Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (review)

In Distracted Subjects, Carol Thomas Neely maps out a new and persuasive model of early modern ideas of madness. Drawing primarily on plays and medical writings, Neely argues that conceptions of madness were fluid, heterogeneous, and evolving during this period, rather than monolithic and static, as depicted by Foucault and others. Emerging ideas about medicine, interiority, and gender shifted madness away from associations with supernatural forces, such as possession and witchcraft, towards a more secular, psychological, and medical model. These changes, Neely suggests, not only generated new terms and categories for mental ailments, but pushed writers and physicians "to rethink the parameters of the human by reimagining madness" (1). Typically described as "distraction," mental illness was not seen as an intrinsically alien or permanent condition, but associated with "temporarily curable disruptions of health" (4). Accordingly, the topic offers a window into broader questions of inwardness, suffering, and solace. This is a thoughtful and original book that will be valuable to a wide range of scholars, especially those interested in early modern drama, medicine, and subjectivity.

Chapters 1 and 2 explore how theatrical representations of madness both reflect and facilitate changes in cultural understandings of it. As a newly popular forum for representing interiority and extreme behavior, Neely argues, the theater offers a crucial site for examining early modern thought on madness. Chapter 1, on Gammer Gurton's Needle and The Spanish Tragedy, considers the depiction of madness in these plays as a crucial element in their transformation of Latin genres into English ones. Chapter 2, on Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, explores how the stage develops a new language for representing madness, and reinforces the gendering of mental disorders. In all of these plays, Neely demonstrates, madness moves away from a traditional link with the supernatural towards a new form of secular inwardness, and becomes a means of illustrating psychological complexity and development.

Chapters 3 and 4 examine the relationship between madness, gender, and erotic desire. Chapter 3 considers the invention of new categories of gendered ailments, such as women's melancholy, an "innovative amalgamation of hysteria, genital congestion, and melancholy" (69). Neely traces representations of the condition in texts on medicine and witchcraft, culminating in a reading of the Daughter's cure in Two Noble Kinsmen. Chapter 4 explores the depiction of lovesickness in medical writings, paintings, and comedy, with attention to the way this affliction destabilizes traditional gender roles and erotic desires in Twelfth Night and As You Like It.

Where chapters 3 and 4 explore sympathetic approaches to alleviating mental distress, the final chapters examine harsher onstage responses, and contrast them with records of actual treatment. In chapter 5, Neely shows how disruptive male figures are punished by being attacked or confined for being mad in The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night. She contrasts the cruelty of the comic stage with the compassionate therapies more frequently documented in parish records and medical case notes, usefully reminding us that plays may have their own motives for distorting, and that "literary representation and social history can diverge as well as converge" (163). Chapter 6 extends the contrast between the stage and actual historical models by examining the treatment of the mad in Bethlem Hospital in relation to images of Bedlamites in plays. This chapter also articulates a forceful and specific break with prior scholarship in criticizing the widely held view of Bethlem as a theatrical space where the mad were put on display for prurient spectators. Arguing that this idea is contradicted by the actual evidence, Neely suggests that the resulting popular analogy between Bethlem and the stage serves the needs both of "[h]istorians wishing to trace a progressive history of psychiatry and asylums" (206), and of literary critics who use the idea "to extol the excitement, excess, and uniqueness of a...