The Project Gutenberg eBook, Elizabethan Drama and Its Mad Folk, by E. Allison (Edgar Allison) Peers

Transcriber’s Note:

A complete list of corrections as well as other notes [follows] the text.

ELIZABETHAN DRAMA AND
ITS MAD FOLK

LONDON AGENTS:
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL & Co. Ltd.

ELIZABETHAN DRAMA
AND ITS MAD FOLK

The Harness Prize Essay for 1913

BY

EDGAR ALLISON PEERS, B.A.

Late Scholar of Christ’s College, Cambridge.

Cambridge:
W. HEFFER AND SONS LTD.
1914

To
My Mother

CONTENTS.

PREFACE.

The bulk of this essay is the result of research work along lines which, so far as the author knows, have not been previously traversed. The arrangement and the general treatment of the work are therefore original. Certain books, notably Tuke’s “History of the Insane in the British Isles,” Bucknill’s “Mad Folk of Shakespeare,” Bradley’s “Shakespearean Tragedy,” and Ward’s “English Dramatic Literature,” have been of special utility in places where reference is made to them. The critical judgments of these authors, however, have by no means always been followed.

The original title of the essay was “The Mad Folk of English Comedy and Tragedy down to 1642.” It has been shortened for purposes of convenience, and the term Elizabethan extended in order to take in a few plays which belong to the next two reigns. The term is, however, generally recognised to be an elastic one, and most of the plays dealt with fall easily within it.

Much of the revision of this work has been carried out under pressure of other duties. I have been greatly helped in it by the criticisms and suggestions of Professor G. Moore Smith, by the constant help of Mr. N. G. Brett James, by some useful information given me by Mr. C. Ll. Bullock, and especially by the kindness of my friend, Dr. J. Hamilton, who has read the essay through in manuscript from the point of view of the physician. Although I have not always taken up this standpoint in dealing with my subject, I have tried at all times to give it due consideration, for, as Ferdinand says in the “Duchess of Malfi,” “Physicians are like kings: they brook no contradiction.”

E. A. P.

Mill Hill,
March, 1914.

CHAPTER I.
Introductory.

“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.

CHAPTER II.
The Presentation of Madness—from the Standpoint of History.

“A mad world, my masters!”

(Middleton.)

The earliest view of madness which finds its way into this drama and persists throughout it, is based on the idea of possession by evil spirits. This conception came down from remote ages; it accounts, for example, for the madness of King Saul in the Old Testament, when “The Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul and an evil spirit troubled him.”[8:1] In the Elizabethan Age, demoniacal possession was still regarded as one of the most potent causes of insanity; it was made to account not only for mental disease but for all kinds of physical deformations and imperfections, whether occurring alone, or, as is often the case, accompanying idiocy. An offshoot, as it were, from this idea, is the ascription of mental disease to the influence of witches, who were often themselves (ironically enough), persons suffering from mental disorders. So enlightened a man as Sir Thomas Browne declares more than once his belief in witches and their influence; Burton’s “Anatomy of

Melancholy” asserts that melancholy can be caused and cured by witches; the learned James, King of England, and Edward Coke, who lived at the same time, both take up the legal aspects, stating that the plea of insanity offered on behalf of witches should not be recognised at the legal tribunal. In Middleton’s “Witch” (i., 2), there is a mention of “solanum somniferum” (otherwise known as Deadly Nightshade or Atropa Belladonna) which was the chief ingredient in many witches’ recipes and produced hallucinations and other abnormal states of mind. Banquo, in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” probably refers to the witches’ influence when he enquires, directly after the first meeting with them:

“Have we eaten on the insane root

That takes the reason prisoner?”[9:1]

A counterpart to the idea of possession by demons is found in a belief, common at this time and earlier, in the inspired utterances of the frenzied prophetess. Neither here nor with the witches was any curative treatment undertaken. For with the oracle no such treatment was thought to be necessary or even advisable, and with the witches none except death was supposed to avail. Occasionally a “witch” might be subjected, like other mad folk, to “chains” and “whips,” but the road more often

taken was the short one. In simple cases of demoniacal possession the means of cure was patent: the demon must be cast out and the patient will return to his right mind. The exorcisation of the “conjuror” was commonly accompanied by pseudo-medical treatment, the nature of which will presently appear.

Now the influence of the demonological conception of insanity is clearly seen in our dramas. Everyone is familiar, to go no farther than Shakespeare, with the famous exorcisation scene in “Twelfth Night,”[10:1] where the clown, disguised as “Sir Topas the curate,” comes to visit “Malvolio the lunatic,” and drives out the “hyperbolical fiend” which is supposed to vex him. Everything Malvolio does can be expressed in terms of Satan. When the wretched man speaks, it is the “fiend” speaking “hollow” within him. His disgusted exclamation when Maria urges him to “say his prayers” is construed into the fiend’s repugnance to things sacred. Fabian advises “no way (of treatment) but gentleness . . . the fiend is rough and will not be roughly used.” While Sir Toby protests that it is “not for gravity to play at cherry-pit with Satan; hang him, foul collier.” A more complete and far more famous illustration may be found in “Lear,”[10:2] where Edgar attributes his assumed madness to possession by the

various spirits which he names. Almost his first words in his disguise tell of the “foul fiend” leading him “through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, o’er bog and quagmire.”[11:1] He names “the foul Flibbertigibbet,” the fiend of “mopping and mowing,”[11:2] who “gives the web and the pin, squints the eye, and makes the harelip;”[11:3] of “the prince of darkness . . . a gentleman; Modo he’s called and Mahu”;[11:4] of “Hobbididence prince of dumbness;” of “Hoppedance” who “cries in Tom’s belly for two white herring”[11:5] and many others—culled from the flowery page of Harsnet’s “Popish Impostures.”

A more modern idea of insanity is that which attributes it to natural physical causes, and this finds expression in our dramas—often in the same play—side by side with the conception just mentioned. The capriciousness of heredity, for instance, is recognised by the author of “A Fair Quarrel”:

“Wise men beget fools and fools are the fathers

To many wise children . . .

A great scholar may beget an idiot,

And from the ploughtail may come a great scholar.”[11:6]

The supposed justice of the same law is illustrated by a passage in Brome’s “English Moor,” where among punishments for sin is included:

“That his base offspring proves a natural idiot.”

One of the most popular of the physical causes assigned by seventeenth century dramatists to madness is the worm in the brain. “Madam,” says Arcadius in Shirley’s “Coronation,” “my uncle is something craz’d; there is a worm in’s brain.”[12:1] Shirley frequently refers to this particular “cause,” and Winfield, one of the characters in “The Ball,” adds to it another superstition when he says: “He has a worm in’s brain, which some have suppos’d at some time o’ the moon doth ravish him into perfect madness.”[12:2]

Superstition is responsible for many of the “causes” of madness in our drama, and among these the most prominent is probably the superstition responsible for the English word “lunatic.” The supposed influence of the moon on insanity and of its deviations on the recurrence of maniacal periods is clearly the source of those words which Shakespeare gives to Othello after the murder of Desdemona:

“It is the very error of the moon;

She comes more nearer earth than she was wont

And makes men mad.”[12:3]

So Lollio, in “The Changeling,” tells Franciscus that “Luna” made him mad.[12:4] The “parson” who figures, too, among the mad folk in “The Pilgrim,” has to be “tied short” since “the moon’s i’ th’ full.”[12:5]

That the superstition connected with the moon, however, was under high medical patronage is shewn by a reference to the “Anatomie of the Bodie of Man” by one Vicary, chief surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (1548-1562). “Also the Brayne” (he writes) “hath this propertie that it moveth and followeth the moving of the moone; for in the waxing of the moone the brayne discendeth downwarde and vanisheth in substance of vertue; for then the Brayne shrinketh together in itselfe and is not so fully obedient to the spirit of feeling, and this is proved in men that be lunaticke or madde . . . that be moste greeved in the beginning of the newe moone and in the latter quarter of the moone. Wherefore when it happeneth that the Brayne is either too drye or too moyst, then can it not werke his kinde; then are the spirits of life melted and resolved away, and then foloweth feebleness of the wittes and of al other members of the bodie, and at the laste death.”

The word “lunatic” itself, it may be noted, quickly passed into common speech, and was used without reference to its original significance. We shall find it constantly recurring throughout this study, but as there is little variety in its use, no further examples need be quoted.

An interesting superstition is connected with

the mandrake plant, round which, from the supposed resemblance of its strangely cleft root to the human figure, many weird notions have gathered. One of these was that when torn from the ground, the plant would utter groans of “sad horror,” which, if heard, caused instant madness, or even death.[14:1] From the numerous references to this superstition in Elizabethan drama may be extracted two,—the first from “Romeo and Juliet” (iv., 3, 47-8), where Juliet speaks of

“shrieks of mandrakes, torn out of the earth

That living mortals, hearing them, run mad”;

the second from a speech of Suffolk’s in “2 Henry VI.” (iii., 2, 310), where the Duke reminds the Queen that curses will not kill

“as doth the mandrake’s groan.”

Other causes to which, rightly or wrongly, insanity is attributed may be grouped together for convenience. In the “Emperor of the East” is an obvious reminiscence of Holy Writ where Flaccilla says of Pulcheria:

“Grant heaven, your too much learning

Does not conclude in madness.”[14:2]

This devout wish, however, has only about as much claim to be taken seriously as Leonato’s fear that Benedick and Beatrice, married a week, would “talk themselves mad.”[15:1]

Such causes as irritation, worry, jealousy and persecution are frequently mentioned as conducing to frenzy, if not actually causing it. The Abbess of the “Comedy of Errors,” reproaching Adriana for her treatment of Antipholus, sums the matter up thus:

“The venom clamours of a jealous woman

Poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.

It seems his sleeps were hinder’d by thy railing,

And thereof comes it that his head is light.

Thou say’st his meat was sauced with thy upbraidings:

Unquiet meals make ill digestions;

Thereof the raging fire of fever bred;

And what’s a fever but a fit of madness?

Thou say’st his sports were hinder’d by thy brawls:

Sweet recreation barr’d, what doth ensue

But moody and dull melancholy . . .

Have scared thy husband from the use of wits.”[15:2]

We need not stay long over the numerous characters who speak of anger as leading to madness. The term “horn-mad,” however, is sufficiently interesting to be cleared up here.[15:3]

It is used in two senses. Often it is no more than an emphatic way of expressing the simple adjective. In this sense it may be connected

with the Scottish word “harns,” meaning “brains,” an alternative form being “horn-wood.” When Joculo, in Day’s “Law Tricks,” suggests that “the better half of the townsmen will run horn-mad,”[16:1] this is clearly the sense in which the words are to be taken. But in another sense, the source of which is evident, “horn-mad” is the word used to denote a kind of madness unknown as a technical term to the medical profession, but very common in the less elevated portions of our drama. This madness is a thing

“Created

Of woman’s making and her faithless vows”;

the madness, in a word, of the cuckold. Falstaff seems to be punning on the two senses of the term when he says: “If I have horns to make me mad, let the proverb go with me: I’ll be horn mad.”[16:2] Dekker exhibits an especial fondness for this particular pun. Cordolente, the shopkeeper of “Match Me in London,” whose wife the King has seduced, says on being informed by that monarch that he is mad: “I am indeed horn-mad. O me! In the holiest place of the Kingdom have I caught my undoing.”[16:3] Similar passages can be found in nearly all Dekker’s plays, whether true madness is actually in question or not.

A world of meaning lies beneath such phrases as “dog-madness,” “midsummer madness,” “March mad,” “as mad as May butter.”[17:1] The first refers primarily to hydrophobia, though it is not always used in that sense; the second is accounted for by the old belief that insanity was fiercest and most prevalent in midsummer. The phrase “March mad” is connected with the saying “As mad as a March hare.” Its explanation is that during the month of March, their breeding season, hares are wilder than usual. An example of the use of the phrase might be quoted from Drayton’s (non-dramatic) work, “Nymphidia”:

“Oberon . . . Grew mad as any hare

When he had sought each place with care

And found his queen was missing.”

“May butter” is unsalted butter, preserved during May for medicinal use in healing wounds. The connexion of the phrase with madness, however, is so deep as to be no longer understood!

Finally, among the causes of madness recognised in the seventeenth century must be mentioned melancholy, though we shall have to return to this on another page. The common belief appears to have been, in the words of the Doctors of the Induction to the “Taming of the Shrew,” that “Melancholy is the nurse of frenzy,”[17:2] and incipient melancholiacs are

constantly adjured by their nearest and dearest to remember this fact—though their adjurations seldom have any effect. The Duchess of Malfi, indeed, hearing in her captivity a “hideous noise,” and being told:

“’Tis the wild consort

Of madmen, lady, whom your tyrant brother

Hath placed about your lodging,”

replies:

“Indeed, I thank him; nothing but noise and folly

Can keep me in my right wits; whereas reason

And silence make me mad.”[18:1]

In the “Lover’s Melancholy,” Prince Palador is presented with a “Masque of Melancholy” (for which the author was largely indebted to Burton) in order that his diseased mind may be relieved. These two cases certainly shew a divergence from the more general opinion. The first may perhaps be attributed to the Duchess’ desire: “to make a virtue of necessity,” the second to the fact that Palador’s disease is not true melancholia, but a state of mind bordering on affectation—that melancholy affected by more than one of Shakespeare’s “humorous” characters, of whom it can be said “You may call it melancholy if you will favour the man, but by my head ’tis pride.”[18:2]

We may gather next, from our plays, some of the recognised symptoms of insanity in these

early times. Epicene, pretending to recognise the madness of Morose, says: “Lord, how idly he talks, and how his eyes sparkle! he looks green about the temples! do you see what blue spots he has?” Clerimont has his answer ready: “Ay, ’tis melancholy.”[19:1] But these two are over-frivolous; their diagnosis is untrustworthy; we must turn to surer ground. One supposed sign of madness was evidently the quickening of the heart and the pulse. Hamlet, in a well-known passage, ridicules his mother’s idea that the ghost which he sees is due to “ecstasy”:

“Ecstasy!

My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time,

And makes as healthful music.”[19:2]

Philaster, declaring his sanity to Arethusa, says:

“Take this sword

And search how temperate a heart I have . . . .”

and again:

“. . . Am I raging now?

If I were mad, I should desire to live.

Sir, feel my pulse, whether have you known

A man in a more equal tune to die.”

