Chapter IV (1)

MAD FOLK IN COMEDY AND TRAGEDY—(i.) THE MANIACS.

“Whom if you’ll see, you must be weaponless.”

(_The Honest Whore._)

In the division of our study upon which we have now entered, the various figures of madmen will be considered under some five or six headings. We shall naturally exclude the mere crowds of madmen who enter the plays as lay figures rather than as personalities of the drama. The largest of the remaining classes will be dealt with first, namely, that which includes “maniacs,” or “madmen” in the proper acceptation of the term. Next come the half-witted, who will not detain us long; then the melancholiacs, who appear so frequently that they demand a section to themselves; next those suffering from hallucinations and delusions, who have not perhaps crossed the border-line, or who exhibit abnormal symptoms which can hardly be included in the term insanity, though they are very near it. Lastly, there is a group of pretenders,—of whom Hamlet and Edgar are the chief,—members of which attract our attention in several other plays.

Greene’s Orlando, a rude and undeveloped character, whose frenzy is quite conventional, may be briefly mentioned by way of prelude. His ravings are composed mainly of scraps of classical lore: “Woods, trees, leaves; leaves, trees, woods, tria sequuntur tria; ergo optimus vir non est optimus magistratus, a peny for a pote of beer and sixe pence for a peec of beife? wounds! what am I the worse? O Minerva! salve; good morrow; how do you to-day? Sweet goddesse, now I see thou lovest thy ulisses, lovely Minerva, tell thy ulisses, will Jove send Mercury to Calipso to lett me goe?”[61:1] It will be seen that Greene has no idea of making his madman anything more than a source of amusement. His violence is noteworthy: more than once he “beats” those who listen to his ravings. Scraps of incident like the fight with Brandimant, King of the Isles, are highly significant:

_Brandimant._ “Frantic companion, lunatic and wood,
Get thee hence, or else I vow by heaven,
Thy madness shall not privilege thy life.”

[_Alarum. They fight. Orlando kills Brandimant._

The following dialogue, too, is delightfully naïve:

_Enter Tom and Ralph._

_Ralph._ O Tom, look where he is! Call him madman.

_Tom._ Madman, Madman.

_Ralph._ Madman, Madman.

_Orlando._ What say’st thou, villain? [_Beats him._

It only remains to add that after being treated for his disease by Melissa, a witch—she sprinkles, among other things, many Latin verses over him—Orlando recovers his sanity, and cries:

“Sirrah, how came I thus disguis’d,
Like mad Orestes, quaintly thus attir’d?”

A more serious study of insanity, in a work of that unbridled force which characterised the University Wits, is Kyd’s portrayal of Hieronimo and Isabella.[62:1]

Hieronimo, Marshal of Spain, whose son Horatio has been murdered by the King’s nephew, Lorenzo, is stricken with insanity as a result of the shock; his lunacy is intermittent (closely akin to the disease known as manic depressive insanity), but it is only right to add that this result is largely due to the addition of certain scenes to the play by another hand. Kyd represents Hieronimo as afflicted by a deep melancholy which is only a later phase of his grief and in no way prevents him from doing his ordinary duties; the scenes in which his ravings are at their wildest are commonly attributed to Ben Jonson. It is therefore of little use attempting to trace any regular development of Hieronimo’s madness; a short account of it will suffice.

It breaks out, not when entering the arbour “in his shirt, etc.,” he first discovers his murdered son, but after he has cut him down from the tree on which he has been hanged, and has lamented the murder with his wife. All his ravings, as we are told later in the play, are of Horatio.

“His heart is quiet—like a desp’rate man,
Grows lunatic and childish for his son.
Sometimes, as he doth at his table sit,
He speaks as if Horatio stood by him;
Then, starting in a rage, falls on the earth,
Cries out ‘Horatio, where is my Horatio?’
So that with extreme grief and cutting sorrow
There is not left in him one inch of man.”[63:1]

At the conclusion of the scene the distracted father is made to recite some Latin verses, usually attributed to Kyd himself. Hieronimo’s “tragical speeches” do not again reveal a mind unhinged, until the eleventh scene of the third act, where the interpolator is once more busy. This, however, occurring as it does in Kyd’s part of the play, where the Marshal is still sane, must not be mistaken for a sign of madness. He utters the word “son.” In his disordered brain this starts a train of bewildered reasoning. “My son, and what’s a son?”—he debates the question dispassionately until he once more remembers his loss. Then his grief breaks forth: he rants of Nemesis and Furies, murder and confusion, and even in Kyd’s work we now see that “this man is passing lunatic.” From this point onwards Hieronimo pursues his course of revenge with all the dogged cunning of real madness. His violence surprises the King, who is ignorant of its cause. He digs with his dagger; he would “rip the bowels of the earth.” “Stand from about me,” he cries to the courtiers,

“I’ll make a pickaxe of my poniard
And here surrender up my marshalship;
For I’ll go marshal up the fiends in hell,
To be avenged on you all for this.”[64:1]

The next scene—an interpolation—is the weirdest and perhaps the most effective in the play. Tormented by delusions of spirits, yet hotly denying his madness even while raving on all kinds of topics, Hieronimo is confronted with a painter, Bazardo. Ever mindful of his cruel bereavement, he entreats Bazardo to paint a picture of him with his wife and son, to paint a murderer, “a youth run through and through,” and—if he only could—“to paint a doleful cry.” At the end of this scene Hieronimo is at his greatest, and, although in a more detailed study of the play the manner of his revenge and his death would find due place, we will be content to leave him here:

“Make me curse,” +he cries,+ “make me rave, make me cry,
make me mad, make me well again, make me curse hell, invocate
heaven, and in the end leave me in a trance—and so forth.

