Abstract
In 40 sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century plays, able-bodied characters counterfeit disability. In this introduction, Row-Heyveld contends that these plays constitute a distinct theatrical tradition. In spite of its popularity, the counterfeit-disability tradition has remained unnoted by scholars. This chapter accounts for that oversight and argues for the need to recognize this tradition as an important part of disability history and early modern drama. In identifying this tradition, Row-Heyveld seeks to recover some of the contexts of early modern disability, in particular the ways in which disability was (re)formed through the period’s discourses and practices of charity. Changing approaches to almsgiving led to increasing concerns about counterfeit disability, powering a feedback loop of performance and suspicion. These contexts provided fertile material for the theater, and the chapter surveys the multifaceted appeal of counterfeit disability for the early modern stage.
A lame beggar:
I am unable, yonder begger cries,
To stand, or move; if he say true, hee lies.
John Donne
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Notes
- 1.
John Donne, “The Epigrams, Epithalamions, Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and Miscellaneous Poems,” in The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 8, ed. Gary A. Stringer and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 295.
- 2.
For the list of plays that participate in the counterfeit-disability tradition, see the Appendix: Early Modern Plays in the Counterfeit-Disability Stage Tradition.
- 3.
For readings of counterfeit disability in Piers Plowman and The Tale of Beryn (and its fourteenth-century French source, Bérinus), see Edward Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
- 4.
Rogue literature has been a source of considerable critical debate in recent years. Kathleen Pories has argued that, in rogue literature, we find the beginnings of narrative fiction. Linda Woodbridge has suggested that these texts should be read within the popular joke-book tradition. Craig Dionne argues for rogue literature as a type of “domestic handbook” that instructed the behaviors of the nascent bourgeoisie by defining their opposites in the rogues. Kathleen Pories, “The Intersection of Poor Laws and Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Fictional and Factual Categories,” in Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose, ed. Constrance C. Relihan (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1996), 17–40; Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 80–108; and Craig Dionne, “Fashioning Outlaws: The Early Modern Rogue and Urban Culture,” in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, ed. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 33–61.
- 5.
For readings of both of these texts as they pertain to questions of vagrancy and poor relief, see Woodbridge, Vagrancy, 110–12.
- 6.
For an extensive analysis of Jennings’s exploits and Harman’s account of them, see (among others) William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 70–89.
- 7.
Martine van Elk, “The Counterfeit Vagrant: The Dynamic of Deviance in the Bridewell Court Records and the Literature of Roguery,” in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, ed. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 120–39.
- 8.
If anything, the historical record suggests abuse of the system by the people running it, rather than abuse by those it was designed to help. For just one representative example, see Nathaniel Bacon, The Official Papers of Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Norfolk as Justice of the Peace, 1580–1620, ed. H. W. Saunders (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1915). Bacon discusses disability-related cases multiple times, almost always in regards to the (willful) mismanagement of disability-related social welfare: the villages of Saxlingham and Alborough bickering over which should be responsible for the maintenance of a man disabled by a fall, 58–9; Overseers of the Poor complaining against one another, 59; accusations from the citizens of Gunthorpe that their Overseers are failing to distribute collected funds to the needy there, 62; the refusal of one George Dawson of Holton to relinquish a small piece of unused land so it could provide housing for a poor disabled man named Bartholomew Barneby, 63–4; and the deeply affecting account of the death of a young vagrant boy who was assumed to be feigning illness, but in fact died when shipped back to his home parish as per the law. Bacon saw this last event as particularly egregious—and I note it as particularly significant, since it represents a type of reverse counterfeiting—because he faults a Mr. Riplingham with purposefully concealing the severity of the boy’s illness by alleging malingering and claiming his impairment was “rather forwardness than weakness.” According to Bacon, Riplingham did this in order to justify expelling the boy from his parish so as to halt further provision for him. Bacon describes Riplingham as “void of all human pity,” but his own papers suggest that human pity may have been in short supply, 63.
- 9.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Colombia University Press, 1997), 35.
- 10.
David M. Turner, “‘Fraudulent’ Disability in Historical Perspective,” History and Policy (February 2012): n.p., accessed June 1, 2017, http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/fraudulent-disability-in-historical-perspective.
- 11.
See Woodbridge, Vagrancy, 23–4; Carroll, Fat King, 40.
- 12.
See Carroll, Fat King, 42.
- 13.
For more on how unemployment was disguised by fears of vagrancy, see Woodbridge, Vagrancy, 13; for more on how the emerging “laboring poor” were disguised by fears of vagrancy, see Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), xix.
- 14.
Kellie Robertson, “Epilogue: Vagrant Spaces,” in The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Literary and Legal Productions in Britain, 1350–1500, ed. Kellie Robertson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 186.
- 15.
Woodbridge, Vagrancy, 23.
- 16.
Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 22–6.
- 17.
Robertson usefully clarifies that, while the social problems of the early modern era may have been distinct in some regards, many of them were not new, but originated in the mid-fourteenth century and persisted to the seventeenth century and beyond. The problems were perpetually perceived to be unique and increasing. She specifically argues that fears of the vagrant poor were not particular to the early modern era, but that “the language of an escalating crisis is always already present in vagrancy legislation.” “Epilogue: Vagrant Spaces,” 189.
