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

Madness—as both medical category and dramatic icon—was heterogeneous, proliferating, gender-inflected, internally divided, and blurry around the scientific and cultural edges. This is a major contention of Carol Thomas Neely's study of the ways in which English doctors, dramatists, and other writers represented mental illness between 1576 and 1632. Neely claims that English playwrights reflected current and humane medical ideas about madness and its cure, made use of them for their own dramatic purposes, and, in certain instances, anticipated the less-humane attitudes of the eighteenth century. She also uses this book to argue against what she sees as an unfortunate historical misconception: the "myth" (p. 199) that before 1632 visitors to Bethlehem (or Bethlem) Hospital, London's refuge for impoverished mad persons, came in order to witness its comic spectacle. She begins her work in 1576 because that is the date for the opening of the first public theater in London. Less convincing is her choice of 1632, the year when the administration of Bethlehem Hospital completely reverted to the City (as opposed to the Crown), as her study's endpoint: why not end with the closing of the theaters in 1642?

In her introduction, Neely contends that her researches counter Michel Foucault's claim that the early modern period represented a period of "expressive madness" (p. 9) that ended when a mid-seventeenth epistemic break inaugurated the suppressing, silencing, and isolation of the mad. To the contrary, she finds in the writings of seventeenth-century physicians and dramatists abundant evidence that distracted persons were not isolated, mistreated, or confined, but rather humored and cared for with kindness. Restraints or confinement in a hospital like Bethlem were thought of as temporary measures that would lead to eventual cure.

While rejecting this Foucauldian notion of a radical epistemic break, Neely also distances herself from those social historians who "assume that medical theory and practice remain[ed] static from the late Middle Ages to the Restoration" (p. 8): instead, she sees "gradual shifts" (p. 8) in the medical categorization and treatment of distracted persons between 1576 and 1632. She thus finds common cause with Ian Hacking's notion of "the secularization of the soul" (p. 2)—the idea that, since the Middle Ages, Western culture has increasingly sought natural and material explanations for the ills of the mind and soul rather than supernatural and spiritual ones. One consequence of these explanatory shifts, claims Neely, is the proliferation of new categories of mental illness, as well as the regendering of certain varieties of psychic disease.

After the introduction the book is divided into six chapters, some more, some less interconnected. In chapter 1 Neely considers the nature and dramatic influence of sixteenth-century representations of madpersons on the English stage, beginning with the comedy Gammer Gurton's Needle and the revenge play The Spanish Tragedy. In chapter 2 she examines the development of a particular dramatic language of stage madness—made up of proverbs, fragments, rhymes, songs—in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. Here, she also shows how dramatic distinctions between feigned and real madness, supernatural and natural madness, and male and female forms of madness help to create depth and complexity of dramatic character as well as contributing to the cultural secularization of the soul. In chapter 3 Neely offers a nuanced reading of the emergence of the psychological category of female melancholy out of the early rubrics of male melancholy and uterine disorders such as suffocation of the mother. Chapter 4 extends the insights of chapter 3 to examine another emergent mental disorder, known as "lovesickness" in the works of Shakespeare and the paintings of Jan Steen. Neely argues in chapter 5 that three Shakespeare comedies—The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night—represent new, harsher attitudes toward the treatment...