“A Mad, Burning Desire” highlights the extraordinary accomplishments of the first English actresses who gained the legal right to take the public stage in the early 1660s. Many of these groundbreaking early modern women capitalized on the concurrent societal fascination with mental illness and catapulted themselves to fame by portraying characters who descended violently into lovesick madness on the Restoration stage. Precisely what the term “madness” meant at the time is difficult to define. Writers often used the words “madness,” “melancholy,” “lovesickness,” and “frenzy” somewhat interchangeably to describe a host of symptoms that ranged from “raving without a fever” to “fear and sadness, evil thoughts without any cause” and “sometimes laughing, singing, then sad, fearful, rash, doating, crying out, threatening, skipping, leaping, then serious, etc.” While the definitions of madness in the seventeenth century are not uniform, most early modern physician-scholars did agree that the cause of such psychological distress was imbalance in the four bodily humors. One of the inherent challenges of understanding the concept of madness at this time is a lack of primary source accounts from diverse perspectives. At the same time that mad characters were being paraded across the English stage to great critical acclaim, first-hand stories and experiences of the very real individuals who suffered from madness were reduced to silence and are consequently lost to history; the silencing of the “mad” — a theme that has regrettably been almost constant across history — was no less operative at this time.

Such silence no doubt rendered the very vocal fall of dramatic characters into madness all the more intriguing to audiences, not least because there was also a growing interest in studying madness and mental illness around this time. Across the course of the seventeenth century, English philosophers and medical experts alike began to think of madness and other psychological maladies as medical conditions rather than spiritual deficiencies. At the visual epicenter of Restoration-era London’s cultural fascination with madness was Bethlehem Royal Hospital (Bedlam), which was transformed from a dilapidated hospital into a sprawling mental institution with space for over 200 patients in 1676. The entrance gate of the new facility was flanked with vivid and foreboding stone carvings of “Melancholy Madness” and “Raving Madness” by Caius Gabriel Cibber. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, visitors could put a donation in the “poors’ box” to observe those society had deemed insane. The reasons for these visits varied, but the inmates of Bedlam provided an element of spectacle and entertainment for those who paid a penny or more to come watch them. 

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The practice of female characters singing madness on the English stage began with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the character of Ophelia. Ophelia famously succumbs to feminine erotic madness after being rejected by Hamlet. Clad in a loose white dress and “playing on a Lute, and her hair down singing,” she talks in riddles and rhymes and sings several bawdy ballads about death and losing her virginity. This crucial moment in the theatrical canon stitched together madness, music and sexuality — in the form of the character’s exposed body and suggestively wild hair— into a complex that would endure for centuries. When women were finally granted the legal right to play female characters in 1662 it was both a significant step for women’s professional advancement and also fraught with political and sexual tension. The very presence of women on the public stage sparked numerous social, religious, and legal debates throughout western Europe in the seventeenth century. From those who decried the immorality of female performers to those who fetishized, courted, and even raped them, most Restoration-era Englishmen seemed to have strong opinions about the women on stage. The very act of appearing on stage subjected seventeenth-century women to having their personal lives enmeshed with their public personae, and the lines between an actresses’s character on stage and her own personality were often blurred in the perception of the public. Working as a professional singer and actress in the Restoration theater was not considered to be an acceptable profession for “respectable” Englishwomen, and the actress as whore trope born out of earlier European traditions of female courtesans entertaining guests with music, drama, and sex was heightened by the presence of women on the Restoration stage.

It was within this complicated system of thought about gender roles and psychological conditions that the Restoration-era mad song rose to popularity. While opera was flourishing in France and the Italian regions in the late seventeenth century, the English remained primarily interested in spoken theatrical plays, many of which contained instrumental music and songs added throughout the drama. Frequently when a character would experience madness in a play, he or she would sing an elaborate mad song. Written for characters in both tragedies and comedies, mad songs featured extreme and rapid changes of mood, incoherent repeated text, abrupt modulations, and fantastical imagery. Male and female characters were liable to succumb to madness in different ways. Madmen either genuinely experience madness due to heartache or vengeful wrath at external circumstances and overcome it to triumph in power, or they briefly fake madness for their own gains. In contrast, the vast majority of female mad characters are shown as solitary in their plights, elicit pathetic pity from the audience, are weak in either character or restraint, and are almost always destroyed by their madness.

