Faces of hysteria in Shakespeare and contemporary dramatists

Abstract

This dissertation deals in depth with three of the four great tragedies by William Shakespeare, these include, King Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet. I also looked at the plays of Thomas Kyd, John Fletcher, William Rowley and Thomas Middleton, with the design of showing how mad women are portrayed on stage during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. In chapter one, I gave a historical overview of the ancient disease hysterica passio, and in chapters two and three, my aim is to demonstrate how an ancient ailment is still a strong part of Elizabethan and Jacobean patriarchal society, and how it is portrayed on stage in the following female characters: Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Isabella (The Spanish Tragedy), the jailer's daughter, Isabella (The Changeling), and Beatrice. My aim is to show that after thousands of years, the Hippocratic concept of hysteria has not changed. It has evolved in particular in the Jacobean era, within which mad women were labelled as either being bewitched, a witch herself, or possessed by the devil. Other than that, these playwrights give these tragic women roles which involve portraying the ancient disease on stage. The beginning of chapter one deals with Shakespeare's King Lear, where a man has gone mad and not a woman. It is important to mention King Lear in this thesis as it is the only play within which Shakespeare outright names the disease and apostrophises it, and in doing so gives Lear, even though he is a man, its symptoms.