Saturday, 30 December 2017

Representations of Madness in Shakespeare

I am no expert on Shakespeare but I have read a few of his plays and thought about them at least a little over the years. Madness was very much an interest of Shakespeare and, in today's post, I want to talk a little about representations of madness in his works. I am only going to cite well known plays, so this should be accessible to a reader of only limited knowledge, and intend to alternate between my own interpretations and the interpretations conceivably given by twenty-first century psychiatrists. I have a point for doing so, as you'll see at the end.

I'll start with King Lear, whose eponymous monarch famously goes mad during a storm on a hearth and then recovers his sanity towards the end of the play. The story begins with Lear deciding to abdicate his position as ruler of Britain and divide his kingdom between his three daughters. He demands his daughters declare their love for him and his two elder daughters fulsomely and insincerely extol their total devotion, while the youngest, Cordelia, the only good one, says "I love your Majesty/ According to my bond, no more, no less." Furious, Lear expels her and deprives her of her inheritance. He then lays out his plan concerning the future of his realm to his remaining two sons-in-law.

    I do invest you jointly with my power,
    Pre-eminence, and all the large effects
    That troop with majesty. Ourself, by monthly course,
    With reservation of an hundred knights
    By you to be sustained, shall our abode
    Make with you by due turn. Only we shall retain
    The name and all th' addition to a king: the sway
    Revenue, execution of the rest,
    Beloved sons, be yours: which to confirm,
    This coronet part between you.

Lear's fatal error is to think that he can retain the dignity or authority of his former office while relieving himself of its responsibility. It is the act of a foolish, capricious god, an act the success of which depends on his two elder daughters being honest in their claims of unconditional love. Of course, it all goes awry. Lear's retinue is soon whittled away by his ungrateful, and in fact evil, daughters to nothing and Lear, crying "I shall go mad!" storms away into the hearth, accompanied only by his few faithful friends, the Fool, Gloucester and Kent.

It is not the purpose of this essay to provide a rigorous interpretation of King Lear. I can simply say however that it concerns Lear's learning the lesson of humility. On the hearth he calls the elements he rails against "servile ministers/ That will with two pernicious daughters join/ Your high-engendered battles 'gainst a head/ So old and white as this". As himself the victim of injustice, called by Lear "filial ingratitude", Lear comes at last to recognise that many others in his realm are also the victims of injustice, if of a different sort, individuals he now realises he should have given more thought to when he had his former position. He, who has always had power, has found out what it is like to be powerless. He says, "As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,/ They kill us for their sport", the theme of the play summed up. In Lear's pagan kingdom, a kingdom before Christ or Providence, the gods are foolish and capricious, as he was, the poor and the mad suffer unnecessarily, and the good die for no reason at all, as Cordelia does at the end. The world is unfair, absurd, meaningless; yet the play is at its heart an argument for a liberal, left-leaning politics.

Lear learns his lesson though madness. Now, suppose we look at Lear from the point of view of a twenty-first century psychiatrist. Lear clearly experiences, on the hearth, in the hovel, a severe psychotic episode, involving thought disorder, that passes when he is reunited with Cordelia. Obviously he must have some type of mental illness. We could say, "Lear is schizophrenic". The problem is that schizophrenia is supposed usually to manifest itself in late adolescence or early adulthood and Lear is an old man. Perhaps he has experienced psychosis before? On and off since he was perhaps seventeen or eighteen? And Shakespeare omitted to mention this? Unlikely. Surely, if Lear regularly went mad, Shakespeare would find a way to bring this fact into the story and this would influence other characters' attitudes towards Lear.

There is a way out for the twenty-first century psychiatrist. Lear has dementia. This would explain his stupid decision to give away his crown – it was an early warning sign. Shakespeare may have had experience of observing elderly people around him with this condition, and, evidently (the psychiatrist will say), Shakespeare was painting a picture of an elderly man with this tragic disease.

Lear announces that he is going to go mad but other characters in Shakespeare's plays don't seem to know that they are mad at all. One such is Macbeth. Macbeth hallucinates twice, the first time on the way to kill Duncan, the second time when he sees the ghost of Banquo at dinner – an apparition no-one else can see. I'll quote the famous soliloquy describing the first hallucination in full.

    Is this a dagger which I see before me,
    The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee;
    I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
    Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
    To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
    A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
    Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
    I see thee yet, in form as palpable
    As this which now I draw.
    Thou marshall's me the way that I was going,
    And such an instrument I was to use!
    Mine eyes are made the fools o'h'other senses,
    Or else worth all the rest: I see thee still'
    And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
    Which was not so before. There's no such thing:
    It is the bloody business which informs
    Thus to mine eyes... Now o'er the half-world
    Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
    The curtained sleep; Witchcraft celebrates
    Pale Hecate's offering; and withered Murder,
    Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf,
    Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
    With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
    Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
    Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
    Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
    And take the present horror from the time,
    Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:
    Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
    I go and it is done, the bell invites me.
    Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell
    That summons thee to heaven, or to hell.