Bellario replies:

“Alas, my lord, your pulse keeps madman’s time!

So does your tongue.”[19:3]

That these tests were inadequate is proved by a simple illustration—in the “Comedy of Errors,”

Pinch the exorcist, mistakes Antipholus’ anger for madness. Luciana cries:

“Alas, how fiery and how sharp he looks!”

And a courtezan,

“Mark, how he trembles in his ecstasy!”[20:1]

Pinch attempts to feel the “madman’s” pulse, but in any case he knows that both man and master are possessed:

“I know it by their pale and deadly looks.”[20:2]

The madman was supposed not to be aware of the nature of his disease. “That proves you mad,” says the Officer in Dekker’s “Honest Whore,” by a strange piece of reasoning, “because you know it not.”[20:3] Throughout the plays occurs the same phenomenon. Even when certain of the mad folk recognise that they are afflicted with some sort of disease, they resent questioning on it. Guildenstern’s account of Hamlet is significant of a large number of cases:

“Nor do we find him forward to be sounded,

But with a crafty madness, keeps aloof

When we would bring him on to some confession

Of his true state.”[20:4]

The resentment is no doubt due to a subconscious wish of the madman to hide his loss of that sense of personal identity which is used by Shakespeare as one of the criteria of madness. Constance’ proof to Pandulph of her entire sanity will be remembered:

“I am not mad; this hair I tear is mine.

My name is Constance; I was Geffrey’s wife;

Young Arthur is my son and he is lost:

I am not mad[21:1]. . .”

Sebastian, in “Twelfth Night,” gives similar evidence:

“This is the air; that is the glorious sun;

This pearl she gave me. I do feel’t and see’t;

And though ’tis wonder that enwraps me thus,

Yet ’tis not madness.”[21:2]

Another symptom of insanity was sleeping with open eyes. Meleander, in the “Lover’s Melancholy,” “sleeps . . . with eyes open, and that’s no good sign”[21:3] and the Duchess of Malfi is said to sleep “like a madman, with (her) eyes open.”[21:4]

A general wildness of demeanour was thought to be characteristic of both the earlier and the later stages of madness. Songs and dances are often associated with it; wild laughter, “the usher to a violent extremity,” accompanied by fulminations against the world in general; bitter sarcasm, sudden touches of pathos and consequent outbursts of anger; “thundering” and “roaring,” which can only be checked by like excesses on the part of others—these are all common symptoms, together with “raving” on all kinds of subjects. This wildness, however,

is not inconsistent with considerable force and pregnancy of speech, which might lead some to doubt the actual presence of insanity; and which is “a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.”[22:1] A sense of physical pain, of being “cut to the brains,” might also afflict the patient; and the disease frequently causes such suffering that

“Nor the exterior nor the inward man

Resembles that it was.”[22:2]

An excellent objective description of a single case is furnished by the “Gentleman” in “Hamlet” who announces the frenzy of Ophelia:

“She speaks much of her father; says she hears

There’s tricks i’ the world, and hems and beats her heart;

Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,

That carry but half sense; her speech is nothing,

Yet the unshaped use of it doth move

The hearers to collection; they aim at it,

And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts;

Which as her winks and nods and gestures yield them

Indeed would make one think there might be thought,

Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.”[22:3]

As to the nature of the madman’s talk, we find it impossible to generalise, and the ideas of different authors on what it should be have not much agreement, beyond the one condition that there should be wanting what Shakespeare aptly calls “a dependency of thing on thing.” This

will be noted more particularly when we come to the study of individual characters.

From these symptoms and others which might be cited it will be evident that the madness of our dramas is far from being confined to one type. We know that various kinds of insanity were recognised in the seventeenth century. Corax, the physician of the “Lover’s Melancholy,” makes it clear that

“Ecstasy

Fantastic Dotage, Madness, Frenzy, Rapture

Of mere imagination differ partly

From Melancholy.”[23:1]

Our learned informant, Ben Jonson, diagnoses another case of insanity as “the disease in Greek . . . called μα νια, in Latin, insania, furor, vel ecstasis melancholica, that is egressio, when a man ex melancholico evadit fanaticus, . . . . But he may be but ‘phreneticus,’ yet, mistress, and ‘phrenesis’ is only ‘delirium’ or so.”[23:2] And indeed there are all varieties of insanity in the plays before us. There is the young person who merely talks “fantastically,” “like a justice of peace,” “of a thousand matters and all to no purpose,”[23:3] and whose words “though they (lack) form a little,” are “not like madness.”[23:4] There is the person dominated by the “idée fixe”—examples differing widely occur in “King Lear” and in “Bartholomew Fair.”

There is the “idiot” and there is the “imbecile”—two types between which it would be affectation here to attempt a discrimination. The melancholiac, one of “sundry kinds,” affected by a “mere commotion of the mind, o’ercharged with fear and sorrow,”[24:1] is one of the commonest types. Mania and delusional insanity are also frequent and account for a large proportion of our characters. Yet, since this is not a medical treatise, how can we distinguish any more finely? We shall do better not to attempt a more detailed classification of our mad folk than this, which will be utilised later in the consideration of individual characters. “It is not as deep as a well, nor as wide as a church-door, but ’twill serve.” Like more than one of those Elizabethan playwrights we may feel that:

“To define true madness

What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?”[24:2]

On this let us act and employ a literary rather than a medical criticism.

Our dramas are not silent as to the way in which lunatics were regarded by the world at large. Few people at that time had the sympathy of Langland for those whom, three hundred years before, he beautifully called “God’s minstrels”—a title explained by the preceding exhortation to his readers to bestow their gifts on the wandering insane as bountifully as though

they were wandering minstrels. For the most part the lunatic seems to have been regarded, when confined, as a negligible factor in everyday life,[25:1] and when at large as a harmless and a gratuitous amusement. So, as has just been noted, the Duchess of Malfi is regaled before her death with “some sport” in the shape of several madmen who sing and dance before her. Here, of course, the intention is a sinister one, but there is no sinister meaning in a casual remark let fall by Truewit in the “Silent Woman”—“Mad folks and other strange sights to be seen daily, private, and public”![25:2] Nor is there any idea but one of legitimate amusement in the entertainment organised by the master of a private asylum, Alibius by name, for the marriage of Beatrice-Joanna (in “The Changeling”) and given, as he says, by:

“A mixture of our madmen and our fools,

To finish, as it were, and make the fag

Of all the revels, the third night from the first.”[25:3]

Isabella caustically remarks “Madmen and fools are a staple commodity.”

In this connexion, a particular class of lunatic deserves notice. The Bedlam beggar, variously known as “bedlamer,” “bedlamite,” and “Abraham’s man,” was originally an inmate of Bedlam, but, coming to be regarded as convalescent, had

been set free and would roam about the country, half-crazed, living for the most part on the charity of such as would befriend him. In Dekker’s “Belman of London,” a non-dramatic work professing to expose “The most notorious Villanies that are now Practised in the Kingdome,” is a long description, in the manner of a seventeenth century “character,” of one of “those Wild-geese or Hayre-braynes . . . called Abraham’s men.” Dekker at least has little good to say of them. “The fellow . . . sweares he hath bin in bedlam and will talke frantickly of purpose: you see pinnes stuck in sundry places of his naked flesh, especially in his armes, which paine he gladly puts himselfe to (beeing indeede no torment at all, his skin is either so dead, with some fowle disease, or so hardned with weather), onely to make you believe he is out of his wits: he calls himself by the name of Poore Tom, and comming neere anybody, cryes out Poore Tom is a-cold . . . .” The mind at once turns to Edgar and the celebrated lines where he poses as one of those very “Abraham-men”:

“This country gives me proof and precedent

Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,

Strike in their numb’d and mortified bare arms

Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;

And with this horrible object, from low farms,

Poor pelting villages, sheep cotes, and mills,

Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers

Enforce their charity.”[26:1]

From all that we can gather, however, of the treatment of the insane in madhouses of the time, it would seem probable that, among those released or escaping from them, many would still be genuine lunatics. At the same time, it was no doubt fairly easy to make a living in the way Dekker describes, and numbers of beggars must have emulated Edgar’s behaviour from far less worthy motives.

Such a lack of popular sympathy could hardly go hand-in-hand with a peculiarly humanitarian treatment of the insane. The Saxon treatment of lunatics has been described as “a curious compound of pharmacy, superstition, and castigation.” In the seventeenth century it had been but little improved upon. Its most characteristic feature was confinement in a dark room, with additional treatment, varying according to circumstances. A book, of date 1542, called “A Compendious Pygment or a Dyetry of Helth” by one Dr. Borde, advises the keeping of lunatics in a dark room, provided with no knives, girdles, nor pictures of man or woman on the wall. Few words are to be used except in gentle reproofs and the dietary is to be careful and ample. Dr. Borde’s treatment was enlarged upon in later days; chains were used to prevent escape; castigation was employed freely and often attended with great cruelty. A quatrain in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” (1621),

confirms this statement, presenting what is indeed a ghastly picture. It is all borne out by the dramatic references, which are extremely numerous. The lunatic chez lui is evidently a subject which appeals to the dramatist: madness and its cure become topics of ordinary conversation. Rosalind, in playful banter with Orlando, compares love to “a madness,” which “deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.”[28:1] Leonato, in “Much Ado” talks (from our point of view ominously) of those who would

“Give preceptial medicine to rage,

Fetter strong madness in a silken thread,

Charm ache with air and agony with words.”[28:2]

Shakespeare is not predicting here, as has been suggested, the application of gentle methods to insanity, but ridiculing those who were so foolish as to apply “a moral medicine to a mortifying mischief.” Even as he wrote lightly of the silken thread, he would have heard in imagination the clank of the lunatic’s chains.

Another addition to the attractions of the asylum was the course of slow starvation, and this is hinted at in a casual allusion by Romeo in “Romeo and Juliet”:

“Why Romeo, art thou mad?” asks Benvolio.

“Not mad,” answers Romeo, “but bound more than a madman is,

Shut up in prison, kept without my food,

Whipped and tormented.”[29:1]

Pinch the conjuror knows what to do in cases of madness:

“Mistress, both man and master is possess’d . . .

They must be bound and laid in some dark room.”

George, in “The Honest Whore,” has heard of domestic cures: “’Sfoot! I have known many women that have had mad rascals to their husbands, whom they would belabour by all means possible to keep ’em in their right wits.” And a character in Marston’s “What You Will” speaks in a delightfully brisk and business-like manner: “Shut the windows, darken the room, fetch whips; the fellow is mad, he raves, he raves—talks idly—lunatic.”

Few tests were needed to convince the keepers of an asylum that their patient was mad, and if it could be made a matter of pecuniary advantage to them to incarcerate any person, they would often take him and clothe him in the “fool’s coat” or clap him into the “madman’s cage” without making too many inquiries. Thus the madhouse became, in many a sinister sense, “a house of correction to whip us into our senses.”[29:2]

Before we leave the historical side of our subject, some mention must be made of the famous Bedlam, so often mentioned in connexion with the mad folk of our plays. The real and original Bedlam, “Bethlem monastery,” as it is called, “the madman’s pound,” which is actually introduced into one or more of the plays under consideration,[30:1] was formerly the Hospital of St. Mary Bethlehem in Bishopsgate Street. The Priory was founded for this Order in 1247 by an ex-sheriff named Simon Fitz-Mary. It passed through many vicissitudes, chief among which were a seizure by the Crown in 1375 and the dissolution by Henry VIII. in 1547. After this latter date the revenues were held by the Mayor, the commonalty and the citizens of London. For some hundred and fifty years the Hospital had been used for lunatics, and the only difference in this use caused by its dissolution as a religious house seems to have been that it became incorporated as a Royal Foundation. For a considerable time it suffered through poverty, being largely dependent on legacies, such as Sir Thomas Gresham’s in 1575, and on general alms. Mistress Trainewell, in Brome’s “Northern Lass” (1632), mentions Bedlam among other objects of charity, and suggests to Squelch an excellent

reason for patronising it. The passage may be quoted in full:

Squelch: “I will now bestow my wealth in monumental good deeds, and charitable uses in my life-time, to be talked well on when I am dead.”

Trainewell: “Yes, build almshouses and hospitals for beggars, and provide in Bridewell houses of correction for your friends and kindred. Pray give enough to Bedlam, you may feel some part of that benefit yourself before you die, if these fits hold you.”

The later history of Bedlam is uneventful, and, to us, unimportant. In 1676 it was transferred to London Wall, the new buildings being known as the “New Hospital of Bethlehem,” and in 1815 to Lambeth. Bethlem Hospital was by far the best known of London mad-houses in the Seventeenth Century; two more are mentioned by Stow in his “Survey of London,” and may be noted here. The first was “an Hospitall in the Parish of Barking Church,” founded “by Robert Denton Chaplen, for the sustentation of poore Priests, and other both men and women, that were sicke of the Phrenzie, there to remaine till they were perfectly whole, and restored to good memorie.”[31:1] In another place, under the title of “An house belonging to Bethlem,” we read: “Then had ye an house wherein sometime were distraught and lunatike people, of what antiquity founded, or by whom I have not read, neither of the suppression, but it was said that sometime a King of England,

not liking such a kind of people to remaine so neare his pallace, caused them to be remoued farther of, to Bethlem without Bishops gate of London, and to that Hospitall the said house by Charing crosse doth yet remaine.”[32:1]

No doubt there were also private asylums in existence, where the treatment of the patients was harsh, and their comforts were few. The conditions, indeed, seem to have been very similar to those of Bedlam. These and other details may be gathered chiefly from four plays, in each of which there are “madhouse scenes”—they are “The Pilgrim” by John Fletcher, “The Honest Whore” by Thomas Dekker, “Northward Ho,” the joint work of Dekker and Webster, and “The Changeling,” ascribed to Middleton, who was probably aided in it by Rowley. A comparison of these plays should give a very fair account of a seventeenth century lunatic asylum.[32:2]

It is not difficult to obtain admission to this asylum, for the charge is only a penny or twopence, and Bellamont and his friends in “Northward Ho” look at the “mad Greeks” for a short time before calling for their horses, which are stabled at “the Dolphin without

Bishopsgate” near by. The hospital consists of “a parlour, kitchen, and larder below stairs, and twenty-one rooms where the poor distracted people lie, and above stairs eight rooms more for servants”; the madmen may either be visited in their cells, or brought in for inspection by the visitors. Preferring the former alternative we approach the cells, and hear a confused roaring—“the Chimes of Bedlam.” It is “Mad Bess roaring for meat or the Englishman for drink”; like “bells rung backward” they are nothing but “confusion and mere noises.” The “shaking of irons” adds to the din, which is increased by the snatches of coarse song which are continually assailing our ears, the playing of rough games such as “barley-break,” the running and jumping of the more violent of the patients, and the cries of those who are undergoing a treatment of the whip:

“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.