_Painter._ And is this the end?

_Hieronimo._ O no, there is no end: the end is death and
madness! As I am never better than when I am mad; then,
methinks, I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders; but reason
abuseth me, and there’s the torment, there’s the hell. At the
last, sir, bring me to one of the murderers; were he as strong
as Hector, thus would I tear and drag him up and down.”[65:1]

Hieronimo’s wife, Isabella, who is similarly afflicted by Horatio’s murder, though she plays a much smaller part in the play, first “runs lunatic” in a short scene with her maid. Here her talk is mere nonsense:

“Why did I not give you gowns and goodly things,
Bought you a whistle and a whipstalk too,
To be revenged on their villanies?”[65:2]

She seems sane enough, however, in the “Painte Scene,” and only appears once again,[65:3] when she cuts down the accursèd arbour and, after a long soliloquy, stabs herself.

The comparatively rough sketches of Greene and Kyd—the first, in order of time, of those under consideration—have been introduced thus early into this chapter for the sake of contrast with the figures that follow.[65:4] Kyd, in “The Spanish Tragedy,” almost certainly inspired “Titus Andronicus,” and we may be fairly sure of his influence on “Hamlet.” Now that we have examined the work of the instructor, let us turn to Shakespeare’s maniacs and see how the pupil has bettered the instruction.

The most powerful character among the maniacs, by far the grandest figure in our drama of insanity, if not indeed in the whole of English drama, is King Lear. “Grandly passive”—the description is Professor Dowden’s—“played upon by all the manifold forces of nature and society,” he “passes away from our sight, not in any mood of resignation or faith or illuminated peace, but in a piteous agony of yearning for that love which he had found only to lose for ever.”[66:1] This alone would make him a noteworthy figure, but he has far greater claims on our admiration and wonder. He is as lovable, even in his greatest weakness, as the most affectionate of all Shakespeare’s characters, yet more terrible than his darkest villains. He takes hold at once of our sympathy, our pity and our imagination, and the tragic feelings evoked by the drama conflict in us with the more human emotions roused by his own essential humanity.

At the beginning of the play he is often said to be already insane, especially by those medical writers who are somewhat inclined to pervert Shakespeare in order to read in him their own opinions. “The general belief is that the insanity of Lear originated solely from the ill-treatment of his daughters, while in truth he was insane before that, from the beginning of the play, when he gave his kingdom away.” Thus Dr. Brigham, in the “American Journal of Insanity,” and thus more than one of his kind. But if what they assert be true, and Lear is really mad in the first scene of the play, then “King Lear” is not, in the Shakespearean sense, a tragedy at all. Lear is not mad, however, at this point, as an examination of the scene will shew. His apparently arbitrary division of the kingdom has really been planned before the opening of the play; the protestations of love on the part of his daughters are only planned as an impressive setting for the bestowal of the richest portion upon his best-loved child. Nor was it the King’s original intention to live with each of his daughters in turn: “I loved her most,” he says of Cordelia, “and thought to set my rest on her kind nursery.”[67:1] His powers are indeed failing; his childishness, his vanity, his wayward temper have more sway over him than of old; but at the very worst his state is but one of incipient senile decay. His daughters themselves recognise this. “’Tis the infirmity of his age,” says Regan to Goneril, “such unconstant starts are we like to have from him as this of Kent’s banishment,” and Goneril adds that they must “look . . . to receive, not alone the imperfections of long-ingraffed condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.”[68:1] Here, then, he stands, impatient and passionate, “a very foolish, fond old man,” but sane in every sense of the word. Only a physician could detect in his “unconstant starts” a predisposition to insanity, with which, since it is not part of the play, we need not concern ourselves.

When the King next appears, his passion is for a time calmed, and his state, apart from the short scene with Oswald (i., 4, 84, etc.), one of tolerant indulgence. The caustic comments of the fool he listens to and encourages; it is only when Goneril appears that his tone changes to one of ill-concealed irritation. “How now, daughter! what makes that frontlet on? Methinks you are too much of late i’ the frown.”[68:2] He pierces the thin disguise of urbanity which cloaks her speeches, and attacks with all the fierceness he can summon the ingratitude which it conceals. It is by no chance that he strikes his head as he exclaims:

“O Lear, Lear, Lear.
Beat at this gate, that let thy folly in,
And thy dear judgment out.”[68:3]

He invokes the most terrible of curses on his ungrateful daughter. His words are here and there broken, but their sense is only too clear. Hot tears escape him in spite of himself; his manhood he feels to be shaken, and when alone with his Fool and the faithful Kent (now disguised as “Caius” the servant), he feels that passion and shock have done their worst. Even as he listens to the jests of the Fool, he knows that the curse is coming upon him. The “self-consciousness of gathering madness” breaks through all restraint:

“O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!
Keep me in temper, I would not be mad”[69:1]

From this time onward his self-control grows less and less; try as he will, he is unable to restrain his passion:

“O how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element’s below!”[69:2]

But the passionate nature is reasserting itself and will not be kept down. Sarcasm, tenderness, and anger alternate in his speeches; he responds to the least sign of love, but anything less draws from him the bitterest reproaches. He prays for patience and for the judgment of Heaven to be manifested in his favour. Now he begins to approach incoherence, and the abruptness which marks the matter as well as the manner of his speech shews only too plainly the affection of his mind. His state of mind is truly described as one of “high rage.”

