Abstract
In Beaumont and Fletcher’s Little French Lawyer, the character Champernell, a military veteran with one arm and one leg, is dropped on the stage and subsequently mocked when he tries and fails to initiate a sword duel. The mean-spirited joke offers insight into early modern representations of disability. A historicized understanding of rapiers demonstrates that when Champernell’s tormentors tell him to “turn it [the rapier] to a crutch,” they are actually recommending that he invert his sword and fall on it in an act of stoical suicide. The play thus offers two important avenues for approaching early modern texts through the lens of disability studies. On one hand, it highlights an early modern notion that impaired individuals should express their honor internally, rather than externally, exercising a kind of stoical agency. This notion manifests masculinist narratives of stoical honor as a means by which the disabled male subject is contained. Later in the play, however, Champernell catches and beats La-Writ, the play’s eponymous lawyer. This event, which parallels Champernell’s earlier shaming, rejects the stoical framework, emphasizing the importance of comportment over embodiment. I show that Champernell’s cathartic victory serves to liberate, rather than constrain, the disabled male subject.
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Notes
- 1.
Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press 2002), 12.
- 2.
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, Volume IX (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Modern spelling corrections mine.
- 3.
David Mitchell importantly explains the function of prostheses in literary texts as something that is used to “compensate for a limitation or to reign in excessiveness.” The sword adds to the mass of the body in much the same way that a prosthetic limb might do to replace a missing one, but unlike a prosthesis, the sword does not “compensate” for anything. David T. Mitchell, “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, eds. Sharon L. Snyder et al. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002), 20.
- 4.
For instance, psychoanalytical readings of prostheses have argued that adding mechanical parts to human bodies creates what Patricia Cahill cites as “an implicit anxiety that an artificial limb has the capacity to transform the ‘impotent and lame’ body to which it is attached into someone strangely unassailable.” Within this framework is implied a prescribed size and a prescribed shape for the body. The leg’s replacement with a prosthetic becomes a return to completion, and in Cahill’s reading, the completion becomes uncomfortable because the leg is not flesh. As my above analysis shows, however, Cahill’s assessment does not apply to Champernell’s case. Patricia A. Cahill, Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 192.
- 5.
Jennifer Low, Manhood and the Duel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 41–43.
- 6.
See Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2010; Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
- 7.
For instance, fencing master Vincentio Saviolo intones that the sword “is that which sheweth who are men of arms and of honor, and which obtaineth right for those who are wronged: and for this reason it is made with two edges and one point,” 193.
- 8.
Cahill sees the early modern suspicion toward the wounded warrior as one that is invested in a discomforting duality: “Attached to an inanimate object imagined to move of its own accord [such as a wooden leg], the body of the lame soldier emerges, at least momentarily, as like that of the not-quite-human wound-man with his many extra parts.” Cahill, Unto the Breach, 193.
- 9.
Jennifer Feather, Writing Combat and the Self in Early Modern English Literature: The Pen and the Sword (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3.
- 10.
Iyengar, “Introduction,” in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. Sujata Iyengar (New York: Routledge, 2015), 3.
- 11.
Oxford English Dictionary, “Correct,” OED (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), http://www.oed.com.libproxy.uncg.edu/view/Entry/277051?result=1&rskey=kZbS8C&.
- 12.
Sainct-Didier, Secrets of the Sword Alone (Montreal: LongEdge Press, 2014), 11.
- 13.
Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 108.
- 14.
René Weis, ed., The Arden Shakespeare: Romeo & Juliet (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).
- 15.
Tobin Siebers, “Disability, Pain, and the Politics of Minority Identity,” in Foundations of Disability Studies, eds. Matthew Wappet and Katrina Arndt, 17.
- 16.
Robert Bogdan and Douglas Biklen, “Handicapism,” in Foundations of Disability Studies, eds. Matthew Wappet and Katrina Arndt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4–5.
- 17.
“Honor natural refers to inherent, rather than inherited, honor.” Low, Manhood and the Duel, 98.
- 18.
Joseph Swetnam, The School of the Noble and Worthy Science of Defense (London: Bodleian Library, 2014), 42.
- 19.
Vincentio Saviolo, His Practice (London: John Wolfe, 1595), D2v.
- 20.
Hobgood and Wood, “Introduction,” in Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, eds. Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood, 3.
- 21.
“You have a sword Sir, and I have none …” (IV.vi.130).
- 22.
Given the dual authorship of the text, I am unwilling to ascribe authorial intention to this reversal; it seems as likely as not to be an inconsistency in the text rather than a deliberate commentary on identity. Whether or not Massinger and Fletcher coordinated with one another to employ this scene is irrelevant for my purposes; the effect the moment has on the play is significant either way.
- 23.
Swetnam, Noble and Worthy Science, 58.
- 24.
Ibid., 40.
- 25.
Ibid., 38.
- 26.
Bogdan and Biklen, “Handicapism,” 4–5.
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Carter, M. (2020). “Turn It to a Crutch”: Disability and Swordsmanship in The Little French Lawyer. In: Dunn, L.C. (eds) Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama. Literary Disability Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57208-2_4
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