Disability and Shakespeare: A Guide for Practitioners and Scholars
by Sawyer Kemp and Cameron Hunt McNabb
“Inclusive” and “accessible” have become popular buzzwords for Shakespeare producers and theatremakers. Perhaps because of the challenges when listening to early modern English verse, perhaps because of the thematic material in many of the plays, or perhaps because of his perceived highbrow canon status (as a dead white dude writing about other dead white dudes for all white dudes), the drive to create “inclusive” and “accessible” Shakespeare has led to productions focusing on physical accommodations, reducing ticket costs, connecting with audiences outside of shows through things like lectures and social media campaigns, and updating settings to allow Shakespeare’s work to speak to contemporary political issues. But how well do these efforts actually succeed in creating more diverse and equitable productions? What can practitioners and scholars do, on and off the stage, to work toward a more inclusive, accessible Shakespeare?
In disability studies, we often talk about “universal design” — the idea of making or remaking a space from the ground up such that everyone could use it. While universal design can name a literal form of design priorities, another way disability scholars describe it is a kind of horizon line toward which we are always working. In our recorded dialogue below, we talk more about some of these issues, and in the suggestions that follow, we aim to outline a horizon line of inclusivity that we challenge the theater to think toward. Some suggestions may be easier than others to enact, and not every suggestion may be possible, but these guidelines offer some best practices for making Shakespeare productions more inclusive and accessible to disability communities.
ON THE STAGE
Don’t Metaphorize Disability: When a character’s impairment may only be mentioned once or twice in text, scholars and practitioners have the tendency to read that impairment as a metaphor or to look for “deeper meaning” about it. Impairments may serve in these ways, but in a dramatic text, they are also clues as to how these characters were performed. They should primarily be taken at face value as a facet of characterization rather than metaphorized and then not staged.
For instance, Taming of the Shrew suggests Katherine has a limp, though scholars have historically read the reference as a metaphor and no modern productions had ever staged her that way (until one very recently). However, staging a limping Katherine, as Rachel E. Hile points out, completely changes interpretations of the play, especially connected with gender expectations and the play’s “marriage problem.”
A similar pattern can be found in Richard II, where the Duke of York calls his arm “prisoner to the palsy.” Despite modern productions overlooking this impairment, it crucially explains York’s political waffling because he may not be able to leverage physical violence. If there are references to disability or impairments in a play, stage them and consider how they may significantly contribute to meaning-making in the play.
Consider Disability as Part of Character Identity: Many of Shakespeare’s plays explicitly mention disability, but many more have lacunae in characterization that may be explored through a lens of disability. For instance, the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C. did a performance of King Lear that cast Cordelia as Deaf, played by a Deaf actor, as a means of examining the communication gap between her and Lear, who does not know how to sign in the production, and her marginalization within the family.
Another such gap may exist in Prospero, whose staff not only points to his role as magician but a possible disability. Considering Prospero as disabled would offer one explanation for his pursuit of magic and expulsion from Milan. Simply “adding in” disability for the sake of virtue signaling diversity or inspiration porn harms disability communities just as ignoring disability does. But considering ways in which characters’ experiences as written overlap or parallel with disability experiences opens up spaces for generative, inclusive productions.
Cast Disabled Actors: We cannot stress this enough. If a part calls for staging a disability, that part should be played by a disabled actor with the same or similar impairment. There are certainly reasons that this could be hard or exceptions to this rule, but by and large, productions should not cast able-bodied actors in disabled roles (as 95% of television shows do). These forms of “cripping up” and “disability drag” often perpetuate harmful stereotypes about disability and contribute to inequity and injustice for the disability community.
Additionally, we suggest you cast disabled actors, with legible and illegible disabilities, in able-bodied roles too. Theatrical audiences have experience in cross-gender and cross-racial casting (in shows like Peter Pan, Hamilton, or Bridgerton), but audiences are not trained to suspend disbelief for disability because casting prejudices have not provided opportunities to do so, a fact that further limits roles for disabled actors. Casting disabled actors increases disability representation, and the more disabled individuals that are part of the production, the more disability knowledge the production gains. Listening to their experiences and feedback regarding inclusivity and access is crucial.
Do Your Homework: If you are staging a disability, do your research on terminology, social barriers and obstacles those with that disability face, and first-person narratives about lived experiences with it. It is best to limit or avoid medical-oriented resources, as these often operate under a “diagnose-and-cure” framework that can perpetuate harm to the disability community. Remember that every disabled person you hire, whether actors or working behind the scenes, brings to your production valuable disability knowledge and experiences.
