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Author Neely, Carol Thomas, 1939-

Title Distracted subjects : madness and gender in Shakespeare and early modern culture / Carol Thomas Neely
Published Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2004
© 2004

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Description 1 online resource (xiii, 244 pages) : illustrations
Contents Introduction: Divisions in the discourses of distraction -- Initiating madness onstage: Gammer Gurton's Needle and The Spanish Tragedy -- Reading the language of distraction: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear -- Diagnosing women's melancholy: case histories and the Jailer's Daughter's Cure in The Two Noble Kinsmen -- Destablizing lovesickness, gender, and sexuality: Twelfth Night and As You Like It -- Confining madmen and transgressing boundaries: The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night -- Rethinking confinement in Early Modern England: The place of bedlam in history and drama -- Epilogue: Then and now
Summary In the first book to provide a feminist analysis of early modern madness, Carol Thomas Neely reveals the mobility and heterogeneity of discourses of "distraction," the most common term for the condition in late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Distracted Subjects shows how changing ideas of madness that circulated through medical, dramatic, and political texts transformed and gendered subjectivities. Supernatural causation is denied, new diagnoses appear, and stage representations proliferate. Drama sometimes leads and sometimes follows other cultural discourses-or forges its own prophetic figures of distraction. The Spanish Tragedy first links madness to masculine tragic self-representation, and Hamlet invents a language to dramatize feminine somatic illness. Innovative women's melancholy is theorized in medical and witchcraft treatises and then elaborated in the extended portrait of the Jailer's Daughter's distraction in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Lovesickness, newly diagnosed in women, demands novel cures, and allows expressions of transgressive sexual desire in treatises and in plays such as As You Like It. The rituals of possession and exorcism, intensely debated off stage, are mocked and exploited on stage in reiterated comic scenes of confinement that madden men to enhance women's power. Neely's final chapter provides a startling challenge to the critically alluring analogy between Bedlam and the early modern stage by documenting that Bethlem hospital offered care, not spectacle, whereas stage Bedlamites served metatheatrical and prophylactic, not mimetic, ends. An epilogue places this particular historical moment within the longer history of madness and shows how our own attitudes toward distraction are haunted by those earlier debates and representations
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-235) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
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Print version record
Subject Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Characters -- Mentally ill
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Knowledge -- Psychology
SUBJECT Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Knowledge -- Psychology
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Characters -- Mentally ill
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. fast (OCoLC)fst00029048
Shakespeare, William 1564-1616 gnd
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Characters -- Mentally ill. nli
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Knowledge -- Psychology. nli
Shakespeare, William. swd
Subject Mental illness -- England -- History -- 16th century
Mental illness -- England -- History -- 17th century
Literature and mental illness -- England
Psychoanalysis and literature -- England
Mental illness in literature.
Mentally ill in literature.
Sex role in literature.
Health attitudes.
Drama.
Gender identity.
Medicine -- History -- 17th century.
Medicine in literature.
Mental Disorders -- history
Attitude to Health
Drama
Gender Identity
History, 16th Century
History, 17th Century
Medicine in Literature
plays (performing arts compositions)
sex role.
PSYCHOLOGY -- History.
Medicine in literature.
Medicine.
Health attitudes.
Gender identity.
Drama.
Literature and mental illness.
Mental illness.
Mental illness in literature.
Mentally ill in literature.
Psychoanalysis and literature.
Psychology.
Sex role in literature.
Drama
Englisch
Geschlechterrolle Motiv
Wahnsinn Motiv
Mental illness -- Great Britain -- History.
Literature and mental illness -- Great Britain -- History.
Psychoanalysis and literature -- Great Britain.
Mental illness in literature.
Mentally ill in literature.
Sex role in literature.
SUBJECT United Kingdom
Subject England.
Genre/Form History.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2003024991
ISBN 9781501729133
1501729136