Staging Legible Disabilities

If a dramatic text requires the prosthesis of the actor's body to embody and thereby stage disability, how does the representation of disability change when thus embodied? How does the embodied stage presence of an actor alter an audience's interpretation and experience of disability within the text?

Lear's cast of non-normate bodies provides ample room to explore how dramatic prosthesis impacts drama's depiction of and engagement with disability. As Row-Heyveld observes, "Lear fills the stage with disabled bodies: mutilated bodies, marginalized bodies, unstable bodies, unwieldy bodies, bodies in pain, bodies at the edge of death" ("'Known and Feeling Sorrows'" 157). Gloucester's blindness serves as an example of staging a (sometimes) legible disability, and its role within the play has been a focal point for productions and scholarship alike. While much of the critical history on blindness in Lear depends on traditional theoretical models, interpretations of Gloucester's blindness shift considerably when its embodiment on stage as well as its perception by an embodied audience are taken into account.

In some ways, Gloucester's blindness initially appears a textbook case of narrative prosthesis and the materiality of metaphor, as scholars like Robert B. Pierce have argued. From Kent's opening admonition that Lear "[s]ee better" (1.1.180) to Lear's final confession that his "eyes are not o' th' best" (5.3.336), the play relies on, as Wood notes, "conventional uses of eyesight and blindness" ("Shakespeare and Disability Studies" 282) to map characters' accurate or inaccurate perceptions of the world around them. 19 Gloucester feels he is physically blinded because he failed to "see" Edmund's deception, admitting "I stumbled when I saw" (4.1.20); his reading of his own condition relies on the traditional "paradox of internal sight in the blind" (Pierce 158). Blind director David Richman applies a similar metaphorical reading: "I would not have Gloucester physically stumble in [4.1]. Were he to do so, the important contrast implied in 'I stumbled when I saw' might be lost" (157). Even Edgar believes that his father's adultery "cost him his eyes" (5.3.207).

But what happens when we consider Gloucester's blindness embodied on stage? 20 While blindness is not always a visible disability, Gloucester's blinding and blindness are hypervisible in the play, with attention dramatically called to the bodies that perform it. As Lin observes regarding early modern productions of Lear, "the figurative meanings of sight take a backseat to the gory physicality of eyeballs dripping with blood" (4). Cornwall graphically cries, "Upon these eyes of thine I'll set my foot" (3.7.82) and, "Out, vile jelly!" (3.7.101) as he removes Gloucester's eyes one at a time. Afterwards, Gloucester is described as being "eyeless" (3.7.117; 4.6.254), having a "bleeding face" (3.7.127), that his "sweet eyes, they bleed" (4.1.62), and having "bleeding rings" (5.3.225). These descriptions draw attention over and over again to the palimpsest of his eyes and the embodied representation of blindness. When Lear recognizes Gloucester, he focuses on his eyes: "I remember thine eyes well enough. Dost thou squinny at me? No, do thy worst, blind Cupid" (4.6.151-2) and then remarks that he has "[n]o eyes in your head" (4.6.160). 21 These textual markers indicate that Gloucester's blindness is signaled on stage through absent eyes, a bleeding face, and a squint, suggesting an actor may play the part with wrapped eyes, stage blood, and/or closed or squinting eyes.

These material details of Gloucester's blindness are not only hypervisual, calling on an audience to look, but they are hyperphysical, calling on an actor to be. Reading blindness through the lens of dramatic prosthesis directs attention to the ways embodiment impacts how blindness is performed, received, and interpreted. The performed external markers of blindness, such as covered or squinting eyes, may restrict the (likely sighted) actor's ability to see, and they most certainly impact his pace, blocking, and movements as he navigates the stage. To whatever extent Gloucester's blindness is read as a metaphor—by the characters or the audience—its embodied presence on the stage still foregrounds its material experiences. 22

But the considerations of the staged disability are not the actor's alone. Lear also demonstrates the network of bodies needed to display disability, for "Lear reveals that disability knowledge is built in relationship" (Row-Heyveld, "'Known and Feeling Sorrows'" 163). Blindness is embodied by Gloucester but also constructed by the interactions and reactions of the other characters. This network tethers the bodies of disabled characters to the bodies of their fellow actors. Inevitably, the performance concerns of embodying blindness, such as pacing and blocking, ripple through every other body connected to them. For instance, Edgar first recognizes his father's blindness because he enters "poorly led" (4.1.10) by a guide. 23 Although the adverb 'poorly' can certainly describe the Old Man's economic status, as he is a long-term tenant of Gloucester's, Richman interprets it as describing the quality of the leading: "I know from considerable experience that a well-intentioned but inexperienced person such as Gloucester's kindly tenant will instinctively grasp the blind person by the upper arm and thrust the blind person ahead of him. Such a position will be awkward, disorienting, and potentially frightening—especially for the newly damaged Gloucester," resulting in "slow, deliberate, shuffling steps" (157). In contrast, Richman imagines that Edgar could "prove a more efficacious guide" (158) and lead properly by the elbow. While such choices demonstrate the spectrum of approaches available to a director's discretion, they also demonstrate how drama requires the realities of (performed) disabled bodies to be considered and accounted for in ways that textual representations do not.

