Tamburlaine, Able-Bodiedness, and the Skills of the Early Modern Player

Abstract

t his essay highlights the idealization of able-bodiedness in early modern playing, a crucial topic in the growing scholarship on disability and early modern drama that has developed in recent years. Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood ’ s foundational work on early modern disability studies has helped frame disability as not an anachronism to early modern England but an “ operational identity category ” in the sense that mentally and physically impaired bodies are quite familiarly stigmatized, devalued, and othered across a vast array of period drama, prose, and poetry. 1 Elizabeth B. Bearden has similarly interro-gated the “ norming effects ” that period literature ’ s frequent deployment of categories like “ natural ” and “ ideal ” institute — categories that, for Bearden, mark mentally and physically impaired bodies as deviant from an able-bodied standard. 2 More recent work on disability and early modern drama presents the stage