SOURCE: “‘Strange and Woonderfull Syghts’: The Tempest and the Discourses of Monstrosity,” in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 50, 1997, pp. 187-99.

[In the essay below, Burnett argues that Shakespeare's depiction of the monstrous reflects Elizabethan culture.]

On the seventeenth of July, 1583, the town chronicler of Shrewsbury recorded in his diary an extraordinary event, an Elizabethan ‘freak show’:

cam to the towne … one Iohn Taylor … a marchant of loondoon and free of the coompany of fyshmoongers there who … brought … with hym strange and woonderfull syghts that ys to saye a dead childe in a coffyn which had ij heades and … ij bake boanes. More a lyve sheep beinge a tupp the which had … ij foondementes vnder hys tayle, also ij pyssells and ij paire of codds … and yf the partee which keapt hym wold aske hym and saye be thosse people welcoom he wold lyft vp hys foorefoote and Crye heighe, heighe, heighe … And also more a glasse artyfycially made beinge but ij candells therin and a chayne with ij faces or pycturs which wolld represent inwardly to the sight of the beholders soondrye candells, chaynes facys, Iuells and other things myraculously …¹

The chronicler's breathless narrative offers a powerful registration of some of the period's deepest fears and aspirations. In early modern England, ‘monsters’, defined in a 1634 translation of a medical treatise by Ambroise Paré as ‘things … brought forth contrary to the common decree and order of nature’, occupied vexed places in popular culture and scientific debate.² Monstrous births were quickly versified in ballads, while fairs with monster booths drew holiday crowds.³ As monsters appealed to the amusement of the fairground populace, so did they tax the minds of the period's most established philosophers and authorities. Attempting to determine how monsters might have been generated, Paré included ‘the glory of God’, ‘mens wickednesse’, ‘abundance of seed’, ‘deficient’ seed, ‘the force … of imagination’ and ‘the craft … of the divell’ in his catalogue of chief ingredients.⁴ It is an index of the fascination monsters exercised that he should have produced a text in which divine intervention, biological complication, intellectual speculation and supernatural visitation are all countenanced as valid interpretative frameworks.

In this paper I shall concentrate on Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610-11), taking as a point of departure its preoccupation with questions of monstrosity and portentous occurrence. In realizing ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ phenomena as signs to be read and deciphered, the play reveals charged connections with contemporary wonder books in which monsters and prodigies are an area of vigorous enquiry. The discourses of monstrosity in the play, however, are neither stable nor consistent. Several monstrous topoi interweave and contradict: monsters blur with wonders, and Prospero is as much a monster as the servants and spirits of his magic kingdom. In the English Renaissance, a number of discursivities shaped monstrous constructions, illuminating points of contemporary debate as well as the evolving philosophy of a more ‘rational’ establishment. If The Tempest is a work deeply implicated in the colonial endeavour, then, it is also one concerned with peculiary English habits and institutions. Like John Taylor's marvellous glass and the monster pamphlets themselves, the drama can finally be viewed as a mirror, which deflects audiences away from monstrosity abroad and back towards the local, domestic forms that it may always inhabit.⁵

I

If the theatre is the institution with which The Tempest is most commonly compared, the fairground would seem to be an equally striking component of its dramatic design. The spirits' performances, for instance, have charged local meanings and associations, such as Ariel's willingness ‘to fly, / To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride / On the curled clouds’, like a circus acrobat.⁶ The number of references to puppets makes clear that such acts, which played within striking distance of the monster booths, formed only one part of a multitude of entertainments crowded together on a single site: it was at the fair, Henry Farley observed in 1621, that Londoners could enjoy ‘a strange out-landish Fowle … a Gyants bone … a Puppit play … A Woman dancing on a Rope … a Iuglers cheats, / A Tumbler shewing cunning feats’.⁷ In the play, puppets are evoked in allusions to the ‘living drollery’ (3.3.21) of the spirits and the ‘demi-puppets’ (5.1.36) Prospero commands, while the fair lies behind Caliban's refrain, ‘'Ban, 'Ban, Ca-Caliban / Has a new master—get a new man! / Freedom, high-day!’ (2.2.179-81): on holidays (high-days or hire-days), servants attended hiring fairs to look for new employment.⁸

