ABSTRACT
This chapter arose from the thematic concern with the “body in history” at the VariAbilities III conference in 2017. It discusses a historical figure whose bodily difference was integral to the success of his career as a comic and actor-manager. Samuel Foote’s leg amputation gave him both a convenient pun on his surname and the third Royal patent on a London theatre. This combination led to renewed public interest in this largely forgotten character (in both the theatrical and personality-based senses of that word) following the publication of Ian Kelly’s biography and the subsequent play starring Simon Russell Beale, both titled Mr Foote’s Other Leg. However, the fascination with Foote as an early amputee-actor has remained rather distant from his lived reality, and has mostly not extended to considering the potential implications of his acquired impairment in his performances. In cognizance of wider popular conversations around disability casting, it seems important to acknowledge and emphasize the practical importance of Foote’s impairment as a marker of the plausibility of success (and even fame) for actors like him – in the current era as much as in the eighteenth century. Moreover, Foote’s other significance is perhaps found in his notorious trial for the alleged indecent assault of a (male) servant, since this would provide a point of intersection for disability and queer theories in the period. This chapter combines these multiple elements and focuses on Foote’s performance of the dandy Sir Matthew Mite in his play The Nabob in order to explore the potential implications arising from the convergence, through Foote’s “actor’s body,” of disability and sexuality on the eighteenth-century stage.
