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 welcoom he wold lyft vp hys...