Tragedy and Madness

• Thomas Kyd


  Wrote The Spanish Tragedy, which is regarded as one of the first revenge tragedies
• Madness in King Lear and Hamlet

  • In both madness is to some degree punishment or doom, corresponding to the adage
  • Lear prays to the heavens that he may not suffer madness and Hamlet asks Laertes, in his apology before the duel, to overlook his conduct since, "You must needs have heard, how I am punished / With a sore distraction"
  • From Maynard Mack's What Happens in Shakespearean Tragedy
• Madness in King Lear and Hamlet pt. 2

  • It is obvious in both cases of Lear and Hamlet, madness has a further dimension is true in Ophelia - Ophelia, mad is able to make awards of flowers to the King and Queen which are appropriate to frailties of which she cannot be supposed to have conscious knowledge
  • From Maynard Mack's What Happens in Shakespearean Tragedy
• Hamlet as a madman

  • It is enough that Hamlet wears, even for a second the guise of a madman and as such can be presumed to have intuitive unformulated awareness that reaches the surface in free associations like those of Polonius with a fishmonger and Ophelia with a carrion
  • Lear likewise makes relevant associations like in his great speech in Dover Fields on the lust of women
  • From Maynard Mack's What Happens in a Shakespearean Tragedy
• Hamlet as a Madman pt. 2

  • Both Lear and Hamlet can be privileged in madness to say things - Hamlet about the corruption of human nature and Lear of the corruption of the Jacobean social system
  • From Maynard Mack's What Happens in a Shakespearean Tragedy
• Cassandra

  • In Greek mythology, Cassandra had the power to see into the future but she was destined to never be believed
  • Cassandra's madness, like Hamlet's and Lear's contains both punishment and insight
  • She is doomed to know by a consciousness beyond the measures of space and time and to never be believed
  • She is an ideal emblem of a Shakespearean hero, caught between the absolute and the expedient