Shakespeare's Things

Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance

Brett Gamboa, Lawrence Switzky, Brett Gamboa, Lawrence Switzky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367429072
• eBook ISBN: 9781000750928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

Floating daggers, enchanted handkerchiefs, supernatural storms, and moving statues have tantalized Shakespeare's readers and audiences for centuries. The essays in Shakespeare's Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance renew attention to non-human influence and agency in the plays, exploring how Shakespeare anticipates new materialist thought, thing theory, and object studies while presenting accounts of intention, action, and expression that we have not yet noticed or named. By focusing on the things that populate the plays—from commodities to props, corpses to relics—they find that canonical Shakespeare, inventor of the human, gives way to a lesser-known figure, a chronicler of the ceaseless collaboration among persons, language, the stage, the object world, audiences, the weather, the earth, and the heavens.

1 Introduction

Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky

In the final scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the lovers’ farfetched stories about what transpired overnight in the woods cause Theseus to reflect on what poets do:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.¹

(5.1.12–17)

Theseus suggests that the poet’s art is essentially one of specifying—naming and arranging the otherwise indistinct products of the imagination. But what happens when things are not given names? Barring the poet’s intervention, observations of what lies between heaven and earth are relegated to a purgatorial realm of indefinition, persisting there as the forms of “things unknown” or so much “airy nothing.” It is tempting to read Theseus’s lines for something of Shakespeare’s own view of his work as a writer, but it is also worth considering how often in his own writing Shakespeare neglects to assign local habitations and names to unknown phenomena or else blurs the boundaries of known phenomena by redefining them as “things.” Examples of the former include references to the spectral threat in Denmark (“Hath this thing appeared again tonight?”) and Emilia’s teasing offer to Iago, “I have a thing for you” (3.3.299), while the latter is seen in Leontes’s demeaning address to Hermione, “O thou thing!” (2.1.84), or when Hamlet declares, “The play’s the thing” (2.2.523).²

What goes undefined remains a “thing”—a catchall, inherently paradoxical term that both limits and delimits, categorizes while simultaneously nullifying the value of the category. The term was versatile for Shakespeare, as for us, describing material objects, abstract ideas, humans, non-humans, the state of the world, and more, and the tensions existing among the range of potential referents contribute to its poetic value. The word’s instability and potential range of meanings clearly interested Shakespeare, as evinced by wordplay wherein the antonymic tension between “thing” and “nothing” is sustained and enhanced by semantic phrases that work to harmonize or equate the terms. Theseus’s lines, for instance, conflate “things unknown” and “airy nothing,” while Lear’s response to Cordelia’s refusal to flatter him—“nothing will come of nothing”—gains energy by suggesting a possible arrival (“will come”) of a non-entity that, because it is a non-entity, cannot come. Similar tension is held in the title of Much Ado about Nothing and is perhaps nowhere more evident than in this example from Hamlet:

HAMLET: The king is a thing—

GUILDENSTERN: A thing, my lord?

HAMLET: Of nothing.³

(3.5.27–29)

A “thing…of nothing” could describe everyone onstage in this play that obsesses about performance, even if audiences continue “minding true things by what their mockeries be” (Henry V, 4.0.53). But it also makes a mystery of Claudius, whose legitimacy as a ruler and even as a human being is threatened by lines that seem to classify him as an inanimate object (“the king is a thing”) and then undercut that classification by suggesting that the resulting material object—and/or subject—was cut from a void (“…of nothing”). In Hamlet, the new king’s legitimacy is already much in question, because Claudius killed the king and because the claim is clouded by Hamlet’s birthright, the reappearance of the former king (Old Hamlet’s ghost), and by players personating kings past and present before an audience that includes Hamlet and Claudius. The language of inanimacy complements the legitimacy problem for a king who is never named in the play, suggesting that he may exist in a realm at or beyond the margins of the human world, like the ghost with whom the play frequently takes pains to compare him.⁴

In the case of the ghost, when Horatio asks Barnardo whether “this thing appeared again tonight?” (1.1.20), the scene becomes haunted with news of an imminent threat of unknown origin.⁵ Here, “thing” suggests a non-human entity, but one notable for seeming to possess agency, or at least the capacity to influence the human characters, much as the “air-drawn dagger” that “marshalls” Macbeth on to murder. The potential agency of non-human (or not entirely human) entities appears to have fascinated Shakespeare throughout his career, as is clear from abundant critical attention paid to objects like Macbeth’s dagger, Yorick’s skull, Portia’s caskets, or Desdemona’s handkerchief, all of which seem not only crucial to the plots in which they appear but also somehow to transcend their own inanimacy.

