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,