Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Greek tragedy and models of madness
- 2 Greco-Roman comedy and folly
- 3 Jealousy the green-eyed monster and madness in Shakespeare
- 4 Ibsen and the domestication of madness
- 5 Tennessee Williams and the theatre of the mind
- 6 Soyinka's theatre of the shadowlands
- 7 Sarah Kane: the self in fission
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Greek tragedy and models of madness
- 2 Greco-Roman comedy and folly
- 3 Jealousy the green-eyed monster and madness in Shakespeare
- 4 Ibsen and the domestication of madness
- 5 Tennessee Williams and the theatre of the mind
- 6 Soyinka's theatre of the shadowlands
- 7 Sarah Kane: the self in fission
- Index
Summary
The self is usually conceived as singular, retaining its identity continuously over time and having a distinct boundary separating it from other objects and selves (beings) in the world. Furthermore, there is self-awareness of vitality and of activity. Now, these characteristic elements of the self are retained in all the dramatic characters that we have examined. The personalities may exhibit deviant, aberrant behaviour, they may be homicidal or violent, their behaviour may have been irrational in the sense that it failed to meet some criterion of logic and reason. Yet, the characters themselves are coherent and whole individuals. In Sarah Kane's works we come before a different kind of person, one that is in fission. Even the dramatic voices at one stage become disembodied and appear to be emanating from a self in disintegration.
The 20th century saw the emergence of individuals who appeared to have multiple personalities, a condition that challenges our natural intuitions about the unity of the self. The first of these cases was Miss Beauchamp, described by Morton Prince in 1905. Prince wrote:
‘Miss Christine L. Beauchamp, the subject of this study, is a person in whom several personalities have become developed; that is to say, she may change personality from time to time, often from hour to hour, and with each change her character becomes transformed and her memories altered. In addition to the real, original or normal self, the self that was born and which was intended by nature to be, she may be anyone of the three persons. I say different, because, although making use of the same body, each nevertheless, has distinctly different character: a difference manifested by different trains of thought, by different views, and temperament, and by different acquisitive tastes, habits, experiences, and memories.’
Prince went further to say:
‘no one secondary personality preserves the whole psychical life of the individual. The synthesis of the original consciousness known as the personal ego is broken up, so to speak, and shorn of some of its memories, perceptions, acquisitions, or modes of reaction to the environment.’
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- Chapter
- Information
- Madness at the Theatre , pp. 83 - 96Publisher: Royal College of PsychiatristsFirst published in: 2017