[In the essay below, the critics examine the linguistic and staging conventions used by Shakespeare and other dramatists to represent "madwomen" on the Elizabethan stage, contending that "madwomen offered the dramatists an opportunity to write speeches of exuberant fancy and lyric grace."]

Mad characters on the Elizabethan stage all have their own special language, costume, and gesture, which depend on a set of theatrical conventions about how to represent madness effectively. These assumptions and expectations are as stylized as those, for example, that govern the staging of ghosts and drunks as well as a variety of ethnic types (some of whom are seen with full-blown accents and mannerisms in Shakespeare's Henry V). We are particularly interested now in the madwomen, who are much more strongly defined than the madmen. Madness allows women an emotional intensity and scope not usually expected in conventional feminine roles. Their madness is interpreted as something specifically feminine, whereas the madness of men is not specifically male.

The madwomen of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists need to be understood in their contemporary context and especially within the cultural assumptions about women built into the language. Any strong emotional expression is generally thought to be womanish. As Laertes says of his tears for the dead Ophelia, "When these are gone, / The woman will be out" (Hamlet, 4. 7. 188-89).¹ In other words, once he has stopped crying, he will have fully expressed the feminine side of his nature. It is, however, shameful for a man to continue in this emotional vein. Hysteria, thought to be caused by a malfunction of the womb, was called familiarly "the mother," as in Lear's passionate attempt to master his imminent madness: "O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! / Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow" (King Lear, 2. 4. 55-56). Like the rising gorge to indicate vomiting, the rising "mother" is an unpropitious physiological sign.

The madness of women in Elizabethan drama is usually brought on by "the pangs of despised love" (Hamlet, 3. 1. 72). Love melancholy fills a whole section of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)—its causes, its symptoms, and its cure—and Burton is particularly sympathetic to those whose problems arise from sexual inhibition. The exact degrees of love melancholy are difficult to determine, but once the "humours" (essential bodily fluids) are burnt (or "adust," in the technical description), pathology sets in. This pathology may be either neurotic or psychotic—Renaissance authors did not insist on an absolute distinction between the two—and "madness" tended to include a wide range of symptoms.² Thus "distracted" and "mad" are used synonymously by Elizabethan writers. "Lunatic," a stronger term, is not so common; according to the Spevack Concordance, Shakespeare uses it (and related forms) nineteen times.³ "Frenzy" is another strong term (used fourteen times in Shakespeare), with the related adjective "frantic" (seventeen examples). "Fit" as a noun (twenty-two occurrences, not all relevant to madness) could be used rather vaguely in combinations, such as the "frantic fit" or "lunatic fit." The strongest word for madness in Shakespeare is "ecstasy" (sixteen examples), a sudden fit in which the soul is imagined to be separated from the body (as, e.g., in a mystical state, either erotic or religious). The mildest madness words are those related to "dotage" (fifteen examples) and "dote" (forty-five examples), many of which do not specifically indicate madness at all but, rather, an advanced state of foolishness associated with old age. In popular parlance, "lunacy," "ecstasy," "frenzy," and "dotage" could all be used as generalized (and sometimes comic) equivalents of "madness."

No external sign of madness is more familiar and more often repeated than that of a woman with her hair down,⁴ virtually an emblem of feminine madness on the Elizabethan stage. Ophelia, for example, who merely enters "distracted" in the Folio stage direction (at line 2766),⁵ in the "Bad" Quarto of 1603 comes on stage "playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing."''⁶ Music, especially the singing of old, wistful, sentimental, and sometimes bawdy ballads, is both a frequent accompaniment of madness (an indication that rational discourse has broken down) and one of the specific cures for disordered wits (as in King Lear, 4. 7. 25).

