What is Material Culture?

Hello.

I'm Catherine Richardson a professor of early modern

studies at the University of Kent.

And I'm going to talk about Shakespeare and Material Culture.

So What is material culture? Well, in the narrowest

definition, it's objects, things you can touch,

things you can up.

But we're gonna talk about it in much broader terms as the

environment within which and through which meaning is made.

It's not only much used to look at that in the abstract for our

purposes here either.

So we're going to think about it as the meeting point of

bodies and their surroundings.

People and things, if you like.

Almost everything we do involves what's called non

human actors. So everything that isn't a human in an

activity or an event, as well as the human ones.

So if you think about sport or music, doing science,

being at school generally.

They all work a whole lot better if you've got a team of

people, so an orchestra, a lab or a whole class.

But they also work better if you've got things like a

football and some goals to play football with,

an instrument to play music with or equipment to do

experiments with. Computers to write on books to read for classes.

And mundane things like the length of the grass on a

football pitch or the foot of the fit of the football boots,

make a huge difference to the overall experience and the

outcome of all the things that we do.

And it's those little things that make a huge difference I

want to talk about in Shakespeare's Theetta.

So theetta's no different.

It needs both the interaction between the actors,

the interaction between the and the audiences

and the props, the costumes,

and the building of the theater itself with its seats,

its stage, etcetera.

In which the lines are spoken and the actors act.

And in this lecture,

I want to get you thinking about the difference that what

you can't see on page makes to our understanding of

Shakespeare's plays.

I'm going to suggest that part of his skill as a playwright

was the way he thought materially.

So the way he thought with and alongside things.

Some of his contemporaries were more interested in props than he was,

so they have a lot more props in stage directions of their

plays, some less so.

But I think what Shakespeare was particularly skilled at was interweaving

imagery,

the language around things that makes his audience think in

pictures with what they see in front of them on the stage.

And what I'm gonna say is got three broad sections.

First,

I'm gonna take you back into the material world of early modern England.

So that you can imagine what things were available and what

you might have owned,

what you might have how you might have dressed,

if you were living then.

And that's important because it helps us to see the work that

Shakespeare is asking his audience to do.

What he might have expected them know about when they went

into the theater and to be able to call upon in their own

everyday lives.

And then what he's asking them to imagine So the things that

they don't have direct experience of.

We're gonna look at the kind of props that were available on

the early modern stage. And beyond that,

the the atmospheres that it's possible to create on the stage

and how that's done through words and things.

Then we're going to start working through the plays,

armed with that knowledge,

seeing how those plays use their material.

And we'll want to look in detail at two different

techniques that Shakespeare uses with things.

Firstly,

relatively small and very ordinary things,

the kind of things with which everybody's familiar.

And then large and very valuable things.

And then to think about how the two relate to one another.

And I'm going to look at tragedies,

primarily the eerie nighttime worlds of McBeth and Othello.

But once we've gone through this,

you'll be able to use those methods to ex explore how

Shakespeare uses props in comedies and a much wider range of plays.

Okay. So first, who had what? What did they do with it? And

why does it matter?

So in early modern England, some people,

those in the middle which is most of society and the top

must have felt that they were absolutely

surrounded by things in this period. And I'm talking today

from from a room that is absolutely packed with books.

There are books on the floor books on the on the shelves,

books all around, books balanced everywhere around me.

And I think that feeling of being in an environment with

lots and lots of things is quite a good analogy to early modern England.

So this is the start of a consumer revolution.

You'll read in other places that that started in the

eighteenth century, but it really didn't.

It started here in the sixteenth century.

People were owning objects in greater numbers,

and they were owning them in different shapes and sizes.

So they might have not just one big table, but a big table and

a couple of small ones. Not just one tablecloth,

but different ones for different occasions,

different type of visitors.

So they're able to mark out their everyday life in different ways.

That's always been the case for the rich.

Who've had lots of stuff the whole way through history.

But it's now the case much further down the social scale

too. And in towns, relatively ordinary people are having that

same experience of being surrounded by stuff.

And in that way it has similarities with our own period.

Most of the things that people owned in this period would be

relatively recognizable to us,

the the everyday building blocks of life. Though some are very different.

So If you think about your clothing and how you do it up,

there are no zips.

On the screen now,

you can see some dress hooks So this is how you fasten your

clothing in early modern England with pins and with

dress hooks. And what you can see here is that These are

really, really different to one another,

even though they do the same jobs.

These have been dug up by metal detectorists from across

country, and they show the variety of everyday items.

You might not want to own just one pair of those dress hooks

because they're really beautiful. You might want to

have three, four, five different ones to use on

different days. So that's the kind of small example of where

you can see diversity creeping in to what people owned.

