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theses

“Irregular” bodies—described as deformed, foul, ugly, maimed, crooked, limping, sick, and infected—appear everywhere in the English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My dissertation asks: what accounts for the theater’s fascination with these bodies, and what, exactly, can “disability” mean on the early modern stage? I read plays by Shakespeare, Dekker, Heywood, Rowley, Jonson, and Middleton (among others), alongside medical manuals, conduct books, and legal codes, to explore how dramatic representations expose the vexed and shifting standards that dictate bodily norms in the period. Drawing upon contemporary work in disability theory, I show how these standards at once constrain and depend upon irregular bodies. I argue that irregular bodies make possible a range of early modern social formations—not only medical knowledge or aesthetic standards of beauty, but also concepts of political power, citizenship, social status, and economic exchange. Theorizing disability through social structures allows us to see how theatrical representations of irregular bodies cut across distinctions—between art and nature, form and matter, public and private—foundational to early modern thought. Bringing disability to the stage, early modern drama highlights the impossible ideals of social order that depend upon excluding irregular bodies and the vibrant re-orderings these bodies elicit.

ETD_4709

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Katherine Schaap Williams

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001600001.ETD.000069002

doi:10.7282/T3416VMC

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.