Excessive Grief the Enemy to the Living
But died thy sister of her love, my boy?
Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 4
Duke Orsino’s question to Cesario about the fate of his sister is not one of incredulity at the cause of death, but a genuine concern that such intense emotion could potentially be fatal. Orsino was not alone in being worried about the dangerous effects of strong emotion. Several Shakespearean characters talk of the possibility – ‘excessive grief the enemy to the living’ (All’s Well That Ends Well), ‘Since that my beauty cannot please his eye, I’ll weep what’s left away, and weeping die’ (Comedy of Errors).
According to the playwright they were right to be worried. Shakespeare’s plays are littered with the bodies of characters that have died of grief, remorse, love or some other strong emotion. More than one character appears to die of a guilty conscience. For example, in Richard II the ‘Abbot of Westminster, / With clog of conscience and sour melancholy / Hath yielded up his body to the grave’. Mostly, the reports of these deaths are taken at face value, details aren’t asked for, and the validity of the statement is not questioned – it seems to be an accepted fact that such things can happen.
Shakespeare was writing at a time when physical well-being and emotion were wrapped up together in the humoural theory of health (see Chapter 3). According to the medical theories of the age, it might be expected that emotion could disrupt the normal equilibrium of the body to an extent that could kill. At a time when the true causes of disease and death were not well understood it could be that the Bard was in fact talking about some symptom of a physical disease that was misinterpreted, or he may have been exaggerating for dramatic effect. But it could also be that he rightly understood that strong emotions can kill.
Fortunately, Shakespeare’s plays contain some clues as to what might be going on. Some characters have their symptoms described, offering an opportunity for modern interpretations of cause of death. And, though most of the characters that are killed in this manner are fictional, some were real figures from history. The historical record can be consulted to see if he was merely repeating the accepted explanation of the time or offering his own interpretation of symptoms and circumstances described by chroniclers.
* * *
The fact that emotion can have a physical effect on the body is no surprise. Fainting through fear or over-excitement is well known, from fans swooning at the sight of their idol, to passing out at the fear of needles or the sight of blood. The modern medical term for this is vasovagal syncope; the heart rate slows, blood vessels in the legs dilate and blood drains to the lower extremities. The drop in blood pressure and reduced flow of blood to the brain causes the pale complexion: ‘he’ll swoon! Why look you pale?’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost) – and there is light-headedness and fainting – ‘I should rejoice now at this happy news; / And now my sight fails, and my brain is giddy’ (Henry IV Part II). In these cases there is normally a full recovery within minutes without the need for medical intervention.
There are more than two dozen examples of swooning or fainting in Shakespeare’s plays. He has monarchs, ordinary folk, and men as well as women collapse from emotion or the sight of some horrible bloody scene, for example Lady Macbeth’s collapse after the discovery of Duncan’s murdered body. There are also a range of emotional triggers. In The Winter’s Tale, Hermione swoons from grief at news of the death of her son – ‘Her heart is but o’ercharged; she will recover’. In King Lear, blind Gloucester faints from fear when he believes he has fallen from a cliff edge. In Pericles, Thaisa faints with joy when reunited with her husband and daughter.
Thaisa’s unconscious state is mistaken by Pericles for death. He isn’t being melodramatic; mistaking a faint for death is common in Shakespeare’s plays. A similar event in Much Ado About Nothing sees Hero faint, not from joy, but in response to an angry accusation of infidelity and threats from her father. Again, those gathered around her unconscious body believe she is dead. Fortunately for both Thaisa and Hero, they make a full recovery. Other characters are not so lucky.
Hero’s situation is similar to a real-life case in Germany in 1856. A girl collapsed and died after being publicly berated by a teacher.1 This was the first recorded case of ‘long QT syndrome’, a condition that causes irregular electrical activity in the heart. Mental or physical stress can create an irregular heartbeat resulting in sudden collapse with no other signs or symptoms. Without medical intervention after a collapse, death is likely. Long QT syndrome can be inherited but it can also be caused by certain medications.
Another cause of sudden unexplained cardiac deaths in young people is catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT). It is a genetic disorder, first described in 1960, that affects proteins controlling the concentration of calcium in the heart – an element essential for allowing heart cells to contract and create a heartbeat. Exercise or emotional stress can lead to blackouts or even cardiac arrest. Both long QT syndrome and CPVT predominantly affect young people.
