Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama

ISBN-13: 9783030572105 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022 / 348 str.

Leslie C. Dunn

Spis treści

PART 1: The Performance of Disability in Everyday Life

 

Chapter 1.  Disability and the Work of Performance in Early Modern England          32

Lindsey Row-Heyveld

 

Chapter 2.  “By the Knife and Fire”: Conceptions of Surgery and Disability in          53

Early Modern Medical Treatises

Jodie Austin

 

Chapter 3.  “’Turn it to a Crutch’: Disability and Swordsmanship in The Little           77

French Lawyer

Matthew Carter

 

Chapter 4.  Mutism and Feminine Silence: Gender, Performance, and Disability        98

in Epicoene

Melissa Geil

 

Chapter 5.  Contented Cuckolds: Infertility and Queer Reproductive Practice in     122

Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Macchiavelli’s Mandragola

Simone Chess

 

Chapter 6.  Reading Shakespeare After Neurodiversity                                             148

Wes Folkerth

 

 

PART II: Disability as a Metaphor in Dramatic Literature

 

Chapter 7. Enabling Rabies in King Lear                                                                   168

Avi Mendelson

 

Chapter 8. Limping and Lameness on the Early Modern Stage                                 192

Susan Anderson

 

 

Chapter 9. “Lame Humor” in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Love’s Pilgrimage              217

 Joyce Boro

 

Chapter 10.  Syphilis Patches: Form and Disability History in The Knight of the     237

Burning Pestle

Nancy Simpson-Younger

 

PART III: The Work of Disabled Artists

 

Chapter 11.  Sign Gain to Deaf Gain: Early Modern Manual Rhetoric and              256

Modern Shakespeare Performances

Jennifer Nelson

 

Chapter 12. “’This is miching mallecho. It means mischief’: Problematizing           273

Representations of Actors with Down Syndrome in Growing Up Downs

Sarah Olive

 

O autorze

Leslie C. Dunn is Professor of English at Vassar College, USA, where she also teaches in the Women’s Studies, Medieval/Renaissance Studies, and Media Studies programs. She co-edited two interdisciplinary collections, Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (1994) and Gender and Song in Early Modern England (2014). Her research and teaching interests include Shakespeare and early modern drama, gender studies, and disability studies. 

Blurb

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability. Proffering an expansive view of early modern disability in performance, the contributors suggest methodologies for finding and interpreting it in unexpected contexts. The volume also includes essays on disabled actors whose performances are changing the meanings of disability in Shakespeare for present-day audiences. By combining these two areas of scholarship, this text makes a unique intervention in early modern studies and disability studies alike. Ultimately, the volume generates a conversation that locates and theorizes the staging of particular disabilities within their historical and literary contexts while considering continuity and change in the performance of disability between the early modern period and our own.