Crucially, the network of bodies that participates in staging disability extends to the audience itself. As the newly blinded Gloucester "climbs" the cliff, he relies on Edgar to physically guide him and to audibly narrate the visual aspects of the scene. His impairment necessitates these accommodations. But if the disabled Gloucester finds himself disoriented in this scenario, as Richman imagines, the audience is likely disoriented about what they are "seeing" as well. In original staging practices, Edgar and Gloucester would be navigating a flat, mostly bare stage, leaving audiences to rely on spoken clues, such as Edgar's descriptions, to establish the setting in their mind's eye. For first-time experiencers of the play, it is unclear whether Edgar is delivering "real" or "feigned" descriptions of the scene, and thus "playgoers, who also do not hear the sea but wonder whether they are meant to imagine that they do, share in the blind man's disorientation" (Richman 159). By making "spectators partake of the blind man's fundamental uncertainty" (Richman 158), the cliff scene disrupts the audience's suspended disbelief and aligns their visual uncertainty with Gloucester's. Are they to "believe" Edgar's description is "real" and thus imagine the cliffs in their mind's eye? Are they to suspect that Edgar is feigning the description at the expense of his blind father? Are they to, or do they, toggle between both options with uncertainty?

By creating a parallel between Gloucester's blindness and the invisible aspects of the theater, the cliff scene replicates, vicariously, an embodied experience of disability for the audience. Building on Row-Heyveld's claim that disability in Lear is "defined not by bodily authenticity but by bodily knowledge" ("'Known and Feeling Sorrows'" 166), I argue that staging Gloucester's blindness positions the audience to gain embodied knowledge not because they themselves are blind but because they are, to return to the phrase, "with and near disability, thinking through disabled sensations and situations" (Row-Heyveld, "'Known and Feeling Sorrows'" 164). Such aligning of actor and audience extends even further when considering the ways in which the bodies of both relate. In the early modern period, actors were often called "shadows," a term that suggests not only their insubstantial proximity to reality but also the modern definition of an "[i]mage cast by a body intercepting light" ("shadow, II"). 24 These early modern meanings illuminate how, in the theater, actors could be seen as shadows of the audience, their bodies in some ways tethered to the network of bodies that performance requires. Reading Gloucester's disability in light of its embodied depiction tethered to an embodied audience significantly shifts its role within the play. Under Mitchell and Snyder's paradigm, it serves as a trite metaphor for Gloucester's misjudgments; under dramatic prosthesis, it serves as a powerful avenue for empathy through the audience's embodied knowledge.

Theatrical Staring

Richman astutely calls Lear's audience members "spectators" and highlights the play's spectatorship, or "the way the audience is invited to take up this [spectator] position and in the way the performers address the audience with their performance, in the way they offer themselves to be seen and understood" (Bleeker 33). Spectatorship is particularly crucial when considering audience members' relationships to disability on stage. Attending to dramatic prosthesis elucidates how, as in the case of Gloucester's blindness, embodiedness shifts not only the roles disability plays on stage but also the ways audiences participate in receiving and interpreting those roles.

Kirsty Johnston, quoting Tobin Siebers, argues that "theatre has long contributed to 'the way that some bodies make other bodies feel'" (2). Though readers of printed texts have feeling bodies too, a central difference between narrative and dramatic texts, and thus between narrative and dramatic prosthesis, lies in how the embodied co-presence of actors and audience work together for meaning-making. Textual narratives, largely mediated through language, require a reader to receive them through one primary sense, and then, to some degree, "imagine"—and thus interpret—the narrative for themselves in ways that are largely immaterial, internal, and abstract. Drama does ask its audience to do some similar work, where imagination must amend whatever semiotic gaps might occur between presentation and representation; however, audiences rely on their senses to receive the narrative more immediately, and the locus of interpretation shifts from written words to physical bodies, vocal utterances, and other material aspects on the stage. Drama relies on a more expansive range of bodily and sensory forms to craft its narrative and exchanges close reading for close looking (and close listening, as I will discuss below). So how do audience members rely on their senses to make sense of a play? If drama needs bodies to stage disability, and embodying disability changes the way disability functions in a play, what of how audiences receive and interpret those bodies?

In the theater, one prominent avenue of reception is sight, often taking the form of staring. While Mitchell and Snyder find unethical "the protected theater darkness [where] audiences are given permission to stare at the socially 'inappropriate fact' of disability" (96), Rosemarie Garland-Thomson expands the critical understanding of staring in her catalogue and analysis of the practice. 25 Among the modes of staring that Garland-Thomson explores, two very relevant to theater include (a) staring as a form of domination, particularly "[t]he kind of staring that 'fixes' a person in gender, race, disability, class, or sexuality systems [a]s an attempt to control the other" (Staring 43) 26 and (b) staring as a form of "knowledge gathering" that can "beget mutual recognition" (Staring 185). 27 She also distinguishes between "virtual staring"— encounters of portraiture and images where starers stare at starees remotely— and live, often spontaneous, face-to-face encounters ("Staring at the Other"; Staring 86). In these critical models, the dynamic motivations and responses of starer and staree form the basis for analyzing the ethics of the encounter. In dominating stares, there "is inadequate identification between starer and staree" (Staring 186), but in knowledge-gathering stares, "identification" and "mutual recognition" transpire because starees productively stare back (Staring 185).

