Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/267

250 “Benvolio. Why Romeo art thou mad : Romeo. Not mad, but bound more than a madman is : Shut up in prison: kept without food,

Whipp'd and tormented.” In “As you like it,” Rosalind incidently refers to the treatment of insanity.

“Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do: and the reason

why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.” Malvolio only gets the half of Rosalind's recipe, which he endures without exciting much commiseration; a fact which may lead to the reflection that the ill-treatment of a

real madman is an offence of very different colour to a frolic, however mischievous, with a vain egotistical coxcomb like Malvolio, or a drunken humorist like Sly. A sane man who has behaved himself like a madman, deserves some sort of

punishment; the misfortune of real disease claims ever enduring forbearance and kindness; from whence it results that the interests of an insane person, who has really suffered

ill treatment, and those of a sane person who has brought upon himself the imputation of insanity, are very far from being identical. -

In the frolic of Twelfth Night, Shakespeare prefaces his character for the imputation of madness, with the same skill he has elsewhere displayed in Saying the ground plan for the reality. unalloyed egot in of the major-domo' at



first vents itself in a querulousºttack on the Fook-and on those who ºugh at his folly. Aſhe is one of those men to

º:

self-impºrtant is an insult. Olivia gives the key nôte-of. Missisposition; a testy temper mea whose

suring all things by the rule of his narrow self-esteem.

“Oli. O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite. To be generous, guiltless, and of free