyd exploits a received visual language (the Elevation of the Host, the ocular proof of the sudarium) for his own sensational ends. The old symbols are stripped of their former theological efficacy, but, much like a painted-over rood screen, the old Catholic imagery bleeds through.” For Kyd, it was necessary to travesty sacred objects in order to reclaim them for his sensational theater. Through the figure of Hieronimo, Kyd thrusts his bloody spectacle in the face of those Puritans who would condemn theater as a temple of idolatry.” Of course, we will never know exactly how Elizabethan spectators reacted to Kyd’s tragedy. A given playwright can only propose a particular theatrical contract—in this case, what I have called a contract of sensation, as opposed to the contracts of revelation and transformation proposed by the sight of sacred cloth on the medieval stage— and it is for the individual spectator to accept or reject that contract. What we do know is that The Spanish Tragedy and its ilk (including the even bloodier Titus Andronicus) were immensely popular, suggesting that Andrea’s addictive response proved contagious. While it is possible that some of The Spanish Tragedy’s spectators left the playhouse with their suspicion of papist idolatry confirmed, it is far more likely that Kyd’s theatrically absorbing handkerchief thrilled its audience and left it thirsting for fresh blood.

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The Stage Life of Props

Such a hypothesis seems confirmed by the slew of bloody handkerchiefs on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage that followed in Kyd’s wake.’° Indeed, the holy figure embedded in the cloth still occasionally rises to the surface, and as ocular proof I close with an image from our own day. In John Pielmeier’s Agnes of God (1982), a commercially successful attempt to revive the medieval genre of the saint’s play, the pregnant nun Agnes “presents a hand wrapped in a bloody handkerchief” as evidence of her stigmata.’* One last time, rising like a phoenix, the bloody piece of linen is displayed to an astonished audience as a spectacular sign of the phantom beneath the cloth.

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| 3 rales the Subject The Skull on the Jacobean Stage

(Vrrether under the aegis of the church or seeking to emancipate itself from it, drama has continually appropriated the church’s holy symbols. On the medieval and early modern stage, as | have shown, both the eucharistic wafer and the bloody handkerchief contained a ghostly residue of the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Mass. But whereas the Croxton Play of the Sacrament

sought to shore up belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, even as it asserted the right of lay actors to handle the holy water (or, at least, some visual equivalent of it), The Spanish Tragedy invoked Christ’s gravecloth only to twist its meaning from a token of shared salvation to one of personal revenge.

In this sense, eternal ritual—the doctrine that Christ’s sacrifice

exists always and forever enshrined in the sacrament of the Eucharist—gives way to dramatic narrative. The story of Kyd’s eerie

handkerchief unfolds at its own pace, surprising its audience as it goes. For paying Elizabethan spectators, the uneasy pleasures of dramatic suspense, along with what today we call shock value, replace

the comforting assurances of a transparent token that could be “read” by all true believers. In the hands of Kyd’s Hieronimo, the

bloody napkin is no universal symbol but a personal fetish, and the sensationalization of the prop continues in the Jacobean era. By the time it mutates into the notorious handkerchief “spotted with strawberries” in Othello, the bloody napkin has acquired a pagan “magic in the web” that features psychic Egyptian soothsayers, twohundred-year-old sibyls in the throes of prophetic ecstasy, and dye 59

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made from lovingly preserved hearts ripped from living virgins’ bodies (3.4.55-74).!

The bloody handkerchief was not the only lurid prop to bewitch early modern audiences. In this chapter | consider how another common religious symbol was subversively appropriated by Jacobean drama: the memento mori skull. Why, of all Jacobean props, seize on the skull? To begin with, it is worth stating the obvious: the skull is

probably the most famous stage property in English drama. In part this is because it makes its first known stage appearance in arguably the most famous western European play. The image of a man talking to a held skull has become iconic, indeed postmodern, recently making its presence felt in such unlikely places as the movies The Last Action Hero and Space Jam. That Shakespeare’s Hamlet picks up a skull and says “Alas, poor Yorick,” is just something that everyone knows, whether or not they have ever read or seen Shakespeare’s play. The ubiquity of this most famous stage image begs analysis of its enduring fascination. The skull’s fascination transcends what one might call “The Hamlet Effect,” or even “The Shakespeare Effect.” Skulls fascinate because

of their sheer uncanniness, their disturbing ability to oscillate between subject and object.? Unlike virtually any other prop, the skull is the physical remains of the deceased human subject. And since it is a universal human attribute, the skull insists on identification as well as fragmentation: the felt absence within the skull’s cavity is not Christ, but ourselves. In John Caird’s production of Hamlet mounted by the Royal National Theatre, featuring Simon Russell Beale as the prince, Yorick’s skull was outfitted in a jaunty cap, a gag at once amusing and deeply unsettling. Neither quite person nor thing, the skull bore a unique charge on the stage, its mirthless grin only compounding its macabre effect.

In this chapter | consider what made the skull an object of such theatrical fascination once it burst onto the theatrical scene at the

very beginning of the seventeenth century.* For when Hamlet returns to Denmark from England, only to find a very English-seeming churchyard and sexton, he walks into a scene unprecedented on the Elizabethan stage. Act 5, scene 1 of Hamlet is apparently the first 90

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known scene in English Renaissance drama to be laid in a graveyard,

and the first scene in which skulls are used as stage properties.* Much ink has been spilled on this groundbreaking scene and, in particular, on Hamlet’s famous address to Yorick’s skull. It is a scene of

such emblematic force (for, as Roland Mushat Frye has demonstrated, it is a scene with nearly a hundred years of memento mori tradition in the visual arts behind it) that it is hard to peel back the encrustations of time to uncover its original effect.?

Why insert at this crucial point in the play’s action such a stale motif, already so conventional by 1601 as to be more honored in the breach than the observance? The graveyard scene is hardly necessary to the plot, the gravediggers ancillary as can be; they are two extra mouths to feed, for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men no less than for the court of Elsinore. Is it simply that Shakespeare could not resist the temptation to bring Yorick’s skull, as it were, to life? Was throwing

up a real skull on stage too thrilling an opportunity to miss, as in those 3-D movies of the 1950s in which the audience shrank back in

horror from monsters that lunged out of the screen? And why did Shakespeare’s contemporaries then produce a rash of skulls on the stage in the following decades, only to consign them (for the most part) to the prop bin of stage history thereafter? Is there any way, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot on Webster, we can recover the skin around the skull?

The fascination of the skull for Shakespeare and his contemporaries went far beyond simply replicating in three dimensions the memento mori—an emblem enshrined in the visual arts to such a degree that, by the time of Hamlet, it already approached cliché. In asserting so, | am aware of going against the weight of critical consensus. Bridget Gellert, for instance, has explored the graveyard scene’s iconography of melancholy, while Harry Morris discerns within the entire structure of Shakespeare’s play that of a memento mori lyric.® For Elizabeth Maslen, “Yorick plays the earthbound memento mori, a reminder of death the leveller.”’ For Jeffrey Alan Triggs, “the scene objectifies Hamlet’s resignation to the human condition through the vanitas motif of a man holding a skull.”® Frye, too, approaches the scene in terms of its emblematic connotations, assert9]

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ing that Hamlet’s address to Yorick’s skull “prepared the original audience for accepting and understanding the serenity of mind and conscience Hamlet displays in the following scene which concludes the play.”’ Given the overwhelming symbolic equation of skulls with death by the time of the late sixteenth century, it is hard to see how

Hamlet and its contemporary skull plays could be warping the emblematic tradition from within. Yet this is precisely what the anamorphic skulls in Hamlet, The Honest Whore, Part 1 and The Revenger’s Tragedy achieve in performance.

All three plays invite the spectator to choose between a conventional memento mori tableau, in which a skull serves as a passive emblem reflecting the protagonist’s mastery of its symbolism, and a second, “trick” perspective (or anamorphosis), in which the skull takes on an active role that undermines the very selfhood the protagonist seeks to establish.!° Moreover, this trick perspective alters the

spectators relation to the action. Once we focus on it, the skull decenters our own “objective” grasp of its stage symbolism and our

presumption of autonomous gazing from outside the emblem’s “frame.” In its oscillation between subject and object, the skull exposes the illusion that we can attain a God’s-eye view.

Phoebe Spinrad comes the closest to understanding these plays’ subversion of the memento mori tradition when she argues that the use of skulls on the Renaissance stage reflects a growing secular uneasiness with that very tradition, defined as “the meditation on

death through the medium of a skull.”'' In Spinrad’s argument, between Hamlet and The Tragedy of Lodovick Sforza (1628) we witness an uncoupling of the signifier from the signified, the skull from its own symbolism, until by the time of Gomersall’s play, “We have

reached the twentieth century .. . all we can see through the eyesockets of the skull is the bone at the back of the head” (p. 9). According to Spinrad, “Like Chaucer’s Troilus looking down from heaven and laughing, the medieval and early Renaissance Christian laughed at the skull because he saw in it the absurdity of human pretensions before the throne of God” (p. 1), but by the time of Gomer-

sall this “absurdity” is no longer Christian but nihilistic, for the moral of Sforza reverses Hamlet’s hopeful message. Contemplation of 92

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the skull now leads to the comfortless conclusion that “[a] hundred years from now, we will all be Yorick” (p. 10). While Spinrad insists Hamlet’s use of the memento mori tradition is still “orthodox” (p. 9), she notes that by the end of the sixteenth century (or thereabouts) the symbol no longer stands for anything beyond itself. The skull is simply an object; it has become a dead metaphor.!? But when does a stone cold metaphor become a hot property? I we wish to understand the work skulls were performing on the English stage at the turn of the seventeenth century, we would do well to cast our eyes back seventy years to the first known association of young men with a skull in English iconography. I refer to Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors, that is, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, who are depicted standing in Westminster Abbey during their visit to England in 1533.'°? The young French

nobles, exquisitely haughty in their finely wrought robes, stand before a shelved table lavishly decked with props that reflect the men’s power and mastery over the very latest in humanist learning: musical instruments, globes, clocks, books. The painting’s surface verisimilitude is breathtaking; yet on second glance a mysterious disk seems to slice through the very canvas, floating between the

young men’s feet and casting its ominous shadow on the ornate mosaic floor—a shadow made more ominous by the fact that it falls in a different direction from those of the men.‘* The phantasm’s presence in the painting only makes sense when one realizes the painting is one of the anamorphic “perspectives” so beloved of the Renaissance: viewed downwards from the right-hand side of the canvas, the shadow turns into a radically foreshortened

skull. From this new perspective, the two young men, so full of themselves just a moment ago, are distorted beyond recognition. They are as flattened, in fact, as the objects that only a moment ago seemed to belong to another visual plane, that of the richly furnished

table behind. The two men themselves thus collapse into their humanist property, that which in its very materiality defines their place in and of the word. The anamorphic skull responds by seeming to spill out of the frame and in turn asserting its claims on what lies behind it. “I own you,” the skull seems to say to the nobles and, by 93

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extension, to the implied viewer outside the frame, himself (for it is presumably a he) so sure of his own dimensionality, his own visual possession of what is framed by and within the canvas. But are we the possessors or possessed of this double image? The canvas initially offers us the illusion of frontal command of the perspective scene. Because of the divergence in vanishing points, however, the skull is so radically elongated as to be virtually absent. In order to see the skull as a skull, we are forced to go nearly to the plane of the painting, becoming all but embedded in the canvas ourselves. The painting’s execution is only completed when the viewer takes up this secondary position: we are framed in more ways than one, for in turning the two men into mere props and literally forcing us off-center, the skull exposes our illusion that the painting’s contents can be captured in a glance from a single perspective outside the frame. As Stephen Greenblatt writes, “To see the large death’shead requires a still more radical abandonment of what we take to be ‘normal vision; we must throw the entire painting out of perspective in order to bring into perspective what our usual mode of perception cannot comprehend.”!? We must “drop the subject” in order to see the object; and the object of our decentered gaze is death itself.'° It is just this anamorphic shift we must make in order to grasp the power of skulls on the Renaissance stage, for it is only by conceiving them as objects that take center stage in the act of performance that they can properly be understood. Marjorie Garber makes the link between Holbein’s anamorphosis and the “double take” of Shakespeare’s “pictorial irony,” whereby the viewer outside the frame (the audience) sees what those inside the frame (Hamlet, Gertrude) do not, in a sort of “tragic relief.”!’ Garber here extends Rosalie Colie’s notion of “unmetaphoring,” in which “an author who treats a conventionalized figure of speech as if it were a description of actuality is unmetaphoring that figure.”!® For Garber, Yorick’s skull and Old Hamlet’s ghost are examples of “literalized” or “reified” memento mori figures, dead metaphors resurrected. But Garber does not make the leap from the “literalization” of the memento mori skull as prop to its personification as character—its refusal to be reified into a dead thing—together with its insistence on turning others into its props.!” 94

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She instead collapses Holbein’s double image back into the Christian

paradox: “Earthly vanity and mortality occupy the same space and are, in essence, visual metaphors for one another.”° The point of anamorphosis, however, is its either/or-ness.*! We can choose to see ambassadors or skull, but we cannot see both at once, as Garber tries to do (even though she accepts that anamorphosis collapses the distinction between tenor and vehicle, so that it is impossible to say in the case of skull and ambassador which is the metaphor and which is the literal fact). Garber thus tames the maddening duality of anamorphosis by collapsing the double perspective back into an emblem: “|T]he particular perspective embodied in the twinning of life and death . . . presents to the eye a visual emblem of the Christian paradox: we die to live.”** Unfortunately, the eye must choose between skull and man—and handy-dandy, which is the person, and which is the prop?*’ Thus, in Hamlet’s graveyard scene, we

cannot simultaneously hold Hamlet and Yorick in focus. To see Yorick properly, we must search for his theatrical traces—his properties—in and through the text in which he lies embedded.

“Flattening Hamlet: The Skull Unmetaphored The chief gravedigger throws up Hamlet’s first skull while cheerfully

mauling Thomas Lord Vaux’s popular memento mori lyric, “The aged lover renounces his love.” The gravedigger alters Vaux’s lament to suit his present occupation: Vaux’s “house of claye” becomes the

eravedigger’s “pit of clay” (5.1.94), about which he seems to feel quite proprietorial.** According to Horatio, “Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness” (5.1.67). The term “property” oscillates intriguingly between object and attribute. While Horatio and Hamlet

are concerned with the gravedigger’s “properties”’—his appurtenances and characteristics—the gravedigger remains single-mindedly concerned with his pit of clay, for as Anne Barton remarks, “His

riddles, his jokes, his small talk, and even his songs all end in the same place: a hole in the ground.” As the gravedigger disinters

skull after skull, Hamlet begins to play with their symbolic 95

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significance. Piqued by class rather than by eschatological anxiety,

Hamlet is prodded by the disturbing sight of a “knave” roughly “jowlling]” the remains of his superiors to the ground into trumpeting his own semiotic mastery of the situation (5.1.75). Hamlet’s dialogue directs the audience’s attention to an ambiguous prop. The first skull is “Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder” (5.1.75). There is an implicit pun in Hamlet’s slippery genitive, for “Cain’s jawbone” could refer to the ass’s jawbone with which Cain is proverbially said to have slain Abel, or it might be the bared jawbone of Cain itself. Is it metaphor (for Claudius’s primal sin of fratricide) or metonym (of Cain’s head); symbol or thing-in-itself (jawbone = jawbone)? Is “Yorick’s skull” Yorick’s, or Hamlet’s? Already the stage prop is arrogating conflicting properties. The skull proves irresistible to Hamlet’s protean mind, and as the

prince begins free-associating, it becomes a Rorschach skull: now a jawbone, now a politician’s pate, now a courtier’s, now a lord’s, now My Lady Worm’s. Hamlet makes the obligatory reference to the wheel of fortune—“Here’s fine revolution and we had the trick to see’t” (5.1.89)—but the old verbal sparkle is missing, and we can sense that his heart is not in these conventional apothegms. Instead Hamlet teases the gravedigger for knocking the bones about, but already he is insidiously identified—and identifying—with them: “Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with em? Mine ache to think on’t” (5.1.90-91). What is theatrically important is that Hamlet’s language fails to do justice to the prop’s disturbing effect on the spectator, its sheer weirdness on the stage, whether it be a bleached dry laboratory specimen or a dirt-encrusted, wormy mess. Furthermore, Hamlet’s reference to “the trick to see’t” implies that, as participants in the action, Hamlet and Horatio lack our anamorphic perspective from outside the frame: our knowledge that the doomed Hamlet’s bones ache with proleptic sympathy, and that this tragic protagonist is himself subject to fortune’s wheel. Most conspicuously missing from Hamlet’s reaction to the skull for a Jacobean audience would have been the expected acknowledgment of the skull’s double message. Glenda Conway points out that Jacobean audiences “would have been aware of the skull as a sign of 96

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the impermanence of earthly life, a memento mori. However, audiences simultaneously would have seen it as a sign of the relative insignificance of the human soul’s brief stay in the flesh, and hence, as a reminder of the everlasting glory that was promised by Chris-

tianity to those who lived their lives piously.” For an orthodox believer the skull’s grim slogan was ultimately consolatory, and this

message was reinforced by a slew of popular sixteenth-century emblem books familiar to Shakespeare’s audience. For a Jacobean audience, then, skulls were “emblematic, meaning-laden, and fullyreadable signs.””° It is just this legibility that Hamlet sets out to complicate and discredit.*’ Whereas Jeffrey Alan Triggs insists that “the

scene objectifies Hamlet’s resignation to the human condition through the vanitas motif of a man holding the skull,” Hamlet avoids

the first-person singular, refusing to see himself reflected in the death’s-head.”®

The gravedigger throws up a second skull, but although outnumbered Hamlet continues his tiresome guessing game. In Hamlet’s imagination this skull is that of a lawyer, and Hamlet deconstructs the legal discourse of property, substituting absence for presence: “Where be his quiddities now, his quillities, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?” (5.1.97-98). Hamlet punningly mimics the memento

mori clichés: “Is this the fine of his fines... ?” (5.1.104). Hamlet deploys the ubi sunt motif not to reflect on his own mortality, but as the vehicle for social satire. This arriviste lawyer has expended considerable energy trying to establish himself as landed gentry, only to end up with a hole in the ground. Once again, the irony that this fate awaits Hamlet himself is lost on the prince. In a sense, language bounces off the skull. Since Horatio refuses to rise to the bait, Hamlet must resort to the gravedigger, whose relentless literalism outsmarts the prince. Each of the latter’s verbal sallies is nullified one by one, and it is hard to find fault with Barton’s elegant gloss: “There can be no arguing, nor even any dialogue, with a literal-mindedness so absolute and perverse. In the face of death, the wings of language are clipped. Hamlet’s own verbal trick played back on him declares itself for what it is: a revelation of the essential meaninglessness, the nonsense of human existence beneath its metaphoric 97

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dress.””? Whereas Hamlet implies that the skulls are properties whose metaphorical exchange-value is limitless, the gravedigger’s insistence over the skull’s singular identity makes no bones about it: “This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester” (5.1.175).

Naming the skull transforms the scene. It is a moment of unmetaphoring in which the conventionalized figure of speech has

suddenly become humanized. No longer can Hamlet ring the changes on the skull’s identity; he has come face to face with someone he once knew and cared about. After an instant of sheer physical revulsion—the prince actually gags on stage—he returns to the tired ubi sunt motif: “Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?” (5.1.182-85). Hamlet’s little skull-game has turned sour; but, rather than accept the conventional memento mori admonition—seeing his own reflection, in fact—Hamlet tries to remetaphor the skull as fast as possible. Hamlet displaces Yorick onto another familiar emblem: that of vanitas, a woman seeing a skull in a mirror instead of her own reflection. “Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch think, to this favour she must come” (5.1.186-87).*°

Hamlet regresses to an invective of the sort he earlier directed at Ophelia, whose paintings he had heard of well enough, and instead of accepting Yorick’s unique presence, he takes the easy way out by comparing the skull to Alexander and Caesar, both memento mori clichés.

Once Hamlet lets go the skull, he is on firmer ground and can improvise until Ophelia’s maimed rites interrupt him, but even Hamlet must admit that Yorick is smellier than Alexander, and in refusing

Yorick’s nauseating thingness Hamlet misses the point. To paraphrase Eliot again, he is Yorick, and is meant to be.’! Hamlet, in effect, takes possession of the skull the way Holbein’s ambassadors take possession of their props. For Hamlet, the value of Yorick’s skull is to occupy his mental powers in a pause between crises, an excuse to strike a pose and dash off a literary parody. But it is Yorick who has the last laugh; the gravedigger mentions that he began his job on the

day Hamlet was born, and he will no doubt complete the prince’s progress by burying him tomorrow. The prince’s true identity is irrel98

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evant, for the gravedigger deals in corpses alone, and Hamlet is almost a corpse himself. The skull in Hamlet thus performs precisely the same anamorphic function as the skull in Holbein’s painting.’ From Yorick’s (and his spokesman, the gravedigger’s) point of view, it is Hamlet who is the prop, and it is not coincidental that this scene flattens out Hamlet’s verbal polydimensionality; for if Hamlet asserts his freedom to bend Yorick’s skull to his own poetic ends, so too does Yorick assert his

own imitable presence on the English Renaissance stage. Yorick refuses the status of mere emblem, insisting on one last “live” cameo appearance, one last royal command performance. The old pro graciously vacates the grave where Ophelia will lie, but at the price of offering the prince a mirror in which the latter refuses to recognize that the last laugh is on him.

Critics intent on the scene’s emblematic function as a conven-

tional memento mori tableau miss the irony of performance, whereby Yorick butts his way into the foreground. As Hamlet fleshes out Yorick’s attributes, he himself is exposed as a skeleton clothed in words. This irony only becomes apparent in performance because on paper the word dominates over the image, so that the sheer theatrical presence of the skull—a prop that in Shakespeare’s day may well have been realistically encrusted with earth and worms—is effaced.** Yet

on stage Yorick becomes a remarkable character, eloquent in his erinning silence, holding a mirror up to nature. The purpose of Shakespeare’s scene is to divest Hamlet of his last defense against the inevitability of death: his incomparable way with words. By insisting (like the critics) on Yorick’s essentially emblematic function, Hamlet forestalls the inevitable and defers rather than confronts the truth of his own demise. When Hamlet’s palliatives confront Ophelia’s funeral procession, Ophelia’s corpse proves only to be Yorick redux. Hamlet cannot bear being upstaged by Laertes’ windy rhetoric because it reflects his own hyperbole, and so he explodes into the funeral canvas just as Yorick burst into the graveyard canvas. As the two men grapple in the grave for necrophilic possession of their now absurdly contested property (Ophelia), they perform a mordant dance of death, two skeletons in 99

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Gn

'a

Hamlet (Christopher Crocetti) sharing a grin with Yorick, Boston College, 2002. (Photo: Stephen Vedder.)

the making trying out their new home. Ophelia herself has been used

as an object throughout, by both Hamlet and her father. Even her corpse gets shoved in the earth while God’s back is turned, and the fact that she is upstaged at her own funeral is sadly appropriate. Yorick is far more of a stage presence in the scene: like Holbein’s phantasmagoric skull, he holds the mirror up to the audience and rubs our face in the dirt—a trick Shakespeare used in Macbeth when the mirror (we speculate) was turned on James I| to indicate Banquo’s continuing line. Only this time, the royal line comes to a dead end.

