by Maddie Buttitta
A common challenge for actors and directors, in terms of staging disability, is the creation of a balanced, fair portrayal of same without delving into caricature. In this wheelhouse of research, Dr. Katherine Schaap Williams of NYU Abu Dhabi focuses especially on early modern drama, and on disability studies, performance theory, and Global Shakespeare. Her work on deformity and cure, dramatic form, and early modern disability studies has appeared or is forthcoming in ELH, English Studies, and Disability Studies Quarterly, as well as in the edited collection Health, Disability, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (Routledge, 2014). She, along with Dr. Genevieve Love of Colorado College, recently participated in a roundtable about disability as portrayed in the American Shakespeare Center’s 2017 Renaissance Season production of Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the Exchange with Dr. Paul Menzer and ASC actors Benjamin Reed and Chris Johnston. Via email, I spoke with Dr. Williams about her research on the performativity of staging disability in early modern theatre.
Q: How did you arrive to researching and studying early modern depictions of disability?
KW: As I was beginning graduate study in English literature, a friend from college who was a disability right organizer suggested that I read some of the germinal work in disability studies (since the academic field of disability studies emerged from the disability rights movement). I did, and I found the theoretical frames from disability theory illuminating and provocative, but I also found myself dissatisfied with their accounts of disability in early modern literature. Richard III was a key figure in scholarly work, but critics often read him as the best example of a “moral model” of disability, in which physical deformity signifies moral depravity. This emphasis on the obvious didacticism, however, does not account for the dynamism of his character. There’s no question that Richard is evil, but he is deliciously aware of the allure of his distinctive physical difference; he begins the play with a soliloquy that allows him to show off the “deformed” body that the audience has been waiting to see. I wanted to revise the too-limited account of disability in the period, expanding our critical attention to include other characters and texts beyond Shakespeare’s plays and arguing that when the early modern theater stages disability, it teaches us something unexpected about early modern social formations. In my current book, I write about Richard III and argue that “deformity” helps us to rethink what disability can mean when we encounter it so frequently in drama of the early modern period. I want to think about how these plays challenge our concepts of disability, and to consider what disability allows the theater to do with and through the actor’s body.
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?
KW: Cripple is striking because he is the central character of the play, and because he works. The technical question about disability in the early modern period is: can this person labor? Are they capable of working, or are they eligible for charitable aid and relief offered by the state because they cannot work? I’m interested in how the play evokes the figure of the crippled beggar, who cannot work, even though Cripple is perhaps the most industrious character in the play. What is similar, I think, to other depictions of disability in the period (such as the figure of the lame soldier), is the worry about how to read the body, and the concern that disability might be faked. Cripple’s disability isn’t (and it’s notable that the play doesn’t discuss the origin of it) but I think that Frank’s performance as Cripple trades on the idea that disability can be so easily counterfeited.
Q: In your essay ” “More legs than nature gave thee”: Performing the Cripple in The Fair Maid of the Exchange“, you cite Cripple as the “theatrical economy” of the play. The Cripple’s demonstrable productivity in the play’s plot is notable, especially in spite of other characters calling him such names as “halting Rascall” (2195), “this paltrie crutch” (771), and “crooked knave” (2532). What can we (as readers, audiences, and scholars) learn from the play’s particular depiction of Cripple as one of the play’s forces of good?
KW: This is a great question, although I want to begin by changing the terms just slightly. I don’t know that I would characterize Cripple as a “force of good,” if only because I don’t think the play is as interested in making a moral judgment about Cripple as it is interested in testing the theatrical exchanges that he makes possible. Cripple matters not only because he is productive within the dramatic economy of the play–in contrast to so many of the gentlemen and citizens, who never seem to be working!–but because this dramatic economy cannot exist without him. He makes the marriages happen through a combination of convincing rhetoric, pre-scripted letters, and a canny sense of how performance works. One thing we might learn from, or at least consider, is how hard the play has to work to undercut Phyllis’s desire for Cripple in order to enable the concluding marriage that we associated with comedy. Early critics who wrote about the play thought that this was a problem for performance, specifically, suggesting that audiences wouldn’t want to see the heroine of the play end up with the disabled character. I think it’s interesting, however, that the play lingers on this possibility, and that that play brings out the bumpiness of the substitution of Frank for Cripple in the final scene.