There's lots of choice about design,

And in our period two,

things are also made more and more cheaply in a variety of

colors, forms and patterns.

So so far, so relatively similar.

Even where the things are different and unfamiliar to us,

they work in a similar way,

and you might think about buying them in a similar way.

But this is also a very, very different period in its

material imaginings.

For instance,

things are all about being showy and demonstrating you well

But they can also be powerful, magical, and surprising.

And they're felt to intervene very strongly in people's lives.

On this next slide then, there are some Belamine jugs,

stoneware jugs imported items imported in large numbers

and used for for drinks. They keep them cool. But also,

they are found buried in the ground.

And when archaeologists have looked inside them,

they at the Museum of London describe one of the

the fillings of these bottles buried in the ground.

A bizarre assortment of objects including iron nails,

lead shot, bundles of hair, and a heart shaped piece

of felt pierced with pins.

So these are witch bottle

They're magical talismans used by past Londoners to ward off

spells or cure disease.

That's what the Museum of London, how they describe them.

And when they're buried,

they're also filled with a final vital ingredient.

And that is urine of the person who wanted protection.

So I think that gives us a really clear sense of how

differently this period also approached material objects.

That's not something you often find nowadays.

Objects are ways of negotiating people's way around the

supernatural as well as the natural world.

They help people to ward off evil and to bring on goodness.

So if we think about those different ways of thinking about the past,

that gives us a way into the power that objects have on the stage.

And this is a semi literate culture.

Around sixteen hundred,

so in the rough middle of the period that Shakespeare was writing.

Literally is something around thirty percent for men and

around ten percent. For women.

So most of the population, the the great majority

did not read and write.

And that's not because they were stupid,

and couldn't manage it,

it's simply because they didn't need to.

So I'm not very good at laying bricks.

I've never learned to lay bricks because it's not very

useful in my everyday job as a professor of early modern studies.

That's the same analogy here, really.

Those people who needed to read and write in their everyday

learned to do so.

But that of course tells us something really important

about how people interacted with stories.

They didn't usually do it through text.

They did it through images, and they did it through their ears.

They had fantastic memories,

and they read visual information really carefully,

much more carefully than we do.

That gives material things a different status in early modern England.

They're the way in which most people communicate most of the

time. Images and objects speak at least as loudly as words.

This is a copy of a wall painting from a pub in

Stratford on Avon in called the White Swan.

And it shows the story of Tobias and the angel from the

bible. And it's got a little bit of text along the top, but primarily,

it's a series of images that demonstrate that story and

that's really important.

Because that's how most people will have understood stories.

And if we think about emotions, the nature of life and death,

the quality of human relationships,

all the big things in life, that's how they are understood

through these visual and material sources

Here's one more example, a death's head ring.

So you wear this ring,

which is often bequeathed to you by a friend,

or a family member to remind you that you are going to die.

And that's not a morbid thing.

It's a brilliant thing because it reminds you that every day

must be lived to the full, to be a good Christian,

to do your your the right thing morally.

And you must never forget that.

And you do that by wearing a reminder, a Memento Mori, a

reminder of death. I've just come back from Japan.

Where I went to think about pre modern material culture and

performance culture in Japan and the UK. And I don't speak

Japanese and I don't read these characters.

And that was one of the first times in my life that I was

forced not to

negotiate social situations and did geography

through words, just had to find my way by other means.

And that's quite a useful way of thinking about how we go

back into the early modern period.

It's a completely foreign environment

for text for most people.

So two takeaways then. From what I've just said.

Material culture had a large and explicit role to play in

how people live their lives in relation to one another.

And plays are made up of bodies,

gestures, props,

which are likely to have had at least as great an impact on

their original audiences.

As the words that Shakespeare wrote.

We need to reconstruct some of those impacts if we're going to

really get to grips with those plays.

It's an alternative way of negotiating the plays,

like my experience of Japan.

So a few examples of material culture at work.

This is fifteen seventy four proclamation against excessive

wearing of clothes, the excess of apparel.

And it has a little man tra,

that it that begins each section of it.

None shall wear.

Here are some of the things that none shall wear.

Any silk of the color purple, cloth of gold, tissue, nor

fur of sables, but only the king, the queen, the king's

mother, and another series of people. And then,

none shall wear a cloth of gold, silver, tinseled satins,

silk, or cloth mixed or embroidered with gold or

silver, except all the degrees above vicounts.

Vicounts, barons, and other persons of like degree.

So it goes through the whole of the social hierarchy, saying,

what cloth you can wear, in what part of your clothing,

and how much of that cloth you can use.

This is a really crucial part early modern society that again

is a bit alien to us.

Dress has to distinguish between different ranks

and different genders. And it needs to be kept still and made

to do that coherently

so that it so that the the social order can continue to be

clearly differentiated.