CHAPTER III.
The Presentation of Madness—from the Standpoint of Literature.

“This mirthful comic style

Makes us at once both serious, and smile.”

(Alex. Brome.)

The questions which we have now to answer, before passing to our main study and considering the mad folk as individuals, are two in number. The first is a general one: What is the place of such a feature as madness in drama? The second is more particular: What place does madness assume in the body of drama under consideration? Let us take them in this order.

1. Clearly there is a great difference between madness in tragedy and madness in comedy. Many of us would hold to the one and emphatically despise the other. At all events, risking confusion through an over-complicated scheme of sub-division, we shall deal with each separately.

The representation of madness in tragedy might be objected to upon the following grounds: If carried out well, it becomes too terrible for the stage; if badly, it is nothing but a ludicrous caricature of greatness. This is at least plausible, and the last proposition is evidently true. But what of the first? Is madness really too terrible

for dramatic presentation, or is it not eminently suited to the stage by virtue of its peculiar qualities?

The critic replies that madness is sheer suffering of the most painful sort, that the ravings of a noble mind o’erthrown have passed the ne plus ultra of the tragic, while the babblings of mere imbecility have not reached the level of tragedy at all. “Such suffering” (he will say), “as is the lot of Lear, should never be dwelt upon, much less paraded before crowds, and decked out with the tinsel of the stage. Think of physical suffering comparable with it, if that be possible—for is not mental suffering far more terrible and heart-rending than physical?—and you would never talk of putting the maniac on the stage. Think of the repulsion caused by the blinding of Gloster and the murder of Lady Macduff’s infant son,—and is not the madness of Lear more terrible? ‘King Lear’ is, of course, a brilliant exception, but the exception proves the rule.”

With this last provoking platitude we need not quarrel, but the main assertion must be challenged nevertheless. In the first place it is a fact that we do not feel the same repulsion at the representation of madness on the stage as we do at a similar case in real life, whereas with physical brutality the effect seems in drama to be almost magnified. Could we possibly feel

more keenly the blow which Othello gives to Desdemona if the scene took place in our own family? It is at least doubtful. But if we think of the suffering of Lear, or of Ophelia, and suppose one-tenth of it inflicted on our dearest friend, the thought becomes perfectly unbearable. It is not that we do not enter into the spirit of “King Lear,” but rather that the sufferings of the aged King, by reason of their very remoteness from human life, give us the actual “tragic feeling” which Shakespearean tragedy inevitably produces.

Not only so, but the state of the madman, provided that apart from him the play contains the requisite tragic hero, is admirably calculated to contribute, through the emotions of pity and fear, to that καθάρσις which Aristotle considers to be the essence of tragedy. Tragic pity will most surely be excited at the misfortunes of “one who is undeserving,” that is of

“a man

More sinn’d against than sinning.”

Hardly any disaster which may befall a human being can excite such tragic pity as the crowning disaster of insanity. Whatever a man’s sins, we feel that the loss of reason more than atones for them all. If the greatest villain in drama should lose his reason, we should feel this; when Lear, the rash, impetuous King of Britain, becomes insane, we cry out, forgetting for the time his

tragic error, that his punishment is too great for him. When the brief scene is ended we consign him to the Great Silence, not with feelings of rebellion but with a sense of supreme calm:

“He hates him

That would upon the rack of this tough world

Stretch him out longer.”[45:1]

So equally with tragic fear. This emotion, which is no vulgar sense of possible or impending misfortune to ourselves, but an awed and sympathetic feeling for a character essentially of the nature of our own, is brought out to the full by means of the portrayal of madness. For what reduces men so quickly to the same level as the loss of reason by a fellow-man? In real life our hearts are stirred by compassion, yet moved by inexpressible awe, as we see or hear of one whom we have known and whose senses have deserted him. Be he of high or low station, it matters nothing. Differences of rank are forgotten—and this is less often so with physical calamity. Loss of reason has effected the belated recognition of our common humanity. Carry this into the imaginative world of drama, and you have the emotion of tragic fear.

The representation, then, of madness in tragedy would seem to be not only permissible, but of the greatest value to the drama when this madness is worked into the plot and becomes an

essential part of it. Often, however, and especially with the lesser lights of the Elizabethan stage, it held a place wholly subsidiary to the main theme of the tragedy. If tragic fear and tragic pity were to be evoked it would be by other means; madness was required for colouring effects, and to lend a peculiar atmosphere to the tragedy. It was sketched but lightly, frequently with little attempt at reality; whether this arose from the dramatists’ lack of ability, or from a desire to lessen the supposed pain, can only be a matter of conjecture. The introduction of madness, as a subsidiary element, into tragedy, appears to be justifiable only when it is regarded objectively with no relation to the pain caused to the sufferer. Let us illustrate. The Duchess of Malfi, previously to her death, is made to listen to the cries and to watch the antics of madmen. The intention of the author is evident. Whether we consider him to have been successful or not, we can hardly cavil at his device when we bear in mind the nature of the tragedy. But had a madman been introduced and presented as a new character with a definite interest of his own, either at this or at an earlier stage of the play, we should have rightly condemned the new feature as inartistic and revolting, for our centre of gravity, so to say, would at once have been shifted from the unfortunate lady to the unfortunate madman.

The conception of madness in tragedy is a powerful one and cannot be trifled with.

There is another point of view from which the question must be considered before we pass from tragedy to comedy,—namely, that of the action. It is recognised that in tragedy properly so called the conflict must spring from the actions of the hero, and that the calamity which marks the tragedy must be unmistakeably dependent upon this generating action. Now the hero, to commit a tragic error, must obviously be responsible for his actions,—otherwise the tragedy will rest upon an irrational basis, which would be absurd. No abnormal mental state, then, such as would arise from drunkenness, hallucination, or insanity, can serve to generate the conflict. The most usual and natural position for the introduction of insanity will be either during a considerable part of the decline of the action from the crisis (as with Ophelia’s madness in “Hamlet”)[47:1] or immediately preceding the catastrophe ( cf. the sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth), when it adds greatly to the force of the tragedy. The construction of “King Lear” is in this respect peculiar. Lear’s madness, to the ordinary spectator, is first noticeable in the third act;[47:2]

but, as Dr. Bradley points out, it is more satisfactory from the point of view of the construction to consider, not Lear, but Goneril, Edmund and Regan, as the leading characters in the play.[48:1]

What of madness in comedy? This, we confess, it is difficult, if not impossible, to justify. Feigned madness may, no doubt, have some place in a comedy, and such tricks as occur in “Northward Ho!” where the poet Bellamont narrowly escapes being immured in a madhouse, may, and certainly did appeal to a certain kind of audience. But the introduction of Bedlam into a romance such as “The Pilgrim,” or a comedy of low life such as “The Changeling,” merely for the sake of giving some cheap amusement to the groundlings, reveals a mind which one would suppose to be untouched by the elements of human pity. It can only be understood in the light of the treatment accorded to the lunatic in real life. And our authors’ sins do not end here. In more than one comedy in which the madman appears, little or no attempt is made to give even an approximate idea of what he might be expected to say or do. His presence is merely an excuse

for the coarsest of jokes and the vilest of songs, which, no doubt, lost nothing in the acting. The degradation of a theme which is properly tragic is unhappily only what may be expected from playwrights whose work graced the Post-Restoration stage.

In tragi-comedy, it may be said, madness has a legitimate place, and we find the authors of “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” among others, making full use of it. We shall best see, when we consider this play separately, how impossible it is to reconcile madness with the dénouement of comedy. We may be able to put a hook into the nose of leviathan, but we can no more use the sufferings of mad folk and then bring them to a dénouement, in a tragi-comedy worthy of the name, than we can supply a “happy ending” to “Hamlet” or “Lear.” The heights of mania are very high, as the depths of idiocy are very low. The maniac, though cured of his disease, does not fit into comedy, any more than the imbecile, however well-born, can harmonise with tragedy. From one point of view at least, a great man is at his greatest when he is possessed by an uncontrollable passion. If the madman of a tragi-comedy is sufficiently great for tragedy, the play cannot be resolved into a comedy; if he is not a possible tragic hero, his madness is not sufficiently imposing to raise the conflict to a crisis. We are on the horns of

a dilemma which may be avoided in practice by some dramatic genius, but which were certainly not avoided in Elizabethan drama by those authors who rushed in where others might fear to tread.

2. We have now to enquire into the actual presentation of madness in our tragedy and comedy, and it must be confessed at once that the results will be somewhat disappointing. We have between twenty and thirty plays of which it may fairly be said that the conception of madness enters definitely into the plot, and of this number all, save four or five, are comedies. The tragedies may briefly be considered first.

In “King Lear,” mad folk are given an exalted place. On the madness of the old King depends the whole play; the scenes which are naturally the most striking become more terrible because of his ravings; their effect is further enhanced by the feigned madness of Edgar and by the curious half-imbecility of the Fool. In “Hamlet” the hero’s assumption of an “antic disposition” is inextricably interwoven with the main plot, while Ophelia’s loss of reason is largely responsible for the catastrophe. Nowhere else in Elizabethan Tragedy do we find so bold a use of the madman as here. Turn to “The Changeling” and Middleton’s ideas of what can be done with

him take shape. There is a comic underplot, alternating during the greater part of the play with a fine tragic theme, and only becoming connected with it towards the end—this underplot embodies the grossest of all possible conceptions of madness. From a sublime passion, it becomes material for vulgar intrigue. Even where mad folk are seriously treated in these tragedies, they are not portrayed with the power of which the author is capable. Penthea, for example, in Ford’s “Broken Heart,” though not, as has been suggested, a mere reminiscence of Ophelia, is somewhat slightly and inadequately drawn. And one would at least have expected Webster, with his penchant towards the carnival of horrors, to have produced something better than the inane songs and dances which, with hardly the saving grace of being grotesque, disfigure the fourth act of the “Duchess of Malfi.” The fact is that the common Elizabethan treatment of insanity was so far removed from the humane that the subject was regarded rather as one for mirth than for solemnity—for comedy and not for tragedy.

Reconciling ourselves as best we can to this state of things, let us examine some representative comedies. There are, in the first place, those in which insanity plays quite a subsidiary part and is not in the least essential

to the main plot. In “The Silent Woman,” for example, the pretended madness of Morose is an occasion for much merriment, but it lasts only for part of a scene. In “Northward Ho!”, Maybery, Greenshield and their friends lay a merry plot against Bellamont and contrive to secure his arrest as a madman, though here again, the jest is but a short one. Similarly, in “Twelfth Night,” Malvolio is treated as if he were insane, much to the delight of Maria, Sir Toby, and the lesser folk; while in the “Comedy of Errors” many accusations of madness are bandied to and fro, which more than once lead to violence. Sometimes the madness is only reported. In “Cymbeline,” the Queen is said in the fourth act to be afflicted by

“A fever with the absence of her son,

A madness of which her life’s in danger,”

and there is little doubt that her violent death, “most shameless-desperate,” was due to some derangement of the reason. So, too, the Lady Constance dies “in a frenzy,” and Brutus’ Portia, it is reported,

“fell distract

And, her attendants absent, swallow’d fire.”

Such scenes as these last three, however, Shakespeare has, with his usual tact, kept off the stage, knowing that in the case of “Cymbeline” he would otherwise introduce too violent a nemesis into what was rapidly becoming the dénouement of a romantic comedy.

Massinger, on the contrary, in “A New Way to Pay Old Debts,” seems rather to welcome this nemesis, allowing his extortioner, Sir Giles Overreach, when outwitted in the fifth act, to go mad and to be taken off to Bedlam. It will be noticed that most of the examples just given (excluding those of “reported” insanity) have been mainly of pretended madness; where bona-fide mad folk are introduced into comedy without affecting the construction of the play, this is usually for the sake of a vulgar realism or of comic effect falsely so-called. We have already seen enough of this and may pass on.

In “Bartholomew Fair” we have a madman delineated with some care. Trouble-all, the lunatic in question, only makes his appearance in the fourth act, but from his entry to the close of the play he evokes, together with Quarlous, who masquerades in his clothes, a considerable share of attention. His place in the plot is an important one. Dame Purecraft, who is being wooed by that notorious Puritan, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, and by a gentleman named Winwife, has had it foretold that she must marry a madman within seven days. She has been daily to Bedlam to enquire if any insane gentlemen are available, but it is only when she meets Trouble-all that she feels any inclination towards one. By a trick, however, Quarlous, a “gamester” and a friend of

Winwife’s, succeeds in duping and eventually marrying the Dame, and although Trouble-all discovers the ruse, all ends happily. It will be seen, when a sketch of the madman is attempted on another page, how carefully the lunatic is portrayed.

It is needless to examine all the comedies in which the madman is more intricately interwoven with the plot than in “Bartholomew Fair,” for the work is seldom done with any appreciable dramatic skill, or with the least vestige of sympathy. The plot of “The Mad Lover,” a play in Fletcher’s worst style, will serve as a typical example. Madness here forms the basis and theme of the plot. Memnon, a valiant general somewhat advanced in years, albeit a blunt, uncourtly fellow, has returned from his victories to the Court of Paphos. He falls in love with Calis, the King’s sister, who is herself in love with Memnon’s brother, Polydore. The General proposes in truly singular fashion; his courtship begins and ends with three remarks: “I love thee, lady,” “With all my heart I love thee,” and finally, “Good lady, kiss me!” Calis, supposing not unnaturally that he is mad, ignores him; when she has left the room, the Mad Lover suddenly grows quarrelsome, talks wildly, and declares that his suit shall succeed. Calis, re-entering, is held up, and, growing fearful, tries to humour him, but

he rushes from her presence with wild threats. In the next act, we find him contemplating death for the purpose of presenting his lady with his heart. This announcement of his project sends more than one of his friends to plead for him with the Princess. Meanwhile, Polydore, who has overheard his brother entreating the surgeon to cut out his heart and seen the surgeon beat a hasty retreat, concludes that the “cause is merely heat” and contrives a double expedient. For Memnon he dresses up another woman as the Princess, in the hope that he may be satisfied with her; at the same time, he reports to Calis that Memnon has carried out his threat and makes believe to present the General’s heart in a cup together with some verses from her “dead” lover. This makes her a little remorseful. But Memnon refuses to be deceived, and it is only when Polydore himself pretends to be dead that the Princess is induced to change her mind and marry Memnon. Instantly the Mad Lover becomes sane, and all is well.

