Dissembling Disability: Performances of the Non-Standard Body in Early Modern England

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Dissembling Disability: Performances of the Non-Standard Body in Early Modern England.

Row-Heyveld, Lindsey Dawn https://iro.uiowa.edu/discovery/delivery/01IOWA_INST:ResearchRepository/12730596670002771?l#13730827500002771

Row-Heyveld, L. D. (2018). Dissembling Disability: Performances of the Non-Standard Body in Early Modern England [University of Iowa]. https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.zso0fphw

DISSEMBLING DISABILITY: PERFORMANCES OF THE NON-STANDARD BODY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

by Lindsey Dawn Row-Heyveld

An Abstract Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in English in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa

July 2011

Thesis Supervisor: Professor Claire Sponsler

ABSTRACT

The fear of able-bodied people pretending to be disabled was rampant in early modern England. Thieves were reputed to feign impairment in order to con charity out of well-meaning Christians. People told stories about these deceptive rogues in widely circulated prose pamphlets, sung about them in popular ballads, and even recorded their purported actions in laws passed to curb their counterfeiting. Feigned disability was especially prevalent—and potent—on the stage. Over thirty plays feature one or more able-bodied characters performing physical impairment. This dissertation examines the theatrical tradition of dissembling disability and argues that it played a central role in the cultural creation of disability as a category of identity. On the stage, playwrights teased out stereotypes about the non-standard body, specifically the popular notion that disability was always both deeply pitiful and, simultaneously, dangerously criminal and counterfeit. Fears of false disability, which surged during the English Reformation, demanded a policing of boundaries between able-bodied and disabled persons and inspired the first legal definition of disability in England. Rather than resolving the issue of physical difference, as the legal and religious authorities attempted to do, the theater revealed and reveled in the myriad complications of the non-standard body. The many plays that feature performances of dissembling disability use the trope to interrogate

issues of epistemological proof, ask theological questions about charity and virtue, and, 1

especially, explore the relationship between the body and identity. Fraudulent disability also had important literary uses as well; playwrights employed this handy theatrical instrument to construct character, to solve narrative problems, to draw attention to the manufactured theatricality of their dramas, and, often, to critique the practices of the commercial theater. Expanding beyond the medical perspectives offered by the few studies that have considered early modern disability, I argue that these performances emerge out of a complex network of literary, religious, and social concerns. For all that

2 fraudulent disability may have been itself a type of fraud, trumped up by the state, the church, and the theater for their own diverse ends, it still wielded enormous influence in shaping notions of the non-standard body that are still current.

Abstract Approved: ______Thesis Supervisor ______Title and Department ______Date

DISSEMBLING DISABILITY: PERFORMANCES OF THE NON-STANDARD BODY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

by Lindsey Dawn Row-Heyveld

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in English in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa

July 2011

Thesis Supervisor: Professor Claire Sponsler

Graduate College The University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL ______

PH.D. THESIS ______

This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of

Lindsey Dawn Row-Heyveld has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in English at the July 2011 graduation.

Thesis Committee: ______Claire Sponsler, Thesis Supervisor

______Miriam Gilbert

______Adam Hooks

______Blaine Greteman

______Douglas Baynton To the memory of Huston Diehl (1948-2010)

ii I am unable, yonder begger cries, To stand, or move; if he say true, hee lies John Donne “A lame beggar”

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In completing a project focused on charity, I have received much charity myself. I offer here poor thanks for the rich generosity of the many people who helped make this project possible. First and foremost, Huston Diehl gave life to this dissertation. She encouraged my first forays into early modern disability studies at the beginning of my graduate career, provided great insight and enthusiasm as I began to shape the project, and perceptively guided the completion of the first several chapters. She did all of this with her characteristic warmth, humor, and sharp scholarly eye, even as my progress through graduate school paralleled the progress of her cancer. Her unfailing support and encouragement of me—as a scholar and as a person—is a gift I could not hope to repay and one that has sustained me even in her absence. I have benefitted greatly from the hard work and generosity of Claire Sponsler, who oversaw the final stages of this dissertation; its completion would not have been possible without her thoughtful assistance and pragmatism. Adam Hooks provided invaluable advice about my dissertation and my job search. Doug Baynton supplied me with engaging, challenging perspectives on disability studies throughout my graduate career. Blaine Greteman graciously agreed to be on my dissertation committee at the last

minute. While she was still at Iowa, Gina Bloom rightly insisted that I could not avoid 4

Richard III; the paper she fostered eventually grew into Chapter 4 and I greatly appreciate her help in beginning this project. Above all, Miriam Gilbert championed my work and challenged my thinking, cheering me on from the very beginning to the very end. I am especially grateful for her unwavering support and kindness. David Wood and Allison Hobgood have been great friends and great colleagues since the moment I met them. I am tremendously thankful for their generosity and their cheerleading.

iv I want to express my ongoing thanks to Brad Shaw and Brian Hartley. I never would have considered pursuing a career in higher education without the encouragement—and inspiration—they have provided me. This dissertation is largely a product of the time afforded me by the Ballard/Seashore Dissertation Year Fellowship granted by the University of Iowa Graduate College, and I am grateful for their funding of my work. My thanks extend to the University of Iowa Department of English for the Freda Dixon Malone Dissertation Research Scholarship, which facilitated research necessary to complete Chapter 3.

My parents and my brothers have gifted me with their faithful support for years. They are the ones who first modeled for me a love of literature and a devotion to charity. Even from thousands of miles away, Joanne Nystrom Janssen invested her time, intellect, and care in me and in my project. Her generous collaboration is responsible for the best parts of this dissertation, and her constant encouragement kept me going through the worst parts of it. I am privileged to be her scholarly partner and her friend. Because Zachary Row-Heyveld told me that he would break up with me if I didn’t go to graduate school, I went. And only because of his patience, hard work, and endless faith in me have I managed to finish. He has taught me more about charity—about love— than a world of books.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER

I. ACT THE FOOL: THE TRADITION OF FRAUDULENT DISABILITY IN JOHN MARSTON’S ANTONIO’S REVENGE AND BEN JONSON’S BARTHOLOMEW FAIR ...... 15

Rogue Revenge: Counterfeiting Disability in Revenge Tragedy and Antonio’s Revenge ...... 18 The Dramatic Relationship of John Marston and Ben Jonson ...... 37 A Fool and His Money are Soon Parted (by a Madman): Fraudulent Disability in Bartholomew Fair ...... 43

II. FEMINIZED DISABILITY AND DISABLED FEMININITY IN FAIR EM AND JOHN FLETCHER’S THE PILGRIM ...... 61

Fictions of Contradiction: Women and Fraudulent Disability ...... 65 Fair Play: Fair Em and Disability Drag ...... 76 The Pilgrim’s Progress and Regress: Variations on Women Counterfeiting Disability ...... 89

III. “THIS LAMENESS WILL NOT SERVE”:LABOR, GENDER, AND DISABILITY IN THE FAIR MAID OF THE EXCHANGE AND THOMAS DEKKER’S THE SHOEMAKER’S HOLIDAY ...... 104

Men at Work: Disability, Masculinity, and the Labor Economy ...... 106 “Take my crooked habite”: Disability and Masculine Commerce in The Fair Maid of the Exchange ...... 111 On the Other Foot: Community, Disability, and The Shoemaker’s Holiday ...... 137

IV. PLAYING PARTS: PERFORMATIVITY AND DISABILITY IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S RICHARD III AND KING LEAR ...... 162

“Dissembling Looks”: The Performativity of Disability in Richard III ...... 164 “To Feel What Wretches Feel”: Charity and Dissembling Disability in King Lear ...... 181

CONCLUSION ...... 201

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 206

vi 1

INTRODUCTION

Composed in 1596, John Donne‟s epigram, “A lame beggar,” is not today among Donne‟s better-known works. It was, however, quite popular in early modern England, where it was circulated in over 50 seventeenth-century manuscript miscellanies.1 The epigram, which serves as the epigraph to this project, succinctly illustrates the contradictory nature of disability in early modern England. The “twist” characteristic of English epigrams of this period—and the paradox of early modern disability—is encapsulated in the pun that finishes the couplet. If the beggar is telling the truth about his disability, then he lies on the ground because he cannot move; the word-play, however, simultaneously suggests that lame beggars are perpetually deceptive. Even when they tell the truth, they still lie. The feigning of disability that Donne references in his epigram found life on the early modern stage. I have identified over 30 plays from this period that feature able- bodied characters pretending to be disabled, a theatrical tradition encompassing plays that range widely in topic, style, popularity, and critical reception.2 In closely examining these

1 Donne, The Epigrams, Epithalamions, Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and Miscellaneous Poems, vol. 8 of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, ed. Gary A. Stringer, et. al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995-), 295.

2 Early modern plays featuring fraudulent disability include (in alphabetical order): Antonio‟s Revenge, John Marston (c. 1599); The Atheist‟s Tragedy, Cyril Tourneur (c. 1601-04); Bartholomew Fair, Ben Jonson (1614); Beggar‟s Bush, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger (c. 1622); The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, George Chapman (1595-96); The Blind Beggar of Bednall Green, Henry Chettle and John Day (c. 1600); The Changeling, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley (1622); The City Wit, Richard Brome (1629-30); The Constant Maid, James Shirley (1640); The Country Captain (Captain Underwit), William Cavendish (c. 1639-40); The Court Beggar, Brome (c. 1640); Every Man in His Humour, Jonson (1598); Fair Em, Anonymous (c. 1589); The Fair Maid of the Exchange, Anonymous (c. 1602); Hamlet, William Shakespeare (1599-1601); Henry VI, Part 2, Shakespeare (1591); The Honest Whore, Part 1, Thomas Dekker (1604); A Jovial Crew, or The Merry Beggars, Brome (c. 1641); King Lear, Shakespeare (1603-06); A Mad World, My Masters, Middleton (c. 1605); The Picture, Massinger (c. 1629); The Pilgrim, Fletcher (1621); The Rape of Lucrece, Thomas Heywood (1608); The Roaring Girl, Middleton and Dekker (1607-10); The Spanish Tragedy, Thomas Kyd (1582-92); The Staple of News, Jonson (c. 1625); Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare (1590-93); Volpone, Jonson (1605-06); The White Devil, John Webster (1612); The Wild Goose Chase, Fletcher (c. 1621); The Winter‟s Tale, Shakespeare (1610-11); Women Pleased, Fletcher (1619-23). 2 plays, I argue that they entrench the stereotype about disability rehearsed in Donne‟s epigram: the idea that people with disabilities are simultaneously deeply pitiful and dangerously criminal. This vision of the non-standard body is influenced by early modern social policy and religious debates, and my project considers the literary, legal, and theological concerns that shaped disability at a critical moment in its history. In the last fifteen years, there has been an increasing focus in the humanities, particularly in literature, on issues of disability. Somewhat surprisingly, very little of this scholarship has focused on the literature and culture of early modern England. One likely reason for this lack of scholarly attention is the suggestion—thanks in large part to arguments made by disability scholar Lennard Davis—that “disability,” as we understand it today, is anachronistic when discussing the centuries before the Industrial Revolution.3 While historical sensitivity is certainly necessary when applying postmodern terms and theory to centuries-old literature, medieval scholars like Irina Metzler and Edward Wheatley have conclusively identified a stigmatized awareness of physical difference in pre-modern Europe, and their work has demonstrated the necessity of interrogating representations of the non-standard body within the paradigm of disability in these early centuries.4 Yet, in spite of the scholarly inroads made in medieval literature and culture, the study of disability in the early modern period has remained strangely dormant. I see two possible explanations for this oversight. The first is that disability studies has not gained traction in early modern literature because fields of study that overlap with

3 See Davis‟s study on the bell curve and the development of disability in “Constructing Normalcy,” in Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body (London: Verso, 1995), 23-49. The term “disability” to describe “a physical or mental condition that limits a person‟s movements, senses or activities” first came into popular use during the early modern period; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was employed in this way as early as 1561 (New Edition, online).

4 Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment during the High Middle Ages, c. 1100-1400 (London: Routledge, 2006); Edward Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). 3 disability have been so thoroughly interrogated in recent years. Virtually an entire scholarly sub-field has been created around early modern discourses of the body, including (but not limited to) studies of humoral balance and imbalance, illness and health, madness and sanity, and constructions of the self in relation to the body.5 Similarly, a host of scholars have investigated monsters and monstrosity in early modern England, a course of study that often takes up non-standard bodies as its subject.6 Finally, an increased focus on issues of poverty and social welfare in early modern England has also intersected with issues of disability, interrogating the economic contexts which both created and resulted from disability.7 These overlapping fields have, in some ways, precluded further studies on disability since they seem to cover the scholarly territory so thoroughly. Nevertheless, very few studies of the body or monsters or poverty engage disability directly; almost none employ disability theory as a method for conceptualizing

5 For a brief, representative sample see: Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare‟s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); David Hillman, Shakespeare‟s Entrails: Belief, Skepticism and the Interior of the Body (New York: Palgrave, 2007); Katherine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and the Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

6 See, for example: Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing „Monsters‟ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Julie Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone, 2001); Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes, eds., Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

7 See: William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), which actually features Jacques Callot‟s 1622 illustration “Beggar on Crutches” on its cover. 4 these subjects. The other possible reason for the dearth of disability studies in the early modern period is the (seeming) lack of representations of disability in early modern literature. Partially this deficiency of disabled characters can be attributed to contemporary normative reading practices, where characters‟ disability is not acknowledged as such or, if acknowledged, is not often recognized as literarily significant.8 Disability also may be overlooked in early modern literature because, especially on the stage, it is so often presented by able-bodied characters who perform the non-standard body; I have identified more instances of fraudulent disability in early modern drama than instances of genuine disability. Disability often goes unnoticed in early modern literature because these meta-performances of the non-standard body are not recognized as conveying important information about the reality of disability in early modern literature and culture. I believe, however, that understanding feigned disability is critical to understanding disability generally in early modern England—and that it is critical to understanding early modern theater as well. Rooting my study in the theories of corporeal difference pioneered by contemporary disability theorists, I also draw from the interrelated early modern discourses on the body, monstrosity, and poverty, in order to examine the cultural and literary tradition of dissembling disability. People with disabilities in early modern England stood at the center of a complex web of theological, political, and moral debates. Their resources were extremely limited: if they could not support themselves financially, they were dependent on the aid of family and neighbors; if they had no community assistance, they often found themselves dependent on the major charitable institutions of the Church (such as confraternities and

8 One example of disability going unacknowledged in early modern literature is the case of Katherine in Shakespeare‟s The Taming of the Shrew. Her limp is referenced over five times in the play, yet has received virtually no scholarly attention and little consideration in performance. For more on this case, see Rachel E. Hile, “Disability and the Characterization of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009), http://www.dsq- sds.org/article/view/996/1180 (accessed April 19, 2011). 5 monasteries) or the charitable impulses of strangers. As Rosemarie Garland Thomson has asserted, “The history of begging is virtually synonymous with the history of disability,” and certainly this was true of early modern England.9 But England, especially as the Reformation gained momentum, was a precarious place for beggars. Stories of beggars faking disability in order to bilk gullible Christians into giving them charity cropped up occasionally in the Middle Ages but began to increase exponentially in the sixteenth century thanks to a spike in population, an expansion in personal mobility, and a surge in urbanization that created both an amplified anonymity and a paranoid fear of the begging poor.10 Often this fear focused on “sturdy beggars”: those who sought charity out of idleness rather than necessity, duping well-meaning citizens out of their alms and cheating the commonwealth out of its due productivity. Uniquely repellent were those sturdy beggars that feigned physical impairment and—in the words of one such counterfeiter, Edgar in King Lear—“Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers, / Enforce their charity.”11 This anxiety about deceptive beggars performing disability helped motivate major reforms of social policy; as Linda Woodbridge states, “Fear of counterfeit disability was a pivotal element in the shift away from individual charity to beggars and toward a state-sponsored relief system.”12 Exaggerating the power of the poor in charitable relations made revising those relationships seem all the more necessary. Fervor for social reforms was concurrent with fervor for religious reforms;

9 Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Colombia University Press, 1997), 35.

10 Edward Wheatley details the history of fraudulent disability in medieval Europe, Stumbling Blocks, 22-23. Linda Woodbridge argues that the pervasive fear of a small, criminal minority was often expanded to include all impoverished persons in the early modern imagination, regularly “tar[ring] poverty with the brush of crime” and further inflating fear of the poor, Vagrancy, 55.

11 William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Methuen, 1997), 2.2.190-91.

12 Woodbridge, Vagrancy, 275. 6 they influenced and increased one another. The dissolution of the monasteries brought an end to a major source of aid for the poor. In 1536, the same year the dissolution began, the state put together a national plan that made poor relief the exclusive domain of the government. The shift from church-controlled to state-controlled aid had obvious theological and political motivations. Charity—both the practice of almsgiving and the Christian virtue—was a vexed topic in early modern England. Personal almsgiving had often been implicated in the Catholic excesses denounced by the Protestant Reformers, especially its vital role in a theology of salvation contingent upon good works rather than one reliant upon sola fide, “faith alone.” At the same time, the centrality of charity in Christian doctrine meant that it had to be reconciled with the Reformers‟ new theology and practice; it could not simply be abandoned. Transferring social aid from the domain of the Church—and its parishioners—to the domain of the government served a dual purpose: it allowed the crown to control the immense wealth that had previously been controlled by the Church, and it excused laypersons from the work of personal charity by allowing the government to take on that responsibility in their stead. The 1536 legislation made the condemnation of charity explicit: the parish dole and individual almsgiving were banned, and, instead, government-appointed parish overseers were employed to distinguish the truly needy from the sturdy beggars and distribute the state-controlled funds.13 Tasked with determining who was eligible for financial assistance, the crown made physical impairment the primary (and, in many ways, the only) qualifying factor in

13 In spite of these laws, almsgiving in England was never entirely quelled: the bulk of the 1536 Act was not fully put into practice and the charitable imperative that undergirded much of Christian thought and habit also did not completely dissipate. However, these laws did lay the groundwork for the more stringent Poor Laws of 1598-1601 and they did much to transform the legal characterization and public practice of charity in England during this period, particularly in regards to the definition of disability. For more, see Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Addison-Wesley, 1988), 118-119. 7 the distribution of aid. For the first time in England, the parameters of disability were legally defined in order to distinguish between people who were willing but unable to work—the deserving poor—and people who were able but unwilling to work—the undeserving poor. Significantly, these reforms linked the definition of disability to social welfare, rather than a specific physical condition: the shift between almsgiving-as-aid to government-controlled social assistance determined that disability (as the very word suggests) would be defined by an individual‟s inability to work. Although this interpretation was uniquely malleable in that it allowed for a flexibility of identification, what it effectively affirmed was a dual, contradictory interpretation of disability in early modern England. Physical impairment became the primary attribute deserving of charity and, simultaneously, the primary characteristic to invite suspicion about the need for such charity. The fear of counterfeit disability entrenched by the law was rehearsed over and over again in early modern culture: it was a popular topic for ballads and it was recounted with detail bordering on hysteria in the popular pamphlet genre known today as “rogue literature.” These cheaply produced and widely circulated texts described the actions of early modern criminals, and they have been a source of considerable critical debate in recent years. Are rogue pamphlets ethnographical studies of a burgeoning Renaissance underworld? Are they largely metaphorical reflections of social ideologies? Kathleen

Pories has argued that, in rogue literature, we find the beginnings of narrative fiction; Linda Woodbridge has suggested that these texts should be read within the popular joke- book tradition.14 Regardless of specific interpretation, critics and historians tend to read

14 Poires, “The Intersection of Poor Laws and Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Fictional and Factual Categories,” in Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose, ed. Constrance C. Relihan (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1996), 17-40; Woodbridge, Vagrancy, 80-108. For an extended analysis of the history of rogue literature‟s critical reception, see Craig Dionne, “Fashioning Outlaws: The Early Modern Rogue and Urban Culture,” in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, ed. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 33-61. Dionne, in addition to offering a useful catalogue of responses to the genre, argues for rogue literature as a type of “domestic 8 the accounts of poverty and homelessness repeated throughout rogue literature as evidence of the very real social and economic ills that plagued England throughout this period. Among the many dangerous figures described in rogue literature, one of the most notorious was the “counterfeiter.” These criminals feigned physical impairment in order to take advantage of the goodwill of citizens who thought they were giving alms to the unfortunate when really they were complicit in their own robbery. This ruse evoked a exceptionally high level of anxiety because it capitalized on both the obligation to charity, a crucial tenet of the Christian faith, and the growing anonymity in early modern London, which increased with the steady stream of people pouring into the city from the countryside. Discerning who deserved charity was a daily problem and, as the writers of the rogue pamphlets explain in detail, these were exceptionally crafty rogues: they specialized. “Counterfeit cranks” feigned epileptic seizures, complete with bits of soap hidden in their mouths to create the requisite foaming.15 “Palliards” or “clapperdudgeons” would create the illusion of festering wounds by rubbing their arms and legs with caustics; this was a popular trick among those attempting to pass themselves off as wounded veterans.16 “Dummerers” could double up their tongues in a convincing display of dismemberment or remain unresponsive to noise in a performance of deafness.17 “Abram-men” feigned madness, complete with wild antics and tales of abuse in Bedlam. Among all the counterfeiters, abram-men seemed to be uniquely

handbook” that instructed the behaviors of the nascent bourgeoisie by defining their opposites in the rogues.

15 Thomas Harman, A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones, in The Elizabethan Underworld, ed. A. V. Judges (New York: Octagon, 1965), 85- 90.

16 Thomas Dekker, O Per Se O, in The Elizabethan Underworld, ed. A. V. Judges (New York: Octagon, 1965), 376-77.

17 Ibid., 375. 9 dangerous because their lack of defining physical evidence made them especially difficult to assess.18 The census of criminals included in these texts identify specific vagrants by their disabilities, both real and feigned, and the canting dictionaries that often accompanied these pamphlets also attest to the fear of fraudulent disability by including in their lists a number of terms related to the practice.19 Contrary to the vivid picture of devious, disguised criminals envisioned in rogue literature, historical evidence suggests that counterfeiting disability was a rare practice in early modern England. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century court records and prison registries suggest that actual instances of beggars counterfeiting disability were infrequent at best; very few people were ever prosecuted for faking physical impairment.20 This reality suggests that the feigning of physical difference, like many of the other illicit practices detailed in rogue literature, existed more in the minds of English citizens than it did on their streets. This disparity raises the question: why did writers of rogue literature fixate on the feigning of disability if it did not reflect a real practice? There are certainly a number of answers to this question, not the least of which is that counterfeiting sold, and its ability to bring customers to the bookstalls—and, eventually, to the playhouses—certainly accounts for part of its popularity. However, the authors of rogue pamphlets themselves suggest another answer that is important to understanding disability, real and fraudulent, in early modern England.

18 Harman, Caveat, 83-84.

19 For example, Harman includes “John Crew (with one arm)” and “James Lane (with one eye; Irish)” alongside “Edward Lewes (a dummerer)” and “John Perse (a counterfeit crank)” in his catalogue of rogues, Caveat, 110-13.

20 The Bridewell court records provide a useful lens through which to view this phenomenon. See Martine Van Elk, “The Counterfeit Vagrant: The Dynamic of Deviance in the Bridewell Court Records and the Literature of Roguery,” in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, ed. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 120-39. 10

Because thieves couched their robbery in requests for alms, charity—the action, as well as the virtue—was a major fixation for writers of rogue literature. The verse introduction to Robert Copland‟s The Highway to the Spital-House, one of the earliest rogue pamphlets, states that the author‟s intention in publishing this collection of thieves‟ tricks is not to “despise the poor” or those who live exclusively off of alms, but, instead, to describe “The misery of such as live in need / And all their life in such idleness doth lead.”21 So, while Copland‟s stated goal is not to condemn beggars, that is exactly what he does throughout his introduction. He acknowledges the mandate to charity asserted by

Christian scripture, but he focuses on its qualifications rather than its crux. “Christ in this world right poverty did sue,” says Copland, and then goes on to explain that “right poverty” is a poorness of spirit, rather than a literal lack (8). In fact, as Copland imagines it, poverty is really a state of mind: “They be not poor that have necessity, / Except therewith they ben right well content; Nor they be not rich that have great plenty, / If they think that they have competent” (15-18). So, while he condemns the man that fails to practice charity and allows the poor to die without succor, the prisoner to go unvisited, and the traveler to suffer without shelter, Copland also makes clear that most poor people, prisoners, and travelers don‟t really deserve charity. The very act of begging, he asserts, is an act of rebellion against a divinely ordained condition of poverty, affirming that those who seek alms aren‟t worthy of them.

Thomas Harman is even more overt in his cautioning against charity. In the dedicatory epistle at the beginning of A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors, he tells Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury (the renowned “Bess of Hardwick”), that he is familiar with her reputation for “abundantly pouring out daily [her] ardent and

21 Copland, The Highway to the Spital-House in The Elizabethan Underworld, ed. A. V. Judges (New York: Octagon, 1965), ll. 4-5. All subsequent quotations from this text will be identified parenthetically by line number. 11 bountiful charity upon all such as cometh for relief unto [her] luckly gates.”22 However, instead of praising her for her charity, as might be the expected action of an author seeking patronage in this familiar way, Harman instead chastises her for her altruism. His purpose in writing and publishing his pamphlet is to familiarize the too-generous Countess with the “abominable, wicked, and detestable behavior of all these rowsey, ragged rabblement of rakehells, that—under the pretense of great misery, diseases, and other innumerable calamities which they feign—through great hypocrisy do win and gain great alms.”23 Harman‟s desired response, then, is that the Countess—and presumably all readers of his pamphlet—cut short almsgiving. Harman does pay lip service to the command to charity, stating at the end of his letter that, regardless of the worthiness of the recipient, the distributor of aid shall be blessed, but this reads as little more than a buffer between his critique of almsgiving and his anticipated benefactress. His introductory epistle suggests what his main text makes clear: his Caveat is as much against charity, as it is against those “common cursetors” who seek it out. By increasing fears of fraudulent disability, authors of rogue pamphlets sought to erase the problem that genuine disability posed to early modern England. Characterizing rogues as undeserving of alms, either because of their spiritual unfitness or, especially, their fraudulent poverty, is common practice in rogue literature. As we have seen, charity was a significant theological and logistical stumbling block for England‟s Reformers, and their efforts to reconcile the Christian mandate to almsgiving with their doctrine of sola fide resulted in a fractured interpretation of the non-standard body. By focusing on feigning—particularly the feigning of disability—authors like Copland and Harman attempt to ease concern about charity by suggesting that it is unnecessary: the beggars who seem to be in such desperate situations really aren‟t, and even those who appear to

22 Harman, Caveat, 61.

23 Ibid., 61. 12 have the strongest justifiable claim to alms—those with physical impairments—are faking their way to a life of idleness built on the backs of well-meaning, but gullible, Christians. Fraudulent disability as it appears in rogue literature serves to relieve early modern England of its social ills and, therefore, its social and religious responsibilities. Rather than resolving the issue of physical difference by strictly enforcing its definition and dictating social responses to it, as the legal and religious authorities attempted to do, the theater revealed and reveled in the myriad complications of the non- standard body. The many plays that feature performances of dissembling disability use the trope to interrogate issues of epistemological proof, explore the relationship between the body and identity, and ask political and theological questions about charity and virtue. Fraudulent disability also had important literary uses as well; playwrights employed this handy theatrical instrument to construct character, to solve narrative problems, to draw attention to the manufactured theatricality of their dramas, and to critique the practices of the commercial theater. Expanding beyond the medical perspectives offered by the few studies that have considered early modern disability, I argue that these performances emerge out of a complex network of literary, religious, and social concerns. For all that fraudulent disability may have been itself a type of fraud, trumped up by the state, the church, and the theater for their own diverse ends, it still wielded enormous influence in shaping notions of the non-standard body that are still current.

My first chapter outlines the way that the theology and praxis of charity influenced the cultural creation of disability. “Act the Fool: The Tradition of Fraudulent Disability in John Marston‟s Antonio‟s Revenge and Ben Jonson‟s Bartholomew Fair” looks at counterfeit disability as both a product and an instrument of the English Reformation, analyzing how playwrights used the performance of disability to control the charitable actions and theatrical reactions of their audiences. In these paired plays, both Marston and Jonson employ fraudulent disability to serve the Protestant agenda of moderating individual charity. However, these meta-performances of disability also serve 13 a literary agenda: Jonson replays the scenes of feigned disability so common in revenge tragedies like Marston‟s in order to criticize and reform the theatrical conventions and expectations of that genre. My project also examines the role that gender played in the creation of disability. In the Renaissance, as now, there was a significant overlap between femininity and disability. Both were defined by their physical departures from an idealized standard, and this facilitated a circular justification for mutual oppression: women were stigmatized because they were like people with disabilities, and people with disabilities were stigmatized because they were like women. My second chapter, “Feminized Disability and Disabled Femininity in Fair Em and John Fletcher‟s The Pilgrim,” studies how dramas of fraudulent disability literally play out this structure of discrimination. I argue that, by exposing the cultural systems that ostracize both women and people with disabilities, these plays allow the female characters who counterfeit disability the (limited) opportunity to reshape and control those systems. My analysis of disability and gender encompasses the performance of non- standard masculine bodies as well. My third chapter, “„This lameness will not serve‟: Labor, Gender, and Disability in The Fair Maid of the Exchange and Thomas Dekker‟s The Shoemaker‟s Holiday,” considers how disability challenged both early modern ideals of masculinity and the burgeoning English labor economy. The legal definition of disability was predicated on the inability to work and, therefore, the ability to “earn” charity. As these plays demonstrate, the stigmatization of disabled people was not only limited to those who could not work, as the definitions of disability in the period suggest.

Both The Shoemaker‟s Holiday and The Fair Maid of the Exchange highlight the flaws in the English Reformation‟s social and legal definitions of disability by demonstrating how those definitions failed to account for the complexities of the lived experience of disability. Their characterizations of successfully employed disabled men and the able- bodied men who mimic them offer rich, nuanced images of early modern masculine 14 disability, even as the comic resolutions of both plays ultimately elide the economic and ideological problems posed by the non-standard male body. By examining scenes of feigned disability in detail and in context, my dissertation focuses repeatedly on issues of theatricality, noting how the Reformation-era stage sometimes challenged the idea of a deterministic physical identity by staging the non- standard body‟s performative possibilities. My fourth chapter, “Playing Parts: Performativity and Disability in William Shakespeare‟s Richard III and King Lear,” argues that, for Shakespeare, disability is always performative. In Richard III, for instance, I demonstrate that the famously disabled duke performs his own deformities in such a way as to prey upon his on-stage and off-stage audiences‟ stereotypes about the non-standard body and thus control their responses to him. This early modern assertion sounds remarkably postmodern; it had—and has—the potential to be both deeply damaging and powerfully liberating for persons with disabilities. It is paralleled by the representation of fraudulent disability in King Lear, where Edgar‟s pointedly transparent performance of disability is used to assert the value of charitable giving regardless of

“authenticity.” While Richard III demonstrates the performativity of real disability, King Lear uses disability to demonstrate the value of performativity and the way it can transform reality. Although John Donne‟s epigram may have fallen out of favor, we still live in a world where people with disabilities are often viewed as pathetic or criminal—or, worse, invisible. My dissertation makes disability visible in early modern literature and culture, and, in doing so, clarifies a key moment in the history of disability. Understanding the connections between literary representations of the non-standard body and the cultural construction of disability offers a more complex approach to the study of both disability and literature, transforming ideas of disability on the page, on the stage, and beyond.

CHAPTER I ACT THE FOOL: THE TRADITION OF FRAUDULENT DISABILITY IN JOHN MARSTON‟S ANTONIO‟S REVENGE AND BEN JONSON‟S BARTHOLOMEW FAIR

Before he sets the wheels of his tragedy in motion, John Marston takes a moment to address the audience of Antonio‟s Revenge and prepare them for the drama they are about to witness. Given the dramatic shift in content and tone between Marston‟s light- hearted romantic comedy, Antonio and Mellida, and this, its blood-soaked sequel, the goal of the prologue is to alter—and lower—audience expectations. “May we be happy in our weak devoir, / And all part pleased in most wished content,” states the prologue wistfully, “But sweat of Hercules can ne‟er beget / So blest an issue.”24 Given this inevitable inability to satisfy every audience member, Marston can only rely on what he terms “the prop that doth support our hopes”: the charity of his audience (31). The prologue concludes, “When our scenes falter, or invention halts, / Your favor will give crutches to our faults” (32-33). Although it seems passive, this plea is carefully crafted to obligate Marston‟s audience into enjoying the drama. By linking the audience‟s approval with its personal goodwill through the dual meaning of the word “favor,” he enforces their enjoyment by appealing to their sense of moral responsibility. This is compounded by his characterization of the play as a pitifully disabled person; crippled and without crutches to prop it up, the play needs the audience to offer it popular support, figured here as physical support. The appeal that Marston makes in the prologue becomes even more complicated when one considers that it was also unnecessary. The humility trope that he employs is exactly that: a trope and not necessarily a reflection on the merits of the

24 Marston, Antonio‟s Revenge, ed. W. Reavley Gair, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), ll. 9-12. All subsequent quotations from this text will be identified parenthetically by act, scene, and line number. 16 drama. For all that the thematic shift between Antonio and Mellida and Antonio‟s Revenge is drastic, the former play was popular enough among early modern audiences to warrant a sequel. Marston‟s vision of his disabled play is a counterfeit, a rogue‟s trick to get the approval he wants from his audience. Ben Jonson presents a contrasting view of the relationship between the play and its audience in his epigraph to Bartholomew Fair. The title page of the 1631 edition contains a modified quotation from Horace‟s second book of Epistles:

Si foret in terris, rideret Democritus: nam Spectaret populum ludis attentius ipsis, Ut sibi praebentem, mimo spectacula plura. Scriptores autem narrare putaret assello Fabellam surdo. [If he were still on earth, Democritus would laugh: he would view the spectacle of the audience far more attentively than the plays themselves, as the crowd supplies more shows than the actors. What‟s more, he would think our playwrights were telling their tales to deaf asses.]25 Unlike Marston, Jonson is not making an effort to please his audience, but rather an effort to be pleased by them. His invocation of Democritus, “the laughing philosopher,” is certainly text-appropriate; Democritus earned his nickname by responding to folly with laughter rather than censure, modeling the behavior that Jonson advocates in Bartholomew Fair. However, Jonson, who had a notoriously antagonistic relationship with the theater-going public, seems to be criticizing his audience rather than responding to it as Democritus does. Marston figures his play as disabled, but, for Jonson, it is the playgoers who are disabled, both impaired (“deaf”) and inhuman (“asses”). Significantly, Jonson eliminates two lines from the middle of the original Horatian text that detail the spectacles these audiences are watching: they are viewing “hybrid monstrosities” [confusa genus], like a camel-leopard and a white elephant.26 Eliminating the reference

25 Translation mine.

26 Horace, The Epistles of Horace, ed. and trans. David Ferry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 195-196. 17 to monsters from the epigraph to Bartholomew Fair seems unusual given the historical Fair‟s reputation for displaying just this kind of human and animal oddity. However, this omission mirrors the larger elimination of monstrous bodies from the play. In the Induction, the Scrivener warns that this Bartholomew Fair will not feature a “servant- monster” nor a “nest of antics,” in spite of apparent audience expectation of them (126- 27).27 Although a “man with the monsters” is mentioned as present at the Fair and Wasp lists off the various freak shows he has taken in that day (including seeing “the bull with five legs and two pizzles” and “the dogs that dance the morris”), they are never present on stage (3.1.11-12, 5.4.85-87). Instead, as his epigraph suggests, Jonson has replaced the anticipated prodigies with the people there to view them. The real monster is the audience who has come out to view Bartholomew Fair—and Bartholomew Fair. Antonio‟s Revenge and Bartholomew Fair initially feel like disparate texts. The former is a revenge tragedy that borrows so heavily from other dramas that critics have debated whether or not it was intended to be a parody, and it is regarded as one of the lesser works of a lesser dramatist.28 The latter is a comedy so wholly original and

27 Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, in English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington (New York: Norton, 2002), ll. 126-27. All subsequent quotations from this text will be identified parenthetically by act, scene, and line number. Many critics interpret Jonson‟s reference to “servant-monsters” here as a jab at Shakespeare‟s Caliban, which it certainly may be, but the reputation of Bartholowmew Fair as a venue for the display of human oddities—as Paul Semonin describes it, “a sort of mecca for monsters”—suggests that audiences would have expected such spectacles because of the play‟s setting, rather than simply their popularity in romances. For more on this, see Semonin‟s “Monsters in the Marketplace: Human Oddities in Early Modern England,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 69-81.

28 In 1962, R. A. Foakes famously argued that the plot of Antonio‟s Revenge was so exaggerated and absurd that Marston must have intended the work as a parody of other revenge tragedies. See Foakes, “John Marston‟s Fantastical Plays: Antonio and Mellida and Antonio‟s Revenge,” Philological Quarterly 41 (1962): 229-39. Since then, however, a number of other critics have challenged Foakes‟s assertion and presented viable explanations for the extremity of language and action in the play. See, for example, George L. Geckle, “Antonio‟s Revenge: „Never more woe in lesser plot was found,‟” Comparative Drama 6.4 (1972-73): 323-35; Elizabeth M. Yearling, “„Mount Tufty Tamburlaine‟: Marston and Linguistic Excess,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 20.2 (1980): 257-69. 18 complex that multiple readings are required to reveal its carefully crafted structure and themes; it is a remarkable work by a remarkable playwright produced at the height of his abilities. Yet, as an examination of their opening texts demonstrate, both plays use the model of disability to conceptualize and craft their audiences, just as they also use their characterization of audiences to create and comment on disability. Specifically, both plays do this by staging fraudulent disability alongside performances of genuine disability, calling attention to the responses evoked by both the non-standard body and theatrical entertainment. Critical to representations of feigned disability in the early modern era was the problem of charity, and how to react to the disabled poor becomes a central fixation of both Antonio‟s Revenge and Bartholomew Fair. Placing these two texts alongside one another helps us better understand the mutually constitutive relationship between audience and disability in early modern England, especially the way they were shaped by the fraudulent disability stage tradition.

Rogue Revenge: Counterfeiting Disability in Revenge

Tragedy and Antonio‟s Revenge Of the early modern plays that stage the disability disguise, a number can be designated as revenge tragedies.29 Here, as in most other plays that enact counterfeiting, the hero feigns impairment. Yet the heroism of the counterfeiter in revenge tragedies is compromised somewhat by his dual status as an avenger. Critics have long debated how early modern audiences responded to the technically unlawful yet potentially satisfying actions of revenge tragedy. Did they see those raging avengers as agents of evil, as Lily

B. Campbell and others have argued?30 Or did audiences look past their Christian

29 Throughout this chapter I use the conventional term “revenge tragedy” to refer to those early modern plays that engage issues of justice and retribution, follow a classically tragic model, and often repeat a set of Senecan tropes; early modern playwrights and audiences would not have used this term to identify these plays as a distinct category.

30 Campbell, “Theories of Revenge in Renaissance England,” Modern Philology 38 (1931): 281-96. 19 context to read avengers as heroic exacters of a necessary blood payment, as Fredson Bowers and his adherents have contended?31 Most critics now seem content to assume that audience response was conflicted and that one of the purposes of the drama was to engage the audience in these thorny ethical questions. One way that avengers were made even more morally complex was through their regular use of the disability disguise; Hieronimo, the father of early modern avengers, counterfeits disability in The Spanish Tragedy, and his practice is copied by a number of his literary descendants, including Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and the eponymous hero of Antonio‟s Revenge.

Written by John Marston around the turn of the seventeenth century, Antonio‟s Revenge was composed as a companion piece to Marston‟s earlier theatrical success, the romantic comedy, Antonio and Mellida. Just as that play was a revision of a number of popular romantic plots of the period, especially Romeo and Juliet, Antonio‟s Revenge is a virtual pastiche of popular revenge dramas, riffing on Hamlet in particular.32 Like the famous Dane, Antonio‟s father is murdered by a man who uses the death as a vehicle to form a romantic union with Antonio‟s mother. This villain, Duke Piero, also murders the son of a courtier, Pandulpho, doubling the revenge plot to include a grieving father in the style of The Spanish Tragedy‟s Hieronimo. Upon the discovery of his son‟s body, Pandulpho laughs in the face of tragedy, like Titus Andronicus. Antonio is urged to avenge these two murders by the ghost of his father, which he does somewhat reluctantly while dressed, Hamlet-like, in black. With further echoes of Titus Andronicus and the Senecan revenge tradition that it, in turn, references, Antonio kills Piero‟s young son and

31 Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940).

32 Although the dating of Antonio‟s Revenge and Hamlet is still not decisive, most scholars tend to accept G. K. Hunter‟s assertion that Marston‟s play was written a few months before Shakespeare‟s play and that the striking similarities between the tragedies are a result of their common source-text. Hunter, introduction to Antonio‟s Revenge: The Second Part of Antonio and Mellida, by John Marston, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), ix-xxi. 20 bakes him into a pie that he serves to the unsuspecting Duke. The play culminates in a spectacular bloody banquet where Antonio and his comrades slaughter Duke Piero by means of a masque-within-the-play. This self-conscious meta-theatricality extended to the original production of the play, which was performed by the Children of Paul‟s shortly after the revival of the boy‟s companies in 1599. Having children perform these shockingly adult actions heightened the play‟s awareness of its own theatricality, as did the fact that it was exclusively adult companies that had previously enacted the revenge plays referenced by Antonio‟s Revenge.

Given the reliance on earlier revenge dramas for source material, as well as the overt meta-theatricality of its text and performance, it is no surprise that Marston has Antonio follow in the footsteps of Hieronimo, Hamlet, and Titus and use the disguise of disability to enact his revenge. All of these characters perform versions of what today would be termed mental or intellectual disability, but, in the English Renaissance, were called “madness” or “foolishness.” However, it should be noted that there is not a perfect correlation between these post-modern and early modern terms. As C. F. Goodey has demonstrated, while words like “fool” and “madman” certainly included mental disabilities, they were not limited to psychiatric or physiological impairments but could also indicate social, economic, or religious status.33 Furthermore, the specific disguise

33 Goodey, “„Foolishness‟ in Early Modern Medicine and the Concept of Intellectual Disability,” Medical History 48 (2004): 304-05. Efforts were made to establish distinct classifications of mental impairment. “Madness” tended to indicate a more volatile and often temporary loss of reason, roughly corresponding with what we today think of as mental illness, while “foolishness” signaled a wide spectrum of longer-term mental incapacities, roughly corresponding with what we today think of as developmental or intellectual disability. Even so, given the imprecision of early modern medical terminology, they were often used interchangeably. I attempt to differentiate between them where appropriate. Because of their complicated definitions, madness and foolishness are often excluded from discussions of disability. I categorize them here as disabilities for a number of reasons: 1) to identify my allegiance with the project of disability studies, which does not segregate “physical” and mental disabilities; 2) to maintain historical accuracy, since, although early modern medicine did treat these ailments differently than other impairments, it did not impose a Cartesian separation of body and mind in its diagnosis and therapeutics; 3) to comport with emerging early modern legal definitions of disability, which grouped madness with impairments like blindness, deafness, lameness, etc. in its categorization and distribution of financial compensation. 21 that Antonio adopts—that of the fool—is additionally complicated by its own multivalence. The term “fool” could indicate a “natural fool,” someone with limited intellectual capacity or an intellectual disability. It could also indicate an “artificial fool,” someone who pretends witlessness (often combined with a very strategic wittiness) for entertainment; artificial fools were often employed as professional entertainers, taking the form of jesters or minstrels. Although natural and artificial foolishness were recognized as distinct categories, they were often conflated. Natural fools, for instance, were sometimes pictured wearing shapeless floor-length coats, but, just as often, were pictured in the belled and parti-colored garments affiliated with artificial fools.34 Sander Gilman, in his detailed study of psychiatric illustration, argues that the similarity of costume and accessory depicted in early modern images of foolishness demonstrates that “the categories were quite interchangeable.”35 Both natural and artificial fools were employed by wealthy households in order to entertain their employer-owners and to advertise the household‟s beneficence. (Henry VIII maintained two fools in his royal entourage: Will Somers, an artificial fool, and a man named Sexton, called Patch, a natural fool; the two often worked together to entertain the court.)36 Some medieval and early modern writers who engage issues of foolishness, like Nicholas of Kues and Erasmus, do not distinguish between natural and artificial fools, while others, like Thomas More, do make the distinction.37

Imprecise early modern terminology requires care when engaging these terms, yet it is exactly this lack of precision that makes madness and foolishness rich instruments of

34 Sandra Billington, The Social History of the Fool (New York: St. Martin‟s Press, 1984), 13-15.

35 Gilman, Seeing the Insane (New York: John Wiley, 1982), 7.

36 John Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the English Court (London: Sutton, 1998), 67- 71.

37 Billington, Social History, 23, 28-29. 22 performance in early modern England, especially when employed in revenge tragedy. Certainly one of the most obvious areas of indistinction that made madness/foolishness so popular was the visual. Unlike other impairments whose counterfeiting was almost entirely contingent on careful and creative costuming, mental disabilities were invisible and could not be discerned by simple ocular proof. This made madness/foolishness exceptionally difficult to identify and exceptionally threatening to a public that feared feigners of disability. At the same time, mental disabilities were also granted vividly visual cues, developed over the centuries into nearly emblematic forms: madmen wore very few clothes or none at all, had either wild, unkempt hair or were entirely bald, and traditionally carried a weapon, usually a club.38 Fools wore striped or checked robes or cloaks, usually in green or yellow (the well-known “fool‟s motley”), a belled or tasseled cap, and also brandished a weapon-like item, although fools‟ weapons were usually distinctly non-threatening, often a marotte or fool‟s head.39 This contrast of eye-catching costume and invisible impairment not only made for effective theatre, but lent itself remarkably well to revenge tragedies which were obsessed with uncovering the unseen and testing the edges of human sanity. For this reason, fools and madmen, both real and fraudulent, proliferate in revenge tragedies. Similarly, the religious contradictions of mental and intellectual disability made its performance useful for revenge drama. The image of the fool or the madman could not be easily divorced from its negative sacred associations: the opening words of Psalm 52—“The fool hath said in his heart, „There is no God,‟”—and the accompanying

38 David A. Sprunger, “Depicting the Insane: A Thirteenth-Century Case Study,” in Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations, ed. Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 2002), 231-33.

39Southworth, Fools and Jesters, 163-174. A marotte was “a baton carried by a fool or jester as a mock emblem of office,” which often featured a replica of a fool‟s face at one end. (Oxford English Dictionary, New Edition, online.) 23 illustrations in medieval Psalters cemented the connection between the person with mental impairments and the atheist.40 This often-allegorical treatment of madness/foolishness was literalized by Renaissance humanists who associated reason with the divine and, therefore, characterized the loss of reason as a break with God.41 On the other hand, persons with mental impairments were granted a uniquely intimate connection with God through their interpretation as “innocents,” “holy fools,” whose lack of fixation on worldly things led them to be thought of as Christ-like. This interpretation was informed by a competing Biblical text: 1 Corinthians 4:10, which begins, “We are fools for Christ‟s sake.” Erasmus plays on this contradiction of associations when he has his Folly, previously depicted as the source of vice, declare herself the only true wisdom, since salvation is itself a type of divine madness.42 These conflicting connections made persons with mental and intellectual impairments decidedly difficult to interpret in early modern England, and, therefore, uniquely appropriate for avenging counterfeiters, since they walked that same difficult line between defying God and doing God‟s will. Antonio and his audience are certainly well aware of the biblical injunctions against revenge, yet, like other avengers before him, Antonio repeatedly figures his act of personal judgment as ordained by God.43 In this way, his counterfeiting of foolishness is well suited for a revenge tragedy since it further reinforces the question of divine censure versus divine consent.