- 18.
For more on the links between poverty and disability, see Mark Priestley, ed., Disability and the Life Course: Global Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Deborah A. Stone, The Disabled State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); Peter Townsend, Poverty and Disability (London: Disability Alliance, 1975), among many others.
- 19.
In spite of these laws, almsgiving in England was never entirely quelled. The bulk of the 1536 Act was not fully put into practice, and the charitable imperative that undergirded much of Christian thought and habit also did not completely dissipate. However, these laws did lay the groundwork for the more stringent Poor Laws of 1598–1601, and they did much to transform the legal characterization and public practice of charity in England during this period, particularly in regards to the definition of disability. For more, see Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Addison-Wesley, 1988), 118–19.
- 20.
While this process had religious motivations, Thomas Max Safley cautions against too strongly reading Reforming theology as the cause of increasingly institutionalized social policy, noting that places where Protestantism eventually took hold already tended toward state-controlled religious practice even before the Reformation. Introduction to The Reformation of Charity: The Secular and the Religious in Early Modern Poor Relief, ed. Thomas Max Safley (Boston: Brill, 2003), 6–7.
- 21.
For more on the persistence of charity in the early modern period, see Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Steve Hindle, “Dearth, Fasting, and Alms: The Campaign for General Hospitality in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 172 (2001): 44–86; Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, The Culture of Giving: Informal Support and Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Hannah Robb, “Purses and the Charitable Gift,” Journal of Social History 49, no. 2 (Winter 2015): 387–405.
- 22.
Steve Hindle notes that, while begging persisted after the implementation of the Elizabethan Poor Laws, the practice of policing boundaries between the deserving/undeserving poor became more stringent. The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 155.
- 23.
Woodbridge, Vagrancy, 23, 275.
- 24.
Quoted in Hindle, The State and Social Change, 155.
- 25.
London, 1646. Although the extant edition is late Carolingian, E. M. Leonard notes that the author addresses the pamphlet to King James, refers to the law requiring the branding of rogues as the “new statue,” and, although the “remedy” of the title is work-houses, makes no reference to the 1610 law establishing Houses of Correction, all of which suggests a composition date between 1604–10 and/or that the extant edition is a reprint. The Early History of English Poor Relief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), 243, fn. 1.
- 26.
Woodbridge, Vagrancy, 24.
- 27.
Samuel Rogers, “The Poore’s Pension: A Sermon Preached in Gregories Church in Sudbury in the County of Suffolke, May 12, 1643, upon Occasion of the Charitable Reliefe that Yearly then, and there is Given, towards the Covering or Clothing of a Hundred Poore People, According to the will of the donour Mr. Martine Cole, Late of the Towne Aforesaid Deceased” (London, 1644), 27–8.
- 28.
Thomas Harman, A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones (London, 1567), D3r–E1r.
- 29.
Thomas Dekker, O Per Se O (London, 1612), N1v–N2r. This was allegedly a popular trick among those attempting to pass themselves off as wounded veterans.
- 30.
Dekker, O Per Se O, N1r–N1v.
- 31.
Harman, Caveat, D1v–D2r. Among all the counterfeiters, abram-men seemed to be uniquely dangerous because their lack of defining physical evidence made them especially difficult to assess.
- 32.
For example, Harman includes “John Crew (with one arm)” and “James Lane (with one eye; Irish)” alongside “Edward Lewes (a dummerer)” and “John Perse (a counterfeit crank)” in his catalog of rogues, Caveat, G1v–G3r.
- 33.
Harman, Caveat, A2r.
- 34.
Ibid., A2r.
- 35.
Carroll, Fat King, 51.
- 36.
Ibid., 52.
- 37.
Edward Wheatley gives the specific example of blind medieval French beggars, whose most common begging cry “claimed that they saw nothing at all (‘ne voir goutte’), so visually impaired people with some sight were basically required by linguistic convention to lie when they used this expression.” Stumbling Blocks, 23.
- 38.
- 39.
Robert Henke, Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015), 20.
- 40.
For more on the theatrics of early modern charity, see Henke, Poverty and Charity, 20–2.
- 41.
Henke notes that the early modern masquerade of disability invited—possibly required—slippage that potentially made it difficult even for performers of disability to differentiate between the real and the fraudulent: “the lines between showing one’s indigence to the bystander, exaggerating one’s destitution, and telling lies about one’s condition could become very thin, and it might even become difficult for the beggar himself to tell the difference.” Henke, Poverty and Charity, 12.
- 42.
For a succinct review of the laws that persistently associated itinerant actors with vagabonds, see Paola Pugliatti, Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003), 43–51.
- 43.
Robert Henke, “Poor,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 460–77.
- 44.
Peter Hyland, Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage (Farnham: Routledge, 2011), 4.
- 45.
Henke, Poverty and Charity, 12.
- 46.
