Shakespeare and Disability Studies

Abstract

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).

Introduction: Disability in Early Modern Theatre

“…Indeed, in 2011 David Houston Wood reported encountering 'reluctance' amongst early modern scholars to engage with disability and suggested that they 'would do well to observe medieval scholarship's eager embrace of disability methodologies'. 5 This situation has now begun to change significantly, especially due to the pioneering work of Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood, whose special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly focusing on 'Disabled Shakespeares' appeared a decade ago. 6 They followed this up with their edited collection, which directly challenged Davis's statement dismissing the premodern from the history of disability, stating categorically that '"Disability" was indeed an operational identity category in the English Renaissance'.…”

The Historicist Turn of Romantic‐Era Disability Studies, orFrankensteinin the Dark

“…Romantic studies lag a bit on this front. Literature Compass , for example, has already published wonderful essays on disability in several other literary periods: Dwight Gabbard's “Disability Studies and the British Long Eighteenth Century,” Taylor Hagood's “Disability Studies and American Literature,” David Wood's “Shakespeare and Disability Studies,” and Courtney Andree's “Reproducing Disability and Degeneration in the Victorian Fin de Siècle.” Did the Romantics simply not take much time to theorize abnormal embodiment? In their foreword to Disabling Romanticism , Tom Shakespeare and Peter Kitson note that Romantic writers, even as they grasped for sublime transcendence of things like mundane embodiment, were still very much aware of their disabled bodies: “Byron's club foot; Coleridge's mental depressions and addictions; Mary Robinson's lower‐body paralysis; Mary Lamb's and John Clare's psychiatric disabilities; and George Darley's stutter” (vii).…”