| Description |
This honors thesis project examines representations of disability in early modern English plays. I analyze two little-known plays of the period: Look About You (c. 1600) and The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607), both anonymous works. Through the characters of Redcap and Cripple, these plays present verbal and physical disabilities as embodiments of contemporary political and economic concerns. They also portray disability as something akin to the project of theatricality - concerns of doubleness, deception, scripting, etc. are examined through Redcap's stutter and Cripple's prosthetically aided body. Though these characters are crucial to the plays' plots, both of them are emphatically silenced by each play's ending. Working from David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's conception of "narrative prosthesis," this project analyzes how the early moderns used disability in their mass media, and ties our own narrative representations of disability back to the early modern English stage. ii |
