Main description:

This book provides a fascinating study into the history of kingship, madness and masculinity that was acted out on the early modern stage. Providing students of early modern history, theatre and performance studies and disability studies with interesting case studies to inform their upper level seminars and research.

Throughout the volume the authors engage with the field of disability studies to show how disability and mental health were portrayed and what that tells us about the period and the people who lived in it. Showing students, a new dimension of early modern Europe.

The chapters uncover how, as the early modern understanding of mental illness re-focused on human, rather than supernatural, causes, the public stages became important arenas for playwrights, actors, and audiences to explore expressions of madness and to practice diagnoses. Enabling students from multiple disciplines such as the history of medicine, the history of theatre and performance and the history of early modern Europe to see the how attitudes formed and changed around kingship, madness and masculinity in this period.

Contents:

Section One: Distracted kingship 1. "Cold in great affairs": finding madness in the writer's method - decoding representations of the madness of Shakespeare's Henry VI 2. "Bad is the world": Richard III and social deformity 3. "Every madman dreameth waking:" Macbeth and The Winter's Tale 4. "Now quit you of great shames": Henry V and the mad French king Section Two: Fractured masculinity 5. "The strangest men that ever nature made!" Wildness, lovesickness, and sodomy in Marlowe's Edward II and Tamburlaine the Great 6. Murderous distraction and the downfall of the tyrant in Thomas Middleton's The Lady's Tragedy 7. Sad stories of the death of kings: using despair to write history Section Three: Performed madness 8. Tom a Bedlam's masculine melancholy and King Lear's missing mad song 9. "My honor's at the stake": anger, illness, and royal identity in All's Well That Ends Well 10. "Let hell make Crook'd my mind": kingship and madness in Richard III 11. Feigning sick: King Lear, Volpone, and the strategic performance of disability 12. Performing the "mad" prince: mental illness and princeliness in Hamlet Conclusion: the future of mad kings