Recovering Disability in Early Modern England

Recovering Disability in Early Modern England EDITED BY ALLISON P. HOBGOOD AND DAVID HOUSTON WOOD THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS | COLUMBUS Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Recovering disability in early modern England / Edited by Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1215-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9316-4 (cd) 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. People with disabilities in literature. I. Hobgood, Allison P., 1977– II. Wood, David Houston. PR423.R43 2013 820.9'3527—dc23 2012048536 Cover design by MaryAnn Smith Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the Ameri- can National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Li- brary Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS List of Illustrations v Acknowledgments vii INTRODUCTION Ethical Staring: Disabling the English Renaissance ALLISON P. HOBGOOD AND DAVID HOUSTON WOOD 1 CHAPTER 1 Dwarf Aesthetics in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Early Modern Court SARA VAN DEN BERG 23 CHAPTER 2 Maternal Culpability in Fetal Defects: Aphra Behn’s Satiric Interrogations of Medical Models EMILY BOWLES 43 CHAPTER 3 Disability Humor and the Meanings of Impairment in Early Modern England DAVID M. TURNER 57 CHAPTER 4 Antic Dispositions: Mental and Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern Revenge Tragedy LINDSEY ROW-HEYVELD 73 iv • CONTENTS CHAPTER 5 Disabling Allegories in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene RACHEL E. HILE 88 CHAPTER 6 Performing Blindness: Representing Disability in Early Modern Popular Performance and Print SIMONE CHESS 105 CHAPTER 7 “There is no suff’ring due”: Metatheatricality and Disability Drag in Volpone LAUREN COKER 123 CHAPTer 8 Richard Recast: Renaissance Disability in a Postcommunist Culture MARCELA KOSTIHOVÁ 136 CHAPTER 9 The Book of Common Prayer, Theory of Mind, and Autism in Early Modern England MARDY PHILIPPIAN, JR. 150 CHAPTER 10 Freedom and (Dis)Ability in Early Modern Political Thought NANCY J. HIRSCHMANN 167 CODA Shakespearean Disability Pedagogy ALLISON P. HOBGOOD AND DAVID HOUSTON WOOD 187 Works Cited 193 Contributors 209 Index 212 ILLUSTRATIONS FIGUre 1. Don Sebastián de Morra, c. 1643–44 (oil on canvas) by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599–1660), Prado, Madrid, Spain/The Bridgeman Art Library 27 FIGUre 2. Sir Anthony van Dyck, Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson, 1633, Samuel H. Kress Collection, image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 29 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I WISH TO thank foremost my coeditor, Allison Hobgood, who took this volume so seriously since we dreamed it up some years ago. Thanks, too, to Susan Crutchfield and Simi Linton, to Sandy Crooms at The Ohio State University Press, and especially to our contributors, whose work I have found endlessly pioneering, fascinating, and insightful. I also want to name Lindsey Row-Heyveld and Sara van den Berg as crucial sounding boards for our introductory material during the seminars and special topic sessions that Allison and I cochaired during the completion of this volume at the 2009 Shakespeare Association of America in Washington, DC; the 2009 Modern Language Association in Philadelphia; and the 2011 Renaissance Society of America in Montreal. Our introduction profits in part from material published as “Shakespeare and Disability” in the Blackwell Literature Com- pass 8.5 (May 2011). Closer to home, I completed this work with the help of release time and funds granted to me by Dean Michael Broadway at Northern Michigan University, and it is to him and my English depart- ment chair, Ray Ventre, that I owe great thanks. To my wife, Vicki, and our kids, Maddie, Henry, and Nate, of course, I owe all. I dedicate this volume to the memory of Tyler Rigg (1972–96) and to the Tyler Rigg Foundation, through which his memory lives. DHW vii viii • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS THANKS MOST OF ALL to my collaborator and friend, David Wood, whose energy, insights, and generosity made this undertaking tremendously plea- surable throughout. I am forever grateful also to Rosemarie Garland- Thomson for her mentor-friendship and support of this project even before I could conceive of it fully myself. Special thanks goes to the volume’s senior editor, Sandy Crooms, copyediting coordinator, Maggie Diehl, and anonymous readers at The Ohio State University Press; to our contributors whose diligent efforts made this work come to life; to members of the 2009 Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Washington, DC, where David and I first envisioned this collection; and to wonderful colleagues at Willamette University, Emory University, and Spelman College who engaged my ideas and words about early modern disability studies over their long evolution and growth. Thanks especially to Sara van den Berg for her expertise and assurance, Lindsey Row-Heyveld