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Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture.

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Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture By Carol Thomas Neely Ithaca, NY: Cornel] University Press, 2004

Carol Thomas Neely's richly nuanced and fascinating study of discourses of madness examines the unstable and multiple conceptions of mental disorder prominent in drama, medical documents, and historical records in England during 1576-1632, challenging misconceptions about the period, pinpointing innovations, and providing a broad framework for the topic. While many historians and literary critics have joined Foucault in claiming that conceptions of madness remained essentially static throughout the period, Neely powerfully argues for heterogeneity and change. Nor is madness distinctively female, as some feminists have held, though gender is important as "a constituent category of analysis that shapes the complementary construction of male and female disorders" (9). Madness is not even a dominant or unified term. Rather, early modern discourses of madness employed a rich, varied, sometimes confusing vocabulary for disordered mental states. As her title suggests, Neely prefers "distraction," a term she uses to conjure up a more historically nuanced way of thinking about the period's attitudes. Distraction named an extreme, but usually temporary, form of mental derangement. Distracted persons raved; they had lost their wits; they saw things that were not there. Yet they were expected to recover and return to themselves. Like other terms for mental disorder at the time ("frenzied," "lunatic," "lovesick," and so on), "distract" most commonly occurred as an adjective, describing behavior, not a fixed identity or innate condition.

Neely does not present a strictly linear chronology of change. As she wisely points out, "The precise path by which new ideas circulate cannot be perfectly mapped" (8). Drama, medicine, and other cultural formations at times converge, at other times move in sharply different directions. Broadly speaking, however, Neely shows us that a general process of secularization and medicalization was going on in the period, as early moderns drew on Galen and Aristotle "to rethink the parameters of the human by reimagining madness" (1) and to reconceptualize "the boundaries between natural and supernatural, masculinity and femininity, body and mind, feigned and actual distraction" (2). Distracted subjects became a compelling focus of inquiry and representation. New languages for the mad were deployed onstage,...

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