Almira, the daughter of the Viceroy of Sicily, in Massinger’s “A Very Woman,” might profitably be considered in a later section dealing with unclassified abnormal states of mind. However, the malady produced in her by the supposed loss of her lover was apparently conceived by the dramatist as “melancholy-madness,” and therefore it finds a place here. Gifford, in a note in his edition of Massinger, describes Almira’s complaint as “not madness, but light-headedness.” She is firmly convinced that Cardenes, who has been wounded in a scuffle with his rival, is dead, and all her friends’ attempts to convince her to the contrary merely strengthen her belief.
“I know you,
And that in this you flatter me; he’s dead,
As much as could die of him: but look yonder!
Amongst a million of glorious lights
That deck the heavenly canopy, I have
Discern’d his soul, transform’d into a star.
Do you not see it?”[133:1]
The belief induces semi-hallucinations. She hears “a dismal sound”—it is Antonio in hell, “on the infernal rack where murderers are tormented.”[133:1] This sets a train of delusive ideas in motion; her cousin fears “she’ll grow into a
frenzy,” when one of her women exclaims “Her fit begins to leave her,” and she is once more herself, relating her “strangest waking dream of hell and heaven.”[134:1] Notwithstanding these temperate intervals her father is alarmed, and fears, not without reason, that