Of the tragi-comedies into which this theme is introduced we may take two—“The Lover’s Melancholy” and “Match Me in London”—as being representative. Each shows some improvement on the “Mad Lover.” The “Lover’s Melancholy” is based, as the name partly implies, on the melancholy of Palador, Prince of Cyprus,

whose love Eroclea has “disappeared,” though in reality she is present in disguise during the whole play. The plot turns on the situation caused by the heroine’s secret presence. Among the disasters occasioned by her “loss” is the madness of her father, Meleander; his recovery, in the fifth act, is the best part of that act, the Prince having rediscovered his love long before (iv., 3.). Dr. Ward considers that the melancholy of Palador “recalls Hamlet.”[56:1] The young Prince is certainly an interesting character, and the curtness of his exclamations and replies, together with the natural grace of his disposition, afford quite a noticeable contrast with the now coherent, now raving old father. Both characters are intimately connected with the plot; and both present traits, as will be seen, which are fully in harmony with their conditions. It only remains to wish that Ford had not been inspired by Burton, and that the zealous physician Corax had refrained from presenting the Prince with that “trifle” of his “own brain,” to wit, the tedious and unnecessary “Masque of Melancholy.”

It may at first appear a violent anti-climax to come to Dekker’s “Match Me in London.” Nevertheless the working into the plot of Tormiella’s feigned madness is quite in the true dramatic spirit, and one scene leaves us a little

suspicious, as is so often the case with the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, of the influence of Ophelia. Tormiella is a young shopkeeper’s wife whom the King tries to seduce; he visits her in disguise and she is beguiled away, with the compliance of her father. The situation develops thus: Malevento, Tormiella’s father, rushes on the stage, crying out that his daughter has lost her reason:[57:1]

Mal. O royal Sir, my daughter Tormiella

Has lost her use of reason and gone mad.

King. When?

Mal. Not half an hour since.

King. Mad now! now frantic!

When all my hopes are at the highest pitch

To enjoy her beauties! talk no more; thou liest.

[Enter Gazetto.

Gaz. May it please your Majesty—

King. Curses consume thee—oh—

[Strikes him.

Gaz. It is dispatch’d, the Queen is lost, never to be found.

King. Wave upon wave,

Hard-hearted Furies, when will you dig my grave?

You do not hear him, thunder shakes Heaven first.

Before dull earth can feel it:—

My dear, dear’st Queen is dead.

The King is distracted. “Without a woman,” he says, he will himself “run mad at midnight.” The physician is to use his “skill,” but if that prove unavailing the King’s resolve is taken nevertheless.

“I will marry

The lunatic lady, she shall be my Queen,

Proclaim her so.”[58:1]

So saying, he leaves the room, and almost simultaneously Tormiella enters. She plays the madwoman for some time before the physician; but, discovering at length that he is in reality an agent for her husband, she reveals her sanity to him, together with the reasons for her assumption of madness. The action hurries on from this point with increasing rapidity; and, after several plots have been thwarted, the dead come to life and sinners are converted, after the approved manner of romantic comedy. But enough has been said to shew how the somewhat vulgar plot is given a startling and unexpected turn, at a point where, to tell the truth, it is badly needed. The actual “mad scene” is extremely short, but it serves a true dramatic purpose and is far from being the worst thing in the play. We are a long way from the comic scenes of the “Changeling” and the “Honest Whore” of Dekker himself.

In these few pages we have briefly considered the places occupied by mad folk in some of the most representative of our tragedies and comedies. In many of them sublime passion is degraded for the most vulgar of purposes; in many more there is little attempt to realise the

nature of insanity—mere surface work, a “writing down” to the lowest type of contemporary play-goer. Such prostitution of art appears to us, in the light of Shakespeare’s plays and of our own opinions, unworthy and base. Yet it must not be forgotten that many of the “madhouse scenes” of our plays contain much genuine humour which from the point of view of the day was harmless and legitimate. And as we have already agreed to take up, as far as possible, the position of the author himself, we shall restrain our Puritanical or artistic indignation, and pass on to consider our mad folk themselves, as men and women rather than as puppets of a playwright, from the point of view not of construction but of character.

FOOTNOTES:

[45:1] “King Lear,” v., 3, 313.

[47:1] Taking the Play Scene (iii., 2.) as the crisis.

[47:2] Indeed many critics find incipient madness in Lear’s conduct even earlier, i.e. from the very beginning of the play. This view I cannot hold; Lear’s actions in the early part of the play do not seem to me to be the result of anything but the childishness of old age. The King is quite responsible for his actions. If he were not, he would be the one exception to Shakespeare’s practice in his tragedies.

[48:1] Sh. Trag., p. 53.

[56:1] Eng. Dram. Lit.: Vol. ii., p. 297.

[57:1] “Match Me in London,” Act v., Sc.1.

[58:1] Ibid., v., 1.

CHAPTER IV.
Mad Folk in Comedy and Tragedy—(i.) The Maniacs.

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

(The Honest Whore.)

In the division of our study upon which we have now entered, the various figures of madmen will be considered under some five or six headings. We shall naturally exclude the mere crowds of madmen who enter the plays as lay figures rather than as personalities of the drama. The largest of the remaining classes will be dealt with first, namely, that which includes “maniacs,” or “madmen” in the proper acceptation of the term. Next come the half-witted, who will not detain us long; then the melancholiacs, who appear so frequently that they demand a section to themselves; next those suffering from hallucinations and delusions, who have not perhaps crossed the border-line, or who exhibit abnormal symptoms which can hardly be included in the term insanity, though they are very near it. Lastly, there is a group of pretenders,—of whom Hamlet and Edgar are the chief,—members of which attract our attention in several other plays.

Greene’s Orlando, a rude and undeveloped character, whose frenzy is quite conventional, may be briefly mentioned by way of prelude. His ravings are composed mainly of scraps of classical lore: “Woods, trees, leaves; leaves, trees, woods, tria sequuntur tria; ergo optimus vir non est optimus magistratus, a peny for a pote of beer and sixe pence for a peec of beife? wounds! what am I the worse? O Minerva! salve; good morrow; how do you to-day? Sweet goddesse, now I see thou lovest thy ulisses, lovely Minerva, tell thy ulisses, will Jove send Mercury to Calipso to lett me goe?”[61:1] It will be seen that Greene has no idea of making his madman anything more than a source of amusement. His violence is noteworthy: more than once he “beats” those who listen to his ravings. Scraps of incident like the fight with Brandimant, King of the Isles, are highly significant:

Brandimant. “Frantic companion, lunatic and wood,

Get thee hence, or else I vow by heaven,

Thy madness shall not privilege thy life.”

[Alarum. They fight. Orlando kills Brandimant.

The following dialogue, too, is delightfully naïve:

Enter Tom and Ralph.

Ralph. O Tom, look where he is! Call him madman.

Tom. Madman, Madman.

Ralph. Madman, Madman.

Orlando. What say’st thou, villain?

[Beats him.

It only remains to add that after being treated for his disease by Melissa, a witch—she sprinkles, among other things, many Latin verses over him—Orlando recovers his sanity, and cries:

“Sirrah, how came I thus disguis’d,

Like mad Orestes, quaintly thus attir’d?”

A more serious study of insanity, in a work of that unbridled force which characterised the University Wits, is Kyd’s portrayal of Hieronimo and Isabella.[62:1]

Hieronimo, Marshal of Spain, whose son Horatio has been murdered by the King’s nephew, Lorenzo, is stricken with insanity as a result of the shock; his lunacy is intermittent (closely akin to the disease known as manic depressive insanity), but it is only right to add that this result is largely due to the addition of certain scenes to the play by another hand. Kyd represents Hieronimo as afflicted by a deep melancholy which is only a later phase of his grief and in no way prevents him from doing his ordinary duties; the scenes in which his ravings are at their wildest are commonly attributed to Ben Jonson. It is therefore of little use attempting to trace any regular development of Hieronimo’s madness; a short account of it will suffice.

It breaks out, not when entering the arbour “in his shirt, etc.,” he first discovers his murdered

son, but after he has cut him down from the tree on which he has been hanged, and has lamented the murder with his wife. All his ravings, as we are told later in the play, are of Horatio.

“His heart is quiet—like a desp’rate man,

Grows lunatic and childish for his son.

Sometimes, as he doth at his table sit,

He speaks as if Horatio stood by him;

Then, starting in a rage, falls on the earth,

Cries out ‘Horatio, where is my Horatio?’

So that with extreme grief and cutting sorrow

There is not left in him one inch of man.”[63:1]

At the conclusion of the scene the distracted father is made to recite some Latin verses, usually attributed to Kyd himself. Hieronimo’s “tragical speeches” do not again reveal a mind unhinged, until the eleventh scene of the third act, where the interpolator is once more busy. This, however, occurring as it does in Kyd’s part of the play, where the Marshal is still sane, must not be mistaken for a sign of madness. He utters the word “son.” In his disordered brain this starts a train of bewildered reasoning. “My son, and what’s a son?”—he debates the question dispassionately until he once more remembers his loss. Then his grief breaks forth: he rants of Nemesis and Furies, murder and confusion, and even in Kyd’s work we now see that “this man is passing lunatic.” From this point onwards Hieronimo pursues his course of revenge with all the dogged

cunning of real madness. His violence surprises the King, who is ignorant of its cause. He digs with his dagger; he would “rip the bowels of the earth.” “Stand from about me,” he cries to the courtiers,

“I’ll make a pickaxe of my poniard

And here surrender up my marshalship;

For I’ll go marshal up the fiends in hell,

To be avenged on you all for this.”[64:1]

The next scene—an interpolation—is the weirdest and perhaps the most effective in the play. Tormented by delusions of spirits, yet hotly denying his madness even while raving on all kinds of topics, Hieronimo is confronted with a painter, Bazardo. Ever mindful of his cruel bereavement, he entreats Bazardo to paint a picture of him with his wife and son, to paint a murderer, “a youth run through and through,” and—if he only could—“to paint a doleful cry.” At the end of this scene Hieronimo is at his greatest, and, although in a more detailed study of the play the manner of his revenge and his death would find due place, we will be content to leave him here:

“Make me curse,” he cries, “make me rave, make me cry, make me mad, make me well again, make me curse hell, invocate heaven, and in the end leave me in a trance—and so forth.

Painter. And is this the end?

Hieronimo. O no, there is no end: the end is death and madness! As I am never better than when I am

mad; then, methinks, I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders; but reason abuseth me, and there’s the torment, there’s the hell. At the last, sir, bring me to one of the murderers; were he as strong as Hector, thus would I tear and drag him up and down.”[65:1]

Hieronimo’s wife, Isabella, who is similarly afflicted by Horatio’s murder, though she plays a much smaller part in the play, first “runs lunatic” in a short scene with her maid. Here her talk is mere nonsense:

“Why did I not give you gowns and goodly things,

Bought you a whistle and a whipstalk too,

To be revenged on their villanies?”[65:2]

She seems sane enough, however, in the “Painte Scene,” and only appears once again,[65:3] when she cuts down the accursèd arbour and, after a long soliloquy, stabs herself.

The comparatively rough sketches of Greene and Kyd—the first, in order of time, of those under consideration—have been introduced thus early into this chapter for the sake of contrast with the figures that follow.[65:4] Kyd, in “The Spanish Tragedy,” almost certainly inspired “Titus Andronicus,” and we may be fairly sure of his influence on “Hamlet.” Now that we have

examined the work of the instructor, let us turn to Shakespeare’s maniacs and see how the pupil has bettered the instruction.

The most powerful character among the maniacs, by far the grandest figure in our drama of insanity, if not indeed in the whole of English drama, is King Lear. “Grandly passive”—the description is Professor Dowden’s—“played upon by all the manifold forces of nature and society,” he “passes away from our sight, not in any mood of resignation or faith or illuminated peace, but in a piteous agony of yearning for that love which he had found only to lose for ever.”[66:1] This alone would make him a noteworthy figure, but he has far greater claims on our admiration and wonder. He is as lovable, even in his greatest weakness, as the most affectionate of all Shakespeare’s characters, yet more terrible than his darkest villains. He takes hold at once of our sympathy, our pity and our imagination, and the tragic feelings evoked by the drama conflict in us with the more human emotions roused by his own essential humanity.

At the beginning of the play he is often said to be already insane, especially by those medical writers who are somewhat inclined to pervert Shakespeare in order to read in him their own opinions. “The general belief is that the

insanity of Lear originated solely from the ill-treatment of his daughters, while in truth he was insane before that, from the beginning of the play, when he gave his kingdom away.” Thus Dr. Brigham, in the “American Journal of Insanity,” and thus more than one of his kind. But if what they assert be true, and Lear is really mad in the first scene of the play, then “King Lear” is not, in the Shakespearean sense, a tragedy at all. Lear is not mad, however, at this point, as an examination of the scene will shew. His apparently arbitrary division of the kingdom has really been planned before the opening of the play; the protestations of love on the part of his daughters are only planned as an impressive setting for the bestowal of the richest portion upon his best-loved child. Nor was it the King’s original intention to live with each of his daughters in turn: “I loved her most,” he says of Cordelia, “and thought to set my rest on her kind nursery.”[67:1] His powers are indeed failing; his childishness, his vanity, his wayward temper have more sway over him than of old; but at the very worst his state is but one of incipient senile decay. His daughters themselves recognise this. “’Tis the infirmity of his age,” says Regan to Goneril, “such unconstant starts are we like to have from him as this of Kent’s

banishment,” and Goneril adds that they must “look . . . to receive, not alone the imperfections of long-ingraffed condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.”[68:1] Here, then, he stands, impatient and passionate, “a very foolish, fond old man,” but sane in every sense of the word. Only a physician could detect in his “unconstant starts” a predisposition to insanity, with which, since it is not part of the play, we need not concern ourselves.

