Tristimania (14 page)

We know it is common for writers to have manic depression: we also know it is an illness that asks for audience, a state of mind which is in itself a theatre; it is a communicating, messenger-driven state of mind.

Charles Lamb wrote: ‘It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare,' but I would say that, while it is hard to think of Shakespeare writing while experiencing madness, it seems only too possible to conceive him writing after – or between – episodes. Shakespeare, in Sonnet 147, describes a feverish, dangerous love-sickness as an illness akin to what we'd now call manic depression.
The sonnet's protagonist loses his reason, seeing his thoughts and words ‘as madmen's are', and interprets his beloved in acute polarity, angelizing and demonizing her; he is death-obsessed and sleep-deprived with reckless energy; of this Shakespeare writes five words which stand as a deft description of mania: ‘frantic-mad with evermore unrest'.

The word ‘frantic' meant ‘insane' from the mid-fourteenth century. From the late fifteenth century, it picked up a more specifically manic definition: ‘affected by wild excitement'. It carries meanings of frenetic, frenzied, disjointed or chaotic, and was used later by William Cobbett, describing ‘a man of violent and frantic disposition'.

In
Romeo and Juliet
Mercutio plays a burlesque spirit-messenger as he cries, staccato:

               
Nay, I'll conjure too:

               
Romeo! humours! madman! passion! lover!

In
A Midsummer Night's Dream
those terms have modulated from ‘madman', ‘passion' and ‘lover' to ‘lunatic', ‘lover' and ‘poet' – a threesome familiar to manic depression – as Shakespeare seems to find the common denominator of all three in the frantic frenzy of polarizing moods.

               
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

               
Are of imagination all compact:

               
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

               
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,

               
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:

               
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

               
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.

In part, this follows the Renaissance honouring of
furor poeticus
as Plato and Aristotle understood it: the madness of the poet, the mark of divine inspiration, the ‘fine madness' ‘which rightly should possess a poet's brain', in the words of Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton.

A Midsummer Night's Dream
opens with a portrayal of the rational mind firmly in the world of flat fiat, predetermined lives and predictable laws, the Court of Athens, mean-lipped with its doling-bells, the world of judgement and the awful demand to be only part of yourself.

But it swiftly moves to show the mind's states where dream, imagination, passion, poetry and madness rule, and mania has its day: ‘A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac; find out moonshine, find out moonshine!' We are in the world of Puck the Trickster, the ‘mad spirit', wings at his heels, putting a girdle about the Earth in forty minutes, as fast as mania can trippily switch to depression. He guides and misguides, misleads people in his realm: ‘I am that merry wanderer of the night.' When Shakespeare decided to give his lead female character the name Hermia, he was giving us the clue that we are in Hermes' Trickster territory, and the punning language is a constant reminder of the swirlingly irrational psyche, as when, for example, Demetrius describes himself as ‘wood within this wood', where the first ‘wood' means
wōd,
mad or frantic.

Looking, finding and seeing are themes of the Dream; eyes are crucial. The play conjures a way of seeing which is like the dizzyingly volatile world of mania. Everything is mutable. Puck is a shapeshifter; Titania has a changeling child; lovers alter their loves under an inconstant moon. Everything at every moment is springing, curling, unfurling, grimacing, gurning, clowning. Yet, like the faerie sleight of sight, you can't quite catch anything in the moment
of its transformation, but rather you are aware, from the corner of your eye, that something shimmers and glistens, the play of light on water, a scent-shadow of bluebells at dusk, the essence of
escence,
as it were: something within the very process of its being: iridescence, effervescence, oscillescence, the beauty of instability. But then, imagination, having run riot and created havoc (‘now are frolic'), makes its peace with reason at the end. Returning to one's normal self is like reawakening into the ordinary and looking back on an episode of madness: one sees it ‘But as the fierce vexation of a dream'.

Many people who have known mania and hypomania have a longing for it; it has seduced them, and they miss it when it is gone. The Dream conjures precisely that sense of nostalgia for the mind in its less ordinary states; it reminds me specifically of the nostalgia for mania when an episode is over. Once one has been possessed, temporarily beguiled and bewitched, one may well want to return to the
wōd
woods but must re-enter the sensible Court of Athens, though always taking a peek back over one's shoulder to see if that naughty Puck is still playing a trick or three.

Antonio in
The Merchant of Venice
is a famous example of causeless depression arising of itself, but Solanio introduces the idea of bipolarity, swearing ‘by two-headed Janus' and remarking the extremes of human nature, from the manic characters who would ‘laugh like parrots at a bagpiper' to those who will not, cannot, smile.

Janus, the bi-psyche god, had one face which smiled and one which frowned, as if bipolar were etched in his image. (The jester's marotte, the head on the stick, would often be carved with the two faces of Janus.)

As You Like It
locates polarities of temperament in the two people in fool position: Touchstone and Jaques. The name Touchstone is
interesting: something which tests the true nature of metals and, equally, tests the true mettle of human nature, as manic depression seems to sound out and detest what is fake, untrue or inauthentic. The role of the jester, of course, is similar: a tester of the fake and a touchstone who has the privilege – and capacity – to speak home truths. Touchstone – merry, mad and wearing motley – represents mania. Jaques – melancholy, philosophizing and dressed in black – stands for depression, as the play notes:

       
Rosalind
: They say you are a melancholy fellow.

       
Jaques
: I am so; I do love it better than laughing.

       
Rosalind
: Those that are in extremity of either are abominable fellows.

