This collection of essays explores the economic and dramatic implications of stage properties in early modern English drama. Written by a team of distinguished scholars, the essays explore the forms of production, circulation and exchange that brought sacred garments, household furnishings, pawned objects and even false beards onto the stage.

This book examines the overlap between early modern English attitudes to disease and to society and explores the cultural meaning of the image of the body at the interfaces of medicine, morality and politics in Tudor and early Stuart England. In particular, it demonstrates how the body politic's metaphorical "cankers" and "plagues" were increasingly attributed to allegedly pathological "foreign bodies" such as Jews, Catholics, and witches. One can glimpse the origins of not only modern xenophobic attitudes to foreigners as carriers of disease, but also "germ" theory in general. The...

Sick Economies Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare's England Jonathan Gil Harris "Sick Economies, wholeheartedly committed to the recovery of noncanonical early modern writing, shows what can happen when a keen literary intelligence is applied to nonliterary texts. The result is a truly interdisciplinary and refreshingly readable book."--Times Literary Supplement "In this important book Harris explores the early modern discourse of mercantilism, tracing its merger with the discourse of bodily illness."--Choice "Harris has successfully argued a decidedly unique...

This book examines the overlap between early modern English attitudes to disease and to society and explores the cultural meaning of the image of the body at the interfaces of medicine, morality and politics in Tudor and early Stuart England. In particular, it demonstrates how the body politic's metaphorical "cankers" and "plagues" were increasingly attributed to allegedly pathological "foreign bodies" such as Jews, Catholics, and witches. One can glimpse the origins of not only modern xenophobic attitudes to foreigners as carriers of disease, but also "germ" theory in general. The...

Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare Jonathan Gil Harris "A stylish, readable, and important intervention in early modern studies. In recalling a past that never was, it invites us to a future that might not be the same."--Jonathan Goldberg, Emory University "It is difficult to do justice here to the extraordinarily wide range of critical and theoretical models that Harris draws on, or the ease with which he brings them together. . . . Harris's book is important . . . not only for its fine discussions of individual works but also for setting a yardstick for the work that early...

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans invented 'Indians' and populated the world with them. The global history of the term 'Indian' remains largely unwritten and this volume, taking its cue from Shakespeare, asks us to consider the proximities and distances between various early modern discourses of the Indian. Through new analysis of English travel writing, medical treatises, literature, and drama, contributors seek not just to recover unexpected counter-histories but to put pressure on the ways in which we understand race, foreign bodies, and identity in a globalizing age that...