"The problem epilepsy poses for the early modern cultural imaginationāand perhaps for our modern sensibilities as wellā resides in this illegibility. Epileptic seizures are transitory episodes that only temporarily register disability on the body and then seem to disappear. In this way, epilepsy forces a particularly rigorous exercise in discernment that might fail at any moment. The epileptic Caesar, in his ability to appear able-bodied, is unidentifiable as "Other" and thus eludes categorization as disabled. Julius Caesar acknowledges this dilemma, performing Caesar's ability to go unrecognized amongst the able-bodiedāto "pass" as "normal." For nearly all his time in the play, in fact, Caesar enacts just such a strategy. He resists his non-normative status in what Simi Linton elsewhere has described as either "a deliberate effort to avoid discrimination or ostracism, or . . . an almost unconscious, Herculean effort to deny to oneself the reality of one's racial history, sexual feelings, or bodily state" (19). Caesar, in his efforts to pass, creates for himself a "minifiction" in which his disability has no place.
Just as these scenes affirm Caesar's ability to "pass" so too does the entire play in its refusal to formally stage Caesar's condition. In other words, although various characters comment on Caesar's disability, it never shows itself in the actions of the drama. In fact, word of Caesar's "falling sickness," the suggestion that he "fell down in the market-place, and foamed at mouth, / and was speechless" (1.2.250-51), appears to be nothing more than rumor. In noting his unconfirmed disability (the lack of actual performance of fit, swoon, or seizure in the drama), I am not denying Caesar's epilepsy but instead further confirming its illegibility. Put another way, this absence of "proof" throughout the play renders epilepsy an unrecognizable condition that, even as it is named disability, resists categorization as such."
āAllison P. Hobgood, "Caesar Hath the Falling Sickness: The Legibility of Early Modern Disability in Shakespearean Drama" (emphasis mine)
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