Dramatic prosthesis suggests that the theater negotiates a third model of staring, wherein the power differentials between starer and staree are complicated by drama's dynamic of live but scripted actors and live but interpellated spectators. While a production can invite and suggest particular types of looking through focalization, much like virtual staring at portraiture and images, it cannot completely control where and how audience members stare. Similarly, while a character is, to a large extent, constrained within the narrative it enacts, a live, embodied character certainly has more opportunity to "stare back" on the stage than on the page.

Moreover, the theater invites multiple and multivalent stares from its audiences. While certain patterns might arise in audience stares based on shared personal and cultural contexts, no two audience members will stare the same way. The stares a naked Edgar might receive may differ from those given to the young Cordelia (and differ still perhaps to ones given to the young man playing Cordelia). A starer who has experienced mental illness may stare at Edgar and Lear differently than one who has not. A visually-impaired audience member may not stare at all. Regardless, though, of the indeterminacy of particular stares, investigating the ways performances attempt to direct and utilize possible modes of staring can delineate ways in which theatrical staring affects interpretations of disability within a text.

The scene of Gloucester's blinding and the servant's dramatic intervention serve as a test case for the modes of staring Lear invites audiences to engage in. The visually graphic, even sadistic, blinding scene "consistently guides the spectator's gaze back to its horrifying specifics" (Lin 5). It invites, almost demands, the audience to stare. 28 As Gloucester's body transitions to being disabled, these stares morally align audience members with Regan and the servants as passive "spectators" to the violence. 29 Such uneven power dynamics between starers and an impaired staree suggest dominating stares that fix Gloucester as a disabled Other. But these dominating stares are exposed as problematic when Cornwall's own faithful servant, who acts as a moral barometer, sees the violence too but cannot stand idly by. He refuses to be a spectator. As Michael Schoenfeldt suggests, "The combination of pain and indignity imposed on a fellow human is in fact too much for the unnamed servant (or for us) to watch" (202). Amrita Dhar reads the Servant's intervention as a moment of "seeing feelingly" that "start[s] a process of irreversible sympathy for us" (79). I argue that the servant's actions, described as "thrilled with revenge" (4.2.89), also function to contrast with the audience's passive enjoyment, in turn making the audience all the more complicit in the scene's violence against a disabled body. 30 Dhar explicates the ethics of the Servant's seeing, where "[t]he responsibility of the eye is inseparable from the responsibility of the I" (87), but the ethical obligations are the audience's as well. If one who had "served [Cornwall] ever since [he] was a child" (3.7.90) was moved by the sight to betray his duty, how much more should the audience be moved to reject rather than enjoy the scene? To, perhaps, do anything other than stare. 31

The moment, like all theatrical moments of sadistic violence, is vexed by the audience toggling between their willing suspension of disbelief, which inserts and implicates them in the moral world of the play, and their simultaneous awareness that the violence is not "real," allowing them to remain passive in the face of that which otherwise would likely incite a more active response. Of course, unlike the servant, the audience has no recourse—and knows it has no recourse—within the world of the play to avenge, and this is the crux of theatrical staring. Staring may make the audience complicit in dominating or Othering disabled characters, but audiences have (almost) no choice otherwise.

The emotional and ethical tension engendered by the audience's stares serves as a catalyst for the audience's identification with Gloucester and his blindness. In the cliff scene, they, like Gloucester, are invited to "see [the world] feelingly" (4.6.164). In the scene, both character and audience are directed, four times in seventy lines, to "look," and each imperative directs attention to a scene that is not there. The scene opens with Edgar's statement, "Look how we labor" (4.6.2), which for the blind Gloucester, in the context of the feigned climb up the cliff, actually means "feel how we labor." But for a sighted audience, the line demands the audience look at the actors' doubly performed labor of pretending to pretend to climb a cliff. The remaining three usages juxtapose sight with sound, a recurring theme throughout the play, but they do so through disorienting negation, describing what cannot be seen or heard. Edgar ends his first narration of the cliff by describing a "murmuring surge / That on th' unnumbered idle pebble chafes / Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more" (4.6.25-7). His dizzying descriptions continue: "Look up a-height. The shrill-gorged lark so far / Cannot be seen or heard. Do but look up" (4.6.72-3). Edgar directs Gloucester and the audience to look, to look thrice in fact, at what cannot (and should not) be seen or heard. While the blind Gloucester may not be able to stare back, the audience directs their eyes alongside his, their theatrical stares tethered to his own, like an object and its shadow, in a moment of identification.

