He has been anointed king, yet he is in exile and is passing incognito among the Gathites. They are beginning to suspect who he is, and they say:
“I wonder if this is not the warrior, King David? It looks like him. Is not this the man about whom they used to make poetry, and about whom they composed a dance, so that the maidens of the city, reeling now on one foot and now on the other, used to sing: ‘Saul has slain his thousands, but David has slain his tens of thousands’? Yes, he is very much like David; he must be David; he is David.”
David, to escape their hands, pretends to be demented; and he said within himself:
“If I act crazily, then these people will not injure me. No one would be so much of a coward as to assault a madman.”
So, one day, while these Gathites are watching King David with increased suspicion, they see him standing by the door, running his hands meaninglessly up and down the panels—scrabbling on the door as though he would climb up, his mouth wide open, drooling like an infant.
I suppose the boys of the streets threw missiles at him, but the sober people of the town said:
“This is not fair. Do you not see that he has lost his reason? Do not touch this madman. Hands off! Hands off!”
So David escaped. But what an exhibition he made of himself before all the ages!
There was a majesty in King Lear’s madness after Regan and Goneril, his daughters, had persuaded him to banish their sister, Cordelia, and all the friends of the drama have been thrilled with that spectacle.
The craziness of Meg Merrilies was weird and imposing, and formed the most telling passage in Sir Walter Scott’s “Guy Mannering.”