“No, I’ll not weep;
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or e’er I’ll weep.—O fool, I shall go mad.”[70:1]

It is from this point, though the physicians, with Dr Bucknill at their head, deny it, that we can actually assert that Lear is insane. Hitherto there have been signs that his madness was imminent, but it is the scene on the Heath which is “par excellence,” the scene of Lear’s madness. It is true that, as Dr. Bucknill says, he has “threatened, cursed, wept, knelt, beaten others, beaten his own head.”[70:2] But “the addition of a physical cause” marks the crisis of what Shakespeare certainly means to be understood as insanity in the sense which that term commonly bears. From this time predominates that symptom which is so widespread in cases of insanity—the domination of an _idée fixe_. After Lear has announced “My wits begin to turn”[70:3] (a statement of itself not without significance), Edgar enters, disguised as Tom o’ Bedlam. Lear mistakes him; the idea dominant in his mind comes to the surface: “Didst thou give all to thy daughters? And art thou come to this?”[71:1]

However, the ravings of the King by no means continue incessantly from this point. Indeed, in the presence of Edgar he becomes comparatively tranquil, and henceforward periods of storm and calm follow in quick succession. His speeches still contain much reason, and they have lost little of their wonderful force. Edgar, appearing unclothed, is to Lear an enviable object—“the thing itself.” Hence, through another semi-delusion, he becomes a “learned Theban,” a “philosopher.”[71:2] This delusion continually recurs, and is developed with much force and even eloquence, but with less poetry.

In the scene where Lear arraigns a pair of joint-stools as his supposed daughters,[71:3] we can trace all the wanderings of the deluded mind. In their “warp’d looks,” the King can read “what store (their) heart is made on.” He resolves to have them tried for their cruelty. Some people are standing about him. One (Edgar) is taken for a “robèd man of justice.” Another (the Fool) is “his yokefellow of equity.” Kent is “o’ the commission,” and must take his place beside them. Goneril is arraigned first, and Lear takes his oath that “she kicked the poor King, her father.” The joint-stool naturally makes no reply; her guilt is thereby confirmed. “She cannot deny it.” The other sister is then brought forward. But even as the self-constituted witness is about to give evidence, the image vanishes from his mind; the delusion changes; the criminal has escaped:

“Arms, arms, sword, fire! Corruption in the place!
False justicer, why hast thou let her ’scape?”

Now Edgar is again the object of a delusion; he is one of those scanty hundred followers: “You, sir, I entertain for one of my hundred; only I do not like the fashion of your garments.” It is all so true, and at the same time so pathetic! Edgar feels that he can hardly sustain his disguise.

“My tears,” +he says,+ “begin to take his part so much,
They mar my counterfeiting.”

A long interval (according to Daniel, four dramatic days) has passed before Lear again appears.[72:1] He is “fantastically dressed with wild flowers” and is at first ignorant of Edgar’s presence. Now he is wild, full of delusions, and certain of nothing. His mind first runs upon soldiers and war: “There’s your press-money. That fellow handles his bow like a crow-keeper.”[72:2] Now he recalls a scene with Goneril, now the terrors of the storm on the heath, now some memory of his former greatness. “Is’t not the King?” asks Gloster, and the reply of Lear rings true:

“Ay, every inch a king.
When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.”[73:1]

“Matter and impertinency,” to quote the words of Edgar, mingle in his speech. He seems no longer to suspect the nature of his disease. He only knows that he needs surgeons: “I am cut to the brains!” Mr. Cowden Clarke aptly draws the reader’s attention to this phrase,—expressive of what acute physical and mental suffering!—together with such phrases as “I am not ague-proof” and “Pull off my boots, harder, harder.” It is in this scene, perhaps, more even than in the Storm Scene of the third act, that we feel the acutest distress at the King’s sad condition.

We are relieved at length. When next we meet King Lear,[73:2] it is at Cordelia’s tent in the camp. Gentle hands are ministering to him; loving faces are near to welcome him, when he shall awaken from the sleep which it is hoped will be his cure. He awakens to the sound of “soft music,” growing gradually louder—how different from the “chimes of Bedlam”!—and when Cordelia speaks to him, he believes her to be a spirit from Heaven. Then at last he wakes—still infirm of mind, but faintly conscious of infirmity, not frantic with physical and mental pain. Everything in this scene is touched with the most delicate pathos; Lear’s wistful plea:

“Do not laugh at me,
For, as I am a man, I think this lady,
To be my child Cordelia.”[74:1]

Cordelia’s heart-felt reply:

“And so I am, I am.”[74:2]

Kent’s loyal assertion that his master is in his “own kingdom,” and the old father’s final

“Pray you now, forget and forgive,”[74:3]

as if he were hardly convinced even yet that Cordelia’s end was not revenge.

With such tender care as might now have been his lot, the old King would surely have recovered something like his former state of mind. But this is not to be, and our dramatic selves at least will not wish that it should be so. When Lear enters, with Cordelia dead in his arms and the rest following behind, we feel perhaps as nowhere else his tragic greatness. One wrathful speech, one tender reminiscence, and another of the fiercest:

“Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman,
I kill’d the slave that was a-hanging thee.”[74:4]

A few questions and replies, and the catastrophe is upon us. Exquisite sympathy creates exquisite pathos:

“And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!—
Pray you, undo this button; thank you, sir,—
Do you see this? Look on her—look—her lips—
Look there, look there!”[75:1]

Lear is dead; he has rejoined his belovèd daughter; he has been “dismissed with calm of mind, all passion spent.” What greater consummation could we desire?

