Separate Theaters: Bethlem (''Bedlam'') Hospital And The Shakespearean Stage

Separate Theaters: Bethlem (“Bedlam”) Hospital and the Shakespearean Stage

Ken Jackson

Newark: University of Delaware Press

Separate Theaters

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Separate Theaters Bethlem (‘‘Bedlam’’) Hospital and the Shakespearean Stage

Ken Jackson

Newark: University of Delaware Press

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䉷 2005 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-87413-890-6/05 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp, pc.] Other than as indicated in the foregoing, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except as permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law), and except for brief quotes appearing in reviews in the public press.

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jackson, Kenneth S., 1965– Separate theaters : Bethlem (‘‘Bedlam’’) Hospital and the Shakespearean stage / Ken Jackson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87413-890-6 (alk. paper) 1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and Criticism. 2. Mental illness in literature. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Characters—Mentally ill. 4. Literature and mental illness— England—History—16th century. 5. Literature and mental illness— England—History—17th century. 6. Bethlem Royal Hospital (London, England)—In literature. 7. English drama—17th century—History and criticism. 8. Bethlem Royal Hospital (London, England)—History. 9. Psychiatric hospital patients in literature. 10. Mentally ill in literature. I. Title. PR658.M5J33 2005 822⬘.3093561—dc22

2004016466

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Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1. A ‘‘pastime’’ That Can ‘‘prompt us to have mercy’’: Putting Malvolio (Ben Jonson?) in a Dark Room 2. ‘‘ ’Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t’’: Poetaster, Satiromastix—and Shakespeare’s Defense of the Popular Stage in Hamlet 3. ‘‘A very piteous sight’’: The Magnificent Entertainment, The Honest Whore, Part One, The Honest Whore Part Two 4. Making Bethlem a ‘‘Jest’’ and Conceding to Jonson in Westward Ho, Eastward Ho, and Northward Ho 5. ‘‘I know not/ Where I did lodge last night?’’: Shakespeare’s King Lear and the Search for Bethlem (Bedlam) Hospital 6. ‘‘Twin’’ shows of madness: John Webster’s Stage Management of Bethlem in The Duchess of Malfi. 7. ‘‘Shadows and Shows of Charity’’: The Changeling, The Pilgrim, and the Protestant Critique of Catholic Good Works 8. ‘‘Foucault was right?’’ Notes Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgments I HAD THE GREAT GOOD FORTUNE TO HAVE EXPERIENCED, GENEROUS, AND firm support at the beginning of this project, and at the end. This study began as a dissertation under the direction of Suzanne Gossett at Loyola University of Chicago, and became a book while I was an assistant professor at Wayne State University mentored by Arthur F. Marotti. I will strive to repay to the profession their integrity, decency, and admirable directness—even if I will never be able to emulate their diligence and skill as editors. I am indebted to many others, of course. At Loyola, James Biester, Pamela Caughie, Allen J. Frantzen, Stephen Harris, Thomas Kaminski, Christopher Kendrick, and Micheline White all provided invaluable assistance in many different ways. The first bit of writing for this book was encouraged by David Bevington at the Newberry Library. At the University of Connecticut, Clare Eby, John Lopresti, Arnold and Anne Marie Orza, Thomas and Peggy Dietz Shea were the dearest of friends and colleagues. David Benson and the entire Medieval Studies Program there provided much intellectual nourishment. Raymond Anselment was a truly gracious reader. At Wayne State, I am especially grateful to Robert Aguirre, Lesley Brill, Richard Grusin, Tara Hayes, Jerry Herron, Donna Landry, Carl Larrivee, Gerald Maclean, Elizabeth Sklar and Barrett Watten. A University Summer Research Grant and a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Research Grant from Wayne State helped complete this project. And I do not have a book without the scholarship of Patricia Allderidge, Jonathan Andrews, and Carol Thomas Neely. My chapter on The Changeling is based on an article that appeared in Philological Quarterly (1995). Significant portions of my chapter on King Lear appeared in English Literary Renaissance 30.2 Spring (2000): 213–40 and are reprinted here with the permission of the editors. My chapter on The Honest Whore plays is based on an article that appeared in Studies in English 7

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Literature 1500–1900 43.2 Spring (2003): 395–413. I am grateful to all these journals for the permission to reprint. I also want to thank David Addison (who dutifully read and responded to the entire manuscript), Helen Addison, Mary Ann Jackson, and Samuel Jackson for their support. As I explain in the Introduction, most of this book about madness, hospitals, religion, and charity was written in and informed by my own experience in ‘‘mad’’ charitable places. So: I need to thank the knights of St. Larry’s—Mick, Krug, Dupe, Stinger, Lynn, and Carolyn—for teaching me about Protestant charity in a Catholic place, and Rita and Athena for teaching me about Catholic charity in a Protestant place. Above all else, this is for Pauline for knowing and understanding the pain involved in any charitable work. I hope she will provide one more good deed and read the entire book.

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Introduction IN ACT FOUR OF BEN JONSON’S EPICOENE (1609), LADY HAUGHTY EXplains that in order to be accepted into the ‘‘College’’ of fine ladies, Epicoene must go with the current members to ‘‘Bedlam, to the chinahouses, and to the Exchange’’(4.3.23).1 Jonson is a crucial figure for this study, but I open with his language simply because it frequently has been used to construct the most common understanding of the relationship between London’s notorious psychiatric hospital, Bethlem (‘‘Bedlam’’), and the stage: the hospital was some sort of theater, a place of perverse and sometimes fashionable entertainment for Londoners, and the practice of visiting and viewing the mad for amusement was depicted or alluded to in a number of plays between 1598 and 1630 such as Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Honest Whore, Part One (1605), William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601), Hamlet (1601), and King Lear (1606), Dekker and John Webster’s Northward Ho (1607), Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1612/14), Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling (1622), John Fletcher’s The Pilgrim (1622), and John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy (1628).2 Based largely on the fact that Jonson and a few other playwrights referred to visitation as recreation, many early modern scholars have assumed nothing more was involved in this cultural practice in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. For example, the quietly influential work my book seeks to update and deepen—Robert Reed’s Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage (1952)—treats Bethlem as perverse entertainment throughout. More recently, historian Michael MacDonald, in his widely read Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (1981) calls Bethlem ‘‘the longest running show in London.’’3 In discussing the tendency to call Bethlem a theater, Steven Mullaney, in the popular The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (1988), writes ‘‘the theatrical metaphor is hardly inappropriate, 11

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if it can be called a metaphor at all.’’4 Duncan Salkeld, in Madness and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1993), more or less accepts the show of Bethlem as strange entertainment only: ‘‘Bedlam scenes became popular in Renaissance drama probably because they depicted a single locus in which the spectacularity and strangeness of madness were contained. As a kind of theatrespace itself, a place where tragic and comic fictions of the mind were painfully lived out, Bedlam furnished dramatists with a resource of spectacular material.’’5 Most recently, perhaps, William C. Carroll, in Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (1996), writes, ‘‘The ‘Bedlam poor’ are . . . just another form of popular entertainment, culturally equivalent to various urban curiosities, or to such theatricalized spectacles as bear—baiting or ‘stage-plays.’ ’’6 These are some of the more serious and thoughtful considerations of the hospital and its relationship to theater. Simply put, the widespread assumption has been that Bethlem was inherently theatrical in a rather macabre way and thus useful as novel dramatic material for very busy playwrights of the popular stage. To assume, however, that playwrights seized on the show of Bethlem only to add some perverse spice for ‘‘primitive’’ elements of its audience or that the stage was the ‘‘equivalent’’ of the show of Bethlem distorts both the complexity of the hospital’s ‘‘show’’ and the development of early modern dramatic art. The primary purpose of this book is to address and, as much as is possible, correct these distortions about Bethlem and the drama. Let me briefly introduce the complexity of the show of Bethlem first. As Jonathan Andrews has pointed out recently en route to producing the new History of Bethlem (1997), the practice of visitation at Bethlem ‘‘can only be properly understood within the context of Bethlem’s evolution as a charity. The hospital’s enduring dependency on the good will of its benefactors had rendered public access to Bethlem not just economically expedient, but necessary, while charity had long required ocular proof of sickness and want and long displayed its objects as living exhortations.’’7 The historians argue that the hospital grew from a tiny monastic charity founded in 1247 to a small hospital for the insane after the Reformation, before becoming a large asylum and spectacle at the end of the seventeenth century. As we shall see, in outlining this narrative covering seven hundred years, Bethlem’s historians admit they are far from having all the necessary

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answers about Bethlem and its complex show’s relationship to charity, particularly in the years 1598 to 1630. But by re-situating the hospital in this general context the new historians have severely complicated our old ‘‘Jonsonian’’ understanding of Bethlem as strange recreation pure and simple. If the hospital was a theater of sorts, even a perverse one, the sort of theater it was—to a certain extent—was also charitable. Any attempt to understand the show of madness and its relationship to the Shakespearean stage must take into account the fact that Bethlem, like all early modern hospitals, was first and foremost a charity. How to take Bethlem’s ‘‘charity’’ into account in understanding its show and the Shakespearean stage presents the critical challenge at hand. The History of Bethlem, I need to make clear at the outset, provides us with striking, persuasive, new contextual parameters with which we can understand the show of Bethlem and the Shakespearean stage, but only contextual parameters. Before 1676, we still have very little sense of what that show was or, for that matter, what Bethlem was. We know, in other words, that it was a ‘‘hospital’’ or ‘‘charity’’ for the ‘‘mad,’’ and that ‘‘visitors’’ came to see the patients, but what does all that mean precisely? We know Bethlem primarily in its late-seventeenth-century form, an architectural splendor designed by Robert Hooke, the long-time colleague and friend of Christopher Wren, after the 1666 fire.8 This Bethlem Hospital was built quickly, probably in the fifteen months between April 1675 and July 1676, not more than four years after it had been approved by the city of London as a project. Architectural historian Christine Stevenson gives us some sense of why this Bethlem, as opposed to the Bethlem of Shakespeare’s lifetime, has so captured our imagination. Hooke’s Bethlem was a phenomenon much more remarkable than has ever been acknowledged. Most obviously, London was in 1676 presented with its first great charitable building since the Savoy Hospital (1505–1517) and one of the few public buildings to have been completed since the Fire, the only one on such an open site [Moorfields]. . . . Bethlem would have been notorious whatever its function, and purposeful reiterations of its expense and speed of construction enhanced the effect as surely as did sheer size, carved stone, cupolas, and galleries. When it came to architectural display, the Bethlem governors were not merely eager, but ferocious.9

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This is the Bethlem that housed more than 150 patients (due to significant additions in 1723 and 1735, the building could house 275 people by 1783) and attracted numerous visitors. From this period, we have numerous eyewitness accounts of visitation, both from the perspective of the visitor and the visited. Generally speaking, we see a practice that involved a mix of charity, moral instruction, and disturbing freak show. Bethlem governors actively encouraged visitation as a very necessary source of revenue, and struggled throughout the period to keep the practice from degenerating into ‘‘pure’’ entertainment. Seeing the mad poor living in squalor moved people to give— that some spectators also enjoyed and even laughed at this show may complicate, but did not yet contradict, the charitable function of Bethlem.10 Early modern charitable impulses coexisted rather comfortably throughout much of the eighteenth-century with a vocal, visible disgust for the recipients of charity, at Bethlem and elsewhere in the culture. Correspondingly, it seems that the enjoyment some spectators took in viewing the mad could coexist with rather than negate their charity. This is in disturbing contrast to our popular sense of charity, which generally involves the efforts of the givers to at least mask any feelings of contempt or difference between themselves and recipients. As Marcel Mauss has remarked in his influential The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies, ‘‘Charity is still wounding for him who accepted it, and the whole tendency of our morality is to strive to do away with the unconscious and injurious patronage of the rich almsgiver.’’11 In addition, many still believed madness stemmed from moral corruption, and argued that seeing the mad could serve as a warning to those who engaged in vice and sin; Hogarth’s plate eight depicting a scene from Bethlem in A Rake’s Progress (1735) is perhaps the most famous and influential example of this kind of thought.12 Increasingly refined and ‘‘civilized’’ sensibilities, however, severely curtailed visitation by the end of the century. The ‘‘beneficial’’ aspects of charitable display became less clear, particularly to members of the elite culture. This sort of charity, in other words, fell out of fashion, and gave way to our preference for more discreet and sedate ‘‘giving.’’ In a marked contrast, the Bethlem of the early Jacobean period was a small hospital housing fewer than thirty patients in the very poor St. Botolph’s parish (located very near what is now the

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Liverpool street station). Additions in the 1650s increased its capacity to fifty or so, but this humble institution bore little resemblance to Hooke’s. Shakespeare’s Bethlem was part of the ‘‘old’’ London that John Stow tried to reclaim in the celebratory nostalgic language of his Survey of London (1598); Bethlem was one of the London Royal Hospitals formed in the middle of the sixteenth century to reestablish some system of poor relief after the closing of the monasteries decimated the old ‘‘Catholic’’ system. The problem of London’s poor outgrew the hospitals and, in 1598 (a crucial year for this study), the nation turned to the poor laws as a social welfare mechanism. In turn, this system shift left the hospitals with little money to operate as funds were redirected through the poor law system determined by parish, rather than city-wide, boundaries. Intriguingly, it becomes clear at roughly this point in history that Bethlem governors were ‘‘showing’’ the mad in some fashion to elicit charity. Bethlem, we shall see, was undergoing major reforms in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including the disastrous appointment of its first physician, Helkiah Crooke, in 1619. But the practice of visitation at the Bishopsgate Bethlem, Shakespeare’s Bethlem, remains much less understood than the practice that followed it at Hooke’s grand eighteenth-century Bethlem at Moorfields. Not only do we not know what visitation at this Bethlem looked like exactly—were visitors charged when they came in? were they allowed to see all the patients? was there a set fee?—we do not know the extent to which visitation even was going on during this time period. There is ‘‘little evidence that large numbers of people visited the Hospital itself for its entertainment or moral value in the sixteenth century: Sir Thomas More’s comment that ‘thou shalt in Bedleem see one laugh at the knocking of his head against a post’ (1522) stands alone.’’13 And given More’s various political and juridical responsibilities, one cannot take his experience as evidence for a widespread cultural practice. In her recent book, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (2004), Carol Thomas Neely goes as far as to suggest that ‘‘visitation’’ did not occur at all in this time period.14 In this historical haze, the History of Bethlem has provided a tentative but provocative thesis that my ‘‘literary’’ study hopes to clarify and corroborate through specialized attention to dramatic texts. According to the historians, it seems the governors began

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showing the mad to compensate for funds lost at the 1598 reconstruction of poor relief. The practice of visitation that is so much better documented in the eighteenth century seems to originate here. Pointing to criticism of the hospital’s physical condition in the 1598 census undertaken by Bridewell governors (then charged with managing Bethlem as well), the first of its kind in forty years, the historians detect a ‘‘desire to encourage unrelated visitors.’’ It was partly the fact that it was ‘‘so loathsomely and filthily kept not fitt for any man to come into’’ which exercised the visiting committee. ‘‘Come into’’ might here equate to ‘‘be admitted to,’’ but, given that the Governors had already commented on the unfitness of the House as a dwelling, it seems more likely that what they had in mind at this point was that visitors might be put off.15

At this moment, the historians surmise, ‘‘the Bridewell Governors had decided to increase revenues by exploiting the attraction of the Hospital as spectacle.’’16 The History of Bethlem points out that ‘‘the first undoubted reference to a real-life visit to see the ‘shew of Bethlem’ ’’ actually follows this event when, in 1610, ‘‘Lord Percy spent 10s on a visit, possibly in company of ‘Lady Penelope and his two sisters.’ ’’17 The thesis that the practice of visitation ‘‘began’’ at this moment needs to be put forth cautiously, of course. It does seems likely, as Bethlem archivist Patricia Allderidge suggests, that some form of visitation had been around for years before 1598 and the ‘‘habit of taking money from visitors grew up by custom.’’18 Regular almsgiving alone would have constituted some form of ‘‘visitation.’’ That the practice of visitation becomes more distinctly visible to us around 1598 may mean simply that the first pangs of modern, ‘‘civilized’’ discomfort with everyday medieval charitable and medical practices are registered at this moment. Some complaints about the practice of visitation at the Bishopsgate Bethlem, complaints comparable to those that ultimately would end the practice in the eighteenth century, appear in the hospitals records in 1632 and 1650.19 These complaints encourage the right kind of visitor, the ‘‘person of quality’’ who intended to do ‘‘the poore Lunatiques good & relieving them,’’ and warn against those with less admirable intentions, suggesting, perhaps, that an older practice already was wearing thin or

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undergoing reform. The need to distinguish more carefully between the well-intended and the not so well-intended is what may be new here, the distinction between those interested, on the one hand, in charity and those, on the other hand, interested in some kind of pleasurable show. In other words, around 1600 the culture simply may have been becoming more conscious of Bethlem’s show as show, as aligned with emerging categories of theater and drama—about which I will say more momentarily—rather than starting any distinctly ‘‘new’’ practice. Bethlem as a theater of sorts, we note, seems that much more perverse when measured against a specific category of theater: the modern representational stage. The very notion of Bethlem as ‘‘perverse’’ theater, which has been so widely accepted, depends on a distinction between the modern representational stage as we know it and other ritual practices involving spectacle that may not yet have been fully developed in history. When we recall that the representational stage itself was only just emerging in its modern form as more or less the ‘‘pure’’ entertainment or art that we tend to consider it, however, then the show of Bethlem begins to look less strange. Juxtaposed to other ritualized theatrum of the medieval world, for example, the often raucous, festive celebrations like parish ales staged even in churchyards to raise money, the ‘‘show’’ of Bethlem at the squalid Bishopsgate site even might seem restrained or pious.20 We simply may not have yet the terms or concepts, in short, to grasp precisely what was involved in earlier versions of ‘‘visitation,’’ having only our more distinct modern categories of ‘‘entertainment’’ and ‘‘spectacle’’ and ‘‘medicine’’ and ‘‘charity’’ to employ. And it was the intensifying distinctions between these very categories, we need to keep in mind, that helped end the show in the eighteenth century. When the educated elite of London decided visiting the charity was no longer also proper entertainment, the show of Bethlem began to come to an end. We must be especially cautious then. Having dissolved the actual show of Bethlem in history, the very categories we must employ to access it now may dissolve the show once again as we proceed. One can only imagine and speculate that the practice of visitation before the eighteenth-century, particularly before the building of Hooke’s Bethlem, was quite fluid. Visitors experienced a range of delight, pity, compassion, disgust, and distributed a range of

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donations. One simply cannot easily distinguish between the ‘‘show’’ and the ‘‘charity’’ because such a firm distinction as we have just did not obtain. As Shakespeare’s Sir Toby might put it having watched enough of the ‘‘mad’’ Malvolio in the ‘‘dark room,’’ visitation was a complicated ‘‘pastime’’ that can ‘‘prompt us to have mercy’’ (3.4.140–41).21 Indeed, upon reexamining dramatic scenes that refer to Bethlem, madhouses, or viewing madness without our ‘‘perverse’’ theatrical prejudice, one discovers rather quickly consistent, explicit connections to early modern charity and poor relief. So much so, in fact, that one suspects that this ‘‘earlier’’ show of Bethlem involved, to invoke these troubling categories yet again, much more charity than entertainment. In other words, the drama suggests a culture where the show of Bethlem was not yet considered inherently perverse, but charitable or potentially charitable. A close consideration of ‘‘Bedlam’’ dramas between 1598 and 1630, in short, supports the larger thesis of the historians that the mad show of charity was once much more acceptable, and only degenerated completely with changing sensibilities in the late eighteenth-century. Interestingly, this evidence of charitable display is clearly present in the drama even though the Bethlem historians themselves disavow any substantial connections between the drama and the hospital: ‘‘Almost certainly the Bedlam scenes of Jacobean drama do not portray the reality of the contemporary Bethlem hospital. . . . What the theatrical madmen say and do is largely a product of the playwrights’ imaginations and their dramatic requirements.’’22 Nonetheless, the very dramatic evidence that has been used to construct the old ‘‘Jonsonian’’ notion of a perverse theater of Bethlem, and the very drama dismissed by Bethlem’s historians as mere fiction, I will argue, actually supports the tentative thesis of the Bethlem historians about the practice of visitation and its relationship to charity. This is not to suggest simply that the drama ‘‘represented’’ a charitable show rather than a perverse one. To do so, quite obviously, only would reverse and reiterate at least two of the critical distortions of my predecessors (even as I critique them!). First, I have tried to stress here at the outset that the show of Bethlem, while not simply a perverse variant of the stage, was not simply an uncomplicated, unmediated display to elicit charity either. In correcting our current distorted view of Bethlem as perverse the-

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ater, I have no intention of substituting another distortion—that the show of Bethlem was institutionally innocent in some ideal fashion. As Roy Porter suggested almost twenty years ago, the troubling ‘‘frisson of the freakshow’’ cannot be denied.23 The intent here is to negotiate more carefully what must have been the complexity of the show, its relationship to charity and entertainment. And, second, the intent here is also to negotiate more carefully the relationship between the stage and reality. One cannot assume, in short, that early modern dramatists were comparable to rapacious videographers, snapping up interesting snippets— perverse or charitable—of ‘‘real’’ life as they came across them. As suggested at the very beginning of this chapter, this video maker assumption distorts the complexity of the development of the modern ‘‘representational’’ stage. On the one hand, it assumes a representational distance (between the videographer and the camera’s object) not yet firmly established; on the other hand, it assumes early modern playwrights had no critical selfreflexivity about their art at all and simply depicted whatever caught the eye. One could say the videographer assumption that has dominated scholarship thus assumes too little about early modern playwrights by assuming too much. Scholarship ‘‘overestimates’’ the representational stance of playwrights by casting them in a purely modern posture relative to the dramatic object, and this critical gesture then effaces just how serious and sophisticated early modern dramatists were about matters of representation and artistic theory. In fact, one of the delightful ironies I discovered while reexamining dramatic treatments of Bethlem and madness in a new, more ‘‘charitable’’ context was that the show of Bethlem initially emerged on the stage as part of one its most theoretically sophisticated efforts to understand its own art and define itself as cultural activity: the Poets’ War or poetomachia. That is, the show of Bethlem emerged on the late sixteenth- and early seventeenthcenturies’ stage not as a kind of protorealism that reveals the hospital to us as if in photographs or videos, or even because the drama acts as a particularly acute cultural register of some ‘‘new historical’’ kind, but because the show of Bethlem became part of a nuanced, literary dispute over what the dramatic stage was and should be. Bethlem and the show of madness actually end up playing a rather surprisingly significant and telling role in the development of early English dramatic art. There was, in other

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words, a rather complex artistic argument that led to the appearance of the show of Bethlem on the stage when and how it did, and one has to grapple with these theoretical, literary matters about art as one teases out any historical ‘‘facts’’ about actual Bethlem from the plays. We do have to read and imagine the plays as plays in a vibrant artistic milieu—something Bethlem’s nonliterary ‘‘historians’’ are understandably reluctant to do—before we can acquire a sense of their relationship to the hospital in history.24 This is not to abandon well established ‘‘New Historical’’ assumptions, but to refine them. Dramatic texts do provide access to the broader ‘‘cultural’’ text. For the literary critic, if not for the historian, reading drama, in that we no longer see art as existing outside history, is reading history, too. This now commonplace understanding in literary studies is particularly true of the history of Bethlem between 1598 and 1630, where dramatic texts constitute the bulk of the ‘‘documentary’’ evidence. In the case of Bethlem, in some extraordinary sense, literature is history, history literature. Even the Bethlem historians almost agree on this point: ‘‘In view of the sparse and uninformative evidence about Bethlem staff and inmates provided by the Bridewell and City records, it is tempting to turn to the early seventeenth-century dramatists in the attempt to establish who did what in Bethlem, and to whom.’’25 Now, granted the chapter that begins with this promising and welcoming admission about literature in history concludes that the drama cannot tell us much about the ‘‘real’’ Bethlem: the historians concluded that the plays do not reflect a reality they, given the sparse evidence, cannot really know. Ten years ago I may have been inclined to point to this move on the part of the historians as an epistemological failing (aha! those theoretically clumsy historians). But now I think it much more important that the historians are at least tempted to talk about a proposition literary scholars have been promoting, without much success beyond the walls of English departments, for some time. And we should not spoil this academic opportunity with misplaced disciplinary arrogance. The drama can tell us much about the show of Bethlem, I am suggesting, and vice versa, but we have to traverse a particular literary history first, and rely on a broader dialogue with Bethlem’s historians rather than our own sense of these plays as ‘‘cultural’’ texts that reach without limits beyond their own artistic milieu.

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To this ‘‘literary’’ history then, and, I hope, a productive historical conversation. Let me offer a necessary summary of the Poets’ War and at least outline how that literary event revealed the relationship between the show of Bethlem and the stage. While trying to establish himself as England’s ‘‘true Poet,’’ Ben Jonson started the famous dispute referred to as the ‘‘Poets’ War’’ or ‘‘poetomachia.’’ Much twentieth-century criticism has ‘‘trivialized’’ the event, considering it a ‘‘literary anecdote’’ involving mainly Jonson, Marston, Dekker, and Shakespeare whereby the playwrights used the stage as a vehicle to argue various minor personal and professional issues. Recent scholarship, however, particularly by James Bednarz, has drawn our attention to the ‘‘most abstract level’’ of the Poets’ War where a ‘‘theoretical debate on the social function of drama and the standard of poetic authority’’ was taking place.26 In so doing, Bednarz artfully has situated the Poets’ War alongside the widely accepted facts of Jonson’s ‘‘laureate’’ aspirations. Driving the Poets’ War was not anything so mundane as a personality conflict or a squabble between acting companies, but Jonson’s well known, remarkable determination to establish a new and much more prominent, powerful role for the ‘‘poet’’ and poetry in the world—including the poet and poetry of dramatic art.27 This reading of Jonson’s drama productively challenges Richard Helgerson’s suggestion that drama could not provide a ‘‘suitable vehicle’’ for Jonson’s ‘‘laureate undertaking.’’ 28 Starting with Every Man in his Humor (1598) and Every Man Out of His Humor (1599), Jonson sought to displace Shakespearean romantic comedy as the dominant dramatic form in the late 1590s and to insert his own form of comical satire. Jonson’s comical satire, the ‘‘poet’’ believed, literally could change the world or, at least, change human behavior significantly: ‘‘In 1599, Jonson attempted to create a visionary theater of social catharsis capable of fulfilling the highest expectations for drama enunciated by the leading humanist theoreticians of his day. The world that he represented to this end was peopled largely with humorist misfits who neglected the possibility of gaining their full humanity to pursue compulsively self-demeaning delusions.’’29 Jonson’s drama, at least as understood by Jonson, could cure or purge these humors, these delusions, and guarantee the poet a place close to the monarch in the social order. Jonson may not have changed human society as he had hoped with this genre, nor did

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he achieve a seat next to Queen Elizabeth, but he did firmly establish his place as an artist and substantially alter the direction of dramatic art, including Shakespeare’s. In addition to making the Poets’ War make sense in the context of Jonson’s laureate activities, then, Bednarz also carefully situates the Poets’ War alongside the ‘‘legend of Shakespeare and Jonson’s wit-combats,’’ which is ‘‘unarguably the most famous case of poetic rivalry in the annuals of English literature’’;30 this move reminds us that the famous differences between the ‘‘authoritarian and self-promoting’’ art of Jonson and the ‘‘indeterminate, self-effacing, skeptical’’ art of Shakespeare originated not in the literary mythmaking of eighteenth-century criticism but with the artists themselves during the Poets’ War.31 Part of the problem with Shakespearean romantic, festive comedy, again, at least as understood by Jonson, is that not only did it not cure or purge the humors, the delusions afflicting the world—Shakespearean romantic comedy indulged and celebrated these delusions. In other words, Jonson despised Shakespeare’s willingness to rely on implausible scenarios, magic, wild bombast, dreams, and (lest the reader forget we are moving toward a connection to Bethlem hospital here) a certain sense of ‘‘midsummer’s madness’’ to resolve his plots. Perhaps Jonson’s most famous and clear critique of Shakespeare’s dramatic habits appears in the well-analyzed prologue to Every Man in His Humor, where he directly attacks the work of Shakespeare and suggests an alternative: Though need make many Poets, and some such As art and nature have not better’d much, Yet ours, for want, hath not so lov’d the stage As he dare serve th’ ill customs of the age: Or purchase your delight at such a rate, As, for it, he himself must justly hate: To make a child, now swaddled, to proceed Man, and then shoot up in one beard and weed, Past threescore years; or, with three rusty swords, And help of some few foot and-half-foot words, Fight over York and Lancaster’s long jars: And in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars. He rather prays you will be pleased to see One such, today, as other plays should be: Where neither Chorus wafts you o’er the seas,

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Nor creaking throne comes down, the boys to please, Nor nimble squib is seen, to make afear’d The gentlewomen, nor roll’d bullet heard To say, it thunders, nor tempestuous drum Rumbles, to tell you when the storm doth come; But deeds and language such as men do use, And persons such as Comedy would choose When she would show an image of the times, And sport with human follies, not with crimes: Except we make ‘em such by loving still Our popular errors, when we know they’re ill. I mean, such error as you’ll all confess By laughing at them, they deserve no less: Which, when you heartily do, there’s hope left then You that have so grac’d monsters may like men. (1–30)32

One cannot summarize easily the differences between Shakespeare and Jonson, the difference between, as Jonson would have it, Shakespeare’s ‘‘monsters’’ and Jonson’s drama showing ‘‘deeds and language such as men do use.’’ Perhaps only after reading plays of the two together, often in distinct sequences, do the differences emerge and only then through a felt sense. Nonetheless, one is obliged to provide some kind of overview in that the readings I offer throughout depend on an awareness of this artistic contrast. I prefer E. A. J. Honigmann’s summary as an introduction for its comprehensiveness and clarity. Honigmann mainly discusses later Romances in this passage, but we note that in doing so he points back to the period of particular interest to us: [Jonson] disliked romantic, improbable plots [Shakespeare’s] that stray too far from ‘‘deedes, and language, such as men doe use’’; he saw himself as the champion of ‘‘nature’’, chiding those who ‘‘runne away from Nature’’ (Alchemist, epistle), being himself ‘‘loth to make Nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries’’ (Bartholomew Fair), and unwilling to ‘‘run away from nature, as [if] hee were afraid of her; or depart from life, and the likenesse of Truth’’ (Discoveries, iv (d)). As the last quotation shows, ‘‘nature’’ also means ‘‘life’’ and ‘‘truth’’; Jonson, in short, here still advocates the principles long ago enunciated in EMOH, where, after ridiculing ‘‘cross-wooing’’ comedies [again, primarily Shakespeare’s], he had proposed as the alternative Cicero’s definition—

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‘‘who would have a Comoedie, to be Imitatio vitae, Speculum consuetudinis, Imago veritatis’’ (iii.6.204–7). The watchwords were Nature, Life, and Truth.33

Jonson began making this distinction between himself and Shakespeare as early as 1599 with Every Man Out of His Humour. For his part, Shakespeare characteristically responds to these charges by creating situations in his own plays that laugh ‘‘at the simple-minded who think they can grasp such slippery concepts’’ as ‘‘Nature, Life, and Truth.’’34 To make this point about Shakespeare’s response to Jonson (or Jonsonian) critiques, Honigmann points to Theseus’s famous ‘‘lunatic, the lover, and the poet’’ speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1596), claiming that Theseus represents the ‘‘hard-headed theorist’’ or the ‘‘Jonsonian view’’ who refuses to believe in the power of fables, fairies, and fantasies when compared to cool reason. To link this important speech more clearly to the study here, one could say the hardheaded, Jonsonian Theseus insists on the power of reason to an audience that has just seen the power of ‘‘unreason’’: Hippolyta: ’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of. Theseus: More strange than true. I never may believe These antique fables nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold; That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination That, if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear! (5.1.1–22)

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Just in case an audience momentarily accepts Theseus as the voice of authority here, Shakespeare has Hippolyta undermine Theseus’s certainty by pointing out that the ‘‘airy nothings’’ summarily dismissed have grown to something of ‘‘great constancy’’ that eludes her husband’s reason. ‘‘Unreason,’’ in short, matters.35 But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images And grows to something of great constancy But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

If Jonson’s critical theory of art could be organized around the terms ‘‘Nature, Life, and Truth,’’ Honigmann’s suggests that Shakespeare’s ‘‘alternative critical theory’’ may be ‘‘summarized as Wonder, Magic, and Faith.’’36 There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, thousands of literature teachers say everyday, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. My only criticism of Honigmann’s description of Shakespeare’s ‘‘alternative critical theory,’’ in fact, is that he did not add the term ‘‘madness’’ or ‘‘unreason’’ to the list. Clearly madness belongs as a descriptor for Shakespeare’s critical theory in romantic comedy. As much as Jonson believed in ‘‘cool reason’’ and its ability to access Nature, Life, and Truth, Shakespeare believed in and relied on something often termed ‘‘madness.’’ As Salkeld points out, ever since C. L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959), Shakespeare criticism has taken up ‘‘the possibility that Shakespearean madness might contribute to the philosophical power of the plays. So madness has been regarded not in opposition to reason but as a kind of superior rationality, an insanity close to genius, in which truths which normally remain hidden are grasped.’’37 Shakespeare was certainly not alone in embracing ‘‘madness.’’ Erasmus, of course, had helped make the ‘‘praise of Folly’’ a central trope of Christian Humanism. Socrates had insisted that the wisest man was he who knew that he knew nothing. Saint Paul had declared that ‘‘God made foolish the wisdom of the world’’ (1 Cor. 1:20). The classical and the Christian traditions of the Renaissance both emphasized the role of madness in reason. Bottom, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is able to draw on Paul and

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the letter to the Corinthians to explain his strange situation in the world (4.1.202–16). Shakespeare is not alone, but, as a dramatist, he exploited these traditions more than others. As early as The Comedy of Errors, we see Shakespeare willing to give his dramatic world over to a certain madness, conceding the error, confusion, subjectivity, and complexity of life in a way that is intimately connected to his belief in ‘‘Wonder, Magic, and Faith.’’38 Dromio of Syracuse may first explain the confusing circumstances of the play by referencing ‘‘the fairy land’’ and ‘‘goblins, elves, and sprites’’ (2.2.188–89), but Antipholus of Syracuse quickly adds the realm of madness as a possible explanation: ‘‘Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?/ Sleeping or waking, mad or well-advised?’’(2.2.211–12). In other words, for Shakespeare, fairies, dreams, love, and madness all allude to the same place outside reason that, paradoxically, has a profound place in the world of reason. As Theseus puts it, ‘‘the lunatic, the lover, and the poet/ Are of an imagination all compact,’’ only Shakespeare, unlike Theseus, is more than content to let this world of unreason coexist with the world of reason and not ‘‘rationally’’ explain it way. This world, Shakespeare suggests again and again, especially in his romantic comedies, is a dream, a mistake, a moment of madness, magic. Give yourself over to a certain kind of madness and all’s well that ends well. This, as suggested, is the sort of thinking and playmaking that drove Jonson proverbially ‘‘nuts.’’ When Jonson began creating his comical satire, he noticeably did not target society’s indulgence of fairies, dreams, faith, or magic. Those attacks came later in addressing the Romances. When Jonson first began attacking the genre of romantic comedy and the worldview that genre seemed to embrace, he specifically targeted society’s indulgence of ‘‘humors’’ and delusions.39 Jonson began this battle, the battle of the Poets’ War, the battle with Shakespeare, the battle for his own poetic dominance, by visibly targeting the ‘‘madness’’ of the world as depicted in Shakespeare’s romantic comedy. To put this a different way, Jonson identified and helped construct ‘‘madness’’ as the central metaphorical battlefield for this struggle over ideas and art. More specifically, again, Jonson suggests his innovative drama can ‘‘cure’’ humours, the mad delusions he sees as causing problems in society. In this dramatic gesture, central to his ‘‘new’’ drama, one can get a glimpse of how the ensuing dispute will help reveal the

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stage’s relationship with the primary place of mad cures in Shakespeare’s London: Bethlem. Many (if not most) playwrights, including Shakespeare, were neither willing to accept Jonson’s ‘‘cure’’ for social problems nor Jonson as the physician fit to administer the cure. While Jonson saw his new theater as having positive ‘‘transformative power,’’ capable of correcting problems in the world, others tended to see his innovations as divisive, a theatrical practice and practitioner standing apart from the world mocking its ‘‘humours,’’ its follies, its madness. In short, many responded strongly to the breach between the mad and not-mad that Jonson revealed. ‘‘Madness’’ in the romantic comedies of the 1590s could imply a certain sense of community and connectedness, including a connectedness to a spiritual ‘‘other,’’ more often than it implied psychic suffering. As Rosalind/Ganymede suggests in As You Like It (a play very much part of the Poets’ War), to cure one of ‘‘humours’’ as Jonson sought to do is, and results in, a distinctly antisocial act: ‘‘I drave my suitor from his mad humor of love to a living humor of madness, which was to forswear the full stream of the world and to live in a nook merely monastic’’ (3.2.406–9). Shakespeare and many other playwrights resisted Jonson’s efforts to cure their mad humours because such a cure seemed to imply a distance from the faith, magic, and wonder of human life. Shakespeare’s character of Orlando flatly rejects Rosalind’s offer of cure: ‘‘I would not be cured, youth’’ (3.2.413). And Rosalind herself, as Harold Bloom repeatedly points out, is far too ‘‘human’’ a character to maintain her Jonsonian position outside the world of love’s madness, curing, and counseling. As she says at one point, joking with the audience about her assumed role, ‘‘lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. Yet I profess curing it by counsel’’ (3.2.). Despite the resistance to his ‘‘cures,’’ however, Jonson’s innovations do force Shakespeare and others to adjust their thinking about madness, and it is this dialectic that exposes the connection of the stage to the show of Bethlem. The adjustment does not come through concession to Jonson’s argument, but from the attempt to respond to Jonson in kind. That is, other playwrights created figures that espoused Jonsonian views only to show that those figures themselves were the ‘‘mad’’ that required treatment. In Satiromastix (1601), for example, perhaps the most explicit response to Jonson’s claims, Dekker has the character of Crispinus

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(a clear figure for Marston) turn the tables on Jonson by telling the character of Horace (a clear figure for Jonson) early on in the play that ‘‘We came like your Phisition to purge/ Your sicke and dangerous minde of this disease’’ (1.2.247–48). How these sorts of exchanges between playwrights tell us anything about the development of the stage and the show of Bethlem is best seen, however, when Shakespeare seeks to turn the tables on the Jonsonian figure of Malvolio in Twelfth Night. In Malvolio, Shakespeare creates a character, like Jonson, who chastises the madness of all the other characters in this flawed play world (‘‘My masters, are you mad? . . . Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?’’(2.3.86–92) the Jonsonian Malvolio asks at one point) and then seeks to expose the ‘‘madness’’ of that character.40 In engaging such a strategy, we see that Shakespeare uncovers, perhaps inadvertently, not just a streak of cruelty in romantic comedy, but a new awareness of madness and the staging of madness. In turning Malvolio into the ‘‘mad’’ dupe that requires treatment, Shakespeare not only fails to reintegrate the Jonsonian figure into the festive world of the play—Malvolio famously refuses to rejoin the reconstructed social world saying instead, ‘‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’’ (5.1.377)—he displays on the stage and romantic comedy a ‘‘dramatic’’ form of madness that it customarily had not addressed. For a lack of better way to put this, Shakespeare thus uncovers a troubling connection between the stage and romantic comedy and the real pain and suffering of mental disorder and its treatment.41 Although he offers a very different explanation for why it happened, Robert Reed should be credited with first noting the dramatic transition in ‘‘madness’’ that occurs at this point: madness as a theatrical medium upon the English stage was neither frequently nor, as a rule, deliberately in use before the year 1601 . . . [earlier] Elizabethan mad folk were, like Hieronimo, little more than stereotyped renditions whose disordered minds were capable of imagining superhuman achievements. In this sense they were consistent with the Elizabethan superconfidence in the high destiny of man. Kyd, Greene, and the young Shakespeare were more inclined to emphasize the capabilities and achievements of mad folk than to examine and analyze insanity objectively. Hieronimo threatens to dig to the bowels of the Earth, Orlando likens himself to Hercules,

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Titus Andronicus threatens the gods and the heavens . . . [and] each recovers to perform with complete sanity an act of culminating vengeance. Indeed, if we overlook his necessity to plot, the Elizabethan madman was little more than a mouthpiece for Elizabethan fustian. The Jacobean madman, on the other hand, was a much more objective study. . . . However theatrical, he was, as a rule, a much more honest study than the Elizabethan madman.42

My revision of Reed begins with the suggestion that this shift from superhuman, Elizabethan, individual mad figures to more ‘‘honest’’ or ‘‘objective’’ Jacobean groups of madmen stems from the stage’s increasing self-consciousness about itself and its attempt to define itself in the wake of Jonson’s innovations. These more honest and objective groups of stage madmen in turn reveal the stage’s proximity to an ‘‘other’’ show of madness in the culture. In revealing and dramatically reflecting on this connection to the ‘‘real’’ show of Bethlem, Shakespeare ultimately helps change the direction of dramatic development generally. The pain and suffering of King Lear’s ‘‘real’’ madness, to take a critical moment in English dramatic art, is not possible without the distinctly different but related pain and suffering of Malvolio. Eventually, the developing representational stage will differentiate itself from the ‘‘real,’’ the show of Bethlem, as it had distinguished itself from Jonson’s stage of social transformation. Richard Halpern recently has revisited T. S. Eliot’s familiar, grand modernist view of the Renaissance, the famous ‘‘dissociation of sensibility.’’ His summary of Eliot’s historical ‘‘allegory’’ might help clarify here my narrative of Bethlem and the stage: ‘‘The modernist view of the Renaissance . . . was of an organic and agrarian society undergoing an accelerated transition into modernity; of a unified sensibility fragmenting into component parts; and of a ritualistic dramatic culture giving way to merely representational forms of art.’’43 The developing show of Bethlem can be understood as part of something like the ‘‘ritualistic dramatic culture’’ that existed prior to Shakespearean theater; as the theater develops, it separates itself from this older dramatic culture and turns to the more modern representational forms that we now categorize as dramatic art. Indeed, in one very literal, geographic sense, the theater did separate itself from the show of Bethlem at this time: the original The Theatre (built in 1576), almost a mile north of Bethlem on Shoreditch, was torn down in

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1597, and its materials used to construct the famous Globe south of the city. Malvolio’s dark room scenes, then, are something of a turning point. The display of Malvolio’s ‘‘madness’’ on stage interrupts and begins to transform the understanding of madness so prevalent in romantic comedy and makes possible the later powerful renderings of madness in tragedy that elicit more pity and charity from an audience than wonder at the ability of ‘‘madness’’ to transcend boundaries. Louis Sass suggests there are ‘‘poles around which images of madness have revolved for so many centuries: on the one hand, notions of emptiness, of defect and decrepitude, of blindness, even of death itself; on the other hand, ideas of plenitude, energy, and irrepressible vitality—a surfeit of passion or fury bursting through all boundaries of reason or constraint.’’44 I am suggesting that Shakespeare moves dramatically from the latter view to the former, as do most upon contact with real chronic mental illness—about which I will say more in a moment. Whatever Shakespeare’s experience or intentions, very few audiences can laugh comfortably at the confinement of Malvolio in a ‘‘dark room.’’ Whatever laughter the scenes in question produce, it differs drastically from, for instance, the restraint and treatment of Antipholus of Ephesus by Dr. Pinch in The Comedy of Errors. While ‘‘madness’’ is ubiquitous as a trope in that early play, no character in it is ‘‘mad’’ in the way Ophelia or Lear is mad; that is, no character suffers in what looks very much like what the modern world would call psychosis. No character, to introduce some problematic logic and terms, is truly insane as we commonly understand that word today. This relative absence of this kind of ‘‘real’’ madness is true of all Shakespearean plays (with the complicated exception of the tragedy of Titus Andronicus that I will address in chapter 2) prior to Twelfth Night. This is not to say, of course, that Shakespeare was not aware of the suffering of real madness or, for that matter, Bethlem. As early as 2 Henry 6, Shakespeare refers to the hospital (but not the show of the mad).45 Nor is this is to say that Malvolio is turned mad in the way that Lear is turned mad, of course, but to emphasize what is clear: something distinctly different and new emerges on stage with Malvolio’s ‘‘madness’’ that has not happened before.46 And this something new severely complicates Shakespearean comedy. If the assumption that playwrights simply seized on a per-

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verse, spectacular object in engaging Bethlem occludes the complexity of both the hospital’s show and early modern dramatic theory, the same assumption also then closes a window through which we can see the growth of drama. ‘‘Malvolio’s’’ transformation of madness on the stage allows us to glimpse from a new angle a larger transformation taking place in dramatic development: the movement from the ritualistic, nonrepresentational stage to the more modern representational stage. In addition to Eliot, Robert Weimann’s brilliant and influential analysis of the development of the modern, ‘‘illusionistic’’ stage of Shakespeare is obviously pertinent here as well. According to Weimann, part of Shakespeare’s success was his ability to ‘‘fruitfully’’ integrate the platea tradition of the older, popular forms of drama and the emerging locus or illusionistic drama.47 In the older tradition, according to Weimann, stage actors were more closely connected to the ‘‘reality’’ of performance. That is, they spoke directly to audience members, such as in the cycle dramas, freely acknowledging their participation in the same time and space as the audience, emphasizing the communal ritual of theater rather than its mimetic function. In the newer, locus-centered drama, actors sought to create an illusionistic space, a different ‘‘reality’’ from the audience; this performance necessitated they create some distance between themselves and the audience. To the extent that Bethlem was a theater of sorts, both a ‘‘perverse’’ and ‘‘charitable’’ theater, it can be categorized more closely with the platea, nonrepresentational, ritualistic theater tradition identified by Weimann more than it can be identified with the modern representational stage. As suggested, part of the difficulty dramatic scholarship has had with the show of Bethlem seems to stem from trying to understand it only in relationship to the more modern representational stage. In such a position the show of Bethlem is only a perverse variant, showing real people in a strange, interactive venue rather than representing an illusory other world. Situated alongside other ‘‘theatrical’’ experiences in history, the show of Bethlem looks, as I suggested above, less perverse, less strange. If, then, we consider the ‘‘reality’’ of the Bethlem show as closer to the older, popular plateacentered modes of theater and Shakespeare’s theater of Twelfth Night almost completely locus-centered—that is, illusionistic— and if we consider Shakespeare’s scenes in someway related to the show of Bethlem, we can also consider the Malvolio dark

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room scenes as revealing a struggle between two forms of theater that are not completely integrated—or, I will suggest, separated.48 The Malvolio confinement scenes are powerful, no doubt, but nobody—characters, playwright, audience, or critics—is completely comfortable with them. Sir Toby voices what many audience members and scholars have seen in the treatment of Malvolio and, more importantly, what the playwright obviously senses, that it had gone too far: ‘‘I would we were well rid of this knavery. If he may be conveniently delivered, I would he were, for I am now so far in offense with my niece that I cannot pursue with safety this sport to the upshot’’ (4.2.67). Shakespeare struggles, albeit productively, with this mad act that he himself has created. He struggles because in putting a ‘‘mad’’ figure in a dark room in a way that elicits both laughter and pity, Shakespeare has revealed the proximity of the stage to the charitable show of Bethlem. This is a relationship he ultimately has to separate from in order to maintain the necessary boundaries of the newly developing modern, illusionistic stage. To use Weimann’s terminology, this ‘‘fruitful integration’’ of theaters works only for a moment—albeit a quite remarkable moment—before a necessary separation takes place. In the process we see the Shakespearean stage shaping itself in relation to other theatrical experiences, ultimately defining new, controlled limitations for itself. Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historical language is only partly useful here. Perhaps, we can consider, as he has taught so many, to understand the relationship between the hospital and the spate of Bedlam dramas that start appearing around 1598 and disappear around 1630 as an attempt by playwrights to appropriate the powerful, new ‘‘alternative theatrical practice’’ being developed at Bethlem.49 But this certainly would be no standard New Historical artistic appropriation. First, the relationship between Bethlem and the stage helps produce not one but several of the most powerful scenes and plays in the English tradition. A cursory consideration of the dramatic, critical, and pedagogical history of some of the plays discussed here—King Lear, The Changeling, and The Duchess of Malfi—suggests something of the profundity of the relationship. And, second, as the Malvolio scenes indicate, the mad or madhouse scenes that help empower these plays simultaneously tend also to trouble directors, audiences, scholars, and students. So powerful and strange is this relationship between the hospital and the stage that, in a curious

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reversal of standard New Historical exchanges, it is almost as if the show of Bethlem threatens at points to appropriate the stage by overwhelming the efforts of playwrights to manage it for dramatic ends. One is never entirely sure, for example, how an audience will respond to Malvolio’s treatment in the dark room. For a brief moment in time, the relationship between the show of Bethlem and the stage provides the drama with a profound, moving, and apparently irresistible piece of ‘‘real’’ life (many playwrights continued to employ ‘‘Bedlam’’ scenes), but the proximity of the two stages always threatens to and ultimately does become too difficult, too confusing, too real, to manage. The playwrights quite visibly have to resist and distance themselves from this relationship with Bethlem at the same moment they invoke it, a resistance that pushes Renaissance drama from its close proximity to other cultural forms and practices—to take the pertinent example, the real charitable show of Bethlem—to more distinct, modern, self-consciously representational forms that we now understand as dramatic art.50 In turn, then, we can see how the representational forms of Shakespeare’s stage continued to participate in the ‘‘civilizing processes’’ that eventually rendered the show of Bethlem an obsolete perversion by the end of the eighteenth century.51 As the stage became more demarcated from other cultural spheres, became drama as we generally understand that term today, the ‘‘show’’ of Bethlem became less tenable as cultural practice in part because it seemed too much like a (perverse) form of the stage, too much like ‘‘pure’’ entertainment. Separating fact from fiction when it comes to Bethlem is simply no easy task. One of the quite obvious reasons this is the case is that ‘‘Bedlam’’ fictions are not completely separate and incompatible from Bethlem’s real or material history, but part of the same cultural, historical matrix. The same historical moment produced the show of Bethlem and ‘‘Bedlam’’ dramatic scenes. We may have more success in understanding the relationship between the two if, instead of looking for intersections, the moment when artist/subject engages an artistic object, we also look for moments when they separate out and become more distinct cultural products. The relationship between the show of Bethlem and the stage, in other words, is more fundamental than representational. This critical move is not to equate, or ‘‘re’’-equate, the show of

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Bethlem with the stage. I remain intent on bringing into focus and correcting the tendency discussed above simply to merge the hospital and the stage together under the rubric of ‘‘early modern spectacle’’ by noting only their cultural proximity. The stage and Bethlem are distinct, but related, cultural institutions. The spectacle of each had a decidedly different function: one was intended to provide dramatic pleasure, the other was intended (it seems) to elicit sympathy for the mad poor. The stage’s efforts to define itself at the end of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century register with almost equal force the artists’ engagement with this other show in the culture and the distance between itself and that show. As suggested, it may also be the case that the show of Bethlem does not ‘‘start’’ at this moment as the Bethlem historians hint, but it is more likely that the culture was becoming more self-conscious about the practice of ‘‘visitation.’’ The culture begins to define or codify the show of Bethlem, in other words, as the representational stage does the same thing. Ultimately, this kind of show, the show of Bethlem, unlike the representational stage, was unsustainable in history. Both theaters and their relationship become more clear and apparent, in short, as they separate out and the culture begins to seek and articulate more specific distinctions between theatrical practices. The unusual relationship and actual separation between the stage and the show of Bethlem actually becomes most visible, I think, in act 3 of Shakespeare’s King Lear when the playwright has to disengage the real processes of Bethlem that had been shaping the play—processes that produce such problematic stage properties as the ‘‘hovel’’ and Gloucester’s ‘‘house’’ somewhere on the heath where Lear receives comfort—before those real processes elicit, not tragic pity, but something more like the feelings Bethlem visitants might have experienced. In short, the ‘‘hovel’’ and Gloucester’s ‘‘house’’ cannot comfort and cure Lear. As many have pointed out, without great artistic care they threaten to confuse, disgust, and disturb rather than dramatically please audiences. We never see the place where Lear is treated: ‘‘I know not/ Where I did lodge last night?’’ (4.7.68–69). For the sake of tragic effect, Shakespeare has to avoid staging the place of the cure for madness. The gap in King Lear, the absence of a place where madness can be staged in a way that will elicit pity, helps us locate, paradoxically, the extraordinary relationship be-

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tween Bethlem’s reality and the stage. This gap, not uncoincidentally, appears at the center of the play standing at the center of the now wobbling (but still standing) English literary canon. Bethlem’s relationship to the stage is particularly significant in that it so visibly marks—indeed seems simultaneously to prompt and threaten—what has stood as the first, best, and most enduring of modern dramatic art. In suggesting that the show of Bethlem played such a significant role in the development of modern dramatic art, my conclusion echoes the conclusion—the very last words—of the text no work on madness and art can avoid: Michel Foucault’s brilliant, flawed, moving, and influential Histoire de la folie a l’age classique (or, as it is commonly know in its abridged English translation, Madness and Civilization).52 There Foucault suggested that the great modern ‘‘art’’ of Nietzsche, Artaud, and Van Gogh was made possible by that art’s relationship to madness. Moreover, to the extent the works of these artists prompt the world to question its own values and judgment, Foucault suggests it is actually madness that prompts this questioning: ‘‘the world finds itself arraigned by that work of art and responsible before it for what it is. Ruse and new triumph of madness.’’53 My narrative describing the charitable show of Bethlem and its relationship to Shakespearean drama is, in fact, very much compatible with the narrative developed by Foucault. Importantly, however, my narrative is compatible with the narrative of Madness and Civilization even though Foucault specifically suggests a different place for Bethlem and the drama in his paradigm than I will here. In other words, the relationship between the show of Bethlem and the stage fits well within the interpretive framework he established, only not in the way he suggested it did. Some more preliminary explanation of Foucault’s historical narrative, as opposed to his understanding of madness and literature, is useful on this last point. Perhaps more than any other thinker of the second half of the twentieth century, Foucault successfully attacked the ‘‘Whig’’ notion of history that ‘‘Reason’’ produced more humane institutions over time, calling into question even the belief in reason as natural phenomena capable of improving the human condition.54 Foucault showed repeatedly the possibility that devotion to reason and its institutions— schools, prisons, hospitals—actually restricted and structured human existence in a way few had imagined or probably wanted.

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In the case of the hopitaux generaux of seventeenth-century France, Foucault argued that the invention of that hospital system did not just involve progressively modern treatment of the insane, but a political reordering and management of those who fell outside the dominant order. He referred to this reordering as the ‘‘great confinement,’’ the process whereby large segments of the population considered socially undesirable were placed in the hopitaux generaux in order to be managed and controlled by the state. From this perspective, ‘‘Madness’’ and mad people actually had it better prior to the seventeenth century and the great confinement. One of the book’s most frequently attacked arguments is expressed most clearly in a single sentence; in the late Medieval, early Renaissance, Foucault suggests the mad had something close to an idyllic lifestyle: ‘‘Madmen then led an easy wandering existence.’’55 While discussing Bethlem and its famous show, Foucault implies that the English hospital was something of a single, Angloprecursor to the hopitaux generaux and that it in fact participated in the processes of the great confinement. My readings of ‘‘Bedlam’’ drama alongside the history of Bethlem will suggest, however, that Bethlem and its odd show of charity stood apart and opposed to the processes of the great confinement. Furthermore, I hope to suggest by the end of the study that had Foucault understood more about the hospital, he would have discovered something he struggled to prove existed: a pre-eighteenth century relationship between the mad and not mad that can be understood as, not idyllic, but at least preferable to the later period. He might, too, have found a ‘‘bard’’ who did not necessarily allow the mad to speak, but one who participated in the processes whereby reason shut away madness. In short, Foucault was wrong about where he situated Bethlem and Shakespeare in his narrative, but more or less right about the historical trajectory of madness overall. Seeing Bethlem and its show as opposed to the great confinement actually invites, then, a reexamination of a crucial argument of his book that has received significant criticism. Even though he was wrong on the specifically English matters of Shakespeare and Bethlem, Shakespeare and Bethlem actually may provide evidence supporting his characterization of madness in the pre-Enlightenment period. Most studies that address Madness and Civilization have pointed to flaws in order to undermine the work as a whole. Mine points to flaws, para-

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doxically, in the hope that the particular mistakes Foucault made about Bethlem and Shakespeare (once corrected and understood) will renew interest and help support, rather than disprove, some of his larger claims about the history of madness.56 Surprisingly enough, given the ubiquitous presence of Foucault’s work in many disciplines, my interest in revitalizing the specific arguments of a single work is rare. Colin Jones and Roy Porter have suggested in the introduction to Reassessing Foucault (1994) that those ‘‘interested’’ in Foucault’s work tend to (a) discover errors, usually historical, with the single intent of dismissing his arguments wholesale, (b) fall into ‘‘pious repetition and incantation’’ because of his ‘‘genius,’’ (c) use his work ‘‘as a springboard to empirically based [that is, more empirically sound than Foucault] and conceptually sophisticated research.’’57 While I certainly consider my work ‘‘empirically based and conceptually sophisticated,’’ it does not fit well in any of these three categories. Obviously, my work has no place in group ‘‘a,’’ although given the heated polemics that can arise in discussions of Foucault, generated mainly by those in group ‘‘a,’’ I do want to point out that it originated there. Much of this book was written in various psychiatric wards where I worked for ten years, mostly on the night shift, as a ‘‘psych tech’’ or ‘‘mental health worker’’—a cross between a psychiatric social worker, security guard, orderly, and nurse’s aid—while completing my undergraduate degree and then graduate program in English literature. I developed a great deal of personal animosity for Foucault, the ideas he promoted, and his acolytes. For, in the Foucaultian narrative, I played the role of arch-villain, an insidious modern successor to medieval torturers. As Jones and Porter describe Foucault’s view of history, ‘‘The Mailed fist, the hangman’s noose, had given way to the velvet glove, operating in recent times through such ‘enlightenment’ innovations as the juvenile office, the psychiatric social worker, probation officer, parole officer, and more peripherally the doctor, marriage guidance counselor, psychotherapist and other voluntary agencies.’’58 It was infuriating to stay up all night immersed in the sights, sounds, smells, and strains of hospital work only to listen to seemingly endless and often confused comments in a graduate literary seminar about the ‘‘fascist’’ nature of such institutional work and how Foucault had demonstrated its horrors. In part because of this experience I took great

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pleasure in reading the often vitriolic backlash against the cultlike following of Foucault’s inaugural study led by, for example, historians Lawrence Stone and Andrew Scull, who challenged many of his arguments and, in fact, his standing as a ‘‘historian.’’ The work of a leading figure in group ‘‘a,’’ H. C. Erik Midelfort, one of the most thorough (and insistent) of Foucault’s critics, who very recently has reduced Madness and Civilization to a ‘‘mental tone poem,’’ was particularly enjoyable, as well as informative, to read.59 Foucault, it was clear to me at one time, made too many factual errors to be very useful. This study began, I have to admit, with a vengeance to turn the studies from group ‘‘a’’ on Foucault. A study that seeks in part to help revitalize Foucault’s argument obviously does not belong in group ‘‘a,’’ but perhaps now it is clear how far it is from the ‘‘pious repetition and incantation’’ of group ‘‘b’’ as well. I disclose my personal animosity, too, frankly, in the hopes of preempting any disciplinary prejudice against what could be thought of as a ‘‘pro-Foucault’’ stance by a literary scholar. I was trained in literary studies in America in the late ’80s and early ’90s when, in fact, Foucault and his politics were in the very air we breathed; but, at various hospitals, I inhaled very different fumes. Much more of my time was spent overcoming my own hostility and repulsion to the people suffering in order to lend some form of comfort than worrying whether I was an agent of state power.60 The various works of more empirically sound historians referred to throughout discussing the dual aspects of early modern ‘‘charity’’—compassion coupled with, occasionally, open hostility—put me closer to understanding the complicated show of Bethlem and the drama. These discussions were compatible with my experience of caring for ‘‘the mad’’ and essential to understanding the show of Bethlem in history. I plan to use careful, historically informed readings of the drama to corroborate and clarify for others the tentative thesis about that show hinted at by the new historians of Bethlem. But my personal experience already has convinced me that the strange mix of compassion, laughter, and horror was already present at ‘‘visitation.’’ Unfortunately, group ‘‘c,’’ those who use Foucault as a ‘‘springboard to empirically based and conceptually sophisticated research,’’ is not quite right either. I certainly see my work as fitting more comfortably here than in the other two groups, but the term

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‘‘springboard’’ hints at the now rather common sentiment among even the most thoughtful and ‘‘sophisticated’’ of scholars that Foucault should be credited with opening a field of study, duly acknowledged and cited, before being more or less dismissed as we jump far ahead of where he left us. This sentiment is so strong and widespread that it has spawned a formulaic expression at the beginning of many studies addressing Foucault. Historian Michael MacDonald’s statement early in Mystical Bedlam, a fascinating empirical study of the period that only glances at Foucault’s arguments, provides an example of the genre: ‘‘Anyone who writes about the history of insanity in early modern Europe must travel in the spreading wake of Michel Foucault’s famous book, Madness and Civilization.’’61 My own sentence opening this section certainly follows the trend except that I do not intend to relegate Foucault to the background. On the contrary, one of my principal objectives is to see if his study, once corrected, can tell us more than it already has—that is, I want my own research to put it back in the foreground. Part of what I want to help do here with my book is to let Madness and Civilization speak again, for itself, for what it is. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of my book, although they examine many individual plays in the context of the Poets’ War, can be seen more broadly as an exploration of the literary and historical events that generated Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Honest Whore, Part One (1605) and The Honest Whore, Part Two (1607), the first plays to use Bethlem and Bridewell as stage settings alongside the developing show of Bethlem. Part One concludes in Bethlem and Part Two concludes in Bridewell. Both plays have baffled scholars largely because we have a particularly difficult time reconciling the use of these settings with dramatic dialogue about social harmony. Once one understands that Bethlem was a charitable institution that alleviated personal and social madness, the endings stressing social harmony make sense. The Bethlem setting in The Honest Whore, Part One and the Bridewell setting in The Honest Whore, Part Two thus seems appropriate in that they facilitate humble, meek ‘‘charitable’’ conclusions fitting the charitable show developing at their reallife counterparts. Still, one must probe further to understand why the playwrights would engage these particular charities when they did. There is a form of ‘‘realism’’ at this moment, but not, in the case

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of Bethlem and Bridewell, representational realism. Dekker and Middleton had been working on the 1604 royal pageant welcoming King James into the City, a pageant described with some detail in Dekker’s The Magnificent Entertainment (1604). Specifically, Dekker and Middleton were working imaginatively at ‘‘Bishopsgate without’’ (right in front of Bethlem) and near the Fleet Street conduit (very near Bridewell) preparing the first and sixth arches. They were charged with making these specific areas welcoming to the King, celebrating old London and civic harmony after London was thrown into ‘‘confusion’’ by Elizabeth’s death. Bethlem and Bridewell were to be part of the background of the pageant. The imaginative work Dekker and Middleton were doing makes its way onto the stage, a stage in this instance still much more connected to spectacles and rituals like royal pageants—and the show of Bethlem. Dekker’s work for the first arch was, in fact, ‘‘layd by,’’ never seen by King James. Ben Jonson’s arch at Fenchurch supplanted Dekker’s and welcomed the King. Much evidence suggests that Dekker resented the change and that his resentment had to do with the Poets’ War. The suggestion that Dekker and Middleton brought Bethlem and Bridewell to the stage as part of their work in the pageant is first suggested then in chapter 1, where I outline the beginning of this important, complicated, and often overlooked literary event, particularly Jonson’s aforementioned ‘‘humour’’ plays and Shakespeare’s response to this ‘‘late innovation’’ in Twelfth Night. In chapter 2, I suggest that Hamlet is another extraordinary response to Jonson’s claims and is, in fact, a defense of the popular stage that counter-intuitively defends the stage by self-consciously setting limits on its powers rather than expanding them. Chapter 3 considers in detail Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore, Part One and Dekker’s The Honest Whore, Part Two. As part of his efforts to reshape dramatic art, Jonson also consistently savaged a ‘‘humorous,’’ almost insanely jealous (or cuckolded) citizen figure in his plays and, in so doing, elicited a strong response from Middleton and Dekker who engaged a theater very much in the world that staged madness, at least in theory, not to divide, but to unify in charity. Dekker and Middleton respond specifically to Jonson’s attack on citizen figures by creating and defending a citizen figure from charges of madness. The show of Bethlem is seen then to first emerge on the stage as part

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of the stage’s most visible effort—the Poets’ War—to define itself as cultural activity. Bethlem ends up on stage not so much as part of an effort of drama to represent reality, but because Jonson’s innovation prompted Dekker and Middleton to consider and invoke the stage’s common relationship with other less representative theatrical practices in the culture, practices such as, in addition to the show of Bethlem itself, the pageant. Both parts of The Honest Whore give modern readers so much trouble because they are so deeply embedded in these more distant ‘‘shows.’’ Chapter 4 considers plays involved in the disputes of the Poets’ War after The Honest Whore, including Westward Ho (1605), Eastward Ho (1606), and Northward Ho (1607). I point out that, in one sense, Bethlem’s first appearance as a ‘‘stage setting’’ does not mark the beginning of the relationship between hospital and drama, but the end. Scenes of group madness proliferate, other madhouses appear, references to Bethlem are made, but after The Honest Whore, Part One only Dekker’s Northward Ho (1607) ‘‘shows’’ or ‘‘creates’’ Bethlem again; and that play’s engagement with Bethlem stands, in contrast to The Honest Whore, as marginal to the play’s central concerns. The use of Bethlem by Dekker and Webster in Northward Ho signals something of a concession to Jonson on the stage’s relationship to these real life spectacles. Bethlem appears to us as a direct representation in The Honest Whore, Part One but we see in Dekker and Middleton’s work, not a representation, but the real processes producing Bethlem. Bethlem appears as it does in this instance because of this particular play’s embeddedness in other cultural practices. We see Bethlem most distinctly in the moment before drama differentiates itself from the cultural matrix common to both. Bethlem is so clearly depicted in The Honest Whore, Part One that we tend to insist on it being a piece of early modern representative ‘‘realism’’ and—without making a distinction between art entangled in other real practices and some kind of literary realism— are baffled. In short, we do not recognize Bethlem when we see it. In contrast, Shakespeare’s more representative, more modern art transforms the reality of Bethlem into a drama we can still enjoy today. In this transformation, however, we lose the clear connection to the reality of Bethlem that empowers the play. What is left are the moving and troubling scars of Bethlem. Paradoxically, in Dekker’s less representative art we see actual Beth-

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lem, but we cannot understand it; in Shakespeare’s King Lear we are not shown Bethlem or any place that cures or comforts madness, but, like the blinded Gloucester, we see it ‘‘feelingly.’’ Chapter 5, on Shakespeare’s King Lear, argues that Shakespeare sought to appropriate the show of Bethlem to elicit pity for his title character. The exaggerated figure of the sturdy or Bedlam beggar helped produce the ‘‘legitimate’’ institutions of poor relief like the Bethlem. In much the same way, Shakespeare achieves authenticity for Lear’s madness by disclosing the Bedlam-beggar’s methodology in Edgar’s Poor Tom. To see that Shakespeare has actually engaged the historical processes shaping Bethlem, one must consider that his dramatic efforts to legitimize Lear’s suffering and move an audience ultimately lead him to search for a place on the stage where Lear’s madness can be comforted in a way that will elicit pity, but the places he creates cannot be easily staged. For example, Shakespeare cannot actually have Lear wallow in the hovel without losing some tragic dignity. He has to move the mad scene to Gloucester’s ‘‘house’’ on the heath. This scene, however, always threatens to degenerate into a confusing picture of group madness (not unlike The Honest Whore’s final scene in Bethlem) and Shakespeare has to ‘‘draw the curtains’’ to keep the tragic—rather than charitable—effect alive. The extraliterary reality of the cultural processes Shakespeare has engaged is in part indicated by the fact that he has to disengage those processes to complete his tragedy, for those processes are driven by a desire for a theatrical place other than the tragic stage itself: Bethlem. Chapter 6, on John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, argues that the stage has gained enough distance from the show of Bethlem for the playwright to manage a show of madmen rather artfully and deliberately. That is, again, once we realize the complex response a show of madness could elicit, it becomes clear that Webster uses the show of madmen in act four not as Ferdinand intends, to torture, but to elicit pity for his title character. Having seen how effectively Shakespeare elicited pity for King Lear, Webster merges the Duchess into the show of madmen in a way that preserves her dignity and gains sympathy. Similarly, Webster stages Ferdinand’s madness in a way that elicits laughter and derision and thus takes advantage of the full range of responses the show of madness could generate. The play also reveals itself

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to be deeply involved in matters of charity and shows itself to be increasingly skeptical of the practice of visitation. Chapter 7 argues that the reality of Bethlem simultaneously threatens and empowers Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling. The strangeness of Bethlem, for example, has inhibited scholars’ attempts to situate The Changeling in its social and political context. Even Margot Heinemann, who established something of a critical consensus in suggesting Middleton’s work as a whole belongs in a ‘‘clearly discernible line of dramatic production which appeals to and encourages‘‘ Parliamentary and City Puritan sympathies, could not convincingly demonstrate that The Changeling itself is ‘‘oppositional’’; and her difficulty stems primarily from an inability to historicize the seemingly bizarre subplot. But The Changeling is oppositional— staunchly Protestant, anti-Catholic, sympathetic with city officials, and antagonistic to the policies of James—but the nature of that opposition lies in its relationship to the charity of Bethlem. And, even more, we realize the play’s powerful engagement with the charitable reality of Bethlem produces the most fascinating aspect of the play: ‘‘the pathological intensity’’ of the beautiful Beatrice and ugly Deflores’s ’’violent sexual union.‘‘ Middleton and Rowley remind us most decidedly that Bethlem was a Protestant London institution shaped by the agonistic efforts to form a specific kind of Protestant charity. Unable to deliver the persuasive argument that one could move upward to God through good works as the Catholic conception of caritas had, Protestant theologians struggled to articulate their justification for charity in a form that would still encourage giving. In the effort to reestablish faith as the source of works, Protestants critiqued Catholic charity as often as they argued that works sprang from faith. Protestant charitable discourse, in other words, works to reestablish faith as the source for good works by repeatedly exposing the Catholic perversion or potential for perversion in the motivation underlying good works. This culture-wide struggle over charity partially explains why, in 1618, when James took an unprecedented personal interest in one of London’s long-standing charitable institutions by replacing the city-appointed keeper of Bethlem, Thomas Jenner, with court physician Helkiah Crooke, a king widely perceived to be pro-Catholic met with resistance from Protestant city officials. On New Year’s Day, 1622, five months before The Changeling

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was first performed, and while Crooke was defending himself against the City’s charges of corruption, the King’s Men perform John Fletcher’s The Pilgrim at Court. Rather than display Protestant skepticism about charity, Fletcher’s play valorizes works rather indiscriminately. And, in his depiction of the madhouse keeper, Fletcher displays a confidence in that character’s abilities commensurate with, presumably, the King’s confidence in Crooke. If the exchange between the Court of Alderman and James was a very real struggle between social actors to determine the nature and government of a charity, The Pilgrim prompts another similar exchange between Middleton and Fletcher. For in The Changeling, Middleton quite clearly reconceives many of Fletcher’s characters (and much of his plot) and demystifies their Catholic charitable gestures by sexualizing those gestures. That is, like so much Protestant charitable discourse, Middleton’s play responds to a valorization of good works by exposing the Catholic perversion or potential for perversion underlying those works—Beatrice’s initial approach to Deflores, for example— and, in the process, offers a subtle critique of James’s intervention in London’s charitable affairs and a bitterly satirical look at Catholic charity generally. Middleton’s and Rowley’s critique virtually ends the depiction of ‘‘Bedlam’’ madhouses on the stage by reflecting seriously and self-consciously on the distinction between the stage and the nature of the charitable show of Bethlem. Their attack on Fletcher for staging the show of Bethlem to titillate, for example, points to an emerging modern distinction between what constitutes proper theater and what constitutes proper charity. When ‘‘Bedlamites’’ appear on stage, again, as they do, for example, in John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy and Richard Brome’s The Antipodes, they are literally and figuratively actors. That is, contrary to most of the plays of the Jacobean period, neither playwright seeks to portray actual patients of Bethlem: actors on the stage ‘‘play’’ at madness. Something of the separation between Bethlem and the stage first visible in King Lear and Edgar’s playacting becomes the norm by the end of this time period. Examining the fundamental dramatic reconsideration of madness that leads up to and ensues after Malvolio’s troubling and troublesome appearance offers not only a new and more comprehensive view of dramatic development generally, but, as suggested, an opportunity to put Shakespeare and his contemporaries

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back into a productive dialogue with Michel Foucault and The History of Madness. In chapter 8 I attempt to begin, or renew, that conversation. In engaging the ‘‘other’’ theater of Bethlem, Shakespeare and others confront an aporia at least analogous to the one that eventually stymied Foucault’s project. Playwrights discover that, while the otherness of madness empowers the stage, it cannot be fully incorporated into his theater. They are two different forms; a distinct and growing breach is apparent between the reasonable, representational stage and the show of Bethlem. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, driven by Ben Jonson, find themselves separating from this ‘‘other’’ cultural form that had helped make it possible. Foucault, then, was largely correct, although not in the way he thought, when he wrote that Shakespeare’s plays testify ‘‘to a tragic experience of madness’’ existing earlier in history. He was right that the plays ‘‘establish a link with a meaning about to be lost, and whose continuity will no longer survive in the darkness.’’ He was wrong only in misidentifying a crucial part of that link: the charitable show of Bethlem.

