A Response to Garrett Sullivan
by Valerie Wayne
I want to add a note of thanks to Garrett Sullivan for his
astute reading of my essay. As I revised it, I took careful note
of his comments: I dropped the anecdote because I agreed with
him that its payoff wasn't sufficient, and I considered briefly
how the bloody cloth shows the limits of the Appadurian model
in approaching this play's stage properties. In response to some
feminist critics who have emphasized Cymbeline's disincorporation
of the feminine, I added a fuller discussion of the way in which
these props materialize women's absence on the English Renaissance
stage. For the bloody cloth in particular, I discussed at some
length how it manifests Posthumus's accommodation to the female
body. My revised essay is called "The Woman's Parts of Cymbeline"
and will appear later in 2002 in Staged Properties in Early
Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha
Korda, from Cambridge UP.
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