Introduction

The introduction establishes the relationship between Richard’s deformity and Shakespeare’s irony through a close reading of the opening soliloquy of Richard III (“Now is the winter of our discontent”). After framing this analysis in terms of Stanley Fish’s audience-oriented literary theory – what a text does is what it means – I propose a cultural history of the deformity as the most effective response to Shakespeare’s decision to make the meaning of the deformity contingent upon the shifting interpretive frames of his audiences. The book is then divided into six chapters which traverse from specific literary exegesis to abstract theoretical questions.

Chapter One
Stigmatizing Richard III’s Deformities up to Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI: The Figural Paradigm

The first chapter will appeal to history buffs: it synthesizes currently scattered insights from the past 50 years of archival research into the representation of Richard’s deformities in the sixteenth century, including visual depictions; it adds several previously unrecognized allusions to Richard’s deformities; it offers fresh readings of some well-known Shakespearean sources (such as Thomas More and Raphael Holinshed); and it situates this narrative amidst insights gained from the recent discovery of Richard’s skeleton. I invoke Thomas Kuhn’s theory of the structure of scientific revolutions to discuss the origin and operation of stigma both in the literary history of Richard III and as a social phenomenon. The example of Richard III illustrates how stigma is rhetoric and revenge against one’s enemies and how, when repeated often enough, the rhetoric of stigma achieves the status of history and reality. If that explains how a figural interpretation of Richard III’s physical deformity became the centerpiece of England’s national identity in the age of the Tudors, then Shakespeare was just practicing what Kuhn called “normal science” at the end of 2 Henry VI when he first introduced his Richard with a figural interpretation of his deformity.

Chapter Two
The Models of Stigma in Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy: Spirituality, Psychology, Sociology

The second chapter shows how, in Richard’s first soliloquy in the middle of 3 Henry VI, Shakespeare invented a causal interpretation of deformity as an alternative to the figural interpretation, offering a psychological model of stigma to oppose the spiritual model popular in the sixteenth century. This model of stigma – in which deformity is the cause rather than the sign of villainy – was embraced by modern thinkers from Francis Bacon to Sigmund Freud, but Shakespeare actually resisted the causal interpretation in the same way he resisted the figural interpretation: by attributing it to a character with a compromised perspective. While Richard’s enemies’ figural interpretation of his deformity is inflicted by their hostility, his own causal interpretation is coordinated with his villainy and deceit: he is a liar, as he repeatedly brags, and the causal interpretation is one of his lies. As such, I suggest Shakespeare endorsed neither the spiritual nor the psychological models of stigma but, instead, what we now think of as a sociological model: the connection between deformity and villainy is not natural and absolute but culturally constructed and mediated, as argued in the modern sociologist Erving Goffman’s book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) and the twenty-first-century discourse of disability studies.

Chapter Three
The Reality of Physiognomy in Richard III

Chapter Three presents a plot twist to the narrative of a progressive Shakespeare, and a corrective to some recent readings of physiognomy in Richard III. Physiognomy is the science of interpreting essence from appearance: a close reading of the scenes of physiognomy in Richard III, in the context of the conceptual tensions in that discourse as it developed from the classical age to the Renaissance to modernity, reveals – shockingly, disturbingly – that physiognomy works perfectly in Richard III. Those who do not interpret Richard’s deformity figurally despair and die, while those who do live, prosper, and go on to establish the Tudor dynasty. Thus, physiognomy is real in Richard III given the version of reality depicted in that play: paradoxically, as Shakespeare’s first tetralogy progressed, its treatment of stigma grew more retrograde.

Chapter Four
The Unnatural Age of Margaret: Antiquating the Spiritual Model of Stigma in Richard III

Building off Chapter Three, Chapter Four suggests stigma has metaphysical stakes in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy: your attitude toward physical deformity has implications for your understanding of reality. Re-reading the retrograde Shakespeare of Chapter Three, I argue he only provided a structural confirmation of the figural interpretation of Richard’s deformity to elevate the stakes of his critique of stigma. Rather than reject the figural interpretation of deformity, he sought to reject the entire view of nature – the metaphysics – that underwrite figural interpretation. Specifically, Shakespeare made an aged and withered Queen Margaret the spokesperson for the providential theology of the Tudor myth so audiences would see this theology – literally see it – as something that is old and ugly. Margaret’s old age is as much “stage stigma” – condemnation crafted into costume – as Richard’s deformity. If so, then Shakespeare used one stigma to critique the production and perpetuation of another: he satirized the aesthetics that promote the beauty of virtue and the deformity of vice, even as – paradoxically – he himself used this very aesthetic to make this point. The sense we are left with at the end of Richard III, therefore, is that Shakespeare both accepted and rejected the figural interpretation of deformity, just as he both invented and critiqued the causal interpretation. Bringing clarity and specificity to this complexity is the principle aim of the close readings in Chapters 2-4.