Part of the complex effect of The Tempest is to suggest at one and the same time the fair and the ethnographic claims that, in a later, vulgarized form, it came to represent. For Prospero is less the showman than the Renaissance collector and, in giving shape to his performative dimension, the play allows him to slip between a range of very different entertainment categories. While still Duke of Milan, Prospero amasses books; in exile, he collects daughters, memories, courtiers, spirits and natural forces. ‘Be collected’ (1.2.13), he instructs Miranda, arranging the shards of her past as he reflects upon his dedication to the ‘study’ of the ‘liberal arts’ (1.2.73-4), and the ‘volumes’ given to him by Gonzalo from ‘mine own library’ (1.2.167). Prospero's ‘cell’, in fact, might be seen as an oblique version of the ‘cabinet of curiosities’, the assembly of bizarre artefacts, monstrous aberrations and miscellanea that was to grow into the museum of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (illustration 9).⁹

II

We find the fair and the museum hinted at more forcibly in the scenes with Caliban, which bring into play rival explanations for the generation of monstrous creatures. At Trinculo's entrance, a process of defining and displacing is quickly initiated. The jester likens the cloud to ‘a foul bombard that would shed his liquor’ (2.2.21) and, seeing Caliban, cannot decide if he is a ‘man or a fish’ (2.2.24):

A strange fish! Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday-fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man—any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. Legged like a man, and his fins like arms! Warm, o' my troth! I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer: this is no fish, but an islander, that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt.

(2.2.26-35)

Employing the techniques of the ballad, in which a picture of the monstrous birth or ‘strange fish’ is followed by a textual commentary, Trinculo runs through various categories to fix Caliban in the world he has left (illustrations 10 and 11).¹⁰ The speech enacts a colonial defamiliarization: Caliban is re-presented in terms of the domestic, and Trinculo, imagining a fresh fairground attraction, plays a comic ethnographer conducting a bizarre autopsy experiment. In a final twist, moreover, he creeps under the gabardine, highlighting the attraction of the monstrous, the creation of a new form with two sets of members, and the possibility that ‘man’ and ‘monster’ may soon become indistinguishable.

In contrast, Stephano's experience of Caliban leads him to a more elaborate attitude towards exotic anatomies. Initially his interpretative mode, which recalls fairground jugglers, parodies Prospero's earlier arguments: ‘What's the matter? Have we devils here? Do you put tricks upon's with savages and men of Ind?’ (2.2.56-7). But popular instincts rapidly take over from the lure of supernatural enquiry. In assuming that the form beneath the gabardine has ‘four legs’ (2.2.58-9) but only one head, Stephano regards Caliban as a conjoined twin—a type of eusomphalien pygopage or syncephalus ectopagus—and the monster's stakes accordingly rise in the commodity market (illustrations 12a and 12b).¹¹ Now, rather than being part of a sideshow, Caliban will be exhibited to ‘any emperor that ever trod on neat's-leather’ (2.2.67-8), and the ambitions of the drunken butler begin to take on magnificent proportions.

In his essays, first published in English in 1600, Montaigne describes a ‘monstrous Childe’ who was ‘Vnder his paps … fastned and joyned to an other childe, but had no head, and … the conduite of his body stopped, the rest whole’.¹² It may have been that Shakespeare, who certainly consulted Montaigne in his composition of The Tempest, found in this passage one prompt for Caliban's fluctuating condition and changing appearance. More pressing influences, I would suggest, are to be found in popular attitudes towards conjoined twins, as Stephano's increasingly frustrated approximations indicate. Once Caliban-Trinculo has spoken with both voices, Stephano's tune alters:

Four legs and two voices; a most delicate monster! His forward voice now is to speak well of his friend, his backward voice is to utter foul speeches and to detract.

