Reconciling ourselves as best we can to this state of things, let us examine some representative comedies. There are, in the first place, those in which insanity plays quite a subsidiary part and is not in the least essential
to the main plot. In “The Silent Woman,” for example, the pretended madness of Morose is an occasion for much merriment, but it lasts only for part of a scene. In “Northward Ho!”, Maybery, Greenshield and their friends lay a merry plot against Bellamont and contrive to secure his arrest as a madman, though here again, the jest is but a short one. Similarly, in “Twelfth Night,” Malvolio is treated as if he were insane, much to the delight of Maria, Sir Toby, and the lesser folk; while in the “Comedy of Errors” many accusations of madness are bandied to and fro, which more than once lead to violence. Sometimes the madness is only reported. In “Cymbeline,” the Queen is said in the fourth act to be afflicted by
“A fever with the absence of her son,
A madness of which her life’s in danger,”
and there is little doubt that her violent death, “most shameless-desperate,” was due to some derangement of the reason. So, too, the Lady Constance dies “in a frenzy,” and Brutus’ Portia, it is reported,
“fell distract
And, her attendants absent, swallow’d fire.”
Such scenes as these last three, however, Shakespeare has, with his usual tact, kept off the stage, knowing that in the case of “Cymbeline” he would otherwise introduce too violent a nemesis into what was rapidly becoming the dénouement of a romantic comedy.
Massinger, on the contrary, in “A New Way to Pay Old Debts,” seems rather to welcome this nemesis, allowing his extortioner, Sir Giles Overreach, when outwitted in the fifth act, to go mad and to be taken off to Bedlam. It will be noticed that most of the examples just given (excluding those of “reported” insanity) have been mainly of pretended madness; where bona-fide mad folk are introduced into comedy without affecting the construction of the play, this is usually for the sake of a vulgar realism or of comic effect falsely so-called. We have already seen enough of this and may pass on.
In “Bartholomew Fair” we have a madman delineated with some care. Trouble-all, the lunatic in question, only makes his appearance in the fourth act, but from his entry to the close of the play he evokes, together with Quarlous, who masquerades in his clothes, a considerable share of attention. His place in the plot is an important one. Dame Purecraft, who is being wooed by that notorious Puritan, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, and by a gentleman named Winwife, has had it foretold that she must marry a madman within seven days. She has been daily to Bedlam to enquire if any insane gentlemen are available, but it is only when she meets Trouble-all that she feels any inclination towards one. By a trick, however, Quarlous, a “gamester” and a friend of