by Maddie Buttitta
Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the Exchange‘s disabled character – aptly named “Cripple” – carries with him agency in the play’s narrative; this agency corresponds to the play’s (as well as early modern theatre’s) consistent use of theatricality. Fair Maid not only is the fifth and final play in the American Shakespeare Center’s 2017 Actors’ Renaissance Season, but it is the only play of their season (and possibly the company’s history) that has not been produced in approximately four centuries. Dr. Genevieve Love of Colorado College has produced extensive scholarship on the labors of physically disabled characters in early modern theatre; Fair Maid‘s Cripple is one of interest. Love shared her edition of Fair Maid, which will be published in 2019 in the Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, with the ASC’s cast and artistic team prior to rehearsals. Via email, I spoke with Dr. Genevieve Love about her research on disabled characters in early modern theatre.
Q: How did you arrive to researching and studying early modern depictions of disability?
GL: I have long been interested in what we might think of as theatrical power, or “theatricality”—the distinctive qualities of theatre as a mimetic medium. “Theatricality” might be given shape, in the context of early modern plays, by the ways theatrical performances are understood as distinct from printed texts. One of the tropes deployed by early modern playwrights and printers to understand this relationship is on that we might now call “disability”—terms like “lame,” “maimed,” “deformed,” are used to characterize performances as opposed to dramatic texts, and vice versa (as well as to differentiate between different versions of printed texts). This “disability” trope is also used by playwrights in theatrical prologues (as one version of a humility topos) to characterize the play we are about to see— the prologues to Fair Maid and Larum for London both do this. Set up by such prologues, physically disabled characters in early modern plays seemed to me to operate in a liminal way, telling us something about the way the play understands theatrical operations (such as the puzzle of the relationship between actor and character). So, overall, I began to see disability representations as a critical way to approach early modern theatricality—and there is a related, but perhaps separate, conversation to be had about theatricality and performance as a critical way to approach disability representations and experiences.
Q: What about the depiction of disability, through the character of the “Cripple”, in The Fair Maid of the Exchange, is different than those in other plays of the time (A Larum for London, for example)? What is similar about its depiction in relation to other early modern plays?
GL: Cripple is distinctive (or relatively so) in a few ways: he is gainfully employed and there is no question about his ability to be a productive member of the labor force; the origin/nature of his disability is never made clear (he’s not a veteran, for example, and all we know is that he experienced a “visitation of his legs”); and, as many critics have emphasized over the years, he has an unusual amount of dramaturgical influence in the play’s action. (His vocation is pattern-drawing for the embroidery of linens, and he seems to control the play’s “pattern” as well.) The representation of Cripple’s disability is similar to that of characters like Stump in Larum in that both plays are particularly interested in describing the nature of these characters’ prosthetic movement, using verbs like “stand,” “stay,” “halt,” “direct,” “bear,” “waft,” “stumble,” scramble.” For me, this complex set of verbs displays the multiple kinds of work these characters as disability representations are asked to do: to “stand” fixed in difference, and to “stand for” the theatrical operation of mimesis, which demands a “standing-for” or (the meaning of metaphor) a “carrying-across.”
Q: In Fair Maid, there are instances of ableist and otherwise discriminatory actions against the “Cripple”, i.e. using rude language, etc. In increasingly insensitive times, what can we (as readers, audiences, and scholars) learn from the play’s depictions of same?
GL: I’m not sure if there’s anything directly to learn from the play’s participation in ableist discourse. I am very interested to learn from my first experience of the play in production how these moments are staged (and how much of the ableist language, for example Bowdler’s, has been cut) and how audiences respond to them. My experience of seeing Look About You, which features a character who stutters, is that it’s very hard for these moments not to be/to be experienced as comic. My guess is that the most pressure will be put on audience responses to the denigration of disability in the first scene and particularly in the last— where the pleasure of the doubled Cripple echoes surprise “twinnings” in other comic endings (like Errors and Twelfth Night).
Dr. Love and fellow early modern scholar Dr. Katherine Schaap Williams will participate in a post-show discussion after Sunday, April 2nd’s afternoon matinee of The Fair Maid of the Exchange at 4:30 PM in the Blackfriars Playhouse.
