Natasha Korda
Natasha Korda (Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University, 1995) is Professor of English and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University. Her research interests include early modern English dramatic literature and culture, theater history, women’s social, economic and legal history, and material and visual culture studies. She is author of Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (2011) and Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (2002), and over thirty scholarly essays. She is co-editor of two anthologies, Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (2011) and Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (2002). Currently, she is editing the Norton Critical Edition of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and working on a new book project on material ephemera, feminist counter-archives and early modern theater historiography. She was elected to serve on the Board of Trustees of the Shakespeare Association of America from 2015-2019, and to serve as SAA President in 2020-2021. Her research has been supported by Wesleyan's Center for the Humanities, an International Research Fellowship at Oxford Brookes University, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library, a Charles S. Singleton Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University’s Villa Spelman, and fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has served on the editorial boards of Renaissance Quarterly, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal and The Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia, on executive committees of the Modern Language Association and the Renaissance Society of America and is a member of the Theater Without Borders research collaborative.
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Papers by Natasha Korda
The essays assembled here address fascinating and hitherto unexplored questions raised by the subject of labor as it was taken up in the drama of the period: How were laboring bodies and the goods they produced, marketed and consumed represented onstage through speech, action, gesture, costumes and properties? How did plays participate in shaping the identities that situated laboring subjects within the social hierarchy? In what ways did the drama engage with contemporary discourses (social, political, economic, religious, etc.) that defined the cultural meanings of work? How did players and playwrights define their own status with respect to the shifting boundaries between high status/low status, legitimate/illegitimate, profitable/unprofitable, skilled/unskilled, formal/informal, male/female, free/bound, paid/unpaid forms of work? Merchants, usurers, clothworkers, cooks, confectioners, shopkeepers, shoemakers, sheepshearers, shipbuilders, sailors, perfumers, players, magicians, servants and slaves are among the many workers examined in this collection.
Offering compelling new readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays in a broad range of genres (including history plays, comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, travel plays and civic pageants), this collection considers how early modern drama actively participated in a burgeoning, proto-capitalist economy by staging England's newly diverse workforce and exploring the subject of work itself.
Contents: Working subjects, Michelle M. Dowd and Natasha Korda; Mythos of labor: The Shoemaker's Holiday and the origin of citizen history, Crystal Bartolovich; Citizens and aliens as working subjects in Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday, John Michael Archer; Staging alien women's work in civic pageants, Natasha Korda; Osmologies of luxury and labor: entertaining perfumers in early English drama, Holly Dugan; Englishmen for My Money: work and social conflict?, Tom Rutter; Will Kempe's work: performing the player's masculinity in Kempe's Nine Daies Wonder, Ronda Arab; The rogues' paradox: redefining work in The Alchemist, Elizabeth Rivlin; Desiring subjects: staging the female servant in early modern tragedy, Michelle M. Dowd; Domestic work in progress entertainments, Sara Mueller; 'You take no labour': women workers of magic in early modern England, Molly Hand; Raising Mephistopheles: performative representation and alienated labor in The Tempest, David Hawkes; Custom, debt, and the valuation of service within and without early modern England, Amanda Bailey; The comic-tragedy of labor: a global story, Valerie Forman; Labor and travel on the early modern stage: representing the travail of travel in Dekker's Old Fortunatus and Shakespeare's Pericles, Daniel Vitkus; Afterword: early modern work and the work of representation, Jean E. Howard; Selected bibliography; Index.