'The Foole transform’d': Disability, Conversion, and Human Difference in an Elizabethan Romance
by Bridger M. Bartlett, PhD
AMEND Postdoctoral Research Associate
The famous historie of Chinon of England does not live up to its name. The few scholars who have made note of the romance since its 1597 publication agree that it not only has a convoluted plot but is made all the harder to read by the attempt of the author, one Christopher Middleton, to capitalize on the dying gasps of the fad for a highly stylized form of prose called euphuism. "It is difficult if not impossible to attribute parodic intent to Middleton' despite the work’s staid and overwrought qualities," Norris J. Lacy comments, "in large part owing to the quite obvious limits to his talent as well as to his twin apparent interests: to excel in alliteration and to regale his contemporaries by elaborating a sequence of highly exotic and fantastic episodes" (447). In this framing, the spectacular elements of the romance have the effect of reinforcing an impression of the author as rather obsessive and embarrassingly oblivious to his own unfashionability and weaknesses as a communicator. I do not wish to explore the potential neurodivergence of Christopher Middleton in this post, but I find Lacy’s impression of the author as comically obtuse worth noting given how neurodivergent disability and the author's evident interest in fantastic exoticism play off one another within the text. In what follows, I want to consider how Middleton brings these topics together and uses them to situate English identities geographically and in terms of racialized religious hierarchies.
The "much unread" (Taylor 294) Chinon does seem to have inspired a now-lost play within a few years of publication (White), but traces of the romance in 17th-century culture appear limited to little else besides a passing mention of "Chinon of England, or the Foole transform’d" in Edmund Gayton’s 1654 book Pleasant notes upon Don Quixot. Like Gayton, I have been struck by the romance’s plot point about a "Foole transform’d." The protagonist, Chinon, was “borne a foole” (Middleton B1r), but he undergoes a transformation: after hearing a "powerfull speech" recounting "honorable accidents" and knights’ "adventerous valour" (D4r), he is cured of his disability through a miracle that the author represents as conversion-like. Middleton describes this change in a way that aligns neurotypicality with whiteness and physical perfection as well as with Christian spiritual enlightenment. This transformation occurs early in Chinon, and Middleton mostly seems to forget about the event throughout the rest of the book. Still, I think this curious use of neurodivergent disability (and its elimination) constitute a useful moment for understanding the negotiations of English identity in a global world in this romance and in late Elizabethan writing more broadly.
Chapter 1 of Middleton’s romance opens by describing a Britain of the distant past, "when Arthur then Monarch of this little worlde, with his attendant Knights, whose valorous exployts every where acted for theyr Countries honour, hath eternized their euerliving names, even in the farthest coasts of the barbarous Pagans" (B1r). We soon learn that the titular Chinon and his sister Laura are the two children of Cador, "an auncient Knight" who has been "installed in the Earledome of Cornewall" by King Arthur "for his many merits and well deserving déedes" (B4v). By figuring Britain as its own "little worlde" and yet situated as distinctively noble within a broader world where Arthur’s knights prove their valour in adventures to "the farthest coasts of the barbarous Pagans," Middleton (intentionally or not) primes the reader to be mindful of Cornwall’s distinctiveness in ways that will matter for how the story treats disability. Although Arthur is typically understood as a king of all Britain, and although he originally appeared in Welsh tradition, Elizabethan texts such as Edmund Spenser’s much more celebrated romance, The Faerie Queene, tended to adopt Arthur as a mascot for England and Englishness. Cornwall, importantly, had not always been considered part of England during the Middle Ages. And to this day Cornwall retains a distinctive cultural identity. Within the "little worlde" of Arthur’s Britain, this western peninsular region perhaps embodies something of the culturally other, even "barbarous" strangeness that "Pagans" exude "in the farthest coasts" of the wider world.
I will return to these themes of geographic, cultural, and religious otherness, but Middleton still has more exposition to share. Cador’s children are both good-looking, but that is where their similarities end. Laura "so forwardly prospered in every Liniament of her beautifull bodie, & all eternall quallities of a vertuous minde" (B4v) that "too bright was her beautie, … and too high her heauenly minde” for their excellence to be adequately captured by “mans base wit" (C1r). Chinon, in contrast, was "outwardly formed in as faire a fashion, as might well beséeme the sonne to such a fire, but in his minde more than a maimed man" (C1r). While everyone is in awe of the sister for her equally beautiful body and mind, "none but with commisseration pittied the other, that so well fashioned a body should containe so ill formed a minde" (C1v). The descriptions of Chinon here notably align his mental disability with physical disability or an appearance that somehow does not meet the standards of beauty that existed for British elites, and a proto-eugenic logic in the text picks up this framework of embodied defect: wit and beauty like Laura’s are understood as proper to the offspring of such a noble and meritorious man as Cador while disability is, by contrast, a serious aberration when it appears in the child of someone so good and illustrious.
