that “preadjustment” which is so valuable an aid to the plot.
Similarly we have in “Richard II” the melancholy of the Queen, which prepares us for the troubles about to befall her. This melancholy may best be attributed, not necessarily, as Dr. Bucknill suggests, to her temperament, certainly not to any prosperity she may have enjoyed, but rather to a vague fear as to the results of her husband’s perilous journey, coupled possibly with her experience of the King’s rashness and a recognition of his recent weakness in dealing with Mowbray and Bolingbroke. It is, at all events, merely a passing sadness of the “inward soul” and her “heavy sad”-ness is soon dispersed, changing first to real grief, which gives place before her weaker husband—true woman that she is!—to a resolution concealing for a time her sorrow.
In Jacques we have a character of more complexity. His humour he describes as “a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.”[142:1] He wishes, in his own words, to
“Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine.”[142:2]
But the Duke, usually so gentle, is quite out of sympathy with the pseudo-reformer. Jacques, he says, has been a libertine, and like many a reformed sinner, the ex-voluptuary would merely “disgorge into the general world,” “all the embossèd sores and headed evils” of his unregenerate days.[143:1]
So much discussion has been lavished on the “case” of Jacques that we shall not attempt to do more than shew what we believe to be its perfectly superficial nature. Judging from the play as a whole, and more especially from the Duke’s contempt and Rosalind’s banter, we should suppose this to be Shakespeare’s view. As Dr. Moulton very justly remarks, egotism is plainly shewn to be at the root of his disposition. He has lived out his life in a short time; now he turns everything, for sheer self-love, into matter not for jests but for scurrilous abuse, or at best for a malevolent, sarcastic humour.
Yet the morbidity of Jacques’ melancholy suggests that, more than any other of Shakespeare’s similarly conceived characters, he carries about with him a secret malady when he persists in his attitude towards the world. One day the secret wound will fester; his “weeping” and his “sullen fits” will become uncontrollable; his frantic abuse will turn to frenzy; his ironic, half-humorous sallies will change to the
disconnected utterances of a maniac; or his surly humour will sink lower and lower until it reaches the dead level of melancholic depression.
Here, then, we have, in briefest outline, some of the types of melancholy—true and false—presented by Shakespeare and certain of his contemporaries. Numerous examples from other authors of the time might be added, but we have seen enough to be clear on two points. These are, the essential difference between the true and the false melancholy, and the use of each to the dramatist in his work, both for its own sake and because of the opportunities which it gives for the introduction of poetical passages. From the character who entertains a “wilful stillness”