Introduction

This chapter explores moments on early modern stages when these theatrical representations of madness, kingship, and masculinity collide. As such, it also interrogates early modern representations and understandings of disability, a category which, for the early moderns, included mental disturbance. Further, Kingship Madness and Masculinity is in conversation with recent scholarship on the early modern ties between physical and mental disability, given that mental disorders were an expression of disability for the early moderns. As Neely argues, late sixteenth-century humanism was invested in discovering the functions and potential failures of the human subject, drawing distinctions, for example, between madness and “similar-appearing conditions caused by sin and guilt, demonic and divine possession, bewitchment, or fraud”. Indeed, as work in Kingship, Madness, and Masculinity explores, this interconnectedness of king and kingdom governed both early modern political thought and the period’s definition of kingship.