Naomi Baker

‘Happy, and without a name’: prosthetic identities on the early modern stage

To have a name is to be guilty. And justice, like magic, is nameless. Happy, and without a name, the creature knocks at the gates of the land of the magi, who speak

in gestures alone. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Magic and Happiness’

Among the first plays to be performed at the Globe theatre was A Larum for London (1599), an anonymously authored play published in 1602 with the subtitle ‘the ventrous actes and valorous deeds of the lame Soldier’. This ‘lame soldier’, a war veteran with a wooden leg, is identified somewhat bluntly in the play’s list of characters as ‘Stump’. Offering the only hope of resistance to the murderous onslaught of Spanish soldiers against the city of Antwerp, Stump is anything but disabled. He instead possesses almost superhuman military strength, as well as a striking ability to rally his otherwise helpless countrymen. Shortly after Stump’s appearance in the Globe, another lame character also featured on the stage. The hero of The Fair Maid of the Exchange (c.1602) is Cripple, an enigmatic character who uses crutches and consequently describes himself as having ‘foure legs’.1 Operating at the centre of London’s Royal Exchange, Cripple is a ferociously hard-working figure on whom the other characters rely, not only for his products (he is a ‘drawer’, designing images on material), but also for his counsel.2 Inhabiting cities characterised by weakness, laziness, selfishness and corruption, both of the lame heroes in these plays take charge, mobilising (or perhaps manipulating) those around them. Stump transforms previously cowardly soldiers into resolute resistance fighters, while Cripple plays matchmaker, causing the two main female characters to switch from their intended husbands to the men he selects for them.3 Ironically,

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then, in both plays it is the ostensibly crooked character who sets the other characters straight, the apparently disabled figure who is the one best able to get things done. Partly because of their uncanny powers of persuasion, Stump and Cripple have been regarded by some critics as sinister figures.4 Within the terms of the plays, however, they possess moral authority. While their fellow citizens of Antwerp and London, respectively, indulge themselves at the cost of others, Stump and Cripple are defined instead by their unswerving commitment to their vocations, resolutely adhering to principles that they believe operate for the wider good.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of both Stump and Cripple is their profound alienation: for both characters, the use of prosthetics signals a dislocation, ethical as much as physical, from social norms. The Antwerp of A Larum for London and the London of The Fair Maid of the Exchange are both prosperous mercantile societies where luxurious commodities circulate in abundance, the soft silks of Antwerp matching the decorative embroidery of the London Exchange. To Stump, a penniless war veteran, the selfish drive to accumulate such goods marks a diseased, effeminate culture. Distanced from the values of Antwerp society, Stump’s radical alienation is represented by his prosthetic leg, a feature which comes to symbolise his dissident mode of living as well as his heroic militant resistance. Cripple, on the other hand, operates at the centre of the London Exchange, participating in an emergent capitalist economy in which words, identities, emotions and relationships are just as transferable on the market as are inanimate objects. On one level, the ‘extra’ legs bestowed on Cripple by his crutches symbolise the prostheticised nature of life in a commodified culture, a society where the line between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’, the ‘real’ and the ‘counterfeit’, is impossible to draw. Despite his involvement in the Exchange, however, Cripple, like Stump, is a disaffected figure.

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Driven by a powerful work ethic, his sense of vocation is not equivalent to the self-interested efforts to accumulate that he witnesses around him. Instead of seeking to accrue wealth and goods at any cost, he places ethical limits on his endeavours. He also seeks to serve others rather than simply pursuing his own profit. Cripple therefore functions within and yet at the same time sets himself apart from life in the Exchange, diagnosing as pathological many aspects of consumerist London society.

Both plays therefore set up a moral contrast between societies defined by greedy consumption and individuals embodying alternative ethical and social values, in both cases casting the characters with prosthetic limbs as the dissident figures. As their failure to be identified by proper names suggests, moreover, Stump and Cripple are detached not only from the hegemonic values of their cultures but from dominant forms of identity. Refusing to regard normative forms of identity as natural or inevitable, they treat such identities as themselves artificial or prosthetic entities: available to be taken up for use, they do not define the subject deploying them. In their failure to coincide with normative constructions of the self, Stump and Cripple evoke Giorgio Agamben’s model of dissident messianic living. For Agamben, the messianic life is a profane life, one which ‘deactivates the apparatuses of power’ by returning ‘to the free use of men’ that which has become ‘unavailable and separate’, partly by being given defined meanings.5 To make use of something in profane terms means to play freely with it, unconstrained by dominant models of its meaning or function. If we want to make free use of something, however, we cannot own it, since ‘use is always a relationship with something that cannot be appropriated; it refers to things insofar as they cannot become objects of possession.’6 Agamben’s model of profanation illuminates the significance of prosthesis in A Larum for London and The Fair Maid of the Exchange. As that which is deployed

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by a subject without ever coinciding with that subject, and that which is used but not owned, the prosthetic is suggestive in these plays of a dissident mode of being, in which the subject operates at one step removed from normative roles and identities. For Stump and Cripple, identities and social roles, as well as limbs, are not essential or natural properties of the self but are instead prosthetic entities which can be put to multiple, playful uses. Dislocated from hegemonic forms of identity, the heroes of the plays define themselves solely in relation to a sense of calling, a messianic vocation which, as Agamben insists, is also characterised by use, not ownership.7 Stump and Cripple do not merely use prostheses, then, but embody a prosthetic form of life, signaling the extent to which the prosthetic operates in profane, messianic terms in these plays.

