‘Happy, and without a name’: Prosthetic Identities on the Early Modern Stage

A Larum for London and The Fair Maid of the Exchange both deploy characters who use prostheses in order to interrogate the emergent capitalist societies depicted in the plays. 'Stump' and 'Cripple', the heroes of these plays, are defined not by their bodies, or by the apparent limitations of these bodies, but by a sense of vocation, a messianic calling which dislocates them from the normative identities operating in their societies. In these plays, I argue, those who try to possess are 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 bring about alternative forms of community.