Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability

Genevieve Love, Tanya Pollard, Lisa Hopkins, Tanya Pollard, Lisa Hopkins

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781350160361
• eBook ISBN: 9781350017214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

What work did physically disabled characters do for the early modern theatre? Through a consideration of a range of plays, including Doctor Faustus and Richard III, Genevieve Love argues that the figure of the physically disabled prosthetic body in early modern English theatre mediates a set of related 'likeness problems' that structure the theatrical, textual, and critical lives of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

The figure of disability stands for the relationship between actor and character: prosthetic disabled characters with names such as Cripple and Stump capture the simultaneous presence of thefictional and the material, embodied world of the theatre. When the figure of the disabled body exits the stage, it also mediates a second problem of likeness, between plays in their performed and textual forms. While supposedly imperfect textual versions of plays have been characterized as 'lame', the dynamic movement of prosthetic disabled characters in the theatre expands the figural role which disability performs in the relationship between plays on the stage and on the page.

Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability reveals how attention to physical disability enriches our understanding of early modern ideas about how theatre works, while illuminating in turn how theatre offers a reframing of disability as metaphor.

1

The work of standing and of standing-for

Disability, movement, theatrical personation in The Fair Maid of the Exchange

‘The Cripple at work’

What is the ‘work’ of Cripple in the anonymous city comedy The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607)? Cripple, who uses crutches due to an unexplained affliction to his legs, is occupied as a pattern-drawer in a shop in London’s Royal Exchange. In his shop, the central location around which the play’s plots swirl, Cripple both completes his pattern-drawing work – outlining designs for embroidery on cloth – and orchestrates the outcomes of the play’s two romantic plots. Women and men seek him out in his shop, and he functions here and in London space more broadly as the play’s central character, empowered to bring about two marriages: that of Phyllis Flower, the eponymous fair maid, to the gentleman Frank Golding, and that of Moll Berry (like Phyllis, a seamstress in the Exchange), to the wastrel gallant Bernard. For all his choreography of these romantic, comic pursuits, however, Cripple stands apart from them. As this chapter will finally argue, to ‘stand’ is, among many intriguing locomotive verbs in the play, one of the most significant things Cripple does. Indeed, the imperative ‘Stand’ is one of the first words addressed to Cripple in the play; it is delivered by a highwayman whose main objective is, ironically, to make Cripple ‘fall’ by ‘snatch[ing]’ his prosthetics.¹ Cripple’s complex and multiple mode of ‘standing’ urges us to attend to the dynamic system that governs the movement of theatrical bodies onto, across and off the stage. To illustrate his embodiment of this kind of system, which I discuss in the latter part of the Introduction in relation to prosthesis, I commit in this chapter to a philological strategy, drilling into the play’s lexicon of prosthetic disabled embodiment, particularly its kinetic verbs. As Mel Y. Chen has written, ‘verbs are defined as processes, that is, they are structured on some time relation (since things are dynamic: change is inherent to a verb)’.² The play’s exploitation of the slippery complexity of verbs for locomotion drives the lively and fungible story of theatrical machinery that the play tells through the work and activity of Cripple. Though the play deploys a number of vivid verbs for Cripple’s movement, ultimately the most intricate labour Cripple is asked to perform is to ‘stand’. When Cripple’s body ‘stands’, he gathers vertical and horizontal forces, and thereby figural forces too. Standing is rising and not-falling; standing is stopping and not-going; standing is, finally, taking-the-place, thereby testing the endurance of likeness and unsettling our notion of the operations of analogy.

In part due to the range of ‘work’ he performs, critics have described Cripple as ‘very original’, ‘unique’, ‘singular … anomalous’, ‘curious’, exercising an ‘unusual amount’ of narrative agency.³ Through the play’s ‘unusual staging of a successfully employed disabled man’,⁴ Cripple’s disability is surprisingly associated with productive participation in the labour market. That Cripple works, then, makes him unusual, curious. Critical attention to this ‘enigmatic … elusive’⁵ figure has put him to work in other ways as well. Cripple carries the mystery of the play’s authorship, especially for earlier commentators, as they debate the play’s attribution to Thomas Heywood. As A. M. Clarke puts it, ‘whether or not the genius of the author limps on and off with the Cripple, as some have supposed, is a matter of taste’; F. Mowbray Velte ‘would like to think, indeed, that it was actually the tender-hearted Heywood who strove, in the person of the cripple, to show how a noble spirit may be lodged in a crooked body, for this is without question the sort of subject that appealed to him’.⁶ Modern discussions of the play also endow Cripple with the work of the author: he ‘fulfills the author’s pedagogic function’, thereby wielding his ‘unusual … influence in the narrative’.⁷ The kind of work Cripple performs – his body the vehicle for the identity and power of the playwright – makes him peculiar and intriguing, too.

Scholarly approaches to Cripple’s special power employ him in yet another way. Katherine Schaap Williams, as she surveys scholarship on Cripple, observes that he ‘oscillates in critical thought between being the play’s most memorable character and being barely a character at all’.⁸ That is, while for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century readers, Cripple is an ‘excellent fellow, and the hero of the Comedy’, contemporary scholarship has tended to remove him from the diegesis and even from his body. ‘Both part and not-part of the community’, he is ‘the genius of the Exchange, the spirit of the place’; as ‘prime mover of the plot’, he is ‘more of a force, or a function, than an individual’.⁹ Across critical approaches, then, Cripple does the work of oscillation, of movement between unique embodiment and curious disembodiment – the latter of which, while powerfully ‘spiritual’, is also partial. Evoking competing conceptions of the disabled body, this critical labour of oscillation is distinctly linked to Cripple’s disability. James I. Porter writes:

a disabled body seems somehow too much a body, too real, too corporeal: it is a body that, so to speak, stands in its own way. From another angle … a disabled body appears to lack something essential, something that would make it identifiable and something to identify with; it seems too little a body: a body that is deficiently itself, not quite a body in the full sense of the word, not real enough.¹⁰

