Falk’s Reviews > Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience > Status Update

"Between one in ten and one in five Americans (one in ten to one in five senators and congressmen, corporate executives and employees, college professors, lawyers, physicians and psychiatrists, scientists, school teachers, soldiers, military officers, etc) are likely to become and be, as another age - less inclined to euphemisms but more sensitive to human suffering - would put it, mad." 550

"Goethe, more than anyone else, was responsible for making madness an ideal. Werther was much more than a literary event—it was a social phenomenon with remarkably widespread and very grave consequences. The.. book.. fulfilled a tremendous need among the readers.. for an acceptable interpretation of the misery they could not escape, an interpretation, in other words, that would make their suffering sufferable." 484

"Goethe, more than anyone else, was responsible for making madness an ideal. Werther was much more than a literary event—it was a social phenomenon with remarkably widespread and very grave consequences. The.. book.. fulfilled a tremendous need among the readers.. for an acceptable interpretation of the misery they could not escape, an interpretation, in other words, that would make their suffering sufferable." 484

"The use of madness on the Jacobean stage, writes Reed in the book specifically devoted to this subject ['Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage'], was “abnormally extensive.”..." (368)
--- Interesting discussion of Shakespeare's Lear and Hamlet (a.o.) along with, to name one, Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy'..