IIThe messianic overtones of lameness are established in the Bible, notably in relation to Jacob, whose laming is described in a mysterious Genesis account said by Luther to be ‘among the most obscure passages of the whole Old Testament’.8 Accosted by an unidentified man or angel, a figure claimed by Luther and Calvin to be Christ, Jacob wrestles him until daybreak. Finally gaining the upper hand, Jacob refuses to let go until the figure gives him a blessing, whereupon he is given the new name of Israel. During the encounter, however, his hip is ‘touched’ (Gen 32:25), leaving him with a permanent limp. For the Reformers, interpreting the account as an archetypal model of the human encounter with the Messiah, part of the difficulty of the passage lies in its paradoxical assertion of human weakness and strength, the dislocation of Jacob’s hip coinciding uneasily with his apparent victory over an omnipotent God. Jacob becomes lame, according to Calvin, as a reminder of his weakness, so that he does not forget that he ‘conquered’ God only ‘by the help of

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God.’ His maiming marks him as a ‘soldier’ and as a ‘son of God’: the ‘mutilated and half destroyed’, to Calvin, are inextricable from the ‘blessed.’9 Luther, however, insists on a more active role for Jacob as the combatant of God, emphasising that Jacob is renamed Israel, that is ‘a fighter, prince, lord, or mistress, of God’, because ‘believers are princes and masters of God’: they ‘struggle with God and conquer’. God ‘plays with Jacob’, enticing a response, but the strength of this response attests to the power of unswerving commitment. ‘I, to be sure, would not readily be prepared to wrestle with a man of faith who has the promise’, notes Luther, ‘not even if I were a strong giant, for in this case nature is toiling above its strength’. Natural categories are transcended by fervency of belief, offering the possibility of overcoming God himself, ‘not with the strength of weapons of your flesh and nature but with confidence in the cause that intervenes between you and God’. Disregarding natural limitations because of his ‘confidence in the cause’, Jacob becomes lame, to Luther, as a sign that he is no longer defined by his ‘carnal birth’ but instead solely by fidelity to his cause. Luther points out that biblical allusions to the thigh often express a sense of posterity, a biological lineage which is cancelled by the violent encounter between Jacob and the Messiah. The dislocation of Jacob’s hip, then, marks the fact that ‘the generation of the flesh has been dislocated’. From now on, Jacob is defined, as his new name suggests, not by past traditions or by ‘carnal succession’, but by his cataclysmic struggle with, and victory over, God.10 He has become, in language used in a different context by the apostle Paul, an ‘heir by promise’ (Gal 3:29), defined solely by his confidence in and faithfulness to the messianic event.

For Luther, then, Jacob’s lameness is a physical dislocation which signals a messianic dislocation from established forms of being. Paul, described by Agamben as ‘the perfect representative of messianism’, elaborates on the significance of this messianic

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dissociation from ‘worldly’ or normative forms of identity.11 Ancient law created apparently self-evident differences between Jew and Greek, male and female, master and slave, but Paul declares that the messianic call nullifies such differences, ‘for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal 3:28). As Alain Badiou emphasises, Paul regards categories of identity defined by conditions of belonging as forms of constraint. Rather than being defined by conditions of birth or by social affiliation, the messianic subject is defined solely by his or her militant commitment to the call. Badiou consequently applauds Paul’s ability to subtract ‘truth from the communitarian grasp’: his message ‘was not for the Romans, Jews, slaves, or masters, or for women or men. It was for everybody.’ As a result, Paul, for Badiou, provides the original model for how it is possible to escape our contemporary paralysis as the ‘prisoners of difference’.12

Agamben agrees that for Paul the messianic event entails the ‘revocation of every worldly condition’, but he emphasises the significance of Paul’s insistence that the person who responds to the messianic call must ‘remain in the same vocation wherein he was called’ (1 Cor 7:20). Social and legal identities are no longer definitive, given that ‘the messianic vocation dislocates and, above all, nullifies the entire subject’.13 After all, as Paul states, it is ‘no longer I that live, but the Messiah living in me’ (Gal 2:20). As Agamben suggests, however, messianic living more precisely involves a dislocation from identity. All, on one level, remains the same, yet an all-important gap opens up between the subject and his or her social role or identity. The messianic, for Agamben, thus introduces the possibility of remaining in socially-defined roles while simultaneously being conscious of their nullification. Messianic life demands that we live in the ‘as not’:

those having wives may be as not having, and those weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not rejoicing, and those

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buying as not possessing, and those using the world as not using it up. For passing away is the figure of this world. (1 Cor 7:29-31)14

Living in the ‘as not’ means no longer regarding one’s identity as a natural or inevitable entity, or as something that one owns, but instead operating within it from one step removed. As an entity that does not coincide fully with the self, an identity or calling no longer defines but instead becomes available for use. Using rather than possessing ‘the world’, playing with rather than being defined by an identity or a vocation: such is the model of profane messianic living outlined by Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles who himself displayed a radical indifference to legal and social categorisations.

Agamben illustrates the fundamental dislocation instigated by the messianic by citing the model of the remnant outlined in Micah 4:7:

In that day, says the Lord, I will assemble the lame, and gather those who have been driven away, and those whom I have afflicted. Of the lame I will make a remnant, of those cast off a strong nation.

