Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewUnfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater. Katherine Schaap Williams. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. Pp. xiii+309.Penelope GengPenelope GengMacalester College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn the closing of her introduction, Katherine Schaap Williams argues that “disability is everywhere in early modern plays, contributing to dramatic convention, character, and plot and exceeding these frames too” (24). In this deeply researched and elegantly structured book, Williams makes one of the best possible cases for why theater has the power to “unfix”—that is, to destabilize and upset—cultural stereotypes about the disabled (or disfigured) body. “Disability is a productive glitch that interrupts the fantasy of smooth relay between form and matter, between actor and character, and between spectator and spectacle” (221–22). For Williams, the “unfixing” potential of theatrical performance does not mean that early modern theater was in the business of creating “positive representations of disability” (8). Instead, Williams suggests that early modern drama is effective at asking audiences to think about why a community would want to consume, echo, and defend disabling discourses and fictions. This story of how disability was culturally constructed in early modern England is told in six chapters. Each chapter balances close reading of dramatic texts with analysis of nondramatic printed sources, such as surgical manuals, jest books, political libels, ballads, chapbooks, diaries, and letters.The word “disability” existed in English in sixteenth-century England—but its usage was largely limited to the juridical field. In legal parlance, disability typically signified an incapacity to perform labor or work (10). In lieu of the modern word “disability,” writers talked about corporeal difference, disfigurement, and physical impairment using words like “deformed” and “ugly.” For this reason, “each of the chapters … begins with a discursive marker, such as ‘deformed,’ ‘lame,’ ‘crippled,’ ‘ugly,’ or ‘monstrous,’ that flags visible anomaly and, simultaneously, requires an actor’s performance” (3). Williams’s keywords approach to the book’s structure reminds me of guides like Keywords for Disability Studies (2015). I suspect this structure reflects Williams’s understanding of accessible design, for the asynchronous structure allows readers a greater degree of freedom to explore the book on their own terms.The introduction engages the latest disability scholarship, including the work of Lennard J. Davis, Tobin Siebers, Robert McRuer, David T. Mitchell, Sharon L. Snyder, Ato Quayson, Petra Kuppers, Carrie Sandahl, and Ellen Samuels. At the same time, Williams spotlights the work of early modern scholars of disability, including Genevieve Love, Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Allison P. Hobgood, Elizabeth Bearden, and other established and emergent scholars of medieval and early modern disability. Even scholars who have not framed their research as disability scholarship, but whose discoveries nonetheless have propelled the field in new and exciting directions, are invited to the conversation. Disability scholarship is a big field, and Williams is extremely skillful at bringing early modern and contemporary scholars into the same conversation.Chapter 1 focuses on deformity using Shakespeare’s Richard III as a central text. The chapter acknowledges that a kind of intellectual and scholarly exhaustion has set in on the question of Richard III’s disability, yet she insists “there is still more to say” (27). “A stable discourse of deformity with Richard III” (27) has proven elusive because the early modern discourse on “deformity” is marked by “stylistic indeterminacy” (51). For actors, the indeterminacy of Richard’s disability provides a welcome opportunity to “show off their skill” (42). She offers the example of Sir Laurence Olivier, whose attempts at “bodily contortions” left him with “torn cartilage in his knee,” cementing the theater’s “mythology of harm” surrounding this particular role (43). Ultimately, the indeterminacy of Richard III’s “deformity” illustrates the social model of disability: “Bodily deformity is simultaneously characterized by fixity of feature and unfixing variance of social response” (51).The state’s debilitation of the soldier-citizen—he who loses a limb while fighting a nation’s war abroad—is the focus of chapter 2. Through an analysis of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, the unattributed A Larum for London, and other lesser-known plays, this chapter complicates Lennard J. Davis’s argument that preindustrial societies were fundamentally more inclusive of corporeal difference. Davis’s argument boils down to this: disabilities (such as limb difference) were “‘more common, expected and accepted [in early modern cultures] than they are today’” (56). Medieval and early modern scholars disagree with this understanding of disability in preindustrial cultures, and Williams sides with Allison P. Hobgood, David Houston Wood, Elizabeth Bearden, and others in the debate. When the lame citizen-soldier returns from war missing a leg, his disability is not viewed as common by his neighbors, but exceptional. Several plays from the 1590s use the veteran’s disability in order to subtly critique English military engagements abroad. “Dekker’s play amplifies … the uncertainty of the citizen-veteran’s relation to labor and the permanently unsettling loss that service in war inscribes” (80).In keeping with the chapter 2’s interest in the experience of the citizen, chapter 3 examines a set of popular “‘beggar’ plays” to further the discussion of disability, citizenship, and performance. Governmental efforts to separate the deserving from the not-deserving poor is the subject of Lindsey Row-Heyveld’s Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama (2019) and Ellen Samuels’s Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (2014). Initially, I thought this chapter would unfold along the axis of biopolitics and governmentality. Instead, Williams surprised me by talking about virtuosic impersonation as a metric for able-bodiedness. Citing Genevieve Love’s wonderful reading of Cripple in Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability (2018), Williams argues that Cripple in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the Exchange “disorients expectations” (98) because he defies the stereotype of the beggar who counterfeits disability. “Although deformed, Cripple works” (102). Cripple conforms to a legal-political understanding of able-bodied, productive citizenship. Yet the play lays bare the social disablement of Cripple: despite his legal and economic abilities, he is “disabled by perceived immobility in a dramatic world of shifting shapes and impersonating bodies” (89). In other words, Cripple is permitted to participate in economic