Introduction: Disability in Early Modern Theatre

The introduction to this selection of essays briefly outlines the recent flourishing of scholarship in disability studies and its perhaps rather belated entry into the field of early modern drama. It discusses the broader opportunities presented by synthesizing developments in disability theory with research on early modern theatre and argues for the vital importance of historical disability scholarship. While introducing some of the directions that disability scholarship on early modern theatre might take, this introduction argues that studying early modern disability offers innovative ways of imagining difference in bodies and minds both in the past and now

Demonstrable Disability

This essay is about how disability rhetoric functions in early modern plays beyond the visible difference of disabled characters. In a medium that makes meaning out of bodies, disability rhetoric registers how much the language of disqualification can only succeed without the human form of the actor. Disability epithets define other bodies on the stage as whole and unmarked by negation, or, by contrast, have the effect of unsettling the scrutiny of the bodies that are onstage. Attention to disability rhetoric thus offers an instructive study because it succinctly outlines the concepts that ossify into, and serve to naturalize, negative images of early modern disability

Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III

This article examines Shakespeare’s Richard III as an important example of staging disability in early modern drama. Although Richard’s character is taken by theorists as emblematic of premodern notions of disability, this article reads Richard instead as a “dismodern” subject who employs rhetorical power and performative ability to compensate for a bodily form marked with negative associations. Richard foregrounds his deformed figure in ways that advance his political power, appealing to bodily deformity and the impotence he claims it entails to obscure his shrewd political maneuvers. Understanding the powerful ends to which Richard uses his disability allows us to think about disabled identity in the Renaissance as a complex negotiation of discourses of deformity and monstrosity as well as a relation to bodily contingency that reveals the instability of all bodies.   Keywords: deformity, disability, dismodern, drama, Shakespeare, Richard III

Irregular bodies: performing disability on the early modern stage

“Irregular” bodies—described as deformed, foul, ugly, maimed, crooked, limping, sick, and infected—appear everywhere in the English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My dissertation asks: what accounts for the theater’s fascination with these bodies, and what, exactly, can “disability” mean on the early modern stage? I read plays by Shakespeare, Dekker, Heywood, Rowley, Jonson, and Middleton (among others), alongside medical manuals, conduct books, and legal codes, to explore how dramatic representations expose the vexed and shifting standards that dictate bodily norms in the period. Drawing upon contemporary work in disability theory, I show how these standards at once constrain and depend upon irregular bodies. I argue that irregular bodies make possible a range of early modern social formations—not only medical knowledge or aesthetic standards of beauty, but also concepts of political power, citizenship, social status, and economic exchange. Theorizing disability through social structures allows us to see how theatrical representations of irregular bodies cut across distinctions—between art and nature, form and matter, public and private—foundational to early modern thought. Bringing disability to the stage, early modern drama highlights the impossible ideals of social order that depend upon excluding irregular bodies and the vibrant re-orderings these bodies elicit.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Katherine Schaap William

Limping and Lameness on the Early Modern Stage

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability