Gloucester's Chair: Object Entanglements on the Early Modern Stage

In Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of emblems (1586),a woodcut entitled “Dolor è medicina” depictsa “Purblinde dame” confronting a devious physician who during his regular visits to her home has been making off with her belongings.1 (See Figure 1, next page.) As the accom-panying short verse details, the woman discovers the theft precisely as the physician requests payment for having restored her sight. Turning the tables on him, she wittily responds to his demand by protesting that she remains impaired: “Bycause my sences either faile, or ells my eies bee blinde./For, where my house before was garnish’d everie nooke:/I, nowe can see no goodes at all, though rounde about I looke.” While the wood-cut captures this moment in which the duplicitous doctor is stopped in his tracks on the way out the door, Whitney’s verse about the woman’s failing vision produces a blind spot for his readers. Accordingly, early modern readers, prompted to see a house “un-garnished” of its goods may well have overlooked the one good remaining in place: the gracious, high-backed wooden chair in which the woman sits and surveys her otherwise empty domestic space. This “mistake” could arise not because chairs were so plentiful as to be invisible — in fact, a typical middling-level Eng-lish household likely contained only one or two chairs, usually made of oak, relying primarily on less costly benches, stools, and chests for seat-ing — but rather because Whitney’s verse, with its emphasis on disposses-sion, invites readers to view the chair as something other than a “goode.”2Divested of its status as a commodity, the chair exists primarily as the familiar and unobtrusive ally of the bereft woman. It exists, we might say, as her environment.