Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theatre by Katherine Schapp Williams

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theatre by Katherine Schapp Williams Marina Gerzić Williams, Katherine Schapp, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theatre, Ithaca/London, Cornell University Press, 2021; hardback; pp. 309; R.R.P. US$59.95; ISBN 9781501753503. Katherine Schaap Williams’s book Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theatre is an exciting and transformative study of the relationship between disability and performance in early modern English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing on a social model of disability, which focuses on how those who are impaired are disabled by barriers in society, Williams shows how early modern theatre produces a concept of disability that is ‘interactive, temporally in flux, and constituted through the volatile form of the actor’s body’ (p. 6). Williams explores how theatrical form ‘remakes—and is in turn remade by—early modern disability’ (p. 5). In doing so, Unfixable Forms deepens our understanding of a range of plays, including more familiar works by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, and Ben Jonson, alongside less well-known unattributed plays such as A Larum for London and The Fair Maid of the Exchange. Williams expertly reads dramatic texts alongside a wide range of sources, including medical treatises, surgical manuals, and philosophical essays. [End Page 276] Unfixable Forms contains an introduction, six chapters, and ends with a coda. Throughout, Williams astutely analyses early modern theatrical practice, and shows how we understand disability in these early modern dramatic texts, both as a ‘cultural analytic and as an aesthetic experiment with the medium of the actor’s body’ (p. 223). In Chapter 1, Williams brings new light to the standard bearer of early modern disability studies, Shakespeare’s Richard III. Williams looks at medieval and Elizabethan historical sources, as well as the unattributed play The True Tragedie of Richard III, to show how disability in Richard III is anything but fixed. Williams’s analysis of performances of Richard III featuring renowned actors such as Colly Cibber, Richard Burbage, and Antony Sher, highlights both the slippage involved in becoming Richard on stage, and the dangers involved in the act of performing disability. In Chapter 2, Williams examines how the character of the lame soldier is represented in works including A Larum for London and Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, and how the staging of these characters differs from early modern medical discourse. Williams shows that while these medical texts champion prosthetics as a means to ‘fix’ bodies damaged from wars, the actor’s body performing ‘lame’ characters, such as Stump and Ralph, ‘points at the body’s disabling’ (p. 57). Chapter 3 offers a detailed discussion about the counterfeit-disability tradition in early modern theatre, in particular the figure of the ‘crippled’ beggar. Williams’s analysis centres on the character of Cripple in The Fair Maid in Exchange and the on-going exchange between the actor’s body (playing Cripple) and that of the characters. While Frank Golding in Fair Maid can borrow Cripple’s prosthetics as props for his counterfeiting, Williams argues that Cripple’s ability to play other roles within the play in fixed. Cripple stands out in his simultaneous surplus and deficiency: he is both a character with a missing limb being played by an actor with an excess leg, as well as character who is crippled and thus incapable of playing other roles. In Chapter 4, Williams considers ugliness—a form of disabling that focuses not on what the body can do, but how the body looks. In her analysis of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Captain, Williams shows how spectators’ assumptions about Jacomo’s distinctive body are undercut by the humorous marriage plot. Similarly, in The Changeling, by Middleton and William Rowley, spectators are conscripted into the gaze of De Flores, who ‘unsettles the normative frame of bodily interpretation’ (p. 132). Chapter 5 considers the sick body, afflicted with palsy, convulsions, and epileptic fits, in works such as Shakespeare’s Othello, Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent, and Jonson’s Volpone, and how they disrupt the text. Williams argues that the display of these convulsions and fits ‘discloses...