Giving Audience to Madness

The chapter deals with how certain tragic dramas represent madness, states of estrangement difficult for others to relate to. The phenomena of madness are involved with an insufficiently supportive environment of onlooker and listener; to that environment they stand as both cause and consequence, as defence and also perhaps as riposte. Key examples here are Beckett’s Not I and Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. Developing these thoughts into Othello and Hamlet brings in a new element: the mother-child relation as something which figures or informs the support or betrayal of the protagonist by the world, as the protagonist perceives it. This idea becomes central to the readings of Macbeth and King Lear which follow.

A related line of thought explores the relation between witness figures within the play and the kind of witness offered by the play itself. When it comes to apprehending states of delusion otherwise than as mere delusion, the space of theatre offers special possibilities. Discussion focuses on Pirandello’s Henry IV and Ibsen’s Master Builder, before moving to how Macbeth and King Lear grant experiential reality to the inflamed subjectivities of their protagonists.

All roads in this chapter lead finally to King Lear, and to thoughts about grieving: in its relation to madness, and as a form of fully accomplished witness. Euripides’ Bacchae offers helpful comparison. Grieving in King Lear is both overwhelmingly required and overwhelmingly difficult, for many of the characters as perhaps also for the audience. Nevertheless, the dimension of theatre makes a difference, affecting both the manner of our witness and the manner of our grief.