Disability and the Characterization of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew

Hile, Rachel E.

doi:10.18061/dsq.v29i4.996

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“…While gender analyses of Katherine’s shrewishness have keenly analyzed the play from a range of feminist positions, Hile illustrates that ‘the tendency to treat gender as the sole important identity marker for Katherine ignores the significance of the opposition of disability/ability to an understanding of Katherine’s character’ (9). Indeed, reading the play via disability theories uncovers a more complex engagement with gender theory.…”

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Shakespeare and Disability Studies

Wood

2011

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This essay examines burgeoning scholarly interest in William Shakespeare’s representations of disability. In contrast with scholarship that identifies the 18th and 19th centuries as the genesis for identity‐categories of disability, this essay explores the competing discourses relating to non‐normative selfhood in the early modern period (the 16th and 17th centuries). In Shakespeare’s work, such discourses tend to function politically in situating disability at the nexus of the particularities of oppression and the construction of the subject, in that they often derive from classical concepts of the aesthetic; medieval concepts of the marvelous; theological concepts involving the radical reordering of personhood wrought by the Reformation; and medical concepts of pathology hinging on the supple explanatory system of humoral theory. The essay then offers concise overviews of three representative readings that illustrate the range of Shakespearean disability scholarship: the first, focusing on demonstrable forms of disability (2 Henry VI); the second, on ostensibly non‐legible forms of disability (Julius Caesar); and the third, on the performance‐history of disability (The Taming of the Shrew).

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Shakespeare and Disability Studies

Wood

2011

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“…Her limp is referenced over five times in the play, yet has received virtually no scholarly attention and little consideration in performance. For more on this case, see Rachel E. Hile, "Disability and the Characterization of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew," Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009), http://www.dsqsds.org/article/view/996/1180 (accessed April 19, 2011). monasteries) or the charitable impulses of strangers.…”

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Dissembling Disability

Row-Heyveld¹

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The fear of able-bodied people pretending to be disabled was rampant in early modern England. Thieves were reputed to feign impairment in order to con charity out of well-meaning Christians. People told stories about these deceptive rogues in widely circulated prose pamphlets, sung about them in popular ballads, and even recorded their purported actions in laws passed to curb their counterfeiting. Feigned disability was especially prevalent-and potent-on the stage. Over thirty plays feature one or more able-bodied characters performing physical impairment. This dissertation examines the theatrical tradition of dissembling disability and argues that it played a central role in the cultural creation of disability as a category of identity. On the stage, playwrights teased out stereotypes about the non-standard body, specifically the popular notion that disability was always both deeply pitiful and, simultaneously, dangerously criminal and counterfeit. Fears of false disability, which surged during the English Reformation, demanded a policing of boundaries between able-bodied and disabled persons and inspired the first legal definition of disability in England. Rather than resolving the issue of physical difference, as the legal and religious authorities attempted to do, the theater revealed and reveled in the myriad complications of the non-standard body. The many plays that feature performances of dissembling disability use the trope to interrogate issues of epistemological proof, ask theological questions about charity and virtue, and, especially, explore the relationship between the body and identity. Fraudulent disability also had important literary uses as well; playwrights employed this handy theatrical instrument to construct character, to solve narrative problems, to draw attention to the manufactured theatricality of their dramas, and, often, to critique the practices of the commercial theater. Expanding beyond the medical perspectives offered by the few studies that have considered early modern disability, I argue that these performances emerge out of a complex network of literary, religious, and social concerns. For all that

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Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama

Anderson

2020

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Literary Disability Studies is the first book series dedicated to the exploration of literature and literary topics from a disability studies perspective. Focused on literary content and informed by disability theory, disability research, disability activism, and disability experience, the Palgrave Macmillan series provides a home for a growing body of advanced scholarship exploring the ways in which the literary imagination intersects with historical and contemporary attitudes toward disability. This cutting edge interdisciplinary work includes both monographs and edited collections (as well as focused research that does not fall within traditional monograph length). The series is supported by an editorial board of internationally-recognised literary scholars specialising in disability studies:

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Disability and the Characterization of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Shakespeare and Disability Studies

Shakespeare and Disability Studies

Dissembling Disability

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama

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