Sacralizing and Aestheticizing Disability in Shakespeare’s Richard III

Sacralizing and Aestheticizing Disability in Shakespeare’s Richard III

Mardy Philippian, Ph.D.

Simpson University

Abstract for SAA 2016 / Seminar 49: “Shakespeare, Materialism, Religion”

Late in act 3 of Shakespeare’s Richard III, the play’s “rudely stamped” titular figure manipulatively appropriates a prayer book and “stands ‘tween two clergymen” in an act of self-sacralizing. Richard Cloucester, later King Richard, choreographs this public spectacle in an effort to elide the sense of holiness and moral probity, which was commonly associated with prayer book worship, with his own dubiously formed body. Yet this is not the only moment in the play when Richard seeks to remake himself in the image of a sacred figure. As early as 1.2.249-250, he apostrophizes in soliloquy, and through careful allusion, that he is not unlike the figure of Yahweh in the Hebrew scriptures. Richard’s disabled frame is gradually refashioned as inscrutable material form.

In my essay I argue that Richard’s use of contemporary religious books, allusions to Hebrew scripture, and the careful exploitation of his physical difference is not merely his particular collective strategy for usurping monarchical authority in Shakespeare’s late fifteenth-century England. Rather, in employing these techniques of deception and manipulation of public sentiment, Shakespeare’s Richard also partakes in, borrowing Tobin Siebers concept, an aestheticizing of disability. As Siebers argues, "Aesthetics is the human activity most identifiable with the human because it defines the process by which human begins attempt to modify themselves, by which they imagine their feelings, forms, and futures in radically different ways, and by which they bestow upon these new feelings, forms, and futures real appearances in the world (Disability Aesthetics 3). Shakespeare’s physically impaired villain, then, cunningly draws upon contemporary associations with sacred materials to aestheticize, or “modify,” his material form.

Bibliography

Cummings, Brian, Ed. The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2011.

Hobgood, Allison P. and David Houston Wood. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England.  Columbus: Ohio State U of P, 2013.

Iyengar, Sujata, Ed. Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. New York:  Routledge, 2015.

Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010.

-- --. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008.

Swift, Daniel. Shakespeare's Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2013.

Short Bio

Mardy Philippian, Ph.D.

I am currently Associate Professor of English at Simpson University in Redding, California, where I teach courses in early modern English literature and culture. My research and publications primarily draw upon three areas of investigation: disability studies, cognitive theory, and religious studies.