“This country gives me proof and precedent Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, Strike in their numb’d and mortified bare arms Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary; And with this horrible object, from low farms, Poor pelting villages, sheep cotes, and mills, Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers Enforce their charity.”[26:1]
From all that we can gather, however, of the treatment of the insane in madhouses of the time, it would seem probable that, among those released or escaping from them, many would still be genuine lunatics. At the same time, it was no doubt fairly easy to make a living in the way Dekker describes, and numbers of beggars must have emulated Edgar’s behaviour from far less worthy motives.
Such a lack of popular sympathy could hardly go hand-in-hand with a peculiarly humanitarian treatment of the insane. The Saxon treatment of lunatics has been described as “a curious compound of pharmacy, superstition, and castigation.” In the seventeenth century it had been but little improved upon. Its most characteristic feature was confinement in a dark room, with additional treatment, varying according to circumstances. A book, of date 1542, called “A Compendious Pygment or a Dyetry of Helth” by one Dr. Borde, advises the keeping of lunatics in a dark room, provided with no knives, girdles, nor pictures of man or woman on the wall. Few words are to be used except in gentle reproofs and the dietary is to be careful and ample. Dr. Borde’s treatment was enlarged upon in later days; chains were used to prevent escape; castigation was employed freely and often attended with great cruelty. A quatrain in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” (1621), confirms this statement, presenting what is indeed a ghastly picture. It is all borne out by the dramatic references, which are extremely numerous. The lunatic _chez lui_ is evidently a subject which appeals to the dramatist: madness and its cure become topics of ordinary conversation. Rosalind, in playful banter with Orlando, compares love to “a madness,” which “deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.”[28:1] Leonato, in “Much Ado” talks (from our point of view ominously) of those who would