“O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!
Keep me in temper; I would not be mad,”[178:3]
as:
“O how this mother swells up towards my heart!”[178:4]
“My wits begin to turn,” “I am cut to the brains,” and the like. These are touches which can be paralleled by none other of the authors who have been dealt with in this study. They are the result of a shrewd, penetrating observation applied to those mental phenomena which
were displayed before the gaze of any who cared to notice them. If we would contrast genius with mediocrity, we have only to look at the general attitude of Shakespeare’s contemporaries towards madness and their representation of it. Take the scene of Lear’s partial restoration to reason. With its soft, sweet music, with the loving faces surrounding the sleeping sufferer, with the gradual re-awakening of sanity—what a contrast there is between this and the metamorphosis of Memnon, the mad lover, or even the rude art of Ford when he pictures the restoration of Meleander.
Dramatic use of Madness.
2. The superiority of Shakespeare, again, in his dramatic use of madness! If there is one thing more than another which arrests a student of this subject it is Shakespeare’s refusal to sacrifice so grand a passion to the interests of comedy, to expose it as a butt for the jests of the groundlings and a subject for idle conversation. His madmen are among his sublimest figures; he introduces them, not after the manner of Dekker and Middleton, as characters of light comedy, but as the agents or the victims of tragedy, “more sinned against than sinning.” They contribute to no coarse underplot, they are not introduced to enhance the supposed terrors of melodrama—they form part of the
plot itself, are inextricably interwoven with it, colour its very texture, determine its whole character. This is no imagination, but sheer fact. “Lear” is the mad king. The word “Hamlet” calls up an image, either of the hero’s “antic disposition” or (which is still more likely) of the lonely pathos of Ophelia in her last passion. Think, on the contrary, of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. There is Fletcher, whose Mad Lover certainly colours the play, but what a play of farce and absurdity! There is Webster, whose sole use of the madman is for the pageantry, and for the intensification by means of it of the effect of his catastrophe. Or there is Dekker, who paints the interior of a Bedlam, for the same reason as elsewhere he leads us into a brothel-house—for the sake of a so-called realism. Or, if you prefer it, there is Middleton, whose madmen supply material for the introduction of a trivial underplot and a few coarse jests and songs. Nowhere, except perhaps in Ford, who appears to have been attracted by insanity, to have studied it and to have painted it with some insight and sympathy, is there any approach in this body of drama to the sustained excellence of Shakespeare.