Literature’s perennial outsiders, persons regarded as mad, have been relentlessly “othered” in fiction. It will be my argument that in his plays, Shakespeare challenges the idea of madness as “other.” Shakespeare designed his tragedies so as to enable audiences not only to witness from a safe distance fierce disintegrations of the self, but also to experience and even partake—to a moderate and tolerable degree, to be sure—in the madness of “distracted” characters like Hamlet, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and King Lear. Deriving from a Latin word meaning “to pull asunder” (distrahere), “distraction” in Shakespeare’s time bore the meaning of “being drawn or pulled (physically or mentally) in different directions by conflicting forces or emotions” (OED): a condition that spectators and readers of his plays experience repeatedly. By referring to Hamlet and King Lear, I contend that the power of Shakespeare’s tragedies derives partly from their power to “distract” audiences in the more vigorous sense of the word and to cause them to have a share in even the most extreme forms of madness in the plays. Shakespearean distraction reflects what Neely characterizes as a new conception of the human subject as a volatile and unstable mix of warring elements: one that the theaters of early modern England helped to establish. In the shadow of such a conception, the mad character comes to be seen not as nonhuman but rather as “excessively human,” with an expanded expressiveness and emotional range. By enabling audiences to share the experience of “distracted” characters, Shakespeare’s plays help create a bond with those suffering from the mental disability of madness.