A Foucaultian Interpretation Of Madness In Shakespeare’s Tragedies

Among William Shakespeare’s tragedies, Hamlet (1603), Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1606) are the zenith of world literature, in which madness reaches epidemic proportions, since a lot of mad characters come to the fore and get a vivid portrayal of their psychological activities by Shakespeare. There are real mad characters and false mad ones in the four tragedies, but a detailed analysis is only given to the real mad ones via Michel Foucault’s proposed definition of madness in Madness and Civilization. The mad characters drawn from this definition are Ophelia, King Lear, and Lady Macbeth, which is also in accordance with Shakespeare’s depiction in the four tragedies. Thus, an extensive interpretation is chosen to center on these three representative mad characters. By virtue of Foucault’s classification and identification of madness, the thesis explores the varieties and causes of their madness. Seemingly unrelated to each other, they exhibit some common features in mental aberrations. Madness in them is mobility of reason in that though considered to be insane, they endeavor to make sense of their inner life and are able to discover the truth in life. This proves that in Shakespearean tragedies, madness is not absolutely inferior to reason; instead, it sparkles with wisdom and truth. Another absorbing feature of madness is that these characters’madness serves as a bridge for the confounding of traitors and restoration of order in these tragedies.In the view of Foucault, there is an incessant dialogue between madness and reason in the Renaissance drama. Madness or folly acts in the circle of truth and reason, evidence of which can be discovered in Shakespeare’s great tragedies. Madness is not an accidental event in Shakespeare’s tragedies, but an avenue to articulate mad characters’ anxiety of their existence, as well as an effective means for Shakespeare to convey his anxiety about the social crisis and philosophical thinking about the human activities in his era.In Shakespearean tragedies, madness leads people to tackle social issues, take care of their inner selves, think about weakness in human nature, and be aware of the significance of love and justice. While, ironically, reason should be responsible for the matters. This makes it rational to conclude that in the age of Renaissance, sometimes madness is closer to truth than reason, thus is more likely to discover problems and resolve them. Just as what Foucault illustrates, madness is the mobility of reason and marks people’s introspection towards the human existence itself.