Chattering humor and crooked habits: disability as metaphor in early modern English drama

This honors thesis project examines representations of disability in early modern English plays. I analyze two little-known plays of the period: Look About You (c. 1600) and The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607), both anonymous works. Through the characters of Redcap and Cripple, these plays present verbal and physical disabilities as embodiments of contemporary political and economic concerns. They also portray disability as something akin to the project of theatricality - concerns of doubleness, deception, scripting, etc. are examined through Redcap's stutter and Cripple's prosthetically aided body. Though these characters are crucial to the plays' plots, both of them are emphatically silenced by each play's ending. Working from David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's conception of "narrative prosthesis," this project analyzes how the early moderns used disability in their mass media, and ties our own narrative representations of disability back to the early modern English stage.

ABSTRACT This honors thesis project examines representations of disability in early modern English plays. I analyze two little-known plays of the period: Look About You (c. 1600) and The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607), both anonymous works. Through the characters of Redcap and Cripple, these plays present verbal and physical disabilities as embodiments of contemporary political and economic concerns. They also portray disability as something akin to the project of theatricality - concerns of doubleness, deception, scripting, etc. are examined through Redcap’s stutter and Cripple’s prosthetically aided body. Though these characters are crucial to the plays’ plots, both of them are emphatically silenced by each play's ending. Working from David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s conception of “narrative prosthesis,” this project analyzes how the early moderns used disability in their mass media, and ties our own narrative representations of disability back to the early modern English stage. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: A Narrative Prosthetic Heritage 1 “Shut Them Forth”: The Uncontrollable Excess of Disability in Look About You (1600) 11 “Cast Wit”: Disability as Deficiency in The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607) 31 Bibliography 53 iii 1 Introduction: A Narrative Prosthetic Heritage Hollywood has an obsession with disability. In the early 1920s, Lon Chaney starred in silent film adaptations of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, both produced by Universal Studios. Chaney donned grotesquely elaborate prosthetics and makeup to transform himself into the deaf hunchback Quasimodo and the deformed Phantom, earning himself a reputation as “the man of a thousand faces.” Both features highlight their disabled protagonists’ unique bodies in close-up shots, promising that the emergent medium of film could deliver spectacle as never before. Yet both works also conclude with their star attractions perishing in grisly murders, reducing the disabled body to a consumable and disposable plot device. One hundred years later, American movies remain firmly committed to telling stories about the disabled only to erase impairment by the time the credits roll. In M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable trilogy (2000-2019), two criminal disabled protagonists (one living with Osteogenesis imperfecta1 and one with dissociative identity disorder) end up relegated to a dubious psychiatric hospital. They both succeed in escaping their confinement, but die before they make it off the institution’s property. Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange (2016), based on the Marvel Comics character, follows a talented neurosurgeon who loses the use of his hands after a car accident; in his desperate quest to undo the damage, he gains magical abilities such as astral projection and spell conjuration, leaving his body not only rehabilitated but enhanced. The highest grossing film of all time, James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) tells the story of a paraplegic ex-Marine who finds a new life — and a new body — on another planet by transferring 1 Better known as “brittle bone disease.” 2 his consciousness into the form of a native inhabitant. Clearly, the fantasy of disability’s cure or erasure by force retains a tight grip on the American cinematic imagination, even a century past the days of Lon Chaney. Of course, American film doesn’t stand alone in its typical portrayals of disability. Parallel uses of the disabled body occur in all forms of narrative, including novels, television, and drama from around the world. To describe disability’s prevalence and function in media, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell coined the term “narrative prosthesis.”2 This phrase serves as a shorthand way to speak about several complex aspects of disability in narrative: …First, narrative prosthesis refers to the pervasiveness of disability as a device of characterization in narrative art. Second, it enables a contrast between the prosthetic leanings of mainstream discourses that would disguise or obliterate the evidence of physical and cognitive differences, and literary efforts that expose prosthesis as an artificial, and thus, resignifiable relation. Third, it refers to the problematic nature of the literary’s transgressive ideal in relation to social violence that often issues from the repetition of a representational formula… Finally, it acknowledges that literary representation bears on the production and realization of disabled subjectivities.3 To attempt a paraphrase: narrative prosthesis describes (a) narrative’s frequent use of disability as a definitive character trait and/or motivation; (b) narrative’s intentional highlighting of prosthetics for the sake of emphasizing and repurposing disability into a metaphor while, in real life, we assume it desirable for a prosthetic to make a disability less visible; (c) narrative’s use of disability as a medium through which to reject cultural norms and offer transgressive commentary while remaining disinterested in the real, lived experiences of disabled people; (d) narrative’s ability to affect how disabled people view themselves and how a culture views disabled people. These factors combine to produce David T Mitchell and Sharon L Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). 3 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 9. 2 3 stories in which disability often takes center stage without managing to offer any meaningful exploration of the circumstances actually surrounding life as a disabled person. The concept of narrative prosthesis has led to debate between disability and literary scholars as to what would constitute positive representation of the disabled experience in media. Michael Bérubé suggests that featuring disabled characters in literature without assigning a degree of figural/metaphorical meaning to their bodies may not be a realistic expectation: “...if you can imagine a version of the disability slogan ‘Nothing about us without us’ that goes, ‘Nothing about us with us — if it turns out that we are being used as figures for something else,’ you may get some sense of how this aspect of disability studies might seem incompatible with the enterprise of professional literary study…”4 Yet, as we’ve seen, popular mass media displays no less interest in the disabled body than do works we’ve granted the designation of “literature” to (along with that title’s invitation to be interpreted in largely metaphorical terms). Today, blockbusters like Avatar and Doctor Strange play a leading role in how the public thinks about disability; given their degree of contemporary influence, these portrayals of disabled characters can and should come under scrutiny for their reliance on narrative prosthesis. Indeed, how we represent disability in popular media holds particular importance for our current global political climate. A decade ago, Lennard Davis theorized that the time was right to usher in a new “dismodern” era in which social identities and classifications would no longer hold weight as prerequisites for governmental aid.5 Michael Bérubé, "Disability and Narrative," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 120, no. 2 (2005): 570. 5 Lennard J. Davis, “The End of Identity Politics: On Disability as an Unstable Category,” in The Disability Studies Reader: Fourth Edition, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 268-282. 4 4 Rather than parceling out aid proportionate to a person’s degree of identity-based disadvantage, Davis imagines that “The dismodernist vision allows for a clearer, more concrete mode of action — a clear notion of expanding the protected class to the entire population; a commitment to removing barriers and creating access for all.”6 He concludes with the rationalization that “...we are all disabled by injustice and oppression of various kinds. We are all nonstandard, and it is under that standard that we should be able to found the dismodernist ethic.”7 Davis’s theory seems grounded in a utopian wish for everybody, regardless of identifying categories such as race, sex, or ability, to receive exactly the amount of assistance they need to live a comfortable and safe life. Yet this egalitarian fantasy has quickly proven attractive to far-right American politicians as a justification for removing legal protections for vulnerable populations. We need only look to the US Supreme Court’s recent outlawing of affirmative action practices in university admissions to see how an identity-blind dismodernist philosophy can translate to further loss of opportunity for marginalized groups.8 If our most popular media continues to engage with disability only so far as it remains metaphorically useful to a narrative and only until the impairment can be eliminated, it seems all too likely that protection for disabled people will be among the next deemed unnecessary by the increasing adherents of far-right political ideology. Of course, the subpar representations of disability in current narratives owe their existence to a much longer tradition of narrative prosthesis. To gain perspective on present-day representations of disability, we can look back to the early modern period, Davis, “The End of Identity Politics,” 276. Ibid. 8 See Nina Totenberg, “Supreme Court guts affirmative action, effectively ending race-conscious admissions,” NPR, June 29, 2023 https://www.npr.org/2023/06/29/1181138066/affirmative-action-supreme-court-decision. 6 7 5 when emergent scientific knowledge produced understandings of bodily difference that have endured for centuries. At this time, the long-held belief that disabilities represented divine omens or judgements began to be challenged by the characterization of disability as a medical condition that must be cured. D. Christopher Gabbard and Susannah Mintz describe the long eighteenth century as a curious amalgamation of attitudes regarding science and divinity: “...rising scientific interest did not sweep away older spiritual concerns so much as coexist with them… The period is best understood then, as one of interpretive flux in which the same bodily characteristic might indicate the individual’s relationship to the divine, the quality of his or her ethical nature, or simply biological pathology.”9 Disability, then, carried a newly diverse set of associations with it, all of which fueled interest in bodily difference. Perhaps nowhere was western culture’s increasing fascination with the disabled body more apparent than on London’s early modern stage — England’s own form of mass media at the time. Indeed, early modern plays feature a vast variety of non-normative bodies. War injuries, epilepsy, dwarfism, blindness, madness, intellectual disabilities, speech disorders, hypersensitivity, and debilitating disease make up a sample of the bodily afflictions featured in surviving early modern dramatic works. In Shakespeare’s major roles alone we find gout in Falstaff, madness in Ophelia, blindness in the Earl of Gloucester, physical deformity in Caliban, and, of course, the infamous hunched back of King Richard III. Shakespeare’s characterization of Richard III endures as the quintessential representative of disability in the English canon over 400 years after the play’s first performances. Richard’s “crook-back’d” body and ignoble deeds created an image of 9 D. Christopher Gabbard and Susannah B. Mintz, ed., A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 3. 