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

‘Known and Feeling Sorrows’: Disabled Knowledge and King Lear

This essay argues that King Lear presents a version of disability determined not by bodily authenticity but by bodily knowledge. By staging multiple forms and experi­ences of disability, the play defies the drive to authenticate and control non-standard bodies that flourished in early modern England. King Lear’s insistence on embodied knowledge both recognizes the unique perspective afforded to disability and resists disability exceptionalism through its attention to populations made vulnerable to impairment. King Lear specifically dramatizes the way disabled knowledge extended to precarious populations by granting Edgar disabled knowledge even though his dis­ability is fraudulent

“The lying’st knave in Christendom”: The Development of Disability in the False Miracle of St. Alban’s

This article examines various retellings of a single story to explore how conceptions of disability changed throughout the English Reformation.  The tale of a false miracle feigned and revealed in the village of St. Alban’s during the reign of Henry VI was recounted by a number of authors: Thomas More, Richard Grafton, John Foxe, and, finally, William Shakespeare.  More’s version imagines a disability that is shaped by an understanding of mutual exchange between disabled and able-bodied persons.  The Reformation eliminated that exchange, and its loss is reflected in the other accounts of the false miracle of St. Alban’s where disability is imagined as increasingly dangerous, deceptive, and emasculating.  I argue that Shakespeare, in particular, expands negative post-Reformation ideas about disability in 2 Henry VI, while simultaneously demonstrating the inability to contain disability in a period that anxiously struggled to define and regulate it.