Introduction: Divisions in the Discourses of Distraction -- Chapter 1. Initiating Madness Onstage: Gammer Gurton's Needle and The Spanish Tragedy -- Chapter 2. Reading the Language of Distraction: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear -- Chapter 3. Diagnosing Women's Melancholy: Case Histories and the Jailer's Daughter's Cure in The Two Noble Kinsmen -- Chapter 4. Destabilizing Lovesickness, Gender, and Sexuality: Twelfth Night and As You Like It -- Chapter 5. Confining Madmen and Transgressing Boundaries: The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night -- Chapter 6. Rethinking Confinement in Early Modern England: The Place of Bedlam in History and Drama Epilogue.