Accessibility and Archives: Disability and Performance 1: “by limping sway disabled”

In the first of three blogs drawing on his experience as a Performing Arts Archivist, Philip Milnes-Smith explores some intersections of disability and performance.  As he prepares a guide to finding disability in the collections at Shakespeare’s Globe, he questions the extent to which those engaging in archival description or exhibition would even register the relevance of disability to what is in their care.  He also suggests the importance of thinking intersectionally.

As blogs in this series have demonstrated, there were lots of disabled people in the past but we are not attuned to spotting them, partly perhaps because they were edited out when the past was explicitly taught to us, and partly because the stigma associated with disability is such that even mentioning it can be regarded as taboo or a slur.  Finding evidence of past disability is complex.  First, even if disabled was a word in use (as in the title, quoting one of Shakespeare’s sonnets), contemporary usage may not map neatly onto it.  Secondly, when words used in the past to refer to what is now understood as disability remain familiar (e.g. cripple), they would now cause offence.  Thirdly, we may simply not be alert to some of the words used in the past.    Finally, using current terms to gloss those in past usage can be misleading as connotations and associations that existed in each era may not be relevant or comprehensible in the other. 

There is limited evidence to judge whether the persona in the sonnets who claims to have been “made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite” reflected the poet’s lived experience, but some performers probably did embody versions of themselves:  Pantaloon, the grumpy and easily hoodwinked old man as a stock character of the Commedia dell’arte could be figured (as Jaques suggests in As You Like It) “with spectacles on nose” and “shrunk shank” and with his “big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound”.  A ‘dwarf’ and a crutch-using amputee may have been available to companies performing Volpone and The Fair Maid of the Exchange.  In other cases, however, the audience are seeing a representation of disability enacted by someone non-disabled people ‘cripping up’.  We may not know very much about it, but one of the properties of the Rose Playhouse listed in March 1598 was “Kentes woden leage”.  Potentially such a prop could have been used in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus which has a scene where someone appears literally to pull off the leg of the title character.  One frequently appearing theme in early modern plays is a non-disabled character adopting disability as a disguise to achieve an objective.  Paradoxically, this could be grabbing attention in order to fool others so as to obtain charity (e.g. Saunder Simcox in Henry VI Part 2), but also avoiding attention by passing beneath their notice (e.g. Edgar becoming Poor Tom in King Lear). 

William Gouge’s Second Treatise on Domesticall Duties advises married couples to pray “That they may have... comely and well proportioned children: nor idiots in understanding, nor monsters in bodily shape.”  This helps us understand that his fellow-Puritan William Prynne was referring to disability (at least in part), when he suggests that in enacting “Monsters, beasts, and sencelesse creatures parts upon the Stage in such prodigious deformed habits and disguises, as are unsuitable to their humanity,” actors manifest the “bruitish frensie of their distempered minds”.  It is also important to note that in being distinguished from ‘normativity’, the monstrous could trouble the gender binary, be associated with non-heteronormative sexual behaviour, and with cultures in other parts of the world (and are thus also relevant to understandings of gender, queerness and race).  However, many archivists dealing with ephemera, prompt books or recordings of popularly performed plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Tempest would simply not realise that we should be alerting users to disability as one framework (alongside gender, race and queerness) for understanding the characters Bottom and Caliban (pictured), explicitly labelled as ‘monsters’.

It is also easy to miss that when Bottom talks of wanting to play a tyrant he uses the word “humour”.  While this might seem like a mood or preference, it would have alerted contemporary hearers to the longstanding belief system that internal physical imbalances (of, for example, yellow or black bile) created mental instability (such as choler and melancholy, respectively).  By mentioning Hercules in a play ostensibly set in Athens and its nearby woods, we might also miss that he is also alluding to the trope of Greek tragedy where a hero experiences a violent mania when temporarily in the grip of a passion (like anger).  Bottom’s part in the play within a play nonetheless gives him the opportunity to act a type of tragic madness, where the intemperate action of suicide is driven by false belief – in this case that the lion had eaten his lover.  When he had talked of “a part to tear a cat in, to make all split”, it might be a typically “rude mechanical” misremembering of Telamonian Ajax (in Sophocles’ tragedy), who believes he is enacting revenge on those who disrespected him, but attacked cattle and sheep instead (a tale referenced in both Henry VI Part 2 and Love’s Labour’s Lost).

When Prynne published his antitheatrical pamphlet in 1632, it associated stage performances with both ‘madness’ and ‘folly’’.  Those two words may now seem like metaphors, but he makes it clear that he is referencing conditions that we might now recognise as mental illness and either learning difficulty or neurodivergence:  the “mad and beastly actions, gestures, speeches, habits, prankes and fooleries” ought to convince the audience that the players are “children, fooles, or Bedlams; since they act such parts, such pranks, yea, use such gestures, speeches, rayment, complements, and behaviour in jest, which none but children, fooles, or mad-men, doe act, or use in earnest”.  Embodiment, it is suggested, creates an equivalence between an acted “fool, a fantastique, a Bedlam… and those who are such in truth”, except that the actors are not so by necessity but only in order to “foment the more than childish folly” of play-goers.  It was not difficult for Prynne to represent the Early Modern playgoer as someone “childish, foolish, or frentique himself”, because in co-creating the performance they were pretending together.  Again, it is easy to miss that when Hamlet wants to spring the Mousetrap to catch his uncle, he imagines an actor who can “make mad” some of those in the audience, and that the Gravedigger’s England is one where Hamlet’s continuing madness would be immaterial as “There the men are as mad as he.”  Prynne himself would twice endure the judicial amputation of his ears.   With the nation still recovering from being turned ‘upside down’ into ‘Duyvel-Landt’, he was appointed Keeper of the Records in the Tower in 1661.

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Thumbnail image by John Hamilton Mortimer - This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61131088