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The opening set of mad songs on today’s program are from Thomas D’Urfey’s stage play The Comical History of Don Quixote, which was performed in three parts in 1694 and 1695. Each song created a sensation at its premiere and remained popular well into the eighteenth century. Anne Bracegirdle was by far the most famous singer-actress in London during her career. Her trademark characteristic was that she boldly claimed to remain a virgin, which was both an anomaly for a seventeenth-century actress and also seemed to heighten the public’s fascination with her. In 1692, Charles Lord Mohun was so infatuated with Bracegirdle that he attempted to abduct and presumably rape her. He was unsuccessful and proceeded to go on a jealous rampage that ended with the murder of actor William Mountfort, who Mohun suspected of being romantically involved with Bracegirdle. This level of spectacle and titulation followed Bracegirdle throughout her career. Her performance of “I Burn, My Brain Consumes to Ashes,” which depicts the quintessential female descending into lovesick madness on the stage, garnered rave reviews. In fact it was so beloved that D’Urfey wrote a laudatory poem about her performance of the work in which he himself goes mad over the experience of watching Bracegirdle sing “I Burn.” This poem was then set by both Henry Purcell and Gottfried Finger in the mad songs that are the second set of songs on this program. “From Rosy Bow’rs,” the last song that Purcell wrote before his death, was performed by the young singer-actress Letitia Cross. While Bracegirdle’s performance resulted in its own type of public hysteria, Cross received a poor review and that part of the play was considered to be a flop. Perhaps her unpopularity was due to the fact that Cross’s character Altisidora does not actually experience lovesick madness. Rather she pretends to go mad in order to manipulate the male hero Don Quixote. “Let the Dreadful Engines” was sung by the male mad character Cardenio (played by John Bowman) who is both devastated and furious that his beloved Lucinda has left him to join a convent. In typical fashion, the song ends with a misogynistic rant in which he blames all women for his problems.

John Blow’s mad song “Lysander, I Pursue in Vain” is one of the few mad songs from the period that was not intended for a stage work, and it is Blow’s only known mad song. It was likely written for the soprano and lutenist Arabella Hunt whose virtues were celebrated by a number of early modern writers, including Blow himself who said “she reigns alone, is Queen of Musick by the People’s choice.” Unlike the other singers on today’s program who were thought of as low-class for their appearances on the public stage, Hunt enjoyed the patronage of Queen Mary II and was a respected member of London society. Her personal life was not without scandal, however, as she apparently unknowingly married a woman who was posing as a man. The marriage was annulled six months later, and rather than remarrying Hunt continued her career as a court musician.

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“Beneath a Poplar’s Shadow” was part of a 1693 revival of Nathaniel Lee’s play Sohponisba. The priestess Cumanna enters the stage scratching her face, stabbing a dagger into her arms, and with spirits following her. As she sings her mad song, she endeavors to induce a trance on those around her. The intense contrasts between each section in the song convey an illogical and deranged state of mind. As a playwright Lee was uniquely positioned to depict mental illness on the stage because he spent five years in Bedlam recovering from a period in time when his mind allegedly became completely unhinged after his patrons neglected him. After being released from his confinement he lamented, “"They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.”

Anne Bracegirdle also gave voice to the premier of “Haste, Give Me Wings” in Thomas Randolph’s The Fickle Shepherdess. Her character was the shepherd Amintas, and once again Bracegirdle was lavishly praised for her performance, especially because the trousers she wore for the role allowed audience members the chance to see the shape of her legs, a feature that was obscured when she portrayed female characters on stage. “Bess of Bedlam” was Henry Purcell’s first mad song, and while excerpts of it were intended for several plays it was never performed in its entirety in a theatrical production. The text was inspired by earlier 17th-century ballad texts “Tom O’ Bedlam” and “Forth from My Sad and Darksome Cell.” The Bedlamite characters Tom and Maud (or Bess in this case) made frequent appearances in the popular culture of the broadside ballads that swept England in the 17th century and were likely the inspiration for numerous mad characters on the Restoration stage.

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In Italian “la follia” means “madness,” and in music a popular early modern ground bass was given the name “La Folia.” This theme was the basis for numerous improvisations and compositions. C.P.E. Bach opens his rendition with a simple setting of the theme followed by a series of increasing complex, or even possibly mad, variations. Several variations of C.P.E.’s setting as well as Bernardo Pasquini’s setting will be played between each set of mad songs on today’s program.

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Bedlam was an institution shrouded in controversy for decades. In addition to conflicts over ownership and management, the seventeenth century and later centuries saw a number of patients wrongfully detained in Bedlam. These included attempts by husbands to control wives, and family members to embezzle fortunes from heirs among other criminal acts that forced perfectly sane individuals into confinement for months or even years, thereby destroying their reputations and stripping them of legal rights. While these incidents were not the norm, they, along with the often brutal and inhumane treatment of the mentaly ill for centuries, are part of Bedlam’s complex history. While mental health issues in contemporary society are fortunately no longer the source of entertainment that they were for early moderns, living with mental health issues today is often brutally stigmatized, frequently leaving those who are most vulnerable without adequate support and care. By looking back at this snapshot view of madness in seventeenth-century London, we can examine the ways in which cultural values have both remained stagnant and also shifted so that we can be more equipped to advocate for better mental health care treatment and awareness.

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— Paula Maust, 2019

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