Shakespeare and Early Modern Madness

Shakespeare and Early Modern Madness , the first collection to focus on madness and mental health in early modern drama, is energized by the belief that madness is a variable concept, situated among a rapidly shifting series of cultural vectors. In addition to investigating the ubiquity of mental health tropes in Shakespearean theater, and their appearance in plays by Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe, the volume showcases Renaissance madness’s impressive variety: its affiliation with mental states as different as demonic possession, melancholic dreams, ecstasy and rapture, rage and fury, excessive grief, and aesthetic pleasure. The essays further demonstrate that madness in early modern drama can be approached through a diverse array of critical perspectives; their authors pull not only from historicist methodologies, disability studies, mad studies, and theories of gender and race, but also from the psychological and psychiatric sciences. The volume concludes with a section on activism and pedagogy, which asks how we can use early modern plays to promote the inclusion of students and scholars with lived experience of neurodiversity.    Leslie C. Dunn  is Professor Emerita of English at Vassar College, USA. She has published articles and book chapters on early modern music and gender, original practices at Shakespeare’s Globe, and Shakespearean disability theatre. She also co-edited two interdisciplinary collections,  Embodied Voices  (1994) and  Gender and Song in Early Modern England  (2014) and edited  Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama (Palgrave, 2020).  Avi Mendelson immigrated from Boston to London midway through his PhD at Brandeis University, USA. His defended dissertation is about madness in Shakespeare and early modern drama. Avi’s scholarship appears in the volumes Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama (Palgrave, 2020) and Inclusive Shakespeares (Palgrave, 2023). Additionally, Avi is a theatre maker whose performance credits include The Pleasure of Your Bedlam (Arcola Theatre) and The Bacchae (Tower Theatre).