(Burton: “Anatomy of Melancholy.”)
The representation of “melancholy” and of the disease which we know as “melancholia” was extremely common in seventeenth century drama. Its popularity with playwrights of all kinds can be traced to several causes. In the first place it gave ample opportunity for introducing poetry of no mean order, which seems to have been more popular on the stage a few centuries ago than it is to-day. Then “melancholy” was commonly associated with unrequited love, and the sad lover has always been a favourite character both in comedy and in tragedy. Again, a hero or heroine afflicted with “melancholy” was, after all, in the seventeenth-century acceptation of the term, quite sane. “Melancholy,” then, became a kind of “humour”—as in the eyes of the mediæval physician it literally had been—and it was not regarded in at all the same way as other species of mental disorder.
We must distinguish, however, between the
variety of ways in which the word “melancholy” is used in these dramas, where there are “large volumes of it in print to very slender purpose.”[127:1] When Shakespeare says in “Cymbeline”
“O melancholy!
Who ever yet could find thy bottom? find
The ooze, to show what coast thy sluggish crare
Might easiliest harbour in,”[127:2]
he is expressing feelings shared by anyone who tries to fathom the treatment of melancholy by Shakespeare’s own contemporaries. There was no common and generally recognised conception of melancholy as of the more obvious forms of insanity. Hence it becomes impossible to consider the question of melancholy from the standpoint of medicine, still less to make any division such as the threefold medical division of to-day, into acute melancholia, excited melancholia, and that alternation of depression and excitement known as “folie circulaire.” We shall instead divide our subject more broadly and simply into Melancholy True and Melancholy False, taking but a few typical cases to illustrate each of these divisions in turn.
By Melancholy True is meant what we call nowadays “melancholia,”—that is, a mental disease in which the prevailing symptom is depression,—a mental disease from the author’s