| While current Renaissance literary criticism focuses largely on the socio-historic significance of the staged madman, this study attempts to uncover his specific dramatic function. A close reading of madness in six plays (Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair) suggests that madness operates as a lens through which playwrights examine and invert traditional conventions of theatre. The staged madman's language collapses ostensibly fixed distinctions, so that spectators become spectacles, and the fictions of story-telling and role-playing become inescapable realities.My study opens with an examination of characters who feign madness. Shakespeare, Middleton, and Jonson all blur the distinction between real and pretended madness by dramatizing a feigned madman's frustrated attempts to return to some unequivocally sane self at play's end. Chapter two shifts the focus of my study from characters who feign madness to characters who are genuinely mad, and explores King Lear's and Hieronimo's demands to be spectators to their own madness. I suggest that such repeatedly unsatisfied demands have a twofold dramatic effect: they usurp the audience's traditional role as spectator to mad behavior, and they reveal the playwrights' self-conscious admission that no staged representation of madness is ever sufficient. Chapter three moves the discussion from staged madness to reported madness. Both Webster's Duchess of Malfi and Shakespeare's Hamlet dramatize the unsettling and unwitting tendency of those who report madness to call into being that which they would merely put into words.Having established the madman's subversive function within Renaissance dramatic history, I challenge in my final chapter the prevalent notion that the height of Jacobean drama marks a low point in the madman's dramatic complexity. Through a detailed examination of Trouble-all, a minor character in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, I suggest that even the most one-dimensional Jacobean madman inherits a rich tradition of troubling dramatic norms. Devoid of his own interiority, routinely dismissed by literary critics as overt spectacle, he quietly disrupts not just the established conventions of theatre, but also the nascent conventions of staged madness itself. |
