The Stage Whisper

The Bard’s Limp

Written by Sam VanNest

In 2008, my junior year of undergrad at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, I had the opportunity to study abroad at Oxford. I wanted to learn the classics: Ancient Greek history, Milton, Dante, and Shakespeare. And where better than England?

I had read somewhere that Ezra Pound, famed poet of the Lost Generation, said that these were essential subjects for aspiring writers to cover. TS Eliot’s sprawling poem The Waste Land, which Pound had given its final edits, was particularly inspiring to me, as it is a poem written by an American informed by European sensibilities. Europe was calling to me, its rich history both alluring and foreboding. My limited mobility was the only impeding factor.

The symptoms of my disability are progressive, and I was using a single forearm crutch to walk at the time, but, in hindsight, I should have been using a wheelchair by then. It took quite a bit of convincing the host University committee that I was up to the feat; the dormitory was up two flights of stairs, the common area and kitchen up another two, and Oxford is a challenge to navigate for even the able-bodied. It took all of my will and energy just to get around to my classes in the ancient city. Further travel, even within England, seemed an unreasonable luxury, physically as well as monetarily.

I did take a day trip to London, though, to see Love’s Labor’s Lost, an obscure Shakespeare comedy, at the then recently rebuilt, historic Globe Theatre on the Thames. The original Globe was the Elizabethan playhouse where the Bard debuted his work, and it stands today as a monument to that history. As in its heyday, the Globe is open-air, offering only benches along the walls for seating, and standing room only for the rest. The sawdust floors complete the authentic feel of the figurative peanut gallery. As a poor American student abroad, I couldn’t afford the price-hiked benches, so I stood stage left in the gallery for the duration, propped up by my crutch.

Waiting for the show to begin, there were moments of uncanny forgetfulness as to where I was on the historical timeline. The Globe experience has been painstakingly tailored to deliver a very authentic sixteenth century representation. If the theatre itself weren’t so near Gatwick airport, with takeoffs and landings visible over the Theatre’s open roof, I might have been able to lose myself completely in the otherwise pristine Elizabethan simulacrum. Every detail was in place, besides. It is a monument to a history that, unfortunately, excludes the disabled.

Because of this, I had been feeling like a foreigner in more ways than the obvious for the few months I had been in the UK so far. Disability representation in Europe was, then, very limited. I’ve been assured that the situation has improved since. At the time, though, most places were inaccessible, so anyone with a mobility issue, temporary or not, was disabled as a result. The Globe was no exception; history trumped accessibility. (I did my best to pass as injured in England, so I had a unique, if fleeting, perspective.) I often longed for home, where life was made accessible by law; the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 saw to that. I stood out like a sore thumb in the UK, an anomaly in spaces that were meant to shut out the physically disabled. As I leaned on my crutch in the sawdust, I wondered where the other sore thumbs and broken fingers were.

I was answered when one of the main characters in the performance took the stage using crutches. It was obvious that his injury was unrelated and an adaptation to the script; he hobbled about the stage, hamming up his disabled body in the fight choreography and blocking, his prostheses adorned with time-period accurate, regal vestige. I felt fellowship for the first time since arriving in-country, like an intimate part of me did, for a moment, belong in this place. My presence there was not entirely an anomaly, and so much less than a character flaw.

In literature, especially in Shakespeare, disability often functions as a metaphor rather than an adaptation or circumstance. In his classic play Richard III, the king’s crooked body (his limp, humped back, and withered arm) stands to represent his twisted mind. The same is true with other notorious villains in classic tales; the peg-legged, revenge-crazed Ahab of Moby Dick, or J.M. Barrie’s murderous Captain Hook.

This staging was a fresh take for me, in that it spoke of disability honestly, as a challenge to be navigated, not a static pathology. True, the script did not mandate the adaptation, but that was exactly why it worked so well. The improvisation was, to me, as authentic a representation as the newly renovated Globe Theatre itself.

Shakespeare understood prostheses, in a sense, and how to use them. The original definition of prosthesis, the one Shakespeare would have known, is, “The addition of a letter or syllable to a word, such to change its definition” – for example, the word “ordinary,” with the prosthesis “extra” becomes “extraordinary.” It wasn’t until WWI that prosthesis took on its contemporary, medical meaning. To Shakespeare, physical details, such as a disability, fundamentally altered its subject. Thus, Richard III and his twisted body necessarily carried meaning: the body as metaphor.

Charles Dickens took the metaphor in a different direction, with the pitiful, disabled Tiny Tim of A Christmas Carol, his body meant to evoke sympathy rather than signify deviance. Disability representation in narrative often oscillates between these two static, metaphorical poles: fear and pity, deviance and sentimentality.

In the USA, the pervasiveness of these stereotypes was seen as harmful not only by people with disabilities most affected by them. During WWII, the US government instructed the Motion Picture Association of America to represent the physically disabled in crowds and in multiple situations in order to combat the historically negative portrayals, insisting that this inclusion would prepare the able-bodied home front for the influx of disabled veterans to come. (The direct result of this stipulation was a 1946 film titled The Best Years of our Lives, which, ironically, only reinforced negative stereotypes.)

However well-intentioned this gesture, many large cities, such as New York and Chicago, had “ugly laws,” barring the “unsightly” physically disabled from public places, in effect since the mid-nineteenth century. Chicago wouldn’t abolish its law until 1974. The disabled were forced to the margins, by physical impediment and by law.

It wasn’t until the passage of the ADA in 1990 that the space for the disabled to exist in public on their own terms was legally possible. No such incentive exists elsewhere in the world. In post-ADA America, the disabled control their own narrative, thanks to the increase in public visibility. As a result, definitions of disability have grown beyond the single, static representations that supported harmful metaphors and stereotypes.

The popular 1991 film Hook, starring Robin Williams as Peter Pan and Dustin Hoffman as the eponymous captain, we can see this new kind of representation in action. As the film follows Hoffman as Hook over the course of the story, we see his disability in action. Hook switches out his iconic prosthesis for another that holds a piece of chalk, another that holds a baseball mitt; he adapts his prosthesis according to situation. Rather than a static metaphor, or a physical reinforcement of pervasive pathology, his disability becomes a circumstance to be mitigated in sequence, much like the ad-hoc portrayal by the injured actor I saw at the Globe Theatre in London.

Headshot of Sam VanNest

About the Writer

Sam VanNest graduated from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in ’09 and went on to get an MA in English from University of Oregon, before moving back to Easton in ’14 to write and teach. He was diagnosed with Friedreich’s Ataxia, a rare neurological disorder, at 15, something which often comes up in his writing. In school, he focused mainly on the portrayal and treatment of physical disability in 20 th century American literature. He lives in Easton with his family.