Graduate School
“MEN LIKE STAGE-PLAYERS ACT VARIETY OF PARTS”: PERFORMING MELANCHOLIC PARTS ON THE EARLY MODERN STAGE
Thesis submitted for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
at the University of Leicester
by Stephanie Collins MA, BA (Hons) College of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities 2020 “Men like Stage-Players Act Variety of Parts”: Performing Melancholic Parts on the Early Modern Stage Stephanie Collins This thesis articulates the importance and influence of medical understandings of humoural theory, particularly melancholy, on English drama of the late 1580s to the 1620s. Using a case study approach of early modern dramatic texts by playwrights such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Chapman, and Middleton, amongst others, alongside an examination of key pieces of medical and religious writing, this thesis investigates the interrelationship between medicine and the theatre which occurred throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to question why dramatists were so concerned with the medicalisation of drama, and the dramatization of medicine. This thesis applies Judith Butler’s concept of anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance to the experience of emotion. Building on research by Gowland, Lund, and Langley, the study identifies melancholy as a performative emotion, both in that it is often performed and that its symptoms lend themselves to spectacle. This leads us to discuss both the performances of “anatomical” emotion, and the idea that emotion is something which can be performed, convincingly or otherwise. Taking its cue from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), this thesis identifies three types of melancholy which were most regularly being presented on the early modern stage: scholarly melancholy, revenger’s melancholy, and love melancholy. This thesis looks at the ways the representations of these melancholic types often overlap, how one melancholy could lead to or be influenced by another kind, and the connotations and significance of these interrelationships. Chapter One begins by looking at the portrayal of scholarly melancholy, and how it can be used alongside love melancholy and religious melancholy, focusing on Doctor Faustus (1589-1592), Love’s Labour’s Lost (1595), and Hamlet (1599). Chapter Two’s focus on the revenge tragedies of the late 1500s – early 1600s also sees an interest in Hamlet, alongside works by Kyd and Middleton to highlight the way melancholy began to be portrayed specifically as a performative emotion, with links to excessive theatricality. Chapter Three’s focus shifts towards comedy and the different ways in which melancholy could be used in comedy – both as something to laugh at, and as something which could derail the traditional comic ending in texts such as The Merchant of Venice, Monsieur D’Olive, and Every Man in His Humour. Chapter Four moves forward to the work of John Ford in the 1620s and highlights the relationship between Ford and Burton which we see in The Lover’s Melancholy, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and The Broken Heart. Returning to the tragedies, Chapter Four suggests that the work of Ford represents a culmination of the melancholic discourses which have come before, as scholarly melancholy, vengeful melancholy, love melancholy, and even comic melancholy combine in what could be considered medical drama. Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the following people: - To my extraordinary supervisory team, Professor Sarah Knight and Doctor Mary Ann Lund: without your inexhaustible support, wisdom, and encouragement, this thesis would never have made it onto the page. - To all of the teachers who have encouraged me, especially Mrs Ritchie, whose insistence that I play Jane Eyre has led to a lifetime of love for the theatre, and to Professor Dzelzainis, whose encouraging words to an undergraduate student ignited a love for research. - To my mother and father, for putting up with the tears of joy, frustration, and despair. For encouraging me to go to university in the first place, and for playing taxi to and from Leicester for eight years! Thank you for listening to me as I read aloud essays, chapters, and eventually lectures. You are truly the greatest people a girl could be lucky enough to call parents. Your kindness, your generosity, your love is something which astounds me every day. Thank you, thank you, thank you. - To Sandy Thompson, for standing by me all the way through this process, throughout the highs and the lows. Thank you for always believing in me and my research, and for never giving up on me, even when I try to drag you halfway around the world. Thank you for not thinking I was mad when I told you I wanted to start a theatre company - and thank you for reminding me to maybe hold off on that until I’d finished my PhD. You have been a guiding light throughout all of this, and I can’t wait to start the next chapter of life with you. - To Emma Probett – a far better academic than I could ever aspire to be, but most importantly, a brilliant friend. Your kindness, encouragement, and friendship have been an extraordinary support. Thank you for the significant contribution you have made to the completion of this research, especially for your kind suggestions and comments on Chapters Three and Four. - The cast, crew, and company of the Stamford Shakespeare Company. In particular: to Larry Wilkes and Paul Moth, for allowing me to use your pictures; to David Fensom and Caroline Stephenson, for answering my questions about Much Ado; and to all of the directors, for their vision and creativity – and most importantly, for casting me! Table of Contents
1-25: ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’: Introduction.
26-67: ‘Lay that damnèd book aside / And gaze not on it’: Scholarly Melancholy, Solitude, and the Supernatural on the late Elizabethan Stage.
68-106: ‘The heart’s disquiet is revenge most deep’: The necessity of melancholy in early modern revenge tragedies.
107-142 ‘Am I melancholy inough?’: Comic melancholy and Melancholic Discontents
143-183: ‘Rapes, Incests, Murders’: Love melancholy in John Ford’s Caroline tragedies.
184-194: ‘Naught so sweet as melancholy’: Concluding Thoughts
195-210: Bibliography ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’: Introduction. 1
I presume thou wilt be very inquisitive to know what Anticke or Personate Actor this is, that so insolently intrudes upon this common Theater, to the world’s view, arrogating another man’s name, whence hee is, why he doth it, and what he hath to say.2 So begins Robert Burton’s (1577-1640) compendious tract on melancholia, madness, and all its various subsets, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) – and so may begin this thesis. Like Burton’s suspicious reader, the reader of this thesis may wonder why I have dedicated so much research, and so many words, to connecting the theatre of the early modern period with the medical and religious discourse which describes and surrounds the humour, temperament, and disease of melancholy.
Although I do not arrogate anyone’s name, I am indeed an ‘Anticke or Personate Actor’ who insolently intrudes upon the theatre [Figure 1]. Consequently, much of the research to which this thesis is dedicated stems from my many years of experience working in the theatre. It is from my experiences with performing Shakespeare that the inspiration for this thesis was born: melancholy abounds in Shakespeare, from Hamlet (1599) to Love’s Labour’s Lost (1595), through As You Like It (1599) and King Lear (1606). Through watching and reading plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and those who came before and after Shakespeare, it became clear to me that this interest in melancholy is a cultural phenomenon, not one that is specific to Shakespeare (1564- 1616) alone. It is to this that I attribute my interest in the performativity of melancholy: it has struck me many times how often characters from this period are themselves acting as other characters, how often people on the early modern stage pretend to be that which they are not. The striking overlap between this metatheatrical performativity and melancholy is an area which I sought to explore throughout this thesis, through looking at instances where melancholy is performed by those who may not truly feel it. I am also interested, however, in the ways in which theatricality and performativity creep into depictions of true melancholy on the early modern stage. In referring to “true” or “genuine” melancholy, I refer specifically to instances where the audience are asked to
1 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. by Juliet Dusinberre (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), Act 2, Scene 7, Lines 140b-141. All further references will be to this edition, and will be made in-text with the abbreviation AYLI. 2 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. by Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, Rhonda L. Blair, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), I, p.1.
1 believe that this character is truly a melancholic, like Prince Palador in The Lover’s Melancholy (published 1629) where much of the action revolves around the curing of Palador’s melancholy.
Examples such as Palador, who suffers from ‘sorrow’s / Close-griping grief and anguish of the soul,’ clearly show that the theatre was interested in medicine in the early modern period, and Ford is particularly interested in ‘Melancholy’ which in Lover’s Melancholy is described as ‘the mind’s disease’ (LM, 4.2.11-12; 3.1.108, 110). The close connection between medicine and theatre can also be seen the diaries of theatre financier Philip Henslowe, who was actively involved in the building of both the Rose Theatre and the Fortune, we find a set of medical instructions ‘against frensye or one that is bytt with a dog.’3 Mary Floyd-Wilson has suggested that the presence of these medical instructions within the theatrical community shows that the ‘how-to structure of early modern receipts […] has a kinship with theatrical enterprises’ as there is ‘evidence to suggest that dramatists and spectators believed [stage] effects could stir an audience member’s emotions against her will.’4 That the theatre could stir up one’s emotions involuntarily was a claim which both defenders and detractors of the theatre used. Thomas Adams (1583-1652), a virulently anti-theatrical clergyman, suggested in 1612, that to uphold the theatres is ‘to the contempt of Religion’ and William Prynne’s (1600-1669) Histrio-mastix (1632) termed the theatre ‘Sinfull, Pernicious, and altogether vnseemely, yea, Vnlawfull vnto Christians’ because ‘the Scriptures doe expressly enioyne vs: to put away all Malice, Anger, Wrath, Contention, Sedition, Strife, Cruelty, Violence, Rapine, and Reuenge,’ but the theatre can encourage such emotions, and act as ‘a kinde of Pander to mens lusts.’5 Yet defenders of the theatre turned this claim on itself, giving the stage ‘potentially therapeutic effects,’ including the ‘power to purge melancholy,’ as Floyd-Wilson has explored.6 Philip Sidney (1554- 1586) explored a similar theme in his Apologie for Poetrie (1595), suggesting that ‘if
3 John Ford, The Lover’s Melancholy, ed. by R. F. Hill (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), Act 4, Scene 2, Lines 11-12. All further references will be to this edition and will be made in-text with the abbreviation LM; Philip Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p.42. 4 Mary Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p.20. 5 Thomas Adams, The White Devil or The Hypocrite Vncased: In a Sermon Preached at Pavls Crosse, March 7 1612 (London: Thomas Snodham, 1613), p.15; William Prynne, Histrio-mastix The Player’s Scourge or Actor’s Tragedie (London: E.A and W.I for Michael Sparke, 1632), p.9, 73, 30. 6 Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, p.20.
2 euill men come to the stage, they euer goe out […] so manacled,’ that the stage itself can cure evil through catharsis.7
Figure One: Performing in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (2019), Stamford Shakespeare Company, dir. Liz Cullum.
It is not just in the theatre, however, where melancholy can be a particularly performative emotion. If we accept that melancholy in the period was considered a performative emotion, though no early modern spectator or reader would use the term, Judith Butler’s theory of performative gender can help us think through the concept of performative emotions. As Butler believes that to ‘claim that gender is constructed is not to assert its illusoriness or artificiality,’ this thesis does not, in seeking to claim that these representations of melancholy are performative, suggest that this melancholy is necessarily inauthentic.8 Theatricality, performativity, and spectacle are things which we can suggest exist in all drama: all dramatic writing must be theatrical, for it is written for the theatre; all speeches in these dramas must be performative, for they are to be performed; and all of these things must construe a spectacle, since they are, by nature ‘specially prepared or arranged’ displays of ‘a more or less public nature,’ a definition which the Oxford English Dictionary dates back to 1340, and they form ‘an
7 Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie (London: Henry Olney, 1595), p.32. 8 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999), p.43.
3 impressive or interesting show’ – at least, the dramatist and actors must hope.9 This thesis adds significance to the terms spectacle and performance, to make the reader aware that the action being described is ‘of a striking or unusual character’ – even within the world of the play.10
Butler suggests that in the performance of gender ‘acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body.’11 We can extend this argument to the discussion of melancholy – in staging melancholy, dramatists create a performative emotion which is portrayed on the surface of the body, for example, in Hamlet’s ‘inky cloak’ of ‘solemn black,’ the ‘forced breath’ – the signs of melancholy – which represents the truth of the emotion inside.12As Butler argues that in drag performance we are ‘actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance,’ I argue that in portraying emotional diseases such as melancholy, we are in the presence of three emotional states: the “true” emotional turmoil which is being felt by the character (their “anatomical” emotion), the emotion which the character identifies with (their emotional identity), and their performance of emotion.13 This thesis aims to discuss the ways in which the performance of emotion can be highlighted. Butler suggests, for example, that the performance of gender is something instituted through ‘a stylized repetition of acts’ which may include ‘bodily gestures, movement, and styles of various kinds.’14 In this thesis I will suggest melancholy, too, may be something which is recognizable through repetitious acts which have come to signify melancholy, and which, I argue, make it performative.
Nathaniel B. Smith has recently recognised the importance of performance in early modern medical language, as we have seen is the case in plays such as The Lover’s Melancholy: ‘Medical practitioners throughout the Middle Ages and early modern periods – as today – cultivated such performative and rhetorical techniques to effect treatments,’ he suggests, noting that there was a movement in early modern Europe
9 “spectacle, n.”, OED Online, (Oxford University Press, 2019),
4 ‘that asked whether the period’s orthodox remedies for illness only worked (when they worked at all) because of the patient’s emotional confidence in the words and performances of medical practitioners.’15 Smith’s work has informed my thinking about how we might respond to melancholy on the early modern stage. Burton adopts a ‘variety of voices and personas’ throughout the Anatomy as his adopted character of Democritus Junior, and potentially Burton himself, attempts to ‘avoid’ his own melancholy.16 For Smith, medical language is itself inherently performative, in that it is stimulated for a specific purpose, that of curing. Throughout this thesis, but particularly in Chapter Four, we will see the concept of language as cure come full circle, as the cure of melancholy becomes the main action of the plays discussed. If language is cure, and language as cure is performative, then these plays are the epitome of performative curing. The clearest example of what I mean when I describe spectacles in this way is the play-within-a-play, such as that we witness in Hamlet’s ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ or ‘The Mousetrap’, the ‘Masque of the Muscovites’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost or the ‘Masque of Madmen’ in John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy. These are spectacles for both the offstage audience – those who have paid to watch the play – and the onstage audience – the characters in the play who are watching another play, or masque, as part of the action of the main play. Such metatheatrical techniques are common during the early modern period, and this thesis explores their relation to melancholy. Under the somewhat umbrella term of “spectacles,” I am, however, placing more than simply the traditional play-within-a-play. Moments where one character is being overheard by another – like the sonnet scene of Love’s Labour’s Lost, where the lovers are overheard by each other in a comical sequence of watching – I am also recording as spectacle, and as “performative” in a way in which the play itself as a whole is not – the audience is privy to the whole action, but the characters are watching an altered version. These moments are ‘thing[s] seen or capable of being seen,’ just as the plays-within-plays are.17 “Spectacle” in this instance, therefore, refers to any moment of heightened
15 Nathaniel B. Smith, ‘Speaking Medicine: A Paracelsian Parody of the Humours in Taming of the Shrew’, in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. by Sujata Iyengar (New York: Routledge, 2015), 195-211 (p.196, 197). 16 Erin Sullivan, ‘Introduction’, in The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. Adapted for the stage by Stan’s Café ed. by Gerard Bell, Rochi Rampal, Graeme Rose, and Craig Stephens (Birmingham: Stan’s Café, 2013), 5-6 (p.5); Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.6. 17 “spectacle, n.”, OED Online
5 theatricality – something which can be seen as theatrical even if the world of the play was, in fact, not itself theatrical, but real. In a recent article, Joanne Entwhistle and Ashley Mears have extended the arguments of Butler and her peers to discuss the role of performative gender in the fashion modelling industry, suggesting that both male and female, but especially female, models not only perform their gender, but undertake a ‘performance of personality.’18 Like modelling, theatre is a ‘work context where men and women perform the same job but within very different discursive settings of appropriate gender identities.’19 The implications of this when we look historically at early modern dramatic texts are even more interesting, for there were no “male” and “female” jobs in the theatre. There was only the male, and their performance of masculinity or of femininity. For Entwhistle and Mears’s male models, there was a queering of performance also – ‘male models,’ they explain ‘learn they can increase their chances [of making a booking] by the strategic performances of (homo)sexuality.’20 The performance of gender which these models must undertake within the performance context of a fashion show is relatable to the spectacles of performativity in these texts – a performance within performance. This conscious performance in order to gain something also occurs in the theatre, when taking part in a masque, for example, or, like Hamlet, affecting an ‘antic disposition.’ (Hamlet, 1.5.170). Such moments are consciously performative within the atmosphere of the play-world: acting within acting must be considered as an extra layer of metatheatricality. The frequency with which this metatheatricality occurs in conjunction with performances of melancholia is what I find particularly interesting here, and this thesis explores in greater detail instances of where performativity and melancholy intersect. Even within the medical texts of the period themselves, there is much overlap between the concepts of performance and melancholy. Burton adopts, as Erin Sullivan has noted, ‘a variety of voices and personas’ throughout his compendious Anatomy, which Mary Ann Lund suggests includes the ‘satirist, historian, preacher, doctor, [and] jovial companion.’21 To this list we can add both melancholic patient and melancholic scholar. Lund has noted that Burton recognized that the ‘delusions and extreme 18 Joanne Entwhistle and Ashley Mears, ‘Gender on Display: Performativity in Fashion Modelling’, Cultural Sociology, 7 (2013), 320-335 (p.324). 19 Ibid, p.322. 20 Ibid., p.329. 21 Sullivan, ‘Introduction’, p.5; Mary Ann Lund, ‘Reflection’ in The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. Adapted for the stage by Stan’s Café, pp.99-101 (p.100).
6 reactions of melancholics are […] the stuff of entertainment,’ and his Anatomy aims provides both entertainment and edification through the tales of melancholics.22 Burton writes in the Anatomy, in the character of Democritus Junior, that he ‘write[s] of Melancholy by being busie to avoid Melancholy,’ diagnosing himself as one of the melancholics he discusses.23 Christopher Tilmouth has noted that Burton in particular ‘repeatedly implicates himself in lamenting the misery of scholars.’24 Burton matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford in 1593, and took his first degree at Christ Church in 1602.25 J. B. Bamborough has shown how there is a gap in our knowledge of Burton’s life, between the years 1593-1599: Bamborough’s research shows that there exists a record of ‘one “Robert Burton,” age twenty, who consulted the astrologer- doctor Simon Forman in London in 1597 and was diagnosed as suffering from melancholy.’26 It may be that this was the same Burton, that the Burton writing the Anatomy really is using the process of writing as a form of distraction from his own melancholic mind – and that in order to do so, he creates this theatrical vision whereby he takes on so many different roles. Burton himself was the author of two dramas – Alba (1605) and Philosophaster (performed 1618). The latter play is concerned with scholarship, detailing as it does the lives of, and lies told by, those who pretends to be philosophers, arguing for the superiority of true academics over faux-philosophers, the philosophasters – Burton’s interest in and connection to scholarship, and the melancholy it can cause, is evident throughout all of his life, including his foray into the theatrical world. Recently, Kathryn Murphy has explored Philosophaster in regards to Burton’s response to the Gunpowder plot, instead of being entirely a satire on Oxford and Burton’s ‘immediate context.’27 The link between Murphy’s discussion of the ‘anti- Catholic’ element of Burton’s work corroborates my discussion of scholars, and scholarly melancholy, as ciphers for discussion around religious melancholy and
22 Mary Ann Lund, ‘Without a Cause: Fear in the Anatomy of Melancholy’, in Fear in the Medical and Literary Imagination: Medieval to Modern, ed. by D. McCann & C. McKechnie-Mason (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp.37-54 (p.48). 23 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.6. 24 Christopher Tilmouth, ‘Burton’s “Turning Picture”: Argument and Anxiety in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, The Review of English Studies, 56 (2005), 524-549 (p.543). 25 J. B. Bamborough, ‘Burton, Robert (1577-1640), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., Oct. 2009)
7 despair.28 The performance of these faux-scholars is insufficient to trick the ‘two true scholars,’ Polumathes and Philobiblos, and involves both melancholy and theatricality, as I argue many onstage performances of melancholy do.29
In other texts of the period, theatricality is presented as being able to cure melancholy. This thesis explores early modern medical writing in relation to onstage performances of melancholy to highlight the ways in which theatricality became an inherent part of representations of melancholy in both medical and dramatic writing. For Andrew Boorde (c.1490-1549), writing in his Breuiarie of Health (first published 1542, reprinted throughout the 1590s), ‘honest pastime’ like ‘sport, play, and musicall instruments’ could help to ‘purge melancholy,’ for they require company and there is ‘nothing that doth hurt this impediment [of melancholy] so much as doth musing and solicitudeness.’30 Some medical works even include in them amusing anecdotes of the delusions suffered by melancholic men which were potentially meant to cure the reader whilst they read about melancholy. André Du Laurens (1511-1564), a renowned professor of anatomy in Montpellier, describes the ‘pleasantest dotage’ that he had ever read as being the story of a man who ‘had resolued with himself not to pisse, but to dye rather, and that because he imagined, that when he first pissed, all his towne would be drowned.’31 These case studies essentially became written versions of a visit to Bethlem Hospital – the inmates of which became known as Bedlams, which then itself became a general term for ‘madness, lunacy’ in the late 1590s.32 In the Anatomy, Burton likewise suggests that melancholy can be cured by ‘some artificiall invention,’ such as that of the ‘melancholy King, that thought his head was off,’ who was cured by the putting on of a ‘leaden cap […] the waight made him perceive it, and freed him of his fond imagination.’33 The connection between madness and melancholia is a fundamental one in this thesis. In 1583 Philip Barrough noted the connection between the two, describing ‘madnes, which is called in the Greeke and Latine Melancholia.’34 By recognising that
28 Ibid., p.11. 29 Ibid., p.2. 30 Andrew Boorde, The Breuiarie of Health (London: Thomas East, 1587), p.74. 31 André Du Laurens, A Discourse on the Preservation of the Sight: of Melancholike Diseases; of Rheumes, and of Old Age, trans. by Richard Surphlet (1599) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p.103. 32 “bedlam, n.”, OED Online, (Oxford University Press, 2019),
8 melancholy is a type, or subspecies of madness, we can find interesting connotations and connections in the representations of madness and melancholy in early modern medical and dramatic writings. The case studies of melancholia are key aspects of the representation of melancholy, and connect directly with the theatre. These anecdotes are a valuable resource when thinking about the performativity of emotion since the cures are “artificial inventions” and consequently seem theatrical. There is, therefore, a distinct overlap between melancholy and theatricality which I felt must be explored.
The work of Erin Sullivan, whose discussions of sadness in the Renaissance have been influential in helping to shape my understanding of the representation of melancholy in the drama, being been particularly informative about the connections between melancholy and the ‘total spiritual dejection’ of despair, especially in connection with the despairing scholars of Chapter One, and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’s Giovanni in Chapter Four.35 The nuanced difference between melancholy and despair is one which it is important to maintain since the latter was believed to cause damnation. Likewise, Mary Ann Lund’s discussion of The Anatomy was useful in the formulation of this thesis’s discussions of early modern medical and theological writings.36 Lund’s work helped to highlight the ‘amusement’ which many of Burton’s tales were designed to cause, and her discussion on the ‘delusions and extreme reactions of melancholics’ and their role as ‘the stuff of entertainment’ in turn brought about discussion on the amusement created by anecdotal evidence in medical texts.37 Jennifer C. Vaught’s, Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England, which attempts to track ‘the development of sustained, nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health – physical, emotional, and spiritual – in medieval and early modern England,’ has been important to the discussion of bodily health in this thesis. 38 One critical trend over the past two decades has been a move towards the importance of the emotions, and this thesis follows work such as that completed by Vaught in continuing to foreground
35 Erin Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p.34; See also Erin Sullivan, ‘Doctrinal Doubleness and the Meaning of Despair in William Perkins’s Table and Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience’, Studies in Philology, 110 (2013), 533-561. 36 See Mary Ann Lund, Melancholy, Medicine, and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 37 Mary Ann Lund, ‘Reading and the Cure of Despair in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, Studies in Philology, 105 (2008), 533-558 (p.542); Lund, ‘Without A Cause’ p.48; Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.103. 38 Jennifer C. Vaught, ‘Introduction’, in Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp.1-22 (p.3).
9 the ways in which early modern writers used mental instability to portray ‘excessive or immoderate behaviours and moral depravity,’ seeking to showcase the ways in which melancholy could be used as both a social commentary.39 Such work is vital in recognising the way which emotional health, or emotional disease, was seen as severely impacting day to day life in this period: as Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble noted recently, ‘the word anxiety comes into English at precisely this moment in history, circa 1611, because this is the moment when a need for such a word enters the language.’40 The need for such words, to create labels for these disorders, indicates the level of importance which was placed on emotional disturbances in this period.
This thesis makes use of several terms which it may be useful to define here. Melancholy itself is not an easy thing to define – it is a humour, a temperament, and a mental state all at once. Although the research presented in this thesis is primarily concerned with the symptoms of melancholy as an emotional disease, it is crucial to understand where these symptoms appear from, and why they are so intrinsically connected with melancholy the humour. In the Galenic medical model, the human body is made up of four humours – blood, phlegm, choler (or yellow bile), and melancholy (or black bile). These four humours, when balanced in what Galen called the ‘natural proportion’, were all necessary to the successful functioning of the human body, for the ‘natural proportion is health’.41 However, Bridget Gellert Lyons has noted, in her 1971 study of literary melancholy, that whilst ‘all four humours had functions that made them necessary to the body, the sanguine humour, warm and wet like blood itself, was considered the best and most life-giving of the four,’ and melancholy was considered ‘the worst’ because its ‘coldness and dryness had affinities with old age and death,’ and it was thought in part to come from ‘the incompletely digested portion of the blood, the sediment and the dregs.’42 Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), whose work De Vita Libri Tres (Three Books on Life, 1489) became influential on Burton and on the dramatists of the period, noted that the best possible combination of the humours was as follows: ‘where there are eight parts blood, let there be two portions bile and two again of black bile.’43 Ficino suggested that melancholy should ‘abound’ in this way, for it could make one
39 Ibid., p.7. 40 Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble, ‘Introduction’, in Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind (London: Routledge, 2014), pp.1-11, p.5. 41 Galen, ‘To Thrasyboulos’, in Galen: Selected Works, ed. and trans. by P. N. Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp.53-99 (p.75). 42 Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p.2.
10 intelligent, but it should have still been ‘rarefied’ and be in a smaller proportion than the blood.44 Because the sanguine humour was considered the best, it was considered most healthy when a body had more blood than any other humour. When the melancholy humour was in overabundance in the body, on the other hand, the patient could suffer from a dramatic series of symptoms: Burton notes the main three as being ‘feare, sadnesse, suspition’ but adds that melancholics often ‘cannot sleepe,’ that their pulse is ‘rare and slowe’ alongside ‘winde, palpitation of the heart, short breath, plenty of humidity in the stomacke, heavinesse of heart and heart ake, and intolerable stupidity and dulnesse of spirits.’45 There is a spectrum of melancholy, and the two extremes are represented by creativity, intellectual ability, and sluggishness, and a desire for a sedentary lifestyle. These varied symptoms, effects, and even causes of the melancholic humour have caused Angus Gowland to suggest that there is, for the historian, a ‘problem with early modern melancholy.’46 This problem lies, Gowland suggests, in the difficulty of defining melancholy, and why so many people identified with the illness. This thesis has attempted to overcome this problem by using early modern medical texts. In using these contemporary sources and attempting to highlight the difference between anatomical emotion and emotional performance, this thesis suggests that the problem with early modern melancholy is more that we underestimate its importance. Gowland has noted that Burton thought that melancholy was an ‘epidemic’ sweeping Europe and especially England.47 Yet melancholy was a difficult term to define even in the early modern period - ‘the diagnostic categories employed by physicians varied across both time and space,’ Gowland reminds us.48 How can we define melancholy when it seems to be such an elusive concept for those writing about it in the early modern period? For the most part of this thesis, my diagnostic criteria are lifted from Burton and his predecessors in the medical field. In choosing to study the presentation of melancholy in early modern dramatic writing, it was crucial to understand precisely what melancholy was and meant during the period itself. Therefore, I have chosen to use
43 Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life: A Critical Edition and Translation, ed. by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghampton, New York: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1989), p.119. 44 Ibid. 45 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.105, 383. 46 Angus Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, Past and Present, 191 (2006), 77-120 (p.83). 47 Ibid., p.80. 48 Ibid, p.82.
11 early modern medical discussions in “diagnosing” melancholy in this way. Burton’s work is not the only medical text which informed this thesis, but it is by far the longest, most in-depth study of melancholy to come out of the early modern period, and its influence, therefore, cannot be understated. Burton, quoting the ‘common sort’ defines it at the outset of the Anatomy thusly: ‘a kinde of dotage without a feaver, having for his ordinary companions, feare, sadnesse, without any apparent occasion.’49 There are different species of melancholy, as Burton again notes, for ‘[w]hen the matter [melancholy itself] is divers and confused, how should it otherwise be, but that the Species should be divers and confused?’50 These ‘divers and confused’ species of melancholy have very different causes, but almost always, the ‘feare, sadnesse, suspition’ which Burton identified are found foremost amongst the symptoms.51 Timothy Bright (1551-1615) wrote A Treatise of Melancholy in 1586, which, along with other medical texts from the period is used throughout this thesis as a guide to understanding melancholy in all of its complexity. Bright notes that melancholy ‘signifieth in all, either a certaine fearefull disposition of the mind altered from reason, or else an humour in the body, commonly taken to be the only cause of reason by feare in such sort depraved.’52 Melancholy, Bright suggests, causes ‘feare, sadnesse, & ielosie’ whilst sufferers often see ‘horrible and feareful apparitions’ – hallucinations or terrible dreams.53 Throughout the course of this thesis, whilst discussing various aspects of melancholy, I have therefore attempted to make it clear how the symptoms of each character can be related to early modern melancholy, and to provide evidence from early modern medical texts in order to substantiate those claims. Other medical texts which are used frequently throughout this thesis include Ficino’s Three Books on Life, which we have seen was influential for writers like Burton. This text from the Italian Renaissance became influential on later medical writers, being in constant print throughout the seventeenth century. Ficino’s work, which recent editors Kaske and Clarke have called ‘the first treatise on the health of intellectuals,’ explores the ways in which ‘learned people,’ academics and students in particular, are particularly susceptible to melancholy.54 Ficino explains the apparent
49 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.162. 50 Ibid., p.168. 51 Ibid., p.168, 105. 52Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy (London: John Windet, 1586), p.1 53 Ibid., p.127, 128. 54 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.113.
12 paradox between melancholy causing intellect and also making people ‘stolid and stupid’ by suggesting the effect of the melancholy is down to the kind of melancholy – ‘natural’ black bile, which a ‘dense and dry part of the blood’ leads to ‘judgment and wisdom,’ where melancholy which ‘comes about by adustion’ ‘makes people excited and frenzied’ before causing stupidity.55 Given Ficino’s particular interest in the mental health and well-being of students, his work unsurprisingly is referenced most frequently in Chapter One, but his work is also important for the discussion of Giovanni and his scholarship in Chapter Four. Chapter Four is also particularly reliant on the arguments of Jacques Ferrand (born 1575), whose De la maladie d’amour ou mélancholie érotique (Treatise on Lovesickness, 1610) discussed the treatment of the subcategory of melancholy suffered specifically by lovers. Ferrand suggested that love ‘is the ground and original of all our affections and the epitome of all the perturbations of the soul,’ responsible solely for ‘amorous fever’ with its dreadful symptoms ‘palpitations of the heart, swelling of the face, depraved appetite, a sense of grief, sighing, causeless tears, insatiable hunger, raging thirst, fainting, oppressions, suffocations, insomnia, headaches,’ and of course ‘melancholy.’56 Ferrand’s work is particularly concerned with the diagnosis and cure of these love melancholics, suggesting that the diagnosis of a love melancholic may be as easy as looking at their eyes, since the eyes of those ‘afflicted with this malady’ ‘take on a certain soft cast.’57 Like Bright, Burton, and Ficino, Ferrand also highlights that ‘fear and sorrow’ are ‘inseparable from the state of melancholy’ and discusses the necessity of diagnosing and curing love melancholics lest their symptoms prove ‘pernicious.’58 Because of their frequent occurrence in early modern medical texts, therefore, fear, sadness, and suspicion therefore make up the starting points for my exploration of melancholy in this thesis. Melancholy’s association with sadness is perhaps its most widely known connotation. Erin Sullivan has noted that all passions were thought to be able to ‘alter the way a person’s mind, body and soul functioned, but none of them […] did so as dramatically, and variously, as sadness.’59 Many of the characters I discuss
55 Ibid., p.117. 56 Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. by Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1990), p.229. 57 Ibid., p.269. 58 Ibid., p.240, 229. 59 Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, p.1.
13 within this thesis are sad without a cause, or sad for too long after the cause of the sadness has occurred, and this sadness becomes an inherently vital part of their character. They are fearful, jealous, suspicious, and scheming, all of which were identified as symptoms of melancholy throughout the early modern period. This thesis identifies three main types of melancholy represented on the early modern stage: scholarly melancholy, comic melancholy, and love melancholy. Within these melancholies there is also much discussion of religious melancholy, and its potential sequel, religious despair. No matter the subspecies of melancholy, however, all kinds of melancholy share some significant symptoms: ‘discontent, feare, sorrow’ are all symptoms which Burton explicitly connected with all kinds of melancholy, and Bright identifies melancholy in his treatise as a ‘fearefull disposition of the mind’ which causes ‘heauinesse, fit comfortlesse, feare, distrust, doubt, dispaire, and lament.’60 Throughout the chapters of this thesis, even when discussing the differing symptoms of different melancholic types, there is a focus on sadness, fear, and distrust: these common symptoms are identified as being a part of all melancholies, and it is on the assumption that melancholics will display some, if not all, of these common symptoms, upon which this thesis rests. It is important for us to historicize melancholy as a disease. In her introduction to her edited collection of essays, Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, Sujata Iyengar notes the importance of seeing that ‘what we now think of as good health – freedom from disease, including chronic, non-life- threatening physical conditions and mental conditions such as depression, anxiety, and obsessive compulsive disorders – is a historically and socially bound phenomenon.’61 By viewing melancholy in the light of modern disability studies, we are therefore urged to be careful to view it as a specifically early modern disease and temperament. Consequently, throughout this thesis I have been careful not to use modern terminology such as depression or anxiety, despite their apparent similarities. It is not the place of this study to map the links and connections between early modern humoural theory and modern psychology – interesting as those links would be – merely to explore the ways humoural theory was enacted and performed onstage. The only piece of modern terminology which I have kept throughout the thesis is “suicide.” Rowland Wymer, in Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama, has discussed the origins of the term:
60 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.25; Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.1, 98. 61 Sujata Iyengar, ‘Introduction’, in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. by Sujata Iyengar (Routledge: New York, 2015), pp.1-19 (p.5)
14 The word “suicide” itself, latinate and morally neutral, is a product of the new outlook. The first known use of the word is in Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (Part I, sect. 44), written in 1635 and published in 1642. Unlike the older terms “self-murder” and “self-slaughter,” it avoids the implication of violence and criminality.62
Whilst not wishing to undermine the historical belief that suicide was against both human and Divine Law, I would like, where possible, to avoid discussing suicide in a manner which condones the ‘violence and criminality’ which early modern law placed on it.63 Discussions of suicide become particularly important in Chapters Two and Four, where the melancholics display a tendency towards suicidal ideation, or engage in activities which they know will lead to their death. Melancholy was known in the period to potentially cause the sufferer to desire death, and many of these protagonists seem to hurtle headlong towards death in a suicidal frenzy. Where necessary, therefore, such as in quotes from medical, religious, or dramatic texts, or when discussing the legal or moral implications of suicide in the early modern period, I shall occasionally use the terms “self-slaughter” or “self-murder,” but as a general rule the ‘morally neutral’ terminology must be my preferred way of expressing this action.64 Radden’s 2002 collection on melancholy showed the importance of melancholy, and its long-lasting influence.65 Michel Foucault’s influential text, Madness and Civilisation, likewise tracks the role of madness in medicine from the Renaissance onwards.66 This thesis, however, is, I believe, one of the first to showcase how wide ranging the influence of medical discussions of melancholy were for the theatrical community, over a period spanning almost fifty years. This thesis does not uphold Lawrence Babb’s binary of minds which are scientific versus those who are ‘unscientific’ or literary, and instead has sought to show the ways in which science and literature can come together to better understand why melancholy was so important during the early modern period.67 Despite the manifold influences these scholars and
62 Rowland Wymer, Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama, (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), p.2. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 See Jennifer Radden, The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 66 See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. by Richard Howard, ed. by David Cooper (London: Routledge, 1967). 67 Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580- 1642 (Michigan: Michigan State College Press, 1951), p.102.
