Shakespeare Dwelling: Pericles and the Affordances of Action

Abstract

Near the end of Pericles, Marina founds a community of women dedicated to needlework, the performing arts, and the practice of eloquence and virtue, an establishment modeled at least in part, as Randall Martin has argued, on the house-churches of Priscilla and Acquila in Ephesus and Corinth.1 Marina has instituted what contemporary DIY (do-it-yourself) artisans call “a church of craft”: “an environment where any and all acts of making have value to our humanness.”2 Although the DIY movement has been co-opted by corporate interests happy to hawk yarn to hipsters as well as housewives, the return to traditional handicrafts in the digital age has also cultivated heightened forms of attention to the environment, labor, beauty, and waste; incubated patterns of enskillment that emphasize peer-to-peer education; and fostered acts of communication that recast crafters as authors and activists (or “Craftivists”).