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1 A ‘‘pastime’’ That Can ‘‘prompt us to have mercy’’: Putting Malvolio (Ben Jonson?) in a Dark Room THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SHOW OF BETHLEM IN THE CONTEXT OF EARLY MODERN CHARITY

EARLY MODERN CHARITY BECAME A MORE DISCRIMINATING ACTIVITY than it had been in the medieval world. The pressure to be charitable (to give to the poor, care for the sick, etc.) remained powerful, but, at the same time, a certain skepticism and even hostility toward charity developed.1 People began to suggest more and more, for instance, that indiscriminate charity could be a disincentive to work.2 England established its first Acts against Beggars in 1495, but the 1531 act ‘‘Concerning Punishment of Beggars and Vagabonds,’’ contains the ‘‘provision for whipping able-bodied beggars’’ that articulates the principal feature distinguishing early modern charity from medieval almsgiving: some poor deserve charity while others most definitely do not.3 Of course, finite resources always required some distinction between deserving and undeserving; but the ‘‘ideal’’ had always been that ‘‘no distinction be made between needy recipients.’’4 That ideal dissipated over time, as, correspondingly, the intensity of animosity toward ‘‘undeserving’’ poor, those perceived as able to help themselves but unwilling to do so, increased.5 To give indiscriminately was increasingly seen as sinful and wasteful. Ben Jonson’s Lorenzo Senior, a character in Every Man in his Humour, confronted by his servant Musco disguised and begging, expresses the sentiment that had grown across Europe, and across religious positions, since the late fourteenth century. 46

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Believe me, I am rapt with admiration, To think a man of thy exterior presence Should, in the constitution of the mind, Be so degenerate, infirm, and base. Art thou a man? And sham’st thou not to beg? To practice such a servile kind of life? ............................... Now, afore God, whatever he be that should Relieve a person of thy quality While you insist in this loose desperate course, I would esteem the sin not thine, but his. (2.2.60–80)

This type of skepticism toward charity used to be regularly presented as a result of the Protestant Reformation, a specifically Puritan attitude toward charity and work.6 According to Reformation principles, good works did not lead to salvation, so people were less obligated to be charitable. Christopher Hill has explained, for example, that ‘‘the Protestant ethic emphasized not the routine good work, but the motive behind it’’; an ethic that when joined with other more Calvinist principles about predestination—‘‘humanitarianism was irrelevant to those who believed in fixed decrees’’—changed attitudes toward charity.7 But, as studies began to show as much as thirty years ago, skepticism towards charity (and the poor) began long before the Reformation and continued apace in Protestant and Catholic countries afterwards; attitudes toward poor relief changed across Europe and were exemplified by ‘‘a more rationalized and laicized form of assistance to the poor.’’8 The role of religion in changing charitable practices, as we shall see, particularly in Chapters 6 and 7, has become a very complicated scholarly issue. At the outset, however, one can say that in both Protestant and Catholic areas, more or less ‘‘indiscriminate’’ almsgiving and haphazard relief from religious orders gave way to more modern ‘‘discriminating’’ charitable institutions that were self-conscious about targets and long range goals. Charity did not disappear or lessen substantially, but refocused its attentions and, as a result, the range of charitable objects narrowed noticeably. The ‘‘truly’’ needy, the demonstrably unfortunate—like the mad of Bethlem—became the focus of late medieval charity.9 One could say charitable objects that demonstrated a true need had a certain cultural value. An institution

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like Bethlem survived in part because it was a place where the contradictory demands of charity could be reconciled: charity could be dispensed there while few could claim that the visibly suffering mad of Bethlem were undeserving. Much of what we know of Bethlem’s early history supports this characterization. Founded in 1247, Bethlem was born as part of what Miri Rubin has called an ‘‘enthusiastic period of donation in prosperous years of the early thirteenth century.’’10 Hospitals founded by religious orders were ‘‘ubiquitous.’’11 The History of Bethlem offers a related, but more specifically religious and social, rather than economic, motivation for Bethlem’s founding, arguing that the crusading spirit of the thirteenth century in part prompted Bethlem’s birth: ‘‘a desire to protect Christ’s birthplace was one of the reasons why, in 1247, the London Alderman, Simon FitzMary, decided to give some of his properties to the Bishop of Bethlehem, for the foundation of a priory, or dependent house, of the Order of Bethlehem.’’12 From the perspective of Bishop of Bethlehem, Bethlem was ‘‘intended, not as a mad-house, but as a link between England and the Holy Land, part of a wider movement in which the cathedral church of the Nativity of Bethlehem and its bishops sought land, alms, and hospitality in Western Europe.’’13 The hospital’s charitable, rather than its psychiatric, function is quite clear at its origins. Goffredo de Prefetti, a new see of Bethelem, saw that the order as a whole ‘‘developed as a distinct entity, with alms-raising as a major aim.’’14 In the late fourteenth and fifteenth century, however, mounting suspicion toward all charities and the diminished ability of elites to maintain them forced such organizations to shut down or transform themselves: in Rubin’s words, hospitals had to ‘‘adapt or perish.’’15 Bethlem adapted by serving a specific group, a group with a demonstrable need. For all the notorious ‘‘ambiguity’’ of early modern madness, one certainty was that it was ‘‘the essence of lunacy to be visible, and known by its appearance’’;16 these highly visible mad were more often than not singled out and identified as legitimate objects of charity rather than gathered together with ‘‘able-bodied’’ beggars believed to be shirking work. Occluding this point has been Foucault’s argument about the ‘‘great confinement’’ of madness suggesting all sorts of social undesirables were gathered together in one institutional setting. But in England, at least, these social groups, when

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confined, were not gathered together. Bridewell and Bethlem were ostensibly under the same governorship but concerted efforts were made to distinguish the mad from the poor. As Roy Porter memorably puts it, ‘‘France lumps; England splits.’’17 We see something of this ‘‘splitting’’ and Bethlem’s established place in the culture in the sixteenth century, when it survived the suppression of monastic institutions to become, along with St. Bartholomew’s, St. Thomas, Christ’s, and Bridewell, one of the five London royal hospitals.18 Each institution served a specific ‘‘deserving’’ charitable group. St. Bart’s and St. Thomas’s, two of the largest medieval hospitals, served the sick poor; Christ’s served orphaned children; Bethlem served the mad; and, Bridewell, a new institution refashioned from an old palace, satisfied the strictures of charity by serving as a correction house.19 Bridewell, perhaps even more than the show of Bethlem, marks the difference between our understanding of charity and early modern London’s. We have a very difficult time considering the workhouse a charity, and such a historical distance, I will show in chapter 3, makes plays like Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Honest Whore, Part Two and its Bridewell setting in act 5 very difficult for us to follow. Not surprisingly, the London hospitals did not solve the problems of perceived and actual poverty in London and worsening economic conditions, especially in the 1590s, precipitated the establishment of England’s first long-lasting and effective poor laws in 1598 and 1601 designed to discriminate even more carefully between the deserving and the undeserving poor. The institution of these laws coincided with the 1598 census at Bethlem, an investigation (the first of its kind in over forty years) primarily intended to determine who should be there and who should not. Bethlem archivist Patricia Allderidge, in her review of the Court Books of Bridewell and Bethlem, points out that, aside from the occasional and ineffective interference in keepership matters, the governors of Bridewell seemed ‘‘to have been almost unconcerned with all Bethlem matters.’’20 ‘‘Something,’’ Allderidge speculates cryptically, drew the governors out to Bethlem in 1598. In addition, Allderidge remarks that two months before the census, a long-serving keeper, London clothworker Roland Sleford, had left his position after some nineteen years.21 The committee reported that the hospital’s physical condition was poor, so they initiated repair work, and gave a detailed census of the

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twenty patients housed there. Unfortunately, even though the census and Sleford’s departure are co-terminous, and the two appear to have more than a coincidental relationship, no hard evidence exists to suggest the exact nature of their relationship; but we can infer reasonably that the ‘‘something’’ that drew Bridewell governors out to Bethlem and prompted Sleford’s departure was somehow connected to the massive poor relief legislation enacted in 1598. Bethlem, like all charitable institutions and practices, was under intense scrutiny by a culture unusually selfconscious of squandering its charitable resources. Theatrical history provides another coincidence to keep in mind. A few weeks before Sleford’s departure in October, Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour played at the Curtain Theater, some three quarters of a mile down the road in the North London suburb of Shoreditch. As I suggested in the introduction, at the same moment the state was reorganizing charity and its institutions, Ben Jonson was attempting to reorganize his place, and the place of the stage in the world by creating an innovative theater that scrutinized the ‘‘humours’’ or, as he occasionally suggested, the social madness of the world. The year 1598 will be a crucial one for this study. A broad social shift was underway and I will suggest that dramatic practice registered and participated in that shift. In 1598, in both matters of the poor law and the statutes of charitable uses, the Crown found an institutional mechanism through which it could effectively manage charitable relations: the Justices of Peace. Paul Slack states that the first poor relief act ‘‘was the most important’’ of all the legislation passed in 1598 and I cite it here because its language does suggest the act’s importance in facilitating an institutional shift in power and social organization: An Act for the Relief of the Poor 1 Overseers of the poor to be nominated in all parishes to employ the able poor, especially the young, and to administer relief; 2 Church wardens and overseers empowered to distrain the goods of any persons refusing to contribute to poor-rates; 3 The same officials to see that habitations are provided for the disabled on waste or common lands, with the agreement of lords of manors; 4 County treasurers to be appointed to administer funds for the relief of prisoners and soldiers and mariners passing through the county.22

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The ‘‘overseers of the poor’’ were under direct supervision of the Justice of the Peace, a political and social alignment that gave the power of charitable gift-giving to a few members of each parish with direct ties to Tudor and Stuart bureaucracy. This legislation severely hampers the negotiation of responsibilities in the middle of the century that created the London hospitals; the laws, in effect, place charitable practices under the jurisdiction of a national government. As Slack suggests, the poor law ‘‘was likely to reflect the interests of those who traditionally managed charitable distributions alongside the religious institutions and fraternities destroyed at the Reformation.’’23 Just as the poor laws of 1598 place a tremendous amount of responsibility and power in the hands of the JPs, the new 1598 and 1601 statutes of charitable uses grant charitable commissions, often composed of JPs, significant control of charitable gift-giving. The new ‘‘charitable commission’’ was designed to allow the church the authority it previously had held only in theory. Under the ‘‘Charitable Uses Act,’’ first developed in 1598 and then improved in 1601, each county was to have ‘‘at least five commissioners’’ to conduct inquiries into contested or controversial matters of charitable trusts: ‘‘the commissioners gave notice to the churchwardens and overseers for the poor of the parishes of the county, that they were authorised to inquire . . . whether property devoted to charitable uses had been employed according to the intent of the donors.’’24 The statute provided some latitude for the composition of each commission: ‘‘ ‘persons of good and sound behaviour’ who, if not Justices of the Peace, were invariably gentlemen of the county.’’25 But the statute did stipulate that ‘‘one of the commissioners had to be the Bishop of the diocese and his Chancellor.’’ Gareth Jones notes that between 1400 and 1601 there were only 223 bills by the Crown to enforce charitable uses; that is, there were only 223 instances over a period of two hundred years when the state officially regulated that aspect of ‘‘charity.’’ In contrast, ‘‘in the reign of James I alone as a result of the investigations of the charity commissioners the Chancellor made over one thousand decrees securing the proper application of charitable endowments and correcting the maladministration of charitable funds by individual feoffees.’’26 One must consider, as Jones’s language suggests, the extent to which this is a more efficient and benevolent government rectifying charitable abuses. One must also consider,

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however, the power usurped by the state and church in terms of its drastically increased control over charitable gift-giving. These changes were not made without resistance. Local governments and individuals had grown accustomed to certain privileges. In the debates in and about the Parliaments of 1598 and 1601 there are several instances of individuals resisting the increased power of the JPs and the state to regulate such matters as poor relief and there is a great deal of anxiety about church courts regaining power and jurisdiction that had been lost at the Reformation. Slack notes, for example, there were disputes about how poor rates were to be assessed and there was ‘‘some resistance still to the very principle of taxation.’’27 There was much skepticism about the JPs’ ability to control and manage behavior. John Bond, a schoolmaster turned physician, asked during the 1601 parliament, ‘‘Who, almost, are not grieved at the luxuriant authority of Justices of Peace? The poor commonality, whose strength and quietness of us all, he only shall be punished, be vexed, for will any that a Justice of Peace will contest with as good a man as himself?’’28 Similarly, Hill notes that the Church courts were an ‘‘irritant for the industrious sort of people.’’29 The Justices of Peace supervised the ‘‘overseers’’ of poor relief who had ‘‘considerable discretion in their use of the financial resources, powers of patronage, and opportunities for what we now call ‘social control’, that poor law gave them.’’30 There was similar resistance to the statutes of charitable uses and the newly acquired power of the charitable commissions. The initial 1598 statute to form the commissions did not survive, for example, partly because it did not provide individuals the right to ‘‘challenge Jurors’’ in what were to be ‘‘highly inquisitorial’’ investigations.31 After some debate, the Charitable Uses Act was rewritten in 1601, but the extent of the charitable commission’s power was always to be in question: ‘‘whether the commissioners did or did not have jurisdiction over a particular charitable use was a question which appeared to arise relatively frequently after . . . 1601.’’32 We note, too, that those skeptical of the charitable commission successfully excluded certain ‘‘charities’’ from the commission’s jurisdiction in 1601. Most importantly for this study, any ‘‘Hospitall’’ governed by a ‘‘Citie or Towne Corporate’’ was outside the commission’s jurisdiction; Bethlem, according to this provision, would have been outside the commission’s responsibility.33

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Slack noted that the London hospitals were ‘‘initially’’ outside the ‘‘main stream of development of English poor relief’’: They were controlled not by justices of the peace but by a body of governors. They did not, at least at first, copy the parochial structure of English social welfare, but centralised relief for the whole capital. Most important of all, they were not designed to be dependent on a parochial poor-rate: the famous half-fifteenth raised for St. Bartholomew’s in 1547 was a once-for-all levy to found the hospital, and it was hoped, vainly at it turned out, that charitable collections and endowments would take care of the future.34

In the struggle to reorganize charity and social welfare underway at the turn of the century, we begin to see that the London hospitals stood apart and often opposed to the newly forming national policy governed by Tudor JPs, commissions, and church courts. This is in contrast to the general tendency, post-Foucault, to consider an institution like Bethlem as an instrument of the state—a means of organizing and placing subjects. As I suggested in the introduction, Bethlem does not stand as an Anglo-precursor to the hopitaux generaux. Bethlem was one of the institutions by and through which the city of London would try to organize their own social, specifically charitable, relations and the hospital, in fact, could stand as a place of opposition to the crown. If the single defining feature of French charity in the seventeenth century was the large institution, Slack argues, the single defining feature of English charity was the poor rate.35 To look to institutions like Bethlem as ‘‘state’’ operated means of control is to misread the institutions of power in England. This point might need some clarification. Was not the program imagined in the Royal Hospitals with each parish contributing to a single fund a centralized program? And, accordingly, were not the poor laws and their emphasis on parish responsibility an example of ‘‘local’’ power or governance? One easily forgets or ignores in using terms like ‘‘central’’ and ‘‘local’’ in this context that the poor laws, despite their emphasis on the individual parish, were a nationalized plan, controlled by the Crown. In contrast, the central London hospitals were a local plan that encouraged the civic elite of London to negotiate with the Crown and church. This is, again, a broad cultural shift. Slack situates the move-

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ment to reorganize charity and social welfare in the poor laws alongside the general ‘‘regulation of manners which is such a striking feature of parliamentary activity between 1580 and 1660. . . .’’36 Ideas of charity that had once bound communities together, including beggars and vagrants, were changing: ‘‘There was the increasing use of the paradigm of the body politic, not to bind together a varied social whole, but to show the damage which untreated disease, disorder or decay in any one member might do to the rest: the diseased members should be cut off. We might point also to the growing interest in civility and refinement of manners which can be traced in the same period.’’ The cultural pressures at work here, in short, were not just affecting the poor. It was, as Slack suggests, as if, faced with a growing and increasingly uglier urban world, ‘‘social boundaries were being redrawn and proper, respectable society being newly and more tightly defined.37 The ‘‘machinery of the poor law was not designed as an economic regulator, but as a moral, social and political one.’’38 This ‘‘moral, social, and political’’ reorganization of charity puts two very different conceptions of charity in flux during the latter part of the century. One could be termed emergent, if not dominant, another residual and oppositional. On the one hand, there is the older or residual conception of charity embodied by the London hospitals: a utopic, centralized body of institutions governed by local authorities and largely sustained by citizens, suggesting in its very form a whole unfragmented community. Slack notes, for example, that the London hospitals were a way around the problem that some parishes were richer than others and that poor parishes could be ineffective in managing poor relief.39 On the other hand, there is the emergent concept of the poor laws: charity managed by a select few JPs, sanctioned by national policy and suggesting in its very form a fragmented, complicated modern bureaucracy necessary to deal with complex economic problems. Most importantly, perhaps, in the first conception, we see an idea of the city as a coherent whole; in the second, we see that notion utterly abandoned for the more ‘‘realistic’’ idea of an early modern city grown too large, requiring micromanagement at the parish level.

‘‘HELLEBORE’’ AND THE CURE FOR HUMOURS IN JONSON’S NEW THEATER This whole dynamic, including those signs of resistance to the Crown’s retaking control of charitable discourse and institutions

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is registered in part on the stage. For example, Jonson’s plays antagonized Dekker (and others) not simply because of what he said about poetry, but because of the larger social vision of the city they presented. In brief, Jonson savaged the London citizen, most particularly the London merchant, generally depicting that figure as paranoid and jealous nearly to the point of insanity. He consistently made the citizen the dupe of more sophisticated, aristocratic figures who were able to play on the citizen’s ‘‘humorous’’ or mad jealousy. In Jonson’s plays, the aristocratic gallants determine social relations. Moreover, in Every Man In, the gallants work hand in hand with the Justice of the Peace to master the citizen figure and others in the play. In this alliance, Jonson’s plays, particularly Every Man In, parallel and reinforce the newly dominant view of social relations manifested in the 1598 poor laws, which dictated that the social and charitable relations of London should be determined not by its citizens or old London institutions like Bethlem, but by more sophisticated and discriminating aristocratic figures able to discern and manage the needs of any particular parish. Jonson’s poetic gallants, like JPs, can monitor and correct the lives of the less fortunate, a social category now much broader than it had been. The working hypothesis over much of this chapter and much of the next two is that Dekker and Middleton eventually resist Jonson’s vision of the city and defend the character of the citizen from Jonson’s charges of mad jealousy. In The Honest Whore, Part One, Dekker and Middleton depict a citizen figure, Candido, who is accused of madness. Candido is sent to Bethlem by the authorities, but the play eventually defends him by having the Duke release Candido and specifically say that he, of all people, has been incorrectly placed. In short, Bethlem first emerges on stage as part of Dekker and Middleton’s defense of London citizens from the satiric attacks leveled by Jonson. In dramatically defending the London citizen, Dekker and Middleton invoke an institution outside and opposed to the view of the City presented in Jonson’s plays. They invoke an institution that suggests London citizens had their own means and institutions of determining madness and social relations outside Jonson’s aristocratic world of ‘‘humours.’’ They engage a Protestant citizen charity and an emblem of city harmony (albeit an odd one) recently supplanted by the poor laws. The two versions of charitable London come into conflict, not only in parliamentary debates on poor laws and other more specifically ‘‘political’’ forums, but also on the stage in the Poets’ War.

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As suggested in the introduction, Jonson’s call for a new status for the poet and poetry, and especially the conflation of that call with his theatrical activity, irritated Marston and Dekker who mocked him on stage in Histriomastix and Jack Drum’s Entertainment (Marston) and Satiromastix (Dekker). Jonson responded by mocking Dekker and Marston in Every Man Out of his Humor, Cynthia’s Revels, and Poetaster. Shakespeare participated significantly in As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Troilus and Cressida. Even though traditional scholarship considers the Poets’ War to begin either with Marston’s Histriomastix (1598) or Jonson’s Every Man In his Humor (1598) and end with Dekker’s Satiromastix (1601) and Jonson’s Poetaster (1601), this chapter and the following two attempt to read Dekker and Middleton’s 1605 defense of the supernaturally patient citizen figure, Candido, and their depiction of Bethlem in the context of this wellknown socio-literary exchange.40 Certainly we see the dispute extending beyond 1601. After the The Honest Whore, Part One, in Dekker and John Webster’s Westward Ho (1605) and Jonson, Marston, and Chapman’s Eastward Ho (1605) and then, yet again, in Dekker and Webster’s Northward Ho (1607), we clearly see Dekker responding to the work of Jonson and vice versa. To date, no one has suggested that either Part One or Part Two of The Honest Whore is part of the conflict.41 But Dekker and Middleton’s creation of Candido and their use of Bethlem is directly connected to the fact that Jonson consistently savaged a humorous, almost insanely jealous (or cuckold) citizen figure. Jonson’s Every Man In His Humor is the groundbreaking play in many ways.42 In Jonson’s first major theatrical success, the author produced what many have considered the first English comedy of manners. His focus and attention on social competition, social styles, manners, and mannerisms in all their folly was unprecedented. More importantly for us, the play seems to have launched the Poets’ War. Here Jonson first sought to distinguish himself by arguing for a new status for poetry and charging others with lack of learning and judgment. Lorenzo Junior, the young gallant Jonson obviously sympathizes with in the play, speaks in what seems to be close to the author’s voice: The state of poesy, such as it is, Blessed, eternal, and most true divine. Indeed, if you will look on Poesy

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As she appears in many, poor and lame, Patched up in remnants and old worn rags, Half-starved for want of her peculiar food, Sacred Invention. (5.3.298–304).43

Jonson’s contemporaries were less impressed by his classicism, however, than they were by his harsh tone and his willingness to attack the status quo. Dekker and others took lines like Lorenzo’s to mean that Jonson thought he alone could produce poetry and drama. Jonson could, the play seems to suggest at times, even do without the audience, who did not know what was good or good for them. Nor is it any blemish to her fame That such lean, ignorant, and blasted wits, Such brainless gulls, should utter their stolen wares With such applauses in our vulgar ears; Or that their slubbered lines have current pass From the fat judgments of the multitude; But that this barren and infected age Should set no difference ’twixt these empty spirits And a true poet. (316–24)

Rather than rehashing any further at the moment what is well known and well studied about Jonson’s theory of art, artistic temperament, and his desire for distinction, let me refocus our attention on how Jonson’s new definition of poetry and theater made visible the theatrical relationship with Bethlem. As I argued in the introduction, Bethlem’s relationship to the stage cannot and should not be explained by simplistic formulas that equate early modern drama with a random videographer starved for dramatic material. On the contrary, Bethlem’s emergence on the stage can be tracked with unusual specificity as originating in a complex dispute about dramatic art. The crucial character is ‘‘Doctor’’ Clement, Jonson’s controlling figure who corrects all the excessive ‘‘humours’’ at the conclusion of Every Man In. After listening to Lorenzo’s complaints about poetry, Clement concurs. His diagnosis involves a specific cause and cure.

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Ay, Lorenzo; but election is now governed altogether by the influence of humour; which, instead of those holy flames that should direct and light the soul to eternity, hurls forth nothing but smoke and congested vapors, that stifle her up and bereave her of all sight and motion. But she must have store of hellebore given her to purge these gross obstructions. Oh, that’s well said. (5.3.326–32)44

‘‘Humour’’ now governs ‘‘election.’’ That is, social posturing, affectations, whims—the humours Jonson mocks throughout the play—govern literary judgment. The cure, according to the rather whimsical Clement, is ‘‘hellebore,’’ a plant traditionally believed to cure madness and purge humours by inducing vomiting. We can easily understand the first part of Clement’s statement, the diagnosis. From Jonson’s point of view, authentic literary judgment had given way to fads, poor taste, and the poorly prepared response of the multitude. The suggested cure, though, this hellebore, might confuse us initially. Why should a cure for madness cure the ‘‘humours’’ Jonson talks about in the play? While Jonson uses the term humours in the play to refer to social affectation, that usage is relatively new. David Riggs writes ‘‘the very meaning of the word ‘humors’ had abruptly broadened, from its older sense of a pathological type and had come to include the transitory mood, the fad, and the fashionable affectation.’’45 Jonson himself acknowledges the confusion surrounding the broadening semantic range in the induction to his next play: Every Man Out of his Humor. He (through his character, Asper) distinguishes between physiological or psychiatric humour and social affectation. . . . So in every human body The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood, By reason that they flow continually In some one part, and are not continent, Receive the name of humours. Now thus far It may, by metaphor, apply itself Unto the general disposition: As when some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man that it doth draw All his affects, his spirits, and his powers, In their confluctions, all to run one way; This may be truly said to be a humour.

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But that a rook, in wearing a pied feather, The cable hatband, or the three-pied ruff, A yard of shoetie, or the Switzers’ knot On his French garters, should affect a humour! Oh, ’tis more than ridiculous. (98–114)

That Jonson felt compelled to make such a distinction suggests something about the audience’s response to Every Man In and their general understanding of ‘‘humours.’’ Jonson ridicules in Every Man Out those ‘‘rooks’’ that engage in particular social affectations and mistakenly call them humours. Presumably, the affectation of humours was a fairly successful social tool in its own right (hence Jonson’s need to attack it so vigorously). It may have provided, Jonathan Haynes suggests, a legitimate mode of ‘‘individual style’’ in a milieu where individual style is ‘‘highly prized,’’ but extremely difficult to achieve because ‘‘the field is crowded and increasingly extreme measures have to be taken to define oneself in a saturated system of distinctions.’’46 Jonson thus co-opts the term humor from its ‘‘authentic’’ physiological and early psychiatric discourse formations and helps reinscribe it in a newly emerging system of social competition. Physiological and psychiatric discourses had provided a legitimizing context for social use of humours. Humours were an essential thing that provided a distinct style free from charges of affectation. One could say Jonson was determined to do away with all that. Looking again at Clement’s suggestion that ‘‘hellebore’’ be used to cure ‘‘humours,’’ we see Jonson and his character playing with this range of meaning. The social affectations or ‘‘humours’’ Jonson mocks and that he says clouds literary judgment are, Clement jokes, a form of madness still and, thus still require a traditional cure for madness. Implicitly at least, then, Jonson proffers his ‘‘new’’ theater and corresponding understanding of poetry as the cure. We note here, too, importantly, Jonson conflates social understanding with this poetic understanding. Those not confused by ‘‘humours’’ in their literary judgment are not confused by ‘‘humours’’ in their social judgment. Good poets make for socially skilled people. Prospero’s letter to Lorenzo, a dramatic device that initiates the action, makes this link fairly clear:

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Sirrah, sweet villain, come and see me; but spend one minute in my company, and ’tis enough. I think I have a world of good jests for thee: oh sirrah, I can show thee two of the most perfect, rare, and absolute true Gulls that ever thou saw’st, if thou wilt come. ‘Sblood, invent some famous memorable lie or other, to flap thy father in the mouth withal: thou hast been father of a thousand in thy days, thou could’st be no Poet else. (1.1.154–62)47

Because of their poetic imagination, Prospero and Lorenzo can identify and laugh at humorous gulls and evade watchful fathers. Joel Altman argues that Lorenzo and Prospero’s mastery stems from the fact that the people they compete with and dominate socially lack the young gallants’ poetic skills: ‘‘The gulls whom Prospero and Lorenzo encounter . . . are not merely exempla engaged in comic consilia, but . . . creators of bad fictions. . . . bad because their inventive faculty serves their passions.’’48 For example, Thorello, the jealous citizen merchant of the play, finds himself in psychological distress throughout because of his ‘‘flawed inventio’’: he imagines false scenarios or ‘‘bad fictions’’ involving his wife that create marked paranoia. Crippled with flawed inventio, Thorello becomes an object for amusement in a game of social competition and poetry he cannot play. The poetic understanding embedded in Jonson’s drama is the cure—some ‘‘hellebore’’—for these cognitive failings, this ‘‘humourous’’ madness. We begin to glimpse here, I hope, how Jonson’s notion of theater and poetry pointed toward the relationship between the stage and the show of Bethlem Hospital. In the long and complicated dramatic dispute that ensues, Dekker and Middleton will remind Jonson that London has a theater involved in the cure of madness. And this theater is charitable, socially unifying, rather than divisive. It does not separate reason from madness, or gallant from citizen, but joins them ‘‘in charity.’’ In Dekker and Middleton’s play the old charity of Bethlem facilitates a harmonious ending to the comedy. In contrast, in Every Man In, Doctor Clement, the ‘‘mad Doctor’’ (4.3.147) Prospero calls him at one point, facilitates the comedic conclusion where all abandon their humours.49 Doctor Clement functions much more like a magistrate than a physician of any kind. And, in fact, in the anglicized version of the play,

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Doctor Clement becomes ‘‘Justice’’ Clement. This play is dependent on the figure of Justice of the Peace and all that institution represents, particularly increasing authority and control of a national bureaucracy of poor relief after 1598, for its resolution; the play stands in stark and telling contrast, then, to The Honest Whore, Parts One and Two that turned to old London charities for their resolution. This piece of the Poets’ War parallels the larger charitable reorganization underway in London whereby the administrative apparatus of the 1598 poor laws transformed and eventually transcended old institutions like the hospital.

EVERY MAN IN AND THE GULLING OF THE HUMOUROUS CITIZEN THORELLO There is, of course, a great deal of distance between the two plays in chronology and content that needs to be explained if I am to show that the The Honest Whore, Part One (1605) is such a response to Every Man in his Humour (1598). The key to closing that distance lies in a close examination of the two citizen figures of each play: Thorello and Candido. The two are almost direct contrasts. Jonson’s Thorello is cast as paranoid, almost delusional, in his belief that more or less innocent gallants and a faithful wife seek to turn him into a cuckold; Dekker and Middleton’s Candido is almost supernaturally patient in dealing with the malicious plots of gallants and his wife to gull him. In reading the two plays together, one can clearly see the patient Candido as a response to the paranoid, almost insanely jealous Thorello. Less easy to see is how and why Dekker and Middleton responded in 1605 to a character first seen in 1598. The road from Thorello to Candido is, in fact, long and winding, but worth traveling. While Jonson’s satire ostensibly attacked all, his call for a new position for poetry coincides with and, in fact, sustains what Haynes has called a ‘‘rehabilitation’’ of the gallant. The gallant who for centuries had been a principal target of morality plays as a figure of foppery, novelty, and urban degeneracy, is rehabilitated . . . as the model for a new balance, a new class style that can cope with and dominate the city . . . Jonson’s attitude toward the gallant and the world he represents is nothing if not critical, but

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moral critics have often been too distracted by individual faults to see a generic social hero, or rather a triumphant cultural norm.50

Jonson’s critique of the ‘‘individual’’ gallant and the intended universal breadth of his satire, if fully appreciated by modern criticism, was lost on much of his audience. Many, like Dekker, saw the witty gallants, Prospero and Lorenzo, engaged primarily in duping and dominating other social figures of the city. In considering Jonson’s rehabilitation of the gallant, we can better see that this play is not just a literary or theoretical act, but also a social act that explicitly attempts to alter social relations. And, importantly, a social act that occurs in 1598; Jonson’s refiguring of social relations coincides with the state’s efforts to redraw social boundaries through the implementation of the poor laws. One easily sees how Jonson’s call for a new position for the poet disrupts his immediate milieu. He wanted to place himself above others engaged in the same sort of work, and other playwrights resisted such an attempt. Jonson’s efforts, however, disrupt the always negotiating ranks of the ‘‘middling sort’’ in a related but broader sense. Working playwrights were not the only ones unsettled by Jonson’s theoretical posturing. In The Case is Altered, Jonson writes, ‘‘[humour plays] pleases the Gentlemen: but the common sort they care not for it, they know not what to make on it, they look for good matter, and are not edified with such toys.’’ This is not surprising. Jonson’s humour plays, particularly Every Man In, valorized the new urbane gallant whose ‘‘first characteristic is mastery’’ of social relations.51 In the young gallant figures of Prospero and Lorenzo, Jonson represented men of ‘‘polished good breeding and easy good manners’’ whose skills in social perception and performance enabled them to dominate in an ‘‘increasingly complex web of communication’’ where slight gestures and phrasing can indicate social distinction.52 In contrast, the citizen figure and Prospero’s brother-in-law, Thorello, does not understand Prospero or his social performances at all. He complains to Prospero’s half-brother, Giuliano, about Prospero’s behavior: My brother [in-law] Prospero, I know not how, Of late is much declined from what he was, And greatly altered in his disposition. When he came first to lodge here in my house,

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Ne’er trust me, if I was not proud of him. Methought he bare himself with such observance, So true election and so fair a form, And, what was chief, it showed not borrowed in him, But all he did became him as his own, And seemed as perfect, proper and innate Unto the mind, as color to the blood. But now, his course is so irregular, So loose, affected, and deprived of grace, And he himself withal so far fallen off From his first place, that scarce no note remains To tell men’s judgments where he lately stood. He’s grown a stranger to all due respect, Forgetful of his friends, and, not content To stale himself in all societies, He makes my house as common as a mart, A theater, a public receptacle For giddy humour and diseased riot; And there, as in a tavern or a stew, He and his wild associates spend their hours In repetition of lascivious jests, Swear, leap, and dance, and revel night by night, Control my servants; and indeed, what not? (1.4.30–56)

Thorello’s words provide a brief satirical composite of the ‘‘rehabilitated’’ gallant. But Jonson also makes clear that Thorello overestimates the seriousness of Prospero’s change. Thorello has legitimate enough complaints to be sure, but in explaining why he will not confront Prospero himself, Thorello reveals his paranoid condition, his inability to see his circumstances clearly. There is a fundamental psychological, and thus social, difference between this citizen and the young gallants: . . . if I should speak, He would be ready in the heat of passion To fill the ears of his familiars With oft reporting to them what disgrace And gross disparagement I had proposed him; And then would they straight back him in opinion, Make some loose comment upon every word, And out of their distracted fantasies Contrive some slander that should dwell with me.

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And what would that be, think you? Marry, this. They would give out, because my wife is fair, Myself but lately married, and my sister Here sojourning a virgin in my house, That I were jealous! Nay, as sure as death, Thus they would say; and how that I had wronged My brother purposely, thereby to find An apt pretext to banish them my house. (1.4.81–97)

Even after Giuliano agrees to intervene, Thorello’s paranoia intensifies as Jonson heightens the distinction between Lorenzo and Prospero and the citizen: ‘‘all the world/Should not persuade me but I were a cuckold’’ (1.4.168–69). Thorello’s misjudgment of his situation and gallants’ intentions severely undermines any criticism Jonson offers through him of the gallants; if the gallants behave poorly, the play suggests, they do so mainly because Thorello’s poor judgment allows them the opportunity. In contrast to Thorello’s misjudgment, in the next act the audience watches as Lorenzo and Prospero engage in their characteristic activity of ‘‘playing on gulls.’’53 Lorenzo and Prospero watch, amused, as Bobadilla, Mattheo, and Stephano make affected attempts to act like gallants. Prospero and Lorenzo encourage this foolishness while, in a long series of asides, they demonstrate they are merely amusing themselves (2.3.67–79). Jonson shows us these gallants are intrigued more by this kind of game-playing than cuckolding. Prospero and Lorenzo (and Lorenzo’s servant Musco) remain fully conscious of the fact they are playing social games while Thorello, Bobadilla, and Mattheo do not. Poetic skills, as suggested, provide their knowledge. Altman contends the gallants have the ‘‘imaginative capacity’’ to ‘‘suppose’’ themselves in ‘‘another’s place’’ and thereby ‘‘perceive others’ motivations.’’54 They easily ‘‘imagine’’ or see the clumsy social desires of Bobadilla as well as the source of Thorello’s anxiety. The gallants can imagine, assume, and play roles in society, a capacity that gives them a distinct advantage in social competition.55 Thorello, in contrast, does not see the ‘‘fictional’’ aspects of social competition because of his ‘‘flawed inventio.’’ Only at the end of the play, when he foregoes his jealousy, does he speak briefly in verse:

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For this I find where jealousy is fed, Horns in the mind, are worse than on the head. See what a drove of horns fly in the air, Winged with my cleansed, and my credulous breath: Watch them, suspicious eyes, watch where they fall, See see, on heads that think they have none at all! Oh what a plenteous world of this will come; When air rains horns, all men be sure of some. (5.3.396–403)56

Jonson may have suggested in the drama that Lorenzo and Prospero were putting on masks, merely playing gallants, but when Dekker and others respond to Jonson’s call for a new status for poetry and the poet, they respond not just to his ‘‘theoretical’’ suggestions about the power of poetry, but also to the fact that Jonson closely aligns this power with a particular social group. This poetic alignment registers and participates in the larger social and charitable reorganization underway in the culture. Citizens were increasingly subject to the gentry and their growing participation in the expanding bureaucracy of the Tudor and Jacobean state. The new statutes passed in late Tudor England ‘‘extended the administrative role of the Justices, imposing on them tasks in the field of religion, economics regulation . . . and the relief of poverty.’’57 And the Justices and those working under them, including overseers of the poor, were largely gentry or ‘‘new men’’ selected in a rather haphazard way.58 This new administrative power helped reconstitute aristocratic class distinctions. As Ian Archer writes, ‘‘Poor relief was increasingly used as a form of social capital. . . . The introduction of an additional tier in poor law administration in the form of the overseers of the poor in 1598, an office served by men of higher social status than the collectors of the poor they supplemented, was a further move towards the realization of these ambitions.’’59 Lorenzo and Prospero do seem to be JPs in training. Most JPs share Lorenzo and Prospero’s background and social status. The play’s Doctor/Justice of Peace, Clement, shares their capacity for duping and mastery. In fact, he functions as something of a senior role model. He quickly sees through their devices and tricks (5.3.31–32), enjoys some duping of his own in his feigned outrage over Cob speaking ‘‘against tobacco’’ (3.3.94), and generally carries himself with the easy grace and control Lorenzo and Pros-

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pero are only recently acquiring (3.3.129–38). It is Clement who gently counsels and corrects Lorenzo’s understanding of poetry (5.3.294–335); and it is Clement who officially punishes and corrects the dupes Lorenzo and Prospero had been correcting ‘‘unofficially’’ in their gulling (5.3.335–52). For their part, Prospero and Lorenzo are impressed, early in the play, by Clement’s persona. Lorenzo: Doctor Clement, what’s he? I have heard much speech of him. Prospero: Why, dost thou not know him? He is the gonfaloniere of the state here, an excellent rare civilian, and a great scholar; but the only mad, merry old fellow in Europe! I showed him you the other day. Lorenzo: Oh, I remember him now. Good faith, and he hath a very strange presence, methinks; it shows as if he stood out of the rank from other men. I have heard many of his jests in Padua. They say he will commit a man for taking the wall of his horse. Prospero: Ay, or wearing his cloak of one shoulder, or anything indeed, if it come in the way of his humour. (3.2.41–50)

Their remarks are, for them, unusually tinged with admiration and respect. Able at ‘‘jests,’’ Clement ‘‘stands out’’ from other men, and, from his government sanctioned position corrects those who breach the rules of social conduct. Clement, Prospero, and Lorenzo all share a distinct social sensibility: the easy grace and mastery of the governing or soon to be governing gentry. And, importantly, as we track the drama’s movement toward Bethlem, they share the ‘‘mad’’ cure for ‘‘humours’’ of hellebore ready to dispense. In contrast, those governed share ‘‘humours.’’ Jonson’s gallants cure social madness while Jonson’s citizens suffer from social madness. Thorello explains his condition: A new disease? I know not new or old, But it may well be called poor mortals Plague; For like a pestilence it doth infect The houses of the brain . . . Till not a thought or motion in the mind Be free from the black poison of suspect. Oh, but what error is it to know this,

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And want the free election of the soul In such extremes? well, I will once more strive, (Even in despite of hell) my self to be, And shake this fever off that thus shakes me. (208–25)

Thorello believes his jealousy stems from humoral madness, not the gallants’ immoral conduct. A particularly bizarre, paranoid exchange with Thorello makes his man Piso struggle with his own wits: Whence should this flow of passion, trow, take head, ha? Faith, I’ll dream no longer of this running humour, For fear I sink! The violence of the stream Already hath transported me so far That I can feel no ground at all. (3.1.124–28)

A few lines later, Thorello’s distorted thoughts prompt Piso to provide perhaps the most commonly cited definition for Jonsonian humours: ‘‘Marry, I’ll tell thee what it is, as ’tis generally received in these days: it is a monster, bred in man by self-love and affectation, and fed by folly’’(3.1.146–48). Here humours are universal, classless; if anything, that they are bred in ‘‘self-love’’ and ‘‘affectation’’ points to humours as an aristocratic problem. Jonson’s own characterization, however, undermines this classical definition. In the character of Thorello we find a type of citizen character that Jonson will depict again and again, and it is to this type of figure Dekker and Middleton eventually will respond; in the almost insanely jealous Thorello, we see not only the first of a type for Jonson, but also hints about the creation of Candido. Certainly the cuckold citizen is already a commonplace in Jonson’s world, but this particular manifestation of an old joke adds some important new twists that, in and of themselves, elicited strong responses. Chiefly, in refiguring Thorello’s jealousy as a ‘‘humour’’—at once a comical form of madness and social affectation—Jonson touched a nerve. Neither female inconstancy nor the gallant’s immoral conduct caused the distress; the inadequacies of the citizen himself are to blame. In earlier plays, closer to the morality plays in spirit and structure, the moral gaze of the citizen coin-

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cided with the plays’ dominant outlook or sensibility. None of this is to suggest intention or to say that Jonson was necessarily anti-citizen.60 But one distinct reverberation of his new posturing remains the responses he elicited, testifying to the extent, perhaps, that this literary quarrel was embedded in other cultural matters and the very real effect his work had on an audience. At a moment when social relations were undergoing significant realignment by government decree, Jonson’s classical, universalist aspirations to satirize all fell on deaf ears. A sensitive ‘‘citizen’’ audience saw only the distinctions between the young gallants and Thorello.

EVERY MAN OUT OF HIS HUMOUR AND THE CUCKOLDING OF DELIRIO In Every Man Out of his Humour (1599), Jonson’s next play after Every Man In, the attack on citizens not only continued, it intensified. As Herford and Simpson pointed out long ago, Every Man Out was in fact ‘‘a far more daring violation of precedent and tradition’’ than Every Man In and its ‘‘comprehensive castigation of follies’’ could ‘‘not fail to wring some withers.’’61 No matter the breadth of Jonson’s satire, Jonson anticipated that the construction of his play would irritate citizens in particular and he tries to control that irritation by having the Grex, Mitus, and Cordatus stress the universality of his satire. We note, however, that he makes this appeal most clearly immediately after an audience sees the citizen Delirio’s wife, Fallace, take a particularly strong interest in a courtier, Fastidius Brisk. ‘‘He has a body like an angel!’’ she remarks (2.6.114) ‘‘and a tongue able to ravish any woman I’the earth!’’(2.6.116). Her lines certainly catch an audience’s attention: ‘‘I have heard of a citizen’s wife has been beloved of a courtier; and why not I? Heigh-ho: well, I will into my private chamber, lock the door to me, and think over all his good parts, one after another’’ (2.6.122–25). It is as this point that Jonson takes the special care to explain that his satire is not directed at one group: Mit: Well, I doubt this last scene will endure some grievous torture. Cor: How? You fear ’twill be racked by some hard construction? Mit: Do not you?

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Cor: No, in good faith: unless mine eyes could light me beyond sense. I see no reason why this should be more liable to the rack than the rest: you’ll say, perhaps, the city will not take it well that the merchant is made here to dote so perfectly upon his wife; and she again to be so fastidiously affected as she is? Mit: You have uttered my thought, sir, indeed. Cor: Why, by that proportion, the court might as well take offence at him we call the courtier, and with much more pretext, by how much the place transcends and goes before in dignity and virtue: but can you imagine that any noble or true spirit in court, whose sinewy and altogether unaffected graces very worthily express him a courtier, will make any exception at opening of such an empty trunk as this Brisk is! Or think his own worth impeached by beholding his motley inside? Mit: No, sir, I do not. Cor: No more, assure you, will any grave, wise citizen or modest matron take the object of this folly in Deliro and his wife: but rather apply it as the foil to their own virtues. For that were to affirm that a man, writing of Nero, should mean all emperors: or speaking of Machiavel, comprehend all statesmen; or in our Sordido, all farmers; and so of the rest: than which nothing can be uttered more malicious or absurd. Indeed, there are a sort of these narrow-eyed decipherers, I confess, that will extort strange and abstruse meanings out of any subject, be it never so conspicuous and innocently delivered. But to such, wherever they sit concealed, let them know the author defies them and their writing tables; and hopes no sound or safe judgement will infect itself with their contagious comments, who, indeed, come here only to pervert and poison the sense of what they hear, and for nought else. (2.6.127–58)

Jonson’s attempts here to defend his attack on merchant ‘‘Citizens’’ as consistent with his attack on others protests too much. His antagonism toward citizen figures simply remains more pronounced than his antagonism toward anyone else. Asper/ Macilente—‘‘an ingenious and free spirit, eager and constant in reproof, without fear controlling the world’s abuses’’—forces many ‘‘out’’ of their humours in the course of the play, but the ‘‘good doting’’ citizen, Delirio, comes in for some of the most distinctive and painful correction. One has a hard time, for example, distinguishing between the affectations of Fastidius Brisk, Fungoso, and Sogliardo; all seem obnoxious courtiers. More distinct characters like Sordido, an uncharitable farmer, are cured

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of their particular humour early on in the play. But Delirio, who foolishly dotes on his shrewish and unfaithful wife, remains a consistent and clear target throughout. More importantly, Asper/ Macilente makes the cuckolding of Delirio the climactic last outing of humours (5.11–14), arranging for Delirio to walk in on Fastidius kissing his wife.62 This cuckold follows hard on the almost insanely jealous Thorello. And, again, while he ridicules gallants and courtiers with vigor, Jonson provides no citizen figure possessing anything like the redeeming aplomb or status in the play of a Lorenzo or the mastery of Macilente. Citizen virtue is markedly absent from these plays. Citizens ‘‘looked for good matter,’’ in these plays but instead found a ‘‘rehabilitated’’ gallant and in Every Man Out the new poet/scholar figure of Asper/Macilente, a figure of theatrical mastery who moves ‘‘without fear controlling the world’s abuses’’ (Inductions). Moreover, Delirio possesses none of the insight that makes Thorello at least interesting as a character. Jonson stressed that this ‘‘correction of manners’’ was part and parcel of a classical definition of comedy (3.6.181), but we see in this play, even without stressing Jonson’s personal attack on Dekker in the character of Orange, the ‘‘new’’ poet creating the sort of work that would lead Dekker and Middleton to produce Candido and The Honest Whore, Part One. All other poets, Jonson complains, ‘‘contemn’’ the ‘‘physic of the mind’’ he offers (Induction, 131). Jonson complains bitterly about this social madness and the reluctance to seek a cure. Dekker and Middleton will respond by providing their own cure: a character with an old-fashioned citizen virtue, patience, and an old London institution. At the beginning of Every Man Out, we see Jonson literally setting the stage for a character like the supernaturally patient Candido to come. Asper asks, ‘‘Who is so patient of this impious world/ That he can check his spirit, or rein his tongue?’’(Induction, 4–5). And, again, as the play starts, Asper asks ‘‘where, the vast world,/Doth that man breathe that can so much command/ His blood and his affection? (1.1.4–5). Dekker and Middleton will provide an ironic, given Jonson’s attack on citizen figures, answer in the figure of Candido.

SHAKESPEARE, TWELFTH NIGHT, MALVOLIO’S DARK ROOM, AND REVEALING THE LINK TO THE SHOW OF BETHLEM We are reminded by the odd interruption in Hamlet—the prince’s discussion with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about

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the ‘‘little eyases’’ ( 2.2. 339)—that Shakespeare certainly was aware of the Poets’ War. As I said in the introduction, if Jonson’s suggestion that his theater could cure social madness prompts the stage to reveal a relationship with Bethlem, Shakespeare’s intervention in the dispute does the deed. Bednarz has recently enhanced a long tradition of scholarship that sees Twelfth Night as in some ways a response to Jonson’s new comical satire or, for Rosencrantz, the ‘‘late innovation’’ (2.2.333). Shakespeare responded to Jonson’s criticism of festive comedy by writing a festive comedy that included virtually all the generic qualities Jonson disliked, turning to the ‘‘popular tradition in the theater’’ and its ‘‘popular rhetoric’’ ‘‘to rebuff Jonson’s neoclassicism.’’63 Moreover, in discussing the character Malvolio, Bednarz argues that ‘‘his hypocritical antagonism to festivity mirrors Jonson’s, and when it is coupled with the governing humour of aspiring self-love, the analogy becomes apparent. The plot to draw Malvolio’s humour. . . . was long ago understood to show the influence of Jonson’s fascination with social pretension.’’ The scenes mocking Malvolio could easily fit into either ‘‘Every Man’’ play. Malvolio, like Jonson, ‘‘seeks to restrain the humor of others through ridicule, having assumed an imagined moral authority.’’64 What is of most interest here is Shakespeare’s particular punishment or attempted correction of this very Jonson-like character. It seems that four years before Dekker and Middleton invoke Bethlem to challenge the theater of Jonson, Shakespeare revealed a comparable and related dramatic relationship between the two theaters in trying to do the same thing. As suggested in the introduction, in placing Malvolio in the dark room, Shakespeare reveals the relationship of the stage to the show of Bethlem. He also first encounters the difficulty or tension in staging madness that will ultimately prompt representational drama to differentiate itself from the theatrical practice of Bethlem. In short, while Shakespeare never used a ‘‘Bedlam’’ stage setting, he was as directly involved with the theater of Bethlem as Dekker, Webster, or Middleton. One is tempted, for example, to point to a play as early as The Comedy of Errors to illustrate his interest in shows of madness. We see in this play extended discussions of madness and, as we will see in Northward Ho, the attempted restraint of a patient and a comical attack on a ‘‘psychiatric’’ doctor. We see, too, the clear connection between the treatment of madness and charity. The abbess explains to everyone why she helps the ‘‘mad’’ Antipholus of Ephesus:

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Be patient, for I will not let him stir Till I have used the approved means I have, With wholesome syrups, drugs, and holy prayers, To make of him a formal man again. It is a branch and parcel of my mine oath, A charitable duty of my order. (5.1.102–7)

Interestingly enough, all this material takes place in front of an old monastery (‘‘to Bethlem Monastery?’’ Candido will ask in The Honest Whore, Part One). Bethlem, I should note, was not the only spectacle of madness in Shakespeare’s world, but it certainly was the dominant one and, geographically, located on Shoreditch, the closest to home and work as it were. And, chronologically speaking, the ‘‘start’’ or reform of the show of Bethlem in 1598 seems to coincide with significant changes in Shakespeare’s representation of madness. For example, while Antipholus is kept at an old monastery, there is no hint in The Comedy of Errors about visitation or the effect of viewing the mad that seems to make its way into so many plays produced after 1598. If Jonson’s new theater that ‘‘cures’’ madness and its governing gallants register and participate in the widespread changes in social relations wrought by the poor laws, it makes sense that a cultural connection to the old hospital reveals itself in rebuffing Jonson’s assault and not earlier in Shakespeare’s career. Early in Twelfth Night, we note, Shakespeare seems willing to play with notions of madness in the manner of festive comedy along with, for the first time, viewing madness for entertainment. When Olivia expresses concern that a messenger from Count Orsino, Viola in disguise, will be met by Sir Toby she says, ‘‘Fetch him off, I pray you. He speaks nothing but madman’’ (1.5.103). The fool and Olivia engage in an extended riddle about the difference between madness and drunkenness (1.5.125–35). Not unlike a cavalier visitor to Bethlem, the depressed Olivia seems curious to view Viola because of her bizarre behavior, but willing to dismiss her quickly if not entertained: ‘‘I heard you were saucy at my gates, and allowed your approach rather to wonder at you than to hear you. If you be not mad, begone; if you have reason, be brief. ’Tis not that time of moon with me to make one in so skipping a dialogue’’ (1.5.193–97). Shakespeare examines the matter of madness and its effect on

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audience in full only, however, when he turns to Malvolio. Malvolio tries to correct the manners of Sir Toby, et al., by employing a familiar trope: ‘‘My masters, are you mad? Or what are you? Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night?’’ (2.3.86). Led by Maria, the gallants seek to turn the tables on Malvolio’s accusation: ‘‘If I do not gull him into a nayword and make him a common recreation, do not think I have wit enough to lie straight in my bed’’ (2.3.133). The Jonsonian humour play and the show of Bethlem, I think, are very close to Shakespeare’s imagination here. Fabian is happy to see Malvolio gulled because ‘‘he brought me out of favor with my lady about bearbaiting here.’’ The connection between London’s ‘‘common recreations’’—charitable or not—is signaled by Sir Toby’s coupling of the gulled Malvolio and the bear: ‘‘to anger him we’ll have the bear again.’’ This seems, again, very close to Jonson in its attitude toward gulling and various kinds of ‘‘madness.’’ The suggestion is that Malvolio could be made a ‘‘bear’’ for entertainment, just as the mad of Bethlem could be viewed as entertainment. Actually turning Malvolio into such a ‘‘common recreation,’’ however, reveals the stage’s strange connection to the show of Bethlem; staging Malvolio as restrained madman also may illuminate the complexity of such supposedly simple, perverse pastimes as viewing the mad at Bethlem.65 Olivia’s sensibility regarding Malvolio’s ‘‘madness’’ first hints at the complexity of such ‘‘real’’ shows. When Maria convinces her of Malvolio’s madness, Olivia insists that he be treated kindly (3.4.62). Unlike her initial voyeuristic interest in the strange behavior of Viola, Olivia displays a generous and genuine interest in Malvolio’s mental condition. The gulling of Malvolio, in fact, begins with Sir Toby feigning gentle, charitable care of the mad (3.4.97). Shakespeare’s gulling and viewing of the mad, as opposed to Jonson’s gulling of the humourous, seems inflected with a kind of charity even before it begins. The common ‘‘recreation’’ of viewing the mad at Bethlem could have been no different. These scenes, like many that we will examine, tend to corroborate the thesis of the historians of Bethlem that the hospital showed its mad to elicit pity and charity all the while struggling not to let that show degenerate into ‘‘pure’’ entertainment. Sir Toby says of Malvolio, ‘‘Come, will have him in a dark room and bound. My niece is already in the belief that he’s mad. We may carry it thus for our pleasure and his penance till

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our own pastime, tired out of breath, prompts us to have mercy’’ (3.4.137–43). As suggested in the introduction, to the extent the theater of Bethlem was a ‘‘pastime,’’ it, too, was similarly one that would eventually ‘‘prompt mercy.’’ In other parts of the plot, we see Shakespeare still working with ‘‘madness’’ as he did in earlier plays like The Comedy of Errors. Sebastian and Antonio wrestle with the problems of mistaken identity and refer frequently to madness. An Officer says to the confused Antonio, ‘‘The man grows mad’’ (3.4.373). And in the lines immediately before the gulling of Malvolio in the dark room, Sebastian tries to understand Olivia’s affection for him: ‘‘What relish is in this? How runs the stream? / Or I am mad, or else this is a dream’’ (4.1.59–60). This is the embrace of madness that made Shakespeare such a target for Jonson (and, I will argue in chapter 8, such an attractive figure for Foucault). In 4.2, however, the scene involving Malvolio and Feste disguised as Sir Topas, one can sense a ‘‘new’’ source has entered Shakespeare’s comedic treatment of madness, a source that takes him away from the trope of madness and mistaken identity still present in this play as it was in The Comedy of Errors.66 The scene begins, it seems, with an ‘‘older,’’ romantic, or Foucaultian understanding of madness from festive comedy. ‘‘Topaz’’ was a stone thought to cure madness in the medieval world, and in Feste’s disguise Shakespeare seems to be reconstituting the parody of psychiatric practice first seen with Dr. Pinch. Malvolio is not ‘‘mad’’ in some psychotic fashion, obviously, anymore than Antipholus was, and in Sir Topas’s bizarre demands to agree to the doctrine of the ‘‘transmigration of souls,’’ Shakespeare seems to be mocking the medical profession again. Here, in short, is a very Foucaultian take on psychiatry: the doctor who assumes a false authority and demands through the power the confinement the patient take on a particular worldview. But a different, perhaps unintended, dramatic effect subsumes Shakespeare’s parody. An audience’s attentions turn more often than not to Malvolio’s suffering, and not Feste’s jokes. The generic, literary sources of Shakespeare’s festive comedy give way here, in other words, to the connections to this ‘‘other’’ theater. Watching Malvolio’s suffering is an entertaining comedic device, no doubt, but Sir Toby voices what many audience members and critics have seen in the treatment of Malvolio and, more importantly, what the playwright obviously senses—that it might go or

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has gone too far. One may feel more sympathy with the gull than the gullers: ‘‘I would we were well rid of this knavery. If he may be conveniently delivered, I would he were, for I am now so far in offense with my niece that I cannot pursue with safety this sport to the upshot’’ (4.2.67). Malvolio’s mad suffering threatens to overtake the comedic dramaturgy. Shakespeare becomes, it seems, much more tentative, cautious, and self-conscious with this ‘‘new’’ mad act even as he seems to distance himself from his ‘‘old’’ embrace of madness in the early romantic comedies. The playwright seems increasingly cognizant that an unusual discrepancy between his depiction of Malvolio’s treatment and the conventional practices of the representational stage needs to be addressed. While watching Malvolio, Fabian tells an audience, ‘‘If this were played upon a stage, now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction’’ (3.4.128–29). Indeed, David Carnegie recently has reminded us that the Folio edition stage direction calls for ‘‘Malvolio within,’’ during the dark room scenes.67 That is, the restrained Malvolio might not have been shown to Shakespeare’s first audiences, Carnegie postulates, because seeing him restrained threatens the comedy. Only in the nineteenth century, after clear lines had been drawn between representational drama and other ‘‘theatrical’’ practices, could this mad show be fully depicted. Shakespeare, I am suggesting, is in the process of discovering in the very act of playmaking a new revelation regarding madness. In the lines that follow Malvolio’s conversation with Feste, Sebastian returns and denies madness as a possible positive Foucaultian or festive comedy presence in the play no less than three times. We see in these lines, I think, the effect of Jonson’s dramatic critique on Shakespeare. Sebastian systematically rules out, in particular, any connection between ‘‘madness’’ and its more romantic associates: fairies, dreams, spirituality. ‘‘Madness,’’ per Sebastian’s logic, is mental suffering and confusion that restricts the sufferer’s role in the world. This is the air; that is the glorious sun; This pearl she gave me, I do feel it and see it; And though ’tis wonder that enwraps me thus, Yet ’tis not madness. Where’s Antonio, then? I could not find him at the Elephant; Yet there he was, and there I found this credit,

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That he did range the town to seek me out. His counsel now might do me golden service; For though my soul disputes well with my sense That this may be some error, but no madness, Yet doth this accident and flood of fortune So far exceed all instance, all discourse, That I am ready to distrust mine eyes And wrangle with my reason that persuades me To any other trust but that I am mad, Or else the lady’s mad. Yet if ’twere so, She could not sway her house, command her followers, Take and give back affairs and their dispatch With such a smooth, discreet, and stable bearing As I perceive she does. There’s something in’t That is deceivable. (4.3.21)

This is distinctly different from the consideration of madness in The Comedy of Errors or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There is no trust in madness here, no willingness to give oneself over, like Hippolita hints, to the mysteries of madness. The actual pain of the patient comes to the forefront, not the artificiality of the diagnosis. Sebastian’s speech, particularly in its close proximity to Malvolio’s dark room scenes, marks a change, too, from what is probably Shakespeare’s first non-comedic consideration of reason and madness. In King John (1594/95), in a speech not unlike Sebastian’s, Lady Constance denies madness after discovering that her son Arthur has been kidnapped. We note, though, that her rendering of ‘‘madness’’ retains something of the romantic notion of mental distress governing the comedies. I am not mad. This hair I tear is mine; My name is Constance; I was Geoffrey’s wife; Young Arthur is my son; and he is lost. I am not mad; I would like to heaven I were, For then ’tis like I should forget myself! O, if I could, what grief should I forget? Preach now some philosophy to make me mad, And thou shalt be canonized, Cardinal; For, being not mad but sensible of grief, My reasonable part produces reason How I may be delivered of these woes,

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And teaches me to kill or hang myself. If I were mad, I should forget my son, Or madly think a babe a clouts were he. I am not mad. Too well, too well I feel The different plague of each calamity. (3.4.44–60)

Lady Constance claims to suffer more in reason than in madness, implying the latter is an escape or a respite from pain. Such a ‘‘positive’’ view of ‘‘Madness’’ cannot be so easily incorporated into Twelfth Night. What to do with Malvolio and his poor treatment becomes famously a central concern for the comedic ending, one resolved only by having him step off the stage in anger threatening revenge. Many tend to read his departure as a signal of the limits of the play’s festive world, or as some kind of subversive rift in the comedic containment. But given the specificity of his treatment, his staged madness designed to make an audience both within and outside the play amused, we should consider another understanding of his troublesome position. This staging of madness stems from a relationship, in other words, that while powerful and complex, cannot be easily managed as it emerges on the stage. Fabian asks that this ‘‘sportful malice’’ bring laughter rather than revenge, but one is not sure entirely how to take this show (5.1.365). Olivia, for example, concludes that Malvolio has been ‘‘notoriously abused’’ (5.1.379). In seeking to respond to Jonson’s criticism, Shakespeare begins to discover that other playwright had a point. In his early romantic comedies, perhaps Shakespeare had been relying in part on what could be termed a false or romanticized sense of madness. At the end of the play, we see Shakespeare still exploring his old understanding of madness, but now alongside an emergent understanding. Olivia seeks to reconcile her ‘‘extracting frenzy’’ of love (5.1.281) with Malvolio’s ‘‘distraction.’’ Her related form of madness, she suggests, simply ‘‘banished his’’ (5.1.282). Tellingly, Olivia initially had considered Malvolio to be suffering from ‘‘midsummer madness’’ (3.4.58). Olivia suggests the old understanding of madness from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘‘the lunatic, lover, and the poet/ Are of an imagination all compact.’’ Immediately after this explanation, however, Feste appears with Malvolio’s letter to complicate matters. Olivia demands that

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Feste read the letter. He begins to do so in a loud and apparently disturbing ‘‘mad’’ voice. Olivia stops him: ‘‘art thou mad?’’ (5.1.292). No, Feste responds with what could be called a Foucaultian understanding, ‘‘I do but read madness. And your ladyship will have it as it ought to be, you must allow vox’’ (5.1.295–96). Feste’s joke reminds Olivia, and the audience, that we are not listening to true madness, we are only ‘‘reading’’ madness through the voice of reason. True madness, as Sebastian indicated earlier, is disturbing to reason and, more importantly for us, the ‘‘new’’ dramatic form of madness Shakespeare explores here in Malvolio has a powerful, but distinctly uneasy, place on the representational stage. Contrary to Olivia’s initial response, the ‘‘madness’’ Malvolio was made to suffer is not so easily wed to her own ‘‘mad’’ love, the midsummer madness of romantic comedy. Feste insists on the disruptive aspect of madness even after Olivia demands that he ‘‘read I’ thy right wits.’’ When he begins to speak ‘‘madly’’ again—that is, in a loud and presumably disturbing voice—she snatches the letter and has Fabian read it. Shakespeare jokes with the gap between reason and madness here, jokes with Jonson’s attempts to rid the developing stage of Shakespeare’s old understanding of madness, but he does seem to realize that Jonson’s criticisms need to be taken seriously. And it is very clear that Jonson’s highly sophisticated literary argument couched in terms of madness has elicited a ‘‘mad’’ response. From this mad response to a mad artistic claim we can garner some sense of the complicated effects of viewing the mad in London in 1600. And as this literary debate unfolds on stage, we will catch glimpses of how one theater grew and developed a sense of itself in constant reference to another, very different, but related, stage.

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2 ‘‘ ’Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t’’: Poetaster, Satiromastix— and Shakespeare’s Defense of the Popular Stage in Hamlet PERHAPS THE THREE PLAYS MOST OFTEN AND CLEARLY ASSOCIATED with the Poets’ War are Jonson’s Poetaster, Dekker’s Satiromastix, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The first two are the most explicit dramatic statements in and about the dispute by the chief antagonists. The latter, of course, contains the most well-known reference to the Poets’ War. This chapter concentrates on these three plays, picking up the Poets’ War after Twelfth Night, with a continued focus on how the dispute leads to Dekker and Middleton’s depiction of the patient citizen Candido and Bethlem in The Honest Whore, Part One. Ultimately this artistic debate will put us very close to the ‘‘real’’ theater of madness in London; so close, in fact, that in the course of determining its own shape and form we can quite visibly see the stage distinguish itself from the show of Bethlem. We can see the stage separate and define itself as cultural activity by examining its relationship with the mad hospital.

POETASTER—AND, ALBIUS, ONE LAST CUCKOLDED CITIZEN FROM JONSON We begin with yet one more play by Jonson: Poetaster. Jonson discovered that Dekker was planning to attack him and his ostentatious claims about the poet and poetry/drama in Satiromastix and so he wrote Poetaster in an attempt to preempt the attack. The play marks Jonson’s loudest and perhaps his most desperate 79

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claim for the new status of the poet. In the figure of the poet Horace, Jonson attacks others and eventually places himself, the true poet, next to Caesar. In the process, Jonson irritates almost everyone: ‘‘citizens of standing, professional persons . . .’’1 Of most concern here, again, as we look forward to the unusual defense of Candido and The Honest Whore, Part One, are the citizen protests elicited by Poetaster. Along with upbraiding Dekker and Marston and others, Jonson returns to his now familiar strategy of creating a cuckold (or, in this case, a near cuckold) citizen and his wife: Albius and Chloe. Albius extends a line of characters that includes Thorello and Delirio; in Albius, though, Jonson offers at least one variation on this type. Whereas Thorello and Delirio were mocked more for their simple inability to compete, Jonson also mocks Albius for the character’s active engagement in social competition, Chloe, a ‘‘gentlewoman born,’’ has married Albius because citizens ‘‘kept their wives as fine as ladies; and that we might rule our husbands, like ladies; and do what we listed’’ (2.1.28). She insults Albius as ruthlessly as Fallace attacked Delirio in Every Man Out. For his part, Albius, like Delirio, accepts this treatment: ‘‘I had rather she should make bumps on my head as big as my two fingers than I would offend her’’ (2.1.31–32). Unlike Thorello or Delirio, Albius sees his wife as helpful to his own social ambitions. ‘‘I had rather want meat, than want guests’: specially if they be courtly guests . . . He that would have fine guests, let him have a fine wife; he that would have a fine wife, let him come to me’’ (2.2.185–90). But he seems as deluded as Delirio and Thorello in his judgment. Alb: But you know, wife; here are the greatest ladies, and gallantest gentlemen of Rome, to be entertained in our house now: and I would fain advise thee to entertain them in the best sort, i’ faith wife. Chl. In sincerity, did you ever hear a man talk so idly? You would seem to be master? You would have your spoke in my cart? You would advise me to entertain ladies and gentlemen? Because you can marshal your pack-needles, horse-combs, hobby-horses, and wall candlesticks in your warehouse better than I; therefore you can tell how to entertain ladies and gentlefolks better than I? (2.1.35–45)

In other words, Jonson creates another emotionally unstable and socially inept citizen. When Albius continues in his efforts to di-

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rect his willful wife, she strikes him (2.1.108). ‘‘Anger me no more,’’ she says, ‘‘Citi-sin, quoth’a! She’s a wise gentlewoman, I’faith, will marry herself to the sin of the city’’ (2.1.102–4). Chloe enjoys and openly solicits the attention of gallants—‘‘Oh, they do so command me here, the courtiers’’(2.1.31)—while her husband clumsily interferes with her flirtations. Chloe wishes her husband could be a poet/ gallant. The rather limited plot centers on the social-climbing and culture-seeking Chloe and Albius joining ‘‘poetasters’’ Crispinus (a clear figure for Marston), Demetrius (a clear figure for Dekker), the poet Ovid, and a soldier, Tucca, in a hastily constructed play ostensibly designed to mock the satirical Horace (Jonson’s dramatic alter ego). This play within the play actually turns into something of an ‘‘orgy.’’2 In this, Jonson attacks Ovidian poetry in Poetaster as well. The play ‘‘scene opens with Ovid’s proclamation, read by Gallus, that to guarantee their pleasure, ‘It shall be lawful for every lover, / To break loving oaths, / To change their lovers, and make love to others’ ’’ (4.5.29–31). I shall turn to this critique of Ovidian poetry and its relevance to Shakespeare shortly, but I point out the play scene here mainly to highlight how Jonson again suggests cuckoldry of the citizen figure. Albius appropriately assumes the play role of ‘‘Vulcan’’ and Chloe ‘‘Venus,’’ offering an opportunity for more explicit and bawdy flirtation involving the citizen’s wife (4.3.34–83; 4.5.45–75). When in Act Four Scene Three Albius enters with the poets Crispinus (Marston), Demetrius (Dekker), and the soldier, Tucca, we see Jonson’s situation regarding the Poets’ War as he perceives it. In Poetaster, the socially and poetically incompetent citizen figure he has been antagonizing (represented here in Albius), the poets Dekker and Marston, and the crass but influential Tucca all conspire to attack the figure of Horace by writing a satirical play about him. All Jonson/Horace’s antagonists are bad actors, poets, cursed with flawed inventio and doomed to a position outside Caesar’s court. Jonson’s conflation of poetic skills and social prestige reaches an almost desperate pinnacle.3 Jonson places himself, in the figure of Horace, at Caesar’s side, a special person, neither a gentlemen nor a commoner, but the ‘‘Poet’’ deserving an emperor’s ear, respect and friendship. Horace/Jonson cannot master the grace and ironic detachment of Lorenzo or Prospero; those characters did not remove themselves from the city, from social relations, but mastered techniques to dominate

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and move easily in society—something Horace/Jonson now seems reluctant to do. When confronted with the boorishness of Crispinus/Marston in Act Three, for example, Horace finds himself not amused, but hopelessly disabled by the demands of social graciousness and ease of performance that he had so valorized in Every Man In. Horace cannot gracefully dodge Crispinus. More importantly, Horace cannot or does not play on Crispinus as a Prospero might. Jonson no longer playfully mocks ‘‘humorous’’ gulls, or those who rely on humorous affectation; instead his Horace displays the frustration of communicating with one who completely misunderstands the social game or competition of which ‘‘humours’’ is a part. When Horace offers many social cues suggesting Crispinus should leave him alone, Crispinus does not see them as cues but misidentifies them as humors: ‘‘Tut, Tut: Abandon this idle humor ’tis nothing but melancholy’’ (3.1.185) and ‘‘What passion? What humour is this?’’ (3.2.24). Crispinus displays the gull’s characteristic reliance on and misunderstanding of humours. But, in a striking contrast to earlier gull to gallant/poet exchanges, Horace/Jonson does not enjoy such obtuseness; on the contrary, he only expresses contempt and frustration. Only rarely in Every Man In do Lorenzo or Prospero express anger or frustration with their gulls (4.2.121). Horace’s frustration is a far cry from even Asper/Macilente’s cutting but confidently controlled ‘‘outing’’ of humours in Every Man Out. Crispinus believes there actually are such things as humours, some physiological determinant fostering eccentric, highly stylized behavior, and this frustrates rather than amuses Jonson. The dominant sensibility of this play is not the easy grace of the gallant, but the frustrated desire of the ostentatious poet. Interestingly, as we again look ahead to Dekker and Middleton’s creation of Candido, Horace repeatedly seeks ‘‘patience’’ (3.1.57; 3.1.66; 3.1.98; 3.1.134; 3.1.220) during the exchange with Crispinus to deal with this social strain. In this instance, as in Asper’s call for a patient man in Every Man Out, Jonson may have helped provide Dekker and Middleton with the unusual rejoinder they offered to Jonson in The Honest Whore, Part One. What Jonson’s characters ‘‘lack’’—a favorite cry of the shopkeeper’s—is patience, the quality Dekker and Middleton’s citizen character has in supernatural abundance. Dekker and Middleton

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ironically will point to this failing of Jonson’s in The Honest Whore, Part One and designate ‘‘patience,’’ rather than Jonsonian poetic skill, as the cure for social distress and competition. And, ironically, they will assign this quality to the citizen figure in his confrontation with gallants. Curiously, several uses of the word ‘‘patience’’ are cut from the EMIH quarto when Jonson revises the play for his folio (either 1605 or 1612). Jonson’s revisions after the exchanges of the Poets’ War suggest the seemingly innocuous word had become a sore point for him. Jonson may have grown quickly frustrated with ‘‘humours’’ and ‘‘playing on’’ gulls, and certainly the humours genre dies quickly, but the duration of his exploration cannot measure its impact and may obscure the rich cultural tensions it absorbed. In linking ‘‘humours,’’ as psychological or physiological imbalance, to ‘‘humours,’’ as social affectation and its associations with social competition, Jonson also prompted the arguments of the Poets’ War to reveal the links between the stage and the city’s principal institution of madness and one of its central charities. Despite his stated intent, to abandon the Poets’ War and turn to tragedy in the ‘‘Apologetical Dialogue’’ of Poetaster, Jonson does not give up his vision of ‘‘true’’ poetry as a cure for madness or his position as the sole physician. As part of the ‘‘arraignment’’ of Marston/Crispinus and Dekker/Demetrius that concludes Poetaster, Horace administers the psychotropic (and emetic) medication introduced by ‘‘Doctor’’ Clement in Every Man In to help clear their ‘‘literary’’/social judgment: ‘‘Please it great Caesar, I have pills about me/ (Mixed with the whitest kind of hellebore)/ Would give him light vomit; that should purge/ His brain and stomach of those tumorous heats’’ (5.3.352–55). Horace also threatens Dekker/Demetrius and Marston/Crispinus that they will be ‘‘taken up for lepers in wit’’ and both they and their ‘‘papers’’ ‘‘forfeited to the Hospital of Fools’’ if they do not stay cured (5.3.554–55).

SATIROMASTIX AND TURNING THE TABLES ON HORACE/JONSON In Satiromastix, Dekker’s explicit response to Jonson, we see that Jonson’s suggestion that his exposure of ‘‘humours’’ provided a cure for some kind of madness certainly had made an

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impression on the playwright who will soon first put ‘‘Bethlem’’ on the stage. At the conclusion of Satiromastix, when Dekker has Horace/Jonson arraigned, he considers administering a comparable ‘‘pill’’: Or should we minister strong pills to thee; What lumps of hard and indigested stuff, Of bitter Satirisme, of Arrogance, Of Self-love, of Detraction, of a black And stinking Insolence should we fetch up? (5.2.218–22)

Looking at Dekker’s treatment of Horace/Jonson, I state again that the common strategy in dealing with Jonson was to turn the tables on him; opposing playwrights habitually suggested that the Jonsonian figure was mad and needed treatment. In Satiromastix, as already suggested, Marston/Crisipinus tells Horace/Jonson that ‘‘We came like your Physician to purge/ Your sick and dangerous mind of this disease’’ (1.2.247–48). Just as Crispinus and Demetrius were ‘‘arraigned’’ at the end of Act Five of Poetaster, Dekker’s Satiromastix, too, from the outset, takes the form of a legal battle, only this time Dekker indicts Jonson. In his prologue, Dekker notes the ‘‘world’’ ‘‘wilt sit as Judge’’ and that he will ‘‘leave it to the Jury’’ to decide who is right or wrong in the dispute. Dekker, like Jonson, claims to be acting ‘‘se defendo.’’ Dekker feels he has been attacked, and plans to defend himself publicly by ‘‘untrussing the humorous poet’’ in a pseudo-legal (if comic) competition. Haynes offers a description of Dekker’s strategy: ‘‘[Dekker] recycles the figures of Horace, Tucca, Crispinus, and Demetrius while shifting the setting to a vaguely archaic England . . . to plunge Horace/Jonson back into society showing his social relations. . . . Everything mystified in Poetaster is demystified here.’’4 Dekker’s willingness to rearrange or ‘‘recycle’’ characters, coupled with his use of legal terminology to describe his dramaturgy, is telling; Haynes’s description recalls Altman’s arguments about rhetoric and dramatic construction. Dekker takes Jonson’s characters and places them in different ‘‘circumstances.’’ He provides different ‘‘colors’’ for their motivations and actions as a student might in a Senecan declamation. The ‘‘facts,’’ ‘‘places,’’ and ‘‘persons’’ are the same, only the nature of their behavior is reconsidered. In

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Satiromastix, Horace remains the superior poet and Tucca the blowhard and so on, just as things were in Poetaster, but Dekker allows the jury/audience to see things in a different light.5 Dekker’s fiction emerges out of his impulse to redefine the nature of the dispute so the jury/audience can see Jonson not as the great wronged Poet, but as a superior poet who has let his ego go too far. Dekker concedes the facts of the case: Jonson is a better poet. But he demands a reconsideration of how Jonson handles that superiority. Later, as I will show in chapter 4, Dekker becomes willing to make further concessions to Jonson’s viewpoint in Northward Ho. And in The Honest Whore, Part One, Dekker will defend a client different than himself and Marston: the figure of the cuckolded citizen. But the Poets’ War is long and very complicated; we are not to Dekker and Bethlem yet. Shakespeare, for example, has prepared a defense of the popular stage to refute Jonson’s claims.

