Fletcher’s <i>Humorous Lieutenant</i> , Soldierly Identity, and Disability

This article explores disability and soldierly identity in John Fletcher’s comedy, The Humorous Lieutenant. The eponymous Lieutenant experiences chronic pain from an unnamed condition. He is an exceptional fighter until a battlefield wound relieves his chronic pain and he thenceforth refuses to enter combat. Fletcher’s Lieutenant inverses the increasingly common early modern figure of the combat-injured soldier experiencing difficulties reintegrating into society, as recognized in Elizabeth I’s 1592 “Act for Relief of Souldiors,” which, as Katherine Schaap Williams points out, registers “disabled” as “the veteran’s inability to work” (58). But inversion does not capture the full complexity of the Lieutenant’s condition in terms of its stage representation. The Lieutenant is subjected to intrusive questions, explications, and advice regarding his “ailment” and is manipulated and exploited via his condition for the state’s benefit. Language in response to his disease echoes in exhortations to other characters experiencing intense emotion rather than a physical condition. Characters employ misogynistic rhetoric that links women to weakness, impairment, and lack in explicit contrast to the conquering strength of the male soldier. I argue that, through these and other threads, the play troubles distinctions between ability and disability, health and illness. This troubling destabilizes what it means to be a soldier – a profession with a long tradition of admitting members based on physical prowess.