Audience starers, then, are invited to move from dominance at Gloucester's graphic blinding to mutual identification as they experience a form of blindness alongside him on the cliff. By positioning the audience initially as both culpable and powerless, Lear creates a tension within theatrical starers that drives them from "staring at" a blind man to "staring with" him. Thus, while Gloucester's blindness may or may not be an exploitative material metaphor for his poor discernment, it does not, to return to Mitchell and Snyder, ignore the impairment's "social and political dimensions" (48). Rather, through dramatic prosthesis, the cliff scene serves as a fulcrum in the play's exploration of empathy through the embodied knowledge characters and audiences receive. Both Gottlieb and Row-Heyveld observe that Lear, Gloucester, and Edgar all gain empathy towards poor, marginalized populations after their own experiences of and with disability, and both read the play as ultimately yielding characters (and reservedly a thesis) that advocate for social justice. This trajectory of empathy, I argue, unfolds not only in the characters but in the audience as well, as the audience is called upon to do more than simply look at what they create in the mind's eye. They are called upon to look at but also with blind Gloucester—the disabled, the displaced, and the marginalized. Unlike its textual depictions, the embodied staging of Gloucester's blindness engenders shared embodied knowledge and empathy in the audience. Analyzing its dramatic prosthesis shifts the significance of disability from the margins of narrative prosthesis and the materiality of metaphor to the center of his and the audience's embodied experiences.

Staging Illegible Disabilities

Though Gloucester's blindness can be readily and graphically made legible to audiences, such stagings of disability are easier done for some impairments than others. Unlike the privilege a written text has to communicate characters' interiority through narration, the stage (often) has no such device. Even soliloquies, the hallmark of Shakespeare's touted depictions of interiority, still rely on the medium and supplement of an actor's body. Rather than relying on narration, drama must signal interiority through characters' external actions and words. Imagination must be bodied forth. Such externalization extends to all disabilities as well; the bodies of the actors and the materiality of the stage must make every depicted disability legible—including "illegible" ones, such as mental illness or intellectual impairment. As Anderson notes regarding cognitive impairment, "While questions of performance and interpretation might seem to apply more readily to physical impairment, the representation of [illegible disabilities] is still also linked to the presence of the body on stage" (147). She uses the term "bodymind" to holistically categorize and conceptualize performing disability; 32 however, although the term helpfully critiques both the mind-body divide and the visible-invisible categories of disability, the "bodymind" must still be materialized on stage via external markers even while some disabilities do not display such markers in real life. This dramatic prosthesis of illegible disabilities— reifying them on stage in ways not always congruent with lived experiences—further foregrounds how embodiment impacts dramatic constructions of disability.

In the case of Lear, the illegible disability of mental illness must be materialized: "for madness to be legible, it must … be a collection of symptoms or physical actions that can be enacted on stage" (Anderson 147). Duncan Salkeld notes that "the site of this semiotic code [is] the body" (3). These embodied symptoms and physical actions are part of the play's dramatic prosthesis, and the play's multivalent exploration of madness—through Edgar's "feigned" and Lear's "real" madness 33—renders the illegible disability legible. This reification occurs most notably through the sights and sounds of madness. In Lear, how do we know madness when we see and hear it?

Edgar's feigning madness contributes to the play's emphasis on the external signification of disability, an emphasis that reinforces an audience-centric framework and situates audience members in the network of bodies needed to stage disability. Edgar's subplot is original to the text, not found in Shakespeare's main sources (King Leir and Sidney's Arcadia), and the 1608 Quarto advertises it as on par with Lear's main plot line: the "True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR and his three daughters / With the unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of TOM of Bedlam." More than just parallel to each other on the title page, the two plots are intricately bound in the play's exploration of how madness is reified for and received by others. 34 Although Edgar's and Lear's presentations of madness differ in many regards, they share certain characteristics in order to render them legible to on-stage and off-stage audiences.

The primary way Lear signals madness is through animality. Gottlieb compellingly argues that "human beings' relationship to animals is central to Lear's shifting definitions of what it means to be human" (para. 4), including a dis/abled one. 35 When Edgar plots his own performance of mental illness, he draws on specist assumptions, acknowledging that "human" markers such as kempt hair and clothes need to be dismissed in order to convincingly feign madness:

To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury in contempt of man,
Brought near to beast. My face I'll grime with filth,
Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots,
And with presented nakedness outface
The winds and persecutions of the sky. (2.3.7-12)

Later, recounting his disguise, he similarly describes how he donned "madman's rags, t' assume a semblance / That very dogs disdained" (5.3.223-4). His language here explicitly ranks those with disabilities as "near to beast," naked, and disdained by dogs, all of which align madness with animality in the play. We may assume that his appearance on stage takes some similar form: a grimed face, knotted or unkempt hair, and nakedness. In the hovel, Lear comments on Edgar's "uncovered body" (3.4.109) and the Fool observes, "he reserved a blanket, else we had been all shamed" (3.4.71-2). In the next act, Edgar's nakedness is emphasised, with Gloucester referencing it three times: he asks, "Is that the naked fellow?" (4.1.46), calls for "some covering for this naked soul" (4.1.51), and then directly addresses Edgar as "Sirrah, naked fellow" (4.1.59).

