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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture, by Carol Thomas Neely. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. Pp. xv + 244. Cloth $52.50; paper $21.95.
A number of years ago, a play that earned the palm for having the longest title ever (shortened to Marat/Sade) dealt with, among other things, the relationship between mental asylum inmates and the theater. It expanded upon the notion that the confined mentally ill were always already "theater" by presenting them "acting" in a production scripted by the Marquis de Sade. This play was certainly not the first to present the madness or confinement of victims of mental illness onstage. In fact, a number of well-known and often-staged early modern plays--Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and King Lear, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling--present characters who become mentally ill, impersonate madness, or reveal the actions of the insane in representations of early modern asylums. Carol Thomas Neely challenges the common wisdom that the early modern theaters' representation of the insane or their confinement reflects the prevailing treatment of the mentally ill at that time. In Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Early Modern Culture, she argues that it was the public theater that staged, and therefore created, the concept of the insane as sources of entertainment and also that repairing to a madhouse to observe the "drama" of the inmates was as amusing as an afternoon at the theater.
Neely's book covers the period from the opening of the first public theater (1576) to the year that the struggle for control of Bethlehem Hospital (Bethlem or Bedlam) between the Crown and the City of London ended (1632). While the humoral theories of Galen and Aristotle were prevalent during this period, the author points out that the terms used to define the insane--"madness," "melancholy," "distraction," "lovesickness," and so on--were not fixed. Up until the cutoff date for her study, she maintains that the culture considered these conditions as "excesses of the human, and temporary curable disruptions of health" (4). Additionally, she considers the gender-marked nature of terms such as "lovesickness" and engages in a necessary "regendering" of some aspects of mental illness. Thus the changing perceptions of madness during the period of her study (1576-1632) become a "renaissance of madness ... a process of secularization, recategorization, and, in effect, humanization ..." (2). The first two chapters of Distracted...
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