6 disabled malevolence that persistently towers over all other fictional depictions of disability. The intrigue surrounding Richard and his body so pervades western media that a 1912 adaptation of Richard III claims the title of oldest surviving American feature film. Starring a hunchbacked Frederick Warde, this silent adaptation no doubt paved the way for Chaney’s Quasimodo and Phantom a decade later. It also powerfully reinforced the popular interpretation that Richard’s evil doings can be explained as vengeance on the world for his deformity and punishment upon his family for their supposed rejection of his body. Mitchell and Snyder note that “Warde’s feature-length effort at portraying a strictly visual Richard III — a limitation that could only transform Shakespeare’s highly verbal character into a malevolent hunchback — resulted in spin-offs and revisions into the next decade.”10 Thus, cinema reestablished in its earliest days a superficial reading of Richard III as canonical proof that aberrant bodies reflect and create aberrant minds. This conclusion, however blatantly ableist it may appear to twenty-first century readers, still finds its adherents in recent scholarship. Following the discovery of the historic Richard III’s remains in Leicester and the king’s posthumus diagnosis of adolescent-onset scoliosis, Stephen Greenblatt wrote that the disfigured skeleton “seems to confirm Shakespeare’s intuition that there is a relationship between the shape of a spine and the shape of a life.”11 It would seem that equating a nonstandard body with moral failing remains an attractive explanation for bodily variance even in a medically advanced culture. Much of the recent criticism of Richard III, however, seeks to complicate that reductive equation between Richard’s body and his villainy to produce more nuanced Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 99. Stephen Greenblatt, “The Shape of a Life,” The New Yorker, February 5, 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-shape-of-a-life. 10 11 7 readings of disability. Lindsey Row-Heyveld argues that Richard III fits into early modern drama’s counterfeit disability subgenre, which features able-bodied “rogue” characters feigning disability to conduct scams and fraud.12 Row-Heyveld does not mean to suggest that Richard has a normative body, but that he selectively plays up his disability to manipulate others and to secure his kingship. Richard’s body thus becomes a unique asset rather than a disadvantage. Row-Heyveld accordingly sees her reading of the play as a liberation from the prevailing ideas surrounding Richard’s disability: “...understanding Richard III as a participant in the counterfeit-disability tradition also decouples Richard’s body from the binary of able-bodied-equals-good versus disabled-equals-evil, dismantling the determinism that still clings to him by granting Richard access to the richly performative disability of the rogue.”13 In other words, we can interpret Richard’s disability not as a mark of evil, but as a morally neutral form which Richard uses as a tool for his corrupt ambitions. Similarly, other criticism examines how Richard’s body seems to lend itself to energetic and dynamic action instead of impairing him. Genevieve Love notes that Richard speaks about his movement patterns much more often than he describes his actual appearance in Richard III.14 He identifies himself with a vast variety of verbs, among them halting, passing, strutting, capering, diving, stumbling, and bustling — all words with vivid physical dynamism. Richard’s extensive catalogue of actions works to open, rather than close, the possibilities available for disabled movement. Moreover, for Love, Richard’s movement distinguishes him as a figure for theatricality itself: “The 12 Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 13 Row-Heyveld, Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama, 139. 14 Genevieve Love, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2019). 8 work of Richard’s bustling is the work of the theatre… The theatrical body bustles: it is directionless, ineffectual, in that its diegetic actions may not have corresponding real-world effects; at the same time it is powerfully committed to a particular direction, the mimetic task of communicating presence to playgoers.”15 Love therefore offers a complicated portrait of Richard that acknowledges his disability as a form of narrative prosthesis while also refusing to read his body as a damning sign of his moral degradation. Some scholarship, however, goes so far as to attempt a rescue of Richard III entirely from the assignation of narrative prosthesis. David Houston Wood uses early modern humoral theory to account for some of Richard’s violent character, contending that “it is precisely Richard’s excess of heat that has constituted his inward monstrosity.”16 Since humoral imbalances could be fairly easily remedied in early modern medical theory, Wood supposes that a Richard “disabled” by such a condition could exert his own agency to restore himself. But actions like Richard’s deliberate consumption of wine (understood to generate bodily heat) before the Battle of Bosworth represent for Wood “an effort to maintain his own identity in a way that proves him to be actively seeking to maintain his inward monstrosity”17 by choosing to sustain a humoral imbalance. Wood concludes that “This view of Richard ultimately refutes those which suggest Richard serves merely as a narrative symbol or as a political symptom, a narrative prosthetic within his cultural moment whose function is simply to be Love, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability, 154. David Houston Wood, “New Directions: ‘Some tardy cripple’: Timing Disability in Richard III,” in Richard III: A Critical Reader, ed. Annaliese Connolly (United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 103. 17 Wood, “Some tardy cripple,” 103. 15 16 9 eradicated.”18 In thus granting Richard agency over both his body and his character, Wood seeks to prevent conflation of the two. However, his rejection of Richard as an example of narrative prosthesis has garnered little endorsement in other scholarship on the play. Ultimately, perhaps, debates on the degree to which Richard III conforms to the narrative prosthesis model do nothing more than prolong the lifespan of a centuries-old association between disability and wickedness. Considering Al Pacino’s 1996 documentary about Shakespeare’s Richard III, titled Looking for Richard, Mitchell and Snyder question the productivity of continuing to examine Richard and his disability: “Whether or not the relationship between physical disability and psychic malfeasance is reconfirmed, as in many performances of Richard III, or refuted… comes to be beside the point… In perpetually invoking this equation filmmakers confirm that disability’s physical and psychological disorder can be recontained and domesticated from the safe distance of an artistic stare.”19 Or, to put the matter in terms of literary scholarship, perhaps our obsessive deliberation on Richard’s body and mind merely reveals our own unwillingness to fully cease equating the two. Moreover, the abundance of criticism on Richard III has worked to effectively eclipse all other representations of disability in early modern drama. Richard’s status as the unofficial mascot of disability in western literature stems in large part from his charm, wit, and sheer consequentiality; but we cannot rely on him as the era’s sole representative of non-normative bodies when so many other disabled characters exist in the early modern canon. This study will examine representations of disability in two 18 19 Wood, “Some tardy cripple,” 103. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 117. 10 little-known plays of the period: Look About You (1600) and The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607). No author has been conclusively associated with either of these plays, but we can at the very least be confident that Shakespeare had nothing to do with them.20 Look About You and Fair Maid thus exist free of any attachment to a genius author’s godlike “intuition” about disability. Perhaps due in part to their anonymity, the plays I’ll discuss have fallen by the wayside of criticism, with only a few pieces of scholarship attending each of them. Still, their portrayals of disabled characters in major speaking roles warrants closer attention. In Look About You, the character in question is a stammering messenger called Redcap; in Fair Maid, the plot centers on a laborer known only as “Cripple” who walks using crutches. These representations of disability deal with people far lower in the social order than a hunchbacked king, providing perspective on how the general public of early modern London conceived of and managed bodily diversity amongst themselves. My analysis will largely concern how Look About You and Fair Maid use Redcap and Cripple as narrative prosthetics to transform disability into the salient metaphors driving each play’s plot. I’ll also explore how these plays incorporate and confirm early modern suspicions of disability that accompanied an increasingly medicalized understanding of impairment. What little criticism that exists on these plays with regard to disability has often leaned towards more generous, disability-positive readings; I will ask whether we can realistically interpret these plays as progressive representations of disability, or whether such an effort can only be wishful thinking. Can we really find seeds of a pro-disability philosophy in these plays, or was early modern mass 20 The plays’ poetic quality alone leave no doubt about this assertion. 11 entertainment — like our own — more interested in disability as a troubling symbol to be eradicated by story’s end than in disability as a real, embodied experience? “Shut Them Forth”: The Uncontrollable Excess of Disability in Look About You (1600) Printed in 1600, Look About You is an anonymous play set during the joint reign of Henry II (1154-1189) and his son known as Henry the Young King. The play’s sheer abundance of disguises distinguishes it from other comedies of the time; sixteen disguises are assumed by a cast of seventeen significant roles, making the ratio of disguised characters to “real” ones extraordinarily high.21 Keeping up with the rapidly shifting identities is a joyfully challenging task for audiences. The appeal of its constant costume and character changes was such that the play may have appeared in Henslowe’s Diary as The Disguises rather than by its printed title.22 Through the plot’s extravagant metatheatrics runs Redcap, a stammering messenger who gets entangled in the factionalized politics of the court. He suffers from truly acute dysfluency, with every one of his lines including at least a few stammered syllables. Though a minor character, Redcap acts as a valuable case study of disability in early modern drama and in early modern English culture more broadly. He represents a conception of disability as a corruptive and uncontainable influence that sows anxiety throughout the entire play. Peter Hyland notes that Look About You includes “a larger number [of disguises] than any other extant play of the period.” See Peter Hyland, Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub. Co., 2011), 6. 22 Certain identification of Look About You with The Disguises is disputed. If the play was first performed in 1595 then it is likely that both titles refer to the same work; if it was first performed at a later date, they must be two separate plays. See Fred L. Jones, "Look about You and The Disguises," PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 44, no. 3 (1929): 835-841. See also Martin Wiggins, British Drama 1533-1642: A Catalogue: Volume IV: 1598-1602, (Oxford University Press, 2014), 106. 21 12 The play begins with the royal court in bitter turmoil. Henry II has crowned his son, also named Henry, while he is himself still living.23 He has subsequently reneged on that decision, wishing to again be the sole monarch. The kingdom thus falls divided under the rule of two kings simultaneously, leaving half of the court to maintain support of the old king and half to rally behind the young one. Robert, Earl of Gloucester (referred to as “Gloster”) and Sir Richard Faulconbridge (“Faukenbridge”) serve as Henry II’s primary allies, while the young king has the support of his mother, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, and of his brothers, Richard and John. A criminal called Skinke arrives; he had been living on the moors of Blackheath in disguise as a Hermit (whom he had apparently murdered), and has been summoned to stand trial for having poisoned the king’s mistress. Skinke understandably wonders to himself why his summons should have been sent to the Hermit, unless the court knows that Skinke has taken his identity. Before an actual trial can commence, however, young Henry pardons him while the older king demands his execution, exemplifying the two monarchs’ inability to agree on anything. The argument grows heated, and Gloster attacks Skinke, who immediately flees (again). The young king’s faction decides that Gloster will be taken to the Tower of London for breaking the court’s peace, and Gloster requests that a message be sent to inform his sister, Lady Faukenbridge. The messenger is a young man called Redcap, the fleet porter’s son, who speaks with a stammer and runs compulsively. On his way to Stepney, Redcap bumps into Skinke, who is looking for another disguise to protect him from the authorities. He manages to convince Redcap to In doing so, the historical Henry II followed the Carolingian tradition of “anticipatory succession;” premature coronation was thought to legitimate a new dynasty and protect its succession from other claims to the throne. See Matthew Strickland, Henry the Young King, 1155-1183. (London: Yale University Press, 2016), 40. If these are Henry II’s motives, they remain unexplained in the play. 23 13 swap clothes with him, and sends him in the wrong direction so that Skinke may safely take on Redcap’s identity, stammer and all. Over the next several scenes, the play’s convoluted sequence of shifting disguises unfolds. A constable, believing Skinke to be Redcap, brings him to the porter (Redcap’s father) at the Tower. Here, Gloster steals Redcap’s identity and clothing from Skinke to trick the porter into letting him leave. The young Henry then orders that the porter be executed for permitting Gloster’s escape; the old Henry, keen to check his son’s authority, produces a pardon for the porter to be delivered to him by a pursuivant. Thinking that the pardon