King Leopold of Belgium was especially notorious for his merciless treatment of the Congolese, who were pressed into service on the rubber plantations. Lanters's discussion places the play within this historical and artistic setting with the European and American treatment of the Blacks as less than human including exhibiting some of them as freaks, natural oddities, and sub-humans or creatures on an evolutionary ladder leading to White perfection, while enslaving native populations to extract natural resources to fuel the "home" country's prosperity. The contemporary clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison demonstrated the truth in Dryden's observation in important books using her clinical experience to evaluate several artists, poets, and musicians, including Touched with Tire (1993), An Unquiet Mind (1995), Night Tails Tast (1999), and most recently Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Tire (2017). Lowell being fully conscious "of its relevance . . . made it a creative force in his writing . . . as the duality of mania and discipline, insanity and sanity was the major organizing force of his life."