African American teachers are in high demand in urban schools. Presupposing these spaces as operating within a matrix of domination for African Americans in the United States, in this chapter, two African American scholars of differing genders model womanist thinking as politic educational ethics and praxis. hooks, Fanon, and Lorde elucidate the Black subject’s ontological condition as a problem of spectatorship. Womanist theory responds to sociopolitical forces devaluing the self as minoritized subject. Through critical self-reflexivity that acknowledges the debilitating white normative gaze and the inner turmoil of its subjugation, womanist thinking offers a normative syntax of freedom. A womanist praxis of radical subjectivity and a pedagogy of love excavates one’s inner visions for oneself and for one’s students that engenders self-authorship.

This introduction begins by setting up the core question of this book: why is it that disability is still frequently used as a metaphor, despite awareness that this is harmful – and what can we as readers and receivers of classical texts do about it? The role played by spectators, by models of reception, and by ways of understanding vision in this problem are underlined. The chapter introduces the concept of assemblage theory, seeing it as something that arises out of the focus on the reader evident in reception theory’s beginnings. It draws out some of the benefits of an assemblage-thinking model, weighing them against other ways of understanding reception and relation. It closes with some examination of the various activisms and limitations evident throughout the book.

Chapter Five attempts to draw out some strategies of visual activism, or resistant spectatorship from the figure of the blind character. Leaning on analyses of staring in disability studies and Black feminist philosophy, it argues that looking back is not only a retrospective gaze but also an activist one. Plays by Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, Peter Rose, John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, Henry Chettle and John Day, and others are at the core of this chapter, as well as other paratexts for discourses on the ethics of spectating (including, for instance, Judith Butler and Susan Sontag’s writing on the ethics of looking at photographs of torture). The chapter concludes that spectatorship needs to divest itself of a view-from-nowhere model and move towards a situated view-from-somewhere model, that emphasises its partiality and its accountability.

In Chapter Four we look at what is perhaps the most frequent metaphorical use of blindness: to stand for insight, second sight, or prophecy. The chapter situates this within what is known in disability studies as the ‘supercrip trope’, and looks in particular at the theatre’s special interest in Tiresias as key to the perpetuation of this trope. The plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, Brian Friel, Samuel Beckett and John Milton are discussed in this chapter, among others. Finally, the chapter compares the theatre’s (and theatrical spectators’ special implication in this trope with more liberatory ways of figuring blindness in speculative fiction (drawing on the work of Sami Schalk).

The book's Conclusion turns to a context which is seemingly unrelated to early modern drama: twenty-first-century professional football. It suggests that present-day culture's pervasive fascination with the skilled, youthful bodies of professional football players finds a corollary in early modern playwrights' and spectators' demonstrable interest in the physical skills of the boy actors who have been the subject of this book. The Conclusion recapitulates the book's central argument for the valuable physical skills boy actors developed and showcased, suggesting that an enhanced appreciation of those skills will allow us more readily to imagine their important contribution to early modern theatrical culture.

Chapter 3 shifts from Britain and Switzerland to France, where electric demonstrations and experimental physics courses had become extremely popular in the 1780s. The artist Girodet referenced the visual and structural features of eighteenth-century electricity in both his written and his painted work. Specifically, he was drawn to its treatment of the human body, which was said to be a porous and penetrable entity capable of receiving and transmitting this powerful, immaterial force. Yet Girodet’s paintings featured dissolving bodies, strange atmospheric effects, and highly unorthodox forms of illumination that were incompatible with the empirical procedures that were central to the study of electricity. Reflecting on the revolutionary implications of a porous conception of selfhood, Girodet’s paintings thus interrogated the epistemological and political viability of an electrified body.

Brecht the theater theoretician is better described as the theater practitioner. His innovative concepts that have come to mark the modern theater were the product of his reflections on the experiments and lessons he learned from his collaborative work in the theater and on the stage. In short, Brecht’s staging practices ground the “Brechtian” approach to theater, even though he never articulated a formal acting method, sometimes contradicted himself, and rarely recommended that actors or theater practitioners with whom he worked read his theoretical writings. This essay traces the development of key concepts around notions of nonmimetic realism and anti-illusionary theater that fed into the epic theater as well as his views of anti-consumerist spectatorship, produced in the theater through episodic structure, distancing or Verfremdung, historicization, and the social Gestus. The centrality of contradiction and dialectical thinking became for Brecht the basis of negation and imagining innovative forms in the theater for his political agenda of changing society, most clearly accomplished in his model of the Lehrstück or learning play aimed at the collective learning process of the actors.

This chapter is about sensibility, which is the term that was commonly used in the second half of the eighteenth century to refer to a special capacity to respond with sensitivity to one’s environment. Colloquially understood as the heightened responsiveness of feeling or emotion, sensibility – in cultural, literary, artistic, historical, social, philosophical, and political contexts – reached far beyond what either of these more familiar terms convey. Eighteenth-century thinking about sensibility, in all of its complexity, remains deeply relevant to twenty-first century theories of affect, feeling, and emotion, and provides robust resources for, and in some cases correctives to, current theoretical and philosophical thought.

What do audience members feel when they go to playhouses, and how and why do they feel it? This essay explores responses to performances within plays as models for imagining the circulation of emotions in theatres. In Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio watches other men play-act versions of himself courting Hero, while Beatrice and Benedick fall in love by eavesdropping on staged stories of each other’s feelings. In Measure for Measure, a deputy representing Duke Vincentio responds unpredictably to watching Isabella’s commissioned performance of pleading on her brother’s behalf. Like playgoers, these characters experience emotions by participating vicariously in deliberately orchestrated dramas. In particular, identifying with surrogates who act on their behalf offers them otherwise risky forms of affective licence. In his depictions of these responses to performances, Shakespeare explores the uneasy status of the artificially induced emotions experienced in playhouses, and the thorny question of who or what is responsible for generating them.

On screen Bette Davis captivates James Baldwin. Baldwin is unsure what to make of her, except that he recognizes a kinship between the two of them and he is not alone in finding himself in Bette Davis’ eyes. What to make of this fascination with Davis? This essay parses the affective currents that flow between Davis, Baldwin, and the playwright Adrienne Kennedy, using the frameworks of camp and melodrama. Both affective genres build identification through excess and exaggeration – camp hyperbolizes style while melodrama amplifies feeling. These queer forms attach to Davis in different ways, revealing identificatory strategies for coping with the unhappiness of minoritarian subjectivity while simultaneously revealing the vacuum that lies at the heart of this excess.