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“Shall I tell you why?

Ay, sir, and wherefore; for they say every why hath a wherefore.”

(Shakespeare: “Comedy of Errors.”)

The jingling criticism of Dromio of Syracuse will ever recur to the essayist on an unconventional subject. Lest any therefore should claim of this essay that “in the why and the wherefore is neither rhyme nor reason,” excuse shall come prologue to the theme, and its “wherefore” shall receive a moment’s merited attention. Of what utility, it may be asked, can the study of certain insane persons appearing in early modern drama be to the student of to-day? To this question let us give a double answer. The study has a distinct historical value, for from the mass of original documents which form the body of drama under consideration, we may gather much of the progress which has been made in the attitude of the country towards insanity, and hence the increasing tendency towards a humane and intelligent outlook upon disease in general. Our study is also of value from the point of view of literature—partly as shewing the varying accuracy of our dramatists and the art with which they portrayed their mad folk and introduced them into their plays, partly by selecting and exposing the chief types of the mad folk themselves, considering them on their own merits, as pieces of art of intrinsic literary value. This last will be the chief business of the present essay.

We shall follow the order above indicated, regarding the presentation of madness successively from the standpoints of history and of literature. Under the latter head we shall consider several general questions before proceeding to isolate individual characters in turn. Lastly, we shall endeavour, from the matter furnished us by these plays, to extract some general conclusions.

One proviso must be made before we can embark upon our subject. What, for the purposes of this essay, is to be the criterion of madness? In ordinary life, as we know, the border-land of the rational and the irrational is but ill-defined. We cannot always tell whether mental disease is actually present in a person whom we have known all our lives, much less can we say when the pronounced eccentricity of a stranger has passed the bourn which divides it from insanity. The medical profession itself has not always been too wise where madness is concerned; and where the profession is at fault, with every detail of the case before it, how can the layman aspire to success, with only a few pages of evidence before him of a “case” propounded by another layman of three centuries before? Were we to take the point of view of the physician we should be plunged into a medical dissertation for which we are both ill-equipped and ill-inclined.

But there is another, and a far more serious objection, already hinted at, to the adoption in this essay of the medical point of view. The authors themselves were not physicians; in many cases, as will be seen, they appear to have had but an imperfect technical knowledge of insanity and its treatment; their ideas were based largely on the loose and popular medical ideas of the Elizabethan age. If we are to consider this subject as a department of literature we must adopt the point of view of the dramatist, not of the practical physician. We must, for the time, definitely break with those who enquire deeply and seriously into the state of mind of every character in Shakespeare. In dealing with “King Lear,” for example, we shall make no attempt to pry behind the curtain five minutes before the opening of the play for the purpose of detecting thus early some symptoms of approaching senile decay. Nor shall we follow those who endeavour to carry the history of Shylock beyond the limits of Shakespeare’s knowledge of him, in the hope of discovering whether he was true or false to the religion of his fathers. The critic who peeps behind the scenes at such times as these finds only the scene-shifters and the green room, where his nice offence will soon receive appropriate comments!

Our best plan, then, will be habitually to consider the plays from the point of view which we take to be that of the author himself. Prejudices will be put aside, and predispositions to premature diagnoses resisted. Constance and Timon of Athens, with several personages from Marlowe’s dramas, will be regarded (with some effort) as sane, for the simple and quite adequate reason that they were so regarded by their authors. The question whether or no Hamlet was actually insane will, for the same reason, be dismissed in a few words; while the many witches who haunt Elizabethan drama, and whose prototypes afforded in nearly every case genuine examples of dementia, will be heroically disregarded, as falling without the bounds of our proposed theme.

From the number of occurrences in this body of drama of such words as “mad,” “madness,” “Bedlam,” “frantic,” and the like, it might be supposed that there are more genuine mad folk than actually appear. A few words will suffice to clear up this difficulty.

The term “madness” is often used in a loose, unmeaning sense,—in phrases such as “Mad wench!”, somewhat resembling the equally unmeaning slang of to-day. To insist on this point would probably provoke the charge of a lack of the sense of humour, and insistence is indeed unnecessary. Most readers of Shakespeare will recall Leontes’ transport before the supposed statue of his wife, a transport which he characterises as “madness”; Portia’s description of that “hare,” “madness the youth”; Biron’s apostrophe:

“Behaviour, what wert thou

Till this madman show’d thee?”[5:1]

and no less Shylock’s famous description of men that

“are mad if they behold a cat.”[5:2]

Those who are acquainted with “Philaster” may remember Megra’s description of

“A woman’s madness,

The glory of a fury,”[5:3]

and everyone has at some time or other lighted upon that kind of “fine madness” which is the property of every true poet, and which Drayton, attributing it to Marlowe, declares

“rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”[5:4]

Nowhere in these passages are we expected to see insanity, though the last two are somewhat stronger than the others, and are typical of many places where “madness” is used for simple passion and for inspiration respectively.

In a very special sense, however, madness is used for the passion of love, to such an extent that there is an actual gradation into madness itself. Loosely, and often humorously, the lover is said to be mad for the same reason as the lunatic. To quote Shakespeare once more—as he is more familiar than many of his contemporaries—

“The lunatic, the lover and the poet,

Are of imagination all compact.”[6:1]

There is only a step between seeing “Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt,”[6:2] and seeing “more devils than vast hell can hold.”[6:3] Once cool reason has given way to “frenzy,” the Elizabethan is not always too subtle in his distinctions within that convenient term. So when Troilus informs us that he is “mad in Cressida’s love,”[6:4] when Rosalind jestingly speaks of love as deserving “a dark house and a whip,”[6:5] and when Mercutio declares that his Rosaline-tormented Romeo will “sure run mad,”[6:6] we must not altogether discard such references as idle or even conventional. For while there is a great gulf fixed between such “frenzies” as these and the madness of the love-lorn Ophelia or even of the Gaoler’s Daughter in the “Two Noble Kinsmen,” we can only account for such a peculiar case as Memnon—in Fletcher’s “Mad Lover”—by postulating a conscious development of the idea that “love is a kind of madness.”

It is possible that the difficulty of keeping to the point of view we have chosen may lead to many mistakes being made in our treatment of individual characters. But it seems better to run the risk of this than to set about this work as though it were a medical treatise, or as though the plays to be considered had been produced by a kind of evolution, and not by very human, imperfect, work-a-day playwrights. That being said, Prologue has finished:

“Now, good or bad, ’tis but the chance of war.”

FOOTNOTES:

[5:1] “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” v., 2, 337.

[5:2] “Merchant of Venice,” iv., 1, 48.

[5:3] “Philaster,” ii., 4.

[5:4] Drayton, “The Battle of Agincourt.”

[6:1] “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” v., 1, 7.

[6:2] l. 11.

[6:3] l. 9.

[6:4] “Troilus and Cressida,” i., 1, 51.

[6:5] “As You Like It,” iii., 2, 420.

[6:6] “Romeo and Juliet,” ii., 4, 5.