ABSTRACT
This chapter explores monstrous off spring and by extension, the mothers who birth them also must be seen to be in dialogue with the reports from medical literature about women with animal-like and deformed wombs. The related discourses about the womb and its role make evident the anxieties about and perceptions of women as less than fully humankind. The chapter from the illustrative King Lear aptly demonstrates, despite Lear's claim to know when one is dead and when one lives, this matter is far from clear indeed when it comes to women subjects. The chapter discusses that keeping with the generic structure that imagines comic female sexuality as much ado about no essential thing, as Linda Bamber has written about. It explores that Juliet, Hero, and Helena are, in many ways, rehearsals for the real revivification and purification rituals in Pericles, and the variations on suffocation and revivification scenes set in Jacobean tragedies.
