In this excellent book, Loftis advocates for the cross-pollination of disability and Shakespeare studies. Disability studies emphasizes inclusion, access, and universal design. These values should be present in Shakespeare studies—yet, as Loftis points out in her afterword, “disability studies . . . has been . . . neglected in Shakespeare studies” (118). Drawing on her expertise both as a Shakespearean and a disability theorist, Loftis reveals where Shakespeare studies has fallen short of inclusion and offers ideas for the field's future.
The introduction begins with a frank disclosure: “I'm a Shakespearian, and I have a disability,” Loftis states (1). She argues that because “disability studies . . . emphasizes disability as culture” (4), it behooves Shakespeareans to think deeply about the role of Shakespearean criticism and performance in fostering cultural attitudes about disability. The cultural significance of Shakespeare presents an opportunity for the field to engage in disability justice and activism (9).
In chapter 1, Loftis examines Shakespeare's most famously disabled character: Richard III. Criticism has tried to erase Richard's disability (scoliosis) even as theater has exaggerated it in performance. Loftis discusses the reasons behind critics’ stubborn “refusal” to “accept” Richard's disability and comments on how that erasure “is a manifestation of a larger cultural denial” of disability (19). She also points out that the “stage tradition . . . embraces the opposite, but equally troubling, stereotype in which disability is the sole defining factor in Richard's character” (19). Both traditions obscure Richard's “internalized disability oppression and hate” (44) and get in the way of thinking about how the social stigma of disability engenders shame among disabled people.
Historically, disability studies emerged in the wake of the disability justice movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which rallied around equal opportunity, as captured in the rallying cry, “nothing about us, without us.” Chapter 2 extends this principle of inclusion to Shakespearean theater. Loftis draws on her lived experience as a playgoer to explore the messy yet rewarding fight for disability access in contemporary Shakespeare theater. I found this to be an outstanding chapter, and I was interested in Loftis's exploration of the reflections of disability access managers at Shakespeare's Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Loftis convincingly argues that access managers play an important role in facilitating greater understanding of disability (55).
Disability studies advances the social model of disability over the medical model. The latter treats a physical and mental impairment as “a pathological state,” one that demands a cure (3). Chapter 3 compares and contrasts two Shakespeare therapy programs for “people with mental disabilities” (79). Loftis argues that Stephen Wolfert's DE-CRUIT, a program serving war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, “encapsulates the social model” and is “focused on building and fostering disability community” (80), whereas Kelly Hunter's Hunter Heartbeat Method (HHM), aimed at autistic children and their caregivers, “bears the impulse of the cultural colonizer” (87). Loftis is unsparing in her critique, which is based in a detailed analysis of the rhetoric and structure of one of the language-acquisition games used in the HHM. In “Teaching Caliban to Speak,” autistic children playact as Caliban while their neurotypical adult teachers pretend to be Miranda. The children learn, via their study of Miranda's famous speech “I pitied thee, / Took pains to make thee speak” (Tempest 1.2.355–56, quoted in Loftis, 98), to reject their own language (which may include “verbal stimming”) as Caliban's “gabble” (98). Loftis exposes the colonialist logic of this game, writing that HHM reenacts an “imperialist impulse . . . between the neurotypical colonizer and the colonized autistic child” (100).
Chapter 4, the final chapter, examines old age and crip time through a close reading of Still Dreaming (2014), a documentary film directed by Hank Rogerson and Jilann Spitzmiller. The film tracks the efforts by two young Shakespeare directors to recruit the senior residents of the Lillian Booth Actors’ Home in a community performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream (103). Some of the elderly actors have dementia and other memory impairments. Tensions arise, yet at the closing of the film, the participants comment on how they had “fun” and felt a stronger “sense of community” (117). In contrast to previous chapters’ use of multiple sources to shape nuanced readings, this chapter was limited by its tight focus on the film as its chief source of evidence. I wonder to what degree the filmmakers were able to shape and mold the testimony of the participants.
Throughout, Loftis acknowledges that “creating access is . . . not easy,” and that at times “some disability accommodations will naturally conflict with each other” (10). Yet Loftis encourages Shakespeareans to develop “the ability to anticipate the needs of someone with a disability without being told about those needs in advance” (74). I learned much from this book and I hope it will be read widely and discussed by readers of Shakespeare, critical disability studies, and theater.