When the Gentleman describes Lear's madness to Gloucester, he too compares his behavior and attire to animals: "This night, wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch, / The lion and the belly-pinched wolf / Keep their fur dry, unbonneted he runs" (3.1.14-6). Kent then remarks on his "bareheaded" (3.2.65) presence upon the heath, an aspect emphasized later by Gloucester too (3.7.72). After Lear discerns Edgar as an "unaccommodated man" and "forked animal" (3.4.113-4, 115), he appears to join him fully in nakedness, crying "Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here" (3.4.115-6). 36 Collectively, these descriptions repeatedly point to physical markers—particularly a lack of clothing—as evidence of mental illness.

But in Lear, we also hear madness, for it is more often the sound than the sight of the mad that materializes disability and renders it legible. 37 Scholars note that the early modern stage "develops a new form of speech, peculiar to the mad, and cues for how to read it" (Neely 49). Neely hears Edgar's mad register as a "pastiche of quoted fragments" (60), while Simon Palfrey calls it "radically indifferent to customary dialogical rules" (4). Heetderks finds Twelfth Night's Feste's disabled speech a "stubbornly non-rational performance" marked by "non-signifying" words that "resist logical parsing" and "repetitive, non-rational interjections" (73, 74), descriptions that apply to Edgar and Lear as well. This attention to the soundscape of madness in Lear harkens to how the "'invisible,' 'illegible' disability [is rendered] both visible and sonic" (Heetderks 65).

In the case of Edgar's madness, while characters repeatedly reference his nakedness, they refer to his vocality even more. When Edgar first enters disguised as "Poor Tom," Kent remarks not on his nakedness but on his voice, "What art thou that dost grumble there i' th' straw?" (3.4.48-9). According to the OED, the verb 'grumble' means "Of persons and animals: To utter dull inarticulate sounds; to mutter, mumble, murmur; to growl faintly." The word's association with animals, and in particular the sense to "growl faintly," further situates Edgar within the specist and ableist construct of madness as animality. Though no stage directions indicate what noises he makes at his entrance, or what he ad libs throughout, Edgar is marked audibly—and audibly as bestial—before he physically appears. Gloucester's later observation that "Methinks thy voice is altered and thou speak'st / In better phrase and matter than thou didst" (4.6.10-11) draws on similar specist assumptions about language. At this point in the scene, Edgar has only delivered three or four lines, but they are enough for Gloucester to recognize that he does not "hear" his madness anymore.

"Stage Bedlamites" like Edgar's "Poor Tom" persona were highly theatrical figures crafted for a theatrical audience, and they were characterized primarily in aural terms: when Edmund mock-performs madness at the play's beginning, he remarks, "My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o' Bedlam—O, these eclipses do portend these divisions. Fa, sol, la, mi." (1.2.142-4). 38 Edgar, too, characterizes "Bedlam beggars … with roaring voices" (2.3.14). These sketches echo contemporaneous theatrical depictions, such as Thomas Dekker's description that, "Some make an horrid noyse, hollowly sounding: some whoope, some hollow" (qtd. Carroll 432). Lear emphasizes the irrationality (a mark of animality) of this hallmark aurality. In his opening speech to Lear and Kent, Edgar punctuates his lines with the vocalizations, "O, do dee, do dee, do dee" (3.4.63), "Alow, alow, loo, loo" (3.4.83-4), and "suum, mun, nonny…boy, boy, sessa!" (3.4.106), and he later returns to the refrain with "Do de, de, de. Sessa!" (4.6.77). His deployment of vocables draws on the play's depiction of madness as animality and contributes to early modern constructs of humanity as those who are thus supposed to speak rationally. Edgar's apparent irrationality continues when he interjects the utterance "Tom's a-cold" five times in his dialogue on the heath, always as a non-sequitur (3.4.62-3, 89, 155, 184; 4.1.60). While the other characters also articulate that they and the heath are cold, the timing and repetitive nature of Edgar's phrase indicate that he intends it to signal his madness, as a vocal tic or involuntary utterance rather than rational speech. Dekker cites this specific expression as a marker of fraudulent "Bedlamites" who "comming neere any body cries out Poore Tom is a colde" (qtd. Carroll 433). Edgar himself characterizes the irrational phrase as that which holds his disguise of madness together, drawing on the metaphor of plaster: when he greets Gloucester with "Poor Tom's a-cold," he ends the line with an aside, "I cannot daub it further" (4.1.60). 39

Lear's madness enacts some mad stereotypes as well. Although there is extensive scholarly debate regarding the etiology of Lear's madness, by the end of act 4, his utterances mirror Edgar's, as his "speech is circular, confused, stuttering, and often language-less" (Row-Heyveld, "'Known and Feeling Sorrows'" 160): 40

Look, look, a mouse! Peace, peace! This piece of toasted cheese will do 't.
There's my gauntlet; I'll prove it on a giant. Bring up the brown bills. O, well
flown, bird! I' th' clout, i' th' clout! Hewgh! Give the word. (4.6.107-111)

He too peppers his lines with repetitive phrases, like "Never, never, never, never, never" (3.7.371), "Fie, fie, fie, pah, pah!" (4.6.144-5), "Now, now, / now, now" (4.6.189-90), "kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!" (4.6.205), "Sa, sa, sa, sa" (4.6.223), and "No, no, no, no" (5.3.9). These clear parallels to Edgar's mad speech cast Lear's utterances as irrational, nonsensical, repetitive—and animalistic—responses.

