The Spanish Tragedy Madness Quotes

This may sound more like depression than madness, but the ruler of a nation throwing himself on the ground in despair would register as mental instability to Elizabethans. Try to picture our President crying on the floor. You'd probably conclude that he was having issues, right?

And we know these issues are all in the Viceroy's head. He's freaking out because he thinks his son is dead. But there is zero evidence that his son is even hurt. One of his most trusted advisors even said there's more reasons to think his son is alive rather than dead. Of course the advisor's audacious positivity almost gets him killed, which is our first hint that the play takes place in a mad, mad world where being crazy is the safest bet.

It's like Alice in Wonderland, where the one sane person among a bunch of crazies begins to think she's the one losing her mind. The point of the video is to show that a crazy queen (or king) means a crazy system for everyone else. And the above quote lets us know that we've gone through the looking glass.

So the first part of this passage says something like, "the cloudy day looks like how I feel inside." And, "my dreams drive me to look for the murderer." But try and figure out what the rest is saying. Not gonna happen, right? It's more a disjointed list than rational thought. Perhaps this is the language of emerging insanity?

Michel Foucault (major philosopher dude) thought and wrote a lot about crazy talk in the late 60s. He even made an attempt to write about madness by using the language of the insane. But he soon realized he couldn't rely on "those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was originally made." That's philosophy talk for, "If I write in crazy talk nobody will know what I'm saying." Well, maybe Kyd's trying the same thing here. If you need to make someone sound crazy, you have to use stammered, imperfect words. We're trying to say that Hieronimo might be losing his grip here. Interested in the philosophy of crazy? Read Foucault's Madness and Civilization.

The 16th century happened long before the invention of modern psychology. But here we get Isabella straining for a cure for her mental unease. She's talking to her nurse about how there's medicine to cure eye infections and even headaches, but none to cure a broken heart. Of course we now know that mental instability doesn't happen in the heart, but Renaissance medicine had yet to locate mental disease.

In fact, it's even remarkable that Isabella expresses her mental unraveling as a disease that needs a cure. She thinks of her madness as a kind of death that needs a cure, but alas, she's the first to realize that there is no cure for the tragic loss of a son. The play charts Isabella's and Hieronimo's mental instability in a way that allows us to ponder the differences and similarities in their respective nervous breakdowns. Isabella tends to act out inwardly while Hieronimo vents outwardly. What does this say about femininity and masculinity in the period?