is for himself, Gloster (now in disguise as his brother-in-law, Faukenbridge) poisons the pursuivant and steals the document. Meanwhile, in a separate plotline, Richard tries to woo Lady Faukenbridge through his ward and “bed-fellow,” Robin Hood. Stubbornly chaste, Lady Faukenbridge ends up using Robin in a disguise plot of her own to test her husband’s faithfulness. Skinke ends up back at Blackheath in the Hermit disguise, attempting to evade the old King’s faction, and it is here that the characters’ interests intersect. For some reason, the bulk of the play’s cast trusts that the Hermit can provide mystical solutions to their respective dilemmas; only Skinke knows that the real Hermit is dead. The older Henry has sent men to Blackheath in hopes that the Hermit can divine where Skinke is hiding; the young king’s faction hopes that the Hermit can tell them where Gloster is so that he may be executed; Lady Faukenbridge travels to ask the Hermit if her brother Gloster will survive the plot against him; Faukenbridge wants to see the Hermit to clear his name, sullied by Gloster’s poisoning of the pursuivant in his person; and Redcap, too ends up on the moors in search of Gloster so that he can set his father’s mistake aright and avoid the 14 Porter’s looming execution. But Gloster, like Skinke, hopes to escape detection under the Hermit’s guise, and both fake Hermits end up on stage at the same time. The two false Hermits fight on stage together, each insisting they are the “real” one until they are exposed and seized by the respective factions seeking them. By the play’s ending, the young Henry appears to be secure in his power. He pardons Skinke for all crimes and looks forward to Gloster’s execution. He also grants a pardon for the Porter — yet when Redcap bids a pardon for the Pursuivant as well, abruptly banishes him from the court. Young Henry then experiences a radical change of heart and realizes he has this whole time been unjust to his father, who should rightfully rule as the country’s only king. He yields to Henry II’s claim as ruler, and the factions are united under the banner of a new crusade. Look About You’s convoluted plot often threatens to lose itself in its own theatrical excess. It juggles political drama, romantic capers, and slapstick disguise escapades so that merely following each character’s interests becomes as difficult as keeping track of who participates in the play’s sixteen disguises at any moment. With so much action going on, key details tend to be overlooked and questions left unanswered. Why did the court send a summons for Skinke to the Hermit? Why does Skinke voluntarily come out of hiding? Why does the absent Hermit — by definition a recluse — seem to operate as a hub for the entire kingdom’s intelligence traffic? Why did Henry II decide to crown his son early and then change his mind, and why does young Henry change his mind in the end about his claim to the throne? Why is the play even called Look About You, when the phrase isn’t used often enough to be a memorable detail of the story? The play’s 15 messiness and apparent carelessness with its own details has made it a less than ideal candidate for serious scholarly criticism. Indeed, Look About You has generated an exceptionally thin body of scholarship, with only a handful of critics devoting any attention to it. Early criticism concerned the play’s dubious authorship and date of performance. Fred Jones concluded in 1929 that Look About You was written by Henry Chettle and must be the same play as The Disguises, first performed by the Admiral’s Men on October 2nd, 1595. He supposes that the play labeled as “Disguises” in Henslowe’s Diary likely refers to Look About You, since no other play called The Disguises seems to exist and “The title ‘Look About You’... is in no way especially indicative of this play… ‘The Disguises’ would be an altogether appropriate name for the most elaborate disguise play in Elizabethan drama.”24 Over thirty years passed without another word on Look About You. In 1962, Jones’s dating of the play was disputed by Malcolm Nelson, who insists that there is no way to be certain of Look About You’s authorship and that it was more likely to have been first performed in late 1598 or early 1599.25 Nelson bases his proposed date of performance on his conjecture that Look About You is a spinoff of Anthony Munday’s The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon. Robin Hood’s presence in the play has also attracted the attention of B.A. Brockman, who marks Look About You as a key text in the growing early modern association of Robin Hood with ribaldry and “low-brow” humor.26 In recent decades, Look About You’s historic setting has drawn more significant criticism. In 1969, Anne Lancashire produced the first substantive analysis of the play, Jones, "Look about You and The Disguises," 841. Malcolm A. Nelson, “‘Look About You’ and the Robin Hood Tradition,” Notes and Queries 9, no. 4 (1962): 141-43. 26 B. A. Brockman, “Children and the Audiences of Robin Hood,” South Atlantic Review 48, no. 2 (1983): 67-83. 24 25 16 making a case for its value not as a pseudo-historical disguise comedy, but as a bonafide history play to be taken as serious political commentary.27 Lancashire identifies numerous details in the play that suggest the author was working from the account of Henry II’s joint reign with his son in Holinshed’s Chronicles, and was thus interested in creating a story grounded in historical fact. Such details as the elder king’s promise to “waite upon [young Henry] and fill his cuppe” (2555) at a feast and Young Henry’s vow to wear a shirt of “hard hayre”(3155) as part of his repentance indicate the author’s familiarity with Holinshed’s text. Lancashire also suggests that Look About You comments on England’s contemporary political situation just as more renowned history plays like Richard II did. In the years leading up to the play’s publication, the English court had grown increasingly riven between Elizabeth I’s supporters and the Earl of Essex, the queen’s young favorite, whom many suspected of plotting to supplant her. Lancashire suggests that “The emphasis in the historical scenes of the play upon the evils of royal favoritism and the rights and duties of the legitimate ruler could even be a warning to the queen specifically against Essex and his possible intentions.”28 In interpreting Look About You as a vehicle for relevant political commentary, Lancashire advocates for further serious criticism of the play. Yet like most of the play’s criticism to date, Lancashire has nothing to say about the play’s most distinctive character. The stammering messenger Redcap, absent from the chronicle accounts and seemingly entirely fictionalized, would appear at first to have no place in a play populated by significant historical figures. He functions most obviously as a clown: his dysfluent speech and signature gag of frantic running seem obviously Anne B. Lancashire, “Look about You as a History Play,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 9, no. 2 (1969): 321-34. 28 Lancashire, “Look about You as a History Play,” 332. 27 17 contrived to get easy laughs. Accordingly, Lancashire views the multiple-disguise plot in which Redcap is thoroughly involved as peripheral to the real work of the play. She wholly excludes the comedic scenes from her analysis, remarking that “although its main plot centers on fictional multiple-disguise, Look About You is a true history play in every sense of the term”29 (my emphasis). I argue that the play is able to produce its political commentary because of the multiple-disguise plot, and through Redcap in particular. No less than the scenes that actually take place at court, Look About You’s disguise plot — and Redcap’s role in it — comments on political duplicity. Look About You’s first court scene informs audiences of the government’s bitter division as quickly as possible. The play immediately presents audiences with the dual entrances of “Henry the second Crowned… on the other part, King Henry the Sonne crowned” (s.d. 84), each followed by their respective entourage. Gloster aptly comments on the schism, asking young Henry of his father “What’s he that sits so neere you?” Prince Richard replies on his brother’s behalf, “King too,” which Gloster quickly reverses into “Two Kings? ha, ha” (90-92). This quip’s chiastically repetitive structure neatly calls attention to the plot’s chief problem of doubleness, but is far from being the scene’s only linguistic device to do so. For at the scene’s end, we meet a living duplication machine named Redcap. From his first line, “I I am am Re Redcap s s sir,” (384) Redcap’s speech patterns literalize duality by making multiples of everything. His constant excess of sound makes him an inefficient speaker, taking at least twice as long to express himself as a normative speaker would. Perhaps to compensate for his time lost in talking, Redcap is a fast runner: a warden recommends him specifically to deliver Gloster’s message to his sister, 29 Lancashire, “Look About You as a History Play,” 321. 18 since “He stammers, but he’s swift and trusty Sir” (382). But running, too, proves to be a less than productive activity for Redcap. In his first scene, he begins no less than three false running exits before he actually gets off the stage with his message. When Gloster instructs him to “Run Redcap to Stepney,” Redcap immediately sets off without waiting to hear what he is supposed to do there, readily declaring “Ile be at Stepney p p presently” (385-386). This gag repeats itself twice more as Redcap tries to run before hearing the complete message he is to deliver, leading Gloster to implore him to “Stand still a while” (395) as Redcap “still runnes” (s.d. 394). Redcap’s propensity for frantic, purposeless movement parallels his excessive yet unproductive speech and intills little confidence that he will successfully perform his task, no matter how many steps he takes or how fast he runs. The stutter that audiences would have heard from Redcap embodies unproductive excess in the extra time it takes him to speak each line. But his lines’ typographical representation to a reader of the play renders them even more ineffectual. In other early modern English plays, stuttering is typically represented by dashes or commas between each sound to indicate that a word is not yet complete. For example, John Marston’s What You Will (1607) includes a stammering character named Albano. The text does not indicate that he stammers nearly as frequently as Redcap, but when he does the repeated sounds are usually separated by commas: “Ile f,f,follow, though I st,st,st,stut, ile stumble to the Duke in p,p,plaine language…”” (IV.i348-349). In the text of Look About You, no such punctuation appears in Redcap’s stuttered lines. Rather, each sound operates as its own word, isolated by a full space between every repetition. Redcap’s stammered syllables are textually detached from the word they seek to produce, and this affects how 19 readers interpret his lines. For instance, “wh wh which is the fa fa false k k k knave?” (2616-2617) forces readers to expect one sound only to receive another when Redcap finally completes the word. Reading the isolated letter “k” three times produces the expectation that the full word will begin with a harsh “k” sound as in “kite” or “kitchen.” But upon reading the completed word “knave,” readers must revise their initial reading and suppose that Redcap was really saying an “n” sound each time. Such jarring moments of aural dissonance abound in Redcap’s printed speech. Ubiquitous phrases such as “By my Ch Ch Christendome,” (926) “you ho honest man,” (1207) or “ge ge Gentleman” (1232) produce dissonant sounds for the play’s readers. The discrepancy in Redcap’s lines between a stammered word’s sound and its typographical representation pointedly contrasts with a commitment to phonetic spelling elsewhere in the play’s text. The word “Gloucester” only ever appears in the text as it sounds: “Gloster,” and the same is true for “Leyster” (Leicester) and even “Elinor” (Eleanor). The comparative lack of effort to transcribe Redcap’s stammer as it would really sound further magnifies the ineffectiveness of excessive speech. The typography of Redcap’s lines regularly creates ruptures between what readers expect a word to be and what it ends up being. This makes the experience of reading more complicated and laborious than necessary, translating the cumbersome effects of stuttered speech for readers who may otherwise read Redcap’s lines with much less effort or time than an actor may need to speak them. The most recent scholarly engagement with Look About You has attempted to read this typography as part of a disability-positive effort to favorably represent vocal dysfluency on the early modern stage. Allison Hobgood optimistically proposes that “Looke About You… offers not only evidence of a distinct early modern disability 20 aesthetic, but one premised on the desire for and deliberate conservation of human biodiversity and disability difference.”30 She bases her argument on the unusual care taken to transcribe Redcap’s stutter, and on the play’s high incidence of characters other than Redcap repeating themselves, stammering, or otherwise making meaningless sound. Hobgood argues that this abundance of vocal incoherence points to speech impairment as the literal “mode of embodiment through which the drama makes meaning.”31 Several characters besides Redcap do indeed regularly repeat sounds. Lady Faukenbridge often begins clauses with a doubled phrase, as in “Ifaith Ifaith you are a noble wagge” (753) or a few lines later, “Well said well said, Ile have these toyes amended…” (758) Two characters sometimes repeat one another: in a particularly curious moment, Faukenbridge (outraged by Gloster’s theft of his identity) declares “Ile to Blacke-heath, talke not of patience, / It is intollerable, not to be borne.” Prince John immediately repeats “It is intollerable not to be borne” (1708-1710). For readers, perhaps, the minute difference of punctuation between these otherwise identical sentences could produce separate meanings, with John reversing Gloster’s idea into “It is unacceptable not to bear it.” Audiences, though, would likely hear the sentences as exact copies of each other, rating this moment as another instance of doubled speech. However, characters in Look About You often repeat themselves specifically to mock Redcap. Blocke, a more conventional clown figure, treats Redcap with unique hostility and takes every possible opportunity to caricature his stammer. Mimicking what he calls Redcap’s “clipping the Kings English” (627), Blocke says “Sir stammerer and your wa watch, y’are pa past ifaith” (1217-1218). And when speaking of Skinke in disguise as Redcap, Blocke advises Allison P. Hobgood, Beholding Disability in Renaissance England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), 142. 