The old man, the fool and the madman: On the representation of madness in King Lear
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Abstract
This essay intends to demonstrate that the approach to madness in King Lear can be divided in three interrelated manifestations, corresponding to three characters: Lear, Poor Tom and the Fool. The first becomes mad as a result of senility and emotional shock, the second feigns the madness of a possessed person, and the third ironically uses nonsensical statements to tell uncomfortable truths. Through these characters, competing forms of explanation of madness appear on the scene: the medical one, which is based on the concept of melancholy; the religious one, which associated it with demonic possession; and the satirical one, which saw madness as the counterpart of rational knowledge. Using Erasmus’ Praise of Folly and Foucault’s History of Madness, the hypothesis defended in the essay is that Shakespeare combined different sides of the experience of madness present in the artistic manifestations of early modernity, thus revealing a dialectical relationship between madness and wisdom.
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