Destabilizing Disability: Performance and Genre on the Early Modern Stage and Page

This dissertation examines performative representations of disability in Early Modern English Literature that disrupt conceptions of normative embodiment and destabilize genre conventions. In Margaret Cavendish’s closet dramas, John Milton’s post-blindness works, and several anonymous Shakespearean-era plays, disability functions not as lack but as a generative and disruptive force. Drawing on theories of performativity, this dissertation frames disability as a socially-enacted identity that unsettles narrative expectations and enables alternative forms of agency. The texts discussed resist able-bodied expectations by embedding impairment into their formal structures and thematic concerns. From Stump’s prosthetic heroism in A Larum for London to Milton’s strategic disidentification with the prophetic lineage of blind poets in Paradise Lost, each chapter highlights how disability reorients models of authorship, virtue, and desire. In foregrounding moments of disability gain, this work shows how early modern literature can not only reflect but actively challenge cultural narratives of bodily deficiency. This dissertation thus offers new insights into early modern literature's engagement with disability not as a marginal condition, but as a formative influence on aesthetics and genre.