31 Hobgood, Beholding Disability in Renaissance England, 153. 30 21 his mistress to “let them bring this ca ca ca ca to the Fleete…” (642). In this sentence, a series of meaningless “ca” noises substitutes for Redcap. These sounds never culminate in a full word as they eventually might from a true stutterer; Blocke here seems less interested in mimicking Skinke-as-Redcap than in simply producing excessive sound for its own sake. In a similar moment, Blocke refers to Redcap as a “stitty stitty stammerer” (654), again representing Redcap’s dysfluency as repetitive nonsense. Clearly, Look About You places great emphasis on vocal repetition through its whole cast of characters. However, I am not convinced that this represents what Hobgood calls “a deliberate reproduction and conservation of disability that is more enabling and agential than stigmatizing.”32 To begin with, Hobgood’s use of the word “conservation” inaccurately describes Look About You’s relationship to disability. “Conservation” implies an effort to preserve an existing entity under threat of erasure. Such a term might make sense if Redcap were a real historical figure like most of the play’s other characters, but he isn’t. He stands as one of the only invented characters in a plot otherwise populated by recognizable figures from English history; Redcap and his disability are therefore produced by the play, not conserved. As a totally fictional character, furthermore, Redcap isn’t even a good “reproduction” of vocal dysfluency. His stammer may be literally and painstakingly spelled out in the text, but his physical movement and intellectual simplicity work to make him into a reductive stereotype of a stutterer rather than a realistically nuanced representative of disability. As we have already seen, Redcap’s compulsive running nearly prevents him from accomplishing even the barest demands of his task as Gloster’s messenger. And when he does finally hear the entirety of the message, he can’t remember 32 Hobgood, Beholding Disability in Renaissance England, 158. 22 the name of its intended recipient. He seems to arrive at Stepney speedily, but has to rack his brains for that essential detail: “I have forgot The La La Lady Fau Fau Fau plague on her… The La the La La Fau, plague on’t; GGloster will goe ne neere to st stab me, fo for forgetting my errand… the La Lady Fau Fau Fau” (477-481). Here, the play blurs all distinction between stammering and forgetting, equating a dysfluent voice with a deficient mind. Redcap’s continual repetition of the first syllables of Lady Faukenbridge’s name underscores his inability to remember the final two, and also reminds us that he’d struggle to complete the word even if he could recall it. The language that other characters use to describe Redcap also points to an essentialized understanding of stammerers as mentally deficient. Skinke calls Redcap a “foole” (483) and “good stammering ninny” (525), while Blocke continues to speak to him in a cruelly condescending tone. He mockingly asks “What Redcap, run redcap, wilt thou see thy father?” (2813) after Redcap has repeatedly expressed that very desire, as if Redcap were totally incapable of any coherent expression and thus childishly dependent on others to interpret his wishes.33 Even the aristocratic characters, who interact with Redcap far less, can’t resist making an occasional derisive comment at his expense. Remarking on Redcap’s vocal disfluency and tireless running, Gloster jokes that “This fellow is of the humour I would chuse my wife, few words and many paces, a word and away…” (1236-1237). While Gloster here frames Redcap’s traits as desirable qualities, he is simultaneously associating disability with femininity — the most basic form of inferiority in early modern English culture. Look About You’s constant denigration and stereotyping 33 Such insulting condescension reflects standard treatment towards the mentally disabled in early modern drama. In Robert Armin’s The History of the Two Maids of More-clacke (1609), able characters address the “natural fool” John-’I-Th’-Hospital much as one would speak to a dog:“Where’s this suck-egg? Where’s Jack-a-boy?” (II.iv.20) 23 of Redcap works to build a representation of disability that is hardly “an anti-ableist counterideology.”34 Neither does the play afford much opportunity for Redcap to challenge these offensive and simplistic views of disability. A radically one-dimensional character, he can be reduced to just a few key traits: he stammers, he runs, he is the porter’s son, and he wears a red hat. Redcap remains so utterly uncomplicated that others can assume his identity with minimal effort and a virtual guarantee of success, making him available for reproduction by anyone in need of a disguise. When Skinke disguises himself as Redcap, he immediately begins rehearsing his stammer: “I thinke I have set your Redcaps heeles a running, wo[u]ld your Pyanet chattering humour35 could as sa safely se set mee fr from the searchers walkes… this tytty tytty a the tongue I beleeve will faile mee” (525-530). Despite Skinke’s apparent concern, he easily performs a more than sufficient imitation of Redcap. Not just Redcap’s stammer, but his entire biography proves easy for Skinke to copy: when questioned by a constable looking for Skinke, he stammers out Redcap’s identifying details without ever having heard them himself. He knows that Redcap is “The Po Po Porters Sonne of the F Fl Fleete” (537) even though he had never encountered or heard of Redcap until earlier in that scene, and Redcap did not mention his father then. Based on that same earlier conversation, Skinke also should not have been able to know Redcap’s name or catchphrase, but he nonetheless tells the constable “Wh wh why le le let me run I am Re Redcap” (542). Skinke’s inexplicably accurate imitation of Redcap speaks to the flatness of Redcap’s character. He functions as little more than a costume for others (Skinke, and later, Gloster) to don when they need a quick escape. 34 35 Hobgood, Beholding Disability in Renaissance England, 173. “Pyanet:” like a magpie, a bird with a sharp and repetitive chirp. 24 Stealing Redcap’s identity only requires putting on a red hat and stammering; those being done, the few biographical details of his character seem to follow automatically. The disability that serves only as a limitation for Redcap simultaneously allows able characters to appropriate his entire selfhood for their personal benefit and convenience. In the same way that Redcap’s stammer makes him the easiest character to imitate in Look About You, it also makes him unable to participate reciprocally in the play’s complicated economy of disguises. Due to his uncontrollable stuttering, he never stops being clearly identifiable as Redcap even when he trades clothing with Skinke. While Redcap remains stuck in a single persona, he nonetheless seems to attract duality wherever he goes. The climactic “two hermits” scene near the play’s end best exhibits the doubleness that accumulates around Redcap. Here, the metatheatrical disguise plot is pushed to its absolute limit, with Skinke and Gloster both onstage and disguised as the murdered Hermit. Redcap had been sent by the Gloster-Hermit to run across the moors looking for the “real” Gloster. Upon his return from this fruitless search, Redcap becomes first witness to the uncanny scene and struggles to deduce which of the two Hermits is real. He cries, “Je Je Jesus bl blesse me, whop to to two Hermits? Ile ca ca caperclaw to to t’one of yee for momo mocking me… wh wh which is the fa fa false k k k knave? For I am s s sure the olde He He Hermit wo would never mo mocke an honest man” (2614-2618). Redcap is confronted with a crisis of authenticity: not wishing to punish the “true” Hermit for the “false” one’s wasting of Redcap’s time and energy, he must decide which of two identical images is genuine. Of course, both Hermits are frauds. There is no reality behind either Hermit costume, just two different versions of deceit. In its radical multiplicity, the scene reminds us that Skinke and Gloster aren’t “real” either, but are 25 themselves characters for actors to disguise themselves in. What is really presented in this scene is two actors wearing two layers of disguises each, burying true identity twice over. The doubly false Hermits invite us to remember that theatre is itself a copy of reality, and thus — like stuttering — inherently generative of multiplicity. Fittingly, Redcap witnesses this metatheatrical climax before any other character does. The spectacle of the play’s two lead actors performing acting itself stands in contradistinction to Redcap’s fundamental inability to act. While remaining excluded from theatricality, Redcap simultaneously epitomizes theatre’s doubleness. His stutter makes him both absolutely singular and uncontrollably multiple. But Redcap’s stammer also belongs in this scene when considered within the distinct historical plot of Look About You. The duplicate hermits unmistakably parallel the play’s multiple kings. Both roles are by definition solitary ones: two kings in the same realm negate one another as absolute heads of state, just as two hermits nullify their antisocial mission. Redcap’s reduplication of each word he says makes his voice the best possible one to describe the play’s doubled hermits, which themselves reflect the nation’s doubled kings. Redcap’s stammer illustrates on a micro scale the overarching problem of Look About You’s historical plot: the paralytic inefficiency that comes from having too much. Just as two of every sound muddles a sentence, or unnecessary movement slows a journey, a kingdom comes to a standstill when two men claim the title of king. Factional bickering and jockeying for the right to speak dominates each of the play’s three court scenes so that nobody is meaningfully heard and the work of governance remains undone. The elder King Henry finds that crowning his son to produce two King Henries has not amplified his voice, but silenced it. In the first court scene, Henry II keeps a conspicuous 26 silence. He delivers only a few short lines himself and allows his opinion on Queen Elinor’s murder of his mistress to be voiced by Lancaster. At Leyster’s urging to free Elinor from the Tower, Lancaster says, “The King replyes your words are foule slaunderous forgeryes” (139-140). Noting that the elder King did not actually speak, Prince John replies that “His highness sayes not so,” to which Lancaster insists “His highness doth” and launches into a lengthy diatribe against Elinor. Lancaster asks “Ist not a shame to thinke that she hath arm’d / Foure Sonnes right hands against their fathers head, / And not the children of a low-priz’d wretch, / But one whom God on earth hath deified?” (157-160) This appeal can only fall flat, spoken as it is on behalf of the supposedly rightful king rather than through the monarch’s own lips. The king stays silent for the duration of the heated debate about Elinor until he weakly consents to free her, begging “Will this content you? I that have sat still, / Amaz’d to see my sonnes devoyde of shame; / To heare my subjects with rebellious tongues, / Wound the kinde bosome of their Soveraigne, / Can no more beare…” (220-224). The constant bickering of the court and Henry II’s verbal impotence, brought on by the existence of two simultaneous kings, produces an utterly disordered and nonfunctional governing body. The fractured state of the court in Look About You finds its counterpart in Redcap’s disfluent speech. The kingdom itself seems to be caught in a kind of “stutter”: the normal succession from one monarch to the next has been corrupted by a premature coronation, similarly to how stammered words disrupt the progression of a complete sentence. In both cases, the presence of excess (linguistic or monarchical) yields a dysfunctional whole. Almost until the very end, this excess persists and the conflict stays unresolved. By the last scene, the court’s division remains as far from being resolved as it 27 was in the beginning. The two Henries still refuse to cooperate or compromise, rehashing once again the interminable argument over young Henry’s authority. Learning that the young king plans to pardon Skinke, the elder Henry asks “Who made you a Justice?” The younger one confidently replies, “I that had the power,” to which Henry II predictably insists “You had none then” (2849-2850). Thus, the same circular debate that had troubled all the previous court scenes remains worryingly unresolved with only a few hundred lines left in the play for a resolution to present itself. And yet, just when the court seems to be irreparably divided, young Henry experiences a miraculous, unexpected, and totally unexplained change of heart. On the brink of severing Gloster’s hand to humiliate — and disable — the elder king’s strongest supporter, the young king suddenly stops himself. He lowers his weapon and assures Gloster, “I doe embrace thee in affections armes” (3106). He then relinquishes all claim to power and acknowledges his father as sole legitimate king: “Father you see your most rebellious sonne, / Stricken with horror of his horred guild, / Requesting sentence fitting his desart, / O treade upon his head, that trode your heart. / I doe deliver up all dignity, / Crowne, Scepter, swoord, unto your Majesty” (3130-3135). This resolution appears to happen entirely without cause: just a few lines earlier, young Henry demanded his father’s subservience under the justification that “Saturne kneel’d to his Sonne, the God was faine / To call young Jove his ages Soveraigne” (3049-3050). Moreover, the play’s sudden mending seems inconsistent with its own obsessive multiplicity. Why should a story mired in an excess of disability and the disability of excess cure itself at the last moment? 