CHAPTER VII.

MAD FOLK IN COMEDY AND TRAGEDY—(iv.) DELUSIONS, HALLUCINATIONS AND OTHER ABNORMAL STATES.

“How now; who’s there? spirits, spirits?”

(“_Spanish Tragedy._”)

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 must not neglect instances in which they occur with persons otherwise sane. These spring to the memory; who, for example, can ever forget the sights which Faustus sees in his last hour on earth?

“O, I’ll leap up to my God; who pulls me down? See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament. One drop would save my soul, half a drop—Ah, my Christ! Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ! Yet will I call on Him: Oh, spare me, Lucifer! Where is it now? ’tis gone: And see where God Stretcheth out His arm, and bends His ireful brows; Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me, And hide me from the heavy wrath of God.”[150:1]

More examples of such hallucinations in moments of great stress might be quoted. It will best serve our purpose if we consider one typical case (Frank, in “The Witch of Edmonton,”) and afterwards discuss a case of special interest—that of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Frank Thorney, in “The Witch of Edmonton,” has married one Winifred, but is forced into a bigamous marriage with Susan, whom he afterwards murders, without letting any suspicion fall on himself. He is tormented on his sick-bed by phantoms indistinguishable from realities, more particularly by the ghost of Susan, and at last reveals to Winifred the awful truth.

“I am not idle,” he says, and he is right. But thick-coming fancies disturb him. The ghost of Susan appears. He stares at it fixedly, then turns to the other side, only to be confronted again by the apparition. When it vanishes he is raving of “a force in which were drawn a thousand ghosts, leap’d newly from their graves, to pluck me into a winding-sheet.” He has, so he says, “Some windmill in my brains for want of sleep,” but sleep only comes with the unburdening of the guilty conscience.[151:1]

Macbeth (like Frank Thorney) is at no time in the play insane, but he becomes the victim of “horrible imaginings” which beyond a certain point seem to him to be real.[152:1] Macbeth is predisposed to hallucinations by a remarkably vivid power of imagination, which finds expression from the very outset of the play. The mere suggestion of the murder of Duncan he describes as a “horrid image” which unfixes his hair and makes his seated heart knock at his ribs, against the use of nature. Thus we have a character whose imagination torments him throughout his career of crime till he has “supped full of horrors” and the “taste of fears” has almost lost all significance.[152:2]

In the well-known “Dagger Scene”[152:3] we are confronted with the first of Macbeth’s hallucinations. It is before the murder of Duncan, and the spectral dagger only deceives him for a moment. Making an unsuccessful attempt to clutch it, he is for a short moment at a loss to explain a weapon which he can see but cannot handle. Then he rightly concludes that it is but a “dagger of the mind, a false creation”; his eyes “are made the fools o’ the other senses,” yet the image does not disappear till courage comes again and with it “the heat of deeds.”

Duncan is murdered; “after life’s fitful fever he sleeps well,” but the regicide’s better self torments him more and more, and the Lady fears for his sanity:

“These deeds must not be thought After these ways; so, it will make us mad.”[153:1]

Macbeth, however, is losing his self-control. At the moment of the murder a fresh hallucination troubled him, and though its true nature is now recognised, and he can “moralise” upon it, its very mention fills the Lady with fears.

“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth doth murder sleep’. . . . Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house: ‘Glamis hath murther’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more.’”[153:2]

Dr. Bucknill, it is true, considers that this is not an hallucination, on account of the word “methought.”[153:3] But the same word would have been used of the dagger, which the critic himself admits to have been an hallucination. Nor is the length of the fancied speeches any obstacle, the greater part of the speech in which they occur being Macbeth’s own embellishment of the event.

The hallucination at the banquet is more formidable. Macbeth, having caused Banquo to be murdered—the murder being unknown to his guests—is regretting his absence, “thus by a voluntary mental act calling before his mind’s eye the image of the murdered man.”[154:1] At the mention of him, an image rises in the place reserved for Macbeth himself. It shakes its “gory locks” at the murderer, it nods but will not speak, and only vanishes like the “air-drawn dagger,” when Macbeth begins to overcome his fear and brave it. When he pledges Banquo it appears again; once more he declaims violently against it and it vanishes, but not before he has

. . “displac’d the mirth, broke the good meeting With most admir’d disorder.”[154:2]

to say nothing of a certain amount of suspicion attached to it.

The remainder of the story, from the psychological point of view, can best be told in Dr. Bucknill’s words.[154:3] “Macbeth,” he says, “saved himself from actual insanity by rushing from the maddening horrors of meditation into a course of decisive resolute action. From henceforth he gave himself no time to reflect; he made the firstlings of his heart the firstlings of his hand; he became a fearful tyrant to his country; but he escaped madness. This change in him, however, effected a change in his relation to his wife, which in her had the opposite result. . . . Her attention, heretofore directed to her husband and to outward occurrences, was forced inwards upon that wreck of all-content which her meditation supplied.” She becomes mad; no medicine can minister to her mind, diseased by crime and remorse, and her madness is fatal. But Macbeth never becomes insane. “Some say he’s mad,” it is true, yet

“Others, that lesser hate him, Do call it valiant fury.”[155:1]

He has saved his own mental life, but he has flung away the “eternal jewel” of his soul.

Lady Macbeth, at every point in the play, is strongly contrasted with her husband. She is frankly distressed at the developments of Macbeth’s criminal career. He bids her be “innocent of the knowledge” till she applaud his deeds. She thus drifts farther away from him and leaves him to pursue his bloody course alone. Her meditation breeds madness. She lacks, even as her husband had done,

“the season of all natures, sleep,”

being

“Troubled with thick-coming fancies That keep her from her rest.”[155:2]

The scene in which she betrays her secret in her sleep is full of significance, shewing the terrible impression made on her by the murder of Duncan, and no less by the slaughter of Lady Macduff. After her fainting fit, which follows the discovery of Duncan’s murder, she ceases to occupy a prominent place in the tragedy. Her death is almost unnoticed. Whether she died naturally or whether her attendants were unable to keep from her the “means of all annoyance,” it is hard to say. But once again Shakespeare shews his dramatic skill in relating rather than portraying the scene of her death.

Returning to Macbeth, one must remark in conclusion that it is only when Shakespeare’s art in delineating the various types of insanity is studied as a whole that this character can be fully appreciated. Yet even from a superficial examination of the play the value to the dramatist of Macbeth’s hallucinations must be clear. For they not only add to the scenic effect of the play, but they constitute a striking contrast between the murderer and his wife, besides clarifying the already powerful idea of his accusing imagination.

* * * * *

We must now briefly consider another kind of abnormality which has not yet been mentioned. Occasionally, in reading the dramatists of the period, we meet with persons whom at first we suppose to be insane, but who are, in reality, not so. Yet their states of mind are far from normal. Occasionally they seem to be possessed by insane desires and ambitions; sometimes lust has taken complete possession of them; sometimes remorse, vengeance or similar passion dominates all their actions. It is hard to point to any of their actions and to say: “That is the act of a madman.” To-day, no doubt, did they exist in the flesh, they would be removed to a Mental Hospital and treated for disease of the mind. But looked at by their author and by his audience and in an Elizabethan environment, they were not, in all probability, and in the ordinary sense of the word, madmen. And for that reason we can only allow them a passing consideration here, though every one of them would repay detailed study.