40 Sprunger, “Depicting the Insane,” 231.

41 Allen Thiher, “Madness and Early Modernity in Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Descartes,” in Revels in Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 74.

42 Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, ed. and trans. Clarence H. Miller, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 132-38.

43 For an extended reading of the divine approval of revenge in this play, see Phoebe S. Spinrad, “The Sacralization of Revenge in Antonio‟s Revenge,” Comparative Drama 39.2 (2005): 169-85. 24

The feigned mental impairment of the protagonists in revenge tragedies asserts the major themes of the genre in other less metaphorical ways as well. For example, madness reinforced the familial connections it also severed. Not only were family members usually the primary caregivers for persons with mental and intellectual disabilities, but an individual‟s capacity to acknowledge and abide by familial ties was one of the primary factors in assessing his or her mental fitness. The failure to recognize a family member—or even the failure to recognize the authority of a family member— could lead to a label of “witlessness” or “insensibility.”44 This contradiction made the presence of mental impairment in revenge tragedy particularly apt, since the primary conflict of the drama often hinges on an avenger‟s clash of familial obligations: in order to earn bloody justice for one family member, Hamlet, for instance, has to kill another. Mental and intellectual disabilities throw into relief both the avenger‟s shattering of familial bonds and his absolute commitment to those relationships. The familial conflicts encoded in madness and foolishness also highlight the violence that was a hallmark of these plays and these disabilities. One of the qualities frequently used to identify (or at least qualify) early modern mental disabilities, especially those categorized as “madness” or “lunacy,” was the threat an individual posed to the peace. As Peter Rushton points out, mental disabilities often went unlabeled during the English Renaissance until the danger of physical harm was evident.45 Claudius alludes to this potential for violence when discussing Hamlet‟s madness—“I like him not, nor stands it safe with us / To let his madness range,” a potential that Hamlet fulfills in the murder of Polonius.46 Although madness and lunacy threatened physical danger,

44 Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 126-27.

45 Rushton, “Lunatics and Idiots: Mental Disability, the Community, and the Poor Law in North-East England,” Medical History 32 (1988): 37-38.

46 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Thomson, 2006), 3.3.1-2. 25 paradoxically, they also resisted the responsibility for that violence. One of the key euphemisms for mental and intellectual disabilities in early modern England was “innocent,” a term that implied both a purity that would not entertain the possibility of violence and a lack of responsibility for any potential harm that might occur.47 Revenge tragedies fixate on this duality, exploring both the simultaneous guilt and innocence of the initial perpetrator and, primarily, the guilt and innocence of the avenger himself, who must engage in unlawful violence in order to restore justice. In this way, having the avenger take on or be overtaken by madness increases the dramatic expectation of violence—and the ethical conundrum—inherent in revenge tragedies. Madness elevates the question of “Will he or won‟t he take revenge?” by transforming it into “Will he be too innocent to commit the required vengeance or will he be so guiltily enraged that he would be unable to stop himself from killing even if he wanted to?” Rather than simply serving as a somewhat unlikely diversion for the avenger, disability becomes a vital part of the anticipatory deferment of violence and its ethical complications. Of the many connections between the feigning of disability and revenge tragedy, perhaps the most significant is their mutual focus on audience. Marjorie Garber details the way that Renaissance tragedies carefully craft audience complicity, lulling spectators into a sense of safety that is ultimately undermined by the actions of the drama. She asserts that the events of the play require a reciprocal action between the individuals on the stage and those in the audience, and, only through this relationship, is the tragic action fully realized.48 Barbara J. Baines argues that Antonio‟s Revenge, specifically, is a play about audience response. She contends that the characters have an intentionally acute awareness of their own words and actions as works of art. By heightening the characters‟

47 Rushton notes poignantly that “innocent” as a euphemism for mental/intellectual disabilities was especially popular among the relatives of people with those impairments, “Lunatics and Idiots,” 37.

48 Garber, “„Vassal Actors‟: The Role of Audience in Shakespearean Tragedy,” Renaissance Drama 9 (1978): 88-89. 26 aesthetic self-awareness, Baines asserts, Marston throws into relief their utter lack of moral self-awareness, creating a deliberate disconnect for the audience that allows Marston to use this revenge tragedy to comment on the genre at large.49 Performances of disability share this same focus. In rogue literature, as we have seen, fraudulent disability was allegedly employed by thieves in order to elicit a certain audience response— almsgiving—just as it was employed by the authors of rogue pamphlets to elicit a corresponding but contradictory response: the quelling of charity. The use of fraudulent disability in Antonio‟s Revenge reaffirms these connections, emphasizing the centrality of audiences (both the onstage viewers of Antonio‟s performance of foolishness and the off- stage witnesses in the playhouse) to the larger workings of the tragedy, and, at the same time, instructing the audience on appropriate practices of charity. Antonio himself draws attention to the importance of audience when he first dons his “fool‟s habit,” at the beginning of act 4. The three other characters who witness his transformation (his mother, Maria; her servant, Lucio; and a Venetian courtier, Alberto), all express serious doubts about his choice of costume, but Antonio insists that choosing any other disguise would be “solid folly” (4.1.8). He outlines the advantages of his costume to his mother and friends, and the first set of benefits he details are entirely focused on the response—or, rather, lack of response—the fool‟s habit will elicit from Duke Piero and his henchmen. Antonio argues that, dressed as a fool, he will have the social license to speak freely if he wishes and to gain full access to the Duke‟s court. Putting on this conspicuous disguise will paradoxically serve to make Antonio inconspicuous, or, at the very least, unthreatening: “When will the Duke hold fee‟d intelligence, / Keep wary observation in large pay, / To dog a fool‟s act?” (4.1.26-28).50

49 Baines, “Antonio‟s Revenge: Marston‟s Play on Revenge Plays,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 23.2 (1983): 279. 50 Antonio‟s insistence that his disguise will protect him from suspicion implies that his performance is that of a “natural fool,” since an artificial fool could not be trusted in the same 27

The social license that Antonio banks on to protect him is rooted to the centuries-long tradition of royalty keeping fools for entertainment, but that tradition was also one of simultaneous—if conflicted—charity. Tudor monarchs made their keeping of court fools an opportunity for public charity: they fed, clothed, and sheltered their “innocents” as a way of broadcasting their royal beneficence.51 (Similar behavior is modeled in Piero‟s relationship to the genuine fool, Balurdo, which I shall examine in more detail later.) In this way, the response Antonio anticipates from the court for his performance of foolishness cements an opposite response for the audience of Antonio‟s Revenge. Instead of seeing fools as deserving of social and financial generosity, the off-stage audience learns to view them with suspicion. In addition to explaining how counterfeiting a fool will help him gain the reaction he wants from his spectators, Antonio argues that feigning foolishness will help him react appropriately to the tragedy he has suffered, transforming himself into a type of ideal audience as well. Like the audience reaction he desires from Piero and his men, Antonio‟s ideal spectatorship is really a response defined by a lack of response. Although

Marston opens the play by announcing that it is designed for those who have “a breast / Nailed to the earth with grief,” Antonio wants to feign foolishness so that he may remain impervious to emotion as he witnesses his own tragedy (21-22). For him, a fool is graced with the ability to maintain “an unturned sail with every wind; / Blow east, blow west, he stirs his course alike” (4.1.40-41). Foolishness becomes for Antonio what death is for Hamlet: a much-desired refuge from the pain and confusion brought on by his father‟s death and his mother‟s remarriage. In fact, Antonio even characterizes foolishness as a possible protection from madness. “Had heaven been kind,” he says, “Creating me an

way; Antonio‟s actions further bear this out, as does the presence of a genuine natural fool, Balurdo, who provides both a template for and a parallel to Antonio‟s performance.

51 Southworth, Fools and Jesters, 61-63. 28 honest senseless dolt . . . I could not thus run mad / As one confounded in a maze of mischief” (4.1.48-49, 54-55). Antonio gets exactly the reaction that he anticipates from Piero. The Duke is oblivious to the presence of his adversary in the court, and seems to be dismissive of the new addition to his entourage precisely because that addition is a fool. Although Antonio begins act 4, scene 2 in his fool‟s costume blowing bubbles, Piero only seems to notice him halfway through the scene. When he finally does notice him, the Duke expresses no suspicion at all about the authenticity or the identity of the fool, instead responding with charitable, if condescending, acceptance. He speaks childish babble (“Dud-a, dud-a”) to Antonio before giving him a gift (4.2.52). Although we are not told what this gift may be, the joke that Piero makes afterward—“Why, lo, sir, this takes he / As grateful now, as a monopoly”—highlights this moment of generosity (4.2.52-53). However, Piero‟s charity is not only complicated by its obliviousness, but by its duplicitiousness. In an aside, he reveals that he means to win the fool over only to take advantage of him. He even advises that, if one has designs for subterfuge, “your unsalted fresh fool is your man” since only he is able to be an uncritical audience and will not discern the “leaks of [a villain‟s] defects” (4.3.43-44). Of course, this lack of discretion that Piero gloats over is the exact behavior that he himself exhibits. In enacting foolishness, Antonio literally makes a fool out of Duke Piero.52

Although Antonio‟s performance makes the Duke a dupe, it does just the opposite for the audience of Antonio‟s Revenge. Like rogue pamphlets, Marston‟s play instructs his audience on how to respond to disability, specifically warning them to be skeptical of disabled beggars lest they be made fools themselves by falling prey to counterfeiters.

52 It seems significant that “fool” as a verb meaning “to dupe or to trifle with” and “to cheat by trickery” becomes current during this time period. The Oxford English Dictionary dates examples of the earliest uses of this meaning of “fool” to the turn of the seventeenth century (New Edition, online). 29

Having the villain of the play walk so easily into this well-rehearsed trap emphasizes for the audience both his complicity in his own downfall, and, thus, his deserving of it, and their own need not to follow after him. In addition, Piero‟s aside further serves to caution audiences against almsgiving. By suggesting that the Duke‟s generosity towards the fool is motivated by his desire to manipulate him, audiences are not only warned against practicing charity themselves, but taught to be suspicious of the motives that inspire charity in others. The reaction of Antonio‟s friends and family to his counterfeiting stresses this connection between disability and the problem of charity. His mother and his friends caution him strongly to reconsider his costume, insisting that feigning foolishness will debase him. Maria and Alberto are distressed by what this counterfeiting may do to his social status—“such feigning, known, disgraceth much,” his mother warns—and they also express fear of what it may do to his essentially noble nature. His disguise is “unsuiting to [his] elate spirit” and will “disgrace [his] high resolve” (4.1.2, 10). The classist overtones to their warnings underscore the specificity of their complaint; they are expressly concerned with Antonio disguising himself via disability. Alberto suggests a more suitable costume for him, one that distinctly resembles Marston‟s disguised protagonist in The Malcontent. “Rather put on some trans-shaped cavalier, / Some habit of a spitting critic, whose mouth / Voids nothing but gentle and unvulgar rheum of censure,” Alberto pleads (3-6). The embittered courtier Alberto imagines is a less precarious costume for Antonio, since it still asserts his noble birth. Their paranoia about the disguise of disability may be inspired by disability‟s associations with begging; even when Antonio does not ask for charity, Piero extends it to him. Accepting charity, especially when it is undeserved, may have been so ignoble as to undermine Antonio‟s inherent nobility, further reinforcing the injunction against almsgiving. However, it is likely that their aversion to disability has less defined and discernable motives. The presence of a genuine fool, Balurdo, who is not only a knight but an intimate member of 30

Piero‟s entourage, suggests disability can be concurrent with noble status, although perhaps its presence indicated the flexible definition of “nobility.” Regardless, Antonio‟s mother and friends see his performance of disability as one that fundamentally endangers who he is and what he hopes to accomplish. The fact that Antonio‟s allies take issue with his specific disguise draws attention to the distinctiveness of Antonio‟s disguise among other stage counterfeiters. Most other counterfeiting protagonists in revenge tragedies feign madness, using their disguise to take advantage of their already-muddled state of mind. In these cases, it becomes increasingly unclear even to the counterfeiters themselves whether their feigning has stayed within the bounds of their control or if their performance has become reality. Unlike the avengers who feign madness, whose disguises are really just another version of themselves (Hamlet is still Hamlet, but mad), Antonio‟s foolishness means that he transforms his whole identity. He is no longer Antonio; in fact, he has word spread that Antonio has committed suicide in a fit of despair, ironically affirming his earlier statement that foolishness would protect him from madness. Instead his disguise allows him to put on another identity entirely, and he becomes the nameless fool whom Duke Piero not only fails to recognize as a feigner but also fails to recognize as his enemy. Antonio‟s choice of disguise, then, makes the distinction between performance and reality both more and less distinct. On one hand, unlike the other feigning avengers, his performance is a clear departure from his authentic self, but, since it requires him to fully immerse himself in that new identity, the transformation is that much more complete. And, initially at least, Antonio has some difficulty shaking off his fool‟s habit.

When he first introduces his disguise, Antonio justifies his counterfeiting by quoting “that Florentine, / Deep, deep-observing, sound-brained Machiavel” in asserting that “[h]e is not wise that strives not to seem fool” (4.1.24-25).53 However, Antonio would

53 Machiavelli dedicates an entire section of his Discourses on Livy to the idea “that it is a very wise thing to simulate craziness at the right time.” Machiavelli praises Junius Brutus, who 31 have done better to listen to the deep-observing, sound-brained Bordelais Montaigne, who, always sensitive to the dangerous powers of imagination, warned that:

Mothers are right to scold their children when they play at being one-eyed, limping or squinting or having other such deformities; for, leaving aside the fact that their tender bodies may indeed acquire some bad habit from this, it seems to me that Fortune (though I do not know how) delights in taking us at our word: I have heard of many examples of people falling ill after pretending to be so.54 Antonio‟s performance hints at this potential danger in counterfeiting disability. At the conclusion of his first (and only on-stage) performance in front of Duke Piero,

Antonio congratulates himself on the success of his feigning by resolving to abandon his disguise: “Antonio‟s dead!” he says gleefully, “The fool will follow too” (4.3.101-02). But he doesn‟t cast off his performance of disability so easily. Later in that same scene, when Maria tells Piero about Mellida‟s sudden death upon learning of Antonio‟s “suicide,” the same dangers are reiterated. Maria states that her fool—Antonio, still in disguise—was present at Mellida‟s deathbed and even temporarily brought Mellida back from the dead to make his presence known to her. Whether or not Mellida recognized her still-living lover is unclear. Maria says that, while the “audacious fool” kissed her hand and called her name, Mellida only “fumbled out, „Thanks, good—‟ and so she died” (4.3.186). In the next scene, Antonio is still dressed in his fool‟s habit when he is praying, implying that his counterfeiting extends even to God. As with Mellida, it is unclear whether or not God recognizes Antonio. After all, Antonio begs God for death, but the only death he encounters is that which he metes out himself. Antonio‟s difficulty in

feigned madness in order to escape observation and buy himself time to overthrow the ruling authorities and free Rome, concluding, “Thus one must play crazy, and make oneself very much mad, praising, speaking, seeing, doing things against your intent so as to please the prince.” Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 213-14.

54 Montaigne, “On not pretending to be ill,” in The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 2003), 782. 32 controlling his counterfeiting echoes the warnings of Montaigne and Antonio‟s friends and family about the dangers of feigning disability. In doing so, Antonio‟s performance further cautions against extending charity towards persons with disabilities, since it suggests that disability is a choice or, more likely, an appropriate consequence for a foolish action. In his address to God, as elsewhere, the specificity of Antonio‟s disguise as a fool is important. Unlike the pretend madmen with their constant implication of violence, Antonio describes himself to God as a “poor, poor orphan; a weak, weak child” (4.4.14).

This characterization of himself as an “innocent,” one of the most common euphemisms for intellectual disability in the Renaissance, at just the moment when he is struggling to reconcile himself with the death of Mellida, recalls his previous statements detailing the virtues of feigning foolishness. Earlier in act 4, Antonio praised the “chub-faced fop [who] / Shines sleek with full-crammed fat of happiness,” impervious to the draining effects of sorrow (4.1.42-43). Continuing his performance of foolishness in soliloquy demonstrates his positioning of God as his audience, and it reveals the self-reflective nature of his counterfeiting. Antonio doesn‟t immediately abandon his fool‟s habit because his impulse to revenge clashes with his desire to attain the innocent fool‟s perpetual happiness. In his counterfeiting, Antonio attempts to transform himself via impassioned acting into an impassive audience.

It is important to note that Antonio‟s prayer is interrupted by Pandulpho, and, in the brief interaction that then occurs, most of the major conflicts of the drama are abruptly resolved. Although they have both previously demonstrated varying degrees of reluctance to accept their roles as avengers, here Antonio steels himself to complete the vengeance that he has already begun with the murder of Piero‟s son, and Pandulpho abandons his Stoic principles and vows to join him, concluding that “Man will break out, despite philosophy” (4.5.46). Yet why this encounter—which occurs, bizarrely, with Pandulpho‟s son‟s corpse laid “thwart” Antonio‟s prone body—serves as such a striking 33 catalyst for action is unclear. It could be simply a matter of dramatic necessity: we have reached act 4, scene 5, after all, and need our protagonists ready to complete the drama with the requisite revenge. Notably, however, this is the last scene in which Antonio appears dressed in his fool‟s disguise. The next time he appears on stage, in act 5, scene 3, he is outfitted in his “masker‟s attire,” setting the table for his Thyestean banquet. This encounter is also the first time that Pandulpho sees Antonio dressed as a fool; in the earlier court scene, where Antonio feigns for Piero, Pandulpho is conspicuously absent. Antonio‟s counterfeiting, then, is the unifying factor that motivates this transformation; feigning always puts the focus on the response of its audience, and the response here is revenge. Pandulpho‟s reaction upon meeting Antonio in his fool‟s disguise reveals the way that counterfeit disability spurs him on towards vengeance. Pandulpho laments the difficulty of knowing people‟s true intentions in what he significantly terms “this apostate age” as the same difficulty one has in discerning true identity when it is disguised by “a painted breast” (4.5.34, 37). Referencing counterfeiting verbally while Antonio in his fool‟s habit signals it visually, Pandulpho‟s climactic exclamation, “Alas, poor innocent!” becomes pointedly confused (4.5.43). Is he speaking to his unfairly slaughtered son, or is he speaking to the “innocent” on whom his son‟s body rests? The convergence of the two, in both address and position, seems to resolve any moral conflicts that might have restrained Antonio from revenge. As an “innocent” himself—and merged with the true innocence of the murdered son—Antonio seems freed from any potential guilt that would come from taking revenge on his enemies and, therefore, free to exact vengeance without fear of divine retribution. Previously, Antonio‟s feigning of foolishness has attempted to make passive audiences of both himself and others. And although he may initially be able to successfully manipulate Piero into the type of audience he desires, he cannot do the same to himself or Pandulpho. Pandulpho eventually becomes aware that he cannot sustain his 34

Stoic impassivity, and he ironically figures his failure as an audience member as a failure of performance. In a dizzyingly meta-theatrical statement Pandulpho—acted, of course, by one of the Children of Paul‟s—declares himself

Like to some boy that acts a tragedy. Speaks burly words and raves out passion; But when he thinks upon his infant weakness, He droops his eye. (4.5.48-51) The gap between actor and role that this speech draws attention to corresponds to Antonio and Pandulpho‟s inability to separate themselves from their prescribed roles, no matter how much they resist. They attempt to remain emotionless in the face of tragedy— Antonio by transforming himself into a fool and Pandulpho by retreating into his Stoic principles—but they cannot maintain their emotional detachment. When Pandulpho witnesses his performance of disability, Antonio‟s feigning falters, demonstrating his inability to resist the powerful emotions inspired by tragedy, but the sight of Antonio reduced to foolishness, as well as the way in which his “innocence” merges Antonio with his dead son, similarly moves Pandulpho to recognize his own overwhelming emotions.

This performance, then, causes Antonio and Pandulpho to transform themselves from audience members into actors. Of course, this is a dissonant resolution, since the end of the play can only be achieved through the grotesquely violent and morally compromised bloodbath conclusion. Here, as elsewhere in the play, fraudulent disability is figured as a damaged and damaging theatrical vehicle that consistently highlights inappropriate responses to its performance. The presence of Balurdo, the genuine fool, provides counterpoint to Antonio‟s feigned foolishness. Balurdo‟s initial role in the drama is traditional, almost trite. He is comic relief, a standard court fool who is retained for his amusing malapropisms and his fine singing voice. (In fact, he is granted knighthood at the end of Antonio and Mellida based solely on the virtue of his musical abilities). At the same time, he is also a “natural” fool, born to foolishness rather than an “artificial” fool; Balurdo is witless, and his 35 witlessness is used to underscore the condemnation of counterfeiting and charity present in Antonio‟s performance of foolishness. For instance, the speech that Piero makes upon first encountering Antonio in his fool‟s habit in act 4, scene 2 is virtually identical to the speech he makes in act 2, scene 1 where, after commissioning Balurdo to do his dirty work, he expresses his thanks for “slavish sots / Whose service is obedience and whose wit / Reacheth no further than to admire their lord” (2.1.57-59). Indeed, it is Balurdo‟s oblivious compliance with Piero‟s wishes that serves to make Antonio‟s performance of foolishness so unthreatening. Yet, as it is also Balurdo‟s complacency that makes him the

Duke‟s pawn, his presence undermines Antonio‟s stated desire to achieve happy oblivion in his feigning of foolishness, since it reveals the consequences of such ignorance. However, Balurdo, like Antonio, does not remain impassive throughout the play. Although he has previously witnessed the Duke‟s various infamies without comment, when Piero refuses to grant Pandulpho mercy and rescind his banishment even after his son‟s innocence has been proven, Balurdo recognizes this injustice for what it is and cannot remain silent. “God‟s neaks,” he blurts, “he has wrong, that he has; and, „sfut, and

I were he, I would bear no coals” (4.3.126-27). With this sudden burst of empathy, Balurdo, for the first time, asserts his own subjectivity. Piero seems ill-equipped to respond to this unexpected confrontation from his least confrontational courtier. He first mocks Balurdo, stuttering “How now, fool, fop, fool!” at him (4.3.129). Then, in spite of

Balurdo‟s increasingly articulate protests, he ignores him; in an aside that interrupts this exchange, we find Piero distractedly weighing new marriage prospects for his daughter rather than considering the seriousness of the charges that the fool levels at him. When he finally does return his attention to Balurdo, it is to have him quickly—almost dismissively—sent to the dungeon: “Lap him in rags and let him feed on slime / That smears the dungeon cheek. Away with him!” (4.3.148-49). Balurdo‟s subjectivity exposes Piero‟s charity as a sham, and he is quick to realize the price that this rush of emotion has cost him. Balurdo tries to retract his momentary independence, pleading “In 36 very good truth now, I‟ll ne‟er do so more; this one time and—” but he is cut off by Piero and quickly escorted from the stage (4.3.151-52). When Balurdo emerges from the dungeon in act 5, he genuinely needs charity. Crawling out from under the stage, he somehow breaks out of his prison; his methods of escape are unclear, but his description of himself as “gaunt as lean-ribbed famine” suggests that starvation made him thin enough to slip between the bars (5.2.3). For the first time in the play, Balurdo is in need and not simply by virtue of his disability. He is starving, freezing, shelter-less, and his language, which has been confused throughout the play, fragments into sing-song scraps that call to mind the ravings of Edgar in King Lear. “O cold, cold, cold, cold, cold!” he sputters, “O poor knight, O poor Sir Geoffrey! Sing like an unicorn before thou dost dip thy horn in the water of death. O cold, O sing, O cold, O poor Sir Geoffrey, sing, sing!” (5.2.13-16).55 When Antonio, Pandulpho, and their comrades stumble across him on their way to the murder-masque, Balurdo is lying in the gutter, his words reduced to a whisper. The avengers recognize him immediately and do not stop to question his identity or the authenticity of his need. When they suggest that, if he only had a costume as they did, Balurdo would be welcome to join them in their final act of revenge, he replies, “[Y]ou talk of revenge, my stomach‟s up, for I am most tyrannically hungry” (5.3.51-52). Connecting his need to their vengeance, Balurdo again turns the acceptance of charity into an acquiescence of individuality. Just as he complied with Piero‟s misdeeds in return for his generosity, we see Balurdo repeat the same behavior with Antonio and his friends. He knows almost nothing of their plans for revenge, but when he asks if they can offer him warmth, shelter, food, and clothing and they respond affirmatively, his mind is made up. “Then I am for you,” he says, explicitly sacrificing his subjectivity for their charity (5.3.58).

55 Balurdo‟s ravings here conform to Carol Thomas Neely‟s characterization of fragmented and quotational mad language in early modern drama. See “Reading the Language of Distraction: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear” in Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 46-68. 37

Antonio‟s Revenge, for all of its eccentricities as a dramatic text, exemplifies the disability-disguise trope in many ways, particularly as it was employed in early modern revenge tragedies. It demonstrates how the feigning of disability is used as plot device to facilitate the hero‟s delay of revenge, while also asserting the appropriateness of the villain‟s punishment, since, much like the coney described in rogue pamphlets, he implicates himself in the deception that ultimately leads to his death. Additionally, counterfeiting disability succinctly but complexly embodied many of the themes of revenge tragedy: conflicts of familial loyalty, questions of guilt and innocence, the intervention or absence of God, and, especially, the problem of accurate discernment. This consistent attention to audience interpretation facilitated one of the disability- disguise trope‟s most important projects: instructing the audience of the play how to react to disability, both on the stage and in the streets of London. Specifically it taught them to be wary of giving or receiving charity since, in Antonio‟s Revenge, gifts of benevolence have dire consequences for all parties involved in their exchange. In his final lines, Antonio says that the appropriate reaction of a “choice audience” would be weeping instead of applause, but, although pity might be required for the death of Mellida, the play makes clear that, when it comes to disability, pitiful tears—and the charity that might accompany them—are the wrong response (5.6.67).

The Dramatic Relationship of John Marston and Ben

Jonson The drastic differences in topic, tone, and reception between Antonio‟s Revenge and Bartholomew Fair have long kept these two dramas from being paired. This is only unusual given how frequently other plays by Marston and Jonson are read in relationship to one another—or, to be more accurate, how often Marston‟s plays are read in relationship to Jonson‟s. Their characters are often compared (Malvole in Marston‟s The Malcontent to Jonson‟s equally embittered protagonists, for instance), as are their tactics 38 of narration and dramatic structure, the playwrights‟ awareness of public persona, and their sense of authorial control. Yet, in spite of all of their artistic similarities, the feature of Marston and Jonson‟s writing that is most often contrasted is their characterization of one another, notably in what has been termed the “Poetomachia” or War of the Theaters.56 The personal and professional relationship of these sometime collaborators and longtime competitors is vital to understanding the connections between their texts, including Antonio‟s Revenge and Bartholomew Fair. John Marston began his literary career in the field of formal satire, where thinly veiled attacks on one‟s colleagues were not only standard but the way to successfully establish a literary reputation. Marston followed this model himself, and two of his early works, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and The Scourge of Villanie, critique the poetry of Joseph Hall. When he made his transition into dramatic work, his first play followed much the same model: Marston produced Histriomastix, a traditional morality play with a satirical bite that lampooned the well-known ego of the more-established playwright, Ben Jonson. It is unclear whether this was composed before or after Jonson staged his own critique of Marston‟s over-blown language in Every Man Out of His Humor, or when these two plays were written in relation to Jonson and Marston‟s collaboration with Henry Chettle and Thomas Dekker on the now-lost drama, The King of Scots.57

What is clear is that this initial skirmish of words instigated the larger Poetomachia, which wore on for the next several years and occasionally caught up other

56 The term “Poetomachia” was first used by Thomas Dekker in his introduction to Satiromastix to describe the literary conflict that had “lately commenc‟d between Horace the second [Jonson], and a band of leane-witted poetasters [Marston and co.],” in Materialien zur Kunde des älteren Englischen Dramas [Materials for the Study of Old English Drama], ed. Hans Scherer, vol. 20, (Leuven: Uystpruyst, 1907), ll. 8-9.

57 For a discussion of the dating of these plays, see James P. Bednarz, “Marston‟s Subversion of Shakespeare and Jonson: Histriomastix and the War of the Theaters,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1993): 103-28. 39 early modern playwrights—like Thomas Dekker—in its conflict. In 1600, Marston transformed Jonson into the over-confident critic and cuckold Brabant Senior in Jack Drum‟s Entertainment. Jonson retaliated with Cynthia‟s Revels, where Anaides, a “strange arrogating puff” who fails at delivering even a decent prologue, is an underling of a distinctly Marstonian stripe.58 Like his other two plays in this battle, Marston‟s What You Will in 1601 features a scene where a bombastic, mean-spirited satirist—who expresses a theatrical sensibility remarkably similar to Jonson‟s—is shamed for being over-critical. Jonson responded with Poetaster later that same year. This play features a scene where Horace, here a barely-disguised version of the author himself, forces Crispinus, Marston‟s stand-in, to disgorge a series of words and phrases (over half of which are taken directly from Antonio‟s Revenge) that Jonson/Horace criticizes for being pretentious and over-blown.59 This last humiliation ostensibly brought an end to Marston and Jonson‟s on-stage feud, and, only two years later, Marston penned congratulatory verse in honor of Jonson‟s Sejanus. The next year, Marston even went so far as to dedicate The Malcontent to

“Benjamin Jonson, the most profound and, at the same time, most polished of poets,” a surprisingly generous gesture offered by “his true and heartfelt friend.”60 However, the fact that it is The Malcontent of all possible plays that Marston dedicates to his former rival suggests that, perhaps, their bad blood had not been entirely purged. Although the two collaborated with George Chapman on the notoriously incendiary Eastward Ho! in 1605, when they were imprisoned because of the play‟s critical comments about the

58 Jonson, Cynthia‟s Revels, ed. Alexander Corbin Judson, Yale Studies in English 45 (New York: Holt, 1912), 3.3.26.

59 James P. Bednarz, “Writing and Revenge: John Marston‟s Histriomastix,” Comparative Drama 36.1-2 (2002): 29.

60 John Marston, The Malcontent in English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington (New York: Norton, 2002), 550-613. 40

Scots, it seems that Jonson attempted to pass the blame for the offense onto Marston.61 Although all three poets were eventually released from jail, for Marston, at least, it was the beginning of the end of his literary career. He was sent to Newgate Prison in 1608 for an unknown offense; critics have speculated that it may have been, as before, for overstepping the bounds of satire, or, possibly, for a more banal reason like debt.62 Regardless, by 1610, Marston had retreated from London to Oxford and from the stage to the Church. He was ordained a priest and, apparently, remained in that vocation until his death in 1634. In life, as in literature, Jonson emerged the victor.

By the time that Jonson wrote Bartholomew Fair in 1614, the Poetomachia was long over, but there are suggestions that the problems it caused for Jonson and the feelings it aroused in him were not so easily put to rest. Gregory Chaplin has argued that the intimate but fraught connections between Jonson‟s trickster teams in such plays as Volpone and The Alchemist reflect his own competitive collaborations with other dramatists. Chaplin details the way that these partnerships had a tendency to produce results—scams to fleece other people of their money and plays that criticize the ruling powers—that quickly escaped the grasp of their creators‟ control.63 The Poetomachia itself, although not so formal in its construction as their co-authored plays, is nevertheless a cooperative creation between Marston and Jonson that bears many of the same marks as their stage-bound collaborations. The Poetomachia is a sprawling work that entertained audiences in an attempt to make its creators wealthy and respected, yet it proved unwieldy and produced unforeseen consequences. Like his other creative partnerships, it

61 E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), 3:254-56.

62 W. Reavley Gair, introduction to Antonio‟s Revenge, by John Marston (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 11-12.

63 Gregory Chaplin, “„Divided Amongst Themselves‟: Collaboration and Anxiety in Jonson‟s Volpone,” English Literary History 69.1 (2002): 57-81. 41 seems to have remained current with Jonson, even with the passing of time. In 1619, he bragged to the poet William Drummond that, as a result of “many quarrels” with Marston, he “beat him and took his pistol from him,” and, to top it all off, “wrote his Poetaster on him.” His clear delight in Marston‟s personal defeat is repeated in his quip to Drummond that “Marston wrote his father-in-law‟s preaching and his father-in-law wrote his comedies.”64 The War of the Theaters may have been over by 1614, but, for Jonson at least, its long-standing resentments and far-reaching repercussions were still alive and echoing throughout the text of his newest work.65

It is my contention that Bartholomew Fair can be read as Jonson‟s response to the disability-disguise tradition in general and to its use in Antonio‟s Revenge in particular. Jonson takes up that trope not once, but twice in Bartholomew Fair, including a fraudulent madman in the form of the gentleman-rogue Quarlous and a fraudulent fool in the disguised magistrate Adam Overdo. This conspicuous doubling of the familiar convention draws attention to it, and, as we will see, Jonson takes it up in order to tear it down, employing the trope as a way to critique its use, as well as a way to critique the social and political agendas that often motivated the staging of fraudulent disability. In fact, it is the very tearing down of this tradition that Jonson uses to build up and defend Bartholomew Fair. Jonson begins Bartholomew Fair by cautioning his audience that “[h]e that will swear that Jeronimo [The Spanish Tragedy] and [Titus] Andronicus are the best plays yet shall pass unexcepted at here as a man whose judgment shows it is constant and hath

64 C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), 1:140, 138.

65 Charles Cathcart has argued that the conflicts of the Marston/Jonson rivalry are evident throughout Marston‟s later plays, including those not usually identified as part of the Poetomachia, suggesting that the War of the Theaters also endured for Marston longer than has previously been asserted. See Marston, Rivalry, Rapprochement, and Jonson (New York: Ashgate, 2008). 42 stood still these five-and-twenty or thirty years” (105-09). By calling attention to these two revenge tragedies—both of which employ the disability disguise as a central part of their plots—only to critique them as passé, Jonson sets up a dichotomy between these older, outdated forms of theater and the new one he is about to present. Given the many similarities between the two plays and the number of other times Jonson singled it out for special vituperation, one cannot help but feel that failing to include Antonio‟s Revenge in this list is itself a kind of slight; its absence suggests that it doesn‟t even rate a passing sneer. Jonson does borrow its doubling of disability, however, pairing a real fool,

Bartholomew Cokes, with a feigned one, Overdo, only to double it again: Troubleall, the genuine madman, provides contrast to Quarlous‟ fraudulent madness. This literal one- upping of Marston‟s theatrical tactics mirrors Jonson‟s intentions for taking up this trope. Not only will he do what Marston does, but he will do it bigger, better, and, in doing so, will employ the disability-disguise trope only to criticize it, specifically the way it is enacted in revenge tragedies like Antonio‟s Revenge. We see this escalation-as- condemnation again when Justice Overdo first decides to put on the costume of foolishness. Just as Antonio justifies his use of the fool‟s habit by quoting Machiavelli, Overdo goes one further, citing Machiavelli‟s source when he shouts “On Junius Brutus!” (2.1.46).66 Both plays use fraudulent disability to probe the practices and ideas of charity, and both do so by placing the focus not on the performances of disability but, rather, on the responses to those performances. But while Marston employs the disability-disguise trope to teach his attentive viewers how to react to the non-standard body, Jonson again goes one further and uses this well-rehearsed tradition in order to teach his spectators how to react to performance in general. Antonio‟s Revenge teaches audiences how to

66 Like Antonio, Justice Overdo‟s disguise of disability is clearly that of a “natural fool,” both because of his insistence that his disguise will protect him from suspicion and because of his paralleling with a genuine natural fool. 43 protect themselves from thieves, but Bartholomew Fair teaches audiences how to be audiences.

A Fool and His Money are Soon Parted (by a Madman): Fraudulent Disability in Bartholomew Fair Justice Adam Overdo‟s introductory soliloquy outlines a common problem for him and for Jonson‟s audience: how does one gain accurate information when so many sources are unreliable? Overdo, as a justice of the peace, is forced to rely on “a foolish constable or a sleepy watchman” to give him eye-witness accounts, and he asserts that these untrustworthy informers lead to judicial mix-ups that are embarrassing at best and unjust at worst (2.1.29-30). His epistemological difficulties lead Overdo, like Antonio, to put on a fool‟s habit in order to move unnoticed throughout the Fair and gain personal— and, therefore, accurate—knowledge of the many “enormities” committed there.67 The problem, of course, is that first-hand knowledge does not guarantee accuracy in judgment, and Overdo‟s repeated mistakes and misinterpretations have led critics to read him as a parody of various authority figures, specifically those associated with the Renaissance Humanist project that Overdo claims for himself.68 I believe that Overdo‟s

67 That Overdo hides his identity to discover crimes and injustices at the Fair also links him to the disguised-magistrate tradition popular in early modern drama (Measure for Measure, The Malcontent, etc.). While I certainly acknowledge the authenticity of this connection, the specificity of his costume leads me to focus on his performance as part of the disability-disguise trope. The Justice‟s fixation on “enormities” further affirms this focus. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “enormity” as “a breech of law or morality,” but also notes that it was used to describe a “divergence from a normal standard or type,” specifically physical abnormalities, making the counterfeiting Overdo‟s inability to identify enormities all the more ironic (New Edition, online).

68 For more on Overdo‟s connection to early modern figures of authority, see Debora K. Shuger, “Hypocrites and Puppets in Bartholomew Fair,” Modern Philology 82.1 (1984): 70-73. For a reading of Overdo as a parody of Renaissance Humanism, see Ian McAdam, “The Puritan Dialectic of Law and Grace in Bartholomew Fair,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 46.2 (2006): 415-33, and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, “„I do not know my selfe‟: The Topography and Politics of Self-Knowledge in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair,” in Textures of Renaissance Knowledge, eds. Philippa Berry and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 177-98. 44 professional incapability combined with his counterfeiting allow Jonson to make an even more pointed critique, using Overdo to challenge the institutions and efforts that sought to identify and define disability, including the disability-disguise tradition itself. Even with first-hand access, Overdo is a judge incapable of correct judgment. He is formally authorized to distinguish between real and feigned disability—a professional disability-identifier—who can‟t recognize a fool or a madman when he sees one. After the introduction of governmental compensation for disability during the Reformation, local magistrates like Overdo were tasked with the appropriate distribution of those funds. This meant identifying those persons whose impairments warranted financial compensation (and determining how much compensation they deserved), and, therefore, defining the often-slippery parameters of disability on a uniquely case-by-case basis.69 Overdo‟s disguise, then, is comically hypocritical, as he is doing just the thing he would have been charged with rooting out and punishing. However, it is Overdo‟s failures of interpretation, more than his double standards, that Jonson skewers in his characterization. Once Overdo begins his quest to uncover enormities at the Fair, he witnesses a number of crimes without recognizing any of them for what they are, and regularly mistakes criminals for well-meaning citizens (and vice versa). Most of all, he even fails to recognize fraudulent disability when his own performance is replayed for him by another counterfeiting character. Casting a magistrate like Overdo as markedly incapable of correctly interpreting disability critiques the system that would have sought to legally distinguish disability in the first place. Jonson‟s politics tended to be quite conservative, and Bartholomew Fair has often been interpreted as critical of the

69 For the legal statue that affirmed the authority of local overseers under Elizabeth, see An Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds, and for the Relief of the Poor and Impotent (14. Eliz. I c. 5). Handbooks were published to assist magistrates in their processes of discernment, providing fascinating insight into how local officials evaluated and assisted persons with disabilities. See, for example: Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (London, 1618); An ease for oversseers of the poore (London, 1601). 45

Reformed establishment, which would have empowered magistrates like Overdo to extend their jurisdiction to include disability.70 As Jonson paints it, the system of justice, particularly as it relates to disability, is broken. It is no accident that Overdo is introduced to the audience already dressed in the guarded coat and fool‟s cap that make up his disguise; his past judicial mistakes (including confusing an ecclesiastical officer with a recusant priest and a music student with a pimp) affirm that he is a fool with or without the disguise. Overdo quips that people “may have seen many a fool in the habit of a justice, but never till now a justice in the habit of a fool,” but it is clear that, in spite of his self-confidence, this is the first time he has ever been clothed accurately (2.1.7-9). Even so, Jonson‟s critique of Overdo and the establishment that he stands for doesn‟t lessen the reality of the problems that the Justice faces. Overdo might be unequal to the task of properly discerning information, especially information about disability, but fears of incorrect interpretation were rampant in early modern England. The appointment of magistrates like Overdo to identify disability was justified by the argument that almsgiving citizens were incapable to doing so correctly themselves. As mentioned before, the difficulty of accurate discernment was one of the motivating factors in the popularity of rogue pamphlets; their stated goal was to assist readers in properly identifying the people and situations they encountered in order to keep themselves from being swindled, especially by feigners of disability. It is also a problem Jonson enmeshes into the very fabric of his drama, as Bartholomew Fair is rife with characters that are unreliable sources of information. Keeping track of everyone and their schemes in the play is a complicated task that seems designed to confuse the interpretations and allegiances of the audience. The proper discernment of disability is exceptionally complicated by the inclusion and confusion of the real fool, the feigned fool, the real

70 For more on Jonson‟s politics and a thoughtful reading of them in Bartholomew Fair, see Jeanette Ferreira-Ross, “Religion and the Law in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 18.2 (1994): 45-66. 46 madman, and the feigned madman throughout the play.71 Jonson‟s intentional incorporation of these difficulties into the text of Bartholomew Fair forges a link between the audience of the play and Justice Overdo, since they both face difficulties of discernment. Forcing the spectators of the play into the same situation as the foolish Overdo could certainly be read as a classic Jonsonian jab at the audience, but, because Jonson also deliberately creates audience members that are better spectators than Overdo—they cannot err in judgment as often as the Justice does, or else the jokes at his expense wouldn‟t play as humor—it seems that the critique is not aimed at their abilities of discernment, but, instead, the very desire to interpret people and situations at all. In the same way, Overdo‟s poor judgment is really a symptom of a larger problem. His fixation on rooting out the enormities of the Fair is the real source of his buffoonery, since the play ultimately argues that enormities cannot—and, perhaps, should not—be labeled and eliminated.72 For this reason, Jonson deliberately targets the disability-disguise trope. In its theatrical incarnation and, especially, in revenge tragedies like Antonio‟s Revenge, the fraudulent-disability tradition rehearses proper and improper discernment. Employing

71 To further the confusion of disability that that Jonson inspires with the real/feigned fools/madmen, a number of the characters closely associated with the Fair have implied, if not overt, disabilities, contradicting Jonson‟s claims in the Induction that his play will be free of the Fair‟s traditional monsters. Joan Trash, for instance, describes herself as “a little crooked o‟my body” (2.2.25-26); Ursula‟s assistant is named Mooncalf, a word that was regularly used to describe monstrous births, and she calls him a “changeling,” another word used to signal early modern disability (2.2.69). Even Ursula herself, the “pig-woman” of the Fair, is linked to physical difference: “Pig-women”—meaning woman-pig hybrids, rather than women who sell pork—were famously displayed in the side-shows of Bartholomew Fair; in reality, these “monsters” were shaved, sedated bears. Ursula‟s name (meaning “she-bear”) puns on this connection.

72 Critics regularly read Bartholomew Fair as a (limited) celebration of disorder and excess. For one indicative example, see W. David Kay, “Bartholomew Fair: Ben Jonson in Praise of Folly,” English Literary Renaissance 6 (1976): 299-316. This possibility is seemingly affirmed by the Fair‟s origins in foolish revelry: St. Bartholomew‟s Priory and Hospital—as well as the Fair held on their grounds—were founded through the bequest of Rahere, the fool employed by Henry I in the twelfth century. 47 fraudulent disability so as to instill suspicion and therefore curb almsgiving reinforced political and social reforms Jonson tended to oppose. More importantly, the trope of feigned disability also affirmed the possibility that all knowledge can and must be known—and, therefore, controlled—which, in Bartholomew Fair, at least, does not seem to be the case. (It‟s possible to read Quarlous as an accurate interpreter and controller of knowledge, but more on him shortly.) Additionally, the necessarily suspicious audience that the tradition attempted to foster was just the kind of audience that Jonson so notoriously disliked.73 Those spectators were the kind who would, in an effort to ensure correct identification, try to read the characters of the play topically or critique the realism of the drama. Jonson rails against just such behaviors in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, chastising audiences for their “inspired ignorance” (140). Jonson, then, appropriates the trope of fraudulent disability to demonstrate its faults; Overdo‟s counterfeiting doesn‟t teach appropriate interpretation, but, rather, reveals how inadequate the disability-disguise tradition is to that task.74 Overdo‟s performance of disability clearly mirrors other performances in this tradition, principally those in revenge tragedies, but transferring the trope across genres immediately transforms it. That which is staged very seriously in Antonio‟s Revenge or Hamlet becomes just the opposite when it is enacted at Bartholomew Fair. For instance, as mentioned previously, Justice Overdo justifies the use of his disguise as Antonio does, by citing Junius Brutus‟ feigning, but his pedigree is made absurd when used to justify

73 George E. Rowe, Jr. states, “Of all the major writers of the English Renaissance, Jonson was the most explicitly concerned with the accurate interpretation of his works, a concern which led him, inevitably, to a concern (almost an obsession) with audience.” “Ben Jonson's Quarrel with Audience and its Renaissance Context,” Studies in Philology 81.4 (1984): 447.

74 Umphrey Lee has suggested that Bartholomew Fair is a parody of another play within the disability-disguise tradition, Henry Chettle and John Day‟s The Blind Beggar of Bednall Green. Although his character-specific connections are not fully convincing, Lee is correct identifying of Jonson‟s awareness of—and disdain for—the use of the disability-disguise trope. See “Bartholomew Fair and the Popular Dramatic Tradition,” Louisburg College Journal of Arts and Sciences 1 (1967): 6-16. 48 this carnivalesque comedy; as is vividly illustrated in the puppet-performed Hero and Leander, classical sources do not translate to Bartholomew Fair. In revenge tragedies, the motive for feigning disability is almost always surveillance; the avenger disguises himself as a madman or a fool in order to discover the murderer of his loved one(s). In his comedy, Jonson drastically and humorously lowers the stakes of that surveillance, presenting a counterfeiter intent on uncovering, instead, puddings that are too big and loaves of bread that are too small.75 Finally, feigning in revenge tragedies usually ends when the avenger puts off his disguise and takes up the necessary slaughter he has been deferring throughout the course of the play; often this concluding spectacle takes the form of a meta-drama or, especially, a banquet, as does the climatic masque in Antonio‟s Revenge. This final feast is mirrored in the conclusion of Bartholomew Fair, but, again, comically transposed: Overdo reveals his identity in the final act but his dramatic control is undercut by the other counterfeiter, Quarlous, who exposes Overdo‟s genuine foolishness. Humbled, the Justice invites the entire assembly back to his home for supper, and the play ends on this note of communion, both personal and alimentary. Unlike the

Thyestean banquet of Antonio or Titus Andronicus, Overdo claims that this concluding meal will be “[f]or correction, not destruction; for building up, not tearing down” (5.6.120).76 In addition to generically transposing the disability disguise trope, Jonson further undercuts the tradition by reversing its intended reception. Most counterfeiters on stage, especially those in revenge tragedies, put on the disguise of disability in order to make

75 Surveillance was a popular theme for early modern comedy as well as revenge tragedy (highlighted in plays such as Volpone and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside); this was also true of the disguised-magistrate tradition, in which Justice Overdo‟s performance also participates. However, Overdo‟s casting of himself as an early modern Junius Brutus, as well as the way he imagines the uncovering of “enormities” as a restoration of justice to a society that has perverted the law leads me to interpret his performance as satirizing revenge tragedy in particular.

