SSWR: Recognizing Early Modern Disability from "The Fair Maid of the Exchange" to "Richard III."

Hello Community! 
Join us for our first Society of the Study of Women in the Renaissance lecture for the 2026 Spring semester. This lecture about disability will be lead by Dr. Genevieve Love who is Professor of English at Colorado College. Her work focuses on disability, theatricality, and performance in Shakespeare and early modern drama. Her most recent book, Shakespeare and Disability Theory (Bloomsbury, 2025), explores how disability studies transforms the ways we read and perform Shakespeare, with particular attention to disability knowledge, recognition, and performance by disabled artists. Her earlier book, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability (Bloomsbury, 2018), examines the relationship between physical disability and theatrical representation in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. She also edited the anonymous The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607) for The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (2020).

What does it mean to recognize disability in Shakespeare and early modern drama? My first book, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability, explored the ways physical disability becomes central to early modern drama’s thinking about theatrical representation itself. My more recent book, Shakespeare and Disability Theory, shifts attention from the self-contained “figure” of disability to disability in motion: circulating among bodies, characters, texts, and performances. This talk develops that shift through a series of encounters with disability recognition. Beginning with the anonymous The Fair Maid of the Exchange, I consider disability’s relationship to theatrical imitation and figuration. I then turn to King Lear, where recent disability scholarship locates disability not in isolated characters but in networks of embodied knowledge, interdependence, care, and critical recognition. Finally, I consider Richard III in performance, asking what disabled actors recognize in Richard and what their performances make newly recognizable in the play. Across these cases, I argue for recognizing Shakespearean disability not—or not only—in the singular disabled character, but among characters and plays: in networks, intertexts, performance histories, and motion.

Join the lecture here: https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/j/83253940617?pwd=kiavjRApYj3Broul0Vm15SYcVQCxHS.1