HAMLET AND THE DEFENSE OF THE POPULAR STAGE In Poetaster, Jonson maintains the claim that his ‘‘poetry’’ can transform the ‘‘madness’ of the world—Horace does administer hellebore to Crispinus (Marston) and Demetrius (Dekker)—but he begins to back away from the suggestion that the theater and drama can do the same. As Bednarz writes, ‘‘Jonson’s two prior comical satires had been optimistic about the ability of drama to transform experience. In Poetaster, however, the players’ mimesis is denigrated in favor of the poet’s direct address, as Jonson’s theater undoes itself.’’6 In fact, Jonson specifically denigrates members of the Chamberlain’s men. Jonson thus prompts Shakespeare to defend and define the stage.7 But, somewhat counterintuitively, Shakespeare does so not by expanding the stage’s powers (that is what Jonson sought to do), but by limiting and clarifying its boundaries. In other words, Shakespeare does not transcend the boundaries of the stage and create the ‘‘human’’ in Hamlet; from one perspective, in fact, it could be said he does precisely the opposite. He creates and defines the modern ‘‘actor’’ as distinct from the real person and establishes the limits of the modern representational stage. And, as part of this process, Shakespeare continues to redefine

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the stage’s understanding of ‘‘madness’’ and expose its strange relationship to the show of Bethlem. In suggesting he set limits on the power of the stage, I do not mean to assign Shakespeare, of all playwrights, a reductive view of the theater. I mean to suggest that, from his perspective in the exchange with Jonson, the stage is more than sufficient as is. The popular theater is what it is, Shakespeare says with Hamlet, but that is quite sufficient, no? Any attempt by Jonson or anyone else to redefine the stage outside its own limits misses the mark of the stage itself. Some of Horatio’s last lines describing the play make the point dramatically. His description of Hamlet is simultaneously true and not true about the nature of the play, at once a ridiculously reductive and brilliantly understated take on what this particular theatrical experience involves. In Hamlet an audience shall see or ‘‘hear’’ Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall’n on th’ inventors’s heads. (5.2.382–87)

The audience knows, Shakespeare trusts, that they have seen this, and much more than this. All of it, as Horatio remarks, ‘‘Truly’’ delivered. In Hamlet, I will argue, Shakespeare uses the conventions of the popular stage Jonson deplored—a ghost, madness, bombast, etc.—to construct the very ‘‘likenesse of Truth’’ called for by Jonson, but this ‘‘likenesse of truth’’ has no pretensions to transform or purge society. The ‘‘purpose of playing,’’ Hamlet says clearly, ‘‘both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’t were the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and very age and body of the time his form and pressure’’ (3.2.20–24). In ‘‘imitat[ing] humanity’’ the stage may prompt some transformation, but it does not do the transforming as Jonson suggested. That Jonson attacked specific conventions of the popular stage in Poetaster is clear. In act 3, to take an example distinctly connected to Hamlet, Tucca, the soldier, tries to sell his boy actors to an adult company run by the ‘‘player’’ Histrio. He has the boys quickly demonstrate their ability and, simultaneously it seems,

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the supposed simplicity of performing on the popular stage. He has them demonstrate in quick succession ‘‘King Darius’’ in ‘‘a doleful strain’’ (182), then in ‘‘an amorous vein’’ (188), then a ‘‘fierce soldier’’ (197). Then Tucca calls for conventions from the revenge tragedy: Tuc. ‘‘the Ghost, boys.’’ 1st Pyr.: ‘‘Vindicta.’ 2nd Pyr.: ‘‘Timoria.’ 1st Pyr. ‘‘Vindicta.’’ 2nd Pyr. ‘‘Timoria’’ 1st Pyr. ‘‘Veni.’’ 2nd Pyr. ‘‘Veni.’’ Tuc. ‘‘Now, thunder, sirrah, you, the rumbling player.’’ 2nd Pyr. ‘‘Aye, but somebody must cry ‘‘murder’’ then, in a small voice.’’ Tuc. ‘‘Your fellow-sharer, there, shall do’t; cry, sirrah, cry.’’ 1st Pyr. ‘‘Murder, Murder.’’ 2nd Pyr.: ‘‘Who calls murder? Lady, was it you?’’ Histrio: ‘‘Oh, admirable good, I protest.’’ (202–16)8

Jonson admitted to mocking the players in the ‘‘Apologetical Dialogue’’: ‘‘Now, for the players, it is true, I taxed them’’ (139). And, as mentioned, he specifically attacks members of Shakespeare’s Chamberlain Company. That Shakespeare creates a much more complicated ‘‘Ghost’’ and ‘‘revenge tragedy’’ than is customary is, then, within the context of the Poets’ War, not surprising.

A JONSONIAN POLONIUS From Shakespeare’s perspective, Jonson just does not understand or appreciate the method in the madness of the popular stage. His response to Jonson comes into focus in act 2 when he turns to Polonius. The act begins with Polonius providing Jonsonian ‘‘lecture and advice’’ (2.1.68) to Reynaldo—straight from Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of his Humor—on reading and producing social affectations and posturing. The purpose of this social ‘‘acting’’ and critique is to discover the behavior of Polonius’s son Laertes: ‘‘And thus do we of wisdom

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and of reach, / with windlasses and with assays of bias, By indirections find directions out’’ (2.1.65–67). In the preceding scene, interestingly enough, Hamlet has just prompted Horatio and Marcellus not to give away the secret of his ‘‘antic disposition’’ with similar social cues: That you, at such times seeing me, never shall, With arms encumbered thus, or this headshake, Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase As ‘‘Well, we know,’’ or ‘‘There be, an if they might,’’ Or such ambiguous giving out, to That you know aught of me. (1.5.182–88)

Shakespeare begins Act Two with a duel, as it were, between one character who believes wholeheartedly, even presumptuously, that he can master the ‘‘truth’’ of someone through careful observation of superficial mannerisms, the assumption, again, of the Jonsonian ‘‘humor’’ plays, and one person who refuses to have his truth known by these gestures and, moreover, displays a notable irritation with such mannerisms. While I am not claiming Polonius is a figure for Jonson per se, he clearly voices and embodies many Jonsonian concerns. For example, he immediately suspects that Hamlet is ‘‘mad’’ for Ophelia’s love (2.1.87). Like Jonson, Polonius immediately assumes Hamlet’s/Hamlet’s madness is the madness of festive comedy and, consequently, easily diagnosed and easily managed. Polonius calls Hamlet’s madness the very ‘‘ecstasy of love’’ (2.1.104). We recall, in Polonius’s obsessive insistence on the madness of love, Olivia and her initial willingness to conflate her love madness with Malvolio’s predicament. Polonius goes on to suggest that Ophelia’s enforced rejection of Hamlet has made the young man mad (2.1.112). He remains faithful to this diagnosis (‘‘Still harping on my daughter’’). Moreover, this diagnosis of madness becomes for Polonius something of a key to all mythologies, with immense explanatory power. Like Jonson did in his laureate efforts of Every Man In and Every Man Out, Polonius wagers his reputation on his ability to diagnose madness correctly: ‘‘If he love her not/ And be not from his reason fall’n thereon, / Let me be no assistant for a state, / But keep a farm and carters’’ (164–66). Very soon after Polonius conceives of his diagnosis, Shake-

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speare brings on stage two more figures with the express intention of reading and understanding the ‘‘madness’’ of Hamlet. Rosencratz and Guildenstern very much resemble Jonsonian gallants—Lorenzo and Prospero of EMIH—young, witty educated men, aligned with the court. They are brought on specifically to read the nuanced and complex behavior of Hamlet. Polonius reappears after Rosencratz and Guildenstern are introduced to announce his diagnosis to Claudius and Gertrude: ‘‘As it hath used to do, that I have found/The very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy’’ (2.2.48–49). In describing his diagnosis, he ‘‘briefly’’ confronts the aporia of madness addressed by Foucault’s project: to speak of madness is to speak only with the voice of reason, to speak for the mad one must turn mad: ‘‘I will be brief. Your noble son is mad. / Mad call I it, for to define true madness, / What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?’’ (2.2.92– 94). To let ‘‘madness’’ truly speak in its own voice is impossible; it has to be translated in some way by reason. That Shakespeare lets the Jonsonian Polonius outline the aporia is not to dismiss the aporia itself. Shakespeare, as I have suggested, seems to be developing a growing respect and understanding for the resiliency of that aporia, approaching it cautiously, circumspectly, humorously, as he did at the end of Twelfth Night. Shakespeare is developing a sense that madness is foreign, inaccessible, ‘‘other’’ than reason. The romanticized madness present in the romantic comedies is specifically disallowed in this play. Shakespeare assigns the aporia to the Polonius, then, in order to have the Jonsonian Polonius clumsily crash through it. ‘‘But let that go,’’ Polonius quickly concludes, before getting hopelessly entangled in the complex problem—‘‘That he’s mad, ’tis true; ’tis true ’tis pity, / And pity ’tis t’s true—a foolish figure’’—and, with Gertrude’s encouragement, simply cuts it loose—‘‘farewell it’’ (99). Polonius, like the absolutist Jonson, has little aptitude for or interest in wrestling with this kind of philosophical problem. Shakespeare’s romantic comedies may have misrepresented or romanticized madness in some way, but he did not dismiss it as simply a flaw to be treated and cut away as did Jonson. I point this out not to join Shakespeare in mocking Jonson’s own rough, clumsy handling of the aporia, his assumption that his innovative theater can so easily read and cure madness. It is, after all, Jonson’s insistence that ‘‘madness’’ in the drama can be

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diagnosed and cured that forces Shakespeare to confront the aporia more respectfully than he had been. As Shakespeare began to see with Malvolio, and as he will realize in full in King Lear, ‘‘true’’ madness is more foreign, resistant, painful than he had allowed in the romantic comedies. One could say, perhaps, that Shakespeare discovers he has no greater handle on this aporia than Jonson. But it is the dialectic between Jonson and Shakespeare that transforms the stage’s relationship to madness, and the stage’s overall development, not the genius or wit of either playwright. Polonius’s diagnosis, and his clumsy crash through the aporia, leads to the play’s first watching of the ‘‘mad’’ a` la Jonson, the humor plays, and Jonsonian gallants. First Polonius, then Rosencratz and Guildenstern, will seek to plumb the ‘‘humours’’ of Hamlet. During this process, Shakespeare provides an audience with something it has not seen yet: the humorous ‘‘madman’’ who is smarter than those who would observe and critique him. Polonius, we note, cannot seem to get enough of this close observation of Hamlet’s humors. After this initial ‘‘staging,’’ he will watch again with Claudius and, finally, fatefully, watch again from behind the arras. At this first watching, though, Shakespeare allows the possibility that the Jonsonian Polonius might become more flexible in his understanding; he allows Polonius to suspect there must be something more to this ‘‘madness’’ business than he has allowed: ‘‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t’’ (3.2.205–6). In his discussion with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet reveals there is indeed ‘‘method’’ in it, more even than an audience had been led to suspect. Hamlet reveals his deception of Polonius, Gertrude, and Claudius to his old friends only to deceive them anew and differently. Hamlet’s is, famously, the complex, multilayered ‘‘madness’’ of a modern, ‘‘rounded’’ stage-character, the model for all to follow; and this complexity, Shakespeare will remind us throughout, is produced with the supposedly flawed and retrograde conventions of the Elizabethan popular theater. Madness may be ‘‘poor Hamlet’s enemy’’ (5.2.226), but madness as developed on the popular stage is also one of Hamlet’s most distinct allies.

THE ‘‘PLAYER’S’’ SPEECH AND SHAKESPEARE’S THEATRICAL VERSION OF THE VIRGILIAN SORTES If Jonson’s misguided effort to diagnose and cure the madness of Shakespeare’s art led to the actual Poets’ War, Shakespeare in-

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triguingly has the Jonsonian Polonius’s misguided efforts to diagnose Hamlet lead to the play’s famous and direct discussion of said literary exchange. At roughly the same moment in the play that Polonius hints that there might be more to Hamlet/Hamlet’s ‘‘mad’’ playing than he had suspected, the ‘‘players’’ arrive. In the ensuing discussion, Shakespeare suggests that the ‘‘boy’s,’’ that is, Jonson’s ‘‘late innovation,’’ is winning the struggle for ideas and art. Hamlet then asks for a speech from the players. The particulars of this request and what follows point to a crucial aspect of the serious, sophisticated debate about ‘‘art’’ that was the Poets’ War. In Poetaster, as suggested, Jonson had denigrated the theater and valorized poetry. Jonson specifically denigrated actors: ‘‘it was the most impressive statement in the English Renaissance of the poet’s authority to the player and of the script’s priority to its enactment.’’9 Jonson’s use of the character ‘‘Virgil’’ in Poetaster makes the point most clearly. Virgil’s spoken poetry is the ideal art form in the play, rewarded by ‘‘Caesar’s’’ patronage. Virgil’s poetry is more than ‘‘ideal’’ in the play; it is, perhaps, something closer to the sacred or mystical. When discussing Virgil with Caesar in act 5, for example, Tibullus suggests the famous Vigillian sortes, the belief that a reader can randomly select a passage and then have that passage usefully speak to the reader’s current situation. Such is, for Jonson, the power and craft of Virgil’s poetry: That, which [Virgil] hath writ, Is with such judgment, labour’d, and distill’d Through all the needful uses of our lives, That could a man remember but his lines, He should not touch at any serious point, But he might breathe his spirit out of him. (1.8–13)

Caesar immediately clarifies the meaning of this power for an audience: ‘‘You meane, he might repeat part of his workes, /As fit for any conference, he can use?’’ In the next scene, Virgil enters on cue and selects a passage from the fourth book of the Aeneid. Jonson’s selection, as opposed to his character’s selection, is, of course, far from random. The passage involves Dido’s ‘‘guilty’’ match with Aeneas and thus ‘‘provides a corrective’’ to the corruption of Caesar’s daugh-

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ter in act 4 by Ovid. It also provides a corrective to the Ovidian ‘‘playmaking’’ in act 4. While listening to Virgil, however, Caesar and his court are interrupted by the ‘‘players’’ and playwrights. Jonson treats their interruption as something of a sacrilege, restoring proper order only after these theatrical troublemakers have been punished appropriately. In act 2 of Hamlet, then, when the prince chooses a speech for the players to perform after their arrival, a seemingly random selection from a play based on the Aeneid, I would suggest that Shakespeare establishes not just a character’s love of the theater, but responds specifically to Jonson and the literary claims made in Poetaster. After Jonson’s employment of the Virgillian sortes to denigrate players in Poetaster, particularly the Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare creates a specifically theatrical sortes to counter. Curiously, Hamlet’s speech before the ‘‘players’ ’’ speech clearly points to Jonsonian distinctions and judgment. ‘‘I heard thee speak me a speech once,’’ he tells the players: But it was never acted, or if it was, not above once, for the play, I remember, pleased not the million; ’twas caviar to the general. But it was—as I received it, and others, whose judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine—an excellent play, well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning. I remember one said there were no sallets in the lines to make the matter savory, nor no matter in the phrase that might indict the author of affectation, but called it an honest method, as wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome than fine. One speech in‘t I chiefly loved: ’twas Aeneas’ tale to Dido, and thereabout of it especially when he speaks of Priam’s slaughter. If it live in your memory, begin at this line: let me see, let me see. (2.2.434–49)

Shakespeare noticeably casts Hamlet as an ideal Jonsonian audience member.10 Hamlet understands that certain plays will not please ‘‘the million,’’ values modesty over cunning, ‘‘matter’’ over ‘‘sallets’’ and ‘‘affectation,’’ the ‘‘handsome’’ over the ‘‘fine.’’ Furthermore, he understands the importance of an ‘‘honest method’’ that might not be popular, but moves the discerning viewer. Moreover, this good ‘‘judge’’ acknowledges even better ‘‘judges’’ than himself (namely, Jonson). And, perhaps most importantly, Hamlet is a prince.

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Shakespeare, however, conspicuously situates the power of this ‘‘art’’ that Hamlet so adroitly judges in the actor rather than in the poet, the playwright, or the poetry. In other words, this royal ‘‘Jonsonian’’ art critic admires actors first, not poets. In a remarkable display of theatrical sprezzaturra, the player picks up the speech immediately where Hamlet’s partial memory leaves off (2.2.468) and delivers a stunning, at least to characters in the play, performance on the spot. In direct contrast to Poetaster, where the players and playwrights burst in on Virgil reading to Caesar, the clumsy Jonsonian Polonius interrupts this quasimystical demonstration of art. And Polonius interrupts with what is, perhaps, another send-up of Jonson’s neoclassical criticism: ‘‘this is too long’’ (2.2.498). If I am correct here about the connection between Jonson and Polonius, it is with wonderful irony, too, that Hamlet says of Polonius/Jonson, ‘‘He’s for a jig or a tale or a bawdry, or he sleeps. Say on’’ (500). The Jonsonian figure, Shakespeare says tongue-in-cheek, just does not appreciate the power of true acting because of his lowbrow love for the popular stage. Notably, Shakespeare does not condemn Virgil or poetry to elevate the popular stage and make his case for its value. On the contrary, at a historical moment when it was not clear exactly what standing or form dramatic art was to have, Shakespeare blurs many of the distinctions Jonson tried so hard to establish. Joseph Loewenstein comments on the ‘‘player’s’’ Virgillian speech: To an extent, the London theater already partakes of official culture, if not securely; that is why Francis Meres can canonize popular dramatists in Palladis Tamia. But surely the ‘‘rugged Pyrrhus’’ speech renders the partaking problematic; that may be learned from the long-standing critical dispute over whether the speech is any good or not. What continues to bother critics, what clearly caused sleeplessness in A. C. Bradley, was that Coleridge found disdain for the speech ‘‘beneath criticism.’’ I trust it is not dismissive simply to say that the speech conflates the manner of ranting tragedy and of Virgilian epic. This is contaminatio, practiced in such a way that it elides the distinction between imitatio and the adoption of stylistic fashion. To be as clear as possible: no particular idiom is being lampooned (interrogated, subjected to critique); what suffers under the solvent of Shakespearean polemical cunning is the idea of a gross sequestering of ‘‘popular’’ idiom from neoclassical stylistic canons.

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The ‘‘Pyrrhus speech’’ accomplishes an assault on discursive strata— say, the official and the popular—per se, an assault that has remained critically unassimilable: in Hamlet 2.2 official and popular are made to be imperfectly distinguishable.11

Shakespeare outwits Jonson throughout these disputes not by proffering alternatives to Jonson’s provocative innovations, but by confusing his categories. At the end of the player’s speech, Shakespeare again allows the possibility that Polonius might learn something, for the old man is properly awestruck by rather than critical of the performance: ‘‘Look whe’er he has not turned his color and has tears in’s eyes. Prithee, no more’’ (519). When Hamlet next addresses Polonius, he offers something of a subtle threat for those that would mistreat the players: ‘‘Do you hear, let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live’’ (523–25). The Jonsonian Polonius, however, still does not quite grasp the royal command about the proper treatment of players and, I would suggest, other people in general: ‘‘My lord, I will use them according to their desert.’’ In clarifying what Hamlet wants from Polonius, Shakespeare clarifies what he and many others want from the cuttingly satirical Jonson: traditional charity. ‘‘God’s bodkin, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity. The less they deserve the more merit is in your bounty. Take them in’’ (529–32). Dekker and Middleton, I will show in the next chapter, offer a related call for traditional charity from Jonson in their use of Bethlem in The Honest Whore, Part One. In confounding Jonson’s Virgillian sortes with a theatrical one, Shakespeare, as Loewenstein suggests, does not mean to ascribe to the theater the power Jonson would ascribe to poetry and create hierarchical distinctions between popular and neoclassical. On the contrary, we need to keep clear that Jonson believes poetry, and properly used poetry in the theater, can transform the world, can cure its madness; Shakespeare, most distinctly, does not. His defense of the theater, to reiterate, limits rather than expands its power. His theatrical sortes, for example, calls attention to the fact that there is nothing ‘‘mystical’’ or sacred in the art or craft. Hamlet does not randomly select a scene that just

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happens to explain his own situation, but, like Jonson and his ‘‘Virgil,’’ carefully selects one that suits his ends. Hamlet does tempt an audience to believe in the power of playing the way Jonson believes in the power of poetry. In the ‘‘Hecuba’’ soliloquy that follows, Shakespeare calls attention not just to Hamlet’s ‘‘inaction,’’ but the wonder of ‘‘playing’’: Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage waned, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing? For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? (551–59)

The players’ ability prompts Hamlet to conjure his ‘‘mousetrap’’ scheme to catch Claudius. Hamlet suggests momentarily the possibility that the play can induce ‘‘guilty creatures’’ to confess (590). But Shakespeare does not share Hamlet’s rather Jonsonian faith in the theater to ‘‘act’’ this precisely and purposively in the world. Immediately after he conjures his rather elaborate scheme to use the ‘‘play within the play’’ to induce Claudius’s confessions, Shakespeare reminds an audience it hardly takes a grand theatrical production to spark a guilty conscience. The carefully constructed ‘‘mousetrap’’ and the professional actors do not move Claudius, but an offhand platitude provided by Polonius does. Having instructed Ophelia to pretend to read a book when confronting Hamlet so ‘‘that show of such an exercise may color/ Your loneliness,’’ Polonius then says, ‘‘We are oft to blame in this—’Tis too much proved—that with devotion’s visage/ And pious action we do sugar o’er/ The devil himself’’ (3.1.45–48). This simple remark prompts Claudius painfully to cry, ‘‘O, ’tis true/ How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!’’ Hamlet’s play within the play cannot be said to have that much more impact on Claudius. In fact, many have pointed out it does exactly the opposite of what Hamlet intends; rather than ‘‘pro-

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claim his malefactions,’’ Claudius renounces repentance and promptly, skillfully plans the exile and murder of Hamlet.

JONSON’S MOCKING OF THE ‘‘CITIZEN’’ HAMLET IN EASTWARD HO That Shakespeare seeks to limit the transformative role of the stage sought by Jonson is further suggested by a brief consideration of one of Jonson’s own responses to Hamlet in Eastward Ho (1605), a play I will consider in more detail in chapter 4. In this play, Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston clearly mock Shakespeare and Hamlet.12 The nature and intensity of this mocking, however, remains largely unclear without the context of the Poets’ War and, in particular, without a willingness to consider that the grand Hamlet is as intimately involved in that dispute as I have suggested. Without that context, we grasp only part of the humor. Let me try to recount the mocking as any fairly well informed reader of Shakespeare might see it. In act 3, Gertrude (the name, obviously, part of the joke that we don’t fully grasp), a social climbing citizen’s daughter, and her mother, Mistress Touchstone, are heading out to meet Gertrude’s lover, Sir Petronel Flash, a broke and cheating aristocrat who has promised to take Gertrude away from her dull, citizen’s existence in London. Much of the humor in the play arises from Gertrude’s clumsy, obsessive social aspirations and affectations. Earlier, in act 1, for example, she insists loudly that ‘‘I must be a lady, and I will be a lady . . . I shall be a lady I cannot endure it’’ (1.2.21–30) and that, as a sign of her new social prestige via her relationship with Sir Petronel Flash, she must have a coach. We will see that Jonson’s young Gertrude is actually linked to Shakespeare’s Ophelia who makes a similar cry for a coach in her madness (4.5.72). In act 3, the playwrights’ provide the coach—and a ‘‘footman’’ named Hamlet who enters the play ‘‘in haste’’ (3.2.80). The footman Hamlet’s part calls for him to call for the coachman: ‘‘What, coachman! My lady’s coach, for shame!’’ Her ladyship’s ready to come down’’ (3.3.5–6). The stage direction that has Hamlet move ‘‘in haste’’ suggests someone frantic or, as we might say today, hypo-manic. So do the lines of Potkin, a ‘‘tankard-bearer,’’ who enters the stage immediately after Hamlet and asks, ‘‘ ’Sfoot, Hamlet, are you mad? Whither run you now? You should brush

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up my old mistress.’’ Hamlet exits here, apparently as hastily as he entered, to brush the clothes of his mistress. The joke involves reducing the role and importance of the larger-than-life Prince of Denmark, already in the early seventeenth-century a remarkable theatrical presence, to that of a jittery footman for social climbing citizens. When the footman reenters the stage, the humor continues, pointing at the limits, rather than the range, of this Hamlet. He enters the stage only to say, ‘‘Your coach is coming, madam’’ (3.2.41). In a wonderful, understated, if easily missed, send-up of Shakespeare’s hero’s now legendary verbal skills, Gertrude responds by saying simply ‘‘That’s well said’’ (3.2.41). Hamlet has no more speaking lines here, but he does not exit from the play yet. Jonson, et. al., have him run alongside the citizen’s coach. Mistress Touchstone asks, ‘‘But must this young man, an’t please you, madam, run by your coach all the way afoot?’’ (3.2.47–48). ‘‘Ay,’’ Gertrude answers, for ‘‘he gives no other milk’’—he serves no other purpose. The context of the Poets’ War allows us to see that the scene reduces the role of ‘‘Hamlet,’’ but in a very complicated and outrageously funny manner. Eastward Ho is a collaboration, of course, but one can detect Jonson’s hand here. Jonson not only mocks the extreme and misinformed aspirations of citizens that would designate single tasks to single servants, he also responds to Shakespeare’s self-imposed limits on the purpose of the stage in Hamlet. Shakespeare’s stage, Jonson mocks, serves no purpose other than to run with the whims of the popular, citizen audience. We, again, might have a hard time understanding Jonson’s joke. For we see the results of Shakespeare’s self-imposed limitations on the role of the stage in Hamlet: an unusually close and paradoxical proximity to the ‘‘real’’ that has become an icon of ‘‘high’’ art. The play, for us, certainly has a ‘‘purpose.’’ For Jonson, however, showing ‘‘deeds and language as men do use’’ without the intent of transforming the world was a popular vulgarity.

‘‘HER SPEECH IS NOTHING’’: LIMITING DRAMATIC RESPONSES TO OPHELIA’S MADNESS That Shakespeare’s self-imposed limitations on the role of the stage in society put him closer to the real was indeed sometimes

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a paradox. But we can see that his efforts in Hamlet to prove through demonstration the falseness of Jonson’s charges about the popular stage without conceding to Jonson’s moral innovations and demands led to a ‘‘likenesse of Truth’’ few could match. In brief, Jonson’s challenge prompted Shakespeare’s most sustained and intense consideration of the relationship between ‘‘art’’ and ‘‘life’’ and the results of this dialectic were remarkable. Most importantly for this study, too, Jonson’s critiques prompted a sustained consideration, or continuing consideration, of the relationship between Shakespeare’s ‘‘old’’ notion of madness and his ‘‘new’’ notion of madness. Prior to Malvolio, Shakespeare had not begun fully exploring his own understanding of ‘‘madness’’ or its relationship to his art. In the festive romantic comedy, Shakespeare had suggested generally that his drama accessed madness, an ‘‘otherness,’’ that reason disallowed. To return to Honigmann’s analysis for a moment, Shakespeare’s critical theory of dramatic art involved a belief in ‘‘Faith, Magic, Wonder’’ to which I added the Foucaultian term ‘‘unreason.’’ But in that Jonson’s critiques led Shakespeare to reevaluate what his drama did in the world, or what his drama’s ‘‘purpose’’ was, those critiques also led to a reevaluation of Shakespeare’s dramatic ‘‘madness’’ and reality. Given Jonson’s claims to stand apart from and cure social madness, Shakespeare sought to turn the tables on Jonson, declare Jonson (in the figure of Malvolio) mad, and cure him. This ironic, combative mirroring of Jonson’s gesture, however, exposed a different relationship between the stage and the reality of madness than Shakespeare had realized before. In challenging Shakespeare to create a greater ‘‘likenesse of Truthe’’ in all things, including madness, Jonson also prompted Shakespeare to abandon his romanticized understanding of madness in the romantic comedies. Starting with the confinement of Malvolio, we see Shakespeare engaging a new, more troubling, more realistic understanding of madness. This engagement with a ‘‘new’’ reality of madness simultaneously empowered and threatened the comedy of Twelfth Night. In contrast to the early romantic comedies, Shakespeare seemed cautious, tentative, and self-conscious with this ‘‘new’’ madness, as if the ‘‘dark room’’ scenes of Malvolio had a life of their own that had to be negotiated carefully. The experience with Malvolio’s madness did not so much deter Shakespeare as it enticed and focused his dramatic efforts.

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Malvolio’s dark room scenes may be troubling, but they are, after all, undeniably powerful drama, too. In Hamlet, then, Shakespeare again seeks rather tentatively to reveal this relationship between ‘‘true’’ madness and the stage again. In other words, this shift in relationship to madness because of Jonson hardly suggested to Shakespeare that he should concede to Jonson on the larger claims about the purpose of playing. He may, in some sense, have been wrong about madness and Jonson right, but that did not change the broader argument about the purpose of playing. On the contrary, ‘‘madness’’—that element of the popular stage Jonson so deplored because it so often implied a drift from reality—became in the figure of Ophelia a striking, even disturbing, ‘‘likenesse of Truthe,’’ but a ‘‘likenesse of Truthe’’ and nothing more. Ophelia’s words are carefully emptied of meaning before she sets foot onstage as Shakespeare preemptively forestalls any attempt to interpret her madness: Her speech is nothing, Yet the unshaped use of it doth move The hearers to collection; they yawn at it, And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts, Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield Them, Indeed would make one think there might be thought Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.13 (4.5.7–13)

In Ophelia, then, too, Shakespeare defends the conventions of the popular stage and their ability to depict truth. But, again, paradoxically, he defends those conventions by limiting and clarifying what a dramatic depiction of truth can do. In the carefully constructed dramatic framework surrounding Ophelia’s mad scenes, the only possible reaction to Ophelia’s madness, either for characters on stage or for an audience, is pity. As the ‘‘gentleman’’ announces prior to her stage appearance, ‘‘Her moods will need be pitied’’ (4.5.2). To look for ‘‘meaning’’ in the ‘‘real’’ pitiful show of the mad Ophelia is misguided: madness is ‘‘nothing sure.’’ Any other interpretation suggests one has ‘‘botch[ed] the words up fit to [one’s] own thoughts.’’ In the tragedy of Hamlet, then, following Jonson’s critiques,

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Shakespeare briefly and subtly enacts a notable reversal of the understanding of madness present in his romantic comedies. The crucial and telling comparison, again, appears in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There the ‘‘airy nothing’’ of Theseus’s ‘‘lunatic, the lover, and the poet’’ was recast ultimately by Hippolyta, and Shakespeare, as ‘‘something of great constancy.’’ The ‘‘nothing’’ of madness in this comedy points, then, to some spiritual ‘‘other’’ beyond the drama, accessed in part only by the drama, and certainly meaningful. The magic of the drama allows us access to this other world suggested in part by madness. In Hamlet, however, while Laertes also suggests that the ‘‘nothing’’ of Ophelia’s madness is ‘‘more than matter,’’ he refers only to its power to elicit pity in the viewer. Ophelia’s show of madness moves him more than words: ‘‘Hadst thou thy wits and didst persuade revenge/ It could not move thus . . . This nothing’s more than matter’’ (4.5.173–78). The actor’s performance of madness, its imitation of nature, is more powerful than words or theorizing about madness. In this strict dramatic limitation of the show of madness, we see Shakespeare, because of Jonson, moving away from the Foucaultian embrace of madness that had been present in his earlier work to realize a greater likeness of truth in madness. In one sense, Shakespeare seems to be coming closer to a Jonsonian understanding on this particular matter.

JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE REVISING THE SPANISH TRAGEDY AND SEPARATING THE MAD FROM THE ‘‘NOT’’ MAD This somewhat odd convergence of opinion becomes more visible if we briefly consider each playwright’s response to perhaps the most frequently performed play on the popular stage: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1592).14 In and around the same historical moment, 1601–2, Jonson and Shakespeare both can be seen to be clarifying the boundaries between ‘‘reason’’ and ‘‘madness’’ that had been significantly more blurred in this earlier and frequently staged play, one that had come to signify the bombast and excesses of the popular stage. In Kyd’s tragedy, Hieronimo enacts revenge for the murder of his son, Don Horatio. As with Hamlet, ‘‘madness’’ is implicated in Hieronimo’s revenge. One crucial difference is that Hieronimo seems more mad

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than Hamlet in that he has less control over his public performances. He cries out for justice in public, for example, madly digging for his son’s dead body in front of the King (3.12.26). He is able to dissemble his own intent and ability to enact revenge, but not his own mental status. He cannot put on an ‘‘antic disposition’’ to mask his plan; on the contrary, he can only ‘‘dissemble quiet in unquietness’’ (3.13.29), relying, it seems, that his actual madness will cloak his revenge or his ability to enact revenge. What audiences seemed to enjoy most about Hieronimo, and what critics like Jonson detested most, was the character’s mad ravings. Often read in conjunction with Hamlet, modern readers tend to look in vein for Hamletesque features in Hieronimo, particularly clear signs of a seriously troubled, but not fundamentally disturbed, interior state. The clear break between reason and madness provided by Hamlet’s assumed ‘‘antic disposition,’’ his controlled interior monologues and, most importantly for the arguments here, his juxtaposition to Ophelia’s ‘‘real’’ madness, is distinctly absent in The Spanish Tragedy.15 While Hamlet’s proximity to some form of mental illness is always a matter for critical argument, there exists a line in Shakespeare’s work between reason and madness that simply does not exist as clearly in Kyd’s. Duncan Salkeld similarly locates the ‘‘madness’’ of Hieronimo and Isabella in an earlier and different world than Hamlet: ‘‘The madness of Hieronimo and Isabella is a salient feature of the play and derives from the medieval European landscape where, according to Foucault, ‘madness traces a very familiar silhouette.’ ’’16 In other words, Hieronimo and Isabella’s madness predates Malvolio’s and the staging of ‘‘real’’ madness. It also, of course, pre-dates the ‘‘start’’ of the show of Bethlem in 1598. One could argue that Hieronimo’s wife, Isabella, goes mad at the death of her son and ultimately commits suicide, and that this mad act sets her apart from Hieronimo, but her ‘‘madness’’ is no more clearly ‘‘bracketed’’ off from reason than her husband’s.17 Her mental state provides no clear contrast to Hieronimo’s in the way Ophelia’s madness provides a contrast to Hamlet’s ‘‘antic disposition.’’ I am not suggesting that Hamlet does not ask us to consider Hamlet’s sanity. Certainly it does. Hamlet claims a limited form of madness after all. But the play provides in Ophelia a clear marker to help make the determina-

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tion between madness and reason by comparison and contrast. No such diagnostic marker exists in The Spanish Tragedy. Consider the form of Isabella’s speech, particularly in relation to Ophelia’s fragmented, mad language. Isabella announces her madness by appearing on stage and questioning a suggested treatment: ‘‘So that you say this herb will purge the eye, /And this the head? /Ah, but none of them will purge the heart:/No, there’s no medicine left for my disease, Nor any physic to recure the dead’’ (3.8.5). A stage direction tells us that she ‘‘runs lunatic’’ at this point, but her speech imagining her dead son in heaven still suggests a clear, functioning mind, albeit distraught with grief: My soul? Poor soul, thou talks of things Thou know’st not what—my soul hath silver wings, That mounts me up unto the highest heavens, To heaven, ay, there sits my Horatio, Back’d with a troop of fiery cherubins, Dancing about his newly-healed wounds, Singing sweet hymns and chanting heavenly notes, Rare harmony to greet his innocence, That died, ay, died, a mirror in our days. But say, where shall I find the men, the murderers, That slew Horatio? Whither shall I run To find them out that murdered my son? (3.8.14–25)

When compared with Ophelia’s disjointed words and singing, Isabella’s words sound troubled, but distinctly rational. Similarly, in her suicide scene, she wildly destroys the ‘‘arbor’’ where Don Horatio died, but clearly expresses her reasons for doing so. She also clearly outlines that her despair comes from Don Horatio’s death and Hieronimo’s delay in taking revenge (4.2.6–38). Isabella retains what modern psychiatry might call ‘‘insight,’’ a rational self-awareness of her own suffering that tends to preclude any complete break with reality, any psychosis. One doesn’t need, however, to impose modern concepts and terms on the play to see the distinction between Ophelia and Isabella. The difference between ‘‘mad’’ speech and the ‘‘pre-mad’’ speech of Hieronimo and Isabella is nowhere near as great as the difference between the speech of Hamlet’s ‘‘feigned’’ madness and Ophelia’s ‘‘real’’ madness. For Hieronimo and Isabella, there clearly

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(or unclearly) is madness in reason and reason in madness (the exact same could be said, I would suggest, of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus). To the extent that Hamlet is a reconsideration of this icon of the popular stage, one of the revisions Shakespeare made was to distinguish more precisely between the mad and the not-mad, unreason and reason. And he does this most powerfully by juxtaposing Hamlet’s ‘‘feigned’’ or lesser madness to Ophelia’s ‘‘real’’ or more severe madness. Interestingly enough, Jonson seems to have been making revisions, more literal revisions, of The Spanish Tragedy as well. In an edition of the play that appeared in 1602, five ‘‘additions’’ were introduced, totaling 320 lines. Authorship of these additions is uncertain, but Henslowe’s diary records a payment to Jonson ‘‘upon his writings of his adicians in geronymo.’’18 Jonson, it seems, had set upon the task of correcting and transforming the play of the popular tradition he attacked so frequently and, perhaps not incidentally, the role he himself had played—a performance, I should add, for which he was mocked. In Satiromastix, Dekker reminds the anti-theatrical, anti-actor Jonson that he himself had played Hieronimo: ‘‘Thou hast forgot how thou amblest (in leather pilch) by a playwagon, in the high way, and took’st mad Ieronimoes part, to get service among the Mimickes’’ (4.1.130–31). The 1602 revisions all seek, like Shakespeare’s juxtaposition of feigned madness and real madness in Hamlet, to clarify the distinction between reason and unreason blurred in the earlier version of The Spanish Tragedy. The first addition, for example, makes it clear that Hieronimo becomes ‘‘mad’’ immediately after finding Don Horatio’s dead body. In the ‘‘original’’ version, Hieronimo only expresses grief and desire for revenge (2.5), but the first addition has Isabella calling attention to Hieronimo’s ‘‘raving’’ and has Hieronimo denying the hanging body is his son’s even though all present tell him otherwise. The second and third additions add mad or strange speech where Hieronimo had only been silent. And, the fourth addition, the best and most complex, the famous ‘‘painter scene,’’ leaves no doubt that Hieronimo is mad in the way King Lear is mad on the heath and in Act Four. Phillip Edwards calls it ‘‘as good a scene of madness as anything in Elizabethan drama outside Hamlet or King Lear,’’ meaning, I think, that the clear lines between ‘‘feigned’’ madness and ‘‘real’’ madness are well drawn, better suiting the tastes of a twentieth-

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century audience, an audience attuned to the ‘‘realism’’ of the representational stage. If Jonson is the author of any or all of these additions, Shakespeare and Jonson are approaching ‘‘madness’’ on the stage in close to the same way. Each seeks to capture and manage the reality of the break between reason and madness that is so clearly felt when encountering, for example, a truly delusional person for the first time. Ironically, Shakespeare does this by making his ‘‘Hieronimo’’ figure, Hamlet, saner in comparison to Ophelia; Jonson does this by making the Hieronimo of the additions more distinctly mad than he had been in Kyd. Paradoxically, what the playwrights gain in dramatic verisimilitude, I suspect, they might lose in actual proximity to a real show of madness. Jonson’s critiques pushed Shakespeare to a greater ‘‘likenesse of truth’’ in madness. In so doing, we see the modern ‘‘representational’’ stage of Shakespeare emerging, defining itself against a competing Jonsonian version of a ‘‘transformative’’ theater in a common culture. In moving the Shakespearean stage closer to a ‘‘real’’ show of madness, the dialectic of the Poets’ War revealed the proximity of the stage to that other theater in London that stages madness to elicit pity. But, in turn, this dramatic revelation of proximity participated in the processes whereby the representational stage would distance itself from the show of Bethlem. One might surmise the contrary. An effort by a dramatist to represent the reality of madness more accurately might seem to bring the stage closer to the ‘‘reality’’ of the show of Bethlem. Nonetheless, Jonson and Shakespeare’s efforts to capture a likeness of truth in madness ultimately help separate the representational stage from the true show of Bethlem. My point has been that the relationship between the stage and the show of Bethlem in early modern theatrical culture pre-dates increasingly sophisticated forms of representation. In creating this new ‘‘likenesse of Truthe’’ for madness called, for example, Hamlet, a ‘‘likenesse’’ that is nonetheless quite distinct from the truth, Shakespeare (and Jonson) creates a verisimilar show of madness with distinctly different intentions and effects from the show of Bethlem. They create something new, not represent something already existing. Indeed, in many ways they extract themselves from a pre-existing theatrical culture. The playwrights give the realistic display of madness a conventional tragic form that audiences

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eventually would come to accept as the ‘‘show’’ of madness, the proper and acceptable staging of madness as entertainment. Hamlet is mad, perhaps, but we can distinguish enough sanity to see him gain some self-knowledge. ‘‘Madness’’ is the ‘‘enemy,’’ one can argue convincingly, Hamlet has conquered. Lear’s seeming return to some semblance of sanity in act 5 provides the same degree of (now) old-fashioned anagnorisis that help us make sense of madness in these plays. This dominant tragic form, we note, probably inhibits our attempt to interpret and appreciate as much as we might earlier plays like The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus that do not provide even the degree of return to sanity that Hamlet and King Lear allow. Modern audiences (and readers), as I suggested, look in vein in Hieronimo and Titus for the more distinct line between reason and madness that Hamlet ultimately displays. And they do so, in part, because in Hamlet Shakespeare helped create the conventions for verisimilar, acceptable staged madness that have persisted into our century. Certainly one can argue that Hamlet and Lear both leave the boundaries between reason and madness blurred as well; but when compared with these earlier plays there is a marked contrast, a new line has been drawn. Only recently, perhaps, with some historical perspective on our own historically determined artistic preferences, are we able to appreciate the complexity of a play like Titus Andronicus and its handling of madness in its own right. I would hold out the possibility, then, that the blurred lines between reason and madness in The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus may have been closer to the ‘‘real’’ of the show of Bethlem even though Hamlet and King Lear provide greater dramatic verisimilitude. Certainly Hieronimo and Titus elicit pity and terror, but we are also often disturbed, confused, amused, disgusted, and utterly baffled by their ‘‘madness,’’ in the way, one suspects, we might react to the actual show of Bethlem. But we cannot now see the show of Bethlem; and, as suggested, having been freed from hundreds-years-old dramatic conventions and preferences, we perhaps are only gaining our first legitimate glimpses at Titus Andronicus and The Spanish Tragedy and other more ‘‘medieval’’ plays. No, we cannot see the show of Bethlem, but I believe we can see the modern representational stage separate itself from a shared theatrical space.

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3 ‘‘A very piteous sight’’: The Magnificent Entertainment, The Honest Whore, Part One, The Honest Whore Part Two DEKKER’S SATIROMASTIX AND JONSON’S POETASTER ARE GENERALLY considered the last plays of the Poets’ War. But, as I have suggested, the dramatic debate extended well beyond these plays and included Hamlet. The terms of the debate do become less explicit, though, and tracking the exchange becomes a much more complicated matter. Indeed, even to say the same ‘‘debate’’ persists presents problems of terminology. Nonetheless, sufficient continuity exists between Dekker and others and their response to Jonson’s self-promotion and theatrical innovations that I will continue to refer this increasingly complex dialectic as the debate of the Poets’ War. Understanding the course of the debate after 1602 becomes particularly complicated when the plague closes the theaters for a year and no dramatic exchanges of any type take place. Even in this hazy historical context, however, some strong traces of the conflict can be detected. The plague not only closed the theaters, it delayed London’s coronation ceremonies for King James.1 Scheduled to take place in the summer of 1603, the ceremonies were postponed until the spring of 1604. Dekker’s The Magnificent Entertainment ‘‘records the spectacle’’ that ‘‘greeted the King.’’2 ‘‘Oddly enough,’’ Hoy notes, Jonson and Dekker were ‘‘the poets chosen to devise the greater part of his entertainment’’: Time had not healed their quarrel. Jonson, obviously disdaining to appear in print with the dresser of plays whom he had ridiculed as Demetrius Fannius in Poetaster, published his part of the Entertainment separately . . . and Dekker, whose responsibility in the publica-

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tion of The Magnificent Entertainment it was to give an account of the whole, had his revenge by treating with scarcely concealed contempt the learned contribution of the poet he had pilloried as Horace in Satiromastix. . . . The Entertainment consisted of a series of pageants staged at each of the seven triumphal arches which were stationed at intervals along the processional way. Jonson wrote the speeches delivered at the first and seventh of these. . . . The fourth, fifth, and sixth pageants were . . . by Dekker. . . .Though Jonson is never named in The Magnificent Entertainment, Dekker was careful to attribute Zeal’s speech . . . to Middleton.3

A close reading of Dekker’s account of the pageant, set in this context, can tell us more. Dekker begins The Magnificent Entertainment (1604) on a somewhat odd note. He begins not by describing the actual beginning of the pageant, or with some instruction about its importance, but by announcing a ‘‘Device’’ that ‘‘should have served at his majesties first accesse to the Citie’’ (2.253). This ‘‘Device,’’ written by Dekker, should have been performed ‘‘about the Barres beyond Bishops-gate’’; in short, this device should have been performed right in front of Bethlem Hospital. Only after this announcement does he proceed to explain the mood or at least the mood pageant designers tried to create: the arrival of King James, ‘‘a Man-Ruler,’’ has stopped ‘‘The sorrow and amazement, that like an earthquake began to shake the distempered body of this Lland (by reason of our late Soveraigns departure).’’ To the extent this pageant had a ‘‘theme,’’ Dekker begins to express it here. London had been thrown into great confusion and suffering by Elizabeth’s death. The crowning of James had alleviated that suffering and brought harmony to the City. ‘‘Troynovant’’ had ‘‘put on a Regeneration or new birth’’ (2.254). That this is a pageant-wide theme and not just Dekker’s is in part demonstrated by briefly considering the work of Dekker’s hostile collaborator. Jonson’s description of his arch at Fenchurch, the display that actually did serve as His Majesty’s first access to the City, describes a curtain of silk ‘‘painted like a thicke cloud,’’ which, at the approach of the King, was drawn.4 The allegory being, Jonson says, ‘‘That those clouds were gathered upon the face of the Citie, through their long want of his most wished sight: but now, as at the rising of the Sunne, all mists were dispersed and fled.’’5 Dekker and Jonson battle over a great deal at the end of the cen-

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tury, but they had a common understanding of the pageant’s message. After introducing the theme and discussing the construction underway, Dekker returns to the ‘‘Device’’ he had announced at the outset, saying again that this device ‘‘should have bene performed first as the service to a more royal Entertainment.’’ The device involves the ‘‘Patron of both Kingdomes,’’ St. George and St. Andrew, and the ‘‘Genius of the Cittie.’’ The genius was to have greeted the two newly reconciled saints and, with three fairly long set speeches, welcomed both to the city. Apparently, this simple mini-drama was to have preceded the display of the first of seven spectacular arches designed for the pageant (‘‘the more Royal and Ensuing Entertainment’’). While describing the device, though, Dekker reminds us for the second time after his initial announcement that this device was not performed as expected, sounding this time a note of disappointment and resentment towards a particular person. Dekker explains that his ‘‘Genius’’ of the City, being the ‘‘God of Hospitalitie and Pleasure’’ was the perfect figure to greet King James: ‘‘none but such a one was to meet to receive so excellent and princely a Guest’’ (254). The ‘‘induction of such a Person ‘‘might (without a Warrant from the court of Critists) passe very currant.’’ We should not be surprised at this point to discover that the ‘‘court of Critists’’ here, who prevented the performance of Dekker’s genius in his device, refers to Jonson. Dekker laces the next few lines with specific references to his scholarly antagonist. He refuses, for example, to describe his genius as Jonson did ‘‘only to shew how nimbly we can carve up the whole messe of the Poets.’’ At this point, Dekker finally provides the script for the ‘‘Device’’ itself, a script that ends with the ‘‘Genius’’ shouting a ‘‘cheerful welcome.’’ Instead of closing this opening section of the pamphlet with this uplifting note, Dekker returns for the fourth time in this relatively short introduction (with what strikes me as compulsive anger) to his now familiar mood: ‘‘This should have beene the first Offring of the Citties Love.’’ Dekker, it seems, cannot let the matter go. Nor, it seems, did he let his device go. We discover that the device was not entirely abandoned after all: ‘‘It was (not utterly throwne from the Alter) but layd by.’’ David Bergeron, in a thorough review of Gilbert Dugdale’s 1604 eyewitness account of the pageant, finds evidence that the device may have been ‘‘picked up and used in conjunc-

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tion’’ with Jonson’s Fenchurch arch.6 According to Dugdale, ‘‘Saint George, and Saint Andrew, in compleat armour, met in one combate and fought for the victorie, but an old hermit passing by, in an Oration: joyned them hand in hand, and so for ever hath made as one harte, to the joy of the King, the delight of the Lords, and the unspeakable comfort of commonality.’’ An altered version of Dekker’s ‘‘Device,’’ it seems possible, was performed at Jonson’s arch. Rather than a female genius humbly welcoming an already reconciled St. Andrew and St. George, a male ‘‘Hermitt’’ interrupts the fighting. Whether Dugdale did witness a revised version of Dekker’s device or not is impossible to say. We can say, however, with certainty, that Dekker’s imaginative work for the pageant ‘‘about the Barres beyond Bishops-gate’’—right in front of Bethlem— produced dramatic material that he ‘‘layd by’’ rather than discarded. And we can say that the dramatic material he produced at this time and place was produced as part an effort to welcome James to London. Specifically, he was trying to demonstrate London’s regeneration and social harmony following Elizabeth’s death and the plague. Even more, we can say with certainty that this dramatic material that originated in front of ‘‘Bishopsgate’’ became enmeshed in his theatrical conflict with Ben Jonson. We note, too, that the performance at the sixth arch that Dekker created, including Middleton’s prepared speech for the character of ‘‘Zeale,’’ took place at the conduit in Fleetstreet: that is, it took place very near Bridewell. I will argue in this chapter that the imaginative work Dekker and Middleton did in front of Bethlem and Bridewell and eventually ‘‘layd by’’ because they were supplanted by Jonson found its way onto the stage in The Honest Whore, Part One and The Honest Whore, Part Two—the first plays to use those London institutions as stage settings. David Riggs’s summary explanation of the difference between Jonson’s participation in the pageants and Dekker’s also, then, provides a context for reading these strange plays in the context of the Poets’ War: at Bishopsgate, Dekker offered a ‘‘thoroughly medieval image of the commonwealth’’ while Jonson ‘‘exhibited a wealth of novel and iconographic material.’’7 Dekker ‘‘was inviting the King to participate in the folkways of the London citizenry; James, who loathed crowds and prided himself on his erudition, found this invitation impossible to accept.’’ In the dispute of the pageant,

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we see Dekker and Bishopsgate and ‘‘old’’ London institutions come into conflict with and eventually be supplanted by Jonson’s ‘‘novelty’’ and we will see the same thing happen on the stage.

DEKKER’S RESPONSE TO THE REVIVAL OF EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR We add to this hazy historical background of the pageant the more distinct fact that sometime late in 1604 Jonson had been commissioned to revive Every Man In at court (in what is perhaps the Anglicized version of the play) and the connection between Jonson’s work and Dekker and Middleton’s odd play becomes more solid. Prior to the plague and the closing of the theaters, Jonson had preempted Dekker’s Satiromastix with Poetaster. Aware that Jonson was about to stage, again, his cure for humours, it seems not out the question that Dekker could have sought some means this time to preempt Jonson. In the Epilogue to Satiromastix, Dekker anticipated that he would have to challenge Jonson again; there he threatened to ‘‘untrusse [Jonson] again, and again, and again’’ if necessary. We note that The Honest Whore, Part One picks up almost literally where Satiromastix left off. At the end of Satiromastix, Sir Quintillian has devised a scheme to save his daughter-in-law’s chastity. The King had become enamored of Celestine earlier in the play and forced her betrothed (and Quintillian’s son) Sir Walter Terrill to take an oath saying that Celestine would sleep with the King before sleeping with Terrill. Quintillian convinces Celestine and Terrill that the only way to save the former’s chastity and the latter’s word is for Celestine to die. Unbeknownst to all, he gives Celestine a ‘‘charm’’ that will induce a deathlike sleep. When Terrill and Quintillian present Celestine to the King she appears to be dead. Quintillian restores her health and the devotion of all involved persuades the King to abandon his sexual pursuit. The Honest Whore, Part One opens with a staged funeral, recalling this ending and scheme. The ‘‘funeral’’ arises when Gasparo Trebatzi, the Duke of Milan, seeks to prevent the marriage of his daughter, Infaelice, to a courtier from a rival family, Hippolito, by faking his daughter’s death. In his mistaken

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grief, Hippolito swears off women and later convinces a prostitute, Bellafront, who has fallen in love with him, to reform. It is really in the ‘‘sub-plot’’ character of Candido, however, and in the seemingly bizarre setting for the play’s conclusion, that we will see the connection of this play to Jonson, the Poets’ War, and the social struggles visible in the pageant. In the conclusion of The Honest Whore, Part One, Dekker and Middleton seek to counter Jonson’s ‘‘cure’’ for social madness by invoking an old-fashioned citizen virtue, patience, and an old London institution. The pairing of the show of Bethlem and the character of Candido counter Jonson’s suggestion that his new theater could cure the ‘‘madness’’ of the world and especially his implication that the paranoid citizen figure needed the cure the most. The relationship of Dekker and Middleton’s ‘‘citizen’’ to Jonson’s earlier citizen figures is apparent almost immediately. A citizen wife, Viola, seeks to try the extraordinary patience of her linen-draper husband, Candido; Viola is, in fact, determined to make Candido ‘‘mad,’’ particularly she wants him jealous. She wants to make her husband mad in part because ‘‘I have heard it often said, that he who cannot be angry, is no man. I am sure my husband is a man in print, for all things else, save only in this, no tempest can move him’’ (1.2.63–65). Viola’s seemingly bizarre motivation and determination is never completely explained. But to a viewer familiar with the exchanges of the Poets’ War, her actions were probably more understandable. For example, one of the places Viola could have heard that a man is not a man till he is ‘‘mad’’—and could expect to here it said again in a revised version at court—was in Jonson’s Every Man In. In that play, when the paranoid citizen Thorello tells Prospero that he should not have antagonized Giuliano, Prospero responds No harm done, brother, I warrant you; since there is no harm done, anger costs a man nothing; and a tall man is never his own man, till he be angry. To keep his valor in obscurity is to keep himself, as it were, in a cloak bag. What’s a musician, unless he play? What’s a tall man, unless he fight? For indeed, all this my brother stands upon absolutely; and that made me fall in with him so resolutely. (4.3.7–13)

Similarly, given the context of the Poets’ War, the early appearance in The Honest Whore, Part One of some hastily constructed,

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rather one-dimensional Jonsonian gallants, is not surprising. Act one scene 4 opens with the gallant Castruchio asking Pioratto and Fluello if they ‘‘shalls be merry? Shalls play the wags now?’’ Their ‘‘sportive conceit’’ of trying Candido’s patience is their sole focus. They are determined, not unlike Jonson’s Asper/Macilente, to ‘‘thrust [Candido] from his humour’’ (1.4.53). Early in the play, Dekker and Middleton present some Jonsonian gallants to demonstrate quickly and convincingly the difference between their citizen figure and Jonson’s Thorello, Delirio, and Albius. Their citizen figure, they make clear early on, will not be gulled by gallants. Candido cannot be thrust from his humour because his ‘‘humour’’ is not a humour in the Jonsonian sense of affectation or poor judgment. Recast by Dekker and Middleton, this citizen’s humour is an essential quality, a virtue to be admired. His virtue, in fact, can serve the same social function that Jonson claimed for his new theater: it can cure ‘‘mad’’ social relations. The gallants begin their antagonism of Candido by ruining an expensive piece of cloth; they then steal a valuable beaker. Candido remains unmoved. The citizen figure in this play knows how to deal with the humours of the gallants: ‘‘We are set here to please all customers, / Their humours and their fancies:—offend none’’ (1.5.121–22). By the end of the scene the gallants are praising Candido: ‘‘Thou art a blest man, and with peace doest deal, / Such a meek spirit can bless a common weale’’ (1.5.228– 29). In Candido’s almost supernatural patience Dekker and Middleton find a unique figure to counter the gulling of Jonson without repeating Jonson’s gulling. That is, Candido does not out ‘‘gallant’’ the gallant. Nor does he become angry and threatening.8 In Every Man In, in contrast, Thorello’s brother Giuliano also tells the gallants to stop, but his aggressiveness makes him simply another target for Jonson’s social satire: ‘‘Come you might practice your ruffian-tricks somewhere else, and not here, I wusse; this is no tavern or drinking school to vent your exploits in’’ (4.2.94–96). Candido’s apprentices do his fighting for him; in act 3 they beat his brother-in-law, Fustigo, employed by his wife to torment him. Dekker and Middleton’s linen draper can remain separate from the violence and openly deplore it. That Candido is a distinct response to Thorello, Delirio, and Albius and the exchanges of the Poets’ War seems clear. We note, for example, in act 3 he challenges the behavior of Fustigo,

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who had been playing the role of Viola’s lover in order to ‘‘mad’’ Candido. Unlike Thorello or Delirio, Candido does not get lost in a paranoid, jealous haze. Instead he confronts and exposes this attempted gulling, ultimately chastising Fustigo. Are you angry sir, because I named the fool? Trust me, you are not wise in mine own house; And to my face to play the Anticke thus: If youde needs play the madman, choose a stage Of lesser compass, where few eyes may note Your actions error; but if you miss, As here you doe, for one clap ten will hiss. (3.1.56–63)

In short, Candido tells Fustigo the sort of thing a sympathetic citizen audience wished Thorello had told Prospero in Every Man In. In the process, he calls attention to the contrast and conflict between the large popular stage of the Fortune theater where The Honest Whore, Part One appears and the smaller theater of the ‘‘Children of Queen Elizabeth’s Chappel’’ that produced Poetaster. Fustigo’s response to Candido has a touch of Jonsonian, antitheatrical, anti-player indignation: ‘‘Zwounds Couzen, he talks to me as if I were a scurvy tragedian.’’ The focus here on Candido and madness in a play titled The Honest Whore may seem odd, but in fact his character is more important to the play than the usual assignment of his story to the subplot may suggest. The rhetorical operations I am tracing suggest this primacy, as does the initial title entry in the Stationers’ Register: ‘‘A Booke called. the humors of the patient man. The longinge wyfe and The Honest Whore.’’ The payment from Henslowe, similarly, was for ‘‘the paysent man & the onest hore.’’9 This ‘‘humorous’’ character of the ‘‘sub-plot’’ is central to the play’s main concern: refuting Jonson. Other moments in the play point to Jonson and the Poets’ War. When Viola engages Fustigo to ‘‘mad’’ her husband she knows his ‘‘swaggering humours’’ make him well suited to the task, but she expresses some concern early on that, like the temperamental Jonson at the end of Poetaster, Fustigo has given up his old ways. Wife: Very well; you ha travelled enough now, I trowe, to sow your wild oats.

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Fust: A pox on them; wild oats, I have not an oat to throw at a horse, troth sister I ha sowed my oats, and reaped two hundred duckats if I had them, here, mary I must intreat you to lend me some thirty or forty till the ship come, by this hand I’ll discharge at my day, by this hand. Wife: These are your old oaths. Fust: Why sister, doe you think I’ll forswear my hand? Wife: Well, well you shall have them: put your self into better fashion, because I must employ you in a serious matter. Fust: I’ll sweat like a horse if I like the matter. Wife. You have cast off all your old swaggering humours . . . I am the more sorry, for I must employ a true swaggerer. Fust: I had not sailed a league in that great fish-pond (the sea) but I cast up my very gall. Wife: I am the more sorry, for I must employ a true swaggerer. Fust: Nay by this iron sister, they shall find I am powlder and touchbox if they put fire once into me. (1.2.34–51)

BRINGING THE CHARITIES OF BETHLEM AND BRIDEWELL TO THE POETS’ WAR Dekker and Middleton are interested in more, however, than countering Jonson’s attack on the paranoid ‘‘jealous’’ citizen figure. Broadly speaking, like Shakespeare, they are interested in countering Jonson’s suggestion that his ‘‘new’’ theater can ‘‘cure’’ and master the madness of the city and they find a unique setting, indeed, another ‘‘theater,’’ to help do so. After several unsuccessful attempts to make Candido ‘‘mad,’’ Viola has him wrongfully committed to Bethlem where the sub-plot reconnects with the main plot. After uncovering the Duke’s deceit, the thwarted lovers Hippolito and Infaelice secretly meet at Bethlem and by the time the Duke discovers them, they are already married and he accepts his new ‘‘son.’’ Bellafront, the whore turned honest by Hippolito, turns up in disguise—somewhat surprisingly since she left act 3 to seek reconciliation with her father rather than shelter in Bethlem—and confronts the friend of Hippolito, Mattheo, who took her virginity.10 The Duke insists Mattheo marry Bellafront and the play ends when the Duke frees Candido and celebrates his patience as a virtue all characters could acquire. In brief, the social conflict and anger starting with

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the Duke’s ‘‘high spleen’’ (I.3.30) and his rivalry with Hippolito’s family that generated so much of the plot are alleviated in Bethlem. For literary scholars tempted by Foucault’s arguments to see a hospital like Bethlem as a particularly ugly instrument of the state, the setting of the conclusion and its pairing with Candido’s patience complicates rather than enhances the comedy. The Bethlem setting, in fact, tends to inhibit us from seeing any social harmony in the play. Viviana Comensoli, for example, has argued that ‘‘the final scenes of domestic comedy typically end in celebration of the reunited couples amid joyfull mirth, ‘sportfull houres,’ . . . and feast[ing]’ . . . [but] the tragic tone of the Bridewell and Bedlam episodes in The Honest Whore plays casts doubt upon the widespread social regeneration promised by the Duke.’’11 Comensoli holds out the possibility that Dekker and Middleton are mocking the traditional comedic reconciliations by setting them in Bethlem. But if this is true, the play may be the most ironic of the period. It looks like a precursor to Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. The language validating the citizen ‘‘hero’’ Candido is so strong that both Dekker and Middleton would have to have had both their tongues firmly embedded in their cheeks, and while I might concede that possibility for the later Middleton, it seems highly unlikely that Dekker had it in him. For example, the play concludes in Bethlem with Candido amplifying the values of patience (5.2.495–514) and the Duke, the principal authority figure, complimenting Candido’s speech: Thou givest it [patience] lively colors: who dare say He’s mad, whose words march in so good array? Twere sin all women should such husbands have. For every man must then be his wives slave. Come therefore you shall teach our court to shine, So calm a spirit is worth a golden Mine, Wives (with meek husbands) that to vex them long, In Bedlam must they dwell, else dwell they wrong. (5.2.515–22)

This pairing of the ‘‘patient’’ madman and Bethlem the setting is appropriate, I would suggest, in that both facilitate a humble, meek ‘‘charitable’’ conclusion that brings all members of the social world together rather than divides them. We recall that from

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the perspective of many of Jonson’s contemporaries, his new theater was divisive, separating the ‘‘mad’’ from the ‘‘not’’ mad, and, as his specific antagonism of citizen figures makes clear, doing so along class lines. Dekker and Middleton invoke a much different theater, a theater of charity. Even Ben Jonson cannot stand outside the mad world of this Bethlem that connects and encompasses everyone. As described by the hospital’s ‘‘sweeper,’’ himself a former patient, this Bethlem [has] blocks for all heads, we have good store of wild oats here: for the Courtier is mad at the Citizen, the Citizen is mad at the Country man, the shoemaker is mad at the cobler, the cobler at the carman, the punke is mad that the Merchants wife is no whore, the Merchants wife is mad that the punke is so common a whore. (5.2.144–49)

In short, we may distrust Bethlem but in 1604 Dekker and Middleton had a decidedly different view. In his sophisticated and increasingly influential study of social relations in late sixteenth-century London, Ian Archer reminds us why. The ‘‘the social fabric [of the city] was highly flammable, but it failed to ignite.’’12 Very real social and economic pressures could have produced much more unrest than they did. The city’s population had at least doubled in the century and social and economic diversity increased. John Twyning aptly points out that much of the population was in some sense ‘‘dispossessed’’ from cultural settings that had provided more stable identities.13 And amidst this swirl of a growing, dispossessed population, social competition was increasingly visible. One of the reasons the city did not ‘‘ignite’’ in the 1590s under the pressure of social competition and social anger was the ‘‘elite’s responsiveness to popular grievances,’’ a responsiveness that included the maintenance of a ‘‘highly developed infrastructure’’ that demonstrated the elite’s concerns for social suffering.14 A number of institutions existed, including the London Royal Hospitals, St. Bartholomew’s, St. Thomas, Christ’s, Bridewell, and Bethlem, that helped ameliorate popular grievances. The lower and middling sorts, Archer suggests, saw in these places some effort to maintain the health of the whole commonwealth. These places were not simply instruments of social control, but a means of mediating social disruption, places where ‘‘a ma-

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trix of communities’’ overlapped and contributed to creating a common sense of identity. Archer does not wish to efface the element of ‘‘social control’’ in explaining how these institutions enabled the stability of Elizabethan London, but he does wish to qualify it, suggesting that we have tended to see these institutions as ‘‘crude’’ forms of ‘‘social control,’’ ignoring how weak the elite’s ‘‘formal coercive powers were.’’15 For example, Archer points to a striking incident (that may or may not be connected to the plays) that tells us much about the complexity of Bethlem in the culture and the need to be skeptical of seeing the hospital as a manifestation of state power controlling subjects. During the volatile summer of 1595, apprentices rioted with alarming frequency and intensity, prompting the imposition of martial law. During similar if less intense outbursts, apprentices had directed their frustrations against foreigners who functioned as a scapegoat for economic difficulties and ‘‘against gentlemen, particularly of the Inns of Court, and against their servingmen.’’16 In the years before 1595, the aldermen and the mayor of London ‘‘took up a mediatorial position . . . recognizing the legitimacy of apprentice grievances.’’17 Confronted with apprentice antagonism toward foreigners, a London mayor might support, for example, restrictions against foreigners. This sort of partnership was part and parcel of the ‘‘highly developed infrastructure’’ that maintained stability in London. But in the summer of 1595 the ‘‘mediatorial position of the [London] elite was under severe strain . . . because the lord mayor himself had become an object of apprentice grievances.’’18 In other words, the apprentices and others focused their anger and attention not simply on the usual targets, foreigners and gentlemen, but on a traditional partner, the mayor, and the partial breakdown in this relationship increased tensions. On June 6, 1595, Archer tells us, a silkweaver used ‘‘hard speeches against the Lord Mayor in dispraise of his government.’’ The notoriously unpopular mayor, John Spencer, tried to have the silkweaver sent to Bethlem. This attempted confinement of a political dissident of sorts fits well, it seems, with Foucault’s attempt to align Bethlem with his version of the hopitaux generaux; what fits less well, however, is that ‘‘without Bishopsgate,’’ in front of the Hospital, the silkweaver ‘‘was rescued by prentices and divers others to the number of about 200 or 300 persons.’’ Later that month the mayor was charged with ‘‘Refus-

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ing to bear or join with his brethren.’’19 Bethlem and Bridewell may look like precursors to the institutions of the great confinement, but they cannot be reduced to this. Archer reminds us, with all the careful methodology of a modern social historian, to what extent these places were charities. They were charities both in the modern sense that they provided in some way for the poor and disadvantaged, and in the older sense that they helped the whole community live ‘‘in charity.’’ Rather than tools of the state, these institutions in many ways seem to stand opposed to state power and suggest an older, perhaps more communal London. We recall from the introduction and chapter 1 that, at various points, London’s hospitals conflicted with the state efforts to establish a more impersonal welfare system through the poor laws. Older institutions, and this particularly true of Bethlem and its distinctive show, still allowed for a face-to-face interaction and integration between different elements of society. Rather than simply exclude, hospitals could foster a sense of community or inclusion, albeit not in the way we generally employ those terms. Bethlem patients had long been considered ‘‘deserving poor,’’ a social group that defined the margins of the community, but from the inside of the margins, rather than the outside. To the extent that the break between reason and unreason described by Foucault happened during this time, it was not fostered by early seventeenth-century Bethlem or its show. This becomes most clear at the end of Dekker and Middleton’s play where the show of Bethlem serves to unite the community, to join ‘‘mad’’ and the not mad. Although it might strike us as strange, one can reasonably speculate that Dekker and Middleton had no trouble incorporating ‘‘charities’’ like Bethlem and Bridewell into their pageant celebrating London (Jonson, on the other hand, might have had a problem with it). Moreover, one can speculate they had no trouble incorporating the show of Bethlem into their pageant or understanding its charitable function. The dramaturgy of act 5 of The Honest Whore, Part One gives us some sense of Dekker and Middleton’s view of the charitable show.

THE ODD, CHARITABLE ENDING OF THE HONEST WHORE, PART ONE The conclusion of The Honest Whore, Part One begins when the Duke learns that Infaelice and Hippolito have made arrange-

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ments to marry at Bethlem and his men set off for the place determined to stop that event. The secret arrangements of Hippolito and Infaelice have clearly ‘‘vexed’’ (5.1.85) the Duke whose efforts to thwart the marriage opened the play. He learns here, too, that the ‘‘Doctor’’ who arranged Infaelice’s fake death in act 1 has betrayed him. All his carefully managed plans threaten to come unravelled: ‘‘is it possible? it cannot be/ It cannot be’’ (5.1.93– 94). Friar Anselmo, who will marry the couple, clearly recognizes the threat of the Duke’s anger: You press me to an act, both full of danger And full of happiness, for I behold Your fathers frowns, his threats, nay perhaps death, To him that dare doe this. (5.2.2–5)

It is important to note here before further considering the Duke’s intended wrath that the playwrights introduce the place, Bethlem, as ‘‘Bethlem monastery’’ (4.3.168). Certainly in history, as in the play, the place was known already as a type of lunatic asylum—a ‘‘mad-mens pound’’ (4.3.170)—but the monastic designation has special significance for our understanding of the play and place. As suggested above, Bethlem was still a small hospital, a symbol of sixteenth-century London charity, a subject, albeit a humble one, of Stowe’s celebratory nostalgia. Candido, the upstanding citizen figure, first names the old ‘‘monastery.’’ And as also suggested above, while many have assumed that visitors flocked to the spectacle of the mad, chortling away at the perverse entertainment, the complicated charitable show of Bethlem probably had not yet established any widespread popularity. The very existence of the play, its first use of the place as a setting, indicates as much. So does the language in the play. The Duke knows Bethlem’s name and principal function, but he does not know its location. Duke: How far stands Bethlem hence? Omn: Six or seven miles. (5.1.97–98)

Bethlem’s notoriety and show will grow and change quickly in the early seventeenth century, a growth paralleled on stage.