The Skull as Ventriloquist: The Honest Whore, Part I Dekker’s The Honest Whore, Part 1 (played at the Fortune by Prince Henry’s Men, formerly the Admiral’s Men, and printed in 1604) is an odd hybrid of city comedy and “repentant courtesan” morality tale. 100

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While the placid draper Candido becomes an undeserving Malvolio dragged off to Bedlam on suspicion of madness in the comic subplot, in the main plot the faithful courtier Hippolito mourns the apparent

death of his beloved, Infelice, while resisting the charms of the lovesick whore Bellatront. Hippolito is a self-styled melancholiac in the Hamlet mode who locks himself away every Monday, complete with skull, to contemplate his dead love—much to the amusement of his servant. According to Triggs, the play treats the memento mori theme “in a comically painless form,” but the reality is more ambiguous.** Spinrad notes that Dekker appears to be both parodying and paying trib-

ute to Hamlet and Yorick’s relationship here: “[S]ince Hippolito makes his usual rounds of town on days other than Monday, and since he will become a quasi-villain in Part II of the play, his memento

mori exercise may seem less a religious devotion than a self-pitying and misogynistic sulk. On the other hand, the whore Bellafront is converted when she sees the skull, so the confusion may be less in Hippolito’s mind than in Dekker’s” (p. 4). It is as if Dekker cannot quite decide if he is parodying an emblem or emblematizing a parody, but the confusion dissolves under the anamorphic gaze of the spectator, for by treating the skull as a hollowly reflective emblem in act 4, Hippolito misses the irony the skull embodies: he himself has already taken the place of the skull and become its mouthpiece in act 2.

Act 2 begins in an emblematic mode, but not with a memento mori. The opening stage directions read as follows: “Enter Roger [Bellafront’s servant] with a stoole, cushin, looking-glasse, and chafing-dish. Those being set downe, he pulls out of his pocket, a violl with white cullor in it, and two boxes, one with white, another

red painting. He places all things in order and a candle by them, singing with the ends of old Ballads as he does it. At last Bellafront (as

he rubs his cheeke with the cullors) whistles within.”*? The phrase “at last” indicates that this dumbshow occupies a not inconsiderable amount of stage time. Act 2, scene 2 marks the first appearance of the play’s title character, so Roger’s comic rigmarole may be by way of prologue to whet the audience’s appetite. When Bellafront finally enters, “not full ready, without a gowne, shee sits downe, with her 101

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bodkin curles her haire, cullers her lips.” In this glimpse behind the scenes (one that will eventually become a Restoration staple), we see the artifice behind the whore’s trade, as all her backstage props are arrayed for the audience’s voyeuristic pleasure (Bellafront orders “all these bables” whisked away before the day’s first customers appear at

2.1.54). Dekker here plays on the vanitas emblem—a beautiful woman at her mirror confronted by the mocking face of the skull— but although Roger offers the conventional remark, “theres knavery in dawbing I hold my life” (2.1.11), the skull itself is strangely absent from the obvious tableau. This is all the stranger in that Roger underscores the scene’s emblematic significance a few lines later—“I looke like an old Prouerbe, Hold the Candle before the diuell” (2.1.35)— while Bellafront’s original seducer, Matheo, pointedly refers to her lodgings as “a house of vanity” (2.1.178). The explanation for the skull’s mysterious absence requires an anamorphic shift on our part: the skull is not to be found within the looking glass but upon the mirror of the stage. When Hippolito reenters after walking out of the party, a crowded stage suddenly hollows out to the two principals.*° The play’s turning point is signaled by Bellatront’s shift from prose to verse in response to Hippolito’s ques-

tion at 2.1.240—“Is the gentleman (my friend) departed mistresse?”—a verse she refuses to abandon for the rest of the play even though she has spent the last two hundred lines speaking prose. Here it is Hippolito, not Yorick, who proves to be the death of the party and provides the incomplete emblem’s missing link as he lashes Bellafront in a 104-line philippic against whores.’ In his unflagging verbal energy, Hippolito ventriloquizes the message of the skull, much as the gravedigger acts as Yorick’s mouthpiece. Indeed, Hippolito all but accuses Bellafront of copulating with skulls: “Be he a Moore, a Tartar, tho his face / Looke vglier then a dead mans scull, / Could the

diuel put on a humane shape, / If his purse shake out crownes, vp then he gets” (2.1.339-42). But whereas Hamlet rejects the skull’s

message, displacing it onto Ophelia, Bellafront internalizes it: “Would all whores were as honest now, as |” (2.1.456). The memento mori, it seems, still carries a charge.*®

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skull does indeed appear at the beginning of act 4, whose stage directions offer an unmistakable visual echo of act 2: “Enter a seruant setting out a Table, on which he places a scull, a picture, a booke and a Taper.” Here we have a counterpoint to Bellafront’s candle and cosmetics, but while her accouterments flesh out the body by disguising its decay, Hippolito’s props strip it down to the essentials. Not content with playing the skull, Hippolito has decided to put himself into

the memento mori frame of mind by staging a miniperformance of Hamlet for himself. The servant’s commentary already indicates that the scene is a spoof of Hamlet (and, possibly, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus) by joking about what can only be termed the prop’s emblematic overkill:

My master meanes sure to turne me into a student; for here’s my booke, here my deske, here my light; this my close chamber, and heere my Punck: so that this dull drowzy first day of the weeke, makes me halfe a Priest, halfe a Chandler, halfe a paynter, halfe a Sexton, I and halfe a Bawd: for (all this day) my office is to do nothing but keep the dore. To proue it, looke you, this good-face and yonder gentleman |Hippolito] (so soone as euer my back’s turnd) wilbe naught together. (4.1.1-11)

The servant underscores the parallel to the earlier “house of van-

ity” tableau. His function is to be the skull’s bawd and keep the door—for the skull and Hippolito will “be naught” together (a wicked pun)—and he thus deflates Hippolito’s Hamletian pretensions before the latter even enters. The servant's is a proto-Brechtian alienation effect that estranges us from the memento mori frame even

as he assembles it on stage before our very eyes. Here we see the labored machinery behind the symbolism apparently so effortlessly achieved in Shakespeare’s earlier play, and when Hippolito does enter, he is more Orsino than Hamlet: Seru. What will your Lordship haue to breakfast? Hip. Sighs. 103

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Seru. What to dinner? Hip. Teares. (4.1.21-24)

It is remarkable that the parodic element so clearly marked in such an exchange has been overlooked. Theodore Spencer, for instance, writes: “A short time after the production of Hamlet, the first part of The Honest Whore appeared (1604), and we there have the skull used

much in Shakespeare’s way. .. . The creation of an atmosphere of death is not really necessary; it is brought in because it has been proved to be theatrically successful.”°? Dekker’s tableau, though, effects a dramatic kenosis of Hamlet, defined by Harold Bloom as an

ebbing “so performed in relation to a precursors poem-of-ebbing

that the precursor is emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not so absolute as it seems.”*° The Honest Whore deflates

both itself and its popular precursor, but the real kenosis occurs between the skulls and their respective properties, Hamlet and Hippolito, each of whom mistakenly believes he holds the skull in the

palm of his hand. Hippolito and Hamlet are hollowed out to the extent that they refuse to confer humanity on a dead thing.

Hippolito does indeed “on a dead mans scull drawe out mine owne,” since he is willing to take the place of the skull in Bellafront’s vanitas conversion. The skull that finds its way onto his desk freshly

unearthed from Hamlet is, by contrast, set up as a joke, a vacuous symbol no one (especially not the audience) is invited to take seriously. Yet in Hippolito’s remarkable meditation on the relationship of props to mimesis, the skull fills out again—not as symbol this time, but as object.

Hippolito addresses in turn a picture of his beloved Infelice and the skull: two representations, one of which is “alive” but a fabrication, the other of which is “dead” but authentic. Hippolito reads the portrait conventionally and emblematically, praising its lifelike qualities and linking it to the cosmetics we have seen earlier: “here ’tis read, / False coulours last after the true be dead” (4.1.41). But the fac-

titiousness of the painting is ultimately at odds with the verisimilitude of the portrait:

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Of all the Roses grafted in her cheekes, Of all the graces dauncing in her eyes, Of all the Musick set vpon her tongue, Of all that was past womans excellence, In her white bosome, looke! a painted board, Circumscribes all: Earth can no blisse affoord. (4.1.42-47)

In the anaphoric triteness of his lines, Hippolito performs the work of the skull in Holbein’s Ambassadors, reading the painting anamorphically against itself. Instead of bringing Infelice to life it freezes her in death, its slice of life revealed as “a painted board.” Hippolito extracts the appropriate moral (“Earth can no blisse atfoord”), but instead of following the memento mori logic to its conclusion—realizing that we live sub specie aeternitatis and must embrace the consolation of God’s eternity—Hippolito, like Hamlet, gets mired in details. Hippolito rejects the painting’s implied divine consolations: Nothing of her, but this? this cannot speake, It has no lap for me to rest vpon, No lip worth tasting: here the wormes will feed, As in her coffin: hence then idle Art, True loue’s best picturde in a true-loue’s heart. Here art thou drawne sweet maid, till this be dead, So that thou liu’st twice, twice art buried. Thou figure of my friend, lye there. (4.1.48-55) Here Hippolito internalizes Infelice’s living image, rejecting the picture as too morbid. The heart, not the board, will be Infelice’s reliquary; but there is a ghoulish echo in the line “Here art thou drawne sweet maid” of Hippolito’s urge “on a dead mans scull” to “drawe out mine own.” Biology dictates that Hippolito’s heart is a less lasting

memorial than the picture, for the former only lasts “till this [i.e., Hippolito’s body] be dead” and Infelice buried a second time. Like a

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vampire, Infelice keeps being brought back from the dead; art may be “idle,” but at least you can count on it to stay put. Hippolito turns to the skull midline, as if temporarily nonplussed. “Whats here? / Perhaps this shrewd pate was mine enimies: / Las! say

it were: I need not feare him now” (4.1.55—57). Once again, Hippolito, like Hamlet, fails to make the connection to his own situation, preferring to see in the skull’s outlines (at least initially) the visage of the Other. In fact, Hippolito prefers the skull to the picture because

it allows him to indulge his theatrical bent and launch into another Set piece:

What fooles are men to build a garish tombe, Onely to saue the carcasse whilst it rots, To maintein’t long in stincking, make good carion, But leaue no good deeds to preserve them sound, For good deedes keepe men sweet, long aboue ground. And must all come to this; fooles, wise, all hether; Must all heads thus at last be laid together. (4.1.71-77) Hippolito’s vapid moralizing falls as flat as Hamlet’s desiccated puns. Hippolito does at least concede the skull’s reflective powers:

Draw me my picture then, thou graue neate workeman, After this fashion, not like this; these coulours In time kissing but ayre, will be kist off, But heres a fellow; that which he layes on, Till doomes day, alters not complexion. Death’s the best Painter then. (4.1.78-83)

Hippolito the patron completes his critique of the picture’s twodimensional naturalism by counterpoising it to the three-dimensional object on his desk. The skull is unaccommodated man; the picture, kitsch. In Spinrad’s words, Hippolito “has not accepted death; he has put himself in control of it” (p. 5). 106

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Why does Dekker introduce the skull into the scene in the first place? Is it simply a homage to his precursor? The skull troubles the very theatrical mimesis that frames the scene. Hippolito, Bellafront, and Infelice are characters played by actors, but whom is the skull impersonating? Is it not, rather, the thing itself? The more Hippolito tries to squeeze the skull into his mental framework as a prop, the more obdurately antisymbolic the skull becomes. It outstrips Hippolito by its very materiality, much as the gravedigger nullifies Hamlet's verbiage. The skull flattens out Hippolito’s language, showing

him up as a performative caricature of an earlier man with a skull who was himself a performative caricature of other men with skulls, and so forth ad absurdum. We cease to take Hippolito seriously, in other words, at the very moment the memento mori emblem and Bellafront, who arrives unexpectedly dressed as a page, seem to authorize him. Dekker cements this irony by restaging Hippolito’s repudiation of Bellatront, this time with props: Hippolito resurrects the painting in self-defense (“should I breake my bond, / This bord would riue in

twaine, these wooden lippes / Call me most periurde villaine” [4.1.162—63]) and invites Bellafront to take his place in the memento

mori tableau (“Stay and take Phisicke for it, read this booke, / Aske counsell of this head whats to be done” [4.1.172—73]). Hippolito has faith these props will support his thoroughly undermined symbolism. Bellafront, under his erotic sway, concedes; but Hippolito himself is under the erotic sway of picture and skull. Like Yorick, they refuse to stay dead and buried, bursting the inert frames that initially contained them.

Remember You Must Kill: The Revenger’s Tragedy

The Revenger’s Tragedy takes its genre’s exhausted conventions and

plays them as farce. In its unnamed city we no longer encounter characters, but roles. It is virtually impossible to particularize the cast in performance, as each character is defined solely by relation-

ship (“the Duchess’ younger son”), function (“the Duke”), or 107

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emblematic essence (“Vindice,” “Lussurioso,” and the rest). Names are consistently withheld from the audience, and even the characters cannot keep the royal brothers straight. The bumbling officers misunderstand Ambitioso’s and Supervacuo’s order to kill “our brother the duke’s son” (3.3.3) and kill the wrong brother, while in one of the play’s many ironies of confusion and substitution, a disguised Vindice is hired to kill himself.*! We are in a heavily ironized world of commodification gone berserk, an economy of lust that relentlessly deadens people into exploited objects. As Glenda Conway notes, “Among the eleven members of the two key families in the play, nearly every repugnant act imaginable occurs—including murder, fratricide, torture, incest, rape, and pandering.”** From the start these characters are virtual walking corpses—“Oh that marrowless age / Would stuff the hollow bones with damned desires,” exclaims Vindice (1.1.6)—and as fast as they use and discard each other as objects, they are themselves recycled into props. This is melodrama teetering on the edge of farce, a play in which being alive or dead at any given point seems arbitrary. Today’s doomed duke is merely a placeholder for tomorrow’s doomed duke. The play opens with Vindice carrying the skull of his dead mistress Gloriana on stage in order to explain (to it?) that Gloriana was poisoned by the old duke “Because thy purer part would not consent / Unto his palsey-lust” (1.1.32—33). Vindice’s brother sees nothing odd in his behavior (“Still sighing o’er Death’s vizard?” [1.1.49]), and

neither, apparently, should the audience; after all, the scene is a visual echo of Holbein’s woodcut series The Dance of Death, in which Death, unseen, watches a procession of nobles—as well as recalling the graveyard scene in Hamlet.** If Vindice begins the play by turn-

ing the procession of corrupt nobles into a queasy morality tableau and Gloriana into a portable memento mori, he himself onomastically and visually completes the pictorial emblem as “Vengeance.”

Vindice treats the skull as a stand-in for Gloriana, but he seems unaware of his own symbolic implication in the scene. He is a revenger who believes himself pure, and at him, too, the skull is grinning. As in Hamlet, the reality of the skull flattens the very rhetoric Vin108

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dice uses to describe it. When Vindice tries to fill out “Thou sallow picture of my poisoned love” (1.1.14), we get no sense of Gloriana as a living, breathing person. It is as if Vindice has lost all memory of the skin around the skull and can offer only metalepsis, the glossing of one rhetorical figure through another: When two heaven-pointed diamonds were set In those unsightly rings—then twas a face So far beyond the artificial shine Of any woman’s bought complexion That the uprightest man—if such there be, That sin but seven times a day—broke custom And made up eight with looking after her. (1.1.19-25) Inset in the skull’s hollow “rings” are diamonds instead of eyes, polished gems that deconstruct the very naturalness Vindice is groping for (“So far beyond the artificial shine .. .”). The diamonds’ implied

value as commodity reinforces rather than counters the “bought complexion” Vindice wishes to repudiate. Far from establishing Gloriana’s chastity, Vindice’s language instead produces an illicit sexuality—her ability to excite an eighth erection in “the uprightest man.” Vindice’s imagery turns Gloriana into a work of artifice; in Laurie Finke’s words, she has been “killed into art.”** Moreover, Vindice cannot keep the language of property and exchange at bay. Even in lite, Gloriana was coveted solely as an object of desire: Oh she was able to ha’ made a usurer’s son Melt all his patrimony in a kiss, And what his father fifty years told To have consumed, and yet his suit been cold: ... Vengeance, thou Murder’s quit-rent, and whereby Thou show’st thyself Tenant to Tragedy, Oh keep thy day, hour, minute, I beseech, For those thou hast determined. (1.1.26-42) 109

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Now reduced to a prop, Gloriana was in life it seems an avid consumer of wealth and property. Her kiss “melted” patrimony, a curious image that at once suggests commodity exchange (patrimony for kisses) and cashing in one’s assets, melting down ingots for gold. In this image fifty years of usury vanish in a twinkling; the “cold suit” is ambiguous, suggesting both father and son as potential suitors. Was

Gloriana her own woman, able to pick and choose her suitors, or simply an object passed down a chain of men? Vindice does not say, and we must draw our own conclusions based on her posthumous activities. Vindice himself, like Hamlet and Hippolito before him, seems to miss the memento mori message behind the skull. “By dehumanizing the skulls of the dead and stripping the flesh off the living, Vindice becomes a puppeteer of death, untouched by any thought of his own mortality.”*° Instead of enjoining him to turn his eyes heavenward, it is as if Gloriana tells Vindice to get cracking and live up to his own

name. Vengeance is “Murder’s quit-rent,” glossed by Gibbons as “rent paid by a freehold tenant in lieu of service to a landlord.”*® Here vengeance is not even a service to the deceased, but rendered as a sort of bastard feudalism—simply a cash payment to fob off potential eviction, in this case the death even Vindice cannot escape. But what master does vengeance serve? It is “Tragedy’s tenant,” making

the metatheatrical point that we are all provisional tenants on this earth. For a fleeting moment, Vindice recognizes his own appointment in Samarra, but he cannot escape the revenge economy that seeks to exploit both his mobility and expendability, his ability to turn people into things. Gloriana returns to the stage as a painted lady in act 3, scene 5, when Vindice, relishing his role as pander to the duke, unmasks the hideously pranked-up skull to his brother Hippolito: Here’s an eye

Able to tempt a great man—to serve God; A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble. Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble, a drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo ’em 110

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To suffer wet damnation to run through ’em. Here’s a cheek keeps her colour, let the wind go whistle: Spout rain, we fear thee not, be hot or cold All’s one with us. (3.5.54-62) Not only has Vindice dressed the skull up in borrowed robes in order to snare the duke, he has entirely forgotten that the skull was once

his beloved, preferring to see her by turns as a reluctant wench coaxed into serving the duke’s lust (“I have took care / For a delicious

lip, a sparkling eye” [3.5.31-32]) and as a grotesque memento occidere, whose “Remember (Dismember?) You Must Kill” dictum inverts the standard memento mori. When Hippolito reminds Vindice that the skull once belonged to his mistress, Vindice indicates

that he has long since forgotten her, except as a spur to revenge: “And now methinks I could even chide myself / For doting on her beauty” (3.5.69-70). Like Hamlet, Vindice turns to preaching against

cosmetics, conveniently forgetting that it is he who has travestied Gloriana’s memory by daubing her lips with poison, the equivalent of the poison the duke used to dispatch her nine years before. Vindice

objectifies Gloriana into a memento mori that symbolizes both the dance of death (“It were fine methinks / To have thee seen at revels, forgetful feasts / And unclean brothels” [3.5.89-91]) and the comfortably misogynistic vanitas emblem (“Here might a scornful and ambitious woman / Look through and through herself” [3.5.95-96]). In Vindice’s mind, Gloriana now exists only to prop up “my tragic business” (3.5.98). The sex object has become a death fetish; the cranium is the message. Yet Vindice himself admits that Gloriana is no mere prop. “I have not fashioned this only for show / And useless property, no—it shall bear a part / E’en in its own revenge” (3.5.99-101). In these crucial lines lies the fiendish anamorphosis of the stage image, its insistence on the secret life of props. For if Vindice (to add insult to injury) refuses to stabilize the skull’s symbolic function, content to use it as bait for the duke and as warning against feminine wiles, by adopting a shift in perspective we may see that it is Gloriana who has engi-

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neered Vindice for her own devices. In effect, she out-emblematizes the emblematizer, enduring Vindice’s hollow mouthings simply as a means of taking center stage. Vindice may think he has transformed the skull into a “dreadful vizard” (5.3.149), a mask of its former self, but Gloriana herself arrogates the shape of bashful “country lady” for a lethally effective performance (3.5.132), using Vindice as her cos-

tumer, valet, and means of transportation to keep her fateful tryst with the duke, literally melting him with a kiss. As self-styled artificer and impresario of death, then, Vindice is literally staging corpses. He turns the duke, too, into a prop and stages

a murderous danse macabre for the new duke’s investiture. But if Vindice turns the body into dismembered, metonymical flesh, he himself is casually dispatched by Antonio. Vindice must finally recognize that he, too, is a throwaway, Murder’s quitrent. In order for

the tableau to be complete, the punisher must be punished. The Revenger’s Tragedy thus offers us two simultaneous perspectives on the play’s action. In the first, Vindice continues the Hamletian tradi-

tion of sucking the marrow from the memento mori emblem and throwing away the bones, displacing memento mori onto vanitas. But

from the second perspective it is Gloriana who pulls the strings all along, manipulating Vindice for her own ends and discarding him when he no longer serves her turn. Conway, Spinrad, and Garber correctly take note of Vindice’s misreading of the skull, whereby what should be the reminder of death becomes the agent of death; they miss, however, the double irony whereby Gloriana transforms her lover, who has desecrated her wish to remain pure and intact by disinterring and mutilating her corpse, into the instrument of her own infernal revenge on the men who treat her like dirt.*’ Unlike Browning’s or Webster’s duchess, Gloriana refuses to take her culture’s relentless emblematic deflections lying down. With Vindice’s death, the skull’s triumph is complete. The skeleton crew of Jacobean skulls that follows in Gloriana’s wake adds little to what one might mischievously call The Revenger’s Tragedy’s prosopropeia.*®

Renaissance playwrights were well aware of the potency of anamorphosis and its ability to make us perform a theatrical double

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take. Thus Bushy in Richard II invokes “perspectives, which rightly gazd upon / Show nothing but confusion; [but] eyd awry / Distinguish form” (2.2.18—20). Rather than affirm the orthodox message of the memento mori, whose semiotic grip on the skull was already slipping by 1600, Jacobean stage skulls dislocate the skull’s rhetorical function and mock its former solace. From the anamorphic angle of

performance, skulls insist on their own materiality, their uncanny oscillation between subject and object, person and prop. In its refusal to become a (mere) prop, the Jacobean skull may ges-

ture toward a larger cultural preoccupation with the uneasy reciprocity between man and thing. In this period the word property begins to hover between object and attribute; it is both something you own and something you are (or might become).*” One meaning of property, cited as early as 1598 by the OED, is “A mere means to an end; an instrument, a tool, a cat’s paw.” Thus Fenton in The Merry Wives of Windsor tells Anne Page (paraphrasing his father’s suspicion) that “’tis a thing impossible / I should love thee but as a prop-

erty” (3.4.9-10), while in Julius Caesar Antony derides Lepidus’s importance to Octavius: “Do not talk of him / But as a property” (4.1.39-40). To be “propertied,” meanwhile, is to be turned into a mere thing: “They have here propertied me,” complains an imprisoned Malvolio to his tormentor Feste in Twelfth Night (4.2.91). Jacobean drama continually reflects people’s sense of being reduced to their use- and exchange-value, especially women. When Quarlous in Bartholemew Fair asks Grace Wellborn how she came to be Justice Overdo’s ward, she replies simply that “he bought me” of the king (3.5.289); during the trial of Vittoria Corombona in The White Devil, Cardinal Monticelso casually reveals that his nephew bought Vittoria from her father.°? The line between marriage and prostitution is thin, and in plays such as A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Bartholemew Fair, and The Revenger’s Tragedy no relationships seem to exist outside the bounds of economic self-interest. Women become properties to be

conveyed between parties, forcibly if necessary. If the legal term alienation strictly referred only to the transfer of one’s “right, title, and interest” in real (i.e., royal) property, it is hard to see Grace or

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Vittoria as any less “real”—or any less alienated—than the wealth

they represent to the men who purchase use-interest in them through the habere et tenere of the marriage contract.