“Crutch dances” feature in plays like Brome’sA Jovial Crew and Fletcher’sBeggars’ Bush, remaining popular enough into the eighteenth century to become proverbial for festive gatherings of old or impaired people. Crutch dances may also have featured genuinely disabled performers at times. For more, see Simon Dickie, “Cripples, Hunchbacks, and the Limits of Sympathy,” in Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 63–6.
- 47.
Although disability had a culturally and historically specific meaning in early modern England, which does not perfectly map onto contemporary definitions of disability, it is not anachronistic to discuss disability as a category in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Stigmatized corporeal difference has persisted throughout history and is very clearly a part of early modern culture and literature. For more, see Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, “Disabled Shakespeares: Introduction,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Fall 2009): n.p., accessed April 25, 2017, http://dsq-sds.org/article/review/991/1183.
- 48.
For more on myriad representations of disability, see the groundbreaking work spearheaded by Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, both the “Disabled Shakespeares” special issue in Disability Studies Quarterly and Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (Columbus: The Ohio State University, 2013). In recent years, scholarly research on early modern disability has rapidly expanded, but much recovery work remains to be done before the full extent of early modern literature and culture’s preoccupation with the non-standard body is illuminated.
- 49.
William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes (Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series, London: Bloomsbury, 1997). All subsequent quotations from this text will appear parenthetically by act, scene, and line number.
- 50.
Edgar himself acknowledges the familiarity of his on-stage and off-stage audiences with abram-men since “The country gives me proof and precedent/of Bedlam beggars” (2.2.184–5). As Ken Jackson has pointed out, Poor Tom is exactly the kind of figure that Poor Laws were designed to eliminate; William C. Carroll takes this identification further, asserting that “the role of Poor Tom was usually conceived of by the culture at large as a theatrical fiction.” Jackson, “‘I know not/Where I did lodge last night?’: Shakespeare’s King Lear and the Search for Bethlem (Bedlam) Hospital,” English Literary Renaissance 30, no. 2 (March 2000), 227–8; Carroll, “‘The Base Shall Top Th’Legitimate’: The Bedlam Beggar and the Role of Edgar in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 434.
- 51.
Sears Jayne even identified charity as the unifying theme of the play, in that it both motivates the primary action of the drama and links the central and subplots through an intricate parallelism. “Charity in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1964): 277–88.
- 52.
Representations of on-stage audiences allowed playwrights to mirror and/or mock the behaviors of the theater’s off-stage audiences, although critics debate exactly how off-stage audiences viewed their on-stage counterparts. Jennifer A. Low suggests that their responses were multiple, complex, and even potentially theatrical: “When dramatic characters witness performances by other characters, they may model a response or ironize it; they may themselves provide a secondary show in their very responses.” “Early Modern Audiences and the Pleasures of Cross-Dressed Characters,” Poetics Today 35, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 564.
- 53.
The thrill of judgment was one of the driving appeals of the theater for early modern audiences. For more, see Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 25–6.
- 54.
Nova Myhill, “Taking the Stage: Spectators as Spectacle in the Caroline Private Theaters,” in Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642, ed. Jennifer A. Low and Nova Myhill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 38.
- 55.
Alvin B. Kernan makes this argument about the on-stage audiences of Shakespeare; Peter Happé makes it about the on-stage audiences of Jonson; Joanne Rochester makes it about the on-stage audiences of Massinger; and Rebecca Kate Yearling makes it about the on-stage audiences of Marston. Kernan, “Shakespeare’s Stage Audiences: The Playwright’s Reflections and Control of Audience Response,” in Shakespeare’s Craft: Eight Lectures, ed. Philip H. Highfill (Carbondale and Edwardsville: George Washington University by Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 138–55; Happé, “Jonson’s On-stage Audiences: Spectaret populum ludis attentius ipsis,” Ben Jonson Journal 10 (2003): 23–41; Rochester, Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013); and Yearling, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and Early Modern Drama: Satire and Audience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
- 56.
Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, “Ethical Staring: Disabling the English Renaissance,” in Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, ed. David Houston Wood and Allison P. Hobgood (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013), 7.
- 57.
Woodbridge is a notable exception to this rule, yet while she discusses disability overtly, she does so only very briefly. Woodbridge, Vagrancy, 23–4.
- 58.
Hyland, Disguise; Victor Oscar Freeburg, Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama: A Study in Stage Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915). In spite of its age, Freeburg’s book is a wonderful resource for those interested in this topic.
- 59.
Hyland, Disguise, 3–4.
- 60.
For more on historicized understandings of mental and intellectual disability, see Irina Metzler, Fools and Idiots?: Intellectual Disability in the Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); Patrick McDonagh, Idiocy: A Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008); Gershon Berkson, “Mental Disabilities in Western Civilization from Ancient Rome to Prerogativa Regis,” Mental Retardation 44, no. 1 (2006): 28–40; and Timothy Stainton, “Reason, Grace, and Charity: Augustine and the Impact of Church Doctrine on the Construction of Intellectual Disability,” Disability & Society 23, no. 5 (2008): 485–96.
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Row-Heyveld, L. (2018). Introduction: Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama. In: Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama. Literary Disability Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92135-8_1
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