In Shakespearean theatre in the 16th and 17th centuries, audiences and actors alike understood that theatrical performance reflected broader cultural concerns about embodiment, identity and transformation. Some critics of the theatre even worried that actors — embodying differences of gender and ability — might experience permanent transformation.
“It was believed that what you perform might change you,” says Katherine Williams, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Art & Science’s Department of English. This is just one of the many insights Williams shares in her new book, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater.
Unfixable Forms explores disability on the early modern stage and what disability in performance teaches us about early modern English culture — and how some of these beliefs and stigmas still exist today. It intertwines theatrical history with contemporary disability studies.
“This is a moment of really exciting theatrical development,” says Williams of the 16th and 17th centuries. “In staging disability, it’s one of the ways that theatre is theorizing what it means to perform.
“It's also making the argument that disability changes how we think about the theatre,” she adds. “Theatre is more than script: it’s not just a matter of what is said, for the form also relies on the actor's embodiment. And that’s really interesting because these dramatic texts let us think about disability differently through the theater. Early modern plays let us see what's different about some of the concepts of disability in the early modern moment, from how we think about disability today.”
Within Shakespearean theatre, actors depicting disability on early modern stages were often described, both in scripts as well as by audiences, with terms such as "deformed," "lame," "crippled," "ugly," "sick," and "monstrous.” These terms — which her book considers as shorthand for concepts of disability — reflect cultural norms about how a body should look and what a body should do, says Williams.
There was the belief that you could tell something about a person by looking at the body, by reading the signs of their body.
In addition to these negative terms and identities, physical disability was sometimes seen as a symbol of moral evil or divine punishment or a representation of someone’s undesirable character.
“There was the belief that you could tell something about a person by looking at the body, by reading the signs of their body,” says Williams.
With such negative views it’s not surprising that disability in Shakespeare’s plays is something that must be resolved in some fashion. So often, the disability plot is one that ends either in disaster, a cure or a final of image of pity.
Williams explores plays such as Richard III, featuring the physically disabled Richard of Gloucester who wants to be King of England. He uses manipulation and deceit to murder his brothers, nephews and any other opponents to become king. Although the play makes a point of his evil, the role presents the pleasure of a difficult challenge for an actor, for whom it is an opportunity to display theatrical skill.
And some of the figures she explores offer interpretations that are not so predictable as moral judgments. She also examines the “crippled beggar” who also often appears in early modern plays, a figure who shows us about the emerging system of legal aid.
She considers the character of the “lame soldier” who appears in several of Shakespeare’s plays — soldiers who have lost limbs in battle and return to England, raising the subject of disability caused by service to one’s country.
“A key concept of disability theory is that disability is the product of encounter between a nonstandard body and a world that wasn’t built to accommodate it. The language of noble service to the country is something that the plays are questioning through the figure of the lame soldier, as they show what happens when you send citizens off to the battlefield and they come home unable to work without care or provisions.”
Casting actors with disabilities is centering the disability experience in those representations, and I think that’s incredibly important. As a long history of people with disabilities have taught us, disability knowledge is something that is positive, that we can value as an identity.
Through studying early modern theatre, Williams explores “disability aesthetics” and discovers that even in the 16th century, there was the suggestion that disability should be looked upon in a more positive way.
“There is this idea that human variation is actually the source of pleasure,” says Williams. “It's a kind of aesthetic innovation. And that I think comes through in plays. The plays challenge any stable idea of a normative body, and they point to how theatre experiments with the body of an actor.”
Moving to the present, some of the disability issues raised in Shakespeare’s era still affect theatre (and other forms of performance entertainment) today — issues such as what is sometimes called “disability drag,” referring to actors without disabilities playing disabled parts.
“It’s a problem,” says Williams. “There's been significant attention to the demand to cast actors with disabilities for these roles that are written for disabled characters as a matter of prioritizing disability identity.
“Casting actors with disabilities is centering the disability experience in those representations, and I think that’s incredibly important. As a long history of people with disabilities have taught us, disability knowledge is something that is positive, that we can value as an identity.”
And there are positive examples of the embodied knowledge that disabled actors bring to any role they play. In 2017, actress Madison Ferris — who uses a wheelchair in real life — played Laura in the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie.
Mike Lew’s play, Teenage Dick, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III, featured actors Gregg Mozgala for the Public Theater production in 2018, and Daniel Monks for the Donmar Warehouse production in 2019 in the title role, which Lew adapted to foreground their distinctive embodiments.
Through her book, Williams encourages readers to consider the stage when thinking about disability — both in history as well as the present day.
“I hope that we will take the theatre seriously as a site of enactment for ideas about bodies and think about how that formal attention changes our concepts of disability. The theatre doesn’t just reflect cultural ideas, it also reshapes them.”