There is little need to insist upon the grandeur and pathos of Lear, and, happily, with our next subject of study, the need is equally small. Yet Shakespeare’s presentation of Ophelia is utterly different from his presentation of Lear. The madness of Lear we are able to trace from its first symptoms; we follow it through all its involutions and are present at its partial cure. Ophelia we see but once after she “becomes distract.” A brief word of introduction, and she appears; a few broken words and snatches of song and she has left us. A brief re-entry and she has passed us again, and all is over—all save the report of her death. Lear is an old man, predisposed to insanity by a passionate temper and a mind weakened by old age. Ophelia is a young girl, a “Rose of May,” whose loss of reason excites in us not so much terror as sheer pity. With Lear the crisis is brought on by thwartings of the will, followed by the severest physical exposure and shock. With Ophelia the cause is mental shock following the deepest of sorrows. Lear dies half-sane; Ophelia is never restored to her right mind,—her death is not shewn to us like that of Lear. There is a reason for these differences. Ophelia is no tragic personage and our sympathies are not to remain for long with her misery. She must disappear, lest she should destroy all our interest in the main plot. And thus we must not expect to find the depth in her character which we find in the character of Lear.

Before her affliction wins for her our sympathy, Ophelia stands in our estimation far below Shakespeare’s other heroines. Perhaps it would not be too much to say that at times, like Isabella in “Measure for Measure,” she is actually repellent, and for exactly the opposite reason. She is passive and reserved, gentle to the point of weakness, a tool in the hand of any man who could gain her confidence. This is the reason for her mind giving way. Throughout her life, she has leaned for support, not on her own strength, but upon the strength of her father and her brother. Her father is murdered, her lover distracted, her brother far away—and Ophelia herself is unable to stand alone.

We may have blamed her for a too ready acquiescence in her father’s prying schemes and despised her for throwing over her lover, but whatever her sins, they are more than atoned for by the treatment to which she has to submit at the hands of Hamlet himself; and when, in addition to this, her father is killed and she loses her reason, we feel that these calamities have been wholly undeserved. Thus, when a Gentleman of the Court prepares the Queen for her sad entry, our sympathy is entirely won:

“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.”[77:1]

She is led in, crooning to herself, chattering incoherently of her sorrows, confusing them in her mind and mingling them together in her speech. Her songs have been censured for their alleged grossness. Small wonder if they should contain reminiscences of her lover’s foul talk, yet for the most part these ditties are mere expressions of piercing sorrow at his supposed untimely madness. First she is clearly recalling the scenes where he has disdained her.

“How should I your true love know
From another one?”[77:2]

But as the Queen demands the meaning of the song, its theme changes:

“He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.”[77:3]

And then, as the King comes in, she confuses the two calamities, and sings, as though her lover and not her father were dead:

“White his shroud as the mountain-snow . .
Larded with sweet flowers;
Which bewept to the grave did go,
With true-love showers.”[78:1]

The King’s voice seems here to divert the broken current of her thoughts and she wanders again. Then, returning to the tragic theme with the most piteous of cries: “We must be patient; but I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him i’ the cold ground,”[78:2] she goes out.

Before long Lærtes returns, furious with rage at his father’s violent end and eager to be revenged “most throughly” on his enemies. He has not heard of his sister’s affliction and is dumbfounded, as at this moment she returns. Then he realises what has taken place and all his anger melts into a terrible grief:

“O heat, dry up my brains! tears seven times salt
Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye . . .
O heavens! is’t possible a young maid’s wits
Should be as mortal as an old man’s life?”[78:3]

Her pitiful condition soon reinforces his determination to be revenged: “This nothing’s more than matter,”[78:4] he exclaims, and the spectator re-echoes the cry as he gazes on the enraged brother and the afflicted girl whose sorrows have been more than she can bear. In her madness there is not a jot of the maniacal frenzy which is the great characteristic of Lear. Her nature was ever too gentle:

“Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
She turns to favour and to prettiness.”[79:1]

Though of a wholly different nature from the insanity of Lear, Shakespeare’s delineation of Ophelia’s madness is in its way quite as masterly. We see nothing of it in its earlier stages—indeed it would seem to have been of sudden birth and to have developed quickly. In her ravings there is none of that force and pregnancy which marks the invective of Lear; two fixed ideas dominate her mind and constantly recur to it; apart from these she is totally incoherent. We are told, by those who know, that her insanity takes the form of erotomania, “the fine name for that form of insanity in which the sentiment of love is prominent;”[79:2] we should suppose, indeed, from what she says, that her father’s death is its chief cause, as the King and Queen naturally think also; but this can hardly be assumed, for we cannot say how far she confuses the two causes of her affliction.

