Madness: A Brief History by Roy Porter Read Free Book Online Page B

world in  which the poor had to pretend to be mad in order to get a crust!
    Certain stereotypes have exercised a powerful and lasting fascination. Alongside those models already mentioned in Chapter 2—for instance, the hubristic hero punished by the gods by loss of his reason—Greek thinkers advanced the idea of divine madness in the artist, ‘inspired’ (literally ‘filled with spirit’) or touched by a divine ‘fire’. Notably in the Phaedrus, Plato spoke of the ‘divine fury’ of the poet, and works attributed to Aristotle (384-322 bc) sketched the profile of the melancholy genius, whose solitary discontent fired his imagination to produce works of originality.
    Such views were revived in the Renaissance by Ficino and other humanists; to dub a poet ‘mad’ was, in the conventions of the age, to pay him a compliment. Michael Drayton thus praised the dramatist Kit Marlowe:
For that fine madness still he did retain,
    Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.
    Shakespeare for his part suggested in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that ‘the lunatick, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact’, and thus described the act of creation:
The poet’s eye in a fine phrensy rolling
    Doth glance from heav’n to earth, from earth to heav’n
    And, as imagination bodies forth
    The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
    Turns them to shape, and gives to aiery nothing
    A local habitation and a name.
    And similar views were later rhymed after the Restoration by John Dryden:
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
    And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
    Visiting what was facetiously dubbed the ‘Academy of Bedlam’, the diarist John Evelyn found one inmate ‘mad with making verses’. It was a standard crack: writers were supposedly mad, and those who were mad suffered from the cacoethes scribendi, the writer’s itch.
    Renaissance artists were credited with receiving visions in dreams and daydreams; gloom and woe fired the poet’s fancy; and, especially on the stage, there skulked the melancholy malcontent, clad all in black, disaffected, disdainful, dangerous, yet brilliantly discerning and diamond sharp. For Hamlet in the churchyard or Jaques in the forest of Arden in As You Like It , something bittersweet was to be savoured in a contemplative sorrow: Jaques enjoyed sucking ‘melancholy out of a stone’. The same idea underlay Thomas Gray’s Elegy
    Written in a Country Churchyard in the eighteenth century. Given man’s mortality, the wheel of fortune, and the scurviness of the times, what other response could there be to life’s changes and chances but a detached sadness?—such was the drift of Robert Burton’s obsessive Anatomy of Melancholy (1621 ):
When I go musing all alone,
    Thinking of divers things fore-known,
    When I build Castles in the air,
    Void of sorrow and void of fear,
    Pleasing my self with phantasms sweet,
    Methinks the time runs very fleet.
    All my joys to this are folly,
    Naught so sweet as Melancholy.
    For Burton, to live in this sordid, base world, surrounded by despots, tyrants, misers, thieves, slanderers, adulterers, and whole broods of knaves and fools was a melancholy matter. Hence his pen name ‘Democritus Junior’, after the Greek philosopher who became a solitary because he found mankind alternately so risible and so pitiable. Life was a black comedy.
    Amongst the paradoxes beloved of the Humanists was the thought that, in a mad world, the only realist was the ‘fool’ or simpleton. In The Praise of Folly (1511), Erasmus’s eponymous heroine, so full of herself, pratedwisdom unthinkingly, while the Fool in King Lear and Feste in Twelfth Night outwitted logic in nonsense ditties which gave voice to darker truths denied to sober speech. In sixteenth-century France Michel de Montaigne, who posed the sceptical question, ‘what do I know?’, thought the whole world run mad, or at least hinted that all humans, since the Fall, lived at risk of Reason’s