The Project Gutenberg eBook, Elizabethan Drama and Its Mad Folk, by E. Allison (Edgar Allison) Peers

Transcriber’s Note:

A complete list of corrections as well as other notes [follows] the text.

ELIZABETHAN DRAMA AND
ITS MAD FOLK

LONDON AGENTS:
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL & Co. Ltd.

ELIZABETHAN DRAMA
AND ITS MAD FOLK

The Harness Prize Essay for 1913

BY

EDGAR ALLISON PEERS, B.A.

Late Scholar of Christ’s College, Cambridge.

Cambridge:
W. HEFFER AND SONS LTD.
1914

To
My Mother

CONTENTS.

PREFACE.

The bulk of this essay is the result of research work along lines which, so far as the author knows, have not been previously traversed. The arrangement and the general treatment of the work are therefore original. Certain books, notably Tuke’s “History of the Insane in the British Isles,” Bucknill’s “Mad Folk of Shakespeare,” Bradley’s “Shakespearean Tragedy,” and Ward’s “English Dramatic Literature,” have been of special utility in places where reference is made to them. The critical judgments of these authors, however, have by no means always been followed.

The original title of the essay was “The Mad Folk of English Comedy and Tragedy down to 1642.” It has been shortened for purposes of convenience, and the term Elizabethan extended in order to take in a few plays which belong to the next two reigns. The term is, however, generally recognised to be an elastic one, and most of the plays dealt with fall easily within it.

Much of the revision of this work has been carried out under pressure of other duties. I have been greatly helped in it by the criticisms and suggestions of Professor G. Moore Smith, by the constant help of Mr. N. G. Brett James, by some useful information given me by Mr. C. Ll. Bullock, and especially by the kindness of my friend, Dr. J. Hamilton, who has read the essay through in manuscript from the point of view of the physician. Although I have not always taken up this standpoint in dealing with my subject, I have tried at all times to give it due consideration, for, as Ferdinand says in the “Duchess of Malfi,” “Physicians are like kings: they brook no contradiction.”

E. A. P.

Mill Hill,
March, 1914.

CHAPTER I.
Introductory.

“Shall I tell you why?

Ay, sir, and wherefore; for they say every why hath a wherefore.”

(Shakespeare: “Comedy of Errors.”)

The jingling criticism of Dromio of Syracuse will ever recur to the essayist on an unconventional subject. Lest any therefore should claim of this essay that “in the why and the wherefore is neither rhyme nor reason,” excuse shall come prologue to the theme, and its “wherefore” shall receive a moment’s merited attention. Of what utility, it may be asked, can the study of certain insane persons appearing in early modern drama be to the student of to-day? To this question let us give a double answer. The study has a distinct historical value, for from the mass of original documents which form the body of drama under consideration, we may gather much of the progress which has been made in the attitude of the country towards insanity, and hence the increasing tendency towards a humane and intelligent outlook upon disease in general. Our study is also of value from the point of view of literature—partly as shewing the varying accuracy of our

dramatists and the art with which they portrayed their mad folk and introduced them into their plays, partly by selecting and exposing the chief types of the mad folk themselves, considering them on their own merits, as pieces of art of intrinsic literary value. This last will be the chief business of the present essay.

We shall follow the order above indicated, regarding the presentation of madness successively from the standpoints of history and of literature. Under the latter head we shall consider several general questions before proceeding to isolate individual characters in turn. Lastly, we shall endeavour, from the matter furnished us by these plays, to extract some general conclusions.

One proviso must be made before we can embark upon our subject. What, for the purposes of this essay, is to be the criterion of madness? In ordinary life, as we know, the border-land of the rational and the irrational is but ill-defined. We cannot always tell whether mental disease is actually present in a person whom we have known all our lives, much less can we say when the pronounced eccentricity of a stranger has passed the bourn which divides it from insanity. The medical profession itself has not always been too wise where madness is concerned; and where the profession is at fault, with every detail of the case before it, how

can the layman aspire to success, with only a few pages of evidence before him of a “case” propounded by another layman of three centuries before? Were we to take the point of view of the physician we should be plunged into a medical dissertation for which we are both ill-equipped and ill-inclined.

But there is another, and a far more serious objection, already hinted at, to the adoption in this essay of the medical point of view. The authors themselves were not physicians; in many cases, as will be seen, they appear to have had but an imperfect technical knowledge of insanity and its treatment; their ideas were based largely on the loose and popular medical ideas of the Elizabethan age. If we are to consider this subject as a department of literature we must adopt the point of view of the dramatist, not of the practical physician. We must, for the time, definitely break with those who enquire deeply and seriously into the state of mind of every character in Shakespeare. In dealing with “King Lear,” for example, we shall make no attempt to pry behind the curtain five minutes before the opening of the play for the purpose of detecting thus early some symptoms of approaching senile decay. Nor shall we follow those who endeavour to carry the history of Shylock beyond the limits of Shakespeare’s knowledge of him, in the hope of

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

“A woman’s madness,

The glory of a fury,”[5:3]

and everyone has at some time or other lighted upon that kind of “fine madness” which is the property of every true poet, and which Drayton, attributing it to Marlowe, declares

“rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”[5:4]

Nowhere in these passages are we expected to see insanity, though the last two are somewhat stronger than the others, and are typical of

many places where “madness” is used for simple passion and for inspiration respectively.