(2.2.85-7)

This assessment of the passive-active nature of conjoined twins has a medical precedent and chimes curiously with passages in histories and wonder books, in which writers question if attached children possess two souls or one.¹³ In his chronicles, first published in 1577 and then in an enlarged edition in 1587, Holinshed describes a ‘monster’ born in Northumberland during the reign of King Constantine of Scotland. With ‘one whole bellie from the nauill downe … and from the nauill vpwards … diuided into two bodies’, Holinshed states:

so did it appeare there was two contrarie wils or desires in the same, euer lusting contrarilie, as when the one did sleepe, the other would wake; when the one required to haue meat, the other passed for none at all. Oftentimes would they chide and brall togither, insomuch that at length they fell so far at variance, that they did beat and rent either other verie pitifullie with their nailes. At length the one with long sickenesse wearing away and finallie deceassing, the other was not able to abide the greeuous smell of the dead carcase, but immediatlie after died also.¹⁴

For Stephano, however, recognizing that the gabardine creature—with two heads, a type of spondylodymus, ischiopagus or dicephalus dipus dibrachius—is a living body (rather than a dead carcass) necessitates drastic action (illustrations 13 and 14).¹⁵ The efforts of the jester and the butler to define the monster culminate in Stephano playing midwife to a grotesque delivery, which is also linked to an evacuation of waste. ‘I'll pull thee by the lesser legs—if any be Trinculo's legs, these are they … Thou art very Trinculo indeed! How cam'st thou to be the siege of this mooncalf? Can he vent Trinculos?’ (2.2.98-102). Parodying Prospero's earlier acts of revelation and his predilection for summoning things into existence, Stephano discovers Trinculo, casting Caliban as a monster and a mother that gives birth to ‘matter’ (2.2.56)—the three terms are locked in a bizarre, triadic relationship. The conjoined twins are surgically separated; Caliban and Trinculo stand again as autonomous; but the strange and threatening properties of the monster remain undiminished.

Ultimately, however, the monstrous in The Tempest ranges far beyond a single character or several scenes. In some senses, the play is primarily concerned with ‘disability’ and ‘imperfection’ in all of their manifestations. The courtiers ‘mar [the] labour’ (1.1.13) of the sailors; Ariel claims that the shipwrecked party has arrived without a ‘blemish’ (1.2.218); and Ferdinand refused earlier offers of marriage because of ‘some defect’ (3.1.44) in the ‘women’ (3.1.43) to whom he was introduced. Behind these details lies an apprehension about the exact consequences of heterosexual intercourse. Birth can never be mentioned in the play without the possibility of complicating factors. In particular, Prospero broods obsessively on ‘that which breeds’ (3.1.76) between the lovers, as his warning to Ferdinand indicates:

If thou dost break her virgin-knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be ministered,
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both.

(4.1.15-22)

Curiously for the Renaissance, a period in which high infant mortality constantly endangered the patrilineal system, Prospero wishes for quality not quantity of issue. While the prevailing metaphors in his speech are horticultural—parasitic vegetation will foul the paradisial garden—the spectre of the monstrous birth and another Caliban (who has already threatened to people the island with his own kind) is the dominant idea, one consequence of sexual incontinence. As Ferdinand's reply makes clear, moreover (he also hopes for ‘fair’ (4.1.24) children), the desire for perfect progeny is shared by potential grandfather and son-in-law alike. Judging from The Tempest as a whole, it would appear that the overriding imperative is less the representation of monstrosity than the terror of reproduction itself.

III

As several critics have observed, Prospero's wish to be self-sufficient has a gendered dimension, which shows itself in anxious constructions of women and the contaminating powers they are thought to exercise. Stephen Orgel writes: Prospero's wife ‘is missing as a character, but [he], several times explicitly, presents himself as incorporating the wife, acting as both father and mother’.¹⁶ What has not received notice is the extent to which the play, as a consequence of the banishment of maternal properties, favours acts of parthenogenesis. Notably it is the unregenerate who seem to want to fashion forms according to their own imperatives. Most feared by Prospero is Antonio's part in having ‘new created / The creatures that were mine … or changed 'em’ (1.2.81-2), and even Sebastian recognizes the ability: ‘The setting of thine eye and cheek proclaim / A matter from thee, and a birth, indeed, / Which throes thee much to yield’ (2.1.227-9). And conspiracy and treason, hatched by Antonio parthenogenetically, have indeed a monstrous shape.

