Unfixable FormsPub Date : 2021-06-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0002
Katherine S. Williams
{"title":"Deformed","authors":"Katherine S. Williams","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the most recognizably disabled body in the early modern period, that of the “deformed” Richard Gloucester. It argues that we have not read Richard's body closely enough, moving swiftly into an “allegory of interpretation” rather than attending to the creaky joints and dazzling dexterity that define the actor's body in the act of deforming the role. The chapter sets Shakespeare's Richard III alongside historical sources and Elizabethan antecedents such as the unattributed The True Tragedie of Richard III to show how Shakespeare's Richard is anything but fixed. Turning to popular verse libels written on the death of Robert Cecil and Francis Bacon's essay “Of Deformity,” the chapter analyses how these literary forms crystallize deformity into an explicitly “crookbacked” shape. The chapter suggests that we must account for the complexity of theatrical form in our analysis of early modern disability. It then explores what emerges from deformity — between Richard Gloucester and Richard III — and offers a concept of theatrical disability that begins from the deformations of the actor.","PeriodicalId":102251,"journal":{"name":"Unfixable Forms","volume":"243 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114579436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Unfixable FormsPub Date : 2021-06-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0006
Katherine S. Williams
{"title":"Playing Time, or Sick of Feigning","authors":"Katherine S. Williams","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores what the “sick” body accomplishes on the stage, signifying through unelective movement such as a spasm or fit, or involuntary immobility such as a dead palsy. It begins with a medical discourse on epilepsy that demonstrates the difficulty of reading from symptomatic display back to cause, then shifts to theatrical staging. Turning to plays like Shakespeare's The Second Part of Henry the Sixth and Othello and Middleton's Hengist, King of Kent, the chapter investigates how a display of palsy or fit of epilepsy affords the theater the opportunity to experiment with the gap between the body of the actor and the body of the character. Ben Jonson's Volpone is the centerpiece example of the chapter, for Volpone constructs stage properties and faked symptoms into an imposture that then imperils him, stricken with a “dead palsy” when his feigning becomes public. The chapter then considers how disabling performance operates as a fixing mechanism as much as an unfixing iterability.","PeriodicalId":102251,"journal":{"name":"Unfixable Forms","volume":"87 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114302039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Unfixable FormsPub Date : 2021-06-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0005
Katherine S. Williams
{"title":"Changing the Ugly Body","authors":"Katherine S. Williams","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter takes the problem of scrutiny into the realm of aesthetics to consider a disabling that moves from what a body does to how a body looks. The chapter considers how ugliness troubles a logic of reading bodily appearance and disables spectatorship in the process. It draws on the notion of the “gifts of the body,” less familiar from our modern perspective on disability. The chapter also discovers a surprising dissent from normative judgments of appearance in the early modern theater's work with the “ugly” character. It starts by considering ugliness in early modern philosophical discourse and then turns to Beaumont and Fletcher's play The Captain (1612), which recruits spectators to the gaze of desire at the character with distinctive appeal and reaps comic fruit for the marriage plot. The chapter then shifts to Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's 1622 tragedy The Changeling and the troubling example expressed by the character De Flores, whose ugliness is registered in persistent contrast to beauty. The chapter reads the “artificial deformities” that John Bulwer identifies with theatrical experimentation as the register of an aesthetic of particularity that engenders new forms.","PeriodicalId":102251,"journal":{"name":"Unfixable Forms","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131292000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Unfixable FormsPub Date : 2021-06-15DOI: 10.1515/9781501753527-009
{"title":"6. Making the Monster","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9781501753527-009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501753527-009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":102251,"journal":{"name":"Unfixable Forms","volume":"35 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113998865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Unfixable FormsPub Date : 2021-06-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0007
Katherine S. Williams
{"title":"Making the Monster","authors":"Katherine S. Williams","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses the “monstrous” body, the other term (along with “deformity”) through which critics have most often wanted to historicize early modern disability. It begins by noting that the monster is apparently recognizable at first glance yet unable to be pinned down in any stable description. The chapter works from the insight that this spectacle of freakishness is always produced for spectators. Rather than charting a direct line from the early modern monster to modernity's sideshow exhibitions, the chapter takes up the monster through the practices of theatrical form, which unsettles the very concept of the monster by implicating spectators in the process of making and witnessing monstrosity. After considering how plays such as The City Match and The Birth of Merlin designate the monstrous character through theatrical properties and manage the speech that may challenge a monstrous spectacle, the chapter then turns back to The Tempest, to consider how the monster is made up wholesale. It finds that the early modern theater contests the very concept of monstrosity it evokes, and it argues that theatrical form tacks across the official discourse to scramble the discursive fervor that monstrosity is supposed to incite.","PeriodicalId":102251,"journal":{"name":"Unfixable Forms","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116834157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Unfixable FormsPub Date : 2021-06-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0004
Katherine S. Williams
{"title":"Performing Cripple in Theatrical Exchange","authors":"Katherine S. Williams","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501753503.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter opens with the anecdote's claim that disability may be a kind of generative overplus. It focuses on one play in particular, the unattributed The Fair Maid of the Exchange (c. 1602, printed 1607), whose central character, Cripple, defies a concept of disability reducible to either commonplace impairment or wondrous difference. Distinguished by his “crutches” (1.1.107) and his “crooked habit” (4.1.31), Cripple works in his shop drawing patterns, moonlighting as a supplier of verse to would-be suitors, and reengineering the romantic preferences of the female characters. Unlike humorous figures of feigning in plays such as George Chapman's The Blind Beggar of Alexandria and John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's Beggars' Bush, Cripple is actually impaired and can work, the legal standard for distinguishing disability. The chapter argues that Cripple's character reveals disability as a fundamental inability to impersonate in a world that demands the transformation it claims to punish. It explores how Cripple's reproducibility gesture to unequal punishment for feigning, and demonstrates how mimetic representation blurs the distinction between seeming and being.","PeriodicalId":102251,"journal":{"name":"Unfixable Forms","volume":"95 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125032156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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