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, often a little wanting in
ordinary intelligence, though this was amply atoned for by his witty
and pregnant remarks. It is also used in a general sense, as to-day,
of a person who has acted, or who habitually acts, in an unwise way.
With reference, however, to our plays, it has more often approximately
the technical meaning of “imbecile”—a term used of those whose brains
are constitutionally affected and whose insanity is therefore rather a
quantitative rather than a qualitative defect. Taken in this sense, the
word “fool” may be applied to some of the asylum’s inmates, the word
“madman” to others. The two classes are not always well distinguished
in these plays, but the fools can generally be detected by the inanity,
rather than the violence, of their words and actions. They tend to
reply in the style of Antonio, the feigning fool of “The Changeling”—
“He, he, he! well, I thank you, cousin, he, he, he!”
To which Lollio, the attendant, replies: “He can laugh; I perceive by
that he is no beast.”
The two classes of patients are apparently allowed to mix in each
others’ company. “We have,” says Lollio, “two sorts of people in the
house, and both under the whip, that’s fools and madmen; the one has
not wit enough to be knaves, and the other not knavery enough to be
fools.” They are kept under very much the same discipline, though the
fools are sent to the “Fools’ College”—which is an institution of the
madhouse itself—and are put to school in various classes in the hope
of improving their wit.
The seventeenth-century asylum, it must be remembered, claims to
have worked cures, though at first it seems hard to believe that its
designation as “the school where those that lose their wits Practise
again to get them” is anything more than a phrase. As we enter the
domain of Anselmo we are met by a “sweeper,” who describes himself as
one of the “implements” of the house—“a mad wag myself here once; but
I thank father Anselmo, he lashed me into my right mind again.”
We are struck at once, as we read these accounts of Bedlam, by the
inconsequence, verging at times on brutal heartlessness, with which
those responsible for the lunatics’ welfare refer to them. It is the
expression of that spirit upon which we have remarked continually
throughout this historical survey. In concluding it we can hardly
illustrate this last point better than by considering a few of the
occasions on which the mad folk are held up to ridicule or satire. It
is, of course, the dramatist with whom we have properly to reckon for
this, yet he was clearly influenced by the attitude of the time, and
contemporary prose-references endorse the spirit of the plays.
Satire abounds on the coarsest of subjects—that of the “horn-mad”
patient—and further examples need hardly be given. More interesting is
the comment of the keeper in the “Pilgrim” when a patient enters crying
“Give me some drink.”
“Oh, there’s the Englishman! . . .
These English are so malt-mad there’s no meddling with ’em;
When they have a fruitful year of barley there,
All the whole island’s thus.”
A similar skit follows on the parson above-mentioned “that run mad for
tithe goslings.” But Fletcher’s best effort in this direction is the
introduction of the Welshman, who, but for his premature exit might
have served as quite a reasonable understudy for Fluellen. “Whaw,
Master Keeper,” is his first remark, “Give me some ceeze and onions,
give me some wash brew . . . Pendragon was a shentleman, marg you, sir.
And the organs at Rixum were made by revelations: There is a spirit
blows the bellows, and then they sing.” He will “sing, dance and do
anything,” and when the Englishman and the Scholar challenge him, he
threatens to “get upon a mountain and call my countrymen.” Dekker, in
the “Honest Whore,” is able to hit the lawyers. There are none of that
company, he says, among Anselmo’s madmen. “We dare not let a lawyer
come in, for he’ll make ’em mad faster than we can recover ’em.”
Questioned as to how long it takes to “recover” any of the patients,
our informant replies that “An alderman’s son will be mad a great
while. . . . A whore will hardly come to her wits again. A Puritan,
there’s no hope of him, unless he may pull down the steeple and hang
himself i’ the bell-ropes.”[41:1]
FOOTNOTES:
[8:1] I. Samuel, xvi., 14.
[9:1] “Macbeth,” i., 3, 84.
[10:1] “Twelfth Night,” iv., 2.
[10:2] “King Lear,” iii., 4, etc.
[11:1] “King Lear,” iii., 4, 52, etc.
[11:2] Ibid., iv., 1, 64.
[11:3] Ibid., iii., 4, 122.
[11:4] Ibid., iii., 4, 148-9.
[11:5] Ibid., iii., 5, 31.