76 Translation from Bevington. 49 themselves less noticeable as they go about their business. Certainly this is Justice Overdo‟s intention; he describes his fool‟s habit as “the cloud that hides me,” and declares “Under this covert I shall see and not be seen” (2.1.45-46). But instead of making him less noticeable, his counterfeiting of disability rather invites attention. He draws the interest of virtually every character that encounters him, and, although they do not recognize him as the Justice of the Fair, the performance does not receive the dismissive response desired by Overdo and achieved by avenging counterfeiters like Antonio. Just the opposite: Bartholomew Cokes, the genuine fool, becomes fixated on him and, as a result, gets robbed—twice—and the crime is blamed on Overdo both times. The Justice is first beaten soundly by Cokes‟ guardian, Wasp, and then placed in the stocks on the orders of his own wife.77 Even those few times when Overdo‟s feigning seems to foster a passive audience, there are suggestions that he is not so inconspicuous as he hopes. He is treated with general ambivalence by Ursula and her servant, Mooncalf, who (mis)identifies him as “mad Arthur of Bradley, that makes the orations” (2.2.128). Overdo exults in being mistaken for the foolish folk-hero, but the reference to the rowdy, extravagant banquet in “The Ballad on the Wedding of Arthur of Bradley” foreshadows the supper Overdo will have to host himself at the end of the play.78 Additionally, Urusula and Mooncalf only respond to Overdo passively because they are enacting a performance of their own, one where they feign tolerance in order to lull him into spending more money at their booth. One of the reasons Justice Overdo‟s performance of disability fails to protect him from attention is that it‟s not much of a performance at all. Characters comment on his

77 The punishment of Overdo ironically affirms the criminal associations of early modern disability; Overdo is automatically suspected because of his “disability,” and, indeed, he is guilty, but of counterfeiting, not thievery.

78 This ballad is included in N. D.‟s An Antidote against Melancholy made up in pills, compounded of Witty Ballads, Jovial Songs and Merry Catches (London, 1661). 50

“guarded coat,” the traditional garb of a fool, but, beyond his dress, the Justice does little to disguise his speech or character.79 Just like the avenging counterfeiters, Justice Overdo‟s feigning blurs the lines between performance and reality, but, unlike those counterfeiters, this ambiguity does more to reveal than conceal him. With many fraudulently disabled avengers like Antonio, the thinness of their disguise demonstrates their potentially genuine madness to the off-stage audience only, while the on-stage audience of their friends and enemies remains conveniently oblivious. Jonson highlights the artificiality of this aspect of the disability-disguise trope by making Overdo‟s performance traditionally revealing while reversing the traditional response. Overdo breaks character regularly—ranting about the evils of tobacco, trying to “rescue” the cutpurse Edgeworth from corrupt companions, etc.—and although this confirms his very real foolishness, it also draws the attention of the fairgoers who encounter him. When his wife, Dame Overdo, discovers him railing against the enormities of the Fair, she comments to Cokes, “He hath something of Master Overdo, methinks, brother.” “So methought, sister,” he responds, “very much of my brother Overdo, and „tis when he speaks” (2.6.75-78). The fact that even the real fool, Cokes, nearly recognizes the feigning fool underscores the absurdity of how, in the theatrical tradition of counterfeit disability, revealing costumes were supposedly more concealing. Jonson‟s characterization of Justice Overdo affirms his familiarity with the disability-disguise tradition, and, further, indicates that the audience of Bartholomew Fair would also have been familiar enough with the tradition to appreciate his lampooning of it. By taking up many of the conventions of the genre only to invert characters‟ usual responses to feigning, we can see how the play attempts to invert audience responses to the trope as well. In Overdo, Jonson demonstrates the absurdity of suggesting that fraudulent disability could successfully lead to the reestablishment of order, or, as Overdo

79 Both Ursula (2.5.50) and Wasp (2.6.18) mention Overdo‟s guarded coat. 51 himself puts it, that there is “a doing of right out of wrong, if the way be found” (2.1.11- 12). Jonson‟s critique extends to the social intentions of fraudulent disability, as well as the theatrical ones. Counterfeiting was frequently used to instruct readers and audiences on the proper response to persons with disabilities, but neither on-stage nor off-stage audiences seem to learn any such lesson from the counterfeiting done by Justice Overdo. If anything, his performance suggests that the systems that warn against counterfeiting are suspect themselves. Overdo‟s bumbling inability to identify disability, his overblown efforts to root out enormities, and the show he makes of himself just as he is attempting to remain incognito all assert that fraudulent disability has value only as a spectacle, not as a legitimate instrument of social instruction. Jonson slyly underscores this by his reference to Thomas Harman‟s A Caveat for Common Cursetors. Nightingale, the troubadour, sings a ballad entitled “A Caveat against Cutpurses,” that, much like Harman‟s tract, blames the victims of crime if they fail to protect themselves from the machinations of wily thieves. Yet, ironically, this very ballad is used to distract Cokes so that his money may be stolen. Making such a warning a cover for robbery indicates that, in Bartholomew Fair, using crime as a way to deter crime is a crime in itself. The reference to A Caveat is doubly pointed; Thomas Harman, just like Justice Overdo, was a magistrate charged with rooting out enormities, not the least of which was counterfeit disability.80

Given the scathing critique of the disability-disguise tradition that Jonson creates in the person of Justice Overdo, it comes as something of a surprise when Quarlous, the closest Bartholomew Fair comes to having a protagonist, puts on the costume of a

80 Linda Woodbridge perceptively points out that Harman himself was guilty of feigned disability. He begins A Caveat by stating that his observation of rogues and vagrants was occasioned by a long-term illness that confined him to his country estate, but, throughout the text, Harman describes himself participating in all kinds of taxing activities that could have only been the result of good health. Read more on this in Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 59. 52 madman and feigns distraction in act 5. His intentions for adopting the disguise are clear: in the wager that he and Winwife make for the hand of Grace Wellborn, the outcome is determined randomly by the genuine madman, Troubleall. Quarlous desires to find out which suitor Troubleall selected to marry the wealthy young lady and feigns madness in order to do so. But when he learns that Troubleall chose his rival and, simultaneously, that the wealthy Puritan widow, Dame Purecraft, believes that she can only achieve true happiness if she marries a madman, he seizes the opportunity afforded him by his serendipitous costume. What‟s more, by further feigning madness, the crafty Quarlous procures a legal warrant to secure the fortune of Grace Wellborn for himself, even as he allows Winwife to marry her. At the end of the play, Quarlous emerges victorious— virtually the only character not to be shamed, swindled, or physically injured—thanks in large part to his counterfeiting. What then do we make of this performance of disability? Does it reflect or remake the assessment of fraudulent disability Jonson offered in the characterization of Justice Overdo? How does Quarlous‟s performance complicate Jonson‟s social commentary, as well as his opinions of theatrical practice as they related to the tradition of feigned disability? Quarlous is, in practically every respect, an entirely different kind of counterfeiter than Justice Overdo. He is motivated to take up counterfeiting by the possibility of personal gain, not by professional obligation, moral zeal, or classical precedent. He is, seemingly, an excellent interpreter of the network of people and schemes at the Fair, unlike Justice Overdo who cannot correctly read anyone or anything. Indeed, observation is nearly all he does; unlike so many other Jonsonian protagonists (Volpone, Dauphine,

Face and Subtle), for most of the play he has no scheme of his own, no carefully planned and elaborately constructed ploy to increase his wealth and his position in the world. Quarlous is simply there to enjoy the spectacle of the Fair, and it is only because of his active observation that the opportunity to participate in a standard Jonsonian stunt—this time in the form of counterfeiting—becomes possible. 53

However, Quarlous‟s powers of perception are not as straightforward as they may initially seem; the gamester is only a good interpreter because he chooses not to interpret the Fair accurately. Unlike Overdo, whose failures of identification are the result of his passion for classification and criticism, Quarlous seems little concerned about correctly labeling the things and people he encounters, and it is that dispassionate acceptance (and, sometimes, even full-on denial) that allows him to read the workings of Bartholomew Fair correctly. When he and his companion, Winwife, first enter the Fair, Quarlous deliberately misidentifies the merchants, calling Leatherhead, the hobby-horse seller,

“Orpheus among the beasts, fiddle and all!” and Joan Trash, the gingerbread maker, “Ceres selling her daughter‟s pictures in gingerwork!” (2.5.7-8, 10-11). Quarlous‟s ironic mislabeling of the merchants demonstrates his willingness to embrace the Fair for its potential, rather than dwelling on its filth and flimsiness. It is a generous perspective he extends even to himself. Winwife is appalled that the trinket-hawkers would view the two gentlemen as potential customers, but Quarlous corrects him, pointing out that their very presence at the Fair makes them—literally—fair game. Quarlous, like Leatherhead and

Joan Trash, doesn‟t let prejudice cloud his vision but is open to seeing opportunity regardless of its guise. When Knockem, the horse-courser who revels in the deliberate misidentification game of “Vapours,” accosts the two gallants, Winwife correctly describes the rogue as an “inconvenience” and tries to avoid him (2.6.29). Quarlous, however, intentionally overlooks the shame of such an inappropriate acquaintance and embraces Knockem as one of the spectacles of the Fair; accordingly, Knockem makes important introductions for Quarlous that assist him in his eventual exploits. By willfully misidentifying the vagabonds and rogues of Bartholomew Fair, Quarlous creates co- conspirators out of what Overdo would consider enormities. In doing so, he secures his fortune and resolves the major conflicts of the play. While this acceptance of the dirty, dangerous and carnivalesque world of the Fair assists Quarlous in his successes and recommends him to the audience as a potential 54 model of tolerance, the generosity of his vision has its limits. Specifically, Quarlous regularly interprets disability as an opportunity for him to exercise his mercenary manipulation; much like Duke Piero in Antonio‟s Revenge, Quarlous sees persons with disabilities as instruments for his own machinations rather than individuals capable of personal subjectivity; he certainly never sees them as unfortunates deserving charity. He affords disability only entertainment value, and it is most entertaining to him in its exploitation. When Quarlous first encounters the genuine fool, Cokes, he laments that he and Winwife arrived too late to witness the picking of Cokes‟s pockets, which he calls

“this prologue o‟the purse.” He comforts himself with the knowledge that the gentlemen will have “five acts of [Cokes] ere tonight,” concluding that, even if the Fair fails to entertain them, the fool will be “spectacle enough” (3.2.2-3). He and Winwife get to witness such a show just a few acts later when Cokes is robbed again; the two gentlemen not only do not intercede to stop the thieves from taking advantage of Cokes‟s “innocence,” but, instead, offer color commentary on the robbery as it is happening (5.3). When Quarlous and Winwife overhear one of the still-disguised Overdo‟s anxious asides,

Winwife uncharacteristically expresses pity for the seemingly deranged man, exclaiming, “What does he talk to himself, and act so seriously? Poor fool!” Quarlous is, instead, dismissive, brushing off Winwife‟s temporary compassion in favor of more spectacle. “No matter what,” he replies, and, noting the reappearance of Cokes, instructs “Here‟s fresher argument; intend that” (3.3.41-44). When Quarlous finally forgoes spectatorship for active participation in the events of the Fair it is as a result of his willingness to exploit disability. He declares that he will

“make use” of Troubleall, which he does at the real madman‟s very personal expense (4.6.161). In a distinct reversal of the charitable mandate to clothe the needy, the gentleman Quarlous steals the madman Troubleall‟s gown and hat in order to make his performance of disability fully convincing. It is significant that, like the avengers who put off their inevitable action until the final moments of the play, Quarlous delays taking 55 action until the end of the drama. Just as counterfeiting is the impetus for Antonio‟s transformation from observer to actor in Marston‟s play, so it is for Quarlous in Jonson‟s play. Quarlous hits upon the idea of feigning madness in the very last scene that Overdo appears in his fool‟s costume, while watching the poorly disguised Justice respond with pity to the real madman, Troubleall (4.6). This focus on response to disability leads to Quarlous‟s resolution to take advantage of that response, just as, in Antonio‟s Revenge, Pandulpho‟s pitying of the “innocent” Antonio (and, therefore, his dead son who he conflates with the counterfeiting hero) spurs the avengers on to kill Piero. Fraudulent disability and the charity that it elicits in its audiences becomes the motivation for action in both plays, although in both cases the action benevolence inspires is pointedly reversed: Quarlous turns to deception and out-right thievery as his counter-response; Antonio and Pandulpho commit murder. Quarlous‟s failure to respond to disability with charity illustrates Jonson‟s purpose in pairing his feigning of madness with Justice Overdo‟s feigning of foolishness. While Jonson uses Overdo‟s counterfeiting to critique the disability-disguise tradition, he is not willing to, correspondingly, advocate for uncritical almsgiving. Just the opposite: Jonson uses these two parallel performances to condemn charity. Virtually every time a character in Bartholomew Fair extends material generosity to another character, they get swindled. Bartholomew Cokes is a prime example: he wildly overpays Leatherhead and

Joan Trash when he purchases all of their goods, only to have them sneak off with his money before he can collect their hobby-horses and gingerbread (3.4). Later in the play, the cut-purse, Edgeworth, takes further advantage of Cokes‟s charity by hiring a costermonger to intentionally spill his pears in front of Cokes, calling out pitifully “I am a poor man. Good sir, my ware!” When Cokes kindly stops to help him gather up the spilled fruit, Edgeworth makes off with his cloak, hat, and sword (4.2.34-35). (It is doubly ironic that Cokes is robbed for his generosity, given that he is genuinely disabled and, therefore, traditionally a recipient rather than a distributor of charity.) Cokes‟s 56 guardian, Wasp, is mocked throughout the play for his short temper and his disapproving attitude towards the Fair. He is further criticized for the one attribute that could potentially be to his credit: his sense of devotion to his foolish charge. He regularly laments his responsibility to Cokes, but, just as regularly, exhibits remarkable loyalty (if not affection) for the young man and is unwilling to abandon him even when he reaches the limits of his frustration. Yet, at the end of the play, this attachment is stripped from him. After a stint in the stocks (the result of his own explosive anger), Wasp is chastened enough to relinquish his oversight of Cokes, stating ashamedly that “[h]e that will correct another must want fault in himself” (5.4.99-100). The loss of this responsibility leaves Wasp unmoored, and we hear little from him for the rest of the play. In the final moments, when it is revealed that Wasp lost the warrant that ensured Cokes‟s marriage to Grace Wellborn, he is literally reduced to silence, which is conflated with a very real fear for his life. “I will never speak while I live, again, for ought I know,” he says miserably, and the play offers no suggestion that his anxiety is not legitimate (5.6.111). Wasp‟s repayment for his responsibility is humiliation and fear.

Yet it is the two counterfeiters, Justice Overdo and Quarlous, who most embody Bartholomew Fair‟s condemnation of charity. Overdo begins his ill-fated feigning of foolishness by characterizing his scheme to reveal enormities as an opportunity for generosity. He cites as his model “a worthy worshipful man,” a previous London official who also disguised himself in order to uncover legal violations. Upon discovering abuses among the food-sellers of the city, the magistrate would “give the puddings to the poor, the bread to the hungry, the custards to his children” (2.1.22-24). The confusion of language here—does “his children” refer to the children of the hungry and poor, or the children of the city official?—indicates the potential for corruption in the Justice‟s otherwise good intentions, but, unlike Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, Overdo never succumbs to hypocrisy. Instead, charity itself is his downfall. The genuine madman wandering the Fair, Troubleall, used to be an officer in Justice Overdo‟s court, but was driven to 57 distraction when he was fired from his position. When Overdo learns the fate of his former employee, he feels an overwhelming sense of pity for the man now irrationally obsessed with him. “If this be true, this is my greatest disaster,” he exclaims, “How am I bound to satisfy this poor man” (4.1.63-64). Troubleall‟s disquieting—if flattering— ravings win Overdo‟s sympathy, and he vows that he will not “breathe in peace till [he has] made him some amends” (4.6.159-60). Unfortunately for the Justice, his poor powers of identification converge with Quarlous‟s impressive powers of deception. Justice Overdo extends generous charity to the man he believes to be Troubleall—“Do you want a house, or meat, or drink, or clothes? Speak; whatsoever it is, it shall be supplied you”—but that man is, of course, Quarlous in disguise (5.2.94-96). The gamester does not hesitate to take advantage of the Justice, requesting from him a warrant without a specified object, essentially a legal blank check, and uses the warrant to secure Grace Wellborn‟s fortune for himself. Yet because Grace is Justice Overdo‟s ward, Quarlous is really stealing the money from Overdo. When Overdo makes out the warrant to Quarlous-as-Troubleall, he expresses relief at his opportunity to extend charity to a man that he believed to be wronged on his account. Like a classic coney, complicit in his own robbery, Overdo fails to realize that it was he himself who was being wronged by his actions. “Well,” he says, “my conscience is much eased,” implying that price of such a clean conscience is much higher than the foolish Justice—or any person willing to extend charity, even when it seems most deserving—could guess (5.2.127). Not only is Justice Overdo punished for being charitable, but Quarlous, who exploits that charity, is rewarded with more of the same. Just before Overdo offers him the warrant, Dame Purecraft, the Puritan widow intent on marrying a madman, confronts Quarlous. He initially tries to rebuff her by describing Puritans as a new category of rogue. “You are the second part of canters,” he says, “outlaws of order and discipline, and the only privileged church-robbers of Christendom” (5.2.44-47). Remarkably, Dame Purecraft‟s affirmation of that accusation forms the basis of her case for marriage. She 58 offers herself as an appealing mate by explaining the extent of her fortune; she has gained six thousand pounds by taking advantage of the charity of her fellow Puritans. Her position within her church‟s hierarchy has afforded her the opportunity to skim off of the fund designated for “the relief of the poor elect,” and she declares herself “a devourer, instead of a distributor, of the alms” (5.2.56-60). Quarlous, seeing the literal value of her offer—and, perhaps, something of a soul mate in the crafty and unscrupulous widow— accepts. Dame Purecraft gets the “madman” that she wanted, and Quarlous gets even more money at the expense of others‟ charity. By pairing these two schemers, the play suggests that anyone unwise enough to give their money away deserves to have it taken by anyone cunning enough to get it. In his epigraph to Bartholomew Fair, Jonson suggests that audience reaction— rather than theatrical action—is the real source of spectacle in his play. He affirms this in the play itself by taking up the disability-disguise trope and transporting it from the revenge tragedy to his wild, ribald city comedy. This generic translation, in addition to Jonson‟s exaggerations of the convention, demonstrates fraudulent disability‟s flaws as both a stage trope and an instrument of social education. The antics of Overdo and Quarlous parallel those of other avenging counterfeiters, especially Antonio in Antonio‟s Revenge (a text which Jonson had exhibited disdain for numerous times.) Further, while Jonson employed the disability-disguise tradition to critique it, in the person of Overdo we also see Jonson criticize the systems of power that sought to define and label disability in early modern England. Jonson goes so far as to condemn the impulse for identification of any kind, even as his play demonstrates the very real difficulty of accurate interpretation during the English Renaissance, particularly as it related to disability. Yet the inclusion of Quarlous as a counterfeiter makes clear that, while Bartholomew Fair might resist labeling and identification, it does not condone charity. For all that Jonson subverts the disability-disguise tradition, remaking it to highlight its weaknesses, ultimately he uses it in the same way that Marston and many other 59 playwrights did: to suggest that disability was difficult to detect, always potentially criminal, and not to be trusted, especially when it came to almsgiving. Marston and Jonson may have warred against one another personally and professionally, but, in this respect at least, they were united. Yet in using fraudulent disability to teach spectators to be wary of personal charity in Bartholomew Fair, Jonson contradicts his own critique of the trope since he simultaneously ridicules the disability-disguise tradition as inadequate to the task of instruction. Jonson makes his contradiction all the more glaring by using fraudulent disability for another, larger pedagogical project: instructing audiences on the very practice of being an audience. For Marston and many of the other playwrights who employ fraudulent disability, it was an instrument of social education as well as a handy plot device; for Jonson, the disability-disguise trope was also—and, perhaps, most importantly—an instrument of theatrical education. Since counterfeiting put the focus on how on-stage audiences responded to these performances of fraudulent disability, Jonson uses it as an opportunity to model for the attendees of Bartholomew Fair how exactly they should respond to the entire drama and not just these single moments of performance. The bad interpreter, Overdo, is motivated by a desire to reveal and control everything he encounters and, for this reason, he fails to correctly identify and respond to the Fair; similarly, his own performance fails to elicit the responses he desires. Quarlous, on the other hand, is an accurate interpreter because he is willing to suspend his disbelief (and his sense of decorum) and appreciate the Fair on its own terms; accordingly, his interpretations are rewarded and his performance elicits just the kind of response he intends it to achieve. It is uniquely important to Bartholomew Fair for attendees of the play to learn this theatrical lesson, for Jonson‟s use of fraudulent disability allows him to accommodate the cross-purposes to which he puts counterfeiting. After all, Jonson‟s contradictory use of the disability-disguise tradition aims to teach audiences that they should, Quarlous-style, disregard any and all such contradictions. 60

Carefully examining fraudulent disability in Antonio‟s Revenge and Bartholomew Fair, specifically its employment as an instrument of social instruction intended to limit almsgiving, raises a number of questions left unanswered by these plays: were there other ways to characterize counterfeiting—and, especially, possible responses to counterfeiting—than those modeled by Marston and Jonson? Could fraudulent disability be staged without enacting a condemnation of charity? I engage these questions in the following chapter, where I consider the way gender affected early modern constructions of disability and of charity. By exploring how female characters perform the non- standard body, I reveal new theological and theatrical possibilities within the tradition of feigned disability on the early modern stage.

CHAPTER II FEMINIZED DISABILITY AND DISABLED FEMININITY IN FAIR EM AND JOHN FLETCHER‟S THE PILGRIM

At first glance, Ophelia‟s madness is simply tragic. When, in act 4, scene 5 of Hamlet, she arrives at Elsinore suddenly “distracted,” muttering half-remembered songs and scattering flowers, the court is shocked by her sudden and precipitous fall from sanity. The King and Queen, her brother Laertes, Horatio, and even the Gentleman who announces her madness all respond with fear and despair to her condition. Ophelia‟s sexually explicit ravings unsettle those present, and they mourn the transformation of this formerly decorous young lady. Claudius speaks for everyone present when he laments “poor Ophelia / Divided from herself and her fair judgment, / Without the which we are pictures or mere beasts.”81 While negative, Ophelia‟s madness also affords her a level of personal agency that was unavailable to her previously. When sane, Ophelia is ruled by the expectations of others, controlled by the moral and social obligations forced on her by her father, her brother, Hamlet, the Queen, and others. Madness frees her to abandon such strictures and she mourns lost love, lost virginity, and her father‟s death with an abandon that facilitates its own consolation: “He is gone, he is gone / And we cast away moan” (4.5.200-01). Her sexuality, which earlier evoked anxiety in Polonius and Laertes and dizzying ambivalence in Hamlet, finds expression in the bawdy choruses she quotes. Before her madness, Ophelia is a character defined by her responses to others; her every scene features her receiving instructions on how to behave. These often-conflicting directives add to her emotional pressures, eventually resulting in her distraction. Once mad,

81William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Thomson, 2006), 4.5.85-87. All subsequent quotations from this text will be identified parenthetically by act, scene, and line number. 62 however, the same characters that demanded responses from Ophelia are now forced to react to her incitements. She doles out instructions along with her flowers—“You must wear your rue with a difference”—and exits and enters when she pleases, forcing the court to start and stop its political wrangling to accommodate her (4.5.186-87). Those characters who before dictated her actions and dismissed her are now forced to respond to Ophelia in precisely the way they should have earlier: Gertrude and Claudius express regret for their actions regarding her father‟s hushed-up murder, Laertes finally grants attention to his often-ignored sister, and even Hamlet, who before told Ophelia “I loved you not” is moved to declare that “Forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum” (3.1.120, 5.1.272-74). In fact, Ophelia‟s madness contains so much heretofore unspoken truth and her mad actions gain her so much previously forbidden agency that those who witness her distraction note its similarity to reason. The messenger who first announces her condition says with some suspicion that her behavior “would make one think there might be thought, / Though nothing sure” (4.5.12-13). Laertes similarly notes the sanity in her insanity, but his language contradicts that of the messenger when he says that “This nothing‟s more than matter” (178). Laertes extrapolates on this a few lines later when he describes his sister‟s ravings: “Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself / She turns to favor and to prettiness” (191-92). There is something unsettlingly positive occurring amidst all the tragedy of Ophelia‟s madness that makes it difficult for her audience to know how to respond to her or even how to identify her condition. Alinda, the heroine of John Fletcher‟s The Pilgrim, is a young woman in circumstances very similar to those faced by Ophelia in Hamlet. Alinda is the only daughter of an overbearing, self-satisfied nobleman who obsesses over his daughter‟s behavior. Her father‟s attempts to micromanage her romantic life estrange Alinda from her melancholic potential lover, Pedro. When the play begins, Alinda is admired for her decorum and piety, but, because of those attributes, she is entirely subject to the will of 63 others, especially her demanding father. Like Ophelia, these overwhelming social and familial pressures converge to drive Alinda to distraction. Once mad, she is free to speak and act on her own feelings, actively resisting the authority of her father in order to assert her own subjectivity and take control of her future. Unlike Ophelia, however, Alinda‟s madness is a choice. She decides to leave her father‟s home and take to the roads rather than marry Roderigo, the nobleman-cum-bandit her father has selected for her. In order to escape, Alinda puts on the disguise of madness to help her avoid recognition and complete her schemes successfully. As a result of her counterfeiting, Alinda relocates her lover Pedro, inspires Roderigo to a life-changing Christian conversion, and forces her father to relinquish his obsessive control over her and repent his overbearing ways. Ophelia‟s madness leads to brief self-expression, but it is, in many ways, just a prelude to her death. For Alinda, madness is not a tragedy. It facilitates her self-expression of personal agency so that she may orchestrate her own happy ending. The success Alinda achieves in counterfeiting is doubly unlikely given that she is a woman and that her madness is fraudulent. As Carol Thomas Neely has demonstrated, a specifically feminine type of madness was identified and articulated during this period: “Maides, Nunnes, and Widowes Melancholy” (as it was described by Richard Burton in his influential Anatomy of Melancholy) inspired virulent stigmatization in early modern culture, making Alinda‟s adoption of that madness to achieve her desired end all the more surprising.82 Additionally, as the previous chapter revealed, counterfeit disability was a target of social condemnation. Rogue literature identified feigners of disability as some of society‟s most dangerous criminals. This was affirmed by the stage tradition of fraudulent disability, where characters who perform the non-standard body are regularly singled out for corporeal or communal punishment. This condemnation was meted out to both

82 Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 69-70. 64 overtly criminal counterfeiters, like Trapdoor in Middleton and Dekker‟s The Roaring Girl and Flamineo in Webster‟s The White Devil, as well as those protagonists who perform disability to achieve ends that the audience may (nominally) support. After Ben Jonson‟s titular hero Volpone is apprehended for his various deceptions, including counterfeiting a number of impairments, he is condemned with a punishment that deliberately fits his crime: “And since the most [of your wealth] was gotten by imposture, / By feigning lame, gout, palsy, and such diseases, / Thou art to lie in prison, cramped with irons, / Till thou be‟st sick and lame indeed.”83 Avengers who put on madness were forced to contend with the slippage between their performance and reality, as if genuine distraction was a punishment they incurred for faking madness. Even those male counterfeiters who are fully heroic are only very rarely able to escape without some form of public shaming to caution them against repeating their behavior in the future. Yet of the nine different English Renaissance plays featuring women who feign disability, almost all of their protagonists achieve at least moderate success because of their counterfeiting, avoiding the censure imposed on male feigners.84 Why are female feigners so much more successful than male feigners on the stage? What is unique about their performances that allows them to elide the punishment experienced by men who counterfeit disability? And why do playwrights employ this unusual method to assert the agency of their heroines? This chapter will examine the performances of female feigners on the early modern stage, particularly those enacted by Alinda, who counterfeits madness and foolishness in Fletcher‟s The Pilgrim, and by Em, who counterfeits deafness

83 Jonson, Volpone in English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington (New York: Norton, 2002), 5.12.121-24.

84Early modern plays that feature female feigners of disability include: The Changeling, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley (1622); The Constant Maid, James Shirley (1640); Fair Em, Anonymous (c. 1589); The Honest Whore, Part 1, Thomas Dekker (1604); A Jovial Crew, or The Merry Beggars, Richard Brome (c. 1641); A Mad World, My Masters, Middleton (c. 1605); The Pilgrim, John Fletcher (1621); The Wild Goose Chase, Fletcher (c. 1621); Women Pleased, Fletcher (1619-23). 65 and blindness in Fair Em. These plays reveal the mutually constitutive relationship between disability and femininity in the early modern England, specifically the way in which performances of disability were simultaneously performances of femininity. I argue that this dual performance mode granted female feigners a freedom from suspicion not available to men who enacted the non-standard body. It also allowed them a unique opportunity to reshape their own feminine identities by exposing the constructs of both femininity and disability as culturally crafted constructs. Reformation debates about charity participated in this project of cultural reconstruction, and I reveal how they contributed to the formation (and limitations) of performative identity within the disability-disguise tradition.

Fictions of Contradiction: Women and Fraudulent Disability Men who feign disability in early modern drama have a variety of motivations. They may seek to uncover injustice and restore order by taking on the disguise of physical/mental impairment (like Justice Overdo in Bartholomew Fair or any of the fake madmen in the revenge tradition). Often these characters desire to restore their damaged personal reputations, which have been unfairly maligned (as in John Day and Henry Chettle‟s The Blind Beggar of Bednall Green). Other male counterfeiters fake disability in order to get rich—or get richer. This is certainly the case for the relatively few on- stage thieves who pretend disability, like Shakespeare‟s Simpcox in 2 Henry VI or Autolycus in The Winter‟s Tale. Far more common are gentleman (like Quarlous in

Bartholomew Fair) who are living beyond their means and are comfortable with a little criminal behavior so long as it provides them with cash. A few men in early modern drama even pretend disability in order to juggle illicit sexual relationships (for example, the heroes of Brome‟s The Court Beggar and George Chapman‟s The Blind Beggar of Alexandria). 66

When early modern women perform fraudulent disability on stage, there is only one motivation: marriage. Female characters may counterfeit a variety of disabilities in a wide range of contexts, but they consistently enact impairment in order to be married and, specifically, to be married on their own terms. For instance, in The Pilgrim, Alinda fakes madness and then foolishness so she can avoid marrying the outlaw her father prefers, and, instead, locate and marry her banished lover, Pedro. In Fair Em, the titular heroine‟s relationship is threatened by her intended husband‟s jealousy, so she performs first deafness, then blindness, and finally both impairments at once in order to allay his fears and secure his love for her. Significantly, not all women who feign disability in order to achieve marriage are motivated by love. Bellafront, the Honest Whore of Thomas Dekker‟s 1604 drama, is driven to marriage by repentance. She counterfeits madness— even going so far as to have herself committed to Bedlam Hospital—in order to marry a man she claims to hate because he was “the first / gave me money for my soul.”85 Neither are all the women who perform the non-standard body unmarried. A few are already married and feign disability in order to tip their relationships‟ balance of power in their favor. For example, Isabella, a madhouse keeper‟s wife in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley‟s The Changeling, pretends madness in order to resist suitors attempting to lure her into adultery. The savvy and strong will she demonstrates in her performance teaches her over-jealous husband to relinquish his obsessive hold on her and “change now into a better husband.”86 In Middleton‟s A Mad World, My Masters, a prostitute helps a wife burdened with a jealous husband teach him a lesson by counterfeiting. The Courtesan‟s “violent sickness” loosely resembles an epileptic fit (but is mistaken for the

85 Dekker, The Honest Whore, Parts 1 and 2, ed. Nick de Somogyi (New York: Routledge, 1998), 64. This text has assigned scene divisions, but no act divisions or line numbers. For this reason, it will be cited parenthetically by page number.

86Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling in English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington (New York: Norton, 2002), 5.3.224-25. 67 plague, the pox, and pregnancy) and it allows Mistress Harebrain the opportunity to meet with her lover even under the obsessive attentions of her husband.87 When Mistress Harebrain herself pretends illness later, it inspires her husband to repent of his paranoid suspicion of her—even now that his suspicion is justified. Just as the wife is rewarded for her deception (and, even more surprisingly, adultery) with marriage on her own terms, the Courtesan is also rewarded with an advantageous marriage to a young gentleman, demonstrating the surprising power of fraudulent disability in managing marriage on the stage.

For women in early modern drama, disability permits them to control their romantic futures by allowing them to act in ways that might be considered unfeminine (specifically, unchaste, deceitful, or disobedient) while still retaining the appearance of appropriate femininity. Female counterfeiters accomplish these marital transformations with overwhelming success. Seven of the nine plays I have identified that feature women performing disability end with the female feigner marrying the man of her choosing; the other two feature married women renovating the power dynamics of their marriages to grant themselves more personal freedom. As noted previously, this success is particularly remarkable given the lack of success demonstrated by most male stage counterfeiters, who usually face varying degrees of social and physical punishment for their performances.88 By feigning disability, these women defy the authority of fathers (A

Jovial Crew, The Pilgrim), mothers (Women Pleased), husbands (A Mad World, My Masters, The Changeling), even uncles (The Constant Maid). They make for themselves the matches that they want, with or without the compliance of their intended marriage partner. When the faithless Mirabel refuses to honor his promise to marry Oriana in

87 Middleton, A Mad World, My Masters in A Mad World, My Masters and Other Plays, ed. Michael Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3-65.

88 A notable exception to this is the Cripple, the protagonist of The Fair Maid of the Exchange, who I will examine in detail in the following chapter. 68

Fletcher‟s The Wild Goose Chase, her performance of madness and impending death shames Mirabel into repentance. In The Honest Whore, Bellafront feigns madness in the presence of the authority-wielding Duke of Milan, a performance which goads Matheo into admitting that he was the first man to pay her for sex. The Duke then forces Matheo to agree to marry her in the unlikely occasion that “her wits stand in the right place” (107). Immediately, Bellafront drops her disguise and triumphantly claims her right to marry Matheo. His grudging acceptance of this arrangement—“Come, wench, thou shalt be mine”—seems pointedly incorrect (107). It is clearly he who shall be hers.

Bellafront‟s actions mirror those of other female characters who feign disability: by counterfeiting powerlessness in the form of physical impairment, these women are able to stage reversals of power that achieve their desired ends while also, paradoxically, affirming their feminine virtues. The uniqueness of feminine disability on the early modern stage becomes even more pronounced when compared with the way feminine disability would be put to literary use in the Victorian era. In her study Fictions of Affliction, Martha Stoddard

Holmes identifies disability—particularly feminine disability—as a crucial part of the Victorian marital melodrama. Disability does not facilitate marriage for the heroines of these nineteenth-century texts, however; instead, disability prohibits marriage. Holmes explains: “These fictions overdetermine the disabled woman‟s unfitness for marriage by characterizing her as hopelessly alienated from normal life and her desire invisible to the non-disabled. Most significantly, however, they represent her as too feeling, too expressive, and potentially too sexual for matrimony.”89 For women on the early modern stage, disability does just the opposite: it permits them to control their romantic futures and exercise their desire by allowing them to act in ways that might be considered unfeminine while still retaining the appearance of appropriate femininity.

89 Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 39. 69

The success of these performances is ensured by the reciprocal relationship between femininity and disability in the English Renaissance. In early modern England— as now—disability was a particularly gendered condition. Like femininity, disability has often been interpreted as a “natural state of corporeal inferiority, inadequacy, excess, or a stroke of misfortune,” and, certainly in the Renaissance, such a totalizing interpretation was used as justification for the stigmatization of both women and people with disabilities.90 Because the loss of physical abilities was equated with weakness and passivity, impairment was interpreted as a distinctly feminine condition. The earliest definitions of disability formed in the English Reformation were shaped around an individual‟s (in)ability to perform productive labor. In spite of the fact that both men and women were active in early modern England‟s burgeoning labor economy, commercial productivity was seen as a primarily male attribute and lack of productivity seriously impeded any man‟s claim to full masculinity. The way that disability foregrounds the experience of embodiment also linked it to femaleness at a time when, generally, women‟s bodies were understood to be more carnal—excessive, expansive, messy, leaky, smelly—than men‟s more rarefied and spirit-affiliated forms. In early modern England, the non-standard body still carried with it the supernatural trappings of earlier corporeal theories, which imagined disability as a sign of divine judgment. The practice of physiognomy linked physical abnormalities to spiritual and moral defects. Physiognomy also served to gender disability, since, in the Renaissance, virtue was a masculine attribute. Patriarchal Christian notions of goodness were conflated with the classical concept of “virtus,” meaning manliness, courage and strength; those without virtue were inherently feminine. This complex gendering of disability made it commonplace in the Renaissance for women who failed to conform to cultural expectations of femininity to

90 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 259. 70 be characterized as physically and mentally defective: whether hermaphroditic “Roaring Girls” or deformed witches hiding their devil‟s teat, these women were often imagined as misshapen, monstrous, and mad. Just as disability was gendered in early modern England, femininity was, in many ways, disabled. Western thought has long imagined femininity as a type of deformity. Ancient anatomists characterized the female body as an undesirable variation on the masculine form: Aristotle suggested that women were defective versions of their male counterparts; Galen described female genitalia as internalized inversions of male reproductive organs. Plato—and the Renaissance scholars like Erasmus who studied him—debated whether women were better classed with monsters or with men. Thomas Aquinas believed that women were not explicitly monstrous (created against the intention of nature), but, rather, simply incomplete versions of their perfected male counterparts.91 The conception of women‟s bodies within the humoral system figured them as both contagious and prone to contagion, lacking the “positive” qualities displayed by male bodies and excessive in the “negative” qualities believed to be inherent to women.92

Even those Renaissance scholars and doctors who moved away from the Aristotelean/Galenic theories of sex definition (as many did in the seventeenth century) still imagined women as distinctly physically inferior to men. However their difference was perceived, women—particularly the bodies of women—were different, and that difference was used as justification for the exclusion and oppression of women at nearly

91 For a concise summary of early modern scientific and theological interpretations of gender, see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

92 Gail Kern Paster‟s Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) discuss humoral interpretations of gender in detail, particularly how they were performed on the early modern stage. 71 every major social, political, religious, academic, and artistic level.93 Contemporary feminist theorists have argued that, whatever its specific context, “female embodiment is a disabling condition in a sexist culture,” and certainly this was true of early modern England.94 This is not to say that femininity and disability were identical in early modern England. Femaleness had a specific set of traits that made it identifiable (however difficult that identification may have sometimes been), and it did not share all of those traits with disability. For example, two of the three primary feminine virtues—silence and obedience—were not virtues associated with disability, since classical tradition linked verbal critique and satire with the non-standard body.95 Similarly, the emerging category of disability was defined by criteria that were not exclusive to women. Neither its legal definition, which characterized disability in relationship to productive labor, nor its nascent cultural definition, which contrasted the eccentric body against some loosely imagined but strictly enforced standard, were synonymous with femininity. However, while these two categories were distinct, their overlap was such that, in early modern

England, one could not be a woman without experiencing the cultural effect of disablement, and one could not be disabled without experiencing the cultural effect of feminization. They were mutual but not interchangeable identities that facilitated a

93 I do not wish to suggest that women didn‟t find ways to resist that oppression, only that the systems that enacted that oppression were dominant. However, the forms of resistance employed by women in the early modern period often involved the abnegation or transformation of their female bodies in order to accommodate the disabling of their gender. Consider the stage and social practice of cross-dressing, or, in a more specific example, Queen Elizabeth‟s famous Tilbury speech, where she owned up to the “weak and feeble body of a woman,” only to claim for herself the “heart and stomach of a king.” Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 325.

94 Garland Thomson, “Integrating Disability,” 260.

95 See Klaus-Peter Koepping, “Absurdity and Hidden Truth: Cunning Intelligence and Grotesque Body Images as Manifestations of the Trickster,” History of Religions 24.3 (1985): 191-214 for an analysis of how the eccentric body participates in the literary and rhetorical tradition of satire. 72 circular justification for reciprocal oppression: women were stigmatized because they were like people with disabilities, and people with disabilities were stigmatized because they were like women. For this reason, disabled men and disabled women garnered distinctly different responses. Disabled men were treated as inherently suspect, since simply by being disabled they were unnatural and inappropriate: consider the libels directed at Sir Robert Cecil, which were regularly fixated on his disabled body.96 The feminization of disability, however, reinforced women‟s feminine identity. Because disability represented what were thought to be natural and appropriate qualities for women, it was regarded with less suspicion in women than in men. Records of early modern poor relief illustrate this variation in interpretation. Women were far more likely than men to be labeled as one of the “deserving poor,” a category primarily defined by disability.97 Although women maintained only a scant majority in most early modern English towns, they outnumbered men two to one in poor relief.98 Hospitals that explicitly catered to the physically impaired served an even higher percentage of women over men.99 The overlap between femininity and disability that made early modern men potentially unworthy of charity actually served to make women more worthy.

96 When Robert Cecil became Queen Elizabeth‟s youngest ever Privy Council member in 1591, he became the focus of much public criticism and private gossip. These screeds cited his body as proof of his untrustworthiness and deviancy. His elevated political status was regularly contrasted with his short physical stature, and his humpback drew unfavorable comparisons with animals (camels, toads, spiders, apes).

97 Although there are a number of possible explanations for this phenomenon, not the least of which is women‟s enforced dependence on others for financial security, it also demonstrates how women, far more than men, were thought to be deserving recipients of aid.

98 A. L. Beier, “Social Problems of an Elizabethan Country Town, Warwick, 1580- 1590,” in Country Towns in Pre-Industrial England, ed. Peter Clark (New York: Palgrave, 1981), 60.

99 Diane Willen, “Women in the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,” in Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women‟s History, ed. Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 186. 73

Early modern drama vividly demonstrates the way gender divided responses to disability. The performances that male and female feigners enact in these plays are virtually identical in their execution; their difference lies in how other characters react to them. On-stage audiences respond to the performances of male counterfeiters with suspicion, and male feigners are often discovered by a sharp-eyed observer who can see through their ruse. Ferdinando, for instance, is pretending madness when he is caught by another character pretending to be a doctor in Richard Brome‟s The Court Beggar; Pennyboy Senior, in Jonson‟s The Staple of News, has his performance of both violent illness and deafness uncovered almost immediately after he begins it. Women who put on the disguise of disability, however, do not face the same suspicion that male counterfeiters do. Other characters do not observe them as closely or treat them with such wariness, allowing these women to eventually reveal themselves instead of being revealed involuntarily. Female characters take advantage of the social and financial benefits afforded them by the non-standard body while eliding the criminal associations that those same performances attached to men.

Women who feign disability in early modern drama further ensure their success because of the way their gender enables them to perform disability as a type of drag. By enacting a version of the non-standard body that conforms to early modern stereotypes about both people with disabilities and women, female feigners highlight the artificiality of those categories of identity. Their performances erode what Judith Butler describes as “naturalized knowledge” about identity: in this case, the idea that people with disabilities are passive and effeminate and that women are submissive and physically unfit. In reality, this interpretation of the body is “based on a set of cultural inferences, some of which are highly erroneous.” By parodying norms that are assumed to be naturally occurring, drag illustrates that “reality” is not fixed or natural, and it shatters the false 74 sense of categorical difference that had previously been culturally imposed.100 Destabilizing the concept of the “real” through parodic impersonation, drag challenges categories of the body, sex, gender, and sexuality. In this way, Butler‟s theory of gender performance extends to disability as well, for, in reproducing disability in performance, feigners expose the constructedness of disability as a category, opening up the possibility for new configurations of what the non-standard body might mean and how one might respond to it. Significantly, these destabilizing performances of disability drag gained popularity on the stage at the same time that disability emerged as a distinct identity in early modern England. Even as “naturalized knowledge” about disability was affirmed through a number of significant cultural forces—including the theater—the theater was nevertheless suggesting that such a natural knowledge might itself be a type of counterfeit. The destabilizing powers inherent in this type of imitative performance illuminate how female characters who feign disability are paradoxically able to seize power over their own lives by enacting passivity. Since performances of disability drag expose the constructedness of both early modern disability and early modern femininity, they unsettle the corporeal and gender norms which limited women‟s subjectivity; by revealing the artificiality of those constructs, they are able to reform those categories on their own terms. Parodic performances of gender and disability allow female characters

(and their off-stage audiences) to see new possibilities for action and new formations of identity not controlled by the oppressive constructs that initially limit them. Not only do these performances suggest fresh options for these female characters, but they permit them to safely engage in exploits in order to achieve goals that would otherwise incur punishment. For instance, in The Changeling, Isabella‟s performance of disability allows

100 Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), xxii. 75 her to use the sexual proposition of another man to assert her chaste devotion to her husband. Specifically, female characters‟ performances of disability risk potentially fulfilling the pervasive misogynist stereotype that imagined all women as “false” creatures who present an artificial front to mask their true natures. However, although these performances initially seem to conform to this stereotype, they ultimately explode it by demonstrating how femininity itself is false—an artificial construct lacking any essential center. In particular, female feigners‟ performances of disability challenge the mutually constitutive connection between femininity and disability. The reciprocal relationship between women and people with disabilities facilitated women‟s agency in these plays. Nevertheless, by exposing the body and gender constructs that they imitated, these performances also reveal the artificiality of that relationship. Parodying femininity and disability exposes how unconnected these two identities actually are: for all that women and people with disabilities may have failed to comport with the early modern masculine norm, they did not necessarily share essential attributes, especially because these performances call into question whether each identity has any essential attributes at all. For this reason, disability and femininity often diverge in the conclusions of these dramas. At the end of disability disguise plays, the female characters who have performed the non-standard body discard their costumes, putting aside both disability and passive femininity. Their performances destabilize ideas of femininity and, therefore, facilitate a refashioning of womanhood that allows them to assert their subjectivity at the end of the play—one not defined by physical impairment but rather by personal agency.

This same division, however, also marginalizes disability at exactly the moment when it could have been similarly redefined. The utilitarian function of disability in these plays further stigmatizes the non-standard body by simultaneously reducing it to a costume to be used by able-bodied people at their pleasure. When Ellen Samuels describes the overtaking of disability by gender as it occurs in twenty-first-century literary criticism 76 she notes the frequent “enfolding of the freakishly disabled body into the freakishly gendered body,” resulting in an assertion of femininity that allows it to be distinguished (however temporarily) from disability so that “the gendered body emerges as a realized subject, while the disabled body remains a reflective trope.”101 Although Samuels focuses on twenty-first-century scholarly practices, she identifies a phenomenon that occurs in both theoretical and non-theoretical literature as early as the Renaissance. Female characters‟ performances of impairment conflate disability and femininity in a way very similar to what Samuels describes, transforming the non-standard body into a theatrical instrument that could be employed and discarded as necessary. This division of identities—facilitated by their explicit conflation in a performance of disability drag—is both realized and complicated at the conclusion of several early modern plays, most especially in the anonymous drama, Fair Em.

