Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama 9783866158405, 3866158408

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LITERARY DISABILITY STUDIES

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama Edited by Leslie C. Dunn

Literary Disability Studies Series Editors David Bolt Liverpool Hope University Liverpool, UK Elizabeth J. Donaldson New York Institute of Technology Old Westbury, NY, USA Julia Miele Rodas Bronx Community College City University of New York Bronx, NY, USA

Literary Disability Studies is the first book series dedicated to the exploration of literature and literary topics from a disability studies perspective. Focused on literary content and informed by disability theory, disability research, disability activism, and disability experience, the Palgrave Macmillan series provides a home for a growing body of advanced scholarship exploring the ways in which the literary imagination intersects with historical and contemporary attitudes toward disability. This cutting edge interdisciplinary work includes both monographs and edited collections (as well as focused research that does not fall within traditional monograph length). The series is supported by an editorial board of internationally-recognised literary scholars specialising in disability studies: Michael Bérubé, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature, Pennsylvania State University, USA G. Thomas Couser, Professor of English Emeritus, Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, USA Michael Davidson, University of California Distinguished Professor, University of California, San Diego, USA Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Emory University, Atlanta, USA Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Professor of English Emerita, Miami University, Ohio, USA. For information about submitting a Literary Disability Studies book proposal, please contact the series editors: David Bolt ([email protected]), Elizabeth J. Donaldson ([email protected]), and/or Julia Miele Rodas ([email protected]). More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14821

Leslie C. Dunn Editor

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama

Editor Leslie C. Dunn Vassar College Poughkeepsie, NY, USA

Literary Disability Studies ISBN 978-3-030-57207-5 ISBN 978-3-030-57208-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: We Three Loggerheads. Unknown artist, 1600-1625. Oil on wood. Object number STRST: SBT 1994-38. CC-BY-NC-ND. Courtesy of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Peter and Leo

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book grew out of a research seminar, “Performing Disability in Early Modern England,” which I co-directed with Angela Heetderks at the 2016 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. I am grateful to the Shakespeare Association for providing a space for early modern disability studies to grow and thrive. I owe a particular debt of thanks to Angela, who conceived this volume with me and edited early drafts of the essays. Sadly, she had to withdraw from the project before it took its final form, but she was a superb co-editor and the best of intellectual partners. Thanks to all the contributors for their outstanding work, their collegiality, and their patience. Thanks to Ben Doyle at Palgrave Macmillan for taking an early interest in the project, and to the series editors of Literary Disability Studies for giving it an ideal home. Allie Troyanos and Rachel Jacobe guided the volume expertly through its journey to publication. Special thanks to the anonymous reader for Palgrave Macmillan, whose acute and generous comments on the proposal and the manuscript made it a far better book. My research assistants at Vassar, Taylor Lodise and Christian Lewis, provided assistance at several stages in the development of this collection. A grant from the Vassar College Research Committee enabled Christian to continue working with me after he graduated; his knowledge of disability studies, editorial expertise, and colleagueship were invaluable. I am also grateful to the students in my Vassar seminars, “Disability and Performance,” “Shakespeare and Disability,” and “After Shakespeare,” whose vii

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enthusiasm, insights, and challenges have deepened my thinking about disability and performance. Many colleagues and friends have given me aid, encouragement, and sustenance along the way: special thanks to Susan Zlotnick, Karen Robertson, Denise Walen, Zoltán Márkus, Christine Reno, Merry Wells, Laury Magnus, Eve Samson, David Bellwood, and Storme Toolis. Paul Edmondson and Paul Taylor of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust answered my call for help in the middle of a pandemic, enabling me to secure permission to reproduce We Three Loggerheads on the cover. The members of the AALAC disability studies group formed a supportive community in which to take my first steps into disability studies. Susan Burch and Sara Hendren are my disability studies lodestars. And to Peter Antelyes, as ever my best partner, editor, and friend, “I can no other answer make but thanks, / And thanks, and ever thanks.” This book is dedicated to him, and to my son Leo, the sea-change in my life that led me to this work. I am grateful to the following for permission to reproduce images in their collections: the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, for We Three Loggerheads; the Wellcome Collection for The Dream of St. John Damascene and a page from John Bulwer’s Chirologia: Or, The Naturall Language of the Hand; and the Science Photo Library, for the woodcut of a rabid dog from Jacques Grévin’s Deux livres des venins.

Contents

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Introduction Leslie C. Dunn

Part I

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The Performance of Disability in Everyday Life

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Disability and the Work of Performance in Early Modern England Lindsey Row-Heyveld

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“By the Knife and Fire”: Conceptions of Surgery and Disability in Early Modern Medical Treatises Jodie Austin

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“Turn It to a Crutch”: Disability and Swordsmanship in The Little French Lawyer Matthew Carter

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Mutism and Feminine Silence: Gender, Performance, and Disability in Epicoene Melissa Hull Geil

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CONTENTS

Contented Cuckolds: Infertility and Queer Reproductive Practice in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Machiavelli’s Mandragola Simone Chess Reading Shakespeare After Neurodiversity Wes Folkerth

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Part II Disability as a Metaphor in Dramatic Literature 8

Enabling Rabies in King Lear Avi Mendelson

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Limping and Lameness on the Early Modern Stage Susan Anderson

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“Lame Humor” in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Love’s Pilgrimage Joyce Boro

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Syphilis Patches: Form and Dramatic History in The Knight of the Burning Pestle Nancy Simpson-Younger

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Part III 12

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The Work of Disabled Artists

Sign Gain to Deaf Gain: Deafness in Early Modern Manual Rhetoric and Modern Shakespeare Performances Jennifer L. Nelson “This Is Miching Mallecho. It Means Mischief”: Problematizing Representations of Actors with Down’s Syndrome in Growing Up Down’s Sarah Olive

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CONTENTS

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Shakespearean Disability Theatre Leslie C. Dunn

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Susan Anderson is Reader in English and Head of English at Sheffield Hallam University. She is the author of Echo and Meaning on Early Modern English Stages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and is co-editor of A Cultural History of Disability in the Renaissance, volume 3 of Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Disability (general editors David Bolt and Robert McRuer). Jodie Austin is Assistant Professor of English at Menlo College in Atherton, California. Her interests include early modern literature, plague studies, and the scientific history of disease/medicine. Joyce Boro is Professor of English literature at Université de Montréal. She is the editor of Lord Berners’s Castell of Love (MRTS, 2007) and Margaret Tyler’s Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood (MHRA, 2014), and author of articles and essays on Anglo-Spanish literary relations, translation, transnational adaptation, romance, drama, and book history. She is co-editor of the forthcoming digital project, Shakespeare au/in Québec. Matthew Carter is the Assistant Director of the Writing Center at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is interested in early modern constructions of the body, and his primary research deals with the relationship between the sword and the body. He is currently working on a monograph, Discovering the Kinetic Language of Violence on the Early

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Modern Stage, which deals with how playwrights in Shakespeare’s day used sword combat as a form of communication. Simone Chess is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program at Wayne State University. She is author of Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations (Routledge, 2016) and is co-editor, with Colby Gordon and Will Fisher, of the “Early Modern Trans Studies” special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. She is working on two new book projects, one on Shakespeare and trans culture for the Routledge “Spotlight on Shakespeare” series and another focused on disability, queerness, and adaptive technologies in the early modern period. Leslie C. Dunn is Professor of English at Vassar College, where she also teaches in the Women’s Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Media Studies programs. She co-edited, with Nancy A. Jones, Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (Cambridge, 1994), and, with Katherine R. Larson, Gender and Song in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2014). Her research and teaching interests include Shakespeare and early modern drama, gender studies, and disability studies. Wes Folkerth is Associate Professor of English at McGill University. He is the author of The Sound of Shakespeare (Routledge, 2002). His current research combines disability studies and Shakespeare studies—specifically, representations of neurodiversity and intellectual disability on the early modern stage. Melissa Hull Geil is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Management & Corporate Communication at Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published articles focusing on disability, gender, and history of the book in the early modern period. Her current book project considers how representations of authorship that take the form of monstrous reproduction contribute to discourses of print culture, disability, and gender in early modern England. Additionally, she teaches business communication with an emphasis on inclusivity, diversity, and connectedness. Avi Mendelson recently received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University, having finished his dissertation about madnesses understood as contagious

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in Shakespeare’s plays. Midway through graduate school, he expatriated himself to the UK, where he taught the English Literature GCSE, and worked in mental health advocacy and performed theater. This year, Avi was the in-house dramaturg for an adaptation of The Changeling at the Arcola Theatre in East London. Other essays appear in the BSA’s Teaching Shakespeare and SFSU’s Interpretations. Jennifer L. Nelson is Professor of English at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC; she teaches and studies Shakespeare, Deafness, sign languages, and disability as routine parts of her work. Dr. Nelson has published books and articles on American Sign Language poetry, Deaf American Prose (two volumes), Deafness and muteness in film, John Bulwer’s manual rhetoric and the deaf community, and others. And last but not least, she is a visual artist who weaves a sense of hands and Deafness into her work. Sarah Olive is a Lecturer in English in Education at the University of York. UK. She is also a Visiting Lecturer at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham where she contributes to the M.A. Shakespeare and Education. She chairs the Education Committee of the British Shakespeare Association and edits their biannual publication Teaching Shakespeare. Her monograph, Shakespeare Valued, was published by Intellect in 2015. Her current research is focused on Shakespeare on television and in East Asian higher education. Lindsey Row-Heyveld is Associate Professor of English at Luther College. She has published articles on early modern drama, disability studies, and disability-focused pedagogy. She is the author of Dissembling Disability in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), which explores fraudulent disability on and off the stage. Nancy Simpson-Younger is Assistant Professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University. Her work on sleep states, consciousness, gender, and ethics has appeared in The Sidney Journal, Studies in Philology, Shakespeare and Women’s Writing. With Margaret Simon, she recently co-edited Forming Sleep: Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance (Penn State UP, 2020).

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 12.1

We Three Loggerheads. Painting, oil on wood, 1600–1625. (Courtesy of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) The Dream of St. John Damascene: the Virgin attaches his severed right hand. Drawing, 16–. Wellcome Collection A rabid dog, from Jacques Grévin, Deux livres des venins (Antwerp, 1569). Woodcut. Middle Temple Library/Science Photo Library John Bulwer, Chirologia: or, the Naturall Language of the Hand (London, 1644), p. 151, 24 hand gestures. Wellcome Collection

3 53 163 259

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Introduction Leslie C. Dunn

Abstract Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability. The contributors define “theatrical” and “performance” broadly to include not only the staging of disability in theatres, but also the ways in which variant early modern bodies and minds could be “theatricalized” in social encounters between the disabled and the nondisabled, as well as in textual representations of disabled subjects. This emphasis on disability both in and as performance opens new perspectives on representations of disabled characters in early modern drama by focusing attention on the complex relationships between non-normative bodyminds and their audiences, both within and outside the theatre. The volume also breaks new ground by including, in its final section, essays about contemporary disabled actors whose performances are creating a “differently disabled” Shakespeare for present-day audiences. Collectively the essays proffer an expansive view of early modern disability in performance, suggesting new methodologies for finding and interpreting it in unexpected contexts, while considering continuity and change between the early modern period and our own.

L. C. Dunn (B) Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_1

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In the collection of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is an anonymous early seventeenth-century portrait of two men entitled We Three Loggerheads (Fig. 1.1). The men are identified as fools not only by the painting’s title—“loggerhead,” meaning a stupid person, was a synonym for fool— but also by their iconic accoutrements: motley coats, bells, hoods with ass’s ears attached; the feather stuck in one man’s hair and the cockscomb on the other’s cap; the fool’s bauble. The man on the left appears to be laughing as he points to his companion, while the one on the right looks directly out at the viewer, smiling. Perhaps the two fools are sharing a private joke, in which case the third “log-head” is the carved face on the wooden bauble. Perhaps, though, the joke is on us: the viewer becomes the third fool by gazing at the other two. That this type of visual joke was well known in the early modern period is suggested by Feste’s greeting to Sir Toby and Sir Andrew in Act 2 scene 3 of Twelfth Night —“How now, my hearts! did you never see the picture of ‘we three’?”—to which Sir Toby responds, “Welcome, ass.”1 The two men in the portrait have been identified as seventeenthcentury court fools: Tom Derry, who served Queen Anne of Denmark, and Muckle John, jester to Charles 1.2 Yet the fool on the left does not look at all like the portrait of Tom Derry by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and not only because Gheeraerts’s Derry is sumptuously dressed; the fool in the anonymous painting has six fingers on his right hand. We don’t know whether the historical Derry had an extra finger, but its presence in We Three Loggerheads , an image replete with signifiers of folly, suggests that it is meant to have an indexical function: the physical difference points both literally and figuratively to an intellectual one. The extra finger may also be the painter’s joke, a “what’s wrong with this picture” game which, like the outward gaze of the man on the right, invites the viewer to join in the fooling.

1 Twelfth Night, or What You Will, 1.5.31–32. All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan (New York and London: Norton, 2016). 2 John Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the English Court (Stroud, Gloucester, UK: Sutton, 1998), 150. According to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the second fool may be either Muckle John or Archibald Armstrong, who was a jester at the court of James 1, http://collections.shakespeare.org.uk/search/museum/strst-sbt-1994-38.

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Fig. 1.1 We Three Loggerheads. Painting, oil on wood, 1600–1625. (Courtesy of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust)

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However one interprets it, the representation of fools in We Three Loggerheads emphasizes what Wes Folkerth, writing in this volume, calls their “performative indicators,” as distinguished from their “individual personhood.”3 The two men are dressed for their work as entertainers; they are playing a role in the painting, just as they would at court or in the theatre. Whether that role involves displaying an actual intellectual disability or the pretense of one—in Feste’s formulation, “foolish wit” or “witty fool”—cannot be deduced from the painting alone; it’s possible that the image is playing on the unstable boundary between the two categories.4 In this way, We Three Loggerheads offers an evocative example of the intersections of disability and performance in the early modern period, and so makes an ideal introduction to the concerns of this volume. Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigate the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability. The contributors define “theatrical” and “performance” broadly to include not only the staging of disability in theatres, but also the ways in which variant early modern bodies and minds could be “theatricalized” by those with whom they came into contact, including neighbors, government officials, surgeons, and authors of nonfiction texts. To use Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s term, these are the “social dramas” of encounters between the disabled and the nondisabled.5 This emphasis on disability both in and as performance opens new perspectives on representations of disabled characters in early modern drama by focusing attention on the complex relationships between non-normative bodyminds and their audiences, both within and outside the theatre. The volume also breaks new ground by including, in its final section, essays about contemporary disabled actors whose performances are creating a 3 Folkerth, “Reading Shakespeare After Neurodiversity”. 4 Based on court records Southworth identifies both Tom Derry and Muckle John as

“innocents,” or what would now be called cognitively disabled: Fools and Jesters in the English Court, 151. On the categories of “natural” and “artificial” fools in early modern England, and the instability of the boundary between them, see Angela Heetderks,“‘Better a Witty Fool than a Foolish Wit’: Song, Fooling, and Intellectual Disability in Shakespearean Drama,” in Gender and Song in Early Modern England, eds. Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 68–70. 5 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Dares to Stares: Disabled Women Performance Artists and the Dynamics of Staring,” in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, eds. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 31.

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“differently disabled” Shakespeare for present-day audiences.6 The focus of this section is on Shakespeare’s plays, rather than early modern drama more broadly, only because they have so far been the venue for most if not all of the revisionary work by disabled actors and theatre practitioners. As for the other key term, “disability,” this volume is in conversation with recent work in early modern disability studies. This is a relatively new field, having emerged in 2009 with the publication of a special section of essays on “Disabled Shakespeares” in Disability Studies Quarterly.7 Editors Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood explained that their goal was “to reveal the utility of disability studies to early modern scholarship.”8 In their 2013 anthology, Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, Hobgood and Wood further articulated their conception of early modern disability studies as both a field of inquiry and a theoretical lens. While warning against an “unthoughtful mapping” of contemporary understandings of disability onto a premodern context, they argued that the idea of early modern disability should not be dismissed as anachronistic “because human variation, though conceived of and responded to diversely, has always existed.”9 It is true that disability was not the medical, social, legal, or political category in the early modern period that it is today.10 According to Lennard Davis, the concept of disability emerged only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, coinciding with the development of statistical norms for measuring and evaluating human variation: “to understand 6 The phrase “differently disabled” comes from Tobin Siebers, “Shakespeare Differently Disabled,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 435–454. 7 “Disabled Shakespeares,” eds. Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009), https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/991/1183. 8 Hobgood and Wood, “Introduction: ‘Disabled Shakespeares.’” 9 Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, “Introduction: Ethical Staring:

Disabling the English Renaissance,” in Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, eds. Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 7.

10 On the meanings of “disability” in the early modern period, see Vin Nardizzi, “Disability Figures in Shakespeare,” Oxford Handbook on Shakespeare and Embodiment, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1–17; Sujata Iyengar, “Introduction: Shakespeare’s ‘Discourse of Disability,’” in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. Sujata Iyengar (New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015), 1–17; and Jeffrey R. Wilson, “The Trouble with Disability in Shakespeare Studies,” Disability Studies Quarterly 37.2 (2017), https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5430/4644.

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the disabled body one must return to the concept of the norm, the normal body.”11 But Hobgood and Wood push against the assumption that because there was no medicalized definition of “normal” in the early modern period, there were no “normative baselines” operating in early modern culture, though these norms had “their own specifically early modern parameters.”12 Using the vocabulary and critical frameworks of disability studies to read early modern texts can thus become a process of reciprocal elucidation. As Elizabeth Bearden puts it, “Understanding how early modern writers normed, located, and related disability not only provides us with more accurate genealogies of disability, but also helps us to nuance current aesthetic and theoretical disability formulations.”13 In recent years early modern disability studies has become a thriving field. A second major anthology, Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, edited by Sujata Iyengar, was published in 2014.14 Articles by younger scholars, including Angela Heetderks, Katherine Schaap Williams, Lauren Coker, Jeffrey R. Wilson, and Christine M. Gottlieb, have enlarged the field and diversified its debates.15 Two important monographs, Lindsey Row-Heyveld’s Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama and Genevieve Love’s Early Modern Theatre and 11 Lennard J. Davis, “Constructing Normalcy,” in Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 23–49. 12 Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, “Early Modern Literature and Disability Studies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability, eds. Clare Barker and Stuart Murray (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 33. Hobgood and Wood are here referring to the work of Elizabeth Bearden, cited in n.13 below. 13 Elizabeth Bearden, Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019), 4. 14 Sujata Iyengar, ed., Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014). 15 Heetderks, “‘Better a Witty Fool’;” Katherine Schaap Williams, “Performing Disability and Theorizing Deformity,” English Studies, 94:7 (2013): 757–772, and “More Legs Than Nature Gave Thee: Performing the Cripple in The Fair Maid of the Exchange,” ELH: English Literary History 82 (2015): 491–519; Lauren Coker, “Boy Actors and Early Modern Disability Comedy in The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Epicoene,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 31.1 (2016): 5–21, and “Disability and the Spectacle of Strangeness: The Construction of Hags in The Masque of Queenes,” Ben Johnson Journal 26 (2019): 253–263; Wilson, “The Trouble with Disability,” and “The Figure of Stigma in Shakespeare’s Drama,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 51 (2018): 237– 266; and Christine M. Gottlieb, “‘Unaccommodated Man’: Dismodernism and Disability Justice in King Lear, Disability Studies Quarterly 38 (2018), https://dsq-sds.org/article/ view/6079/5133.

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the Figure of Disability, were published in 2018 and 2019 respectively.16 A cluster of essays on disability in early modern theatre appeared in Early Theatre in 2019.17 As the titles indicate, much of the recent work on disability in early modern English literature has focused on drama. This makes sense, not only because early modern plays feature a large and varied group of disabled characters—Richard III, as Hobgood and Wood say, is “just the tip of the iceberg”18 —but also because drama was the artistic medium in which early modern ideas about disability were both literally and figuratively embodied in performance, through speech, gesture, movement, and dynamic encounters between disabled and nondisabled characters. To signal its innovative historical and theoretical reach, Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama is structured around the three meanings of disability performance identified by Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander in their groundbreaking anthology, Bodies in Commotion: “disability as a performance of everyday life, as a metaphor in dramatic literature, and as the work of disabled performing artists.”19 At the same time, essays are juxtaposed to highlight their thematic and methodological resonances. The contributors expand the definition of early modern disability to include impairments and diseases such as muteness, infertility,

16 Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Genevieve Love, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2019). 17 Susan L. Anderson, ed., “Issues in Review: Disability in Early Modern Theatre,” Early Theatre 22.2 (2019): 143–198. 18 Hobgood and Wood, “Early Modern Literature and Disability Studies,” 32. For discussions of Richard III and disability studies see Katherine Schaap Williams, “Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III ,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009), https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/997/1181, and “Performing Disability and Theorizing Deformity,” English Studies 94.7 (2013): 757–772; David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “Performing Deformity: The Making and Unmaking of Richard III,” in Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 95–118: Lindsey Row-Heyveld, “Rules of Charity: Richard III and the Counterfeit Disability Tradition,” in Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 135–170; and Abigail Elizabeth Comber, “A Medieval King ‘Disabled’ by an Early Modern Construct,” in Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. Joshua R. Eyler (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 183–196. 19 Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, eds., Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 1.

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rabies, and syphilis. They also expand the range of theoretical approaches to early modern disability by incorporating gender studies, queer studies, and theories of neurodiversity. Collectively the essays proffer an expansive view of early modern disability in performance, suggesting new methodologies for finding and interpreting it in unexpected contexts, while considering continuity and change between the early modern period and our own.

Part I: The Performance of Disability in Everyday Life Contemporary disability theorists and artists have claimed that disability is always a kind of performance: the disabled body, marked by difference, draws the eyes of observers, putting it on a metaphorical stage. The playwright John Belluso described his experience in explicitly theatrical terms: Any time I get on a public bus, I feel like it’s a moment of theater. I’m lifted, the stage is moving up and I enter, and people are along the lines, and they’re turning and looking, and I make my entrance. It’s theater, and I have to perform. And I feel like we as disabled people are constantly onstage, and we’re constantly performing. We have to make the choice either to perform or not to perform … There are times when it’s fantastic to perform your disability, it’s joyful, and it’s powerful.20

The pleasure and power that Belluso finds in his performance are related to his sense of agency. By imagining the bus as his stage, and re-casting the other passengers as his audience, he reverses the usual social dynamic of staring in which the nondisabled gawk at the disabled, subjecting them to what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson describes as “intrusive interest” and “uneasy attention.”21 Early modern English spectators could stare at non-normative bodies in a variety of venues, from the streets, to the fairs, to the Court, to the theatre. When Trinculo discovers Caliban in The Tempest , he compares two apparently disparate types of encounter: 20 John Belluso, interview with Carrie Sandahl, quoted in Bodies in Commotion, 2. 21 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Dares to Stares: Disabled Women Performance Artists

and the Dynamics of Staring,” Bodies in Commotion, 30.

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What have we here? a man or a fish? dead or alive? … A strange fish! Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver: there would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man: when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.22

What distinguishes the “dead Indian” from the “lame beggar,” in Trinculo’s mind, is context: one belongs to the theatricalized realm of paid entertainment, while the other presents the passerby with an optional (and, Trinculo suggests, frequently refused) opportunity to show charity. Yet the very fact that Trinculo associates these two exchanges reveals their underlying commonality. Mark Thornton Burnett comments that “Trinculo’s reflections work to deflect responsibility away from the inherent characteristics of the ‘monster’ and onto the subjectivity of the spectator.”23 In fact, every encounter between the disabled and the nondisabled is constructed through the viewer’s subjectivity: the nondisabled perspective turns a sight into a spectacle. The early modern theatre, like the fairground, was a site of staring at difference on display, licensed by commercial exchange. A conversation in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613) suggests how easily the two types of spectacle could be conflated: Wife: [O]f all the sights that ever were in London, since I was married, methinks the little child that was so fair grown about the members was the prettiest, that, and the hermaphrodite. Citizen: Nay by your leave Nell, Ninivie was better. Wife: Ninivie, Oh, that was the story of Joan and the Wall, was it not George? Citizen: Yes lamb.24

22 The Tempest , 2.2.24–31. 23 Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early

Modern Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 3.

24 Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Michael Hattaway (London: Ernest Benn; New York: Norton, 1969), 3.273–280. Scott Shershow, citing Hereford and Simpson, suggests that Ninivie (Nineveh) may have been a puppet-play version of Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene’s Looking Glasse, for London and England, which features the story of Jonah and the whale (misremembered by Nell as “Joan and the Wall”); see Scott Cutler Shershow, Puppets and ‘Popular’ Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 47n.6.

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Although the disabled bodies represented on the early modern stage were doubly fictive—dramatic characters, performed by able-bodied actors— they often enacted encounters with disability that would have had topical resonance for early modern audiences. For example, four essays in the volume consider disabled veterans, who were sufficiently numerous in early modern England to constitute, in Geoffrey Hudson’s words, a “political problem,” yet have so far received little attention from scholars of early modern disability studies.25 In A Larum for London (1602), the character Stumpe (whose name identifies him with his wooden leg) reproaches a citizen of Antwerp: let a Soldier, that hath spent his bloud, Is lame’d, diseas’d, or any way distrest, Appeale for succour, then you looke a sconce As if you knew him not.26

The citizen’s averted gaze signals not only a refusal to acknowledge Stumpe, but also, perhaps, contempt or suspicion (OED, “look askance”) for the disabled man seeking “succour.” Since the play draws an explicit parallel between Antwerp and London, it’s possible to imagine Stumpe’s accusation being directed at the theatrical audience as well.27 Several essays in this volume further explore the dynamic of staring at disability in early modern theatres by examining how plays could position their audiences in relation to a disabled character by alternately confirming and destabilizing their assumptions, evoking responses that ranged from derision (Boro) to confusion (Mendelson) to “inclusion through identification” (Folkerth). In Staring: How We Look, Garland Thomson argues that an extraordinary body is spectacularized when it “disorders expectations” of an ordinary body.28 Sometimes, however, a disabled body can disorder 25 See Geoffrey L. Hudson, “Disabled Veterans and the State in Early Modern England,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 117. 26 A larum for London, or The siedge of Antwerpe With the ventrous actes and valorous deeds of the lame soldier (London, 1602), C2v. 27 Stumpe is discussed in this volume by Austin and Anderson. For a different theoretical argument about Stumpe’s prosthesis, see Genevieve Love, Early Modern Theatre, 69–102. 28 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 37.

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expectations by not conforming to the nondisabled observer’s preconceived notions of disability: it doesn’t look or act “disabled enough.” In “Disability as Masquerade” Tobin Siebers describes such an encounter: In December 1999, I had an altercation at the San Francisco airport with a gatekeeper for Northwest Airlines, who demanded that I use a wheelchair if I wanted to claim the early-boarding option. He did not want to accept that I was disabled unless my status was validated by a highly visible prop like a wheelchair …The incident was trivial in many ways, but I have now adopted the habit of exaggerating my limp whenever I board planes. My exaggeration is not always sufficient to render my disability visible—gatekeepers still question me on occasion—but I continue to use the strategy, despite the fact that it fills me with a sense of anxiety and bad faith, emotions that resonate with previous experiences in which doctors and nurses have accused me of false complaints, oversensitivity, and malingering.29

Siebers’s reference to a wheelchair as a “highly visible prop” underscores the role of the spectator in theatricalizing disability: for disabled people themselves, a wheelchair is not a mere “prop,” but, in Petra Kupper’s words, “a tool, a lived experience, an aesthetic statement, and a form of self-identification.”30 Siebers’ performance, as the term “masquerade” suggests, is fraught with negative connotations of disguise and falsehood. Ironically, in order to prove that he is “really” disabled and receive the attention he needs, Siebers is compelled to act the part with stereotypical props and gestures, to “masquerade” as a culturally legible figure of disability. In Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Lindsey Row-Heyveld locates an early modern analogue for Siebers’ disability masquerade in the street performances of early modern beggars. As she explains, early modern begging was inherently theatrical: Even when the disability on display was real, the relationship between a beggar and an almsgiver distinctly resembled the relationship between a player and a playgoer. Charity was street theater with a performer 29 Tobin Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade,” Literature and Medicine 23.1 (Spring 2004): 1–22. 30 Petra Kuppers, “The Wheelchair’s Rhetoric: The Performance of Disability,” TDR: The Drama Review 51 (2007): 81.

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attempting to elicit a particular response and an audience tasked with evaluating that performance.31

The stakes of these performative encounters could be high. Changes in social policy increased the pressure to distinguish clearly between those who were truly unable to work, and thus deserving of charity, and those who were merely malingering. Disabled beggars could be compelled to exaggerate their impairments to convince skeptical onlookers or officials that they were “disabled enough.” “While the ‘masquerade’ may be a nearly universal experience of disability,” Row-Heyveld writes, “in a world in which begging was a primary (if conflicted) form of poor relief, masquerade must have been a necessity.”32 Robert Henke makes a similar point: “Begging is such a powerful form of theatricality because of its inborn paradox: on the one hand, it must be distilled, exaggerated, and performed; on the other hand, if it is to be successfully received, the ‘performance’ must be read as indicating true need.”33 Row-Heyveld’s essay in this volume, “Disability and the Work of Performance in Early Modern England,” anchors the collection by examining the implications of the everyday work of disability performance in city streets for representations of disability on the early modern English stage. Row-Heyveld argues that disability created complications for the professional theatre, since the social performance of disability and the performative labor of the theatre mirrored one another. At times, the theatre used its representations of disability to demonize disabled people and to deny the analogy between begging and playing as forms of theatricality. But Row-Heyveld argues that when the theatre extended itself to imagine the disabled experience, as in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, it found a valuable parallel—even a partner—in the project of legitimizing the work of performance. The essays by Jodie Austin, Matt Carter, Melissa Geil, Simone Chess, and Wes Folkerth focus on the intersections of disability performance with the other aspects of the early modern social self, including gender, sexuality, and intelligence. In “‘By the Knife and Fire’: Conceptions of Surgery and Disability in Early Modern Medical Treatises,” Austin sheds 31 Row-Heyveld, Dissembling Disability, 13. 32 Row-Heyveld, Dissembling Disability, 12. 33 Robert Henke, “Poor,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2013), 466.

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new light on early modern conceptions of disability and their implications for wounded veterans. She examines early modern treatises on amputation and prosthetics, arguing that they reflect a surprisingly complex attitude towards disability and the quality of life post-surgery. Early modern surgeons imagined their treatment of war wounds, including the construction of prostheses, as a performative craft aimed at re-enabling bodies so that they could return to military service, thus restoring the veteran to both bodily and social wholeness. Ultimately Austin makes the case for a reconsideration of these medical texts alongside those in the literary tradition as a means of shedding light on seventeenth-century European conceptions of disability and prosthesis and their implications for veterans in the early modern period. Matt Carter’s “‘Turn it to a Crutch’: Disability and Swordsmanship in The Little French Lawyer” complements Austin’s essay by examining a dramatic character, Champernell, who has lost an arm and a leg in combat. Champernell is publicly shamed on his wedding day when he is unable to use his sword in a duel. Carter argues that the challengers’ mocking suggestion that Champernell “turn [his sword] to a crutch”— that is, fall on his sword—manifests masculinist narratives of stoical honor as a means by which the disabled male subject is contained. Yet the play subverts that paradigm when Champernell catches and beats La-Writ, the play’s eponymous lawyer. Champernell’s victory serves to liberate, rather than constrain, the disabled male subject by emphasizing the importance of comportment over embodiment. Melissa Geil’s “Mutism and Feminine Silence: Gender, Performance, and Disability in Epicoene” uncovers intersections of disability and the performance of early modern femininity by examining the slippage of language between cognitive, psychological, and linguistic impairments (muteness) and cultural ideals of feminine behavior (silence). Geil considers accounts of two seventeenth-century women, Martha Hatfield and Elinor Channel, who experienced what we now might call selective mutism, arguing that their stories, as appropriated by male authors, cast them as vessels of God who perform feminine ideals of piety by speaking only when God speaks through them. Geil then turns to Ben Jonson’s play Epicoene, which draws attention to female silence as a kind of disability masquerade—a performance that diminishes the actual lived experiences of mute women like Channel and Hatfield. In “Contented Cuckolds: Infertility and Queer Reproductive Practice in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Machiavelli’s

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Mandragola,” Simone Chess focuses on a medical condition that has occupied a marginal position in contemporary discourses of disability. Chess argues that early modern authors connected infertility and disability by medicalizing barren couples in ways that mark them as disabled. Her essay examines a ballad, “The Contented Cuckold,” and two plays, Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Machiavelli’s Mandragola, which present a social solution to this ostensibly medical problem: the wife sleeps with another man with the husband’s consent, and the resulting children are accepted as the couple’s “natural” offspring. Drawing parallels between early modern and contemporary reproductive practices, Chess reads these texts through the lens of contemporary queer studies, arguing that they do “queer work” by challenging heteronormative structures of marriage and family. In “Reading Shakespeare After Neurodiversity,” Wes Folkerth uses the contemporary concept of neurodiversity, which defines cognitive difference in terms of variability rather than deficit, to see past Shakespeare’s apparent designation of fools and clowns as types of cognitive impairment: what distinguishes these characters, Folkerth argues, is rather their idiosyncrasy. Folkerth begins by contextualizing the individuality of Shakespeare’s fools through a reading of Robert Armin’s accounts of historical fools in Foole Upon Foole (1600). He then examines the variable speeds of wit in The Two Gentlemen of Verona in order to draw out the ways in which early modern ideas of intelligence could be more flexible and inclusive than our own. The essay concludes by arguing that Shakespeare encouraged a sense of “inclusion by identification” in his audiences by manipulating the dramatic sense of time to put them in the subject position of the fool.

Part II: Disability as a Metaphor in Dramatic Literature For the nondisabled, atypical embodiment and cognition always seem to require explanation, a questioning of cause (“What happened to you?”) and meaning (“Why did this happen to you?”). Explanatory frameworks in Western culture have varied over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the religious or moral model, which interpreted disability as a sign of Divine judgment or an outward manifestation of inner defect, was supplanted by a medical model that defined disability as abnormality, an individual “problem” requiring treatment or cure. In

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the late twentieth century the medical model was challenged by the social model, which located disability not in individual impairments, but rather in societal barriers that stigmatize disabled people and prevent them from living full lives.34 Most recently, some disability theorists have critiqued the social model’s binary distinction between body and society, advocating instead for a relational or cultural model that acknowledges the material, embodied experience of disability and the varied interactions of disabled bodyminds with their environments.35 Yet despite positive changes in cultural understandings of disability, and the continuing growth of disability awareness and activism, the older moral and medical models remain embedded in language in the form of metaphors that use disability as a vehicle of negativity: “lame” excuses, “blind” alleys, “freak” weather conditions, “idiotic” statements, pleas that “fall on deaf ears.”36 These expressions have become so normalized that their connections to actual disability are forgotten: they are “dead metaphors.” As Vivian Sobchak points out, this erasure of the lived experience of disability is inherent in the process of metaphorization: [P]rimarily based on relations of ideas rather than objects and on structural and functional resemblances rather than physical similarities, metaphorical usage does not owe any necessary allegiance to the literal object—such as a

34 See Tom Shakespeare, “The Social Model of Disability,” in The Disability Studies

Reader, 5th edition, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2017), 195–203.

35 Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 6. For more detailed discussions of these models in the context of pre-modern disability studies, see Joshua R. Eyler, “Introduction: Breaking Boundaries, Building Bridges,” in Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. Joshua R. Eyler (London: Routledge, 2016), 1–8; and Sujata Iyengar, “Introduction,” 1–2; Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, “Introduction: Ethical Staring: Disabling the English Renaissance,” in Recovering Disability, 3–6; and David Houston Wood, “Staging Disability in Renaissance Drama,” A New Companion to Renaissance Drama, eds. Arthur F. Kinney and Thomas Warren Hopper (Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 487–500. 36 On disability metaphors see Joseph Grigely, “Blindness and Deafness as Metaphors:

An Anthological Essay,” Journal of Visual Culture 5.2 (2006): 227–241; Amy Vidali, “Seeing What We Know: Disability and Theories of Metaphor,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4.1 (2010): 33–54; and Jay Dolmage, “Between the Valley and the Field: Metaphor and Disability,” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 27 (2005): 108–119.

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prosthesis—that generated it. Nonetheless, it does owe necessary allegiance to a ‘common opinion’ about the object.37

For many people living with disabilities, however, disability metaphors are emphatically not dead; their very “allegiance to a common opinion” means that they have lost neither their imaginative force nor their power to hurt. As Carrie Sandahl puts it, “Metaphors are not innocuous artistic flourishes … but powerful discursive structures that can misrepresent, define, and confine people with disabilities and as such are the focus of much disability activism.”38 Disability metaphors, and disability-as-metaphor, also haunt Western literature. In Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder write that disability in narrative functions “first, as a stock feature of characterization, and second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device.”39 Stock characterizations form a catalogue of disability stereotypes—the criminal, the villain, the monster, the tragic victim, the misfit, the “special child,” the “supercrip”—whose deviance from societal norms is used either to signify their inner defects or to render them objects of pity or admiration.40 The need to resolve the “problem” of that deviance drives the plot, making disability what Mitchell and Snyder call a “narrative prosthesis”: a “crutch upon which

37 Vivian Sobchak, “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality,” in The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, eds. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 17–46. 38 Sandahl, “Ahhh Freakout! Metaphors of Disability and Femaleness in Performance,” Theatre Topics 9 (1999), 14. See also Sami Schalk, “Metaphorically Speaking: Ableist Metaphors in Feminist Writing,” Disability Studies Quarterly 33.4 (2013), https://dsqsds.org/article/view/3874/3410. For a nuanced critique of disability metaphor, see Tanya Titchkosky, “Life with Dead Metaphors: Impairment Rhetoric and Social Justice Praxis,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 9 (2015): 1–18. 39 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 47. 40 See Paul Longmore, “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Tele-

vision and Motion Pictures,” in Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 131–148; Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 31–62; and Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (Columbia University Press, 2007), 32–53.

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literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight.”41 The standard strategy for resolving the “problem” of disability is to eliminate the disabled character through a process that Jay Timothy Dolmage starkly terms “kill-or-cure.”42 Disability can also be used symbolically to “give abstraction a body,” in which case it becomes symptomatic of larger social ills.43 Mitchell and Snyder term this capacity of disability to travel “between the micro and macro levels of meaning” the “materiality of metaphor,”44 arguing that “the corporeal metaphor offers narrative the one thing it cannot possess—an anchor in materiality.”45 Disabled characters and disability metaphors are equally pervasive in drama; as theatre historian Victoria Lewis points out, plays have historically used disability as a dramaturgical device.46 Unlike prose narrative, however, drama casts an “anchor in materiality” through performance. As Susan L. Anderson explains, “drama foregrounds the body—or rather, a range of bodies—as the very medium through with it makes its claims.”47 In Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability, Genevieve Love argues that these theatrical embodiments of disability are always inherently metaphorical because the theatre itself is a site of figuration. Specifically, Love reads dramatic characters using prostheses—which, in a double metaphorization that echoes Mitchell and Snyder, she terms “prosthetic characters”—as “complex metarepresentational figure[s]” for the “likeness problem” of theatrical mimesis: they “capture the simultaneous presence of the represented, imaginative world of the fiction and the material, embodied world of the theatre, putting before us the metaphor—presentation is representation—on which theatrical pleasure is based.”48 41 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 49. 42 Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, 39. 43 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 47. 44 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 57. 45 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 63. 46 Victoria Lewis, “The Dramaturgy of Disability,” Michigan Quarterly Review 37 (1998): 525–540; see also Sandahl, “Ahhh Freakout!,” 11–30. 47 Susan L. Anderson, “Introduction” to “Issues in Review: Disability in Early Modern Theatre,” Early Theatre 22.2 (2019): 147. 48 Love, Early Modern Theatre, 4.

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In developing her theory of disability as meta-metaphor Love distances herself from other scholars of disability in early modern drama, announcing that her arguments are “[grounded] in neither a historicist nor a disability studies methodology”49 The essays by Avi Mendelson, Susan Anderson, Joyce Boro, and Nancy Simpson-Younger take a different approach: they explore interactions of disability metaphors with dramatic genres and forms while emphasizing the historical, social, and political dimensions of performance’s “anchor in materiality.” In doing so they draw out possibilities for contradiction as well as congruence between texts and bodies, words, and actions. Like other essays in this volume, they are also concerned with the dynamics of spectatorship and audience reception. Avi Mendelson’s “Enabling Rabies in King Lear” argues that the play’s representation of madness associates the metaphorical transfer of meaning in language with the physical transfer of contagion in bodies. Mendelson traces Edgar’s metaphor, “a dog in madness,” (3.4. 86–87) to early modern medical treatises on rabies, a contagious disease that caused infected humans not only to “rage” irrationally but also to behave like dogs. He links the performances of human/animal shapeshifting described in these treatises to both the circulation of canine metaphors in the play and to the increasingly currish behavior of its characters. Mendelson concludes that madness in King Lear, rather than being contained within a single bodymind, is contagious: it spreads pathogenically through the play’s language, among its characters, and from the actors to members of the audience. Susan Anderson’s “Limping and Lameness on the Shakespearean Stage” investigates how the early modern theatre reframes disability as metaphor by combining rhetorical (as in “lame verses”) and performative lameness. She uses Tobin Siebers’ theory of complex embodiment to argue that textual representation and embodied performance must be considered together if the operations of lameness on the early modern stage are to be understood. Through readings of As You Like It , The Fair Maid of the Exchange, The Shoemakers’ Holiday, The Taming of the Shrew, and A Larum for London, Anderson establishes a range of categories of lameness and shows that, although “lame” as a term for both human and poetic movement is exclusively negative, its pejorative implications do not

49 Love, Early Modern Theatre, 6.

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necessarily apply to dramatic characters who are described as lame, or who exhibit “lameness” on stage. Anderson uses Chris Mounsey’s concept of variability (as distinguished from the ability/disability binary) to account for the ways in which some lame characters seem both to invite and resist categorization as “lame.” Joyce Boro’s “‘Lame Humor’ in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Love’s Pilgrimage” focuses on a character that might exemplify Mitchell and Snyder’s “materiality of metaphor.” Ableism and Hispanophobia converge in the figure of Don Sanchio, a disabled war veteran who is carried in a chair—itself a material metaphor in the early modern theatre, given the visual and symbolic link between sick chairs and sick thrones.50 Boro explains how Beaumont and Fletcher transformed their Spanish source into a farcical critique not only of Philip II of Spain, who used a wheelchair in his later years, but also of Spanishness generally. Drawing on theories of comedy, she argues that the playwrights exploited the power of comic laughter to unite the audience as a community of able-bodied, healthy, and moral English spectators by licensing and encouraging them to mock the disabled, degenerate foreign Other. Nancy Simpson-Younger’s essay, “Syphilis Patches: Form and Disability History in The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” uses the framework of disability studies to articulate parallels between the metaphorical “patching” of early modern plays with pieces of text and the literal “patching” of early modern syphilitic bodies with pieces of material. Beaumont and Fletcher’s metatheatrical comedy explores the overlap and divergence of these types of patching by staging two conflicting approaches to the treatment of syphilis. The barber-surgeon Barbaroso subjects his patients to medicalized treatments, including social isolation and a nose patch. In an extra scene “patched” onto the play’s plotline, the grocers’ apprentice Rafe appears to free Barbaroso’s victims and re-integrates them into the community. Where Barbaroso patches literally, to conceal or protect a wound, the grocers add figurative patches to the play text, gaining greater visibility for the socially ostracized. In the latter part of the essay SimpsonYounger takes on broader questions of metaphoricity by examining the play’s history as a “patched” or “syphilitic” text.

50 Alan C. Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 114.

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Part III: The Work of Disabled Artists In her introduction to Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, Sujata Iyengar writes that the term “Shakespearean body” encompasses “not only bodies in Shakespeare but also bodies that read, perform, and critique the plays.”51 Yet there is one group of Shakespearean bodies that has so far received little attention from Shakespeare scholars: those of the d/Deaf and disabled actors who perform Shakespeare today.52 The final section of this volume brings its analysis of disability performance into the twenty-first century by considering how the material realities of disabled bodyminds on stage affect both the performance and reception of early modern plays for contemporary audiences. The essays by Jennifer Nelson, Sarah Olive, and Leslie Dunn show how the interventions of Deaf and disabled actors in Shakespearean performance traditions not only challenge us to think about Shakespeare and disability differently; they also reveal what has changed—and what hasn’t—between early modern attitudes towards disability and our own. Theatre historian Kirsty Johnson has written about the “mutual revitalizing power found in the encounter between modern drama and disability artists.”53 The same revitalizing power is found in performances of Shakespeare by Deaf and disabled actors. The revisionary Richards of Dave Richer (2001), Peter Dinklage (2004), Michael Patrick Thornton (2016), Debbie Patterson (2016), Mat Fraser (2017), and Kate Mulvany (2017) challenged an acting tradition in which the role had become an occasion for bravura “cripping up” by able-bodied actors.54 When disabled 51 Sujata Iyengar, “Introduction,” 1. 52 Exceptions include Michael W. Shurgot, “Breaking the Sound Barrier: Howie Seago

and American Sign Language at Oregon Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism and Scholarship 30.1 (2012): 21–36; and Lezlie Z. Cross, “Speaking in the Silence: Deaf Performance at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival,” in Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, eds. Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kathryn R. McPherson, and Sarah Enloe (Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), 7–17. The use of the term “Deaf” acknowledges the differences between the medical construction of deafness as an audiological condition (“small d deaf”) and Deafness as a cultural identity. 53 Kirsty Johnson, Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 30. 54 On Richard’s performance history see Paul Menzer, Anecdotal Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2015), 137–172, and Scott Colley, Richard’s Himself Again: A Stage History of Richard III (Greenwood Press, 1992).

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actors play Richard, by contrast, they draw instead on their own embodied knowledge of disability. As Mat Fraser said in an interview, “I don’t have to start performing my own impairments … I can just be, in my body. I don’t have to make any flourishy hand movements to show my wonderfully crippled hand, or prance about on a stick or anything to illustrate the point. I can just stand there and be, and I feel be more direct and honest.”55 Critics and audiences are challenged by these performances, too, since they no longer able to rest comfortably in the knowledge that Richard’s disability is merely performative. In recent years d/Deaf and disabled actors have increasingly had opportunities to play Shakespearean characters other than Richard, as professional companies such as the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival expand their commitments to diversity and access. Through the performances of actors such as Howie Seago, Regan Linton, Nadia Albina, Charlotte Arrowsmith, Karina Jones, and Nadia Nadarajah, audiences have been invited to reimagine Celia, Cassandra, and the Ghost as deaf, Don John and Measure for Measure’s Juliet as wheelchair users, Bianca and Nerissa with one arm. As ability-neutral casting becomes more commonplace in Shakespeare productions, that act of audience reimagining may cease to be noteworthy, as it has with gender-neutral and race-neutral casting. Disabled artists are also creating and performing new Shakespearean works that explicitly critique stereotypes of disability while claiming the right of disabled actors to inhabit Shakespearean bodies. Mike Lew’s Teenage Dick, an adaptation of Richard III set in an American high school, was commissioned and developed by the The Apothetae, a New York company dedicated to changing perceptions of disability through theatre. Its founding director, Gregg Mozgala, played Richard in the first production, while his friend Buck was played by Shannon DeVido, a wheelchair user. A note in the published script insists that future productions “[c]ast disabled actors for Richard and Buck. They exist and they’re out there.”56 Commenting on the 2019 production at the Donmar Warehouse, Peter Kirwan wrote that “the writing-in of the actor’s body invites 55 Ian Youngs, “Mat Fraser on Playing Richard III and TV’s ‘Pathetic’ Disabled Casting,” BBC News, 4 May 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-397 49041. Accessed 14 May 2020. 56 Mike Lew, Teenage Dick (Dramatists Play Service, 2019), 4.

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a more serious and sustained reflection on living with difference than Shakespeare ever managed, drawing attention to the detail of Richard’s body and the way it works, while at the same time insisting on Richard’s right to be a complex and multifaceted individual.”57 Daniel Monks, who played Richard in the Donmar production, underscored this “writing-in of the actor’s body” when, in the middle of his opening soliloquy, which began with an allusion to Shakespeare’s (“Now that the winter formal gives way to glorious spring fling”), he suddenly slipped, physically and vocally, into a pitch-perfect imitation of Olivier’s Richard.58 The audience at the performance I attended laughed in recognition, but Monks was also making a serious point: for this play’s Richard, Shakespeare’s Richard was an imitation of disability rather than the real thing. Performances such as these do more than unsettle inherited approaches to Shakespeare: they also perform disability activism through Shakespeare. By bringing both disabled actors and disability awareness to the center of the theatre-making process, they answer the disability rights movement’s call for “nothing about us without us.” The final three essays in this collection do the same for early modern disability studies. Jennifer L. Nelson’s “Sign Gain to Deaf Gain: Deafness in Early Modern Manual Rhetoric and Modern Shakespeare Performances” constructs an explicit bridge from the early modern period to the present by linking the seventeenth-century rhetorician John Bulwer and the twenty-first-century scholar and director Peter Novak. Bulwer’s experience with deaf people and his interest in sign language led to his invention of a manual rhetoric that emphasized the signifying power of gesture. Peter Novak made use of Bulwer’s manual rhetoric and other visual/historical images when he served as project manager for a translation of Shakespeare ‘s Twelfth Night into ASL and directed a groundbreaking production by the Amaryllis Theatre Company. Nelson’s account of attending a performance of this production with her Gallaudet University Shakespeare class highlights the ways in which ASL Shakespeare brings “Deaf gain”— a change in the perception of deafness from loss to benefit—to Deaf and hearing audiences alike.

57 Peter Kirwan, “Teenage Dick @ The Donmar Warehouse,” U of N Blogs: The Bardathon, January 25, 2020, https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2020/01/25/ teenage-dick-the-donmar-warehouse/. Accessed 30 June 2020. 58 Mike Lew, Teenage Dick, 5.

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Sarah Olive’s essay, “‘This is miching mallecho. It means mischief’: Problematizing Representations of Actors with Down Syndrome in Growing Up Down’s ,” builds a more implicit bridge between past and present by examining disability representation and actor–audience dynamics in a Shakespeare performance by disabled actors. Olive focuses on a film, Growing Up Down’s , that documents the 2012 production of Hamlet by the Blue Apple Theatre, an organization based in Winchester (UK) that challenges prejudice against people with learning disabilities through theatre, dance, and film. Olive shows how the makers of Growing Up Down’s imposed a well-meaning but ableist narrative of transformation onto the production, with the result that the production is seen by viewers not as a performance by actors with disabilities, but rather as a performance about actors with disabilities. Olive’s critique of Growing Up Down’s underscores a challenge faced by all disabled actors who perform Shakespeare, namely the possibility that directors and audiences may be unable to see them through anything other than their culturally conditioned responses to both disability and Shakespeare—their “nondisabled lens.”59 This challenge is addressed in the final essay, Leslie Dunn’s “Shakespearean Disability Theatre.” Dunn begins by asking why the bodies of Shakespearean actors have historically been almost exclusively able bodies, considering such factors as performance tradition, actor training, and audiences’ unease with “real” as opposed to fictive disability onstage. After discussing some productions in which an actor’s disability was problematically metaphorized by the directors, Dunn turns to the work of Howie Seago with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which has expanded the meanings of disability in Shakespeare through collaborations with directors and cast members. The essay concludes by looking at two recent adaptations, Redefining Juliet and Follies in Titus , which put disabled artists at the center of the creative process. These final essays argue that reimagining Shakespeare through a disability lens can be generative work, creating performances with the potential to change the meanings of disability both on and off the stage. In doing so they enable the collection as a whole to gesture both backwards and forwards, modelling fruitful new directions for the ongoing 59 The term “non-disabled lens” comes from Christine Bruno, who was referring to the ways in which disabled characters in drama are most often viewed; quoted in Kirsty Johnson, Disability Theatre and Modern Drama, 148.

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conversation between early modern and contemporary disability studies. Even more importantly, they bring the voices of disabled performers into that conversation.

References Anderson, Susan L., ed. “Issues in Review: Disability in Early Modern Theatre.” Early Theatre 22.2 (2019): 143–198. Anon. A larum for London, or The siedge of Antwerpe With the ventrous actes and valorous deeds of the lame soldier. As it hath beene playde by the right Honorable Lord Chamberlaine his Seruants. London, 1602. Bearden, Elizabeth. Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Beaumont, Francis. The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Edited by Michael Hattaway. The New Mermaids. London: Ernest Benn; New York: Norton, 1969. Berson, Jessica. “Performing Deaf Identity: Toward a Continuum of Deaf Performance.” In Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, edited by Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, 50–52. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005. Burnett, Mark Thornton. Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Coker, Lauren. “Boy Actors and Early Modern Disability Comedy in The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Epicoene.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 31.1 (2016): 5–21. ———. “Disability and the Spectacle of Strangeness: The Construction of Hags in The Masque of Queenes.” Ben Johnson Journal 26 (2019): 253–263. Comber, Abigail Elizabeth. “A Medieval King ‘Disabled’ by an Early Modern Construct.” In Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, edited by Joshua R. Eyler, 183–196. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Cross, Lezlie Z. “Speaking in the Silence: Deaf Performance at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.” In Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kathryn R. McPherson, and Sarah Enloe, 7–17. Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013. Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London and New York: Verso, 1995. Dessen, Alan C. Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Dolmage, Jay Timothy. “Between the Valley and the Field: Metaphor and Disability.” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 27 (2005): 108–119. ———. Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014.

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Eyler, Joshua R. “Introduction Breaking Boundaries, Building Bridges.” In Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, edited byJoshua R. Eyler, 1–10. London: Routledge, 2016. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Dares to Stares: Disabled Women Performance Artists and the Dynamics of Staring,” In Bodies in Commotion, edited by Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, 30–41. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. ———. Staring: How We Look. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Gottlieb, Christine M. “‘Unaccommodated Man’: Dismodernism and Disability Justice in King Lear.” Disability Studies Quarterly 38 (2018). https://dsqsds.org/article/view/6079/5133. Grigely, Joseph. “Blindness and Deafness as Metaphors: An Anthological Essay.” Journal of Visual Culture 5.2 (2006): 227–241. Heetderks, Angela. “‘Better a Witty Fool than a Foolish Wit’: Song, Fooling, and Intellectual Disability in Shakespearean Drama.” In Gender and Song in Early Modern England, edited by Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson, 63–76. Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Henke, Robert. “Poor.” In Early Modern Theatricality, edited by Henry S. Turner, 460–477. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hobgood, Allison P. and David Houston Wood, eds. “Disabled Shakespeares.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/ 991/1183. ———. “Early Modern Literature and Disability Studies.” In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability, edited by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray, 32–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Hobgood, Allison P., and David Houston Wood. “Introduction: ‘Disabled Shakespeares.’” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). https://dsq-sds. org/article/view/991/1183. ———. “Introduction: Ethical Staring: Disabling the English Renaissance.” In Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, edited by Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, 1–22. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Hudson, Geoffrey L. “Disabled Veterans and the State in Early Modern England.” In Disabled Veterans in History, edited by David A. Gerber, 117–144. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Iyengar, Sujata. “Introduction: Shakespeare’s ‘Discourse of Disability.’” In Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, edited by Sujata Iyengar, 1–20. New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015. Kirwan, Peter. “Teenage Dick @ The Donmar Warehouse,” U of N Blogs: The Bardathon, January 25, 2020. https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/ 2020/01/25/teenage-dick-the-donmar-warehouse.

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Kuppers, Petra. “The Wheelchair’s Rhetoric: The Performance of Disability.” TDR: The Drama Review 51 (2007): 80–88. Lewis, Victoria. “The Dramaturgy of Disability.” Michigan Quarterly Review 37 (1998): 525–540. Longmore, Paul. “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Television and Motion Pictures.” In Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability, 131–148. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. Love, Genevieve. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability. London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2019. Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder. Cultural Locations of Disability. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Nardizzi, Vin. “Disability Figures in Shakespeare.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, edited by Valerie Traub, 1–17. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Row-Heyveld, Lindsey. Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Sandahl, Carrie. “Ahhh Freakout! Metaphors of Disability and Femaleness in Performance.” Theatre Topics 9 (1999): 11–30. Sandahl, Carrie and Philip Auslander, eds. Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Schalk, Sami. “Metaphorically Speaking: Ableist Metaphors in Feminist Writing.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33.4 (2013). https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/ 3874/3410. Siebers, Tobin. “Disability as Masquerade.” Literature and Medicine 23.1 (Spring 2004): 1–22. ———. “Shakespeare Differently Disabled.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, edited by Valerie Traub, 435–454. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.. Shakespeare, Tom. “The Social Model of Disability.” In The Disability Studies Reader, 5th edition, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 195–203. New York: Routledge, 2017. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. In The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan, 3205–3266. New York and London: Norton, 2016. ———. Twelfth Night, or What You Will. The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E.

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Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan, 1907–1972. New York and London: Norton, 2016. Shershow, Scott Cutler. Puppets and ‘Popular’ Culture. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Shurgot, Michael W. “Breaking the Sound Barrier: Howie Seago and American Sign Language at Oregon Shakespeare Festival.” Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism and Scholarship 30.1 (2012): 21–36. Sobchak, Vivian. “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality.” In The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, edited by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, 17–46. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. Southwell, John. Fools and Jesters at the English Court. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1998. Titchkosky, Tanya. “Life with Dead Metaphors: Impairment Rhetoric and Social Justice Praxis.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 9 (2015): 1–18. Vidali, Amy. “Seeing What We Know: Disability and Theories of Metaphor.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4.1 (2010): 33–54. “We Three Loggerheads.” Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. http://collections.sha kespeare.org.uk/search/museum/strst-sbt-1994-38. Williams, Katherine Schaap. “Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III .” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). https://dsq-sds.org/ article/view/997/1181. ———. “‘More Legs Than Nature Gave Thee’: Performing the Cripple in The Fair Maid of the Exchange.” ELH: English Literary History, 82 (2015): 491– 519. ———. “Performing Disability and Theorizing Deformity.” English Studies 94:7 (2013): 757–772. Wilson, Jeffrey R. “The Figure of Stigma in Shakespeare’s Drama.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 51 (2018): 237–266. ———. “The Trouble with Disability in Shakespeare Studies.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37.2 (2017). https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5430/4644. Wood, David Houston. “Staging Disability in Renaissance Drama.” In A New Companion to Renaissance Drama, edited by Arthur F. Kinney and Thomas Warren Hopper, 487–500. Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2017. Youngs, Ian. “Mat Fraser on Playing Richard III and TV’s ‘Pathetic’ Disabled Casting.” BBC News, 4 May 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertain ment-arts-39749041.

PART I

The Performance of Disability in Everyday Life

CHAPTER 2

Disability and the Work of Performance in Early Modern England Lindsey Row-Heyveld

Abstract In early modern England, nascent capitalism put increasing pressure on one’s ability to work. Disability became the boundary that defined the worker’s body, with physical impairment understood as the only legitimate exemption from productive labor. This exemption from work sharpened suspicion about the disabled body since it heightened fears of able-bodied people feigning disability in order to gain “undeserved” compensation from the state and charity from individuals. The result was that genuinely disabled people were required to performatively display their impairments in order to affirm those impairments’ authenticity. Performance became the work of disability, ironically demanded out of fear of performative disability. This chapter traces out the circular relationship between disability’s performance and disability’s work. It also explores the complications that this relationship created for the burgeoning professional theater in England. Using Thomas Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday as an example, I explore how the theater’s representation of disability reveals both the work of performance assigned to people with disabilities and the way in which the theater negotiated and

L. Row-Heyveld (B) Luther College, Decorah, IA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_2

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regulated that performance as they attempted to legitimate their own performative work. In early modern England, blindness didn’t make you disabled. Deafness, also, did not make you disabled, nor did limblessness nor old age. You were only disabled—legally, at least—if you could not work. Elizabethan poor laws established England’s earliest legal articulation of disability, and this foundational legislation made work (or, rather, the inability to work) disability’s defining trait.1 An Ease for Overseers of the Poore (1601), a handbook for magistrates tasked with dispensing poor relief, articulates this definition. A section entitled “A Description of poore by their Defects,” begins by stating: “Such poore as should have releefe in money are described by their defects of {nature; senses; members; Bodie, as {olde; blinde; lame; not able to work” and then specifies, “The last defect, not able to worke, is an exposition of the former.” The anonymous author then provides further clarity: There be many aged can worke, and there be some workes require more use then labour, and may easily be done by the olde: and therefore by old is not meant such as be onely in yeares, but by reason of the imbicillitie of their age they cannot work, or live of their work. There be some that want an eie, and yet can worke with the use of one eie, and therefore by blind is intended such a one as cannot see at all to worke, or live of his worke. There be other that want a legge, and yet he may doe many workes having the use of his hands, and therefore by lame is meant such an one, as for want of his limmes he cannot labour, nor live of his labour.2

Disability, then, was not defined by physical condition, but by participation in productive labor. Just as the elderly were not truly “aged” unless they could not work, nor the eyeless “blind,” nor the limbless “lame,” so people with physical impairments did not acquire the designation that would earn relief—and, therefore, were not grouped within the emerging legal category of disability—unless they could not work.3 1 For more, see Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004). 2 An Ease for Overseers of the Poore: Abstracted from the Statutes (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1601), 23. 3 No one single term was consistently employed to describe this emergent category in early modern England: Often identified as the “impotent” or the “impotent poor,”

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In practice, this definition meant that disabled people were virtually the only group in early modern England who were excused from labor. Major shifts in social, economic, political, and religious structures, especially those knotted up in the English Reformation, put enormous pressure on English people to perform productive labor. Disabled people were—ostensibly—free from that pressure. All legal statues attest to the “impotent” poor’s exemption from the mandate to work. Even the most exacting preachers, reformers, and statesmen prone to insisting with St. Paul that “if there were any which would not work, that he should not eat,” still consistently provided for the care of people whose impairments kept them from labor.4 Instead, disabled people faced a different work requirement. While excused from productive labor, they were tasked with performative labor. Disabled people had to prove the authenticity of their disability in order to receive relief from magistrates and to avoid the suspicion that shadowed disability in daily interactions as well. Proof required performance: Disabled people carefully orchestrated presentations of their impairments that required skill, ingenuity, and effort. In this way, performance became the work of disability.5 But disability’s performative work posed a potential challenge to the commercial theater. The legal definition of disability implied that performance could replace work, but, in reality, it enforced performance as the work of disability. At the same time, the commercial theater was trying to prove that performance was work. The stage often viewed

Michael Dalton does use the term “disability” to describe the burgeoning category of impaired people in his handbook for Justices of the Peace: “The person naturally disabled, either in wit, or member, as an Ideot, Lunatick, Blinde, Lame, &c. not being able to worke” can be provided for by overseers. The Countrey Justice (London, 1618), 99. Sujata Iyengar provides a helpful survey of Shakespeare’s uses of the word in “Introduction: Shakespeare’s ‘Discourse of Disability,’” in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. Sujata Iyengar (New York: Routledge, 2015), 9–13. 4 2 Thessalonians 3:10, Geneva Bible: A facsimile of the 1560 edition, eds. Llyod E. Berry and William Whittingham (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 5 For more on the performance demanded of disability, see Tobin Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade,” Literature and Medicine 23.1 (Spring 2004): 1–22. For a discussion of the performance imperative faced by disabled people in early modern England, see Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

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disability’s theatrical labor as threatening its own tenuous claims to occupational legitimacy, and, in response, regularly demonized and erased disability. But sometimes the stage recognized disabled labor as performative labor and found in disability a powerful analogue to its own work. Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599) provides one example of this unusual theatrical response. Instead of conceptualizing disability as a threat, The Shoemaker’s Holiday recognizes disability as a potential parallel or even partner in performative work. The play vividly depicts the performative labor done by people with disabilities, and deploys that depiction in an attempt to validate the theatrical work of both disabled people and the early modern stage. In doing so, The Shoemaker’s Holiday offers a unique example of the imaginative possibilities that the disabled experience could offer the early modern theater.

The Performative Work of Disability and the Performative Work of the Theater Before the English Reformation, people with disabilities who could not support themselves depended on their families and local parishes; in their absence, they received charity from monasteries, confraternies, and the solicitation of alms. The English Reformation brought sweeping changes to the systems of poor relief upon which many disabled people relied. The Elizabethan poor laws, in particular, sought to replace religious and informal aid with institutionalized, government-controlled aid.6 Long before the early modern era, people worried about who merited charity, but the shift to formal, state-controlled poor relief demanded that England establish a clear distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. Disability became that dividing line. English authorities agreed that “impotent” people deserved financial support, and they determined who counted as impotent by evaluating an individual’s ability to support him/herself through work.7 The poor laws defined disability, then, not

6 For more, see Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531–1782 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 41–48. 7 For an overview of Elizabethan social policy and disability, see David M. Turner, “‘Fraudulent’ Disability in Historical Perspective,” History and Policy (February 2012): n.p., accessed 1 June 2017, http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/fra udulent-disability-in-historical-perspective.

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in terms of a specific impairment or physiological state, but in terms of one’s ability to perform labor. Disability was held up as the only legitimate exemption from work, but that exemption sharpened suspicion about the disabled body. It entrenched fears of able-bodied people faking disability in order to gain undeserved compensation from the state and undeserved alms from charitable individuals. Fears of counterfeit disability were not invented during the early modern era; the possibility of fake disability fueled anxieties as early as the classical period, and evidence of those anxieties persist through the medieval era, as well.8 But distrust of disability flourished in the early modern period, driven in England by the interwoven escalation of population, urbanization, and poverty and, of course, by the Reformation’s renovation of social policy.9 Linda Woodbridge describes fears of counterfeit disability as “the very foundation of bureaucratic control of poor relief in that it provided a pretext for taking charity out of individual hands.”10 But these anxieties are not only visible in legislation: Fears of counterfeit disability helped sustain the popular early modern pamphlet genre known today as “rogue literature.” Dedicated to recounting the allegedly true exploits of the criminal underworld, rogue literature frequently focused its attentions on fraudulent disability, describing thieves who scoured

8 Hindle, On the Parish?, 227. For a survey of medieval counterfeit-disability narratives,

see Edward Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).

9 Anxiety about counterfeit disability was part of larger cultural anxiety about anonymity and false identities that has led Miriam Eliav-Feldon to describe the early modern period as the “Age of Impostors,” in Renaissance Imposters and Proofs of Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). The beginnings of British colonialism further propelled fears of fraudulent disability as colonial visual cultures insisted that able-bodied white colonizers could discern the profitability of colonized bodies via visual cues in spite of Black and brown people’s visual indications of pain. See Khairani Barokka, “How Colonial Visual Cultures Have Worsened This Pandemic and What Needs to Change,” Disability Visibility Project (April 2020): n.p., accessed 26 June 2020, https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/04/13/how-colonial-visualcultures-have-worsened-this-pandemic-and-what-needs-to-change. 10 Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 23. For more, see Bill Hughes, “Disabled People as Counterfeit Citizens: The Politics of Resentment Past and Present,” Disability & Society 30.7 (2015): 991–1004.

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their limbs with caustics to feign leprosy and mimed violent seizures to counterfeit epilepsy.11 Most of all, fears of fraudulent disability found life on the early modern stage. There the trope of the able-bodied character faking disability recurred so often that it developed into a fully-fledged stage tradition, complete with repeated conventions and consistent thematic concerns. At least forty early modern plays feature counterfeit disability.12 The stage tradition of dissembling disability offered a more diverse and nuanced picture of the performance of disability than did its legal and prose fiction counterparts. Taken together, however, all of these narratives reveal a deep anxiety about how easily the boundaries between ablebodied and disabled might be crossed and how easily one might profit from disability’s exemption from work. Ironically, legal protections put in place to guard against deceptive disability demanded that people perform disability. The Elizabethan poor laws tasked local administrators, typically Justices of the Peace and Overseers of the Poor, with determining the validity of poor petitioners’ claims for relief. These local magistrates interviewed and observed petitioners in order to judge whether they were authentically impaired enough to be compensated. Steve Hindle describes the result of this system as “a welfare regime … predicated on compulsory assessment,”13 and because that assessment evaluated ability to work rather than physical condition, magistrates relied on performance (instead of, say, physical exam) to form their judgements. Handbooks for local magistrates outlined methods designed to determine one’s ability to do labor, and depositions or “examinations” of the poor proliferate in Tudor quarter sessions records, recording how Justices of the Peace interrogated impoverished claimants.14 Interviewees had to provide detailed responses about their

11 See, for example, Robert Copland’s The Highway to the Spital-House (1536), John Awdeley’s The Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561), Thomas Harman’s A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors (1566–1567), and the many pamphlets written by Thomas Dekker, including The Bellman of London (1608) and Lanthorne and Candle-light (1608). 12 For an extended study of the counterfeit-disability tradition on stage, see RowHeyveld, Dissembling Disability. 13 Hindle, “Technologies of Identification Under the Old Poor Law,” Local Historian 36.4 (November 2006): 223. 14 A. L. Beier, “New Historicism, Historical Context, and the Literature of Roguery: The Case of Thomas Harman Reopened,” in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture,

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past travels, employment, criminal histories, even sexual encounters.15 At times authorities requested that the poor display their bodies or perform particular actions in order to authenticate their impairment. Petitioners had to carefully coordinate dialogue, inflection, gesture, stance, and dress in order to prove their impotency. Even when one’s body was not directly under scrutiny, presentation of the body was certainly a critical element in the authentication process.16 Therefore, in order to receive compensation, people had to perform disability in word and, sometimes, in deed in such a way as to convince skeptical audiences that their disability was, in fact, authentic. Further, given the pervasiveness of fears of fraudulent disability during this period, disabled people must have been required not only to perform disability formally for local authorities, but also informally for neighbors in daily interactions.17 While this system may have been exploited by some people willing to counterfeit disability, even genuinely impaired people were required to perform their disability in this way.18 Tobin Siebers describes the phenomenon of being required to strategically enact one’s disability— even when authentically impaired—as the “masquerade” of disability. Masquerade meets ableist expectations of disability in order to negotiate those prejudices and even put them to work in the disabled person’s favor. Historical evidence suggests that this has been a consistent practice of disability in many cultures and eras.19 The early modern version

eds. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 110. 15 Steve Hindle discusses the way that petitioners prioritized their impotency in appeals for poor relief. Hindle also records the way in which even the most inarguable accounts of disability were often not answered with relief, further suggesting the urgency of making a persuasive performance of one’s impairment. On the Parish?, 409, 417. 16 For examples of verbal and physical examinations of vagrants, especially those accused of counterfeiting, see Martine van Elk, “The Counterfeit Vagrant: The Dynamic of Deviance in the Bridewell Court Records and the Literature of Roguery,” in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, eds. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 126–130. 17 In fact, these daily performances may have been at least as urgent as those staged in formal appeals, since magistrates distributed the majority of poor relief to local residents known to them personally. Hindle, On the Parish?, 408. 18 Van Elk identifies several historical examples of disability counterfeiters in the Bridewell court records she analyzes. “The Counterfeit Vagrant,” 128–131. 19 Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade.”

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of disability masquerade was specifically deployed in order to demonstrate one’s inability to work, but masquerade certainly was work all its own: It required energy, ingenuity, concerted effort and skill. When done well, it earned social legitimacy, legal protection, and money. At the same time that performance was being established as the work of disability, the early modern theater was struggling to demonstrate that performance was work. As the first established commercial theatrical enterprise in England, the theater faced an uphill battle in establishing its legitimacy. When theatrical work had, previously, been the stuff of holiday-making, why should this theatrical work be considered valid labor? (Or, to put a finer point on it, when theatrical work had previously been available for free, why should people pay now?) The question of labor was central to early modern critiques of the theater, which repeatedly accuse players and playmakers of idleness.20 One of the earliest antitheatrical writers, John Northbrooke, made idleness the center of his critique, declaring that “Idleness is the mistress of wanton appetites … and more Idleness can there not be, than where such plays and interludes are.” Northbrooke was among the first to group actors with vagabonds and rogues, but he was less concerned with player’s “masterlessness” or lack of formal patronage than his belief that “their trade is such an idle loitering life, a practice to all mischief.”21 Northbrooke’s use of the word “trade” here is deliberate: to him, actors’ work is idleness. Northbrooke’s critiques were expanded and expounded on by later antitheatrical writers. Samuel Cox described acting as “an occupation of idelness,”22 and Stephen Gosson uses the same phrase, asserting that players’ “idle occupation” is an enemy to the word of God and that actors “have no occupation at all.”23 Philip Stubbes also framed his critique of the stage in terms of idleness, describing the theater as maintaining “a 20 Tom Rutter provides a comprehensive survey of both accusations that the theater fostered idleness and accusations that the theater itself was idle in Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 27–44. 21 Northbrooke, A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, with Other Idle Pastimes (1577), in Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, ed. Tanya Pollard (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 1–18; 10–12. 22 Cox, “Letter to an unknown recipient, dated 15 January, 1590,” in English Professional Theater, 1530–1660, eds. Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, and William Ingram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 169. 23 Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582), in Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, ed. Tanya Pollard (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 88, 110.

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great sort of idle persons, doing nothing but playing and loitering, having their livings of the sweat of other men’s brows.”24 To antitheatricalists, “playing” was not recognizably work; defenders of the theater tried mightily to prove that it was. Nathan Field centers his justification of the stage in its labor, equating playing with the work of mercers, drapers, and goldsmiths.25 In his Apology for Actors, Thomas Heywood uses the commercial theaters’ origins in artisanal civic drama as a way to legitimate theatrical labor.26 On the stage, playwrights repeatedly depicted theatrical work as imaginative, generative, productive labor in an attempt to justify the validity of their project. This is particularly evident in early modern metadrama, which reveals the arduous process of making a play. In plays-within-plays, actors are skillful professionals who need careful practice and meticulous training to perfect their craft, and theatrical rehearsals demand intensive time and labor—all demonstrating that playing was work.27 The legal articulation of disability suggested performance as a replacement for valid labor at just the moment when the theater was attempting to assert performance as valid labor. Disability, then, potentially undermined the theater’s claims to legitimate labor. If disability equaled exemption from work, and disability also equaled performance, then it followed that performance was not work. Antitheatricalists articulate and expand upon the threat that the early modern definition of disability posed the theater by suffusing the language of bodily ill throughout their writings. These writers regularly depict playhouses as dens of infection that could deform playgoers with their sinful interludes.28 In particular, 24 Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses (1583), in Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, ed. Tanya Pollard (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 117. 25 Field, “Letter to the Revd. Mr. Sutton” (1616), in Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, ed. Tanya Pollard (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 277. 26 Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), sig. A5r. 27 For a full reading of this phenomenon, see Rutter, Work and Play, 26–54. 28 Nichole DeWall catalogues how plague tropes, in particular, power antitheatricalist

discourse, critique obviously rooted in concern about the theater as a location for potential contagion from the plague. However, DeWall notes that there is little correlation between a text’s use of plague imagery and the proximity of its publication to an actual outbreak, suggesting that that the trope’s rhetorical value exceeded its effects as an instrument of public health. “‘Sweet Recreation Barred’: The Case for Playgoing in Plague-Time,” in Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, eds. Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman (New York: Routledge, 2011), 134–135.

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antitheatrical writers connect idleness with impairment. Among many examples, a vivid representative is William Rankins’ 1587 A Mirror for Monsters , wherein he envisions an idyllic England overrun by terrifying allegorical representations of sin. Chief among them is the deformed and diseased Idleness, whom Rankins directly links to the theater: [Idleness] must needs, in respect it marcheth amongst men, having some veil to cover his deformity lest, being easily discerned, it be not so well allowed. … So Idleness, lest his filthy spots should bewray the foulness of his face, doth cover the same with the vizard of honest recreation so far that minds seduced by self-will to ignorance can hardly say this is Idleness. As if it should be said plays are honest recreation, and therefore players are not ministers of Idleness.29

The theater’s attempts to defend itself against accusations of idleness are here figured as a type of reverse roguery, with the theater hiding its disability under a mask rather than hiding under the mask of disability as counterfeiters did. How did the theater respond to the potential threat posed by disability? Often, it seems, the theater sought to distance itself from disability’s performative labor by demonizing that performative work or erasing disability altogether. One of the most defining versions of on-stage impairment in this period is actually not really impairment at all: as mentioned previously, the counterfeit-disability tradition staged able-bodied characters faking disability in virtually every dramatic genre of the period, featuring meta-performances of blindness, madness, deafness, mobility impairments, speech impairments and more. A variety of motivators drove the relentless persistence of this trope on stage, among them the theater’s investment in defending its work. The counterfeit-disability trope can be read as a defense against the implicit substitution of performance for work encoded in early modern disability’s legal formulation. Counterfeitdisability plays erase the theatrical labor demanded of real people with disabilities in early modern England by erasing disabled characters altogether. At the same time, the counterfeit-disability stage tradition renders criminal the performative qualities of the non-standard body, and, in

29 Rankins, A Mirror of Monsters (1587), in Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, ed. Tanya Pollard (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 128.

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doing so, discredits the theatrical labor demanded from disabled people in the early modern era.30 But the theater did not need to see disability’s theatrical work as a threat to its own. On the rare occasions when the theater extended itself to imagine the disabled experience, it found a valuable parallel—even a partner—in its own project of defending the work of performance.

