Elizabeth Sharrett

Lynchburg College, English, Faculty Member

University of North Carolina at Greensboro, English, Faculty Member

University of Birmingham, Shakespeare Institute, Adjunct

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My research explores lifecycle rituals and material culture in Renaissance society and drama. It is particularly concerned with how an understanding of objects can inform the interpretation of plays, as well as theatre and performance history. I am currently writing my first monograph on the cultural meaning of beds in early modern England and their use as stage properties. It considers the full corpus of English dramatic works from 1533-1642.

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Talks by Elizabeth Sharrett

“You are mine heire, and my land must descend upon you”: Deathbeds and Will-writing in Renaissance Drama

Marriage rituals and The Taming of the Shrew

“Mewling and puking in the nurses arms": Exploring infancy in Shakespeare’s England

Rites of Passage in the Tudor Household

Beds as stage properties in Renaissance drama

Papers by Elizabeth Sharrett

Marriage bed manoeuvrings: sociopolitical functions of the bed in the 1647 folio text of John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, Or The Tamer Tamed

Arrêt sur scène

Play Reviews: Romeo and Juliet

Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 2015

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Beds as stage properties in English Renaissance drama: materializing the lifecycle

This thesis examines beds as stage properties in English Renaissance drama. It argues that their ... more This thesis examines beds as stage properties in English Renaissance drama. It argues that their indissoluble associations with the major rites of passage in the early modern lifecycle – birth, marriage, and death – created particular dramatic effects in performance not immediately obvious to audiences today. Chapter one identifies the theoretical and methodological frameworks informing the thesis, and addresses assumptions about the physical structure of beds from the period and their appearance as props. The succeeding chapters each explore different rites of passage. Chapter two considers childbirth rituals in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and other plays depicting the lying-in ritual, and the bed’s function in these plays as a mockery of the religious and cultural ideals it was intended to represent. Chapter three focuses on marriage, exploring how the bed becomes a subversive emblem of female marital control through a comparison of the manuscript and Folio editions of The Woman’s Prize. Chapter four analyzes the death ritual in relation to Humphrey’s murder in Henry VI Part II, comparing the uses of the bed in the Quarto and Folio versions in order to consider the extent to which Humphrey ‘dies well’. Chapter five explores the inherent interconnectedness of all three rites in A Woman Killed With Kindness, and establishes the ways in which they converge upon the bed. As these case studies demonstrate, the use of the bed by playwrights as a prop in performance on the Renaissance stage was a not an incidental inclusion, but a considered choice intended to exploit the dramatic potential of the object’s multivalency to affect the scene in which it appeared, due to its rich symbolic association with the three major rites of passage.