Question 4

Myers 1

Michael Myers
Francois-Xavier Gleyzon
Shakespeare Studies
24 April 2015
Moral Teratology: Novelization of Deformity in Richard III and The Tempest
The figure of deformity, the monster, may be treated as a cipher to decode perceptual
changes in presentations of the body in Renaissance science and art. According to Chris Baldick
in his book, Frankensteins Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth-Century Writing, the
figure of physical deformity arises as a variant of that venerable clich of political discourse, the
body politic (14). With physical deformity as a dissection tool, Renaissance artists such as
Carracci and Porta isolated and transgressed cultural standards of beauty, reshaping the aesthetic
representations of bodies politic. The profane monster became a marvelous icon of conflict
between the spirit and body, joined in the aberration of one by the disease of the other. This
conflict in the monster, or what Michel Foucault called the genesis of difference (156), gives
rise to the concrete of the state body in Shakespeares workthe deformed body politic. The
desire for an integral and sacred whole (Baldick 14) given as a product of transgression and
illumination, is the Kings body.
From his position as an abject bodily terror, Richard III himself becomes an icon with
which we may decode this body. His figure derives from anomalous animal figures, much as
Giambattista della Portas De Humana Physiognomonia takes a teratological approach to
spiritual discovery, by portraying each of the bodies politic as a physical reflection of its spiritual
ailments, an analogy to its beast. His silhouette makes what Cheng called in her article, The
Cult of the Monstrous: Caricature, Physignomy, and Monsters in Early Modern Italy, a

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marvelous creature of nature from a freak omen (197). This transformation occurs through
animal images and through the implausible courtship of the Lady Anne, whose attitude towards
the figure of the King marks him at first for aberration and then for his return to physical power.
Richard IIIs body reasserts what Kantorowicz called in The Kings Two Bodies the
fiction of the king as a Corporation sole (3), with his iconic visual manipulation. How the state
fits inside the beast in Shakespeares art becomes less a matter of aberration as of cultural
manipulation, however, when viewed from the distorted figure of Caliban. Presented as much a
product of language as flesh, the ill-fated hag-spawn enunciates a clear dilemma between interior
and exterior forms, an elicitation of deformity which ultimately allows him to claim his
transgressors language as his own. The aberration becomes a re-transcribed body politic. As the
colonized loses agency, his body mimics a form of his former physical power with language
flattery. Caliban, king no longer, does not even own himself. Yet, he is less a beast than a
caricature of kingliness, like to Richard III in grotesque irony. He makes a montage of the
corporation and tempts the kings body with an ironic cultural transgression, an aesthetic as
much as physiognomic inquiry parallel to the change in Renaissance art.
This valuation of aberration becomes an obsession with scarcity. To value the obscene
thus transforms the premise of these figures, for if their rarity is the only factor in their value,
why are the rare beauties shunned as trinkets of bygone cultural premises; why is a genius so
much less appealing than a madman, or a hero so much less than a hunchback? Shakespeare
infuses the Renaissance premise of beauty-through-deformity with a dispersal of the monarchy
onto its image. He identifies Baldicks body politic not merely in but of the contentious frame of
his monsters, both the disfigured Richard III and the colonized Caliban. Yet by mythologizing
novel deformity he leaves no moral room for the birth of genius, no possibility for an aberration

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for good or beauty. What he does is less characterizing as caricaturing. Thus the process of
caricaturing the body politic in the beasts body of Richard III becomes the first topic.
Animal Bodies: Idol Beasts in Richard III
Richard bears his text through a singularity of aesthetic transformationbeauty through
contrariness. Contradictions in his appearance and attitude set the play for its physiognomic
transgression. An atypical address to the audience begins the discourse with an immediate and
striking schism between dual Richards, which paradoxically emphasizes both his being other
than human and his corporeality. As went his birth in Henry VI,
Where sits Deformity to mock my body;
To shape my legs of an unequal size;
To disproportion me in every part,
Like to a chaos, or an unlicked bear-whelp,
That carries no impression like the dam.
And am I then a man to be beloved?
(3.2.160-65)
His anomalous form is at once, according to Olson, threatening, pleading, and pious (86). The
bear in him stresses his lack of humanness while the aberrations of his proportion place him
against the standard, with corporeality though crude. He hopes for no delight save whiling time
to its end, as he proclaims no purpose
Unless to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
(1.1.26-27)
He presents an aesthetic threat, a kingly politic without the visual peace of normalcy. He may
exist in a loving world, yet he should not hope or expect to see fortune that way, as unlike his
brother he is unable to prove a lover (1.1.28). The courtship of Anne thus becomes an
unprecedented contradiction in the established politic of Richards body. What Harold Bloom
called Richards sadomasochism (71) institutes a threatening, contradictive discourse between