What are we to make of Ophelia with "her haire downe singing"? That is, what sort of singing and lute playing can we expect from a young girl whose father has been murdered by her lover—compare Juliet's cousin Tybalt murdered by her lover, Romeo—and is now being buried "in huggermugger" (Hamlet, 4. 5. 84) and "with such maimèd rites" (5. 1. 221)? We are grateful to the bad quartos for giving us stage directions that seem to record contemporary stage business, directions that are missing in the more formal texts. In the "Bad" Quarto of Hamlet (also called Quarto 1), we are told that "Leartes leapes into the graue " of Ophelia and that "Hamlet leapes in after Leartes." Ophelia is suffering from the classic symptoms of love melancholy, and her sexual frustration is compounded by grief for her father. We know at once that she is distracted because her hair is no longer in place on its ornamental wire frame (or "tire"). Instead of being "put up," her hair has been "let down." Shakespeare must have known about tires, since he boarded with a French Huguenot tire-maker, Christopher Mountjoy, on the northeast corner of Muggle and Silver Streets in London around the year 1604.⁷

In Troilus and Cressida as well, Cassandra, "our mad sister," as Troilus calls her, enters "with her haire about her eares" (1082-83), which gives an especially dire quality to her prophecies of Trojan doom, since mad persons were supposed to be psychically in tune with the future. In Marston's extravagant play, Antonio's Revenge, Maria appears with "her hair loose" (3. 2, s.d.),⁸ and the foolish Balurdo would "kiss the curled locks of your loose hair" (3. 2. 19). Like the rank "unweeded garden" of Hamlet's first soliloquy (Hamlet, 1. 2. 135) and the disordered garden-commonwealth of Richard II, loose hair is an offense against decorum and therefore against the whole hierarchy of orderly correspondences. It is so improper and so overtly sensual that it may conventionally be understood to indicate a loss of reason, either temporary or permanent.

A thin line separates heightened emotion from distraction. Constance, the grieving mother of young Arthur in King John, is clearly not mad in our sense of the term, yet her loose hair expresses a grief excessive enough to be the subject of a little set piece of rhetorical elaboration. The conceit on binding and loosing is so artificial that the whole passage sounds like parody. King Philip of France begins,

Bind up those tresses! O, what love I note
In the fair multitude of those her hairs!
Where but by chance a silver drop [tear] hath
 fall'n,
Even to that drop ten thousand wiry friends
Do glue themselves in sociable grief.…
                                 [3. 3. 61-65]

With insufferable fullness, Constance completes the figure of binding up her hairs:

Yes, that I will; and wherefore will I do it?
I tore them from their bonds and cried aloud,
"O that these hands could so redeem my son,
As they have given these hairs their liberty!"

But now I envy at their liberty,
And will again commit them to their bonds,
Because my poor child is a prisoner.
                                 [3. 3. 69-75]

This is like the "sorrow and grief of heart" that make Richard II "speak fondly like a frantic man" (Richard II, 3. 3. 183-84).

Everything that we know about Elizabethan acting suggests that the boy actors understood the conventions of playing madwomen. Otherwise, how are we to interpret a stage direction so cryptic and so compressed as the one in The Spanish Tragedy: "She runs lunatic" (4. 1. 5, s.d.)?⁹ Without any warning, Isabella, the mother of the murdered Horatio, suddenly goes into her mad role. "She runs lunatic" is a practical and specific stage direction, fully comprehensible to the actor, not just a general invitation to ad lib. There is a similar example in Webster's White Devil: "CORNELIAdoth this in several forms of distraction" (5. 4. 82, s.d.).¹⁰ Webster presumably knows that there are various ways, besides the Ophelia-like language of her part, for the grief-crazed Cornelia to express her distraction. Mad folk have sudden starts; whims, cranks, and windmills in their brains; paranoid fears and hallucinations, spirits pursuing them, instructions from unseen powers. They are giddy, fantastic, apish, self-willed, and wild. All of these qualities demand a certain style of acting: spasmodic, lyrical, and intuitive. Even madness has its appropriate decorum—its "answering style."

