Shakespeare’s Things

Floating daggers, enchanted handkerchiefs, supernatural storms, and moving statues have tantalized Shakespeares readers and audiences for centuries. The essays in Shakespeares 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 playsfrom commodities to props, corpses to relicsthey 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.