Читать книгу Elizabethan Drama and Its Mad Folk - E. Allison Peers - Страница 6

“If sad, they cry,

If mirth be their conceit, they laugh again;

Sometimes they imitate the beasts and birds,

Singing or howling, braying, barking, all

As their wild fancies prompt ’em.”

When the lunatics are brought in, or (as was more usual in real life though unsuited for dramatic representation), we visit them in their “cages” or cells, we are confronted with a strange sight. A “pretty poet” who “ran mad for a chambermaid” invokes Titania and Oberon, and speaks in the sanest of tones of “daisies, primrose, violets”; his madness, though at the time we do not know it, is feigned. The Englishman is still crying for drink. Everyone must go down on his knees and pledge him: “A thousand pots, and froth ’em, froth ’em!” The parson, “that run mad for tithe goslings,” threatens to excommunicate and curse the whole company. A musician walks slowly and deliberately apart; he fell mad “for love of an Italian dwarf.” Many a lunatic resembles Candido, “much gone indeed,” who believes himself to be a prentice, “talks to himself,” selling “pure calicos, fine hollands, choice cambrics, neat lawns,” and resenting interference in a way which is positively dangerous. Near him is a lad brought in (like Alinda) “a little craz’d, distracted” and not suffering acutely; he is allowed comparative freedom and accorded light treatment till more dangerous symptoms shew themselves. He

“talks little idly

And therefore has the freedom of the house.”

We speak to the keepers about their charges, and they seem mildly interested. The most entertaining characters we may discuss at length with them; and, if we will brave their foul talk, we may even converse with the patients as freely as they are permitted to converse with each other. We must be prepared, in this case, to hear frank comments on our personal appearance and the wildest of guesses, often mere expressions of an idée fixe on our profession or our business. The lunatics will not, of course, allow that they are mad, though they may recognise that they are ill and under a doctor’s care. This, however, is less common with our asylum patients than with those undergoing private treatment, such as Ford’s Meleander. The mere suggestion that they may be of unsound mind usually amuses them, or makes them indignant. It is only when the keeper ceases to reproach them with madness and turns the conversation to “Whips!” that they become serious again. Perhaps, after all, a talk with the keeper will best serve our purpose.

Friar Anselmo is at hand and will describe to us with more sympathy than many of his kind the condition of the inmates:

“There are of madmen, as there are of tame,

All humoured not alike. We have here some

So apish and fantastic, play with a feather;

And, though ’twould grieve a soul to see God’s image

So blemished and defaced, yet they do act

Such antic and such pretty lunacies,

That, spite of sorrow, they will make you smile.

Others, again, we have, like hungry lions,

Fierce as wild bulls, untameable as flies;

And these have oftentimes from strangers’ sides

Snatch’d rapiers suddenly and done much harm;

Whom if you’ll see, you must be weaponless.”

We may ask him about his treatment of these poor creatures, who are ever in fear of the lash. It will be easily justified:

“They must be used like children; pleased with toys,

And anon whipt for their unruliness.”

Alternate cajolings and threats are the mildest form of treatment that we can hope to see in these places. The Elizabethan asylum keeper holds with Shakespeare that

“Diseases desperate grown

By desperate appliance are relieved

Or not at all.”

In the middle of this entertaining discussion we are interrupted. A prospective patient, it seems, is being announced, but the first words of the Master, who enters with him, suggest that we have been fortunate enough to meet with a case of false incarceration. A scholarly young man has been confined without cause and his friends in high quarters have come, armed with a “discharge from my lord cardinal,” to demand his release. “I am heartily sorry,” says the Master, “If ye allow him sound, pray take him with ye.” A gentleman protests that there is nothing in the Scholar

“light nor tainted,

No startings nor no rubs in all his answers;

In all his letters nothing but discretion,

Learning and handsome style.”

He is quite “perfect”; “a civiler discourser I ne’er talked with.” Then, before the Master, the Scholar is catechised:

“You find no sickness?” “Do ye sleep o’ nights?” “Have you no fearful dreams?” The answers, to the Master’s disgust, are satisfactory. “I think,” exclaims the friend, “You keep him here to teach him madness.” But, just then, his “eyes alter,” and

“On a sudden, from some word or other.

When no man could expect a fit, he has flown out.”

The mention of “stubborn weather” and “strange work at sea,” starts in him a new delusion or revives an old one. He rants and raves: “I am Neptune.” Now it is the Master’s turn to jeer, and the visitors retire, discomfited.

