Shakespeare and Early Modern Madness, the first collection to focus on madness and mental health in early modern drama, is energized by the belief that madness is a variable concept, situated among a rapidly shifting series of cultural vectors. In addition to investigating the ubiquity of mental health tropes in Shakespearean theater, and their appearance in plays by Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe, the volume showcases Renaissance madness’s impressive variety: its affiliation with mental states as different as demonic possession, melancholic dreams, ecstasy and rapture, rage and fury, excessive grief, and aesthetic pleasure. The essays further demonstrate that madness in early modern drama can be approached through a diverse array of critical perspectives; their authors pull not only from historicist methodologies, disability studies, mad studies, and theories of gender and race, but also from the psychological and psychiatric sciences. The volume concludes with a section on activism and pedagogy, which asks how we can use early modern plays to promote the inclusion of students and scholars with lived experience of neurodiversity.
Chapter 01: Introduction.
Chapter 02: Shakespeares Distracted Globe.-
Chapter 03: I am . . . besides myself: Ecstatic Dispositions in The Comedy
of Errors.
Chapter 04: Tragic Madnesses: Playing with Furor and Losing with
Ableism in Jonsons Cataline.
Chapter 05: All leveled to my mind: The
Madness of Barabas in The Jew of Malta.
Chapter 06: Joan of Arc and Mental
Illness: Dream Visions and Their Causes in Henry VI, Part 1.
Chapter 07:
Making Sense: Madness and Masculinity in Shakespeare and His Modernizations.-
Chapter 08: Both/And: Analyzing Lear.
Chapter 09: Shakespearean ADHDs.-
Chapter 10: Quintessence of Dust: Centering Neurodivergence and Lived
Experience of Suicidal Ideation in Readings of Hamlet.
Chapter 11:
Neurodiverse Pedagogy.
Leslie C. Dunn is Professor Emerita of English at Vassar College, USA. She has published articles and book chapters on early modern music and gender, original practices at Shakespeares Globe, and Shakespearean disability theatre. She also co-edited two interdisciplinary collections, Embodied Voices (1994) and Gender and Song in Early Modern England (2014) and edited Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama (Palgrave, 2020).
Avi Mendelson immigrated from Boston to London midway through his PhD at Brandeis University, USA. His defended dissertation is about madness in Shakespeare and early modern drama. Avis scholarship appears in the volumes Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama (Palgrave, 2020) and Inclusive Shakespeares (Palgrave, 2023). Additionally, Avi is a theatre maker whose performance credits include The Pleasure of Your Bedlam (Arcola Theatre) and The Bacchae (Tower Theatre).
