Shakespeare's Things

Reviews / Votes

"This dynamic collection of essays explores the theatrical objects, vibrant matter, and more-than-human things that populate Shakespeare's stage, demonstrating that the new in new materialism isn't that new after all. Whether analyzing human remains, Elizabethan shoes, atmospheric conditions, or the peculiar powers of baby-props, the authors assembled here by editors Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky offer fresh, engaging readings of Shakespeare's plays on the page and in production. Shakespeare's Things is a must-read collection for anyone interested in the intersection of new materialist thought, theatre history, and Shakespeare studies."

--Marlis Schweitzer, co-editor (with Joanne Zerdy), Performing Objects and Theatrical Things

"In Shakespeare's Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance, Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky offer an imaginative collection of fifteen essays catching the wave of the "non-human turn" in the humanities to search out new territory for the agency of things in Shakespeare's plays and their performances. Things that do things are essential to the work of theatre, a thingy agency bespeaking the stage as practicing a kind of new materialism avant la lettre. Tracing the animating power of mirrors and shoes, skulls and puppets, rag-bundle "babies" and an actively ecological (not merely symbolic) setting, the essays gathered here resituate the porous-play/stage; stage/world-identities of dramatic theatre, notably by vigorously negotiating the consequential slippage between things and us. Shakespeare's Things, attending to the historical, theoretical, and theatrical work of things, fashions a network of interpretive, ethical, and philosophical questions that remake a staid confidence in the Shakespearean "human" at the interface with its defining, non-human others."

--W. B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, Barnard College, Columbia University