Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface: an outline of approaches taken
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and editions
- Introduction: Brick, lime, sand, plaster over lath and ‘new oaken boards’: the early modern playhouse
- Case study A Richard III at the Globe
- Case study B An outdoor theatre repertoire: the Rose on Bankside
- Chapter 1 Tragedy
- Case study C Opening scenes
- Case study D Staging violence and the space of the stage
- Chapter 2 Revenge drama
- Case study E ‘Here, in the Friars’: the second Blackfriars indoor playhouse
- Case study F The social life of things: skulls on the stage
- Chapter 3 Histories
- Case study G Title pages and plays in print
- Chapter 4 Comedy, pastoral and romantic
- Case study H The boy actor: body, costume and disguise
- Chapter 5 City comedies
- Case study I The dramaturgy of scenes
- Case study J Collaborative writing or the literary workshop
- Chapter 6 Satire
- Case study K Topical theatre and 1605–6: ‘Remember, remember the fifth of November’
- Case study L ‘Little eyases’: the children's companies and repertoire
- Chapter 7 Tragicomedy
- Case study M The visual rhetoric of dumb show
- Conclusion: The wind and the rain: the wider landscape of early modern performance
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Introductions to . . .
Case study F - The social life of things: skulls on the stage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface: an outline of approaches taken
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and editions
- Introduction: Brick, lime, sand, plaster over lath and ‘new oaken boards’: the early modern playhouse
- Case study A Richard III at the Globe
- Case study B An outdoor theatre repertoire: the Rose on Bankside
- Chapter 1 Tragedy
- Case study C Opening scenes
- Case study D Staging violence and the space of the stage
- Chapter 2 Revenge drama
- Case study E ‘Here, in the Friars’: the second Blackfriars indoor playhouse
- Case study F The social life of things: skulls on the stage
- Chapter 3 Histories
- Case study G Title pages and plays in print
- Chapter 4 Comedy, pastoral and romantic
- Case study H The boy actor: body, costume and disguise
- Chapter 5 City comedies
- Case study I The dramaturgy of scenes
- Case study J Collaborative writing or the literary workshop
- Chapter 6 Satire
- Case study K Topical theatre and 1605–6: ‘Remember, remember the fifth of November’
- Case study L ‘Little eyases’: the children's companies and repertoire
- Chapter 7 Tragicomedy
- Case study M The visual rhetoric of dumb show
- Conclusion: The wind and the rain: the wider landscape of early modern performance
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Introductions to . . .
Summary
A man stands in a graveyard. This is a man whom we have previously become accustomed to associating with ruminations on death and suicide. This is a man who when we first encountered him on the stage was dressed all in black (‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, cold mother, / Nor customary suits of solemn black…’, Hamlet, 1.2.77–8), a figure of melancholy and grief, someone deeply associated in our minds with notions of mortality. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (for the man is he) comes then already laden by the fifth and final act of this play with associations on the part of the audience with ideas of death, but these are undoubtedly heightened, brought to a kind of performative peak, by the fact that at this particular moment he holds a specific stage property: a skull.
The skull has been quite literally thrown up onto and into the stage space by the gravedigger's excavations of a new plot (which we will later realise is for the drowned Ophelia). It is one of several different skulls produced by the gravedigger's labour and all of them provoke the philosophical Danish prince to trenchant observations on the brevity of life and the levelling effects of death:
That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once…Here's fine revolution an we had the trick to see't…Why, may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddits now…?
(5.1.75–6, 88–9, 95–6)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014