We can best pursue this argument with examples from the many women characters who feign madness for some special purpose. In Fletcher's Pilgrim, Alinda is able to conceal herself from her own father by playing mad:

ALPHONSO. Dost thou dwell in Segovia, Fool?
ALINDA. No, no, I dwell in Heaven;
And I have a fine little house, made of
 marmalade,
And I am a lone woman, and I spin for Saint
 Peter;
I have a hundred little children, and they sing
  psalms with me.
                                          [4.1]¹¹

Alinda is so successful in her disguise because she has mastered the pretty, fanciful, childlike style and manner associated with mad girls. Free association produces an extravagance of metaphor not bound by the rules of rational discourse, and the mad speeches often make little separable arias. The mad style offers a way of combining the lunatic, the lover, and the poet of Duke Theseus's speech in A Midsummer Night's Dream: their "seething brains" and "shaping fantasies" "apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends" (5. 1. 4-6).

The most frenzied (and most poetic) example of feigned madness is in Middleton and Rowley's Changeling. Isabella, the young wife of the old and foolish Alibius, offers herself to Antonio, who is also feigning madness in the private sanatorium of Alibius. In typical fashion, Isabella's madness is strongly sexual, both in its overt intent and in its covert meanings. She pretends that her lover is Icarus at the very moment that he is falling into the sea, and her hallucination is made vividly dramatic—a fully realized enactment of "fear of flying":

          Art thou not drowned?
About thy head I saw a heap of clouds
Wrapped like a Turkish turbant [turban]; on
 thy back
A crook'd chameleon-colored rainbow hung
Like a tiara down unto thy hams.
Let me suck out those billows in thy belly;
Hark, how they roar and rumble in the streets!
Bless thee from the pirates!
                             [4. 3. 131-38]¹²

This seems to echo Edgar's speech to Gloucester on Dover Cliffs in King Lear (4. 6). On the prosaic Antonio, however, Isabella's lyrical assault is completely wasted. He protests, "Pox upon you, let me alone!" (line 138) and, more violently, "I'll kick thee, if again thou touch me, / Thou wild unshapen antic; I am no fool, / You bedlam!" (lines 145-47). Antonio loses the very ready and willing Isabella, eager to "tread the lower labyrinth" (line 129), from failure of imagination. It is interesting how closely madness is identified with the powers of the imagination. We discover imaginative gifts in the "mad" Isabella that make Antonio wholly unworthy of her.

The mad Ophelia, too, is able to draw on an entirely different range of experience from what was available to her as only daughter of the chief counselor of state in Denmark. For her earlier career, "I do not know, my lord, what I should think" (Hamlet, 1. 3. 104) is an entirely characteristic utterance, and she is "loosed" to Hamlet as a mere pawn in her father's plans. Her madness opens up her role, and she is suddenly lyric, poignant, pathetic, tragic. Madness enables her to assert her being; she is no longer enforced to keep silent and play the dutiful daughter.

Ophelia is the prototype of a great many madwomen to follow, who scrupulously imitate her style. She is close to nature, as indicated in her flower imagery and her concern for natural processes, but it is a nature full of folklore perils, especially the danger of self-annihilation.¹³ Her speech is childlike in both matter and manner, from which she draws a fund of pathos from the audience—"Her mood will needs be pitied" (4. 5. 3). She sings snatches of old ballads and is preoccupied with her own repressed sexuality: "Young men will do't if they come to't, / By Cock, they are to blame" (4. 5. 60-61). Her syntax is broken; her discourse is organized by lyrical free association, with many veiled innuendos and pointed allusions to the state of affairs in Denmark. In her transformation, Ophelia worries Claudius: "Follow her close; give her good watch, I pray you" (4. 5. 74). The loss of rationality is expressed by a shift from verse to prose, as if blank verse were too orderly a vehicle to express Ophelia's wild fancies.

