| In this study, I examine characters with monstrous traits in the works of Shakespeare. In a series of essays I explore the monstrosity of five characters (Nell, from The Comedy of Errors, the dark lady of the sonnets, Richard III, Falstaff and Caliban) and focus on their common characteristics. I show the ways in which historical and literary elements are interconnected in the concept of monstrosity, and I argue that even though Shakespeare presents monstrous figures and ideas in virtually all his works, the five characters discussed in this dissertation (which I refer to throughout as the ‘prodigies’) embody combinations of these concepts. In addition, I delineate eleven traits that the ‘prodigies’ share. These include their status as lusus naturae (“jokes of nature”—or “freaks of nature,” to use our modern parlance), their ability to inspire a sense of wonder from reader/audience and from other characters within their respective works, corporeal distortion of some sort, a comic element or nature, elements of play and display, a rejection of some type, a sense that (at least at one point) they should be pitied, adherence to more than one variation of the definition of ‘monster,’ an archetypal or similar relationship to the biblical creation story, with particular emphasis on Adam's chthonic state and Eve's culpability in the Fall, and connections and similarities to a variety of other archetypes and conventions such as misogyny, carnival, the body-as-world motif and the legend of the golem. Throughout the dissertation, Renaissance perceptions of the body, deformity and monstrosity are considered with reference to topical works including Ambroise Paré's sixteenth-century medical treatise, On Monsters and Marvels, the essays of Montaigne and Bacon, and More's Utopia. In evaluating the figure of the ‘prodigy,’ the dissertation utilizes research from the areas of biblical criticism, archetypal criticism, the history of ideas, the history of science, anthropology and misogynistic literature. I conclude with an assessment of these characters as being inherently earth figures, rendering their monstrosity uncomfortably familiar to Shakespeare's readers or audience. |
