Coda

Abstract

This chapter traces the tension between fixing and unfixing through two late-seventeenth-century texts, narrative accounts that recast the formal experiments that are the output of the early modern theater's staging of disability. It presents Jeremy Collier's account of the stage at the end of the seventeenth century which laments that the theater's affective power “disables the whole Audience.” The chapter then turns to discuss this disabling as the electrifying endpoint of the theater's aesthetic experimentation with formal unfixing. It examines how the early modern theater, in a moment before the typical settles into the normative, enjoins us to a speculative theater history that defamiliarizes theatrical form. The chapter illustrates how inextricable are the thinking of disability and theatricality in early modern culture.