28 But perhaps the reconciliation isn’t actually as baseless as it appears. Just before young Henry’s renunciation of his kingship, he hears a plea from Redcap, who begs a pardon for his father’s letting Gloster out of the Tower. The young king grants that pardon, but refuses to grant another for the pursuivant whose papers Gloster had stolen: When Redcap petitions “O I Lord s sir, I have another s sute for the P P Pursevant, that has l l lost his b b box, and his wa wa warrant” (2918-2920), Henry at first grows frustrated by Redcap’s stuttering and then abruptly gives up on trying to understand him at all. “What meanes the fellow?” (2921) he demands before ordering guards to “Take hence that stuttering fellow, shut them forth” (2936) without granting Redcap’s second request. Again, Redcap finds himself stifled by excess: asking one pardon from the king is acceptable, but making multiple requests proves sufficient reason for expulsion. This marks Redcap’s removal from the play; without any acknowledgement of Redcap’s final plea to “let Sk Skinke and Gl Gloster be lo lo looked too, for they have p p playd the k k knaves to to to b b bad” (2933-2935), the young king forces him out. Mere moments after expelling Redcap, Young Henry undergoes his transformation into a remorseful son and loyal supporter of the original king. It is no coincidence, I would suggest, that the troubled court of Look About You seamlessly heals itself after Redcap’s ejection from the plot. For reconciliation to be possible, Redcap can no longer be tolerated; it is almost as if his stuttering directly implicates itself in the kingdom’s own debilitating problem of multiplicity. In other words, Redcap’s disability stands as not only a symptom of a government paralyzed by an excess of authorities, but somehow as the very cause of it. This logic is consistent with how stuttering was medically understood in early modern England. Andrew Boorde’s 29 1587 Breviary of Health explicitly describes stuttering as a contagious condition: stuttering “doth come three maner of wayes, one doth come by nature. The other doth come by humiditie of the senewes of the tongue, and the third commeth to be in the companie of a stutter or stamerer.”36 The remedy for a stutter contracted in this third manner is simple: “a man must refraine the companie of a stutter.”37 Indeed, Redcap and his stutter circulate everywhere in the play. As quoted previously, Skinke begins to stammer as soon as he puts on Redcap’s clothing, even before any witnesses are there to be fooled by the disguise; his speaking in Redcap’s voice is therefore entirely gratuitous here. A similar moment happens the second time Redcap’s identity gets stolen. When Gloster decides to steal Redcap’s costume from Skinke, the latter informs him that he’ll hear from Lady Faukenbridge “p p presently,” to which Gloster replies “And p presently sir off with your coate” before wrestling Skinke out of the disguise (811-813). Gloster might be mocking Skinke’s affected stammer here, but in doing so he “catches” the affliction before beginning to properly impersonate Redcap. These instances of purposeless stuttering demonstrate that close exposure to Redcap carries risk: associating with him leads to practically unconscious imitation of his speech, turning Skinke and Gloster into stammerers themselves. The principle of multiplicity that Redcap embodies and disseminates spreads from Look About You’s linguistics to its very structure. Not only does the story feature two kings and two Hermits, it has two clowns as well. Redcap clearly operates as a foolishly comic role through his simplemindedness and distinct voice and physicality — we’re 36 Andrew Boorde, The Breuiarie of Health Vvherin Doth Folow, Remedies, for all Maner of Sicknesses & Diseases, the which may be in Man Or Woman. Expressing the Obscure Termes of Greke, Araby, Latin, Barbary, and English, Concerning Phisick and Chirurgerie. Compyled by Andrew Boord, Doctor of Phisicke: An English-Man (London: 1587), 21. 37 Ibid. 30 meant to laugh at and ridicule him. But Blocke’s jests, puns, and causticness undoubtedly mark him as a conventional clown figure, too. On some level, this break from early modern tradition could metatheatrically inform Blocke’s malice towards Redcap: Blocke’s stage time is halved by the existence of a second clown, even if Redcap can’t help the traits that make him comic. But for a play already presenting itself as a comedy, including multiple clowns is wholly unnecessary; the doubled roles seem designed only to further compound Look About You’s pathological excessiveness. This structural redundancy extends further still: Redcap manages to escape the boundaries of the play itself and infect Look About You’s early modern audience. A 1609 promotional pamphlet for a sort of early modern pleasure resort titles itself Pimlyco. Or, Runne Red-cap. It concludes “Run, (Red-cap) Run, amongst the Rest, / Thou art nam’d last, that once wert best, / But (Red-cap) now thy Wooll is worne, / By Pimlyco is Red-cap shorne.”38 This document is otherwise totally unrelated to Look About You. By inserting Redcap into a completely foreign context, Pimlyco assumes that the character was popularly familiar enough to need no introduction. This further suggests that Pimlyco wasn’t the only document to refer to Redcap outside of the play. He seems to have essentially become an early modern meme, removed from his original context and re-placed as a joke into other settings. Moreover, there is even some evidence that Look About You at some point acquired a third potential title, becoming popularly known as Run, Redcap.39 This catchphrase isn’t often spoken verbatim in the play’s text; rather, it seems likely to have originated from Look About You’s reception, perhaps as a way to catcall Redcap every time he enters or exits the stage. Redcap’s character appears to have 38 39 Pimlyco. Or, Runne Red-Cap Tis a Mad World at Hogsdon. London: 1609. Wiggins, British Drama 1533-1642, 106. 31 repeated himself so often that audiences began to repeat him, too, potentially redefining the entire play under the name of a minor character. Such an outsized influence emanating from a small role certainly speaks to a kind of contagiousness; Redcap reduplicates himself every time an audience member repeats his catchphrase, transmitting himself and all the multiplicity he contains into the public world. Given all this doubleness that Redcap produces in and beyond the play, Young Henry seems to be correct in his diagnosis of Redcap as the source of the kingdom’s illness. When he orders guards to “Take hence that stuttering fellow, shut them forth,” (my emphasis) he explicitly reads Redcap as more than one person. Henry here recognizes Redcap’s stutter as a mark of unnatural multiplicity with the potential to infect anybody who hears it, necessitating its expulsion from the court if the kingdom is to return to a healthy singularity. Redcap is therefore both Look About You’s heart and the thing it needs to repudiate for the story to finally end: the play forms itself out of his substance, yet knows it has to discard him “That England never know more Prince than one” (3198). “Cast Wit”: Disability as Deficiency in The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607) In some ways, The Fair Maid of the Exchange (anonymous, 1607) engages with disability far more directly than does Look About You. The play’s central character is a drawer40 known only as “Cripple,” who lives with a highly visible impairment: he walks with two crutches, having lost the use of his legs through some unexplained accident or 40 Cripple works in the Exchange tracing patterns onto fabric for others to embroider over. 32 disease. Given that Cripple thus has “more legs than nature gave” him, (I.i.114) Fair Maid seems poised to portray disability as a figure for threatening excess much as Look About You does. Indeed, this play features multiples of nearly every main character. Not one, nor even two, but three brothers (Ferdinand, Anthony, and Frank Golding) are all in love with Phyllis Flower, a seamstress. Phyllis herself is one of two “fair maids” working in the London Exchange41, the other being her friend and counterpart, Moll Berry. Moll, naturally, boasts two suitors of her own (Bowdler and Bernard), and both women also each have a father anxious to see his daughter married. Such redundancies saturate the plot from beginning to end. In the play’s first scene, Phyllis is nearly raped and robbed by no fewer than two thieves, named Bobbington and Scarlet. Cripple happens to be passing by and beats away the robbers with his crutches, saving Phyllis. But the thieves immediately return for a second attack and succeed in knocking Cripple to the ground. This time, Frank plays the hero, rescuing both Phyllis and Cripple, as well as earning Cripple’s promise to one day repay him for his gallantry. In the wake of this incident, Frank finds himself falling in love with Phyllis and therefore in competition with his two older brothers for her favor. But Phyllis has fallen in love with Cripple, who is entirely uninterested in her and seems to scorn marriage in general. Unaware of their third rival for Phyllis’s affections, Ferdinand and Anthony try to block one another’s suits, inadvertently creating an opening for Frank in the process. Attempting to thwart Anthony’s wooing of Phyllis, Ferdinand arranges for Frank to disguise himself as a porter to intercept a love letter from Anthony and deliver one from The Royal Exchange was opened in 1571 as a center for London’s mercantile commerce, functioning as a kind of early modern shopping mall. 41 33 Ferdinand instead. Frank doesn’t deliver either letter, instead going to Cripple for advice on how to win Phyllis for himself. Cripple suggests that Frank forge rejection letters from Phyllis to Ferdinand and Anthony so that they stop pursuing her. Frank objects that this will take too much time, but Cripple assures him that he — for whatever reason — already has a collection of pre-written letters from a hoard of unpublished writing bequeathed to him by a local poet; Frank can simply use two of those. Frank agrees, and the rejection letters are sent. Frustrated but undeterred, Ferdinand and Anthony each decide to take the matter to Phyllis’s parents; the former resolves to win her father’s favor, while the latter will present his suit to her mother. Still in love with Cripple, Phyllis dodges her parents’ subsequent urgings to marry one of the elder Golding brothers by separately promising each that she will wed the one they prefer. Frank, still no closer to winning Phyllis’s love, reminds Cripple of the promise he had made to repay Frank for intervening in the attack at the play’s beginning; it seems that Cripple’s providing the forged letters to Ferdinand and Anthony wasn’t enough to settle the debt. Cripple therefore comes up with a fool-proof plan to ensure Frank and Phyllis’s marriage: Frank must woo the fair maid while in disguise as Cripple, the man she really loves. Wearing Cripple’s “crooked habit” (IV.ii.31), Frank receives Phyllis into the drawer’s shop. Phyllis proclaims her love for Cripple; Frank, after some feigned uncertainty, agrees to marry her, leaving Phyllis convinced she’s won her target. The real Cripple then arranges a second marriage between Moll and Bernard, a man in debt to Moll’s father. Oddly concerned with Mr. Berry’s finances, Cripple hopes for this marriage to settle Bernard’s debt. Moll had earlier decided to marry Bowdler, but Cripple convinces her that she really loves Bernard, telling her that she calls out for Bernard in her sleep (how or why 34 Cripple could be sleeping in such close proximity to Moll is left a mystery). With alarming ease, Moll buys into Cripple’s story and decides that she does indeed love Bernard, not Bowdler. In the play’s final scene, the romantic pairings are at last finalized. Moll marries Bernard, and Phyllis’s parents receive forged letters from Frank (or, perhaps, from Cripple’s stash of letters) revoking each of his brothers’ earlier proposals of marriage. Mr. and Mrs. Flower agree that this leaves Frank the only viable suitor. But Frank knows that Phyllis won’t go through with marrying him unless he looks like Cripple, so he dons the