Closer to home, for actors in Jacobean playing companies, the skull might have suggested not only the very live possibility of being upstaged by a dead prop. In one sense, actors who were hirelings or apprentices rather than shareholders may have felt that they were the

property of the company, along with its costumes and scripts (although not, obviously, in a legal sense). Scene-stealing skulls may retlect a perceived lack of agency on the actor’s part, an acknowledg-

ment that the prop makes and unmakes the man. We recall that a common term for a supernumerary in the seventeenth century was a property-boy, and to this day the stalwart spear-carrier becomes the prop’s prop. Indeed, the skull’s “live performance” may have been one way for the playwright to threaten the autonomy of actors.?! If according to Hamlet the responsible clown speaks no more than is set down for him, Shakespeare suggests that, unlike the improvisational comedian Richard Tarlton whom Yorick once resembled, the ideal jester is mute—literally empty-headed. Whether or not we link the stage skull to wider discourses of subject-formation and dissolution in the period, the skulls exhumed in this discussion refuse to settle for the role of either living attribute or dead object. They are a kind of no-man’s land, a crucible for explor-

ing the porous boundary between property and person. The very characters who would commodify them as objects (the duke, Vindice) or absorb them as attributes (Hamlet, Hippolito) find themselves eerily drained of their own vitality, even as the skulls in Ham-

let and The Revenger’s Tragedy take on “life” as Yorick and Gloriana—who administers her own posthumous revenge on the duke who wronged her, slyly using Vindice as both costumer and stagehand before making her final exit. Interestingly, none of these props seems to make it to the final tableau: it is as if they are consumed, willy-nilly, in the heat of performance. But their traces linger on in our uneasy imaginations as we file out of the theater, unsure of just what it is we have glimpsed beneath the surface. “What could there possibly be ‘behind’ Gloriana’s skull?” asks 114

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Peter Stallybrass.°* The paradox the skull embodies in Hamlet, The Honest Whore, and The Revenger’s Tragedy is precisely the paradox of “property,” its oscillation between live attribute and dead thing. The fascination of the skull for the Renaissance playwright lies less in its emblematic than in its anamorphic properties, its willingness to steal the show from under the noses of the brotoi, the “dying ones,” and to

put the spectator literally on edge. I we wish to understand the appeal of skulls on the Renaissance stage, we must see them not merely as symbols, but as characters in their own right who may be less self-effacing than they seem.

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—S

| ri . Fan of Mode Sexual Semaphore on the Restoration and EarlyFighteenth-Century Stage The only thing you can’t do with a fan [on stage] is fan yoursely. —Dame Edith Evans

ian the eucharistic water, the bloody handkerchief, and the memento mori skull, the ladies’ folding fan helped reshape the cultural signification of the English stage, but with an important difference. The fan was devoid of the sacred associations that haunted the water, handkerchief, and skull and inspired their

theatrical appropriation by medieval and early modern drama. Despite the fact that liturgical fans had been used in the eastern Mediterranean Mass between the sixth and fifteenth centuries—the flabellum, a circular fan with pleated leaves, whisked away insects from the precious Host during consecration—English drama provides no record that playwrights exploited the potential link between fans and church ritual. Fvidently in use on the commercial pre-Commonwealth stage, the fan remained a resolutely secular prop once the theaters reopened, after an eighteen-year hiatus, following the restoration of Charles II in 16060. Nevertheless, like the earlier props | have considered, the fan was pressed into service to address a wider semiotic crisis: in this case, the degree to which the Restoration actress—a novelty on the professional English stage—could affect the theatrical representation of women’s sexuality. The tan’s grip on the imagination of Restora117

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tion and early-eighteenth-century playwrights must therefore be explained in terms of contemporary sexual politics rather than ghostly echoes of Catholic symbolism.’ How did that imagination figure the fan? In his mock-heroic poem “The Fan” (1713) John Gay devises a creation myth for the “instrument of Love” that bewitched fashionable society.’ When the swain

Strephon appeals to Venus for “some bright toy” to charm his beloved Corinna, Venus exhorts her smithy-Cupids to forge a delicate flirtation device to her exact specifications. The machine will unfurl after the peacock’s example, and its taper sticks will be fashioned from Cupid-darts. Tongue firmly in cheek, the poet bemoans the new erotic power such a toy grants the female sex, even as he celebrates its piquancy: The peeping fan in modern times shall rise, Through which unseen the female ogle flies; This shall in temples the sly maid conceal, And shelter love beneath devotion’s veil. . . . As learned Orators that touch the heart, With various action raise their soothing art, Both head and hand affect the listning throng, And humour each expression of the tongue. So shall each passion by the fan be seen, From noisie anger to the sullen spleen.

The fan’s sexual semaphore, complains Gay, will hand women an untair advantage: “How are the Sex improwd in am’rous arts, / What new-found snares they bait for human hearts!” As if acknowledging the dangers inherent in giving women a wordless yet eloquent language, Venus decrees that the fan must speak for itself as well. Her insistence that the fan’s folding paper bear a painted emblem spurs a fractious debate in Olympus over what fable the fan should illustrate. Seeking to even the sexual odds, Venus herself suggests the fan be graced with “unresisting nymphs, and am’rous swains ... To melt slow virgins with the warm design.” Chaste Diana coun-

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ters that images of forsaken women and perfidious men better suit the fan: “May some chast story from the pencil flow, / To speak the virgin’s joy, and Hymen’s woe.” Envisioning a gallery of erotica for male delectation, the cynical Momus proposes that the fan feature choice

scenes of gods seducing mortals: “Let these amours adorn the new machine, / And [concupiscent] female nature on the piece be seen.” Last, Minerva suggests that the fan depict a series of object lessons in

“the follies of the female kind”: the pride of Niobe, the jealousy of Procris, and the vanity of Narcissus. The gods applaud Minerva’s con-

ceit, and the painted fan imparts its chastening message to Corinna, who has strayed into a dalliance with Leander. When confronted with the fan’s admonitory images, Corinna duly repents and, in the poem’s final couplet, marries Strephon. Gay’s comic fantasy is a textbook example of female subversion contained. Thanks to the fan’s painted images, what begins as an instrument of female erotic expression becomes a tool to put unruly women in their place. Notwithstanding its cheerfully sexist conclusion, Gay’s poem pinpoints the tension between two possible uses of the fan: as static emblem, whose didactic message is eternally fixed by the male poet/playwright, and as sexual semaphore, whose fluid semiosis is controlled by the female performer/actress. That tension between frozen utterance and mobile signification, as it is embodied in the performance of fans in the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century playhouse, is the subject of this chapter. On the Restoration stage, the sexual politics of the fan converged

with perhaps the most revolutionary innovation in the history of English theater: the arrival of the first actresses on the licensed public stage.* Between the opening of the commercial public playhouses

in the 1570s and the closing of the theaters in 1642, boys or men played all female roles. In 1662, possibly at the suggestion of the patentees themselves, the royal patents to the two licensed theater companies confirmed that henceforward all female roles on the licensed London stage should be played by women.’ Until 1660, then, the natural way to play a woman was to have a boy impersonate her. But the Restoration stage’s “natural woman” literally looked

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quite different, and in the process of assimilating the actress to English drama, Restoration playwrights were compelled to reassess an entire tradition of staged femininity. While certainly a presence on the pre-Commonwealth stage, the fan became an archetypal female prop on the Restoration stage.® Because of its metonymic association with femininity—an association that was of course entirely constructed—the fan soon figured in the struggle over who would control how the actress signified on stage. More precisely, the sexual politics surrounding the Restoration actress explain the striking recurrence of a dramatic topos I call the fan lesson: a scene in which a young woman is instructed in the correct art of the fan. What object lesson might these fans have imparted to audiences, and who ultimately determined their message—actress, playwright, or spectator? Were these property-fans the aids to male seduction devised by Gay’s Venus; the bulwarks to keep predatory

men at bay sought by Diana; the titillating stimuli envisioned by Momus; or the lessons in the containment of female subversion limned by Minerva?

Through a close examination of the key fan lessons extant in Restoration and early-eighteenth-century drama, I consider why the artifice of the fan had to be repeatedly staged for an audience all too familiar with its erotic charm in the world beyond the playhouse. I shall argue that, like the actress herself, the eloquent fan embodied an unstable signifying excess—an excess that could never be entirely

contained by the playwrights who, perhaps in response to the actresses’ penchant for improvisation, sought to script its sexual sem-

aphore ever more narrowly.’ More broadly, as in other chapters, I claim that the prop can be an important key to reconstructing actual performance practice. While performance critics, actors, and movement specialists have speculated on how the Restoration fan might have been wielded in performance, such reconstructions tend to be highly generalized, ahistorical, and/or divorced from the flesh-andblood actress.® In contrast, I spotlight very precise moments of dramatic text that demand to be read as evidence of a vanished perfor-

mance history. | am aware that the problem of what counts as evidence for the stage life of props is especially acute in the case of 120

The Fan of Mode

the fan. What I attempt is the contextual reanimation of a theatrically conspicuous but textually elusive prop that focuses as much on producible staging as on textual signification.’ Indeed, I shall claim that, in the case of the fan, actress’s gesture and playwright’s dialogue may

even be at odds. But before I take up this argument, the popular notion that the fan spoke its own explicit language in late-seventeenth-century England needs to be addressed.

Arresting Gestures: Addison and the Mythical “Language of the Fan” Fashionable Restoration society, which is largely what the plays of the period reflect, was characterized by rigid adherence to class- and gender-appropriate bodily codes of behavior. As Peter Holland notes, “The hundreds of seventeenth-century books describing the correct manner of comporting oneself in society, many translated from the French, point to a codification of social behaviour into consciously defined patterns of conduct.”!° Nowhere is this more evident than in the various attempts to prescribe and codify a so-called language of the fan—a language that, as we shall see, was more mythical than real.

As the era’s most fashionable female accessory, the fan achieved a high level of cultural visibility. Poets apostrophized the fan in verse; journalists satirized its erotic dangers; manuals were eventually written purporting to reveal its secret lexicon. Once the pleated, or folding, fan was introduced into Europe from the East around 1500, following the opening of the sea route by Vasco de Gama in 1498, the fan became a ubiquitous female accouterment, a prosthetic extension

of the woman’s arm and hand.!! Able to alter physical form, to expand and contract with a single motion, the folding fan paradoxi-

cally served as both shield and resonance chamber. The fan hid blushes and covert glances, but it also drew attention to them, even

as it magnified the slightest movement of the arm and wrist and thereby betrayed inner perturbation or arousal. In a revealing study of fan iconography in the work of Hogarth, Angela Rosenthal empha12]

The Stage Life of Props

sizes the fan’s ability to stage-manage encounters between the sexes by manipulating the male gaze:

Although this highly contrived tool could be used to protect against light and heat—often necessary in overcrowded assem-

blies and for women who were bound up in tightly fitting bodices—these pragmatic services were subordinate to the primary function of the fan as a means of focusing the gaze and

enhancing communication. Controlled by the hands and fingers of women, the fan was mobile and subject to permanent transformation. It thus registered and betrayed in its dynamic deployment—and even via the sounds produced by its sudden unfolding, nervous fluttering, or abrupt closure—the thoughts and emotions of its owner.!? As a flirtation device, the fan placed a degree of sexual power (or, at least, sexual signification) directly in the hands of women.

The theatrical potential of the fan proved irresistible, and it became a staple of the Restoration stage. As in wider fashionable society, fans came in at least two varieties: the so-called matron’s fan, a bunch of ostrich feathers set in a heavy handle, and painted, semicircular folding fans.'° The latter was such a ubiquitous female accessory that it must have graced virtually every play. Just as playwrights took it for granted that an actress would stamp her own personality

on a custom-written role, so they would expect her personal fan, from which she was inseparable, to underscore and amplify the “beats” of a given scene. Animated by the expert manipulation of living, breathing actresses, the fan must have electrified the playhouse in a way that registers only dimly on the page. Indeed, the surviving textual evidence shows the drama continu-

ally—almost obsessively—figuring the fan as an eroticized, femi-

nized weapon in the battle between the sexes. For instance, the widow in Richard Steele’s The Funeral; or, Grief A-la-Mode (Drury Lane, 1701) makes explicit the link between fans and gender politics: “Ay Tattleaid, |men] imagine themselves mighty things, but Govern-

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ment founded on Force only, is a Brutal Power—We rule them by their Affections, which blinds them into a belief that they rule us, or at least are in the Government with us—But in this Nation our Power is Absolute; Thus, thus, we sway—(Playing her Fan). A Fan is both the Standard, and the Flag of England: I Laugh to see the Men, go our Errands, Strut in Great Offices, Live in Cares, Hazards and Scandals to come home and be Fools to Us in Brags of their Dispatches, Negotiations, and their Wisdoms.”!* As an erotic weapon, however, the fan can backfire. While occasionally used as a literal weapon for comic purposes, as when Lady Maggot “pummels Whachum with her Fan and Fist; then she strikes [her husband] Sir Humphrey with her fan and thrusts him out by the

nape of the neck” in Thomas Shadwell’s 1690 play, The Scowrers (4.208 s.d.), more often the fan directs women’s anger inward. Thus Mrs. Loveit tears her fan in George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1667), while Lady Addle “strikes her fan on her hand passionately” to signal anger at the “frigid fop” Nincompoop in Thomas Durtey’s Love for Money (1691). Almost without exception, the lady’s fan is eroticized and feminized in order to render the woman who wields it an object of male sexual attention. Fans become a male target; rakes were known as “fan-tearers,” perhaps to express their ability to make women tear their own fans, or perhaps in order to suggest the association of fans with the female genitals. In the playhouse, the visual opposition between fan and sword (or pistol) helped the audience fix the sexes into separate spheres, especially once fans became the accouterments solely of women and effeminate fops.? According to fan historian G. Woolliscroft Rhead, by the eighteenth century the folding fan had developed a codified language of its own. Rhead’s many examples of the “language of love” include placing the shut fan near the heart (“You have won my love”); pressing the half-opened fan to the lips (“You may kiss me”); and covering the left ear with the open fan (“Do not betray our secret”). Rhead then observes, “A shorter code has been published in England (duly copyrighted) by M. J. Duvelleroy. This, although the principle is the same, differs materially in the details; thus, ‘I love yow’ in Spanish is

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to hide the eyes behind the opened fan; in English, to draw the hand across the cheek. ‘I hate you, in the former instance, is to raise the shut fan to the shoulder in the right hand; in the latter, to draw the fan through the hand: either code being sufficiently expressive and acquired with tolerable ease.” !° Rhead fails to note that Duvelleroy was a manufacturer of fans, and his fan-code a commercial putf. Indeed, the whole notion that a codified language of the fan was in public circulation in eighteenth-

century England is almost certainly a fanciful myth.'’ No less an authority than Charles Gildon, author (or rather editor-compilerplagiarist) of England’s first acting manual, found it difficult to formalize strict rules for correct manual gestures in 1710: “We come now to the hands, which as they are the chief instruments of action, varying themselves as many ways as they are capable of expressing

things, so is it a difficult matter to give such rules as are without exception.”!® It is true that, according to at least one conduct book, the fan’s gestural lexicon had congealed into a rigid code of flirtation by the Victorian era.'° But if “the fan actually developed a secret code of signals in the nineteenth century,” as J. L. Styan conjectures, its signals must have been less codified in the Restoration—to the extent they were codified at all.7° The struggle to pin down the fan’s expressive potential found its definitive expression in Joseph Addison’s satire on the Academy of the Fan in The Spectator (June 27, 1711). Addison parodies the cultural anxiety surrounding the fan’s semiotic mobility by means of a fantasy of male instruction in its arts:

Women are armed with Fans as Men with Swords, and sometimes do more Execution with them: To the End therefore that Ladies may be entire Mistresses of the Weapon which they bear, I have erected an Academy for the training up of young Women in the Exercise of the Fan, according to the most fashionable Airs

and Motions that are now practised at Court. The Ladies who carry Fans under me are drawn up twice a Day in my great Hall,

where they are instructed in the Use of their Arms, and exercised by the following Words of Command, 124

The Fan of Mode

Handle your Fans, Unfurl your fans, Discharge your fans, Ground your fans, Recover your fans, Flutter your fans.

By the right Observation of these few plain Words of Command, a Woman of a tolerable Genius who will apply her self diligently to her Exercise for the Space of but one half Year, shall be able to give her Fan all the Graces that can possibly enter into that little modish Machine.?!

Addison claims that his purpose is to make the ladies “entire Mistresses of the Weapon which they bear.” But his monstrous regiment

of fan-bearing women betrays the unspoken fear that women improperly schooled in the art of delighting men may choose to strike out on their own.

Addison wishes to naturalize the fan; in other words, women should learn to tie the precise internal emotion to the correct external gesture without thinking, in a one-to-one relationship. To borrow a distinction from philosopher Gilbert Ryle, the purpose of the academy is not so much training as drill.?” After enumerating the var-

ious kinds of flutter (angry, modest, timorous, confused, merry, amorous), Addison observes that “there is scarce any Emotion in the Mind which does not produce a suitable Agitation in the Fan; insomuch, that if I only see the Fan of a disciplin’d Lady, I know very well whether she laughs, frowns, or blushes” (emphasis added).*? Dis-

arming in more ways than one, Addison’s academy disciplines women to broadcast rather than veil their most intimate emotions, intentions, and desires. Like Gay, Addison bestows with one hand what he takes away with the other. In both cases, the male author’s playful impulse to control the fan’s feminine language betrays how potentially powerful that language is. Despite its parodic exaggeration, Addison’s sweeping “exercise of the fan” probably bears more resemblance to Restoration fan-practice 125

The Stage Life of Props

than the rigidly codified “language of the fan” described by Rhead. Two pieces of theatrical criticism from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries echo Addison, which implies that a more elaborate sema-

phore would not have communicated itself even to the more au courant spectators. In 1757, critic Arthur Murphy marveled at David Garrick’s cross-dressed Sir John Brute in a revival of Vanbrugh’s comedy The Provoked Wife (1697). “When personating Lady Brute, you would swear he had often attended the toilet and there gleaned up the many various airs of the fair sex: he is perfectly versed in the exercise of the fan, the hips, the adjustment of the tucker and even the minutest conduct of the finger.”*t+ J. Roberts’s much reproduced 1775 engraving of Garrick in drag as Sir John Brute shows Garrick’s arms demurely crossed, his limp right hand gently clasping a closed fan between thumb and forefinger. Rather than following the line of the forearm, the fan forms an elegantly drooping extension of Garrick’s hand and wrist, adding an incongruous note of fey delicacy that is all

the more absurd when juxtaposed to his oversized headgear. Evidence thus suggests that Garrick’s gender mimicry owed much to Addison but proved more wickedly accurate in performance. More than half a century later, Mrs. Jordan’s biographer James

Boaden praised Frances Abington’s command of the fan. “She, | think, took more entire possession of the stage than any actress | have seen... . The ladies of her day wore the hoop and its concomitant train. The Spectator’s exercise of the fan was really no play of fancy. Shall I say that I have never seen it in a hand so dexterous as that of Mrs Abington?” Although Boaden leaves us guessing as to the precise nature of Mrs. Abington’s dexterity, several visual depic-

tions of her fan-performances survive. A portrait of Abington as Aurelia in The Twin Rivals (1777) shows her using a shut fan, delicately balanced between thumb and forefinger, to extend the sweep of her right arm, which like her left appears rather stubby owing to her voluminous hoop dress and tiny, corseted torso. As Lady Teazle in the famous screen scene in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal in the

same year, Abington once more tilts her head coyly aside, but this time stands with her legs pressed together and rigidly clasps an open fan in both hands over her genital area as a patent substitute for the 126

The Fan of Mode

screen that has tumbled at her feet. The fan turns Abington into a clothed Venus Pudica, at once modestly veiling and drawing attention

to Lady Teazle’s sexual parts. (An anonymous engraving from the Theatre Museum of the same scene shows Lady Teazle veiling her face with her fan at the moment of discovery.)*° Last, a well-known portrait showing Abington delivering an aside as Lady Betty Modish in Cibber’s The Careless Husband (1704) suggests how integral the fan was to her performance. If “The Spectator’s exercise of the fan was really no play of fancy,” as Boaden asserts, it may well be because Addison’s crude repertory of

moves lent itself to endless refinement and variation in the hands of such skilled actors as Garrick and Abington, rather than congealing into a lexicon that actors were expected to reproduce on cue. No fullfledged language of the fan existed in the Restoration, but Addison’s fanciful drill demonstrates that the fan’s potential capacity to speak for itself became a potent source of cultural anxiety nonetheless.

