Our project aims at investigating the representation of cognitive disability in drama texts from the sixteenth century to today, with a focus on the reception of a few Shakespearean female characters: first and foremost, Ophelia, but also the Jailer’s Daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen, Lady Macbeth and Cassandra. Historically, women have been discriminated against by patriarchal society; women who have cognitive disability have experienced a further exclusion from social accessibility. Their behaviours have been read as performances susceptible of being interpreted on the basis of a two-way transaction between the arts and the sciences.
Our methodology is interdisciplinary bridging different fields, including reception studies, disability studies, the history of European medicine, and the semiotics of theatre and drama. We will take into examination texts and materials belonging to multiple European countries. Accessing Ophelia will include the organisation of one-day seminars/conferences and lead to the publication of an edited volume and a number of articles. Moreover, on the basis of the experience gained by the participation in the subproject CEMP (Classical and Early Modern Paradoxes in England) within the previous Project of Excellence, we will create a digital database of texts which feature relevant interpretations of the cognitive disability of the Shakespearean dramatis personae (from eighteenth-century critics to modern neuroscientists), along with iconographic materials, historic audio recordings, silent films, etc.
Group leader: Emanuel Stelzer
Internal members:
- Silvia Bigliazzi
- Petra Bjelica
- Felice Gambin
- Cristiano Ragni
- Roberta Zanoni
External members:
- Clark Lawlor (Northumbria University, Letteratura inglese e Storia della medicina)
- Sandra Pietrini (Università di Trento, Storia del teatro)
- Anne Sophie Refskou (Aarhus University, Letterature comparate)
- Martina Zamparo (Università di Udine, Letteratura inglese)
Actions: WP 1.1, WP 1.3
References:
Kiefer, Carol Solomon, ed. 2001. The Myth and Madness of Ophelia. Amherst: Mead Art Museum, Amherst College.
Peterson, Kaara L. & Deanne Williams, eds. 2012. The Afterlife of Ophelia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rhodes, Kimberly. 2016. Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century. Abingdon & New York: Routledge.
Showalter, Elaine. 1985. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism”. In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker & Geoffrey Hartman, 77-94. New York and London: Methuen.