01 - "Documents in Madness"

"Documents in Madness": Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and
Early Modern Culture

Author(s): Carol Thomas Neely
Source: Shakespeare Quarterly , Autumn, 1991, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 315-
338
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2870846
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"Documents in Madness": Reading Madness
and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies
and Early Modern Culture
CAROL THOMAS NEELY
Olivia: How now? Art thou mad?

Clown: No, madam, I do but read madness.
(Twelfth Night, 5.1.293-94)1
If others had not been mad, then we should be.

(Shoshana Felman quoting Georges Bataille quoting William Blake)2
HIS ESSAY BEGINS TO INVESTIGATE THE CONTINUITIES and discontinuities

between the above epigrams. In the Twelfth Night exchange Olivia
accuses Feste, her licensed fool, of madness; he defends himself against the
charge by declaring that he is rather an interpreter of madness, referring
literally to the letter he is reading from the supposedly mad Malvolio,
figuratively to his fool's role as a satirist of human folly, and at a deeper level
to his apt inscription of madness in Malvolio, the ambitious Puritan social
climber and foolish would-be lover of Olivia. In the second quotation
Shoshana Felman, in the epigram to her book Writing and Madness, identi-
fies herself with the madness that is her subject in a quotation which enacts
the intertextuality espoused by contemporary theorists. Feste inscribes
madness to thwart Malvolio's desires and reads madness to dissociate him-
self from it; Felman reads madness to associate herself with it and to license
desire.
As the epigrams imply, madness is a conundrum to those who would
study it. It is a material condition that, to be understood, must be read, made
sense of, inscribed into discourse.3 As Michael MacDonald has aptly noted,
it is "the most solitary of afflictions to the people who experience it; but it is
I am indebted to the questions, comments, and suggestions of fellow participants in

Shakespeare Association of America seminars ahd of audiences who heard versions of this
essay at Dartmouth College, Illinois State University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and at the conference "New Languages
for the Stage" at the University of Kansas. I am especially indebted to hard questions raised by
Peter Stallybrass, Steven Mullaney, Jean Howard, Richard Knowles, Richard P. Wheeler, and
Michael Shapiro, and by Shakespeare Quarterly's anonymous readers and careful editors.
All citations of Shakespeare plays will appear in text and refer to The Complete Signlet Classic
Shakespeare, Sylvan Barnet, gen. ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972).
2 Writing and Mladniess (LiteraturelPhilosoplhylPsvchoa nalvsis), trans. Martha Noel Evans and
Shoshana Felman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), p. 11.
3 W. F. Bxnum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, eds., The Anatolm of Aladnes.s: Essays iin
the Histonr of Pschtiatrl , 3 vols. (Lond(on: Tavistock, 1985), Vol. 1, p. 7.

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316 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY
the most social of maladies to those who observe it

the early modern period, it is detected by layperson
doctors. Because it is "theoretically indeterminate,"5
read from within some framework; its definitions a
constructed from a particular historical moment an
social order, influenced by and influencing that orde
reading madness-implicit in the two epigrammat
the act of doing so, one dissociates oneself from it o
it, and in either case becomes disqualified as an
madness sanely is to miss the point; to read madnes
point be missed. In this essay I want to begin to exam
what consequences madness was read and represe
early modern period by focusing on how represe
Shakespeare's tragedies function within wider cultu
It has long been recognized that England in the period from 1580 to 1640
was fascinated with madness, although some aspects of this obsession have
been overestimated or misreported. The signs of its fascination are to be
found in the treatises on the topic by Battie, Bright, Jorden, Wright, and
Burton; in the theatrical representations of madness in the plays of Kyd,
Shakespeare, Dekker, Middleton, Fletcher, and Webster; in the large num-
bers of patients who consulted such well-known doctors as Richard Napier
and John Hall (Shakespeare's son-in-law) with symptoms of mental distress;
and in the widespread references to and representations of Bethlem, or
Bedlam, the popular name for Bethlehem Hospital, the main institution in
England in this period which confined the insane. Bedlam, according to a
1598 visitation report made a couple of years before Hamlet and Twelfth
Night were written, contained only twenty inmates: nine men and eleven
women (or perhaps ten of each). The thirty-one inmates listed in a 1624
report caused overcrowding in the institution, which was tiny, "loathsomely
and filthely kept," and badly mismanaged. The term "Bedlam" was in
widespread use in early modern England not so much because of the impact
of the institution itself (which had been in existence as a hospital since about
1330 and may have started accepting disturbed patients sometime before
1403, when a visitation record reports the presence of six men "mente capti")
but because it had become a code word in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture
for the confused, charged, and contested topic of madness.6
4 Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century

England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), p. 1.
5 Andrew Scull, Social Order/Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989), p. 8.
6 See Patricia Allderidge, "Management and mismanagement at Bedlam, 1547-1633" in
Health, medicine, and mortality in the sixteenth century, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 141-64, esp. pp. 153, 143. This essay and a subsequent one by
Allderidge, "Bedlam: fact or fantasy?" in Anatomy of Madness, Vol. 2, pp. 17-33, correct the
inaccuracies and fantasies of Bedlam scholarship, especially those of the standard history, E. G.
O'Donoghue, The Story of Bethlehem Hospital: From its Foundation in 1247 (New York: Dutton,
1914). Although many Bedlam inmates were released, some were incarcerated for periods of
twenty years or more, and numbers and turnover were small; there could have been few actual
Tom o' Bedlams wandering the countryside.

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"DOCUMENTS IN MADNESS" 317
Madness, a concept in transition in the per

structed/experienced differently in the sixtee
than it had been in the Middle Ages (where it
human and transcendent) or than it will be
eighteenth century, it will become, as Michel
unreason, the symbol of the animal side o
confinement and restraint; in the nineteenth
preferred term7) becomes identified with her
morality and is to be rectified by "moral treat
latter half of the twentieth century, philosoph
atry movement, and investigations into the c
orders have collapsed the boundaries betwee
physical, real and illusory, that were being co
This twentieth-century breakdown of partiti
ical practice and philosophical theory. In the 1
retical work of Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing, and
ment argued that mental illness was a my
behavior under control, a "sane" reaction to op
the culture.8 Current public policy mandating
"mainstreaming" of the mentally distressed sim
motives) loosens boundaries between the sane and the insane. Current
research and recent therapies stress the biochemical basis of and pharma-
cological treatments for mental distress, re-splicing mind and body. Like-
wise, for literary theorists and philosophers, reading madness functions
subversively to blur boundaries, to put the verb "to know" in quotation
marks, as Shoshana Felman notes.9 Poststructuralist philosophers of radical
skepticism like Derrida and Lacan, denying the possibility of a unified
subject with continuous identity, of a coherent language that can ever say
what it means, of "true" knowledge of the world, erase the boundaries
between madness and sanity that were constructed in the Renaissance and
strengthened and policed in the Enlightenment. Most influentially, Michel
Foucault's Madness and Civilization critiques the Age of Reason for exploiting
the discourse of madness and the confinement of the mad to erase reason's
antithesis, unreason.
Because current theories and therapies of madness work to deconstruct
what the early modern period worked to construct, misreadings of the past
are likely. Too often, analyses of the cultural construction of madness, like
those of Foucault and Elaine Showalter, fail to historicize their own position
and to distinguish it from that of earlier periods. Both these influential
7 The OED records this shift in a cautionary paragraph following the first definition of mad
("Suffering from mental disease; beside oneself; out of one's mind; insane, lunatic"), which
prescribes: "The word has always had some tinge of contempt or disgust and would now be
quite inappropriate in medical use or in referring sympathetically to an insane person as the
subject of an affliction." Insane, from the Latin root insanus, means not sound, not healthy, not
curable, and does not come into widespread use until the eighteenth century, when it appears
first in medical and legal contexts. Madness, the earlier term, is not the opposite of not-mad
but on a continuum with it.
8 Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York:
Harper and Row, 1974); Laing, The Divided Self: A study of sanity and madness (London:
Tavistock, 1960).
9p. 12.