The messianic remnant, referred to in Micah as a future hope, is transformed by Paul into a description of the present experience of living in the messianic age: ‘at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace’ (Rom 11:5). Where the law operates by means of division, assigning people into categories such as Jew and non-Jew, the messianic call cuts across existing forms of difference so that established identities no longer coincide with themselves: ‘not all of those of Israel are Israel’ (Rom 9:6). A remainder opens up, one that refuses to be identified within the binaries of existing identitarian structures.15 The ‘lame’, in this context, then, do not constitute an alternative category of identity but represent the destabilization of the very structures of identity. For Agamben, as a result, the ‘lame’

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remnant, as ‘that which make[s] salvation possible’, represents ‘the only real political subject’.16

Making free use of the identities and bodies which they regard as fundamentally alienable, prosthetic entities, Stump and Cripple function in the plays as the lame ‘remnants’ of the emergent capitalist societies whose decadence they decry. Disjointed from the normative identities operating in their societies, a dislocation figured in their prostheticised bodies as well as in their absent names, they emerge in the plays as dissident political subjects, ultimately suggestive of alternative forms of being and of community.

IIIA Larum for London (1599) depicts real life events, namely the sack of Antwerp in 1576 by mutinous Spanish soldiers, an episode known as the ‘Spanish Fury’. This shocking event, in which thousands were massacred, held particular horror for the English at the time of the play, since there were widespread fears of a Spanish invasion. The play criticizes the citizens of Antwerp for their vulnerability to attack while showing the horror of the attack in gruesome detail. It has been dismissed by some critics as ‘blatant propaganda’, a play whose meaning can be reduced to a call for increased military investment.17 In the midst of the bloodcurdling slaughter on stage walks – or, to use his own term, ‘halts’ – a fearsomely resolute soldier with a wooden leg. Stump, the so-called ‘lame soldier’, is the living embodiment of Pauline inversions, a supposedly weak and abject figure who possesses superhuman strength. He is courageous and principled, and even though he fails to turn the tide of the slaughter, he goes down fighting, inspiring others to do the same. Interestingly, however, critics have been reluctant to present this character in a positive light. He is an uncanny figure, a hybrid man-machine with apparently

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supernatural military capacities, and he has been described as a ‘murderous machine run amok’ and a ‘menace’.18

Criticism of the play has nevertheless largely ignored its intensely apocalyptic framework.19 Stump is described by his enemies as ‘a devil of hell’, and from one perspective he represents both judgement and damnation. The play opens with a prologue delivered by the lame figure of Time, and Stump on one level evokes the punishment time brings. His opening lines castigate Antwerp for its complacency:

Are yet your eye-lids open, are you yetAwak’t out of the slumber you were in?Or will you still lye snorting in your sloth?Be still persuaded you are safe enough?20

Stump’s words paraphrase Paul’s warning to the Thessalonians that the day of the Lord shall come, even as a thief in the night. For when they say, Peace and safety, then shall come upon them sudden destruction … Therefore let us not sleep as do others, but let us watch and be sober. (1 Thess 5:2-6)

Critics have commented on the striking soundscape of the play, drawing attention to its dramatic use of noise.21 The ‘great screeke’ (l.207) with which the attack begins and the terror this sound evokes is primarily reminiscent, I suggest, of the blast of the trumpet inaugurating the final judgement (1 Cor 15:51-53).

Although the apocalyptic judgement in A Larum for London is inflicted by brutal Spaniards, the play insists that the responsibility for this cataclysm lies squarely with Antwerp itself. The play depicts a self-interested society where the rich are more concerned with showy appearances than with helping those in need. Stump draws attention to the neglect of disabled war veterans, describing how the Governor’s wife passes him in the street and ‘stop[s] her nose with her sweet gloves,/ For fear my smell should [infect] her’ (ll.761-2). Blocking up her nose, she literally seeks to shore herself up, shielding

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herself from the contaminating presence of the other. As a direct result, it seems, she is now assaulted by the ‘lowzie totter’d rogues’ (l.764) who threaten her with rape, before Stump comes to the rescue. An old man callously murdered by the Spanish likewise elicits little sympathy:

Had you bin more rich in inward giftsAnd less magnificent in outward shew, Then had you liv’d to dye a naturall death:… but pride and luxury have ever been,The gate of miserie, and nurse of sinne. (ll.1097-1102)

The fate of the old man, and of Antwerp as a whole, is reminiscent of the destruction of ‘Great Babylon’ as described in Revelation. Babylon is said to be devoted to the trade of

gold, and silver, and of precious stone, and of pearls, and of fine linen, and of purple, and of silk, and of scarlet … and of cinnamon, and odors, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and servants, and souls of men. (Rev 18:12-13)

Guilty of reducing men’s souls to just another item of merchandise, Babylon, like the Antwerp of A Larum, is brought in an apocalyptic instant to nothing:

The merchants of these things which were waxed rich, shall stand afar off from her, for fear of her torment, weeping and wailing. … For in one hour so great riches are come to desolation. (Rev 18:15-17)

While the Geneva Bible confidently asserts that the ‘great whore’ by which Babylon is represented in this passage ‘is Rome’, A Larum draws parallels between the doomed city and Antwerp, shifting the focus from the spiritual ‘whoredom’ generating the judgement to the crimes of greed and excessive consumption.22 It is not the Catholic enemy who evokes the ‘great whore’ in this play, then, but Antwerp, ‘amorous as the wanton ayre’ and arrayed in garments ‘imbroidered

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with pure golde’, who ‘invites,/ And beckons us unto her sportfull bed’ (ll.77-84). Sounding a warning to London, the play therefore stages the horror of an apocalyptic judgement primarily caused by uncontrolled consumerism rather than by religious heresy or military weakness.

