Elizabethan Drama and Its Mad Folk The Harness Prize Essay for 1913 — Inside the Classic

A Physician’s Eye on Stage Madness

Peers frequently consults medical authorities of the period. In discussing the cure of Cardenes in The Pilgrim, he notes that the physician rejects the common practice of confining the patient in a dark room, insisting instead that the patient “must take air.” The physician prepares “trapdoors, and descents” and presents “good spirits of the air, bad of the earth” to manipulate the patient’s humours. Peers remarks that the physician’s versatility—acting as “friar, soldier, philosopher, poet, architect, physician”—makes him more interesting than the madman himself. This attention to contemporary therapeutic methods, rather than modern psychology, is a hallmark of the essay.

Madness as Climax and Moral Lesson

Peers contrasts two uses of raving madness in tragicomedy. In Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Sir Giles Overreach’s madness is a stage device to emphasize his defeat. Overreach, with “distracted looks,” attempts to kill his daughter, sees those around him as “Furies with steel whips,” and is finally bound and carried to a dark room. Peers criticizes the moralizing tag that follows, spoken by Lord Lovell, as “the most objectionable manner.” By contrast, Webster’s Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi is driven to lycanthropia by remorse after murdering his sister. Peers praises the realism: Ferdinand’s howling and violence against dead bodies arise naturally from his passionate nature, and no commentator intrudes to point a moral.

The Pretenders and the Theatrical Tradition

A full chapter is devoted to characters who feign madness. Peers examines how dramatists distinguished counterfeit insanity from genuine disorder, often through exaggerated or inconsistent behavior. He notes that pretended madness served plot functions—allowing characters to speak truth under cover, to escape danger, or to manipulate others. The essay traces this device from earlier plays through Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Edgar in King Lear, though the excerpts do not reveal Peers’s final conclusions. Readers will find detailed comparisons of how different playwrights signaled pretense to the audience while deceiving other characters onstage.

Melancholy as a Distinct Category

Peers treats melancholy separately from mania and imbecility, recognizing it as a fashionable Elizabethan malady with its own literary conventions. He discusses characters whose melancholy is both a psychological state and a social pose, often linked to love or ambition. The physician in The Pilgrim diagnoses “strange melancholy” and prescribes fresh air and humoral adjustment, a cure that Peers finds “most noteworthy.” The essay distinguishes between tragic melancholy, which deepens character, and comic melancholy, which is mocked or cured. Peers draws on contemporary medical texts to ground his analysis, avoiding anachronistic labels.

Peers’s essay rewards readers who attend to the specific plays he cites. The excerpts suggest that his strongest insights come when he compares treatments of the same type of madness across multiple authors. Because the work is organized by category rather than by play, it functions best as a reference to be consulted alongside the dramas themselves. Readers unfamiliar with the less-known plays—such as The Pilgrim or The Honest Whore—may wish to have summaries at hand.

Reading about how Elizabethan playwrights captured the fragile line between feigned and true madness, I remembered sitting with my grandfather, who’d lent me his worn copy of Tamburlaine the Great — Part 1 — A Reader’s Guide the summer before he passed. That book, like this essay, made me feel the raw ambition behind the verse—the way Tamburlaine’s towering confidence felt almost like its own kind of mania, beautiful and terrifying. Some books don’t just explain a play; they hold it up to the light. Tamburlaine the Great — Part 1 — A Reader’s Guide gave me that same quiet ache of recognition, long before I understood why.