Fair Play: Fair Em and Disability Drag At the beginning of Fair Em, the heroine‟s father, Sir Thomas Goddard, cautions his daughter Em not to succumb to the seductions of Manvile, her favored suitor. “Let not vehement sighs,” he warns, “Nor earnest vows importing fervent love, / Render thee subject to the wrath of lust.”102 Sir Thomas‟s warning is standard fatherly fare, but it makes an odd turn at the end of the speech. He says:

Chaste thoughts and modest conversations, Of proof to keep out all enchanting vows, Vain sighs, forced tears, and pitiful aspects Are they that make deformèd ladies fair. (2.60-63) On the surface, Sir Thomas‟s warning is clear: do not be moved by pity to accept the false attentions of theatrical lovers; it is only chastity and modesty that can keep young

101 Samuels, “Critical Divides: Judith Butler‟s Body Theory and the Question of Disability,” National Women‟s Studies Association Journal 14.3 (2002): 63.

102 Fair Em, ed. Standish Henning (New York: Garland, 1980), 2.55-57. All subsequent quotations from this text are identified parenthetically by scene and line number. 77 women from succumbing to corruption.103 This caution on appropriate feminine behavior parallels the instructions imparted to viewers of fraudulent disability. Both Em and counterfeiters‟ audiences must resist pitiful performances in order to maintain their integrity, be it sexual or financial. Yet Sir Thomas‟s reference to disability in this speech suggests another interpretative possibility. Robert William Barzak reads this passage as warning that “[t]hrough affected sighs, tears and woebegone faces, certain unscrupulous and lustful men, in order to gain their ends, will delude young ladies into believing that they are what they are not („make deformèd ladies fair‟).”104 Sir Thomas‟s grammar, however, implies something more permanent: in his words, it is pointedly not perception that is transformed, but the disfigured women themselves that are remade into a normalized ideal. He focuses here on audience response, since it is not simply the actions of the seducers, but also the reactions of the pursued women that ensure this metamorphosis. Although the masculine vows, sighs, tears, and aspects may provide motivating factors, it is the feminine abandonment of modesty and chastity that transfigures deformity into something desirable. But this somewhat unexpected conclusion—that an unchaste response to suitors‟ theatrical attentions can make a disfigured woman beautiful—raises the question: does the reverse also hold true? Does acting chastely make a woman deformed? This perplexing question raised by Sir Thomas seems to be answered by his daughter; Em herself puts on disability in order to assert her chastity. But Em‟s performances of disability throughout the play raise more questions than they answer.105

103 The Oxford English Dictionary cites a number of early modern sources in using the word “deformed” to mean morally corrupt, in addition to its traditional definition meaning physically disfigured (New Edition, online).

104 Barzak, “Faire Em: A Critical Edition, with an Introduction on the Authorship of the Play” (PhD Diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1959), 220.

105 Fair Em itself raises a number of questions, specifically about its authorship and its frequently fractured, clearly incomplete play-text. For more on the origins and textual history of the play see Standish Henning, “Fair Em and Robert Wilson: Another View,” Notes and Queries 78

An anonymous drama written circa 1589, Fair Em pairs the pseudo-historical account of William the Conqueror‟s troubled romance with a Danish princess with the trials of the eponymous Em.106 Em‟s father is an English nobleman who is forced into hiding because of the Norman Conquest. Now living as a miller, Sir Thomas‟s seemingly low social station is not enough to deter the suitors that seek his daughter‟s hand. One suitor, Manvile, has secured Em‟s affections, but two others, Valingford and Mountney, continue to pursue her. Their attentions inspire jealousy in Manvile, who scolds Em for even acknowledging the existence of these other men, insisting with a biblical fury that

“[i]f sight do move offence, it is the better not to see” (5.98-99). Eager to prove her faithfulness, Em takes him at his word. She performs disability three times: when Mountney comes to call, she feigns deafness; when Valingford seeks her out, she feigns blindness; and when both men attend her at once, she pretends to be both blind and deaf. Em‟s performance of disability, then, is explicitly a performance of appropriate femininity, using impairment to enact constancy and chastity. Although her feigning seems designed to protect her emotional and sexual integrity by making her less desirable to her suitors, Em‟s own explanation of her behavior suggests that her performance was motivated by self-control. She clarifies, “That enticing speeches should not beguile me, I have made myself deaf to any but [Manvile]. And lest any man‟s person should please me more than his, I have dissembled the want of my sight” (16.75-78). For Em, disability not only creates the perception of appropriate feminine behavior, but also the reality of it.

7 (1960): 348-49, 360; George W. Mannel, “The Source of the Immediate Plot of Faire Em,” Modern Language Notes 28.3 (1913): 80-82; H. S. D. Mithal, “The Authorship of Fair Em and Martin Mar-sixtus,” Notes and Queries 7 (1960): 8-10; Alwin Thaler, “Faire Em (and Shakespeare‟s Company?) in Lancashire,” PMLA 46.3 (1931): 647-58.

106 In reality, William the Conqueror was married to Matilda, a Flemish princess. The union was legendarily troubled; various accounts describe William throwing Matilda around by her braids. 79

Her performances take advantage of the overlap between disability and femininity in other ways as well. She shields herself from her unwanted suitors and affirms her desirability to Manvile by using disability to connect herself to her home and to interior spaces. Well-born women were supposed to have limited mobility and limited contact with the outside world, but, due to her father‟s new profession, Em experiences increased physical mobility and social interaction. This freedom exacerbates Manvile‟s jealousy, and Em uses disability as a way to dramatically ensure an appropriate level of enclosure. In both her performance of blindness and her performance of deafness, her suitors encounter her away from her home at the mill, and she cuts short their wooing by insisting that her “disability” requires that she be at home. This certainly serves a practical purpose—limiting the duration of her performance lowers Em‟s chances of being discovered—but it also facilitates her assertion of appropriate femininity. Em does not want to be a public figure, and insists on her desire for privacy, even as, paradoxically, she puts on a public performance. Her desire for privacy is even evident when her feigning occurs at home. “Good father,” she begs, “give me leave to sit where I may not be disturbed, sith God hath visited me both of my sight and hearing” (11.47-49). Later she asks again, “Good father, let me not stand as an open gazing-stock to everyone, but in a place alone as fits a creature so miserable” (11.53-54). Her performance of disability allows Em to underscore her conformity to early modern ideals of feminine enclosure. She is even able to use her feigned disability to assert her obedience to her father. Although in reality, Em enacts her schemes without consulting (or even alerting) her father, in her performances she casts herself as overtly dependent upon his protection and care. In the examples above we twice find Em pleading with her “good father” to provide shelter; later we find her swearing off her suitors in order that she may yield her obedience “to none but to my father”—although her father still has no clue that her impairments are just an act (16.49). Again, her performance of disability facilitates a 80 gendered paradox: by acting in unfeminine ways, operating independently, and deceiving her father, she is able to secure a reputation as demure and submissive. The reaction of Em‟s suitors to her performances of blindness and deafness demonstrates the way that gender transformed reactions to disability. Em‟s first performance of disability seems a little haphazard; when confronted by unwanted wooer Mountney, she initially seems to be merely curt. But as Mountney‟s fervor mounts, Em is forced to be ever more evasive, and when she finally states that she literally cannot hear a word her suitor says, it is unclear whether she had planned to counterfeit deafness all along or had only decided on it at just that moment. Regardless of the inconsistencies in her performance, Mountney is instantly convinced of the truth of her statement and immediately interested in taking charitable action to find a cure for her. “What, is she deaf? A great impediment!” he says, “Yet remedies there are for such defects” (5.143- 44). When Em leaves him and Mountney is left to lament her loss of hearing, he again turns to the idea of providing physical care for his newly impaired beloved: “Ah Em, fair Em,” Mountney sighs, “if art can make thee whole / I‟ll be that sense for thee, although it cost me dear” (5.161-62). Similarly, when Em performs blindness for her other unwanted suitor, Valingford, he also accepts her disability as reality and begins to consider how he can further demonstrate his love for her through acts of charity, also offering to pay for a physician to minister to her. Although Em‟s performance here is free of the inconsistency that plagued her previous act, thus making her even less suspicious to Valingford, she actively attempts to malign her own character. She suggests that her blindness is a “plague justly fallen” on her, meant to punish her fascination with “the vanities of love”

(7.34-35). Yet even when she wants him to suspect her character, he cannot. Valingford ignores her comment, and instead showers her with jewels, further reinforcing his benevolence while, simultaneously, providing her with more of the “vanities of love” should she want them. 81

Em is one of the few female feigners to eventually be found out, but even when her unwanted suitors do suspect her of faking her impairment(s), they nevertheless seem entirely unwilling to place the blame for counterfeiting on a woman. Mountney, speaking to himself, fears that Em‟s deafness “may be but deceit, / A matter feigned only to delude thee, / And not unlike, perhaps by Valingford” (5.163-65). His indirection is significant: not only does he believe Valingford to be the instigator of Em‟s performance, he cannot even name her as a participant in this action. It is “a matter feigned” seemingly by no one at all. Valingford, in parallel, believes Mountney to be the source of deception. “Why may this not be feigned subtlety, by Mountney‟s invention, to the intent that I, seeing such occasion, should leave off my suit, and not any more persist to solicit her of love?” he speculates (7.46-50). He also fails to identify Em as an active participant in this drama, rather displacing his mistrust onto his former friend. The two suitors seek to confirm their suspicions by confronting one another; when they discover that Em has displayed two different disabilities to them individually, they seek her out together, prompting her performance of simultaneous blindness and deafness. It takes less than ten lines of dialogue to convince Mountney that Em‟s impairments are genuine. He is so assured of her disability that he immediately decides to break off his pursuit of her and return to the service of the King. Valingford, however, here parts ways with Mountney; he continues his pursuit of Em, possibly motivated by suspicions about her performance (which I shall examine in more depth shortly). Still, as all three of Em‟s performances demonstrate, women feigning disability were far less likely to be doubted—and if doubted, far less likely to be blamed—than men who did the same.

In fact, the real trouble for Em is that her performance of disability is too convincing. Em puts on the non-standard body in order to repel her unwanted wooers and, in doing so, prove her devotion to her chosen love, Manvile. Unfortunately, she ends up repelling Manvile as well. Her jealous lover learns from his two rivals that Em has suddenly been stricken blind and/or deaf. Although Manvile has been cautioned by her 82 father that, even if the other suitors have propositioned Em, “her chaste mind hath proof enough to prevent it,” Manvile is immediately convinced that Em is truly disabled and his primary reaction is condemnation (9.7-8). “This is God‟s judgment for her treachery,” Manvile instantly concludes (9.27). As we have seen, disability reinforces femininity through their mutually constitutive relationship. So while Em‟s performance of disability affirms positive feminine attributes to her unwanted suitors, to Manvile, her disability only reinforces the negative feminine stereotypes he already fears. The credulity that feminine disability tended to inspire means that Manvile never questions the reality of

Em‟s condition, and, therefore, never questions his own conclusions about its cause. When he witnesses her performance of simultaneous blindness and deafness for himself, his rejection is swift and absolute. “Both blind and deaf?” he says in an aside, “Then is she no wife for me. And glad I am so good occasion is happ‟ned. Now will I to Westchester and leave these gentlemen [Mountney and Valingford] to their blind fortune” (11.57-60). Manvile‟s cruel pun ironically underscores what he himself fails to see: he rejects Em on account of her disability, but only does so because the overlap between disability and femininity in her performance has made him blind to her deception. Manvile‟s reaction to Em‟s counterfeiting is all the more surprising given the exaggeration of her performance of disability. The disability drag that Em puts on exposes the unnatural, constructed aspects of both femininity and disability. Her characterization of the non-standard body is an inflated stereotype: as a blind/deaf woman she is isolated and isolating, pathetic, vulnerable, and reduced to a childlike state that asserts her dependence on her father and enforces her femininity. Her larger-than-life performance of disability, then, stages a femininity that is equally overstated. In spite of the way her actions contradict her characterization of herself, by performing disability she projects an image of herself as a devoted, demure, chaste, and submissive young woman. These mutual performances are so exaggerated as to be parodic; Em enacts a 83 disability and a femininity that do not seem to represent a real experience or identity—as even her own experience contradicts them—but, instead, presents a caricature of how women and people with disabilities were imagined in early modern England. In this way, Em‟s counterfeiting not only allows her to make her own decisions about her future, but allows her to illustrate the confines of corporeal and gender expectations that her feigning helps her elide. In freeing herself, she frees the audience of the play to see the mutually oppressive relationship between femininity and disability. Yet Em‟s disability drag does not persist throughout the play, and, at the end of the drama, femininity and disability are pointedly separated. When Valingford comes bearing the news that her performance of disability has repelled her true love, Manvile, and driven him to engagement with another woman, Em abandons her counterfeiting of disability. Although Em is distressed by the news that her lover has forsaken her, she nevertheless takes advantage of the agency that her feigning has afforded her. After perfunctory apologies to her father and to Valingford, she immediately departs to confront the mercurial Manvile, declaring that revenge is the only remedy for her broken heart. “But may I live to see / that ungrateful man justly rewarded for his treachery,” she says, “poor Em would think herself not a little happy” (16.91-93). Em‟s description of herself in the third person demonstrates the lasting effects of her disability drag: although no longer overtly performing herself, she retains a performative self-awareness that allows her to be, simultaneously, “Poor Em” and the active agent of retribution who teaches that vile man, Manvile, his much-needed lesson. She does so by taking her suit to the King and confronting Manvile with his betrayal in front of the assembled court.

Although he has already engaged himself to another woman, when he learns that Em‟s disability was actually fraudulent, he is happy to throw over his new fiancée for his old one. Em will have none of it. She shames him, again demonstrating her dual identity as avenging agent and passive victim by shifting her narrative mode from first to third person, even as she makes a declaration of her own constancy that defies disability: 84

I tell thee, Manvile, hadst thou been blind, Or deaf, or dumb, Or else what impediments might befall to man, Em would have loved, and kept, and honored thee, Yea, begged if wealth had failed for thy relief. (17.200-04) Manvile‟s failure to demonstrate a matching devotion leads to his rejection. “[N]ever speak to me, nor seem to know me,” Em commands, reversing onto Manvile the very impairments that granted her the authority to take control of their relationship (17.208). Manvile‟s failing here is clearly marked as a lack of charity. There are suggestions throughout the play that it might be socially acceptable for a man to forsake his beloved on the basis of her disability: Mountney abandons Em when he believes her disability to be genuine as a matter of course, and Em herself, when trying to get rid of Valingford, describes loving a blind woman as “folly” (16.35). Nevertheless, when Manvile actually does forfeit his previous vow because of her impairments, Em characterizes him as “unkind” and “ungentle” (16.55-56). Her prefixes here highlight the virtues Manvile fails to foster. The disability Em enacts demands charity, and, by shaming Manvile so explicitly, the play instructs its audience to learn from his lesson. In addition to chastising and socially disabling Manvile, Em‟s actions inspire the other woman Manvile has wooed to reject him also, and he ends the play a laughingstock for the whole company, demonstrating the new distance between empowered femininity and limited disability that Em‟s performance evokes. Em‟s actions not only resolve her own plot conflicts, but also those of the play‟s parallel plot involving William the Conqueror. After being tricked into bringing the wrong young woman home to England, William finds himself married to the Danish princess Blanch, instead of the Swedish princess Marianna whom he preferred. Appalled at the trickery the young women enacted to bring about this result, William rejects his new, unwanted wife and renounces all women categorically: “[U]tterly do I abhor their sex,” he declares, for they are “all disloyal, unconstant—all unjust” (17.143-44). Immediately after the King‟s wholesale rejection of women, Em enters to bring her suit 85 before his judgment. The tale of her devotion sways the King‟s opinion about women in general and his wife in particular. “I see that women are not general evils,” he says, before turning to his bride. “Blanch is fair; methinks I see in her / A modest countenance, a heavenly blush,” accepting his deceptive wife because, ironically, the misleading machinations of another woman have convinced him that even women‟s deceptions are not always what they appear (17.223-25). William‟s circular conversion is another consequence of Em‟s parodic and paradigm-shifting performance: her imitation of disabled femininity and feminine disability not only transforms understandings of what women are and can be for herself, but for other women as well. Fair Em ends on this seemingly comprehensively happy note: Em is empowered to control her own destiny, reshape feminine identity, and avoid censure for the feigning that facilitated that transformation. She also punishes her former lover for his lack of devotion to her and shames him for rejecting her on account of her disability, modeling a uniquely generous attitude towards the non-standard body by insisting that physical impairment is not a barrier to a loving mutual relationship. Her actions not only ensure a happy ending for herself—she ends up married to the devoted Valingford—but also secure a happy ending for William the Conqueror, by reconciling him to his new wife. In this way, Em‟s counterfeiting of disability brings peace to all of England, since it quells the threat of war with Denmark that was the result of the King‟s marital strife. Yet this resolution is not without complications. While her other suitors are immediately convinced by Em‟s performance of disability, Valingford is never fully sure of what he is witnessing. A handful of lines in the play suggest that he suspects all along that her impairments are false. When the other men abandon her, Valingford remains with Em, stating, “I imagine that I shall find this but a feigned invention” (11.66). Valingford then tracks down Manvile‟s new fiancée and confirms his impending marriage so that he may be “revenged on Manvile, and by this means / get Em to my wife” (14.53-54). Valingford permits himself to be cast as the 86 devoted suitor who remained loyal to his beloved in spite of her impairments. He allows Em to reenact her performance of blindness a third time and declares his perpetual love for her in spite of her apparent disability before revealing Manvile‟s betrayal and inspiring Em to admit to her counterfeiting. When she makes her confession, Valingford appears shocked only that she does not immediately fall into his arms as he had intended. Valingford accompanies Em to the court of William the Conqueror, ostensibly to introduce her suit to his friend the King, but his warm relationship with both the monarch and Em‟s father conveniently places him to gain the wife he‟s been angling for all along.

In the final moments of the play, the King says—seemingly out of nowhere—“But say, Sir Thomas, shall I give thy daughter?” (17.268) The recipient is none other than “lovely Valingford” since “it seemed he loved [Em] well” (271-72). Indeed, it did seem so. In spite of her previous and vehement disinterest in Valingford, Em accepts this sudden match “for his desert,” as appropriate recompense for his devotion to her (276). Em‟s marriage to the potentially deceptive Valingford mirrors the ambivalent conclusions of a number of the early modern plays that feature women counterfeiting disability. Although all of these dramas seem to celebrate the successes of female feigners, there are also suggestions that their transformations of feminine identity may not be flawless. While many of these plays do seem to support women taking control of their romantic/erotic futures by means of fraudulent disability—however fantastical that possibility—several undercut the authorization of performative feminine agency that they initially seem to enact. The Honest Whore is one such example. Upon learning that her performance of disability has tricked him into agreeing to marry her, Matheo initially curses Bellafront and only grudgingly resigns himself to marriage. The shadow of doubt cast on their union at the end of The Honest Whore, Part 1 is confirmed in the play‟s sequel, The Honest Whore, Part 2, where we see the disastrous results of Bellafront‟s choice. Matheo is a drunken, abusive lout who repeatedly humiliates and beats his wife; the agency Bellafront displayed in securing her marriage in Part 1 is entirely gone. 87

Although The Honest Whore is unique in its vision of the couple‟s life after fraudulent disability has brought them together, a number of other plays hint at similar conclusions, including The Wild Goose Chase and A Mad World, My Masters. Some female counterfeiters seem perfectly capable of using fraudulent disability to secure ideal husbands (or transform current husbands into their ideal), but others seem to become deceived by their own deceptions and they fail to recognize inappropriate partners just as other characters have failed to recognize them. In Fair Em, Valingford‟s deception similarly complicates the play‟s characterization of Em‟s agency. If Valingford is aware of her deception, what good does her performing do her? And if Valingford is working a parallel counter-scheme— feigning charity in response to Em‟s feigned disability—is she really the one controlling her future? Similarly, Valingford‟s actions potentially transform the play‟s attitude toward disability. In her chastisement of Manvile, Em argues that love ought to transcend disability and, initially, Valingford‟s actions seem to do just that. Yet the possibility that Valingford was aware of Em‟s real physical condition suggests another interpretation: perhaps Valingford is Manvile‟s opposite, not because he was devoted to Em in spite of her disability, but because he correctly identifies Em‟s performance as a fraud. Not motivated by benevolence, but rather by his suspicions that Em is feigning disability, Valingford‟s triumph seemingly advocates for suspicion as the appropriate response to disability, as do most other representations of fraudulent disability in early modern English literature. Valingford‟s actions, however, also suggest a different—and potentially transformative—interpretation of the play. For, while it is clear that he possesses real suspicions about Em‟s disabilities, those suspicions are not confirmed until after he has vowed that “none can content me but the fair maid of Manchester”—regardless of her physical condition (16.30-31). Even if he is wrong and she is both blind and deaf, Valingford promises to marry Em. What‟s more, he resolves to marry her if his 88 suspicions are correct and his wife-to-be proves herself capable of elaborate and sustained deception, fulfilling in her actions some of the most paranoid misogynist stereotypes of the day. Why would Valingford want to marry such a potentially deceitful woman? His willingness to commit to marriage in spite of his suspicions about Em‟s feigned disabilities imply that, perhaps, Valingford wants to marry Em because of her actions. He never explicitly confronts Em about her performances of disability, nor does he attempt to catch her in an unguarded moment or trick her into revealing her fraud. Instead, he allows her to play out her performance on her own terms, only demonstrating to her the consequences of her actions and letting her choose how to respond. Although the fragmented play-text doesn‟t allow a conclusive interpretation, what evidence we do have suggests that Valingford loves Em for her agency, and his ability to recognize and value that agency is what earns him Em‟s favor at the end of the play. Together with the more cynical reading of Valingford‟s actions, these two interpretations illustrate how the early modern theater experimented with disability and femininity in the fraudulent disability tradition, sometimes defending—and sometimes demolishing—ideas of corporeal difference. The dual construction of femininity and disability unraveling in Fair Em is characteristic of the plays that feature female feigners. One of the earliest of the these plays, Fair Em outlines many of the tropes repeated throughout the genre: the circular connections between feminine identity and physical disability, the destabilizing drag that allows women to reshape how their audiences respond to both women and people with disabilities, the divergence of those two identities at the play‟s conclusion, the way that these performances also engage with issues of charity, and, finally, the frequent complication of these tropes thanks to an ambivalent conclusion. But Fair Em also raises questions about the female counterfeiter tradition that the text seems unable to answer. Was there the flexibility in these conventions to permit a diversity of opinions on the nature of the non-standard body, or was there only one inevitable conclusion—that it was 89 false and always to be mistrusted? What was the role of charity in the construction of disability—and femininity—in early modern England and in these plays especially? And why, after staging scenes of such dramatic female subjectivity and deconstructive parodic power, did these dramas so often revert to conventionally patriarchal conclusions? For some answers to the questions posed by Fair Em, we turn to a play from late in the canon of feigned disability plays: John Fletcher‟s tragicomedy The Pilgrim.

The Pilgrim‟s Progress and Regress: Variations on Women

Counterfeiting Disability When a group of beggars come to Alphonso‟s door at the beginning of John Fletcher‟s The Pilgrim, their disgruntled host asks them who, exactly, they are. “Poor people, and „t like your worship,” “Wretched poor people,” “Very hungry people,” they respond in turn.107 In spite of these purposeful introductions, Alphonso presses them still further to justify why they have gathered at his home. One explains, “[We are] strangers that come to wonder at your charity, / Yet people poor enough to beg a blessing” (2.2.43-

44). “Wonder” is a particularly apt word to describe the literally spectacular almsgiving of The Pilgrim. Who dispenses charity and how they go about it becomes the repeated, nearly obsessive focus of the drama. As this brief interaction demonstrates, charity evokes wonder for both the characters in the play and the spectators of the play. And because charity is a rare commodity in The Pilgrim, it also inspires wonder because of its oddity. In this sense, charity retains both the religious connotations of the word “wonder” (in that it is miraculous) and its associations with physical difference (for “wonder” was a euphemism like “prodigy” employed to put a supernatural spin on non-standard bodies).

107 Fletcher, The Pilgrim in The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. A. R. Waller, vol. 4 (New York: Octagon, 1969), 2.2.35-37. All subsequent quotations from this text are identified parenthetically by act, scene, and line number. 90

The Pilgrim has much in common with Fair Em and the other plays that feature women feigning the non-standard body. It rehearses and reshapes the themes of that tradition, especially the connections between femininity and disability, charity, and performative identity. Yet The Pilgrim differs significantly from many of the feigning- female plays and stands in particular contrast to Fair Em. Unlike that drama, with its obscure origins, much is known about the authorship and early performance of The Pilgrim. Using an English translation of Lope de Vega‟s 1604 drama El Peregrino en su Patria, John Fletcher composed The Pilgrim in the last three months of 1621 and the

King‟s Men performed it at court during the Christmas celebrations of 1621-22.108 The text of the play, first published in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, seems mostly complete and is not plagued by the inconsistencies and gaps that complicate the text of Fair Em.109 Just as Fair Em represents an early contribution to the tradition of the female feigner, The Pilgrim reveals a later incarnation, one which recasts some of its established tropes. In particular, its representation of charity is unique: unlike many of the other plays that use fraudulent disability to discourage almsgiving, The Pilgrim presents an argument for indiscriminate charity. However, the vision of charity that The Pilgrim stages results in drastically different interpretations of femininity and disability than we see in other plays which feature female counterfeiters. Examining this drama in detail reveals what a central role Reformation debates about charity played in the construction of early modern femininity and disability. Further, The Pilgrim demonstrates that, although disability-disguise plays had the power to reshape those identities, the genre also had limits to its transformative powers, limits that are here imposed by the encouragement of almsgiving. Charity might have been something to wonder at in early

108 Baldwin Maxwell, “The Date of The Pilgrim,” Philological Quarterly 13 (1934): 350-56.

109 The Pilgrim, although published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio is also unique in that it is one of a handful of Fletcher‟s solo compositions. 91 modern England, but it could not always work wonders for women who wanted to fulfill the charitable imperative and retain their personal agency. The Pilgrim tells the story of Alinda, the beautiful and virtuous daughter of an overbearing father, Alphonso. She has long been in love with Pedro, the son of one of her father‟s enemies, but Pedro has left his family and his whereabouts are unknown. Instead, her father wants her to marry Roderigo, a gentleman-turned-bandit who ranges about the countryside with his band of highwaymen. Pedro sets the wild-goose-chase of a plot in motion when, disguised as a pilgrim, he begs for alms at Alphonso‟s house. Alinda only recognizes her disguised lover after he has left. Determined to find him and avoid the unwanted marriage to Roderigo, Alinda disguises herself in a series of increasingly improbable costumes in order to pursue Pedro, with her father and his friends hot on her trail. Chasing after Alphonso is Juletta, Alinda‟s maid, who plays mind-games with Alphonso in order to throw him off his daughter‟s tracks, even going so far as to have him involuntarily imprisoned in a madhouse. Pedro and Alinda have various run-ins with Roderigo and with each other without being successfully and safely reunited. Only when

Alinda, dressed as a “she-fool” who has escaped from the madhouse, meets up with Roderigo in the woods does the play reach any resolution: her performance startles him into repentance, and he renounces his life of crime. His conversion allows him to reconcile with Pedro, and a further performance from a disguised Alinda, this one with added assistance from Juletta, brings the former fake pilgrim, Pedro, and the newly minted genuine pilgrim, Roderigo, back to the city where they are pardoned by the Governor. Alphonso, finally free from his stay in the madhouse, vows never to try to control his daughter again and gives his blessing to her marriage to Pedro. All ends happily—or at least appears to. But The Pilgrim‟s bold support of indiscriminate charity paired with the staging of fraudulent disability means that the play‟s themes and actions contradict one another, resulting in a conclusion far less conclusive than it initially appears. 92

The opening scenes of the play fixate on this issue of charity: Alinda gives generously to any who seek her help, throwing her father into regular rages about his daughter‟s devotion to the poor. Alinda‟s charity is lauded by virtually every character as her best attribute, greater even than her beauty. Friends advise her cantankerous father that “‟Tis charity / Methinks, you are bound to love her for,” and, even if her father will not, the audience is surely supposed to love her for that reason (1.2.29-30). Charity is an unusual virtue to honor in an early modern heroine (chastity being, by far, the more popular quality for female protagonists), and the way that Alinda enacts her charity is also unusual: she does not discriminate as to who receives her generosity. Early in the play, her maid, Juletta, voices the most common early modern critique of charity, notably the criticism reinforced by the tradition of fraudulent disability. When Alinda asks, “What Poor attend my charity to day, wench?” Juletta responds by saying, “Of all sorts, Madam; your open handed bounty / Make‟s „em flock every hour: some worth your pity, / But others that have made a trade of begging” (1.1.110-13). Juletta‟s argument that some people feigning poverty are abusing Alinda‟s benevolence carried significant influence in early modern social policy and practice, but it does not matter to Alinda. “Wench, if they ask it truly, I must give it: / It takes away the holy use of charity / To examine wants,” she says. For her, the purpose of charity is not to be just, but to be generous; discriminating between who does and who does not deserve her generosity undermines its very purpose. Alinda‟s practice of charity has distinctly Catholic overtones. Not only does she advocate for an indiscriminate almsgiving, which mirrored Catholic rhetoric about charity, but characters honor her for her charity in unusually Catholic terms: the beggars that come to seek her benevolence imagine Alinda herself as a shrine, “the holiest we ere heard of” for “[t]he very shrines of saints sink at her vertues, / And swear they cannot hold pace with her pieties” (1.2.51, 54-55). Ken Jackson has noted that this religious rhetoric is underscored by allowing Alinda‟s bombastic father to voice a distinctly 93

Protestant opposition to her generosity. As Jackson establishes, the whole first act of the play is dedicated to showing how entirely wrongheaded Alphonso‟s opinions about charity really are and mocking him for his views.110 We find in Alphonso a broad caricature of the subtle apologetics of discriminate charity crafted by Calvin, Luther, and other Protestant theologians. He claims that Alinda‟s “conscience” is really just “outward holiness,” a common Protestant criticism of Catholic charity (1.1.83-84). He even goes as far as to mock the possibility that good works can ensure salvation: “I warrant ye,” he scoffs, “If men could sail to Heaven in Porridge-pots, / With masts of Beef, and Mutton, what a Voyage should I make!” (1.2.31-33). The play further reinforces its religious perspective by giving more Reformed habits to its other villain, the bandit Roderigo. In contrast to Alinda‟s indiscriminate giving, this outlaw demonstrates the very type of cynical suspicion about the poor advocated by Reformers and illustrated by many of the other fraudulent disability plays. He instructs his henchmen to search every traveler they encounter for goods to steal since “Rogues and Beggars, / Have got the trick now to become Bank-masters. . . . Appear how they will, they may have purses” (2.2.10-11, 16).

By having a notorious thief voice the opinions of Protestant theologians, the play recasts those opinions significantly: instead of turning the poor into criminals, as the Protestant- influenced fraudulent disability tradition often does, The Pilgrim instead makes clear that those unwilling to extend charity to the poor are the real criminals.

The indiscriminate charity advocated in The Pilgrim significantly reshapes understandings of disability in the play. In most Protestant-influenced early modern narratives of fraudulent disability (or even genuine disability), the non-standard body is defined by its two related but contrasting stereotypes: people with disabilities are always pitiful and therefore in need of charity from able-bodied persons, and, simultaneously,

110 Jackson, “Bedlam, The Changeling, The Pilgrim, and the Protestant Critique of Catholic Good Works,” Philological Quarterly 74.4 (1991): 382-83. 94 they are potentially criminal and therefore dangerous to able-bodied persons. It is this contradiction that the women who perform disability drag attempt to elide, skirting the criminal and attempting to project the pitiable exclusively. The doctrine of indiscriminate charity espoused by Catholic critics of Reformed theology and articulated by Alinda in The Pilgrim eliminates the criminal element of disability altogether—or, at least, makes its criminal potential irrelevant. If charity is, as Alinda insists, undermined by differentiating between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor,” the possible criminality of the recipients does not matter; only the distribution of charity matters.

Christians practicing the type of charity that The Pilgrim advocates would not (or should not) even consider the possibility that the disabled beggars they encounter might be feigning their impairments. In order to practice appropriate charity, they would have to regard disabled vagrants as pitiful innocents to whom they should give freely without consideration of deception. Alinda not only advocates for indiscriminate almsgiving, but she receives indiscriminately distributed alms when she performs disability later in the drama, thus reinforcing the play‟s message of uncritical charity. Over the course of the play, Alinda engages in multiple performances of the non-standard body, each time adopting a different identity and impairment. Her diverse performances are united by the responses of her on-stage audiences. Regardless of what identity she puts on or her own fears about the flimsiness of her disguise, the people who encounter her respond with overwhelming pity, rehearsing for her the charity she had modeled herself. When she meets with her father‟s friends, Curio and Seberto, in the woods, she is disguised as a young boy and claims to have been “extreamly beaten” by a band of robbers (3.3.44). In a performance that rivals Autolycus‟s in The Winter‟s Tale, Alinda moans about her bones and side and back until the two men give her money to help her pay for medical treatments. Alinda amends this performance later: still pretending to be a boy, she feigns madness and admits herself into to a local asylum, one of the primary charitable institutions in early 95 modern England. The madhouse keeper, who shelters her, feeds her, and keeps her separated from the rowdier inmates, treats her with remarkable kindness. A chance reunion with her long-lost love Pedro in the madhouse shocks Alinda, and when the keeper sees her overcome with emotion, he blames his visitor—rather than his inmate— for the disturbance. Even when Alinda does not intend to evoke pity with her performance of disability, the nature of charity in this play transforms her performance into a pitiful one automatically. In the only instance where her feigned disability fails to elicit charity from her on-stage audience—when she feigns foolishness for her father— the outcome seems to have more to do with her father‟s hardheartedness than her performance‟s lack of pathos. But her pathetic performance still affects Alphonso, albeit temporarily: “‟Tis pity this pretty thing should want understanding,” he says before dismissing her with his characteristic lack of sympathy, “But why do I stand here talking to a coxcombe?” (4.1.49-50). Like other female feigners of disability, Alinda‟s performance convinces her audiences, but they hardly need convincing; they are almost always ready to extend charity to her before she even asks.

The performances of disability that earn Alinda alms in The Pilgrim conform to the conventions established by plays like Fair Em, particularly in the staging of disability drag. Alinda performs the non-standard body in order to exercise personal agency and marry the man of her choice. Like Em and other female feigners, Alinda‟s counterfeit disability allows her to engage in traditionally unfeminine activities (familial disobedience, unaccompanied travel, etc.) while still retaining an image of appropriate femininity—even as the parodic elements of her performance allow her to rewrite what

“appropriate” femininity actually looks like. The play concludes with a conventionally happy ending that reinforces the approval of Alinda‟s newly empowered womanhood: she and Pedro are reunited and betrothed thanks to her proactivity (for Pedro has remained largely passive throughout the drama) and the union is blessed by her father, who repents of his earlier efforts to control her life. 96

Nevertheless, Alinda‟s performance is also uniquely unstable and limited in the agency that her disability drag grants her. Most women who counterfeit disability do not get caught for their fraudulent performances, and neither do they get caught up in them, losing their grasp on the difference between fantasy and reality. Unlike Hamlet and his faux-mad/genuinely mad compatriots, these women know who they are (and who they aren‟t) and they use that difference to their advantage. Alinda, however, is an exception. Throughout the play, her performances threaten to overwhelm her reality, drawing her unwillingly into the madness that she feigns. Her very first performance of disability in front of her father‟s friends prompts her to pray, although not for assistance to make her performance convincing, but rather for God to keep her sane as her feigning threatens to undo her: “Keep my wits Heaven, I feel „em wavering, / O God my head” (3.3.31-32). Surprisingly, this performance is not of madness, but of expressly physical impairment. For Alinda, madness seems to be the consequence of performing the non-standard body, regardless of what impairment she puts on. When we are told shortly after that a boy (Alinda in disguise) was found “a little craz‟d, distracted” and sent to the local asylum, it is unclear whether our heroine has simply transformed her feigned disability to gain shelter and succor, or whether she was sent to the madhouse because she has truly become “a little craz‟d” (3.4.165). Once inside, she seems better able to control her performance, until an unexpected reunion with Pedro leads the madhouse keeper to believe she is having a fit. It‟s not entirely clear that Alinda is not having some type of a seizure: the madhouse keeper describes her as sobbing, swelling, and tearing at herself. She seems to recover enough to escape from the asylum, and when she stumbles upon her father and Julettta in the woods, she stutters and trembles uncontrollably even when she is not “in character,” making it unclear how much of her performance is really performative. Alinda‟s flagging abilities to maintain the disguise of disability are particularly evident in The Pilgrim‟s climatic confrontation between Alinda and Roderigo. The scene 97 begins with Roderigo fuming about the way that Alinda has repeatedly eluded his grasp, furious that she has “fool‟d and slighted” him again and again (4.2.3). He fantasizes about raping her to settle the score—“‟Tis not the name of Virgin shall redeem ye, / I‟ll change that property”—but when a figure appears to him and he cannot identify whether it is supernatural, his fears reflect his previous aggression back onto himself (16-17). “I think „twill ravish me,” he says (40). The unidentifiable figure, of course, is Alinda disguised as a she-fool, and the reversal of the threat of rape that her performance inspires marks a significant change in the drama. Throughout The Pilgrim, the threat of rape has shadowed Alinda, generally as she travels without male protection through the countryside, but particularly when she performs disability. In her first performance as a wounded boy, her father‟s friends seem to infer a sexual assault as well as a physical one; they deliberately fail to define his injuries, rather mourning that the child has been “abus‟d” and “used” by other men (3.3.39, 46). They give him money because they believe it was “extreamly foul, to vex a child thus” (3.3.60). This same suggestion is repeated even more explicitly when Alinda pretends to be a mad boy. The madhouse keeper who brings Pedro to her cell mistakes their reunion for sexual assault. Although Pedro warns Alinda when the madhouse keeper leaves to “Be not so full of passion, / Nor do not hang so greedily upon me; / „Twill be ill taken,” their actions are misinterpreted when the warden returns (3.4.196-98). He carts off a frantic Alinda, mistaking her sorrow for a fit brought on by Pedro shamefully “afflict[ing] him” and he bans Pedro from ever returning (3.4.203). Invoking this theme of sexual assault in the play‟s climax—only to reverse it—signals a larger change occurring in both the characters and the structure of the drama at this moment.111

111 Barbara Mathieson notes that the threat of rape is often used as a comic plot device in Fletcher‟s plays. She details how female characters are able to regain control of the situation by feigning sexual attraction for their attackers, repelling male desire with female desire by disrupting traditional gender roles. Although she does not include this scene from The Pilgrim in her study, it mirrors the way that the threat of rape is used as vehicle for female empowerment through a reversal of gender norms in Fletcher‟s other dramas. See “Rape, Female Desire, and 98

Alinda‟s disguise perplexes Roderigo: he cannot identify the figure that he sees as Alinda. In fact, he cannot identify what he‟s seeing at all. Although Alinda is wearing her “she-fool” costume (which includes a “Fool‟s coat”) when she finds him in the woods, he first believes her to be some type of supernatural creature, “a Fairy, or some small Hobgoblin” (4.2.36). Only after closer inspection does Roderigo finally conclude that “The thing‟s mad, / Abominably mad, her brains are buttered” (47-48). Roderigo‟s difficulty in identifying Alinda conforms to the conventions of the counterfeiting-female plays. Alinda‟s difficulty in identifying Roderigo, however, defies those conventions.

Unbeknownst to her, her lover and her enemy have traded costumes, and Roderigo has disguised himself in Pedro‟s old pilgrim habit. For this reason she initially takes Roderigo for Pedro, only realizing her mistake once she has alerted his attention. This initial misstep is in keeping with the increasingly shaky performances that Alinda stages throughout the end of play. Her words to herself upon realizing this misidentification affirm the breakdown between her performance and her reality. Like the she-fool she imitates, Alinda‟s language becomes both fragmented and repetitive: “Ha? Now, now, now,” she stutters in an aside before concluding, “O most miserable” (4.2.25-26). For all that Alinda‟s performance may be bleeding into reality, the apparent authenticity of her performance works in her favor: not only does it protect her from Roderigo in the moment, forestalling his recognition and safeguarding her from the rape that he had planned, but it defends her in the long term as well. Alinda‟s antics convert Roderigo from a bandit disguised as a pilgrim into the real thing. In many ways, her performance is traditional: she sings Roderigo scraps of songs, babbles almost-nonsense about astrology, and offers to tell his fortune. After looking at his palm, Alinda announces that Roderigo has two wives and then explains that “To day you shall wed

Sexual Revulsion in John Fletcher‟s Plays,” in Women, Violence, and English Renaissance Literature, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Sharon Beehler (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003), 101-22. 99 sorrow, / And repentance will come tomorrow” before she escapes into the forest (4.2.69- 70). Roderigo is deeply moved by this “Sibyl,” and, specifically, moved by her disability to repent of his own lack of pity. He says:

When fools and mad folks will be Tutors to me, And feel my sores, yet I insensible; Sure it was set by Providence upon me To steer my heart right. (4.2.80-83) This realization precipitates Roderigo‟s unlikely conversion. Immediately after their encounter, he falls asleep in the woods and wakes a changed man, one who reconciles with Pedro, relinquishes his claim on Alinda‟s affections, and repents of his sins. In The Pilgrim, disability not only elicits charity from its audiences, but it has the power to transform those audiences into charitable people as well. Alinda‟s performance of the non-standard body in this moment fills Roderigo with shame and repentance, but it utterly depletes her. As we have seen, ambivalent endings are conventional in plays that feature women in disability drag, but Alinda‟s loss of power in The Pilgrim is so extreme as to be remarkable even within that tradition. The wavering resolve that she displays as her performances of disability become more varied and more frequent completely disappears when she next appears on stage. Although reunited with Juletta, Alinda sees no way out of the predicament she has performed herself into. Juletta insists that Alinda transform herself one final time, or else risk discovery (and worse, since the women are unaware of Roderigo‟s recent conversion), but Alinda has lost the imagination and the energy to make the change again. “I have no means to shift it,” she says of her previously easy-to-alter identity (5.2.31). Throughout the scene, Alinda is reticent and ambivalent, ready to accept whatever death will come to find her; her only action is to tremble violently. She even has difficulty placing her trust in Juletta because “my fears have so distracted me / I durst not trust myself” (5.2.21). Alinda‟s final performance is only possible because Juletta provides her with everything she needs: food, shelter, clothing, a plan, and motivation to complete it. The two young 100 women disguise themselves as old women and confront Pedro and Roderigo, convincing them to return to the city and reconcile themselves with the authorities there.112 In this way, it is Juletta and not Alinda who resolves the conflicts of the drama, supplanting her as the play‟s heroine at its conclusion. Why does Alinda‟s performance of disability fail? In a play that illustrates so clearly the possibilities of performative identity to empower women and inspire generosity, why does The Pilgrim rescind those same opportunities in its final scenes? I believe that Alinda‟s limited performance—and, similarly, the ambivalent endings of many of the plays featuring female feigners of disability—is a result of the overlap between femininity and disability in early modern England. While femininity and disability were uniquely compatible for eliding the criminal associations of the non- standard body, the mutual construction of those two identities made them uniquely incompatible with the genre of fraudulent disability. Avoiding the criminal aspects of disability meant that women‟s performances of the non-standard body projected a characterization of disability that was wholly pitiful, deserving of charity but never suspicion. However, the very fact that these performances were performances undercuts the characterization of disability that these plays initially seem to support. The performance of disability by an able-bodied person is always a drama of discernment— specifically the discernment of fraud—and whatever the motives of the play that enacts this trope or the character that puts it on, such performances cannot help but instruct its

112 It is unclear how to categorize this final performance of Alinda and Juletta‟s: is it a performance of disability or not? The text states that the women enter “like old Women” and there is no direct statement that these costumes include feigned physical impairments. However, old age in the Renaissance was often synonymous with disability and was regularly categorized as a significant type of physical difference. Roderigo even comments that one of the women “has main need of a Barber” because of the “trim beard she has,” one of the many ways that old age results in physical difference (5.4.73-74). The men‟s responses also reflect their awareness of the “old” women as varying from a physical norm. As in the previous scene of feigned disability, the men have difficulty identifying whether the women are mortal or not. Roderigo, in particular, uses charged words to describe them, calling them “grandam things, those strange antiquities,” even using the particularly disability-associated word “wonder” to describe them (44-45). 101 audience in critical spectatorship. The Pilgrim stages a religious and theatrical conflict between a predominantly Protestant stage tradition and a predominantly Catholic plot, revealing that the genre of fraudulent disability cannot support a message of indiscriminate charity. The conflict between the tradition of counterfeit disability and message of uncritical almsgiving in The Pilgrim is made all the more impossible by having Alinda, the character most associated with charity, engage in fraudulent behavior. Her actions are pointedly paradoxical: even as she claims that people should give alms without reservation and her performance projects a disability that attempts to resist criminal associations, by performing disability at all she reinstates and reinforces that criminality herself. She may insist that the authenticity of one‟s poverty ought not matter to the truly charitable almsgiver, but the very tradition that she participates in insists that it does matter. Although Alinda never seems aware of the hypocrisy her performance imposes on her, her breakdown suggests that her conscience might know better. As she becomes increasingly incapable of performing disability, multiple characters note her trembling, shaking uncontrollably in any scene where she is not actively “in character.” Roderigo later mirrors this same action after his conversion: Juletta exclaims upon his behavior— “See how he shakes”—and explains it by noting that, “[a] secure conscience never quakes” (5.4.90-91). Alinda, apparently, has been wrestling with a less-than-secure conscience, but Juletta has no such scruples. At the beginning of the play, Juletta voiced several of the Protestant arguments advocating skepticism about charity, stating that some beggars were unworthy of the benevolence extended to them. For her, feigning disability does not bring about a conflict of conscience; rather, it reinforces what she already believed. Juletta, then, is capable of bringing the drama to an appropriate conclusion when Alinda‟s performance collapses under the weight of its contradictions. This breakdown between the plot and the genre even extends to other plays that stage female counterfeiters. Although few plays advocate for indiscriminate charity with 102 the same fervor as The Pilgrim, by having women project a more pitiable and less criminal disability than their male counterparts, these plays nevertheless support a more generous version of giving than those featuring male feigners. Rather than being punished, female counterfeiters usually get what they want because people extend charity to them. Yet, as I have previously noted, the seemingly happy endings that female feigners achieve are not always the slick resolutions that the plays promise. Like Alinda‟s failure to sustain her performances, ambivalent endings demonstrate cracks in the foundation of these dramatic projects. While cutting short the feminine empowerment that the plays initially suggest is certainly a symptom of the patriarchy dominant even within the theater, I argue it is also a symptom of incompatible dramatic projects: a play cannot use fraudulent disability to encourage charitable giving and skepticism about charity simultaneously, and plays which attempt to do so, especially those featuring female counterfeiters, ultimately fail in both regards. For this reason, their conclusions— and their heroines—suffer for it. As Alinda and Juletta leave the men in the forest, they overhear music in the distance. It is the sound of a celebration to honor the King, a celebration that serves as the setting for the final scene of the play. This well-timed fanfare confuses Alinda, but Juletta understands it and appreciates its coincidence. “This comes in right to confirm their reverence. / Away, away, let them admire, it makes / for our advantage” (5.4.121-23).