Either of these two conditions could explain the sudden death of Mamillius, the young son of Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. Mamillius is still a child when he hears of the imprisonment of his mother and the news kills him: ‘The prince your son, with mere conceit and fear / Of the queen’s speed, is gone.’
* * *
However, Shakespeare does not confine his emotional deaths to the younger generation. In King Lear, Gloucester, an older man who has already suffered considerable physical and emotional stress – he was tortured by having his eyes gouged out – is exiled and is later tricked into believing he is about to walk off a cliff edge. Gloucester is in an understandably fragile state when he is eventually reunited with his estranged son. The emotional stress of the reunion proves too much for him: ‘But his flaw’d heart / (Alack, too weak the conflict to support!) / ’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / Burst smilingly.’ Edgar’s report of the death gives some hint at a possible physical cause, a flawed heart.
Older people may be less likely to die from long QT syndrome or CPVT, but the effect of strong emotion and physical torture would have an understandably deleterious effect on their health. In the case of Gloucester perhaps a pre-existing heart condition could turn fatal after his harsh recent experiences. The reasons behind other adult deaths in Shakespeare’s play are less well described, relying purely on emotional factors.
In Romeo and Juliet Lady Montague’s death is reported by her husband: ‘Alas, my liege, my wife is dead to-night; / Grief of my son’s exile hath stopp’d her breath’, but no further details are given. Her death is overshadowed by the tragedy discovered in the Capulet tomb. Similarly, in Cymbeline, Leonatus’s death from grief is reported as a statement of fact: ‘this gentleman in question, / Two other sons, who in the wars o’ the time / Died with their swords in hand; for which their father, / Then old and fond of issue, took such sorrow / That he quit being’. In Othello, Brabantio dies because ‘pure grief / Shore his old thread in twain’. Grief seems to be sufficient explanation for these deaths.
Another possible death from emotional causes is that of Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra. Although he dies onstage there is little indication in the dialogue, and no stage direction, to indicate precisely how:
O sovereign mistress of true melancholy,
The poisonous damp of night disponge upon me,
That life, a very rebel to my will,
May hang no longer on me: throw my heart
Against the flint and hardness of my fault:
Which, being dried with grief, will break to powder,
And finish all foul thoughts. O Antony,
Nobler than my revolt is infamous,
Forgive me in thine own particular;
But let the world rank me in register
A master-leaver and a fugitive:
O Antony! O Antony!
[Dies]
Enobarbus is clearly very emotional and his death is usually attributed to remorse for betraying Antony, but there are no physical symptoms described. He does not commit suicide; the guards who find his body see no sign of injury and at first assume he is sleeping. It seems Enobarbus is simply able to wish his life at an end.
Shakespeare hadn’t run out of ideas; he was being faithful to the true history of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, or at least the version of events written in Plutarch’s Lives, which Shakespeare used as the source for much of the play Antony and Cleopatra. Ahenobarbus was a politician, general and friend of Mark Antony, but he defected to Augustus’s side at the Battle of Actium. He didn’t fight though. He died, according to Plutarch, a few days after he reached Augustus from ‘the shame of his disloyalty and treachery being exposed’.
Such a sudden death in an adult, without obvious signs or symptoms, might be explained by apical ballooning syndrome, a condition causing dangerous changes in the heart. In most cases it occurs after an incident of extreme mental or physical stress. Another name for the condition is takotsubo cardiomyopathy, after the Japanese word for an octopus pot. The shape of the octopus pot, with a narrow neck and a round bottom, is similar to the shape of the deformed left ventricle of the heart as it balloons. The left ventricle of the heart pumps oxygenated blood round the body and when it balloons it doesn’t contract efficiently. The mechanism of how the heart can be physically altered by dramatic changes in emotion is still poorly understood.
