Bardolatry in Bedlam: Shakespeare, Psychiatry, and Cultural Authority in Nineteenth-Century America

In the first three decades of American psychiatry, no figure was cited as an authority on insanity and mental functioning more frequently than William Shakespeare.¹ In the pages of the American Journal of Insanity (AJI)—the official organ of the nascent profession—no fewer than thirteen lengthy articles of Shakespeare criticism were published from 1844–1864, and in other psychiatric writings his name was regularly invoked in matters concerning diagnosis, nosology, and treatment. "There is scarcely a form of mental disorder," wrote Amariah Brigham (superintendent of the New York State Lunatic Asylum and the first editor of AJI) in the lead article of the journal's first issue, that Shakespeare "has not alluded to, and pointed out the causes and method of treatment." "A very complete system of psychological medicine could be compiled from the works of Shakspeare," wrote A. O. Kellogg (Brigham's former assistant and later the superintendent of the Port Hope Asylum, Canada West); "no text-book or treatise extant deserves to be so carefully studied by those engaged in psychological pursuits as the works of this most wonderful of men."²

In virtually all of these articles, the Shakespearean "system of psychological medicine" was shown to resemble almost exactly the system of "moral treatment" that was institutionalized by the authors themselves—a program that stressed the need for medical experts to administer treatment to patients in carefully controlled environments. According to Kellogg, Shakespeare believed that madness was "a disease of the brain, and could be cured by medical means, aided by judicious care and management: all which he points out as clearly as it could be done by a modern expert."³ Not only did a careful reading of the Bard endorse the findings of modern experts, but modern mental science provided what Kellogg called "the true key" to understanding the great works of literature, especially Shakespeare's.⁴ According to Isaac Ray, the influential superintendent first of the Maine Insane Asylum and then the Butler Hospital, "The revolution in the management of the insane, that occurred toward the end of the last century, produced among its legitimate effects a better knowledge of insanity, that became visible in works of literature as well as in the current opinions of society." Longstanding problems of critical interpretation could be resolved with recourse to this new knowledge; for instance, "It is enough to state as scientific fact, that Hamlet's mental condition furnishes in abundance, the characteristic symptoms of insanity, in wonderful harmony and consistency." In this formulation, insanity and Shakespeare's "delineations" of it are collapsed into each other as givens: mental illness is simply a natural fact that Shakespeare, who worked "in the strictest accordance with the principles of human nature," could not fail to observe correctly.⁵

Ever since Samuel Johnson's account of him, Shakespeare had been granted primacy in the understanding of "human nature," a primacy that the asylum superintendents (as this first generation of psychiatrists called themselves) were trying to establish for themselves. And so the literary criticism of Ray, Brigham, and Kellogg was in part a demonstration of their mastery in the cultural realm over that which they presumed to govern medically. "Human nature," wrote Brigham in his discussion of Shakespeare, "as respects the passions and emotions, is ever the same, and correct descriptions of mental phenomena, though of ancient date, are still worthy of our attention."⁶ Despite Shakespeare's antiquity, when Ray and the others used the term "human nature," they were invoking an Enlightenment conception of what was distinctive and invariant in humanity—a conception that was entirely secular and mechanistic.⁷ But what was radically new in their brand of "enlightened" science—what Michel Foucault called a "rupture" in the order of knowledge—was the institutional authority that the asylum superintendents claimed as the logical end of such conceptions, and the social power that came with turning other humans into...