disguise a second time. Soon after Frank arrives at the Flower residence for the wedding, however, the real Cripple shows up to speak with Phyllis. We never learn what Cripple was going to say — he is immediately cut off by Phyllis’s cries of terror at the sight of two Cripples, and he never speaks again for the rest of the play. Frank reveals his true identity in an attempt to calm Phyllis, but she is so upset by the appearance of duplicate Cripples that she renounces both Cripple and Frank: now she will not marry either of them. With the other two Golding brothers by this point in attendance, Mr. Flower encourages his daughter to choose whomever she wishes to marry out of Ferdinand, Anthony, and Frank. Unimpressed with any of them, Phyllis nonetheless reverses her previous oath by passionlessly submitting to Frank’s bid for marriage. With both Phyllis’s and Moll’s weddings concluded (however unsatisfactorily), Fair Maid should end here. But it doesn’t. Instead, an easily forgettable moment from the second act is brought forward again to further steer the play’s ending in an entirely unexpected direction. Shortly after attacking Phyllis, the thief Bobbington had disguised himself as a sailor named Captain Racket and given Mr. Flower a diamond as insurance 35 for a “loan” of 10 pounds in a deal that Mr. Flower had eagerly accepted. In the play’s final moments, we learn that the diamond had been stolen from a man named Wood, who has traced the missing jewel to Mr. Flower and now demands his arrest. Fair Maid closes with Mr. Flower urging “Wife, and friends, all / Go with me to my trial. You shall see / A good conceit now brought to infamy” (V.i.373-375). Fair Maid’s bafflingly inconclusive ending has demanded significant attention from most of its scholarship. Any convincing reading of the play must somehow reckon with those last moments and try to make sense of an ending that rejects logical resolution in favor of introducing an entirely new conflict with no time left in which to unfold. The body of criticism on Fair Maid remains about as scant as that on Look About You; only a few substantial studies have been heretofore made of it. Within this scholarship, the play’s representation of women working at the heart of London’s economy has stood out as a point of interest. Juana Green reads Fair Maid as an anxious response to early modern women’s increasing sexual agency brought on by their involvement in London’s flourishing retail market.42 She interprets the ending as an illustration of growing insecurity within traditional marital arrangements: “Flower’s arrest ties up a loose thread in the plot, but it also undermines a model of marriage formation predicated on a model of market exchange, the exact model the play has just dramatized in the contractual negotiations or ‘business’ surrounding the two betrothals.”43 In other words, Mr. Flower’s arrest questions the ability of the old patriarchal family structure to survive within London’s new mercantile culture. Similarly, Jean Howard reads the play as an exposure of the Exchange’s threats to women’s safety (and chastity) and to the integrity of 42 Juana Green, "The Sempster's Wares: Merchandising and Marrying in The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607)," Renaissance Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2000): 1084-1118. 43 Green, “The Sempster’s Wares,” 1112. 36 traditional family control over marriage negotiations.44 For Howard, Fair Maid’s ending is the last of many illustrations of ineffective parental control within the play, perhaps beginning with Mr. Flower’s failure to protect Phyllis from sexual assault. “The play thus ends with the discrediting of patriarchal authority,” she writes. “His daughter barely escaped rape at Bobbington’s hands, but Mr. Flower was actually fleeced both of his 10 pounds and of his freedom.”45 Both Green’s and Howard’s readings of Fair Maid’s perplexing ending attempt to position it as a logical continuation of the play’s warnings against women’s involvement in the Exchange. But I think the ending’s extreme departure from the plot’s central focus remains an unjustifiably large disturbance to create for a mere reinforcement of points already made. If the play wants to depict personal and familial dangers associated with women’s work in the Exchange, it’s already done so time and time again by the final scene. Phyllis and Moll are threatened with sexual assault numerous times in the play, emphasizing that women working in the Exchange risk male customers equating them with the objects that they sell. As Howard herself notes, furthermore, the play aims to highlight parental ineptitude throughout. Mr. and Mrs. Flower both fail to secure Phyllis’s marriage to their preferred suitors, and Mr. Berry displays no agency whatsoever in selecting a spouse for Moll, allowing Cripple to play the father’s role of arranging a propitious match. Why should Fair Maid so fundamentally rupture itself in its last fifteen lines for the sake of reiterating an obvious theme? Even for a play with a weakness for redundancy, such an ending can’t comfortably belong within the work’s boundaries: at Jean E. Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 45 Howard, Theater of a City, 64. 44 37 the last moment, it points to a sequel that seems never to have existed, thus sloppily rejecting the self-containment fundamental to a standalone play. Criticism focusing on Cripple and his representation of disability also fails to account for Fair Maid’s final moments. For Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Cripple embodies the early modern suspicion that the disabled are potentially faking impairment to receive charity; in order to prove himself as legitimately disabled, Cripple must therefore labor to support himself while remaining careful not to render himself suspect by appearing too able.46 While this may be true as far as it goes, Row-Heyveld doesn’t necessarily provide a reading of Cripple as he functions within the play, much less a reading of the play itself. She offers no interpretation of the sudden reappearance at the play’s end of the Captain Racket scam. She does, however, try to make sense of Cripple’s conspicuous silence in that scene, proposing that his speechlessness represents “his final performance of honesty… Perhaps the Cripple is not immobilized by the actions of others,” Row-Heyveld suggests. “Perhaps what is required of him in order to secure his reputation as the rare honest disabled man is to step back from the spotlight and let these dramas unfold without his obvious interference.”47 This explanation, though well-intentioned, seems doubtful. If Cripple really sought to protect his honest reputation, he would be better served by keeping a safe distance from the marriages he’s duplicitously arranged. Rather, he arrives at Phyllis’s door with a specific intention to speak with her about something, only to be cut off by her exhortation to “Drive him from my sight!” (V.i.285) Cripple’s silence seems more likely to be in reaction to Phyllis’s new disgust with him — a drastic change in affection that Row-Heyveld also does not attempt to parse. Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Dissembling Disability in Early Modern Drama, Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 47 Row-Heyveld, Dissembling Disability in Early Modern Drama, 190-191. 46 38 Cripple’s role as a duplicitous match-maker at a time in which disability was understood as inherently suspect has proven an attractive subject for other critics. Katherine Schaap Williams describes how Cripple, inevitably associated with fraud and dissembling, is nevertheless too distinctively himself to ever impersonate anybody else.48 Like Redcap in Look About You, Cripple is prevented by his distinct body from reciprocating when others disguise themselves as him. Williams reads the play’s ending as a warning against duplicity: “Fittingly, for a comedy that opens with a prologue foregrounding the possibility of fraud that a ‘Cripple’ evokes, with a plot in which nearly every social interaction relies on deceit through studied ignorance, disguise, double-crossing, and intent to swindle, the play ends with the threat of punishment.”49 Certainly, the play’s relentless sequence of dishonest and selfish dealings seems to demand some kind of admonishment by the end. But Williams’s interpretation, like Green’s and Howard’s, fails to account for the fact that Fair Maid has already offered such a warning before Mr. Flower’s arrest. Once both weddings are performed, a distinct sense of hollow dissatisfaction pervades the scene, rather than the joyful resolution that such an occasion should precipitate. Phyllis agrees to choose one of the three Golding brothers out of a mere obligation to repay their efforts made in trying to woo her: “I must confess, you all have taken pains, / And I can give but all for that pains taken. / And all my all is but a little love, / And of a little, who can make division?” (V.i.328-331) She then settles on Frank to receive this “little love” because he demands more of her than his two brothers do. She reasons that Ferdinand and Anthony can be content remaining only friends with her since they respectively beg “Thy love” and “Thy life and love” from Katherine Schaap Williams, “‘More Legs Than Nature Gave Thee’: Performing the Cripple in The Fair Maid of the Exchange,” ELH 82, no.2 (2015): 491-519. 49 Williams, “‘More Legs Than Nature Gave Thee,’” 509. 48 39 Phyllis, while Frank won’t be satisfied unless he has “Thy life, thy love, thy self, and all for me” (333-335). Phyllis therefore resigns herself to Frank “to end all strife” (345). Moll’s marriage, meanwhile, is an equally unhappy occasion. She tells Bowdler that her betrayal can’t be undone because “What I do is by authority,” leaving Bowdler to pledge vengeance on Bernard: “Thus, in arms, will Menelaus mourn, / Till Troy be sacked, and Helena return” (358-361). Both of Fair Maid’s plots thus joylessly burn themselves out. Frank is the sole character to have attained his goal: Moll and Phyllis have both married men they don’t love; Mr. and Mrs. Flower have each failed to secure their desired son-in-law; Bernard, Anthony, and Ferdinand have all been tricked out of wooing their beloveds; and Cripple, who had previously been known as “An honest man, as any is in all the town” (II.ii.174), has been publicly reviled as a monster. This profound unhappiness resulting from the deceitfully arranged marriages should represent punishment enough for the characters’ various dishonesties. In the wake of a much more natural and widespread sense of retribution, Mr. Flower’s arrest feels entirely excessive and unnecessary, as well as decidedly unjust. After all, he didn’t steal the diamond, or even know that it was purloined. In Williams’s reading, however, Mr. Flower bears the punishment for all the characters’ misdealings as if they did not already receive their own penance from the two grimly settled marriages. Cripple’s extensive involvement in Fair Maid’s various schemes naturally draws a parallel between disability and theatricality. Genevieve Love identifies him as an explicit figure for dramatic artifice that the play wants to — but ultimately cannot — repudiate. She notes that “Cripple establishes the connection of theatricality and disability… 40 directly, since his prosthetic embodiment and movement becomes literally a site of imitation when Frank Golding impersonates him.”50 The simultaneous appearance of the real Cripple and Frank-disguised-as-Cripple in the final scene stresses this relationship even further. For Love, Fair Maid’s rejection of Cripple at this moment represents a “fantasy that doubleness can wholly and powerfully resolve to singleness — a fantasy, that is, that theatre’s power does not bank on the stirring tremor between actor and role, the frisson that we might call the theatre’s crutch.”51 This fantasy is exposed as fiction when the Captain Racket plot reappears at the last moment: “At the end of the play, the ‘borrowed shape’ of Captain Racket haunts the unfortunate Master Flower, suggesting that ‘borrowed shapes,’ even if cast off by their wearers or blown away, are not so easily consigned to the realm of the dead.”52 Love marks this moment as a triumphant return of the theatrical force that Cripple embodies, a metaphorical “strik[ing] back” of Cripple’s crutches — and of the stage — underscored by the fact that the owner of the stolen diamond is named Wood.53 Love’s interpretation of the play’s ending makes a compelling case for Cripple as a figure for theatricality. After all, Cripple compulsively directs the affairs of his neighbors in much the same way a director or playwright might instruct actors. When Mr. Berry fumes at Cripple and his acquaintances, “Oh, I want words for to define you rightly” (II.ii.131), Cripple is happy to script those words for him: “I’ll teach thee words. / Thou shouldst have come to every one of us / As thus: ‘Thou wretch, thou miser, thou vild slave and drudge to money…’”(134-137). Similarly, he encourages Bowdler to recite Genevieve Love, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, 43. 51 Love, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability, 65. 52 Love, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability, 66. 53 Love, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability, 67. 