Figurations of Care and Disability in Shakespeare’s Drama

This thesis re-examines Shakespeare’s representation of disability with an attentiveness to themes of caregiving, both the representation of caregiving on stage and the invocation of principles and figurations of care. Specifically, it analyses Shakespeare’s use of tropes and common images of care and disability that circulated in the print literature of the time, to argue that his drama constructs disability in distinctly relational terms. The first two chapters pay particular attention to early modern metaphors of care as a form of prosthetic enablement or state of shared embodiment. They explore the deployment of such metaphors in various plays, from The Comedy of Errors to King Lear, to demonstrate the troubled vision of co-corporeality that Shakespeare raises when depicting familial care in cases of physical and/or sensory impairment. The third chapter then draws attention to Shakespeare’s pre-occupation in the late 1590s with the classical tale of Aeneas and Anchises, which was popularly invoked in conduct manuals of the era to establish dues not just of filial piety, but specifically of care in cases of parental disability. Chapter four considers a later thematic engagement in the 1600s with notions of ‘negative human exceptionalism’, which, I argue, sought to ground a vision of political community in the needs of the disabled body and the care that it requires. The final two chapters turn to Shakespeare’s dramatic appropriation of the highly theatricalised, therapeutic strategies discussed in the various medical case histories which circulated in the period. Exaggerating this form of informal care strategy, he explores communal caregiving, emerging pathologising logics of intellectual impairment, and challenges to traditionally-conceived notions of duty and the importance of truth-telling. By examining the representation of care and disability in Shakespeare, this thesis reveals key thematic concerns which allow for a greater understanding of premodern constructions of impairment and interdependence.