Richard III's Bodies from Medieval England to Modernity

Richard III will always be central to English disability history as both man and mytha disabled medieval king made into a monster by his nations most important artist. In Richard IIIs Bodies from Medieval England to Modernity, Jeffrey Wilson tracks disability over 500 years, from Richards own manuscripts, early Tudor propaganda, and x-rays of sixteenth-century paintings through Shakespeares soliloquies, into Samuel Johnsons editorial notes, the first play produced by an African American Theater company, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the rise of disability theater. For Wilson, the changing meanings of disability created through shifting perspectives in Shakespeares plays prefigure a series of modern attempts to understand Richards body in different disciplinary contextsfrom history and philosophy to sociology and medicine. While theorizing a role for Shakespeare in the field of disability history, Wilson reveals how Richard III has become an index for some of modernitys central concernsthe tension between appearance and reality, the conflict between individual will and external forces of nature and culture, the possibility of upward social mobility, and social interaction between self and other, including questions of discrimination, prejudice, hatred, oppression, power, and justice.