15 critics, amongst numerous others, have had on this work, this thesis adds significantly to our overall understanding of melancholy in this period.
Many other critics have discussed the role and understanding of medicine in the early modern period. Gellert Lyons’s Voices of Melancholy has discussed the medical understanding of melancholy in particular, as has Gowland’s The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy.68 Stephanie Shirilan’s recent text, Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy has noted the importance of Burton’s own potential melancholy to his Anatomy, an argument which draws heavily on Mary Ann Lund’s Melancholy, Medicine, and Religion: Lund’s work was particularly influential on my thinking in Chapter One’s discussion of Hamlet and Doctor Faustus.69 Christopher Tilmouth’s exploration of Burton in ‘Burton’s Turning Picture’ likewise has discussed Burton’s own mental health in detail, suggesting that the ‘frenetic’ voice of the Anatomy comes from ‘a recurrent fear’ that ‘melancholy may not be suppressible; that man’s descent into the disease may be unavoidable’ and the idea of the inevitability of melancholy ties neatly in to my argument throughout this thesis that it is a widespread phenomenon on the early modern stage.70 Erin Sullivan has contributed significantly to the wide variety of literature on medicine in this period, including her explorations of sadness and its relationship to melancholy in Beyond Melancholy.71 Sullivan’s work on the connection between sadness and melancholy has been useful in helping to outline who we might consider melancholy on the early modern stage – who is melancholy and who might merely be sad. F. David Hoeniger’s influential 1992 study Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance usefully examines the role which doctors and physicians play on the early modern stage, arguing that physicians are often ‘presented as a satirical stock-type’ which is usually ‘grossly incompetent,’ which has been important in thinking about the role which physicians like Corax take on in these texts.72 Hoeniger likewise notes that love melancholy ‘is the theme of many medieval and Renaissance poems,’ an argument which I extend to include all subspecies of melancholy.73 William Kerwin’s more recent book, Beyond the Body,
68 Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy; Gowland, Problem of Early Modern Melancholy. 69 Stephanie Shirilan, Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Lund, Melancholy, Medicine, and Religion. 70 Tilmouth, ‘Burton’s “Turning Picture’, p.526. 71 Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy. 72 F. David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (London: Associated University Press, 1992), p.54. 73 Ibid., p.160.
16 likewise discusses the relationship between ‘the dynamics of drama’ and the ‘social dynamics of medical culture.’74 Kerwin discusses the differences between the Mantuan apothecary and Friar Laurence in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (written 1591-1595), outlining the different reactions to medicine both on and offstage which become particularly interesting for my comparison of Friar Laurence and the Friar from John Ford’s later play, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (performed 1629-1633). Gail Kern Paster’s recent book, Humouring the Body, likewise examines the way medicine is presented on the stage, highlighting the ‘bodily reality’ of mental health and what we may today describe as purely ‘emotional.’75 As Paster rightly notes, it is important for us to remember the physical reality of diseases like melancholy, just as it is important for us to remember that these dramas were created for performance. This thesis seeks to connect both in its understanding of performative emotional disease.
In this study I likewise set out to question which types of melancholy were being presented on the early modern stage. This question arises from Burton’s varying categories of melancholy: that of ‘Philosophers and Schollers,’ of ‘fond lovers,’ of ‘Jewes, Hereticks, Enthusiasts, Divinators, Prophets, Sectaries […] Epicures, Libertines, Atheists, Hypocrites, Infidels,’ and even a kind of melancholy which is particular to ‘Maides, Nunnes, and Widowes.’76 This research attempts to identify which, if any, of these categories were being invoked most often on the early modern stage, or to see if stage melancholy bears little resemblance to the melancholy found in medical and religious literature. The research presented here shows that each of these categories were being explicitly shown in the dramas of the late Elizabethan to Caroline periods. I cannot, therefore, in good conscience uphold the binary which we have seen Babb instigated between drama and science when he stated that ‘malcontent characters are cut to patterns which are more literary than scientific.’77 Much of Babb’s research has been influential on my thinking for this thesis, but this study has shown that melancholics and malcontents are cut to patterns, to use Babb’s phraseology, that are both literary and scientific.
74 William Kerwin, Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance Drama (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), p.10. 75 Gail Kern Paster, Humouring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p.26. 76 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.100; vol.3, p.93, 339; vol.1, p.370. 77 Babb, Elizabethan Malady, p.102.
17 In order to answer the question of which categories were being used in these dramas, I structured the chapters of this thesis generically as well as roughly chronologically: scholarly melancholy, revenger’s melancholy, and lover’s melancholy being the three main types of melancholy discussed, with religious melancholy making important appearances specifically in chapters One and Four. It became clear that it would be easy to group together plays which have an interest in similar forms of melancholy whilst keeping to a roughly chronological timespan. I wanted to keep as closely as possible to this chronology to see if interest in melancholy waned or waxed throughout the eras, and the research clearly shows an increase in interest in the portrayal of melancholy, and particularly love melancholy on the stage. We can see this increase in interest through the growth in its representations on the stage. Through using both a generic and chronological structure, this thesis will show the ways in which early modern dramatists became increasingly interested in using melancholy overtly in their drama, climaxing in the plays discussed in Chapter Four.
Chapter One of this thesis discusses the representation of scholarly melancholy in the late Elizabethan period, and through a combined focus on comedies and tragedies, examining Doctor Faustus (written 1589-1592) and Hamlet (written 1599- 1602) alongside Love’s Labour’s Lost (written 1595-1596) and As You Like It (written 1598-1599), to explore the way scholarly melancholy combined onstage with other forms of melancholy. Not only was melancholy thought to cause ‘intolerable stupidity and dulnesse of spirits,’ it was also considered ‘the scholar’s occupational disease,’ as Babb has memorably termed it.78 For Ficino, melancholy was ubiquitous for scholars. The activity of the scholar’s brains produces ‘black bile, which they call melancholy’79 Ficino believed that this ‘natural’ black bile, which is produced by the body, ‘leads to judgment and wisdom’ but can also, if not tempered by a sufficient amount of the other humours, cloud the spirit ‘with a mass that is black and dense’ which then ‘terrifies the soul and dulls the intelligence.’80 Even Burton later goes on to say that melancholy is ‘one of those five principall plagues of students’ and that it can be caused by ‘overmuch study; too much learning.’81 Each of these texts contain a character whose melancholy shows traits connected with that associated with scholars in the early modern period.
78 Ibid., p.25 79 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.113. 80 Ibid., p.117. 81 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.302.
18 Yet each melancholic in these texts also identifies strongly with another kind of melancholy at some point in their story – love melancholy, religious melancholy, or in the case of Jaques, his own unique melancholia ‘extracted from many objects.’ (AYLI, 2.1.68). I chose to use a combination of comedies and tragedies in this chapter to show that melancholics, whether their melancholy can be considered genius or not, are deliberately denied a traditionally happy marriage ending – in both genres. Those suffering from a scholarly melancholy in these texts are denied the traditional happy ending, because their melancholy, which combines with other forms as the plays progress, is never purged. The protagonists do not reach the ‘natural proportion’ of humours which Galen required for health.82 For the scholar-lovers of Love’s Labour’s Lost and for the melancholic Jaques in As You Like It, their plays therefore end in exile – Jaques in a voluntary exile to the forest, and the scholarly lovers of Love’s Labour’s Lost being enjoined to live for a ‘year’ in ‘some forlorn and naked hermitage / Remote from all the pleasures of the world.’83 For Faustus and Hamlet, the generic conventions of their tragedies require death. Particularly relevant to my discussions in Chapter One was Emily Anglin’s article ‘Something in me dangerous,’ which highlights the importance of performativity to Hamlet’s melancholy, as Hamlet ‘both is and pretends to be melancholic.’84 Chapter One argues against the idea that Hamlet’s melancholy is ‘illegible’ as Anglin contends, and suggests that his performance of madness is deliberately based on his own experiences with scholarly melancholy.85 Peter Iver Kaufman’s ‘Hamlet’s Religions’ and Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory were both influential on my thinking around religion in Hamlet, and how this may connect with his spiritual despair.86 The connection of spiritual despair and melancholy is particularly important in Chapter One, as I argue for Faustus’s descent from scholarly melancholy to despair. Important to the discussion of despair and damnation was Arieh Sachs’s The Religious Despair of Doctor Faustus (1964), which argues that the central ‘spirit of the play’ is Faustus’s belief that he must be damned, and the spiritual religious despair such a belief must
82 Galen, ‘To Thrasyboulos’, p.75 83 William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. by H. R. Woudhuysen (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1998), Act 5, Scene 2, Lines 798, 789-790. All further references will be to this edition and will be made in-text with the abbreviation LLL. 84 Emily Anglin, ‘“Something in me dangerous”: Hamlet, melancholy, and the early modern scholar,’ Shakespeare, 13 (2017), 15-29 (p.25). 85 Ibid., p.23. 86 Peter Iver Kaufman, ‘Hamlet’s Religions’, Religions, 2 (2011), 427-448; Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013).
19 cause.87 Despite Sachs’s many convincing arguments, this thesis moves away from the assumption that Faustus ‘by its very nature cannot be suspenseful, since Faustus’s despair is such as to make his reprobation a foregone conclusion,’ and instead argues that Faustus is not necessarily condemned before the beginning of the play, but that his melancholy makes him believe he is so. Thomas Stroup’s discussion on the role of religion in Faustus and Hamlet, on the other hand, like this thesis, highlights the importance of the protagonists’ mental health, with Stroup suggesting that both plays are deeply concerned with ‘psychomachia’ - which Faustus ends with and Hamlet begins with, and which Stroup describes as ‘a battle with despair.’88 Gerald M. Pinciss’s 1993 article on ‘Marlowe’s Cambridge Years and the Writing of Doctor Faustus’ likewise did much to inform my reading of Faustus in relation to Calvinist theology.89 Tom McAlindon has also outlined the ways in which Faustus is influenced by contemporary understandings of both theology and astrology, which become important as we discuss the role which Saturn plays in the creation of scholarly melancholy, and the concept of the Saturnine man.90 H.C. Porter’s Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (2015) is an important study which described the way in which the Protestant reformation took hold in university cities like Cambridge, and was consequently important to much of my thinking surrounding Faustus and Hamlet.91
Chapter Two explores the generic convention of death further, looking at the role of the death of the revenger in revenge tragedies. This chapter focuses on revenge tragedies from the late 1500s to early 1600s – The Spanish Tragedy (written 1582- 1592), The Revenger’s Tragedy (performed 1606), and The Tragedy of Hoffman (ca.1602) – alongside two tragicomedies from the same period – Antonio’s Revenge (written 1600-1601) and The Malcontent (ca.1603). Chapter Two draws on Eric Langley’s suggestion that revengers act as a ‘pharmaceutical purgative’ and that they must heal ‘social disease’: this chapter suggests that the death of the melancholic
87 Arieh Sachs, ‘The Religious Despair of Doctor Faustus’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 63 (1964), 625-647 (p.626). 88 Thomas B. Stroup, ‘Doctor Faustus and Hamlet: Contrasting Kinds of Christian Theology’, Comparative Drama, 5 (1971), 243-253 (p.246). 89 Gerald M. Pinciss, ‘Marlowe’s Cambridge Years and the Writing of Doctor Faustus’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 33 (1993), 249-264. 90 Tom McAlindon, ‘Doctor Faustus: Grounded in Astrology’, Literature and Theology, 8 (1994), 384- 393. 91 H.C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).
20 revenger, and its healing power of purgation, cure the society both on and offstage.92 Burton gave the ‘Desire of Revenge’ as a cause for melancholy, suggesting that revenge ‘aggravate[s] our misery, and melancholy, [and] heape[s] upon us hell and eternall damnation.’93 Gellert Lyons has noted that villainy ‘has always been connected with melancholy through the sinister personality and attributes of Saturn.’94 The protagonists of this chapter are all revengers who appear to suffer from melancholy, not just grief, but from an innate disposition. In again choosing to discuss a selection of tragicomic and tragic texts, this chapter aims to explore the differing ways this desire to remove melancholy manifests itself, and why the revenger comes to embody the concept of melancholy so fully. The close chronological similarities which Chapter Two shares with Chapter One serve to prove the inherent importance of melancholy on the early modern stage, in all genres and in many guises.
In tragicomedies, the melancholic revenger is allowed to live only because his melancholy is successfully purged through the removal of the villain. Chapter Three goes on to explore what might happen when that removal is incomplete, and the melancholy continues to exist in plays which we might ordinarily expect to end happily, the comedies. This chapter looks at texts such as Twelfth Night (written 1601-1602), The Merchant of Venice (written 1596-1599), Every Man In His Humour (performed 1598) and An Humorous Day’s Mirth (performed 1597). In the selection of these texts, I was careful to include an equal number of both types of comic melancholy which I distinguish between in this chapter. The chapter outlines these two types of melancholic as ‘discontents’ and ‘gulls’ – both suffering from a melancholy, usually a love melancholy, whose endings are decidedly different. These categories are derived from distinctions made in the period itself – characters such as Malvolio are called “gulls,” and the term ‘discontents’ I take from Burton’s Anatomy, which regularly gives ‘discontent’ as a significant symptom of melancholy.95 This thesis groups this specific type of melancholic together without conflating them with other categories, such as malcontent, as they play a different role. Chapter Three deals with a variety of comic dramas, and as such there is much criticism which has been useful to my thought process. Richard A. McCabe’s article ‘Ben Jonson, Theophrastus, and the Comedy of
92 Eric Langley, Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.254, 253. 93 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.265. 94 Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy, p.35. 95 Burton, Anatomy, vol.2, p.25.
21 Humours’ was of particular interest, especially the suggestion that Jonson draws a distinction between ‘an actual bias of the mind and a completely conscious affectation.’96
Drew Daniel’s work on Antonio’s attempted sacrifice The Merchant of Venice was likewise important for this chapter, as was J. F. Bernard’s excellent article ‘The Merchant of Venice and Shakespeare’s sense of humour(s)’, which articulates some similar conclusions about the play’s almost-tragic ending and the ‘tonal dissonance’ that we, the audience, find – and its root cause in melancholy.97 Bernard’s recent book, Shakespearean Melancholy, released during the research stage of this chapter, is one I am particularly indebted to. Bernard argues that a ‘sustained comic reliance’ on melancholy emerges in the 1590s, which is the argument I have likewise attempted to track throughout Chapter Three, using my categorisations of different types of comic melancholy – gulls and discontents.98 Bernard has very recently charted the ‘sustained comic reliance on melancholy’ in Shakespearean texts, suggesting that melancholic characters, such as The Merchant of Venice’s Antonio strike ‘a considerably discordant note because melancholy – paradoxically’ both assists and impedes comic resolution.’99 This chapter seeks to extend Bernard’s argument to take in examples from Shakespeare’s contemporaries like Chapman. Brian Walsh’s book, Unsettled Toleration (2016), looks at stage Puritanism, and convincingly argues that ‘plays have something to contribute to our understanding of how early moderns expressed and experienced toleration,’ which becomes particularly relevant to our discussion of characters such as Malvolio.100 Chapter Three engages with Walsh’s arguments to discuss the relationship between affected Puritanism and the end of melancholy on the early modern stage. Chapter Three explores the idea that melancholy is presented as an obstacle to overcome in the comedies, and looks at the ways in which melancholy is purged in comedies with conventional “happy” endings, in a genre where the protagonist cannot
96 Richard A. McCabe, ‘Ben Jonson, Theophrastus, and the Comedy of Humours’, Hermathena: A Trinity College Dublin Review, 146 (1989), 25-37. 97 Drew Daniel, ‘“Let me have judgment, and the Jew his will”: Melancholy Epistemology and Masochistic Fantasy in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 61 (2010), 206-234; J. F. Bernard, ‘The Merchant of Venice and Shakespeare’s sense of humour(s)’, Renaissance Studies, 28 (2013), 643-658 (p.646). 98 J. F. Bernard, Shakespearean Melancholy: Philosophy, Form, and the Transformation of Comedy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p.25. 99 Ibid., p.25; Bernard, Shakespeare’s Sense of Humour(s), p.649. 100 Brian Walsh, Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p.20.
22 be the purgative, as in revenge tragedy, and cannot die, as in other forms of tragedy, and the ways in which the melancholy of the discontent can subvert or complicate the ending.
The conflation of comedy and melancholy does not only occur in the drama: as Sullivan again notes, Du Laurens ‘included in his book outlandish and even farcical descriptions of melancholic patients’ intended to amuse and delight the readers.101 These amusing stories, written to delight those who may be reading for edification or possibly even to cure their own melancholy, are an interesting parallel to the melancholy presented in the comic drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. An interesting point of comparison which I have found is in a 1582 edition of the thirteenth-century medical text De proprietatibus rerum, where Anglicus Bartholomaeus describes various melancholic patients who believed in fanciful and “amusing” delusions: the men who believe themselves to be earthen vessels, who ‘feare to be touched, lest they break;’ those who believe that they hold the whole world ‘in their fist;’ those who believe that the angel who ‘holdeth vp the world’ is about to let it fall ‘for wearinesse,’ and therefore attempt to ‘heaue their hands & shoulders to holde vp the world,’ lest the world fall to its destruction, are a few examples from Bartholomaeus’s text.102 Burton’s Anatomy is also full of these strange, whimsical stories, such as the ‘melancholy King, that thought his head was off,’ who was cured by the wearing of a ‘leaden cap,’ the weight of which made him realise he did have a head; or the woman who believed she had ‘swallowed a Serpent’ – the physician in this instance ‘gave her a vomit, and conveied a Serpent, such as shee conceaved, into the bason, upon the sight of it she was mended.’103 These amusing tales are mirrored in the entertaining stories of the gulls in Chapter Three, which counterbalance the more moralizing tales of the discontents, which serve as a warning against melancholy.
The love melancholy discussed in Chapter Three is given a fuller exploration in Chapter Four, which argues for a culmination of stage performances of melancholy in the late Jacobean – Caroline periods, and focuses on the work of John Ford as the main example of this peak of interest in melancholy. This chapter concentrates on the work of John Ford, whose connection with Burton is undeniable. Lisa Hopkins’s work on
101 Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, p.110. 102 Anglicus Bartholomaeus, Batman vppon Bartholome his booke De Proprietatibus rerum (London: Thomas East, 1582), p.97. 103 Burton, Anatomy, p.112.
23 John Ford (1586-1639) is particularly influential in studies of Ford. In particular, Hopkins’s ‘Speaking Sweat: Emblems in the Plays of John Ford’ encouraged me to think about the ‘dynamics of stage action’ in Ford’s texts, which led to my belief that the important action in Ford’s work is, in fact, the curing of melancholia.104 Likewise, Hopkins’s John Ford’s Political Theatre provides an excellent understanding of Ford’s political background and the social context in which he was writing, which became important to me in my later discussions on Giovanni and irreligion. Hopkins discusses several close readings regarding Ford’s work and it’s connection to the religious circumstances in which Ford was living, such as the fact that even Giovanni and Annabella ‘who turn so determinedly away from the usual life and customs of their society, cannot manage without ritual.’105 Dorothy M. Farr’s work on Ford in John Ford and the Caroline Theatre also encourages us to think about the space in which Ford’s texts were performed, and the ways this plays into our understanding of ‘spectacle.’106 Farr’s research has shown that Ford acknowledges his ‘debt to The Anatomy of Melancholy in a marginal note in [The Lover’s Melancholy].’107 Ford’s intense interest in melancholy means his work can act as a climax to the growing interest of melancholy throughout the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline periods. This chapter explores the ways in which Ford became interested in portraying the medical curing of melancholy, as well as the way Ford combines many of the aspects of melancholy from previous decades. Discussing The Lover’s Melancholy alongside The Broken Heart (published 1633) and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore means that I can highlight Ford’s growing interest in love melancholy and the way it can be cured.
Throughout the chapters I have attempted to select texts from a variety of authors: Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton are all well-researched, Shakespeare more so than anyone, but this study also includes works by relatively under-researched authors like Chettle, Chapman, and Ford. These authors use melancholy frequently throughout their works. In selecting a range of texts, both canonical and otherwise, I have attempted, in this case study approach to select the most interesting examples which still fit within my chronological and generic parameters. The use of a wide
104 Lisa Hopkins, ‘Speaking Sweat: Emblems in the Plays of John Ford’, Comparative Drama 29 (1995), 133-146 (p.140). 105 Lisa Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p.117. 106 Dorothy M. Farr, John Ford and the Caroline Theatre (London: Macmillan Press, 1979), p.5 107 Ibid., p.110.
24 variety of texts suggests that the inclusion of melancholy is almost universal in the drama. Melancholy in these plays is always significant, driving the plot forward, providing the motivations for the actions of the characters, and providing an obstacle which must be overcome, or at the very least balanced, in order for the ending to have hope. Melancholy is one of the most important temperaments and ailments staged during the early modern period, and its continuous presence goes some way to partially explaining why early modern drama remains as popular in our current world as in their own: how many university undergraduates would argue against the idea that too much studying can make you sad - or how many academics, for that matter? How many young lovers think of themselves as modern-day Romeos and Juliets? Would every actor long to play the Dane, if Hamlet were not melancholy?
25 ‘Lay that damnèd book aside / And gaze not on it’: Scholarly Melancholy, Solitude, and the Supernatural on the late Elizabethan Stage. 108 As early as the fourth century B.C.E, writers such as Aristotle were propounding a link between melancholy and the intellect, asking ‘[w]hy is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics?’109 The belief that melancholic people ‘were inclined to’ creativity, intelligence, and even genius, Erin Sullivan has noted, endured throughout the early modern period.110 Angus Gowland has noted that ‘the subject of melancholy was becoming more interesting and important to the learned population of late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century Europe,’ a trend which Gowland suggests can be seen in ‘the rapid increase in the production of treatises and university disputations devoted solely to the disease.’111 The link between melancholy and intellect endured on the late Elizabethan stage, appearing in the melancholic scholars in plays such as Doctor Faustus (written 1589-1592), Hamlet (written 1599-1602), As You Like It (written 1599), and Love’s Labour’s Lost (written 1595-1596). Jennifer Radden goes so far as to call the connection between melancholy and intellect a ‘glorification’ of melancholy.112 This chapter explores the ways in which these melancholic scholars were presented on the stage, the symptoms dramatists used, and what reasons they may have had for dramatizing this form of melancholy – were they glorified, as Radden suggests was occurring in popular culture, as opposed to being merely important to the learned population as Gowland suggests? In discussing scholarly melancholy, this chapter also covers some of the key areas which intersect with representations of scholars on the early modern stage, such as love melancholy, religion and religious melancholy, magic, and the supernatural. This chapter explores what connotations come from the intersection of these elements and the scholarly melancholy of the protagonists, to highlight scholarly melancholy as a tool for the creation of tragedy.
During the late Elizabethan period melancholy became a fashionable humour. Radden has suggested that the ‘glorification’ of melancholy, as she terms it, can be
108 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (A-Text), ed. by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), Act 1, Scene 1, Line 72. All further references will be to this edition, and will be made in-text with the short title Faustus. 109 Aristotle, ‘Problemata XXX.1’, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. and trans. by Jonathan Barnes, 12 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), II, 952a 10-14. 110 Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, p.29. 111 Gowland, Problem of Early Modern Melancholy, p.84. 112 Radden, Nature of Melancholy, p.29.
26 traced back to the ideas of Ficino, ‘the author of a book devoted to the melancholy man of genius.’113 This book, De Vita Libri Tres, was published frequently well into the seventeenth century, and has been described by its recent editors Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark as the ‘first treatise on the health of intellectuals.’114 Ficino’s work addresses itself directly to scholars, comparing them favourably to athletes, insisting that scholars should have ‘as much concern for their brain and their heart, their liver and their stomach,’ as runners do their legs – even more so, in fact, since, he suggests, ‘literary scholars use their parts more frequently and for more important things than [runners] do theirs.’115 Ironically, considering that Ficino suggests that scholars use their brains for such great things compared to athletes and their attention to physicality, he berates scholars for being ‘inactive in the rest of body.’116 Ficino claims that it is through inactivity that the body of the patient is compelled to secrete pituita, or phlegm, and because of the activity of the mind that the body secretes black bile.117 The secretion of black bile, or melancholy, can result either in ‘judgment and wisdom’ – genius – or can have the opposite effect of terrifying the soul and dulling the intellect.118 The former consequence is the one which Radden uses as the basis for her claim that melancholy was glorified in the Elizabethan period. Gowland seems to suggests that it may have been a fashion, rather than a “real” ‘epidemic,’ when he suggests that ‘we must ask why people described themselves or others as melancholic, and consider what they meant by this.’119
Ficino may have had personal reasons for wanting to link melancholy with genius. Kaske and Clarke note that Ficino had ‘a very bad horoscope,’ and suggest that he could therefore ‘hardly be casual and lukewarm towards astrology: he would have to either reinterpret it to give him some hope, or else deny it outright.’120 A ‘bad horoscope’ might account for Ficino’s mixture of adapted astrology and outright rejection of some aspects of horoscopes, but his text is most significant for shaping the
113 Ibid., p.13. 114 Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark, ‘Introduction’, in Three Books on Life: A Critical Edition and Translation with Introduction and Notes, ed. and trans. by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghampton: Sta.te University of New York, 1989), 3-90 (p.3) 115 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.111. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid., p.113. 118 Ibid., p.367. 119 Gowland, Problem of Early Modern Melancholy, p.83 120 Kaske and Clarke, ‘Introduction’, p.18.
27 link between astrology and scholarly melancholy.121 Ficino establishes that Saturn is responsible not only for creating the melancholic, or Saturnine, temperament, but also for bestowing intellect and wisdom. In his adapted astrology, Ficino reclaims Saturn as the ‘highest of planets’ in an attempt to shed a positive light onto its melancholic influence.122 Ficino suggested that ‘[t]hose who are dedicated to scrutinizing carefully the depths of secret things, should know themselves to be […] Saturnine.’123 By relating melancholy to men of learning and wisdom in this way, Ficino contributed significantly to the popularity of melancholy as an affected disposition. The correlation of melancholy and genius is one of the reasons that melancholy became a topic of such interest on the stage in this period. Babb has suggested that melancholy was ‘affected by the would-be great’ – those who wished to present themselves as aristocratic, or geniuses, since it was ‘regarded as the malady of great minds.’124 This connection meant that melancholy became a fashionable quality to affect, and in using it, dramatists had the opportunity to satirize the affected melancholic, or to explore the tragic consequences of scholar’s melancholy.
It may not have been only the inactivity of the body, or a desire to be fashionable, which caused scholars to become melancholic, however. The anonymous Cambridge university play Return from Parnassus (1601) follows the unsuccessful attempts of two graduates to forge careers for themselves, eventually reaching a depth of hopeless poverty and misery in a world ill-suited to scholars. Sarah Knight has shown how Francis Bacon, a Cambridge graduate himself, created in The Advancement of Learning (1605) a system for a new social structure which ‘values the truly learned’ and which ‘eradicates scholarly melancholy,’ a world in which the Parnassus graduates may have lived a far happier existence.125 Gellert Lyons suggests that Shakespeare’s representation of scholarly melancholy in Hamlet showcases ‘the disillusioned scholar’s weary cynicism,’ and this scepticism may have had something to do with the world’s rejection of ‘the truly learned’ as Knight proposes.126 Knight has shown how the early modern curriculum was the subject of satirical attacks in the university dramas, and that
121 Ibid. 122 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.367. 123 Ibid., p.377. 124 Babb, Elizabethan Malady, p.74. 125 Sarah Knight, ‘Fantastical Distempers: The Psychopathology of Early Modern Scholars’ in Early Modern Academic Drama, ed. by Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 129- 152 (p.145). 126 Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy, p.82.
28 students would use ‘a variety of genres to articulate intellectual frustration and occupational anxieties,’ citing the Parnassus playwrights as examples of dramatists who chart ‘the fortunes of scholars who ultimately fail in the dizzying array of careers they attempt after leaving the universities.’127 Melancholy was so linked with University life that the texts written by college dramatists were the ‘first to link melancholy with excessive fantasy.’128 The link to excessive fantasy is key, the idea that melancholy would lead to creative imagination and output.
Knight also notes that scholars ‘were represented as sharply conscious of their own psychological frailty and social inadequacy.’129 Such an analysis suggests that these scholars were at least partially aware of the connection to melancholy which their profession was meant to give them. Gowland likewise notes that, in writing his Anatomy, Burton may have sought a way of ‘denouncing the marginalisation of scholars’ from society, and ‘exploring the psychology of [the scholar’s] withdrawal’ and their inability to form close personal connections.130 Gowland seems to suggest that Burton, himself a scholar, was reacting to the ways in which society perceived scholarly melancholics. If scholars were so keenly aware of the potential ways in which they were perceived, then it seems likely that the link between scholarship and melancholy was well known, or may have led to a situation where scholars might begin to unconsciously perform the melancholy they believe they should feel – perhaps a kind of fashion of its own. Despite the fashion which the connection between intellect and melancholy fostered, scholarly melancholy is rarely presented in isolation on the stage – that is to say, there are few characters who are melancholy only because they are scholars. This contrasts with the medical texts which treat scholarly melancholy as a distinct species of melancholy. This chapter highlights the ways in which the scholarly melancholy of these characters evolves into other kinds of melancholy, and the implications of those kinds of melancholy alongside that of the scholar.
The revelation that something which appears to be one kind of melancholy could be another, is best exemplified in Love’s Labour’s, where Shakespeare’s young male lovers begin the play as scholars before their melancholy transforms into that of
127 Knight, ‘Fantastical Distempers’, p.145. 128 Ibid., p.133. 129 Ibid. 130 Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p.293.
29 the lover. ‘Our court shall be a little academe,’ the King of Navarre states at the beginning of the play, positioning himself and his ‘fellow-scholars’ as academics seeking ‘to know which else we should not know’ (LLL, 1.1.13, 17, 56). As we have seen, studying has the potential to lead one to be Saturnine: ‘a person who is stimulated into scrutinizing curiously the depths of secret things, should know himself to be not only Mercurial but Saturnine.’131 This sounds similar to that which the King states the mission of the scholars is, to ‘know which else we should not know,’ which Berowne translates as to ‘know the thing I am forbid to know’ (LLL, 1.1.56, 59). Likewise concerned with gaining “forbidden” knowledge is the protagonist Faustus, who wishes to know, not merely ‘slender trifles’ but the ultimate question of ‘who made the world.’ (Faustus 2.3.49, 66). This piece of knowledge is forbidden to mankind – ‘I will not tell thee,’ Mephistopheles insists (Faustus, 2.3.69). Although the kinds of knowledge which the King and Faustus desire to gain are clearly different, there are grounds for comparison here. Berowne’s accusation, however much like a friendly joke it can appear in performance, is similar – the seeking of knowledge forbidden to mortals. This could be seen to position the scholarly melancholy of the young men as potentially sinful, a deliberate attempt to gain that which they cannot have, in a parallel to the biblical Fall of Man.
