Nicole Sheriko
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nicolesheriko.bsky.social
Nicole Sheriko
@nicolesheriko.bsky.social
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English prof and theater historian of Renaissance drama / puppet researcher / clown scholar / hellmouth aficionado / dragon enthusiast🐉
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nicolesheriko.bsky.social
And here's the DOI link for readers with institutional subscriptions: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
Acting Naturally: Clown Performance as Disability Imitation in English Renaissance Drama | Renaissance Drama: Vol 53, No 1
www.journals.uchicago.edu
July 21, 2025 at 8:16 PM
nicolesheriko.bsky.social
Here's a free no-subscription-required link for the first 50 clicks: www.journals.uchicago.edu/eprint/KJRVG...
University of Chicago Press Journals: Cookie absent
www.journals.uchicago.edu
July 21, 2025 at 8:16 PM
nicolesheriko.bsky.social
Thanks to everyone who read and helped me through earlier drafts! This has been a long time in the making and it's not over yet. Looking forward to thinking more about this for a longer future book chapter version.

Links below for anyone interested in giving it a read:
July 21, 2025 at 8:16 PM
nicolesheriko.bsky.social
Another well-known image: possibly of Robert Armin, one of the professional clown actors in Shakespeare's company. Here he's doing his famous impersonation of Blue John, a local London man with a cognitive disability. The impersonation was apparently so popular that Armin wrote a play around it.
Title page for a seventeenth-century play with a portrait of a man in a cloak and hat. This is Blue John, a character in the play who is based on a real London man with a cognitive disability which the play's author was known to imitate for entertainment. The clothing and pose of the man in the portrait strikingly recalls a description of Blue John that Armin wrote in a different pamphlet where he lists different types of "natural fools," some based on real people.
July 21, 2025 at 8:16 PM
nicolesheriko.bsky.social
This well-studied illustration of The Wits features famous characters from several plays and most of these characters are either clowns or disabled figures, or both. My essay thinks a bit about how the condition of clownish celebrity depended on virtuosic imitation of disabled figures.
A page from a seventeenth-century book showing seven famous characters from different plays standing on a stage. One has a crutch and a bandaged leg, one plays the fiddle, one holds a cup out to a woman, one eats bread, one wears the costume of someone living in a mental hospital, and one enters through a curtain.
July 21, 2025 at 8:16 PM