It may be noticed, in passing, that the questions addressed by the keepers of madhouses to prospective patients in order to ascertain whether or no they are indeed mad are hardly less irrelevant and absurd than those of “Sir Topas” in “Twelfth Night.” Antonio, in the “Changeling,” is asked as “easy questions”: “How many true (i.e. honest) fingers has a tailor on his right hand?” ... “and how many on both?”—“How many fools goes to a wise man?” These remind us of the questions put by the Fool to King Lear.

Our madhouse does not contain only those lunatics who are termed “madmen”; there is another variety, known most commonly as the “fool.” Now the word “fool,” in Elizabethan literature, has a number of connotations. It may be used, as in Shakespeare, for the professional jester of the court, who was, indeed, often a little wanting in ordinary intelligence, though this was amply atoned for by his witty and pregnant remarks. It is also used in a general sense, as to-day, of a person who has acted, or who habitually acts, in an unwise way. With reference, however, to our plays, it has more often approximately the technical meaning of “imbecile”—a term used of those whose brains are constitutionally affected and whose insanity is therefore rather a quantitative rather than a qualitative defect. Taken in this sense, the word “fool” may be applied to some of the asylum’s inmates, the word “madman” to others. The two classes are not always well distinguished in these plays, but the fools can generally be detected by the inanity, rather than the violence, of their words and actions. They tend to reply in the style of Antonio, the feigning fool of “The Changeling”—

“He, he, he! well, I thank you, cousin, he, he, he!”

To which Lollio, the attendant, replies: “He can laugh; I perceive by that he is no beast.”

The two classes of patients are apparently allowed to mix in each others’ company. “We have,” says Lollio, “two sorts of people in the house, and both under the whip, that’s fools and madmen; the one has not wit enough to be knaves, and the other not knavery enough to be fools.” They are kept under very much the same discipline, though the fools are sent to the “Fools’ College”—which is an institution of the madhouse itself—and are put to school in various classes in the hope of improving their wit.

The seventeenth-century asylum, it must be remembered, claims to have worked cures, though at first it seems hard to believe that its designation as “the school where those that lose their wits Practise again to get them” is anything more than a phrase. As we enter the domain of Anselmo we are met by a “sweeper,” who describes himself as one of the “implements” of the house—“a mad wag myself here once; but I thank father Anselmo, he lashed me into my right mind again.”

We are struck at once, as we read these accounts of Bedlam, by the inconsequence, verging at times on brutal heartlessness, with which those responsible for the lunatics’ welfare refer to them. It is the expression of that spirit upon which we have remarked continually throughout this historical survey. In concluding it we can hardly illustrate this last point better than by considering a few of the occasions on which the mad folk are held up to ridicule or satire. It is, of course, the dramatist with whom we have properly to reckon for this, yet he was clearly influenced by the attitude of the time, and contemporary prose-references endorse the spirit of the plays.

Satire abounds on the coarsest of subjects—that of the “horn-mad” patient—and further examples need hardly be given. More interesting is the comment of the keeper in the “Pilgrim” when a patient enters crying “Give me some drink.”

“Oh, there’s the Englishman!...

These English are so malt-mad there’s no meddling with ’em;

When they have a fruitful year of barley there,

All the whole island’s thus.”

A similar skit follows on the parson above-mentioned “that run mad for tithe goslings.” But Fletcher’s best effort in this direction is the introduction of the Welshman, who, but for his premature exit might have served as quite a reasonable understudy for Fluellen. “Whaw, Master Keeper,” is his first remark, “Give me some ceeze and onions, give me some wash brew ... Pendragon was a shentleman, marg you, sir. And the organs at Rixum were made by revelations: There is a spirit blows the bellows, and then they sing.” He will “sing, dance and do anything,” and when the Englishman and the Scholar challenge him, he threatens to “get upon a mountain and call my countrymen.” Dekker, in the “Honest Whore,” is able to hit the lawyers. There are none of that company, he says, among Anselmo’s madmen. “We dare not let a lawyer come in, for he’ll make ’em mad faster than we can recover ’em.” Questioned as to how long it takes to “recover” any of the patients, our informant replies that “An alderman’s son will be mad a great while.... A whore will hardly come to her wits again. A Puritan, there’s no hope of him, unless he may pull down the steeple and hang himself i’ the bell-ropes.”[41:1]

FOOTNOTES:

[8:1] I. Samuel, xvi., 14.

[9:1] “Macbeth,” i., 3, 84.

[10:1] “Twelfth Night,” iv., 2.

