‘The Disabled Body as Performance: Disabled Performers in the Records of Early English Drama’

Chambers, Mark

Abstract

The saints’ healing of an infirmed limb or organ is a recurrent theme in hagiographic literature—particularly from the earlier medieval period. In Ælfric’s account of the life of St. Swithin of Winchester, for instance, he reports that the saint’s shrine “wæs eall behangen mid criccun and mid creopera sceamelum” (“was hung all around with the crutches and stools of the cripples [sic]”). The loss of a limb or other appendage by disease, violence or accident could, of course, result in a potential performative event. And it indeed appears in the early English drama: this is something the Jew Jonathas learns to his horror in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament: initially deprived of the hand he has used to desecrate the host, his handless-ness becomes the chief comic business of the latter half of the play.
Beyond the much-studied literary examples, however, what evidence is there for the actually ‘physically disabled’ body in premodern performance? And what might the records for apparent physically disabled performers say about their relative conceptualisation and socialisation in the period? This paper will outline instances in the record of early performance from Britain and Ireland where some form of musculoskeletal difference—other than size—seems to have been part of the act: where the scoliotic or kyphotic performer or player whose amelia or amputation seems to have served some manner of performative function. Derived from a wider study of the ‘performance’ of disability in the early British and Irish record, it will highlight the surviving evidence in order to reframe how such performers contributed to the wider culture of premodern performance.

Citation

Chambers, M. (2024). ‘The Disabled Body as Performance: Disabled Performers in the Records of Early English Drama’. In M. Twycross, S. Carpenter, E. Dutton, & G. Kipling (Eds.), Medieval English Theatre 45 (102-125). Boydell & Brewer. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.11589157.9

• Acceptance Date: Oct 1, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Jun 25, 2024
• Publication Date: Jun 25, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jul 24, 2024
• Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 102-125
• Series Title: Medieval English Theatre
• Series Number: 45
• Book Title: Medieval English Theatre 45
• ISBN: 9781843847199
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.11589157.9
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2612247