Because the condition can be triggered by a recent sudden bereavement, it is more popularly known as ‘broken heart syndrome’. Whatever you call it, the condition affects only a tiny percentage of the population. There are usually severe chest pains, breathlessness and collapse. Apart from grief, other triggers can also include domestic abuse, financial worries or debt, physical assault or illness, though occasionally no source of stress is identified. Most cases occur in women over 50, though it has been seen in much younger women and in men. The death of Lady Montague, though perhaps not yet in her fifties, would be a classic candidate for the condition. However, since its discovery it has been rarely shown to be fatal. The heart usually returns to normal within days or weeks without any treatment. Things might not have had such a good outcome before general health care could support the patient while they recover.
The deaths of Gloucester, Lady Montague and Enobarbus all occur rapidly with no extended period of change in health preceding their deaths, or certainly none that is mentioned. The suffering of other characters, however, is more prolonged. The behaviour of Doctor Pace in Henry VIII, Lady Constance in King John, and most famously Lady Macbeth in Macbeth changes dramatically owing to stress. In the plays their deaths are directly linked to their changed emotional state, or as young Lucius puts it in Titus Andronicus, ‘Extremity of griefs would make men mad’.
* * *
In Henry VIII, Doctor Pace is a former secretary to the King. He never makes an appearance onstage, but his history is discussed between Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Campeius: ‘you envied him, / And fearing he would rise, he was so virtuous, / Kept him a foreign man still; which so grieved him, / That he ran mad and died.’ It is only a brief mention of what seems to have been a prolonged change in mental health brought on by stress that led to death.
In real life this character was Richard Pace, a diplomat who was sent on several important assignments in Europe before being recalled to England in 1526. He was simultaneously Dean of St Paul’s, Salisbury and Exeter. In February 1536, it is reported that Pace was to be supported in his role as Dean by Richard Sampson because his ‘mental imbecility for many years past has interfered with the due government of the cathedral’. He died a few months later at the age of 54. This may have been a case of early-onset dementia but Shakespeare’s account of his death is certainly not inconsistent with the historical record.
Considerably more poetic licence was taken in King John where Lady Constance and her son Arthur are portrayed. Constance, Duchess of Brittany, really was the mother of Arthur, the claimant to the English throne in opposition to King John. He was only 15 when he led a campaign against his uncle but was captured and held prisoner at Rouen Castle where he is believed to have died (see Chapter 9). In Shakespeare’s account, Lady Constance’s agonised laments and despair over the separation from her son and his mistreatment are among the most memorable parts of the play.2 Shakespeare probably wrote Constance’s harrowing lines some time in 1596, the year Hamnet, his 11-year-old son, died:
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?
Fare you well: had you such a loss as I,
I could give better comfort than you do.
I will not keep this form upon my head,
When there is such disorder in my wit.
O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son!
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!
My widow-comfort, and my sorrows’ cure!
Other characters in the play think Constance’s grief has changed into something else: ‘Lady, you utter madness, and not sorrow.’
To lose your sense of who you are was taken as a sign of madness. For example, in The Taming of the Shrew, Christopher Sly is tricked into thinking he is a rich nobleman. Not understanding why everyone around him calls him ‘honour’ and ‘lordship’, he protests, ‘What, would you make me mad? Am not I Christopher Sly, old Sly’s son of Burton Heath; by birth a pedlar, by education a cardmaker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker?’ In King John, Constance uses a similar tactic, knowledge of who she is, as proof she is not mad:
I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine;
My name is Constance; I was Geoffrey’s wife;
Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost:
I am not mad: I would to heaven I were!
For then, ’tis like I should forget myself …
She may not be mad in any delusional sense but she is clearly distressed and suicidal: ‘My reasonable part produces reason / How I may be deliver’d of these woes, / And teaches me to kill or hang myself’. Two scenes later a messenger reports that ‘The Lady Constance in a frenzy died’.
