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The artistic and scholarly output of the time alone testifies to its popularity, as it was the subject of numerous late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century treatises, and figured into some of the age's most popular plays.
Shakespeare wrote in an age which witnesses an "intense and sustained struggle...to redefine the central values of society" and the relationship between this struggle and the fascination with madness goes beyond simple coincidence.
Madness, though primarily a source of spectacle for the Jacobean masses, was nonetheless implicated in the "medical, legal, theological, political, and social aspects of the reconceptualization of the human."
The Renaissance was a time which sought, if not to totally redefine, then at least refine the definition of madness, separating it from its traditional unions with the supernatural, the spiritual, and the criminal (witchcraft and fraud, for instance).
It was, in short, no small part of the values struggle. In the wake of some important scholarship which investigates madness in the Renaissance critics have been quick to praise Shakespeare for his "faithful reproductions" of madness as it was defined by his society and as it has been transmitted to us through the medical treatises and notebooks of the time.
Indeed, Shakespeare himself seems caught up in the fascination of the times, treating madness, in one form or another, in a variety of his plays: "toying" with it early on in The Comedy of Errors and presenting a virtual study of it in Hamlet and King Lear.
In these later plays, and particularly in King Lear, Shakespeare's mad characters are remarkably realistic. Shakespeare, however, doesn't simply reproduce anything. As Stephen Greenblatt observes, "...the closer Shakespeare seems to a source, the more faithfully he reproduces it on stage, the more devastating and decisive his transformation of it" even and especially if that source is reality itself. Shakespeare's art doesn't simply imitate life, it integrates life, and transforms it to throw back a commentary on it.
Brad Campbell
"Reason in madness!"
Shakespeare's Re-Presentation of Madness in King Lear.
Shakespeare writes for an audience fascinated with madness.