When the King next appears, his passion is for a time calmed, and his state, apart from the short scene with Oswald (i., 4, 84, etc.), one of tolerant indulgence. The caustic comments of the fool he listens to and encourages; it is only when Goneril appears that his tone changes to one of ill-concealed irritation. “How now, daughter! what makes that frontlet on? Methinks you are too much of late i’ the frown.”[68:2] He pierces the thin disguise of urbanity which cloaks her speeches, and attacks with all the fierceness he can summon the ingratitude which it conceals. It is by no chance that he strikes his head as he exclaims:

“O Lear, Lear, Lear.

Beat at this gate, that let thy folly in,

And thy dear judgment out.”[68:3]

He invokes the most terrible of curses on his ungrateful daughter. His words are here and there broken, but their sense is only too clear. Hot tears escape him in spite of himself; his manhood he feels to be shaken, and when alone with his Fool and the faithful Kent (now disguised as “Caius” the servant), he feels that passion and shock have done their worst. Even as he listens to the jests of the Fool, he knows that the curse is coming upon him. The “self-consciousness of gathering madness” breaks through all restraint:

“O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!

Keep me in temper, I would not be mad”[69:1]

From this time onward his self-control grows less and less; try as he will, he is unable to restrain his passion:

“O how this mother swells up toward my heart!

Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,

Thy element’s below!”[69:2]

But the passionate nature is reasserting itself and will not be kept down. Sarcasm, tenderness, and anger alternate in his speeches; he responds to the least sign of love, but anything less draws from him the bitterest reproaches. He prays for patience and for the judgment of Heaven to be manifested in his favour. Now he begins to approach incoherence, and the abruptness which marks the matter as

well as the manner of his speech shews only too plainly the affection of his mind. His state of mind is truly described as one of “high rage.”

“No, I’ll not weep;

I have full cause of weeping; but this heart

Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,

Or e’er I’ll weep.—O fool, I shall go mad.”[70:1]

It is from this point, though the physicians, with Dr Bucknill at their head, deny it, that we can actually assert that Lear is insane. Hitherto there have been signs that his madness was imminent, but it is the scene on the Heath which is “par excellence,” the scene of Lear’s madness. It is true that, as Dr. Bucknill says, he has “threatened, cursed, wept, knelt, beaten others, beaten his own head.”[70:2] But “the addition of a physical cause” marks the crisis of what Shakespeare certainly means to be understood as insanity in the sense which that term commonly bears. From this time predominates that symptom which is so widespread in cases of insanity—the domination of an idée fixe. After Lear has announced “My wits begin to turn”[70:3] (a statement of itself not without significance), Edgar enters, disguised as Tom o’ Bedlam. Lear mistakes him; the idea dominant in his mind comes to the surface: “Didst

thou give all to thy daughters? And art thou come to this?”[71:1]

However, the ravings of the King by no means continue incessantly from this point. Indeed, in the presence of Edgar he becomes comparatively tranquil, and henceforward periods of storm and calm follow in quick succession. His speeches still contain much reason, and they have lost little of their wonderful force. Edgar, appearing unclothed, is to Lear an enviable object—“the thing itself.” Hence, through another semi-delusion, he becomes a “learned Theban,” a “philosopher.”[71:2] This delusion continually recurs, and is developed with much force and even eloquence, but with less poetry.

In the scene where Lear arraigns a pair of joint-stools as his supposed daughters,[71:3] we can trace all the wanderings of the deluded mind. In their “warp’d looks,” the King can read “what store (their) heart is made on.” He resolves to have them tried for their cruelty. Some people are standing about him. One (Edgar) is taken for a “robèd man of justice.” Another (the Fool) is “his yokefellow of equity.” Kent is “o’ the commission,” and must take his place beside them. Goneril is arraigned first, and Lear takes his oath that “she kicked the poor King, her father.” The joint-stool naturally

makes no reply; her guilt is thereby confirmed. “She cannot deny it.” The other sister is then brought forward. But even as the self-constituted witness is about to give evidence, the image vanishes from his mind; the delusion changes; the criminal has escaped:

“Arms, arms, sword, fire! Corruption in the place!

False justicer, why hast thou let her ’scape?”

Now Edgar is again the object of a delusion; he is one of those scanty hundred followers: “You, sir, I entertain for one of my hundred; only I do not like the fashion of your garments.” It is all so true, and at the same time so pathetic! Edgar feels that he can hardly sustain his disguise.

“My tears,” he says, “begin to take his part so much,

They mar my counterfeiting.”

A long interval (according to Daniel, four dramatic days) has passed before Lear again appears.[72:1] He is “fantastically dressed with wild flowers” and is at first ignorant of Edgar’s presence. Now he is wild, full of delusions, and certain of nothing. His mind first runs upon soldiers and war: “There’s your press-money. That fellow handles his bow like a crow-keeper.”[72:2] Now he recalls a scene with Goneril, now the terrors of the storm on the heath, now some memory of his former greatness. “Is’t not

the King?” asks Gloster, and the reply of Lear rings true:

“Ay, every inch a king.

When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.”[73:1]

“Matter and impertinency,” to quote the words of Edgar, mingle in his speech. He seems no longer to suspect the nature of his disease. He only knows that he needs surgeons: “I am cut to the brains!” Mr. Cowden Clarke aptly draws the reader’s attention to this phrase,—expressive of what acute physical and mental suffering!—together with such phrases as “I am not ague-proof” and “Pull off my boots, harder, harder.” It is in this scene, perhaps, more even than in the Storm Scene of the third act, that we feel the acutest distress at the King’s sad condition.

We are relieved at length. When next we meet King Lear,[73:2] it is at Cordelia’s tent in the camp. Gentle hands are ministering to him; loving faces are near to welcome him, when he shall awaken from the sleep which it is hoped will be his cure. He awakens to the sound of “soft music,” growing gradually louder—how different from the “chimes of Bedlam”!—and when Cordelia speaks to him, he believes her to be a spirit from Heaven. Then at last he wakes—still infirm of mind, but faintly conscious of infirmity, not frantic with physical and mental

pain. Everything in this scene is touched with the most delicate pathos; Lear’s wistful plea:

“Do not laugh at me,

For, as I am a man, I think this lady,

To be my child Cordelia.”[74:1]

Cordelia’s heart-felt reply:

“And so I am, I am.”[74:2]

Kent’s loyal assertion that his master is in his “own kingdom,” and the old father’s final

“Pray you now, forget and forgive,”[74:3]

as if he were hardly convinced even yet that Cordelia’s end was not revenge.

With such tender care as might now have been his lot, the old King would surely have recovered something like his former state of mind. But this is not to be, and our dramatic selves at least will not wish that it should be so. When Lear enters, with Cordelia dead in his arms and the rest following behind, we feel perhaps as nowhere else his tragic greatness. One wrathful speech, one tender reminiscence, and another of the fiercest:

“Her voice was ever soft,

Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman,

I kill’d the slave that was a-hanging thee.”[74:4]

A few questions and replies, and the catastrophe is upon us. Exquisite sympathy creates exquisite pathos:

“And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never!—

Pray you, undo this button; thank you, sir,—

Do you see this? Look on her—look—her lips—

Look there, look there!”[75:1]

Lear is dead; he has rejoined his belovèd daughter; he has been “dismissed with calm of mind, all passion spent.” What greater consummation could we desire?

There is little need to insist upon the grandeur and pathos of Lear, and, happily, with our next subject of study, the need is equally small. Yet Shakespeare’s presentation of Ophelia is utterly different from his presentation of Lear. The madness of Lear we are able to trace from its first symptoms; we follow it through all its involutions and are present at its partial cure. Ophelia we see but once after she “becomes distract.” A brief word of introduction, and she appears; a few broken words and snatches of song and she has left us. A brief re-entry and she has passed us again, and all is over—all save the report of her death. Lear is an old man, predisposed to insanity by a passionate temper and a mind weakened by old age. Ophelia is a young girl, a “Rose of May,” whose loss of reason excites in us not so much terror as sheer pity. With Lear the crisis is brought on by thwartings of the will, followed by the severest

physical exposure and shock. With Ophelia the cause is mental shock following the deepest of sorrows. Lear dies half-sane; Ophelia is never restored to her right mind,—her death is not shewn to us like that of Lear. There is a reason for these differences. Ophelia is no tragic personage and our sympathies are not to remain for long with her misery. She must disappear, lest she should destroy all our interest in the main plot. And thus we must not expect to find the depth in her character which we find in the character of Lear.

Before her affliction wins for her our sympathy, Ophelia stands in our estimation far below Shakespeare’s other heroines. Perhaps it would not be too much to say that at times, like Isabella in “Measure for Measure,” she is actually repellent, and for exactly the opposite reason. She is passive and reserved, gentle to the point of weakness, a tool in the hand of any man who could gain her confidence. This is the reason for her mind giving way. Throughout her life, she has leaned for support, not on her own strength, but upon the strength of her father and her brother. Her father is murdered, her lover distracted, her brother far away—and Ophelia herself is unable to stand alone.

We may have blamed her for a too ready acquiescence in her father’s prying schemes and despised her for throwing over her lover, but

whatever her sins, they are more than atoned for by the treatment to which she has to submit at the hands of Hamlet himself; and when, in addition to this, her father is killed and she loses her reason, we feel that these calamities have been wholly undeserved. Thus, when a Gentleman of the Court prepares the Queen for her sad entry, our sympathy is entirely won:

“She speaks much of her father; says she hears

There’s tricks i’ the world, and hems and beats her heart;

Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,

That carry but half sense.”[77:1]

She is led in, crooning to herself, chattering incoherently of her sorrows, confusing them in her mind and mingling them together in her speech. Her songs have been censured for their alleged grossness. Small wonder if they should contain reminiscences of her lover’s foul talk, yet for the most part these ditties are mere expressions of piercing sorrow at his supposed untimely madness. First she is clearly recalling the scenes where he has disdained her.

“How should I your true love know

From another one?”[77:2]

But as the Queen demands the meaning of the song, its theme changes:

“He is dead and gone, lady,

He is dead and gone;

At his head a grass-green turf,

At his heels a stone.”[77:3]

And then, as the King comes in, she confuses the two calamities, and sings, as though her lover and not her father were dead:

“White his shroud as the mountain-snow . .

Larded with sweet flowers;

Which bewept to the grave did go,

With true-love showers.”[78:1]

The King’s voice seems here to divert the broken current of her thoughts and she wanders again. Then, returning to the tragic theme with the most piteous of cries: “We must be patient; but I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him i’ the cold ground,”[78:2] she goes out.

Before long Lærtes returns, furious with rage at his father’s violent end and eager to be revenged “most throughly” on his enemies. He has not heard of his sister’s affliction and is dumbfounded, as at this moment she returns. Then he realises what has taken place and all his anger melts into a terrible grief:

“O heat, dry up my brains! tears seven times salt

Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye . . .

O heavens! is’t possible a young maid’s wits

Should be as mortal as an old man’s life?”[78:3]

Her pitiful condition soon reinforces his determination to be revenged: “This nothing’s more than matter,”[78:4] he exclaims, and the spectator re-echoes the cry as he gazes on the enraged brother and the afflicted girl whose

sorrows have been more than she can bear. In her madness there is not a jot of the maniacal frenzy which is the great characteristic of Lear. Her nature was ever too gentle:

“Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,

She turns to favour and to prettiness.”[79:1]

Though of a wholly different nature from the insanity of Lear, Shakespeare’s delineation of Ophelia’s madness is in its way quite as masterly. We see nothing of it in its earlier stages—indeed it would seem to have been of sudden birth and to have developed quickly. In her ravings there is none of that force and pregnancy which marks the invective of Lear; two fixed ideas dominate her mind and constantly recur to it; apart from these she is totally incoherent. We are told, by those who know, that her insanity takes the form of erotomania, “the fine name for that form of insanity in which the sentiment of love is prominent;”[79:2] we should suppose, indeed, from what she says, that her father’s death is its chief cause, as the King and Queen naturally think also; but this can hardly be assumed, for we cannot say how far she confuses the two causes of her affliction.

The Queen’s account of the death of Ophelia is in keeping both with the tone of the “mad scene” and with the nature of Ophelia’s malady.

Exquisitely pathetic, it tells how the distraught girl, obeying a common instinct of the insane for floral decoration (an instinct which we also find in “King Lear”) clambered with “fantastic garlands,” on to a willow which overhung a stream. Mad folk are notoriously regardless of danger, and Ophelia’s rashness led to a premature grave:

“An envious sliver broke;

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,

And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up;

Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indued

Unto that element: but long it could not be

Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death.”[80:1]

It will be seen that Shakespeare’s Ophelia, though not in the technical sense a tragic character, is essentially a character of tragedy, for it would be only in the gravest and most pathetic of tragi-comedies that scenes so magnificently portrayed as those of Ophelia’s madness and the report of her death could be allowed to appear. And in no case could we witness with equanimity her restoration to complete sanity. The character was apparently a popular one on the Elizabethan stage and in more than one contemporary play there are resemblances to it which are so marked as to

make a conjecture of mere coincidence impossible. We are now to consider a personage similarly conceived, but treated with none of the “high seriousness” of Ophelia and in altogether a lighter vein—and introduced into a comedy. This character (that of the ‘Gaoler’s Daughter’ in ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen,’ probably the work of Shakespeare and Fletcher) is certainly one of the imitations of Ophelia. It is with equal certainty the work of Fletcher—indeed, the present writer is only prepared to admit Shakespeare’s hand at all in two or three scenes, and these are entirely concerned with the main plot, whereas the story of the Gaoler’s Daughter is a side issue, and she never appears on the stage at the same time as the Two Noble Kinsmen themselves. The nature of Fletcher’s imitation—we might almost say his caricature—of Ophelia will best be seen from a brief account of the various scenes in which the Gaoler’s Daughter appears.

The main plot embodies the well-known story of Palamon and Arcite and their love for the fair Emilia. It will be remembered that in Chaucer’s version of the story it was “by helping of a freend” that Palamon escaped from prison; in our play the friend is none other than the daughter of the gaoler. She is prompted to do this service by a hopeless and entirely unrequited love for the unfortunate

prisoner, which helps to drive her to distraction. The exact nature of her malady is somewhat doubtful, and the author is not concerned to make it clear. One suspects that he was none too clear on the subject himself. The Doctor, who, unlike Shakespeare’s physicians, is a rather incompetent fellow with a very competent tongue, says that her disease is “not an engraffed madness, but a most thick and profound melancholy.”[82:1] Various other references, however, suggest mania rather than melancholy, and as the girl is an obvious imitation of Ophelia, she may best be considered here.