Faustus is likewise positioned as sinful from the outset, with his desire to gain forbidden knowledge at the heart of this. Faustus’s opening soliloquy confirms Marlowe’s familiarity and interest in representing scholarly melancholy in Faustus. Faustus is shown alone, rejecting logic, law, medicine, and divinity as topics of study, eventually settling on magic as the only topic he has yet to master. As Ficino stated, ‘withdrawal from human affairs’ and studying ‘theology, the more esoteric philosophy, superstition, [and] magic,’ are likely to cause melancholy.132 Such activity would also be described by Burton later as a cause of scholarly melancholy.133 Although the Anatomy was not published until after the first performance of Faustus and could not, of course, have been influential for Marlowe, it seems likely that Burton was collecting examples and conducting research throughout the early 1600s, during which time Faustus was being regularly performed.134 Ficino ascribed the secretion of melancholy
131 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.377. 132 Ibid., p.253. 133 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.303. 134 It is also interesting to note that Burton owned texts by Marlowe, although no copy of Doctor Faustus appears in his collection. See Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford:
30 in scholars to the constant activity of the brain and believed that the abundance of melancholy ‘vexes the mind with continual care and frequent absurdities and unsettles the judgement.’135 Andrew Boorde likewise suggested that this ‘infirmitie’ can be caused by ‘musing or studying vpon things ye his reason can not comprehend’ – perhaps like the forbidden knowledge which Faustus seeks in the opening soliloquy.136 That Faustus’s mind has been kept constantly active is aptly demonstrated in his opening soliloquy: he is familiar enough with law, medicine, and divinity to term them all dull, ‘paltry’ pursuits (Faustus, 1.1.30). Faustus’s decision to study magic is inherently linked to his scholarly melancholia. The conjuring of Mephistopheles is one such example. Faustus enters, presumably ‘holding a book,’ since Valdes told Faustus to take ‘wise Bacon’s and Albanus’ works / The Hebrew Psalter, and New Testament’ along with ‘whatsoever else is requisite’ with him when he went to conjure the devil (Faustus, 1.3.SD; 1.1.156-157, 158). Given the association which books inevitably have with learning, it is easy to see that Faustus is here still supposed to represent the melancholic scholar – melancholic in his solitude: as Burton notes, by virtue of being a scholar, a scholar must ‘abandon all company, society of other men, and betake themselves’ to a private life.137 Burton may have been drawing on his own experiences as a scholar when discussing the solitary nature of student life, and since he matriculated at Oxford in the early 1590s, not long after Marlowe’s matriculation at Cambridge, then their experiences of institutional curricular at least, can be considered comparable. During Marlowe’s time at Cambridge University, he would have been a witness to the meteoric career of William Perkins (1558-1602), a leading religious reformer and a proponent of the doctrine of Predestination.138 Gerald M. Pinciss has argued convincingly that Perkins’s successful rhetoric and the subsequent ‘counterattack’ from anti-Calvinist opposition ‘provided the background of the debate Marlowe would dramatize in Doctor Faustus.’139 Marlowe was a student at Cambridge between 1580 and 1587, and Perkins received his BA from Christ’s College in 1581, and his MA in
Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988), especially pages 190 and 278. 135 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.113 136 Boorde, Breuiarie of Health, p.78 137 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.242. 138 See Pinciss, ‘Marlowe’s Cambridge Years’ for a succinct and interesting look at the correlation between Marlowe’s studentship, Perkins’s rise to fame, and Doctor Faustus. 139 Ibid., p.252.
31 1584.140 In the same year, Perkins was elected a fellow at Christ’s College. Marlowe’s own college was Corpus Christi, not Christ’s, but the two colleges are in close enough proximity to at least conjecture that Marlowe may have heard Perkins speak or known of his reputation. Patrick Collinson suggests that ‘[c]lerical puritanism, as a cohesive, national movement, was created in the universities.’141 Collinson suggests that the universities formed a ‘brotherhood’ of preachers, including men like Perkins, which allowed Puritanism to rise.142 Porter has noticed a similar trend, and called Perkins’ Cambridge college ‘a seed plot of Puritanism,’ and attributed this to ‘the Fellows,’ who would teach ‘anything from one to twenty pupils, boys who lived with him, and directly paid him, and were entirely controlled by him.’143 David K. Anderson has noted Marlowe’s interest in theology, suggesting that ‘Marlowe's dramatic effect demanded of him a perceptive understanding of the religious culture that shaped his audience,’ suggesting religion and religious tensions are an inherent part of Marlowe’s dramatic style.144 Religion, Anderson reminds us, ‘occurred not only on the official level of theological treatise, sermon, or polemic, but also within a theatrical audience / and within the mind of each audience member.’145 Anderson is right to highlight the importance of theological narrative to Marlowe’s work, and the idea that both dramatists and audiences would have been affected by the conscious and unconscious theological influences which surrounded them is significant. Perkins, as Porter explains, was ‘a Fellow until his marriage in 1595,’ and would have exercised extraordinary influence over the students in his care, not to mention over those who came to hear him speak.146 Marlowe’s Cambridge years influenced the presentation of religion in Faustus, and his presentation of scholarly melancholy. Faustus is a play with an intense interest in the doctrine of predestination: a doctrine which Bishop Whitgift described in 1595 as how ‘God from eternity has predestined some men to life [in Heaven], and reprobated
140 Charles Nicholl, ‘Marlowe, Christopher (bap. 1564, d. 1593)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., Jan 2008
32 some to death,’ and presents the audience with the descent of one man through the stages of scholarly melancholy, religious melancholy, and despair. 147 Faustus’s sinful desire for magic is intrinsically linked to his melancholia throughout the play, specifically in Faustus’s desire to become a ‘mighty God’ through his magical abilities (Faustus, 1.1.58). The connection between the desire for knowledge, or for power, and melancholy is clear. This link is one that we have seen in Love’s Labour’s, where the protagonists likewise suffer from melancholy, albeit in a different form from that of Faustus. The King admits that knowing things which are ‘hid and barred’ from ‘common sense’ is ‘study’s god-like recompense’ (LLL, 1.1.58). Although the King desires only a ‘god-like recompense,’ rather than truly to become a deity, as Faustus does, the scholarly melancholy of the two men does manifest in a similar way. (LLL, 1.1.58, emphasis mine). This desire for forbidden knowledge is key in creating their identity as scholarly melancholics. Ficino describes scholars as those who have ‘minds that are yearning for knowledge,’ and counsels them to follow his ‘precepts conducive to a long life,’ in case they are overtaken by melancholy.148 Another early modern stage scholar who, it may be suggested, suffers from a scholarly melancholy is Hamlet. Not only is Hamlet predisposed to suffer from melancholy as a man ‘dedicated to learning,’ as his desire to return to Wittenberg shows, but Hamlet’s melancholy and the ‘antic disposition’ it leads him to perform comes from seeking the truth – to know more than is ‘dreamt of’ in an ordinary scholar’s ‘philosophy’ (Hamlet, 1.4.166). Like the scholars of Love’s Labours and Faustus, Hamlet may be accused of seeking knowledge which is forbidden – perhaps because of his scholarly melancholy.
Part of the problem with scholars, Ficino reminds us, is that ‘with too little physical exercise, superfluities are not carried off and the thick, dense, clinging, dusky vapors [of melancholy] do not exhale.’149 In Hamlet, although we are told Hamlet has been practising his fencing, the Queen notes during the duel with Laertes that Hamlet is ‘fat and scant of breath,’ suggesting that exercise is not something which is regularly applied to ease Hamlet’s melancholy (Hamlet, 5.2.269). We have seen that Ficino suggested such inactivity causes the body to secrete excess pituita which, when combined with the activity of the mind created both by Hamlet’s time at ‘school in
147 Bishop Whitgift, ‘The Lambeth Articles’ (1595), quoted in translation in H.C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p.371. 148 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.167. 149 Ibid., p.115.
33 Wittenberg’ and with his meditations on his father’s death, creates melancholy (Hamlet, 1.2.113). Likewise, ‘long wakefulness or much agitation of the mind’ can increase black bile through ‘excessive dryness of the body.’150 Such wakefulness is perhaps a part of Hamlet’s routine from Wittenberg, but it is also connected with the late hour at which the Ghost appears – ‘’twixt eleven and twelve’ (Hamlet, 1.2.250). Hamlet is clearly intended to be a representation of a solitary, scholarly melancholic. The solitude of scholars is a recurring and noteworthy theme in both medical and dramatic literature. In A Treatise of Melancholy, which Radden described as the ‘first full-length English work on melancholy,’ Timothy Bright gave ‘solitarines’ as a common cause and symptom of melancholy.151 Ficino likewise connects ‘solitude’ to the ‘influence of Saturn’ and the melancholy which Saturn can cause, specifically that suffered by scholars: Ficino suggests that solitude requires a ‘withdrawal from human affairs.’152
Faustus proves to be very solitary once he decides to study magic, and with the exception of Mephistopheles, Faustus is onstage alone for much of the play, save the short appearance of Valdes and Cornelius. Although Faustus states that he longs to learn from his human companions, begging them to ‘show [him] some demonstrations magical, / That [he] may conjure in some lusty grove,’ it is Faustus who has the dominant voice throughout their interaction, not Valdes or Cornelius (Faustus, 1.1.152- 153). Valdes and Cornelius do not appear after 1.1, and the other characters in Faustus are essentially peripheral. Even Lucifer himself is given only a marginal amount of stage time. There are multiple opportunities for doubling in this play (the only parts which cannot conceivably be doubled are those of Faustus and Mephistopheles), which serves to reaffirm the claustrophobic atmosphere, as people whose parts have ostensibly ended reappear in a manner likely to cause a sense of déjà vu. The only characters who seem to care about Faustus’s well-being are his ‘fellow-scholars’ who appear intermittently throughout the play to wonder at the change which has happened to Faustus (LLL, 1.1.17). The scholars, determined to discover what it is that ‘ails Faustus,’ suggest that he has ‘grown into some sickness by being / over-solitary’ (Faustus, 5.2.2, 7-8). Faustus’s scholarly melancholy is therefore consistently related to the fact he is solitary. In As You Like It the melancholic scholar Jaques actively chooses a solitary life. At the end of the play, Jaques makes the decision to leave the court and
150 Ibid., p.133. 151 Radden, Nature of Melancholy, p.28; Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.99, 152 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.253.
34 remain in the forest, to live life as a hermit with the reformed Duke Frederick, who has ‘thrown into neglect the pompous court’ and instead ‘put on a religious life’: such a decision is significant in terms of what it means for Jaques’s solitude (AYLI, 5.4.180, 179). Bright describes those suffering from the condition as ‘delighted more in solitarines & obscurity’ than in company.153 Auger Ferrier (1513-1588), a French physician and astrologer, noted that those born under ‘Saturne’ were ‘sadde, solitarie, fearefull, melancholie’ and ‘of a deepe cogitation.’154 Solitariness was a frequently reoccurring and important symptom of melancholy, particularly that associated with scholars like Faustus and Hamlet.
Unlike Faustus, which we have seen has a small cast with multiple opportunities for doubling, thus highlighting the solitary atmosphere of the protagonist’s melancholy, Hamlet has a large main cast, offering fewer opportunities for actors to double roles. It is helpful to think about the characteristics of these plays, for example onstage presence and opportunity for doubling, as it reminds us of the conditions of performance which these playwrights could exploit to highlight aspects of their texts, such as melancholy. Based on the logic previously applied to Faustus, this should make Hamlet seem less claustrophobic. Hamlet himself, however, has a remarkable ability to isolate himself even amongst this large group of characters. The concentration on the use of soliloquies and monologues is key in representing the emphasis on isolation and interiority in Hamlet. Unlike Marlowe’s anti-hero, however, Hamlet is by no means alone for his first monologue. Cues in the text, however, indicate that Hamlet’s separation is still apparent as a mental separation. Hamlet does have more intimate relationships than Faustus. Faustus has only Valdes and Cornelius as his ‘dearest friends,’ with whom he shares no intimate moments, at least onstage, and the re-animated Helen of Troy as a lover (Faustus, 1.1.66). Hamlet, on the other hand, has not only Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his close friends ‘of so young days brought up with him,’ with whom he appears on stage several times, but also Horatio and Ophelia (Hamlet, 2.2.11). Prior to the action of the play, Hamlet has been courting Ophelia seriously enough for Gertrude to admit to having had positive thoughts of becoming Ophelia’s mother-in-law – ‘I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid’ (Hamlet, 5.1.234). Yet none of these apparently close friendships help Hamlet in his melancholy.
153 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.121 154 Auger Ferrier, A learned astronomical discourse, of the iudgement of natiuities, (London: Richard Watkins, 1593), p.13, 21.
35 For such supposedly close friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern betray Hamlet, and die at Hamlet’s command. Hamlet reports their death to Horatio with disdain, saying that ‘[t]hey are not near [his] conscience. Their defeat / Does by their own insinuation grow’ (Hamlet, 5.2.57-58). In the Folio text, an additional line – ‘Why man, they did make loue to this imployment,’ – highlights how little Hamlet cares about the death of these two former friends.155 Likewise, Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia is cut short as soon as the play begins: the moment we meet Ophelia she is being warned not to think of Hamlet, and his own thoughts are too preoccupied with the death of his father and his ghostly revelation to even mention this woman whom he supposedly loves more than ‘forty thousand brothers’ could do (Hamlet, 5.1.258). After Polonius forbids Ophelia from contacting Hamlet, Hamlet has only Horatio. Horatio’s character is the one who Hamlet interacts with most frequently, and although Hamlet’s isolation and solitude is thematically important to the plot, Hamlet appears in scenes with Horatio almost as often as he does without Horatio: he has six scenes with his friend, and seven without him. Interestingly, it is only after Hamlet begins to enact madness which he adopts with his ‘antic disposition’ that Hamlet’s scenes without Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern begin to increase (Hamlet, 1.5.170).
Understanding Hamlet’s solitary nature is key to understanding his melancholy – and knowing his melancholy is a key to explaining much of the (in)action of his play. In performing his madness through solitude, Hamlet perhaps draws himself too far under the ‘influence of Saturn’ to which he is susceptible as a scholar.156 The fact that Hamlet’s scholarship is highlighted from the outset of the play becomes significant when thinking of Hamlet as a potential melancholic. Emily Anglin has noted that, in the character of Hamlet ‘[g]rief combines with scholarly melancholy’ to form the melancholic humour which contributes so much to the delay of Hamlet’s vengeful action.157 At the beginning of the play, Claudius insists that Hamlet does not return to university in Wittenberg: ‘For your intent / In going back to school in Wittenberg, / It is most retrograde to our desires,’ Claudius asserts, a curiously astrological reference, perhaps linking to the astrological links to melancholy which we have already seen (Hamlet, 1.2.112b-114). This is the first interaction which is directed towards Hamlet and is consequently one of the first things which the audience learn about him. Giving
155 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, 5.2, Footnote 57, p.437. 156 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.253 157 Anglin, ‘“Something in me dangerous”’, p.25.
36 this fact such prominence within the text cements it as a vital piece of information: all Hamlet’s subsequent actions, and the revelation of his madness, must be coloured by this knowledge of his scholarship, and its association with scholarly melancholy. Hamlet’s melancholy takes on a scholarly cast throughout the play, being concerned with ‘words, words, words,’ books, and philosophy (Hamlet, 2.2.189) Hamlet’s own isolation, whether mental or physical, must be related to his melancholy and the ‘musing and solicitudenes’ which physicians like Boorde warned against, and which came, according to Ficino, from studying ‘theology, the more esoteric philosophy.’158
Anglin has recently shown in great detail that Hamlet ‘both is and pretends to be melancholic.’159 Anglin proposes that in Hamlet, Shakespeare ‘recombines familiar elements from humoural theory and its literary representations in new ways to construct a character startling in his elusiveness and illegibility.’160 Anglin suggests that Hamlet’s emotions are unreadable, illegible, that his emotional performance, emotional identity, and anatomical emotion do not match, to the extent that Hamlet’s emotions are unknowable. It is true that Shakespeare uses traditional stage props and markers which had been used to ‘conventionalize melancholy on stage – the black attire, the inky cloak, the book, the skull.’161 If we compare this to the frontispiece of The Anatomy [see Figure Two], we can see this ‘inky cloak,’ standard early modern scholarly garb which links Burton directly to scholarship, and by default, scholarly melancholy, and, if not skull, at least skullcap, of Burton’s own central portrait, itself potentially personifying the scholarly melancholy which Burton himself identified with (Hamlet, 1.2.77).
158 Boorde, Breuiarie of health, p.78.; Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.253. 159 Anglin, ‘“Something in me dangerous”’ p.17. 160 Ibid., p.16. 161 Ibid.
37 Figure Two: Frontispiece to the 1652 edition of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.
There is no denying that Hamlet’s melancholy appears conventional in its symptoms, especially at the beginning of the play, with his self-imposed segregation from the court and itemization of his own grief: ‘inky cloak,’ ‘solemn black,’ ‘forced breath,’ or sighs, ‘fruitful river[s] in the eye,’ and the ‘dejected haviour of the visage’ are all parts of Hamlet’s show, or performance, of grief (Hamlet, 1.2.77, 78, 79, 80, 81). All these markers of melancholy, Anglin argues, are subverted in the character of
38 Hamlet to create an illegible character, which she defines as ‘invisible or illegible’ to others.162 Yet Hamlet’s melancholy is not illegible, at least to the audience, it is scholarly. Much as Butler argued that gender is both something which is ‘constructed’ but also not illusory, Hamlet’s performance of melancholy is both consciously constructed and real.163 Hamlet’s melancholy is performative because he builds it around his ‘anatomical’ emotion of scholarly melancholy.164 As Butler argued that gender is instituted through the ‘stylized repetition of acts,’ Hamlet creates his performance of emotion through the conventional markers of melancholy – the black cloak, the tears, the sighing breath.165 The performance of his melancholic emotional identity causes Hamlet to be accused of excessive grief – ‘obstinate condolement,’ as Claudius terms it, a ‘fault to heaven, / A fault against the dead, a fault to nature’ – which Ethan H. Shagan has noted was, in the early modern period, ‘symptomatic of insufficient faith in the righteousness of God […] a potentially dangerous attachment to worldly things’ (Hamlet, 1.2.93, 101b-102).166 We know that the tears Hamlet has apparently shed – the ‘fruitful river in the eye’ – must be authentic, however, not performative, since he berates himself for not being able to act them later in the play, admirably discussing how the player can ‘in a fiction, in a dream of passion,’ create all ‘forms’ of grief (Hamlet, 1.2.80, 2.2.487, 492). Hamlet consciously creates a melancholic persona which will emulate the scholarly melancholy he has been known to feel. Hamlet truly suffers from a scholarly melancholy, which he uses to create the performance of his ‘antic disposition’ (Hamlet, 1.5.170).
Hamlet’s speech on the merits of action versus inaction – ‘To be or not to be’ – is an example of his scholarly melancholy. Hamlet is alone onstage, with no need to keep up his performance of melancholia, and yet this is arguably the most famous melancholic soliloquy in the early modern canon. Taking the form of a disputation in which Hamlet argues the merits and detractions of each case, it is a scholarly exercise born from Hamlet’s studentship (Hamlet, 3.1.55). In his recent discussion on Shakespeare and philosophy, Jeffrey R. Wilson has noted that ‘the start of Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be, or not to be”, invokes the form of philosophy called ontology […]
162 Ibid., p.23. 163 Butler, Gender Trouble, p.43. 164 Ibid., p.175. 165 Ibid., p.179. Emphasis Butler’s. 166 Ethan H. Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p.51.
39 the study of being-qua-being’ which Wilson suggested Shakespeare would have thought of ‘in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics, the study of first and supreme causes and principles.’167 The connection Wilson identifies between ontology, philosophy, and the ‘[t]o be or not to be’ speech highlights the importance of Hamlet’s scholarship to this most famous of soliloquies (Hamlet, 3.1.55). Although Wilson persuasively argues that this speech is actually ‘Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life,’ it does highlight that this specific theatricality – the enacting of melancholy – is linked to Hamlet’s already established scholarship. However, as Wilson likewise notes, this speech ‘may not be the profoundly philosophical moment it has been taken to be by centuries of readers. It may be, instead, what someone says when he wants others to think he is crazy’ (Hamlet, 3.1.55).168 The implication that this soliloquy, which has been taken by many critics and scholars as an indication of Hamlet’s deeply felt melancholy, is a performed piece, in which Hamlet uses his scholarship in order to assume his ‘antic disposition’ is deeply significant (Hamlet, 1.5.170). The fact it is performed highlights Hamlet’s connection to the academic world, since early modern academic culture was more or less exclusively oral.
It still highlights the importance of scholarly melancholy to Hamlet’s persona – for, whether this is a deeply felt personal reflection or a performed emotion, Hamlet has still actively chosen to use this scholarly mode. If this is indeed a feigned soliloquy, where Hamlet is pretending to soliloquize whilst others onstage “overhear,” as Wilson suggests, then Hamlet has actively chosen to perform in the mode of a scholarly melancholic. This reading could be supported by looking at 2.2, where Hamlet enters ‘reading,’ a possible nod either to his scholarship, or to his appropriation of scholarly melancholy (Hamlet, 2.2.165). Hamlet continues this performance rooted in scholarly melancholy when, upon being asked what he is reading, he replies with ‘Words, words, words,’ which indicates either the extent of Hamlet’s reading – thus linking back to his status as a former scholar – or that, perhaps, Polonius would not understand the ‘matter’ of the book, or even that Polonius is a fool for asking such an inane question (Hamlet, 2.2.189, 190). It certainly reminds the audience forcibly of Hamlet’s position both as an ‘antic’ melancholic, and as a scholarly one, and the crossover in performance which that might imply. Hamlet’s performative melancholy, whether entirely performed or felt
167 Jeffrey R. Wilson, ‘“To be, nor not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy’, Shakespeare, 14.4 (2018), 341-359 (p.344). 168 Ibid., p.343.
40 at least in part, is continually related to his scholarly melancholy – from his appearances reading, to the ‘method’ in his madness, Hamlet is consistently related to that ‘philosophy’ which Ficino remarks has a tendency to draw people under the influence of Saturn, and, therefore, further into a melancholy (Hamlet, 2.2.203).169
Boorde warned that melancholics should ‘not be alone’ or ‘muse of this thing nor of that matter,’ but rather counselled the friends of the melancholic to ‘occupy him in some manual operation,’ - advice which seems particularly difficult for the melancholic scholar to take, given that they are bound by their careers to both solitude and musings.170 Hamlet does none of these things: he resists the attempts of his friends to accompany him, he muses and meditates upon the state of mankind – ‘how noble’ it is in reason, but to him, a mere ‘quintessence of dust,’ – and he forgoes ‘all / custom of exercises,’ and thus does not occupy himself in the manual occupation which would be beneficial in the curing of his melancholia (Hamlet, 2.2.69, 73, 62-63). Hamlet’s failure to ‘vse company,’ as Boorde counsels melancholics to do, to prevent himself falling into melancholy is one of the reasons his melancholy manifests itself in the way that it does.171 Even in the comedies of the period, solitude is an inherently recognisable symptom for melancholic characters. For the protagonists of Love’s Labour’s, solitude becomes an important part of their scholarly melancholy. In order that they may study effectively, the King declares that ‘no woman shall come within / a mile of my court’ (LLL, 1.1.119-120). In reading Ficino, we might suspect that the King is right to suggest that the men should avoid women, since ‘Saturnine people should avoid the Venereal act, which takes away most of the life even of people who are young.’172 The King’s pronouncement that none of the young men shall fraternise with women, ill-fated as that resolution is, may, therefore, be an apt way of warding off further melancholy. The men are not, after all, intending to be as solitary as Faustus. They have their ‘fellow- scholars,’ and even Berowne, who is adamantly against the vow of scholarship, when told he may leave, desires the company of his friends so much that he will agree to the ‘strictest decrees’ (LLL, 1.1.117). Nor are these scholars intending to refuse ‘all joy and consolation,’ as French writer, Pierre de la Primaudaye (1546-1619), whose works were
169 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.253. 170 Boorde, Breuiarie of Health, p.78. 171 Ibid. 172 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.189.
41 influential in their English translations, suggests melancholics will do in The French Acadamie (English translation 1594).173 Berowne momentarily worries that there is to be no ‘quick recreation’ – no amusing sport to distract the scholars from falling too far ‘under the influence of Saturn.’174 However, the King is quick to reassure Berowne that just because they have taken vows to ‘war against [their] owne affections’ they shall not be without amusements: they will hear stories of ‘the worth of many a knight’ from Don Armado, whose ‘vain tongue / Doth ravish like enchanting harmony’ (LLL, 1.1.9, 170, 164-165). Unlike Faustus, therefore, the protagonists of Love’s Labour’s take every precaution to not fall under Saturn’s influence, and to ensure they are not ensnared by melancholy. Ultimately, in Love’s Labour’s the protagonists fail, both to keep their vows to avoid women, and to avoid melancholy, for soon all four men find themselves ‘in love!’ (LLL, 3.1.169). Berowne resolves to perform, or give into, the classic symptoms of love melancholy, saying ‘I will love, write, sigh, pray, sue, and groan’ (LLL, 3.1.199). In A Discourse on the Preservation of the Sight (published in English 1595), Du Laurens suggests that all melancholics are ‘commonly giuen to sigh,’ as Berowne states he will, especially ‘louers, and all those which are very busily occupied in some deepe contemplation.’175 Du Laurens seems to suggest a common link between the symptoms of love melancholy and those of scholarly melancholy. The extent of the protagonists’ new love melancholy is revealed in 4.3, when each in turn enters to read aloud a letter they have written to their respective loves. As we have seen, melancholy often causes ‘solitarines,’ and sufferers of the disease refuse ‘the light and frequency of men, delighted more in solitarines and obscurity.’176 In 4.3, it is therefore significant that each lover enters alone, or at least so they believe: the melancholy which they swore to avoid by staying strong as a group overcomes them anyway. Like Faustus, the group initially share a desire to gain forbidden knowledge, but this is soon forgotten in their new quest – to gain the love of the Princess and her ladies. This, too, is forbidden, and the men lament in 4.3 that they are all ‘forsworn’ (LLL, 4.3.43). Like Faustus, and like Hamlet, these protagonists suffer with melancholy because they wish to know something which they should not – initially viewing knowledge as ‘study’s god-like recompense,’ but
173 Pierre de la Primaudaye, The Second Part of the French Academie (London: GB, 1594), p.254 174 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.253. 175 Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.94. 176 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.121.
42 eventually desiring to “know” the princess of France and her ladies, and to break their initial self-imposed isolation (LLL, 1.1.58).
In As You Like It, the melancholy scholar Jaques likewise never redresses the balance of his melancholic humour. Sean H. McDowell has commented that ‘[c]onventional scholarly wisdom […] identifies Jaques as the supreme melancholic not only of this play but of Shakespeare’s oeuvre as a whole.’177 Though I agree with McDowell that such criticism overlooks ‘Orlando’s volatility’ and its connection to lovesickness, which I explore in Chapter Three, Jaques’s status as the melancholic of the play is firmly established both in the play-world itself and critical scholarship.178 Jaques, like the scholars of Love’s Labour’s, is sent into exile at the end of the play – but for Jaques this solitude is a conscious choice, not an enjoined penance. Jaques melancholy is so profound that, upon realising the court will be moving back to civilisation, he chooses not merely to remain in the forest, but to retire to a ‘cave’ rather than waiting to watch the ‘pastime’ of marriages and the associated celebrations (AYLI, 5.4.194, 193). This is despite Jaques’s popularity at court, where he has taken on the role of an advisor – for when he is melancholy, he is full of ‘matter’ (AYLI, 2.1.68). Jaques rejects the life of the court, thereby deliberately choosing isolation and ‘solitarines’ which is such a common cause and symptom of melancholy.179 However, since Jaques has, throughout the play, rejected the ‘scholar’s melancholy,’ which the Duke and the court seem to wish to bestow upon him, his rejection of the court at the end of the play could be taken as Jaques rejecting the life of scholar which it would thrust upon him (AYLI, 4.1.10).
Yet Jaques’s ending does not feel tragic. The exile imposed upon the scholar- lovers of Love’s Labour’s, by comparison, feels weighty and sad because it is imposed, not freely undertaken. Jaques, on the other hand, is implored to ‘stay,’ but leaves of his own free will, to hear and learn ‘much matter’ from the reformed Duke Frederick (AYLI, 5.4.192, 183). His ending seems to intend pleasure for him as much as the marriages between the lovers seem to portend for them. It also seems to be an ending which embraces the scholarly life – not only the ‘solitude’ which can draw the scholar ‘under the influence of Saturn,’ but also being actively ‘devoted to the study of
177 Sean H. McDowell, ‘Of Quintains, Harts, and Lionesses: Impure Melancholy As Shakespeare Liked It’, Revue de literature et de civilisation, 33 (2018), 1-23 (p.2). 178 Ibid. 179 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.121.
43 philosophy’ and applying his mind ‘to incorporeal things.’180 This undermines Jaques’s assertion that his melancholy is not ‘the scholar’s melancholy’ but his ‘own’ unique melancholy (AYLI, 4.1.10, 15). Despite Jaques’s desire for uniqueness, his melancholy is scholarly, and he is one of those ‘learned people’ who almost ubiquitously must be melancholy: ‘many things cause learned people either to be melancholy or to eventually become so,’ Ficino notes, which suggests that scholars can never escape their natural predisposition to melancholy.181
It is worth remembering, however, that it is the court which has consciously crafted the persona of the ‘melancholy Jaques’ – Jaques himself is content merely to be left to his own devices, to think and ruminate on his ‘travels’ and the ‘many objects’ which cause him ‘sadness’ but which he loves ‘better than laughing’ (AYLI, 2.1.26, 4.1.18, 17, 4). Jaques, after learning that Duke Frederick ‘hath put on a religious life,’ turns to piety as something which he would like to emulate, despite his earlier disdain for emulation as ‘the scholar’s melancholy’: whether Jaques’s melancholy is truly the scholar’s melancholy, or whether it is ‘a melancholy of [his] own,’ at the end of the play it has not been balanced, and his humour is still melancholic (AYLI, 4.1.10, 15). It is interesting that Jaques should turn to religion at the end of the play. In Faustus, the results of combining religion and melancholy prove tragic, but for Jaques this seems, not like an exile, but like a welcome shift. Perhaps, for Jaques, the command of Calvin to know ourselves has resulted in ‘[b]lessed life’ which he suggests ‘ariseth from the knowledge of God and therefore it ariseth likewise from the knowledge of ourselves.’182 It has not diminished his melancholy, because his humoural temperament, his anatomical emotion, cannot be changed. Because Jaques cannot be included in the marriage ending, with its shift in focus away from isolation, Jaques must leave the community represented at the end of the play.
The solitude of these scholars is, therefore, a reoccurring and noteworthy theme. The fact that Hamlet’s self-imposed solitude is due to a scholarly melancholia becomes crucial to the all-important philosophical delay which forms the basis of the play’s inaction: Hamlet cannot trust his ‘prophetic soul,’ - he must have evidence, because this
180 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.253, 115. 181 Ibid., p.113. 182 William Perkins, ‘A Golden Chain or the Description of Theology containing the order of the causes of salvation and damnation according to God’s word. A view whereof is to be seen in the Table annexed’ in The Work of William Perkins, ed. by Ian Breward (Berkshire: The Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), p.177.
44 is the way he has been taught to think (Hamlet, 1.5.40b). Identifying the symptoms of Hamlet’s melancholy is made more difficult by the ‘antic disposition’ he puts on, but it seems that Hamlet utilizes his own experiences with melancholy in order to create a realistic impersonation of madness (Hamlet, 1.5.170). Hamlet’s torment stems from the fact that he cannot prove that the murder of his father was committed by his uncle. Hamlet suspects that the Ghost which appeared to him might not have been his father, but ‘a de’il’ since ‘the de’il hath power / T’assume a pleasing shape’ (Hamlet, 2.5.534- 535). These worries themselves may be founded on Hamlet’s melancholy, since the devil is ‘very potent with such spirits’ (Hamlet, 2.5.537). The play is certainly engaging with debates surrounding the validity of ghostly visitations which had been ongoing for several years. In 1572, for example, Swedish theologian Lewes Lavater (1527-1586) argued that ‘that many men doo falsly persuade themselues that they see or heare ghostes: fort that they imagin they see or heare, proceedeth eyther of melancholie, madnesse, weaknesse of the senses, feare, or some other perturbation.’183 Hamlet’s fears are legitimised by this understanding of ghosts in the period, and Shakespeare uses this to play with the common dramatic trope of ghostly visitations, using Hamlet’s melancholy to do so.
Hamlet’s scholarly melancholy therefore takes on a religious bent, as his philosophy-focused mind questions the Ghost’s reliability, its origins, and whether or not it may be a devil, since the devil is ‘very potent’ with those already suffering from melancholy (Hamlet, 2.5.537). The fact that the devil loved the melancholic humour was well known in the period, with writers such as Johann Weyer (1515-1588) suggesting that if the devil finds someone under the influence of melancholy, he will ‘insinuate himself into the organs of sense, and stir the humours or vapors suitable for his purposes,’ causing delusions and wreaking havoc upon mankind.’184 Hamlet’s fellow scholar, Horatio, expresses this belief, that the devil will use melancholy souls for evil deeds. Horatio begs Hamlet not to follow the Ghost, asking:
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
183 Lewes Lavater, Of Ghostes and Spirites walking by Nyght (1572), ed. by J. Dover Wilson and Mary Yardley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), p.9. 184 Johann Weyer, On Witchcraft: An Abridged Translation of Johann Weyer’s De Praestigiis Daemonum, ed. by Benjamin G. Kohl and H. C. Midelfort, trans. by John Shea (Asheville, North Carolina: Pegasus Press, 1998), p.100.
45 That beetles o’er his base into the sea, And there assume some other horrible form Which might deprive you of your sovereignty of reason And draw you into madness? (Hamlet, 1.4.69-74a) Horatio’s fears fit with Weyer’s philosophy. Horatio fears that the Ghost is not the spirit of Old Hamlet, but a devil – just as Helen of Troy is in Faustus – who will tempt Hamlet into madness by stirring the ‘humours’ of his melancholy.185 Faustus takes the re-animated Helen of Troy as a lover, but she may well be a ‘Devil, dressed like a woman,’ as was the ‘wife’ whom Mephistopheles originally provided for Faustus (Faustus, 2.1.SD, 152). Arieh Sachs argues that Helen represents ‘the devil in female guise, a succubae,’ which would make Faustus’s sexual relations with her ‘demonality,’ a sin.186 Sachs suggests that this demonality is a ‘symbolic suicide’ which enacts Faustus’s ‘death-wish that was in him from the outset.’187 In Hamlet, Horatio expresses precisely the same fear: that this “devil,” the ghost, will lead Hamlet towards suicide – to ‘the dreadful summit of the cliff’(Hamlet, 1.4.70, 73). In both Hamlet and Faustus, the protagonist is united with the spirit of a long-dead person whom they desire to see, and in both, the protagonist is led offstage alone with this otherworldly visitor. It is the fact that the Ghost wishes to be alone with Hamlet which causes Horatio’s fear that it is in fact a devil preying on Hamlet’s melancholia, like how Mephistopheles is almost consistently seen alone with Faustus. The fact that the Ghost encourages Hamlet’s solitude, away from his close friends and those who might help guard against his melancholy, suggests to Horatio that the Ghost is not all that they seem. The scholar’s solitude – a key sign of their melancholy, as we have seen – is key to the inclusion of the supernatural.