Equally overlooked in critical assessments have been the precise connections between parthenogenesis, the monstrous birth and the artist. The single author's work is invariably figured as a monstrous delivery. In the Arcadia, first completed in 1580, Sir Philip Sidney states that if his ‘idle work … though in itself it have deformities … had not been in some way delivered, [it] would have grown a monster’, a perception which informs a similar remark in his An Apology for Poetry (1580-1); the poet, he writes, ‘lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, [delights] … in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like’.¹⁷ Such relations between monstrous progeny and artistic production are at the heart of The Tempest's aesthetic. Giving birth to Ariel from a tree (1.2.292-3) permits Prospero to demonstrate his ‘art’ (1.2.291) and to use the spirit for tasks of an essentially theatrical nature. With Ariel's aid he produces from the heavens the masque of Ceres, Iris and Juno, who join in harmony to banish famine (4.1.116-17), a prodigious token sent by God as a judgement.¹⁸ Prospero's parturition of wonders is more sharply observed still. As a ‘wondered father and a wife’ (4.1.123), Prospero ‘discovers’ Ferdinand and Miranda at chess by pulling aside a curtain, adding, ‘I will requite you with as good a thing, / At least bring forth a wonder to content ye / As much as me my dukedom’ (5.1.169-71). Between Sycorax, the witch who brings forth monsters, and Prospero, the magician who brings forth wonders, there may be little room for manoeuvre.

In delivering Ariel from his sylvan hysteria, Prospero avails himself of the opportunity to use the spirit for providential purposes. Ariel's transformation into the monstrous creatures of myth and legend enables the magician to bring the courtiers to a semblance of repentance. The central stages map his efforts to produce in his enemies a spiritual change as dramatic as his spirits' prodigious performances. With the villains Prospero's schemes fail to achieve even a measure of success. For instance, when Antonio's plot is foiled by Ariel, he explains away his behaviour with the ruse of a noise, which implies that the ultimate monstrosities are his own dissimulations: ‘'twas a din to fright a monster's ear, / To make an earthquake’ (2.1.312-13). The ‘monstrous shape’ (3.3.31) of the spirits similarly makes little impression on Sebastian, who only sees in them justification for hackneyed fantasies: ‘Now I will believe / That there are unicorns; that in Arabia / There is one tree, the phoenix’ throne, one phoenix / At this hour reigning there’ (3.3.21-4). But with the rest of the company Prospero's art reaps greater rewards. Appalled by the warnings of Ariel as a harpy (a mythical creature described in a 1626 dictionary as one of a group of ‘Monstrous devouring birds’), Alonso laments the death of his son: ‘O, it is monstrous, monstrous! / Methought the billows spoke and told me of it, / The winds did sing it to me … and the thunder’ (3.3.95-7).¹⁹ The exclamations of the King of Naples offer a final demonstration of the magician's strategic powers. Like Sidney's artist, Prospero produces prodigies which inspire wonder and threaten terrible developments. Having appropriated the maternal function, he forces his captives to read their landscape, and to discover in its strange operations corroboration of a monstrous interior or hope for a miraculous recovery.

IV

For the majority of early seventeenth-century spectators, wonders in the air, such as Ariel's prodigious pyrotechnic displays before the mariners and the courtiers, had a key role to play in scriptural tradition and exegesis. Almost all extraordinary phenomena were regarded as tokens of the far more disturbing judgements that were to accompany the end of the world, the apocalypse. As a devotional work of 1610 detailed:

the Sun shall be turned into darknesse, and the Moone into blood, and the starres shall fall from heauen, the aire shal be full of whirle winds, stormes, correscations, flashing meteors, and thunders: the earth with fearefull tremblings, and swallowing Gulfes: the flouds of the sea shall swell so high, as if they would ouerflow the whole world … an Archangel shall … giue a signe to all that are dead, to rise againe, and to come to Gods iudgement.²⁰