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When Middleton, with William Rowley, returns to the use of a madhouse as a stage setting in The Changeling (1622), for example, the ‘‘castle-captain’’ Vermandero not only knows the location of Alibius’s madhouse (it is contained inside the walls of Alicante), he knows the keeper and commissions a show that exploits the mad for mere entertainment (3.4.247–50). But in 1604 the problem of the show of Bethlem degenerating this way does not seem imminent. More, perhaps, can be teased out of the play regarding the practice of visitation. The Duke plans to arrive at Bethlem ‘‘As if we came to see the Lunaticks’’ (5.1.110), but he also insists that they meet at ‘‘some space of time/ Being spent between the arrival of each other’’ (5.1.108–9). The play assumes visiting the mad an acceptable practice, but it also seems to assume that some rules of decorum apply. The Duke and his men avoid being seen arriving in a group as if out for pure entertainment. I would suggest that registered here are the subtle rules governing the exhortation and distribution of charity at the hospital, the as yet unwritten and flexible social rules governing the balancing act between entertainment and compassion. Visiting Bethlem was, in some sense, a laughing matter, but to see this practice only as a matter of recreation is reductive, particularly at this early date. To see the place as a torture chamber, as some have been tempted given, for example, Ferdinand’s use of madmen in The Duchess of Malfi (1612), is equally reductive (in fact, as I will show in chapter 6, Webster uses the show of madmen for a very different purpose than his character intends). Candido’s wife, Viola, has the citizen wrongfully taken to Bethlem as part of her efforts to ‘‘mad’’ him and his eventual placement there convinces her to repent; but she does not repent because she fears his treatment there. She fears only that her excessive actions truly will make him insane (5.1.1–70). Rather than intensify fear, anxiety, or anger, the place alleviates such feelings. When the angry Duke and his men arrive, bent on punishment, they are literally ‘‘disarme[d]’’ (5.2.154). This occurs at Father Anselmo’s insistence; part of his efforts, like Shakespeare’s Friar Lawrence, ‘‘To turn the ancient hates of your two houses/ To fresh green friendship’’ (5.2.378–79). But Dekker and Middleton link the ‘‘disarming’’ to the visitors’ engagement with the patients and the complex show of charity they will see. When Father Anselmo first explains the patients to the visitors, he pre-

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pares them for the ‘‘grotesque’’ charitable effect. That is, the patients may amuse the visitors in some way, but that is in ‘‘spite of sorrow’’: And though twould grieve a soul, to see Gods image, So blemished and defaced, yet do they act Such anticke and such pretty lunacies, That spite of sorrow they will make you smile. (5.2.158–61)

The show of Bethlem may have provided a perverse pleasure, but that does not contradict its charitable purpose. It elicits smiles and pity. Upon encountering the first madman, the visitors seem much more amused than charitably moved, but Anselmo prompts the visitors toward a gentler response: ‘‘O, do not vex him pray’’(5.2.184).20 Still, when the madman explains that he is fishing for his five lost ships, the ‘‘loss at Sea’’ that has driven him mad, the visitors respond only with laughter (5.2.200). This time the madman himself redirects the visitors’ responses: ‘‘Do you laugh at Gods creatures? do you mock old age you rogues? is this gray beard and head counterfeit, that you cry ha ha ha?’’(5.2.201–3). In other words, the madman and Father Anselmo seek to turn amusement into pity. They sound not unlike Shakespeare’s Lear (in a play produced at about the same historical moment), who elicits pity from almost any audience: Pray do not mock. I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward and, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Methinks I should know you, and know this man; Yet I am doubtful for I am mainly ignorant What place this is; and all the skill I have Remembers not these garments; nor I know not Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me, For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia. (4.7.58–67)

The madman, also like Lear, misidentifies them as his children and demonstrates resentment (5.2.203–20). When the madman

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becomes agitated by the visitors, Anselmo threatens to ‘‘tame’’ him (5.2.227) by whipping. Like Lear the madman pleads for justice: ‘‘whip me? what justice is this, to whip me because I am a beggar?—Alas? I am a poor man: a very poor man: I am starved, and have had no meat by this light, ever since the great flood, I am a poor man’’ (5.2.231–33). By the end of this encounter, the visitors’ responses have changed significantly. Rather than laughter, we see pity and appreciation for the hospital’s work. Omn.: A very pitious sight. Cast.: Father I see you have a busy charge. (5.2.240–41)

Twyning notes that ‘‘the drama agitates our response to elicit an understanding of the mad-poor and their plight.’’21 Given this important moment in the play, I would add that the show of Bethlem does the same for characters in the play. If one is reading the play for historical evidence, rather than dramatically, this important transformation from cruel laughter to pity may be missed. The word ‘‘charity’’ does not appear, nor is there any giving of alms, but the dramatic context registers the practices, or at least the practices the Bethlem governors intended, at Bethlem. Not surprisingly, the compilers of the History of Bethlem, who clearly established the charitable component of the show of Bethlem, were not attending to dramaturgy when they wrote that ‘‘Almost certainly the Bedlam scenes of Jacobean drama do not portray the reality of the contemporary Bethlem hospital. . . . What the theatrical madmen say and do is largely a product of the playwrights’ imaginations and their dramatic requirements.’’22 In The Honest Whore, Part One, the historians complain Dekker and Middleton place the Chapel by the ‘‘west end of the Abbey Wall’’ while, in reality, ‘‘neither the Church or the Chapel [of Bethlem] stood in that relationship to the Long House [the main building holding patients] or the Master’s House.’’23 Ironically, even if they deny the correspondence, in The Honest Whore, Part One we see much of the reality of Bethlem the historians describe. In particular, we see the development of the complex charitable show that constituted much of the hospital’s history. The historians miss the correspondence to the reality they describe so well elsewhere in part because in looking for historical evidence they overlook—understandably—drama-

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turgy. They overlook the complicated dramatic engagement of madmen and visitants in The Honest Whore, Part One’s conclusion, an engagement that corroborates their description of Bethlem’s charitable reality; and, we shall see shortly, they ignore Part One’s relationship to The Honest Whore, Part Two, a play that uses Bridewell, Bethlem’s sister institution, in its conclusion, and in the process reveals more clearly the influence of early modern charity in both plays.24 Bridewell, the palace turned into a prison or workhouse, was designed to cure social ills by putting vagrants back to work and by punishing prostitutes, bawds, and panders. Bridewell’s charity, like Bethlem’s, poses obvious problems for the modern reader. The next two madmen of The Honest Whore, Part One seem more directly connected to the plot. The first Fell from the happy quietness of mind, About a maiden that he loved, and died: He followed her to church, being full of tears, And as her body went into the ground, He fell stark mad. (5.2.248–52)

Certainly this mad character is meant to have some charitable effect on the Duke who, in faking his daughter’s death, drove Hippolito to hysterics in act 1. We shall see that the angry Duke becomes more sympathetic to Hippolito and his love for Infaelice. The second madman in this pair was married and ‘‘Was jealous of a fair, but as some say/ O very virtuous wife, and that spoiled him’’ (5.2.252–54). Seeing this madman rant at all those he imagined slept with his wife (5.2.258–68) similarly prepares the Duke and audiences to better appreciate Candido’s patience with his wife. When Bellafront enters disguised as a madwoman, she implicates all the visitors in the mad world of the hospital. Bell: Doe not you know me? nor you? nor you, nor you? Omn: No indeed. Bell: Then you are an Ass, and you are an Ass, and you are an ass, for I know you. (5.2.308–11)

The visitants lose their place as viewers; they become part of the mad world of the hospital, part of the show.25 We recall the simi-

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larly inclusive remark cited above made by the ‘‘sweeper’’ as the group arrived at the hospital. We have blocks for all heads, we have good store of wild oats here: for the Courtier is mad at the Citizen, the Citizen is mad at the Country man, the shoemaker is mad at the cobler, the cobler at the carman, the punke is mad that the Merchants wife is no whore, the Merchants wife is mad that the punke is so common a whore. (5.2.144–49)

The hospital here is simultaneously a figure for the city and a place in the city that contains and mediates the social anger or ‘‘madness’’ threatening public order discussed by Archer and other historians.26 In this play, Bethlem links and integrates all elements of society. This is certainly no ‘‘easy wandering existence,’’ but this does seem to suggest something like the more positive pre-Enlightenment relationship between reason and madness that Foucault sought to describe. According to The History of Bethlem, we note, the hospital was not an isolated asylum but a building thoroughly integrated into its increasingly crowded neighborhood.27 After Bellafront implicates the courtiers in Bethlem’s madness, she unmasks Hippolito and Infaelice, but the Duke and his men have been disarmed. Hippolito, now married to Infaelice, tells the Duke, ‘‘You cannot shed blood here, but tis your own, / To spill your own blood were damnation’’ (5.2.364–65). This reconciliation is a contrivance, but the place in which it occurs matters. As the Duke says, You beseech fair, you have me in place fit To bridle me, rise Friar, you may be glad You can make madmen tame, and tame men mad. (5.2.386–88)

Bethlem could elicit cruel laughter rather than charity. It could be at moments a place of perverse entertainment. As we shall see in chapter 4, in Dekker and Webster’s Northward Ho, staged only two years after The Honest Whore, Part One, Bethlem becomes much less central to the play’s thematic concerns. But in The Honest Whore, Part One the place is central and it encourages a specific form of social compassion and harmony. And the play

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offers a distinct alternative to Jonson’s new theater and its cure for madness.

THE ODD, CHARITABLE ENDING OF THE HONEST WHORE, PART TWO If we assume some continuity of tone between The Honest Whore, Part One and The Honest Whore, Part Two, there does exist additional literary evidence to solidify the connection between the play, Bethlem, and charity. For, in addition to ‘‘Bedlam’s’’ reputation, some poor dramatic design clouds our understanding of the comedic tone; a consideration of these dramatic concerns is, then, helpful. If our historical distance from a cultural understanding of Bethlem in 1604 makes the play difficult to understand, the playwrights’ somewhat haphazard comic planning does not help very much. Larry Champion points out the structural problems of Part One: ‘‘the spectator in Part I does not, for the great bulk of the plot, observe the action from a vantage of superior knowledgeability. He is not led to anticipate a pattern of action which provides the emotional assurance of comedy at the same time that it sustains the absorbing interest of narrative, and consequently there are several points at which the comic perspective is blurred.‘‘28 This ‘‘uncertainty of tone and [comic] trajectory’’ produced some ‘‘moments of inadvertent comedy,’’ some misplaced laughter, at a recent production of the play at the newly reconstructed Globe.29 But a brief examination of The Honest Whore, Part Two, a much more carefully constructed play, suggests the comedic tone and charitable sensibility in both plays.30 In The Honest Whore, Part Two, written by Dekker alone, the playwright provides what Part One lacked: ‘‘a comic pointer or comic controller.’’ That is, Dekker provides the audience with a character ‘‘visibly controlling the various complications and providing through his actions and his comments a sufficiently comic view for the spectator to rest secure that impenetrable circle of wit has exorcised any dangers of permanent consequence.’’31 Dekker links this comic controller’s activities to his charitable intentions. Orlando Friscobaldo (‘‘Old mad Orlando’’), Bellafront’s father and Part Two’s comic controller, announces at the beginning of the play his intentions to disguise himself and

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secretly help his recently repentant daughter and her new husband, Mattheo. After Hippolito informs Orlando that Bellafront is alive and repentant, but suffering in poverty because of Mattheo’s poor behavior, Orlando remarks Las my Girl! art thou poor? poverty dwells next door to despair, there’s but a wall between them; despair is one of hells Catch-poles; and lest that Devil arrest her, I’ll to her, yet she shall not know me; she shall drink of my wealth, as beggars do of running water, freely, yet never know from what Fountains head it flows. Shall a silly bird pick her own breast to nourish her young ones, and can a father see his child starve? That were hard; The Pelican does it, and shall not I. Yes, I will victuall the Camp for her, but it shall be by some stratagem; that knave there her husband will be hanged I fear, I’ll keep his neck out of the noose if I can, he shall not know how. (1.2.168–79)

Orlando publicly refuses to help his fallen daughter, but acts secretly to help by disguising himself as a ‘‘servant,’’ Pacheco, who strangely wants to serve the destitute Mattheo. While in disguise, Orlando discovers that Hippolito’s interest in helping Bellafront and Mattheo stems from his sexual desire for the prostitute he reformed in Part One. Bellafront remains reformed, however, refuses the advances of Hippolito, and Orlando and the Duke secretly arrange for all to be brought to Bridewell so that Mattheo’s poor behavior and Hippolito’s desire can be rectified. They attempt to ‘‘cure’’ their respective sons-in-law. In Bridewell, Hippolito and Mattheo are shamed into reforming and Orlando makes public the private charity he has been offering all along to his daughter and son-in-law. Candido, who plays a less prominent role here, has also been brought to Bridewell after he was tricked into buying stolen goods. All the conflicts caused by immoral conduct are resolved in Bridewell. Orlando thus succeeds in his task, ultimately helping his daughter and her husband out of poverty. The Duke calls Orlando ‘‘the true Physician’’ (5.2.191). This declaration is no surprise to an audience who has known from the beginning of the play that Orlando will control events—charitably. Interestingly enough, this comic controller with charitable intentions initially might have had a role in Part One. Hoy suggests a starting point for considering the relationship between the two

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plays: ‘‘If The Honest Whore was not originally planned as a twopart play it seems likely that Part Two had been conceived before Part One was completed.’’32 He goes on to point out that ‘‘near the end of 4.1 of Part One’’ Bellafront, having failed to gain Hippolito’s love, plans to leave the city and return to her father. The lowest fall can be but into hell, It does not move him [Hippolito]. I must therefore fly, From this undoing City, and with tears, Wash off all anger from my fathers brow, He cannot sure but joy seeing me new borne, A woman honest first and then turn whore, Is (as with me) common to thousands more, But from a strumpet to turn chaste: that sound, Has oft bin heard, that woman hardly found. (4.1.191–200)

Bellafront never meets her father, Orlando, in Part One, but she turns up instead at Bethlem. One can not recover whatever initial design there might have been, of course, but Orlando’s presence in Part Two suggests what history and less than perfect playmaking have obscured in Part One: Bethlem and Bridewell were conceived of by the playwrights as charities fitting for harmonious, comedic endings. We can easily miss the charitable effect the show of Bethlem has on characters, particularly the Duke and his men, in Part One; but with Orlando’s help we can see clearly the connection between charity and Bethlem’s sister institution, Bridewell. We still have to look beyond our prejudices, though, and understand that charity differs from one historical moment to another. For example, we may cringe when the first Master explains that, on occasion, Bridewell inmates are whipped. But this does not change the fact that the play and playwright praise the institution and see them as instruments of social harmony, appropriate settings for comedy: Nor is it seen, That the whip draws blood here, to cool the Spleen Of any rugged Bencher: nor does offence Feel smart, on spiteful, or rash evidence: But pregnant testimony forth must stand, Ere Justice leave them in the Beadles hand,

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As Iron, on the Anvil are they laid, Not to take blowes alone, but to be made And fashioned to some Charitable use. (5.2.45–53)

To believe the master’s language, to see Bethlem and Bridewell as charities, is not to get lost in the ideological haze of civic authorities. Instead, one sees that ideology working, working against competing ideologies. Dekker juxtaposes the hard London charity of Bridewell to the insidious charity of the aristocracy. Orlando initially believes Hippolito when the courtier shows a charitable interest in Bellafront: ‘‘we have few Lords of [Hippolito’s] making, that love wenches for their honesty’’ (1.2.167–68). Disguised as Pacheco, Orlando explains to Bellafront his understanding of why Hippolito has provided her a secret gift of gold: ‘‘it may be, he thinks you want money, and therefore bestows his alms bravely, like a Lord’’ (2.1.234–35). Bellafront immediately and sharply corrects him: ‘‘He thinks a silver net can catch the poor,/ Here’s bait to choak a Nun, and turn her whore’’ (2.1.236–38). Next to Hippolito’s sinfully motivated ‘‘alms,’’ the harsh and public charity of Bridewell that Orlando works with later looks less cruel. Appearances, Orlando notes at the end of act 1, can be deceiving. He first asks, ‘‘Is’t possible the Lord Hippolito, whose face is as civil as the outside of a Dedicatory Booke, should be a Mutton-Munger?’’ (2.1.254–55). And then concludes: ‘‘All are not Bawds (I see now) that keep doors,/ Nor all good wenches that are marked for Whores‘‘ (2.1.264–65). Part Two, like Part One, celebrates elements of London normally not celebrated, parts that are not particularly attractive on the surface. What Joost Daalder says of Part One applies to Part Two: ‘‘Dekker’s predominant intention . . . is to show how certain people who are usually disapproved of by society, or held in contempt, are worthy of serious sympathy. This is true not only of the patients in Bethelem Hospital . . . but also of the honest (⳱chaste, virtuous) whore, Bellafront.’’33 I would extend and revise these comments to include the institutions in the play. Bethlem and Bridewell were not held in contempt by the London society in the way we hold them in contempt, but they were emblems—unusual and humble perhaps—of civic pride and solidarity. In Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), when Simon Eyre can not prevent the conscription of his journeyman

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Rafe, Eyre offers Rafe five sixpences at the new soldier’s departure and something of a pep talk: ‘‘fight for the honor of the Gentle Craft, for the gentlemen Shoemakers, the courageous Cordwainers, the flower of saint Martins, the mad knaves of Bedlem, Fleetstreete, Towerstreete, and white Chappell, crack me the crowns of the French knaves, a pox on them, crack them, fight, by the lord of Ludgate, fight my fine boy’’ (1.1. 211–16). Similarly, as mentioned in the introduction, ‘‘Madness’’ can be a term of familiarity that facilitates social bonding. Simon Eyre habitually refers to his friends and apprentices as ‘‘mad’’: ‘‘drink you mad Greeks’’ (1.4.105); ‘‘come your mad hyporboreans’’ (1.1.112); ‘‘hear you mad Mesopotamions’’ (2.3.71); ‘‘my mad lads’’ (3.3.69). Simon himself delights in being called a ‘‘mad wag’’ throughout the play. For Dekker, like Shakespeare’s festive comedy, ‘‘Madness’’ tends to link, rather than divide, people. Dekker’s celebratory description of Bridewell in act 5 mirrors Stowe’s language. Duke: Your Bridewell? that the name? for beauty strength, Capacity and form of ancient building, (Besides the Rivers neighborhood) few houses Wherein we keep our Court can better it. 1 Master: Hither from foreign Courts have Princes come, And with our Duke did Acts of State Commence, Here that great Cardinal had first audience, (The grave Campaign,) that Duke dead, his Son (That famous Prince) gave free possession Of this his Palace, to the Citizens, To be the poor mans ware-house: and endowed it With Lands to’ the value of seven hundred mark, With all the bedding and the furniture, once proper (As the Lands then were) to an Hospital Belonging to a Duke of Savoy. Thus Fortune can toss the World, a Princes Court Is thus a prison now. (5.2.1–17)

That the language describing Bridewell is much stronger and more positive than the language describing Bethlem in Part One should not suggest Bridewell was admired and valued while Bethlem was not. Bethlem was simply smaller, a less impressive, physically and historically, building. Dekker’s greater control of

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tone and comic perspective produces the stronger language that more clearly describes the institution’s place in the culture. Just as the spectacle of the mad had a charitable (‘‘pitious’’) effect on the Duke and his men in Part One, a visit to Bridewell in Part Two has a transformative effect on Hippolito and Mattheo. To reiterate some of the plot, in 4.2 Orlando and the Duke devise a scheme to ‘‘cure’’ Hippolito and Mattheo. Lodovico, a courtier, joins the plan to get Bots, a pander, and Horsleach, a Bawde, because they have abused his friend Candido. For the Duke, curing his son-in-law involves a cure for the whole city. Ile try all Phisicke, and this Medicine first: I have directed Warrants strong and peremptory (To purge our City Millan, and to cure The outward parts, the Suburbs) for the attaching Of all those women, who (like gold) want weight, Cities (like Ships) should have no idle freight. (5.2.89–94)

In act 5 at Bridewell, when Mattheo seeks to implicate the innocent Bellafront in his wrongdoing, Orlando reveals himself and humiliates Mattheo (5.2.179). A transformation takes place in the characters not unlike the transformation Bridewell was supposed to enact. The characters are shamed into better behavior. This transformation, as the transformation of the visitants to Bethlem in Part One, is easily missed if one neglects dramatic context. Hippolito points out the transformation in a single, but important line: ‘‘Tis a good sign when our cheeks blush at ill’’ (5.2.194). Bridewell allows Orlando to perform publicly and more effectively the private charitable deed he set out in act 1. After the humiliating ‘‘cure’’ of Mattheo and Hippolito, Dekker presents a display of prostitutes. Having watched this display, Bellafront decides to stay with her husband despite all his flaws rather than return to her former life. Alexander Leggatt has explained how the powerful depiction of Bridewell—‘‘where unrepentant whores are portrayed with brutal realism’’—helps make up her mind. Dorothea Target, the first to be brought forward, scorns the thought of repentant tears: ‘Say ye? Weep? Yes forsooth, as you did when you lost your maidenhead; do you not hear how I weep? (Sings).’’ An-

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other, Penelope Whorehound, makes a great display of lamentation and begging for bail—but we learn that this is an act she puts on regularly, and that she is in reality a hardened reprobate. These unsentimental portrayals have a documentary quality; Dekker here displays a tough frankness that makes the repentant whore seem by comparison a wraith. . . . The play’s lectures on prostitution seem academic by comparison with this dramatization of the real thing.34

The powerful show of prostitutes, in other words, like the powerful show of the mad, transforms the viewer. For Orlando, obviously, Bellafront’s decision to reform and stay with her husband is the correct one: ‘‘let go his hand: if thou doest not forsake him, a Fathers everlasting blessing fall upon both your heads’’ (5.2.475–77). As in Part One, the setting facilitates a harmonious ending. Clearly, Dekker and Middleton did not use these institutions ironically. These institutions appear on stage because they were figures for a humble charity in early modern London that engaged and integrated many elements of the city. Even more, they were invoked as authentic and familiar theaters intimately connected with other cultural spectacles like the popular stage and the pageants to oppose Jonson’s ‘‘new’’ theaters. From Dekker and Middleton’s perspective, the show of Bethlem, like the popular stage and the pageants, was part of communal London whereas Jonson’s version of the theater stood alien and apart. They already did, in short, with greater charity, what Jonson sought to do: cure the madness of the city.

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4 Making Bethlem a ‘‘Jest’’ and Conceding to Jonson in Westward Ho, Eastward Ho, and Northward Ho THE TERMS OF THE POETS’ WAR HAD BECOME LESS DISTINCT BY THE time of The Honest Whore, Part One. Clearly, though, the battle Jonson had initiated was still underway. In the three famous ‘‘directional’’ plays—Westward Ho, Eastward Ho, and Northward Ho—that follow The Honest Whore, Part One, we see Dekker, this time with Webster, responding to the work and arguments of Jonson (and vice versa) again. The disputes seem to culminate in Northward Ho, the play that brings Bethlem, as opposed to a fictional madhouse shadowing Bethlem, to the stage for the second and last time. If, however, in The Honest Whore, Part One, Dekker and Middleton presented the theater of Bethlem as an alternative to the Jonsonian theater, Northward Ho marks a significant change in Dekker’s perspective. Rather than figuring as a complete challenge to Jonson’s view of the theater, Bethlem appears in this play to make only a qualifying point in the literary dispute at hand. To be more precise, in Northward Ho Dekker concedes that Jonson’s view of poetry and the stage was correct, for the most part, and this concession makes the show of Bethlem marginal rather than central to the play. In these later exchanges, we see that points have been taken in the dispute, strategic alliances rearranged, sometimes slightly, sometimes dramatically. Dekker and Shakespeare move toward Jonsonian positions in their dramaturgy; John Marston, an early antagonist of Jonson, collaborates with him and Chapman on Eastward Ho. What I want to focus on most distinctly here is how Jonson’s pressure has shifted dramatic constructions of madness. Just as Jonson prompted Shakespeare to reconsider his understanding and engagement with ‘‘madness,’’ Jonson also seems to have 132

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prompted Dekker to draw stricter lines between the stage and the show of Bethlem. This move to the margins that makes a visit to Bethlem a ‘‘jest’’ prefigures the total separation of Bethlem ‘‘proper’’ from the stage. As the stage continues to define itself as we understand it, Bethlem hospital will haunt the stage, but not appear again as it did in The Honest Whore, Part One.

WESTWARD HO Northward Ho and Dekker’s second use of the Bethlem stage setting does not make a great deal of sense to a modern audience without considering its predecessors. At the end of 1604, Dekker collaborates with John Webster in writing Westward Ho to present what in some ways can be considered a continuation of the defense of the citizen figure seen in The Honest Whore, Part One. Westward Ho is often misread, Hoy has pointed out, as a depiction of citizen immorality (2.159–63); but, in fact, this play more often than not simply inverts the relationship of gallant ‘‘duping’’ citizen. In this play, the citizens dupe the gallants. At one point, for example, Justiniano, an Italian citizen merchant in London, disguises himself as his wife and confronts the Earl who has tried to seduce her. Like Sir Quintillian in the earlier Satiromastix, Justiniano stages his wife’s ‘‘corpse’’ and helps his wife ‘‘avoid the lustful embraces of the Earl.’’1 Most strikingly, though, the play culminates in the citizen wives gulling the gallants. According to Mistress Honeysuckle, who has helped arrange a meeting with the gallants only to defer its ultimate sexual consummation, the gallants ‘‘shall know that Citizens wives have wit enough to out strip twenty such gulls; tho we are merry, lets no be mad; be as wanton as new married wives, as fantastic and light headed to the eye, as feather-makers, but as pure about the heart, as if we dwelt amongst them in Black Friars’’ (5.1.159– 63). The citizens are neither more ‘‘mad,’’ nor more immoral, nor more affected than the gallants; they are, however, as clever. As Hoy writes, ‘‘The trio of Citizen’s wives shows signs of yielding to the wits of their respective gallants, but only we discover in the end for the purpose of heightening the discomfiture of their would be seducers.’’2 In this, the play bears a resemblance to Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1601) where citizen

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wives also turn the tables on a very famous gallant, Sir John Falstaff, out to cuckold their husbands. While Westward Ho thus fits well into the pattern of citizen comedies and the give and take of the Poets’ War we have been examining, the play does manifest distinct differences from its predecessors and these differences would prompt yet another shift in the literary dispute. Westward Ho has been termed— correctly, I think—a more ‘‘realistic’’ take on the matters of social competition we have seen manifested in other plays. As did Every Man In, Every Man Out, Poetaster, Satiromastix, and The Honest Whore, Parts One and Two, Westward Ho registers social struggles between various groups. But in this play we have no remarkable solution to these struggles proffered. There is neither a skilled poet (nor gallant) to cure humours nor is there a supernaturally patient citizen to mollify disputes. Social tensions, again, are registered in a jealous citizen and gulling gallants, but in this play neither figure possesses clear superiority. The citizen figure, the Italian Justiniano, is very jealous as the play opens. Consistent with what we have seen in other plays, his wife considers this a type of mental illness: ‘‘This madness shows very well’’ (1.1.150). We are reminded that we are not far from the Poets’ War, The Honest Whore, Part One, or Bethlem. Justiniano responds: ‘‘Why look you I am wondrous merry, can any man discern by my face, that I am a Cuckold? I have known many suspected for men of this misfortune; when they have walked through the streets, which commonly wear their hats over their eye-brows, like politic penthouses, which commonly make the shop of a Mercer, or a Linnen Draper as dark as a room in Bedlam’’ (1.1.151–56). But Justiniano is not paranoid and his wife is not a lascivious shrew; this jealous citizen has complex, realistic reasons to be jealous just as his wife has complex, realistic reasons to behave in a way that makes him jealous. The play begins with Birdlime, a bawd, seeking to arrange a relationship between Mistress Justiniano and the highest-ranking aristocrat in the play, the Earl. Mistress Justiniano entertains the proposition because, as she explains, Justiniano’s conduct has left them dangerously poor: ‘‘Your prodigality, your dicing, your riding abroad, your consorting your self with Noble men, your building a summer house hath undone us, hath undone us? What would you have me do?’’(1.1.189–91). She reveals at the same moment, though, touching romantic feelings for her hus-

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band: ‘‘Jealousy hath undone many a Citizen, it hath undone you, and me. You married me from the service of an honorable Lady, and you knew what matches I might have had, what would you have me to do? I would I had never seen your eyes, your eyes . . .’’ Justiniano admits to his financial failings, but that does not provide him with any more sympathy for his wife. ‘‘What would you have me doe?’’ she movingly asks throughout the scene. She refuses to tell Justiniano her intentions: ‘‘I have no counsel in your voyage, neither shall you have any in mine’’ (1.1.199). They separate in what strikes me as one of the most painfully realistic, overlooked scenes in early modern drama: Just.: Go, no longer will I make my care thy prison. Mist. Just. O my fate; well sir, you shall answer for this sin which you force me to; fare you well, let not the world condemne, if I seek mine own maintenance. Just.: So, so. Mist. Just.: Do not send me any letters; do not seek any reconcilement. By this light I’ll receive none, if you will send me my apparel so, if not choose, I hope we shall never meete more. (1.1.201–9)

Here in Mistress Justiniano we see, perhaps, the hand of the creator of Vittoria and the Duchess of Malfi. At this point early in the play, Justiniano goes into disguise, not to resolve any societal ills, but to seek psychological comfort from his misery: ‘‘Farewell my care, I have told my wife I am for Stoad; that’s not my course, for I resolve to take some shape upon me, and to live disguised here in the City; they say for one Cuckold to know that his friend is in the like head-ache, and to give him counsel, is as if there were two partners, the one to bee arrested, the other to bail him’’ (1.1.218–23); or, as he says later, ‘‘I have plaid the fool a little to beguile the memory of mine own misfortune’’ (3.3.98). The directionlessness of Justiniano’s disguise is largely what has prompted many to call the play immoral or directionless as a whole. His lack of direction seems connected, for example, to his tendency to revel in bawdy flirtations with other men’s wives. A critic attuned to the ‘‘realistic’’ turn induced by Jonson in the Poets’ War, however, would tend to emphasize the poignancy of Justiniano’s simple change of heart in Act Three. Without Can-

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dido’s supernatural patience or a deus ex machina/ Justice of Peace, the citizen figure comes to his senses with a simple letter from his wife who has resisted the Earl’s advances: ‘‘Jealousie, it makes many Cuckoldes, many fooles, and many banquerouts: It may have abused me and not my wifes honesty: Ile try it’’ (3.3.108–10). These characters appear in all their, more or less, normal or realistic faults. Mistress Justiniano does go to the Earl, dressed and prepared for seduction, but retreats at the last moment: ‘‘though my husbands poor, / I’d rather beg for him than be your Whore’’ (2.2.120). From our perspective, Westward Ho may involve ‘‘the deeds and language as men do use’’ and ‘‘the persons such as Comedy would choose / When she would show an image of the times,’’ but the kind of ‘‘realism’’ in this play was distinctly not what Jonson had in mind when he introduced the humour genre that helped spawn it. As suggested in chapter 2, from Jonson’s neoclassical perspective, such a play, especially in its (what some have called) ‘‘vulgar’’ realism, did not promote or correct virtue. Even as it pressed the stage toward a greater likeness of truth, the argument Jonson had begun seemingly had turned drama far away from his initial intention to purge, correct, and transform society. While it is still unclear to me the extent to which The Merry Wives of Windsor is connected to this dispute, I am tempted to say much the same thing about Shakespeare’s ‘‘citizen comedy’’ as I do of Westward Ho. Like Dekker and Webster’s play, The Merry Wives of Windsor turns to the ‘‘real’’ as Jonson suggested. It even demystifies the ‘‘fairies’’ of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the final scene where real children, dressed as fairies, gull Falstaff. We can see in these moments, I think, Shakespeare responding again to Jonson’s criticism of his most magical and ‘‘monstrous’’ play. The Merry Wives also corrects virtue, or the lack of virtue, particularly on the part of Falstaff’s licentiousness. At the same time, though, the play mocks Justices of the Peace in the figure of Shallow who stands in stark contrast to Every Man In’s Dr. Clement. And the play allows little or no room for the social graces of the gallant or the gifts of the Jonsonian poet. While it retains the ridiculously paranoid, jealous citizen in the figure of Ford, the play’s emphasis on household domesticity, Wendy Wall recently has shown, challenges the aristocratic ideology with which Jonson’s new theater was complicit: ‘‘domes-

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ticity . . . remains the cornerstone of the community.’’3 Housewives purging Sir John Falstaff, one suspects, was not what Jonson had envisioned in arguing for a ‘‘transformative’’ theater.

EASTWARD HO Indeed, Westward Ho and its brand of realism, if not The Merry Wives of Windsor, in part prompts the collaboration of Jonson, Marston, and George Chapman in Eastward Ho, a play that mocks Westward Ho, The Honest Whore, Part One, The Honest Whore, Part Two and, one could argue, the whole genre of citizen comedy dating back to The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Eastward Ho, in its focus on generic conventions and form, seeks to remove theatrical practice from the social struggles with which it had become entangled and place the focus of the play on the art itself. In short, Jonson and his fellow collaborators returned to considerations that initiated the Poets’ War: questions about the nature of art, poetry, and theater and what it was supposed to be and, of course, not supposed to be. Principal among the things that writers like Dekker, Middleton, and Webster did wrong, at least based on a careful reading of the tone of Eastward Ho, was to align their art with civic pageants and older narratives of city heroes. For Jonson and, presumably, his collaborators, true poetry, including his drama, should stand outside those other forms of theatrical practice. In Eastward Ho, Jonson, Chapman, and Marston seemingly give Dekker (and, to a lesser degree, Middleton, and Webster) what he wants based on Dekker’s defense of citizen figures in The Honest Whore and Westward Ho. The heroes of this play, or at least the controlling figures, are the London goldsmith, Touchstone, and his virtuous apprentice, Golding. At the end of the play, Golding, who has risen meteorically to the post of deputy Alderman (like Dekker’s Simon Eyre), with the advice of Touchstone, sits in judgment of the gallant, Sir Petronel Flash, the gallant want-to-be, Quicksilver, and the usurer, Security. Their ‘‘citizen’’ judgment is lenient, humane and easy, in part because a stay in a London correctional institution has convinced all to repent their sins. In other words, Jonson has replaced the gallant/ JP figures of Clement, Prospero, and Lorenzo, and the poet figure

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Asper/Macilente/Horace, with citizen figures; and, moreover, London institutions, not unlike Bethlem and Bridewell, play a key role in implementing virtue. The problem, though, at least from Dekker’s perspective, is that Jonson, et. al.’s apparent change of heart seems more or less tongue-in-cheek. Jonson, Chapman, and Marston mock these conventions, these celebrations of civic virtue that, from their perspective, belong more in civic pageants and old legends than in the new theater Jonson is helping to shape. Touchstone tells us that Golding’s quick rise to power should be celebrated in particular places: Worshipful son! I cannot contain myself; I must tell thee, I hope to see thee one of the monuments of our city, and reckoned among her worthies, to be remembered the same day with the Lady Ramsey and grave Gresham, when the famous fable of Whittington and his puss shall be forgotten, and thou and thy acts become the posies for hospitals, when thy name shall be written upon conduits, and thy deeds played in thy lifetime, by the best companies of actors, and be called their get-penny. This I divine. This I prophecy. (4.2.76–89)

The kind of play Dekker writes, which is the kind of play Jonson is parodying at the moment, is the place for Golding’s story— not Jonson’s theater. ‘‘Posies for hospitals,’’ quite literally like The Honest Whore, Parts One and Two, should be separate from this theatrical world. At the end of the play, Touchstone provides the didactic last lines: Now, London, look about, And in this moral see thy glass run out: Behold thy careful father, thrifty son, The solemn deeds, which each of us have done; The usurer punished, and from fall so steep The prodigal child reclaimed, and the lost sheep. (5.5.216–24)

But Quicksilver, the apprentice who wants to be a gallant, gives the epilogue. And the epilogue reminds the audience of the play in its entirety, the sort of display they have just seen, the parody that mocks Touchstone’s civic message: ‘‘Stay, sir, I perceive the multitude are gathered together to view our coming out at the

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Counter. See, if the streets and the fronts of the houses be not stuck with people, and the windows filled with ladies, as on the solemn day of the Pageant! Oh may you find in this our pageant, here, The same contentment which you came to seek; And as that show but draws you once a year, May this attract you hither once a week. (1–10)

Jonson, Marston, and Chapman, in other words, again shift the focus at the play’s last moment to the nature of dramatic art itself. This type of play, the one they have just staged and parodied, a ‘‘Dekker’’ type of play one might say, with citizen heroes celebrating London institutions, is a ‘‘pageant’’ and, thus, decidedly not a play as Jonson would have the theater defined. Dekker’s plays have closer ties to the alternative theater of Bethlem, or the theater of the prison Jonson and the others create in order to mock Dekker’s work in act 5 of Eastward Ho. Golding plans to make Touchstone ‘‘relent’’ in his punishment of the gallants by having himself falsely imprisoned. Knowing that Touchstone will visit him, Golding hopes to make Touchstone ‘‘a spectator of their miseries’’ (5.3.117) so that, as in The Honest Whore, Parts One and Two and, ostensibly, Bethlem and Bridewell in actuality, this viewing will produce a softer, more charitable heart. The prison in Eastward Ho has already had a remarkable effect on the prisoners before Touchstone gets a chance to see it. It has had the effect hoped for by City Aldermen, an effect in short, Dekker took more seriously in The Honest Whore plays. The jailer, Wolf, tells Golding ‘‘I never knew or saw prisoners more penitent, or more devout. They will sit you up all night singing of psalms, and edifying the whole prison—only Security sings a note too high, sometimes, because he lies I’ the Two penny Ward, far off, and cannot rest for him, but come every morning to ask what godly prisoners we have’’ (5.2.49–56). This is very funny, of course, especially set in the context of Dekker’s Honest Whore plays as discussed in chapter 3. Touchstone’s response to the spectacle of the prisoners, and Quicksilver’s specially composed song of repentance, is funnier still: ‘‘Son Golding and Master Wolf, I thank you: the deceit [the show of prisoners] is welcome, especially from thee [Golding], whose

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charitable soul in this hath shown a high point of wisdom and honesty. Listen. I am ravished with his ‘Repentance’, and could stand here a whole prenticeship to hear him’’ (5.5.111–17). Quicksilver, in fact, insists on being released in a way that will allow him to ‘‘go home through the streets . . . as a spectacle, or rather an example, to the children of Cheapside’’ (5.5.216–18). Here Jonson, Marston and Chapman mock the very kind of theater Dekker provided without irony in The Honest Whore, Part One and Part Two to counter Jonson’s innovations. Jonson thus is still trying to transform the popular stage. We recall from chapter 2 that Shakespeare’s defense of the popular stage in Hamlet did not impress Jonson, but rather prompted him to align that play with Dekker’s citizen comedy and the like. Jonson humorously tried to yoke Hamlet to these citizen, pageantinspired plays of the popular stage by creating the figure of the footman (‘‘Hamlet’’) whose only purpose is to run cooperatively alongside the socially deluded citizens. Given the specific antagonism between Jonson and Shakespeare, these references must flow specifically from Jonson’s pen. His specific satirical take on Hamlet as citizen art of the popular stage is visible throughout Eastward Ho. In Hamlet, when Horatio comments on the short time between the funeral of King Hamlet and the wedding of Claudius and Gertrude, Hamlet offers a sarcastic rationale: ‘‘Thrift, thrift, Horatio, the funeral bak’d meats/ Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’’ (1.2.180–81). In Act Two of Eastward Ho, Jonson recasts this witty repartee as citizen frugality. Golding, without irony, suggests that he and Mildred do not need their own wedding feast because they can use leftovers from Sir Petronel Flash’s and Gertrude’s much more extravagant wedding: ‘‘the superfluity and cold meat left at their nuptials will with bounty furnish ours. The grossest prodigality is superfluous cost of the belly’’ (2.1.17–23). Jonson parodies the remark from Hamlet again in Act Three. When Gertrude asks Quicksilver where her sister Mildred is, he responds: ‘‘Marry, madam, she’s married by this time to prentice Golding. Your father, and someone more, stole to church with ’em, in all the haste, that the cold meat left at your wedding might serve to furnish their nuptial table’’ (3.2.65–68). Shakespeare’s suggestions regarding Hamlet and Ophelia’s sexual relationship, presented primarily in Ophelia’s mad speech, are mocked in this scene as well. The day after her wed-

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ding night Gertrude (again, more a figure for Ophelia than Shakespeare’s Gertrude) suddenly asks Quicksilver if he recalls their prior relationship: ‘‘Dost thou remember since thou and I clapped what-d’ye-call-’ts in the garret?’’ (2.1.82–83). Quicksilver denies any recollection of this sexual interlude and Gertrude lapses into a version of Ophelia’s mad songs: His head as white as milk, All flaxen was his hair; But now he is dead, And laid in his bed, And never will come again. God be at your labor. (85–90)

To make the connection between Jonson’s Gertrude and Shakespeare’s Ophelia clear, Mildred appears at this moment with one of the mad Ophelia’s notorious flowers: ‘‘Rosemary.’’ From Jonson’s perspective, Ophelia’s speech is not pitiful, realistic madness suggestively pointing at a passionate but doomed romance, but simple, citizen bawdy. The satirical view of the sexuality of Ophelia and Hamlet is apparent, too, in the scenes with Hamlet the footman. When Gertrude explains that Hamlet the footman will run all the way alongside the coach, Mistress Touchstone says ‘‘Alas! ’tis e’en pity, methinks; for God’s sake, madam, buy him but a hobbyhorse; let the poor youth have something betwixt his legs to ease ’em. Alas! We must do as we would be done to’’ (3.2.50–52). The lines recall, of course, Hamlet’s ‘‘mad’’ flirtations with Ophelia before ‘‘The Murder of Gonzago’’ (3.2.112–35). Perhaps most striking, though, is Jonson’s mocking of the pathetic description of Ophelia’s suicide in Hamlet. Shakespeare’s Gertrude describes the death that takes place offstage: There is a willow grows askaunt the brook, That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream, Therewith fantastic garlands did she make Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our scull-cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them. There on the pendant boughs her crowned weeds Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,

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When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, And mermaid like awhile they bore her up, Which time she chaunted snatches of old lauds, As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element. But long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death. (5.1.166–82)

In Act Four of Eastward Ho, after the boat carrying Sir Petronel Flash and Gertrude to the ‘‘new world’’ shipwrecks near the ‘‘isle of gulls’’ on the Thames, ‘‘Slitgut’’ describes the floating Gertrude trying comically to make it to shore: Ay me, see another remnant of this unfortunate shipwreck—or some other. A woman! I’faith, a woman. Though it be almost at Saint Katherine’s, I discern it to be a woman, for all her body is above the water, and her clothes swim about her most handsomely. O, they bear her up most bravely! Has not a woman reason to love the taking up of her clothes the better while she lives, for this? Alas, how busy the rude Thames is about her! A pox o’ that wave! It will drown her, I’faith, ’t will drown her. Cry God mercy, she has escaped it! I thank heaven she has escaped it. O, how she swims like a mermaid! (4.1.63–75)

The point of all Jonson’s parody is to remind audiences that Shakespeare’s drama, no matter its affective power, is akin to citizen comedy and still the aligned with the popular stage Jonson deplored. As I argued in chapter 2, Shakespeare suggested the kinship himself, in a more positive fashion, in Hamlet; indeed, in that play he defended his connection to the popular stage. In Eastward Ho, Jonson seems only too happy to hold him to his word by mocking Hamlet in the same way and in the same play he mocks Dekker’s ‘‘poesies for hospitals.’’

NORTHWARD HO Just as Jonson’s critiques prompted Shakespeare to adjust his art, Jonson’s critiques prompted Dekker to adjust his. In the last

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of the directional plays, Northward Ho, we will see Dekker conceding much to Jonson’s new stage. This play includes the show of Bethlem, but it is no ‘‘poesy for a hospital.’’ Jonson has caused the distance between the stage and other spectacles like the pageant or the show of Bethlem to widen substantially, even for Dekker. We see in these concessions that, Jonson’s strong personality aside, the Poets’ War was not primarily the personal, petulant battle it often has been thought, but much more of an intense intellectual and artistic debate. In these kinds of debates, one often turns to the ad hominem, but, ultimately, it is the ideas and arguments that matter—and the ideas and arguments that shift more distinctly than personal feelings. This debate had changed the stage for good, and we see in Dekker’s concessions the ebb and flow of a serious artistic ‘‘discussion’’ move in a certain direction. As Hoy writes, Northward Ho ‘‘begins where most comedies of adulterous intrigue end,’’ that is, ‘‘even before the play has opened, the gallant, Luke Greenshield, has attempted to seduce Mistress Mayberry [the citizen’s wife] and has failed in his efforts.’’4 Dekker and Webster thus respond yet again to Jonson, moving the struggle we have been reviewing in yet another direction. This play stands as something of a compromise on the part of Dekker and Webster. In a slightly different context, Bednarz has concluded that Dekker eventually conceded much to Jonson: ‘‘In Satiromastix, Dekker accepted Jonson’s intellectual premise that great poets were ideally suited to serve as moral educators, that they embodied an ideal form of ethical authority. [Dekker] was prepared to admit, with Jonson, that impossibility of any man’s being a good poet without first being a good man. His only objection was that his rival did not live up to the ideal he espoused and therefore had no right to assume moral and literary authority over his contemporaries.’’5 Dekker was prepared to admit the truth of Jonson’s ideals, but refused to acknowledge that Jonson embodied those ideals. If this is accurate, it seems very likely Dekker might make his concession on literary ideals by representing a poet other than Jonson. And, in fact, in Northward Ho, the citizen Mayberry and citizen’s wife ‘‘outgull’’ the gallants, Greenshield and Featherstone, with the guidance of a poet, Bellamont, clearly a figure for George Chapman. Dekker and Webster seem to concede, in other words, that the poet and poetic imagination Jonson has been arguing for

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ever since Every Man In are a useful way to ease social tension, but that Chapman and not Jonson embodies those ideals. Their concession does not come without other qualifications of Jonson’s artistic theorizing. Specifically, while willing to concede something of the power of poetic imagination Jonson has been arguing for, Dekker and Webster align that poetic power with a citizen figure rather than a gallant. And they refuse to allow the poet a place outside and apart from the world from which to use that poetic imagination. If the poet and poetry are to have the status Jonson has been calling for, Dekker and Webster suggest that the poet must not antagonize a particular social class and, furthermore, the poet must locate himself in the world of its subjects rather than, as Jonson tends to suggest, apart (and above) the world. As Dekker said about Jonson (if not Chapman) in the prologue to Satiromastix, Jonson should not have kept himself out of Every Man in his Humour. Most importantly for the larger argument of my study, the scene where Dekker and Webster mostly clearly comment on the relationship between art, artist, and life unified in charity is set in Bethlem Hospital. That is, the place where the playwrights refuse the social divisions demanded by Jonson, and particularly the new social position of the poet, is the mad hospital. Social tension is, again, figured as a citizen jealous that his wife is going to sleep with a gallant. And that jealousy is again aligned with madness. When Mayberry first becomes jealous his poet friend, Bellamont, responds ‘‘O madness! That the frailty of a woman should make a wise man thus idle! Yet I protest, to my understanding this report seems as far from truth, as you from patience’’ (1.1.173–75). The ‘‘report’’ Bellamont refers to is the deceitful information that Greenshield and Fetherstone have just passed on to Mayberry. Pretending they don’t know who Mayberry is, they inform him that a citizen’s wife with that name has been unfaithful, and they produce a ring they have taken that Mayberry recognizes immediately. Bellamont’s imagination, his ability to conjure the probability of the circumstances, however, helps Mayberry see through this ruse: Indeed [their story and the possession of the ring] breeds some suspicion: for the rest most gross and open, for two men, both to love your wife, both to enjoy her bed, and to meet you as if by miracle, and not knowing you, upon no occasion in the world, to thrust upon you a

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discourse of a quarrel, with circumstance so dishonest, that not any Gentleman but of country, blushing would have published. I and to name you: do you know them? (1.1.178–84)

Mayberry immediately thinks more clearly: ‘‘Faith now I remember, I have seen them [Greenfield and Fetherstone] walk muffled by my shop.’’ Mayberry the citizen, coached by Bellamont, displays the poetic skill, Altman might argue, that served Jonson’s gallants so well in Every Man In, the imagination that allowed them to be successful in a socially competitive world. For the first time in this struggle we see playwrights align this poetic power, in the form of the friendship between Bellamont and Mayberry, with the citizen. Bellamont tells Mayberry, ‘‘I would give two pieces of Plate, to have you stand by me, when I were to write a jealous mans part: Jealous men are either knaves or Coxcombs, be you neither: you wear yellow hose without cause . . . and without wit’’ (1.3.35–40). Similarly, in act 2, when Mayberry’s wife becomes momentarily confused and jealous because of Mayberry’s counterplotting against the gallants, Bellamont helps her see more reasonably. Ultimately, Bellamont writes the ‘‘scripts’’ that undo the gallants and resolve the tensions in the play. At other points in the play, Bellamont easily deflects the schemes of the whore, Doll, who seeks to trick him out of money: ‘‘shall we be merry with him and his muse?’’ (2.1.277); ‘‘thou shalt see me make a fool of a Poet, that hath made five hundred fools’’ (3.1.11). In another revision of Jonson’s theory about art, however, Bellamont’s poetic powers do not exempt him from the world in which he lives. He is no Doctor/ Justice Clement or an Asper/Macilente standing apart and laughing easily at the foibles of others. No sooner does Bellamont deflect Doll’s efforts to dupe him does Doll fall (surprisingly enough) in love with the aging poet and change the course of her own life. The understanding of art and artistry here seems closer to Shakespeare’s Rosalind in As You Like It—the controlling figure controls events up until the point that figure becomes implicated in events. And Doll’s love for Bellamont seems a clear reference to The Honest Whore, Part One and Bellafront’s transformation after meeting Hippolito. That Dekker and Webster give such a role to the poet/Chapman suggests, perhaps, not just a comment on the poet’s place in the

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world, but some connection between Chapman’s thoughts on that earlier play. It is, of course, impossible to determine beyond this speculation what the actual reason was, what might have transpired between the playwrights to cause this focus on Chapman. But that this play is certainly connected to The Honest Whore, Part One and that Bethlem hospital is certainly connected to the disputes of the Poets’ War becomes clear in act 4 where, as a diversion, Mayberry and the others visit Bethlem Hospital while en route to gulling the gallants. Many have argued that the visit seems out of place in the play, but Dekker and Webster carefully prepare an audience for this visit in the first scene of act 4. The scene opens with Bellamont alone, working on his poetry, and suggests the risks inherent in such creative solitude. He displays, in some ways, the antisocial and antitheatrical aspects of Jonson’s creativity. Bellamont tells his servant ‘‘Ile speak with none’’ (4.1.1). The servant responds, ‘‘Not a player?’’ ‘‘No though a Sharer ball,’’ Chapman/Bellamont answers, ‘‘Ile speak with none, although it be the mouth/ Of the big company, Ile speak with none,—away.’’ An audience then sees the poet ruminating, confusing art and life and the relationship between the two. More specifically, an audience sees the poet, like Jonson, imagining incredible power for his profession: ‘‘Why should not I be an excellent statesman? I can in the writing of a tragedy, make Caesar speak better than ever his ambition could: when I write of Pompey I have Pompeies soul within me, and when I personate a worthy Poet, I am then truly my self, a poore unprefered scholar’’ (4.1.6–10). When the Captain comes to see Bellamont, he asks for the man ‘‘that talks besides to himself when he’s alone, as if he were in Bed-lam, and he’s a poet’’ (4.1.19–21). Bellamont responds that ‘‘it may be me you seek me, for I am sometimes out a my wits’’ (4.1.22). Dekker and Webster thus begin to immerse the poet tempted with Jonsonian delusions of grandeur back into the familiar London charity. Bellamont’s potential for engaging delusions about the proximity of the poet to Caesar (we recall the place of Horace/Jonson in Poetaster) lead Dekker and Webster back to Bethlem where this kind of thinking can be cured. Their poet, Bellamont/Chapman, needs to be reminded of his place in ‘‘charity’’ with others. Bellamont’s poetic ‘‘madness’’ provides some context, then, for understanding the visit to Bethlem later in the same act. He, in

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fact, initiates the visit because ‘‘I never was amongst’’ the madmen at Bethlem (4.3.29). Once inside the hospital, Bellamont asks polite, curious questions of a bawd and of a musician. When he tells the musician that he is a musician too, the musician says, ‘‘We’ll be sworn brothers then, look you sweet rogue’’ (4.3.114). All in all, Bellamont seems to enjoy his visit, a few lines later we see him speaking Italian with the musician. When, after a brief separation, all the visitors join together again, Bellamont says distractedly, ‘‘oh, whether shrunk you: I have had such a mad dialogue here’’ (4.3.157). Bellamont has not had, however, a humane dialogue with the mad, suggesting a more humane connection between people (what I might term a ‘‘Foucaultian’’ dialogue), but an ‘‘artistic’’ exploration by a poet whose solitary and concentrated participation in his art creates a distance between himself and real life. Prior to the ‘‘Bedlam’’ scene, we had just seen how Bellamont’s almost deluded notions of poetry could confuse and detach him from others and reality in general. Similarly, when an audience first meets Bellamont they do not see the poet engaged in the world, but a more Jonsonian poet, detached and removed from the world, viewing others simply as grist for his comedic mill. I tell you Gentlemen I have observed much with being at Sturbridge; it hath afforded me mirth beyond the length of five latin Comedies; here should you meet a Nor-folk yeoman ful-but; with his head able to overt-turn you; and his pretty wife that followed him, ready to excuse the ignorant hardness of her husbands forehead; in the goose market number of freshmen, stuck here and there, with a graduae: like cloves with great heads in a gammon of bacon: here two gentlemen making a marriage between their heirs over a woo-pack; there a Ministers wife that could speak false latin very lispingly; here two in one corner of a shop: Londoners selling their wares, and other Gentlemen courting their wives; where they take up petticoats you should find scholars and towns-mens wives crowding together while their husbands were in another market busy amongst the Oxen; twas like a camp for in other Countries so many Punks do not follow an army. I could make an excellent description of it in a Comedy. (1.1.39–55)

In other words, this is a poet with the potential to fall into a purely Jonsonian way of thinking. The amused, poetic attachment to the mad displayed by Bellamont when they first enter

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Bedlam in fact prompts a ‘‘jest’’ to ‘‘creep into’’ Mayberry’s head; he plots with these others to falsely commit Bellamont. To understand this ‘‘jest’’ in full we turn, again, to the context of the Poets’ War and the argument over the proper or improper construction of art. In Chaucerian fashion, Bellamont had suggested to his fellow travelers that the group play ‘‘jests’’ on one another to see who would ‘‘bear the charge of the whole journey’’ (4.3.14). The assignment of this proffer to Bellamont/Chapman by Dekker and Webster is not haphazard. In the prologue to All Fools (1605), Chapman had lamented that, for contemporary audiences, the viciousness and personal nature of the attacks in the Poets’ War had supplanted the more ‘‘witty’’ and ‘‘harmless jests’’ of classical comedy: Who can show cause why the ancient comic vein Of Eupolis and Cratinus (now revived Subject to personal application) Should be exploded by some bitter spleens? Yet merely comical and harmless jests (Though ne’er so witty) be esteemed but toys, If void of th’ other satirism’s sauce. Who can show cause why quick Venerian jests Should sometimes ravish, sometimes fall far short Of the just length and pleasure of your ears, When our pure dames think them much less obscene That those that win your panegyric spleen? But our poor dooms (alas) you know are nothing. To your inspired censure ever we Must needs submit, and there’s the mystery. (13–27)6

In Mayberry’s practical joke, I would suggest, then, Dekker and Webster provide Chapman/Bellamont with what he had requested: a quick jest. Now wrongful commitment to Bethlem might not strike us (or Chapman for that matter) as witty, harmless fun, but given that the depiction of Chapman is so positive elsewhere in the play, we can say safely say that the commitment does not come from particularly ‘‘panegyric spleens.’’ The jest, in fact, like the final setting of The Honest Whore, Part One, seems to have a particular point to make about literature and art in the world. And that point, as Chapman suggested in his prologue to All Fools, may be difficult for modern audiences

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to understand. The strange jest on Bellamont should be viewed as a correction of the poet figure that does so much correcting in the play himself. In other words, when Bellamont takes his penchant for viewing and examining others for comedic purposes into Bethlem, Dekker and Webster remind him that he cannot stand apart as an observer this way. The jest, in short, is meant to help the poet keep his place in the follies of the world, as opposed to apart from it in solitude, judging, evaluating, critiquing, and, more simply, visiting and viewing without a clear sense of real human charity. One recalls Berowne’s required service at the end of Love’s Labor’s Lost to cure his excessive mirth making. Rosaline insists he spend a year in a hospital telling jokes to suffering patients: ‘‘Then if sickly ears, /Deafed with the clamors of their own dear groans, / Will hear your idle scorns, continue then’’ (5.2.853–55). Berowne agrees to the condition: ‘‘Ill jest a twelvemonth in an hospital’’ (5.3.90–91). Bellamont’s potential for ‘‘poetic’’ delusions, Dekker and Webster suggest, requires a dose of the real thing. Perhaps Dekker and Webster knew that Chapman’s art was turning in a rather Jonsonian direction. As Frank Manley writes in his introduction to All Fools, the play is Chapman’s ‘‘most human and large-minded. His comedies and tragedies that followed are satiric and fragmented, tainted with the bitterness and revulsion we associate with the Jacobean age.’’7 The jest has its intended effect on Bellamont. Bellamont’s amused, detached engagement with the madmen turns to violent struggle when the keeper, Full-Moone, tries to have him committed at the behest of the others. Bell. How now, Sdeath what do you mean? Are you mad? Full. Away sirra, bind him, hold fast: you want a wench sirrra, doe you? Bell. What wench? Will you take mine arms from me, being no Heralds? Let go you Dogs. Full. Bind him, be quiet: come, come, dogs, fie, and a gentleman. Bell. Master Maibery, Philip, master Maibery, uds foot. Full. Ile bring you a wench, are you mad for a wench. Bell. I hold my life my comrades have put this fools cap upon thy head: for I am not mad; I am not mad; I am not mad by Iesu! Full. Ask the Gentlemen that.

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Bell. Bith Lord I’ am as well in my wits, as any man in the house, and this trick put upon thee by these gallants in pure knavery. Full. Ile try that, answer me to this question: loose his arms a little, look you sir, three Geese nine pence; every Goose three pence, whats that a Goose, roundly, roundly one with another. Bell. Sfoot do you bring your Geese for me to cut up. Strike him soundly, and kick him. (4.3.164–84) The jest reminds an audience and Bellamont that poets and poetry are useful in the world, but they should be cautious about adopting a Jonsonian position outside the world of their subject lost in solitude of the creative act. That the jest is geared specifically toward Bellamont’s role as a poet is suggested in his surprisingly good natured response: ‘‘twas well done, you may laugh, you shall laugh Gentlemen: if the gudgeon had beenswallowed by one of you it had bin vile, but by Gad ‘tis nothing, for your best Poets indeed are mad for the most part’’ (4.3.190–94). The jest points specifically to Chapman/Bellamont’s rather extreme comparison between poetic fury and real madness and asks that he reconsider the limits of the poet and poetry in the world. Had the jest been perpetrated on another character without a clear literary point to it, the jest would have been, as many audiences and critics see it, simply ‘‘vile.’’ In this scene and Bellamont’s response, however, we also note again the central tension between the real theater of Bethlem and the developing stage. The latter seeks to make some kind of point, and limit the reactions of its audience within a fairly distinct range. The former, too, seeks to guide the audience to a fairly specific reaction—that is, to see and understand the suffering of the mad poor and provide charity—but it has much less control over the staging and audience response. As discussed in earlier chapters, the show of Bethlem could produce as many laughs as alms. The relationship between the show of Bethlem and the stage certainly can produce moving drama, but at great risk. The early modern playwright almost always struggles with this relationship to the real, almost always loses some degree of control over the dramaturgy. Stagings of this scene from Northward Ho are infrequent so, unlike the heath scene of King Lear considered in the next chapter, we have little real evidence of its strengths and weaknesses

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in performance. But some speculation on its effect on an audience not steeped in the literary arguments of the Poets’ War is useful. The opening contact with the keeper strays dangerously close to eliciting non-comedic feelings. Bellamont’s declarations of sanity—‘‘I am not mad, I am not mad by Jesu’’—prefigure, for example, Webster’s depiction of the Duchess of Malfi’s comparable and tragic declarations of sanity. It may elicit more pity or horror than laughs. In other words, to an audience the ‘‘jest’’ on Bellamont threatens the comedic sensibility of the play and, like so many mad scenes, is deplored by critics as a distraction or diversion. Dekker and Webster include several jokes—‘‘I am as in my wits, as any man in the house’’ Bellamont says at one point— seemingly to guide an audience’s response. At the end of the encounter, Bellamont seizes control of the situation and attacks the doctor. An audience is freer at this point in the staging, I think, to laugh rather than cringe. Similarly, we shall see, as we look ahead to Webster’s further work with mad scenes, an audience is allowed to laugh at Ferdinand’s madness, his attack of the doctor, after having its reactions to the Duchess carefully controlled. In one fairly complicated sense, then, Dekker and Webster get a dose of the medicine they sought to dispense to Chapman/Bellamont. In seeking to appropriate the show of Bethlem to make a literary point in their dialogue with Jonson and Chapman, the staged show of Bethlem retains its own voice in this ‘‘mad dialogue,’’ threatening to disrupt the intended meaning of the playwrights. Even Dekker, who, I have argued, sought to respect the otherness of madness ‘‘in charity’’ in a way Jonson did not, struggles to do so here. The mad of Bethlem resist complete appropriation by the newly developing representational stage. Just as Dekker and Webster sought to remind Chapman/ Bellamont that the poet cannot stand detached from the mad and use them as artistic fodder, so the staging of the scene itself reminds Dekker and Webster of their own limitations. Berowne’s service in the hospital, we recall, interrupts the comedy: ‘‘Our wooing doth not end like an old play; / Jack hath not Jill. These ladies’ courtesy/ Might well have made our sport a comedy’’ (5.2.864–66). I suggested that in engaging the theater of Bethlem in The Honest Whore, Part One, Dekker and Middleton juxtaposed a theater in the world to the repeated suggestion in Jonson’s innovative comical satire that his theatrical work was apart from the world, distinct enough to stand apart and judge objectively the world’s

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folly. Here, again, for Dekker and Webster in Northward Ho, Bethlem is the theater in the world that reminds the poet Chapman/ Bellamont and, ultimately, Dekker and Webster not to stand apart, amused and detached. At the very least, we see clear evidence by Dekker and Webster’s use of Bethlem in Northward Ho that the hospital was intimately connected to the Poets’ War, to the efforts of early modern playwrights to define the nature of their activity. Interestingly, we note that the concession Dekker and Webster make in Northward Ho to Jonson and Chapman— that the poet and poetry have a distinct and useful status in the world—relegates the theater of Bethlem to a diversion, device, or ‘‘jest’’ in the play. As the playwrights and the stage move closer to the kind of theater Jonson advocated, the playwrights and the stage move further from the other theatrical practices in the culture like the charitable show of Bethlem. The show of Bethlem just does not fit in the play as it did in The Honest Whore, Part One. In The Honest Whore, Part One the institution was central to the play’s resolution; in Northward Ho, the institution is far from central. Dekker and Webster use Bethlem to make a qualifying point about the place of the Jonsonian poet and the stage. They do not offer it, as Dekker and Middleton did, as an alternative to the Jonsonian stage. I have been referring to The Honest Whore, Part One as the stage’s initial engagement with the stage and, in one sense, of course, it was. We can consider now more fully, however, that The Honest Whore, Part One marks not an initial engagement, but a separation from the stage. It becomes so visible to us in that play, not because of any representative realism on the part of Dekker and Middleton, but because that ‘‘play’’ and the playwrights at the moment are still so deeply embedded in other theatrical practices in the culture, e.g., the civic pageant. In fact, we need Jonson’s more modern ‘‘literariness’’ to gloss these historically distant plays for us. Bethlem appears to us as a more or less direct representation in The Honest Whore, Part One, but we see in Dekker’s work, not a representation, but Bethlem; or, to be less dramatic, we see the real cultural, theatrical practices that shaped both the show of Bethlem and the stage. We see the hospital most distinctly in the moment before drama separates out, differentiates itself as Jonson wished, from the cultural matrix common to both. It is so real in The Honest Whore, Part One that we tend to insist on it being a piece of early modern representa-

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tive ‘‘realism’’ and—without making a distinction between art entangled in other theatrical practices and Jonsonian precursors to modern literary ‘‘realism’’ as art form—are baffled. In short, we do not recognize Bethlem when we see it. In contrast, we shall see in the next chapter Shakespeare’s more representative, more modern art manage to transform the reality of the show of Bethlem into a drama we can still understand and enjoy today. In this transformation, however, we lose, until now, the direct connection to Bethlem, the reality of Bethlem that empowers the play. What are left are the troubling vestiges of a common ‘‘theatrical’’ relationship. Paradoxically, in Dekker’s less representative art, the art with strong ties to the pageant and the show of Bethlem itself, we see Bethlem, it is a stage setting, but we can not understand its bizarre mixture of comedy and pain; in Shakespeare’s King Lear we do not see Bethlem or any place that cures and comforts madness, but we understand and feel its reality much more powerfully. Like the blinded Gloucester, perhaps, we see it ‘‘feelingly.’’

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5 ‘‘I know not/ Where I did lodge last night?’’: Shakespeare’s King Lear and the Search for Bethlem (Bedlam) Hospital IN CHAPTER 1 I SUGGESTED THAT FOUR YEARS BEFORE THE HONEST Whore, Part One, Shakespeare places the Jonsonian Malvolio in the position of a Bethlem patient in order to give the poet a taste of his own medicine and ‘‘cure’’ the madness of the antisocial steward; in so doing Shakespeare reveals a powerful, but troubling connection between the show of Bethlem and the stage, a structural proximity between ‘‘theaters’’ most fully realized, perhaps, in The Honest Whore, Part One. A new ‘‘reality’’ of madness emerges on the stage first, however, in Twelfth Night; this different madness, while certainly powerful and moving, also uneasily complicates the comic vision of the play. The gulling or ‘‘visitation’’ of Malvolio in the dark room turns quickly from recreation to pitiful sight. As Sir Toby says, this ‘‘pastime’’ quickly ‘‘prompts mercy’’ and the chief reveler himself voices the need to rid the play of such knavery. Shakespeare seems to realize at least in these scenes the very precarious relationship of this newly realistic staging of madness to the representational stage. Under pressure from Jonson’s innovations and criticisms, Shakespeare certainly realizes his old treatment of madness in the romantic comedies was at odds with the representational dictum to hold a mirror up to nature or present a ‘‘likenesse of Truthe.’’ That Jonson had been right about madness and Shakespeare wrong, however, did not lead Shakespeare to abandon his vision of the popular stage for Jonson’s. On the contrary, in his defense of the popular stage in Hamlet Shakespeare took ‘‘madness’’—that dramatic element from the romantic comedies Jon154

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son despised—and produced the remarkable likeness of truth called Ophelia. But in distinguishing his theater from Jonson’s, Shakespeare then found himself in the position of having to distinguish the developing representational stage from a theater that did not stage a likeness of the truth of madness, but the real thing. The primary purpose of this chapter is to show more fully that such a fundamental relationship between the show of Bethlem and the stage existed in history that would have necessitated such a distinction. The show of Bethlem and ‘‘Bedlam’’ dramas emerged from the same cultural matrix. We can only identify that common background, however, when both ‘‘theaters’’ separate out and define themselves more distinctly. The proximity between the two becomes visible, in other words, when they distance themselves from each other. The strange and powerful relationship and ultimate separation between the show of Bethlem and the stage is most distinct and most artistically productive in King Lear. To see the relationship between the two institutions more clearly it makes sense to turn to a genre other than comedy, one that moves and manipulates emotions in a way more comparable to what the governors of Bethlem intended at their theater of charity. It seems the most powerful presence of the theater of Bethlem would be found in tragedy and, in particular, the tragedy of Shakespeare’s that, not unlike the show of Bethlem, involves the ‘‘comedy of the grotesque’’ where ‘‘incident and dialogue so recklessly and miraculously walk the tightrope of our pity and the depths of bathos and absurdity’’: King Lear.1 Shakespeare’s King Lear, mainly in act 3 on the heath, registers most profoundly the common relationship between the stage and the theatrical practices of Bethlem, the hospital’s practice of showing the mad to elicit charity—and the distance between two. This is not, as I said in the introduction, to equate the stage and the hospital. The intent, again, is to bring into focus and correct the tendency to simply merge the hospital and the stage together under the rubric of ‘‘early modern spectacle’’ by noting only their cultural proximity. The stage and Bethlem are distinct cultural institutions. The spectacle of each had a decidedly different function: one was intended to provide dramatic pleasure, in the case of a tragedy like King Lear by depicting the activities

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of those of high social standing, while the other was intended to elicit generous sympathy for the mad poor. Shakespeare’s dramatic efforts register with equal force the artist’s engagement with the processes producing other spectacles in the culture and the distance between great tragedy and other spectacles. In seeking to elicit tragic pity, Shakespeare produced such moving scenes of madness—‘‘almost real’’ to quote one critic—in part because of the stage’s relationship to the real processes shaping the different theater of Bethlem.2 But in that he can not realize dramatically in Acts Three and Four the thing these real ‘‘other’’ processes produce—a place where the comfort and cure of madness could be staged in a way that would elicit pity— and because he visibly struggles with these processes before disengaging them for the sake of his own tragic requirements, the play also registers the distinct gap between dramatic practice and other cultural processes.3 Paradoxically, we locate the intersection between the real processes shaping Bethlem and the processes shaping King Lear by locating the place where they diverge: the place where the work of art has ‘‘absorbed’’ all it can of this other social process empowering it and must turn away or, to be more precise, turn inward to its own tragic development. We see, again, as we did in the dispute between Jonson and Dekker, the proximity of the stage to the theater of Bethlem, the playwrights’ willingness to invoke Bethlem’s dramatic power, but the tension between the developing, more representational stage and the hospital is now revealing more distinctly the distance between the two ‘‘spectacles.’’ The gap in King Lear, the absence of a place where madness can be staged in a way that will elicit pity, helps us understand why the play still moves us in such a powerful, disturbing, and almost extra-literary way, but we no longer show the mad to elicit charity.4

THE SHOW OF BETHLEM IN THE CONTEXT OF EARLY MODERN CHARITY AND POOR RELIEF It is necessary at this point to review and clarify what we know about the processes whereby the mad at Bethlem came to be shown to elicit charity. The staging of madness developed in the context of England’s efforts to relieve or manage the poor. These efforts, in turn, occur within the changing world of the Reforma-

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tion. One only has to note the dates of the major innovations in social welfare and poor relief to gain some sense of the role the Reformation must have played in allowing certain ideas and practices, certainly in existence prior to 1517, to develop: ‘‘Experiments in poor relief were initiated in Nuremberg in 1522, in Strasbourg and Leisnig in 1523–24, in Zurich, Mons, and Ypres in 1525, in Venice in 1528–29, in Lyons, Rouen, and Geneva between 1531 and 1535, and in Paris, Madrid, Toledo, and London in the 1540s.’’5 Generally, these innovations involved local governments taking control of charity from the church and large monastic institutions by implementing some sort of poor law system. Under such poor law systems, overseers for the poor collected money for the truly needy and distributed it to them. Humanist ideas and growing urban bourgeois city governments had been challenging and competing with ecclesiastical authority for some two hundred years prior to the Reformation for control of charitable institutions, but only in the 1520s and 30s do major changes occur.6 This is not to say that the ideas of Calvin and Luther shaped social welfare, although they were certainly influential, but that they disrupted discursive limits of what could be thought and said about the poor. Margo Todd has critiqued the historical tradition ranging from ‘‘Weber and Tawney to Hill and Walzer’’ that credits Protestant reformers with a ‘‘degree of originality of thought rarely attributed to and almost never deserved by any intellectual movement.’’7 And my understanding of the Reformation’s role in relation to charity and poor relief does not contradict her position. I differ with Todd only in that in critiquing the old view of Tawney, et al., she understates the role of religion generally and, in particular, neglects the role the Reformation played in allowing ideas present in Catholic humanism to come to fruition. The ideas underlying new Reformation policies and experiments, if not derived from ‘‘Catholic’’ humanists like Juan Luis Vives, by and large were expressed most distinctly in his work. Vives’s work was widely disseminated in part because of increasing fear of the New Poor across Europe. So great was the perceived threat that as part of its widespread effort to control the ‘‘New Poor,’’ England sought to control even the limited power the poor had in charitable interactions: the poor’s ability to elicit charity, their ability to move others to give. The spectacle of the

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poor was simply too volatile and unnerving. Consider the widely influential treatise by Vives, De Subventione Pauperum (1526), a treatise advocating large, state-controlled systems for distributing charity that informed most major poor relief projects in early modern culture, in which we see the common antagonism and repulsion to beggars alluded to above: Suppose there is at some church or other high festival drawing great crowds: one has to make one’s way into the building between the two lines of diseases, vomitings, ulcers, or other afflictions disgusting even to speak of . . . Do you think they can all be made of iron that they would not be disturbed, fasting as they are, at the sight? Especially when ulcers of this sort are not only forced upon the eyes, but upon the nose and mouth, and are almost touched by the hands and bodies of the passersby, so insolent are they begging.8

This repugnance to the poor should not suggest a decrease in charitable impulses.9 Vives’s main interest was in modifying charity and controlling the poor. His antagonism is directed specifically toward the spectacle of the poor and the manner in which charity was elicited and distributed. One could say Vives and those around him were moved by the sight described above—he is advocating massive poor relief—but not in the way they wanted to be moved and, more importantly, not by whom they wanted to be moved. Poor relief and charity, including the power to move others to give, should be in the hands of the authorities. The Ypres Scheme for Poor Relief, Forma Subventionis Pauperum (1531), the plan that would play a significant role in the development of the English Poor Law, suggested other spectacles could move people to give, spectacles that did not involve direct contact with the poor. The ‘‘lyvely voyces’’ of the preacher ‘‘hath more efficactice strength and credence than the syghinges and sobbynges of a thousand complaynte of the pore men and dothe more good than the heuy and pytuose outcryes of the wretched bodyes.’’10 Most interestingly for our study, Vives singled out the cure of madness as the first area of reform: The cure of reason, man’s most precious possession, is of first importance. When a person of unsound mind is brought to hospital, first ascertain if his insanity is congenital, or caused by some mishap; if there is a chance of recovery, or not; nothing must be done to increase the insanity or cause it to persist—such as irritating or mock-

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ing the sufferer. How inhumane that is! Treatment suited to each individual case should be tried: for some, applications and diet; for some, gentle treatment; for some, teaching. Others may require coercion or bonds, but all should be done in a way likely to pacify them, and lead to recovery.11

Not surprisingly, then, given this emphasis on harnessing the theatrical power of the poor and the importance of curing the mad, a hospital for the cure of madness that could stage its patients in a way that would not threaten or disgust givers of charity later would find a significant place in England’s poor relief system. In an effort to transfer what limited influence the poor had in charitable relations to the state, the culture exaggerated the power of the poor, their ability, in the words of Shakespeare’s Edgar in King Lear, to ‘‘enforce charity.’’ And, it was suggested, the instrument of charity was not just being ‘‘enforced’’ by the poor, it was too easily accessed and manipulated: ‘‘these counterfayted poore and usysured nedy folke that lyve idely and under the cloke of beggynge they idyly hyde and shadow sluggardly and al mischef to the great undoinge of the comen welth.’’12 William C. Carroll argues that the sixteenth century’s obsessive and inadequate attempts to brand the poor as frauds were an attempt to exaggerate the accessibility of the system and the acting prowess of beggars: ‘‘Rarely has any culture fashioned so wily and powerful an enemy out of such degraded and pathetic materials.’’13 Rather than allow the poor, counterfeit or otherwise, any role in charitable relations, Vives suggested that officials remove the poor from the streets, then collect ‘‘voluntary alms’’ from citizens and distribute relief, thus ensuring both that charity would be given and that the spectacle would end. The state would determine as completely as possible who was deserving poor; the state, rather than the beggars, would ‘‘enforce’’ charity. Such was the logic informing the new programs for poor relief following the Reformation and the end of the Catholic church’s dominance over charitable practices. Such reasoning may seem unremarkable to us because it is the genesis of our welfare system, but for England in 1536, such thinking was too ‘‘radical.’’14 In that year the state tried to employ a plan for poor relief, presumed to have been written by William Marshall, but never fully implemented the Vivesian tenets outlined: the common dole and

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almsgiving were to be banned, all able-bodied men put to work, medical attention provided for the poor, parish overseers assigned to determine the truly needy and distribute funds, and a compulsory parish poor rate enforced to pay for it all. But as G. R. Elton has argued, England did not have the institutional mechanisms, such as the parish overseers and public works administration, to make the plan work: the actual 1536 act took from Marshall’s draft ‘‘all that was new in its principles, but it dropped all the new machinery which alone gave reality to good intentions.’’15 The strong resistance to compulsory national poor rates and the ban on common doles also kept Marshall’s plan from coming to fruition. Several contradictory ‘‘provisos in defence’’ of almsgiving maimed ‘‘the act from the start.’’16 The state could not fill the charitable ‘‘vacuum’’ created by the Reformation; moreover, having just seen the church lose its hold on charity, no one had much interest in giving the state so much control.17 We read in the 1536 Act itself the struggle to control charitable practices: It is therefore enacted . . . that no manner of person or persons shall make or cause to be made any such common or open dole, or shall give any ready money in alms, otherwise than to the common boxes and common gatherings. . . . upon pain to leese and forfeit ten times the values of all such ready money as shall be given in alms contrary to the tenor and purport of the same. . . . And that every person or persons of this realm . . . be bound or charged . . . to give or to distribute any ready money. . . . unto such common boxes. . . .18

As great as the fear of the poor was, the state met with resistance because the population was unwilling to relinquish what had been a personal and pious matter; the givers of charity were reluctant to have their role in charitable interactions absorbed by the state. Similar plans had succeeded on the continent, but only at the local or city level; England was the first country to try to establish a national plan.19 Consequently, the actual enforcement of the ideas of Marshall were put in abeyance until that crucial year 1598 when the Tudor state did have the power and institutional mechanisms in place to substantially influence charity. As Slack remarks, while the earlier 1536 act survived only on paper, it did lay ‘‘down the guidelines’’ for future poor-relief, specifically the poor laws of 1598–1601.20 The 1536 Act’s emphasis on

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a poor rate, parish responsibility (‘‘freezing’’ the poor, to use W. K. Jordan’s term, in their home parish), public labor for the poor, and strict punishment of frauds would remain the foundation of England’s poor law legislation until the nineteenth century. But in midcentury, charity had been loosened from its ecclesiastical moorings and no ‘‘national’’ institution could seize firm control of it. In brief, from shortly before the Reformation until 1598, charitable practices had to be negotiated between the Crown, the church, local governments, and the individual. The Crown had to work with local governments to try to manage charity on a smaller scale rather than try to implement a national plan of the sort suggested in 1536. To take the example pertinent to our study, between 1544 and 1557 the Crown in cooperation with the City government set the terms and practices of charitable giving in the capital by forming the London Hospitals. Bethlem, St. Bartholomew’s, St. Thomas, Christ’s, and Bridewell together became the central charitable organization of London. Each hospital, again, served a specific charitable group. Through the hospitals, the state, in cooperation with the City, would designate the ‘‘deserving poor’’ and control charity. The institutional influence of the City, while real and with real effects, was, however, in one sense illusory. Edward VI granted London’s request for church hospitals and monastic properties to use for charitable purposes, but that ownership was certainly not secure. Edward VI granted St. Bartholomew’s outright to the city in 1547. And in 1553 a charter granted to the citizens of London the hospitals of St. Thomas, Christ, and Bridewell. But ‘‘Mary hesitated to confirm the grant of Bridewell [and Bethlem] until February 1556 . . . and it was not until September 1557 that the hospitals were united and the system finally completed. . . . The delay was partly a result of the uncertain status of monastic property at the beginning of the reign.’’21 As early as 1555, the London Hospitals came into conflict with Mary’s regime because ‘‘they stood as a reproach to good Catholics . . . for their very creation marked the loss of religious houses.’’ In John Howes’s Contemporary Account in Dialogue-form of the Foundation and Early History of Christ’s Hospital and of Bridewell and St. Thomas’ Hospital (1889) the character of ‘‘Dignity’’ notes that ‘‘the city had much to do to keep them from suppressing.’’22 We return, again, to the complex problem of religion. The hos-

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pitals were not considered strictly a Protestant innovation— Catholics and Reformers alike joined in their creation—but the hospitals were more closely aligned with the Reformers. The staunchly Protestant Edward VI’s role in their creation suggests this and, in the case of Bethlem, the Lutheran martyr Robert Barnes was a keeper for a period of time.23 The History of Bethlem points out, too, that ‘‘the master of Bethlem from 1529 until his spectacular downfall and execution in May 1536 was George Bulleyn or Boleyn, Queen Anne’s brother. Like his sister, Bulleyn was a supporter of the evangelicals.’’24 Such associations in part made Bethlem and the other hospitals sites of political and social struggles, largely between the Crown and the City, as the central government sought more control over poor relief and charity. As Susan Brigden remarks, ‘‘The Hospitals were a perpetual reminder not only of lands lost to the Church but of power lost, for control of hospitals belonged to the City.’’25 The city government’s control over charities had been increasing even before the Reformation and was always a challenge to church authority, but the formation of the city hospitals marked nearly an official usurpation of the church’s power. Bethlem, in particular, was a point of conflict. In contrast to the contested but outright grants of St. Bartholomew’s and the other hospitals, the crown retained ownership of Bethlem so that institution is in a slightly ‘‘different position’’ from the other hospitals. Patricia Allderidge explains that ‘‘the City became the governor, but not the possessor, of Bethlem, a position which was confirmed in a charter of Charles I in 1638.’’26 Bethlem was a site, we shall see, where the central government’s efforts to control charity and poor relief were, in contrast to other institutions, more distinctly visible. As we shall see in chapter 7’s consideration of The Changeling, for example, the crown could assert its authority when it wished. For all their innovation, the hospitals did not solve the problems of highly visible and offensive begging that Vives and others attacked. The poor filled the streets of London in increasing numbers.27 Consequently, the state’s efforts to control charity, to reabsorb into Tudor-Stuart ideology the New Poor, continued. Each poor law continued to stress (exaggerate?) the problem of the sturdy beggars.28 And, in 1598, the state eventually established something like the national control it had been looking for since the Reformation. The 1598 poor laws essentially gave what

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little control the City had over to the Crown, including control of Bethlem, in that this massive legislation was now the primary form of poor relief in the country. The national policy of the poor laws severely reduced the prestige and significance of the hospitals by authorizing Justices of the Peace and parish officers under their direction to determine need, method, and giving in any parish. Parishes now retained their own alms, a process unofficially underway by the 1560s, and under sanction of state law money formerly directed to the hospitals went elsewhere.29 England had established some semblance of a poor rate in 1572, but special provisions were made to protect the London hospitals. The 1598 Acts made no such provisions and ‘‘destroyed what remained of central organization through the hospitals.’’30 The London Hospitals, including Bethlem, would eventually regain some independence from the Crown, but at the time of Shakespeare they were engulfed by the nationalist and absolutist policies of the Tudor-Stuart state. Bethlem’s fate was shaped mainly by what Slack calls a ‘‘purposeful direction from the center.’’31 While the Poor Laws had reduced the significance of the Royal Hospitals, indeed had put the two systems of poor relief at odds with one another, the effort to establish a national program had clearly designated the hospitals as legitimate places of charity. And, as a result of Tudor-Stuart efforts to shape poor relief, Bethlem became a particular kind of charity, one that distinctly bore the imprints of the culture-wide efforts to control and harness the spectacle of the New Poor. This place of madness became a site where the culture could ‘‘freeze’’ a specific group of the poor in place, determine who was deserving and undeserving, and harness their spectacular power to elicit charity. In 1598, the governors of Bridewell visited Bethlem ‘‘to view and p[er] use the defaultes and want of rep [ar] ac[i]ons’’ at the hospital; this inspection was the first of its kind in forty years.32 As suggested in the introduction, exactly how this newly inspired interest in an old charity is related to the poor relief legislation is unclear from Bridewell and Bethlem documents; however, the chronological coincidence and the facts we do have warrant some informed speculation. First, the inspectors initiated repairs. Second, in what seems to be an uncommon move, a long-term keeper was dismissed.33 And the language of the report, according to the History of Bethlem, suggests that inspec-

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tors were concerned not just with how fit the hospital was for patients, but how it looked to outsiders: It was partly the fact that it was so loathsomely and filthely, kept not fitt for any man to into’ which exercised the visiting committee. ‘‘Come into’’ might here equate to ‘‘be admitted to,’’ but, given that the Governors had already commented on the unfitness of the House as a dwelling, it seems more likely that what they had in mind at this point was that visitors might be put off. . . . In other words, criticism of the Hospital may have been the product of the Governors’ desire to encourage unrelated visitors. So one thing which may have changed between 1598 and 1632, by which time the Commissioners distinguished between friends of some of the distracted persons’ and ‘‘persons that come to see the House, and the prisoners,’’ is that the Bridewell Governors had decided to increase revenues by exploiting the attraction of the Hospital as spectacle.34

This makes a great deal of sense given Bethlem’s place in the larger context of charity and poor relief. Financially, Bethlem had long struggled more than the other hospitals because of its small size and its unusual administrative relationship to Bridewell. It seems Bethlem never received the large charitable gifts bestowed on larger hospitals, and gifts meant for Bethlem may never have made their way through Bridewell administration.35 Bethlem was not even included in the annual Spital Sermons, another spectacle designed to elicit charity, until 1641.36 Nevertheless, while never fully supported financially by either Crown or City, Bethlem’s charity was sanctioned and encouraged. The combined pressures to centralize poor relief and charity, and the City’s willingness to maintain its old institution, it seems, prompted and allowed Bethlem to function as a theater of charity. The degree to which the Governors intended to make visitation and the spectacle of the mad a means to generate revenue may have limited relevance. It happened. As suggested, it is very likely that visitation was a casual and common practice earlier that required little comment. What becomes visible in and around 1598 is only a formalization of what had been a standard, everyday, unremarkable culture practice. The evidence suggests that this theater of charity at least took on a new, more distinct form after the national legislation of 1598. Before 1598, we recall, there is only one substantial suggestion, Sir Thomas More’s, of

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visitation at Bethlem. The first ‘‘undoubted reference to a reallife visit to see the show of Bethlem is from 1610, when Lord Percy spent 10s on a visit, possibly in the company of Lady Penelope and his two sisters.’’37 In the 1598 census of Bethlem, again the first government inspection of the hospital in forty years, the patients are listed by proper name: Salvado Mendes, Neme Barker, Elizabeth Androwes, Jone Bromfeild, Henrye Richards, Elizabeth Dicons, etc. By the 1607 census, however, after Dekker and Middleton first used ‘‘Bedlam’’ as a stage setting in The Honest Whore, Part One (1605) and Shakespeare had exploited the relationship between madness and charity in King Lear, many patients had acquired more theatrical monikers: ‘‘Black Will, Welsh Harry, Old Madam, Joan of the Hospital, Abraham.’’38 The show of Bethlem as show, as entertainment or recreation, becomes visible to us at precisely the historical moment when new theatrical categories, Shakespeare and Jonson’s modern representational stage, become visible.