You should be able to tell

whether someone is a man or a woman,

and whether they are of a particular rank in that

society, just by looking at them. Now obviously,

the fact that there's so much legislation about this suggests

that it didn't always happen.

It's continually under threat and that insecurity

helps to helps to fuel moral outrage in this society.

I think we can see something similar happening

with the way in which gender is is changing at the moment in

the way it's represented.

In this period,

people are concerned about other people pretending to be

more wealthy than they really are.

But also about some of those questions of gender.

And if you think about the very clear distinctions between men

and women in this period in their dress,

and then you think about something like drag nowadays.

You think about RuPaul and how that look would be

There are some people in every society that find those changes

very threatening. And in this society,

puritans and other strong protestants were very concerned

about what the theater, in particular, was doing to muddy

these boundaries.

Because what the theater does in a period before female

actors, is to dress men as women.

And to dress,

working people as kings and nobility.

And that's very exciting.

You see them embodied in front of there,

speaking to you as an audience,

but it's also very,

very worrying for what it says about the ability to change

shape and to ruin those clear hierarchies.

So this is a deeply polarized society

where Rich and poor, men and women,

immigrants and settled populations have very different experiences.

And we need to think about that because we need to understand

how audiences saw these plays. It won't do just to talk about audiences.

As though they were all the same kind of person because as

you know, all groups of people have significant difference

not everyone has experience of every type of thing in a society.

And what its entertainment

chooses to stage chooses to show so that we can think about

it as a society is really telling.

Are those things familiar to most are they unfamiliar?

And then,

what response are we expected to make depending on the

familiarity that we have with

You might be very familiar with very elite objects, but as a

servant who uses them on behalf of their master.

So we need to do some thinking then about how people interact with things.

And if you want to go away and do this work for the plays that

you're working on.

You can use a concordance to the works of Shakespeare to

find out you you or you can go through it yourself,

but this is a shortcut how often objects are explicitly

called for on the stage,

and how often they're referred to in the dialogue.

And you can do that quite quickly through a search.

And that shows us different categories of staged object.

There are essential goods, which familiar to all. So some

types of everyday thing,

pins like the ones I showed you earlier,

and some types of furniture.

There are specialized objects which relate skills, trades,

and professions such as the Buck basket, for instance,

for washing in the merry wives of Windsor.

And there are also specialized theatrics items.

And then there are expensive items like tapestries or

banqueting goods,

which are largely the preserve of the rich and which most

people may have seen in passing, but not experienced directly.

Now you'll hear a lot that was an empty stage. The stage of

the globe, theetta, was bare. And to a certain extent,

relatively speaking, that's true.

It doesn't have complex scenery.

But it's not as bare as perhaps we've often thought.

So the theatrical entrepreneur, Philip Henslow,

left an account book or or a diary. And he left as part

of his his papers, an inventory

of props.

And this is just a quick look at some of those things.

There was also There are also further inventories of costumes

which are really fascinating.

But I think what you can see is that most of these objects are play specific.

We've got the general categories of rock cages,

tombs, and a hellmouth, which you don't need in every play.

And then things for particular place, so the tomb of dido, for

instance. That's only gonna be used in one play.

But then things like a bedstead, which I'll come on

to. A wooden canopy.

And then some things that you need in the theater like a

wooden and a leather hatch it so that you can pretend to

murder people and be very careful about it.

So it's a really fascinating

group of objects.

But they're very specialized things. They're props,

proper rather than what you might borrow from an everyday situation.

And what we know from looking at the stage directions of the

plays in this period is that a lot of things were general everyday,

all purpose objects that were obviously borrowed

from somebody's house or from an inn.

Familiar domestic items.

And what we want to think about then is that sess of making a

generic thing, a bedstead, specific

to a particular play and a particular family within that play.

And that's something that this kind of drama is doing for the

first time, particular things for specific people.

So I want to look at a couple of props in detail to give you

a model for some of the questions you might want to ask

about the material circumstances of performance.

Then you'll be able to make a list of props and costumes that

are needed in the plays you're studying,

and think about what that tells you about characterization

and about audience interaction.

You need to think about the kind of theater that the play

was put on in. Was it an indoor theater?

Like the Black Fryars,

or was it an outdoor theater like the globe?

Did it have natural light like the globe, or did it use candle

light, like the blackfriars?

These are really important differences,

where were the audio sitting in relation to the stage,

what kind of detail could they see?

Because that will help you to think about,

why Shakespeare writes as he does with those things.

So knowing these things about the period in which play was written,

you can of course expand your analysis to take in modern productions.

On stage and screen,

seeing how they use their space their objects and their interactions

differently to speak to the concerns of a modern audience.

And you might want to do a comparison between the two.