Selected by "Choice" magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
for 2009The New Historicism of the 1980s and early 1990s was
preoccupied with the fashioning of early modern subjects. But,
Jonathan Gil Harris notes, the pronounced tendency now is to engage
with objects. From textiles to stage beards to furniture, objects
are read by literary critics as closely as literature used to be.
For a growing number of Renaissance and Shakespeare scholars, the
play is no longer the thing: the thing is the thing. Curiously, the
current wave of "thing studies" has largely avoided posing
questions of time. How do we understand time through a thing? What
is the time of a thing?In "Untimely Matter in the Time of
Shakespeare," Harris challenges the ways we conventionally
understand physical objects and their relation to history. Turning
to Renaissance theories of matter, Harris considers the profound
untimeliness of things, focusing particularly on Shakespeare's
stage materials. He reveals that many "Renaissance" objects were
actually survivals from an older time--the medieval monastic
properties that, post-Reformation, were recycled as stage props in
the public playhouses, or the old Roman walls of London, still
visible in Shakespeare's time. Then, as now, old objects were
inherited, recycled, repurposed; they were polytemporal or
palimpsested.By treating matter as dynamic and temporally hybrid,
Harris addresses objects in their futurity, not just in their
encapsulation of the past. "Untimely Matter in the Time of
Shakespeare" is a bold study that puts the "materiel"--the
explosive, world-changing potential--back into a "material culture"
that has been too often understood as inert stuff.
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