What Dramatic Literature Teaches about Disability

Abstract

Disabled people have always been represented in dramatic literature. However, the appearance of disabled characters prior to the mid 20th century may be considered primarily in terms of their dramatic functionality and symbolic value rather than representing any explorations of disability itself. Tiresias, for example, is an embodiment of the proverb that ‘there are none so blind as those who will not see’, while Richard III’s deformity and both Lear’s and Hamlet’s ‘madness’ are manifestations of ‘something being rotten in the state’ as a result of the ‘natural order’, or ‘great chain of being’ having been disturbed.