“The Mad Butler of Gray’s Inn: Service, Disability, and the Limits of Early Modern Institutional Care”
In March 1593, John Somerscales, a junior butler of Gray’s Inn, fell ill. In response, the Inn’s administrators, comprising senior lawyers of the Inn (including a young Francis Bacon), ordered the disbursement of his weekly wages and permitted him to convalescence at the Inn. When it became apparent that Somerscales had lost his “perfect sence & memorye,” the lawyers committed him to London’s Bethlem Hospital. They also paid for Somerscales’s “keeping” using the limited funds of the legal society. This talk uses Somerscales’s case to ask questions about early modern master-servant relations, the nature of care-work outside of the family structure, the precarity of wage-earners (particularly those who experienced debilitating mental conditions), and the cultural significance of able-minded, hyper-rational lawyers staging, spectating, scripting, and performing dramatic scenes of madness.
Bio: Penelope Geng is an Associate Professor of English at Macalester College, where she teaches courses on early modern literature, Shakespeare, law and literature, and disability. She is the author of Communal Justice in Shakespeare’s England: Drama, Law, and Emotion (University of Toronto Press, 2021). Her articles and essays have appeared in Studies in Philology, The Sixteenth Century Journal, The Ben Jonson Journal, Law, Culture and the Humanities, Situating Shakespeare Pedagogy in US Higher Education, and The Shakespearean International Yearbook: Disability Performance and Global Shakespeare. She is working on her second monograph, provisionally titled “Disabled by Law,” which uncovers the deep influence of feudalism on early modern notions of disability, racial purity, and able-bodied citizenship. With Jennifer E. Row (French, UMN), she is the co-convener of Uncommon Bodies, a workshop devoted to the study of early modern disability, embodiment, race, and performance.
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