If Constance had carried out her threats of suicide it might be expected her death would be reported as such. Instead the word ‘frenzy’ is used. The modern definition of frenzy – a period of uncontrolled excitement or wild behaviour – is different from the sixteenth-century understanding. The word is derived from the word ‘phrenesis’, described by Philip Barrough in 1593 as a ‘continual madness’ joined with acute fever – a physical as well as mental disorder. Although it might have several causes and manifestations (Barrough classified three types of phrenesis according to the mental functions that might be affected), it was a specific diagnosis and considered an incurable and deadly condition.3
Shakespeare may have been making a sophisticated medical diagnosis, but he was slipshod with his historical accuracy. The real-life Lady Constance died on 5 September 1201, almost a year before Arthur was captured and imprisoned. The cause of her death has variously been given as leprosy or complications during childbirth, but not ‘frenzy’. In Holinshed’s Chronicles Queen Elinor, King John’s mother, is also said to have died of grief and ‘anguish of mind’. In fact Elinor (Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine) died three years after Constance in her early eighties. She had supported John in his fight against Arthur for the crown, and after Arthur’s capture (see Chapter 9) returned to England and spent her remaining years as a nun. In the play, the deaths of Elinor and Constance are reported in the same sentence. Shakespeare deliberately or accidentally conflated the two.
He may also have felt they both needed a more dramatic ending and perhaps took inspiration from another real-life figure, such as Cardinal Beaufort. It is said the Cardinal died in a state of delirium, offering England’s treasury to Death in return for living a little longer.4 In Henry VI Part II, written before King John, Shakespeare depicts the death of Cardinal Beaufort more graphically:
Cardinal Beaufort is at point of death;
For suddenly a grievous sickness took him,
That makes him gasp and stare and catch the air,
Blaspheming God and cursing men on earth.
Sometimes he talks as if Duke Humphrey’s ghost
Were by his side; sometime he calls the king,
And whispers to his pillow, as to him,
The secrets of his overcharged soul;
And I am sent to tell his majesty
That even now he cries aloud for him.
The explanation for the Cardinal’s disturbing cause of death is given by Warwick: ‘So bad a death argues a monstrous life.’ It was thought that sin, or remorse for a sinful life, could have life-threatening psychological and physical effects. The line ‘See, how the pangs of death do make him grin!’ suggests the Cardinal’s face shows a ‘risus sardonicus’ (a prolonged muscle spasm that looks like a sardonic grin). Considerable physical exertion is needed to produce such an effect and it is usually seen during convulsions induced by tetanus or strychnine poisoning.
The possibility of grief, stress or guilt leading to prolonged anguish, even madness, and death perhaps stuck in Shakespeare’s mind. He used a very similar idea, explored in much more detail, in a later play, Macbeth.
* * *
Lady Macbeth, following her involvement in the murder of Duncan, is somewhat preoccupied. Her guilt dramatically affects her mental health and behaviour. To outward appearances she is a calculating and cold-blooded murderer, but the facade crumbles to reveal a tormented soul.
Lady Macbeth encourages her husband to kill the Scottish King and so claim the crown for himself. She plans the murder with meticulous detail to ensure the blame will be laid elsewhere. Even immediately after the death she plays the part of incredulous bystander perfectly. It is Macbeth who is initially most affected by the death, not his wife. He can’t sleep and begins to hallucinate. Lady Macbeth has to try to cover for her husband’s obvious distraction. Only later, as the bodies pile up, do the physical effects on Lady Macbeth, brought on by her increasing psychological stress, start to show themselves – ‘she is troubled by thick-coming fancies / That keep her from her rest.’
The preoccupation with sleep seen in Macbeth is characteristic of Shakespeare. Modern sleep researchers have praised his insights into sleep and speculated that the playwright wrote from bitter personal experience. His plays contain references to many sleep conditions, from insomnia – a disorder particularly affecting royalty in his plays: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’ (Henry IV Part II) – to sleep apnoea, where breathing rapidly stops and starts – see Falstaff ‘snorting like a horse’ and ‘Hark, how hard he fetches breath’ in Henry IV Part I.
Lady Macbeth is perhaps the most famous literary example of the most well-known sleep disorder, sleepwalking (somnambulism), as well as sleeptalking (somniloquy). Stress and anxiety are acknowledged triggers for periods of disturbed sleep such as insomnia but sleepwalking is a rarity in adults. Those that suffer from it normally have a history of sleepwalking from their childhood onwards. How Lady Macbeth’s emotional state affects her sleep, and how it ultimately leads to her death, is worth exploring more closely.