The supernatural elements of Marlowe’s Faustus, including the magic which Faustus performs throughout the course of his play, are strongly connected to his melancholia. Reginald Scot, author of The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) upholds the belief that witches are melancholic: melancholia, for Scot, causes witches to hallucinate their bargains with the devil. Scot’s influence on Shakespeare is long-documented, with William Gulstad noting in 1994 Scot’s influence on the ‘mock-trial’ of Goneril and
185 Ibid. 186 Sachs, ‘Religious Despair of Doctor Faustus,’ p.642. 187 Ibid., p.641.
46 Regan in King Lear.188 The Discoverie was widely influential in the period, undergoing several reprintings and being heavily plagiarized for texts such as The Art of Juggling (1612).189 Scot’s growing influence caused a significant divide, as Scot claimed that witchcraft cannot exist in a world created by an omnipotent God. He asks: ‘What firme bargaine can be made betwixt a carnall bodie and a spirituall?’ This negates much of the evidence upon which many witchcraft trials were based, and, indeed, the contract upon which the plot of Faustus rests.190 Scot also claims the following: melancholie abounding in their head, and occupieng their braine, hath deprived or rather depraved their judgments, and all their senses: I meane not of coosening witches, but of poor melancholike women, which are themselves deceived. [….] For as some of these melancholike persons imagine, they are witches and by witchcraft can worke wonders, and doo what they list: so doo other, troubled with this disease, imagine manie strange, incredible, and impossible things.191 For Scot, the disease of melancholy causes sufferers to begin to believe fantastical things, such as their own magical abilities. For Scot, Faustus’s magic cannot be fact, because to allow any potency to the power of magic is to deny the omnipotence of the Christian God: if a witch can do as they please without the intercession of God, then God is either not the sole power in the universe, or God is in league with witches. Anyone who believes otherwise, Scot declares, is ‘an infidel, and woorsse than a pagan [….] bicasue [sic] they attribute that to a creature, which onlie belongeth to God the creator of all things.’192 Similarly, in De praestigiis daemonum (1563), Johannes Weyer states that there is no doubt that witches are often ‘melancholic by nature,’ and that they cannot have the power they confess to having.193 However, Weyer differs from Scot in one aspect: Weyer conceives of melancholy as not merely natural, but as caused by the devil. In practice, therefore, if magic has no power, its usage must be a performance – a suggestion of which we saw in the conjuring scene. For both Scot and Weyer, the melancholic witch or magician has been deceived by the devil and has no true power. The interaction between Faustus and Mephistopheles in 2.3 shows how Faustus has been deceived by sin, and likewise
188 William Gulstad, ‘Mock-trial or witch-trial in King Lear’, Notes and Queries, 41 (1994), 494-516 (p.494). 189 David Wooton, ‘Scott [Scot], Reginald (d. 1599)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., Sept 2004 190 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Hugh Ross Williamson (Arundel: Centaur Press Ltd, 1964), p.58 191 Ibid., p.64. 192 Ibid., p.97. 193 Weyer, On Witchcraft, p.268.
47 proves that Faustus lacks power. The pair engage in a disputation, a common academic activity which serves to reinforce Faustus’s scholarly status. This dialogue could be seen to contribute to Faustus’s scholarly melancholy, as he is denied the forbidden knowledge for which he made the contract with Mephistopheles in the first instance – Faustus’s ability to study what he wishes is denied to him. Faustus is dissatisfied with the answers he receives from Mephistopheles, but despite receiving only ‘freshmen’s suppositions’ from the devil, a phrase which itself hearkens to Faustus’s scholarly melancholy, Faustus continues to question him (Faustus, 2.3.56). As the play progresses, Faustus’s academic ambitions are continually thwarted, and it becomes clear that Faustus has gained no power in return for his immortal soul. In Faustus’s behaviour there is perhaps some suggestion that Scot and Weyer are right, that it is ‘the force which melancholie hath’ which causes people to ‘imagine [that] they are witches and by witchcraft can worke wonders.’194 For if Faustus had truly gained this power, and had become one of the ‘coosening witches’ which Scot separates from melancholic witches, Faustus may have achieved his ambitions of having the devils ‘wall all Germany with brass / And make swift Rhine circle fair Wittenberg,’ instead of being content with petty magic tricks (Faustus, 1.1.90-91).195 For it becomes clear that either Faustus forgets the vaulting ambition which initially led him to magic, or he does not truly receive the power for which he sold his soul. If this is the case, then we can see Faustus not as a necromancer but as a man ‘deceived.’196 However, some writers, like William Perkins, who we have seen exercised some considerable theological influence during Marlowe’s time at Cambridge, and King James I & VI, refuted the claims of Scot that witchcraft was mere melancholic delusion. In A Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1608), Perkins declared that the ‘grounds of all the practices of witchcraft is a league or covenant between the witch and the devil,’ just as Faustus’s magical abilities are founded on his contract with Mephistopheles.197 Although Damned Art did not appear in print until 1608, it seems likely that it grew out of a series of sermons Perkins gave at Cambridge on the subject, possibly during the 1590s, and which Marlowe may have been aware of, given his potential connections with Perkins and the wider movement of Puritanism at
194 Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, p.64. 195 Ibid. 196 Ibid. 197 William Perkins, ‘A Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft’, in The Work of William Perkins, ed. by Ian Breward (Berkshire: The Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), 581-609 (p.593).
48 Cambridge. The stark warning of Exodus 22 - ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ – is a reminder to all Christians that witchcraft is inherently against the will of God.198 A succession of witchcraft Acts appeared and were repealed during the period 1547-1735. The 1563 Act laid down the death penalty for those whose witchcraft caused harm: lesser offences were punishable by prison sentences – ‘one year with four appearances in the pillory for the first offence, and death for the second, was the punishment for injuring people or their property by witchcraft.’199 If Marlowe is engaging with the contemporary debate around the legitimacy of witchcraft, and the idea that witches may in fact be suffering from an emotional disease like melancholia, rather than having any true supernatural power, this may have heavily impacted on his writing of the character of Faustus, and our reaction to this character might be coloured by this discourse. Is Faustus to blame for his sin, or is he the victim of his own melancholia humour? In this period there was a flourishing of texts which dealt with witchcraft: Jean Bodin’s De la démonomanie des sorciers (On the demon- mania of sorcerers) (1580); Henry Holland’s A Treatise against Witchcraft (1590); George Gifford’s A Dialogue Concerning Witches & Witchecrafts (1593); & James I and VI’s Daemonologie (1597) all appeared within two decades. The arguments of Scot and Weyer were in the minority, and we must assume that Faustus is supposed to represent the character of a sinful witch. Faustus does perform magic over the course of the play – the chorus tells us at the beginning of Act 4 that Faustus’s ‘fame spread forth in every land’ for his ‘learnèd skill’ in academic matters and for his magic (Faustus, 4.Chorus.12, 10). In 4.1, the Emperor admits that he has heard ‘strange report’ of Faustus’s knowledge of ‘the black art’ of magic, and through the help of Mephistopheles he conjures ‘Alexander and / his paramour’ (Faustus, 4.1.53-54). He simply gives up on his quest for forbidden knowledge. Like the men of Love’s Labour’s Lost, who abandon their quest for forbidden knowledge, Faustus gives up on his ideals of great power – such as having devils ‘fly to India for gold, / Ransack the ocean for orient pearl / And search all corners of the new-found world / For pleasant fruits and strange philosophy’ – and becomes satisfied with performing petty magic tricks, until his conscience makes his religious melancholy come to the fore.
198 Exodus 22:18 (Geneva)
49 Indeed, it is from 2.3 onwards, where Faustus is denied the knowledge he seeks, that Faustus’s melancholy becomes more religious in nature, and he begins his spiral towards despair. Even in the depths of Faustus’s despair, Marlowe ensures that the audience remembers the scholarly melancholy which began Faustus’s descent into religious melancholy and finally despair. This scholarly melancholy, therefore, acts as a possible catalyst for the despair of the protagonist, and also as a way for Marlowe to questions some of the more problematic aspects of Calvinist doctrine. Faustus’s scholarly melancholy leads to his performance of magic, and this enacting of magic is what eventually leads to his religious melancholy, and finally, his despair. Faustus’s academic ambition leads him to feel dissatisfied in his studies, and instead to crave the variety and power which he believes magic can give him. Faustus wishes to control ‘[a]ll things that move between the quiet poles,’ to be more powerful than all mortal leaders, and instead be like ‘a mighty god’ (Faustus, 1.1.58, 64). Faustus considers himself above the ‘freshmen’ to whom he dismissively compares Mephistopheles in 2.3 (Faustus, 2.3.56). His desire to go beyond the office of doctor indicates his pride in his abilities. Pride, the ‘abhominable and detestable vice,’ is the cause of the Fall of Man.200 Faustus’s ambition may emulate Original Sin. Mephistopheles tells Faustus that Lucifer himself was thrown ‘from the face of heaven’ because of his ‘aspiring pride,’ which is in direct comparison with Faustus’s own aspirations to be ‘a mighty god,’ who has all ‘things that move between the quiet poles’ in his command: Faustus is proud of his achievements, and his ability, as when he refuses to further study medicine since he cannot ‘make man to live eternally.’(Faustus, 1.3.70, 69; 1.1.58, 24). In Genesis, it is pride which Satan uses to tempt Eve to eat the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge: ‘the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’201 As we have seen, Faustus’s scholarly melancholy stems from a desire to be ‘a mighty god’ (Faustus, 1.1.58). Faustus’s pride in his abilities, first as a scholar with a ‘wit’ fitter for a ‘greater subject’ than logic, law, physics, or divinity, is what causes him to crown himself ‘conjurer laureate,’ even though, as the devil explains to Faustus, Mephistopheles does not come because of the power of Faustus’s ‘conjuring speeches,’ but only ‘in hope to get [Faustus’s] glorious soul’ because he had blasphemed against God (Faustus, 1.1.11;
200 Ralph Allin, The hauen of hope containing godlie praiers and meditations for diuers purposes. (London: Yarath Iames, 1585), p.50. 201 Genesis, 3:5 (Geneva). 50 1.3.33, 46, 50). Christina Knellwolf King has shown how mainstream Protestantism, ‘particularly Calvinism, severely condemned the craving for knowledge’ which Faustus displays throughout the play, going so far as to suggest that Calvinists believed that ‘God had banned the pursuit of knowledge.’202 This craving for knowledge which Faustus displays is symptomatic of his melancholy nature – Agrippa suggested that the melancholy humour ‘stirs up a madness conducing to knowledge.’203 This affirmation would later be repeated by writers like Ficino, suggesting that ‘Saturn’ and the ‘melancholic nature’ which Saturn induced ‘make[s] learned people melancholics.’204 Faustus is therefore sinful in the eyes of the Protestant church, and if Faustus is meant to be a Calvinist hero, then this may be one reason Faustus ends the play convinced that he is a reprobate, and that his soul will soon ‘be plagued in hell’ (Faustus, 5.2.112). Initially, Faustus claims to not believe in hell, calling it a ‘fable’ and asking Mephistopheles if he thinks ‘Faustus is so fond / To imagine that after this life there is any pain?’ (Faustus, 2.1.130, 136-137). After Mephistopheles denies Faustus any answers which go ‘against our kingdom’ – Hell – Faustus rails that Mephistopheles has ‘damned distressèd Faustus’ soul,’ thus admitting that Hell must be a real place, and that there will be pain in the afterlife for him (Faustus, 2.3.76). Faustus’s mind becomes increasingly fixated on ideas of heaven and hell: he tells Lucifer it would make him happy to ‘see hell and return again,’ and coming to the conclusion in 5.2 that ‘Faustus’ offence can ne’er be pardoned,’ that ‘heaven, the seat of God, the throne of the blessed,’ is forever denied to him, and that he must ‘remain in hell for ever’ (Faustus, 2.3.168; 5.2.15, 24, 25). Faustus’s melancholy, even as it takes on a religious tone, becoming more concerned with hell and damnation, is always connected to his scholarship. Mathew R. Martin reasons that the God of Faustus’s Calvinist universe ‘demands not exaltation but abjection,’ which Faustus, in his belief in his own abilities as ‘conjurer laureate’ does not feel able to give until it is too late (Faustus, 1.3.33).205 At the end of the play, Faustus wishes that he had never been a student, saying ‘would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read / book’ (Faustus, 5.2.20-21). In pleading with Christ to save his soul, in the very depths of his despair, 202 Christina Knellwolf King, Faustus and the Promises of the New Science, c.1580-1730 From the Chapbooks to Harlequin Faustus (Surrey: Ashgate, 2008), p.9, 53. 203 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, ed. by Donald Tyson (Alberta: Theophania Publishing, 2011), p.159. 204 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.113. 205 Mathew R. Martin, Tragedy & Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p.147. 51 Faustus offers to ‘burn [his] books’ – not just his books of magic, but all his books (Faustus, 5.2.123). Faustus therefore progresses from a scholarly melancholy, through a religious melancholy, and into despair, but his emotional state is consistently related to his scholarship. This, Martin argues, is the ultimate violence of Faustus – not ‘extreme physical violence,’ as in so many other tragedies, but the violence of mental disorder.206 Faustus’s scholarship is the ultimate cause of his despair, and of his descent into hell. The relationship between scholarship, melancholy, sinfulness, and despair is, therefore, symbiotic, with one leading almost inevitably to the other. The connection between sinfulness and emotional disease is part of what Vaught has identified as part of a long tradition which linked ill health to loose morals: ‘diseased bodies,’ Vaught explains, ‘were recurrently interpreted as signs of moral and spiritual depravity. The attributing of sin to sickness offered medieval and early modern writers, readers, and audiences a rationale for human suffering.’207 Read this way, Faustus’s mental sickness and descent into despair is a punishment for his moral depravity in wanting to study forbidden magic. In a predestinate universe, Faustus is therefore caught in an endless loop: led to study magic because of his scholarly melancholy, he is damned for his pride, and as a punishment is made to suffer the same illness which caused him to study magic in the first place. Sachs argues Faustus portrays predestination doctrine at work, suggesting that Faustus ‘by its very nature cannot be suspenseful,’ since Faustus is predestined to damnation.208 The behaviour we have identified in Faustus seems consistent with such a reading. Michael Davies has noted that Marlowe does ‘what no other dramatist dares: he puts into his protagonist’s hand a copy of the Bible, only for that Bible to be cast aside.’209 This blasphemous action happens at the beginning of the play, as, after picking up ‘Jerome’s Bible,’ Faustus discards it, saying ‘Divinity, adieu!’ (Faustus, 1.1.38, 50). Faustus, even before he has made the sinful pact with Mephistopheles, is potentially already condemned as a reprobate. Discarding the Bible certainly sounds like the actions of the reprobate according to Perkins, who believed that the reprobate ‘consenteth not to God’s word when he hath heard and known it.’210 Faustus’s belief in his own damnation causes him to despair, 206 Ibid., p.145. 207 Vaught, ‘Introduction’, p.7. 208 Sachs, ‘Religious Despair of Doctor Faustus’, p.638. 209 Michael Davis, ‘Reading the Bible on the Early Modern Stage’, in Early Modern Drama and the Bible: Contexts and Readings, 1570-1625, ed. by Adrian Streete (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 27-47 (p.31). 210 Perkins, ‘A Golden Chain’, p.252. 52 which he begins to do ‘basely’ in 2.3 (Faustus, 2.3.31). Faustus has engaged in the intense self-scrutiny required by Calvinist theology, which propounded the doctrine of predestination and was practiced by influential theologians like Perkins – for no man ‘can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves’ – but Faustus comes up lacking in his own estimation.211 Calvin encouraged intense self-scrutiny, insisting that it would be the sin of ‘sloth’ for a man to not ‘take the trouble of descending into himself’ in order to find God.212 John Stachniewski has commented that ‘Calvin ignores the anxieties he is creating [….] While encouraging a necessarily introspective search for the operation of the Holy Spirit in the would-be Christian’s life he at the same time warned that ‘If thou consider thy self, there is certaine damnation (Inst. 3. 2. 24).’213 It is once again a problem of studying which Faustus faces: to deeply study the depths of his own soul, which may cause him to despair and to be damned, or to not consider himself, which is ‘sloth.’214 Faustus’s haunting exhortation to himself to ‘despair and die’ shows the clarity of thought, gifted to him by the scholarship which began his melancholy, with which Faustus believes his soul to be ‘hopeless’ (Faustus, 5.1.49, 69). ‘Despair,’ Ken Colston reminds us, ‘is not mere hopelesseness. It is a living nothingness, spiritual death, the starting point and destiny of all sin.’215 For Colston, Faustus’s sin would mean his despair is inevitable, his damnation a foregone conclusion. Burton would later describe despair as a ‘pernicious kinde of desperation,’ a ‘fearefull passion, wherein the part oppressed thinks he can get no ease but death.’216 The correlation to melancholy is clear, but as Mary Ann Lund rightly notes, ‘Burton avoids condemning anyone to reprobation [….] accept[ing] the far greater challenge of comforting any and every reader. He therefore casts as wide a net as possible, imagining a worst case of sinful, hard-hearted humanity as a means of reaching every reader’s own situation.’217 Lund suggests Burton is showing the ‘worst extremes of human behaviour’ in order to console his reader, who is most likely much less ‘extreme 211 Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. by Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: The Calvin Translation Society, 1845), p.47. 212 Ibid., p.67. 213 John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p.21. 214 Calvin, Institutes, p.47. 215 Ken Colston, ‘Macbeth and the Tragedy of Sin’, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 13 (2010), 60-95 (p.85). 216 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.410 217 Lund, Melancholy, Medicine, and Religion, p.59. 53 and exotic’ in their sinfulness, whose ‘sins are moderate.’218 This is perhaps what Marlowe is likewise doing in showing Faustus, in all his “worst-case” glory. In any case, it is, in theatre as well as medical texts, much ‘more interesting to read about a blaspheming, adulterous murderer who has made a pact with the devil,’ as Lund puts it, than the ordinary man who may worry unnecessarily for the state of his soul.219 In showing us a man whose melancholy and hubris combine to create this terrifying state of despair, Marlowe both entertains and edifies. But what, precisely, causes Faustus’s despair? As a point of comparison John D. Cox looks to Macbeth and notes that his ‘absolute belief in his punishment’ causes his ‘hallucinations, lack of sleep, constant fear, self-deceived hope […] his famously expressed despair.’220 In the earlier play, Faustus, too, has an absolute belief in his own punishment, and his belief causes his damnation, stopping his heart and his ears to the merciful judgment of the Good Angel and Old Man, who insist it is ‘[n]ever too late, if Faustus can repent,’ instead only allowing himself to hear the Bad Angel’s threatening words – ‘If thou repent, devil’s shall tear thee into pieces’ (Faustus, 2.3.79, 80). Faustus is also fearful: like Macbeth, he oscillates between wild self-confidence – ‘I think hell’s a fable,’ – and despair – ‘then I repent / And curse thee, wicked Mephistopheles’ (Faustus, 2.1.130, 1.3.1-2). Alison Hobgood suggests that ‘fear on stage really was caught by spectators,’ and that the audiences of Macbeth, or Faustus, could have become ‘fearfully sick’ in the ‘context of theatrical participation.’221 If the audience could become ‘fearfully sick’ as Hobgood suggests, then theatre goers would need to be purged of the melancholy fear which Faustus and Macbeth, amongst others, demonstrate.222 Detractors of the theatre such as William Prynne, seemed to believe that playing a part was almost the same as being a part – ‘For who will call him a wise man that playes the foole and the vice? Who can call him a good Christian that playeth the part of the Devill, the sworne enemy of Christ?’223 If actors can be considered as being the same as the part they are playing, then this may suggest the actors too, could suffer from the melancholy which they are performing, and would require purgation. This, 218 Ibid., p.58, 59. 219 Ibid., p.59 220 John D. Cox, ‘Religion and Suffering in Macbeth’, Christianity and Literature, 6 (2013), 225-240 (p.232). 221 Allison P. Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p.57. 222 Ibid. 223 Prynne, Histrio-mastix, p.141. Italics Prynne’s. 54 however, goes against our suggestion that emotion has three distinct aspects: anatomical, identity, and performance. Clearly, the performance of melancholy itself does not make you melancholic, and to play Faustus would not make the actor a sinner. We can say, with Colston, that ‘[s]in, not crime’ is the subject of Faustus as it is Macbeth, the ‘transgression,’ is not of human but of divine law, and Faustus is merely human, ‘made in such a way as to sense [sin’s] deceit,’ and therefore unable to ‘enjoy ill-gotten gains.’224 This inability to even enjoy his sin feeds Faustus’s melancholy, and it is Faustus’s melancholy is the other great theme of the play. It is his melancholy that causes Faustus to end the play in sin, in what Thomas Stroup describes as his ‘great psychomachia’ – the ultimate revelation of despair.225 The fear which is symptomatic of Faustus’s melancholy links to the religious melancholy and despair which Faustus finds himself in at the end of the play. As Martin has noted, ‘early modern theology’ emphasized the ‘fearful response to the call of the Other’ – the call of God: faith itself is predicated on the fear of the believer. By Act 5, Faustus has spiralled into a dangerous religious melancholy, and is condemned as a reprobate. Turning to Perkins, we can see that reprobation can be known through five symptoms: Firstly, the reprobate is […] deceived by some sin. Secondly, his heart is hardened by the same sin. Thirdly, his heart being hardened he cometh wicked and perverse. Fourthly, then followeth his incredulity and unbelief whereby he consenteth not to God’s word when he hath heard and known it. [//] Fifthly, an apostasy, or falling away from Christ doth immediately follow this unbelief.226 Faustus is deceived by the devil: he believes that signing the contract with Lucifer will grant him the ability to command ‘[a]ll things that move between the quiet poles,’ thereby relieving him, as he thinks, of the scholarly melancholy that has come from his overmuch study of other subjects (Faustus, 1.1.58.). This does not come to pass as the devil promised. Perkins’s second symptom of religious despair, that the sinner’s ‘heart is hardened by the same sin,’ is less obvious.227 Although Faustus believes he is ‘damned,’ he curses ‘wicked Mephistopheles’ for depriving him of the ‘joys’ of heaven (Faustus, 2.1.1; 2.3.21a, 2, 3). Already this suggests that there has not been a ‘falling 224 Colston, ‘Macbeth and the Tragedy of Sin’, p.61, 65. 225 Stroup, ‘Doctor Faustus and Hamlet’, p.243. 226 Perkins, Golden Chain, p.252-3. 227 Ibid. 55 away from Christ,’ that Faustus may have the opportunity to repent, for him to be saved.228 However, after viewing the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins, Faustus accepts the gift of a book from Lucifer, saying that the book ‘feeds’ his soul (Faustus, 2.3.172). The book which makes Faustus happy is a direct link to the books he discarded at the beginning of the play, once again tying Faustus’s religious predicament to his scholarly melancholy. The book reminds Faustus of the scholarly ambition for which he made his original promise, the power to have ‘[a]ll things that move between the quiet poles’ at his command (Faustus, 1.1.58). Despite his commitment to his own educational advancement, much of Faustus’s questioning of Mephistopheles continues throughout the play to be about God. Therefore Perkins’s fourth symptom of reprobation – that the sufferer ‘consenteth not to God’s word’ cannot be applied to Faustus.229 Faustus’s continuing belief in God and his wavering belief that he may ‘[a]bjure this magic’ and ‘turn to God again’ suggests the possibility that Faustus need not despair (Faustus, 2.1.10). It suggests that a part of Faustus still believes that he can be saved, that his despair is a symptom of a holy desperation – identified by Perkins as the fourth sign of ‘effectual calling’ towards God, rather than damnation.230 Someone suffering from a holy desperation might, much like a reprobate, despair that God would never grant them eternal life, since they feel deeply their inherently sinful nature: knowledge of the state of humanity is seen as a cause for this desperation, much as the knowledge of the scholar causes him to become melancholy. Kaufman suggests that it is more than an understanding that being called to God might cause melancholy, but that in fact the ‘faithful […] were called to be miserable,’ and suggests that if ever someone ‘should start to believe that their goodwill and good deeds curried favour in the celestial court and that they had earned God’s grace,’ they were immediately called to ‘“clear” that conceit, which – in the end – would count against them.’231 If both the Elect and those who are reprobate are called to misery, and a belief that one had ‘earned’ God’s grace is a potential sign of damnation, then Faustus’s initial melancholy may not be the damning condemnation of his soul that he believes it is. The Old Man and the Good Angel are the two harbingers of God’s voice in this play, or at least claim to be, and both represent 228 Ibid. 229 Ibid. 230 Ibid., p.228. 231 Kaufman, Hamlet’s Religions, p.431. 56 a decidedly anti-Predestination worldview – in direct contrast to the worldview upheld by Faustus – suggesting that he may be saved. Even in the very depths of his despair, Faustus’s belief in Christ continues still, as he begs for forgiveness for his sinful magic, and wishes he had asked his fellow scholars to get the ‘divines’ to pray for him – which suggests an undercurrent of belief that the prayers of priests, and masses, could be held for someone else, the opposite of the personal relationship with God which is upheld by Calvin and his followers as the only true way to salvation: Ian Breward notes that that this movement attempted to ‘foster personal piety,’ rather than allowing people to ‘rest content with corporate observance which went no deeper than conformity to the requirements of the law,’ but this importantly meant that the individual was ‘subordinated’ to God, rather than the most important factor in the relationship.232 Faustus is unable to do this. Even at the end of the play Faustus does not fall from Christ, and instead begs to undergo ‘a thousand years / A hundred thousand’ in hell, so long as he could ‘at last be saved’ (Faustus, 5.2.103-104, 104). This sounds reminiscent of Hamlet’s father’s stint in Purgatory, where he is ‘[d]oomed for a certain time to walk the night / And for the day confined to fast in fires / Till the foul crimes done in [his] days of nature / Are burnt and purged away,’ upon which he will presumably be granted salvation (Hamlet, 1.5.10-13). Faustus attempts to plead for this kind of bargain, wishing that he existed in the potentially Catholic universe of Hamlet’s father where, despite his sins, the Ghost is able to look forward to a time where he will not be ‘doomed’ (Hamlet, 1.5.10).233 Such a suggestion hints at a belief, or hope, that Christ’s blood has ‘ransomed’ Faustus from everlasting torture (Faustus, 5.2.100). In the violent imagery of spilt blood, Marlowe may be referring to Faustus’s own inherent sinfulness, of the contaminated blood with which Faustus signed the contract with the devil. In Galenic medical theory, blood can become corrupted through an overabundance of the other humours, such as melancholy, and we know that Faustus suffers with such an overabundance. The streaming of Christ’s blood ‘in the firmament,’ calls to mind Thomas Nashe’s description of the mind in The Terrors of the Night (1594). Nashe describes the brain as being ‘like the firmament,’ and our 232 Ian Breward, ‘Introduction’ in The Work of William Perkins, ed. by Ian Breward (Berkshire: The Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), 3-131 (p.99, 108). 233 See Roy W. Battenhouse, ‘The Ghost in Hamlet: A Catholic Linchpin?’, Studies in Philology, 48 (1951), pp.161-192. 57 exhalations ‘in euerie respect like those grose mistremred vapors and meteors.’234 Nashe matriculated at Cambridge in 1582, just two years after Marlowe entered the university, and where they likely met and possibly collaborated on Dido, Queen of Carthage (1593), makes it clear that melancholy causes hallucinations: ‘this slimie melancholy humour still thickening as it stands still engendreth many misshapen obiects in our imaginations.’235 Faustus’s vision of the firmament could be considered a hallucination, or a ‘horrible vision,’ which causes him to feel ‘halfe strangled, and intercepted of speech though [he] striue[s] to call.’236 Du Laurens concedes that melancholic men have ‘strange visions, which may be seene with the eye, notwithstanding that they be within.’237 What Faustus sees, whether hallucination, dream, or premonition, is a representation of his own mind, the blood a vision of his own guilty, melancholic blood. Bright called melancholy ‘the grossest part of all the blood,’ saying that blood infused with too much black bile, like Faustus’s, is ‘thicke and grosse, & therfore easily floweth not though the veine be opened.’238 This recalls Faustus’s difficulty in getting his blood to flow to write the devil’s contract: ‘My blood congeals, and I can write no more’ (Faustus, 2.1.62). Faustus’s blood refusing to flow freely indicates not only that his body is rebelling against his sin, but also highlights the disease that has brought Faustus to this point. The contract signing could also be a failed purging. Philip Barrough’s The Methode of Phisicke recommends that physicians ‘[v]se bloodletting’ for patients that are ‘diseased through flowing of melancholy.’239 Faustus’s blood-letting does not work, and Faustus’s melancholy is not abated, but it points to the undercurrent of melancholy which brings Faustus to his final moment of despair. The blood which Faustus sees ‘in the firmament,’ innocent and free-flowing, is in direct contrast to Faustus’s melancholic, sinful blood (Faustus, 5.2.78). Faustus’s scholarly melancholy is therefore the foil with which Marlowe showcases some problematic aspects of Calvinist doctrine. Despite the attempts of the Good Angel and the Old Man, for example in 1.1 and 5.1, Faustus is damned – either through predestination proper, as Faustus believes, 234 Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night, or A Discourse of Apparitions (London: John Danter, 1594), p.40. 235 Ibid., p.12. 236 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.128. 237 Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.91 238 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.88, 262. 239 Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p.167. 58 or through the subtle, insinuating tricks of Lucifer and his company of devils, as Marlowe gives the audience reason to suspect. Faustus’s end is ultimately in death, and the implication is of eternity in hell – an implication which is viscerally brought to life in the B-Text, which calls for ‘Faustus’ limbs’ to be ‘torn asunder by the hand of death,’ rather than Faustus merely exiting with the devils, as happens in the A-Text.240 A suicidal impulse is a symptom of melancholy – which can often cause suffers to ‘determine to kell them selues.’241 ‘Men did not forget,’ H. C. Porter tells us, ‘John Randall of Christ’s [William Perkins’s own Cambridge college], found hanged in his room, his Bible open at a passage concerning pre-destination.’242 In his Book of Martyrs, Foxe refers to the incident, which he places as happening ‘about the year of our Lord 1531,’ and says that Randall ‘was found hanged with his own girdle within the study, in such sort and manner that he had his face looking upon his Bible, and his finger pointing to a place of Scripture, where Predestination was treated of.’243 Foxe makes it clear what he believes drove Randall to such desperate measures as suicide: ‘the poor young man through fear of predestination was driven to despair.’244 The implication that Randall took his own life after being terrified of damnation can easily be applied to Faustus’s situation, whose scholarly melancholy takes on a religious bent as he questions Mephistopheles ‘about hell’ and where it is (Faustus, 2.1.119). Despair, from the earliest writings on the subject, encouraged suicide. Arieh Sachs has compiled a list of Despair’s arguments throughout history which encouraged suicide, including that ‘God cannot love an ugly, odd creature like yourself,’ and that ‘life without sin is impossible,’ but most importantly ‘[y]ou know as well as I do that you are reprobate. You feel it in your bones and your certainty is increased each time you review your past life.’ 245 In Faustus, this feeling is exacerbated by the scholarly melancholy with which the protagonist begins the play. Just as Marlowe uses Faustus’s melancholy to discuss themes of damnation and Hell, Shakespeare uses Hamlet’s initial scholarly melancholy, plus his grief at his 240 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (B-Text), ed. by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), Act 5, Scene 3, Line 6, 7. 241 Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p.35. 242 Porter, Reformation and Reaction, p.71. 243 John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church, 59 father’s death, to question the existence of Purgatory. Hamlet’s scholarly melancholy becomes the driving force of his play: without it, Hamlet may have become the type of revenger personified by Laertes, quick to action and without doubts. The melancholy of the scholars must be purged from the stage at the end of the play: for Faustus and Hamlet, this ends in their death, as they fail to rebalance their melancholy. In the comedies, likewise, the melancholy must be removed from the stage, and consequently the endings of these two comedies are somewhat unusual, at least for the scholars involved. For the scholars of Love’s Labour’s, the comic ending is compromised. The men, whose love melancholy leads them to their theatrical display of affection in the Masque of the Muscovites, are unable to balance their humours so that their melancholy is at an acceptable level in comparison with their other humours. Because the men are unable to redress the balance of humours within the play, the comic ending is denied to them. Lisa Hopkins has described the marriage ending as a trope designed as a fortification against solitude, because marriage ‘focuses primarily on the experience of the group, as opposed to the individualist, isolationist emphasis of tragedy.’246 But for the lovers of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the ending is one of isolation, as the women depart to mourn and the men go to their exile. The protagonists of Shakespeare’s comedy are punished with exile for their performative love melancholy. The Princess calls the King ‘perjured’ and suggests that he is ‘full of dear guiltiness’ for his unconvincing performance of love melancholy (LLL, 5.2.784, 785) In order to prove his love true, the King, and the men who follow him, must ‘go with speed / To some forlorn and naked hermitage, / Remote from all the pleasures of the world,’ and remain there for twelve months, to assure the ladies that this new oath of love is not like the scholarly oath to stay away from women which they swore and then promptly broke at the outset of the play (LLL, 5.2.788-790). The men, whose combined scholarly and love melancholy has not become balanced through the enacting of the Masque of the Muscovites, are not allowed the satisfaction of the marriage conclusion. They must instead adopt an ‘austere insociable life’ in ‘some forlorn and naked hermitage’ (LLL, 5.2.793, 789). This unsociable lifestyle to which they are sent is linked to the vow which the scholars made at the beginning of the play: to ‘war against [their] own affections / And the huge army of the world’s desires’ in order to ensure that the ‘offer made in heat of blood’ ‘bear[s] this trial’ (LLL, 1.1.9-10; 246 Lisa Hopkins, ‘Marriage as Comic Closure’, in Shakespeare’s Comedies, ed. by Emma Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 36-54 (p.37). 