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accounts are weakened by inadequate knowledge

which they focus (Foucault focuses on the eightee
the nineteenth); by a conventional, hence inac
periodization; by a refusal to make sufficient dist
representation and other sorts of historical data
gender the subject of madness. For Foucault ther
Showalter there are only madwomen.0l
In the early modern period the discourse of madness gained prominence

because it was implicated in the medical, legal, theological, political, and
social aspects of the reconceptualization of the human. Gradually madness,
and hence sanity, began to be secularized, medicalized, psychologized, and
(at least in representation) gendered. In the Middle Ages, madness was seen
as the point of intersection between the human, the divine, and the de-
monic. It was viewed alternatively or simultaneously as possession, sin,
punishment, and disease, and it confirmed the inseparability of the human
and transcendent." By theorizing and representing madness, the Renais-
sance gradually and with difficulty began to try to separate human madness
from the supernatural (from demonic and divine possession, as does Ed-
ward Jorden's treatise on hysteria, The Suffocation of the Mother); from the
spiritual (from doubt, sin, guilt, and rational suicide, as does Timothy
Bright's Treatise of Melancholy); from witchcraft and bewitchment (as does
Reginald Scot's Discouerie of Witchcraft); from frauds who imitated these
conditions (as does Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impos-
10 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans.
Richard Howard (New York: Tavistock, 1967), and Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady:
Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985). Showalter looks
only at women's experience of madness and only after 1830, and the category of gender is
missing from Foucault's large intuitive canvas. The discussion of the period from the Middle
Ages to the end of the seventeenth century is the most sketchy and least supported part of his
book (at least in the English translation), for his concept of the modern centralized state does
not make sense of early modern institutions. Mental institutions like Bedlam often developed
early out of medieval hospitals; unlike leper houses, they attempted cures and declared
patients recovered. Confinement of the mad is also more varied, more historically continuous,
and more complicated in its representations, aims, and consequences than Foucault or
Showalter allows. But Foucault's intuitions about the transformation of the madman from
supernatural voyager to secular case study are useful, as are Showalter's analyses of th
associations among women, madness, and sexuality which developed in representations o
madwomen. For criticism of Foucault by an historian, see H. C. Erik Midelfort, "Madness a
Civilization in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal of Michel Foucault" in After the Reform
tion: essays in honor ofJ. H. Hexter, Barbara C. Malament, ed. (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsy
vania Press, 1980), pp. 247-66. For criticism of Showalter by an historian of medicine, s
Nancy Tomes, "Historical Perspectives on Women and Mental Illness" in Women, Health, an
Medicine in America: A Historical Handbook, Rima D. Apple, ed. (New York: Garland, 1990), p
143-71. I am grateful to Nancy Tomes for allowing me to read her review essay in manuscri
form before its publication.
1I See especially pages 45-55 in Judith S. Neaman, Suggestion of the Devil: The Origins of
Madness (New York: Anchor Books, 1975), a study of the medical, theological, legal, and soc
contexts of madness in the Middle Ages. See also Penelope Doob, Nebuchadnezzar's Children
Conventions of Madnes.s in Middle English Literature (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), ch
1; and MacDonald, Mvystical Bedlam, pp. 3-4.

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tures); and from the sheerly physical (as do Jor

Napier and John Hall in their diagnoses of epi
ders), and began to try to map the normal, "n
secular human subject. Splitting the superna
attempting to define what remained, the perio
from body, man from woman, insanity from
types of aberrance such as poverty, heresy, an
linked aspects of this multifaceted process unf
choly, hysteria, and witchcraft, in medical an
drama.
In his A Treatise of Melancholy Timothy Bright (at the time a doctor and
subsequently an Anglican priest) provides elaborate classifications of mad-
ness and recommendations for treatment that serve, by complex distinc-
tions between the spiritual and the psycho-physiological, to subordinate the
former. The treatise is written in the form of a letter to a male friend,
addressed as "M", who is suffering from what we would call depression.
Designed to cure M, the letter advises him on how to distinguish between
spiritual doubt and the disease of natural melancholy. Spiritual doubt,
caused by the sense of sin and the incomprehensible and inexpressible loss
of God's favor, is to be cured by penitence, prayer, and faith. Spiritual
consolation is the subject of the longest of the treatise's forty-one chapters.12
The rest of the treatise outlines an etiology of melancholy that explicates the
elaborate interactions between the soul, mind, passions, and body, on the
one hand, and, on the other, the animal spirits that unify them. Natural
depression is caused by the unnatural excess or combustion of natural
melancholy, the cold dry humor or black bile that, when burned, causes
such symptoms as passivity, unsociability, fury, stupidity, paranoia, lust,
anger, mania, but especially sorrow and fear. Bright's recommended treat-
ment (remarkably familiar) is healthy diet, exercise, sleep, and good friends.
In Bright's treatise, however, the careful distinctions between spiritual
and physiological melancholy repeatedly collapse. Both states are charac-
terized by the same symptoms: hallucinatory terror and unreasonable
sadness. Natural melancholy predisposes one to spiritual doubt while spir-
itual doubt exacerbates the pathology of the black bile. Both the medical
therapy, based on diet and rest, and the spiritual cure, dependent on faith
and grace, are designed to relieve the loss of self-worth that characterizes
equally both forms of the disease. The effect is to merge the two kinds of
melancholy and to subordinate the spiritual causes and cure to the psycho-
logical and physiological ones. The gender of M, the respectful scholarly
tone of Bright's letter/treatise, and the identification of the disease with
spiritual doubt all point to the associations of melancholy with the fashion-
able, the upper class, the literate, the masculine-associations that become
yet more prominent in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).
While Bright's treatise strives unsuccessfully to distinguish spiritual guilt
from natural melancholy, Edward Jorden's landmark treatise, A Briefe
Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother, sets out to distinguish
bewitchment from insanity (and, indirectly, to legitimize licensed physi-
12 In the original edition of Bright (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1586), as in the 1969
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum facsimile, this chapter, number 36, pages 207-42, is misnumbered
chapter 30.

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cians). It is directed atJorden's fellow members of the

who, as trained and experienced doctors are, he claims
what is naturall, what not naturall, what prete
supernaturall,"'3 and who might therefore be called u
been, to testify on the status of the victim's symptoms in
symptoms are diagnosed as natural in origin, the resu
accused witch is acquitted (as over half were'4); if the
natural, she (or, infrequently, he) is convicted. The di
one to make because the symptoms of bewitchment a
tical. Hysteria was caused, traditional medicine believed
the diseased and wandering womb, and hence it was pr
exclusively a disease of women: "The passiue condit
subiect vnto more diseases and of other sortes and natures then men are:
and especially in regarde of that part from whence this disease which we
speake of doth arise," Jorden declares.'5 One internal cause of the disease,
Jorden claims with some reticence, is retention of menstrual blood or sperma
(which women were believed to have) due to sexual frustration or the
suppression of the "flowers," the menstrual periods. The origin of the
fantastic and disconnected symptoms of the disease-swooning, paralysis,
choking, convulsions, numbness, delirium, epilepsy, headaches-is the wild
peregrinations of the uncontrollable uterus and its capacity to corrupt all
the parts of the body. One recommended cure is marriage, which institutes
regular sexual relations and thus aids in evacuation of fluids and brings the
wild uterus under a husband's control. In spite of the tendency of such an
analysis to identify hysteria as a disease of women, Jorden does not explicitly
draw this conclusion and refers without comment (as do other writers) to
men who suffer from "the mother."'6
This association of hysteria with women, especially women of the upper
classes, incipient in the early modern period, is present as well in Robert
Burton's compendious Anatomy of Melancholy. As the all-male frontispiece of
the book suggests, Burton associates melancholy especially with male schol-
ars, philosophers, and geniuses like Democritus and himself, although its
causes and symptoms are multitudinous and its sufferers are everywhere.
But when he defines the "Symptomes of Maides, Nunnes, and Widowes
melancholy," he associates this type with "fits of the mother," which he
represents as linked with marital, sexual, and class status, associated with
sexual frustration, and cured by sexual satisfaction: "For seldome shall you
see an hired seruant, a poore handmaid, though ancient that is kept hard
to her worke, and bodily labour, a course country wench troubled in this
kinde." Those who are "prone to the disease" are "noble virgins, nice
gentlewomen, such as are solitary and idle, live at ease, lead a life out of
action and imployment, that fare well in great houses and Ioviall companies,
13 Jorden's treatise (London: Iohn Windet, 1603) is available in a 1971 facsimile reprint from
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; quotation at fol. C r. See Michael MacDonald's reprint ofJorden's
pamphlet in Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: EdwardJorden and the Mary Glover Case
(London: Routledge, 1991).
14 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribners, 1971), pp. 451-52.
15 fol. B1 r.
16 fols. F4r, G3r, F4v-G1r, H1r. Jorden is the first to find the source of hysterical symptoms
in the brain as well as in the uterus. See Ilza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 122-23.