The whole story of the development of her madness is told in those portions of the play which form the underplot, and, in its first stages, it is told with considerable skill. A “Wooer” is asking the Gaoler for his daughter’s hand, and during the conversation the daughter herself comes in and the talk runs on the noble prisoners.[82:2] The daughter is full of their praises. “By my troth, I think fame but stammers ’em; they stand a grise above the reach of report.” “The prison itself is proud of ’em; and they have all the world in their chamber.” Then the two prisoners appear “above” and the girl at once shews the nature of her interest—much as Portia, in “The Merchant of Venice” is made to display her preference for Bassanio:

Gaoler: “Look yonder they are! that’s Arcite looks out.”

Daughter: “No, sir, no; that’s Palamon; Arcite is the lower of the twain; you may perceive a part of him.”

The love which one has probably suspected here is openly revealed in the fourth scene of the second act, which consists solely of a soliloquy by the Gaoler’s Daughter. The course of her love is made plain to us: first she admired him; finally, pity having sprung from admiration and helpless love from pity, she

“Extremely lov’d him, infinitely lov’d him.”

Her love has been fed by the plaintive songs he sings and impassioned by his kindness, his courtesy and a chance caress. On the next occasion[83:1] we see her more sympathetically yet—her love has achieved something, Palamon is free, and before long his deliverer is to meet him with food. But though she wanders by night through the forest, she is unable to find him. For two days nothing has passed her lips save a little water, she has not slept, and her whole being is alive with terror at the “strange howls” which seem to tell of her hero’s untimely fate. “Dissolve my life!” she cries, with the dire foreboding of the incipient lunatic,

“Let not my sense unsettle,

Lest I should drown, or stab, or hang myself . . .

So, which way now?

The best way is the next way to a grave:

Each errant step beside is torment.”

For a moment she disappears, only to re-enter[84:1] in a state bordering on frenzy. Dawn has broken, and her search has been unsuccessful:

“Palamon!

Alas no! he’s in heaven—where am I now?

Yonder’s the sea, and there’s a ship; how’t tumbles!

And there’s a rock lies watching under water;

Now, now, it beats upon it; now, now, now,

There’s a leak sprung, a sound one; how they cry!

Spoom her before the wind, you’ll lose all else;

Up with a course or two, and back about, boys;

Good night, good night; ye’re gone. I’m very hungry:

Would I could find a fine frog! he would tell me

News from all parts o’ the world; then would I make

A careck of a cockle-shell, and sail

By east and north-east to the King of Pygmies,

For he tells fortunes rarely.”

She leaves us again, breaking into the first of her mad songs:

“For I’ll cut my green coat a foot above my knee;

Hey nonny, nonny, nonny.”

Up to this point the character of the Gaoler’s Daughter is not unworthy of Shakespeare, but Fletcher could not keep at so high a level for long. More than any of his contemporaries he creates mad folk for the purpose of embellishing his comedies; in this play, having developed a situation with many fine capabilities, he proceeds to rush in and spoil his own work in the worst possible way. The luckless girl is introduced into a rustic scene[84:2] and made to sing for the delectation of some peasants, to exchange coarse banter with them, and

even to join in their morris. From this time forward the underplot is hopelessly degraded, both by its being drawn out to an absurd length and by its ending in the coarsest of scenes which leads to what we are asked to believe is the girl’s complete restoration to sanity.

The Wooer first acquaints the Gaoler with his sweetheart’s complaint.[85:1] We learn that it has been preceded by the natural irritation which is common in such cases, and that she has answered her father’s questions:

“So childishly,

So sillily, as if she were a fool,

An innocent.”

Since we have last seen her, her senses have quite gone. She constantly repeats phrases which tell of her trouble—“Palamon is gone,” “Palamon, fair Palamon,” and the like. She even plagiarises Desdemona, and sings nothing but “Willow, willow, willow.” She has been playing and garlanding herself with flowers; now she weeps, now smiles, now sings; reckless of danger, she sits by a lake, and attempts to drown herself at the Wooer’s approach. She appears at length[85:2] and carries on the same kind of conversation, fancifully constructing long trains of imagination from the smallest incidents. While ever and anon the theme of

Palamon recurs: he is still in love with her—“a fine young gentleman,” and he “lies longing” for her in the wood.

This her father reports to the Doctor: “She is continually in a harmless distemper, sleeps little; altogether without appetite, save often drinking; dreaming of another world and a better; and what broken piece of matter so e’er she’s about the name Palamon lards it.”[86:1] The Doctor is out of his depth. He understands little of the mind diseased, holding the popular notion that it is “more at some time of the moon than at other some,” and confessing that he “cannot minister” to her “perturbed mind.” The remedy which he proposes is of the crudest. The Wooer is to dress as if he were Palamon, satisfy all the girl’s desires, and wait for her to return to her right mind. Both Wooer and Gaoler protest against the extreme application of this “cure,” but the Doctor is so insistent that they give in, and when in the last scene Palamon enquires after the girl who procured his escape and who, he has heard, has been ill, he is told that she is

“well restor’d

And to be married shortly.”[86:2]

It is unnecessary to dwell on the cure, for long before this stage the story has lost all semblance of probability.

The inferiority of the Gaoler’s Daughter to Ophelia is as patent as that of the false to the true Florimel of Spenser’s “Færie Queene.” A little more skill on the part of the author and a great deal more restraint would, no doubt, have effected an enormous improvement, but it is unlikely that Fletcher could ever have made us take the same interest in the Gaoler’s Daughter as we take in Ophelia. She is quite unnecessary to the plot, and would require far greater depth of characterisation before she could appeal with any force to our sympathies. Had this been done, the taint of the comic and the coarseness removed, the ravings lessened and the execrable character of the Doctor changed, we might have had another Ophelia and not an exaggerated and debased imitation.

Whatever the nature of the madness of our last subject, the affliction of Penthea, in Ford’s “Broken Heart” is certainly acute melancholia. She is dealt with here for the sake of contrast with the two preceding characters. “The Broken Heart,” as far as its “mad-scenes” are concerned, has certainly more in common with “Hamlet” than with “The Two Noble Kinsmen.” It is a tragedy of more than usual gloom, and the scenes in question are marked by a subdued restraint quite absent from the “Two Noble Kinsmen.” Penthea talks much more coherently than either Ophelia or her ape; and though there

is a distinct want in her speeches of that colour which so marks the other two plays, she is much nearer Ophelia in spirit and essentials than the girl for whom Ophelia actually stood as a model.

The story, so far as it concerns Penthea, is this: She is in love with Orgilus, son of a counsellor to the King of Laconia, but has been compelled to marry Bassanes, a jealous nobleman whom she detests. Her brother Ithocles’ love for the King’s daughter, Calantha, becomes known to Penthea, who, in spite of her brother’s cruelty to her, tries to bring about their union; when she is dead, however, her lover stabs Ithocles and the Princess dies of a broken heart. Penthea’s situation, when in the second act she has an interview with Orgilus, is this: she is contracted to Bassanes, and though she loathes him and will have no more to do with him than she can help she will not consent to break the bond of marriage. Her loss of reason, which terminates in her death in the fourth act, is one of the main factors of the series of events which leads up to the impressive final situation.

The scenes which portray the melancholy and distraction of Penthea are much superior to the others in which she appears, by reason of the irresistible sympathy which they inspire. We are not greatly enamoured of the unhappy girl in the first scenes; her character is somewhat slightly drawn, and, as one commentator

puts it, there is “a trace of selfishness in her sorrow, which operates against the sympathy excited by her sufferings.”[89:1] This is dispelled in that touching scene (iii., 5), where Penthea pleads with Calantha on behalf of her brother. Her plaintive farewell to life, in the same scene, is not less touching:

“Glories

Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams

And shadows soon decaying; on the stage

Of my mortality my youth hath acted

Some scenes of vanity, drawn out at length

By varied pleasures sweetened in the mixture,

But tragical in issue . . .

. . . You may see

How weary I am of a lingering life,

Who count the best a misery.”

When she next enters “with her hair loose” (iv., 2), Bassanes and Orgilus are engaged in a violent quarrel. She is followed by Ithocles heart-broken like Shakespeare’s Lærtes, begging her to look up and speak to him:

“Your Ithocles, your brother,

Speaks t’ ye; why do you weep? Dear, turn not from me.”

The sight moves all to pity or remorse, save only Orgilus, whose bitter sarcasm, when rebuked by Ithocles, turns to a dreadful thirst for revenge. But the afflicted girl recks nothing of this. Loss of sleep and a voluntary fast have combined with her heavy sorrows to produce the inevitable

result; her depression has deprived her of her reason and she is sinking into her grave:

“There’s not a hair

Sticks on my head, but, like a leaden plummet,

It sinks me to my grave: I must creep thither;

The journey is not long.”

“Her fancies guide her tongue,” but the burden of her talk is the subject of marriage, child bearing, infidelity, and true love. Her resolve to die by starvation is certainly the project of a disordered brain, though Mr. Saintsbury treats it as if it were not, and censures the character as unnatural![90:1] Assuming that

“There is no peace left for a ravished wife

Widowed by lawful marriage,”

she declares that her blood shall

“be henceforth never heightened

With taste of sustenance,”

and falls fainting into her attendant’s arms. The subsequent account of her death[90:2] is the more pathetic by reason of its brevity:

Philema. “She called for music,

And begged some gentle voice to tune a farewell

To life and griefs; Christalla touched the lute;

I wept the funeral song.

Christalla. Which scarce was ended

But her last breath sealed up these hollow sounds,

‘O cruel Ithocles and injured Orgilus’

So down she drew her veil, so died.”

The presentation of Penthea’s madness is one of the few examples of a truly artistic

treatment of the subject, and “The Broken Heart” is one of the few post-Shakespearean plays which with some touches by the Master-hand might have become a really great romantic tragedy. Penthea is, to tell the truth, about as far inferior to Ophelia as she is superior to the Gaoler’s Daughter. The partly unsympathetic presentation of her character in the first part of the play, the lack of picturesqueness and relief from the gloom of the tragedy, the suspicion of melodrama in the surrounding scenes and the involved nature of the plot—all these combine to place Penthea on a lower level than Ophelia. And, in addition, she is less important and hence less striking from a purely dramatic point of view.

Something has already been said of the plot and the personages of “The Lover’s Melancholy,” but the melancholy of Palador and the madness of Meleander may be briefly considered here as furnishing additional examples of Ford’s treatment of the subject. Palador’s melancholy, which gives the title to the piece, seems to be largely temperamental and scarcely a case for the physician, though Corax, his medical adviser, goes to some pains to “cure” it, and is in consequence, hailed as a “perfect arts-man.”[91:1] The Prince’s melancholy is thus described:

“He’s the same melancholy man

He was at’s father’s death; sometimes speaks sense,

But seldom mirth; will smile, but seldom laugh;

Will lead an ear to business, deal in none;

Gaze upon revels, antic fopperies,

But is not moved; will sparingly discourse,

Hear music; but what most he takes delight in

Are handsome pictures.”[92:1]

His melancholy apparently began at his father’s death and was increased by the disappearance of Eroclea. We need not stay long over him. Corax, who is apparently a man of many theories and much resource, presents the Prince with a Masque,[92:2]—already mentioned—in which madmen of various sorts pass over the stage and make speeches. The last of these persons is Palador’s lost love in disguise who appears as “Love-Melancholy.” How far the Prince’s malady is relieved by this is uncertain; but the form of “Parthenophil” arouses memories and the re-appearance of Eroclea in the next act is the real “potent” which restores the melancholy lover.

The madness of Meleander, Eroclea’s father, is more interesting. He has, so far as we know, no sort of predisposition to insanity, which comes upon him following a cloud of troubles—he has been accused of treason, his lands have

been seized and his daughter has disappeared. We are informed by our physician that his affliction is not madness; it is

“His sorrows—

Close-griping grief and anguish of the soul—

That torture him.”[93:1]

Yet we can find in Meleander all those “signs” which by now we are beginning to associate with insanity. The unfortunate man “sleeps like a hare, with his eyes open,” he groans, “thunders” and “roars,” and his “eyes roll.” He talks wildly, yet at times coherently, knows his daughter Cleophila, enquires “Am I stark mad?” His maniacal excitability displays itself in his laughter, “the usher to a violent extremity.”[93:2] The reaction soon follows; he faces those about him and remarks:

“I am a weak old man; all these are come

To jeer my ripe calamities.”[93:2]

At times—and this is surely the greatest praise we can give him—his ravings remind us of Lear’s, with their mingled sarcasm, pathos and unconcealed rage. His brother’s son Menaphon approaches him with a “Good uncle!” What, outside Shakespeare, can be more like Lear before his eloquence goes and leaves his rage supreme, than Meleander’s furious reply:[93:3]

“Fools, desperate fools!

You’re cheated, grossly cheated; range, range on,

And roll about the world to gather moss,

The moss of honour, gay reports, gay clothes,

Gay wives, huge empty buildings, whose proud roofs

Shall with their pinnacles even reach the stars,

Ye work and work like moles, blind in the paths

That are bored through the crannies of the earth,

To charge your hungry souls with such full surfeits

As being gorged once, make ye lean with plenty;

And when ye’ve skimmed the vomit of your riots,

Ye’re fat in no felicity but folly;

Then your last sleeps seize on ye; then the troops

Of worms crawl round and feast; good cheer, rich fare,

Dainty, delicious!”