Chapter Five
Richard III’s Deformity After Shakespeare: Discovering the Causal Paradigm

The climax of the story told in this book, Chapter Five shows that, given the dominance of the figural paradigm in sixteenth-century literature, Shakespeare’s causal interpretation of Richard’s deformity was clearly (in Kuhn’s terms) an “anomaly,” but that anomaly was also clearly suppressed by the figural paradigm, which continued its dominance throughout the seventeenth century – on up to the writings of David Hume and Voltaire in the 1760s. Because that’s a sweeping historical claim, there’s lots of evidence given to document it. Then, in the middle of the eighteenth century, there was a remarkable “paradigm shift” in which Shakespeare’s causal account of Richard’s deformity swung from suppressed anomaly to dominant paradigm in the span of only about 10 years (1765-75). Inaugurated by Samuel Johnson’s notes in his edition of Shakespeare’s Works (1765), this paradigm shift occurred in concert with a radical re-orientation of the motives, assumptions, and commitments of interpretation, whether of literature or of life, which this chapter uses to reflect on what modernization really was. It is often described as the rise of the age of reason and science (to replace religion), democracy (to replace monarchy), capitalism (to replace feudalism), and urbanization (to replace country living). I conclude, however, that if we extrapolate outward from the example of Richard’s deformity, we see modernization as not a gradual, incremental change but a decisive break in the third quarter of the eighteenth century when the dominant habits and beliefs related to etiology (the study of causes) and hermeneutics (the study of interpretation) shifted from figural to causal ways of thinking.

Chapter Six
Richard III’s Deformity in Modern Performance: The Changing Bodies of Character and Actor

Chapter Six continues the story of Richard’s deformity in modernity with a performance history emphasizing three periods. The first section shows the size of Richard's hump decrease down to nothing over the first half of the nineteenth century, then grow back up over the second half. This transaction reveals the competing models of authenticity – Charles Kean’s historical authenticity vs. Henry Irving’s textual authenticity – that held sway in Shakespearean theater at different points in the nineteenth century. The chapter’s second section turns to the twenty-first century and the recent trend of disabled actors (such as Kathryn Hunter, Peter Dinklage, and Mat Fraser) playing the part of Richard III. Drawing upon emerging theories of disability theater, I argue the “cripping” of Richard has been more about politics than aesthetics. Examples running from Peter Dinklage’s Richard III (2004) to Mike Lew’s Teenage Dick (2018) suggest that, while it’s nice to have an actor who can connect with the character because he or she truly knows what it’s like to be disabled, the “cripping” of Richard has more centrally been an effort to draw attention to unfair hiring practices biased against people with disabilities, especially in an entertainment industry obsessed with physical appearance. The third section brings us fully up-to-date by analyzing the erasure of Richard's deformity in recent global and digital appropriations, including Al-Bassam’s Richard III, an Arab Tragedy (2007), the Netflix show House of Cards (2013-18), and analogies drawn to the rise of US President Donald Trump. As these examples illustrate, modern life – especially politics – deeply resonates with stories and themes which emerge, in Shakespeare's play, specifically in response to the issue of physical deformity. But what are the implications of drawing comparisons to Richard III that erase the motivating feature – deformity – of Richard III?

Conclusion
The Anthropology of Audience: Historical Presentism in Shakespeare Studies

The book concludes with a methodological manifesto engaging the two dominant forces in Shakespeare studies right now – historicism and presentism – and offering a synthesis in the notion of “historical presentism.” In brief, historicism is a discourse of truth: it is nostalgic for objectivity. It is about the meaning of literature. Presentism is purposively subjective: it is a discourse of virtue. It is about the use of literature. At their cores, what the historicist and the presentist are really saying is, “I want to be scientific” vs. “I want to be political.” Offering the story told in Shakespeare’s Hunch as an example, I theorize an approach which collapses the categories of historicism and presentism into a historical presentism which does historicist readings of presentist renderings of Shakespeare. On the one hand, this approach returns to and advances the audience-oriented literary theories used to frame the introduction (focusing on the work of Stanley Fish, Steven Mailloux, and Wolfgang Iser). On the other hand, this approach to Shakespeare studies dates back at least 30 years to reception histories like Graham Holderness’s The Shakespeare Myth (1988) and Gary Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare (1989), which grew into concerns with The Appropriation of Shakespeare, the title of the 1991 collection edited by Jean Marsden. After exploding in the 1990s, this field was cemented in 2005 with the creation of a dedicated journal, Borrowers and Lenders: A Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar. In 2006, Douglas Lanier dubbed this field “Shakespearean cultural studies,” but it has never been fully theorized. What are we doing when we are unearthing the reception of Shakespeare throughout time and across the globe? Why do we care about the uses and abuses of Shakespeare? I invoke the discipline of anthropology to theorize the “anthropology of audience” that has arisen in Shakespeare studies. The simplest way to describe the anthropology of audience is to say that it is the objective study of the subjective experience of art. It addresses the origins, motives, commitments, development, organization, networks, and institutions of audience behavior in an effort to create a body of knowledge about interpretive difference, consensus, disagreement, negotiation, and change. As the study of artistic experience in the context of cultural engagement, the anthropology of audience marries the philosophy of phenomenology with the social science of cultural materialism for a new kind of Shakespearean reception history and cultural studies.