discovering whether he was true or false to the religion of his fathers. The critic who peeps behind the scenes at such times as these finds only the scene-shifters and the green room, where his nice offence will soon receive appropriate comments!
Our best plan, then, will be habitually to consider the plays from the point of view which we take to be that of the author himself. Prejudices will be put aside, and predispositions to premature diagnoses resisted. Constance and Timon of Athens, with several personages from Marlowe’s dramas, will be regarded (with some effort) as sane, for the simple and quite adequate reason that they were so regarded by their authors. The question whether or no Hamlet was actually insane will, for the same reason, be dismissed in a few words; while the many witches who haunt Elizabethan drama, and whose prototypes afforded in nearly every case genuine examples of dementia, will be heroically disregarded, as falling without the bounds of our proposed theme.
From the number of occurrences in this body of drama of such words as “mad,” “madness,” “Bedlam,” “frantic,” and the like, it might be supposed that there are more genuine mad folk than actually appear. A few words will suffice to clear up this difficulty.
The term “madness” is often used in a loose,
unmeaning sense,—in phrases such as “Mad wench!”, somewhat resembling the equally unmeaning slang of to-day. To insist on this point would probably provoke the charge of a lack of the sense of humour, and insistence is indeed unnecessary. Most readers of Shakespeare will recall Leontes’ transport before the supposed statue of his wife, a transport which he characterises as “madness”; Portia’s description of that “hare,” “madness the youth”; Biron’s apostrophe:
“Behaviour, what wert thou
Till this madman show’d thee?”[5:1]
and no less Shylock’s famous description of men that
“are mad if they behold a cat.”[5:2]
Those who are acquainted with “Philaster” may remember Megra’s description of