Circuits of disease correspond to previously unconsidered practices of caregiving in early modern English drama in this new volume by Darryl Chalk and Rebecca Totaro. They explore how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to and intersected with local and international ideas of communal care, health management, quarantine, embodiment, and theatricality.
The role of the spectators who found themselves represented in such themes of caregiving in times of crisis finds new meaning in Chalk and Totaro’s framing. Foregrounded by pioneering archival research, chapters provide new insights into several Shakespeare plays performed on stages in London and at the court of King James I, as well as several plays by his contemporaries including Webster, Dekker, and Middleton. Contributors explore plague and privilege in Romeo and Juliet, servants and caregiving in King Lear, women and herbal medicine in The Winter’s Tale, astrology in The Duchess of Malfi, and the humour that attaches itself to illness in The Roaring Girl. These case studies expand our understanding of the caregiving that connected people across place and time as powerfully as the lived experience of disease did.
Critical Introduction by Darryl Chalk (University of Southern Queensland, Australia)
1. “Power, time, meanstomeet”—Plague, movement, and privilege in Romeo and Juliet, Eileen Sperry (SUNY Empire State College, NY, USA)
2. Sallow Hal: Care and Coloration in the Henriad, Laurie Johnson (University of Southern Queensland, Australia)
3. Who Cares?: Servants and Caregiving in King Lear, Heidi Craig (Texas A&M University, USA)
4. Untender Air: Cymbeline’s Queen, Imogen, and Domestic Communities of Care, Jennifer Forsyth, (Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, USA)
5. Healing through Winter: Women, Plant Virtue, and Temporality in The Winter’s Tale, Susan C. Staub (Appalachian State University, USA)
6. “A terrible childbed has thou had, my dear”: pregnant embodiment, labour and intersubjective networks of caregiving in Pericles (3.1.56), Katarzyna Burzynska (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland)
7. Contagion and Care in Coriolanus and Timon of Athens, Brid Mary Phillips (The University of Western Australia, Australia)
8. “Drown the lamenting fool”: Shakespeare’s watery networks of heart health and disease, Claire Hansen, (Australian National University, Australia)
9. Astral Networks and Almanacs in The Duchess of Malfi, Katherine Walker (University of Nevada, USA)
10. ‘[T]he goodness of God, and the Medicines of my Father, directed by my own order and instruction’: Mary Trye and the Politics of Plague Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England, Kathleen Miller, Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland
11. Humor in Despair: Laughing at Illness in Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton's The Roaring Girl (1611), Molly Ziegler (Open University, UK)
Critical Afterword
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