Shakespeare and Early Modern Madness

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 Shakespeare’s 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. Avi’s 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).

• Chapter 01: Introduction.- Chapter 02: Shakespeare’s 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 Jonson’s 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.