Today, few people remember John Donne’s 1596 epigram, “A lame beggar.” The short verse, however, enjoyed great popularity in early modern England, where readers recorded it in over 50 seventeenth-century manuscript miscellanies.1 The epigram, which serves as the epigraph to this project, succinctly illustrates what I argue is the dominant narrative about disability in early modern England: that people with disabilities are, simultaneously, pitiful and criminally deceptive. The “twist” characteristic of English epigrams of this period—and the paradox of early modern disability—is encapsulated in the pun that finishes the couplet. If the beggar tells the truth about his disability, then he lies on the ground while pleading pathetically that he cannot move; the word play, however, simultaneously suggests that lame beggars are perpetually dishonest. Even when they tell the truth, they still lie.
The fraudulent disability that Donne references in his epigram found life on the early modern stage. Although relatively few genuinely disabled characters appear in early modern drama, characters that fake disability abound. In play after play throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, able-bodied characters counterfeit disability. Characters pretend blindness, deafness, lameness, madness , foolishness, speech impediments, profound injury, and deformity; counterfeit disability appears in virtually every dramatic genre and is employed by every major playwright of the period and many of the minor ones as well. This extremely popular trope capitalized on broader cultural and literary trends that amplified suspicion about the authenticity of the non-standard body (like Donne’s “A lame beggar,” among many others), but the disguise of disability became most prevalent—and potent—on stage. I have identified 40 plays from the 1580s to the 1640s that feature able-bodied characters dissembling disability.2
These plays constitute a distinct early modern stage tradition, one as yet unrecognized by scholars, but one that played a vital role in both shaping literary fantasies about the non-standard body and creating social realities for people with disabilities. Specifically, the counterfeit-disability tradition vividly and consistently enacted what Donne’s epigram just winks at: that disability is always inherently fraudulent. In charting the formal conventions, shared contexts, and overlapping themes of these repeated performances, I also note how the tradition’s attention to audience interrogates the player/playgoer/playmaker relationship and guides spectators to respond to disability with suspicion rather than pity or alms . In recovering this neglected element of early modern theater history, my study details why this trope proved so compelling for the stage and how the tradition of counterfeit disability participated in the construction of disability as a category of identity.
Counterfeit disability had a long history in English literature before it reached the early modern commercial theater. Able-bodied characters feign disability for various motives in multiple medieval texts, including William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1370–90), the anonymous The Tale of Beryn (mid-15th century), and Arthur Brandeis’s Jacob’s Well (c. 1440).3 In the early Tudor period, the trope featured in the satires Ship of Fools by Alexander Barclay (1509) and the anonymous Cock Lorells Bote (c. 1518–19). Literary counterfeit disability gained momentum, though, with the rise of the popular pamphlet genre known today as “rogue literature.” Detailing the antics of cunning criminals, rogue literature described how disability could be faked, frequently depicting how effective the disguise of disability was for duping gullible citizens out of their money.4 The genre was inaugurated on the continent in 1509 with the printing of Liber Vagatorum (Book of Vagabonds and Beggars). It was a blockbuster: In 1528, Martin Luther himself wrote an introduction for the book on the occasion of its 30th printing. Its English imitators were many and, like Liber Vagatorum, often recounted narratives of fraudulent disability. In fact, it is the rare rogue pamphlet that does not dedicate a significant portion of its text to discussing false disability: examples include Robert Copland’s The Highway to the Spital-House (1536), John Awdeley’s The Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561), and Thomas Harman’s hugely influential A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors (1566–67), as well as a spate of rogue books penned by playwrights like Robert Greene and Thomas Dekker. Not limited to “low” literature, counterfeit disability also inspired elevated discourse, discussed in detail by Erasmus in 1524’s “Beggar Talk” and Juan Luis Vives in 1526’s De Subventione Pauperum (Concerning the Relief of the Poor), both popular in England.5 Before arriving on the stage, feigned disability had already proven to be open to a range of literary treatments and compelling for a range of audiences.
By the rise of the commercial theater, then, counterfeit disability narratives, both on and off the stage, appealed to audiences, in part, because English citizens genuinely felt threatened by beggars feigning disability. The fear of counterfeit disability was pervasive and influential in early modern England, and, as I will discuss in more detail shortly, served as the primary justification for the increasing institutionalization of poor relief throughout the period. Yet, in spite of the stereotype’s proliferation in literature and its prevalence in cultural debates about poverty and charity, there appears to be very little historical evidence of beggars actually faking disability in early modern England. Historians widely cite one highly visible instance of fraudulent disability: Nicholas Jennings, a “counterfeit crank” who faked epilepsy and disfigurement in order to gather undeserved alms, is the star of Thomas Harman’s A Caveat for Common Cursitors and was arrested and publicly whipped in 1567.6 While scholars frequently repeat this anecdote, few other recorded instances of feigned disability in the early modern era have been discovered. In part, this lack of information may be a result of the lack of scholarship on disability history; one of the few studies to have looked into counterfeit disability in England, Martine van Elk’s investigation of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Bridewell court records, turns up many accounts of men and women pretending impairments of various kinds.7 Even so, the sheer quantity of fictional fake disability stands in stark contrast to the relative dearth of factual fake disability in the early modern historical record.8
This disparity invites the question why did counterfeit disability so occupy the early modern imagination? In particular, why was it so enormously popular on the early modern stage? Further, why did counterfeit disability take literary precedence over genuine disability? Narratives of dissembled disability that flourished off-stage in early modern literature and culture typically recount beggar-thieves putting on impairment in order to con citizens out of money. Usually overtly didactic in their intentions, these narratives often explicitly instruct readers to embrace suspicion of the non-standard body and forego almsgiving. The theatrical tradition is much more diverse. On stage, characters fake disability for myriad reasons: They put on the disability disguise for money, and also for love, position, politics, revenge, reputation, critique, even fun. Plays also employ the trope for varied thematic ends: to interrogate issues of epistemological proof, to explore the relationship between the body and identity, and to ask political and theological questions about charity and virtue. Further, playwrights adopted this handy theatrical instrument for literary ends: to construct character, to solve narrative problems, to draw attention to the manufactured theatricality of their dramas, and to critique the practices of the commercial theater. Finally, while the stage tradition of counterfeit disability resists simple didacticism, it nevertheless paints a very consistent portrait of responses to disability. In on-stage encounters with disability, spectators are either shrewd interpreters who treat the non-standard body with suspicion or naïve dupes whose charity makes them easy marks. The steady representation of this binary on stage has off-stage implications, and so, while the theatrical tradition of counterfeit disability may differ from non-theatrical malingering narratives in some respects, it similarly attempts to guide its audiences toward doubting disability and ending uncritical charity.
Socioeconomic and Religious Contexts of Counterfeit Disability
The theatrical tradition of counterfeit disability gained dramatic power and garnered audience engagement, in part, through its grappling with questions of charity. Then, as now, disability played a central, although often unacknowledged, role in any debate about social welfare, vagrancy, and charity. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has asserted, “The history of begging is virtually synonymous with the history of disability.”9 David M. Turner elaborates, “The history of disability is … a history of distrust, in which the authenticity of symptoms has been consistently questioned.”10 Begging and distrust have often intersected and increased one another; in early modern England, they converged powerfully. Even accounting for the per...