1st Edition
Kingship, Madness, and Masculinity on the Early Modern Stage Mad World, Mad Kings
Introduction: madness, kingship, and early modern masculinity
Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy
Section 1: Distracted kingship
1. "Cold in great affairs:" finding madness in the writer’s method: decoding representations of the madness of Shakespeare’s Henry VI
Alison Basil
2. "Bad is the world": Richard III and social deformity
Liberty S. Stanavage
3. "Every madman dreameth waking": Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale
Carole Levin
4. "Now quit you of great shames": Henry V and the mad French king
Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy
Section Two: Fractured masculinity
5. "The strangest men that ever nature made!" Wildness, lovesickness, and sodomy in Marlowe’s Edward II and Tamburlaine the Great
Sarah Crockarell
6. Murderous distraction and the downfall of the tyrant in Thomas Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy
William David Green
7. Sad stories of the death of kings: using despair to write history
Jeffrey S. Squires
Section Three: Performed madness
8. Tom a Bedlam’s masculine melancholy and King Lear’s missing mad song
Stacey Jocoy
9. "My honor's at the stake": anger, illness, and royal identity in All's Well that Ends Well
Deb Streusand
10. "Let hell make Crook’d my mind": kingship and madness in Richard III
Benjamin Curns
11. Feigning sick: King Lear, Volpone, and the strategic performance of disability
R.W. Jones
12. Performing the "mad" prince: mental illness and princeliness in Hamlet
Rachel Stewart
Conclusion: the future of mad kings
Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy
Biography
Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy is Assistant Professor of Performance and Theatre History at Northern Arizona University. Her research interests include the adaptation of early modern history plays for American political contexts. Her first book, Like a King: Casting Shakespeare’s Histories for Citizens and Subjects, was published in 2020.
