The pleasure of your Bedlam': The theatre of madness in the Renaissance

History of Psychiatry

Volumn 6, Issue 23, 1995, Pages 283-308

  Hattori, Natsu ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; HISTORY; HISTORY OF MEDICINE; LITERATURE; MENTAL DISEASE; MENTAL HOSPITAL; UNITED KINGDOM;

DRAMA; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY OF MEDICINE, 17TH CENT.; HOSPITALS, PSYCHIATRIC; MENTAL DISORDERS;

EID: 0029377528     PISSN: 0957154X     EISSN: 17402360     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0957154X9500602302     Document Type: Article

References (89)

1. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)
2. cited in W.H. Logan, A Pedlar's Pack of Ballads and Songs (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1869), 173.
3. See Max Byrd, Visits to Bedlam: Madness and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1974)
4. Michael V. DePorte, Nightmares and Hobby Hrrses. Swift, Sterne and Augustan Ideas of Madness (San Marino, Ca: Huntingdon Library, 1974)
5. Lillian Feder, Madness in Literature (1980)
6. Elaine Showlater, The Female Malady (New York: Pantheon, 1986).
7. See Robert Rentoul Reed, Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage (Cambridge, Mss.: Harvard University Press, 1952).
8. Michael Dalton, The Countrey Iustice (1626), 98 and 243
9. cited in Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam. Madness, An1iety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 6 and 123.
10. R. Fessler, ‘The Management of Lunacy in Seventeenth-Century England. An Investigation of Quarter-Session Record’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 49 (1956), 901–907.
11. See John Awdeley, The Fratemitie of Vagabondes (1565)
12. Thomas Harman, A Caveat or Wareningfor Commen Cursetors vulgarely calledI Vagabones (1561).
13. There are twenty-seven listings in Mrrris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Si1teenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950)
14. eg.: ‘Anger is a short madness’ (c.1539, A 246)
15. ‘As mad as Aja1’ (c.1594–5, A 95)
16. ‘Take heed of mad fools (folks) in a narrow place’ (c.1599, H 381)
17. ‘For mad words deaf ears’ (c.1594, T 56);
18. ‘A mad world my masters’ (c.1603, W 880)
19. ‘Mirth without measure is madness’ (c.1626, M 993)
20. ‘ A mad parish must have a mad priest’ (c.1642, P 53)
21. ‘The older the Welshman, the more madman’ (c.1659, W 270).
22. Fessler, 902; Richard Neugebauer, ‘Medieval and Early Modern Theories of Mental Illness’, The Archives of General Psychiatry, 36 (April 1979), 477–483.
23. Roy Porter, Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Harmondswrrth: Penguin, 1990), 22, 35–6.
24. Macdonald, 139.
25. Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper's School of Physick (1659)
26. cited in Macdonald, 139.
27. Enid Welsford, The Fool. His Social and Literary History (London: Faber & Faber, 1935);
28. Sander L Gilman, Seeing the Insane (New York: Brunner, Mazel, 1982)
29. Sandra Billington, The Social History of the Fool (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), 32 f.
30. Bartholomeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum (1435)
31. cited in Penelope Doob, Nebuchadnezzar's Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974), 25.
32. Philip Barrough, The Methode ofPhisicke (1583), 31.
33. Macdonala, 121.
34. Sir Thomas More, The Four Last Things, ed. D. O'Connor (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1935), 6.
35. For sightseeing see Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Camrridge, Msss.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978)
36. also Thomas Tryon, A Treatise of Dreams and Visions, 2nd ed.(1689)
37. Tom Brown, Amssements Serious and Comical, Vol. ii (1700).
38. Edward Ward, The London Spy (1699)
39. Hist. MSs. Report VI, pt.i, appendi1, 229b, 6 February, 1610
40. cited in Jonathan Andrews, ‘Bedlam revisited: a history of Bethlem Hospital, c.1634-c.1770’ (London University PhD thesis, 1991) 39
41. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (London: Bell & Hyman, 1970–1983), II, 454
42. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E.S. DeBeer, 11 vols (O1ford: Clarendon, 1955), 191. Andrews, 20–1.
43. Abranam men tOOK tneir name from the Abranam ward at betniem. a long gallery with twenty cells, part of the old monsstic building. See Basil Clarke, Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain (Cardfff: University of Wales Press, 1975), 238.
44. Anno 111I1 Reginae Elizabethae, An Act for Punishment of Rogues, Vagabonds, and sturdy Beggars, cap.4. See also A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: the Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 158–164.
45. For e1ample, Edward in King Lear, in the disguise of poor Tom, complains of being ‘whipped from tithing to tithing’(III.iv.131).
46. Thomas Dekker, The Bellman of London (1608), cited in Clarke, 238–239.
47. Logan, 183.
48. Clarke, 239
49. Harman, Caveat, ‘An Abraham Man’, in Gamini Salgado (ed.), Cony-catchers and Bawdy Baskets: An Anthology of Elizabethan Low-Life (Harmondswrrth: Penguin, 1972).
