Defining Nature Through Monstrosity in Othello and Macbeth

Abstract

The seed for this essay was sown by a set of simple questions: what did the word “nature” mean in the Renaissance period? How did sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people understand nature and what kind of relationship did they form with the natural world? My field of research is Renaissance English literature, and at the time when I started to think about the ways different cultures relate to nature I happened to be rereading Othello and Macbeth. I was struck by the frequent references to monstrosity and wanted to explain why monstrosity should be so interesting to Shakespeare in these particular plays. It occurred to me that one way of defining nature is to look at its opposite and to study what is unnatural and monstrous. In other words, I could identify the Renaissance understanding of nature by looking at Renaissance definitions of the unnatural and the extraordinary. In fact, what I found was that words such as nature and monster have always been fluid terms whose meaning shifts according to context and to the purposes of the speaker. This is not to say that natural phenomena do not have their own irreducible existence. When I stub my foot on the root of a tree, that tree is emphatically there, and resists any attempt to privilege either language, or abstract thought, or the culturally constructed nature of our world. Our world is an irreducible factual reality, but the way we apprehend that reality is culturally constructed. What also became clear to me, as I thought about this essay, is that the answer to the question “What is nature?” always betrays something about a person’s moral and ethical perspectives.