60 5.2.794, 797). The ladies must be sure that the love melancholy of the scholars has not made them swear to things which they will regret, that the heat of their blood is true love, not ‘burning lust,’ a phrase which Burton would later use to describe heroical love melancholy.247 Burton would go on to suggest that lovers ‘will sweare and lye, promise, protest, forge, counterfeit, bragge, bribe, flatter, and dissemble’ in order to ‘move others, and satisifie their lust.’248 Given that the men have already perjured themselves once during the course of the play, the Princess and her ladies are perhaps right to seek confirmation that the men are true by consigning them to the penance of further solitude. The scholar's do not purge themselves of their melancholy because they do not truly understand their own emotional state: it is only at the end of the play that they come to such an understanding of their anatomical emotion and can make steps to address their melancholy. At the outset of the play, the emotional identity of the young men is a scholarly melancholy, devoting themselves to study in a ‘war’ against their own ‘affections,’ yet this itself is revealing – in order to maintain their emotional identity as melancholic scholars, they must fight against their anatomical ‘affections,’ which is, if anything, love melancholy, to which they are naturally inclined as young ‘gallants’ (LLL, 1.1.9).249 Their performance shifts from scholarly melancholy, which they enact at the beginning of the play, to love melancholy as they come to accept their anatomical emotion and to adjust their performance to match this. The behaviour of the scholars becomes performative as they discover one another’s oath-breaking love in 4.3, as they discover their loves in “secret” with each man acting as an audience for the men who have gone before. Each lover enters alone, ‘with a paper in his hand,’ and discovers to the audience, both that offstage and the unknown audience of fellow scholars, that he has written to the beloved woman (LLL, 4.3.SD). Berowne flits between ideas and is easily distracted from his original thought – ‘Defile, a foul word. Well, set thee down sorrow, for so they say the fool said, and / so say I, and I the fool’ (LLL, 4.3.3-5). Berowne admits that this love is making him feel ‘mad’ and then that it ‘hath taught’ him ‘to be melancholy’ (LLL, 4.3.6, 11, 12). Berowne even oscillates between feelings – he ‘will not love’ on line seven, but by line eleven admits that by ‘heaven’ he does love yet insists that he wouldn’t if only ‘for her eye’ (LLL, 4.3.7, 11, 247 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3 p.48. 248 Ibid., p.126. 249 Ibid., p.39 61 9). Ferrand would go on to discuss the importance of the eye in creating love, stating that the ‘eyes are the windows by which love enters to attack the brain,’ and that ‘love deceives the eyes, which are the true spies and gatekeepers of the soul.’250 The King enters after Berowne, and Berowne must hide, or stand somewhere where the King cannot see him, for the King goes on to perform his sonnet for the offstage audience, as he believes, alone. The King joins the onstage audience, however, when he too hides as Longaville enters, also believing himself ‘perjured’ and performs his sonnet to the offstage audience (LLL, 4.3.48). The farcical hiding continues as Dumaine enters, Longaville hides, and Dumaine ‘read[s] the ode that [he has] writ’ (LLL, 4.3.96). In between sonnet reading, the hidden men comment on the action they are watching, much as the audience in an early modern playhouse may have commented on the action onstage. The audience is therefore reflected in the metatheatricality of the scene: actor becomes audience. In making this relatively short scene have no less than four distinct and separate audiences by the one-hundred-line mark, Shakespeare highlights a conspicuous performativity to the melancholy which each lover displays. This is continued as each lover is revealed in turn, and each acts as though they have not just also declared their love for one of the women – Longaville states that he ‘should blush’ to be ‘o’erheard and taken napping so,’ before it is revealed that he is ‘offending twice as much’ by chiding Dumaine whilst pretending to not be in love too (LLL, 4.3.126, 127, 129). Berowne revels in the theatricality of it all: You found his mote, the King your mote did see; But I a beam do find in each of three. O, what a scene of foolery have I seen, Of sighs, of groans, of sorrow and of teen! O me, with what strict patience have I sat, To see a king transformed to a gnat! (LLL, 4.3.158-163). Although the offstage audience knows that this is indeed a ‘scene’ in a play, to have it referred to in such specifically theatrical terminology by the characters onstage confirms its theatricality (LLL, 4.3.160). Berowne, in his monologue, essentially describes the experience of the theatre-goer – sitting patiently and watching the ‘sighs,’ ‘groans’ ‘sorrow’ and ‘foolery’ of this very play (LLL, 4.3.161, 160). That the audience are described as sitting would have been accurate for the first performance of Love’s 250 Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, p.233, 252. 62 Labour’s, which the title page of the first quarto suggests was at court – the British Library’s website, describing the title page suggests that Love’s Labour’s ‘may have been performed at court during the Christmas season 1597-1598’ but that the ‘title-page of the second quarto of 1631 declares that the play was ‘acted by his Maiesties Seruants at the Blacke-Friers and the Globe.’251 It seems likely that the performances for which the play was written may have been indoor theatres, either at the Court or at Blackfriars, which would have involved a completely seated audience, and this line may therefore have resonated quite strongly with the audience. Berowne positions himself as almost one of the members of the offstage audience – all seeing and all knowing. The true offstage audience, however, knows that Berowne, too, is acting when he says that he ‘hold[s] it sin / To break the vow [he is] engaged in’ (LLL, 4.3.174-175). Berowne’s declaration is performative and could be spoken in a way that highlights its own self- conscious theatricality. Berowne declares that he alone is ‘honest,’ that everyone else is inconstant, that he shall never ‘praise a hand, a foot, a face, an eye,’ when the audience has heard him repeatedly praise Rosaline’s eyes at the outset of the scene, a mere one hundred and seventy two lines previously – nothing at all in stage time (LLL, 4.3.174, 181). The theatricality is liked very consciously to his newly discovered love melancholy for Rosaline. Each of these men becomes entangled in a performative mode when they become lovers. Berowne links their love melancholy, which Dumaine suggests they require a ‘salve’ for, to their original scholarship (LLL, 4.3.285a). Berowne suggests that they are still studying, and learning, but about ‘love, first learned in a lady’s eyes’ rather than their ‘books’ and other things which can be taught through ‘leaden contemplation’ (LLL, 4.3.301, 293, 295). In this way the scholarly melancholy and lover’s melancholy which these characters suffer from are almost considered one and the same – beauty has something to teach these men, something which could not be taught by ‘[o]ther slow arts’ (LLL, 4.3.298). The men resolve to ‘woo these girls’ through another theatrical device – ‘entertainment,’ ‘revels, dances, masques’ are considered the perfect things for their wooing (LLL, 4.3.345, 347, 353). Boorde suggested that ‘myrth, sport, play, and musciall instruments’ were an excellent way to 251 Anonymous, British Library ‘Shakespeare Quartos: Love’s Labour’s Lost’, 63 ‘purge melancholy’ since they require good cheer and company.252 Burton would also go on to dedicate a subsection of the Anatomy to music as a cure, saying that music has an ‘excellent power’ to ‘expel many other diseases’ but is particularly useful as a ‘soveraigne remedy against Despaire and Melancholy, and will drive away the divell himself.’253 Ferrand, on the other hand, suggested that such activities are ‘extremely dangerous’ for those who are in love – ‘reading dirty books, listening to music, playing viols, lutes, and other instruments, and even more, going to plays and farces, balls and dances, for such exercise open up the pores of the heart no less than those of the skin.’254 This masque could be considered either as a useful way for the scholars to help rid themselves of their love melancholy, or a dangerous pastime which might actually deepen it. The masque is an opportunity for these sometime scholars to ‘advance’ their ‘love-suit’ to their mistresses (LLL, 5.2.123). Boyet tells the ladies of France that the men are coming ‘apparelled thus, / Like Muscovites, or Russians’ with a purpose ‘to parley, court, and dance’ (LLL, 5.2.120-121, 122). Not only do the men come dressed in character as ‘Muscovites, or Russians,’ but the women join the theatricality of the wooing, disguising themselves as each other: ‘we will every one be masked,’ the Princess explains, so that the men will ‘[w]oo contrary, deceived by these removes’ (LLL, 5.2.120, 128, 136). The Princess goes on to explain that she adds this extra layer of theatricality because she believes the men come to them ‘in mockery merriment / And mock for mock is only [her] intent,’ suggesting that the Princess does not believe that the men’s performance of love melancholy matches their authentic, anatomical emotion (LLL, 5.2.139-140). The wooing is therefore doubly theatrical. The initial performance of scholarly melancholy of the men, which stems from a desire ‘to know which else we should not know,’ is changed to a performance of love melancholy, stemming from a desire to know the ladies of the Princess (LLL, 1.1.56). It is love melancholy that causes such theatrics and performativity: the scholarly melancholy, for Love’s Labour’s Lost, at least, is merely a catalyst for the performance of authentic emotions. Their melancholy is not, therefore, a pure scholarly melancholy. Likewise, the melancholy of Jaques in As You Like It is not truly a scholarly melancholy, or so Jaques 252 Boorde, Breuiarie of Health, p.78. 253 Burton, Anatomy, vol.2, p.113 254 Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, p.324. 64 tells us. He insists that his melancholy is not borne out of scholarship. He likens the melancholy of scholars to ‘emulation,’ which he claims his melancholy has no grounds in (AYLI, 4.1.10). The idea that scholarly melancholy can be emulative, and therefore potentially performative, rather than anatomical, fits with what we have seen of the scholars in Love’s Labour’s – that the melancholy is both performative and mimetic, having its grounds in desire and emotional identity rather than anatomy and authenticity. It is an emotional identity, rather than an anatomical emotion. Despite being known for his ‘matter’ – intelligence and wit – when he is melancholy, Jaques insists on consciously cultivating his own “type” of melancholy (AYLI, 2.1.68). Jaques insists that his melancholy is not that of ‘the soldiers’ nor ‘the lawyers,’ but is instead his own, ‘extracted from many objects,’ and which he states comes from his travels (AYLI, 4.1.12, 16). In performing this melancholy, Jaques exemplifies Babb’s theory that fashionable melancholy was brought to England from Italy, where he suggests that English travellers were ‘prone to imitate foreign manners.’255 Jaques is potentially positioning himself as someone who affects melancholy for its fashionable qualities, for the respectability it gives him as an intelligent man who has travelled to exotic locales. Rather than a melancholy caused by scholarship, therefore, Jaques seems to represent a reversal: Jaques’s scholarship, or at least his perceived scholarship, seems to be caused by his melancholy. Whereas Faustus and Hamlet both suffer from melancholy because they are scholars, Jaques’s popularity with the Duke, who loves ‘to cope him in these sullen fits,’ stems from his melancholy, meaning that he becomes valued for his ‘matter,’ and intelligence (AYLI, 2.1.67, 68). Yet Jaques’s melancholy appears at the end of the play to run deeper than mere artifice. His deliberate choice of isolation and solitude is proof that Jaques’s melancholy is not superficial performance, but an authentic, anatomically felt melancholy. McDowell suggests a similar concept when he notes that, in As You Like It, Shakespeare deliberately places Orlando’s love melancholy in dialogue with ‘the unyielding complexional melancholy of Jaques.’256 That Jaques’s melancholy is a part of his complexion, and is unchangeable, unyielding, suggests it is an “anatomical” emotion, a part of Jaques’s natural inclination and humour. It is only through his insistence that his melancholy is of his own kind does Jaques position himself away from medical understanding of melancholy and therefore create this performative aura. 255 Babb, Elizabethan Malady, p.74. 256 McDowell, ‘Of Quintains, Harts, and Lionesses’, p.10. 65 Jaques is one of the few scholars whose ending appears to be a happy one. This is because he is allowed to choose his fate, unlike the scholars in Love’s Labour’s Lost, though they suffer a similar fate to Jaques. These scholars are sent to live in ‘some forlorn and naked hermitage’ – not dissimilar to Jaques’s ‘abandoned cave’ – ‘remote from all the pleasures of the world,’ just as they had at the beginning of the play intended to ‘war’ against their ‘own affections’ in order to study, which they will presumably do during this twelvemonth exile (LLL, 5.2.789; AYLI, 5.4.194; LLL, 5.2.790; 1.1.9). The difference between the two is, of course, free will. The scholars of Love’s Labour’s are enjoined to their penance as punishment: they are ‘perjured much,’ and the women cannot trust their oaths, the Princess condemns the King of France and his men to ‘go with speed’ to live out this ‘austere’ life and promises that at the ‘expiration of the year’ the women will return and take up the offers of marriage which have been presented to them (LLL, 5.2.784, 788, 793, 798). It is not, therefore, an ending without hope, but an ending which still punishes the failure to redress the balance between the humours. In comedy, melancholy must be removed from the finale, but the finishing point of melancholy is often much more tragic for scholars on the early modern stage, as we have seen. The restoration of Galenic balance is key to the outcome of these plays. When the heroes fail to purge themselves of their excessive emotion, they must be exiled, as with the scholar-lovers of Love’s Labour’s, or be punished. For Faustus, this ends in the torment of despair, and a terrifying death. Hamlet manages to overcome his melancholy to a certain degree, enough to commit the revenge which he promised at the outset of the play, but this only occurs once he has been stabbed with Laertes’s poisoned sword: whilst the ‘mortal’ unction courses through his melancholy blood, when the poison in his bloodstream perhaps outweighs the melancholy which was ‘the grossest part of all the blood,’ and which must be purged (Hamlet, 4.7.139).257 Yet Hamlet must still die, since melancholy must be removed entirely from the stage through exile or death. For Radden, we saw, scholarly melancholy is glorified in the proliferation of discussion which sprang up around it. Yet there is no ‘glorification’ of the scholarly melancholy presented in the examples discussed here.258 In all four plays, scholarly melancholy causes solitariness and isolation, as we are told it will in the medical texts of the period. In Faustus and Hamlet, this scholarly melancholy leads to 257 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.99. 258 Radden, Nature of Melancholy, p.12. 66 the protagonists questioning of religion, and their eventual death. In Love’s Labour’s Lost and As You Like It, the fact that the melancholy of Jaques and the scholar-lovers is not re-balanced by the end means that the comic ending of the play is compromised: they are all, therefore, exiled. For Jaques, and Jaques alone, this is a happy ending, as he wishes to continue his melancholy lifestyle, to learn from Duke Frederick and continue his scholarship, unlike the men from Love’s Labour’s Lost, whose ending is unsatisfactory, for it is not the marriage ending of comedy but an imposed ending of isolation. 67 ‘The heart’s disquiet is revenge most deep’: The necessity of melancholy in early modern revenge tragedies. 259 The scholarly melancholy of the previous chapter was represented in a way which allowed dramatists to discuss other kinds of melancholy: love melancholy, as in the case of the scholars from Love’s Labour’s or religious melancholy, like that in Faustus. In its links to pride and the study of forbidden knowledge, we saw how scholarly melancholy could be related to sin. We see a similar interest in revenge tragedies of the period. Dramas such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587), Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman (1602) and The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), a play generally attributed to Thomas Middleton, all use the melancholy of their protagonists to suggest sinfulness. More specifically, these dramatists used a category which I here term “revenger’s melancholy,” a category not precisely medical in its origins, but which is clearly marked as separate in the literature of the period: these revengers suffer not from a specific love melancholy, or scholarly melancholy, but from something which is all their own – just as Jaques’s melancholy in As You Like It is ‘extracted from many objects,’ but ultimately a feeling which belongs to no category but his own (AYLI, 4.1.16). Although few medical texts discuss revenge as directly linked to melancholy, Burton does give ‘Desire of Revenge’ as a cause of melancholy, suggesting that the violence it causes, as we ‘maule and vexe one another,’ as well as the ‘torture’ and ‘disquiet’ it creates in the revenger themselves, ‘aggravate[s] our misery, and melancholy’ as well as heaping upon the revenger ‘hell and eternall damnation.’260 The connection between revenge and melancholy in the drama may be due to an association between melancholy and villainy which Gellert Lyons puts down to ‘the sinister personality and attributes of [the planet] Saturn.’261 Revenge tragedy relies on villainy, because the heroes of these plays commit acts which could be considered villainous fairly frequently: murder being the most obvious and recurrent example. The revenger’s propensity towards plotting and deeds of evil is especially displayed in their theatricality: they plot fantastical masques or devices with which to commit their 259 John Marston, ‘The Malcontent’, in The Selected Plays of John Marston, ed. by Macdonlad P. Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp.189-287, Act 1, Scene 3, Line 178. All further references will be to this edition, and will be made in-text with the short title Malcontent. 260 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.268. 261 Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy, p.35. 68 murder. Their insistence on a theatrical form of murder highlights their tendency to sinister plotting, which Gellert Lyons identifies as a particularly melancholic trait, and turns theatricality itself sinister. This link between melancholy and villainy has some significant implications for these plays. Eric Langley, suggesting that revenge tragedy is, of all dramatic genres, the one most ‘driven by a suicidal impetus,’ describes the role of the revenger as that of a ‘pharmaceutical purgative’ released into the world of the play to cure a ‘social disease’ through ‘the cathartic cure of remedial violence.’262 These revengers, Langley suggests, become ‘tainted by the sickness’ which they seek to cure, and thus the plays end in the suicidal impetus which he identifies.263 This chapter argues that the social disease which the revengers are dispensed to cure is melancholy, that the revengers are tainted by melancholy, and that the drive to suicide which characterizes the ends of these plays is a part of that melancholic disease. This revengers melancholy can be attributed to several causes. Grief and love melancholy are two of the most likely candidates, but the troubles of these characters are more than ‘the trappings and the suits of woe’ which represent grief, and neither is love melancholy always an understandable reason for the revenger’s actions (Hamlet, 1.2.86). For some revengers, the dead loved one is not a romantic partner but a family member, as in The Spanish Tragedy for example, meaning that it is unlikely that we can attribute their motivation to a romantic love melancholy. It is, instead, a kind of melancholy specific to revengers. It does, however, share symptoms with other forms of melancholy, such as ‘sadness and feare’ along with nightmares – that ‘kinde of suffication [sic] in the night’ – and revengers, like the scholars of Chapter One, delight ‘more in solitarines’ than in company.264 Revenger’s melancholy also shares one other commonality with the tragedies discussed in Chapter One: theatricality and performativity. These revengers engage in theatrical and performative behaviour, which is consistently linked to their melancholia. For example, one metatheatrical trope which is used frequently in these revenge tragedies is the body as prop. This is best illustrated in the image which has come to be representative of and represented by Hamlet: the solitary, melancholic man, soliloquizing to a skull. The figure of Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull is everywhere: it has even been seen, according to John D. Coyne, in a 262 Langley, Narcissism and Suicide, p.253, 254. 263 Ibid., p.255 264 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.102, 128, 121. 69 cutaneous haemangioma.265 As Laurie E. Maguire and Emma Smith have rightly noted, however, this particular image ‘was already iconic before Shakespeare staged it.’266 The memento mori, which it epitomizes, was a perpetual reminder to all that ‘achievements were earthly and would one day be undermined by death.’267 Death is a theme which is timeless: as Gertrude reminds Hamlet, ‘’tis common all that lives must die’ (Hamlet, 1.2.72). There is a literary tradition of the memento mori which seems, in the drama, to be linked with melancholy. This tradition itself may be linked with early modern medical practices: as Michael Neill has noted, a ‘Renaissance public dissection […] was at least as much a piece of drama, a species of didactic tragedy, as it was a scientific event.’268 Death, the danse macabre, and the memento mori were all, therefore, associated with theatricality. The frequent use of both the memento mori (itself melancholy in its relationship with death, grief, and sadness), and the illness of melancholia is particularly interesting, and suggests a close relationship between melancholy and theatricality. One example of the link between melancholy, theatricality, and the memento mori is Thomas Middleton’s violent and bloody Senecan tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy. Described by Jonathan Dollimore as ‘subversive black camp,’ Revenger’s Tragedy is a critically important text in the discussion of revenge tragedy in the early Jacobean period.269 The vengeful protagonist, Vindice, looks to avenge the murder of his beloved Gloriana, and uses the ‘skull of his love dressed up in tires [dress, apparel]’ in order to poison the Duke who poisoned her.270 Throughout the play, Vindice speaks to Gloriana’s skull as though she still retains bodily agency, mocking the tradition of the romantic blazon by describing her features: Gloriana has ‘an eye / Able to tempt a great man’ a ‘pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble. / Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble,’ and ‘a cheek keeps her colour.’271 Vindice 265 John D. Coyne, ‘Hamlet by William Shakespeare Presented by Surgical Pathology’, International Journal of Surgical Pathology, 21 (2013), 508 (p.508). 266 Laurie E. Maguire and Emma Smith, 30 Great Myths About Shakespeare, (Sussex: Wiley- Blackwell, 2013), p.178. 267 Ibid. 268 Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p.119. 269 Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), p.139. 270 Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy (London: G Eld, 1607), Folger STC 24149 sig.Flv. 271 Thomas Middleton, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 2010), 543-593, Act 3, Scene 6, Lines 55-56, 57-58, 61. All further references will be to this edition unless otherwise stated, and will 70 mocks the idea of this woman: Gloriana is able to tempt a great man ‘to serve God,’ because the sight of her empty eye socket is enough to make a great man fear death; she has forgotten how to dissemble because she can no longer lie; her cheek keeps its natural pallor of death, not a blushing rouge (RT, 3.5.56). Vindice takes great delight in his use of the memento mori for his murderous plot, and speaks at length about the ubiquity of death in an amused fashion – ladies can, he says, ‘with false forms,’ like makeup, ‘deceive men, but cannot deceive worms’ (RT, 3.5.97-98). Vindice’s reaction to Gloriana’s skull is quite different to Hamlet’s sad soliloquizing over the skull of his friend – Hamlet’s ‘gorge’ rises at the sight of Yorick’s skull, whilst Vindice revels in his use of Gloriana’s remains, delighted that Gloriana’s ‘very skull’ ‘shall be revenged’ (Hamlet, 5.1.177; RT, 3.5.102, 104). Margaret Owens has noted that Vindice ‘treats both Gloriana’s and the Duke’s remains as theatrical props,’ and suggests that Vindice is unusual in that his devotion appears to be not to the ‘memory or spirit of the murdered woman’ but rather to ‘the skull itself.’272 Vindice’s obsession with Gloriana’s skull as memento mori is, as Owens suggests, a key aspect of his theatricality, and his theatricality is a key component of his melancholy and his role as revenger. Burton would later go on to describe fixation itself, such as that we see in Vindice’s attachment to Gloriana’s remains, as a symptom of melancholy. Discussing love melancholy in particular, Burton suggests that looking at beautiful things, such as desirable women or men, is ‘pleasing and good […] fit to be had.’273 When we, however, ‘fixe an immoderate eye’ on these objects, and ‘dote on them over much, this pleasure may turne to paine, bring much sorrow and discontent unto us, worke our finall overthrow, and cause melancholy in the end.’274 In Burton’s terms, as in the plays, to dote on things too much – as to study things too deeply – can lead to melancholy. Vindice’s brother Hippolito seems unsurprised, if a little exasperated, to find Vindice still ‘sighing o’er death’s visor’ (RT, 1.1.50). Such a statement implies to the audience that Vindice has been studying Gloriana’s skull excessively and that he has been carrying it around long enough for it to be considered as merely something which Vindice does. Vindice’s repetition of the act of speaking to Gloriana’s skull is the ‘stylized repetition of acts’ which can come to signify melancholy, and particularly the be made in-text with the abbreviation RT. 272 Margaret E. Owens, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy as Trauerspiel’, Studies in English Literature 1500- 1900, 55 (2015), 403-421 (p.414, 411). 273 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.20. 274 Ibid. 71 creation of melancholy through the performance of acts.275 Vindice calls the skull his ‘study’s ornament,’ and as we have seen in Chapter One, excessive studying is one cause of the melancholy of both Hamlet and Faustus, since ‘studious people are in danger of drying out’ (RT, 1.1.15).276 Dryness was seen as a symptom of melancholy, the cold and dry humour. Perhaps by studying the skull of his dead fiancée, Vindice’s sadness has crossed the threshold between grief and melancholia. Given that Vindice has apparently spent much of the time preceding the play in a state of inaction, whilst he awaits an opportunity to be ‘happy’ – i.e. an opportunity to enact his revenge – it makes one wonder how long Vindice has been carrying around Gloriana’s skull in case such an opportunity occurred (RT, 1.1.56). Vindice has inexplicably waited ‘nine years’ to complete his revenge (RT, 3.5.122). This begs the further question of whether Vindice beheaded Gloriana shortly after death in order to carry around her skull, or whether his revenge has taken so long because he has been waiting for the process of decomposition to reveal Gloriana’s skull. Contemporary medical and tanning beliefs seem to suggest that the skull should be completely revealed after nine years – as the Gravedigger tells Hamlet, only the ‘tanner’ will ‘last you nine year’ in the ground, all others will decompose, for the tanner’s ‘hide is so tanned with his / trade that ’a will keep out water a great while’ (Hamlet, 5.1.158, 160-161). An ordinary body that isn’t riddled with the pox will last ‘some eight year,’ so perhaps Vindice really has just waited all this time to procure Gloriana’s skull without having to take the trouble to remove her flesh himself (Hamlet, 5.1.157). The long process of waiting for the bare skull to reveal itself adds a kind of necromantic eroticism to this memento mori but also in essence disassociates the woman from the skeleton. Is Vindice’s melancholic vengeance therefore actually a performance of rage that this is no longer the true Gloriana, no matter how much he dresses her in ‘tires?’ (RT, 3.3.SD). The length of time between crime committed and vengeance enacted certainly explains why Vindice’s ‘betrothéd lady’ is now no more than a ‘sallow picture’ of herself, a ‘shell of death’ – no longer the true spirit of Gloriana (RT, 1.1.16, 15). There is, perhaps, a link here to love melancholy – with which one could become infected through the eyes. Ferrand noted that the eyes ‘are the windows by which love enters to attack the brain,’ and once there, love ‘attacks the reason [….] Then all is lost: the man is finished, his senses wander, his reason is deranged, his 275 Butler, Gender Trouble, p.179. Emphasis Butler’s. 276 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.263 72 imagination becomes depraved, and his speech incoherent. The poor lover thinks of nothing but his idol.’277 Du Laurens likewise suggested that through the eyes ‘thou maist spie out loue and hatred.’278 Du Laurens also believed that the melancholic would suffer from ‘continuall watchings,’ such as those which may have led Vindice to his long study of Gloriana’s skull, and that this can cause the ‘imagination or reason’ to become ‘corrupted.’279 Vindice may certainly be said to fit with these symptoms. That Vindice thinks of nothing but Gloriana is best evidenced by the fact he continues to carry around her skull in the hope of an opportunity to be ‘happy’ by seeking revenge on the man who killed her (RT, 1.1.56). That Vindice must revenge himself on the Duke’s whole family rather than simply the Duke himself perhaps is proof that his reason is ‘deranged.’280 Although after poisoning the Duke, Vindice suggests that Gloriana is avenged, saying that the ‘very ragged bone / Has been sufficiently revenged,’ he still plots to murder Lussurioso – and potentially many more, promising to ‘cut ’em down’ as soon as ‘they peep up’ (RT, 3.5.153-154, 223). The revenge on the Duke is enough for the dead body of Gloriana, but Vindice is unsatisfied, and must have more blood: he has become deranged with the idea of revenge. That Vindice dresses up Gloriana’s dead body to entice the Duke not only to his death but to necrophilia, and then forces the Duke to witness ‘the incest’ of the Duchess and the Duke’s bastard son, Spurio, whilst the Duke’s tongue is nailed to the floor, may also suggest that Vindice’s imagination is depraved (RT, 3.5.183). Perhaps ‘overmuch study’ of Gloriana’s eye(sockets) has caused this melancholy in Vindice, in a twisted, necrophilic version of erotic melancholy.281 There is another way of reading this, however. We have seen already that Vindice must have “created” this prop of Gloriana, either by beheading her soon after death or by removing her skull recently following the decomposition of her flesh. In doing so, Vindice has created a simulacrum of Gloriana – it is not the true Gloriana to whom Vindice speaks when he addresses the skull, for he recognizes its separation from his former love – ‘It were fine, methinks, / To have thee seen at revels, forgetful feasts, / And unclean brothels,’ he tells the skull, to frighten the lecherous sinners there (RT, 3.5.90-92). Vindice surely would not speak to a woman whose eyes he has likened 277 Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, p.233, 252. 278 Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.19. 279 Ibid., p.94, 87. 280 Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, p. 252. 281 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.303. 73 to ‘diamonds,’ and whose ‘purer part’ was so chaste it got her murdered in such a way (RT, 1.1.19, 33). The fact that he does either suggests that Vindice has removed Gloriana the person from Gloriana the prop, or it indicates that Vindice is inconsistent and fickle: this too, could be a symptom of melancholy, according to Burton who says that melancholics are ‘Inconstant […] in all their actions.’282 In his pseudo-Gloriana, Vindice creates a token of his melancholia, ‘drie as ashes’ – for to ‘dust and ashes’ the body must return.283 Does Vindice, in creating this melancholic prop, attempt to transform his own humour by using melancholy – in its deathly melancholic form of the skull? Vindice may here be using the memento mori in a failed attempt to mitigate his own melancholic humour through the external prop of the dead Gloriana. The showing of the staged body is of vital importance in the revenge tragedy genre. Nearly eighty years ago, Fredson Bowers noted it as one of several important characteristics of revenge tragedy, which he took from his reading of The Spanish Tragedy: these include ‘the exhibition of Horatio’s body; the wearing of black’ reading ‘in a book before a philosophical soliloquy,’ and ‘the melancholy of the revenger.’284 Hamlet famously enters reading in 2.2, Hieronimo uses a book in 4.1, and in 2.2 of Antonio’s Revenge, the titular Antonio enters, reading, into a room of his friends, all of whom are attempting to cure him of his melancholy: ‘solitaryness’ was a commonly given symptom of melancholy, and the way to cure it was through occupation.285 Antonio describes his reading as a form of ‘physic,’ as his own attempt at curing his melancholy (AR, 2.2.44). We have, however, seen already that the use of a book as a prop is an indicator of and a potential cause of melancholy, particularly scholarly melancholy. In Antonio’s Revenge, the book’s use is also inherently performative. Antonio uses the book as a prop to inform the onstage and offstage audiences about his melancholic mental state. The moment Alberto and Lucio exit in 2.2, Antonio reads aloud a passage of Seneca: ‘Ferte fortoter [sic]: hoc est quo deum / antecedatis. Ille enim extra patientiam malorum: vos supra. Contemite dolorum: aut solvetur, aut / solvet. Contemnite fortunam: nullum telum, quo feriret animum habet’ [Endure with 282 Ibid., vol.2, p.390. 283 Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.95; Genesis, 18:27 (King James Version). The famous verse “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” taken from the Book of Common Prayer and commonly used at Christian burials is taken from this passage, along with Genesis 3:19 and Job 30:19. 74 fortitude. In this you may outstrip God; he is exempt from enduring evil, while you are superior to it. Scorn poverty; no one lives as poor as he was born. Scorn pain; it will either be relieved or relieve you. Scorn death, which either ends you or transfers you. Scorn Fortune; I have given her no weapon with which she may strike your soul]. (AR, 2.2.47-51).286 ‘Antonio, much like Hieronimo,’ as Thorndike has observed, and like Hamlet and Vindice as I have suggested above, ‘is a scholar [….] fond of philosophy [….] distinguished, also, by the same tendency to reflection.’287 This reading should give him comfort, but instead its doctrine is rejected outright by Antonio, who claims that because Seneca has not suffered the same precise traumas he himself has suffered, Seneca cannot sigh as much as Antonio can: in other words, Antonio claims that he is the most melancholy of all possible melancholics (AR, 2.2.65). Du Laurens claimed that ‘sighings, watchings, fearefull dreames, silence, solitaryness’ are among the ‘vnseperable accidents of this miserable passion’ of melancholy.288 We have already seen that Antonio is the victim of ‘fearefull dreams’ in 1.2, and his actions in 2.2 hint at his desire for ‘solitaryness’ – he tells Lucio to go away, since his ‘voice is hateful’ (AR, 2.2.21). Sighing, Antonio claims in his 2.2 soliloquy, is something which he is capable of doing beyond the power of any other. Before leaving Antonio, his friends urge him to join them at dinner, saying they ‘dare not’ leave him alone in his melancholic state (AR, 2.2.9). The use of company and merry occupation as a cure for melancholic symptoms can be seen in various medical texts from the period. For example, in The Breuiarie of Health, Andrew Boorde advises the friends of the melancholic to occupy him in ‘some honest pastime […] vse myrth, sport, play, and musicall instruments,’ for solitude was thought to increase melancholy.289 Antonio’s friends try to tempt him with this kind of honest pastime, to cure him of his melancholy. The idea of using mirth to cure melancholy also has implications for the theatricality of plays which use the body as prop, as Gloriana is used in Revenger’s Tragedy, and as the tableaux of bodies are used in Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy. Using play, mirth, and spectacle was supposed to cure melancholy. In a way, it seems as though one’s performance of emotion, even if disingenuous, could influence one’s anatomical emotion, or that watching other’s perform happier emotions 286 Seneca, De Providentia, trans. John W. Basore, LCL 214: 2-3. 287 Ashley H. Thorndike, ‘The Relations of Hamlet to Contemporary Revenge Play’, PMLA 17, (1902), 125-220 (p.164). 288 Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.89. 289 Boorde, Breuiarie of health, p.78. 