By 5.3, Lear's madness is well established, and Albany articulates the most immediate sign of it: "He knows not what he says" (5.3.355). Reading madness as characterized by utterances beyond "known" or "human" rationality invites a compelling new interpretation of Lear's most famous line. When Lear enters carrying the presumably dead Cordelia at the end of the play, his cry of "Howl howl howl!" (5.3.308) becomes the climax of his "mad" utterances as he employs, like Edgar's "grumbling," bestial sounds to express himself. This moment of sheer grief—a crucial part of the human experience within the play—can only be expressed through an irrational, animalistic howl. Lear's signifier stands naked without a conventional signified and becomes the utterance of unaccommodated humanity in the face of irrational death. In this way, the animalistic sights and sounds of Lear's mad characters are the dramatic prosthesis the play relies on for representing "legibly" the "illegible" disability of mental illness. However, considering the play's dramatic prosthesis also complicates the audience's experience of disability, as they both identify animalistic madness and (unwittingly) participate in its maddening display. When Lear releases his howl out into the audience, what Bruce R. Smith calls the "primal cry" of the [o:] reverberates throughout the wooden O of the Globe into a surround sound of grief (13). 41 The audience's physically-present bodies must participate in its echo, absorbing some of the sound and reflecting some back to fellow audience members and even to Lear himself. The mad howl, then, becomes not just the sound of the disabled Lear, set apart on the stage for audiences to hear, but the resonance of the audience too.

Theatrical Learing

Lear's climactic howling contributes to Lear's soundscape of disability in much the same way as the vivid staging of Gloucester's blindness contributes to its visual landscape, both demonstrating how the play enacts a dramatic prosthesis not only to stage disability but also to craft spectators and auditors to receive it. Audiences perceive both sight and sound in the theater—what Lamb calls the "tricks of the eye and ear" (para. 2, emphasis added)—and it is a tired but true line that early modern scholars tout about audiences going to hear as much as see a Shakespeare play. Although Garland-Thomson notes that the modern Western world is overwhelmingly "ocularcentric" (Staring 25), this orientation is and was not universal. The early modern period in particular co-privileged sight and sound, as seen in the staging of disability in Lear. 42

Modern critical approaches have reinscribed this ocularcentricism, as evidenced even in the very terms used—lenses, perspectives, frameworks, viewpoints, scope. When sound is discussed at all, criticism has long relied on a dichotomy of seeing as objectifying versus hearing as a source of empathy and respect. This can be seen in the numerous terms we have for objectifying sight—"gazing / the gaze," "staring," "leering," "peering," "gawking," "ogling," "glaring"—and conversely the phrases we have for empowering or acknowledging agency through sound—"coming to voice / giving voice to," "amplifying," "resonating with," "listening to," "hearing." 43 Jonathan Sterne poetically describes such cultural codings as the "audiovisual litany" that juxtaposes hearing as "tend[ing] toward subjectivity" against seeing as "tend[ing] toward objectivity" (15). 44 In fact, English has no aural equivalent for "gazing," "staring," or "leering," a lexical fact that suggests that modern English speakers have ample categories for dominant staring but none for dominant hearing. Garland-Thomson, in her own treatment of staring, gives a particularly illustrative example of this ocularcentricism when she describes how "a madman in his fantasy rant arrests our eye" (Staring 15). In fact, the fantasy rant arrests our ear even more. 45 Like the madman in his rant, individuals with disabilities can be Othered not just by how they are seen but by how they are heard. A number of impairments and disabilities manifest audibly, such as a stutter or vocal tics, and more broadly, as Lear and Edgar demonstrate, those with mental illness or intellectual impairment may not always speak rationally or within conventional social scripts. These utterances often display difference audibly in the same way appearance may display difference visually. When a hearer hears these differences and dominatingly "'fixes a person in gender, race, disability, class, or sexuality systems [a]s an attempt to control the other" (Garland-Thomson Staring 43), they objectify and marginalize the hearees. 46 It is in these moments that hearers do audible leering, or what I call "learing." 47

To understand what learing may entail, I apply Garland-Thomson's mode of dominant staring to acts of hearing. 48 As much as people categorize Others based on appearances, the constructed, oppressive categories of gender, race, disability, class, and sexuality all have aural markers, or stereotypes, as well. When a hearer hears a higher-pitched voice and "fixes" that speaker to a specific gender, or hears Black vernacular English and "fixes" that person to a specific race, or hears "a madman in his fantasy rant" and "fixes" that person to mental illness, the hearer objectifies through hearing. The hearer lears.

