THEME OF MADNESS

Question 1

Summarise how madness is represented?

Answer 1

1) madness as a performance and stratagem

2) Madness as a permitted space for truth telling (Foucault)

3) Genuine madness triggered by grief and trauma,

4) blurred line between real and performative madness.
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Question 2

Historical/ social context

Answer 2

Madness as a result of excessive, maladaptive thought, black bile imbalance or divine curse or insight.

Madman as truth teller archetype in Renaissance Dramas.

Question 3

Madness as performance an strategy (quotes)

Answer 3

‘To put on an antic disposition on’

‘Though this be madness yet there is method in it’

‘I am but mad north-north west. I know a hawk from a handsaw.’

Question 4

Madness as a permitted space for truth telling.

Answer 4

‘You men will do it/ by cock they are to blame’

‘They say the owl was a bakers daughter. Lord, I know what we are, but not what we may be’

Question 5

The say the owl…

Answer 5

Was a bakers daughter. Lord we know what we are, but not what we may be.

Question 6

Madness as genuine psychological fragmentation

Answer 6

“I would give you some violets but they withered all when my father died’

Question 7

‘ Madness as a blurred line between real and performative madness’

Answer 7

How now? A rat! Dead for a ducat, dead!

O that this too solid flesh would melt and resolve itself into a dew

Question 8

Kate flint-

Answer 8

Hamlets madness gives him the licence to speak cruel truths, transgressing the language of social decorum

Question 9

Psychoanalysis?

Answer 9

Jungian lens- madness the forceful emergence of the shadow or fragmentation of the symbol mask.

Freudian- return of the repressed.

Question 10

Foucault and madness?

Answer 10

Madness is a space for truth telling and thus resistance,

Madness is socially constructed use to silent dissent,