“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