Disability from Shakespeare to Milton: Poems, Plays, Prose

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Many writers of the Early Modern period regularly include physically and mentally impaired characters in their poetry, prose, and plays. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were obsessed with portraying disability on the Elizabethan stage, and John Milton gives us poignantly moving poetry about his struggles with blindness; representations of disabled bodies and minds appear at every turn in the literature of the period. However, until very recently, almost no scholarship has considered the cultural, social, and material contexts of these early modern representations of disability. In this course, we will consider how and why early modern writing displays such an abiding anxiety about disability, paying close attention along the way to the materiality of disabled bodies and how the body itself shapes disability discourse. Through our inquiries, we will better understand how early modern texts both reflect and challenge modern ideas about disability and the human body.