75 can influence the audience’s anatomical emotions, and plays and spectacles are shown to be useful for the diagnosis and cure of melancholy in some later tragedies discussed in Chapter Four. However, in these instances of revenge tragedy, it is inverted, becoming a part of the revenger’s melancholy. Perhaps this is related to a wider theme of audience-performance relationships, whereby early modern audiences come to the theatre to make merry, but watch tragedy to essentially exorcise themselves of their own feelings of violence and melancholy – again, the idea of curing melancholy through watching becomes particularly pertinent to the love tragedies of Chapter Four, but in these revenge tragedies, the feelings of violence do not dissipate through the theatricality of the revenge, which is why the revenge tragedies come back to the ‘suicidal impetus’ described by Langley.290 Revengers like Vindice attempt to cure themselves through play, but the cure is unsuccessful, which requires their ultimate purgation through death. The tableau of bodies in revenge tragedy acts as a final, theatrical reminder of the devastation which this melancholic use of theatrical property can cause. Hamlet ends visually with a tableau of corpses, but verbally it ends with Fortinbras’s command to ‘[b]ear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage’ where his body will be publicly displayed (Hamlet, 5.2.280). This self-consciously theatrical staging of Hamlet’s body is the final link to the performativity which led Hamlet to put on an ‘antic disposition’ and which caused him to take great delight in those ‘players’ to whom he acted as a kind of hybrid writer, director, and fellow actor in 3.2 – and the revenge tragedy plot which inevitably leads to a large number of deaths (Hamlet 1.5.170, 3.1.16). The display of corpses is integral to Hamlet’s revenge plot and highlights the revengers theatricality. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy likewise ends with a startling tableau of gore which is intrinsically connected to the melancholy of Hieronimo. Hieronimo’s revenger’s melancholy leads to the display, not only of the murdered body of his son, Horatio, but also the corpses of Bel-Imperia, Lorenzo, and Balthazar: all are displayed in a doubly theatrical staging, since they have died as a part of a masque – Hieronimo points out this metatheatricality when he asks the audience to ‘[s]ee here my show, look on this spectacle,’ for not only is he asking the offstage 290 Langley, Narcissism and Suicide, p.253. 76 audience, who are watching Spanish Tragedy, to look on the spectacle, he is also asking the onstage audience, who are watching the masque of Soliman and Perseda.291 Molly Smith has suggested that Kyd’s use of ‘the body as spectacle’ represents a ‘coalescence of the theatrical and punitive modes in Elizabethan England,’ and indeed Kyd’s early use of the staging of corpses – subsequently used in many revenge tragedies, as in Hamlet – is reminiscent of the hangings at Tyburn which became so frequent whilst Kyd was working.292 Kyd was born in the year Elizabeth I ascended to the English throne, 1558, and died nine years before her: as Smith notes, during ‘Elizabeth’s reign 6160 victims were hanged at Tyburn,’ which was around an hour on foot from The Rose theatre, where Kyd was working.293 In her study of Marlowe’s titular figures, Karen Cunningham has noted that these executions were not merely ‘a source of terror,’ but also ‘a call to carnival.’294 There are no records of revulsion, nor any ‘miraculous conversions to lives of righteousness’ surrounding executions; rather, they inspired a sense of the theatrical, of something to be enjoyed.295 The theatricality of public executions is clearly invoked in Spanish Tragedy, as Smith suggests, with Hieronimo dipping a handkerchief in his son’s blood, and showing this handkerchief at several moments throughout the play. This act recalls the way in which onlookers at hangings ‘frequently dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood of the victim which was believed to carry curative, divine powers.’296 Hieronimo’s handkerchief carries no such curative powers - Hieronimo still suffers from melancholy brought on by his grief at Horatio’s murder. Such enjoyment in and use of bloody spectacle, and of the display of corpses, has a clear crossover to the displaying of bodies which occurs in so many of the revenge plays of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. The displaying of Horatio’s body, and the staging of the masque in which the bodies of Bel-Imperia, Balthazar, and Lorenzo, and the melancholy which they represent, are also displayed as a significant part of the revenge tragedy, as Bowers suggested. However, Bowers implies that the ‘melancholy 291 Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. by J. R. Mulryne (London: Methuen Drama, 1970, 2009), Act 4, Scene 4, Line 89. All further references will be to this edition and will be made in-text with the abbreviation ST. 292 Molly Smith, ‘The Theater and the Scaffold: Death as Spectacle in The Spanish Tragedy’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 32 (1992), 217-232 (p.217). 293 Ibid. 294 Karen Cunningham, ‘Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death’, PMLA, 105 (1990), 209-222, (p.213). 295 Ibid. 296 Smith, ‘Theater and the Scaffold’, p.225. 77 of the revenger’ is merely a ‘minor’ characteristic of revenge tragedy.297 That melancholy is a minor characteristic is clearly an understatement: the revenger’s melancholy is integral to all aspects of revenge tragedy, including the theatricality of the displayed bodies. Thomas Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion (c.1600) also makes use of this need for corpses in a theatrical manner, possibly influenced by Hamlet and Spanish Tragedy. Eleazer the Moor, the play’s anti-hero protagonist, seeks vengeance for his father’s death. In the midst of his gory vengeance, Eleazar calls for yet more death, demanding more ‘Actors’ for his ‘Scene’ – for in his opinion a ‘Tragedy / Ought to be graves, graves this shall beautifie.’298 Eleazer knows that a revenge tragedy must include a tableau of corpses, and calls for more actors, so that more bodies can be strewn around the stage in the scene of his gory revenge. This desire for a tableau of corpses might seem excessive in its theatricality, but it is a key component of the revenger’s melancholia. It is the theatrical spectacle which confirms the link between melancholy and villainy, which comes about ‘through the sinister personality and attributes of Saturn, and through the tenacious, plotting, and revengeful nature that was attributed to melancholy types’ in the early modern period, as Gellert Lyons rightly reminds us.299 The displaying of bodies is a particularly theatrical aspect of the revenger’s behaviour, and one which links directly with the revenger’s performance of melancholy. Butler’s gender theory, which we have used to describe the performativity of emotion, suggests that gender is instituted through ‘a stylised repetition of acts.’300 By acts, Butler refers to actions, those ‘that a man might play,’ as Hamlet might term them (Hamlet, 1.2.84). The act must be repeated frequently, which Butler terms a ‘re-enactment and a reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established.’301 These repeated acts ‘produce the effect of internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body.’302 The performance of gender never truly reveals the core anatomical gender, but merely suggests the ‘principle of identity.’303 If, as we have suggested, Butler’s theory of performativity can be mapped onto emotion in the early modern period, then this 297 Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, p.73 298 Thomas Dekker, Lust’s Dominion (London: F.K., 1657), Act 5, Scene 4, Lines 147-148. 299 Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy, p.35. 300 Butler, Gender Trouble, p.179. Emphasis Butler’s. 301 Ibid., p.178. 302 Ibid., p.173. Emphasis Butler’s. 303 Ibid. 78 repetition of acts could include the theatrical displaying of the body which we see in the revengers – an act which has come to signify revenge, and signify melancholy. The theatricality of the revenger might remind us of the virulently anti-theatrical rhetoric which was building throughout this period. Thomas Beard’s venomous The Theatre of God’s Judgements (1597) suggested that ‘Playes and Comedies’ have ‘no other use in the world but to deprave and corrupt good manners, and to opne a doore to all uncleannesse,’ and indeed the theatricality which these dramatists infuse into the revenge tragedies might seem to prove Beard correct.304 Even more vehement was William Prynne, whose later text, Histrio-mastix, suggested that not only were plays ‘sinfull, hurtfull, and pernitious Recreations’ but that they were the instruments of ‘the Deuill himselfe.’305 By putting dangerous theatricality into the hands of the revenger, and making it as outrageous as these revenge tragedies do, the dramatists seem to say that theatricality can be dangerous, but only in the hands of these overblown and occasionally unrealistic characters. We have seen that Hobgood has outlined the ways in which theatre could be thought to transmit emotions as disease: ‘Fear and contagious fear-sickness’ run through plays like Macbeth, she suggests, and the play-texts themselves have an ability ‘to induce fear and disease in playgoers [which] highlights the contagious transmission of emotion, and emotion as illness.’306 Hobgood suggests that because of this, even going to the early modern theatre may have been considered ‘risky’ – theatregoers could easily be driven to ‘fear, sickness, madness,’ even melancholia.307 Perhaps these dramatists are playing with the potential contagion of their plays, pushing the boundaries through their outrageous revengers and their bloodthirsty melancholia. In Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman our supposed protagonist, Hoffman, could be perceived as villainous for his absolute desire for blood. Thorndike has suggested that Hoffman cannot be considered a hero at all – ‘[Hoffman] is ever tricky, unscrupulous, […] and unrelenting – in short, an absolute stage villain.’308 Hoffman’s father has been executed for piracy before the play begins, and Hoffman is determined to avenge his father – not only by killing the Duke of Lunenburg (‘the murtherer,’ as Hoffman describes him) but through the murder of ‘anie man that is assied / Has but 304 Thomas Beard, The Theatre of God’s Judgments (London: Adam Islip, 1597), p.290. 305 Prynne, Histrio-mastix, p.6, 16. 306 Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing, p.41, 57. 307 Ibid., p.57. 308 Thorndike, ‘Relations of Hamlet’, p.192. 79 one ounce of blood, of which hees part.’309 As with these other revenge tragedies, Hoffman is concerned with the display of a body: the body of Hoffman’s father, which is presented hanging in the manner he was killed. Neill suggests that the ‘presence of the skeleton gives a strange hallucinatory life to Chettle’s insistent anatomical imagery.’310 The anatomical imagery which Neill identifies includes Hoffman’s many references to his father’s body, and also includes Hoffman’s obsession with spilling the blood of his enemies. Like Vindice in Revenger’s Tragedy, Hoffman feels obligated to spill the blood of any person related to the original murderer. Hoffman may not, therefore, conjure the same empathy from the audience as does a revenger like Hamlet: Hoffman is too far gone in his desire for utter destruction, which he freely admits. In contrast, Joseph Jarrett has recently suggested that Hoffman relies on a ‘quantification of death,’ whereby the anti-hero strives ‘not for a spectacle of excess,’ as Thorndike suggests, but ‘of precise reciprocity.’311 But Hoffman’s desire to rid the earth of all blood related to the Duke cannot be ‘precise reciprocity’: Hoffman’s multiple murders are more than enough to avenge a single death which, whilst it clearly affected Hoffman himself negatively, was judged lawful by the head of state – he ‘dyed for piracy,’ although Hoffman insists that had his father ‘bin iudge himself, he would haue shew’d / He had bin clearer then the Christall morne!’ – a rather weak case for his innocence, that he would have found himself innocent if he had been ‘both the plaintiff and the judge / Of [his] own cause’ (Hoffman 1.1.212, 213-214; TN, 5.1.348-349a). There is no evidence that Hoffman’s father did not commit the crimes he was accused of. Hoffman’s revenge therefore becomes a spectacle of excess, as Thorndike suggests. Yet neither can I call Hoffman an ‘absolute stage villain’ as Thorndike does.312 Hoffman is an anti-hero, striving for as much vengeance as Vindice does – and his play ends with no less “excess” of death than does Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, or Revenger’s Tragedy. I likewise do not believe Thorndike’s assertion that the difference between Hoffman and other revengers of the period is that Hoffman is ‘not driven to madness,’ for Hoffman has certainly been driven to a point of madness: he is melancholy. In the opening act, Hoffman declares he intends to ‘be no longer subiect’ to the ‘[c]louds of 309 Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman (London: Hugh Perry, 1631), Act 1, Scene 1, Line 67, 68- 69. All further references will be to this edition and will be made in-text with the short title, Hoffman. 310 Neill, Issues of Death, p.136. 311 Joseph Jarrett, ‘Quantifying death, calculating revenge: mathematical justice in Henry Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman’, Renaissance Studies, 31 (2017), 549-568 (p.550, p.558) 312 Thorndike, ‘Relations of Hamlet’, p.192. 80 melancholy’ which have been tormenting him, because he believes he will rid himself of these unwanted emotions through the murder of those he believes has wronged him (Hoffman, 1.1.2, 1). Whilst melancholy and madness cannot be conflated there are grounds to link the two closely. Medical evidence from period suggests a close relationship between madness and melancholia. The 1583 text The Methode of Phisicke, by Phillip Barrough, a medical writer licensed to practise medicine by the University of Cambridge in 1559, for example, describes a cure for headaches that have been caused by melancholy ‘in the chaptre of melancholy, or madnes.’313 There is clearly a link between the two terms, and Barrough goes on to underscore this link by highlighting the difference between ‘[p]hrenitis,’ or frenzy, and ‘madnes, which is called in Greeke and Latine Melancholia, or Mania.’314 Barrough’s meaning here is clear: madness is the English term for a Greek word – melancholia. There is a case for considering carefully, therefore, references to madness as cases of potential melancholia, and cases of melancholia as a form of madness. Burton later made a distinction between the two terms, suggesting that they differ because madness is ‘full of anger and clamor, horrible looks, actions, gestures.’315 The difference here is significant, for it would seem that the actions of our revengers fit them more neatly into the categorization of madness – for their actions are full of anger and horrible actions. Yet, nevertheless, Burton did suggest that ‘[a]ll the world is melancholy or mad’: a close relationship between the two afflictions is clearly in the minds of medical writers throughout the period.316 Burton also suggests that madness occurs ‘without all feare and sorrow,’ which we must deny for our revengers, for their lives are full of sadness.317 Gowland has argued that, since ‘all fooles are mad,’ and ‘passions were evidence of foolishness, then those suffering from melancholy, itself a passionate condition of fear and sorrow, were essentially madmen.’318 Hoffman, therefore, is no different to other stage revengers: Hoffman is no hero, but neither is he a villain. He is simply a revenger much like Vindice, whose revenge becomes a spectacle of excess. For Vindice, Hoffman, and Hieronimo, their spectacles of excess 313 Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p.9. 314 Ibid., p.17. 315 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.132. 316 Ibid., p.109. 317 Ibid., p.133. 318 Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, p.15. 81 ultimately end in their own destruction, in what could be categorised as a drive towards suicide. There were two ways in which melancholy could cause death: through the intense emotion it caused, and through suicide. In 1604, Thomas Wright, a Catholic scholar recently returned from exile, published an extended version of his 1601 work The Passions of the Minde, called The Passions of the Minde in Generall.319 The central argument of The Passions, according to Richard Firth-Godbehere, is ‘one of control and cure of the disease of the unruly passions.’320 Firth-Godbehere has argued convincingly that Wright’s controversial Catholic theology played an important part in the writing of The Passions, since by their very nature uncontrollable passions could do more than simply make one ill – they could kill you, or worse still, ‘they could ‘drag your soul into hell.’321 Certain passions were more dangerous than others. Wright states that the passions which coarct [contract] the heart, as feare, sadnesse, and despayre, as they bring more payne to the minde, so they are more dangerous to the body; and commonly, men prove lesse harme in those [pleasurable emotions, such as joy], than in these: and many have lost their lives with sadnesse and feare; but few, with love and hope, except they changed themselves into heavinesse and despayre.322 We can find several examples in the tragic canon of characters who perish because of their passions, in particular because of grief and melancholia. In King Lear (1605/1606), Lear dies shortly after his discovery of Cordelia’s murder, which is often read as him dying of shock and/or grief. Similarly, as we will see in Chapter Four, in John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Florio dies after discovering that his son, Giovanni, and his daughter, Annabella, have been engaged in an incestuous affair: discovered when Giovanni enters brandishing Annabella’s heart on his sword in a display of theatrical love melancholy. In ’Tis Pity, the Cardinal explicitly tells Giovanni the cause of his father’s death: ‘see what thou hast done, / Broke thy old father’s 319 The latter version is the one I shall be referring to throughout the remainder of this chapter, as it is the version expanded upon and revised by the author himself. It shall hereafter be referred to as The Passions. 320 Richard Firth-Godbehere, ‘For “Physitians of the Soule”: The Roles of “Flight” and “Hatred of Abomination” in Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall’, Cerae: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2 (2015), 1-30 (p.7). 321 Ibid., p.8. 322 Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London: Valentine Simmes, 1604), p.61. Emphasis mine. 82 heart!’323 It seems as though Florio has died from a broken heart – a trope which Ford also used in his earlier play The Broken Heart (1625), where the Princess Calantha dies to the sound of a song, which proclaims ‘Love only reigns in death; though art / Can find no comfort for a broken heart’ after having commanded her heart to ‘Crack, crack!’324 Neither is it only grief over a death which can induce death itself: in Romeo and Juliet (published in quarto in 1597), Lady Montague dies of a broken heart caused by Romeo’s exile to Mantua: ‘Grief of my son’s exile hath stopp’d her breath,’ Lord Montague reports.325 Whilst Wright discusses the ways in which sadness can physically cause death through grief, fear, sadness, and melancholy, there was also an understanding in the period that melancholy could lead sufferers to seek their own deaths through suicide. I use the term ‘suicide’ throughout this chapter, although, as we noted above from Wymer’s work, the term was not in use until Religio Medici was published in 1635 – ‘Unlike the older terms, “self-murder” and “self-slaughter”, [suicide] avoids the implication of violence and criminality.’326 It is important to be aware of this criminality – not only legally, but spiritually, as self-slaughter is considered a sin: if only the ‘Everlasting had not fixed / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter,’ revengers might not be so troubled by their compulsion towards a path which leads to their own deaths (Hamlet, 1.2.131-132). Wymer has catalogued the ‘gradual increase in both ecclesiastical and legal sanctions against suicide, beginning with the Council of Braga (563),’ that began after St Augustine condemned suicide in The City of God.327 The fear of damnation inducing despair increased the extremity of the tone against suicide. Yet the act was talked of extensively, both in medical writing, which often attributed it to melancholy, and in the theatre. Barrough writes extensively on melancholy, and states that as well as suffering from fear and sadness, melancholics do often ‘desire death, and do verie often behight and determine to kell them selues, and some feare that they should be killed.’328 It is specifically important to revenge tragedy, since so many of the protagonists seem 323 John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ed. by Martin Wiggins, (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2003, 2015), Act 5, Scene 6, Lines 62-63. All further references will be to this edition, and will be made in-text with the abbreviation TP. 324 John Ford, The Broken Heart, ed. by Brian Gibbons (London: A & C Black, 1965, 1994), Act 5, Scene 3, Lines 93-94, 77. All further references will be to this edition, and will be made in-text with the abbreviation BH. 325 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. by T. J. B. Spencer (London: Penguin Books, 1967, 2005), Act 5, Scene 3, Line 211. 326 Wymer, Suicide and Despair, p.2. 327 Ibid., p.15. 328 Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p.35. 83 set on a course which will inevitably lead to their deaths – a suicide by proxy, as it were. As we have seen, Langley has noted that revenge tragedy ‘in particular is driven by a suicidal impetus,’ and suggests that it stems from a need to heal ‘social disease’ by prescribing the ‘cathartic cure of remedial violence,’ dispensing ‘a pharmaceutical purgative localized in the figure of the revenger.’329 Such social ills are prevalent in revenge tragedies, and Langley is correct in suggesting that revengers become ‘tainted’ by the illness which they are attempting to purge – they become melancholy.330 Catharsis itself is both a theatrical and medical concept: through catharsis not only do we purge ‘the excrements of the body,’ like the physical embodiment of melancholy, which is the ‘drosse’ of the blood, but also the emotions ‘by vicarious experience, esp. through the drama.’331 One possible translation of the Greek “catharsis” is purging. Both the revenger and the audience undergo a purgation through catharsis. This theatricality becomes significant to the revenger’s suicidal goals, their performative madness is a major aspect of their characterisation as they purge both themselves and the audience. This connection between performative madness and suicidal ideation comes to a climax in texts like The Broken Heart, where the protagonist, Orgilus, dies by a suicidal execution, but the drive to suicide is visible in many revenge tragedies. In Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo’s suicide, and his strange refusal to tell his story which precedes it, is a lesson in theatricality, but can also cause some puzzlement. Hieronimo, after all, has vowed nothing ‘inviolate’ as he claims, and has told almost all there is to tell about his bloody play-within-a-play (ST, 4.4.188). Allison Deutermann has recently argued that Hieronimo does not mean that he has any secrets ‘left to tell, but that he refuses to be forced to speak what he has already voluntarily discovered.’332 For Deutermann, by biting out his own tongue, Hieronimo is taking control over the telling of his story, and ‘retaining control over his own speech, and by extension his own body.’333 Hieronimo’s refusal to speak is a complex reclamation of not only his own body and the ability to tell his own story, but also of his own mind, and his mental state. Hieronimo’s actions in the final scene of Spanish Tragedy are easily attributable to 329 Langley, Narcissism and Suicide, p.253, 254. 330 Ibid., p.255. 331 “catharsis, n.” OED Online, (Oxford University Press, 2019), 84 madness. The full title, The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is mad again, confirms that Hieronimo runs mad, but as with Hamlet, Hieronimo blurs the lines between feigned and true madness. Thorndike has noted that ‘in old Hieronimo, real and assumed madness blend together,’ showing that assumed madness, or feigned madness, occurs frequently throughout revenge tragedy.334 In 3.13, Hieronimo announces his intention to ‘rest […] in unrest / Dissembling quiet in unquietness’ – he will put on a show of madness in order to deceive the murderers of his son (ST, 3.13.29-30). But Hieronimo may also go truly mad. Hieronimo tells the audience in a soliloquy that his soul is ‘tortured’ with ‘restless passions’: the same restless passions which, for Thomas Wright, can cause death – fear and sadness following his son’s murder. The distinction between whether Hieronimo is performing his melancholic madness, or whether his madness makes him act in this performative manner, is interesting in terms of his suicidal drive at the end of the play – if Hieronimo is anatomically melancholy then this explains his suicidal motivation. It is important to distinguish Hieronimo’s madness as a ‘melancholic’ form rather than ‘frenetic’ one, to use the early modern terminology. Boorde noted that one particular form of madness, known as ‘Frensis’ – frenzy – comes ‘in a feuer, they do rause & speke, & cannot tel what // they say.’335 Although Hieronimo’s final speech is controlled, and measured, and therefore most likely not the frenetic raving of a madman, it is interesting to think of his refusal to keep talking, and the gruesome lengths to which he goes in order to accomplish this, in terms of his madness. For Hieronimo’s refusal to speak is final, resisting any possible tortures that the King can inflict upon him. It comes just after he declares that he is ‘[p]leased’ with the ending of his play within the play, and happy with the outcome of his revenge (ST, 4.4.190). Yet Hieronimo’s actions do not uphold this. He bites out his tongue and calls for a knife with the full intention of committing suicide: neither of these actions can be considered the actions of a man who is ‘[p]leased’ (ST, 4.4.190). But unlike the madmen in Boorde’s account of frenzy, Hieronimo seems to know exactly what he says, and what he is doing. Before he self-mutilates, Hieronimo’s tongue is ‘tuned’ well, and he speaks confidently and fluently (ST, 4.4.85). So Hieronimo’s choice to self-mutilate and commit self-murder is attributable only to his melancholy. 334 Thorndike, ‘Relations of Hamlet’, p.204. 335 Boorde, Breuiarie of Health, p.13. 85 On the other hand, Richard Carew’s translation of Juan Harte de San Juan’s Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (1575), the Examination of Men’s Wits (1594) suggests that frenzy can have the opposite effect than that suggested by Boorde. In this text, which Rocío G. Sumillera has noted in a recent translation became a ‘bestseller’ in Continental Europe, Carew translated Huarte as saying that ‘if a man fall into any disease by which his brain upon a sudden changeth his temperature (as are madness, melancholy, and frenzy) it happens that at one instant he leeseth, if he were wise, all his knowledge, and utters a thousand follies; and if he were a fool, he accrues more wit and ability than he had before.’336 If such a work was a “bestseller,” then it is likely that the dramatists working in the same period were aware of its publication and therefore, it seems likely that Kyd may have been aware of the contents. For Huarte/Carew, the heat of the blood and brain, a frenzy which can be caused by a melancholic illness, can cause wisdom. Carew defends this with an anecdote of ‘a rude country fellow who becoming frantic made a very eloquent discourse’ which amazed onlookers.337 Carew is reminded by this story that ‘the art of oratory [is] a science which springs from a certain point or degree of heat’ – that, in essence, the burning sensation caused by a melancholic illness can heat the brain, and can reach a critical point whereby the brain will be suddenly gifted in coining ‘flowers of rhetoric and such apt choice of words,’ such as that, perhaps, which Hieronimo displays at the end of Spanish Tragedy.338 This may seem contrary to the ‘coldness and dryness’ which has hitherto been associated with the melancholic humour.339 As Ficino tells us, however, melancholy can become ‘adust’ – when it has been heated and burnt – and this particular kind of melancholy ‘makes people excited and frenzied, which melancholy the Greeks call mania and we madness.’340 We have already seen the importance of the close association between these two terms, and it becomes particularly important as we discuss the actions of the “mad” revengers, and the connection their actions therefore have to melancholy. Like the wise man in Carew’s anecdote, Hieronimo does eventually lose his wits: during the middle part of the play, despite knowing about Horatio’s death, Hieronimo simply refuses to do anything about Horatio’s murder. To not act after such 336 Richard Carew, The Examination of Men’s Wits (1594) ed. by Rocío G. Sumillera (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2014), p.113. 337 Ibid. 338 Ibid. 339 Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy, p.2. 340 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.11 86 an injustice seems contradictory behaviour for the steadfast man who, in 1.2, is so firmly on the side of the ‘just and wise’ law that he speaks out to the King about ‘Horatio’s right’ to claim the reward of Balthazar’s capture (ST, 1.2.166, 169). It is possible, therefore, to suggest that Hieronimo is suffering from a frenzy brought on by his melancholy – his final skill in oration may stem from the heat of his melancholy following the death of his son. In this instance, scholarship is not the cause of melancholy, as it is for Faustus and for Hamlet, but rather a symptom – Hieronimo’s melancholy, as we saw may have been the case for Jaques in As You Like It, who is deemed an intelligent man because of his melancholy. The association between melancholia and scholarship appears to be so strong here that it can be presented as a symptom of the disease as much as a cause. This association may even be brought to bear in the manner Hieronimo chooses to commit suicide. As Neill has noted, Hieronimo ‘stabs himself with the knife he has requested to “mend his pen,”’ which Neill suggest is a metatheatrical call to ‘write finis to his tragedy.’341 The ‘self- conscious metadrama,’ as Neill describes it is a performative call to his melancholy. The chaos of the multilingual play, which represents the disorder Hieronimo has felt mentally since the discovery of his son’s murder, is directly linked to Hieronimo’s reclamation of his own body through self-mutilation: his actions display a violent logic which lead to his suicide. I noted above that melancholic people often ‘determine to kell [sic] them selues, and some feare that they should be killed.’342 Either, Barrough suggests, sufferers of melancholy will become so fearful that they are paranoid they will be killed at any moment, or they desire death so strongly that they will kill themselves. Hieronimo’s suicide speaks to both extremes. Hieronimo knows that after orchestrating a mass murder – even if his motives are understandable and perhaps even evoke sympathy in the off-stage audience – he will be tried and executed at the very least for murder, if not for treason, since one of the victims is Balthazar, Prince of Portugal, and another is the Duke of Castile’s daughter, Bel-Imperia. The threat of violence to the onstage audience is ever present, involving them in the performance of Soliman and Perseda in a frightening way. James Condon has suggested that the theatricality of the deadly masque, used in both Spanish Tragedy and Revenger’s Tragedy, plays upon ‘cultural understandings of dramatic frame and [the] passive role of audience spectatorship,’ 341 Niell, Issues of Death, p.201. 342 Barrough, Method of Phisicke, p.35. 87 allowing the otherwise ostracized revenger to take control of the physical space of his surroundings, appropriating ‘his enemy’s tyrannical control of space’ to enact his vengeance.343 Such an argument lends itself to Vindice’s murder of the Duke in Revenger’s Tragedy, which occurs after Vindice and Hippolito ‘[n]ail down his tongue,’ and threaten to ‘tear up his lids / And make his eyes like comets shine through blood’ so he is forced to watch the incestuous meeting of his wife and bastard son (RT, 3.5.196, 200-201). Although the Duke is an unwilling audience, and his passivity is forced, this example highlights the vulnerability of the onstage audience, their passivity, and the revenger’s activity causing an imbalance of power. The threat to the onstage audience is even present after the play within a play concludes, when Hieronimo stabs the Duke – the Duke becomes another “actor” in Hieronimo’s scene – like the ‘actors’ Eleazar calls for in Middleton’s Lust’s Dominion.344 Perhaps, like Barrough’s melancholy subject, Hieronimo fears that he will be killed, or that he will be executed, and commits suicide to avoid the shame of a traitor’s death. Hieronimo expresses his fear throughout the course of the play: in 2.5 his ‘throbbing heart’ is chilled with ‘trembling fear’ as he leaves his bed, just before he discovers Horatio’s body (ST, 2.5.2). Here, Hieronimo is not in control of his body – he states he has been ‘pluck[ed]’ from his bed against his will, and his heart and body are acting of their own accord (ST, 2.5.1). Hieronimo fears in 3.2 that his life will be taken at the hands of another, perhaps foreshadowing a fear of execution: ‘Hieronimo, beware, thou art betrayed, / And to entrap thy life this train is laid’ (ST, 3.2.37-38). Hieronimo is afraid of the death which he fears comes from Bel-Imperia. Fearfulness is a common symptom of melancholy: Bright calls melancholy a ‘fearefull disposition of the mind altered from reason.’345 What Hieronimo seems to fear most, however, is not death itself, but a death which comes from a hand other than his own. This fear of execution is why he determines to commit suicide, presenting his death almost as a gift to the men who have watched the rest of the slaughter: ‘First take my tongue, and afterwards my heart’ (ST, 4.4.91). By presenting his tongue and heart as a gift, Hieronimo attempts to take control of his own bodily agency which had failed him in his fear and its cause, his melancholy: by regaining control over his body, Hieronimo attempts to defeat the cause of his fear, his melancholy. 343 James J. Condon, ‘Setting the Stage for Revenge: Space, Performance, and Power in early modern revenge tragedy’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 25 (2012), 62-82 (p.64). 344 Dekker, Lust’s Dominion 5.4.147-148 345 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.1. 88 There are two other suicides in Spanish Tragedy. Bel-Imperia and Isabella both take their own lives, but Bel-Imperia’s suicide seems more controlled and measured than Isabella’s. Bel-Imperia, throughout the play, is presented as a woman with a plan – swearing to Hieronimo ‘in sight of heaven and earth’ that if he neglects his vengeful duties she herself will ‘send [the murderer’s] hateful souls to hell’ (ST, 4.1.25, 28). Bel- Imperia’s control and single-minded pursuit of revenge throughout, despite ‘bear[ing] it out for fashion’s sake,’ ends in her planned suicide (ST, 4.1.24). Isabella’s suicide is linked directly to the murder of Horatio. She ‘stabs herself’ after cursing her womb to bear no fruit, a curse she extends to include the tree her son was hung from (ST, 4.2.SD). Isabella’s suicide has some implications of madness, as she revenges herself ‘upon this place’ where Horatio was murdered, cutting ‘down the arbour’ as if to commit an act of vengeance on the trees for being complicit in Horatio’s murder (ST, 4.2.4, SD). Bel-Imperia is the other suicide in Kyd’s play. Bel-Imperia’s melancholy is evident as early as 1.4, where Bel-Imperia gives a soliloquy, and indicates her need for seclusion, which we have noted is a typical symptom of melancholy – ‘[f]or solitude best fits [her] cheerless mood’ (ST, 1.4.59). When her brother Lorenzo enters, he makes the connection between Bel-Imperia’s soliloquy and her mental state even clearer, asking what she means by ‘this melancholy walk’ alone in the arbour (ST, 1.4.76). Bel- Imperia’s melancholy may be a love melancholy, as her grief for Andrea’s death is complicated in her attraction to Horatio. Love for someone who cannot be yours – not only because Horatio is the friend of Bel-Imperia’s dead lover, but because he is also far below her in the strict class system of the Spanish court – is a reason for love melancholy in a great many of the tragedies of the period. In The Tragedy of Locrine (1595), for example, Locrine himself is described as ‘entrapt’ and ‘louesick’ for the Scythian queen, Estrild, despite the fact he is already married to Guendoline.346 Locrine’s love melancholy is the cause of the revenge plot in this play as Guendoline’s brother vows revenge after Locrine flaunts his affair with Estrild by promising, in the presence of Guendoline’s father, to make Estrild ‘queene of faire Albania.’347 Like Bel- Imperia, Locrine is placed in an impossible situation between two loves, one of whom society dictates he should not love – although Locrine’s love for Guendoline proves doubtful at best, since he is simply given her as a ‘present’ and marries her at the 346 Anonymous, The Lamentable tragedie of Locrine (London: Thomas Creede, 1595), p.50. 347 Ibid., p.52. 89 command of his father.348 Bel-Imperia’s love, and her subsequent love melancholy, could be considered as untrue as that of Locrine. Bel-Imperia’s melancholy does not appear to be as theatrical as that of Vindice, with his morbid use of Gloriana as prop, or even that of Hieronimo with his theatrical use of the masque at the end of the play. Yet Bel-Imperia could be accused of performing her melancholy. In Robert Toft’s Alba: The Months Minde of a Melancholy Lover (1598), the titular melancholic weeps that his lover’s grief for him is feigned: it is like that passion seen ‘in a play, / Which men do rauish with Melancholy: / But acted once, and out of sight away, / In minde, no longer there doth stay, but dy.’349 The melancholy of the woman is dismissed as play-acting, as performative rather than authentically felt (or “anatomical”). Bel-Imperia could be accused of acting the part of a lover ‘ravish[ed] by melancholy,’ either in order to fan the flames of Horatio’s vengeance, since as a woman she feels unable to enact the revenge herself, or to mitigate her own sense of guilt that she has sexual feelings towards the friend of her dead lover.350 We know that Bel-Imperia has a penchant for theatrics given her enthusiastic participation in Hieronimo’s production of Soliman and Perseda, ‘appointed to that tragic part / That she might slay him that offended her’ and going full method-acting in her suicidal ‘resolution’ to kill herself in-character (ST, 4.4.138-139, 145). Bel-Imperia dies as a part of the masque even though she should have lived: Hieronimo tells the onstage audience that her character should have died but that ‘of kindness, and of care to her,’ Hieronimo had determined ‘otherwise’ of her end – presumably by this Hieronimo means he either doctored the text of Soliman and Perseda so that Bel-Imperia’s character might live, or that her character’s death would have been feigned, as in a real play (ST, 4.3.42, 43). Bel-Imperia’s death was her own idea, a part of her own plan for reclaiming her right to her body after her two lovers are murdered. The cycle of revenge tragedy calls for the death of the revenger, and Bel- Imperia must therefore die. Neither Bel-Imperia nor Hieronimo can find a cure for their melancholy in life and must find solace in death to complete the cycle of revenge. Eric Langley’s metaphor, of the revenger as ‘pharmaceutical purgative’ dispensed to provide the ‘cathartic cure of remedial violence’ before dying themselves ‘lest the vaccination 348 Ibid., p.8. 