2. • typically represented through melancholic or love-sick characters
• moves through the stages of conflict, confusion and irrationality
• In comedy, madness is resolved, and the conflicts straightened out; in tragedy, madness perpetuates
the crisis of the self until death
• madness has always a destructive vigor, of signaling the failures of authority and reason
• Earlier it was humoral imbalance....fury, rage...fool and folly to the language of madness
• mad characters of the Renaissance stage were given new languages...discourses of madness
prospered because they helped to reconceptualize the borders between natural and supernatural,
body and mind, masculinity and femininity, feigned and real madness
3. • relationship between revenge tragedy and madness is symbiotic...a vengeful purpose hones and focuses the passions, whilst madness
allows its host to pursue revenge unclouded by reason or moral judgment
• ghost of Andrea accompanied by a personification allegory in the form of Revenge...movement upward incites a
movement downwards as the underworld ascends to destroy the present...eruption of infernal passions into the world of men
• We observe interior monologue of the madman battles with the reasoned duty of the obedient courtier with repulsion an elevated
figure (foundering in misdeeds) Eg. Hieronimo rationalizes the destruction of others as a means of satiating his desire for justice
• amore compellingly political and complex psychological play
• ‘Here sit we down to see the mystery, | And serve for chorus in this tragedy’ (I.i.90-1)...reinforces the classical notion of infernal
powers influencing characters’ futures
• men display an increasing reluctance to wait for divine justice to work, taking it upon themselves to enact it
• Hieronimo’s increasingly odd behaviors imagines his entering into the classical underworld in the model of Seneca
4. • in the revised text however that the psychological development of Hieronimo is given most depth.
• The first half of the long monologue argues that there is nothing in a son ‘To make a father dote, rave
or run mad’as they are ‘A thing begot | Within a pair of minutes’ (3rdAdd.10, 4-5).Sons pout, cry, and
‘must be fed, | Be taught to go, and speak’ and end up ‘unsquared, unbevelled’ (3rdAdd.12-13, 22).
But in the second half of the speech, he reforms his own satirical cynicism by identifying with
Horatio’s personal attributes. He was loving and honourable: ‘my comfort and his mother’s joy’ (30);
‘his great mind, | Too full of honour’ (36-7).
• That lives not in this world’ because ‘God hath engrossed all justice in his hands’ (III.xiiA.82-83, 86)
• developing madness hones and sharpens revenge
• representations of an heroic madness that consumes body and mind, but opens up self-
representation whilst challenging the established social order