Disability and the Work of Performance in The Shoemaker ’s Holiday Thomas Dekker’s city comedy The Shoemaker’s Holiday stages an example of this alternative vision of disabled work. In the play’s first scene, Ralph Damport, a journeyman shoemaker, is conscripted to fight in “those wars of France” in spite of his recent marriage.31 When Ralph returns halfway through the play, he is disabled and his wife, Jane, is gone. The exact nature of Ralph’s impairment is never clear. “Enter RALPH being lame,” reads the stage direction, and the text indicates that he has either permanently injured his left leg or had all or part of it amputated. In spite of the severity of his condition, Ralph is more distressed by Jane’s absence than by his disability. He returns to the work of shoemaking but hopes to find his missing bride. A fortuitous order for new shoes reveals her whereabouts: Believing Ralph to have died in the war, Jane is about to marry a nefarious gentleman who has lied to her about Ralph’s death. With the help of his fellow shoemakers, Ralph arrives in time to stop Jane’s wedding and deliver appropriate comeuppance to her suitor. The Shoemaker’s Holiday raises the specter of counterfeit and idle disability only to repudiate that stereotype and authenticate Ralph’s impairment and identity. In the climax of the play, Ralph reunites with Jane just as she is about to enter the chapel to marry his rival. The play’s other subplot collides with Ralph’s at that moment, when the guardians

30 The intense metatheatrics of the counterfeit-disability tradition complicate the possibility that the stage deployed it to resist critique of its own performative labor, because the stage also deploys counterfeit disability to interrogate the theater’s theatrical practices. Even so, the counterfeit-disability trope still entrenched suspicions about disabled bodies and enforced the stereotype of disability’s potential for deception. 31 Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris (London: Methuen/New Mermaids, 2008), scene 1, line 49. All subsequent quotations from this text will appear parenthetically by scene and line number.

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of two higher-class lovers arrive at the same church, believing they are interrupting their children’s wedding. The guardians mistake Ralph and Jane for the other couple who, they assume, must have disguised themselves. They read Ralph’s disability—which might serve as an obvious indicator that he is not the errant able-bodied gentleman—as a sign of deception rather than evidence against it. They interpret Jane’s veil as an attempt to feign disability, as well. “See, see, my daughter’s masked,” says one guardian, and the other answers, “True, and my nephew, /To hide his guilt, counterfeits him lame” (18.114–115).32 This moment of mistaken identity clearly invokes the counterfeit-disability trope, although pointedly reversed, since Ralph’s disability is real. The guardians even threaten to tear off their disguises, quipping—in clear parallel to other disability-revealers in texts like Thomas Harman’s A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors and in the Simpcox episode of 2 H VI —“I’ll ease her blindness” and “I’ll his lameness cure” (18.17). Counterfeitdisability narratives on and off the stage characterized disability as lazy, deceptive, and potentially criminal in its idleness. But this moment introduces the stereotype of counterfeit disability only to swiftly shut it down: Ralph’s disability is real, he is demonstrably hard-working, and the people suspicious of disability are villains instead of heroes.33 Ralph is one of a constellation of characters in The Shoemaker’s Holiday who are popularly associated with idleness in early modern England and whose reputations the play seeks to revise. Apprentices—who populate the play, arriving en masse in its jubilant conclusion—were virtually mascots of idleness in Tudor England. Between 1590 and 1595, Elizabeth issued a series of proclamations condemning the behavior of London’s apprentices, particularly their penchant for leading riots and protests, since the rowdy behavior of allegedly idle apprentices was regarded as a serious

32 Confusion about Jane’s potential blindness may be explained by her wearing a mask rather than a traditional veil, possibly a mask that resembled a blindfold. See Paul J. C. M. Franssen, “‘Lame and Blind’: A Stage Emblem in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Notes and Queries 59.4 (December 2012): 557–559; 557. 33 Intriguingly, Franssen suggests that the pairing of impairments in this moment would have created a “stage emblem,” recreating in the theater a common visual allegory: that of a lame person carried by a blind person, representative of “mutual help,” a moral that seems richly resonant for my reading of this scene. Franssen, 558.

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threat to the commonweal.34 Strong cultural associations also linked shoemakers to idleness and the unruly, riotous behavior it supposedly engendered; evidence of shoemakers’ reputation for idle mischief appears on stage in Julius Caesar (and echoes in Henry V ).35 Filling the play with not just apprentices but, specifically, shoemaker’s apprentices signaled to audiences an investment in issues of idleness. In a secondary plot, the play adds Roland Lacy, a young profligate nobleman who deserts his military duties to pursue a woman, a plot which underscores this theme. By definition nobility did not work, and, as a deserter, Lacy further enforces the stereotype of idleness leveled at aristocrats. Yet, in each of these cases, The Shoemaker’s Holiday rehabilitates these figures of idleness by staging apprentices, shoemakers, and even noblemen industriously working. Ralph plays an important part in the play’s interrogation of idleness. As I have demonstrated, accusations of idleness also haunted disabled people in early modern England, and Ralph, like these other characters, counters those stereotypes through his diligent labor. Audiences see Ralph engaged in work on stage at multiple points throughout the drama: he makes shoes, he receives orders, he even helps serve the food that furnishes the play’s concluding feast. Reading Ralph alongside the other figures of idleness-rendered-industrious reveals Dekker adding disability to the roster of other populations whose alleged sloth The Shoemaker’s Holiday refutes. Of course, this means that—accordingly to the emergent legal definition, at least—Ralph is not disabled. In part, this incongruity can be explained by the play’s comedic mode and by Dekker’s fantasy of a unproblematic artisanal world. But it is also of a piece with the play’s larger interrogation of work. Ralph’s productive labor coexists alongside his performative labor because Dekker wants to explore the eroding boundaries between categories of work throughout The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Disability, which was so consistently understood in terms of idleness and artifice, becomes a central part of the rehabilitation of performative work in The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Throughout the play, Ralph does literal 34 See Emily Anglin, “Idleness, Apprentices, and Machines in Deloney and Dekker,” in Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature, eds. Monika Fludernik and Miriam Nandi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 86–106. 35 See Alison A. Chapman, “Whose St. Crispin’s Day Is It?: Shoemaking, Holiday Making and the Politics of Memory in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Quarterly 54.4 (Winter 2001): 1467–1494.

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performative work, showcasing how he strategically displays his disability at some times, and, at others, strategically conceals it. The play reveals the effort, energy, and skill necessary for these performances too, affirming the legitimacy of performative labor. In doing do, Dekker diverges from the usual presentation of on-stage disability in the early modern period. He does not demonize disability in an attempt to distance the theater from the threat disability’s performance posed. Instead, Dekker stages the performative work of disability in order to justify the similarly performative work of the commercial theater.36 The Shoemaker’s Holiday showcases disability masquerade, which the play makes uniquely visible by staging a character both pre- and postimpairment. Ralph begins the play able-bodied. This facilitates the narrative workings of the drama, and it also clearly establishes the parameters of his character, making visible his disability masquerade later in the play. The opening scene introduces Ralph in a moment of great turmoil: He is being conscripted into battle, and his master, Simon Eyre, and fellow shoemakers argue for his release. Their efforts fail, however, and Ralph is forced to part with his friends and with his newly married wife, Jane. Although Ralph stands at the center of the action for much of the scene and in spite of the heightened emotion that these events would seem to evoke, Ralph himself remains noticably quiet, and the scene establishes his character as steadfast, diligent, and not prone to bold outbursts, traits that remain consistent throughout the play—with one major exception. In the play’s climactic confrontation, Ralph is someone altogether different, and in this moment The Shoemaker’s Holiday reveals him masquerading. When the authenticity of his impairment is questioned by the guardians, Ralph offers a vivid display of his disability in response. Instead of presenting himself as pitiful (as counterfeiters of disability on stage often do), Ralph figures his impairment as a sign and even instrument of valor. “’Swounds, what mean you? Are you mad?” he asks, flipping their language of disability back on them, before responding, “The proudest of you that lays hands on [my wife] first, I’ll lay my

36 In this way, I read the deployment of disability in The Shoemaker’s Holiday as a

parallel to Genevieve Love’s assertion that disability representations in early modern theater were “a means of pointing back to the mimetic challenges and opportunities, showing off the challenges on which the theatre is founded and, and what it can get away with under those challenges,” albeit focused on labor rather than on semiotic strategies. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 14.

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crutch ’cross his pate” (18.128, 132–133). Ralph performs his disability verbally here, attesting to his bodily difference but claiming it as a mechanism of resistance rather than passivity. We can only speculate as to what the actor playing Ralph did with his body, clothing, or prop crutch in materializing this performance. Whatever it entailed, it works: Ralph’s fellow shoemakers rally around him, led by the ringleader Firk’s affirmative cry, “To him, lame Ralph!” and the guardians immediately recognize their mistake. While his impairment is real, the play suggests that this moment is perhaps not entirely authentic. Ralph’s presentation of himself here leans towards the spectacular, with his implied exposure of his own body and stated unveiling of his wife, his brashly heroic claims, and his dramatically important actions that reverse the power of the play’s villains. Especially in contrast to the consistently quiet, dutiful, dependent Ralph of the rest of the play, the swaggering picture of disability he presents in this climactic showdown makes his performance vividly visible. Sometimes, though, Ralph performs his disability away. While he can enact the masquerade of disability, the play also reveals that Ralph strategically passes, concealing and suppressing his impairment at times to gain inclusion in the community of shoemakers. In an exchange frequently cited as demonstrative of the play’s generous spirit, the newly-returned Ralph complains to his foreman Hodge that his family will be impoverished “now I want limbs to get whereon to feed.” Hodge responds: “Limbs? Hast thou not hands, man? Thou shalt never see a shoemaker want bread, though he have but three fingers on a hand” (10.73–76). This statement seems to offer acceptance, incorporating the disabled character into the artisanal community and acknowledging Ralph’s talents rather than his limitations. But Hodge’s declaration outlines the limits of inclusion. He is not offering an unqualified admission to the “Gentle Craft” for all people with disabilities, but predicating Ralph’s inclusion on his ability to work. Disabled people like Ralph, whose impairments did not fit into the rigid definition established by the state, were faced with a choice: They could amplify their disability, in order to receive the financial relief and social legitimacy—and powerful stigma—that the designation conferred. Or they could soften it, suppress it, erase it in order to maintain selfsufficiency, vocation, and, potentially, inclusion in labor-focused communities from which the legal articulation of impotence barred them. In discussing Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Siebers argues that predicaments like Ralph’s are, in fact, the defining experience of disabled life: “Passing,” he

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asserts, “not coming out, defines the breathless moment when disabled persons first come to consciousness as disabled.” Siebers explains that disabled people have “come to accept long ago that they had better manage their own ‘spoiled identity’ … by the conscious enactment of being disabled too little or too much, depending on the circumstances, by putting into action undercompensation or overcompensation as a survival technique.”37 Hodge’s uneasy reassurance poses the question of how Ralph will survive in his artisanal community, and the play reveals how Ralph conceals and suppresses his impairment at different moments in response. Lacunae in the text trace out the places where Ralph’s disability should be: striking absences call attention to the ways Ralph conceals and suppresses his impairment at different moments. Historian of racial passing Allyson Hobbs argues that studying passing “uncovers a phenomenon that, by definition, was intended to be clandestine and hidden, to leave no trace,” requiring scholars to examine both “the evidence presented and the consequences of the act.”38 Both the evidence and the consequences of Ralph’s passing proliferate in the second half of The Shoemaker’s Holiday. When he first returns to the shop, his friends give him a notably odd reception, with Hodge awkwardly calling him a “tall soldier,” and then directing the conversation away from his condition. Their discomfort with his disability seems to set a precedent that Ralph follows. He performs his disability away, diminishing it and distracting from it, but his weirdly unremarked physical labors illuminate the way his performance works. Ralph makes shoes on stage with no one noting the adjustments and accommodations that he would have needed to accomplish this task. He dances a Morris with a group of shoemakers before the Lord Mayor, and no one comments on the oddness or the difficulty of this feat. He parades with his coworkers from St. Paul’s to Leadenhall to celebrate Simon Eyre’s promotion to Mayor, a

37 Siebers, “Shakespeare Differently Disabled,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 443. 38 Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 6. For more on the complicated relationship between racial passing and disability passing, see Jeffrey A. Brune and Daniel J. Wilson, “Introduction,” in Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 1–12.

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march of approximately three-quarters of a mile, and no one acknowledges the effort this must have demanded of him. In the play’s boisterous final celebration, Eyre commands his journeymen to serve at feast. Eyre twice calls Ralph by name, both times commanding him to physically hurry in his tasks, first alliteratively commanding “Avoid, Hodge; run, Ralph; frisk about, my nimble Firk!” (20.14–15) and then, “Firk, Hodge, lame Ralph, run” (21–22). How is Ralph supposed to run? The lack of discussion of Ralph’s (in)ability to complete all of these seemingly impossible tasks suggests, instead, that in order to keep such discussion at bay, Ralph must be enacting a tremendous performance of competence, coordination, balance, and strength to make his disability so invisible. In performance, these silences must seem especially stark: Seeing Ralph performing this work alongside his able-bodied colleagues naturally invites comparison, since his efforts would be conspicuous alongside their relative ease, and their silence would be conspicuous alongside his efforts. It is possible, of course, that the members of his artisanal community have simply forgotten that he is impaired (though highly improbable, given how often they call him “lame Ralph”) or that consistently asking him to perform seemingly impossible tasks is a joke (although, if that were the case, one might assume the occasional verbal punchline would underscore this comic effect.)39 For Ralph and for the theater, performance isn’t a replacement for work; it is work itself. When Ralph exaggerates his disability and when he minimizes it, Dekker shows how performative work required effort, energy, skill, and practice. Demonstrating the validity of performative work refutes the claims of idleness leveled at both people with disabilities and the theater. The performative labor of disability and the performative labor of the theater mirrored one another, as The Shoemaker’s Holiday demonstrates, but players chose theatrical work, while disabled people had to perform to survive. Ralph masquerades his impairment, displaying and embellishing his disability, but only because the suspicion of the play’s villains demands it. Back in the workshop, Ralph enacts a different performance of disability, laboring to diminish and even erase his impairment in order 39 These seemingly impossible commands may also encode a meta-theatrical joke about the able-bodied actor playing Ralph. For more on the play’s awareness of the able-bodied actor enacting the disabled character, see Alanna Skuse, “Missing Parts in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Renaissance Drama 45.2 (September 2017): 161–179.

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to earn inclusion in the community on which he is so dependent. As the play makes clear, performative labor was required of disability: Whether masquerade or passing, early modern legal policy and practice made the performance of disability compulsory, with disabled people required to perform in daily personal and professional interactions. The work of the early modern commercial theater, however, was not compulsory. Players and playmakers could opt out of it in a way that disabled people never could. By recognizing disabled labor as a parallel to the stage’s own performative work, Dekker offers an alternative formulation for the relationship between disability and the theater, one that demonstrates unique empathy with the fraught position of disabled people in early modern England and acknowledges the performative work demanded of them. But the comparison fails to acknowledge the important difference in their labors: The theaters could close, but people with disabilities had no such option. Their show had to always go on.

Bibliography An Ease for Overseers of the Poore: Abstracted from the Statutes. Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1601. Anglin, Emily. “Idleness, Apprentices, and Machines in Deloney and Dekker.” In Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature, edited by Monika Fludernik and Miriam Nandi, 86–106. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Barokka, Khairani. “How Colonial Visual Cultures Have Worsened This Pandemic and What Needs to Change.” Disability Visibility Project (April 2020): n.p. Accessed 26 June 2020. https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/ 2020/04/13/how-colonial-visual-cultures-have-worsened-this-pandemicand-what-needs-to-change. Beier, A. L. “New Historicism, Historical Context, and the Literature of Roguery: The Case of Thomas Harman Reopened.” In Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, 98–119. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Brune, Jeffrey A. and Daniel J. Wilson. “Introduction.” In Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity, 1–12. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. Chapman, Alison A. “Whose St. Crispin’s Day Is It? Shoemaking, Holiday Making and the Politics of Memory in Early Modern England.” Renaissance Quarterly 54.4 (Winter 2001): 1467–1494. Cox, Samuel. “Letter to an unknown recipient, dated 15 January, 1590.” In English Professional Theater, 1530–1660, edited by Glynne Wickham, Herbert

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Berry, and William Ingram, 169. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Dalton, Michael. The Countrey Justice. London, 1618. Dekker, Thomas. The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Edited by Jonathan Gil Harris. London: Methuen/New Mermaids, 2008. DeWall, Nichole. “‘Sweet Recreation Barred’: The Case for Playgoing in PlagueTime.” In Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, edited by Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman, 133–149. New York: Routledge, 2011. Eliav-Feldon, Miriam. Renaissance Imposters and Proofs of Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Field, Nathan. “Letter to the Revd. Mr. Sutton” (1616). In Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, edited by Tanya Pollard, 274–278. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Franssen, Paul J. C. M. “‘Lame and Blind’: A Stage Emblem in The Shoemaker’s Holiday.” Notes and Queries 59.4 (December 2012): 557–559. Geneva Bible: A facsimile of the 1560 edition. Edited by Llyod E. Berry and William Whittingham. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. Gosson, Stephen. Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582). In Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, edited by Tanya Pollard, 84–114. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Heywood, Thomas. An Apology for Actors. London, 1612. Hindle, Steve. On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550–1750. Oxford: Clarendon, 2004. ———. “Technologies of Identification Under the Old Poor Law.” Local Historian 36.4 (November 2006): 220–236. Hobbs, Allyson. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. Hughes, Bill. “Disabled People as Counterfeit Citizens: The Politics of Resentment Past and Present.” Disability and Society 30.7 (2015): 991–1004. Iyengar, Sujata. “Introduction: Shakespeare’s ‘Discourse of Disability.’” In Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, edited by Sujata Iyengar, 1–19. New York: Routledge, 2015. Love, Genevieve. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Northbrooke, John. A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, with Other Idle Pastimes (1577). In Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, edited by Tanya Pollard, 1–18. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Rankins, William. A Mirror of Monsters (1587). In Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, edited by Tanya Pollard, 124–134. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Row-Heyveld, Lindsey. Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Rutter, Tom. Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

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Siebers, Tobin. “Disability as Masquerade.” Literature and Medicine 23.1 (Spring 2004): 1–22. ———. “Shakespeare Differently Disabled.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, edited by Valerie Traub, 435–453. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Skuse, Alanna. “Missing Parts in The Shoemaker’s Holiday.” Renaissance Drama 45.2 (September 2017): 161–179. Slack, Paul. The English Poor Law, 1531–1782. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Stubbes, Philip. Anatomy of Abuses (1583). In Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, edited by Tanya Pollard, 115–123. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Turner, David M. “‘Fraudulent’ Disability in Historical Perspective.” History and Policy (February 2012): n.p. Accessed 1 June 2017. http://www.histor yandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/fraudulent-disability-in-historical-perspe ctive. Van Elk, Martine. “The Counterfeit Vagrant: The Dynamic of Deviance in the Bridewell Court Records and the Literature of Roguery.” In Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, 120–139. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Wheatley, Edward. Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Woodbridge, Linda. Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

CHAPTER 3

“By the Knife and Fire”: Conceptions of Surgery and Disability in Early Modern Medical Treatises Jodie Austin

Abstract This chapter examines early modern medical treatises on surgery, amputation, and the treatment of combat-related wounds through the lens of disability studies. Although many such texts were intended primarily as reference guides for surgeons, they also provide insight into early modern conceptions of surgery—including amputation—as processes of performative craft. Texts considered include works by Ambrose Paré, Paul Barbette, and John Woodall, paying attention to the ways in which their illustrations often reflected as much fascination with medical “tools of the trade” as the bodies upon which they operated. Medical treatises that dealt with amputation and prosthesis in particular reveal a striking concern for patient welfare and quality of life, contrary to existing narratives surrounding the perceived barbarity of early modern surgery. I also argue, however, that such texts betray problematic tendencies on the part of their authors to fashion themselves as arbiters of cosmetic and disabled difference based on fantasies of bodily restoration. Ultimately, this chapter makes the case for reconsidering these medical

J. Austin (B) Menlo College, Atherton, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_3

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texts alongside those in the literary tradition as a means of shedding light on seventeenth-century European conceptions of disability and prosthesis and their implications for veterans in the early modern period. While browsing the Wellcome Library Collection of early modern visual media, one might come across a rather remarkable seventeenth-century sketch depicting the Virgin Mary leaning tenderly over Saint John Damascene while he gazes upward in gratitude. The archived image has been tagged with the usual array of keywords, including “dream,” “Virgin Mary,” “vision,” and “John Damascene.”1 However, the inclusion of a sixth word—“amputation”—hints at the drawing’s remarkability in terms of its subject matter. Upon closer inspection, the Virgin Mary is shown grasping the severed hand of the saint; the unknown artist chose to capture the precise moment before the unbloody appendage is reattached to the limb’s stump (Fig. 3.1). The sketch illustrates multiple aspects of the early modern medical imaginary, layering conceptions of embodiment, physicality, and the “sanctioned touch” of the healer. The Dream of Saint John of Damascene is, essentially, an allegory of reunion; the saint is reunited with the maternal beacon of divinity (i.e. the Virgin Mary) while his hand is reunited with his arm’s stump. The sterile bloodlessness of the limb’s reattachment is somewhat characteristic of instructional prints from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century—as Nancy Siraisi notes in Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, there was often a discrepancy between the sometimes violent surgical procedure depicted and the serene nature of the participants.2 And yet, perhaps paradoxically, illustrations of surgery did little to shy away from the anatomy of the wounds themselves; The Dream, for example, treats the viewer to a frontal view of the stump, figuring the site of reattachment at the visual center of the drawing. In short, this is a text that demands that close inspection as much as it promotes a fantasy of immaculate healing.

1 The Dream of Saint John Damascene: The Virgin Attaches His Severed Right Hand. Drawing, 16–, 1600, Wellcome Library Collection, https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/ b16513411#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0. 2 Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, 1st edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 160.

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Fig. 3.1 The Dream of St. John Damascene: the Virgin attaches his severed right hand. Drawing, 16–. Wellcome Collection

Indeed, early modern European portrayals of surgery complicate conventional definitions of aesthetic studies as belonging to any one discipline. Such texts often provided representational “case studies” for early modern medical practitioners while serving an allegorical and/or aesthetic purpose—i.e. studies in form. The somewhat ambiguous nature of such texts accurately reflects the similarly murky distinction between medicine

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as an abstract or theory-driven field and medicine as an empirically based practice during this period. Furthermore, the word “medicine” as applied to early modern healing represents, to an extent, a misnomer in that it supposes a unified professional body committed to standardized practices. In reality, the disciplinary landscape was complex in its social, practical, and political stratification, resulting in confusion surrounding professional qualifications and clinical nomenclature. English medical treatises in the seventeenth century, for example, frequently referred to veterans as those who “have been maimed in the Parliament’s service”—a phraseology that emphasized the inextricable relationship between the body and the State. If such “maimed” bodies of soldiers managed to make it back from the battlefield, their newly politicized corps often bore the legible marks of war that presented challenges for the body politic. As Geoffrey L. Hudson succinctly summarizes, “The bodies of those who survived were a political problem.”3 While the hermeneutics of embodiment has become a crucial field in early modern literary studies,4 scholarship pertaining to the bodies of veterans wounded in battle has remained scant. Conversely, broad developments in the field of disability studies have provided a helpful vocabulary for historians and literary scholars seeking to reify the narratives of early modern veterans and the surgeons/physicians who treated them. This chapter examines early modern treatises on military surgery, amputation, and prosthesis through the discursive lens of disability studies in order to argue that the written works of seventeenth-century European surgeons reflected a surprisingly complex attitude toward disability and quality of life. Contrary to assumptions regarding the rudimentary nature of surgical treatment, physicians, empirics, and barber-surgeons often emphasized quality of life issues and patient care—e.g., heeding signs of pain or fear during treatment. Furthermore, I would argue, such texts invite the reader’s participation in a shared fantasy of restoration; as 3 Geoffrey L. Hudson, “Disabled Veterans and the State in Early Modern England,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David Gerber (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 117. 4 See, for example: Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines

of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture, Digital Printing (London: Routledge, 2006); and Katharine Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 47.1 (1994): 1–33.

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with the visual language of The Dream of Saint John Damascene, medical treatises and illustrations imagine surgery and prosthesis as a means of re-enabling further service—to one’s country as well as to God. Subsequently, early modern surgical writers frequently evoked the language of artisanship/craftsmanship in describing their vocation, which reflects a more complex attitude toward the patient–doctor relationship. In short, such pamphlets have the power to both surprise and educate contemporary readers, offering striking parallels to the ways in which the bodies of disabled veterans remain loci—even in the modern era—for the combined and often conflicting performances on behalf of medicine, God, and the State.

Patient Care/Quality of Life The introduction of gunpowder into combat as well as subsequent developments in military technology resulted in the production of medical literature that sought explicitly to address their effects upon the body. The titles of pamphlets often referred specifically to the types of wounds they were meant to address. The writings of William Clowes, who humbly identified himself as “one of her Highnes Chirurgians,” exemplifies this trend in his publications from 1591 to 1602. The abridged title of his pamphlet from 1596—“A profitable and necessarie booke of obseruations, for all those that are burned with the flame of gun powder, &c. and also for curing of wounds made with musket and caliuer shot, and other weapons of war”—embodies this tendency toward hyperspecificity.5 Likewise, John Woodall’s 1628 Viaticum bore the subtitle “Intended chiefly for the better curing of wounds made by gun-shott.”6 Lastly, 5 William Clowes, A Profitable and Necessarie Booke of Obseruations, for All Those That Are Burned with the Flame of Gun Powder, &c. and Also for Curing of Wounds Made with Musket and Caliuer Shot, and Other Weapons of War Commonly Vsed at This Day Both by Sea and Land, as Heerafter Shall Be Declared: Vvith an Addition of Most Approued Remedies, Gathered for the Good and Comfort of Many, out of Diuers Learned Men Both Old and New Writers: Last of All Is Adioined a Short Treatise, for the Cure of Lues Venerea, by Vnctions and Other Approued Waies of Curing, Heertofore by Me Collected: And Now Againe Newly Corrected and Augmented in the Yeere of Our Lorde 1596. By William Clowes One of Hir Maiesties Chirurgions (Early English Books, 1475–1640 / 193:13. Imprinted at London: By Edm. Bollifant, for Thomas Dawson, 1596). 6 John Woodall, Woodalls Viaticum: The Path-Way to the Surgions Chest Containing Chirurgicall Instrvctions for the Yonger Sort of Surgions Now Imployed in the Service of His Maiestie for the Intended Reliefe of Rochell. And Composed by Iohn Woodall, One of the

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a much later publication by Wilhelm Fabricius Hildanus, commonly known as the “father of German surgery,” advertised “His experiments in chyrugerie: concerning combustians or burnings, made with gun powder, iron shot, hot-water, lightning, or any other matter whatsoever.”7 The repeated mention of “burnings” and “flame” underscore the unique challenges that barber-surgeons often faced when treating wounds on the early modern battlefield that went beyond bullet extraction. As medical historian Mary Lindemann asserts: “The move toward more active and extensive surgical interventions can be traced to the fifteenth century with the introduction of gunpowder and small firearms. Warfare itself required, or at least fostered, innovative surgical techniques.”8 Early modern surgery, it should be emphasized, developed in tandem with war. For this reason, many early modern soldiers who went under the knife represented a unique generation of veterans whose bodies bore the marks of innovations in violence and in cure. For one, the inclusion of words such as “comfort,”9 “relief,”10 and “recovery”11 suggests that surgeons and physicians were, in many cases, quite mindful of issues concerning quality of life and patient care. While Present Masters or Governors of the Companie of Barber Surgions London. Intended Chiefly for the Better Curing of Wounds Made by Gun-Shott. Published by Authoritie (Early English Books, 1475–1640 / 1055:10. Imprinted at London: [By J. Dawson], 1628). 7 Wilhelm Fabricius Hildanus, Gulielm, Fabricius Hildamus, His Experiments in Chyrurgerie Concerning Combustions or Burnings Made with Gun Powder, Iron Shot, HotWater, Lightning, or Any Other Fiery Matter Whatsoever: In Which Is Excellently Described the Differences, Signs, Prognostication and Cures, of All Accidents and Burning Themselves: Very Necessary and Useful for All Gentlemen, and Soldiers as Well of the Trayned Bands, as Others, Especially upon Sudden Occasions/Translated Out of Latine by Iohn Steer, Chyrurgeon (Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 93:12. London: Printed by Barnard Alsop …, 1642). 8 Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 130. 9 William Clowes, A Profitable and Necessarie Booke of Obseruations. 10 John Woodall, Woodalls Viaticum. 11 Lowe, Peter, A Discourse of the Vvhole Art of Chyrurgerie VVherein Is Exactly Set Downe the Definition, Causes, Accidents, Prognostications, and Cures of All Sorts of Diseases, Both in Generall and Particular, Which at Any Time Heretofore Haue Beene Practiced by Any Chyrurgion: According to the Opinion of All the Ancient Professors of That Science. Which Is Not Onely Profitable for Chyrurgions; but Also for All Sorts of People: Both for Preventing of Sicknesse; and Recoverie of Health. Compiled by Peter Lovve Scottishman, Doctor in the Facultie of Chyrurgerie at Paris: And Ordinary Chyrurgion to the French King and Navarre. Whereunto Is Added the Rule of Making Remedies Which Chyrurgions Doe

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scholarship on early modern surgery doesn’t contradict this point in any regard, the subject of early modern patient care/quality of life is rarely addressed. In Woodall’s Viaticum, the author-surgeon urges the reader to weigh all options when considering any major amputation. Echoing the common sentiment that the loss of more than half of a limb signalled “no hope to save on the rest,” Woodall admonishes his peers against performing any surgery that “will indanger the life of the patient, and be a hinderance.”12 While modern medicine disclaims his assertion that “but halfe of any member be taken away, with the fracture of the bone, it is impossible to save it on to doe service,” Woodall’s language suggests his anticipation of life after surgery. Thus, although modern assumptions regarding pre-anesthetic surgery foreground the problem of high mortality rates and/or brutal disfigurement, Woodall’s dictum prioritizes the need for surgical economy as well as a speedy recovery. Perhaps the most famous barber-surgeon to publish his battlefieldadapted techniques was Ambroise Paré, whose late sixteenth-century work offered equally valuable insights into early modern attitudes toward surgery and recovery. Paré’s observations reflect a more nuanced role of the surgeon that incorporates post-traumatic effects on the body. In his section on prosthetics, which he termed “A supplement of the defects in Mans body,” Paré notes that “It happens also manie times, that the patient, that had the nervs or tendons of his Leg wounded, long after the wound is whole and consolidated, cannot go but with verie great pain and torment, by reason that the foot cannot follow the muscle, that should draw it up.”13 Along these lines, Paré’s regimen anticipates contemporary attitudes towards therapy and rehabilitation. Overall, his writings on surgery and the development of prosthetics also indicate that he thought quite deeply about the challenges faced by those who had been disabled in battle (as seen in his poignantly detailed description of an elaborate cast, intended to enable the weapon-grasping functions of the lower arm and hand). Rather than enable more civilian-oriented functions, Paré’s

Commonly Use: With the Presages of Divine Hippocrates (Early English Books, 1475–1640 / 845:22. At London: Printed by Thomas Purfoot, An. Dom. 1634). 12 Woodall, Woodalls Viaticum, 6. 13 Ambroise Paré, The Collected Works of Ambroise Paré, Translated Out of the Latin by

Thomas Johnson from the First English Edition, London 1634, Pound Ridge (New York: Milford House, Inc., 1968), 883.

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design and accompanying description are tailored with weapon-bearing capabilities in mind: Therefore I caussed a cast to be made for it of latin, whereinto I put the thumb: this case was so artificially fastened by two strings that were put into two rings, made in it above the joint of the hand, that the thumb stood upright, and straight out, by reason whereof hee was able afterwards to handle anie kinde of weapon.14

Paré was not the only surgeon to theorize and illustrate conceptions of “restored ableness” and/or “service” for post-operative veterans in early modern Europe.15 Indeed, traces of his more empathetic moments can be found in the writing of his peers. In the 1634 edition of the Somatographia anthropine by the prolific medical writer/physician Helkiah Crooke, the reader is treated to a remarkable blend of practical explanations and personal asides on how to ease nervous patients. Crooke dutifully provides explanations for “Three and fifty instruments of chirugery gathered out of Ambroise Pareus, the famous French surgeon,”16 from the lancet to the speculum. Significantly, Crooke remains mindful of patient discomfort, offering frequent anecdotes and advice on addressing pre- and post-operative issues. Pausing to detail the functions of an elaborately-designed lancet, the author offers advice on 14 Paré, The Collected Works of Ambroise Paré, 878. 15 Nor was Paré—immune to his own tendencies toward prosthetic or embodied

fetishization. As David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder comment in their reading of Paré’s Des monstres et prodigies (1575), the surgeon often attempted to strike a narrative balance between explication and spectacular indulgence: “In these ‘believe-it-or-not’ presentations, the physician must maintain his professional credibility by establishing his empirical accuracy while simultaneously acting as a witness to the extraordinary tales that give flesh to fantasy.” The seemingly contradictory attitude that Paré adopts is thus telling of the ways in which disabled individuals were often classified using a range of arbitrary criteria, e.g. whether the disability was congenital, physical, injury-based, etc. For more on this subject, see: David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 16 Helkiah Crooke, Somatographia Anthropine. Or A Description of the Body of Man With the Practise of Chirurgery, and the Use of Three and Fifty Instruments. By Artificiall Figures Representing the Members, and Fit Termes Expressing the Same. Set Forth Either to Pleasure or to Profit Those Who Are Addicted to This Study, ed. Ambroise Paré (Early English Books, 1475–1640 / 998:13; Early English Books, 1475–1640 / 1360:06. [London]: Printed by Tho. Cotes, and are to be sold by Michael Sparke at the blew Bible in Greene Arbor, 1634).

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how to conceal the blade from any squeamish patients: “because some faint-hearted patients are afraid of this Instrument, Chirugians have deviated to fasten the point of a Lancet of Knife in the midst of a peece of a Coyne, to stand out as far as they would have the wound to be deep. That coyne they cover with some thin Ceare-clooath, to hide the edge or point, pretend.”17 In the subsequent section on cauterization, Crooke similarly admonishes the physician to employ the “cautery” only in cases in which the injury is “poisonous.”18 Any improper use of the hot-iron, he warns, “beside the pain and terror it carries with it, weakens and affrights the Patient much.”19 Such asides reveal an acute consciousness of healing as a holistic practice. While describing the act of suturing facial lacerations, Crooke reminds novice surgeons to “avoyd scarres which will make the face deformed. For that is the marketplace, especially in women, to please whom Chirugians have devised this kind of Suture.”20 While the sexist undertones of Crooke’s statement cannot be denied, his repeated insistence on envisioning the after-effects of major surgery (from scarring to chronic pain) disrupt any easy assumptions that barber-surgeons were crude overseers of surgical triage. Despite such textual evidence, however, medical historians often seem inclined to overlook the possibility of early modern practitioners displaying any bedside manner. In his otherwise thorough account of military history during the reign of Charles II, for example, historian John Childs dismissively notes that “the total lack of a medical corps [during Charles’ reign] was of little real significance,” as “Medicine in the seventeenth century was primitive. The curing of disease relied on guesswork and good luck whilst the treatment of physical injury was more in the hands of the Almighty than the surgeon.”21 The sentiment is similarly echoed by the medically-informed Alan J. Thurston, who declares that the Renaissance “practice of amputations remained a

17 Helkiah Crooke, Somatographia Anthropine, Chapter 1, 4–5. 18 Ibid., Chapters 2, 5. 19 Ibid., Chapters 2, 5. 20 Ibid., Chapters 7, 26. 21 John Childs, The Army of Charles II , Studies in Social History (London: Routledge

& Kegan Paul, 1976), 73.

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barbaric one without anaesthesia and with a high risk of death from either haemorrhage or overwhelming infection, or both.”22 While it should be acknowledged that many treatments of battlefield injuries were sometimes painfully misguided (e.g. pouring hot oil into gunshot wounds under the mistaken assumption that it would draw out the “toxins” of the shot), surgical manuals often reveal marked sympathy toward patient suffering which, in many cases, influenced medical techniques and even instrumental innovation. Both James Yonge (1679)23 and James Cooke (1676),24 for example, emphasize the need to properly treat stumps following amputations out of consideration for the patient. In Yonge’s Mellificium chirurgiae, the author advocates applying “Pledgets armed with the common restrictive of Bole, &c. together with bladder and bandages, moist with water and Vinegar,” as soon as possible; later he details stitching guidelines intended expressly to prevent “those ghastly and unseemingly swellings of Wounds, and spreading of Stumps.”25 While such notes might seem relatively insignificant to modern readers, the fact that surgeons urged cosmetic as well as practical considerations amongst their peers resists the stereotype of practitioners

22 Alan J. Thurston, “Paré and Prosthetics: The Early History of Artificial Limbs,” ANZ

Journal of Surgery 77.12 (December 1, 2007): 1114, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14452197.2007.04330. 23 James Yonge, Currus Triumphalis, È Terebinthô, Or, An Account of the Many

Admirable Vertues of Oleum Terebinthinae More Particularly, of the Good Effects Produced by Its Application to Recent Wounds, Especially with Respect to the Hemorrhagies of the Veins, and Arteries, and the No Less Pernicious Weepings of the Nerves, and Lymphaducts: Wherein Also, the Common Methods, and Medicaments, Used to Restrain Hemorrhagies, Are Examined, and Divers of Them Censured: And Lastly, a New Way of Amputation, and a Speedier Convenient Method of Curing Stumps, Than That Commonly Practised, Is with Divers Other Useful Matters Recommended to the Military Chirurgeon, in Two Letters: The One to His Most Honoured, James Pearse, Esq, Chirurgeon to His Royal Highness the Duke of York, and Chirurgeon General to His Majestie’s Navy Royal: The Other, to Mr. Thomas Hobbs, Chirurgeon in London / by James Yonge (Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 1113:20. London: Printed for J. Martyn …, 1679., 1679). 24 James Cooke, 1676. Mellificium Chirurgiae, or, The Marrow of Chirurgery Much Enlarged to Which Is Now Added Anatomy, Illustrated with Twelve Brass Cuts, and Also the Marrow of Physick, Both in the Newest Way/by James Cooke … (Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 1649:08. London: Printed by J.D. for Benji. Shirley, and are to be sold at his shop …, 1676). 25 James Yonge, Currus Triumphalis, 55, 63.

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as a “barbaric” or unskilled sadists. As with Crooke’s section on cauterization,26 keen attention to pain symptoms enabled the surgeon to adhere to ethical as well as diagnostic standards. Ultimately, closer examination of surgical manuals that foregoes a deterministic lens better supports Roy Porter’s conclusion that “The practice of early modern surgeons challenges the myth that before anesthesia and antisepsis their craft was crude and often lethal.”27

Surgery as Craft Porter’s use of the word “craft” is not incidental; as other historians have observed, barber-surgeons and physicians alike throughout Europe took care to refer to their vocation within the context of artistry and/or craft.28 The barber-surgeon trade was characterized by a remarkably sophisticated epistemological network based on academic and practical expertise— a framework that subsequently complicates contemporary attempts to account for its impact on early modern quality of life.29 For example, James Cooke begins his Mellificium chirugiae (1676) with a declaration on behalf of the surgical vocation: “Medicine is an Art (some say a Science) removing diseases,”30 thus setting a lofty tone for the rest of the manual. In his Complete Treatise of Surgery (1674), Paul 26 Helkiah Crooke, Somatographia Anthropine, Chapters 2, 5. 27 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New

York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 189.

28 See: Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 19; Margaret Pelling, “Occupational Diversity: Barbersurgeons and the Trades of Norwich,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 56.4 (1982): 488; Celeste Chamberland, “From Apprentice to Master: Social Disciplining and Surgical Education in Early Modern London, 1570–1640,” History of Education Quarterly 53.1 (2013): 27; Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 186–189; Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 128. 29 See: Celeste Chamberland, “From Apprentice to Master: Social Disciplining and Surgical Education in Early Modern London, 1570–1640,” History of Education Quarterly 53.1 (2013): 44. 30 James Cooke, Mellificium Chirurgiae, or, The Marrow of Chirurgery Much Enlarged to Which Is Now Added Anatomy, Illustrated with Twelve Brass Cuts, and Also The Marrow of Physick, Both in the Newest Way / by James Cooke … Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 1649:08. London: Printed by J.D. for Benji. Shirley, and are to be sold at his shop …, 1676, 1.

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Barbette describes surgery as an art “which endeavours to remove the Diseases of the Body.”31 Finally, the title of Noah Bigg’s 1651 treatise “Mataeotechnia medicinae praxeos” offers a witty critique of “the vanity of the craft of physick […] wherein is dissected the errors, ignorance, impostures, and supinities of the schools.”32 The tendency to equate the practice of surgery and/or internal medicine with a form of artisanship is not in itself surprising. The question of how such perceptions influenced the doctor–patient relationship, and (subsequently) early modern views of disability, however, deserve attention if contemporary readers wish to track the history of attitudes towards disability. As I would argue, the preferred analogy of surgeon as “craftsperson” or “artist” necessarily complicates this relationship in its recasting of the patient as a work in progress. While medical treatises and handbooks resist easy categorization as narrative texts (compared to, say, novels) many of the works discussed inherently deploy rhetorical strategies identified by Mitchell and Snyder that conflate rehabilitation with “repair” and healing with “cure.”33 Notably, even regulations surrounding the licensing of professional barber-surgeons invoked the language of craftsmanship and production, which held practitioners to like standards. As Siraisi observes, “official motivations for requiring medical practitioners to be licensed were essentially similar to those inspiring the regulation of other crafts: maintenance of standards and provisions of legal recourse for any consumers of the craft’s products or services who could show they had suffered injury through poor workmanship.”34 Indeed, the 31 Paul Barbette, A Complete Treatise of Chirurgery: Containing the Chirurgical and Anatomical Works of Paul. Barbette, M.D. Practitioner at Amsterdam: Composed According to the Doctrine of the Circulation of the Blood, and Other New Inventions of the Moderns: With a Treatise of the Plague, with Observations, / by the Same Author, ed. Paul Barbette (Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 2561:02. London: Printed by W.G. and are to be sold by Moses Pitt at the Angel by the little North door in St. Paul’s Church-yard, 1674), 1. 32 Noah Biggs, Mataeotechnia Medicinae Praxeos, The Vanity of the Craft of Physick, Or, A New Dispensatory Wherein Is Dissected the Errors, Ignorance, Impostures and Supinities of the Schools in Their Main Pillars of Purges, Blood-Letting, Fontanels or Issues, and Diet, &c., and the Particular Medicines of the Shops: With an Humble Motion for the Reformation of the Universities and the Whole Landscap [Sic] of Physick, and Discovering the Terra Incognita of Chymistrie: To the Parliament of England / by Noah Biggs (Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 270:11. London: Printed for Edward Blackmore …, 1651). 33 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 53. 34 Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine, 19.

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conflation of the body with crafted product borders the level of comedy in some treatises, as with James Yonge’s 1678 Currus triumphalis, è terebinthô, or, An account of the many admirable vertues of oleum terebinthinae. In his guide to the medical merits of turpentine, Yonge extols its many virtues as a household product in addition to being a blood coagulant; the oil, as he notes, preserves wood from “air” and “Worms” while helping painters in tempering their pigment “Colours.”35 Despite its somewhat shameless evangelistic tone, Yonge’s text thus tempts easy comparison between the disabled body and other forms of artistic media that encourage “touch-ups” or restoration. As evidenced by contemporary debates concerning codified distinctions between cosmetic versus medically necessary operations, the force of what one might term the “surgical gaze” has remained inherently unstable, inextricably tied to traditions of making and craft despite its relative dedication to empiricism. Although Paré notes the “great paine and torment” of his patient in the selection previously quoted, the word “patient” gradually disappears after the first two lines, replaced instead by a hyperfocus on parts both artificial and bodily (“linen band,” “show,” “pained foot,” and “knee”). When the word “patient” is used toward the end of the passage, it comes in the form of the possessive (“the patient’s middle”), included for the sake of rhetorical clarification. In fact, Paré’s section on artificial prosthesis is characterized by a notable absence of anatomized illustrations that depict the body in full. While other sections of his Workes illustrate patients in repose or sitting upright while surgeries are performed, “A supplement of the defect in Mans body” focuses on the prosthetic parts themselves, alienated from the rest of the body. Metallic noses are drawn in profile and from the front, “floating” in a sea of negative space.36 Artificial eyes, which were meant to cover the orbital socket, are drawn in the absence of a face. Even prosthetic hands, beautifully rendered in all of their mechanical sophistication, fail to show the means by which they would attach to the patient’s stump.37 In essence, their 35 Yonge, Currus Triumphalis, 41. 36 Elaborating on the analogy to modern-day plastic surgery, Paré’s illustrations bear

some resemblance to modern day photo galleries featuring disembodied noses in their pre- and post-operative states; the common practice of censoring identifying traits in said photos underscores the legal, ethical, and personal issues associated with restoring subjectivity to the patient in the modern era. 37 Paré, Workes, 870–882.

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composition either minimizes or effaces the rest of the body, reducing the patient’s disability to a concentrated ailment or defect rather than an embodied reality and/or lived experience.38 The aestheticizing— even fetishizing— of injury within the context of Paré’s Workes resonates with the findings of disability scholars interested in the historical roots of the “medical model of disability” in the literary tradition. More significantly, scholars such as Allison Hobgood, David Houston Wood, Katherine Schaap Williams, Sujata Iyengar, and Jeffrey R. Wilson have teased apart the frameworks for conceptualizing disability, including the specific medical model described by Lennard Davis in Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions.39 While it should be acknowledged that the imposition of “disability” as an identity category on seventeenth-century subjects represents, to some degree, an anachronistic exercise deployed by those with the privilege of retrospection, the texts discussed offer some evidence that surgical discourse frequently collapsed the distinction between “deformity,” “defects,” and disability. That the early modern period’s relationship to the word “disability” frequently failed to correspond to modern conceptions of disability should not be seen as an argument against the medical model’s existence in the seventeenth century; rather, the frequent slippage between these identity categories within the literature itself provides compelling evidence for how the medical model came to be. While couched within the language of craftsmanship and repair, the nascent discourse of medicalization anticipates eighteenth-century European tendencies to pathologize disability identified by Davis. In Jeffrey R. Wilson’s call for a more cautious utilization of disability theory in 38 Similarly, Allison Hobgood argues that readers’ obsessive focus on Richard III’s physical attributes paradoxically does more to efface than illuminate, as the body “gets erased by over-signification.” See: Allison P. Hobgood, “Teeth Before Eyes: Impairment and Invisibility in Shakespeare’s Richard III,” in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. Sujata Iyengar (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015), 30. 39 See: Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, eds., Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013), 4; Katherine Schaap Williams, “Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (October 2, 2009), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/997; Naomi Baker, “‘Happy, and Without a Name’: Prosthetic Identities on the Early Modern Stage,” Textual Practice 30.7 (2016): 1311, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2016.1229913; and Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions, Cultural Front (New York: New York University Press, 2002).

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Shakespearean studies, he simultaneously reaffirms the study of “stigma” as a force that undergirds all Shakespearean narratives of difference, from the ethnic to the physical.40 Although I would argue that the need for disability theorists to revisit such narratives (including those that appear in Shakespeare) is more imperative than ever, such critiques provide useful reminders that systemic forms of othering often occur under the aegis of altruism and welfare for healers and patients alike.

Subjective Effacement Overall, an unanswered question lingers at the margins of the medical texts cited here: namely, for whom were they intended? While the specificity of the technical procedures described assume some degree of knowledge in the field, their rhetoric also reveals a telling tendency to justify the ways of the surgeon to man. Paré’s apparent focus, for example, on the prosthetics themselves as objects d’art complicate both the notion of the surgeon as brute as well as the surgeon as empathetic healer. One might argue that such aesthetic decisions were made in the service of practicality, i.e. that Paré’s illustrations were schematic rather than medically didactic. Nevertheless, the absence of any bodily context within the illustrations, combined with a lack of commentary regarding the logistics for attachment, comfort, wearability, etc., prompts a redefinition of his prosthetics as mechanical curios staged for the viewing pleasure of the audience. Therein one locates the most problematic conception of disability shared by many surgical texts: the ubiquitous framing of disability (including that resulting from combat-related wounds) as a bodily defect in need of correction. Paré himself advertises his manual as a “Means and Manner to repair or supplie the natural or accidental defects of wants in Man’s bodie”41 Similarly, in “A treatise of the first part of chirugerie,” (1638) Alexander Read reminds practitioners to be dutiful in seeing through “the restitution of the parts disjoyned to their natural union.”42 Finally, in a treatise on dental surgery (appearing fifty years after 40 Jeffrey R. Wilson, “The Trouble with Disability in Shakespeare Studies,” Disability Studies Quarterly 37.2 (2017), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5430. 41 Ibid., 869. 42 Alexander Read, A Treatise of the First Part of Chirurgerie, Called by Mee Synthetike

the Part Which Teacheth the Reunition of the Parts of the Bodie Disjoyned. Containing the Methodical Doctrine of Wounds: Delivered in Lectures in the Barber-Chirurgeons Hall, upon

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Read’s text), the professor/surgeon Charles Allen describes methods for “restoring or supplying the defects of [teeth] in old or young.”43 In sum, characterizations of medical ailments as mistakes or deficiencies in nature were common in texts written by author-surgeons who, consequently, saw their role as mediators between nature and art. Complicating existent analyses of the early modern disability experience is the relative lack of dramatic representations of post-conflict disability. In line with Geoffrey L. Hudson’s observation that the bodies of veterans specifically constituted a “problem” in terms of evoking the sociopolitical anxieties of Europe at war, the role of the “disabled veteran” may have presented somewhat taboo challenges for writers and actors alike. While syphilis could be turned into a bawdy joke, for example, writers likely found it difficult to make the plague conventionally funny.44 Much in the same way, the added signifier of “veteran” sees the stigma of disability married to markers of heroism. Notably, the frenzied bloodlust of Shakespeare’s historically-inspired veterans (e.g. Macbeth, Alcibiades, Coriolanus) contrasts with the pity-inducing humility of Stump of A

Tuesdayes, Appointed for These Exercises, and the Keeping of Their Courts. By Alexander Read, Doctor of Physick, a Brother of the Same Company, and One of the Fellowes of the Physitians College of the Famous Citie London (Early English Books, 1475–1640 / 1360:07. London: Printed by John Haviland for Francis Constable, and are to be sold at his shop under Saint Martins Church neare Ludgate, 1638), 11. 43 Charles Allen, Curious Observations in That Difficult Part of Chirurgery, Relating to the Teeth Shewing How to Preserve the Teeth and Gums from All Accidents They Are Subject to, as 1. An Account of Their Nature, 2. Their Alteration, with Their Proper Remedies, 3. Their Cause of Corruption and Putrefaction, 4. Directions for Restoring or Supplying the Defect of Them in Old or Young, 5. Considerations on the Tooth Ache, Looseness of the Teeth, the Decay of the Gums, with Their Remedies and Restoratives, 6. The Use of the Polican or Instrument Wherewith, They Are Drawn on All Occasions: Lastly, Teeth in Children, What They Are in the Original, and How They Come to Perfection, in What Order Produced, the Means to Hasten Them, and Render Them Easie in Breeding: To Which Is Added, A Physical Discourse, Wherein the Reasons for the Beating of the Pulse, or Pulsation of the Arteries, Together with Those of the Circulation of the Blood Are Explained, and the Opinions of Several Ancient and Modern Physicians and Phylosophers, as Gallen, Gassendus, Cartesius, Lower, Willis, &c. upon This Subject Are Examined (Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 557:05. Dublyn: Printed and are to be sold in London, by William Whitwood …, 1687). 44 As Katherine Duncan-Jones has noted, the plague as a significant plot device has remained “curiously absent from Renaissance drama and poetry,” suggesting the presence of more than one stage taboo that invoked morbidity. See: Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare: An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2010), 62.

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Larum for London or Champernell of The Little French Lawyer.45 The narrative prosthesis of the latter becomes problematized in light of their status as servicemen, compounding the metaphors in an uneasy relationship.46 The solution, perhaps, was simply for playwrights to avoid the subject of their existence. For this reason, Stump’s accusation of hypocrisy in A Larum for London seems as much leveled against seventeenthcentury English theater culture as the citizens of Antwerp: But let a Soldier, that hath spent his bloud, Is lame’d, diseas’d, or any way distrest, Appeale for succor, then you look a sconce As if you knew him not.47

In short, what remains missing from early modern medical texts that address the treatment of soldiers is somewhat ironically, the soldiers themselves. For this perspective, one would need to turn to accounts written by early modern veterans treated for battlefield wounds. In a rare account titled “Idolator’s ruine and Englands triumph” written by a veteran known only as W.W., the writer purportedly offers “[t]he meditations of a maimed souldier wherein is contained singular incouragement for

45 W. W. Gregg and Thomas Lodge. A Larum for London: 1602. Malone Society Reprints (London: Oxford University Press, 1913); Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, “The Little French Lawyer,” in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Thayer Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 9. 46 In her analysis of Stump in A Larum for London and Cripple The Fair Maid of the Exchange, Naomi Baker identifies the characters’ “unswerving commitment to their vocations”—qualities that demarcate them as “dissident political others” and thus “dislocate” them their normative societies. Such a reading supports the notion that “unswerving commitment,” especially for those disabled in battle, perhaps remained an uneasy subject for dramatization. See: Naomi Baker. “‘Happy, and Without a Name’: Prosthetic Identities on the Early Modern Stage,” Textual Practice 30.7 (2016): 1311, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/0950236X.2016.1229913. 47 W. W. Gregg and Thomas Lodge, A Larum for London, lines 612–615.

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all souldiers that fight for the lawes of a Kingdome.”48 While the treatise is primarily evangelical in nature, the opening dedication provides a strikingly introspective statement articulating the soldier’s outlook after having been “wounded in the Parliament’s service”: My unworthiness, I hope, shall not hinder the acceptation of my insuing Discourse; I was known to be active in the execution of my place in the field, before the face of an enemy; so also I could not be idle in my private chamber, according to my abilities, although lame of body, being in a cure under a Surgeons hands 17 weeks, and in the writing of it in much paine. Wherefore if there be any thing amisse in it, cover it with the mantle of love and true affectation of a Soldier. My love to the peace of this Kingdome is such, that though I cannot serve the State in a military way, as before, yet I have presumed to write this booke, for the incouragement of such Soldiers which have their limbes, to be faithfull and valiant, in and the Cause of God, for the pulling downe the Kingdome and Throne of Antichrist.49

The writer’s humble plea in the epistle captures the complicated nature of his relationship to his disability, especially within the context of his service. As his tone suggests, his self-described “unworthiness” as a wounded veteran paradoxically offers him some degree of credibility amongst his fellow servicemen—“such Soldiers which have their limbes”; in other words, the writer’s conception of disability appears to be inextricably bound with his identity as a soldier. The nuances of this relationship might not have been entirely lost on writers like Paré who, as previously discussed, designed at least one prosthetic with the intent to preserve weapon-grasping functions. W.W.’s words bear some similarity to those of John Milton, who, in his blindness, similarly grappled with questions 48 W. W., Idolaters Ruine and Englands Triumph, Or, The Meditations of a Maimed

Souldier Wherein Is Contained Singular Incouragement for All Souldiers That Fight for the Lawes of a Kingdome, and the Liberty of the Subject and Contend for the Gospel of Christ against the Power of Antichrist: And Also Certaine Descriptions of Plots and Traytors Both in England and Ireland, and Also How God Hath Crossed Idolaters Ever Since the Creation at One Time or Other, and of Later Times How God Hath Prevented by His Power and Providence the Noysome Vermine and Brood of Rome, from Bringing Their Cursed Intents and Purposes to Perfection: Written by a Commander, Wounded in the Parliament Service, Well Knowne, and Approved of in and about London, in the Time of His Cure Meditating upon the 48 of Jeremiah, at the 30 Verse … / by W. W. … (Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 232:E.25[3]. London: [s.n.] 1645). 49 W. W., Idolaters Ruine and Englands Triumph.

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of service and aptitude while declaring: “that one talent that is death to hide / lodged with me useless.”50 Both writers ultimately locate their disabilities within the framework of their respectful vocations and, on the larger scale, their obligations to God. Hence, while studies of Renaissance humanism have, historically, found currency in discourse related to the body and conceptions of selfhood, such arenas should be expanded to include the impact of veteran disability specifically.51 Although analyses concerning guild culture/craft culture have yielded important findings regarding the infrastructure of the medical complex in early modern Europe, more work is needed to determine the extent to which such craft-based discourse influenced veterans’ attitudes toward their own disabilities, especially those sustained while in the service. Furthermore, the community of historians in medicine and early modern literary scholars in general would benefit from the analysis of more personal, testimony-based texts. The power of anecdotal accounts lies in the potential challenges they pose to accounts written by and for practitioners. As much as it is tempting to apply more contemporary discursive lenses (such as that of the “cyborg”) to early modern subjects, some aspects of the “prosthetic impulse” described by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra52 should be resisted, inasmuch as they invite convenient semanticization of a complex time in military and medical history.53

50 John Milton, “Sonnet XIX,” in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003), lines 3–4. 51 Again, it is worth acknowledging the important contributions of other scholars who have written about amputation, surgery, and/or the veteran experience within the context of early modernism; see, for example: Geoffrey L. Hudson, “Disabled Veterans and the State in Early Modern England,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David Gerber (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012); Vin Nardizzi,“The Wooden Matter of Human Bodies,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, eds. Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, Early Modern Cultural Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Patricia Cahill, Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 52 Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, eds., The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future (Cambridge London: The MIT Press, 2007), 3–7. 53 As Vivian Sobchak observes: “the scandal of the [cyborg] metaphor is that it has become a fetishized and ‘unfleshed-out’ catchword that functions vaguely as the ungrounded and ‘floating signifier’ for a broad and variegated critical discourse on technoculture that includes little of these prosthetic realities.” See: Vivian Sobchak, “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality,” in The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, eds. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2007), 19.

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However, the prosthetic impulse as a critical exercise does serve an important function in allowing historians to track developments and changes in early modern conceptions of disability. While the rhetorical elevation of surgery to the status of an “art” or “craft” often risks subordinating or effacing concerns of the patient, other moments in the surgical manuals discussed reveal a degree of consideration for the patient’s livelihood that deserves further acknowledgment. The conceptual balance was often delicate, however. As his Workes reveal, Ambroise Paré often combined the language of pragmatism, objectification, and poignant consideration within a single volume. Along these lines, The Dream of St. John Damascene represents the ideal surgical allegory, uniting practice with steadfast belief. The saint’s limb reattachment is both an expression and a performance of gratitude—a bloodless reunion of flesh with the aid of skilled intervention relying on the power of spectacle and faith. Nevertheless, the fact that such texts resist easy categorization as radical or reductive should be instructional for contemporary readers seeking to make sense of the ways in which the language of disability is often as alienating as it is empowering. For one to hold any medical text to an honest standard, one must privilege the perspective of the soldier under the knife.

Bibliography Allen, Charles, 17th cent. Curious Observations in That Difficult Part of Chirurgery, Relating to the Teeth Shewing How to Preserve the Teeth and Gums from All Accidents They Are Subject to, as 1. An Account of Their Nature, 2. Their Alteration, with Their Proper Remedies, 3. Their Cause of Corruption and Putrefaction, 4. Directions for Restoring or Supplying the Defect of Them in Old or Young, 5. Considerations on the Tooth Ache, Looseness of the Teeth, the Decay of the Gums, with Their Remedies and Restoratives, 6. The Use of the Polican or Instrument Wherewith, They Are Drawn on All Occasions: Lastly, Teeth in Children, What They Are in the Original, and How They Come to Perfection, in What Order Produced, the Means to Hasten Them, and Render Them Easie in Breeding: To Which Is Added, A Physical Discourse, Wherein the Reasons for the Beating of the Pulse, or Pulsation of the Arteries, Together with Those of the Circulation of the Blood Are Explained, and the Opinions of Several Ancient and Modern Physicians and Phylosophers, as Gallen, Gassendus, Cartesius, Lower, Willis, &c. upon This Subject Are Examined. Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 557:05. Dublyn: Printed and are to be sold in London, by William Whitwood …, 1687., 1687.

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Baker, Naomi. “‘Happy, and Without a Name’: Prosthetic Identities on the Early Modern Stage.” Textual Practice 30.7 (November 9, 2016): 1309–1326. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2016.1229913. Barbette, Paul, d. 1666? A Complete Treatise of Chirurgery: Containing The Chirurgical and Anatomical Works of Paul. Barbette, M.D. Practitioner at Amsterdam: Composed According to the Doctrine of the Circulation of the Blood, and Other New Inventions of the Moderns: With A Treatise of the Plague, with Observations, / by the Same Author. Edited by Paul Barbette d. 1666? Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 2561:02. London: Printed by W.G. and are to be sold by Moses Pitt at the Angel by the little North door in St. Paul’s Church-yard, 1674., 1674. Beaumont, Francis, John Fletcher, and Fredson Thayer Bowers, eds. The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon. Vol. 9: The Sea Voyage. The Double Marriage. The Prophetess. The Little French Lawyer. The Elder Brother. The Maid in the Mill. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994. Biggs, Noah. Mataeotechnia Medicinae Praxeos, The Vanity of the Craft of Physick, or, A New Dispensatory Wherein Is Dissected the Errors, Ignorance, Impostures and Supinities of the Schools in Their Main Pillars of Purges, Blood-Letting, Fontanels or Issues, and Diet, &c., and the Particular Medicines of the Shops: With an Humble Motion for the Reformation of the Universities and the Whole Landscap [Sic] of Physick, and Discovering the Terra Incognita of Chymistrie: To the Parliament of England / by Noah Biggs … Early English Books, 1641– 1700 / 270:11. London: Printed for Edward Blackmore …, 1651., 1651. Cahill, Patricia. Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Chamberland, Celeste. “From Apprentice to Master: Social Disciplining and Surgical Education in Early Modern London, 1570–1640.” History of Education Quarterly 53.1 (2013): 21–44. Childs, John. The Army of Charles II . Studies in Social History. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976. Clowes, William, ca. A Profitable and Necessarie Booke of Obseruations, for All Those That Are Burned with the Flame of Gun Powder, &c. and Also for Curing of Wounds Made with Musket and Caliuer Shot, and Other Weapons of War Commonly Vsed at This Day Both by Sea and Land, as Heerafter Shall Be Declared: Vvith an Addition of Most Approued Remedies, Gathered for the Good and Comfort of Many, out of Diuers Learned Men Both Old and New Writers: Last of All Is Adioined a Short Treatise, for the Cure of Lues Venerea, by Vnctions and Other Approued Waies of Curing, Heertofore by Me Collected: And Now Againe Newly Corrected and Augmented in the Yeere of Our Lorde 1596. By William Clowes One of Hir Maiesties Chirurgions. Early English Books, 1475–1640 / 193:13. Imprinted at London: By Edm. Bollifant, for Thomas Dawson, 1596., 1596.

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Cooke, James. Mellificium Chirurgiae, or, The Marrow of Chirurgery Much Enlarged to Which Is Now Added Anatomy, Illustrated with Twelve Brass Cuts, and Also The Marrow of Physick, Both in the Newest Way / by James Cooke … Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 1649:08. London: Printed by J.D. for Benji. Shirley, and are to be sold at his shop …, 1676., 1676. Crooke, Helkiah. Somatographia Anthropine. Or A Description of the Body of Man With the Practise of Chirurgery, and the Use of Three and Fifty Instruments. By Artificiall Figures Representing the Members, and Fit Termes Expressing the Same. Set Forth Either to Pleasure or to Profit Those Who Are Addicted to This Study. Edited by Ambroise Paré 1510? Early English Books, 1475–1640 / 998:13; Early English Books, 1475–1640 / 1360:06. [London]: Printed by Tho. Cotes, and are to be sold by Michael Sparke at the blew Bible in Greene Arbor, 1634., 1634. Davis, Lennard J. Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions. Cultural Front. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life. Rev. ed. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare: An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2010. Gregg, W. W., and Thomas Lodge. A Larum for London: 1602. Malone Society Reprints. London: Oxford University Press, 1913. Fabricius Hildanus, Wilhelm. Gulielm, Fabricius Hildamus, His Experiments in Chyrurgerie Concerning Combustions or Burnings Made with Gun Powder, Iron Shot, Hot-Water, Lightning, or Any Other Fiery Matter Whatsoever: In Which Is Excellently Described the Differences, Signs, Prognostication and Cures, of All Accidents and Burning Themselves: Very Necessary and Useful for All Gentlemen, and Soldiers as Well of the Trayned Bands, as Others, Especially upon Sudden Occasions/Translated out of Latine by Iohn Steer, Chyrurgeon. Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 93:12. London: Printed by Barnard Alsop …, 1642., 1642. Feerick, Jean E., and Vin Nardizzi, eds. Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Hobgood, Allison P. “Teeth Before Eyes: Impairment and Invisibility in Shakespeare’s Richard III.” In Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, edited by Sujata Iyengar. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. Hobgood, Allison P., and David Houston Wood, eds. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013. Hudson, Geoffrey L. British Military and Naval Medicine, 1600–1830. Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine; Clio Medica; 81; Variation: Clio Medica (Amsterdam, Netherlands); 81; Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2007.

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———. “Disabled Veterans and the State in Early Modern England.” In Disabled Veterans in History, edited by David Gerber. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Lindemann, Mary. Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Lowe, Peter, ca. 1550-ca. A Discourse of the Vvhole Art of Chyrurgerie VVherein Is Exactly Set Downe the Definition, Causes, Accidents, Prognostications, and Cures of All Sorts of Diseases, Both in Generall and Particular, Which at Any Time Heretofore Haue Beene Practiced by Any Chyrurgion: According to the Opinion of All the Ancient Professors of That Science. Which Is Not Onely Profitable for Chyrurgions; but Also for All Sorts of People: Both for Preventing of Sicknesse; and Recoverie of Health. Compiled by Peter Lovve Scottishman, Doctor in the Facultie of Chyrurgerie at Paris: And Ordinary Chyrurgion to the French King and Navarre. Whereunto Is Added the Rule of Making Remedies Which Chyrurgions Doe Commonly Use: With the Presages of Divine Hippocrates. Early English Books, 1475–1640 / 845:22. At London: Printed by Thomas Purfoot, An. Dom. 1634., 1634. Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003. Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001. http://www.press.umich.edu/11523. Nardizzi, Vin. “The Wooden Matter of Human Bodies.” In The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, edited by Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi. Early Modern Cultural Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Paré, Ambroise. The Collected Works of Ambroise Paré, Translated Out of the Latin by Thomas Johnson from The First English Edition, London 1634. Pound Ridge. New York: Milford House, Inc., 1968. Paré, Ambroise, and Janis L. Pallister. On Monsters and Marvels. Translated by Janis L. Pallister. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989. Park, Katharine. “The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy.” Renaissance Quarterly 47.1 (1994): 1–33. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pelling, Margaret. “Occupational Diversity: Barbersurgeons and the Trades of Norwich.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 56.4 (1982): 484–511. Porter, Roy. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Read, Alexander, 1586? A Treatise of the First Part of Chirurgerie, Called by Mee Synthetike the Part Which Teacheth the Reunition of the Parts of the Bodie Disjoyned. Containing the Methodical Doctrine of Wounds: Delivered in Lectures in the Barber-Chirurgeons Hall, upon Tuesdayes, Appointed for These

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Exercises, and the Keeping of Their Courts. By Alexander Read, Doctor of Physick, a Brother of the Same Company, and One of the Fellowes of the Physitians College of the Famous Citie London. Early English Books, 1475–1640 / 1360:07. London: Printed by John Haviland for Francis Constable, and are to be sold at his shop under Saint Martins Church neare Ludgate, 1638., 1638. ———. Chirurgorum Comes: Or The Whole Practice of Chirurgery. Begun by the Learned Dr. Read; Continued and Completed by a Member of the College of Physicians in London. Licensed, Feb. 15. 1686. Early English Books, 1641– 1700 / 1978:21. London: printed by Edw. Jones, for Christopher Wilkinson; and sold by John Salisbury at the Atlas in Cornhil, 1687., 1687. Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. Digital Printing. London: Routledge, 2006. Siraisi, Nancy G. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. 1st ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. ———. “Vesalius and the Reading of Galen’s Teleology.” Renaissance Quarterly 50.1 (1997): 1–37. Smith, Marquard, and Joanne Morra, eds. The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. Paperback edition. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2007. Sobchak, Vivian. “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality.” In From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, edited by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2007. The Dream of Saint John Damascene: The Virgin Attaches His Severed Right Hand. Drawing, 16–. 1600. The Wellcome Collection. Thurston, Alan J. “Paré and Prosthetics: The Early History of Artificial Limbs.” ANZ Journal of Surgery 77.12 (2007): 1114–1119. https://doi.org/10. 1111/j.1445-2197.2007.04330.x. W. W. Idolaters Ruine and Englands Triumph, or, The Meditations of a Maimed Souldier Wherein Is Contained Singular Incouragement for All Souldiers That Fight for the Lawes of a Kingdome, and the Liberty of the Subject and Contend for the Gospel of Christ Against the Power of Antichrist: And Also Certaine Descriptions of Plots and Traytors Both in England and Ireland, and Also How God Hath Crossed Idolaters Ever Since the Creation at One Time or Other, and of Later Times How God Hath Prevented by His Power and Providence the Noysome Vermine and Brood of Rome, from Bringing Their Cursed Intents and Purposes to Perfection: Written by a Commander, Wounded in the Parliament Service, Well Knowne, and Approved of in and about London, in the Time of His Cure Meditating upon the 48 of Jeremiah, at the 30 Verse … / by W. W. … Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 232:E.25[3]. London: [s.n.] 1645., 1645.

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Williams, Katherine Schaap. “Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). http://dsq-sds.org/ article/view/997. Wilson, Jeffrey R. “The Trouble with Disability in Shakespeare Studies.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37.2 (2017). http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/ 5430. Woodall, John, 1556? Woodalls Viaticum: The Path-Way to the Surgions Chest Containing Chirurgicall Instrvctions for the Yonger Sort of Surgions Now Imployed in the Service of His Maiestie for the Intended Reliefe of Rochell. And Composed by Iohn Woodall, One of the Present Masters or Governors of the Companie of Barber Surgions London. Intended Chiefly for the Better Curing of Wounds Made by Gun-Shott. Published by Authoritie. Early English Books, 1475–1640 / 1055:10. Imprinted at London: [By J. Dawson], 1628., 1628. Yonge, James. Currus Triumphalis, è Terebinthô, or, An Account of the Many Admirable Vertues of Oleum Terebinthinae More Particularly, of the Good Effects Produced by Its Application to Recent Wounds, Especially with Respect to the Hemorrhagies of the Veins, and Arteries, and the No Less Pernicious Weepings of the Nerves, and Lymphaducts: Wherein Also, the Common Methods, and Medicaments, Used to Restrain Hemorrhagies, Are Examined, and Divers of Them Censured: And Lastly, a New Way of Amputation, and a Speedier Convenient Method of Curing Stumps, than That Commonly Practised, Is with Divers Other Useful Matters Recommended to the Military Chirurgeon, in Two Letters: The One to His Most Honoured, James Pearse, Esq, Chirurgeon to His Royal Highness the Duke of York, and Chirurgeon General to His Majestie’s Navy Royal: The Other, to Mr. Thomas Hobbs, Chirurgeon in London / by James Yonge. Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 1113:20. London: Printed for J. Martyn …, 1679., 1679.

CHAPTER 4

“Turn It to a Crutch”: Disability and Swordsmanship in The Little French Lawyer Matthew Carter

Abstract In Beaumont and Fletcher’s Little French Lawyer, the character Champernell, a military veteran with one arm and one leg, is dropped on the stage and subsequently mocked when he tries and fails to initiate a sword duel. The mean-spirited joke offers insight into early modern representations of disability. A historicized understanding of rapiers demonstrates that when Champernell’s tormentors tell him to “turn it [the rapier] to a crutch,” they are actually recommending that he invert his sword and fall on it in an act of stoical suicide. The play thus offers two important avenues for approaching early modern texts through the lens of disability studies. On one hand, it highlights an early modern notion that impaired individuals should express their honor internally, rather than externally, exercising a kind of stoical agency. This notion manifests masculinist narratives of stoical honor as a means by which the disabled male subject is contained. Later in the play, however, Champernell catches and beats La-Writ, the play’s eponymous lawyer. This event,

M. Carter (B) University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_4

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which parallels Champernell’s earlier shaming, rejects the stoical framework, emphasizing the importance of comportment over embodiment. I show that Champernell’s cathartic victory serves to liberate, rather than constrain, the disabled male subject. In contemporary disability studies, the social model defines “disability” in opposition to “impairment.” As Lennard Davis puts it, “Impairment is the physical fact of lacking an arm or a leg. Disability is the social process that turns an impairment into a negative by creating barriers to access.”1 In Massinger and Fletcher’s obscure play, The Little French Lawyer,2 Champernell, a one-armed, one-legged fencer, is considered unmarriageable due to his injuries; as a result, these injuries function in the text as a disability. Yet Champernell does marry, and his wedding provokes an incident that reveals just how socially disabled his war injuries have made him. The main character, Dinant, is chafing after Lamira marries Champernell instead of him. To get his revenge, Dinant disrupts the wedding party and publicly shames Champernell. Mocked on his marriage day by a pair of roaring boys, Champernell would normally be expected to defend his honor in a duel. When he finally draws his sword to fight, however, he falls on the stage instead. The wedding scene highlights the way that swords engaged with embodiment in early modern England, demonstrating how swordsmanship constructs the masculine social self. The play further gestures toward an idea that a man who is physically disabled is socially expected to rely on an internal sense of honor rather than its physical expression. In early modern treatises on swordsmanship, the drawn sword facilitates a kind of division between exterior and interior, a common theme in sword duels, because the weapon protects, or “fences,” the body from harm. Masculinity is understood, in these cases, as a process that enforces this interior/exterior division. In the case of men whose wounds prevent them from enforcing this division through fencing, however, the division exists when the man demonstrates a kind of masculine interiority instead. Rather than drawing the sword, Champernell is expected to keep

1 Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press 2002), 12. 2 Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, Volume IX (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Modern spelling corrections mine.

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it in its sheath and project patience. The Little French Lawyer dramatizes Champernell’s loss of masculine containment, failure to fight, and subsequent embarrassment. In a later scene, however, Massinger and Fletcher reverse Champernell’s shaming by revealing that he can, in fact, enact physical violence when driven to extremes. In this chapter, I shall argue that careful attention to Champernell’s sword shows us how early modern disability narratives can employ theatrical mimesis to reinforce, then challenge, received perceptions of the disabled body. Despite a real potential to read an impaired body along stereotypical lines when it fails to wield a sword, The Little French Lawyer stages an impaired body that, in the end, proves to be an exemplar for masculine virtue and internalized honor. Champernell’s body becomes dangerous not because it lacks that which others have, despite the roaring boys’ attempts to shame him for his missing limbs; it is frightening because he attempts to overachieve beyond what early modern Londoners socially prescribed for the disabled body. Champernell’s choice to draw his sword and attack, rather than sitting stoically in his chair, extends his reach toward the young men, defying the social expectations placed on him. Furthermore, because Champernell’s body does not conform to early modern standards of symmetry, it might be possible to read his rapier as an arm with the potential to replace the mass of the missing biological limb. While early modern writers consistently called swords “arms,” frequently highlighting a metonymic relationship between the sword and the physical arm, swords extend the expected boundaries of the body, offering to their users a mechanical advantage in combat. In classical Greek models of the body (the models employed in the early modern period as a function of humanism), however, the body relies on symmetry and containment. The addition of a sword to a person’s hand changes the length of the arm, which in turn changes the profile of the user and undoes the definitional symmetry of the body. The swordsman, in short, sacrifices bodily symmetry in exchange for the opportunity to defend the boundaries of his body during a fight. The expectation might be that the sword enables Champernell to do more than his body is usually capable of doing. In the early modern period, soldiers were praised for their martial prowess, and since the addition of weaponry is not represented as overcoming a lack, a sword does

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not fit with the definition of prosthesis.3 There is no doubt that the sword serves as an extension of the user’s arm, but it is also chosen by the person wielding it. When Champernell attempts to draw his sword, he instantiates a haziness between bodily apparatus and tool that textures our understanding of early modern constructions of disability.4 As I shall show, drawing the sword actually re-inscribes his socialized disability, rather than protecting him from his enemies. The drawn sword highlights the asymmetrical nature of Champernell’s bodily difference and, due to the young men’s goading, comes to be read as an unwanted variation and a loss of containment. Rather than understanding Champernell’s sword as performing the function of most “prosthetic arms” by providing a substitute for a biological limb, I shall instead interpret the sword as an excess of mass, one that draws his body into asymmetry. At various points, characters describe the drawing of a sword as something that represents excess, whether an excess of youthful blood or actual bodily mass. At the beginning of the play, when Cleremont and Dinant argue over the merits of stoicism, they list several foolish reasons swords have been drawn: punishing insults (1.1.19), impressing women (31), and cheating “at cards or dice” (32). While Claremont initially uses these examples as reasons not to act in service of “The blood of our bold youth … with prodigal expense” (1.1.14, 18), the pair eventually cave into baser urges and antagonize Champernell. Meanwhile, Champernell’s own description of the sword is

3 David Mitchell importantly explains the function of prostheses in literary texts as something that is used to “compensate for a limitation or to reign in excessiveness.” The sword adds to the mass of the body in much the same way that a prosthetic limb might do to replace a missing one, but unlike a prosthesis, the sword does not “compensate” for anything. David T. Mitchell, “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, eds. Sharon L. Snyder et al. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002), 20. 4 For instance, psychoanalytical readings of prostheses have argued that adding mechanical parts to human bodies creates what Patricia Cahill cites as “an implicit anxiety that an artificial limb has the capacity to transform the ‘impotent and lame’ body to which it is attached into someone strangely unassailable.” Within this framework is implied a prescribed size and a prescribed shape for the body. The leg’s replacement with a prosthetic becomes a return to completion, and in Cahill’s reading, the completion becomes uncomfortable because the leg is not flesh. As my above analysis shows, however, Cahill’s assessment does not apply to Champernell’s case. Patricia A. Cahill, Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 192.