‘‘A SIGH LIKE THEM OF BEDLAM’’ Although King Lear is scarcely all about madness or Bethlem, the playwright engages the discourse of early modern madness in developing the play’s central dramaturgical movement: Shakespeare makes an audience feel, to one degree or another, pity for the title character.39 This dramaturgical movement is important because in Act Three an audience finds itself wishing Lear could find relief specifically from his developing madness. Turning momentarily to a primary literary source for Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, the anonymous King Leir, we see the playwright substituting a mad Lear for a starving Leir (2160–80), a scene constructed to elicit pity for another specifically ‘‘mad’’ scene.40 By interjecting madness, rather than simple starvation, Shakespeare offers a novel and moving change to an old story.41 In the course of doing so, though, he also reveals and engages again the processes already forming an ‘‘alternative theatrical practice’’: the charitable show of Bethlem. The first engagement with the processes shaping Bethlem is visible, in act 1, when Edmund assigns for himself the role of ‘‘villainous melancholy’’ (1.2.122). He will usurp the inheritance of legitimate Edgar and his character will use ‘‘a sigh like them

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of Bedlam’’ to initiate his plan. That is, in the quarto’s first reference to Bedlam (1.2.122), Edmund plans to imitate a sigh ‘‘like them of Bedlam’’ whereas in the folio edition he plans to imitate a sigh like ‘‘Tom o’ Bedlam’’ (1.1.126). William Carroll argues that the revision, if not simply a ‘‘compositor’s misreading,’’ suggests an ‘‘attempt to equate Edmund’s assumed voice and Edgar’s enforced role . . . more closely.’’42 I would say, however, that the earlier version indicates a closer proximity to the cultural source on which the play draws. The ‘‘shift’’ to the more theatrical ‘‘Tom of Bedlam’’ parallels the shift to more theatrical names for Bethlem patients in the census data above. In other words, just as the reality of Bethlem threatened to transform the theatricality of the stage, the theatricality of the stage threatened to transform the reality of Bethlem and its ostensibly charitable show. The show of Bethlem became identifiable as show as the representational stage developed. When Edgar approaches, Edmund lures him in by sighing: ‘‘O these eclipses do portend these divisions’’ (1.2.14). The sigh elicits a concerned question from Edgar: ‘‘How now, brother Edmund, what serious contemplation are you in?’’ The sound of the Bedlam is as available to Edmund as a means of soliciting a ‘‘charitable’’ response as the disguise of the Bedlam-beggar is available later to Edgar. Edmund clearly juxtaposes his new theatrical ‘‘role’’ to the old, conventional role of Edgar: ‘‘the catastrophe of old comedy.’’ Edmund’s theatrical abilities draw on the energies of real people and a real place; Edgar’s theatrical capabilities, for the moment, consist of worn out stage conventions.43 Despite referring to himself as ‘‘new’’ and Edgar as ‘‘old,’’ it is Edmund that Weimann might call a platea figure complexly integrated with Edgar’s illusionistic locus figure. Edmund, a character distinctly related to the medieval vice figure, has, in these early lines, a much closer relationship to the audience and the immediate world of the theater. He speaks directly to the audience’s world while calling attention to the theatrical conventions at work in the world of the play. Edgar, as yet, seeks no such relationship with an audience. What is ‘‘new’’ about Edmond’s platea figure is his adoption of the ‘‘real’’ Bedlam-beggar’s sigh. When Edgar adopts the comparable theatrics of a Bedlam-beggar, I will show, he comes to occupy the same platea role relative to Lear’s locus-centered or illusionistic role. In short, as real and relatively ‘‘new’’ as the ‘‘show’’ of Bethlem may have been, it has

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ties to the older, popular, platea-centered drama and is at odds with the increasingly locus-centered theater of Shakespeare. More important at the moment, though, is the function Edmund’s Bedlam disguise plays. Part of the dramatic movement of act 1 to make an audience sympathize with the King, Edmund’s act immediately precedes the scenes involving Goneril’s intentional antagonizing of King Lear (1.3.11–15), and the reappearance of the disguised Kent, who the audience trusts, to help the King (1.4.1–7). As Stephen Booth points out, while the opening scene may leave an audience yearning ‘‘to see Lear get his comeuppance,’’ by act 1 scene 4, Shakespeare has shown enough of the other characters so that one is ‘‘ready to see Lear’s situation from Lear’s point of view.’’44 Early in the play, then, Shakespeare discloses and thus employs the ‘‘illegitimate’’ appropriations of Bethlem madness largely to prepare an audience to be moved by Lear’s ‘‘legitimate’’ suffering and thus engages the processes shaping Bethlem.45 The exaggerated figure of the sturdy or Bedlam-beggar helped produce, as suggested above, the ‘‘legitimate’’ institutions of poor relief like the Bethlem of the mid- and lateseventeenth century. That Shakespeare achieves authenticity for Lear’s madness in much the same way the state legitimized Bethlem’s theater of charity, by disclosing sturdy or Bedlam beggars, in part demonstrates the common cultural relationship between the hospital and the stage. Lear is juxtaposed to false begging throughout the early part of the play. Goneril asks him to ‘‘voluntarily’’ give up his train: ‘‘Be thou desired/ By her that else will take the thing she begs/ A little to disquantity your train’’ (1.4.234–35). Lear’s forceful response is ‘‘Darkness and Devils!’’ He clings to his sense of self as absolute monarch here despite the fact that the material conditions sustaining that self evaporate, but we should also note that the contrast between his and Goneril’s forceful ‘‘begging’’ prepares an audience to accept the authenticity of his later madness. In Act Two, in a related context, Lear indignantly refuses to ‘‘pension beg’’ (2.4.184). Earlier, Lear had threatened to whip the Fool for suggesting the King ‘‘beg’’ a coxcomb of his daughters (1.4.101). Disclosing the Bedlam-beggar’s methodology in Edgar’s Poor Tom, however, most clearly distances Lear from fraudulent displays of madness and false begging. Edgar’s willingness to assume a role, to negotiate his disenfranchisement, highlights

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Lear’s unwillingness to do so. Edgar will play at madness; Lear will not or cannot. While I may scape I will preserve myself, and am bethought To take the basest and most poorest shape That ever penury in contempt of man Brought near to beast. My face I’ll grime with filth, Blanket my loins, elf all my hair with knots, And with presented nakedness outface The wind and persecution of the sky. The country gives me proof and precedent Of Bedlam beggars who with roaring voices Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary, And with this horrible object from low service, Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes and mills Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers Enforce their charity. Poor Turlygod! poor Tom! (2.3.5–20)

Shakespeare and Edgar are very much aligned with the TudorStuart state here. The wandering Bedlam-beggars, the state and the play would have an audience believe, were ‘‘enforcing’’ something which by rights should be freely given or exchanged, eliding the state’s own growing control over charitable relations and exaggerating (and literally ‘‘demonizing’’) the influence such beggar/actors exerted. In the poor laws, the state was indeed ‘‘enforcing charity,’’ but that activity, like Lear’s madness, was authentic and legitimate.46 As many have pointed out, ‘‘Tom o’ Bedlam’’ was exactly the type of figure the poor laws were designed to eliminate. Why would Shakespeare appropriate for Edgar, a character both play and audience are generally sympathetic towards, the role of a ‘‘documented fraud’’? One answer is to distance Lear from exploiters of charity and develop and preserve the more ‘‘authentic’’ feelings he will elicit. Just as the culture used the image of the Bedlam-beggar to legitimize the charitable show of Bethlem, the play uses the illegitimacy of Bedlam beggars to make Lear’s madness seem legitimate. The relentless exposure (or creation of) fraudulent beggars in the sixteenth-century made the charitable theater of Bethlem legitimate; and to a large extent Lear’s re-

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fusal to participate in false begging authenticates his madness. The inability to beg defines complete or absolute madness in this play. When later in the play the Old Man describes Poor Tom as ‘‘madman and beggar, too,’’ Gloucester responds, ‘‘A has some reason, else he could not beg’’ (4.1.30). In the scene immediately following Edgar’s transformation to Poor Tom, when Regan tells Lear to ask for Goneril’s forgiveness, Lear mocks, albeit pathetically, the ‘‘acts’’ of beggars: ‘‘Dear daughter, I confess that I am old; /Age is unnecessary. On my knees I beg/ That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food’’ (2.4.124–27). The effect is to distance Lear from inauthenticity. Lear explicitly demonstrates his refusal to participate in any ‘‘show’’ of charity, familial or otherwise. As an absolute monarch, he should not have to ask for deference. Lear’s gestures are, Regan tells him, ‘‘unsightly tricks’’; indeed they are precisely the tricks Edgar exploited in the preceding scene. Unlike Edgar’s efforts to ‘‘preserve himself,’’ Lear refuses to put on a show, and parodies the very notion that he would. Certainly, Edgar’s disenfranchisement and even his ‘‘performance’’ elicit some sympathy from the audience, but it is a different sort, more distinctly theatrical than Lear’s later ‘‘realistic’’ suffering on the heath.47 One could argue, of course, that the strategies of the state and the strategies of the dramatist are simply analogous and have no connection in history. The state used these strategies to produce a legitimate place where madness could be comforted in a way that would move spectators, while Shakespeare uses these strategies to produce a verisimilar image of a mad King. To see that Shakespeare’s stage actually has fundamental connections to the historical processes shaping Bethlem, one must consider the extent to which in act 3 his dramatic efforts to legitimize Lear’s suffering and move an audience ultimately lead him to search for a place on the stage where Lear’s madness can be comforted in a way that will elicit pity. The effort to stage the place of mad cure produces much of the dramatic power of act 3, much of that act’s ‘‘reality.’’ But the dramatist eventually has to abandon the effort because the staging of such a place is essentially at odds with the generic demands of early modern tragedy and the developing representational stage. Ultimately, the abandonment of this effort and the absence of a place on the stage where madness can be cured mark the gap between an alternative theatrical practice and the tragic stage itself; but in that the temporary struggle to

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create such a place generates such moving drama, the gap also helps us locate, paradoxically, the intersection between the processes producing Bethlem and the processes producing King Lear.

SEARCHING FOR BETHLEM ON THE STAGE When Act Three opens, the Fool works ‘‘to outjest/ [Lear’s] heart struck injuries’’ (3.1.16). In this situation, however, as even the Fool acknowledges, Lear does not need the orientation the Fool offers, but a place, a shelter. Indeed, the Fool will disappear soon after Lear begins seeking that place. When Kent finds the Fool and Lear in the storm, he suggests a nearby ‘‘hovel.’’ Gracious my lord, hard by here is a hovel. Some friendship will it level you gainst the tempest. Repose you there whilst I to this hard house— More hard than is the stone whereof tis raised, Which even but now, demanding after you, Denied me to come in—return and force Their scanted courtesy. (3.2.60–67)

The ‘‘hovel’’ here is figured as a rough, perhaps unsatisfactory, place of charity, clearly juxtaposed to the ‘‘hard house’’ of Gloucester, currently governed by Cornwall and Goneril. Interestingly, too, Kent’s mention of the ‘‘hovel’’ coincides with Lear’s ‘‘turn’’ in ‘‘wit’’ (3.2.68), and Lear’s new found concern for the Fool: ‘‘How dost my boy? Art cold? / I am cold myself.’’ The ‘‘hovel,’’ I am suggesting, first links madness, charity, and Lear; that is, a single place on the stage signals the connection between Bethlem’s two identifying features and the character for whom Shakespeare is trying to elicit pity.48 Lear becomes suddenly insistent on getting to the hovel: ‘‘Where is this straw, my fellow’’ (3.2.70)? ‘‘Come your hovel,’’ he says, and then, a few lines later, ‘‘Come, bring us this hovel.’’ The figurative association between the hovel, charity, and madness continues in the scene between Kent’s suggestion and the actual arrival at the place. In 3.3, having just been treated inhospitably in his own house, Gloucester, like Lear, has begun to think of others. He plans to help Lear and asks Edmund to ‘‘Go you and maintain

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talk with the Duke, that my charity be not perceived’’ (3.3.14– 15). In 3.4, Kent, Lear, and the Fool arrive at the hovel, and Kent begins a series of entreaties to Lear to ‘‘enter’’ the hovel, a series which will last for the next 150 lines. ‘‘Here is the place, my lord; good my lord, enter’’ (3.4.1). Even though in 3.2, Lear had been receptive to the hovel, he now refuses to enter. In fact, he will not ‘‘enter’’ any place until line 159, an agonizingly long time, Booth points out, during which an audience increasingly desires Lear’s comfort. Shakespeare, in other words, instills a desire for a place that will comfort and cure Lear’s madness, brings us tantalizing close to such a place, but defers a close look at it. Shakespeare links Lear’s sudden and somewhat confusing resistance to the hovel to the King’s struggle to maintain his wits. ‘‘Let me alone,’’ he tells Kent, believing, it seems, the very act of entering the hovel will damage his spirit, further erode his mental capacity. Kent: Good my lord, enter. Lear: Wilt break my heart? Kent: I had rather break mine own. Good my Lord, enter. (3.4.5–7)

Certainly this refusal involves Lear’s reluctance to debase completely his royal self. But the hovel is at once a figurative place of madness, charity, and squalor and should not be too easily generalized. Refusing to think of his daughters’ ingratitude, Lear continues: ‘‘O, that way madness lays. / Let me shun that; no more that’’ (3.4.19–20). ‘‘That way’’ no doubt refers to Lear’s thought processes, but standing here in front of the hovel that he is being encouraged to enter, it is also a physical direction, a place on the stage that he will ‘‘shun’’ because ‘‘madness lies’’ there. The Fool enters the hovel at this point (3.4.23), and Lear makes his famous plea for charity. Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en Too little care of this. Take physic, Pomp;

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Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the Heavens more just. (3.4.28–36)

Many have noted that Shakespeare has not carefully prepared an audience for this display of social concern. Harry Berger remarks, the plea for the poor ‘‘has comically little to do with what has been going on since the play’s opening.’’ The reflections are, he says, ‘‘conspicuously irrevelant.‘‘49 But given the historical processes informing the play, the lines have everything to do with not only what has been going on since the play’s opening, but with what is inherent in the play’s construction.

THE POLITICS OF BETHLEM AND ST. STEPHEN’S DAY This moment in front of the hovel may be connected even more specifically to Bethlem’s history than I have been suggesting. According to the 1608 Quarto title page, King Lear was first performed at court on St. Stephen’s Day (‘‘Boxing Day’’) 1606. ‘‘On this day,’’ Margreta de Grazia reminds us, ‘‘the poor were entitled to the hospitality and charity of the rich’’; the poor ‘‘demanded instead of begged’’ their charity.50 On this day, then, it is not surprising that Shakespeare and the King’s Men would perform a play that in some way demonstrates the ‘‘bond’’ between rich and poor, King and beggar that such a holiday ritualizes. And another look at the anonymous True Chronicle Historie of King Leir suggests the possibility that Shakespeare was seeking to produce just such a play. The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir, John Murphy tells us, was deeply involved in the polemics of Reformation, including disputes over charity.51 In general, the play persistently elicits pity from an audience and makes connections between feeling such pity and giving charity. Cordella, Leir’s youngest daughter, appeals for all to live in ‘‘perfit charity’’ (1091); Perillus offers his own flesh to feed the starving Leir (2120–30); Leir hopes that ‘‘kind pity’’ will ‘‘mollify the hearts’’ of those who see him in such ‘‘great extreames’’ (2172). That Shakespeare might seize on a source like this for a performance at Court on St. Stephen’s Day is not surprising. For King Leir engages in a fairly common discursive strategy that

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may simultaneously categorize the poor, legitimize the King’s absolute authority, and confirm the bond between the top of the social order and the bottom: a strategy already identified in a related Shakespearean context by Carroll as ‘‘symbolic inversion.’’52 In this strategy, the legitimacy of the King and the social standing of the beggar are conveyed by displaying their relationship as opposites. As an example of this trope, Carroll cites Hamlet’s famous response to a query about Polonius to demonstrate how these two apparent opposites, King and beggar, ‘‘are at the same time twins.’’ A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table. (4.3.19–24)

The antithesis of beggar/king, top and bottom, Carroll argues, ‘‘confirms the king’s hierarchical superiority’’ but also involves the political risk of placing the King too close to a beggar, thus calling royal authority ‘‘into question.’’ In King Leir monarchy is never seriously called into question. While the King does become a starving ‘‘beggar’’ for a time, his rightful position is restored at the end. Shakespeare appears to take a much greater political risk in the depiction of his ‘‘inverted monarch.’’ In substituting a mad Lear for a starving Leir, Shakespeare intensifies the King’s suffering and then never completely alleviates that suffering; he never inverts the inversion. In other words, he seems to display the relationship between King and beggar, as Hamlet does above, to show the Crown’s vulnerability. Somewhat paradoxically, however, turning the King into a mad object of pity on St. Stephen’s Day, and keeping him an object of pity, is in line with the ideology of Tudor-Stuart poor relief generally and the later exertion by King James of royal prerogative powers toward Bethlem in particular. As we shall see in chapter 7 and the consideration of The Changeling, at the time of King Lear, the Crown was in the process of seeking control of charity and poor relief generally, and by 1618 King James was personally active in the affairs of Bethlem, asserting control over ‘‘His’’ hospital in a dispute with the City of London.53 Against the wishes of the City Governors,

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James placed his own physician, Hilkiah Crooke, in charge of the ‘‘city’’ hospital. A more politicized understanding of Bethlem and the play would involve a consideration of the extent to which Shakespeare’s display of King Lear’s suffering was a distinctly dramatic part of a larger cultural act in which Tudor and Stuart ideology tried to transfer all aspects of charity, including the ability of the mad poor to elicit it, to the Crown.54 The extent to which these moments in the play have any such topical connections is, of course, difficult to say. But at the point in history when England was reshaping its mad hospital largely because of directives from the central government and the institution of the poor laws, a fictional King regrets, in front of a real King who will later take a personal interest in madhouse business, that more has not been done to help the poor. And, we shall see, the new found empathy of this fictional King leads to improved conditions for a Bedlam beggar.

DRAWING THE CURTAINS ON BETHLEM When the Fool reenters the stage after Lear’s plea for charity, he confirms Lear’s sense that ‘‘madness,’’ at least figuratively, lies in the hovel. ‘‘Come not in here, nuncle’’ (3.4.44), he cries to Lear after seeing Poor Tom in the hovel. Kent demands to know who ‘‘grumbles there in the straw.’’ ‘‘Do Poor Tom some Charity’’, Edgar cries (3.4.52). Several lines later, after talking to the mad, nearly naked ‘‘Poor Tom,’’ Lear strips off his clothes and begins speaking wildly: ‘‘Off, off, you lendings, come on’’ (3.4.97). One of the reasons this sight can be so stirring, of course, is that juxtaposed to the feigned madman, Lear’s madness seems authentic and legitimate. As Alexander Leggatt writes, ‘‘Other stage madmen are performers; Lear is the thing itself.’’55 The ‘‘Bedlam-beggar,’’ on the stage, as in ‘‘real’’ life, helped produce a legitimate figure of madness that could profoundly move audiences. While the verisimilitude of Lear’s mad suffering has been clearly established, however, the effort to do so has lead Shakespeare to produce a place on the stage that, while suggestive and moving for a few lines, quickly threatens the tragic movement. Whether we consider it a stage property or imaginative projec-

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tion, Poor Tom’s hovel is too small, too squalid, to further move an audience to pity Lear. Shakespeare has taken us to the limits of tragic representation and put an audience at the brink of a different sort of theater. An audience is moved at the prospect that King Lear will have to share this space, but actually to bring King Lear inside will only disgust, horrify, and confuse. As Cordelia was heard to say, apparently believing her father actually had hovelled ‘‘with swine and rogues forlorn/ In short and musty straw’’ (4.7.35–36) rather than just stepped near the hovel, ‘‘let pity not be believed’’ (4.3.29). Tragic pity could not exist under such circumstances. Two related, but very different, theaters cannot exist in one place. We recall the stage direction from Twelfth Night: Malvolio must be placed ‘‘within’’ to prevent his complex suffering from interrupting the play’s dramaturgy. Inasmuch as this is also the place on the stage where the subplot and the main plot intersect, the generic trouble, the threat to the tragic movement I am noting, can be considered a struggle between the traditional tragic, serious elements of the main plot and the comedic elements of the subplot in Renaissance drama. As Richard Levin pointed out, the use of the subplot is limited in Renaissance tragedy (Shakespeare uses it only in King Lear) because it ‘‘is in direct conflict with the demands of tragedy,’’ interfering with the line of causation that should ‘‘spring directly from the . . . protagonist and his immediate situation.’’56 However, it is not the sub-plot or comedy that threatens the tragedy here, but the emergence of this place on the stage. Shakespeare has worked to legitimize Lear’s madness in a striking way, but the desire to find a place where Lear’s madness could be comforted produces a theatrical place that may elicit extra literary or nontragic responses. Charles Lamb may have done a disservice to theatrical experience by his critical effort to separate the ‘‘sublime’’ experience of reading Shakespeare’s ‘‘poetry alone’’ from the more banal experience of viewing the play, but he pointed out long ago the difficulty of staging King Lear’s madness, how easily it could elicit feelings other than tragic pity: ‘‘So to see Lear acted,—to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me.’’57 Lamb’s response exposes a link to the act’s historical sources. For Lamb,

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the sight of Lear elicited what could be called ‘‘charitable’’ feelings; that is, we can call them charitable if we put aside momentarily the serious ideological problem that a King and not a poor character elicits these feelings and if we openly admit what earlier cultures admitted with greater ease: feelings of disgust (‘‘nothing . . . but what is painful and disgusting’’) often coincide with the desire to help or give (‘‘we want to take him into shelter and relieve him’’). Shakespeare finds himself rather suddenly engaged with the dramaturgical problems that faced the Bethlem governors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The conditions at Bethlem were more likely to disgust visitors than move them. If, as Jonathan Goldberg argued, references to Dover that do not produce a ‘‘Dover’’ on stage signal the ‘‘incapacity of the stage—and of language—to realize what the lines represent,’’ the language of madness, charity, and hovels, in contrast, produces a place that threatens to exceed the fictional activity.58 And the place is ‘‘real,’’ what Weimann might term the theatrical residue of performance. The hovel threatens to exceed even the ‘‘comedy of the grotesque’’ that, as G. Wilson Knight elegantly argued, constitutes much of the tragedy of King Lear. Shakespeare’s ‘‘masterful artistry’’ cannot easily weave this place into the tragic design anymore easily than he could manage Malvolio’s suffering.59 On the contrary, he must escape it. Rather than bring everyone, including Gloucester, into the hovel, Shakespeare changes his ‘‘place’’ in order that the staging of madness move the audience appropriately. We shall see the dramatist in 3.4 actively seeking another place to stage Lear’s mad cure in a way that will offer a better guarantee that a viewer like Lamb will be moved to tragic pity, rather than disgust, confusion, and charity. When Gloucester appears on stage again (3.4.113), after Lear has ‘‘imitated’’ Edgar, the search for a more appropriate place continues. He offers a ‘‘house,’’ a place distinct from the hovel or his castle. Go in with me. My duty cannot suffer To obey in all your daughters’ hard commands. Though their injunction be to bar my doors And let this tyrannous night take hold upon you, Yet have I ventured to come seek you out And bring you where both food and fire is ready. (3.4.133–37)

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This ongoing search for a place where Lear’s madness can be comforted is, I think, easily overlooked in the dramatic emptiness of the ‘‘heath.’’60 But a closer consideration does show a marked search by the dramatist, one ultimately abandoned, to find and manage a place on the stage where madness can be staged in a way that will elicit tragic pity. This is not to suggest that Act Three does not elicit pity. In its entirety, of course, carefully staged, the act can be incredibly moving and there is, perhaps, great artistry in the fact that audiences so easily overlook this change in place. But that tragic, painful effect that seems so real comes from the representation of Lear’s search for comfort, not the representation of Lear suffering in a single place. Kent joins forces with Gloucester and entreats Lear away from the hovel and toward the ‘‘house’’ (3.4.140). The prospect of entering this house coincides with the unsettling of Gloucester’s wits, just as the prospect of the hovel made Lear’s wit turn: ‘‘I am almost mad myself’’ (3.4.150). Gloucester attempts to return Poor Tom/Edgar to the hovel—‘‘In, fellow, there in t’hovel; keep thee warm’’ (3.4.157)—but Lear’s mad identification with the ‘‘Bedlam-beggar’’ prohibits such a separation. Finally ready to enter the hovel—‘‘Come, let’s in all’’— the King’s reluctance to part with his ‘‘philosopher,’’ his new found mad empathy, results in all the characters on stage, including the ‘‘Bedlam-beggar’’, exiting the scene for Gloucester’s ‘‘house.’’ But this ‘‘house’’ is still not clearly identified.61 Is it part of Gloucester’s castle? An outbuilding of sorts? The audience knows only that Shakespeare has turned his characters away from the hovel, without having had them enter it (except Poor Tom and the Fool), and is directing them toward still rough, but more comfortable quarters. Act 3 scene 6 opens with Gloucester announcing their arrival inside: ‘‘Here is better than the open air; take it thankfully. I will piece the comfort with what addition I can.’’ He exits almost immediately. But in Gloucester’s ‘‘house’’ the dramatist’s struggle with mad places again becomes apparent. Roger Warren has argued that, in performance, the mock trial (3.6) of the quarto version always threatens to degenerate into a confusing scene of group madness, with Lear, the Fool, and Edgar only occasionally working in concert, and that this potential for artistic degeneration prompts its cutting in the folio version.62 If the hovel had been too small and too squalid, Gloucester’s ‘‘house’’ is too crowded.

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We are reminded here of Dekker and Middleton’s initial (and nearly contemporaneous) use of Bethlem as a stage setting. For it appears in 3.6 that Shakespeare struggles to produce a Bethlem ‘‘madhouse’’ scene that artfully elicits sympathy for a specific tragic character without turning into the sort of ‘‘pageant’’ theater Dekker and Middleton produced, a theater that confuses a modern audience entirely. In chapter 6, we shall see Webster struggle in The Duchess of Malfi with the same dramatic effects; that is, Webster has to plot carefully so that his ‘‘mad’’ scenes will elicit the desired response. The place of madness Shakespeare produces, again, threatens the tragedy or even the ‘‘comedy of the grotesque.’’ The reality of the processes producing Bethlem simultaneously empower and threaten the generic integrity of the play before Shakespeare is able to draw ‘‘the curtains’’ (3.6.77) on the moving but troublesome place(s) they produce. As I suggested in the introduction, in a curious reversal of standard new historical exchanges, it is as if Bethlem threatens to appropriate the stage. In order to preserve (and develop) the emerging modern representational stage, Shakespeare has to conceal and turn away from the reality of madness at Bethlem. Edgar’s efforts to guide the audience’s response both here— ‘‘My tears begin to take his part so much/ They’ll mar my counterfeiting’’ (3.6.56–57)—and at the end of the scene (at least in the Quarto version) seem to suggest a heightened awareness on the part of the dramatist that generic boundaries need to be clearly articulated. Edgar’s speech echoes Sidney’s famous statement of tragic effect: When we our betters see bearing our woes, We scarcely think our miseries our foes. Who alone suffers, suffers most i’th’ mind, Leaving free things and happy shows behind. But then the mind much sufferance doth o’erskp When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship. How light and portable my pain seems now, When that which makes me bend, makes the King bow. (3.6.95–102)

When Gloucester reenters the play, an audience discovers that Lear’s madness will not be cured in this place or ‘‘house’’ either (3.6.81–89), and Kent reminds us, at least in the Quarto version,

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that absent a place for Lear to rest, the King’s madness will be difficult to cure. Oppressed nature sleeps. This rest might yet have balmed thy broken sinews Which, if convenience will not allow, Stand in hard cure. Come, help to bear thy master, Thou must not stay behind. (3.6.90–94)

In searching for such a healing place, however, Shakespeare produces an act that displays something more than a ‘‘likenesse of Truthe’’ of the pain and suffering of a real early modern hospital, but still not the truth, the reality of that hospital. The search, not the simple verisimilar sight of madness and suffering, moves an audience. ‘‘Real’’ madness and suffering may move one to give charity, but it does not elicit tragic pity. We note the insufficiency of this staging of madness to move even Shakespeare’s own character, Edgar, to ‘‘good pity,’’ or active virtue.63 Having witnessed Lear’s mad suffering, Edgar remains content to wait until ‘‘proof repeals’’ ‘‘false opinion’’ (3.6.103–7) and feels only the vapid comfort that things can only get better (4.1.1–6). Interestingly enough, in a play that has instilled so much desire to a find a place where the spectacle of madness could be staged in a way that would elicit pity, the first ‘‘cure’’ of mental illness, Edgar’s cure of Gloucester’s despair (4.6.34–35), is inspired not by the staging of act 3, but by Gloucester’s gouged eyes (4.1.6) and his subtle, despairing language regarding ‘‘the Gods’’—and the cure takes place ‘‘outside.’’ When Edgar sees Gloucester, he finally acknowledges the inability of humans to put limits on suffering—‘‘And worse I may be yet. The worst is not/ As Long as we can say This is the worst.’ ’’ (4.1.25–26); and when he hears Gloucester express utter despair he seems moved for the first time to act in response to suffering: ‘‘How should this be?/ Bad is the trade that must play the fool to sorrow,/ Ang’ring itself and others’’ (4.1.37–38). When we next see Edgar, he is ‘‘altered’’ (4.6.8), changed from Poor Tom to a ‘‘peasant.’’ For the audience, Edgar’s ‘‘cure’’ of Gloucester’s despair is tinged with cruelty. Many have noted that Edgar could simply reveal himself. And the cure on cliff always threatens to generate as many laughs as tears. Finding a place on the stage

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where madness can be cured in a way that will elicit pity seems, if not impossible, incredibly difficult. Even the section of act 4 scene 6 involving the mad Lear, Gloucester, and Edgar is described at the beginning as a ‘‘side-piercing sight’’ (85) and a ‘‘sight most pitiful‘‘ (192) at the end perhaps to clarify, as in the careful directions regarding Ophelia’s madness, an audience’s response. Edgar’s theatrical cure of Gloucester does set the stage for Cordelia’s more poignant cure of Lear, the place of which, we note, is not staged either. Nor is Cordelia’s pity for Lear inspired by the actual spectacle of Lear’s madness. For Cordelia has never seen Lear suffer, only heard of it, and that produces her ‘‘good pity’’: Patience and sorrow strove Who should express her goodliest. You have seen Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears Were like, a better way. Those happy smilets That played on her ripe lip seem not to know What guests were in her eyes, which parted thence As pearls from diamonds dropped. In brief, Sorrow would be a rarity most belove If all could so become it. (4.3.16–24)

Lear leaves 4.6 running, pursued by Cordelia’s men (4.6.191), and when an audience sees him again (4.7), he has been apparently caught, restrained, lodged, and cured in a place, presumably in or near the French camp, that is never staged. His understanding of the place of his cure is telling: ‘‘I am mainly ignorant/ What place this‘‘ (4.7.62–63). Certainly the scene elicits pity, but, again, it is not the staging of the actual cure of madness that elicits pity, but the reconciliation with Cordelia after the difficult and, perhaps, ugly or at least undramatic cure has happened. Lear does not know, and neither does the audience for sure, ‘‘where [he] did lodge last night’’ (4.7.65). ‘‘Am I in France?’’ he asks (4.7.74). To complete the tragedy, Shakespeare has to disengage the culture processes that had empowered his play. He has to abandon the desire to stage the place where the actual cure of madness happened. For that spectacle, for a relatively short time in history, may have moved some to give charity, but it would not have moved an audience expecting to be moved to tragic pity. The extraordinary engagement with Beth-

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lem’s reality, however, helps produce the extraordinary, extraliterary to return to Lamb’s formulation, power of the play. This is the source of much of the extraordinary power that an audience still feels in King Lear—even though the practice of showing the mad to elicit charity now horrifies us. One could speculate that the scholarly tradition that insists on seeing the theater of Bethlem as only perverse entertainment persists because we do not want to admit the connection between the theater we enjoy—be it tragedy and comedy—and the suffering or ridicule of real people. We prefer the notion, I think, that more proper sources shaped our theater—church liturgies, for example. As mentioned in the introduction, Foucault concludes Madness and Civilization with the suggestion, albeit cryptic, that the medieval and Renaissance madness shut away during the enlightenment will return (as something like the repressed) in modern art: The frequency in the modern world of works of art that explode out of madness no doubt proves nothing about the reason of that world, about the meaning of such works, or even about the relations formed and broken between the real world and the artists who produced such works. And yet this frequency must be taken seriously, as if it were the insistence of a question.64

This insistence of a question becomes more of a threat or forewarning by the book’s last paragraph. Madness and art merge, or reemerge, as the victims of a crime to confront their assailants: The moment when, together, the work of art and madness are born and fulfilled is the beginning of the time when the world finds itself arraigned by that work of art and responsible before it for what it is. Ruse and new triumph of madness: the world that thought to measure and justify madness through psychology must justify itself before madness, since in its struggles and agonies it measures itself by the excess of works like those of Nietzche, of Van Gogh, of Artaud. And nothing in itself, especially not what it can know of madness, assures the world that it is justified by such works of madness.65

This is far from the romantic notion, based on some classical sources, that great art requires a form of madness, a poetic fury like Bellamont’s, a notion we embrace from time to time. It seems to me that our unwillingness to look at the ‘‘madness’’ of Elizabe-

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than and Jacobean drama and its ‘‘real’’ origins is tied in part to our desire to avoid such Foucaultian recriminations. Interestingly enough, the current arch-nemesis of Madness and Civilization, historian H. C. Erik Midelfort, recently has presented us with a very related and disturbing proposition about our theatrical tastes en route to telling the true story of madness in sixteenth century Germany.66 He argues that ‘‘natural’’ fools, the truly disabled, and ‘‘artificial’’ fools, actors or performers, found a place in the courts amusing aristocrats. The reason for their popularity was that the pressures of the ‘‘civilizing process’’ to increasingly modify and restrict behavior needed a release. ‘‘Courtly culture was increasingly demanding a smooth behavior and appearance of just the sort that one could not expect of the fool.’’ Somewhat ironically, it seems to me, the cathartic laughter provided by the fool—at least the ‘‘natural’’ fool—later became a victim of the civilizing process itself. Good taste eventually precluded laughter at the truly disabled. The ‘‘artificial’’ fool remained the only outlet for the spontaneous laughter generated by ‘‘natural’’ behavior. As Midelfort points out, though, the artificial fool imitated the natural fool; that is, the natural fool is the ultimate source for the entertainment. Midelfort, like Foucault and myself, points to the connection between madness (or the ‘‘natural’’ fool) and art we want occluded.

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6 ‘‘Twin’’ shows of madness: John Webster’s Stage Management of Bethlem in The Duchess of Malfi R. S. WHITE MAKES A SEEMINGLY SIMPLE BUT UTTERLY CONVINCING point about John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi (1612/14) that I quote at length because it cuts through much of the critical morass surrounding the play, particularly when considering that, in a marked contrast to his sources, Webster works to create sympathy rather than hostility for his title character: At the center of any analysis of The Duchess of Malfi, whether moral, aesthetic or thematic, must be the violent and powerful scene of strangling of the Duchess, in Act IV, scene ii. Here the plot on the Duchess is consummated, the central character is killed, and the action precipitates radical changes in at least two characters, Ferdinand and Bosola. In terms of the moral design, Webster makes it clear by his manner of presentation that the audience is to be shocked into certain recognitions. It may be possible in earlier scenes to see the clandestine relationship between the Duchess and Antonio as dangerously unwise and even foolish. It may be possible early on to blame the indignity of such a furtive and closeted affair on the Duchess’s rash choice to fall in love beneath her station (young widows were seen as particularly susceptible to lust), rather than upon her brother’s malevolence—in short, to blame her for the consequences. But in this scene it becomes impossible to do so without remaining inhumanly detached from the action. . . . In short, everything in the scene is designed to startle us into a firm and fundamental recognition of the innocence of the Duchess, to make us reassess any suspicion of her own collusion, and to highlight the injustice.1

The central argument of this chapter is that en route to guiding an audience towards such pity and understanding for the Duch183

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ess, Webster engages the theater of Bethlem as part of his dramaturgy. The critical assumption here is that the stage has gained enough distance in the cultural matrix from the show of Bethlem for a more standard New Historical ‘‘appropriation’’ to take place. Having wrestled with troubling, but powerful scenes of ‘‘Bedlam’’ madness in Northward Ho (1607), and having seen how effectively Shakespeare could use scenes of group madness to guide an audience’s reaction in King Lear, Webster borrows the madmen’s show to elicit pity for the Duchess. However, despite the growing distance between the stage and the show of Bethlem, we will still see the difficulty such a staging presents; the madmen’s performance clearly has enthralled as many critics and audience members as it has disgusted and confused.2 Like the scenes on the heath, the scene of group madness both empowers the play and threatens its artistry. The scenes of group madness are not, in other words, easily appropriated. Many tend to see the madmen’s appearance from Ferdinand’s perspective. That is, the purpose of the madmen is to elicit fear from the Duchess and to make her mad. Clearly, Ferdinand intends to torture the Duchess with the madmen; Webster’s intent, though, is to orchestrate the Duchess in the show of madmen and suffering and elicit pity for her as Shakespeare did for King Lear. In choosing to appropriate the show of Bethlem, though, Webster creates a dramatic challenge we have not yet had to consider. Bedlam scenes can elicit much pity but can a playwright use those scenes while keeping the recipient of that pity sane?

TRANSFERRING PITY FOR THE MAD TO THE DUCHESS As White suggests, we can clearly see Webster working very hard to turn the audience’s sympathy toward the Duchess. In 4.1, having been presented with the wax bodies of her family, the Duchess tells Bosola and a servant ‘‘I shall shortly grow one/ Of the miracles of pity’’ (95).3 The ‘‘acts’’ perpetrated against the Duchess have already made even Bosola hesitate: ‘‘Faith, end here; / And go no farther in your cruelty, / Send her a penitential garment, to put on / Next to her delicate skin, and furnish her / With beads and prayerbooks’’ (4.1.115–18). If we can assume Webster as determined to guide the audience as White suggests, we see the need for the playwright to seek another device, an-

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other show, after the presentation of the wax bodies, in order to further ensure audience reaction. Dramatically speaking, though, one has few options more disturbing, more guaranteed to elicit pity than the presentation of wax bodies. From a modern perspective, the choice of the madman’s show to follow the display of bodies can seem simply bizarre. It certainly does not seem a vehicle that will terrify the Duchess more than the display of bodies or necessarily intensify the fear she feels at that point. In his classic study of the play The Duchess of Malfi: Sources, Themes, and Characters, Gunner Boklund answers many questions and, confident in the comprehensiveness of his source material, rarely hesitates in his critical judgment; but when it comes to the show of madmen and their source even he pauses: The appearance of the madmen . . . is more difficult to explain [than the wax bodies]. Both source and plot demanded a detailed presentation of the death of the Duchess, and once the course of gradually breaking her spirit had been decided upon, the introduction of some new devices to accomplish this became a logically desirable solution. But no combination of logic and casual references would inevitably lead to the creation of anything like the madmen episode. . . . There is nothing inevitable about it; many other methods would have sufficed to test the Duchess’ spirit of resistance. Why then was this particular one chosen?4

When, however, we consider that in Webster’s world the show of madness had proven very effective in eliciting pity, the selection seems less puzzling. And it becomes clear that placing the Duchess in or near that show of madness in a way that will take advantage of that theatrical power is the dramatic challenge at hand. Act 4, scene 2 opens with the Duchess identifying herself as nearly mad. She identifies herself, in short, as part of the show to come: ‘‘nothing but noise, and folly/ Can keep me in my right wits, whereas reason/ And silence make me stark mad’’ (4.2.5). Webster does for the Duchess what Shakespeare did for Lear; he aligns his character with an authentic, moving display. Echoes of King Lear, in fact, are present. ‘‘Discourse to me some dismal tragedy’’ (4.2.8) the Duchess asks. Her servant, Cariola, tells her that will make things worse, but the Duchess thinks like Edgar for a moment—‘‘Thou art deceiv’d; /To hear of greater grief would lessen mine’’ (4.2.9–10)—and she invokes other characters. ‘‘This is a prison?’’ she asks. ‘‘Yes,’’ Cariola tells her, but like

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Lear shaking off the superflux and crawling unburdened toward death, ‘‘[the Duchess] shall live/ To shake this durance off’’ (4.2.12–13). The Duchess disagrees and conjures images of Cordelia and Lear briefly reconciled and reunited in captivity: ‘‘Thou art a fool: / The robin red-breast and the nightingale/ Never live long in cages’’ (4.2.12–14). Cariola’s questions eventually produce the most famous echo in King Lear. When she asks the Duchess ‘‘of what’’ she thinks, the Duchess answers, ‘‘Of nothing: When I muse thus, I sleep.’’ The lines may recall King Lear, but Webster has a very different dramatic statement to make about his title character. He simultaneously associates the Duchess with the madmen that an audience is about to see (she sleeps ‘‘like a madman’’ with her eyes open, and is ‘‘chain’d to endure’’ the show), while insisting on her sanity: ‘‘I am not mad yet . . . yet I am not mad’’ (4.2.25–27). Webster thus engages a dramaturgy almost as complicated as Shakespeare did in struggling with mad places on the heath. The Bedlam scene of group madness has the potential to elicit pity, but transferring that power to the sane Duchess takes some doing. That the playwright seeks to do so is revealed in part by his conspicuous efforts to guide the audience’s sympathy. Just before the madmen are to enter, Cariola tells the Duchess she looks like ‘‘some reverend monument/ Whose ruins are ever pitied’’ (4.3.34–35). The Duchess, in other words, more than the madmen, takes on the appearance of an old institution, a physical place that elicits pity. Making this transfer of pity to the Duchess is only part of the challenge; for creating new dramatic challenges do not automatically solve old ones. Webster not only has to transfer the sympathy the Bedlam scene can generate to the sane Duchess, he has to make sure the mad scene elicits the proper reaction. As with Lear on the heath, the dramatist cannot afford laughter or disgust at this moment. Consequently, when the servant announces the appearance of the madmen, Webster provides him with a remark that may confuse a modern audience but is a necessary cue to his contemporaries: I am come to tell you, Your brother hath intended you some sport. A great physician when the Pope was sick Of a deep melancholy, presented him

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With several sorts of madmen, which wild object, Being full of change and sport, forc’d him to laugh, And so the imposthume broke: the selfsame cure The Duke intends on you. (4.2.39–44)

One can take this as an additional bit of cruelty: Ferdinand suggesting to the Duchess that the show will help when she and an audience knows it will not. But we must recall that Webster directs these comments to an early modern London audience that could as easily laugh at mad scenes as feel pity. At this critical moment, then, in the process of directing an audience’s sympathies, he points out that Catholics laugh at the mad; Protestants, particularly at a London Protestant charity like Bethlem, show appropriate charity. Interestingly, Winfried Schleiner has argued that laughing at the mad has distinct ties to Erasmus and Catholic Humanism and pre-Reformation medical practices. Numerous medical casebooks reveal doctors laughing at psychotic disorders; and Erasmus suggests in The Praise of Folly that certain delusions were pleasurable, prompting a less than serious concern on the part of the physician. Given this, Schleiner suggests looking to Luther and Protestant charity for the origins of modern psychiatric practices: If, then, a certain kind of psychotic case tended to attract medical ridicule and if the Erasmian notion of pleasurable delusion likewise did not lead to serious consideration of therapy, we may have to look elsewhere in the Renaissance for a glimpse of what has become so strikingly obvious in our times: that a knowledge of the patients’ histories, empathy with their condition, and endeavors to understand their particular thought processes are important in the treatment of psychotics whose suffering and pain are beginning to be fully recognized . . . the cases recounted in Luther’s Tischreden (or Colloquia) are informed by a sense of caring for the patient and include the nature of the patient’s cure. Indeed it can be said that this sense of caring becomes a vehicle of therapy.5

As we shall see more fully in chapter 7, anti-Catholic sentiment made a pronounced appearance in disputes about proper charity; and Bethlem itself, with its distinct ties to Reformation charity, was engaged in these disputes. We have hints at these disputes in Webster’s play. When, under extreme duress, the

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Duchess curses her brothers—‘‘Let them like tyrants/ Never be rememb’red, but for the ill they have done: / Let all the zealous prayers of mortified/ Churchmen forget them’’ (4.1.102–3)— Bosola responds, ‘‘O uncharitable!’’ Prayers for the dead, a traditionally Catholic act of charity vilified by Protestants, are here mocked against the background of the monstrosity of the Cardinal and Ferdinand. The servant’s anti-Catholic remark at the beginning of the scene also leads me to try and interweave an intriguing, longstanding, and persuasive reading of this scene as ‘‘anti-masque’’ with my understanding of the scene as connected to the charitable show of Bethlem.6 In a still often cited article, Inga-Stina Ekeblad argued that in the madmen’s dance, Webster used the form of the anti-masque, the type of performance that traditionally preceded the main dances of a masque, very frequently challenging the principal themes of the masque. Here the madmen’s anti-masque functions as a ‘‘kind of charivari put on to ‘mock’ the Duchess for her remarriage.’’7 In noting, for example, how the servant’s next few lines introducing and describing the individual madmen (4.2.45–58) parallel masques performed at Princess Elizabeth’s wedding (1613), Ekeblad makes a convincing case for some connection between the form of the two displays.8 Ekeblad ignores entirely, however, the servant’s lines about the Pope and viewing the mad that begin this ‘‘anti-masque’’; she does so, I suspect, because they do not make a great deal of sense in her understanding of the scene; she also ignores entirely obvious connections that I will turn to shortly between the madmen’s performance and Antonio’s important earlier remarks in Act One about visitants making mad patients lunatic beyond all cure (1.2.337–44). Interestingly, despite these omissions, Ekeblad does consider Bethlem a potential source for Webster to use in the scene. In fact, Ekeblad sees Webster’s use of the anti-masque structure as differentiating the scene from other ‘‘Bedlam’’ scenes in Renaissance Drama. From Ekeblad’s perspective, though, ‘‘Bedlam’’ scenes lack form and artistry; they are not only perverse, it seems, but damnable: By now it should be possible to say that the madmen’s masque is not just ‘Bedlam-broke-loose’, as Archer, and with him many, would have it. Nor do we need to excuse this interlude, as has been done, by saying that Webster is not alone in it; that there are plenty of mad-

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men in Elizabethan drama, and Webster’s Bedlam stuff is as good as any. Such an excuse does not save the scene, as a piece of dramatic art, from damnation. But we are beginning to see the masque as peculiarly functional in the play.9

Ekeblad believes that only by separating the scenes from the source of Bethlem/Bedlam and finding another source, the antimasque, may one see any artistry or sense here. For Ekeblad, a ‘‘Bedlam’’ scene remains perverse confusion, something distant from true dramatic craftsmanship. Had Ekeblad had a different understanding of the actual show of Bethlem, her understanding of Webster’s artistry might have incorporated multiple sources for the scene. Ekeblad persuades me that the form of the antimasque helped in some way shape the scene, but that influence does not preclude the influence of the show of Bethlem. While the madmen perform, Ekeblad points out that ‘‘the Duchess has for a while been as much a passive spectator as anyone in the audience’’;10 when Bosola appears like an ‘‘old man,’’ he performs the traditional masque maneuver of involving a viewer in the proceedings. But it is more accurate to say from the text that we lose track of the Duchess in the performance; she enters the mad show, I agree, but at what point remains a matter of performance. Bosola may invite her in or the madmen themselves may place her at the center of events. It seems entirely likely that, like Lear, the Duchess becomes part of a scene of group madness on the stage that elicits pity. Echoes of King Lear return as the scene moves along. The Duchess’s brief questioning of her identity to Bosola after the mad scene—‘‘dost know me’’ and ‘‘Who am I?’’—although not the result of a loss of senses, certainly recall Lear and Cordelia’s uncertain and tentative speech after Lear’s ‘‘cure.’’ Interestingly, the Duchess must provide herself the reassurance and reality orientation Cordelia provides Lear, while Bosola tries to inflict the sense of discomfort on the Duchess that Lear inflicts on himself. Having momentarily escaped his madness and suffering, Lear says famously, ‘‘You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave. / Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead’’ (4.6.46–49). Bosola tells the Duchess in her brief interim between tortures, ‘‘Thou art a box of worm seed, at best, but a salvatory of green mummy: what’s this flesh? A little cruded milk, fantastical puff-paste’’ (4.2.123–25). While his

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sanity is distinctly less secure than the Duchess’s, Lear still reminds an audience several times after his participation in a Bedlam scene of his essential social standing. He is ‘‘every inch a king’’ (4.6.107); and he asks, ‘‘Come, come, I am a king, / Masters, know you that?’’ (4.6.199). The Duchess asserts her identity in the most famous lines of the play—right after her Bedlam scene: ‘‘Am not I thy Duchess?’’ and ‘‘I am the Duchess of Malfi still’’ (4.2.139). One could argue here, perhaps, for Shakespeare’s greater dramatic dexterity and willingness to take theatrical risks. To elicit sympathy for Lear, Shakespeare actually turns Lear mad, turns him into a kind of ‘‘Bedlam,’’ and thus subjects Lear and the play to the unpredictability of that real alternative theater, the risks of the mad places in act 3 discussed in the last chapter. The playwright does this and still manages to preserve pity for the King. Webster, in contrast, oft noted for his wildness and extravagance, keeps his character sane and completely dignified; his theater, in short, is no longer culturally connected to the theater of Bethlem in the way of Shakespeare’s King Lear. But this should not discount Webster’s success in this scene. He gains the Duchess something like the sympathy (charity) a Bethlem show might procure on its own in addition to sympathy for one wrongfully treated. In chapter 4, we did touch upon yet another possible reason, aside from the influence of King Lear and the anti-masque, as to why Webster might try to make this sort of staging work: perhaps the playwright recalls a strong audience reaction to Bellamont’s wrongful commitment in Northward Ho.

VISITING THE SHOW OF MADNESS WITHOUT MADNESS Whether he builds on his own work or on Shakespeare’s, Webster should be credited with having the dramatic skill to place the Duchess in the position of the Bedlamite eliciting pity without losing the dignity necessary for a tragic hero. That this was Webster’s intent, and that he drew on Bethlem theatrics to achieve it, is suggested even earlier than the crucial act 4. When the Duchess proposes to Antonio in act 1, he hesitates a moment and then employs a strange simile to describe the situation: Ambition, Madam, is a great man’s madness, That is not kept in chains, and close pent rooms,

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But in fair lightsome lodgings, and is girt With the wild noise of prattling visitants, Which makes it lunatic, beyond all cure. Conceive not, I am so stupid, but I aim Whereto your favours tend. But he’s a fool That, being a—cold, would thrust his hands I’th’ fire To warm them. (1.2.337–44)

In these lines that prefigure the dance of the madmen there is no suggestion of the anti-masque, only the show of Bethlem. We see here, too, a growing skepticism about the charitable show of Bethlem. Visitation, Webster’s simile suggests, can make madness worse. I shall address this growing skepticism of Bethlem and its practices in greater historical detail in the next chapter, but a brief return to Jonson at this point is perhaps illuminating. As suggested in the first line of the introduction, Jonson’s language has stood as the primary evidence for the notion of crass, perverse, and probably disruptive visitation at Bethlem between 1598 and 1630. In Act Four of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene (1609–10), to take the most frequently used example again, Lady Haughty explains that in order to be accepted into the ‘‘College’’ of fine Ladies, Epicoene must go with current members to ‘‘Bedlam, to the chinahouses, and to the exchange’’ (3.23). Here visitation is mocked as a strange and fashionable practice by social climbers and, as I suggested at the outset, many have taken Jonson’s words as a simple, straightforward account, one that renders history clearly visible. Jonson repeats the joke in a comparable context in the contemporaneous The Alchemist (1610) when Face and Subtle insist Dame Pliant engage in the same kind of social posturing: Dame Pliant will need a coach with eight mares ‘‘To hurry her through London, to the Exchange, Bedlam, the china houses’’ (4.4.47) and ‘‘have the citizens gape at her, and praise her tires, / And my lord’s goose-turd bands, that ride with her!’’ (48–50). We can see better at this point that these lines neither depict real life with photographic accuracy nor do they conjure completely imaginary events. As Jonson and Webster’s lines and the records of Bethlem indicate, visitation for simple amusement, particularly by elite groups who made the practice fashionable for many less desirable visitors (less able to dispense alms), did

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become a problem for Bethlem governors to address. But this degeneration does not discount the ostensible charitable purpose of visitation that Dekker and Middleton engaged in The Honest Whore, Part One and Shakespeare did in King Lear. Nor should these references to the show suggest, as they are most often made to suggest, a longstanding, well-known practice prior to 1598. The timing of these dramatic references (as is the timing of the appearance of all these Bedlam plays after 1598) is telling. Jonson only comments on the practice of visitation after Dekker and Middleton have turned the theater of charity against him. We can imagine, perhaps, he took particular delight (two similar references in two years) to see the London ‘‘charity’’ show signs of degenerating into something less virtuous than citizens and antagonistic playwrights would have it. We recall from the last chapter ‘‘the first undoubted reference to a real-life visit to see the show of Bethlem is from 1610, when Lord Percy spent 10s on a visit, possibly in the company of ‘Lady Penelope and her two sisters.’ ’’11 Jonson’s references can tell us something about the practice of visitation, then, but only if read within a dramatic context, rather than as clear, timeless statements of fact. Later Jonson references to ‘‘Bedlam,’’ at some remove from the Poets’ War and the early development of the show, do not comment on visitation at all.12 We have to use equal care, of course, to understand how Antonio’s intriguing remarks on visitation aggravating the mad pertain to the Duchess. As Frank Whigham has suggested, Antonio probably does not allude to his own ‘‘ambition’’ in these lines— the context alone suggests that he does not think of himself as a ‘‘great man’’—but to the Duchess’s ambition to reshape social norms about marriage.13 She is, as hard as this has been for many modern critics to imagine, the tragic hero, and the great ‘‘ambitious’’ figure of the play. If we take this reading as accurate, Antonio’s words become very specific comments on the Duchess and the significance of the Bedlam scenes to the play as a whole. First, we can take these words as a further guide to an audience on how to respond to the Duchess and the mad scene. In pointing out the potential damage of visitants, Webster suggests to an audience a caution, decorum, and sympathy in viewing the mad, a solemnity that will help the audience sympathize with the Duchess in act 4. Second, according to Antonio’s logic, the lines guide the audience in another sense: the Duchess may be a great figure

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but she is distinctly not ‘‘ambitious’’ because the madhouse scene specifically and noticeably does not make her lunatic beyond all cure. Antonio’s strange visitation simile places the Duchess figuratively where I suggested Webster seeks to place her: in the position of the madhouse patient without being mad. Antonio’s words, then, gives us hints about Webster’s dramaturgical practice and sources. Similarly, Cariola’s comments at the end of the same scene reveal Webster’s dramatic practice and source: ‘‘Whether the spirit of greatness, or of woman/ Reign most in her, I know not, but it shows a fearful madness: I owe her much of pity.’’ If we parse this comment carefully, we note that Cariola does not believe the Duchess mad, but the Duchess’s motivation—either the spirit of greatness or the spirit of woman—‘‘shows’’ or looks like madness. Webster here, again, places the Duchess in the position of the mad sufferer without ascribing madness to her. The only certainty in Cariola’s statement is that this showing or resemblance to mad suffering is ‘‘owed’’ much pity.14 A definite source for the play, William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure (1567), makes the connection to the Duchess and the display of Bethlem remarkably distinct. Painter compares Antonio and the Duchess’s love in the face of social opposition to a kind of madness. Thus Bologna framed the plot to intertaine the Duchesse (albeit hir love alredy was fully bent upon him) and fortified him self against all mishap and perilous chaunce that might succeede, as ordinarily you see that lovers conceive all things for their advantage, and fantasie dreames agreeable to that which they most desire, resembling the mad and Bedlem persons, which have before their eies, the figured fansies which cause the conceit of their furie, and stay themselves upon the vision of that, which most troubleth their offended brain.15

The Duchess and Antonio ‘‘resemble’’ the Bethlem mad. For Painter, that comparison suggested a fault on the part of both. Throughout the narrative he attacks the Duchess in particular for wanton behavior in remarrying. For Webster, however, writing after the charitable show of Bethlem had developed, it seems likely that such a resemblance, properly staged, suggested a way to elicit pity rather than criticism for the tragic couple.

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SOME MAD SHOWS DESERVE CHARITY, OTHERS DON’T The next two scenes, including Ferdinand’s show of madness, further verify the dramaturgical connection to the show at Bethlem. Act 5, scene 1 includes some historical information from the source story about the stealing of Antonio’s lands; and it sets the stage for his trip to the Cardinal. But interestingly enough, given the complex charitable show that is our focus, the scene emphasizes proper charitable giving. Delio petitions the noble Marquis de Pescara for Antonio’s lands in order to ascertain their status. The Marquis refuses and promptly gives the lands to Julia. She casts herself in a particular image: ‘‘I am grown your poor petitioner, / And should be an ill beggar, had I not / A great man’s letter here, the Cardinal’s / To court you in my favour’’ (5.1.26– 28). Antonio watches dismayed, and Delio demands an explanation: ‘‘you deni’d this suit to me, and gave’t /To such a creature’’ (5.1.39). Pescara’s answer will satisfy both Antonio and Delio, convincing them both of the nobility of his giving: Do you know what it was? It was Antonio’s land: not forfeited By course of law; but ravish’d from his throat By the Cardinal’s entreaty: it were not fit I should bestow so main a piece of wrong Upon my friend: ‘tis a gratification Only due a strumpet; for it is injustice. Shall I sprinkle the pure blood of innocents To make those followers I call my friends Look ruddier upon me? I am glad This land, take from the owner by such wrong, Returns again unto so foul an use, As salary for his lust. Learn, good Delio, To ask noble things of me, and you shall find I’ll be a noble giver. (5.1.40–54)

Delio says in response, ‘‘You instruct me well.’’ And the man who has just lost his lands, Antonio, remarks, ‘‘Why, here’s a man would fright impudence / From sauciest beggars.’’ He adds a few lines later that the Marquis ‘‘Tis a noble old fellow.’’ The point of all this discussion of charity and good-giving versus badgiving may seem remote to a modern audience. But once we con-

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sider that Webster has shown us one Bethlem show and is about to show us another, this intermediary scene makes more sense. Let me recast Pescara’s remarks, rather unpoetically, as directions to an audience viewing charitable shows: when you see a true show of charity be a noble giver, but when you see an undeserving show of charity adjust your giving accordingly. Webster still guides the audience response to viewing the mad. Here, however, in the figure of the Marquis and in this scene immediately prior to Ferdinand’s show of madness, he reminds an audience that not all such shows and suffering deserve charity or, to use Cariola’s words, are owed pity. Sometimes derision and laughter are more appropriate. Some ‘‘impudent’’ and ‘‘saucie’’ beggars deserve a fright. As I have argued throughout, the traditional understanding of Bethlem as place of amusement is flawed and incomplete, but not totally inaccurate. People could enjoy their ‘‘charitable’’ viewing and very often laughter and disgust were part of that viewing. In guiding an audience to respond to Ferdinand’s madness, Webster engages that less appealing aspect of the theater of Bethlem. If, since The Honest Whore, Part One, playwrights have worked to downplay the laughter madness could bring and emphasize instead the pity it could arouse, here is an instance where a playwright reverses the norm. Webster allows and encourages the audience to laugh at rather than feel for Ferdinand because this is what this ‘‘madman’’ deserves. This visitation begins like the visitations in comedies, only here the playwright does not attempt to redirect responses towards pity. Pescara: ‘‘Now doctor, may I visit your patient?’’ Doctor: ‘‘If’t please your lordship: but he’s instantly To take the air here in the gallery, By my directions. (5.2.1–4)

While it has attracted much serious scholarly attention, Ferdinand’s particular illness is simply hilarious, the sort of unusual and specific disorder that elicits humorous conversations amongst modern mental health care providers. Lycanthropia, the Doctor explains, is a Melancholy humour, they imagine Themselves to be transformed into wolves.

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Steal forth to churchyards in the dead of night, And dig dead bodies up: as two nights since One met the Duke, ‘bout midnight in a lane Behind St. Mark’s church, with the leg of a man Upon his shoulder; and he howl’d fearfully: Said he was a wolf: only the difference Was, a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside, His on the inside: bad them take their swords, Rip up his flesh, and try. (5.2.9–19)

The performance of Ferdinand and his Doctor is funnier still. The Doctor’s overconfidence in his own abilities dominates much of the scene: ‘‘if he grow to his fit again/ I’ll go a nearer way to work with him/ Than ever Paracelsus dream’d of. If They’ll give me leave, I’ll buffet his madness out of him’’ (5.2.23– 26). Ferdinand throws himself on his own shadow at this point in the scene and refuses to get up. He claims to be studying the ‘‘art of patience’’ by trying ‘‘to drive six snails before me, from this town to Moscow; neither use goad nor whip to them, but let them take their own time: (the patient’st man i’ th’ world match me for an experiment!) and I’ll crawl after like a sheep-biter’’ (5.2.46– 51). This is a rather remarkable parenthetical reference (for this study at least) to an earlier ‘‘experiment’’ with the show of Bethlem by Webster’s old collaborator, Dekker, and current dedicator, Middleton. Apparently, the supernaturally ‘‘patient’’ Candido and The Honest Whore also played a part in the construction of The Duchess of Malfi. That Webster had Dekker’s The Honest Whore, Part One and The Honest Whore, Part Two in mind is suggested earlier, too, in Ferdinand’s plot to torture the Duchess. Ferdinand plans not only the visitors from the ‘‘common hospital’’ (4.1.125) but to ‘‘send her masques of common courtesans, / Have her meat serv’d up by bawds and ruffians’’ (4.1.122–23). What happened to the Bridewell scene, presumably like the one in The Honest Whore, Part Two, is impossible to determine, but the linking of these spectacles by Ferdinand clearly points us back to Dekker and the London Hospitals. When Ferdinand’s doctor finally approaches his patient, Ferdinand says the doctor should ‘‘have his eyebrows fil’d more civil’’ (5.2.57). The doctor believes that Ferdinand begins to fear him

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and he continues to approach the Duke aggressively. At this point, the doctor seems as mad as the patient, only, perhaps, funnier: ‘‘Let me have some forty urinals filled with rosewater: he and I’ll go pelt one another with them; now he begins to fear me. Let him go, let him go upon my peril. I find by his eye, he stands in awe of me: Ill make him as tame as a dormouse’’ (5.2.68–70). When he tries to grab Ferdinand, he gets a thorough beating. The Marquis deadpans at this moment, ‘‘Doctor, he did not fear you thoroughly’’ (5.2.80). This is not grotesque comedy, but an unmitigated mocking of Ferdinand. Playing Ferdinand for grotesque sympathy here, as many modern actors have, is the result, yet again, of not seeing or understanding the show of Bethlem’s presence in the play. This time, however, the misunderstanding is of another sort than we have been considering. Scholars and actors have misunderstood scenes of group madness as perverse horror shows played for bizarre laughter and neglected the charitable effect of the mad display intended. In this instance, ironically, scholars and actors tend to ascribe too much sympathy to Ferdinand’s display. In one of the few moments when a Renaissance playwright does intend an audience to laugh at a madman without any qualifying pangs of guilt or sympathy, modern readers impose misplaced pity. Bosola provides the precise reason for this particular staging: ‘‘Mercy upon me, what a fatal judgment/ Hath fall’n upon this Ferdinand!’’ (5.2.81–3). Webster thus gives two ‘‘twin’’ shows of madness, the Duchess and Ferdinand’s, and directs two opposing responses, one charitable, one mocking. This could be considered a particularly brilliant solution to the dramaturgical problem the theater of Bethlem itself presented. The show struggled throughout its history with the opposing responses of pity or laughter it could generate. Webster incorporates both aspects of the show into his play, but separates them cleanly. This separation, I will show momentarily, suggests the self-conscious artistry at work here in engaging the show of Bethlem, a self-consciousness not as visibly present in King Lear where the authentic complexity of the show of Bethlem seems much more deeply embedded in the play’s construction.

JUDGING CHARITABLE EXCHANGES GENERALLY In more fully examining The Duchess of Malfi connections to the show of Bethlem, however, the play does reveal itself to be

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more deeply concerned with charitable display than one had suspected. Webster begins the play by asking us to consider two comparable charitable relationships. Bosola complains early on about the lack of reward for a soldier. He suggests that a soldier’s destiny is charitable support: ‘‘There are rewards for hawks, and dogs, when they have done us service; but for a soldier, that hazards his limbs in a battle, nothing but a kind of geometry is his last supportation.’’ He then explains the imagery. ‘‘Ay, to hang in a fair pair of slings, take his latter swing in the world, upon an honourable pair of crutches, from hospital to hospital: fare ye well sir. And yet do not you scorn us, for places in the court are but like beds in the hospital, where this man’s head lies at that man’s foot, and so lower and lower’’ (1.1.63–68). The workings of a hospital certainly inform this play. Antonio tells us that Bosola’s self—characterization as unrewarded charity case is correct: ‘‘Tis great pity/ He should be thus neglected, I have heard He’s very valiant’’ (1.1.73–75). When we next see Bosola he is dependent on the ‘‘good deeds’’ of Ferdinand and the Cardinal. Ferd. ‘‘There’s gold. Bosola. So: What follows? (Never Rain’d such showers as these Without thunderbolts i’ th tail of them; Whose throat must I cut? (1.2.167–69)

Bosola tries to resist these ‘‘gifts’’ that will take him to hell. When Ferdinand gives Bosola the ‘‘provisorship’’ of the house and asks for a display of gratitude, Bosola responds I would have you curse yourself now, That your bounty, Which makes men truly noble, ever should make Me a villain: oh, that to avoid ingratitude For the good deed you have done me, I must do All the ill man can invent. Thus the devil Candies all sin over: and what Heaven terms vile, That names he complemental. (1.2.192–98)

Bosola loudly and clearly exposes the corruption of Ferdinand’s giving, his good deeds:

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Let good men, for good deeds, covet good fame Since place and riches oft are bribes of shame; Sometimes the devil does preach. (1.2.210–12)

Similarly, a few lines later the Duchess couches her flirtation/ seduction of Antonio in charitable terms. She calls for Antonio under the ruse that she wants to prepare a will. I am making my will, as ’tis fit princes should In perfect memory, and I pray sir, tell me Were not one better make it smiling, thus? Than in deep groans, and terrible ghastly looks, As if the gifts we parted with, procur’d That violent distraction? (1.2.295–99)

Like the Marquis, the Duchess expresses concern not just about giving but about how one gives. The conversation turns, as did the discussion between Bosola and Ferdinand, to ‘‘good deeds.’’ The Duchess asks, ‘‘What good deed shall we first remember? Say’’ (1.2.303). Antonio tells her to ‘‘Begin with that first good deed, begin i’th’ world, /After man’s creation, the sacrament of marriage. / I’ld have you first provide for a good husband/ Give him all’’ (1.2.304–6). All this discussion of good deeds, we note with interest, leads to Antonio’s reference to ambition and visiting the mad and the propriety of responses. Distinct charitable processes are thus metonymically linked. The advancement of Antonio, like the advancement of Bosola, involves ‘‘debts’’ and ‘‘payments’ and concerns about ‘‘begging.’’ Webster asks an audience to compare and contrast these ‘‘charitable’’ exchanges, ultimately directing an audience to accept one—the good deed of marriage—as noble and right. Thomas Middleton’s dedication in the 1623 printed version of the play (following a recent revival), perhaps somewhat obscure, makes better sense in this context: In this thou imitat’st one rich, and wise, That sees his good deeds done before he dies; As he by works, thou by this work of fame, Hast well provided for thy living name; To trust to others’ honourings, is worth’s crime,

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Thy monument is rais’d in thy life time; And ’tis most just; for every worthy man Is his own marble; and his merit can Cut him to any figure, and express More art, than Death’s cathedral palaces, Where royal ashes keep their court: thy note Be ever plainness, ’tis the richest coat: Thy epitaph only the title be, Write, Duchess, that will fetch a tear for thee, For who e’er saw this Duchess live, and die, That could get off under a bleeding eye?