Shakespeare might have learned to represent madness as a sudden shift from verse to prose from Marlowe's Zabina in / Tamburlaine, perhaps the first madwoman in Elizabethan drama (although Isabella in The Spanish Tragedy may also date from the same year, 1587). Zabina is crazed by extreme grief in seeing her husband, Bajazeth, knock his brains out against his cage. She does not go mad instantaneously but takes five exclamatory lines of Marlovian blank verse to lose her wits. No attempt is made to conceal the artifice of Zabina's highly wrought mad style:

Give him his liquor? Not I, bring milk and fire, and my blood I bring him againe, teare me in peeces, give me the sworde with a ball of wildefire upon it. Downe with him, downe with him. Goe to, my child, away, away, away. Ah, save that Infant, save him, save him. I, even I speak to her. The Sun was downe. Streamers white, Red, Blacke. Here, here, here. Fling the meat in his face. Tamburlaine, Tamburlaine. Let the souldiers be buried. Hel, death, Tamburlaine, Hell. Make ready my Coch, my chaire, my jewels, I come, I come, I come. [1 Tamburlaine, 5. 1. 310-18]¹⁴

In an emotional frenzy, "She runs against the Cage and braines her selfe." In anticipation of Tennessee Williams's more highly colored "memory" technique (as in The Glass Menagerie), Marlowe uses madness to dislodge fragments of remembered images. Zabina is wilder than Ophelia, her imaginative leaps and repetitions more emphatic; but both characters are suddenly freed by madness from their completely conventional female roles.

The explosive sexual imagery of Zabina and Ophelia is politely echoed by the Jailer's Daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen, a late play generally attributed to Shakespeare and Fletcher. The madness of the Jailer's Daughter is almost purely ornamental, an occasion for "pretty" discourse rather than a soul-ravaging disorder. As she flees her father and misses her rendezvous with her beloved Palamon, whom she has freed from prison, she falls into charming hallucinations, in which she animates nature in the style of a child's fable:

Would I could find a fine frog; he would tell
 me
News from all parts o' th' world; then would
 I make
A carack of a cockleshell, and sail
By east and north-east to the King of Pigmies,
For he tells fortunes rarely.
                                 [3. 4. 12-16]

As the Doctor puts it so energetically, "How her brain coins!" (4. 3. 40), and "What stuff she utters!" (5. 2. 67). The Jailer's Daughter is the most extensively developed madwoman in all of Elizabethan drama, and her cure is effected with a fullness and specificity that leave little to the imagination. In short, since "'tis not an engraffed madness, but a most thick and profound melancholy" (4. 3. 49-51), she can be restored to her wits only by the generous sexual activity denied her by Palamon but supplied without stinting by the anonymous gentleman called simply Wooer.

The Doctor in this play has typically folkloristic views about the powers of sex:

        Please her appetite
And do it home: it cures her ipso facto
The melancholy humor that infects her.
                        [5. 2. 35-37]

This is the traditional folk motif of "sickness (madness) cured by coition" (Stith Thompson's motif F950.4, "Marvels").¹⁵The Two Noble Kinsmen uses the mad-woman motif in an almost completely conventional way, without exploring any psychological nuances. The Doctor, and more specifically the alienist-doctor, like our modern psychoanalyst (but without the stage-German accent), was a familiar figure on the Elizabethan stage. He is nowhere more vigorously represented than in Webster's Duchess of Malfi, where, if all else fails, he threatens to "buffet" Ferdinand's "madness out of him" (5. 2. 26).¹⁶

Curiously, there is not a more explicit connection between female madness and guilt, although the implied guilt of sexuality is an important overtone. Lady Macbeth comes closest to a modern feeling of anxiety symptoms. Her sleepwalking scene (5.1) is also a mad scene, since she speaks in a free-associational, non-rational, broken discourse that we expect from Elizabethan madwomen on stage. She plays on the forbidden acts that she cannot properly suppress. Her hands cannot be washed clean of the blood that has stained them—the characteristic gesture of the scene is the attempt to remove from her hands imaginary spots that will not disappear—and she speaks throughout to her husband, who she thinks is with her. Her hallucinations echo a bloody reality that is only too emphatically true. Under these circumstances, Macbeth understands with chilling clarity that his questions to the doctor are purely rhetorical:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous
 stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
                                 [5. 3. 40-45]