[10:2] “King Lear,” iii., 4, etc.

[11:1] “King Lear,” iii., 4, 52, etc.

[11:2] Ibid., iv., 1, 64.

[11:3] Ibid., iii., 4, 122.

[11:4] Ibid., iii., 4, 148-9.

[11:5] Ibid., iii., 5, 31.

[11:6] Middleton: “A Fair Quarrel,” i., 1.

[12:1] iii., 2.

[12:2] i., 1.

[12:3] “Othello,” v., 2, 109.

[12:4] iii., 3.

[12:5] iii., 6. Cf. with these the phrases: “planet-struck,” “planet-stricken,” etc.; e.g. Brome’s “City Wit,” v., 1—Crazy: “Sure I was planet-struck.”

[14:1] For further information on this subject Bulleine’s “Bulwark of Defence” and Sir Thomas Browne’s “Vulgar Errors” may be consulted.

[14:2] Act iii. Sc. iv., cf. Jonson: “The Alchemist,” ii., i. Face of Dol:

“She is a most rare scholar,

And is gone mad with studying Broughton’s works.

If you but name a word touching the Hebrew

She falls into her fit and will discourse

So learnedly of genealogies,

As you would run mad, too, to hear her, sir.”

[15:1] “Much Ado About Nothing,” ii., 1, 368.

[15:2] “Comedy of Errors,” v., 1, 68.

[15:3] For further information on this interesting word see the New English Dictionary. s.v. “horn-mad.”

[16:1] “Law Tricks,” iv., 2.

[16:2] “Merry Wives of Windsor,” iii., 5, 153.

[16:3] “Match Me in London,” iv., 1.

[17:1] All taken from plays of the period under consideration.

[17:2] “Taming of the Shrew,” Ind. ii., 135.

[18:1] “Duchess of Malfi,” iv., 2.

[18:2] “Troilus and Cressida,” ii., 3, 92.

[19:1] “Epicene,” iv., 2.

[19:2] “Hamlet,” iii., 4, 139, etc.

[19:3] “Philaster,” iv., 3, 45, etc.

[20:1] “Comedy of Errors,” iv., 4, 52-3.

[20:2] Ibid., l. 96.

[20:3] “Honest Whore,” iv., 3.

[20:4] “Hamlet,” iii., 1, 7.

[21:1] “King John,” iii., 4, 48, etc.

[21:2] “Twelfth Night,” iv., 3, 1, etc.

[21:3] “Lover’s Melancholy,” ii., 2.

[21:4] “Duchess of Malfi,” iv., 2.

[22:1] “Hamlet,” ii., 2, 212.

[22:2] Ibid., ii., 2, 6-7.

[22:3] Ibid., iv., 5, 4, etc.

[23:1] “Lover’s Melancholy,” iii., 1.

[23:2] “Epicene,” iv., 2.

[23:3] “Honest Whore,” v., 1.

[23:4] “Hamlet,” iii., 1, 171.

[24:1] “Lover’s Melancholy,” iii., 1.

[24:2] “Hamlet,” ii., 2, 93.

[25:1] e.g. A lunatic’s legal acts were annulled and his property was placed under control. (See further, Encyl. Brit., s.v. Insanity.)

[25:2] “Epicene,” ii., 1.

[25:3] “The Changeling,” iii., 3.

[26:1] “King Lear,” ii., 3, 13, etc.

[28:1] “As You Like It,” iii., 2, 420, etc.

[28:2] “Much Ado About Nothing,” v., 1, 24, etc.

[29:1] “Romeo and Juliet,” i., 2, 54, etc.

[29:2] Shirley: “Bird in a Cage,” ii., 1.

[30:1] Notably into “Northward Ho.” The madhouses of “The Pilgrim,” “The Honest Whore,” and “The Changeling” are private asylums.

[31:1] Stow: “Survey of London” (Clarendon Press), i., 137.

[32:1] Ibid., ii., 98.

[32:2] The chief sources from which this description is compiled are:—“The Pilgrim,” iii. 6, iv. 3, v. 5; “The Honest Whore,” v. 12, 13; “The Changeling,” i. 2, iii. 3, iv. 3, v. 3; “Northward Ho,” iv. 1. For obvious reasons the specific references to every quotation are not given.

[41:1] Another interesting passage, no doubt satirical, but too long for quotation at length, occurs in “The Duchess of Malfi,” Act iv., Sc. 2: It begins:

“A mad lawyer and a secular priest

A doctor that hath forfeited his wits

By jealousy,” etc., etc.