‘Monsters’ and ‘Molas’: Body Politics in Richard III

Abstract

A 1658 English translation of a treatise by the sixteenth-century Dutch physician, Levinus Lemnius, relates the following episode: a woman … married a Sea-man, and conceived by him, her belly began to swell to such a vast magnitude, that one would think it would never hold to carry the burden. When nine Moneths were past … the Midwife was cal’d; first with much a do she was delivered of a rude lump … there were fastned to it on both sides two handles, like to arms for the length and the fashion of them; It panted and seem’d to be alive, as sponges and Sea-fish … After this a Monster came forth of the Womb with a crooked back, and a long round neck, with brandishing eyes, and a pointed tail, and it was very nimble footed. So soon as it came to the light, it made a fearful noyse in the room, and ran here and there to find some secret place to hide itself: at last the women with cushions fell upon it and strangled it. This kind of Monster, because like a Leech it sucks the blood from the child, they call it a Leech, commonly a Sucker. At last this woman extreamly tired and almost ready to die, brought forth a Man-child, of which the Monster had so eaten up the flesh; that soon as it was christened, it had very little life remaining in it.1 Animating the passage is the evocation of three ‘extraordinary’ productions — a partly consumed infant, a ‘monster’ (the so-called ‘leech’) and what was described in the period as a ‘mola’, an essentially shapeless composition of flesh that frequently appeared before a ‘natural’ term was completed. This is, then, a birth of multiple ‘monstrous’ proportions.2 As part of his adjudication between the three deliveries, Lemnius avails himself of a theoretical paradigm that equates physical appearance with behavioural traits. The non-normative shape of the ‘mola’ is directly linked to its sub-aquatic responsiveness, while the distorted frame, fiery look and scampering mobility of the ‘monster’ are read as evidence of its aural destructiveness and annihilatory tendencies.