- On Good Form(s)
In The Year of the King, his account of playing Richard III for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984, Antony Sher describes how he was warned that 'Richard is notorious for crippling actors'. Famously playing Richard as a 'bottled spider' on crutches, Sher details the mental and physical preparations he undertook to play this demanding role. He mused that 'maybe it would be possible to develop such speech and flexibility with the crutches that they became a positive asset. That's what you see when you look at someone who is disabled: they have a different rhythm.'1 Sher began his performance sitting upstage in the 'sun', lazily recounting Richard's famous opening soliloquy, before making a startling dash downstage on his crutches, disrupting the familiar rhythm of Shakespeare's lines. This is an image to hold in mind when encountering Unfixable Forms: Katherine Schaap Williams's book attends to the different, shifting rhythms offered by the perspective of disability.
Schaap Williams's monograph is the latest fine addition to the newly emerging and rapidly growing field of early modern disability studies. It is not simply a 'book about disability' but rather a reorientation of what we think we know about some key aspects of early modern theatre, performance practice, and theatrical embodiment. Williams makes explicit the connection between the construction of disability as a social and cultural phenomenon and the discursive work of representation as embodied by the actor. Her book achieves her stated aim of attending 'both to what the theatre demonstrates about disability in early modern culture and to what the performance of disability in the early modern theatre makes possible on and beyond the stage'. This reciprocity is key to her argument that 'theatrical form relies on disability to unfix theatrical signification', and the mutability of disability, and what this means for the equally varied theatre of early modernity, is the book's central pillar. [End Page 373]
Disability studies is often consciously public and performative, with its origins in the activism of disability rights groups and its development taking place alongside intersectional disciplines such as feminism and queer theory.2 Schaap Williams's book offers several case studies for how its energies and ideas work in tandem with early modern texts. Unfixable Forms is not breaking entirely new ground here. Collections by David Hobgood and Alison Wood and by Sujata Iyengar have placed experiences of disability alongside early modern medical theories and embodied understanding.3 But Schaap Williams offers an elegantly argued and worthy addition to this scholarship. Her emphasis is on the precarity of disability as a social category, and the difficulty in both definitively defining and embodying it. By thinking about disability as a 'gerund', rather than a noun, she exposes the instability of the social construction of disability, both in the early modern period and in our own. For Schaap Williams, the staging of disability in early modern theatre offers a reciprocal opportunity to see 'how early modern theatre thinks about disability through the form of the actor, and what, in turn, the staging of disability allowed the theatre to think about its own practices'. One of the strengths of this book is its consistent focus on how these signifiers are 'constructed through interaction', rendering disability 'a temporal phenomenon and therefore radically contingent'. This is Schaap Williams's thesis: that disability is constructed between people and [End Page 374] through their participation in society, and that 'disability operates as a formal aesthetic for the early modern theatre'.
The first chapter begins with Shakespeare's Richard III. Schaap Williams takes perhaps the most famous of all disabled literary figures to illustrate how Richard's presence undoes and unfixes the staging and idea of disability, even as other characters, and subsequent adaptations, attempt to categorise him definitively. Schaap Williams's perceptive close reading of the play notes that Richmond is repeatedly called 'fair', and that this is the 'keyword for the "normative body" of a king'. Fairness here not...