349 Robert Tofte, Alba: The Months Mind of a melancholy louer (London: Felix Kingston, 1598), p.44. 350 Ibid. 90 become a plague,’ is one which has helped inform our discussion of melancholy. In the case of Spanish Tragedy, the social ill is the injustice of Don Andrea’s death, the injustice of Horatio having to share the glory of Balthazar’s capture with Lorenzo, despite even Balthazar admitting that it was to Horatio that he yielded ‘perforce’ and that Horatio ‘conquered’ him,’ and then Horatio’s cruel murder (ST, 1.2.161, 164). The pharmaceutical purgative is localised in the melancholy of both Bel-Imperia and Hieronimo – Hieronimo through the direct action he eventually takes, and Bel-Imperia, unable to take direct action herself, through her attempts to spur on the revenge of Horatio, then her aiding of Hieronimo. Both, therefore, must die for the cycle of revenge to be complete, and it is done so through their suicidal ideation. In Revenger’s Tragedy, Vindice’s suicidal ideation is more subtle than that of Hieronimo or Bel-Imperia, and he does not even commit suicide. Suicidal ideation is still an important theme, and one which is present from the outset of the play. As early as 1.1 Vindice expresses a desire for death. Vindice admits that ‘since [his] worthy father’s funeral / My life’s unnatural to me, e’en compelled, / As if I lived now when I should be dead,’ which at the very least suggests a belief he should be dead, even if it lacks any enthusiasm for the concept (RT, 1.1.119-121). This is similar to Hieronimo’s expressed desire to ‘not take [his] breath’ now that Horatio has died – but he knows, like Vindice, that he must wait until the revenge is complete: ‘For if I hang or kill myself, let’s know / Who will revenge Horatio’s murder then?’ (ST, 3.12.15, 17-18). At the end of Revenger’s Tragedy, however, unlike both Bel-Imperia and Hieronimo, Vindice and his brother Hippolito have no intention of committing suicide. It seems, rather, that Vindice’s belief that he ‘should be dead’ has dissipated now that he has completed his vengeance – in Vindice’s mind, the ‘pharmaceutical purgative’ of his revenge has been successfully dispensed.351 After Antonio responds positively to Vindice’s suggestion that the ‘rape of [Antonio’s] good lady has been ’quited / With death on death,’ Vindice is compelled to confess that it was he and Hippolito who committed the ‘witty-carried murder’ (RT, 5.3.90-91a, 98). Vindice’s admission is a confession of guilt – one that, whether Vindice thought it would or not, leads to their deaths. Heather Hirschfeld has described the death of the revenger as a commitment to enforcing ‘penitence and self-revenge or self- punishment,’ which could explain Vindice’s somewhat strange desire to confess to 351 Langley, Narcissism and Suicide, p.254. 91 multiple murders.352 The quest for vengeance, Hirschfeld argues, is in itself a ‘species of sin’ which must be atoned for.353 This is not unlike Langley’s argument that the world must be purged by revengers, who cure society of the “illnesses” of sin and corruption – once the revengers have cured society, the revenger themselves must be purged, to avoid their sin becoming a ‘plague.’354 Hirschfeld also suggests that Vindice has a ‘compulsion to confess, which perverts a stage of penance into a surer means of death and damnation for himself and others.’355 Hirschfeld reads Vindice’s compulsion as part of Middleton’s anti-Catholic agenda. However, if this is truly a compulsion, it cannot be a conscious one. Vindice is initially surprised at the outcome – ‘How, on us?’ (RT, 5.3.100b). Either Vindice’s subconscious forces him into the confession which allows for the death of the revenger, or Vindice is truly shocked. His confession, then, cannot be taken as a true, religious confession. Much like Claudius’s failed attempt at repentance in Hamlet, where his ‘words fly up,’ but his ‘thoughts remain below,’ Vindice’s confession cannot be true repentance as he still has the effects for which he committed the murders: Vindice gained what he wanted, and these are things which he cannot return – justice for his dead betrothed, a chaste sister, and a reformed mother (Hamlet, 3.3.97-98). Neither does he feel as though he deserves to die: his remark, presumably to Antonio, that ‘[t]hou has not conscience,’ indicates as much (RT, 5.3.107). However, although he is surprised at his imminent execution, we cannot say that Vindice is unduly distressed at the idea. When it becomes clear that his death has ‘come about,’ Vindice reassures himself that at least he dies ‘after a nest of dukes’ – that his death means the revenge cycle is complete (RT, 5.2.125). Vindice resigns himself to the idea of death quickly, telling himself that it is ‘time to die when we are ourselves our foes,’ suggesting not only that he understands why he must die, even if it was not the expected outcome, but that this understanding stems from a knowledge that, once the revenge is complete, the ‘poisonous medicine’ of the revenger himself must be disposed of, so that ‘the vaccination’ does not ‘become a plague’ as Langley suggests (RT, 5.3.109).356 Vindice seems to understand that he has become the ‘plague,’ the ‘foe’ of 352 Heather Hirschfeld, The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare (New York: Cornell University Press, 2014), p.70. 353 Ibid., p.72. 354 Langley, Narcissism and Suicide, p.254. 355 Hirschfeld, End of Satisfaction, p.91. 356 Langley, Narcissism and Suicide, p.254. 92 society, and it is now ‘time to die’ (RT, 5.3.109).357 Vindice does not actively seek his death in the way which other revengers do, although he knows it is possible that his quest for vengeance may lead to that outcome: hence his cryptic statement that he feels ‘[a]s if [he] lived now when [he] should be dead’ (RT, 1.1.121). At the end of Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo likewise defeats his fearful melancholy to give a defiant final speech, stating he is ‘[p]leased’ with the death of the conspirators, and ‘eased with their revenge’ (ST, 4.4.190, 189). For Hieronimo, his confession is a moment where he can admit that he has been suffering mentally, ever since his ‘hope, heart, treasure, joy, and bliss’ died with Horatio, and where he acknowledges that his actions could be considered symptomatic of ‘brainsick lunacy’ (ST, 4.4.94, 119). This link between suicidal compulsion and execution is most clearly seen in Ford’s Broken Heart. Here, the revenger, Orgilus, is given the choice of ‘what death’ he suffers as his execution, and chooses suicide (BH, 5.2.81). Orgilus chooses to ‘bleed to death’ through slitting his own wrists, in the ultimate combination of a suicidal execution (BH, 5.2.99b). The need for blood onstage is in direct contrast to the Senecan tragedies which inspired dramatists from the period, where bloodshed typically happened offstage, out of view of the audience. Orgilus also confesses – telling the court that it was he that ‘murthered cruelly’ Ithocles (BH, 5.2.16). Orgilus’s desire for confession, and the death which accompanies it, mirrors the desire for death which is seen in these earlier revengers, brought to its inevitable conclusion through this combination of suicide and execution. Death, for these revengers, is the natural ending to their tale, and it is through suicide, or a suicidal compulsion, that this natural ending is brought to fruition. Orgilus positions himself as the ‘learned Physitian’ who is ‘well skilled in letting blood’ and therefore is able to perform the operation which will finally rid the stage of the melancholy which he embodies through his death (BH, 5.2.102).358 This idea of purging melancholia is one which reoccurs throughout drama in the early modern period. Du Laurens recommended the ‘letting of blood, or purgation’ as a cure for the melancholic patient, and Burton quotes Avicenna as finding the practice of particular use in cases of love melancholy: ‘blood-letting above the rest, which makes amantes ne sint amentes.’359 Langley’s suggestion that the revenger is a ‘pharmaceutical 357 Ibid. 358 Edward Edwards, The vvhole art of Chyrurgery (London: Thomas Harper, 1637), p.42. 359 Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.108; Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, vol.3, p.206. 93 purgative’ connects directly with this idea of purgation – the revenger is the object used to cure the ‘social disease’ of the object of revenge, and must then be flushed from the body of the society themselves through death.360 This idea that revengers represent a blood-letting, or purging, is not a new one, nor does it exist only in pure tragedy. In his 1601 treatise The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, Giambattista Guarini (1538- 1612), an Italian diplomat who also worked as a dramatist, wrote that in tragicomedy, the dramatist creates a play in which ‘the instrumental end is that which is mixed and represents a mingling of both tragic and comic events. But the purging, which is the architectonic end, exists only as a single principle, which unites two qualities in one purpose, that of freeing the hearers from melancholy.’361 In their revenge, their confessions, and their deaths, Vindice and Hieronimo both purge the stage of the social evil of the villains, and then of the social evil of the disease of melancholy, which they have come to embody. Through the deaths of these characters, the social evil is ultimately defeated. Yet in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, the vengeful protagonist is allowed to live. To create such a situation, Marston has Antonio purge his own melancholy. Marston’s view of melancholy is therefore potentially different from that held by the other dramatists we have discussed here. Marston’s reaction to melancholy seems to suggest that it is not necessarily connected with villainy to the extent that all those suffering from it must be treated with the ‘pharmaceutical purgative’ of death.362 Marston’s heroes, Antonio and Altofronto, both overcome their melancholy and live. Antonio is noticeably melancholy from the outset of the play. Nathaniel Leonard has suggested that Antonio’s melancholic entrance creates discord, since the prequel, Antonio and Mellida (1599) ends on a comic note. Leonard proposes that the comic prequel is ‘engaged very obviously in revenge tragedy logic,’ which then continues into the tragic Antonio’s Revenge.363 Marston sets up Antonio’s melancholy in what appears to be a conventional manner. Antonio desires solitude above all things, dismissing the ‘sapless 360 Langley, Narcissism and Suicide, p.254. 361 Giambattista Guarini, ‘The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry’, trans. by Allan H. Gilbert, in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (1940; rept. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962), 504-533 (p.524). 362 Langley, Narcissism and Suicide, p.254. 363 Nathaniel Leonard, ‘Embracing the “Mongrel”: John Marston’s “The Malcontent,” “Antonio and Mellida,” and the Development of Early Modern Tragicomedy’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 12.3 (2012), 60-87 (p.75). 94 jests’ his friends are using to try and make him smile.364 Antonio then goes on to describe a dream which has made his spirit ‘heavy’ and caused the ‘juice of life’ to creep ‘slowly through [his] stiffened arteries’ (AR, 1.2.112, 113). Like Marlowe’s Faustus, whose blood ‘congeals’ when he first attempts to sign away his soul, Antonio’s blood has been made thick by his melancholy (Faustus, 2.1.62). Barrough suggested that ‘melancholious’ blood was ‘thicke and blacke bloud,’ and Bright likewise agreed that ‘melancholy blood is thicke and grosse,’ causing it to be slow and ‘easily floweth not’ through the veins of the afflicted even when ‘the vaine be opened’ through an attempt at purgation.365 Just as Faustus’s blood congeals, Antonio’s blood seems to have thickened due to fear: Faustus’s body recoils at the unholy promises he is making, Antonio’s body fears the portents of his dream. However, thick blood might also link to resolve, to a determination to see his plans through, as even in Lady Macbeth’s speech, where she is not yet melancholic, where she calls on ‘spirits’ to ‘[m]ake thick [her] blood,’ ensuring that no ‘remorse’ will stop her in her intended plans.366 A 1582 translation of Bartholomew Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things), notes that melancholy is ‘thicke, and is bred of troubled congealyngs of bloud,’ in other words, blood which is thick, and which would creep ‘slowly’ through the veins (AR, 1.2.113).367 The thickened blood of Faustus, Lady Macbeth, and Antonio may represent the melancholy which ‘breedeth euills incurable,’ like murder.368 Barrough advocates the letting of blood for melancholic diseases, and also suggests that melancholy can be caused by suppressing a woman’s menstrual cycle, literalizing Lady Macbeth’s desire for the spirits to unsex her: ‘altogether melancholious caused naturally or through […] suppression of menstruis.’369 Lady Macbeth’s desire to be physically unsexed suggests a disconnect between her ‘anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance.’370 Lady 364 John Marston, ‘Antonio’s Revenge’ in The Selected Plays of John Marston, ed. by Macdonald P. Jackson and Michael Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 189-287, Act 1, Scene 2, Line 3. All further references will be to this edition, and will be made in-text with the abbreviation AR. 365 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.262. 366 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2015), Act 1, Scene 5, Lines 43, 44, 41. 367 Bartholomaeus, De proprietatibus rerum, p.68. 368 Ibid., p.69. 369 K.A. James, ‘Barrow, Philip (d.1600)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Online ed., 2008), < https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb- 9780198614128-e-1545?rskey=9jALW3&result=1> [Accessed 25/07/2019]; Barrough, Methode of Phisicke p.35-36. 370 Butler, Gender Trouble, p.175. 95 Macbeth’s ‘wished for’ unsexing causes her to use the ‘words, acts, gestures, and desires’ which would proclaim her as masculine – such as murder, a lack of empathy – but do so ‘on the surface of the body’ rather than on the inside, to use Butler’s theory of performativity.371 The way Lady Macbeth performs her gender is similar to the way Antonio performs his melancholy. Antonio’s performed melancholic persona is an outward reflection of his anatomical melancholy – the thick blood which makes him ‘heavy’ (AR, 1.2.112). The circumstances surrounding Antonio’s entrance should be comic and light-hearted, but the arrival of the melancholy Antonio serves as a generic marker for something other, signalling that this play is not what the audience may expect after the comic ending of Mellida, and preparing us for the protagonist’s melancholy. Antonio’s relation of his dream is a performance of his melancholic emotional identity, to the rest of the people on stage at this point. It is a dramatic speech to a large audience, involving ghosts crying for revenge, bleeding wounds, and heavenly fire. Yet without Piero’s first scene, where he admits that his reconcilement with Antonio and his father is all a ruse (to further his own revenge plot), the dream Antonio relates seems contextually strange – as it certainly must seem to his onstage audience. Antonio’s dream seems to fit the category of ‘fearefull dreams’ apparently visited upon those of a melancholy complexion according to Aristotle, whose thinking remained influential throughout the early modern period.372 Du Laurens also diagnoses ‘fearefull dreames’ as a common symptom of melancholy: Du Laurens describes melancholic patients as being ‘assayled with a thousand […] hideous buggards […] dredfull dreames’ so terrible that ‘it were better for them to be awake [….] nothing but dead men, graues, and all other such mournfull and vnpleasant things.’373 Hamlet anticipates such dreadful nightmares when, longing for the rest that must come from ‘sleep,’ or death he suddenly remembers that either state may inflict ‘dreams’ upon him – both of which may ‘give us pause’ (Hamlet, 3.1.63, 65, 67). Du Laurens suggests that it would be better for the dreamer to be awake than to continue experiencing the dream, so fearful is its content. Antonio’s recounted experience seems to support this. The terror of hearing ghosts cry out for revenge forcibly causes Antonio’s body to awaken – his ‘trembling joints’ ‘[l]eapt forth the sheets’ (AR, 1.2.121, 123). We saw in Spanish Tragedy how 371 Ibid., p.173. 372 Aristotle, The Problemes of Aristotle (Edinburgh: Robert Waldgrave, 1595), p.105. 373 Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.89, 82, 95. 96 Hieronimo’s melancholy and ‘trembling fear’ ‘pluck[ed] him from his bed in the night: Antonio’s circumstances are remarkably similar (ST, 2.5.2, 1). Antonio continues to feel fearful throughout 1.2 – the ‘frightful shades of night yet shake [his] brain,’ even in daylight hours, and this contributes to his antisocial behaviour (AR, 1.2.150). It is significant that this anti-social behaviour – telling his friends to ‘[b]ow hence these sapless jests,’ essentially to be quiet – comes just before the tale of his dream (AR, 1.2.111). Antonio wishes to ensure his onstage audience are listening to his melancholic tale. Both Marston and Kyd use the physical properties of fear to convey the intensity of the emotional melancholy which their protagonists feel. Peter Lowe (c.1550-1610), a surgeon and founder of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, describes fear as follows: ‘a motion, that reuoketh the spirite to the center, to the heart by the arters suddenly, which soffocateth the naturall & vitall heat, it causeth trembling, sometime the bellie looseth, and death ensueth.’374 Lowe goes onto suggest that fear is directly related to melancholy, in that it ‘maketh the same accidents’ – i.e. that they create many of the same symptoms.375 The difference between melancholy and fear is that fear comes on much ‘greater in short time,’ whereas melancholy is more chronic.376 In The Terrors of the Night (1594), Thomas Nashe, a pamphleteer and playwright, also mentioned that fearful dreams are often suffered by melancholy persons.377 He wrote that ‘[s]undry times wee behold whole Armies of men, skirmishing in the Ayre, wilde beasts, bloody streamers, blasing Comets, firie strakes with other apparitions innumerable,’ and suggested that these arise from ‘the fuming melancholy of our spleene’ which had risen into the ‘higher Region of the braine.’378 Such apparitions are very like the blood-covered ghosts Antonio sees in his dream, ‘fresh paunched with bleeding wounds / Whose bubbling gore sprang fresh in frighted eyes’ (AR, 1.2.118- 119). Likewise, Antonio’s vision of the sky being ‘[t]hick-laced with flakes of fire’ and a ‘blazing comet’ is extremely similar to Nashe’s reports of ‘firie strakes’ and ‘blasing 374 Peter Lowe, The Whole Course of chirurgerie (London: Thomas Purfoot, 1597), p.31. 375 Ibid. 376 Ibid. 377 Nashe also collaborated with dramatists such as Marlowe and Shakespeare, and therefore had a similar understanding of theatrical devices, which he may have been using here. 378 Nashe, Terrors of the Night, p.12-13. 97 comets’ imagined by the melancholic mind (AR, 1.2.129, 130).379 Antonio’s dream, however, is more than a dream – it functions as more of a premonition. Antonio’s melancholy at the beginning of 1.2, despite being perhaps an unexpected emotion for his character to be feeling, pre-empts his role as revenger: it is a signal for the audience to expect the revenge tragedy genre Marston had been hinting at since Antonio’s unusually melancholic entrance in Antonio and Mellida. Once the truth is brought to light, Antonio’s melancholy fixes itself to the purpose of revenge. When told to ‘be patient’ by Alberto, Antonio suggests that he cannot be patient since his heart is ‘with punching anguish’ spurring him to revenge (AR, 1.2.295). Antonio describes his torment as ‘boundless woe’ and ‘black’ grief ‘more weighty than [his] soul can bear’ (AR, 1.2.301, 302, 308). Melancholy is, as we have seen, ‘of colour black’ and can cause woe – ‘mourning, weping [sic],’ and therefore Antonio may be referring to the melancholic humour when he describes his emotions as black.380 Antonio’s melancholy, which before this context is revealed seems disproportionate and unwarranted, is now given purpose: although his initial grief is too much to bear, and causes him to leave the stage, the combination of emotions eventually resolves itself into his revenger’s melancholy. Therefore, when we next see Antonio, he is still ‘wanton-sick’ with grief, but it has settled into the combination of sadness and anger which a revenger must have for the plot to have its requisite violence (AR, 2.2.2). This feeling is not specified as melancholy by name: yet it is ‘not grief, / ’Tis not despair, nor the most plague / That the most wretched are infected with; / But the most grief- full, despairing, wretched, / Accursèd, miserable’ feeling (AR, 2.2.13b-17a). These other emotional states – grief and despair – share symptoms with melancholy, as we have seen throughout Chapter One. The reference to the ‘plague,’ suggests the physicality of Antonio’s emotion – the anatomical feeling which aligns with his emotional identity (AR, 2.2.14). Antonio’s melancholy causes his need to purge himself. For example, after he kills the villain, Piero, Antonio desires to ‘cleanse’ his hands, and even more specifically, to ‘[p]urge hearts of hatred.’ (AR, 5.3.153b, 154). This purgation is required for Antonio to be allowed to ‘live enclosed’ as he desires, and for melancholy to be fully ousted from society (AR, 5.3.151). As we have discussed, melancholy could be seen as a ‘social disease’ which must be overcome, and the balance redressed – 379 Ibid. 380 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.120. 98 through purgation – after the revenge is complete.381 The idea of purgation exists throughout revenge tragedy in the period. Macbeth is also a play which is concerned with the concept of cleansing throughout. Although not traditionally considered a revenge tragedy, revenge is a predominant theme throughout Macbeth, as the eponymous anti-hero seeks to protect himself from the revenger – Macduff. Macbeth is the object of revenge rather than a revenger, like the other protagonists discussed here. Macbeth is interested in the need for ritualized cleansing after a murder – with Lady Macbeth’s insistent refrain ‘[o]ut damned spot’ and repeated motion of ‘washing her hands’ being the clearest example (Macbeth, 5.1.35, 29). Lady Macbeth’s actions are taken to be indicative of the state of her soul – her ‘heart is sorely charged,’ and the Doctor notes that it is most likely that ‘[u]nnatural deeds’ have caused these ‘unnatural troubles,’ even going so far as to call her mind ‘infected’ (Macbeth, 5.1.54, 72). It is easy to draw comparisons with Antonio here: like Lady Macbeth, Antonio suffers because of his sins, and appears to desire absolution. Both suffer from melancholy during their plays, and their absolution, or lack thereof, is connected with their purgation of melancholy. Antonio’s desire to ‘cleanse’ his hands after stabbing Piero reveals a desire to remove all connection to the crime (AR, 5.3.152b). Since vengeance involves murder, and murder is a sin, vengeance itself must be sinful – hence Langely’s statement that revengers are a ‘poisonous medicine’ which must be dispensed with once they have cured their society of its ills.382 Antonio’s third wish is to bury Mellida, ‘[o]ver whose hearse [he will] weep away [his] brain / In true affection’s tears’ (AR, 5.3.155-156). Bright argued that weeping was good for the heart, since it allows the body to ‘discharge the fulnes wherewith it was before strayned and oppressed. These vapours cause that rednes in the cheeks, and about the eares of those that weepe, heateth the fact, and causeth the head to ake.’383 Perhaps this headache is what Antonio is referring to when he says he will weep his brain away over Mellida’s hearse. Melancholy makes one prone to weeping ‘without anye outward occasion,’ but Antonio’s grief for Mellida must be the main cause of his sadness here.384 It is her death on which he dwells in his final monologue, requesting ‘doleful tunes, a solemn hymn,’ and asking people to sing 381 Langley, Narcissism and Suicide, p.254. 382 Ibid., p.25. 383 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.156. 384 Ibid., p.157. 99 ‘“Mellida is dead”,’ as ‘all hearts will relent / In sad condolement, at that heavy sound’ (AR, 5.3.170, 173, 173-174). But the phraseology of Antonio’s desire to ‘weep away’ his brain is indicative of the undercurrent of melancholic sadness which has run throughout his plot, from the moment he enters describing his dream. It also indicates his desire to purge away the melancholy which has caused so much death, and which has been present since Antonio’s entrance and relation of his dream at the outset of the play. Through his purgation, Antonio frees the society of the play from the poisonous effects of melancholy. That revengers themselves are poisonous is perhaps best exemplified in Antonio’s murder of Piero’s innocent son, Julio. Like Vindice and Hieronimo, Antonio must revenge himself on not only the original murderer, Piero, but must kill the revenger’s whole family, in this instance including an innocent child. James Condon has suggested that through the murder of Julio, Marston reminds his audience that ‘no matter how brutal his enemy, the revenger will ultimately do worse.’385 For Condon, the slaughter of Julio, which despite Antonio’s claims to ‘love [Julio’s] soul,’ is violent and brutal, and the pageantry of Antonio using Julio’s blood to ‘make incense’ to ‘Vengeance,’ showcases the way in which Antonio begins to resemble ‘the villain whom he stalks,’ Piero. (AR, 3.1.82, 207).386 Condon’s revenger ultimately cannot escape his destiny to become the very villain whom he seeks vengeance on, and Bowers has noted a similar tendency to evil. Bowers stated that the majority of stage revengers meet their deaths at the end of their play for one of two reasons: either ‘they turned from sympathetic, wronged heroes to bloody maniacs whose revenge might better have been left to God,’ or because ‘the strain of the horrible situation in which they found themselves so warped their characters that further existence in a normal world became impossible and death was the only solution.’387 Antonio claims that it is not Julio whom he kills but the ‘father’s blood that flows within [Julio’s] veins’ which he wishes to spill: this is somewhat difficult to credit when we consider the satisfaction Antonio displays once Julio has died – heaving his ‘blood- dyed hands to heaven, / Even like insatiate hell, still crying: ‘More! / My heart hath thirsting dropsies after gore’ (AR, 3.1.12-14). Antonio admits that this murder, of an innocent child, has only whetted his appetite for further killing, not that he finds it 385 Condon, ‘Setting the Stage for Revenge’, p.62. 386 Ibid. 387 Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, p.40. 100 distasteful. Condon’s suggestion that the revenger can become worse than the villain seems correct here: although the murder of Antonio’s father was unjustified and likewise brutal, killing a young, innocent, child whom Antonio claims to ‘love’ must be at least as horrific as Piero’s acts, if not worse (AR, 3.1.182). Yet despite his brutality, and his melancholy, Antonio is not compelled to suicide or to execution, unlike the other revengers discussed here. Antonio is instead commended for his brave acts. Galeatzo suggests that Antonio has become a hero for ‘ridding [the] huge pollution from our state’ (AR, 5.3.130). This pollution has now been “cleansed,” to use Antonio’s imagery, through the stab wounds given to Piero by Antonio, Pandulpho, and Alberto. As noted above, the literal connotations of a medical purging include the letting of blood. It is recommended in Jean Goeurot’s popular medical text The Regiment of Life (1544), which had several reprints between 1544 and 1600, all corrected and translated by Thomas Phaer. Goeurot’s treatise recommends bleeding melancholic patients through the ‘veine of the belly,’ possibly where Piero was stabbed, with Antonio purging his own melancholy by vicariously bleeding the villain.388 Not only does Antonio survive his revenge plot, but, as Phoebe Spinrad has commented, he is lavishly praised by the senators who ‘offer Antonio a triumph, a cash reward, and a role in Venetian government.’389 In all other respects, Antonio’s Revenge seems to follow generic conventions for revenge tragedy: there is a father’s murder to be revenged, a ghostly visitation, the revenge is delayed, and the revenger displays a marked tendency towards melancholy. Yet, at the end, the senators find ‘extenuating circumstances’ for Antonio’s actions, which include the brutal murder of the ‘pretty, tender child,’ Julio (AR, 3.1.178).390 These generic conventions were established by Seneca and expanded on by earlier dramatists like Kyd and Shakespeare, so that by the time Marston came to write Antonio’s Revenge, he could afford to subvert them.391 Antonio rejects Seneca’s philosophy in ‘Ferte fortoter [sic]…’ and his play rejects Senecan tradition in allowing the melancholic to live (AR, 2.2.47). Antonio’s ending is therefore an unusual one. It is not the ending of suicidal or murderous rage which we have seen in revenge tragedy, but of a calm acceptance. 388 Jean Goeurot, The Regiment of Life (London: Edward Whitechurch, 1550), p.71. 389 Phoebe S. Spinrad, ‘The Sacralization of Revenge in Antonio’s Revenge’, Comparative Drama 30.2 (2005), 169-185 (p.170). 390 Ibid. 391 See Seneca, Seneca his tenne tragedies, translated into Englysh (London: Thomas Marsh, 1581). 101 Instead of death, Antonio and his fellow revengers choose to live life as ‘[m]ost constant votaries’ of ‘some religious order’ (AR, 2.1.338). Much like the scholar-lovers we saw in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Jaques in As You Like It, Antonio’s melancholy ends in exile. However, it is Pandulpho who makes that decision known: the reluctant revenger who insists that ‘true valour’s pride’ cannot be shown through raving, stamping, or swearing, or by daring ‘the acts of sin whose filth excels / The blackest customs of blind infidels’ (AR, 2.1.338). Antonio has a few acts left to perform in the world before he retires to his ‘calm sequestered life’ (AR, 5.3.151, 160). Those acts are noteworthy: Antonio wishes to firstly ‘cleanse our hands, / Purge hearts of hatred, and entomb my love’ (AR, 5.3.153b-155). The purging of melancholy is significant throughout early modern drama, and Antonio’s speech here, as we have seen, is one example of this. Antonio is one of the very few revengers who is, not only allowed, but encouraged to live in the society he has helped to purge of its ‘huge pollution’ (AR, 5.3.130). In purging society of this pollution, it seems that Antonio has, for the Senators at least, performed a religious service. Senator 2 wishes blessings on them all and expresses a hope that the revengers will live ‘[r]eligiously held sacred, even for ever and ever’ (AR, 5.3.128). This imagery conjures up connotations of relics and canonized saints: by suggesting that Antonio – who is at heart a murderer who used the blood of a child as incense, presumably by dipping his hands in the blood as Hieronimo dips his handkerchief in Horatio’s ‘gore’ – should be held as sacred as these objects, Marston complicates the audience’s feelings towards both Antonio and the senators who are praising him (AR, 3.1.210). Nine years after Antonio’s Revenge was published, Marston became a priest, a change of career which may appear sudden until we read the anti- Catholic sentiments which run through Marston’s work. Both Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge are set in Venice, in Catholic Italy. This setting becomes particularly interesting when we consider Antonio’s response to the Senator’s offers. Instead of accepting the rewards offered to him for cleansing Venetian society, Antonio states that he must decline the offer, as ‘vows constrain another course’ (AR, 5.3.146). Pandulpho explains that the revengers have made vows to ‘live enclosed / In holy verge of some religious order’ as votaries – possibly as monks (AR, 5.3.151-152). The revengers have all sworn themselves to a religious life: this may suggest a desire for confession similar to that which I have already discussed in relation to Hieronimo and Vindice. The ending 102 of Antonio’s Revenge is therefore highly revealing. It is not a truly happy ending – Mellida is still dead, and there is no satisfactory conclusion once Antonio and the revengers reveal they are bound for a religious life: they do not even stay to rebuild a now shattered society. Yet neither does it end in a bloodbath on the same scale as Spanish Tragedy, Revenger’s Tragedy, Tragedy of Hoffman, or even Hamlet. Instead, it seems to pave the way for the tragicomedy. Marston himself went on to write a tragicomedy: The Malcontent (1603). The play’s title itself indicates the central role which melancholy will go on to play: malcontents are a character type who are represented as discontented, unhappy, unsettled. A famous example of a malcontent character type is Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi, who is at one point instructed to leave off his ‘out-of-fashion melancholy.’392 Melancholy is therefore central to the play, as is the necessary purgation. We have seen that Guarini wrote that the tragicomic ending, where there is a ‘purging,’ has ‘one purpose, that of freeing the hearers from melancholy.'393 The protagonist of The Malcontent, Malevole, displays a type of melancholy which is theatrical: his entire character is theatrical because Malevole is not Malevole at all, but Altofronto, the usurped Duke of Genoa. In a soliloquy, Malevole reveals that his position is an ‘affected strain,’ which Altofronto puts on in order to give him the freedom to ‘speak foolishly, ay, knavishly,’ and to ‘torment’ the court in his role as a kind of licensed melancholic fool (Malcontent, 1.2.22, 23). Just as Antonio’s melancholy must be purged for him to be allowed his atypical revenge tragedy ending, Malevole’s melancholy represents the obstacles which must be overcome for Duke Altofronto to regain his position as the Duke of Genoa. Significantly, Malevole’s revelation of his true identity comes after a masque, wherein he and his confederates, Pietro, Freneze, and Celso enter ‘in white robes, with dukes’ crowns upon laurel wreaths, pistolets and short swords under their robes’ (Malcontent, 5.5.SD). The masque, ostensibly the most “performative” part of the play, actually restores Malevole to his true ducal status, both in the costume he is wearing – with the duke’s crown and laurel wreath – and in terms of how the masque ends – with Altofronto reunited with his faithful wife Maria, restored to his ducal seat, and the usurper Mendoza ‘prostrate’ at his feet (Malcontent, 5.5.137). Once Altofronto discards the character of Malevole and 392 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. by Leah S. Marcus (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2009), 2.1.91. 393 Guarini, ‘Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry,’ p.524. 