Shakespeare’s Things Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance

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 PART I History 2 Reviving Vitalism in King Lear AARON GREENBERG 3 Understanding Shakespeare’s Shoes NATASHA KORDA 4 Mirrors and Macbeth’s Queer Materialism JOHN S. GARRISON 5 The Mirror and Age in Shakespeare’s Sonnets HANH BUI 6 Shakespeare’s Babies: “Things to Come at Large” MEGAN SNELL PART II Theory 7 Eliot and His Problems: Hamlet’s Correlative Objects ANDREW SOFER 8 Shakespeare’s Virtuous Properties JULIA REINHARD LUPTON 9 The Power to Die: Liveliness, Minor Agency, and Shakespeare’s Female Characters KELSEY BLAIR 10 Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies: Rethinking the Environment in Macbeth and King Lear GILES WHITELEY PART III Performance 11 Human Remains: Acting, Objects, and Belief in Performance AOIFE MONKS 12 Shakespeare’s Puppets KENNETH GROSS 13 Art, Objecthood, and the Extended Audience: Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works LAWRENCE SWITZKY 14 “Newes from the Dead”: An Unnatural Moment in the History of Natural Philosophy JANE TAYLOR 15 Tail-Piece: Shake That Thing MARJORIE GARBER

Dr. Brett Gamboa is an Assistant Professor of English, Dartmouth College Dr. Lawrence Switzky is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto