Abstract
This chapter analyzes plays where women counterfeit disability. Unlike their male counterparts, female dissemblers avoid punishment and achieve the ends for which they feigned disability. Specifically, dissembling disability allows them to marry on their own terms. Focusing on the anonymous comedy Fair Em (c. 1590) and John Fletcher’s tragicomedy The Pilgrim (1621), Row-Heyveld asserts that these plays reveal the mutually constitutive relationship between disability and femininity in the English Renaissance, in particular, the way in which performances of disability were simultaneously performances of femininity. This dual performance mode granted female dissemblers a freedom from suspicion not available to male dissemblers. It also allowed women a unique opportunity to reshape their own feminine identities by exposing both femininity and disability as culturally crafted constructs. However, these plays ultimately encode complications in their ambivalent endings—where feminine and disabled identities suddenly diverge and issues of charity trouble easy resolution.
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- 1.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson, 2006), 4.5.84–6. All subsequent quotations from this text will appear parenthetically by act, scene, and line number.
- 2.
Ben Jonson, “Volpone,” in The Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington (New York: Norton, 2002), 5.12.121–4.
- 3.
Early modern plays that feature female dissemblers of disability include the anonymous Fair Em (c. 1590); Richard Brome’s A Jovial Crew (c. 1641–42); John Fletcher’sThe Pilgrim (1621), The Wild Goose Chase (1621), and Women Pleased (c. 1619–23); Ben Jonson’sThe New Inn (1629); Thomas Middleton’sA Mad World, My Masters (c. 1606); Middleton and Thomas Dekker’sThe HonestWhore, Part 1 (1604); Middleton and William Rowley’sThe Changeling (1622); and James Shirley’sThe ConstantMaid (c. 1637–40).
- 4.
A notable exception to the punishment of male dissemblers is found in The Fair Maid of the Exchange. I examine this anomalous performance of disability—which is stage-managed by a genuinely disabled character—in detail in Chap. 6 of this volume.
- 5.
Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, The Honest Whore, Parts 1 and 2, ed. Nick de Somogyi (New York: Theater Arts Books/Routledge, 1998), 64. This text has assigned scene divisions, but no act divisions or line numbers. For this reason, it will be cited hereafter by page number.
- 6.
Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, ed. Michael Neill (London: Bloomsbury/New Mermaids, 2006), 5.3.224–5.
- 7.
Thomas 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.
- 8.
The only matrimonial outlier is Ben Jonson’s The New Inn, which features a woman counterfeiting disability in order to be reunited with her daughter.
- 9.
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).
- 10.
I do not wish to suggest that women did not 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 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 “body but of a weak and feeble woman,” only to claim for herself the “heart and stomach of a king.” Elizabeth I, “Speech to the Troops at Tilbury,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2012), 762–3.
- 11.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” in The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 260.
- 12.
Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability,” 259.
- 13.
See Myles McDonnell, Roman Manliness: “Virtus” and the Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- 14.
See Klaus-Peter Koepping, “Absurdity and Hidden Truth: Cunning Intelligence and Grotesque Body Images as Manifestations of the Trickster,” History of Religions 24, no. 3 (February 1985): 191–214 for an analysis of how the eccentric body participates in the literary and rhetorical tradition of satire.
- 15.
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 non-standard 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). See Pauline Croft, “The Reputation of Robert Cecil: Libels, Political Opinion and Popular Awareness in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 1 (1991): 43–69.
- 16.
Paola Pugliatti reviews women’s reputation for duplicitous theatrics as discussed in rogue pamphlets, particularly those written by Robert Greene in Beggary and Theater in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 105–6.
- 17.
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.
- 18.
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.
- 19.
Tobin Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade,” Literature and Medicine 23, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 6.
- 20.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), xxii.
- 21.
Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade,” 16.
- 22.
In an investigation of disability drag in Jonson’s Volpone, another play in the counterfeit-disability tradition, Lauren Coker usefully notes the way in which this additional layer of performance in disability drag connects “the suffering body’s credibility … reciprocally with the character’s staging of able-bodiedness.” Coker largely reads disability drag within the context of cross-class dressing, which applies to Volpone, but not the disability-disguise tradition generally. Lauren Coker, “‘There is No Suff’ring Due’: Metatheatricality and Disability Drag in Volpone,” in Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, ed. Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood (Columbus: The Ohio University Press, 2013), 123.
