often a little wanting in ordinary intelligence, though this was amply atoned for by his witty and pregnant remarks. It is also used in a general sense, as to-day, of a person who has acted, or who habitually acts, in an unwise way. With reference, however, to our plays, it has more often approximately the technical meaning of “imbecile”—a term used of those whose brains are constitutionally affected and whose insanity is therefore rather a quantitative rather than a qualitative defect. Taken in this sense, the word “fool” may be applied to some of the asylum’s inmates, the word “madman” to others. The two classes are not always well distinguished in these plays, but the fools can generally be detected by the inanity, rather than the violence, of their words and actions. They tend to reply in the style of Antonio, the feigning fool of “The Changeling”—
“He, he, he! well, I thank you, cousin, he, he, he!”
To which Lollio, the attendant, replies: “He can laugh; I perceive by that he is no beast.”
The two classes of patients are apparently allowed to mix in each others’ company. “We have,” says Lollio, “two sorts of people in the house, and both under the whip, that’s fools and madmen; the one has not wit enough to be knaves, and the other not knavery enough to be fools.” They are kept under very much the same discipline, though the fools are sent to the “Fools’
College”—which is an institution of the madhouse itself—and are put to school in various classes in the hope of improving their wit.
The seventeenth-century asylum, it must be remembered, claims to have worked cures, though at first it seems hard to believe that its designation as “the school where those that lose their wits Practise again to get them” is anything more than a phrase. As we enter the domain of Anselmo we are met by a “sweeper,” who describes himself as one of the “implements” of the house—“a mad wag myself here once; but I thank father Anselmo, he lashed me into my right mind again.”
We are struck at once, as we read these accounts of Bedlam, by the inconsequence, verging at times on brutal heartlessness, with which those responsible for the lunatics’ welfare refer to them. It is the expression of that spirit upon which we have remarked continually throughout this historical survey. In concluding it we can hardly illustrate this last point better than by considering a few of the occasions on which the mad folk are held up to ridicule or satire. It is, of course, the dramatist with whom we have properly to reckon for this, yet he was clearly influenced by the attitude of the time, and contemporary prose-references endorse the spirit of the plays.
Satire abounds on the coarsest of subjects—that
of the “horn-mad” patient—and further examples need hardly be given. More interesting is the comment of the keeper in the “Pilgrim” when a patient enters crying “Give me some drink.”
“Oh, there’s the Englishman! . . .