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"Tom o' Bedlam" is the name of an anonymous poem in the "mad song" genre, written in the voice of a homeless "Bedlamite." The poem was probably composed at the beginning of the 17th century; in How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom calls it "the greatest anonymous lyric in the [English] language."
Contents
The term "Tom o' Bedlam" was used in Early Modern Britain and later to describe beggars and vagrants who had or feigned mental illness (see also Abraham-men). They claimed, or were assumed, to have been former inmates at the Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam). It was commonly thought that inmates were released with authority to make their way by begging, though this is probably untrue. If it happened at all the numbers were certainly small, though there were probably large numbers of mentally ill travellers who turned to begging, but had never been near Bedlam. It was adopted as a technique of begging, or a character. For example, Edgar in King Lear disguises himself as mad "Tom o' Bedlam".
Structure and verses
As we know it, the poem has eight verses of eight lines each, each verse concluding with a repetition of a four-line chorus. The existence of a chorus suggests that the poem may originally have been sung as a ballad. The version reproduced here is the one presented in Bloom's How to Read and Why.
Mad Maudlin's Search
The original ballad was popular enough that another poem was written in reply, "Mad Maudlin's Search" or "Mad Maudlin's Search for Her Tom of Bedlam" (the same Maud who was mentioned in the verse "With a thought I took for Maudlin / And a cruise of cockle pottage / With a thing thus tall, Sky bless you all / I befell into this dotage." which apparently records Tom going mad, "dotage") or "Bedlam Boys" (from the chorus, "Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys / Bedlam boys are bonny / For they all go bare and they live by the air / And they want no drink or money."), whose first stanza was:
For to see Mad Tom of Bedlam,Ten thousand miles I've traveled.Mad Maudlin goes on dirty toes,For to save her shoes from gravelThe remaining stanzas include:
I went down to Satan's kitchenTo break my fast one morningAnd there I got souls piping hotAll on the spit a-turning.There I took a cauldronWhere boiled ten thousand harlotsThough full of flame I drank the sameTo the health of all such varlets.My staff has murdered giantsMy bag a long knife carriesTo cut mince pies from children's thighsFor which to feed the fairies.No gypsy, slut or doxyShall win my mad Tom from meI'll weep all night, with stars I'll fightThe fray shall well become me.It was apparently first published in 1720 by Thomas d'Urfey in his Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy. "Maudlin" was a form of Mary Magdalene.
Because of the number of variants and confusion between the two manuscripts, neither "Tom o' Bedlam" nor "Mad Maudlin" can be said to be definitive texts.