Shakespeare gives a detailed portrayal of her disrupted sleep. A doctor is called in by Lady Macbeth’s gentlewoman to observe her as she sleepwalks. Even though she is asleep she manages to successfully light and carry a candle. The two observers watch her compulsively wash her hands and complain aloud about bloodstains on her hands: ‘Out, damned spot!’ and, ‘Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’. Although sleepwalkers are known to be able to carry out complex tasks like cooking or driving a car, more usually their behaviour is much less dramatic and meaningful than Shakespeare’s example would suggest.5
Sleeptalking can vary from incoherent mumbles to long speeches. Most of Lady Macbeth’s somniloquy is fragmented repetitive phrases about blood and the stains on her hands. But there are moments when she appears to be thinking and reasoning. The phrase ‘who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him’ is more than an expression of horror and shows Lady Macbeth analysing Duncan’s murder in some depth. In the four humours theory of health of the time, the human body was thought to slowly dry out as it aged. Older people, like Duncan, would not have been expected to bleed so profusely according to the medical theories of the day.
Another statement from the sleeping Queen, ‘What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?’ seems to be almost a confession. But it is less likely that sleeptalkers will reveal some deeply repressed secret in their night-time ramblings. Shakespeare’s doctor is probably off the mark when he says, ‘infected minds / To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets’.
A few scenes later the doctor is discussing Lady Macbeth’s restlessness with her husband. Macbeth asks the doctor to give her something:
Cure her of that.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
It almost sounds as though he is recommending psychotherapy to manage Lady Macbeth’s sleep disorder. If so, he is centuries ahead of his time. The modern approach to alleviating sleep disruption is to treat the underlying cause, be it a medical or a psychological issue. In the case of Lady Macbeth it is most certainly psychological. But her doctor cannot help and she dies. Could it be that her extreme emotional state had deprived her of sleep to the point that it killed her?
The idea that lack of sleep could kill can be found long before Shakespeare hinted at it. In Plutarch’s Lives, a source for several Shakespeare plays, though not Macbeth, there is the story of Paulus Aemilius. He was said to have been killed by his captors by being kept awake. They took it in turns to watch him and kept him from rest so that ‘at last he was quite wearied out and died’.6
Research in animals has shown that sleep may be as important as food for survival. A series of experiments on rats forced them to stay awake by making them move every time they began to drift off. They ate more than usual but lost weight and their general physical condition deteriorated, no matter what the researchers did to alleviate it. Only sleep helped. After two weeks of continuously being awake the rats died, and not because of weight loss or any other physical reason that could be determined. Sleep kept the rats healthy and lack of it meant they died.
Sleep allows the body to carry out running repairs. People who are sleep-deprived tend to have higher blood pressure and compromised immune systems, which can lead to infections. Symptoms of depression can appear, along with seizures and migraines. One theory to explain the effects on the mind is that sleep allows the brain to remove waste material from brain cells more efficiently than during wakefulness. This theory is backed up by studies in sleep-deprived animals that show changes on the brain and brain stem that vary by species. Lack of sleep certainly killed these animals, and more quickly than lack of food, but the end result might not be the same for humans.
Sleep-deprivation studies have also been carried out on people. The most famous was done in 1964 by Randy Gardner, a 16-year-old student from San Diego in California, who stayed awake for 11 days for a school science project.7
The experiment was conducted under medical supervision. His observers noted that as the experiment progressed Gardner’s attention span suffered and he became sullen and irritable. More alarmingly, on the third day he mistook a street sign for a pedestrian. By the fourth day he was convinced he was a professional football player and got upset when anyone questioned his skills. By the ninth day he struggled to complete sentences and blurred vision became an increasing problem. The experiment was stopped after 264 hours because Gardner had reached his goal of beating the previous record of 260 hours. He then slept for over 14 hours and made a full recovery.
No one in medical history has ever been able to deny a person sleep to the point of death.8 Microsleeps, an uncontrollable period of sleep lasting between a few microseconds and ten seconds, are characterised by brief memory lapses, the head bobbing down and brief loss of muscle control. They occur most frequently when someone is tired and trying to fend off falling asleep. They happen so easily that people are often only aware they have occurred when they jerk awake again. The human need for sleep may be so strong that you could never die for lack of it, but that is not a recommendation to try and test the theory. Experiments that would answer the question conclusively cannot be carried out ethically.