But what does learing sound like in the theater? It is crucial to emphasize that the object of all forms of hearing—sound—is just as material as objects that are seen. 49 Sound, too, then is inevitably rooted in the speaker's and listener's embodiment, and as Smith notes, the theater demands this "embodied understanding … grounded in the speaker's body and in mine" (21, emphasis original). While readers of a written text supply their own voice (silent or aloud) to a characters' words, performed dramatic speech requires an encounter with another body. To theatrically hear necessarily relies on the exchange of material sound between two bodies, and these bodies co-participate in meaning-making. For Smith, "It is not only the performer's body that distinguishes 'work' [or interpretations of texts] from 'text' but the listeners' bodies" (21, emphasis original). Listeners' bodies can create "works" through a variety of modes of listening, but one such mode is learing.

Early modern audiences were particularly good learers, well attuned to sounds on the stage. As the plays of the period indicate, audiences were able to recognize by ear the distinctions between verse and prose (which were used to indicate class distinctions between characters) and even changes of meter. Lear draws on these audience skills as the play invites ample learing. Lear's admonition to "Look with thine ears" (4.6.166) serves as a hermeneutic for the entire play. When we look with our ears, what do we hear?

Gloucester is quite adept at looking with his ears and models learing for the audience. He not only tunes into Edgar's changes in speech, remarking "Methinks thy voice is altered and thou speak'st / In better phrase and matter than thou didst" (4.6.10-11) and "methinks you're better spoken" (4.6.14), 50 but his use of the word "better" demonstrates how he situates (or fixes) Edgar amid certain disability and class categories based on the "quality" of his speech. Similarly, Gloucester identifies Lear after hearing his nonsensical, repetitive speech: "I know that voice" and "The trick of that voice I do well remember. / Is 't not the King?" (4.6.114, 125-6). The OED definitions of trick include "deceit or artifice" (I) and "relating to a particular habit or practice" (II), both of which speak to the word's associations with theatricality and performativity, much like Edgar's own trick of feigning madness. While the precise "trick" in reference is unclear, Lear's identity, as perhaps madman and/or king, is directly connected to his utterances. These moments of recognition demonstrate how learing, like dominant staring, can function to identify and relegate characters to particular constructed categories.

As with theatrical staring, the ethics of theatrical learing are complicated because audiences are expected to do it, and Lear interrogates both modes of sensory reception by defamiliarizing them for audiences. If the cliff scene replicates an experience of blindness in the audience by positioning them as not "seeing" what is "there," the scene equally replicates an experience of deafness, as the audience also cannot hear the cliff scene. Each of Edgar's descriptions pair visual and aural components: the murmuring surge and the shrill-gorged lark "[c]annot be seen or heard" (4.6.73, emphasis added). The scene calls into question the audience's sensory perceptions—what is and is not seen or heard—in ways that foreground the embodied knowledge of disability. Further, just as the play invites audiences to stare at Gloucester's blindness and then recognize that stare as problematic, it mediates the hearing of Lear's madness similarly. And just as the play invites audiences to resolve the emotional and ethical tension of in/voluntary staring through eventually identifying with the disabled Gloucester, it mediates their learing at the disabled Lear similarly.

If madness is most frequently marked sonically within the play, then audiences are called upon to "fix" characters in the category of disabled and "mad" by looking with their ears. In the same way audiences might gaze at Edgar's nakedness, they likewise lear at Lear's howling. Moreover, Edgar's feigned mad utterances to on-stage audiences confirm that off-stage audiences too are expected to lear. As audiences "make sense" of his irrational expressions, find "reason in madness" (4.6.193), the play shifts the burden of meaning-making heavily to them, where "auditors construct their own notions of intellectual normativity in opposition to carefully parsed deficiencies" (Heetderks 71). Although Heetderks is referencing depictions of intellectual disability in Twelfth Night, Lear positions audiences similarly, asking them to construct sonic categories of 'mad' and 'sane' and relegate characters within them.

Yet the play's howls also move audiences from learing—"fixing" Lear firmly as bestial and thus (within the specist and ableist paradigm of the play) a disabled Other—to a shared, embodied experience of disability. As with the avenging servant at Gloucester's blinding, the final scene supplies audiences with an interpretive barometer to mediate and guide its hearing. Lear's first words immediately after he howls rebuke the on-stage bystanders' silence: "O, you are men of stones! / Had I your tongue and eyes, I'd use them so / That the heaven's vault should crack" (5.3.308-10). In these lines, Lear inverts the expected animalistic coding of his howling by comparing the men to stones. Stony silence—not his bestial utterance—is the irrational, inhuman(e) response to death. Crucially, the audience passively shares in the stony silence that Lear hears and rebukes, and his casting of them as inhuman—"men of stones"—demonstrates that he can lear back. Although audience members must lend their bodies to participate in Lear's echoing, boomeranging grief, they choose not to lend their voices. They lear at instead of howl with. As with their vexed theatrical staring, however, audiences are not supposed to do otherwise. The conventions of theater dictate that audiences maintain a stony silence. 51 Once again, audiences are found culpable for being passive while simultaneously discouraged from doing otherwise.