In a very special sense, however, madness is used for the passion of love, to such an extent that there is an actual gradation into madness itself. Loosely, and often humorously, the lover is said to be mad for the same reason as the lunatic. To quote Shakespeare once more—as he is more familiar than many of his contemporaries—

“The lunatic, the lover and the poet,

Are of imagination all compact.”[6:1]

There is only a step between seeing “Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt,”[6:2] and seeing “more devils than vast hell can hold.”[6:3] Once cool reason has given way to “frenzy,” the Elizabethan is not always too subtle in his distinctions within that convenient term. So when Troilus informs us that he is “mad in Cressida’s love,”[6:4] when Rosalind jestingly speaks of love as deserving “a dark house and a whip,”[6:5] and when Mercutio declares that his Rosaline-tormented Romeo will “sure run mad,”[6:6] we must not altogether discard such references as idle or even conventional. For while there is a great gulf fixed between such “frenzies” as these and the madness of the love-lorn Ophelia or

even of the Gaoler’s Daughter in the “Two Noble Kinsmen,” we can only account for such a peculiar case as Memnon—in Fletcher’s “Mad Lover”—by postulating a conscious development of the idea that “love is a kind of madness.”

It is possible that the difficulty of keeping to the point of view we have chosen may lead to many mistakes being made in our treatment of individual characters. But it seems better to run the risk of this than to set about this work as though it were a medical treatise, or as though the plays to be considered had been produced by a kind of evolution, and not by very human, imperfect, work-a-day playwrights. That being said, Prologue has finished:

“Now, good or bad, ’tis but the chance of war.”

FOOTNOTES:

[5:1] “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” v., 2, 337.

[5:2] “Merchant of Venice,” iv., 1, 48.

[5:3] “Philaster,” ii., 4.

[5:4] Drayton, “The Battle of Agincourt.”

[6:1] “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” v., 1, 7.

[6:2] l. 11.

[6:3] l. 9.

[6:4] “Troilus and Cressida,” i., 1, 51.

[6:5] “As You Like It,” iii., 2, 420.

[6:6] “Romeo and Juliet,” ii., 4, 5.

CHAPTER II.
The Presentation of Madness—from the Standpoint of History.

“A mad world, my masters!”

(Middleton.)

The earliest view of madness which finds its way into this drama and persists throughout it, is based on the idea of possession by evil spirits. This conception came down from remote ages; it accounts, for example, for the madness of King Saul in the Old Testament, when “The Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul and an evil spirit troubled him.”[8:1] In the Elizabethan Age, demoniacal possession was still regarded as one of the most potent causes of insanity; it was made to account not only for mental disease but for all kinds of physical deformations and imperfections, whether occurring alone, or, as is often the case, accompanying idiocy. An offshoot, as it were, from this idea, is the ascription of mental disease to the influence of witches, who were often themselves (ironically enough), persons suffering from mental disorders. So enlightened a man as Sir Thomas Browne declares more than once his belief in witches and their influence; Burton’s “Anatomy of

Melancholy” asserts that melancholy can be caused and cured by witches; the learned James, King of England, and Edward Coke, who lived at the same time, both take up the legal aspects, stating that the plea of insanity offered on behalf of witches should not be recognised at the legal tribunal. In Middleton’s “Witch” (i., 2), there is a mention of “solanum somniferum” (otherwise known as Deadly Nightshade or Atropa Belladonna) which was the chief ingredient in many witches’ recipes and produced hallucinations and other abnormal states of mind. Banquo, in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” probably refers to the witches’ influence when he enquires, directly after the first meeting with them:

“Have we eaten on the insane root

That takes the reason prisoner?”[9:1]

A counterpart to the idea of possession by demons is found in a belief, common at this time and earlier, in the inspired utterances of the frenzied prophetess. Neither here nor with the witches was any curative treatment undertaken. For with the oracle no such treatment was thought to be necessary or even advisable, and with the witches none except death was supposed to avail. Occasionally a “witch” might be subjected, like other mad folk, to “chains” and “whips,” but the road more often

taken was the short one. In simple cases of demoniacal possession the means of cure was patent: the demon must be cast out and the patient will return to his right mind. The exorcisation of the “conjuror” was commonly accompanied by pseudo-medical treatment, the nature of which will presently appear.