In many ways, the revival of Webster’s work in 1623 points to the exposure of corrupt charity that Middleton and Rowley had just delivered in The Changeling —the subject of chapter 7.

THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN Before turning to Middleton and Rowley, though, I want to return to the artfulness by which Webster engages the theater of Bethlem in comparison to other plays considered here. He has, I have tried to show, a firm control of these Bedlam scenes as dramatic devices. This artfulness implies the growing distance between the theater of Bethlem and the stage that we have seen so far. In contrast to Dekker and Middleton, who almost literally give us the show of Bethlem rather than a more, modern representative play, or Shakespeare, who struggles profoundly and eerily with the relation between the real theater of Bethlem and his stage, Webster’s dramaturgy and its self-consciousness about Bedlam scenes marks a further separation between the theater of Bethlem and the stage. Webster’s use of Bethlem is closer to a New Historical ‘‘appropriation’’ in the customary sense of the term; that is, we see an artist managing and controlling material for dramatic purposes. The historical distance between the charitable theater of Bethlem and ourselves makes that appropriation confusing, but once we understand the power of that theater to elicit pity we see pretty quickly and clearly, I think, how Webster employs it. We can see this greater separation of ‘‘theaters’’ more clearly yet by briefly speculating about a play contemporaneous with The Duchess of Malfi, one that similarly engages displays of

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madness and their ability to elicit charity—Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613/14). In a fairly recent reading, Douglas Bruster makes a provocative and convincing case for the significance of the Jailer’s Daughter in early modern dramatic study.16 The Jailer’s Daughter, we recall, frees the two noble kinsmen, Arcite and Palamon, from their imprisonment because of her love for Palamon. When Palamon fails to return her love or, in fact, even have any more contact with her in the play, she goes mad. In many ways, she stands apart from the rest of the plot, only marginally connected to Palamon and Arcite’s efforts to win Emilia. As Bruster points out, though, the mad language of this ‘‘otherwise disempowered’’ character standing ‘‘outside the play’s self-definition of the social’’ registers ‘‘the increasing separation of court and city from the country.’’17 This culture wide separation of social spheres includes the dramatic shift from Shakespeare’s ‘‘more popular forms of drama’’ to Fletcher’s ‘‘more aristocratic’’ theater and the collaboration of the two playwrights at a moment when the former was giving way to the latter produces this unique character.18 The Jailer’s Daughter functions, then, as something of a transitional marker in history. Through a fascinating analysis of her language, Bruster shows that many of her words ‘‘float’’ within the play, unable to ‘‘find an object’’ because her ‘‘thoughts’’ are, in fact, bits of the fast disappearing world of folk culture not thoroughly integrated into the play.19 As Bruster ingeniously points out, however, the mix of the new theater (and its interest in strong, individualized female roles) with the old inflects these bits of folk culture with a ‘‘complex individual psychology’’: ‘‘what is inside her mind turns out to be the outside world.’’20 Not random at all, the Jailer’s Daughter’s language provides something of a Jamesonian political unconscious for the play: ‘‘demarcated from the rest of the drama . . . hidden yet present, unseen at the same time powerful.’’21 In that it deals with a single mad character without the hint of a madhouse or hospital, The Two Noble Kinsmen stands just outside the scope of my analysis here; but as a means of linking my reading of The Duchess of Malfi to my reading of Fletcher’s The Pilgrim and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling in the next chapter, I want to try briefly to extend and connect Bruster’s analysis to the relationship between Bethlem and the stage. The Jailer’s Daughter, as Bruster says, is ‘‘grounded in pathetic mad-

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ness’’ and what informs this remarkable character is a disappearing folk and country culture. I think we can include in that category of folk and country culture the charitable show of Bethlem. While certainly not ‘‘country’’ in the way Bruster uses the term, the show of Bethlem does fit the category of folk or popular culture, a show with distinct ties to an older medieval way of life that would disappear under the pressure of modern civilizing (and artistic) processes. The Jailer’s Daughter’s madness is a pitiful sight that empowers and enrichs the play, but remains, like so many Bedlam scenes, at an odd and confusing distance from the play as a whole. We see the stage, the emerging drama of Fletcher, literally attempt to supplant this mad sight at the end of the play. As the Doctor, Wooer, and Jailer seek to humor the Jailer’s Daughter into sanity, a messenger arrives onstage to call them and the audience to another show, the fight between Arcite and Palamon: ‘‘What do you here? You’ll lose the noblest sight/ That e’er was seen’’ (5.2.9899).22 The scene with the Jailer’s Daughter ends and Pirithous steps on stage to similarly redirect the audience and, this time, Emilia to the proper show: ‘‘Will you lose this sight?’’ (5.3.2). Of course, in a sense, everyone will lose this sight because the playwrights do not stage the battle. But registered here is an awareness of the theatrical power of the Jailer’s Daughter’s madness, an awareness registered also in the countrymen’s pleasure at discovering an authentic madwoman to enhance their show within the show: Third Countryman. There’s a dainty madwoman, master, Comes i’th’ nick, as mad as a March hare: If we can get her dance, we are made again: I warrant her, she’ll do the rarest gambols. First Countryman. A mad woman? We are made, boys. (3.5.70–73)

Engagement with authentic madness can energize older forms of spectacle like the dancers’ morris but, as Bruster points out, in this play such performances, including their appropriation of authentic mad spectacles, are disconnected from the main plot. There is, it seems, little or no contact between the world of the

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Jailer’s Daughter and the main plot of Arcite and Palamon; that is, there seems little or no contact between where the stage is going and where it has been. Yet, in production, the Jailer’s Daughter more often than not creates the most memorable scenes for an audience. It is her performance, in other words, that threatens to overwhelm the new theater of Fletcher. If we consider the Jailer’s Daughter’s pathetic madness as in some way informed by the charitable show of Bethlem, we see in this threat to developing art a familiar dynamic. The stage struggles with the alternative theatrical practice of Bethlem. Indeed, we might even sense that the Bedlam spectacle and its strange charitable practice haunt this play. The last thing Palamon does before the gods reverse the course of events in his favor is give charity to the mad. Palamon. [to the jailer] Aha, my friend, my friend, Your gentle daughter gave me freedom once; You’ll see’t done now forever. Pray, how does she? I heard she was not well; her kind of ill Gave me some sorrow. Jailer. Sir, she’s well restored And to be married shortly Palamon. By my short life, I am most glad on’t; ’tis the latest thing I shall be glad of. Prithee, tell her so; Commend me to her, and to piece her portion Tender her this. (5.4.23–32)

Stage directions command that Palamon ‘‘give his purse’’ and this prompts the other knights to do so as well. Palamon says of her ‘‘A right good creature, more to me deserving/ Than I can quite or speak of.’’ The Jailer says in response, ‘‘The gods requite you all, and make her thankful.’’ It could be suggested that in the next moments of the play the theatrical ‘‘gods’’ of Shakespeare and Fletcher do, in part, requite this charitable gesture of giving to the mad by striking Arcite dead instead of Palamon. But to even consider that argument one would have to show that, to some extent at least, Fletcher (and/or Shakespeare) was willing to entertain the rather Catholic notion that good deeds could produce miraculous results.

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7 ‘‘Shadows and Shows of Charity’’: The Changeling, The Pilgrim, and the Protestant Critique of Catholic Good Works IN CHAPTER THREE I POINTED OUT THAT IN DEKKER AND MIDDLETON’S The Honest Whore, Part One (1605), the Duke knows Bethlem’s name and its principal function, but he does not know its location. Duke: How far stands Bethlem hence? Omn: Six or seven miles. (5.1.97–98)

In Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling (1622) the ‘‘castlecaptain’’ Vermandero not only knows the location of Alibius’s madhouse—it is contained inside the well-fortified walls of Alicante—he knows Alibius and commissions the madhouse director’s work. In the period between 1605 and 1622, in the time between The Honest Whore, Part One and The Changeling, in the period between when Thomas Middleton helps bring Bethlem to the stage and the time when he helps write what is perhaps the best and most famous English ‘‘madhouse’’ play, actual Bethlem’s relationship and proximity to state authority had changed as well. Much damage had been done to Bethlem’s status as a local, citizen charity. The show of Bethlem, as suggested in the last chapter, had come under criticism for emphasizing its ‘‘theater’’ rather than its charity. The 1598 poor laws had supplanted the Royal Hospitals as the charitable institution in London and the entire country. By 1622 the Crown was asserting its control over all charitable practices. Bethlem had the personal attention of the King of England and, in fact, had the King’s man within its walls. 204

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Robert Reed tells us that King James had ‘‘claimed the privilege of legal guardianship of the institution.’’1 More interestingly, the King personally intervened in Bethlem’s affairs: in 1618 . . . the king personally engineered the removal of Thomas Jenner from the mastership of Bethlem: three months later, he appointed one of his private court physicians, Dr. Hilkiah Crooke, as Jenner’s successor. . . .2 How does one read the events of 1618? How does one read The Changeling and its relationship to those events? Certainly the initial temptation exists to see James’s intervention in Bethlem affairs as fitting Foucault’s narrative. With the figures of Dr. Crooke and James, we have, it seems, the active collusion of medical and royal authority. May we not read the beginnings of the modern absolutist state’s medical ‘‘personage’’ and the confinement of madness Foucault described? And, given the now modified but still distinct ‘‘political’’ interest in Thomas Middleton’s work, may we not see The Changeling as displaying ‘‘oppositional’’ anxiety to the growing absolutism of James’s regime by dramatizing the institution Foucault made emblematic of the power of the modern absolutist state—the psychiatric hospital? My answer to these questions is no, not yet, not at this point in history. At this point in time, Bethlem and its show still have a place outside and opposed to the processes of the Great Confinement and modern state power. We have to concentrate still on the charitable context of Bethlem and its show before revisiting Foucault. An uncharitable understanding of the ‘‘madhouse’’3 best known to Middleton and his audience has inhibited scholars’ attempts to situate The Changeling in its social and political context.4 Even Margot Heinemann, who established something of a critical consensus in suggesting Middleton’s work as a whole belongs in a ‘‘clearly discernible line of dramatic production which appeals to and encourages’’ Parliamentary and City Puritan sympathies, could not convincingly demonstrate that The Changeling itself is ‘‘oppositional’’; and her difficulty stems primarily from an inability to historicize the seemingly bizarre subplot.5 But once one reconstructs charity’s relationship to Bethlem, the play seems much more compatible with Middleton’s other work. The Changeling is oppositional—staunchly Protestant, antiCatholic, sympathetic with city officials, and antagonistic to the policies of James—but the nature of that opposition lies in its re-

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lationship to Reformation charity. Charity’s relationship to The Changeling also helps explain perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the play: ‘‘the pathological intensity’’ of the beautiful Beatrice and ugly Deflores’s ‘‘violent sexual union.’’6

THE PROTESTANT CRITIQUE OF CATHOLIC CARITAS The apparent ease with which Bethlem and other monastic institutions became long-standing fixtures in London culture helps to dispel the myth that Protestants were uniquely hostile towards charity.7 But, if, as suggested in chapter 1, differences between Catholic and Protestant charity have been overstated, one does not wish to overcompensate for that by understating or effacing the importance of religious difference.8 Lacking any sociological explanations for ‘‘charity’’—such as the need of a culture to maintain social cohesion, peace, and order, by partially redistributing wealth—early modern Europe relied primarily on religion, and religious discourse to explain, justify, and manage its charitable practices. The concept of ‘‘Charity’’ became at the very least a doctrinal dilemma for Protestants, an issue Catholic propagandists could attack in return. Calvin finds himself having to refute those ‘‘impious persons who slanderously charge us with refusing good works when we condemn all pursuit of them by men . . . also with leading men away from zeal for good works when we teach they are not justified by works or merit salvation.’’9 Or he finds himself critiquing the doctrinal ‘‘subtlety’’ that places love above faith. He specifically attacks those who ‘‘misinterpret’’ Paul’s words: ‘‘If anyone has all faith so as to remove mountains, but has not love, his is nothing’’ (I Cor. 13:2). To those he argues, ‘‘It certainly is a matter of no little significance that faith has at the same time as companions hope and love. If these are utterly lacking, however learnedly and elaborately we may discuss faith, we are proved to have none. Not because faith is engendered in us from hope or love, but because it can in no way come to pass without hope and forever following faith.’’10 Convincing opponents that ‘‘we do not deny good works’’ but only insist ‘‘those that are good . . . [come] from God’’ was a primary focus of Calvin and many others. An explosion of charitable literature in Post Reformation England indicates that the

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populace had to be convinced that ‘‘works,’’ while not leading to salvation, still mattered; the audience for these sermons needed convincing both for fear that charity would diminish and to ease their concerns about Catholic challenges to their piety.11 The matter of charity was a point of some anxiety for Protestants. Recusant Catholics, for example, recognized the doctrinal dilemma and found it rhetorically useful to appeal to Protestants on the grounds of charity.12 Londoners often took pride in contrasting their charity with Catholic charity, usually pointing out the value of their new long-range attitude toward charity in contrast to the ‘‘older’’ Catholic almsgiving.13 Part of the Protestant anxiety stems from the fact that, while Calvin could refute Catholic charges of being ‘‘anti-charity’’ in ‘‘one word,’’ others found the concept of charity in the Reformed faith more problematic. As W. K. Jordan remarks, quoting a sermon from John Donne: the obligations which the man of the reformed faith must shoulder are more difficult than those of the Roman Catholic, for he must understand that good works, abundant charity, are required of him, but without relying upon them as meritorious.14

At the annual Spital Sermon in Front of St. Mary’s Hospital, Lancelot Andrewes attempted to reconcile the principle that ‘‘Good works’’ are still a ‘‘foundation’’ for Christianity even though Reformed doctrine stresses faith as the principal grounding of the religion: ‘‘So among the graces within us, faith is properly in the first sense said to be the foundation; yet in the second, do we not deny but, as the apostle calleth them, as the lowest row, next to faith, charity, and the works of charity may be foundations too.’’15 The hortatory rhetoric was, in short, contradictory and complex. Told to be charitable, the early modern citizen was also told to discriminate very carefully between the deserving and the undeserving and to base that charity on Reformation principles. Thomas Adams aptly expresses the potentially confusing chiastic structure of these demands in a sermon exhorting Protestant charity: ‘‘There indeed may be a show of charity without faith, but there can be no show of faith without charity.’’16 So: if the dominant feature of early modern charity across Europe was its attempt to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving poor, we can begin to see here in the Protestant culture’s

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ruminations over religious justification one of the odd features specific to English charity. At the time of The Changeling, charity in England shared with Europe a focus on what one could call the demonstrably unfortunate, such as the mad of Bethlem, but unlike Catholic Europe, England had a complicated, contested, and newly forming religious justification for that focus. Charity, in short, does not just involve good works, but an entire cultural belief system. Traditional Catholic medieval teaching had formulated its understanding of charity, its ‘‘interest’’ in the demonstrably unfortunate, around the Augustinian doctrine of love embodied in the term caritas. For much of Medieval Catholicism, caritas, love to God, was the principal commandment to all Christians; Augustine had subsumed ‘‘Christianity as a whole under the aspect of love.’’17 God reveals his love to man in the figure of Christ in order for man to know better how to love God. The ‘‘pre-Augustinian’’ commandment to love one’s neighbor remains intact, but that love of neighbor must be enjoined first and foremost to the love of God. Anders Nygren explains: ‘‘the commandment of love to neighbor . . . has no independent place or meaning. . . . It is really included already in the commandment of love to God. . . . Augustine regards love to neighbor as fully legitimate only in so far as it can be referred ultimately, not to the neighbor, but to God Himself.’’18 Such was the case with all forms of love, including marital; but the doctrine was particularly relevant to ‘‘charitable’’ love in that if all love came from and was directed back toward God, no individual, in theory, would be exempted from charitable love on the basis of physical or personal undesirability.19 Christians across Europe were warned consistently that caritas could easily slip into a specific type of sin or perversion (cupiditas) if one loved someone (or self) for that object’s own sake rather than God’s. One consequence of this doctrine was that an individual was bound to ‘‘love’’ both the attractive and unattractive. In Catholic charity or caritas, the emphasis was on transcending the physical world and, accordingly, physical distinctions. Traditional medieval teaching consistently reinforced this doctrine, in part because it helped sustain charitable relations and overcome ‘‘instinct.’’ But, as Brian Pullan notes, ‘‘nearly two centuries before the Reformation,’’ the ugliness generally associated with poverty ‘‘had begun to breed a second official attitude to the poor, coexisting uneas-

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ily’’ with the ancient Christian demand to ‘‘love’’ the unfortunate, Christ’s representatives on earth, in charity.20 In Protestant England, however, the Augustinian doctrine of caritas was not only not sufficient to explain or justify charitable love, it was sinful in and of itself and very often the subject of ridicule. Luther observed that the ‘‘whole of Catholic doctrine of love [caritas] displays an egocentric perversion,’’ in that no matter how much Catholicism spoke of God’s love in its desire for caritas, ‘‘the centre of gravity in our relation to God was nevertheless placed primarily in the love we owe God.’’ The emphasis, in other words, was on man’s love, not God’s, and man’s ability to move ‘‘upward’’ toward God to acquire the only right love. Against this ‘‘egocentric perversion,’’ Luther ‘‘sets a thoroughly theocentric idea of love’’ whereby God’s love came down to man in Christ but man had no possibility of ascending upward to God in caritas.21 Man is so base and sinful that even his ‘‘love’’ or charity is polluted; to attempt to ‘‘seek fellowship’’ with God in caritas is doubly ‘‘polluted’’ in that it presumes in its underlying intention a commonality between God and man that does not exist.22 Luther could not obey the Catholic ‘‘commandment to love with all the heart.’’23 Middleton and Rowley provide a humorous example of how these disputes played out in the drama in their collaboration prior to The Changeling—The Fair Quarrel (1616). Many critics have noted a connection between Deflores’s assault of Beatrice and a scene involving the ‘‘physician’s’’ efforts to extract sexual favors from ‘‘Jane’’ for his services. In this scene the playwrights provide Jane with what could be considered a rather witty ‘‘Lutheran’’ response to the logic of caritas. In an attempt to extract sexual ‘‘love’’ from Jane, the physician says Oh, pray you urge it not: we are not born For ourselves only; self-love is a sin; But in our loving donatives to others Man’s virtue best consists: love all begets; Without, all are adulterate and counterfeit (3.2.32–36)24

Jane replies to this appeal for total love, ‘‘Your boundless love I cannot satisfy’’ (3.2.27). From Luther’s perspective, the psychic work necessary to participate sincerely in caritas (change one’s

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very human and therefore sinful love into a holier form of love) was simply too demanding, a ‘‘boundless’’ task only God could perform. For Middleton and Rowley, then, this command suggested a ‘‘Catholic’’ opportunity for corrupt exploitation. Unable to deliver the persuasive argument that one could move upward to God through good works, Protestant theologians struggled to articulate their justification for charity in a form that would still encourage giving. In fact, in the effort to establish faith as the source of works, or develop a charitable believe system to function as caritas had, Protestants most often justified their interest in the demonstrably unfortunate by claiming or demonstrating what it was not: caritas.25 Richard Hooker, after an eight-hundred-word explication of the Catholic doctrine of merit detailing its central precept that ‘‘workes of charitie pilgrymages fastes and suche like’’ move man closer to Grace, prepared his listener or reader for the place of charity in Protestant doctrine: This mase the churche of Rome doth cause her followers to tread, when they aske her the way of justification. I cannott stand nowe to unripp this buyldinge and to sifte it peece by peece, onely I will sett a frame of Apostolicall erection by it in fewe wordes, that it maie be fall Babilon in presence of that which god hath buylded as it happened unto Dagan before the Ark.26

The justification for Protestant charity almost always exists in a ‘‘fewe wordes’’ juxtaposed to a ‘‘Catholic mase’’ or ‘‘buyldinge’’ in part because the justification is almost impossible to express without a critique of the Catholic position.27 Nygren asks if Luther ‘‘succeeds in building up [an] other idea of love’’ or only in critiquing caritas.28 He answers that Luther fails mainly because the Protestant justification defies easy representation in language. To define another idea of love to replace the Catholic concept of caritas is to define God: ‘‘there is complete identity between God and love, love and God.’’ Luther implies that such a definition, if possible, could only be found in an ‘‘artistic’’ rendering: ‘‘If anyone would paint and aptly portray God, then he must draw a picture of pure love, as if the Divine nature were nothing but a furnace and fire of such love, which fills heaven and earth. And again, if it were possible to paint and picture love, we should have to make such a picture as would be

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not of works nor human, yea not of angels nor heavenly, but God himself.’’29 In Andrew Willett’s influential Synopsis Papismi (1593, first annotated edition 1614), the author valorizes Protestant religious motivation for charity by displaying, in catalogue form, London charities, and by comparison: ’’[Catholic charities] were done in the pride of their heart, in opinion of merit to purchase remission of sinnes . . . [Protestant charities were made to] serve as testimonies of our faith.’’30 It would seem that in frequently comparing Protestant ‘‘charity’’ to Catholic almsgiving, London preachers were not simply employing a rhetorical device: the Protestant doctrinal justification ‘‘exists’’ principally in its opposition to the Catholic position. No culture is a monolith, however, and not every Londoner felt the same animosity toward Rome and not every preacher could or would present the doctrinal subtlety that separated Protestant and Catholic ‘‘charity’’ with precision and clarity. John Squire, Vicar of St. Leonard Shoreditch, for example, simply glances over the dispute: I dispute not the distinctions, whether good workes bee . . . sacrificia impetrantia, to beg a blessing upon our King and kingdome, upon families and persons: or whether they be onely sacrificia eucharistica, the tribute of our thankfulnes . . . Buth this I know, [they are] sacrifices wherewith God is pleased.31

The Protestant justification for charity was certainly formed in opposition to Catholic charity but the intensity and sophistication of that ‘‘opposition’’ varied considerably. Consequently, much ‘‘Protestant’’ charity could seem ‘‘Catholic’’ in its underlying intention and, occasionally, meet with resistance from the more Puritan minded. If, in the process of exhorting charity, an English preacher spoke too much of a relationship between good works and grace—either from ignorance, carelessness, economic desperation, or true Catholic sympathies—someone would respond to the popish language.32 ‘‘Protestant’’ English charity was formed amidst this contested discourse. Protestant charitable discourse, in other words, works to reestablish faith as the source for good works by repeatedly exposing the Catholic perversion or potential for perversion in the motivation underlying good works. The whole struggle over charitable

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language and logic made loving the demonstrably unfortunate for sinful, superstitious and ‘‘Catholic’’ reasons a sin tantamount to cupiditas—loving the attractive for their attributes—in that both kinds of ‘‘love’’ had unholy motivations. This culture-wide struggle over charity partially explains why, in 1618, when James took an unprecedented personal interest in one of London’s long-standing charitable institutions by replacing the city appointed keeper of Bethlem, Thomas Jenner, with court physician Helkiah Crooke, a king widely perceived to be pro-Catholic met with resistance and skepticism from staunchly Protestant city officials.33 Patricia Allderidge’s account explains that Crooke initiated events by complaining to the king that Thomas Jenner ‘‘was not fitted for his office and was inadequate in medical matters.’’ James recommended his personal physician as replacement in July of 1618. In October, a ‘‘committee had been set up to consider His Majesty’s letter recommending Helkiah Crooke to be master under the patronage and oversight of the mayor and citizens of London of the Hospital of Bethlem.’ ’’ The language suggests that the City was asserting authority over its hospital and testing the limits of its autonomy by only considering the King’s recommendation. James’s response indicated as much. He commissioned his own committee to investigate ‘‘his hospital’’ and insisted that Crooke ‘‘was to have some allowance from the hospital revenues while the investigation was in progress.’’ The conflict did not lessen in the next few years. There is evidence of Crooke rather vociferously defending himself against charges of mismanagement. By 1632, Crooke had been removed by City officials for corrupt practices. After which there was a ‘‘marked and immediate increase’’ in charitable gifts to Bethlem.34 On New Year’s Day, 1622, five months before The Changeling was first performed, and while Crooke was defending himself against the City’s charges of corruption, the King’s Men perform John Fletcher’s The Pilgrim at Court. Rather than display Protestant skepticism about charity, Fletcher’s play valorizes works rather indiscriminately or, at the very least, fails to draw the distinction between Protestant and Catholic charity insisted upon by so many puritan-minded preachers.35 And, in his depiction of the madhouse keeper, Fletcher displays a confidence in that character’s abilities commensurate with, presumably, the King’s confidence in Crooke. If the exchange between the Court of Al-

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derman and James was a very real struggle between social actors to determine the nature and government of a charity, The Pilgrim prompts another similar, but specifically dramatic, exchange between Middleton and Fletcher. For, in The Changeling, Middleton quite clearly reconceives many of Fletcher’s characters (and much of his plot) and demystifies their superficial or Catholic charitable gestures by sexualizing those gestures. That is, like so much Protestant charitable discourse, Middleton’s play responds to a valorization of good works by exposing the Catholic perversion or potential for perversion underlying those works and, in the process, offers a subtle critique of James’s intervention in London’s charitable affairs and a bitterly satirical look at Catholic charity generally. Middleton and Fletcher participate in what was a social, religious, and political dispute involving charity and Bethlem by reworking that cultural material into dramatic form. In the process, they provide a ‘‘picture’’ of the true Protestant charity in question: the show of Bethlem. The well-known primary ‘‘source’’ for The Changeling is John Reynolds’s The Triumph of God’s Revenge against The Crying and Execrable Sinne of Wilfull and Premeditated Murther (1621), but that narrative is, of course, not the only influence on the play. My reading will show that the major points on which Middleton and Rowley’s version differs from Reynold’s, such as the addition of the madhouse subplot, Deflores’s ugliness, and Beatrice’s strong repulsion to him, can be explained by the influence of Fletcher and charity.36

THE PILGRIM AND FLETCHER’S VALORIZATION OF CATHOLIC GOOD WORKS Disputes about charity dominate the opening scenes of the now infrequently read Pilgrim. An overbearing father, Alphonso, prefers that his daughter, Alinda, as renowned for her charity as her beauty, marry Roderigo, a banished nobleman turned ‘‘outlaw,’’ instead of her true love, Pedro, a courtier. Pedro comes to Alinda disguised as a pilgrim begging alms; she recognizes him only after he leaves. Alphonso worries noticeably about his daughter’s indiscriminate charity. When Alinda appears on stage dispersing alms to a throng of beggars and pilgrims, Alphonso responds:

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She is so full of conscience too, and charity, And outward holiness, she will undo me: Relieves more beggars, then an hospital; And all poor rogues, that can but say their prayers, And tune their pipes to Lamentations, She thinks she is bound to dance to. (1.1.74)37

The precise and subtle argument for discriminating charity that Calvin, Luther, and Protestant preachers struggled to make is here cast in the most negative light. Alphonso advocates discriminating charity not for holy purposes but to protect his own wealth. As suggested, Catholics and Protestants often disputed the notion that the Protestant arguments about discriminating charity could be refigured by the greedy for unholy purposes.38 Most characters do not share Alphonso’s view of Alinda or her charity. Curio and Seberto, two of Alphonso’s friends, try to convince Alphonso that he is too harsh on a wonderful daughter: ‘‘so excellent in all endowments’’ (1.1.5). Almost everyone except for Alphonso thinks well of Alinda, who, unlike Middleton and Rowley’s Beatrice, maintains her good reputation. Most of act 1 works to demonstrate the holiness and attractiveness of Alinda’s indulgent or indiscriminate charity while mocking those, like Alphonso, who critique her. Alinda’s maidservant, Juletta, echoes Alphonso’s concerns: Your open handed bounty Makes em flock any hour: some worth your pity, But others that have made a trade of begging. (1.1.96)

Intriguingly, Alinda’s response mirrors the rhetoric of Catholic critics of Protestant charity: Wench, if they ask it truly, I must give it: It takes away the holy use of charity To examine wants. (1.1.100)

Alphonso shows a gold piece to a beggar only to take it away in a petty gesture (1.2.70); Seberto finds him ‘‘too unreverent’’ in his charitable obligations (1.2.75). Alinda’s Porter, reprimanded

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for treating beggars cruelly, complains that they lack only ambition (1.2.7–10). In general, the play portrays Alphonso’s opinions as wrongheaded and works to mock him and his words. Seberto warns him that ‘‘The wrongs ye do these men, may light on you, / Too heavy too: and then you will wish you had said less;/ A comely and sweet usage becomes strangers’’ (1.2.80–82). In fact, Alphonso’s realization that he has made mistakes plays a significant part in the drama’s resolution: ‘‘I dare say nothing; / My tongue’s a new tongue Sir, and knows his tither’’ (5.6.77–78). Accordingly, when Alphonso offers ‘‘Protestant’’ criticisms of Alinda’s ‘‘Catholic’’ charity, we gain some sense of the play’s religious perspective. The play hollows out Protestant rhetoric about charity. Consider Alphonso’s version of the doctrine of elect and the Protestant critique of the Catholic tendency to emphasize charitable deeds over faith as a means to salvation. When Seberto reminds Alphonso, on a stage full of beggars and pilgrims, of his charitable obligations, he responds with characteristic coarseness: ‘‘Yes, I warrant ye, If men could sale to heaven in porridge pots/ With masts of Beef, and Mutton, what a voyage should I make’’ (1.2.22–25). Alinda, on the other hand, should be loved for what Reformed doctrine would have considered her indiscriminate charity: ‘‘Tis charity/ Methinks, You are bound to love her for’’ (1.1.25). She mixes easily and carelessly with the ‘‘lousy’’ beggars and pilgrims. A pilgrim explains that so many have come to see Alinda, ‘‘a living monument of goodnesse’’ (1.2.40–49). Alphonso calls this ‘‘sainting’’ of Alinda a new ‘‘way of begging’’ (1.2.47), a remark that receives criticism (1.2.54). Contrary to much Protestant preaching, Alinda has clear expectations of a reward in exchange for her charity: ‘‘Remember me by this: and in your prayers/ When your strong heart melts, mediate my poor fortunes’’ (1.2.113–14). In addition, Fletcher portrays Alphonso as wrongheaded, too, in not allowing Alinda the freedom to choose her own husband. Seberto asks early on, ‘‘Will ye allow no liberty in choosing?’’ (1.1.30). Almost every character on stage hopes that Alinda will find liberty and love away from her tyrannical father. Curio says in an aside, ‘‘Keep her from thy hands, I beseech’’ (2.1.156). In act 2 Alinda leaves home in pursuit of Pedro. Both arrive independently at Roderigo’s camp. Roderigo, Pedro’s sworn enemy, recognizes him and takes him prisoner. Alinda saves

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Pedro’s life when, disguised as a boy servant, she persuades Roderigo that to kill Pedro on such unfair terms would be dishonorable. Having escaped Roderigo, both Alinda and Pedro, still separated by circumstance and still in disguise, seek refuge in a madhouse. Pedro and Alinda recognize one another in the madhouse, are again separated, but rely on a series of tricks and feigned madness to evade Alphonso and Roderigo. While pursuing his daughter, Alphonso is confined as the result of Juletta’s forged letter testifying to his madness. Eventually, all parties reconcile in the mad hospital. When Fletcher first describes the mad hospital, we see hints at the complexity of Bethlem’s charitable ‘‘show’’ that we saw first in Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore, Part One. Having escaped Roderigo, Pedro finds himself in town with a gentleman who offers a tour. When the gentleman discovers that Pedro has seen the ‘‘Castle’’ (3.6.3), he offers another attraction: the madhouse. This is no simple spectacle, no bear-baiting, however, and more than a perverse pleasure. The gentleman hesitates at first before taking Pedro: ‘‘But that I would not/Affect you with more sadness, I could show ye/ A place worth view’’ (3.6.7–8). ‘‘Showes,’’ Pedro responds, ‘‘seldom alter’’ him. The gentleman then continues, explaining that this is a madhouse Where people of all sorts, that have been visited With lunacies and follies wait their cures: There’s fancies of a thousand stamps and fashions, Like flies in several shapes buzz round about ye, And twice as many gestures; some of pity, That it would make ye melt to see their passions: And some as light again, that would content ye. But I see sir, your temper is too modest, Too much inclin’d to contemplation, To meet with these? (3.6.10–19)

Pedro agrees to the strange attraction: ‘‘I never had such a mind yet to see misery.’’ This show, in short, produces complex—and perhaps to us—contradictory responses in its viewers. Its ‘‘misery’’ may induce laughter and content or pity or some combination.

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THE CHANGELING AND MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY’S SEXUALIZATION OF CATHOLIC GOOD WORKS The first scenes in the madhouse in The Pilgrim show us a busy staff attentive to the individual needs of patients that ‘‘waite their cures’’: Carry mad Besse some meat, she roars like Thunder; And tie the Parson short, the Moone’s ith full, H’as a thousand Pigs in’s braines: Who lookes to the Prentize? Keep him from women, he thinks h’as lost his Mistresss; And talk of no silk stuffs, ’twill run him horn mad. (3.7.1–5)

Interestingly, the first scene in the madhouse explores the competence of the madhouse keeper. Two investigators free a mad scholar, believing him sane, but their assessment proves incorrect when, as the master of the house predicts, the scholar quickly turns mad at the mention of a thunderstorm. The master treats him quickly with music to prevent his fit from growing worse (3.7.119). The investigators are moved: ‘‘I must pity him . . . We are sorry, sir: and we have seen a wonder; /From this hour we’l believe, and so we’l leave ye.’’ The challenge to the master’s authority and skill, followed by a quick and dramatic confirmation of that authority and skill, could be seen as a gesture of affirmation towards the King James’s controversial appointee: Hilkiah Crooke.39 Fletcher’s madhouse, and its competent master, ‘‘have few Citizens: they have bedlames of their own . . . / And are mad at their own charges’’(4.3.16–18); ‘‘madhouses’’ for the elite, such as the one run by Crooke in his own home, provided better care for their patients and the citizen madhouse, Bethlem, could use the guidance of James and his physician. In a stark contrast, the master of the madhouse in The Changeling, Alibius, requires reformation (5.3.210–16). The play ends with his ‘‘change,’’ like Crooke’s fate, still to come. To the extent that these two representations of madhouse keepers can be considered topical references, one can take this as evidence that Middleton was offering a distinctly different view of James’s interest in the demonstrably unfortunate of Bethlem. Middleton had reason to be suspicious of Fletcher’s production given its

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Spanish source, setting, and valorization of Catholic doctrinal positions at the time of Charles and Buckingham’s ‘‘pilgrimage’’ to Spain.40 Given the city’s resistance to Crooke, he certainly had reason to be skeptical of madhouse keepers. But before turning to a complete topical consideration of Alibius and Fletcher’s ‘‘master’’ and their connection to Crooke’s position at Bethlem, we need to consider a more central focus of the dramaturgy to understand the playwrights’ response to Fletcher. It is by reconceiving the character of Alinda as Beatrice that Middleton most powerfully responds to Fletcher’s work and participates in the struggle to form Protestant charity. In mixing with the lousy beggars and pilgrims, Alinda may seem a marked contrast to Beatrice, also the sheltered daughter of a wealthy man, who cannot bear to look at the ugly Deflores and would rather throw away a glove he has touched than wear it again. Middleton and Rowley, though, would not necessarily have a generous view of a character like the saintly Alinda. To the Protestant citizen, the actions of St. Catherine of Siena, the late fourteenth-century mystic who had a predilection for kissing (and drinking the pus from) the cancerous sores of patients, were sinful ‘‘charity,’’ a mere superficial and superstitious showing, which the more satirically minded puritan might suggest was akin to lewd forms of sex and carnal lust.41 Deflores, we note, maintains an interest in Beatrice despite her longstanding repulsion partly because others, ‘‘far worse’’ than him, receive care. ‘‘I’ll despair the less,’’ he says after one of Beatrice’s tirades Because there’s daily precedents of bad faces Belov’d beyond all reason. (2.1.83–84)

Some women, Deflores remarks, are ‘‘odd feeders’’ (2.2.155), attracted to the ugly, deformed, or maimed for no good—or holy— reason. Deflores’s motivation suggests that, for these playwrights, Catholic charitable relationships with the demonstrably unfortunate (the play is set in Alicante, not London), like Alinda’s contact with lousy beggars or James’s interest in Bethlem, often mask sinful or perverted intentions on the part of both giver and recipient. A Protestant audience would note that, in her overtures to Deflores, Beatrice couches her intent to have Piracquo murdered in

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charitable language and gestures. The scene actually recalls some of Webster’s strategy in The Duchess of Malfi and the ‘‘good deeds’’ Ferdinand does for Bosola. Beatrice touches Deflores’s face and and tells him that he was ‘‘not wont / To look so amorously’’ (2.2.74), feigning she has overcome the loathing for his appearance she demonstrated earlier. Then, she offers to treat his boils: ‘‘I’ll make water for you shall cleanse this/ Within a fortnight’’ (2.2.75–95). Deflores asks, ‘‘With your hands lady.’’ To which Beatrice responds, ‘‘Yes, mine own, sir; in a work of cure / I’ll trust no other.’’ Her offer here mimics the traditional offer of charitable cleansing told in the story of the good samaritan. Looking at his desire to do the deed, for money she thinks, Beatrice convinces herself that ‘‘possible his need / Is strong upon him.—There’s to encourage thee’’ she says, handing him money (2.2.129).42 Charitable discourse this, complete with distinct charitable gestures, all laced with the cultural anxieties about the perversion or potential for perversion of good works. Protestant reformers could not deny that Catholics like Alinda did good works, but they argued that the Catholic faith or intention underlying those works undermined the deed. Cranmer explained in the homilies: ‘‘For that faith which brings forth . . . evil works, or no good works, is not a right pure, and lively faith, but a dead, devilish, counterfeit, and feigned faith. . . .’’43 Feigned or Catholic faith brings forth not good works, he explained in ‘‘An Homily or Sermon of Good Works Annexed Unto Faith,’’ but ‘‘shadows and shows of lively and good things.’’44 The production of ‘‘shadows and shows’’ of charity like Beatrice’s exchange with Deflores is linked in Protestant theology to the ‘‘wilfulness’’ inherent in the Catholic doctrine of good works:’’ notwithstanding God’s commandment, he gave credit unto the woman seduced . . . and so followed his own will, and left God’s commandment. . . . all his succession hath been so blinded through original sin, that they have been ever ready to decline from God and his law, and to invent a new way unto salvation by works of their own device.’’45 False works, in other words, implied that one follow his or her will. Middleton and Rowley demonstrate Cranmer’s promise that willfulness, like a daughter’s refusal to obey her father, can lead to hypocritical and sinful shows of charity. In Beatrice’s willfulness, they also provide, I think, some comment on Fletcher’s suggestion throughout the Pilgrim that Alinda should have her will and liberty.

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After Deflores murders Piracquo, he presents himself to Beatrice-Joanna demanding sex and mocking the nature of the relationship she has initiated: . . . I have eas’d You of your trouble, think on’t; I’m in pain And must be eas’d of you; tis a charity. (3.4.98–100)

‘‘An essential part’’ of Catholic compassion, historian Brian Pullan reminds us with considerably more tact than Deflores and distinctly less bias than Middleton, is ‘‘physical contact’’ with the demonstrably unfortunate.46 Catholic charity involved a ‘‘kind of ascetism which entailed . . . mortification of the senses by immediate proximity to dirt, disease, and stench.’’ Beatrice, in the satiric hands of Middleton and Rowley, becomes literally and with ‘‘pathological intensity’’ the ‘‘odd feeder’’ the playwrights saw in Alinda. While The Changeling opens with Alsemero trying to reconcile his romantic interest in ‘‘beauty’’ or Beatrice, rather than a charitable interest in ugliness, with the ‘‘holy purpose,’’ we should not let that obscure the fact that this play exposes at the outset the potential for unholy purposes in ‘‘love’’ relations: Twas in the temple where I first beheld her And now again the same; what omen yet Follows of that? None but imaginary; Why should my hopes or fate be timorous? The place is holy, so is my intent: I love her beauties to the holy purpose. (1.1.1–7)

At the end of the play, Alsemero returns to this concern, seeing in his initial contact with Beatrice something of a tragic flaw. Alsemero’s concerns at the very beginning and end of the play signal the traditionally Catholic distinction between cupiditas and caritas as a primary interest or target of the playwrights. O the place itself e’er since Has crying been for vengeance, the temple Where blood and beauty first unlawfully Fir’d their devotion, and quench’d the right one;

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’Twas in my fears at first, ’twill have it now: O thou art all deform’d! (5.3.73–78)

In Fletcher, the pilgrims explained more convincingly, and without the troubling hint of superstition (‘‘what omen yet’’), that they came to see Alinda, not with ‘‘prophane eyes,’’ but with a ‘‘holy purpose’’ (1.2.40–49). Read in conjunction with Fletcher, Alsemero’s opening lines remind us that at least one of those pilgrims, the disguised Pedro, has something more than a charitable interest in Alinda. From the moment Alsemero struggles with his desire for Beatrice’s beauty, Middleton and Rowley sexualize and thus demystify the ‘‘Catholic’’ love so prominent in The Pilgrim, reworking Fletcher’s material perhaps to suit a more puritan temperament and skeptical citizen patronage. Pedro identifies himself to Alinda by quoting poetry on a ring that he had presented sometime earlier as a gift (1.2.160–72), thus encouraging her to pursue him and disengage herself completely from her father and her father’s chosen suitor, Roderigo; in a grotesque piece of demystification, Beatrice believes herself free from Vermandero’s choice and able to pursue Alsemero when Deflores presents her with Piracquo’s ring finger still attached (3.4.28). Deflores’s presentation of the ring and Beatrice’s efforts to pay him in money recall the exchange between Alinda and the disguised Pedro. Pedro quotes the words on the ring as Alinda tries unsuccessfully to give him alms (1.2.160–75). Beatrice had suggested before the exchange with Deflores that the ‘‘refulgent virtue’’ of her love would make her father appreciate her willful decision to switch choices in husbands (3.4.10– 16); Fletcher had suggested throughout that Alinda’s charity should be enough to convince her father. When an audience sees Deflores for the first time after his ‘‘charitable’’ sexual encounter with Beatrice in act 3, the playwrights strive yet again to comment on the term and practice. Tomazo asks Deflores for help in discovering the truth about his dead brother. Deflores answers that ‘‘I am so charitable, I think none/ Worse than myself’’ (4.2.48–49). For Deflores, ‘‘charity’’ covers sin. A few lines later, the playwrights show that true Protestant charity is not such a pleasant easy matter; on the contrary, it is very often painful, difficult, and repulsive. Jasperino risks angering his friend Alsemero by revealing his doubts about Beatrice. After an initially

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hostile reaction, Alsemero realizes that Jasperino has acted ‘‘charitably’’ in telling him an uncomfortable truth (4.2.110). Exposing the false uses of charity like this was, in fact, something of a thematic habit with Middleton and Rowley. I have already pointed to the playwrights’ previous collaboration, The Fair Quarrel (1616) and its humor exposing how the logic of cupiditas and caritas can be abused. I should also mention that Middleton’s powerful tragedy, Women Beware Women (1621), written immediately before The Changeling, is rife with references to charity covering for lust and sin. When this play’s Isabella discovers her uncle’s (Hippolito) incestuous desire for her she asks ‘‘What’s become/ Of truth in love, if such we cannot trust, / When blood that should be love is mix’d with lust?’’ (1.3.24–26). Livia, in seeking to procure the newly married Bianca for the Duke, reminds Leantio’s mother of old-fashioned charitable obligations. It is not ‘‘too bold,’’ she tells ‘‘mother,’’ for Bianca to come out of her seclusion: ‘‘Too bold? O What’s become/ Of the true hearty love was wont to be/ ’Mongst neighbours in old time?’’ (2.2.217–19). Having ‘‘submitted’’ to the Duke, Bianca comments sarcastically on the ‘‘true hearty love’’ of Livia: ‘‘The kindness of some people, how’t exceeds!’’ (2.2.56). Leantio refers specifically to Livia’s sudden lust for him as ‘‘charity’’ when later chastising Bianca. Livia’s good works produce erections, not charitable institutions: ‘‘But there was ever still more charity found out/ Than at one proud fool’s door; and twere hard, faith, / If I could not pass that. Read to thy shame, there—/ A cheerful and a beauteous benefactor too, / As ev’r erected the good works of love’’ (4.1.68–72). When the Cardinal challenges the quick marriage of the Duke and Bianca after Leantio’s death, Bianca tries to preserve this perverse relationship by telling the Cardinal that he is uncharitable: ’mongst all your virtues I see not Charity written, which some call The first-born Religion, and I wonder I cannot see’t in yours. Believe it, sir, There is no virtue can be sooner miss’d Or later welcom’d; it begins the rest And sets ’em all in order. (4.3.49–54)

Middleton delighted in displaying corrupt uses of charity, particularly corrupt uses that relied on the Catholic logic of caritas.

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True charity for this Protestant-minded playwright was harsh, difficult, and often ugly. At the end of the play, the incestuous Hippolito asks for ‘‘some blest charity’’ to lend him ‘‘the speeding pity of his sword/ To quench this fire in blood’’ and kills himself by running into a Guard’s halberd (5.2.149–51). In short, Middleton was predisposed to respond to Fletcher’s valorization of charity in a madhouse and James’s personal attention to the old London hospital.

THE ‘‘SUBPLOT’’ OF THE CHANGELING AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO THE ‘‘MAIN PLOT’’ As suggested earlier, establishing a relationship between the subplot and the main plot of The Changeling has caused much critical consternation, but like the main plot, the subplot exposes the perversion or the potential for perversion in the holy motivation for charity. Alibius worries that the visitants to the madhouse have less than a charitable interest in his madhouse: his beautiful wife, Isabella. And he is correct. Antonio and Franciscus have come to the madhouse previously as visitors, Middleton and Rowley suggest, masking cupiditas for Isabella with caritas for the mad. In unmasking these two, the playwrights critique this ‘‘Catholic’’ charitable logic as a whole. We saw in The Duchess of Malfi, and specifically in Antonio’s remarks about visitants making patients lunatic beyond all cure, some growing skepticism about the practice of visitation. Visitation, it seemed, was edging closer and closer to entertainment rather than charitable display, a matter of constant concern for Bethlem governors. Antonio and Franciscus’s motivation for ‘‘visiting’’ the madhouse, and Alibius’s excessive desire to market his patients as entertainment registers this concern and, more generally, the concern that an old, London, Protestant charity was being compromised. That Middleton and Webster write such powerful plays about charity and madness at the same time suggests something of the events transpiring at Bethlem. And, as we shall see in the next section, Middleton and Rowley respond with some specificity to Fletcher’s more positive take on visitation at the hospital. Perhaps because of James’s recent involvement in Bethlem, the playwrights consider the growing problem of visitation as some-

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thing more than a minor problem to be staged for comedic value. They, in fact, link the degeneration of the practice of visitation with the murder in the main plot. The false visitors, Antonio and Franciscus, are held in act 5 as suspects in the murder of Alonzo (4.2.1–15). Alibius tells everyone on stage ‘‘The time of their disguisings agrees justly/ With the day of the murder’’ (5.2.76–77). Vermandero considers this ‘‘suspicion near as proof itself’’ (5.3.123). This connection between murder and improper visitation is made with more dramaturgical care than these references might suggest. Everyone on stage initially accepts on sight ‘‘Tony’s’’ (the disguised Antonio) rightful place in Alibius’s madhouse, his legitimacy as charitable object: ‘‘This sight takes off the labor of my tongue’’ (1.2.81–87). The audience responds (in the only way they can) by accepting Tony as Alibius and Lollio do: under the auspices of a somewhat tainted charitable care. As R. V. Holdsworth has pointed out, the audience does not necessarily know Tony feigns idiocy or madness until act 3 scene 3 (270); the true nature of Tony’s ‘‘deformity’’ becomes clear, in short, immediately after the audience watches Deflores kill Piracquo. Having just seen the product of Beatrice’s sinful motivation, an audience watches as yet another charitable relation is shown to be motivated by unholy intentions, a mere shadow or show of true charity.47 Perhaps more importantly, the audience might be forced to consider its own response to Antonio’s fooling, their own enjoyment and pleasure at this false and degenerate charitable show. In sexualizing the charitable relationship throughout, the playwrights heighten the sense that charitable motivation has been perverted, and the seriousness of that problem. In The Changeling, much of the anxiety or tension about ‘‘polluted’’ charity is located in the female body. Isabella’s body, her fidelity and constancy, stands in stark contrast to Beatrice’s inconstancy and willfulness. Equally striking in this play, I think, is the dramatic placement of that body. Restricted by her husband to the cramped, confined space of the madhouse, Isabella simultaneously preserves her chastity and the charitable ideal, at least, of the mad hospital. She is skeptical, for example, of finding anything entertaining in the viewing of madness. When Lollio offers to show the ‘‘pitiful delight’’ of madmen, she responds, ‘‘let me partake, if there be such a pleasure.’’ When shown the madmen, she responds, ‘‘Alack, alack, tis too full of pity/ To be laugh’d at

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. . . (3.3.20–40). The reality of Bethlem, as Shakespeare realized in the heath scenes, can be ‘‘too full of pity’’ to be a ‘‘pitiful delight’’ or, as Alibius puts it, a ‘‘frightful pleasure.’’ Playwrights like Fletcher might seek to transform this show into something else on stage, and the actual show of Bethlem may be deteriorating under the care of James and Crooke, but the show still has a charitable purpose for the Protestant citizens Middleton and Rowley. Isabella’s chastity, her refusal to respond to the lust of Antonio and Franciscus, maintains her credibility as a ‘‘critic’’ of the mad show and allows an audience to keep its attention on the show’s true, if difficult and troubling, charitable function. The ‘‘actual’’ madmen in the play—that is, those in Alibius’s house other than Franciscus and Antonio—have a certain sort of innocence assigned to them, something of the innocence of Foucault’s ‘‘animality,’’ perhaps, but this innocence elicits pity. Their appearance ‘‘as birds, others as beasts’’ interrupts Antonio’s attempted seduction of Isabella (3.3.175). And Isabella’s description of their condition highlights their inability to dissemble. The occupants of the madhouse act their fantasies in any shapes Suiting their present thoughts; if sad, they cry; If mirth be their conceit, they laugh again. Sometimes they imitate the beasts and birds, Singing, or howling, braying, barking; all As their wild fancies prompt’ em (3.3.178–83)

Isabella exists as a figure in the very restricted space allotted to sinless or holy charity in early Stuart London, nearly crushed between the pressure to act charitably and the counterpressure urging one not to give indiscriminately or without good motive. She occupies one of the narrow spaces where a Protestant sentiment would try to preserve an ideal charitable interest in the demonstrably unfortunate with its holy purpose: a madhouse. It is Isabella, too, who turns the tables on Antonio and Franciscus and she does it in a way that parallels the false charitable relationship of Beatrice and Deflores. In demanding sex from Beatrice, Deflores exposed the sexual nature of her ‘‘charitable’’ gestures towards him; that is, whether we consider Beatrice actually attracted to Deflores for some ‘‘pathological’’ reason or

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whether we consider her sudden and undue lust for Alsemero as the sole motivator for her dealing with Deflores, we see Deflores unmasking her ‘‘caritas’’ for him as cupiditas in a particularly appropriate way. Similarly, in disguising herself as a madwoman (4.3.89) and seductively approaching Antonio, Isabella exposes the purely physical, sexual nature of Antonio’s visit to the hospital. What should have been caritas for the mad sufferers reveals itself as cupiditas. The notion of ‘‘loving’’ the residents of the mad hospital in the romantic or sexual way Antonio thinks of love repulses him as much as loving Deflores initially repulses Beatrice: ‘‘Prithee, cuz, let me alone . . . Pox upon you, let me alone!. . . . I’ll kick thee if again thou touch me, Thou wild unshapen antic; I am no fool, You bedlam!’’ It is, of course, possible to suggest that Isabella actually entertains Antonio’s seduction as a way to escape Alibius’s claustrophobic marital love. She does, for example, respond to Antonio’s disgust by saying ‘‘Have I put on this habit of a frantic/ With love as full of fury to beguile/The nimble eye of watchful jealousy, / And am I thus rewarded?’’(4.3.141–44). She may appear at this moment, in other words, an interested lover insulted by Antonio’s rejection. ‘‘Ha! Dearest beauty!’’ he says when Isabella removes her disguise. Her response: ‘‘No, I have no beauty now, / Nor never had, but what was in my garments,/ You quick sighted lover? Come not near me!?/ Keep your caparisons, y’are aptly clad; / I came a feigner to return stark mad.’’ To read Isabella this way, however, compels one to ignore completely her discussion with Lollio prior to putting on the disguise. Isabella makes it clear that she plans to ‘‘use’’ Antonio and Franciscus (4.3.50–62) in the sense of ‘‘abusing’’ or gulling them. And this reading of Isabella’s disguise ignores her initial contact with Antonio, when she promised ‘‘As you are a gentleman, I’ll not discover you; / That’s all the favor that you must expect’’ (3.3.155–56). It seems much more likely that when Isabella says she ‘‘came a feigner to return stark mad’’ she describes her disguise and the just anger she feels towards Antonio’s sexual advances. Antonio himself glosses the phrase ‘‘stark mad’’ as anger a few lines later (4.3.156) when threatening Lollio. In its punning on the word ‘‘mad,’’ the scene recalls Shakespeare’s not too distant Cymbeline where the notably faithful Imogen rejects the obtuse advances of Cloten. Having been somewhat testily put off, Cloten

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tells Imogen ‘‘To leave you in your madness, ’twere my sin./ I will not’’ (2.3.100–101). Imogen: Fools are not mad folks. Cloten: Do you call me fool? Imogen: As I am mad, I do. If you’ll be patient, I’ll no more be mad; That cures us both. I am much sorry, sir, You put me to forget a lady’s manners By being so verbal; and learn now for all That I, which know my heart, do here pronounce, By th’very truth of it, I care not for you, And am so near the lack of charity To accuse myself I hate you—which I had rather You felt than make’t my boast. (2.3.104–13)

Antonio’s advances, like Cloten’s, elicit indignant anger in the faithful woman. Isabella’s disguise is not, then, an attempt to elude the watchful eyes of Lollio and Alibius, but a very effective attempt to make Antonio ‘‘behold [his] own deformity’’ in ‘‘her eyes’’ (3.3.200–201). His love is ‘‘deformed.’’ She reveals Antonio’s love to be cupiditas, motivated by surface appearance, rather than caritas. In short, Beatrice and Antonio (and Franciscus) all seek to conceal their lust in charitable relations and are rewarded, fittingly from the perspective of Protestant playwrights, with ‘‘real’’ charitable objects as their sexual partners or potential partners. At one point, in fact, near the end of the play, the playwrights equate Deflores and the mad hospital in much the same way they, temporarily, equate Isabella and a mad patient. While Tomazo initially had considered Deflores to have a ‘‘wondrous honest heart’’ (4.2.57), he quickly and inexplicably changes his mind. ‘‘Weary’’ of all man’s ‘‘bloody friendship,’’ thinking ‘‘all men villains’’ (5.2.3–5), Tomazo begins to recognize the truth about Deflores: O the fellow that some call honest Deflores, But methinks honesty was hard bested To there for a lodging, as if a queen Should make her palace of a pest house,

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I find a contrariety in nature Betwixt that face and me. (5.2.9–14)

No longer imbued with the ‘‘charitable’’ spirit Deflores had solicited from him in act 4, Tomazo’s instinctive loathing for Deflores (and the charitable place to which he is compared, ‘‘pest house’’ or hospital for infectious diseases) becomes clear. ‘‘Instinct is of a subtler strain,’’ Deflores himself says, explaining Tomazo’s quick ‘‘change’’ (5.2.39–40); in suddenly moving from ‘‘loving’’ to ‘‘loathing,’’ rather than vice versa like Beatrice, Tomazo inverts the movement of caritas, and in this Protestant-minded play, that is the direction of truth. Middleton and Rowley thus mock the ‘‘Catholic’’ love for the poor displayed in The Pilgrim and question any potentially superficial or uncharitable interest in madhouses.

TWO VERY DIFFERENT KEEPERS, AND TWO VERY DIFFERENT SHOWS OF MADNESS, AND THE ‘‘SUB-PLOT’S’’ RESPONSE TO FLETCHER Isabella maintains chastity and charity in the madhouse despite her husband (and Lollio) who, as we have mentioned, is required to ‘‘change’’ at the end of the play. No madhouse keeper we have seen so far has quite the theatrical or financial aspirations of Alibius. Even Ferdinand conjured an admirable public excuse, a cure for the Pope, for his staging of madmen. Alibius, perhaps like James’s Helkiah Crooke, seems to have lost sight entirely of the charitable purpose of showing the mad, and plans displaying the madmen as pure entertainment: We have employment, we have task in hand; At Noble Vermandero’s, our castle-captain, There is a nuptial to be solemniz’d— Beatrice-Joanna , his fair daughter, bride— For which the gentleman hath bespoke our pains: A mixture of our madmen and our fools To finish, as it were, and make the fag Of all the revels, the third night from the first. (3.4.233–40)

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In order to understand the creation of Alibius, though, we should not begin by speculating about topical connections between Crooke and Alibius, but look again at Fletcher’s depiction of the madhouse keeper and visitation. To the extent that Middleton and Rowley are responding to James, Crooke and the corruption of ‘‘true’’ Protestant charity at Bethlem, their response is mediated by the dramatic exchange with Fletcher. The subplot of The Changeling not only comments on the main plot, but it, too, responds to Fletcher and The Pilgrim. Certainly Fletcher provided a much more compassionate madhouse master, one less interested in staging and finances than in proper treatment of his patients. For example, Fletcher’s master handles the ‘‘show’’ of madness much differently than Alibius. When visiting the madhouse, Pedro discovers Alinda in disguise as a boy. The two become very emotional, embracing and kissing, and that prompts the master to believe the visitor has upset the young patient. The master reacts, in fact, much like the sympathetic keeper, Anselmo, Dekker, and Middleton had portrayed years before in The Honest Whore, Part One. As the Bethlem governors sought to do, the master redirects the visitor’s responses to pity and proper treatment: I told ye sir, What ye would doe: for shame doe not afflict him; You have drawn his fit upon him fearfully: Either depart, and presently; Ile force ye else.

Pedro tries to explain, but the master has him separated from Alinda and continues his rebuke: This is the way never to hope recovery. Stay but one minute more, Ile complain to the Governour. Bring in the boy [Alinda in disguise]: doe you see how he swells, and tears himself? Is this your cure? Be gone; if the boy miscarry Let me nere find you more, for ile so hamper ye. (3.7.160–70)

The gentleman, Pedro’s tour guide, agrees with the master’s castigation: ‘‘You were to blame: too rash.’’ Here is a madhouse master concerned with propriety and, given Crooke’s situation with the London Aldermen, respectful

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of the authority of this ‘‘Bedlam’s’’ governors. Similarly, when Alphonso turns up at the madhouse looking for Alinda in disguise, the master is cautious and compassionate towards his patients when dealing with the visitor. Master. ‘‘Yes sir, here be such people: but how pleasing They will appear to you— Alphonso. Pray let me see’m. I come to that end: pray let me see ‘em all. Master. They will confound ye sir, like bells rung backward They are nothing but confusion, and mere noises. (4.3.1–6)

The master reminds Alphonso to be careful: ‘‘Pray ye do not disturb ’em sir,’’ and ‘‘pray be not too violent.’’ Consistent with his character, though, Alphonso taunts and thoroughly enjoys the mad patients: ‘‘Mad gallants: Most Admirable mad: I love their fancies.’’ When the patients ‘‘grow wild,’’ the Master holds Alphonso responsible: ‘‘Sir, ye are much too blame’’ (4.3.105). Alphonso’s behavior worsens when he discovers the ‘‘boy’’ he sought has left and, appropriately, at that moment, Juletta arrives with a false letter committing Alphonso to the hospital. For Fletcher’s ‘‘master,’’ in short, visitation is a problem just as it is for Alibius, but one that he can manage and one that does not point to his own corruption. The master participates in the practice of visitation, but in the role he should play: charitable care giver seeking pity for his charges. Near the end of the play, Curio and Seberto explain Alphonso’s situation and ask for his release. The madhouse master remains confident of his own actions. had I known sooner H’ad been a neighbour, and the man you speak him, (Though as I live, he carried a wild seeming) My service, and my self had both attended him: How I have us’d him, let him speak (5.5.15–19)

Fletcher valorizes the madhouse master, at least when we compare him to Alibius, but somewhat surprisingly the playwright has no qualms about using the madhouse scenes to titillate. Just before the master discovers Pedro kissing Alinda (again,

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disguised as a boy), Fletcher presents and audience with a ‘‘leacherous’’ ‘‘She-foole’’ who engages in some bawdy word play with two of the keepers and an English Madman: ‘‘How the foolbridles? How she twitters at him?/ These Englishmen would stagger a wise-woman./ If we should suffer her to have her will now, We should have all the women in Spain as mad as she here’’ (3.7.41–44). In addition, when Alphonso enters after the scene with Pedro and Alinda he is asking for ‘‘boyes’’: ‘‘Have ye not boyes, handsome yong boyes? (4.3.6–7). Later, the She-foole repeats her act, suggesting she has disrobed Alinda (4.3.52–57). This particular kind of cupiditas amongst presumed caritas must have also prompted Middleton and Rowley’s bitterly sarcastic response to the ‘‘good works’’ in the play. Fletcher may have valorized the efforts of the madhouse keeper, but his willingness to use these hospital scenes to elicit sinful sexual desire played right into the hands of Middleton and Rowley and their satirical, sexualized versions of ‘‘Catholic’’ charity. In this context, one can see Isabella’s mad act for Antonio (and the disgust, rather than desire, she elicits) not just as a subplot reflection of the false charitable love Beatrice offers to Deflores, but also as a response to the ‘‘she-foole’s’’ act in Fletcher. In Isabella’s disguised madwoman, Middleton and Rowley replace Fletcher’s ‘‘she-fool’’ with a figure who would make an audience properly uneasy or uncomfortable, as she certainly does Antonio, rather than aroused. Middleton and Rowley also, then, recast Fletcher’s ‘‘master,’’ not as the skilled, careful physician that shows the mad as a charitable function, redirecting amusement to pity, but as the moneymotivated and newly stagestruck Alibius who tries to take pitiful sights and make them a ‘‘frightful pleasure.’’ Like a somewhat clumsy (and lazy) playwright, Alibius imagines harnessing the powerful and moving sight of the mad to communicate in a novel way a dramatic point: Only an unexpected passage over, To make a frightful pleasure, that is all, But not the all I aim at; could we so act it, To teach it in a wild distracted measure, Though out of form and figure, breaking time’s head, It were no matter, ’twould be heal’d again. In one age or other, if not in this.

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This, this, Lollio, there’s a good reward begun, And will beget a bounty, be it known. (3.4.241–49)

What Alibius does not seem to recognize, and in this he also functions as a satire of Fletcher’s ‘‘master,’’ is that the primary attraction of his mad show is a young, beautiful woman (the added satirical twist, of course, Middleton and Rowley give the madhouse keeper is that the young, beautiful woman who lures spectators is not some anonymous ‘‘she-foole,’’ but the keeper’s wife). In Alibius, then, Middleton and Rowley also call attention to the fact that, despite the valorization of the ‘‘master’s’’ psychiatric skills, Fletcher’s master functions as something of a dramatic dupe, a bad vaudevillian comic with a stripper behind him, naively unaware of the true attraction of the show he presents. In other words, Fletcher is simultaneously honorific about the madhouse master and unreflective about the real ‘‘show’’ of madness he engages. Fletcher’s apparent blindness to the sinful nature of his show of madness figures in Middleton and Rowley’s response. Middleton and Rowley present Alibius as equally oblivious to the effect his ‘‘dance’’ of madmen at the end of Act Four will have on an audience. The dance can only be painfully disturbing. Isabella has just unmasked Antonio; Lollio has just finished playing Franciscus against Antonio (and vice versa) and is manipulating Alibius; Alibius insists Isabella watch the sort of ‘‘sight’’ (4.3.94) she already has termed ‘‘too full of pity’’ to be enjoyed and, to add one more piece of ugliness, Alibius asks suddenly for an ‘‘incurable fool’’ so that he can cheat some money out of a patient. There are no lines scripted for the dance and, importantly, no music—Alibius plans to ‘‘fit’’ it to ‘‘strains’’ later (4.3.201). It is with unsettling dramatic irony, I think, that Middleton and Rowley have Alibius pronounce the dance ‘‘perfect.’’ The commentary here, in short, points in part to Fletcher, who portrays an honorable madhouse keeper while unaware that the entirety of the mad show he presents is sinful. Without stage directions, music, or lines for the dancers, we cannot know for sure how this dance at the end of act 4 of The Changeling was staged. But we can deduce that no audience could process this show as masque or even anti-masque. It seems more likely that it only appears as a horrible, perhaps disturbin-

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gly awkward—too ‘‘realistic’’ one could say—dramatic display. This show of madmen can by no means entertain in the way Fletcher’s did. On the contrary, it can only be painfully disturbing. In particular, it cannot possibly titillate as his use of the ‘‘she-foole’’ did; it can only in some way remind an audience of the pitiful, disturbing, painful ugliness of all the characters in the act and prepare them for the even more pitiful ugliness of act 5. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, a picture of true, Protestant charity only emerges in the critique of Catholic good works. And this is true of the dramatic exchange between Middleton, Rowley, and Fletcher. Only in critiquing Fletcher’s valorization of the madhouse keeper do we get a glimpse of the actual Protestant charity of Bethlem and its show. Middleton and Rowley’s dramatic critique of Fletcher brings us very close indeed at the end of act 5 to the disturbing, painful charitable show that emerged out of Protestant efforts to shape a ‘‘new’’ charity. The drama, though, as in King Lear and other plays, cannot quite grasp this alternative theater even as it seems to move tantalizingly near it. We have, again, no lines, no music, no stage directions at the end of act 4—only the theatrical space opened for the madmen’s dance. All that is left is the residue of the historical performance, an uncomfortable, awkward trace of the real that we cannot access completely through the text. The critical tradition is telling. Scholars agree that the subplot empowers the play as a whole, but cannot quite explain how. Importantly, things are literally missing at the end of act 4 to connect completely the mad show to (the rest of) the play. Isabella confronts Antonio at the beginning of act 4, but after the mad rehearsal we never see her ‘‘deal’’ with Franciscus even though we are told that she is the one that unmasks them both: ‘‘ ’Twas my wife’s fortune, as she is most lucky/ At a discovery, to find out lately/ Within our hospital of fools and madmen/ Two counterfeits slipp’d into these disguises:/ Their names, Franciscus and Antonio’’ (5.2.70–75). Similarly, and as mentioned, the playwrights spend some time (4.3.125–90) having Lollio pit Francisus against Antonio and vice versa, but, after this extended preparation, we never see that matter resolved. On the one hand, these are simply missing or cut scenes. On the other hand, perhaps the specific point in the play where the cuts happen reveals something more meaningful: the inability of the developing

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modern stage to fully incorporate this show of madness that is, quite simply, ‘‘too full of pity.’’ I turn, then, at the end of this study that began in part to challenge the claims of Michel Foucault, to Foucault’s words to explain or, at least, illuminate the odd relationship, determined, as in King Lear, by yet another telling gap between Bethlem and the stage as it manifests itself at the end of act 4. In Middleton and Rowley’s play we ‘‘see’’ that strange proximity between madness and literature, which ought not be taken in the sense of a relation of common psychological parentage now finally exposed. Once uncovered as a language silenced by its superposition upon itself, madness neither manifests nor narrates the birth of a work [of art] (or of something which, by genius or by chance, could have become a work); it outlines an empty form from where this work comes, in other words, the place from where it never ceases to be absent, where it will never be found because it had never been located there to begin with. There, in that pale region, in that essential hiding place, the twinlike incompatibility of the work and of madness becomes unveiled; this is the blind spot of the possibility of each to become the other and of their mutual exclusion.48

Middleton and Rowley’s critique of Fletcher virtually ends the depiction of ‘‘Bedlam’’ madhouses on the stage by reflecting seriously and self-consciously on the distinction between the stage and the nature of the charitable show of Bethlem. Their attack on Fletcher for staging the show of Bethlem to titillate, for example, points to a very modern distinction between what constitutes proper theater and what constitutes proper charity. When ‘‘Bedlamites’’ next appear on stage, as they do, for example, in John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy and Richard Brome’s The Antipodes, they are literally and figuratively actors. That is, contrary to most of the plays of the Jacobean period, neither playwright seeks to portray or engage actual patients of Bethlem: actors on the stage ‘‘play’’ at madness. Something of the separation between Bethlem and the stage first visible in King Lear and Edgar’s playacting becomes the norm by the end of this time period. But this ‘‘separation’’ between theaters can only prompt us to revisit the historian and theoretician who suggested such a powerful symbiotic relationship in the first place.

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8 ‘‘Foucault was right?’’ AS I SAID IN THE INTRODUCTION, I DID NOT INTEND ON CONCLUDING with such a ‘‘Foucaultian’’ thesis about madness and art. On the contrary, because of my personal experiences with psychiatric hospitals, my rather fierce intent was to participate in any way I could in the revisionist work systematically demolishing the arguments of Madness and Civilization and its cult following, particularly in the humanities. Nonetheless, my reevaluation of the relationship between the show of Bethlem and ‘‘Bedlam’’ dramas leads me to believe that Foucault was right about a great deal. Like the revisionists I so enjoyed reading (and still enjoy, although less passionately), my work suggests flaws in Foucault, flaws I actively sought out; but, unlike most of the flaws found by the revisionist tradition, the particular mistakes my work suggests Foucault made about Bethlem (once corrected and understood) help support, rather than disprove his larger claims about the history of madness. The relationship between the theater of charity at Bethlem and the drama as I see it supports one of his central arguments, an argument that is, we recall, both historical and philosophical: the voice of the mad was more thoroughly integrated into the culture of the Renaissance and they spoke more forcefully, for themselves, than in later time periods. The show of Bethlem and Shakespearean drama fit well within the interpretive framework the ‘‘master’’ established, only not in the way he suggested they did. For the sake of clarity, let me rehash briefly some information suggested in the introduction here. No one typically associates Foucault’s understanding of psychiatric hospitals with the term charity, but in suggesting that the show of Bethlem played such a significant role in the development of modern dramatic art, my conclusion echoes the conclusion—the very last words—of his brilliant, flawed, moving, and influential Histoire de la folie a 235

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l’age classique or, as it is commonly known in its abridged English translation, Madness and Civilization. There Foucault suggested that the great modern ‘‘art’’ of Nietzsche, Artaud, and Van Gogh was made possible by that art’s relationship to madness. Moreover, to the extent the works of these artists prompt the world to question its own values and judgment, Foucault suggests it is actually madness that prompts this questioning: ‘‘the world finds itself arraigned by that work of art and responsible before it for what it is. Ruse and new triumph of madness.’’1 Perhaps more than any other thinker of the second half of the twentieth century, Foucault successfully attacked the ‘‘Whig’’ notion of history that ‘‘Reason’’ produced more humane institutions over time, calling into question even the belief in reason as natural phenomena capable of improving the human condition. Foucault showed repeatedly the possibility that devotion to reason and its institutions—schools, prisons, hospitals—actually restricted and structured human existence in a way few had imagined or probably wanted. In the case of the hopitaux generaux of seventeenth-century France, Foucault argued that the invention of that hospital system did not just involve progressively modern treatment of the insane, but a political reordering and management of those that fell outside the dominant order. He referred to this reordering as the ‘‘great confinement,’’ the process whereby large segments of the population considered socially undesirable were placed in the hopitaux generaux in order to be managed and controlled by the state. From this perspective, ‘‘madness’’ and mad people actually had it better prior to the seventeenth century and the great confinement. ‘‘Madmen,’’ the famous sentence is translated, ‘‘then led an easy wandering existence.’’ While discussing Bethlem and its famous show, Foucault implies that the English hospital was something of a single, Angloprecursor to the hopitaux generaux and that it in fact participated in the processes of the great confinement. My work suggests, however, that Bethlem and its odd show of charity stood apart and opposed to the processes of the great confinement and that had Foucault understood more about the hospital, he would have discovered something he struggled to prove existed: a preeighteenth century relationship between the mad and not mad that can be understood as, not idyllic, but at least preferable to the later period. Seeing Bethlem and its show as opposed to the

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great confinement actually strengthens a crucial argument of his book that has received significant criticism. In order to see this, however, we need to retrace some of Foucault’s steps.