Semiotic Surplus and the Restoration Actress Who then controlled the fan’s eloquence? Of the props analyzed in this study, the fan is perhaps the most actor-dependent for its stage interest. After all, there is nothing inherently captivating about either the visual appearance of a fan or the sight of someone fanning herself

on stage (compare the skulls in Hamlet or the pistols in Hedda Gabler). Indeed, in the hands of an unskilled actress there is a strong risk that the fan’s metronomic beat will regularize the rhythms of the scene and become soporific. The fan’s stage life depends upon the

transcendence of its mundane practical function—hence Edith Evans’s witty exaggeration that one can do anything with a fan on stage except fan oneself with it.

The theatrical possibilities of such a talking prop are apparent, since the fan amplifies those telling gestures that might otherwise be invisible or easily missed. Because the fan was usually held away from the body, it helped make the actress larger than life: along with

her hoop skirt and tragedy train, the large folding fan meant that 127

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The Fan of Mode

women literally took up more stage space than their male counterparts. Yet the fan’s very ubiquity on the Restoration and early-eighteenth-century stage threatens to render the prop invisible to the modern reader. Between 1660 and 1737 the fan is mentioned in a rel-

atively small number of stage directions, presumably because the playwright would have expected the actress to incorporate her own fan business into virtually every scene. Although the fan has occasionally featured as a central plot device (Goldoni’s The Fan, Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan), for the most part the fan depends upon the skill of the individual actress to vivity it. While companies seem to have supplied various costume props for most performers, male and female, evidently actresses provided their

own fans and put their own stamp on both their appearance and use.*” Colley Cibber notes of Anne Oldfield that “[t]he qualities she

had acquired were the genteel and the elegant. The one in her air, and the other in her dress, never had her equal on the stage; and the ornaments she herself provided . . . seemed in all respects the paraphernalia of a woman of quality.”7° It is thus impossible to separate the dramatic impact of the fan from that of the actresses who revolutionized theatrical practice.

The extent to which the arrival of professional actresses on the commercial London stage transformed Restoration dramaturgy is debatable, but Restoration audiences soon became fascinated, even obsessed, with the sexuality of the actresses both on and offstage.”? The sexual availability of the actresses became a standing joke in prologues and epilogues. Spectators were allowed to visit the actresses in

the tiring house in various stages of undress; on January 23, 1667, Pepys recorded that he and his wife both kissed Nell Gwyn on one such backstage visit, “and a mighty pretty soul she is.”°° Dramatists responded to the actresses’ erotic charge by foregrounding sexual politics in play after play, especially in the comedies of sexual manners that characterized late-seventeenth-century drama. Legitimated by royal patent, and buoyed by a core audience centered on the king and his court, the increasingly licentious theaters threw themselves with vigor into the sexual politics of the age.?! In a theatrical culture marked by the constant need for new plays 129

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by both male and female playwrights, and in which roles were tailored to specific company members, a pressing issue became whether

the new performing women would be presented as subjects or objects. Would actresses like Moll Davis, Mary Betterton, and Nell Gwyn inspire male playwrights to create more complex and realistic female roles, even as they invested lines previously set down for boys with their own powerful stage presence? Or would the new actresses reinforce the commonplace equation of actress and whore as sexual toys displayed for consumption at a price??? For theater historians David Thomas and Arnold Hare, the work of Restoration actresses reflected women’s greater self-confidence in society at large: “|F]or the first time ever, English playwrights could write women’s roles for women, giving them the same weight and complexity in the overall fabric of the plays as the male characters.”*? Conversely, John Harold Wilson concludes that the “chief effect” of

the actresses on dramatic literature “was to push it steadily in the direction of sex and sensuality.”°* The truth may lie somewhere in between, but in his autobiography Restoration actor-playwright Colley Cibber emphasizes the impact of the actresses’ sex appeal at the box office (and beyond): “The additional objects then of real, beautiful women could not but draw a proportion of new admirers to the theatre. We may imagine too that these actresses were not ill-chosen,

when it is well known that more than one of them had charms sufficient at their leisure hours to calm and mollify the cares of empire.”*? Although many actresses were sexually unavailable, Cibber’s coy allusion to the king’s mistresses, Nell Gwyn and Moll Davis, indicates how easily in the masculine imagination the work of pleasing men theatrically slid into pleasing them sexually.

Trickier still to determine is to what extent an accomplished actress might have been able to twist the fan’s message away from the patriarchal script set down by the playwrights who were, for the most

part, bent on exploiting the actresses as sexual commodities. Descriptions of actresses’ actual performances are frustratingly gen-

eral and colored by the male gaze. Cibber’s description of Anne Bracegirdle’s Millamant in Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700) suggests that the actress used her considerable sexual charm to blunt 130

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the character’s potentially disturbing agency: “[A]II the faults, follies and affectations of that agreeable tyrant were venially melted down into so many charms and attractions of a conscious beauty.”*° Behn

herself adopts the objectifying male gaze in her dedication to Nell Gwyn in The Feigned Courtesans (1679): “[Flor besides, madam, all the charms and attractions and powers of your sex, you have beauties peculiar to yourself, an eternal sweetness, youth and air, which never dwelt in any face but yours, of which not one unimitable grace could be ever borrowed or assumed, though with never so much industry,

to adorn another. They cannot steal a look or smile from you to enhance their own beauties’ price, but all the world will know it yours, so natural and so fitted are all your charms and excellencies to

one another, so entirely designed and created to make up in you alone the most perfect lovely thing in the world.”’

Yet feminist scholars lend cautious assent to the notion that actresses colored roles with their own powerful stage presence— even if the agency they displayed was overwhelmingly limited to the sexual arena.*® Thus Elizabeth Howe claims, “Like many of the consequences of the arrival of the actress, their introduction was simultaneously radical—in allowing women a voice on the public stage for

the first time—and conservative: within a predominantly courtly, coterie theatre the women were almost entirely controlled by male managers and playwrights and were exploited sexually on stage and off. .. . The actresses were perceived predominantly as sex objects and were required, with significant frequency, to represent rape victims and to enact explicit love scenes. Again, however, the consequences of such developments can be seen as both reactionary and subversive, questioning as well as reinforcing traditional dramatic female stereotypes.”*”

Examining the wider ideological work the actress performed in the eighteenth century, Kristina Straub views the actress as “a site of ideological contradiction in the emergence of dominant notions of gender and sexuality. . . .The actresses’ transgressions tend to question more dangerously [than male actors] the construct of woman as man’s submissive opposite. ... Whereas the discourse of professionalism helped to legitimate actors’ ‘feminine’ excesses, it intensified 131

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the contradiction between femininity as a public spectacle and emergent definitions of the middle-class woman as domestic and private, veiled from the public eye. Asa result, the actress figures discursively as the site of an excessive sexuality that must be—but never fully is— contained or repressed.”*° The fact that these plays repeatedly stage moments in which femininity is constructed before our very eyes, such as the fan lesson and the lady’s toilet, suggests the need to contain sexual excess by presenting sexuality as a product rather than a prerequisite of gender identity. In the theater, at least, feminine sexuality is shown as manutactured for male consumption rather than springing naturally trom biology. In a study of gambling women on the eighteenth-century stage, Beth Kowaleski Wallace agrees with Straub that actresses produced a potentially disruptive “semiotic surplus” beyond the roles assigned to them. “As is often acknowledged, the minute a female actor plays, she opens up semiotically in ways that male actors do not. Most often

this semiotic surplus works to her disadvantage—signaling she is sexually available, even if she is not, for example. Yet historically the

presence of live actresses on the stage also thwarted patriarchal assumptions about feminine sexuality. . .. Live female performance can also confound male expectation in other ways, especially where a strong physical presence coincides with an otherwise controlling representation.”*! Wallace goes further than Straub, Maus, and Howe by positing a “double message” in women’s performance that audiences at live performances internalized in ways that readers of texts cannot.t* Although women’s playing was subject to male control in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, actresses nonetheless embodied powerful presences on stage that may well have undercut the textual insistence on women’s passivity and vulnerability: “While

the text may work to construct one kind of female subject, it is equally possible that live female performance contests the very terms

of that construct.” Wallace thus calls on feminist theater historians “to take performance history into account and to imagine the innumerable ways in which an actress’s actual, physical presence may have enhanced the scene.”*?

Regrettably, very little evidence survives of just how actresses 132

The Fan of Mode

played the parts they were (literally) handed and subsequently owned. How then did the fan, that most concrete way in which an actress’ “actual, physical presence ... enhanced the scene,” speak in the playhouse? In a brief but illuminating discussion, J. L. Styan offers his own account of Restoration fan-language:

It was, indeed, a direct extension of a lady’s personality, and at all times signalled her mood. A slow wafting of air indicated her thoughtful assent, an energetic pumping her anger or embarrassment. A glance of the eyes along the line of the open fan could show her interest in a lucky mortal on the other side of the room or the stage; another inch and he could be excluded from all further communication. By a dexterous switching of the fan from one side of her face to the other, a lady could even conduct two intimate but independent conversations, spoken or silent, on either side of her at the same time.**

The theater was one public site where the semiosis of the fan was improvised, extended, and potentially stabilized by the Restoration actress. Just as musicians today attend concerts to pick up the latest “licks” from their peers, the theater might have been where those on the outskirts of fashionable society went to learn the latest modish

flourish of the fan. But in the absence of eyewitness reports, recovering the Restoration fan’s speech has proved a challenge to theater practitioners and scholars alike and tends to be based as much on intuition as on evi-

dence. In the 1940s, asked to provide some instruction to other “period” actors, actress Athene Seyler (who was touring in Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan at the time) speculated that “the use of a fan must have indicated and reflected the same attitude towards life as shows in the style of the hairdressing, of the clothes and of the dances in any given age. The late seventeenth-century women wore a mass of shaking curls, bared their bosoms and evidently had flung themselves out of Puritanism with a gay vengeance. So what more reasonable than to suggest in a Restoration play that one should flirt one’s fan and flutter it gaily around one’s curls, or gaze archly over it?” By contrast, 133

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“In the next [eighteenth] century one would gather from its more formal and exaggerated character, from the grace and dignity of the minuet and the pomp of the hair styles, together with the idiosyncrasies of the huge hats, that fans were also larger in proportions and, as we know, exquisitely painted. So perhaps a more measured movement in their use—and a pose held with them at arm’s length, to display them to the fullest advantage—would be correct. .. . At least so I see it!”*° Seyler’s modest conclusion betrays how little actual textual or historical evidence supports her suppositions. Contemporary actor Simon Callow, who once had a subspecialty playing Restoration fops, also rejects the notion of a rigid language as he imagines a fan lesson of his own:

The use of the fan, far from being an arbitrary affectation, was part of the enormous repertory of a woman’s wiles. Their use was inherited wisdom; one can imagine a mother teaching her daughter, “Darling, never open your fan like that, let it out very gently.” It was not an accessory like a parasol or a muff. It was an indispensable adjunct to social life, because it spoke a language of its own. I don’t mean any sort of decorous Japaneselike “language of the fan,” where each position has attributed to it some precise meaning; but a subtext language, where the fan can improvise, sometimes faster than the tongue, sometimes merely saying a bit more than the tongue. It’s what provoked that interesting remark of Edith Evans that you can do almost anything with a fan except fan yourself with it.*’

Callow goes on to quote Young Worthy’s speech to Narcissa from Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift (1696) to illustrate “how a fan reinforces a coquette’s weaponry”:

Why, madam, | have observed several particular qualities in your ladyship that I have perfectly adored you for: as, the majestic toss of your head, your obliging bowed curtsy, your satirical smile, your blushing laugh, your demure look, the

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careless tie of your hood, the genteel flirt of your fan, the designed accident in your letting fall, and your agreeable manner of receiving it from him that takes it up.

According to the play’s stage directions, “What he speaks, she imitates in dumb-show”; for Cibber, then, femininity itself is a kind of masquerade orchestrated by the fan.*® Intriguingly, each imaginative reconstruction of a Restoration fan-wielder I have cited—whether it be Styan’s lady, Seyler’s flirt, or Callow’s ingenue—registers the abid-

ing sexual politics of the fan, the struggle to control the fan’s unstable semiosis and essentialize Restoration femininity. Women were, of course, complicit in transmitting the pedagogy of the fan. In act 4 of Mary Pix’s The Beau Defeated (1700), which contains the only Restoration fan lesson I have discovered in which a woman instructs another woman, the pretentious middle-class social climber Mrs. Rich tells her niece, “Give yourself airs, child, when I admit ye into my company: humph! Pluck up your head. What! No motion with your fan? Ah, ’tis awkward, but sure, by my example, she'll learn.” Lucinda’s vexation dramatizes her budding desire to ape her superiors: “Oh la, I can’t make my fan do like my aunt’s.”*? The only other fan lesson involving two women that I have been able to trace dates from much later and appears in Robert Lloyd’s The Capri-

cious Lovers (1765). Here the coquette Lisetta tempts innocent Phoebe with lessons in the art of flirtation, and the air Lisetta sings betrays the Addisonian rigidity of the fan’s semaphore on the eighteenth-century stage: For various purpose serves the fan, As thus, a decent blind; Between the sticks to peep at man, Nor yet betray your mind. Each action tells a meaning plain, Resentment’s in the snap; A flirt expresses strong disdain, Consent a gentle tap.

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All passions will the fan disclose, All modes of female art; And to advantage sweetly shews, The hand, if not the heart. Tis folly’s sceptre first design’d, By Love’s capricious boy; Who knows how lightly all mankind, Are govern’d by a toy.”

Rather than accept as a given the prevalent view of fans as simply “the standard-issue artillery of coquetry,” I believe it is possible to

glean a more nuanced understanding of the handling of the fan in performance, and by extension of the sexual stakes behind Restoration and eighteenth-century theater practice.?' To do so, we must move beyond the generalizations of Styan, Seyler, and Callow to more precise accounts of the fan’s play between motion and stillness. The material prop’s implicit choreography reveals the performance potential of the actress’ semiotic surplus—a subversive counterpoint that moves alongside the text—and hence makes visible a vanished

dimension of theater history that would otherwise be lost to the present-day reader. Lacking detailed accounts of individual performances, we can only recover the fan’s resistance to following established “lines of business” through the contextual reanimation of its textual traces.

Apt Pupils: The Man of Mode’s Object Lessons

Beneath its surface sparkle, George Etherege’s popular The Man of Mode; or, Sir Fopling Flutter depicts a brutal world of male sexual predation.’ In the course of the play the rake Dorimant spurns one mis-

tress (Mrs. Loveit), seduces another (Bellinda), and wins a country

heiress (Harriet). The orange-selling bawd’s visit to Dorimant’s rooms in the play’s first scene underscores the fact that for men of Dorimant’s class women, like fruit, are commodities to be purchased, savored, and discarded. Under guise of selling Dorimant peaches, the 136

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orange-woman extols the virtues and attractions of Harriet Woodvill,

who is monied, beautiful, and fresh from the country. The action revolves around how Dorimant juggles his two mistresses, jealous Mrs. Loveit and infatuated Bellinda, while courting the gimlet-eyed Harriet, who rails against Dorimant at every opportunity but secretly loves him nonetheless. The coplot revolves around the attempts of a comical senex, Old Bellair, to marry his son to Harriet and wed young Emilia, who is in love with Young Bellair and vice versa. One man of mode is Sir Fopling Flutter, a popinjay whom the desperate Loveit exploits in order to stir up Dorimant’s jealousy. More important, Sir Fopling’s risibly self-conscious attempts at sexual and sartorial sprezzatura counterpoint the lovers’ breathtaking mastery of the game of seduction and manipulation. The Man of Mode is perhaps the most self-conscious comedy of manners: it aims to expose as well as celebrate just how the sexual

game is best played. To this end Etherege provides the ingenues, Emilia and Young Bellair, with symmetrical examples of how to do it

well (Dorimant and Harriet) and ill (Loveit and Sir Fopling). Although Loveit and Sir Fopling remain at odds, the play implies that

all three couples deserve each other—even as Dorimant’s fifth-act reform leaves open the possibility that his affair with Bellinda will continue following his marriage to Harriet and confinement in the country. The play’s relentless self-consciousness, its Berkeleyan insistence that in this world to be is to be perceived, strips away any

notion of natural behavior. While the central trope circulating through the play is the plucking off of society’s vizard so as to expose the truth beneath the mask, the play’s central prop is not the vizard

but the fan, whose artifice visibly underscores the impossibility of there being any truth to reveal. Dorimant’s fifth-act conversion is merely another performance that, together with his levée, bookends the play.

The Man of Mode is structured around two fan-scenes, the first involving Mrs. Loveit and the second involving Harriet. Indeed, it is one of the most fan-busy plays of the Restoration; an unseen “Mr

Wagfan” is even mentioned at one point (2.2.38).°° Like other Restoration rakes, Dorimant is an inveterate fan-tearer. As he com137

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plains to his friend Medley, “But the devil’s in’t, there has been such a calm in my affairs of late, I have not had the pleasure of making a woman so much as break her fan, to be sullen, or forswear herself, these three days” (1.1.191—4). Having grown tired of the possessive,

jealous Loveit, Dorimant plots to send a “vizard” (his latest prey, Bellinda) to visit Loveit and raise her jealousy to such a pitch that Loveit will fly at Dorimant, who will appear on cue and use this action as an excuse to break off with her.** As Medley informs Lady Townley and Emilia, the sadistic Dorimant has “made [Loveit] break a dozen or two of fans already, tear half a score points in pieces, and destroy hoods and knots without number” (2.1.118—20). The spectator is primed for a scene of fan tearing in which the weapon is turned back on its wielder. Dorimant frames his confrontation with Loveit according to a pre-

scripted scenario, just as Etherege frames the entire action through Dorimant’s desires. By choosing to begin the play in Dorimant’s lodgings, Etherege capitalizes on actor Thomas Betterton’s charisma and

easy rapport with the audience. Etherege invites us to identify with Dorimant; to enjoy his erotic escapades; and to revel in his destructive campaign against the fan (clearly a metonym for womankind in general). We are taken as it were behind the scenes of rake-construction: not coincidentally, act 1, scene 1 takes place during Dorimant’s levée, and his costuming in the clothes of a gallant visually accompanies his erotic scheming and takes us into his confidence. By contrast with Dorimant’s louche elegance in act 1, Mrs. Loveit is introduced in act 2 as a self-conscious actress who fusses over her props: “Enter Mrs Loveit and Pert; Mrs Loveit putting up a letter, then pulling out her pocket glass and looking in it” (2.2.1 s.d.). The emblem-

atic vanitas gesture of staring at herself in the glass, combined with her trademark line, “I hate myself, | look so ill today,” shows that

Dorimant’s letter has wounded her pride. If this moment formed Elizabeth Barry’s first stage appearance following her tutelage by John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, the actress’s own nervousness would have been appropriately channeled into Loveit’s jerkily handled fan. In any case, it seems likely that the actress used her fan to magnify her agitation and gradually build up to the scene’s climactic moment. 138

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Both Loveit’s jealous nature and her fetishizing of the fan as site of sexual struggle are underscored by Pert, her insolent maid: “I little thought, madam, to see your spirit tamed to this degree, who banished poor Mr Lackwit but for taking up another lady’s fan in your presence” (2.2.18-20).>° By the time Loveit’s friend Bellinda arrives to set Dorimant’s plot in motion, Loveit is already jittery and primed to explode. Etherege provides both women with asides to the audience; one elegant staging choice would be for each actress to tilt her fan to cover the side of her face nearest the other woman so as to deliver her aside in private but without interrupting the flow of the scene. Bellinda plays her part

and describes seeing Dorimant at the playhouse with a “mask” (Bellinda herself, of course). Loveit “[w]alks up and down with a dis-

tracted air,” probably fanning herself the while to quell the jealous flush of her cheeks. Loveit’s ranting suggests that the scene was played as a lampoon of artificial and formalized tragic style, in which

the extended rant was a main attraction. Loveit repeats the Renaissance convention of figuratively turning her anger inward rather than outward toward her tormentor: “Would I had daggers, darts, or poisoned arrows in my breast, so I could but remove the thoughts of him from thence!” (2.2.102—3). Loveit’s speech begs a correspondingly histrionic stab with her own fan straight out of Addison, especially since Bellinda chides, “Fie, fie, your transports are too violent, my dear” (2.2.105). Arriving pat on cue, Dorimant observes: “What,

dancing the galloping nag [a country dance] without a fiddle?” (2.2.127-28). Loveit’s grotesque caperings expose her as Dorimant’s puppet. When, after provoking Loveit still further, Dorimant hints that he has slept with the unnamed vizard, Loveit cries “Hell and furies!”

and the stage direction reads, “Tears her fan in pieces” (2.2.153). Loveit’s disturbing fan-gesture, one of the most violent in Restoration drama, surely caps a sequence of “worrying” her fan that began much earlier. Dorimant’s cruel remark, “Spare your fan, madam. You

are growing hot and will want it to cool you” (2.2.154—5), then reduces Loveit to tears. After Dorimant leaves, despite her begging him to stay, she rants: “Monster, barbarian! I could tear myself in 139

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pieces” (2.2.264—65; emphasis added). Here Loveit clearly identifies with her metonymic fan, translating Othello’s jealous rage (“PII tear her all to pieces”) into internalized misogyny. In a sense, by destroying her fan Etherege punishes Loveit for broadcasting her distress too nakedly on the one hand (by giving vent to her real feelings) and too

extravagantly on the other (by gauchely pushing the fan over the brink of acceptable behavior).°° As Loveit’s torments increase, the scene takes on an unpleasantly sadistic edge for the modern reader, especially since Loveit’s disintegration is observed by the coolly detached trio of Bellinda, Pert, and Dorimant. To what extent do these observers model the spectator’s

own attitude? From Loveit’s perspective the scene is tragic rather than comic, so it is hard to determine to what extent the actress playing Loveit is supposed to be in on the joke. If her fan-scene is played for emotional realism, as it might have been by the untried actress Elizabeth Barry, the play exposes Dorimant’s heartlessness at the risk of wrenching our sympathy toward Loveit (who as antagonist continues to be the chief obstacle to the union of Dorimant and Harriet). If, as seems more likely, Mary Lee created Loveit, she must have bur-

lesqued her own trademark tragic acting style to hilarious effect.’ Lee’s parodic imitation of her own extravagant gestures would have

cued the audience that Loveit’s “outrageous passion” (2.2.269) is merely an extension of her histrionic personality and hence not to be taken seriously. In short, the fan’s impact cannot be detached from the personality of the actress who wielded it in a given production. As the action shifts from a love affair gone stale to the younger characters’ attempts to hone their erotic skills, act 3 intensifies the

play’s investigation of whether anything natural exists under the artifice of social codes. The act’s opening, in which Harriet rejects her maid’s wish to “set that curl in order” (3.1.1), echoes Dorimant’s and

Loveit’s first appearances, appearing to contrast Harriet’s country naturalness with Dorimant’s languid affectation and Loveit’s propdependent artificiality. But although Harriet rails against “powdering, painting, and... patching” (3.1.15), the action soon reveals that what Harriet disdains is the visibility of feminine artifice rather than the artifice itself. The whole point of “doing gender” is to make it 140

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look natural. Harriet knows the conventions of city comedy backwards (she cites Jonson’s Bartholemew Fair), and her outward deference to her mother’s marriage plans is a studied act of hypocrisy designed to get her up to London. No less than The Importance of Being Earnest, The Man of Mode undermines the standard distinction between corrupt town gallant and untutored country innocent. The fan vividly demonstrates that Harriet outclasses Loveit in the game of love (Loveit has after all gone

far beyond flirtation). Indeed, Harriet is more polished than Young Bellair, whom she patronizes as still caught up in the externals of gentility: “The man indeed wears his clothes fashionably and has a pretty, negligent way with him, very courtly and much affected” (3.1.39-41). Since Harriet is an arch mimic, it would be natural here for the actress to use her fan and curls to illustrate Young Bellair’s alfectedness. Young Bellair’s entrance, using some of the same gestures, would then have elicited a laugh from the audience. In the ensuing fan lesson, the country girl’s predictable instruction by the practiced young gallant is reversed. After joining hands in a mock vow to avoid marriage to each other at all costs, the couple agrees to pretend to be in love for their parents’ benefit, “if it be but for the dear pleasure of dissembling” (3.1.111). Styan aptly terms the dumb show that follows the “locus classicus for the use of the fan.”°®

Harriet takes the lead in setting up the stage picture: “I will lean against this wall and look bashfully down upon my fan while you, like an amorous spark, modishly entertain me” (3.1.118—20).°? When Lady Woodvill and Old Bellair enter, the older couple decides to “keep back and observe” (3.1.134), thereby creating a split stage wherein the young lovers perform for both an onstage and offstage audience. Since they remain out of earshot of the older couple but not of the audience, Harriet and Young Bellair must be downstage of

the others—presumably on the apron or forestage thrusting out in front of the proscenium. At first, Harriet instructs Young Bellair on the proper deportment of a gallant: “Your head a little more on one side. Ease yourself on

your left leg and play with your right hand” (3.1.137-38). After Young Bellair adjusts his posture accordingly, he returns the favor 141

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and offers Harriet a lesson of her own. “At one motion play your fan,

roll your eyes, and then settle a kind look upon me” (3.1.145-7). Harriet’s “so” is a verbal stage direction indicating her acquiescence. Bellair’s next command is “Now spread your fan, look down upon it, and tell [count] the sticks with a finger,” to which Harriet responds

approvingly, “Very modish” (3.1.149-51). “Clap your hand up to your bosom, hold down your gown. Shrug a little, draw up your

breasts and let ’em fall again, gently, with a sigh or two, etc.” (3.1.152-54). Etherege’s “etc.” implies that the actors were free to improvise. Bellair caps the charade by returning to the fan: “Clap your fan then in both your hands, snatch it to your mouth, smile, and with a lively motion fling your body a little forwards. So! Now spread it, fall back on the sudden, cover your face with it, and break out into a loud laughter. Take up! Look grave and fall a-fanning of yourself. Admirably well acted!” (3.1.162-67).

