Due Monday, November 22nd (by the end of the day)

In our discussion of The Rape of Lucrece, we spent some time considering a wooden chest that depicts the story of Lucretia from Italy. That discussion is an example of a kind of criticism that you will be exploring for your third essay assignment—a materialist reading of one of the plays (or poem) we have read so far this term. In your analysis you may choose to develop a thesis that aligns with the ideas of our course (crisis, presentism, Shakespeare in contemporary interpretation) or take a different direction.

For this assignment you will first choose an object from one of the plays we have read. That object could be (for instance, but not limited to): a prop (either mentioned or suggested in the play), an item of clothing, a location, or some other physical thing that comes up in the dialogue or stage directions of the play you select (see below for further thoughts on selecting your object). Or, like the wedding chest, it might be a material artifact that has some direct relevance to one of our plays. You will then perform research on the object using: historical materials available online; the OED; scholarly essays found in the MLA International Bibliography or Jstor; or in online book repositories (Google Books, Internet Archive, HathiTrust, etc.). The goal of your research should be twofold: to elucidate the history of the object as related to Shakespeare’s time, and to provide some interpretive insight about the play as a whole through your reading of the object and its relevance to the play.

I have provided a bibliography of three essays below that provide models of how this kind of work can be done (the essays themselves can be found in our class’s shared readings folder). You will note that in each of these examples the author(s) seek to connect their object and the play within a broader context of some kind: religion, a history of reading and writing, gender relations and dynamics, etc. Make sure that your object and the reading you carry out aspires to ask some larger questions about the play in which it appears: your thesis should propose that the object is a significant interpretive portal for understanding one or more of these broader issues.

General Guidelines:
-4-5 pages, typed and double spaced
-Follow MLA style for all citations and adhere to the guidelines outlined in my style sheet
-Submit via Dropbox (deposit in the individual folder I shared with you for the first assignment)

Bibliography:

Helgerson, Richard. “The Buck Basket, The Witch, and the Queen of Fairies: The Women’s World of Shakespeare’s Windsor.” Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, edited by Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, U of Penn P, 1999, pp. 162-182.

Schwyzer, Philip. Trophies, Traces, Relics, and Props: The Untimely Objects of Richard III. Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 3, 2012, pp. 297-327.

Stallybrass, Peter, Roger Chartier, J. Franlin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe. “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 4, 2004, pp. 379-419.