50 41 verse from Venus and Adonis as a way to impress the quick-witted Moll: “Do you not remember one pretty phrase, / To scale the walls of a fair wench’s love? … If you remember but a verse or two, / I’ll pawn my head, goods, lands, and all, ‘twill do” (III.iii.60-65). And, of course, both of the marriages at the play’s end owe their fulfillment directly to Cripple’s meddling. Cripple’s fantastic degree of influence over Fair Maid’s other characters, as well as the prologue’s invocation “Though our invention lame imperfect be, / Yet give the cripple alms for charity” (13-14), appear to mark him as a personification of dramatic authorship. Indeed, Love’s reading of the play falls in step with Richard Waswo’s earlier assertion that Cripple “is an explicit figure of the author.”54 Scholarship on this play thus agrees that Cripple stands as Fair Maid’s creative center, producing the very fabric of the story. And yet much of Cripple’s supposed originality crumbles upon a closer look. Authors, after all, depend upon a vast network of outsiders to create a single work. For a playwright’s vision to emerge, actors, playgoers, patrons, and craftsmen must all participate in the piece’s creation. Moreover, the author himself must in all likelihood take inspiration from existing works created by others. Fittingly, then, Cripple’s very first lines disavow agency over himself. Immediately upon entering, he apostrophizes his crutches in a quasi-soliloquy: “Now, you supporters of decrepit youth, / That mount this substance ‘twixt fair heaven and earth, / Be strong to bear that huge deformity, / And be my hands as nimble to direct them, / As your desires to waft me hence to London” (I.i.75-79). Cripple here introduces himself as an aid for the crutches and their movement, inverting the relationship between body and prosthetic. Like a poet or 54 Richard Waswo, “Crises of Credit: Monetary and Erotic Economies in the Jacobean Theatre,” in Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy, ed. Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock, & Anne-Julia Zwierlein (Ashgate, 2004), 62. 42 playwright, he professes dependency on a muse to enable his creations: he serves as a mere conduit for his crutches’ genius. When Cripple successfully beats away Scarlet and Bobbington, they too identify his prosthetics as the real agent to be dealt with: “Come thou behind him, snatch away his crutches, / And then thou know’st he needs must fall to ground” (107-108). The plan works, leaving Cripple helplessly unable to defend himself or the two women, reduced to another “distressèd object” for Frank to rescue (127). In thanking Frank for his intervention, Cripple again distances himself from personal agency. He prays, “May but the cripple be / Of power to gratify this courtesy, / I then shall think the heavens favor me” (131-133). Not only does Cripple here use a third person descriptor to speak about himself rather than for himself, he also ascribes any “power” he may display in the future to divine favor rather than to his own efforts. The play’s first scene thus ends with Cripple insisting upon an absence of ingenuity or control over his life, let alone over anybody else’s. Cripple’s body clearly forces him into dependency on prosthetics and, should his crutches fail, on able-bodied people. Yet he stands out as a disabled man who is nonetheless gainfully employed, refusing to confirm the early modern suspicion that disabled people were merely trying to avoid labor and fleece others of their charity.55 Cripple frequently reminds other characters of his job as a “drawer” and uses his work as a justification for rejecting social invitations. When Bowdler exhorts Cripple to come In his 1573 Caveat for Common Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones, Thomas Harman describes “Roges” who beg money by “halting althoughe they nede not” and betray “by their coloure [that] they cary both helth & hipocrisy about them, wherby they get gain, when others want that cannot fayne and dissemble.” The same suspicion appears in the advice “Cripple, do not counterfeit, (as some do) but do some easie work for the good of the Common-wealth,” in Stanleyes Remedy: Or, the Way how to Reform Wandring Beggers, Theeves, High-Way Robbers and Pick-Pockets. Or, an Abstract of His Discoverie: Wherein is Shewed, that Sodomes Sin of Idlenesse is the Poverty and Misery of this Kingdome. by some Well-Wishers to the Honour of God, and the Publike Good both of Rich and Poore (London: 1646), 1. 55 43 dancing with Bernard and him, Cripple insists “My business stays me here… I’ll to my shop / And fall to work” (II.ii.196-206). And after devising the plan for Frank to disrupt his brothers’ designs on Phyllis, Cripple urges Frank to leave him to his work: “And so farewell! I can no longer stand / To talk with you: I have some work in hand” (III.ii.141-142). His shop even seems in some ways to be an extension of himself: stage directions mark his entrances as “The Cripple at work” (s.d. III.ii.1) or “Enter Cripple in his shop” (s.d. IV.ii.1), as if his workplace enters the stage along with him. In fact, we may reasonably conjecture that Cripple has no residence other than his shop. He mentions to Bowdler that he used to walk on the ground floor of the Exchange “before the visitation of my legs, and my expense in timber” (II.ii.53-54). Assuming that his shop is located near the embroiderers’ businesses in the Exchange’s upper-floor “pawn,” it seems likely that Cripple might find himself confined to his workplace in order to avoid moving up and down a staircase after his affliction. Cripple’s labor may thus conflate itself with his private life, further stressing his employment’s value as a cornerstone of his identity. Cripple’s dedication to his job would appear to make him a productive, self-sufficient member of London’s economic sphere. But at its core, his role as a drawer is a distinctly unproductive one, utterly dependent on the artistry and skill of others to be at all useful. Kay Staniland describes the drawer’s work as but one step within a medieval/early modern assembly line of textile production: “Production of… repetitive motifs was aided by tracing the design onto paper, pricking the outline, and then transferring the design on to cloth any number of times by pounding with powdered chalk, pumice, or charcoal. When the paper was lifted, rows of fine dots of powder lay revealed, and these in turn could be fixed with ink or paint…”56 Any suggestion of 56 Kay Staniland, Embroiderers, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, 31. 44 creative artistry that the word “drawer” may evoke therefore rings hollow. Cripple doesn’t earn his living by designing motifs, but by tracing pre-cut patterns onto fabric for seamstresses like Phyllis to embroider over. Nor does he even get to decide which patterns to transfer onto a garment: the most detailed glimpses we get into his professional life involve a seamstress dictating the pattern Cripple should trace. Moll plans to go to him with a design for “pretty peascod” (I.ii.20), and Phyllis instructs him to create an intricate and obviously romantic image featuring “wanton Love, / Drawing his bow, shooting an amorous dart” (II.ii.224-225) as well as a pierced heart, a figure for disdain, a laurel tree, and a rhyme that Phyllis apparently wrote. All the creative, original, and productive labor in Cripple’s profession falls to people other than himself, leaving him to mechanically trace over pregenerated ideas. The play thus denies Cripple professional independence, situating him as a cog between designer and embroiderer just as it confines him between two crutches. Fair Maid continually recalls this system of economic reliance in its romantic plots. Wooing in this play never involves only a suitor and his beloved, but seeks the involvement of other men in an unnecessarily complicated widening of romantic enterprise. When we first see Bowdler attempting to flirt with Moll, Bernard soon arrives and participates on Bowdler’s behalf, encouraging “To her, sir, to her! I dare swear she loves you” (I.ii.70) and “try her again. / You know by course all women must be coy. / To her again; then she may haply yield” (76-78). Bernard’s role in this scene seems completely useless and perhaps actually detrimental to Bowdler’s suit: Moll exits with the advice to “learn this when you do woo: / Arm you with courage, and with good take-heed, / For he that spares to speak must spare to speed” (83-85). Moll hints that 45 Bowdler will need to personally quicken his wits and improve his conversation if he hopes to impress her. Bowdler promptly disregards this suggestion by falling back upon a third party’s support, immediately begging “call her again Bernard” (86) as if he cannot reach out to Moll himself. A similar pattern holds for each of the Golding brothers’ pursuits of Phyllis. Ferdinand plans not to deliver a love letter for Phyllis himself, but to “by some trusty messenger or other, / Convey the same into my love’s own hand” (II.iii.85-86). Eavesdropping on Ferdinand, Anthony accordingly decides to intercept the letter and send one of his own. Like Ferdinand, Anthony won’t deliver his letter personally, sending it instead “by a porter to her hand” (136). The older brothers’ unwillingness to deliver their own love letters allows Frank to foil both of them. Ferdinand enlists Frank as a disguised “porter” to deliver his letter to Phyllis instead of Anthony’s (thus reversing Anthony’s own interception plot), putting both love letters into Frank’s hands. Frank, upon finding himself in full control over his brothers’ suits for Phyllis, observes of them that “It had been better you had sent some other” (218). Frank himself cannot envision Ferdinand or Anthony taking charge of their own letters, instead imagining that the elder Goldings would have succeeded if they’d only recruited a third party other than Frank for the task. Instead of keeping his victory to himself, Frank, too, instantly looks to involve an extra person in his romantic endeavors: “There is a cripple dwelling here at hand, / That’s very well acquainted with the maid… To him I will for counsel; he shall be / My tutor by his wit and policy” (248-253). Frank complicates matters even further when he gets to Cripple’s shop. He arrives still in his porter persona, which he’s named “Trusty John.” He then claims Anthony’s 46 love letter as his own composition, though transcribed by somebody else, and asks Cripple to read it. This scheme is completely inexplicable. The letter is obviously signed by Anthony, and Frank has no reason to want to deceive Cripple when the drawer already owes him a favor for rescuing him at the play’s beginning. Cripple easily sees through Frank’s disguise anyways, slyly musing that “Trusty John” didn’t write the letter but rather “being employèd as a messenger, / Play’dst legerdemain with him that sent the same” (III.ii.26-27). Frank immediately drops the act, conceding “Nay, then, I see I must disclose myself” (33), leaving us with no inkling of what he had hoped to achieve by this bizarre plot. The episode epitomizes Fair Maid’s network of romantic dependence: Frank invents a separate identity in which to ask for help reading a letter that he supposedly composed with a scribe’s assistance, but was actually written by somebody else — all before he can broach his actual request for help wooing Phyllis. Evidently, the work of love must involve as many real or imagined people as possible in Fair Maid’s social economy. The helpless dependency upon others that all these suitors display corresponds to the language they use to speak about love. Each of them consistently describes love as a disabling force, robbing them of their physical and mental faculties. Bowdler predicts that if he earned Moll’s sexual favor “it would intoxicate my head” (I.ii.63). Ferdinand describes his infatuation as being plagued by “A little, little boy that’s blind… Woe be to those that feel his wounding dart. / And one of them I am: wounded so deep, / That in my passions I no mean can keep” (I.iii.36-48). Anthony wishes “That I myself had still been like myself; / That my poor heart had never felt the wound / Whose anguish keeps me in a deadly sound” (65-67). And Frank feels himself falling in love by first noting “I am not 47 well, and yet I am not ill. I am — what am I?” (I.iv.1-2). Frank’s language here figures love as not only a physically debilitating condition, but also as a complete loss of individual identity. The images of injury, illness, and self-loss that Fair Maid’s suitors use to speak about love perhaps justify their cooperative wooing strategies: if love truly “disables” a man, then he might really depend on others to help him remedy his condition. Fittingly, then, Cripple becomes the primary organizer of each love plot, marked by his body as a resident expert on impairment despite his asexual claim to “detest the humor of fond love” (II.ii.241). Indeed, Cripple’s extensive involvement in Fair Maid’s romances comes to betray a profound deficiency in his capacity to operate independently as a complete individual. When Frank brings his brothers’ love letters to Cripple for advice, the latter suggests that “You shall deliver neither of them both, / But frame two letters of your own invention, / Letters of flat denial to their suits… as from Phyllis” (III.ii.65-68). At Frank’s reluctance to spend time doing so, Cripple lessens the degree of originality expected from him, revealing “I have the copies in my custody / Of sundry letters to the same effect… My own, I assure you, sir” (78-80). But these letters also prove to be less original than Cripple at first makes them seem. Just a few lines later, he admits that he lacks the skill for epistolary composition and instead inherited this collection of prewritten letters from a deceased poet who “did bequeath to me / His library, which was just nothing, / But rolls, and scrolls, and bundles of cast wit, / Such as durst