Makes us at once both serious, and smile.”
(Alex. Brome.)
The questions which we have now to answer, before passing to our main study and considering the mad folk as individuals, are two in number. The first is a general one: What is the place of such a feature as madness in drama? The second is more particular: What place does madness assume in the body of drama under consideration? Let us take them in this order.
1. Clearly there is a great difference between madness in tragedy and madness in comedy. Many of us would hold to the one and emphatically despise the other. At all events, risking confusion through an over-complicated scheme of sub-division, we shall deal with each separately.
The representation of madness in tragedy might be objected to upon the following grounds: If carried out well, it becomes too terrible for the stage; if badly, it is nothing but a ludicrous caricature of greatness. This is at least plausible, and the last proposition is evidently true. But what of the first? Is madness really too terrible
for dramatic presentation, or is it not eminently suited to the stage by virtue of its peculiar qualities?
The critic replies that madness is sheer suffering of the most painful sort, that the ravings of a noble mind o’erthrown have passed the ne plus ultra of the tragic, while the babblings of mere imbecility have not reached the level of tragedy at all. “Such suffering” (he will say), “as is the lot of Lear, should never be dwelt upon, much less paraded before crowds, and decked out with the tinsel of the stage. Think of physical suffering comparable with it, if that be possible—for is not mental suffering far more terrible and heart-rending than physical?—and you would never talk of putting the maniac on the stage. Think of the repulsion caused by the blinding of Gloster and the murder of Lady Macduff’s infant son,—and is not the madness of Lear more terrible? ‘King Lear’ is, of course, a brilliant exception, but the exception proves the rule.”
With this last provoking platitude we need not quarrel, but the main assertion must be challenged nevertheless. In the first place it is a fact that we do not feel the same repulsion at the representation of madness on the stage as we do at a similar case in real life, whereas with physical brutality the effect seems in drama to be almost magnified. Could we possibly feel
more keenly the blow which Othello gives to Desdemona if the scene took place in our own family? It is at least doubtful. But if we think of the suffering of Lear, or of Ophelia, and suppose one-tenth of it inflicted on our dearest friend, the thought becomes perfectly unbearable. It is not that we do not enter into the spirit of “King Lear,” but rather that the sufferings of the aged King, by reason of their very remoteness from human life, give us the actual “tragic feeling” which Shakespearean tragedy inevitably produces.
Not only so, but the state of the madman, provided that apart from him the play contains the requisite tragic hero, is admirably calculated to contribute, through the emotions of pity and fear, to that καθάρσις which Aristotle considers to be the essence of tragedy. Tragic pity will most surely be excited at the misfortunes of “one who is undeserving,” that is of