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ill-disposed peraduenture of themselues, and n

resistance, discontented otherwise, of weake judg
subject to passions." Like Jorden, Burton rec
"remedy."17
Jorden's Discourse not only aims to forestall m
witchment but also to expose "impostures" who o
symptoms. Reginald Scot's ironically titled and co
erie of Witchcraft (1584) is written by this Justic
supernatural powers of witches themselves, attr
cluding their voluntary confessions, to the effects
This diagnosis, of course, has the effect of contin
witchcraft by medicalizing witches' behavior. (W
secularized when its disposition was consigned
statute.) Samuel Harsnett (an ambitious chaplin t
the established church's coordinated campaign ag
exorcists in his A Declaration of Egregious Popish
attacks illegal Catholic exorcism rituals, exposing
orcism as instigated insanity-fraud.18 These cont
why the drama of the period often focuses on dis
and actual madness and represents tests, like Cla
uncover fraud.19 While witchcraft prosecutions
England until 1680, these treatises and others fu
behavior of witches and the bewitched and to call
these areas-bewitchment, possession, witchcra
psychological alternative to conditions formerly
origin and treatment.
On the new stages of the public theaters, Shake
revising classical and Senecan tragedy, in Hamlet
shapes a new language for madness and provides
redefinition.20 The plays, by representing both m
reading madness, theatricalize and disseminate th
that the treatises theorize. In the drama, as in the
is diagnosed by those who observe it-both specia
17 The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is. With all the Kindes, Cau
Severall Cures of it, 4th ed. (Oxford: J. Lichfield, 1632), pp
MacDonald's statistics, although far larger numbers and perce
to report distress in connection with courtship, love, sex, an
these sufferers were untitled (Mystical Bedlam, Table 3.6
aristocratic women suffered less stress in matters of courtsh
little or no choice in the matter.
18 For discussion of the political climate that produced Jorden's and Harsnett's pamphlets in
1603, see Thomas, pp. 482-86; Stephen Greenblatt, "Shakespeare and the Exorcists" in
Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 94-128; MacDonald, Witchcraft, pp. vii-lxiv.
19 Two other plays of the period that contain scenes in which characters undergo a test for
madness are Dekker's The Honest Whore, Part I (1604) and Middleton and Rowley's The
Changeling (c. 1623).
20 Ascriptions of madness occur elsewhere in Shakespeare, beginning with Titus Andronicus,
The Comedy of Errors, and Twelfth Night and concluding with the extended portrait of the Jailer's
Daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Her characterization has connections with Ophelia's and
with that of the madwomen and groups of madpersons in other Jacobean plays, for example,
Dekker's Honest Whore, Part I, Webster's Duchess of Malfi, Fletcher's The Pilgrim, Middleton and
Rowley's The Changeling. Such representations will be the subject of another essay.

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readings enable the drama's audience to participate with

guishing madness from sanity and from madness's lo
grace, bewitchment, possession, or fraud. Since madness, li
is extreme, dislocated, irrational, alienated-separated both
who performs and the spectators who watch-the diagnosi
Shakespeare's plays that make this diagnosis, the speech o
acters constructs madness as secular, socially enacted, gen
marked, and medically treatable.
Although the importance of madness in the period's drama, especially in

that of Shakespeare, has long been acknowledged, and although literary
historians have outlined its anatomy and traced its occurrences,21 there
have been few recent attempts to understand its rhetorical structure and
dramatic function in Shakespeare's tragedies, or its wider cultural signifi-
cance. Take, for example, responses to Ophelia and to Lear. A. C. Bradley
sums up, at the beginning of the twentieth century, two centuries of views
of and visual representations of Ophelia in madness as beautiful, sweet,
lovable, pathetic, and dismissible.22 More recently, feminist critics, challeng-
ing this interpretation, have read Ophelia's madness as either her liberation
from silence, obedience, and constraint or her absolute victimization by
patriarchal oppression.23 In responses to King Lear, traditional critics often
see Lear's madness as a means to illumination and self-knowledge.24 Sig-
nificant contemporary analyses, in opposing the humanist optimism of
these earlier interpretations, oddly pass over Lear's madness without notice.
Stanley Cavell's influential monograph, "The Avoidance of Love: A Read-
ing of King Lear," bypasses the long period when Lear is, as he puts it,
"stranded in madness." Stephen Greenblatt's important new historicist
essay, "King Lear and the Exorcists," reinterprets Edgar's feigned madness
but ignores Lear's actual madness. Jonathan Dollimore, rather than seeing
21 Robert Rentoul Reed, Jr., Bedlam on theJacobean Stage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1952); Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature
from 1580-1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1951); and Bridget Gellert Lyons,
Voices of Melancholy: Studies in literary treatments of melancholy in Renaissance England (London:
Routledge, 1971). The discussion closest to mine is Lillian Feder's analysis of Lear's madness
in Madness in Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), p. 6 and pp. 119-46.
22 Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1985), pp. 132-33. As a result of this attitude, Bradley did not give Ophelia's
mad scenes the detailed analysis that he is elsewhere known for.
23 These interpretations of Ophelia replicate feminist theorists' polarized interpretations of
the association between women and madness. For positive readings of the textual represen-
tations of the connection, see Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979); of Ophelia, see Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in
Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 103-4. For the negative aspects of
the connection, see Showalter, The Female Malady, and for an extended discussion of repre-
sentations of Ophelia, see Showalter, "Representing Ophelia: women, madness, and the
responsibilities of feminist criticism" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker
and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 77-94. Showalter discusses how
different periods represent Ophelia according to their stereotypes of female insanity.
24 See, among many examples, Robert Bechtold Heilman, This Great Stage: Image and
Structure in King Lear (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1948), pp. 173-223; Paul A.
Jorgensen, Lear's Self-Discovery (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), pp. 78-82.

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radical theatrical or social implications to Lear

"demented mumbling."25 None of these critics,
rent theoretical approaches, reads madness close
as I do here, how its linguistic construction,
dramatic functions participate in cultural needs
Shakespeare, prefiguring Foucault's analysis,
marily through a peculiar language more often
symptoms, stereotyped behaviors, or iconogr
characteristic speech is both something and n
incoherent. Spectators, onstage and off, read thi
"sense" of it, translating it into the discours
language of madness is characterized by frag
repetition, and most importantly by what I w
might instead be called "bracketing" or "ital
"beside themselves"; their discourse is not their own. But the voices that
speak through them are not (even in the case of Edgar's parody of posses-
sion) supernatural voices but human ones-cultural ones perhaps. The
prose that is used for this mad speech (although it includes embedded songs
and rhymes) implies disorderly shape,28 associates madness with popular
tradition, and contributes to its colloquial, "quoted" character. These
quoted voices, however, have connections with (or can be interpreted to
connect with) the mad characters' pre-mad gendered identity and history,
their social context and psychological stresses-as well as with larger themes
of the plays and of the culture. The alienated speech allows psychological
plausibility, thematic resonance, cultural constructions, and social critique.
Using it, Shakespeare represents distinctions between female hysteria and
feigned male melancholy in Hamlet, between supernatural witchcraft and
natural alienation in Macbeth, and between feigned possession and natural
madness in King Lear.
Onstage characters mediate this pregnant, mad discourse, showing us
how to translate it in ways made explicit by the anonymous Gentleman in
25 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge In Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.

Press, 1987), pp. 39-124, esp. pp. 50, 74, and 77); Greenblatt (cited in n. 18, above), pp.
94-128; Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and
his Contemporaries (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 193.
26 For Foucault, language constitutes madness; "Language is the first and last structure of
madness" (p. 100 [cited in n. 10, above]). Since madness is unreason, the "delirious discourse" (p.
99) that constitutes it is the inverse of reason but, in effect, identical with it. It involves
"sedimentation in the body of an infinitely repeated discourse" (p. 97), "the language of reason
enveloped in the prestige of the image" (p. 95). "Itis in this delirium, which is of both body and
soul, of both language and image, of both grammar and physiology, that all the cycles of
madness conclude and begin" (pp. 100-101).
27 I take the notion of italicized writing from Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plots and
Plausibilities in Women's Fiction" in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and
Theory, Elaine Showalter, ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 339-60. She extends Luce
Irigaray's analysis of women's special relation to the mimetic (in This Sex Which Is Not One) and
defines italics as a modality of intensity, intonation, and emphasis that characterizes women's
writing (p. 343).
28 A. C. Bradley notes, in Shakespearean Tragedy, that Shakespeare invariably uses prose to
represent abnormal states of mind like madness or Lady Macbeth's somnambulism (pp.
335-37). I am indebted to Lars Engle for bringing this discussion to my attention.