Eclipses and, not surprisingly, monstrous births were invoked as additional indications of the time of great reckoning, and it was in Revelation that they were granted their most forceful realization.²¹ With its multiple monstrous forms, such as plagues and seven-headed beasts, Revelation, the discovery of God's word, takes us back to the monster's etymological derivations. In Latin, ‘monstro’ means ‘To show … demonstrate … expound, [and] reveal’; a ‘monstrum’ is a ‘portent, prodigy, [or] sign’; and ‘moneo’ translates as ‘to give warning of, presage’.²² Many of these meanings are at work in Renaissance uses of the discourses of monstrosity, and lie behind the warnings threatened in the vision of Saint John the divine, which also takes us forward to the apocalyptic concerns of The Tempest.

By 1610-11, when The Tempest was composed, millenarian ideas had lost none of their Elizabethan popular appeal. In addition to enlisting the obvious apocalyptic sign of the tempest, the play invests with contemporary meanings Prospero's appeal to an army of spirits to come to his assistance:

                                                  I have bedimmed
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar. Graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art.

(5.1.41-50)

It has long been recognized that the passage derives from Medea's incantation in Golding's 1567 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, but more apposite would appear to be its apocalyptic dimensions—the eclipses, thunder and lightning, earthquakes and revelation of the graves' contents.²³ As earlier dramatic representations indicate, moreover, Prospero's sentiments have a recognizable precedent: the speech illuminates the specific events of its historical moment and gains energy from an established theatrical lineage.²⁴

As the ‘revels’ (4.1.148) end and Prospero's ‘pageant’ (4.1.155) dissolves, we are once again reminded of the arresting connections between popular entertainment and divine judgement. To ‘reveal’ is etymologically related to the old French, révéler (to revolt, make a din and make merry), from which are derived the verb, to ‘revel’, and the noun, ‘revel’, a parish fair.²⁵ In the final scene the play's prevailing metaphors are deployed in innovative combinations—Prospero discovers himself and passes judgement on the assembled courtiers. But Prospero is fallible, and his strange remark—‘this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine’ (5.1.275-6)—expresses several tendencies—an attraction to the monstrous, which entails a twin-like dependency. Dependency is certainly the hallmark of his epilogue:

                                                  Now 'tis true
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples …
                    release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands …
                                                  Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer …

(5.1.321-3, 327-8, 331-4)

The main idea is of being freed from a cage: presenting himself as a kind of limbless wonder, Prospero is finally twinned to the audience, on whom he depends for favourable judgement. In requesting release and relief, Prospero is also asking for deliverance—it is only through being monstrously reborn, with the theatre's spectators as a parthenogenetic parent, that the magician can become the actor and abandon the part, that he can clarify the already blurring perimeters of a dissolving playworld. The performance concluded, Prospero, finally more of a monster than a showman, solicits applause.

V

As we approach another millennium, it is sobering to contemplate the very different inflections that are now placed on monstrous phenomena and apocalyptic possibilities. If Shakespeare does enjoy a prophetic ability, then it resides in his glimpses into the remarkable power of technology. Prospero's magical ambitions have their counterpart in the modern conquest of space. Indeed, with so much of the world available to the eye of the scientist, monsters have been relocated to areas which lie outside an earthly perimeter. In Prospero's destruction of books, moreover, are the seeds of another apocalyptic tendency for, in this theoretical climate, the author is dead, the future of the book is in jeopardy, and text has been superseded by hypertext.

