Like mad Orestes, quaintly thus attir’d?”
A more serious study of insanity, in a work of that unbridled force which characterised the University Wits, is Kyd’s portrayal of Hieronimo and Isabella.[62:1]
Hieronimo, Marshal of Spain, whose son Horatio has been murdered by the King’s nephew, Lorenzo, is stricken with insanity as a result of the shock; his lunacy is intermittent (closely akin to the disease known as manic depressive insanity), but it is only right to add that this result is largely due to the addition of certain scenes to the play by another hand. Kyd represents Hieronimo as afflicted by a deep melancholy which is only a later phase of his grief and in no way prevents him from doing his ordinary duties; the scenes in which his ravings are at their wildest are commonly attributed to Ben Jonson. It is therefore of little use attempting to trace any regular development of Hieronimo’s madness; a short account of it will suffice.
It breaks out, not when entering the arbour “in his shirt, etc.,” he first discovers his murdered
son, but after he has cut him down from the tree on which he has been hanged, and has lamented the murder with his wife. All his ravings, as we are told later in the play, are of Horatio.
“His heart is quiet—like a desp’rate man,
Grows lunatic and childish for his son.
Sometimes, as he doth at his table sit,
He speaks as if Horatio stood by him;
Then, starting in a rage, falls on the earth,