Monstrosity and performance on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stage

Abstract

This PhD thesis offers a new approach to the study of early modern monstrosity. It does so by introducing the notion of ‘extraordinary embodiment’ – a capacious conceptual category encompassing characteristics including disability, gender identity, religion, foreignness, and ethnicity – and examining theatrical performances in which monstrous characters are portrayed by extraordinarily embodied performers. In doing so, it highlights the intersectionality central to early modern attitudes towards monstrosity. This thesis contains three case studies highlighting the contributions of extraordinarily embodied performers to three distinct performance traditions, in performance modes which engage audiences in diverse ways, hold different cultural status and take place in different physical spaces. In doing so, it puts seventeenth- and eighteenth-century performance traditions in dialogue with each other, challenging existing period boundaries. It begins by reconstructing the performance career of Jeffrey Hudson (1619-1682), court dwarf and masque performer at Charles I’s court; it then examines the impact of late-seventeenth-century fairground performers like, the gigantic Dutchwoman Mrs Saftry on the patent stage; before finally turning to the ‘Swedish Giant’ Daniel Cajanus (1702/3-1749) and his performances on stage and page. Challenging monster theory’s tendency to see monsters as readable metaphorical bodies providing insights into the cultures from which they emerge, this thesis looks at and with monsters, investigating how performing monstrosity and claiming ‘monster’ as a subject position enabled extraordinarily embodied people to negotiate and articulate what they meant to themselves. It highlights ways in which their performances created spaces which facilitated close encounters with extraordinarily embodied people and disrupted performer-audience relations by resisting being read as metaphors and instead speaking to their lived experience. Situated at the intersections of theatre history, cultural history and disability studies, this thesis positions extraordinarily embodied performers as active participants in and innovators of theatrical practice, highlighting their impact on generic change.