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- Title
'What Shall We Hear of This': Understanding Judgment, Epilepsy in William Shakespeare's Tragedies.
- Authors
Cazan, Roxana
- Abstract
This paper underlines that Renaissance audiences and writers such as William Shakespeare recognized brain damage, particularly epilepsy, as depriving the individual of self-control. It remains uncertain whether or not Shakespeare's audience was able to understand the medical implications suggested by the onset of epilepsy, or whether or not the dramatist himself employed this disease for dramatic reasons. Nevertheless, reading brain afflictions such as epilepsy in Shakespeare's tragedies opens them up to a wider readership and spectatorship, who understand mental disturbance as an 'evil thing.'
- Subjects
ENGLISH drama (Tragedy); SHAKESPEARE authorship question; BRAIN damage; LITERATURE; EPILEPSY; READERSHIP
- Publication
Neophilologus, 2014, Vol 98, Issue 3, p503
- ISSN
0028-2677
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11061-013-9370-4