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imbued with a sense that it takes up too much physical space; his initial reluctance to draw is not based on his physical prowess, but on space: …O that I had thee In some close vault, that only would yield room To me to use my sword… …I would make thee on thy knees, Bite out the tongue that wrong’d me. (1.1.227–229, 230–231)

In both instances, the tension of the sword is the tension between its user’s patience and his willingness to assert space—and with it, dominance—in the world. This claim on the physical space around the swordsman’s body was, in fact, central to the fencer’s ethos. Jennifer Low, for instance, has argued that the phenomenon of the fencer’s swagger was a direct result of the need to communicate dominance by taking up space.5 Champernell’s missing limbs and failure to duel his enemies, in the context of early modern fencing culture, highlight and exacerbate his inability to take up space—and thereby assert a very particular form of masculine honor. Just as fluid production often was negatively linked to the overflowing of the classical body’s symmetrical boundaries (an overflowing that often figures in early modern gendered discourses as evidence of the incontinence of women),6 the sword creates an arm that is exponentially longer and significantly more dangerous than an unweaponed one. While the sword is often represented as a heroic tool for the destruction of one’s enemies, it is only as morally just as its user.7 In the case of the weapon-bearing arm, we must understand the metallic addition as overcompensation, and that overcompensation figures as nefarious in the hands of people that early modern society labelled as humorally or bodily unbalanced. Classically speaking, the body’s wholeness is evinced by its symmetry, but Champernell’s impairment, insistently mocked by 5 Jennifer Low, Manhood and the Duel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 41–43. 6 See Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation and the Origins of Human

Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2010; Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 7 For instance, fencing master Vincentio Saviolo intones that the sword “is that which sheweth who are men of arms and of honor, and which obtaineth right for those who are wronged: and for this reason it is made with two edges and one point,” 193.

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the younger men as simultaneously a source of leaking (“We ha’ made him cry” I.i.301) and a lack (“roll up your broken limbs” I.i.288), becomes central in reconfiguring his own social realities in a way that the rapier exacerbates. Because the weapon gives Champernell’s body more than its naturalized allotment of matter in theory, it also highlights the disability toward which his missing limbs point. For Champernell’s tormentors, the sword’s surplus accentuates his bodily removal from symmetrical parameters, and, whether this extra material is seen as an improvement or a detriment, it is socially constructed. The problem is still one of bodily difference, but the paradigm differs because increasing the body’s capabilities frequently seems more acceptable in an early modern context than replacing a lack. The difference lies in whether the sword is used honorably or not— and early modern systems of honor do not apply to everyone equally. In Champernell’s case, this becomes particularly useful for understanding the relationship between the body and the social self because the sword’s usual function as a hyper-able arm accentuates his socialized disability.8 The sword-bearing arm, meanwhile, does represent an excess, but the excess it provides allows the body to overcome the natural limitations of a prescribed whole. In this sense, the sword becomes capable of negotiating and speaking to both the physical and the social self. Extending the capacity of a body defines that body’s previous limitations. The sword-as-object represents a wide variety of bodily and personality traits which, put in conversation with the opponent through acts of violent, agonistic struggle such as dueling, is expected to distinguish the warriors based on their worth.9 If the extra-long arm extends the abilities of the user beyond the symmetrical limits of the body, then people whose bodies do not meet those standards may experience a highlighted, socialized disability even with the weapon in tow.

8 Cahill sees the early modern suspicion toward the wounded warrior as one that is invested in a discomforting duality: “Attached to an inanimate object imagined to move of its own accord [such as a wooden leg], the body of the lame soldier emerges, at least momentarily, as like that of the not-quite-human wound-man with his many extra parts.” Cahill, Unto the Breach, 193. 9 Jennifer Feather, Writing Combat and the Self in Early Modern English Literature: The Pen and the Sword (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3.

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Unlike a person who has been born with an impairment, Champernell owes his impairments, and by extension his disability, to the fact that he has lost both an arm and a leg in naval combat. He expresses that: I got these, not as you do your diseases, In brothels, or with riotous abuse Of wine in taverns; I have one leg shot, One arm disabled, and am honor’d more, By losing them. (I.i.272–276)

Champernell locates his honor in the missing limbs and contrasts his loss with “dishonorable” wounds earned through promiscuity and brawling. By contrasting his impairments (“one leg shot, / One arm disabled”) with the roaring boys’ own (“got … with riotous abuse”), Champernell distinguishes his body as honorably impaired. This distinction matters, as wounds accrued for an honorable cause increase Champernell’s sense of his own honor, unlike the decay he describes in his attackers, brought about through sexually transmitted diseases. When the young men confront him, however, they insist on honor found in the physical realities of the body. Champernell shows that his honor is now entirely internal; the affront incites him to challenge the young men, but his missing leg and arm appear to make it impossible for him to duel them in the physical world. Rather than continuing to satisfy himself with internal honor through stoicism, Champernell attempts to rise from his chair and fight the gallants. Two problems arise as a result of this event. First, to understand the body in an early modern context, a context that responded to the classical body’s demands of symmetry and solidity, requires the recognition that everyone is disabled to some degree. The question is not about perfection; rather, the question that Champernell’s attempted duel raises has to do with which variations receive privilege over others.10 Champernell sees the loss of his limbs as a sign of his honor—and he is quick to point out that the young men could not do the same, even if they were wounded: “Though hopeless, such an honorably way / To get wealth or honor in yourselves” (1.1.254–255). Champernell rejects disability narratives levied against his body by insisting upon an internal honor, found 10 Iyengar, “Introduction,” in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. Sujata Iyengar (New York: Routledge, 2015), 3.

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through stoicism, which the missing limbs actually qualify, rather than refute. Meanwhile, his detractors seek to draw his honor back into the physical realm by placing a derogatory reading upon his wounds. Recognizing the historicized nature of the body, and by extension, the socially constructed nature of disability, brings us to our second point of difficulty. As I have established, the sword cannot serve as a prosthesis, as it over-extends the expected boundaries of the classical body. Because the sword is usually seen as an enhancement over the unarmed body, it stands to reason that drawing a sword would increase that body’s access to power and privilege. The sword further offers the threat of disabling (or killing) one’s opponents, physically offering to increase the power differential between the victor and his or her opponent. However, in the hands of a person whose body does not conform to those standards of symmetry, the act of sword fighting takes on a socialized context of contagion. When he tries to fight, Champernell threatens a kind of violence that could potentially impair his enemies, just as his service in the wars did to him. The fear of the roaring boys is that Champernell might bring their bodies farther from classical, symmetrical models. It is, perhaps, for this reason that Champernell attempts to fight his assailants on his own. When Champernell rises to enact this promised violence, his family attempts to help him to his feet, but he rejects the offer: I alone must right myself And with one leg, transport me, to correct These scandalous praters. (I.i.268–270)

As he attempts to rise, Champernell falls to the stage and begins to weep. He fails both to “right” himself in the sense of rising from the chair and to “right” himself in the sense of revenging himself against his detractors. Though his use of the word “correct” clearly means that Champernell wishes to punish the wrongs of his opponents, there was also an early modern valence of the word which functioned medically. To “correct” could mean to remove or curb a hurtful agent.11 Just as the gallants hope to highlight the differences between their more-symmetrical bodies and Champernell’s lost limbs, Champernell seeks to bring their honor 11 Oxford English Dictionary, “Correct,” OED (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), http://www.oed.com.libproxy.uncg.edu/view/Entry/277051?result=1& rskey=kZbS8C&.

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system better in line with his own. He plans to shut the men up for good, enforcing a more-controlled Stoical ethos on their roaring misbehavior. Understandably, the audience might expect a spectacular fight in which the wronged Champernell enacts vengeance against his abusers, but no such gratification occurs. The sword takes on a powerful presence in this moment because Champernell makes the mistake of failing to maintain a stoical interiority. It is not his body that holds him back; early modern philosophical understandings of rapier combat practically demand that he lose the duel because he fails to exhibit self-control. Rapier manuals from all across Europe emphasize the duelist’s ability to hide his true intentions in order to succeed in combat, requiring an internal honor that relies on cleverness (or deception, depending on the observer). For instance, the French fencing master Henry de Sainct-Didier attempts to locate the fighter’s will in the sword’s blade, suggesting that the exterior was capable of masking an internal deceit. Advising his student to watch the point of the sword instead of its blade, Sainct-Didier asserts that “the reason for deciding on one of the strikes is that the exterior, which is the point of the sword, is guided and directed by the interior, which is the will, and the point of the sword, which is the exterior, cannot know to be so useful that the eyes and by consequence the sight judges [sic] the strike to gain tempo.”12 Like a person’s wit, the sword’s intentions are ultimately obfuscated from sight, and the fencer is tricked into watching the exterior movements in order to determine truth. The model further suggests that to truly know a person, one must look at his or her true intentions, but the physical body becomes a distractor; as Katherine Maus points out, “[social order] ignores unacted desires not because wicked secrets are rare, but rather because they are universal.”13 The rapier’s close association with interiority takes a front row in Champernell’s exchange with his enemies. When Champernell drops to the stage, the scoffing Dinant instructs him to “Put up your sword” (I.i.282) and Claremont adds “or turn it to a crutch, there’t may be useful” (I.i.283). As I have shown, the sword does not serve the function of a prosthetic limb, but never is that assertion more difficult to maintain than in this moment, when two men

12 Sainct-Didier, Secrets of the Sword Alone (Montreal: LongEdge Press, 2014), 11. 13 Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 108.

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instruct a one-armed, one-legged man to use the sword for that exact function. Audiences would be tempted in such a moment to diagnose his collapse as a result of his missing leg (or a crutch to replace it). To think about the mechanics of such an action, however, is to realize that the comment is not an expectation that Champernell should carry the sword as a crutch at all. Rapier blades were too flexible and too light to carry the weight of a man in this manner. Even the much-heavier long sword that Capulet calls for in Romeo and Juliet is not a good crutch; his wife instructs him to get a crutch instead of the sword (1.1.73).14 The comment is actually a mean-spirited joke on Claremont’s part. When swordsmen committed suicide, they placed the hilt on the ground, the point in their pectoral region (roughly the same location as a crutch), and fell on it. By suggesting that Champernell lean on his sword for support, Claremont is functionally telling him to go kill himself. This sense of the line appears in the syntax of those that follow. They tell him to relate to his wife “what a brave man you were once” (I.i.285) commending her on her kindness in “giv[ing] an old man pap” (I.i.287). They then offer an alternative option, in which he retires to her home and hires a surgeon to teach her how to wrap and treat his wounds—and to endure the smell of healing poultices. Essentially, Claremont asserts that Champernell should go home and live up to the stereotype of a disabled person. Both options evoke prejudices against Champernell’s socialized disability. In suggesting that he kill himself, Dinant and Claremont’s mockery of Champernell seeks to weaponize his disabilities against his self-image. As Champernell fails to get back off the stage, they even suggest that he learn “To make a Poultice and endure the scent / Of nasty oils and plasters” (I.i.288–289). This prejudice serves a detrimental social function, as Tobin Siebers explains: [M]inority identity is twice disabling. First, one is subjected; then the subject internalizes its suffering and lays claim to its own subordination. Pain serves as the glue that laminates the outside and inside of minority identity, ensuring that the violence enacted by society against individuals remains embedded in the psyche.15

14 René Weis, ed., The Arden Shakespeare: Romeo & Juliet (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). 15 Tobin Siebers, “Disability, Pain, and the Politics of Minority Identity,” in Foundations of Disability Studies, eds. Matthew Wappet and Katrina Arndt, 17.

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The two men attempt to contextualize Champernell’s disability as painful, and in so doing, they re-inscribe what Robert Bogdan and Douglas Biklen describe as the “self-fulfilling prophecy” of social disability.16 Champernell is compelled to “play the part” of a person who is miserable in his disability through their public shaming ritual. Drawing attention to Champernell’s wounds and mocking him for his healing medicines allows the two to diffuse the blame for their own bad behavior, recasting his social disabling into a medicalized context. The tension in Champernell’s struggles throughout the play primarily comes from the opposition between internally derived honor and physically derived honor. Because Champernell has drawn his honor from his bodily prowess for so many years, he keeps trying to revert to his older understanding of honor won through physical means. As he exclaims: All powerful heaven, Restore me, but one hour, that strength again, That I had once, to chastise in these men, Their follies…. (I.i.295–298)

He functionally disables himself by limiting his options for revenge to physical prowess. By redefining his honor as external, he eliminates the possibility for revenge, unless he receives the help of his nephews (or heaven, as he suggests). Meanwhile, those around him expect a more internalized version of honor from him. When Claremont suggests that Champernell go kill himself, he is mechanically suggesting that the old man insert his sword (the emblem of his honorable behavior) inside as well. Because his body is unable to use the sword for combat, and thereby defend his own wounded honor, his enemy reasons that it would serve him better on the inside, where his honor remains intact. Rather than relying on his own internalized system of honor, Champernell accepts readings of his social disability, which guarantees only shame and defeat. We can see clearly the way that the sword speaks to disability in this scene. In The Little French Lawyer, the sword’s presence nearly retreads a familiar trope regarding disability: that the impaired person cannot right the wrongs perpetrated against him because of his inability to perform. 16 Robert Bogdan and Douglas Biklen, “Handicapism,” in Foundations of Disability Studies, eds. Matthew Wappet and Katrina Arndt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4–5.

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Champernell attempts to draw his sword and fight, but ultimately fails because of his impairments. As his enemies stand over him, mocking his wounds, the limitations of Jennifer Low’s “honor natural”17 appear to be relative to the limitations of the body. This narrative insists upon the body as a container for, and a limit to, interiority. While it might be tempting to empathize with Champernell, it is reasonably clear from the context of the scene that the audience was expected to take a similarly cruel joy in Champernell’s misfortunes. His own family, including his newly wedded wife, chides him for crying in front of his attackers: “Shed tears upon / Your wedding day? This is unmanly Gentleman” (I.i.293). The release of his tears, and with them, his emotions, show Champernell’s failure to exhibit masculine stoicism, a virtue that takes center stage in the early moments of the play. Dinant and Claremont open the play with a philosophical discussion of the merits of stoicism only to reject the philosophy altogether. Throughout the play, the tension between traditional, masculine stoicism and the over-reach of emotion we see in many of the characters registers as a failure of masculine containment. Champernell’s emotional outburst is “unmanly” by his wife’s standards of masculinity; ultimately, his aggressive reactions to mockery serve as the catalyst for his changing character arc. His attempts to use the sword in a fight are yet one more example of a notable insistence on physically derived honor—and both his friends and enemies insist that he would be better served to derive honor from within. By staging Champernell’s outburst as an act that dishonors him, Beaumont and Fletcher redirect assumptions about his impairments into a morality lesson about patience. Despite his social disability, Champernell’s choice of the rapier is a poor one because of his inability to exercise self-control (necessary to the proper wielding of a rapier). Joseph Swetnam argues that the duelist’s best defense is simply not to fight: “let patience be thy buckler, and a fair tongue thy sword, and always have a care in the beginning what will be the end … Oh, thrice happy were that man, which towards the latter end of his days, can without a pair of lying lips say, ‘I never bare malice.’”18 When Champernell keeps the sword at his side, it serves as an accessory to his internal honor, carried proudly after a life spent in service to the navy. 17 “Honor natural refers to inherent, rather than inherited, honor.” Low, Manhood and the Duel, 98. 18 Joseph Swetnam, The School of the Noble and Worthy Science of Defense (London: Bodleian Library, 2014), 42.

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The honor of the gallants, who he insists have never “seen / The horror of a Sea-fight,” (I.i.241–242) is carried externally in their roaring. As they put it, public shaming is a victory to them as much as Champernell’s valiance at sea was to him: “We ha’ the better of him, / We ha’ made him cry” (I.i.300–301). The incongruities between Champernell’s internal honor and the embodied honor of the gallants, which depends upon agonistic competition rather than the ability to bear hardship patiently, result in Champernell’s disgrace. Champernell’s naval service won him wounds and honor in the war, but now, it limits his ability to participate in peacetime brawls—and in the economy of manhood to which they contribute. It may seem that Champernell’s body is not able to enact the honor duel necessary for this outward show of worthiness. In actuality, if Champernell had chosen to bear calmly the scorn of his enemies, his internal honor would have remained intact, but because he attempts to seek his self-worth in the physical realm, he is found wanting. The morality of the sword as arbiter of a fighter’s righteousness becomes clear in this context as a demonstration of Champernell’s unworthiness, but not because he is unable to fight the other men. Instead, he shows his failings through his overreach of emotion and the breach of etiquette in not being satisfied with internal, stoical honor. If, as Vincentio Saviolo points out, the two edges of the sword can both wound the duelist’s enemies and the duelist himself,19 then the duelist’s ability to extend the social self into the physical world can be simultaneously powerful as a statement of agency and dangerous to the duelist’s own honor. The gallants’ unkindness becomes justified within their own sense of masculinity because they are able to overcome the line between Champernell’s interior and exterior, thereby bringing him to tears and dropping him on the floor. Hobgood and Wood explain that the physical realities of the world lend themselves toward compulsory able-bodiedness, figuring the disabled body as “insufficient.”20 This is exactly the process that the roaring boys use to emasculate Champernell. Dinant and Claremont assert their dominance over Champernell through lurid descriptions of his wounds and the implication that Lamira will be unsatisfied on her wedding night because “this leg, this arm, / And there is something

19 Vincentio Saviolo, His Practice (London: John Wolfe, 1595), D2v. 20 Hobgood and Wood, “Introduction,” in Recovering Disability in Early Modern

England, eds. Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood, 3.

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else, I will not name” (I.i.263–264) lack the strength to physically please her. Meanwhile, when Champernell accepts a construction of his body as being insufficient, he tries to draw and fight. His failure to stand seems to validate the ableist notion at work in the boys’ analysis, but the real loss comes from having relinquished his self-control in a fit of anger. There does not need to be a battle, because Champernell’s loss of containment (and the crying that exemplifies it) is an exposure of his insides—and therefore the goal of the duel is already achieved. Fortunately for anyone hoping that Champernell will be able to reclaim his honor, the play does offer a cathartic moment of revenge, albeit one situated in the same prejudiced framework that is used for his shaming. After the eponymous little French lawyer, La-Writ, defeats Champernell’s family in a duel over the initial incident, he goes throughout the city, ruining his law career by engaging in duel after duel. His reign of terror comes to a close when he, unarmed,21 encounters Champernell in the woods. La-Writ, trying to puff himself up, derides Champernell’s honor: “That little Lawyer [I], would so prick his ears up, and bite your honor by the nose” (4.6.136–137). The exchange leads to disaster for La-Writ: La-writ. So niggle about your grave shins Lord Vertaigne too – Sampson. No more, sweet Gentleman, no more of that Sir. La-writ. I will have more, I must have more. Vertaigne. Out with it. Sampson. Nay he is a brave fellowChampernell. Have I caught you? Strike him downe. Vertaigne. Do not kill him, do not kill him. Champernell. No, no, no, I will not;- do you peep again, down down proud heart. Sampson. O valor, look up brave friend, I have no means to rescue thee, my Kingdome for a sword. Champernell. I’ll sword you presently, I’ll claw your skin-coat, too. (4.6.139–150)

This exchange, which parallels Champernell’s torment at the beginning of the text, is useful to examine for several reasons. First, it is in this moment that the play reverses its representation of Champernell as helpless. The emphasis here is on the absence of the sword, rather than on Champernell’s bodily symmetry. Second, the assumptions about Champernell’s 21 “You have a sword Sir, and I have none …” (IV.vi.130).

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disabilities that the play encourages in the first fight are disrupted because of this slapstick event. Massinger and Fletcher encourage a reading of Champernell’s abilities that reinforces traditional disability stereotypes, only to subvert it in this scene, in which Champernell dramatically overcomes the toughest fencer in town.22 The sword’s function as extra mass, rather than a prosthesis, comes full circle at the end of the play, when this fight plays out with bare hands. Swetnam, in his treatise on dueling, explains that different weapons belong to different bodies, using animals’ prescribed purposes under the Great Chain of Being as an example: “… the Unicorn and the Bull [fight] with their horns, and the force of their heads, so that there is no other beast or creature is able to abide the violence and force thereof.”23 As we have seen, Champernell’s inability to use the sword in defense of his honor excludes him from one economy of masculinity, but he finds a way to reinstate himself in the same masculine paradigm through his fist. His repetition of the word “down” and taunting of La-Writ (“do you peep again”) imply that he is progressively pummeling the truculent lawyer until he has curbed the passions of La-Writ’s “proud heart.” Before, the play offered two options for how to use a sword: either draw it and fight or leave it sheathed and exercise what Swetnam might call “the patience of him that can bear with one that is past reason.”24 Having failed at the second, and then having tried and failed at the first, Champernell does with his fists what he does not do with a sword. The sword therefore serves as a barometer of Champernell’s righteousness in the fight; despite the roaring boys’ desert of a good stabbing, Champernell learns to hurt without killing, and it is actually his body that enables him to do what the sword could not. Unlike the first example, where Champernell attempts to make war on the young men for their intemperate behavior, Champernell would not have been fighting a worthy fight: Swetnam assures his readers that the early modern man might be “much deceived as those which think that a quarrel begun with words 22 Given the dual authorship of the text, I am unwilling to ascribe authorial intention

to this reversal; it seems as likely as not to be an inconsistency in the text rather than a deliberate commentary on identity. Whether or not Massinger and Fletcher coordinated with one another to employ this scene is irrelevant for my purposes; the effect the moment has on the play is significant either way. 23 Swetnam, Noble and Worthy Science, 58. 24 Ibid., 40.

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cannot be ended but with weapons.”25 When Champernell instead uses his fist for instructive purposes, both body and soul are aligned in a good cause, and his impairments are no hindrance at all for his retribution. He even understands the beating to be corrective: “Alas Sir I must beat him, beat him into his business / again, he will be lost else” (IV.vi.167–168). Just as carrying the sword extends Champernell’s body beyond the expected, classical bounds, drawing it brings him out of alignment with traditional moral boundaries. When he wants to kill the boys for taunting him, despite the fact that he is the victim of their abusive language, he comes dangerously close to ruin. The sword becomes, for the boys, a crutch that highlights Champernell’s impairments, but for Champernell, it ultimately becomes an emblem of his overreaching. Despite the fun the play makes of Champernell’s body, it does not uphold the young men’s prejudiced attitudes regarding the sword. The sword endangers Champernell because it threatens to lead him into intemperate brawling. The original implication that the sword threatens his safety by way of his missing limbs is reversed as a result: when the time comes for Champernell to issue a righteous beating, La-Writ finds him perfectly able to deliver. The mangling Champernell delivers to La-Writ completely disrupts the disability narrative that the play instantiates in the induction. Whether the impaired man falling on the floor inspires laughter (as the play seems to encourage) or empathy, neither reaction to Champernell’s spill relies on catching the audience by surprise. This is important because the earlier scene encourages audiences to pre-judge Champernell’s abilities. As Bogdan and Biklen explain, those who uphold a stereotype will often maintain it even when evidence suggests that reality is more nuanced. This process often manifests as exceptionalism; one may praise a person who outperforms the stereotype’s expectations without actually challenging the preconceived notion that created the assumption in the first place.26 When Champernell falls over trying to enact his revenge on Dinant and Claremont early on, many audience members will immediately point to his impairments as the reason he is unable to participate in the duel. The one-armed, one-legged man is not the typical duelist. Here, however, Champernell not only wins a fight; he dry-beats La-Writ, whose fencing prowess has bested several other characters by this point. Depending on

25 Ibid., 38. 26 Bogdan and Biklen, “Handicapism,” 4–5.

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an audience’s (or reader’s) reception of the earlier scene, this moment seems either ludicrous or cathartic. In other words, the play encourages its audience to engage in the exact behavior described by Bogdan and Biklen, holding on to a prejudicial notion instead of modifying its views to accommodate for new evidence, so that those prejudices can be upended in this pivotal scene. The sword differs from a prosthetic in that, rather than accommodating for missing parts of the body, it overreaches the body’s boundaries, ostensibly so that it can fence or shield the body from invasion. While the sword may not register as a prosthetic limb when a person without impairments hold it, the minute a character such as Champernell draws one, correlations between his missing limbs and the extraneous mass inscribed by the sword become a possibility. As we have seen, however, the context of Massinger and Fletcher’s play casts Champernell in a different light, one that gestures toward stereotypical readings of disability in order to supplant them with nuanced, thoughtful representations of an impaired body that can still instantiate traditional masculine valor. True, Dinant and Claremont engage in a prejudiced joke that draws comparisons between the rapier and a crutch, but in The Little French Lawyer, easy readings of Champernell’s abilities are confounded in the dissonance between descriptions of the wounded warrior and his actual activity in the play. The sword serves to accentuate the character’s social realities, without a doubt, and Champernell’s unfortunate shaming at the beginning of the play is tied to a socialized disability—and the resulting stigma. As the play shows, though, it is not Champernell’s impairments that cost him the fight; rather, it is his hot temper that leads to his downfall. The sword provides the masculine subject with an opportunity to enact and defend his honor, but Champernell’s unique subjectivity as a disabled veteran enables him to use the sword in a nontraditional way. Champernell becomes a sympathetic hero not by drawing his sword, but by putting it away.

Bibliography Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, Volume IX. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Bogdan, Robert, and Douglas Biklen. “Handicapism.” In Foundations of Disability Studies, edited by Matthew Wappet and Katrina Arndt, 1–16. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

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Cahill, Patricia A. Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Davis, Leonard J. Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions. New York: New York University Press, 2002. de Sainct-Didier, Henry. Secrets of the Sword Alone. Montreal: LongEdge Press, 2014. Feather, Jennifer. The Pen and the Sword: Writing Combat and the Self in Early Modern English Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Hobgood, Allison P., and David Houston Wood. “Introduction.” In Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, edited by Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, 1–22. Columbus: The Ohio University Press, 2013. Iyengar, Sujata. “Introduction.” In Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakeseparean Body, edited by Sujata Iyengar, 1–19. New York: Routledge, 2015. Low, Jennifer A. Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Maus, Katherine Eisaman. Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995. Mitchell, David T. “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor.” In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon L. Snyder et al., 15–30. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002. Oxford English Dictionary. “Correct.” OED. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://www.oed.com.libproxy.uncg.edu/search?searchType=dictionary&q= bend&_searchBtn=Search&. Park, Katherine. The Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Saviolo, Vincentio. His Practice. London: John Wolfe, 1595. http://eebo.cha dwyck.com.libproxy.uncg.edu/home. Shakespeare, William. Romeo & Juliet. Edited by René Weis. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Siebers, Tobin. “Disability, Pain, and the Politics of Minority Identity.” In Foundations of Disability Studies, edited by Matthew Wappet and Katrina Arndt, 17–28. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Swetnam, Joseph. EEBO Editions: The School of the Noble and Worthy Science of Defense. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2010.

CHAPTER 5

Mutism and Feminine Silence: Gender, Performance, and Disability in Epicoene Melissa Hull Geil

Abstract This chapter examines the slippage of language in the early modern period between muteness and silence in women; between cognitive, psychological, and linguistic impairments and ideal feminine behavior. First, by considering two accounts of early modern women, Martha Hatfield and Elinor Channel, who experienced what we now may call selective mutism or dumbness, this chapter argues that these narratives articulate a connection between incidents of mutism and didactic accounts of virtuous women’s elective silence. The chapter then looks at Ben Jonson’s play Epicoene, which uniquely presents how female silence and female muteness overlap in considerations of feminine performance in the early modern period. Examining the intersection of female mutism and female silence allows us to consider the richly varied experiences and expectations of women in the early modern period and how their narratives are often framed by male interlocutors, and permits us to see where moments of subversion, contradiction, and resistance open up

M. H. Geil (B) Kenan-Flagler Business School, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_5

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space for women to communicate their own messages and challenge these narratives. William Gouge’s 1622 Of Domesticall Duties considers the roles of speech and silence as evidence of a wife’s reverence and subjection to both her husband and to God. A husband’s authority manifests in his wife’s silence; while her words, if they be too free or too many, suggest his failure of authority. As by gesture, so by speech also, must a wiues reuerence be manifested: this must be answerable to that. For by words as well as by deeds, the affection of the heart is manifested, Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. A wiues reuerence is manifested by her speech, both in her husbands presence, and also in his absence. For this end in his presence her words must be few, reuerend and meeke. First few: For the Apostle enioyneth silence to wiues in their husbands presence, and inforceth that dutie with a strong reason in these words: I permit not the woman to vsurpe authoritie ouer the man, but to be in silence: the inference of the latter clause vpon the former sheweth that he speaketh not only of a womans silence in the Church, but also of a wiues silence before her husband: which is further cleared by another like place, where the same Apostle enioyneth wiues to learne of their husbands at home. The reason before mentioned for silence, on the one side implieth a reuerend subiection, as on the other side too much speech implieth an vsurpation of authoritie.1

The respondent then asks the question implied in this edict on a wife’s relationship to speech: “Then belike a wife must be alwayes mute before her husband”?2 The speaker’s ultimate answer is no, because there are also problems with total female silence as an indication of agency, a “stubbornness of the heart.” However, the speaker’s clear sense of women’s speech informs his reader that a woman’s voice needs to be monitored and controlled, lest it revert back to its predisposed state, in which their

1 William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties Eight Treatises. I. an Exposition of that Part of Scripture Out of which Domesticall Duties are Raised. … VIII. Duties of Masters. by William Gouge (London, Printed by Iohn Haviland for William Bladen, and are to be sold at the signe of the Bible neere the great north doore of Pauls, 1622), http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.lib proxy.lib.unc.edu/docview/2248559962?accountid=14244, 281–282. 2 Ibid., 282.

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“slipperie tongues” interrupt their husbands, and “thus-they disgrace themselues, and dishonour their husbands.”3 This study is about the slippage of language in the early modern period between muteness and silence in women, between cognitive, psychological, and linguistic impairments and enforced control over a women’s body.4 The qualities possessed by an “ideal” woman in early modern conduct literature, as illustrated by Wendy Wall, Ann Rosalind Jones, Dympna Callaghan, and Suzanne Hull’s seminal work, are the three pillars: chaste, silent, and obedient.5 On conduct literature, Heidi Brayman writes that “these manuals advocated the ideals of silence, chastity, and obedience with consistency to the point of cliché.”6 Richard Brathwait’s English Gentlewoman, for example, would do best to “tip her tongue with silence” and be “seene, and not heard.”7 Robert Cleaver

3 Ibid., 282. 4 As discussed in Allison Hobgood and David Wood’s introduction to Recovering

Disability in Early Modern England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013); Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum’s Defects: Engendering the Modern Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 1–28; and Elizabeth Bearden’s “Before Normal, There Was Natural: John Bulwer, Disability, and Natural Signing in Early Modern England and Beyond,” Publication of the Modern Language Society of America 132.1 (2017): 33–51, I denote the difference between impairment—mental and/or physical difference as manifested—and disability, in which mental and/or physical impairments are understood socially. Moreover, as Emily Cockayne notes in “Experiences of the Deaf in Early Modern England,” The Historical Journal 46.3 (2003): 493–510, I am using the terms deaf, dumb, and mute as they refer to depictions of individuals in early modern England, and recognize that, in the modern period, many perceive deafness not to fall into the category of disability. 5 Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Dympna Callaghan, Women and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy: A Study of King Lear, Othello, The Duchess of Malfi, and The White Devil (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1989); and Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475–1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982). 6 Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 200.

7 Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman, Drawne Out to the Full Body (London: Printed by B. Alsop and T. Fauucet, for Michaell Sparke, 1631), 41, 89.

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advises, “The dutie of the man is, to bee skillfull in talke: and of the wife, to boast of silence.”8 More recently, Christina Luckyj and Jessica Murphy have plumbed deeper into considerations of silence, problematizing notions of silence as golden. Murphy writes, “Women’s silence is not a virtue that can be easily thought of as existing in a clearly delineated world of right and wrong; rather it is a virtue that is better conceived of as covering a range of occasionally contradictory meanings.”9 One of these “contradictory” points of consideration, as yet to be fully explored, is the imbrication of the language of dumbness and muteness as it pertains to the “virtues” of feminine silence. Moreover, the interconnectedness between abuse, violence, and female silence that lay beneath these modes of conduct showcase exactly how connected the language of silence and muteness are: one has only to meditate on Philomel or Lucrece to understand. This essay looks at accounts of women who experience what we now may call selective mutism or dumbness. It explores the similarities between these texts and those in praise of virtuous women of silence and calls attention to the lived experiences of mute women in the early modern period. In particular, I consider the intersections of performance of perceived ideal femininity and the cultural production of narratives of dumbness and deafness in the early modern period. I begin with a consideration of historical and literary accounts of deafness and muteness in the early modern period and then move on to discuss two key accounts of mute women—not prelingually deaf—who present with conditions that modern medical accounts might call selective mutism. Both of these accounts—of Martha Hatfield and Elinor Channel—demonstrate key features that define acceptable parameters for women to speak the word of God; namely, they are not in control of their own faculties, but rather merely a vessel of the divine word of God. These two accounts, I argue, serve as key demonstrative moments that articulate a connection between incidents of mutism and didactic accounts of female

8 Robert Cleaver, A Godly Form of Householde Gouernment: For the Ordering of Private Families (London By Thomas Creede, for Thomas Man, dwelling in Pater-Noster Rowe, at the signe of the Talbot, 1598), 160. 9 Jessica Murphy. Virtuous Necessity: Conduct Literature and the Making of the Virtuous Woman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 23. See also Christina Luckyj, “A Moving Rhetoricke”: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).

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behavior. Then, I look at two works that feature more “contradictory” depictions of the performance of female muteness and female silence. First, I consider the tradition of a frequently printed early modern jest involving a mute wife and an earnest husband looking to cure her. Then I look at Ben Jonson’s play Epicoene, which uniquely presents how female silence and female muteness overlap in considerations of feminine performance in the early modern period. Examining the intersection of female mutism and female silence allows us to consider the richly varied experiences and expectations of women in the early modern period. Moreover, we can see how these narratives are often framed by male interlocutors, and, paradoxically, how these narratives permit us to see where moments of subversion, contradiction, and resistance open up space for women to find ways to express themselves.

I Much is unknown about the status of those considered deaf, dumb, and/or mute in early modern England.10 What can be pieced together— from parish records, manuscripts, letters, and town/county records— offers a limited view of what was. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, for example, there was a thriving community of users of British Sign Language (BSL) on Martha’s Vineyard. That community emigrated from the Maidstone area in England where the use of sign language must have been prevalent enough that George Downing, a politician who grew up there in the 1630s, was able to comprehend a deaf boy in 1666, as recounted in Samuel Pepys’s diary.11 10 I employ the terms deaf, dumb, and mute as they are employed in early modern England, where those who were born deaf did not learn to speak before becoming fear are referred to as “deaf and dumb” or deaf mutes. Moreover, the early moderns used the term “mute” and “dumb” quite interchangeably, to refer both to the medical condition of being unable to speak, or a more temporary condition of speechlessness. See Emily Cockayne’s “Experiences of the Deaf in Early Modern England,” The Historical Journal 46.3 (2003): 493–510, esp. 494; Harry G. Lang’s Silence of the Spheres: The Deaf Experience in the History of Science (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994), xvii. Moreover, I recognize that, in naming muteness as a disability, I am only referring to how the early moderns referred to the condition, and understand that the Deaf today are a part of a community that shares a culture and communal traits. 11 Peter Jackson, Britain’s Deaf Heritage (Edinburgh: The Pentland Press, Limited. 1990), 10. For more information on the Martha’s Vineyard colony, see Nora Ellen Groce, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard

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Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts of deafness and/or dumbness feature those from the upper classes, the lower classes, and those in between. The Norwich census of the poor in 1570 features several listings of both deaf and/or dumb persons, including “Margaret Warnes, a deff woman, that spyn lynen” and “dombe Elizabeth, that worketh nott, but begg contynually.”12 With the lower classes, there are reports of a system of gestures whereby prelingually deaf or mute persons communicate with their families, and some information is available on the occasions of those families being in need. In A Prophecy of the White King: and Dreadfull Dead-man Explaned, William Lilly writes of a “dumbe” woman who delivered prophecies to King James and Queen Anne in 1615, communicating with gestures. Lilly writes “for manifestations of her sense and meaning tels us how active and intelligent your dumbe people are so that they will almost apprehend any thing by signes.”13 Not only does Lilly advocate for the understanding of a system of gestures, his example suggests something of the lives of the poor deaf and dumb and how successfully they communicated with one another and with those in their social network. Wealthy families hired tutors to teach their deaf and dumb children to communicate, among them Dr. Wallis of the Royal Society, who brought his pupil, Daniel Whaley, with him to a meeting in 1662.14 Beginning in the mid to late seventeenth century, practices that had begun in Spain to teach the prelingually deaf to speak were brought to England. In 1644, John Bulwer’s Chirologia: Or the Naturall Language of the Hand saw publication. The work discusses the system of gestures already ingrained into the tactile vernacular of early modern England. Bulwer’s Chirologia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Douglas Baynton, “A Silent Exile on This Earth: The Metaphorical Construction of Deafness in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Lennard Davis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 33–48. 12 John F. Pound, ed., The Norwich Census of the Poor 1570 (Norfolk Record Society, 40, Norwich, 1971): 51, 84. 13 William Lily, A Prophecy of the White King: And Dreadfull Dead-Man Explaned, to Which Is Added the Prophecie of Sibylla Tibyrtina and Prediction of Iohn Kepler: All of Especiall Concernment for These Times (London, Printed by G.M. and are to be sold by John Sherley and Thomas Vnderhill, at the Golden Pellican in little Brittaine, and Bible in Woodstreet, 1644), 4–5. 14 Royal Society Meeting Minutes (GB 117. Royal Society. Wellcome Library MS), JBO/1/78.

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was followed by a number of texts including his own Philocophus: Or, The Deafe and Dumbe Mans Friend (Bulwer, 1648), William Holder’s Elements of Speech (which included an appendix, “Concerning Persons Deafe and Dumb”) in 1677 (ms. 1668), George Sibscota’s The Deaf and Dumb Man’s Discourse (1670), and Jean Amman’s The Talking Deaf Man (1694). Of the accounts of those who were unable to speak—whether by virtue of being prelingually deaf or any of the numerous things that could cause mutism—historical accounts of mute females were scant. While the first account of a will made by a deaf male appears in 1672 (Framlingham Gaudy), no seventeenth-century example of a will of a deaf or mute woman15 is currently known. While multiple accounts of prelingually deaf males being taught to speak in the seventeenth century feature in the annals of the Royal Society, the main account of a female is from Amsterdam: Esther Koland, a Dutch girl taught to speak by Jean Amman. Two curious records that do exist, however, are exegetical in nature, and serve as illustrative examples of both how mute women in the seventeenth century were portrayed, and how the discourses of mute women relate to treatises exhorting the virtues of female silence. Both of these narratives feature accounts of women speaking the word of God when they were otherwise depicted as being mute. Both of their tales are authorized by male interlocutors, who construct the framework whereby these females become acceptable speakers. And both stories utilize the female character’s mutism to exemplify how they embody the key virtue of silence.

II The Wise Virgin (1653) tells the story of Martha Hatfield, a pious girl aged eleven, stricken with a disease that renders her unable to walk, speak, hear, smell, and see. Prior to the disease, Hatfield’s health flourished, and she could speak and write, thus she is not categorized as prelingually deaf. When in the ecstasies of her disease, however, Hatfield began to speak, channeling the word of God, according to James Fisher, the author of the work, a minister, and Hatfield’s uncle. Fisher describes these episodes as “grand extasies.” He continues, 15 For more information see Peter Jackson’s account of Framlingham Gaudy in Britain’s Deaf Heritage, 16–17.

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whereby (after that her body had been racked on the wheel of convulsion) it became as stiffe and expanse as that bodie which is seized on by death and coldnesse. In which extasies did God to astonishment appear. For now flowed those streames of living waters, those precious, divine sentences contained in the engulfing pages: which thou tasting, with the Organes of the same Spirit they were delivered, thou canst but admire.16

Fisher’s account of Martha Hatfield’s tale relies on narrative strategies akin to a saint’s life.17 He frames the episodes where she serves as the vessel for the word of God by accounts of her illness and recovery. The section describing “Her Disesase” accounts for Hatfield’s precocious piety, citing “the Spirit blossoming in her in the very Spring of her age. Even while she spelled words and syllables, she spel’d out Christ.”18 Establishing her as a worthy recipient of this gift of prophecy, Fisher then details her illness: [S]he could not move but as she was born by others, and much of this time her teeth was so closed, that she was not capable of receiving food, onely some liquid matter they dropped in at a broken tooth, and this was very little, she putting it out so fast as it was given her.19

On the one hand, Fisher frames the narrative that Hatfield’s piety and purity offer the pretext for her being the recipient of God’s word. On the other hand, Hatfield’s illness could be read as a punishment from God,

16 James Fisher, The Wise Virgin (London, 1653), B5r-v. 17 Narrative strategies of a saint’s life include the following: formulaic framing strategies,

directly reported discourse that switches to dialogue at key points in the narrative, the emphasis on quotations. For more information on these narrative strategies, see Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti, “Discoursal Aspects of the Legends of Holy Women by Osbern Bokenham,” in Topics in English Linguistics: Methods in Historical Pragmatics: Methods in Historical Pragmatics, eds. Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (Berlin/Boston, DE: De Gruyter Mouton, 2007), 285–305. Nigel Smith speaks specifically of Hatfield’s narrative in relation to Puritan Saint’s lives in his article “A Child Prophet: Martha Hatfield,” esp. pp. 89–90 in Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, eds. Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs; with a foreword by Iona Opie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 79–93. 18 Fisher, Wise Virgin, B4v. 19 Ibid.

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paradoxically implicating Hatfield as a sinner punished with disease, in accordance with a religious model of disability.20 Hatfield herself showcases this point in Fisher’s account of her religious ecstasies, as he quotes her preaching the righteousness of God’s administration of “correction:” Correction is good for poor souls, it maketh them stick closer to Christ … As the Father calleth his childe when he hath done amiss, and asks why he doth so, and give him correction: so God he gives his children correction, but it is for their good and comfort. God scourgeth and whippeth his children, but he will not give them one whip nor one lash more than is for their good.21

Hatfield, in this case, voices the necessity of correction, while also serving as an exemplar of what correctives might look like. “Godly chastisement,” according to Hannah Newton, functioned as a narrative salve, particularly for children, “making physical pain seem more bearable” when they know that “sickness was a spiritual purge or correction” that may “‘purify,’ ‘cleanse,’ or ‘perfect’ the soul.”22 In this example, Hatfield’s correction offers both the occasion for purification of the soul and the opportunity for a mute child to serve as the mouthpiece for the word of God. Mouthpiece certainly characterizes the function Hatfield plays in the narrative. Paratext, including Fisher’s accounts of her life, disease, and recovery, surround her words, which are acknowledged to be occasionally inappropriate for a child under the age of twelve. Fisher asserts that Hatfield’s condition for the entire duration of these speeches that she “neither did see or hear, or know any body, and that she neverminded what was said to her, no answered to any thing that was spoken to her.”23 Hatfield’s ability to speak only occurred when inhabited by God, according to Fisher. Otherwise, she was completely incapacitated. In his account of her recovery, Fisher tells us that, when having been told that she had been a “Preacher of righteousnesse and taught us the way to 20 See Edward Wheatley’s Stumbling Blocks before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 7–8. 21 Fisher, Wise Virgin, 34. 22 Hannah Newton, The Sick Child in Early Modern England 1580–1720 (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2012), 205–206. 23 Fisher, Wise Virgin, 16–17.

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heaven,” Hatfield replied, “Have I? Have I? me cannot tell, I can do nothing of myself; it was not me, it was the Spirit of God in me; I am nothing but a poor Earth-worme, and me hath nothing in me but what my God giveth me, for me is nothing but dust and ashes.”24 Moreover, Fisher claims “there was a Divine hand that guided her tongue, and that God was with her mouth, adapting her speeches to their necessities.”25 While Hatfield’s claim to be merely a vessel for the word of God is notable enough in itself, Hatfield’s surrendering of responsibility, that she did not even know her own mind, and her incapacitation—both bodily and mental—is worth considering, particularly in light of pressure placed upon female prophets like Anna Trapnel, Sarah Wright, and Elinor Channel (whom I discuss below). Fisher’s account both insulates Hatfield from scrutiny—the words were not hers—and removes all agency from her except for the virtuousness she innately possessed. Moreover, her status as a child removed some of the “crisis” created by Puritan female prophets, making it “easier and even unproblematic” to showcase Hatfield’s “innocence” and “special insight into reality” that Hatfield possesses as a child.26 As a child of eleven, Hatfield borders precariously on early modern adulthood; indeed her frailty and health serve as key factors in her continuing to be considered a child.27 Of particular interest to this study is Fisher’s use of Hatfield’s selective mutism. Hatfield cannot hear or speak in her state, but when in her ecstasies, she speaks the word of God. This mutism allows for a splitting of Hatfield’s two roles: one as a dutiful subject of God and one as a vessel for God’s word. It enables her silent obedience while permitting her speech, albeit while removing the agent of that speech from the speaker herself. As Smith puts it, “the spectacle presented to the Hatfields was one of extremes: a child who gave forth what appeared to be prophetic speech and who threw up anything she ingested from this world.”28 Fisher depicts Hatfield as a frail child, barely alive, her family attempting to help her by dripping liquid through a crack in a broken tooth. The contradiction between Hatfield’s fragility and her role as an 24 Ibid., 148. 25 Ibid., 134. 26 Smith, “A Child Prophet,” 84–85. 27 Ibid., 85. 28 Ibid., 83.

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instrument of God showcases the value of her betweenness—between life and death—that enables her special status as vessel for God’s word. Silence, as Luckyj writes, “leaves women, perhaps more than men, open to manipulation.”29 Hatfield’s silence, and indeed her voice when presented in her ecstasies, serves as the occasion for Fisher to manipulate her entire story, from his narrative accounts of her illness and recovery, to his paratextual accounts of her speeches themselves. A Wise Virgin presents a mute girl’s story appropriated twice by male “authors”—Fisher and, through Fisher’s account, God himself.

III The account of Elinor Channel’s selective mutism, A Message from God, by a Dumb Woman To His Highness the Lord Protector, stages paradoxical layers of vulnerability and agency, abuse and vindication. During the Interregnum, Englishwoman Elinor Channel, “as she was in bed a slumber, had a Blow given her upon her heart,” which removed all the “corruption” from her.30 Then she heard an “audible voice” telling her to come to London and deliver a message to Oliver Cromwell, himself.31 Her husband, however, refused to allow her to travel to London from Surrey. Upon his third refusal, Channel becomes sleepless and selectively speechless,32 and her husband relented and sent her to London. As a mute woman in London, however, Channel did not fare well, and she was berated, committed to Bridewell, and ignored until she met Arise Evans, the publisher/intercessor of Channel’s message. Evans includes a

29 Luckyj, Moving Rhetoricke, 66. 30 Elinor Channel, A message from God, by a dumb woman to his Highness the Lord

Protector. together with a word of advice to the Commons of England and Wales, for the electing of a Parliament. By Elinor Channel. Published according to her desire, by Arise Evans (1653), 1. 31 Channel, A message, 2. 32 “And your Petitioner being three times hindered by her Husband, who is a very

poor man, and hath many small children, three of them very young ones, her mind was sore troubled that her sleep went from here; and at sometimes she was speechless” (2).

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lengthy account of the circumstances which led to the printing of Channel’s message as well as a disturbing account of what happened to her following her interactions with him.33 Channel’s condition, potentially diagnosable as selective mutism34 in the modern world, leaves her in a very vulnerable position. Unable to speak for herself during the times when she is affected by her condition, Evans says that when she is Dumb, all her senses are taken up, and then the matter which troubles her mind, is dictated and made plain to her by the Spirit of God; so that when she comes to her self, she has it by heart. And though it be but short, yet you shall find more truth and substance in it, than in all Hana Trampenels songs or sayings, whome some account as the Diana of the English, Acts. 19.34. as may appear by this written for her.35

Evans, in service of comparing Channel to other female prophets such as Anna Trapnel, describes Channel as a voice only, a literal channel for the word of God.36 Moreover, this condition that incapacitates Channel, who is typically “very sensible and profound”, renders her possibly subject to a series of abuses. Evans discusses hearing of a woman he believes to be Channel being “dragged to Bridewel” and then being “turned out again among the wanton mad crew, who flocked about her and abused her.”37 The mistreatment of this woman—potentially Channel—about which Evans writes, speaks to the precarity of early modern female agency as it 33 Bridewell Prison and Hospital served as a prison and a poor house during the early

modern period.

34 The Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary defines mutism as the following: “inability or refusal to speak. Innate speechlessness most commonly occurs in those who have been totally deaf since birth (deaf-mutism). Inability to speak may result from brain damage (see aphasia). It may also be caused by depression, psychosis, or psychological trauma, in which case the patient either does not speak at all or speaks only to particular persons or in particular situations. This latter condition is called selective mutism.” From Elizabeth Martin, “mutism,” in Concise Medical Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/ 9780199687817.001.0001/acref-9780199687817-e-6479. 35 Channel, A message, 7. 36 Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing

and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), makes this excellent point about Channel’s name itself being a conduit (73). 37 Channel, A message, 7.

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relates to voice and silence. Unable to use her voice, Channel ends up institutionalized, abused, and generally subject to a system that disempowers those who cannot speak for themselves. With the exception of Evans, who “took all the report from her mouth, as you have it above, and then sent her away, promising to get it Printed,”38 no one believed Channel, and even Evans, serving as a scribe for this woman—because she was illiterate, perhaps—sends her away once he has taken from her the thing that she values most, leaving her voiceless and at the mercy of London. Hilary Hinds has written eloquently about Channel’s account in terms of its significance as it relates to silence and female subjectivity. She suggests that there are two kinds of silence in Channel’s account: the silence of Channel’s own voice as author—Channel is merely a mouthpiece for the word of God—and the literal silence of Channel, her speechlessness.39 These layered and varied silences at once empower Channel and take away any autonomy she has, ultimately causing her imprisonment. Thinking about Channel’s silence as a form of selective mutism, however, adds another dimension to the consideration of Channel’s subjectivity. The “blow” which renders Channel free of corruption and unable to think any evil does not render her without the ability to speak; she is not speechless until her husband refuses to allow her to come to London. Selective mutism is different from innate speechlessness, which means that someone has never spoken. With selective mutism, the inability to speak may be caused by a number of factors, including trauma, and the condition may be situational.40 Thinking of Channel in these terms allows for us to understand how a speechless female body moving through urban early modern spaces may be made legible. How does one “read” selective speechlessness in early modern England? Channel’s initial mutism manifests when her husband refuses to allow her to go to London, and therefore her silence can be read as a kind of resistance. But the muteness continues after her husband permits her to travel to London, where she cannot find anyone who will take her message “from her mouth.”41 Evans omits how Channel managed 38 Ibid., 6. 39 Hinds, God’s Englishwomen, 73. 40 Martin, “Mutism.” 41 Channel, A message, 2.

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to communicate all of this, which makes it difficult to assess how much her speechlessness impacted her ability to gain an audience with the Lord Protector. How did Channel communicate? Evans suggests that if she had merely five pounds with which to bribe the officials, she would have been seen, but this suggestion that a wayward selectively mute prophetess from Surrey may easily win entrance with Cromwell raises some speculation. What raises less speculation is the account of what may have happened to Channel after her meeting with Evans. Evans’s account of Channel’s journey to London offers a tale of compassion and indifference, of opportunistic aid and abuse. Evans hears her tale and prints it, but then sends her away. Without the means by which to communicate, without money to journey back to her home, Channel’s fate becomes the fate of the poor and disabled in early modern London. She is imprisoned, abused, and ignored. Both Channel and Hatfield’s accounts of mutism render their speech as something other than their own. Their words belong to God. Female speech on its own, even the most virtuous, only gains credibility by losing attribution. During their stints as vessels for the word of God, Channel and Hatfield receive tacit permission to speak to the establishment—even to address Oliver Cromwell himself. While not inhabiting this position, however, Channel is categorized as corrupt and evil, and Hatfield as having no knowledge of anything outside of her childhood innocence and belief in God. While they speak the word of God, their speech is prioritized, but the attribution of muteness to these women, more than simply praising silence, implies that this may be a preferred state of being for female subjects. Speak, but only when God and the men who deem themselves worthy of recording His word, allow. One of the complex intersections in the accounts of Martha Hatfield and Elinor Channel arises from the issue of performance and transmittal. In taking away the voices of these women, and attributing them instead to the voice of God, James Fisher and Arise Evans turn the occasion of Hatfield and Channel speaking into an account of a performance. They perform—as the selectively mute vessels of God—and that performance embodies virtuosity, femininity, and piety. The framing mechanism, in this instance the text, contains what could be a subversive performance more akin to that of Anna Trapnel. One of the methods of containment, however, is how the authors interpret the mutism that precedes the delivery of God’s word. In order for Hatfield and Channel to be able to speak, God has to permit them to do so, which makes real the edicts

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in treatises like Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties , whereby women’s voices fall under the strict purview of a male authority (in this case a divine male authority). The narrative use of muteness and speech in these works makes visible the kind of rhetorical and metaphorical work that is done at the intersection of female muteness and female silence when it comes to understanding the nuances of gender performativity in the early modern period.

IV In The Dumbe Divine Speaker (1605) a treatise “in praise of silence,” the author writes about the dangers of women “of a quick and ready tongue” when it comes to matters of pride, voluptuousness, and other delights, who are “dumb, drowsie and negligent” in church. Their only interests include the “praising of idle fashions, devises of delicates for the bellie, or where to meete at some wanton exercise.”42 The history of jests in the early modern period also embeds critiques of stereotyped loquacity in women, and, as we see below in Epicoene, offers women’s silence— idealized in the representation of a dumb woman—as an unattainable yet desirable standard. A well circulated joke—as it appears in AC Mery Talys (1526), “Pasquil’s Jests” (1635), and in translations of Rabelais’s tales of Pantagruel (1693)—goes something like this43 : The husband of a dumb women wants to cure his wife of this “impediment of nature.”44 A stranger (or a doctor, or a magician) offers a cure and the husband accepts it. The cure works, but too well. Now the wife spoke too much, so much that the husband now seeks a cure for the cure. The source material deviates a bit in the end of the jest: Rabelais’s doctor offers to make the husband deaf, while A.C. and Pasquil’s stranger tells 42 Giacomo Affinati, The Dumbe Divine Speaker, or: Dumbe Speaker of Divinity, trans. Anthony Munday (London: Printed [by R. Bradock] for William Leake, 1605), 128. 43 Thomas Urwhart, The Third Book of the Works of Mr. Francis Rabelais, Doctor in Physick Containing the Heroic Deeds of Pantagruel the Son of Gargantua (London: Printed for Richard Baldwin, 1693), 287–288; “A. C. Mery Talys” (London: by J. Rastell at Southwark for P. Treveris, 1526); and “Pasquil’s Jests: With the Merriments of Mother Bunch” (1635), reprinted in Ian Munro (ed.), “A Womans Answer Is Neuer to Seke:” Early Modern Jestbooks, 1526–1635, The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Series III: 8 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), fols 17v–18r, sig. A4v. 44 AC Mery Talys (1526): fols 17v.

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the husband that all the devils in hell cannot figure out a way to make a woman stop speaking. Regardless, the message is clear: do not desire to have a wife speak more. You will regret it. As Anu Korhonen writes, the “jest was well known” in the seventeenth century, appearing in multiple versions and letters, and it highlights how representations of female muteness and female silence are in service of critiquing all women.45 Korhonen writes that “muteness was a way to criticize all women, not disabled women in particular—in fact, the masculine irony of jestbooks suggested that the disabling of women corresponded to the enabling of men.”46 She continues to suggest that women “were also considered the group most in need of mocking” with the idea that ridicule would have a corrective effect.47 And while the jest overtly suggests that the mute wife of the beginning of the tale epitomizes the ideal spouse all husbands should desire, one of the things that makes this jest so compelling are the contradictory notes inherent in it. The impetus for “curing” the wife comes from the husband, who of course becomes the fool of the joke, for who would want a wife that speaks? But inherent in his wish is the problematical notion we saw first with Gouge at the beginning of this essay: how much speech is too much, and how much not enough? Both Gouge and the jesters want the performance of a contained voice, which is idealized, paradoxically, in both the jest and in the accounts of Channel and Hatfield, as an approximate form of male- controlled selective mutism. Ben Jonson’s play Epicoene is both an obvious and curious choice to discuss female silence. It’s obvious, because its subtitle is “the silent woman.” It’s curious because, for all of its exhortations to silence, there is not a single silent character in the play. Even the servant, paradoxically called Mute, speaks, and speaks often. The main character, Morose, “loves no noise,” and goes to lengths to avoid noise in his life: he stays away from the city, lives on a quiet street, and has Mute answer him in a series of gestures and signs when possible. Other characters in the play revel in playing pranks on Morose, exposing him to as much noise as possible, which he blames on his nephew, Dauphine. Morose intends to marry and

45 Anu Korhonen, “Disability Humour in English Jestbooks of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Cultural History 3.1 (2014): 52. 46 Ibid., 38. 47 Ibid.

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procreate in order to disinherit Dauphine, and has enlisted a charlatan barber to help him find “a dumb woman, be she of any form or any quality, so she be able to bear children; her silence is dowry enough.”48 Dumbness becomes the standard par excellence for Morose. Women’s perceived value—through her estate, her virtue, her beauty—cannot be measured in comparison to the worth her silence brings. Having no luck finding a dumb woman, Morose sets his sights on a “woman who is exceedingly soft-spoken, thrifty of her speech, that spends but six words a day.”49 The slippage between dumbness and soft-spokenness as attractive qualities in a woman imbricates the rhetoric of female silence and female muteness. Morose’s barber—already in cahoots with Dauphine—fails to find a dumb woman so a silent one will do. Both possess the desired quality of silence. When he can only find a silent woman, Morose’s demands for Epicoene change: there are moments in Epicoene where Morose insists that Epicoene speak. “What say you, Lady? Speak out, I beseech you.”50 Morose quizzes Epicoene on the finer points of female submission, testing her to see whether or not she will bend to his wishes. Her curtsies are not enough here; he demands answers. One of the curious things about this moment is that, while Morose develops a system of signs to communicate with Mute and Cutbeard the barber (they “make a leg”) he asks for more from Epicoene; he demands her speech, as if to assure himself that her silence is voluntary, much like Gouge’s edicts in Of Domesticall Duties . Morose learns quickly that her silence was, indeed, voluntary and short-lasting. Once married, Epicoene starts talking. And she does not stop. She advocates for herself and instills her reign over the house, insisting that “I’ll have none of this coacted, unnatural dumbness in my house, in a family where I govern.”51 Calling it forced and unnatural, Epicoene charges against decrees of female silence espoused in the conduct literature of the time. But Epicoene is also drawing attention to female silence as a type of “disability drag,” wherein women acting

48 Epicoene, in Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques, ed. Robert M. Adams (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1979), 104. 49 Ibid., 105. 50 Ibid., 120. 51 Ibid., 131.

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mute are engaging in a type of masquerade that performs disability.52 Siebers discusses disability drag—which he defines as “variety of the masquerade” of disability—as calling attention to the able-bodied actor’s performance instead of the actual lived experience of disabled individuals, and furthermore, speaks to the idea that “the performances represent their able-bodiedness as much as their pretense of disability” (116).53 In Epicoene, then, female silence as a type of disability drag actively diminishes the actual lived experiences of mute individuals in the early modern period like Elinor Channel and Martha Hatfield. The performance of dumbness is not the same as the day to day lives of women who are physically unable to speak. However, the intersection of female silence and mutism also speaks to the curtailed speech of able-bodied women through systemic misogyny and a system of violence and abuse that fosters an environment where female silence is encouraged and enforced. But Jonson is not, of course, critiquing the abuse of women through forced silence; he is mocking women for talking too much. The play mocks the pseudointellectual Collegiate Ladies whose feigned learnedness and ridiculous manners make female silence an appealing option. And the play does render them silent: when Epicoene is revealed to be engaging in another form of drag altogether, both she and the Collegiate ladies have no words; Truewit says, “Madams, you are mute upon this new metamorphosis!”54 But like the jest of the dumb wife, there are contradictory moments in Epicoene that demonstrate that the idealized notion of contained female silence does not exist and, moreover, the use of muteness as a means to express this idealized silent women is also problematical. As the jest of the dumb wife and the evolution of Morose’s desire for a mute wife to that of a wife who only speaks when bid by her husband suggest, muteness as an ideal characteristic of female behavior 52 Lauren Coker’s article on Ben Jonson’s Volpone discusses the use of disability drag by the titular character, who pretends to have a number of illnesses in order to grift money. While Coker forces on corporality and bodily deceit in her article, I am looking at disability drag in terms of performances of voice and silence. “‘There is no Suffering Due’: Metatheatricality and Disability Drag in Volpone,” in Hobgood and Wood, 123– 135. Coker is using disability drag as it is employed by Tobin Siebers in Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 114–116. Siebers defines disability drag as a “final variety of the masquerade” which “represses disability and affirms the ideology of ability” (114). 53 Siebers, Disability Theory, 114. 54 Epicoene, 175.

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only “works” when the condition is controlled by a male companion— a narrator, an interlocutor, a husband, a father. Otherwise, the silence of a mute woman can be subversive, obstinate, and insubordinate. But, as Epicoene, Elinor Channel’s account, and the jest of the dumb wife suggest, this kind of control is a fantasy; women’s voices will out, even when they are portrayed as mute. Indeed, even in the case of mute women this can be seen to be true. In France in the eighteenthcentury, the Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Épée was inspired to create a sign-language system “after witnessing two deaf sisters in Paris communicate by using their hands.”55 While this can be seen as a benevolent gesture to aid the women in communicating with the outside world, the Abbé’s intervention also suggests something deeply troubling about the secret languages of women. The performance of silence then, can also be a source of anxiety. The key—for Gouge, Morose, Fisher, Evans, and even the husband of the jest—is control or; in the case of Morose and the husband, the lack of control. The performance of silence, just like the performance of speech, plays as subversive or submissive depending on who is in control of the power to communicate. The performance of silence as a kind of disability drag in Epicoene is unveiled for what it is in a manner similar to the unveiling of Epicoene’s gender drag performance: for Jonson, an unattainable ideal. The untenable idealized version of the silent women, when viewed alongside accounts of mute and dumb women, offers yet another way of thinking through issues of dominance and control when it comes to women’s subjectivity in the early modern period. For Hatfield and Channel, they get the opportunity to express themselves, but only as vessels for the word of God, and only through male interlocutors. For Epicoene, the veil of marriage enables the opportunity for her to speak, and ultimately, the unveiling of her gender performance legitimates that speech in a manner similar to the male interlocutors. When discussed together, these three accounts, along with the jest, highlight the relationship between muteness and silence for women in the early modern period. Both can be used as ways to oppress women, by limiting women’s ability to interact and assert their agency. As we have seen, however, women’s power to communicate will out, and Morose’s idealized world without women’s noise is yet another unattainable ideal. 55 See Patrick McDonagh, “The Mute’s Voice: The Dramatic Transformations of the Mute and Deaf-Mute in Early-Nineteenth-Century France,” Criticism, 55.4 (2013): 663.

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Bibliography “A. C. Mery Talys.” London: by J. Rastell at Southwark for P. Treveris, 1526. Affinati, Giacomo. The Dumbe Divine Speaker, Or: Dumbe Speaker of Divinity. Translated by Anthony Munday. London: Printed [by R. Bradock] for William Leake, 1605. Baynton, Douglas. “‘A Silent Exile on This Earth’: The Metaphorical Construction of Deafness in the Nineteenth Century.” In The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd ed. Edited by Lennard Davis, 33–48. New York: Routledge, 2006. Bearden, Elizabeth. “Before Normal, There Was Natural: John Bulwer, Disability, and Natural Signing in Early Modern England and Beyond.” PMLA 132.1 (2017): 33–51. Brathwait, Richard. The English Gentlewoman, Drawne Out to the Full Body. London: Printed by B. Alsop and T. Fauucet, for Michaell Sparke, 1631. Brayman Hackel, Heidi. Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Bulwer, John. Chirologia: Or the Naturall Language of the Hand. London, 1644. Callaghan, Dympna. Women and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy: A Study of King Lear, Othello, The Duchess of Malfi, and The White Devil. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1989. Channel, Elinor. A Message from God, by a Dumb Woman to His Highness the Lord Protector. Together with a Word of Advice to the Commons of England and Wales, for the Electing of a Parliament, Published according to Her Desire, by Arise Evans. 1653. Cleaver, Robert. A Godly Form of Householde Gouernment: For the Ordering of Private Families. London By Thomas Creede, for Thomas Man, dwelling in Pater-Noster Rowe, at the signe of the Talbot, 1598. Cockayne, Emily. “Experiences of the Deaf in Early Modern England.” The Historical Journal 46.3 (2003): 493–510. Coker, Lauren. “‘There Is No Suffering Due’: Metatheatricality and Disability Drag in Volpone.” In Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, edited by Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, 123–135. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella. “Discoursal Aspects of the Legends of Holy Women by Osbern Bokenham.” In Topics in English Linguistics: Methods in Historical Pragmatics: Methods in Historical Pragmatics, edited by Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen, 285–305. Berlin/Boston, DE: De Gruyter Mouton, 2007. Deutsch, Helen, and Felicity Nussbaum, eds. Defects: Engendering the Modern Body. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Fisher, James. The Wise Virgin. London, 1653. Gouge, William, 1578–1653. Of Domesticall Duties Eight Treatises. I. an Exposition of That Part of Scripture Out of Which Domesticall

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Duties are Raised. … VIII. Duties of Masters by William Gouge. London, Printed by Iohn Haviland for William Bladen, and are to be sold at the signe of the Bible neere the great north doore of Pauls, 1622. http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquestcom.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/docview/2248559962?accountid=14244. Groce, Nora Ellen. Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Hinds, Hilary. God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Hobgood, Allison P., and David Houston Wood, eds. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Hull, Suzanne W. Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475– 1640. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982. Jackson, Peter. Britain’s Deaf Heritage. Edinburgh: The Pentland Press, Limited, 1990. Jones, Ann Rosalind. The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540– 1620. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Jonson, Ben. Epicoene. In Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques. Edited by Robert M. Adams, 98–175. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1979. Korhonen, Anu. “Disability Humour in English Jestbooks of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Cultural History 3.1 (2014): 27–53. Lang, Harry. Silence of the Spheres: The Deaf Experience in the History of Science. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994. Lilly, William, 1602–1681. A Prophecy of the White King: And Dreadfull Dead-Man Explaned. to which is Added the Prophecie of Sibylla Tibvrtina and Prediction of Iohn Kepler: All of Especiall Concernment for these Times. by William Lilly Student in Astrology. Ob Peccata Mutat Sceptra Deus, Variata Reges. Published According to Order. London, Printed by G. M. and are to be sold by John Sherley and Thomas Vnderhill, at the Golden Pellican in little Brittaine, and Bible in Woodstreet, 1644. http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquestcom.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/docview/2240949350?accountid=14244. Luckyj, Christina. “A Moving Rhetoricke”: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Martin, Elizabeth. Concise Medical Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/ 9780199687817.001.0001/acref-9780199687817-e-6479. McDonagh, Patrick. “The Mute’s Voice: The Dramatic Transformations of the Mute and Deaf-Mute in Early-Nineteenth-Century France.” Criticism 55.4 (2013): 655–675.

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Munro, Ian, ed. “A Womans Answer Is Neuer to Seke:” Early Modern Jestbooks, 1526–1635, The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Series III: 8. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Murphy, Jessica. Virtuous Necessity: Conduct Literature and the Making of the Virtuous Woman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Newton, Hannah. The Sick Child in Early Modern England 1580–1720. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pound, John F., ed. The Norwich Census of the Poor 1570. Norfolk Record Society, 40, Norwich, 1971. Royal Society Meeting Minutes. GB 117. Royal Society. Wellcome Library MS. JBO/1/78. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Smith, Nigel. “A Child Prophet: Martha Hatfield.” In Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie. Edited by Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs; with a foreword by Iona Opie, 79–93. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Urwhart, Thomas. The Third Book of the Works of Mr. Francis Rabelais, Doctor in Physick Containing the Heroic Deeds of Pantagruel the Son of Gargantua. London: Printed for Richard Baldwin, 1693. Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Wheatley, Edward. Stumbling Blocks before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.

CHAPTER 6

Contented Cuckolds: Infertility and Queer Reproductive Practice in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Machiavelli’s Mandragola Simone Chess

Abstract This chapter is interested in disability and queerness as they are represented in early modern dramatic texts, especially in the plays A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (Thomas Middleton, c.1613, published 1630) and Mandragola (Niccolò Machiavelli, c.1518, published 1524). Each of these plays features a married couple dealing with infertility, and a “cure” that involves the wife sleeping with a man with proven fertility, with the husband’s implicit or explicit consent. Though infertility has been at the margins of contemporary disability studies, and most mainstream contemporary discussions of infertility avoid discourses of disability, there is a long relationship between disability rights and theory and movements for reproductive rights and justice. These plays demonstrate that early modern authors saw a connection between infertility and disability by explicitly medicalizing infertile bodies and barren couples in ways that mark them as disabled. But early modern representations of infertility also

S. Chess (B) Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_6

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do queer work: they go beyond the cuckold/bastard narrative and undermine normative heterosexual monogamy, offering models of consensual polyamory, generative extra-marital desire, nonreproductive heterosexual sex, and non-genetic kinship and inheritance systems. Presented superficially as a problem, infertile/disabled bodies actually open up new textual possibilities for queering marriage, sex, reproductive practice, and family structures. The late-seventeenth-century ballad “The Contented Cuckold: OR, The Fortunate Fumbler” describes a marriage complicated by impotence and infertility and a nonnormative reproductive arrangement that enables the couple to secure their marriage, inheritance, and family futurity.1 The ballad troubles the concept of cuckoldry by presenting a situation in which the husband plans on, consents to, and benefits from his wife’s intentional pregnancy by another man, with the other man serving more as a sperm donor than a lover or parent. In describing how “contented” the husband is in his decision and its outcome, the ballad models types of kinship and family formation that, within the parameters of heterosexual marriage, nevertheless queer and transform that system. A similar scenario plays out in Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (c.1613, published 1630) and Niccolò Machiavelli’s Mandragola (c.1518, published 1524 in Italian, also called The Mandrake), both representative plays from the surprisingly queer genre of “infertility comedy.”2 Like “The Contented Cuckold,” each play features a married couple dealing with infertility, and a “cure” that involves the wife sleeping with a man perceived to be more fertile, with the husband’s implicit or explicit consent.3 1 Houghton Library—Huth EBB65H 1.33; available through the English Broadside Ballad Archive at https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/35095/image. 2 There are several other plays that stage infertility and explore extramarital sex as a “cure.” Another notable example is John Webster and William Rowley’s A Cure for a Cuckold (c.1620, published 1661), which includes this theme but complicates it with a paternal custody battle. 3 In most infertility plays, the issue of the husband’s consent is generally more implicit than explicit; it is certainly not as direct as the ballad husband’s. Still, especially given leeway for staging and performance, both Chaste Maid and Mandragola offer the possibility of the husbands’ consent or willful ignorance to the process of insemination through sex with another man. For an argument that Middleton drew upon Machiavelli’s play, or a version of it, for the “fertility potion” portions of Chaste Maid, see Robert I. Williams, “Machiavelli’s Mandragola, Touchwood Senior, and the Comedy of Middleton’s A Chaste

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Though it is impossible to accurately diagnose fictional characters, I intentionally call the struggles that the married couples in the ballad and plays face infertility, with all its clinical and medical implications, because each play demonstrates a connection between infertility and disability by explicitly medicalizing barren couples in ways that mark them and their bodies as disabled.4 As I will discuss, even in contemporary disability discourses, infertility and other reproductive and sexual disorders occupy a liminal space, sometimes included and sometimes excluded from definitions and understandings of what “counts” as disability. By devoting attention to medical causes and cures for infertility, then, these texts offer a validating historical precedent that makes a case for disability-informed approaches to reproductive disorders. Simultaneously, by experimenting with both medical and social “cures” for infertility, early modern texts demonstrate that reproductive disability need not be treated as necessarily negative or restrictive. In fact, infertility and disability in these plays are presented as preliminary impairments that productively open up possibilities for queering marriage, sex, reproductive practice, and family structures. In these texts, early modern representations of infertility do queer work: they go beyond the cuckold/bastard narrative and undermine normative heterosexual monogamy, offering models of consensual polyamory, generative extra-marital desire, nonreproductive heterosexual sex, and non-genetic kinship and inheritance systems. Further, they do disability justice work, reacting to bodily limitations not by “fixing” the infertile body but by adapting social and cultural conventions to accommodate characters’ desires and goals despite and through the Maid in Cheapside,” in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 10.2 (Spring, 1970): 385–396. 4 The three cases discussed in this essay all depict forms of male infertility (even though the wives take a good deal of the blame); generally, female infertility has held a greater focus in both modern and early modern scholarship. For discussions of (in)fertility in the early modern period more broadly, see Daphna Oren-Magidor, Infertility in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Jennifer Evans, Aphrodisiacs, Fertility, and Medicine in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014); Gayle Davis and Tracey Loughran, eds., A Handbook of Infertility in History: Approaches, Contexts and Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Sarah Toulalan, “‘To[o] Much Eating Stifles the Child’: Fat Bodies and Reproduction in Early Modern England,” Hist Res 87.235 (2014): 65–93; Daphna Oren-Magidor and Catherine Rider, eds., “Infertility in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine,” Special issue of Social History of Medicine 29.2 (May 2016): 211–223.

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circumstances of infertility. In all three of the cases I discuss here, queer and crip cures work better than medical ones, modeling a social solution for a medical problem and a queer compromise for a straight predicament. “The Contented Cuckold,” A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and Mandragola all show infertility to be a disability, a “cripping” condition. But they also all show it to be an enabling force, one that allows for creative and productive results. In each case, infertile/disabled bodies actually open up new textual possibilities for queering marriage, sex, reproductive practice, and family.

The Contented Cuckold The “Contented Cuckold” serves as a kind of ur-text for the infertility cure of the wife sleeping with another man, in part because of the ballad’s frankness about the situation and solution. But while “The Contented Cuckold” has been discussed in terms of the cuckold husband’s male infertility,5 it has never been read as queer, in terms of disabled adaptation, or as a success story. The ballad describes a “young spark” who wins the affection of a “beautiful damsel” and, in marrying her, also secures a dowry of five hundred pounds. Importantly, the early stanzas of the ballad establish that the couple share mutual attraction: There was a Beautiful Damsel of late, Whom many young men did admire, One above all of a worthy Estate came to her, and love did require: Soon he obtain’d this amorous Maid and all things was decently carried.

In describing the damsel’s beauty and desirability and the young man’s worthy estate, the ballad shows them to be well paired, both desirable and exceptional. In his pursuit of her hand and her role in granting it, the ballad shows that they each make an active choice in selecting each

5 The ballad is discussed by Jennifer Evans in her essay on male fertility diagnoses and treatments, “‘They Are Called Imperfect Men’: Male Infertility and Sexual Health in Early Modern England,” Social History of Medicine 29.2 (May 2016): 311–331. See also Evans, Aphrodisiacs, Fertility, and Medicine in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014).

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other for marriage. At the ballad’s start, they are models of normative, non-disabled, heterosexual marriage culture. In addition to the dowry, the father of the bride further promises an additional five hundred pounds, to be paid at the birth of the couple’s first child. But, seven years later, the couple has no heirs, a situation that is costing them the loss of that money but also the loss of reputation and social standing.6 The ballad voices some of the criticism leveled against the husband by “all his old Cronies” during these years, including the accusation that he cannot fulfil his “family duty.” But it also explores and describes the exact nature of the couple’s nonreproductive sex, which is less a matter of failed effort or interest than of failed completion: True, he would stroak her and make a strange rou[t?] nay, kiss her, and call her his Honey, But something else must be done without doubt, e’re he has the rest of the Mony.

Unable, whether through anatomy or impotence, to perform penetrative intercourse, the husband nevertheless makes a regular habit of stroking, kissing, praising, and making a row/rout with his wife. When the wife sighs, “I here am debar’d of all pleasure,” her lack of pleasure can most obviously be read as a lack of sexual satisfaction, but it is also at least partially linked to the fact that, without penetration and conception, without the “something else” that must be done, she is prevented from getting the second half of her inheritance. While the ballad’s married couple do not seek a medical opinion to diagnose or treat their fertility problem, the ballad’s detailed attention to the mechanics of their sexual problem and the husband’s own clinical discussion of his inabilities both do the work of medicalizing the couples’ problematic coupling: the ballad does not normalize the lack of conception, and it treats the lack of an heir as a serious, chronic, situation: “There was no hopes [sic] of an Heir being born.” To the question of the wife’s satisfaction, as the husband understands it, the stroking and kissing might be enough, if it weren’t for the problem of secondary infertility that they cause. He tells her: 6 Seven years seems to be a significant period of time, marking a period of time after which a couple’s childlessness comes to be seen as official infertility as opposed to simply delayed reproduction. The same period of time is mentioned by Sir Oliver Kix in Chaste Maid, below, and the number occurs in other texts as well.