One or two examples may be cited from Shakespeare—the first being Constance, in “King John.” Dr. Bucknill, without the least hesitation, styles her mad,—but he is a physician. Shakespeare, who may be supposed to have known better, represents her as passionate by nature, and half-demented with grief. But she is never more than half-crazy, always retaining sufficient of her native strength of will to control her wonderful imagination. Her own explanation of her conduct:

“Grief fills the room up of my absent child,”[158:1]

is quite sufficient. Her reply to Pandulph’s accusation,

“Lady, you utter madness, and not sorrow,”[158:2]

is conclusive proof that she is to be regarded as sane. She does not, like many a lunatic, merely protest that she is not mad; she gives what, according to the standard of the day, would pass as clear evidence of her sanity:

“I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine; My name is Constance; I was Geffrey’s wife; Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost! I am not mad; I would to heaven I were! For then, ’tis like I should forget myself . . . If I were mad, I should forget my son, Or madly think a babe of clouts were he. I am not mad; too well, too well I feel The different plague of each calamity.”[158:3]

Constance, even when her blemishes are taken into account, is a sublime figure. At times the poet’s instinct seems for a moment to fail him; his touch is less sure and his Fury becomes dangerously like a common scold. But at her best she is unsurpassed, and if we wonder at the skill with which Shakespeare portrays and utilises true madness on the stage, we must not forget to withhold a portion of our admiration for his sure-footed walk on the border line.

Timon of Athens, too, is a wonderful character—the wonder of the play. A good-natured, generous and wealthy noble, he has attracted to him crowds of parasites whom he calls friends, but who in reality do nothing but receive his favours. At length he discovers their essential baseness, and becoming, in his own words, “misanthropos” who “hates mankind,”[159:1] leaves Athens, with oaths and curses, for a cave near the sea-shore. There he ends his days—the manner of his death is uncertain. His friends consider him beyond all doubt insane. A creditor says that his debts “may well be called desperate ones, for a madman owes ’em”;[159:2] others sum the matter up tersely by saying “Lord Timon’s mad.”[159:3] Alcibiades excuses Timon’s behaviour on the ground that

“his wits Are drown’d and lost in his calamities.”[159:4]

Only Flavius, his faithful steward, gives no hint that he considers his lord insane, though even he is struck with Timon’s unhappy condition, so “full of decay and failing.”[159:5] Flavius, in this as in other particulars, seems, like Ulysses, in “Troilus and Cressida” and other characters in different plays, to be Shakespeare’s mouthpiece. There is nothing in his representation of Timon which gives us cause to impute madness to the protagonist. His state of mind is one of acute depression, which we should call melancholia, were there any hint that such a conception entered into the mind of the author. The condition of Timon is not unlike that of Hamlet, and we could easily understand his feigning madness to avoid the real evil coming upon him.

If any further proof were needed that Timon is not a maniac his speeches would suffice. The objection that “all satire upon the hollowness of the world would lose much of its point if it came from the lips of an undoubted lunatic,”[160:1] is perfectly valid. In “King Lear” the speeches which contain the most sarcasm, as well as the most poetry, are those of the earlier scenes, in which Lear has not yet become entirely a maniac. This kind of speech is characteristic of Timon to the end. His very last words, though lacking the force of the first outburst, are equally coherent and contain far more poetry:

“Come not to me again: but say to Athens, Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood; Who once a day with his embossed froth The turbulent surge shall cover; thither come And let my gravestone be your oracle. Lips, let sour words go by and language end: What is amiss plague and infection mend! Graves only be men’s works and death their gain! Sun, hide thy beams! Timon hath done his reign.”[161:1]

A character far more repulsive, but depicted with the greatest force, is Malefort Senior, of Massinger’s “Unnatural Combat.” Malefort is an Admiral of Marseilles who is challenged by his apostate son to a duel and comes off victorious, the son being slain. Shortly afterwards, Theocrine, Malefort’s daughter, is sought in marriage by the son of the Governor; the father consents, but his strange extravagances towards her, as he loads her with jewels, riches and a superfluity of caresses, is generally commented upon, and before long it appears that he has fallen in love with her. The remainder of the plot hastens to the catastrophe, Theocrine being dishonoured and virtually murdered by a false friend of her father’s. Malefort himself is persecuted by ghosts, and is finally killed by a flash of lightning.