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the lovers. They exchange fluidsRichard offers as a potential penetrative measure his sword,
provoked by beauty. Yet he does so on his kneesthe penitence of the monster portraits a
kings body at once in power and out of power, at once kingly and sadomasochist. His
beastliness is the aesthetic marker to this discovery.
Like a chaos, from Richards own words, the distortion of form and of the measures of
established kingly paradigm places his body at the center of an artistic pivot. It swings alternately
between a pitiful power over the expectations of his grotesque form and the realization of his
monstrosity with all the perversity expected. Once succumbed to a contradictive beastliness, as
Baldick relates, The humanly recognizable form of the body politic is lost, dispersed into a
chaos of dismembered and contending organs (14). Such contention distorts the state body in
equal measure to the kings, which mythologized on a pious altar should have been fitted at birth
for nobility and power (where Richard was born with beast teeth). Departed from the state of
kingliness but not of its office, the state politic loses its head, whereon according to Kantorowicz
its absence might render the body corporate incomplete or incapable of action (314). Richard
himself believes that he is unfit for state and majesty (3.7.207). What appears as a cross
purpose then in the opening speech is really the birth of an abnormal aesthetic: the art of
ugliness.
The drawings of Porta and Carracci reflect a perceptual change in Renaissance arts
response to beauty in the world. The scientific and aesthetic study of the abnormal refocused
expressions of beauty on a valuation of novelty. Portas De Humana Physiognomonia analogizes
beasts with humans, presumably to cross liminal aesthetic boundaries in a changing cultural
environment, to pronounce them like in appearance and thus in nature. The boundary crossed by
the beasts body in the king is what Slotkin called a sinister aesthetic (5), by which he meant a

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pathological desire to dissect, Richard in this case, for his evil traits. The caricature, on which
Porta was an influence, is the artistic concrete of this desire. I believe Slotkins term could be
taken further to refer to an actually perverse mechanism of artistic representation inherent in the
Renaissance obsession with defection, a caricaturing not merely of form but of value itself.
Valorizing ugliness, Richard makes of a monsters body an aesthetic appeal parallel to
then new inquiries into the artistic value of deformity. The monstrous idol unnerves the body
politic by supplanting the mythologized image of kingliness with one unfit for majesty, love, and
power. Despite being no longer an integral and sacred whole (Baldick 14), he yet finds each of
these in turn, in progressively unlikely ways. Richards physical transgression undergoes a
semiotic revision which makes it less an ugly state than a transition to his political assertions, not
despite his monstrosity but because of it. This transition becomes more evident in the body of
another Shakespearean monsterthe hag-born Caliban. Yet each births a malformed aesthetic
premisetwo-fold as the fetishization of scarcity and, by the sheer lack of beautiful rarities, an
obsession with defection. This policy creates an image which unmakes the body politic on the
altar of its own contrary. The kings body empowers its politic by concretizing the soul beneath
it, but which in Shakespeares case always conceives a monster. In the case of Caliban, lesser
than a king and greater, his body re-transcribes on a social idiomhis ugliness does not merely
challenge the kings body politic with ugliness, but with an echo of that self-same rule. His form
is a space on which the body politic issues a graphic response, a transmutative politic. To the
greatest monster we now turn.
Transgressions and Transmutations: Caliban and Bodily Territory
Prosperos incursion onto the island transgresses its natural state. Of land, visual changes
are apparent and in no way exclusive of spiritual onesbuildings, signs, dwellings appear upon

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the landscape and alter its semiotic use. Land becomes space for living, barren wilds become
civilization, abstinence from value becomes value, amoral becomes moral. Less evident,
however, is the transgression on the body of Caliban. As much as on the land itself, Prospero
crosses the boundary of Calibans bodily territory to deliver no less startling or transmutative a
change as when he summons the elements, chains the spirits, tills the land.
Therefore, Caliban must be read as colonized. Impressing on him the subject of
civilization, Prospero makes of his new pet a transitory object, supplanting Calibans syntax with
the language of his own id. As Prospero scolds,
I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes
With words that made them known. But thy vile race,
Though thou didst learn, had that in't which
good natures
Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou
Deservedly confined into this rock,
Who hadst deserved more than a prison.
(1.2.424-36)
The supposed good nature of the colonizer satisfies itself in rejecting and replacing Calibans
native language. Though intentionally to promote the values of his dear Milan, Prosperos
civilized tongue falls on his monsters palette like Parisian cuisine on a dog, and as Caliban
rejects his master he has no choice but to use the masters language to do so. He relates,
You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
(1.2.437-39)
Through the discord between Calibans interior and exterior natures, his natural and colonized
personas, Shakespeare depicts his monstrosity as a product of and a response to language. As

