Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899Various
History
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Niceforus has shown how Dante in his Inferno has delineated in the
damned the characteristics which my school gives to the born criminal.
Shakespeare has done better, and has divined many criminal
characteristics through the greater intensity of the crime in the
criminal woman. Virile even when compared with the criminal man, Lady
Macbeth is crueler than her husband, and, more than that, has many of
the characteristics of men:
"Bring forth men-children only,
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males."
And Macbeth, as cool in the crime as the artful contriver of it, is
hysterical and hypnotic, and in the accesses reproduces the acts and
words of the tragedy, showing that the author knew that hysterics and
somnambulists often repeat the acts and the emotions which mark the
climax of their malady.
Hamlet has the folly of doubts and hallucinations, simulates the
ravings of a madman, but in his suspicious cunning discovers and
anticipates what is contemplated to his harm, is homicidal through
fear, and is yet often discreet, and a good lover, save that his love
vanishes before the fixed idea.
In Ophelia, disappointed love, the contact with a madman or a
pretended one, the death of her father almost under her very eyes,
provoke a species of madness which would now be called mental
confusion, with vague ideas of persecution, dim recollections of love
betrayed and of her father, incoherent and confused expressions ending
in automatic suicide. This confirms our conclusions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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