Lack of sleep may not have killed Lady Macbeth but it could certainly have contributed to her death. Increasing mental deterioration, hallucinations and poor attention from sleep-deprivation can lead people to do irrational and potentially dangerous things. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Lady Macbeth’s decline, through extreme emotional distress and anxiety leading to sleepwalking, then insomnia and finally death, is a plausible sequence of events. The theory is supported by a later speech in the play, from Malcolm, who repeats a rumour that Lady Macbeth killed herself.
Where Shakespeare got the idea for such an elaborate series of changes leading up to death is not clear. It certainly wasn’t from the history books. Macbeth, Duncan and Lady Macbeth, as well as many other characters in the play, were real historical figures. But Shakespeare’s version of events goes far beyond a bit of artistic licence.
In real life, Macbeth was the Mormaer, effectively Lord, Earl or even King, of Moray, and his wife, Gruoch, was also of royal descent. They had an excellent lineage and justifiable claim to the throne. They would have expected to rule after the death of Malcolm II in 1034. But instead the crown went to Malcolm’s grandson, Duncan, causing a considerable amount of upset. Duncan I of Scotland was not the gentle, revered older statesman of the play. He was a rash youngster who had been promoted well beyond his level of competence. He was an unpopular king to say the least.
After six years of troubled rule, Duncan met Macbeth in battle on 10 August 1040, where Duncan was killed, but it was not necessarily Macbeth who killed him. Whatever really happened on the battlefield, Duncan was certainly not stabbed in his sleep at Macbeth’s castle as is his fictional counterpart. Also, when the real-life Duncan died there was little controversy; Macbeth was immediately accepted as King of the Scots and reigned successfully for 17 years.
But Shakespeare had not simply invented the image of Macbeth as an unpopular bloodthirsty tyrant; nor had his main historical source, Holinshed’s Chronicles. Macbeth had already been portrayed as a murderer and usurper for more than 200 years, a story started by John of Fordun in his 1380 Chronica Gentis Scotorum. And the play wasn’t merely repeating the accepted version of events; it was written with his audience, King James, very much in mind.
The Scottish King James claimed he was descended from Banquo, Macbeth’s right-hand man in the play, who Macbeth also has brutally murdered. Shakespeare included the prophecy that, though Banquo would never rule, his descendants would: ‘Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none’.9 The playwright also made references to the recent Gunpowder Plot against the monarch,10 and added witches to the story to please the witchcraft-obsessed monarch.
But what was the truth about Lady Macbeth, or Queen Gruoch Macbeth as she would have been titled? Her history is vague to say the least, but she almost certainly wasn’t the cold-hearted, power-grabbing schemer of Shakespeare’s play. One of the Bard’s most interesting and iconic characters seems to have sparked little interest in historians and chroniclers. Even the dates of her birth and death are not known for certain (though she probably died in 1054). Had she died of something so unusual as lack of sleep, it might have been expected to be commented on, but it seems the true cause of her death has not been recorded.
Notes
1 When the girl’s parents were informed they told how another of their children, a son, had died after a fright, evidence that it might be an inherited condition.
2 Jane Austen, on a visit to London, was very put out when a performance of King John she had hoped to see was replaced with Hamlet. Sarah Siddons, the leading tragic actress of the day, was intended to have played Lady Constance. Instead Austen reluctantly went to see Macbeth performed the following Monday.
3 Phrenesis fell out of favour as a medical term in the nineteenth century, to be replaced by delirium, confusion or clouding.
4 Other reports say he died quietly and with dignity.
5 However, bed partners often report more elaborate behaviour than is observed in controlled environments such as sleep clinics.
6 Sleep deprivation has been used as a method of extracting confessions even up to the twentieth century. Sleep deprivation is also one of the tactics used by Petruccio to ‘tame’ Kate in The Taming of The Shrew.
7 The experiment has been entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest time a human has gone without sleep, but they no longer track records like this as it is too dangerous.
8 There is a very rare genetic condition, Fatal Familial Insomnia, that prevents its sufferers from sleeping; but it is believed that it is the damage done to the brain by the disease that causes death, and sleeplessness is a side effect.
9 Later historians have shown that Banquo never actually existed and trace James’s lineage from a Breton family that relocated to Scotland after Macbeth’s time.
10 The plan was to blow up the Houses of Parliament on 5 November 1605 when King James was in attendance.