Etherege’s fan lesson thematizes the male attempt to script the fan’s eloquence—a situation that recurs, on a metatheatrical level, between the playwright’s script and the actress who is paid to perform it. In the Restoration playhouse, did Harriet’s fan resist Young Bellair’s attempt to make it act a part of his devising? The scene’s comedy depends on the contrast between the artifice of the charade, which takes in the older couple, and the cool ratiocination of the dialogue to which only the audience is privileged: “By the good instructions you give, I suspect you for one of those malicious observers who watch people’s eyes, and from innocent looks make scandalous conclusions” (3.1.155-57). On one level, not just the fan but Harriet herself is a puppet, acting out the moves that the Bellair-actor (Mr.

Jevon, according to prompter John Downes) improvises. That the fan’s gestures simulate rather than reveal emotional truths does not vitiate the fact that its deceptive gestures are scripted by a man. Harriet proves an able pupil (“I think I am pretty apt at these matters” [3.1.168]), and she does not use the fan as a weapon to deceive Bellair himself—unless her fan-performance visibly mocks him. But on another level, Wallace’s notion of semiotic surplus reminds us that the actress can make free with her fan and tell more than one story. H Harriet was originally played by Elizabeth Barry, as seems 142

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likely given the pairing of Betterton and Barry in similar lead roles a few months later in Aphra Behn’s The Rover, then Harriet’s instruction by Bellair would no doubt invoke the actress’s own instruction

by Rochester for the cognoscenti in pit, box, and gallery. At least some cognoscenti in the audience would have known that Barry was

the protégée of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, the Restoration’s most notorious rake, and voyeurs would have eagerly searched for signs that Barry had been broken in sexually as well as theatrically. Rochester reportedly bragged that he would teach the inept Barry in under six months to be “the finest player on the Stage,” so it is quite likely that the fan-tearing Rochester himself initiated Barry into the arts of the stage fan.°' Barry’s handling of the fan-scene might have developed in the course of the play’s successful run. If so, her line, “I think I am pretty apt in these matters,” which may have raised a condescending titter at Barry's expense on opening night, would soon have become an ironically understated declaration of Harriet/Barry’s freedom from male tutelage. After all, the script suggests that Harriet merely humors Young Bellair’s wish to instruct her, since she has ear-

lier dismissed his gentility as a sham: “Varnished over with good breeding, many a blockhead makes a tolerable show” (3.1.44—45).°?

The whole thrust of the scene suggests that in performance it is Harriet rather than Bellair who is master of the fan. The spectator is invited to compare Loveit’s fan tearing with Harriet’s fan flirtation and to measure the distance between actresses and, through their

gestures, between overwrought tragedy and sparkling comedy. Loveit/Lee’s fan play burlesques tragic acting style, whereas Harriet/Barry’s fan lesson displays a mastery of the gestural conventions of comedy. In order to work on stage, the fan lesson must be not a robotic drill a la Addison, but a virtuoso turn in which the actress playing Harriet puts her own spin on the fan. Harriet’s charade may

well have registered for the Restoration audience much as the “vogueing” briefly popularized by the pop singer Madonna did for audiences in the 1980s—as a camp celebration of “striking a pose,” rather than as an ideological demystification of it. While not called for in Etherege’s script, the fan can enliven sev-

eral other scenes. Loveit’s flirtation with Sir Fopling, which is 143

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designed to kindle Dorimant’s jealousy, begs an exaggerated use of the fan to match her “loud, affected” laugh (3.3.234 s.d.). By contrast, Harriet no doubt marshals her “vogueing” fan to support her smooth badinage with Dorimant in 4.1: “If it be on that idle subject Loft love], | will put on my serious look, turn my head carelessly from

you, drop my lip, let my eyelids fall and hang half o’er my eyes— thus, while you buzz a speech of an hour long in my ear and I answer never a word” (4.1.158—-62). Less amusingly, the fan could magnify

Bellinda’s nervous fear of exposure once she is carried by mistake from Dorimant’s lodging to Loveit’s in act 5, scene 1. Acting as a lie-

detector, the fan could ratchet up the dramatic tension as Loveit probes Bellinda’s whereabouts earlier that day. Certainly, the fan once more reveals effeminacy as contrived per-

formance in the person of Sir Fopling, the most self-conscious wielder of props in The Man of Mode. The play’s back-stabbing characters are united in disdain for this walking prop-closet (although a skilled actor can render him sympathetic). Dorimant’s snide description of fops “[p]laying with your fan, smelling to your gloves, com-

mending your hair, and taking notice how ’tis cut and shaded after the new way” (5.1.122—24) probably echoes Sir Fopling’s earlier stage business, as well as providing an opportunity for Dorimant to mimic Fopling’s mincing affectation.

In the final scene, the fan may once more contrast Harriet and Loveit visually. Faced with the threat of impending marriage to Young Bellair and on the point of confessing her love, Harriet twice turns away from Dorimant, possibly using the fan as a buffer between audience and beloved: “My love springs with my blood into my face. I dare not look upon him yet” (5.2.92—93).°* And when Loveit enters with Bellinda, her possibly fan-assisted aside similarly betrays her love: “I see him, (aside) and with him the face that has undone me. Oh, that I were but where | might throw out the anguish of my heart! Here it must rage within and break it” (5.2.219-21). The fan underscores two possible object lessons. Loveit is defeated in part by her lack of control over her props—by her fan’s refusal to act as a shield and its insistence on blazoning Loveit’s self-loathing. By contrast, Harriet can smoothly discard her fan—or put it away until the next 144

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occasion warrants—once it has served its purpose as a smokescreen. In the stage-world of The Man of Mode, theater rewards theatricality: Loveit and Sir Fopling are punished for their inability to “do gender” correctly, while Dorimant, Harriet, and Young Bellair are rewarded with spouses for their appealing performances.** As a machine for regulating the acceptable performance of gender, Etherege’s fan seems to offer circumscribed options to women, cautioning them to use its semaphore only as directed or else risk selfdestruction. Yet by revealing the fan as a fluid theatrical sign, one moreover that can be ironically inflected by the skill of the individual actress, the play simultaneously opens up an improvisational space for the apt pupil to make present subtle countermeanings of her own.

‘The Fan as Sexual Fetish: Farquhar’s The Inconstant If The Man of Mode brandishes the fan as an emblem of female independence in the face of male tutelage, George Farquhar’s The Inconstant; or, The Way to Win Him (Drury Lane, 1702) presents the fan lesson as a displaced form of rape.®? Adapted from Fletcher, the play

is a flirtation comedy set in Paris in which the resourceful, crossdressing Oriana schemes to trap a charming but commitment-shy

rake, Young Mirabel, into matrimony. In a parallel courtship, Mirabel’s friend Captain Duretete, a bashful soldier, pursues the coquette Bisarre. Not unlike the Beatrice and Benedick subplot of Much Ado about

Nothing, the merry war between the flamboyant Bisarre and the crusty Duretete became a chief attraction on the eighteenth-century stage, as evidenced by casting. Duretete was originated by the low comedian William Bullock but was later played by David Garrick among others, while actresses such as Kitty Clive and Frances Abing-

ton followed Susanna Verbruggen’s Bisarre. The plays comedy exploits the common theme that men pursue sex whereas women pursue marriage; more unusually, the dramatic emphasis is on active female pursuit.

Unaccustomed to wooing but eager to play the cad, Duretete 145

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assures his rakish friend that his intentions toward Bisarre are purely dishonorable. Bisarre knows her Restoration comedy well, however, and sees through Duretete’s clumsily executed gallantry: “Your visit, Sir, was intended as a Prologue to a very scurvy Play, of which Mr Mirabel and you so handsomely laid the Plot” (2.2.99-101). Despite his protestations that he wishes only to converse, Bisarre refuses to let Duretete get a word in edgewise and instead humiliates the gruff captain by forcing him to dance and drink, then threatening to kick him. If Duretete’s principal weapon is seductive speech, Bisarre parries with ceaseless motion: Duretete. Good Madam let me sit down to answer you, for | am heartily tird. Bisarre. Fye upon’t; a young man, and tird; up for shame, and walk about, action becomes us—a little faster, Sir. (2.2.66-69)

Plainly Duretete must resort to other weapons besides speech in order to penetrate Bisarre’s defenses. Certain he has become an object of public ridicule, Duretete fixes

on revenge (despite a letter from Bisarre avowing her penitence): “farewell Gallantry, and welcome Revenge; ’tis my turn now to be upon the Sublime, Ill take her off, | warrant her” (4.3.6-7). The audience is primed for a scene of sexual aggression—especially since when Bisarre enters, the couple is alone on stage. But instead of “tak-

ing her off,” Duretete insists that Bisarre act out a pantomime to prove the devotion professed in her letter. Once again a man trains a woman in the gestural language of love: Duretete. Confirm it then, by your Obedience stand there; and Ogle me now as if your Heart, Blood, and Soul, were like to fly out at your eyes—First, the direct surprise. (She looks full upon him.) Right, next the Deux yeux par oblique. (She gives him the side Glance.) Right, now depart, and Languish. (She turns from him, and looks over her Shoulder.) Very well, now Sigh. (She Sighs.) Now drop your Fan a purpose. (She drops 146

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her Fan.) Now take it up again. Come now, confess your Faults, are not you a Proud—say after me. Bisarre. Proud. Duretete. Impertinent. Bisarre. impertinent. Duretete. Ridiculous. Bisarre. Ridiculous. Duretete. Flirt. Bisarre. Puppy. Duretete. Soons Woman, don’t provoke me, we are alone, and you don’t know but the Devil may tempt me to do youa Mischief, ask my Pardon immediately. Bisarre. | do, Sir, | only mistook the word. Duretete. Cry, then, ha, you got e’re a Handkerchief? Bisarre. Yes, Sir.

Duretete. Cry then Hansomly, cry like a Queen in a Trajedy. She pretending to Cry, burst out a Laughing, and Enter two Ladies Laughing. (4.3.17-39)

As stage manager, or what we would today call director, Duretete paradoxically directs his lover to demonstrate her sincerity by trotting out generic clichés: the ogling and fan play are drawn from Restoration comedy, the “tragedy handkerchief” from Restoration

tragedy. How should the actress handle the sequence? We know from an earlier scene that the flirtatious Bisarre dismisses the captain as a cox-

comb but is genuinely attracted to him. Her fan play thus calls for delicately layered performance. The actress must prove convincing

enough to stave off physical assault, yet the very staginess of Duretete’s commands reveals how artificial the gestures must be in order to satisfy him. The actress must offer a fan lesson in quotation marks. Duretete claims that he wants confirmation of love, but what he really seeks is obedience—and, perhaps, evidence that all female passion is as artificial as a comedic fan or a tragedy handkerchief. Duretete brings Addison’s academy to life (and, given the dates, could partly have inspired it); for him, the actress is a marionette, her 147

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fan a prosthetic extension as the man pulls the strings. Indeed, Duretete’s humiliating games of sexual theater are designed to arouse him: “Soons Woman, don’t provoke me, we are alone, and you don’t know but the Devil may tempt me to do you a Mischief” (3.3.33-35).

Yet Duretete’s threat of sexual mischief proves empty, for the tables turn when “She pretending to Cry, burst out a Laughing, and Enter two Ladies Laughing.” Looming sexual danger dissolves into a nightmare of male sexual humiliation as the three women “lay hold

on him” and threaten to expose his manhood: “Come Ladies, let’s examine him” (4.3.54—55). On the point of being stripped naked by the three “Furies,” Duretete begs for mercy: “I you please to let me

get away with my Honour, Id do any thing in the World” (4.3.61-62). Duretete manages to flee just before he is forced to swear he will marry Bisarre, and Farquhar blunts the edge of this disturbing scene of aborted female rape by restoring the “Furies” to the domestic sphere: “Ha, ha, ha, this Visit Ladies, was Critical for our Diversion, we'll go make an end of our Tea” (4.3.67-68).

In this short scene, Farquhar rehearses the central riddle of the fan. Is it a male tool of intimidation and control—even a fetish for stimulating male sexual excitement—or a seductive weapon whose fluid semiosis remains firmly in female hands? Here again much depends on the actress. As Mrs. William Mountfort, Susanna Verbruggen (who originated Bisarre) may have played Harriet in The Man of Mode and thus reprised some aspects of her earlier fan lesson, to the delight of the crowd.°’ Certainly Verbruggen was an accomplished and versatile comedienne skilled at witty breeches roles, and

her pairing with William Bullock, who had a penchant for skirts roles, may well have reinforced the comic “woman on top” aspect of The Inconstant’s fan scenes.°®

Whether or not the actress’s fan play blatantly mocks her wouldbe instructor in act 4, Bisarre turns the fan back to her own advantage in act 5. When she appears dressed as a soldier to inform Duretete that she intends to dog his steps abroad, even as far as the bawdy house, Duretete echoes his earlier sexual threat and his own subsequent humiliation: “Let me go Madam—or I shall think that you're a Man and perhaps may examine you” (5.3.35-36). In a speech that 148

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echoes both The Tempest and The Merry Wives of Windsor, Bisarre forces Duretete to burlesque her own fan lesson in the previous act and “gallant” the fan accordingly: Bisarre. Stir if you dare, I have still Spirits to attend me, and can raise such a muster of Faries as shall punish you to death—come Sir, stand there now and Oggle me. (He frowns upon her.) Now a languishing sigh. (He groans.) Now run and take up my Fan, faster. (He runs and takes it up.) Now play with it handsomely. Duretete. Ay, ay, (He tears it all in pieces.) Bisarre. Hold, hold, dear humorous Coxcomb, Captain, spare my fan and [’'ll—why you rude inhumane Monster, don’t you expect to pay for this. Duretete. Yes Madam there’s twelve pence, for that’s the price on't. Bisarre. Sir, it cost a Guiney. Duretete. Well Madam you shall have the sticks again. Throws them to her, and Exit. Bisarre. Ha, ha, ha, ridiculous below my concern. (5.4.37—52)

Unwilling to play the woman’s part, Duretete refuses to follow his own earlier fan script. The Inconstant is a rare example of literal fan tearing by a man, and perhaps it is impossible to recover just how disturbing or indeed hilarious such a sight might have struck its original audience. As in The Man of Mode, the feminine prop is literally

deconstructed on stage. But rather than channeling female rage inward—and hence suggesting that all female rage is ultimately selfdestructive—Bisarre’s fan is fetishized in another way: as a displaced act of male aggression against the female body. For Loveit, the fan is an extension of herself; for Duretete, it is a representation of those female parts he wishes to rend asunder. But perhaps Farquhar’s lesson is that men are by nature clumsy, ageressive, and ill-equipped to handle the fan’s sexual semaphore. Fan éclat is exclusively feminine; were Duretete to handle the fan properly, he would be revealed as something even worse than a cox149

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comb: effeminate. When the fan threatens to detach itself from the woman and attach itself to the man as an expression of his inner erotic life, it must quit the stage. The fact that Bisarre treats the torn object as a fungible commodity (“it cost a Guiney”), rather than identifying/collapsing with it (like Loveit), shows that she is immune

to the sexual fetishization of the object, that is to say its ability to

duplicate as well as orchestrate feminine allure. By contrast, Duretete’s act of violence against the fan is a gesture of male frustration and defeat that keeps the fan’s sexual mystique in motion for the frustrated man, even as it dismantles that mystique for the laughing woman.

Oxit, Pursued by a Fan: Odingsells’s The Bath Unmask’d Farquhar’s preface to The Inconstant claims that the play ran six successive nights in February 1702, neither a triumph nor a defeat. Yet since the play was not revived until fourteen years later, when it ran for three nights, and only entered the repertory securely by the third

decade of the century, one cannot claim that Farquhar’s fan lesson inspired his contemporaries. I have found no extant fan lessons in the drama between 1702 and 1725, but Addison’s 1711 piece in The Spectator, roughly midway through this period, suggests that a clear repertoire of fan moves had developed, if not congealed, in the playhouse.

Of course, stage fans are ubiquitous throughout this period; for instance, in what has become one of the most famous entrances in Restoration drama, Millamant sweeps into William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700) “full sail, with her fan spread and streamers out, and a shoal of fools for tenders.”°’ But the first fan lesson proper after The Inconstant appears in Gabriel Odingsells’s comedy The Bath Unmask’d (Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1725). Although it did not prove a

living play (to borrow John Downes’s expression), The Bath Unmask’d provides a virtual compendium of fan usage on the earlyeighteenth-century stage.’? More to the point, by associating the fan’s

motion with feminine decadence and self-indulgence, and _ its 150

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signification with masculine rationality and self-control, the play recapitulates the central tension I have been exploring throughout this chapter. As its title suggests, The Bath Unmask’d exposes England’s most fashionable middle-class resort town, a place of “idleness and pleasure” (1.2), as the epitome of male indulgence and female lewdness hidden under the mask of gentility.’ What The Man of Mode does for London, Odingsells’s play does for Bath: we are taken behind the scenes in order to see how the machinery of pleasure works. If the former play asks whether the country miss will succeed in reforming the town rake, the latter asks whether priggish Lord Wiseman will catch the “contagious Air” of Bath (1.1). The fan itself, “that little modish machine,” runs through the play as a leitmotif in the struggle for sexual dominance between men and women. The play contrasts the two attitudes toward women exemplified by Lord Wiseman, who despite his “nice rigid honour” (1.2) courts

flighty Liberia rather than her worthy sister Honoria, and by Mr. Sprightly, a libertine who delights in tormenting the love-smitten Cleora. Odingsells counterpoints male idealization (Wiseman) and male sadism (Sprightly) to various forms of female addiction. The sisters’ mother Lady Ambs-ace is addicted to gambling, while the Loveit-like Cleora craves the maltreatment dished out by her beloved Sprightly.