The Queen’s account of the death of Ophelia is in keeping both with the tone of the “mad scene” and with the nature of Ophelia’s malady. Exquisitely pathetic, it tells how the distraught girl, obeying a common instinct of the insane for floral decoration (an instinct which we also find in “King Lear”) clambered with “fantastic garlands,” on to a willow which overhung a stream. Mad folk are notoriously regardless of danger, and Ophelia’s rashness led to a premature grave:

“An envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.”[80:1]

It will be seen that Shakespeare’s Ophelia, though not in the technical sense a tragic character, is essentially a character of tragedy, for it would be only in the gravest and most pathetic of tragi-comedies that scenes so magnificently portrayed as those of Ophelia’s madness and the report of her death could be allowed to appear. And in no case could we witness with equanimity her restoration to complete sanity. The character was apparently a popular one on the Elizabethan stage and in more than one contemporary play there are resemblances to it which are so marked as to make a conjecture of mere coincidence impossible. We are now to consider a personage similarly conceived, but treated with none of the “high seriousness” of Ophelia and in altogether a lighter vein—and introduced into a comedy. This character (that of the ‘Gaoler’s Daughter’ in ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen,’ probably the work of Shakespeare and Fletcher) is certainly one of the imitations of Ophelia. It is with equal certainty the work of Fletcher—indeed, the present writer is only prepared to admit Shakespeare’s hand at all in two or three scenes, and these are entirely concerned with the main plot, whereas the story of the Gaoler’s Daughter is a side issue, and she never appears on the stage at the same time as the Two Noble Kinsmen themselves. The nature of Fletcher’s imitation—we might almost say his caricature—of Ophelia will best be seen from a brief account of the various scenes in which the Gaoler’s Daughter appears.

The main plot embodies the well-known story of Palamon and Arcite and their love for the fair Emilia. It will be remembered that in Chaucer’s version of the story it was “by helping of a freend” that Palamon escaped from prison; in our play the friend is none other than the daughter of the gaoler. She is prompted to do this service by a hopeless and entirely unrequited love for the unfortunate prisoner, which helps to drive her to distraction. The exact nature of her malady is somewhat doubtful, and the author is not concerned to make it clear. One suspects that he was none too clear on the subject himself. The Doctor, who, unlike Shakespeare’s physicians, is a rather incompetent fellow with a very competent tongue, says that her disease is “not an engraffed madness, but a most thick and profound melancholy.”[82:1] Various other references, however, suggest mania rather than melancholy, and as the girl is an obvious imitation of Ophelia, she may best be considered here.

The whole story of the development of her madness is told in those portions of the play which form the underplot, and, in its first stages, it is told with considerable skill. A “Wooer” is asking the Gaoler for his daughter’s hand, and during the conversation the daughter herself comes in and the talk runs on the noble prisoners.[82:2] The daughter is full of their praises. “By my troth, I think fame but stammers ’em; they stand a grise above the reach of report.” “The prison itself is proud of ’em; and they have all the world in their chamber.” Then the two prisoners appear “above” and the girl at once shews the nature of her interest—much as Portia, in “The Merchant of Venice” is made to display her preference for Bassanio:

_Gaoler_: “Look yonder they are! that’s Arcite looks out.”

_Daughter_: “No, sir, no; that’s Palamon; Arcite is the
lower of the twain; you may perceive a
part of him.”

The love which one has probably suspected here is openly revealed in the fourth scene of the second act, which consists solely of a soliloquy by the Gaoler’s Daughter. The course of her love is made plain to us: first she admired him; finally, pity having sprung from admiration and helpless love from pity, she

“Extremely lov’d him, infinitely lov’d him.”

Her love has been fed by the plaintive songs he sings and impassioned by his kindness, his courtesy and a chance caress. On the next occasion[83:1] we see her more sympathetically yet—her love has achieved something, Palamon is free, and before long his deliverer is to meet him with food. But though she wanders by night through the forest, she is unable to find him. For two days nothing has passed her lips save a little water, she has not slept, and her whole being is alive with terror at the “strange howls” which seem to tell of her hero’s untimely fate. “Dissolve my life!” she cries, with the dire foreboding of the incipient lunatic,

“Let not my sense unsettle,
Lest I should drown, or stab, or hang myself . . .
So, which way now?
The best way is the next way to a grave:
Each errant step beside is torment.”

For a moment she disappears, only to re-enter[84:1] in a state bordering on frenzy. Dawn has broken, and her search has been unsuccessful:

“Palamon!
Alas no! he’s in heaven—where am I now?
Yonder’s the sea, and there’s a ship; how’t tumbles!
And there’s a rock lies watching under water;
Now, now, it beats upon it; now, now, now,
There’s a leak sprung, a sound one; how they cry!
Spoom her before the wind, you’ll lose all else;
Up with a course or two, and back about, boys;
Good night, good night; ye’re gone. I’m very hungry:
Would I could find a fine frog! he would tell me
News from all parts o’ the world; then would I make
A careck of a cockle-shell, and sail
By east and north-east to the King of Pygmies,
For he tells fortunes rarely.”

She leaves us again, breaking into the first of her mad songs:

“For I’ll cut my green coat a foot above my knee;
Hey nonny, nonny, nonny.”

Up to this point the character of the Gaoler’s Daughter is not unworthy of Shakespeare, but Fletcher could not keep at so high a level for long. More than any of his contemporaries he creates mad folk for the purpose of embellishing his comedies; in this play, having developed a situation with many fine capabilities, he proceeds to rush in and spoil his own work in the worst possible way. The luckless girl is introduced into a rustic scene[84:2] and made to sing for the delectation of some peasants, to exchange coarse banter with them, and even to join in their morris. From this time forward the underplot is hopelessly degraded, both by its being drawn out to an absurd length and by its ending in the coarsest of scenes which leads to what we are asked to believe is the girl’s complete restoration to sanity.

The Wooer first acquaints the Gaoler with his sweetheart’s complaint.[85:1] We learn that it has been preceded by the natural irritation which is common in such cases, and that she has answered her father’s questions:

“So childishly,
So sillily, as if she were a fool,
An innocent.”

