Two of Shakespeare's more fanciful plays, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream explore the limits of the human form through its characters: the grotesque monster-human hybrid Caliban in The Tempest and the comical Bottom from Midsummer, a human with the head of an ass.

Shelley is conscious of Frankenstein's play with generic convention, and the role genre has in its agreement with representation of reality. In his review of the first edition in 1818 for Edinburgh Magaizine, Sir Walter Scott seems cognizant of the shift in consciousness. He notes: "The real events of the world have, in our day, too, been of so wondrous and gigantic a kind--the shiftings of the scenes in our stupendous drama have been so rapid and various, that Shakespeare himself, in his wildest flights, has been completely distanced by the eccentricities of actual existence."