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For as I am a right-honest Man, you know I was never unwilling, But yet I can do no more than I can, you ne’r wanted Kissing and Billing.7

Here, the ballad differentiates between the husband’s desire, his will, and his capacity. He frames his impotence as insurmountable—“I can do no more than I can”—but also frames it in terms of the adaptations he has made when it comes to sex and pleasure; he can’t make her pregnant, but she’s “ne’r wanted Kissing and Billing.” By emphasizing what he can do to give his wife pleasure, the husband reframes his disability and suggests adaptive modifications: he can’t offer penetration, but he can offer “billing,” a vaguely applied sexual term that can mean everything from caressing to kissing to “love-making.” Gordon Williams even offers a reading of a use of the term in Massinger’s Guardian “where the sense is rather striking with the phallic bill.”8 Thus, even after he acknowledges his sexual disability, and just before he suggests a solution, the husband’s speech serves as a reminder that the couple has had, and can continue to have creative, loving, and pleasurable marital sexual contact, so long as they can solve the “something else” that is debarring their pleasure. This section of the ballad reframes the wife’s earlier displeasure as a situational problem rather than a sexual one, unexpectedly deprioritizing penetrative sex except insofar as it restricts reproduction. Thus, even before the ballad introduces the queer cure of gamete donation through nonmonogamy, it also centers queer sex practices in the context of disability before the cure, by exploring the limits of—and pleasures within—nonreproductive and nonpenetative marital sex. Just as the husband centers the successful aspects of their sexual practice even as he admits his shortcomings, he similarly emphasizes the security of their marriage in his proposal that his wife have sex with their neighbor, Robin the Miller, to conceive a child. The husband tells his wife:

7 The OED defines “billing” as “The caressing of doves; kissing; love-making.” “Billing, n.2”. OED Online. June 2017. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/19020?rskey=RhYNhb&result=2&isAdvanced=false, accessed September 14, 2017. 8 “Bill, vb.2.” Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature: Volume I (London: Athlone Press, 1994).

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There is a lusty lad lives at this Mill, who I have fancy to hire, Being a man of much Practise and Skill, I’m sure he will grant your desire: then will thy joys and blessings abound, When as he has made thee a Mother; before I will loose the Five Hundred Pound, I’le give the one half for the other.

The ballad plays here with the idea of the wife’s desire, just as it did with her sexual pleasure above. The line break and colon serve as a kind of joke on reader/audience expectations here. Where it first seems that the impotent husband is telling his wife that sex with Robin will grant her desire, after the caesura of the colon and in the new line we learn that her desire is not the act of sex but its outcome, the joy and blessing of becoming a mother. Further, the wife’s desire is complementary, not opposed, to her husband’s in this act, since it gives him a mechanism to access the money that has been withheld from him for seven years, and to get an heir.9 As the ballad concludes, the husband assures his wife that, because Robin is “a right honest man” who will “be sworn our counsel to keep,” the method of their conception will be kept private. For this reason, the husband declares, “Then what he Sows I do reckon to Reap.” The ballad ends with the husband’s assertion of kinship and paternity with his not-yet-conceived child. Though they will not be genetically related, the husband is confident that “There’s no Creature alive need to know/ but that I am still the right father.” Rather than being humiliated by his impotence, which prevents him from meeting cultural expectations of gender and family roles, the husband, together with his wife, reinvents the rules of heterosexual monogamy to build the family that he wants. Though seeking out Robin the Miller requires an admission of his disabling condition, it does not require him to give up his place as a husband or father. By expanding the kinship rules of what it means to be a father and husband, the ballad’s protagonist finds a queer path to contentment.

9 From a financial perspective, it is worth noting that, while this stanza suggests that the husband would spend the first half of the inheritance, the dowry money, just to earn the second half, only lines later we learn that he actually secures Robin’s services for just ten pounds.

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Infertility, Disability, and Queerness What does it mean in terms of disability when the contented cuckold tells his wife that he “can do no more than [he] can,” or when his sexual practice is described as lacking a “something else” which “must be done without doubt”? Certainly the ballad husband has an impairment that prevents him from doing what he is willing and wanting to do, but there is also evidence that he has found adaptive solutions and that his impairment can be resolved through a creative social (rather than strictly medical) solution. So, is he disabled or not? This unclear status of infertility as a disability is not unique to the ballad, or limited to early modern contexts. In contemporary disability studies, infertility has been at the margins. Similarly, most mainstream contemporary discussions of infertility avoid discourses of disability, a gap that is especially striking in light of the long relationship between disability rights and movements for reproductive rights and justice. For example, in the 2015 Keywords for Disability Studies there is an entry for “Reproduction,” but the entry makes no mention of infertility, focusing rightly but also exclusively on the reproductive questions that have been central to disability studies: either on “children who will be born with disabilities, or on the less commonly discussed area of people with disabilities becoming genetic or rearing parents.”10 When infertility is discussed in the context of disability, it is frequently framed in more legally-oriented discussions of whether infertility diagnosis and treatment should be included under the regulations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or the World Health Organization (WHO).11 10 Adrienne Asche, “Reproduction,” in Keywords for Disability Studies, eds. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 155–157. 11 For a discussion of the debate over infertility coverage and ADA, see Shorge Sato, “A Little Bit Disabled: Infertility and the Americans with Disabilities Act,” Journal of Legislative and Public Policy 5.1 (2001): 189–223, and Kimberly Hovarth, “Does Bragdon v. Abbott Provide the Missing Link for Infertile Couples Seeking Protection under the ADA?”, DePaul Journal of Health Care Law 2 (1999): 819–841; in brief, while this legal issue has gained some limited traction, it seems that, so far, infertility treatments can be limited as a treatment-based exclusion that does not violate ADA, even if it does “impact a major life activity,” one of the standards of the ADA. For the WHO’s statement “Infertility is a Global Public Health Issue,” see http://www.who.int/reproduct ivehealth/topics/infertility/perspective/en/. WHO defines infertility as “a disease of the reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a clinical pregnancy after 12 months

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Arguments in favor of including infertility in legal definitions of disability are generally focused on access to legal and financial protections that would come from that definition: insurance coverage for (in)fertility treatments and workplace anti-discrimination protection for employees who need to miss work for (in)fertility treatments or protocols. This pragmatic alignment has been critiqued as an appropriation of the rhetoric of the disability rights movement that comes without a real connection with disability experience or community.12 Other critiques of framing infertility as a reproductive disability point out ways that infertility can be situational or even elective; it is only a disability when the person with infertility is someone who wants to have children. As recently as 2010, Griel et. al. summarize the state of social science literature about infertility by describing it as “a socially constructed process whereby individuals come to define their inability to have children as a problem, to define the nature of that problem, and to construct an appropriate course of action.”13 This idea is taken to its furthest iteration by scholars like Dion Farquhar, who argues that, “Although contemporary infertility is medicalized, it is unlike illness in that is it the absence of a desired exceptional status. Infertility is a way of constructing the body as failed if and only if the woman or couple express their desire for a child.”14 By these standards, infertility is too situational, too bound by personal desire, to qualify as a disability. And yet, disability studies has always made, and continues to make expansive room for a vast range of subjects, bodies, impairments, and social contexts. In response to Farquhar—and actually considering early modern contexts—Catherine Belling pushes back against the “elective critique” in her claim that “infertility reminds us of the continuum of disabling conditions produced by the pervasive social construction of

or more of regular unprotected sexual intercourse.” In October 2016, it was reported that WHO had updated its statement on infertility to include gay, lesbian, and single individuals; WHO clarified that they had not updated their clinical definition. 12 For example, see Judith Mosoff, “Reproductive Technology and Disability: Searching

for the ‘Rights’ and ‘Wrongs’ in Explanation,” Dalhouse Review 16 (1993): 98–124.

13 Arthur L. Griel, Kathleen Slauson-Blevins, and Julia McQuillan, “The Experience of Infertility: A Review of Recent Literature,” Sociology of Health and Illness 32.1 (January 2010): 2, 140–162. 14 Dion Farquhar, The Other Machine: Discourse and Reproductive Technologies (New York: Routledge, 1999).

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normality as well as the real diversity of responses to medical discourse and ‘medicalization.’”15 This way of understanding infertility within the broad umbrella of disability is in keeping with what Rosemarie GarlandThomson and Martha Stoddard Holmes describe as “The New Disability Studies,” which “explores disability as a historical system of thought and knowledge that represents some bodies as inferior, as in need of being somehow changed, so as to conform to what the cultural imagination considers to be a standard body. In other words, this critical perspective considers ‘disability’ as a framework for thinking about bodies rather than as something that is wrong with bodies.”16 By this formation, understanding and historicizing infertility in the context of disability can help us to more accurately understand the stigma surrounding childlessness or difficulty in conceiving as part of a broader continuum of bodies interpolated by social and cultural consequences. Further, recognizing that “disability” is always a product of culturally specific interpolations of the body is in line with cultural studies and historicist approaches to early modern studies: it matters less whether or not infertile couples in early modern texts are officially disabled than that the texts show that they were seen as, and thought of themselves as, having something wrong, being in need of a cure, and being out of line with social and medical expectations. Thus the repeated iterations of the “Contented Cuckold” narrative shows us that early moderns were worried about infertility, saw it as disabling, and wanted to see solutions—medical, sexual, or otherwise. In a 2012 review of two memoirs about infertility for Disability Studies Quarterly, Crystal Benedicks asks readers to “consider what we can learn—both about infertility and about disability—if we think about infertility as a form of disability.”17 Though the memoirists that Benedicks discusses are not intentionally writing in a disability studies framework,

15 Catherine Belling, “The Purchase of Fruitfulness: Assisted Conception and Reproductive Disability in a Seventeenth-Century Comedy,” Journal of Medical Humanities 26.2/3 (Fall 2005): 79–96, 81. 16 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Martha Stoddard Holmes, “Introduction,” Journal of Medical Humanities 26.2/3 (Fall 2005): 73–77, 73. 17 See Crystal Benedicks, “Review of Potts, Good Eggs: A Memoir & Tsigdinos, Silent Sorority: A (Barren) Woman Gets Busy, Angry, Lost and Found,” Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ) 32.3 (2012). Book review available online only: http://dsq-sds.org/article/ view/3284/3118.

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they nevertheless “grapple with the ways in which their bodies and lives slip slowly and without outward sign from ‘normal’ to ‘abnormal,’ forcing them to recognize normalcy as a construct.” As such, Benedicks argues that the memoirs “partake in some of the central work of disability studies: they break down traditional categories of natural and artificial, normal and abnormal.” Finally, Benedicks suggests that “infertility also poses some interesting questions for disability studies, questions that probe the anxious and shifting boundary between able and disable.” Medieval and early modern disability studies have already demonstrated that this shifting boundary between able and disabled is mediated by time and culture; understanding infertility as part of disability discourse broadens the ways we can read texts and memoirs about the experience of infertility then and now. Further, in cases like the “Contented Cuckold,” Mandragola, and Chaste Maid of Cheapside, the nonmedical “cure” of gamete donation is one that treats the social challenges (the need for an heir) rather than the medical ones (infertility). These cuckold cures, then, are aligned with modern disability activism in seeking to changes the social norm (in these cases, monogamy, biological kinship) to accommodate difference, rather than demanding that the solution be purely medicalized. Thinking about infertility as—at least potentially—a form of disability crips the narrative of early modern infertility texts. More than just impotent, the “Contented Cuckold” husband is navigating an impairment that makes him nonnormative in medical, social, and personal contexts. His solution, if his problem is a type of disability, is an adaptation that circumnavigates his limitation. But his solution is also nonnormative because it challenges the rules of heterosexual monogamy; because he seeks adaptation due to disability, he finds himself in a queer situation.18 The contented cuckold’s queer solution to his reproductive limitations feels familiar in the current medical and social context in which lesbian, gay, queer, trans, and nonbinary couples and individuals often 18 Queer and disability culture, community, theory, and activism have long been imbricated, though not generally on the topic of fertility or reproduction. For some foundational work on queerness and disability, see Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Cambridge: South End Press, 1999); Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006); and McRuer, “Shameful Sites: Locating Queerness and Disability,” in Gay Shame, eds. David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 181–187.

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depend upon technologies and discourses of infertility and/or disability for reproduction. Assisted conception is a situation in which disability and queerness are near neighbors with striking similarities and overlaps. Today, the same technologies which assist heterosexual people with reproductive disabilities are often at the center of queer reproductive experience; so too, the old tools of queer conception like the use of known and unknown gamete donors, surrogates, and open acceptance of nongestational parenthood and nongenetic kinship are now being put to use by infertile heterosexuals. This recognition across identity and experience can also extends across historical periods: as a queer gestational parent myself, I am struck each time I read early modern infertility texts, which resonate not only because of the shared experience of wanting children despite a barrier, but also because they bring up familiar contemporary questions and themes (including similarities like negotiating known donor contracts, donor sibling worries, nongestational parent concerns, false medicalization of nonnormative family structures and family building plans). Thus, while the characters in “The Contented Cuckold,” Mandragola, and The Chaste Maid of Cuckold are all in heterosexual marriages and appear ablebodied, we stand to gain by reading them as both cripped and queer, and by tracing connections between those queer and crip reproductive contexts and our own. More than just sexual farces, contented cuckold narratives are best understood as engaging with reproductive disability and also, because of their use of nonnormative adaptive strategies, also queer.

Representing Infertility as a Disability on the Early Modern Stage Central to my conviction that infertility is represented as a disability in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Mandragola, even more clearly than in “The Contented Cuckold,” is the explicit discussion about infertility as a medicalized problem that happens in both plays. In Chaste Maid, Sir Oliver Kix tells his wife, “Thou know’st we are rich enough,” and she responds, “all but in blessings, / And there the beggar goes beyond us. Oh, oh, oh! / To be seven years a wife and not a child, oh, not a child!”

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(2.2.139–141).19 Sir Oliver’s response to this lamentation is to refer to the medical cures they’ve sought. He says, “I know ’tis great, but what of that, wife? / I cannot do withal: there’s things making / By thine own doctor’s advice at the ‘pothecary’s’ / I spare for nothing, wife; no, if the price / Were forty marks a spoonful, / I’d give a thousand pounds to purchase fruitfulness” (2.2.144–149). Kix and his wife see their infertility as something they can cure with medical help, for a cost.20 Understanding the problem as bodily, they further debate about which of their bodies is responsible: she accuses him of “brevity,” implying that their problems rest in his lack of sexual stamina (2.2.157), and he tells her “Tis thy fault. […] Thine, ’tis thou art barren” (3.3.51–53); she retorts, returning the accusation, “I, barren! Oh life, that I durst but speak now, / In mine own justice, in mine own right! I barren! / ’Twas otherways with me when I was at court; / I was ne’er called so before I was married” (3.3.54–57). Their fights show the stress that infertility has caused in their marriage, and also the medical model of seeking a (targeted) diagnosis for their barrenness. Similarly, in Mandragola, the infertile husband Nicia reports, “I have such a longing to have children that I’m willing to do anything. But you talk about it with these doctors, see where they advise me to go; and meanwhile I’ll be with my wife, and we’ll meet again” (1.2, p. 16).21 Nicia’s desperation to fund a way to have an heir depends, in his opinion, on medical advice from doctors; thus, when the play’s protagonist Callimaco is advised by a trickster, Ligurio, about how to have sex with Nicia’s wife, Ligurio advises him to pose as a medical authority. Ligurio explains, “I want you to do it my way, and that’s to say that you’ve studied medicine and have had some experience in Paris” (1.2, p. 18). Medical authority is thus confirmed as the go-to response for infertility in both

19 This and all quotations from Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments, 2nd ed., ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), 589–636. 20 Arthur Marotti has argued that, in his efforts to write Chaste Maid as a popular comedy, Middleton emphasizes the theme of fertility, which is best addressed through comedy. See “Fertility and Comic Form in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside,” Comparative Drama 3.1 (Spring 1969): 65–74. 21 This and all quotations from Niccolò Machiavelli. Mandragola, trans. Mera J. Flaumenhaft (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1981).

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plays, elevating the couple’s problems with conception from unlucky to clinical. Building on this foundation, both plays introduce “cures” in the form of extra-marital sex. But they present this queer option in medical terms. In Chaste Maid, the Kix’s maid suggests: Throw down your doctor’s drugs, They’re all but heretics; I bring certain remedy That has been taught, and proved, and never failed […] There’s a gentleman, haply have his name too, that had got Nine children by own water that he useth. It never issues; they come so fast upon him, He was fain to give it over. (2.2. 188–196)

Here, she is referring to the character Touchwood Sr., who is so incredibly hyper-fertile that he has to live apart from his wife to prevent accidental impregnation (2.1.8–17); he’s also responsible for countless women’s babies across the play, even causing a labor problem when all of the country wenches are too pregnant to harvest their fields, all in the same season (2.1.53–61). Touchwood is “fertile beyond [his] means” and has a “fatal finger,” and thus his “medicinal water” can be understood as a high-motility sperm donation. The maid concludes, “sir, he’ll undertake, / Using that water, within fifteen years, / For all your wealth, to make you a poor man, / You shall so swarm with children” (2.2.199–201). If the maid in Chaste Maid medicalizes Touchwood’s potent sperm, in Mandragola Callimaco uses his disguise as a doctor and the fact that he can speak Latin as a way of presenting his own sexual “cure.” While Callimaco could say any nonsense in Latin to the foolish husband—that’s the whole point of the joke, that Nicia has no idea that he’s being fooled— instead, Machiavelli has him present actual fertility pseudoscience in his Latin speech. Callimaco lectures, “in order to satisfy your desire, it’s necessary to know the cause of your wife’s sterility, because there could be many causes. Nam causae sterilitatis sunt: aut in semine, aut in matrice, aut in sdtrumentis seminariss, aut in causa extrinseca. (For the causes of sterility are either in the semen, or in the womb, or in the seminal organs, or in the penis, or in an extrinsic cause)” (2.2, p. 21; translation by editor). He also suggests that the husband, rather than the wife, might be impotent, echoing Oliver Kix’s argument with his wife over the causes of their impotence; Nicia laughs that one off, retorting “I don’t

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believe there’s a tougher or more robust man than I am in Florence” (2.6, p. 24). The play further lingers in the medical discourse of infertility by staging a detailed urinalysis, including a long Latin discourse on the inferior quality of women’s urine to men’s.22 The fact that the fake doctor goes to the extent of collecting real urine samples demonstrates how infertility is medicalized, far beyond what would be necessary for the cuckolding punchline of the husband not recognizing the “doctor’s” intentions. Finally, Callimaco makes his pitch: In conclusion, Dottore, either you have faith in me or not, either I have a sure remedy to teach you or not, either I have sure remedy to teach you or not. For myself, I’ll give you the remedy. I’ll give you the remedy. If you have faith in me, you’ll take it, and if, one year from today, if your wife doesn’t have her own son in her arms, I’m willing to give you two thousand ducats. […] You have to understand this, that there’s nothing more certain to make a woman pregnant than to give her a potion made from mandragola to drink. This is something I’ve tested two pairs of times and always found true; if it weren’t for this, the queen of France would be sterile, and countless other princesses of that state. (2.6, pp. 24–25)

In dealing with their infertility, which both couples understand to be a medical problem or disability, and in seeking a cure, each infertile couple considers and rejects the idea of the husband having an extramarital affair and fathering bastard children with a mistress. Nicia complains, “If I’d believed I wasn’t going to have any children, I’d sooner have taken a country girl for my wife […] How much labor I’ve endured to make this stupid woman give me this specimen!” (2.5, p. 24). Similarly, Oliver Kix fantasizes, “I’ll give up the house, and keep some fruitful whore, / Like an old bachelor, in a tradesman’s chamber; / She and her children shall have all” (3.3.62–64). But, crucially, these fantasies are completely rejected by both husbands. Kix succinctly praises the value in finding a way “To get and multiply within your own house, / At your own proper costs in spite 22 Nam mulieris Urinae sunt semper maioris grossetiei et minoris pulchritudinis quam

virorum. Huius autem, in caetera, causa est amplitude canalium, mixtio eorum quae ex matrice exuent cun urina. (For the urine of women is always of more thickness and whiteness and of less beauty than that of men. Now among other things, the cause of this is the large size of the canals, the mixture of those things that go out of the womb with the urine) (2.6, p. 24).

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of censure” (3.3.68–69). In this way, the couples in the plays emphasize the value that they place on reproducing within their marriage, and on producing legitimate marital kin and heirs.

The Queer Cure Nevertheless, when each play presents the idea that the infertile wife must “cure” her infertility by queering heterosexual marriage (and undermining patriarchal systems of genetic kinship and inheritance) and sleeping with another man, this option is taken seriously as a cure that works within the parameters of that system. In Chaste Maid, Mr. Kix takes a medicinal placebo drink of almond milk as his “cure”; when the lady asks, “How must I take mine?” (3.3.176), fertile Touchwood Sr. responds, “Clean contrary, yours must be taken lying” (3.3.177). When she responds, “Abed, sir?” he answers, “Abed, or where you will for your own ease; / Your coach will serve. / Lady: The physic must needs please” (3.3.178–180). In the end, she has no complaints about this arrangement. In Mandragola, when Callimaco reveals that his medical “cure” requires that Nicia’s wife sleep with another man, Nicia initially responds, “Bloody shit! I don’t want this sugar and vinegar; you won’t stick it on me. You’ve fixed me good!” (2.6, p. 25). But while he initially resists a proposal that he feels would “make my wife a whore and myself a cuckold,” he is ultimately easily convinced, and colludes to convince his wife (2.6, p. 25). Lucrezia, Nicia’s wife, is the only spouse who resists the queer solution to conceiving her heir (setting aside Oliver Kix, who debatably stays in the dark about the details of his wife’s cure, as I’ll discuss below). She raises legitimate ethical concerns about the idea: I’ve always feared that Messer Nicia’s longing to have children would make us commit some error and, because of this, whenever he’s spoken to me about something, I’ve been on guard and suspicious of it […] But of all the things that have been attempted, this seems to me the most strange: to have to submit my body to this disgrace, to be the cause that a man might die for disgracing me; because if I were the only woman remaining in the world and if human nature had to rise again from me, I couldn’t believe that such a course would be allowed to me. (2.10, pp. 34–35)

But in the end, she is convinced when her priest, Timoteo, makes a compellingly queer argument in favor of generative nonnormative sexual

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and familial arrangements: “There are many things that from far away seem terrible, unbearable, strange, and when you get near them, they turn out to be humane, bearable, familiar; and so it is said that fears are worse than evils themselves; and this is one of those things” (2.11, p. 35). Though Timoteo can be written off as a corrupt priest, his advice to Lucrezia helps her, and the audience, to understand that her resistance to conceiving in this way is more because of socially constructed norms than any real moral or ethical qualm. Indeed, while pregnancy by gamete donation can sound complex and unintuitive, the babies and families it produces are familiar and everyday. Thus, following medical and religious advice, and seeking to fulfil their roles as wives and would-be-mothers, both women find their “cure” by sleeping with, and conceiving by, men other than their husbands. In her 2005 essay “The Purchase of Fruitfulness: Assisted Conception and Reproductive Disability in a Seventeenth-Century Comedy,” Catherine Belling makes an argument parallel to mine both in her reading of Chaste Maid and in her comparisons between the play and modern infertility and disability studies.23 Where my interests in Chaste Maid are primarily in the queer solution enabled by the Kix’s infertility, Belling rightly emphasizes the unbalanced blame placed on the wife. Indeed, though in Chaste Wife, Mandragola, and “The Contented Cuckold” the actual reproductive disability is the husband’s, either through impotence, infertility, or both, the plays especially highlight how heavily the wives carry both the stigma of infertility and the burden of finding a cure.24 Because of this focus, while Belling celebrates that Middleton “is able to provide a subversive and still remarkably apposite perspective on the

23 It is wonderful and terrifying to find an essay that comes so close to the one you are writing yourself; in this case, the experience was amplified by the interdisciplinarity of disability studies, and the gap between literary studies and the social sciences, which meant that I had been writing, reading, and talking about these ideas for several years before I found Dr. Belling’s article. I am grateful to have found it, and I mention it as a reminder that interdisciplinary work means often finding our best sources beyond our own databases! See Catherine Belling, “The Purchase of Fruitfulness: Assisted Conception and Reproductive Disability in a Seventeenth-Century Comedy,” Journal of Medical Humanities 26.2/3 (Fall 2005): 79–96. 24 In exploring the gendered nature of the stigma of infertility, Belling discusses the early modern opinion that all male infertility was caused by impotence. See p. 87 and n. 17.

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potential that existed for dislocating procreation from parenthood,”25 she also focuses on the ways that assisted reproduction in the play must be concealed or undisclosed, primarily to protect the husband’s reputation and paternal rights, in a move that predicts early practices in modern assisted reproduction, where gamete donation was generally kept secret even from donor-conceived children. In the case of the Kixes, Belling emphasizes Sir Oliver’s exclusion from the nature of his wife’s cure: “The Kixes are no longer a fruitless couple. As far as Sir Oliver knows, the story ends here. But Middleton has meanwhile let the audience in on a couple of secrets.”26 But where Belling sees dramatic irony, in Kix thinking his wife has been cured of a reproductive disability when, in fact, she’s found a way to work around his infertility and make him a cuckold, I find that the very fact of the dramatic irony predicts a different, more current, modern attitude about assisted reproduction: that it can be an open, even welcome, secret. Or, as with Mandragola and “The Contented Cuckold,” not a secret at all, at least to the people involved. Indeed, though the play can probably be staged both ways, in the Kix’s community, with a culture so rich with gossip and newsmongering, isn’t it also possible that Sir Oliver knows but chooses not to emphasize the method of this heir’s conception? In other words, might this not be dramatic irony but willful and intentional oversight, or even queer accommodation? Couldn’t Kix, like Nicia, be a part of the contented cuckold club of men who are open to paternity by any means necessary? Indeed, what makes “The Contented Cuckold,” Mandragola, and Chaste Maid feel relevant to modern discourses around infertility and assisted reproduction is, in part, the texts’ resolutions, which balance the complexity disability and nongenetic kinship with the satisfaction of a solution that meets the needs of all parties involved. Belling calls Mrs. Kix’s conception “what we would now call donor insemination (though it is not, admittedly, artificial).”27 While it’s true that the insemination happens through intercourse, I argue that the texts give evidence that this sort of sex is, nevertheless, an artificial means to an end. Mrs. Kix (and Lucrezia, and the ballad wife) takes her intercourse as a not-unpleasant medical cure, with every intention of conceiving within 25 Ibid., 91. 26 Ibid., 86. 27 Ibid., 88.

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her marriage, a child for herself and her husband. It is therefore a queer conception, where even if the methods are not artificial, the sex is mediated, medicalized, and dovetailing with, as opposed to conflicting with, the goals of the Kix’s marriage.

Queer Conclusions Both of these infertility plays have happy, fertile, comedic endings. But the queerness made possible through the medicalization of infertility prevents a pat heterosexual reproductive narrative. The resolutions of the plays demonstrate that, because of disability that prevented them from typical heterosexual reproduction, and because of the cure they have taken in a prescription for extramarital sex, the couples find themselves more open to other nonnormative arrangements and ideas. In “The Contented Cuckold,” the final stanza is vague in its use of tense, so that it is not clear how long the husband expects his wife’s arrangement with Robin the Miller to last: “And in private shall he come and go, / then though you lye often together / There is no creature alive need to know.” Because of the lack of temporal specificity here, it is unclear whether the ballad couple plan to end their arrangement with Robin after this conception; the husband seems fine with this arrangement so long as, as he reminds us all in the ballad’s last line “I am still the right father.” In Mandragola, the trickster Callimaco confesses to Lucrezia, and later reports: I made myself known to her, and made her understand the love I bore for her, and how easily, on account of her husband’s simplicity, we could live happily without any scandal, promising her, whenever God did otherwise with him, to take her for my wife. And besides these reasons, having tasted what a difference there is between my lying with her and Nicia’s, and between the kisses of a young lover and those of an old husband, after some sighs, she said: ‘Since your astuteness, my husband’s stupidity, and my confessor’s wickedness have led me to do what I never would have done by myself, I’m determined to judge that it comes from a heavenly disposition which has so willed; and I don’t have it in me to reject what Heaven wills me to accept. Therefore, I take you for lord, master, and guide; you are my father, my defender, and I want you to be my every good; and what my husband wanted for one evening, I want him to have always. You will therefore, make yourself his close friend and you’ll go to the church this morning, and from there you’ll come to dinner with us;

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and your comings and goings will be up to you, and we’ll be able to come together at any time and without suspicion’. (5.4, pp. 52–53)

Lucrezia’s transformation from a skeptic unwilling to risk her virtue even for a solution to her infertility to a woman committed to an ongoing extramarital relationship demonstrates the permanent queering work of the cure. But the play offers evidence that Nicia, like the contented cuckold, isn’t necessarily opposed to this nonmonogomous arrangement, which will keep his wife satisfied and, potentially, provide him with several heirs. In the closing scene, he invites Callimaco and Ligurio to have free access to his wife and their estate, telling his wife, “Lucrezia, this [Callimaco] is the man who will have been the cause of our having a staff to sustain our old age […] And I want to give them [Callimaco and Ligurio] the key of the ground floor room in the loggia, so that they can return their at their convenience, because they don’t have women at home and they live like beasts” (5.6, p. 54). They thus end the play in a state of semi-consensual polyamory, where, instead of being fooled by the men of the play, the wife accepts the medical diagnosis of infertility, and, thus cripped, gets an ongoing queer cure for her infertility and for her marriage. In Chaste Maid, Oliver Kix is so pleased to learn that his wife is pregnant that he sends a servant with “a hundred pounds out for the gentleman / That gave my wife the drink” (5.3.11–12), since “As our joy grows, / We must remember still from whence it flows, / Or else we prove ungrateful multipliers” (5.3.14–16). Later, Kix offers Touchwood room, board, and an income, essentially inviting his sperm donor to become part of his chosen family and pledging to support his future child’s future donor-siblings: I am so endeared to thee for my wife’s fruitfulness That I charge you both, your wife and thee, To live no more asunder for the world’s frowns: I have purse, and bed, and board for you; Be not afraid to go to your business roundly; Get children, and I’ll keep them. (5.4.79–87)

While the queerness of Kix and Touchwood’s arrangement at the conclusion of Chaste Maid might be undermined by the argument that he never officially learns how his wife was treated for her infertility (again, I believe the play can be staged in such a way that he does know, but doesn’t

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care), the queer resolution for the Kixes and Touchwoods is amplified by another intentional nonmonogamous arrangement in the same play, one that is explicitly informed and consensual for all three adults. At the opening of the play, Allwit describes his comfort with the queer family structure, in which his wife sleeps with Sir Walter Whorehound, and carries Whorehound’s babies, but the babies are raised as Allwit’s in a home provided and funded by Whorehound. Allwit explains, “I thank him, h’as maintained my house these ten years. / Not only keeps my wife, but a keeps me, / And all my family; I am at his table, / He gets me all my children, and pays the nurse, / Monthly, or weekly, puts me to nothing, / Rent, not church duties, not so much as the scavenger: / The happiest state that ever man was born to” (1.2.16–22). Describing the generous ways that Whorehound supports Mrs. Allwit during her pregnancies and lying in, Allwit further elaborates: I see these things, but like a happy man, I pay for none at all, yet fools think’s mine; I have the name, and in his gold I shine. And where some merchants would in soul kiss Hell To buy a paradise for their wives, and dye Their conscience in the bloods of prodigal heirs To deck their night-piece, yet all this being done, Eaten with jealousy to the inmost bone (as what affliction nature more constrains Than feed the wide plump for another’s veins?) These torments stand I free of, I am as clear From jealousy of a wife as from the charge. Oh, two miraculous blessings! ’Tis the knight Hath took that labor all out of my hands. I may sit and play; he’s jealous for me, Watches her steps, sets spies. I live at ease, He has both the cost and torment. When the strings Of his heart frets, I feed, laugh, or sing. La dildo, dildo la dildo, la dildo dildo de dildo. (1.2.39–57)28

Allwit’s positive attitude about his queer family structure—his willingness to raise Whorehound’s sons as his own (at Whorehound’s cost), his 28 On the Allwits, and especially on the context of Mrs. Allwit’s lying-in, see Janelle Day Jenstead’s “Lying-in Like a Countess: The Lisle Letters, the Cecil Family, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.2 (Spring 2004): 373–403.

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contentment with the material gains that the arrangement gives him and his wife, his relative lack of jealousy toward Whorehound, even his song about the dildo, implying that Whorehound’s intrusion in his marriage is little different than an especially generous dildo—all set the tone for the Kix conclusion at the end of the play. Meanwhile Whorehound, generally content with his end of the arrangement, makes plans to prevent his secret children from marrying whatever legitimate children he will later have in marriage (1.2). Kix might not know that Touchwood is the donor for his newly conceived heir, but if he does, the play offers ample evidence that their arrangement could be positive and mutually beneficial, even as it is necessitated by disability and inherently queer. In “The Contented Cuckold,” Mandragola and Chaste Maid, barrenness is figured as a disability that generates queer possibility and futurity. The infertile couples not only pass through a representational identification with disability, but also through an identification with—and enjoyable benefit from—nonnormative sex practices and engagements. Side-stepping the more conventional discourses of bastardry and cuckoldry, these texts offer cures that address the social restrictions within which the barren couples are living, rather than the medical causes that are preventing conception. If, as the narratives imply, the cuckold husbands Kix and Nicia are impotent or sterile, it matters less whether they are diagnosed and treated and more whether they can find ways to save face, maintain property, preserve their marriages and control the distribution of their wealth. Disability therefore disrupts the norms of heterosexual reproduction and enables queerness, even as the queer reproductive practices appear on the surface to elide disability and buttress normative marriage and family structures. In literary representations, that surface straightness is always-already superficial, allowing glimpses on the stage and page that reveal the queer disability in the margins and wings.

References Anonymous. “The Contented Cuckold” Houghton Library Huth EBB65H 1.33, English Broadside Ballad Archive EBBA 35095. https://ebba.english.ucsb. edu/ballad/35095/image. Asch, Adrienne. “Reproduction.” In Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, 155–157. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

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Belling, Catherine. “The Purchase of Fruitfulness: Assisted Conception and Reproductive Disability in a Seventeenth-Century Comedy.” Journal of Medical Humanities 26.2/3 (Fall 2005): 79–96. Benedicks, Crystal. “Review of Potts, Good Eggs: A Memoir & Tsigdinos, Silent Sorority: A (Barren) Woman Gets Busy, Angry, Lost and Found.” Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ) 32.3 (2012). http://dsq-sds.org/article/ view/3284/3118. “billing, adj.”. OED Online. June 2020. Oxford University Press. https:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/19022?rskey=Ebc4zb&result=7&isAdvanced= false. Accessed July 2, 2020. Clare, Eli. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. Cambridge: South End Press, 1999. Davis, Gayle, and Tracey Loughran, eds. A Handbook of Infertility in History: Approaches, Contexts and Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Evans, Jennifer. “‘They Are Called Imperfect men’: Male Infertility and Sexual Health in Early Modern England.” Social History of Medicine 29.2 (May 2016): 311–331. ———. Aphrodisiacs, Fertility, and Medicine in Early Modern England. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014. Farquhar, Dion. The Other Machine: Discourse and Reproductive Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1999. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, and Martha Stoddard Holmes. “Introduction.” Journal of Medical Humanities 26.2/3 (Fall 2005): 73–77. Griel, Arthur L., Kathleen Slauson-Blevins, and Julia McQuillan, “The Experience of Infertility: A Review of Recent Literature.” Sociology of Health and Illness 32.1 (January 2010): 140–162. Hovarth, Kimberly. “Does Bragdon v. Abbott Provide the Missing Link for Infertile Couples Seeking Protection under the ADA?” DePaul Journal of Health Care Law 2 (1999): 819–841. Jenstead, Janelle Day. “Lying-in Like a Countess: The Lisle Letters, the Cecil Family, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.2 (Spring 2004): 373–403. Kafer, Allison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Mandragola. Translated by Mera J. Flaumenhaft. Illinois: Waveland Press, 1981. Marotti, Arthur. “Fertility and Comic Form in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.” Comparative Drama 3.1 (Spring 1969): 65–74. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

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———. “Shameful Sites: Locating Queerness and Disability.” In Gay Shame, edited by David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, 181–187. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Middleton, Thomas. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. In Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments. 2nd ed. Arthur F. Kinney, ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009. 589–636. Mosoff, Judith. “Reproductive Technology and Disability: Searching for the ‘Rights’ and ‘Wrongs’ in Explanation.” Dalhousie Law Journal 16 (1993): 98–124. Oren-Magidor, Daphna. Infertility in Early Modern England. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Oren-Magidor, Daphna and Catherine Rider. “Introduction: Infertility in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine.” Social History of Medicine 29.2 (May 2016): 211–223. Samuels, Ellen. Fantasies of Disidentification: Disability, Gender, Race. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Sato, Shorge. “A Little Bit Disabled: Infertility and the Americans with Disabilities Act.” Journal of Legislative and Public Policy 5.1 (2001): 189–223. Toulalan, Sarah. “‘To[o] Much Eating Stifles the Child’: Fat Bodies and Reproduction in Early Modern England.” Historical Research 87.235 (2014): 65–93. Williams, Gordon. “Bill, vb.2.” A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature: Volume I. London: Althone Press, 1994. Williams, Robert I. “Machiavelli’s Mandragola, Touchwood Senior, and the Comedy of Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.” In Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 10.2 (Spring, 1970): 385–396. World Health Organization. “Infertility Is a Global Public Health Issue.” World Health Organization Website, June 28, 2019. https://www.who.int/reprod uctivehealth/topics/infertility/perspective/en/.

CHAPTER 7

Reading Shakespeare After Neurodiversity Wes Folkerth

Abstract The term neurodiversity is used to argue against the pathologizing of people who exhibit atypical cognitive styles by considering their difference in terms of diversity rather than lack. As the concept gains greater acceptance, it may help us not only to better understand people we live with now, but also to provide a way of approaching similar characters as they are represented in Shakespeare’s theatre. Reading “Shakespeare after neurodiversity” means reading the characters in his plays, especially the many fools and clowns, with an eye to the diversity of their individual personhoods. The chapter begins with a reading of Robert Armin’s catalogue of fools in his Foole Upon Foole (1600), and continues by discussing the variable speeds of wit in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Shakespeare’s success with the character of the fool goes beyond the confines of the stage, however. Borrowing principles of anamorphosis which were popular in contemporary visual arts and applying them to the experience of theatrical time, Shakespeare positions the audience in the subject position of the fool, enabling them to understand what fools are not only by watching them on stage, but also by undergoing the experience of foolishness themselves.

W. Folkerth (B) McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_7

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This chapter proceeds from my interest in Shakespeare’s fools and early modern representations of intellectual disability and related conditions. In Shakespeare’s works these characters typically exist on the margins of communal, spiritual, and political life. In some cases, as with courtly fools such as Touchstone, Lavatch, Feste, and Lear’s Fool, they enjoy a certain protection and even a tenuous privilege. But the sense of subjectivity they evoke seems so historically contingent, so seemingly “given,” the specific character of their relationship to the dominant culture so complicated and curious, that even scholars and theatrical practitioners who specialize in Shakespeare and early modern culture can find them difficult to understand. Translating the historical reality of this particular form of personhood is difficult enough; translating the subjective reality of individuals in whom this early modern form of personhood found physical expression is even more challenging. The necessity of this act of translation motivates my interest in these characters. It has also motivated the emergence of an important civil rights movement in the early twenty-first century: the pursuit of social and political recognition for self-described “neurodiverse” individuals. Many of the physiological conditions we now link with disability were recognized in Shakespeare’s day. These conditions appear in his plays, which feature characters who are blind, who have trouble hearing, who are unable to speak or who have speech impediments, who suffer from mental illness, who limp, who describe themselves as deformed, and so on. That said, our notion of the word disability as an expansive cultural and legal category encompassing a range of impairments of varying severity, as well as cultural attitudes and beliefs about them, would not have been available to Shakespeare and his contemporary audiences. What we consider disability is a function of specific cultural contexts, which continue to evolve and change. One example of this change is the emergence of the word neurodiversity, which has come into use within the past two decades as a way of calling for increased awareness and discontinued pathologizing of people who exhibit nontypical cognitive styles. Neurodiversity suggests we consider their difference primarily in terms of diversity rather than lack. The term’s first appearance in print is most often attributed to Judy Singer, who deployed it in her contribution to the 1999 collection Disability Discourse. In her essay on autistic subjectivity, Singer suggested that “the key significance of the ‘autistic spectrum’ lies in its call for and anticipation of a politics of neurological diversity, or neurodiversity. The ‘neurologically different’ represent a new addition to

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the familiar political categories of class/gender/race and will augment the insights of the social model of disability.”1 As Singer predicted, the term has gained increasing influence in recent years. It forms the central argument of Steve Silberman’s history of autism, Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (2015), has been the subject of numerous recent scholarly monographs, and was the topic of a special 2010 issue of the journal Disability Studies Quarterly edited by Ralph Savarese. Reading “Shakespeare after neurodiversity” means reading the characters in his plays, especially the many fools and clowns, with an eye to the specific conditions of their predicaments. For Shakespeare the terms “clown” and “fool” are primarily performative indicators. They do not supersede or take the place of individual personhood. As such, these characters are not indicative of specific forms of “social personhood,” to borrow Elizabeth Fowler’s elegant concept, which she defines as “a paradigmatic representation of personhood that has evolved historically among the institutions of social life.”2 The remarkable thing about Shakespeare’s clowns and fools is how individuated they are, how diverse they are in their humanity. The most conventional aspect of their character is their extreme idiosyncracy. This is very different from stock characters developed from other social types, who delight audiences in large part because of their predictability, their tendency to conform to expectations. In this respect Shakespeare’s fools are similar to the natural fools represented in his colleague Robert Armin’s collection of stories featuring historical fools from the same period. Reading neurodiversity in Shakespeare also involves noting how his works reflect early modern notions of intelligence that are in some ways more expansive and inclusive than our own. Finally, it also entails recognizing how he deploys various representational conventions in the service of destabilizing audience perspectives so as to encourage a sense of inclusion through identification.

1 Judy Singer, “‘Why Can’t You Be Normal for Once in Your Life?’ From a ‘Problem with No Name’ to the Emergence of a New Category of Difference,” in Disability Discourse, eds. Mairian Corker and Sally French (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999), 64. 2 Elizabeth Fowler, Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003), 2 n.3.

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Robert Armin’s Accounts of Early Modern Fools Robert Armin joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men about the same time as he first published a book called Foole Vpon Foole or Six Sortes of Sottes , in which he purports to categorize and catalogue a variety of foolish “types.”3 As a professional or “artificial” fool, Armin would have had a keen interest in stories about “natural” fools. He would have studied them for cues and clues about how to play such characters more effectively. Despite announcing itself as a sociological work, Foole Vpon Foole reads more like a jest book, relating humorous stories about individuals who exhibit highly idiosyncratic behaviors.4 The book’s nod to philosophical rigor is a throwaway structural device, and all part of the general levity. Armin introduces the reader to Jack Oates, a “flat” fool; Jemy Camber, a “fat” fool; Lean Leonard, a “lean” fool; Jack Miller, a “clean” fool; Will Summers, a “merry” fool; and John of Hospital, a “very” fool. That these various rubrics rhyme underscores the forced nature of their construction. What makes Foole Vpon Foole such a fascinating historical document is that many of the behaviors depicted within it are strikingly similar to behaviors associated with people who might be considered to have some form of intellectual disability. Today, this jest book masquerading as a sociological investigation can be revisited as an actual sociological casebook, one that helps us to imagine intellectual disability in the early modern context as it was experienced by those who might be considered to have such a disability. It also helps us to imagine how such disability was experienced and understood by individuals in the wider community.5 3 Robert Armin, Foole Vpon Foole, or Six Sortes of Sottes (London: William Ferbrand, 1600). 4 H. F. Lippincott titled his 1973 edition of Armin’s work A Shakespeare Jestbook, Robert

Armin’s “Foole Upon Foole” (1600). See Lippincott (1975, 244 n.3).

5 Armin’s book has rested in relative critical obscurity, but I do wish to direct the reader to Peter Cockett’s excellent discussion of the book in “Performing Natural Folly: The Jests of Lean Leanard and the Touchstones of Robert Armin and David Tennant,” New Theatre Quarterly 22.2 (2006): 141–154. While his focus is trained on relations between Armin’s book and the character Touchstone, Cockett’s argument creates a space for the kind of Disability Studies approach taken here. Cockett claims that Armin’s book is “the only substantial account of natural fools in early modern England,” one in which these individuals are treated as “a concrete historical reality rather than as part of a developing literary, dramatic, or performance tradition” (143). Richard Preiss also discusses Armin’s Foole Upon Foole at some length in his Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre

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There are certain commonalities one finds in Armin’s sequence of portraits. Many of the fools he depicts have difficulty with impulse control, especially when it comes to food. Jack Oates, the “flat fool,” absconds with a quince pie left out to cool by his master’s cook. The pie is still too hot to eat, therefore so as not to be pursued Jack wades chest-deep into the moat to enjoy it while it burns his fingers and mouth.6 “Lean fool” Lean Leonard steals food from the dairy house and then runs away to avoid punishment. He later kills and attempts to eat his master’s hawk raw after mistakenly hearing the birds were a cherished delicacy.7 John of Hospital, a “very fool,” attempts to walk off with some soup by pouring it into his pockets, burning himself in the process.8 The stories of the first two fools occasion much alarm in their respective households, as people search for Jack Oates and Lean Leonard. They seem to do so not primarily to punish them, but rather in the first instance to assure their safety. Several of the fools described by Armin are cruelly teased as a source of merriment. Jack Oates misbehaves to a visiting nobleman, giving him a box on the ear after seeing the visitor kiss the lady of the house in greeting. Jack apologizes and then insults the eminent visitor, after which his master plays a joke on him by suggesting that he has acquired a new fool to take Jack’s place. A visiting minstrel is recruited to play the new fool. Jack jealously attacks the imposter so violently that the master has to arrange for medical care and a new musical instrument for the man.9 The cruellest story is of Jemy Camber, a Scottish “fat fool,” who develops an intense passion for a maid who lives in the nearby town. The maid strews nettles under her bed, and when Jemy comes at the assigned hour she tricks him into thinking a rival lover is at the door and urges him to hide there. She leaves him there where he is stung by the nettles, which results in Jemy’s death a few days later.10 Armin conveys this story with surprising dispassion.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 195–203, though his attention is drawn more to the work’s interesting strategies of authorial presentation and production. 6 Armin, Foole Vpon Foole, B2r-3r. 7 Ibid., D1r; D2r. 8 Ibid., F2r. 9 Ibid., A4r-B2r. 10 Ibid., C3r-v.

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Most of the stories related by Armin appear to have been transmitted to him by others. There are two fools, however, who Armin claims to have witnessed first-hand.11 The first is John of Hospital, who was a familiar figure around London, and who Armin would later inscribe into his 1609 play The History of the Two Maids of More-Clack. The second is Jack Miller, a “clean fool” of Worcestershire. In an episode of Jack Miller’s story, the household receives a visit from a traveling theatre troupe, the Lord Chandos’s men. Armin was himself a member of this troupe in the 1590s. Jack becomes so enamoured of the players, especially of a fool named Grumball, that he attempts to run away with them. He dangerously exits an upper-storey window, climbs down the outside of the building, and ventures across an icy river to catch up with them. He had been placed in the upper storey for his own safety, Armin notes, “because they of the towne loathe to loose his company, desired to have it so.”12 Jack catches up to the players, who respond by whipping him with rosemary “till the blood came, which he tooke laughing.”13 Armin claims to have witnessed the event, though not to have participated in the whipping, nor to have been the Grumball for whom Jack had developed such a fascination. The communities in which these fools reside respond to their presence in two notable ways. First, the community’s sporadic reactions of cruelty can be construed as crude and ultimately unsuccessful attempts at enforcing an increased socialization on the part of the fool. Such tactics were not solely used on fools; other practices of unofficial social correction such as charivari and skimmingtons are found throughout the period as well. Secondly, however, it appears the people in these communities value these individuals for more than the entertainment they supply and the humorous narratives they engender. And as Armin’s depictions make clear, this concern regularly extends beyond the immediate household. The larger community often seems to have a stake in the welfare of this individual. This concern is why people run out to search for Jack Oates and Lean Leonard when they go missing, and why Jack Miller is locked in an upper-storey room with a window as the players depart. 11 Andrew McConnell Stott, “New Directions: ‘Let Them Use Their Talents’: Twelfth Night and the Professional Comedian,” in Twelfth Night, a Critical Reader, eds. Alison Findlay and Liz Oakley-Brown (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2014), 155. 12 Armin, Foole Vpon Foole, D4v. 13 Ibid., D4v-E1r.

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What these fools are shown to possess in Armin’s accounts is an indelible personhood that can be construed in one way as idiosyncracy, but in another as authenticity. Their inability or innate disinclination to adhere to expected social norms and codes gives their lives an authenticity that few other members of the communities represented in these tales are shown to possess outside of their interactions with them. The most salient fact about these depictions is how deeply individuated these fools are, how diverse they are in their personhoods, despite sometimes sharing traits such as difficulty with impulse control or challenges reading social cues. From the outset they defy Armin’s categories, which does not bother the author, because those categories were only ever intended as a structural joke anyway. Armin’s book demonstrates that early modern individuals with these sorts of disabilities were integrated into the community, were familiarly accepted for who they were, and were considered the subjects of collective concern. The Jemy Camber example also indicates that this was not always the case, and that the fool’s lot could still be a precarious one. This ambivalent inclusivity is based on social familiarity, but it also has roots in more expansive early modern notions of intelligence.

The Speed of Wit in the Two Gentlemen of Verona Reading Shakespeare after neurodiversity not only means reading his fools and clowns with an attention to their surprisingly striking individuality; it also means reading with an historically-informed sense of how intelligence could be defined in the period differently than it is now. For instance, nowadays, to observe that someone has a “quick wit” is to praise them unequivocally. But this has not always been the case. A moment from the first scene of The Two Gentlemen of Verona in which Valentine exclaims to his friend’s servant “Beshrew me, but you have a quick wit” (1.1.124) suggests the value of a quick wit was a more complicated issue in Shakespeare’s day.14 Proteus has been bantering with his friend’s page, whose speech is replete with the wordplay and chop-logic so often found in the mouths of Shakespeare’s clowns and fools. After listening to Speed’s comic riffing on the words sheep and noddy in his account of delivering Proteus’s letter, Proteus’s observation on the speed of Speed’s wit is less a compliment than a mildly fascinated observation. His tone evinces more 14 All quotations from Shakespeare are from David Bevington’s Pearson sixth edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (2009).

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exasperation than admiration as he tries to elicit from Speed some sense of Julia’s response to the receipt of the letter. And while it’s tempting to consider that Proteus might be playing upon the page’s name, this is improbable given that Speed is never referred to by name by any character over the course of the play (which is to say the theatre audience never learns his name—Shakespeare curiously withholds this information). What the moment underscores is that in Shakespeare’s day speed was not an unequivocally positive way to characterize wit and intelligence. For while Speed has delivered the letter in due time, neither he nor Proteus, nor the audience at this point, is aware that the letter has not been given to Julia at all, but rather to her waiting-woman Lucetta. In his brilliant and far-reaching account A History of Intelligence and “Intellectual Disability”: The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe, historian C. F. Goodey finds early sixteenth-century Italian physician/translator Niccolò Leoniceno to be the first to use the word ingenium, or wit, to denote the ability to perform abstract mental operations with swiftness.15 The idea became so successful that the word eventually “came to describe not just the operation (one among several) of one faculty, but a whole faculty or ability in itself.”16 That is, ingeniousness, or wit, the ability to work with abstractions quickly, came to serve as a synecdoche for the entire faculty of human intelligence. The self-serving nature of this formulation is never lost on Goodey—nor is it lost on Paul Michael Privateer, who suggests in his review of the history of intelligence that “the history of modern ideas of intelligence (content and institutional practices) can be traced to the creation of the modern state, to increased support for capital access, and to the emergence of a new ‘intelligent’ class whose ‘genius’ ultimately helped to generate that capital.”17 According to Privateer, the emergent Renaissance ideology of intelligence develops out of a medieval Christian ideology that sees the disembodied divine realm as the primary home of intelligence. “This new epistemology,” writes Privateer, “transformed prior notions of celestial intelligence into the virtual flesh and blood of a human and measurable characteristic. And to do so, it subverted classical religious thought that had ideologically prevented 15 C. F. Goodey, A History of Intelligence and “Intellectual Disability”: The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 52–53. 16 Ibid., 55. 17 Paul Michael Privateer, Inventing Intelligence: A Social History of Smart (Oxford:

Blackwell, 2006), 33.

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humans from trusting their own minds to create certainty. Human intelligence became the agent for this certitude.”18 The transition from focus on a divinely-centered intelligence to a humanly-centered one still retained useful vestiges of the old ethical structure, however, in “the pervasiveness of the idea that intelligent individuals or classes were closer to God, while the unintelligent reflect the mundane or evil, as is the case with Caliban in The Tempest .”19 Though Privateer points to the figure of Caliban, the influence of these ideas is no less perceptible in other Shakespearean characters and plays, and especially in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. While the association of intelligence with speed was gaining ground as an operational metaphor in the early modern period, and although the consideration of speed is something of a constant in the assessment and measurement of intelligence throughout history, the attribution of the highest value to a quick intelligence has not always been the case. As Goodey observes: [U]nderlying the relationship between intelligence and speed is a deeper, tripartite framework that appears to run across cultures. It seems to be always the case that human intelligence is fast and efficient, or slow and deliberative, or a mean between the two. Each of these three models comes with inseparable cultural baggage: each is better than the others. Each dominates a particular period or culture, though closer inspection reveals that at any period of history all three are at work, and that the dominance of one or another is a matter of political and cultural bias.20

Goodey finds the attribute of speed connected to different styles of intelligence as early as Plato, who in his Theaetetus has Socrates compare human memory to a wax tablet.21 Fast learners possess tablets made of softer wax, which allows them to make impressions more quickly. However, this softer wax can more easily melt, with the result that the impressions inscribed in them may become indistinct and confused. The harder wax tablets of slower learners mean they take longer and must exert greater effort to make impressions, but those impressions have a better chance of leaving a lasting impression in the wax. The trade-off is between speed 18 Ibid., 41; emphases in original. 19 Ibid., 58. 20 Goodey, History of Intelligence, 40. 21 Ibid., 49–51.

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and retention, and for the most part Plato seems to be a proponent of the latter. The later Aristotelian veneration for the “mean” meant that for much of the medieval and early modern periods the mixed model was often considered the best—though Goodey notes that subsequently, as we have developed various metrics for quantifying the speed of intelligence, the mean’s pre-eminence has been replaced by the notion that it is merely “average,” such that “the ethical desirability of the mean in the ancient model had vanished.”22 This contemporary ambivalence about the speed of wit, along with a corresponding concern with the relation of intelligence to the instrumental and the ethical domains, is an abiding focus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In the opening dialogue between Valentine and Proteus we hear frequent wordplay drawing on the subject of folly and wit. Valentine begins by warning his friend that “Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits” (1.1.2). He opines that Proteus’s preference to remain in Verona to pursue his relationship with Julia amounts to “living dully sluggardized at home” (1.1.7). Love is described more generally by Valentine in the chiastic figure of “a folly bought with wit, / Or else a wit by folly vanquishèd,” to which the lover Proteus rapidly responds “So by your circumstance you call me fool.” Without missing a beat, Valentine replies, “So by your circumstance I fear you’ll prove” (1.1.35–38). Proteus protests that Valentine’s criticisms are directed at love and not himself, but Valentine remarks that “he that is so yokèd by a fool / Methinks should not be chronicled for wise” (1.1.41–42). Proteus then calls upon the authority of writers, who note that “eating love / Inhabits in the finest wits of all,” to which Valentine counters with contradicting authors who write that “Even so by love the young and tender wit / Is turned to folly, blasting in the bud, / Losing his verdure even in the prime” (1.1.44–45; 48–50). As the argument intensifies, each turns to the authority of writers as a way of defending their position. The conversation abruptly comes to a halt with Valentine’s impatient attack: “But wherefore waste I time to counsel thee / That art a votary to fond desire?” (1.1.52–53). The speed and momentum of the conversation suddenly halts, and Valentine takes leave of his friend, refusing to let him even accompany him to the waiting ship where he might see him off.

22 Ibid., 40.

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The verbal sparring between the two friends suggests a certain anxiety about the geographical separation they are about to experience, as well as the emotional distance that has developed between them on account of Proteus’s keen interest in a particular member of the opposite sex. Their anxiety is transmuted or sublimated into accusations of idiocy, and clichéd observations about the effect of love on lover’s wits. When Valentine exits, Proteus is left to second-guess himself, to deflect such accusations in an apostrophe to Julia about how she has “Made wit with musing weak” (1.1.70). Although filled with entertaining wit, the opening moments of the play present a moment of crisis in the relationship between the two friends, each anxious about the future of that relationship, each unsure about what the future holds for them as individuals. The deployment of wit, especially in the case of Valentine but with Proteus as well, is a way of expressing that anxiety, of talking around their feelings of inadequacy without having to acknowledge them to each other, or to themselves. That is, wit is here the marker of a certain kind of technical intelligence combined with linguistic facility, a capability largely disconnected from another kind of self-knowledge we might call “emotional maturity” in the present day. This is not to say that wit doesn’t perform an important psychological function for the two youths in this scene, just that its utility as such is entirely dependent on their inability to recognize its deployment as a compensatory mechanism as they each shout back at the barking dog of an uncertain future. When Proteus’s father enters and finds his son reading a letter, Proteus has to construct a lie on the spur of the moment. His speed gets away from him, and the lie works against him, providing his father with the perfect opportunity to voice his determination to see his son shipped off to gain experience in the world. The same thing happens to Valentine when he is slyly accosted by Sylvia’s father—he too is forced to come up with a lie so quickly that he is unable to see where the moment is headed. Do these moments occur because these two young gentlemen of Verona are too fast, or because they are too slow in their capacity to recognize the situation and develop their responses in accordance with it? There is a difference between speed and “haste,” a word deployed in the play more than once, along with “impatient,” and “rashness,” and “whither away so fast?” The clownish servants are also called upon to quickly catch up with their masters numerous times in the play. Launce is the kind of clown associated with a slower mental capacity, the kind of rural person for whom the epithet “idiot” would be deployed

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in the period. A particular speech impediment seems to have been in Shakespeare’s mind as part of his characterization. He repeatedly confuses the letters B and V, saying vanished when he means banished, lubber when he means lover (3.1.217; 2.5.40). On the other hand, Launce, who seems to be a slower-witted clown, actually fools Speed, and shows himself to be a better friend to his dog than Proteus is to Valentine. Launce slows things down when he converses with Speed about the woman he is wooing, going over the balance-sheet of her virtues and vices—all the while knowingly preventing Speed from catching up with his master, thereby getting him into serious trouble. We learn of Launce’s trick only at the end of the scene, making it only one of many examples in the play in which the audience itself, in an inversion of dramatic irony, is confronted with its own ignorance. This is telling, because ordinarily a clownish rogue on the early modern stage would share his plan for the jest with the audience beforehand. Here Launce keeps even the audience in the dark. We may laugh at Launce, but he is laughing at us, too. While the characters often speak of fools and foolishness as dishonorable or negative, their wit is neither enough to keep them out of trouble nor to prevent them from harm. Both clowns, Launce and Speed, disappear from the play before the end, lending greater focus to the young lovers at the end. Launce is presumably still looking for the lapdog Proteus gave him to give to Sylvia, and Speed disappears completely after the first meeting with the outlaws in the forest. The issue of speed in the latter part of the play is best shown at the crucial moment in the play’s famous ending, when Proteus attempts to rape Sylvia, and Valentine reveals himself to castigate his friend. The rapidity of Valentine’s forgiveness of Proteus is remarkable (it occurs without a break in the rhythm of the line in which it occurs). That is, Valentine presumably forgives his friend faster than he can think, faster than his wit can travel, and certainly faster than many audience members and readers are prepared to accept. The Two Gentlemen of Verona explores how the speed of a wit is not a reliable indicator of its value. Speed can be associated with alacrity, but it can also be deployed in the service of illusion. More than any other play Shakespeare wrote, The Two Gentlemen of Verona relies on projecting the impression of a speed that is meant to feel delirious. The improbable ending of the play is like the last seconds of a roller coaster ride when the block brakes jar the car to a halt as our body’s inertia continues our forward motion into the lap bar. Criticisms of the play routinely fail to

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recognize the significance of the work’s pacing and its overall contribution to the experience of the play in the theatre. In this early play, we find Shakespeare playing with his power as a playwright over his audience’s awareness, the limits of which he probes and manipulates. Contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson are typically more overt about wielding this power, but Shakespeare works with it as well, and usually for a different reason. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, audiences are repeatedly presented with situations with respect to which their own ignorance will be made evident—either later, as with the fact that Speed has unknowingly delivered Proteus’s letter to the wrong woman, or almost immediately, as when Speed picks up on Sylvia’s trick of getting Valentine to write her love letter to him for her. I would challenge any first-time audience member or reader of the play to recollect having picked up on Sylvia’s trick even slightly before the servant explains the trick as he sees it happening. What is most significant is that the audience is given no time for the realization to occur before Speed jumps in with his explanatory aside. Shakespeare doesn’t want us to get it before we have it explained to us by a clown. Reading Shakespeare after neurodiversity means developing an awareness of how frequently Shakespeare places his audience in the subject-position of the fool.

Fooling Around with Time: Temporal Anamorphosis on the Early Modern Stage In his Defense of Poesy, Sidney criticizes playwrights of his day for their disinclination to follow the Aristotelian unities of place and time in their work. Their free and easy use of time is the focus of particular objection: Now, of time they are much more liberal: for ordinary it is that two young princes fall in love; after many traverses, she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy; he is lost, groweth a man, falls in love, and is ready to get another child; and all in this two hours’ space: which, how absurd it is in sense, even sense may imagine, and art hath taught, and all ancient examples justified—and at this day, the ordinary players in Italy will not err in.23 23 Sir Philip Sidney, “The Defence of Poesy,” in Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 243.

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However “liberal” and “absurd” these practices seem to Sidney, contemporary playwrights were often very deliberate in their implementation. One of the great early examples occurs at the end of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus when Faustus begins his final speech with “Ah, Faustus, / Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,” and then he dies less than sixty lines later (5.2.57–116).24 The effect is to place the audience into Faustus’s consciousness, to experience the acceleration of time in the same way the character does as his impending fate rushes inexorably towards him. This is not a gratuitous violation of the unities. It is rather the deployment of theatrical time in the service of the representation of a character’s psychological state. It’s a trick early modern dramatists likely learned from, and adapted from, contemporary visual artists and craftpersons who delighted their patrons with visually anamorphic representations. Early modern anamorphic visual art was an elaboration of the representational principles that had informed the development of the technique of perspective drawing, in which a two-dimensional representation creates the realistic illusion of three-dimensional space. Shakespeare and other early modern writers were aware of the technique of perspective, and by extension anamorphosis. Its influence on their work has been documented at least since the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy.25 When Feste greets Sir Toby and Sir Andrew with “How now, my hearts! Did you never see the picture of ‘we three’?” (TN 2.3.16–17), he refers to a painting of two fools that has been composed in order to implicate the observer, to put them in the place of the third fool. What has not yet been sufficiently observed is the extent to which early modern playwrights elaborated on these anamorphic principles in their representations of time, the fourth dimension, as we have seen with Marlowe and

24 I cite the A-Text of Marlowe’s play here, but the B-Text operates in much the same manner. 25 McLuhan (1962) finds Edgar’s description of the cliffs of Dover to his father to be one of the first verbal renderings of visual perspective in Western literature. Two more recent and extensive scholarly accounts of Shakespeare’s awareness and deployment of anamorphic principles are Michael Hattaway, “Shakespeare and the Invention of Landscape: The View from Dover Hill,” in Shakespeare’s World/World Shakespeares: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare World Congress, eds. Richard Fotheringham and Christa Jansohn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 73–86; Alison Thorne, Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking Through Language (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000).

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the final moments of Doctor Faustus .26 Perhaps the most overt voicing of this in Shakespeare occurs in As You Like It , when Rosalind schools Orlando on how the passage of time is perceived differently by different people: “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I’ll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal” (AYLI 3.2.303–306). To experience time in a particular way is to grasp a particular mode of consciousness, which enables the contemplation of multiple modalities of consciousness, or neurodiversity. If repetition is any indicator, some of Shakespeare’s favorite jokes are the ones he plays on his audiences, holding up a mirror to our capacity for foolishness and misprision. In the plays set in Italy, he enjoys playing on the audience’s expectation of the simple convention that the characters will speak in English even though they are Italian. That is, realistically, Italian characters set in Italy among other Italians should speak in Italian, but because the play is written in English for English audiences, to be performed in a theatre in England, they will speak English. In The Taming of the Shrew he has Petruchio and Hortensio greet each other in Italian. “Signior Hortensio, come you to part the fray? / Con tutto il cuore, ben trovato, may I say”—to which Hortensio replies, “Alla nostra casa ben venuto, / molto honorato signior mio Petruchio” (1.2.23–26). Grumio responds by saying he doesn’t understand them: “Nay, ’tis no matter, sir, what he ’leges in Latin” (1.2.28). Something similar happens in the second scene of The Merchant of Venice when Nerissa asks Portia how she likes her English suitor, Lord Falconbridge. Portia responds, “You know I say nothing to him, for he understands not me, nor I him. He hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian, and you will come into the court and swear that I have a poor pennyworth in English” (1.2.66–70). Moments such as these underscore the fragile nature of the conventions audiences accept when they enter into the representational contract the theatre requires of them, how it elicits a particular mode of consciousness that is atypical, and enforces modes of perception that would ordinarily mark audience members as in some way impaired in the quotidian world outside of the theatre because they do not experience things in the normally accepted way. These moments serve as representational windows 26 For a famous example of Shakespeare’s deployment of time (without the anamorphic context), see A. C. Bradley’s discussion in the chapter “The Duration of the Action in Othello” in his Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1992), 384–390.

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that invite the audience to become cognizant of the ways their extratheatrical experience is also framed. In so doing they create space for the contemplation of, and even experience of, other modes of consciousness and being-in-the-world. In short, they create space for the awareness of neurodiversity. Reading Shakespeare after neurodiversity allows us a way into, and sheds light on, the history of disability, of how our understanding of what we have come to call disability has changed over time. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries its individual expressions were more familiar, and more often, in instances we might do well to follow, seen as a natural reflection of human diversity. Shakespeare’s audiences come to understand what fools are by watching them on stage, where they experience them less as expressions of a particular social type to be judged than as unique individuals with an often delightfully surprising perspicacity. Perhaps more importantly, Shakespeare’s audiences also come to understand what it means to be a fool by being confronted with the limits of their own conscious awareness in the act of assenting to the fictional contract, whereby they experience their own capacity for foolishness. Shakespeare after neurodiversity reads the fool less as a particular social type exemplified by specific individuals than as a pervasive tendency inherent in the human condition. Like the painting of “we three,” Shakespeare’s fool is there to implicate us, to include us, and to remind us that, “by the grace of God” and not “but for” it, we go there along with him.

Bibliography Armin, Robert. Foole Vpon Foole or Six Sortes of Sottes. London: William Ferbrand, 1600. Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy. 3rd ed. London: Macmillan, 1992. Cockett, Peter. “Performing Natural Folly: The Jests of Lean Leanard and the Touchstones of Robert Armin and David Tennant.” New Theatre Quarterly 22.2 (2006): 141–154. Fowler, Elizabeth. Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Goodey, C. F. A History of Intelligence and “Intellectual Disability”: The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. Hattaway, Michael. “Shakespeare and the Invention of Landscape: The View from Dover Hill.” In Shakespeare’s World / World Shakespeares: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, edited

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by Richard Fotheringham and Christa Jansohn, 73–86. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Lippincott, H. F. “King Lear and the Fools of Robert Armin.” Shakespeare Quarterly 26.3 (Summer 1975): 243–253. Marlowe, Christopher. “Doctor Faustus, A-Text.” In Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, 137–183. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. McGee, Micki. “Neurodiversity.” Contexts 11.3 (2012): 12–13. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. Owren, Thomas, and Trude Stenhammer. “Neurodiversity: Accepting Autistic Difference.” Learning Disability Practice 16.4 (May 2013): 32–37. Preiss, Richard. Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Privateer, Paul Michael. Inventing Intelligence: A Social History of Smart. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Riddle, Christopher A. “The Ontology of Impairment: Rethinking How We Define Disability.” In Emerging Perspectives on Disability Studies, edited by Matthew Wappett and Katrina Arndt, 23–39. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 6th ed. Edited by David Bevington. New York: Pearson, 2009. Sidney, Sir Philip. “The Defence of Poesy.” In Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones, 212–250. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Silberman, Steve. Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. New York: Avery, 2015. Singer, Judy. “‘Why Can’t You Be Normal for Once in Your life?’ From a ‘Problem with No Name’ to the Emergence of a New Category of Difference.” In Disability Discourse, edited by Mairian Corker and Sally French, 59–67. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999. Stott, Andrew McConnell. “New Directions: ‘Let Them Use Their Talents’: Twelfth Night and the Professional Comedian.” In Twelfth Night, a Critical Reader, edited by Alison Findlay and Liz Oakley-Brown, 144–165. London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2014. Thorne, Alison. Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking Through Language. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.

PART II

Disability as a Metaphor in Dramatic Literature

CHAPTER 8

Enabling Rabies in King Lear Avi Mendelson

Abstract This chapter about rabies in King Lear—a play with a shocking amount of dog imagery—argues that Lear is less about a mad king than it is about the difficulty of differentiating between madness and sanity. Positioning myself against critics who seek to isolate madness to the play’s specific characters, I suggest that we should rather understand Lear’ s madness as contagious. Offering a rigorous epidemiology of early modern rabies, I emphasize how the illness produces corporeal and linguistic features shared among several of Lear’s characters. As the play’s characters are repeatedly described as dogs, for example, they exhibit the metamorphic symptoms of being injected with a dog’s venom. Medical books from the period further describe rabid patients barking and howling like furious curs. I argue that Shakespeare infuses his characters’ ostensibly doggish mad speeches—the byproduct of rabid rage—with startlingly rational poetic structures that make madness sound reasonable. By showing how madness in the play is an infection between bodies and often indistinct from reason, I ask that we reconsider whether “disability” is an accurate description of madness in Lear.

A. Mendelson (B) London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_8

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Retirez vous arrière, à fin que vostre veue Ne se souille, voyant vne beste incongneue, Qui pleine de cholere et d’vn coeur forcené Se iette à trauers champs d’vn pas abandonné. Elle a l’oeil de trauers et la gueulle efeumante, Ses naseaux sont remplis d’vne éscume sanglante, Le boire et le manger luy sont à contrecoeur, Son oeil est ésclerant plein de haine et rancoeur, Elle mord vn chacun, sans faire différence Des incogneuz à ceux dont elle a congnoissance: Elle est maigre de corps et sans cesse luy pend Du gosier deseiché la langue d’vn serpent: Elle baisse la queue et de ses grands oreilles Elle bat son museau plein de grosses abeilles, Qui sans fin la piquants de leurs grands aiguillons Luy sont prendre chemin, ores par les seillons De nouueau labourez, ores par les bruyères, Ores par les forests, ores par les iachères.1 –Jacques Grévin on “les signes du chien enragé” (1568)

Among the menagerie of sins Edgar attributes to Tom o’ Bedlam—“hog in sloth, / fox in stealth, wolf in greediness”—is a “dog in madness” (3.4.86–87) (Fig. 8.1).2 Lear’s animal imagery has garnered a resurgence of attention in recent animal studies criticism, and dogs have been

1 Jacques Grevin, Deux livres des venins (Anvers, 1568), 167. My thanks to Christine Reno for this wonderful translation of Grévin’s rabies poem: “Pull back, so that your eyes / Be not befouled at the sight of an unknown beast / Which, full of anger and with a ferocious heart, / Propels itself across the fields with a wild gait. / It has a crooked eye and a frothing maw, / Its nostrils are filled with a bloody foam; / Eating and drinking repulse it; / Its eye burns with hate and rancor. / It bites everyone indiscriminately, / From people it does not know to those it does know. / Its body is skinny, and from its parched gullet / Hangs the tongue of a serpent. / It lowers its tail, and with its large ears / It strikes its snout full of fat bees / Who, ceaselessly stinging it with their large needles, / Chase it away, now by the furrows / Newly plowed, now by the heather, / Now by the forests, now by the fallow fields.” 2 All references to Shakespeare’s works, unless otherwise noted, are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008); references to Lear from The Norton are from the conflated text.

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Fig. 8.1 A rabid dog, from Jacques Grévin, Deux livres des venins (Antwerp, 1569). Woodcut. Middle Temple Library/Science Photo Library

of particular interest.3 This unusually canine-heavy Shakespeare play has provoked discussions of dogs symbolizing selfless love, flattery, displaced authority, servility, loyalty, and the corky consistency of Gloucester’s arms.4 To these I am adding Poor Tom’s observation that dogs are a 3 For other recent animal discussions of Lear, see Andreas Höfele, “Bestarium Humanum: Lear’s Animal Kingdom,” in German Shakespeare Studies at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Christa Jansohn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 84–101; Erica Fudge, “Renaissance Animal Things,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 76 (2012): 86–100; Laurie Shannon, The Accommodated Animal (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Michael C. Clody, “The Mirror and the Feather: Tragedy and Animal Voice in King Lear,” ELH 80.3 (2013): 661–680. 4 For discussions of dogs in Lear, see Ralph M. Tutt, “Dog Imagery in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, King Lear, and Timon of Athens ,” Serif 1.3 (1964): 15–22;

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zoological symbol for madness. Yet rather than just focus on what dogs mean in the play as previous critics have done, I am going to focus on how dogs work. Dog imagery unobtrusively speckles the thick air of the play’s fibers, attaching itself to a range of characters that exhibit various forms of “doggish” behavior. By subtly including doggishness as a metaphor for multiple characters, Lear pressures its audience to apprehend (but not comprehend) that madness, rather than solely possessing a single character such as Lear, takes diverse forms, and moves between characters. In other words, it is contagious.5 I use the term “contagious” as a metaphor for madness in Lear for several reasons: the play’s spreading of different forms of madness around the thick air of its recurrent imagery, its rapidfire intermingling of fluid words within mad speeches (“mad speak” in this play is “contagious” language in the sense of the Latin con-tangere, or “to touch together”), and—perhaps most importantly—its subterranean flashings of a specific type of inter-species madness that is passed between bodies via saliva: rabies. The play mentions this form of canine madness a few times (3.4.86–87, 3.6.64, and 4.3.41–46), yet it remains largely neglected by critical discussions of madness in Lear. In this chapter I argue that the indecipherability of madness—one of the play’s central themes—is circulated by the rabid animals packing and kenneling across the play’s language, as well as by the “currish” actions of its characters. Shakespeare spreads the mad animal around, confounding the audience’s attempt to focus on anyone’s particular madness by subtly attaching it to several characters at once. In this reading Lear is less a play

Erica Sheen, “‘Why Should a Dog, a Horse, a Rat, Have Life, and Thou No Breath at All?’: Shakespeare’s Animations,” in Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Erica Fudge (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 87–100; Michael Neill, “‘The Little Dogs and All’: Ceremony, Nakedness, Shame, and the Deconsecration of Kingship in King Lear,” in Shakespeare’s World/World Shakespeares, ed. Richard Fotheringham et al. (University of Delaware Press, 2008), 31–57. 5 This chapter is indebted to Gail Paster’s description of the passions as ecological in Humoring the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Though her focus is neither madness nor contagion, Paster details a dynamic interaction in which the bodily humors and the external environment engage in a recursive relationship of mutual influence—what she calls “the psychophysiology of bodily fluids”: “circumstance engenders humors in the body and humors in the body help determine circumstance by predisposing the individual subject to a characteristic kind of evaluation and response” (14). My argument differs from hers both in degree—mental illness is ecological (not just the passions)—and, in kind, as I am also concerned with moments during which extreme passions become indistinct from their seeming antithesis, reason.

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about a mad king than it is about the difficulty of distinguishing between madness and sanity, and of isolating madness to any single bodymind. Rather than give us an obvious explanation of what it means to be mad, Lear is saturated with several madnesses whose sources are made indistinct and multiple. In just the first act, Lear’s madness is simultaneously a product of old age (1.1.287), a lack of self-knowledge (1.1.291–292), a symptom of a greater social ailment (“The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash” [1.1.293]), and a failed attempt to secure manly composure around women who could “shake [his] manhood thus” (1.4.274). Whether displacing madness’ source or describing it as a deadly pathogen, the signifiers of Shakespeare’s airborne madness travel across the play’s imagery and dramatic action, passing among the characters and seeping into the audience’s eyes and ears. In spite of the variety of madnesses wildly whirling around Lear’s language, early modern performance conventions encourage the audience and critics to classify madness, like modern psychiatrists enumerating the behavioral symptoms of mental illness. Rather than note the difficulty of understanding what madness is and whom it possesses, critics—with painstaking precision—try both to locate exactly when Lear is officially mad and to diagnose why he is mad at that moment. Maurice Charney says that Lear is “not fully mad” until 4.6—the only scene, he says, that shows this maximum madness—because the stage direction “Enter Lear mad” appears, and Lear’s speech becomes strange and non-linear.6 Kendra Preston Leonard notes three tropes that allow us to know Lear is mad: “his obsession with Poor Tom’s nonexistent daughters, who represent his own three children (beginning at 3.4.52); his act of stripping (3.4.115); and his persistence in thinking Poor Tom is an ancient philosopher (beginning at 3.4.162).”7 After giving us an exact line when Lear turns mad (3.4.62), Carol Thomas Neely argues that Lear is mad because his speech is similar to Shakespeare’s other (questionably or feigning) mad characters: “The construction of Lear’s mad discourse, like that

6 Maurice Charney, Shakespeare’s Style (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 121. 7 Kendra Preston Leonard, Shakespeare, Madness, and Music: Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2009), 99.

