Chimeras
It was commonly perceived during the Renaissance that imagination could engender monstrous offspring: a mother’s imaginings could deform the fetus in her womb. This chapter notes that the early moderns thought of outlandish phantasms as monsters too, akin to the chimera—an unnatural creature, part lion, serpent, and snake. Ironically, the power of imagination to produce chimeras through combination is unconsciously mimicked by early modern natural history texts, in which exotic beasts are routinely described as assemblages of other animals. Shakespeare in The Tempest challenges the supposed difference between natural and unnatural forms using a motif of “shape”—misshapen Caliban, but also shape-shifting Ariel, and the shapely Miranda and Ferdinand.