Now the influence of the demonological conception of insanity is clearly seen in our dramas. Everyone is familiar, to go no farther than Shakespeare, with the famous exorcisation scene in “Twelfth Night,”[10:1] where the clown, disguised as “Sir Topas the curate,” comes to visit “Malvolio the lunatic,” and drives out the “hyperbolical fiend” which is supposed to vex him. Everything Malvolio does can be expressed in terms of Satan. When the wretched man speaks, it is the “fiend” speaking “hollow” within him. His disgusted exclamation when Maria urges him to “say his prayers” is construed into the fiend’s repugnance to things sacred. Fabian advises “no way (of treatment) but gentleness . . . the fiend is rough and will not be roughly used.” While Sir Toby protests that it is “not for gravity to play at cherry-pit with Satan; hang him, foul collier.” A more complete and far more famous illustration may be found in “Lear,”[10:2] where Edgar attributes his assumed madness to possession by the

various spirits which he names. Almost his first words in his disguise tell of the “foul fiend” leading him “through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, o’er bog and quagmire.”[11:1] He names “the foul Flibbertigibbet,” the fiend of “mopping and mowing,”[11:2] who “gives the web and the pin, squints the eye, and makes the harelip;”[11:3] of “the prince of darkness . . . a gentleman; Modo he’s called and Mahu”;[11:4] of “Hobbididence prince of dumbness;” of “Hoppedance” who “cries in Tom’s belly for two white herring”[11:5] and many others—culled from the flowery page of Harsnet’s “Popish Impostures.”

A more modern idea of insanity is that which attributes it to natural physical causes, and this finds expression in our dramas—often in the same play—side by side with the conception just mentioned. The capriciousness of heredity, for instance, is recognised by the author of “A Fair Quarrel”:

“Wise men beget fools and fools are the fathers

To many wise children . . .

A great scholar may beget an idiot,

And from the ploughtail may come a great scholar.”[11:6]

The supposed justice of the same law is illustrated by a passage in Brome’s “English Moor,” where among punishments for sin is included:

“That his base offspring proves a natural idiot.”

One of the most popular of the physical causes assigned by seventeenth century dramatists to madness is the worm in the brain. “Madam,” says Arcadius in Shirley’s “Coronation,” “my uncle is something craz’d; there is a worm in’s brain.”[12:1] Shirley frequently refers to this particular “cause,” and Winfield, one of the characters in “The Ball,” adds to it another superstition when he says: “He has a worm in’s brain, which some have suppos’d at some time o’ the moon doth ravish him into perfect madness.”[12:2]

Superstition is responsible for many of the “causes” of madness in our drama, and among these the most prominent is probably the superstition responsible for the English word “lunatic.” The supposed influence of the moon on insanity and of its deviations on the recurrence of maniacal periods is clearly the source of those words which Shakespeare gives to Othello after the murder of Desdemona:

“It is the very error of the moon;

She comes more nearer earth than she was wont

And makes men mad.”[12:3]

So Lollio, in “The Changeling,” tells Franciscus that “Luna” made him mad.[12:4] The “parson” who figures, too, among the mad folk in “The Pilgrim,” has to be “tied short” since “the moon’s i’ th’ full.”[12:5]

That the superstition connected with the moon, however, was under high medical patronage is shewn by a reference to the “Anatomie of the Bodie of Man” by one Vicary, chief surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (1548-1562). “Also the Brayne” (he writes) “hath this propertie that it moveth and followeth the moving of the moone; for in the waxing of the moone the brayne discendeth downwarde and vanisheth in substance of vertue; for then the Brayne shrinketh together in itselfe and is not so fully obedient to the spirit of feeling, and this is proved in men that be lunaticke or madde . . . that be moste greeved in the beginning of the newe moone and in the latter quarter of the moone. Wherefore when it happeneth that the Brayne is either too drye or too moyst, then can it not werke his kinde; then are the spirits of life melted and resolved away, and then foloweth feebleness of the wittes and of al other members of the bodie, and at the laste death.”

The word “lunatic” itself, it may be noted, quickly passed into common speech, and was used without reference to its original significance. We shall find it constantly recurring throughout this study, but as there is little variety in its use, no further examples need be quoted.

An interesting superstition is connected with

the mandrake plant, round which, from the supposed resemblance of its strangely cleft root to the human figure, many weird notions have gathered. One of these was that when torn from the ground, the plant would utter groans of “sad horror,” which, if heard, caused instant madness, or even death.[14:1] From the numerous references to this superstition in Elizabethan drama may be extracted two,—the first from “Romeo and Juliet” (iv., 3, 47-8), where Juliet speaks of

“shrieks of mandrakes, torn out of the earth

That living mortals, hearing them, run mad”;

the second from a speech of Suffolk’s in “2 Henry VI.” (iii., 2, 310), where the Duke reminds the Queen that curses will not kill

“as doth the mandrake’s groan.”

Other causes to which, rightly or wrongly, insanity is attributed may be grouped together for convenience. In the “Emperor of the East” is an obvious reminiscence of Holy Writ where Flaccilla says of Pulcheria:

“Grant heaven, your too much learning

Does not conclude in madness.”[14:2]

This devout wish, however, has only about as much claim to be taken seriously as Leonato’s fear that Benedick and Beatrice, married a week, would “talk themselves mad.”[15:1]

Such causes as irritation, worry, jealousy and persecution are frequently mentioned as conducing to frenzy, if not actually causing it. The Abbess of the “Comedy of Errors,” reproaching Adriana for her treatment of Antipholus, sums the matter up thus:

“The venom clamours of a jealous woman

Poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.