The ‘freak show’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is no more, only surviving in a handful of ‘museum pieces’ still on tour in American carnivals.²⁶ But the logic and discourse with which it was associated are still alive. In the tabloid newspapers of the summer of 1995, for instance, the ‘monster’ is the schoolboy who has failed his A-Levels, as a cartoon in The Mail on Sunday reveals (illustration 15).²⁷ The academic manifestations of the monstrous aside, and our own status as hawkers of intellectual progeny, the technological dimensions of the question require further comment. In the twentieth century technology is such that monstrosity can either be created or destroyed. The biological effects of global war are still fresh in the imagination. Cases of children with microcephaly increased dramatically following the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki; Dioxin, contained in ‘Agent Orange’, which was used in Vietnam, has been linked to the malformation of infants' limbs; and babies have been born without ears or spleen to Gulf War veterans.²⁸ There may be little finally separating Prospero's tempest and the mushroom cloud of the holocaust. The world of wonders captured in the miraculous glass of John Taylor, the Elizabethan Shrewsbury showman, has now dissolved. But we continue to discover in the past reflections of our own anxieties, and look to Shakespeare for revelations of mysteries and demonstrations of things to come.²⁹

Notes

1. J. Alan B. Somerset, ed., Records of Early English Drama: Shropshire, 2 vols. (Toronto, Buffalo and London, University of Toronto Press, 1994), vol. 1, p. 237.

2. Ambroise Paré, The workes of that famous chirugion (London, 1634; STC 19189), p. 961.

3. Henry Fitzgeffrey, Satyres: and satyricall epigram's (London, 1617; STC 10945), sigs. A7^v-A8^r. For exhibitions of monsters in the period, see Katharine Park and Lorraine J. Daston, ‘Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England’, Past and Present, 92, August (1981), pp. 20-54; Somerset, ed., Shropshire, vol. 1, pp. 219, 221, 226.

4. Paré, The workes, pp. 962-3.

5. The association of the monstrous races, monstrous births and Africa was proverbial. See Henry Miller, God the protector of Israel (London, 1641; Wing M2060A), p. 18; Sebastian Munster, Cosmographiae universalis lib. VI (Basileae: apud Henrichum Petri, 1554), p. 1151. Wonder and monster books often advertised themselves as instructive mirrors; see William Averell, A wonderfull and straunge newes (London, 1583; STC 982.5), sig. Avi^r. For an excellent local reading of The Tempest, see Douglas Bruster, ‘Local Tempest: Shakespeare and the work of the early modern playhouse’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 25 (1995), 33-53.

6. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1990), 1.2.190-2. All further references appear in the text.

7. Henry Farley, St. Paules-Church her bill for the parliament (London, 1621; STC 10690), sigs. E4^r-v. See also Ben Jonson's parody of The Tempest in Bartholomew Fair (1614), ed. E. A. Horsman (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1979): ‘If there be never a servant-monster i' the Fair, who can help it? he says; nor a nest of antics? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries’ (Induction, 128-32).

   Barbara A. Mowat has recently argued that Prospero ‘belongs more to the mundane world of the streetcorner “art-Magician” or “Jugler” (these are Reginald Scot's terms for Houdini-type illusionists) than to the arcane, terrifying Hermetic or demonic spheres … Performing magicians … played on street corners, in “Fayres and Markets”, in provinces, and in London theatres' (‘Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus Pocus’, English Literary Renaissance, 11 (1981), 297-8).

8. See Michael Roberts, ‘“Waiting upon Chance”: English Hiring Fairs and their Meanings from the 14th to the 20th Century’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 1, June (1988), 119-60.

9. See Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford, Clarendon, 1987); Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London and New York, Routledge, 1995).

10. For accounts of strange and monstrous fish in wonder books, medical works and ballads, see Pierre Boaistuau, Certaine secrete wonders of nature (London, 1569; STC 3164.5), fos. 47^r-54^r; Paré, The workes, pp. 1002, 1007; Hyder E. Rollins, ed., A Pepysian Garland: Black-Letter Broadside Ballads of the Years 1595-1639 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 440-1.

11. These terms are taken from Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, ed. Janis L. Pallister (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 177-80.

12. Michel de Montaigne, The essayes or morall, politike and millitarie discourses (London, 1600; STC 18041), p. 409.

13. Boaistuau, Certaine secrete wonders, fo. 36^r; Paré, The workes, p. 966; Park and Daston, ‘Unnatural Conceptions’, 22.

