Shakespeare and Material Culture examines how Shakespeare’s plays engage with the objects of early modern culture, both those brought onstage as props and those brought to mind through language. Writing implicitly against readings that focus on language alone, Richardson contends that a fuller understanding of how Shakespeare’s plays work requires attending to “how he thinks with things as well as words” (4). She argues for “a material logic as one of the governing paradigms of Shakespeare’s theater — the tensions between objects, images, and texts which suggests that things might mean just as strongly as words, and not always in the same way — that they might push against the meanings of language” (193). Because ultimately “the meaning of both objects and texts is in the hands of the reader” (194), Richardson explores both the practical and imaginative relationships audience members may have had with the material of drama in an effort to “know more about how these plays were experienced” (196).

Structurally, each of the six chapters foregrounds a particular object, for which Richardson selects an exemplum that is pictured under the chapter’s heading. She begins chapter 1 by examining a gimmal ring inscribed with the posy, “‘As hands do shut so hart be knit’” (1). Visible only when the ring’s two parts are united, this object exemplifies “the way early modern men and women used objects, and the way writing and material culture were related to one another in the period” (3). The ring thus epitomizes Richardson’s project, and the remainder of the chapter lays the book’s foundation by setting out the early modern proscriptive and prescriptive discourses and practices that govern her readings. The discourses examined address political, economic, and moral debates about consumption. For practices she reviews the quantity and quality of objects owned by the lower-, middling-, and elite-status in order to stress the importance of how social class could influence audience responses to — and engagement with — material culture on stage.

Chapter 2, “Personal Possessions,” positions Shylock’s turquoise ring next to the rings Portia and Nerissa give their husbands in The Merchant of Venice, tracking the rings’ movements to show how the meanings of things “shift in and out of different webs of discourse and through the shades of different generic emphases” (63). Chapter 3, “Dressing and Cross-Dressing,” explores the way costume expresses inner identity in Hamlet and creates a gendered identity in Twelfth Night. Chapter 4, “Household, Rooms and the Spaces Within,” first foregrounds the role a stage prop chair plays in the creation of rooms on stage in Richard II and Hamlet, and then considers how space is shaped in Othello and Cymbeline. Chapter 5, “Banquet and Celebration” looks at elite banqueting objects and practices to analyze how stage banquets in As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, and Titus Andronicus “bring into play notions of hospitality and reciprocity” (129). Chapter 6, “Words and Things,” considers how Shakespeare “uses words to make the audience imagine objects, locations and events” (166) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline.

Shakespeare and Material Culture contributes to current scholarship in its effort to bridge the gaps between readings that privilege the aesthetic over the material. Richardson weaves complex and thought-provoking narratives for the objects of Shakespeare’s drama, and she makes a convincing case for how attention to Shakespeare’s engagement with material culture opens up new ways of reading his plays. There are several weaknesses. First, at times Richardson’s desire to explicate the multiple “webs of discourse” that could accrue around a thing stretches her argument out of focus. An example is the over-proliferating contexts that connect to the chair in Gertrude’s closet, discussed in chapter 4. Second, although she carefully considers how status could contribute to audience understandings of a dramatic object, more attention to how actual people used such objects would help ground Richardson’s study. Third, one of the most significant aspects of material culture is barely mentioned: an object’s status as a manufactured product. In fairness, as part of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series, the book’s purpose is to introduce the topic. A considerable body of scholarship underpins Shakespeare and Material Culture, and “further reading” offers an excellent compendium of secondary sources for advanced graduate students, teachers, and scholars seeking to explore the topic further.