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of Ophelia and Poor Tom, involves fragmentation, formula, depersonalization, the intersection of communal voices, and secularized ritual.”8 This range of critical disagreement over when and why Lear is mad is an example of the conceptual trouble Lear gives its audience—which is both beckoned to and prevented from making quick diagnostic decisions about madness.9 The play makes diagnosing madness difficult not only because madness is pluralized and itinerant, but also because Lear blurs the madness/reason binary by making madness seem reasonable. The traditional association between madness and animals—Edgar describes Poor Tom as “the basest and most poorest shape / That ever penury, in contempt of man, / Brought near to beast” (2.3.7–9)—is undercut by the play’s establishment of a kind of pan-bestiality10 ; though the explicitly mad characters are described as animal, so is everybody else.11 Madness in Lear is humanized, ironically, because all humans are bestialized. As the play repeatedly attributes brutish qualities to humans, bizarre rabies symptoms—expressing the threat of human/animal fungibility—appear progressively more reasonable. Rabies is not only a contagious madness, but also an image that enables the audience to challenge their assumptions about the ease with which they can parse mental wellness from illness. Apart from making the bestial symptoms of rabies seem reasonable, Lear subverts reason/madness distinctions by making madness sound reasonable. Logical structures are installed in Lear’s mad speeches that are impressively poetic—based on an aggregation of noises and 8 Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 63. 9 For additional critics who make claims about when and why Lear is mad, see Kenneth S. Jackson, Separate Theaters: Bethlem (“Bedlam”) Hospital and the Shakespearean Stage (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005); Parneet Jaggi, “Consciousness to Dissolution: The Insane Prodigies of Shakespeare,” New Academia: An International Journal of English Language Literature and Literary Theory 3.1 (2014): 1–7; and Danielle A. St. Hilaire, “Pity and the Failures of Justice in Shakespeare’s King Lear,” Modern Philology 113.4 (2016): 482–506. 10 Foucault famously says, “It has doubtless been essential to Western culture to link, as it has done, its perception of madness to the iconographic forms of the relation of man to beast.” See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (London: Tavistock Publications Limited, 1967), 77. 11 For a more comprehensive catalogue of Lear’s animals, see Laurie Shannon, “Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism, and the Natural History of ‘King Lear,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 60.2 (2009): 195.

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themes rather than denotative value. Even Poor Tom’s feigned mad speeches—veritable echo-chambers—are exceptionally dense with rhetorical figures and aural patterns: “Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water” (3.4.119– 120). The long “o” of “Poor” repeats in “toad” and “tadpole”; the short “o” sound of “Tom” reappears in “frog,” “wall,” and “water”; there is the baffling alliterative (sonically similar) yet antithetical (materially opposite) “wall/water,” and a slew of other reverberations: that/eats/tadpole/water, Poor/(tad)pole, toad/tad(pole), Poor [Tom] / [tad] pole (i.e. a PT/TP chiastic structure), “swim/ming” (likewise chiastic), “Pour” Tom/swimming frog/water [newt]/tadpo[o]le.12 The play’s emphasis on this musical rationality of madness travels to other characters, such as the Fool, whose implicit lack of wisdom and mental stability is offset by the logical organization and proverbial clout of his rhyming songs. Ultimately I will argue, on one hand, that madness is radically diversified and spreads pathogenically between characters and, on the other, that madness is frequently not madness (i.e. “madness” understood as abnormality, intellectual nonsense, or stupor) because it is mixed with reason. These discussions about the simultaneous dispersion and obfuscation of the term “madness” may allow us to dwell on the extent to which we can elide the difference between early modern madness and modern constructions of mental illness—categorizing the former as disability—as Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood hesitatingly do: Shakespeare’s creative output encompasses a broad range of disabled selfhoods: it moves across a spectrum from bodily to metaphysical disfigurement, ranging from instances of blindness to limping, from alcoholism to excessive fat, from infertility to war wounds, from cognitive impairments to epilepsy, from senility to ‘madness,’ and from feigned disability to actual.13 12 The “pool” in “tadpo[o]le” is an inevitable mashup of “Poor/pour [Tom]” and [tad]pole. “Poor” influences “pole” due both to shared alliteration and assonance, and to the ensuing water imagery; i.e. “pole” receives an extra, spectral “o” because of the “Poo” in “Poor,” in the same way that—in this quote—“tadpole” resonates as “t[o]adpole” because it follows shortly after the “toad” (and furthermore because tadpoles are the offspring of toads). 13 Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 11.

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I suggest that if we consider madness or “‘madness’” (to quote Hobgood and Wood) disabling in Lear—it certainly is sometimes—then we should think about how this disability operates differently than our contemporary understanding of mental illness as disability in two important registers. First, madness in Lear is a disability that travels among people rather than simply an individual’s impairment. Second, its questionable visibility and trafficking with its able other, reason, renders it a disability that paradoxically blurs distinctions between ability/disability. Rather than merely a disabled selfhood, Lear’s early modern rabid madness—in its forging of sympathetic relations between various bodyminds—is a disability to which modern medical prognoses of mental illness ought to aspire.

A Brief History of Doggish Madness The play, as I noted, says dogs are mad. And Shakespeare links its characters by comparing several of them to dogs at one point or another. Oswald is called “whoreson / dog” and “cur!”14 (1.4.69–70), “son and heir of a mongrel bitch” (2.2.19), as well as the type of person who “turn[s] their halcyon beaks / With every gale and vary of their masters, / Knowing naught, like dogs, but following” (2.2.70–72); however, the be-stocked Kent (Oswald’s nemesis) compares himself to “[Regan’s] father’s dog” (2.2.128) and the Fool then says Kent’s restrained state is like that of a dog “tied […] by the neck” (2.4.8). Whereas Goneril and Regan “flattered […] like a dog” (4.6.95–97) and like “Lady the brach [‘bitch’] may stand by the fire and stink” (1.4.96), Lear likens Cordelia—their seeming antithesis—to a dog: “Why should a dog […] have life / And thou no breath at all?” (5.3.305–306). Lear himself is like Cordelia’s “enemy’s dog” (4.7.36). In addition to both drinking pond scum and eating

14 In Lear there is a mysterious appearance of an exceptionally minor character—who oddly appears in the main list of characters—named Curan (emphasis mine). He appears at the beginning of 2.1, gives less than ten lines telling Edmund both that Regan and Cornwall are visiting and that there is a potential war between Cornwall and Albany, and then vanishes forever. R. A. Foakes, editor of The Arden Lear, suggests Shakespeare “may have initially envisaged a larger part for him” and inquires about Curan’s namesake: “The name could be a version of Ciaran; a noted sixth-century abbot of this name was made a saint” (p. 156). I want to suggest it is also possible both that the name gets more emphasis because of his minor appearance and lack of lines, and that this name is yet one of the many perverse dispersions of “curs.” “Curan” acts allegorically in the same way as, say, Eros in Antony and Cleopatra and Seyton in Macbeth.

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cow dung as if it were a crisp salad, Poor Tom also claims to “swallow […] the ditch-dog” (3.4.128). His “madman’s rags,” Edgar says, are beyond doggish—“a semblance / That very dogs disdained” (5.3.186– 187). This subtle scattering of dogs around the play has this effect: these characters are not only like dogs, but they are also like each other (including characters on apparently opposite teams, such as Kent/Oswald or Cordelia/Goneril and Regan). Because dogs signify madness by the third act, these currish humanoids—whether openly declared mad by the play (Lear, for instance) or not (such as Kent)—are all sutured to the iconic image of the mad dog; they may not behave madly (in the manner the play codifies madness), but, due to the infection of subtly repeated metaphor, we are pressured to question their sanity. The play not only describes madness as a contagion that travels between characters through the use of dog metaphors, but also envisions Lear becoming more corporeally infected with doggish madness due to Goneril and Regan’s mistreatment of him. After an anonymous gentleman asks Kent why Lear refuses to visit Cordelia, Kent responds that injury from Goneril and Regan as well as intense shame keep him away from her: A sovereign shame so elbows him; his own unkindness, That stripped her from his benediction, turned her To foreign casualties, gave her dear rights To his dog-hearted daughters, these things sting His mind so venomously, that burning shame Detains him from Cordelia. (4.3.41–46)

Kent describes Lear’s “sovereign shame” in terms of infection—“these things sting / His mind so venomously”—and the phrase itself linguistically represents the process of infection by connecting words using “in”: the “in” from “unkindness” spreads like venom to “these things sting / his mind so venomously, that burning shame / detains.” The repeating of the “in” not only shows how words begin to infect one another during madness (they also do, as I shall detail, in Lear’s seemingly mad speech), but also exemplifies the pressure and ferocity of the shame, which stuffs itself into the very marrow of words with an insistent, sustained “in.” Though this shame may appear a byproduct of “these things” (personal unkindness, giving away rights, and Goneril and Regan’s behavior), the proximity of “dog-hearted daughters” to

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“these things”—along with the fact that “unkindness” is singular (it is a “thing”)—push the reader to affiliate the canine Goneril and Regan with the venomous sting that provokes madness.15 Ultimately, the play imagines Lear’s ostensibly shame-induced madness as Goneril and Regan contaminating Lear with a dog’s poison. The association between these two currish sisters and canine toxins is part of a larger network of imagery that connects them both— but especially Goneril—to envenomed and deadly teeth. The “gilded serpent” (5.3.85) Goneril, who poisons her sister in the play’s final scene, contaminates Lear with madness due to filial ingratitude “sharper than a serpent’s tooth” (1.4.265); this “sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture” (2.4.128) that Lear says pierces his heart stems from the brutality, Gloucester claims, of Goneril’s “boarish fangs” (3.7.59). Goneril’s serpentine, porcine, and avian incisors are metonymically connected to the rabid dog’s poisonous cuspids, all of which further fortify the overarching motif of madness infectiously trespassing the skin and infiltrating the brains. Though Lear affords us sympathy for the two sisters—they too fear contagious madness, that of “a hundred knights and squires; / Men so disordered, so deboshed and bold, / That this our court / infected with their manners, / Shows like a riotous inn” (1.4.216–219, emphasis mine)—the play primarily emphasizes the mental distress caused by their diseased teeth. Goneril and Regan’s currish sickness invades Lear’s bodymind and then travels around the play, breaking down structures of gender and individuality that were once self-contained. The male/female division corrodes from the dog sisters’ bite as Lear becomes less anatomically male throughout the play.16 Lear loses his “rod” (1.4.149–151), the Fool says, as he relinquishes his regal scepter to his daughters and—calling Lear a “shealed peascod” (1.4.174)—the Fool famously suggests the excision of Lear’s peas from his codpiece; Lear’s madness is eventually described as

15 One might consider, too, that as Lear becomes a “nothing” (1.4.171) by giving away his crown, Goneril and Regan, by contrast, increasingly become “things.” 16 For other discussions of Lear’s unorthodox imaginings of gender, see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers (New York: Routledge, 1992), 103–130; Peter Rudnytsky, “‘The Darke and Vicious Place’: The Dread of the Vagina in King Lear,” Modern Philology 96.3 (1999): 291–311; and Kathryn Schwarz, What You Will (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 181–207.

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categorically uterine mental despair: Hysteria passio (2.4.55).17 In addition to the blurring of gender divisions, the initial bite spreads to other characters such as Gloucester who, unmanned like Lear, in 3.7 gets his eyeballs—the “precious stones” (5.3.189) Edgar mentions—plucked out and pulverized into a slack jelly-like goo. Gloucester’s blindness is analogized with Lear’s madness, which initially lies dormant in Goneril and Regan’s frothing mouths and, after having been injected into Lear, turns epidemic: “’Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind,” Gloucester tells the Old Man (4.1.47).18 This diseased melding of subjectivities even ambushes Kent, who becomes both Edgar-like by running around in disguise throughout the play and Cornwall-like in his aggression and violence towards the sycophantic Oswald in 2.2. And, as I noted before, all subjectivities seem to dissolve as several of Lear’s characters devolve into doggish creatures. Why is Edgar a “dog in madness”? Why are dogs mad rather than, say, bats or squirrels? One reason, as Edgar notes in his epic catalogue of the hounds he will ward away from Lear (3.6.62–70), is that dogs may have a “Tooth that poisons if it bite” (3.6.64). “Rabies” is etymologically connected to madness and comes from the Latin rabere, which means “to rage, rave, [and] be mad.”19 In ancient Greece, rabies was called Lyssa or Lytta—which meant madness20 ; lyssa may be linked to lykos or wolf (an animal sometimes considered a type of dog in the seventeenth century).21 Early modern English Physician Thomas Spackman, author

17 For both a thorough editorial history of Lear’s “hysteria passio” and a fascinating

discussion of how Shakespeare appropriates the phrase from the Samuel Harsnett antiexorcism tract, see Kaara L. Peterson, “Historica Passio: Early Modern Medicine, King Lear, and Editorial Practice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 57.1 (2006): 1–22. 18 For a critique of the connection between madness and blindness through the lens of modern disability theory, see Robert B. Pierce, “‘I Stumbled When I Saw’: Interpreting Gloucester’s Blindness in King Lear,” Philosophy and Literature 36 (2012): 155. 19 See “rabies, n.” OED Online. September 2014. Oxford University Press. 20 George M. Baer, The Natural History of Rabies (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1991), 1.

For other historical accounts of rabies, see Henry Carter, “The History of Rabies,” Veterinary History 9.1 (1996): 21–29; Kenneth F. Kiple, The Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003); Laura Sumrall, “Aristotelian Methodology in Renaissance Science: Analyzing Andrea Bacci’s Treatise on Rabies” (Thesis, University of Southern Mississippi, 2012). 21 See Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 16. For debates about whether a

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of the most rigorous early-seventeenth-century medical treatise on rabies, A Declaration of such grievous accidents as commonly follow the biting of mad Dogges, together with the cure thereof (1613), also points out the connection between rabies and madness: “This kind of madnesse is called […] in latine Rabies, or Furor […]. The greek word mania doth also signify furorem, furie, but that is such a maner of fury as belongeth to reasonable creatures, rather then bruit beasts.”22 The primary symptom of rabies is similar to that provoked by Lear’s fear of “women’s weapons, water-drops” (2.2.466). “Hydrophobia,” another early modern term for rabies, has this medically frustrating trait: “although the sicke therof be extreamly tormented with thirst and heat, yet doe they so wonderfully abhorre and feare the sight, yea (as some haue obserued) the very noise or speech of water and other drinke, as they will in no wise taste thereof, but tremble and quake when they looke on it, and therefore by all meanes auoid it.”23 Consequently, doctors such as Stephen Bradwell alleviated hydrophobia by prescribing violent cures—a minor suffocation that Bradwell calls “Water-Torture” which, if done correctly, forces water up the patient’s nose—in order to make the parched rabid drink.24 Any historian of “doggish madness” will note this startling symptom: the rabid human will start behaving like a dog. Royal French physician Ambroise Paré gives this description of the currish symptoms: they still think of dogs, and seem to see them, yea and desire to bark and bite just after the maner of dogs; I conjecture that the virulent humour hath changed all the humours & the whole body into the like nature, so that they think themselves also dogs; whence their voice becomes hoarse by much endevouring to barke, having forgot all decencie, like impudent dogs, to the great horrour of the beholders. For their voice growes hoarse by reason of the great drynesse of the aspera arteria.25

wolf was a wild dog or a dog was a docile wolf, see Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-footed Beastes (London, 1607), 736–737. 22 Spackman, Declaration of Such Grievous Accidents , 11. 23 Ibid., 11. 24 Stephen Bradwell, Helps for Suddain Accidents Endangering Life (London, 1633), 70–71. 25 Ambroise Paré, The Workes of That Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey (London, 1634), 786–787.

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The rabid patient’s “endevouring to barke, having forgot all decencie, like impudent dogs” represents the fluid human/beast binary we saw when multiple characters in Lear metaphorically transform into foaming canines. This rabid metamorphosis does not necessarily have to be only human/dog. According to rabies expert Thomas Spackman, animals besides dogs can contract rabies, but a dog has to bite the other beast first. Spackman notes that morphing into a beast because of a mad dog’s slaver is cumulative; the unsuspecting host twists into a grotesque hybrid of the two animals. Mentioning a “certaine Gardiner” who was “upon the sodaine […] assailed with an old red cocke, and bitten by him on the lefthand,” Spackman warns the reader that “the very same day [the gardener] shewed his teeth and grinned like a dogge, and straight after he offered to leape like a fighting cocke, at such as were neere him, with fierce staring eyes.”26 The performances of human/animal shapeshifting in this medical text and in Lear vividly illustrate the interchange between early modern rhetorics of dramaturgy and pathology. Lear, however, reframes Spackman’s spectacular tale by standardizing beastly behavior that medical knowledge deems symptomatic. The human–dog or human–dog–rooster transformation inspired by toxic canine spittle may have seemed less perverse during the early modern period because the potential for animality was internal to every human. Though humans were often figured as antithetical to animals because humans have rational faculties, as Erica Fudge explains in her rigorous survey of Renaissance human/beast relations, Aristotle’s tripartite understanding of the human soul included the animal’s soul: There are in the Aristotelian model three different kinds of soul—vegetative, sensitive, and rational—a trinity that is also discussed in terms of the binary of the organic (vegetative and sensitive) and the inorganic (the rational). The vegetative soul is shared by plants, animals, and humans and is the cause of nutrition, growth, and reproduction: all natural— unthought—actions. The sensitive soul is possessed by animals and humans alone (plants have only the vegetative soul) and is the source of perception and movement. The rational soul houses the faculties that make up reason—including will, intellect, and intellective memory—and is only found in humans.27

26 Spackman, Declaration, 13. 27 Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning (New York: Cornell University Press, 2006), 8.

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Because the sensitive soul is shared by humans and animals, the human is both in a constant state of potentially “becoming animal,” as Fudge says, and has to put in significant work to become human.28 As when many of Lear’s main characters figuratively mutate into mad beasts, the early modern soul’s inherently bestial qualities mark madness, oddly, as a ubiquitous emotional continuum on which everyone is susceptible to degeneration, rather than an animal other.29 The need to control endemic animality was not limited to the regulation of souls—especially when a person fell victim to rabies. The rabid body and its functions were meticulously scrutinized by medical theorists, who scoured its wastes for evidence of animal intrusion. According to melancholy anatomist Robert Burton, for example, people infected with rabies possibly pissed puppies: to lye awake, to be pensiue sad, to see strange Visions, to barke and howle, to fall into a sown, and sometimes fittes of the Falling Sicknesse. Some say that little things like whelpes will be seen in their vrines. If any of these signes appeare, they are past recouery.30

Burton’s description of this rabid patient’s painful, monstrous micturition is an example of the internalization—and subsequent evacuation—of the beast. These urologic concerns and liquid-based phantasms persisted as an international problem throughout the seventeenth century, appearing not only in medical treatises, such as Jacques Grévin’s Deux Livres des Venins (1568), that catalogue poisonous serpents, stingrays, and salamanders.31 In a letter marked January 29, 1640, Descartes debated the reality of this post-rabies-whelpy-discharge, or as he calls it, “les effigies des petits chiens qu’on dit paraître dans l’urine de ceux qui ont

28 Fudge, Reasoning, 60. 29 I am borrowing the idea of a “continuum” of madness from Anne Wilson and Peter

Beresford, who consider mental health and illness as part of a gradual, fluctuating scale on which everyone finds themselves. See Peter Beresford and Anne Wilson, “Madness, Distress and Postmodernity: Putting the Record Straight,” in Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, eds. Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare (Bloomsbury Academic, 2002), 144. 30 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621), 14. 31 Grévin, Deux livres des venins, 168–169.

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été mordus par des chiens enragés.”32 Though perhaps not as seminal as Descartes, Marin Mersenne—mathematician, music theorist, and friend of Descartes—suggests in La Vérité des Sciences that the rabid may see puppies in their semen.33 Not only is the animal sensitive soul capable of infecting the human rational one, the contagion of tainted canine saliva also may be able to impregnate a human’s seedy, pissy fluids with awful dog spawn. These heated excremental discussions show that—though the madness of rabies’ symptoms was a contested matter—defining madness often concerned locating beasts and their internal/external relationships to the human. In addition to detailing sickly patients warping into frothing curs and hallucinating litters of dog offspring in their bodily secretions, medical descriptions about rabies—as in the above passage by Ambroise Paré— frequently point out how the rabid sound like a dog. Proto-zoologist Edward Topsell, for example, lists these symptoms: “Men thus affected, feare al waters, their virile member continually standeth, they suffer many conuulsions, and oftentimes barke like dogs.”34 Topsell offers an anecdote about “a certaine Mason at Zuricke, who had his finger greeuously bitten with a madde Dog” and who subsequently began to make doggish noises: “when he felt any colde ayre, hee cried out for feare it had bin water, thus he remained trembling, and offering to vomit at the sight of water, many times howling, and so perished after two daies ended.”35 Physician Stephen Bradwell writes of the deadly consequences of a rabid human’s sickly woof: “when once he comes to barke like a Dogge, to hate the light, and sight of all shining metalls and looking-glasses; as also to feare water, & all other kindes of liquors (which Symptoms at last doth follow such bitings hitherto uncured) he is held to be past cure.”36 In his treatise about the existence of ghosts (1572), Ludwig Lavater mentions that the hydrophobic sometimes “barke like Doggs, and bite them that come vnto them.”37 Central to Topsell, Bradwell, and Lavater is the fear that rabies will make the human voice “hoarse” and reduce it to an 32 Jean Th´eodorid`es, Histoire de la rage: Cave Canem (Paris: Masson, 1986), 81. 33 Ibid. 34 Topsell, The Historie of Foure-footed Beastes, 185. 35 Ibid. 36 Bradwell, Helps for Suddain Accidents, 58. 37 Ludwig Lavater, Of Ghostes and Spirites, Walking by Night (London, 1596), 12.

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incomprehensible lupine ululation like Lear’s reverberating “howl, howl, howl, howl!” (5.3.256). Madness in Lear is often expressed by contagious animal noise.

Sounding the Hound Rabies’ devolving of the human voice to a paralinguistic barking or woofing has etymologic precedents. “Rabies” is related to words that suggest a garbling of language or voice. In Sir Thomas Elyot’s famous Latin-English dictionary, rabies appears near “Rabula,” which means “one whiche is hasty or wylfull, in any cause, ianglynge, or full of wordes.”38 “Rabula” which, according to the OED, is derived from “rabies,” marks the intersection of indecipherable speech, animality, and—in its association with “rabble”—poverty.39 Edward Topsell points out how rabies historically suggested an upsetting of the voice: “the ancients haue deriued Rabiem, of Rauiem, madnesse, of the hoarsnes of voice, (because a Dog at that time hath no perfect voice.).”40 In a delightfully coy litotes, Montaigne says that those bitten by mad dogs will have “no great constancie of discourse” and points out how rabies will stupefy even the smartest philosophers: “The spittle or slavering of a mastive dog shed vpon Socrater his hands, to trouble all his wisdome, to distemper his great and regular immaginations, and so to vanquish and annull them, that no signe or shew of his former knowledge was left in him.”41 The currish Lear’s speech in 4.6 may seem—like Montaigne’s rabid Socrates—a disintegration of his knowledge when the content of what he says sporadically bounces from cheese-starved mice, to an adulterous “small gilded fly,” to a hypocritical clergyman whipping a prostitute whom he himself “hotly lusts to use” (4.6.86–156). I submit, however, that though the “hasty or wylfull […] ianglynge […] of wordes,” the “hoarsnes of voice,” and lack of “constancie of discourse” that we see in the above descriptions of rabies represent the voices of the allegedly and spuriously mad characters in Lear, there is an 38 Sir Thomas Elyot, Bibliotheca Eliotae Eliotis librarie (London, 1542), n.p. 39 The word “rabula,” according to the OED, “was derived by ancient authors from

rabies” and “sometimes taken (by folk etymology) to be related to rabble.” OED Online. September 2014. Oxford University Press. 40 Topsell, The Historie of Foure-footed Beastes, 184. 41 Michel de Montaigne, Essays (London, 1613), 309.

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internal logic to “mad-speak” in the play based both on sonic resonances and aggregation of themes, rather than linear causality or denotative value. Though this speech is never directly called “rabid,” it is certainly the byproduct of “rage”—the “high rage” (2.4.291) that propels Lear out to the heath, the “ungoverned rage” (4.4.20) Cordelia begs the Doctor to cure, and the “great rage” that is eventually “killed in him” (4.79–80); “rage” not only is a cognate of rabies (both come from the Latin rabia), but also, in the seventeenth century, is synonymous with rabies.42 Here is an example of a rabidly enraged speech—a superbly rational one, as I will argue—that appears after Lear shows up wearing a crown of flowers and starts madly ranting43 : Lear Nature’s above art in that respect. There’s your Press-money. That fellow handles his bow like a crowKeeper: draw me a clothier’s yard. Look, look, a mouse: Peace, peace, this piece of toasted cheese will do’t. There’s my gauntlet, I’ll prove it on a giant. Bring up The brown bills. O well flown, bird, i’the clout, i’the Clout! Hewgh! Give the word. (4.6.86–92)

In this dangerously poetic mad speech, Shakespeare boldly presumes that speakers’ and listeners’ associations among words may be the effects of arbitrarily similar, ruthlessly contagious sounds and letters rather than an intentional drive toward reference. For instance, the “O” repeated in “O well flown” is padded by a series of sonic repetitions: (fellow/bow/crow/clothier/toasted). The “ow” in “flown” comes from these typographic echoes: (O well/fellow/bow/crow/word). “Peace,” obviously, is a homophone for “piece” and rhymes with “cheese” (among other rhymes, such as bird/word and fellow/bow/crow). “Gauntlet” rhymes with “prove it” and “do’t” and both rhymes and alliterates with “giant” (among other alliterations in the speech, such as bring/brown/bills/bird). The passage is also thematically organized, for example, around birds and money. The word “bills” alerts us to both the “press-money” mentioned before, as well as the “bird” and “crow” 42 See definition “4.c” for “rage, n.” OED Online. August 2018. Oxford University Press. 43 For another example of a seeming mad speech that is chock-full of densely compacted sonic and orthographic resonances, see Tom o’ Bedlam’s speech, 3.4.50–60.

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(both of which have beaks—or “bills”); this reading of “bills” as beaks is reinforced by the alphabetical echo of “brown bills” after “crow.” These ornithologico-pecuniary themes repeat, seemingly arbitrarily, in Lear’s following speeches.44 Though Lear performs the degeneration of speech to noise that we saw staged in the aforementioned descriptions of rabies, it critiques these strict associations between madness and incomprehensibility by making infectious mad-speak tightly organized and exceptionally reasonable. As the audience listens to this seemingly mad speech, they are positioned and forced to undergo a series of viciously dynamic mental acrobatics in order to even begin cultivating understanding. Lear’s rabulous mad-speak explodes the meaning of words with quick jabs of similar sounds, questionably consequential ricochets of letters, and non-diegetic thematic recurrences. In other words, birds and money do not necessarily have anything to do with the plot of Lear. They act as an organizing principle to help make this surely mad speech seem to make sense. Apart from fumbling to keep their thoughts and words distinct amongst a blast and crackle of doubling noises and letters, the audience has to wrap their heads around the distressing thought that the speech repeatedly described as mad by the play sounds logical—logical because auditors detect associations among morphemes and then patterns of sound emerge. Perhaps it is Lear’s putting the audience’s capacity for reason on trial (and on the treadmill) that leads Stephen Booth—who discusses the play’s repeated undermining of our faith in limits, boundaries, and categories— to compare the audience’s thinking to that of the mad characters: “The attractive nuisance of ideational static [in Lear] tempts an audience’s mind within inches of the extravagance which, for differing reasons and with differing effects, is a common denomination of Lear’s thinking, the Fool’s, and Edgar’s as they leap from one frame of reference to another.”45 Lear subverts the madness/reason binary not only by making the audience hear in Lear’s rabid speech—as Edgar says—“matter and

44 More birds: “The wren goes to’t and the small gilded fly / Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive” (4.6.111–112). More money: “Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to / Sweeten my imagination. There’s money for thee […] Oh ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your / Head, nor no money in your purse?” (4.6.126–127 & 4.6.141–142). 45 Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 35.

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impertinency mixed, / Reason in madness” (4.6.170–171), but also by luring the audience towards an experience of contagious madness using the “ideational static” of distracting noise and seemingly meaningless yet rapidly duplicating signification. Analyzing the less traditional early modern analogues of madness in Lear, such as rabies, allows us to reconsider how we discuss other instances of madness in the play and perhaps even early modern madness in general. As the play confuses distinctions between reason and madness by presenting mad sound as reasonably organized, by projecting mad infection across the airscape, and by pressuring several humans (overtly sane or not) to confront and express their mad animality, we should recognize how representations of madness in Lear defy and subvert the very diagnostic categories that the play itself—and its critics following in tow—evoke to pin down madness. As scholars of early modern disability studies progressively include madness as a category of disability, it is important that they consider the quirks of Shakespearean madness.46 Rather than try to pinpoint a single moment of madness in a play, we should explore and perhaps, in so doing, indulge in the various madnesses. Rather than trying to diagnose and confine Shakespearean madness, we should release and spin out its potentiality, analyzing the more questionably negative embodied experience tangentially related to madness such as dreaming during the day, loss of self-awareness, confusion, and compulsion. Rather than solely focusing either on who is mad or what is madness, we might think about the various ways Shakespeare either toys with or aggressively eradicates distinctions between reason and madness. Is Hamlet’s “antic disposition” (1.5.173) real or feigned? How can we know? And what might our wanting to know suggest? What is reasonable about Ophelia’s distraction? And what might be unreasonable about those who witness her madness? Is Othello’s alleged “savage madness” (4.1.52) 46 For additional Shakespearean disability scholarship that focuses on mental disability, see Allison Hobgood, “Caesar Hath the Falling Sickness: The Legibility of Early Modern Disability in Shakespearean Drama,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009), https:// dsq-sds.org/article/view/993/1184; Lindsay Row-Heyveld, “Antic Dispositions: Mental and Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern Revenge Tragedy,” in Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, eds. Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood (Ohio State University Press, 2013), 73–87; and Angela Heetderks, “‘Better a Witty Fool than a Foolish Wit’: Song, Fooling, and Intellectual Disability in Shakespearean Drama,” in Gender and Song in Early Modern England, eds. Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 63–75.

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a representation of early modern racist fears that dark skinned African men are emotionally volatile? Or is it a comment on how Iago’s strategic use of powerful rhetoric may be mind-altering? Is there a difference between madness and error in The Comedy of Errors ? While discussing this particular playwright’s ornate and variegated depictions of madness, we should consider the moments in which Shakespeare enables madness—blowing it open as an indecipherable field of inquiry—rather than focusing only on madness as an easily diagnosable disability.

Works Cited Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. Baer, George M. The Natural History of Rabies. 2nd ed. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1991. Beresford, Peter, and Anne Wilson. “Madness, Distress and Postmodernity: Putting the Record Straight.” In Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, edited by Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, 143–158. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002. Booth, Stephen. King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Bradwell, Stephen. Helps for Suddain Accidents Endangering Life by Which Those That Liue Farre from Physitions or Chirurgions May Happily Preserue the Life of a Poore Friend or Neighbour, Till Such a Man May Be Had to Perfect the Cure. Collected Out of the Best Authours for the Generall Good, by Stephen Bradwell, Physition. London: Printed by Thomas Purfoot, for T. S[later] and are to be sold by Henry Overton in Popes-head Alley, 1633. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy What It Is. With All the Kindes, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Seuerall Cures of It. In Three Maine Partitions with Their Seuerall Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Vp. By Democritus Lunior. With a Satyricall Preface, Conducing to the Following Discourse. Oxford: Printed by Iohn Lichfield and Iames Short, for Henry Cripps, Anno Dom. 1621. Carter, Henry. “The History of Rabies.” Veterinary History 9.1 (1996): 21–29. Charney, Maurice. Shakespeare’s Style. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. Clody, Michael C. “The Mirror and the Feather: Tragedy and Animal Voice in King Lear.” ELH 80.3 (2013): 661–680. Elyot, Thomas, Sir. Bibliotheca Eliotae Eliotis librarie. Londini: In officina Thomae Bertheleti…, M.D.XLII [1542].

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Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. London: Tavistock Publications Limited, 1967. Fudge, Erica. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. ———. “Renaissance Animal Things.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 76 (2012): 86–100. Grévin, Jacques. Deux livres des venins, ausquels il est amplement discouru des bestes venimeuses, thériaques, poisons et contrepoisons … Ensemble les oeuvres de Nicandre, médecin et poëte Grec, traduictes en vers François. Anvers: C. Plantin, 1568. Heetderks, Angela. “‘Better a Witty Fool Than a Foolish Wit’: Song, Fooling, and Intellectual Disability in Shakespearean Drama.” In Gender and Song in Early Modern England, edited by Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson, 63–75. Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Hobgood, Allison P. “Caesar Hath the Falling Sickness: The Legibility of Early Modern Disability in Shakespearean Drama.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/993/1184. Hobgood, Allison P., and David Houston Wood. “Introduction: ‘Disabled Shakespeares.’” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). https://dsq-sds. org/article/view/991/1183. ———. eds. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Höfele, Andreas. “Bestarium Humanum: Lear’s Animal Kingdom.” German Shakespeare Studies at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, edited by Christa Jansohn, 84–101. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006. Iyengar, Sujata, ed. Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. New York: Routledge, 2015. Jackson, Kenneth S. Separate Theaters: Bethlem (“Bedlam”) Hospital and the Shakespearean Stage. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. Jaggi, Parneet. “Consciousness to Dissolution: The Insane Prodigies of Shakespeare.” New Academia: An International Journal of English Language Literature and Literary Theory 3.1 (2014): 1–7. Kiple, Kenneth F. The Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Lavater, Ludwig. Of Ghostes and Spirites, Walking by Night and of Straunge Noyses, Crackes, and Sundrie Forewarnings, Which Commonly Happen Before the Death of Men: Great Slaughters, and Alterations of Kingdomes. One Booke, Written by Lewes Lauaterus of Tigurine. And Translated into English by R.H. Imprinted at London: By Thomas Creede, 1596. Leonard, Kendra Preston. Shakespeare, Madness, and Music: Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2009.

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Montaigne, Michel de. Essays Written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne, Knight of the Order of S. Michael, Gentleman of the French Kings Chamber: Done into English, According to the Last French Edition, by Iohn Florio Reader of the Italian Tongue vnto the Soueraigne Maiestie of Anna, Queene of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, &c. And One of the Gentlemen of Hir Royall Priuie Chamber. London: Printed by Melch. Bradwood for Edward Blount and William Barret, 1613. Neely, Carol Thomas. Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Neill, Michael. “‘The Little Dogs and All’: Ceremony, Nakedness, Shame, and the Deconsecration of Kingship in King Lear.” In Shakespeare’s World/World Shakespeares, edited by Richard Fotheringham, Christa Jansohn, and R. S. White, 31–57. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Paré, Ambroise. The Workes of That Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey Translated Out of Latine and Compared with the French. by Th: Johnson. London, 1634. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Peterson, Kaara L. “Historica Passio: Early Modern Medicine, King Lear, and Editorial Practice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 57.1 (2006): 1–22. Pierce, Robert B. “‘I Stumbled When I Saw’: Interpreting Gloucester’s Blindness in King Lear.” Philosophy and Literature 36 (2012): 153–165. Row-Heyveld, Lindsay. “Antic Dispositions: Mental and Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern Revenge Tragedy.” In Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, edited by Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, 73–87. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Rudnytsky, Peter L. “‘The Darke and Vicious Place’: The Dread of the Vagina in King Lear.” Modern Philology 96.3 (1999): 291–311. Schwarz, Kathryn. What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Shakespeare, William. King Lear, edited by R. A. Foakes. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997. ———. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. ———. Hamlet. In The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. ———. King Lear. In The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

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———. Othello. In The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. ———. The Comedy of Errors. In The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. ———. The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus. New York; London: W. W. Norton, 2008. Shannon, Laurie. “Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism, and the Natural History of King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly 60.2 (2009): 168–196. ———. The Accommodated Animal. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Sheen, Erica. “‘Why Should a Dog, a Horse, a Rat, Have Life, and Thou No Breath at All?’: Shakespeare’s Animations.” In Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, edited by Erica Fudge, 87–100. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Spackman, Thomas. A Declaration of Such Greiuous Accidents as Commonly Follow the Biting of Mad Dogges, Together with the Cure Thereof, by Thomas Spackman Doctor of Physick. London: Printed [at Eliot’s Court Press] for Iohn Bill, 1613. St. Hilaire, Danielle A. “Pity and the Failures of Justice in Shakespeare’s King Lear.” Modern Philology 113.4 (2016): 482–506. Sumrall, Laura. “Aristotelian Methodology in Renaissance Science: Analyzing Andrea Bacci’s Treatise on Rabies.” Thesis, University of Southern Mississippi, 2012. Théodoridès, Jean. Histoire de la rage: Cave Canem. Paris: Masson, 1986. Topsell, Edward. The Historie of Foure-footed Beastes Describing the True and Liuely Figure of Euery Beast, with a Discourse of Their Seuerall Names, Conditions, Kindes, Vertues (Both Naturall and Medicinall) Countries of Their Breed, Their Loue and Hate to Mankinde, and the Wonderfull Worke of God in Their Creation, Preseruation, and Destruction. Necessary for All Diuines and Students, Because the Story of Euery Beast Is Amplified with Narrations Out of Scriptures, Fathers, Phylosophers, Physitians, and Poets: Wherein Are Declared Diuers Hyerogliphicks, Emblems, Epigrams, and Other Good Histories, Collected Out of All the Volumes of Conradus Gesner, and All Other Writers to This Present Day. By Edward Topsell. London: Printed by William Jaggard, 1607. Tutt, Ralph M. “Dog Imagery in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, King Lear, and Timon of Athens.” Serif 1.3 (1964): 15–22. Wasik, Bill, and Monica Murphy. Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus. New York: Penguin Books, 2013.

CHAPTER 9

Limping and Lameness on the Early Modern Stage Susan Anderson

Abstract This chapter explores the interaction between literal and metaphorical meanings of lameness by examining several early modern plays in which lameness is staged and/or a subject of discussion. Through readings of As You Like It, The Fair Maid of the Exchange, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, The Taming of the Shrew, and An Alarum for London, the chapter establishes a range of categories of lameness and shows that, although “lame” as a term is exclusively negative, its pejorative implications do not necessarily apply to characters who are described as lame, or who exhibit “lameness” on stage. The genre of dramatic verse necessitates that we think about the ways in which it might be enacted by real bodies in space and time; textual representation and embodied performance must be considered together if we are to fully understand the way lameness operates. The chapter uses Chris Mounsey’s concept of variability to account for the ways that these examples seem to both invite and resist categorization as “lame.” Through tracing the “steps” taken by poetic feet and walking feet, the essay uncovers the extent to which

S. Anderson (B) Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_9

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these plays maintain lameness as a quality of variability and how far they concretize it into an exclusionary absolute. When Rosalind describes Orlando’s poetry as having “more feet than the verses would bear,” she prepares the ground for a pair of puns on lameness. Responding to Celia’s quip that “the feet might bear the verses,” she replies: Ay, but the feet were lame, and could not bear themselves without the verse, and therefore stood lamely in the verse. (3.2.165–167)1

Clearly lameness is a negative value here, and “lame” poetry an object for gentle patronizing scorn. But “lame” dramatic verse is potentially doubly “lame” because poetic feet do become real feet that stand and walk on the stage. When discussing drama, scholars regularly use idioms like “getting the play on its feet” to refer to acting out passages or scenes. Such phrasing attests to the sense that combining words with action reveals something not present solely on the page. To point this out is hardly revelatory in the context of modern pedagogy.2 However, it is still worth exploring the implications of this way of thinking about drama and embodiment. Reading dramatic verse necessitates that we also think about the ways in which it might be enacted by real bodies, in space, across time. For drama to come into being as drama, both texts and bodies are necessary: bodies that can be read as texts, and texts that become embodied.3 What would it mean for those bodies and/or those texts to be “lame”? To answer this question, I will examine how early modern drama both embodies and describes lameness using Tobin Siebers’ notion of “complex embodiment.” Siebers asserts a “mutually transformative,” or indeed

1 All references to Shakespeare are taken from The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd edition, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 2 See for example James Stredder’s handbook on active learning, The North Face of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 3 Genevieve Love foregrounds the persistence of representativeness in dramatic performance emphasizing theatre as inherently metaphorical in Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2019).

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mutually constitutive, relationship between “the body and its representations.”4 In this respect, disability theory offers an important realignment of cultural theory. As Siebers points out, the emphasis on social constructionism since the 1990s has privileged “performativity over corporeality,” when in fact there is a reciprocal relationship between the two.5 Siebers encourages us to see the body itself as an active participant in the process of constructing identity, describing it as “a biological agent teeming with vital and often unruly forces” that is “as capable of influencing and transforming social languages as they are capable of influencing and transforming us.”6 It follows, therefore, that in dramatic performance the materiality of the body contributes to, enhances, resists, and/or modifies the meanings ascribed to it. This is not to posit the body as an unchanging “natural” or unmediated reality. Rather, it means remembering the reciprocity and interconnectedness of bodies and ideas, materiality and ideals, and feet and verse, and seeking more complex ways of understanding these apparently binary relations. The notion of “variability,” as theorized by Chris Mounsey, presents a more useful approach than a disability/ability binary.7 Variability foregrounds the inevitable variation in human perception and experience of the world through the uniqueness of individual embodiment. Mounsey articulates this idea in the context of calling for a different kind of disability history, focusing upon historical individuals’ experiences on their own terms (rather than in relation to a posited able-bodiedness). This essay explores the ways in which such an argument for “history from below” can be applied to literary texts, especially texts that are literally embodied in performance. As Mitchell and Snyder assert, historical disability studies provides “an important barometer by which to assess shifting values and norms imposed upon the body.”8 In applying this notion to early modern drama, this essay joins a recent wave of scholarship that is widening the focus of 4 Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 25. 5 Ibid., 57. 6 Ibid., 68. 7 Chris Mounsey, “Introduction: Variability: Beyond Sameness and Difference,” in The

Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Chris Mounsey (Plymouth: Bucknell University Press, 2014), 1–27. 8 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 51.

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literary disability studies both in terms of historical period and genre, and going beyond Richard III as the focus for analysis.9 Siebers himself in a recent essay outlined the ways in which Ophelia and Falstaff can be considered examples of “disability” as “neither a condition of a person nor a construct of an oppressive environment, but a complex embodiment involving the mutual transformation between the body and its environment.”10 This essay will show that combining Siebers’ “complex embodiment” with the idea of variability is a productive way to approach drama as a genre. Lennard Davis used the novel as the exemplary form to show the ways that literature is specifically implicated in constructing disability. Unlike epic and poetry, which, according to Davis, represent idealizations, characters in novels are “embodied in specific bodies”, and thus construct ways in which real bodies should behave and react.11 It seems curious to ground this argument in prose, rather than drama, where actual bodies enact the practices and behaviours being constructed as normative. Although all literary genres engage with bodily identity and its limits in some way, drama foregrounds complex embodiment as the very medium through which it makes its claims. As Mounsey puts it, “no one is totally ‘able’ … and no one totally ‘disabled’,”12 and drama offers the opportunity to examine how variability affects our readings of characters and their construction in both body and word. To examine the interaction between ideas about lameness and its manifestations in particular bodies in early modern drama, I begin with some potential definitions, exploring how the term and its cognates are used across several dramatic and poetic texts, and its close association with age and slowness. I then discuss two very dissimilar plays: A Larum for London and The Fair Maid of the Exchange. Both include lame characters, 9 See, for example, Hobgood and Wood’s special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly focusing on Shakespeare in 2009; Hobgood and Wood, eds., Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013); Sujata Iyengar, ed., Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (New York: Routledge, 2015). 10 Siebers, Tobin, “Shakespeare Differently Disabled,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 448. 11 Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 45. 12 Mounsey, “Variability,” 16.

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and refer to lameness at the very outset, demonstrating contrasting examples of the range of meanings made possible by the interaction between ideas about lameness and the performance of it. I then reflect on the interaction between the metrical qualities of verse and the bodily qualities of the characters who speak it in The Shoemaker’s Holiday. I conclude by discussing lameness in recent performances and criticism of The Taming of the Shrew, and what this suggests about the relationship between textual evidence and physical embodiment. These examples all demonstrate the inseparable interconnectedness of body, word, and meaning in early modern drama, and its fundamental variability.

Defining Lameness As Sagal notes, despite widespread use, the term “lame” is especially ambiguous “both in terms of location,” that is, “what precise injury renders the subject ‘lame’?” and in terms of its “duration or state of permanence.”13 Despite this vagueness, it is unmistakably negative in the way that it is used. This much is clear from repeated associations with ugliness (e.g. Constance’s speech in King John where she lists “lame” alongside “Ugly … / Full of unpleasing blots and sightless stains,” and explicitly opposes it with “fair” [2.2.44–51]). References to lameness and limping in Shakespeare’s sonnets are invariably part of their selfdeprecation, where the poet positions himself as at a disadvantage to a lover who outranks him in class, wealth, beauty, and youthful vigour (Sonnets 37, 66, and 89 in particular). The clearest association Shakespeare makes with lameness is old age. The strength of the conceptual link between “old” and “lame” makes the two terms almost a hendiadys. The principle is articulated in the quasi-proverbial “Youth is nimble, age is lame” of The Passionate Pilgrim (12.6), which aligns nimbleness and lameness with a list of other binary oppositions. The poem maps the distinction between youth and age onto, on the one hand, speed and dexterity, and on the other, slowness and immobility, and this pattern of associations is illustrated amply throughout the canon.

13 Anna K. Sagal, “Disability, Trauma, and Language in Tristram Shandy,” in The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Chris Mounsey (Plymouth: Bucknell University Press 2014), 108–109.

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In As You Like It , Adam’s description of saving for retirement invokes the expectation that age is inevitably accompanied by lameness as a state of debility. I have five hundred crowns, The thrifty hire I sav’d under your father, Which I did store to be my foster-nurse, When service should in my old limbs lie lame. (2.3.39–42)

Adam views disability as an inevitable stage of human development. As Siebers puts it, “being human guarantees that all other identities will eventually come into contact with some form of disability identity.”14 Adam’s concerns show, however, that disability is more complex than physical change. The line “When service should in my old limbs lie lame” transfers lameness from its literal manifestation in the body to the notion of service. Adam anticipates that his physical condition will interfere with his ability to perform the service he is obliged to render his master. There is no concomitant expectation of reciprocal care here. Adam’s thrift eschews communal responsibility in favour of one-sided self-sufficiency; one-sided because it only applies to those who already work for their living. Orlando, by contrast, expects that he should, on adulthood, ascend to the life of a gentleman. Thus, lameness is inflected through social class as well as the physical condition of an aged body. The play counters Adam’s fears with a paternalistic vision of aristocrats looking after their vulnerable followers. Orlando famously carries Adam when he can no longer walk, and Duke Senior responds magnanimously to Orlando’s (initially threatening) appeal for sustenance. This appeal is itself at least partly on Adam’s behalf, whom Orlando describes as “an old poor man / Who after me hath many a weary step / Limped in pure love” (2.7.128–130). Adam’s limp here derives primarily from the fact that, as established in 2.6, he is famished. His efforts to keep up with his younger, stronger master are read by Orlando as “pure love.” Limping is the physical manifestation of Adam’s exhaustion, exacerbated by age, but it is also a legible sign of his devotion to Orlando. Adam’s older, lamer self is operating at a reduced speed. Timon’s cursing of the Athenians demonstrates the axiomatic connection between slowness and lameness: 14 Siebers, Disability Theory, 5.

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Thou cold sciatica, Cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt As lamely as their manners. (Timon of Athens , 4.1.23–25)

Timon wishes for physical affliction to match the senators’ moral deficiency—a familiar trope of physical impairment as a metaphor for wickedness. But Timon does not just insist that halting limbs match halting manners. His wish is that the enforced slowness of the sciatic body transfers onto the senators Timon’s frustration and pain. To halt, as a way of describing the uncertain, difficult and slow steps of aged bodies, is another frequent association with lameness, as suggested by the proverbial “You halt before you are lame.”15 That is, a halting quality of movement is a signifier of lameness that should follow becoming lame. Halting movement is somewhere between moving and not moving, progress and stopping. This lexical ambiguity means that “halt” becomes a contronym: it means both to stop completely, and to continue (albeit slowly and tentatively).16 Richard III invokes this association between physical difference and slowness when he blames “some tardy cripple” for the death of his brother Clarence, asserting that they must have been “too lag” with the countermand to stop his execution (2.1.90–91). Characteristically, Richard’s verbal trickery here both signals and conceals that not only is he the one responsible for Clarence’s death but he is also deftly out-manoeuvring everyone on stage at this point. Juliet also links slowness and lameness when, tired of awaiting the Nurse’s return, she exclaims: O, she is lame! love’s heralds should be thoughts, Which ten times faster glides than the sun’s beams. (Romeo and Juliet. 2.5.4–5)

She attributes this frustrating slowness to the Nurse’s age: But old folks, many feign as they were dead; Unwieldy, slow, heavy and pale as lead. (2.5.16–17)

15 Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), H57. 16 See “halt, v.1,” OED Online, December 2015, Oxford University Press.

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The reversed foot on “heavy” interrupts the meter, slowing down the line’s delivery. It also introduces a corresponding “lameness” of the poetic foot by disrupting the iambic rhythm, textually embodying what Juliet perceives to be the Nurse’s dragging feet. Notwithstanding recent attempts to rehabilitate the concept by the “slow food movement,” or even “slow scholarship,”17 the term “slow,” when applied to the intellect or body, is overwhelmingly negative. Lameness’s associations with problematic slowness become figuratively transferred to language in moments like that in The Winter’s Tale, where the 3rd Gentleman avoids describing Leontes’ reunion with Perdita, claiming “I never heard of such another encounter, which lames report to follow it and undoes description to do it” (5.2.55–57). The parallelism here suggests that lameness negates following in the same way that “undoes” negates doing. The locution is rather tangled, contributing to the sense that such unlikely events are beyond language. “Lame report” cannot keep up and elsewhere we see speed of language itself presented as a condition for adequacy. Nowhere is this more apparent than the verbal sparring of Shakespearean comedy. Characters match wits, vying to outdo each other in punning and extended sequences of absurdity or bawdy conceits. As You Like It repeatedly lines up verbal wit in opposition to foolishness in linguistic flurries in which a quick response is essential: CELIA When Nature hath made a fair creature, may she not by Fortune fall into the fire? Though Nature hath given us wit to flout at Fortune, hath not Fortune sent in this fool to cut off the argument? ROSALIND Indeed, there is Fortune too hard for Nature, when Fortune makes Nature’s natural the cutter-off of Nature’s wit. CELIA Peradventure this is not Fortune’s work, neither, but Nature’s, who perceiveth our natural wits too dull to reason of such goddesses, and hath sent this natural 17 Alison Mountz et al., “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 14.4 (2015): 1235–1259.

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for our whetstone; for always the dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits. (2.1.42–53)

The insistently chiastic writing that pits fool against wit necessitates the dullness of the fool. Wit is competitive, measured by comparison to discover who is the “quickest.” Rosalind and Celia need a slow fool to present themselves as quick and witty. Rosalind suggests that Orlando’s poetic feet were stranded—they “could not bear themselves without the verse, and therefore stood lamely in the verse”—but this is not strictly true. The poems are publicly displayed and convey Orlando’s state of mind (more than he intends, as they reveal his naivety as well as his sincerity). They even communicate his love for Rosalind to Rosalind herself. They move information—bearing verse—between the person who writes them to those who read them. Like youth and age, nimble speed and lame slowness are not, in fact, exclusive categories, but either end of a contiguous spectrum. Slow and steady may not win the race, but it does reach the destination eventually. There is a large range of adequacy between immobility and top speed, and lameness does not reside at only one end.18 But Rosalind uses the notion of lameness to turn a quality of variability into an exclusionary absolute in the service of quick wit.

Rhetorical and Performative Lameness in the Fair Maid of the Exchange and A Larum for London The rhetorical value of lameness for Rosalind is that it serves as a foil to the superlative speed of the speaker’s wit. Lameness is also invoked as a rhetorical gambit in the prologues to The Fair Maid of the Exchange and A Larum for London. It is again relational, as both plays use lameness to define their relationship to their audience before the action starts. The two plays are, however, completely antithetical in genre, tone, and approach. Whilst Fair Maid is a city comedy with a screwball romance plot, A Larum, as the title suggests, is a warning in the shape of a sternly moral horror show, displaying bloody acts of war to scare its audience 18 C. F. Goodey argues that the association between speed and mental acuity emerged in this period precisely because it enables measurement, making variable ability and speed discrete (A History of Intelligence and Intellectual Disability: The Shaping of Psychology in Early Europe [Burlington: Ashgate, 2011], 45–46).

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into a more godly lifestyle. Where Fair Maid delights in the humorous machinations of middle-class life, A Larum’s characters pour scorn on city burghers, merchants, and women while torturing, abusing, and often killing them on stage. The justification for A Larum’s violence and cynicism is declared at the very beginning in the prologue spoken by Time, who expects that his audience will be predisposed to disregard his warnings: you will scorne my wants, Laugh at my lamenes, looke basely, fume and frowne But doe so, doe so, your proude eyes shall see The punishment of Citty cruelty: And if your hearts be not of Adamant, Reforme the mischiefe of degenerate mindes, And make you weepe in pure relenting kinde. (A1v)

Time’s explicit self-identification as lame provides a clear connection with the character of Stumpe, a lame soldier whose nickname refers to his prosthetic leg. The roles of Stumpe and Time may have been doubled,19 especially considering Time’s use of the future tense in “you will … Laugh at my lameness.” Stumpe often delivers judgemental statements blaming Antwerp’s residents for their suffering, and these are entirely consistent with Time’s message. Stumpe complains bitterly about the fact that the citizens refused to pay him properly. When a Burgher objects that he should fight for duty to his country, not payment, Stumpe’s response exacts the implied value the Burgher has placed on human life: Bindes me my country with no greater bondes, Than for a groate to fight? then for a groate, To be infeebled, or to loose a limme? (C3r)

The implication throughout is that, had they invested in experienced soldiers like Stumpe, the citizens might have been defended against the Spanish onslaught. The soldier’s damaged limb both symbolizes and literalizes the mismatch between the soldier’s wages and the price he pays,

19 Genevieve Love also considers the implications of this potential doubling (Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability, 88–89).

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writing his sacrifice onto his body. The play’s efforts to provoke repentance center Stumpe’s body as an object of pity and emblem of the city’s carelessness. The spectacularization of Stumpe’s body is evident from the title page, which advertises “the ventrous actes and valorous deeds of the lame Soldier” (A1r). Stumpe certainly proves superlative as a soldier and a survivor, living long enough to see those who scorned him “have their throates cut” whilst “still my olde rotten stump and I, / Trot up and downe as long as we can wag” (C4v). “Trot” seems a surprising verb to apply here. Describing the gait of a horse between walking and running speeds, it signifies busy, purposeful and swift movement.20 This, and “wag,” are typical of Stumpe’s self-deprecating speech, animalizing himself, as well as denoting inappropriately cheerful styles of movement amidst a massacre.21 Stumpe’s movement (or at least his description of it) is ironic, therefore. He is a malcontent who refuses to conform to polite expectations in speech and styles of movement. References to different kinds of gait abound in the play. At the outset, the Spanish general Danila imagines the forthcoming battle as dancing “a venturous measure” in the streets of Antwerp (A3r). Danila advises a fellow conspirator to conceal his intentions by using a particular kind of movement: “Walke thou into the towne as if thou hadst / But only come abroad to take the ayre” (A4r).When the English governor and companion attempt to make diplomatic representations to the Spanish on behalf of English nationals stranded in the city, they are forced to come in on their knees, and “craule unto his presence to beg life” (D2v). Movement styles explicitly denote power relations, therefore. But Stumpe resists expectations. Conspicuously, his lameness does not prevent him from carrying out extreme violence. His formidable combat skills lead one Spanish soldier to describe him as “a lame fellow that doth want a legge, / Who layes about him like a devill of hell” (E1r). His lameness remains his most notable characteristic, but does not restrict his deadly proficiency.

20 “trot, v.,” OED Online, June 2017, Oxford University Press. 21 Trot might also have an aural resonance, linking the clatter of a prosthetic leg to

the sound of a shod hoof. Love explores the sonic elements of the play in detail (Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability, 97–101).

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Scraping together a band of desperate holdouts, Stumpe finds two soldiers trying to think of an escape plan. One suggests disguising themselves as “maymed men” (F1v), presumably thinking that such men would be allowed to leave the city because they do not pose a threat. Given the merciless slaughter of a blind man and his family in a previous scene, this seems unlikely. Furthermore, Stumpe, the bona fide maimed man of the play, resists the invaders more effectively than anyone, even when it is suicidally hopeless. He persuades the potential deserters not to run away, and responds to their request to “lead us” with a sardonic “Yes, Ile halt before you, follow mee as straight as you can” (F2r). Stumpe’s quality of movement is clearly different, but he is by no means incapable and is not the only person who stumbles. Even his enemies respect him, vowing to give him a decent burial at the end. This post-mortem admiration is ironic, however, as it only arrives when he no longer needs it. His heroic “stand” could not save the city. As he complains earlier: let a Soldier, that hath spent his bloud, Is lame’d, diseas’d, or any way distrest, Appeale for succour, then you looke a sconce As if you knew him not. (C2v)

His charge that “you” looked askance at those who could have saved the city is directed towards the singular “you” of the citizen he is addressing, but metonymically encompasses the plural “you” of a citizenry who ignored their vulnerable. The Fair Maid of the Exchange, by contrast, celebrates all that A Larum rails against, revelling in the making and enjoying of wealth and an incipient consumer lifestyle. It, too, begins with a prologue that mobilizes lameness as a symbolic value: The humble Socke that true Comedians were Our Muse hath don’d, and to your fav’ring eyes, In lowest Plaine-song doth her selfe appeare, Borrowing no colours from a quaint disguise: If your faire favours cause her spirite to rise, Shee to the highest pitch her wings shall reare, And prowd quothurnicke action shall devise To winne your sweete applause she deems so deare.

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Meane while shore up our tender pamping twig That yet on humble ground doth lowely lie: Your favours sunneshine guilding once this sprig It may yield Nectar for the gods on hie: Though our Invention lame, imperfect be, Yet give the Cripple almes for charitie. (A2v)

The play opens by directing attention to the actors’ feet. The octave invokes the traditional contrast between the footwear worn by actors in Greek comedy and tragedy. The sock, or low shoe, denotes comedy, and this is contrasted with the cothurnus (“quothurn[us]”) of tragedy, a kind of boot (or ‘buskin’). The lameness claimed in the couplet invokes both poetic and actual feet that walk upon, or are perhaps dragged across, the stage. These lines suggest a paradigmatic link between disability and charity that invokes an automatic association between lameness and beggary, between physical impairment and economic dependence. Although the play is “lame” in the pejorative sense established earlier, the audience are asked nevertheless to reward the players with alms, because lameness, in the sense of impairment, necessitates charity. Thus, in a neatly self-serving paradox, the worse the play is, the more the audience is obliged to reward it. As with A Larum, it is possible that the actor who played the lame character also spoke the prologue, literalizing this rhetorical lameness.22 However, the character who embodies this request also undermines it. Usually called “Cripple,” or “the Cripple,”23 he is also referred to as “the Drawer” because he draws embroidery designs onto fabric ready for a sempstress to sew and a tailor to assemble the garment.24 His role in the complex processes of clothing manufacture demonstrates not just 22 The 1607 quarto includes a chart showing how “Eleaven may easily acte this Comedie” (A2r), listing Cripple as a role not doubled with any others. The prologue is not included in the list, however. 23 Katherine Schaap Williams notes the variation in the use of the definite article in referring to this character, that is, between the archetypal (“the Cripple”) and the individual (“Cripple”). I follow Williams in using the latter. He is also given the metonymic nickname of “crutch” by both friends and foes. The text almost invariably gives him the speech prefix: “Crip”. See Williams, “‘More Legs Than Nature Gave Thee’: Performing the Cripple in The Fair Maid of The Exchange,” ELH 82 (2015): 491–519. 24 Susan North, “Jacobean Embroidery,” The Fair Maid of the Exchange: Malone Society Staged Reading and Symposium, 17 May 2014, Oxford University.

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economic productivity but also continuing embeddedness in interdependent professional, economic, and social networks. A useful comparison here is The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Ralph’s injury provides plenty of opportunity for puns and stage business (see below), but does not prevent him from resuming his occupation. As Hodge declares on Ralph’s return from war, “Hast thou not hands, man? Thou shalt never see a shoemaker want bread, though he have but three fingers on a hand” (3.4.44–45). In both texts (and A Larum too) lameness is explicitly an impairment of the legs, and thus one which allows both Ralph and Cripple to retain their professional identities, and for Stumpe to continue to fight. Nevertheless, having been highlighted in the prologue as embodying the self-deprecatingly identified lameness of the Invention (i.e. the play itself), Cripple is still “different.” His crutches take on part of this symbolic and literal weight. They feature prominently in the action, and operate as a metonym for both Cripple and disability more broadly.25 In the first scene, Cripple uses his crutches to foil a robbery and rape, saying to himself “of thy foure legs / Make use of one, to doe a virgin good” (B2r), weaponizing the emblem of his disability. Following Schalk’s caution about the term,26 I do not consider this a “supercrip” narrative, as this “overcoming” of disability is almost immediately reversed. Phillis has barely had time to thank Cripple for saving her before the villains attack again. This time, they snatch away the crutches first. The rescue is thus incomplete until the able-bodied Frank enters, saving Cripple as well as the women. This scene establishes an economy of obligation: Phillis “owes” gratitude to Cripple (“For this aid, Ile ever honour thee” [B2v]), and Cripple “owes” gratitude to Frank (“If I do live, your love Ile recompence” [B3r]). This circuit of indebtedness is overlaid by another, that of sexual desire, which travels in a different direction. Frank desires Phillis, and Phillis desires Cripple. But although every other male character involved in the main plot wants to marry Phillis, Cripple is not interested. He instead acts as a broker, coming up with a plan to help Frank win Phillis’s hand.

25 Williams develops the synecdochic overlapping between body, object, and word (“More Legs,” 502). 26 Sami Schalk, “Reevaluating the Supercrip,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 10.1 (2016): 71–86.

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Cripple, far from regretting being unmarried, embraces singledom enthusiastically, invoking a proverbial misogyny to celebrate his immunity to Phillis’s charms: “A yong man’s never mar’d, / Till he by marriage from all joy be bar’d” (E1r). But when discussing it with Frank, Cripple uses different language, recruiting a trope of disability as foul deformity: I will resigne the same To you my friend, knowing my unworthy selfe Too foule for such a beautie. (H3r)

This metaphorical use of disability as unworthiness is, however, rendered ironic because the character who speaks it has already shown he has no interest in marriage. Because Phillis loves Cripple, Frank “crips up,” borrowing Cripple’s “crooked habit” and crutch so that she will think Frank is the object of her affections. Williams reads Frank’s substitution for Cripple as an instance of “metonymic replication,”27 ultimately arguing that the play constructs disability as an inability to impersonate others. Cripple’s body is irreversibly marked as disabled, making it imitable by others but fixed for Cripple himself. He can facilitate but not participate in economic circulation in a world based on “shifting shapes and impersonating bodies.”28 When all is revealed, Phillis chooses Frank over all her other suitors. This exclusion of Cripple from the heterosexual coupling of the ending could be considered a form of “narrative prosthesis.”29 As noted above, however, Cripple explicitly disavows the marriage market. Furthermore, he remains on stage, haunting the very marriage that he arranged. The denouement presenting both Cripple and Frank-as-Cripple alongside each other is a powerfully suggestive moment of double vision, which evokes the mutual interdependence of normative and non-normative identities.30 Phillis’s astonishment does not convince us that they must really look

27 Williams, “More Legs,” 503. 28 Ibid., 494. 29 This only follows if we ignore the potential for queer readings of desire in the play, however. See David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 30 Williams notes that Frank’s speech prefixes temporarily change to “Crip” during the scene where he is in disguise (Williams, “More Legs,” 506).

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alike, but alerts us to the underlying similarities between them. Even as it insists on their difference, the play suggests that these two varying bodies are similar enough to be easily mistaken.

Performing Lameness: The Shoemaker ’s Holiday The Shoemaker’s Holiday also features a case of mistaken identity. When looking for Lacy, his runaway nephew, Lincoln misidentifies Ralph, assuming that “my nephew, / To hide his guilt, counterfeits him lame” (18.114–115). Lame can be something that you do, then, as well as something you are. Both meanings seem possible in the intriguinglyphrased stage direction “Enter Ralph being lame” (10.51–52). Other verbal cues also mark Ralph out as moving differently. He acquires the epithet “lame Ralph” (used three times), and reports that his wife did not recognize him because “my lame leg and my travel beyond sea made me unknown” (18.11–12). Ralph’s moment of return seems calculated to create maximum impact. It comes as Hodge is teasing Margery, the volatile mistress of the household, by offering her a pipe of tobacco, presumably in order to provoke the disgusted response that ensues. Margery’s short but vehement anti-pipe rant ends by declaring “men look not like men that use them” (10.52). This immediately precedes Ralph’s entrance, creating an implied link between her notion of masculine degeneracy and Ralph’s changed appearance. Does Ralph look not like Ralph? Although the stage direction’s “being lame” might suggest that Ralph’s lameness could be a quality of movement, the moment is sometimes presented as a dramatic reveal. Anthony Parr reported that, in the 1981 production at London’s National Theatre, Ralph appeared at the top half of a pair of stable doors to a “tumultuous welcome” that was abruptly interrupted when he “threw open the lower half to reveal one leg missing.”31 The implication being that the joy of Ralph’s return is spoiled by shock at his life-changing injury—spoiled, that is, for those around him. Certainly, Hodge seems to take a moment to clock that Ralph is lame, recognizing him first: “What, fellow Ralph! Mistress, look here—Jane’s 31 Anthony Parr, cited in Jonathan Gil Harris, “Introduction,” in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, by Thomas Dekker, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), vii–xxix, xxviii.

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husband!” before exclaiming “Why, how now—lame? Hans, make much of him: he’s a brother of our trade, a good workman, and a tall soldier” (10.53–55). Ralph is, to Hodge, first and foremost a fellow shoemaker, a married man and, lastly, a war veteran. Although Hodge’s “tall” might be construed as tactless, Margery’s efforts at sympathy are more obviously so. Both Ralph and Margery harp on the word “well,” starting with her observation “I am glad to see thee well” which elicits from Ralph the rueful “I would to God you saw me, dame, as well / As when I went from London into France” (10.59–60). Margery blunders on, struggling to express sympathy without casting aspersions: Trust me, I am sorry Ralph, to see thee impotent. Lord, how the wars have made him sunburnt! The left leg is not well;’twas a fair gift of God the infirmity took not hold a little higher, considering thou camest from France—but let that pass. (10.61–64)

“Impotent” is an etymological equivalent of disabled, but is also potentially bawdy, and Margery’s reference to France implies that Ralph might have acquired a sexually-transmitted disease. The term “infirmity” speaks both to this suggestiveness and the euphemistic avoidance of naming what is actually “wrong” with Ralph. He is both well and not well, his body presenting an indeterminate variation on the Ralph who had gone to war. Margery’s clumsy speech is prose, bookended on either side by Ralph’s verse, firstly lines 59–60 quoted above, and subsequently the following (assuming elision between the first two words of line 65): I am glad to see you well, and I rejoice To hear that God hath blessed my master so Since my departure. (10.65–67)

Margery’s speech is irregular in rhythm, compared to the smooth iambs of Ralph’s more elegant verse. Ralph’s comment seems a magnanimous response to her probing and innuendo. The control of verse parallels the control involved in taking on the emotional labour of managing other people’s reactions to his acquired impairment—dealing with their discomfort on top of, or instead of, his own. Ralph’s use of verse sets him apart from the other shoemakers. Most of the time, he shares their tendency to speak in prose, but here, and when it comes to his involvement in the romance plot of finding and

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winning back his wife Jane, he speaks in verse, and occasionally rhyme. For example, when explaining that he can identify her by her shoe, he declares: This is her size, her breadth. Thus trod my love. These true-love knots I pricked. I hold my life, By this old shoe I shall find out my wife. (14.46–48)

Ralph’s metrical speech, therefore, aligns him with the more obvious romantic hero of the play, Lacy, a young gentleman trying to marry his sweetheart in the face of familial disapproval. This is the same character who is mistaken for Ralph when avoiding his uncle. This link does not suggest that there is no distinction between the ways characters move, appear, and speak, but that their appearance is on a contiguous spectrum of variability. Ralph’s lameness is not a quality of abjection that must be purged from the text. Neither Shoemaker’s Holiday nor Fair Maid conform to the model outlined in Mitchell and Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis whereby deviance is foregrounded in order to be obliterated through cure, expulsion, or extermination. Instead, Cripple and Ralph both remain part of the variability of their respective dramatic worlds.

Conclusion: Variability Now in the Taming of the Shrew Textual evidence supports some limited conjectures about how lameness might have been embodied on stage. One has to be careful not to read in an overly literal way, however, making claims about the past that are not supported by evidence. For instance, Weis makes the claim, not adopted to my knowledge by any other scholars, that references to lameness in Shakespeare’s sonnets are autobiographical, saying “there is no reason why the lame references should not literally be true,” and speculating on a range of causes for Shakespeare’s putative impairment.32 Although there might be attractive reasons for claiming Shakespeare as a potential object of identification for people with disabilities, there is simply no evidence to

32 René Weis, Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography (London: John Murray, 2007), 164; also cited in Jeffrey R. Wilson, “The Trouble with Disability in Shakespeare Studies,” Disability Studies Quarterly 37.2 (2017).

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support the literal reading of these lines back into the life of this particular historical individual. Such speculative readings are more appropriate where they relate to fictional characters, since their truth value is of a different order and requires different kinds of evidence. A case in point here is Petruccio’s description of Kate as limping in The Taming of the Shrew. Interesting performance possibilities and effects might be elicited by casting actors with visible disabilities in this role, regardless of literal textual direction. In this case, however, there is a potential textual anchor for the interpretation in Petruccio’s lines. It is worth quoting the whole passage: ’Twas told me you were rough, and coy, and sullen, And now I find report a very liar, For thou art pleasant, gamesome, passing courteous, But slow in speech, yet sweet as spring-time flowers. Thou canst not frown. Thou canst not look askance, Nor bite the lip, as angry wenches will, Nor hast thou pleasure to be cross in talk, But thou with mildness entertain’st thy wooers, With gentle conference, soft, and affable. Why does the world report that Kate doth limp? O sland’rous world! Kate like the hazel twig Is straight and slender, and as brown in hue As hazelnuts, and sweeter than the kernels. O let me see thee walk. Thou dost not halt. (2.1.238–251)

The trick here, of course, is that Petruccio is gaslighting Kate and nothing he says can be taken seriously. He is bamboozling her with contradictory statements. His suggestion that she is “slow in speech, yet sweet as springtime flowers” is an insult wrapped in a compliment negated by her quick and acerbic replies in the rest of the scene. Petruccio’s motives distort the value of his statements to the extent that the “literal” truth of the matter seems somewhat irrelevant. This does not rule out the possibility that it might be interesting to see what happens if Kate really does limp, however. Although unusual, there has been at least one production which has tried this approach. According to Rachel E. Hile, in a 2008 production directed by Peter Hinton at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, Irene Poole portrayed Kate with a physical limp. Hile outlines some of the hostility that met the production, as reviewers mocked the interpretation on the grounds that it was an overly literal reading based on

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slender evidence.33 Jeffrey Wilson’s critique of Hile’s essay replicates the reviewers’ incredulity, describing Hile’s support for the interpretation as a “misreading” that is derived “by willfully ignoring the evidence against it” and dismisses categorically the idea that Kate might limp.34 I dispute Wilson’s argument on the grounds of its categorical exclusiveness, since it is quite possible that Petruccio’s statements can be glossed differently. Rather than claiming that Wilson’s view is wrong, I suggest that it is one of a variety of readings and interpretations of varying levels of plausibility and usefulness. Such variety is inevitable in reading a text of this complexity. We are not, as per F. R. Leavis, searching for “one right total meaning” when we read,35 and in the case of dramatic interpretation and reinterpretation, variation is to be celebrated rather than restricted. If imagining Shakespeare’s Kate with a limp leads to interesting readings and performances then it is a valid reading. Readers can hold contradictory interpretations with equal weight simultaneously. In performance, certain choices must be made one way or another. Thus not only is the interpretation of a role like Kate variable, drama itself is complexly embodied. Each performance makes different choices and has different effects upon the text, performers, and audience, and these elements in turn all interact with all other variable qualities of performance. This can be illustrated by a very unusual example from a single performance: a preview of The Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare’s Globe on May 17, 2016, which happens to have been the performance reviewed by Peter Kirwan for his Bardathon blog. According to Kirwan, just before the interval the actor playing Kate (Kathy Rose O’Brien) injured her foot. After some delay, the production was hastily reblocked and continued with O’Brien staying seated for much of the rest of the show, being assisted on and off-stage by Edward MacLiam (playing Petruccio). Kirwan’s review speaks of “the uneasy intimacy added to the second half by O’Brien’s injury” and its effect of making “Kate and Petruchio a

33 Rachel E. Hile, “Disability and the Characterisation of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/ 996/1180. 34 Wilson, “The Trouble with Disability.” 35 Leavis, F. R., Education and the University (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943),

72.

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symbiotic pair, where the one’s pain directly affected the other.”36 Clearly, I am not suggesting that pain and injury are a desirable part of live theatre, and sadly, O’Brien’s role was recast after this performance. But its uniqueness is an acute example of the intervention of bodily variability into the experience and meaning of dramatic performance. Taking Kate as a variable element, this performance demonstrates very clearly the specificity of the acting body and its combination with the consistent elements of the performance. That is, the interaction between body and text, thing and idea is essentially what creates dramatic performance. Whilst this is potentially a banal thing to say about theatre more generally, its implications for disability and disabled performers are important to bring forward. Casting actors with disabilities, by accident or design, brings their variability into dialogue with the ideas and ideologies of the text. Such casting practices worked to the benefit of the 2017 Sheffield Theatres production of Julius Caesar, for example, in which a cast diverse in its genders, ethnicities, and impairments created a production that had a vital relevance to its contemporary context.37 Lame characters, and indeed all characters, should therefore be portrayed with at least as much variety and variability as they have had in the past. This essay has shown that variable bodies moved and spoke on the early modern stage, creating variable effects arising from the complex interactions between visual, kinetic, aural, and verbal signifiers of lameness. Thus, lameness must be understood as the product of both ideas and bodies. Judith Butler is right to assert that there is no “prediscursive anatomical facticity,”38 but this is not because bodies do not exist per se, but because our understanding of them is always already mediated through ideology. This essay does not pretend to talk outside discourse, but it understands that bodies can intervene in the possible meanings we attach to them. Although its associations with age and slowness make it something negative, lameness is not necessarily an exclusionary absolute. It is true that, in A Larum for London, the lame character’s death in battle eliminates him from the play’s dramatic world. But in The Fair Maid of the 36 Kirwan, Peter, “The Taming of the Shrew @ Shakespeare’s Globe,” Bardathon (blog), May 17, 2016. 37 Susan Anderson, “Review of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (directed by Robert Hastie for Sheffield Theatres) at the Crucible, May 31, 2017,” Shakespeare 13.4 (2017). 38 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 8.

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Exchange and The Shoemaker’s Holiday, lame characters are and remain embedded in their social worlds. Their feet, poetic, prosthetic, and otherwise, speak and move, and in doing so alert us to alternative ways of imagining bodies and experience both then and now.

