Songs of Madness: The Lyric Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Poor Tom

Summary

'To sing publikely, is by a kinde of tolleration, permitted only to beggars'

Henry Chettle, Kind-Hartes Dreame

In Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler (1653), written nearly five decades after the first appearance, in 1605, of Shakespeare's Poor Tom in King Lear, Piscator promises Coridon that 'I'll sing a song that was lately made at my request, by Mr William Basse, one that hath made the choice songs of the Hunter in his cariere, and of Tom of Bedlam, and many others of note'. In the nineteenth century, Isaac Disraeli claimed that 'Poems composed in the character of a Tom-o'-Bedlam appear to have formed a fashionable class of poetry among the wits; they seem to have held together their poetical contests, and some of these writers became celebrated for their successful efforts [here he cites Walton]'. And writing after Disraeli, William Chappell observed of one ballad, “This is the song which, under the name of Mad Tom, was much sung in theatres, and in other public places . . . until within about thirty years ago [i.e. the 1840s]”. In this article, I want to examine how, and why, the destitute figure of Poor Tom of Bedlam - in Shakespeare, a complex emblem of suffering, poverty, displacement, and, in part, histrionic counterfeiting - was transformed into a music-hall entertainer, a subject of 'poetical contests' for fashionable 'wits'.