Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater by Katherine Schaap Williams

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater by Katherine Schaap Williams Louise Geddes Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater. By Katherine Schaap Williams. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pp. xiii + 309. Hardcover $59.95. Ebook $38.95. Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and Early Modern English Theater by Katherine Schaap Williams is an ambitious book with two competing aims. Firstly, the project examines how representations of disability in early modern theater point us at social formations and cultural issues that are ostensibly not about disability. Secondly, the book aims to think about how scripted disability draws attention to both the theatricality of performance and the body of the actor, therefore enabling Williams “to theorize theatricality itself as a medium” (3). The result is a rich examination of early modern drama that destabilizes notions of disability, unfixing them, as the title suggests, from biological essentialist understandings of what the body can and cannot do in society. Performance is the monograph’s secondary focus, and, due to the paucity of historical records on how roles were performed, the scope of this aspect of the study is more limited, and necessarily more speculative. This observation is not a criticism; the book’s emphasis is rather on the fluid relationship between actor and character as a metaphor for what is unknowable or unfixable about disability. The monograph offers a compelling and important argument that early modern dramatic representations of disability matter because “by putting such ideas on view as fictions of disabling rather than innate truths about bodies, they let slip the contingency of fictions of disqualification” (9, emphasis original). The five chapters of Unfixable Forms range across early modern drama, beginning and ending with Shakespeare, and shifting from the more traditional definitions of disability to the more abstracted and metaphorical, thereby creating a spectrum of bodily forms that might be integrated into theorizations of disability. Unsurprisingly, the book opens with Richard III, as a key illustration of how early modern disability is a flexible and social construct that fixes and unfixes form, rather than simply describing a body in need of repair in terms that contemporary critics might understand as ableist. In chapter one, “Deformed: Wanting to see Richard III,” Williams makes a point that particularly illustrates the stakes of the book. She explains how “Richard mobilizes deformity as the [End Page 185] object of interpretive fervor and leverages this attention to his shape for seductive power, challenging the critical and cultural impulses to codify his deformity into a specific, legible, bodily formation” (53). The ambiguity of what constitutes Richard’s disability, Williams claims, is a powerful strategic position for both the actor and Richard because it emphasizes the extent to which “disability is constructed through encounter, [in which] even the apparent fact of bodily difference keeps shifting” (13). This fascinating reading is underscored by an understanding of the affective power of theater to fix and unfix the body, enabling spectators to “witness what the theater is making in front of them” (53) in ways that destabilize easy categorization. This emphasis on cultural expectations rolls over into chapter two, “Citizen Transformed: Being the Lame Soldier,” which considers the figure of the lame soldier and the ways in which discourses around disability expose contradictions at the heart of the notion of citizenship. Williams’s argument draws parallels between the discomfort of spectatorship within the fiction and the discomfort which occurs in the playhouse. The idea that “The lame soldier’s marginal presence embodies an injury from which spectators recoil and look away” (57) invokes the community’s complicity in distinguishing between bodies which are socially included and those which are not. Of particular interest to this chapter is the tension between nationhood, for which the lame body is a mark of service, and local citizenhood, where the lame body is unsuited to guild labor. Williams downplays (for this Marxist reader, at any rate) the full economic implications that the presence of the lame guildsman embodies, offering little more than a perfunctory nod at Jean-Christophe Agnew’s work. Nonetheless, the “darker formulation of the relation between the individual and corporate body” (82) that grounds her reading...