What should be established at the very outset is that Shakespeare and Cervantes were not doctors or physicians, they were writers and, as such, Don Quixote and King Lear’s portrayals of madness transcend purely medical models and should be understood from an eclectic point of view, since they could be regarded as a mixture of the medical, the literary and the social. That is to say, they represent a fusion of Renaissance feeling towards madness and current medical opinions together with those modifications having its origins in the author’s stylistic or literary intentions. Once this has been clarified, let’s have a look at how madness was generally understood in Europe within the socio-cultural context of the late 16^th century.

            In his widely known work Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in The Age of Reason, Foucault (1965)discusses the role madness has had in western society. This author draws our attention to the fact that, during the Renaissance, madness was public and present everywhere; it was not exhibited behind bars, as it happened in the 18^th century, and it was not considered as a moral or a mental disease, as it was the case in the 19^th century. On the contrary, madness was present as a force in society, it was an everyday experience integrated into the rest of the world.

The study of human body and soul/mind has always been a main theme in humanities. According to Landon (2002), the Renaissance brought about a dramatic societal, religious and philosophical shift that resulted in a larger focus on mankind and his environment, as opposed to God. Anyway, and despite of the fact that, for the first time, mankind became a legitimate subject of research, human body and mind were treated by philosophers and medics as a single entity, as a consequence of the holistic approach to medicine that dated back to the classical Greek.

            In this respect, Adrian Ingham (1996) stresses that 'the medieval work De Propriatibus Rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus clearly illustrates this classical heritage and have an enormous influence in the Renaissance view of madness'. It is no coincidence that this work contains the classical explanation of illness as an imbalance of the four humours: melancholy (black bile); choler (yellow bile); blood and phlegm. According to this model, madness was understood as the result of excess of the melancholy humour.

            Adriam Ingham (1996) also notices that Shakespeare’s understanding of madness is in some way influenced by Bright's A Treatise of Melancholie, where the theory of the four humours is present again. In a similar way, it has been also suggested that Cervantes draw inspiration in the contemporary work Examen de ingenio para las ciencias, where Juan Huarte de San Juan also includes a treatise on what was conceived in classical philosophy and during the middle Ages as the previously mentioned theory of the four humours.

Aubrey Landon (2002) notices that these humours were described in the works of current doctors and physiologists such as Robert Burton as some sort of liquids that flow throughout the body and work to maintain a sense of bodily homeostasis or equilibrium, preserving life and good sense.  In fact, the ideal condition of man during the Renaissance was that of a sound mind in a sound body and it was thought that any outside influences on a human being would eventually have physical and, consequently, psychical consequences. In his work, Landon also highlights that in Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, possible imbalances of the temperament related to problems with the levels of certain humours were regarded to be caused by God, bad Angels or devils, witches and magicians, stares, old age, heredity, bad diet, especially the quality of meat, and wine, the quantity of food consumed, bad air, imagination, idleness, fear, shame, disgrace, envy, hatred, desire for revenge, narcissism, inappropriate education, poverty and want, and general perturbations of the mind.

            The previous observation is interesting because it comes to show, as argued by Foucault (1965), that  madness was understood and accepted as a mixture of natural causes and supernatural intervention before the Renaissance. It is significant that during the Renaissance, and specially during the late 16^th century, discussions of madness were often focussed on distinguishing between supernatural and physical explanations. As O’Brien (1996) points out, ‘belief in supernatural causes for mental illness was not limited to the illiterate, who were less familiar with ‘physical’ explanations based on the theory of humours [...] the learned explanations for madness was in fact more likely to be supernatural than natural. Even medical doctors who ordinarily pointed to ‘natural’ causes would, in extreme cases, point to supernatural ones’.  

            Ultimately, then, I would like to say that in Shakespeare and Cervantes, we observe an understanding of madness according to the standards of their times. We could conclude by saying that these authors overtly conceived madness as something ordinary but, at the same time, as something different and inescapable from reason.  Foucault (1965) comments in this respect that Cervantes and Shakespeare communicated madness at the historical moment before its silencing since in them, ‘madness still occupies an extreme place, in that it is beyond appeal. Nothing ever restores it either to truth or to reason. It leads only to laceration and thence to death’. According to this author, from them on, madness ‘leaves these ultimate region where Cervantes and Shakespeare had situated it’, enters into medico-judicial discourses and begins to be conceived according to moral standards. As Foucault highlights, 'in the Age of Reason there was no place to unreason and madness was, for the first time, segregated, subordinated and ejected'.  

© a.r.e.a./Dr. Vicente Forés López

© Cristina Ortega Marcos

Universitat de València Press

Page mantained by Cristina Ortega Marcos

Created: 06/02/2005