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Hamlet who introduces Ophelia, Shakespeare's fir

madness":
She ... 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 yawn 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.
(4.5.6-13)29
The speech here described is painful, unshaped un-sense that can be

"botched" up into shape by an audience's perceptions. Ophelia's alienated
discourse invites a psychological, thematic, and gendered interpretation. It
resituates sacred material in a secular, psychological context, and she and
Hamlet act out distinctions between feigned and actual madness and be-
tween rational and mad suicide, distinctions that the culture was gradually
establishing.
Ophelia's madness is represented almost entirely through fragmentary,
communal, and thematically coherent quoted discourse. Through it, rituals
elsewhere involving the supernatural are appropriated and secularized.
Ophelia recites formulas, tales, and songs that ritualize passages of trans-
formation and loss-lost love, lost chastity, and death. These transitions are
alluded to in social formulas of greeting and leave-taking: "Well, God dild
you," "Good night, ladies, good night" (11. 42, 73); in religious formulas of
grace and benediction: "God be at your table!" "God 'a' mercy on his soul!
/ And of all Christian souls, I pray you" (11. 44, 198-99); in allusions to folk
legends or tales of daughters' metamorphic changes in status: tales of the
"owl [who] was a baker's daughter" (11. 42-43) and of the master's daughter
stolen by the steward.
Her songs likewise enact truncated rites of passage. Love and its loss are
embodied in the song of the "truelove," imagined with a cockle hat, staff,
and sandals, all icons of his pilgrimage. She sings of Valentine's Day loss of
virginity when a maid crosses a threshold both literal and psychological:
"Then up he rose and donned his clothes / And dupped the chamber door,
/ Let in the maid, that out a maid / Never departed more.... / Young men
will do't if they come to't, / By Cock, they are to blame" (11. 52-55, 61-62).
This imagined deflowering preempts and precludes a marriage ritual. The
other songs mourn a death and represent the concrete markers of a spare
funeral ritual-a flaxen poll, a bier, 'a stone, no flowers. They enable
Ophelia to mourn her father's death, enact his funeral, encounter his dead
body, and find consolation for her loss: "He is gone, he is gone, / And we cast
away moan" (11. 196-97). Into this central loss and its rituals, Ophelia's other
losses or imagined losses-of lover, of virginity, of "fair judgement"-are
absorbed. Her distribution of flowers to the court is an extension of her
29 The phrase "document in madness" occurs at 4.5.178. Other mad characters are given
equally precise and explicit introductions: see the conversation between Lady Macbeth's
waiting woman and the doctor (5.1.1-20) and Edgar's commentary as he disguises himself as
Poor Tom in Lear (2.3.1-21).

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quoted discourse, an enacted ritual of dispers

deflowering, and death. A secularized cultura
mourning is enacted through Ophelia's alienated
Ophelia's madness, as the play presents it, begin
ways that later stage representations of Ophelia
exaggerate.31 Her restlessness, agitation, shifts o
nods and gestures" (1. 11) suggest the spasms of
madness is exhibited by the body as well as in s
equally convulsive, blend together: Ophelia "b
enviously at straws" (11. 5-6). The context of her
later, is sexual frustration, social helplessness, a
women's bodies. The content of her speech refle
anguished response to Ophelia as a "documen
and affliction, passion, hell itself, / She turns to
187-88)-shows how the reading of madness's self
theticize the condition, mitigating both its s
aspects. In a similar fashion Gertrude narrates O
natural, and eroticized, foreshadowing later rep
resentations of female hysterics as sexually fru
luring. The representation of Ophelia implicitly
reading madness as gender-inflected.
Gender distinctions likewise begin to take shape
Hamlet and Ophelia. Although Ophelia in her
serve as a double for Hamlet during his absence
the play,32 Hamlet's madness is in every way con
no doubt, to emphasize the difference between f
His discourse, although witty, savage, and chara
and bizarre references, almost never has the "qu
alized quality of Ophelia's-as we are instruct
though it lacked form a little, / Was not like m
icantly, the one time it is "like madness"-that i
after the encounter with his father's ghost, wh
reenter the human, secular world of his friend
words" (1.5.133) that he utters to effect this tr
and social formulas for parting which are incoh
And so, without more circumstance at all,
I hold it fit that we shake hands and part:
You, as your business and desire shall point
30Joan Klein, "'Angels and Ministers of Grace': Hamlet,

156-76, reads Ophelia's madness closely and attends to the cu
whereas she sees Ophelia's role as providential, as a min
references as split off from their theological context in her m
devoted to Ophelia's speeches has been directed toward ident
especially the "truelove," and determining to which charact
analysis suggests that it is not possible to pinpoint a sing
discourse's referents are multiple and are both personal and
Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare: A Critical History (Cam
1967), pp. 131-56, for a summary of commentary.
31 Cf. Showalter, Female Malady (cited in n. 10, above).
32Joan Klein sees Ophelia as Hamlet's surrogate and m
mirroring aspects of Hamlet's melancholy (pp. 11-12), but I
in Gilbert and Gubar's sense, acts out what is repressed in

78.92.24ff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
For every man hath business and desire

Such as it is, and for my own poor part,
Look you, I'll go pray.
(11. 127-32)
After this moment of dislocation he announces a plan to feign madness, to

"put an antic disposition on" (1. 172); and he is able to "go in together" (1.
186) with his friends, reuniting himself with the world of human fellowship
and sanity, although he is himself marked by the remembrance of the
Ghost's "commandment" (1. 102).
The stylistic distinction between Hamlet's feigned madness and Ophelia's
actual madness is emphasized by other distinctions. Henceforth in the play,
Hamlet is presented as fashionably introspective and melancholy while
Ophelia becomes alienated, acting out the madness Hamlet only plays at.
Whereas her madness is somatized and its content eroticized, Hamlet's
melancholy is politicized in form and content. Caused purportedly by
Claudius's usurpation of the throne and by his father's commandment, it
manifests itself in social criticism, and it is viewed as politically dangerous.
Ophelia must be watched, contained within the family, within the castle;
Hamlet must be first contained and later expelled to England to be mur-
dered. By acting out the madness Hamlet feigns and the suicide that he
theorizes, the representation of Ophelia absorbs pathological excesses open
to Hamlet and enables his reappearance as a sane, autonomous individual
and a tragic hero in the last act. There he appears detached from family and
from sexuality, seemingly freed from passivity and loss of control, capable
of philosophical contemplation and revenge, worthy a spiritual epitaph and
a soldier's funeral; his restored identity is validated-symbolically as well as
literally-over Ophelia's grave: "This is I, / Hamlet the Dane" (5.1.257-58).
The contrast between Ophelia's mad suicide and Hamlet's contemplated
one represents in drama the distinction the period was required to make
between calculated suicide (felo-de-se), a religious sin and a civil crime, and
insane self-destruction (non compos mentis). When the act was judged self-
murder, the deceased's property was seized by the state and Christian burial
was not encouraged.33 Madness, however, rendered suicide innocent and
permitted conventional inheritance and burial. The secularization of sui-
cide and that of madness reinforced each other. The play enacts these
distinctions without choosing sides. Whereas Hamlet's calm contemplation
of suicide would render the act on his part a sin (of despair) and a crime (as
he recognizes with his reference to the "canon 'gainst self-slaughter"
[1.2.132]), Ophelia's suicide is described by Gertrude as accidental ("an
envious sliver broke" [4.7.173]), passive, involuntary, mad. In England in
the period, drowning was the most common means of suicide for women
and the cause of death that made distinctions between accident and volition
33 Some form of Christian burial might be possible, even in cases of suicide; cf. Michael
MacDonald, "Ophelia's Maimed Rites," SQ, 37 (1986), 309-17, esp. pp. 314-15. For other
discussions of suicide, see Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam (cited in n. 4, above), pp.
132-38; "The Inner Side of Wisdom: Suicide in Early Modern England," Psychological Medi-
cine, 7 (1977), 565-82, esp. pp. 566-67; "The Secularization of Suicide in England 1660-
1800," Past and Present, 111 (May 1986), 52-70; see also Michael MacDonald and Terence R.
Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, forth-
coming).

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most difficult.34 The play keeps various possibili

trude's representation of Ophelia's death neither
grounds nor explicitly condones it on medical/leg
narrates it without interpretation as a beautiful, "
and purification, the mad body's inevitable retur
Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaidlike awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element.
(11. 175-80)35
Later the issue of Ophelia's death is reopened when the lower-class

gravedigger and the priest skeptically challenge the "crowner's" warrant
and argue that it is aristocratic prerogative that permits Ophelia's Christian
burial.
In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth's suicide has none of the purifying and invol-
untary aspects of Ophelia's, and its meaning is not interrogated. But it
occurs following a state of gendered alienation represented through quoted
discourse with similarities to Ophelia's. The alienation of Lady Macbeth in
sleepwalking is, like Ophelia's, psychologized, represented by means of
quoted speech, read by representatives of the community, associated with
symbolic purification, and it culminates in suicide. Her breakdown embod-
ied in sleepwalking is contrasted with Macbeth's enraged, bloody, "valiant
fury" ("Some say he's mad" [5.2.13]). But the division between her powerful
will in the early acts of the play and her alienated loss of it in the sleep-
walking scenes, her connections with and dissociation from the witches, and
their bifurcated representation all construct-and blur-other distinctions
associated with madness: those between supernatural and natural agency,
diabolic possession and human malevolence.
Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking, like Ophelia's madness, occurs after an
absence from the stage, is presented as a sharp break with earlier appear-
ances, and is introduced by an onstage spectator. When sleepwalking, Lady
Macbeth quotes, in the form of proverbial commonplaces ("Hell is murky"
[5.1.38]) and chilling pseudo-nursery rhymes ("The Thane of Fife had a
wife. Where is she now?" [11. 44-45]), her own earlier words (or perhaps
thoughts) and Macbeth's. She refers to Duncan's murder, Banquo's ghost,
and the death of Lady Macduff all in the mode of advice and comfort to
Macbeth ("No more o' that, my lord, no more o' that" [1. 46]). She narrates
Macbeth's bloody acts, talks directly to him although he is not present, and
acts out her own complicity by "washing" her hands to remove the smell and
sight of the blood that taints them. This quotation has the effect of distanc-
ing the discourse from its speaker and inviting a reading. But it is less
communal and thematic, more personal and psychologized than Ophelia's.
The doctor explicitly reads Lady Macbeth's state as religious despair, not as
demonic possession or physical breakdown-in Bright's terms, as spiritual
34 MacDonald, "Ophelia's Maimed Rites," p. 311, and "Inner Side of Wisdom," p. 567.
35 Immersion is both conventional to the iconography of madness and a traditional cure for
it. Cf. Foucault (cited in n. 10, above), pp. 162, 166; Basil Clarke, Mental Disorder in Earlier
Britain: Exploratory Stdie.s (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 1975), pp. 229-30.