THE ATTEMPT TO LET THE MAD SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES As suggested, Foucault made the creation of the first Hopital General in Paris (1657) an unmistakable icon for ‘‘Reason’s progressive conquest’’ over unreason in the history of the West, one that marked an epistemic shift in the history of both reason and madness. While the reasons for a major shift in social and medical policy are always many, one can argue that more than any other academic, and perhaps more than any other single individual, Foucault’s work helped make possible the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s and the literal destruction of the modern system of psychiatric asylums. We feel quite palpably the effect of this massive transformation every time we encounter a chronic schizophrenic homeless person on the street. Perhaps in these encounters we also feel some residue of the complex amalgam of feelings—compassion, repulsion, amusement, guilt—felt by visitors to an early modern hospital prior to the establishment of modern asylums. This complex range of emotions and responses, I have tried to show, certainly were pervasive in dramatic texts from the period that address visiting or viewing the mad. Madness and Civilization is then simultaneously history, philosophy, and political act. It does seek to trace the very real history of madness in terms of its treatment, its institutions, etc. But it seeks to use that history not just to catalogue a historical truth, but, as the author says in the preface to the first edition, to return to a ‘‘zero point in the course of madness at which madness is an undifferentiated, a not yet divided experience of division itself.’’2 As much as it is a historical exercise, it is one intended to solve a philosophical problem. From Foucault’s philosophical perspective, to even begin talking about madness, is to exclude or silence the voice of madness in the voice of reason: ‘‘The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.’’3 Foucault seeks to let madness speak for itself without objectify-

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ing it or excluding its otherness or alterity in the language of reason, our metaphysics. In this, I would suggest Foucault could be seen following the path of twentieth-century phenomenology traced first by Edmund Husserl. In seeking to establish the subject as the generator of meaning for the world outside itself, Husserl gave the intentional acts of individual consciousness primacy that had heretofore been lacking. From this perspective, acts of individual consciousness determined the meaning of the ‘‘objective’’ world. But this understanding of the individual consciousness cannot fully account for the existence of the ‘‘other’’ individual consciousness outside itself. That is, if my consciousness determines meaning in the world, how do I make sense of yours? I can make sense of you, but I cannot simultaneously make sense of your consciousness making sense of me. Philosopher Colin Davis explains the inherent difficulty: If intentionality, the cornerstone of Husserlian phenomenology, shows me a world which is always already my own possession, I cannot share that possession with anyone else; I have no equal, I am alone, there is no Other. Husserl himself was aware that any philosophy which takes the transcendental Ego as its first apodictic certainty must necessarily face the problem of solipsism. . . . The difficulty arises from the primacy accorded to the transcendental Ego, which phenomenological reduction reveals to be the source of all experience. I can encounter other people as physical objects in the natural world, but I cannot presume that other transcendental Egos exist because I can have no direct experience of them. Indeed, if I could have direct experience of them, they would by definition no longer be transcendental since they would be part of the world as presented to and constituted by my consciousness.4

The alterity of the other is obliterated by my attempt to make sense of it. I cannot make sense of the ‘‘other’’ ego without transforming that other into part of my same/or self. For Husserl, this can be categorized as an epistemological problem: how can one understand or know the other ego?5 With his The´ orie de l’intuition dans la phe´ nomenologie de Husserl (1930), however, Emmanuel Levinas gave this ‘‘epistemological’’ problem of otherness an ethical inflection it would retain to the present day. The other Ego that cannot be known is not only a gap in my un-

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derstanding, an unanswerable problem that complicates my ability to ground all understanding in individual consciousness as phenomenology sought to do, but the other as other ego (autrui) exerts an ethical call on me that has to be addressed.6 Shoshana Felman has been very clear in articulating Foucault’s ‘‘historical’’ project alongside this twentieth-century phenomenological philosophical tradition. We can see clearly, too, in her summary, how the now familiar Levinasian politics and ethics of respecting the excluded ‘‘other’’ are embedded in the philosophical questions Foucault addresses:7 The fundamental question [for Foucault] which, though not enunciated, is implicitly at stake, is: What does understanding mean? What is comprehension? If to comprehend is, on the one hand, to grasp, to apprehend an object, to objectify, Foucault’s implicit question is: how can we comprehend without objectifying, without excluding? But if to comprehend is, on the other hand, (taken in its metaphysical and spatial sense), to enclose in oneself, to embrace, to include, i.e., to contain within certain limits, the question then becomes: how can we comprehend without enclosing in ourselves, without confining? How can we understand the Subject, without transforming him (or her) into an object? Can the Subject comprehend itself? Is the Subject thinkable, as such? To put the question differently: is the Other thinkable? Is it possible to think the Other, not as an object, but as a subject, a subject who would not, however, amount to the same?8

In writing his ‘‘history,’’ then, Foucault seeks to establish a new discourse that does not repeat and reinforce the history he describes and exclude, confine, and silence the mad. To accomplish this philosophical feat, he needs new language. To quote from the preface of the first edition again, ‘‘I have not tried to write the history of that language [the language of the mad], but rather the archaeology of that silence.’’9 This philosophical impetus for Madness and Civilization has tended to confound even sympathetic historians who tend, at best, to downplay the ‘‘foreign’’ disciplinary elements at work. These philosophical elements, it is frequently argued, compromise the work’s historicism. Porter and Jones, for example, write in Reassessing Foucault, ‘‘It would be sad indeed . . . if historians threw out the Foucauldian baby with the philosophical bathwater.’’ 10 Gary Gutting is more specific in writing about those historians who believe Foucault’s ‘‘philosophical’’ efforts make

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his history ‘‘anti-historical’’: ‘‘My own view is that the book shows an anti-historical character primarily in Foucault’s intermittent efforts to evoke madness as it is experienced by the mad themselves. This experience he tends to present as an absolute transcending the history of madness. (The theme is most apparent in the preface to the first edition, which Foucault later dropped) . . . I think this theme is clearly outside the main thrust of the book.’’11 That Foucault drops the language I have been citing from his preface, however, should not be seen as evidence that he cut his secondary or distracting philosophizing in response to the critiques of more empirically-minded historians. Nor should his interest in letting the ‘‘otherness’’ of madness speak for itself be considered ‘‘intermittent.’’ On the contrary, Foucault redirects his philosophical focus, a redirection powerfully manifested in his cutting of the original preface and its overt philosophizing, because his philosophizing came under substantial critique from those engaged in similar philosophical pursuits—namely, Jacques Derrida. He does not abandon his philosophical activity; he seeks to refine it. In brief, Derrida pointed out (as early as 1963) that Foucault’s new ‘‘archeology,’’ strictly speaking, does not truly let madness speak for itself but functions as only one more name for reason.12 Foucault is not able to transcend the metaphysics he works within. Any effort like Foucault’s to let the ‘‘other’’ speak ultimately results in some sort objectifying or excluding of the other by the ‘‘same.’’ This particular philosophical critique illuminates, of course, much of Derrida’s now famous ‘‘deconstruction’’: he repeatedly and convincingly has shown that attempts to escape the ‘‘same’’ of Western metaphysics to access something ‘‘other’’ ultimately reinscribe the metaphysics they sought to elude. From this perspective, Foucault’s stated task was, to borrow what has become a favorite term of Derrida’s, ‘‘the impossible.’’13 The aporia at hand here, the fact that the self/same always objectifies or excludes the other, is more or less hardwired into human history; there is no point, then, at which ‘‘madness’’ is able to speak for itself without reason. As Felman writes, ‘‘The difficulty of Foucault’s task is thus not contingent, but fundamental. Far from being a historical accident, the exclusion of madness is the general condition and the constitutive foundation of the very enterprise of speech.’’14 Because of this powerful Derridean critique, Foucault refigured his understanding of the aporia of ‘‘self’’ and

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‘‘other’’ in much of his later work. Foucault was hardly alone in adjusting his understanding. Derrida has had enormous success prompting thinkers of all kinds to have more respect for the aporia as aporia; that is, an aporia is something one by definition does not overcome as Foucault ostensibly sought to do. The best one can hope for is to recognize that impossibility and learn to approach the ‘‘other,’’ considered either in an epistemological or ethical sense, with the utmost respect, fully aware of the tendency of the self/same language of western metaphysics to objectify or exclude the other’s absolute difference.15 Derrida’s deconstruction itself has struggled to show that revealing the ‘‘impossibility’’ of the project does not instantiate a pessimistic futility, but instead points to the desire for the impossible and a greater respect for the ‘‘otherness’’ of the other. When Foucault approached the problem of accessing alterity in the middle of the twentieth century, however, it was still a radical and remarkably intriguing perspective. And embedded in Madness and Civilization is the very real sense of hope, intellectual hope at least, that ‘‘madness’’ as otherness could be allowed to speak, and that a very real break in the history of metaphysics did occur, manifesting itself politically in the creation of the hopitaux generaux, and that this break somehow could be revisited. Foucault’s philosophizing cannot, then, be seen as at odds with his historicism. In fact, in order to fully reconsider his historicism it makes sense to trace and understand, rather than ignore and belittle, the philosophical motivation driving that historicism. I would suggest that much of the hope that ‘‘reason’’ could be escaped, that the other could speak for itself, and that addressing ‘‘madness’’ in history would lead the way, has to do with Foucault’s proximity in time and in sensibility to an earlier figure who brought this kind of energetic philosophical historicism, itself antiphilosophical as much as it is antihistorical, to the twentieth century: Nietzsche and, in particular, his The Birth of Tragedy.16

NIETZSCHE’S THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY AND FOUCAULT Certainly the general parallels between Foucault and Nietzsche’s intellectual aims are clear on the surface. Lillian Feder says of Nietzsche, ‘‘it is surely not an oversimplification to say

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that in essence [Nietzsche’s thought] is based on his conception of a grand conflict between instinct and consciousness, feeling and rationality, art and systems of morality.’’17 Before Foucault, Nietzsche sought (among other things) to access the often ignored side of these conflicts, the other side of reason, the part of human experience not governed, regulated or explained by the Western metaphysics he saw operating since Socrates. In Nietzsche’s first great work, The Birth of Tragedy, he sought to recover the irrational power of the pre-Socratic, Dionysian festival as it transformed into the more rational and controlled, and thus accessible, Apollinian Greek drama. The Apollinian drama is a mediocre substitute for the truly Dionysian—as Feder says, Nietzsche’s ‘‘devotion to the Dionysian is unqualified; his acceptance of the Apollinian generally ambivalent’’—but it is much preferable to Socratic thought.18 While Nietzsche’s Dionysian frenzy is not synonymous with madness, it bears a close relation. In the 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche brought the two very close indeed: ‘‘And what, then, is the significance, physiologically speaking, of that madness out of which tragic and comic art developed—the Dionysian madness? . . . Is madness perhaps not necessarily the symptom of degeneration, decline, and the final stage of culture?’’19 As Felman puts it, citing Heidegger and Bataille, Nietzsche thus made madness a ‘‘major philosophical preoccupation’’ for the modern world, a possible ‘‘other’’ place from which to examine our own structures of reason and rationality: ‘‘Nietzsche’s madness [both his intellectual exploration of the limits of reason and his own suffering] stands before the world as both invitation and a warning, as the danger on which the condition of its very possibility is built. To reflect on the significance of ‘Nietzsche’s madness’ is thus to open up and to interrogate the entire history of Western culture.’’20 From this perspective, reflecting on Nietzsche’s madness is precisely what Foucault does in Folie et de´ raison: Histoire de la folie a` l’aˆ ge classique.21 If Nietzsche sought to access the Dionysian energy before it was contained by Socratic reason, Foucault sought to return to that ‘‘zero point in the course of madness’’ in the Renaissance before it was silenced by reason. He sought, like Nietzsche, to access whatever ‘‘thought’’ was before it became thought. The principal difference is not the philosophical problem addressed, but the historical period these ‘‘historical philos-

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ophers’’ chose to examine. In his first work, Foucault chose not ancient Greece, but looked to the pre-Cartesian Renaissance to find, not the ‘‘Dionysian’’ before it was squelched by Socratic reason, but the language of madness before the language of psychiatry silenced it. As Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter say from a less admiring perspective, Foucault’s efforts can be described as a ‘‘quasi-Nietzschean transvaluative gesture.’’22 Despite differences in time periods, the connection between Madness and Civilization and The Birth of Tragedy is visible early in the former’s preface where Foucault makes clear allusions to Nietzsche’s search for the pre-Socratic: ‘‘The Greeks had a relation to something that they called hubris. This relation was not merely one of condemnation; the existence of Thrasymachus or of Callicles suffices to prove it, even if their language has reached us already enveloped in the reassuring dialectic of Socrates. But the Greek Logos had no contrary.’’23 The connection between Madness and Civilization and The Birth of Tragedy is most clear, though, in considering the way Foucault uses art, and various transitions in the history of art, to make his argument. Although Nietzsche’s work focuses more explicitly on art as a topic, both Foucault and Nietzsche see art as a means of accessing the ‘‘Dionysian/ madness’’—the other of reason. More specifically, both see art as the possible solution to the ‘‘impossible’’ problematic they have set up for themselves.24 Reason cannot engage madness (or whatever form one gives reason’s ‘‘other,’’ e.g., the Dionysian) without either becoming mad or speaking for the mad. Thus both efforts were doomed to failure. Nietzsche famously went mad, and Foucault, as suggested, radically redirected his project, admitting his own inability to let the mad themselves speak. But, for a time, both saw a possible way to manage this problematic in art. As suggested, Nietzsche proposed that the development of Apollinian art made a link to the Dionysian, and thus ancient Greek art, tragic drama in particular, was juxtaposed to the reason of Socrates. Greek tragic drama came to occupy a strange, liminal position, accessible and almost ‘‘authentic’’ without being completely nonsensical and barbaric. Nietzsche’s influence on Foucault is never clearer, then, when Foucault also points to modern art as the only possible connection to the ‘‘otherness’’ of madness (indeed, as mentioned above, Foucault points to the madness of Nietzsche himself).25

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In his treatment of carefully selected pre-Cartesian dramatic art, such as Don Quixote and King Lear, Foucault constructed an analogue to Nietzsche’s Dionysian festival. In other words, he cast these works as a more authentic, pre-art in the Middle Ages where the traumatic and final breach between reason and madness had not yet occurred. The relationship between madness and art found in Don Quixote and King Lear, Foucault suggests, was much ‘‘closer’’ than in later years. For Foucault, they were among the principal works of art of the ‘‘preceding period’’ where ‘‘madness still occupies an extreme place’’ marking the unknowable limits of man’s experience. Shakespeare’s work even seems to stand out among the others. Foucault mentions it several times, once at the end of his chapter on the ‘‘great confinement,’’ specifically contrasting Shakespeare’s art to this, for him, horrendous event: ‘‘Not so long ago, [madness] had floundered about in broad daylight: in King Lear, in Don Quixote.’’26 Foucault went further, though, in tracing Nietzsche’s steps. Not only did he provide the Dionysian festival in the form of carefully chosen late medieval art, he eventually provided the Apollinian art, in his case French classical tragedy, that made the Dionysian sensible and meaningful. For Foucault, French classical tragedy parallels madness in that it stands opposed to reason, unconfined by it. It may not have the connection that earlier art did, but some kind of intimate relationship persists. on either side of this order [the order imposed by reason], two symmetrical, inverse figures bear witness that there are extremities where it can be transgressed, showing at the same time to what degree it is essential not to transgress it. On one side, tragedy. The rule of the theatrical day has a positive content; it forces tragic duration to be poised upon the singular but universal alternation of day and night; the whole of the tragedy must be accomplished in this unity of time, for tragedy is ultimately nothing but the confrontation of two realms, linked to each other by time itself, in the irreconcilable. Every day, in Racine’s theater, is overhung by a night, which it brings, so to speak, to light: the night of Troy and its massacres, the night of Nero’s desires, Titus’s Roman night, Athalie’s night. . . . On the other side, facing tragedy and its hieratic language, is the confused murmur of madness. Here, too, the great law of division has been violated; shadow and light mingle in the fury of madness, as in the tragic disorder. But in another mode. In night, the tragic character found a somber truth of day. . . . The madman, conversely, finds in

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daylight only the inconsistency of the night’s figures; he lets the light be darkened by all the illusions of the dream; his day is only the most superficial night of appearance. It is to this degree that tragic man, more than any other, is engaged in being, is the bearer of his truth, since, like Phedre, he flings in the face of the pitiless sun all secrets of the night; while the madman is entirely excluded from being. And how could he not be, lending as he does the day’s illusory reflection to the night’s non-being?27

Foucault’s classical French tragedy has a relationship to madness comparable to the relation of Nietzsche’s Apollinian theater: one cannot incorporate the other, the two may strangely parallel one another, but never merge. As Foucault puts it, ‘‘In the classical period, the man of tragedy and the man of madness confront each other, without a possible dialogue, without a common language; for the former can utter only the decisive words of being, uniting in a flash the truth of light and the depth of darkness; the latter endlessly drones out the indifferent murmur which cancels out both the day’s chatter and the lying dark.’’28 Foucault’s ‘‘Apollinian’’ art, French classical tragedy, could partially access the ‘‘otherness’’ of madness, but, at the same time, this less authentic kind of art revealed and sustained the irreparable breach between reason and madness that had occurred.

FOUCAULT’S UNDERSTANDING OF THE SHOW OF BETHLEM Had Foucault had a better understanding of the show of Bethlem, he would have identified something closer to Nietzsche’s Dionysian festival than the art of Shakespeare and Cervantes; he would have identified an authentic, nonrepresentational ‘‘theater’’ that more fully incorporated madness in the world of reason. I want to suggest that a clear understanding of the drama and the show of Bethlem support Foucault’s narrative, that what he sought actually existed in history. Foucault’s philosophicallydriven historicism actually produced good history, perhaps a better and more complicated history than even he knew. To see this, however, we need to understand first how Foucault actually did understand the show of Bethlem. Foucault suggests, but never directly claims, that the early seventeenth-century show of Bethlem fits his model. He makes

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this suggestion by discussing the ‘‘show’’ of Bethlem, but only in an eighteenth-century context, using the show as evidence that madness had a special place in the forms of unreason confined. Specifically, madness was confined or locked away, but it was also put on display. He never says anything directly about late sixteenth-century or early-seventeenth century Bethlem, although he says at one point, ‘‘there is nothing in common between this organized exhibition of madness in the eighteenth century and the freedom with which it came to light during the Renaissance.’’29 We will return to this claim and strange omission shortly. While he does not discuss the show of Bethlem in the early seventeenth century, he does discuss Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Shakespeare’s King Lear in particular, in some detail, and somewhat cryptically argues that the non-Shakespearean literature of the period not only registers a significant change in the history of madness, but participates in processes leading to the great confinement. In other words, his narrative suggests early seventeenth-century literature, rather than the actual charitable show of Bethlem in the early seventeenth century (which we will assume for the moment he either doesn’t know about or intentionally avoids discussing), somehow leads to or participates in the great confinement to come. He argues that this period in history may not have confined madness as the eighteenth century did, but its literature at least registered (if not actually participated in) a ‘‘taming’’ or ‘‘restricting’’ of the freedom madness had and helped make possible the later confinement: ‘‘in the literature of the early seventeenth century it [madness] occupies, by preference, a median place; it thus constitutes the knot more than the denouement, the peripity rather than the final release. Displaced in the economy of narrative and dramatic structure, it authorizes the manifestation of truth and the return of reason.’’30 The important exception to this process by which madness was tamed or restricted, we note again, is Shakespeare. As with Cervantes, Foucault abstracts Shakespeare from his own literary historical context: ‘‘both testify more to a tragic experience of madness appearing in the fifteenth century, than to a critical and moral experience of Unreason developing in their own epoch. Outside of time, they establish a link with a meaning about to be lost, and whose continuity will no longer survive except in darkness. But it is by comparing their work, and what it main-

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tains, with the meanings that develop among their contemporaries or imitators, that we may decipher what is happening, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in the literary experience of madness.’’31 For Foucault, again, Shakespeare’s art suggests something of the Nietzschean Dionysian festival, a purer engagement with the ‘‘other’’ of reason before the divide brought about by the great confinement. Cast this way, Shakespeare’s art stands opposed to the processes whereby reason oppressed unreason. The work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, in contrast, ‘‘reveals’’ and ‘‘maintains’’ the processes necessary for the great confinement to come. True to his Nietzschean model, we could say these artists are at some distance from the ‘‘Dionysian’’ Shakespeare, constituting something of an Anglo-‘‘Apollinian’’ theater. Non-Shakespearean seventeenth century literature occupies the liminal place between the authentic, desirable Dionysian Shakespeare and the great confinement to come. Non-Shakespearean drama may access madness in a certain way, but, like Nietzsche’s Apollinian theater, it also registers and reinforces the breach between madness and reason that both philosophers sought to overcome. We shall return to this fascinating bit of ‘‘bardolatry,’’ this special treatment of Shakespeare, especially as it relates to the absence of specific comments on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Bethlem in Foucault. For now, I only want to call attention to the way Foucault’s narrative hints that early seventeenth century Bethlem hospital, and literature about madness in particular, supports his case. ‘‘This world of the early seventeenth century is strangely hospitable, in all senses, to madness,’’ he says ironically at one point.32 Ironically because the kind of ‘‘hospitality’’ he refers to is the fascination with and taming of madness in the period that allows for the later great confinement. This ‘‘hospitality’’ has dark undertones. The motif in art of the great ‘‘Ship of Fools,’’ a motif that signifies the wandering freedom of madness in the medieval world, gives way to the figure of the ‘‘hospital’’ in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature, a figure Foucault obviously sees as insidiously signifying the great confinement to come: Oblivion falls upon the world navigated by the free slaves of the Ship of Fools. Madness will no longer proceed from a point within the world to a point beyond, on its strange voyage; it will never again be

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that fugitive and absolute limit. Behold it moored now, made fast among things and men. Retained and maintained. No longer a ship but a hospital. Scarcely a century after the career of the mad ships, we note the appearance of the theme of the ‘‘Hospital of Madmen,’’ the ‘‘Madhouse’’. . . . Already in this ‘‘Hospital’’ confinement has succeeded embarkation.33

So, while Foucault never specifically claims the Elizabethan and Jacobean Bethlem as a single Anglo-precursor to the hopitaux generaux, he certainly leads one to that conclusion. That is, given Foucault’s artful equivocation on the matter, many are logically tempted to see the great thinker as having a model onto which we can simply graft the show of Bethlem in developmental stages. Consider Steven Mullaney’s widely read The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England that I quote at length because, I would wager, his description elegantly represents how most literary scholars informed by Foucault still would place Bethlem in history if asked to do so: The late sixteenth century stands as an odd interregnum in history. The impressive but ineffectual body of Elizabethan poor laws began, at this time, to compose its growing list of peddlers, wandering scholars, unlicensed players, sturdy beggars, and the like, all brought together as ‘‘vagabonds,’’ assembled like the marvels of a wonder cabinet, to await the disposition of a later age—in this instance, to wait nearly one hundred years before the early modern state articulated itself well enough to create a bureaucracy capable of implementing Vagabond Acts. Madness was confined and maintained during the period, but not excluded from public view or shut away from light—of day or Reason—as it would be during the Enlightenment. Rather, Folly in all its variety was gathered together so that it could be fully licensed for display, made more accessible and given greater currency than had ever been the case in the Middle Ages, when madness was free (or subject) to wander. Throughout Europe, writes Michel Foucault, ‘‘a new and lively pleasure is taken in the old confraternity of madmen, in their festivals, their gatherings, their speeches.’’ In England, Bedlam Hospital was operated as a concession under its Tudor administration, a playhouse of Folly that served as much to oversee its performance as to confine or control it.34

Mullaney yokes Foucault’s two assertions together here to form a specific Foucaultian take on Bethlem and art. Mullaney’s early

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seventeenth century show of Bethlem, like Foucault’s early seventeenth-century literature, prefigures the great confinement to come, makes it possible in the sense that it ‘‘sets’’ the stage for a much larger and more nefarious eighteenth-century effort. Mullaney’s interpretation of things, again, given Foucault’s overall narrative, if not his precise claims, makes a great deal of sense. Unfortunately, for those that like quick assembly of models, recent studies have pointed out the substantial differences between France and England in terms of psychiatric history that deny the possibility of Bethlem as ‘‘precursor.’’ For example, and as suggested in chapter 1, Roy Porter has shown rather convincingly that the rate of confinement in England was much less than the rate of confinement in France, and that England tended not to group together various kinds of people considered undesirable in the same way France did.35 To the extent confinement happened in England in the way it happened in France, it happened slowly, gradually, haphazardly in the nineteenth-century. In the first part of the seventeenth century, then, Bethlem simply did not even begin to suggest the influence of the hopitaux generaux. In addition, one would hesitate to ascribe so much Foucaultian power, even preliminary Foucaultian power (‘‘oversee[ing],’’ rather than ‘‘confine[ing],’’ and ‘‘control[ling]’’), to Bethlem once aware that the early seventeenth-century hospital was a ‘‘hovel,’’ desperately in need of repair, usually holding only twenty-five patients or so.36 According to the historical facts, Foucault’s suggestion about Bethlem’s place in his model just does not work. Pointing out historical mistakes in Madness and Civilization has become akin to complaining that there is gambling at Rick’s. As Gutting writes, ‘‘the consensus’’ of historians ‘‘even favorably disposed’’ to Foucault is that ‘‘on the ‘object-level’ of specific historical facts and interpretations’’ his work is ‘‘seriously lacking.’’37 Less favorably disposed historians have offered ‘‘widespread and often bitter’’ attacks of Foucault’s handling of factual matters. The historical mistakes Foucault made in hinting that Bethlem and the drama were some sort of precursor to the great confinement are, however, of a decidedly different sort than the ones with which he is usually charged. Once corrected, these ‘‘mistakes’’ paradoxically help prove, rather than disprove, his larger claims about the history of madness. I should add that the mis-

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takes Foucault made when addressing Bethlem and the drama are ‘‘different’’ in another sense as well. For the most part, critics of Foucault charge that his kind of ‘‘history’’ is bad history in that it seeks not facts and interpretations that lead to ‘‘Truth,’’ but that it draws on other disciplines, mainly philosophy, to undermine the logic of traditional historical scholarship. For many, Foucault’s desire to critique traditional, Whig historicism leads him too far from the course of events for it to be useful—even as critique. From this perspective, Foucault’s mistakes derive from his straying too far from traditional historicism. In the case of the show of Bethlem, however, Foucault makes mistakes in part because he was not yet able to go far enough beyond traditional historicism; he makes mistakes in part because he remained wedded to myths of traditional, conventional scholarship of the twentieth century used to explain the show of Bethlem. This is not simply a case of Foucault ‘‘willfully and provocatively turning his back on the events which compose the customary warp and woof of the past’’; this is as much a case of Foucault embracing the customary warp and woof of ‘‘Whiggish’’ myths about Bethlem.38 Critics often have forgotten, particularly given the nature his influence, that Foucault was writing in the middle of the twentieth century and, no matter his efforts to escape convention, was subject to his time.

FOUCAULT’S DESIRE FOR THE ‘‘GOOD’’ HERO AND THE ‘‘BAD’’ VILLAIN Understanding in full how Foucault fell prey to the myths about entertainment takes some extended explanation. To begin, we return to the fact that while Foucault clearly wanted to imply that the show of Bethlem was a precursor to and very much part of the great confinement, he did not mention the existence of the show in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Either Foucault did not know of the existence of the show at that time or he specifically and strategically chose to avoid discussing it. The former seems highly unlikely. First, he wrote a great deal about its existence in the eighteenth century and certainly would have inferred some previous activity even if he never checked to make sure. Second, he wrote and knew a great deal about the literature of the time period we have just reviewed, particularly

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the drama filled with madness, madhouse scenes, and madhouse visitation, and allusions to Bethlem. As mentioned above, he calls specific attention to the ‘‘appearance of the theme of the ‘Hospital of Madmen,’ the ‘Madhouse’ ’’ during this time period. In addition to Shakespeare, he cites—of all playwrights— Thomas Dekker, co-author of The Honest Whore, Part One. Most tellingly, for me, though, in trying to determine the extent to which Foucault was aware of the early show of Bethlem, is the surprising and striking presence in Folie et Deraison of a single number: 96,000.39 This figure originates in the principal literary study my book seeks to update and deepen, Robert Reed’s Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage (1952), and refers to the number of people Reed estimates visited Bethlem per year in the eighteenth century. Published a few years before Madness and Civilization, and still the standard reference on the topic of Bethlem and the stage, Reed’s book assumes throughout the insatiable, perverse tastes of the Jacobean audience to explain the connection between stage and hospital while broadening the scope of the practice of visitation considerably. His wild calculation that 96,000 people per year in the eighteenth century (and thirty percent less than that in the preceding century) went to view the mad has been quietly influential.40 Foucault uses visitation and the 96,000 figure at Bethlem as an example of how the classical age tried to ‘‘organize’’ madness ‘‘on the other side of bars . . . under the eyes of a reason that no longer felt any relation to it and that would not compromise itself by too close a resemblance.’’41 Foucault does not cite Reed, but he cites the source Reed used to generate the large numbers: a single comment by Ned Ward in The London Spy (1700) pricing ‘‘admission’’ to the hospital at two pence. Given the somewhat complex, and distinctly odd nature of Reed’s calculations, it is highly improbable that Foucault generated exactly the same number on his own without consulting Reed in some form. In short, it seems more reasonable to assume Foucault knew a great deal about the existence of the sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century show at Bethlem. Moreover, it is quite reasonable to assume he chose not to discuss it because, quite simply, the mere presence of the ‘‘perverse’’ show, even on a smaller scale, complicates his more positive view of madness and the treatment of madness during this time period. If Renaissance England was locking away mad people and displaying them for entertain-

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ment, one cannot claim they had ‘‘an easy wandering existence.’’ And if there is no ‘‘easy wandering existence,’’ there is no later epistemic shift to be described. The Nietzschean model he followed breaks down completely. That he did include a discussion of the show in the eighteenth century, and perhaps that he included a discussion of Bethlem at all, is, I would contend, a product of exactly the same logic. Simply put again, something as ugly as the show of Bethlem, or something as ugly as that show is generally understood to have been, fits well with the ‘‘ugliness’’ of Foucault’s eighteenth century and the great confinement. Somewhat surprisingly for a thinker known for his complex arguments and dense prose style, the particular kind of ‘‘simplicity’’ is consistent with much of Foucault’s writing. Gutting has pointed out that the ‘‘power of Foucault’s writing is due’’ in large part to the ‘‘deeply emotional myths that inform many of his books. These myths take the traditional form of a struggle between monsters and heroes. The History of Madness, for example, is built on the struggle between the terrors inflicted on the mad by the moralizing psychiatrists and the dazzling transgressions of mad artists such as Nietzsche, van Gogh, and Artaud.’’42 Similarly, Derrida, in a relatively recent reconsideration of Foucault’s treatment of Freud in Madness and Civilization, humorously points to the same tendency in Foucault to cast ‘‘characters’’ as ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad’’: ‘‘to say it quickly and with a bit of a smile, using all the necessary quotation marks, [Freud is, at points,]‘on the good side.’’43 In short, in searching for evidence to critique psychiatric asylums, the show of Bethlem is too tempting to pass by. Here is an obvious villain in the grand plot to confine madness. Tempting as the show of Bethlem must have been to Foucault, however, it just did not fit easily within his narrative, even in the ‘‘bad’’ eighteenth century. While the show may seem to be part of a villainous act, the large ‘‘display’’ of madmen at Bethlem directly contradicts the ‘‘confinement’’ and shutting away of madmen.44 Consequently, Foucault had to work hard, harder than he probably intended I would wager, to make the show fit his version of history. His strategy was necessarily daring. He explained away this glaring contradiction by arguing it was not a contradiction at all, but a paradox supporting his larger narrative. The ‘‘show’’ of Bethlem, he sought to show, provided evidence for the ‘‘particular

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place of the mad in the world of confinement.’’45 The show of Bethlem becomes one of only two pieces of evidence Foucault cites to prove the ‘‘special’’ place of madness within the other forms of deviancy. The classical age sought to confine other forms of unreason—‘‘the debauched, spendthrift fathers, prodigal sons, blasphemers’’—because of a new sense of ‘‘shame’’ and a ‘‘desire to avoid scandal.’’46 Contrary to the Middle Ages that required public exposure of evil to purge it, the Classical Age feared that ‘‘aspects of evil . . . have such a power of contagion, such a force of scandal that any publicity multiplies them infinitely.’’ Among the forms of unreason, madness was exceptional in that, while confined, it was also displayed: ‘‘Unreason was hidden in the silence of the houses of confinement, but madness continued to be present on the stage of the world—with more commotion than ever.’’47 Foucault explains clearly his reasons for the distinction: We see why the scandal of madness could be exalted, while that of the other forms of unreason was concealed with so much care. The scandal of unreason produced only the contagious example of transgression and immorality; the scandal of madness showed men how close to animality their Fall could bring them; and at the same time how far divine mercy could extend when it consented to save man. For Renaissance Christianity, the entire instructive value of unreason and of its scandals lay in the madness of the Incarnation of God in man. For classicism, the Incarnation is no longer madness; but what is madness is this incarnation of man in the beast, which is, as the ultimate point of his Fall, the most manifest sign of his guilt; and, as the ultimate object of divine mercy, the symbol of universal forgiveness and innocence regained. Henceforth, all the lessons of madness and the power of its instruction must be sought in this obscure region, at the lower confines of humanity, where man is hinged to nature, where he is both ultimate downfall and absolute innocence.48

This strained explanation, while daring enough, does not hold up to scrutiny. Porter has suggested already that Foucault’s discussion of ‘‘animality’’ is deeply flawed.49 Gutting, again, for the most part a Foucault advocate, is skeptical enough to make this issue central to evaluating the worth of Foucault’s study as history of madness: ‘‘To what extent is the nature of nineteenth-century psychiatry illuminated by thinking of it as constructed from the polar Classical conceptions of madness as innocent animality

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and as moral fault? The issue of Foucault’s status as a historian of madness should remain open until historians have posed and answered questions such as these.’’50 My point: no matter how well the notion of an entertaining show of Bethlem might seem to fit the Foucauldian narrative of the great confinement, it ultimately creates fissures in that narrative. The show of Bethlem, I am suggesting, became more of an obstacle than the convincing evidence it probably seemed to be when Foucault first considered it. In fact, Foucault may have misplaced or miscategorized madness with other forms of deviancy in large part because of the show of Bethlem. Or, to be more precise, Foucault may have miscategorized madness because of the reductive account of the show of Bethlem that has dominated, and still dominates, popular and academic understanding. If we stay within Foucault’s logic while acknowledging his notion of ‘‘animality’’ as a mistake, certain speculative lines of inquiry are suggested: if the mad at Bethlem were shown, not to remind people of their proximity to animals and their possible redemption, but to elicit charity for their suffering, people are not ‘‘hinged to nature’’ in the show of madness, then, but hinged to each other ‘‘in charity’’; the lessons of madness and the power of its instruction are grounded, not in the ‘‘lower confines of humanity,’’ but in our response to the suffering of the other; the ‘‘naturalness’’ of the insane’s ‘‘animality’’ does not ‘‘prepare the moment’’ for when the mad can become the focus of ‘‘objective’’ scientific analysis, but their place as charitable object leaves them where they seem to be at the moment—at the margins and intersections of the medical, judicial, and social welfare systems—with the complete modern, medical scientific analysis that Foucault feared so much long delayed and only now beginning in full. One can begin to speculate, too, about other larger implications of this mistake, the ethical direction Foucault’s work may have headed had he categorized the mad not, pace Nietzsche, as the ‘‘other’’ of reason, but as the ultimate figure for the ‘‘other’’ ego (autrui). Instead of seeing madness as linked to the inaccessible ‘‘other’’ of Nietzschean prethought that one can somehow return to, he could have recognized madness as the figure for the Levinasian other self, the other subject that we must respond to, but cannot access completely. Consider Louis Sass’s description of schizophrenia in this Levinasian context:

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Schizophrenia’s elusiveness makes itself felt not only at the theoretical or scientific level but also in the more immediate sphere of the human encounter, in the intense yet indescribable feelings of alienness such individuals can evoke. In the presence of normal people, as well as with patients of nearly every other psychiatric diagnosis, one feels an immediate sense of a shared humanity, whereas the schizophrenic seems to inhabit an entirely different universe; he is someone from whom one feels separated by a ‘‘gulf which defies description.’’ European psychiatrists have labeled this reaction the ‘‘praecox feeling’’—the sense of encountering someone who seems ‘‘totally strange, puzzling, inconceivable, uncanny, and incapable of empathy, even to the point of being sinister and frightening.’’51

At a moment in history when subjectivity seems to be undergoing some major transformation, the mad, in short, stand as a compelling reminder of absoluteness of alterity, the distance between subjects that cannot be closed. The other (autrui) is not just like me, an alter ego, but something different that cannot be reduced to simply another version of me. Madness preserves, displays, and prompts an awareness of the irreducible strangeness of all others from each other.

THE SHOW OF BETHLEM AS A BETTER CHOICE FOR THE ‘‘DIONYSIAN’’ THEATER IN FOUCAULT? More to the point for my study, however, is that Foucault seemed absolutely wedded to the notion of the show of Bethlem as fundamentally entertainment, albeit instructive entertainment, and this, in addition to his desire to establish a coherent narrative matching an ‘‘a priori theoretical position’’ created flaws in his argument.52 The conventional understanding of the show of Bethlem is, surprisingly, a piece of Whig historicism he was unwilling to challenge largely because this piece of historicism seemed to fit his description of good and bad, heroes and monsters. His logic in dealing with the show of Bethlem is, again, implicit: because visitation seemed so ugly, certainly it must fit somehow within the processes of the great confinement—the villainous act in Madness and Civilization. It seems odd in hindsight that the great skeptic of all things suggesting benevolent progress would not have been more intrigued by a practice that

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benevolent progressives so universally considered perverse and so universally congratulated themselves for ending. Foucault does render the show didactic, rather than simply perverse. But he offers no substantial reconsideration of the now standard and horrific version of the hospital’s history. In fact, he inadvertently reinforces the Whig tradition he sought so feverishly to challenge. Andrew Scull has shown, we note, that much of the ‘‘demonized’’ version of Bethlem Foucault employs in his narrative originates in the ‘‘reform’’ efforts of the early nineteenth century when, in order to transform medical treatment of the insane, followers of Samuel Tuke found themselves attacking older psychiatric practices and institutions to help make the case for change.53 In accepting the show of Bethlem as perverse entertainment, Foucault accepts at its most ideologically charged the benevolent reform history of those he on other points attacks relentlessly. Even though this is an English rather than a French matter, it seems that Foucault should have been more interested in or more sensitive to something standard historical scholarship and popular imagination deplored. For example, still staying within Foucault’s own logic, in looking at the show of the mad and the great confinement, he ends up aligning two different events on two different trajectories: the great confinement may be beginning (to the extent it happened in any way close to the magnitude asserted by Foucault), but the display of madness is most distinctly ending. That is, as conventionally understood, the ‘‘civilizing process’’ of the enlightenment rendered the show of Bethlem obsolete at roughly the historical moment Foucault situates the first signs of the great confinement. According to the History of Bethlem, the first official bans on visitation to the hospital (on Sundays and holidays) took effect in 1657, the very same year the hopitaux generaux system started.54 It seems strange, again, that he did not seriously consider the possibility that the display of madmen was not part of the growing confinement of ‘‘unreason’’ at all, then, but part of the earlier social structures determining the place of madness.55 Given that the show of Bethlem was eventually eliminated by ‘‘enlightened’’ and ‘‘civilized’’ thinking, it seems likely—again, if we stay within Foucault’s logic— that the show of Bethlem was not only not part of the process of confinement but was itself opposed to that process and possibly could have delayed and mitigated the process of confinement in

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England. It seems likely, in fact, that the charitable show of Bethlem constituted a pre-Enlightenment relationship between the mad and the not mad that itself had to be contained and hidden away by Enlightenment processes. I am not suggesting here merely a rhetorical strategy, that somehow Foucault could have found a better example to make his argument more elegant. I am suggesting something much more substantial. The existence of the theater of charity at Bethlem supports one of his central arguments, an argument that is, again, both historical and philosophical: the voice of the mad was more thoroughly integrated into the culture of the Renaissance and they did speak more forcefully, for themselves, than in later time periods. My study supports this by showing that the reality of the Bethlem mad and their ‘‘show’’ empowers the drama while, at the same time, resisting the full and complete incorporation by the representational stage. My study suggests that the charitable show of Bethlem actively resists appropriation by the representational theater more closely aligned with the voices of reason (the more ‘‘Apollinian’’ theater one could say). Madness quite distinctly resists being spoken for. In the Renaissance relationship between Bethlem and the stage we see a nonrepresentational theater very much in the world transformed by and transforming a newly emerging representative theater. The newly developing Renaissance stage must ultimately separate from this other but related theater. In short, in the charitable show of Bethlem we see the analogue to the Nietzschean Dionysian festival that Foucault so clearly sought. Here at Bethlem is the otherness of madness that defies representation, that defies reason, but, as Foucault suggested, actually shapes both before it is shut away, confined, accessible only in part by a more mediocre ‘‘Apollinian’’ art form. All this is not to repeat what Carol Thomas Neely rightly has called Foucault’s ‘‘valorization’’ of the Renaissance’s treatment of madness.56 On the contrary, a more comprehensive understanding of the show of Bethlem would have eliminated this distortion in Foucault. Foucault’s characterization of an ‘‘easy wandering’’ madness does valorize the Renaissance, but understanding the charitable show of Bethlem could have allowed him to make his point about a more thorough integration of madness in the culture without such valorization. Foucault could have juxtaposed the charitable show of Bethlem to the great confine-

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ment as a means of showing the break between reason and madness that occurred during the period while more honestly examining the harsh complexity of this ‘‘charity.’’ The show of Bethlem, in other words, may in some ways be preferable to the great confinement (at least, it seems to me a more honest engagement with madness) but no one could consider it valorous, easy, or pleasant. Just as no one, I suppose, confronted with the reality of such a thing, could consider a Dionysian festival valorous, easy, or pleasant.57 The face-to-face interaction of charitable giver and recipient, no matter the potential for ridicule and crass entertainment, suggests a profoundly different relationship between the mad and not mad than in later periods. And the historical fate of this relationship also supports Foucault’s broader view of human history. Bethlem’s odd charity, with all its flaws, disappears—just as the scaffold of the punishment disappears in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish—only to be replaced immediately by a supposedly more ‘‘humane’’ and discrete system of faceless poor laws wherein giver and recipient never interact at all.58 To put this another way, my study suggests that Foucault had good reason, other than a degree of discipleship, to seek an analogue to Nietzsche’s Dionysian festival. He had the simple and important historical reason that one existed.

SHAKESPEARE, BARDOLATRY, AND THE SHOW OF BETHLEM IN LITERARY HISTORY Unlike his Nietzschean model, Foucault’s reading of French classical tragedy as Apollinian theater accessing in some way the otherness of madness has no Dionysian counterpart outside of representational theater, no nonrepresentational theater with which it differs. Nor, somewhat surprisingly, does Foucault appear that interested in uncovering one. Shakespeare and other ‘‘Dionysian’’ art like that of Cervantes seem to suffice. Perhaps he was too self-conscious of his own artful imitation of Nietzsche to believe a corresponding model actually existed in history.59 Or, perhaps, it could be that in order to consider a more positive version of the show of Bethlem in the late sixteenth century, one analogous to the desirable, ‘‘real’’ ritual of the Dionysian festival transformed and tamed by a new theater, Foucault not only

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would have had to overcome the myth of Bethlem as mere entertainment, but he would have had to challenge yet one other, one much more powerful and influential, myth of his era: the ‘‘timeless’’ genius of Shakespeare. To even consider the late sixteenthand, early seventeenth-century show of Bethlem as analogue to the Dionysian festival, Foucault would have had to recast Shakespeare and make him more a villain than a hero. As noted, for Foucault, Shakespeare embodies the more ‘‘Dionysian’’ late medieval world before the harsh division of reason and madness. Shakespeare is on the ‘‘good’’ side that refuses reason’s dominance over unreason. To put the non-representational show of Bethlem in the role of the ‘‘Dionysian’’ festival would relegate Shakespeare to a role played by his contemporaries, that of mediocre, ‘‘Apollinian’’ artist ‘‘taming’’ and using madness for its own purposes. To consider a different role for the show of Bethlem in the Foucaultian narrative, one would have to return Shakespeare from ‘‘Outside of Time’’ to his literary historical context. I am not insinuating that Foucault was a bad or historically naı¨ve literary critic in not doing so. On the contrary, from one perspective, despite obviously being effected by the still powerful ‘‘bardolatry’’ of his time, Foucault was not that far from the truth in claiming that Shakespeare’s engagement with madness was uniquely profound. As much as any Elizabethan dramatist, Shakespeare did seek to embrace ‘‘madness’’ in something like the sense Foucault suggested. But, as I have shown, with the particularly acute critical help of Ben Jonson, this attempt to embrace madness ultimately was more a superficial than fundamental distinction between Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Not surprisingly, given the considerable scope of his project, Foucault simply did not look closely enough at this enormously complicated single literary milieu. While Foucault did not see it, Shakespeare, as much as any literary artist in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, participated in the processes that would ‘‘tame’’ and harness the ‘‘madness’’ of the show of Bethlem to create and refine its own ‘‘theater.’’ Shakespeare, as much as any literary artist in the early seventeenth century participated in the processes whereby Reason gained dominion over madness.60 Shakespeare, simply put, did not stand ‘‘outside’’ of his time. And this particular misunderstanding of Shakespeare, once

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corrected, like his misunderstanding of the show of Bethlem, supports Foucault’s larger argument. By correcting Foucault’s bit of bardolatry, we refine and enhance his position that in the early seventeenth century, literary madness was ‘‘authoriz[ing] the manifestation of truth and the return of reason.’’61 While Shakespeare might not embody the ‘‘Dionysian’’ in the way Foucault suggested, seeing Shakespeare as part of a more ‘‘mediocre’’ Apollinian theater as understood by Foucault helps us to see that the ‘‘true’’ Dionysian theater of unreason he sought did exist and, even more, as Foucault eventually concluded, it did determine much modern or early modern art, at least drama. While he was wrong in his particular statements about Shakespeare, a closer reading of madness in Shakespeare shows that, generally speaking, Foucault was right about this moment in the history of madness and dramatic art. Moreover, as further testimony to Foucault’s skills as a literary critic, we see that Shakespeare, as much as any seventeenth century playwright, did seek to let the mad speak for themselves, did seek to embrace them as ‘‘other,’’ rather than confine or shut them away, but, interestingly enough, he encountered a comparable artistic aporia to the philosophical aporia that redirected Foucault’s own project. Shakespeare discovered, like Foucault, the difficulty—the impossibility, Derrida might say—of letting the otherness of madness speak. Jonson was right about madness, Shakespeare concluded; his embrace of madness in the romantic comedies did not even approach the ‘‘likenesse of Truthe’’ of madness. In other words, like the show of Bethlem, Shakespeare may have been on the ‘‘good’’ side of unreason, just not the way Foucault thought. In turning to the reality of madness after Jonson’s criticisms, Shakespeare helped expose the stage’s relationship with this ‘‘other’’ theater in the culture. Once this relationship was realized, Shakespeare helped distance the stage from such a ‘‘Dionysian’’ relative and helped define for the modern period the representational stage’s own distinct nature as cultural activity. The more Shakespeare actually realized the relationship between the stage and the real show of madness, the more distinctly he drew boundaries between that show and his stage. Shakespeare eventually has to turn away from the ‘‘unreason’’ of the charitable show of Bethlem and this turn helps establish theater as we understand it.

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Jonson’s innovations (‘‘cures’’) did force Shakespeare and others to adjust their thinking about madness, and it is this dialectic that exposed the relationship of the stage to Bethlem and, in turn, ultimately transformed the stage. The adjustment did not come through concession to Jonson’s argument, but from the attempt to respond to Jonson in kind. The crucial moment, again, comes when Shakespeare seeks to turn the tables on the Jonsonian figure of Malvolio in Twelfth Night. In Malvolio, Shakespeare creates a character, not unlike Jonson, who chastises the madness of all the other characters in this flawed play world. In engaging such a strategy, we see that Shakespeare uncovers, perhaps inadvertently, not just a streak of cruelty in romantic comedy, but a strange relationship to a different kind of theater. In revealing the connection to the ‘‘real’’ show of Bethlem, looking forward especially to the madness of the monumentally important King Lear, Shakespeare changed the direction of dramatic development generally. The pain and suffering of Lear’s ‘‘real’’ madness is not possible without the distinctly different but related pain and suffering discovered in Malvolio and the show of Bethlem. The display of Malvolio’s ‘‘madness’’ on stage interrupts and transforms what could be termed in this context the Foucaultian or Nietzschean understanding of madness so prevalent in romantic comedy and makes possible the later powerful renderings of madness in tragedy that elicit more pity and charity from an audience than wonder at the ability of ‘‘madness’’ to transcend boundaries. Indeed, as the stage direction ‘‘Malvolio within’’ reminds us, it is unclear to what extent Malvolio is, like Lear’s hovel or the missing scenes in The Changeling, visible on the stage. Whatever Shakespeare’s intentions, very few audiences can laugh comfortably at the confinement of Malvolio in a ‘‘dark room.’’ Whatever laughter the scenes in question produce, it differs drastically from, for instance, the restraint and treatment of Antipholus of Ephesus by Dr. Pinch in The Comedy of Errors. While ‘‘madness’’ is ubiquitous as a trope in that early play, no character in it is ‘‘mad’’ in the way Ophelia or Lear is mad; that is, no character suffers in what looks very much like what the modern world would call psychosis. No character, to introduce some problematic logic and terms, is truly insane as we commonly understand that word today. This relative absence of this kind of ‘‘real’’ madness is true of all Shakespearean plays prior to Twelfth Night. This is not to say

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that Malvolio is turned mad in the way that Lear is turned mad, of course, but to emphasize what is clear: something distinctly different and new emerges on stage with Malvolio’s ‘‘madness.’’ And it happens because of Shakespeare’s response to Jonson. In trying to counter Jonson’s suggestion that he could cure humours by ‘‘treating’’ the Jonsonian figure of Malvolio for madness, Shakespeare reveals the fundamental cultural link between the stage and show of Bethlem and exposed the emerging gap between his developing ‘‘Apollinian’’ stage and an other more ritualistic, nonrepresentational theater—one could say ‘‘Dionysian’’—operating in the culture. While powerful scenes, in these dramatic moments he begins to realize that the former cannot comfortably contain or even coexist with the latter. As I suggested early on, the show of Bethlem can be understood as part of something like the ‘‘ritualistic dramatic culture’’ that existed prior to Shakespearean theater; as the theater develops it turns to more modern representational forms that we now categorize as dramatic art. In turn, the representational forms of Shakespeare’s stage continued to participate in the ‘‘civilizing processes’’ that eventually rendered the show of Bethlem an obsolete perversion by the end of the eighteenth century.62 That is, as the stage became more demarcated from other cultural spheres, became drama as we generally understand that term today, the ‘‘show’’ of Bethlem became less tenable as cultural practice in part because it seemed too much like a (perverse) form of the stage, too much like ‘‘pure’’ entertainment. Certainly these are separate theaters; but they are so because a separation occurred.

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Notes INTRODUCTION 1. All passages from Jonson are quoted from The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952) unless otherwise indicated. 2. The standard reference on the topic of Bethlem’s relationship to the stage is Robert Reed’s Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage (Cambridge Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1952). See also Duncan Salkeld, Madness and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); Carol Thomas Neely, ‘‘Recent Work in Renaissance Studies: Psychology; Did Madness Have a Renaissance?’’ Renaissance Quarterly 44.4 (1991): 766–91 and ‘‘ ‘Documents in Madness’: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Early Modern Culture,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 42.3 (1991): 315–38; Natsu Hattori, ‘‘ ‘The pleasure of your bedlam’ ’’: the theatre of madness in the Renaissance,’’ History of Psychiatry, Vol. 6 (1995): 283–308; and William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). Jonson’s various references to Bethlem have received an inordinate amount of attention as historical evidence for the hospital. Fredson Bowers, for example, in his edition of Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore, Part One (1605) the first play to use Bethlem as a stage setting and five years earlier than Epicoene, cites Jonson. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953) and Cyrus Hoy, Introduction, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Carroll provides a concise catalogue of the ‘‘Bedlam’’ references in Jonson: ‘‘The Alchemist, 4.4.47–48; Bartholomew Fair, 1.2.54–55 and 1.5.23–25; The Staple of News, 4.1.12; and The Magnetick Lady, 5.5.37’’ (101). I will discuss this string of references in more detail in chapter 6. 3. Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 121. 4. Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 72. 5. Duncan Salkeld, Madness and Drama, 72. 6. William Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar, 100. 7. The quote actually comes from Jonathan Andrews’s dissertation, which informs much of The History of Bethlem: ‘‘A History of Bethlem Hospital c. 1600–1750’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1991), 16. Much the same point is made in the new history itself: Jonathan Andrews, Asa Briggs, Roy Porter, Penny Tucker, Keir Waddington, The History of Bethlem (London: Routledge,

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1997), 191. See also Andrews, ‘‘ ‘Hardly a Hospital, But a Charity For Pauper Lunatics’: Therapeutics at Bethlem in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,’’ in Medicine and Charity Before the Welfare State, ed. J. Barry and Colin Jones (London: Routledge, 1991), 63–81; Patricia Allderidge, ‘‘Management and Mismanagement at Bedlam, 1547–1633,’’ in Health, Medicine, and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 141–64, and ‘‘Bedlam: Fact or Fantasy?’’ in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, Vol. 2, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 17–33. Roy Porter has done much to create the history of psychiatry and has addressed, in various places, the history of Bethlem. See, in particular, MindForg’d-Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Other very useful studies include Penelope Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Basil Clarke, Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain: Exploratory Studies (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975); and Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 8. Christine Stevenson, ‘‘Robert Hooke’s Bethlem,’’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55 (Sept. 1996), 254–75. Much of the material in this article is reprinted as chapter fifteen in The History of Bethlem. 9. Ibid., 255. 10. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, 121, expresses some curiosity over the fact that Bethlem’s early seventeenth-century size and condition would compromise its function as pure entertainment, as does Reed, Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage, 16. While discussing Isabella’s remark about ‘‘pitiful delight’’ in seeing the madmen in Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, Hattori, ‘‘The Pleasure of your Bedlam,’’ 299, does say that the remark suggests ‘‘tension between the conflicting impulses of compassion and revulsion, the voyeuristic thrill of witnessing misfortune or vice at second hand,’’ although she refers to the show throughout her essay as entertainment. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar, 101, while referring to the show of Bethlem as ‘‘pure entertainment’’ does hint that charity was involved in some way: ‘‘Part of Bedlam’s cultural appeal may have derived from its locus as an intersection of both the poor and the mad, two of the most compelling and disturbing marginal social groups.’’ 11. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies, trans., W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 65. 12. See, in particular, Sander Gilman, Seeing the Insane (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1982), 55. 13. Andrews, History of Bethlem, 132. 14. Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Neely’s very informative book was released while mine was going into production. This very useful study extends Neely’s groundbreaking essays on madness and early modern literary studies. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. This thesis is foregrounded in the historians’ ‘‘Background’’ Introduction, 11.

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17. Ibid., 133. 18. Allderidge, ‘‘Fact or Fantasy,’’ 21. 19. Andrews, History of Bethlem, 180–81. 20. Lawrence Clopper, in Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), recently has suggested that scripted drama had yet to fully separate itself from all sorts of ludi or ‘‘play’’ in the sixteenth century, arguing that much ‘‘anti-theatricalism’’ was not directed at drama as we understand the term, but at all sorts or rowdy play and festival activity. 21. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations from Shakespeare are from David Bevington’s The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th edition, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992. 22. Andrews, History of Bethlem, 139. 23. Porter, Mind-Forg’d-Manacles, 122. The line is repeated in Andrews, History of Bethlem, 186. 24. Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), points to the need for a ‘‘thin’’ rather than ‘‘thick’’ description in literary historical scholarship, one that does not see the text as engaging whole segments of a culture at once, but a specifically ‘‘literary’’ part of the culture first. 25. Andrews, History of Bethlem, 130. 26. James Bednarz, Shakespeare & the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 7. 27. On Jonson’s rather unique temperament and artistic drive, see, in particular, Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); George Rowe, Distinguishing Jonson: Imitation, Rivalry and the Direction of a Dramatic Career (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Robert Evans, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989); W. David Kay, Ben Jonson: A Literary Life (New York: Macmillan, 1995). 28. Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates, 167. 29. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, 7. 30. Ibid., 2. 31. Ibid., 18. 32. EMIH exists in two forms, a quarto version with an Italianate setting (1601, corresponding to the play’s first performance in 1598) and a revised Anglicized version (either prepared in 1605 for a new production at court or in 1612 for Jonson’s folio). The Prologue only appears in the folio, but no one would contest that it also expresses Jonson’s views in 1598. I cite mainly from the quarto (1598) version throughout because of my interest in the immediate responses Jonson’s work elicited. Differences between the two versions relevant to my argument are generally discussed in notes. See, in particular, J. W. Lever, Every Man in His Humour: A Parallel Text Edition of the 1601 Quarto and the 1616 Folio (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971) and Gabriele Bernhard Jackson, Every Man in his Humor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969) for discussions of the dates of the revised version. My reading of the Poets’ War supports the case for a 1605 revision for a production at court.

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33. E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare’s Impact on His Contemporaries (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1982), 110. 34. Ibid. 35. Salkeld, Madness and Drama, 50–51. In Shakespeare criticism Theseus’s words ‘‘have been matched with Hippolyta’s’’ to form a ‘‘balance of aesthetic truth that brings a final coherence to the play. Great art requires both reason and imagination to achieve its effects’’; but these attractive ‘‘combinative judgements’’ still tend ‘‘to understate the extent to which irrationality makes itself felt in the play.’’ 36. Honigmann, Shakespeare’s Impact, 115. 37. Salkeld, Madness and Drama, 18. 38. Ibid., 68. Salkeld, in contrast, sees The Comedy of Errors as introducing this new understanding of madness. 39. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, notes, but does not explore in any depth how madness became central to the debate. 40. Salkeld, Madness and Drama, 72. Without addressing the show of Bethlem or the Poets’ War, Salkeld outlines a comparable dramatic development. Clearly underlying his take on this development is the Foucaultian assumption that Bethlem and the Shakespearean stage were Anglo-precursors to the great confinement: ‘‘If madness in Shakespeare’s plays in the 1590s took its place in the visible public world, there were already signs of a more repressive attitude towards lunacy growing in England in the late sixteenth century and reflected in the drama. Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus are both bound and laid in a dark room under the orders of the absurd and ignorant Pinch. In As You Like It (1600?), madness and love are equated together and said to deserve a dark house and whip, a punishment and a cure. The language registers an alteration of mood. Twelfth Night (1601) offers evidence of this socially hardening attitude by identifying madness much more closely with individual and isolating the mad man in confinement at the dark periphery of the stage. The change, however, has not entirely evolved. The ‘madness’ of Malvolio is still sited unmistakably on the body and takes its place in the wider pattern of relationships that constitute the main plot of the play.’’ 41. This has been made quite clear in the recent Trevor Nunn film interpretation. 42. Reed, Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage, 5. Andrews, The History of Bethlem, 130, makes a similar remark on a transition in dramatic handling of madness: ‘‘For some reason, the first quarto of the seventeenth century was a period in which playwrights seem first to have discovered Bethlem as a dramatic resource. Both before and after that date, interest in Bedlam, apart from passing references or ‘Bedlam Ballads,’ a rather different genre, was slight.’’ More recently, Karin S. Coddon, in ‘‘Tyranny and Spectacle in Jacobean Drama,’’ New Casebooks: The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Dympna Callaghan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), has discussed this ‘‘transition’’ from ‘‘Elizabethan’’ madmen to ‘‘Jacobean’’ madmen from yet another perspective: ‘‘The untenability of the mad tragic subject in early seventeenth-century drama suggests a significant rift between interiority and unreason. For while Jacobean drama is noteworthy for its ubiquitous lunatics, the disordered subjectivity that so marks the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean tragic hero tends to be eclipsed, if not outright ef-

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faced, by representations of madness almost impenetrable in their exteriority, their theatricality’’ (25). In short, ‘‘individual—and individuated—mad tragic’’ subjects give way to ‘‘emblematic madmen.’’ 43. Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 27. For Halpern, this view is ‘‘historical allegory . . . organizing and lending coherence (if not historical veracity) to the modernist conception of the Renaissance. To put it bluntly, modernism constructed the English Renaissance as an allegory for the colonial encounter itself; the [Renaissance’s] catastrophic experience of modernity and the disintegration of its organic and ritualized culture offered an historically displaced and geographically internalized image of the effects of contemporary imperialist penetration into indigenous third world societies.’’ While not historical ‘‘truth,’’ then, this ‘‘allegory’’ still has use. As Halpern puts it, ‘‘modernism’s allegorical readings of Shakespeare do not erode historical meaning but enrich it. By unleashing a conflicted, dialectical interplay between the past and present, they construct a Shakespeare who is at once ‘our contemporary’ and our bracing Other’’ (14). Borrowing Halpern’s suggestion, I intend to use ‘‘modernism’s allegorical readings of Renaissance texts’’ as a ‘‘productive resource’’ and ‘‘point of departure’’ for trying to reconfigure the role of Bethlem in the development of the stage (10). The modernist notion of a dramatic ritualistic culture giving way to a more representational one has yet to be supplanted and, moreover, as Halpern suggests, the ‘‘allegory’’ reveals aspects of plays not otherwise accessible. 44. Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 3. 45. 5.1.131. 46. Neely, ‘‘Documents in Madness,’’ offers a related reading of Ophelia’s mad language that I will address in chapter 2. 47. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 237. 48. Weimann’s analysis may have a closer than analogous relationship to mine. When he turns to demonstrate the ‘‘flexibility’’ of Shakespeare’s stage, its ability to merge the platea and locus traditions, he refers first to the ‘‘mad’’ scenes of Hamlet and King Lear where, I am suggesting, Shakespeare’s stage wrestles with the ‘‘popular,’’ ‘‘ritualistic’’ show of Bethlem (208–24). Indeed, in his conclusion he notes how the ‘‘innovations’’ of the private stage, the ‘‘new’’ theater associated with Jonson and the children’s companies, prompted Shakespeare to alter his stage. In a recent reading of Twelfth Night and Jonson’s Epicoene, Jason Scott-Warren has detected an uncomfortable proximity between the developing stage and bear-baiting gardens saying, ‘‘it is legitimate to doubt whether those theaters had really left behind the bear-gardens of the past.’’ ‘‘When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens; or, What’s at Stake in the Comedy of Humours,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 54.1 (spring 2003): 63–82, 82. 49. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 10.

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50. Neely, ‘‘Documents in Madness,’’ 338. ‘‘The theater does not just reflect, contain, or subvert cultural realities in which it is embedded. But finding the right metaphor for the relationship is hard.’’ Finding the right metaphor is particularly hard in the case of Bedlam and the stage because the two theaters are so complexly intertwined. I have chosen, then, to use the metaphors of ‘‘separation’’ to illustrate this difficult interplay, trusting that the individual readings of plays will clarify and justify the choice. 51. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Vol. 1: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 52. See Folie et Deraison: Histoire de la folie a l’age classique (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1961) and Richard Howard’s abridged, English translation Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1988). For a substantial discussion of issues relating to its translation and reception see Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault’s Histoire de la folie, ed. Arthur Still and Irving Velody (London: Routledge, 1992). See also Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine, and the Body, eds. Colin Jones and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1994) and The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Gutting’s suggestion that Madness and Civilization is good ‘‘idealist’’ history, but flawed ‘‘empirical’’ history summarizes the views of most sympathetic to Foucault, 47–71. 53. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 289. 54. For a comprehensive discussion of psychiatric historiography and the attacks on traditional ‘‘Whiggism’’ that began in the 1960s, see the introduction to Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter, eds. Discovering the History of Psychiatry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 55. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 8. This single sentence itself has become a matter of much controversy. Colin Gordon makes an interesting case in ‘‘Histoire de la folie: An unknown book by Michel Foucault’’ (Rewriting the History of Madness) that this sentence has been poorly translated. The original—Les fous alors ansient une existence facilement errante—should be translated as ‘‘the existence of the mad at that time could easily be a wandering one’’ (33). According to Gordon, then, Foucault should not be criticized as he has been for ‘‘valorizing’’ and distorting the medieval period and its treatment of madness: ‘‘Whether it would be an easy life is, in Foucault’s account of the matter, extremely dubious’’ (33). See, however, Andrew Scull’s rebuttal—‘‘A failure to communicate? On the reception of Foucault’s Histoire de la folie by Anglo-American historians’’—in the same collection of essays. Scull is clearly much more persuasive in pointing out the ‘‘dominant thrust’’ of Foucault’s argument in this disputed section—regardless of the translation of a single line—is to suggest a more positive place for madness in the culture: ‘‘the dominant thrust of Foucault’s analysis is to emphasize the real presence of madness within society, in daily life as in art and literature, ‘au Coeur meme de la raison et de la verite’. . . . It is the openness of medieval society to folly and unreason, not its harshness and cruelty, that is at the center of Foucault’s account. . . .(156).’’ 56. I thus seek to support Gary Gutting’s statement ‘‘that there is no good

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reason to place Histoire de la folie entirely outside the domain of history,’’ (or, for that matter, literary criticism) and suggest that critiques of Foucault can revitalize rather than simply malign his study (70). 57. Jones and Porter, Reassessing Foucault, 13. 58. Ibid., 2. 59. H. C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 7. See, in particular, Midelfort’s influential critique ‘‘Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal of Michel Foucault’’ in Barbara Malament, ed., After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). 60. To situate this personal point in a more academic framework, I am very wary of the extent to which Foucault’s ‘‘anti-Whiggism’’ was itself not ‘‘free of ideology so much as counterideological’’ (Micale, Discovering the History of Psychiatry, 11). 61. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, xi.

CHAPTER 1. A ‘‘PASTIME’’ THAT CAN ‘‘PROMPT US TO HAVE MERCY’’ 1. See especially Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Colin Jones, The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Re´ gime and Revolutionary France (London: Routldege, 1989); W. K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England 1480–1660: A Study of the Changing Pattern of Social Aspirations (London: Unwin & Allen, 1959); Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964); Lindsay Grandshaw and Roy Porter, eds., The Hospital in History (London: Routledge, 1989); Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Addison Wesley, 1988) and The English Poor Law 1531–1782 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay on Social History, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of the Catholic State, to 1620 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1971) and Poverty and Charity: Europe, Italy, Venice, 1400–1700 (Hampshire: Variorum, 1994); Sandra Cavallo, Charity and Power in Early Modern Italy: Benefactors and Their Motives in Turin, 1541–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Rubin argues, for example, that twelfth century prosperity for land owners inspired a great deal of charitable activity, but in the following centuries during economic decline for this group ‘‘a long process of disenchantment both with the poor and with workers, who in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were better off and more socially mobile, led to a decline in the trust in poverty’s virtue’’ (98). For a recent ‘‘literary’’ study that presents a synopsis of this historiography see Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, English Renaissance Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 2. See, in particular, Hill, Society and Puritanism, 283–91.

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3. A. L. Beir gives a useful and concise history of poor laws in The Problem of the Poor in Tudor and Early Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1983). 4. Rubin, Charity and Community, 8. 5. Thomas Riis, ‘‘Religion and Early Modern Social Welfare.’’ in Through the Eye of a Needle: Judeo-Christian Roots of Social Welfare (Kirksville, Mo.: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1994) offers another general summary about changing attitudes to the poor: ‘‘The discrimination against able-bodied migrants and beggars had several roots. The principle of the obligation to work emphasized in certain countries in the wake of the Black death, and which spread to the rest of Europe; the need to do something efficient in order to cope with the serious problems of the sixteenth century; the protomercantilist belief that begging by able-bodied persons was a waste of resources; and, the recognition that begging and vagrancy were incompatible with a well governed polity, not the least because of the fear of the spread of disease’’ (194). 6. This argument has its most famous roots in R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Kancourt, Brace and Co., 1925); see Beier, Problem of Poverty, 1–25, for a concise summary and, also, Slack, Poverty and Policy, 1–13. 7. Hill, Society and Puritanism, 287. 8. Jones, Charitable Imperative, 3. See also Pullan, Poverty and Charity: Europe, Italy, Venice 1400–1700 ; and Slack, Poverty and Policy, 10. 9. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 115, notes that the first Henrician statutes about poor relief singled out the ‘‘witless’’ as a group deserving help. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, 6, notes that after 1601 ‘‘the government obliged parishes to treat impoverished madman as deserving poor’, people who, like orphans and cripples, were unable to work through no fault of their own.’’ 10. Miri Rubin, ‘‘Development and Change in English Hospitals, 1100– 1500’’ in The Hospital in History, 48. 11. Ibid., 46. 12. Andrews, History of Bethlem, 15. 13. Ibid., 25. 14. Ibid., 26. 15. Rubin, ‘‘Development and Change,’’ 53. 16. Porter, Mind-Forg’d-Manacles, 35. 17. Porter, ‘‘Foucault’s Great Confinement,’’ Rewriting the History of Madness, 121. 18. See, in particular, Slack, Poverty and Policy, 118–21, and Carole Rawcliffe, ‘‘The Hospitals of Later Medieval London,’’ Medical History 28 (1984), 1–21. 19. For an interesting contrast with French development of similar institutions, see Robert Castel, The Regulation of Madness: The Origins of Incarceration in France, trans. W. D. Halls (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 28–45. 20. Allderidge, ‘‘Management and Mismanagement,’’ 151–54. 21. Bethlem ‘‘keepers’’ displayed a well-documented reluctance to give up their posts in the second half of the sixteenth century and if this historical reluctance is any indication, Sleford’s departure was not routine. Allderidge provides a concise history and suggests the desirability of the position:

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The appointment of the keeper was made in the Court of Aldermen, and there seems to have been little to choose between those appointed by the crown and those by the City: and if the King had previously rewarded his friends and servants with the patronage of Bethlem, it is hard to see any different motives at work in the City’s administration. In 1561 the ‘‘reversion and next avoidance of the office of the keepership of Bethlem with all fees, profits and advantages thereunto justly belonging’’ was, at the request of the Lord Mayor, granted to Richard Munnes, his Lordship’s porter. Munnes (or Munes), a draper, had some difficulty in getting possession of his office because his predecessor Edward Alyn would not give it up; but within four years he had himself vacated it ‘‘with most hearty thanks,’’ whereupon the court appointed Edward Rest, a grocer. On Rest’s death in 1571, ‘‘at the request of my Lord Mayor and for his sake’’, the keepership was given to John Mell, whose occupation is unspecified but whose suitability for the office may be assessed from the fact that in June 1578, the governors of Bridewell gave him notice to find ‘‘another place’’ by Michaelmas. He was said to have received various legacies and ‘‘cancelled them’’, and to have abused the governors, those who gave money to the poor, and the poor themselves. In July of the following year he was still there and was again dismissed, having by now also abused the surveyors, and committed other disorders jointly with his wife. Mell replied that he had been appointed by the mayor and aldermen, and would go if they disliked his behaviour: but his death in December freed the post without further controversy and it was given to Roland Sleford. (149–50)

Even when administrative action prompted a keeper’s departure, only death guaranteed a change. That a Bethlem keeper of twenty years would leave his post alive or without documented administrative action seems, thus, out of the ordinary. 22. Beier, Problem of the Poor, 41. 23. Slack, Poor Laws, 20. 24. Gareth Jones, The History of the Law of Charity 1532–1827 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 40. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 19. 27. Slack, Poverty and Policy, 127. 28. J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584–1601, (New York: Norton, 1958), 401. 29. Hill, Society and Puritanism, 325. 30. Slack, Poor Laws, 28. 31. Jones, Law of Charity, 24, 33. 32. Ibid., 33. 33. Ibid., 37. 34. Slack, ‘‘Social Policy,’’ 109. 35. Slack, Poverty and Policy, 13–16. 36. Ibid., 103. 37. Ibid., 24. 38. Ibid., 130. 39. Slack, ‘‘Social Policy,’’ 45. 40. Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, 102. Harbage pointed out long ago that that the Poets’ War is very much ‘‘alive’’ as late as 1607 in Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle. Bednarz does not discuss the ‘‘poets’ war’’ beyond 1603.

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41. See George Price, Thomas Dekker (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969), 60: ‘‘Doubtless under the influence of Jonson’s EMIH and EMOH plays, Dekker, in two plays called The Honest Whore tried to combine realistic depictions of London life with his accustomed morality and romance.’’ 42. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, points out that ‘‘due to the pioneering work of W. David Kay, Ben Jonson: A Literary Life, critics now generally agree that Every Man Out, not its predecessor, ‘marks a watershed in Jonson’s work’ and was recognized as such by his contemporaries’’ (56). Nonetheless, Bednarz also maintains that Jonson’s ‘‘innovation’’ began ‘‘however tentatively, with Every Man In’’ (57). I cite from J. W. Lever’s edition of the play. 43. Lorenzo Junior’s speech on ‘‘Sacred Invention’’ is cut from the later Anglicized version, suggesting perhaps that Jonson tempered his high-handed, antagonistic theorizing somewhat as a result of the Poets’ War. 44. These lines on madness are cut from the later folio version, suggesting again that Jonson tempered his antagonism of ‘‘mad’’ Londoners in response to the Poets’ War. For a broader consideration of how these lines relate to the Poets’ War see Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, 33. 45. Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life, 40. 46. Jonathan Haynes, Social Relations of Jonson’s Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 42. 47. Substantial cuts have been made to this speech in the folio version, suggesting an author less willing in later years to equate social power with poetic skills—a claim, we shall see, that inspired much animosity from fellow playwrights. 48. Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 186. 49. Theodore Leinwand, The City Staged: Jacobean City Comedy, 1603–1613 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 116. Clement is ‘‘Jonson’s deus ex machine.’’ See, too, Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston, and Middleton (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1968) and Alexander Legatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973). 50. Haynes, Social Relations, 40–41. 51. Ibid., 41. More specifically, Haynes argues that Jonson’s drama and its intense scrutiny of social interactions (conversations, gestures, ‘‘the small arts of everyday life’’) was a particularly acute register, mediator, and transmitter of a newly forming urban culture anxious about the nuances and subtleties of style and manners. 52. P. K. Ayers, ‘‘Dreams of the City: The Urban and Urbane in Jonson’s Epicoene,’’ Philological Quarterly 6 (1987): 1–14, 14. 53. Haynes, Social Relations, 41. 54. Altman, Tudor Play of Mind, 189. 55. Ibid., 189. For Jonson this fiction making involves nothing so base as deceit or social competition, but implies ‘‘a Jonsonian ideal—the human being whose [poetic] play is an instrument of understanding and who therefore is not ‘forgetful of himselfe.’ ’’ 56. In the later folio version, Thorello or ‘‘Kitely’’ steps out of his role to de-

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liver the lines directly to the audience, suggesting perhaps that after the critiques of the Poets’ War Jonson no longer wants to suggest an actual ‘‘social’’ transformation of the citizen, but only to call attention to the play as art. 57. Anthony Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 3. See also, J. H. Gleason, The Justices of Peace in England 1558 to 1640: A Later Eirenarcha (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). 58. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, 7. 59. Archer, Pursuit of Stability, 97. 60. Haynes, Social Relations, 59. 61. (HS I.2.22–23). See also Kay and Bednarz on the significant innovations of Every Man Out. 62. Bednarz contrasts the focus on the ‘‘disintegration of Delirio’s marriage to Fallace’’ with the use of marriage at the end of Shakespearean festive comedy: ‘‘Unlike a festive comedy such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which depicts the irrational attraction of unmarried lovers complicated by misalliances that end happily, Every Man Out traces the erosion of marriage through a husband’s discovery of his wife’s infidelity’’ (63). This is, Bednarz contends, a philosophical as well as artistic difference: ‘‘In Shakespeare’s comedies, social conflict is routinely resolved by conceding error, subjectivity, and the contingency of perspective. Macilente dares Delirio to assume the role of a Shakespearean lover by claiming that what he sees was caused by ‘some enchantment,’ deceptio visus,’ ‘a dream,’ or ‘imagination,’ since ‘there’s nothing impossible.’ Indeed, from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s comedies are regularly resolved by granting the lie Delirio rejects’’ (64). 63. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, 16. 64. Ibid., 192. 65. Jason Scott-Warren, ‘‘When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens,’’ 82. The moment also reveals the ‘‘proximity’’ of the stage to bear baiting. 66. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, 179. The main plot of Twelfth Night ‘‘was the summation of a genre and a period that began with Shakespeare’s explicit imitation of Menaechmi and Amphitryon in The Comedy of Error.’’ 67. David Carnegie, ‘‘Malvolio Within’’: Performance Perspectives on the Dark House,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 52.3 (2001), 393–414.

