Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/242

Rh good and discreet physician, who had baffled the Queen's intended poisonings. “Hail great king !

To sour your happiness I must report The Queen is dead.

Cymbeline. Whom worse than a physician Would this report become But I consider, By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death . Will seize the doctor too.

How ended she

Cor. With horror, madly dying like herself, Who being cruel to the world, concluded Most cruel to herself.” The death of the noble minded wife of Brutus is a distant

terror like that of Constance. Impatience at the absence of her husband, and grief at the growing power of his enemies,

induce the frenzy of despair and suicide. “With this she fell distract, And her attendants absent, swallowed fire.”

In all the deaths of all the plays, a long bill of mortality indeed, there is only one instance in which all the horrors of a bad end are laid bare, namely, in that of the Cardinal Beau fort. In King John's death, physical anguish alone is ex pressed, and this with such beauty and force of language as to veil the foul reality of death by a corrosive poison. Constance even more than Lear establishes the fact that

Shakespeare held the origin and nature of insanity to be emotional.

Until the last there is no delusion, scarcely a

deviation from reason, and yet she is conducted through a tempest of emotional disturbance into the very midst of maniacal excitement. All the causes of disease are purely emotional. The predisposing cause is her fiercely passionate disposition. The exciting cause is grief. The symptoms are the same as the causes, transformed into abnormal conditions

of degree. Disorder in the wit is felt, but scarcely exhibited. Loss of control over the operation of the intellect is mani Q’