Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability. Proffering an expansive view of early modern disability in performance, the contributors suggest methodologies for finding and interpreting it in unexpected contexts. The volume also includes essays on disabled actors whose performances are changing the meanings of disability in Shakespeare for present-day audiences. By combining these two areas of scholarship, this text makes a unique intervention in early modern studies and disability studies alike. Ultimately, the volume generates a conversation that locates and theorizes the staging of particular disabilities within their historical and literary contexts while considering continuity and change in the performance of disability between the early modern period and our own.

Leslie C. Dunn is Professor of English at Vassar College, USA, where she also teaches in the Women's Studies, Medieval/Renaissance Studies, and Media Studies programs. She co-edited two interdisciplinary collections, Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (1994) and Gender and Song in Early Modern England (2014). Her research and teaching interests include Shakespeare and early modern drama, gender studies, and disability studies. 

Chapter 1: Disability and the Work of Performance in Early Modern England, Lindsey Row-Heyveld.- Chapter 2:  "By the Knife and Fire": Conceptions of Surgery and Disability in Early Modern Medical Treatises, Jodie Austin.- Chapter 3: "'Turn it to a Crutch': Disability and Swordsmanship in The Little French Lawyer, Matthew Carter.- Chapter 4: Mutism and Feminine Silence: Gender, Performance, and Disability in Epicoene, Melissa Geil.- Chapter 5: Contented Cuckolds: Infertility and Queer Reproductive Practice in Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Macchiavelli's Mandragola, Simone Chess.- Chapter 6: Reading Shakespeare After Neurodiversity, Wes Folkerth.- Chapter 7: Enabling Rabies in King Lear, Avi Mendelson.- Chapter 8: Limping and Lameness on the Early Modern Stage, Susan Anderson.- Chapter 9: "Lame Humor" in Beaumont and Fletcher's Love's Pilgrimage, Joyce Boro.- Chapter 10: Syphilis Patches: Form and Disability History in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Nancy Simpson-Younger.- Chapter 11: Sign Gain to Deaf Gain: Early Modern Manual Rhetoric and Modern Shakespeare Performances, Jennifer Nelson.- Chapter 12: "'This is miching mallecho. It means mischief': Problematizing Representations of Actors with Down Syndrome in Growing Up Downs, Sarah Olive.