Bibliography Anderson, Susan. “Review of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (directed by Robert Hastie for Sheffield Theatres) at the Crucible, May 31, 2017.” Shakespeare 13.4 (2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2017.1354911. Anon. A Larum for London. London, 1602. Baker, Naomi. “‘Happy and Without a Name’: Prosthetic Identities on the Early Modern Stage.” Textual Practice 30.7 (2016): 1309–1326. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990. Davis, Lennard J. Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Dekker, Thomas. 2008. The Shoemaker’s Holiday, edited by Jonathan Gil Harris. London: Bloomsbury. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, and Georgina Kleege. “Plenary Panel: ‘What Her Body Taught’ Revisited.” Disability and Disciplines Biennial Conference. July 2, 2015. Liverpool Hope University. Goodey, C. F. A History of Intelligence and Intellectual Disability: The Shaping of Psychology in Early Europe. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Introduction to The Shoemaker’s Holiday, by Thomas Dekker, vii–xxix. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Heywood, Thomas. The Fayre Mayde of the Exchange. London, 1607. Hile, Rachel E. “Disability and the Characterisation of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). http://dx.doi.org/ 10.18061/dsq.v29i4.996. Hobgood, Allison P., and David Houston Wood, eds. “Special Issue on Disabled Shakespeares.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). http://dx.doi.org/ 10.18061/dsq.v29i4. ———. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Iyengar, Sujata, ed. Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. New York: Routledge, 2015. Kirwan, Peter. “The Taming of the Shrew @ Shakespeare’s Globe.” Bardathon (blog), May 17, 2016. http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2016/ 05/17/the-taming-of-the-shrew-shakespeares-globe-2. Leavis, F. R. Education and the University. London: Chatto and Windus, 1943.

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Love, Genevieve. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Mounsey, Chris. “Introduction: Variability: Beyond Sameness and Difference.” In The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Chris Mounsey, 1–27. Plymouth: Bucknell University Press, 2014. Mountz, Alison, et al. “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance Through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 14.4 (2015): 1235–1259. North, Susan. “Jacobean Embroidery.” The Fair Maid of the Exchange: Malone Society Staged Reading and Symposium. May 17, 2014. Oxford University. Sagal, Anna K. “‘An HOBBY-HORSE Well Worth Giving a Description of’: Disability, Trauma, and Language in Tristram Shandy.” In The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Chris Mounsey, 105–133. Plymouth: Bucknell University Press 2014. Schalk, Sami. “Reevaluating the Supercrip.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 10.1 (2016): 71–86. Shakespeare, William. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works. 2nd ed. Edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. ———. “Shakespeare Differently Disabled.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, edited by Valerie Traub, 435–454. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Stredder, James. The North Face of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Tilley, Morris Palmer. A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950. Weis, René. Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography. London: John Murray, 2007. Williams, Katherine Schaap. “‘More Legs Than Nature Gave Thee’: Performing the Cripple in The Fair Maid Of The Exchange.” ELH 82 (2015): 491–519. Wilson, Jeffrey R. “The Trouble with Disability in Shakespeare Studies.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37.2 (2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq. v37i2.5430.

CHAPTER 10

“Lame Humor” in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Love’s Pilgrimage Joyce Boro

Abstract Much of the humor in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Love’s Pilgrimage centers on Don Sanchio, a disabled war veteran who is carried in a chair and whose nonstandard body is a potent site of ridicule, of “lame humor” (pun intended) and of topical critique. The play adapts Miguel de Cervantes’ “Las dos doncellas” (1613), transforming it into both a sustained critique of Spanishness and an exploration of social concerns about disability. Love’s Pilgrimage divests “Las dos doncellas” of moral exemplarity by adding farcical, low humor and by debasing many of Cervantes’s characters, all the while delivering constant reminders of the Spanish setting and of the characters’ Spanish-ness. As a result, the characters’ depravity becomes a symptomatic function of their nationality. Contemporaneous anxieties about both disability and Spain converge in Don Sanchio: Spanish degeneracy is yoked to disability, while serious concerns about Spanish political and military power, syphilis, and injured war veterans are transmuted into deeply resonant jokes. The play harnesses laughter’s power—its ability to distance the laugher from the object of humor through scorn, mockery, and Schadenfreude; and its

J. Boro (B) Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_10

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social dimension, which unites laughers in shared rebellion, festivity, and catharsis—to explore these domestic and transnational affairs. Much of the humor in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Love’s Pilgrimage centers on Don Sanchio, a disabled war veteran who is carried in a chair and whose nonstandard body is a potent site of ridicule, of “lame humor” (pun intended) and of topical critique. He evokes sentiments of fear, derision, and superiority in audiences of Love’s Pilgrimage because of his Spanishness, his disability, and the disability’s aetiology, which may be a sexually transmitted illness or a military injury. Anxieties about disability and about Spain converge in Sanchio and the play uses comedy to process the real, immediate concerns that contemporaneous audiences felt about both. As negotiations for the Spanish Match intensified during the period 1614–1623, Hispanophobia increased and playwrights such as John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont capitalized on public opposition to the proposed Anglo-Spanish dynastic union by crafting plays that presented Spain in a negative light, as a country of corruption, debauchery, lasciviousness, and military impuissance.1 The play adapts “Las dos doncellas” from Miguel de Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares (1613), transforming it into both a sustained critique of Spanishness and an exploration of social concerns about disability. Love’s Pilgrimage divests “Las dos doncellas” of moral exemplarity by adding farcical, low humor and by debasing many of Cervantes’s characters, all the while delivering constant reminders of the Spanish setting and of the characters’ Spanish-ness. As a result, the characters’ depravity becomes a symptomatic function of their nationality. This is especially true for Sanchio, who is changed from a noble warrior-knight

1 Strangely, many of these anti-Spanish plays were adaptations of Spanish sources, evidencing a paradoxical state of combined Hispanophilia and Hispanophobia that characterizes early modern Anglo-Spanish relations: while English people increasingly sought to learn Spanish and Spanish literature was avidly read (in the original, in translation, and in adaptations), anti-Spanish bias and prejudice was rampant. See Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2009); Barbara Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Glyn Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta: The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Alexander Samson, “A Fine Romance: Anglo-Spanish Relations in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39 (2009): 65–94; and Alexander Samson, “Introduction,” in The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, ed. A. Samson (London: Routledge, 2016), 1.

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on his mighty steed into a risible “old lame angry Soldier.”2 Through Sanchio, Spanish degeneracy is yoked to disability, while serious concerns about Spanish political and military power, syphilis, and injured war veterans are transmuted into deeply resonant jokes. The play harnesses laughter’s power—its ability to distance the laugher from the object of humor through scorn, mockery, and Schadenfreude; and its social dimension, which unites laughers in shared rebellion, festivity, and catharsis—to explore these domestic and transnational affairs. The concept of “lame humor” raises the issue of the cruelty inherent in laughter, what Pamela Allen Brown names “bad fun.”3 Why do we, and how can we, laugh at someone’s physical infirmities? Modern theories of humor fall into three major categories—superiority, incongruity, and release—and develop chronologically, with the superiority theory originating in ancient Greece and dominating through the Renaissance to the eighteenth century.4 The superiority theory roots laughter in mockery, disparagement, or the degradation of others. Accordingly, laughter is seen as scornful, antisocial, “ethically suspect,”5 and linked to our more unkind, undignified, or “derogatory impulse[s].”6 As Thomas Hobbes explains, “the passion of laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with our own formerly.”7 His contemporaries similarly posited that while laughter was linked to happiness, “this joy must be of a peculiar kind, since it appears to be connected 2 The description is from the dramatis personae of Love’s Pilgrimage. All references to the play are to Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, “Love’s Pilgrimage,” in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 567–704. 3 Pamela Allen Brown, “Bad Fun and Tudor Laughter,” in A Companion to Tudor Literature, ed. Kent Cartwright (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 324–338. 4 Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (London: Sage, 2005); John Morreall, Taking Laughter Seriously (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); John Morreall, The Philosophy of Laughter and Humour (Albany: State University of New York Press 1987); and Simon Critchley, On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002), 3. 5 Morreall, Philosophy of Laughter, 3. 6 James Sully, An Essay on Laughter (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902),

119–120.

7 Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 54–55.

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in some way with feelings of scorn, contempt and even hatred.”8 The most eminent medical writers of the period, such as Laurent Joubert, Robert Burton, and Thomas Browne, equally link laughter and derision, explaining that we laugh at what we find “ugly, deformed, dishonest, indecent, malicious and scarcely decorous.”9 The mockery of disability played a central role in Classical, medieval, and early modern societies as “its association with sin and corruption made the impaired body a powerful image in lampoons, satires, and defamatory verses.”10 In depictions of lameness and other forms of bodily difference, David Turner notes the prevalence of “witty wordplay, extended metaphor, and comic resemblances,” links to the devil or the monstrous, and attacks on the disabled individual’s authority, masculinity, or social position.11 However, scholars such as Turner and Anu Korhonen also demonstrate how “the ludicrous possibilities of joking situations gave humor the potential to interrogate conventional wisdom about bodily norms” as well as both the experiences of disabled people and larger social and ethical issues, including gender relations, poverty, relationships of

8 Quentin Skinner, “Why Laughing Mattered in the Renaissance: The Second Henry Tudor Memorial Lecture,” History of Political Thought 22.1 (March 2001): 421–422. Cf. Baldessare Castiglione: “Whenever we laugh, we are always ‘mockinge and scorninge’ someone, always seeking ‘to scoff and mocke at vices’,” in Castiglione, The Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio … done into Englyshe by Thomas Hoby. 128. London, 1561. qtd in Skinner, “Why Laughing Mattered,” 422; Thomas Wilson: “We experience feelings of contempt whenever we perceive ‘the fondnes, the filthines, the deformitee’ of someone else’s behaviour, with the result that we are prompted to ‘laugh him to skorne out right,’” in Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, for the Use of All Suche as Are Studious of Eloquence . fos. 74v, 75r. n.p., 1554, qtd. in Skinner, “Why Laughing Mattered,” 422; Vives, De anima & vita libri tres. 206. Lyon, 1550, qtd. in Skinner, “Why Laughing Mattered,” 422. 9 Joubert, Traité du ris, contenant son essance, ses causes, et mervelheus essais, curieusemant recherchés, raisonnés & observés. 16. Paris, 1579. Emphasis mine, trans. Qtd. In Skinner, “Why Laughing Mattered,” 422; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melanchol y, eds. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 37, 57, 101; and Thomas Browne, “Pseudodoxia Epidemica,” in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, Vol. 3 (London: n.p., 1931), 312. 10 David M. Turner, “Disability Humor and the Meanings of Impairment in Early Modern England,” in Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, eds. Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 58. 11 Ibid., 61.

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power and authority, mind–body interactions, and anxieties about impurity.12 As such, these Renaissance writers anticipate modern theories of laughter which focus on the “social life of laughter”: the important roles it plays in “promoting group cohesion, provoking intergroup conflict and providing social control”13 ; its communal quality; and its tendency to liberate the laugher from the restrictions of social norms and niceties, what Henri Bergson memorably named “a momentary anaesthesia of the heart.”14 Accordingly, Michael Bristol concludes that “Renaissance theories of laughter all posit a human collective as the precondition for laughter,” and moreover, that “interaction between social groups provides the most usual occasion for creating or discovering laughing matter.”15 Social theories of laughter help to account for laughter’s explosive, cruel, rebellious, and “releasing” tendencies, and also, to bring the rougher side of laughter into a contemporary context so that we do not heed the temptation to distance ourselves from early audiences by portraying them as archaically cruel in opposition to our enlightened, kind, modern selves.16 The theatre audience’s laughter is thus a powerful communal experience. It is communal because laughter is “always the laughter of the group” and also because theatre is a public sphere, with literary, social,

12 Ibid., 58; Anu Korhonen, “Disability Humour in English Jestbooks of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Cultural History 3.1 (2014): 27–53. Rosemarie GarlandThomson makes a similar point about humor in a different geo-historical context; see Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 6. 13 Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 123; Cf. Gary Fine, “Sociological Approaches to the Study of Humor,” in Handbook of Humor Research, eds. P. E. McGee and J. H. Goldstein (New York: Springer, 1983), 173; Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (New York: MacMillan, 1911), 8; Sophie K. Scott, “The Social Life of Laughter,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18.12 (December 2014): 618–620. 14 Ibid., 5; Korhonen evocatively classifies this phenomenon as “a mechanism of bypassing sympathy and empathy” Korhonen, “Disability Humour,” 33. 15 Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 137. 16 As Brown observes, “It is well known that many people in sixteenth-century England

delighted in plays, jests, and rituals mocking or exhibiting Jews, Moors, Africans, Catholics, mental defectives, deformed children, hunchbacks, and dwarves; what is less remarked is that some oddly familiar early pastimes seem to be reviving and prospering right now, with some media updating and the additional callus of impermeable irony” (Brown, “Bad Fun,” 335–336).

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festive, and political dimensions.17 Theatre has “the capacity to create and sustain a briefly intensified social life” and is “a privileged site for the celebration and critique of the needs and concerns of the polis.”18 Theatre is a prime site of festivity and laughter, and laughter itself is central, Bristol argues, to “an active critical consciousness.”19 Festive forms are communal sites of permitted transgression. They are cathartic, sanctioning the release of tension and resentment, as is clearly apparent in the rise of Hispanophobic plays written in response to Anglo-Spanish political tension. But the energy overflows festive limits, blurring the boundaries between the “double time” of festival and everyday life.20 In short, laughter bonds the participants in a shared social community and Others the object of their laughter. In Love’s Pilgrimage, the object of this laughter is Sanchio, a potent site of Otherness because of both his nationality and his disability.21 17 Bergson, Laughter, 5; Investigating actual instances of laughter in the theatre, Matthew Steggle explores the shared qualities of theatrical laughter, arguing that “stage laughter anticipates and shapes audience laughter” (Matthew Steggle, Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007], 4, 5–10, 57–80). On the socially infections qualities of early modern emotion more generally see Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 18 Bristol, Carnival and Theater, 1. 19 Ibid., 138. 20 Ibid., 2–3; Cf. Peter Stallybrass, “‘Drunk with the Cup of Liberty’: Robin Hood, the Carnivalesque, and the Rhetoric of Violence in early modern England,” in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, eds. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 45–76; and Naomi Conn Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). For a different, yet still useful, exploration of the tensions between the cruelty, commonality, subversiveness, and release of festivity as well as its roots in Classical dramatic and festive forms, see C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959). Laughter’s contradictory socio-political roles are also discussed by Jonathan Hall, who extends the internal dialogism of Bakhtinian carnival and argues that early modern theatrical comic simultaneously (even schizophrenically) produces “anxiety and pleasure, disruption and affirmation, critique and conformity.” See Jonathan Hall, Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), 23. 21 On laughing at Otherness see Bristol, Carnival and Theater, 51; Thomas Keith Brown, “The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England,” Times Literary Supplement 21 (January 1977): 77–81; David M. Turner, “Introduction: Approaching Anomalous Bodies,” in Social Histories of Disability and Deformity, eds. David M. Turner and Kevin

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Overflowing with hispanisms, references to Spanish people, customs, and geography, as well as to Catholicism, the first scene of Love’s Pilgrimage firmly establishes the play’s Spanish setting. While the frequency of references diminishes after the first scene, the allusions continue throughout the drama, constantly reminding the audience that the action occurs in a Spanish locale, peopled by Spaniards.22 All of the characters have Spanish names and they are consistently referred to using the Spanish honorifics Signor and Don. Spanish terminology peppers the dialogue: terms such as “paramentos” (1.1.34), “Infanta” (1.1.43), “carbonado’d (1.1.134), and “soldadoship” (3.4.48) are used, and great emphasis is placed on the expression “in cuerpo” through paronomastic play (1.1.27, 29, 31, 51, 55, 68, 79, 127). The characters trade in the Spanish currency of “Marvedis” (1.1.148), “realls” (1.1.297, 323) “peece[s] of eight” (1.1.323), and Venetian duckets (1.1.108).23 Theodosia’s vesture and appearance is likened to that of “the Constables son of Spain” (1.1.168), while Marco Antonio is compared to a lascivious jennet (2.1.40), a small Spanish horse. Regular geographical references to places such as Seville, Osuna, Madrid, Andalucía, Barcelona, and the Port of Santa María firmly situate the action in known, Iberian locations.24 There are also allusions to Spanish texts such as Geronimo Caranza’s La Verdadera Destreza de las Armas (5.4.202, 5.6.55, 5.6.60, 5.6.61, 5.6.69, 5.6.79, 5.6.117) and Don Quijote (2.3.114). The setting is not only Spanish, but it is also particularly Catholic. The regent is referred to as the “Catholique King” (1.1.49, 1.1.313), the title bestowed on King Ferdinand by the Pope, and Ferdinand and Isabella’s infamous Tribunal

Stagg (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1–15; Turner, “Disability Humor,” 57–72; and Alan Powers, “‘Gallia and Gaul, French and Welsh’: Comic Ethnic Slander in the Gallia Wars,” in Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare’s plays, ed. Frances N. Teague (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994), 109–122. 22 The Changeling likewise uses an explicitly Spanish locale to further a political agenda. See Carol Thomas Neely, “Hot Blood: Estranging Mediterranean Bodies in Early Modern Medical and Dramatic Texts,” in Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, eds. Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 63; Dale B. J. Randall, “Some New Perspectives on the Spanish Setting of The Changeling and Its Source,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 3 (1986): 189–216. 23 For additional references to currency, see also 2.2.133, 2.4.69, 2.4.81, 5.1.25. 24 See also 1.1.30, 1.1.115, 1.2.56, 1.2.104, 1.2.161, 1.2.186–187, 1.2.192, 1.2.195,

1.2.203, 2.1.95, 2.2.162, 2.3.5, 2.4.19, 3.1.10, 3.2.136–137, 3.3.2, 3.3.10, 3.4.71, 3.4.76, 4.1.9, 4.1.223, 5.4.126, 5.4.139, 5.6.18.

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del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición is also invoked (1.1.247, 2.3.119). There are Friars (2.2.59–62, 2.2.85–86, 2.2, 98–143) and references to the specifically Catholic practices of praying the rosary (1.1.140, 2.2.59–62), observing The Vigil of Lady’s Day (1.1.346), the sacrament of confession (1.2.93, 4.3.78–79), and, of course, the titular pilgrimage. Unlike the noble world of “Las dos doncellas,” Love’s Pilgrimage’s landscape is full of danger and immorality. It is peopled with thieves, rapists, dishonest innkeepers, and foolish old men. As Beaumont and Fletcher adapt Cervantes’s characters, they magnify existing personality flaws; give more space to lowborn, corrupt, and farcical characters; and add dishonourable roles. Because of the insistence on the Spanish locale in Love’s Pilgrimage, nationality is a key element of characterization; the characters’ moral flaws are intrinsically linked to their Spanishness so that being Spanish comes to be synonymous with lewdness, dishonesty, and disrepute. As Leonardo exclaims when criticizing Alphonso’s ridiculous behaviour: “Ye are as like Sir / As any man in Spain” (2.1.112–113). For example, unlike Cervantes’s “diligente y de recado” [diligent and solicitous] Host and “caritativa” [charitable] Hostess (142), Diego and his wife lack “scruples” (1.1.145), and function according to the modus operandi, “If I be paid, I am praid” (1.1.108).25 Incubo’s gluttony is rooted in Cervantes’s satirized constable, who is depicted as a harmless, if slightly amusing figure. Yet, after the introductory section of “Las dos doncellas,” the innkeeper, his wife, and the constable disappear from the novela, ceding the way for the development of the highborn characters’ adventures. In contrast, in Love’s Pilgrimage, Diego’s and Incubo’s roles are expanded: they accompany the lovers on their journey and they are the source of much farcical comedy involving gluttony and dishonest work habits. Their impact on the lowered tone of the play is amplified through the introduction of the like-minded Lazaro and the doubling of Diego and his wife in Host 2 and Hostess 2, who are equally mercenary and comical. Marco Antonio’s villainy is also magnified in Love’s Pilgrimage. Not only does he deceive Leocadia and Theodosia, potentially irreparably damaging their reputations, he also tries to seduce Eugenia, and he is afforded a long scene full of misogynistic commentary, crude sexual 25 References to “Las Dos Doncellas” are to the Spanish–English parallel text edition, edited and translated by Barry William Ife: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, “Las Dos Doncellas,” in Exemplary novels = Novelas ejemplares, ed. and trans. Barry William Ife, Vol. 3 (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1992).

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remarks, and confessions of lechery and promiscuity. Moreover, in the play, an elaborate trick is required to generate his unconvincing confession; in the novela, he repents as soon as he is confronted about his behaviour. The lovers’ fathers, who only appear in the final pages of the novela as “fine-looking” chivalric knights, encounter each other “bravely and skilfully” “like gentlemen” in “dazzling” armour (187, 189).26 In contrast, the fathers’ roles are amplified in through multiple scenes in Love’s Pilgrimage; like Diego and Incubo, they are sources of low humor. Sanchio is, therefore, one of many Spaniards targeted in the play, but he is rendered particularly risible because of his disability and because he is a figure for King Philip II, making his nationality especially important, as I will discuss below. Stage directions and dialogue emphasize Sanchio’s disability. For instance, all but one of his entrances specifies that he is carried: “Enter … Don Sanchio (carried by two Servants in a chair)” (s.d.2.1.23), “Enter Sanchio carried [by servants ]” (s.d. 3.4.15), “Enter Sanchio, carried” (5.4.125). In addition, Leocadia identifies her father as “He that is carried” (5.4.131), and Sanchio repeatedly asks others to “set [him] down” (3.4.16), “set [him] a little nearer” (50), “take” (60), “fling” (61), “carry” (5.4.156), “bear” (167, 174, 180), and “hurle” (5.6.21) him. Sanchio’s nonstandard body has a prosthetic narrative function: not only is it is a source of humor, but also it performs metonymically, pointing beyond the play to the macrocosmic level of Anglo-Spanish politics and social anxieties about disability.27 Through the Middle Ages and most of the sixteenth century, care for disabled individuals was idiosyncratic, dependent on the means and abilities of individual families, communities, and church parishes. However, the secularization of poor

26 In “Las dos doncelas,” Don Sancho de Cardenas is wealthy “y de rico linaje” [and of an illustrious lineage] (168), and his comportment reflects his station: he is beautifully armed, possesses great “donaire y apostura” [grace and bearing] (186), and behaves nobly, refusing to “combatirse con alguna ventaja, sino uno a uno, como caballeros” [fight with any advantage, but rather one at a time, like gentlemen] (188). Strangely, the story also includes another Sancho. Equally noble, Don Sancho de Cardona, “ilustrísimo por sangre et famoso por su persona” helps the young lovers by offering them refuge and “sus esclavinas y de todo le necesario” for their pilgrimage (184). 27 On disability and narrative prosthesis, see David T. Mitchell, and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

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relief, the nationalization of the military, and rapid, continuous urbanization transformed care for the disabled poor and disabled ex-servicemen into national social, economic, and political issues. Ethical and religious discourse surrounding physical impairment complicated the development and implementation of new social programmes. For example, disabilities thought to derive from morally suspect activities or those that were interpreted as divine punishment were deemed less worthy, or even unworthy, of assistance. This was especially the case for individuals like Sanchio, who were suspected to be plagued by syphilis, a dreaded illness linked to sexual immoderation and to transnational contagion. Although Sanchio is a minor character, only appearing in four scenes, his body is over-saturated with signification. The aetiology of his disability is ambiguously bivalent. Whereas at the start of the play Sanchio is depicted as a retired war veteran, the honourability of his injury is undermined by Alphonso, who posits sexual sin at the root of Sanchio’s disability. Sanchio is treated respectfully in his first scene (2.1), and, in fact, he there operates as the voice of reason, expertly negotiating peace between Alphonso and Leonardo. Once he discovers that Leocadia has disappeared, his attitude shifts from reason to fury, and Alphonso and Leonardo’s approach to him transforms from respect to disdain. In anger, Alphonso dismisses Sanchio’s “soldadoship” (3.4.49) and threatens: “how dar’st thou talk of killing, / Or think of drawing any thing but squirts / When letchery has dry founderd thee?” (3.4.56). To be “dry foundered” is to be “render[ed] lame” (OED); Alphonso hence posits that lechery is the cause of Sanchio’s lameness, revealing, perhaps, a syphilitic body hiding under the cloak of military respectability. So while Sanchio’s disability may stem from an injury incurred on the battlefield, signifying his courageous heroism; alternatively, his inability to use his legs may be a manifest symptom of tertiary stage syphilis and thus subject to the harsh moral judgement of an early modern audience. The conjunction of syphilis and the military is, of course, far from unexpected due to the well-documented, lengthy history of epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases amongst service members,28 as well as to the widely accepted hypothesis that syphilis originated amongst the military.29 28 John Frith, “Syphilis: Its Early History and Treatment Until Penicillin and the Debate on Its Origins,” Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health 20.4 (2012), para. 3. 29 While the exact origins of syphilis are unknown, the first great syphilis epidemic was within the French army of Charles VIII while in Naples in 1495. It is thought that

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The experiences of war veterans have not been central to disability discourse, since as David Gerber explains, veterans do not tend to be involved in the critique of ableism that underpins disability studies. Disabled veterans usually aspire to resume normalized, civilian lives “with ordinary street invisibility.”30 Further, the public and the military alike often valorize their injuries, symbolically configuring battle wounds as physical manifestations of courageous, heroic self-sacrifice—as service medals inscribed directly onto the body.31 Accordingly, since the late sixteenth century, war veterans have benefitted from privileged treatment within cultural discourse, access to unparalleled medical services, and systematic financial remuneration through government agencies.32 In 1593, as part of the move towards the secularization of poor relief, a national pension scheme for disabled veterans was instituted.33 This new scheme aimed to encourage heroism, prevent desertion, avoid the evasion of impressment, and replace charity with reward for military service. It likewise sought to encourage conscription since the maimed, begging, poor, injured men who peopled the urban landscape were ineffective advertisements for the glories of military service.34 Moreover, the Act of 1593 reflects the special status accorded to ex-servicemen, who were

the illness spread from the French servicemen across Europe and into Asia and North Africa. See Louis F. Qualtiere and William W. E. Slights, “Contagion and Blame in Early Modern England: The Case of the French Pox,” Literature and Medicine 22.1 (2003): 3–4; Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis, trans. Judith Braddock and Brian Pike (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 9–11; Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 56–57. 30 David A. Gerber, “Preface to the Enlarged and Revised Edition: The Continuing Relevance of the Study of Disabled Veterans,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), xiii. 31 Gerber, “Preface,” xiv; David A. Gerber, “Introduction: Finding Disabled Veterans in History,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 5–7. 32 Gerber, “Introduction,” 12; Geoffrey L. Hudson, “Disabled Veterans and the State

in Early Modern England,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 117.

33 Hudson, “Disabled Veterans,” 117–118. 34 Ibid., 119. As a result of the extended war with Spain (1585–1604), the country was

overwhelmed by maimed ex-servicemen and current methods of relief were insufficient to deal with the rising numbers Hudson, “Disabled Veterans,” 118–119.

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clearly differentiated from the rest of the poor.35 The poor were subdivided into “disabled poor worthy of assistance and those sturdy beggars, who feigned disability out of fecklessness … those whose deformities were ‘natural’, or caused by heroic endeavour on the battlefield with ‘those that deform themselves by their Irregular courses of Living’.”36 Such taxonomies are, of course, subject to slippage, as we see in the case of Sanchio, but they retain their importance since access to financial assistance and public reputation, independently of one’s social class or economic status, depended upon categorization: wealthy or poor, one could be heroically or immorally disabled. When syphilis first appeared at the end of the fifteenth century, it was interpreted as a scourge from God to punish humanity for sin or to deter them from immorality. By the start of the seventeenth century, however, while the providential theories persisted amongst some segments of the population, it was widely recognized that syphilis could be controlled or contained by human action and that contagion was rooted in transgressive sexual activity.37 As an affliction “intimately connected with surfeiting, lechery and criminal activity, [syphilis] emerges as a product of disordered, intemperate living: bodily and social order converge.”38 Syphilis was both medically and socially destructive. Syphilis struck fear into the population of early modern Europe because of its horrific symptoms

35 Charles Greig Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 183– 186; John McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: The Burdens of the 1590s Crisis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), Chapter 9. 36 Turner, “Introduction,” 5–6. Margaret Pelling nuances this division of the deserving and undeserving poor, pointing to the large segment of the population that was willing and able to work but unable to find sufficient or regular employment to meet their financial needs for survival. See Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations, and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London and New York: Longman, 1998), 63. See Irina Metzler, “Disability in the Middle Ages: Impairment at the Intersection of Historical Inquiry and Disability Studies,” History Compass 9 (2011): 45–60, esp. 51 for a discussion of the shift away from relatively indiscriminate charity in the early medieval period to a more skeptical and selective approach to helping the disabled and the needy. 37 Qualtiere and Slights, “Contagion and Blame,” 1; Bryon Lee Grigsby, Pestilence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004), 157. 38 Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 131.

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and its rapid, seemingly uncontrollable, spread.39 Indeed, the pandemic rates of infection and the corrosive effects of syphilis resulted in largescale cultural paranoia, enabling the disease to function powerfully in literary and dramatic texts as a sign of political or cultural disintegration.40 As Margaret Healy observes, because syphilis “had physical, spiritual, moral, religious and social resonances, all centering on degeneration and corruption” it was “a powerful stage vehicle for coded comment and dissent.”41 Jonathan Gil Harris underscores the importance of syphilis in the shift from an endogenous conceptualization of disease to an exogenous and politicized model of contagion.42 The transnational nomenclatures of syphilis highlight how disease “was increasingly seen as an exotic if dangerous commodity, shipped into the nation by merchants, soldiers, and other alien migrants. Infection of the body politic by foreign bodies thus provided a template for the infection of bodies natural.”43 Syphilis is, for example, the German sickness in Poland; the Polish disease in Russia; the French sickness in Germany, Italy, and England; the Spanish sickness in Holland, Portugal, and North Africa; the English or Neapolitan sickness in France; the Portuguese sickness in Japan and the East Indies; the Turkish disease in Poland and Persia, etc. Analysing the “projected impulse to identify the disease with a feared or hated group,” Anna Foa argues that this tendency is a form of social or political aggression, “a means of taking revenge on the cultural Other.”44 Likewise, Sander 39 Girolamo Fracastoro, Fracastoro’s Syphilis, trans. Geoffrey Eatough (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984), 55–57. 40 These same conditions lead to the development of syphilis as a source of humour. Syphilitic jokes are ubiquitous and sufferers of the disease were subject to satiric scorn and ridicule from other characters and audience members (Qualtiere and Slights, “Contagion and Blame,” 15–16). 41 Healy, Fictions of Disease, 150, 153. 42 Similarly Bryon Lee Grigsby demonstrates how as a result of the plague epidemics,

disease emerges from under the rubric of divine punishment and comes to be understood as subject to human action, and specifically carnal action in the case of syphilis Grigsby, Pestilence, 157. 43 Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 17. 44 Qualtiere and Slights, “Contagion and Blame,” 19; Anna Foa, “The New and the Old: The Spread of Syphilis (1494–1530),” in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, eds. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggerio, trans. Margaret A. Gallucci, Mary M. Galluci and

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Gilman posits that the creation of mythic foreign origins for disease is rooted in a profound fear of disintegration; by locating the threat outside of the self and society, the perceived danger is distanced and thereby diminished.45 Foreign bodies are pathologized as disability aligns with racial discourses of othering: disability is figured as an absolute state of otherness dichotomous to the unmarked normative body.46 Just as, according to Mary Douglas, “The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system,” disease is reimagined as a foreign body waging war on the domestic, healthy body, leaving disability in its wake.47 In England, the pox was unconditionally rooted in foreign climes, in France or Spain.48 In this context, Sanchio’s portrayal draws on geo-medical racialized understandings of bodies and on the widespread early modern connection of “foreign origin with impairment or infirmity.”49 The credibility of Alphonso’s attack partially depends on the range of syphilitic symptoms that actor and director attribute to Sanchio in performance—the text makes much of his lameness and alludes to his infertility and erectile dysfunction—yet the cultural extent of syphilophobia and the functioning of syphilis as “a densely symbolic stage signifier”50 mean that the very hint of infection is enough to tarnish his reputation and instil sentiments of fear, aversion, and Schadenfreude in an audience. Moreover, Sanchio also fits the stereotype of the poxy dramatic character because he is foreign, disreputable, and a figure of ridicule and scorn. He accuses women of promiscuity as he jokes about “the everlasting Carol C. Galluci (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 26–45; Cf. Healy, Fictions of Disease, 132. 45 Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 46 Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Introduction: Integrating Disability into Teaching and Scholarship,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, eds. S. L. Snyder, B. J. Brueggemann, and R. Garland-Thomson (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002), 2. 47 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 116. 48 Borough of Aberdeen records, 21 April 1497, qtd. in Healy, Fictions of Disease, 128. 49 Sujata Iyengar, “Introduction: Shakespeare’s ‘Discourses of Disability’,” in Disability,

Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. Sujata Iyengar (New York: Routledge, 2014), 9. Cf. Harris, Sick Economies, 2. On the geo-medical, see also Neely, “Hot Blood,” 55–68. 50 Healy, Fictions of Disease, 150.

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motion in his scabbard,” suggesting that he is familiar with the sin of sexual immoderation (2.1.150). Alphonso’s taunting remarks also configure the impuissance of Sanchio’s legs as damaged masculinity. By claiming that his semen emerges only in “squirts,” Alphonso casts doubt on the power and efficacy of Sanchio’s ejaculate. The use of the adjective “dry” likewise contributes to an understanding of impotence furthering the attack on Sanchio’s masculinity. This link between disability and emasculation is ubiquitous in the transhistorical representation of veterans, where the hero is often described as feminized by his injury, and his rehabilitation is configured according to a narrative of re-masculinization. Gerber identifies this gender tension as foundational to an understanding of veterans.51 Yet, these conceptual associations also feed into larger discussions of disability. Situating the genesis of the polarization of disability and masculinity in the early modern period, Catherine Doubler explains that “Physiological discourse on muscle presupposes that the body has certain movements and abilities that it can perform, and implicitly suggests that those who are unable to perform these movements are incompetent and weak—in other words, these discourses begin to mark certain variances from the standard conception of the body as disabling.”52 In early modern anatomical and gymnastic manuals ideal masculinity is defined not only against femininity but also against disability, with heroic manliness linked to activity, athleticism and able-bodiedness, and opposed to sluggishness, passivity, and disability.53 Furthermore, as Doubler explains, masculinity centered on muscular embodiment or able-bodiedness was not universally accepted. She identifies a counter-tradition, exemplified by thinkers such as Galen and Girolamo Mercuriale and fictional characters such as Falstaff, who posit that “manliness is not denigrated,

51 Gerber, “Introduction,” 5. 52 Catherine E. Doubler, “‘Gambol Faculties’ and ‘Halting Bravery’: Falstaff, Will

Kemp, and Impaired Masculinity,” in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. Sujata Iyengar (New York: Routledge, 2014), 143. 53 This athletic, or physical, conceptualization of masculinity is readily apparent in the emphasis on the male legs and groin in early modern portraiture and fashion, see Doubler, “Gambol Faculties,” 146 and Bruce Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 31. On the connections between emasculation and disability in jestbooks, see Korhonen, “Disability Humour,” 34–37.

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but is actually affirmed, by impairment and illness.”54 Paradoxically, bodily malleability signifies a non-malleable, innate masculinity within.55 Sanchio, like Falsaff, resists this articulation of athletic masculinity and gestures towards an un-embodied conceptualization of masculinity. In contrast, Alphonso’s denigration of Sanchio is rooted in the body, in the conceptual nexus of disability, emasculation, and sexually transmitted illness.56 As Sanchio comes to be identified as one of “those that deform themselves by their Irregular courses of Living,” he is emasculated and demeaned, and additionally, he becomes a figure of ridicule. Laughs are derived from his persistent uttering of violent threats that he is incapable of executing and his numerous requests to be thrown at or transported towards his victim so that he can engage in physical battles (see 3.4, 5.4, 5.6).57 Puns on terms such as “carriage” (2.1.89–90, 3.4.51), “stay” (3.4.16–17), “stand” (3.4.28–30, 5.6.74), and “impotent” (5.4.168–170) further highlight and mock Sanchio’s disability. His repeated insistence on following Caranza (5.4.202, 5.6.55, 60, 61, 69), a Spanish duelling manual written by Geronimo Caranza that was much ridiculed for its ceremonial excesses, further connects his impotence with false bravado and with the ritual extravagances that English audiences derisorily associated with Spain. The final scene sees Alphonso bound in a chair to fight Sanchio since “he has th’advantage … in legs” (5.6.72), but in the end, in a display of cowardice revealing that all their fierce provocations have been unfounded, both men “ha’ not the heart” to “dicharg[e]” their weapons (5.6.110, 106). Although Sanchio is the explicit target of the jokes, the ridicule transcends his physical body and refracts nationally. Sanchio’s Catholicism and Spanishness thus add another dimension to readings of Sanchio’s emasculated, ridiculed body because his sexual and moral depravity

54 Doubler, “Gambol Faculties,” 147. See Falstaff’s comments in 2HenryIV , 2.4.43–44. 55 Doubler, “Gambol Faculties,” 148. 56 On the link between disability and femininity see also Allison P. Hobgood, “Caesar Hath the Falling Sickness: The Legibility of Early Modern Disability in Shakespearean Drama,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29 (2009). https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/993/ 1184. 57 Steggle demonstrates that physical comedy and wordplay were potent sources of laughter in early modern drama. Steggle, Laughing and Weeping, 71–79.

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contribute to the larger xenophobic, anti-Catholic discourse that underlies both the play and Jacobean culture more broadly. Like Alphonso’s mockery, the nationalist and religious dimension of the play transforms his wounded legs from an exemplary military “badge of courage” into an example of Spanish martial defeat, to be mocked and applauded by their English enemies. Sanchio is a symbolic representation of the Spanish military: old, ineffectual, diseased, and full of empty threats, false bravado, and surface formalities. He enables the English audience to indulge in communal debasing laughter, thereby neutralizing their fears of the dreaded, powerful Spanish Empire. The topical, political critique is rendered even more potent as Sanchio functions as representation of Philip II, King of Spain (1527–1598) through the use of his “sick-chair.” Not only was the sick chair a recognized visual shorthand for illness on the early modern stage, but also, in a survey of about thirty early modern plays that have sick chairs as stage properties Alan C. Dessen observes that there is an important visual and symbolic link between sick chairs and sick thrones.58 He demonstrates that the sick chair connotes political disease: it is “a built-in image or ready-at-hand technique to drive home the metaphor or concept that ‘the throne is a sick-bed’ or ‘the kingdom is diseased’.”59 The disabled character thereby figures a political leader who is censured for being corrupt or ineffectual. Sanchio is most obviously fashioned as a critique of Philip II, who was exceptional for his use of a wheelchair in his later years. Wheelchairs were not in current usage in Jacobean England: the first selfpropelled wheelchairs were made in Germany in the 1640s.60 Before this point those who could not walk unassisted would be transported in litters, sedan chairs, wheelbarrows, or carts.61 Small wheels were put under chairs or beds to facilitate the indoor mobility of the furniture rather than the people, as is evidenced by the presence of wheels only on two of the four chair legs or bedposts.62 There is evidence of a chair on wheels that

58 Alan C. Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 114. 59 Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare’s, 125. 60 Herman L. Kamenetz, The Wheelchair Book: Mobility for the Disabled (Springfield,

IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1969), 14.

61 Kamenetz, Wheelchair Book, 8–11. 62 Ibid., 14.

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could be transformed into a bed or a commode made in Nuremberg in 1588,63 but the most renowned example belonged to Philip II, who is often cited as the first person to use a wheelchair in Western Europe.64 The “gout chair” was built for him in 1595 by Jehan L’hermite, who includes sketches and descriptions of the “Vraye pourtraict[u]re de la chayre des gouttes de sa ma[jes]te” [True depiction of the gout chair of His Majesty] in his diary. Fabricated from wood, leather, and iron, with horsehair padding in the seat and backrest, the chair rolled on four wheels, and boasted a fully adjustable back and footrest, enabling it to transform from completely upright to supine, with various positions in between.65 L’hermite explains how Philip spends all day in the chair, sometimes even sleeping in it at night.66 A report from the Venetian Ambassador in Spain in May 1595, specifies that Philip is “being carried … in a chair,” which concurs with L’hermite’s account.67 Indeed, news of Philip’s ailing health began to circulate as early as 1592,68 and dispatches from Spain consistently report his physical weakness and his increasingly debilitating medical conditions.69 63 Ibid., 14. 64 Louis XIV (1638–1715) also used a wheelchair towards the end of his life. Lauren

Gilbert, “The Bath Chair,” English Historical Fiction Authors, 2014, http://englishhisto ryauthors.blogspot.ca/2014/10/the-bath-chair.html. 65 Jehan L’hermite, Le passetemps (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), 256, and image adjacent. On Philip’s ailing health and his use of a wheelchair, see Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 302–315, esp. 306, 311, and 313; Geoffrey Parker, Philip II (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 192–193; and María Teresa Oliveros De Castro and Eliseo Subiza Mart´in, Felipe II; estudio m´edico-historico (Madrid: Aguilar, 1956), 168–192. The chair is on display at the Escorial in Madrid, according to Parker, Philip II , 192. 66 “s’y tenoit dedans depuis le matin qu’il se levoit jusques au soir qu’il se couchoit … y estoit couché dedans comme en son propre lit” (L’hermite, Passetemps, 258). It is “un meuble des meilleurs et plus aysez que Sa Majesté pouvoit avoir, non en valeur ni estimation de richesse, mais bien en la grande commodité qu’il en reçoit en touttes ses maladies” (L’Hermite, Passetemps, 257). 67 Great Britain, Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts

Relating, to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy, Vol. IX (London: Longman Green, 1864–1947), 351.

68 Great Britain, CSPV , 43. 69 Great Britain, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reigns of Edward

VI, Mary, Elizabeth and James I, 1547 –1625 Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, eds. Mary Anne Everett Green and Robert Lemon

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By crafting Sanchio as a figure for Philip or for the Spanish military more generally, no matter the aetiology of his disability, Beaumont and Fletcher use Sanchio to satirize, ridicule, emasculate, and pathologize Spain. As a war veteran, Sanchio shows the Spanish military to be lame, powerless, and cowardly. If he is afflicted with syphilis, he presents Spain as similarly ineffective, but also as immoral, spiritually tainted, and providentially punished. Read in this way, the play articulates a strong religious and political stance against Spain and against James’s proposed dynastic union of Prince Charles and the Infanta Maria Ana. As a Catholic super-power, Spain posed significant political and ideological threats to England. English racial bigotry impacted the perception of Spaniards, who were feared not only for their Catholicism, but also for their supposed Moorish or Jewish heritage. Essential to the national imagination and to the self-construction of Englishness was a differentiation from Catholic continental Europe and a perception of England as a strong, unique Protestant nation. Love’s Pilgrimage is one of many Jacobean plays that responds to these Hispanophobic sentiments. Paradoxically, this ideological aim is achieved by adapting a Spanish source. Love’s Pilgrimage combines racial, nationalist, and medical discourse, centring this conceptual nexus on Sanchio’s disabled body. In Sanchio, disability, foreignness, emasculation, and immorality are fused. Because disability has a prosthetic literary function and “acts in cultural representation as a magnet for hyperbolic meaning in texts and lives,” Sanchio’s body is suffused with interpretive possibilities.70 Moreover, laughter overflows the bounds of the theatre. By harnessing the communal power of festive laughter the play unites spectators in a shared experience of Schadenfreude, in which Sanchio’s physicality is a risible microcosm for larger, serious political issues. Laughter creates overlapping publics of able-bodied, healthy, and sexually moral spectators, defining them against individuals who are ill or disabled. Participation in the community signals superiority and gives the group licence to mock the Other. But this laughter is not motivated by pure cruelty; it stems from social and personal discomfort and insecurity, from very real questions plaguing early seventeenth-century playgoers, such as: How can we protect ourselves from syphilis, this (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1856–1872), IV: 145, 520, V: 103, 160; Great Britain, CSPV , 150, 213, 218, 323, 348, 389, 416, 418, 432, 528, 610, 653, 683, 690, 709, 714–15, 717–723, 725, 727–728, 731–732, 734, 736. 70 Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson, “Introduction,” 2.

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debilitating disease that seems to be inexplicability and uncontrollably spreading across the population? How can we take care of all of the wounded, impoverished war veterans in a time of economic scarcity in a society with little appropriate infrastructure in place? Given the paucity of resources, how can we know who is deserving of our care and ensure that they receive the support that they need? How would I take care of my loved ones if they were incapacitated? Who will take care of me? These are big questions and the answers are bleak, or unclear at best. Laughter is a refuge from the insecurity. Laughter protects, distances individuals from their fears. There is safety in the communal qualities of laughter. The lame humor is not at all lame.

References Barber, C. L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959. Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. “Love’s Pilgrimage.” In The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, edited by Fredson Bowers, Vol. 2, 567–704. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. New York: MacMillan, 1911. Billig, Michael. Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London: Sage, 2005. Bristol, Michael D. Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England. New York and London: Methuen, 1985. Brown, Pamela Allen. “Bad Fun and Tudor Laughter.” In A Companion to Tudor Literature, edited by Kent Cartwright, 324–338. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Brown, Thomas Keith. “The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England.” Times Literary Supplement 21 (January 1977): 77–81. Browne, Thomas. “Pseudodoxia Epidemica.” In The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, 6 vols, Vol. 3. London: n.p., 1928–1931. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melanchol y, edited by Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, Vol. I. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1989. de Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel. “Las Dos Doncellas.” In Exemplary novels = Novelas ejemplares, edited and translated by Barry William Ife, Vol. 3, 142– 189. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1992. Critchley, Simon. On Humour. London: Routledge, 2002. Cruickshank, Charles Greig. Elizabeth’s Army. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.

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De Castro, María Teresa Oliveros, and Eliseo Subiza Martín. Felipe II; estudio médico-historico. Madrid: Aguilar, 1956. Dessen, Alan C. Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Doubler, Catherine E. “‘Gambol Faculties’ and ‘Halting Bravery’: Falstaff, Will Kemp, and Impaired Masculinity.” In Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, edited by Sujata Iyengar, 142–157. New York: Routledge, 2014. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Praeger, 1966. Fine, Gary. “Sociological Approaches to the Study of Humor.” In Handbook of Humor Research, edited by P. E. McGee and J. H. Goldstein, 159–181. New York: Springer, 1983. Foa, Anna. “The New and the Old: The Spread of Syphilis (1494–1530).” In Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, edited by Edward Muir and Guido Ruggerio. Translated by Margaret A. Gallucci, Mary M. Galluci, and Carol C. Galluci. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Fracastoro, Girolamo. Fracastoro’s Syphilis. Translated by Geoffrey Eatough. Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984. Frith, John. “Syphilis: Its Early History and Treatment Until Penicillin and the Debate on Its Origins.” In Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health 20.4 (2012): 49–58. Fuchs, Barbara. Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2009. ———. The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Gerber, David A. “Introduction: Finding Disabled Veterans in History.” In Disabled Veterans in History, edited by David A. Gerber, 1–52. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. ———. “Preface to the Enlarged and Revised Edition: The Continuing Relevance of the Study of Disabled Veterans.” In Disabled Veterans in History, edited by David A. Gerber, ix–xxiv. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Gilbert, Lauren. 2014. “The Bath Chair.” English Historical Fiction Authors. http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.ca/2014/10/the-bath-chair.html. Gilman, Sander L. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Great Britain. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reigns of Edward VI., Mary, Elizabeth and James I, 1547–1625 Preserved in the State

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Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, edited by Mary Anne Everett Green and Robert Lemon. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1856–1872. ———. Public Record Office. Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating, to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy, Vol. IX. London: Longman Green, 1864–1947. Grigsby, Bryon Lee. Pestilence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004. Hall, Jonathan. Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Healy, Margaret. Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Hobbes, Thomas. Human Nature and De Corpore Politico. Edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Hobgood, Allison P. “Caesar Hath the Falling Sickness: The Legibility of Early Modern Disability in Shakespearean Drama.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29 (2009). https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/993/1184. Hudson, Geoffrey L. “Disabled Veterans and the State in Early Modern England.” In Disabled Veterans in History, edited by David A. Gerber, 117–144. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Iyengar, Sujata, “Introduction: Shakespeare’s ‘Discourses of Disability’.” In Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, edited by Sujata Iyengar, 1–19. New York: Routledge, 2014. Kamen, Henry. Philip of Spain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Kamenetz, Herman L. The Wheelchair Book: Mobility for the Disabled. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1969. Korhonen, Anu. “Disability Humour in English Jestbooks of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Cultural History 3.1 (2014): 27–53. L’hermite, Jehan. Le passetemps. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971. Liebler, Naomi Conn. Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Lindemann, Mary. Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. McGurk, John. The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: The Burdens of the 1590s Crisis. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Metzler, Irina. “Disability in the Middle Ages: Impairment at the Intersection of Historical Inquiry and Disability Studies.” History Compass 9 (2011): 45–60. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

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Morreall, John. Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983. ———. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humour. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Neely, Carol Thomas. “Hot Blood: Estranging Mediterranean Bodies in Early Modern Medical and Dramatic Texts.” In Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, edited by Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson, 55–68. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Parker, Geoffrey. Philip II . London: Hutchinson, 1979. Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pelling, Margaret. The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations, and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England. London and New York: Longman, 1998. Powers, Alan. “‘Gallia and Gaul, French and Welsh’: Comic Ethnic Slander in the Gallia Wars.” In Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare’s plays, edited by Frances N. Teague, 109–122. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994. Qualtiere, Louis F., and William W. E. Slights, “Contagion and Blame in Early Modern England: The Case of the French Pox.” Literature and Medicine 22.1 (2003): 1–24. Quétel, Claude. History of Syphilis. Translated by Judith Braddock and Brian Pike. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Randall, Dale B. J. “Some New Perspectives on the Spanish Setting of The Changeling and Its Source.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 3 (1986): 189–216. Redworth, Glyn. The Prince and the Infanta: The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Samson, Alexander. “A Fine Romance: Anglo-Spanish Relations in the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39 (2009): 65–94. ———. “Introduction.” In The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1–7. London: Routledge, 2016. Scott, Sophie K. “The Social Life of Laughter.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18.12 (December 2014): 618–620. Skinner, Quentin. “Why Laughing Mattered in the Renaissance: The Second Henry Tudor Memorial Lecture.” History of Political Thought 22.1 (March 2001): 418–447. Smith, Bruce. Shakespeare and Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Snyder, Sharon L., Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. “Introduction: Integrating Disability into Teaching and Scholarship.” In

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Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by S. L. Snyder, B. Brueggemann, and R. Garland-Thomson, 1–12. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002. Stallybrass, Peter. “‘Drunk with the Cup of Liberty’: Robin Hood, the Carnivalesque, and the Rhetoric of Violence in Early Modern England.” In The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, edited by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, 45–76. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Steggle, Matthew. Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Sully, James. An Essay on Laughter. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902. Turner, David M. “Introduction: Approaching Anomalous Bodies.” In Social Histories of Disability and Deformity, edited by David M. Turner and Kevin Stagg, 1–15. New York: Routledge, 2006. ———. “Disability Humor and the Meanings of Impairment in Early Modern England.” In Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, edited by Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, 52–72. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013.

CHAPTER 11

Syphilis Patches: Form and Dramatic History in The Knight of the Burning Pestle Nancy Simpson-Younger

Abstract At the intersection of disability history and literary form, the concept of patching applies to both early modern plays and early modern bodies. The metatheatrical comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle explores the overlap and divergence between types of patching by staging not only a barber’s syphilis treatment (involving a nose patch) but also a series of “extra” scenes that are patched onto the plot structure of the play, as demanded by a faction of grocer-onlookers. In one of these scenes, the tensions between barbers’ and grocers’ approaches to syphilis lead to staged conflict. The barber Barbarossa operates on a medical model of disability, meaning that he sees syphilis primarily as a problem to be treated. This treatment can be both physically harsh and socially isolating. Conversely, the grocer’s apprentice Rafe appears to free Barbarossa’s victims, integrating them back into society in a scene that was spontaneously added to the play by members of his guild. The grocers’ patched scene counteracts the literal patching treatment provided by the barber: it makes those with syphilis more visible as components of society,

N. Simpson-Younger (B) Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_11

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augmenting both the text of the play and the scope of the play’s portrayal of a verisimilar London. In the early modern period, as Tiffany Stern notes, plays were collections of individual documents (or “patches”), pieced together like a quilt in a process known as “play-patching.”1 While the textual implications of this metaphor have been compellingly explored by Stern and others, the cultural implications have not been fully parsed—particularly from a disability perspective. In the seventeenth century, “patches” could mean not only play components, but pieces of material applied to the skin to disguise or treat physical marks. When syphilis caused facial sores (or even nasal disintegration), these blemishes could be covered with ornamental patches, publicly marking the wearer. While a full-nose patch clearly signaled syphilis, smaller patches could ambiguously indicate cosmetic enhancements, moles, smallpox marks, or lanced syphilis chancres—but always with the threat of the latter, as John Bulwer underscores: “black Patches” became prevalent because “French Pimples have need of a French Plaister.”2 Keeping this context in mind, this paper will use the framework of disability studies to ask what it means to foreground the “patchiness” of a play’s structure alongside the “patchiness” of the body with syphilis. As Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood point out, three overarching models structure the modern theorization of disability. First, the medical model proposes that the disabled body must be treated or “cured,” to appear as normal as possible. In scholarly circles, this model is often denigrated in favor of a constructivist approach: either the social model (which argues that impairments become disabilities when social conditions prevent equal access) or the cultural model (which prioritizes the experience of embodied engagement with the environment).3 For early modern thinkers, none of these categories officially existed, as Hobgood and Wood underscore, following Joshua Eyler: “We must innovate new models of disability studies that are historically specific and less 1 Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press,

2012), 1.

2 Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: Or, the Artificiall Changling (William Hunt, 1653), 272–273. For a late but visually helpful woodcut illustration of patching, see “Jennies Answer to Sawny” (P. Brooksby, 1682). 3 “Introduction: Ethical Staring: Disabling the English Renaissance,” in Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (Ohio State University Press, 2013), 5.

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broadly constructivist.”4 In doing so, I think, we must ask how contagious illnesses that could generate impairments or social consequences might have been considered disabling in the past. Were early modern writers applying versions of medical or constructivist models to diseases like syphilis? Were those with syphilis publicly visible, or socially excluded, because of these models? And what does this imply about early modern definitions of disability, and the boundaries of our own modern discourse? While many critics have approached early modern syphilis as a social construction, few have asked if early modern writings shared this view, or what this might mean for the early public reception of those with syphilis.5 If syphilis is a “palimpsest,” as Jonathan Gil Harris argues, the early moderns often grounded that palimpsest in symptomatic and religious terms.6 The physician William Clowes describes “violent, corrosive, malignant” sores, deep bone aches, rotting flesh, and lost teeth and jaws in his syphilis patients, viewing these symptoms as manifestations of personal and national sin.7 Still, when a 1682 broadside ballad calls a syphilis-infected person “disabled,” the meaning is more social than physical. After losing his money, the character Sawney is “Disabled and turned out of doors by the Miss of London Town,” a facially-patched prostitute.8 Whether “disabled” means a syphilis infection or a changed social status here is an open question—but either way, Sawney’s disability leads his former girlfriend to spurn and exile him. Earlier works also reflect the social consequences of syphilis. In the 1619 pamphlet “The Hunting of the Pox,” friends of the allegorical Morbus Gallicus “began him to forsake” when he became facially disfigured; even earlier, Erasmus

4 Ibid., 8. 5 See Jonathan Gil Harris, “(Po)X Marks the Spot: How to ‘Read’ ‘Early Modern’

‘Syphilis’ in The Three Ladies of London,” in Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kevin Siena (Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005); Todd Pettigrew, “Sex, Sin, and Scarring: Syphilis in Redford’s Wit and Science,” in Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare, 1485–1590, ed. Lloyd Edward Kermode et al. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 224; and Winifred Schleiner, “Infection and Cure Through Women: Renaissance Constructions of Syphilis,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24.3 [1994]: 500. 6 Gil Harris, “(Po)X,” 110–111. 7 William Clowes, A Brief and Necessary Treatise … (Thomas Cadman, 1585), 4v, 18r,

26v, 38v. Subsequent citations are made parenthetically. 8 (P. Brooksby, 1682).

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warned the wife of a syphilis patient to protect herself by using “separate beds, cups, linens, and razors” and wearing armor to bed.9 Patients could be isolated at home, banished to “foul wards,” or sequestered in institutions for fear of contagion.10 Twenty-five percent of patients at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1548 had a syphilis diagnosis; many were too embarrassed to be seen in public because of the rumored immorality of the disease, marked visibly by facial patching, uncovered spots, or hair loss.11 This resonates with Tobin Siebers’ modern assertion that “the more visible the disability, the greater the chance that the disabled person will be repressed from public view and forgotten.”12 While early moderns theorized syphilis as a medical and religious matter, they were clearly aware of its social implications: visibly affected individuals could experience constructed barriers to civic participation. In 1607, The Knight of the Burning Pestle creatively stages this issue. In a scene patched into the play by members of the grocers’ guild, a “giant” barber-surgeon isolates and torturously treats a series of patients with syphilis. After defeating the barber, the Knight of the Burning Pestle liberates the captives, stops the treatment, and integrates the patients back into society. This scene is particularly fruitful for modern critics because it highlights how barber-surgeons and grocers could hold starkly different views on the medical and social valences of syphilis. My essay will begin by exploring the grocers’ and barber’s outlooks in detail. Then, in the next section, it will ask how these ideas set up and re-inflect the six patched-on scenes that dominate the larger structure of the play. Taken together, the sections demonstrate that versions of medical and constructionist models 9 (J.W. for J.T., 1619), B3r; Erasmus, qtd. in J. D. Rolleston, “Venereal Disease in

Literature,” British Journal of Venereal Diseases 10.3 (1934): 154.

10 Jonathan Gil Harris, “‘Some Love That Drew Him Oft from Home’: Syphilis and International Commerce in The Comedy of Errors,” in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, Vol. 144 (Gale Cengage Learning), 326; Frederique Fouassier, “William Clowes’s Treatise on Syphilis (1579): A Trebly Eccentric Work?,” in In and Out: Eccentricity in Britain, ed. Sophie Aymes-Stokes and Laurent Mellet (Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 69. 11 Frederique Fouassier, “William Clowes’s Treatise,” 69. Clowes claims four practitioners cured over 1000 people in five years at St. Bartholomew’s (Brief and Necessary Treatise, 1v). 12 Quoted in Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood, “Ethical Staring,” 3. Todd Pettigrew notes that “syphilis was always vigorously represented as a visible disease” (ibid., 216).

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are both present in the play—with the privileged constructionist model, represented by the grocers, applied both to the human body and to the playtext itself.

Barber-Surgeons and Grocers During the Induction, the character Rafe is introduced as a grocer’s apprentice. At the urging of his master and mistress (“audience members” who have climbed onstage and become directors of the dramatic action), Rafe eventually dons a costume, reads a romance excerpt out loud, and creates himself “Knight of the Burning Pestle.” (A pestle symbolizes the grocers’ guild because grocers sell spices and other finely-ground commodities. At the same time, the “burning” pestle sets up the idea of venereal disease in the play.)13 While Rafe rides off in search of adventure, he keeps a grocers’ outlook, advocating dietary means of controlling bodily humors. In his May Day speech, he proclaims: “Now butter with a leaf of sage is good to purge the blood; /Fly Venus and phlebotomy, for they are neither good” (Interlude 4.43–44).14 As a grocer-knight, Rafe believes with Thomas Cogan that five physical practices (exercising, eating, drinking, sleeping, and having sex) can influence his listeners’ humoral balance, allowing them to “purge” themselves to conform to seasonal demands.15 In his focus on diet, Rafe echoes the preoccupations of his mistress, a grocer’s wife. She recommends an astonishing range of home remedies to the actors on stage: licorice for opening the throat (1.70), green ginger for a lump on the head (2.263), sugar-candy after an exhausting fight (2.336), and carduus benedictus and mare’s milk for worms in the stomach (3.309–310). This treatment is both medical and personalized to particular individuals—like a “child” that hath a “sweet breath” (3.307)—and, importantly, suggested in a public context. In other words, the grocers advise non-invasive dietary remedies after seeing 13 On burning, see Gil Harris, “Some Love That Drew Him Oft from Home,” 327 and Alexander Leggatt, “The Audience as Patron: The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” in Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, eds. Paul Westfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 308. 14 Quotations from The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Sheldon P. Zitner (Manchester University Press, 2004) will be cited parenthetically in the text. 15 Cogan describes this Hippocratic model (and a somewhat similar Galenic one) in The Haven of Health (London: Anne Griffin for Roger Ball, 1636), B5v.

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and responding to other actors’ bodies onstage, surrounded by other onlookers. In their approach, the grocers are implicitly opposed to the single barber in the play—a towering “giant” called Nick, who is renamed “Barbaroso” before his sudden incorporation into the mock-romance plotline (3.215, 235).16 Affiliated with surgeons at the guild level, barbers weren’t supposed to cut into the body—but Barbaroso still carries “a naked lance of purest steel,” a razor that could perform phlebotomy or even tissue excision (3.236).17 Nick’s other barbering services include tooth-pulling and hair-clipping, both of which are described by a hotelier in terms of bodily violence. Even soap pellets for shaving cream are “bullets” that the barber “knocks … round about his [victim’s] cheeks” (3.250). Modifying his client’s body through direct touch, Barbaroso is characterized by the speaker as an extreme, pain-causing practitioner—even cutting out the nose tissue of a patient with syphilis in isolation (3.404–405). All of this, crucially, takes place in mock-romance terms, which exaggerate the barber’s degree of bodily violence to imply the grocers’ judiciousness and superiority. As Rafe’s comic but also ideological opponent, Barbaroso represents an invasive medical approach that grocers do not support in this play. The clash of perspectives comes to a head when Rafe defeats Barbaroso in combat and discovers four “captives” in the giant’s “sable cave” (3.361). All of the captives (three knights and a lady) show symptoms that could be linked to syphilis, from visual degeneration and the disintegration of the nose to deep bone-level aches.18 Moreover, all have been treated by Barbaroso in comparative social isolation, going six weeks or two months without seeing more than one other person (3.433,

16 Richard Madelaine hints at this in “Apprentice Interventions: Boy Actors, the Burning Pestle, and the Privy Mark of Irony,” Q/W/E/R/T/Y 5 (1995): 76. 17 Frederique Fouassier, “William Clowes’s Treatise,” 67. Unlike Rafe, Clowes recommends springtime phlebotomy for syphilis patients (Brief and Necessary Treatise, 14r). 18 Opinions differ here. Roy Booth argues the first has “pubic lice,” the second, a syphilis scar, and the third, “primitive pox” (“‘Down with Your Title, Boy!’: Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Its Insurgent Audience” (Q/W/E/R/T/Y 5 (1995): 54)). Lucy Munro says all have “venereal disease” and discusses symptoms in depth (“The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Generic Experimentation,” in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Garrett Sullivan et al. [Oxford University Press, 2006], 197).

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3.446).19 In isolating his patients, Barbaroso is conducting an extreme version of the treatment that his fellow guild member William Clowes advises in a 1585 vernacular treatise: “above all things,” the patient must “be kept close in all times of the cure,” meaning doors and windows must be shut firm to retain heat (for sweating) (37v). While Clowes nominally wants the patient to have “company,” he also justifies isolation implicitly with his definition of syphilis: it is “the pestilent infection of filthy lust,” hinting that quarantines are necessary for physical and moral health.20 Janette Dillon notes that “sexual offenders” could be carted outside the city walls; Clowes mitigates this by calling syphilis curable when he (or a peer) supervises the patient in a hospital, as long as divine aid is available (e.g. 41r).21 Because of Clowes’ work, barber-surgeons became associated with isolating syphilis patients as well as healing them. In practice, as Barbaroso’s character emphasizes, Clowes’ advice could lead to painful and lonely treatment. Daily experiences might include surgical cutting (3.404), enforced sweating (3.445–456), meager diets (3.448), and quill-injected enemas (3.455), either in solitude or with a single, equally-sick companion.22 In the world of the play, this treatment protocol makes Barbaroso a comic villain: Rafe’s dwarf George calls him “inhuman,” and the hotelier goes a step further, calling him “no man but furious fiend of hell” (3.392, 3.222). Writing about similar treatments depicted in The Faerie Queene, Colin Milburn argues that “aggressive medical tactics were often understood as the only way to remove [the] powerful and evil poisons filling the syphilitic body”—but, even if this was the case, these treatments were also clearly perceived as excruciating and “harsh.”23 For The Faerie Queene, according to Milburn, this serves a didactic purpose, discouraging dangerous sexual activity. For Knight, 19 Clowes recommends a 40 or 50-day course of diet (Brief and Necessary Treatise, 37r). 20 Ibid., 37r, A3r. 21 Janette Dillon, “‘Is Not All the World Mile End, Mother?’: The Blackfriars Theater,

the City of London, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 9 (1997): 128; Frederique Fouassier, “William Clowes’s Treatise,” 67. 22 See Colin Milburn, “Syphilis in Faerie Land: Edmund Spenser and the Syphilography of Elizabethan England,” Criticism 4.4 (2004): 603. 23 Ibid., 607–608; see also 613 and “The Hunting of the Pox,” B3r–4r. Rabelais’ Pantagruel shows “unfortunate syphilitics tortured in their mercury baths,” aligning Knight with a satirical literary tradition (Isabelle Pantin, “Poetic Fiction and Natural

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in contrast, there is no overt teaching moment here, and no redeeming quality to the pain of treatment. The barber remains, in Rafe’s words, a “traitor foul” with a “guilty soul” (3.262–263). Even allowing for the mock-romance tone (and the grocer’s potentially naive enthusiasm), the barber’s methods are framed as unjustifiably cruel, transforming patients into prisoners with no positive consequences. At the same time, the captives with syphilis are not wholly absolved from blame. If Beaumont’s light touch skewers a barber by exaggerating his professional techniques, it also pokes fun at courtiers, whose lifestyles predispose them to venereal diseases. (The lady who emerges with the third knight comes from Turnbull Street, where prostitution is rife (3.440).)24 For Roy Booth, this means that the “satire on knights is as scabrous as Beaumont can make it”—preserving the citizen Rafe as a “virile” (if naive) agent of comic inversion, while marking the gallant class as morally and physically corrupted.25 While this can be true, Beaumont is also implicitly using these caricatures to ask serious ethical questions about medical treatment from a social standpoint. Does the behavior of the knights really justify a combination of treatment and captivity? Should barber-surgeons be the ones to decide if a person is a poor victim or a violator of morality, to be therapeutically scourged? And is syphilis really the kind of disease that should be treated (or prevented) by removal from the community? These questions are highlighted during the testimony of the second knight. As the captive most overtly associated with syphilis, he goes by “Sir Pockhole,” cites his French ancestry, and wears a patch across his nasal cavity (3.395–404).26 (This is where the “furious fiend … did cut the gristle of [his] nose away,/ And in the place this velvet plaster stands” (3.401, 404–405).) At the center of the play, the patch acts as a publicly legible sign of Sir Pockhole’s diagnosis. Looking at it, Rafe has a choice. He had freed the first knight, who suffered from visual difficulties and Philosophy in Humanist Italy: Fracastoro’s Use of Myth in Syphilis,” in Fiction and the Frontiers of Knowledge in Europe, 1500–1800 [Ashgate, 2010], 21). 24 On prostitution and the gendered implications of syphilis, see Kevin Siena, “Pollution, Promiscuity, and the Pox,” e.g. 559. 25 “‘Down with Your Title, Boy!’” 54. 26 On “French pox,” see Frederique Fouassier, “William Clowes’s Treatise,” 68 and Ton

Hoenselaars, “‘As Catching as the Plague, Though Not All so General’: Syphilis in Tudor and Stuart Literature,” Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 15 (1997): 49.

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an “itch,” but who wasn’t yet visibly marked as a disabled person. In this first case, at the urging of his mistress, Rafe had sent the knight “to the town / where he may find relief”—hinting that relief isn’t possible in social isolation.27 Sir Pockhole, however, presents a different case. He is visibly and socially affected by syphilis, “scorched and scored” by the barber’s treatment, and obviously in a more advanced stage of the disease (3.392).28 He has also ridden a “trotting horse,” suggesting the sexual activity that Rafe warns against in his May Day speech—so his painful treatment could be moralized, ostensibly, as chastisement for his previous behavior (3.399). While he calls himself “free by his copy”—indicating membership in the city of London—he is imprisoned by Barbaroso, deprived of his participation in city life (3.397). Should someone visibly disabled be forcibly sequestered for moral or treatment-based reasons? For Rafe, the answer is no. When the knight begs, “Relieve me,” and the grocer’s wife approves (in part because “his breath stinks” from mercury treatments), Rafe responds, “Convey him straight after the other knight. —Sir Pockhole, fare you well” (3.408–409).29 On one level, this makes Rafe a hero for ordinary folks. Sir Pockhole’s treatment with mercury (not guaiacum wood) marks him as a non-elite sufferer, meaning his liberation has little to do with high social class.30 At the same time, Rafe wants the smelly man to leave “straight,” or immediately—making Rafe the kind of hero who wants to rescue others without too much personal unpleasantness. Rafe also acts at the request of his mistress, who has attended at least one public display of a child with enlarged genitalia (3.278–279). Town life is not free of staring or judgment, and Rafe’s do-gooder instincts are not necessarily unmitigated. This is true even if Sir Pockhole calls Rafe “Kind sir” and says “good [k]night”—an audible

27 For an alternative perspective, see Richard Madelaine, “Apprentice Interventions,” 73–74. 28 For stages and symptoms, see Jonathan Gil Harris, “(Po)X,” 116. I disagree here with Glenn Steinberg’s argument that Rafe “never realizes” these knights have syphilis. (“‘YouKnow the Plot/We Both Agreed On?’: Plot, Self-Consciousness, and ‘The London Merchant’ in Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 5 [1991]: 219). 29 Clowes defends controversial quicksilver treatments in A Brief and Necessary Treatise, 24r–25v. 30 Winifred Schleiner, “Infection and Cure,” 499.

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pun. While Rafe’s kindness enables the social reintegration of Sir Pockhole, it also allows Beaumont to comment backhandedly on that society: goodness, it seems, may have its limits. The third set of prisoners, a man and woman groaning “deliver us,” present the most overt challenge to Rafe’s grocer-based perspective. Barbaroso was keeping this pair in “diet,” a long-term treatment strategy involving food, soaking baths, and enemas (3.448). Here, Barbaroso echoes Clowes down to the menu: bread, broth, water, and meats like mutton (though Clowes would quibble with Barbaroso’s burning of the meat) (3.448–450; 15r). Clearly, this dietary healing aligns with the grocers’ medical methodology. In confronting these prisoners, Rafe must decide whether this methodology makes sense for syphilis patients in isolation. Surprisingly, without any debate, Rafe simply increases his condemnation of the barber at this juncture, telling the prisoners “From this infernal monster you shall go, / That useth knights and gentle ladies so” (3.456–457). Echoing earlier demonic descriptions of Barbaroso, Rafe’s language here implies that isolation for even dietary treatment is unacceptable: it violates the patients’ gentle status. Importantly, though, this knight and lady are actually a prostitute and her lover. While this language might make Rafe seem naive or silly, it might also make him seem kind or compassionate—or simply willing to overlook previous moral faults.31 Either way, his shocking actions make an implicit claim: that all humans, no matter their status, deserve to be in a social context for non-torturous treatment. Rafe’s sympathy for the prisoners resonates with two other moments in the text: his dismissal of Barbaroso and his interaction with a soldier during a military drill. Both moments emphasize Rafe as an agent of carnival inversion, simultaneously upending and reconstructing social expectations.32 They also implicate him in the syphilis economy. When Barbaroso asks forgiveness, Rafe requires the barber-giant to “swear /upon [his] burning pestle” that he “henceforth never gentle blood will spill” (3.465–466, 464). Barbaroso not only swears, but kisses the pestle—implicating both himself and Rafe in a transaction with overtones 31 Context is important here. As Richard Madelaine notes, Rafe later reminisces about throwing eggs at (presumably) prostitutes on Shrove Tuesday. While Rafe rescues distressed patients, practicing prostitutes might be different (“Apprentice Interventions,” 73). 32 E.g. Alexander Leggatt, “The Audience as Patron,” 304.

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of venereal disease. Later, when supervising a march, Rafe points out that the “touch-hole” of a soldier’s gun “would breed the pox in the army” if it had nine similar peers (5.112). Still, although he makes a series of syphilis jokes in the next twenty lines, he avoids actually punishing this soldier, saying “let me tell you no more on it” (5.124). He even tells another soldier to replace the “nose” of his “flask”—which had detached—“at the city’s charge” (5.125–128). In all of these moments, Rafe is the keeper of order, but also aligned (either wittingly or unwittingly) with the metaphorical promulgation of syphilis. Knight is layered so far in “the privy mark of irony” here that it’s hard to diagnose the knight’s full complicity and role.33 Is he simply comic relief, or knowing comedy with an undertone of ethical inclusivity, or “inadvertent” comedy that pokes fun at naive grocers? Should the city really be “charged” to support syphilis patients, at the potential cost of further infections, even if isolation is a negative, socially disabling state—and even if noses aren’t actually replaceable? Raising these questions without answering them, Rafe still refuses to avoid the topic of syphilis out of a concern for propriety—becoming, at the very least, a channel for the social airing of a disability-focused topic. Taken as a whole, Rafe’s scenes highlight the difference between an extreme medicalizing stance and a more socially-conscious approach to the treatment of syphilis. If syphilis is considered disabling, creating not only physical impairments but social barriers, the early modern community could approach this disability through stark medical treatment in isolation, or through a more moderate view that retained the syphilis patients as visible community members. Here, it’s possible that Rafe could seem foolish or counterproductive: the reintegration of syphilis patients could threaten public health, from Clowes’ early modern perspective. At the same time, Rafe’s actions have an ethical component. By socially reintegrating those with syphilis, and freeing them from the vilified barber, Rafe aligns grocers with a moderate stance—not quite rejecting medical models, but demanding inclusion for those with visible differences.

33 “Dedicatory Epistle,” Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Zitner, 51.

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Play-Patching and Syphilis-Patching If Rafe offers “relief” to the captives with syphilis, Robert Keysar offers “relief” to the text of Knight itself. Rejected by its first audience, it was printed by Walter Burre in 1613 with a note that says Keysar was moved “both to relieve and cherish” it.34 The verb choice is either a curious coincidence or a deliberate resonance: both the play and the captives needed reincorporation into a public sphere to be “relieved.” But what ultimately enables this link between the captives and the text? In this section, I argue that the idea of patching frames Knight as a syphilitic play, with a “pieced” nature that foregrounds both its textual subunits and its clear demand to be put back into a public context. If the play is constructed as syphilitic, by both the prefatory letter-writers and the grocer characters, then syphilis becomes something that can be publicly labeled, characterized, and manipulated, moving it further outside the purview of medicalizing perspectives within the period itself. As many critics have noted, Walter Burre’s prefatory letter denigrates the public rejection of the staged version of Knight.35 For Burre, the play is a premature child that was “exposed to the wide world, who for want of judgment, or not understanding the privy mark of irony about it (which showed it was no offspring of any vulgar brain) utterly rejected it, so that for want of acceptance it was even ready to give up the ghost” (51). Keysar then rescues the play, allowing Burre to “foster it privately” and re-dress it in “good lasting clothes” (51). This description resonates with public assumptions about syphilis. Clowes writes of young babies who contract syphilis from their parents or nurses; the children are visibly “infected with the pockes,” sometimes (though not always) on the privy members, and cures can involve higher-quality fostering and a new set of non-infected clothes (3r, 3v).36 In light of this, Burre is saying that the original audience looked at a play with a “privy mark” and judged it prejudicially, without understanding. While the mark should have ensured its

34 Ibid. See Zachary Lesser, “Walter Burre’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” ELR

29.1 (1999): 23.

35 Alexander Leggatt, “The Audience as Patron,” 312; Lucy Munro, “Knight,” 190; Zachary Lesser, “Walter Burre,” 24; Joshua Smith, “Reading Between the Acts: Satire and the Interludes in The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” Studies in Philology 109.4 (2012): 477–478. 36 On genital sores, see Colin Milburn, “Syphilis in Faerie Land,” 605.

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public reception, the public banished it instead, forcing it to waste away and nearly die (like one of Clowes’ patients). With good, non-corrupt fostering and new clothes, according to Burre, the play is ready to try again for a positive public reception. In other words, Burre understands the social forces at work in welcoming or shunning those with a “privy mark,” and he uses the language of syphilis to try to reintegrate the rejected text, despite the unkindnesses of the original audience members. Here, the question of metaphoricity becomes relevant. After all, framing Knight as a syphilitic play maps the human body metaphorically onto a dramatic performance or artifact, in a way that demands an ethical examination. Is it fair to take an embodied condition as the root of this simile?37 Jonathan Gil Harris argues that Shakespeare and others make this move in the period, using syphilis in part as a figure to comment on international commerce.38 In another paper, though, he goes even further, arguing that “early modern syphilis” itself is a “persistent effect of textuality.”39 If Gil Harris is right, it would mean that both the text of Knight and the idea of syphilis in the period are constituted through language. Importantly, this does not mean that there is nothing embodied or biological occurring in a syphilis patient.40 Instead, it means that words help to condition the embodied experience of syphilis, providing common vocabularies and understandings of the disease, and creating a culture that expects, for example, patient isolation. If public language conditions the experience of both the textual and the physical corpus, as Burre hints, then the play and the patient both experience a verbally-mediated version of embodied (or imprinted) being—one that can obstruct their access to public contexts. By hinting that Knight is a publicly-rejected syphilitic play, in other words, Burre uses a metaphor that highlights the sociallyconstructed consequences of a syphilitic body— politically aligning the play’s outcomes with the outcomes of contemporary syphilis patients, who are unlikely to be socially received unless they appear “cured.” If Walter Burre aligns the reception of Knight with the reception of a syphilis patient, the grocers in the play take things even further, by 37 See Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood, “Ethical Staring,” 14; Kevin Siena’s analysis of Susan Sontag’s work on syphilis as metaphor (“Pollution,” 572). 38 “Some Love That Took Him Oft from Home,” 320. 39 “(Po)X,” 110. 40 For Joshua Eyler, extreme constructionism can unproductively downplay embodied experience. Qtd. in Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood, “Ethical Staring,” 5.