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rather than natural melancholy: "More needs she the

physician" (1. 77).
The witches and Lady Macbeth, as Peter Stallybrass ha
indirectly identified with each other by their gender, by t
symbolism of the play, and by their parallel roles as catal
actions. They function as cultural scapegoats for the unna
der, and violence let loose. But the play also implies contras
Macbeth and the witches, and these produce disjunctio
natural and the supernatural. The witches' supernatural am
trasted with the "natural" ambiguity of Lady Macbeth's sle
In their early appearances they are described as ambig
female, as on the earth but not of it; they speak equivocally
Lady Macbeth, when sleepwalking, is in a state that combine
sleep" with "the effects of watching" (5.1.11-12); "Her eye
their sense are shut" (11. 26-27). The witches are dramatiz
with some of the conventional accoutrements of witchcraft
submission to Hecate, spells, potions, fortune-telling, and
juring. In contrast Lady Macbeth's attempted (and unsucce
is to spirits that seem more natural than supernatural: they
thoughts" and "wait on nature's mischief" (1.5.41, 50). S
directly for help to harm others as witches typically do,
perversion of her own emotions and bodily functions: "fill
/ Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood" (11. 42-43). In con
plot to cause the magical kinds of harm to others convent
with witches' maleficium: interference with livestock, weat
sexuality.
The witches are, then, ambiguously associated with and dissociated from
Lady Macbeth.37 Their own representation is likewise bifurcated. They are
ambiguously "natural" and supernatural. They are represented partly as
the disgruntled outcasts of Scot's Discouerie, partly as the agents of harmful
activities like those charged in English witch trials, and partly as devil-
possessed like the witches described by Continental witch-mongers in the
Malleus Maleficarum (c. 1486). In the opening scenes they seem to invite
Scot's psychological interpretation (statistically supported by Alan Macfar-
lane's social, structural analysis38); they appear to be frustrated, melancholic
women who, on the margins of society, get back at those who have disre-
garded them by muttering curses and plotting revenges-"I'll do, I'll do,
36 "Macbeth and witchcraft" in Focus on Macbeth, John Russell Brown, ed. (London: Rout-
ledge, 1982), pp. 189-209.
37 I see the relationship between the witches and Lady Macbeth as more ambiguous and
unstable than does Janet Adelman ("'Born of Woman': Fantasies of Maternal Power in
Macbeth" in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, Marjorie Garber, ed.
[Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987], pp. 90-121). I do not see their relationship as
an "alliance" (pp. 97, 98) either literal or symbolic, nor do I find the witches or Lady Macbeth
as unstintingly malevolent or powerful as Adelman does. In fact the witches wish Macbeth to
fail while Lady Macbeth wishes him to succeed, and their relation to the supernatural is quite
different from hers. Both the witches and Lady Macbeth lose what power they have by the end
of the play, though Adelman never discusses the implications of Lady Macbeth's somnambu-
lism and suicide. Whatever power each has exists only contingently; neither the witches nor
Lady Macbeth have agency or control except through Macbeth.
38 Witchcraft n1 Tudor and Stuart England: A regional and comparatlie study (London: Routledge,
1970).

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and I'll do" (1.3.10)-and hence attracting blam

ever, they do have familiars and seem capable o
are not represented merely as social misfits. In
and 4.1), although their theatrical power is di
endowed with all the paraphernalia of demonic
tal witchlore. They serve Hecate (in what may b
ean addition), use illusion to influence Macbeth,
the noxious parts of animals (and humans).39 M
their "profess[ed]" supernatural powers (4.1.5
representations of an alienated Lady Macbeth an
uously connected with each other, is to create a c
malevolence in the play, which blurs the bound
supernatural agency, among witchcraft of Engl
antisocial behavior, and madness. This continuum
ask of the play just as the period (through wi
through reading madness) was asking: who is to b
source of harm and evil? The questions produce
ible answers, as they did in the period. The conti
the question of agency in the play as it blurs the
status of "witches." It reproduces the period's "h
dictory belief systems and conflicting attributio
God and the devil, madwomen and witches, cast
tyrants.
To understand the complicated responses and flexible practices that such

uncertainty created, and to place Shakespeare's tragedies against contem-
porary attempts to categorize madness, it is helpful to look briefly at the
medical practice of Richard Napier and at the 1598 and 1624 Bedlam
censuses. Napier was a doctor, a minister, and an astrologer who from 1597
to 1634 treated about sixty thousand patients in Great Linford in northern
Buckinghamshire, taking notes on each consultation. Two thousand and
thirty-nine of these patients from all social classes consulted him for mental
disorders, and these cases are analyzed in the epidemiology of mental
disorder constructed by Michael MacDonald in Mystical Bedlam: Madness,
Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England. Thanks to MacDonald's
superb, detailed, and gendered analysis, Napier's practice becomes a site
where definitions, distinctions, and gender-coding in mental ailments can
39 Thomas, in chapter 14 of his book (cited in n. 14, above), discusses how Continental views
of witchcraft, conceived as a heresy marked especially by a pact with the devil, were only
gradually and incompletely filtered into England, where witchcraft was defined more usually
as harmful activities. The fact that the witches in Macbeth are also called "weird women" (3.1.2)
and compared with "elves and fairies" (4.1.42) emphasizes their shifting representations. If
Hecate and the songs from Middleton's The Witch were later interpolations, somewhat at odds
with the earlier portrayal of the witches, this strengthens my claim that the witches are
ambiguously portrayed, reflecting the conflicting ideas about witches in the period. For
arguments that 3.5.39-43 and 4.1.125-32 are interpolations, see Macbeth, The Arden Shake-
speare, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1951), pp. xxxv-xxxviii. That the witches are
dramatically more powerful early in the play when presented more naturalistically may also be
connected to the weakening of beliefs in possession and witchcraft in England.

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be explored. Like theorists and playgoers, Napier str

between the similar symptoms caused by possession,
mental or physical disorders; he worked hard to do so b
loss.40 His cures, designed to fit the disorder, were e
medical, astrological, and spiritual; to some patients he g
purges, to a few amulets or prayers or exorcisms.
Women consulted Napier for all causes more often tha
78.8 men to 100 women); they consulted him more for
than did men (ratio: 58.2 men to 100 women, similar to
England today) and reported suffering almost twice as
(ratio: 52.3 men to 100 women). Most of Napier's female
suffered mental distress and depression from the same
(23.6 percent), marital problems (17.6 percent), berea
cent), and debt (12.9 percent).4' The reasons why women
sented in Napier's practice, especially in consultations f
are as complex and difficult to analyze as why women v
than men do today and report more depression. Then
connected with their vulnerability to diseases of the re
their need therefore to see doctors more, and the stres
under patriarchy puts on them.42
However, although more women came to Napier wi
mental distress, there is not much difference in the perc
numbers of men and women identified as suffering
mental disturbance-i.e., madness. (Similarly, recent f
historians and sociologists show that while, today, wome
for depression, insomnia, and other imprecisely identifie
distress, they do not suffer from extreme pathological
phrenia more often than do men and, contrary to earli
more likely than men to be institutionalized for menta
40 MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, pp. 189-217. John Hall, a successful d

the same time as Napier (1600-1635) in nearby Warwickshire and w
more Puritan in his religious beliefs, and more of an apothecary and le
Napier, treated a similar range of disorders. Analysis of his casebooks
presented similar symptoms of mental disorder in similar ratios.
(included in Harriet Joseph, Shakespeare's Son-in-law: John Hall, Man
Conn.: Archon Books, 1964]), Hall treated 70 men and 109 wome
percent) and 39 of the women (or 22 percent) showed signs of emotio
in John G. Howells and N. Livia Osborn, "The Incidence of Emo
Seventeenth-Century Medical Practice," Medical History, 14 (1970), 19
based on only a small sample of Hall's cases, which were published to
for purges, not to explicate his patients' symptoms. "Emotional disor
broadly defined by Howells and Osborn than by MacDonald.
41 MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, pp. 35-40, 72-75.
42 MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, pp. 35-40; Tomes (cited in n. 10, a
discussion of the gender distribution of psychiatric illnesses in twenti
Michael Shepherd, Brian Cooper, Alexander Brown, and Graham Kalto
in General Practice (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 164-66; for
essays cited in note 44, below. The self-reporting and diagnosis of wo
depend on a difficult-to-unravel conjunction of factors including vulne
ailments, women's self-images, gender-role socialization, medicine's co
the nature of diagnoses, and wider cultural trends.
43 Tomes, pp. 146-47, and her numerous sources, especially Noree
Ravid, "Comnmunity Surveys: Sex Differences in Mental Illness,"

