(Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies) 1st Edition
by Meredith Conti (Author)
Few life occurrences shaped
individual and collective identities within Victorian-era society as
critically as witnessing or suffering from illness. The prevalence of
illness narratives within late nineteenth-century popular culture was
made manifest on the period’s British and American stages, where
theatrical embodiments of illness were indisputable staples of actors’
repertoires.
Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine reconstructs
how actors embodied three of the era’s most provocative illnesses:
tuberculosis, drug addiction, and mental illness. In placing
performances of illness within wider medicocultural contexts, Meredith
Conti analyzes how such depictions confirmed or resisted salient
constructions of diseases and the diseased. Conti’s case studies, which
range from Eleonora Duse’s portrayal of the consumptive courtesan
Marguerite Gautier to Henry Irving’s performance of senile dementia in King Lear,
help to illuminate the interdependence of medical science and theatre
in constructing nineteenth-century illness narratives. Through
reconstructing these performances, Conti isolates from the period’s
acting practices a lexicon of embodied illness: a flexible set of
physical and vocal techniques that performers employed to theatricalize
the sick body. In an age when medical science encouraged a gradual
decentering of the patient from their own diagnosis and treatment, late
nineteenth-century performances of illness symbolically restored the
sick to positions of visibility and consequence.
