ECT in Shakespeare's King Lear

In an interpretation of KING LEAR to students during a class in Al-al-Bayt University back in 1999, I said that the play arouses in us the feeling that things in the course of time increase, widen and deepen that we feel lost the more we try to control them. Later I brought up the same topic with a colleague, a professor of physics, and he agreed with me quoting The Quraan انا له لموسعون"We are ever enlarging the universe", meaning the universe is ever-widening and broadening. Earlier, I had read that madness is a state where the atoms of the brain disintegrate and flow out of control and it is the function of ECT (Electro Convulsion Treatement) popularly known as electric shock. Shakespeare, in King Lear who goes mad, dramatised ECT. After an ECT dose, patients become unconscious and when they come to they wonder where they are and what has happened to them. An ECT dose creates a state of temporary death. Cf: Lear when Cordelia rouses him after the physician had treated him with a sedative herb. Says Lear addressing Coredelia: "You do me wrong to take me out of the grave. I may be a fond old man, but I think you are my child Cordelia."Towards the closing years of the eighteenth century, there appeared a race of men-of-letters who badly needed doses of ECT, and a quick list would include Mary Lamb, William Cowper, John Clare and Christopher Smart. The Marquis de Sade was their contemporary across the le Manch between Dover and Calais. In the 2000 Hollywood film,"Quills", the Marquis de Sade receives a sort of primitive ECT treatment. It is a fiendish irony that in King Lear this area figures, and in my communication 24 hours ago I brought up the topic of King Lear's madness which required an ECT dose. Among twentieth-century authors who took ECT doses, introduced by two Italian doctors in 1933, were Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and Robert Lowell. Actress Vivien Leigh, 2nd Mrs Laurence Olivier, twice-Oscar winner as Scarlet O'Hara in Gone with the Wind in 1939 and as Blanche de Bouis in A Streetcar Named desire in 1953 took ECT doses more frequenly than she saw her dentist. Sometimes she would take a dose after finishing a performance on the stage near mid-night, to come back following evening to appear on the stage