{"schema_version":"bf_book_companion_v1","release_id":"20261010T034321Z-reviewed-full-unique-works","book":{"amazon_purchase_url":"https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501753509?tag=bookfrontie00-20","asin":"1501753509","authors":["Katherine Schaap Williams"],"book_id":"9781501753503","canonical_url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/unfixable-forms-9781501753503","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9781501753503.jpg?v=d07b3c3d9a80f5d3","description":"Unfixable Forms explores how theatrical form remakes?and is in turn remade by?early modern disability. Figures described as \"deformed,\" \"lame,\" \"crippled,\" \"ugly,\" \"sick,\" and \"monstrous\" crowd the stage in English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In each case, such a description distills cultural expectations about how a body should look and what a body should do?yet, crucially, demands the actor's embodied performance. In the early modern theater, concepts of disability collide with the deforming, vulnerable body of the actor. Reading dramatic texts alongside a diverse array of sources, ranging from physic manuals to philosophical essays to monster pamphlets, Katherine Schaap Williams excavates an archive of formal innovation to argue that disability is at the heart of the early modern theater's exploration of what it means to put the body of an actor on the stage. Offering new interpretations of canonical works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, as well as close readings of little-known plays such as The Fair Maid of the Exchange and A Larum For London , Williams demonstrates how disability cuts across foundational distinctions between nature and art, form and matter, and being and seeming. Situated at the intersections of early modern drama, disability studies, and performance theory, Unfixable Forms locates disability on the early modern stage as both a product of cultural constraints and a spark for performance's unsettling demands and electrifying eventfulness.","forthcoming":false,"isbn13":"9781501753503","publication_date":"20210615","publisher":"Cornell University Press","slug":"unfixable-forms","subtitle":"Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater","title":"Unfixable Forms"},"discovery":{"categories":{"all":[{"bisac_code":"PER011020","confidence_band":"medium","label":"Theater History & Criticism","score":0.7214,"source":"bisac_hint_model"},{"bisac_code":"LIT024010","confidence_band":"medium","label":"16th-Century Literary Criticism","score":0.7189,"source":"bisac_hint_model"},{"bisac_code":"PER011030","confidence_band":"low","label":"Playwriting","score":0.6605,"source":"bisac_hint_model"}],"hint":[{"bisac_code":"PER011020","confidence_band":"medium","label":"Theater History & Criticism","score":0.7214,"source":"bisac_hint_model"},{"bisac_code":"LIT024010","confidence_band":"medium","label":"16th-Century Literary Criticism","score":0.7189,"source":"bisac_hint_model"},{"bisac_code":"PER011030","confidence_band":"low","label":"Playwriting","score":0.6605,"source":"bisac_hint_model"}],"publisher":[{"bisac_code":"LIT004120","confidence_band":"high","label":"British & Irish Literary Criticism","score":1,"source":"onix_publisher_code"},{"bisac_code":"LIT015000","confidence_band":"high","label":"Shakespeare Studies","score":1,"source":"onix_publisher_code"},{"bisac_code":"LIT024010","confidence_band":"high","label":"16th-Century Literary Criticism","score":1,"source":"onix_publisher_code"}]},"genres":[{"label":"Theater History & Criticism","score":0.7214,"slug":"theater-history-criticism"},{"label":"16th-Century Literary Criticism","score":0.7189,"slug":"16th-century-literary-criticism"},{"label":"Playwriting","score":0.6605,"slug":"playwriting"}],"reader_fit":["Good for readers interested in disability studies and early modern drama","Good for readers interested in performance theory and theatrical form"],"related_lists":[],"series":null,"similar_books":[{"authors":["Helen Hackett"],"book_id":"9781848856868","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9781848856868.jpg?v=aa53562745d6aac6","score":0.6522,"title":"A Short History of English Renaissance Drama","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9781848856868"},{"authors":["Kenneth S. 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Sullivan"],"book_id":"9781469631448","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9781469631448.jpg?v=9f2733c08782b3e9","score":0.6032,"title":"Stages of Power","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9781469631448"},{"authors":["Julianne Sandberg","Emma Mason","Mark Knight"],"book_id":"9781350452893","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9781350452893.jpg?v=deee0ef213c16713","score":0.6022,"title":"Early Modern Literature and the Bodies of a Reformed Eucharist","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9781350452893"},{"authors":["Daniel Swift"],"book_id":"9780374601270","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9780374601270.jpg?v=252a4dd44404db7d","score":0.5905,"title":"The Dream Factory","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9780374601270"},{"authors":["Richard Wilbur"],"book_id":"9780156032315","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9780156032315.jpg?v=3ad98b4a49e6a542","score":0.5865,"title":"The Theatre of Illusion","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9780156032315"}],"topics":[{"evidence_refs":["keyword:disability in english renaissance drama, shakespeare and disability, richard iii, literary form, deformity"],"label":"Literary","score":0.0312,"slug":"literary"},{"evidence_refs":["keyword:disability in english renaissance drama, shakespeare and disability, richard iii, literary form, deformity"],"label":"English","score":0.03,"slug":"english"}],"what_you_get":["Themes: Disability on the early modern stage, Actors' embodied performance, Disability and theatrical form.","Themes: Literary, English.","Reading lane: Theater History & Criticism and 16th Century Literary Criticism."]},"llm_signals":{"confidence":0.96,"pacing":"unknown","reader_fit":["Readers interested in disability studies and early modern drama","Readers interested in performance theory and theatrical form"],"themes":["Disability on the early modern stage","Actors' embodied performance","Disability and theatrical form"],"tropes":[]},"source_presence":{"amazon":true,"book_detail":true,"goodreads":true,"llm_signals":true,"similarity_seed":true},"stats":{"amazon_ratings_count":0,"goodreads_ratings_count":4,"goodreads_reviews_count":2,"quality_score":0.8248}}