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Baldick related, the rebellious body politic is said to be not just diseased, but misshapen,
abortive, monstrous (14). Calibans body signifies the inner barbarism of a creature, as Prospero
remanded, as disproportion'd in his manners/ As in his shape (5.1.347-8).
What then does Prospero achieve by colonizing the body and language of the monster?
Caliban is not merely violated by Prosperos civilization, he actually becomes into its product.
By crossing the boundary of Calibans body politic, Prospero incites the territory of his new
civilized construction. As Heidegger related, the boundary between the colonizer and colonized
is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from
which something begins its presencing (152). Prospero does not merely change Calibanhe
creates a cultural hybrid, made in disjointed parts of his own and the beasts own language. By
the end of Calibans rebirth, to paraphrase Homi Bhabha, only Prospero can represent his selfesteem (88). Thus despite seeming a whole monster, Caliban is something elsea transmuting
figure of colonial discourse conflicted with what Baldick called its dismembered and
contending organs (14). As a partial body politic, it becomes difficult to discern what in Caliban
is authentic.
As Renaissance art had begun to value aberration, Prospero takes the monster as the ideal
site of change. Overlaps occur in the language reorientation of Calibans native manner,
revealing what Bhabha called a displacement of domains of difference (2). Yet, Calibans
nature bleeds through. He was a king after all, of his island,1 and bound to restore his kingdom
through posterity just as Prospero manipulates his own blood into the royal Neapolitan line.2 Yet
Calibans kingship is overthrown and his body politic transformed. Thus what is authentic in him

This islands mine (1.2.396)

O ho, O ho! would't had been done!/ Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else/ This isle with Calibans. (1.2.41921)
1
2

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is only mimicry, resulting in what Bhabha called partial representation (88). As a colonized
subject, Calibans bodily territory becomes remapped as a partial-society, a deformed body
politic, in the mirror of Prosperos expectations. His tradition becomes a site for re-transcription,
where the civilized menace places his body in a state of cultural flux.
This relationship between native and foreign bodies seems inevitable in Shakespeares, as
well as in Bhabhas, assessment. Shakespeare offers, for instance, a possible solution through the
guise of Gonzalo, who deigns to remove all civilized apparatus and thus discount the possibility
for inculcation. As he relates,
I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty;
(2.1.162-71)
Thus Shakespeare leaves no room for the uniquely beautiful in a rational society, if as Gonzalo
related all structures of rule create colonizing super-ids and colonized monsters. Unmindful of
whether civilization provides Caliban with a chance at reason in a civilized world, Shakespeare
takes the act of asserting difference as the highest moral stake in the matter. The monster reigns
then as a body politic that emphasizes the boundary between an ordered beauty and the
philosophy of defection, over which much of the Renaissance obsessed. As readily as a portrait
of a beautiful young woman caricatured as a squat-nosed, toad-chinned hag, Shakespeare
employs the ugly aberration as the ultimate symbol for representational value.

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In valuating defection Shakespeare rejects good, beautiful, and heroic not only as
unlikely traits but as those with less aesthetic value than valorized ugliness; he forgoes roses, not
merely for their supposed impossibility, but in rejection of rosiness itself. Baldick expresses this
relationship between the monstrous in form and the venerable in meaning such that the monster
becomes a marvelous construction, marvelous in its contrariness, its dual persona, its defection.
Richard III proudly asserts his deformitywith valor in his ugliness he pursues the state of king
with an ironic transgression against the physical and aesthetic obligations to his state. Despite a
tragic end, he contradictorily pursues his body politic even as the state sickens by his form as
much his form sickens for his soul. The contention to which Baldick refers is as much a
malfeasance of the organs as a political downfall. Yet of beastly icons none are more potent than
Caliban, his bodily territory subjected to the transmutation of Prosperos cultural usurpation. As
the beast transmutes into the servant Calibans difference prompts his valuation. Even as the
most defected among us becomes king, the most abortive and monstrous mimics and halfpresents himself, as he used to be so. While Richards body politic surmises his character from
his form, his state from his body, Calibans superimposes a conflict of difference on his
colonized body politic. He becomes Shakespeares ideal caricatureby its rarity a novel beauty,
and by its ugliness the highest ideal his representation can afford.

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Works Cited
Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-century Writing.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Print.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead, 1998. Print.
71.
Cheng, Sandra. The Cult of the Monstrous: Caricature, Physiognomy, and Monsters in Early
Modern Italy. Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 1.2
(2012): 197-231. Project Muse. Web. 21 April 2015.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York:
Pantheon, 1971. Print. 156.
Porta, Giambattista Della. De Humana Physiognomonia ... Libri IIII., Qui Ab Extimis, Qu in
Hominum Corporibus Conspiciuntur Signis Ita Eorum Naturas, Mores Et Consilia
(egregiis ... Iconibus) Demonstrant, Ut Intimos Animi Recessus Penetrare Videantur ...
Nunc ... Emendati ... Cum Duplici ... Indice, Etc. Apud G. Antonium: Hanovi, 1593.
Print.
Heidegger, Martin. Building, dwelling, thinking. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York:
Harper & Row, 1971. Print. 152.
Hodgdon, Barbara. Replicating Richard: Body Doubles, Body Politics. Theatre Journal 50.2
(1998): 207-225. JSTOR. Web. 22 April 2015.
Kantorowicz, Ernst Hartwig. The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957. Print.

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Olson, Greta. "Richard III's Animalistic Criminal Body." Criminals as Animals from
Shakespeare to Lombroso. Library of Congress: Berlin. Germany, 2013. Print.
Shakespeare, William, Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman
Maus, and Andrew Gurr. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
Print.
Slotkin, Joel Elliot. HONEYED TOADS: Sinister Aesthetics in Shakespeares Richard III. The
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 7.1 (2007): 6-32. JSTOR. Web. 22 April
2015.