Greek tragedy had hidden mad behaviour from view but the dramatic and violent consequences, even though not held up as spectacle, remained a powerful and compelling antithesis of the good. In contradistinction, comic madness in Greco-Roman comedy was treated with levity, rendered innocuous and enacted to full public gaze. Plautus in The Brothers Menaechmus had begun the process of demystifying the signs of madness by placing sideby-side professional and lay views. This process was fully explored and exploited by Shakespeare in varying degrees in Othello, Hamlet and King Lear.

It is obvious, as Meisel says, that:

The problem for the playwright is how to signal madness, a rare condition that is neither seen nor interpreted daily by the audience. In Shakespeare, the action, the body and the language carry the weight of this task. In this chapter, I will examine Shakespeare's treatment of madness in Othello, The Winter's Tale, Hamlet and King Lear. These four plays reveal different aspects of madness: the induction of madness by manipulation of the social world; inexplicable madness that distorts reality; factitious madness that serves the protagonist's purpose and by implication inaugurates for the audience the symbols that denote madness; folly and its relationship to madness; and the tragedy of the disintegration of mental life.

Green-eyed monster

In Othello, Shakespeare explores the nature of jealousy, the boundaries of understandable jealousy and its violent consequences. This treatment of jealousy differs from that in The Winter's Tale, where it is inexplicable and has not arisen by trickery or understandable antecedents. Jealousy is a complex emotion.