never visit Paul’s churchyard” (102-105). What Cripple can do is memorize the contents of all these papers, “pater-noster-like” (110), so that he can impress company by reciting verse and passing it for his own: “I could now… Upon a theme make an extemporal ditty / (Or one at least 48 should seem extemporal) / Out of th’ abundance of this legacy, / That all would judge it, and report it, too, / To be the infant of a sudden wit” (111-117). Moreover, Cripple can memorize what he overhears in conversation. He conjures an unsettling scenario in which he dines with “the best-witted gallants” to “overhear their talk, observe their humors, / Collect their jests, put them into a play, / And tire them too with payment, / to behold / What I have filched from them. This I could do” (121-127). The entire description of how Cripple got his collection of letters drips with the language of formulaic imitation. The words “frame,” “copies,” and “cast,” all lead to Cripple’s vision of systematically produced writing that begins as a sheaf of letters and ends as a recirculatory machine of plagiarism. This scene exposes Cripple — and the work he does in arranging the play’s two marriages — as entirely fraudulent and unoriginal. Any impression that he may give throughout Fair Maid as being a creative figure dissolves with this bald admission of total reliance on anonymous strangers to generate Cripple’s wit for him. Moreover, his specifically theatrical vision of charging people to view their own thoughts put into a play suggests a disingenuity inherent to dramatic authorship itself. Cripple implies that all plays — including Fair Maid — may be nothing more than regurgitated arrangements of overheard ideas and turns of phrase. In Cripple, Fair Maid presents a character who seems at first to overflow with creative agency, exerting an influence upon the plot disproportionate to his physical capabilities. But at a second glance Cripple discloses himself as utterly deficient, lacking the ability to create original ideas and products just as he lacks the means to move his body without external aid. In this sense, Cripple does indeed fulfill the prologue’s explicit identification of the play with him. Like Cripple, Fair Maid is ultimately a deficient text. 49 The play’s 1607 quarto is one of only two surviving playbooks of the period to provide in its dramatis personae a suggested doubling of roles so that “Eleven may easily act this comedy.”57 But this doubling chart doesn’t actually work. The roles of Mrs. Flower and Bernard are assigned to the same actor, but both characters have to be onstage simultaneously in the final scene; the same goes for Mr. Berry and “Officers.” If the play’s suggested doublings were followed, the final scene would produce even more confusion than it already does. Mrs. Flower would have to deliver the lines “Husband! Because hereafter you may say / And think me loving, loyal, and submiss, / I am content. Frank shall have my consent” (V.i.153-155) before somehow entering as Bernard just three lines later and addressing Mr. Flower in an entirely different manner: “By your leave, Master Flower!” (158) More shockingly, Mr. Berry would need to go from advising Mr. Flower on dealing with Phyllis’s distress to declaring “Master Flower, I arrest you upon felony, and charge you to obey” (363). A document that would appear to helpfully clarify production of the play thus only creates dysfunctionality when put into practice. A similar problem emerges when considering the logistics of Frank’s disguise as Cripple. When Cripple first suggests the means by which Frank should woo Phyllis, he urges him to “take / My crooked habit, and in that disguise / Court her, yea, win her, for she will be won” (IV.ii.30-32). The “crooked habit” seems to refer to Cripple’s cloak. Oddly, he makes no mention of the more important component of Cripple’s costume: his crutches. If we take this to mean that Cripple doesn’t lend Frank his crutches at all, the disguise should fail. “Crutch” is, after all, used as another name for Cripple numerous See Love’s introduction to her edition of Fair Maid in The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, ed. Jeremy Lopez, Milton: Taylor & Francis, 2020, 816. 57 50 times throughout the play. If we assume, on the other hand, that Cripple includes the crutches as part of his “crooked habit,” we have to wonder how he is supposed to exit the stage, since he cannot walk without them. The text’s failure to indicate how this disguise works adds yet another element of perplexity to Fair Maid’s ending. After securing the Flowers’ blessing to wed Phyllis, Frank asks that they “give me leave / To come and court her in my borrowed shape” (V.i.97-98) since Phyllis expects to marry Cripple. We don’t see Frank ask to borrow Cripple’s disguise again; it remains uncertain whether Cripple was even aware that Frank would be donning his “crooked habit” once more. Cripple’s final lines reveal nothing of his degree of involvement in this second disguising: “Gentlemen, sweet bloods, or brethren of familiarity, I would speak with Phyllis. Shall I have audience?” (282-283) Again, the question arises: what does Frank’s “Cripple” disguise look like? If he borrowed the crutches, how did the real Cripple travel to the Flower residence? If he didn’t, how can the disguise be convincing? Does Cripple own two pairs of crutches, raising his total number of “legs” to six? How else could Frank and Cripple appear to Phyllis as entirely identical? Fair Maid’s costuming logistics prove crucial for the play’s climactic moment to succeed, but the text offers no indication of how the disguising works. This absence of critical detail adds itself to the tally of insufficiencies accumulating in Fair Maid’s final scene. If we are to take Fair Maid seriously, we have to wonder whether its conundrums aren’t glitches, but deliberate features. Such a problematic work seems to insist on its own insufficiency as a text: in order to know how the play really navigates itself, it demands to be viewed in the communal context of the theatre - not consumed in isolation. The text of the play thus announces itself as not enough on its own but as, at best, a 51 mediator between reader and actor. Or, to use Cripple’s words, Fair Maid exists as an imperfect “substance ’twixt fair heaven and earth.” Indeed, the play builds its insufficiency into its very plot structure, doggedly charting a course towards collapse in its last minutes. Early in the play, Moll foreshadows the Cripple/Frank disguise plot when she wonders whether there’s any difference between a real flower and an embroidered one: “For what is he, loving a thing in heart, / Loves not the counterfeit, though made by art? / I cannot tell how others’ fancies stand, / But I rejoice sometime to take in hand / The simile of that I love” (I.ii.15-19). In other words, the image or copy of a beloved can produce just as strong an attraction as the beloved itself does. Phyllis adheres to this logic, accepting Frank’s copy of Cripple as equal to the original — until she sees both original and copy standing together. Rather than make a choice between two identically desirable Cripples, Phyllis radically reverses her previous estimation of Cripple’s body: “Hence, foul deformity! Nor thou, nor he shall my companion be” (V.i.288-289). This moment marks an enormous rupture in the play’s expected trajectory. Following the rhetoric established at the beginning, Phyllis should have found Cripple’s “simile” just as attractive as the original, even knowing Frank to be a counterfeit. Instead, she rejects both Cripples as loathsome and only reluctantly yields to Frank’s demand for “Thy life, thy love, thy self, and all for me” (335). With her marriage thus unhappily arranged, the play already fails to live up to the ending promised by its self-identification as a comedy. But in a final self-destructive flourish, it insists upon a second explosive fracture in its last few seconds with Mr. Flower’s arrest. At every possible turn, Fair Maid chooses to build deficiency into its ending. Its recommended number of actors isn’t enough to produce the final scene; it offers no 52 feasible explanation for how Cripple and Frank can both convincingly look like Cripple at the same time; Cripple, the play’s main character, never gets to say his final lines; and Mr. Flower announces the imminent spectacle of a trial that never happens. Ultimately, perhaps, Fair Maid does give the audience exactly what it promised in its prologue: a “lame imperfect… cripple” (13-14) of a play that, like its protagonist, wears a shape marked out as inescapably deficient. This fundamental inability to stand alone perfectly suits itself to the play’s setting. As the epicenter of early modern capitalism, London’s Royal Exchange brimmed with people beginning to experience a new social order of interdependence. The objects for sale at the Exchange were not crafted by one or two skilled artisans, but produced by assembly lines of intermediaries, few of whom ever saw the final product they had worked on. Early modern shoppers thus found themselves not only unable to craft their own goods, but dependent upon a vast economic web of other equally deficient individuals just to create something as simple as a handkerchief. Hence, Cripple and the disabled play that he inhabits naturally embody Londoners’ new and rapidly expanding condition of reliance upon numberless strangers that marks the beginnings of modern capitalism. 53 Bibliography Anonymous. Pimlyco. Or, Runne Red-Cap Tis a Mad World at Hogsdon. London: 1609. Anonymous. Stanleyes Remedy: Or, the Way how to Reform Wandring Beggers, Theeves, High-Way Robbers and Pick-Pockets. Or, an Abstract of His Discoverie: Wherein is Shewed, that Sodomes Sin of Idlenesse is the Poverty and Misery of this Kingdome. by some Well-Wishers to the Honour of God, and the Publike Good both of Rich and Poore. London: 1646. Armin, Robert. The History of the Two Maids of More-clacke. London: 1609. Bérubé, Michael. “Disability and Narrative.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 120, no. 2 (2005): 568-576. Boorde, Andrew. The Breuiarie of Health VVherin Doth Folow, Remedies, for all Maner of Sicknesses & Diseases, the which may be in Man Or Woman. Expressing the Obscure Termes of Greke, Araby, Latin, Barbary, and English, Concerning Phisick and Chirurgerie. Compyled by Andrew Boord, Doctor of Phisicke: An English-Man. London: 1587. Brockman, B. A. “Children and the Audiences of Robin Hood.” South Atlantic Review 48, no. 2 (1983): 67-83. Davis, Lennard J. “The End of Identity Politics: On Disability as an Unstable Category.” In The Disability Studies Reader: Fourth Edition, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 268-282. New York: Routledge, 2013. Gabbard, D. Christopher, and Susannah B. Mintz, ed. A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Green, Juana. “The Sempster's Wares: Merchandising and Marrying in The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607).” Renaissance Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2000): 1084-1118. Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Shape of a Life.” The New Yorker, February 5, 2013. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-shape-of-a-life. Harman, Thomas. Caveat for Common Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones. London: 1573. Hirsch, Richard S.M. A Pleasant Commodie, Called Looke About You: A Critical Edition. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1980. Hobgood, Allison P. Beholding Disability in Renaissance England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. Howard, Jean E. Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Hyland, Peter. Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub. Co., 2011. Jones, Fred L. “Look about You and The Disguises.” PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 44, no. 3 (1929): 835-841. Lancashire, Anne B. “Look about You as a History Play.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 9, no. 2 (1969): 321-34. Lopez, Jeremy, ed. The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama. Milton: Taylor & Francis, 2020. Love, Genevieve. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Mitchell, David T, and Sharon L Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Nelson, Malcolm A. “‘Look About You’ and the Robin Hood Tradition.” Notes and Queries 9, no. 4 (1962): 141-43. Row-Heyveld, Lindsey. Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 54 Staniland, Kay. Embroiderers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Strickland, Matthew. Henry the Young King, 1155-1183. London: Yale University Press, 2016. Totenberg, Nina. “Supreme Court guts affirmative action, effectively ending race-conscious admissions.” NPR, June 29, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/29/1181138066/affirmative-action-supreme-court-decision. Waswo, Richard. “Crises of Credit: Monetary and Erotic Economies in the Jacobean Theatre.” In Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy, edited by Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein, 55-73. Ashgate, 2004. Wiggins, Martin. British Drama 1533-1642: A Catalogue: Volume IV: 1598-1602. Oxford University Press, 2014. Williams, Katherine Schaap. “‘More Legs Than Nature Gave Thee’: Performing the Cripple in The Fair Maid of the Exchange.” ELH 82, no.2 (2015): 491-519. Wood, David Houston. “New Directions: ‘Some tardy cripple’: Timing Disability in Richard III.” In Richard III: A Critical Reader, edited by Annaliese Connolly, 91-107. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013. 55 Name of Candidate: Lily Weeks Date of Submission: August 7, 2023