[11:6] Middleton: “A Fair Quarrel,” i., 1.
[12:1] iii., 2.
[12:2] i., 1.
[12:3] “Othello,” v., 2, 109.
[12:4] iii., 3.
[12:5] iii., 6. Cf. with these the phrases: “planet-struck,”
“planet-stricken,” etc.; _e.g._ Brome’s “City Wit,” v., 1—Crazy: “Sure
I was planet-struck.”
[14:1] For further information on this subject Bulleine’s “Bulwark of
Defence” and Sir Thomas Browne’s “Vulgar Errors” may be consulted.
[14:2] Act iii. Sc. iv., cf. Jonson: “The Alchemist,” ii., i. Face of
Dol:
“She is a most rare scholar,
And is gone mad with studying Broughton’s works.
If you but name a word touching the Hebrew
She falls into her fit and will discourse
So learnedly of genealogies,
As you would run mad, too, to hear her, sir.”
[15:1] “Much Ado About Nothing,” ii., 1, 368.
[15:2] “Comedy of Errors,” v., 1, 68.
[15:3] For further information on this interesting word see the New
English Dictionary. _s.v._ “horn-mad.”
[16:1] “Law Tricks,” iv., 2.
[16:2] “Merry Wives of Windsor,” iii., 5, 153.
[16:3] “Match Me in London,” iv., 1.
[17:1] All taken from plays of the period under consideration.
[17:2] “Taming of the Shrew,” Ind. ii., 135.
[18:1] “Duchess of Malfi,” iv., 2.
[18:2] “Troilus and Cressida,” ii., 3, 92.
[19:1] “Epicene,” iv., 2.
[19:2] “Hamlet,” iii., 4, 139, etc.
[19:3] “Philaster,” iv., 3, 45, etc.
[20:1] “Comedy of Errors,” iv., 4, 52-3.
[20:2] Ibid., l. 96.
[20:3] “Honest Whore,” iv., 3.
[20:4] “Hamlet,” iii., 1, 7.
[21:1] “King John,” iii., 4, 48, etc.
[21:2] “Twelfth Night,” iv., 3, 1, etc.
[21:3] “Lover’s Melancholy,” ii., 2.
[21:4] “Duchess of Malfi,” iv., 2.
[22:1] “Hamlet,” ii., 2, 212.
[22:2] Ibid., ii., 2, 6-7.
[22:3] Ibid., iv., 5, 4, etc.
[23:1] “Lover’s Melancholy,” iii., 1.
[23:2] “Epicene,” iv., 2.
[23:3] “Honest Whore,” v., 1.
[23:4] “Hamlet,” iii., 1, 171.
[24:1] “Lover’s Melancholy,” iii., 1.
[24:2] “Hamlet,” ii., 2, 93.
[25:1] _e.g._ A lunatic’s legal acts were annulled and his property was
placed under control. (See further, Encyl. Brit., _s.v._ Insanity.)
[25:2] “Epicene,” ii., 1.
[25:3] “The Changeling,” iii., 3.
[26:1] “King Lear,” ii., 3, 13, etc.
[28:1] “As You Like It,” iii., 2, 420, etc.
[28:2] “Much Ado About Nothing,” v., 1, 24, etc.
[29:1] “Romeo and Juliet,” i., 2, 54, etc.
[29:2] Shirley: “Bird in a Cage,” ii., 1.
[30:1] Notably into “Northward Ho.” The madhouses of “The Pilgrim,”
“The Honest Whore,” and “The Changeling” are private asylums.
[31:1] Stow: “Survey of London” (Clarendon Press), i., 137.
[32:1] Ibid., ii., 98.
[32:2] The chief sources from which this description is compiled
are:—“The Pilgrim,” iii. 6, iv. 3, v. 5; “The Honest Whore,” v. 12,
13; “The Changeling,” i. 2, iii. 3, iv. 3, v. 3; “Northward Ho,” iv. 1.
For obvious reasons the specific references to every quotation are not
given.
[41:1] Another interesting passage, no doubt satirical, but too long
for quotation at length, occurs in “The Duchess of Malfi,” Act iv., Sc.
2: It begins:
“A mad lawyer and a secular priest
A doctor that hath forfeited his wits
By jealousy,” etc., etc.