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Donald's raw statistics show a similar pattern. P

symptoms-symptoms associated with mania as
designated by terms like "mad," "lunatic," "
"furious," "frantic"-are rare. There are more cases for women in almost
every category (because there are more women in the sample), but the
percentages are virtually identical and the absolute numbers not that dif-
ferent. For example, of the 2,039 patients, 34 of the men (or 5 percent) and
54 of the women (or 4 percent) are designated "mad"; 25 of the men (or 3
percent) and 21 of the women (or 2 percent) as "lunatic." There is 1 man
with mania and 7 men and 3 women with frenzy. Men are more likely to be
designated melancholy or "mopish," a milder form of melancholy (in accord
with the early modern period's male coding of this disease-which is
re-gendered female in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), whereas
women more often "take grief," "grieve," and are more often "troubled in
mind"; both men and women are tempted to and attempt suicide in about
equal rates, but women are more often tempted to kill their children or,
uniquely, tempted to kill either their children or themselves.44 Napier never
identifies the fits of the mother as mental disturbance but connects it with
strictly physical symptoms like menstrual cramps. And "sexual urges" are a
symptom of only one (male) patient.45
In Napier's report of his practice, while women suffer more mental
disturbance than men, the gendering of types of madness is only hinted at,
foretold, much less apparent than in such dramas as Hamlet. What stands
out is Napier's attempts to categorize madness, to distinguish it from
supernatural visitations and from physical maladies. Another set of docu-
ments of the period also shows tentative movement toward division by
gender, but here, too, the reading must be cautious. These are the 1598 and
1624 censuses of Bedlam, included in visitation committee reports to
Bridewell Hospital, which administered the facility.46 The reports give the
names of the inhabitants and some of the following data: source of admis-
sion (from Bridewell, the lord mayor of London, or private parties); length
of stay (from Neme Baker, twenty-five years in the 1598 census, to Thomas
Denham, fourteen days in the 1624 census); source of maintenance (guilds,
Noreen Goldman, "Patterns of Diagnoses Received by Men and Women," both in The Mental
Health of Women, Marcia Guttentag, Susan Salasin, and Deborah Belle, eds. (New York:
Academic Press, 1980), pp. 31-55, 21-30.
44 Cf. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, pp. 243-45. Selected comparisons:
Males Females Totals

Symptoms N % N % N %
Melancholy 177 24 287 22 465 23
Mopish 160 21 187 15 347 17
Troubled in mind 257 34 458 36 717 35
Tempted to kill child 9 1 31 2 40 2
Tempted to kill child
or self 0 0 20 2 20 1
Tempted to kill self 37 5 102 8 139 7
Attempted suicide 17 2 29 2 46 2
Suicidal act 17 2 30 2 47 2
45 p. 244.
46 The two Bedlam censuses I cite are reproduced in Allderidge, "Management" (cited in n.
6, above), pp. 152-53, 158-60.

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individuals, parishes, colleges, other hospitals); indica

and context (in the 1598 census, when such information was more fre-
quently noted, inhabitants included "Welch Elizabeth", "Rosse an
Almeswoman", "Edmond Browne one of the Queenes Chappell", and
"Anthoney Greene fellow of Penbrooke Hall in Cambridge"). Both censuses
usually list patients with the longest tenure first, but the 1598 census is
divided between admissions from Bridewell and from elsewhere, and the
1624 census is divided up into men (18) and women (13), and comments are
made on the seriousness of the condition (probably because even at these
small numbers the place was overcrowded, and the committee wished to
reduce the number of those confined). The designations for the men speak
to their administrative status; they are termed "fitt to bee kepte," "not fitt to
bee kept," or to be sent to "some other hospitall," "home to his wife," "to
Hull from whence hee came." Only two of the men, who are "Idiots," have
their illness specified, and none are called "mad." In contrast the women are
explicitly characterized as "very ill," "madd," "very madd," "a mad woman,"
"something idle headed," "fell madd." (Eight of the 18 men are designated
fit to be kept and 9 to be sent elsewhere; 7 of the 13 women are to be kept
and 4 are to be removed to other care; the dispositions of 1 man and 1
woman are not specified.47) These no-doubt-unconsciously chosen desig-
nations suggest a tendency to identify the women with their illness and the
men with their institutional disposition.
While the stage does not associate madness more with one class or gender
than another, in King Lear, as in the records of Richard Napier and of
Bethlehem Hospital, madness and distress are conceived of as treatable
illnesses with mental and physical components. By underlining the distinc-
tion between Lear's natural madness and Edgar's feigned supernatural
possession and by including two cures, one physical (administered by a
doctor) and one mental (administered by Edgar, a layperson), the play
contributes to the secularization, psychologizing, and medicalization of
madness and extends conventions for representing it.
Edgar, victimized by his bastard brother, Edmund, assumes the speech of
demonic possession as a role-as a disguise.48 Quotation in his speech is, in
effect, quadrupled. Disinherited Edgar speaks in the voice of Poor Tom, the
Bedlam beggar, who speaks in the voice of the devil, who quotes Samuel
Harsnett's melodramatic exposure of the drama of bewitchment and exor-
cism.49 Tom's mad speech, like Ophelia's, is made up of quoted, that is
47 The removal of more men may merely indicate that the distribution of space in the facility
makes the confinement of similar numbers of men and women patients a convenience; hence
more men are designated removable. I cannot tell whether Bedlam was sex-segregated as some
later asylums were.
48 This use of madness as disguise derives perhaps from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and is
common in other Jacobean plays, for example The Changeling and The Pilgrim. William C.
Carroll, "'The Base Shall Top Th'Legitimate': The Bedlam Beggar and the Role of Edgar in
King Lear," SQ, 38 (1987), 426-41, analyzes the period's identifications of Tom o' Bedlams as
feigning, lower-class con men. While this may not be the only Poor Tom stereotype, it does add
associations with feigning at another level to Edgar's role-playing.
49 This is the point developed by Greenblatt in "Shakespeare and the Exorcists" (cited in n.

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culturally and psychologically resonant, fragm

porates differently inflected cultural voices.
ments-"Through the sharp hawthorn blows
mance-"But mice and rats, and such small deer, / Have been Tom's food
for seven long year"-formulaic commandments and proverbial sayings-
"obey thy parents; keep thy word's justice," "Keep thy foot out of brothels,
thy hand out of plackets" (3.4.45, 136-37, 79-80, 95-96). These quotations
transmit a theological discourse of sin and punishment in which Poor Tom
is an emblematic fallen Christian, a "servingman, proud in heart and mind,"
"hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness" (11. 84,
92-93). Embodying the seven deadly sins, especially those of pride and lust,
he represents, like traditional madmen, guilt over and punishments for
these sins; he is led by the "foul fiend" "through fire and through flame,
through ford and whirlpool, o'er bog and quagmire," and "eats the swim-
ming frog, the toad, the todpole, the wall-newt and the water" (11. 51-52,
127-28).
This mad discourse functions variously. It provides Edgar-as-Tom with a
coherent characterization by permitting him to express and conceal his
victimization and (it has been argued) his suppressed desire for self-pun-
ishment and revenge.50 It functions dramatically to trigger, mark, and
counterpoint the specific moment of Lear's own break with sanity, which
occurs decisively at his emotionally apt but logically groundless identifica-
tion with Poor Tom at line 62: "What, has his daughters brought him to this
pass?"51 The disguise allows the disinherited Edgar, by identifying with the
middling or lower sorts and by adopting their speech and beliefs, to
participate with the Fool and naked Lear in the reversals of class and status
that pervade the play. But always Edgar's quoted religious discourse is
rendered theatrical, both because the discourse is feigned and because it is
constructed through quotation of Samuel Harsnett, who himself narrates
possession as theatrical role-playing instigated by the suggestion and re-
hearsal of the exorcists. By appropriating for Poor Tom a "documented
fraud," the spuriousness of Edgar's madness is emphasized, possession and
divine retribution are mocked through mimicry, Lear's contrasting mad-
ness is marked as "natural," and the Church's attempt to outlaw exorcism is
furthered. At the same time, the surviving belief in possession, perhaps
18, above). Kenneth Muir, "Samuel Harsnett and King Lear," Review of English Studies, 2 (1951),
11-21, finds over fifty separate fragments from Harsnett embedded in the play, many of them
connected with the role of Poor Tom.
50Janet Adelman, in her introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1978), pp. 1-21, has a fine discussion of the role and
language of Poor Tom and the ways in which this disguise allows Edgar to protect and preserve
himself. In contrast, William Carroll sees the Poor Tom disguise as a source of pain and
suffering for Edgar as well as a release from them (p. 436).
51 Although my students have long been unable to identify this moment and have refused
to accept it as marking a decisive break with sanity, Lillian Feder (p. 132 [cited in n. 21, above]
and PaulJorgensen (p. 80 [cited in n. 24, above]) concur. The definitiveness of Lear's delusion
is emphasized by his four-times-repeated claim that Tom's daughters are to blame for his state
"Didst thou give all to thy daughters?" "What, has his daughters brought him to this pass?"
"Now . .. plagues ... light on thy daughters!" "Nothing could have subdued nature / To such
a lowness but his unkind daughters" (3.4.48, 62, 66-67, 69-70). This theatrical moment
manifests one of the places where the boundary between sanity and madness was defined and
crossed.

