Constructing 'Monsters' in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (review)

The academic study of monsters has burgeoned in the past decade, and Mark Thornton Burnett's book is a welcome contribution to this ongoing conversation. Previous teratological work has usually adopted one of three approaches: taxonomic, providing a detailed ontology of the variety of monstrous forms available to a given cultural moment, and tending to privilege deep history over current function; contextualist, explaining monsters as allegorical or anxious embodiments of contemporary political, social, and theological issues; and philosophical, invoking recent critical theory to illuminate some of the eternal truths strange creatures express about the conflictedness of human identity. The strength of Burnett's work is that he is able to hybridize all three of these approaches seamlessly and cast new light on the study of early modern England and its discourses in the process.

In part Burnett is able to accomplish this blending because he makes such good use of the work of Rosemarie Garland Thomson, a guiding light of disability studies. Admiring references to her Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (1997) abound, so much so that extraordinary body becomes a synonym for monster throughout Burnett's book. This useful term allows Burnett to examine the monster as a freak, as a non-normative body that reveals more about the audience eager to gaze on it than it does about itself. Burnett therefore returns repeatedly to the monsters exhibited at early modern fairgrounds, where for a penny one might look on conjoined twins, abnormally sized humans or animals, creatures that seemed suspended between species. The monster-booth, Burnett argues, has a deep continuity with other "display venues" (4)—most notably curiosity cabinets, the court, and the stage.

"Mapping 'Monsters,'" the first chapter, excavates a cultural history of the freak show in Renaissance England, paying close attention to the material conditions surrounding the exhibit of monsters at fairs and elsewhere. Citing antitheatrical tracts, Burnett intimately links the category-defying monstrous body with that of contemporary actors, who likewise exhibited their protean forms for money. One might wish that he had dwelled a bit more on why so many of the famous monsters were foreigners (the hairy German Barbara Urselin, the hog-faced and Dutch Tannakin Skinker, the horned Welsh woman Margaret Griffith, the Italian conjoined twins Lazarus Colloredo / John Baptist) and on what these origins suggest about the construction of contemporary Englishness. But Burnett leaves consideration of racialized and ethnicized monstrosity for the next chapter, an intriguing reading of Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great. In this play, which Burnett aptly terms a "creative war zone" (49), Tamburlaine's triumph is to first slough off his own embeddedness in discourses of monstrosity and then to deploy their rhetorical force against his enemies. Othello's problem, we learn in chapter 4, is just the opposite: he is a monster-denying rationalist caught in the hands of a fairground exhibitor, Iago. Richard III, meanwhile, is described by Burnett as "poised between finished and unfinished states" (68), like the English regnum itself. Burnett's explication of Richard III is the most historicist passage in the book, and also—through his attention to Anne and Margaret—his best consideration of gender. It does make one wonder, however, why all his Shakespearean monsters are male, given that so many of the freak-show monsters of which he writes were women: where are Goneril and Regan? Sycorax, the witch-mother of Caliban, does figure briefly in a chapter on The Tempest (chapter 5), but mainly as part of Burnett's attempt to read the play as about something other than colonialism. A drama full of "generative cogitations" (127), The Tempest here is less about the Americas and ethnic others than about contemporary religious division and anxieties over national unity, seen especially in the close ties between the magician Prospero and the magic-obsessed James. A final chapter on Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair examines a play...