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overtly patching the text with additional materials. When the grocerspectators George and Nell climb onstage in the Induction, they instantly begin to restructure the play. Critic Alexander Leggatt calls them figures of multileveled burlesque, poking gentle fun at the middle-class guild members who want to see episodic spectacles, while remaining sympathetic because of their “energy and generosity of spirit.”41 Framed in this satirical/indulgent way, the grocers add six new episodic units to the plot—asking Rafe to enact a hotel stay, an encounter with a princess, a Mayday speech, a mustering of troops, and a spectacular death scene, in addition to the Barbaroso confrontation.42 While these moments are aesthetically naive and nouveau riche, according to Zachary Lesser, the grocers aren’t necessarily wrong about the ethics that underpin Rafe’s episodic heroism—what Lucy Munro calls his “well-meaning attempts to help those in need.”43 If all community members are both burlesqued and subtly praised by the play, as Joshua Smith argues,44 then the grocers are mocked for their aesthetics but acknowledged for their willingness to intervene on behalf of others, as they create six moments that rescue citizens or celebrate civic engagement. If each of these moments is a “patch” added to the plot, in early modern parlance, then the text of Knight becomes even more obviously syphilitic: its body is thoroughly covered with pieces of extra material. In this vein, new scenes are marked for the audience by the word “peace”— a homonym for “piece” that highlights a new patch of text. Climbing onstage in line four of the induction, George interrupts the prologue by demanding “Hold your peace” (meaning both “be quiet” and “stop delivering your piece of text, so we can patch our piece in.”) Although “hold your peace” is an extremely common phrase (and a catch, sung for example in Twelfth Night ), it happens too often in Knight to be accidental. Out of twenty-two occurrences of “peace” in the play, thirteen come at the ends of scenes, marking the transition to another plotline or event in lines like “Peace! —Begin, Rafe” (1.214), “Look, George, peace, here comes the merry old gentleman again” (2.436–437), “Peace,

41 “Audience as Patron,” 305, 310. 42 On plot, see Lucy Munro, “Knight,” 193; Glenn Steinberg, “‘You Know the Plot,’”

217; and Joshua Smith, “Reading Between the Acts,” 475.

43 Zachary Lesser, “Walter Burre,” 34; Lucy Munro, “Knight,” 198. 44 “Reading Between the Acts,” 494–495.

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cony … Here’s Luce’s father come now” (2.479–480), and “Peace, Nell, here comes the prisoners” (3.431). By adding new textual patches, and foregrounding the pieced nature of the play verbally for the audience, the grocers highlight the patchwork construction of the plot, drawing attention to the new, qualitatively different materials that are appended to the structure of the underlying play. (Since “piece” can also be a double entendre—Rafe’s “Let me see your piece, neighbor Greengoose” kicks off twenty lines of syphilis references—the idea of venereal disease is never too far from the idea of “pieces,” either [5.105].) The grocers are perpetually conscious of audience responses to their patched-on scenes. George notes “I can tell thee the gentlemen like Rafe” after the Barbaroso encounter, and Nell thanks the public openly, promising further episodes (3.459–462). In gauging the effect of their patched-on scene about patching, George and Nell reinforce the play’s preoccupation with the public reception of patched patients, while emphasizing their own agency as controlling piecers of the plot. While each of the grocers’ patches contributes to the whole play, it can also circulate independently—giving greater mobility and flexibility to the patch, and granting it further opportunities for public showing. During the Interregnum, when performances were banned, the Barbaroso scene was extracted for stand-alone use as a “droll” (or one-time, flashtheater production). Published in a 1662 collection of drolls as “The Encounter,” the episode was prefaced by an argument calling it “A peece of Mock-Knight errantry performed between Ralfe a Grocers Prentice and Barbarossa a Barber” (emphasis mine).45 Detaching this piece from the whole allows it to be publicly shown during a time when authorities wanted not to isolate, but to ban all plays for fear of moral contagion. Its unsuppressed appearance, as a portable “piece” of a larger play, speaks to the defiant flexibility enabled by textual patching, where a subunit becomes not only a distinctive representative of the whole, but also socially and politically charged. If the Barbaroso “patch” of Knight can stand alone, flaunting public performance laws, then patching might become a strategy that emphasizes or advertises a larger corpus, instead of hiding or disguising it. Here, the grocers’ patching strategy pushes most obviously against the barber’s use of a nose patch for his syphilis patient. Where Barbaroso

45 Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Zitner, 166–169 reprints the full droll.

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patches literally, to conceal or protect a wound, the grocers add figurative patches to the playtext, gaining greater visibility for the socially ostracized. Where Barbaroso’s patch is worn by a patient in isolation, the grocers’ play-patches become detachable units of drama that remind others about conditions like syphilis, less didactically than nonjudgmentally. While Barbaroso’s patch transparently attempts to disguise a condition, the grocers’ patches foreground not only the fact of syphilis, but the need for greater social integration of syphilis patients. Finally, and vitally, the grocers’ patched material allows the play’s message to recur. Rejected by its initial audience, Knight is nevertheless printed within six years, printed again in 1635, staged by Beeston’s Boys around 1639, then excerpted for performance during the Interregnum.46 In the paratexts of these recurring presentations, the grocer–barber interaction is emphasized as a selling point: full of mock-romance ridiculousness, it burlesques all parties while raising ethical questions.47 Here, I push against the claim that Knight rejects anything “earnest” or “serious.”48 Even though the grocers do not go unmocked, they evolve an ethical brand of civic engagement, a “community of inclusion,” which is not mutually exclusive with burlesque.49 By renaming the play and adding patched scenes to the plotline, the grocers make syphilis and those with syphilis more visible as components of society—augmenting both the text of the play and the scope of the play’s portrayal of a verisimilar London. While the grocers do advocate forms of treatment and even joke about symptoms, then, they also draw attention to the social dimensions of a chronic condition, using the dramatic technique of patching to reject a solely medical understanding of disability.

46 Zachary Lesser, “Walter Burre,” 22; Karen Kettnich, “‘Nowmark That Fellow; He Speaks Extempore’: Scripted Improvisation in The Antipodes,” Early Theatre 10.2 (2007): 131. 47 The “Dedicatory Epistle” (1613), excerpted droll (1662), and new prologue (1665– 1667) all emphasize mock-romance themes (Knight, ed. Zitner, 52, 163–164, 166). 48 Zachary Lesser, “Walter Burre,” 37. 49 Brent Whitted, “Staging Exchange: Why The Knight of the Burning Pestle Flopped

at Blackfriars in 1607,” Early Theatre 15.2 (2012): 113.

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Works Cited Beaumont, Francis. The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Edited by Sheldon P. Zitner. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Booth, Roy. “‘Down with Your Title, Boy!’: Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Its Insurgent Audience.” Q/W/E/R/T/Y 5 (1995): 51–58. Bulwer, John. Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: Or, the Artificiall Changling. William Hunt, 1653. Accessed through EEBO on June 18, 2018. Cogan, Thomas. The Haven of Health. London: Anne Griffin for Roger Ball, 1636. Accessed through EEBO on June 18, 2018. Clowes, William. A Brief and Necessary Treatise… Thomas Cadman, 1585. Accessed through EEBO on June 18, 2018. Dillon, Janette. “‘Is Not All the World Mile End, Mother?’: The Blackfriars Theater, the City of London, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 9 (1997): 127–148. Fouassier, Frederique. “William Clowes’s Treatise on Syphilis (1579): A Trebly Eccentric Work?” In In and Out: Eccentricity in Britain, edited by Sophie Aymes-Stokes and Laurent Mellet, 65–82. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2012. Gil Harris, Jonathan. “(Po)X Marks the Spot: How to ‘Read’ ‘Early Modern’ ‘Syphilis’ in The Three Ladies of London.” In Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, edited by Kevin Siena, 109–132. Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005. ———. “‘Some Love That Drew Him Oft from Home’: Syphilis and International Commerce in The Comedy of Errors.” In Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, Vol. 144, 319–333. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Cengage Learning. Hobgood, Alison P., and David Houston Wood. “Introduction: Ethical Staring: Disabling the English Renaissance.” In Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, 1–22. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Hoenselaars, Ton. “‘As Catching as the Plague, Though Not All so General’: Syphilis in Tudor and Stuart Literature.” Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 15 (1997): 39–58. “The Hunting of the Pox.” J.W. for J.T., 1619. Accessed through EEBO on June 18, 2018. “Jennies Answer to Sawny.” P. Brooksby, 1682. Accessed through EEBO on June 18, 2018. Kettnich, Karen. “‘Now Mark That Fellow; He Speaks Extempore’: Scripted Improvisation in The Antipodes.” Early Theatre 10.2 (2007): 129–139. Leggatt, Alexander. “The Audience as Patron: The Knight of the Burning Pestle.” In Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, edited by Paul Westfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall, 295–315. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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Lesser, Zachary. “Walter Burre’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle.” ELR 29.1 (1999): 22–43. Madelaine, Richard. “Apprentice Interventions: Boy Actors, the Burning Pestle, and the Privy Mark of Irony.” Q/W/E/R/T/Y 5 (1995): 73–77. Milburn, Colin. “Syphilis in Faerie Land: Edmund Spenser and the Syphilography of Elizabethan England.” Criticism 46.4 (2004): 597–632. Munro, Lucy. “The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Generic Experimentation.” In Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, edited by Garrett Sullivan et al., 189–199. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pantin, Isabelle. “Poetic Fiction and Natural Philosophy in Humanist Italy: Fracastoro’s Use of Myth in Syphilis.” In Fiction and the Frontiers of Knowledge in Europe, 1500–1800, edited by Richard Scholar and Alexis Tadié, 17–29. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Pettigrew, Todd. “Sex, Sin, and Scarring: Syphilis in Redford’s Wit and Science.” In Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare, 1485–1590. Edited by Lloyd Edward Kermode et al., 213–227. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Rolleston, J. D. “Venereal Disease in Literature.” British Journal of Venereal Diseases 10.3 (1934): 147–174. Schleiner, Winifred. “Infection and Cure Through Women: Renaissance Constructions of Syphilis.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24.3 (1994): 499–517. Smith, Joshua. “Reading Between the Acts: Satire and the Interludes in The Knight of the Burning Pestle.” Studies in Philology 109.4 (2012): 474–495. Steinberg, Glenn. “‘You Know the Plot/We Both Agreed On?’: Plot, SelfConsciousness, and ‘The London Merchant’ in Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle.” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 5 (1991): 211–224. Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Whitted, Brent. “Staging Exchange: Why The Knight of the Burning Pestle Flopped at Blackfriars in 1607.” Early Theatre 15.2 (2012): 111–130.

PART III

The Work of Disabled Artists

CHAPTER 12

Sign Gain to Deaf Gain: Deafness in Early Modern Manual Rhetoric and Modern Shakespeare Performances Jennifer L. Nelson

Abstract Deaf Gain helps to realize what John Bulwer, seventeenthcentury manual rhetorician, began to do: it moves Bulwer’s valorizing of signs on the printed page to actual performative moments on the stage via Deaf actors and sign language. Bulwer’s work presciently emphasizes how bodies and words need to be together for authenticity in public and theatrical rhetoric and discourse in contrast to the aural society around him that prioritized the spoken word. Bulwer’s ideas resonate in modern theatre in his focus on movement, body, and expression, which helps open up rhetorical space and possibilities for Deaf Gain in Shakespearean performances. Gesture and eloquence, mind and body: for John Bulwer, rhetorician, these things are intertwined through physical, manual bodily movements, and as such he was ahead of his time in terms of the rhetorical bodily expression which comes to fruition in recent years in sign language theatre. This essay will argue that Bulwer’s work constructs a “bridge” between early modern rhetorical theory and contemporary Deaf theatre, partly via director and professor Peter Novak’s use of his manual rhetoric

J. L. Nelson (B) Gallaudet University, Washington, DC, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_12

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and other visual/historical images to aid his American Sign Language translation process for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Deaf Gain is an important concept in contemporary Deaf studies, and indeed disability studies, in that it legitimizes and validates a language and a state of being that do not fit the established aural norm and potentially adds a communicative dimension to society. The concept of Deaf Gain can “counter the frame of hearing loss as it refers to the unique cognitive, creative, and cultural gains manifested through deaf ways of being in the world.”1 John Bulwer’s seventeenth-century experiences with deaf people and their sign language start to counter the idea of deafness as a loss in that his knowledge of deaf people and sign language influences his writings on rhetoric.2 Bulwer is known for believing that gestures and manual rhetoric heighten and infuse eloquence in verbal discourse, a kind of Sign Gain if not entirely Deaf Gain.3 While Deaf Gain certainly wasn’t an actual concept then, it works well in understanding how Bulwer practiced a kind of Sign Gain in that he was aware of deaf people and sign language and inserts this knowledge into much of his work. Bulwer was not able to fully realize the Deaf Gain potential because he wrote for an intensely aural reading audience and his ultimate goal was to create a verbal rhetoric using manual gestures.4 Bulwer’s work is also not fully Deaf Gain in that he deals largely in gestures in his rhetorical studies, rather than a full-fledged sign language with all the legitimate rules of language that pertain. According to Bauman and Murray, the concept of Deaf Gain requires an alternative paradigm and understanding not of loss, but of difference, as Bulwer shows through his study of manual rhetoric: “To many in the deaf community, being deaf has nothing to 1 H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray, eds., Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for

Human Diversity (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xv.

2 For more specific information on Bulwer and manual rhetoric, please see: Jennifer L. Nelson, “Bulwer’s Speaking Hands: Deafness and Rhetoric,” in Bauman and Murray, Deaf Gain, 82–189. This article also acknowledges a debt to an older work by Jennifer L. Nelson and Bradley S. Berens, “Spoken Daggers, Deaf Ears, and Silent Mouths: Fantasies of Deafness in Early Modern England,” in The Disability Studies Reader, 1st edition, edited by Lennard Davis (New York: Routledge, 1997). Without Dr. Berens all this work might not have been done. 3 Jennifer L. Nelson, “Bulwer’s Speaking Hands,” 182–189. 4 I will be using the lowercase deaf in Bulwer’s time for deaf people as the capital D

concept was not used in the Early Modern England period; I will use the capital D for Deaf in Deaf Gain and modern Deaf actors and performers as that is modern usage.

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do with ‘loss’ but is, rather, a distinct way of being in the world, one that opens up perceptions, perspectives, and insights that are less common to the majority of hearing persons.”5 Marginalized knowledge such as sign language is now being partially seen in a more gainful way in Bulwer’s works, in that looking to Deaf people and their language “increases the already astounding variation on ways to be human.”6 This modern movement of Deaf Gain, especially in theatre, creates a two-way street that both Deaf and hearing people are able to benefit from, in that Deafness opens up a space in culture and society that hearing people can learn from. Modern theatre and Deaf actors are more able to capitalize on sign language translations and performances, which can embody kinetically the Deaf Gain inherent in sign language, in addition to the gestural rhetoric that Bulwer could only represent statically on the page in the service of verbal rhetoric. On John Bulwer’s Sign Gain as opposed to Deaf Gain, Bauman and Murray note that “Bulwer’s Chirologia and Chironomia read like a seventeenth-century manifesto on Sign Gain. Having been influenced by deaf individuals, this rhetorician recognized a supreme Deaf Gain irony: that deaf people are the vanguard in the arts of eloquent discourse.”7 Bulwer stops short of Deaf Gain insofar as his writings benefit rhetoric as a field, not sign language or deaf people so much. In Bulwer’s time and work, deafness is enacted in the background in that his books on manual rhetoric “perform” invisibly via signs, gestures, and pictures on the static page for a larger hearing audience, not in terms of a fully realized sign language; as such, Bulwer’s rhetoric is more Sign Gain than Deaf Gain. Deaf Gain helps to realize what Bulwer began to do: it moves Bulwer’s valorizing of signs on the printed page to a height he could not realize, that of actual performative moments on the stage via Deaf actors and sign language. Bulwer’s work presciently emphasizes how bodies and words need to be aligned for authenticity in public and theatrical rhetoric and discourse, in contrast to the aural society around him that prioritized the spoken word. Bulwer’s ideas resonate in contemporary theatre through his focus on movement, body, and expression, which helps open up rhetorical space and possibilities for 5 Bauman and Murray, Deaf Gain, xv. 6 Ibid., xix, xxxv. 7 Ibid., xxxv.

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Deaf Gain in Shakespearean performances. Gesture and eloquence, mind and body: for John Bulwer, rhetorician, these things are intertwined through physical, manual bodily movements, and as such he was ahead of his time in terms of the rhetorical bodily expression which comes to fruition in recent years in sign language theatre. Bulwer’s knowledge and use of deafness contribute significantly to his writings on elocution, and this knowledge does make him probably the first British person to write about deafness and sign language in any depth; Kristiann Dekesel dubs him the “founding father of British sign language research.”8 John Bulwer’s experience with deaf people and sign language figure handily in his rhetorical writings about gestures as the pinnacle of eloquence in discourse, and the ideas that underpin Bulwer’s work had later resonance with theatrical and rhetorical attitudes. While it seems unusual to incorporate knowledge about deaf people and sign language into areas such as rhetoric and thus transform the field through a kind of Sign Gain, the early modern period was a time when rhetoricians focused more on the individual and various senses in creation of language and not so much on “rules;” in this way Bulwer uses his knowledge of deaf people and sign language to attempt to infuse and enlarge the discipline of rhetoric. Bulwer had history on his side: Francis Bacon had started to emphasize learning through the senses, and Juan Pablo Bonet (1561– 1633), known for his book on The Reduction of Letters and the Art of Teaching the Mute to Speak, looked at using different senses such as vision and touch to stand in for others or replace others such as hearing.9 The direct influence of deaf people on Bulwer’s rhetorical theory is indicated in his 1648 Philocophus, or, the Deaf and Dumbe Mans Friend, where he praises deaf people, their sign language, and their intellectual capacities, more so than his other books on manual rhetoric. He also directly acknowledges his debt to the signing of the deaf Gostwick brothers: “This language you speak so purely, that I who was the first that made it my Darling study to interpret the naturall richnesse of

8 Kristiann Dekesel, “John Bulwer: The Founding Father of BSL Research,” Signpost: The Newsletter of the International Sign Linguistics Association, Winter 1992: 11. 9 Juan Pablo Bonet, The Reduction of Letters and the Art of Teaching the Mute to Speak (Madrid, 1620). William Holder (1616–1698), in his 1669 Elements of Speech: An Essay of Inquiry into the Natural Production of Letters: With an Appendix Concerning Persons Deaf & Dumb (London, 1669) also started looking to the education of the deaf via the use of hands and the eyes.

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our discoursing gestures.”10 Additionally, evidence gleaned from his will indicates that he adopted and provided for a possibly deaf child named Chirothea—literally, one who uses sign language.11 These interactions with deaf people indicate a greater influence on Bulwer’s rhetoric—and therefore on the rhetorical tradition—than might be supposed from his Chirologia and Chironomia, which cite the Greek and Roman orators, philosophers, politicians, and teachers, as well as other great names, in support of his enterprise rather than deaf people. Kristiaan Dekesel notes that the Gostwicke brothers and Chirothea were likely the shadow “motivation behind [Chirologia and Chironomia].”12 Indeed, when read alongside these more familiar treatises, Philocophus reveals Bulwer’s use of sign language in raising the bar for eloquence. His writings on rhetorical eloquence deal heavily with muscles and their motions, and he ties body and motions to public speaking and performance. For Bulwer, motion is what makes a human a perfect creature,13 whether it be expression through the motions of the hands, fingers, face, larynx, or lips. Bulwer notes that speech and “Words are nothing else but Motion”14 ; this is the moment where speech and manual signs share a common ground. He indicates many times over in his works that motion in whatever form is the universal thing binding all people. Rhetoric is composed of motions and so are the sign languages of the deaf. Gestures, as the “universall language of Humane nature,” are what the deaf have in common with hearing people,15 and Bulwer appropriates this knowledge to influence the elocutionary movement in rhetoric. His 1644 Chirologia and Chironomia 16 deal with the many expressive gestures that may be used in public speaking and that can be sculpted to 10 John Bulwer, Philocophus: Or, the Deafe and Dumbe Mans Friend (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1648), a3v–a4r. 11 Kristiann Dekesel, “John Bulwer: The Founding Father of BSL Research,” 12. 12 Ibid., 13. 13 Stephen Greenblatt, “Toward a Universal Language of Motion: Reflections on a Seventeenth Century Muscle Man,” in Choreographing History, edited by Susan Leigh Foster, 26–27 (Indiana University Press, 1995). 14 John Bulwer, Philocophus: Or, the Deafe and Dumbe Mans Friend (London, 1648),

19.

15 Ibid., a3v–a4r. 16 John Bulwer, Chirologia: Or the Naturall Language of the Hand. Composed of the

Speaking Motions, and Discoursing Gestures Thereof. Whereunto Is Added Chironomia: Or

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an art. His Pathomyotomia 17 deals with the facial muscles, movements, and expressions—all of which are crucial components of grammatical features in sign languages. Peter Novak says: Bulwer also recognized how important facial “gestures” were within the communicative act; his next work, Cephalelogia/Cephalenomia, was supposed to do just that. Sadly, it was never published. He was really ahead of his time in acknowledging how much data is interpreted not through what someone says, but how they say it through their body and face.18

Not only does Bulwer invest gestures with heavy rhetorical eloquence and vice versa, but his method of analyzing gestures also emphasizes his devotion to the belief that manual signs are of paramount importance in public speaking. From Chirologia’s detailed explications of various significant gestures (“I reprove,” “I extol,” etc.), one can see that he is remarkably sensitized to gestural visual effects and their physical production. This quality, which also characterizes Deaf culture today, arose from his experience with the deaf and their sign language. His constant use of chirograms—pictures of static hand movements which carry meaning— throughout his books also shows his keen attention to visual language. His works stress the importance of gestures as the “crown of eloquence” in a concrete, almost bodily way through the rare visual presentation of many chirogrammatic plates, which portray drawings of hands and their proper shapes. For example, the included illustration for “invito” (“I invite”) shows a hand upturned and curved gracefully inward, toward the speaker’s body (Fig. 12.1).19 Similarly, to extend the middle finger is “a natural expression of scorn and contempt,”20 as many will recognize the Art of Manual Rhetoricke. Consisting of the Naturall Expressions, Digested by Art in the Hand, as the Chiefest Instrument of Eloquence (London, 1644). 17 John Bulwer, Pathomyotomia: Or a Dissection of the Significant Muscles of the Affections of the Minde (London, 1649). 18 Email interview with Dr. Peter Novak, June 26 and 27, 2017. 19 P. 151, 24 hand gestures, from Chirologia. Wellcome Collection. Also see John

Bulwer, Chirologia: Or the Naturall Language of the Hand and Chironomia: Or the Art of Manual Rhetoric. In Landmarks in Rhetoric and Public Address, edited by James W. Cleary, 51, 115 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 1974.

20 John Bulwer, Chirologia: Or the Naturall Language of the Hand and Chironomia: Or the Art of Manual Rhetoric. In Landmarks in Rhetoric and Public Address, edited by James W. Cleary, 132, 143 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 1974.

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Fig. 12.1 John Bulwer, Chirologia: or, the Naturall Language of the Hand (London, 1644), p. 151, 24 hand gestures. Wellcome Collection

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to this day. From Chirologia, Bulwer moves to Chironomia with more chirograms included, and continues to show that the hand is fully capable of eloquence in its own right. In fact, he argues gestures are more efficacious than speech, since they can function by themselves, whereas speech cannot function properly without gestures: Whereas man by a happy endowment of nature is allowed two instruments, speech and a hand, to bring his concealed thoughts unto light; the tongue, without the hand, can utter nothing but what will come forth lame and impotent, whereas the hand, without the discourse of the tongue, is of admirable and energetical efficacy, and hath achieved many notable things.21

As in Chirologia and Chironomia, Bulwer in Philocophus opines that speech has more “life and efficacy”22 when joined with gestures and motion, saying: “To speak, is nothing else but by certain motiuncles of the Tongue and Lips, to intimate and signifie certaine things, as it is agreed between those that speak together.”23 He also notes that speech doesn’t require a “voyce,” but it requires motion; it can “produce mute and inaudible articles of Elocution.”24 In his motional philosophy, Bulwer creates a viable, equal—even arguably exalted—space for gestures and sign languages, a space where Sign Gain has silently changed the face of rhetoric. Although Bulwer is not consciously used much in theatre, it is worth noting that Bulwer is still well known by theatre people, especially those focused on movement and gesture; as such this background, much like Bulwer’s experiential knowledge of deaf people, infuses modern theatre even as gesture is often said to be downplayed in favor of speech. Evelyn Tribble has noted this bias: “… in Shakespearean scholarship there is a persistent denigration of gesture as a mere formal device”25 ; also, “Because gesture is sometimes considered to be a non-naturalistic device,

21 Ibid., 156–157. 22 John Bulwer, Philocophus, a3v. 23 Ibid., 29. 24 Ibid., 49. 25 Evelyn Tribble, Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the

Body (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017), 34.

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or is subsumed into movement, and neglected in ‘voice,’ this potentially powerful tool has to some extent been overlooked in contemporary discussions of the craft of acting, just as gestural arts have tended to be denigrated in theatre history.”26 Tribble also calls gesture “a form of kinesic intelligence” and imagines the early modern actor using his “embodied experience, a lifetime of training” in various modes of performance such as singing and playing instruments to “animate his part.”27 Tribble writes about social theory as espoused by Elias and Bourdieu, which articulates the “relationship between structure and the body,” and notes that “the body is shaped through implicit (and more rarely, explicit) forces and cultural codes.”28 Even when downplayed or not formally acknowledged, gesture and body as culturally coded and embodied practices do inform or enhance a part of modern theatrical consciousness, much as sign language and deafness are embodied within Bulwer’s rhetorical writings. With sign language embodied in actual Deaf actors on today’s stage, these signs or gestures cannot really be downplayed or ignored. Farah Karim-Cooper addresses this inequity via her book, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage, which deals with the hidden importance of gesture and hands: she notes that “Hands bring a static body to life, whether it is in the flesh or in a narrative poem,”29 something both Bulwer and current Deaf actors would agree with. In validation of gestures and signs as of paramount importance in society, Karim-Cooper writes, “The hand was not just a symbol of God’s ‘sacred mystery’, but it also emblematized the tactile pursuit of knowledge and was the part of the body inextricably linked to the mind.”30 Karim-Cooper writes at length about how gestures were actually seen as “communicative signals.”31 While Karim-Cooper’s book, like Bulwer, stresses signs/gestures and hands as important for the stage and for rhetoric, what is missing from this analysis is the significance of signs and gestures in themselves, as well as the situation of the 26 Ibid., 37. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 6. 29 Farah Karim-Cooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch, and the

Spectacle of Dismemberment (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 126. 30 Ibid., 34. 31 Ibid., 67.

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deaf at this time. Gestures and signs generally become more important when used in the context of hearing arts such as theatre and oratory, a kind of reverse Deaf Gain, but not quite so acceptable for deaf people themselves as “communicative signals.” Nelson and Berens note that to actually benefit from and partake in gestures and signs in legitimate ways, one must be a member of an aural society at this time and these gestures must be situated within an auditory framework or background.32 Within this aural framework, Bulwer’s anticipatory Sign Gain thoughts on bodily movements and expression are able to manifest more clearly in modern sign-language performances, which help open up rhetorical space and possibilities for Deaf Gain. Modern ASL Shakespeare can be a form of Deaf Gain both ways, because Deaf actors are enabled on the stage and also because hearing audience members are often compelled to engage in new ways with the embodied and gestural aspects of Shakespeare on the stage. Hearing audience members also recognize their own loss as non-signers and their own aural bias, a kind of two-way street. We are in the enviable position of seeing the evolution of and manifestation of Deaf Gain in recent years through the work of Deaf actors such as Howie Seago, ASL theatre, and productions of Shakespeare in American Sign Language as well as other sign languages. Sign language transforms Bulwer’s static representations of gesture into “performative moments” via Deaf actors who add Deaf Gain to the Shakespearean stage, in addition to opening up non-deaf minds to the power of acting in sign languages such as ASL. Deaf Gain is realized in innumerable sign language Shakespeare performances, while Deaf actors perform in mainstream venues such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Shakespeare Theatre Company in DC, and Shakespeare’s Globe in London. There are also many Deaf directors, artists, and translators such as Willy Conley, Monique Holt, Ethan Sinnott, and Howie Seago who translate Shakespeare into American Sign Language for various audiences and venues. Signs move from a quiet presence on the page in Bulwer’s work to an actual full linguistic presence on the stage in front of a viewing audience.

32 Jennifer Nelson, “Deafness: Deafnesses and Silences in Shakespeare’s Early Modern England,” in A Cultural History of Disability, Vol. 3. General eds: David Bolt and Robert McRuer, Volume eds: Susan Anderson and Liam Haydon (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 101–116. Also see Jennifer L. Nelson and Bradley S. Berens, “Spoken Daggers, Deaf Ears, and Silent Mouths.”

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Bulwer was used as a kind of embodied two-way bridge to present Deaf Gain when director and professor Peter Novak made use of his manual rhetoric and other visual/historical images to aid his process of translating Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night into American Sign Language.33 Peter Novak’s ASL translation enables the Sign Gain gestures underlying Bulwer’s rhetorical ideas to more fully become Deaf Gain, and in so doing, Novak stresses how Bulwer and the body may figure into this transition. Novak says that, when he was working on the translation for Twelfth Night with a largely Deaf translation team of experts, “we [himself and the translation team] looked at Bulwer and other visual representations to see how we might incorporate them into the translation. For Bulwer, we thought some of his rhetorical gestures might lend a sort of historical authenticity to the translation, even though he was publishing his work 30 years after Shakespeare’s death.”34 Novak’s team also examined paintings and visual representations of Shakespeare by many different artists to see how they might help inform the translation, either through body movement, position, or other physical markers. Novak says Bulwer’s work did literally figure in their final product: his team used “an image from Chirologia that depicted the handshape for certain gestures. We used it on the cover of the program, the poster, and all designs related to the play, because the hands are so extraordinarily prominent on the Elizabethan stage.” Novak expands further how hands metaphorically figure heavily in Shakespeare, particularly Twelfth Night : “They [hands] signify myriad elements beyond themselves, and even in Twelfth Night, the word “hand” or “hands” are mentioned thirty-three times, meaning everything from marriage, revenge, the written word, and more.”35 Novak says: “For me, it’s interesting to see that Bulwer could only illustrate a static moment of gestures, not the movement that comes before or after them,” and it frustrated the hell out of him. He said that 33 This ASL performance was hosted at the Amaryllis Theatre in Philadelphia, PA; one of these performances was also saved on DVD and is readily available, and Dr. Novak also maintains an ASL Shakespeare website related to this performance. Peter Novak, Director. ASL Performance of Amaryllis Theater Production on DVD: Twelfth Night (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2006). Related website: http://aslshakespeare.org/twe lfth-night/#twelfth-night. While many ASL performances over the years have been saved and archived, they are often not easily found or accessible—a digital archive is urgently needed. 34 Email interview with Dr. Peter Novak, June 26 and 27, 2017. 35 Email interview with Dr. Peter Novak, June 26 and 27, 2017.

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the intensity of the movement, or “percussion” as he called it, could only be “imagined.”36 Modern theatre and performance are more able to elevate Bulwer’s frustrated static moments into performative moments through endeavors like Peter Novak’s. Bulwer’s Sign Gain “understanding of gesture was intimately tied to his belief that the hands and their gestures are better able to communicate cross-culturally than are spoken languages” in that “the hand speaks all languages.”37 For Bulwer as for Novak, the body can easily become a tool for more comprehensive communication, as manifested in today’s ASL translations of Shakespeare; Sign Gain becomes Deaf Gain. When I brought my Honors English students to Philadelphia to see Dr. Peter Novak’s ASL play, Twelfth Night ,38 featuring Deaf actors such as Jackie Roth, Peter Cook, Adrian Blue, Monique Holt, Robert DeMayo, and others, there were definite Deaf Gain moments in that Shakespeare’s sexual puns were more visually obvious in their translation on the body for Deaf and hearing audiences alike. My students and I laughed heartily at a number of lines, and many hearing members in the audience looked at us in puzzlement to see what we were laughing about, as they had aurally missed the joke; through the evening, they started to use our reactions as cues to pay more attention to what was really happening on the stage between the lines, so to speak. This kind of Deaf Gain moment is instructive for a hearing audience if they pick up on the fact that there’s more going on than just spoken words. The hearing audience had a sense that they were actually the ones missing out, not my students, an interesting Deaf Gain reversal that benefited my students. Shurgot, in his article on the Deaf actor and translator Howie Seago, notes this advantage that heteroglossia via multiple languages holds: “In an essay published in 1960 in Johns Hopkins Magazine Leonard Siger, an English professor at Gallaudet University, the national university for the deaf, argued that… ‘sign language properly learned and properly used can be a vehicle of considerable power and beauty, better suited to the 36 Ibid. 37 Peter Novak, “Shakespeare in the Fourth Dimension: Twelfth Night and American Sign Language,” in Remaking Shakespeare: Performance Across Media, Genres and Cultures, edited by Pascale Aebischer, Edward J. Esche, and Nigel Wheale (Basingstoke and New York City: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 20. 38 This play ran at the Amaryllis Theatre in Philadelphia, PA from September 21 to October 1, 2000.

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expression of emotion, in some respects, than any spoken language’ (qtd in Baldwin 13).”39 Similarly, in writing about Howie Seago, Cross says, “Seago’s attention to language enables the entire cast to become more attuned to the intricacies of language use in the play. The company must discover how sign language, verbal language, and silence can each be used to greatest effect in the world of the play.”40 My students told me that it was the first Shakespeare play they really understood, and their reactions also clued in the hearing audience to more things going on behind the spoken words. Lezlie Cross, in writing about Howie Seago, says that this “place beyond spoken language is where Seago’s translations reside: in a language that marries the textual, the verbal, the emotional, and the gestural.”41 For example, there is a scene where Olivia asks Malvolio to describe the young man waiting outside (Act 1, scene 5); Malvolio responds by describing Cesario in terms of fruits and vegetables and stages of ripeness to indicate his youth. As Peter Novak often says, “Olivia thinks he’s just talking about fruits and vegetables,” and many audiences are like Olivia in thinking this too. In contrast, sign language expands the meaningful universe of this scene. The ASL performance in this particular play embodies the properties of the young man via the description of the squash in a phallic way, and the apples (“codlings”) are depicted as hanging partially down, not fully off, the tree in ripeness, and it’s clear Malvolio is unknowingly depicting apples as balls that haven’t quite fully descended yet.42 My students thought this was one of the most masterful scenes via American Sign Language in the play.

39 Michael W. Shurgot, “Breaking the Sound Barrier: Howie Seago and American Sign

Language at Oregon Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Bulletin 30.1 (Spring 2012): Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press: 24–25. The quoted Baldwin work is: Stephen C. Baldwin, Pictures in the Air: The Story of the National Theatre of the Deaf (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1993), 13. 40 Lezlie C. Cross, “Speaking in the Silence: Deaf Performance at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival,” in Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kathryn R. McPherson, and Sarah Enloe, 7–8 (Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), 2013. 41 Ibid., 8. 42 Peter Novak, Director. ASL Performance of Amaryllis Theater Production on DVD:

Twelfth Night. (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2006). Related website: http://aslshakespeare.org/twelfth-night/#twelfth-night.

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Novak’s Twelfth Night production shows several examples of Deaf Gain through ASL translation for hearing and Deaf audiences alike; for example, we laughed uproariously at the line about “many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage,” because this line translated into signs alone provides a rich opportunity for overlaying different levels of meaning simultaneously, as Robert DeMayo signs “hanging” from the neck with one arm and signs “penile erection”43 with the other arm in Act 1, scene 5.44 Novak expands on the potential of ASL further, calling ASL a four-dimensional language as it uses space and time in a more “intrinsically performance-oriented medium than in written or spoken languages”: What emerges, then, in the performance of the translation is a series of different but simultaneous texts in simultaneous juxtaposition. The result for the hearing audience was a visual and aural dissonance. They are, in essence, hearing one language (Shakespeare’s text) while simultaneously seeing an altogether different one (ASL). The advantage for the hearing audience is that they do, in fact, watch a translation, an augmentation of the ASL performance with temporal sounds of the spoken language—in essence, they see Shakespeare for the first time.45

Gestures, sign language, and Sign Gain manifesting in eventual Deaf Gain therefore may serve as two-way street between deaf and hearing people. Bulwer’s rhetorical mindset is more fully manifested in modern Deaf Gain moments such as ASL performances of Shakespeare, as well as those derived from the appearance of Deaf actors within mainstream performances such as that of Monique Holt in The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s run of King Lear; in this performance, Monique Holt was Cordelia, and her Deafness stressed and emphasized Cordelia’s position in her family as well as the relationship between Cordelia and King

43 Hanging a man is known to engorge his private areas with blood, and the ASL translation literalizes this medical fact in a visual and informative way. 44 Peter Novak, Director. ASL Performance of Amaryllis Theater Production on DVD: Twelfth Night. (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2006). Related website: http://aslshakespeare.org/twelfth-night/#twelfth-night. 45 Peter Novak, “Shakespeare in the Fourth Dimension,” 19.

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Lear.46 Shakespeare’s Globe in London has frequently done British Sign Language performances and has used Deaf actors in their plays as well. Deaf people like Howie Seago, who has done various Shakespeare roles in addition to translating at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, embody the Deaf Gain that Bulwer in a sense strove to attain. Seago says, “Audiences who witness any type of performance by deaf talent are and will be so affected that it will have a continuous ripple effect on their perspectives of deafness.”47 Further, Howie Seago writes: I consider all the plays I have performed in over the years as Deaf Gain, mainly because normally the roles would have been performed by hearing actors, but I had the fortune to work with creative visionaries who adapted the roles for me as a Deaf actor. I think this also applies to all other roles by Deaf talent whether the characters are originally Deaf or not, as any kind of exposure of ASL or Deaf culture to both Deaf and hearing audiences always has a degree of Deaf Gain in some ways. … I take pride in considering how many in the audiences for my performances over the span of forty plus years might have positively influenced their perspectives and attitudes toward our Deafness and culture how their horizons might have been expanded in considering what is possible for Deaf talent to accomplish.”48

Musing further on his Deaf Gain work for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Seago says: “When I translate Shakespeare, I strive to match the eloquence and uniqueness of his words, also to match the authenticity of the ASL to the time period the play is set in. For instance, you can’t point to your watch to indicate time but to use the sign for the orbit of the sun or moon or how many times the clock bell rings.”49 Seago, as well as many other Deaf translators, are able to navigate between Shakespeare and translation via the body in defiance of the common idea that Shakespeare can’t be translated into ASL or another bodily sign language.

46 Shakespeare Theatre Company, King Lear, August 31–October 24, 1999, Lansburgh Theatre (Washington, DC. Director: Michael Kahn). 47 Qtd. in Michael W. Shurgot, “Breaking the Sound Barrier: Howie Seago and American Sign Language at Oregon Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Bulletin 30.1 (Spring, 2012): Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012, 34. 48 Email from Howie Seago, Saturday, August 18, 2018, at 11:29 p.m. 49 Ibid.

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There is a common assumption that sign language and Shakespeare don’t mix and that there is no real gain to be had there, especially in translation. I recall an argument I had with a noted Shakespeare scholar at Berkeley when I started graduate school where I insisted that American Sign Language was the perfect vehicle for Shakespeare translation. This scholar insisted that only Signed English (not a true language in its own right as it does not exhibit its own manual grammatical rules and so forth) should be used to translate Shakespeare. In the end, we agreed to disagree. Why? Because speech “is the traditional form of theatrical language to which all spectators—from ancient Athens to modern Ashland—are accustomed and which all theatres strive to accommodate.”50 In contrast, Peter Novak—much like the Gallaudet professor Leonard Siger quoted earlier—often says that “Shakespeare is better in ASL!” and clarifies: The distance between Shakespeare and sign language is not so far as one might expect. The renderings of seventeenth-century Englishman John Bulwer have often been used to cite a physical manifestation of Elizabethan stage acting. … Bulwer’s renderings [of rhetorical signs] are instrumental for translators whose work depends on historical documentations of the face and hands and for what ‘it implies about the extraordinary visibility of hands in Elizabethan society, and on Shakespeare’s stage in particular.’51

As sign language surprisingly informs Bulwer’s rhetoric and plays into the “visibility of hands in Elizabethan society,” so too can and ASL inform Shakespeare. Bulwer’s seventeenth-century mindset and cultural understanding of deaf people and bodily movements and language fit well with modern theatre, and I think he would agree with Peter Novak: “Definitions that privilege either the written text and its hold on the primacy of a canon of transcribed literature, or the oral/aural performance of that text, must be re-envisioned in the case of American Sign Language literature. By combining text and performance we open the possibilities for other definitions of literature, definitions that begin and end with the only

50 Michael W. Shurgot, “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” 22. 51 Peter Novak, “Shakespeare in the Fourth Dimension,” 20.

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material presence we have, the body.”52 In the end, body is all, whether it be by hand or mouth movements.

References Baldwin, Stephen C. Pictures in the Air: The Story of the National Theatre of the Deaf. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1993. Bauman, H-Dirksen L., and Joseph J. Murray, eds. Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Bonet, Juan Pablo. The Reduction of Letters and the Art of Teaching the Mute to Speak. Madrid, 1620. Bulwer, John. Chirologia: Or the Naturall Language of the Hand. Composed of the Speaking Motions, and Discoursing Gestures Thereof. Whereunto Is added Chironomia: Or the Art of Manual Rhetoricke. Consisting of the Naturall Expressions, Digested by Art in the Hand, as the Chiefest Instrument of Eloquence. London: Thos. Harper, 1644. ———. Chirologia: Or the Naturall Language of the Hand and Chironomia: Or the Art of Manual Rhetoric. Edited by James W. Cleary. Landmarks in Rhetoric and Public Address. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974. ———. Pathomyotomia: Or a Dissection of the Significant Muscles of the Affections of the Minde. London: W. W., 1649. ———. Philocophus: Or, the Deafe and Dumbe Mans Friend. London: Humphrey Moseley, 1648. Cross, Lezlie C. “Speaking in the Silence: Deaf Performance at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.” In Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kathryn R. McPherson, and Sarah Enloe, 7–17. Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013. Dekesel, Kristiann. “John Bulwer: The Founding Father of BSL Research.” Signpost: The Newsletter of the International Sign Linguistics Association, Winter 1992: 11–14 and Spring 1993: 36–43. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Toward a Universal Language of Motion: Reflections on a Seventeenth Century Muscle Man.” In Choreographing History, edited by Susan Leigh Foster, 25–31. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. Holder, William. Elements of Speech: An Essay of Inquiry into the Natural Production of Letters: With an Appendix Concerning Persons Deaf & Dumb. London:

52 Email interview with Dr. Peter Novak, June 26 and 27, 2017.

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Printed by T.N. for J. Martyn Printer to the R. Society at the Bell without Temple-Barr, 1669. Karim-Cooper, Farah. The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch, and the Spectacle of Dismemberment. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Nelson, Jennifer. “Bulwer’s Speaking Hands: Deafness and Rhetoric.” In Deaf Gain, edited by H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray, 182–189. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. “Deafness: Deafnesses and Silences in Shakespeare’s Early Modern England.” In A Cultural History of Disability, Vol. 3, edited by Susan Anderson and Liam Haydon, 52–74. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Nelson, Jennifer, and Bradley S. Berens. “Spoken Daggers, Deaf Ears, and Silent Mouths: Fantasies of Deafness in Early Modern England.” In The Disability Studies Reader, 1st ed., edited by Lennard Davis, 52–74. New York: Routledge, 1997. Novak, Peter. “Shakespeare in the Fourth Dimension: Twelfth Night and American Sign Language.” In Remaking Shakespeare: Performance Across Media, Genres and Cultures, edited by Pascale Aebischer, Edward J. Esche, and Nigel Wheale, 18–38. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Shurgot, Michael W. “Breaking the Sound Barrier: Howie Seago and American Sign Language at Oregon Shakespeare Festival.” Shakespeare Bulletin 30.1 (Spring 2012): 21–36. Tribble, Evelyn. Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017. William’s Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, performed in American Sign Language and English. DVD, directed by Peter Novak. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2006.

CHAPTER 13

“This Is Miching Mallecho. It Means Mischief”: Problematizing Representations of Actors with Down’s Syndrome in Growing Up Down’s Sarah Olive

Abstract This chapter looks at the actions and responsibilities of program-makers representing people with learning impairments using BBC3’s documentary Growing Up Down’s. The film shows a group of actors with learning impairments rehearsing and performing Shakespeare’s Hamlet in their company’s hometown of Winchester and on tour, as well as their lives outside the theatre. It explores the way in which meaning is constructed from, rather than inherent in, actors’ impairments, particularly by the juxtapositions the program-makers create between the impairments, their supposed effects and Shakespeare’s words. In Growing

In North America the preferred spelling is now “Down Syndrome,” but this chapter uses “Down’s Syndrome,” which is standard usage in the UK, as reflected in the documentary’s title. S. Olive (B) University of York, York, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_13

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Up Down’s, the actors are constructed using both capacity and deficit models of disability, but an error of judgment on the part of the programmakers in using Shakespeare to mean about actors with impairments undercuts this balance in the closing lines of the documentary. I argue that well-meaning documentary-makers run the risk of “meaning by” and talking over the heads of people with impairments. This is particularly prevalent in the current UK television culture that highly values transformation and rehabilitation narratives. It suggests that problematic examples of advocacy could be avoided and replaced by self-advocacy if the people with impairments being represented on screen were involved throughout the production process. This chapter explores the way in which meaning is constructed from, rather than inherent in, a group of Shakespearean actors’ impairments in a BBC documentary. It is particularly interested in the juxtapositions the program-makers create between the actors’ impairments, their supposed effects, and Shakespeare’s words. These juxtapositions create narratives of transformation for the actors from “disabled”—or at least unable with Shakespeare—to capable, even heroic performers. In Meaning by Shakespeare, Terry Hawkes takes Ophelia’s question to Hamlet on viewing the Murder of Gonzago/Mousetrap, “Will ’a tell us what this show meant?” (3.2.152), and uses it to critique the notion of texts as having an essential, unchanging message. He reads Hamlet’s answer, “Marry, this is miching mallecho. It means mischief” (3.2.146), as embodying the anti-essentialist position that meaning does not inhere in texts but is constructed in relation to what a text, its creation or use, “intends now” or “means to do”1 : in Hamlet’s case, harm, injury, damage or evil by stealth to Claudius and Gertrude.2 Hawkes asserts that “we use [Shakespeare’s plays] to generate meaning,” that “Shakespeare doesn’t mean: we mean by Shakespeare.”3 Similarly, Simi Linton has argued that “disability studies is concerned with human variations, but more so the meanings we make of them.”4 She

3.

1 Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1992),

2 Shakespeare’s Words | Hamlet | William Shakespeare, http://www.shakespeareswords. com/Plays.aspx?Ac=1&SC=4&IdPlay=2#115693. 3 Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare, 3. 4 Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: NYU Press,

1998), 133.

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contributes to a chorus of voices from disability studies arguing that individuals and society construct the meaning of human variations. Chloe Stopa-Hunt has welcomed the opportunity that using actors with impairments—human variations controversially defined by the World Health Organization as “any loss or abnormality of psychological, physiological or anatomical structure or function”—on inclusive, professional stages has to generate new readings of Shakespeare.5 Meanwhile, Carrie Sandahl has objected to the way in which “[her own] impairment was being put to use [by directors] to create meaning, meaning over which [she] had little control.”6 Problematically, prevalent meanings about impairments are generated and deployed by a hegemony of people without them or whose impairments are not considered disabling, i.e. that do not cause “restriction in or inability to perform an activity in the manner or within” a range considered normal.7 In Growing Up Down’s —a documentary featuring actors with Down’s Syndrome staging Hamlet —human variation and Shakespeare are used by the non-disabled documentary-makers as “powerful elements” with which to advocate for the capacity, and to a lesser extent heroic, model of disability.8 The actors are presented by the documentary as unusually “brave people who can ‘make it through’ the complexities of life” and theatrical performance, “overcoming their impairments at all odds.”9 Such heroic representations have attracted criticism because of the pressure they place on people with impairments to conform to social norms and to mask their socio-psychological suffering.10 The capacity and heroic messages of this documentary’s makers (empowered, influential

5 Chloe Stopa-Hunt, “Hamlet on Wheels.” Teaching Shakespeare 5 (2014): 9–10. The WHO’s definition of impairment can be found at The International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities, and Health, http://www.who.int/classifications/icf/en. 6 Carrie Sandahl, “From the Streets to the Stage: Disability and the Performing Arts,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA) 120.2 (2005): 620– 624. 7 World Health Organization, International Classification of Impairments. 8 Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare, 3. 9 Anastasia Vlachou, Teachers’ and Peers’ Attitudes Towards the Integration of Pupils with DS (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Sheffield, 1995), 30; Dan Goodley, Self -Advocacy in the Lives of People with Difficulties (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), 32. 10 Vlachou, Teachers’ and Peers’ Attitudes, 30.

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and nondisabled) about Down’s Syndrome adults—their (well)meaning by Shakespeare, their “intending now” for Hamlet —are problematically privileged over other possible interpretations of the documentary’s subjects’ words and actions. I will demonstrate this with reference to examples of self-advocacy—people with impairments “support[ing] one another to speak out against discrimination,” “deciding what’s best for [them] and taking charge of getting it”—and, conversely, advocacy (“someone without this label speaking up on their behalf”) throughout.11 The related term “self-/representation” can be found in the work of Jan Gothard and Colin Barnes.12 Throughout this chapter, I will consider the control that the documentary-makers have over meaning: firstly, the meaning/s of the subjects of the documentary, in filming, producing and directing it. I will look at the representations of ability, disability and deficit that their product contains. That I chose to use the term “subject” above—rather than “participant”—reflects my interpretation of the power relationships between the BBC documentary-makers and the actors, who were filmed by William Jessop. Secondly, I will consider William Jessop’s control over Shakespeare’s work, namely adapting Hamlet to provide a script for the company. Finally, I will analyze a fascinating and disturbing rewriting of lines from Hamlet, with which the documentary presumably intends to create a positive takeaway message for its audience about the capabilities of actors with Down’s Syndrome but which clumsily stereotypes, reduces, homogenizes and sentimentalizes people with Down’s Syndrome. I will argue that despite its origins in classic “expositional” documentary, the film evidences a “postdocumentary” dedication to transformation and character arcs in a way that compromises its stars’ self-advocacy. Postdocumentary television is characterized by the fusion of traits from varying genres, such as drama and reality within one program or series.13

11 Goodley, Self -Advocacy, 1, 6. 12 Jan Gothard, “Beyond the Myths: Representing People with Down’s Syndrome.”

In Down’s Syndrome Across the Lifespan, eds. Monica Cuskelly, Anne Jobling, and Susan Buckling (London: Whurr, 2002), 2–15; Colin Barnes, Disabling Imagery and the Media: An Exploration of the Principles for Media Representations of Disabled People (British Council of Organizations of Disabled People [BCODP], 1992). 13 John Corner, “Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions,” Television and New Media 3.3 (August 2002): 255–269.

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Shakespeare and Disability Scholarship with a focus on doing Shakespeare with actors or students with impairments is not the most prevalent literature on Shakespeare and disability. Rather, there is a significant amount of writing by authors working in or informed by disability studies that considers representations of disability in Shakespeare. These include including critical introductions to editions as well as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s seminal book Narrative Prosthesis.14 David Houston Wood has written that “Shakespeare’s creative output encompasses a broad scope of disabled selfhood: from instances of blindness to limping, from alcoholism to excessive fat, from infertility to war wounds, from intellectual incapacity to epilepsy, from senility to ‘madness’, from congenital deformity to acquired impairment, and from feigned disability to actual.”15 In terms of writing by and about professionals and performers with impairments, sustained engagement from Shakespeare studies is lacking. Stopa-Hunt and Sandahl are unusual examples of academically-published self-advocacy on disability in the (Shakespearean) theatre. Mentions of actors with impairments appear occasionally in theatre reviews, for instance of deaf-led company Deafinitely Theatre’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, part of the World Shakespeare/Globe to Globe Festival in 2012. My own selectivity here in mentioning Deafinitely Theatre’s production is reflective of the limited inclusion of such groups in theatre festival programming, despite the existence of inclusive theatre companies regularly producing shows including, and beyond, Shakespeare. More frequently found is mention of a nondisabled actor playing a character with a disability—also known as “crip drag”—usually as a cultural shorthand for that character’s age-related decrepitude, e.g. in a wheelchair or with a walking stick.16 Some disability activists have suggested that actors “cripping up” should be seen as equally offensive as blacking up, whoever

14 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 15 David Houston Wood, “New Directions: ‘Some Tardy Cripple’: Timing Disability in Richard III ,” in Richard III: A Critical Reader, ed. Annaliese Connolly (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 129. See also Sandahl, “From the Streets to the Stage,” 622. 16 Stopa-Hunt, “Shakespeare on Wheels,” 9–10.

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the play-text’s writer.17 Yet banning the practice in favor of using actors with impairments in these roles, though it would have many social and individual benefits, is no guarantee of representations of disability being welcomed onto the stage. Chloe Stopa-Hunt has pointed to the way in which the critics’ response to, for example, mobility aids is often negative or essentializing. Take, for example, Mark Lawhorn’s suggestion in a review of Greg Doran’s 1999 The Winter’s Tale that the able-bodied actor Emily Bruni’s use of a wheelchair in playing Mamillius had “a deadening effect.”18 In addition to theatre reviews, there are occasional newspaper and radio features on Shakespearean theatre practitioners with impairments. For instance, some attention was given recently, in local papers and on BBC Radio 4, to Bolton’s Octagon Theatre hiring Alyson Woodhouse, who is blind, as an assistant director.19 Reaching an audience of educators in schools and higher education, there are articles, such as those I commissioned from Stopa-Hunt on “wheelchair Shakespeare,” Kelly Hunter on playing Shakespeare with autistic children (and her subsequent book), and Heather Edgren on staging Shakespeare with students with learning difficulties for the British Shakespeare Association’s magazine Teaching Shakespeare.20 This paucity is indicative of the under-representation of actors with impairments in professional Shakespearean theatre internationally and the way in which they are “weeded out of … training programs” because of institutions’ drive to “create standardized bodies [and voices] appropriate to particular performance

17 Frances Ryan, “We Wouldn’t Accept Actors Blacking Up, So Why Applaud ‘Cripping Up’?” Guardian [Online], January 13, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentis free/2015/jan/13/eddie-redmayne-golden-globe-stephen-hawking-disabled-actors-charac ters. 18 Mark Lawhorn, “Staging Shakespeare’s Children,” in Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, ed. Naomi Miller (New York: Routledge, 2003), 95. 19 Annie Brown, “Scots Theatre Director Tells How Visual Impairment Gives Her Unique Perspective on How Productions Should Materialize on Stage,” Daily Record [Online], October 17, 2014, http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/real-life/scots-theatredirector-tells-how-4451914; BBC, “Finding a Way into the Arts,” In Touch—BBC Radio 4 [Online], http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04kbl8t. 20 Kelly Hunter, “Shakespeare and Autism,” Teaching Shakespeare 3 (2013): 8–10; Kelly Hunter, Shakespeare’s Heartbeat: Drama Games for Children with Autism (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015); Heather Edgren, “Shakespeare in the Special Education Classroom,” Teaching Shakespeare 2 (2012): 8–10.

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media [and] … artistic forms.”21 Theatre practitioners and writers such as Jo Verrent and Jonathan Meth have celebrated examples of arts workplaces’ and training institutions’ inclusivity and positive discrimination in the Guardian’s series on disability arts. The series is not, however, specifically about Shakespearean theatre. In recent decades, it has become common for television programs to portray groups of non-professionals learning Shakespeare and, what the Royal Shakespeare Company calls “hard-to-reach” groups, learning Shakespeare for the audience’s delectation and edification. These groups include black and minority ethnic (BME) people, those in areas of deprivation, or school students identified as behaviourally “unteachable” (frequently the learners featured are shown as displaying several of these characteristics). In programs such as When Romeo met Juliet; Macbeth, the Movie Star …and Me; and Jamie’s Dream School, Shakespeare is frequently welcomed by producers and celebrity theatre professionals, and to a lesser extent, non-celebrity participants as vehicles for educational and personal transformation of individuals from marginalized communities or with marginalized behaviours.22 Growing Up Down’s adds to this canon with its narrative of the “com[ing] of age,” through Hamlet, of another group frequently subject to marginalization: people with learning disabilities. The above programs struggle to balance progressive attitudes and aims with un/conscious drives to create a spectacle out of impairment—physical, intellectual, financial, social; celebrate conformity to social or academic norms; and laud rare and heroic feats. This is something I suggest could be largely overcome with greater recourse to self-advocacy in the processes of conceiving and producing programs. This chapter also contributes to diversifying considerations of Shakespeare on television away from the adaptations of his plays, or documentaries about his life, that have been historically dominant, in the vein of Cary M. Mazer, Stephen O’Neill, Laurie Osborne, Mariangela Tempera and my own writing on the programs above as part of a growing genre of Shakespearean make-over documentaries (or Sh-makeover).23 21 Sandahl, “From the Streets to the Stage,” 622. 22 Sarah Olive, “‘In Shape and Mind Transformed’? Televised Teaching and Learning

Shakespeare,” Palgrave Communications 2, 16008 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1057/pal comms.2016.8. 23 Cary M. Mazer, “Sense/Memory/Sense-Memory: Reading Narratives of Shakespearian Rehearsals,” Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009): 328–348; Stephen O’Neill, ed.,

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Hamlet vs. Growing Up Down ’s The lines between the making of the theatre production of Hamlet and the documentary are blurred by filmmaker William Jessop’s involvement with both: his mother, Jane, founded the Blue Apple theatre company for actors with learning disabilities in 2005 (I will refer to both using their first names throughout because several members of the Jessop family feature herein). Many such producing companies exist throughout the UK, including Deafinitely, Chickenshed, Graeae and Pegasus. Teatr 21 and Blue Teapot are companies elsewhere in Europe whose work I have sampled. Such organizations have proliferated since the decline in Europe of the routine institutionalization of people with learning impairments, the extension of rights to and the provision of statutory education, and demands for meaningful employment and leisure opportunities after formal education (though whether this reflects what people with learning disabilities want for themselves, or socially paternalistic aspirations for them, is hotly debated). Some of these companies tour, some pay their actors wages; increasingly they challenge once-dominant notions of theatre made by people with impairments as therapy, rather than “authentic art” and the situation of such performers “as patients in search of cure.”24 Working with a local population of people with learning disabilities, Blue Apple’s main company of “able and learningdisabled actors” stages two major productions open to the paying public each year.25 When, in 2011, the main Blue Apple company expressed an interest in staging Hamlet, William created what the website calls “a bold new adaptation of Shakespeare’s original text,” a “fresh, fearless and funny Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change Across Media (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Laurie Osborne, “Serial Shakespeare: Intermediate Performance and the Outrageous Fortunes of Slings & Arrows,” Borrowers and Lenders 6.2 (2011), http://www. borrowers.uga.edu/7162/toc; Mariangela Tempera, “‘Only About Kings’: Reference to the Second Tetralogy on Film and Television,” in Shakespeare on Screen: The Henriad, eds. Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Rouen: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2008), 233–268. 24 Sandahl, “From the Streets to the Stage,” 623; Dorata Krzeminska and Jolanta Rzeznicka-Krupa, “Between Therapy and Art: Borderline Space in Theatre of People with Intellectual (Dis)ability,” paper presented at “Negotiating Space for (Dis)ability in Drama, Theatre, Film and Media” Conference, University of Lodz, September 25, 2015. 25 “Blue Apple Theatre Winchester, Empowering People Through Theatre, Dance and Film,” http://www.blueappletheatre.hampshire.org.uk.

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adaptation us[ing] Shakespeare’s original language.”26 Within the company’s marketing shtick, the vexed question for Shakespeareans and textual scholars of what constitutes original text and original language where Hamlet is concerned, perhaps understandably, has no place. The company uses the phrase “original” as widely-accepted shorthand for a version in unmodernized English. Unmodernized Shakespeare in turn popularly connotes difficult, and therefore (good) quality Shakespeare.27 It is worth noting some other features of the play’s adaptation at this stage, because of their potential impact on meaning-making in the production and documentary. Only twelve per cent of William’s script (itself twelve per cent of the Penguin Complete Works edition) is shown being performed or rehearsed in the documentary. Key features include: textual cuts (William’s script uses twelve per cent of lines from the Penguin text of Hamlet ); the redistribution of lines from one character to another (one laudable feature of this adaptation for women actors is the relative beefing up of the female characters—Gertrude goes from having the fifth to third largest speaking part, again, as far as the Penguin edition is concerned); the repetition of key speeches or phrases; the re-ordering of lines (“To be or not to be” opens the play); and bowdlerization, which is oddly infantilizing—especially given the frank discussions about sexuality the actors have on camera and the use of the Mousse T vs. Dandy Warhol’s song “Horny as a Dandy” in the documentary’s soundtrack. In addition to scripting the production of Hamlet and filming its performances, William decided to film the development of the show and four of the lead actors’ home lives over a year—those of Tommy/Hamlet, Katy/Ophelia, Lawrie/Claudius, and James/Laertes. Tommy, Jane’s son and William’s brother, is an actor with Down’s Syndrome who previously starred in the BBC film, Coming Down the Mountain, and appeared on elsewhere on radio and film. Behind-the-scenes footage of Tommy and his fellow actors makes up the majority of the documentary. Made with the production companies Maverick Television and Dartmouth Films, the sixty-minute documentary was commissioned by Elliot Reed for BBC3’s Fresh strand for eighteen to thirty-four-year olds after William had already

26 http://www.blueappletheatre.hampshire.org.uk. 27 Sarah Olive, Shakespeare Valued: Policy and Pedagogy in Education, 1989–2009 (Bristol: Intellect, 2015), 89.

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shot footage of the production and its actors’ lives. William’s twelvemonth time frame for the documentary’s action allows him to largely eschew providing “an urgency of plot” to the narrative, in contrast to other programs depicting teaching and learning encounters with Shakespeare which more usually last five days or a few weeks.28 Another benefit of the substantial period of filming is that the considerable and varied footage of the actors living in the community contributes positively to politicizing and discussing in/equality in a way that many disabilitythemed films and television programs do not: for example, in the UK, Channel 4 documentaries introducing viewers to Britain’s fattest man, a family with primordial dwarfism, and brothers with Leukodystrophy. It goes beyond “cultivating aficionados of” a wide range of individual cases of impairment29 to consider the relationship between the actors’ impairments and the restrictions or challenges they face in their achievements as actors, lovers and friends. These factors in the documentary’s production, along with William’s stated purpose in filming the actors outside the theatre, suggest a conscious twist on the classic “expositional” documentary intention of “explor[ing] the effect, not of Down’s Syndrome, but of Hamlet on their lives.”30 In his words, he “discovered” that “what happened was quite extraordinary—the play and reality began to blur.” Any blurring of these two realms by the actors (I will discuss my reservations about this below) was reinforced by William in the documentary’s initial title, Hamlet in Love, and its narrative focus on young-but-troubled-love which conflate the eponymous character with Tommy as actor31 (Broadcast Now).

28 Corner, “Performing the Real,” 261; Olive, “In Shape and Mind Transformed?”. 29 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, “Global In(ter)dependent Disability Cinema:

Targeting Ephemeral Domains of Belief and Cultivating Aficionados of the Body,” in Cultures of Representation: Disability in World Cinema Contexts, ed. Benjamin Fraser (London and New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 18. 30 Corner, “Performing the Real,” 260; “Growing Up Down’s , BBC3,” Broadcast Now, http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/features/growing-up-downs-bbc3/5066056.article. 31 Growing Up Down’s , Broadcast Now.

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Ability in Growing Up Down ’s In the documentary’s voiceover and publicity for the program, William frequently refers to one premise of the show as being a test of theatrical ability, to see whether this group of “extraordinary young actors” (“extraordinary” can be read as “with Down’s Syndrome/learning disabilities,” as well as “super-talented”) working in “mainstream theatres for the first time” can “really pull off Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” “the world’s most famous play”—given widespread low expectations of people with Down’s Syndrome as exemplified by Jane and Tommy Jessop’s doctor (see below). This is answered at the end of the documentary by the performers’ (who might reasonably be expected to have some bias), satisfaction at their achievement: Katy tells us that they received three curtain calls and exclaims “We’re famous,” while James reflects on his achievement and self-efficacy saying “I never believed that I’d really understand Shakespeare.” William’s voiceover question is further answered in the documentary with reference to ticket sales for the show having gone from worryingly low to “pretty good,” applause, standing ovations and soundbites from departing audience members which tally with those given in response to successful West End productions in their rather generic approval: “I’m just gobsmacked how amazing it was,” “I thought it was stunning,” and “Absolutely fantastic production.” Blue Apple’s Hamlet tour for the paying, theatre-going public in South East England counteracts the sense, which sometimes adheres to theatre by actors with impairments, of theatre as therapy for the participants rather than art for an audience’s consumption.32 In terms of presenting a capacity model of disability, the actors in Growing Up Down’s go beyond their own and others’ constructions of them as expert performers to posit themselves as experts in terms of dramaturgy, the play-text and its authenticity. Clearly conscious of the credibility gap, which research has acknowledged that people with impairments face, sensing a need to “work harder, be a bit aggressive” to be taken seriously, the majority of actors repeatedly decide against suggestions from individual actors to change the plot.33 For instance, Katy at one point floats the idea of a happy ending in which Ophelia and Hamlet 32 Sandahl, “From the Streets to the Stage,” 623; Krzeminska and Rzeznicka-Krupa, “Between Therapy and Art.” 33 Goodley, Self -Advocacy, 6.

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survive, marry and celebrate with a dance; Lawrie similarly moots the possibility of altering the play’s action so that Claudius can “get away with everything.” The cast vote on all such decisions, practicing selfadvocacy in the sense of “tak[ing] responsibility and mak[ing themselves] responsible” for the production’s success,34 as well as “generat[ing] new aesthetic practices and theories … not just [being seen as] ‘problem’ students or audiences to be grudgingly accommodated.”35 Despite the fact that the version of Hamlet they are working with is already an adaptation produced by William from folio and quarto versions of the play, the actors repeatedly resist changes to that script on the grounds of their infidelity to Shakespeare and the play-text, concepts frequently invoked by Shakespearean academics and the play-going public. The actors’ advice to each other when debating changes include: “Its Shakespeare himself,” “If that’s what a play is … then that’s what a play is,” “Follow the play’s rules,” “The play is Hamlet … It can’t be Claudius, ’cos that’s not a play. It’s called Hamlet. ’Cos it’s all about Hamlet,” as well as staking individual claims to fidelity: “I’m doing the play … sticking to the play.” While such statements are often framed explicitly in terms of opposition to another cast member’s outlandish proposal, this resistance arguably also constitutes an implicit refusal to confirm deficit views of theatre by people with impairments as less than art, as inferior or watered-down.36 Existing literature by people with impairments, on their ability to stage professional theatre, maintains that it should not be surprising given that “many [people] with disabilities understand [their] disabilities as performance, not exclusively in an aesthetic or theoretical sense, but as an actual mode of living in the world … disabled people are constantly onstage and we’re constantly performing.”37 The playwright and wheelchair-user John Belluso similarly argues that: Any time I get on a public bus, I feel it’s a moment of theatre. I’m lifted, the stage is moving up, and I enter, and people are along the lines, and

34 Ibid., 81. 35 Sandahl, “From the Streets to the Stage,” 622. 36 Ibid., 623. 37 Ibid., 620.

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they’re turning and looking, and I make my entrance. It’s the theatre, and I have to perform.38

The feeling of being the object of non-disabled people’s gaze and opening oneself to that is closely echoed by a Teatr 21 actor with Down’s Syndrome during an interview on the program The Love Boat.39 However, the documentary itself does not always avoid the pitfall of theatre as therapy. In addition to suggesting the play’s universal appeal and the actors’ universal ability, the documentary also positions the production as a means of instigating the actor’s personal (over their professional) growth and refers to John Langdon Down’s belief in the therapeutic value of dramatic performance for those with the syndrome to which he gave his name. Its use as a measure of success with which the actors can, as William’s voiceover puts it, “tour to prove themselves before the public” equally echoes and further cements Shakespeare’s historical place in education policy and assessment, as the author used to determine elite ability among populations from students in Victorian England to applications for India’s civil service.40 Beyond the theatre, the NHS Choices website explicitly and consistently frames its consideration of people with Down’s Syndrome in terms of positive capacity. It features statements such as: “children and adults with Down’s syndrome can and do continue to learn throughout their lives just like the rest of the population;” “acquire many of the cognitive and social skills most other people develop;” “leave home, form new relationships, gain employment … lead independent lives [and] pursue further education.”41 A case study of a girl with Down’s Syndrome and her mother is provided to evidence the assertion.42 A range of similar, everyday abilities are captured in the documentary by William’s decision to record his participants’ lives outside, as well as within, the theatre. Some of them house-share with their peers, while all four reminisce

38 Quoted in Sandahl, “From the Streets to the Stage,” 620. 39 The Love Boat, Fakty, November 25, 2014. 40 See Olive, Shakespeare Valued. 41 NHS UK, Down’s Syndrome—NHS Choices [Online], http://www.nhs.uk/condit

ions/downs-syndrome/pages/introduction.aspx. 42 NHS, NHS Choices.

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about past, pursue present, and imagine future, romantic and sexual relationships, both queer and straight. Growing Up Down’s goes some way towards redressing what Milton Diamond and Tom Shakespeare have posited in relation to society and the media as either an “unwillingness to engage with disabled people’s sexuality,” because it is not seen as a rehabilitation priority; an assumption or imposition of asexuality or sexual inadequacy; or a demonization of their sexuality as malignant.43 While the documentary shows only relationships between people with Down’s Syndrome—choosing as Tom Shakespeare puts it, in inverted commas, their “own kind”—it does challenge the lazy assumption that the actors “chose each other for no other reason [than their shared status as disabled], and not for any other qualities [they] might possess.”44 For example, the participants identify their actual or desired partners’ emotional intelligence, career, celebrity, good looks and caring nature as inspiring their desire. Growing Up Down’s portrayal of queer and straight desire among the participants also successfully redresses an imbalance that Shakespeare and his colleagues recognize their own project was unable to: the under-exploration of lesbian and gay experience among people with impairments.45 The futile yearning of Growing Up Down’s openly queer Lawrie (playing Claudius) for straight Tommy (playing Hamlet) also offers potential for a resistant or against-the-grain queer reading of these characters in which Claudius uses Gertrude to get close to her son and Hamlet’s hatred of his uncle is fueled not just by his father’s death but Claudius’ unwanted affections. The documentary’s actors not only have many abilities but are also enabling of others’, with and without impairments, readings of Hamlet.

Deficit in Growing Up Down ’s There are deficit narratives in almost all programs showing the teaching and learning of Shakespeare. They highlight the participants’ lack of money, formal education, cultural capital, opportunity and inclusion as 43 Milton Diamond, Sexwatching: Looking into the World of Sexual Behaviour (London: Macdonald Orbis, 1984), 211; Mitchell and Snyder, “Global In(ter)dependent Disability Cinema;” Tom Shakespeare, Kath Gillespie-Sells, and Dominic Davies, The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires (London: Cassell, 1996), 12. 44 Shakespeare et al., Sexual Politics of Disability, 9. 45 Ibid., 8.

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well as the ultimate failure to extend Shakespeare for all in education policy and practice. In Growing Up Down’s the participants’ deficit is located in their homogenously-described impairments, with the exception of James who does not have Down’s Syndrome but an unspecified learning impairment. These include the delayed development and acquisition of vocabulary; gap between sensory-motor and cognitive performance; poor motivation and concentration; difficulty coping with change, understanding and communicating new and complex information and mental states are all made reference to in the documentary.46 At the outset of the documentary, Jane Jessop recounts her friend’s and doctor’s expectations that Tommy’s life would be defined by deficit: “A doctor came to examine him and said he’d do very little, ever. He wouldn’t write and he wouldn’t read, and he didn’t do any developing for a whole year.” Acknowledging such attitudes is pivotal for the documentary in creating a narrative of transformation in the director’s and audience’s perceptions of the actors, from deficit to capacity. However, Jane’s recollection is the only point in the documentary at which a person without Down’s Syndrome is asked explicitly to comment on the actors’ past or present lack of ability in relation to their learning impairments. The production’s director, Peter, is shown giving notes about the actors’ deficiencies in their performances after the dress rehearsal, as directors usually do: “It needs a lot more energy,” “there are things pulling it back,” and to Tommy, “you had neither of your props.” Rather, William includes moments in which the actors with Down’s Syndrome discuss their feelings of inadequacy with each other. For example, Tommy asks Lawrie how he feels about having Down’s Syndrome, eliciting Lawrie’s response which shows an internalized awareness of Down’s-related difference and difficulty: “[It] feels always strange, because I always felt like I always had a problem in my life.” On another occasion, apparently unprompted, James reveals to William a sense that Hamlet ’s author is judging the actors on the possible shortcomings of their production, particularly with respect to memorization: “Shakespeare does not like people without no lines … He’ll be

46 Janet Carr, Down’s Syndrome Children Growing Up (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1995), 5; David Perry, Caring for the Physical and Mental Health of People with Learning Disabilities (London: Kingsley, 2011), 58; Susan Buckley and Gillian Bird, “Cognitive Development and Education: Perspectives on Down syndrome from a Twenty-Year Research Problem,” in Cuskelly et al., Down’s Syndrome Across the Lifespan, 69.

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thinking, ‘Is he going to get this, this idiot?’” These occasions offer rarely broadcast examples of self-doubt, or “crip killjoy,” in a medium that much prefers narratives where people are either shown to be recuperating from, or self-accepting and happy in spite of, their impairments. Less progressively, William’s voiceovers include statements of deficit from him, introducing those made by the actors. They represent the “extensive and heavy commentary” seen in traditional documentaries.47 For example, his line “Away from the theatre, Lawrie’s plagued by selfdoubt” precedes and accentuates footage of the actor looking at his face in his bathroom mirror, saying: “I could be a good-looking guy, hot with the girls. So far, no-one thinks I look hot or sexy.” The documentary-makers arguably, intentionally or otherwise, craft a similar narrative around other Blue Apple actors’ notions of aesthetic deficit in a scene with Katy cleansing her face in the bathroom mirror and talking to the camera: “my face won’t be nice for Ophelia. ‘Cos Ophelia is … is fair.” However, Katy resists a reading of this as relating to any sense of deficit she has in her appearance because of Down’s Syndrome by delimiting any aesthetic deficit as strictly temporally limited and unusual: “At the moment, I don’t look beautiful. I’m going to get my face back to normal. How it was,” implicitly, before an outbreak of spots. The documentary-makers also articulate a sense of deficit among the actors regarding their in/ability to distinguish between the play and real life, in decoupling “internal representations from real objects and events … engag[ing] in pretence or symbolic play … imagin[ing] the mental state of another person and reason[ing] about it.”48 William’s tone in these voiceovers echoes that of doctor–patient observations: “When Tommy first started acting, he found it hard to separate the fictional storylines from real life. I’ve also noticed this in other actors with Down’s.” Tommy’s having overcome this difficulty is shown in shots of him counseling other actors to distinguish between the play and life as well as his consistent use of characters’ names to talk about action and emotion in

47 Corner, “Performing the Real,” 259. 48 Nicola Grove and Keith Park, Social Cognition Through Drama and Literature for

People with Learning Disabilities: Macbeth in Mind (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2001), 15; see also Verity Botroff, Roy Brown, Eddie Bullitis, Vicky Duffield, John Grantley, Margaret Kyrkou, and Judy Thornley, “Some Studies Involving Individuals with Down’s Syndrome and Their Relevance to a Quality of Life Model,” in Cuskelly et al., Down’s Syndrome Across the Lifespan, 133.

