| This dissertation examines the ancient but insistant aesthetics of stigma as they appear in Shakespeare's plays, focusing on the figural systems he inherits from earlier English drama and those he invents on his own. In contrast to the reading that treats the marked body as a simple sign of some spiritual, mental, or social deficiency, I contend that Shakespeare recognized and represented stigma as an uneasy encounter that is constitutionally tragicomic. After my introduction outlines the typology of stigma in early English drama, and positions Shakespeare in relation to it, Chapter 1 considers two stigmata that appear in Shakespeare's first tetralogy. One of them has been obsessively addressed, the other seldom acknowledged, but I offer a reading in which Richard's deformities and Margaret's old age are most meaningful when taken together, as a dialectic, each constituting the significance of the other. I argue that Shakespeare characterizes the theological model of stigma as old and ugly by attributing it to old Queen Margaret, while he satirizes the psychological model that is usually positioned as a more modern alternative by attributing it to Richard himself, a compulsive and self-confessed liar. My second chapter explores Shakespeare's mounting suspicion of stigma as a viable aesthetic practice by considering the flexibility of character and genre in The Merchant of Venice in light of Shakespeare's careful avoidance of the artificial nose Marlowe had strapped on Barabas. Addressing Falstaff's obesity and Bardolph's rosacea in Chapter 3, I suggest that the naturalized stage of Shakespeare's second tetralogy gestures toward the modern medical model of stigma as a sign of poor health in the past and a painful death in the future. In Chapter 4, readings of Thersites' ugliness and Ajax's monstrosity show Shakespeare trying (with some success) to out-maneuver the primitive origins of stigma in the Greco-Roman tradition he scourges with Troilus and Cressida. A fifth chapter concludes this study by detailing Shakespeare's most successfully skeptical response to stigma, his treatment of Caliban -- or, rather, his treatment of Prospero, Trinculo, and Stephano -- in The Tempest. |
