Lunchtime Lectures: Shakespeare's Objects: Understanding the Off-Stage Lives of Early Modern Stage Props

This talk introduces Shakespeare's Objects, a book recently published as one of a series of 'Insights' - guides to sit alongside the latest Arden editions of Shakespeare's plays. It explores the writing of the book - how do you chose amongst all the possible objects, and what might it be possible to say about them? - including the vital role the V&A collections played in this process. It will consider how such an approach to objects might be used to understand both Elizabethan and Jacobean material culture and daily life, and Shakespeare's plays, more deeply. Along the way, brief snapshots will be given of a few of the expected and unexpected objects that appear in the chapters.

Catherine Richardson is Professor of Early Modern Studies and Pro-Vice-Chancellor Arts and Humanities at University of East Anglia. Her research explores early modern material culture on and off stage and the history of the creative industries. She is particularly interested in the cultural life of early modern towns, especially as understood through the objects, people and ideas circulating within them and the entertainment on offer there. She ran the AHRC-funded Cultural Lives of the Middling Sort project from 2019-24, (www.middlingculture.com ). Recent publications include A Day at Home in Early Modern England, 1500-1700 (with Hamling, Yale), Ephemera (ed with Davies and Lilley, Routledge), an edition of Arden of Faversham (Bloomsbury) and Shakespeare’s Objects, about which she will be talking.

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