The Spanish in the play demand ransoms on pain of death, heartlessly measuring human life in monetary terms. Their brutality nevertheless gives violent expression to Antwerp’s own commodification of human life, echoing the objectification of ‘souls’ in the Revelation description of Babylon. Women are repeatedly reduced to the level of possessions by their fellow citizens: ‘I will attend to locke and guard my doores,’ states one burgher, ‘And keepe my wealth, my wife, and daughter safe,/ For feare these hungry soldiers get a snatch’ (ll.481-3). The Spanish refer to women as trophies, ‘jewell[s]’ ‘which (like a mizer) thou didst hide from us’ (ll.945-6), but in doing so they are simply echoing back to the inhabitants of Antwerp their own images for these women, claiming ownership of those who are already regarded as objects of exchange.

Antwerp’s ‘foule Bestiall’ (l.229) population is vividly represented by the character known only as ‘fat burgher’, a man described by Stump as ‘the Tallow-cake, the Rammish Fat,/ That would not give a penny to a Soldier’ (ll.1513-14). The burgher’s obesity, for Stump, evokes his greedy accumulation of goods: ‘as thy treasure/ Has bin a pray to their devouring lust,/ So in this dung-hill of thy carryon flesh,/ Their ravenous swoords might finde a durtie feast’ (ll.1522-5).23 Both literally and figuratively bloated by consumption, the burgher’s excessive flesh stands in stark contrast to Stump’s own efficient body, marked by privation instead of excess.24 Indulging the flesh and its appetites, whether for food or for wealth, leads to death, we are shown, whereas the denial of the body, its willing sacrifice in the name of a good cause, is the means to achieve heroic immortality.

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‘Whosoever will save his life, shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it’ (Matt 16:25), states the gospel, a motto which could serve as an epithet for the play as a whole.

Referring to the inhabitants of Antwerp as ‘you’, not ‘we’, Stump insists throughout on the difference ‘twixt [his] thought’ and ‘the base temper’ of the ‘muddy minde[s]’ (ll.1528-9) by which he is surrounded. He draws attention to the casual cruelty of a society structured by monetary exchange, highlighting the brutality of purchasing the limbs and lives of soldiers for ‘a groat’. He repeatedly rejects payments for his heroic rescue attempts, asking the governor’s wife what he should do with the jewel she offers him: her ‘groate/ Will do [him] no pleasure’ (ll.787-8). The ‘fat burgher’ also offers him a bag of coins for saving his life, an offer met with contempt: ‘Guts, trouble me no more’ (l.1541), spits Stump. The greedy drive to ‘sucke [up] honny’ (l.1548) has generated an economy in which all human activity has its price. To Stump, this is a dehumanizing process that generates monstrosities: ‘How like Leviathan, his clumsie limbes/ Walke not but tumble’ (ll.1546-7), he states of the burgher.

Surrounded on stage by piles of mutilated corpses, Stump himself seems strangely immune to death:

How nimbly death bestirs him everywhere, I that am weary of my life, And would fain die I cannot, Death is so proud he will not look on me, These muddy rogues that hoarded up their coin,Now have their throats cut for the coin they have:They that for two pence would have seen me starve;And still my old rotten stump and I,Trot up and down as long as we can wag. (ll.739-47)

Careless of his own life, Stump continues to ‘trot up and down’, while those who ‘hoarded’, seeking to grasp hold of both their lives and their possessions, ‘have their throats cut for the coin they have’. It is Stump’s lack of ownership, whether of money or even of his body,

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which appears to be the source of his effectiveness. He is strong, then, not despite but precisely because his body is prosthetic: alienated from him, his ‘old rotten stump’ figures his potent renunciation of that which others insist on possessing.

‘Trot[ting] up and down’ with him, his wooden leg seems uncannily animated, an impression perpetuated later in the play:25

my poor stump and I have stumbled through a thousand shot, and yet we halt together; there was never one poor piece of Timber has been so singed as it has been, ‘sblood it has been four times a fire under me, and yet we scramble together trotting, trotting. (ll.1381-4)

Whether scrambling or trotting alongside him, Stump’s stump advertises its resistance to appropriation: the image of Stump and his stump is one of doubleness and companionship rather than possession. Towards the end of the play Stump literally detaches himself from his wooden leg:

They say the Spaniards and their whores are at dice upon the Change: I’ll lay my wooden leg afore them, cast at it who will. (ll.1401-2)

Regarding his body, as his life, with indifference, Stump heedlessly casts aside his prosthetic limb, displaying a profane disregard for its original purpose as he puts it to use in a different, playful context.26

The term ‘stump’, as Nardizzi notes, can refer either to the wooden leg or to the amputated limb to which this leg is attached.27 Stump’s telling repetition of phrases such as ‘my poor stump and I’ and ‘my old rotten stump and I’ therefore suggests his detachment not only from his prosthesis but from his body itself. His body, whether wooden or fleshly, is an entity from which he seems to be at one step removed. Given that the play names the character ‘Stump’, the phrase ‘my stump and I’ also strangely dislocates Stump from his own name. Stump’s alienation from his own name is evident in our belated realization that he does in fact have a name: we find out towards the

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end of the play that he is ‘Lieutenant Vaughan’ (l.1082). This name, assigning him a social rank, is nevertheless so vastly inappropriate for this abject revolutionary figure that hardly any characters in the play, nor, it seems, many critics, seem able to bring themselves to use it of him.28 Stump therefore remains Stump, defined not by name or by rank but by his very absence from himself.

