Yasser Khan reminds us that race, simply put, is made. It is the consequence of painstaking and deliberate work, whether in the meticulous anthropological taxonomies offered by Kant and Blumenbach, or in the line of poetry, or, as Khan argues, in the representation of racial differences on the Romantic-era stage. Drawing on the notion of “racecraft,” which “foregrounds racism as a reality that produces ‘race’ to rationalize the dispossession of wealth, power, and rights,” Khan shows how stagecraft in John Fawcett’s Obi; or Three-Finger’d Jack (1800) establishes the terms by which racialized subjects come to be understood as fundamentally exploitable.

Chapter 3 treats the staging of tiny props in both the Globe and Blackfriars theaters. In Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Antony and Cleopatra as well as Massinger’s The Picture, minuscule objects are deployed as metonymic evidence purporting to offer privileged, indubitable knowledge about a woman’s inscrutable body. The chapter demonstrates that the objects’ epistemological limitations, as detailed in the playtexts, became a phenomenological impasse in the playhouse. The very conditions of the props’ theatrical display in the large outdoor amphitheater and the small indoor hall would have variously exacerbated their narrative failures, undermining spectators’ attempts to see the objects clearly. At an historical moment when new empiricist methodologies promised to mitigate uncertainty, if not eradicate it entirely, the theater involved spectators in the failures of forensic investigation only to posit itself as a site for the capacious fulsomeness of spectacular display. The chapter ultimately argues that the very ephemerality of theatrical spectacle becomes, in all three plays, the alternative to the permanence of partial knowledge.

The chapter discusses how cultural institutions and artefacts affect the shared workspace framework. We first consider the integration of linguistic and non-linguistic information in the shared workspace when interlocutors do such things as jointly constructing flat-pack furniture. We show how the framework is ideally suited for such integration of signs and non-signs as part of the activity. We then consider how different activity types serve to refine dialogue games. Finally we consider how cultural artefacts augment the shared workspace to support alignment. We consider the role of illustration, recording and other communication technologies.