Cripple is, then, peculiar in his distinctive embodiment: as a disabled figure on the early modern stage neither deformed from birth (like Richard III) nor a veteran (like Larum for London’s Stump), he is more of a character than others in the play, ‘the only one who really comes alive’.¹¹ Yet at the same time he is markedly less real, less identifiable. Like the question mark of the author, he is not fully of the world of the play or of the world outside it. I suggest that this work of oscillation, this movement-between, that criticism has asked of Cripple is connected both to Cripple’s skilful locomotion in the play and to his related figuration of theatrical movement-between, in which actor’s body and character’s being compete and collaborate in an on-going exchange.

Indeed, Fair Maid ties Cripple, in his simultaneous surplus and deficiency, to theatrical mimesis, specifically to the relationship between actor and role, outlined at length in the Introduction. The play proposes that the doubleness of theatrical personation traffics in both power and compromise: commanding in its surplus; disabled in its excess. Like the disabled body in Porter’s formulation above, the actor’s body may be too much itself, standing in the way of the personation it would adopt. Equally, it may not be real enough, not essentially identifiable with that which it would become. As the disabled prosthetic body may be both less (in its partiality) and more (in its prosthesis) than an idealized, whole and coherent human body, so the actor’s body may put itself under erasure to make way for character, while simultaneously augmenting and exceeding character. In the parallax of the theatrical body, as in the disabled body, the partial and the multiple coexist.¹² Cripple figures this coexistence. Of the disabled characters examined in this book, Cripple establishes the connection of theatricality and disability most directly, since his prosthetic embodiment and movement becomes literally a site of imitation when Frank Golding impersonates him as part of a key plot development.

The play proposes the analogical relationship of theatricality and disability in three linked modes. First, it develops a complex relationship between Cripple and his prosthetics, his crutches. Cripple’s crutches are tropologically flexible, operating as both synecdoche and metonymy, and thereby enabling him to metaphorize theatrical personation. This tropological flexibility reverberates with Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological exploration of ‘materiality and metaphor’ in her contemporary prosthetic embodiment. Sobchack’s insistence on the contingency and variability of ‘whether and to what degree I live (and describe) my prosthetic metaphorically, metonymically, or synecdochically’ helps us attend to the distinction between incorporation and separation – of Cripple and prosthetic, actor and role – in Fair Maid.¹³ Second, Cripple’s intricate relationship with his crutches is put in motion as he displays locomotive skill, a skill linked to his other accomplished labours and to the work of theatrical mimesis. The suggestion that disabled embodiment is a skill builds on the exploration of the mutual incorporation of body and prosthetic, actor and role. Finally, Fair Maid acknowledges and deepens the linkage of disability and skilful theatrical imitation by more broadly meditating on the riddle of incorporation of actor and role. The successful impersonation of Cripple becomes crucial to the plot’s resolution, making Fair Maid the play, of those studied in this book, that lays most bare the analogy of disability and theatricality. Even as it offers up this metaphorical relationship between prosthetic disabled embodiment and theatrical personation, however, the play complicates the possibility of that metaphor, ultimately using Cripple’s unique physical deportment to trouble figuration itself.

‘By this crutch’

The complex and bivalent relationship between Cripple and his crutches is laid out in the play’s first scene. It opens at night with a pair of highwaymen, Scarlet and Bobbington, lurking near a bridge in London’s northern suburbs and planning to rob the next passers-by. The unlucky pair who enter, Phyllis and her co-worker Ursula, are expecting to meet ‘one of [my Lady’s] gentlemen’ at the bridge, to make a delivery of ruffs and stomachers. Overhearing their plans, the thieves decide to ‘seeme … my Lady’s Gentlemen’, and approach the women, explaining, ‘You see my Ladyes care, she promisde one / But hath sent two’ (B2). The two immediately reveal their ruse, attempting to drag the women from their ‘way’. Into this scene of self-conscious pairing and doubling – a pair of women, and a pair of men in place of one – enters Cripple, who characterizes himself as a third pair. Cripple doesn’t hear Phyllis and Ursula’s cries of distress at first, and his opening words apostrophize his crutches:

Now you supporters of decrepite youth,

That mount this substance twixt fair heaven and earth,

Be strong to beare that huge deformitie,

And be my hands as nimble to direct them,

As your desires to waft me hence to London.

(B2)

This strange introductory passage immediately foregrounds Cripple’s relationship with his crutches, employing a lexicon of fused opposition: oxymoron (‘decrepite youth’) and antithesis (‘heaven and earth’). Cripple addresses his paired prosthetics as separate and autonomous entities: ‘you supporters’ as opposed to ‘my hands’. Yet the tender intimacy of his address to his crutches and the distance Cripple places between himself and his body (‘this substance’ and especially ‘that huge deformitie’) combine to suggest the inclusion of the crutches in Cripple’s person. This suggestion is underscored by Cripple’s noti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Texts
• Introduction: Disability and/as theatricality
• 1 The work of standing and of standing-for: Disability, movement, theatrical personation in The Fair Maid of the Exchange
• 2 The sound of prosthetic movement: Transnational and temporal analogy in A Larum for London
• 3 ‘Faustus has his legge again’: Truncation and prosthesis, theatricality and bibliography in Doctor Faustus
• 4 Richard’s ‘giddy footing’: Degree of difference and cyclical movement in Shakespeare’s Richard III
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright