Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Greek tragedy and models of madness
- 2 Greco-Roman comedy and folly
- 3 Jealousy the green-eyed monster and madness in Shakespeare
- 4 Ibsen and the domestication of madness
- 5 Tennessee Williams and the theatre of the mind
- 6 Soyinka's theatre of the shadowlands
- 7 Sarah Kane: the self in fission
- Index
3 - Jealousy the green-eyed monster and madness in Shakespeare
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Greek tragedy and models of madness
- 2 Greco-Roman comedy and folly
- 3 Jealousy the green-eyed monster and madness in Shakespeare
- 4 Ibsen and the domestication of madness
- 5 Tennessee Williams and the theatre of the mind
- 6 Soyinka's theatre of the shadowlands
- 7 Sarah Kane: the self in fission
- Index
Summary
Greek tragedy had hidden mad behaviour from view but the dramatic and violent consequences, even though not held up as spectacle, remained a powerful and compelling antithesis of the good. In contradistinction, comic madness in Greco-Roman comedy was treated with levity, rendered innocuous and enacted to full public gaze. Plautus in The Brothers Menaechmus had begun the process of demystifying the signs of madness by placing sideby- side professional and lay views. This process was fully explored and exploited by Shakespeare in varying degrees in Othello, Hamlet and King Lear.
It is obvious, as Meisel says, that:
‘Theatre is physical, its means material, belonging to the order of bodies, objects, things. When a play dramatizes inner states, inner conflicts, it does so through corporeal means, principally speech and behaviour of actors, and the cues for doing so are what we find in the script … the skills to read each other's latent thought and feeling are what we, the potential audience, practise everyday of our lives in the everyday world.’
(2007: p. 33)Meisel goes on:
‘Reading gesture is critical when it takes on more than illustrative and expressive function, when it conveys meanings beyond the dialogue, which it can qualify or condense into something that feels definitive, like the kiss that seals the union of lovers in stage and film.’
(2007: p. 53)The problem for the playwright is how to signal madness, a rare condition that is neither seen nor interpreted daily by the audience. In Shakespeare, the action, the body and the language carry the weight of this task. In this chapter, I will examine Shakespeare's treatment of madness in Othello, The Winter's Tale, Hamlet and King Lear. These four plays reveal different aspects of madness: the induction of madness by manipulation of the social world; inexplicable madness that distorts reality; factitious madness that serves the protagonist's purpose and by implication inaugurates for the audience the symbols that denote madness; folly and its relationship to madness; and the tragedy of the disintegration of mental life.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Madness at the Theatre , pp. 31 - 47Publisher: Royal College of PsychiatristsPrint publication year: 2012