Q. What is the book about?
Performing Disability showcases performers from the medieval and Early Modern era who seem to have been attributed with some manner of “disability”. And the book’s primary focus is on those performers in the record whose ostensible disability played a part in their act. Drawing largely on new or little-known evidence, the book attempts to address a gap in the current study of historic disability and its relationship to performance culture: by focusing on the real evidence for disabled performers, alongside those often studied literary and artistic representations (i.g., in Chaucer’s work, in the Shakespearean drama, in premodern art, etc.), Performing Disability prompts a wholesale reassessment of disability as an aspect of performance in premodern British and Irish societies. Along the way, it tells the seldom-heard tales of disabled performers in the historic record whose appearance is as remarkable as it is enlightening.
Each chapter investigates a traditional category of historic “disability,” focusing on performers whose intellectual variance, blindness, distinctive size or shape, musculoskeletal difference, or other “othering” through disability seems to have informed the nature of their performance.
Much of the evidence is new: indeed, the evidence for individual disabled performers is drawn primarily from unpublished manuscript sources, or else overlooked records in the premodern archive. Each chapter investigates a traditional category of historic “disability,” focusing on performers whose intellectual variance, blindness, distinctive size or shape, musculoskeletal difference, or other “othering” through disability seems to have informed the nature of their performance. It considers evidence for the lives of those performers alongside popular fictional representations of disability-in-performance, demonstrating how premodern life and art both reflect and contrast one another.
Q. What inspired you to write this book?
Work on this project rose initially from work on the Records of Early English Drama or “REED.” If you’re not aware of this long-running archival project, you really should be. Since the late 1970s, REED scholars have been working to identify and transcribe any and all records for early “performance” from across Britain and Ireland. Records include the earliest identifiable evidence from the early medieval period, from the late 16th-century rise of the professional theatres in London, up to the closing of the theatres by the Puritan Parliament in 1642. Understandably, the number of records is enormous, and the work is ongoing. To date, over 30 print collections have been published (in the “big red” city, county, and London-based volumes), and there is a growing list of “e-REED” collections appearing on the project’s new online database (see REED Online).
I have been working with John McKinnell on the forthcoming collection for County Durham (Durham is in the far north-east of England, near the Scottish border). My colleague Professor McKinnell and I have identified several fascinating records from the historic “palatinate” (or self-governing) County Durham, and, in particular, from the numerous records surviving from Durham’s powerful Benedictine priory. Durham Priory was one of England’s most powerful monastic institutions, due largely to its position as the resting place of Saint Cuthbert and his holy relics. Pilgrims came from around Europe to pray at the shrine of St. Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral (where the relics are still housed today).
Lucky for us, the medieval monks of Durham kept good records. And they liked to entertain: there are numerous records surviving for musicians, actors, and other entertainers in the priory records. These come not only from the main monastery in Durham City, but also from the 11 or so “daughter houses” across northern England and southern Scotland.
Q. So who were these performers, exactly?
What fascinated me from the beginning was the number and detail of records I kept coming across of performers who were attributed with some manner of disability or “impairment” (to use modern legal and/or social designations). For instance, the priory and its wider community employed numerous blind harp players—this kind of musician seems to have been in particular demand. Throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries, blind harpists and ‘citharists’ received regular employment by the monastery and its community.
Even more fascinating were those records that featured what we might call “celebrities”—e.g., when the same performer appeared for multiple occasions. The Durham Priory accounts record multiple payments to figures with names like “William, Blind Harper of Newcastle,” “Walter, the Blind Harper,” “Master Nicholas, the Dwarf Harper of York,” alongside many others. Many of these figures appear again and again in the priory records—so frequently, in fact, that it is possible to construct parts of their lives and careers as in-demand performers.
Even more fascinating were those records that featured what we might call “celebrities”—e.g., when the same performer appeared for multiple occasions.
Individual chapters started taking shape for the book, built around some of these performers. For example, “Blind William of Newcastle” led to wider consideration blindness as an aspect of musical performance; Tomas Fatuus, the medieval priory’s resident “fool,” to the possible conceptualization of intellectual variance as “performative”; Master Nicholas of York to the potential othering of performers of atypical size and shape (and so forth). Each of these historic performers contributes to discussions about the nature and conceptualization of disability in performance during the medieval and early Tudor periods. Each is also placed alongside some of those famous literary examples of disability—for example, the medieval Croxton play’s handless Jonathas, Piers Plowman’s prophetic “lunatik lollers,” King Lear’s blinded Gloucester, the “curtail’d” Richard III, etc., etc. Each chapter thus sets out to consider disability and performance in-the-round, attempting to bring historic evidence alongside fictional representation, so that the various kinds evidence can work together in concert.
Q. What was the most surprising or exciting thing that you discovered during your research?
There so many surprising or remarkable figures in the records – I’m certain readers will be as fascinated as I have been, encountering the evidence for these hitherto unknown “celebrities”. So many studies of medieval and Early Modern disability are built entirely around the fictitious portrayals in art and literature (what I call, “the fictional representations or imagined chimeras of the premodern imagination,” p. 33). I found that full consideration of the evidence for “real” disabled performers was wanting—hence the necessity for this book.
What’s more, I found that the records evidence supports disability historian Irina Metzler’s assertion that the medieval period has been largely misrepresented in the popular imagination and in previous scholarship: I’ll leave it to potential readers to discover more. But suffice it to say that the fashion for “kept” or courtly-maintained “disabled” figures is largely a product of the so-called Renaissance (this popular “medieval” practice wasn’t really medieval at all).
I found that full consideration of the evidence for “real” disabled performers was wanting.
I hope readers will find these performers as fascinating as I have—indeed, as fascinating as their original audiences must have. The medieval and early Tudor records positively abound with popular blind musicians, with performers particularly gifted by apparent amelia or phocomelia; with atypically sized performers whose nominal dwarfism or gigantism undoubtedly contributed to their allure. I hope, at least to a small degree, that this book will allow these forgotten performers to once again “make there shewes” and step again into the proverbial limelight. I wish you all happy reading!
by Mark Chambers