Demonstrable Disability

Abstract

This essay is about how disability rhetoric functions in early modern plays beyond the visible difference of disabled characters. In a medium that makes meaning out of bodies, disability rhetoric registers how much the language of disqualification can only succeed without the human form of the actor. Disability epithets define other bodies on the stage as whole and unmarked by negation, or, by contrast, have the effect of unsettling the scrutiny of the bodies that are onstage. Attention to disability rhetoric thus offers an instructive study because it succinctly outlines the concepts that ossify into, and serve to naturalize, negative images of early modern disability.This essay considers how disability rhetoric functions in early modern plays beyond the visible difference of disabled characters. First: an illustrative experiment. If you turn to an online database of early modern drama -say, for example, a research tool such as the Open Source Shakespeare concordance -and enter a keyword associated with bodily difference, one of many terms we might consider an early modern analogue for our contemporary vocabulary of disability, the results are surprising. A search of 'lame' returns eighteen instances across Shakespeare's corpus, and only rarely do these phrases discursively construct a character's body in the present. 1 In As You Like It, for example, 'lame' is a future that Adam imagines for his 'old limbs' (2.3.685); 'lame' is Rosalind's critique of poetic feet in verses that 'could not bear themselves' (3.2.1279); and 'lame' is Celia's verb of choice for the effect of an onslaught of words (1.3.412). The term evokes bodily limitation, but it works abstractly rather than describing a character's body or becoming a cue to an actor's practice. Similar patterns emerge in examples from other plays by Shakespeare. When Aufidius realizes he would 'lame the foot / Of our design' and Desdemona laments 'O most lame and impotent conclusion' (Othello 2.1.949), the metaphor takes for granted a powerful analogy between bodies that can function and other objects that receive praise Katherine Schaap Williams (ks.williams@utoronto.ca) is an assistant professor in the department of English at the University of Toronto. Katherine Schaap WilliamsEarly Theatre 22.2