A health librarian at the theatre: Twelfth Night

Part of our lockdown routine is to watch the National Theatre Live performances on YouTube, and last week it was a recording of a performance of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

I managed to get through school without reading any Shakespeare, aided by the fact that I dropped English as fast as I could after O levels (that's what GCSEs used to be, in case you are not sure!)

I came round in the end to the idea of English literature, and did an A level as an adult. I enjoyed that a lot, so the lesson there is not to give up completely on a subject!  For A level, I read Hamlet, and one theme in that is that of madness.

And it turns up in Twelfth Night too.   Malvolio is persuaded to dress in yellow stockings and cross garters as a trick, and there follows a scene where he is blindfolded and secluded as a lunatic.    (In the NT performance, Malvolio becomes a woman and is called Malvolia).

After we had watched, I, as one does, wondered if anyone had written anything in the medical and health journal literature about Malvolio specifically.   Apparently not, not that I could find in PubMed or Web of Science.   Actually there are references in PubMed to Malvolio, but this is because it is a gene studied in beetles and in Drosophila.  Google comes to our rescue and finds other sorts of literature:

First, a thesis by Caroline van Thienen presented for the degree of Master in taal- en letterkunde Engels at the Universiteit te Gent, and available in their repository.   There is a chapter on Twelfth Night, with a section about Malvolio.

Then, there's "Documents in Madness": Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Early Modern Culture, in Shakespeare Quarterly by Carol Thomas Neely.  There is a little bit of discussion of Twelfth Night, and a lot about ideas of madness at the time, although the article is mostly about other Shakespeare plays.  (This I ought to have found in Web of Science, although it is not specifically about Twelfth Night or Malvolio).   

And last a book by Derek Russell Davies, Scenes of madness: a psychiatrist at the theatre.  The author's argument is that mental health professionals can learn from playwrights, and there is discussion of Malvolio in the conclusion.

References

Davies, D.R. (1992).  Scenes of madness: a psychiatrist at the theatre.  London: Routledge.

Neely, C. (1991). "Documents in Madness": Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Early Modern Culture. Shakespeare Quarterly, 42(3), 315-338. doi:10.2307/2870846

van Thienen, C. (2014). The Use of Madness in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Macbeth: A Study of Disorder as Dramatised in the Shakespearean Plays.  Masterthesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de taal- en letterkunde Engels”.  Gent: Universiteit Gent.  Available from https://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/002/162/564/RUG01-002162564_2014_0001_AC.pdf.  Accessed 25th April 2020.