This journey charts the course of loyalty to family and to the king in Gloucester and Kent, and loyalty to a sense of justice in Lear himself. He loses it, then finds it again in his madness. This value is built in the face of destruction, a cruel destruction of the foolish which only The Bacchai can match. It is affirmed in Lear s far off contortions of raging madness, and his deathbed vision of the wheel of fire. The issue of madness is focused at the very center of the play, on the storming heath.
Madness is also an issue raised by Hickey at the end of Iceman.
Perhaps it was insanity which led him, Hickey claims, desperately to curse his wife Evelyn after he killed her. That is liberation, that is triumph. It is indeed a triumph, I want to argue, but in the context of what I want to call the tragedy of muted revelries, the tragedy that arises where the comic march takes us not to health but confusion, not to love but to hatred or jealousy or obsession. What results is the maiming of the rite, the wretched funeral of Ophelia that we can elevate only by melodramatic gestures and grand speeches. It is I, Hamlet the Dane, says the prince as he leaps into the grave, at last seeing himself for who he is, someone trapped in the net of death.