『정숙한 창녀 1부』에 드러난 광기
Insanity Represented in The Honest Whore Part 1
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This paper explores the possibility of reading The Honest Whore Part 1 with the keyword of insanity in mind, providing a whole framework to the play which has often been criticized for the lack of coherence in terms of both its themes and main characters. Insanity is, as Michael MacDonald argues, the most solitary affliction for the victims but the most social malady for the specific society where he/she belongs, as insanity isolates its victims in terms of the conventions of behavior, thought, and emotion that bind the members of a society together. The Honest Whore Part 1 can be read through insanity, as every character, at the final scene, converges on the Bethlehem, the asylum for the insane, showing that they are related to madness in some way or another, and even in the course of the play, the main characters show some sign of madness. Hippolyto, detained from marrying his lover, Infelice, by her fake death and funeral directed by the Duke, her father, falls into melancholy. His melancholy is represented as a gentle disease, appropriate for the aristocracy and gentry. However, his melancholy does not display any sign of the exalted state of the spirit, contrary to the typical view of it in the period. Viola, the wife of Candido, is another character who shows some symptoms of madness. Her insanity takes the form of hysteria, which was considered the result of wandering womb. She shows the characteristics of a hysterical wife, but Dekker and Middleton embody her insanity not only as a distinctive woman’s disease but also a justifiable response to her over-patient husband, Candido. Through the representation of Viola’s unreasonable behavior toward Candido, the dramatists let open the other side of the merchant’s ideological background, the pursuit of profit at all odds. Finally, Bellafront is also associated with madness by incarcerating herself voluntarily in the Bethlehem to everybody’s surprise. Her feigned madness is an inevitable choice for her as she has no place to go when she tries to flee from “the undoing city.” As soon as she seeks to abandon her identity as a prostitute and join respectable society, she is only rebuked and rejected. Her dislocation to the Bethlehem is symbolic of what options people at the margin of the society could have once they were expelled from that society. In sum, Dekker and Middleton dramatize each character’s insanity as a class-appropriate response to social stress. In addition, by gathering all the characters to the Bethlehem at the final scene, Dekker and Middleton go as far as to explore several implications around the insanity: what makes the gap between sanity and insanity in this specific society: where the theatricality of the madness originates: how the display of madness is appropriated by the ruling class to contain the disorder and confusion. In this way, The Honest Whore Part 1 actively participates and negotiates in the debate of the early modern England on “the confused, charged, and contested topic of madness.”
Abstract
This paper explores the possibility of reading The Honest Whore Part 1 with the keyword of insanity in mind, providing a whole framework to the play which has often been criticized for the lack of coherence in terms of both its themes and main characters. Insanity is, as Michael MacDonald argues, the most solitary affliction for the victims but the most social malady for the specific society where he/she belongs, as insanity isolates its victims in terms of the conventions of behavior, thought, and emotion that bind the members of a society together. The Honest Whore Part 1 can be read through insanity, as every character, at the final scene, converges on the Bethlehem, the asylum for the insane, showing that they are related to madness in some way or another, and even in the course of the play, the main characters show some sign of madness. Hippolyto, detained from marrying his lover, Infelice, by her fake death and funeral directed by the Duke, her father, falls into melancholy. His melancholy is represented as a gentle disease, appropriate for the aristocracy and gentry. However, his melancholy does not display any sign of the exalted state of the spirit, contrary to the typical view of it in the period. Viola, the wife of Candido, is another character who shows some symptoms of madness. Her insanity takes the form of hysteria, which was considered the result of wandering womb. She shows the characteristics of a hysterical wife, but Dekker and Middleton embody her insanity not only as a distinctive woman’s disease but also a justifiable response to her over-patient husband, Candido. Through the representation of Viola’s unreasonable behavior toward Candido, the dramatists let open the other side of the merchant’s ideological background, the pursuit of profit at all odds. Finally, Bellafront is also associated with madness by incarcerating herself voluntarily in the Bethlehem to everybody’s surprise. Her feigned madness is an inevitable choice for her as she has no place to go when she tries to flee from “the undoing city.” As soon as she seeks to abandon her identity as a prostitute and join respectable society, she is only rebuked and rejected. Her dislocation to the Bethlehem is symbolic of what options people at the margin of the society could have once they were expelled from that society. In sum, Dekker and Middleton dramatize each character’s insanity as a class-appropriate response to social stress. In addition, by gathering all the characters to the Bethlehem at the final scene, Dekker and Middleton go as far as to explore several implications around the insanity: what makes the gap between sanity and insanity in this specific society: where the theatricality of the madness originates: how the display of madness is appropriated by the ruling class to contain the disorder and confusion. In this way, The Honest Whore Part 1 actively participates and negotiates in the debate of the early modern England on “the confused, charged, and contested topic of madness.”
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