Nicole Sheriko

Acting Naturally: Clown Performance as Disability Imitation in English Renaissance Drama | Renaissance Drama: Vol 53, No 1

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Thanks to everyone who read and helped me through earlier drafts! This has been a long time in the making and it's not over yet. Looking forward to thinking more about this for a longer future book chapter version.

Links below for anyone interested in giving it a read:

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Title page for a seventeenth-century play with a portrait of a man in a cloak and hat. This is Blue John, a character in the play who is based on a real London man with a cognitive disability which the play's author was known to imitate for entertainment. The clothing and pose of the man in the portrait strikingly recalls a description of Blue John that Armin wrote in a different pamphlet where he lists different types of "natural fools," some based on real people.

Another well-known image: possibly of Robert Armin, one of the professional clown actors in Shakespeare's company. Here he's doing his famous impersonation of Blue John, a local London man with a cognitive disability. The impersonation was apparently so popular that Armin wrote a play around it.

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A page from a seventeenth-century book showing seven famous characters from different plays standing on a stage. One has a crutch and a bandaged leg, one plays the fiddle, one holds a cup out to a woman, one eats bread, one wears the costume of someone living in a mental hospital, and one enters through a curtain.

This well-studied illustration of The Wits features famous characters from several plays and most of these characters are either clowns or disabled figures, or both. My essay thinks a bit about how the condition of clownish celebrity depended on virtuosic imitation of disabled figures.

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Excited to have a new article out in Renaissance Drama! This one traces how early modern clowns relied on disability imitation. So much familiar clowning activity appropriates disabled performance, behavior, or positionality that the distinction between "artificial" and "natural" fools is tricky.

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Woman holding a jester's staff that wears a multicolored hat with bells and white clown makeup.

Finally making the move to Bluesky! Stay tuned for more adventures in the archives and hot takes on Renaissance drama. 🔥🔥🔥 Here's a throwback to my visit to the prop stores of Shakespeare's Globe.

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