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Chapter Three begins with a reading of Everyman, and deals with the persistent narrative use of disability as a kind of metaphorical death. This is not just the case in medieval or early modern drama, but persists in the present day where it is still evident in the dangerous (and deadly) ideological fantasy that insists that disabled people’s lives are less worth living than those of enabled people. As well as examining this trope in texts like Seneca’s Oedipus, and through characters such as Lamech in biblically-inspired drama, this chapter also begins to address some of the problems of the model of a classical tradition as a way of figuring reception. The chapter closes with some thoughts on the relationship between this eugenicist conflating of disability and closeness to death, and gender.
Toria Johnson interrogates the classification and portrayal of compassion in two major texts: the anonymous morality play Everyman (c. 1508) and Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606). Taking these plays as examples of pre- and post-Reformation approaches to compassionate interaction, she scrutinises a noticeable shift in attitudes towards the idea of pity, both as a fundamental human trait, and as an organising principle for human interaction. Whereas pre-Reformation plays like Everyman stress the volatility and unreliability of an emotion like pity – preferring instead the more established structure offered by charity – King Lear imagines a world without charity, and without the Church as an overseer of interpersonal exchange. Lear, she argues, reflects an emotional response to the Protestant revision of medieval penitential culture, and in so doing, Shakespeare imagines the possible consequences of England’s new emotional landscape. This chapter examines how the language, structure and ceremony of ‘compassion’ changed in the wake of the English Protestant Reformation, and how these shifts altered the way people experienced or understood the compassion of their communities.
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