This now-familiar tension between audience's culpability and the roles prescribed for them shuttles them forward to Lear's climactic ending. The play's final moments, like the cliff scene prior, replicates an experience of disability for them by aligning them with a disabled character. In this case, the audience's intentionally vexed suspended disbelief invites an embodied knowledge reflective of madness.

In the final scene, after his howling and rebuke, Lear attempts to assert his own rationality by declaring that he knows the difference between the living and the dead. Yet he undoes these categories as quickly as he advances them, spiraling into confusion over Cordelia's mortal state:

I know when one is dead and when one lives.
She's dead as earth—Lend me the looking glass.
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives. (5.3.311-4)

In the span of three short lines, he pivots from her being "dead as earth" to "she lives." His confusion grows when he announces, "This feather stirs. She lives" (5.3.319) even though she does not (or perhaps will not much longer). Lear's maddening uncertainty over Cordelia's vital state is also the audience's. During original performances, most audience members would have been familiar with Shakespeare's source text King Leir, wherein both Cordelia and Lear live, so their expectations in this scene would be primed for both characters to ultimately survive. Kent even ventriloquizes the audiences' anticipations with his metacommentary, "Is this the promised end" (5.3.316). The confusion only mounts further if, as the text calls for, a glass actually mists and a feather actually stirs (for, whether or not Cordelia the character breathes, the actor playing her surely does). As in Edgar's dizzying narration in the cliff scene, the audience becomes disoriented as it attempts to discern what is "real" within the world of the play and what is a consequence of theatrical presentation that they must disbelieve. The audience sees these material signs of life—a misted glass and a stirred feather—but does not know how to interpret them: is the breath that of the not-dead and soon-to-be-revived Cordelia, as in the source text? Or is it the breath of the living actor playing the dead Cordelia and thus meant to be disregarded under the audience's willing suspension of disbelief? The scene relies on what Love calls the "ontological challenge" of theater's "vexed likenesses" (4, 2) to approximate an experience of madness in the audience. Lear's final lines, in an echo of Edgar's imperatives to "look" in the cliff scene, draw attention to these confounding signs: "Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!" (5.3.374-5). Tellingly, the play text never fully resolves when Cordelia actually dies (and the actor never stops breathing), leaving her moment of death in the interpretive hands of Lear and audience members alike. The play turns us all into fools and madmen.

If the ethical and emotional tension audiences experienced regarding Gloucester's blindness returns with Lear's madness, then audiences are invited once again to move from their culpable yet theatrically scripted silence at his howling to embodied knowledge of his confused madness. Between Lear's rebuke of their silence and Cordelia's maddening death, the audience must negotiate the dynamic between their implied complicity and their powerlessness by sliding from learing at a mad Lear to feeling madness with him. The ultimate sign of this empathic positioning comes at the play's proper end when the audience finally howls back. With the help of their good hands and gentle breath, audiences will make their own vocables, in the form of shouts and applause. No longer men of stones, these nonsensical utterances, like Lear's howling, will reverberate through the Globe and make "the heaven's vault … crack." Tellingly, too, the last sounds audiences hear are themselves, sounds that once again tether theatrical bodies together. A contemporaneous play casts applause as an "eccho" of the actors, which Matthew Steggle finds "a metaphor for the interdependent relationship between audience and performer" (128). This moment in Lear is the final interpretive act of the audience, trading sound as much as sight, across a stage. If actors are shadows of the audience, audiences are an echo of actors.

Lamb contends that "[t]he greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual" for "[t]his case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on" (para. 18). Only in reading, he argues, "we see not Lear, but we are Lear" (para. 18). He pointedly asks, "What has voice or eye to do with such things?" It turns out, they have everything to do with them. Receiving a performance of the play, in all our flesh and blood, emphatically positions the audience as Lear, sharing experientially in his intellect and his madness. We not only see him but we are him. It is not too insignificant to be thought on.

Reading Gloucester's blindness and Edgar's and Lear's madness through dramatic prosthesis dramatically shifts the play's portrayal and audience's experiences of disability. By paying attention to the embodiedness that staging disability requires, interpretations of Lear can move beyond explicating the ableist metaphor of Gloucester's blindness or the specist metaphor of madness to privileging disability as the vehicle for the play's exploration of embodied knowledge and empathy—and the audience's embodied participation in it. Through the metamorphosis of their stares and lears, audiences and actors emerge in a final moment of mutual identification, each in turn seen and heard.

Significantly, the fruits of such an analysis are not limited to Lear. Rather, I contend that attending to the embodiedness that dramatic prosthesis requires can produce innovative, rich interpretations of disability in any dramatic text. Critical approaches such as the ones I theorize here make important inroads into defining a dramatic disability studies, one in which bodies make all kinds of difference.