What can be learnt about madness from plays? This work believes that playgoers can learn as much about madness at the theatre as from textbooks of psychiatry, and that the understanding plays give of madness is all the more vivid because the events are presented dramatically, evoking feelings as well as intellectual curiosity. It discusses the account given by playwrights of the madness afflicting such diverse characters as Orestes, Oedipus, Hamlet, King Lear, Dr Faustus, Peer Gynt, Alving, Ivanov and Blanche Dubois. The madness depicted in plays is put into the context of the crucial...