“Nor the exterior nor the inward man Resembles that it was.”[22:2]
An excellent objective description of a single case is furnished by the “Gentleman” in “Hamlet” who announces the frenzy of Ophelia:
“She speaks much of her father; says she hears There’s tricks i’ the world, and hems and beats her heart; Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt, That carry but half sense; her speech is nothing, Yet the unshaped use of it doth move The hearers to collection; they aim at it, And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts; Which as her winks and nods and gestures yield them Indeed would make one think there might be thought, Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.”[22:3]
As to the nature of the madman’s talk, we find it impossible to generalise, and the ideas of different authors on what it should be have not much agreement, beyond the one condition that there should be wanting what Shakespeare aptly calls “a dependency of thing on thing.” This will be noted more particularly when we come to the study of individual characters.
From these symptoms and others which might be cited it will be evident that the madness of our dramas is far from being confined to one type. We know that various kinds of insanity were recognised in the seventeenth century. Corax, the physician of the “Lover’s Melancholy,” makes it clear that
“Ecstasy Fantastic Dotage, Madness, Frenzy, Rapture Of mere imagination differ partly From Melancholy.”[23:1]
Our learned informant, Ben Jonson, diagnoses another case of insanity as “the disease in Greek . . . called μα νια, in Latin, insania, furor, vel ecstasis melancholica, that is egressio, when a man ex melancholico evadit fanaticus, . . . . But he may be but ‘phreneticus,’ yet, mistress, and ‘phrenesis’ is only ‘delirium’ or so.”[23:2] And indeed there are all varieties of insanity in the plays before us. There is the young person who merely talks “fantastically,” “like a justice of peace,” “of a thousand matters and all to no purpose,”[23:3] and whose words “though they (lack) form a little,” are “not like madness.”[23:4] There is the person dominated by the “idée fixe”—examples differing widely occur in “King Lear” and in “Bartholomew Fair.” There is the “idiot” and there is the “imbecile”—two types between which it would be affectation here to attempt a discrimination. The melancholiac, one of “sundry kinds,” affected by a “mere commotion of the mind, o’ercharged with fear and sorrow,”[24:1] is one of the commonest types. Mania and delusional insanity are also frequent and account for a large proportion of our characters. Yet, since this is not a medical treatise, how can we distinguish any more finely? We shall do better not to attempt a more detailed classification of our mad folk than this, which will be utilised later in the consideration of individual characters. “It is not as deep as a well, nor as wide as a church-door, but ’twill serve.” Like more than one of those Elizabethan playwrights we may feel that: