In Shakespeare's King Henry 6 part 3, we are truly introduced to that devilishly delightful Richard for the first time by means of his first and longest soliloquy wherein he introduces to the audience what he wants, why he wants it, and how he plans to get it ("it" being the English Crown of course!).
He speaks the following line about half-way through the soliloquy and refers to himself as a "Chaos":
To dis-proportion me in every part:
Like to a Chaos, or an un-lick'd Bear-whelp,
That carries no impression like the Dam.
The capitalization is not a mistyping on my part, but is how the Folio has it printed. I thought keeping the capitalization would be important as in Paradise Lost, John Milton in the eleventh line of the epic poem wrote (or I suppose spoke, due to his blindness)
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos.
I am assuming the word "chaos" is capitalized to signify that this is no ordinary "chaos" but thé great "void" itself at the beginning of the book of Genesis, wherein God creates all things from no thing; hence the great "Chaos".
I bring this point up because I feel like I am missing something in Richard's speech. When he refers to himself as a "Chaos" (due to his "bunch-back'd Toad" deformities) what is he referring to?
Online Etymology Dictionary puts the following definitions for "chaos":
late 14c., "gaping void; empty, immeasurable space," from Old French chaos (14c.) or directly from Latin chaos, from Greek khaos "abyss, that which gapes wide open, that which is vast and empty," from *khnwos, from PIE root *ghieh- "to yawn, gape, be wide open."
Meaning "utter confusion" (c. 1600) is an extended sense from theological use of chaos in the Vulgate version of "Genesis" (1530s in English) for "the void at the beginning of creation, the confused, formless, elementary state of the universe." The Greek for "disorder" was tarakhe, but the use of chaos here was rooted in Hesiod ("Theogony"), who describes khaos as the primeval emptiness of the Universe, and in Ovid ("Metamorphoses"), who opposes Khaos to Kosmos, "the ordered Universe." Sometimes it was personified as a god, begetter of Erebus and Nyx ("Night"). Meaning "orderless confusion" in human affairs is from c. 1600.
Any of these definitions Shakespeare might have known about (with the exception of maybe the c.1600 definitions since the play in question was written sometime in mid to later part of the 1590s). So which is he referring to? Is the capitalization used to signify a biblical allusion, or is it something else entirely.
P.S I do know spelling and capitalization were highly unmanaged during Elizabethan and Jacobean England.