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Shakespeare & Beyond

The madness of Hamlet and King Lear: When psychiatrists used Shakespeare to argue legal definitions of insanity in the courtroom

King Lear, III, 2. Johann Heinrich Ramberg. 19th century. Folger Shakespeare Library.
King Lear, III, 2. Johann Heinrich Ramberg. 19th century. Folger Shakespeare Library.
King Lear, shown here in the middle of a storm, is a Shakespeare character associated with madness.

King Lear, III, 2. Johann Heinrich Ramberg. 19th century. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Well-known Shakespeare characters such as King Lear and Hamlet suffer (or appear to suffer) from madness — and early American psychiatrists took note. Observations drawn from literature began to bleed into courtroom testimony regarding insanity pleas.

“From the mid-1840s through about the mid-1860s in the United States, during the first generation of American psychiatry, no figure was cited as an authority on insanity and mental functioning more frequently than William Shakespeare,” according to Benjamin Reiss, the author of a book called Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture.

Reiss, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English at Emory University, was interviewed for the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast by Rebecca Sheir for an episode about Shakespeare and insane asylums. See an excerpt from the interview below, with Sheir’s interjections and questions in bold.

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