Monstrous Kinds

Bearden, Elizabeth B.

doi:10.3998/mpub.10014355

Cited by 31 publications

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“…In the premodern vision of the world as oikumenethat is, the idea of the civilised world inherited by Greek cultureemphasis was often placed on 'the natural inhabited world and its resulting designation of monstrosity for different peoples'. 7 As a matter of fact, the main conventions of ancient and medieval geography pertained 'privileged centres and enclosing edges', and monsters were thus constructed in terms of 'geographical "exorbitance" [seen] as moral transgressiveness […] the other is a force for "confusion", whether at the biological level […] or at the most intimate levels of social structure'. 8 The classical representation of the marvellous combining monstrosity and margins was inherited in the early and late Middle Ages in the so-called topography of wonder, that is, the set of geographical and encyclopaedic treatises that classified natural wonders inhabiting the fringes of the world (mostly Africa, Asia, and Ireland).…”

Section: Introduction: a Cultural Migrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Speak of me as […]’: Refashioning geographies of monstrosity in Othello

Compagnoni

2022

Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies

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The connection between monstrosity, space, and power in Othello is explored through the notion of ‘geographies of monstrosity’. I argue that the play's spatial collocation of monsters and a-normativity echoes the Renaissance transition towards a more introjected perception of monstrosity, which does not occur when Othello is in a ‘central’ place (Venice), but when he moves to a frontier point (Cyprus) and refashions himself as the monstrous protagonist of tales to be circulated in Venice. As suggested, this emergence of an inner geography of monstrosity is strictly linked to the subversion of power politics.

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Section: Introduction: a Cultural Migrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Speak of me as […]’: Refashioning geographies of monstrosity in Othello

Compagnoni

2022

Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies

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“…Critics have tended to read 'monstrous' as a signifier for extreme bodily difference, a conceptual analogue for bodies that would today be identified in terms of congenital deformity. 2 Unlike 'lame' the term was not adduced in a legal category that governed the cultural administration of disability in the early modern period but appears in natural-philosophical, political, and theological contexts that employ 'monstrous' to describe extraordinary bodily variance. 3 With the exception of Caliban's persistent description as 'monster', however, 'monstrous' in Shakespeare's works rarely describes the physical appearance of a character in the sixty-five times it appears.…”

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confidence: 99%

Demonstrable Disability

Williams

2019

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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.This essay considers how disability rhetoric functions in early modern plays beyond the visible difference of disabled characters. First: an illustrative experiment. If you turn to an online database of early modern drama -say, for example, a research tool such as the Open Source Shakespeare concordance -and enter a keyword associated with bodily difference, one of many terms we might consider an early modern analogue for our contemporary vocabulary of disability, the results are surprising. A search of 'lame' returns eighteen instances across Shakespeare's corpus, and only rarely do these phrases discursively construct a character's body in the present. 1 In As You Like It, for example, 'lame' is a future that Adam imagines for his 'old limbs' (2.3.685); 'lame' is Rosalind's critique of poetic feet in verses that 'could not bear themselves' (3.2.1279); and 'lame' is Celia's verb of choice for the effect of an onslaught of words (1.3.412). The term evokes bodily limitation, but it works abstractly rather than describing a character's body or becoming a cue to an actor's practice. Similar patterns emerge in examples from other plays by Shakespeare. When Aufidius realizes he would 'lame the foot / Of our design' and Desdemona laments 'O most lame and impotent conclusion' (Othello 2.1.949), the metaphor takes for granted a powerful analogy between bodies that can function and other objects that receive praise Katherine Schaap Williams (ks.williams@utoronto.ca) is an assistant professor in the department of English at the University of Toronto. Katherine Schaap WilliamsEarly Theatre 22.2

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Introduction

Dunn¹

2020

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama

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Monstrous Kinds

Cited by 31 publications

References 0 publications

‘Speak of me as […]’: Refashioning geographies of monstrosity in Othello

‘Speak of me as […]’: Refashioning geographies of monstrosity in Othello

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