Since we have last seen her, her senses have quite gone. She constantly repeats phrases which tell of her trouble—“Palamon is gone,” “Palamon, fair Palamon,” and the like. She even plagiarises Desdemona, and sings nothing but “Willow, willow, willow.” She has been playing and garlanding herself with flowers; now she weeps, now smiles, now sings; reckless of danger, she sits by a lake, and attempts to drown herself at the Wooer’s approach. She appears at length[85:2] and carries on the same kind of conversation, fancifully constructing long trains of imagination from the smallest incidents. While ever and anon the theme of Palamon recurs: he is still in love with her—“a fine young gentleman,” and he “lies longing” for her in the wood.

This her father reports to the Doctor: “She is continually in a harmless distemper, sleeps little; altogether without appetite, save often drinking; dreaming of another world and a better; and what broken piece of matter so e’er she’s about the name Palamon lards it.”[86:1] The Doctor is out of his depth. He understands little of the mind diseased, holding the popular notion that it is “more at some time of the moon than at other some,” and confessing that he “cannot minister” to her “perturbed mind.” The remedy which he proposes is of the crudest. The Wooer is to dress as if he were Palamon, satisfy all the girl’s desires, and wait for her to return to her right mind. Both Wooer and Gaoler protest against the extreme application of this “cure,” but the Doctor is so insistent that they give in, and when in the last scene Palamon enquires after the girl who procured his escape and who, he has heard, has been ill, he is told that she is

“well restor’d
And to be married shortly.”[86:2]

It is unnecessary to dwell on the cure, for long before this stage the story has lost all semblance of probability.

The inferiority of the Gaoler’s Daughter to Ophelia is as patent as that of the false to the true Florimel of Spenser’s “Færie Queene.” A little more skill on the part of the author and a great deal more restraint would, no doubt, have effected an enormous improvement, but it is unlikely that Fletcher could ever have made us take the same interest in the Gaoler’s Daughter as we take in Ophelia. She is quite unnecessary to the plot, and would require far greater depth of characterisation before she could appeal with any force to our sympathies. Had this been done, the taint of the comic and the coarseness removed, the ravings lessened and the execrable character of the Doctor changed, we might have had another Ophelia and not an exaggerated and debased imitation.

Whatever the nature of the madness of our last subject, the affliction of Penthea, in Ford’s “Broken Heart” is certainly acute melancholia. She is dealt with here for the sake of contrast with the two preceding characters. “The Broken Heart,” as far as its “mad-scenes” are concerned, has certainly more in common with “Hamlet” than with “The Two Noble Kinsmen.” It is a tragedy of more than usual gloom, and the scenes in question are marked by a subdued restraint quite absent from the “Two Noble Kinsmen.” Penthea talks much more coherently than either Ophelia or her ape; and though there is a distinct want in her speeches of that colour which so marks the other two plays, she is much nearer Ophelia in spirit and essentials than the girl for whom Ophelia actually stood as a model.

The story, so far as it concerns Penthea, is this: She is in love with Orgilus, son of a counsellor to the King of Laconia, but has been compelled to marry Bassanes, a jealous nobleman whom she detests. Her brother Ithocles’ love for the King’s daughter, Calantha, becomes known to Penthea, who, in spite of her brother’s cruelty to her, tries to bring about their union; when she is dead, however, her lover stabs Ithocles and the Princess dies of a broken heart. Penthea’s situation, when in the second act she has an interview with Orgilus, is this: she is contracted to Bassanes, and though she loathes him and will have no more to do with him than she can help she will not consent to break the bond of marriage. Her loss of reason, which terminates in her death in the fourth act, is one of the main factors of the series of events which leads up to the impressive final situation.

The scenes which portray the melancholy and distraction of Penthea are much superior to the others in which she appears, by reason of the irresistible sympathy which they inspire. We are not greatly enamoured of the unhappy girl in the first scenes; her character is somewhat slightly drawn, and, as one commentator puts it, there is “a trace of selfishness in her sorrow, which operates against the sympathy excited by her sufferings.”[89:1] This is dispelled in that touching scene (iii., 5), where Penthea pleads with Calantha on behalf of her brother. Her plaintive farewell to life, in the same scene, is not less touching:

“Glories
Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams
And shadows soon decaying; on the stage
Of my mortality my youth hath acted
Some scenes of vanity, drawn out at length
By varied pleasures sweetened in the mixture,
But tragical in issue . . .
. . . You may see
How weary I am of a lingering life,
Who count the best a misery.”

When she next enters “with her hair loose” (iv., 2), Bassanes and Orgilus are engaged in a violent quarrel. She is followed by Ithocles heart-broken like Shakespeare’s Lærtes, begging her to look up and speak to him:

“Your Ithocles, your brother,
Speaks t’ ye; why do you weep? Dear, turn not from me.”

The sight moves all to pity or remorse, save only Orgilus, whose bitter sarcasm, when rebuked by Ithocles, turns to a dreadful thirst for revenge. But the afflicted girl recks nothing of this. Loss of sleep and a voluntary fast have combined with her heavy sorrows to produce the inevitable result; her depression has deprived her of her reason and she is sinking into her grave:

“There’s not a hair
Sticks on my head, but, like a leaden plummet,
It sinks me to my grave: I must creep thither;
The journey is not long.”