How does Corax propose to cure such a patient as this? Spurred on by the flatteries of Rhetias—“a reduced Courtier”—nothing daunted by the picturesque report that Meleander “chafes hugely, fumes like a stew-pot,”[94:1] he coolly explains his intention of out-Heroding Herod—“We will roar with him, if he roar,”[94:1]—and suiting the action to the word he “produces a frightful mask and headpiece.”[94:1] Meleander enters, armed with a poleaxe and raving in a vein which must have delighted the greediest of the groundlings. A battle of words and mock actions ensues, and the madman is soon reduced to a state of comparative calm. He lays down the poleaxe, and Corax removes the mask. The physician then proceeds to minister to the mind diseased with tales of his own supposed mental sufferings, assuming apparently that like counteracts like in madness as in melancholy. This is to some

extent true, and Shakespeare rightly represents Lear as in a state of comparative tranquillity when in the presence of Edgar. But Ford’s play would seem to be inspired rather by a desire to please than by a fidelity to real life. The concluding scene,[95:1] however, so far as it concerns Meleander, is sufficient compensation, for again it recalls “King Lear” in its general nature if not in matters of detail. The madman has been put to sleep, his hair and beard have been trimmed and his gown is changed. Music, as in “King Lear,” is playing, and a song, full of delicate charm, is being sung by a Boy outside. At its close Meleander awakens, confused and half-dreaming. He is inclined to sleep again, but the physician hails him—somewhat boisterously, one would think—and in spite of his patient’s brusque “Away, beast! let me alone,” he succeeds in rousing him. The madness certainly appears to have left him; he is now quite calm, though the burden of his troubles still oppresses him.

“The weight of my disease,” he says,

“Sits on my heart so heavy,

That all the hands of art cannot remove

One grain, to ease my grief.”

Corax has, indeed, in preparation, a cordial which is to effect this, but it is reserved—not wholly for dramatic reasons,—to a fitting climax. Successive messengers first bring the

news that the Prince, now happy (though the father knows it not) in the possession of his love, has restored to Meleander all the honours he formerly enjoyed, together with new honours and marks of favour undreamed of. Then at last Eroclea is presented to him and his restored reason stands the test of happiness. Explanations ensue; all part friends; and “sorrows are changed to bride-songs.”

It will be seen that Ford’s conception of madness is by no means a low one; he has not debased it by making it a sport for those to whom it is a thing to fleer and jest at; he has introduced it into comedy indeed, but it must be remembered that Ford’s tragi-comedy is a wholly different thing from the gross buffooneries of Fletcher, Dekker and Middleton, and that the madness of Meleander, though resembling that of Lear, is on a far lower scale. It rises now and then to unusual heights, but remains at their exalted level for so short a time that we never look at it seriously for long. The gloom is also lightened by the antics of the whimsical Corax, whose triumphs of psycho-medical skill would, no doubt, in happier times, have induced him to set up a private Bedlam of his own!

In considering Chettles’ “Tragedy of Hoffman”[96:1] we are met by an initial difficulty of

authorship, for the resemblance between this play and “Hamlet,” as well as between Lucibella and Ophelia, would suggest plagiarism. The question, however, is difficult to decide, and can hardly be discussed here. Whatever be the solution, Lucibella is a most effective character. To a certain degree her madness is merely conventional. But there are numerous touches of real art in her portrayal, and she is not degraded like the Gaoler’s Daughter in “The Two Noble Kinsmen” by being made “a motley to the view.” On the contrary, as one editor points out, Chettle surpasses Shakespeare by making her, unlike Ophelia, directly instrumental in bringing about the dénouement of the play.

The madness of Lucibella is brought about by the murder of her lover, Lodowick, through the agency of Hoffman. In her mad wanderings she discovers the skeletons of Hoffman’s father, and of Prince Otho, for whose death her lover’s murderer is also responsible. Eventually the mischief caused by the first shock is undone by a second; Lucibella recovers her reason. Hear her in her first ravings:

“Oh [Oh] a sword, I pray you, kill me not,

For I am going to the river’s side,

To fetch white lilies and blue daffodils,

To stick in Lod’wick’s bosom, where it bled,

And in mine own . . . .

‘We must run all away, yet all must die’

’Tis so;—I wrought it in a sampler.

’Twas heart in hand, and true love’s knots and words,

All true stitch, by my troth, the posy thus—

‘No flight, dear love, but death shall sever us.’

Neither did that! He lies here, does he not?”

She cannot make up her mind whether her lover is really dead or not. Only conscious of a vague calamity, she cries:

“Tell Lod’wick, Lucibell would speak with him!

I’ve news from heav’n for him, he must not die;

I’ve robb’d Prometheus of his moving fire:—

Open the door!—I must come in, and will;

I’ll beat myself to air, but I’ll come in!”

So saying, she knocks violently at the door of the vault; those who surround her fear that she will “do violence upon herself.” She understands:

“Oh, never fear me! there is somewhat cries

Within me, ‘No!’ tells me there’re knaves abroad;

Bids me be quiet, lay me down, and sleep.”[98:1]

Her violence is noteworthy; three or four men attempt to hold her; but she succeeds in freeing herself from them, and wanders abroad.

When we next see her the second shock is at work and Lucibella is returning to sanity. Mathias, Lodowick’s brother, still fears for her life, having seen her “clamb’ring upon the steepness of the rock,” but what she has seen in Hoffman’s cave has saved her mental life. She talks still with the fierce sarcasm of mania.

Shewing the skeletons, she cries:

“Is it not like

I keep a princely house, when I have such

Fat porters at my gate.”

Still, as before, she lards her speech with scraps of song:

“Here, look here!

Here is a way goes down!

Down, down, down,

Hey down, down!”

This ditty is reminiscent of the descent to the cave, but the next moment the memory of that is gone and only the consciousness of her loss remains:

“I sang that song while Lod’wick slept with me:”

But at length, gradually and before our eyes, she recovers her lost reason. Her speech to the Duchess of Luneberg shews what seems to be the wandering of her still distraught mind. She displays the rich clothes of Otho:

“A poor maiden, mistress, has a suit to you,

And ’tis a good suit, very good apparel.”

And she breaks into song again. But shortly afterwards she recognises the two corpses, and as Lorick unfolds the ghastly story of Hoffman’s crime the princess comes to her right mind again. At the end of the scene she declares her complete sanity:

“Nay I will come; my wits are mine agen,

Now faith grows firm to punish faithless men.”[99:1]

For a moment now we may look at the madness of Cardenes, which enters into the plot

of Massinger’s “A Very Woman.” He is son to the Duke of Messina and a rival of Don John Antonio, the Prince of Tarent, for the hand of Almira, daughter of the Viceroy of Sicily. In a violent quarrel with Antonio, who is enraged at not being the favoured suitor, Cardenes is wounded—it is at first thought mortally, but he recovers, though for a time he loses his senses. Eventually he is restored by a physician named Paulo. We see very little of him in his mad condition. First we learn that his disease is

“Melancholy

And at the height, too, near akin to madness . . .

. . . His senses are distracted,” says Paulo,

“Not one, but all; and if I can collect them

With all the various ways invention

Or industry e’er practised, I shall write it

My masterpiece.”[100:1]

When Cardenes actually appears,[100:2] any maniacal excitement which may have disturbed him has disappeared, and he appears to be in a state of simple melancholia:

“Farewell, farewell, for ever, name of mistress!

Out of my heart I cross thee; love and women

Out of my thoughts.”

This is the burden of his discourse. Paulo encourages him by mild half-contradictions:

“And yet I’ve heard of many virtuous women.”

But Cardenes’ new-learned philosophy remains unchanged:

“Not many, doctor; there your reading fails you:

Would there were more, and in their loves less dangers.”

The treatment recommended for this “strange melancholy” by the physician, who is of good reputation and has received many gifts from the Duke of Messina and others, is most noteworthy. He is no friend of prevailing customs: The patient “must take air.” Though, as the surgeons protest, “he hath lost already . . . much blood,”

“To choke up his spirits in a dark room,

Is far more dangerous.”

The remainder of the cure is not unlike the prescription of Corax. The physician applies himself to all the patient’s “humours,” “checking the bad and cherishing the good.”

“For these I have

Prepared my instruments, fitting his chamber

With trapdoors, and descents; sometimes presenting

Good spirits of the air, bad of the earth,

To pull down or advance his fair intentions.

He’s of a noble nature, yet sometimes

Thinks that which, by confederacy, I do,

Is by some skill in magic.”[101:1]

Who can wonder, for “Protean Paulo” with his quaint devices shews a truly super-human versatility. At all events, he succeeds in gathering the “scatter’d sense” of Cardenes, who thanks him profusely for having been

“My friar, soldier (and) philosopher,

My poet, architect, physician.”

Paulo is indeed a disinterested and enthusiastic doctor, and is really more interesting than Cardenes himself.

The madness of Sir Giles Overreach is worth our notice, as being introduced merely as a stage device, to emphasise the defeat of the cruel extortioner and to serve as a climax to the comedy. The last act of the play, into which he is introduced, shows every sign at the outset of being the usual type of “last act” of a tragi-comedy. Overreach, with “distracted looks,” has learned how he has been tricked both by his creature, Marall, and by his daughter Margaret, who, against his will, has married her lover, and now appears with him, as his wife. The usurer is overcome by the double shock. “My brain turns,” he cries. His rage passes all bounds. He attempts to kill his daughter and threatens to make the house “a heap of ashes.” Flourishing his sword, he raves of his courage; those standing around are, to his disordered mind,

“hangmen,

That come to bind my hands, and then to drag me

Before the judgment seat: now they are new shapes,

And do appear like Furies, with steel whips

To scourge my ulcerous soul. Shall I then fall

Ingloriously and yield? No! spite of Fate,

I will be forced to hell like to myself.

Though you were legions of accursed spirits,

Thus would I fly among you.”[102:1]

He flings himself on the ground, foaming and biting the earth, only to be disarmed, bound and carried “to some dark room.” He will be

tended by physicians from Bedlam, who will try

“What art can do for his recovery.”[103:1]

The climax could hardly be more effective, were it not for Lord Lovell, who, before winding up the business of the play, thinks it necessary to point the moral in the most objectionable manner, only surpassed by Massinger himself elsewhere:

“Here is a precedent to teach wicked men,

That when they leave religion, and turn atheists,

Their own abilities leave them.”[103:2]

With Overreach may be compared Webster’s Ferdinand, who, after causing his sister, the Duchess of Malfi, with her little children, to be murdered, is driven by remorse to self-questionings and fears, and thence to raving madness. Webster’s presentation of insanity is far superior, in these scenes, to that by Massinger just cited. For the ravings of Ferdinand come upon us with the greatest force after the awful tragedy for which he has been responsible—we are spared the comments of Justice Greedy on the situation. Further, the madness of Ferdinand is what we should expect from one of so passionate a nature, and its course, as will now be seen, is depicted with realistic force to its terrible end.

His insanity takes the form, so we are told, of lycanthropia,[103:3] victims of which, we learn

imagine themselves transformed into wolves and do deeds of violence to dead bodies; the Duke has already been found at night, has “howled fearfully” and seems in danger of his life. When he enters, he is persecuted by a fear of his shadow, which he tries unreasoningly to kill. The Doctor approaches him, but can do nothing with his patient beyond extracting one expression of fear: “Hide me from him; physicians are like kings, they brook no contradiction.” But the timidity lasts but a moment, and Ferdinand leaves the stage in a fit of insane passion.

When he reappears, it is but for a moment; his words are few but tense, and recall the terrible crime he has committed. “Strangling is a very quiet death . . . So, it must be done in the dark: the Cardinal would not for a thousand pounds the doctor should see it.” In the next scene, he is more violent. Interrupting a struggle between Bosola, his bloody instrument, and his brother the crafty Cardinal, he wounds them both, in spite of the latter’s cry for assistance, and is himself stabbed by Bosola, who stigmatises him as “thou main cause of my undoing.” In his last moments he recovers something of his reason.

“He seems to come to himself,” says Bosola,

“Now he’s so near the bottom.”

And in truth the last words which fall from

the Duke’s lips reiterate the remorse which he feels for his crime.

As concluding examples of the presentation of the madman, in the most usual sense of the word, may be taken two of Fletcher’s characters and one of Jonson’s. Fletcher’s productions shall be considered briefly in succession: they are “The Passionate Madman,” in the play, with that sub-title, usually known as “The Nice Valour,”[105:1] and Shattillion in “The Noble Gentleman.”

“The Passionate Madman,” who has no name besides, is inspired, like many of his fellows, rather by a desire to please the public than by a passion for probability. His peculiar mania takes the form of a succession of “fits,” characterised as the “love fit,” the “merry fit,” the “angry fit” and so on. There is seldom any reason adduced for the change from one state to another, which is probably governed by the dramatic situation. There seems to be no authority for the classification of insanity in so many compartments in this manner; if the author ever thought about this at all, he probably arrived at a generalisation of the most common attribute of mania—the violent and rapid succession of emotions—in much the same way as Jonson generalised traits of character into “humours.”

The madman of this play is a kinsman to the Duke of Genoa. He makes his appearance at the end of the first act,[106:1] coming on with a wooden smile and making “a congee or two to nothing.” He selects a courtier for the object of his affections, makes love to him as if to a lady, and as the object of his choice is quite willing to sustain the delusion, he works himself up to a great state of excitement. In the next scene[106:2] it appears “by his flattering and his fineness” that “he is still in his love-fit,” and his mistress, thinking it well to humour him, disguises herself as Cupid and persuades him that if he comes away she will make all ladies follow him. She really hopes to cure him:

“She keeps this shape. . . .

To see if she can draw all his wild passions

To one point only, and that’s love, the main point.”[106:3]

She has every opportunity of trying, for at this moment the “love fit” obligingly gives way to the “angry fit.” Galoshio, the clown, has been “almost beaten blind” by the Passionate Madman, “twice thrown down stairs, just before supper,” and “pluck’d and tugg’d by th’ hair o’ th’ head about a gallery half an acre long.”[106:4] The Passionate Lord, after giving this foretaste of his achievements, is not long in appearing, “rudely and

carelessly apparelled, unbraced and untrussed,”[107:1] and followed by the Lady, still in disguise. The fit would seem at first to be one of melancholy, which rejects all the Lady’s blandishments and stigmatises those of her sex as “fair mischiefs.” As Lapet, Galoshio’s master, approaches, the “furious fit” succeeds. Lapet is struck down and discreetly shams death, while the madman accompanies his truncheon-blows with wild snatches of song. We see no more of our madman after this until the fifth act when the “merry fit” has sway. The burden of his speech is “Ha! ha! ha!” and his songs are wildly merry: he begins to be “song-ripe.”[107:2] The Lady once more appears, followed by several others dressed as fools. But a cure is unexpectedly wrought more quickly than she could accomplish it. “The Soldier” (brother to Chamont, the chief character of the play) has been insulted by the madman at an earlier stage in it, and, much to the dismay of the Lady and her attendants, he now stabs the Passionate Lord, and makes his escape. He only re-appears at the end of the play, cured of his wound and at the same time of his madness. La Nove explains this to the Duke:

“Death cannot be more free from passions, sir,

Than he is at this instant; he’s so meek now,

He makes those seem passionate were never thought of;

And, for he fears his moods have oft disturbed you, sir,

He’s only hasty now for his forgiveness.”[108:1]

There is little to add to this sketch, which is sufficiently expressive. The Lord is not interesting, still less striking, as a character; no attempt is made to introduce a vestige of reality into the madness, and thus the comedy leaves us unmoved. We cannot even be indignant at it—it is so feeble.