exchange, yet he is barred from the erotic order of sexual exchange. In his pursuit of Phyllis, the able-bodied Frank borrows Cripple’s crutch (a prop that stands in for his lameness) and adopts Cripple’s “crooked” costume. “Frank can impersonate Cripple, but Cripple cannot impersonate Frank” (113).The first time I read this chapter, I did not wholly appreciate its argument. It was only upon second and third reading that I realized the success and great potential of Williams’s theorization of ability and personation. Plays like Fair Maid reveal that the ability to shape-shift in and out of roles—which is the actor’s special skill—reproduces the ideology of ability, which attributes to the abled body the power “to do.” “In Fair Maid, disability does not depend on how a body looks but on what a body can or cannot do, and the crucial doing is not labor but impersonation. An able body, in this early modern city comedy, is defined by the ability to engage in endless iterations of performance, by borrowing a prop rather than depending on a prosthetic device” (114).The idea of shape-shifting is amplified in chapter 4’s discussion of ugliness as disability and the resistant act of “crip dissent.” Williams references Robert McRuer’s crip theory, which explores the “revol[t] against a standard of ability for bodies and minds” and celebrates “the refusal to affirm able-bodied preference” (124). The crip dissent of De Flores, of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, lies at the heart of the analysis. “Crip” evokes disability pride, community, and activism. In what way is De Flores, one of the least redeemable characters in the play, the exemplary of “crip” refusal? Williams understands that some readers may push back at her choice of character, and she states that her reading does seek to “recuperate De Flores at the cost of diminishing the sexual violence and murder he perpetuates” (125). For her, the interest lies in how the play deploys “dialogic misfire” and “a series of asides from De Flores” (135) to produce an intimate, affective channel of understanding between De Flores and spectators—one that upsets Beatrice-Joanna and others’ attempts to render “ugliness as disabling” (142).Chapter 5 examines the conflict between the medical model and the social model of disability. To review, the medical model of disability approaches disability as a flaw of human biology and it seeks to fix individuals of their diseases and disabling conditions through medical interventions (surgery, medication, therapy, etc.). In contrast, the social model of disability understands disability as a disabling condition produced by social factors, such as a preference for able-bodiedness and a prejudice against disabled bodyminds. Williams studies Ben Jonson’s Volpone as a play that affirms the social model of disability. She notes that for much of the play, the chameleonlike “Volpone … never doubt[s] that his sickness is a sheddable ruse, another ‘disguise’ (5.1.2).” In the closing of the play, however, Volpone discovers “the danger of impersonation … that theatrical pretending threatens bodily transformation” (181). In the juridical space, “Volpone cannot control the scrutiny that the trial effects on his bodily feigning in public … Volpone thinks that disability is a semiotic; Volpone finds that disability is a logic” (181).Chapter 6 focuses on Caliban’s monstrosity in The Tempest. This outstanding final chapter synthesizes many of the book’s themes and questions. The chapter opens with a list of the different ways characters attempt to qualify Caliban’s “monstrosity”: “this monster … A very shallow monster … A drunken monster” (186). Williams argues, “like ‘deformed,’ and ‘ugly,’ keywords in earlier chapters of this book, ‘monstrous’ suggests a shared judgment about a body that departs from expected form—without ever quite specifying what that body looks like” (186). The scholarship on monstrosity is vast. Williams knows that bibliography well. She updates the conversation by exploring the method by which theater “unsettles” the discourse of monstrosity (209). This is how I understood her argument: when I watch a performance of The Tempest, my impression of Caliban is grounded on the actor’s style of acting, makeup, and costumes. I have a concrete sense of Caliban’s form, yet my knowledge of him is troubled by various characters’ contradictory descriptions of Caliban. The uneasy tension that arises between how I see Caliban—and how others are telling me to see him—forms the basis for what William calls “an epistemological crisis of witnessing” (187) that highlights “‘monster’ as an incoherent concept” (210).No monograph can or should attempt to be everything to everyone. Williams’s obvious strength is in drama, performance studies, and theater history. She does not neglect poetic and prose sources, but her argument does not focus on poetry. As well, although the book sensitively attends to matters of race, gender, and sexuality, it does not attempt to replicate the work of premodern critical race studies or queer and trans studies. The project is primarily a contribution to disability studies and theater criticism. Lastly, because of the book’s stated focus on physical disability, readers curious about the representation of intellectual disability or neuroatypicality may wish to consult the 2021 monographs by Alice Equestri (Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England) and Sonya Freeman Loftis (Shakespeare and Disability Studies). I applaud Williams’s intellectual generosity; she repeatedly invites readers to strike out in new directions, to trust their instincts, and to continue to expand the field of early modern disability studies so that “the doing of disability … will never be completely done” (24).The dramatic texts central to Williams’s book expose popular notions of what is “normal” or “beautiful” as artifices, and in so doing, they anticipate the very work of critical disability studies. In A History of Disability, historian Henri-Jacques Stiker asks, Are you a person who harbors a “love of difference or the passion for similarity?” For Stiker, the love of difference, “if it becomes socially contagious (through education, cultural action, political action)—leads to human life.”1 In recent years, the disability justice movement and critical disability studies have shattered the silence surrounding disability. Yet disability is still a stigmatized identity, and discrimination abounds in the public sphere. Unfixable Forms marks a milestone in disability studies. It is an essential book that prompts readers to think about, and cultivate a desire for, human difference.Notes1. Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), xviii. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 3February 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722265 Views: 147Total views on this site HistoryPublished online November 15, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.