    In a recent BBC documentary, it was stated of the conjoined twins, Dao and Duan: ‘one twin—Dao—is smaller and weaker than her sister. Even though they share a third leg, Duan appears to have more control over it. Wherever Duan wants to go, Dao must follow.’ Following a successful separation operation, ‘[Dao's] personality is just as strong now as Duan's. She has independence, which she never had before. She talks back to Duan, which she never did before—she was always the one that was quiet and let Duan dominate.’ See Horizon: ‘Siamese Twins’ (London, Broadcasting Support Services, 1995), pp. 5, 19.

14. Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 6 vols. (London, Johnson, 1807-8), vol. v, p. 228.

15. The terms are from Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, ed. Pallister, pp. 177-80.

16. Stephen Orgel, ‘Prospero's Wife’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers, eds., Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 54. See also Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (New York and London, Routledge, 1992), p. 237; Anny Crunelle-Vanrigh, ‘“Unmixed with baser ‘mater’”: Le monstre et la matrice’, in Claude Peltrault, ed., Shakespeare ‘La Tempête: Etudes Critiques (Besançon, Université de Franche-Comté, 1994), pp. 99, 109.

17. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 3; Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1973), p. 100. In an unpublished paper, ‘Masculine Parturition and the Generation of Monstrous Prodigies’, William E. Engel suggests that the idea of the author's parthenogenesis leading to monstrous births may derive from Montaigne's essays. I am grateful to Professor Engel for sending me a copy of his paper.

18. Charles Fitz-Geffrey, The curse of corne-horders: with the blessing of seasonable selling (London, 1631; STC 10938), p. 31; Samuel Hieron, A helpe unto devotion (London, 1608; STC 13406.3), p. 207; Ludwig Lavater, Three christian sermons, of famine and dearth of victuals (London, 1596; STC 15322), sig. A4^r.

19. Henry Cockeram, The English dictionarie (London, 1626; STC 5462), sig. T4^v.

20. Thomas Tymme, A silver watch-bell (London, 1610; STC 24424), pp. 48, 51, 54, 56.

21. Gods handy-worke in wonders (London, 1615; STC 11926), sigs. BI^v-B2^r; A true relation of the French kinge his goode successe (London, 1592; STC 13147), sig. B3^r. For scriptural antecedents, see Lloyd E. Berry, ed., The Geneva Bible: A facsimile of the 1560 edition (Madison, Milwaukee and London, University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), New Testament, Revelation (VI.12-14), fos. 116^v, (VIII.5, 7, 10, 12), 117^r, (XVI.21), 120^r.

22. P. G. W. Glare, ed., Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), vol. II, pp. 1130-1.

23. Arthur Golding, Ovid's ‘Metamorphoses’, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London, De La More Press, 1904), Book VII, lines 244-89.

24. See William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London and New York, Methuen, 1987), 1.1.116-18, 120, 123; John Marston, The Malcontent, ed. George K. Hunter (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1975), 2.5.128, 130-1.

25. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, eds., The Oxford English Dictionary, 20 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon, 1989), vol. XIII, pp. 811-12.

26. Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1988), passim; Randy Johnson, Jim Secreto and Teddy Varndell, Freaks, Geeks and Strange Girls: Sideshow Banners of the Great American Midway (Honolulu, Hardy Marks, 1996), p. 15; ‘Your Place or Mine?’, BBC Radio 4, 26 June 1996.

27. Joe Murphy, ‘Shephard orders exam pass probe’, The Mail on Sunday, 20 August (1995), p. 15.

28. John Pilger, ‘Nam now,’ The Guardian Weekend, 22 April (1995), p. 21; Sean Ryan, ‘Disabled baby “is Gulf war victim”’, The Sunday Times, 20 November (1994), p. 13; Alice Stewart, ‘Children of a lesser god’, The Times Higher, 11 August (1995), p. 19.

29. I am greateful to the following for their helpful and trenchant comments on earlier drafts of this paper: John Archer, Emily Bartels, Crystal Bartolovich, Doug Bruster, Brian Caraher, Fran Dolan, Neil Kenny and Laura Lunger Knoppers.