Making Madnesses in Early Modern England (RSA Boston, March 20-22, 2025)
In John Ford’s raucous tragicomedy, The Lover’s Melancholy (1628), the proto-psychiatrist Corax attempts an experimental treatment on his forlorn melancholic patients: he stages a masque – acted by the allegorical figures of psychic ailments, including Dotage, Phrenitis, Hypochondria, St. Vitus’ Dance, Hydrophobia (rabies), and Lycanthropia (the delusion that you’ve transformed into a wolf) – in order to shake his afflicted clients out of their melancholic funk. Pulling from Robert Burton’s massive tome, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Ford’s play showcases the sheer variety of madnesses – even within a subgenre such as “melancholy” – that were active, endemic, and of great dramatic interest in early modern England.