Critics

Question 1

Will Tosh

Answer 1

‘Shakespeare and madness’
- “rejected or unsatisfied lovers were thought to be at risk of mental collapse”
LINK to Shakespeare’s play ‘As you like it’
= ‘Love is merely a madness’= character of Rosalind represents harmful nature of romantic love

Question 2

Maurice and Hanna Charney

Answer 2

Advance a feminist interpretation of madness on Elizabethan stage
- “she is no longer enforced to keep silent and play the dutiful daughter”
- “her madness allows her to assert her being”
LINK to Macbeth
= saner women often oppressed, uses madness in women like Lady Macbeth to release and highlight their emotional powers

Question 3

Elaine Showalter

Answer 3

Ophelia’s “madness is caused by her unrequited love and repressed sexual desires”

Question 4

A. D. Nuttall

Answer 4

‘The pleasure of Tragedy’
- “Madness is to some degree a punishment or doom”

Question 5

AC Bradley

Answer 5

‘Shakespearean Tragedy (1904)’
- Hamlet’s madness is “pretended and purposeful” and is “a mask behind which he can act with impunity.”
- “Hamlet is not a man of action, he is a man of thought”
- “He is not merely concerned with his own private wrongs but with the very nature of human existence, the problems of life and death, and the morality of revenge.”

Question 6

Greenblatt

Answer 6

‘Who’s There?’ article
= ABOUT PURGATORY AND GHOSTS!!!
- “the apparitions that men and women encountered from time to time […] were mere delusions or, still worse, they were devils in disguise, come to tempt their victims to sin”