Props to Goethe - Staging Things

Actors and language tend to hog the limelight in performance studies and drama scholarship. Though long neglected, stage properties have earned new attention since the publication of Andrew Sofer’s "The Stage Life of Props" (2003) and Melissa Mueller’s "Objects as Actors" (2014). Objects in the theater play both functional roles in the world of the stage and symbolic roles for the spectating audience. Sofer’s dichotomy between the enlivened prop and the dead symbol is foreshadowed by Goethe's opposition of symbols to allegories.

This talk will observe the on- and off-stage life of theatrical props in Goethe's plays and a novel, "Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre." Theveil left behind by the ghost of Hamlet’s father both illustrates and challenges Sofer’s claims about props as a 'haunted medium'. The functional and symbolic orders of stage business in fact intimate the problematic action of drama in the world: are objects in plays "mere" toys, or do they have real effects?