It seems his sleeps were hinder’d by thy railing,

And thereof comes it that his head is light.

Thou say’st his meat was sauced with thy upbraidings:

Unquiet meals make ill digestions;

Thereof the raging fire of fever bred;

And what’s a fever but a fit of madness?

Thou say’st his sports were hinder’d by thy brawls:

Sweet recreation barr’d, what doth ensue

But moody and dull melancholy . . .

Have scared thy husband from the use of wits.”[15:2]

We need not stay long over the numerous characters who speak of anger as leading to madness. The term “horn-mad,” however, is sufficiently interesting to be cleared up here.[15:3]

It is used in two senses. Often it is no more than an emphatic way of expressing the simple adjective. In this sense it may be connected

with the Scottish word “harns,” meaning “brains,” an alternative form being “horn-wood.” When Joculo, in Day’s “Law Tricks,” suggests that “the better half of the townsmen will run horn-mad,”[16:1] this is clearly the sense in which the words are to be taken. But in another sense, the source of which is evident, “horn-mad” is the word used to denote a kind of madness unknown as a technical term to the medical profession, but very common in the less elevated portions of our drama. This madness is a thing

“Created

Of woman’s making and her faithless vows”;

the madness, in a word, of the cuckold. Falstaff seems to be punning on the two senses of the term when he says: “If I have horns to make me mad, let the proverb go with me: I’ll be horn mad.”[16:2] Dekker exhibits an especial fondness for this particular pun. Cordolente, the shopkeeper of “Match Me in London,” whose wife the King has seduced, says on being informed by that monarch that he is mad: “I am indeed horn-mad. O me! In the holiest place of the Kingdom have I caught my undoing.”[16:3] Similar passages can be found in nearly all Dekker’s plays, whether true madness is actually in question or not.

A world of meaning lies beneath such phrases as “dog-madness,” “midsummer madness,” “March mad,” “as mad as May butter.”[17:1] The first refers primarily to hydrophobia, though it is not always used in that sense; the second is accounted for by the old belief that insanity was fiercest and most prevalent in midsummer. The phrase “March mad” is connected with the saying “As mad as a March hare.” Its explanation is that during the month of March, their breeding season, hares are wilder than usual. An example of the use of the phrase might be quoted from Drayton’s (non-dramatic) work, “Nymphidia”:

“Oberon . . . Grew mad as any hare

When he had sought each place with care

And found his queen was missing.”

“May butter” is unsalted butter, preserved during May for medicinal use in healing wounds. The connexion of the phrase with madness, however, is so deep as to be no longer understood!

Finally, among the causes of madness recognised in the seventeenth century must be mentioned melancholy, though we shall have to return to this on another page. The common belief appears to have been, in the words of the Doctors of the Induction to the “Taming of the Shrew,” that “Melancholy is the nurse of frenzy,”[17:2] and incipient melancholiacs are

constantly adjured by their nearest and dearest to remember this fact—though their adjurations seldom have any effect. The Duchess of Malfi, indeed, hearing in her captivity a “hideous noise,” and being told:

“’Tis the wild consort

Of madmen, lady, whom your tyrant brother

Hath placed about your lodging,”

replies:

“Indeed, I thank him; nothing but noise and folly

Can keep me in my right wits; whereas reason

And silence make me mad.”[18:1]

In the “Lover’s Melancholy,” Prince Palador is presented with a “Masque of Melancholy” (for which the author was largely indebted to Burton) in order that his diseased mind may be relieved. These two cases certainly shew a divergence from the more general opinion. The first may perhaps be attributed to the Duchess’ desire: “to make a virtue of necessity,” the second to the fact that Palador’s disease is not true melancholia, but a state of mind bordering on affectation—that melancholy affected by more than one of Shakespeare’s “humorous” characters, of whom it can be said “You may call it melancholy if you will favour the man, but by my head ’tis pride.”[18:2]

We may gather next, from our plays, some of the recognised symptoms of insanity in these

early times. Epicene, pretending to recognise the madness of Morose, says: “Lord, how idly he talks, and how his eyes sparkle! he looks green about the temples! do you see what blue spots he has?” Clerimont has his answer ready: “Ay, ’tis melancholy.”[19:1] But these two are over-frivolous; their diagnosis is untrustworthy; we must turn to surer ground. One supposed sign of madness was evidently the quickening of the heart and the pulse. Hamlet, in a well-known passage, ridicules his mother’s idea that the ghost which he sees is due to “ecstasy”:

“Ecstasy!

My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time,

And makes as healthful music.”[19:2]

Philaster, declaring his sanity to Arethusa, says:

“Take this sword

And search how temperate a heart I have . . . .”

and again:

“. . . Am I raging now?

If I were mad, I should desire to live.

Sir, feel my pulse, whether have you known

A man in a more equal tune to die.”

Bellario replies:

“Alas, my lord, your pulse keeps madman’s time!

