Elizabethan Drama and Its Mad Folk The Harness Prize Essay for 1913

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 mer...

The earliest view of madness which finds its way into this drama and persists throughout it, is based on the idea of possession by evil spirits. This conception came down from r...

The representation of “melancholy” and of the disease which we know as “melancholia” was extremely common in seventeenth century drama. Its popularity with playwrights of all ki...

Delusions and hallucinations occurring in cases of real madness we have already encountered, but since these phenomena are themselves symptoms of a disordered state of mind we m...

The questions which we have now to answer, before passing to our main study and considering the mad folk as individuals, are two in number. The first is a general one: What is t...

In such a study as this, dealing largely with the work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, it is to be hoped that it will not be out of place to centre the concluding portion aroun...

Last of all in the long train of madmen which has now almost passed us come the Pretenders—characters who have feigned insanity for some purpose. We need not, of course, devote...

Of the few sketches of imbeciles which we find in the drama under consideration there is hardly one which can properly be called a full-length portrait. As a class, the idiots c...

The jingling criticism of Dromio of Syracuse will ever recur to the essayist on an unconventional subject. Lest any therefore should claim of this essay that “in the why and the...