“Her fancies guide her tongue,” but the burden of her talk is the subject of marriage, child bearing, infidelity, and true love. Her resolve to die by starvation is certainly the project of a disordered brain, though Mr. Saintsbury treats it as if it were not, and censures the character as unnatural![90:1] Assuming that

“There is no peace left for a ravished wife
Widowed by lawful marriage,”

she declares that her blood shall

“be henceforth never heightened
With taste of sustenance,”

and falls fainting into her attendant’s arms. The subsequent account of her death[90:2] is the more pathetic by reason of its brevity:

_Philema._ “She called for music,
And begged some gentle voice to tune a farewell
To life and griefs; Christalla touched the lute;
I wept the funeral song.

_Christalla._ Which scarce was ended
But her last breath sealed up these hollow sounds,
‘O cruel Ithocles and injured Orgilus’
So down she drew her veil, so died.”

The presentation of Penthea’s madness is one of the few examples of a truly artistic treatment of the subject, and “The Broken Heart” is one of the few post-Shakespearean plays which with some touches by the Master-hand might have become a really great romantic tragedy. Penthea is, to tell the truth, about as far inferior to Ophelia as she is superior to the Gaoler’s Daughter. The partly unsympathetic presentation of her character in the first part of the play, the lack of picturesqueness and relief from the gloom of the tragedy, the suspicion of melodrama in the surrounding scenes and the involved nature of the plot—all these combine to place Penthea on a lower level than Ophelia. And, in addition, she is less important and hence less striking from a purely dramatic point of view.

Something has already been said of the plot and the personages of “The Lover’s Melancholy,” but the melancholy of Palador and the madness of Meleander may be briefly considered here as furnishing additional examples of Ford’s treatment of the subject. Palador’s melancholy, which gives the title to the piece, seems to be largely temperamental and scarcely a case for the physician, though Corax, his medical adviser, goes to some pains to “cure” it, and is in consequence, hailed as a “perfect arts-man.”[91:1] The Prince’s melancholy is thus described:

“He’s the same melancholy man
He was at’s father’s death; sometimes speaks sense,
But seldom mirth; will smile, but seldom laugh;
Will lead an ear to business, deal in none;
Gaze upon revels, antic fopperies,
But is not moved; will sparingly discourse,
Hear music; but what most he takes delight in
Are handsome pictures.”[92:1]

His melancholy apparently began at his father’s death and was increased by the disappearance of Eroclea. We need not stay long over him. Corax, who is apparently a man of many theories and much resource, presents the Prince with a Masque,[92:2]—already mentioned—in which madmen of various sorts pass over the stage and make speeches. The last of these persons is Palador’s lost love in disguise who appears as “Love-Melancholy.” How far the Prince’s malady is relieved by this is uncertain; but the form of “Parthenophil” arouses memories and the re-appearance of Eroclea in the next act is the real “potent” which restores the melancholy lover.

The madness of Meleander, Eroclea’s father, is more interesting. He has, so far as we know, no sort of predisposition to insanity, which comes upon him following a cloud of troubles—he has been accused of treason, his lands have been seized and his daughter has disappeared. We are informed by our physician that his affliction is not madness; it is

“His sorrows—
Close-griping grief and anguish of the soul—
That torture him.”[93:1]

Yet we can find in Meleander all those “signs” which by now we are beginning to associate with insanity. The unfortunate man “sleeps like a hare, with his eyes open,” he groans, “thunders” and “roars,” and his “eyes roll.” He talks wildly, yet at times coherently, knows his daughter Cleophila, enquires “Am I stark mad?” His maniacal excitability displays itself in his laughter, “the usher to a violent extremity.”[93:2] The reaction soon follows; he faces those about him and remarks:

“I am a weak old man; all these are come
To jeer my ripe calamities.”[93:2]

At times—and this is surely the greatest praise we can give him—his ravings remind us of Lear’s, with their mingled sarcasm, pathos and unconcealed rage. His brother’s son Menaphon approaches him with a “Good uncle!” What, outside Shakespeare, can be more like Lear before his eloquence goes and leaves his rage supreme, than Meleander’s furious reply:[93:3]

“Fools, desperate fools!
You’re cheated, grossly cheated; range, range on,
And roll about the world to gather moss,
The moss of honour, gay reports, gay clothes,
Gay wives, huge empty buildings, whose proud roofs
Shall with their pinnacles even reach the stars,
Ye work and work like moles, blind in the paths
That are bored through the crannies of the earth,
To charge your hungry souls with such full surfeits
As being gorged once, make ye lean with plenty;
And when ye’ve skimmed the vomit of your riots,
Ye’re fat in no felicity but folly;
Then your last sleeps seize on ye; then the troops
Of worms crawl round and feast; good cheer, rich fare,
Dainty, delicious!”

How does Corax propose to cure such a patient as this? Spurred on by the flatteries of Rhetias—“a reduced Courtier”—nothing daunted by the picturesque report that Meleander “chafes hugely, fumes like a stew-pot,”[94:1] he coolly explains his intention of out-Heroding Herod—“We will roar with him, if he roar,”[94:1]—and suiting the action to the word he “produces a frightful mask and headpiece.”[94:1] Meleander enters, armed with a poleaxe and raving in a vein which must have delighted the greediest of the groundlings. A battle of words and mock actions ensues, and the madman is soon reduced to a state of comparative calm. He lays down the poleaxe, and Corax removes the mask. The physician then proceeds to minister to the mind diseased with tales of his own supposed mental sufferings, assuming apparently that like counteracts like in madness as in melancholy. This is to some extent true, and Shakespeare rightly represents Lear as in a state of comparative tranquillity when in the presence of Edgar. But Ford’s play would seem to be inspired rather by a desire to please than by a fidelity to real life. The concluding scene,[95:1] however, so far as it concerns Meleander, is sufficient compensation, for again it recalls “King Lear” in its general nature if not in matters of detail. The madman has been put to sleep, his hair and beard have been trimmed and his gown is changed. Music, as in “King Lear,” is playing, and a song, full of delicate charm, is being sung by a Boy outside. At its close Meleander awakens, confused and half-dreaming. He is inclined to sleep again, but the physician hails him—somewhat boisterously, one would think—and in spite of his patient’s brusque “Away, beast! let me alone,” he succeeds in rousing him. The madness certainly appears to have left him; he is now quite calm, though the burden of his troubles still oppresses him.

