‘Strange and woonderfull syghts’: The Tempest and the Discourses of Monstrosity

Summary

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 . . .

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. Monstrous births were quickly versified in ballads, while fairs with monster booths drew holiday crowds. 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.