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.

This chapter considers how Samuel Johnson’s various disabilities shaped perceptions of him during his lifetime and continue to influence critical and biographical assessments of his personality, conversational prowess, and literary style. Given that modern conceptions of disability formed in the nineteenth century, I discuss why interpretations of Johnson’s mental and physical impairments might be better served by focusing on terms that were current in the eighteenth century, such as melancholy and peculiarity. Johnson’s friends and associates frequently commented on the “peculiarity” of his bodily movements. I examine episodes in which these peculiarities inspired people to stare at Johnson or to imitate him. These episodes reveal the deeper significance that eighteenth-century men and women ascribed to unusual and surprising forms of embodiment. I conclude by exploring the intriguing connections critics have made between Johnson’s “peculiar” body and his distinctive prose style.