for her humbling knowledge about the field and incredible collegiality, and Ann Fox for her conversation and confidence. Rebecca Olson is the best reader and cham- pion I know, and I thank her immensely for that. I likewise am indebted to all the “other mothers” whose day-to-day care and love for my daugh- ters sustained them while I pursued this endeavor. And to my family (especially Fred Schnell), as always, I owe so much: I appreciate most your love, patience, listening, and laughter along the way. APH INTRODUCTION Ethical Staring Disabling the English Renaissance ALLISON P. HOBGOOD AND DAVID HOUSTON WOOD his is a book about difference, but more importantly, about how we stare at difference. As disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson remarks, “we don’t usually stare at people we know, but instead when T 1 unfamiliar people take us by surprise.” Recovering Disability in Early Mod- ern England encourages us to stare at the extraordinary and to honor the surprise, discomfort, and bewilderment that come with noting the unfamiliar. Our book does not condone detached gazing but instead insists upon productive looking. The essays that follow play to our human penchant for “obsessive ocularity,”2 asking readers to grapple with non-normative bodies and minds as well as the radically different social, historical, and literary con- texts in which those bodies and minds were assigned and helped make mean- ing. This encounter with embodied difference and with a past that embodies that difference enables a reimagining of what we think we know about disability in an early modern context. Toward this end, Garland-Thomson’s seminal rehabilitation of the staring encounter as a “conduit to knowledge” and “an opportunity to recognize one another in new ways”3 functions as a key logic shaping this collection. Following Garland-Thomson, we propose early modern disability studies, as exemplified by the essays assembled here, as a means for more ethical staring practices and hence robust and transformative scholarship. “Productive 1 2 • INTRODUCTION: ETHICAL STARING interactions”4 with literary history and the representations produced therein require, in other words, new ways of looking. In its efforts to recover disability in early modern England, our collection suggests that we have not been staring hard or well enough at representations of disability right beneath our noses and, moreover, that the encounters we have had with those representations—the ways we stared upon finally recognizing them—should better reflect efforts toward ethical beholding. This generous stare at history, literature, and disability representation should, to borrow again from Garland- Thomson, “be understood as a potential act of be-holding, of holding the being of another particular individual in the eye of the beholder.”5 Certain social, cultural, and intellectual prohibitions, akin to those that police our daily staring practices, have made it difficult for early modernists to identify disability in their midst and, even more so, to acknowledge it as worthy of scholarly pursuit. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, as it cements early modern disability studies as a field of inquiry, calls attention to what Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell have described as “the myriad ways that traditional fields have been willing to study their topic from a dis- tance without embracing the ideas of disabled persons concerning their own predicament.”6 This collection invites readers to reflect on their own relation- ship to disability both now and in the English Renaissance and prods us to stare differently at disability, disability histories, and disability representations. It mandates that we stop refusing to look or that we, equally problem- atically, cease gawking unilaterally at the extraordinary; instead, it proposes engagement in a reciprocal interaction in which disability, disability histories, and disability representations stare back. This reciprocity and mutual recogni- tion may cause unease in readers, but such is the price, and ultimate advan- tage, of ethical staring encounters. As they practice ethical staring, these essays unapologetically make visible “urgent efforts to make the unknown known, to render legible something that seems at first glance incomprehensible.”7 They also, as good staring should, “[offer] an occasion to rethink the status quo,” presenting and corroborating Garland-Thomson’s insistence that “who we are can shift into focus by staring at who we think we are not.”8 This volume thus confirms that, as she puts it, “things happen when people stare.”9 In the case of Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, a proper beholding of the early modern English past in which we look ethically and with fresh eyes reveals a new disability history, a new early modern scholarship, and a new commitment to “redress the exclusion of disability and disabled people from our critical discourses, our scholarly imaginations, and our classrooms.”10 ALLISON P.

Load more