If the foregoing quotations were isolated, we might dismiss them as wordplay, but Shakespeare routinely deploys the term ‘thing’ to blur lines between subject and object (the word and its variants occur nearly 30 times per play), often in moments when readers and audiences would seem most in need of clarity and definition. It may not be coincidental, then, when Macbeth declares while confronted by Banquo’s ghost, “there’s no such thing” (2.1.47), or when, after taking up the handkerchief, Emilia announces to Iago, “I have a thing for you” (3.3.299). The ghosts of King Hamlet and Banquo are only two of many examples wherein “thing” is associated with a living entity that transcends the human world, the term being also preferred for non-human creatures such as Caliban, Ariel, ass-eared Bottom, witches, divinities, and others. Shakespeare often uses things and their inherent vagueness to ascribe cosmic significance and some degree of agency to material and immaterial objects, and even to landscapes or the atmosphere.

As is well known, the storm in King Lear can seem to reflect the interior of the king caught out in it. Lear’s commands for the storm to “rage” and “blow” are not empty personifications so much as signs of a natural world elevated to a role roughly coequal with that of the human characters. It is amid the storm that Lear meets Edgar disguised as Poor Tom, a figure likewise marked out as inhuman and yet somehow quintessentially human. The fact that the naked madman is not really mad gradually recedes for readers and playgoers until Tom seems not a performer but the authentic being that underlies any performance, as Lear indicates by declaring him “the thing itself” (F 3.4.98–99). Lear’s epithet suggests that a human paragon of sorts resides beyond the margins of the world inhabited by the more “sophisticated” characters, thus further animating the landscape and instilling it with life and feeling. The refrain “Tom’s a-cold” would be as applicable to the storm with which he seems contiguous, and its insistent repetitions seem inseparable from the thunder that punctuates them.

As with the tragedies so far discussed, Julius Caesar works to lend agency to objects and to make objects of agents. This becomes evident from its very first scene when Marullus insults the commoners—“You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things” (1.1.34)—and later when Caesar’s wounds are bid to speak for Antony, or when the “Ides of March” arrive more like a character in a play than a date in the calendar—“The Ides of March are come” (3.1.1). As in King Lear, the storm and landscape of Julius Caesar register the health and status of Rome itself, an idea that Casca posits when he develops a catalogue of the “portentous things” in Rome and the skies overhead on a night “When all the sway of earth / Shakes like a thing unfirm” (1.3.3–4). The heavens are likewise active in responding to and rectifying injustice in Macbeth, which introduces an Old Man to complain of having seen “Hours dreadful and things strange” (2.4.3), during a night when nature seems to become conscious of tyranny and to seek vengeance by undoing itself to reflect and complement Duncan’s unnatural murder. Like the ghost in Hamlet, those of Caesar and Banquo—even when absent from the stage—are thought mighty and agential by the other characters, capable of predicting but also enforcing retribution for their murders.

Several non-human elements come together in Shakespeare’s articulation of the witches in Macbeth. They forecast meeting in “thunder, lighting, or in rain” and vanish “into the air” after delivering their prophecies (1.1.2; 1.3.82). After the witches’ disappearing act, Banquo turns to Macbeth and asks suggestively, “Were such things here as we do speak upon?” (1.3.84). Predictably, Banquo refers to the weird sisters as “things.” The word appears often when characters need to describe something indefinite and at the margins of human understanding. Again, it is provocative how the term negotiates a relationship between human and non-human objects or entities, thereby helping to assign a kind of consciousness and agency to non-human elements in the plays. In this case, the witches oscillate ontologically between roles as earthly hags and ethereal beings, as seers of fate and its enforcers, as sisters who “should be women” yet cannot be understood as such because of their beards (1.3.46–48). This last example resonates with Lady Macbeth’s desire to be “unsexed,” suggesting that the play is interested in the relationships between human and non-human entities and potential transitions from one pole to the other. As a result, the quartet can alternate as sexless elements in an object world that reflects Macbeth’s own ambitions and fears back to him, and as gendered subjects that share responsibility for bringing about a tragic outcome.

