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:

The following dialogue, too, is delightfully naïve:

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:

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.

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,

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:

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:

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:

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:

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

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.”

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:

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.

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:

“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:

Cordelia’s heart-felt reply:

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

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:

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

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 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.

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

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

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:

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:

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:

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:

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

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,

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:

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