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especially prevalent among middle and lower ranks, is r

While Greenblatt sees these rituals as "emptied out,"52 I woul
in this mad discourse their sacred meaning is resituated
suffering, and punishment are understood within hu
parameters.
In stark contrast to Edgar's feigned delirium of sin, guilt, and divine
punishment, Lear's madness is staged as "natural," as psychologically en-
gendered, and as obsessed with secular revenge and justice. It is rooted in
obvious physical and psychological causes: his exposure to the cold and
storm in old age, his mistaken banishment of Cordelia, his other daughters'
betrayals, his encounter with Poor Tom. His alienation is rendered on a
continuum with his sanity from which it gradually emerges. He is meta-
phorically described by Kent as "mad" in the first scene, notes the onset of
delirium himself, specifies his malady with medical precision as "hysterica
passio"-the fits of the mother, defined, ingeniously, as his rising heart
rather than his wandering womb (2.4.55-56). As he loses control of his
children and his kingdom, he feels weak, vulnerable, a victim of feminine
and feminizing hysteria.53 But once he is beside himself, his madness grows
more aggressively satiric. He is restored to sanity by conventional remedies,
conventionally applied by a doctor-herbal medicine, sleep, clean gar-
ments, music, and the presence of Cordelia.
The construction of Lear's mad discourse, like that of Ophelia's, involves
fragmentation, formula, depersonalization, the intersection of communal
voices, and secularized ritual. Like Ophelia, he uses tags of social formulas
incongruously: "We'll go to supper i' th' morning," "Give the word," "Pull
off my boots: harder, harder: so" (3.6.83; 4.6.92, 173). But more often,
rather than being transected by quoted voices, Lear envisages hallucinatory
cultural dramas in which he is both narrator and participant. Whereas Poor
Tom acts out guilt by presenting himself as poor and persecuted, Lear
defends himself against guilt by acting as prosecutor: "cry / These dreadful
summoners grace" (3.2.58-59). His hallucinations of the rituals of secular
trial and judgment expose their fraudulence. His scenarios expose civil
punishment as fraudulent just as Edgar's Poor Tom role implicitly exposes
demonic punishment as fraud. In the enacted mock trial (found only in
Quarto Lear), Lear plays the judge who will "arraign" (3.6.20) his absent
daughters, Goneril and Regan, for their crimes against him while Edgar,
Kent, and the Fool serve asjury. But the ritual, like those in Ophelia's songs,
is aborted, and the judge humiliated, barked at by dogs (11. 61-62).
During Lear's encounter with Gloucester in 4.6, his identification with the
prosecutor can no longer protect him; he is given fantasy scenarios ofjustice
undone by the corruption of female sexuality and the complicity of the
judge. In his first fantasy Lear asjudge will "pardon that man's life" because
all are guilty of copulation centered in the "sulphurous pit" of female
52 Greenblatt, pp. 117, 119.

53 Coppelia Kahn, "The Absent Mother in King Lear" in Rewriting the Renaissance: The
Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilli-
gan, and NancyJ. Vickers, eds. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 33-49, argues that
Lear's madness results from his rage at maternal deprivation and that it enables him eventually
to accept his own vulnerability. While this argument seems partly valid, I see both the causes
and uses of Lear's madness as more complicated.

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sexuality, the domain to which the fiend is m

discourse (4.6.126-29). Whereas Edgar's fei
locates lust in himself-"[I] served the lust of m
act of darkness with her" (3.4.85-87)-Lear's
onto women and theirjudges. In Lear's second
reversals, the punisher and the punished b
constable who whips the whore "hotly lusts to us
he whips her (4.6.162). These fantasies simu
habit of persecuting others to conceal his ow
of the operations of a class-determined syste
the costumes that the period prescribed to ma
and punishment: "Through tattered clothes s
and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold
justice hurtless breaks; / Arm it in rags, a pyg
164-67). Withjustice presented, like the theate
fraudulent nature is revealed.
The impertinent madness of Lear, like that of Edgar and the Fool, serves,
as Robert Weimann suggests, to provide satiric "disenchantment" of con-
servative values and hierarchies supported by those in power: "The Prince
of Darkness is a gentleman" (3.4.141). Ophelia's madness, although Wei-
mann does not discuss it, functions similarly to disenchant domestic values:
she "marks" the falsehood of love, the emptiness of religious formulas, the
betrayal of men. She narrates the arbitrariness, instability, and corruption
of love and the family as Lear narrates those of justice and the state.54 But
the theatrical, fragmented, and psychologized discourse of madness, while
it allows these critiques, also italicizes and distances them.
Edgar in disguise not only provides critique and counterpoint but is the
vehicle of another inversion as he becomes a "philosopher" to King Lear
and caretaker for his father, Gloucester. With each, Edgar employs a
traditionally recommended remedy for delusion and despair, a strategy
that Burton and others record and which Foucault calls "continu[ing] the
delirious discourse."55 In this strategy the delusions of the mad are complied
with and extended through theatrical representation in order to undo
54 Weimann uses the range and scope of Hamlet's and Lear's mad speech to exemplify the
flexible alternation possible in Renaissance popular theater between the illusionistic locus
position, staging dialogue of the psychologically naturalistic character, and the non-illusionistic
platea position, staging monologue which draws on popular tradition, induces audience
identification, and permits social critique (Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater:
Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz [Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978], pp. 120-35 and 215-20). This flexibility also reveals "the
twofold function of mimesis ('enchantment' and 'disenchantment'), which we have seen to be so
fundamental a part of traditional popular drama" (p. 132). More recently, in "Bifold Authority
in Shakespeare's Theatre," SQ, 39 (1988), 401-17, Weimann again uses the "impertinent"
language of Hamlet and Lear to define the bifold authority generated by the language and play
space of the Elizabethan theater (pp. 410, 416). This highly particularized form of discourse
perhaps cannot stand as the theatrical norm, but Weimann's analysis does get at the combi-
nation of individual psychology and cultural discourse that I argue characterizes this speech.
Although Weimann (curiously) does not discuss Ophelia's madness, it functions in many of the
same ways. She too speaks impertinently, proverbially, bawdily, disturbingly; she too is both
actress and character, partly an object of the audience's gaze, partly a spokesperson for their
contempt for Claudius and his court. Ophelia, as much as (or perhaps even more than) Lear,
"disrupts the authority of order, degree, and decorum" ("Bifold Authority," p. 417).
55 p. 188 (cited in n. 10, above).

