Deformity and Illegitimacy in Shakespeare's Plays

Shakespeare’s plays provide modern readers with tremendous insight into the deeply-rooted convictions and beliefs that impacted everyday life in sixteenth-century England, ranging from parent-child relationships, marriage, and royalty to magic, fate, and courtly love.  Two of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Richard III and King Lear, reflect Elizabethan attitudes regarding deformity and illegitimacy. Are Richard, the hunchback, and Edmund, Lear’s illegitimate upstart, villains because they are inherently evil or because the norms of Shakespeare’s time deemed them so from birth?

In Richard III, the malevolent king’s evil nature can be examined in light of his physical abnormalities.  In Shakespeare’s day, the possibility of giving birth to a deformed child haunted Elizabethan women, for it was widely believed that “a crooked body meant a crooked heart” (Pearson 80). Scholars and historians of the period exploited this belief to slander the real Plantagenet king and lend credence to his alleged crimes. 

For instance, John Rous claimed that Richard was destined from birth to lead a wicked life because he was supposedly born with a full set of teeth, shoulder-length hair, and a scorpion’s tail (Ross xxi).  And according to Sir Thomas More, a loyal member of the Tudor propaganda machine, Richard’s deformities - “little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed” - mirrored a personality that was “arrogant of heart...dispitious and cruel” (xxii.xxiv).  

Thus, the Globe’s audiences were conditioned to believe wholeheartedly in Richard’s villainy from the moment Shakespeare’s malformed creature limped onto the stage.  The Elizabethan concept linking physical appearance and character had already predetermined the evil path he is expected to follow, and Shakespeare does not disappoint.