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ELIZABETHAN DRAMA AND ITS MAD FOLK
* * * * * *
[Illustration: Logo]
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.
CHAP. PAGE
PREFACE
I. INTRODUCTORY 1
II. THE PRESENTATION OF MADNESS—FROM THE STANDPOINT OF
HISTORY 8
III. THE PRESENTATION OF MADNESS—FROM THE STANDPOINT OF
LITERATURE 42
IV. MAD FOLK IN TRAGEDY AND COMEDY—(i) THE MANIACS 60
V. MAD FOLK IN TRAGEDY AND COMEDY—(ii) IMBECILITY 118
VI. MAD FOLK IN TRAGEDY AND COMEDY—(iii) MELANCHOLY 126
VII. MAD FOLK IN TRAGEDY AND COMEDY—(iv) DELUSIONS,
HALLUCINATIONS, AND OTHER ABNORMAL STATES 150
VIII. MAD FOLK IN TRAGEDY AND COMEDY—(v) THE PRETENDERS 167
IX. CONCLUSION 176
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.