The play's dominant perspective is male. By taking us into Sprightly’s confidence at the outset, Odingsells invites us to see Cle-

ora through his eyes and to invest in his twin missions to corrupt Wiseman and to torment Cleora: Since her Perverseness is fed by my Love, I design it shall starve by my Indifference; and then by Degrees I shall either teaze her into a Sense of her Folly, and make her rationally renounce it; or at least she must grow good naturd to be perverse. (1.1)

Disturbingly, libertinism cloaks itself as rationalism. Sprightly’s designs on Cleora are nominally therapeutic, while the unsavory Mr. I5]

The Stage Life of Props

Pander exploits his position as tutor to take sexual advantage of his pupils. This is a world in which rational men of leisure train love-

enslaved women for the delight and instruction of respectable onlookers like Wiseman and, by extension, ourselves.’? Underlying this sadistic fantasy of control is the suspicion that female love is mere performance. In the words of Sprightly’s unpleasant associate Pander, “among Ladies of Fire and Vivacity, the Art of making Love is acting it” (1.2). As we have seen, this suspicion has metatheatrical

implications for the actress. Is she holding the mirror up to true female nature or just going through the motions? As in earlier plays, the fan embodies the symbiotic relationship between male voyeurism and female artifice. The constructed nature of the fan’s language emerges when the innocent Miss Whiffle, who is Pander’s prey, “Spreads her fan awkwardly before her Face” in an

attempt to both hide and reveal a flirtatious blush (2.9). Miss Whiffle’s unseasoned awkwardness with her prop contrasts with the extravagant fan game staged by star actress Jane Rogers Bullock, and her character Liberia’s male counterpart, the foppish French count Fripon (played by Thomas Walker, future Macheath in The Beggar’s

Opera).’° Liberia responds to the count’s outrageous flirting—he kisses her, and retreats dancing—by using her fan to feign English prudishness:

Iam so confounded at your Impudence, I don’t know which way to look. (Her Fan before her Face, blushing.) What do you mean, Sir? I never was so affronted by anyone who made the Appearance of a Gent in my Life before. (Walks about confus’d, and fanning her self.) (2.6)

Liberia’s feigned modesty evaporates when Sprightly cuts in and kisses Liberia himself: “Fie upon you, Mr Sprightly, | vow you startle me. (Gives him a Pat with her Fan)” (2.6). This gentle remonstrance, rather than a resounding crack on the skull with the closed fan, suggests that Sprightly’s liberty is welcomed rather than resented. (The scene may contain a faint “ghosting” of an earlier fan lesson, for the

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actor who created Sprightly, Lacy Ryan, had played Young Bellair in The Man of Mode between 1715 and 1718.) The fan sexually hypnotizes all the men present, just as it focuses

the audience’s attention on the exquisitely self-conscious actress. The fan’s contrived charm is all the more apparent for being exposed in a public space (“before the Abbey”). Indeed, Liberia’s use of the fan is self-consciously parodic: she mocks prudish English manners

even as she embraces the French extravagance epitomized by the count. Motion itself has nationalistic implications, since stiffness is associated with the English, unrestrained motion with the French: “You shall have an English Lady glide into an Assembly, as if she was afraid of waking the Company, with an Air as stiff as a Wax-baby that is incapable of changing its Posture” (2.6). In contrast to this description, the count all but compares Liberia to a fan: “Ah, Madam, when

you make de Entrée you shew de grand Flutter to fill de Compagnie vid de Surprize” (2.6). But from the disgusted Wiseman’s point of view, and by extension that of the audience, the fan’s frenchified decadence is directly linked to its mercurial motion. Liberia and the Count are always on the move and thus at risk of performing exhaustion; they exit the scene “singing and dancing” (4.6). The fan remains the nodal point for the play’s linkage of female motion with feminine affectation and emotional duplicity. The fan itself becomes crucial, since Odingsells intimates that he who controls the fan controls the woman. Whereas Liberia’s coy fan-play disgusts Wiseman with its public display of mock modesty in act 2,

Sprightly appropriates the fan as a weapon to keep Cleora in her place in act 3. Sprightly wins a fan in a raffle and displays the trinket in turn to Cleora and Honoria, of whom Cleora has developed a raging jealousy. On whom will Sprightly bestow the trinket? Unlike the other fans I have examined, Sprightly’s displays a con-

veniently apposite emblem, which he expounds for the benefit of Cleora, Honoria, and Wiseman: Sprightly. Observe that principal Figure in the Middle, with one Dart entering about the left Pap, and another at his right

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Ear. In his left Hand, you see a Heart which he is presenting to a scornful Fair, who stands exactly in your Posture, Madam, (To Cleora who turns round with a disdainful Air) kissing her Monkey, with his fore Paws about her Neck; she embracing him with one Hand, while the other is grasp’d by a Beau on one Knee, kissing the Monkey behind. Was the Beau design’d to represent you or me, my Lord? Cleora. | think the Monkey hath the nearest Resemblance of you. Sprightly. In Feature perhaps, but not in Fate. (3.4) In the scene depicted on the fan, the woman prefers the monkey to her lovelorn suitor, and the monkey prefers the woman’s beau. Several personified figures hover over the scene. Sprightly identifies the first as “Vanity, the Guardian Goddess of the Fair; who usurp’d the Province of Love, and dispatch’d that Arrow to the left Pap. Our Hero

looks with a Countenance of Concern, as if he was divided in his Mind, and turns his Head upon that agreeable Lady on the other Side,

who with a graceful Modesty extends one Hand to receive the slighted Gift, and in the other shews a Heart for exchange.” Sprightly

identifies the second as “Vertue display’d by her majestic Meen, [who] with one Hand holds a starry Crown over her Head, and with the other beckons our Hero. That upper Figure with a Bow in his Hand in form of an Angel mounted on an Eagle, must be good Sense, that let fly that Arrow at his right Ear” (3.4).

The crucial point about this particular fan lesson is that, in Sprightly’s hands, the fan ceases to become a moving prop, as it has been up to this point, and instead becomes a speaking prop. The fan’s

emblem is patently moral: Wiseman is a fool to offer his heart to scornful Liberia, who prefers her foppish French monkey, rather than to faithful Honoria, who would receive it with gratitude and affection. Like Minerva’s images in Gay’s poem, the misogynistic emblem drives home the fruits of female vanity in a static object lesson. But more important theatrically is the fact that the prop arrests the stage action while Sprightly interprets the picture. In male hands the fan is a hermeneutic riddle to be interpreted rather than a sema154

The Fan of Mode

phoric signal to be obeyed (like Pander’s snuff taking, which is Miss Whitfle’s cue to elope). Moreover, the fan is a sadistic weapon: the freely offered heart in the picture contrasts with the poisonous gift whose calculated purpose is to humiliate Cleora. The fan must have gained some gravitas in the hands of Lacy Ryan, who could temper levity where necessary; he played not only comic roles but Iago and Edgar, too. Significantly, Cleora (played by Mrs. Parker) only “glances sideways at it,” as if reluctant to reveal her interest in the prize. When Sprightly promises a further retardation of stage action in the form of “a Speech, Ladies, to recommend my fan,” Cleora retorts, “I scorn it”

and temporarily restores motion to the fan by flinging it away. Sprightly takes advantage of this impulsive action, which breaks up the stage tableau imposed by Sprightly’s exegesis, to bestow the fan on Honoria (played by Mrs. Vincent). In response to this crowning humiliation, Cleora quits the field: “I can bear no more!—perjurd Monster. (Stamps, cries, and runs off)” (3.4). In a sense, the fan has come full circle. What begins as a source of female sexual power mutates into a male weapon of sexual humiliation. Even Honoria, who connives with Sprightly’s “cure” of Cleora’s malady, uneasily regrets her quick acceptance of the fan: “Poor Cleora!—I wou’d give a thousand Fans to see thee thyself again.” But there is no question that, as with Loveit’s fan tearing in The Man of Mode, the audience is meant to enjoy and laugh at Cleora’s humiliation. In fact, the symmetry between the play’s two plots suggests that Cleora’s suffering is just recompense for Liberia’s mistreatment of Wiseman—even though Cleora’s crime is not vanity but masochistic desire. That female lovesickness is punished far more harshly than female coquetry may even indicate that the former is ultimately more threatening to eighteenth-century mores than the latter. Thanks in part to the fan, Sprightly achieves his desired effect of humiliating Cleora, who in act 4 feigns illness to kindle Sprightly’s affections but is outsmarted by the man who sees through her decep-

tion and himself plays dead. Repenting both her deception of Sprightly and her jealousy of Honoria, Cleora forswears feminine pride in order to embrace masculine rationality: “Reason Ill adore, / 155

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And being less than Woman, I'll be more.” Like the ending of Gay’s poem on the fan, the resolution of the love plot is cheerfully sexist.

Ignoring the fact that Sprightly has mercilessly tormented her throughout the action, Cleora figuratively places her lover in the role of father-confessor: “Yet will I let him see I have a Soul that dares confess a Wrong, spight of the senseless Pride of my mistaken Sex” (4.20). If Wiseman sees the error of his ways and transfers his affections to Honoria, Cleora learns that she cannot outwit Sprightly by resorting to Liberia-like wiles. At the close of comedy, masquerade is a male province: Sprightly burlesques Wiseman’s stiffly formal lovemaking and Honoria’s excessive modesty, enabling the play’s virtuous couple to laugh at themselves and woo with more ease. But it is Cleora’s repudiation of feminine hypocrisy, and her willingness to

“submit” to “Correction,” that finally melts Sprightly’s heart and

forces a confession of love. Notably, the play does not require Sprightly himself to reform. When he apologizes for giving her pain,

Cleora only bids him “resume your own natural, easy Humour.” Odingsells seems to say that whereas Sprightly’s merry form of cruelty is natural, Liberia’s dizzying blend of vanity and hypocrisy is an infectious disease that must be purged from the social (and national) body. Masculine/English naturalness triumphs over feminine/French flutters.

The fan’s Janus-faced role in stoking sexual tension on the one hand and orchestrating—even enforcing—the appropriate performance of gender on the other haunts the play’s ending. “Which of you, Ladies, tears the first fan?” jests Sprightly as he offers his arm to Honoria instead of Cleora on the way to attend Liberia’s wedding to Fripon—the bogus count who is exposed as a mercenary fake with a spouse ex machina (5.3). As if to underscore the extent to which the women have been disarmed, a pale threat of physical violence haunts

the fan’s final appearance. When Sprightly threatens to reveal to Wiseman the true extent of Honoria’s devotion, she warns him: “Hold your Tongue, I beg you.—Ill cram my Fan down your Throat else... . Dear Cleora, help me to beat him” (5.12). The line suggests that Honoria flails at Sprightly with her fan, in an effort to stem his 156

The Fan of Mode

gossip that only succeeds when she claps her fan before his face. But the fan proves a weak weapon indeed; “Ha, ha, ha!—I am afraid, my

Dear, your Triumph will be as short as mine,” comments Cleora, who has learned the limits of female resistance and put her own fan away.

If The Bath Unmask’d offers the actress playing Liberia yet another

Opportunity to demonstrate the stage fan’s sexual electricity, Odingsells’s script seeks to foreclose the possibility that the fan can be reclaimed for the female characters’ sexual agency. Yet the lingering image of the two women using their props to beat the man who has taken so much pleasure in tormenting one of them suggests that

the fan has not discharged its ammunition for the last time. Odingsells’s sour comedy failed to capture the audience’s imagination; the play managed only twelve performances in 1725 before falling out of the repertory, so audiences literally did not “buy” the play as they had The Man of Mode and would The Inconstant. Moreover, the fact that Mrs. Bullock chose the play as a benefit showpiece three years later—and followed her reprise of Liberia with a Scottish

dance—may indicate that actress rather than playwright wrested ultimate control of the play’s sexual semaphore.”

Qelsted, the Exercise of the Fan, and the Male Gaze Jane Rogers Bullock, a versatile actress skilled in both comedy and tragedy, would have one more chance to inflect a male-scripted fan lesson.’? On December 14, 1726, fourteen months after last appearing as Liberia in The Bath Unmask’d, she played the witty Emilia in Leonard Welsted’s The Dissembled Wanton; or, My Son Get Money

(Lincoln’s Inn Fields). Not much is known about Welsted, who seems to have been a poet and minor Scriblerian. His play is undis-

tinguished and ran for only five performances. Nevertheless, it embodies a male dramatist’s attempt to pin down the fan’s sexual semaphore once and for all. If The Bath Unmask’d takes female motion to be the primary threat posed by the subversive fan, The Dissembled Wanton targets the fan’s 157

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potential control of male vision. Control of the male gaze was one of

the eighteenth-century fan’s most powerful abilities. As Angela Rosenthal points out, “[W]omen armed with fans can be recast not only as targets but also as active participants in the visual field, for, with the flick of a wrist, a woman could transform eighteenth-century scopic hierarchies: the power of the gaze was, quite literally, in her hand.””° Yet the ability to trap or deflect the male gaze cut both ways; as Erin Mackie observes, obscuring the object of desire only inflames male ardor. The fan thus produces the very desire it repudiates.’’ Nearly two decades after Addison’s fictional Academy of the Fan, Welsted seems to illustrate Rosenthal’s thesis by placing the fan’s scopic power squarely in female hands. But in fact, the play becomes a test case for whether actress or playwright orchestrates the gaze of the spectator, and whether the female form can ultimately elude voyeuristic capture by the male eye. In act 4 of Welsted’s play, Toby, a coxcomb soldier emboldened by

liquor, presumes to make love to the self-possessed Emilia. At the 1726 premiere William Bullock, third son of the William Bullock who had created Duretete in The Inconstant, played Toby opposite his sister-in-law Jane Rogers Bullock. Here there is no threat of rape; for

one thing, Toby’s friend Wormwood (who provides the liquor) remains on stage to witness the fun as the audience’s surrogate. Emilia has no difficulty teasing Toby under the guise of flattering his

clumsy advances. In what is by now a tradition of exchanging demonstrations of male and female martial arts, Toby vows to “shew

my Wit, and Valour too.”’> Emilia wittily interprets this a sexual entendre, which goes over Toby’s head: “Your Valour, Mr Toby! What against a Woman, your Valour! You are not going to draw upon me?” Toby responds by spinning around in a robotic paradeground movement that strains preposterously toward erotic gamesmanship:

No, no, there’s no Danger in our Valour, Madam; we only Exercize; we never fight in earnest: But when I was taught in the Artillery Ground, I have wish’d any Woman, that lov’d me, had seen me Exercise; for you must know, Madam, we are 158

The Fan of Mode

taught to turn about any manner of way, which Soldiers call our Facings; but which, I think, wowd be a prettier Word, for making Love, than making War: as thus, To the Front—Present—to the Right—then I present again—to the Right—to the Right—to the Right—You see, Madam, you have me, and you have me not, every Moment.—Now, while you are looking at me, you quite lose me again—To the Right about— There’s nothing in it, Madam, but keeping firm upon one Heel: Pr’ythee try it, Madam Emilia.

When Toby wittily “presents arms” by embracing Emilia, she must reach for her fan literally to turn the scene around in an extended fan lesson that moves from coquetry to violence: Hold! Hold, Mr Toby! We have our Artillery, and Instruments of War, as well as you. (She gives him a Rap with her Fan.) Come, Sir, I'll shew the Exercise of the Fan, which is a Womans Valour... . Thus then, I handle my Fan—now I unfurl it gradually; you see, Sir, you have me, and you have me not; now you have lost me; but here have me again; now you see me, by a side Glance, and here I kill you, at full glare. Consciously or not, Emilia follows the sequence of Addison’s academy almost exactly. Welsted must have known Addison’s piece well and simply dramatized it. According to Addison, When my female Regiment is drawn up in Array with every one her Weapon in her Hand, upon my giving the Word to handle their Fans, each of them shakes her Fan at me with a Smile, then

gives her Right-hand woman a Tap upon the Shoulder, then presses her Lips with the Extremity of her Fan, then lets her arms Fall in an easy Motion, and stands in a Readiness to receive the next Word of Command. All this is done with a close Fan, and is generally learned in the first Week.

The next Motion is that of unfurling the Fan, in which are comprehended several little Flirts and Vibrations, as also grad159

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ual and deliberate Openings, with many voluntary Fallings asunder in the Fan it self, that are seldom learned under a Month’s Practice. This part of the Exercise pleases the Spectators more than any other, as it discovers on a Sudden an infinite Number of Cupids, Garlands, Altars, Birds, Beasts, Rainbows, and the like agreeable Figures, that display themselves to View, whilst every one in the Regiment holds a Picture in her Hand.”

In contrast to Toby’s absurd pirouette, the actress playing Emilia crisply shields and reveals her features with the help of her fan. The scene’s visual dynamic is quite complex, however, since there are two men on the stage: Toby and Wormwood. The latter (like the audience) is in on the joke: “He! He! ’'m pleased with her Folly.” The

gaze is triangulated between Toby (for whom Emilia oscillates between visibility and invisibility), Wormwood (who seems to have a privileged view of events, and who must be downstage of the couple to share his aside with us), and the audience. Depending on how the scene is staged, we may or may not share the now-you-see-hernow-you-don’t perspective of either of the two men. Emilia caps the scene by moving from coquetry to violence. The fan mutates in her hand from toy to weapon: Emilia. Now, Mr Toby, be upon your Guard; now I discharge my Fan full at you. (She cracks it in his face.) There’s a Report for you, half as loud as a Gun—Courage, Courage, Sir! There is no Danger—Do you mind me Sir, | recover my Fan—I ground my Fan— Wormwood. Madam, Mr Toby can stand a lady’s Fire. He! He! Emilia. There is one more Action I wowd show you, Mr Toby. Toby. | an’t afraid to ask you, what it is. Emilia. Why, that is, Mr Toby, the Flutter of the Fan. Now this, for Example, is the Indolent Flutter—this the Disdainful One—and this, Mr Toby, is the Furious—the Furious—the Furious Flutter. (She drives him about.) O! Sir, I assure you, the Fan is a formidable Weapon, and I understand the Menage [sic] of it, as well as any Coquette in London. 160

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This sequence might be subtitled “the triumph of the fan.” Toby is a pest, and Emilia’s fan puts him in his place, although he is too much the booby to realize he is being twitted from the stage. We laugh at Toby’s expense even as we applaud the actress’s execution of what seems an unalloyed example of the fan as improvised female weapon.

Yet this spontaneity is illusory. Not only are Emilia’s actions scripted by the playwright, but Emilia continues to follow Addison’s drill almost to the letter. Since his famous description remains the richest description of fan play in the Restoration, and is instructive on its own terms, I quote Addison at some length: Upon my giving the Word to discharge their Fans, they give one

general Crack that may be heard at a considerable Distance when the Wind sits fair. This is one of the most difficult Parts of the Exercise; but I have several Ladies with me, who at their first

Entrance could not give a Pop loud enough to be heard at the further End of a Room, who can now discharge a Fan in such a Manner, that it shall make a Report like a Pocket-Pistol. .. . When the Fans are thus discharged, the Word of Command in Course is to ground their Fans. This teaches a lady to Quit her

Fan gracefully when she throws it aside in order to take up a Pack of Cards, adjust a Curl of Hair, replace a falling Pin, or apply herself to any other Matter of Importance. This Part of the Exercise, as it only consists in tossing a Fan with an Air upon a long Table (which stands by for that Purpose), may be learned in two Days’ Time as well as in a Twelvemonth. When my Female Regiment is thus disarmed, I generally let them walk about the Room for some Time; when on a sudden

(ike Ladies that look upon their Watches after a long Visit) they all of them hasten to their Arms, catch them up in a Hurry, and place themselves in their proper Stations upon my calling out recover your Fans. This part of the Exercise is not difficult, provided a Woman applies her Thoughts to it. The Fluttering of the Fan is the last, and indeed the Masterpiece of the whole Exercise; but if a Lady does not misspend her Time, she may make herself Mistress of it in three Months. I

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The Stage Life of Props

generally lay aside the Dog-days and the hot Time of the Summer for the teaching this Part of the Exercise; for as soon as ever I pronounce Flutter your fans, the Place is filled with so many Zephirs and gentle Breezes as are very refreshing in that Season of the Year, though they might be dangerous to Ladies of a tender Constitution in any other. There is an infinite Variety of Motions to be made use of in the Flutter of a Fan: There is the angry Flutter, the modest Flutter, the timorous Flutter, the confused Flutter, the merry Flutter, and the amorous Flutter. Not to be tedious, there is scarce

any Emotion in the Mind which does not produce a suitable Agitation in the Fan.°°

Emilia departs from Addison’s script only in reversing the order of the grounding and recovery of the fan, and in her choice of the most apposite flutters to deal with the matter at hand. Although Emilia’s

fanfare routs Toby, it does so only thanks to the academy; and Emilia’s wiles prove no match for the lusty Colonel Severne, who chases her off toward the bedroom at the end of the scene. To what extent, then, was Mrs. Bullock bound to follow Addison’s

exercise point by point? The script suggests that Welsted expected the actress to improvise only within strict limits; there is no equivalent of Etherege’s casual “etc.” in The Man of Mode. Fifteen years after Addison’s piece appeared in The Spectator, it seems that the exercise

of the fan has become a more or less fixed routine, at least for parodic purposes. Surely some, if not most, in the audience would have recognized Welsted’s dramatic quotation and taken pleasure in seeing Addison’s academy brought to life. If the fan remains a “formidable weapon,” as Emilia claims, it does so only within the strict limits set by the male imagination. In the half century between The Man of Mode and The Dissembled Wanton, the textual license for female fan

improvisation seems to expire. The fan is the weapon not of the woman who resists rape (as in The Inconstant twenty-four years earlier) but of the coquette. Repelling the unwanted male gaze of the booby alone, Emilia’s fan draws the voyeuristic spectator on, whet-

ting our appetite for the erotic chase that follows in earnest. Like 162

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Addison, Welsted invites us to admire the actress’s execution rather than her innovation. In The Dissembled Wanton, the fan becomes an instrument of pure voyeurism. We cannot tell how well The Dissembled Wanton reflects tan usage

in the period either on or offstage. What we do know is that it achieved only five performances. While the play marks one last attempt by a male playwright of the period to dramatize Addison’s academy of the fan as a fixed repertory of moves designed to inflame male desire, earlier, more flexible fan lessons dominated the eighteenth-century stage.°! Whereas The Bath Unmask’d and The Dissembled Wanton faded into oblivion, The Man of Mode and The Inconstant

went from strength to strength, suggesting that actress rather than playwright propelled the fan’s stage life. Perhaps actresses preferred not to be limited in their use of the fan; perhaps the trope of the fan lesson, while an amusing conceit in The Man of Mode, simply failed to

persuade audiences subsequently. Whatever the case, eighteenthcentury audiences evidently paid to see plays in which the fan was

kept mobile in female hands rather than pinned down by male dramatists as cautionary emblem (The Bath Unmask’d) or academic exercise (The Dissembled Wanton).

¢ onclusion: A Final Handle on the Fan? The property fan was both ally and antagonist of the Restoration actress. On the one hand, the fan’s limited semantic repertoire threat-

ened to reduce the actress’s manual gestures to a series of codified moves whose meaning was determined by a theatrical culture overwhelmingly concerned to objectify the actress as a sexual commodity. Yet, on the other hand, I have argued that the fan’s theatrical energy derived not only from its male-scripted lexicon—a lexicon, moreover, that was considerably less codified than has sometimes been imagined—but from its incessant and continually improvised play in the hands of flesh-and-blood actresses. On stage, fan and actress are locked in a struggle between meaning and motion, for the fan threatens to go dead as soon as the actress loses her grip. If it is 163

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not to become simply dead weight, an affected tic, the fan must be plied throughout the scene in which it appears.®* The fan constantly threatens to block the actress from view; to muffle her speech; to slip from her control; and to mean something other than she intends, for, as Simon Trussler points out, its signals “variously affirm, contradict,

or modulate the spoken word.”®* Yet at the same time the fan enlarges the actress’s physical command of the playing space, con-

trols our visual access to her, underscores or ironizes particular speeches, and magnifies her performance. The fan’s oscillation between motion and stillness has undeniable consequences for the sexual politics of Restoration and eighteenth-

century theater. Like Harriet’s fan in The Man of Mode, the prop strives to demonstrate female agency and control; yet like Loveit’s fan

in the same play, the prop always risks congealing into a symbol of female helplessness and panic.** As a trope, the fan remains subject to the directions of those playwrights who seek to arrest, frame, and emblematize it. But as a dynamic prop, the fan orchestrates the male gaze and fends off unwanted male attention. As I have shown, fans continually threaten to disrupt the sexual economies of the plays they traverse. The fan’s semiotic instability, its disturbing tendency never quite to mean what it says, explains the popularity of the fan lesson in Restoration and early-eighteenth-century drama. The very artifice that enables the fan to speak in the first place undermines the sincerity of any given speech-act; hence the (paradoxical) Addisonian obsession with training women to speak its language ever more “naturally.” “A useful thing a fan, isn’t it?” quips Lady Windermere in act 2 of Lady Windermere’s Fan—a late-nineteenth-century play whose cen-

tral property, as in Othello, threatens to turn on its owner as an immobilizing badge of sexual shame.*? On the Restoration and earlyeighteenth-century stage, by contrast, the fan is no static symbol; or rather, the fan’s status as symbol is renegotiated by every actress who takes it up. In the struggle to turn women from theatrical objects into theatrical subjects, the fan’s contribution depends in large part on the

semiotic surplus of the individual actress and her ability to shape meaning through motion. 164

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The impact of that surplus in performance remains an enigma. I have suggested that what we find in the scripted fan lesson may be

the textual traces of a countermovement, an Addison-inspired attempt by male playwrights to circumscribe the actress’s freedom of

expression and thus limit what the fan can say. To adjust the metaphor slightly, if the stage fan were already singing in tune, it wouldn't need constant rehearsal. The fact that the chastening fan lesson returns like the repressed to the stage as late as 18300—“My dear ma’am, this is the way to maneuver a fan,” admonishes Handy Junior in Thomas Morton’s Speed the Plough—suggests that the prop’s unruly sexual semaphore eluded even Minerva’s control.*® Despite the best efforts of the period’s playwrights to tame it, the Restoration and early-eighteenth-century fan flirts with the possibility that it will someday be freed from male instruction and learn to speak entirely for itself.

