s are fashioned not of some brutish ugliness but of our own failure toacknowledge the humanity of the stranger. In Richard of Gloucester Shakespeare has created atwisted fiend of unparalleled malice, a misshapen stump of a man who neither evidences nor invitespity. Here is a Shakespearean villain without a shred of conscience, a Renaissance Ted Bundy, GaryGilmore, or, as Ian McKellen suggests in his recent production, Adolf Hitler. But this disfigured regentbelieves that he has the same complaint against the world, the same cause for rancor, asFrankenstein's creature--which is that he is not, and indeed cannot be, loved. I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty ... that am curtailed of this fair proportion, cheated of feature by dissembling nature, deformed, unfinished, and sent before my time into this breathing world ... have no delight to pass away the time ... and therefore, since I cannot prove a lover ... am determined to prove a villain" (act I, scene i). Indeed, Ken Magid and Carole McKelvey argue in High Risk: Children Without a Conscience(M & M Publishers, 1987), sociopaths are all too often the products of emotional abandonment,children who have never been able to form an attachment or bond with a loved one. Such insights are, of course, not really so different from the central argument of monster storieslike Frankenstein. As the creature says to his maker/parent: I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, that which thou owest me ... I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed ... I was benevolent and good, misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous. The underlying message of these stories is that monsters are made, not born, and that they arefashioned...
