singing madness in Restoration Drama

The featuring of mad characters on the English stage can be traced as far back as the first dramatic performances in the Elizabethan Age, and more predominantly throughout the seventeenth century. Theatrical insanity reflects the Renaissance attraction and interest in melancholy and mental illnesses, and becomes an arena where tortured psyches interact and express themselves. Madness seems somehow related to music in the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as part of this more generalised interest, but the reformed Restoration stage is to recall this tradition and develop it into a completely new musical achievement: the mad song. This paper analyses Restoration mad songs as a landmark in the evolution of the conception of madness, in terms of its relationship to music as an expressive means. On the basis of early-seventeenth century dramatic performances and contemporary treatises on melancholy (Burton), the analysis will focus on Restoration madness as a climatic receptor of this tradition and the ways it transforms it. The attraction that Early Modern England held for melancholy and madness, at times synonymous terms, is now widely recognised. In particular, the period from 1580 to 1640 witnesses the heyday of this fascination. In those decades madness was all pervasive, and the interest in the topic can be traced in various cultural instances: medical treatises, like those of Burton or Bright; in the recurrent references to Bethlehem Hospital, Bedlam; or in the mad characters in the plays of Kyd, Shakespeare, Fletcher, Dekker