What Elizabethan playwrights learned from the Greek classics was not theories of insanity, but dramatic practice - that is, madness is a dandy theatrical element. It focuses the audience's attention and increases suspense, since you never know what a mad person may get up to next; and Shakespeare himself makes use of it in many forms. In King Lear, there's a scene in which one man pretending to be mad, another who has really gone mad, and a third who has probably always been a little addled, are brought together for purposes of comparison, irony, pathos, and tour de force acting. In Hamlet, there are two variations - Hamlet himself, who assumes madness, and Ophelia, who really does go winsomely bonkers. In MacBeth, it's Lady MacBeth who snaps.

However, there are all sorts of behaviours in the Bible that might be called mad now, but aren't designated as insanity by the text itself. People see visions …

When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

For a thousand years, the Bible was almost the only book people read, if they could read at all. The stories that were officially told and portrayed were Bibli…

Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

From the American retelling of Romeo and Juliet in West Side Story to the Japanese adaptation of King Lear in Ran, Shakespeare's cultural influence is virtuall…

A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.