CHAPTER 2. ‘‘ ‘THOUGH THIS BE MADNESS, YET THERE IS METHOD IN’T’’ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Jonson, The Complete Plays, eds. Herford and Simpson, 1.416. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, 207. In addition to Bednarz, see Haynes, Social Relations, 76–90. Haynes, Social Relations, 86. Altman, Tudor Play of Mind, 66–67. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, 235. Bednarz reminds us that Satiromastix was not the only response to Poet-

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aster and that Dekker’s response was of a type. Dekker admitted Jonson was right about the poet and poetry; he only refused to admit that Jonson lived up to the ideal. Dekker conceded ‘‘too much to the project of humanist poetics’’ advocated by Jonson; Shakespeare, in contrast, thoroughly rejected and ‘‘demolished’’ the Jonsonian standards. In this, Bednarz follows the lead of the author of the second part of The Return from Parnassus who suggests that Shakespeare, above all others, responded to Jonson’s claims. In this Cambridge academic play, the ‘‘character’’ Will Kempe tells the ‘‘character’’ Richard Burbage, ‘‘O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray [that is, befoul] his credit.’’ J. B. Leishman, ed. The Three Parnassus Plays (1958–1601) (London, 1949), 2. 1770–73, 337. In Ben Jonson: A Literary Life, Kay remarks, ‘‘Much paper has been expended on speculation as to which of Shakespeare’s plays contains this ‘purge’ of Jonson, but no convincing candidate has been put forward’’ (61). For Bednarz, that purge comes mainly in Troilus and Cressida where Shakespeare ‘‘refused to sanction the authority of reason upon which Jonson had grounded his poetics and sought instead to undercut the most critical element of his drama. Interestingly, Bednarz concludes his book by turning to Hamlet, hinting at the possibility that this play and, in particular, the ‘‘little eyasses’’ addition, has much to do with the purge of Jonson. I am expanding on this parting suggestion by Bednarz, in particular his suggestion that the play is a defense of the ‘‘theater’’ and ‘‘acting’’ in response to Jonson’s innovations. Moreover, in reading Hamlet as a response to Jonson in the Poets’ War, we see the continuing effect of Jonson’s arguments on Shakespeare’s understanding of the relationship between madness and the drama. Bednarz also argues that Shakespeare mocked the temperamental Jonson more directly in the figure of Ajax. It seems to me, however, at least based on the ‘‘Parnassus’’ quote, that a much more substantial ‘‘purge’’ was delivered than Troilus and Cressida can provide. 8. See Joseph Loewenstein, ‘‘Plays Agonistic and Competitive: The Textual Approach to Elsinore,’’ Renaissance Drama 19 (1988): 63–96. Loewenstein suggests the notable attack on popular theater came in Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels where ‘‘Pavy’’ in the Induction says, ‘‘the umbrae, or ghosts of some three or four playes, departed a dozen yeeres since, have bin seene waling on your stage here: take heed, boy, if your house bee haunted with such hobgoblins, ’twill fright away all your spectators quickly’’ (194–98). 9. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, 230. 10. Loewenstein, ‘‘Plays Agonistic,’’ 75. Hamlet is in part a response to Poetaster, and this moment in the play in particular: ‘‘Almost immediately Hamlet asks for a recitation from a very Jonsonian play, Jonsonian in its slavish neoclassicism.’’ Dating is a vexed matter here. It is not clear whether Poetaster preceded Hamlet or not or whether Hamlet was revised in part because of Poetaster. My reading suggests Poetaster preceded the construction of much of Hamlet. 11. Ibid., 76. 12. See R. W. Fossen’s Revels edition of the play (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979). Richard Horwich, ‘‘Hamlet and Eastward Ho,’’ Studies in English Literature (1971): 222–33 and Heather Anne Hirschfeld, ‘‘ ‘Work

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upon that now’: The Production of Parody on the English Renaissance Stage,’’ Genre 32.3 (1999): 175–200 offer brief discussions. 13. See Neely’s very interesting and different reading of Ophelia’s madness in ‘‘Documents in Madness.’’ See Salkeld, Madness and Drama, as well. 14. See Philip Edwards’s Revels play edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). 15. This absence of a comparable break between reason and madness in Hieronimo certainly can be understood as the absence of a Hamlet-like interiority generally. I am suggesting, however, that the very development of that more complex interiority is intertwined with Shakespeare’s engagement with ‘‘madness’’ and Jonson. 16. Salkeld, Madness and Drama, 120–21. 17. Neely, ‘‘Documents in Madness,’’ 323. ‘‘Shakespeare’s language of madness is characterized by fragmentation, obsession, and repetition, and most importantly by what I will call ‘quotation,’ which might instead be called ‘bracketing’ or ‘italicization.’ The mad are ‘beside themselves’; their discourse not their own. . . . ‘‘Neely does not emphasize how new and unique Ophelia’s speech and appearance is, nor does she suggest dramatic precursors. 18. See Edwards, The Spanish Tragedy, lxi–lxvi, and the five additions appended, 122–35. Edwards, like many, doubts Jonson’s authorship, mainly because of the quality of the writing. Only the painter scene seems appropriately Jonsonian. He also has doubts because of Jonson’s notorious dislike for the play and its type, including his own mocked performance. These seem to me, however, equally good pieces of evidence to argue that Jonson did undertake the revisions because they provide motivation to correct a flawed play. And, Jonson would not have been above paid ‘‘hack-work’’ at this time. In addition, no other writer appears as a strong a candidate. In the context of ‘‘madness,’’ the revisions seem perfectly Jonsonian to me. I am grateful to the work of Tara Hayes for illuminating Jonson’s revisions.

CHAPTER 3. ‘‘A VERY PITEOUS SIGHT’’ 1. Hoy, Introduction and Commentary, 2.128. ‘‘Queen Elizabeth I died in the early hours of 24 March 1603, and later that day James VI of Scotland was proclaimed King James I of England. He left Edinburgh for his new capital on 5 April and reached London on 7 May. Plans for his coronation, scheduled to take place on St. James’s day (25 July), began at once, according to Dekker, writing a year later, in March ‘after his Majestie was proclaymd.’ ’’ But the outbreak of plague that began to rage in May had become so severe by early July that a proclamation was issued on 11 July curtailing the coronation ceremonies and decreeing ‘‘that all parts of that solemnity which are not essential to it are forborne, together with his majest’y solemn entry and passage through the City of London which is put off till the winter.’’ 2. Ibid., 2.128. 3. Ibid., 2.128–29. 4. Cited in David Bergeron’s English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), 75–76.

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5. Cited in Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 76. 6. David Bergeron, ‘‘Gilbert Dugdale and the Royal Entry of James 1 (1604)’’ in Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13.1 (1983), 111–25. 7. Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life, 111. 8. Leinwand, The City Staged, 44–80. Fashioning a ‘‘positive image and social role’’ for the citizen merchant without turning him into a pseudo-gallant or an avaricious villain was difficult. 9. See Bowers; Hoy. 10. Bellafront’s change in plans suggests that the two parts of The Honest Whore may have been conflated initially. The possible connection is discussed below. 11. Viviana Comensoli, ‘Household Business’: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 146. 12. Archer, Pursuit of Stability, 257. 13. John Twyning, London Dispossessed: Literature and Social Space in the Early Modern City (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 21, 23. Twyning understands that Bethlem was not a state mechanism but an ‘‘interstitial’’ site ‘‘which display[s]’’ the ‘‘frustration of conflicting authorities’’—mainly the City and the Crown (10). As he puts it, Bethlem ‘‘denied the authorities easy acts of social containment’’ (11). Despite his more sophisticated understanding of Bethlem in history, Twyning still sees a substantial critique of the institution in Dekker’s plays. They offer ‘‘simultaneously an exclamation and critique of civic power and the ethos of the city’’ (28). This ‘‘balanced’’ response is attractive, but the critique he sees depends largely on his understanding of the show of Bethlem. Like so many, he sees the show as pure entertainment and this clouds his readings of the plays. 14. Archer, Pursuit of Stability, 259. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 3. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. Ibid. 19. HM, 250. A comparable incident occurred at Bridewell even closer to the construction of The Honest Whore plays. In 1601, in order to offset costs, the city leased out Bridewell to four men (Thomas Stanley, a gentleman; Nicholas Bywater, a tanner; Thomas Brownlow, a draper; and Thomas Daniel, a weaver) to ‘‘set four hundred poor people to work at new and profitable trades.’’ Not long after, however, it was discovered that the men were leasing rooms to family and friends and, in fact, running a small brothel with Bridewell inmates. This sort of scandal fits well with ‘‘Whig’’ horror stories about these corrupt institutions. What fits less well is that within one month the city had shut down the operation, including the ‘‘insolent’’ bawds, and within another month the four men had surrendered their lease. The incident is recounted in E. G. O’Donoghue’s Bridewell Hospital: Palace, Prison, Schools from the earliest times to the end of the reign of Elizabeth (London, 1926.). See Twyning for a different historical take on this matter. 20. For contrast, see Joost Daalder, ‘‘Madness in Parts 1 and 2 of The Honest Whore: A Case for Close Reading,’’ JAUMLA 86 (1996): 63–79, who argues ‘‘There can be no doubt that Dekker disapproves of Father Anselmo’s attitude

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to lunatics’’ (73). Daalder’s view seems determined by the ‘‘whipping’’ that is later threatened, but whipping was a standard means of patient management. His anachronistic skepticism about Bethlem, however, does not prohibit him from seeing the plays as eliciting ‘‘sympathy’’ for its less-fortunate characters (68). 21. Twyning, London Dispossessed, 31. 22. Andrews, History of Bethlem, 139. 23. Ibid., 136. 24. Ibid., 156. Bethlem was ‘‘separately administered from the later sixteenth century [to the nineteenth century] by the joint Bridewell and Bethlem Court of Governors.’’ Hoy, Introduction and Commentary, 2:68. ‘‘It is to be assumed’’ Part Two was written shortly after Part One noting an entry for the play ‘‘in the Stationer’s Register on 29 April 1608.’’ 25. Salkeld, Madness and Drama, 124. ‘‘Bedlam’’ plays like The Honest Whore, Part One ‘‘site’’ madness on the female body and that ‘‘Bedlam becomes a vehicle for contemporary misogyny.’’ This is not terribly accurate. More often than not, female characters, including Bellafront, are able to assert some power in the confused, charitable world of Bedlam. 26. Twyning, London Dispossessed, 10. ‘‘Social conflict is not discrete but interconnected as each character is paired with some other form of aggravatingly maddening behavior . . . The play revels in a long running pun on social anger and mental instability.’’ 27. Andrews, The History of Bethlem, 50–51. Bethlem was an ‘‘open building.’’ 28. Larry Champion, ‘‘From Melodrama to Comedy: A Study of the Dramatic Perspective in Dekker’s The Honest Whore, Parts I and II,’’ Studies in Philology (1972): 192–209, 196. 29. John Mullan, ‘‘Scenes from a deranged marriage,’’ Times Literary Supplement 4978:19 (August 28, 1998). 30. Hoy, Introduction and Commentary, 16. Part Two might be Dekker’s ‘‘finest play.’’ 31. Champion, ‘‘From Melodrama to Comedy,’’ 200. 32. Hoy, Introduction and Commentary, 2:68. 33. Daalder, ‘‘Madness in Parts 1 and 2,’’ 68. 34. Legatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare, 116.

CHAPTER 4. MAKING BETHLEM A ‘‘JEST’’ 1. Hoy, Introduction and Commentary, 2. 162. 2. Ibid., 2.159. 3. Wendy Wall, ‘‘Why Does Puck Sweep?: Fairylore, Merry Wives, and Social Struggle,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (2001), 67–106. 4. Hoy, Introduction and Commentary, 2.247. 5. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, 224. 6. Ibid., 12. 7. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968, x.

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CHAPTER 5. ‘‘I KNOW NOT / WHERE I DID LODGE LAST NIGHT?’’ 1. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy with Three New Essays, reprint 1966 (New York: Barnes & Noble), 168. 2. Alexander Leggatt, ‘‘Madness in Hamlet, King Lear, and Early Modern England’’ in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s King Lear, ed. Jay Halio (New York: Prentice Hall, 1996), 137. 3. Jonathan Goldberg, ‘‘Perspectives: Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation,’’ New Casebooks: King Lear, ed. Kiernan Ryan (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 145–57, argues that because references to Dover in Act Three fail to generate Dover on stage—‘‘Instead of that place, we arrive at Dover Cliff only in the lines that Edgar speaks to his father in 4.6’’—the language of the play ‘‘which would seem (to us) solidly to locate the world slides into an abyss, an uncreating, annihilative nothingness.’’ Whereas Goldberg’s deconstruction highlights the breech between language and reality, the ‘‘gulf between world and word,’’ mine insists on their interaction. 4. In a study of the same play, Stephen Greenblatt makes one of his more eloquent statements on the almost equal participation of ‘‘art’’ and ‘‘history’’ in producing a text while defining that that makes art unique. Works of art are, to be sure, marked off in our culture from ordinary utterances, but this demarcation is itself a communal event and signals not the effacement of the social but rather its successful absorption into the work by implication or articulation. This absorption—the presence within the work of its social being—makes it possible, as Bakhtin has argued, for art to survive the disappearance of its enabling conditions, where ordinary utterance, more dependent upon the extra verbal pragmatic situation, drifts rapidly toward insignificance or incomprehensibility. Hence art’s genius for survival, its delighted reception by audiences for whom it was never intended, does not signal its freedom from all other domains of life, nor does its inward articulation of the social confer upon it a formal coherence independent of the world outside its boundaries. On the contrary, artistic form itself both expresses and fashions social evaluations and practices.

‘‘The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and his Heirs’’ in New Casebooks: King Lear. ed. Kiernan Ryan (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 168. 5. Slack, Poverty and Policy, 8. See also Bronislaw Geremak, Poverty: A History, trans. Agnieszka Kolukouska (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), 121. 6. See, in particular, Rawcliffe, ‘‘Hospitals of Later Medieval London,’’ for a detailed look at how London officials slowly encroached on the church’s control over charitable hospitals. 7. Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 4. 8. Vives and the Ypres Scheme cited below are found in F. R. Salter’s useful collection Some Early Tracts on Poor Relief (London: Methuen, 1926). My extensive use of Vives here should not suggest that his work inspired poor relief programs. As Cavallo argues, his influence has been overemphasized (24). Nonetheless, he functions well as an ideological amplifier.

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9. R. H. Tawney’s influential Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) promulgated the notion that charity decreased with the Reformation. 10. Salter, Some Early Tracts, 56–57. 11. Ibid., 16. Vives’s remark about laughing at the mad maybe a reference to the standard practice in Renaissance medical case books to point out how amusing the mad were. Winfried Schleiner, in ‘‘Renaissance Exempla of Schizophrenia: The Cure by Charity in Luther and Cervantes,’’ Renaissance and Reformation 9.3. (1985): 157–76, has linked this habit to Erasmus and The Praise of Folly, particularly Erasmus’s suggestion that some psychological disturbances could be pleasurable for the patient and thus a matter of laughter for everyone. Interestingly, Schleiner juxtaposes this response to madness to a much more sober view taken by Luther: ‘‘If, then, a certain kind of psychotic case tended to attract medical ridicule and if the Erasmian notion of pleasurable delusion likewise did not lead to serious consideration of therapy, we may have to look elsewhere . . . for a glimpse of what has become so strikingly obvious in our times: that a knowledge of the patients’ histories, empathy with their condition, and endeavors to understand their particular thought processes are important . . . the cases recounted in Luther’s Tischreden are informed by a sense of caring for the patient and include the nature of the patient’s cure’’ (163). 12. Salter, Some Early Tracts, 47. 13. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar, 47. 14. Slack, Poverty and Policy, 118. See also G. R. Elton, ‘‘An Early Tudor Poor Law’’ in Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, Vol II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 137–54. 15. Elton, ‘‘Early Tudor Poor Law,’’ 150. 16. Slack, Poverty and Policy, 118. 17. Archer, Pursuit of Stability, 161. 18. Salter, Some Early Tracts, 126. 19. Ibid., 120–21. 20. Slack, Poverty and Policy, 119. 21. Slack, ‘‘Social Policy,’’ 111. 22. Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 622. 23. On Barnes, his placement at Bethlem, his martyrdom, and significance in London history, see Brigden, London and The Reformation, 247–75. Bethlem’s mere association with an avowed Lutheran like Barnes may have given the place some cultural meaning now lost. He reportedly said in 1536 that he would rather have the keepership than a Bishopric, a remark Allderidge interprets to mean that the keepership of Bethlem was a fairly lucrative post (‘‘Management and Mismanagement,’’ 144). Given his Reformist zeal, however, it seems more likely Barnes considered Bethlem a Godly if strange charity juxtaposed to a corrupt catholic hierarchy. 24. Andrews, History of Bethlem, 60. 25. Brigden, London and the Reformation, 622. 26. Allderidge, ‘‘Management and Mismanagement,’’ 148. 27. Archer, Pursuit of Stability, 161. 28. Slack, Poverty and Policy, 127.

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29. Ibid.,121; Archer, Pursuit of Stability, 159–60. 30. Slack, Poverty and Policy, 129. 31. Ibid., 140. 32. Allderidge, ‘‘Management and Mismanagement,’’ 152. 33. Ibid., 152. 34. Andrews, History of Bethlem, 132. 35. Ibid., 171 36. Ibid., 183. 37. Ibid., 133. 38. Allderidge, ‘‘Management and Mismanagement,’’ 152–54. 39. Even readings like Stanley Cavell’s ‘‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear’’ in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Harry Berger’s Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), which expose Lear’s complicity in the tragedy do not deny the dramatic effect when responding to the stage rather than the page. 40. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare Vol. 7 (London: Routledge and Paul, 1973), 337–402, ll. 2160–80. 41. In carefully tracing the influence of King Leir on King Lear, Martin Mueller, ‘‘From Leir to Lear,’’ Philological Quarterly (1994), 195–217, suggests that Shakespeare has already used the charitable scene of feeding an old man in the woods in As You Like It. 42. William C. Carroll, ‘‘ ‘The Base Shall Top Th’ Legitimate’ ’’: The Bedlam Beggar and the Role of Edgar in King Lear,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987), 428. 43. Weimann’s, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, 237. I consider this a visible instance of Shakespeare ‘‘fruitfully integrating’’ in the subplot the platea tradition of popular drama with locus-centered modes of representation. 44. Booth, King Lear, MacBeth, Indefinition and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 52–53. 45. Similarly, Kathleen Pories has argued that blurred categories between fact and fiction allowed prose pamphlets to influence the writing of the poor laws. ‘‘The Intersection of Poor Laws and Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Fictional and Factual Categories’’ in Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose, ed. Constance Relihan (Kent, Oh.: Kent State University Press, 1996), 17–40. 46. Later, of course, Edgar and Edmund enact a more legitimate ‘‘exchange’’ of charity (5.3.160); that Edgar must fatally wound Edmund to enact the exchange often is ignored. 47. In contrast, Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar, emphasizes Edgar’s ability to elicit powerful feelings: ‘‘. . . in rejecting idealization, Shakespeare represents in Edgar/Poor Tom an acute questioning of the beggar’s cultural status. In giving this marginalized figure so rich and painful a subjectivity, Shakespeare created a voice unique in early modern drama’’ (315). Of course, Edgar is by no means a simple figure whose sole role is to offset and highlight Lear’s different kind of suffering; it is, however, one his primary roles. It seems to me that Edgar’s

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complexity is another instance of what Weimann refers to as Shakespeare’s sophisticated intermingling of platea and locus figures in the English stage tradition. The platea figure, Edgar, still serves to highlight the locus figure, Lear, but in the new theater of Shakespeare the platea figure is equally complex. 48. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, refers to Bethlem as a ‘‘tiny hovel’’ (4). 49. Berger, Making Trifles of Terror, 38. These lines are also an instance of ‘‘conspicuous evasion,’’ an effort on Lear’s part to avoid his own guilt. 50. ‘‘The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear a period piece,’’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 32. See, also, the ‘‘local’’ reading of the play and its relationship to ‘‘Boxing Day’’ that Leah Marcus provides in Puzzling Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 149–57. 51. For example, late in the play, Leir, unnerved by the fact that Gonorill and Ragan have refused to repay his gifts with kindness, is unconvinced that Cordella will forgive him because, after all, he has given her nothing. Leir: Oh, how can I perswade my selfe of that, Since the other two are quite devoyd of love; To whom I was so kind, as that my gifts, Might make them love me, if’twere nothing else?

Perillus, a loyal figure much like Kent, reminds the King Leir of the Protestant dictum that true charity depends on faith, not deeds or gifts. Per: No worldly gifts, but grace from God on hye, Doth nourish vertue and true charity. Remember well what words Cordella spake, What time you askt her, how she lov’d your Grace, She sayd, her love unto you was as much, As ought a child to beare unto her father (1768–77)

See, too, John L. Murphy, Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and King Lear (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984). 52. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar, 8–17. ‘‘The monarch, top of the social and legal hierarchy, is understood in opposition to the figure at the bottom of the social hierarchy, the socially and metaphysically null—the beggar; and the beggar is understood in opposition to the figure at the top of hierarchy—the monarch. . . . Each term of this habitually paired inversion requires the other in order to mount a full definition of its own identity’’ (9). See also Stephen Brown, ‘‘Shakespeare’s King and Beggar,’’ Yale Review 64 (1974), 370–95. 53. Slack, Poverty and Policy, 141. The absolutism of the Stuarts informed social policy. By 1630 Charles I was trying to make London a royal city ‘‘fit for an imperial’’ king, through determined use of building regulations; and his physician Mayerne, was advocating a public-health commission for London which would have absolute power ‘‘to repress all opposition.’’ Although neither of these latter schemes was realized, they show that

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social policies were an integral part of the ambition of King and Council at the start of Charles I’s personal rule.

54. Judith Kronenfeld, ‘‘So distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough’’: Shakespeare’s King Lear—Anabaptist Egalitarianism, Anglican Charity, Both, Neither?’’ ELH 59 (1992), 757, situates the play’s language of poor relief and charity in the language of the authorities: King Lear clearly relates to the outpouring of homiletic literature that came at a time when there was both an increase in poverty and/or salience of the poor, and an increase in governmental response to poverty . . . [the language of the play] belongs to the traditional and authoritative, not to say authoritarian, discourse of charity, as controlled and orchestrated by Elizabethan and Jacobean administrators—city and town alderman, JPs, churchwarden and overseers of the poor—and by Anglican and Puritan ministers.

55. Leggatt, ‘‘Madness in Hamlet, King Lear,’’ 137. 56. Richard Levin, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 221. 57. Charles Lamb, ‘‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,’’ in The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb (New York: Random House, 1935), 298. In Poverty and Charity, Brian Pullan notes that ‘‘nearly two centuries before the Reformation’’ the ugliness generally associated with poverty ‘‘had begun to breed a second official attitude to the poor, coexisting uneasily’’ with the ancient Christian demand to ‘‘love’’ the unfortunate, ‘‘Christ’s representatives on earth, in charity’’ (25). 58. Goldberg, ‘‘Perspectives,’’ 151. 59. Knight, Wheel of Fire, 172. 60. Ibid., 168. This change in place, perhaps not uncoincidentally, is effaced in Knight’s reading. He moves quickly from the hovel to Gloucester’s ‘‘house’’ without noting a difference. 61. Foakes, in the third Arden series edition, notes The location is not specified, but it seems that Lear and his companions have been led away from the hovel and back to some outhouse or room connected with Gloucester’s house. . . . This explains why Gloucester can augment (piece out) comforts for Lear by making use of the resources of his own house and convey him through the gates on his way to Dover at 3.7.14–19; it also explains why Edmund has no difficulty in finding his father comforting the King (3.5.20). 62. Michael Warren, ‘‘The Folio Omission of the Mock Trial: Motives and Consequences’’ in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 45–47. 63. Geoffrey Aggeler, ‘‘Good Pity in King Lear: The Progress of Edgar,’’ Neophilologus 77 (1993), 321–31. 64. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 286. 65. Ibid., 289. 66. Midelfort, History of Madness in Sixteenth Century Germany, 228–76.

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CHAPTER 6. ‘‘TWIN’’ SHOWS OF MADNESS 1. R. S. White, ‘‘The Moral Design of The Duchess of Malfi,’’ in New Casebooks: The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Dympna Callaghan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 201–21, 205–6. 2. For a consideration of the critical history, particularly responses to the madmen’s scene, see John Webster: A Critical Anthology, eds. G. K. and G. S. Hunter (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969). Charles Lamb’s positive response to the scene in Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets (1808) and A. C. Swinburne’s positive response to the scene in Sonnets on the Elizabethan Poets (1882) elicited harsh criticism from William Archer (1893). The dispute finds analogues in much twentieth century criticism. See Karin S. Coddon, ‘‘The Duchess of Malfi: Tyranny and Spectacle in Jacobean Drama’’ in Callaghan, in New Casebooks, 25–45, and Frederick Kiefer, ‘‘The Dance of the Madmen in The Duchess of Malfi,’’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17.2 (1987), 211–33. 3. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations from The Duchess of Malfi are from Elizabeth Brennan’s New Mermaids edition (New York: Norton, 1990). 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962, 110–11. 5. Schleiner, ‘‘Renaissance Exempla of Schizophrenia,’’ 157–76, 163. 6. Boklund, Sources, Themes, and Characters, 112. Boklund thinks it ‘‘unlikely’’ that the scene ever achieved a ‘‘charavari effect,’’ but while disagreeing with Ekeblad he writes that the scene is a ‘‘belated and distorted celebration of the Duchess’ wedding’’ and calls the scene ‘‘an extended masque, with music and songs, dance and stylized motion.’’ 7. Inga-Stina Ekeblad, ‘‘ ‘The Impure Art’ of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi,’’ Review of English Studies 9 (1958). Reprinted in John Webster: a Critical Anthology. Eds. G. K. and G. S. Hunter (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 214. 8. ‘‘It is in the masques performed at the Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, in February 1613, that individualized comic characters first appear. It is worth noting that Campion’s ‘twelve frantics . . . all represented in sundry habits and humours’ in The Lord’s Masque—such as ‘the melancholic man, full of fear, the school-man overcome with phantasy, the overwatched usurer . . .’—as well as Beaumont’s various figures in the second antimasque of The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, are described in much the same manner as Webster’s eight madmen. Webster is here working in an antimasque, which was to have many uses in the drama after him. We see it, for instance, in Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy (1628), which in 3.3. has a masque of the same shape as the madmen’s interlude in The Duchess of Malfi: six different types of Melancholy are described and present themselves; their antic talk is given; and then the Dance, ‘after which the masquers run out in couples’ ’’ (208–9). 9. Ibid., 211. 10. Ibid., 214 11. Andrews, The History of Bethlem, 132. 12. In Bartholomew Fair, The Staple of News, and The Magnetic Lady. 13. Frank Whigham, ‘‘Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi’’ in Callaghan, New Casebooks, 179.

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14. For contrast, see Coddon, ‘‘Tyranny and Spectacle in Jacobean Drama.’’ 15. Printed in The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 183. Painter’s work was an English retelling of Matteo Bandello’s twenty sixth novella that was itself ‘‘translated and augmented by Belleforest in the second volume of Histoires Tragiques (1565): xxvii. Boklund says that ‘‘perhaps [this reference to Bethlem] in itself [was] all that an imitative dramatist with a sense of the grotesque needed in order to include one of the popular dances of lunatics’’ (61). See also Hattori, ‘‘ ‘The Pleasure of your Bedlam’: The Theater of Madness in the Renaissance,’’ 337. 16. Douglas Bruster, ‘‘Quotation and Madwomen’s Language’’ in Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). 17. Ibid., 145, 170. 18. Ibid., 135, 155. 19. Ibid., 156. 20. Ibid., 161, 158. 21. Ibid., 162. 22. Citations in this chapter are from The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. G. R. Proudfoot (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.

CHAPTER 7. ‘‘SHADOWS AND SHOWS OF CHARITY’’ 1. Reed, Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage, 51. 2. Ibid., 21. 3. The distinction between mad ‘‘houses’’ and mad ‘‘hospitals’’ for Middleton’s audience is not clear. The only full length study of madhouses traces their origins to Bethlem and the early seventeenth century. See W. L. Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: A Study of Private Madhouses in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Routledge & Paul, 1972). One of the first known private ‘‘madhouses’’ was operated by court physician Crooke, who handled a few of his more affluent patients in his home (Porter, Mind-forg’d Manacles, 137) and who, as mentioned, was the keeper of Bethlem at the time of The Changeling; in that, one sees how the public and dramatic imagination could have conflated ‘‘houses’’ and ‘‘hospitals.’’ See too, MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, who argues, ‘‘Bethlem was the only institution of its kind . . . private institutions . . . did not begin to proliferate until the last half of the seventeenth century’’(4). Unless otherwise indicated, all citations from The Changeling come the version found in Five Plays: Thomas Middleton, eds. Bryan Loughery and Neil Taylor, (New York: Penguin, 1988.) 4. The play’s dramatic power has drawn most critical energies in a formalist direction and that focus, too, has inhibited the recognition of ‘‘charity’’ in the work. Peter Morrison, ‘‘A Cangoun in Zombieland: Middleton’s Teratological Changeling,’’ in ‘Accompaninge the players’: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, 1580–1980, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (New York: AMS Press, 1983), 219–41. 5. Margot Heinemann, Puritanism & Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Op-

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position Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 1980), 174–80. 6. Morrison, ‘‘A Cangoun in Zombieland,’’ 221. 7. Jordan makes this point in his massive trilogy on charity in England. Jordan’s work on philanthropy in England has undergone substantial critique. See, for example, J. A. F. Thomson, ‘‘Piety and Charity in Late Medieval London,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 16 (1965), 178–95. In particular, Jordan inadequately accounted for inflation and thus overstated the amount Protestants gave to charity. However, he offers an invaluable reading and survey of ‘‘charitable’’ sermons which, if he mistook as indicators of unusual Protestant generosity, are still very useful for understanding the cultural pressures surrounding the concept of charity. 8. For contrast, see Slack, Poverty and Policy, who does not wish to ‘‘exaggerate’’ the social importance of doctrinal difference (10), and Susan Brigden, ‘‘Religion and Social Obligation in Early Sixteenth Century London,’’ Past and Present 103 (1984), 67–112, who notes that Protestants were as obliged as Catholics to be ‘‘in charity’’ and that they made the same ‘‘communal’’ promises in liturgy: ‘‘Amend your lives and be in perfect charity with all men’’ (112). Brigden also makes the point that ‘‘the dichotomy between charity animated by the old faith and the new cannot have been so marked, nor the inspiration so different; certainly they often seemed the same’’ (106). 9. Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1986), 3.16.1. 10. Ibid., 3.2.9. 11. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 155. 12. In a lengthy exchange with D. Potter, Matthew Wilson, in Mercy & Truth or Charity Maintayned by Catholiques (1634), argued initially that ‘‘Charity was mistaken by Protestants.’’ Wilson argues that Protestants should not condemn Catholics because of a common understanding of charity. 13. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 231–33. 14. Ibid., 189. 15. The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, vol. 5, ed. John Henry Parker (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 49. 16. ‘‘The White Devil; or The Hypocrite Uncased’’ in The English Sermon: 1550–1650, Vol. 2. (Cheadle: Carcanet Press), 256. 17. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Phillip S. Watson (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1932). 18. Ibid., 453. 19. David Sanderlin, ‘‘Charity According to St. John of the Cross: A Disinterested Love for Interesting Special Relationships, Including Marriage,’’ Journal of Religious Ethics 21.1. (1993), writes that ‘‘in order to love others charitably, we must empty our will of desirous attachments to people for their attractive qualities, for with these attachments we love them partly for our own sake, insofar as they please us with these qualities. As John points out, if we love some more for their attractive qualities (Ascent 3.22.2), we are likely to love others less who lack such qualities. With such a self-centered eros, we tend to love

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and sometimes even idolize beautiful, talented people . . . while caring less for downtrodden, rude, deformed, and hurting people’’ (87–88). 20. Pullan, Poverty in Europe, 29–30. He makes the point more graphically on the preceding page: ‘‘The infective stench of syphilis could easily drown the odour of sanctity.’’ 21. Nygren, Agape and Eros, 683. 22. Generally, Christian ethical studies considers Luther’s departure from Augustine on this point part of a larger historical impulse in Europe to deny the ‘‘self-love’’ that Augustine had made respectable in the concept of caritas. English ‘‘puritan’’ preachers like Ames and Perkins took a middle ground in this dispute; that is, they rejected Augustine’s concept of caritas but never went as far as seventeenth-century mystics like Madame Guyon who renounced all ordinary human or ‘‘self-love.’’ Stephen Post. Christian Love and Self-Denial: An Historical and Normative Study of Johnathan Edwards, Samuel Hopkins, and American Theological Ethics (London, 1987). 23. Nygren, Agape and Eros, 695. 24. Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, A Fair Quarrel, ed. R. V. Holdsworth (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1974). 25. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 180. Elizabethan preachers spent significant time trying to articulate the Protestant doctrine that charity was necessary because charity displayed faith, but Jacobean preachers, on the other hand, exhibited a more ‘‘confident’’ rhetorical pose and mentioned justification less frequently. 26. Hooker, ‘‘A Learned Discourse of Justification, Workes, and How the Foundation of Faith is Overthrowne,’’ in The Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 5, ed. W. Speed Hill, 112. Delivered in 1586, first in print in 1612, and reprinted in London in 1622. 27. One can hardly read a paragraph of Hooker’s influential sermon without noticing the juxtaposition. When Hooker explains that good works are holy and necessary (‘‘sanctification’’), he distinguishes such a belief from the Catholic understanding that sanctification through charity helps justify man’s soul to God: ‘‘Nowe concerninge the rightuousness of sanctification we denye it not to be inherente, we graunte that without we work we have it not, only we distinguishe it as a thinge in nature differente from the righteousness of justification’’ (113). We see the same ‘‘distinctions’’ made throughout: ‘‘Then what is the faulte of the churche of Rome? not that she requireth workes att theire handes that wilbe save but that she attributeth unto workes a power of satisfying god . . . [when] salvation by Christe is the foundation of christianitye’’ (159). 28. Nygren, Agape and Eros, 722. 29. Qtd. in Nygren, 722. See Luther WA 36, 424. 30. Qtd. in Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 235–36. 31. Ibid., 190. 32. Hooker’s long and influential ‘‘justification’’ of Protestant charity cited above was part of a response to Walter Traver’s charges that Hooker did not sufficiently condemn Catholic beliefs (Hooker, 83–298). 33. For citations in this paragraph see Allderidge, ‘‘Management and Mismanagement,’’ 155. 34. Jordan, Philanthropy in London, 189–90.

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35. Phillip Finkelpearl, in Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), has convincingly demonstrated that Fletcher was no crypto-Catholic or simple spokesman for James, and I am not contradicting that assertion here; for Fletcher was no City Puritan either. The problems of city charity were, one suspects, less relevant to him and it is possible that in reworking his primary source for the drama (most likely the English version of Lope de Vega’s El Peregrino en su Patria titled The Pilgrime of Casteele and first printed in 1621) Fletcher ignored, as did many preachers, charitable distinctions. 36. N. W. Bawcutt, ed. The Changeling (London: Methuen, 1958), 113–29. 37. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations for Fletcher refer to The Dramatic Works in Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 6 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 38. See, in particular, Hill, Society and Puritanism, 259–98. 39. Reed, Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage, 13–54, points out the possible topical connection to James and Crooke in The Changeling, but, to my knowledge, no one has noticed the connection in The Pilgrim. 40. Dale B. J. Randall, The Golden Tapestry: A Critical Survey of Non-Chivalric Spanish Fiction in English Translation (1543–1657) (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963), 102–12, discusses how well English dramatists might have been aware of Lope de Vega or the origin of The Pilgrime of Casteele. 41. Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 46. 42. Deflores’s role as charitable object here stems mainly from his ‘‘deformity.’’ More could be made of his unusual and sketchy social status. Deflores describes himself as a ‘‘gentleman’’ whose ‘‘hard fate’’ has thrust him ‘‘out to servitude’’ (2.1.48–49) and an early modern audience might have recognized some affiliation with the charitable category ‘‘Poveri Vergognosi.’’ 43. The English Sermon: 1550–1650, 29. Three of Cranmer’s four surviving homilies are printed in this text. For convenience, they are referred to here as the ‘‘Homily of Salvation’’; ‘‘A Short Declaration’’; and ‘‘Good Works Annexed Unto Faith.’’ This quote comes from the ‘‘Homily of Salvation.’’ 44. Ibid., 42. 45. ‘‘Good Works Annexed Unto Faith,’’ The English Sermon, 45. 46. Pullan, Poverty and Charity, 29. 47. Hattori, ‘‘The Pleasure of your Bedlam,’’ 296, n. 47, notes the connection made between the main plot and the subplot in these moments. 48. Foucault, ‘‘Madness, the Absence of Work’’ in Foucault and his Interlocutors, trans. Peter Stastny and Deniz Sengel, ed. Arnold Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 103.

CHAPTER 8. ‘‘FOUCAULT WAS RIGHT?’’ 1. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 289. 2. Ibid., xi. 3. Ibid., x–xi.

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4. Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 24–25. 5. Ibid., 26. Husserl’s solution to the problem relied on analogy. The ‘‘other’’ is another me, another self, an alter ego. As Levinas points out, however, this analogy, even at its most empathetic, leaves no room for the other as other. To borrow the phrasing of Davis, there is not enough ‘‘alter’’ in the concept of the alter ego. 6. Derek Attridge’s summary of Levinas in ‘‘Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other,’’ PMLA 114.1 (1999): 20–32 is useful in understanding the radical gesture of Levinas’s attention to alterity: Not only is there no moral or pragmatic ground for responsibility [for the other], there is also no philosophical ground. The ethical force . . . is prior to any possible grounds. This priority is not temporal but ontological (though Levinas would insist that responsibility precedes ontology as well). Without responsibility for the other . . . there would be no other; without the other, repeatedly appearing, always different, there would be no same, no self, no society, no morality. We cannot deduce the obligation to the other from the world; the world—including the means by which any deductions could be made about ethics or responsibility—is premised on an obligation to the other. Ethics, then, is the fundamental relation not just between objects but also between the subject and its multiple others—a relation that is not a relation and that cannot be named, for it is logically prior to relations and names, prior in fact to logic.’’ (28)

7. Alain Badiou rather dramatically has identified Levinas as the starting point for current ethics. See Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Halliward (London: Verso, 2001), 18–29. 8. Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness, Trans. Martha Noel Evans (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 41–42. 9. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, xi. 10. Porter and Jones, Reassessing Foucault, 10. 11. Gary Gutting, ‘‘Michel Foucault’s Phanomenologie de Krankengeistes’’ in Discovering the History of Psychiatry, eds. Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 344. 12. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Cogito and the History of Madness’’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Foucault’s response ‘‘My Body, This Paper, This Fire,’’ trans. Geoff Bennington in Oxford Literary Review 4:1 (1979), 26–27. See also Felman, Writing and Madness, and Ann Wordsworth’s synopsis ‘‘Derrida and Foucault: writing the history of historicity’’ in Poststructuralism and the Question of History, eds. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Printed in Writing and Difference is also Derrida’s comparable challenge to Levinas himself; Derrida shows in ‘‘Violence and Metaphysics’’ that Levinas’s efforts to move outside the ‘‘same’’ of metaphysics fail as well. I should also point out that many of Foucault’s ‘‘historically’’ oriented critics have been very wrong in suggesting Foucault ‘‘devised a new terminology [e.g. ‘‘archeology’’] to distance himself . . . from routine academic inquiry’’ (Porter and Jones, Reassessing Foucault, 3). The new terminology is essential to addressing certain philosophical problematics. 13. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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14. Felman, Writing and Madness, 44. For a clear, concise summary of the exchange between Derrida and Foucault, see also Salkeld, Madness and Drama, 34–44. Salkeld falters when, after identifying the problem of the Derridean aporia, he surprisingly seeks to solve rather than respect the aporia: ‘‘The way out of this difficulty, I suggest, is to adopt a weak differentiation of the terms ‘reason’ and ‘madness’ in which neither is fixed as absolute’’ (44). 15. Derrida’s engagement with the work of Emmanuel Levinas has intensified of late and what was mainly an epistemic point—how to understand the other ego—has become an ethical one: what claim does this ‘‘other’’ have on me? For discussions of Levinas’s work, including Derrida’s reading, and how that work has shaped the discussion of ‘‘self’’ and ‘‘other’’ and the interest in accessing ‘‘otherness,’’ respectfully see Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1993) and Davis, Levinas: An Introduction. Tracing Levinas’s participation in phenomenological debates of the twentieth century allow one to better understand Foucault’s initial interest in letting the ‘‘otherness’’ of madness speak and his later adjustments in his approach. In brief, in order to keep the ‘‘other’’ absolutely other, without subsuming it within the same, Levinas (and now Derrida more and more) turned to metaphors that imply a gentle approach without actual contact. Colin Davis explains, ‘‘The imperious metaphors of possession, property and comprehension are replaced by a vocabulary which instead privileges approach, proximity, caress, and fecundity’’ (25). 16. See, in particular, Alan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 17. Lillian Feder, Madness and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 206. 18. Ibid., 209. 19. For a very interesting discussion of Nietzsche’s Dionysian and madness, see Sass, Madness and Modernism. While it is far from his only argument on the matter, Sass suggests at one point that modern ‘‘schizophrenic experience may have less in common with the spirit of Dionysus’’ than Nietzsche and those influenced by his model thought. Indeed, schizophrenia may have more in common ‘‘with the god Apollo’’ and Socrates: ‘‘it may be characterized less by fusion, spontaneity, and liberation of desire than by separation, restraint, and an exaggerated cerebralism and propensity for introspection’’ (10). Schizophrenia, Sass argues, far from ‘‘offering a potential escape from [the] dilemmas of [modernism’s] hyperconsciousness and self-control—may, in fact, be an extreme manifestation’’ of modernism’s ‘‘hyperreflexity,’’ its over attention to the self. While Sass covers much historical ground, he, unfortunately, overlooks Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1622) that, of course, makes much the same point in an early modern context. It is tempting to try to apply Sass’s analysis to the early modern period’s increasing fascination with subjectivity and madness. 20. Felman, Writing and Madness, 37. 21. Ibid., 37. 22. Micale and Porter, Discovering the History of Psychiatry, 7. 23. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, xi. In one of the earliest and most

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influential responses to Foucault’s work, Michel Serres makes the specific connection to The Birth of Tragedy. Madness and Civilization ‘‘locates itself consciously at the juncture of the richest inspirations, bringing together the Jules Michelet of La Sorciere, the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, Sade’s underground intuition, the poetic and linguistic illuminations of Rene Char and Antonin Artaud, to name only a few—all inspirations coming together. . . .’’ Foucault and his Interlocutors, Ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 37. 24. Derrida, too, seems to see ‘‘art,’’ particularly literary art, as a means to address the problematic. The ‘‘impossible’’ he has written recently, the moment when one escapes the circularity of metaphysics to something other, only occurs, if it occurs, in narrative. Given Time, 41. 25. Felman, Writing and Madness, 15. ‘‘A book like Foucault’s reminds us that throughout our cultural history, the madness that has been socially, politically, and philosophically repressed has nonetheless made itself heard, has survived as a speaking subject only in and through literary texts.’’ 26. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 64. 27. Ibid., 110–11. 28. Ibid., 111. 29. Ibid., 70. 30. Ibid., 32. 31. Ibid., 31. 32. Ibid., 37. 33. Ibid., 36. 34. Mullaney, Place of the Stage, 71–72. See also Salkeld, Madness and Drama, 123, who, while less wedded to the particulars of Foucault’s narrative, similarly situates Bethlem and Bethlem dramas as precursors to the great confinement: ‘‘The increased use of confinement as a political strategy for social control is reflected in early-seventeenth century drama. . . . Such [mad confinement] scenes are no longer amusing but point up the way in which madness was increasingly repressed in the seventeenth century by institutions whose functions were largely punitive. . . . Such scenes reflect the power of an autocratic regime over the delirium of those who do not or will not conform.’’ 35. Porter, Mind-Forg’d-Manacles, 7–8, 121. For an intriguing consideration of nineteenth-century France and confinement see Castel, The Regulation of Madness. 36. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, 4. 37. Gutting, Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 48. 38. Jones and Porter, Reassessing Foucault, 3. 39. Foucault, Folie, 179, n. 3. 40. See Allderidge’s ‘‘Management and mismanagement at Bedlam’’ and ‘‘Bedlam: fact or fantasy?’’ for convincing and entertaining critiques of Reed’s numbers. The two articles have informed much recent work on madness in early modern England. 41. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 70. 42. Gutting, Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 20–21. 43. Derrida, ‘‘ ‘To do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,’’ Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas in Foucault and his Interlocutors, 76, Arnold I. Davidson.

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44. Andrews, The History of Bethlem, 197. 45. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 65. 46. Ibid., 65–66. 47. Ibid., 69. 48. Ibid., 81–82. 49. Porter, ‘‘Foucault’s Great Confinement’’ in Rewriting the History of Madness. 50. Gutting, Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 6. 51. Sass, Madness and Modernism, 14. 52. Porter and Jones, Reassessing Foucault, 3. 53. Andrew Scull, Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 27–29. There is some irony in all this that Edward Wakefield, a ‘‘London-based Quaker land agent who had long professed a philanthropic interest in the welfare of the insane’’ and ‘‘the author of a brief article endorsing the idea of adapting Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon scheme to accommodate the mad,’’ in his efforts to reform, did much to create the horrific understanding of Bethlem that Foucault endorsed. 54. Andrews, History of Bethlem, 190. A full ban on visitation did not go into effect until 1770. 55. One could make the case, perhaps, that Foucault’s list of older, medieval institutions in Folie et de raison, 137–40, constitutes such a consideration, albeit brief. 56. Neely, ‘‘Did Madness Have a Renaissance?’’, 779. 57. Sass, Madness and Modernism, 4. Only a few who have had ‘‘little or no experience with the realities of chronic insanity’’ maintain any belief that it offers Dionysian pleasures. ‘‘One suspects their glorification of madness may be fueled by motivations other than the purest desire for truth. For many such people—intellectuals, for the most part—it may serve as a way of announcing, a bit too loudly, that they at least cannot be placed among those self-satisfied yet anemic souls whom Nietzsche mocked so pitilessly for staying on the sidelines of life, having no idea ‘how cadaverous and ghostly their sanity appears as the intense throng of Dionysiac revelers sweeps past them.’ ’’ 58. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979). 59. Jones and Porter, Reassessing Foucault, 5. Foucault can be ‘‘disarmingly frank about his shortcomings as a historian.’’ 60. Neely, ‘‘Documents in Madness,’’ 338. ‘‘By constructing a language through which madness can be represented, the popular theater facilitated the circulation of discourse; by italicizing the language of madness it encouraged its interrogation and transformation.’’ 61. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 32. 62. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process.

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Authority and Judgment in Three Major Comedies.’’ Renaissance Drama a Cultural History: Essays from Renaissance Drama, 1977–1987. Ed. Mary Beth Rose. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi. Ed. Elizabeth Brennan. New York: Norton, 1990. ———. The Duchess of Malfi. Ed. John Russell Brown. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Weiman, Robert. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. White, R. S. ‘‘The Moral Design of The Duchess of Malfi.’’ In New Casebooks: The Duchess of Malfi. Ed. Dymphna Callaghan. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001. Wilson, Matthew. Mercy & Truth or Charity Maintayned by Catholiques (1634). Ed. D. M. Rogers, 1973. Woodbridge, Linda. Vagrancy, Homelessness, English Renaissance Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

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Index Acts against Beggars, 46, 160–61, 163 Adams, Thomas, 207 Allderidge, Patricia, 16, 49, 162, 212, 263–64 n. 7, 270–71 n. 21, 279 n. 23, 290 n. 40 Altman, Joel, 60, 84, 145 Andrewes, Lancelot, 207 Andrews, Jonathan, 12, 263–64 n. 7, 266–67 n. 42 Anne, Queen. See Boleyn, Anne anti-masque, 188–90, 191, 283 n. 8 apprentices, riots of, 117 Archer, Ian, 65, 116–18, 124, 283 n. 2 Artaud, Antonin, 35, 181, 236, 252, 289–90 n. 23 Attridge, Derek, 288 n. 6 Augustine, Saint, 208, 286 n. 22 Badiou, Alain, 288 n. 7 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 278 n. 4 Bandello, Matteo, 284 n. 15 Barber, C. L., 25 Barnes, Robert, 162, 279 n. 23 Bataille, Georges, 242 bear baiting, 12, 73, 216, 267 n. 48, 273 n. 65 Beaumont, Francis: The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 271 n. 40; The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, 283 n. 8 Bedlam ballads, 266–67 n. 42 Bednarz, James, 21, 22, 71, 85, 143, 266 n. 39, 271 n. 40, 272 nn. 42 and 44, 273 n. 61 and 62, 273–74 n. 7 Beir, A. L., 270 nn. 3 and 6 Belleforest, Franc¸ois de: Histoires Tragiques, 284 n. 15 Bentham, Jeremy, 291 n. 53 Berger, Harry, 172, 280 n. 39

Bergeron, David, 108 Bethlehem (Holy Land), 48 Bethlem Hospital: architecture of, 13, 122, 129, 281 n. 49; as charity, 12– 19, 31, 33, 35, 36, 39, 43, 47–54, 60, 116, 118, 119–24, 127–28, 131, 144, 146, 150, 155, 163–65, 167, 187, 191–92, 195, 203, 204–5, 212–13, 223, 233–34, 236, 254, 257–58, 264 n. 10, 279 n. 23; history and development of, 12–16, 48, 161–65, 173– 74, 204–5, 212, 256, 270–71 n. 21, 277 n. 24, 279 n. 23, 291 n. 54; and the pageant for King James, 40, 109; as stage setting, 12, 18, 32–33, 39, 41–44, 55–56, 94, 109, 111, 114–16, 119–24, 127, 132–33, 143, 144, 146–53, 165, 176, 263 n. 2; as theater/recreation and its relation to the stage, 11–21, 27–29, 31–36, 39, 41–45, 57, 60, 66, 71, 73, 79, 83, 86, 104–5, 119–20, 133, 139, 150–53, 154–56, 165–67, 176, 181, 184, 190–92, 194, 195, 197, 200, 201, 203, 233–34, 235, 257–62, 263 n. 2, 267 nn. 43 and 48, 268 n. 50 Bishopsgate, 15, 16, 17, 40, 109, 110, 117 Bloom, Harold, 27 Boklund, Gunner, 184, 283 n. 6, 284 n. 15 Boleyn, Anne, 162 Boleyn, George, 162 Bond, John, 52 Booth, Stephen, 167, 171 Bowers, Fredson, 263 n. 2 Bradley, A. C., 93 Bridewell, 16, 20, 39–40, 49, 50, 109, 115, 116, 118, 123, 126–31, 138,

303

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162, 164–65, 196, 276 n. 19, 277 n. 24 Brigden, Susan, 162, 279 n. 23, 285 n. 8 Briggs, Asa, 263–64 n. 7 Brome, Richard: The Antipodes, 44, 234 Bruster, Douglas, 201–2, 265 n. 24 Buckingham, first Duke of (George Villiers), 218 Burton, Robert: The Anatomy of Melancholy, 289 n. 19 Calvin, John, 157, 206–7, 214 Calvinism, 47 Campion, Thomas: The Lord’s Masque, 283 n. 8 Carnegie, David, 75 Carroll, William C., 12, 159, 166, 173, 263 n. 2, 264 n. 10, 280–81 n. 47, 281 n. 51 Castel, Robert, 270 n. 19, 290 n. 35 Catherine of Siena, Saint, 218 Catholicism: and charity, 15, 43–44, 47, 157–62, 187–88, 203, 205–15, 218–33, 279 n. 23, 285 nn. 8 and 12, 286 nn. 27 and 32 Cavallo, Sandra, 278 n. 8 Cavell, Stanley, 280 n. 39 Cervantes: Don Quixote, 244–46, 258 Chamberlain’s Men, 85, 87, 92 Champion, Larry, 125 Chapman, George, 143–52; All Fools, 148; Eastward Ho (with Johnson and Marston), 41, 56, 96–97, 132, 137–42 Char, Rene, 289–90 n. 23 Charitable Uses Act, 51, 52 charity, 71–72, 94, 282 nn. 54 and 57; Bethlem Hospital and show as, 12– 19, 31–33, 35, 36, 39, 43, 47–54, 60, 73, 116, 118, 119–24, 127–28, 131, 144, 146, 150, 155, 163–65, 187, 191–92, 195, 203, 204–5, 212–13, 223, 233–34, 236, 254, 257–58, 264 n. 10, 279 n. 23; and caritas, 208– 10, 220, 222, 226–27, 231, 286 n. 22; Catholic vs. Protestant, 15, 43–

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44, 156–62, 172, 187–88, 203, 205– 15, 218–33, 279 nn. 9 and 23, 281 n. 51, 285 nn. 7, 8, and 12, 286 nn. 25, 27, and 32; and disgust, 14, 158–59, 176, 221; skepticism of, 46–48, 159, 191, 206–13, 221; sociopolitical reorganization of, 49–55, 61, 62, 65, 118, 159–64, 168–69, 172–73, 204; unifying theater of, 115–16, 118, 124–31, 139–40. See also Poor laws Charles I, 162, 218, 281–82 n. 53 Children of Queen Elizabeth’s Chappel, 113 Christ’s Hospital, 49, 116, 162 Cicero, 23–24 city, idea of, 54, 55–56, 61, 114, 272 nn. 41 and 51, 276 n. 13 Clarke, Basil, 263–64 n. 7 Clopper, Lawrence, 265 n. 20 Coddon, Karin S., 266–67 n. 42, 283 n. 2 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 93 Comensoli, Viviana, 115 ‘‘Concerning Punishment of Beggars and Vagabonds,’’ 46 Cranmer, Thomas, 219, 287 n. 43 Crooke, Helkiah, 15, 43–44, 174, 205, 212, 217–18, 225, 228, 229, 284 n. 3 culture, folk, 202 Curtain Theater, 50 Daalder, Joost, 128, 276–77 n. 20 Davis, Colin, 238, 289 n. 15 deconstruction, 240–41 de Grazia, Margreta, 172 Dekker, Thomas, 21, 55–57, 60, 65, 67, 71, 80, 81, 83–85, 251; resentment toward Jonson of, 40; The Honest Whore, Part One (with Middleton), 11, 39–42, 55, 56, 61, 70, 72, 79, 80, 82–83, 94, 109–16, 118– 34, 137–39, 145, 148, 151, 154, 165, 178, 192, 195, 196, 204, 216, 229, 263 n. 2, 272 n. 41, 276 nn. 8, 10, and 19, 276–77 n. 20, 277 nn. 24, 25, and 26; The Honest Whore, Part Two, 39–41, 56, 61, 85, 109, 123, 125–31, 134, 137–39, 196, 272 n.

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41, 276 n. 10, 277 nn. 24 and 30; The Magnificent Entertainment, 40, 106–9; Northward Ho (with Webster), 11, 41, 56, 71, 85, 124, 132, 133, 142–53, 184, 190; Satiromastix, 27–28, 56, 79, 83–85, 103, 106, 107, 133, 134, 143, 144, 273–74 n. 7; The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 128– 29, 137; Westward Ho (with Webster), 41, 56, 132, 133–37, 137 Derrida, Jacques, 240–41, 252, 260, 288 n. 12, 289 nn. 14 and 15, 290 n. 24 Donne, John: Sermons, 207 Doob, Penelope, 263–64 n. 7 drama: and actors, 44, 85, 87, 91–95, 100, 103, 113; and the closing of the theaters in 1602, 106, 110; and development of the modern representational stage, 17–19, 29, 31, 33, 34, 41, 44–45, 71, 75, 78, 85, 90, 104–5, 135–36, 150–53, 154–56, 166–67, 169, 176, 200, 233–34, 235, 257–62, 267 nn. 43 and 48; self-consciousness of, 29, 40, 44, 137, 139, 152, 165, 200; subplots in, 175, 205, 213, 223, 233, 287 n. 47. See also Poets’ War Dugdale, Gilbert, 108–9 Edward VI, 161, 162 Edwards, Philip, 103, 275 n. 18 Ekeblad, Inga-Stina, 188–89, 283 n. 6 Eliot, T. S., 29, 31 Elizabeth I, 22, 40, 107, 109, 275 n. 1 Elton, G. R., 160 Erasmus, Desiderius, 25, 187; The Praise of Folly, 187, 279 n. 11 Evans, Robert, 265 n. 27 Feder, Lillian, 241 Felman, Shoshana, 239, 240, 242, 290 n. 25 Fenchurch, 40, 107, 109 Finkelpearl, Phillip, 287 n. 35 FitzMary, Simon, 48 Fletcher, John: The Pilgrim, 11, 44, 201, 212–17, 219, 221, 223, 225, 228–33, 287 nn. 35, 39, and 40; The

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Two Noble Kinsmen (with Shakespeare), 201–3 Foakes, R. A., 282 n. 61 Ford, John: The Lover’s Melancholy, 11, 44, 234. 283 n. 8 Fortune (theater), 113 Foucault, Michel, 35–39, 45, 48, 53, 74, 89, 98, 100, 101, 115, 117, 118, 124, 147, 181–82, 205, 225, 234–61, 266 n. 40, 268 nn. 52 and 55, 268–69 n. 56, 269 n. 60, 288 n. 12, 289 nn. 14 and 15, 289–90 n. 23, 290 n. 34, 291 nn. 53, 55, and 59 Freud, Sigmund, 252 Gay, John: The Beggar’s Opera, 115 Gibbons, Brian, 272 n. 49 Goldberg, Jonathan, 176, 278 n. 3 Gordon, Colin, 268 n. 55 Globe (original), 30 Globe (reconstructed), 125 Great Fire, 13 Greenblatt, Stephen, 32, 278 n. 4 Greene, Robert, 28 Gutting, Gary, 239–40, 249, 253–54, 268 n. 52, 268–69 n. 56 Halpern, Richard, 29, 267 n. 43 Harbage, Alfred, 271 n. 40 Hattori, Natsu, 263 n. 2, 264 n. 10, 284 n. 15, 287 n. 47 Hayes, Tara, 275 n. 18 Haynes, Jonathan, 59, 61, 84, 272 n. 51 Heidegger, Martin, 242 Heinemann, Margot, 43, 205 Helgerson, Richard, 21, 265 n. 27 Henslowe, Philip, 103, 113 Herford, C. H., 68 Hill, Christopher, 47, 52 Hogarth, William: A Rake’s Progress, 14 Holdsworth, R. V., 224 Honingmann, E. A. J., 23–25, 98 Hooke, Robert, 13, 15, 17 Hooker, Richard, 210, 286 nn. 27 and 32 hopitaux generaux, 36, 53, 117, 236, 241, 248–49, 256

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Howes, John: Contemporary Account, 161 Hoy, Cyrus, 106, 126, 143, 263 n. 2, 275 n. 1, 277 n. 30 Humanism, 25, 187 Husserl, Edmund, 238, 288 n. 5 Inns of Court, 117 Jackson, Gabriele Bernhard, 265 n. 32 James I, 40, 43, 51, 106–9, 173–74, 204–5, 212–13, 217, 223, 225, 228, 229, 275 n. 1, 287 nn. 35 and 39 Jenner, Thomas, 43, 205, 212 Jones, Colin, 37, 239 Jones, Gareth, 51 Jonson, Ben: and curing humours/ madness, 26–27, 40, 50, 55, 57–60, 62, 66–67, 69–70, 72, 73, 82–84, 90, 94, 110–11, 114, 125, 131, 136; and the figure of the jealous citizen, 40, 55–56, 60–70, 80–81, 111, 114; and the gallant, 61–68, 70, 72, 81, 82, 89, 90, 112, 137–38, 145; laureate aspirations of, 21, 22, 26, 57, 62, 80, 85, 88, 106, 265 n. 27; and the pageant for King James, 40, 106–11; and the Poets’ War, 21–25, 40–41, 45, 55–57, 60–61, 68, 71, 72, 75, 77, 79, 81–86, 88–91, 96–100, 104, 106, 110–14, 132, 135–37, 143–53, 154, 192, 259–62, 265 n. 32, 272 nn. 43 and 44, 272–73 n. 56, 273–74 n. 7, 274 nn. 8 and 10; and Polonius (Hamlet), 88–91, 93–94; revisions to Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy by, 103–4, 275 n. 18; Works: The Alchemist, 23, 191; Bartholomew Fair, 23; The Case Is Altered, 62; Cynthia’s Revels, 56, 274 n. 8; Discoveries, 23; Eastward Ho (with Marston and Chapman), 56, 96–97, 132, 137–42; Epicoene, 11, 191, 263 n. 2, 267 n. 48; Epistle, 23; Every Man in His Humor, 21–23, 46–47, 50, 55, 56–68, 82, 83, 87, 88, 89, 110, 113, 134, 137, 144, 145, 265 n. 32, 272 nn. 41–44, 51, and 55, 272–73 n. 56; Every Man Out of His Humor, 21,

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23, 24, 56, 58–59, 68–70, 80, 82, 87, 88, 134, 272 nn. 41 and 42, 273 nn. 61 and 62; Poetaster, 56, 79–87, 91, 93, 106, 113, 134, 146, 273–74 n. 7, 274 n. 10 Jordan, W. K., 161, 207, 270 n. 9, 285 n. 7 Justices of the Peace, 51–53, 61, 65, 137, 143, 163, 282 n. 54 Kay, W. David, 265 n. 27, 272 n. 42, 273 n. 61, 273–74 n. 7 Kiefer, Frederick, 283 n. 2 King’s Men, 44, 172, 212 Knight, G. Wilson, 176, 282 n. 60 Kronenfeld, Judith, 282 n. 54 Kyd, Thomas: The Spanish Tragedy, 28, 100–105, 275 nn. 17 and 18 Lamb, Charles, 175–76, 181, 283 n. 2 Leggatt, Alexander, 130, 174, 272 n. 49 Leinwand, Theodore, 272 n. 49, 276 n. 8 Lever, J. W., 265 n. 32 Levin, Richard, 175 Levinas, Emmanuel, 238–39, 254, 288 nn. 5, 6, and 12, 289 n. 15 Loewenstein, Joseph, 93, 94, 274 nn. 8 and 10 London: social relations in, 116–18, 124. See also city, idea of; Royal Hospitals Luther, Martin, 157, 209, 210, 214, 286 n. 22; Tischreden, 187, 279 n. 11 MacDonald, Michael, 11, 39, 264 n. 10, 270 n. 9, 281 n. 49, 284 n. 3 madness, 12, 18, 122, 129, 134, 153, 163, 235–62, 289 n. 15, 290 nn. 25 and 40, 291 n. 60; ambiguity of, 48; and art, 35, 181, 234–36, 242–45, 252, 289 n. 19; dramatic transition in handling of, 28–31, 44–45, 75– 78, 132–33, 266–67 n. 42; history of hospital confinement and, 36–37, 48–49, 53, 204, 235–37, 239, 241, 246–49, 252, 255–58, 266 n. 40, 270

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n. 19, 290 n. 34; and humours (or social madness), 58–60, 66–67, 70, 83, 98, 112–13, 114, 125, 131; laughter at, 195, 197, 216, 279 n. 11; and moral corruption, 14, 253–54; poetic, 146, 149–50, 181; and reason, 25–26, 78, 89, 100–105, 237, 240, 242–47, 251, 254, 256–60, 266–67 n. 42, 275 n. 15, 289 n. 14; in Shakespeare, 22, 25–33, 42, 44– 45, 71–78, 86–91, 94, 96, 98–105, 132, 140–41, 154–56, 165–74, 174– 81, 184–86, 189–90, 246–47, 259– 62, 266 nn. 35, 38, and 40, 267 nn. 46 and 48, 273–74 n. 7, 275 nn. 13, 15, and 17; and tragedy, 30, 34, 42, 104–5, 155–56, 169–70, 174–80, 185–86, 190, 192–93, 243–45, 258, 266–67 n. 42; visibility of, 48; in Western tradition, 25–26; and women, 277 n. 25 Manley, Frank, 149 Marcus, Leah, 281 n. 50 Marshall, William, 159–60 Marston, John, 21, 28, 56, 80–84; Eastward Ho (with Chapman and Johnson), 41, 56, 96–97, 132, 137–42; Histriomastix, 56; Jack Drum’s Entertainment, 56 Mary, Queen, 161 masque, 283 nn. 6 and 8 Mauss, Marcel, 14 Meres, Francis: Palladis Tamia, 93 metaphysics, 240–42, 288 n. 12, 290 n. 24 Micale, Mark S., 243, 268 n. 54 Michelet, Jules, 289–90 n. 23 Middleton, Thomas, 55–56, 60, 67, 71, 107, 109, 196, 199–200; The Changeling (with Rowley), 11, 32, 43–44, 120, 162, 173, 200, 201, 204–6, 208, 209, 212–13, 217–34, 261, 264 n. 10, 284 nn. 3 and 4, 287 n. 39, 42, and 47; The Fair Quarrel (with Fletcher), 209, 222; The Honest Whore, Part One (with Dekker), 11, 39–42, 55, 56, 61, 70, 72, 79, 80, 82–83, 85, 94, 109–16, 118–31, 134,

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137–39, 145, 148, 151, 154, 165, 178, 192, 195, 196, 204, 216, 229, 263 n. 2, 276 nn. 8, 10, and 19, 276–77 n. 20, 277 nn. 24, 25, and 26; Women Beware Women, 222 Midelfort, H. C. Erik, 38, 182, 269 n. 59 modernity, 29, 31–33, 267 n. 43, 289 n. 19 Moorfields, 13, 15 More, Sir Thomas, 15, 164 morris dancing, 202 Mullaney, Steven, 11, 248–49 Murphy, John, 172, 281 n. 51 Neely, Carol Thomas, 15, 257, 263 n. 2, 264 n. 14, 267 n. 46, 268 n. 50, 275 nn. 13 and 17, 291 n. 60 New Historicism, 20, 32–33, 184, 200 New Poor, 157, 162, 163 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 35, 181, 236, 241–45, 247, 252, 254, 258, 289 n. 19, 289–90 n. 23, 291 n. 57 Nunn, Trevor, 266 n. 41 Nygren, Anders, 208, 210 O’Donoghue, E. G., 276 n. 19 Ovid, 81, 92 pageants, civic, 137–40, 152; and James’s coronation, 40, 41, 106–10, 118, 131, 275 n. 1 Painter, William: The Palace of Pleasure, 193, 284 n. 15 Pamphlets, 280 n. 45 Parry-Jones, W. L., 284 n. 3 Paul, Saint: 1 Corinthians, 25–26, 206 Peperzak, Adriaan, 289 n. 15 phenomenology, 238–39, 289 n. 15 Pilgrime of Casteele, The, 287 nn. 35 and 40 plague, 106, 109, 270 n. 5, 275 n. 1 Poets’ War (poetomachia), 19, 21–28, 39–41, 55, 60–61, 68, 71–78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 90–91, 96–97, 105, 106, 109–14, 132, 134–37, 143–53, 154, 192, 265 n. 32, 266 nn. 39 and 40, 271 n. 40, 272 nn. 43 and 44,

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272–73 n. 56, 273–74 n. 7, 274 nn. 8 and 10 Poor laws, 15, 16, 49–55, 62, 65, 118, 157–58, 160, 162, 168, 204, 248, 258, 270 n. 3, 280 n. 45 Pories, Kathleen, 280 n. 45 Porter, Roy, 19, 37, 49, 239, 243, 249, 253, 263–64 n. 7, 268 n. 54, 284 n. 3 Post, Stephen, 286 n. 22 Potter, D., 285 Prefetti, Goffredo de, 48 Price, George, 272 n. 41 Protestantism: and charity, 43–44, 47, 156–62, 187–88, 205–15, 218–33, 279 nn. 9 and 23, 281 n. 51, 285 nn. 7, 8, and 12, 286 nn. 25, 27, and 32 psychiatry, 187, 237, 243, 249, 252, 254, 256, 263–64 n. 7, 268 n. 54 Pullan, Brian, 208, 220, 282 n. 57, 286 n. 20 Puritanism, 205, 211–12, 218, 221, 286 n. 22 Racine, Jean, 244–45 Randall, Dale B. J., 287 n. 40 Rawcliffe, Carole, 278 n. 6 Reed, Robert, 11, 28–29, 205, 251, 264 n. 10, 266–67 n. 42, 287 n. 39, 290 n. 40 Reformation, Protestant, 12, 47, 51, 52, 156–62, 172, 187, 206, 207, 279 n. 9, 282 n. 57 Return from Parnassus, The, 273–74 n. 7 Reynolds, John: The Triumph of God’s Revenge, 213 Riggs, David, 58, 109, 265 n. 27 Riis, Thomas, 270 n. 5 Rowe, George, 265 n. 27 Rowley, William: The Changeling (with Middleton), 11, 32, 43–44, 120, 162, 173, 200, 201, 204–6, 208, 209, 212–13, 217–34, 261, 264 n. 10, 284 nn. 3 and 4, 287 n. 39, 42, and 47; The Fair Quarrel (with Middleton), 209–10, 220 Royal Hospitals (London), 15, 49–54, 116, 161–65, 204, 278 n. 6

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Rubin, Miri, 48, 269 n. 1 Sade, Marquis de, 289–90 n. 23 Salkeld, Duncan, 12, 25, 101, 263 n. 2, 266 nn. 35, 38, and 40, 275 n. 13, 277 n. 25, 289 n. 14, 290 n. 34 Salter, F. R., 278 n. 8 Sanderlin, David, 285–86 n. 19 Sass, Louis, 30, 254, 289 n. 19, 291 n. 57 Savoy Hospital, 13 Schleiner, Winfred, 187, 279 n. 11 Scott-Warren, Jason, 267 n. 48, 273 n. 65 Scull, Andrew, 38, 256, 263–64 n. 7, 268 n. 55 Serres, Michel, 289–90 n. 23 Shakespeare, William, 15, 41–42, 245, 258–62, 267 n. 43, 273 n. 62; defense of the stage by, 85–95, 97– 98, 140, 142, 154, 273–74 n. 7; and madness, 22, 25–34, 42, 44–45, 71– 78, 86–91, 94, 96, 98–105, 132, 140–41, 154–56, 165–81, 184–86, 189–90, 246–47, 259–62, 266 nn. 35, 38, and 40, 267 nn. 46 and 48, 273–74 n. 7, 275 nn. 13, 15, and 17; and the Poets’ War, 21–28, 40, 56, 71–78, 79, 85, 86–91, 94–100, 104, 106, 132, 136, 142, 154, 259–62, 273–74 n. 7, 274 n. 10. Works: As You Like It, 27, 28, 56, 145, 266 n. 40, 280 n. 41; The Comedy of Errors, 26, 30, 71, 72, 74, 76, 261, 266 n. 38 and 40, 273 nn. 62 and 66; Cymbeline, 226; Hamlet, 11, 30, 40, 70–71, 79, 85–105, 106, 140–42, 154–55, 173, 180, 261, 267 nn. 46 and 48, 273–74 n. 7, 274 n. 10, 275 nn. 13 and 17; 2 Henry 6, 30; King John, 76; King Lear, 11, 29, 30, 32, 34, 42, 44, 90, 103, 105, 121–22, 150, 153, 155–56, 159, 165–81, 184–86, 189–90, 192, 233–34, 244, 261–62, 267 n. 48, 278 nn. 3 and 4, 280 nn. 39, 41, and 46, 280–81 n. 47, 281 nn. 49, 50, and 51, 282 nn. 54, 60, and 61; Love’s Labor’s Lost,

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149; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 133–34, 136; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 24–25, 25–26, 76, 77, 100, 137, 266 n. 35, 273 n. 62; Romeo and Juliet, 120; Titus Andronicus, 29, 30, 103, 105; Troilus and Cressida, 56, 273–74 n. 7; Twelfth Night, 11, 18, 28, 29–33, 40, 44, 56, 72–78, 79, 89, 90, 98–99, 101, 175, 176, 261–62, 266 n. 40, 267 n. 48, 273 nn. 62, 65, and 66; The Two Noble Kinsmen (with Fletcher), 201–3 Shoreditch, 29, 50, 72 Simpson, Percy, 68 Slack, Paul, 50–54, 160, 163, 270 n. 6, 281–82 n. 53, 285 n. 8 Sleford, Roland, 49–50, 270–71 n. 21 Socrates, 25, 242, 243, 289 n. 19 Spain, 218 spectacle, 12, 16, 17, 34, 41, 155–57, 159, 164, 179–180, 202–3, 216 Spencer, John, 117 Spital Sermons, 164, 207 Squire, John, 211 Stationer’s Register, 113, 277 n. 24 St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, 49, 53, 116, 162, 162 St. Botolph’s parish, 14 Stevenson, Christine, 13 Stone, Lawrence, 38 Stowe, John: Survey of London, 15, 119, 129 St. Stephen’s Day, 172, 173 St. Thomas’s Hospital, 49, 116, 162 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 283 n. 2 Tawney, R. H., 157, 270 n. 6, 279 n. 9 theater. See drama Theatre, The, 29–30 Thomson, J. A. F., 285 n. 7 Todd, Margo, 157 tragedy, 30, 34, 42, 104–5, 155–56,

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169–70, 174–80, 185, 190, 192–93, 243–45, 266–67 n. 42, 280 n. 39 Traver, Walter, 286 n. 32 True Chronicle Historie of King Leir, The, 165, 172–73, 380 n. 41, 281 n. 51 Tucker, Penny, 263–64 n. 7 Tuke, Samuel, 256 Twyning, John, 116, 276 nn. 13 and 19, 277 n. 26 Van Gogh, Vincent, 35, 181, 236, 252 Vega, Lope de: El Peregrino en su Patria, 287 nn. 35 and 40 Virgil, 91–95; Aeneid, 91–92 Vives, Juan Luis, 157–59, 162, 278 n. 8, 279 n. 11; De Subventione Pauperum, 158; Forma Subventionis Pauperum, 158–59 Waddington, Keir, 263–64 n. 7 Wakefield, Edward, 291 n. 53 Wall, Wendy, 136 Walzer, Michael, 157 Ward, Ned, 251 Warren, Roger, 177 Weber, Max, 157 Webster, John, 71; The Duchess of Malfi, 11, 32, 42, 120, 135, 151, 178, 183–201, 219, 223, 283 nn. 2, 6, and 8; Northward Ho (with Dekker), 11, 41, 56, 71, 85, 124, 132, 133, 184, 190; Westward Ho (with Dekker), 41, 56, 132, 133–37, 142–53 Weimann, Robert, 31, 32, 176, 267 n. 48, 280 n. 43, 280–81 n. 47 Whigham, Frank, 192 White, R. S., 183, 184 Willett, Andrew: Synopsis Papismi, 211 Wilson, Matthew, 285 n. 12 Woodbridge, Linda, 269 n. 1 Wren, Christopher, 13

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