Stump is also alienated from national identities, which he regards as politically convenient fictions. He is told that he should be willing to fight and to lose limbs simply on the grounds that he is ‘bound’ to his country, but he recognizes no such binds, regarding this appeal to patriotism as exploitative. ‘Bindes me my country with no greater bondes/ Than for a groate to fight?’ he asks, scathingly: ‘well, I’ll learne/ To pay my debt and to measure my desert/ According to the rate’ (ll.619-24). To Stump, national identities are arbitrary labels used to justify violence and oppression: ‘if any man hate a man, call him but Wallo[o]n’ (l.1374), he observes. Defining himself solely in relation to his pursuit of his ‘rightful cause’ (l.1602), he regards both his body and all available forms of identity as fundamentally artificial entities. It is in this radically prosthetic sense of himself that he emerges as a messianic and as a political figure.

Stump declares that ‘the world is turn’d’ (l.1412), and his dislocated identity, in the end, is suggestive of a new social model. While the citizens of Antwerp callously pursue their own interests, Stump stands for principles of openness to the other and of mutual dependency. ‘If we must go, we’ll go together’ (l.1466), he tells his recruits, inspiring them to communal action: ‘If you reserve the courage you were wont/ Of a brave soldier …/ Let’s do something yet worthy the talking of’ (ll.1452-4). Stump therefore upholds an order in which people forget that which divides them as they unite behind the ‘rightful cause’. In the light of militant commitment, as Stump reveals, all other forms of identity, including those of physical difference,

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become meaningless. By the end of the play, he becomes indistinguishable from a fellow fighter, the Captain. They begin to merge into each other, embracing in ‘sweet affinity’ (l.1586) at the moment of their deaths. Stump describes himself and the Captain as ‘Like in our lives, agreeing in our deathes’ (l.1587), a sentiment echoed by those who discover their bodies, describing them in indistinguishable terms as ‘two fierce assailing Brabanters’ (l.1635). Any form of physical difference between the men, it seems, has become redundant, even invisible.

Remaining unacknowledged by the majority of his countrymen, Stump has to rely on the leader of the Spanish assault for his eulogy. To Danila, the ‘honourable’ cause pursued by Stump and the Captain transcends the battle lines dividing them, enabling him to recognize the valour of his enemies as he states that ‘There never lived two more Heroicke spirits’ (l.1649). Throwing into question categories of friend and enemy, Spanish and Flemish, ‘impaired’ and ‘non-impaired’, Stump, to the end, stands not for identity or for difference but for what Badiou defines as the essential freedom to move ‘across differences’, to change places.29 He thus embodies the dissident possibilities opened up by prosthetic messianic living.

IVCripple’s dramatic entrance in The Fair Maid of the Exchange sees him using his crutches to fight off the would-be rapists of two women who work in the London Exchange. His reference in this scene to his ‘foure legs’ establishes the blurring of the lines between the natural and the artificial that is to become a key motif in the play. According to one of the villains, he has ‘more legs than nature gave [him]’ (l.127), marking him as unnatural and simultaneously dismantling any division between natural limbs and artificial prostheses.30 Set at the heart of the Royal Exchange, a world where objects and people

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circulate incessantly in pursuit of advantage, this is a play interested in exploring the relationship between authenticity and representation. Under the sign of the commodity, it asks, is the copy of a thing worth anything less than the thing itself? ‘[W]hat is he loving a thing in heart,/ Loves not the counterfeit, though made by art?’ (ll.166-7), asks Mall Berry, foreshadowing the end of the play, when her counterpart, Phillis Flower, will indeed love a ‘counterfeit’ version of her chosen bridegroom. As Mall’s and Phillis’s surnames suggest, this is a world in which the border between subject and object is not as clear as we might imagine it to be. Cripple is referred to as ‘crutch’ in the play, recalling the collapse of the distinction between prosthesis and the user of that prosthesis in the name ‘Stump’.31 In an order where people are indistinguishable from prosthetics, is it meaningful to talk of an authentic entity existing behind its representation? Critical responses to the play have largely focused on its depiction of women within the Exchange, yet men in the play are equally shown to come under the pressures of commodification.32 Witnessing Bowdler’s failure to seduce Mall, for instance, Barnard instructs him to ‘become a man’ (l.246), later approving a more aggressive outburst as ‘spoke like a gallant, spoke like a gentleman, spoke like your selfe’ (l.258). The ‘self’ alluded to here is evidently a construct based upon the image of ‘a gallant’ or ‘a gentleman’, or even just ‘a man’, illustrating the illusory line between identity and its ‘artificial’ representation. If he is to circulate in the sexual economy, Bowdler must construct himself in suitably marketable terms.

