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.
Chapter 1: Disability and the Work of Performance in Early Modern
England, Lindsey Row-Heyveld.- Chapter 2: By the Knife and Fire:
Conceptions of Surgery and Disability in Early Modern Medical
Treatises, Jodie Austin.- Chapter 3: Turn it to a Crutch: Disability and
Swordsmanship in The Little French Lawyer, Matthew Carter.- Chapter 4: Mutism
and Feminine Silence: Gender, Performance, and Disability in
Epicoene, Melissa Geil.- Chapter 5: Contented Cuckolds: Infertility and Queer
Reproductive Practice in Middletons A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and
Macchiavellis Mandragola, Simone Chess.- Chapter 6: Reading Shakespeare
After Neurodiversity, Wes Folkerth.- Chapter 7: Enabling Rabies in King
Lear, Avi Mendelson.- Chapter 8: Limping and Lameness on the Early Modern
Stage, Susan Anderson.- Chapter 9: Lame Humor in Beaumont and Fletchers
Loves Pilgrimage, Joyce Boro.- Chapter 10: Syphilis Patches: Form and
Disability History in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Nancy
Simpson-Younger.- Chapter 11: Sign Gain to Deaf Gain: Early Modern Manual
Rhetoric and Modern Shakespeare Performances, Jennifer Nelson.- Chapter 12:
This is miching mallecho. It means mischief:
Problematizing Representations of Actors with Down Syndrome in Growing Up
Downs, Sarah Olive.
Leslie C. Dunn is Professor of English at Vassar College, USA, where she also teaches in the Womens 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.