So does your tongue.”[19:3]

That these tests were inadequate is proved by a simple illustration—in the “Comedy of Errors,”

Pinch the exorcist, mistakes Antipholus’ anger for madness. Luciana cries:

“Alas, how fiery and how sharp he looks!”

And a courtezan,

“Mark, how he trembles in his ecstasy!”[20:1]

Pinch attempts to feel the “madman’s” pulse, but in any case he knows that both man and master are possessed:

“I know it by their pale and deadly looks.”[20:2]

The madman was supposed not to be aware of the nature of his disease. “That proves you mad,” says the Officer in Dekker’s “Honest Whore,” by a strange piece of reasoning, “because you know it not.”[20:3] Throughout the plays occurs the same phenomenon. Even when certain of the mad folk recognise that they are afflicted with some sort of disease, they resent questioning on it. Guildenstern’s account of Hamlet is significant of a large number of cases:

“Nor do we find him forward to be sounded,

But with a crafty madness, keeps aloof

When we would bring him on to some confession

Of his true state.”[20:4]

The resentment is no doubt due to a subconscious wish of the madman to hide his loss of that sense of personal identity which is used by Shakespeare as one of the criteria of madness. Constance’ proof to Pandulph of her entire sanity will be remembered:

“I am not mad; this hair I tear is mine.

My name is Constance; I was Geffrey’s wife;

Young Arthur is my son and he is lost:

I am not mad[21:1]. . .”

Sebastian, in “Twelfth Night,” gives similar evidence:

“This is the air; that is the glorious sun;

This pearl she gave me. I do feel’t and see’t;

And though ’tis wonder that enwraps me thus,

Yet ’tis not madness.”[21:2]

Another symptom of insanity was sleeping with open eyes. Meleander, in the “Lover’s Melancholy,” “sleeps . . . with eyes open, and that’s no good sign”[21:3] and the Duchess of Malfi is said to sleep “like a madman, with (her) eyes open.”[21:4]

A general wildness of demeanour was thought to be characteristic of both the earlier and the later stages of madness. Songs and dances are often associated with it; wild laughter, “the usher to a violent extremity,” accompanied by fulminations against the world in general; bitter sarcasm, sudden touches of pathos and consequent outbursts of anger; “thundering” and “roaring,” which can only be checked by like excesses on the part of others—these are all common symptoms, together with “raving” on all kinds of subjects. This wildness, however,

is not inconsistent with considerable force and pregnancy of speech, which might lead some to doubt the actual presence of insanity; and which is “a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.”[22:1] A sense of physical pain, of being “cut to the brains,” might also afflict the patient; and the disease frequently causes such suffering that

“Nor the exterior nor the inward man

Resembles that it was.”[22:2]

An excellent objective description of a single case is furnished by the “Gentleman” in “Hamlet” who announces the frenzy of Ophelia:

“She speaks much of her father; says she hears

There’s tricks i’ the world, and hems and beats her heart;

Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,

That carry but half sense; her speech is nothing,

Yet the unshaped use of it doth move

The hearers to collection; they aim at it,

And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts;

Which as her winks and nods and gestures yield them

Indeed would make one think there might be thought,

Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.”[22:3]

As to the nature of the madman’s talk, we find it impossible to generalise, and the ideas of different authors on what it should be have not much agreement, beyond the one condition that there should be wanting what Shakespeare aptly calls “a dependency of thing on thing.” This

will be noted more particularly when we come to the study of individual characters.

From these symptoms and others which might be cited it will be evident that the madness of our dramas is far from being confined to one type. We know that various kinds of insanity were recognised in the seventeenth century. Corax, the physician of the “Lover’s Melancholy,” makes it clear that

“Ecstasy

Fantastic Dotage, Madness, Frenzy, Rapture

Of mere imagination differ partly

From Melancholy.”[23:1]

Our learned informant, Ben Jonson, diagnoses another case of insanity as “the disease in Greek . . . called μα νια, in Latin, insania, furor, vel ecstasis melancholica, that is egressio, when a man ex melancholico evadit fanaticus, . . . . But he may be but ‘phreneticus,’ yet, mistress, and ‘phrenesis’ is only ‘delirium’ or so.”[23:2] And indeed there are all varieties of insanity in the plays before us. There is the young person who merely talks “fantastically,” “like a justice of peace,” “of a thousand matters and all to no purpose,”[23:3] and whose words “though they (lack) form a little,” are “not like madness.”[23:4] There is the person dominated by the “idée fixe”—examples differing widely occur in “King Lear” and in “Bartholomew Fair.”

There is the “idiot” and there is the “imbecile”—two types between which it would be affectation here to attempt a discrimination. The melancholiac, one of “sundry kinds,” affected by a “mere commotion of the mind, o’ercharged with fear and sorrow,”[24:1] is one of the commonest types. Mania and delusional insanity are also frequent and account for a large proportion of our characters. Yet, since this is not a medical treatise, how can we distinguish any more finely? We shall do better not to attempt a more detailed classification of our mad folk than this, which will be utilised later in the consideration of individual characters. “It is not as deep as a well, nor as wide as a church-door, but ’twill serve.” Like more than one of those Elizabethan playwrights we may feel that:

“To define true madness

What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?”[24:2]

On this let us act and employ a literary rather than a medical criticism.

