Insanity in Shakespeare's Plays

Presumably it is between 421 and 416 BC Euripides has represented The Madness of Heracles, whose main action is based on the misfortunes of Heracles who, having bravely performed his twelve labors returns home and is condemned by the will of Hera in avenging a fit of insanity during which he kills his own people. After Geoffrey of Monmouth, Holinshed and John Higgins, William Shakespeare in 1605 resumed the story of King Lear who goes mad because of selfish cruelty of his daughters. He played this tragedy in five acts titled King Lear for the first time in 1606. For the first time in 1922 in Milan, Luigi Pirandello's play is a tragedy in three acts by Henry IV. He treats a subject that has continued to fascinate him: the insanity of a hero who fights constantly with his own ghosts. Each of his three works dealt with the problem of personality with an original special that makes the topic is raised every time very differently. The common main works is that they are all written texts for a dramatic adaptation based on the resemblance between the actor and his character (Cox, Pp. 23-45). But these texts are also adapted to please a public that is easier to handle if he is deported from theater to reality is the reason for the insanity is represented on a stage that maintains a ratio of resemblance with reality. But beyond the theatrical illusion, Shakespeare plays with the illusion that everyone is feeling the fool, the chimera of his inner world and his inner truth.

These parts are the representatives of the greatest periods of drama that are each illustrated by an ideological project and this project is rooted in writing and is then relayed by the scene, so that the events of the play and their arrangement act on the spectator. Identification of viewer that is played before it starts with the credibility of the theatrical work.

For the conversion of the state of the viewer to witness state can truly be accomplished, it is imperative that whoever attends the show believes in the reality of things, speech and behavior reproduced on the stage. Thus, Shakespeare strive to carefully insert the imaginary reality in which the audience saw through the illusion created by the sets, costumes or aesthetic impressions sought by the use of certain techniques.

The fact that Shakespeare intentionally dive back into the viewer's real environment clearly expresses their teaching projects and their stated intentions to action on the public. They make regular and acceptable that ordinary consciousness and consider inadmissible cache: insanity. Insanity becomes an external reference and the viewer must judge as witness the refusal of reality that comes from the behavior of the protagonists, madmen who questions everything (Salkeld, Pp. 66-73). Shakespeare offer viewers a complete reversal tends to be, thanks to the theatrical illusion that the world we live in is not what we believe. The outside world of Henry IV is apparently that of ...