Abstract
Katherine Schaap Williams is an ambitious book with two competing aims. Firstly, the project examines how representations of disability in early modern theater point us at social formations and cultural issues that are ostensibly not about disability. [...]the book aims to think about how scripted disability draws attention to both the theatricality of performance and the body of the actor, therefore enabling Williams “to theorize theatricality itself as a medium” (3). Williams considers, for example, Ralph’s inability to join the dancing that closes the play, which she suggests illustrates “the early modern theater’s refusal to celebrate the aims of undetectable restoration,” and the problem of the soldier expected to give his body in national service without receiving earned compensation (83). Chapter four considers how to read De Flores’s ugliness in The Changeling, the fifth chapter echoes the earlier chapters on performing Richard by examining how feigning disability in Volpone results in the eponymous character’s own sickness, and the final section of the book examines the deeply unstable category of “monster,” looking, unsurprisingly, at Caliban as an example of the conflation of monstrousness with race.