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| a Killing Time Guns and the Play of Predictability on the Modern Stage I hate endings. You have to end it somehow. I like beginnings. Middles are tough, but endings are just a pain in the ass. —Sam Shepard

First of all, when you've got a gun— Everybody pays attention. —Stephen Sondheim, ASSASSINS

d, the end of act 1 of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890), Hedda observes (in Una Ellis-Fermor’s translation) that she still has “one thing to kill time with”: her father’s pistols.’ Hedda speaks more truly than she knows, for she will use the pistols not only to pass the time but to end time—both the time of her life and, almost immediately following, the time of the play. Playwrights have often played with time by using objects to speed up, retard, or suspend the action, but the stage gun is unique because its appearance

immediately raises the possibility of killing time altogether. The modern stage inherited the climactic pistol-shot from the piéce bien faite of Scribe and Sardou, and such diverse playwrights as Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard, Sam Shepard, and Suzan-Lori Parks have (with varying degrees of irony) obeyed Chekhov's famous dictum that a gun shown in the first act should always go off in the last. Unlike mere chronicity, defined by Frank Kermode as “humanly uninteresting successiveness,” playgoing is a meaningful and funda16/

The Stage Life of Props

mentally metrical experience, with a beginning, middle, and end.’ As

the action unfolds in performance, the spectator is at some level aware that the play itself is winding down, in the same way that a line

of iambic pentameter exhausts itself after five stressed beats. This meter is shaped by the spectator’s expectation of dramatic closure, which, according to June Schlueter, “can occur only when the production of meaning intended and initiated by the beginning is complete.”? Successful closure results when the audience feels that a play’s ending is a natural outcome of the plot rather than a necessary contrivance of the playwright; “rising” action and “falling” meter pleasingly converge as the action draws to a close. (This counterpoint is clearer on the page, where act and scene numbers serve as visual reminders of the underlying metrical beat over and against which the action unfolds. )

For the attentive spectator, a gun planted in the action early on underscores the unwinding meter of performance that counterpoints the rising action of any play. Marsha Norman’s successful “night, Mother (1982) provides a modern example. In this meticulously crafted play, stage time and clock time synchronize.* ‘night, Mother begins at around eight o’clock on a Saturday night, precisely the time at which an audience might be settling down to watch a performance of the play. The action proper starts with Jessie Cates retrieving her

father’s gun from the attic and announcing to her mother that she intends to shoot herself at the end of the evening. As Thelma Cates struggles to keep Jessie alive, the audience is made continuously aware that the gun behind the bedroom door is both a threat and a promise of dramatic closure; true to form, very shortly after Jessie locks herself behind the door and shoots herself, the play ends. ‘night, Mother’s commercial success attests to the affective pleasure of

the well-made play, which shapes undifferentiated clock time into linear, structured stage time. The aesthetic pleasure granted the audience reinforces the play’s theme: Jessie’s wish to impose a meaningful shape on her life is realized by means of the conclusive prop. Despite *night, Mother's theatrical effectiveness, the playwright’s need to contrive dramatic closure is often a curse as much as a blessing. Henry J. Schmidt has observed that “as the moment of closure 168

Killing Time

approaches, the [literary] work tends to become self-conscious, seemingly aware of the judgmental presence of the reader, who, hav-

ing been captured, must be successfully released... . The resulting exertion renders art more artificial, theater more theatrical, as the literary work builds to a final flourish before it disappears from view.”?

Although the gun provides a convenient ready-made ending, the price paid is predictability. “The ubiquitous second-act firearm. Ever notice how frequently one is drawn at the climax of an unconvincing play?” laments theater critic Peter Marks. “In lesser works, the sudden appearance of a weapon often is a sign of dramatic desperation, an indication of the surrender of a less than sublime sensibility, the kind that resorts to force when imagination falls short.”® This still popular trope was a staple of nineteenth-century melodrama, in which a gun proved a tried-and-true device not only for driving home the moral (the virtuous triumph, and the wicked are punished), but also for bringing down the curtain with a bang. Thus in the play that ends in the female protagonist’s suicide—a melodramatic genre that dates back at least to Friedrich Hebbel’s Maria Magdalene (1843)—a gun often kills protagonist and play with a single shot.’ Already by the mid—nineteenth century, the climactic gunshot was such a hackneyed means of dispatching a drama’s fallen woman that one first-night wag greeted the melodramatic ending of Olympe’s Marriage (a typical 1855 boulevard drame by Emile Augier) with the cry, “Voila un coup de pistolet qui tuera la piéce!”® But as the piéce bien faite of Scribe and Sardou mutated (via the piéce a thése of Augier and Dumas fils) into the realistic social drama of Ibsen, Shaw, and others, the melodramatic device persisted. Even such a sympathetic treatment of the fallen woman motif as Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893) resorts to the inevitable shot. Modern dramatists recognized the staleness of the device. Shaw

complained that “[t]here is an unwritten but perfectly well understood regulation that members of Mrs Warren’s profession [i.e., prostitution] shall be tolerated on the stage only when they are beautiful, exquisitely dressed, and sumptuously lodged and fed; also that they

shall, at the end of the play, die of consumption to the sympathetic tears of the whole audience or step into the next room to commit sui169

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cide.”’ Yet dramatists remained unsure what could be put in the gun’s place. Chekhov once wrote in a letter that he knew of “only two ways to end a play,” to get his hero “married” or killed off at the curtain.!? And a century later, Cuban-American playwright Maria Irene Fornes echoed Chekhov’s frustration by confessing in an interview,

“I don’t know how to end a play unless . . . who’s going to kill whom?”!! While the eucharistic wafer, the bloody handkerchief, the skull, and the fan have largely quit the stage, the gun still haunts the drama nearly four hundred years after a handheld firearm first burst

onto the scene.'* The modern stage inherited the climactic pistol shot as a dramatic cliché that required bold innovations in order to revitalize its theatrical life. Playwrights soon discovered that guns could threaten, distort, or

even rupture stage time in other ways besides killing it outright. Sometimes this is simply a matter of flouting convention, as when Stoppard begins as well as ends Jumpers (1972) with a pistol shot. More subtly, guns may import the past into the present, like the deadly pistol shot that haunts Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)./° On occasion, guns are not only psychological but actual time machines: a repeated gunshot in J. B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner (1932) introduces two alternative sequences of events, one disastrous for the characters, the other benign.

Like the props considered earlier in this study, then, guns can either accelerate or decelerate the dramatic action. On the modern stage, guns both drive the plot forward (like the bloody handkerchief in The Spanish Tragedy) and plunge character and spectator back into the past (like Yorick’s skull in Hamlet). Besides ratcheting up dra-

matic tension, property-guns often retard the action by providing breathing spaces for actorial improvisation between lines of dialogue, as when Hoss silently appraises his gun collection in Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime (1972), or when Jessie cleans Daddy’s gun in “night, Mother. Such moments are easy to skip over when reading the text, since they usually occupy only a line or two of stage directions, but in performance they become self-contained beats charged with dramatic meaning and power. During such “fondled moments” the plot

is put on hold, and our attention is focused on the gun’s affective 170

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qualities as an object as well as on its semiotic properties as a sign.‘* Sometimes this byplay between actor and gun is an excuse for virtuosity (as when an actor demonstrates his ability to sharpshoot), but more often the actor seizes on the prop as a tool for extended characterization, in the way that one might personalize a fan or a cigarette. At its most extreme, as in Beckett’s Happy Days (1961), such stage business displaces conventional plot altogether.

The gun’s lethal potential has broader thematic implications, moreover. As plays unfold in performance, guns can acquire a his-

tory and trajectory beyond human intention, a counterlife that mocks the characters’ efforts to kill time with them. As ironic emblems of mortality, guns recall the Jacobean stage skull, which, as I argued in chapter 3, undermines rather than reasserts the memento mori assurance that despite the transitory nature of our flesh we all

live sub specie aeternitatis. The gun counterpoints our subjective experience of being stranded in mortal time by adding to the skull’s traditional memento mori message (“Remember You Must Die”) the ironic coda: “And that I'll go on regardless.” Like all props, guns are durational objects whose existence implicitly extends beyond any staged events; but unlike other props, their power to destroy human time is potentially limitless. In this sense, the property-gun thematically opposes the property with which I began, the eucharistic wafer in the Croxton Play of the

Sacrament. Both props transcend mortal time: the flesh of Christ embodied in the sacrament is immortal, the gun is unliving metal.

But whereas the real presence of Christ in the Host guarantees redemption of the faithful through Christ’s grace—a point driven home by the conversion of the Jews in the Croxton play—the gun extinguishes human lives without ever expending its own. Since the stage gun traditionally demonstrates a character’s control over temporal fate (even if that control is exerted only by bringing it to a full stop), the gun’s indifference to human life—which it can extinguish at a moment’s notice—is a potent dramatic irony. Ever since Ibsen, playwrights have been quick to exploit the gun’s implied insult to mortal time. In this chapter, I demonstrate how three playwrights use guns to 17]

The Stage Life of Props

wrench characters out of what I shall call the play of predictability: the drama in which a gun in the first act always goes off in the last— usually by dispatching the protagonist. Each gun disrupts the traditional, well-made plot so as to kill time in a different way. I begin by analyzing the pistols in [bsen’s Hedda Gabler, which at first sight follow the play of predictability’s conventional pattern. Seen from this perspective, General Gabler’s melodramatic pistols rigidly enforce

the linear, causal trajectory of the well-made play as they drive Hedda to suicide. But seen from another perspective, the pistols assist Hedda’s aesthetic project of creating “[s]omething irradiated with spontaneous beauty” by transcending human time altogether (357). If Hedda’s pistols appear to enforce linear stage time, in Beckett’s

Happy Days the pistol is unmoored from any context in which time makes sense. On Beckett’s bleak, minimalist canvas, time is distorted

as the furniture of realism disappears. Winnie’s props no longer embody a recoverable past, as in Ibsen, but taunt her with an interminable present. An ironic parody of Hedda’s fetishized pistols, Winnie’s revolver “Brownie” teases both Winnie and Willie with the promise of escape from mortal time but ultimately refuses to commute their life sentence and thereby confirm the linear metrics of the well-made play. Last, I read Maria Irene Fornes’s Fefu and Her Friends (1977) as a

feminist answer to Hedda’s overdetermined pistols. Fefu’s shotgun literally props up the furniture of realism in part 1, only to rupture the frame of realism through a burst of surreal logic in part 3.'° Fefu’s impossibly double-barreled shooting of both a rabbit and her friend Julia with a single shot is a liberatory act, one that shatters causal logic and (despite its violence) suggests the possibility of a transformative feminist dramaturgy that subverts the play of predictability altogether. If Ibsen uses Hedda’s pistols to kill time by transcending as well as fulfilling the telos of the female suicide play, and Beckett deploys Brownie to prolong time and frustrate the spectators’ desire for closure, Fornes uses Fefu’s final shot to buy time—both for her protagonist and for her audience.

L/Z

Killing Time

The Double Life of Hedda Gabler's Pistols Before writing Hedda Gabler, Ibsen had perfected his technique of representing time spatially by means of fateful props. Like other playwrights who limited the action to a single room and a discrete, successive time period, Ibsen needed to find a way to dramatize the past while avoiding lengthy exposition. Objects were his solution, and in Ibsen they both embody the past and propel the plot.!’ While Ibsen’s dramatically charged objects—such as the incriminating letter in A Doll’s House (1879)—outwardly resemble the plot devices that crowd the well-made plays of Scribe and Sardou, Ibsen’s props embody the decisive influence of the past on the present: they externalize his characters’ internal (and hence ethical) characteristics, which emerge as damning evidence in the forensic anatomizing of the psyche that is Ibsen’s project. In Ibsen’s spatialized dramaturegy,

no prop is innocent; his drawing rooms are symbolic minefields in which virtually every item—a pile of books, a hat on a chair, a letter in a mailbox—is a depth-charge primed to explode into revelation at its allotted point in the action. Mrs. Alving’s books, Nora’s forged signature, and Hedda Gabler’s pistols are no mere plot devices, but windows into the soul.

Having experimented with more overt symbolism in his two previous plays, Rosmersholm (1886) and The Lady from the Sea (1888), in Hedda Gabler Ibsen returned to the realistic bourgeois interior of his earlier plays of social realism. Mimetic realism admirably suited Ibsen’s thematic ends: what better way to dramatize the crushing effects of Hedda’s stifling heredity and environment than to imprison Hedda in her drawing room? Within this naturalistic environment, Hedda’s pistols perform a double function, for they seem to obey two time signatures in performance as we view them alternately from a synoptic perspective

and from a processual perspective. At key moments, the pistols retard the action and demand to be read as elements that signify spatially in a pictorial mise-en-scéne framed by the proscenium. But at other moments, Hedda’s pistols (or at least one of them) propel the

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plot toward its dénouement by becoming invisible instruments of

blackmail and suicide. Hedda Gabler might be subtitled “The Revenge of the Prop,” since at every turn Hedda’s pistols frustrate her

attempt to freeze time into an aesthetic image. Instead they insist upon the inexorable causal logic of female suicide exemplified by Hedda’s contemporary, Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Hedda’s final act is tonally ambiguous, however. Is her suicide a capitulation to the play of predictability, or a sardonic parody of its melodramatic sentiment? Hedda’s attitude toward her pistols exemplifies their double life as pictorial emblem and plot device. As souvenirs of Hedda’s motherless

lite with the general, the phallic props become associated with Hedda’s yearnings for freedom and power.'® Each time her urge for agency is frustrated, Hedda reaches for her pistols, but like the child

in Hedda’s womb, the pistols are a continual reminder that her options are running out. The pistols thus hover between two modes of killing time. On the one hand, Hedda mobilizes the pistols in a disastrous attempt to create “an element of beauty” by orchestrating Fjlert Lovborg’s death as an aesthetic triumph (355). On the other hand, the pistols resist Hedda’s attempt to harness them as weapons against time: Lovborg’s pistol goes off unexpectedly and falls into the hands of the police, leaving Hedda no means to avoid blackmail and scandal other than suicide. This tension between Hedda’s pictorial strategy and the play’s linear momentum becomes explicit when one pistol leaves the set in order to spring its melodramatic trap between acts 3 and 4, while its fellow remains behind on stage as Hedda’s final means of escape.

In act 1, spatial dramaturgy dominates over forward momentum (plot). In some sense, the set is the action, for the act limns Hedda’s feelings of claustrophobia and boredom in the cozy bourgeois sphere of the Tesman villa. Hedda’s desire for agency and freedom is displaced into the aesthetic sphere: she obsessively rearranges her environment, softening the light and remonstrating against any item whose presence she finds offensive (Tesman’s slippers, Miss Tesman’s hat, the bouquets of flowers). But these petty assertions of con-

trol cannot disguise the fact that she is trapped in a static frame: when Hedda, left alone on stage for the first time, “crosses the room, 174

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raising her arms and clenching her hands, as if in fury,” Ibsen stages a naturalistic equivalent of Edvard Munch’s expressionist painting The Scream (276). Hedda then pulls back the curtains from the glass

door and stands there looking out at the withered autumn leaves. These two portraitlike images—one dynamic, one static—are the first in a series of “animated pictures” that arrest the relentless forward motion of the plot. In the following acts, the pistols themselves brake the action and allow such emblematic moments to crystallize. Act l’s spatial dramaturgy introduces several fateful objects. The most prominent is the portrait of General Gabler, which hangs on the back wall of the inner room as a constant visual reminder of Hedda’s past (a link underscored by the play’s title).!? Further, emblematic properties highlight the incompatibility between Hedda and Tesman: Tesman has his beloved slippers, which repulse Hedda, while Hedda is devoted to her father’s pistols, which terrify Tesman. When Tesman refuses Hedda’s (crudely symbolic) requests for a manservant and saddle horse, Hedda taunts him with “those dangerous things!” (p. 295). But in addition to their patently phallic symbolism, which

links Hedda retrospectively to her father, the pistols are already implicated in the play’s sluggishly emerging plot, since Mrs. Elvsted

has mentioned Lévborg’s ongoing attachment to the mysterious woman who once threatened to shoot him. When Hedda’s pistols first appear at the beginning of the next act, however, they arrest the action as part of an animated picture. Hedda stands alone in the inner room by the open glass door that leads to the garden, loading a pistol whose fellow lies in an open pistol case on the writing table (which has replaced the piano that stood there in act 1). Hedda is framed for the audience by the inner proscenium

formed by the wide, curtained doorway of the inner room; her father’s portrait hangs above and behind her, thus forming a composite portrait of father and daughter. To borrow Henry James’s summation of the play, we see “the picture not of an action but of a condition.””9

Any stage business accompanying Hedda’s mime lies outside the rhythm determined by the dialogue. It is up to the actress how to kill the time allotted to the scene, which can expand or contract accord175

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ing to her wishes (and those of the director). Here, for example, is how Janet Suzman filled out Ibsen’s brief stage directions:

I thought perhaps I might not load the gun in full view. Gives the game away too soon... . If you are loading a gun it is pretty

obvious that you will be using it sooner or later. And what about the piano? Why not play it? But she’s too unsettled to sit

down. So, I ran the butt of the gun down the keys. An ugly sound. Defiant. | wandered into the main room surveying the newly arranged furniture. It was better than it had been, but neither pleased me nor displeased me. I shoved the back of the rocking-chair as I passed. It rocked noisily on its own. Ghostly.

I stood, unsure of what to do, toying with time. Time toying with me? The clock ticked. | remembered the gun in my hand and began polishing it with a piece of lint. What a splendid gleaming weapon. | loved it. I checked the sights and turned to take mock aim at something. Daddy’s frozen glare caught my eye. I hated him. | nearly squeezed the trigger. Patricide! Don’t bother you fool—he’s well and truly dead. Ah, but what does it feel like to kill yourself, | thought. I slowly brought the gun to my own temple, interested by the feel of cold metal on warm skin. It felt good to me, and strangely desirable. I must investigate whether this looks as ferocious and beautiful as I think. I went to the mirror above the desk to look, and posed in front of it—as an actress might, I fancied. A stray wisp of hair annoyed me. Spoiled the picture. I smoothed it into place, diverted from morbidity by vanity. I wished fleetingly I had hair like Thea’s. I heard the crackle of leaves from outside, and whirled around to see the figure of the Judge picking his way towards my house. The back way! How dare he, I thought. Too presumptuous by half. I shall give him a fright. So I did! Now | expect the purist will tut. But I don’t mind. For me this

one minute charade expanded her dilemma most explicitly. Emptiness, boredom, pistols, vanity, death and dying, time creeping past. “Well, for God’s sake, what am I to do?” she cries to the Judge. What indeed??! 176

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For the actress, the pistol is no symbol but a concrete acting tool that successively releases feelings of sexual excitement, hatred, morbidity, and vanity. The mime allows each actress to characterize “her” Hedda. Thus for Elizabeth Robins, who first played Hedda in Britain, the pistols were “allies” that symbolized Hedda’s power of escape from sexual enslavement, whereas for Minnie Maddern Fiske they were mere toys and thus a sign of Hedda’s cowardice.”” For Hedda herself, the gun offers a “time out”—a temporary breathing space outside the relentless trajectory of the plot. This temporal freedom is mirrored spatially: the scene takes place in the liminal safety zone of the inner room, Hedda’s sanctum, which connects the Tesman area downstage to the invisible bedrooms to the rear.

In the next beat of the play, however, the animated picture dissolves into action as the play’s meter starts running again. Hedda sees

Judge Brack approaching the house by the back way and shoots at him. (The gesture is a joke on Hedda’s part but establishes for the audience that the pistols are not just toys.) A flustered Brack appears and disarms Hedda, “taking the pistol gently out of her hand” (297). Brack counters Hedda’s hold on the pistol’s meaning by literally tak-

ing it out of her hands, and in this exchange, we see the pistol reclaimed as a masculine prop.