To my ear, these lines have the tone of an in-joke, suggesting accustomed exasperation on the part of Shakespeare or perhaps one of his players, knowing manic depression like a visitor: both familiar and (sometimes) unwelcome.

Of course, Shakespeare may have been abstractly curious about melancholy, known as ‘the Elizabethan malady', and, of course, too, it may be the case that Shakespeare did not experience manic depression himself but, rather, closely observed others who did, perhaps including Robert Armin, his clever clown, who is thought to have joined Shakespeare's players in 1599 and given new depth to Shakespeare's fools.

‘If any player breathed who could explore with Shakespeare the shadows and fitful flashes of the borderland of insanity, that player was Armin,' wrote John Leslie Hotson in
Shakespeare's Motley
in 1952. Add to that the fact that he was a solo comedian and a writer, thought to be the author of a pamphlet called ‘A Pil to Purge
Melancholie', published in 1599, and it looks like Armin is seriously lining up the black, in terms of manic depression. Armin was by trade a goldsmith, giving resonance to his playing (and probably co-creating) the character of Touchstone, that tool of the goldsmith's trade. He also played Feste, Lear's Fool, the Porter in
Macbeth,
the Fool in
Timon of Athens
and Autolycus. Armin was fool-fascinated, exploring all aspects of clowning, interested in the ‘philosopher-fool', the jester and the zany. He wrote about the distinction between a fool artificial and a fool natural, which delighted Ken Kesey (himself the creator of that fool natural McMurphy). A true fool natural, says Kesey, ‘never stops being a fool to save himself; he never tries to do anything but anger his master, Sir William. A fool artificial is always trying to please; he's a lackey. Ronald McDonald is a fool artificial. Hunter Thompson is a fool natural.'

Hamlet
is a portrait of the psyche at stress. Famously, Hamlet suffers nightmares, hallucinations, volatility, aggression and grandiosity, coupled with bleak misery as he thinks of suicide. These combined characteristics are an acute rendition of manic depression, though of course it is a moot point whether Hamlet is truly suffering madness or making a pretence of it. Shakespeare doffs his cap to Timothy Bright's
Treatise of Melancholy
(1586) as Bright writes that ‘the air meet for melancholic folk ought to be . . . open and patent to all winds . . . especially to the South, and South-east,' while Hamlet says, ‘I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.'

King Lear
can be read as a portrait of manic depression. Lear is impetuous, speedy, agitated, excessive in generosity, poor in judgement, irritable, grandiose, and suffers hallucinations. Shakespeare, in setting part of the play in a storm, makes real a frequent metaphor of the manic psyche, that the onset of madness is like a storm and
that the mind's metaphoric world surpasses the actual world in intensity and significance:

                         
The tempest in my mind

                         
Doth from my senses take all feeling else

                         
Save what beats there.

In lines which are heartbreakingly apt for anyone who has known what it is like to cross the threshold of sanity while retaining insight sufficient to fear it, Lear cries out:

                         
O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven;

                         
Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

For Lear, as for many in psychosis, a partial recovery comes through sleep, but even sleep cannot, ultimately, protect him.

Timon's character also seems an astute portrait of manic depression. He spends money recklessly until he is bankrupt; his sociability and speediness are excessive; his connectivity extreme: he is impulsive in generosity and hyperbolic in describing it.

                         
Methinks, I could deal kingdoms to my friends,

                         
And ne'er be weary.

His judgement is poor – ‘Unwisely, not ignobly, have I given' – and, equally unwisely, he gives himself false consolation, believing ‘I am wealthy in my friends.' Not so. As they disperse like mist in sunshine, he falls into an isolated and angry depression.

And then there's Cleopatra, queen of the mood-swingers. One of Shakespeare's later plays,
Antony and Cleopatra
evidences his
ongoing fascination with mercuriality. Cleopatra is volatile, contradictory, emotionally vast, and her language loves extremes: ‘Eternity was in our lips and eyes.' She is given to violence and finally commits suicide in flaming language:

                         
I am fire and air; my other elements

                         
I give to baser life.

It is impossible not to see in Cleopatra the temperament of manic depression, but in
The Winter's Tale
Shakespeare locates bipolarity not in a character but in the play itself, with its first half Tragedy and second Comedy, hinged on the central character of Autolycus as every winter's tale is hinged at the door of January, Janus the two-headed, and as theatre itself is symbolized by two faces, one tragic, one comic.

And I, meanwhile, was also at the hinge of the year, my mind ajar in January.

It was in the dark days of January that I became feverish to write the poetry of this madness. I felt a ferocious need to transmute the pain, to translate the fury and glory from inside to outside.

On the first and maddest night of this episode, Mercury had got the upper hand and had recklessly sent me mad. I had begged not to be sent incurably mad. He looked hell-bent on ignoring my plea, so I had pinioned him to the ground with drugs.

One night, half asleep, I dreamt of a woman saying:

– It's the pylons, Jay.

And I understood the metaphorical truth of that image. The electrical currents in my brain which should be flowing had shorted, the neurotransmitters (the chemical messengers) had gone berserk and an electrical fire was almost out of control. Almost. The antipsychotics and mood stabilizers were firefighting. I was caught between the wisdom of sanity and the beguiling compulsion of madness. The leaflet with the pills I was taking said they ‘correct the functioning of the neurotransmitters'.
Take that, Mercury.
But he prowled, only half corrected, through my nights and days, making each one last a year. He cast spells of furious intensity, such messages from my memories that I was shocked into childhood. I was all the ages of my life, in one breathless present.