A modern author would no doubt represent such a character as Malefort as suffering from some mental disease, but Massinger appears to have considered the unnatural passion of the father for his daughter as the fruit of the unnatural combat in which he kills his son. He cares more for the development of this idea than for the mental condition of Malefort, who speaks, in one place, of his son’s blood as growing upon him like Hercules’ poisoned shirt, though he seems also to feel an inward cause of his passion which he cannot explain. Montreville, the false friend, supposes that he may be mad, and recommends:

“A deep-read man, that can with charms and herbs Restore you to your reason.”[162:1]

But from the general character of the play it is easy to see that he is not considered insane.

Here, then, we have an attempt made to subject an outrageous and unnatural passion, the manifestations of which bear at times the closest resemblance to mania, to the dramatic treatment of tragedy. That Massinger has wholly succeeded, few would be rash enough to assert. He has given us a grim and ghastly picture, full of brute strength but wanting in that higher power which restrains and subdues. He has created a character at times human, always terrible, but only partially effective in the highest sense of the word.

It is probable that if Constance and Malefort had been portrayed as mad and not merely as possessed by an overpowering passion, the result in each case would have been a considerable dramatic gain. The death of the Lady Constance “in a frenzy”—like the deaths of Lady Macbeth and the Queen in “Cymbeline”—is only reported by a messenger. Had that frenzy actually been depicted, the result would have been a weakening of the whole plot, but a decided increase in the effectiveness of Constance. In the two plays which we shall now consider, a comparatively poor theme is treated in such a way that the passion portrayed is heightened,—without being raised, however, to the level of madness. It is interesting to speculate on the result had this been done—whether the madness would have elevated the drama or whether the paucity or the inconsequence of the theme would have debased the presentation of insanity.

Grimaldi, the remorse-stricken renegade of Massinger’s play “The Renegado,” who first immures a young girl, and afterwards repents, is reduced in the fourth act to a state approaching insanity. He is a poor sort of creature, at any rate until the concluding portion of the play, where he contrives a remarkable stratagem which brings about the dénouement. His remorse bears many of the signs of madness, and indeed may have been intended for such by the author. For days he has taken no food; the mention of the words “church” and “high altar” increases his melancholy; his speech ends ever with “those dreadful words damnation and despair.”[163:1] His “ravings” lead him to contemplate all kinds of extravagances; he would do a “bloody justice” on himself, pull out his eyes, lop off his legs, and give his body to those whom he has injured. He does none of these things, however,—a Jesuit priest, habited like a Bishop, curing him by the very simple means of granting him absolution. The wild ravings give place to calmer expressions of contrition and he goes off with a riming couplet! It is unnecessary to follow him; one only wishes that the extreme nature of his remorse had not made it advisable for us to include such a creature, for whom little can be felt but contempt.

Our last example is Memnon, in Fletcher’s play, “The Mad Lover.” Here is a character for whom we cannot help entertaining some regard, but we are at a loss to know what exactly to make of him. If he is really mad, as seems at first sight unlikely, it is a very unreal kind of madness, with more dramatic purpose than realism. One of the characters, indeed, calls him “stupid mad,” and the term is not an inapt one. We should be inclined to group him with the pretenders, but for three considerations. Firstly, he never declares nor even hints to anyone that he is not what he seems, as Hamlet does to Horatio and as Memnon himself might with perfect ease have done—for example, to Siphax. Then his recovery, however sudden, complete and unreal, is only the sort of thing one would expect from Fletcher, and may be left out of the question. Lastly, in the scene where he refuses the whore, it is true that he shews considerable sagacity and discrimination. Nevertheless it is no more than has actually been found in “cases” arising from the same cause as Memnon’s. Yet obviously, as we shall see, the mad lover is not mad in the acceptation of the word then common, and the hypothesis of an abnormal passion will meet the case, better perhaps than if we consider our hero either mad or sane.

