“Bless Us All, ‘Tis A Mad World”: Mad Tom O’ Bedlam, Music, And The Politic Of Noise In Seventeenth-Century London

Abstract

Music and noise often operated as divergent sonic experiences for those living in seventeenth-century London. The degree to which people thought of music as noise often depended on the stylistic conventions of heavily class-inscribed music such as courtly dances. Music for rural dances, including folk/traditional music, was far more often associated with disorderly characters such as beggars and vagabonds. However, music and noise operated on a spectrum of sonic experiences that often ran parallel to notions of social and political disorder. This dissertation explores the connections between music, sound, and the politics of noise through a study of Poor Tom o’ Bedlam, or Mad Tom, and the sonic environment of Bethlem Hospital. This includes a history of Tom from the sixteenth-century rogue pamphlets and William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606) to Restoration broadside ballads and eighteenth-century political pamphlets. Through analysis and close reading of music, images, and texts associated with Mad Tom, it becomes clear that the circular associations of madness, noise, and disorder in his songs run parallel to wider attitudes toward the poor, street culture, and class in London. Finally, these associations survived well into the eighteenth century and still impact how people think of madness, noise, and politics today.