From my perspective as a lecturer in premodern writing and embodiment, Sujata Iyengar’s edited collection Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body is an important publication for both research and teaching purposes. However, and as the book’s title suggests, its focus on sixteenth and seventeenth-century corporealities is subordinate to a wider analytical remit foregrounding integration rather than separation; presentist rather than period-specific sensibilities. Taking a ‘post-medicalised’ (1) approach to Disability Studies, this mindfully interdisciplinary volume ‘puts into conversation early modern and postmodern ideals of health, vigor, ability, beauty, well-being, and happiness’ (1). Iyengar’s lively assembly of established and emerging scholars:
turns to William Shakespeare’s works because of their multiple voices or polyvocality (drama, and the lyric speaker in the poems), and because of the works’ wide cultural allusiveness in their own time (the range of references within them) and their wide cultural appropriation in our own era. (8)
The first discussion in the central segment ‘Sex’, Hillary M. Nunn’s comparative review of Hamlet and James VI and I’s interventions in a curial accusation of murder, forges a neat link from profoundly geographical to gendered concerns. Underpinned by Lennard J. Davis’s notions of ‘Normality, Power, and Culture’, Nunn shows how the King’s ‘body becomes the measure of what is normal’ (136) at micro and macro levels. Alongside Susan Wendell’s concepts, Davis’s research informs Catherine E. Doubler’s study of Will Kemp’s performance as the portly Falstaff in the Henry IV plays and his 130-mile dance from London to Norwich. Using the terms ‘abrasive’ (148) and ‘gambol’ (146) to describe these respective modes of masculinity, Doubler argues that Kemp’s theatrical and social personae delineates ‘male bodies in flux’ (143). If Kemp ‘enacts the key tenet to representing disability: to form and affirm what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls “social relations between people who assume the normate position and those who are assigned the disabled position”’ (155), Darlena Ciraulo’s subsequent chapter looks at the ‘correspondence’ between non-human and human bodies in Romeo and Juliet’s use of ‘floral analogy’, a relationship that speaks to the ‘states of ideal womanhood’ and ‘the generative health of the male body’ (159). The editor’s own chapter examines air’s function as a ‘shifting, contingent, enabling, and disabling vector for sexuality’ (177) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline.
Emotion, the volume’s final section, begins with Nathaniel B. Smith’s analysis of Galenic allopathy and Paracelsian homeopathy in The Taming of the Shrew. Exploiting J. L. Austin’s and Judith Butler’s relevant work on speech acts and performativity, Smith argues that ‘Shrew cites humoral language much the way drag performances and cross-dressing cite conventional gender stereotypes, parodying and destabilizing essentialist categories of “natural” or physiologically-defined gender identity’ (198). Working out from Sonnet 147, Ian Frederick Moulton’s essay situates a generically diverse range of Elizabethan and early Jacobean Shakespearean texts (from Venus and Adonis to All’s Well that Ends Well) within their medicinal milieu to complicate twenty-first-century notions of love. Bringing third-wave feminist scholarship to bear on her discussion of lactation and grief in Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth and Coriolanus, Ariane M. Balizet shows how recent discourses of so-called ‘attachment parenting’ and a related ‘ongoing and heated debate, waged largely over the internet, on the concept of modern motherhood’ (223) are culturally determined. Balizet thus reflects on how the playwright’s modes of maternality, from birth-mother to wet-nurse, are bound by reciprocal loss (237). In spite of ‘resolutely activist’ research on cancer and ‘historicizing’ in the ‘health humanities’, Alanna Skuse argues that the related Shakespearean term ‘canker’ has ‘escaped closer examination by critics of early modern literature’ (240). By probing the word’s slippery semiotic valency – from its use in horticultural to corporeal domains – alongside ‘the enigmatic Sonnet 95’ (242), Skuse suggests that ‘canker’ is a valuable ‘phrase with which to address anxieties about change, identity, and bodily, emotional, and relational integrity’ (256).
Like Skuse, Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body’s authors are keenly engaged in close textual analysis. At the same time, they are also alert to the means by which Shakespeare’s cultural cachet can be put to wider political use. In sum, this valuable collection of pithy essays on premodern embodiment expertly troubles both pervasive and radical views of contemporary Anglo-American culture.
Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
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© 2017 Liz Oakley-Brown
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2017.1283840