In all his letters nothing but discretion,
Learning and handsome style.”
He is quite “perfect”; “a civiler discourser I ne’er talked with.” Then, before the Master, the Scholar is catechised:
“You find no sickness?” “Do ye sleep o’ nights?” “Have you no fearful dreams?” The
answers, to the Master’s disgust, are satisfactory. “I think,” exclaims the friend, “You keep him here to teach him madness.” But, just then, his “eyes alter,” and
“On a sudden, from some word or other.
When no man could expect a fit, he has flown out.”
The mention of “stubborn weather” and “strange work at sea,” starts in him a new delusion or revives an old one. He rants and raves: “I am Neptune.” Now it is the Master’s turn to jeer, and the visitors retire, discomfited.
It may be noticed, in passing, that the questions addressed by the keepers of madhouses to prospective patients in order to ascertain whether or no they are indeed mad are hardly less irrelevant and absurd than those of “Sir Topas” in “Twelfth Night.” Antonio, in the “Changeling,” is asked as “easy questions”: “How many true (i.e. honest) fingers has a tailor on his right hand?” . . . “and how many on both?”—“How many fools goes to a wise man?” These remind us of the questions put by the Fool to King Lear.
Our madhouse does not contain only those lunatics who are termed “madmen”; there is another variety, known most commonly as the “fool.” Now the word “fool,” in Elizabethan literature, has a number of connotations. It may be used, as in Shakespeare, for the professional jester of the court, who was, indeed,