The Tempest (Vol. 61) | Mark Thornton Burnett (essay date 1997)
Mark Thornton Burnett (essay date 1997)
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...
[The entire page is 5535 words long]
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