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 Documents
in Madness,
summary of Thomas Nelly’s article

Create by: Virág Meiszter

Overview
• Warm-up questions • Shakespearean plays
• Introduction • Summary
• Century rundown • Comprehension check
• Elizabethian theatre
Introduction
• madness is an illness that to be understood must
be read, made sense of, and put into discussion
• madness and its theories have to be interpreted
in a particular "framework”:
• time, social environment, medical
knowledge, and historical influence
• Readers of madness also can be categorised:
• Reading it to disassociate or to
associate with it.
• This leaves us with the disqualification
of both parties as an interpreter
Warm-up questions
1. What supernatural thing was madness
repetitively confused with in the past?

2. What is the name of the famous hospital

in England, where insanity was treated?
 Century
rundown
Madness was experienced differently
over the years:

• Between 1580 and 1640:

• General fascination
• Misinterprated but theories
became more permanent
with time
• 16th – 17th century:
• Inntersection between
human and transcendent
• 18th century:
• Mark of unreason
• 19th century:
• Concept of hereditary illnesses
• Immortality
• 20th century:
• Rise of medical knowledge
• Chemical make-up of mental
disorders
• Anti–psychiatry movement
 Permanence of madness

Timothy Bright: Edward Jorden: Robert Burton:

A treatise of melancholie A Briefe Discourse of a Disease The Anatomy of Melancholy
(1586) Called the Suffocation of the (1621)
Mother (1603)
 Reginald Scot: Samuel Harsnett:
The Discouerie of Witchcraft He wrote A Declaration of
(1584) Egregious Popis Impostures
(1603)
 Napier's practice

Richard Napier was a doctor

who treated about 60 000
patients from all social classes
throughout his career, taking
notes for each one.

He alongside the Bedlam

Hospital focused on the
distinction of supernatural and
natural madness and the
division of gender.
Bedlam Hospital started accomodating
patients around 1330.

According to a 1598 visitation report:

• 20 inmates (11 female, 9 male)
Bedlam Hospital
• before Hamlet and Twelfth Night
According to a 1624 visitation report:
• 31 inmates
• overcrowded, filthy, and
mismanaged
The word Bedlam:
• became the code word for the
topic of madness
The hospitalisation process involved:
• the source of admission, length of
stay, source of maintenance, social
class and context, gender, and
seriousness of the condition
 Characters are inevitably
gender- and class-specific
Gender distinctions may be
rigid because of adult
actors playing men, and boy
actors playing women.
• It leads to the inevitable
use of gender
stereotypes

Elizabethan • A possible reason for

gender - markings earlier

Theatre
in the theatre than in the
medical field
Shakespearean
plays
New site to redefine madness and
gives it a new language
The one diagnosing madness in
the drama is the one watching the
play
Shakespeare’s way of constructing
madness is through the rhetorical
structure, rhetorical function, and
wider cultural significance
He uses alienated speech
as a way of showing
madness:

• It is characterised
by fragmentation,
obsession, and
repetition.

• It also allows • the voices he uses are in direct connection

psychological plausibility, with the characters.
thematic resonance, • The onstage characters clue us in on
cultural constructions, how to interpret the characters
and social critique
Hamlet
differentiating between female
hysteria and feigned male
melancholy

Ophelia:

• early interpretations of madness as

beautiful and pathetic, and later, as
either her liberation or victimization
• speech:
• painful, unshaped unease
formulas, songs, and tales
• shows love and loss, a
sense of mourning, and loss
of judgement and virginity
• Symbolism:
• flowers: love, deflowering, and
withering
• madness:
• gender-specific, later the representation
of female hysteria
• suggests "the fits of the mother„
• her gestures and speech blend together
Contrast between Ophelia's and Hamlet's Ophilia Hamlet
madness
alienated with acted contemplative with
• her madness serves as a double for out madness melancholy
Hamlet (when he is gone) somatized and politicized in form and
• Ophelia enables Hamlet's reappearance eroticized content
as sane
• Hamlet lacks Ophelia's ritualised quality must be watched, must be arrested and
contained within family exiled to be killed

• Contrast between the two types of

madnesses also represents the distinction
the period was required to make between
calculated suicide a religious sin, civil
crime, and insane self-destruction.
• In the case of Ophelia: gives
suspension
Macbeth
Lady Macbeth

• Speech patterns Distinctions between

• Quotes, nursery rimes supernatural
• More personal and witchcraft and
psychologized than Opilias’s. natural alienation
• Sleepwalk:
Rises question of
• Psychologised, associated
agency.
with symbolic purification
• Her breakdown is in contrast
with her anger
• Macbeth's suicide was ruled as
religious despair rather than
possession
 Macbeth’s connection to witches

• similarities:
• identified by gender, symbolism,
structure, and parallel roles
• scapegoats for illness,
unnaturalness, and uncontrolled
violence
Aim: To make a • differences: -
continuum of alienation • witches’ spiritual ambiguity in
and evil, and blur the contrast with Macbeth's
barrier between natural naturality
and supernatural • witches are dramatised,
stereotyped while Macbeth is
naturally human
• witches generally wish to hurt
people, Macbeth only wishes
the perversion of her own
emotions
 King Lear
Differentiating between feigned
possession and natural
madness
Contributes to the
medicalisation of madness
Madness is treatable, with
physical and mental elements
Contrast between Lear's and
Edgars madness
Edgar
• feigned delirium of sin, punishment, and
guilt
• exposes possession as fraud, he chose
madness himself
• speech:
• song fragments, sayings, bits of
romance, and quotes about
possession
• the references of possession, make
Lear look more natural

• Poor Tom:
• gives a coherent characterisation: express and conceal victimisation, suppressed revenge and
self-punishment
• counterpoint and trigger for Lear's madness
• makes interaction with the Fool and naked Lear possible
• Position as Philosopher
• uses traditional methods to cure the madness of Lear and Gloucester
• Lear's barking, Gloucester's fake suicide
Lear
• early interpretations of madness, as a way of illumination and self-knowledge, but later,
disregarded
• psychologically engendered, focused on revenge and justice
• he loses control, feels weak and as a victim of hysteria Madness: grows worse but can be fixed by
medicine, rest, and family support (Cordelia)
• speech: fragmentation, formula (social), depersonalisation, satire, and quotes

• defends himself from guilt by acting as

the prosecutor
• hallucinations:
• rituals of secular judgement
• mock trial Lear is the judge and
Edgar, Kent, and the Fool are the
jury
• Bears all corruption on female
sexuality and the complicity of the
judge
• ends up humiliated, the fantasies
uncover his and state's corruption
 Summary
• The conversation about insanity displays the problem and need of
historicizing.
• The theories and the shape of gender difference cannot be
assumed but must be reimagined in exact cultural and historical
contexts.
• The theatre does not just mirror, include, or devalue the cultural
existences in which it exists in. It also influences and changes
them.
• The writers express internal conflicts, cites cultural voices and
are shielded from liability because dramas are fantasies.
• They do and also do not belong to the authors. They are
experienced, acted out, and utilised by other people in the benefit
of their own sanity.
Comprehension check
1. What does Macbeth differentiate
between in regards to madness?

2. What does Shakespeare use to show

insanity?

3. What is the role of Poor Tom when it

comes to Lear?
 References

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