Shakespeare's Objects: Early Modern Material Culture (Arden Shakespeare Insights)

The world in which Shakespeare lived and wrote was a material one before it was a textual one - made up of people’s interactions with a wide variety of things.Shakespeare’s plays were first experienced as a rich mixture of objects, language, spaces and actors’ bodies.This accessible and fascinating book delves into the lives of 33 significant things through full-colour images and an easy-to-read analysis of their significance.Objects include beds and perfumes, doublets and torches, lutes, spurs, clocks and handkerchiefs, all explored in relation to social status, gender, race, economics and manufacture.Individually and together, they reveal the rich cultural and physical geography within which the playwright, his characters and audiences lived their lives.Shakespeare’s Objects asks who owned these things and how were they used?It considers the diverse reality of trade, exchange and conquest which meant some individuals in early modern England could encounter carpets from Turkey and Chi