Drama Tuesday - What's in a prop?

 “What is this quintessence of dust?” 

Duchess is looking for his brokendown drunk father, a former Shakespearean actor reciter in vaudeville houses. He does not find his father but he is handed something left behind by his father.

 At the height of his father’s fame, when he was a leading man in a small Shakespearean troop performing to half filled houses, he had six of these cases and they were his prized possessions.

The gold embossing on this one was chipped and faint, you can still make out the O for Othello.  Throwing the class, I opened the lid. Inside there were four objects resting snuggly in velvet lined indentations: a goatee, a golden earring, a small jar of black face, and a dagger. 

Like the case, the dagger had been custom-made. The golden hilt which had been fashioned to fit perfectly in my old man’s grasp, was adorned with three large jewels in a row: one ruby, one sapphire, one emerald. The stainless steel blade has\d been forged, tempered, and burnished by a master craftsman in Pittsburgh, allowing my father in Act 3 to cut a wedge from an apple and stick the dagger upright into the surface of the table, where it would remain ominously as he nursed his suspicions of Desdemona‘s infidelity.

But while the steel of the blade was the real McCoy, the hilt was Gilded brass and jewels were paste. And if you press the sapphire with your thumb, it would release a catch, so that when my old man stabbed himself in the guts at the end of Act Five, the blade would retract into the hilt. As the ladies in the loge gasped, he would take his own sweet time staggering back-and-forth in front of the foot lights before giving up his ghost. Which is to say, the dagger was as much of a gimmick as he was.

When the set of six cases was still complete each has its own label embossed in gold: Othello, Hamlet, Henry, Lear, Macbeth, and – I kid you not – Romeo. Each has its own velvet mind indentations holding its own set of accessories.

P. 247 

Your challenge is to make imagined prop cases for other plays.

What are four emblems central to Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet?

What would you choose to symbolically encapsulate any other of Shakespeare’s plays? 

Or any other play that you can perform?

How might this activity of looking for the essence of a play help you understand a role?

Towles, A (2021) The Lincoln Highway, New York, New York, Random House,