"Stigma in Shakespeare" at Case Western's Evil Incarnate Conference

Part of the Stigma in Shakespeare project was presented at the conference Evil Incarnate: Manifestations of Villains and Villainy at Case Western Reserve University. 

Abstract

The Renaissance was filled with a number of texts and traditions that transformed what you or I might call “difference” into the more dire ideas of error, crime, sin, villainy, immorality, and evil. This paper addresses a special instance of this conceptual slide as it occurs in drama, where the analogy between physical and moral abnormality is ready at hand, an analogy Shakespeare both exploited and undercut. Shakespearean villains as various as Richard III, Aaron the Moor, Shylock the Jew, Edmund the Bastard, Falstaff, Thersites, and Caliban are marked off by their bodies because physical difference was the insignia of evil in the Renaissance. This physiognomy is as ancient as the Greek ideal of kalokagathia, “the beautiful in the good,” and as current as the Disney aesthetic that assures us all villains are ugly, but how did Shakespeare negotiate the claim of stigma and its demand that our eyes do the work of our minds? Like his contemporaries and his characters, Shakespeare’s critics tend to treat the aberrant body as a symbol, an object with a static significance, but the plays resist this position because they show meaning being made in the volatile exchange between stigmatizer and stigmatized, meaning that is therefore circumstantial and inherently dramatic. I contend that Shakespeare developed a specifically dramatic way of thinking about stigma by staging it as a scene, by showing how it takes its meaning from an explosive social encounter, effectively exposing its concealed status as a cultural event as opposed to an attribute of the human body. We might even say that Shakespeare fathered the line of thought made famous by Erving Goffman, whose dramaturgical theory of sociology is based on the Shakespearean conceit that “all the world’s a stage.” Like Goffman’s book on Stigma (1963), and the field of sociology it established, Shakespeare’s plays show that stigma begins in ambivalence about difference and ends in uneasiness for both the stigmatized and the stigmatizer, as well as – crucially – for the audience observing the scene of stigma.