Introduction

Summary

A Passing Record of early performance surviving from Norwich from 1633 is remarkable for a number of reasons. Recorded in the mayor's Court Book under the thirteenth day of July, a note records the request for the right to perform by one Adrian Provoe and his wife. The wife is unnamed, but she was undoubtedly the star of the show. Previously licensed by the Seal of the Revels, the couple were granted leave to “make their shewes” in the city over the next four days. Moreover, the shewes the Provoes were exhibiting seem to have drawn particular attention, as they seem to have featured the manipulation of the wife's apparent physical disability: “whereby she beinge a woman without handes is licenced to shew diverse workes &c done with her feete.” Somehow rendered handless, Mrs. Provoe had apparently become a gifted foot performer. And her pedal dexterity was the key feature of her act. Regrettably, the exact nature of the woman's performance is as unknowable as her full name. But her fancy footwork must have proven lucrative for the couple to seek civic licensing.

This rather late, yet thoroughly intriguing “Record of Early English Drama” (REED) and performance is particularly memorable because it appears so idiosyncratic. We might argue that it indicates a degree of what might be considered “agency” on behalf of the disabled professional performer. We return to Mrs. Provoe and her act in Chapter 5 below. I just mention her here in the introduction, however, in order to foreground the kinds of performers and performance found in the premodern record which form the main subject of this book. Often piecemeal, frequently overlooked, and arguably underrepresented in studies of medieval and early modern disability (as well as early performance), records such as this one from REED offer the potential to bring fresh perspective on the relative socialization of disability as an aspect of performance in the islands of premodern Britain and Ireland. It is such a perspective this book hopes to discover.

Of course, the connection between “performance” as a cultural phenomenon and the “disability” as a socially constructed one is frequently acknowledged in studies of the latter. According to Bruce Henderson and R. Noam Ostrander, for example, “disability is something that we do, rather than we are,” and, moreover, “disability studies is always in some sense a form of performance studies.”