The artificiality of identity in the play is highlighted by its perplexing ending, where Frank must ‘assume [the] shape’ of Cripple, with whom Phillis is in love, in order to deceive her into marrying him. ‘Supply my place, to gaine thy hearts desire’ (l.1969), Cripple instructs Frank, casting the lover in a prosthetic role. Frank subsequently embraces this role as a form of self-realisation:33

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Am I not like my selfe in this disguise, Crooked in shape, and crooked in my thoughts?Then am I a Cripple right. (ll.1984-86)

Once again, the dividing line between artificial and natural is far from obvious: ‘I’, defined by Frank in terms of Cripple’s identity rather than his own, appears to be more a copy than it is an original being. The speech prefixes further undermine the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ identity at this point in the play, unexpectedly referring to Frank as ‘Crip.’ (ll.2039-2041).34 Even stranger than Frank’s adoption of Cripple’s identity, however, is Phillis’s reaction to the ploy. Recovering from her initial shock at the revelation that her bridegroom is in fact Frank, not Cripple, she ultimately accepts the man who ‘supplies’ the ‘place’ of her beloved, implicitly agreeing with Mall’s earlier insight that love for ‘a thing’ equates to love for its ‘counterfeit’. In this play, people, like Cripple’s multiplicity of legs, are interchangeable entities.35

The prosthetic therefore signifies on multiple levels in The Fair Maid of the Exchange, the presence of ‘excess’ legs on its hero marking a wider fascination in the play with the blurred border between human and artificial, subject and object, in an emerging capitalist economy. What, then, is Cripple’s role in all of this? On one level, he is a key facilitator of trade in the play. Working obsessively as a drawer in the Exchange, he is intertwined with the business of circulation, executing his designs on the materials brought to him and returning them to the women who embroider them. He also trades in words: having inherited a library from a gallant, he sells off the letters contained there for others to use for their own ends. Words, thoughts and sentiments, as well as fabric, are alienable entities in the Exchange, their original context and purpose no barrier to their re-appropriated function. Cripple observes that he could also make a tidy profit out of listening to the conversations of men in taverns and

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selling their own stories back to them in the form of plays. Such is the senselessness of consumption, it seems, that people will even purchase their own words and deeds, in the form of theatrical performance. Staging the activities of the London Exchange for a London audience, The Fair Maid here displays a self-conscious awareness of its complicity in the act of making profit from the appropriation of the everyday: Cripple’s derisory assessment of the foolish men in the tavern similarly applies to the play’s own audience, paying to witness scenes lifted from their own world. Even as it ironically acknowledges its own participation in the commodification of everyday experience, however, the play works to critique such processes. Cripple knows that he could easily make a profit by such means, but he will not sink to the ‘shame’ of this form of ‘verball theft’ (l.1415). He is well aware that this differentiates him from others (including, perhaps, the author/s of this play): ‘Yet men there be that have done this and that,/And more’ (ll.1416-7). Despite such ethical limits, Cripple continues to facilitate the exchange of people and relationships, working to divert both Phillis and Mall from the object of their affections to the men he has assigned them, partly for financial reasons. Offering his ‘crooked habite’ (l.1963) to Frank at the end of the play, clothing, as Williams demonstrates, which cannot be distinguished from Cripple’s body itself, he is even willing to alienate and exchange his own identity.36 Cripple, then, is a compulsive worker whose uncanny ability to manipulate the market and its consumers at one level identifies him as the ultimate representative of life in the Exchange.37 His own ambiguously human body, with its incorporation of the artificial into the natural, from this perspective marks his participation in a fundamentally alienating social and economic system.

There is a strangeness about Cripple, however, which renders him elusive and prevents easy judgements about his function in the

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play. On the one hand, he is at the heart of the Exchange, its master trader. Yet on the other, as his ethical concerns suggest, he is profoundly estranged from its practices and values.38 Like Stump, he carries eerie overtones of other-worldliness, for instance in his allusion to the ‘visitation’ (l.677) that has lamed him, a term often taken to signal a divine intervention. Marked by the supernatural in a manner that has left him maimed, he evokes not only Jacob but the apostle Paul, a figure whose strength-in-weakness he embodies, whose commitment to celibacy he echoes and whose abrasive verbal rebukes he imitates. He berates his companions for their moral shortcomings: ‘I’le crush the heart of thy wit till I have straind foorth thy infectious humour to a drop’ (ll.639-40), he lambasts Bowdler, just one of several moments in the play where he insists on the pathological nature of those participating in the life of the Exchange. Bowdler incites Cripple’s fury for his false boasting of female conquests, leading Cripple to rebuke him for his cheapening of the women whom he constructs as ‘ware[s]’ or ‘bargain[s]’ (ll.696, 698). ‘When wilt thou cast off this anticke garment of ostentation?’ (l.700), demands Cripple, warning that he will ‘anatomize the very bowells of thy absurdities, that all the world shall … shunne thee as the pox or the pestilence.’ (ll.702-4) In the midst of an inauthentic world, Cripple’s tirades evoke a different moral order in which false representation is unacceptable and the commodification of women is wrong.

Cripple also takes a dim view of those who are motivated solely by personal gain. ‘Thou miser, thou vile slave’, he exclaims to Berry,

And drudge to money, bond-man to thy wealth,Apprentice to a penney, thou that hourds upThe frie of silver pence and half-pennies,With shew of charitie to give the poore,But putst them to increase …Thou that invents new clauses for a bondTo cousin simple plainnesse:

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O not a Dragon, No, not the devils fangs are halfe so cruellAs are thy clawes[.] (ll.774-84)

