Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability by Genevieve Love (review)

Two of the foundational tenets of disability studies are resisting the use of disability and illness as metaphor (Susan Sontag) and resisting using disability as a “narrative prosthesis,” a narrative device that either overburdens the disabled body with meaning or hollows it out as a storytelling tool (David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder). Such formulations create stigmas and myths around disability while placing disability in service of something else (often to show that able-bodiedness is the baseline, natural, and normal state of the body). When attending to disability in premodern literature and culture, metaphor and narrative prosthesis become critical pitfalls as scholars are pulled either to consider disability as discourse and rhetoric or try to recover how “real” disabled people lived in the past.

Thankfully, there are a number of studies that avoid these pitfalls, often by directly challenging them. Elizabeth Bearden’s Monstrous Kinds and Jason Farr’s Novel Bodies, for instance, weigh the differences between the real and the discursive. Collections like Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood’s Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum’s Defects: Engendering the Modern Body, and Chris Mounsey’s The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century ask scholars to think through similar theoretical cruxes. Genevieve Love’s Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability may be added to this list, as it deftly highlights and narrates these tensions—between real and representative, material and discursive, metaphor and lived experience. Love thinks deliberately and specifically about disability figurations, and this choice opens up an exciting conversation about theatre, mimesis, the stage versus the page, and finally, the way we write about theatre history.

By foregrounding theatre and theatrical meaning-making, Love moves early modern disability studies into a new space. One of the valuable contributions of this work is simply that it makes visible disability’s saturation through early modern theatricality. As Love notes, “exploration of disability’s privileged relationship to literary representation began, in disability studies, with the novel, or at any rate with narrative fiction” (10). Alongside the reminder that, indeed, theatre and disability have a shared history, Love makes a more provocative claim: that disability is the way early modern England understood theatrical meaning-making. She writes that “prosthetic disabled characters parade the being of theatrical persons, and animate dramatic textual forms” (37). In other words, prosthetic performances show audiences how the actor is different from the role, and how the form of drama makes meaning on and through bodies. To illustrate how the theatre made use of “disabled characters as figures for theatrical representation” (30), Love explores the work that the characters Cripple (The Fair Maid of the Exchange) and Stump (A Larum for London) do not only in their respective plays’ plotting but also for the theatre itself. She sees these two roles as jointly constituting “a particular kind of theatrical analogy-machine” (22), varying in their operations but yoked together by the way they mediate how actors relate to their roles through the binaries of excess/lack, similarity/difference, horizontal/vertical movement, standing/stopping, past/present, and domestic/foreign (71).

This monograph is important both for performance studies scholars and for literary historians of disability—beginning with Love’s theoretically savvy introduction, which synthesizes disability and performance theory. Despite her claim that her work is “[g]rounded in neither a historicist nor a disability studies methodology” (6), Love signals her theoretical positioning by attending up front to disability as metaphor and narrative prosthesis. This is a smart move since, as her title makes clear, she is centering figures of disability, which necessarily require attention to metaphor and prosthesis. She writes that “[m]y focus on figuration would seem to fly in the face of much disability studies scholarship, which over the past twenty years or so has introduced a variety of ethical critiques of disability as metaphor” (8). However, Love’s deft rendering of key concepts from...