Our dramas are not silent as to the way in which lunatics were regarded by the world at large. Few people at that time had the sympathy of Langland for those whom, three hundred years before, he beautifully called “God’s minstrels”—a title explained by the preceding exhortation to his readers to bestow their gifts on the wandering insane as bountifully as though

they were wandering minstrels. For the most part the lunatic seems to have been regarded, when confined, as a negligible factor in everyday life,[25:1] and when at large as a harmless and a gratuitous amusement. So, as has just been noted, the Duchess of Malfi is regaled before her death with “some sport” in the shape of several madmen who sing and dance before her. Here, of course, the intention is a sinister one, but there is no sinister meaning in a casual remark let fall by Truewit in the “Silent Woman”—“Mad folks and other strange sights to be seen daily, private, and public”![25:2] Nor is there any idea but one of legitimate amusement in the entertainment organised by the master of a private asylum, Alibius by name, for the marriage of Beatrice-Joanna (in “The Changeling”) and given, as he says, by:

“A mixture of our madmen and our fools,

To finish, as it were, and make the fag

Of all the revels, the third night from the first.”[25:3]

Isabella caustically remarks “Madmen and fools are a staple commodity.”

In this connexion, a particular class of lunatic deserves notice. The Bedlam beggar, variously known as “bedlamer,” “bedlamite,” and “Abraham’s man,” was originally an inmate of Bedlam, but, coming to be regarded as convalescent, had

been set free and would roam about the country, half-crazed, living for the most part on the charity of such as would befriend him. In Dekker’s “Belman of London,” a non-dramatic work professing to expose “The most notorious Villanies that are now Practised in the Kingdome,” is a long description, in the manner of a seventeenth century “character,” of one of “those Wild-geese or Hayre-braynes . . . called Abraham’s men.” Dekker at least has little good to say of them. “The fellow . . . sweares he hath bin in bedlam and will talke frantickly of purpose: you see pinnes stuck in sundry places of his naked flesh, especially in his armes, which paine he gladly puts himselfe to (beeing indeede no torment at all, his skin is either so dead, with some fowle disease, or so hardned with weather), onely to make you believe he is out of his wits: he calls himself by the name of Poore Tom, and comming neere anybody, cryes out Poore Tom is a-cold . . . .” The mind at once turns to Edgar and the celebrated lines where he poses as one of those very “Abraham-men”:

“This country gives me proof and precedent

Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,

Strike in their numb’d and mortified bare arms

Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;

And with this horrible object, from low farms,

Poor pelting villages, sheep cotes, and mills,

Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers

Enforce their charity.”[26:1]

From all that we can gather, however, of the treatment of the insane in madhouses of the time, it would seem probable that, among those released or escaping from them, many would still be genuine lunatics. At the same time, it was no doubt fairly easy to make a living in the way Dekker describes, and numbers of beggars must have emulated Edgar’s behaviour from far less worthy motives.

Such a lack of popular sympathy could hardly go hand-in-hand with a peculiarly humanitarian treatment of the insane. The Saxon treatment of lunatics has been described as “a curious compound of pharmacy, superstition, and castigation.” In the seventeenth century it had been but little improved upon. Its most characteristic feature was confinement in a dark room, with additional treatment, varying according to circumstances. A book, of date 1542, called “A Compendious Pygment or a Dyetry of Helth” by one Dr. Borde, advises the keeping of lunatics in a dark room, provided with no knives, girdles, nor pictures of man or woman on the wall. Few words are to be used except in gentle reproofs and the dietary is to be careful and ample. Dr. Borde’s treatment was enlarged upon in later days; chains were used to prevent escape; castigation was employed freely and often attended with great cruelty. A quatrain in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” (1621),

confirms this statement, presenting what is indeed a ghastly picture. It is all borne out by the dramatic references, which are extremely numerous. The lunatic chez lui is evidently a subject which appeals to the dramatist: madness and its cure become topics of ordinary conversation. Rosalind, in playful banter with Orlando, compares love to “a madness,” which “deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.”[28:1] Leonato, in “Much Ado” talks (from our point of view ominously) of those who would

“Give preceptial medicine to rage,

Fetter strong madness in a silken thread,

Charm ache with air and agony with words.”[28:2]

Shakespeare is not predicting here, as has been suggested, the application of gentle methods to insanity, but ridiculing those who were so foolish as to apply “a moral medicine to a mortifying mischief.” Even as he wrote lightly of the silken thread, he would have heard in imagination the clank of the lunatic’s chains.

Another addition to the attractions of the asylum was the course of slow starvation, and this is hinted at in a casual allusion by Romeo in “Romeo and Juliet”:

“Why Romeo, art thou mad?” asks Benvolio.