Rejecting Berry’s selfish accumulation, Cripple operates according to different principles. His own work-ethic is closer to that outlined by the Protestant theologian William Perkins in A Treatise of the Vocations (1603), in which the need to pursue a vocation is tempered by the insistence that ‘he abuseth his calling, whosoever he be that … employs it for himselfe, seeking wholly his owne and not the common good.’39 The Protestant insistence that all work is a divine calling did not simply validate the individualistic pursuit of capital within the early modern economy. The Christian calling, as Perkins insists, does not map neatly onto ‘worldly’ vocation, but instead constitutes a calling ‘out of the world to be a child of God, a member of Christ’. A Christian in pursuit of his vocation is necessarily ‘distinguished and severed from all other sorts of men in the world’. From the position of being ‘severed’ from the ‘world’, he can take up his work, or his ‘particular calling’, but the motivation for this work must be ‘to further the good estate of the true Church of God’. The Protestant work-ethic, as espoused by Perkins, therefore exhibits itself in a disciplined commitment to one’s vocation but imagines that calling as a duty to be taken up rather than as an expression of the self or a means of establishing an identity. We ‘gave up our names to God, and Christ’, notes Perkins: our vocations, then, are not a means of establishing who we are, and cannot be driven by self-interest.40 They are, instead, acts of service, roles to be taken up and performed for the benefit of others. The sense in which the pursuit of a vocation is distanced from the expression of an authentic truth about the subject is clear in Luther’s description of human work as the means by which God operates:

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What else is all our work to God – whether in the fields, in the garden, in the city, in the house, in war, or in government – but [… the means] by which He wants to give His gifts in the fields, at home, and everywhere else? These are the masks of God, behind which He wants to remain concealed and do all things.41

Operating as a mask of God, the Protestant subject is a prosthetic extension of God’s body, at once engaged in his or her calling and alienated from an activity which signals God’s agency, not his or her own. Reformed theology therefore teaches the Christian subject to pursue a vocation not as a means of self-assertion but as an expression of the death of the self which Paul insists is at the heart of love, the governing principle of the messianic community. Love ‘does not seek its own’ (1 Cor 13:5), as Luther repeats, so that the work of the Christian, as an aspect of this love, is self-denying rather than self-interested. The economy in which a Christian operates, according to Luther, is one in which ‘the good things we have from God should flow from one to the other and be common to all, so that everyone should ‘put on’ his neighbor and so conduct himself toward him as if he himself were in the other’s place.’42

Cripple, whose dedication to his vocation in the Exchange is accompanied by a concern to help others – ranging from the women he rescues in the first scene to his efforts to secure Frank the bride of his choice through allowing himself to be ‘put on’ by another – is at once engaged in the world of exchange and fundamentally ‘severed’ from it: attempting to reconcile an emergent capitalist economy with the Protestant ethic of work as service of others, he remains an awkward figure. Instead of pursuing selfish acquisition, he gives himself up to be used by others: ‘I will resigne the same/ To you my friend’, he states to Frank: ‘assume this shape of mine,/ Take what I have, for all I have is thine’ (ll. 1956-7, 1967-8). Cripple here lives up to his earlier vow Frank that ‘my love is yours, my life to doe you good’ (l.1337). He thus inverts the values of the consumerist society in

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which he operates. In choosing Cripple, a ‘lumpe of poor deformity’, Phillis explicitly rejects the ‘beauty’ of ‘golde’, setting wealth against the ability to be ‘Rich in kindnesse beyond comparison.’ (ll.2154-5) Like Stump, then, Cripple eschews the superficial appeal of decadent consumerism, his ‘ugly’ body signaling his prioritization of alternative ethical values.

A Larum for London and The Fair Maid of the Exchange therefore both deploy lame characters who use prosthetics in order to interrogate the emergent capitalist societies depicted in the plays. Both Stump and Cripple are ultimately defined not by their bodies, or by the apparent limitations of these bodies, but by a powerful sense of vocation, a messianic calling which dislocates them from the normative identities operating in their societies. While other characters are obsessed with acquisition as a means of self-definition, Stump and Cripple both illuminate the pathology of the drive to possess goods, wealth or, even, identities. ‘To have a name is to be guilty’, notes Agamben: names trap us within the punitive legal systems which impose these names upon us. ‘Happy, and without a name’, Stump and Cripple exhibit the strategic possibilities opened up by the careless, even negligent, use of identities and the body.43 By the end of the plays, both central characters have merged indistinguishably into other characters, giving themselves up to the point of invisibility in order to achieve a greater good. In these plays, those who try to possess are paralysed and ineffective, while those who eschew ownership, even of themselves, and seek instead to put their identities and bodies to use – those, in other words, for whom identities and bodies are fundamentally prosthetic – are able to start to bring about alternative forms of community. Ultimately, then, the users of prostheses in these plays do not represent an alternative category of identity, but demonstrate a prosthetic form of life that fundamentally undermines the very structures of identity. As such,

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they are the political subjects of these plays, those, in the end, who promise to ‘[make] salvation possible’.44

University of Manchester

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1Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Gideon Baker, Bruce Baker, Anke Bernau, Jerome de Groot, Jo Carruthers, Deni Kasa, David Matthews, James Paz and Fred Schurink for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to present aspects of this research at the University of Manchester, the University of Sussex and the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting in Berlin, and thank all of the participants at those seminars for their responses.

