Making Obesity Fat: Crip Estrangement in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1

Abstract

This article argues that the "play extempore" in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 is a privileged site for "crip estrangement," a phenomenon that occurs in Shakespearean drama when a normate character encountering disability is featured within a metatheatrical structure. While this scene is supposed to allow Prince Henry an opportunity to "practise an answer" before he meets his father King Henry IV, in actuality, the question of how to interpret Falstaff's fat body takes center stage. Since this encounter with fat, which already induces self-reflection, is placed within a second self-reflecting metatheatrical structure, the scene constitutes a protracted rendering of the protocols of rhetorical representation: it estranges Falstaff's substance that readers and theatregoers usually understand as "the old fat knight" into its rhetorical parts. The scene demonstrates that Falstaff's actual fat body is the wax (matter) that Hal's speeches (form) attempt to impress into a substance, the old, obese character we recognize as Falstaff. Since Renaissance rhetoric was intimately linked to acting, the article argues that the scene's estrangement could also occur in performances of the play. More than merely a queer expression of fat from Falstaff, the play extempore deconstructs the representation of obesity: it "make[s] a stone stony" (Shklovsky); it makes obesity fat.