“With Antick Measures We’ll Beat the Ground”: Wooden Legs, “Crutch” Dances, and Performative Disability in 18th-Century London

“There was a jovial beggar, he had a wooden leg” sings the merry chorus of beggars in A Jovial Crew (1731), continuing “He was lame from his cradle, and forced for to beg.” This hit song, titled “A Begging We Will Go,” was one of several in the ballad opera that was likely accompanied by a “crutch” dance, a comic or novelty dance in which performers danced on crutches or with walking sticks. Crutch dances entertained London audiences in eighteenth-century musical theatre hits from Charles Coffey’s The Beggar’s Wedding (1729) to William Bates’s opera The Ladies’ Frolick (1770). This paper pulls together a brief history of these unique entertainments and puts them into context by synthesizing developments in the field of disability studies with new research on eighteenth-century theatre and music. The paper also makes use of recent scholarship in dance history (Thorp, Harris-Warwick, Goff) to further explore the relationship between grotesque dancing and physical disability.

Vanessa L. Rogers is Associate Professor of Music and Elizabeth G. Daughdrill Chair in Fine Arts at Rhodes College (in Memphis, Tennessee), where she teaches music history and literature courses. Her primary area of research is eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century English stage music, and she has written on the subjects of Henry Fielding’s ballad operas, French theatrical  influences on London repertory, and iconography and orchestral seating in English theatres in the Georgian era. Her current project is a book on musical comedy in Britain, 1727-1767.