Course Blog # 11 Death, Wings, and Gogol's Gun

I was really excited by Bernstein's notion of scriptive objects and thrilled to deploy her methodologies, but each time upon contemplating the "dances with things" that happen on theatrical stages, I couldn't help but think that the notion of a scriptive thing and a thing dictated by a theatrical playscript collide in this discussion in such a way that Bernstein's readings becomes problematic.

In contemplating the dance choreographed by Yorick's skull, Klestakov's gun, or Mary Zimmerman's set of Angel wings (still pondering that fish), one must acknowledge, as Andrea mentioned, the double nature of the theatrical prop. Much like Diderot's paradox of the actor, in reading stage props as things, there is an inherent conception that they are betwixt and between the realm of real and artificial. Things certainly, but perhaps only in their determinacy.

As Sofer notes, stage props are always already scriptive because they have been "written on" by the playwright in his attempt to exert his authority and initiate the aforementioned dance. I giggle as I think of Shakespeare as the officer of interpellation shouting, "Hey you," (or "thou," as the case may be) "stand here, hold this, say that..."

Nevertheless, within the world of the play, it may be yet helpful to distinguish between things and objects. I think here, perhaps of the difference between Hamlet's sword and  Yorick's skull. The sword is a means to an end for Hamlet the character, in spite of it's thingliness for the actor, and the skull a thing that invites interaction in and out of the world of the play, a thing by any of Bernstein's standards. I was curious to find in a bit of historical digging that this was not always the case, however. That is was only a scant 100 years prior to Hamlet that the skull took on the iconicity of death and mortality and that it was Shakespeare who was among the first to transfer the trope of "youth holding skull" from the realm of  vanitas to playhouse, writing the memento mori into Hamlet's stage business by virtue of saying "hold this." (See Frye)

Youth with skull by Frans Hals (c. 1626). An example of vanitas, National Gallery, London.

Whitney is quite right on her insistence on the emblematic nature of "Hamlet with skull" as emblem, but I'm fascinated to note that, in fact, the image was emblematic (as in, inscribed in medieval emblem books) even before Hamlet's first performance.

All this being said, I'm still curious, though, about the thingness of stage props outside of their role as objects scripted by the playwright, and it is here that I share Hodgson's lament. One might imagine the first Hamlet (Richard Burbage) examining this skull, if he had one (surely he must have) and interacting with it according to Shakespeare's specifications, but also according to the "scripts" dictated not only by it iconicity, but it's veracity as the remains of a human's head (whether real or artificial). Though we think of it now as "Hamlet's cliché," might not the holding  up of the skull and the contemplation of Yorick nose to nose be part of the script of the thing itself, for what is the "proper" way to regard the human face but to look it in the eye?

David Tennant contemplates André Tchaikovsky's skull in a publicity still for the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2008 production of Hamlet.

I am particularly intererested, for this reason, in the Hamlet that Jenna originally selected, David Tennant in 2008 at the RSC. As Hodgdon and Whitney pointed out, what remains of this performance in the archive is a publicity still, an impoverished moment valued for its iconicity over its capture of the ephemerality of the performance moment. This image is meant to "read" Hamlet as a certain kind of character with psychological depth and nuance as well as an entertainment commodity, but this Yorick is distinct in his own duality, as the skull in this image, though prop, is also "not prop" as it is the actual skull of pianist André Tchaikovsky who donated his remains to science and the RSC in 1982, with the intent to become Yorick.

This was not the first RSC Hamlet to rehearse with Tchaikovsky's skull, but it was the first to use it on stage in performance, and I find this hauntingly significant. For, as Hodgdon laments, in the absence of rehearsal photos from the earlier productions what as most likely archived was the iconic "Hamlet with skull" rather than a real youth, an actor, contemplating the remains of not just a thing, but a real man, and in many cases, I'm sure, one he knew (Tchaikovsky being a close friend of the RSC). So, in effect, is this image more appropriately the dance that Bernstein describes when compared to other images of Hamlet with skull for the simple fact that the "thingness" of real human remains might have the capability of overriding the script for the object provided by either Shakespeare or the director. Although Tennant's pose isn't apparently different from any other, is it somehow less "staged" than those others with the knowledge of that context, or does it make a difference?

And then does this examination of the thingness of stage props inside and outside the world of the play then helpful in looking at Gogol's gun and Zimmerman's wings. Both are certainly things in that they are props, endowed with a scriptive nature by the playwrights themselves, but then does their performance history of the physical object (in the case of Zimmerman's wings) and the performance history of the signified (Osip's story that Klestakov "always" plays this game with the gun) changing their status of thingness inside the world of the play, does it "change the script," so to speak?

**Edited to add sources and complete ideas malformed yesterday.

WORKS CITED

Bernstein, Robin. “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race.” Social Text 27, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 67-94.

Frye, Roland Mushat. "Ladies, Gentlemen, and Skulls: Hamlet and the Iconographic Traditions." Shakespeare Quarterly 30, no. 1 (1979): 15-28.

Hodgdon, Barbara. "Photography, Theater, Mnemonics; or, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Still." In Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History, edited by William B. Worthen with Peter Holland. Redefining British Theatre History, 89-119. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Sofer, Andrew. The Stage Life of Props.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.