There can be little wonder that the examples we’ve cited so far are drawn from Shakespeare’s tragedies. Tragedy depends for much of its interest on a lack of definition—on making those responsible for a given outcome difficult to identify or blame. Oedipus’s situation is tragic because he does everything imaginable from his perspective to avoid committing the heinous acts expected of him; Othello is a tragic figure because we readily guess that he would not have committed the murder without Iago’s provocation. Or if Emilia had not stolen the handkerchief. Or if Desdemona had not lied when asked to produce it. Or if Cassio was not so easily inebriated. Et cetera. In the case of Macbeth, there can be no doubt that Macbeth is guilty of treason and murder. But considering that he begins the play notably loyal in defeating the Thane of Cawdor, that the witches first raise the idea of him taking the throne, and that this prophecy leads Lady Macbeth to suborn and shame him until the murder is accomplished, it is difficult to consider Macbeth’s guilt without bringing to mind the number of “things” that help force his hand. As parts of an object world, such things may seem merely to reflect his own desire; as subjects, though, they seem to implant the seed of that desire and guide it to fruition. Therefore, in the interplay of human and non-human forces that Shakespeare presents in the play, we cannot but receive these things both ways, simultaneously, aiding—or forcing—us thereby to convict and exculpate the protagonist on the same evidence. As a result, it is natural that many of the authors in this collection attend to tragedy—the language, landscapes, objects, weather, and more that influence the human world or those elements of the human world that diffuse themselves into the natural or spiritual dimensions and then exert influence.

Returning to Hamlet, it may be that some of its most famous passages are so because of this elusiveness and multiplicity of Shakespeare’s things: “The play’s the thing” (2.2.523); “things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely” (1.2.136–37); “I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me” (3.1.121–23); “There are more things between heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (1.5.168–69); and “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (1.4.90). In each of these cases, the “thing” seems to exist just beyond our ken, among a range of things the character is unwilling to disclose or cannot quite understand. The weird sisters know that “something wicked” is coming but not what it is (4.1.45); King Lear knows that he wants to do “such things” in revenging himself on Goneril and Regan, even though “What they are, [he] know[s] not” (2.2.449–50). The authors throughout this collection explore in various ways Shakespeare’s fascination with such interplay between subject and object worlds, finding the membrane between them easily and often permeated, and to significant thematic and theatrical ends.

Things Themselves

Like Shakespeare, we continue to be captivated by things. In recent years, this persistent fascination has generated eclectic and sometimes contentious critical approaches. Etymologically, a thing (Ding) can mean a gathering of persons, the matters that concern that gathering, and the inanimate objects that are present for and involved in any human assembly. Throughout his books and essays, founding thing theorist Bill Brown calls our attention, as Shakespeare does, to the surprising acuity and plenitude of the word “thing,” the value of its “specific unspecificity” and “semantic vertigo.”⁶ This vertigo differs significantly from what psychoanalytic critics call the uncanny, where the alien within the familiar is already known but repressed and often spellbindingly displaced. Things are fugitive with respect to knowledge. The simultaneous precision and deflection of the “thing” indicates an evasive if commonplace feature of experience: a desire to name something (or some thing), an object, an atmosphere, or a sensation, that refuses to settle within anthropocentric parameters. In The Universe of Things, speculative realist Steven Shaviro identifies “retreat and eruption” as antiphonal features of things. For Shaviro, things evade both conceptualization and description: “If I cannot control and instrumentalize a thing, this is both because it draws me into extended referential networks whose full ramifications I cannot trace and because its singularity, bursting forth, stuns me in excess of anything I can posit about it.”⁷ As vibrant materialist Jane Bennett would also remind us, though, things don’t only demonstrate “negative power or recalcitrance” as they slip through our grasp. They also exhibit “thing-power,” the ability to affect our bodies and other things at a pace and scale we seldom apprehend.⁸ In these overlapping and sometimes contradictory evocations, the “thing” is a verbal bearer of the non-human; and in that sense, to discuss Shakespeare’s things is also to consider how “animals, plants, organisms, climatic systems, technologies, or ecosystems,” in Richard Grusin’s handy formulation of the non-human constituency, refuse human exceptionalism in their ability to influence, construct, transform, and establish value in our shared world.⁹ Many things under examination in the following chapters are specific stage objects, but some are more diffuse, distributed, and atmospheric.

As even a brief catalog discloses, thinking about things has increasingly become the province of recent philosophical and sociological approaches which can be roughly grouped under the heading of New Materialism. Largely in reaction to scholarship since the 1970s that has focused on subjective experience and the linguistic and cultural b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction
• PART I History
• PART II Theory
• PART III Performance
• Notes on Contributors
• Index