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them. This strategy further naturalizes madness and

control while testifying to the real power of the
longstanding awareness of the theatricality of madn
lently extend the delusions of the mad to manipulat
The most frequently cited example of this is a story
who, believing himself dead, refused to eat. Friends
dead men and consumed a banquet in front of him to
dead eat; he then ate too and recovered. A more biza
a man who refused to urinate, believing that if he d
world; friends set fire to the house next door and p
it out lest the town burn. "So he pissed and was by th
Less ingenious strategies involve physicians or frien
complain of toads or snakes in their bellies by admi
slipping the animals into the vomit basin. Similarly
himself barked at by dogs, Edgar exorcises them for
which he impersonates a dog (3.6.64-72). Later
"trifle[s]" with his father's "despair" to "cure" it, en
mock' suicide and the mock exorcism of his (and Ed
save his father from actual suicide. In this perform
exorcism, the rituals of the supernatural are approp
and used by humans to reverse human self-alienatio
Renaissance treatises on melancholy, medicine, exor
Edgar's uses of the illogic of madness in the service of logic and sanity,
like Feste's claims that he but reads madness to exonerate himself from the
charge of being mad, demonstrate how the purpose of reading madness,
propounding definitions, and prescribing cures is usually to dissociate
oneself from the condition and to regulate its disruptiveness. In these
Shakespeare tragedies, as in the treatises and the medical practices, the
representation of madness permits a restoration of normality, a restoration
in which madmen and madwomen participate differently. The disguise of
Poor Tom is abandoned, Gloucester eschews suicide, and Lear is returned
to sanity. The mad women characters in tragedy, however, are not cured
but eliminated. Ophelia is reabsorbed into cultural norms by her narrated
drowning and her Christian burial. The report of Lady Macbeth's suicide,
abruptly announced in the play's final lines, reduces the supernatural to a
simile to vilify and dismiss her as a "fiendlike queen, / Who, as 'tis thought,
by self and violent hands / Took off her life" (5.8.69-71).
Likewise, in the culture, constructions of madness tended to support
established institutions in preserving the status quo. Preferred treatments
were those undertaken by Anglican ministers, not Catholic exorcists or
56 Clarke (cited in n. 35, above), p. 226, quoting Du Laurens. He describes such ingenious
cures as part of "the folk-lore tradition of the profession" (p. 222). He discusses (pp. 222-23,
226) cases cited by Levinus Lemnius in The Touchstone of Complexions (trans. Thomas Newton
[London: Thomas Marsh, 1576], pp. 150v-52r) and by M. Andreas Du Laurens in A Discourse
of the Preservation of the Sight: of Melancholike Diseases ... (trans. Richard Surphlet [London: Felix
Kyngston, 1599], pp. 100-40). See also Burton (cited in n. 17, above), pp. ii, 114-15, and
Jorden (cited in n. 13, above), chap. 7.

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Puritan enthusiasts, by licensed practitioners, no

ners tended to favor outcomes that sustained conventional social hierar-
chies, and these too had different impacts on men and women; Napier, fo
example, viewed wives who wanted to leave brutal husbands, children wh
resisted their parents, servants who did not obey their masters, as mental
unstable and was severe with them. But the mad could be recuperate
because they were not seen as inhuman; hence they were not usuall
isolated, confined, or ostracized. They might be subjected to purges an
bleeding (like all ill people), drugged sleep or music therapy, or might be
coaxed back, through their own delusions, into the rituals of everyday life
Such treatments, however, did not yet segregate them from human com
munity as did the eighteenth century's institutionalization, the nineteenth
century's "moral treatment," or the twentieth century's romanticization o
pharmacological normalization.
If the discourse of madness, in the short run, promoted normalization
and supported the status quo, in the long run it had the capacity to
contribute to changing constructions of the human and hence to cultural
change. The distinctions established in this discourse helped redefine the
human as a secular subject, cut off from the supernatural and incompre-
hensibly unstable and permeable, containing in itself a volatile mix of min
and body, of warring and turbulent elements: "For seeing we are not
maisters of our owne affections, wee are like battered Citties without walle
or shippes tossed in the Sea, exposed to all maner of assaults and daunger
even to the overthrow of our owne bodies."57 Such images opened up a new
range of questions about and possibilities for human beings.
The theater, by representing and disseminating madness, contributed t
its changing constructions and its destabilizing potential. Shakespearea
tragedy, drawn to madness perhaps because of its inherent theatricality,
represented madness by a conventionalized speech that was successful (an
imitated) by virtue of its excessiveness, its rich imagery and associations, it
verbal inventiveness, its multiple functions: psychological, thematic, satiri
theatrical. By providing a language for madness, the theater contributed t
the process whereby it was becoming a secular, medical, and gendere
condition. The Elizabethan theater is, at its origin, as C. L. Barber ha
suggested, a place apart, a space where the sacred is reconstituted in the
human,58 and madness is, as we have seen, one place where this reconsti-
tution is especially apparent. The secular human characters this sta
represents are inevitably gender- and class-specific in ways that the hierar
chical "dramatis personae" or "names of the actors," introduced in seven-
teenth-century editions, inscribe. Gender distinctions may be especial
rigid because of the absolute division between adult actors who play men
and boy actors who must self-consciously perform femininity, drawing on
gender stereotypes to do so-as the instructions to the Page in the Inductio
of The Taming of the Shrew suggest. This may be one reason why madness
shows signs of gender-markings in the theater earlier than in medic
treatises or in the visual arts. Even while representing stereotyped o
conservative formations, the theater may participate in change. As Steve
57 Jorden, fol. G2v.

58 With Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development (Berkeley
Univ. of California Press, 1986), pp. 20 ff.

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Mullaney has shown, it is a place apart from the establish

from the established church, situated in the Libertie
neighbors: taverns, bearbaitings, brothels, and the empty
Foucault (wrongly) imagines will soon fill up again w
constructing a language through which madness can be r
popular theater facilitated the circulation of the discours
language of madness, it encouraged its interrogation and
Although these Shakespeare plays represent madness
treat, italicize, or eliminate, and although the gender
initiate can still prove oppressive to women, their repre
ness can be vehicles for social critique achieved through u
tions or indecorous interventions by performers. Hamlet
and Lear's natural madness can be performed and read as
in Grigori Kozintsev's 1970 film of King Lear or in the
Moscow's 1989 production of Hamlet). Ophelia's madness
by an actress who might represent the hysterical femal
eroticized and aestheticized object of desire and repuls
agent of uncontrollable voice, desire, pain, and rage (as i
"Ophelie Song" [1989], an "opera minimal" derived
songs).60
The complexities of reading the discourse of madness in Shakespeare
and his culture reveal the difficulty and necessity of historicizing: that is, of
trying to understand one's own position and that of one's subject(s) in
today's culture in relation to the construction of the subject(s) that emerged
in early modern culture, of trying to tease out disjunctions and connections.
In particular this project reveals that the shape of gender difference cannot
be assumed but must always be reformulated in specific cultural and
historical contexts. Reading the discourse of madness provides powerful
lessons in the gradual and erratic progress of cultural change and in the
complex and not fully retrievable interactions between dramatic texts and
other cultural documents. The theater does not just reflect, contain, or
subvert the cultural realities in which it is embedded. But finding the right
metaphor for the relationship is hard. Perhaps, in the context of this essay,
it is appropriate to note that the playwright, like the mad, expresses inner
conflicts, quotes cultural voices, speaks through disguises, enacts emotions
visually and verbally, performs for diverse audiences, and is protected from
harm because playtexts are illusions. These playtexts, moreover, like other
"documents in madness," both do and do not belong to the authors who
generate them, and they are read, performed, and used by others in the
service of their own sanity.
59 The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1988), chap. 2; Foucault, pp. 3-7.
60 The Studio Theater performed this Hamlet at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, 12 February 1989. "Ophelie Song" was a co-production by Ange Magnetic and Mon
Oncle d'Amerique, collaborated on by French director Antoine Campo and American choreog-
rapher Clara Gibson Maxwell and produced in 1989 in Paris, in New York, and at the
Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

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"Documents in Madness": Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and

Early Modern Culture

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2870846

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Olivia: How now? Art thou mad?

If others had not been mad, then we should be.

HIS ESSAY BEGINS TO INVESTIGATE THE CONTINUITIES and discontinuities

I am indebted to the questions, comments, and suggestions of fellow participants in

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the most social of maladies to those who observe it

4 Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century

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Madness, a concept in transition in the per

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accounts are weakened by inadequate knowledge

In the early modern period the discourse of madness gained prominence

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tures); and from the sheerly physical (as do Jor

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cians). It is directed atJorden's fellow members of the

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ill-disposed peraduenture of themselues, and n

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readings enable the drama's audience to participate with

Although the importance of madness in the period's drama, especially in

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radical theatrical or social implications to Lear

25 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge In Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.

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Hamlet who introduces Ophelia, Shakespeare's fir

She ... speaks things in doubt

The speech here described is painful, unshaped un-sense that can be

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quoted discourse, an enacted ritual of dispers

30Joan Klein, "'Angels and Ministers of Grace': Hamlet,

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For every man hath business and desire

After this moment of dislocation he announces a plan to feign madness, to

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most difficult.34 The play keeps various possibili

Later the issue of Ophelia's death is reopened when the lower-class

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rather than natural melancholy: "More needs she the

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and I'll do" (1.3.10)-and hence attracting blam

To understand the complicated responses and flexible practices that such

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be explored. Like theorists and playgoers, Napier str

40 MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, pp. 189-217. John Hall, a successful d

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Donald's raw statistics show a similar pattern. P

Males Females Totals

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individuals, parishes, colleges, other hospitals); indica

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culturally and psychologically resonant, fragm

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especially prevalent among middle and lower ranks, is r

52 Greenblatt, pp. 117, 119.

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