OFF THE STAGE
Be Flexible with Space and Accommodation: The contemporary conventions of the theater are often inherently inaccessible to many people with disabilities. Modern audiences are expected to quietly sit still and focus for long periods of time with no break, expectations that many cannot meet. One inclusive approach is relaxed performances, or performances where those expectations are different: noise is allowed, people are free to come and go as they need, and more breaks may be built into the production. It’s important to note that relaxed performances more closely mirror the original conditions at the Globe than our modern expectations do.
Provide Educational Materials: Intellectual and educational practices like pre-show lectures, informational lobby displays, dramaturgical program materials, podcasts, post-show chats, or resources to explain certain archaic or uncommon language help your audiences get on the same page. Broadly speaking, these increase access by filling audiences in on information that they may not necessarily have. Usually these are expert-oriented events where one or more people with specialized knowledge make that knowledge available in active or passive ways. These can also be opportunities to educate audiences about advocacy issues you are engaging thematically. For instance, it could be a time to provide information about disabilities you may be staging and to support or advocate for disability communities. Here is where casting disabled actors and doing your homework (from above) are crucial.
Emphasize Exchange rather than Expertise: These strategies can take many forms. It could be something on-site, like a lobby activity (the Stratford Festival did an interesting connectivity-building event in a production of The Diary of Anne Frank where patrons could record themselves reading passages of Frank’s diary, and then listen to recordings left by others) but, increasingly, this is an online and social media tactic. What’s tricky about this space is in creating prompts for engagement that are interesting enough to solicit responses, but not so creative that people get, you know, weird in the way that only the Internet seems to produce. Another thing to keep in mind is that these prompts are actually asking audiences to do a certain type of marketing labor for the company for free.
Make Productions Relevant: Design, direction, and marketing choices can encourage audiences to emotionally identify with a production. Increasingly, a popular mode of creating emotional accessibility is to encourage audience investment by mapping the early modern play onto contemporary political or social justice themes. This can be a super effective mode of public engagement, but it’s important that there is continuity between the theatre and the specific issue that the production is addressing. For a low-stakes example, I (Sawyer) once attended a production of a Dickens “Christmas Carol” adaptation at a theatre where I knew the front of house staff made minimum wage and were required to work on Christmas Eve without holiday pay — which I suppose is a mild hypocrisy, but it’s a yikes from me.
Engage Different Communities… Throughout the Organization: If the play addresses themes that affect a specific community group, it’s even more important that members of that community group be involved in identifying how that production represents acts of violence toward their community. Ideally, this reflects an authentic community investment in helping raise awareness toward fixing social injustice, not just the act of borrowing the idea of socioeconomic precarity for a six-week run. One way to prevent appropriating struggle in the name of art is to prioritize a multidirectional exchange between the theatre and the group in question. Consider working with specific community partners and drawing up a Memorandum of Understanding (or MOU) that indicates what the theatre is giving back to the group in exchange for their labor educating actors, practitioners, and staff.
Of course, another way to model community engagement is to prioritize creating diverse paths to success within the organization’s structure and leadership. What are the racial, gender, age, ability, income, demographics, etc. of your artistic staff or repertory? Of your leadership? Where do you post audition notices? Who doesn’t see them? Creating accessible productions for new audiences of diverse communities necessarily involves unmaking the binary of the theatre and its “underserved communities.”
From Universality to Universal Design
Shakespeare has often been heralded for his universality, as a “man for all time.” We of course know that’s rubbish. But productions of his works can strive toward universal design to be as inclusive and accessible as possible to the disability community. As access becomes a broad term we use to describe physical accommodation as well as our attempts to make Shakespeare speak to our contemporary moment, it is important that the theater be thoughtful, responsive, and flexible space. In order to create such a space, theaters need to create continuity and consistency across their various strategies for engagement and inclusivity.
Sawyer Kemp (they/them) is currently the inaugural Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Transgender Studies with the Gender & Women’s Studies department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In fall of 2022, Sawyer will join the English department at CUNY Queen’s College as an incoming Assistant Professor. Sawyer’s work has appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and the edited collection Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare. Their most recent article, “Two Othellos: Transitioning Anti-Blackness” was published in a Social Justice-themed special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin.
Cameron Hunt McNabb (she/her) works on disability studies and premodern drama. She is the General Editor of The Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe and has published in Disability Studies Quarterly (forthcoming), Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Bulletin. Her current project is titled Dramatic Prosthesis: Disability and Drama, and she is grateful for the generous support it has received from the NEH and ACMRS. She is on Twitter @cameronmcnabb.
