Huntington Library - Early Modern Props and Costumes: Materials, Techniques, and Makers

Early Modern Props and Costumes examines the materials, makers, and techniques of theatrical props, costumes, and stage effects in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century performance. My book broadens the focus of existing studies of early modern theatre to encompass a range of different performances (plays, masques, pageants) and documents (accounts, inventories, dramatic texts), from canonical drama such as Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to “lost” plays like Friar Rush and the Proud Woman of Antwerp. Close analysis of material culture and its archival traces reveals hitherto unknown details about the individuals and networks which shaped early modern performance, from the colonial spice trade to one woman’s London linen-draping business. This will be the first book-length study of the makers, traders, and artificers who were integral to the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries but are so often overlooked. This monograph argues that collaboration and the sharing of knowledge, personnel, and resources were essential to early modern theatre across different forms of performance and venues. This research is a development of my doctoral thesis, Ephemeral Matters: The Materials and Documents of Early Modern Performance (submitted July 2023), which examined the ephemerality of materials and props such as snow, starch, fruit, mirrors, and paper. I will use this Fellowship to develop a book proposal, for which I am in conversation with Bloomsbury’s Studies in Early Modern Material Culture series, as well as new research using the Huntington’s manuscript and print collections into a chapter on the printer Elizabeth Allde.