The music, she insists, will ensure that the men “wonder” at their exit (119). Transferring wonder from the audience of charity, as in the beginning of the play, to the audience of fraudulent performance, specifically the performance of disability, demonstrates the conflicting forces at work in The Pilgirm. The drama might attempt to maintain the vestiges of its Catholic intentions, especially in the vivid pageantry of the King‟s celebration that concludes the drama. But it cannot shake off the nagging contradictions that plague its heroine and its plot. Alinda is almost entirely silent throughout the conclusion at the celebration, leaving Juletta to do all the explaining and to take most of 103 the credit. Even Roderigo‟s reconciliation with the political authorities (which takes precedence over the reunion of Alinda and her father and the reunion of Alinda and Pedro) seems a bit hollow. This court, it is clear, only affirms the transformation that had already taken place out in the forest, where Roderigo declared, “I would ever dwell here, / For here is a kind of Court of Reformation” (5.4.136). Indeed, it is not just the bandit— or the heroine—who has been “Reformed,” but the entire drama that, by participating in the tradition of fraudulent disability, found itself remade in a new and Protestant likeness, even against its will.

Examining women‟s performances of fraudulent disability in early modern drama reveals significant information about both disability and the theatrical tradition that staged it, but it also raises significant questions. If disability and femininity were mutually constitutive, what did that mean for masculinity? Was it simply eroded by disability, or were there restitutional strategies available to men with non-standard bodies (and men who faked the non-standard body)? If charity was so central to the construction of disability, how were disabled men who did not need charity—men who possibly dispensed charity themselves—categorized? What was the relationship between work and charity? By examining two plays that features both actively employed and actively charitable disabled men I hope to answer these questions and further illuminate the way that performances of the non-standard body reflected and reshaped real disability in early modern England. 104

CHAPTER III “THIS LAMENESS WILL NOT SERVE”: LABOR, GENDER, AND DISABILITY IN THE FAIR MAID OF THE EXCHANGE AND THOMAS DEKKER‟S THE SHOEMAKER‟S HOLIDAY

A small emblem decorates the title page of the 1637 edition of the anonymous drama The Fair Maid of the Exchange. Growing in the middle of the page is a fruit tree, its branches heavily laden; underneath the tree, two children scramble to gather the fruit.

One child bends down to pick up a piece of fruit that has fallen to the ground, while the other jumps in an effort to knock low-hanging pieces loose. Between the children and the fruit-heavy foliage, a curling banner is woven amongst the branches of the tree. Its motto reads: “Charitas.” This emblem of charity freely given and joyfully received is unique. It does not appear in the other extant edition of The Fair Maid of the Exchange printed in 1625, nor have I identified it in any other works published by Anne Griffin, the printer of the 1637 edition. Thematic emblems are also unusual in printed play-texts; far more common are decorative flourishes or emblems that designate the identity (and ideals) of the text‟s printer. Emblems of charity, while not uncommon in emblem books, usually depict a mother surrounded by her children, rather than a fruit tree surrounded by children. The singular use of this singular emblem sends a very clear signal: this is a play about charity. The title of the play points readers to the object of that charity. It announces (in the 1637 edition) “THE FAYRE MAIDE Of the EXCHANGE: Together with the merry humors, and pleasant passage of the Cripple of Fanchurch. Furnished with a variety of delectable mirth.”113 The play‟s prologue affirms this, concluding with this

113 Although The Cripple is only ever linked with Fanchurch on the title page of the play and never in the body of the play itself, the designation makes geographical sense. Fanchurch (now Fenchurch) Street runs nearby the location of the original Royal Exchange, linking Aldgate with Lombard and Gracechurch Streets. Presumably it was the supposed residence for the Cripple. This unusual detail raises the question: was there a real Cripple of Fanchurch on whom the character is based and whose designation on the title page might draw readers, much as Mary Frith‟s real presence drew audiences to Middleton and Dekker‟s The Roaring Girl? Muriel Clara 105 couplet: “Though our Invention lame, imperfect be, / Yet give the Cripple almes for charitie.”114 This imagining of an audience‟s approval as a gift of charity is not uncommon, especially among disability-disguise plays.115 However, directing the “charity” of the audience‟s approval expressly at the Cripple seems to undermine the actions of the play itself, which consistently figure the Cripple as a successfully employed member of London‟s economy and society, a person who not only does not need charity but actively rejects it. The Cripple‟s employment makes the title page‟s framing emblem similarly dissonant: who is all this “Charitas” really for?

As I have demonstrated in the two previous chapters, the disability-disguise genre offered unique theatrical opportunities for early modern playwrights looking to shape the social and theatrical habits of their audiences. Specifically, I have shown how the repeated staging of able-bodied characters feigning disability was employed to curb the charitable impulses of the early modern theater-going public. In this chapter, I reveal a unique variation on that theme, where representations of genuinely disabled, commercially productive characters appear to advocate for charitable giving. By examining the representations of disability, both real and feigned, in The Fair Maid of the Exchange and Thomas Dekker‟s The Shoemaker‟s Holiday I posit that these plays challenge the prevailing definitions of disability developing during the early modern era, specifically those legal definitions that linked disability with the inability to participate in productive labor. Through their unusual staging of successfully employed disabled men,

Bradbrook postulates that the Cripple was “probably a real person,” given how often early modern playwrights incorporate familiar local characters into their dramas, although she provides no additional evidence for that assumption. Clearly more research is needed. Bradbrook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 246.

114 The Fair Maid of the Exchange, ed. Peter H. Davidson (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1962), 13-14. All subsequent quotations from this text will be identified parenthetically by line number.

115 Recall that Marston uses a similar image in his prologue to Antonio‟s Revenge. 106 these plays suggest a more complex image of disability than was established by the legal and religious authorities of the period. At the same time, their visions of vibrant and valuable disabled characters also have distinct limits. The disabled men in these plays are able to contribute to social and financial networks only through the assistance of able- bodied male friends and colleagues who facilitate their inclusion in these economies. The result is that both plays neatly elide the problems that disability posed to the burgeoning English labor economy—as well as the problem that the potentially unruly middling-class male work force posed to English peace and productivity—by suggesting that disability is not a problem, provided that one was a diligent worker with a devoted cadre of male companions. Unique rehearsals (and reversals) of the fraudulent-disability trope in both plays further support this image of seemingly unproblematic disability. The Fair Maid of the Exchange and The Shoemaker‟s Holiday present images of disability that absolve their viewing audiences from feeling any obligation to extend charity to people with disabilities, because the plays insist that charity is entirely unnecessary. Although the prologue of The Fair Maid of the Exchange might request that the audience “give the

Cripple almes for charitie,” the play also makes clear that those alms are entirely figurative.

Men at Work: Disability, Masculinity, and the Labor Economy

In early modern England, disability was frequently associated with effeminacy. As I have demonstrated in the previous chapter, the attributes ascribed to disability—like passivity, stasis, and weakness—overlapped with those ascribed to femininity, making them mutually constitutive identities. Because disability was gendered female, when men possessed disabilities, the feminine associations of their physical condition seriously compromised their claims to masculinity. Early modern manhood was often defined by various forms of regulation and authority: political, financial, erotic, and, especially, 107 corporeal. Pristine health was perceived as the result of careful control over the body‟s essential fluidity, making disease and disability the products of dangerous and potentially immoral lack or excess.116 Therefore men who experienced disability in early modern England were almost automatically cut off from claims to full masculinity. In addition to resembling constructions of femininity and compromising masculine bodily integrity, disability was also encoded in a number of other conditions that threatened early modern masculine identity. Infancy, childhood, and old age were regarded as intervals in a man‟s life when he failed to achieve manhood in part because of the bodily weaknesses associated with those periods: consider the “mewling and puking” infant and the old man, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” in Jacques‟s famous speech in As You Like It.117 National identity was also important to constructions of manhood in early modern England. Masculinity was very specifically an English masculinity, and disability was often the justification for the exclusion of non- Englishmen from that category. Jews, Irishmen, Gypsies, and Moors were often represented as lacking in manhood because they were believed to be physically weak, prone to disease and defect, and uniquely susceptible to madness. Even men from nations regarded as corresponding to (although, of course, inferior to) England, were stripped of masculinity because of stereotypes linked to disability. The Spaniards and Italians were choleric and inclined towards mental illnesses; the French were lacking in essential vigor and virility, while also, paradoxically, pox-ridden; the Dutch, England‟s Protestant neighbors, were grossly fat and perpetually drunk. Thoroughly English men prone to drunkenness risked their own claims to manhood, both because drunkenness was thought

116 Mark Breitenberg makes the body‟s potential for effeminizing excess or lack the cornerstone of his argument about early modern masculinity‟s essential precariousness. See especially, “Fearful Fluidity: Burton‟s Anatomy of Melancholy,” in Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 35-68.

117 Shakespeare, As You Like It, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 5th ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2003), 2.7.143, 165. 108 to signal a lack of control over one‟s body and because the short- and long-term physical effects of excessive drinking were believed to be disabling (especially in the way they limited sexual performance).118 Cuckolds were regarded as necessarily emasculated, and, although in this case the locus for emasculation occurred outside the man‟s body, early modern opinion often asserted that cuckoldry was the result of the wronged husband‟s sexual impotence.119 Even sodomites were ostracized because their bodies, like their sexual acts, were characterized as “against nature.”120 Disability particularly compromised masculine identity through the way it limited men‟s ability to work, which was a critical component of early modern manhood. Certainly men‟s ability to work was essential to the project of patriarchy; as Alexandra Shepherd asserts, “That householders and married men should be providers was as important a tenet of patriarchal ideology as the expectation of chastity in women.”121 But even for unmarried men, work was a key part of shaping their masculine identity. Gentlemen, who otherwise occupied a position of power and social status that enforced their manhood, found their claim to masculinity somewhat undermined by their perceived idleness; similarly, men of the lower and middling classes could bolster their claims to masculinity through their active, productive labor.122 Specifically as the older feudal

118 Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999), 40.

119 Ibid., 104-06.

120 Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 53. The association of disability with these other non-masculine male identities, specifically the use of disability as the implicit justification for their stigmatization, has, I believe, often precluded discussions of disability and masculinity during this period.

121 Shepherd, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 186.

122 Tom Rutter, Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 15. The way in which work conferred masculinity is complicated by the fact that noble status—a position specifically without commercial production—was also a key factor in creating masculinity. These contradictions were characteristic of early modern constructions of manhood. Bruce R. Smith, for example, asserts that because of both their 109 economic system, which upheld a manhood based on land-ownership, was replaced by a newer capitalist model, which upheld a manhood based on the accumulation of money and commercial mobility, work became an ever-more-important part of what it meant to be an early modern man. Perhaps even more pointedly, not participating in work limited claims to manhood. Building off of biblical injunctions that condemned idleness— especially 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “[I]f any would not work, neither would he eat”—men who were unwilling or incapable of working were excluded from early modern manhood. As Shepherd‟s insightful study of older men in early modern England demonstrates, even those men with legitimate reasons for their inability to financially support themselves were effeminized and, often, ostracized. When forced to rely on their parish for support, “decrepitude—in terms of incapacity and need—became the primary determinant of their identity . . . and there was no alternative positive male identity with which to escape „impotence.‟”123 The connections between work and masculinity were distinctly problematic for men with disabilities because the legal definition of disability in early modern England was based on an individual‟s inability to work. The earliest legislation in England regarding the treatment of beggars was an Act of 1349 expressly forbidding the giving of alms to any person able to labor.124 Five years later it was again affirmed that the only individuals who could legally travel from place to place begging were those “impotent to serve,” and even those beggars were required to carry letters patent to affirm the legal verification of their disability.125 The Tudor laws that built on these earlier medieval

reversibility and their aspirational nature, early modern masculine ideals “entail certain fundamental conflicts,” the foremost being that “the ideals contradict each other.” Shakespeare and Masculinity, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 64.

123 Shepherd, Meanings of Manhood, 245.

124 23. Edw. III. c. 7.

125 12. Rich. II. c. 8. 110 statutes further stressed that physical impairments limiting an individual‟s ability to work were the only primary justification for charity. Henry VIII‟s 1536 Act for the Punishment of Sturdy Vagabonds and Beggars states that charity is only to be reserved for “the poor, impotent, lame, feeble, sick, and diseased people, being not able to work,” while “that such as be lusty or having their limbs strong enough to labor may be daily kept in continual labor.”126 These laws articulated a specific group of people who were defined by their impairments—but, significantly, not by their impairments alone, but by the way in which those impairments limited their ability to participate in productive labor. The handbooks issued to justices of the peace and overseers of the poor, the legal authorities tasked with identifying disability, attest to this unusual definition. One such handbook, An ease for oversseers of the poore, published anonymously in 1601, spells out the specifics of this classification. A section entitled “A Description of poore by their Defects,” begins by stating: “Such poore as should have releefe in money are described by their defects of {nature; senses; members; Bodie, as {olde; blinde; lame; not able to work” and then clarifies, “The last defect, not able to worke, is an exposition of the former, as for instance.” The author then provides further elucidation on the other listed impairments:

There be many aged can worke, and there be some workes require more use then labour, and may easily be done by the olde: and therefore by old is not meant such as be onely in yeares, but by reason of the imbicillitie of their age they cannot work, or live of their work. There be some that want an eie, and yet can worke with the use of one eie, and therefore by blind is intended such an one as cannot see at all to worke, or live of his worke. There be other that want a legge, and yet he may doe many workes having the use of his hands, and therefore by lame is meant such an one, as for want of his limmes he cannot labour, nor live of his labour.127

126 27. Hen. VIII. c. 25.

127 An ease for oversseers of the poore (London, 1601), 23. 111

Disability, then, was not contingent on physical condition, but on participation in productive labor. Just as the elderly were not truly “aged” unless they could not work, nor the eyeless “blind,” nor the limbless “lame,” so people with physical impairments were not grouped into this emerging category of people stigmatized by their disabilities unless they could not work. Or at least that is what the legal authorities of the time assert; The Fair Maid of the Exchange presents an early modern representation of disability that challenges the prevailing definitions. In its depiction of a commercially productive disabled man, the play demonstrates the potential for a broader early modern conception of disability. At the same time, this more inclusive theatrical portrait deliberately glosses over the problems faced by workers with disabilities and the problems people with disabilites posed to the commercial economy of London. Although complicating the connections between disability, masculinity, and work, The Fair Maid of the Exchange‟s argument about charity—that it is unnecessary—is ultimately as reductive as the definitions of disability it attempts to revise.

“Take my crooked habite”: Disability and Masculine Commerce in The Fair Maid of the Exchange Far more fraudulently disabled characters populate the early modern English stage than do genuinely disabled characters. While genuinely disabled characters do appear, they tend to fall into two categories: set-pieces or symbols. The characters with disabilities who are used as set-pieces hardly qualify as characters. Like the group of madmen and fools who occupy Alibius‟s madhouse in Middleton and Rowley‟s The

Changeling, or the gaggle of antics who torment the Duchess of Malfi in the play that bears her name, these set-piece characters are often staged in colorful collectives and are employed more for atmosphere than for advancing the plot. Symbolically disabled characters are those who begin the play fully able-bodied, but take on metaphorically loaded impairments. Sometimes these disabilities are figured as consequences of their 112 own evil or foolish actions, like Titus Andronicus, whose amputated hand recalls his murder of his son, or the lawsuit-happy lawyer Tangle in Middleton‟s The Phoenix, whose madness punishes him with a torment similar to what he inflicted on others. Alternatively, these disabilities are cast as emblematic symbols of tragedy, most often when they apply to women: like Lavinia, whose mutilation attests to her rape in Titus Andronicus; Ophelia, whose madness speaks to both her father‟s murder and her betrayal by Hamlet; or Isabella in The Spanish Tragedy, whose madness is a result of her son‟s death and her husband‟s inaction. Only rarely are genuinely disabled characters allowed a depth of personality and a (nominal) detachment from symbolic meanings on the early modern stage. Exceptions include Richard III, Lieutenant Stump in the anonymous 1602 drama A Larum for London, and, perhaps especially, the Cripple in The Fair Maid of the Exchange. The Cripple has no other name. Throughout The Fair Maid of the Exchange, characters treat this descriptor as his proper name, both when addressing him directly (“Cripple, tis knowne I am an honest man,” [77]; “Cripple, will you along?” [840]) and when speaking about him (“And in good time the Cripple is at worke,” [1285]; “Instruct the Cripple to find out my love” [853]). It is also the moniker he applies to himself when speaking to himself in soliloquy (“Now stirre thee cripple,” [97]) and when speaking about himself in third person to others (“And if this sort not well to your content, /

Condemne the Cripple,” [1357-68]). The nature of his disability, beyond that ubiquitous designation, is not entirely clear. Although the word “cripple” was used to identify people who had impairments in any of their limbs, it is evident that the Cripple‟s impairments are located in his legs. Crutches assist him with his mobility. With them he seems to have little difficulty negotiating the presumably tricky environment of early modern London, although without them he experiences serious limitations. The play provides little information about the origin of the Cripple‟s disability. The only reference occurs when the Cripple speaks of walking with a friend through the 113

Royal Exchange “before the visitation of my legges, and my expence in timber”—the loss of the use of his legs and his adoption of crutches (677).128 This passing mention supplies us with a valuable piece of information: the Cripple was not always disabled, and, because he works in the Royal Exchange, we can assume that his employment began before the onset of his impairment. This information is important because of the early modern distinction between disabilities that were congenital and those that were acquired. Although both were grouped together under the legal definition of disability when they limited individuals‟ ability to work, congenital disabilities tended to draw more of the supernatural associations and physiognomic stigmas than disabilities that originated from injury or illness. Because the Cripple falls into this second, somewhat-less-stigmatized group, and especially because he seems to have established his employment before he became disabled, it is possible that the circumstances of his disability allow him more opportunities than some of his impaired early modern counterparts. The Cripple, for instance, faces considerably less invective directed towards his disability—and from a much smaller segment of the population—than, say, Richard III, whose disabilities were congenital (but whose social influence was much greater). The suggestion that the Cripple was a member of the commercial community before the “visitation” of his legs, however, also serves to make the totalizing force of his identity as “the Cripple” all the more surprising.129 Although the specifics and social perceptions of the Cripple‟s impairments are not fully clarified by the play, what is clear is that those impairments define him. Whoever he was before he became “the Cripple” is unknown.

128 “Visitation” was a word that implied both the action of traveling from one place to another and also an affliction with illness or trouble of some kind, especially as a result of wrongdoing. Both associations leave the nature and origins of the Cripple‟s disability ambiguous. Coincidentally, “visitation” was also a word frequently used to describe the charitable act of visiting ill or impaired persons (Oxford English Dictionary, New Edition, online).

129 The small number of authentically disabled characters in early modern drama, however, limits opportunity for comparison. 114

Second only to his disability, the Cripple‟s major defining characteristic is his profession: he is a “drawer”—a term referring to a draftsman who drew or traced designs to be embroidered on cloth. In order to embroider the ornate and yet repetitively uniform designs popular in early modern England, drawers would trace images or motifs onto paper and then transfer the outline of that image onto cloth using chalk, pumice, or charcoal so that skilled needleworkers could recreate the designs in thread.130 Although drawers are one of the lesser-known contributors to early modern textile production, their role was critical to producing the highly valued, widely circulated luxury goods that helped power London‟s financial and social networks. The Cripple‟s professional importance is signaled in a number of ways. In the few instances when he is not called “the Cripple,” he is referred to as “the Drawer” (178, 235). We often see him engaged in the process and commerce of his profession, taking orders, offering thoughts about designs, and returning completed work. Indeed, it is important to the play that the Cripple is not simply gainfully employed, but that he is demonstrably successful at his work; a number of critical plot points rest on the Cripple‟s brisk business as a drawer. The greatest marker of the Cripple‟s success—and an important context for the play—is the location of his shop in London‟s Royal Exchange. Founded in 1566 and officially opened by Queen Elizabeth herself in 1571, the Royal Exchange was part stock market and part shopping mall, a place where you could purchase everything from linen thread to life insurance; in short, it was the beating heart of early modern London‟s commercial life.131 By the publication of the first edition of The Fair Maid of the Exchange in 1607, the Royal Exchange was coveted real estate for merchants of all kinds. The Cripple‟s possession of his own shop at the Exchange indicates not only his commercial success,

130 Kay Staniland, Embroiderers (London: British Museum Press, 1991), 31.

131 In fact, the first recorded life insurance policy issued in England was sold at the Royal Exchange in 1583. For more on the history and workings of the Exchange, see Ann Saunders, ed., The Royal Exchange, (London: London Topographical Society, 1997). 115 since retail space there was at a premium, but it also signals his full integration into London‟s social and mercantile economies. The Cripple‟s two defining characteristics—his disability and his successful professional life—would seem to contradict one another, but The Fair Maid of the Exchange presents us with a vision of early modern London where not only are these two attributes not opposed, but where the disabled workman is held up as a something of a masculine, capitalist ideal. The Cripple can rule his unruly body with an authority unmatched by his less-temperate, able-bodied fellow workers. His ability to exact effective control extends beyond his body, and he commands the actions and feelings of other characters in The Fair Maid of the Exchange, orchestrating the erotic and financial reversals that constitute the play‟s conventionally happy ending. He accomplishes this though his impressive powers of regulation and control, but he also benefits from the assistance of a cadre of male friends and colleagues, whose participation in the Cripple‟s plans help ensure his success. This is especially evident in the play‟s performance of fraudulent disability, which is stage-managed by the Cripple. The play‟s vision of a productive disability empowered by male friendships and careful regulation by the disabled character seems to belie the emblem that graces the play‟s title page: this is not a world where charity is necessary or even welcome. At the same time, carefully examining the play‟s characterization of manhood and male friendships reveals cracks in its carefully constructed ideal image of disability, highlighting the problem that physical difference posed to early modern masculinity and the early modern labor economy. The opening scene of the play highlights these central issues—disability, masculinity, productive labor, and male friendship—all within the context of an attempted rape that endangers the fair maid of the title. She is Phillis Flower, the daughter of a merchant and moneylender, who is employed as a sempster (a maker and merchandiser of textiles) at the Royal Exchange. She and another female shop assistant, Ursula, are delivering goods at London‟s Mile End when they are accosted by two men 116 who intend to “rifle them of that they carry, . . . both goods, and their virginitie” (57-58). Phillis and Ursula cry for help; serendipitously, the Cripple happens by and hears their screams. After just a brief pep-talk to himself—“Now stirre thee cripple, and of thy foure legs / Make use of one, to do a virgin good” (97-98)—the Cripple uses one of his “foure legs,” a crutch, to fight off the assailants. Phillis is especially appreciative. She offers the Cripple her fervent thanks, and when he tries to deflect her gratitude and instructs her to give credit to God, she does so only briefly before returning to declare her admiration for the Cripple: “For this aid,” she insists, “Ile ever honour thee” (108). At this point, the play seems to be setting up a very stereotypical patriarchal erotic alliance, wherein the Cripple earns sexual rights to Phillis because he has protected her chastity. Rather than undermining his manhood, his disability further affirms his masculinity, since the Cripple, through his courage and physical prowess, controls his unwieldy body and exerts control over the able bodies of other men in order to rescue Phillis. It is significant that he uses his crutch to save her; rather than becoming an emblem of his limitation, it becomes an instrument of his strength.

The scene, however, makes a sudden reversal. The attackers return, and this time they have a plan: “Come thou behind him snatch away his crutches, / And then thou knowst he needs must fall to the ground” (119-20). They creep up on Phillis, Ursula, and the Cripple and then confront them. “Stand thou that hast more legs than nature gave thee,” commands one assailant, recasting the Cripple‟s previously positive claim to excess limbs as an insult (127). The Cripple nevertheless attempts to maintain his personal agency while turning the assailant‟s dehumanizing, four-legged accusation against him, by responding, “Mongrell, ile choose” (128). His brief resistance is futile; the attacker steals his crutches and soon the Cripple is crying “Murder, murder!” along with the women. They are overheard by a passing young gallant, Frank Golding, who, like the Cripple before him, drives off the assailants and rescues the would-be victims. At first Frank Golding seems to mistake the Cripple for one of the attackers, which might 117 seem improbable given his presumed incapacity at that moment, but perfectly comports with the stereotype connecting disability and criminality in early modern England. Only after the Cripple‟s protestations are confirmed by Phillis does Frank back off. Frank wants to know more about the circumstances of the attack, but Phillis, understandably, is far more interested in repairing to a safe location than chatting with Frank. The Cripple also fixates on a specific goal: repaying Frank Golding for saving his life. “Thanks worthy sir,” he says, “may but the Cripple be, / Of power to gratifie this courtesie, / I then shall thinke the heavens favour me.” The anxious Phillis interrupts, saying “No more now for Gods sake, let us hence”; the Cripple completes the couplet by insisting again to Frank, “If I do live, your love Ile recompence” (146-50). This reversal of action at the end of this scene does seem to suddenly effeminize the Cripple, by demonstrating his physical limitations, his similarities with the female characters (even sharing collective dialogue with them), and his reliance on another man for personal safety. However, this seemingly simple—and stereotypical— characterization of a disabled man is complicated by the issue of charity raised at the end of the scene. The Cripple very clearly feels the need to “recompence” Frank Golding for his assistance, an impulse the women do not share. If the Cripple were automatically effeminized by his disability, as many early modern sources suggest, it seems unlikely that he would be so intent on restoring the balance of “courtesie” between himself and

Frank because such an imbalance would be the norm. Instead, the Cripple‟s desire to repay Frank suggests that it is Frank‟s action that has made him the Cripple‟s superior, not simply his able-bodiedness and, therefore, superior masculinity. In asserting his desire to repay Frank, the Cripple reasserts his own masculinity by suggesting that there is a debt that can be repaid. In addition, the Cripple‟s determination to repay Frank Golding introduces us to a world wherein a disabled man does not need charity—in fact, he is clearly uncomfortable having received, even temporarily, a gift he cannot pay back—and, instead of a handout, requires reciprocal male friendship. On the one hand, in 118 insisting on the need for mutual exchange, The Fair Maid of the Exchange envisions a version of disability that is uniquely progressive for the early modern era. On the other hand, this version of disability is only possible through nearly super-human displays of physical prowess (such as the Cripple‟s fighting off the would-be rapists with his crutch) and emotional and social control (as the Cripple demonstrates throughout the rest of the play, and I will examine in some detail shortly.) The complications of this unusual depiction of disability form the basis for what I would argue is the central conflict of the drama: how will the Cripple be able to “recompense” Frank Golding for saving his life?

Although the question of the Cripple‟s repayment of Frank‟s kindness might open the play, the majority of the drama is occupied with the related, but more conventional question of how to resolve the characters‟ erotic conflicts. Frank Golding has two older brothers, Ferdinand and Anthony, both of whom have fallen uncontrollably in love with Phillis Flower. Frank is initially skeptical of his brothers‟ devotion to the fair maid of the Exchange, scoffing, much like Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing that he will not be won by a woman or effeminized by love. He boasts:

Whats here, Phillis and love, and love and Phillis: I have seene Phillis, and have heard of love; I will see Phillis and will heare of love: But neither Phillis, nor the power of love, Shall make be bond-slave to a woman‟s becke. (316-20) Frank mocks his brothers for their devotion to Phillis until, of course, he is similarly stricken with lovesickness for her. In spite of being pursued by all three Golding brothers, Phillis herself is not interested in any of them; she has bestowed her affections elsewhere. “Well, let them pleade and perish if they will,” she declares, “Cripple, my heart is thine, and shall be still” (485-86). The Cripple, however, does not reciprocate Phillis‟s feelings. Instead, he adheres to Frank‟s pre-lovesick theories about love, swearing off marriage altogether. When Frank loves Phillis, Phillis loves the Cripple, and the unenamoured Cripple owes a debt of gratitude to Frank, the improbable solution is nevertheless obvious: in order to recompense Frank and resolve the erotic conflicts of the drama, the 119

Cripple disguises Frank as himself and, by stage-managing Frank‟s performance of disability, helps him woo and win Phillis. While this course of action handily resolves the play‟s dramatic conflicts, it also raises a significant question: why doesn‟t the Cripple want to marry Phillis himself? We might speculate that, as a disabled man, he would not have been regarded as a suitable romantic/erotic partner for the able-bodied Phillis.132 The Cripple himself says as much. When he tells Frank Golding about Phillis‟s love for him, he justifies his rejection of her by saying that he is “Too foule for such a beautie, and too base / To match in brightness with that sacred comet, / That shines like Phoebus in Londons Element” (1957-59). However, the erotics of early modern disability are complicated. While sometimes divested of erotic power, at other times disability was seen as a site of erotic excess and pleasure.133 The Cripple himself seems to benefit from this stereotype, as he claims that he is “hourly solicited” by women in his shop (888). Therefore, the Cripple‟s disability, while certainly challenging his masculinity, would not have necessarily excluded him from erotic candidacy. The Cripple‟s contradictory reasons for rejecting Phillis make this clear. When considering Phillis‟s love in soliloquy, his objections have nothing to do with disability and everything to with his resistance to marriage. “Fancie shall never marry me to woe,” he vows, “[A] yong man‟s never mar‟d, / Till he by marriage from all joy be bar‟d” (898-900). His rejection of marriage generally seems to counter his rejection of Phillis specifically, suggesting that his refusal of her has more to do with fulfilling his own wishes than protecting her propriety.

132 This assumption is repeated by later critics of the play, who, like Andrew Ward, question “the propriety of bringing a deformed hero on stage,” let alone potentially marrying him to the play‟s heroine. A History of English Dramatic Literature (New York: American Book Company, 1907), 2:574.

133There are a number of sources, in both literature and the visual arts, that attest to the erotic allure of disability in the early modern period. Perhaps the best known of these is Montaigne‟s essay “On the Lame,” wherein he discusses the reputation of both lame men and women as ideal sexual partners. The Complete Essays, ed. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 1987), 1170-71. 120

Refusing Phillis—and marriage—might actually be a beneficial choice for the Cripple. Not only does assisting Frank in his pursuit of Phillis restore the equilibrium between himself and Frank, doing so also creates a homosocial bond that, within the context of early modern sexual and commercial structures, may have been more valuable than any marriage. Adhering to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick‟s now-famous model, the Cripple, Frank Golding, and Phillis Flower form a homosocial triangle, wherein the female love object mediates men‟s bonds with (and potentially sexual desire for) one another.134 Male friendship was critical to both constructions of masculinity and to commercial success in early modern England, but it had to be very carefully negotiated since the social markers that identified male friendship were identical to those that signaled sodomy.135 Especially for a disabled man, for whom male friendship was particularly essential to social and commercial integration and who was (as we have seen) often associated with sexual excess/deviance, the need for a mediating female figure to deflect any possibilities of homosexual desire was imperative. Friendship with Frank is critical to ensuring the Cripple‟s masculinity and social/commercial success, and the connection with Phillis is critical to accommodating his friendship with Frank. Similarly, the Cripple‟s rejection of marriage in general further bolsters his claim to manhood, since erotic love was regularly figured as effeminizing, both because of the way it drew men away from stereotypically masculine pursuits (like business or war) and attuned them to stereotypically feminine concerns (like appearance and fashion).136 Even entering into

134 Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, Columbia University Press, 1985), 23-27. Sedgwick‟s homosocial triangle usually describes a relationship where two men are rivals for the same woman, but variations like this one are also described using this same model.

135 Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 40-61.

136 This is one justification claimed by Benedick for his resistance to marriage in the early scenes of Much Ado About Nothing, such as when he laments that Claudio used to be “an honest man and a soldier,” but, once in love, has “turned orthography.” (William Shakespeare, 121 marriage without the baggage of romantic feeling could be effeminizing, since it signaled a domestication of sexual and financial interests. Juana Green, the only scholar in recent years to produce a sustained analysis of The Fair Maid of the Exchange, persuasively argues that the Cripple exempts himself from the play‟s erotic economies to better assert himself into the play‟s financial economies. Citing the early modern belief that disability resulted in excessive energy that, if not released sexually, would be channeled into other efforts, Green suggests that by diverting his sexual energies into professional pursuits, the Cripple asserts his masculinity. Not participating in erotic hijinks, the Cripple instead dedicates himself to economic production, facilitating a rise in his financial and social standing, and, somewhat paradoxically, making himself even more attractive to Phillis. “It is the Cripple‟s productive rather than reproductive ability,” Green insists, “that makes him a desirable commodity in London‟s marriage market.”137 By resisting an erotic connection, the Cripple reasserts his masculinity and becomes even more erotically appealing through his professional success. The Cripple may also choose to divert the affections of Phillis Flower to Frank

Golding because of the possibility that she is not a suitable match for him. Although ostensibly a winsome, hardworking English heroine like those found in a number of city comedies, Phillis also displays attributes that complicate that characterization. Specifically, in scenes where she is engaged in the work of shopkeeping, we see a surprisingly sharp edge to the fair maid of the Exchange. In the opening scene, when she is delivering goods with Ursula, Phillis is very short with her fellow sempster, both threatening her and castigating her at once: “If your forgetfulnesse cause any defect,” she

Much Ado About Nothing, ed. Claire McEachern, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. [London: Methuen, 2007], 2.3.19-20.) Of course, marriage also conferred masculinity in certain regards, not least by affirming a man‟s responsibility for a household. This is another example of the contradictory nature of early modern masculinity.

137 Green, “The Sempster‟s Wares: Merchandising and Marrying in The Fair Maid of the Exchange,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 1105. 122 warns Ursula, “You‟r like to pay for‟t, therefore looke unto it” (32-33). She is even more short-tempered with her shop‟s errand boy. She bickers with him about her authority within the hierarchy of the business. He accuses her of acting tyrannically when their mutual mistress, the shop‟s owner, is out; Phillis responds by threatening to beat him with a yard-stick, going so far as brandishing her makeshift weapon. When the boy stops her, he says, “I know your wilfulnes, / These wordes are but to shew the world your humor” (1181-82). Critics have taken note of her ill-temper. Says Karl E. Snyder, “[Phillis] seems to have definitely shrewish characteristics. One is quite willing for her to be overreached at the end of the play in her desire to marry the Cripple, and the fact that she is allowed to choose the young and personable Frank for a husband is almost a better fate than she deserves.”138 Snyder‟s suggestion that the audience might appreciate the thwarting of Phillis‟s love for the Cripple might be an anachronistic response, but, given the Cripple‟s thoughtful attention to discerning others‟ characters throughout the play, it seems unlikely that Phillis would be the only person to escape his scrutiny. Whether he is simply motivated by the desire to recompense Frank Golding for the charity that he extended to him in the opening scene of the play, or whether the Cripple has other complex motives for wanting to transfer Phillis‟s affections to Frank, he clearly plays an essential role in their eventual union. Frank is, in fact, a remarkably passive hero; his first actions in the romantic plot of the play aren‟t directed towards winning Phillis‟s love, but, rather, to defeating his two rival brothers. Even this he simply stumbles into, rather than craftily plotting the plan on his own. Unaware that Frank has come to share his adoration of Phillis, Ferdinand Golding recruits Frank to help him impede the suit of their other brother, Anthony. Knowing that Anthony is writing Phillis a

138 Snyder, introduction to The Fair Maide of the Exchange, by Thomas Heywood (New York: Garland, 1980), 39. Although Snyder‟s assessment of Phillis seems to be fairly common, his high opinion of Frank is not universally shared. Peter Davison, for instance, described Frank as “repellant” in “Thomas Heywood,” in Elizabethan Dramatists, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 62 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale, 1987), 113. 123 love letter (in his own blood, no less), Ferdinand arranges for Frank to dress up like a porter and instructs him to promise—but fail—to deliver Anthony‟s letter to Phillis. Finding himself in disguise, Frank is, at first, a bit anxious about his transformation from gallant to servant: “Now would not all the world take me for a Porter? / How strangely am I metamorphosed?” he wonders (1079-80). Although until this point Frank has seemed simply a pawn in his brother‟s machinations, dressing in disguise inspires him to take matters into his own hands, redeeming the potential damage caused by trading his higher social station for a lower one. Frank says:

And yet I neede not be ashamed neither, Jove when his love-scapes when he attempted ever Transformed himselfe, yet ever sped in love, Why may not I then in this strange disguise? This habite may proove mighty in loves powre As beast, or bird, bull, or swanne, or golden showre. (1081- 86) Taking his cue from Jove, Frank goes to Anthony and, introducing himself as the pointedly misnamed “Trusty John,” offers to deliver his letter to Phillis. Knowing better than to hand over the letter to his rival brother but unsure of how to take best advantage of his opportunity, Frank suddenly remembers “a Cripple dwelling here at hand, / That‟s very well acquainted with the Maide” (1152-53). Specifically, Frank recalls saving the Cripple and that the Cripple “[s]wore, if he lived, he would requite that kindness” (1155). What knowledge Frank has of the Cripple‟s abilities and reputation beyond their single encounter at Mile End is unknown, but Frank immediately sets off to seek his “councell,” stating, “he shall be / my tutor by his wit and pollicie” (1156-57). What Frank Golding lacks in creativity and ambition, the Cripple more than adequately supplies. Although Frank arrives at his shop in the Royal Exchange still pretending to be Trusty John the porter, the Cripple quickly sees through his ruse: he voices his suspicions when he sees the letter is signed by Anthony Golding, but, given his reputation for sharp discernment, it‟s possible that he recognized Frank instantly, giving the Cripple‟s greeting—“Welcome honest friend” (1286)—an ironic twist. When Frank 124 does formally reveal himself to the Cripple, he does so by insisting on the debt that the Cripple owes him. “Cripple,” Frank says, “thou once didst promise me thy love, / When I did rescue thee on Mile-end Greene, / Now is the time, now let me have thy ayd” (1332- 34). The Cripple hastily affirms his vow to recompense Frank for his kindness, but, when he does, he expands his previous promise, offering Frank not only his help, but also his life: “Sir, what I promised I will now performe; / My love is yours, my life to do you good” (1336-37). In this way, the Cripple clearly repays Frank according to the terms he identified earlier in the play: Frank saved the Cripple‟s life and now the Cripple gives that life back to Frank. This exchange restores the Cripple and Frank‟s relationship to a point of equilibrium, since the Cripple‟s debt has been fully repaid by his offer. However, the Cripple adds an important condition to Frank‟s acceptance of this exchange: “Which to approve, follow me but in all” (1338), forcing Frank to obey the Cripple‟s every command. Frank quickly agrees, and his response affirms the new mutuality of their relationship by acknowledging how the Cripple‟s offer of his life affords him the right to direct Frank‟s: “Saist thou to me so friend, for that very word / My life is thine, command my heart and sword” (1339-40). With their relationship restored to equality, the two men commence their plotting. What follows is another demonstration of the Cripple‟s masterful abilities. The plan that he hatches for Frank hangs on the Cripple‟s remarkable social, literary, commercial, and performative skills. The Cripple details how Frank will deliver letters of harsh rejection to his brothers, claiming that they are from Phillis. In reality, they will be letters selected from a literary hoard maintained by the Cripple, which he (conveniently) inherited from a deceased poet he used to know. Having acquired this library of songs, epigrams, and witticisms, the Cripple says that he has “Pater-noster-like . . . kon‟d them all” (1396). Thanks to his ventriloquism, the Cripple claims that he can fool even the sharpest of City Wits, and, certainly, can select letters to con Frank‟s brothers. He boasts, “Sirra, I could conny-catch the world, / Make my selfe famous for a sodaine wit, / and be 125 admired for my dexteritie, / Were I disposed” (1375-78).139 He instantly produces two appropriately scathing letters and sends Frank on his way, insisting “I can no longer stand / To talke with you, I have some worke in hand” (1428-29). By ending this display of his literary prowess, theatrical power, and social labor with an affirmation of his commercial work, the Cripple again asserts his resistance to the stereotype of disability as idle and unproductive. As this scene attests, the Cripple is, in many ways, the ideal worker, who can provide whatever you need instantly. The authorial power, ingenious strategizing, and nearly supernatural resourcefulness displayed by the Cripple in this scene are only a few of the many remarkable qualities that identify him as an early modern counterpart to the post-modern disability stereotype of the “super-crip.” Paul K. Longmore articulates this stereotype as a staple of twentieth-century “human interest” stories in magazines and news broadcasts, which feature

individuals with disabilities performing a physical feat to demonstrate that they are not „handicapped,‟ only „physically challenged.‟ . . . [Super-crip stories] reiterate, with the active complicity of the disabled participants themselves, the view that disability is really a problem of emotional coping and physical overcoming, rather than an issue of social discrimination against a stigmatized minority.140 Although super-crip narratives today tend to imagine the overcoming of disability as a feat of physical strength, in early modern England, where disability was defined via

139 The Cripple‟s claim to “conny-catching” here, along with the repeated use of the verb “gull” by both Frank and the Cripple throughout this scene (1330, 1335, 1339) adds a subtly criminal tone to their conversation, suggesting that even a commercially productive and economically successful disabled man like the Cripple cannot escape the taint of criminality in early modern England.

140 Longmore, “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Television and Motion Pictures,” in Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 140. Certainly, the Cripple, as a fictional character, is not complicit in his characterization in the same way as the twentieth- and twenty-first-century subjects of these human-interest stories, nor is the characterization of ideal disability in these contemporary texts the same as in the early modern play. Nevertheless, I think that they represent variations of the same myth, albeit specific to their individual cultures and eras. 126 inability to work, characters such as the Cripple suggest that overcoming disability was best represented through feats of commercial prowess. We see evidence of his professional success in his maintenance of a shop in the Royal Exchange, in the brisk business we see him participate in, and, perhaps especially, in the nearly magical assistance we see him provide to others. This disabled man not only does not need assistance to do his work, but uses his work to provide assistance to others. The characterization of the Cripple certainly seems to defy the definition of disability established by the legal authorities in early modern England, but, much like later incarnations of the super-crip myth, it presents a disability that can be overcome through hard work and resourcefulness, a disability that denies the social and economic realities faced by people with disabilities during this period. Thanks to the Cripple‟s impressive abilities, Frank‟s brothers are easily dismissed and the only task that remains for the men is to transfer Phillis‟s love from the Cripple to Frank.141 The Cripple recounts to Frank that Phillis has recently delivered a handkerchief to him to be drawn, and that the design she requested clearly communicates her love for the Cripple. He explains that, when she returns to retrieve the finished handkerchief, she will expect him to either requite her love or reject her. The Cripple‟s plan is for Frank to “take / My crooked habite, and in that disguise / Court her, yea win her, for she will be wonne” (1962-64). Significantly, this action is facilitated by the

Cripple‟s good work: both his commercial labor (the completion of the handkerchief), his relational efforts (the friendship he forged with Frank), and his theatrical production (the performance of himself that he arranges). After explaining his plan to Frank, he reminds him again that all this work “will I doe, to pleasure you my friend,” to which Frank responds, “For which my love to thee shall never end” (1965-66). The reaffirmation of

141The men‟s ability to control women‟s emotions is symptomatic of women‟s limited agency in the play generally. For more on this, see Green, “The Sempster‟s Wares.” 127 how the Cripple‟s work creates a mutual—and mutually beneficial—relationship between the two men concludes the scene, with the Cripple instructing Frank to “assume this shape of mine, / Take what I have, for all I have is thine” (1967-68). Frank‟s performance of disability is unique amongst disability-disguise plays in that he pretends to be a specific disabled person, not simply a stock disabled character.142 Yet while the performance that Frank enacts does engage some of the specifics of the Cripple‟s life, ultimately the disability he performs reflects more of the early modern stereotypes about disabled men than the lived experience we have seen from the Cripple. Frank begins his reductive performance with an equally reductive statement: “Am I not like myself in this disguise, / Crooked in my shape, and crooked in my thoughts? / Then I am a Cripple right” (1984-86). Frank‟s statement rehearses the early modern saw that people with disabilities (“crooked shapes”) were by necessity deceptive (“crooked in my thoughts”), a stereotype influenced by notions of physiognomy. Although Frank‟s comment does include an admission of his own guilt in this ethically murky scheme, it also includes an implicit condemnation of the Cripple, who only a few lines before he called a “mirrour of kindnesse,” “extremities best friend” and a man of “fine policie” (1931, 1977). What‟s more, the implied admission of guilt in the statement is deflected onto the Cripple by making Frank‟s “crooked thoughts” complicit with his newly adopted “crooked form,” signaling a new ambivalence towards disability that continues throughout the end of the play. Frank begins his performance by putting on the Cripple‟s “habit,” which presumably includes both a change in dress and a change in performance, adopting the

Cripple‟s hallmark crutches, and faking the limited mobility that makes them necessary. Significantly, he also begins by attempting to feign the Cripple‟s work as a drawer. Frank

142 This occurs only rarely in the disability-disguise plays I have identified: Quarlous, who takes on the identity of the madman Troubleall in Jonson‟s Bartholomew Fair is another example. 128 is aware of his inability to accurately portray this key factor of the Cripple‟s identity, saying to himself as Phillis arrives, “Yonder she comes, now frame thy hands to draw, / A worser workeman never any saw” (1989-90). Frank quickly abandons his attempts to mimic the Cripple‟s skilled labor, and he does not again make reference to the Cripple‟s work (as the Cripple himself often does) during his performance. Instead, Frank adopts a version of disability that, instead of simply imitating the Cripple (which is all that is needed to make the scheme work) presents a pitiful version of disability in order to use Phillis‟s charity to achieve his desired end, just like numerous counterfeiters before him.

Frank‟s strategy to win Phillis‟s love involves initially resisting her attentions, which allows Frank to perform a pathetic version of disability that goads her wooing on even further. Nevertheless, many of Frank‟s claims to pity are transparently false. “Is my ungarnished, dark, and obscure Cell / A mansion fit for all commanding love?” he asks of the Cripple‟s impressively located and certainly well appointed shop (2016). He says that he is “base,” when both the shop and the actions of the drama prove the Cripple to be financially secure; he says that Phillis‟s “friends dislike” him, when in reality the whole community seems to enjoy the Cripple‟s company and rely on his counsel (2039, 2041). Frank even claims that to be “deform‟d” is a deterrent to their relationship, although this protest, in particular, seems flimsy given that he offers no reason why that may be and given the Cripple‟s previous statement about his sexual popularity (2040). Frank‟s performance of a weak, poor, and friendless disabled man (when the play presents a disabled man who is anything but) elicits an insistence from Phillis that her love is a gift that can reverse his fortunes. To his statement that he is “too base,” Phillis responds, “My wealth shall raise thee up”; when he argues that his deformity is a barrier to their love, and Phillis says flippantly, “Tut, I will beare with that” (2039-40). Her offer to support him—literally and financially—entirely fits with the crisis of charity that Frank‟s performance has elicited. Of course, in this case, the crisis is entirely his; Frank stages “the Cripple‟s” movement from resistance to love as a conversion from ungratefulness to 129 appropriate, but again pitiful, thanksgiving. “Forgive what‟s past,” he finally begs, “And here I proffer all the humble service / Your hie prized love doth merrit at my hands, / Which I confesse is more then I unable / Can gratefie” (2048-51). Frank‟s confession of love as an offer of service parallels the similar offer of service that the Cripple earlier made to Frank. However, there is a significant difference between the two offers. When the Cripple offered his labor and life to Frank, he did so to repay Frank for a service rendered to him and to establish equality in their relationship. Here, Frank (as the Cripple) makes an offer that he says cannot repay the debt owed, and does not result in an equal relationship, but in one where “the Cripple” is reliant on Phillis‟s mercy. Phillis acknowledges this inequity and responds with an inequity of her own: “I take thee at thy word,” she promises, “prowd of thy serice, / But yet no servant shalt thou be of mine, / I will serve thee, command, and ile obey” (2054-56). Phillis‟s willing subjugation mirrors Frank‟s willingness to follow the Cripple‟s every order, but the motivations for their obedience are very different: Frank obeys the Cripple because he believes the man can help him, while Phillis obeys “the Cripple” because she believes him to be helpless.

