OOO + HHH = Zany, Interesting, and Cute

My first venture with Punctum Books and the dynamic circle of scholars associated with it began in March 2011, at the conference on “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Early Modern and Medieval Periods” hosted at george Washington university. The con-ference led to a volume of the same name, and my article “The Renais-sance Res Publica of Furniture,” remains one of my favorite pieces, in part because of the company it keeps with such an innovative group of col-laborators. I am thrilled to rejoin the conversation in this volume, which brings together some of the same authors with other scholars investigat-ing Shakespearean thing worlds. My response scans these papers through the scrim of two triads of terms: the aesthetic categories zany, interesting, and cute, as established for our time by Sianne Ngai; and the methodological categories of his-toricism, humanism, and hermeneutics. At stake in the relation between OOO and HHH are the vectors of usage and forms of significance that bind objects to worlds, to actions, and to language, and the extent to which Shakespearean drama and its criticism accommodates, exhibits, and reflects upon the traffic patterns that constitute the real and theatrical life of persons and things.