"Some sweet oblivious antidote"—some pleasant remedy that cures anxiety by physical means—recalls The Two Noble Kinsmen and the Doctor's remarkable cure in that play, but there seems to be an absolute separation between the madwomen in comedy and in tragedy. In comedy, all is always recoverable, even one's wits, and an episode of madness may prove to be a valuable educational experience. Thus Pandora, in Lyly's Woman in the Moone, goes through a "lunaticke" phase in act 5 under the influence of Luna (or Cynthia). She becomes "new fangled, fyckle, slothfull, foolish, mad" (5. 1. 5), "idle, mutable, / Forgetfull, foolish, fickle, franticke, madde" (lines 307-8).¹⁷ These are the "humours" that content her best, but, once they are displayed and she becomes "sober" again, she chooses to remain with Cynthia as the woman in the moon. During her mad fit, Pandora can fully indulge feminine caprices that are not only whimsical but also highly lyrical:

Where is the larks? come, weel go catch some
 streight!
No, let vs go a fishing with a net!
With a net? no, an angle is enough:
An angle, a net, no none of both,
Ile wade into the water, water is fayre,
And stroke the fishes vnder neath the gilles.
                                 [Lines 25-30]

Her sensuality, volatile and siren-like, anticipates the bored Cleopatra of act 2, scene 5 of Shakespeare's play.

Madwomen offered the dramatists an opportunity to write speeches of exuberant fancy and lyric grace. They also provided a sanction for witty sexual innuendo and outright bawdy, since love melancholy could be pathetic, pretty, and sensual all at the same time. If the madwoman was a conventional role on the Elizabethan stage, it was unconventional—and perhaps even disturbing—in its exploration of feminine consciousness. Through madness, the women on stage can suddenly make a forceful assertion of their being. The lyric form and broken syntax and unbridled imagination all show ways of breaking through unbearable social restraints.

We may conclude from our examples that madness on stage releases the emotional and imaginative powers that the saner women in the play are required to suppress. To put it in a different way, it would seem that only imaginative women have the capacity for either true or feigned madness. There is an art in madness by which a character may bring her imaginative energies to fruition. The literary and theatrical problems of how madwomen express themselves in Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists overlap with the more general problems so polemically formulated in Phyllis Chesler's Women and Madness.¹⁸ In the larger context, we need to work through this question of how women are used symbolically and what sort of releases madness offers. The next step in the discussion is to explain the social norms that shape and energize the madness of women in any particular historical period. In this area, we are likely to find remarkable consistencies between Elizabethan attitudes and our own.

Notes

¹ Unless otherwise indicated, Shakespeare's works are quoted from the paperback editions of the Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: New American Library).

² See J. Leeds Barroll, Artificial Persons: The Formation of Character in the Tragedies of Shakespeare (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), esp. chap. 1. See also

³ Marvin Spevack, ed. The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1974).

⁴ See E. R. Leach, "Magical Hair," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 88 (1958): 147-64. This fascinating essay examines the wider context of hair symbolism and its sexual connotations.

⁵ Quoted from Charlton Hinman's facsimile edition of the First Folio of Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1968). The references are to Hinman's through-line numbering.

⁶ Quoted from the facsimile edition of the Huntington Library copy of the First Quarto of Hamlet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931).

⁷ See Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 208.

⁸ John Marston, Antonio's Revenge, ed. G. K. Hunter, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).

⁹ Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards, The Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1959).

¹⁰ John Webster, The White Devil, ed. John Russell Brown, The Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1960).

¹¹ John Fletcher, The Pilgrim, in The Dramatic Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. George Colman (London, 1811), 2:299.

¹² Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, ed. N. W. Bawcutt, The Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1958).

¹³ See Paolo Valesio, "The Language of Madness in the Renaissance," Yearbook of Italian Studies 1 (1970-71): 208 ff. We are indebted to Coppélia Kahn for calling our attention to this wide-ranging study as well as for many other valuable suggestions.

¹⁴The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), vol. 1.

¹⁵ Cited by Valesio, p. 209, n. 23.

¹⁶ John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown, The Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1964).

¹⁷ John Lyly, The Woman in the Moone, in The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), vol. 3.

¹⁸ Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1972).