“Monstrous/Bestial Corporealities: The Imagery of the ‘Mola’ from Classical Natural Science to Shakespeare’s Richard III and Caliban”, in Shakespeare / Nature, ed. Charlotte Scott, Arden Shakespeare Intersections Series, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2024, pp. 173-87.

Starting from a post-structuralist theoretical definition of monsters as liminal creatures or entities that undermine, contravene, and subvert a given system of norms, in this chapter I will explore Shakespeare’s rhetorical construction of the monstrously deformed bodies of Richard III (3H6; R3) and Caliban (Temp). In particular, I will focus on how the descriptions of these characters’ monstrosity often draw almost verbatim upon classical and early medieval accounts of the “mola” – an abnormal and lifeless mass growing in the mother’s uterus – and upon early modern revivals of this notion in anatomical and gynaecological treatises. I will start from the analysis of specific lexical items and linguistic formulae that are frequently connected to the “mola” in treatises and are recurrent in the monstrous representations of Richard III and Caliban. By taking into consideration shifting paradigms of corporeality (from a purely analogical conception of the body to the emergence of anatomical dissection as a heuristic principle), I will then discuss how the plays’ references to this pseudoscientific concept epitomize many aspects of the complex and multifaceted notion(s) of monstrosity in early modern English cultural imagery and how they open to the discourses of Renaissance “bestiality” with regard to ethnical identity, sexuality, and reproductivity.