Frank‟s performance of a pitiful and weak disability allows him to control their relationship. By initially refusing Phillis, Frank plays out the Renaissance trope of the resisting lover with Phillis in the traditionally male role and himself in the traditionally female role.143 In this respect as well, Frank‟s performance contradicts the version of disability we have seen throughout the play from the Cripple, who is pointedly not effeminized. Yet, as before, Frank‟s feigning of a stereotypical disability allows him to control his

143 The reversal of these roles is not unheard of in early modern literature, although it was far more common to have a male pursuer and a female resister than not. One notable exception is Shakespeare‟s Venus and Adonis, which is mentioned by name in The Fair Maid of the Exchange. In the sub-plot, the Cripple tries to coach another young man in wooing a woman, suggesting that he quote poetry to win her over. The young man replies that he‟s “never read anything but Venus and Adonis,” to which the Cripple responds, “Why thats the very quintessence of love” (1649-50). 130 unfolding relationship with Phillis by permitting her to feel that she is in control. After Frank finally concedes to love Phillis, his two brothers, who have come to confirm Phillis‟s rejection in person, confront Phillis and Frank. Phillis not only roundly rebuffs them, but, to prove her devotion to “the Cripple,” betroths herself to him by, again, reversing their gendered roles. She initiates the action by publicly stating her love for the Cripple and then proceeds to enact the man‟s role in a traditional betrothal/marriage ceremony: she takes his hand, stating, “I give my hand, and with my hand, my heart, / My selfe, and all to him” (2121-22). Then she makes an even more explicitly masculine move, giving “the Cripple” a ring (which was usually only given to a woman during a marriage/betrothal ceremony) and announcing, “And with this ring / Ile wed my selfe” (2122-23). Frank then offers the traditional feminine response, “I take thy offering, / And for the gift you gave to me, take this / And let us seale affection with a kisse” (2124-26). By performing a disability that is distinctly effeminate, Frank frees Phillis to take the active, masculine role and entrap herself in an unwanted relationship, while he, like any good coney-catcher, reaps the benefits with very little output of effort.

At the end of his first performance of disability, Frank and the Cripple greet one another as “deere friend[s]” (2157) and demonstrate their partnership by whispering together onstage while other characters are excluded from their private conference. They part warmly, with the Cripple wishing Frank good fortune in his further exploits (2170).

Frank leaves to secure the approval of Phillis‟s parents, Master and Mistress Flower, which he does quickly and without his disguise, recruiting them to assist in his deceptive wooing of their daughter. In the final scene of the play, Frank again disguises himself as the Cripple, and, again, performs a pitiful disability. He has Master Flower scorn him, to which Frank responds deferentially, saying “Sir, I am content, ile not move your patience” (2552). Phillis, then, is moved to defend him, since he will not defend himself. Eventually, Master Flower “consents” to their marriage, promising a nominal exchange between the two men that ultimately proves to be an offer of charity: “Heere, take my 131 daughter, Cripple, love her well, / Be kinde to her, and ile be kinde to thee, / Thou art poore, well I will make thee rich” (2579-81). This benevolent blessing suits the pitiful version of the Cripple that Frank enacts, but the arrival of the real Cripple immediately challenges the fantasy it presents. He greets the men gathered warmly, calling them “Gentlemen,” “sweet bloods,” and, a moniker specifically signaling his equality with them, “brethren of familiarity,” before announcing, “I would speake with Phillis, shall I have audience?” (2588-89). It is the last time he speaks in the entire play. Instead, Phillis herself speaks, suddenly filled with awe and panic at the sight of two Cripples. “Helpe me deare father, O helpe me Gentlemen,” she cries, “This is some spirit, drive him from my sight” (1590). Although Frank tries to comfort her, telling her to “Feare not,” Phillis‟s terror at the sight of her doubled suitor only increases. It culminates in a sudden reversal of emotion and a striking regression in her notion of disability, when she declares:

Hence foule deformitie. Nor thou, nor he, shall my companion be, If Cripples dead, the living seem to haunt, Ile neither of either, therefore I say avaunt. (2595-98) The doubling of the Cripple causes Phillis to revert to some of the most negative ideas about disability circulating in early modern England, replacing her previous generosity and openmindedness with fear and stigmatization. How much of this reaction was anticipated by Frank and/or the Cripple is unclear; what is clear is that, instead of challenging her prejudice, Frank takes advantage of her fear to drop his disguise. “Here are no spirites nor deformities,” he declares, removing his costume, “I am a counterfeit

Cripple now no more, / But yong Franke Golding as I was before” (2601-02). Although Phillis‟s immediate reaction clearly articulates a rejection of both men, Frank capitalizes on her terror to transform himself into a savior by distancing himself from the supposedly dangerous disability. Frank simply drops his disguise, conveniently ignoring the fact that his costume was the cause of her panic in the first place. At the same time, his action 132 affirms her paranoid prejudice about disability, a perspective that the Cripple, because of his silence, has no opportunity to refute. Although the entire scheme has been the Cripple‟s doing and although he and Frank have formed a strong, mutual bond during the course of the drama, in this final scene the Cripple receives no credit for his hard work and brilliant planning, and Frank does not acknowledge him as a friend; indeed, Frank does not acknowledge him at all. Frank‟s success, in fact, relies on his distancing himself from the Cripple and insisting on their inherent inequality. Throughout The Fair Maid of the Exchange the Cripple has been characterized as a viable, hard working, and vital part of the community, but in the final moments of the drama he is suddenly figured as something that is segregated, dangerous, and other. What changed? The Fair Maid of the Exchange presents an economically productive disability that operates successfully within the labor economy because of the hard work and ingenuity of the Cripple and his strong, mutual male friendships. At the end of the play, the super-crip myth appears to remain intact; the Cripple doesn‟t get credit for his role in bringing together Frank and Phillis in the final scene, but audience members are certainly aware of the critical role that he plays in the play‟s conclusion. Instead, it is the myth of ideal male friendship that is unsustainable. In order to restore his masculinity by establishing an equal relationship with Frank, the Cripple must repay Frank by helping him win Phillis‟s love. However, in order for Frank to secure Phillis‟s love, Frank has to distance himself from the Cripple. The friendship that benefitted both men cannot survive the conventional conclusion it facilitated. The Fair Maid of the Exchange challenges the notion that charity is the appropriate response to disability by staging a disabled man who is not only commercially and socially productive, but essential to his community. However, it also suggests that the male friendships that ensure the Cripple‟s place within those communities are not reliable. Even within the fantasy world of the playhouse, the fantasy of masculine bonds proves unsustainable. 133

The subplot of the play affirms and clarifies The Fair Maid of the Exchange‟s characterization of charity, masculinity, and male friendship through another narrative of the Cripple revising a romantic relationship. This time the homosocial triangle consists of Bowdler, a rowdy gallant who likes to boast of his sexual conquests; Barnard, a gentleman whose bad luck has put him in debt; and Mall Berry, another sempster of the Royal Exchange who frequents the Cripple‟s shop. Bowdler is loud, crass, and annoying, and he wants to wed—or at least bed—Mall. He is also the only character in the play to mock the Cripple‟s disability; although they are ostensibly friends (they call one another

“friend” and have obviously spent considerable time in one another‟s company), Bowdler regularly calls the Cripple “dog,” “cur” and “crutch.” He particularly takes offense at the Cripple‟s dedication to his work, slinging even more animalistic slurs at him when the Cripple refuses Bowdler‟s invitation to go carousing on the grounds that he has business to attend to at his shop. For his part, the Cripple has little tolerance for Bowdler‟s bragging, and calls him out on some of his more ridiculous claims. Bowdler‟s over-the- top interpretation of masculine behavior actually undermines his claim to manhood, demonstrating the precarious nature of early modern masculinity. His relationship to the Cripple reasserts the necessity and conflict of male friendships, especially friendships between able-bodied and disabled men. In spite of all this, the Cripple initially attempts to help Bowdler woo Mall, but he expresses genuine surprise when Bowdler actually succeeds in gaining her love. Barnard, the third party in this triangle, seems to hardly notice the unlikely union of his unlikable friend with Mall Berry, as he has problems of his own. Mall‟s father, a moneylender named Master Berry, threatens to have Barnard thrown in jail for unpaid debt; in the past, Barnard stood as surety for another friend‟s financial venture, but the enterprise went under, the friend died suddenly, and Barnard was left responsible for the loan. In spite of this tragic backstory, Master Berry is unrelenting in his demands for repayment and unchecked in his prejudice. He paints all the young men gathered at the 134

Exchange with a single, disapproving brush, calling all of them (including the Cripple) “a crew of unthrifts, careless dissolutes, / Licencious prodigalls, vilde tavern-tracers,” and insisting that “tis no charitie / To favour you that live like Libertines” (766-67, 762-3). The Cripple takes umbrage with Master Berry‟s assertions, calling him a “drudge to money, bond-man to thy wealth, / Apprentice to a penny,” who “hourds up . . . silver pence and half-penies, / With shew of charitie to give the poore, / But putst them to increase, where in a short time / They grow a childs part or a daughters portion” (775- 780). The Cripple‟s assertion that Master Berry pretends charity, but, in reality, makes damaging financial demands on the most defenseless members of society at their most vulnerable moments, suggests a wider contextualizing of charitable action. His insistence that charity involves more than just almsgiving presents a model for ethical behavior but, nevertheless, presents individual almsgiving as ineffectual at best and hypocritical at worst. The Cripple, of course, does not stop there; through his ingenious efforts he reverses Barnard‟s fortunes, repays Bowdler for his constant mocking, and forces Master

Berry into benevolence. He resolves to do this by saying, “Ile now turne provident; Ile to my shoppe / And fall to worke” (850-51). It is no mistake, I think, that the Cripple‟s generous actions are distinctly not described as charity, but, rather, as “worke,” since, even when the play stresses generosity, it does so within the context of labor. The Cripple convinces Mall Berry that, instead of loving the rowdy Bowdler, she is instead in love with Barnard. Although Mall is initially taken aback by the Cripple‟s assertion that she is actually in love with another man and insists that “thou shalt never moove me” (2218), in just a matter of moments, he does. By assuring Mall that he has heard her declare her love for Barnard many times, watched her anxiously adjust her appearance in expectation of seeing Barnard, and even heard her call Barnard‟s name in her sleep at night, he gets her to agree to marry Barnard instead of Bowdler. “Imbrace thy Barnard, take him for thy husband” he insists, “And save his credite, who is else undone, / By thy hard fathers 135 hatefull crueltie” (2247-49). The Cripple‟s scam serves a three-fold purpose: it repays Bowdler for his constant mocking by divesting him of a bride; it repays Master Berry‟s prejudice and threats by divesting him of a daughter (and, perhaps more importantly, of her dowry); and it restores Barnard‟s fortunes, since Master Berry will be forced to forgive his debts if he is married to Mall. And the Cripple‟s “worke,” however unbelievably, works out exactly as he planned. Barnard‟s marriage to Mall saves him from jail, Mall‟s father is forced to bestow his blessing—and his money—on the match, and Bowdler‟s romantic reversal causes him to leave the stage in the final scene of the play believing that Barnard has simply stolen Mall‟s heart away from him, never the wiser about the Cripple‟s involvement. Like the central plotline of The Fair Maid of the Exchange, the subplot suggests that charity is not an appropriate response to disability. By demonstrating that the Cripple does not need charity but actually gives charity to others, it underscores its rejection of almsgiving. The subplot valorizes work and exchange over charity by casting the Cripple‟s efforts to save Barnard as “worke” and not charity. Just as in the main plot, the

Cripple‟s success is again predicated on his amazing compensatory abilities, since the story would not resolve without the Cripple‟s hard work, sharp thinking, and astonishing powers of persuasion. The Cripple‟s success also rests on the myth of ideal male friendship, since his relationship with Barnard and his desire to defend his friend lead to a seemingly happy conclusion. Yet, like the play‟s main plot, the subplot also demonstrates the flaws in this system. While the Cripple‟s seemingly supernatural powers remain intact, the myth of idealized male friendship crumbles: Barnard‟s past male friendship has landed him in jail. Bowdler calls the Cripple his “friend,” and yet keeps up a constant barrage of insults that affirm the way in which the Cripple‟s disability precludes that possibility. The Cripple is similarly unfriendly to Bowdler, rebuking him repeatedly and, ultimately, duping him out of a bride. Although the conclusion that the Cripple orchestrates does seem to have the potential to create equality in this relationship by 136 providing Barnard with assistance and giving Bowdler his comeuppance, because Barnard does not recognize the Cripple‟s contribution to his marriage with gratitude and Bowdler does not recognize the Cripple‟s revenge in his jilting, restitution is hard to justify. For all that The Fair Maid of the Exchange strives to present commercially productive, communally integrated disability, at the end of both plots, the Cripple‟s disability proves still too high a hurdle for his male friendships to fully surmount. In the Cripple, The Fair Maid of the Exchange provides a counterpoint to the definitions of disability that were forming throughout the early modern period in

England. As a successfully employed but still distinctly disabled man, he stands in contrast to the narrow work-related definitions of disability that were being enforced by the English government. In shaping this image of a commercially productive disabled man, however, The Fair Maid of the Exchange ignores the problems that real disabled men would have encountered when attempting to join the work force, glossing over those problems with the dual myths of the “super-crip” and idealized masculine friendship. In this way, we can see how the drama accommodates the image of “Charitas” that introduces it: the play can advocate for charity, because, in the world the play imagines, charity is essentially unnecessary—and, therefore, unproblematic. The Fair Maid of the Exchange imagines a world where no one needs charity, so long as they have a super- human work ethic and good male friends. Charity can be advocated because the play does not imagine a situation where one might actually need it. At the same time that the play projects this myth of uncomplicated, commercially integrated disability, it also hints at the problems with that myth, specifically the problems posed by relying on male friendships. Idealized male bonds were the source of much admiration in early modern English literature, but they were also the source of much anxiety as authors questioned their validity and endurance. The male friendships in The Fair Maid of the Exchange are undone by disability; another play featuring a productive disabled man provides increased insights on why male friendships would have been of such concern in contexts 137 of disability. The Shoemaker‟s Holiday further explores the relationship between work, disability, and masculinity, addressing the crisis of the disabled worker by focusing on the problems faced by—and caused by—male artisans.

On the Other Foot: Community, Disability and The Shoemaker‟s Holiday Thomas Dekker‟s 1599 comedy The Shoemaker‟s Holiday shares much in common with The Fair Maid of the Exchange. Both plays stage the emerging capitalist commercial world of London, focusing specifically on the workers that power the economy. Both plays also fixate on the exchange of luxury commodities (handkerchiefs and linens in The Fair Maid of the Exchange; shoes, wigs, and other accessories in The Shoemaker‟s Holiday). The specter of debt haunts both dramas, notably the threat of imprisonment for debt, as each play enacts the potential risks and rewards of commercial venturing. Both also engage the issues of working women in early modern England and the way their social and economic visibility was often assumed to equal a sexual availability. Most importantly for this study, The Fair Maid of the Exchange and The Shoemaker‟s Holiday also share a focus on the place of disabled men in London‟s labor economy. Although The Shoemaker‟s Holiday does not directly portray counterfeit disability, its unique reversal of the trope, as well as its portrayal of a productive disabled man engaged in the emerging commercial labor market, makes it a useful counterpart to

The Fair Maid of the Exchange. Like The Fair Maid of the Exchange, The Shoemaker‟s Holiday stages a disabled man that thrives in London‟s commercial economy because of the assistance of a network of supportive male friends. However, unlike the earlier drama, The Shoemaker‟s Holiday advocates for charitable giving as an important part of the bonds that unite men, disabled and able-bodied, in mutual friendship, making charity a (literally) valuable part of the economy. Yet The Shoemaker‟s Holiday suggests, like The Fair Maid of the Exchange, 138 that the male friendships necessary to fuel the market economy and ensure the integration of disabled men into the work force are unstable at best. The play‟s focus on communal celebration has led a number of scholars to read The Shoemaker‟s Holiday as countering the social and economic tensions in the early modern marketplace through its drama of unity, presenting an idealized vision of London‟s work force at its best.144 I argue that the idealized male friendships, which are featured in the play‟s fantasy of brotherhood and facilitate its conventionally happy conclusion, collapse under closer inspection, demonstrating the unresolved problems disability posed to the working world valorized by the play. The Shoemaker‟s Holiday fictionalizes the life of the historical Simon Eyre, a shoemaker who rose through the ranks of society to become the Lord Mayor of London in the fifteenth century. In Dekker‟s revision of this story (freely adapted from Thomas Deloney‟s prose narrative The Gentle Craft, published in 1598), Simon Eyre is the jolly, low-born, hard working and hard partying overseer of a cadre of journeyman and apprentice shoemakers, who comes to wealth and power through good fortune and his happy-go-lucky attitude. Among Eyre‟s merry band of cobblers is Ralph, who is conscripted to fight in “those wars in France.”145 He is reluctant to leave his new wife,

144 See, for example, Stephen Maynard, “Feasting on Eyre: Community, Consumption, and Communion in The Shoemaker‟s Holiday,” Comparative Drama 32.2 (1998): 327-47; Peter M. McCluskey, “„Shall I betray my brother?‟: Anti-Alien Satire and its Subversion in The Shoemaker‟s Holiday,” Tennessee Philological Bulletin 37 (2000): 43-54; Howard B. Norland, “Leavening Laughter in The Shoemaker‟s Holiday,” in Tudor Theater: For laughs(?)/Pour rire(?): Puzzling Laughter in Plays of the Tudor Age/Rires et problemes dans le theatre des Tudor, ed. Roberta Mullini (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002), 261-74; Marta Straznicky, “The End(s) of Discord in The Shoemaker‟s Holiday,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 36 (1996), 357- 72. 145 Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker‟s Holiday, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris, New Mermaids (London: Methuen, 2008), 1.49. All subsequent quotations from this text are identified parenthetically by scene and line number. Although the play is technically set during the reign of Henry VI, a number of references throughout the text make clear that “those wars in France” are actually Henry V‟s French invasion. The Battle of Agincourt, particularly as Shakespeare imagined it, is recalled multiple times throughout the play. In fact, Sts. Crispin and Crispianus, so famously invoked in Shakespeare‟s play, were the patron saints of shoemakers, making their feast day—October 25th—the “shoemaker‟s holiday” of the title, as well as the date of the Battle of 139

Jane, but has little choice in the matter. Ralph returns from France mid-way through the play, permanently disabled and unable to locate Jane, who, in his absence, seems to have disappeared. The bulk of his plot is occupied with Ralph‟s attempts to locate and win back Jane from the clutches of an unscrupulous suitor named Hammon, all with the help of his fellow shoemakers. Hiding in their ranks is a young nobleman, Roland Lacy, who was supposed to have gone to France to fight in the wars like Ralph, but, instead, disguised himself as a Dutch shoemaker in order to stay in England and secretly woo Rose, the daughter of an earlier London mayor. The machinations necessary to bring

Lacy and Rose together against the wishes of their guardians form the other major plot in the drama. The Shoemaker‟s Holiday concludes with the dual unions of Ralph and Jane and Lacy and Rose, which coincide with Simon Eyre‟s ascension to the post of Lord Mayor. The play‟s final scene features a citywide festival for apprentices whose joyful celebration mirrors that of the two couples. Even with its improbably happy ending, Ralph‟s plot injects a dose of pseudo-realism into the otherwise buoyant play, tempering its fantasy of a jovial, economically productive community with the realities of social instability, fractured friendships, and disenfranchised men. We are introduced to Ralph before the onset of his disability as he bids farewell to his fellow shoemakers and his wife before leaving for France. He is characterized in this opening scene primarily by his relationships: he is a member of the “Gentle Craft,” the guild of cobblers; he is specifically a part of Simon Eyre‟s shop and the community of shoemakers there; and he is newly married to Jane, who is distraught over his departure. These relational contexts are all established within the first few lines, and the characters gathered express concern about how Ralph‟s time away will affect these relationships.

Agincourt. For more on connections between The Shoemaker‟s Holiday and Shakespeare‟s Henry V, see Alison A. Chapman, “Whose Saint Crispin‟s Day Is It?: Shoemaking, Holiday Making, and the Politics of Memory in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 1467-94. 140

The question that concerns this plot, however, is more specific: how will Ralph‟s eventual disability affect these relationships? The opening scene highlights this issue by its repeated stress on how Ralph‟s ability to perform economic and sexual labor assures his place in these relationships. Indeed, Ralph‟s colleagues explicitly conflate these two forms of “work” (to borrow the early modern pun) in this opening scene. Although Ralph himself remains stoic in the face of his departure, Simon Eyre and his journeymen rail against Ralph‟s conscription. His bawdy coworker, Firk, tells the officer, “You shall do God good service to let Ralph and his wife stay together. She‟s a young, new-married woman. If you take her husband away from her a-night, you undo her; she may beg in the daytime; for he‟s as good a workman at a prick and awl as any in our trade” (1.137- 41).146 Firk‟s dirty joke establishes the connection between productive and reproductive labor that is reinforced throughout the play and poses such significant challenges to Ralph‟s eventual disability. Firk‟s argument also emphasizes another occupation of the play: the way in which Ralph‟s skilled labor/sexual prowess is important to the wellbeing of his wife, Jane. Jane herself affirms her reliance on her husband by following up Firk‟s statement with the cry, “O let him stay, else I shall be undone!” (1.142). This opening scene, then, attests to the way that Ralph‟s ability to perform both commercial and sexual labor ensures his engagement in personal and professional relationships, and how the elimination of those relationships endangers both himself and his wife.

Ralph‟s masculinity is verified through his commercial and sexual workmanship, his recent acquisition of a dependent wife, his impending military service, and, especially, his participation in labor-focused friendships with his fellow shoemakers. In a demonstration of their vital role in Ralph‟s life, his companions try to make various deals with the military officers in an effort to exempt Ralph from his conscription. Simon Eyre

146 Pricks and awls were shoemakers‟ tools. “Awl” is also a pun on “hole”; “prick” is also a bawdy pun, which, conveniently, needs no explanation since its sexual connotations have not faded over the past 400 years. 141 offers to keep the coronel in new boots for seven years if he will let Ralph stay home (1.131-33); journeymen Hodge and Firk attempt to argue that Ralph‟s personal obligations as a newly married husband outweigh his patriotic obligations. None of these arguments sway Roland Lacy, the receiving officer. He claims that altering Ralph‟s orders “lies not within my power,” swearing that he “cannot change a man” (1.147). Lacy‟s statement affirms Ralph‟s masculinity in that he recognizes him as a man, but rejects the possibility of mutual masculine exchange (like that evident in The Fair Maid of the Exchange), where masculine commerce benefits all qualifying men. Indeed, this rejection of exchange is echoed throughout The Shoemaker‟s Holiday, as a series of characters attempt to bribe one another into doing their will; by and large, characters that offer such bribes are villains and the characters that accept them are fools or cowards. However, Lacy‟s own situation belies the truth of his rejection of exchange: ordered to go to the wars in France himself, the noble Lacy purchases his way out of battle in order to stay in London and pursue his lady love in exactly the way Ralph cannot. Although the parallel situations of these two men cast a critical light on Lacy‟s actions, they are never openly criticized in the course of the drama and he remains unpunished for shirking his duty at the end of the play. With the exception of Lacy‟s draft-dodging, the drama‟s rejection of exchange, particularly between men, facilitates a unique argument for charity. Specifically, The

Shoemaker‟s Holiday presents a world of interconnected masculine communities that are mutually supported through charitable giving. When Ralph‟s companions determine that they cannot erase the empress against him, they instead affirm his continued place within their personal and commercial networks by offering him charity. Simon Eyre gives Ralph five sixpence, along with the instruction that he should “fight for the honor of the Gentle Craft, for the Gentleman Shoemakers, the courageous cordwainers, the flower of St. Martin‟s, the mad knaves of Bedlam, Fleet Street, Tower Street and Whitechapel” (1.210- 14). By listing off the neighborhoods that comprised early modern London‟s shoemaking 142 district, Eyre asserts that his gift of money still links Ralph with his home community and his profession even as he leaves for France and soldiering. Eyre‟s gift and affirmation is mirrored by his journeymen: Firk gives Ralph three twopence, telling him to carry two to France but to save the third to buy them a round of drinks upon his return, and Hodge gives Ralph a shilling to aid him when he does not have his fellow shoemakers to do so. This charity does not assert Ralph‟s separation or subordination from the men who give it to him (which, as we have seen, was usually the case with early modern charity), but rather asserts their similarities and their connection.

Ralph even asks for further charity from the men, requesting that the shoemakers care for Jane while he is in France. In this instance, their charity is less good-natured—or at least less direct: when Jane asks what she will do with Ralph gone, Firk jokes that she can “be doing with me, or my fellow Hodge—be not idle!” (1.206), an ostensible invitation to join in their work that also carries something of a sexual invitation or threat. Simon Eyre is less bawdy, but no more welcoming. He insists that Jane shall have charity for Ralph‟s sake but only if she works hard. “Work, you bombast-cotton-candle quean, work for your living, with a pox to you,” he charges her (1.208-09). Although these responses to Ralph‟s request seem somewhat less-than-charitable, in another instance of gift-giving, Ralph presents Jane with a pair of shoes crafted by all the members of Simon Eyre‟s shop:

Here, take this pair of shoes cut out by Hodge Stitched by my fellow Firk, seamed by myself, Made up and pinked with letters for thy name. Wear them, my dear Jane, for thy husband‟s sake, And every morning, when thou pull‟st them on, Remember me, and pray for my return. (1.228-33) Ralph‟s gift of costly and carefully made shoes confirms both his relationship to Jane and also his relationship to his fellow shoemakers—and, presumably, Jane‟s relationship to them as well, since their collective work resulted in this gift. Throughout this scene, the many gifts given illustrate The Shoemaker‟s Holiday‟s unique championing of charity as 143 a key instrument in affirming relationships, specifically those within masculine commercial communities. The connections established in his first scene that provide for Ralph at his departure, disintegrate upon his return from the wars in scene 10.147 When Ralph enters the now-socially-elevated Simon Eyre‟s shoe shop, Hodge greets him, saying, “What, fellow Ralph! Mistress, look here—Jane‟s husband! Why, how now—lame?” Hodge then turns to Roland Lacy, now disguised as Hans the Dutch shoemaker and instructs him, “Hans, make much of him: he‟s a brother of our trade, a good workman, and a tall soldier” (10.53-55). Hodge‟s greeting reaffirms Ralph‟s defining relationships: he is “Jane‟s husband,” and “a brother of our trade.” However, his disability immediately complicates these relationships. Although Hodge reaffirms his ability to perform productive labor by calling him “a good workman,” such a description defies the legal definition of disability current during this period. Certainly Hodge‟s identification of Ralph is at least as much of a question as it is a statement: can Ralph be a good workman now that he is disabled? Hodge‟s follow-up descriptor of Ralph as “a tall soldier” pointedly underscores this, since while Ralph may be “tall”—brave—his disability means that he is no longer physically tall. Ralph is greeted next by Margery Eyre, Simon‟s bumbling, malapropism-prone wife. “I am sorry, Ralph, to see thee impotent,” she declares, beginning a string of jokes that imply a sexual dysfunction accompanies

147The stage directions for this important theatrical moment are minimal: “Enter RALPH being lame.” In performance, it becomes a moment of heightened drama. In describing the 1987 performance at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Heather Henderson noted that, “When Rafe came back from the war crippled, the actors did not pause for an obligatory moment of sadness, nor did Lacy/Hans act guilty for having sent Rafe off to war in the first place. The moment was focused instead on helping Rafe move beyond melancholy, inviting him to return to his old job as a shoemaker and welcoming him back into good fellowship.” Anthony Parr described the emotional dissonance of Ralph‟s return in the National Theater‟s 1981 production where “Ralph threw open the top half of a stable door at the back of the set and received tumultuous welcome. Then he threw open the lower half to reveal one leg missing.” Heather Henderson, “Re-creating Dekker‟s Aesthetics of Mirth,” Theater 19.3 (1988): 92-95; Anthony Parr, introduction to The Shoemaker‟s Holiday, by Thomas Dekker, New Mermaids, 2nd ed. (London: A & C Black, 1990), n. 10.57. 144

Ralph‟s disability. “Lord, how the wars have made him sunburnt! The left leg is not well,” she notes, “‟twas a fair gift from God the infirmity took not hold a little higher, considering thou camest from France—but let that pass” (61-64). Her statement calls to mind the “French pox,” syphilis, which “burned” its victims, but it also serves to immediately link the specter of sexual dysfunction with Ralph‟s impairment of mobility. Given the way the play conflates sexual and commercial labor, Margery‟s statements are not surprising, for if Ralph‟s ability to serve as a good workman has been called into question, certainly his sexual workmanship is at stake as well.

The bonds of charity that solidified Ralph‟s relationships earlier in the play are also considerably transformed upon his return. Hodge immediately asks Ralph about the war—“And, sirrah Ralph, what news, what news in France?” (10.69)—but Ralph will not answer until he hears about his wife: “Tell me, good Roger, first, what news in England? / How does my Jane? When didst thou see my wife? / Where lives my poor heart? She‟ll be poor indeed / Now I want limbs to get whereon to feed” (70-73). Ralph‟s concern encompasses not only his ability to locate his wife, but also his ability to adequately provide for her because of his disability. And while Hodge reassures Ralph, saying, “Limbs? Hast thou not hands, man? Thou shalt never see a shoemaker want bread, though he have but three fingers on a hand,” there is little reassurance to be offered him about Jane (74-76). Although Ralph specifically requested that his employers and friends watch out for his wife, it becomes quickly apparent that, in his absence, his compatriots have not extended the charity that they promised. Margery claims that, while Jane did work in their shop for awhile, “because she was married [she] grew more stately than became her. I checked her, and so forth. Away she flung, never returned, nor said bye nor bah” (79-81). Margery Eyre‟s account of Jane‟s haughty behavior and subsequent departure does not ring true, since, throughout the play, we see Jane consistently act and speak with humility, loyalty, and attention to duty, while Margery Eyre is a shameless social climber who relishes taking advantage of her increased power and wealth. What 145 seems more likely is that Jane suffered under the slights and abuses of Margery until Margery ran her off. Speculation aside, the charity promised Jane (and Ralph, in turn) was not offered. None of the men provide any explanation for their lack of generosity to Jane; Hodge simply says, “Jane is a stranger here” (94). Fear for her welfare moves Ralph to tears, but Hodge and Margery try to assuage his distress. Hodge assures him that he knows someone who has seen Jane in London recently, and, if she is in London, they will find her. Margery offers to fetch Ralph meat and drink, a direct offer of charity, which he accepts. It is hard not to read Hodge‟s offer of assistance to locate Jane or

Margery‟s gift of hospitality to Ralph as too little, too late. A woman alone in early modern London could (as the plot of The Shoemaker‟s Holiday bears out) easily fall into the grasp of predatory suitors, be forced into prostitution, or worse. The failure of Ralph‟s friends to care for Jane implies that perhaps their bond-creating charity is not as strong as it initially seems. If Ralph feels any resentment about this, it is not apparent. He accepts their offers of help, saying, “Since I want limbs and lands, / I‟ll trust to God, my friends, and to my hands” (10.102-103). Although ostensibly a declaration of faith and gratitude, Ralph‟s statement suggests that he must now rely on the charity of his “good friends” not because of their communal connections, but because his disability has limited any other options. It should be noted that before Margery can make good on her offer of meat and drink, news arrives that her husband has been promoted yet again, this time to the post of Sheriff of London, and she leaves without fulfilling her promise. Simon Eyre himself returns to the shop bedecked in a gold chain that signals his increased wealth, but does not offer any of that wealth to Ralph or even acknowledge Ralph‟s presence. When he praises his “fine men,” Ralph is not listed among them (133), and when the shoemakers leave the shop for their holiday, shouting, “we‟ll be with them for a morris-dance” (151), Ralph again goes unmentioned, although all the other shoemakers are named. 146

Ralph seems not to register the slights against him that seem so painfully apparent to a twenty-first-century audience; instead, all his emotion is directed toward mourning the loss of Jane and worrying about her recovery. In this regard, Ralph differs distinctly from his counterpart, the Cripple, in The Fair Maid of the Exchange. The Cripple exempts himself from the erotic exchanges of early modern London, and that exemption serves to make him more successful in the commercial economies represented in the drama. In contrast, Ralph seeks to assert himself into those erotic economies as a way to reassert his place in commercial economies. Within a historical context, his actions are unusual. The acquisition of a wife by a journeyman would have increased his responsibilities and bills to such an extent as to be an economic hardship; throughout the European apprentice system, most journeymen were not allowed to marry until the final stage of their tenure, wherein their marriage marked the transition into personal and professional maturity.148 In Ralph‟s case, the economic obligations incurred by his marriage serve to legitimate his place within the early modern London community established by the play. Because Ralph clearly cannot rely on the charity of others to provide for his wife, he must do so himself by participating in productive labor. In this way, The Shoemaker‟s Holiday repeats the myth of the fully integrated, commercially successful disabled man rehearsed in The Fair Maid of the Exchange. For although there is some initial concern expressed about Ralph‟s ability to engage in productive labor (and thus provide for himself and his wife), those fears are very quickly put to rest. His unflagging work ethic and talent as a cobbler remain undiminished in spite of his physical impairment.149 But, even more than the Cripple, Ralph‟s integration into early modern

148 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 29.

149 Although Ralph is clearly a talented cobbler, his abilities do not appear quite as prodigious as those of the Cripple. For this reason, I do not identify Ralph as a proto-“super-crip” character. This lack of super-human abilities makes his dependence on his cohort of shoemakers all the more pronounced. 147

London‟s world of work is dependent upon his close friendships with other men. (Possibly the necessity of such friendships is why Ralph insists on those bonds even when his friends‟ negligence would have seemed to sever them.) Assisted by his male companions, Ralph‟s quest to locate Jane and affirm their marriage is also a mission to rehabilitate his status within the community after the onset of his disability. In a play that so consistently conflates commercial and sexual labor, the question of whether Ralph can “provide” for Jane is both economic and erotic. Locating her and reaffirming their marriage implicitly affirms Ralph‟s sexual and economic viability and, therefore, secures his masculine identity and his location in a world that insists on both sexual and economic ability. Yet neither Ralph‟s commitment to his marriage nor his work seems to fully protect him from the emasculating potential of his disability. In the first scene in which we see Ralph fully engaged in the work of shoemaking following his return from war, his fellow cobblers mock his masculinity on account of his disability. Hodge asks after the shoes ordered by one Mistress Priscilla, who Firk implies is a prostitute. Ralph responds to Hodge‟s question, saying, “I am in hand with [the shoes]. She gave charge that none but I should do them for her” (13.21-22). Firk then quips, “Thou do for her? Then „twill be a lame doing; and that she loves not” (23-24). Firk‟s joke takes aim at both Ralph‟s ability as a shoemaker and a lover, which, until the onset of his disability, had both been the object of Firk‟s admiration, not his derision. Firk follows up his put-down by insisting, “Ralph, thou mightest have sent her to me: in faith, I would have yerked and firked your Priscilla,” again conflating sex and shoemaking (24-25). Ralph, for his part, does not respond. This is not the only instance where the fusion of productive and reproductive labor serves to undermine Ralph‟s manhood. Later in the play, as Ralph laments the loss of Jane, he vows his continued fidelity to her in spite of her absence, saying, “Hereof am I sure, I shall live till I die, / Although I never with a woman lie” (14.64-65). Firk responds, “Thou lie with a woman, to build nothing but Cripplegates!” 148

(66). Cripplegate was one of the city of London‟s seven traditional gates, well known as a gathering place for disabled beggars. Jonathan Gil Harris notes the way in which the play repeatedly uses monuments as markers of patrilineal reproduction, and cites Firk‟s joke as another instance in which characters imagine their ancestors or descendants as literally forming the city of London.150 While the joke certainly might participate in that project of city-making, unlike other references to monumental ancestry throughout the play, it is distinctly negative. Firk does not imagine a place for Ralph‟s children in the commercial heart of the city, but rather one at its margins, where commerce has been reduced to begging. Firk‟s quip serves to undercut Ralph‟s claims to both sexual and economic viability—and, thus, his claim to masculinity. While Ralph‟s investment in his marriage helps affirm his masculine identity, his excess of emotion, which Firk takes aim at in the “Cripplegate” joke, further complicates his masculine identity. From the moment he discovers that Jane is not in the care of his friends, Ralph is filled with distress. He immediately begins to weep upon hearing of her rejection from the Eyres‟ household, and although Margery makes an attempt to comfort him and Hodge tells him to “pull up a good heart—I know thou hast one” (10.94-5), Ralph is still “overcome with sorrow” (98). Given that, at his departure, Ralph was stoic while Jane was sobbing and unable to speak for grief, his emotional response upon his return links him to his wife and to the feminine displays of emotion that were much maligned by the other characters in the departure scene. Ralph‟s excessive emotion overflows again in scene 14, when a servingman arrives at Simon Eyre‟s shop with an order for shoes to be made for a bride whose wedding is the next day. Ralph takes the order, but when the servingman gives him a pair of the lady‟s shoes to use as models, he is again overcome. “How? By this shoe must it be made? By this? Are you sure, sir? By

150 Harris, introduction to The Shoemaker‟s Holiday, by Thomas Dekker, New Mermaids, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 2008), xxi. 149 this?” he stammers (14.10-11). The servingman mocks him: “How „by this‟? Am I sure, „by this‟? Art thou in this wits? . . . Dost thou understand me?” (12-13, 15). The shoes, of course, are the special pair that Ralph had made for Jane upon his departure for France, and it is in this way that he learns of her impending marriage to another man. His anxiety is certainly understandable, but when he tells Firk about his discovery, Firk mocks him for his panic. He first dismisses Ralph‟s anxious explanations about the importance of the shoes as an “ague-fit of foolishness,” a pointedly corporeal dismissal of Ralph‟s distress. Even when Ralph does finally make his urgent situation known to his colleague, Firk is flippant about it at best. When Ralph poses the rhetorical question, “Why may not this [bride] be my sweet Jane?” (55), Firk responds with “And why mayst not thou be my sweet ass? Ha, ha!” (56). Even once Ralph lays out his plan to rescue Jane from her unintentional bigamy, Firk seems merely amused by Ralph‟s intensity of emotion. In this way, the paradox of Ralph‟s commitment to his marriage is clear: although his marriage affirms his masculinity in that it verifies his ability to provide for his wife financially and sexually, Ralph‟s excessive passion about it also compromises his masculinity, opening him up to the ridicule of other men. In Ralph, we see the way in which disability disrupts Dekker‟s attempt to envision a happy, supportive brotherhood of male artisans. The idealized community of cobblers in Simon Eyre‟s workshop offers a vision of what the English labor economy could achieve and the inclusion of a disabled man in that group seems to underscore the play‟s insistence on the positive potential of all workers. This is certainly Rhonda A. Arab‟s interpretation of The Shoemaker‟s Holiday. Arab argues that the play celebrates “low” bodies (“low” in both a Bahktinian grotesque sense, as well as in a historically humoral sense), finding in these vigorous, unregulated, artisanal bodies both an ideal for the emerging capitalist labor system and a vital component in the measure of national 150 value.151 Arab reads Dekker‟s revision of masculine standards as part of a larger project to rehabilitate the respectability and importance of artisans and she sees Ralph as a strategic part of that project. Ralph‟s inclusion in the glorified community of shoemakers demonstrates “the play‟s commitment to a politics of the male body that defies high canons. Manhood is not defined in terms of the completed whole closed-off body, nor in terms of the self-sufficient individuality of the body.”152 Instead, Arab asserts, the play supports a mutual interdependence among men, characterized by the shoemakers‟ collective work and their loyalty to one another. Although Arab acknowledges that

Dekker‟s play is a type of “wish-fulfillment” and his vision of a happy, mutually supportive, productive artisanal community glosses over the very real problems and divisions that plagued early modern labor systems, I believe that, in Ralph, the play temporarily reveals those divisions. While The Shoemaker‟s Holiday does test out new definitions of masculinity and disability and does argue for the value of charitable dependence, it does not succeed in erasing the divisions caused by disability, particularly within the burgeoning labor economy. Ralph may be offered charity, but, as with the loss of Jane, it is a charity with distinct limits; Ralph may be welcomed back into the cadre of shoemakers, but it is clear that his disability shifts their interpretation of his commercial and sexual labor, and, therefore, segregates him from his “brothers.” Even within the play‟s fantasy of masculine unity, divisions between men—especially those created by disability—never fully disappear. The instability of masculine friendships is even evident in the conventionally happy ending of The Shoemaker‟s Holiday. Upon discovering that his wife will be marrying another man the next day, Ralph immediately formulates a plan:

151 Arab, “Work, Bodies, and Gender in The Shoemaker‟s Holiday,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14 (2001): 182-212.

152 Ibid, 192. 151

Against tomorrow morning I‟ll provide A lusty crew of honest shoemakers To watch the going of the bride to church. If she prove Jane, I‟ll take her in despite From Hammon and the devil, were he by. (14.58-62) Ralph‟s plan highlights his reliance on his network of male compatriots; he knows he can rely on the assistance of his fellow guild-brothers to defy the pseudo-aristocratic Hammon who wants to marry Jane.153 Firk initially does not seem to take Ralph‟s plan seriously, but, two scenes later, Firk is not only supportive of the plan but wrangles things in such a way as to benefit both Ralph and Jane and the play‟s other struggling couple,

Rose Oatley and Roland Lacy. Firk arranges for Rose and Lacy‟s two disapproving guardians to interrupt their wedding, which he tells them will be taking place at Saint Faith‟s Church. In reality, Saint Faith‟s is the church where Hammon and Jane are to be married, and this diversion will not only serve to interrupt their marriage (in case Ralph and the shoemakers fail to do so) but also keeps the guardians from interrupting Rose and Lacy‟s marriage, which will actually be occurring in the chapel of the Savoy Hospital. During his explanation of his beneficial trickery—or “fine tickling sport,” as he describes it (16.148)—Firk also signals the change that has occurred in the treatment of Ralph. Both times that Firk calls his colleague by name he identifies him as “lame Ralph” (146, 150). Ralph can (somewhat) rely on the friendship of his fellow shoemakers, but his physical difference has not been eliminated by the bonds of their camaraderie. Ralph‟s place within the community of male workers has become profoundly shaped by his disability, as the play‟s final scenes demonstrate. In addition to reasserting Ralph‟s reliance on his male friendships, the conclusion of The Shoemaker‟s Holiday also reasserts the importance of charity in creating relational

153 Hammon‟s social status is never entirely clear: he is initially considered as a potential match for Rose Oatley, who boasts wealth but not aristocratic breeding, and he eventually attempts to marry Jane, who clearly has neither. Regardless of his actual position, he is obviously grouped with the strata of rich, powerful men like Sir Roger Oatley and the Earl of Lincoln who stand in contrast to Simon Eyre and his shoemakers. 152 bonds. This is initially addressed as Ralph and his fellow shoemakers are waiting at Saint Faith‟s Church to accost Hammon and Jane on the way to their wedding. When Hodge questions Ralph about his certainty that the bride-to-be is his wife, Ralph responds by recounting how, earlier that morning, he delivered the shoes she had ordered. As he helped her put them on, “I looked upon her, and she upon me, and sighed, asked me if I ever knew of one Ralph. Yes, said I. For his sake, said she—tears standing in her eyes— and for thou art somewhat like him, spend this piece of gold” (18.8-11). This gift of charity fulfills a number of purposes: it demonstrates that the bride in question is certainly Ralph‟s wife, Jane; it verifies that Jane is not committing bigamy knowingly, since she does not recognize the man helping her with her shoes as her husband, and, in spite of their momentary alienation from one another, it solidifies the bond between the two of them. The gift of charity that Jane offers Ralph is unsurprising given his disability, but she does not cite his disability as the motivation for her benevolence. Rather, she is motivated by Ralph‟s resemblance to the husband she believes to be dead and gives him the gold “for his sake,” affirming her love for Ralph in spite of her impending marriage to

Hammon. Although Ralph‟s “lame leg and travel beyond sea made [him] unknown,” Firk reads Jane‟s gift as a further affirmation of their relationship (11-12). Upon hearing that she gave Ralph gold, he exclaims, “O glorious glittering gold! She‟s thine own, „tis thy wife, and she loves thee; for, I‟ll stand to‟t, there‟s no woman will give gold to any man but she thinks better of him than she thinks of them she gives silver to” (14-17). The charity here does not serve to segregate or emasculate Ralph, but rather to affirm his favor in the eyes of his wife even when she cannot recognize him as her husband.

As soon as Hammon and Jane arrive at the church, Ralph moves to take charge of the situation, but his fellow shoemakers swiftly usurp his power. Although Ralph has planned this attack and gathered the cudgel-toting workman there to stop the wedding, when their quarry finally arrives and Ralph commands, “Stand to‟t, my hearts. Firk, let me speak first,” Hodge silences him right away (18.23). “No, Ralph, let me,” Hodge says, 153 and then immediately asks “Hammon, whither away so early?” (24). This swift transferral of power is surprisingly absolute: after Hodge assumes Ralph‟s position of power at the beginning of the scene, he commands control of the entire confrontation. He speaks directly to Hammon, he controls the actions of the mob of shoemakers—even borrowing Ralph‟s term of endearment, “my hearts,” when addressing them (31)—and Hodge, not Ralph, is the person who reveals her husband‟s identity to Jane. Ralph, for his part, is effectively silenced. In spite of the fact that he is at the center of the action throughout the scene, he doesn‟t speak again for nearly a hundred lines, and then only briefly. In fact, Ralph speaks only a handful of lines throughout the rest of the play. His silence is especially resonant given how often characters speak directly to Ralph but never receive answers from him. This is a critical moment for Ralph, when his reassertion of his marriage should affirm his sexual and economic viability and when his communal work with his fellow artisans should assert his inclusion within their community. Instead, Hodge‟s hijacking of the action demonstrates the way Ralph‟s disability reconfigures his position within the economies of the play. Ralph still has a place within the “Gentle

Craft,” but only as a subordinate. The return of Jane further illustrates how Ralph‟s disability ensures a limited inclusion within the economies of the drama. The scene is marked by imperatives: nearly every line spoken by every character includes some form of instruction as the power struggle unfolds. It begins with Hodge‟s usurpation of Ralph‟s command at the beginning of the scene and increases when Hodge instructs Jane to “look not strange [on Ralph], but run to him, fold him about the neck and kiss him,” even though “he be lamed by the wars” (18.37-39). Jane then instructs Hammon to release her: “O God, let me go! Let me embrace my Ralph!” (40-41). Hammon attempts to justify his actions by claiming that he only propositioned Jane because it was rumored that Ralph was dead. Firk tells Jane to “go, pack home with [Ralph],” prompting Hammon‟s servant to cry “‟Swounds, master, fight for her!” which, in turn, rouses the mob of shoemakers to shout, “Down with that 154 creature! Clubs!” (45, 47, 48). This chain of imperatives escalates until Hodge tells Ralph to “follow [his] counsel: Set the wench in the midst, and let her choose her man, and let her be his woman” (53-54).154 Jane casts the issue at hand as one of money versus love. She says to Ralph:

Thou art my husband and these humble weeds Makes thee more beautiful than all his wealth. Therefore I will put off his attire, Returning it into the owner‟s hand, And after ever be thy constant wife. (57-61) Jane‟s choice validates all artisans gathered there, in that she chooses a workingman over a gentleman of leisure, but, inasmuch as her decision validates Ralph‟s economic and sexual viability, her statement also undercuts that validation. In Jane‟s speech, Ralph is defined by his poverty rather than the commercial potential that has been stressed throughout the play. His sexual potential is similarly undermined by Jane‟s statement that his “humble weeds” make him beautiful to her, rather than his body itself; since those “weeds” are also a sign of his poverty, their erotic appeal seems limited at best. Even once Jane has made her choice, Ralph remains significantly silent.