Notes

The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607), ed. Peter H. Davison (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1962), l.97. The play has been attributed to Thomas Heywood, but its authorship remains uncertain. 2 Juana Green discusses the role of the drawer in early modern embroidery production in ‘The Sempster’s Wares: Merchandising and Marrying in The Fair Maid of the Exchange’, Renaissance Quarterly, 53:4 (Winter 2000), p. 1093.3 On Cripple’s ‘correction’ of female desire see Green, ‘The Sempster’s Wares’, p. 1113. 4 Roslyn L. Knutson states that Stump has the ‘wicked wit of a Vice’, “Filling Fare: The Appetite for Current Issues and Traditional Forms in the Repertory of the Chamberlain’s Men’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Vol 15, ed. John Pitcher (London: Associated University Press, 2003), pp. 70-1. Patricia Cahill claims that the play represents Stump as ‘sinister’, Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 204. Jean E. Howard notes Cripple’s ‘uncanny power’ over the female characters in the play, describing him as ‘the ambiguous genius of the Exchange, the spirit of the place, and that spirit is of mixed and vaguely sinister origins’, Theater of a City: The Places of London, 1598-1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 66. 5 Giorgio Agamben, ‘In Praise of Profanation’, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), pp. 81, 77. 6 Agamben, ‘In Praise of Profanation’, p. 83.7 To ‘remain in the calling in the form of the as not means to not ever make the calling an object of ownership, only of use’, Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 26. On the Christian form of life as involving a ‘theory of use’ see also Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 139.8 Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis 31-37, Luther’s Works Vol. 6, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1970), p. 125. 9 John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of Genesis Vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1850), 196, 199.10 Luther, Lectures on Genesis, pp. 130-154.11 Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 3. 12 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 5; Badiou, The Subject of Change: Lessons from the European Graduate School, ed. Duane Rousselle (New York: Atropos, 2013), pp. 14, 16.13 Agamben, Time That Remains, p. 41.14 See Agamben, Time That Remains, p. 23.15 See Agamben, Time That Remains, pp. 47-57.16 Agamben, Time That Remains, p. 57.17 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), p. 139. 18 Cahill, Unto the Breach, 203; Vin Nardizzi, ‘The Wooden Matter of Human Bodies: Prosthesis and Stump in A Larum for London’, The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, eds Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 126. 19 Cahill discusses the play in terms of its staging of catastrophe, citing contemporary descriptions of this catastrophe which themselves reference apocalyptic texts, yet she focuses on the play’s representation of ‘collective trauma’ rather than on its apocalyptic framing per se. See Cahill, Unto the Breach, pp. 176-8.20 Anon., A Larum for London, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: Malone Society, 1913), ll. 570-4.

21 See for example Cahill, Unto the Breach, pp. 181-3, where Cahill argues that the sound of the play represents an ‘otherwise unrepresentable traumatic excess’. 22 See Geneva Bible note to Rev 17:4.23 See Knutson, ‘Filling Fare’, p. 70. 24 Cahill describes Stump as ‘the antithesis of Antwerp’s swollen-bellied burghers’, Unto the Breach, p. 173.25 Nardizzi notes the uncanny animation of Stump’s wooden leg, ‘The Wooden Matter of Human Bodies’, p. 125. See also Cahill for a discussion of the ‘uncanny powers’ bestowed on Stump by his prosthetic leg, Unto the Breach, p. 192.26 Agamben argues that ‘to profane means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence’, as well as play, ‘In Praise of Profanation’, p. 75. 27 Nardizzi discusses the lack of distinction between Stump’s prosthetic limb and the stump of his amputated limb in ‘The Wooden Matter of Human Bodies’, pp. 122-3.28 Nardizzi comments on the ‘textual tradition’ of the play, where the ‘disabled veteran’ is ‘overwhelmingly interpellate[d]’ as ‘Stump’, ‘The Wooden Matter of Human Bodies’, p.120.29 Badiou, Subject of Change, p. 20. 30 See Katherine Schaap Williams, ‘”More legs than nature gave thee”: Performing the Cripple in The Fair Maid of the Exchange’, ELH, 82:2 (Summer 2015), p. 502.31 Williams discusses the labelling of Cripple as ‘crutch’ in ‘”More legs than nature gave thee”’, p. 502.32 On the role of women in the play, see Howard, Theater of a City, 60-7 and Green, ‘The Sempster’s Wares’, pp. 1084-1118. Green nevertheless notes that ‘the play shows how men, too, are commodified in the process of making marriage’, p. 1110. 33 Peter Hyland notes that Frank ‘sees in his disguise a negative moral actualisation of his self’, Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), p. 139.34 See Williams, ‘”More legs than nature gave thee”’, p. 506.35 In ‘“More legs than nature gave thee”’, Williams argues that Cripple is distinguished by his inability to impersonate others, yet this argument underplays Cripple’s adept role-playing, including for instance his adoption of the role of the unworthy-because-deformed object of affection, when the audience knows that his motivation for rejecting Phillis is different to the one suggested by this pose. Frank impersonates Cripple rather than vice versa, as Williams states, but this is because Cripple has no desire to impersonate Frank, not because he is ‘disabled’ in these terms. Richard Waswo discusses the extent to which the play’s representation of the exchange of capital renders characters interchangeable in ‘Crises of Credit: Monetary and Erotic Economies in the Jacobean Theatre’, Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy, eds. Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock and Anne-Julia Zwierlein (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 62-3. 36 Williams, ‘”More legs than nature gave thee”’, p. 503.37 Waswo describes Cripple as ‘the market personified’, ‘Crises of Credit’, p. 63. 38 Green notes that he is ‘both part and not-part of the community’, ‘The Sempster’s Wares’, p. 1106.39 William Perkins, A Treatise of the Vocations, or, Callings of Men (1603), p. 7. 40 Perkins, Treatise of the Vocations, pp. 13-14.41 Martin Luther, Selected Psalms III, Works Vol 14, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1958), p. 114. 42 Luther, The Freedom of a Christian, Works Vol 31, ed. Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1957), p. 371.43 Agamben, ‘Magic and Happiness’, Profanations, p. 22.44 Agamben, Time That Remains, p. 57.