The plot has already been sketched, and a few references should make this statement clear. The lover’s rude courtship is the fruit of long campaignings and absence from court; when he is told by his friend of the strange impression he has made he speaks perfectly rationally and merely becomes confirmed in his purpose. The extravagant idea of cutting out his heart is the first sign of the strength of his passion. Yet his soliloquy:

“’Tis but to die. Dogs do it, ducks with dabbling, Birds sing away their souls, and babies sleep ’em . . .”[165:1]

is spoken in a temper quite unlike the madman’s. His argument might even by some be considered valid: “For in the other world she is bound to have me,” he says, “Her princely word is past.” When others enter, he grows wilder, and throughout the play talks in the most extravagant vein, more particularly to the surgeon whom he tries to persuade to cut out his heart. “Here I am, sir,” says Memnon,

“Come, look upon me, view the best way boldly; Fear nothing, but cut home. If your hand shake, sirrah, Or any way deface my heart i’ the cutting, Make the least scratch upon it . . . . . . . I’ll slice thee to the soul. . . . I will not have you smile, sirrah, when you do it, As though you cut a lady’s corn; ’tis scurvy. Do me it, as thou dost thy prayers, seriously.”[166:1]

Here is a man whose mind is certainly in an abnormal condition, and, whatever the precise nature of that condition may be, it alone gives to the play the least vestige of probability. If Memnon were sane, the play would be absurd; if he were mad, then madness would once more be degraded. As it is, he is not an unpleasing fellow; at times he is even touched with pathos: any verdict on him would assuredly be more favourable than a just verdict on the play as a whole.

FOOTNOTES:

[150:1] Dr. Faustus, l. 1419, etc. (Oxford text.)

[151:1] The insanity of Ann Ratcliff, in this play, may also be noticed, though it is of the same rude type as that of Greene’s Orlando. “See, see, see,” she cries, “the Man in the Moon has built a new windmill, and what running there’s from all quarters of the city, to learn the art of grinding.” The only feature of interest in her frenzy is the expression of physical pain which we noticed in “King Lear.” Her ribs are like to break, and “there’s a Lancashire horn-pipe in my throat. Hark how it tickles it, with Doodle, doodle, doodle, doodle,” etc.

[152:1] With Macbeth might be compared two other remorse-stricken murderers in little known plays. Glapthorne’s “Albertus Wallenstein” is the story of a man who causes his son and his son’s betrothed to be killed and is then haunted by his crimes. His soul “is shaken with a nipping frost”; he mistakes his son’s page for a ghost and murders him; after this false visions of spirits are ever before him. Only when mortally wounded by conspirators is his mind at rest. In Denham’s “Sophy” (which is in spirit outside our period, though it was acted in 1641), Abbas, King of Persia, is likewise tormented by the ghosts of those whom he has murdered. Abbas, unlike Macbeth and Wallenstein, is quite a maniac, and does not recover his senses before his death.

[152:2] cf. “Macbeth,” v., 5, 9, etc. “I have almost forgot the taste of fears . . .”

[152:3] Act ii., Scene 1.

[153:1] “Macbeth,” ii., 3, 32-3.

[153:2] Ibid., ii., 2, 35, etc.

[153:3] “Mad Folk,” etc., p. 20.

[154:1] Ibid., p. 24.

[154:2] “Macbeth,” iii., 4, 109.

[154:3] “Mad Folk,” etc., p. 29.

[155:1] “Macbeth,” v., 2, 13.

[155:2] Ibid., v., 2, 37-8.

[158:1] “King John,” iii., 4, 93.

[158:2] l. 43.

[158:3] ll. 45, etc.

[159:1] “Timon of Athens,” iv., 3, 53.

[159:2] Ibid., iii., 4, 101-2.

[159:3] Ibid., iii., 6, 129.

[159:4] Ibid., iv., 3, 88.

[159:5] Ibid., iv., 3, 465.

[160:1] Raised and disputed by Bucknill, “Mad Folk,” etc., p. 259.

[161:1] “Timon of Athens,” v., 1, 217, etc.

[162:1] “The Unnatural Combat,” iv., 1.

[163:1] “The Renegado,” iv., 1.

[165:1] “The Mad Lover,” ii., 1.

[166:1] Ibid., iii., 2.