“Not mad,” answers Romeo, “but bound more than a madman is,

Shut up in prison, kept without my food,

Whipped and tormented.”[29:1]

Pinch the conjuror knows what to do in cases of madness:

“Mistress, both man and master is possess’d . . .

They must be bound and laid in some dark room.”

George, in “The Honest Whore,” has heard of domestic cures: “’Sfoot! I have known many women that have had mad rascals to their husbands, whom they would belabour by all means possible to keep ’em in their right wits.” And a character in Marston’s “What You Will” speaks in a delightfully brisk and business-like manner: “Shut the windows, darken the room, fetch whips; the fellow is mad, he raves, he raves—talks idly—lunatic.”

Few tests were needed to convince the keepers of an asylum that their patient was mad, and if it could be made a matter of pecuniary advantage to them to incarcerate any person, they would often take him and clothe him in the “fool’s coat” or clap him into the “madman’s cage” without making too many inquiries. Thus the madhouse became, in many a sinister sense, “a house of correction to whip us into our senses.”[29:2]

Before we leave the historical side of our subject, some mention must be made of the famous Bedlam, so often mentioned in connexion with the mad folk of our plays. The real and original Bedlam, “Bethlem monastery,” as it is called, “the madman’s pound,” which is actually introduced into one or more of the plays under consideration,[30:1] was formerly the Hospital of St. Mary Bethlehem in Bishopsgate Street. The Priory was founded for this Order in 1247 by an ex-sheriff named Simon Fitz-Mary. It passed through many vicissitudes, chief among which were a seizure by the Crown in 1375 and the dissolution by Henry VIII. in 1547. After this latter date the revenues were held by the Mayor, the commonalty and the citizens of London. For some hundred and fifty years the Hospital had been used for lunatics, and the only difference in this use caused by its dissolution as a religious house seems to have been that it became incorporated as a Royal Foundation. For a considerable time it suffered through poverty, being largely dependent on legacies, such as Sir Thomas Gresham’s in 1575, and on general alms. Mistress Trainewell, in Brome’s “Northern Lass” (1632), mentions Bedlam among other objects of charity, and suggests to Squelch an excellent

reason for patronising it. The passage may be quoted in full:

Squelch: “I will now bestow my wealth in monumental good deeds, and charitable uses in my life-time, to be talked well on when I am dead.”

Trainewell: “Yes, build almshouses and hospitals for beggars, and provide in Bridewell houses of correction for your friends and kindred. Pray give enough to Bedlam, you may feel some part of that benefit yourself before you die, if these fits hold you.”

The later history of Bedlam is uneventful, and, to us, unimportant. In 1676 it was transferred to London Wall, the new buildings being known as the “New Hospital of Bethlehem,” and in 1815 to Lambeth. Bethlem Hospital was by far the best known of London mad-houses in the Seventeenth Century; two more are mentioned by Stow in his “Survey of London,” and may be noted here. The first was “an Hospitall in the Parish of Barking Church,” founded “by Robert Denton Chaplen, for the sustentation of poore Priests, and other both men and women, that were sicke of the Phrenzie, there to remaine till they were perfectly whole, and restored to good memorie.”[31:1] In another place, under the title of “An house belonging to Bethlem,” we read: “Then had ye an house wherein sometime were distraught and lunatike people, of what antiquity founded, or by whom I have not read, neither of the suppression, but it was said that sometime a King of England,

not liking such a kind of people to remaine so neare his pallace, caused them to be remoued farther of, to Bethlem without Bishops gate of London, and to that Hospitall the said house by Charing crosse doth yet remaine.”[32:1]

No doubt there were also private asylums in existence, where the treatment of the patients was harsh, and their comforts were few. The conditions, indeed, seem to have been very similar to those of Bedlam. These and other details may be gathered chiefly from four plays, in each of which there are “madhouse scenes”—they are “The Pilgrim” by John Fletcher, “The Honest Whore” by Thomas Dekker, “Northward Ho,” the joint work of Dekker and Webster, and “The Changeling,” ascribed to Middleton, who was probably aided in it by Rowley. A comparison of these plays should give a very fair account of a seventeenth century lunatic asylum.[32:2]

It is not difficult to obtain admission to this asylum, for the charge is only a penny or twopence, and Bellamont and his friends in “Northward Ho” look at the “mad Greeks” for a short time before calling for their horses, which are stabled at “the Dolphin without

Bishopsgate” near by. The hospital consists of “a parlour, kitchen, and larder below stairs, and twenty-one rooms where the poor distracted people lie, and above stairs eight rooms more for servants”; the madmen may either be visited in their cells, or brought in for inspection by the visitors. Preferring the former alternative we approach the cells, and hear a confused roaring—“the Chimes of Bedlam.” It is “Mad Bess roaring for meat or the Englishman for drink”; like “bells rung backward” they are nothing but “confusion and mere noises.” The “shaking of irons” adds to the din, which is increased by the snatches of coarse song which are continually assailing our ears, the playing of rough games such as “barley-break,” the running and jumping of the more violent of the patients, and the cries of those who are undergoing a treatment of the whip:

“If sad, they cry,

If mirth be their conceit, they laugh again;

Sometimes they imitate the beasts and birds,

Singing or howling, braying, barking, all

As their wild fancies prompt ’em.”