Just as Jane has to decide between love and money, Hammon complicates the lovers‟ reunion by giving Ralph as similar choice: the wealthy gentleman offers Ralph twenty pounds in gold for Jane, promising more if the shoemaker would want a higher price for the purchase of his wife. Hammon‟s proposal elicits a response from Ralph‟s companions; Hodge immediately commands, “Sell not thy wife, Ralph; make her not a whore,” while the company of shoemakers speaks collectively, saying, “No, do not, Ralph!” (18.80-83). Although he has been silent throughout the entire confrontation,

154 Of course, bigamy was not permitted in early modern England and so Hodge‟s proposition has legal limits. However, it was not unheard of for a wife to leave her living husband for another man—although, as the play suggests, there were social penalties for this type of separation. For more, see Tim Stretton, “Marriage, Separation and the Common Law in England: 1540-1660,” in The Family in Early Modern England, ed. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 18-39. 155

Hammon‟s proposition finally prompts Ralph to speak. “Sirrah Hammon, Hammon,” he says, “dost thou think a shoemaker is so base to be a bawd to his own wife for commodity? Take thy gold, choke with it! Were I not lame, I would make thee eat thy words” (83-86). Ralph‟s response further solidifies his bond with Jane, since not only did he choose her over the prospect of wealth, but his actions parallel her own earlier in the scene. His response also clearly affirms his identity as an active member of the artisan community; his answer both follows the commands of his compatriots and it explicitly couches his choice in his active identity as a shoemaker. In rejecting Hammon‟s offer,

Ralph reaffirms his connection to his fellow cobblers—he is only doing what any shoemaker would do—which Firk seconds with his following exclamation, “A shoemaker sell his flesh and blood—O indignity!” (87). At the same time, in voicing his futile desire to further punish Hammon‟s audacity, Ralph also demonstrates that, while disabled men could be included within the male commercial community, it was a marked position, one in which the limits of disability were not entirely overcome. Hammon, for his part, seems shamed by Ralph‟s firm refusal—or perhaps he is simply trying to save face—and he quickly amends his offer:

I will not touch one penny. But in lieu Of that great wrong I offered thy Jane, To Jane and thee I give that twenty pound. Since I have failed of her, during my life I vow no woman else shall be my wife. (18.89-93) Hammon‟s dual vow of charity and chastity parallels the monetary and sexual riches that Ralph has gained in the return of Jane and further reinforces the play‟s championing of charity. Throughout the play, men reject commercial exchange in favor of charitable giving that affirms masculine bonds. Hammon‟s gift works similarly. Although it does not eliminate the slight of his initial offer or reconcile Hammon to the shoemakers, his gift does grant him the clearance to leave peaceably, which Firk‟s farewell, “Touch the gold, creature, if you dare! You‟d best be trudging,” affirms (96-97). Instead, Hammon‟s 156 money serves to strengthen the bond between Ralph and the other shoemakers; it is their money to defend as much as it is his, as Firk‟s exclamation attests.155 This confirmation of charity introduces The Shoemaker‟s Holiday‟s brief engagement with the genre of dissembling disability. As soon as Hammon leaves, Sir Roger Oatley and Sir Hugh Lacy, the Earl of Lincoln, arrive at the church with the intention of halting the marriage of Rose Oatley and Roland Lacy, their respective heirs. When they ask after Rose and Lacy, Hodge directs them towards Jane (who is now masked) and Ralph; Oatley and Lincoln jump to their own conclusions. “See, see, my daughter‟s masked,” Oatley says, and Lincoln responds, “True; and my nephew, / To hide his guilt counterfeits him lame” (18.113-115). Firk jumps on this. “Yea, truly,” he says, “God help the poor couple, they are lame and blind” (116). Oatley and Lincoln respond with the cliché quip common in rogue pamphlets‟ accounts of feigned disability: “I‟ll ease her blindness,” says Oatley; “I‟ll his lameness cure,” says Lincoln (117). Lincoln confronts Ralph, believing his “fake” lameness to be especially mocking, since he thinks it mirrors the disability that maimed so many soldiers in the wars Lacy himself did not fight. His contemptuous rebuke ironically becomes a particularly cutting challenge to Ralph: “Where are thy powers? / What battles have you made? O yes, I see / Thou fought‟st with shame, and shame hath conquered thee. / This lameness will not serve” (123-26). Of course, Lincoln‟s attempts to shame “Lacy” come back to shame him when Ralph finally reveals himself. “‟Swounds, what mean you?” Ralph cries, “Are you mad? I hope you cannot enforce my wife from me” (128-29). Oatley and Lincoln remain confused (and possibly still under the impression that Ralph is actually Lacy in a very

155 A final instance of charity reinforces the play‟s positive characterization of benevolent giving. In the last scene of the play, the new mayor Simon Eyre has an audience with the king where he describes his shoemakers as “all beggars” and entreats the king “on both [his] knees” for commercial privileges. The king gives the cobblers the monopoly they request, and, thus, their begging and the king‟s charity lead to a newly formed special relationship between the crown and the shoemaker‟s guild. 157 impressive disguise) until Ralph unmasks Jane, proving that she is his wife and “therefore the proudest of you that lays hands on her first, I‟ll lay my crutch „cross his pate!” (132- 33). Ralph‟s threat of violence stands in contrast to his earlier statement of powerless desire for retribution against Hammon; in that instance, his disability divided him from his fellows, while here it unites him to them—literally. The mob of shoemakers who have somewhat dispersed are rallied after Ralph‟s threat by Firk, who calls “To him, lame Ralph!—Here‟s brave sport!” (134). This moment deliberately stages a revision of fraudulent disability. In most instances of dissembling disability on the early modern stage, the spectators are fools for assuming that feigned disability is genuine, whereas here Oatley and Lincoln are fools because they assume genuine disability is feigned. This reversal comports with the play‟s overall support of charitable giving to all people, since it condemns the kind of charity-shunning suspicion that the theatrical trope of fraudulent disability usually inculcates. Unlike most plays in this tradition, The Shoemaker‟s Holiday presents a disability that is both deserving of charity (and not demeaned by it) and free from criminal suspicion.

However, while the play allows for a disability that is economically productive and worthy of generosity because of its inclusion in a community, that inclusion still has its limits. Ralph is now officially “lame Ralph.” His new moniker is not only used by his bawdy coworker Firk, but also by the newly appointed mayor, Simon Eyre, indicating its entrenchment and legitimacy. Ralph‟s expression is, again, limited. After rebuking Oatley and Lincoln, Ralph speaks only once more in scene 18, and, although he is present in both of the play‟s final scenes, Ralph remains silent. Even though he is a recognized part of the fellowship of shoemakers, Ralph‟s disability relegates him to a secondary role in their community (in spite of his primary role within the drama of The Shoemaker‟s Holiday). His final line, ostensibly an expression of communal solidarity, hints at his exclusion even within the bonds of guild-life. After having packed off Oatley and Lincoln, the shoemakers hear the sound of a bell ringing. It is the “pancake bell,” the bell 158 that calls all shoemakers and apprentices to the feast Simon Eyre is hosting to celebrate Shrove Tuesday, workingmen‟s greatness, and his investiture as Lord Mayor. Firk celebrates upon hearing the bell: “O brave! O sweet bell! O delicate pancakes! . . . Let‟s march together for the honor of Saint Hugh to the great new hall in Gracious Street corner, which our master the new Lord Mayor hath built” (18.178, 180). Ralph chimes in with his final words of the play, saying “O, the crew of good fellows that will dine at my Lord Mayor‟s cost today!” (183-4). Although his comment explicitly includes himself within the “crew of good fellows” whose bonds will be strengthened through the charity of Simon Eyre and his pancake feast, one cannot help but wonder about Ralph‟s inclusion in a celebration that is preceded, as Firk asserts, by a “march.” This is made explicit at the end of the scene, when, after throwing their hats in the air in celebration, the shoemakers take to the streets following the call of the pancake bell to the Lord Mayor‟s home, Firk leading the way with another cry of “March fair, my fair hearts!” (209). How can Ralph be expected to “march fair” on his crutches? Granted, he seems to have some mobility, but nothing to match the rowdy carousing of his fellow shoemakers. This disparity is underscored in the final scenes of the drama, when, after having gathered with their master/mayor for the feast, Simon Eyre commands his journeymen to serve at the tables that accommodate the city‟s apprentices. Eyre twice calls Ralph by name, both times commanding him to physically hurry in his tasks. Although always grouping him among his shopfellows, he draws attention to Ralph‟s inability rather than his inclusion when he says, first, “Avoid [hurry up], Hodge; run, Ralph; frisk about, my nimble Firk!” (20.14- 15) and then, “Firk, Hodge, lame Ralph, run” (21-22). Both times Ralph‟s name is specifically paired with the command to run, a instruction he is clearly unable to fulfill; on the stage, when Firk and Hodge can hop to Eyre‟s commands without trouble but Ralph cannot, the difference between the disabled and able-bodied men must be even more pronounced. Ralph may be included within the men of the Gentle Craft, but, within that sphere, The Shoemaker‟s Holiday acknowledges that not all workingmen are equal. 159

For all its fantasy of artisanal life, the stigmatization of disability persists even within the idealized world of the drama. In The Shoemaker‟s Holiday, Thomas Dekker stages a vision of early modern commercial life where the solidarity and brotherhood of workers is illustrated by the inclusion of a disabled man among their ranks. As with the depiction of the Cripple in The Fair Maid of the Exchange, Ralph‟s disability seems to be only a minor hurdle because it is supported by the generous assistance of his male companions. Gifts of charity, which both create and reinforce masculine bonds, are figured as a particularly vital part of the social and economic communities of early modern London. In this way, The Shoemaker‟s Holiday takes the unusual position of advocating charitable giving, unlike the majority of early modern plays that engage with (especially fraudulent) disability. However, the central role that charity plays in the formation of these communities can actually be read as discouraging the play‟s audience from extending charity to people with disabilities. For all that the play may promote generosity, it does not promote indiscriminate almsgiving. The gifts exchanged in The Shoemaker‟s Holiday are not haphazard: they constitute a commerce among friends who know one another well. What‟s more, when generosity is extended to Ralph it is never because he is disabled, but, rather, because he is part of the network of male artisans (or, in the case of Jane‟s gift, because he reminds her of someone with whom she already has a relationship). In fact, by repeatedly demonstrating the ways in which Ralph is cared for by the generosity of his guildsmen, The Shoemaker‟s Holiday suggests that individual, indiscriminate charity is unnecessary, since men with disabilities are successfully provided for by their male friends and coworkers. Like the Cripple in The Fair Maid of the Exchange, Ralph has provisions that preclude his need for alms. Yet Dekker‟s project of myth-building fails. The male friendships required to ensure the integration of disabled men into commercial communities are not reliable: Ralph‟s “brothers” in the shoemaking trade claim to love and care for him, but they 160 repeatedly mock him for his disability, exclude him from their communal activities, and fail provide the support necessary for his full inclusion. It‟s true that they do reunite him with his wife, but their reunion would not have been necessary if his friends had upheld the charity—and enacted the brotherhood they espouse—as they initially promised. Critics have regularly commented on Dekker‟s pseudo-propagandistic characterization of male artisanal workers in The Shoemaker‟s Holiday, specifically his glossing over of the problems caused by unruly, riot-prone young men and their unstable relationships even with one another.156 Yet in spite of Dekker‟s boisterous comedy and lively action,

Ralph‟s treatment belies the play‟s projections of a productive, happy world of workmen by revealing the unreliability of those men. (The play does not even consider the plight of disabled men outside of the guild system, or those whose disabilities eliminated their ability to work.) For all its many suggestions to the contrary, Ralph‟s lameness will not serve, and Dekker‟s drama of blissful masculine enterprise is disrupted by disability. Both The Fair Maid of the Exchange and The Shoemaker‟s Holiday reveal important information about the cultural construction of early modern disability. In their portrayals of commercially productive disabled men, they defy the definitions of disability that had begun to form during the English Reformation, demonstrating that men with disabilities could be valuable contributors to the burgeoning labor economy, but also that disabled workers‟ commercial contributions did not shield them from stigma and disenfranchisement. Both plays vividly illustrate the centrality of economics to the cultural construction of disability in early modern England. Even though both the Cripple and Ralph are successfully employed, questions of charity still shadow them constantly.

Both plays attempt to portray charity as unnecessary: in The Fair Maid of the Exchange,

156 As mentioned previously, for more on this issue, see Arab, “Work, Bodies, and Gender.” See also Elyssa Y. Cheng, “A Living Libel: Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker's Holiday, and The 1595 London Apprentices‟ Riots,” in Class, Boundary and Social Discourse in the Renaissance, ed. Alexander C. Y. Huang, I-chun Wang, and Mary Theis (Kaohsiung: National Sun Yat-Sen University, 2007), 134-147. 161 the Cripple‟s prodigious talent and network of male friends protect him from needing charity and in The Shoemaker‟s Holiday Ralph is similarly protected by the bonds of his guild. Yet by casting almsgiving as unnecessary and by presenting such (initially) uncomplicated images of disabled workingmen, both plays ignore the problem that disability posed to early modern England‟s economic system. Neither The Fair Maid of the Exchange nor The Shoemaker‟s Holiday take on the troubles faced by real disabled workers who did not have the Cripple‟s super-human gifts or Ralph‟s trusty comrades. If other plays stage fraudulent disability in an attempt to curb almsgiving by suggesting that people with disabilities are deceptive and potentially dangerous, these plays attempt to curb almsgiving by suggesting that people with disabilities are perfectly fine and have no need of charity. (Although I think it is no mistake that, in spite of their portrayals of upstanding, reputable disabled men, both plays do engage with the trope of fraudulent disability. The threat of feigned disability can never be entirely shaken.) What really sets apart The Fair Maid of the Exchange and The Shoemaker‟s Holiday from the other early modern plays in this study, however, is the ambivalence in their message about appropriate responses to disability. There are fissures in their idealistic veneers. Although both dramas posit male friendship as the answer to the problem of disability, with masculine bonds either replacing the need for charity or appropriately supplying it, eventually these seemingly perfect support networks disintegrate. My next chapter unites the focus of the previous one—the performativity of disability—with the reality that this chapter enforces—the financial needs of disability—as I explore Shakespeare‟s performances of the non-standard body. 162

CHAPTER IV PLAYING PARTS: PERFORMATIVITY AND DISABILITY IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE‟S RICHARD III AND KING LEAR

When Richard of Gloucester introduces himself in the opening moments of the play that bears his name, he not only gives his audience time to view his body, but he verbally invites their gaze, detailing the wonders of his eccentric body like a side-show barker working a crowd. Richard uses this show-and-tell to explain how he came to be

“[d]eformed, unfinished, sent before my time / into this breathing world, scarce half made up.”157 Characters throughout the play debate the origin of Richard‟s disability: Is it the work of God? The Devil? Is his mother to blame? Is it the consequence—or cause—of Richard‟s tyrannical actions? In the opening moments of the play, Richard offers his own complex explanation. According to him, his deformities are the result of having been “[c]heated of feature by dissembling Nature” (1.1.19). “Nature,” then, is responsible, and the personified attribute appears to absolve all others of blame. Yet Richard‟s unusual descriptor, “dissembling,” complicates his scapegoating of Nature. Richard is charged with dissembling throughout the play—he is himself called a “dissembler” in the very next scene—and so he subtly links himself to the guilty Nature even as he attempts to avoid that guilt.158 But describing Nature as “dissembling,” suggests another, more complicated possibility for the origin of Richard‟s disability since Nature, if anything, is incapable of feigning. Whether imagined as a pure, idealized state or a blemished, base one, in the early modern period “Nature” was used to describe the physical world in its

157 William Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. James R. Siemon, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Methuen, 2009), 1.1.20-21. All subsequent quotations from this text are identified parenthetically by act, scene, and line number.

158 Richard makes similarly masked confessions throughout the play, one of the most famous in act 2, scene 1 when he blames “some tardy cripple” for the mix-up that leads to Clarence‟s death. 163 most essential form.159 For innate reality to deceive—even when anthropomorphized— would contradict its very, well, nature.160 If, as Richard tells us, a dissembling Nature has made him deformed, then there must be a whole, perfectly formed Richard hidden by this formless, unfinished version.161 If that is the case, then dissembling Richard must be conspiring with Nature, since he dedicates the bulk of this introductory soliloquy to “descant[ing] on mine own deformity,” affirming the reality of his disability (27). But his odd turn of phrase lets the possibility linger: Is his disability just a performance? The answer is both yes and no. Richard III represents Shakespeare‟s first foray into the genre of the fraudulent disability play, and, in his version, disability is always both authentic and theatrical. Richard, albeit genuinely impaired, enacts a performance of disability that clearly links him to the charity-hungry thieves of rogue literature and to the tradition of the counterfeiter on the early modern stage. Later in his career, Shakespeare takes up the genre again in King Lear. In Edgar‟s performance as Tom o‟ Bedlam, Shakespeare provides a counterpart to Richard: Edgar is not genuinely disabled and his performance of disability is overtly theatrical, but his performance, nevertheless, accesses authentic physical suffering and social stigma. In addition to using disability to

159 For an extended discussion of “Nature” in Shakespeare‟s works see John Francis Danby, Shakespeare‟s Doctrine of Nature (London: Faber and Faber, 1949).

160 This characterization of Nature‟s role in Richard‟s disability also directly conflicts with the narrative of his origins in 3 Henry VI. There, Richard claims that “frail nature” was bribed by Love to make him deformed, because Love didn‟t want anything to do with him. (William Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI, ed. David Bevington in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 5th ed. [New York: Pearson, 2003], 3.2.153-57. All subsequent quotations from this text are identified parenthetically by act, scene, and line numbers.) Although similarly negative, this description of Nature is pointedly different: in the earlier play, Richard‟s disability was the result of rejection; here it is the result of theatrical deception.

161 This possibility certainly comports with William N. West‟s assertion that Richard‟s description of his deformity in the opening soliloquy demonstrates a particularly Aristotelian understanding of the physical world, wherein “de-formed” means “without form” rather than “diverging from a particular form.” In West‟s interpretation, because Richard is incomplete in regards to Nature, he can only become complete through the process of performance; see his “What‟s the Matter with Shakespeare?: Physics, Identity, Playing,” South Central Review 26.1-2 (2009): 103-26. 164 interrogate the relationship between performance and reality, Shakespeare also engages with the questions of charity that undergirded discourses of disability in early modern England. Richard‟s rise to power is facilitated by his manipulation of his audiences‟ charitable impulses and the play seems to suggest that charity should be replaced with suspicion when dealing with people with disabilities, fraudulent or otherwise. Edgar‟s performance as Poor Tom articulates the opposite conclusion: his audiences are moved to charity even when they should not be and their responses, while mistaken, are nevertheless redemptive. These two plays offer unique variations of the disability- disguise trope and, together, present a vision of the non-standard body that defies the era‟s definitions to reveal a surprisingly dynamic—and not deterministic—picture of early modern disability

“Dissembling looks”: The Performativity of Disability in Richard III While Richard III affirms the popular Tudor depiction of Richard as deformed, he performs his deformity to facilitate his rise to power by preying upon his spectators‟ charity. Richard is a consummate actor, but his body has most often been identified as the source of his remarkable powers of deception, rather than an instrument of that deception. Many scholars who have located his performative abilities in his body have connected their assessment in some way to the early modern practice of physiognomy, the belief that a correspondence existed between one‟s physical exterior and spiritual interior.162

162 For representative examples of physiognomic readings of Richard III, see Richard Marienstras, “Of a Monstrous Body,” in French Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: „What Would France with Us?‟ ed. Jean-Marie Maguin and Michele Willems (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 153-74; Greta Olson, “Richard III‟s Animalistic Criminal Body,” Philological Quarterly 82.3 (2003): 301-24; Marie A. Plasse, “Corporeality and the Opening of Richard III,” in Entering the Maze: Shakespeare‟s Art of Beginning, ed. Robert F. Wilson, Jr. (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 11-25. For a reading of the play that complicates many strictly physiognomic interpretations, see Michael Torrey, “„The plain devil and dissembling looks‟: Ambivalent Physiognomy and Shakespeare‟s Richard III,” English Literary Renaissance 30.2 (2000): 123-53. 165

Although physiognomy certainly wielded a measure of influence, reading Richard almost metaphorically through its lens has limited explorations of what his material body may have meant to an early modern audience. A complex network of cultural discourses helped to craft disability in the English Renaissance, and I contend that Richard‟s sharp awareness of the many interpretations of the non-standard body facilitates his rise to power. In particular, I read Richard as performing his own body in such a way as to prey upon his spectators‟ charity. As I will demonstrate, he begins by enacting roguish versions of the non-standard body in his personal relationships, especially in his famous wooing of Lady Anne, and then progressively widens his net, performing disability to ensnare first the court and then the whole country as he makes his way to the throne. Once king, however, Richard‟s powers of manipulation suffer dramatically. Assuming the monarchy makes it impossible for Richard to use his body in the dangerously pitiful way he had done in the past, and further affirms that the performance of disability—and not its physical reality—is what makes possible Richard‟s seizure of the throne. By enacting fraudulent disability in his authentically impaired body, Richard III suggests an early modern notion of the non-standard body that is not only less deterministic than notions of physiognomy suggest, but is, in fact, just the opposite: as he implies when he invokes “dissembling Nature,” Richard‟s disability is threatening because of its very performativity.

Although many scholars have investigated the influence of rogue literature on Shakespeare‟s work, none read Richard III in this tradition.163 This negligence seems surprising, particularly in light of the numerous connections drawn between rogues and actors in early modern popular literature, as well as the heavy emphasis on theatrics and deception in Richard III—to say nothing of the rich tradition of fraudulent disability on

163 Among scholars who have investigated the role of rogue literature in Shakespeare are William C. Carroll, James A. S. McPeek, and Linda Woodbridge. 166 the stage. Nevertheless, a fairly simple explanation for this oversight exists: unlike the counterfeiters, Richard is actually disabled. However, careful attention to Richard‟s display of his body and characterization of his physical condition makes clear that, while his impairments are real, Richard‟s disability is highly performative. Although his deformity is designed to impress us—Richard‟s catalogue in 3 Henry VI details his withered arm, uneven legs, hunchback, and “disproportion . . . in every part” (3.2.156- 60)—and in spite of the fact that Richard draws attention to his disability in virtually every scene he‟s in, he seems to experience no physical limitations because of it. Other than his deformity, martial ability defines Richard‟s character: he rides horses, leads troops, and fights hand-to-hand combat with little or no display of a handicap. The major limitations that he claims for himself are social, yet even those seem to be undercut by the actions of the play. In both 3 Henry VI and in the famous opening soliloquy of Richard III, Richard locates his ambition for the throne and alienation from his family in his body, specifically in the sexual rejection of his disabled body. He pits the world of war that he excels in against the “weak piping time of peace,” concluding that he will take on villainy because he “cannot prove a lover” (Richard III, 1.1.24, 28). Facing the possibility that the only kingdom he will ever rule is “in a lady‟s lap,” Richard laments, “O miserable thought, and more likely / Than to accomplish twenty golden crowns!” (3 Henry VI, 3.2.148, 151-52). Of course, Richard accomplishes both the crown and the

“lady‟s lap” with aplomb. Richard‟s first attempt at seduction, his wooing of Lady Anne, he is a resounding success. Richard‟s mother, who curses her son and directs her invective at his body, seems to confirm the alienation that he claims to experience from his family, but her animosity comes only after Richard has legitimately earned her hatred by killing her son and grandsons. Although Richard announces that “I have no brother; I am like no brother,” both of his brothers demonstrate genuine affection and loyalty towards him (3 Henry VI, 5.6.79). These disability-transcending interactions do not to 167 suggest that Richard never encounters limitations or stigmatization, only that the disability he performs and the one that he experiences are distinctly different. Seeing Richard‟s performance for what it is—a performance—illuminates the possibility of a more varied and complicated understanding of early modern disability than has previously been asserted. Richard‟s self-conscious fashioning of his own disability in order to force the charity of his various audiences demonstrates an early modern awareness of disability as a construct rather than a constant. In fact, it is the instability of disability that rogues—and Richard—take advantage of. Counterfeiters executed their con by embodying an epistemological problem; they made it financially and spiritually necessary to accurately interpret reality. The possibility that, like the rogues, Richard‟s disability is performative—even primarily performative—is what makes him truly dangerous. Richard‟s performance in his opening soliloquy epitomizes his roguish conflation of piteous and criminal disability. He appears alone on stage, the only one of Shakespeare‟s characters to begin a play in soliloquy, and his solitariness, coupled with a speech about the limitations of his body, invites the audience to look at him. The staging of his body as the sole focus of audience attention elicits sympathy, since early modern audiences (as could be fairly argued for audiences today) were trained to look on disability with pity. Richard characterizes himself as “cheated of feature” (1.1.19), unfairly given an unhappy, loveless lot in life so pathetic that “dogs bark at me, as I halt by them” (23). Yet in these opening moments, the parallels between his performance and those of early modern counterfeiters complicate Richard‟s ploy for pity. As the audience is still in the process of suspending its disbelief, the soliloquy affirms how Richard‟s performance is itself an act of counterfeiting by making obvious the clever feigning and careful costuming of the able-bodied actor playing the role of Richard III.164 Richard

164 This presumes, of course, that an able-bodied actor is playing the part of Richard, as is almost always the case. The resistance to a disabled actor taking on the role is chronicled by 168 repeatedly confirms the danger believed to accompany early modern disability when he states outright that he is “determined to prove a villain” (30) and, throughout the speech, reiterates his intentions to be “subtle, false, and treacherous” (37). Even his pitiful description of his limping figure attracting the attention of barking dogs had a ring of danger to it; a popular Elizabethan rhyme warned “Hark, hark, the dogs do bark: the beggars are coming to town.”165 All of this self-referential emphasis on Richard‟s rogue- like disability makes it even more shocking that he accomplishes his greatest deception of all: the seduction of the audience. Like “coneys,” the gullible citizens tricked by rogues into believing that they were taking part in a fraud to entrap someone else when really they were the victims, the audience willingly submits to Richard‟s deception because he convinces them that they are not the objects of his con. And it is worth noting that, to an extent, Richard has succeeded. An astounding number of actors, directors, critics, and scholars over the course of the play‟s 400-year history have accepted Richard‟s disability as his primary motivation for his evil—taking Richard at his word. In the famous seduction of Lady Anne in act 1, scene 2—as in his opening soliloquy—Richard performs a rogue disability in order to successfully manipulate his prey. Anne herself articulates one half of the early modern interpretation of disability: she consistently links Richard‟s non-standard body with criminality, both his previous actions and the “heinous deeds” she expects from him (53). Before Richard even enters, Anne curses him by singling out his individual body parts for her vitriol (14-16). Once he arrives, Anne incessantly—almost obsessively—draws attention to his disability. She

Leanore Lieblein in “Dave veut jouer „Richard III‟: Interrogating the Shakespearean Body in Quebec,” Canadian Theater Review 111 (2002): 15-21. This possibility was realized in the 2004 Peter DuBois/Peter Dinklage production at New York‟s Public Theater.

165 The nursery rhyme concludes: “Some in rags, and some in tags, and one in a velvet gown.” For more on the origins of this poem and its possible connections to early modern rogue culture and sumptuary laws, see Albert Mason Stevens, “Hark Hark,” in The Nursery Rhyme: Remnant of Popular Protest (Lawrence: Coronado Press, 1968), 99-106. 169 calls him a “lump of foul deformity” (57) and a “diffus‟d infection of a man” (78), as well as a “hedgehog” and “foul toad,” animalistic slurs that bear distinct connections to disability in early modern England (104, 150).166 When she describes how Richard‟s “hell-govern‟d arm” slaughtered the king (67), the literal sense of her phrase resounds at least as strongly as the metaphorical, since Richard‟s withered arm is there on stage to illustrate her language. Anne‟s fixation on Richard‟s body—and her defensive description of their burial procession as “charitable deeds”—betrays an opportunity for manipulation that Richard seizes upon. He locates his seduction in his body, playing the dual interpretations of disability against each another, thus inviting and securing Anne‟s complicity with his plans. Richard presents to Anne a version of disability that, first and foremost, demands charity. Although he is rude to the guard escorting the funeral procession, Richard is conspicuously courteous, even deferential, when addressing Anne. Specifically, he peppers this performance of pitiful disability with references to the charity that would have been present in any early modern interaction with the non-standard body. He first interrupts her invective against him by stating, “Sweet saint, for charity, be not so curst” (1.2.49). Pleading for the sake of charity, Richard not-so-subtly chastises Anne for failing to act the good Christian when she does not immediately respond to his disabled body with pity. Calling her a saint ironically underscores his accusation and also harkens back to the two times Richard swears by St. Paul in the preceding lines.167 St. Paul, in addition to his reputation as the apostle who penned the famous passage on charity in 1

166 Paul Semonin explores the relationship between disability and animalistic characteristics in the English Renaissance in “Monsters in the Marketplace: The Exhibition of Human Oddities in Early Modern England,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 69-81.

167 Richard swears by St. Paul a total of five times: 1.2.36; 1.2.41; 1.3.45; 3.4.75; 5.3.216. Significantly, he is the only character in Shakespeare‟s corpus to swear by St. Paul. 170

Corinthians, was often characterized as lame in popular legend, further linking him to Richard and affirming Richard‟s performance of pitiful disability.168 Anne tries to offer an appropriately Protestant response, paralleling Richard‟s language when she says, “Foul devil, for God‟s sake hence, and trouble us not” (50). By replacing “charity” here with “God,” Anne makes a particularly Reformed rhetorical move: a central tenet of the Reformation was that the grace of God trumped works of charity in the action of salvation. However, in this situation, invoking God does not save Anne. Richard continues to assert that she ought to respond to him with pity, and, by engaging in his warped theological debate, she only adds weight to the literally damning accusation he levels at her: “Lady, you know no rules of charity” (68). In addition to supplying the other half of the conflicted image of early modern disability, Richard also directly inserts his body into his performance of innocence. He pitifully denies his guilt, claiming, instead, that the Lancastrians have “laid their guilt upon my guiltless shoulders” (1.2.100). Richard‟s famously misshapen shoulders there on stage literally flesh out this metaphor, and Richard uses them here as props in his performance of pitiful disability. In addition, the implied stage directions throughout the scene indicate that Richard undertakes a great deal of physical movement: he has to halt the funeral procession, threaten the guards with bodily violence, wipe Anne‟s spit from his face, and, ultimately, force her to take his sword and kneel before her, laying his breast bare to her will. These actions seem designed to tax the agility and dexterity of the disabled Richard (or allow him the opportunity to exaggerate his physical limitations), and this visible display of impairment enforces the image of pained, pathetic disability that Richard projects as he attempts to enforce Anne‟s charity.

168 St. Paul‟s legendary lameness most likely is the result of speculation about the enigmatic “thorn in the flesh” that he claims has been sent as “a messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure” (2 Corinthians 12:7, King James Version). 171

Indeed, Richard manages to make the climatic moment of the scene a crisis of charity. When Anne spits in his face, her anger does not deter him. In fact, it provides him with the opportunity to enact for her his own definition of charity: just as it “renders good for bad, blessings for curses” (1.2.69), so he showers her with affectionate names and flatteries. When it becomes clear that Anne will not waver in her hatred of him, Richard puts her charity to the test:

If thy revengeful heart cannot forgive, Lo, here I lend thee this sharp-pointed sword, Which if thou please to hide in this true breast And let the soul forth that adoreth thee, I lay it naked to the deadly stroke And humbly beg thee death upon my knee. (1.2.176-81) Significantly, Richard not only highlights his impairment through the action of kneeling, which further asserts his personal pathos through the posture of prayer and submission, but he also describes his action here as “begging.” Although the verb “to beg” was regularly used in the neo-platonic love narratives that also inform this scene, when it comes from a disabled character, especially one that is so intent on demonstrating his disability, Richard‟s begging recalls the begging of disabled vagrants that motivated the debates about charity.169 His actions, then, make his ultimatum to Anne—“Take up the sword again, or take up me” (186)—a choice between vengeance or a very peculiar kind of mercy. Like the rogues who also performed disability, Richard uses his victim‟s charity against her, making Anne as complicit in her downfall as the well-meaning citizens who willingly gave away their money to thieves. Richard asks Anne to cement her change of heart towards him by accepting his ring. She offers an equivocal response:

“To take is not to give” (205). This statement seemingly denies her agency, since now it is Anne who is accepting gifts from a benevolent Richard, but by speaking to the

169 Donna Oestreich-Hart provides a detailed examination of Richard‟s skillful manipulation of “courtly” love practices and patterns in “„Therefore, Since I Cannot Prove a Lover,‟” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 40.2 (2000): 241-60. 172 charitable exchange that Richard has reversed, Anne‟s statement instead further enforces her complicity. Richard seals his triumph by imagining for Anne her perfect body intermingled with his disabled one, a transformation illustrated by this exchange. “Look how my ring encompasseth thy finger,” he says to her, “Even so thy breast encloseth my poor heart” (206-207). Later, when Anne recalls this interaction, the presence of Richard‟s body has grown so large in her mind that she mis-remembers speaking her self- fulfilling curse, not before he arrived, as it actually occurred, but “O when, I say, I looked on Richard‟s face” (4.1.70). By skillfully manipulating Anne‟s interpretation of his impairments, performing his body in such a way as to demand her charity, Richard succeeds in this most unlikely of seductions. The gloating soliloquy that follows Anne‟s departure reveals Richard‟s awareness of how his disability both complicated and facilitated his conquest. He begins by acknowledging how the circumstances of their encounter made his seduction unlikely, but he very quickly turns his attention to the ways in which his body would seem to stand in the way of such an erotic coup. Richard is satirically shocked that she would “abase her eyes on me,” since he has nothing to recommend his suit to her except “the plain devil and dissembling looks” (1.2.249, 239). His pun here, paired with the adjective “dissembling,” links back to the “dissembling Nature” he mentions in the opening soliloquy: he seduced Anne with illusory glances, such as the kind a lover might make, but also with his deceptive appearance.170 He marvels that Anne would love one who “halts and [is] misshapen thus” (253), before exclaiming, “I do mistake my person all this while!” (255). Richard‟s joke—that he has misinterpreted his body—underscores the way that Anne has misinterpreted his body. And his focus is, very much, on his body, and not his person generally. Richard describes how he will buy himself new clothes and

170 Shakespeare repeatedly puns on “looks” in just this way in Sonnet 93: “What e‟er thy thoughts or thy heart‟s workings be, / Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.” (The Sonnets, ed. G. Blackmore Evans [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 73, ll. 10-12.) 173 expensive mirrors to admire his appearance now that he has “crept in favor with myself” (261). Yet even this is a pun foregrounding his disability; Richard “creeps” into his favor in the same way that he “halts” instead of walking. Instead of impeding his seduction, Richard‟s disability has made it possible. Further, Richard punctuates his boastful speech with exclamations that describe the enormous odds of his unlikely success: first, “All the world to nothing!” and then, “My dukedom to a beggarly denier” (240, 254).171 Richard‟s penchant for using gambling terms to characterize his success makes sense given that his entire ploy for the throne is something of a gamble (and they foreshadow the reversal of these bargains when he offers his “kingdom for a horse” at the Battle of Bosworth Field). These phrases also echo with a pointed accuracy, since Richard has just gained the first thing he needs to conquer “all the world” using a beggar‟s tricks. Richard expands his roguish characterization of disability to ensnare the entire court in act 3, scene 4, when he focuses his performance on single body part—his arm— to incite a manipulative charity. In this compact scene, unfolding in little more than 100 lines, Richard executes his role as counterfeiter flawlessly. He begins by presenting himself as pitiful: his brother‟s wife and mistress are “offenders” who have “conspire[d]” against him. Then he asks the group of gathered counselors about what should be done to those who “have prevail‟d / Upon my body with their hellish charms?” (3.4.60-61). There is no context for this question within the scene, and its abruptness immediately derails the council‟s intended action of naming a coronation date for the new king—a disruption Richard no doubt intends. But the conniving Duke reaches beyond mere interruption. His performance of innocence invites Lord Hastings‟ participation, and the lord promptly steps into the role that Richard created for him, proclaiming that anyone who would do such a terrible thing to Richard deserves to die. Upon Hastings‟ declaration, Richard

171 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a “denier” is “a French coin, the twelfth of the Sou,” used proverbially to signify a very small sum (New Edition, online). 174 bares his arm and demands, “Then be your eyes the witness of their evil. / Look how I am bewitched! Behold, mine arm / Is like a blasted sapling withered up!” (66-68). The staggering audacity here is that all the witnesses of this performance—the counselors to whom the arm is presented, and the audience to whom the scene is presented—are aware that Richard‟s body has been deformed since his birth, and the condition of his arm is in no way a new development to be attributed to witchcraft. Nevertheless, Richard‟s almost comical impudence pays off, and in a matter of moments Lord Hastings has been condemned to death and Richard has all but announced his usurpation of the throne.

Richard roguishly uses his body as false proof against Hastings, but Hastings‟ earlier complicity in Richard‟s ruse means that he has, coney-like, already condemned himself. Hastings bewails his own involvement before he is led to execution, warning that he “who builds his hope in the air of your good looks”—and certainly the play on words is intended—will soon find himself dead (98).172 Richard reprises this performance of disability in his seduction of the English people in act 3, scene 7. With Lord Buckingham working as his accomplice—rogue literature would say, the “fingerer” to Richard‟s “cheater”—they manipulate the mayor and citizens of London into asking Richard to assume the kingship. Though Buckingham is a skillful accomplice, he is clearly unable to perform the part of the counterfeiter in the

172 The only other action in this brief scene is a bizarre interlude in which Richard asks the Bishop of Ely to send for some strawberries from his garden before ducking out again to confer with Buckingham before his final entrance and the announcement of his “bewitchment.” Critics have debated the purpose of this action, which can seem comical on stage. The business with the strawberries has historical precedent in Thomas More‟s account of the life of Richard III, and, within the context of the scene, it serves to get the Bishop out of the way. John Dover Wilson suggests, however, that Richard requests strawberries because they could have caused an allergic reaction in the form of an urticarial rash, creating (or at least augmenting) the withered look of his arm. Wilson argues that this explains not only Richard‟s success in the scene, since a rash would have been new to those already familiar with his deformity, but also the strawberries‟ presence in More and Shakespeare, since it demonstrates how theatrical Richard‟s intrigues against Hastings actually were. If Wilson is right, then not only does Richard meta-theatrically enact rogue disability, but also performs actual disability, borrowing the palliard‟s trick of raising sores on the arms to achieve his deception; see “A Note on Richard III: The Bishop of Ely‟s Strawberries,” Modern Language Review 52 (1957): 563-64. 175 way Richard does. Early in the scene, Buckingham recounts how he previously tried to win the citizens over to the idea of Richard‟s kingship, with disappointing results. He describes how he attempted to portray Richard as the innocent, detailing his “bounty, virtue, fair humility,” while at the same time, attempting to present Richard‟s body in absentia (3.7.17). He tells Richard that he “did infer your lineaments,” referring, on the surface, to Richard‟s paternal lineage, but also referencing the makeup of his body, stating explicitly in the next line that he described Richard‟s physical likeness to his father (12-13). Yet, for all of Buckingham‟s impressive oratory, the citizens do not joyously take up the cry “God save Richard, England‟s royal king,” but instead simply “star‟d on each other” (22, 26). Perhaps this is because they had no enticing but dangerous body to look on instead. For indeed, when Buckingham makes a similar speech later—this time with Richard physically present—the ploy works. As in the opening soliloquy, Richard‟s role in this scene is staged for viewing: he enters “aloft” with the bishops in the upper balcony of the stage. This placement sets him on display and in several of the comments made by Buckingham and the citizens it is clear that they are viewing Richard as much as listening to him. Indeed, they are only listening to him for a relatively short time; most of the scene is taken up with Buckingham‟s rhetoric while Richard simply stands there. In light of Buckingham‟s narrative of his failed attempt to win over the citizens, clearly something about Richard‟s physical presence augments Buckingham‟s words, enabling them to successfully seduce the people of London. It is my contention that the difference is Richard‟s disability, which becomes the visual and verbal focus of the scene.

Richard draws attention to his impairments in order to force Buckingham and the citizens to refute his claims of inadequacy, making his performance of pathos explicitly part of his trap. “So mighty and so many are my defects,” he says, “That I would rather hide me from my greatness” (3.7.159-60). Richard repeatedly references his limitations throughout the scene, finally declaring: “I am unfit for state and majesty” (205). While 176 his remarks can obviously be read metaphorically, the presence of his body on stage underscores their literal meaning: each one reminds his audience(s) that he is disabled.173 Here Richard parlays his physical impairment into a performance of humility, one no doubt affirmed by the charitable imperative directed at disabled persons. Buckingham‟s rhetoric underscores Richard‟s performance. Richard pretends to be at prayer when Buckingham arrives with the Mayor and citizens; when he appears, standing between two bishops, Buckingham says approvingly to the Mayor, “Two props of virtue for a Christian Prince, / To stay him from the fall of vanity” (95-96). Again, Richard‟s physical weakness is figured as his moral advantage; not a limitation, but a location of virtue. Richard and Buckingham both affirm this interpretation of disability as deserving of charity and then uniquely reverse it. They both begin the scene affirming how, because of his impairments, Richard needs the goodwill of the citizens of London, but they conclude by suggesting that it is the citizens of London who need Richard‟s disability. Buckingham characterizes England itself as deformed: “The noble isle doth want her proper limbs; / Her face defac‟d with scars of infamy,” which Richard‟s misshapen legs will replace as the “proper limbs” and his deformity reform the nation (3.7.124-25). Richard employs a slightly different tactic. Throughout the scene, he characterizes the monarchy as a physical weight, one they are trying to “lay” or “heap” on him, but, because he is “unfit,” Richard fears he may be unable to bear it (170, 203-04). Nevertheless, this rhetorical move also allows him to suggest that his impairment is what makes him an appropriate monarch. When he finally accepts their offer of the crown,

Richard says, “Since you will buckle fortune on my back / To bear her burden, whe‟er I

173 Richard‟s repeated references to his disability might also aim at mitigating the archaic English law preventing anyone not physically perfect from taking the throne. Coggeshall‟s Chronicle, which Shakespeare likely knew and used as a source for King John, mentions this law as a motivation for the near-blinding of young Prince Arthur by his usurping uncle. 177 will or no, / I must have patience to bear the load” (237-39). His acceptance recalls the humpback that Richard already has to carry with him whether he wants to or not, and the parallel suggests that he has already learned the patience he needs to bear this new load by virtue of his disability. Yet for all that Richard both skillfully and successfully performs recognizable models of disability, the fact that it is a performance does not go unnoticed: his nephew, the young Duke of York, recognizes Richard‟s roguery for what it is. In addition to sharing the Christian name Richard, the two Dukes have other similarities as well, especially their wit, cunning, and powers of manipulation. Throughout his two scenes, little York plays on the many similarities he shares with his uncle, though he repeatedly returns to their physical difference, often cuttingly.174 Young Richard offers an explicit performance of his uncle‟s performances in act 3, scene 1. When the little Duke asks to have his uncle‟s dagger, he prompts Richard‟s famously threatening quip, “My dagger, little cousin? With all my heart” (3.1.111), but his brother, the Prince of Wales, has a different reaction to the question. “A beggar, brother?” he asks, and, indeed, that is the role that the little Duke takes on (3.1.112). He requests that his uncle give him a greater gift (a request Richard again uses for a veiled threat), and ends with the assertion that Richard has only a limited generosity; when asked for greater charity, he‟ll “say a beggar nay” (3.1.119). Not only does this sharp wordplay demonstrate that little York is aware of

Richard‟s performance of roguery, since he mimics him by taking on the beggar‟s role, but it turns Richard‟s performance of the charity case on its head, since the young Duke‟s requests demonstrate Richard‟s lack of charity—indeed, even his murderous intentions.

174 It is common for performance to merge both the similarity and the difference by having the young Duke mimic the limp and posture of the older Duke, or climb onto his back to demonstrate/accentuate his disability; both the 1992-93 Sam Mendes/Simon Russell Beale production and the 2002 Michael Grandage/Kenneth Branagh production staged imitative young Dukes of York. 178

Shortly after the beggar episode, York expresses his awareness of Richard‟s theatricality again, this time in the form of an insult specifically directed at his uncle‟s disability. York says, “Because that I am little, like an ape / . . . you should bear me on your shoulders” (3.1.130-31). The sight of a bear with an ape on its shoulders was a common one at country fairs and bearbaitings, and so this line has traditionally been interpreted as one that mocks Richard‟s famously deformed shoulders. Little York‟s statement may also allude to the iconographic tradition of picturing a Fool with an ape on his shoulders, doubling the insult (and the reference to disability). However, the fact that fools were frequently interchangeable with beggars and the fact that “ape,” of course, meant “to imitate,” we again see the young Richard‟s mimicry identifying the older Richard‟s performative roguery.175 Unfortunately, York‟s theatrical threats are ultimately empty. For all his wit, the little Duke, like his brother, gets shuffled off to the tower, and the rest is, inevitably, history. Although Richard quickly silences this detractor—and the other characters who attempt to speak out against him—he ultimately cannot sustain the performance he initially maintained so skillfully. Once he achieves the position of king, his new identity undercuts the dynamic force of rogue disability; the most powerful man in England can demand honor and obedience, but exacting pity and charity—whatever his physical condition—becomes much more difficult. Richard himself suggests that the monarch and the rogue are diametrically opposed earlier in the play when Lord Rivers suggests that Richard may one day be king, and Richard responds, “I should rather be a peddler” (1.3.149). Without the powerful model of the counterfeiter to draw from in his enactment of disability, Richard‟s performance flounders. Although he tries, he cannot seduce Elizabeth Woodeville, he cannot control his courtiers, and he cannot rally the citizens as

175 Fools, both “genuine” and “artificial,” were linked to beggars through the literary and performative tradition of rustic clowns and minstrels. Autolycus in The Winter‟s Tale illustrates the slippage between these two categories. 179 he once did. As Richard increases in power and as his actions frequently expose him as a villain, even his seduction of the audience disintegrates. As the play progresses, Richard is less and less frequently staged in ways that focus the audience‟s attention on his body. His dream in act 5, scene 3 is the last time we see Richard by himself, yet even in this instance he is not physically alone. He shares the stage with Richmond, who, although on the other side of the battlefield, is presented in tandem with Richard. The parade of ghosts run throughout the scene, and their numerous entrances and exits draw attention— and charitable feelings—away from the king with their impressive litany of suffering. In addition, many of the ghosts (six of the eleven that appear to him) request that their spirits “sit heavy in [Richard‟s] soul.” Although this curse is somewhat overshadowed by the ghosts‟ other refrain, “Despair and die,” the threat that they will, in the words of the young princes, “be lead within thy bosom, Richard / And weigh thee down to ruin, shame, and death” echoes Richard‟s own characterization in act 3, scene 7 of the monarchy as a weight that his disability has uniquely equipped him to bear (5.3.147-48). Here, however, by figuring themselves as the impairment that Richard must contend with, the ghosts reverse his appropriation of pitiful disability and reaffirm his physical impairment as a form of supernatural punishment. By becoming king, Richard cuts himself off from the manipulative potential of disability; in his final soliloquy, he admits that it would be impossible for anyone to pity him, since, “I myself / Find in myself no pity to myself” (5.2.202-03). Although Richard‟s ascension to the throne exposes his previous modes of manipulation and cuts him off from his most effective instrument of deception, the power of the rogue is not removed from the play. In his rather uninspiring pre-battle speech to his troops, Richard figures Richmond‟s soldiers as

A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways, A scum of Bretons and base lackey peasants, Whom their o‟ercloyed country vomits forth To desperate adventures and assured destruction. … 180

These famished beggars, weary of their lives, Who, but for dreaming on this fond exploit, For want of means, poor rats, had hanged themselves. (5.3.316-19, 329-31) One cannot help but hear a nearly wistful regret in Richard‟s otherwise negative fantasy of Richmond‟s troops, since he pictures them with virtually the same roguish qualities he adopted for himself in his performance of his disability. It is also worth noting here that the men Richard figures as diseased vagabonds are, of course, the victors in this battle, which suggests that the power of such performances remains constant in the play, even after those performances are no longer available to Richard.

