 |
Shakespeare and the Insane Asylum |
Today, we rarely hear the term “insane asylum” outside of a horror movie. In the mid-1800s, however, it had a somewhat more positive meaning. Doctors in the new field of psychiatry hoped to study, treat, and cure their patients in the asylums, which were intended as shelters from the stress of modern life. To them, the fact that some patients were held against their will was not important, since the patients were insane.
The public, however, was more skeptical about the asylums—and the entire notion of psychiatry. Professor Benjamin Reiss explores how early American psychiatrists and asylum superintendents often used the name of Shakespeare in journal articles and court testimony to win support for their ideas. Shakespeare was presented as a medical genius who had anticipated the discoveries of modern psychiatry, and fictional characters like Lear and Hamlet were treated as the equivalent of real-life case studies.
 |
Benjamin Reiss
Associate professor of English, Emory University Shakespeare the naturalist
|
|
||||||||||
The problem of circular reasoning
|
|
|||||||||||
Shakespeare and the courts
|
|
|||||||||||
Tests of insanity from Hamlet
|
|
|||||||||||