When the lunatics are brought in, or (as was more usual in real life though unsuited for dramatic representation), we visit them in their “cages” or cells, we are confronted with a strange sight. A “pretty poet” who “ran mad for a chambermaid” invokes Titania and Oberon,

and speaks in the sanest of tones of “daisies, primrose, violets”; his madness, though at the time we do not know it, is feigned. The Englishman is still crying for drink. Everyone must go down on his knees and pledge him: “A thousand pots, and froth ’em, froth ’em!” The parson, “that run mad for tithe goslings,” threatens to excommunicate and curse the whole company. A musician walks slowly and deliberately apart; he fell mad “for love of an Italian dwarf.” Many a lunatic resembles Candido, “much gone indeed,” who believes himself to be a prentice, “talks to himself,” selling “pure calicos, fine hollands, choice cambrics, neat lawns,” and resenting interference in a way which is positively dangerous. Near him is a lad brought in (like Alinda) “a little craz’d, distracted” and not suffering acutely; he is allowed comparative freedom and accorded light treatment till more dangerous symptoms shew themselves. He

“talks little idly

And therefore has the freedom of the house.”

We speak to the keepers about their charges, and they seem mildly interested. The most entertaining characters we may discuss at length with them; and, if we will brave their foul talk, we may even converse with the patients as freely as they are permitted to converse with each other. We must be prepared, in this case,

to hear frank comments on our personal appearance and the wildest of guesses, often mere expressions of an idée fixe on our profession or our business. The lunatics will not, of course, allow that they are mad, though they may recognise that they are ill and under a doctor’s care. This, however, is less common with our asylum patients than with those undergoing private treatment, such as Ford’s Meleander. The mere suggestion that they may be of unsound mind usually amuses them, or makes them indignant. It is only when the keeper ceases to reproach them with madness and turns the conversation to “Whips!” that they become serious again. Perhaps, after all, a talk with the keeper will best serve our purpose.

Friar Anselmo is at hand and will describe to us with more sympathy than many of his kind the condition of the inmates:

“There are of madmen, as there are of tame,

All humoured not alike. We have here some

So apish and fantastic, play with a feather;

And, though ’twould grieve a soul to see God’s image

So blemished and defaced, yet they do act

Such antic and such pretty lunacies,

That, spite of sorrow, they will make you smile.

Others, again, we have, like hungry lions,

Fierce as wild bulls, untameable as flies;

And these have oftentimes from strangers’ sides

Snatch’d rapiers suddenly and done much harm;

Whom if you’ll see, you must be weaponless.”

We may ask him about his treatment of these poor creatures, who are ever in fear of the lash.

It will be easily justified:

“They must be used like children; pleased with toys,

And anon whipt for their unruliness.”

Alternate cajolings and threats are the mildest form of treatment that we can hope to see in these places. The Elizabethan asylum keeper holds with Shakespeare that

“Diseases desperate grown

By desperate appliance are relieved

Or not at all.”

In the middle of this entertaining discussion we are interrupted. A prospective patient, it seems, is being announced, but the first words of the Master, who enters with him, suggest that we have been fortunate enough to meet with a case of false incarceration. A scholarly young man has been confined without cause and his friends in high quarters have come, armed with a “discharge from my lord cardinal,” to demand his release. “I am heartily sorry,” says the Master, “If ye allow him sound, pray take him with ye.” A gentleman protests that there is nothing in the Scholar

“light nor tainted,

No startings nor no rubs in all his answers;

In all his letters nothing but discretion,

Learning and handsome style.”

He is quite “perfect”; “a civiler discourser I ne’er talked with.” Then, before the Master, the Scholar is catechised:

“You find no sickness?” “Do ye sleep o’ nights?” “Have you no fearful dreams?” The

answers, to the Master’s disgust, are satisfactory. “I think,” exclaims the friend, “You keep him here to teach him madness.” But, just then, his “eyes alter,” and

“On a sudden, from some word or other.

When no man could expect a fit, he has flown out.”

The mention of “stubborn weather” and “strange work at sea,” starts in him a new delusion or revives an old one. He rants and raves: “I am Neptune.” Now it is the Master’s turn to jeer, and the visitors retire, discomfited.

It may be noticed, in passing, that the questions addressed by the keepers of madhouses to prospective patients in order to ascertain whether or no they are indeed mad are hardly less irrelevant and absurd than those of “Sir Topas” in “Twelfth Night.” Antonio, in the “Changeling,” is asked as “easy questions”: “How many true (i.e. honest) fingers has a tailor on his right hand?” . . . “and how many on both?”—“How many fools goes to a wise man?” These remind us of the questions put by the Fool to King Lear.

Our madhouse does not contain only those lunatics who are termed “madmen”; there is another variety, known most commonly as the “fool.” Now the word “fool,” in Elizabethan literature, has a number of connotations. It may be used, as in Shakespeare, for the professional jester of the court, who was, indeed,