“The weight of my disease,” +he says,+
“Sits on my heart so heavy,
That all the hands of art cannot remove
One grain, to ease my grief.”

Corax has, indeed, in preparation, a cordial which is to effect this, but it is reserved—not wholly for dramatic reasons,—to a fitting climax. Successive messengers first bring the news that the Prince, now happy (though the father knows it not) in the possession of his love, has restored to Meleander all the honours he formerly enjoyed, together with new honours and marks of favour undreamed of. Then at last Eroclea is presented to him and his restored reason stands the test of happiness. Explanations ensue; all part friends; and “sorrows are changed to bride-songs.”

It will be seen that Ford’s conception of madness is by no means a low one; he has not debased it by making it a sport for those to whom it is a thing to fleer and jest at; he has introduced it into comedy indeed, but it must be remembered that Ford’s tragi-comedy is a wholly different thing from the gross buffooneries of Fletcher, Dekker and Middleton, and that the madness of Meleander, though resembling that of Lear, is on a far lower scale. It rises now and then to unusual heights, but remains at their exalted level for so short a time that we never look at it seriously for long. The gloom is also lightened by the antics of the whimsical Corax, whose triumphs of psycho-medical skill would, no doubt, in happier times, have induced him to set up a private Bedlam of his own!

In considering Chettles’ “Tragedy of Hoffman”[96:1] we are met by an initial difficulty of authorship, for the resemblance between this play and “Hamlet,” as well as between Lucibella and Ophelia, would suggest plagiarism. The question, however, is difficult to decide, and can hardly be discussed here. Whatever be the solution, Lucibella is a most effective character. To a certain degree her madness is merely conventional. But there are numerous touches of real art in her portrayal, and she is not degraded like the Gaoler’s Daughter in “The Two Noble Kinsmen” by being made “a motley to the view.” On the contrary, as one editor points out, Chettle surpasses Shakespeare by making her, unlike Ophelia, directly instrumental in bringing about the dénouement of the play.

The madness of Lucibella is brought about by the murder of her lover, Lodowick, through the agency of Hoffman. In her mad wanderings she discovers the skeletons of Hoffman’s father, and of Prince Otho, for whose death her lover’s murderer is also responsible. Eventually the mischief caused by the first shock is undone by a second; Lucibella recovers her reason. Hear her in her first ravings:

“Oh [Oh] a sword, I pray you, kill me not,
For I am going to the river’s side,
To fetch white lilies and blue daffodils,
To stick in Lod’wick’s bosom, where it bled,
And in mine own . . . .
‘_We must run all away, yet all must die_’
’Tis so;—I wrought it in a sampler.
’Twas heart in hand, and true love’s knots and words,
All true stitch, by my troth, the posy thus—
‘_No flight, dear love, but death shall sever us_.’
Neither did that! He lies here, does he not?”

She cannot make up her mind whether her lover is really dead or not. Only conscious of a vague calamity, she cries:

“Tell Lod’wick, Lucibell would speak with him!
I’ve news from heav’n for him, he must not die;
I’ve robb’d Prometheus of his moving fire:—
Open the door!—I must come in, and will;
I’ll beat myself to air, but I’ll come in!”

So saying, she knocks violently at the door of the vault; those who surround her fear that she will “do violence upon herself.” She understands:

“Oh, never fear me! there is somewhat cries
Within me, ‘No!’ tells me there’re knaves abroad;
Bids me be quiet, lay me down, and sleep.”[98:1]

Her violence is noteworthy; three or four men attempt to hold her; but she succeeds in freeing herself from them, and wanders abroad.

When we next see her the second shock is at work and Lucibella is returning to sanity. Mathias, Lodowick’s brother, still fears for her life, having seen her “clamb’ring upon the steepness of the rock,” but what she has seen in Hoffman’s cave has saved her mental life. She talks still with the fierce sarcasm of mania.

Shewing the skeletons, she cries:

“Is it not like
I keep a princely house, when I have such
Fat porters at my gate.”

Still, as before, she lards her speech with scraps of song:

“Here, look here!
Here is a way goes down!
Down, down, down,
Hey down, down!”

This ditty is reminiscent of the descent to the cave, but the next moment the memory of that is gone and only the consciousness of her loss remains:

“I sang that song while Lod’wick slept with me:”

But at length, gradually and before our eyes, she recovers her lost reason. Her speech to the Duchess of Luneberg shews what seems to be the wandering of her still distraught mind. She displays the rich clothes of Otho:

“A poor maiden, mistress, has a suit to you,
And ’tis a good suit, very good apparel.”

And she breaks into song again. But shortly afterwards she recognises the two corpses, and as Lorick unfolds the ghastly story of Hoffman’s crime the princess comes to her right mind again. At the end of the scene she declares her complete sanity:

“Nay I will come; my wits are mine agen,
Now faith grows firm to punish faithless men.”[99:1]