https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=156 Madness, Mimesis and Theatricality The early modern perception of madness was influenced by social codes and medical, as well as religious, beliefs. The representations of madness on the early seventeenth-century stage reflected a number of these perceptions, but also provided the spectators with certain keys for deciphering the spectacles of madness which abounded, thanks, for instance, to Bedlam hospital and the performing of exorcism by Puritan preachers, as well as Catholic priests. Madness generated anxiety in a society whose strict social, religious and political codes were hardly compatible with the shifting status of the distracted subject. Similarly disturbing elements were sexual ambivalence and supposed manifestations of the supernatural. All these are linked with the metadramatic dimension of stage performance. The treatment of madness in King Lear includes the emergence of a dichotomy in dramatic space and the loss of mental bearings by Lear and Gloucester. Because of the dramatic irony in their presentation, their madness stands out as the symptom of their inability to appreciate the rules of theatricality. Just as sanity and madness are linked with dramatic space, the issue from the spectator’s point of view is one of distance and proximity, not quite in Weimann’s terms of stage geography, with a division between locus and platea, but rather in terms of dramatic illusion and dramatic awareness. The spatial dichotomy is paralleled by a dichotomy between the characters who master the art of theatrical illusion and those who fall victim to it. The former adopt disguises and keep their sanity, though they may feign madness; the latter go mad in exposing pseudo-miracles as theatrical frauds, so that belief is defined as interpretive madness, and the absolute power of theatrical performance on its spectators is demonstrated. Shakespeare en devenir N°3 — 2009 fr jeu., 28 janv. 2010 15:41:55 +0100 jeu., 28 janv. 2010 15:41:55 +0100 https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=156 0