In Macbeth's world, what we could now 'insanity' is an expression of the supernatural. The dagger and the ghost could be hallucinations but we know the witches and their fatal prophecies to be real –because Banquo sees and hears them as well. In the soliloquy quoted above, Macbeth considers the idea that the dagger is a hallucination "Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain" but ends up siding with the supernatural. He becomes the embodiment or personification of Murder in a world where "nature seems dead". Macbeth is founded on a dichotomy between the natural and the unnatural, between a real world and a supernatural world that is a battleground between Good and Evil, between heaven and hell. It is a world in which spiritual or religious judgements continually intrude. In the end it is the natural world which prevails, however, because God and nature are on the same side. I once worked out a more detailed interpretation of Macbeth which I have forgotten but it is sufficient here to say that Macbeth is perhaps mad and perhaps knows it.

What would a twenty-first century psychiatrist say about Macbeth? Hallucinations are a first-rank symptom of schizophrenia. Macbeth evidently has anosognosia or 'lack of insight'. Furthermore, when Macbeth hears about Lady Macbeth's suicide and delivers his signature "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech, he evidently seems to be displaying 'blunted affect', a negative symptom of schizophrenia, another sign that this diagnosis must be correct. Shakespeare was evidently painting a picture of schizophrenia just as, with Lady Macbeth, with her compulsive hand-washing, he was evidently painting a picture of OCD.

Shakespeare often featured characters if not in the grips of madness, than in the grips of a passion resembling madness in its intensity or extremity. When Othello is finally persuaded by Iago that Desdemona has been unfaithful, he displays signs of thought disorder or even paraphasia before collapsing and having a fit. Then later, when advancing towards Desdemona's bedroom with the intention of smothering her with a pillow, he shows clear signs of depersonalisation. Evidently, the psychiatrist would say, even if Othello is not schizophrenic, he is suffering from some kind of mental illness or personality disorder.

I turn now to the most famous madman in Shakespeare's ouvre: Hamlet. After Hamlet junior converses with the ghost of Hamlet senior, the prince tells Horatio he "shall think meet/ To put an antic disposition on". Thereafter he demonstrates problems with self-care, appearing to Orphelia "with his doublet all unbraced/ No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled/ Ungart'red and down-gyved to his ankle, / Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other/ And with a look so piteous in purport/ As if he had been loosed out of hell/ To speak of horrors". His family and friends become concerned about him. He shows indications of being delusional, telling Polonius "I know you well – you are a fishmonger." He demonstrates difficulties  with abstract thinking and limited insight, appearing to believe his mental health is weather-dependent, telling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

The history of Hamlet criticism is bedevilled by two basic questions. First, why is Hamlet so indecisive? Why does he exhibit what the psychiatrists today call 'aboulia'? Second, is Hamlet genuinely mad or just pretending to be mad? I believe both questions have the same answer. Hamlet doesn't know himself if he's mad or not. Consider the situation from Hamlet's point of view. He is an educated rationalist who has conversed with a ghost; he is a Protestant who doesn't believe in Purgatory who has been informed by the spectre of his father that the father spends his days there. Hamlet can't commit himself to exacting bloody revenge on Claudius because of the very real possibility that the ghost wasn't real. This is why he organises the play within the play ("the play's the thing/ Wherein I'll catch the conscience of a king.") He engages in what psychiatrists today call "reality-testing". Only after he sees Claudius's reaction to the play does he know for sure that the ghost was real and telling the truth – whereafter he flips out completely, abusing his mother in her bedroom and killing Polonius in the mistaken belief that he is killing Claudius.

Claudius and Gertrude decide to send Hamlet to England for a rest; there, according to Claudius's secret instructions, Hamlet is to be killed. If Hamlet were set in the 1950s or 1960s, he would have been sent to a Mental Hospital with instructions that he be lobotomised.

In this post, readers may have noticed a certain inconsistency of tone. Sometimes I have provided sincerely meant interpretations, sometimes satirical ones. To spell out my hidden meaning: Shakespeare was a genius and the psychiatric profession today is full of cretins. To understand the mad people in Shakespeare, as in real life, we must look for causes as well as symptoms. King Lear goes mad because of his treatment by his daughters; Macbeth's madness is an expression of his guilty conscience or foreknowledge; Othello loses his grip on reality because of Iago's manipulation; Hamlet goes mad because his uncle has killed his father and married his mother. In writing this post, I have been influenced, I should say, by my reading of critical texts about Shakespeare, such as What Happens in Hamlet by J. Dover Wilson; the topic of madness in Shakespeare probably merits a full book rather than this hastily written post but this is a start. I will finish by making one more point to be read straight. It is often a mistake to look for autobiographical content in a writer's work, but Shakespeare's interest in madness might conceivably be because he experienced a little madness himself, what we would now call 'psychotic symptoms'. His characters never hear voices but madness was quite literally something different in the Elizabethan age than it is now. Perhaps, like Hamlet, Shakespeare was sometimes unsure if he was mad or not.

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