50. Clarke, 239.
51. see Logan, Pedlar's Pack, and Jack Lindsay (ed.), Loving Mad Tom: Bedlamite Verses of the 1VI and1VII Centuries (London: Fanfrolico Press, 1927.
52. Rept. Hertfordshire: Seven Dials Press, 1969).
53. ‘From the Hagg and Hungry Gollin’, Giles Earle his booke (1615): B. M. Addl. MS.24, 665;
54. Wit and Drollery (1656);
55. appendi1 to Le Prince d'Amour (1660);
56. Westminster Drollery (1672).
57. Macdonaid, 140. For Biblical account of running, living in the wilderness, see the miracle of the Gadarene swine, Mark 5:1–15: the ‘man with an unclean spirit’ who was ‘always, night and day…in the mouttains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones’.
58. Forth from my sad and darksome Ce’, in Playford, English Dancing Msster (1650–1) and Antidote against Melancholy (1669)
59. Michel Foucault, Madness and (civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Random House, 1965).
60. See Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Lrreek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 1992) 86–96.
61. The borrowing and parodying of elements from ‘high’ culture is a common feature of popular culture in this period: see Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple-Smith, 1978). Padel, 68–71.
62. Anoshona Felman, Writing and Madness, trans. Martha Noel Evans et al. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 35–55.
63. The Spanish Fryar, H.2, 114–115.
64. See Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg (eds), The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), xiv.
65. Notably: Muriel iSradbrook, Themes and Convention of Elizabethan Tragedy (Camrridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935)
66. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935)
67. Inga-Stina Ekeblad, ‘The “Impure Art” of John Webster’, Review of English Studies (new ser.) ix, No. 35 (1958), 253–267
68. Richard Levin, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1971)
69. Sarah P. Sutherland, Masques in Jacobean Tragedy (New York: AMS Press, 1983). None of these, however, deal in any detail with the performance aspect of madness in these scenes.
70. Reed, Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage; Duncan Salkeld, Madness and the Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993),123–4.
71. Thomas Middleton, Five Plays, ed. Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor (Harmondswrrth: Penguin Books, 1988).
72. For the uteralization in the subplot of themes and issues in the main plot, particularly in its treatment of disguise and madness, see Levin, 34–48;
73. Bradbrook, 213–225.
74. For the characterization of Beatrice-Joanna: her ‘esthetic transvaluation of values’, and dependence on die visual surfaces of life, see Levin, 39 ff.
75. The overt connection between main and subplot is revealed in uiis scene, where the comic ‘changes' of Antonio and Franciscus are contrasted with the tragic change of Beatrice-Joanna's ’beauty … to ugly whoredom’, and De Flores's ‘servant obedience to … imperious murder’ (v.iii. 197–9). The two pairs are linked through their use of literal or figurative ‘disguise’: Antonio and Franciscus are first brought forward accused of Piraquo's murder, before Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores are revealed to be the guilty ones: VERMANDERO: These two have been disguis d
76. E'er since the deed was done. ALSEMERO: I have two other That were more close disguis d than your two could be, E'er since the deed was done. (v.iii. 126–9)
77. Thomas Dekker, The Dramttic Works, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
78. In an earlier attempt to annoy him, his wife hides his gown before a guild meeting, but to his wife's disgust Candido goes wearing a carpet instead: ‘the maddest fashion tliat e're I saw’ (iv.iii.30).
79. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, me l-llgnm, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in The Dramttic Works, 9 vols, gen.ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–1994), vi.
80. See Doob, Nebuchadnezzar's Children, 28–30;
81. Porter, Mind-Forged Manacles, 42–43.
82. Edward Ward, The London Spy (1699) (London: The Folio Society, 1955), 48–52.
83. From Commtttee Reports of 1598 and 1607: cited in Patricia Alldendge, ‘Management and mismanagement at Bedlam, 1547–1633’, pp. 141–64 in Charles Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 152, 154.
84. Cf. Vangoose's comment in Jonson's The Masque ofAugures (1622): ‘O, Sir, all de better, vor an antick-masque, de more absurd it be, and vrom de purpose, it be ever all de better.’ 11.265–6.
85. John Webster, The Duchess of Mllfi, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan, New Mermaids (London: A. & C. Black, 1964) iv.ii.40–5.
86. For the relation of court masque to the madmen's scenes in The Duchess of Mllfi and The Changeling, see Bradbrook, 221–3;
87. Ekeblad; and Sutherland, 74–85 and 101–111.
88. Isen Jonson, Ttie yueen s Masque, 11.17–18.
89. John Ford, The Lover's Mllancholy, ed. R. F. Hlll, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 3.3.