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.

[1]

CHAPTER I. Introductory.

(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 [2]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 [3]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 [4]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, [5]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:

and no less Shylock’s famous description of men that

Those who are acquainted with “Philaster” may remember Megra’s description of

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

Nowhere in these passages are we expected to see insanity, though the last two are somewhat stronger than the others, and are typical of [6]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—

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 [7]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:

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.

[8]

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 [9]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:

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 [10]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 [11]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”:

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

[12]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:

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]

[13]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 [14]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

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

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:

[15] 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:

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 [16]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

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.