Queen Mary and Westfield College London University PhD Thesis ...

e compared to Isabella's role in The Changeling, or the Fool's and Edgar's roles in King Lear68.
Madness for Lear, maligned, but morally blind and calling Heaven's wrath upon his own head,
is part just deserts, part exemplum and part revelation. In Burton's Analomy of Melancholy
(1621), while all afflictions are 'God's just punishment', a visit to Bethlem is exemplary on a
more prosaic level 69 . Although a scholar and 'scribbler' himself, Burton (anticipating Swift a
century later) explained the propensity to insanity amongst scholars, declaring that they 'many
times. ..deserve it'. Moreover, he told his readers to prove it for themselves, and to 'Go to Bedlam
and ask'. Bedlam was, indeed, standardly conceived of by contemporaries as an academy, college
or school of folly 70 . Donald Lupton, 10 years after Burton, maintained the universality of the
age old 'Lesson' being learned by Bedlamites, namely 'to know...themselves' 71 . The didactic
symbol of the Collegiate of Bedlam proved more apposite than ever during the Augustan era72.
More significantly, for men like Lupton, however, the 'desperate Caitifes' in Bethlem only went
to show how strong was 'the Divell...to Delude', how 'easily' were 'men...to be drawne', and
what inevitably befell those who 'dare make a mocke of judgment'.
As Thomas has observed, 'the less they spoke of divine judgments, the more did Protestant
moralists elaborate upon the pangs of a troubled mind' 73. Yet the providential lesson of insanity
proved extremely tenacious. At both ends of the seventeenth century patients were occasionally
recorded as 'recovered' in Bethlem's Court of Governors' Minutes and Admission Registers 'by
68 Antonio, who insults and abuses Isabella in the disguise of 'a madwoman' and denies that he is a 'fool',
when formerly he had claimed to love her, ls forced ultimately to recognise his own folly. Contemptuous,
inhumane responses to the insane (or the appearance of madness) are commonly illustrative of moral blindness
and insensibility in early seventeenth century literature. See The Changeling, IV, iii, Is 102-35 & Is 204-7; 84-6
& 111.
69 Robert Burton, The Anafomp of Melancholp (ed), Holbrook Jackson (London, J. M. Dent, 1948-9), 2 vols,
ii, Part I, Section I, 5th pars., 82 & pass,m.
70 See e.g. Changeling, i, ii, Is 78-80, 18; 'it wiH be long Era all thy scholar* learn this lesson, and I did look
to have a new one entered'. Also, I, ii, Is 162 & 214-6, 22 & 24; III, ii, Is 34 & 110, 46 & 50.
71 London and he Cosstry Caronadoed and Qvanfied into severm!l Characters (London, 1632), chap. 19,
748.
72 Bethlem as a school of folly, as Ignatieff has observed concerning the prison as a 'school of crime', might
assume a decidedly negative connotation, however, as a breeding ground where inmates were confirmed in their
vices and folly. See Michael Ignatieff, A J.t Meassre of Pa,*. The Penitentiary in the Indutrial Revelation
1750-1850 (London, Penguin/Peregrine, 1989; orig. New York, Pantheon, 1978), 54.
Religion & Magic, 128.
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