Is it necessary to complete the story by adding that the Passionate Lord marries the Lady?

As a slightly different example of Fletcher’s work, we may consider his “Noble Gentleman” and the madman Shattillion. We can diagnose his case more readily than that of the Passionate Lord. He suffers from a kind of persecutory delusion, being

“strong opinion’d that the wench he lov’d

Remains close prisoner by the King’s command,

Fearing her title.”[108:2]

At the same time, he believes that certain enemies have designs on his life. Meeting his cousin Cleremont, he enquires of him his “faction,” and being told:

“I know no parties nor no factions, sir,”

he commands him:

“Then wear this cross of white,

And where you see the like, they are my friends;

Observe them well, the type is dangerous.”[109:1]

A touch of the pathetic (often mingled with the comic), accompanies the “poor, grieved gentlewoman” who once refused his suit and for love of whom Shattillion’s mind became unhinged, who:

“Follows him much lamenting, and much loving,

In hope to make him well.”[109:2]

But, says Longueville, a courtier,

“he knows her not,

Nor any else that comes to visit him.”[109:2]

Shattillion is plainly created for a dramatic purpose. The main story concerns the gulling of a gentleman named Mount-Marine by his wife, who persuades him that the King has granted him many high honours, and that he is Duke of Burgundy. Shattillion, whose delusions persuade him that he has himself a claim to the crown, is worked into the plot with considerable skill, and his quarrel in the fifth act with the “Duke” and his servant unites the two plots with great effect.

A short study of the “mad scenes” will shew the strength and the weakness of this character. The particular form of his mania is brought out very clearly. The madman is perfectly sure about the plots laid for him; his friends are really enemies disguised to “sift into” his words;

he “can see and can beware”; he has his wits about him and thanks Heaven for it! The burst of laughter with which the audience would greet this assertion is at once hushed as the Lady laments the o’erthrow of her lover’s noble mind;

“That was the fairest hope the French court bred,

The worthiest and the sweetest-temper’d spirit,

The truest, and the valiantest, the best of judgment.”[110:1]

She is remorse-stricken at being the cause of it all, and prays Heaven to be merciful; she will do all she can to restore her lover to his senses.

A long interval elapses before Shattillion is again introduced.[110:2] Now he has heard of the “new duke” and he is suspicious and curious, so much so that he is gesticulating and enquiring about it in the open street. The Lady appears and begs Madam Marine to take him into her house “from the broad eyes of people.” She does so. Shattillion, now believing that he is “betray’d” and about to be beheaded, is led away giving his last instructions. Before long, we see him once more, this time in Marine’s house, proving to Marine that he (Shattillion) is of the blood royal, and but for the interference of his friends he would seize Marine as a traitor. In the next act he persuades Jacques, Marine’s old servant, that he too is in danger of his life, and drags him into his house for shelter. As they

go in, the Lady appears, and, knocking at Shattillion’s door, is repulsed as another enemy. The madman’s imagination goes so far as to see “some twenty musketeers in ambush,” and he suspects his love of being their captain. Meanwhile Jacques, disguised as a woman, is leaving the house, when his preserver stops him, accuses him of being

“A yeoman of the guard,

Disguised in woman’s clothes, to work on me,

To make love to me and to trap my words

And so ensnare my life.”[111:1]

Jacques at length escapes, and after another adventure returns as servant to the “Duke.” In this capacity he is forced into a fierce quarrel with Shattillion, who, in his furious loyalty, seizes Marine and throws him to the ground. Hereupon the Lady has a remedy to propose:

“A strange conceit hath wrought this malady;

Conceits again must bring him to himself;

My strict denial to his will wrought this,

And if you could but draw his wilder thoughts

To know me, he would, sure, recover sense.”

Longueville undertakes the charge. Assuring Shattillion that the King has rewarded his loyalty, he presents to him the Lady, who, he says, has been released from prison for his sake. Shattillion is overcome, and after a few minutes falls asleep. Longueville knows that this is a good sign:

“His eyes grow very heavy. Not a word,

That his weak senses may come sweetly home.”[111:2]

He wakes, indeed, still “weak and sickly,” but himself again.

The general impression left by this comedy is, on the whole, pleasant, that part of it concerned with Shattillion included. The antics of the madman himself are certainly comic, especially on the stage, and the lighter side of his mania is persistently put forward. The only pathetic touch is, in fact, the genuine sorrow of his Lady. This predominance of the comic may be regretted, though in a play of the farcical nature of “The Noble Gentleman” little else could be expected. However, the sound, realistic basis of the disease, together with the simple and unassuming cure—which, nevertheless, would hardly be successful in real life,—makes the treatment of Shattillion as far superior to the treatment of the Passionate Lord as the one play is to the other. Considered absolutely, the representation of Shattillion is chiefly remarkable for its reality, its skilful weaving into the plot, and its mingling of pathos with broad humour. On the other hand the pathos would not be so artificial if the entrance of the lady were somewhat less mechanical—we could almost certainly predict when she will enter in the last two acts. Fletcher’s almost total blindness to everything but the comic and its possibilities also detracts from the effect of Shattillion, and the very obvious dramatic

motive for his introduction does not, on reflection, improve matters.

We have now passed from the heights of tragedy, through its pathos, and the ill-blended pathos and broad humour of inferior tragi-comedy to the pure and simple inanity of “The Nice Valour”—a work which certainly appears to be unfinished. In considering Shattillion, we have risen as high as we can hope to do within the limits of comedy, and before leaving the raving lunatic for another class of madman we must descend slightly as we consider Ben Jonson’s comedy of “Bartholomew Fair,” and his madman, Trouble-all.

The plot has already been outlined, and it will be seen that the place of the madman is an important one. Theoretically, he is of prime importance to the play, since it is foretold that Dame Purecraft, who has already had two suitors, shall “never have happy hour unless she marry within this sen’night; and when it is it must be a madman,” and it is Quarlous, dressed in Trouble-all’s clothes and affecting his malady, who eventually marries her. As a matter of fact, the main portion of the play is concerned with other things, and we only meet our madman in the fourth act. From this point onward, the author shews great ingenuity in his handling of him; the burden of his remarks alone serves as a point d’appui

for the spectator (who by this time is probably getting wearied), while the humorous situations which he provokes, culminating in the acuteness of Quarlous and its success, are largely responsible for the undoubted popularity of the comedy with both reader and spectator.

This is, of course, very much to the credit of a comedy which professedly deals with low life; it is more to our purpose to remark that as a picture of madness the character of Trouble-all is exceptionally correct. Gifford’s note to Cunningham’s edition of Ben Jonson remarks that “Even the trifling part of Trouble-all, in any other writer than Jonson, would be thought deserving of praise for its correct delineation of a particular species of insanity, too inoffensive for fear and too slight for commiseration.”[114:1] Gifford is right, both in what he states and in what he implies. We expect correctness from Jonson and we are not disappointed.

A sketch of the madman should make this clear. He was “an officer in the court of pie-poudres last year and put out of his place by Justice Overdo.”[114:2] His affliction is marked by the idée fixe; he raves continually about the Justice, and will do nothing—not even the simplest actions of daily life—without satisfying himself that he has Overdo’s warrant for it. How true to life this feature is may be read in

any modern book on insanity. He appears first of all in the fair, where Overdo is being put into the stocks: “If you have Justice Overdo’s warrant,” he says, “’tis well; you are safe: that is the warrant of warrants.”[115:1] He is walking to and fro, with all the restless impatience of mania, demanding to be shewn Adam Overdo. In his frantic wanderings he comes upon Dame Purecraft, who apparently thinks him more suitable for her than any madman she has yet seen and cries: “Now heaven increase his madness and bless and thank it.” Trouble-all’s reply does not vary: “Have you a warrant? an you have a warrant, shew it.”[115:1] Person after person presents himself but the madman’s reply is always the same. Every conversation he interrupts with his query, and, when he is ignored, he turns away in disgust. Once he exasperates a watchman, who strikes him. The latent rage of the lunatic shews itself, but the madman’s rationalisation first provides it with an excuse: “Strikest thou without a warrant? take thou that.” When Quarlous personates the lunatic[115:2] our author rightly depicts him as only partially successful, though his end is nevertheless as well reached as if he had been wholly so. He raves occasionally about a warrant, but it is not hard to see his sanity peeping through the veil of assumed madness. Much of his talk

is comparatively coherent, and beyond his occasional references to the warrant he makes no attempt to play the madman. To turn his literal phrase into metaphor, he is “mad but from the gown outward.”[116:1] Trouble-all himself, when Quarlous’ purpose is accomplished, makes one furious entry, armed “with a dripping pan,”[116:1] but he does no mischief, and soon disappears.

Trouble-all is a noteworthy character, though a small one; yet, for more than one reason, the character is less praiseworthy than Fletcher’s Shattillion. Considerable care is shewn in the sketch, but little or no sympathy; and, if madness is to be utilised in comedy, the comic element should at least, as has been seen, be mingled with some touches of pathos. As it is, any other character than the madman would have served Jonson equally well, provided that it had supplied him with the same dramatic advantages. When Overdo says: “Alas, poor wretch! how it yearns my heart for him!” we believe him about as readily as if Jonson had made the same remark in an “author’s footnote.”

In one respect, and in one respect only, can any claim be made on behalf of Jonson’s character to rank above Fletcher’s “Noble Gentleman.” Fletcher makes us look at madness from the point of view of the madman,

and tries to put us in sympathy with him. We have seen that he is only partially successful. Jonson, on the other hand, treats madness in quite an objective way, uses it frankly for a subsidiary dramatic purpose, and portrays his madman with the utmost conscientiousness and care. It may be just a question—though the writer himself does not think so—whether from the point of view of art Jonson’s production is not the more praiseworthy.

Be that, however, as it may, it is nevertheless absolute Ben Jonson!

FOOTNOTES:

[61:1] From the Alleyn MS.

[62:1] “Spanish Tragedy.”

[63:1] “Spanish Tragedy,” iii., 12a.

[64:1] “Spanish Tragedy,” iii., 12.

[65:1] Ibid., iii., 12a.

[65:2] Ibid., iii., 8.

[65:3] Ibid., iv., 2.

[65:4] Other examples of conventional madness abound. See [page 151, Note 1]. (Ann Ratcliff, in “The Witch of Edmonton.”) Peele, in the “Old Wives’ Tale,” presents us with a character, Venelia, sent mad by a sorcerer, Sacrapant:

She “runs madding, all enraged, about the woods

All by his cursèd and enchanting spells.”

But, apart from this, she does nothing!

[66:1] “Shakespeare, His Mind and Art,” p. 272.

[67:1] “King Lear,” i., 1, 125-6.

[68:1] “King Lear,” i., 1, 296, etc.

[68:2] Ibid., i., 4, 207-8.

[68:3] Ibid., i., 4, 292-4.

[69:1] “King Lear,” i., 5, 50-1.

[69:2] Ibid., ii., 4, 56-8.

[70:1] “King Lear,” ii., 4, 285-9.

[70:2] “The Mad Folk of Shakespeare,” p. 194.

[70:3] “King Lear,” iii., 2, 67.

[71:1] “King Lear,” iii., 4, 49-50.

[71:2] Ibid., iii., 4 passim.

[71:3] Ibid., iii., 6.

[72:1] “King Lear,” iv., 6, 81, etc.

[72:2] l. 85.

[73:1] ll. 109-10.

[73:2] “King Lear,” iv., 7.

[74:1] “King Lear,” iv., 7, 68-9.

[74:2] l. 70.

[74:3] l. 84.

[74:4] Ibid., v., 3, 272-4.

[75:1] “King Lear,” v., 3, 305, etc.

[77:1] “Hamlet,” iv., 5, 4, etc.

[77:2] Ibid., iv., 5, 23, etc.

[77:3] ll. 29-32.

[78:1] “Hamlet,” iv., 5, 35, etc.

[78:2] ll. 68-70.

[78:3] Ibid., iv., 5, 155, etc.

[78:4] l. 173.

[79:1] ll. 188-9.

[79:2] Ferriar, quoted by Dr. Bucknill, p. 155 (op. cit.)

[80:1] “Hamlet,” iv., 7, 167, etc.

[82:1] “Two Noble Kinsmen,” iv., 3.

[82:2] Ibid., ii., 1.

[83:1] Ibid., iii., 2.

[84:1] Ibid., iii., 4.

[84:2] Ibid., iii., 5.

[85:1] Ibid., iv., 1.

[85:2] Ibid., iv., 1, 104, etc.

[86:1] Ibid., iv., 3.

[86:2] Ibid., v., 2.

[89:1] Ward, Eng. Dram. Lit., ii., 300. The original criticism, as Dr. Ward points out, is Gifford’s. Cf. the latter’s edition of Ford, vol. i., p. 337.

[90:1] “Elizabethan Literature,” p. 408.

[90:2] “The Broken Heart,” iv., 4.

[91:1] “The Lover’s Melancholy,” iii., 3.

[92:1] Ibid., i., 1.

[92:2] A similar device is found in Brome’s play, “The Antipodes,” where, however, the physician uses the fantastic but less morbid device of a “play within a play.” See page 136.

[93:1] Ibid., iv., 2.

[93:2] Ibid., ii., 2.

[93:3] Ibid., ii., 2.

[94:1] Ibid., iv., 2.

[95:1] Ibid., v., 1.

[96:1] Acted in 1602; first printed in 1631.

[98:1] “Hoffman,” iv., 1.

[99:1] Ibid., v., 2.

[100:1] “A Very Woman,” ii., 2.

[100:2] Ibid., iii., 3.

[101:1] Ibid., iv., 2.

[102:1] “A New Way to Pay Old Debts,” v., 1.

[103:1] Ibid., v., 1.

[103:2] Ibid., v., 1.

[103:3] “The Duchess of Malfi,” v., 2.