ABSTRACT
This chapter applies concepts from Black disability studies and cripistemology to examine the representation of disability, race, and citizenship in two adaptations of King Lear: Richard Eyre’s film (2018) and Shakespeare’s Globe’s stage production (summer 2022). The film evokes the transnational nature of disability by setting the storm scene in a refugee camp. However, in privileging citizen Lear’s subjective point of view over that of racialized noncitizens, the film inadvertently advances a “white cripistemology.” The Globe’s production, in contrast, staged the intersection of race and disability without surfacing their global histories. An eclectic set and costume design periodized the world of the play without anchoring it to a specific time. Yet even so decontextualized, the performance gave audiences a powerful representation of “mad Blackness” (Therí Alyce Pickens) as resistance to white persecution. After weighing the achievements and limitations of both of these productions, the chapter ends with open-ended questions about the future of disability representation and Shakespearean disability theater.