Familial disappointment and embarrassment about Chinon’s disability persist for some time, but everything changes when two of King Arthur’s knights come to the Cornish court with "straunge tydings of … admirable atchivements" (D3v). When Chinon hears these reports of chivalrous deeds, "the happy heavens dispers[ed] now the sable vale of sad faced follie, that so long in the darke dungeon of ignominy, had lockt up the happines of his after hopes, being now able in himselfe to sée, that which before in another he could not discerne" (D3v). The cured Chinon goes on to spend the bulk of the romance participating in adventures like "the recoverie of beauteous Celestina from the handes of the Soldan [Sultan]" of Babylon (G3v) and "a great battaile in Egipt, … where by the meanes of the Englishmen the King [was] overc[o]me" (M4v). In helping to liberate people from oppression by distant, implicitly non-Christian foes such as these, Chinon’s deeds rehearse a politics of imperialist Christian expansionism that we see prefigured in his own wondrous recovery from disability.
The description of Chinon’s mental transformation uses a racialising framework to liken his disability to paganism and imagines him being elevated from wretched dual states of blackness and ignorance as though by baptism. A long tradition in Christian thought and rhetoric maps the associated ideas of goodness/sight/understanding/holiness and badness/sightlessness/ignorance/wickedness onto light and dark, respectively. As scholars like Kim F. Hall and Dennis Austin Britton have shown, early modern English writers drew on this tradition to conflate not being Christian with dark skin and ascribe ignorance and a lack of understanding to both conditions. This thinking assumed white Christian English people as a standard for humanity, and, as Britton demonstrates, conversion to Christianity was often imagined as overriding the physical signs of racial difference or turning converts white on a psychic or metaphysical level. Middleton draws on all these associations and assumptions when he describes Chinon’s disability in terms of "the sable vale of sad faced follie" and "the darke dungeon of ignominy." The passage invites us to think of Chinon’s cognitive inability to "discerne" as analogous to how unchristianised peoples were imagined to be unable "to sée" in terms of spiritual truths, and it imagines the removal of Chinon’s disability as a change that makes him count fully as the noble British cultural insider whom his father had wanted and romance readers expect.
Middleton does not use the same kinds of anti-neurodiversity ableist language that we might encounter today, but he is able to convey a similar attitude by tapping into Elizabethan society’s beliefs about other things. Racist and ableist standards for physical attractiveness and an assumption that non-Christians are exotic, radically other, and both mentally and spiritually impoverished become Middleton’s tools for describing Chinon’s disability and letting readers know how they should feel about it. It is Chinon’s later exploits as a knight who adventures forth from King Arthur’s "little worlde" to subdue non-European, infidel tyrants, moreover, that the text demonstrates Chinon’s transformation and the ways it brings him in line with both the cultural and the generic expectations that exist for him. Although the plot point of "the Foole transform’d" has apparently proved to be a relatively memorable aspect of The famous historie of Chinon of England, it is true that Middleton’s romance is not, really, all that remarkable. That very pablum quality, though, can be taken as a testament to the representativeness of the ideas and attitudes the text promulgates. Chinon of England and texts like it help to illustrate how ideas about neurodivergence in early modern culture were often bound up with other considerations of human difference.
My own recently-completed monograph manuscript (currently under review) explores how attitudes about religion, race, and neurodiversity informed one another in early modern English literature. One of the ongoing tasks for me in my role as a postdoc with AMEND is to connect my knowledge and ongoing interest regarding English identity constructions in relation to the rest of the world with a broader attention to Europe (and its various global connections). Chinon, which touches on complexities within and among English and British identity groupings in the process of developing stories of dramatic exoticism can invite us to look for international connections in new ways. Chinon's story as I have very briefly summarized it here is not especially interested in continental Europe; nonetheless, Middleton's romance encourages in the reader a cognizance of England's own geo-politico-religious situatedness and may prove to be a useful text with which to compare and contrast works from other cultural and linguistic traditions.
Bridger M. Bartlett, PhD, is AMEND's postdoctoral research associate. Broadly, their research focuses on neurodiversity as an intersectional consideration in 16th- and 17th-century English culture. With Laura Seymour and Bradley J. Irish, they are a co-editor of the collection Neurodiversity and Early Modern English Literature (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press). Bartlett's research has appeared in ELH and JEMCS, and they have recently completed a monograph manuscript on neurodiversity and race-making in early modern English literature.
References
Britton, Dennis Austin. Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance. Fordham UP, 2014.
Gayton, Edmund. Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixot. 1654. Early English Books Online.
Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Cornell UP, 1995.
Lacy, Norris J. “‘Coda’: Chinon of England (1597), or the Limits of Romance.” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies, no. 30, no. 30, Dec. 2015, pp. 441–50. OpenEdition Journals, https://doi.org/10.4000/crm.13905.
Middleton, Christopher. The Famous Historie of Chinon of England. 1597. Early English Books Online.
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Edited by Thomas P. Roche Jr., Penguin, 1978.
Taylor, Jane H. M. “Experiments in Fiction: Framing and Reframing Romance at the End of the Middle Ages, and Beyond.” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies, no. 30, no. 30, Dec. 2015, pp. 287–95. OpenEdition Journals, https://doi.org/10.4000/crm.13892.
White, Paul Whitfield. “The Admiral’s Men, Shakespeare, and the Lost Arthurian Plays of Elizabethan England.” Arthuriana, vol. 24, no. 4, 2014, pp. 33–47. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/91/article/565274.
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