Once more, the pistols arrest the action in a speaking picture, which this time juxtaposes man and prop. As Brack toys with Hedda’s pistol, it begins to fill with additional meaning by acquiring

a mysterious past. “Ah, this one. I know it well,” Brack remarks, before replacing it in its case (297); again, this beat can expand or contract in performance to suit the actor. Brack’s appraisal of the pistol is more erotic than practical. Brack finds the idea of power over Hedda erotically stimulating, and his disarming action anticipates his

eventual triumph over the pistol—and Hedda herself. Meanwhile, the creepy detail of his prior acquaintance with this particular pistol is never explained (although Brack’s ability to identify it proves crucial later). Evidently the prop’s history extends beyond Hedda to include a male circuit that may link Judge Brack to the general himself. The fondled moment ends when Brack replaces the pistol and shuts the case, and Hedda asserts her control once more by placing 177

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the case in the drawer of the writing desk. The pistols are dramatically primed, hidden but not forgotten. By this point in the play, then, Ibsen’s fetishized pistols have acquired a good deal of dramatic weight. Psychologically, they suggest that Hedda’s frustration with her present circumstances stems from her desire for the sexual and social prerogatives of a man; her shooting “up into the blue” (296) literalizes her emotional aimlessness and her anger at having sold herself too cheaply. The pistols are a sexual talisman: they link Hedda to the dissolute but brilliant Ejlert Lovborg, but they also intrigue Judge Brack, who has his own myste-

rious connection to the pistols. Temporally, the pistols brake the action and produce arresting visual images that demand the spectator’s interpretation. The fateful pistols are neglected until the end of act 3, but in the meantime Hedda’s frustration mounts, with disastrous results. The tension between the snowballing events of the plot and Hedda’s wish to arrest biological time (symbolized for her by the growing child in her womb) intensifies. Instead of turning to her pistols for relief, she decides to wrest Lovborg away from the redemptive influence of Thea Elvsted and mold him into a Dionysian figure “|w]ith vineleaves in his hair” (324). Deprived of control over her own life, she

states: “I want, for once in my life, to have power over a human being’s fate” (324). But Hedda can only exert that power in the aesthetic realm, seeking to transform Ejlert the man into a godlike icon. The dissolute Lovborg is made out of recalcitrant clay, however; tempted by Hedda to drink, he accompanies Brack and Tesman to Brack’s bachelor party, after which he ends up arrested in a drunken brawl at Mademoiselle Diana’s brothel. The predatory Brack’s sudden visits unnervingly punctuate the action and remind us both that the

play’s clock is ticking and that the pistols remain unfired: “Oh, | don't think people shoot their farmyard cocks” (338). Significantly, all of Hedda’s failed attempts to kill time according to her own aes-

thetic take place offstage; she herself remains trapped in Ibsen’s proscenium frame. In act 3, Hedda’s favored pistol (Pistol A) and Lovborg’s manuscript are mobilized as tools for suicide and symbolic murder respec178

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tively. These fateful props become two ways for Hedda to kill time: she deploys the gun to orchestrate Lovborg’s suicide and then burns the manuscript that is Thea and Lovborg’s child (and an effigy of her own). Hedda’s most dramatic bid for agency arrives at the close of act 3, when Lévborg confesses losing the manuscript during his drunken spree and announces to Hedda his intention to kill himself. Hedda faces a choice: both Lovborg’s manuscript and the pistol case are now locked in the same drawer of the writing desk. Should she return the manuscript, and thereby redeem Thea and Lovborg’s relationship, or give Lovborg the pistol and destroy her rival’s child? As Hedda goes to the writing table and opens the drawer, the play hovers between

two possible outcomes; when she returns with the pistol, the past bleeds into the present and forms another animated picture in which the prop demands to be read by the audience. This new picture might be subtitled, “Lovborg Confronts the Past in the Form of a Pistol”: Lévborg (looking at her). Is that the souvenir? Hedda (nodding slowly). Do you recognize it? It was aimed at you once. Lévborg. You should have used it then. Hedda. There it is. Use it yourself now. Lovborg (putting the pistol in his breast pocket). Thanks. Hedda. And beautifully, Ejlert Lovborg. Promise me that. Lévborg. Good-bye, Hedda Gabler. (He goes out by the hall door.) (344)

This exchange visibly reverses that between Brack and Hedda in act 2, when Brack symbolically disarmed Hedda—indeed, it is the very

same pistol. Here Hedda arms Lovborg with (as she thinks) the courage and the nobility to do something “beautiful” that she cannot accomplish herself. The prop creates another breathing space for the actors: the terse dialogue leaves open Lovborg’s precise attitude to the pistol—which may range anywhere from erotic attraction to sardonic resignation—as once again Ibsen gives the actor some leeway in terms of how to handle the prop. Hedda’s motivation is clear, how179

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ever. She rebels against time by seeking to remove Lovborg from time, just as she goes on to burn the manuscript in another animated picture (which might be subtitled “Killing the Child”). For the first time, a pistol leaves the stage. Paradoxically, once

Hedda’s pistols are separated, the play's two time signatures— Hedda’s pictorial strategy of freezing time as art, and the linear trajectory of the well-made play—clash. A whole day passes between the end of act 3 and the beginning of act 4, and a weird foreshortening of stage time results. Ironically, Hedda’s bid to freeze stage time by means of Pistol A only telescopes the action: Brack arrives to tell Hedda that her pistol has discharged in Lévborg’s pocket at Mademoiselle Diana’s. Instead of killing Lovborg beautifully, the pistol has grotesquely unmanned him by shooting him in the genitals. The pistol is now in the hands of the police, and if Brack identifies it a scandal will ensue; the price of his silence is her sexual acquiescence to a

triangular relationship. Loosened from Hedda’s grip, the pistol behaves exactly like any incriminating prop in a French Boulevard drame. Moreover, because of the act break, it seems to have done so in no time at all. In a sense, the melodramatic pistol insists that Hedda is trapped by genre as much as by circumstance. Ibsen’s own notes comment, “Life for Hedda resolves itself as a farce that isn’t ‘worth seeing through to the end.’”*’ Hedda’s attempt to create something beautiful by means of the prop backfires: “The ridiculous and the sordid lies like a curse on everything I so much as touch” (359). Hedda’s “choice” between pistols turns out to be a choice between two modes of melodrama. She can either succumb to the fate proposed by Pistol A—Brack’s sexual blackmail and the triangular relationship—or else obey the telos of the female suicide play by shooting herself with Pistol B—an act straight out of Scribe or Augier. “That is the kind of thing one says. One doesn't do it,” scoffs Brack, implying that shooting oneself only happens in the bourgeois theater (361). The invisible Pistol B dominates the last moments of the play. As her finale, Hedda stages an alternative ending to the script she has been given, in which her remaining pistol becomes a central prop.

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Rather than being framed unconsciously, like her dramatic predecessors in suicide, Hedda deliberately constructs a speaking picture that demands to be read on her own terms. She begins by arranging the set to her specifications. Under the guise of preparing her desk for Tesman and Mrs. Elvsted to work at, Hedda pulls the pistol case out of the drawer, covers it with music paper, and carries it into the inner room, where she places it on the piano in the wings. Now all of her scant precious objects—her piano, her pistols, and her portrait of her

father—are sequestered in her sanctum, which becomes a stagewithin-stage framed by its own curtained proscenium.

As Hedda retires to the inner room and draws the curtains, the audience’s attention splits between the visible scene downstage, which consists of Mrs. Elvsted and Tesman working at the writing desk and Brack in the easy-chair, and the invisible room behind the curtain, in which Hedda puts the finishing touches to her scene.**

There is a wildly inappropriate burst of dance music from the piano—an ironic overture—and then Hedda pops her head out between the curtains to assure Tesman, “I will be quiet in future” (363). A shot is heard within. Tesman pulls open the curtain to reveal a lifeless Hedda stretched out on the sofa with a bullet through

her temple; the play ends with Brack’s famous line, “But, merciful God! One doesn’t do that kind of thing!” (364). Hedda’s suicide is her last artwork, a self-consciously aesthetic, painterly act designed to rectify Lovborg’s botched attempt to kill himself beautifully. No sooner is the shocking spectacle of Hedda’s lifeless body revealed than Tesman supplies a caption: “Shot herself!

Shot herself in the temple! Think of it!” (64). The frozen image of woman, pistol, and portrait begs interpretation, however. As Charles Lyons indicates, “Hedda’s suicide is a suicide without a note, without an explanatory text. Whereas part of the spectator’s response may be

to use the data of the text to construct a motive or explanatory narrative, the visual image itseli—the display of Hedda’s body—both invites and frustrates interpretation.”*? Ibsen’s text leaves open whether Hedda succeeds in killing time on her own terms. Does the pistol become an instrument of aesthetic triumph that ironizes the

18]

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telos of the female suicide play, or does it turn against her even at the

last and confirm her sense that “The ridiculous and the sordid lies like a curse on everything I so much as touch” (359)?7° Much depends on the visual placement of the gun relative to the

body in the final tableau once Tesman pulls the curtains aside. According to Ibsen’s text, “Hedda is lying lifeless, stretched out on the sofa” (364). The pistol’s exact whereabouts are unspecified; the prop may dangle from Hedda’s lifeless hand, lie beside her on the sofa, or else lie on the floor nearby. At the English premiere of Hedda

Gabler at the Vaudeville in 1891, “[Elizabeth] Robins’ posture demonstrated Hedda’s triumph: she lay with her head back and her face up but slightly averted, with the metal-white pistol (the Scribean

‘fateful prop’) in the hand that had fallen across her black dress. Ambiguities were carefully ironed out: Hedda had definitely ‘done it beautifully.’”*’ Conversely, Ingmar Bergman, who has directed the

play three times, comments: “The irony in all this is that she dies such an ugly death anyway—that she ends up lying there with her rump in the air.”*° In short, the tableau can be arranged to demonstrate either Hedda’s triumph over the pistol or the pistol’s triumph over Hedda.

If one pistol insists on what Ibsen called farce by discharging in Lovborg’s pocket, the other escapes into irony—although at whose expense the play refuses to say. Ibsen was accused of resorting to melodrama by at least one English critic.?? But such criticism fails to

acknowledge Hedda’s own ironic awareness that she is playing a part—her willingness to go through the motions, together with her refusal to display the requisite affect associated with the dramatic figure of the female suicide (compare Hedda’s insulting dance tune to Miss Julie’s narcoleptic acceptance of Jean’s razor in Strindberg’s Miss

Julie). It is perhaps this coolness of affect that confused the play’s early audiences and critics, primed by the well-made play to feel superior to (and thus sympathy for) the flawed beings on stage.°° In the end, Hedda’s pistols backfire against the audience’s expectations by observing the letter rather than the spirit of the female suicide play. They both confirm the telos of the well-made play and ironize that telos by allowing Hedda to leave the play of predictabil182

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ity on her own terms—perhaps. The final irony may be left to Hedda,

who ends two lives with one shot: Hedda’s suicide is also a child murder in which she ruthlessly stops two biological clocks. Hedda Gabler’s pistols alternate between spatial and linear time signatures; in performance, the disorienting effect is one of simultaneous motion and stillness. They change everything, and nothing. Frustrating the expectations of the female suicide play even as they outwardly fulfill

it, the pistols refuse to divulge just on whose terms stage time is being killed.

The Revolver as Impasse in Happy Days If Hedda Gabler depicts a race against time, Happy Days dramatizes a

marathon effort to fill time. Beckett abandons mimetic realism in order to magnify Winnie’s struggle to get through her day. Winnie’s predicament of being buried up to her waist (and subsequently up to her neck) in earth literalizes Hedda Gabler’s feeling of claustrophobic entrapment in the Tesman villa. In fact, Winnie’s nightmarish environment is an expressionist version of Hedda’s, stripped as it is of the furniture of realism. Ibsen’s bourgeois drawing room is replaced by a harsh expanse of scorched grass; airlessness and autumnal flowers by

bright light and blazing heat; the fawning Tesman by the taciturn Willie. Most pertinently, Hedda’s principal weapon against boredom—her diverting pistols—is replaced by Winnie’s bag of props, which include her beloved revolver Brownie. Just as Beckett rejects Ibsen’s mimetic use of spatial perspective in order to confront the spectator with an impossibly frontal image—

that of a tiny head (and torso) of a woman engulfed by a huge expanse of earth stretching into the distance—so too Beckett rejects what Benjamin K. Bennett has usefully termed Ibsen’s “temporal per-

spectivism.” According to Bennett, “Just as the painter gives the impression of planes situated behind the place of his canvas—by using lines that are assumed to be parallel in reality but converge in his drawing—so the dramatist, by making his plot depend on events in the relatively distant past, gives the impression of a temporal continuum extending beyond the limits of what is performed.”*! As we 183

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have seen, Ibsen creates this illusion of temporal depth by smuggling the past onstage in the form of objects. In Bert O. States’s formula,

General Gabler’s pistols are “both the relics of a causal past and omens of things to come.”** As they move through the play, the pistols absorb psychological causality and fatal consequence, for events

in Hedda Gabler are progressive, cumulative, and nonrepeating. Incarnating the principle of causal logic, Hedda’s gift of Pistol A to Lovborg (event A) results in Lévborg’s death (event B) and in the recovery of the pistol by the police (event C), which itself enables Brack’s sexual blackmail (event D) and precipitates Hedda’s suicide with Pistol B (event E). One might say that Pistol B’s continuous presence on Ibsen’s set spatializes Hedda’s fate. Beckett’s objects offer no such temporal key to the characters’ fate, for in Beckett’s plays subjective time belies the comforting contours

of linear causality. Time is at once brief—“The light gleams an instant,” cries Pozzo, “then it’s night once more”’?—and infinitely prolonged: “Yes, something seems to have occurred, something has seemed to occur, and nothing has occurred, nothing at all . . .” muses Winnie.** For Winnie, time is shapeless, a succession of present moments to be endured rather than appreciated. In Beckett’s own production of Happy Days at the Royal Court in 1979, with Billie Whitelaw as Winnie, Beckett exaggerated the quality of discontinuity in Winnie’s time-experience. “‘One of the clues of the play is interruption, Beckett stated at rehearsal. ‘Something begins; something else begins. She begins but doesn’t carry through with it. She’s constantly interrupted or interrupting herself. She’s an

interrupted being. She’s a bit mad. Manic is not wrong, but too big.”? In his production notebook, Beckett reminded himself: “Relate frequency of broken speech and action to discontinuity of time. Winnie’s time experience incomprehensible transport from one inextricable present to the next, those past unremembered, those to come inconceivable.”*° In Bennett’s terms, Ibsen’s temporal perspectivism is replaced by “temporal expressionism”: time is at once distorted, discontinuous, and repetitive, and it seems to move at bewil-

deringly different velocities.’ The earth in Happy Days is both getting hotter and not getting hotter; day and night no longer exist, 184

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but a piercing bell signals the time for waking and the time for sleeping; Winnie’s sight is failing, yet the same as it ever was. At any given moment in the play, time can seem entropic, frozen, or repetitive. Throughout the play, however, memory consistently fails to anchor Winnie in meaningful time: “Then... now... what difficulties here, for the mind” (161). Like Winnie herself, Winnie’s props are jolted out of the frame of realism, together with realism’s reliance on spatial and temporal perspective. In contrast to Ibsen’s fateful objects, which demand to be “plotted” by the spectator, Beckett’s props are fragments of reality unmoored from history, memory, and function.?® Neither metonyms grounding the characters in a recognizable socioeconomic milieu, nor metaphors standing for ideas beyond themselves, they are just there. We are not told where they came from or how they got there,

although tantalizing hints are occasionally dropped (we learn, for instance, that Winnie’s bag was a gift from Willie). In Russian formalist terms, Beckett's props are defamiliarized: the signifier is estranged from its signified so that a pistol (or example) becomes a sensual object whose phenomenal properties are uplifted to the view of the audience. When Hedda toys with her pistols, she wields a compensatory phallic symbol; when Winnie kisses Brownie, she kisses a prop—one that cannot even take its own phallicism seriously. If Hedda’s self-appointed task is to mobilize her pistols so as to

freeze life into art, Winnie’s aims are more modest. She uses her props as distractions from her horrific situation, and as compensation for the loss of Willie, who has elected to live behind the mound. Yet in both Hedda Gabler and Happy Days, the prop resists obeying

the will of the subject. Winnie’s props adamantly refuse to play along, and their “defused vitality” mocks Winnie’s attempts to bring them to life.°? “Ah yes, things have their life, that is what I always say, things have a life,” Winnie reassures herself (162). But that very life consists in the object’s indifference to the human. Winnie marshals her props as ballast against psychic disintegration, but every attempt to do so only underscores their failure to console: “Take my looking glass. (Pause.) It doesn’t need me” (162). Winnie can mobilize her props, but she cannot animate them. 185

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Confusingly, Winnie’s props seem to inhabit several temporalities at once. In the first place, things are running out (toothpaste, lipstick,

music box). In the second place, things are going on (as Winnie removes each item from her bag, she arranges it on the mound beside her where it remains visible until Winnie replaces it at the end of act

1). Most mysteriously of all, things are coming back. Winnie announces that the mirror that she shatters on the mound will be in her bag tomorrow, and her parasol (which combusts in act 1 and is extinguished by the earth) reappears, phoenixlike and unreachable, beside her on the mound in act 2. The parasol’s reappearance marks it explicitly as a stage prop (things wear out; props return each night of the run).*°

Perhaps the most horrific implication of this fact is that Winnie herself is caught in a loop of eternal repetition rather than organic decline.*! It is hard to say whether Winnie herself is running down, going on, or coming back: “Ah well, no worse .. . No better, no worse, no change,” is her motto in act 1, although by act 2 the strain is beginning to tell: “Then...now... what difficulties here, for the mind. (Pause.) To have been always what I am—and so changed from what I was” (161). In one sense at least, Winnie resembles her props: the audience knows that “Winnie” will be back, same time same place, tomorrow.

Within this prop-driven drama, which elevates stage business to the status of dramatic action, Brownie occupies a privileged position. The revolver is the only prop that Winnie attempts to engage in dialogue, and it is her only named object. Once Winnie completes her

ritual of praying, brushing her teeth, and rousing Willie with her parasol, she “|t]urns to bag, rummages in it, brings out revolver, holds it up, kisses it rapidly, puts it back” (141). The pistol’s presence in Winnie’s bag is an amusing visual joke, as is Winnie’s gesture

of affection. The kiss ironizes the gun: Brownie is uplifted to our view as a prop and replaced in the bag before it can be “distorted into intelligibility” as a symbol.** Yet it is hard not to detect an echo of Hedda’s erotically fetishized pistols, especially since Brownie offers a potential “Hedda solution” to Winnie’s plight of being stuck in mor-

tal time. The incongruous gun is both fetishized and ironized (“no 186

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symbols where none intended,” as Beckett joked in his addendum to Watt).*°

Later in the act, ignoring her own advice not to “overdo” the bag, Winnie allows herself “just one quick dip” with her eyes closed and is surprised by Brownie’s reappearance: “You again!” (151). As Win-

nie weighs the revolver in her palm, she muses, “You'd think the weight of this thing would bring it down among the . . . last rounds. But no. It doesn’t. Ever uppermost, like Browning. (Pause.) Brownie

_..” (151).** Brownie becomes an excuse for Winnie to address Willie, whose response she craves throughout the play. The revolver apparently once tempted him to suicide: Remember Brownie, Willie? (Pause.) Remember how you used to keep on at me to take it away from you? Take it away, Winnie, take it away, before I put myself out of my misery. (Back front. Derisive.) Your misery! (To revolver.) Oh I suppose it’s a comfort to know youwrre there, but ’m tired of you. (Pause.) Vl leave you out, that’s what I'll do. (She lays revolver on ground to her right.) There, that’s your home from this day out. (151)

James Knowlson comments, “The dramatic effectiveness of the moment at which Winnie takes the revolver out of her bag depends hardly at all on recognizing the word-play on Browning as both a gun and a poet (and the quotation from Browning’s poetry) but hinges rather on the incongruous presence of the gun among the other feminine articles and on the contrast between nostalgia and the actual

threat of suicide.”*? For Winnie, Brownie is at once a prop with which to tease Willie, a potential Willie substitute should Willie fail

in his role of interlocutor, and a talismanic guarantee that release from the “misery” of being is indeed possible.

As in Chekhov, a technical problem faced by the playwright is translated into an existential problem faced by the character, to which the pistol (suicide) seems to provide a neat solution. The pistol is introduced as a potential escape hatch that will resolve both the

existential dilemma of the character (“How can I bear unhappi187

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ness?”) and the dramaturgical dilemma of the playwright (“How can I end this play?”). But while Chekhov’s early characters Ivanov and

Treplev obey this logic, for Chekhov’s later protagonists, such as Uncle Vanya, the pistol is revealed as an inadequate solution to the problem of being in time. Thus in Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, the gun introduced early in the action fails to kill anyone, and the characters are left where they began, stranded in mortal time. Chekhov dramatizes his repudiation of the melodramatic ending by having Vanya return Astrov’s morphia bottle. In just the same way, Beckett dangles the possibility of suicide betore his characters—the poison pill in Eleuthéria, the tree in Waiting for Godot, Brownie in Happy Days—only to reject suicide as either an existential or a dra-

maturgical solution to the problem of durational existence in time. Brownie embodies a conventional ending that the drama can no longer endorse. Thus Winnie can never pull Brownie’s trigger, for should Brownie

fail her (as her other props continually do), Winnie’s life sentence would be confirmed and Brownie exposed as comfortless metal. In the meantime, Brownie poses another threat to Winnie’s status quo. She can use the revolver as a lure to draw Willie, but she must keep it away from him or risk an even worse fate: talking on alone into the void forever. In an evident break from her routine, Winnie elects to keep Brownie beside her on the mound where she can keep an eye on

it while she turns to her other props for diversion. This change of heart is reemphasized at the end of the act, when Winnie arrests her gesture of replacing the revolver in the bag. By keeping the revolver squarely in view for the rest of the play, Beckett cunningly feeds our expectation that the revolver will indeed fire—even as he suggests that, like the arrival of Godot, this will never happen. Brownie’s affective impact on the spectator alters in act 2. Instead of the periodic appearances that punctuate Winnie’s act 1 prop-play, the revolver continuously occupies the spectator’s visual field. Winnie is now buried up to her neck in earth and can no longer manipulate her objects. The items left visible on the mound—wWinnie’s head, Brownie, the bag, and the parasol—torm a composite still life iconographic in its starkness. Winnie’s bag tantalizes Winnie with means 188

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by which to make time pass more quickly; her combusted parasol, which has magically regenerated to appear beside her on the mound,

illustrates the impossibility of extinguishment by the earth; and Brownie, “conspicuous to her right on mound,” playfully dangles the (im)possibility of killing time right before our eyes (160). The thread

connecting the object to the subject’s intention, already frayed in Hedda Gabler, is now utterly severed—along with the object’s temporal and spatial depth. Lived, subjective time does not seep into the pistol but bounces off it. Instead of kairos, “a point in time filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end,” Brownie’s mute presence on the mound partakes of chronos,

“purely successive, disorganized time of the sort that we need to humanize.”*© The stage pistol, which conventionally turns chronos into kairos (as in “night, Mother), is here displayed as a fossil left over from the play of predictability. Deprived of the use and comfort of her props, Winnie tries to compensate for her temporal confusion and fear of loneliness by weaving

narratives around her unreachable objects. But Winnie becomes increasingly disoriented and her speech more fragmented and discontinuous. Now lacking any evidence that Willie is listening, she reassures him that Brownie is still there beside her, as if to coax him

to her side of the mound. Winnie’s repeated cry that “Brownie is there, Willie,” consequently acts as one of the slowest entrance cues in drama (162). After several minutes of agonizing monologue, in

which a story built around an imaginary prop (Mildred’s waxen Dolly) climaxes in Winnie/Millie’s terrified scream, Willie appears around the corner of the mound, suggestively “dressed to kill” (166), and begins to crawl up toward Winnie—and Brownie. Winnie seeks reassurance from Willie—“Is it me you're after, Willie . . . or is it something else?”—but she is alarmed by his expression: “Don’t look at me like that!” (167). Willie never responds directly; his one sound is the ambiguous syllable “Win” after he has slid down the mound in defeat.

Winnie interprets Willie’s sound as an affectionate diminutive of her name, and she sings the Waltz Duet from The Merry Widow, blithely changing the last line from “I love you so” to “You love me 189

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