Shakespeare and the Courts

BENJAMIN REISS: In the nineteenth century, psychiatrists were often called to testify in legal cases. Isaac Ray, who was the superintendent first at a state-run asylum in Maine, and then a private asylum in Rhode Island, was considered the foremost expert on psychiatric matters as they pertained to law. And he counseled other psychiatrists to turn frequently to great literature, and specifically to Shakespeare, to give examples of the kinds of problems that people who came before the law might face.

So, for instance, if they wanted to establish that somebody had only recently become fully insane—say, an older person who had never manifested any signs of mental illness until the past year or two, at which point this person wrote a will that was contested—the psychiatrists were enjoined to explain to the jurors or to the judge that King Lear himself had shown no signs of insanity, or shown very few signs of insanity until late in life, but that if you read the play very carefully, you could see in those early conversations he has with his daughters, that something was beginning to go amiss, and it was only an environmental trigger, specifically the storm sequence, that led him to go fully over the edge.

Another famous case that they referred to was the case of Hamlet. The asylum superintendents agreed almost unanimously that Hamlet really was mad, but the point they wanted to make, and it was a very important one for them, was that he had a partial madness. That it was possible to be completely sane in the majority of one's behaviors and dealings with others, and to have a mental illness that was isolated to either a certain part of the brain or to certain realms of experience and thought, and that this explained why so many people considered Hamlet not really to be mad, because he only acted crazy part of the time.