Adopting a particularly evocative model of early modern disability facilitates Richard‟s nearly comprehensive destruction of the royal family and his ascension to the throne. Although he cannot maintain his political deception, he very effectively extends it beyond the stage to the audience of the play, who are cozened into accepting this unacceptable hero, as well as accepting Richard‟s version of the events that take place. Yet careful scrutiny of his performance reveals its meta-fraudulence—he is feigning the actions of feigners, after all—and in this performance we find the possibility for an early modern disability that is not pre-determined by medicine, the state, or Nature, but one that can be fashioned as necessary, a disability that is open and malleable. In this way, Richard both enforces and undercuts popular early modern notions of disability. He challenges the idea that persons with disabilities are pitiful charity cases, which, in many ways, encourages a very Protestant type of canny suspicion. On the other hand, suggesting that disability is performative bursts the boundaries of definition that the English Reformation attempted to impose on extraordinary bodies. Careful scrutiny of

Richard‟s performance affirms that the problem of charity—and the categorization of disability—cannot be so easily resolved. Richard famously boasts that he was able to seduce Anne with only “the plain devil and dissembling looks,” ironically, the same instruments he uses to deceive his audience. Looking beyond the devil and the dissembling allows us to see both the reality of disability as a construct and its 181 construction in Richard‟s performance of a body whose form may be fixed, but whose powers are anything but limited.

“To feel what wretches feel”: Charity and Dissembling Disability in King Lear Over a decade after demonstrating the theatrical potential of disability in Richard III, Shakespeare returned to the performance of the non-standard body in King Lear. There Edgar, heir to the Earl of Gloucester, performs disability in order to hide himself from his father who has been tricked into believing that Edgar plotted against his life. Unlike Richard, who performs variations on the impairment he already possesses, Edgar takes on an entirely new persona in his performance of disability: Edgar becomes “Poor Tom,” a wandering madman whose desperation and disorientation provide a counterpoint to the real madness of King Lear. This difference in impairments separates Richard and Edgar. Richard performs corporeal disability—specifically, his hunchback and withered arm—but even at his most theatrical, Richard is always articulate and thoughtful. Edgar‟s feigned mental disability renders him virtually incoherent for a large percentage of his on-stage time. The disparity in their performances of disability is paralleled in Richard and Edgar‟s theatrical control throughout the two dramas. Richard knows what he wants to attain through his performance of his body, and he accomplishes those clearly defined goals through his skillful theatrics. As the play progresses, however, Richard‟s goals slip beyond his performative grasp as the kingship separates him from the pity that empowered his earlier performances of disability. Edgar‟s performance stands in contrast to Richard‟s: he adopts the costume of madness on the fly, while escaping his deceived but dangerous father. Putting on Poor Tom provides Edgar with a much-needed disguise, but the motives and purposes of Edgar‟s performance are never fully defined. Although his act requires a demanding commitment, Edgar‟s feigned madness also seems a bit haphazard; he is always in danger of ruining his disguise. Yet Edgar‟s performative 182 powers evolve rather than degenerate over the course of King Lear. By the end of the play, Edgar can slip seamlessly in and out of a number of disguises, including disability, and he seems uniquely capable of judging just what kind of performance will be most effective for any given audience. The play ends as he comes back to his true identity— “My name is Edgar and thy father‟s son,” he says triumphantly to his dying brother—just in time to claim his inherited earldom and (in the Folio at least) the throne as well.176 Richard and Edgar, then, have opposite trajectories: Richard‟s dissembling ultimately leads to his downfall, while Edgar‟s concludes with his rise to power.

Taken together, Richard III and King Lear provide contrasting but complementary images of early modern disability, as well as corresponding lessons on how audiences should respond to the non-standard bodies that they encounter on stage and on the streets of London. While Richard reveals that disability is always performative, even when enacted by someone with real impairments, Edgar demonstrates the reverse: that disability, even when fraudulent, always illuminates the reality of physical and emotional difference and physical and emotional pain. Further, by engaging the trope of fraudulent disability, King Lear, like Richard III, takes up the question of charity, both specifically in relation to disability and more generally as well. Shakespeare‟s later play reaches a very different conclusion than its earlier counterpart, however. Unlike Richard III, King Lear advocates for generous—even indiscriminate— charity.

176 Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Methuen, 1997), 5.3.167; all subsequent quotations from this text are identified parenthetically by act, scene, and line number. In the Folio, it is obvious that Edgar will take the throne, but, in the Quarto, that outcome is not clear. I do not generally address the problem of the “two-text” King Lear in this chapter, as the differences between the two (particularly as they relate to Edgar) do not greatly affect my argument. For more on how the dual texts do affect readings of Edgar, see Michael J. Warren, “Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar,” in Shakespeare, Pattern of Excelling Nature: Shakespeare Criticism in Honor of America‟s Bicentennial from the International Shakespeare Association Congress, Washington, D. C., April 1976, ed. David Bevington, Jay L. Halio, Kenneth Muir, and Maynard Mack (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978), 95-107. 183

King Lear is a play intimately concerned with charity, both the theological/spiritual attribute and the practice of almsgiving. Sears Jayne even identifies charity as the unifying theme of the play, in that it both motivates the primary action of the drama and links the central and sub-plots through an intricate parallelism.177 It is, specifically, the failure of charity that occupies King Lear. Lear fails to extend generosity to Cordelia; his other daughters fail to extend generosity to him. These psychological betrayals accumulate into genuine unmet physical need. At the beginning of act 2, scene 2, Lear mockingly requests aid from Regan: “On my knees I beg / That you‟ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food” (2.2.344-45). What he asks for sarcastically, he genuinely needs by the end of the scene: lost in his rage, Lear storms out into a tempest and Regan shuts her doors against his return, leaving him without raiment, bed, or food. Much of the central action of the play is concerned with other characters, particularly Kent, attempting to help Lear meet these most basic human needs. The Earl of Gloucester faces a similar crisis of charity. He‟s far too ready to condemn his son Edgar without concrete evidence, and, although uncomfortable with the judgment Lear imposes on Cordelia and, later, distressed by the cruelty Regan and Cornwall inflict on Kent, he seems unwilling to involve himself too deeply in their disputes. When Regan‟s lack of charity finally inspires him extend his own to Lear and provide him with much-needed shelter, Gloucester is immediately chastised for it. Cornwall puts out his eyes as punishment for being a

“traitor,” and suddenly Gloucester finds himself in need of charity too. As with Gloucester‟s act of generous rebellion, in the few instances in King Lear where characters do extend pity to one another, they are often met with punishment: Kent is put in the stocks and pummeled by the elements only to see his hopes dashed with Lear‟s death; he ends the play in despair, with his death (possibly by suicide) imminent. Cordelia, who repays her father‟s wrongs with forgiveness, is hanged. Even Albany, who comes to

177 Jayne, “Charity in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15.2 (1964): 277-88. 184 generosity late in the play, is cuckolded and widowed in rapid succession following his move towards pity. For all that these characters are punished for their altruism, the play does not necessarily condemn their generosity. Rather, the punishment they suffer serves to condemn their punishers and valorize their attempts at benevolence. Over and again, King Lear asserts human need, only to highlight the profound lack of charity that leaves those needs unmet. The question of charity comes into sharpest focus whenever Edgar takes the stage disguised as Tom o‟ Bedlam. Edgar transforms himself into Tom with a vividness and energy that earned his relatively brief performance a place on the title page of the play; the Quarto‟s first page promises the “True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR and his three daughters,” but advertises with equal enthusiasm “the unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of TOM of Bedlam.” Critics, too, have noted Edgar‟s unusual position within the make-up of the play. Although such literary luminaries as Leo Tolstoy and George Orwell have dismissed Edgar as a “superfluous” character, he has been the focus of much critical and scholarly attention, for a number of reasons.178 Possibly he has garnered so much attention because, as Andrew Dillon points out, he is the one character in the entire play whose motivations are unclear: Edmund is driven by envy and anger, Lear and Gloucester by their life-long entitlement, Cordelia by her integrity, and her sisters by greed. Even Kent and the Fool are clearly inspired to action by their love of Lear.179 But Edgar, who ostensibly takes up the costume of madness out of self- preservation, maintains his disguise long after that fear has dissipated and his antics have ceased to make sense. This questionable action of Edgar‟s is compounded by his virtuoso

178 Tolstoy, Tolstoy on Shakespeare (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1907), 63; Orwell, Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1950), 51.

179 Dillon, “Edgar‟s Journey: Shame, Anger, and Maturity in King Lear,” North Dakota Quarterly 57.2 (1989): 81-91. 185 performance in what is known as the “Dover cliff” scene, where Edgar, still nominally in disguise as Poor Tom, tricks his father into thinking that he jumps from a precipice but survives the fall. Even after his father‟s “miraculous” survival, when it would make sense to reveal himself, Edgar still maintains his disguise. This, along with his other ethically murky actions, has made Edgar a polarizing figure. Critics regularly vilify him for what they see as his unfeeling manipulations, particularly of his father, and link him with the other pitiless characters in the play; Stanley Cavell asserts that Edgar is critical to the play‟s bleak moral landscape since “Edgar‟s capacity for cruelty—and the same cruelty as that of the evil characters in the play—shows how radically implicated good is in evil.”180 Others, however, have read Edgar as King Lear‟s moral center, since his courage in taking on unrelenting forces of evil and his loyalty to both father and king represent the possible return of order and compassion to the world of the play. Edgar is regularly singled out as the pre-Christian Christ-figure, whose journey of discovery requires a sacrifice of the self that is repaid with a hard-earned knowledge.181 Even if unwilling to make a moral judgment about Edgar, many critics stand against Tolstoy and

Orwell in their assessment of this character, concluding that Edgar is “the more important figure in the subplot, perhaps even the second most central figure in the play.”182 His performance of madness further confuses his interpretation, since dissembling disability was a criminal action that Edgar employs to conduct charitable care. Especially because of his performance as Poor Tom, Edgar is a complex and a contentious character.

180 Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, 2nd ed. (New York: Scribners, 2002), 283.

181 For a representative pro-Edgar reading of the play, see Geoffrey Aggeler, “„Good Pity‟ in King Lear: The Progress of Edgar,” Neophilologus 77 (1993): 321-31; for a more complex assessment of his character, see Harry Berger, Jr. “Text Against Performance: The Gloucester Family Romance,” in Shakespeare‟s “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, eds. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 210-29.

182 Russell A. Peck, “Edgar's Pilgrimage: High Comedy in King Lear,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 7.2 (1967): 219. 186

Edgar‟s feigning inspires such complicated reactions because it is itself complicated, blurring the lines between performance and reality. He describes his disguise in act 2, scene 2 as “the basest and most poorest shape / That ever penury in contempt of man / Brought near to beast” (188-90). The costume Edgar adopts is minimalist to the point of being non-existent; he paradoxically puts on nakedness to protect himself from recognition. Because nakedness was the standard costume for madness,183 this anti-costume obscures his true identity, but it also exposes him— literally—to the very real consequences of early modern madness: Edgar must suffer the punishing effects of the elements without the protection of either shelter or clothing. His bold claim that he will “with presented nakedness outface / The winds and persecutions of the sky” (182-83) affirms the physical danger that putting on Poor Tom subjects him to; he may be brave enough to “outface” or defiantly confront the weather, but his very body cannot be removed from that challenge. Edgar also performs physical mortification as part of his Poor Tom costume. He recalls the madmen who “Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms / Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary,” and, in many productions, Edgar performs these self-lacerations on stage as he describes them (186- 87).184 Edgar, then, while not genuinely mad, experiences many of the physical consequences of impairment that demonstrate the slippage between real and performative disability.

183 David A. Sprunger, “Depicting the Insane: A Thirteenth-Century Case Study,” in Marvels, Monsters and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations, eds. Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 2002), 231-33. On stage Edgar is rarely fully naked, but often clothed in little more than a loincloth.

184 This was true of the 2007 Trevor Nunn/Ian McKellen production of King Lear, featuring Ben Meyjes as Edgar. For more on descriptions of Edgar in performance, see Michael Hattaway‟s “Possessing Edgar: Aspects of King Lear in Performance,” in Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes, ed. Grace Ioppolo (Newark: University of Delaware Press: 2000), 198-215. 187

At the same time that Edgar‟s performance of disability takes on elements of authentic impairment, it also deliberately draws attention to its artificiality. The primary way that this occurs is through Edgar‟s specific costume as a Bedlam beggar. As I have asserted, fears of fraudulence consistently haunted early modern disability, so that impairment always carried with it suspicions of feigning. This was especially true when that impairment was mental and/or intellectual. Of all the counterfeiters described in rogue literature, the most consistently catalogued was the “Abram-man” or the Bedlam beggar.185 Thomas Harman describes them as “those that feign themselves to have been mad, and have been kept either in Bethlem or in some other prison a good time, and not one amongst twenty that ever came in prison for any such good cause. Yet they will say how piteously and most extremely they have been beaten and dealt withal.”186 This vision of the wily Abram-man is affirmed by playwright Thomas Dekker; in his rogue pamphlet O Per Se O he insists that Bedlam beggars are “more terrible to women and children than the name of Raw-head and Bloody-bones, Robin Goodfellow, or any other hobgoblin . . . so that when they come to any door a begging, nothing is denied them.”187

Abram-men made their way to the stage frequently, mentioned in such plays as John Fletcher‟s The Beggar‟s Bush and fully embodied in dramas like Brome‟s The Court Beggar and Cavendish‟s The Country Captain. Of all the counterfeiting rogues that loomed large in the English imagination, the Abram-man was foremost in their fears as one who manipulated people‟s charity through his theatrical prowess. Edgar thus selects

185 Although the etymology of “Abram-man” is unclear, the use of this term to describe a counterfeiter of madness spawned a later slang phrase, “to sham Abraham,” meaning “to feign insanity, especially in order to beg,” which still occasionally appears in popular use (Oxford English Dictionary, New Edition, online).

186 Harman, A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones, in The Elizabethan Underworld, ed. A. V. Judges (New York: Octagon, 1965), 83.

187 Dekker, O Per Se O in The Elizabethan Underworld, ed. A. V. Judges (New York: Octagon, 1965), 372. 188 as his disguise a persona that would have been immediately tagged as a sham. As Ken Jackson has pointed out, Poor Tom is exactly the kind of figure that Poor Laws were designed to eliminate; William C. Carroll takes this identification further, asserting that “the role of Poor Tom was usually conceived of by the culture at large as a theatrical fiction.”188 Even Edgar himself acknowledges the familiarity of his on-stage and off- stage audiences with Abram-men since “The country gives me proof and precedent / of Bedlam beggars” (2.2.184-85). This obvious but often-overlooked fact then affirms that, in transforming himself into Tom o‟ Bedlam, Edgar does not simply pretend disability, but he pretends to be a man who everyone suspects is a pretender of disability. The transparent theatricality of Edgar‟s performance is evident even before Edgar begins his act. The Poor Tom persona is first introduced not by Edgar, but by his treacherous half-brother, Edmund. In act 1, scene 2, after he has managed to convince their father that Edgar is plotting his death, Edmund awaits the arrival of his brother. When he sees Edgar approaching, Edmund, in anticipation of the new act he will have to perform to trick his brother into following along with his plans, comments on the theatricality of the moment. “Pat he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy,” says Edmund, likening his brother‟s timing to the contrived conclusion of classical dramas. “My cue,” he continues, “is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o‟ Bedlam” (134-35). Two lines later Edmund sings briefly as Edgar walks up to him, “Fa sol, la, mi,” a little bit of theatrics that might simply serve to suggest his innocence to his approaching brother (137). However, given how frequently singing was associated with madness—and, especially, with the stock character Tom o‟ Bedlam who had number of popular ballads composed in his honor—Edmund‟s brief song can be read as his own

188 Jackson, “„I know not / Where I did lodge last night?‟: Shakespeare's King Lear and the Search for Bethlem (Bedlam) Hospital,” English Literary Renaissance 30 (2000): 227-28; Carroll, “„The Base Shall Top Th‟ Legitimate‟: The Bedlam Beggar and the Role of Edgar in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 434. 189 momentary performance as Poor Tom.189 This unusual introduction to the character that his brother will eventually embody affirms the Bedlam beggar‟s reputation as a “villainous” counterfeiter of disability within the world of the play; not only is Tom o‟ Bedlam a familiar stock figure in early modern England, but also in Shakespeare‟s pre- Christian version of England as well. What‟s more, Edmund‟s statement anticipating his own performance as Poor Tom—and his brief singing that realizes his expectation— further reinforces the malleability of Tom as a character. He can be created with just a sigh to signal his melancholy, or brought to life with just a scrap of a song.

A second performance from Edmund also affirms the theatrical flexibility of fraudulent disability. In order to remove his brother from his father‟s house while simultaneously maintaining Edgar‟s affections and stoking Gloucester‟s fear and anger, Edmund cleverly stages a fake swordfight. He claims that Edgar attacked him and, as proof of his brother‟s treachery (and his own valor) cuts his arm so the wound may serve as evidence: “Some blood drawn on me would beget opinion / Of my more fierce endeavor” (2.1.33-34). Although he carries out authentic bloodletting here, he also aims to entertain: not only does the wounding occur within the context of Edmund‟s theatrical betrayal of his father, but he verbally links it to performative play, saying dismissively, “I have seen drunkards / Do more than this in sport” (35-36). Yet even this comment is clearly theatrical, part of Edmund‟s assertion his own prowess to himself and to the audience that he addresses in aside. His self-mutilation also leads to one of the most overtly comedic scenes in this otherwise relentlessly bleak play, when, after going to the pain of voluntarily maiming himself in order to secure his father‟s attention (and, presumably, admiration), Edmund can hardly get his father to notice his wound. Gloucester is so intent on tracking Edgar, that even Edmund‟s very pointed direction—

189 For more on the early modern connections between madness and singing, see Dolly Mackinnon, “„Poor Senseless Bess, Clothed in her Rags and Folly‟: Early Modern Women, Madness and Song in Seventeenth-Century England,” Paregon 18.3 (2001): 119-51. 190

“Look, sir, I bleed”—cannot distract Gloucester from his task (41). Above all else, however, Edmund‟s self-laceration links him with Edgar‟s Poor Tom persona, since, as we have seen, a vital part of Edgar‟s costume consists of his mortified arms. Although Edgar‟s self-mutilation blurs the lines between real and fraudulent impairment, Edmund‟s rehearsal of the same action—indeed, on the same body part—affirms the way that even the most realistic fraudulent disability is still performative, easily manipulated and capable of manipulating others. Like Edmund‟s earlier reference to the Poor Tom character, it also asserts that particular persona‟s reputation as a theatrical trope; all of these actions occur before Edgar transforms himself, so that, by the time Edgar appears raving and bleeding in full Poor Tom mode, his actions are already familiar. We have seen his act staged elsewhere already. The persona that Edgar adopts is transparent in its theatricality, as is his performance. He first appears in act 3, scene 4, when he encounters Lear, who is slipping into his own madness in the storm. Edgar‟s performance is formulaic: he speaks and acts in all the ways expected of a stereotypical fake madman. He sings bits of songs, he speaks gibberish, he makes nonsensical couplets—in just the way that rogue pamphlets warn Bedlam beggars do. When Lear asks him, “What hast thou been?” Edgar responds with a standard “demoniac‟s confession” that mirrors the moralizing back-story attributed to many counterfeiters in rogue literature, and specifically apes Samuel Harsnett‟s send- up of Catholic exorcisms on the faux-possessed in his Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603). Rehearsing this satire by putting the words of the fake demoniacs in Poor Tom‟s mouth further enforces the fraudulence of Edgar‟s act.190 Once he goes with

Lear into a shelter and Lear stages his delusional trial against Regan and Goneril, Edgar‟s

190 Lewis Theobald commented on Edgar‟s obviously fake possession in 1733, noting that “his whole frenzy is Satire levell‟d at a modern Fact, which made no little Noise at that Period of Time: and, consequently, must have been a rapturous Entertainment to Spectators, when it was first presented;” quoted in William R. Elton, “King Lear” and the Gods (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988), 92. 191 identity is nearly revealed by his failing performance. Moved to tears by Lear‟s madness, he says, “My tears begin to take his part so much / They mar my counterfeiting” (3.6.58- 59). His performance becomes more fractured when he is forced to play his Poor Tom role in front of his blinded father, and he again mentions how his overwhelming emotion makes it difficult to maintain his disguise. “Bad is the trade that must play fool to sorrow, / Angering itself and others,” he says as he begins his Poor Tom act again (4.1.40-41). Later, he nearly falters, saying “I cannot daub it further—” but when his father calls him, he keeps on: “And yet I must” (4.1.55-56). The transparency of Edgar‟s performance does not go unnoticed. When Edgar is forced to play Poor Tom in front of his newly blinded father, Gloucester comments that, while others might identify him as a “[m]adman, and a beggar too,” he knows that “[h]e has some reason, else he could not beg” (4.1.33). Gloucester goes on to state that he noticed “such a fellow” the night before in the storm and that, upon seeing him, “[m]y son / Came then into my mind” (35-36). Although Gloucester does not fully recognize Poor Tom as his estranged son, he does recognize Edgar‟s inconsistency in his disguise as Poor Tom. Later, as Edgar leads him to the Dover cliff, Gloucester notes, “Methinks thy voice is altered and thou speak‟st / In better phrase and matter than thou didst” (4.6.7-8). Edgar tries to brush off the discrepancy, but Gloucester still insists, saying “Methinks you‟re better spoken” (10). The play deliberately underscores the artificiality of Edgar‟s performance, repeatedly calling attention to the theatricality of its form and its execution. Given the obvious fakeness of Edgar‟s act as Poor Tom, it is remarkable that neither Lear nor Gloucester—his primary audiences—identifies him. Instead, both men radically misinterpret his performance. When Edgar encounters Lear in the storm, the mad king not only fails to recognize him as the son of one of his most important nobles, he even fails to recognize him as a madman. At first Lear seems to read Poor Tom as a parallel version of himself, asking if his nakedness and poverty are a result of having “give[n] all to thy two daughters” (3.4.48). Although Edgar clearly depicts a stereotypical 192

Bedlam beggar, Lear believes that Poor Tom is, just like himself, a “discarded father,” insisting that “Nothing could have subdued nature / To such a lowness but his unkind daughters” (69-71). Later in the scene, Lear seems to have shifted in his misperception of Poor Tom, now claiming that he is a “noble philosopher,” a “learned Theban” and “good Athenian” like Diogenes or one of the other cynics who adopted a costume of poverty.191 Lear then casts Poor Tom as the judge in his trial of Regan and Goneril. In spite of his constant spouting of nonsense, Lear calls Tom a “most learned justicer” and, later, a “robed man of justice,” who he believes is qualified to weigh the evidence against his daughters (3.6.21, 36). His mistaken esteem for Poor Tom even prompts Lear to grant him a place among his retinue of knights before he falls asleep, lost in his delirium (3.6.75-76). Gloucester similarly misinterprets his son‟s performance as Poor Tom. As noted previously, Gloucester comes closer than Lear in seeing through Edgar‟s disguise, but, in spite of his suspicions, never actually identifies his son. Instead, Gloucester is taken in by Edgar‟s most notorious deception: the trick at the Dover cliff. Not only does Gloucester believe that he is standing on the edge of a precipice (when he is not) and that he has jumped off the cliff (when he has not), but he also entirely misreads his son‟s performance. He fails to recognize Poor Tom as Edgar even once his disguise has changed and his act is slipping, and, after his “jump” from the cliff, he fails to recognize Edgar again when he pretends to be a kindly passerby who witnessed the “miracle” of

Gloucester‟s survival. In this new persona, Edgar further misleads his father by suggesting that the “poor unfortunate beggar” Gloucester thought had led him to the edge of the cliff was actually a hideous fiend with “a thousand noses, / Horns whelked and waved like the enraged sea” and eyes that were “two full moons” (4.6.68-71). Gloucester believes Edgar‟s suggestion that Poor Tom was really a fiend of hell, misidentifying even his previous misinterpretation.

191 See F. G. Butler, “Who Are King Lear‟s Philosophers?: An Answer, with Some Help from Erasmus,” English Studies 67 (1986): 511-24. 193

While Edgar‟s performance of Poor Tom does not spark recognition in either Lear or Gloucester, it does elicit charity. Both men respond with generosity and compassion to his performance of feigned disability in pointedly parallel ways. Just before Edgar makes his first appearance as Poor Tom, Lear‟s exposure to the storm prompts him to make one of the most famous speeches of the play:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe‟er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta‟en Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just. (3.4.28-36) Lear‟s prayer serves as an important turning point for his character, since it signals a new self-awareness that, paradoxically, is a product of his loss of sanity. In fact, Lear‟s speech signals several new insights on the part of the deranged king. First, he recognizes the suffering of others, when, until this point, he has been fixated largely on his own mistreatment. Second, Lear‟s statement, “O, I have ta‟en / Too little care of this,” recognizes his own complicity in the affliction of others, a complicity which Lear has, in case of Cordelia at least, failed to own. His awareness of personal responsibility for the wellbeing of others would seem to be a painful revelation, but Lear imagines it as a necessary medicine—“physic”—although administered indirectly to the generic “pomp” rather than to himself. Lastly, his final recognition identifies a solution to the problem of suffering, namely the distribution of charity to the poor by rich people like himself.192 It is a moment of crucial revelation: the physical experience of suffering reorients Lear‟s focus from the need to assert his own authority to the need to provide for others. Lear‟s

192 It should be noted that Lear identifies not only himself and “pomp” as the source of human suffering, but also God/the gods, since he imagines human charity showing “the heavens” how to be just. Given that it is raining, however, and that the storm is figured throughout the scene and especially in this speech as causing suffering, it is also possible that Lear might be suggesting that human charity is greater than the “justice” of nature. 194 charity is immediately put to the test, since, just after he finishes the speech, we hear Edgar speak as Poor Tom for the first time; he appears on stage shortly after, as though Lear‟s prayer for “poor naked wretches” called him into being. At this point, Lear has almost nothing to offer him, but Lear‟s misperception of the madman means that he affords Poor Tom a dignity that the other characters do not extend to him—particularly Gloucester, who gruffly responds to Poor Tom by saying to Lear, “What, hath your grace no better company?” (3.4.137). Lear‟s insistence on talking to and staying with “my philosopher” also ensures that Poor Tom shares in the shelter Lear eventually takes from the storm.193 Thanks in large part to his misinterpretation of Edgar‟s performance, Lear offers charity to him in a way that reshapes his own character and participates in Shakespeare‟s project of recasting charity in King Lear. Later in the play, after he has been blinded, Gloucester also explicitly gives charity to Edgar when he believes him to be Tom o‟ Bedlam. Unlike Lear, who is unsure of his actions, Gloucester is deliberate in his generosity. He first arranges to have the naked Tom clothed, and he is assisted in his charity by another man, a former tenant of his, who hopes to offer charity to Gloucester. The blinded Duke refuses the generosity of the old tenant because he fears the man may be punished for helping him, but allows him to go and fetch clothes to dress Tom instead. Gloucester then gives Tom charity directly. After listening to his raving, Gloucester hands him a bag of money and says:

Here, take this purse, thou whom the heaven‟s plagues Have humbled to all strokes. That I am wretched Makes thee the happier. Heavens deal so still! Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man That slaves your ordinance, that will not see

193 In performance Lear might provide Poor Tom with (minimal) clothing as well as shelter. When Lear shouts “Off, off you lendings” and attempts to remove his clothes, stage tradition and propriety have often required Kent and the Fool to prevent Lear from actually disrobing; however, if they do not, it makes more sense for him to hand off the garments to (or for them to be picked up by) the naked man on stage instead of simply abandoning them on the heath. For the stage history of this interaction, see J. S. Bratton, King Lear (Plays in Performance) (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987), 142. 195

Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly: So distribution should undo excess And each man have enough. (4.1.67-74) Gloucester speech clearly mirrors Lear‟s prayer: like the king‟s plea for “poor naked wretches,” Gloucester, too, identifies the needs of people like Poor Tom, “whom the heaven‟s plagues / have humbled to all strokes” (67-68). He also recognizes his own complicity in the suffering of others, although somewhat less directly, since he immediately deflects the excesses of wealth onto a figurative “superfluous and lust-dieted man,” rather than first making a personal confession, as Lear does (70). Nevertheless, the recognition of his guilt is obvious, both in word, as when he identifies the offending man as someone who “will not see, / Because he does not feel” (a statement that references his blindness and deliberately echoes Gloucester‟s confession only a few lines earlier, “I stumbled when I saw” [21]) and in deed, since, in giving the purse to Tom, he takes the part of the wealthy, formerly corrupt man (71-72). And, like Lear, Gloucester also believes that charity is the solution to suffering. He identifies distributing money to the poor as the way to right the wrongs he, too, seems to believe have been handed out by

“heaven.” Reading King Lear within the tradition of fraudulent disability reveals a new interpretation of Lear and Gloucester‟s much-contested speeches on charity. Critics have long debated how to understand these statements about charitable giving. Dieter Mehl argues that they are largely irrelevant, stating, “the plight of the poor is not a major concern of the play, or only insofar as it affects the protagonists.”194 Others have disagreed with his assessment. Walter Cohen sees Lear and Gloucester‟s statements as aligning with the utopianism aspired to by the Digger religious sect; John Frances Danby reads them as advocating the communal socialism practiced by radical Anabaptists; Jonathan Dollimore interprets these scenes as interrogating the theological relationship

194 Mehl, “King Lear and the „poor naked wretches,‟” Shakespeare Jahrbuch (1975): 156. 196 between empathy and social justice, ultimately asserting that justice must precede empathy.195 Some scholars, like Debora Shuger and Judy Kronenfeld, have argued that charity is important to the play, but that these speeches by Lear and Gloucester are less socially radical than critics like Cohen, Danby, and Dollimore have suggested, asserting, instead, that they inscribe a charity that enforces hierarchy rather than obliterating it.196 I believe that these speeches and the accompanying actions of Lear and Gloucester affirm the importance of charity in King Lear, but, I read them less as explicating the nature of charity than recasting the fraudulent disability trope in order to advocate for almsgiving.

Unlike most characters in early modern drama who misinterpret fraudulent disability and give alms to a counterfeiter, Lear and Gloucester are not shamed or punished for their actions. Instead, their uncritical treatment of Edgar as Poor Tom signals the redemptive transformation of the characters; by extending charity to him, we see both Lear and Gloucester move from a fixation on protecting their own interests to an investment in the wellbeing of others. In this way, King Lear radically revises the fraudulent-disability trope, which is so frequently employed to increase suspicion and decrease almsgiving, by arguing instead for the irrelevance of “accurate” interpretation and the need for charity. The overt falseness of Edgar‟s performance as Poor Tom only serves to underscore the play‟s revision of fraudulent disability: he should be exceptionally easy to identify as a fraud, and he models the exact kind of beggar early

195 Cohen, “King Lear and the Social Dimensions of Shakespearean Tragic Form, 1603- 1608,” in Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Approaches, ed. Harry R. Gawin (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 106-18; Danby, Shakespeare‟s Doctrine of Nature (London: Faber and Faber, 1961); Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 3rd ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

196 Kronenfeld, “„So distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough‟: Shakespeare‟s King Lear—Anabaptist Egalitarianism, Anglican Charity, Both, Neither?” English Literary History 59 (1992): 755-84; Shuger, “Subversive Fathers and Suffering Subjects: Shakespeare and Christianity,” in Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540-1688, ed. Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 46-69. 197 modern citizens were supposed to avoid. Nevertheless, Lear and Gloucester‟s misinterpretation of his performance is not figured as stupidity or poor judgment, but, rather, the recognition of a shared humanity in a person who has been denied his personhood. In many ways, the play asserts that misinterpretation can be life-giving: literally, since, for Edgar, it facilitates the gifts of shelter and clothing that sustain him during his punishing performance as Poor Tom, but also figuratively, since the misreading of Tom reveals a revival of humanity for the previously hard-hearted Lear and Gloucester.197 Rather than using fraudulent disability to quash charity, Shakespeare uses it to assert the need for charity, even to people excluded from the strictly policed category of the “deserving poor.” Edgar‟s performance and Lear and Gloucester‟s responses model the necessity of withholding suspicion and judgment and the mutual benefits of almsgiving. Indeed, the play‟s support of generous misinterpretation is bigger than disability; King Lear advocates for withholding judgment and extending charity to people generally. All of the play‟s many failures of charity attest to this, but none more so than Lear‟s condemnation of Cordelia. Had he been willing to overlook her seeming reticence in professing her love for him, the entire tragedy could have been averted. The transformation of Lear and of Gloucester is not brought about by Edgar‟s performance of fraudulent disability, however. Rather, their turn towards charity is the result of their own experience with disability. They do not identify Poor Tom as Edgar because their disabilities make it seemingly impossible for them to do so: Gloucester cannot see him to know him, and Lear‟s distraction means that he could not know him

197 Indeed, misinterpretation‟s opposite—revelation—seems to kill in King Lear. When Edgar finally reveals himself to his father, Gloucester dies because “his flawed heart, / Alack, too weak the conflict to support, / „Twixt two extremes of passion, joy, and grief, / Burst smilingly” (5.3.195-98). Similarly Lear dies following his recognition of Cordelia‟s death: “I know when one is dead and when one lives,” he says, “She‟s dead as earth,” (5.3.258-59). His one brief moment of misinterpretation, when he believes he sees Cordelia breathing—“Do you see this? Look on her: look, her lips, / Look there, look there!”—offers the only merciful respite Lear gets before his death, a mistake that allows him a fleeting (albeit fantastical) reunion with his murdered daughter (5.3.309). 198 even if he wanted to. Similarly, Lear and Gloucester‟s experience with disability is clearly their impetus for empathy and for charity. Both of their speeches make this clear: “feel[ing] what wretches feel” prompts Lear‟s confession of guilt and expression of charity, and Gloucester similarly identifies that because “I am wretched” he is moved to give Poor Tom money and “mak[e] thee the happier” (3.4.34, 4.1.68-69). The specificity of their conditions seems to preclude the possibility of social instruction, since it is only the physical experience of disability that creates empathy and inspires almsgiving.198 King Lear is capable of instilling powerful social instruction because the experience of witnessing the play confers the empathetic knowledge of suffering necessary to inspire charity. Marjorie Garber theorizes that audience members of Shakespearean tragedy themselves become victims of the crimes they witness. The relationship between the characters of the play (the on-stage audience of the tragic events) and the spectators of the play (the off-stage audience) is carefully measured to create both connection and disjunction: the off-stage audience knows information that the on-stage audience does not, but the enforced passivity of their spectatorship denies them the opportunity to intervene in the action of the play and forestall the horrors of the drama.199 We see this tragic spectatorship modeled in King Lear in the person of Edgar, who is, of course, not just a performer, but audience, too. The two times his feigning nearly fails attest to the way his spectatorship wounds him. Shocked with the knowledge of Lear‟s debilitating madness, Edgar is nevertheless unable to aid the mad king, and his tears nearly reveal his disguise. He experiences a similar crisis of spectatorship when he sees his eyeless father for the first time and is so overcome by emotion that he fears he

198 This problem, of course, assumes that King Lear‟s audience members are themselves free of disability and the physical knowledge of suffering, which, given the frequency of impairment and the limits of medical treatment in early modern England, is an assumption we should be hesitant to make of even the most privileged audience.

199 Garber, “„Vassal Actors‟: The Role of the Audience in Shakespearean Tragedy,” Renaissance Drama 9 (1978): 71-89. 199 cannot “daub [his performance] further” (4.1.55). Although helpless as an audience member, once freed from the constraints of spectatorship, Edgar tries to restore the men‟s wellbeing, attempting to save Gloucester from despair and attempting to restore Lear to the throne. He models what Garber asserts is the ultimate action of the audience: “to „relate‟ in two senses—to retell the tale, and in retelling it to reconstitute the human bond which has been severed, to re-make a community and a society by placing the hero and his downfall in the instructive context of history.”200 Essentially, the suffering that Edgar experiences as an audience member creates empathy that he channels into an active response, one that aspires to be charitable.201 By turning playgoers into victims, King Lear allows them a measure of the “wretchedness” experienced by Lear and Gloucester and, thus, provides them with the necessary empathy to participate in the indiscriminate charity the play proposes. King Lear‟s medium as an expressly fictional play underscores its message of generous misinterpretation, since the suspension of disbelief required to engage the theater appropriately mirrors the suspension of disbelief King Lear asserts is necessary to treat others with charity.202

200 Garber, “„Vassal Actors,‟” 84.

201 John D. Staines also affirms that the witnessing of tragedy as an audience member can inspire people to pity and, subsequently, radical action in “Radical Pity: Responding to Spectacles of Violence in King Lear” in Staging Pain, 1580-1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theater, ed. James Robert Allard and Mathew R. Martin (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 75- 92. Staines cites another spectator-turned-actor in the play as further evidence: the nameless servant of Cornwall‟s, who, moved by the blinding of Gloucester, takes arms against his master and mortally wounds him before being killed himself. Notably, the servant figures this action as a type of violent charity, beginning his attack by saying to Cornwall, “I have served you ever since I was a child, / But better service have I never done you / Than now bid you hold” (3.7.72-74).

202 The generous misinterpretation advocated by King Lear resembles the willful misidentification demonstrated in Bartholomew Fair. As I argue in my first chapter, Bartholomew Fair, like King Lear, implies that withholding judgment is the appropriate response to both disability and the early modern stage. The plays differ radically, however, in their stance on charity; Bartholomew Fair argues strongly against almsgiving and offers misinterpretation as its justification, while King Lear does exactly the opposite. 200

The significant differences between Richard III and King Lear—and the decade or more that separates their composition—tempts one to read King Lear as a revision of Shakespeare‟s previous intervention into the disability-disguise genre. Given King Lear‟s attention to empathy earned by life‟s troubles, it is appealing to imagine that Shakespeare, too, gained a more generous perspective on disability with time and experience. Yet there is no evidence beyond their chronology for such reading. Instead of interpreting King Lear as a correction of Richard III, it is more productive to read it as a continued exploration of the same difficult issues: the relationship between performance and reality, the complications of charity, and the nature of disability. On this final issue in particular the two plays work as important counterparts in shaping our understanding of the non-standard body in early modern England. Religious and civil authorities struggled to pin down a definition of disability and to determine the best way to accommodate the non-standard body in their rapidly changing theological and political worlds. Doctors and anatomists attempted to assign unusual bodies pre-determined meanings and predictable outcomes. But disability defied their grasp: the questions of what, exactly, constituted the category of disability and how, exactly, Christian citizens should respond to it were never solved in the courts, in the universities, in the streets, or in the playhouses. Pairing Richard III and King Lear illustrates the dynamic nature of early modern disability. In them Shakespeare shows us disability that is deeply complex, and, like the plays in which it is staged, demands a careful—and a caring—response. 201

CONCLUSION

On January 29, 2008, Brian Sterner was brought to the Hillsborough County Sheriff‟s Office in Tampa, Florida, under arrest for a traffic violation. Sterner, a graduate student in philosophy at the University of South Florida and a C6/C7 quadriplegic, was instructed by the booking deputy, Charlette Marshall-Jones, to stand up in order to be frisked; he claims that he told her repeatedly that he was quadriplegic and could not stand. With security cameras rolling, Marshall-Jones calmly walked behind Sterner‟s wheelchair, grabbed its handles and tilted it forward, dumping Sterner onto the floor. As he lay there, Marshall-Jones patted him down, positioning his limbs as necessary, and then, with the help of two other deputies in the office, hauled Sterner awkwardly back into his wheelchair. Sterner sustained this treatment because Marshall-Jones believed he was faking paralysis. When the surveillance video hit the Internet, the public outcry was immediate. People reacted strongly to the jarring video, which was viewed thousands of times on

YouTube. The incident was reported on CNN, MSNBC, and other major networks; Brian Sterner himself was interviewed on The Today Show. Charlette Marshall-Jones was suspended without pay and eventually charged with felony abuse, and three other deputies on duty who witnessed the incident without intervention or comment were placed on administrative leave. In February 2008, Florida‟s Attorney General, Bill

McCollum, announced that his office and the state‟s Office of Civil Rights would be investigating the case, ensuring further censure for Marshall-Jones and the Hillsborough

County Sheriff‟s Office.203 The reaction of the disabled community was one of outrage, not only at Sterner‟s treatment by Marshall-Jones, but also at his portrayal in the mainstream media. Commentators pointed to articles that identified Sterner by his

203 Casey Cora and Rodney Thrash, “Treatment of disabled man attracts national spotlight,” St. Petersburg Times, February 13, 2008. 202 disability alone, failing to note his status as a Ph.D. candidate, his role as the former director of the Florida Spinal Injury Resource Center, or even his name. They expressed concern over the many pity-inducing adjectives used to describe Sterner, such as “helpless” and “suffering,” as well as the way he was frequently characterized as victim primarily because he was quadriplegic, and only secondarily because he had been dumped out of his wheelchair. The mainstream media, they asserted, had glossed over the most important issue—the false accusation of fraud leveled at Sterner—in order to characterize him as pitiful.204

Brian Sterner‟s treatment is not an anomaly; it is the result of a long-standing, deeply rooted characterization of disability that stretches back to at least the early modern era. For centuries, disability has been imagined as deterministic in both its origins and its outcomes. Yet both our ideas of disability and the lived experience of disability are not automatic or absolute, but profoundly shaped by cultural perceptions and literary representations of the non-standard body. The dual image of disability as simultaneously pitiful and suspect—vividly illustrated in the Sterner case—is critically affected by the early modern tradition of dissembling disability. Although fears of fraudulent disability existed in England before the Reformation, the theological and political changes brought about by that major upheaval inspired a new paranoia about the disguise of disability. The theater seized on and teased out those fears. The theatrical tradition of fraudulent disability, which flourished during and after the English Reformation, brought to life the contradictory image of disability as both deserving of charity and deserving of suspicion. As I have demonstrated, the plays that feature counterfeit disability are a diverse group; they do not necessarily share the same representations of or messages about the non- standard body and its performance, but through their repetition of this trope they

204 For a representative example, see William J. Peace, “The outrage is grossly misplaced,” CounterPunch, February 16-17, 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/peace02162008.html (accessed April 12, 2011). 203 entrenched the myth of dissembling disability. Although the actual practice of faking disability in order to steal charity seems to have been largely imaginary, these plays transformed fantasy into fact—or at least taught people to accept it as such. We still live with the repercussions of that theatrical transformation today. The fear of fraudulent disability motivates our legislative approaches to the non- standard body. In her foundational study of disability as a political apparatus, Deborah A. Stone argues that “the concept of disability has always been based on a perceived need to detect deception.”205 Stone traces the development of our current systems of disability compensation (and contemporary social welfare policy generally) to the Elizabethan Poor Laws. These laws were predicated on the assumption that people would refuse to work if other means of sustenance were available to them, and, specifically, that if disability compensation were available, lazy people would try to game the system in order to avoid work. This assumption, as I have demonstrated, does not reflect early modern historical reality, but, rather, is a theatrical production, emerging out of the thinly veiled fiction of rogue pamphlets and anchored by the myth‟s frequent repetition on the stage. Yet this false assumption became the foundation for English welfare policy and, according to Stone, a key factor in the development of the wage labor system. When the Poor Laws were revised in 1843, one of the primary goals of their revision was to simplify the differentiation of the disabled from the able-bodied, but what the revision really accomplished was the creation of an even-more elaborate system of disability classification. The need for the more-detailed system of human categorization was, again, justified by the fear of counterfeiters attempting to steal welfare money.206

When the American system of disability pensions was developed in the first half of the twentieth century, it was, in many ways, simply an extension of the British system.

205 Stone, The Disabled State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 23.

206 Ibid., 53. 204

Even following the rise of vocational rehabilitation as a central part of disability care in the 1970s and the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, the majority of social welfare programs designed to assist people with disabilities in the United States rely on “a dichotomous either-or distinction: those certified as incapable of work are thus disabled and eligible for benefits and services; those capable of work are therefore not disabled and are ineligible for benefits.”207 A major justification for this binary system is the difficulty distinguishing between genuinely disabled persons and those attempting to receive compensation they do not deserve, since the two-category system supposedly makes differentiation easier. The current American system of disability compensation, then, defines disability not as a specific physical condition or set of characteristics that result in financial need but, rather, as a network of ideas and assumptions about the appropriate distribution of aid. As Stone demonstrates, the central belief that motivates this system of distribution is that people with disabilities are innocent—that disability is a condition beyond their control—and society should help them because they are burdened with impairment through no fault of their own. This assumption renders people with disabilities particularly lamentable; in fact, it makes their ability to induce pathos a requirement of their receiving compensation. In this way, embodying suffering may be more important than actual physical impairment in the determination of disability benefits. The result is a system where people with disabilities may be required to perform pitiful disability in order to legitimately acquire social aid because of the entrenched fear of undeserving people performing pitiful disability in order to illegitimately acquire social aid.

The persistent fear of fraudulent disability that motivates contemporary social policy is bolstered by the continued tradition of dissembling disability in contemporary

207 Richard K. Scotch, “American Disability Policy in the Twentieth Century,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 386. 205 literature and culture. The trope established by the early modern stage is alive and well on twenty-first-century TV. Characters who fake disability in order to obtain emotional pity or financial charity have appeared on The Amazing Race, Arrested Development, Castle, Doctor Who, Frasier, Glee, House, How I Met Your Mother, Law and Order, The Mentalist, Monk, The Office (both the British and the American versions), Pushing Daisies, and The X-Files; so closely do these characters follow in the footsteps of their early modern counterparts that their antics could be lifted directly from a rogue pamphlet or a Bankside playhouse. Fraudulent disability is a potent myth, one that still motivates popular narratives and still shapes our systems of welfare and charity. As such, it profoundly affects the lives of people with disabilities like Brian Sterner, who become caught in the paradox of its prejudice. It is my hope that in recognizing dissembling disability for what it is—a myth—we can begin to reshape the social policies and personal practices governed by that myth today.

206

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