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the play, and actors’ names to talk about life outside it. For example, shots of Tommy in rehearsal for the closet scene are interspersed with those of him walking in the twilight countryside angrily shouting his line “Follow my mother” (5.1.321), i.e. “die!” When William asks “who were you shouting that at?” Tommy replies that he was directing it at “Katy mostly,” having been hurt by her saying she hates him and subsequently deciding to split up until the tour ends. The context around the quotation suggests he is deliberately appropriating the line and imagining hurling it at his ex to vent his upset and frustration. He is shown actively and incisively appropriating Hamlet to understand and share his life experiences. The documentary then shows contrasting cases who are supposedly unable as yet to consistently make this distinction, Lawrie and Katy. William’s subsequent voiceovers run thus: “Katy’s finding it hard to understand that Tommy’s just acting … And Katy isn’t the only one confusing the play with real life. Lawrie’s been wrestling with the guilt of his evil character Claudius” and “From the very start, Lawrie seems to confuse the play with his real life.” The documentary evidences this supposed slippage further with footage of James telling Lawrie in an off-script outburst during rehearsals to “go to hell.” This is followed with footage of the latter’s resulting upset reaction inflected by the early modern, Christian understandings of the afterlife encountered through rehearsal, as well as his personal experiences of bereavement. Yet, just like Tommy, Lawrie elsewhere shows himself quite capable of separating the two, as a professional actor would, in his direct-to-camera address: “I know it’s only acting but, I feel I have a lot in common with Hamlet” (my emphasis). Furthermore, when the actors directly reflect on their affinity with their characters to the camera it is overwhelmingly and consciously in terms of being similarly—not identically—in love, loved or jealous. In spite of this evidence of the actors’ ability to overcome difficulties separating out reality and fiction, which clinicians have identified as characteristic of their impairment, William shapes these moments in the documentary into a voiceover narrative that one of the “extraordinary” effects of staging the play on the actors’ lives was that “the play and reality began to blur.” William’s and the BBC’s advocacy mission for the documentary may be largely to blame as well as producer’s and viewer’s preferences for dramatic transformation narratives in postdocumentary television. Another factor is society’s addiction to a specific

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kind of transformation narrative around “characters” with impairments: narrative prosthesis or rehabilitation stories.49

Problematizing Growing Up Down ’s Advocacy The documentary realizes many positive and rare achievements including getting actors with Down’s Syndrome on national television. This was recently expanded in BBC3’s 2015 “disability season” (broadcast in summer 2015, when viewing figures are traditionally low). Growing up Down’s highlights the actors’ abilities, achievements, and contains moments of self-advocacy. Nonetheless, it also has problematic qualities, some there from William’s initiation of the Blue Apple Hamlet project, others introduced by Growing Up Down’s in the production of the documentary. I want to identify these below, with the intention of informing future practice for filmmakers and producers representing people with impairments. Despite critical and medical literature increasingly recognizing the individuality of people with impairments, and the documentary maintaining an emphasis on individual actors throughout, it nominally homogenizes the group (although Williams’s original title for the documentary, Hamlet in Love, eschewed this) and focuses on their “commonality” of being “special,” rather than, say their commonality with non-disabled readers and performers of the play in feeling the “smack of Hamlet.”50 Notwithstanding Blue Apple’s website declaring its main company to be inclusive, and the DVD of the production evidencing the presence of non-disabled actors in supporting roles, viewers of the documentary see only its actors with impairments. The opportunity to counter dominant representations of segregation is therefore lost. Despite the inclusion of queer desire in the program, the promotional material around the documentary is largely heteronormative, foregrounding Tommy and Katy’s relationship and downplaying Lawrie’s unrequited love for Tommy and the way it complicates their friendship for both. Despite avoiding the portrayal of 49 See Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 50 See Goodley, Self -Advocacy, 52; NHS, NHS Choices; Vlachou, Teachers’ and Peers’ Attitudes, 34. The phrase “smack of Hamlet” comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who claimed that “I have a smack of Hamlet myself;” Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets (London: George Bell, 1904), 531.

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the actors as tragic figures or victims of impairment, and including material that shows participants making mistakes, behaving aggressively or in psychological distress, the documentary’s emphasis on Shakespeare’s and Hamlet ’s elite cultural value could be seen as pushing them towards the problematic image of “super-cripples.” Despite the way in which the actors clearly take responsibility for the production, and exercise self-advocacy both during rehearsals and in speaking directly to the camera, the documentary is ultimately a product of its makers’ advocacy. It therefore risks perpetuating the way in which “disabled people are [often] displaced as subjects and fetishized as objects”51 and have “consistently had their histories written for them by others: caseworkers, psychologists, historians, social scientists” and other academics such as myself.52 Growing Up Down’s exhibits some tension between a narrative of universality—in which Hamlet is Everyman, and Everyman (including men and women with Down’s Syndrome) really has a smack of Hamlet—and one in which Hamlet has a particular resonance for this group. The documentary constructs Hamlet’s fictional experiences of anger, grieving, remembering and forgetting as mapping particularly well onto the medical characteristics of Down’s Syndrome.

Who Are Growing Up Down ’s “Wondrous Fools”? The will to make the documentary proclaim a homogenizing affinity between Hamlet’s experience and those of people with Down’s Syndrome is most awkwardly and objectionably evident in the last significant lines spoken by Tommy as Hamlet. I have repeatedly listened to them and checked them against the transcript of the program on BUFVC’s Box of Broadcast online off-air recording service, and they are rendered thus: “I pray you all, / that whatsoever else shall hap’ tonight, / you look through our sad performance and see / that we fools of nature are wondrous too.” Given the program’s focus and ostensible purpose (to explore whether the actors could “pull off” the production), these lines might be glossed as “whatever happens in tonight’s performance, we hope you will see that actors with learning disabilities are amazing too,” i.e. compare

51 Sandahl, “From the Streets to the Stage,” 623. 52 Goodley, Self -Advocacy, 8.

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favorably with non-disabled actors. Having largely avoided sentimentalizing the participants throughout the documentary, this declamation, a feature of William’s performance text, undermines that integrity. This is all the more so given its positioning towards the end of the documentary, as a cheap but catchy parting shot. The language in this extract is offensive: the phrases “fools of nature” and “sad performance” connote the powerless—“plaything[s], pawn[s] and puppet[s],” and the inherently defective—“born fool[s], simpleton[s] by nature.” They invoke the very personal tragedy, pitiful models of disability that the documentary is supposed to be rebutting.53 “Wondrous” is glossed as “unbelievable, bizarre, and strange.”54 Its use reinforces the notions of spectacle and freakishness that have often accompanied disability on stage. The guileful use of these lines lets slip a gamut of negative discourse and cultural stereotypes of Down’s Syndrome and learning difficulties, something Ato Quayson identifies as “the most deadly instruments for denying the humanity of people.”55 It is unfortunate that these lines from the production were chosen for an ostensibly progressive documentary. There was no need to do so: as mentioned above, the documentary only uses twelve per cent of William’s script, so there were presumably plenty of alternative lines filmed from the performances which might have made the cut instead. The producers legitimize such retrograde and patronizing sentiments by presenting these lines as though they were Shakespeare’s: authentic products of his widely-held genius and knack for speaking to all human conditions and eventualities. Rather, they are William’s mawkish patchwork of Shakespeare’s words. “I pray you all … whatsoever else shall hap tonight” includes two lines of Claudius’ recommendations on concealing Polonius’ death which appear in all three early editions (Hamlet 1.2.246 & 250). “Look through our bad performance” has been slightly altered from Claudius’ incitement to Laertes to kill Hamlet in the same editions. “See that” appears in Hamlet’s “angels and ministers” soliloquy in the 1603 Quarto (Q1), along with a description of his father’s ghost as “wondrous strange,” while “we fooles of nature” appears in his musings on the ghost’s appearance in the First Folio version (1.3). “That,” “are” 53 Shakespeare’s Words Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Words King Lear. 54 Shakespeare’s Words Hamlet. 55 Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness, 210.

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and “too” have been gleaned from elsewhere in the play. The pastiche reduces successful Shakespeare by Down’s Syndrome actors to a matter of William as dramaturge and documentary-maker “putting the words in the right place” (as James elsewhere in the documentary defines the art of acting). It ignores the actors’ transparent and self-advocated commitment to (the admittedly fraught concepts) of real and original Shakespeare. It is the documentary-makers’ very own, presumably well-intentioned, piece of “miching mallecho” drama. This final serve of “Shakespeare” in the documentary further begs the question, identified earlier, of whether it is really the actors who cannot distinguish between fiction and reality because of their Down’s Syndrome, or the documentary-makers because of their sense of (ad)vocation. The lines and their position at the end of the documentary also indicate the producers’ failure to explore the ability of actors with intellectual impairments to be involved in arts collaborations throughout the process, beyond the “starring” roles. Dorota Krzeminska and Jolanta Rzeznicka-Krupa—researching companies of actors with learning disabilities in Poland—as well as playwright Christian O’Reilly and Blue Teapot’s director Petal Pilley, staging the production Sanctuary in Ireland, have demonstrated their actors’ involvement in researching, plotting, scripting, directing and marketing productions.56 Growing Up Down’s goes “over [its actors/subjects] heads” to advocate for understanding their abilities using a reactionary textual pastiche to achieve the “revelatory” narrative—actors with Down’s Syndrome can “pull off” Hamlet —desired by the documentary-makers.57 Admittedly, I have had the benefit in preparing this chapter of hearing O’Reilly talk about his methods and processes, whereas I have only had access to published, usually promotional, interviews with William. It may be typical of this medium that they foreground William’s individual role in the making of the program and reflect William’s inexperience or ambition that he does not manage to convey a greater sense of shared input. I have dwelt in these last few paragraphs on representations of deficit in the program, and given them a longer consideration than the representations of ability with which I started and which constitute Growing

56 Krzeminska and Rzeznicka-Krupa, “Between Therapy and Art.” 57 Michael Oliver, “Social Theory and Disability: Some Theoretical Issues,” Disability,

Handicap and Society 1.1 (1986): 26.

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Up Down’s overall message of capacity (triumphing) over disability. One reason that the deficit narrative remains so central to the program and substantial in this chapter is the requirement of postdocumentary television to demonstrate the kind of character arcs, narrative transformations, of failure to success (Blue Apple’s director is shown, at one crisis point, hoping for a “moment of great lightness [in which] things will turn around”), historically expected on television in drama.58 To better contribute to anti-oppression work, postdocumentary programming—Shakespearean or not—needs to consistently listen to the people who experience oppression, believe what they say, and look to them for leadership in ending that oppression.59 From my analysis of Growing Up Down’s —and other documentaries I have seen which go behind-thescenes of theatre productions by people with learning disabilities, such as Somebody to Love and the Teatr 21 episode of The Love Boat —I venture some recommendations for subsequent documentary-makers. Resist glibness and boost the leadership roles of people with learning disabilities in the production wherever possible: give more weight to the value of their program’s title and closing scenes which frame its content—paying more attention not to their role in marketing the film, but to establishing the program’s possible meanings; involve the people you aim to represent at every level—in front of and behind the camera, in the editing suite and marketing department; and further self-advocacy—making advocacy such as mine in this chapter and the documentary-makers’s in Growing Up Down’s redundant. Avoid, if not meaning by Shakespeare, “meaning by” people with impairments.

Bibliography Barnes, Colin. Disabling Imagery and the Media: An Exploration of the Principles for Media Representations of Disabled People. London: British Council of Organizations of Disabled People (BCODP), 1992. BBC. “Finding a Way into the Arts.” In Touch—BBC Radio 4 [Online]. http:// www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04kbl8t. Accessed May 7, 2015.

58 Corner, “Performing the Real,” 260–266; Olive, “In Shape and Mind Transformed?”. 59 Karol Collymore, “I’m Tired of Explaining Why I’m Offended by a Racist Drag

Queen,” Bitch Media, February 7, 2013, http://bitchmagazine.org/post/im-tired-of-exp laining-why-im-offended-by-a-racist-drag-queen.

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Blue Apple Theatre|Winchester, Empowering People Through Theatre, Dance and Film. http://www.blueappletheatre.hampshire.org.uk. Accessed May 5, 2015. Blue Apple Theatre|Hamlet [Online]. http://blueappletheatre.hampshire.org. uk/hamlet.html. Accessed May 5, 2015. Botroff, Verity, Roy Brown, Eddie Bullitis, Vicky Duffield, John Grantley, Margaret Kyrkou, and Judy Thornley. “Some Studies Involving Individuals with Down’s Syndrome and Their Relevance to a Quality of Life Model.” In Down’s Syndrome Across the Lifespan, edited by Monica Cuskelly, Anne Jobling, and Susan Buckling, 121–138. London: Whurr, 2002. Broadcastnow.co.uk. Growing Up Down’s, BBC3, January 31, 2014. http:// www.broadcastnow.co.uk/features/growing-up-downs-bbc3/5066056.art icle. Accessed May 5, 2015. Brown, Annie. “Scots Theatre Director Tells How Visual Impairment Gives Her Unique Perspective on How Productions Should Materialise Onstage.” Daily Record [Online], October 17, 2014. http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/ real-life/scots-theatre-director-tells-how-4451914. Accessed May 7, 2015. Buckley, Susan, and Gillian Bird. “Cognitive Development and Education: Perspectives on Down Syndrome from a Twenty-Year Research Problem.” In Down’s Syndrome Across the Lifespan, edited by Monica Cuskelly, Anne Jobling, and Susan Buckling, 66–80. London: Whurr, 2002. Carr, Janet. Down’s Syndrome Children Growing Up. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets. London: George Bell and Sons, 1904. Collymore, Karol. “I’m Tired of Explaining Why I’m Offended by a Racist Drag Queen.” Bitch Media, February 7, 2013. http://bitchmagazine.org/post/ im-tired-of-explaining-why-im-offended-by-a-racist-drag-queen. Accessed October 1, 2015. Corner, John. “Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions.” Television and New Media 3.3 (2002): 255–269. Diamond, Milton. Sexwatching: Looking into the World of Sexual Behaviour. London: Macdonald Orbis, 1984. Down’s Syndrome—NHS Choices [Online] 2015. http://www.nhs.uk/condit ions/downs-syndrome/pages/introduction.aspx. Accessed May 7, 2015. Edgren, Heather. “Shakespeare in the Special Education Classroom.” Teaching Shakespeare 2 (2012): 8–10. Goodley, Dan. Self-Advocacy in the Lives of People with Difficulties. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000. Gothard, Jan. “Beyond the Myths: Representing People with Down’s Syndrome.” In Down’s Syndrome Across the Lifespan, edited by Monica Cuskelly, Anne Jobling, and Susan Buckling, 2–15. London: Whurr, 2002.

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Grove, Nicola, and Keith Park. Social Cognition Through Drama and Literature for People with Learning Disabilities: Macbeth in Mind. London: Jessica Kingsley, 2001. Growing Up Down’s. Directed by William Jessop. BBC3, February 3, 2014. Hawkes, Terence. Meaning by Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Hunter, Kelly. “Shakespeare and Autism.” Teaching Shakespeare 2 (2013): 8–10. ———. Shakespeare’s Heartbeat: Drama Games for Children with Autism. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015. Jamie’s Dream School. Created by Jamie Oliver. Fresh Start Productions. Channel 4, March–April 13, 2011. Krzeminska, Dorota, and Jolanta Rzeznicka-Krupa. “Between Therapy and Art: Borderline Space in Theatre of People with Intellectual (Dis)ability.” Paper delivered at “Negotiating Space for (Dis)ability in Drama, Theatre, Film and Media” Conference, University of Lodz, September 25, 2015. Lawhorn, Mark. “Staging Shakespeare’s Children.” In Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, edited by Naomi Miller, 89–97. New York: Routledge, 2003. Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York: NYU Press, 1998. Macbeth, the Movie Star … and Me. Directed by Neil Leighton. BBC2, 2012. Mazer, Cary M. “Sense/Memory/Sense-Memory: Reading Narratives of Shakespearian Rehearsals.” Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009): 328–348. Meth, Jonathan, “Disability Arts: The Challenge of Ensuring Creative Momentum.” Guardian [Online], September 3, 2015. http://www.thegua rdian.com/culture-professionals-network/2015/sep/03/disability-arts-thechallenge-of-ensuring-creative-momentum. Accessed October 1, 2015. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. “Global In(ter)dependent Disability Cinema: Targeting Ephemeral Domains of Belief and Cultivating Aficionados of the Body.” In Cultures of Representation: Disability in World Cinema Contexts, edited by Benjamin Fraser, 18–32. London and New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. ———. Narrative Prosthesis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Olive, Sarah. “‘In Shape and Mind Transformed’? Televised Teaching and Learning Shakespeare.” Palgrave Communications 2 (2016). https://doi. org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.8. ———. Shakespeare Valued: Policy and Pedagogy in Education, 1989–2009. Bristol: Intellect, 2015. Oliver, Michael. “Social Theory and Disability: Some Theoretical Issues.” Disability, Handicap and Society 1.1 (1986): 5–17. O’Neill, Stephen, ed. Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change Across Media. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017.

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O’Reilly, Christian. “Invited Talk 2.” Lecture delivered at “Negotiating Space for (Dis)ability in Drama, Theatre, Film and Media” Conference, University of Lodz, September 26, 2015. Osborne, Laurie. “Serial Shakespeare: Intermediate Performance and the Outrageous Fortunes of Slings & Arrows.” Borrowers and Lenders 6.2 (2011). http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/7162/toc. Perry, David. Caring for the Physical and Mental Health of People with Learning Disabilities. London: Kingsley, 2011. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia, 2007. Ryan, Frances. “We Wouldn’t Accept Actors Blacking Up, So Why Applaud ‘Cripping Up’?” Guardian [Online], January 13, 2015. http://www.thegua rdian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/13/eddie-redmayne-golden-globe-ste phen-hawking-disabled-actors-characters. Sandahl, Carrie. “From the Streets to the Stage: Disability and the Performing Arts.” Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) 20.2 (2005): 620–624. Shakespeare, Tom, Kath Gillespie-Sells, and Dominic Davies. The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires. London: Cassell, 1996. Shakespeare’s Words | Hamlet | William Shakespeare. Shakespeareswords.com, 2015. http://www.shakespeareswords.com/Plays.aspx?Ac=1&SC=4&IdPlay= 2#115693. Accessed May 8, 2015. Shakespeare’s Words | King Lear | William Shakespeare. Shakespeareswords.com, 2015. http://www.shakespeareswords.com/Plays.aspx?Ac=4&SC=6&IdPlay= 11#155117. Accessed May 8, 2015. Somebody to Love. Directed by Anna Rogers. RTÉ1. February 17, 2014. Stopa-Hunt, Chloe. “Hamlet on Wheels.” Teaching Shakespeare 5 (2014): 9–10. Tempera, Mariangela. “‘Only About Kings’: Reference to the Second Tetralogy on Film and Television.” In Shakespeare on Screen: The Henriad, edited by Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, 233–268. Rouen: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2008. The Love Boat. Fakty TVN, Poland. Broadcast November 25, 2014. Vlachou, Anastasia. Teachers’ and Peers’ Attitudes Towards the Integration of Pupils with DS. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Sheffield. 1995. When Romeo Met Juliet. BBC2. June 23, 2010. Wood, David Houston. “New Directions: ‘Some Tardy Cripple’: Timing Disability in Richard III .” In Richard III: A Critical Reader, edited by Annaliese Connolly, 129–154. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. World Health Organization. The International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities, and Health. 2001. http://www.who.int/classifications/icf/en/. Accessed October 6, 2015.

CHAPTER 14

Shakespearean Disability Theatre Leslie C. Dunn

Abstract Disability theatre empowers d/Deaf and disabled theatre practitioners to redress their invisibility, challenge disability stereotypes and stigma, and create new meanings of disability through performance. This chapter asks what it might mean to create a specifically Shakespearean disability theatre. I begin by discussing some of the institutional and attitudinal obstacles for d/Deaf and disabled Shakespearean actors, including performance traditions, ableist biases in actor training, and audience unease with “real” as opposed to fictive disability onstage. I then discuss the particular issues that arise when disabled actors take on the most iconic disabled Shakespearean role, Richard III, focusing on Michael Patrick Thornton’s performance at Chicago’s Gift Theater in 2016. I also discuss two other Shakespeare productions in which an actor’s disability was problematically metaphorized by directors. I then turn to the work of Howie Seago at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in which the Deaf actor’s collaborations with his director and fellow cast members reimagined Shakespeare through a disability lens. The chapter concludes by considering two recent Shakespeare adaptations, Redefining Juliet and Follies in Titus, which put the experiences and perspectives of disabled actors at the center of the theatre-making process.

L. C. Dunn (B) Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_14

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I owe the title of this chapter to Kirsty Johnson, whose book Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism first got me thinking about what a Shakespearean disability theatre might look like. Johnson defines disability theatre as “one branch of a wider international disability arts and culture movement which seeks to address and redress the very idea of disability in the modern arts and, by extension, society.”1 Disability theatre places Deaf and disabled artists at the center of the theatre-making process, empowering them to redress their own invisibility and to challenge stereotypes and stigma through performance. In the words of Richard Tomlinson, co-founder of the UK’s Graeae Theatre: the very act of controlling the particular medium for a certain time in front of a largely passive, captive crowd, actually does allow for the possibility of clearing away much of the mythology that has been created about disability … So performance gives power.2

This chapter is about the power that Shakespeare performance gives to disabled actors and theatre practitioners. There are some crucial distinctions between the disability theatre movement that Johnson describes and what I am calling “Shakespearean disability theatre.” There are no specifically Shakespearean disability theatre companies analogous to Theater Breaking Through Barriers and The Apothetae in New York or Graeae and Deafinitely Theatre in London. Some of those companies have mounted groundbreaking Shakespeare productions, but reimagining disability through Shakespeare is not their primary mission. Much of that work is going on in mainstream companies such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Shakespeare’s Globe, which don’t have the same commitment to disability arts and activism. Yet these companies share some of the practices and goals of disability theatre, including increased access to performances, inclusive casting, and new approaches to canonical plays that interpret disability differently. Shakespearean disability theatre is also being created through adaptations that use the plays to tell contemporary stories about disability stereotypes and stigma. 1 Kirsty Johnson, Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 15. 2 Richard Tomlinson, Disability Culture and Community Performance (London, 1982), 11–13; quoted in Johnson, Disability Theatre, 31.

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Shakespearean disability theatre requires that actors and directors “address and redress” specifically Shakespearean performance traditions, including assumptions that only certain characters can or should have disabilities, and the history of able-bodied actors “cripping up” to play them. At the same time, like other forms of disability theatre, Shakespearean disability theatre redresses the entrenched ableism of the theatre as a whole, which is apparent in everything from the exclusion of disabled artists to ideologies of actor training to preconceptions about disability on the part of both directors and audiences. This chapter begins by discussing some of these institutional and attitudinal barriers, focusing on the “problem” of the disabled body in modern actor training and in Shakespearean performance. I then examine some recent productions and adaptations that have addressed the idea of disability through Shakespeare. My argument is that the contributions of disabled artists to contemporary Shakespeare performance en/able scholars, theatre practitioners, and audiences by showing us how to imagine, in Tobin Siebers’ words, a “Shakespeare differently disabled.”3

The Disabled Actor’s Body Why has the Shakespearean actor’s body almost always been an able body? Performance history is certainly a factor. What we know about early modern acting suggests that few if any professional actors could have had permanent impairments. In Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking Through the Body, Evelyn Tribble cites an early seventeenth-century text that outlines the range and variety of actors’ physical abilities: “Player hath many times, many excellent qualities: as dancing, actiuitie, musicke, song, elloqution, abilitie of body, memory, vigilancy, skill of weapon, pregnancy of wit, and such like.”4 “Activity” refers to gymnastics, wrestling, vaulting and tumbling—feats of athleticism that actors also performed in extra-theatrical entertainments. Tribble

3 Tobin Siebers, “Shakespeare Differently Disabled,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 435–454. 4 The Rich Cabinet Furnished with Varietie of Excellent Descriptions (probably by Thomas Gainsford) [London: I.B. for Roger Jackson, 1616], 117v; quoted in Eveyln Tribble, Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 3.

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cites the frequent stage directions calling for specific movements or displays of physical skill—everything from “stagger[ing] with faintness” to dancing “an antic” to fighting a duel—to support her claim that early modern playwrights expected their players to possess a “kinesic intelligence that undergirded their entire practice.”5 She imagines the early modern actor using his “embodied experience, a lifetime of training” to “animate his part.”6 The physical demands of performing Shakespeare might seem to preclude the casting of disabled actors, yet this exclusion rests on a limited conception of the kinds of “kinesic intelligence” that can be used to “animate” a Shakespearean role, which in turn rests on a limited understanding of what disabled bodies can do. When asked how she developed her “wheelchair choreography” to play Don John in a 2015 production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Regan Linton explained: It comes from 13 years of practice and wheel-physics awareness. Movement is important to me; I think a wheeling actor should be just as intriguing, graceful and nuanced in movement as a walking actor and should have command of wheels in the same way that a dancer has command over his/her legs. In movement classes in graduate school, I did everything my cohorts did, from contact improvisation to cloud walks and tumbling. It was just slightly different. My wheelchair is part of my body, part of my acting instrument. So I have to be skilled in every aspect of its maneuvering. The same goes for the paralyzed parts of my body.7

An embodied knowledge of disability can also be a resource in working with fellow disabled actors. Gregg Mozgala, who has cerebral palsy, wrote about directing another actor with CP who was playing Puck in his production of Spirits of Another Sort, an adaptation of Midsummer Night’s Dream: With Chris, I noticed that he always seemed to be rushing to make his entrances and exits … This is completely related to CP in particular, which 5 Tribble, Early Modern Actors, 11. 6 Ibid., 37. 7 Quoted in Catherine Foster, “Don’t Mess with Don John,” Prologue/Summer 2015, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, https://www.osfashland.org/en/prologue/prologuesummer-2015/prologue-su-15-much-ado.aspx.

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thrives on speed and momentum in an effort to maintain balance and stability. Throughout the process I encouraged him to acknowledge his CP and integrate it into the character. Puck is non-human and supernatural, so there is no need for him to appear “normal.”8

Both Linton and Mozgala have said that they are empowered as artists by embracing the creative possibilities of their nonstandard bodies. As Mozgala puts it, “It’s completely antithetical to ‘good acting’ to deny the vessel one was born into. This is the instrument through which one accesses sound, breath, emotions, and you know, everything that makes a person human.”9 Yet as we saw in the early modern account of an actor’s skills, Western conceptions of “good acting” are often predicated on a nondisabled body. Colette Conroy begins her book Theatre and the Body by noting Sarah Bernhardt’s insistence that “only the physically perfect and well proportioned should even consider acting as a career.”10 Bernhardt’s argument was based on the belief that audiences must be able to distinguish between voluntary, intentional movements—the “artistry” of acting—and the involuntary movements that might be made by a variant body: as Conroy explains, “if we start to doubt that a specific act is intentional, the coherence of the artistic structure is threatened.”11 To ensure that all their movements will be perceived as intentional, modern actors are trained to achieve a “neutral body” stripped of idiosyncracies, an unmarked physical and emotional state from which they can freely express the specific physicality of their character.12 In “The Tyranny of Neutral,” actor and performance theorist Carrie Sandahl unpacks the ableist assumptions that underlie this cultivation of unmarked bodies, assumptions which, she points out, “often do not make

8 Gregg Mozgala, “Spirits of Another Sort” (2017) Post Mortem “How Shall We Find The Concord of This Discord?”, http://www.theapothetae.org/news/spirits-of-anothersort-2017-post-mortem-how-shall-we-find-the-concord-of-this-discord. 9 Mozgala, “Spirits.” 10 Colette Conroy, Theatre and the Body (Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2010), 2.

11 Conroy, Theatre, 38. 12 On the history and ideology of the neutral body see Mark Evans, Movement Training

for the Modern Actor (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2009), 69–119.

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sense to disabled actors.”13 Sandahl traces the idea of the neutral body to the nineteenth century, “an age when bodies were studied and trained for efficiency, standardization, and normalcy.”14 She further links it to what she calls the “emotional body,” that is, the idea that outward physicality expresses inner emotional states.15 The notion that body types express psychological types is first cousin to the moral model of disability, in which a physical deformity is interpreted as a sign of a psychological defect. In fact, some of the types featured in twentieth-century acting textbooks effectively, if inadvertently, metaphorize actual disabilities as signs of deviance: In one textbook, Sandahl writes, “I was disturbed to find my own likeness in the swayback profile of the ‘rigid hysterical.’”16 The idea of the emotional body, when informed by cultural metaphors of disability, means that a disabled actor’s body, in Sandahl’s words, “always signifie[s], no matter what role [the actor is] playing.”17 Disabled actors can find that they have little control over these significations, as they are culturally conditioned and projected onto them by audiences and directors. Sandahl relates an experience she had when playing an old beggar in a student production: I was directed to make a long, slow cross from upstage left to downstage right. During rehearsal I told the director that walking so slowly put me off balance and was somewhat painful and that I might fall. She replied that I should take my time, that it would be OK if I fell, that falling would just add to my characterization. I dreaded making that cross each performance. I felt the hot stare of the audience’s pity—not pity for the character, but pity for me. I could no longer tell the difference between the two.18

13 Carrie Sandahl, “The Tyranny of Neutral,” in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, eds. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 259. 14 Sandahl, “Tyranny of Neutral,” 262. 15 Ibid., 256. 16 Ibid., 263. 17 Carrie Sandahl, “From the Streets to the Stage: Disability and the Performing Arts,”

Publications of the Modern Language Society of America 120.2 (March 2005): 622. On the emotional body, see Sandahl, “Tyranny of Neutral,” 262–265. 18 Sandahl, “From the Streets,” 620.

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Though not originally applied to disability, Erika Fischer-Lichte’s distinction between the phenomenal body and the semiotic body is relevant here. Discussing actors’ performance of violence to their own bodies, Fischer-Lichte observes that actors have historically been taught to produce the illusion of bodily suffering while maintaining a clear distinction between their own body and the body of the character: “it is the semiotic body that brings forth the expression of suffering, while the phenomenal body does not actually suffer.”19 This enables the audience to empathize with dramatic characters while remaining comfortable in the knowledge that their suffering is only a performance. But when the distinction between the actor’s two bodies is blurred—when the actor’s phenomenal body is brought “to the fore” and “cannot be overlooked or forgotten by the spectator,” the relationship between the actor and the spectator is negatively affected.20 Fischer-Lichte cites an eighteenthcentury theatre director, Johann Jakob Engel, who wrote in his book Mimic Art (1784/85) that actors should never do violence to their own bodies (for example, by falling) because the spectators will become concerned for the “physical integrity” of the actor, and “such a concern, inevitably, disrupts the illusion; we should only sympathize with the character, and we start sympathizing with [the actor].”21 Fischer-Lichte’s theory of phenomenal and semiotic bodies helps to explain the “problem” of the disabled actor’s body for audiences. Not only does the actor’s disability invite metaphorical interpretations that may not be relevant to the character being portrayed; it also confronts audiences with a “real” disability when they are expecting an illusion. Disability brings the actor’s body “to the fore” for audience members, making it harder for them to “see” the character being portrayed. The actor’s disability may also activate cultural assumptions that the disabled body is necessarily a suffering body, which can in turn evoke feelings of pity for the actor and thus further erode the distinction between actor and role. The paradoxical implication of this way of thinking is that only nondisabled actors can play disabled characters successfully, because only they are free to build a convincing fictional character through the simulation of physical difference.

19 Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Prologue: Electra’s Transgressions,” in Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (Routledge, 2005), 4. 20 Fischer-Lichte, “Prologue,” 5. 21 Quoted in Fischer-Lichte, “Prologue,” 4.

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Performative Deformity: Richard III A striking example of the preference for feigned disability is the performance history of Shakespeare’s iconic disabled character, Richard III. Paul Menzer cites John Hill’s 1751 account of an ill-fated performance by a disabled actor: There is some where about town a person of the name of Machen …It is his misfortune to be lame of one leg; which is so much shorter than the other, that the highest heel he can wear is not enough to raise that side of his body to a level with the rest. Tragedy is the darling passion of this player, and he concluded, from this natural imperfection, he was the fittest of all men to perform the character of Richard III, which Shakespeare himself (with how much justice we do not presume to say) has figured to us as lame. Vast were the expectation of applause with which this man had flatter’d himself, when he should come to that part of the character where this peculiar natural defect, by which he thought himself qualified to perform the part, should come on; But what was the event? The audience, when he hop’d across the stage as he spoke the line, ‘Dogs bark at me as I halt by them,’ instead of the applause he listen’d for, burst out into a loud laugh. They could never reconcile themselves to have an original impos’d on them, when they expected or desir’d no more than a copy.22

Menzer, echoing Bernhardt, comments that Machen failed because “his disability only proved that he wasn’t acting.”23 According to this ableist logic, disabled people can’t act because they can’t imitate another body— even one with the same disability. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the role of Richard has become associated with spectacular imitations of disability involving feats of physical prowess that rival those of the early modern actor.24 Antony Sher based his landmark 1984 performance on Queen Margaret’s image of Richard as a “bottled spider” (1.3.238), propelling himself around 22 John Hill, The Actor: A Treatise on the Art of Playing (London, 1751), 56–57; quoted in Paul Menzer, Anecdotal Shakespeare: A New Performance History (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015), 151–152. 23 Menzer, Anecdotal Shakespeare, 152. 24 For a comprehensive performance history see Scott Colley, Richard’s Himself Again:

A Stage History of Richard III (New York, Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1992). On the physical risks of playing Richard see Menzer, Anecdotal Shakespeare, 153–160.

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the stage with frightening swiftness on custom-designed arm crutches. Ian McKellen’s 1990 Richard fascinated audiences with the trick of removing and opening his cigarette case with one hand. In 2002 Kenneth Branagh delivered the opening soliloquy from what one reviewer called “a Heath-Robinson contraption, part-stretcher, part-trolley, part-rack, upon which [he was] having his limbs exercised by white-coated physiotherapists.”25 Kevin Spacey’s 2011 Richard, according to John Lahr, “skitter[ed] buglike” while wearing a heavy brace on his left leg, with the foot turned out at a ninety-degree angle; when ascending the throne at his coronation he threw away his cane and “immediately lurch[ed] forward, falling flat on his face.”26 The point of all these disability simulations seems not so much to disappear into the character of Richard as to show that the actors really are acting. The crutches, braces, canes, and humps are just props; as Menzer puts it, “They are there to remind you that [the actor] doesn’t need them … Where a legless man might rely on a prosthetic merely to allow him to limp, here the able actor arrives at the same place but from the other end.”27 It’s precisely these performative aspects of Richard’s deformity—their association with both evil and entertainment, and the distance established between actor and character—that have made him not only one of Shakespeare’s most popular characters, but also one theatre and film’s most enduring disability icons, what Michael Patrick Thornton has called “the looming Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloon character of all disabled characters,” with all the connotations of spectacle, exaggeration, and emblematization that Thornton’s metaphor implies.28 It is understandable, then, that contemporary disabled actors would want to play Richard. To date at least six actors have taken on the role: Dave Richer (2001), Peter Dinklage (2004), Debbie Patterson (2016),

25 Benedict Nightingale, “Capable Branagh, but More Venom Would Be Nice,” The Times, March 19, 2002; quoted in Kate Wilkinson, “Richard III on Stage,” in Richard III: A Critical Reader, ed. Annaliese Connolly (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2013), 63. 26 John Lahr, “Boldfaced Bard: Shakespeare’s Scandal Sheet,” The New Yorker,

January 23, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/boldfaced-bard, accessed June 30, 2020. 27 Menzer, Anecdotal Shakespeare, 158. 28 Quoted in Gregg Mozgala, “Richard on Richard: A Conversation with Michael

Patrick Thornton,” http://www.theapothetae.org/news/richard-on-richard-a-conversat ion-with-michael-patrick-thornton, accessed June 30, 2020.

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Michael Patrick Thornton (2016), Mat Fraser (2017), and Kate Mulvany (2017).29 I’ve chosen to focus on Thornton’s performance at the Gift Theater in Chicago because for me it exemplifies both the opportunities and the risks of disabling Shakespeare differently: the opportunity to challenge disability stereotypes carries with it the risk of confirming those stereotypes for audiences, however inadvertently. For Thornton, playing Richard was at least partly about taking control over disability representation back from the long parade of able-bodied actors who preceded him. In a 2016 conversation with Gregg Mozgala, Thornton recalled reading Sher’s The Year of the King as a student: I remember being enthralled with it; pages of pages devoted to his sketches of how to play Richard as a bottled spider and his use of arm crutches and physical training etc. But that was before I became disabled. And now, I look at that sort of focus on one aspect—the disability—by a non-disabled actor and it seems empty and sorta parlor tricky and kind of insulting, actually, as if everything about Richard can be tied to his disability which, when you think about it, doesn’t seem that much more of an evolved point of view on disability than the medieval explanations for disability as outward manifestations of a crooked and evil inner soul.30

Thornton went to say that disabled actors need to play Richard so they can intervene in the “disability conversation” that surrounds him: “we can’t just punt and leave the articulation of that subject matter to Olivier and Sher and McKellen and Spacey and every other non-disabled actor … Heavily focusing on the playing of the disability as the panacea to playing Richard is, I’m sorry, precisely the miscalculation that arguably only a non-disabled actor would make.”31 As it turned out, Thornton’s desire to shift the focus away from the performance of disability was complicated, some might even say thwarted, by director Jessica Thebus’s decision to have him use a progression of assistive devices to mark critical moments in his quest for the crown, 29 Allison Hobgood includes a discussion of Peter Dinklage’s performance as Richard

III in “Teeth Before Eyes: Impairment and Invisibility in Shakespeare’s Richard III ,” in Disability, Health, and Happiness, ed. Iyengar, 23–40. On Dave Richer’s performance see Leanore Lieblein, “Dave Veut Jouer Richard III: Interrogating the Shakespearean Body in Quebec,” Canadian Theatre Review 111 (2002): 15–21. 30 Quoted in Mozgala, “Richard on Richard.” 31 Ibid.

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beginning with a wheelchair, followed by a walker (which he used to entrap Anne in 1.2), and culminating with a $70,000 dollar robotic exoskeleton in which he walked to his coronation. Thebus saw this technology representing Richard’s ability to “create and maintain a mutable identity.”32 Thornton saw it as a way for Richard to “project power vertically,” drawing an analogy with FDR (Franklin D. Roosevelt), who hid his polio braces from the public as he tried “to give society what they expect from a leader” while simultaneously commenting on that expectation.33 The transition from wheelchair to exoskeleton served to literalize Richard’s “rise to power.” But when the audience applauded during a performance, the meaning of the exoskeleton changed in a way that recalls Fischer-Lichte’s theory of the actor’s two bodies: it collapsed the distinction between actor and character. As Thornton commented, “I get up and I walk, and everybody claps … On the one hand, it makes me proud. I busted my ass to be able to do that. But on the other hand, is it ableism? Are people clapping because I’m standing up, and that’s much better than being in a wheelchair? What if I couldn’t stand? Does that make me less worthy of applause?”34 The exoskeleton confined Thornton within a stereotypical disability narrative in which a disabled person “overcomes” his disability through heroic efforts.35 And the sequential use of wheelchair, walker, and exoskeleton made it possible for audiences to see the wheelchair—which for Thornton, as for Linton, is an integral part of his acting body—as just another metaphorical prop.

32 Quoted in Noel Schecter, “A Chance to Be Good: ‘Richard III’ Reimagined with Michael Patrick Thornton and the Gift Theatre,” New City Stage, February 25, 2016, https://www.newcitystage.com/2016/02/25/a-chance-to-be-good-richard-iiireimagined-with-michael-patrick-thornton-and-the-gift-theatre. 33 Quoted in Schecter, “A Chance.” 34 Quoted in Catey Sullivan, “Actors with Disabilities Add Depth to Chicago

Stages,” Chicago Magazine, April 5, 2016. http://www.chicagomag.com/arts-culture/ April-2016/Actors-With-Disabilities-Add-Depth-to-Chicago-Stages. 35 Scholars of disability studies have called this the “supercrip” narrative; see Sami Schalk, “Reevaluating the Supercrip,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 10.1 (2016): 71–86.

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Beyond Disability as Metaphor Thornton’s experience with the exoskeleton offers a cautionary tale about the complications that can arise when disabled actors become the instruments of problematic disability representation. The phenomenon is not limited to Richard III . When Michael Kahn cast Deaf actor Monique Holt as Cordelia in his 1999 production of King Lear at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC, he used her signing (which the Fool interpreted by speaking Cordelia’s lines) to literalize the play’s connection between silence and truth. But as Jessica Bersan points out, this “disabling” of Cordelia not only romanticizes deafness by associating it with innocence, it also reduces Cordelia’s agency, making her “someone who doesn’t speak, but is spoken for … an object rather than a subject with her own, albeit visual, voice.”36 The director’s disability metaphor subsumes the disabled actor’s performance. Regan Linton’s casting as Don John in Much Ado at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was problematic in a similar way. One review suggests how Linton’s disability was explained in the production: While people take their seats in the Angus Bowmer Theatre, a figure hunches in a wheelchair at the back of the stage. A hood covers the figure’s face, hinting at darker ambitions … [later] Regan Linton enters in a wheelchair—now its early presence makes sense—dressed as a combat veteran. A war wound, we surmise, put her in the wheelchair … Shakespeare famously doesn’t give a reason for Don John’s anger, but Blain-Cruz suggests PTSD, which resonates with today’s audiences.37

Don John as a wounded war veteran made dramatic sense in this production, and the concept created a backstory to account for Regan Linton’s own disability. But in redressing one ableist stereotype—that disabled actors can’t act—the director, perhaps unwittingly, substituted another. To cast the only disabled actor in the production as the villain, and then to introduce her as a dark, hooded figure in a wheelchair, plays 36 Jessica Bersan, “Performing Deaf Identity: Towards a Continuum of Deaf Performance,” in Bodies in Commotion, eds. Sandahl and Auslander, 47. 37 David Stabbes, “Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2015 Opens: Wit and Bitterness Spark ‘Much Ado About Nothing’,” Oregon Live: The Oregonian, March 4, 2015, updated January 9, 2019, http://www.oregonlive.com/performance/index.ssf/2015/03/oregon_ shakespeare_festival_20_21.html.

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into what Petra Kuppers has called “the older wheelchair = villain, homicidal maniac, bitter baddie stereotype that used to rule Hollywood representations.”38 The opening focus on the wheelchair as a sign of Don John’s malignity encourages the audience to assume that the actor’s own disability is once again being used metaphorically, instead of asking them to accept the materiality of her variant body on the Shakespearean stage. It’s telling that one reviewer didn’t realize that Linton’s wheelchair use wasn’t just a creative choice: “Special note must be made of Regan Linton, who drew perhaps the toughest assignment, as the wounded female war veteran, the villainous Don John of this production, constrained to do most of her sinister acting from a wheelchair.”39 In other Oregon Shakespeare Festival productions, however, an actor’s disability was not used merely as a characterological or thematic metaphor, but rather incorporated into a re-imagining of the play. In 2010 the Deaf actor Howie Seago played the Ghost in Hamlet. In a conversation with Michael Shurgot, Seago commented on the process of integrating his performances into speaking productions: “The most important question [for my acting] is does my deafness and the use of ASL fit within the parameters of the character and not come off as too much of a gimmick?”40 The director, Bill Rauch, reconceptualized the Ghost for Seago by imagining that King Hamlet had been deaf, and that both Gertrude and young Hamlet had learned sign language to communicate with him. This explained Seago’s use of sign language; it also enabled Rauch to solve the practical problem of making Seago’s signing accessible to the hearing audience by having his Hamlet, Dan Donohoe, voice some of the Ghost’s lines from the play text while Seago signed his own ASL translations, and simultaneously signing and speaking his own lines during their scenes together. Shurgot writes that Rauch thought of

38 Petra Kuppers, “The Wheelchair’s Rhetoric: The Performance of Disability,” TDR: The Drama Review 51.4 (Winter 1997): 86. 39 Lee Greene, “Shakespeare Festival Opens 2015 Season with a Triumphal Update of Much Ado About Nothing,” Jacksonville Review, February 28, 2015, http://jacksonville review.com/shakespeare-festival-opens-2015-season-triumphal-update-much-ado-nothing. 40 Michael W. Shurgot, “Breaking the Sound Barrier: Howie Seago and American Sign Language at Oregon Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism and Scholarship 30.1 (2012): 27–28.

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Hamlet and his father as “shar[ing] a secret language—the language of signing—that was a major part of their bond while Hamlet Sr. lived.”41 This idea of ASL as a secret language became crucial to the staging of Hamlet’s first encounter with the Ghost in Act 1. Seago explains how it added “a whole other layer, a whole other dimension” to the Ghost’s narration of his murder: You know the audience has to hear my words through my son … and Hamlet was channeling me … The challenge was that we didn’t want him to, let’s say “interpret” out loud our conversation. You know that’s not real, that wouldn’t be real life … so it became Hamlet Jr. channeling the anger, the need for revenge from his own father, so I was putting it all onto him, and to spur him into action … He didn’t always interpret what I said, he didn’t always voice it, because he was shocked sometimes … and my translation is so clear about what’s going on—that he took this poison and poured it into my ear—so he doesn’t have to say anything at that part. But the audience knew we were talking about poison, you know, they can tell … There are some nice opportunities for me to communicate with the audience directly through gesturing so I don’t have to be dependent on someone’s voicing … the audience really enjoys that because it’s very clear what I’m doing with my movements and my gestures.42

In Seago’s performance, signing was more than just a translation: it became the visual and kinetic medium through which the Ghost projected himself into the body, mind, and voice of his son. Hamlet’s need to maintain eye contact with his father gave further physical expression to the bond. At one point during the Ghost’s speech, Donohoe’s Hamlet covered his eyes in distress; at that point Seago changed the Ghost’s line, “List, list, O list,” to “Look at me”—signed first with one hand, then with the other, finally with both. Hamlet’s duty to his father meant that he literally could not take his eyes off him.43 The extent to which Hamlet

41 Shurgot, “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” 30. 42 “Howie Seago: On Playing the Ghost,” Part 3 of a 5-Part Interview with Michael

Shurgot. Oregon Shakespeare Festival Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDL 5HD8wzHo&t=575s, accessed June 20, 2020. 43 Lezlie C. Cross, “Speaking in the Silence: Deaf Performance at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, eds. Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kathryn R. McPherson, and Sarah Enloe (Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), 13.

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was haunted by memories of his father was further communicated by his intermittent signing at other moments in the play.44 Howie Seago’s performance as the Ghost proved that it is possible to incorporate Deaf actors into hearing productions in a way that transcends both disability stereotypes and the negative connotations of “accommodation.” The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) 2013 production of Cymbeline went even further, reconceptualizing the entire play by putting Deafness at its center. Seago played the titular King as a “culturally Deaf monarch” whose court used ASL, according to Maureen McDonnell, “as a vehicle of empire and military dominance.”45 The other characters and their interrelationships were defined by their respective modes of communication: signing exclusively, using a combination of ASL and spoken English, or speaking English only. A diversity of sign languages was also used throughout the production to express the play’s linguistic and geographic diversity. McDonnell argues that placing the Deaf king and his “vocal counterpart,” the Royal Interpreter, at the center of the drama created an “inversion of hearing-dominant spaces and practices” that “affirmed Deaf communities and [their] members.”46

Adaptations and Activism The OSF Cymbeline was a thoroughly heteroglossic production, created through an equal collaboration between Deaf and hearing actors. In this it was exceptional; most recent mainstream Shakespeare productions have cast only one disabled actor as a relatively minor character, which provokes me to ask why disabled actors are so rarely allowed to play leading roles. This was precisely the question that confronted the audience of Redefining Juliet , an experimental adaptation of Romeo and Juliet

44 Denise Battista, “Big Upset in a Hamlet for the Moment,” PlayShakespeare.com, updated March 24, 2010, https://www.playshakespeare.com/hamlet-reviews/theatre-rev iews/big-upset-in-a-hamlet-for-the-moment, accessed June 29, 2020. 45 Maureen McDonnell, “Signing Shakespeare: Staging American Sign Language in Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Bulletin 35.1 (Spring 2017): 37. 46 McDonnell, “Signing Shakespeare,” 43.

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performed at the Barbican in 2016.47 The idea came from the longstanding desire of its creative director, Storme Toolis, to play a role for which mainstream theatre companies would never consider her because she has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair: “I figured that if no one would let me get past the casting call, I’d have to do the work myself. So I devised Redefining Juliet , which casts six women as Juliet—women who just don’t get to play that role in the normal run of things.”48 The play interwove Juliet’s scenes, played by each actor in turn, with verbatim theatre monologues based on the actors’ personal stories. Not all of the Juliets in Redefining Juliet were disabled: their differences ranged from deafness to baldness to large bodies and unusual height. This diversity of differences reflects Toolis’ desire to integrate disability into a consideration of cultural constructions of femininity: “Disability is a factor, but I looked at … sexuality, size, weight, race, and all the other barriers that might impede someone from being conventionally ‘beautiful’ on stage.”49 The stories told in the verbatim theatre sections of the play stressed the difficulties of being accepted as feminine or desirable according to white heteronormative standards of beauty and sexuality. In the documentary, however, the actors stressed that the production was about “more than that,” and during rehearsals they told stories about being “othered” more generally because of their nonstandard bodies—mocked by peers, commented on by passersby.50 So Redefining Juliet told multiple, intersectional stories in counterpoint. In addition to representing Juliet on stage, the six women were also representing themselves, making a conscious decision to claim their phenomenal bodies while inhabiting a Shakespearean body. In the BBC 47 Redefining Juliet was conceived by Storme Toolis in 2015 through the Open Lab program at the Barbican in London; a revised version was developed at the RSC in 2018. The quotation is from the teaser for a documentary about the original production, directed by Glen Milner and shown on the BBC in 2016: BBC-Redefining Juliet , https://vimeo. com/127293435. The complete documentary is available on YouTube, https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=9kT5Yqniklk&t=677s. 48 Storme Toolis, “As a Disabled Actor Wanting to Play Juliet, I Had to Rewrite the Script,” Mumsnet, April 28, 2016, https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/guest_posts/ 2625368-Guest-post-As-a-disabled-actor-wanting-to-play-Juliet-I-had-to-rewrite-the-script. 49 Raya Aljadir, “Redefining Juliet and Perceptions of Disabled People,” Disability Horizons, May 1, 2016. http://disabilityhorizons.com/2016/05/redefining-juliet-and-the-per ceptions-of-disabled-people/, accessed June 30, 2020. 50 Redefining Juliet , directed by Glen Milner. BBC documentary 2016. Available on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kT5Yqniklk&t=677s.

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documentary Toolis asserts that “Juliet being in a wheelchair is completely irrelevant.”51 Redefining Juliet challenges the audience to agree. By putting Deaf and disabled actors at the center of the theatre-making process, and openly challenging cultural stereotypes of disability both in the theatre and in the larger world, Redefining Juliet creates Shakespearean disability theatre in Johnson’s sense. When I spoke with Storme Toolis in 2017, she told me that she thinks of Redefining Juliet less as a text than as a template: the play is meant to change with each iteration, as new actors bring their bodies and their stories to the collaboration. Toolis is hoping to work with adolescent girls in schools, encouraging them to use the play to explore their own relationships to self-image, beauty standards, disability, and gender identity.52 Finally, I’d like to turn to another, even more radical reimagining of Shakespeare as disability theatre: Teatro Patologico’s Follies in Titus , an adaptation of Titus Andronicus , which was created in Rome and performed at New York’s LaMama in 2017. Teatro Patologico was founded in 1992 by Dario D’Ambrosi to give people with physical, mental, and intellectual disabilities access to theatre-making. In 2016 D’Ambrosi established the Integrated Theatre of Emotion, a university theatre arts program for people living with schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder, and Down Syndrome. The program combines pre-professional training with medical and psychological support for the students and their families.53 D’Ambrosi wrote in the director’s notes for his production of Medea, in which students from Teatro Patologico played the Chorus: Some of these actors, before this experience, weren’t able to talk; some of them were deathly afraid to walk up a flight of stairs; some have been harming themselves for years. Seeing their progress is what gave us the strength and the enthusiasm to push forward.54

51 Redefining Juliet , BBC documentary. 52 Storme Toolis, interview with the author, London, May 2017. 53 See Gaia Pianigiani, “Using Theatre as a Salve to Soothe Minds,” New York Times,

June 2, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/theater/06pathological.html?act ion=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer. 54 “Dario D’Ambrosi to helm MEDEA with Chorus from Teatro Patologico at LaMama, 10/8–18,” Broadway World, September 2, 2015, https://www.broadwayworld. com/off-off-broadway/article/Dario-DAmbrosi-to-Helm-MEDEA-with-Chorus-from-Tea tro-Patologico-at-La-MaMa-108-18-20150902.

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But for D’Ambrosi, Pathological Theatre isn’t just therapy. It is also a new kind of theatre: Working with actors with mental disabilities brings us to a new form of theatrical language. Only they have the key to it, only they can unlock and dictate new guidelines for the future of the theater. That is because their presence on the stage is intentionally “anti-theatrical” … What you’re about to see is absolutely truthful and unique. Each night will be an absolute surprise for both my “patient-actors” and the audience. It is a unique experience that will bring you close to true theatre, the Theatre of Emotion.55

D’Ambrosi refuses to subordinate disability to the formal and institutional conventions of the theatre, or even to integrate it within them; instead he reimagines theatre itself as the domain of disability. Follies in Titus was performed by students from the Integrated Theatre of Emotion. The creative process involved making a canovaccio—a plot outline that lists acts and scenes but leaves the dialogue to be improvised by the actors, in the tradition of Commedia dell’Arte.56 Copies of the canovaccio were given to the audience, and the character of Titus (Tito) delivered his opening soliloquy in a combination of Italian and English, but otherwise the play was entirely in Italian, compelling most New York audience members to follow the performance through visual images, gestures, sound, and music. Natasha Lardera described Tito’s opening soliloquy: “Am I a man who cures, or a man who needs to be cured?” These are the words of Titus, words that bring to mind another Shakespearean soliloquy, uttered as he is lying in a clawfoot bathtub while holding a vial full of pills. His bandaged head, the rags he is wearing, reminiscent of a straitjacket, and his isolation immediately make the audience think of a violent prisoner or mental patient. As his hands shake, the noise of the pills becomes rhythmic as it is transformed in actual music. As the rhythm becomes more pressing, thus solemnly enter all the other characters of Follies in Titus .57

55 “Dario D’Ambrosi to helm MEDEA.” 56 Natasha Lardera, “The Follies of ‘Follies in Titus,’” iItaly, December 7, 2017,

http://www.iitaly.org/magazine/focus/art-culture/article/folly-follies-in-titus. 57 Lardera, “The Folly.”

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The play adapted the central themes of Shakespeare’s play to its actors; the struggle for domination in Rome became the struggle for power in the little world of a psychiatric ward through control over distribution of medication. D’Ambrosi explained that he considers Titus Andronicus “perfect to tell the audience of this conflict between power and medicine.”58 At one point, Tamora taunts Titus: “Titus, is it better without medicines? Don’t you find it even a little bit funny that it is in my control to decide when to drive you crazy? Who do you have left? I have the power, I have my sons. What do you have?”59 I wish now that I had taken more notes on the production when I saw it, but I was too immersed in the experience of watching a familiar play about power and madness (real and feigned) transmuted through the perspectives and voices of psychiatric patients. I felt as if I were witnessing the recreation, not only of a Shakespeare play, but also of a theatrical world—a world that I could access only through the actors. The fact that they made almost no linguistic concessions to their American audience gave me the same sense of inversion that hearing audience members must have felt in the OSF’s production of Cymbeline. The critical distance associated with conventional performances—which includes, presumably, a distance from disability—was no longer available. It seemed to me that the performance was a theatrical embodiment of the disability rights movement’s demand for “nothing about us, without us.” The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Cymbeline, Redefining Juliet , and Follies in Titus are just some of the recent Shakespeare productions to demonstrate not only that disabled actors can be Shakespearean actors, but also that their differences can be sources of creative possibility for everyone involved in Shakespeare performance. In each case, disabled actors used their embodied experience of disability to create their characters, rather than having the meaning of their impairments imposed on them. They also re-interpreted Shakespeare through disability, working in creative partnership with directors and fellow actors. The results were productions that challenged scholars, critics, and audiences to think “differently” about both disability and Shakespeare. And that, for me, is Shakespearean disability theatre.

58 Ibid. 59 Ibid.

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Hutchinson, David. “DaDafest Director Claims Outdated Views Cause Theatres to Shun Shows with Disabled Actors.” The Stage, March 18, 2016. https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/2016/dadafest-director-claims-out dated-views-cause-theatres-to-shun-shows-with-disabled-actors. Iyengar, Sujata. “Introduction: Shakespeare’s Discourse of Disability.” In Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, edited by Sujata Iyengar, 1–20. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Johnson, Kirsty. Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Kuppers, Petra. “The Wheelchair’s Rhetoric: The Performance of Disability.” TDR: The Drama Review 51.4 (Winter 1997): 80–88. Lahr, John. “Boldfaced Bard.” The New Yorker, January 23, 2012. https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/boldfaced-bard. Lardera, Natasha. “The Follies of ‘Follies in Titus.’” iItaly, December 7, 2017. http://www.iitaly.org/magazine/focus/art-culture/article/folly-fol lies-in-titus. Lieblein, Leanore. “Dave Veut Jouer Richard III: Interrogating the Shakespearean Body in Quebec.” Canadian Theatre Review 111 (Summer 2002): 15–21. McDonnell, Maureen. “Signing Shakespeare: Staging American Sign Language in Cymbeline.” Shakespeare Bulletin 35.1 (Spring 2017): 37–63. Menzer, Paul. Anecdotal Shakespeare: A New Performance History. Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Mozgala, Gregg. “Richard on Richard: A Conversation with Michael Patrick Thornton.” Web. http://www.theapothetae.org/news/richard-on-richard-aconversation-with-michael-patrick-thornton. ———. “Spirits of Another Sort (2017) Post Mortem: How Shall We Find the Concord of This Discord?” http://www.theapothetae.org/news/spiritsof-another-sort-2017-post-mortem-how-shall-we-find-the-concord-of-this-dis cord. Pianigiani, Gina. “Using Theatre as a Salve to Soothe Minds.” New York Times, June 2, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/theater/06patholo gical.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion= Footer. Redefining Juliet. Directed by Glen Milner. Produced by Many Rivers Films. BBC Documentary. 2016. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9kT5Yqniklk&t=649s. ———. Directed by Rae McKen. Creative Director Storme Toolis. Rehearsal Scene. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/140771942. Sandahl, Carrie. “From the Streets to the Stage: Disability and the Performing Arts.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 120.2 (March 2005): 620–624.

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Index

A ableism, 19, 219, 299, 307 actors Deaf, 254, 255, 261, 262, 264, 266, 267, 308, 309, 311 and disability performance, 20 disabled, 4, 5, 20–23, 298, 300, 302–306, 308, 311–313, 315 early modern, 261, 300, 304 and Richard III, 21, 308 training of, 23, 299, 300 Affinati, Giacomo, 109 American Sign Language (ASL), 22, 262–268, 309–311 translation, 22, 263, 264, 266, 267, 309 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 124 Amman, Jean, 101 amputation, 13, 52, 54, 57, 59, 60, 69 anamorphosis, 154 Anglin, Emily, 43 animal studies, 162

antitheatricalists, 38–40 Apothetae, The, 21, 298 apprentices, 19, 42, 43, 237 Aristotle, 173 Armin, Robert, 14, 143–147 Foole Vpon Foole or Six Sortes of Sottes , 144 History of the Two Maids of More-Clack, The, 146 audience, 4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 14, 18–23, 37, 43, 65, 85, 86, 88, 92, 93, 108, 123, 133, 134, 142, 143, 148, 152–156, 164–166, 178, 193, 194, 197, 204, 210, 213–215, 218, 221, 222, 224, 225, 244–248, 254, 255, 262, 264–267, 274, 276, 277, 281, 282, 285, 299, 301–303, 305–311, 314, 315 aural bias, 262

B ballad, 14, 118, 120–124, 135, 235

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. C. Dunn (ed.), Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2

319

320

INDEX

“The Contented Cuckold”, 14, 118, 120, 126–128, 133–135, 138 Barokka, Khairani, 35 Bauman, H-Dirksen L. and Murray, Joseph J., 254, 255 BBC, 21, 272, 274, 276, 279, 287, 288, 312, 313 Bearden, Elizabeth, 6, 97 Beaumont, Francis The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 9, 19, 236–239, 241, 243, 244, 247, 248 Beaumont, Francis and Fletcher, John Love’s Pilgrimage, 19, 210, 211, 214–217, 227 Beier, A.L., 36 Belling, Catherine, 125, 126, 133, 134 Belluso, John, 8, 282 Benedicks, Crystal, 126, 127 Bergson, Henri, 213, 214 Bernhardt, Sarah, 301, 304 Bersan, Jessica, 308 Biklen, Douglas, 87, 92, 93 Blue Apple Theatre, 23, 278 Blue Teapot, 278, 291 body of actor, 10, 21, 22, 45, 47, 238, 299, 301–303 classical, 79, 81, 83, 84 emotional (in actor training), 302 neutral (in actor training), 301, 302 phenomenal (in acting), 303, 312 semiotic (in acting), 303 standard and nonstandard, 40, 126, 210, 217, 223, 301, 312 Bogdan, Robert, 87, 92, 93 Bonet, Juan Pablo, 256 Bradwell, Stephen, 172, 175 Brathwait, Richard The English Gentlewoman, 97

Brayman Hackel, Heidi, 97 Bristol, Michael D., 213, 214, 279 Brown, Pamela Allen, 211 Browne, Thomas, 212 Brueggemann, Brenda Jo, 222, 227 Brune, Jeffrey A., 46 Bulwer, John Chironomia: or the Art of Manual Rhetoricke, 258 Chrirologia: or, the Naturall Language of the Hand, 100, 257–259 Philocophus: or, the Deaf and Dumbe Mans Friend, 256 Burnett, Mark Thornton, 9 Burre, Walter, 244–246, 248 Burton, Robert, 174, 212

C Callaghan, Dympna, 97 Caranza, Geronimo, 215, 224 Verdadera Destreza de las Armas, La, 215 Catholicism, 215, 224, 227 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de Don Quijote, 215 “dos doncellas, Las” (Cervantes), 210, 216 Changeling, The (Middleton and Rowley), 215 Channel, Elinor, 13, 98, 104–108, 110, 112, 113 Chapman, Alison A., 43 Charney, Maurice, 165 Cleaver, Robert, 97, 98 Clowes, William, 55, 56, 235, 236, 238, 239, 241–245 clowns, 14, 143, 147, 151–153 Cockayne, Emily, 97, 99 Cockett, Peter, 144 Cogan, Thomas, 237

INDEX

Coker, Lauren, 6, 112 Conroy, Colette, 301 Cox, Samuel, 38 crip, 120, 128, 197, 199, 286 drag, 275 “cripping up”, 20, 275, 276, 299 Cromwell, Oliver, 105, 108 crutch, 13, 16, 45, 85, 86, 92, 93, 197–199, 305, 306 D Dalton, Michael, 33 D’Ambrosi, Dario, 313–315 Follies in Titus , 23, 313–315 Davis, Lennard, 5, 6, 15, 64, 78, 100, 188, 254 Deaf Gain, 22, 254–256, 262–264, 266, 267 Deafinitely Theatre, 275, 298 deafness, 20, 22, 32, 40, 97, 98, 100, 254–256, 261, 266, 267, 308, 309, 311, 312 prelingual, 98, 100, 101 Deaf studies, 254 Deaf theatre, 255 De Castro, María Teresa Oliveros, 226 Dekesel, Kristiann, 256, 257 Dekker, Thomas, 43, 200 The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 12, 34, 41–44, 46, 47, 189, 198, 200, 206 Descartes, René, 174, 175 Deutsch, Helen, 97 DeWall, Nichole, 39 difference, bodily, 45, 80, 82, 212 Dillon, Janette, 239 disability and actor training, 23, 299 advocacy, 275 capacity model of, 281 and community response, 48, 125, 144, 243

321

counterfeit, stage tradition of, 36, 40 cultural model of, 15, 234 deficit model of, 274, 292 drag, 111–113, 197 and femininity, 13, 223, 224, 312 fraudulent, 35–37 heroic model, 273, 307 intellectual, 4, 142, 144, 313 and masculinity, 223 masquerade, 11–13, 33, 37, 38, 44, 45, 48, 112 medical model of, 14, 15, 64, 234 as metaphor, 7, 15–18, 23, 199, 234, 302, 303, 308, 309 passing, 46, 48 performance, 4, 7, 8, 11–13, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 33, 36, 38, 39, 44, 47, 48, 113, 205, 298, 299, 304, 306, 315 public attitudes towards, 20, 62 and queerness, 127, 128, 135, 138 religious model of, 103 representation of, 12, 23, 44, 66, 138, 142, 187, 227, 274–276, 306, 308 social model of, 15, 78, 143 stereotypes of, 16, 21, 91, 298, 306, 311, 313 disability studies, 7, 15, 54, 78, 126, 127, 133, 219, 234, 254, 272, 273, 275, 307 early modern, 5, 6, 10, 18, 19, 22, 24, 54, 124, 125, 127, 179, 187, 234 disability theatre, 298, 299, 313 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 154, 155 documentary, 271–274, 278–281, 283–285, 287–291, 312, 313 dogs, 18, 162, 163, 168, 169, 171–173, 175, 176 Dolmage, Jay Timothy, 15–17

322

INDEX

Donmar Warehouse, 21, 22 Doubler, Catherine E., 223, 224 Douglas, Mary, 222 Down Syndrome, 23, 271, 285, 313 dumbness, 98, 100, 111, 112 E Ease for Overseers of the Poore, An, 32 Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, 35 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 176 embodiment complex, 18, 186, 188 disabled, 13, 17, 188 drama and, 186 Evans, Arise, 105–108, 113 Eyler, Joshua, 7, 15, 234, 245 F Fair Maid of the Exchange, The, 6, 18, 67, 188, 193, 196, 206 Farquhar, Dion, 125 femininity, 13, 98, 108, 223, 224, 312 fencing, 78, 81, 85, 92 Field, Nathan, 39 Fine, Gary, 213 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 303, 307 Fisher, James, 102–105, 108, 113 The Wise Virgin, 101, 102 Fletcher, John, 19, 67, 78, 79, 88, 91, 93, 210, 211, 216, 227 Fletcher, John and Massinger, Philip The Little French Lawyer, 13, 67, 78, 79, 87, 93 Foa, Anna, 221 fool artificial, 4, 144 natural, 4, 143, 144 professional, 144 Fowler, Elizabeth, 143 Franssen, Paul J.C.M., 42

Fraser, Mat, 20, 21, 306

G gamete donation, 122, 127, 133, 134 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 4, 8, 10, 126, 213, 222, 227 Gerber, David A., 10, 54, 69, 219, 223 gestures, 7, 11, 22, 23, 37, 78, 93, 96, 100, 110, 113, 224, 254–264, 266, 310, 314 Gift Theater (Chicago), 306 Gilman, Sander, 222 Goodey, C.F., 148–150, 193 Gosson, Stephen, 38 Gouge, William, 110, 113 Of Domesticall Duties , 96, 109, 111 Grévin, Jacques, 162, 174 Growing Up Down’s (BBC documentary), 23, 273, 277, 278, 280, 281, 284, 285, 288, 289, 291, 292

H Harman, Thomas, 36 A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors , 36, 42 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 41, 200, 221, 235–237, 241, 245 Hatfield, Martha, 13, 98, 101–105, 108, 110, 112, 113 Heetderks, Angela, 4, 6, 179 Henke, Robert, 12 Heywood, Thomas, 39 Hile, Rachel E., 203, 204 Hill, John, 304 Hindle, Steve, 32, 35–37 Hobbes, Thomas, 211 Hobbs, Allyson, 46

INDEX

323

Hobgood, Allison P., 5–7, 15, 64, 89, 97, 167, 168, 179, 188, 212, 224, 234, 236, 245, 306 Holder, William, 101, 256 Holt, Monique, 262, 264, 266, 308 Hughes, Bill, 35 Hull, Suzanne, 97 hydrophobia, 172

Karim-Cooper, Farah, 261 Keysar, Robert, 244 kinship, 118, 119, 123, 127, 128, 132, 134 Kirwan, Peter, 21, 22, 204, 205 Koland, Esther, 101 Korhonen, Anu, 110, 212, 213, 223 Kuppers, Petra, 11, 309

I idiot, 151, 286 idleness, 38, 40, 42, 43, 47 impairment, 7, 12–15, 21, 32, 33, 35, 37, 40–42, 44–47, 78, 81, 83, 88, 92, 93, 97, 119, 124, 125, 127, 142, 167, 168, 191, 197, 198, 201, 202, 205, 218, 222, 224, 234, 235, 243, 272–278, 280–282, 284–289, 291, 292, 299, 315 speech, 40 infertility, 7, 14, 118–121, 124–129, 131–136, 222, 275 ingenium, 148 intelligence, 12, 14, 143, 147–151, 261, 284, 300 interiority, 78, 85, 88 Iyengar, Sujata, 5, 6, 15, 20, 33, 64, 83, 188, 222, 223

L labor, 12, 32–36, 38–41, 43, 44, 46–48, 130, 131 lame(ness), 9, 15, 18, 19, 32, 41, 42, 45, 47, 68, 80, 82, 186, 188–198, 200, 202, 205, 206, 210–212, 218, 222, 227, 228, 260, 304 Lardera, Natasha, 314 Larum for London, A, 10, 18, 67, 188, 193, 205 laughter, 19, 92, 211–214, 224, 225, 227, 228 Lavater, Ludwig, 175 Leavis, F.R., 204 Leggatt, Alexander, 237, 242, 244, 246 Leonard, Kendra Preston, 165 Leoniceno, Niccolò, 148 Lewis, Victoria, 17 Lew, Mike, 21 Teenage Dick, 21, 22 L’hermite, Jehan, 226 Lieblein, Leanore, 306 Lilly, William, 100 A Prophecy of the White King: and Dreadfull Dead-man Explaned, 100 limping, 18, 167, 189, 190, 203, 275 Linton, Regan, 21, 300, 301, 307–309 Love, Genevieve, 6, 7, 10, 17, 18, 44, 186, 194, 195

J Jessop, William, 274, 278 jest books, 144 Johnson, Kirsty, 20, 23, 298, 313 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 97 Jonson, Ben, 13, 99, 110–113, 153 Epicoene, 13, 99, 109–113 K Kahn, Michael, 267, 308

324

INDEX

Low, Jennifer, 81, 88 Luckyj, Christina, 98, 105 M Machiavelli, Niccolò, 13, 118, 129, 130 madness, 18, 40, 162, 164–172, 174–176, 178–180, 275, 315 Marlowe, Christopher, 153, 154 The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus , 154, 155 Martha’s Vineyard, Deaf community, 99 masculinity, 78, 88, 89, 91, 212, 223, 224 Massinger, Philip, 78, 79, 91, 93, 122 McDonnell, Maureen, 311 McKellen, Ian, 305, 306 McLuhan, Marshall, 154 The Gutenberg Galaxy, 154 Menzer, Paul, 20, 304, 305 Mercuriale, Girolamo, 223 Metzler, Irina, 220 Middleton, Thomas, 13, 118, 129, 133, 134 A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 13, 14, 118–120, 128, 129, 137 Middleton, Thomas and Rowley, William The Changeling , 215 Milburn, Colin, 239, 244 Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder, 7, 15–17, 19, 58, 62, 80, 187, 199, 202, 217, 275, 280, 284 Monks, Daniel, 22 Montaigne, Michel de, 176 motion, 152, 223, 257, 260 Mounsey, Chris, 19, 187–189 Mozgala, Gregg, 21, 300, 301, 305, 306 Mulvany, Kate, 20, 306

Murphy, Jessica, 98 muteness, 7, 13, 97–99, 107–113. See also mutism mutism, 98, 99, 101, 106–108, 112 selective, 13, 98, 104–107, 110. See also muteness N narrative prosthesis, 16, 67, 80, 199, 217, 288 Neely, Carol Thomas, 165, 166, 215, 222 neurodiversity, 8, 14, 142, 143, 147, 153, 155, 156 nonmonogamy, 122, 123, 127 Northbrooke, John, 38 Novak, Peter, 22, 258, 263–266, 268, 269 Nussbaum, Felicity, 97 O Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 20, 21, 23, 262, 265, 267, 298, 300, 308–311, 315 P Paré, Ambroise, 57, 58, 63–65, 68, 70, 172, 175 patching (in plays), 19, 234, 236, 244, 246–248 Paul, Saint, 33, 46 Pepys, Samuel, 99 performance by disabled actors, 4, 20, 23, 298, 304, 308, 315 of disability, 4, 7, 8, 12, 13, 20, 33, 36 work of, in early modern England, 12, 48 personhood, 4, 142, 143, 147

INDEX

Philip II, King of Spain, 19, 217, 225, 226 Plato, 150 Theaetetus , 149 poor laws, 32, 34, 36 postdocumentary, 274, 287, 292 Preiss, Richard, 144 Privateer, Paul Michael, 148, 149 prosthesis, 10, 16, 54, 55, 63, 80, 84, 91 and disabled veterans, 55, 66 and early modern surgery, 13, 55–57 R rabies, 8, 18, 162, 164, 166, 171–179 Rankins, William, 40 Mirror of Monsters, A, 40 rapier, 79, 82, 85, 86, 88, 93 Rauch, Bill, 309 Reformation, 33–35, 235 rehabilitation stories, 288 rhetoric, 16, 65, 111, 125, 173, 180, 254–257, 260, 261, 268 manual, 22, 254–256, 263 Richard III (character), 7, 21, 64, 188, 191, 304, 306, 308 Richer, Dave, 20, 305, 306 rogue literature, 35 Rowe, Katherine, 214 Row-Heyveld, Lindsey, 6, 7, 11, 12, 33, 36, 179 Rutter, Tom, 38, 39 S Sagal, Anna, 189 Sainct-Didier, Henry de, 85 saint’s lives narratives, 102 Sandahl, Carrie, 4, 7, 8, 16, 17, 273, 275, 277, 278, 281–283, 289, 302, 308

325

and Philip Auslander, 4, 7, 302 Saviolo, Vincentio, 81, 89 Seago, Howie, 20, 21, 23, 262, 264, 265, 267, 309–311 self-advocacy, 274, 275, 277, 282, 288, 289, 292 sexuality, 12, 279, 284, 312 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 2, 3 Shakespeare’s Globe, 21, 204, 205, 262, 267, 298 Shakespeare, William adaptations of, 23, 277–279, 282, 298, 299 in American Sign Language, 20, 22, 262–268, 309 As You Like It , 18, 155, 190, 192 Cymbeline, 311, 315 Henry IV, Part 2, 42 King John, 189 King Lear, 166, 266, 267, 308 Merchant of Venice, The, 155 Much Ado About Nothing , 300 Richard III , 21, 64, 304, 308 Romeo and Juliet , 86, 311 Sonnets , 189, 202 The Taming of the Shrew, 18, 155, 189, 203, 204 The Tempest , 8, 9, 149 Timon of Athens , 163, 191 Titus Andronicus , 313, 315 Twelfth Night , 2, 22, 246, 263, 264, 266 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 14, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 163 Winter’s Tale, The, 192, 276 Sher, Antony, 304, 306 shoemakers, 41, 43–46, 198, 201 Shurgot, Michael, 20, 264, 265, 267, 268, 309, 310 Sibscota, George, 101 “sick-chair”, 225 Sidney, Philip, 153, 154

326

INDEX

Defense of Poesy, The, 153 Siebers, Tobin, 5, 11, 18, 33, 37, 45, 46, 86, 112, 186–188, 190, 236, 299 Sign Gain, 22, 254–256, 260, 262–264, 266 sign language, 22, 99, 254–258, 260–262, 264–268, 309, 311 American, 20, 22, 262–268, 309–311 translation, 255 Silberman, Steve, 143 silence and feminine virtue, 98 performance of, 13, 47, 99, 112, 113 Singer, Judy, 142, 143 Skinner, Quentin, 212 Skuse, Alanna, 47 Smith, Bruce R., 223 Sobchak, Vivian, 15, 16, 69 social personhood, 143 Spacey, Kevin, 305, 306 Spackman, Thomas, 171, 173 Declaration of such grievous accidents, A, 172 Spain, 100, 210, 215, 216, 219, 222, 224, 226, 227 and Hispanophobia, 210 speech impairment, 40 speed, 14, 147–153, 189, 190, 192, 193, 195, 301 Stern, Tiffany, 234 Stubbes, Philip, 38, 39 Swetnam, Joseph, 88, 91 sword, 13, 78–82, 84–93 symmetry, bodily, 79, 81, 83, 84, 90 syphilis, 8, 66, 211, 218, 220–222, 227, 234–236, 238–245, 247, 248 patches, 19, 234, 248 treatments for, 19, 241, 243, 248

T Teatr 21, 278, 283 Teatro Patologico, 313 television, 274, 277, 280, 287, 288, 292 Thebus, Jessica, 306, 307 Thornton, Michael Patrick, 20, 305–308 Tomlinson, Richard, 298 Toolis, Storme, 312, 313 Redefining Juliet , 23, 311–313, 315 Topsell, Edward, 172, 175, 176 Trapnel, Anna, 104, 106, 108 Tribble, Evelyn, 260, 261, 299, 300 Turner, David M., 34, 212, 214, 220

V Van Elk, Martine, 37 variability, 14, 19, 187–189, 193, 202, 205 veterans, 10, 13, 54–56, 58, 66, 67, 69, 211, 219, 223, 228

W Wall, Wendy, 97 We Three Loggerheads , 2, 4 Wheatley, Edward, 35, 103 wheelchair, 11, 19, 21, 225, 226, 275, 276, 300, 307–309, 312, 313 Williams, Gordon, 122 Williams, Katherine Schaap, 6, 7, 64, 197 Wilson, Daniel J., 46 Wilson, Jeffrey R., 5, 6, 64, 65, 202, 204 wit, 4, 14, 33, 85, 147, 148, 150–152, 192, 193, 299

INDEX

Wood, David Houston, 5–7, 15, 64, 89, 97, 112, 167, 168, 179, 188, 212, 234, 236, 245, 275 Woodbridge, Linda, 35, 120 work, 4–7, 9, 12, 14, 21–23, 32–41, 43–48, 54, 57, 62, 69, 90, 97, 99–101, 109, 113, 119, 121, 125, 127, 132–134, 136,

327

142–145, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154, 162, 164, 174, 190, 192, 216, 220, 235, 239, 245, 254–258, 262, 263, 267, 268, 274, 278, 292, 298, 312, 313 World Health Organization (WHO), 124, 125, 273