- 23.
Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade,” 18.
- 24.
Ellen Samuels, “Critical Divides: Judith Butler’s Body Theory and the Question of Disability,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 14, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 63.
- 25.
Standish Henning, introduction to Fair Em, ed. Standish Henning (New York: Garland, 1980), 81.
- 26.
Sarah Neville, “Fair Em,” Shakespeare Bulletin 31, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 535.
- 27.
W. W. Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: The Battle of Alcazar and Orlando Furioso (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922).
- 28.
See Peter Kirwan, “The First Collected ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 594–601; Roslyn Evander Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1616 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991), 184.
- 29.
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. See David Bates, William the Conqueror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
- 30.
Fair Em, ed. Standish Henning (New York: Garland, 1980), 5.98. All subsequent quotations from this text will appear parenthetically by scene and line number.
- 31.
John Fletcher, “The Pilgrim,” in The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, vol. 2, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 2.2.35–7. All subsequent quotations from this text will appear parenthetically by act, scene, and line number.
- 32.
Baldwin Maxwell, “The Date of The Pilgrim,” Philological Quarterly 13 (1934): 350–6.
- 33.
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.
- 34.
Social policy in Catholic countries did insist on a differentiation between the deserving and undeserving poor, but, in contrast to Protestant countries, never formally outlawed it and policies regarding the distinction between the deserving/undeserving poor were more ambiguous. For more, see Thomas Max Safley, introduction to The Reformation of Charity: The Secular and the Religious in Early Modern Poor Relief, ed. Thomas Max Safley (Boston: Brill, 2003), 8.
- 35.
This Catholic turn may seem particularly unlikely in Fletcher, given his aggressive Protestantism, but Clare McManus has noted that his ongoing attraction to Spanish Catholic sources reveals a literary interest that belied—or overrode—his personal religious impulses and politics. See Clare McManus, introduction to The Island Princess, by John Fletcher, ed. Clare McManus (London: Methuen Drama, 2013), 1–95; 16.
- 36.
Nancy Cotton, John Fletcher’s Chastity Plays: Mirrors of Modesty (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1973), 228–9.
- 37.
Ken Jackson, “Bedlam, The Changeling, The Pilgrim, and the Protestant Critique of Catholic Good Works,” Philological Quarterly 74, no. 4 (Fall 1995): 382–3.
- 38.
Few studies consider the layering of other types of identity performance on cross-gender dressing. In one of the few that does, Cristine M. Varholy reads of cross-class dressing as it relates to cross-gender dressing and explores the erotic potential of the dual practices, which may also apply to Alinda’s male and disabled cross-dressing here. Christine M. Varholy, “‘Rich Like a Lady’: Cross-Class Dressing in the Brothels and Theaters of Early Modern London,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2008): 4–34.
- 39.
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 a vehicle for female empowerment through a reversal of gender norms in Fletcher’s other dramas. See Barbara Mathieson, “Rape, Female Desire, and 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.
- 40.
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 counterfeit 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 (5.4.73–4). The men’s responses also reflect their awareness of the “old” women as varying from a physical norm. As in the previous scene of counterfeit 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 (44–5).
- 41.
This generic/narrative breakdown harmonizes with a similar instability Gordon McMullan identifies in all Fletcher’s tragicomedies. He describes them as generically “self-contradictory, elusive,” because the form of the tragicomedy “had never (and still has never) established itself in any clear and definitive way.” Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), x. Peter Hyland further affirms the way the structural instability of The Pilgrim comports with the genre of tragicomedy, stating that “tragicomedy is founded upon a conflict between form and content.” Peter Hyland, Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage (Farnham: Routledge, 2011), 42.
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Row-Heyveld, L. (2018). Feminized Disability and Disabled Femininity in Fair Em and The Pilgrim. In: Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama. Literary Disability Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92135-8_4
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