His counsel now might do me golden service : For though my soul disputes well with my sense, That this may be some error, but no madness, Yet doth this accident and flood of fortune
So far exceed all instance, all discourse,
That I am ready to distrust mine eyes, And wrangle with my reason, that persuades me To any other trust, but that I am mad, Or else the lady's mad ; and yet, if 't were so, She could not sway her house, command her followers, Take and give back affairs, and their despatch, With such a smooth, discreet, and stable bearing, As, I perceive, she does : there 's something in 't That is deceivable.” It is however no better a test of madness than
that
applied by Cassio, to prove his state of sobriety. “Do not think, gentlemen, I am drunk : this is my Ancient ; This is my right hand, and this is my left.” Angrily as Constance rejects the idea of madness, yet she is mad ; the very type of acute reasoning mania. In real life the intellect would scarcely be so consistent and consecutive in its operations; but in real life neither sane nor insane people talk blank verse, and express even their deepest emotions in the magnificent imagery which great poets use. The raving of maniacal frenzy, in which the emotions are exclusively involved, would be represented by short and broken sentences, in which every link in the idea-chain would not be expressed, and which would therefore represent, more or less the features of incoherence. The poet fills up these chasms in the sense, and clothes the whole in the glowing language of excited intellectual power; and thus we have in Constance the representation of a frenzied woman, speaking with more arrangement of ideas, than frenzy really permits. King Philip bids her bind up her tresses, which she has
been madly tearing with her own hands to prove herself not mad.
These tresses,
