Abstract

Shakespeare’s Richard III was the first text to describe Richard as “hunch-backed,” also the first instance of that word in English. Earlier writers addressed Richard’s physical disability, but Shakespeare was the first to envision him as an almost inhuman monster. The “hunch” belongs to Shakespeare more than Richard. But “hunch-backed” wasn’t Shakespeare’s word. It was a misprint in the second quarto of Richard III for Shakespeare’s “bunch-backed,” the common early-modern word in the first quarto and first folio. The “hunch” belongs to us, not Shakespeare—his audience, not the author. It’s our “hunch” which we see as his, (mis)interpretation incorporated into text, indicating the swirl of objective reality and subjective interpretation that always attends Richard III’s body.

Equally concerned with the creation and reception of Richard’s disability, this book shows it travelling through time into and away from Shakespeare’s hands, on down to today. While mired in details of medieval English history, Richard III and its configuration of disability, villainy, and tragedy still speak to us in the twenty-first century with a surprising urgency. “Foremost among the standard-bearers of Disability Studies is Shakespeare’s Richard III,” Tobin Siebers noted just before his death in 2015. Richard’s body was international front-page news in 2012 when his skeleton was discovered.  He’s in that echelon of Shakespearean characters—Shylock, Falstaff, Hamlet, Othello, Caliban—who have entire books written about them. The four greatest Shakespearean actors of the past four centuries—Burbage, Garrick, Kean, Olivier—all played Richard before Hamlet. The first Shakespeare play professionally staged in America? Richard III in 1749. The first play performed by an African American acting company? Richard III in 1821. Documentaries are made about the challenge and importance of Richard III. It was Shakespeare’s second-most popular play in quarto, and most performed history play in the eighteenth century and the twenty-first.  It inspired the recent Netflix hit House of Cards, and has drawn comparisons to the rise of Donald Trump in the United States.

How is Richard III always both so historical and so current? Why are issues related to medieval disability so relevant to modern life? Why is Shakespeare’s play so persistent? Why do we care so much about Richard III? What is the significance of his body—not only its meaning in Shakespeare’s text (what it signifies), but also its importance as a cultural touchstone in England and beyond (why it is significant)?

This book connects the answer to the first question (about textual meaning) to the answer to the second (about cultural importance). I argue that Shakespeare’s ironic representation of Richard’s disability—which destabilized meaning by dramatizing different meanings being made, deferring meaning to different audiences interpreting disability from different perspectives—created a flexible conceptual space with a huge gravitational pull: some of our most consequential theories of modern aesthetics, theology, philosophy, ethics, psychology, sociology, historiography, science, medicine, and politics have been brought into attempts to understand Richard’s body. In a quintessentially Shakespearean exchange, the playwright’s dramatic mode, both tragic and ironic, calls upon some of life’s biggest questions (because it is tragic), but defers answers to the audience (because it is ironic), leaving Richard’s body open to interpretation in different ages embracing different attitudes toward stigma. The changing meaning of disability repeatedly re-contextualized through shifting perspectives and circumstances in Shakespeare's first tetralogy has thus prompted and sustained more than 400 years of changing interpretations of Richard, his body, his behavior, and his status as either the villain or victim of Tudor history. Shakespeare’s irony makes possible a cultural study using Richard’s disability to tell the story of our encounter with tragedy in modernity. And, in the conclusion to this book, this multi-century story opens up a new approach to Shakespearean phenomena widely interpreted, debated, and adapted in modern culture, called the “anthropology of audience,” which marries the historicism and presentism currently at odds in Shakespeare studies.