Deformity and Performance in "Richard III"

Chapter four of Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse addresses representations of Richard’s deformity in film, tracking historical interpretations of Richard’s disability and finally examining various film versions of the play. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder assert that film as a representational medium relies on “external deformities and visible ticks of character” in order to communicate the character’s psychological state (97). Comparing Richard’s quest for vengeance and need to compensate for “built-in defects” to the cyborgs in Bladerunner, the authors state that Richard’s disability “[underlines] his own metaphysical unfitness to govern” and would have been recognized by an Elizabethan audience as a traditional representation of Vice (99-100). However, the authors also suggest that when viewed in the context of changing contemporary attitudes towards disability and self-fashioning, Richard’s deformity becomes part of his performance and a narrative device. Richard wields his disability as a weapon, “[reclaiming] the myriad of associations placed upon his form to his own advantage even while divulging his tactics to an audience that thereby becomes an accomplice to his own treachery” (104). Mitchell and Snyder ultimately argue that “Richard III is Shakespeare’s first depiction of the modern subject,” who “conceives of the world as a stage” and “yields the very stuff that individuality is made of—the multitude of psychic ‘depths’ alluded to by disability” (108). The chapter ends with a brief discussion of various film versions of Richard III, some which only reaffirm the naturalized connection between physiology and psychology while others take advantage of the unfixed meanings of Richard’s deformed physique.

This essay provides a basis for understanding Richard’s deformity in a non-traditional way, opening up his deformity to interpretation by the director, the actor and the audience while also revealing how Richard’s disability can humanize his often caricature-like character. Rather than a fixed character trait that must be worked around by the production and the actor, Richard’s deformity becomes a powerful tool that helps to drive the action of the play, such as the scene where Richard craftily uses his disability dispatch Hastings. If Richard’s disability is a narrative device and a tool, then the nature of his physical difference is mutable, potentially enhancing, and no longer predetermined by the text. This reading of Richard’s deformity also asks the audience to question their own naturalized perceptions of disability and psychology, making the play a story about physicality, performance and personal identity. If Richard’s deformity is no longer trapped within the medieval conception of disability and psychological depravity, then Richard is a fuller, more modern, and more threatening protagonist and the play’s traditional performances destabilized.

References:

Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. The University of Michigan Press. 2003.

Cyborgs and Prosthetics

Medieval scholars, engineers and artists may not have conceived of the word "cyborg," but they were certainly thinking about how technology and the body related to one another, how the body could be changed, enhanced, and reconceptualized with technology. We are no less concerned with these issues in today's digital age and we continue to challenge traditional notions of the limits of the body and the meaning of words such as "disabled," "whole," or "beauty." Aimee Mullins gives an excellent lecture about adversity and how we define disability on TED, and January's issue of National Geographic featured an article on bionics that completely challenges the way our culture thinks about disability and prosthetics.

Shakespeare too was interested in this definition when he wrote "Richard III" about a man whose physical deformity is never stable, neither historically or in the play, and is constantly performed and manipulated by Richard to achieve diabolical ends and other characters to villanize him. In our version of the play, Queen Margaret is also going to become a female cyborg, finding new limitations and as well as agency through her physical handicap and use of technology to compensate for it.

Here are a few of my favorite cyborg images:

16th century gadget people.

Prosthetics meets weaponry.

Tammy Duckworth is a veteran of the Iraq War who lost both of her legs in combat. Today, she is Assistant Secretary at the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

A robotic prosthetic arm.

Duckworth and President Barack Obama.

Aimee Mullins and one of her many pairs of (gorgeous) legs. Although aimee was told that she would never walk due to her missing fibulae in both legs, she has become a celebrated athlete, model, actress and role model for people with disabilities and women.

Cyborg Feminism and "Richard III"

I could gush about Donna Haraway and athlete/model/actress/badass Aimee Mullins, but instead I'll try to reign it in and focus on why this feminist theory tailored to our technological age has anything to do with a play written hundreds of years ago about a man with a disability.

In A Cyborg Manifest: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century Donna Haraway describes how the cyborg in today’s world of biotechnology, robotics, and cybernetics is not limited to its monstrous science-fictional image of future warfare and domination but is also a powerful tool of post-modernism and feminism, undermining the binary tradition of white, masculinist, Western culture to allow new understandings of sexuality and selfhood. Haraway’s argument rests on the premise that “we are all cyborgs,” who join material reality with imagination, function outside of gendered notions of reproduction and erase the boundaries between public and private spheres (384-5). Cyborg politics not only calls attention to its own artificiality, it also challenges the naturalization of dichotomies like body/mind, organism/machine, nature/culture, women/men. Haraway suggests that the cyborg is “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self” that “[indicates] that science and technology provide fresh sources of power” (388-9). The female cyborg is freed “of the need to root identification in vanguard parties, purity, and mothering” and becomes empowered by her appropriation of “masculine” information and technology (392). Cyborg feminism asks the question “why should our bodies end at the skin?” and insists on bodies as “maps of power and identity,” actively communicating and creating new meaning. Haraway’s cyborg imagery provides “a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves,” concluding by stating that she “would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (394).

Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto functions as a potentially powerful framework for a play that participates in a Western masculine literary tradition, particularly for new ways of understanding issues of deformity and gender in Richard III within a contemporary setting. For example, rather than trapping Richard’s deformity within the boundaries of systems of whole/part, or male control, aggressiveness and fertility/feminized weakness and sterility, it can also be understood within the cyborg imagery of the “enhanced” human, challenging Richard’s role as naturally depraved or villainous and accusations of his mother/sorceress-creator as perpetrator. Queen Margaret’s identity as a war veteran might also explore new territories of gender identity, her physical and political immobility potentially complicated by her access to technology. Cyborg feminism also calls into question the “naturalness” of the female characters as cursing witches, lamenting mothers, usurping queens or powerless widows. When women have access to masculine technology, military force and cyborg identities, a patrilineal monarchy that rests on the strict dichotomy of women as reproducers and men as rulers become entirely unstable. Within a cyborg feminist framework, the women of the play are neither harpies and hags nor helpless victims, excluded from masculine military strength and equated with nature, but instead they seize significant agency. Their curses become their powerful tools of communication, their access to technology as a means of participating in the chaos and killing. Even the considerable reproductive power enjoyed by the women of the play can be understood as part of their cyborg identities, pushing the boundaries of female agency at the intersection of biology and politics at a time when the nation was concerned over its female monarch, the embodiment of this contradiction of gender identity. When seen as part of cyborg feminist discourse, the disruption of order in Richard III is no longer the result of “problematic” overturned gender roles, but representative of both Elizabethan and contemporary politics and culture, full of frightening and liberating uncertainty punctuated by advancing technology. Within a world of cyborg imagery, Shakespeare’s characters no longer have fixed meanings within political or gender discourses, giving the production freedom to challenge traditional performances of Richard III and its characters while addressing culturally relevant issues such as post-modern identity, advancing cybernetic technology, and polymorphous sexuality and gender roles.

Want to see more? Check out Cyborgs and Prothetics.

Donna Haraway. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Twentieth Century.” Feminist Theory, A Reader. Second Edition. Ed. Kolmar, Wendy and Frances Bartowski. McGraw Hill Companies, Inc. 2005.