Description
Book SynopsisUnfixable Forms explores how theatrical form remakesand is in turn remade byearly modern disability. Figures described as deformed, lame, crippled, ugly, sick, and monstrous crowd the stage in English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In each case, such a description distills cultural expectations about how a body should look and what a body should doyet, crucially, demands the actor''s embodied performance. In the early modern theater, concepts of disability collide with the deforming, vulnerable body of the actor. Reading dramatic texts alongside a diverse array of sources, ranging from physic manuals to philosophical essays to monster pamphlets, Katherine Schaap Williams excavates an archive of formal innovation to argue that disability is at the heart of the early modern theater''s exploration of what it means to put the body of an actor on the stage.
Offering new interpretations of canonical works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jo
Trade Review
Unfixable Forms marks a milestone in disability studies. It is an essential book that prompts readers to think about, and cultivate a desire for, human difference.
* Modern Philology *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Unfixing Early Modern Disability
1. Deformed: Wanting to See Richard III
2. Citizen Transformed: Being the Lame Soldier
3. Performing Cripple in Theatrical Exchange
4. Changing the Ugly Body
5. Playing Time, or Sick of Feigning
6. Making the Monster
Coda: Inviting Performance
