"Knowing I lov'd my books,
he furnish'd me . . ." (The Tempest 1.2.167)
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In Elizabethan English, a "natural" is another
term for .
The idea was that a "natural" child would be one who was born out of
its parents' "nature," which is to say out of that animal nature that
cannot stop itself when fleshly pleasures are at hand. Never mind the fact
that, in nature, animals do not mate constantly; they mate only in season,
unlike humans. What did they know, anyhow? They were just Elizabethans. They
didn't have the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet to tell them these things.
Sometimes, therefore, a "natural" could also refer to a village
idiot, because the thinking was that a "child of nature" might be
marked, somehow, by the sin in which his or her parents had indulged. They
believed in the Biblical notion that "the sins of the fathers would be
visited upon the children" and all that sort of thing.
Shakespeare was pretty savvy, though, on this particular front. Both of
Shakespeare's notorious bastards (in his plays, that is, in his plays!) seemed
not to conform with the cultural definitions of the day.
Witness, for example, John the Bastard (that's his name, folks. I don't make up
this stuff) in a little-known (but absolutely exquisite) play called King
John. You might expect him to be stupid or to be a bad guy.
The best example, though, is
the ever-famous villain Edmund in King Lear, who, far from being a
village idiot, is just about the smartest fellow in the play.
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