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Shakespeare & Beyond

Richard III's dagger

Richard III
Richard III
Richard III

Richard (Drew Cortese) and the Duke of York (Remy Brettell) in Richard III, directed by Robert Richmond, Folger Theatre, 2014. Photo by Teresa Wood.

This is an excerpt from Yale professor Joseph Roach’s talk for the Shakespeare Anniversary Lecture Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library in October 2016. Listen to the full recording on SoundCloud.

The most humble or even abject items of material culture—take stage properties, for instance—can speak eloquently about history, if we will only listen carefully to what they have to tell us. That is because their power to symbolize belies their apparent lack of inherent use-value or even their exchange value on any market but that of the imagination.

In my own practice as a stage director, respect for the objects of material culture continually informs the details of my productions, such as the Richard III “straight” that I directed for Yale College Theater in 2013. While we were rehearsing, the malformed skeleton of the historical Richard pushed its way up through the asphalt of a Leicester carpark, like the return of the repressed.