In tragi-comedy, it may be said, madness has a legitimate place, and we find the authors of “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” among others, making full use of it. We shall best see, when we consider this play separately, how impossible it is to reconcile madness with the dénouement of comedy. We may be able to put a hook into the nose of leviathan, but we can no more use the sufferings of mad folk and then bring them to a dénouement, in a tragi-comedy worthy of the name, than we can supply a “happy ending” to “Hamlet” or “Lear.” The heights of mania are very high, as the depths of idiocy are very low. The maniac, though cured of his disease, does not fit into comedy, any more than the imbecile, however well-born, can harmonise with tragedy. From one point of view at least, a great man is at his greatest when he is possessed by an uncontrollable passion. If the madman of a tragi-comedy is sufficiently great for tragedy, the play cannot be resolved into a comedy; if he is not a possible tragic hero, his madness is not sufficiently imposing to raise the conflict to a crisis. We are on the horns of a dilemma which may be avoided in practice by some dramatic genius, but which were certainly not avoided in Elizabethan drama by those authors who rushed in where others might fear to tread.
2. We have now to enquire into the actual presentation of madness in our tragedy and comedy, and it must be confessed at once that the results will be somewhat disappointing. We have between twenty and thirty plays of which it may fairly be said that the conception of madness enters definitely into the plot, and of this number all, save four or five, are comedies. The tragedies may briefly be considered first.
In “King Lear,” mad folk are given an exalted place. On the madness of the old King depends the whole play; the scenes which are naturally the most striking become more terrible because of his ravings; their effect is further enhanced by the feigned madness of Edgar and by the curious half-imbecility of the Fool. In “Hamlet” the hero’s assumption of an “antic disposition” is inextricably interwoven with the main plot, while Ophelia’s loss of reason is largely responsible for the catastrophe. Nowhere else in Elizabethan Tragedy do we find so bold a use of the madman as here. Turn to “The Changeling” and Middleton’s ideas of what can be done with him take shape. There is a comic underplot, alternating during the greater part of the play with a fine tragic theme, and only becoming connected with it towards the end—this underplot embodies the grossest of all possible conceptions of madness. From a sublime passion, it becomes material for vulgar intrigue. Even where mad folk are seriously treated in these tragedies, they are not portrayed with the power of which the author is capable. Penthea, for example, in Ford’s “Broken Heart,” though not, as has been suggested, a mere reminiscence of Ophelia, is somewhat slightly and inadequately drawn. And one would at least have expected Webster, with his penchant towards the carnival of horrors, to have produced something better than the inane songs and dances which, with hardly the saving grace of being grotesque, disfigure the fourth act of the “Duchess of Malfi.” The fact is that the common Elizabethan treatment of insanity was so far removed from the humane that the subject was regarded rather as one for mirth than for solemnity—for comedy and not for tragedy.