103 the melancholic performance which accompanied it to resume his own identity, he speaks entirely in verse, after speaking predominantly in prose throughout the rest of the play: traditionally, characters with higher social status speak in verse, and this is another way Marston reinforces Altofronto’s newly regained position as Duke. However, it would be incorrect to suggest that at the end of the play Marston dismisses all the performative characteristics which have led Altofronto to this point. Altofronto’s final speech re-emphasizes the performativity which Marston made so integral to The Malcontent. Altofronto’s monologue is almost a list of stage directions: he directs Pietro and Aurelia to ‘wipe your long-wet eyes,’ a standard enough comforting line to the reunited couple, but ‘[h]ence with this man’ immediately precedes the direction for Mendoza to be escorted from the stage (Malcontent, 5.5.166, 167). Altofronto also summons Celso and the captain to his ‘breast,’ Maria to his heart, and orders the ‘rest of idle actors idly part’ (Malcontent, 5.5.171, 172). This choice of words is revealing. The term “actors” had multiple meanings in the early modern period, including a ‘person who performs or takes part in an action; a doer, an agent,’ which correlates well with Altofronto’s use of “agents” as part of his coup d’état, but the theatrical definition of “actor” which we would today most associate with ‘a dramatic performer, a player’ was also very much in use during the period.394 In the situation in which this speech would be heard – during a play, after a masque has been performed within the play, it is not difficult to assume that Altofronto’s words may have had theatrical connotations, especially as his words seem to match what the characters would most likely be doing at that point. Marston deliberately chooses the word “actors” to highlight that although Malevole’s character is no more, it is not merely the malcontent who is performing a role. Altofronto’s list of stage directions grants him control once more – in terms of the dukedom and of his play, having rid the play of melancholy through his discarding of the malcontent role. When Hieronimo cannot take control of his life in the way he desires, he bites out his tongue and stabs himself. Both Vindice and Hoffman initially believed they have regained control, but control is ultimately denied them as Vindice is borne away to ‘speedy execution,’ and Hoffman is executed in the same manner as his father (RT, 5.3.101a). In the end, Hoffman suggests he deserves such treatment, as he has ‘slackt 394 “actor, n.” OED Online, (Oxford University Press, 2019), 104 reuenge / Through fickle beauty, and a woman’s fraud’ (Hoffman, 5.1.670-671). Hoffman suggests that by allowing love to control his life, rather than revenge, he deserves his execution. Antonio fails to regain control to the extent which would allow him to accept the senator’s praise, and instead he gives up his search for control: at the end of 5.3, it is Pandulpho who is truly in control, as he expresses the revenger’s intention to ‘live enclosed’ until they are called by the ‘dread power’ of God at the Day of Judgement (AR, 5.3.151, 150). Antonio essentially gives control of his life over to the religious order he intends to join, and ultimately to god. Although Antonio, like Altofronto, gives some “stage directions” in his speech, they are still actions of melancholy, proving that his humours have not been rebalanced: Antonio wishes for the company to ‘cleanse’ their hands, to ‘[p]urge’ their hearts, and them ‘entomb’ Mellida (AR, 5.3.153, 154). The rest of Antonio’s speech consists of actions which he will perform alone, rather than orders for the rest of the company to follow – he will ‘weep away [his] brain,’ and vows himself to ‘a virgin bed’ (AR, 5.3.155, 157). Rather than attempting to appropriate the tyrant’s ‘sociopolitically sanctioned control of space,’ as Condon suggests, it seems that throughout their dramas, the revengers are attempting to regain control of themselves, or more specifically, to rebalance their humours to regain control over themselves, over their anatomy, – to create balance between their emotional identity, their anatomical emotion, and their performance of emotion, a balance which must fit with the ‘natural proportion’ which means melancholy is not in abundance.395 The revengers who are able to regain control of their mental faculties are allowed to live: those who are unable to do so end the play either taken away for execution, or in suicide – the only control left to them is over their own bodies, and they choose to exercise that control through self-murder. The most self-conscious portrayal of melancholy, the most performative, is the easiest to overcome: Altofronto is able to overcome his melancholy because he is performing it from the very beginning, but never allows it to take control of him, as it does in the performances of his fellow revengers – his melancholy is not anatomical. Where the melancholy is more anatomical, less performative – the revenger struggles to redress the balance and are less often allowed to survive after the end of the play. Whether these revengers are allowed to survive their play, as are Malevole and Antonio, or if they meet their end through tragic accident, suicidal impetus, or execution, and whether 395 Galen, ‘To Thrasyboulos,’ p.75 105 or not their madness is real or feigned, the figure of the revenger is melancholic to the end. 106 ‘Am I melancholy inough?’: Comic melancholy and melancholic discontents. 396 ‘When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good,’ says Vindice, the vengeful protagonist of Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (RT, 3.5.202). In the preceding chapter, we saw the ways in which Middleton and his contemporaries represented melancholy throughout their revenge tragedies, providing an obstacle for the revenger to overcome, and as a means of crafting theatrical spectacle. It is only in revenge tragicomedies, like The Malcontent, that the protagonists avoid the ending of exile or death which is common to other melancholics in the tragic genre. In plays like The Malcontent, the protagonist is able to live because the balance of humours is restored to what Galen refers to as the ‘natural proportion,’ which we noted in Chapter One – with melancholy being the least present humour – as in Marston’s play the villain Mendoza, the cause of Malevole’s melancholy, is removed from the court to meditate upon his ‘sins,’ and Malevole himself throws off the mantle of his assumed, performative, melancholy when he regains his position as Duke Altofronto (Malcontent, 5.5.147).397 In tragedy, the bleeding of the villain and protagonist occurs as a means of cathartic cure and purgation – only then, as Vindice says, is the tragedy ‘good.’ (RT, 3.5.202). In comedy, melancholy must also be removed from the stage, especially as its presence may affect the traditional happy marriage ending typical of the genre. Sullivan noted that ‘it was Shakespeare’s comedies that took up the trope of melancholy most regularly and laughed at it as they did so [….] While Shakespeare cites ‘melancholy’ twice by name in Hamlet, he references melancholy most frequently in his comedies: especially in The Merry Wives of Windsor (six times), Love’s Labour’s Lost (seven), Much Ado About Nothing (seven), and most often of all, As You Like It (nine).’398 Melancholy is mentioned frequently in Shakespearean comedy, as Sullivan’s study proves. We have already seen that Love’s Labour’s does not have the traditional comic ending, and this becomes part of the necessary rebalancing of humours – like some revengers, the scholar-lovers of Love’s Labour’s are exiled at the end of the play, removing their melancholy from the stage. The same happens in As You Like It, where 396 Ben Jonson, ‘Every Man In His Humour, folio version (1616)’, ed. by David Bevington in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online ed., Act 3, Scene 1, Line 85. All further references will be to this edition, and will be made in-text with the short title Every Man In. 397 Galen, ‘To Thrasyboulos’ p.75. 398 Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, p.110. 107 the melancholic philosopher Jaques exiles himself to avoid intruding on the marriage resolution – the ending is therefore not quite the traditional comic outcome of marriage. This chapter, however, explores the ways melancholy is dealt with in comedies that do have a traditional marriage ending, particularly comedies of the late Elizabethan period and early Jacobean period. The comic ending is almost always a marriage ending. Lisa Hopkins has suggested that the marriage ending occurs in comedy with such frequency because marriage ‘focuses primarily on the experience of the group, as opposed to the individualist, isolationist emphasis of tragedy,’ and because marriage shows ‘humans in a relationship which is, in theory at least, one of indissoluble bonding.’399 The marriage ending is a fortification against solitude, and by connotation against melancholy, which is by nature a solitary disease: Bright reminds us that melancholy causes ‘solitarines, mourning, and weping,’ and that sufferers refuse ‘the light and frequency of men, delighted more in solitarines & obscurity.’400 By coupling the protagonists into their heterosexual relationships, the marriage ending acts as a preventative against melancholy, in ensuring that the protagonists are no longer solitary or mourning. We have also seen how anecdotes of melancholy could be used by medical writers to amuse and delight readers, and as a potential preventative against the melancholy of the reader. That we are supposed to be amused by these stories is made clear by Du Laurens, who describes the story of a man who ‘had resolued with himselfe not to pisse, but to dye rather, and that because he imagined, that when he first pissed, all his towne would be drowned,’ as the ‘pleasantest dotage’ that he had ever read.401 This ‘sillie melancholike man’ was ‘preserued’ by the physicians ‘causing the next house to be set on fire, & all the bells in the town to ring,’ forcing the patient to believe that ‘there is but one way to saue the towne, and that it was, that he should pisse quickelie’ to quench the flames.402 Lund has noted the ways in which the ‘delusions and extreme reactions are, as Burton recognizes, the stuff of entertainment’ and the tension in medical writing between the ‘avowed purpose to help melancholics and the pleasure and interest to be found reading about them.’403 We are encouraged to laugh with these authors, like Du Laurens, at the delusions being retold in these anecdotes, possibly as a means of beginning a cure for the reader’s melancholy through ‘myrth,’ which Boorde 399 Hopkins, ‘Marriage as Comic Closure’, p.37. 400 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.121. 401 Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.103. 402 Ibid. 403 Lund, ‘Without a Cause’, p.48 108 suggested was the ideal way to purge melancholy, along with ‘sport, play, and musicall instruments.’404 Yet Burton suggested that a ‘sweet voice and musicke are powerful inticers’ to love melancholy.405 Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night opens with a demand that musicians ‘play on,’ as Orsino, sick with unrequited love for Olivia, attempts to cure himself through surfeit, believing that the music, as an ‘inticer’ to love melancholy, will cause him to feel too much melancholy, and that through this surfeit, his appetite for love will die (TN, 1.1.1).406 This cure is ineffective, however, and we are therefore inclined to believe Ferrand who termed music ‘extremely dangerous’ for those who are already suffering from love melancholy, which, as we have seen, he places in the same category as ‘reading dirty books,’ playing instruments, and even attending plays.407 Du Laurens and Boorde, however, are both of the mind that the right kind of amusements will cure melancholy, and such a cure is given to Sly in the framing narrative of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1593), who requires ‘exposure to the merriment of comedy,’ so that he can be nursed back to health.408 These amusing tales contrast sharply with catalogues of symptoms, which serve as stark warnings against melancholy: for Du Laurens, sufferers of melancholy are always ‘fearefull and trembling […] afrad of euery thing […] always sighing […] with an vnseperable sadness, which oftentimes turneth into dispayre […] disquieted in both bodie and spirite’ and troubled with bad dreams.409 Both this fearful melancholy, and the amusing melancholy which may be able to cure through laughter, are portrayed in comic drama, through the use of two contrasting character types – the gulls and the discontents. In both comic and tragic drama, and medicine, there is an element of catharsis, a possibility that some of this unwelcome emotion can be purged through witnessing or reading about melancholy. The idea of catharsis has its origins in the works of Aristotle, who uses it in a medical sense, in terms of the evacuation of material from the body, until Poetics, where the term catharsis takes on the role of medical metaphor, where, as F. L. Lucas has described, it becomes an emotional purgation – ‘the human soul,’ Lucas suggests, is, through tragedy, ‘purged of its excessive 404 Boorde, Breuiarie of Health, p.74. 405 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.111. 406 Ibid. 407 Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, p.233. 408 Bernard, Shakespearean Melancholy, p.2. 409 Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.82. 109 passions.’410 This is what makes the comic drama ‘good,’ as Vindice uses the term: the comic gulls can be compared with the tales of pleasant ‘dotage,’ designed to make the audience laugh, to purge melancholy through amusement; the melancholic discontents are more like the catalogues of symptoms – a stark warning that the comic ending is only able to be gained when this terrifying disease is dissipated or cured (RT, 3.5.202).411 However, the line between discontent and gull is not always clear in the drama – discontents can be gulled, and gulls can be revealed as discontents. In the late Elizabethan period, Ben Jonson and George Chapman popularized a new style of drama, the comedy of humours. Richard Allen Cave has studied in depth the differences between the comedies of humours and other comedies from the same period and finds that in the humours comedy ‘the tone is quite new; there is little in the way of what conventionally passed for plot; and courtship is marginalised almost to the point of exclusion.’412 In this newer style of comedy, each predominant character is supposed to represent one of the four humours that exist within the Galenic medical model: blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy.413 The comedy of humours is a genre most closely linked with Jonson, who, as we saw in the Introduction, distinguished in Every Man Out of His Humour between a humour which applies itself to ‘the general disposition’ – which is, in other words, an innate characteristic, is anatomical, – and a humour which is an ‘affect,’ practised by those who ‘in wearing a pyed feather’ assume a habit that is not their own.414 The former kind of humour, that which is part of a man’s ‘general disposition,’ is something which cannot be helped, Jonson argues, and it is therefore not a fit subject for raillery – like the melancholy suffered by discontents in comic drama (Every Man Out, Induction, 102). This aligns with Butler’s theory of performative gender which we have been using to describe performative emotion: the ‘anatomical’ emotion, as we have called it, is the that humour which is a part of the sufferer’s ‘general disposition,’ and the emotional performance is that which is falsified 410 F. L. Lucas, Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle’s Poetics, (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), p.74. 411 Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.103. 412 Richard Allen Cave, ‘Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour: A Case Study’, in The Cambridge History of British Theatre Volume 1: Origins to 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 282-297 (p.286). 413 P. N. Singer, ‘Introduction’, in Selected Works ed. by P. N. Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), vii-xlii (p.x). 414 Ben Jonson, ‘Every Man Out of His Humour (1599)’, ed. by Randall Martin in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online ed., Induction, Lines 102, 105, 108. All further references will be to this edition, and will be made in-text with the short title Every Man Out. 110 in the wearing of a ‘pyed feather’ (Every Man Out, Induction, 102, 108).415 It is the affected humour which is ‘most ridiculous’ in Jonson’s representation, and which is therefore acceptable fodder for mockery on the stage and can therefore be aligned most easily with the gulls (Every Man Out, Induction, 112). Richard A. McCabe also refers to this distinction as one between ‘an actual bias of the mind and a completely conscious affectation.’416 The melancholy of the gulls, a consciously performed affect, is contrasted to the melancholy of the discontented protagonists, a deeply felt anatomical emotion. In Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour, Stephen, ‘A Country Gull,’ and Matthew, the town gull, compare their feelings of the ‘fine humour,’ melancholy, which they both affect (Every Man In, 3.1.71). This affectation of melancholy makes them a ripe subject for Jonson’s satire, with both gulls being particularly keen to prove that they are melancholy: ‘Cousin, is it well? Am I melancholy inough?’ Stephen asks, desperate to be assured that he is still in fashion (Every Man In, 3.1.87). The gull here reveals the secret of his melancholy, and that of Matthew too – it is performed. Stephen does not feel melancholy in the way which we might argue Hamlet, Vindice, or Faustus do – Stephen merely puts on the performance of melancholy in order to be considered fashionable. To use the Butlerian phraseology, Stephen’s “anatomical” melancholy is at a disconnect with his performance of emotion. Discussing gender performance, Butler suggests that ‘if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity,’ which is precisely how Stephen’s melancholy can be interpreted.417 Perhaps, as Butler suggests can happen, ‘the actors themselves’ can come to believe in their own performance, which would mean melancholy was Stephen’s emotional identity as well as his performed one, even if it is not correlated to his anatomical reality.418 Stephen’s first scene indicates his desire to be fashionable, as he tells his uncle, Knowell, that he has bought ‘a hawk, and a hood, and bells,’ since if ‘a man / have not skill in the hawking, and hunting-languages now a days, I’ll not give a / rush for him’ (Every Man In, 1.1.35, 37-39). Such a statement implies that his affections are not long lasting, since he will change a friendship based on fashion. Knowell disparagingly calls his nephew a 415 Butler, Gender Trouble, p.175. 416 McCabe, ‘Ben Jonson, Theophrastus, and the Comedy of Humours,’ p.27. 417 Butler, Gender Trouble, p.179. 418 Ibid. 111 ‘prodigal absurd coxcombe,’ indicating Stephen’s status as a gull, and thereby giving the audience permission to find Stephen absurd (Every Man In, 1.1.47). The first reference to Stephen’s “melancholy” comes in 1.3, when Stephen thinks that someone may have ‘laughed at’ him, an indication that his temperament is affected (Every Man In, 1.3.56). Edward Knowell, Stephen’s cousin, encourages Stephen’s over-exaggerated performativity, telling Stephen to ‘let the idea of what you are be / portrayed i' your face’ – suggesting that one should fit their emotional performance to their emotional identity, rather than to their anatomical emotion (Every Man In, 1.3.95-96). Stephen performs the role of a fashionable melancholic, but because this does not match his anatomical emotion, this makes him, for Edward Knowell and the audience, an affected gull suitable for mockery. Stephen willingly takes Edward’s advice, vowing to be more melancholic than ever. Stephen’s melancholy is, therefore, no true melancholy: he displays no symptoms of the disease as described in the medical texts of the period. He is not ‘disturbd’ [sic], nor is his body disquieted, as Bright suggested a melancholic should be.419 Stephen is seldom, if ever, solitary, which we have previously seen is one of the symptoms of melancholy commonly presented on the stage. Rather, Stephen is always in company, even though his companions are laughing at him. Stephen does not seem in ‘feare’ or ‘distrust’ and the only ‘doubt’ that appears to cross his mind is whether he is ‘melancholy inough’ to compete with Mr Matthew (Every Man In, 3.1.87).420 The satiric intent in Jonson’s play is to mock this kind of performative melancholy – perhaps to mock those who would pretend to be melancholy for their faux-intellectualism, as with Matthew, who wishes to be the kind of intellectual, creative man, who will ‘overflow you half a score, / or a dozen of sonnets, at a sitting,’ as he claims to Stephen (Every Man In, 3.1.73-74). Matthew and Stephen have a short but interesting duologue on how best to give the performance of melancholy. Both are ‘mightily giuen to melancholy,’ which they profess as being the ‘only fine humour,’ and Matthew, possibly because of melancholy’s association with genius and creative output, is quick to inform Stephen that when he is melancholy, which is ‘divers times,’ he will simply ‘take pen, and paper presently, and overflow you half a score, / or a dozen of sonnets, at a sitting’ (Every Man In, 3.2.70, 71, 72, 73-74). This calls to mind the sonnet writing of the melancholic 419 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.79. 420 Ibid., p.98. 112 scholars of Love’s Labour’s, who attempt to purge the ‘fever in [their] blood,’ caused by black bile which has been heated by ‘vnkindly heate’, by writing sonnets which they hope will help them to possess their loved ones (LLL, 4.3.94).421 Although the melancholics of Love’s Labour’s should mainly be considered discontents, not gulls, the sonnets become a comic revenge as they all overhear each other’s poems in a theatrical spectacle, which is a kind of amusing gulling of themselves. Their love melancholy is authentic, rather than affected, and should therefore lead to the marriage ending. Yet their melancholy is not overcome, which is why the ending of Love’s Labour’s is not traditionally comic. Bernard has recently discussed the melancholy represented in Love’s Labour’s where he notes that the love melancholy and ‘naïve, unadulterated merriment of the young lovers’ is shattered by the news of the King of France’s death, and Bernard suggests that the time which the lovers must spend apart becomes a ‘curative practice of the lords’ love melancholy.’422 The time apart becomes the cure for the love melancholy which must be alleviated before the scholars can win their ladies: Burton would later suggest that the best course of action to cure love melancholy is to ‘send [the lovers] several waies, that they may neither heare of, see, nor have the opportunity to send to one another againe.’423 In As You Like It, the lovesick Orlando also takes to writing poems as an expression of his frustrated love: ‘tedious [homilies] / of love,’ as Rosalind calls them, and Rosalind-as-Ganymede offers to cure Orlando of his ‘mad humour of / love’ after reading them (AYLI, 3.2.152-153, 400-401). Yet Ganymede accuses Orlando of not performing the role of lover to the utmost, suggesting that because Orlando does not give an accurate performance of love melancholy, he is not a true lover. According to Ganymede, to be a true lover Orlando should have a ‘lean cheek,’ a ‘blue eye,’ a ‘neglected’ beard, and his attire should be dishevelled; his ‘hose should be ungartered,’ his ‘bonnet / unbanded,’ sleeves unbuttoned and shoes untied (AYLI, 3.2.359, 361, 364, 364-365). Although said partially in jest, this speech suggests a theatricality to love melancholy, since it can be recognized visually through costume, which mocks the sufferer but without which the love melancholy cannot be taken as seriously. Orlando’s performance of emotion does not match his anatomical emotion, and therefore Rosalind throws doubt on the veracity of his stated feelings. This is the opposite of Ophelia and 421 Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.108. 422 Bernard, Shakespearean Melancholy, p.87, 88. 423 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.211. 113 Polonius’s reaction to Hamlet’s performance of love melancholy, when he comes before her with ‘[n]o hat upon his head’ and with stockings ‘[u]ngartered and down- gyved to his ankles’ and his ‘doublet all unbraced’ (Hamlet, 2.1.76, 77, 75, 82a). Hamlet’s performance of love melancholy is, in reality, false, but it looks the part since he has managed to perform it so well: Polonius immediately recognizes it, asking Ophelia if she thinks Hamlet is mad ‘for [her] love?’ (Hamlet, 2.1.82a). Orlando’s love melancholy, although deeply felt, is not performed as well as Hamlet’s faux- melancholia, and it is therefore open to question. The gulls in Every Man In are not truly sick for love, and their performance is not convincing enough – the audience is aware that Matthew’s sonnet writing is merely part of the theatrical garb of his melancholy. Like an actor putting on a costume, Matthew’s sonnet writing is a tool to help him convincingly embody the persona of the melancholic. Because their performance of melancholia is unconvincing, the audience is encouraged to laugh at the hypocrisy and foolishness of the gulls. Stephen and Matthew’s overarching concern is not their melancholy, but ensuring they are still in fashion. They are not, therefore, apparently considered by Jonson to be worthy of the comic marriage resolution. Jonson went on to write many comedies, including the satirical Eastward Ho! (1605), co-written with John Marston and George Chapman, who himself experimented with the humours comedy style of dramatic form in An Humourous Day’s Mirth. In Chapman’s play, as in Every Man In, the audience is presented with a lovesick gull, whose melancholy we are encouraged to laugh at. Labesha, a gentleman who we might consider a ‘feeling young love-sicke gallant, an effeminate courtier, or some such idle person,’ who Burton would believe might suffer from love melancholy, is mocked for his supposed melancholia.424 His friends call his emotion ‘some amorous disposition of his mistress,’ suggesting that they consider this a performance, rather than a true testament of his anatomical feelings.425 Labesha’s love melancholy stems from a realization that Martia does not love him, and because of this, he swears that he will ‘in silent [sic] live a man forlorn / Mad and melancholy as a cat’ (Humorous, 9.9-10). 424 Ibid., p.1. 425 George Chapman, An Humorous Day’s Mirth, ed. by Charles Edelman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), Scene 10, Line 21. All further references will be to this edition, and will be made in-text with the short title Humorous. This edition does not contain act divisions, and therefore references to this play will contain only scene and line numbers. 114 Labesha’s declaration is reminiscent of the list of delusional men which Shylock gives in 4.1 of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice: Shylock recounts examples of men who ‘love not a gaping pig,’ men who are ‘mad if they behold a cat,’ or even those who cannot ‘contain their urine’ when they hear bagpipes.426 Labesha’s vow is also evocative of the fabricated story of Cesario’s melancholic sister in Twelfth Night, who, suffering from a ‘green and yellow’ love melancholy, sat ‘like Patience on a monument / Smiling at grief’ (TN, 2.4.114-115). David Schalkwyk has recently noted that, in this story of the fictitious sister, Viola/Cesario not only forges a common bond with Orsino under the categorization of ‘we men,’ but also insists that ‘love is not an internal condition but a form of action or behaviour.’427 Love is clearly, within the context of these plays, a performative emotion, and love melancholy equally so. Chapman mocks the performativity of this emotion by having Labesha, whose actions are made to be laughed at, so overblown in his performance of melancholy. In doing so, Chapman highlights the ridiculousness of affecting a humour which is not your own. In mocking this affected form of melancholy, Chapman allows the audience to laugh also, using ‘myrth’ to cure their own melancholy, and discouraging what would come to be called the ‘out-of-fashion’ affected humour of melancholy.428 Labesha’s friends mock him by setting out a ‘mess of cream, a spice-cake, and a spoon,’ in a parody of the way they attempt to cure the melancholic discontent, Dowsecer, with ‘armour, picture, and apparel’ – a sword, fine clothes, and a picture of a beautiful woman (Humorous, 10.26). Unlike the accoutrements of gentlemanly living with which Dowsecer is tempted, Labesha is tempted with food, to force him out of the melancholy humour he ‘hath taken on him’ (Humorous, 10.24). Such an ensemble of items is meant to force Labesha out of his melancholy, for unlike Dowsecer, whose melancholy is deeply felt and is therefore not tempted so lightly, Labesha’s melancholy does not hold up under scrutiny – the cream, spice-cake, and spoon, Catalian suggests, ‘will work a rare cure upon [Labesha’s] melancholy,’ because it is affected. (Humorous, 10.28). It is the ease with which Labesha leaves his melancholic humour that forms the basis of the comedy, since his nonchalance proves him to be a performative gull. 426 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. by John Drakkis (London: Methuen Drama, 2010), Act 4, Scene 1, Lines 46, 47, 49a. All further references will be to this edition, and will be made in-text with the short title Merchant. 427 David Schalkwyck, ‘Is Love an Emotion? Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Antony and Cleopatra,’ symplokē, 18 (2010), 99-130 (p.109). 428 Boorde, Breuiarie of Health, p.74; Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, Act 2, Scene 1, Line 91. 115 Labesha is unable to resist the spice-cake, which marks him as unworthy of the love of Martia, and the comic resolution of the marriage ending. Whilst the affected melancholy of Stephen, Matthew, and Labesha, is clearly to be laughed at and mocked, their melancholy does share some traits of performativity with the supposedly authentic, anatomically felt, love melancholy of the discontented lords in Love’s Labour’s, and Orlando in As You Like It, as we have seen. These lords are mocked for the performative, narcissistic aspects of their love melancholy – such as the theatrical quadruple gulling of the lords and King in Love’s Labour’s, in which they are all revealed as ‘perjured’ lovers (LLL, 4.3.154). In some comedies, the line between discontent and gull becomes yet more blurred. The gulling of Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, for example, owes a debt to the satiric gulling of Labesha. In Much Ado, the gulling is far better intentioned, however. The gullings of both Benedick and Beatrice are extremely meta-theatrical, as both protagonists become onstage audiences to a “secret” conversation, enacted by the other characters for their benefit. This meta-theatrical gulling, where the participants pretend not to know that the protagonists ‘hath hid’ themselves to eavesdrop, begins to blur the distinction between gull and discontent (MA, 2.3.38). Those performing the gulling act out scenes in these plays-within-plays, where they discuss the love Benedick and Beatrice supposedly hold for the other – Benedick is made to overhear that Beatrice ‘loves him with an enraged / affection,’ and Beatrice that ‘Benedick loves [her] so entirely’ (MA, 2.3.102-103, 3.1.37). As Benedick begins to ‘dote on’ Beatrice immediately after hearing his friends talk about her, we suspect that his faith may be ‘as the fashion of his hat,’ after all (MA, 1.1.72). At the beginning of the gulling scene, Benedick had called Claudio a ‘fool’ for falling in love, and he then himself becomes the fool, or gull (MA, 2.3.204, 9). As much as Benedick insists that he has ‘the toothache,’ his friends, and by proxy the audience, laugh as they know love to be the true cause of his sadness (MA, 3.2.20). Benedick had previously suggested that Claudio’s love for Hero had turned Claudio effeminate – before falling in love, Claudio was ‘wont’ to be an ‘honest man and a soldier,’ but now he lounges around fashioning a ‘new doublet’ for himself, as part of that desire to ‘set out’ himself to the highest degree: a practice common among love melancholics according to Burton (MA, 2.3.19, 17).429 Burton also suggests that love melancholy ‘turns a man into a woman,’ confirming that Benedick’s accusation of 429 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.185. 116 effeminacy stems from a common understanding of the effects of love on men.430 Effeminacy is the exact accusation Beatrice later levels against Benedick himself, after he has confessed his love for her, but refused to fight and kill her ‘enemy’ Claudio – she tells him that ‘manhood is melted into curtsies, valour into / compliment’ (MA, 4.1.299, 317-318). That men are, as Beatrice suggests, now nothing but ‘tongue,’ suggests that they are no longer true men (MA, 4.1.318). Benedick is also accused of spending a long time setting himself out in the most attractive way, as he suggests Claudio does. Benedick has made it his ‘study,’ as it is of all lovers, to ‘weare [his] cloaths neat’ and to ‘set out’ himself so he is attractive to Beatrice.431 That Benedick is studying to make himself attractive may itself have made him melancholy. As we have seen, being ‘devoted’ to study can draw a man ‘under the influence of Saturn.’432 Benedick’s friends suggest that Benedick has taken to wearing his clothes neatly and setting himself out in a more traditionally attractive way because he is in love with Beatrice, having fallen for the bait laid for him in the gulling scene. But, interestingly, Benedick’s friends propose that the greatest note of Benedick’s new status as lover is ‘his melancholy’ (MA, 3.2.49). Benedick’s friends say that he is ‘sadder’ than he was before, which, combined with his other symptoms, proves that for all his disdain for ‘Monsieur Love,’ and his ‘strange dishes,’ Benedick has now also fallen prey to love’s allure (MA, 3.2.15, 2.3.34, 21). Benedick’s love melancholy is eventually cured, however, as he undertakes Beatrice’s request to ‘[k]ill Claudio’ (MA, 4.1.288). Benedick goes from laughable gull, tricked by the theatrical gulling, which is almost a play within a play, to discontented protagonist, who overcomes his own melancholy to become worthy of the love of Beatrice. Benedick’s melancholy is directly contrasted to that of his friend, Claudio. One of the most telling catalogues of symptoms of love melancholy from Burton’s Anatomy is the following: ’Tis full of feare, anxiety, doubt, care, peevishnesse, suspicion, it turns a man into a woman [….] Moreover they are apt to mistake, amplifie, too credulous sometimes, too full of hope and confidence, and then againe very jealous, unapt to believe or entertaine any good newes.433 430 Ibid., p.149. 431 Ibid., p.185. 432 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.115, 253. 433 Ibid., p.149. 117 Benedick’s implication that Claudio is no longer interested in the “masculine” pursuits of warfare is therefore supported by some of the contemporary medical writing on love melancholy – it turns a man ‘into a woman.’434 In Chapman’s Humorous Day’s Mirth, the melancholic discontent Dowsecer has a similar issue. Dowsecer’s friends, concerned about his melancholy, put a selection of items, including ‘armour’ in his room, in a failed attempt to rid him of his melancholia (Humorous, 10.28). Benedick’s assertion that Claudio will no longer walk ‘ten mile afoot to see a good armour,’ and would rather hear ‘the tabor / and the pipe’ rather than the more martial, and “masculine,” music of the ‘drum and the fife,’ suggests that Benedick has had previous experience with melancholic young lovers, and that he believes there is no hope – and indeed, in Chapman’s play, the trick played upon Dowsecer by his friends does not work, suggesting that Benedick may be right (MA, 2.2.16, 14-15, 14). Dowsecer, like Claudio, is also concerned with his appearance: he ‘makes him[self] fine’ after seeing Martia for the first time (Humorous, 7.203). Both characters are set up as the lovesick discontents, as the protagonists who must overcome the negative effects of their love melancholy. Burton also suggests in this passage that love melancholics like Claudio are ‘apt to mistake,’ and very jealous.435 Claudio shows his tendency to mistake throughout Much Ado. Early on in his courtship of Hero, Claudio believes, upon the word of a known villain that Don Pedro has wooed Hero ‘for himself’ (MA, 2.1.159). Claudio’s instant belief in Don John’s lie marks Claudio as a lover who is ‘unapt’ to believe good news.436 Claudio displays this propensity towards incredulity again, as Don John attempts to interfere once more with the happiness of this ‘young start-up’ by telling him that Hero is ‘disloyal’ (MA, 1.3.61, 3.2.93). Claudio’s immediate reaction, before even seeing the staged evidence of Borachio and Margaret’s tryst, is to believe Don John over the woman he professes to love: ‘If I see anything tonight why I should / not marry her, tomorrow in the congregation where I / should wed, there I’ll shame her’ (MA, 3.3.111-113). That Claudio chooses, again, to take the word of a proven villain over the woman he loves demonstrates that he is ‘unapt to believe’ his good fortune in being allowed to marry Hero.437 434 Ibid. 435 Ibid. 436 Ibid. 437 Ibid. 118 Claudio’s love melancholy causes the crisis of the play – Hero’s “death” and subsequent resurrection. Without his tendency to believe ill news Claudio would never continue to believe Don John after so many proofs of his villainy. To gain the comic ending and marriage resolution, therefore, Claudio must be purged of his love melancholy through Hero’s symbolic death and resurrection. In Twelfth Night, the love melancholy of the male discontent, Orsino, is also purged through a symbolic death and resurrection. Orsino, in a fit of jealousy, threatens to kill Viola-as-Cesario – ‘I’ll sacrifice the lamb that I do love / To spite a raven’s heart within a dove’ (TN, 5.1.127). Viola-as-Cesario agrees to the death sentence, saying that they would die ‘a thousand deaths’ to satisfy Orsino’s rage (TN, 5.1.129). In Much Ado, the symbolic death is performed by Hero’s family – ‘thou hast killed my child’ – and in some productions even involves Hero playing the role of her own corpse (MA, 5.1.78). In Twelfth Night, it is not the beloved woman who must die, but the beloved boy, Cesario: the hybrid of Viola and her twin Sebastian, whom Viola ‘imitate[s]’ in her service to Orsino (TN, 3.4.380). Cesario must die so that Viola and Sebastian can claim their distinct, heteronormative places for the first time in the play. The gender confusion must lift, the melancholy of the protagonists must be rebalanced, so that the marriage ending can be accomplished. The marriage ending is specifically pursued as a cure for melancholy, and also as a reward for beating it: Burton notes that in cases of ‘Immoderate Venus in excesse’ sufferers ‘rave single, and pine away, much discontent, but marriage mends all.’438 In Humorous Day’s Mirth, the marriage ending is achieved as the melancholy of the protagonist, Dowsecer, is cured by the mere sight of Martia. This, however, is because Dowsecer’s initial melancholy is not love melancholy but a ‘holy fury:’ it is the shock of seeing Martia that cures Dowsecer, as in the case of one patient of Ferrand, who was shocked out of his melancholy by a sudden onset of fever, in almost an inverse of Dowsecer’s case (Humorous, 7.200).439 Dowsecer’s melancholy is called a ‘holy fury’ by the King, who contrasts this with the idea that it is a ‘frenzy’ (Humorous, 7.200). The King seems to deny that Dowsecer is afflicted with a ‘humour’ at all: rather than the madness he was expecting to witness, the King instead sees in Dowsecer what he terms ‘perfect judgment’ (Humorous, 7.87). For the King, Dowsecer does not need curing, because his melancholy provides him with insight and judgment. In this way, 438 Ibid, vol.2, p.31. 439 Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, p.233. 119 Dowsecer’s melancholy is closer to that of Faustus or Hamlet: he is a scholar ‘rarely learned,’ who ‘hateth company and worldly trash,’ and could therefore be valuable as an advisor (Humorous, 7.15, 16). The King believes that Dowsecer’s melancholy could be of value in a similar way to that which Jaques’s melancholy is to Duke Senior in As You Like It. Duke Senior loves to ‘cope [Jaques] in these sullen fits, / For then he’s full of matter,’ and is therefore useful as an advisor (AYLI, 2.1.67-68). Both Jaques’s and Dowsecer’s contemplative melancholy is considered useful because of its association with learning and scholarship. Unlike Jaques, who leaves at the end of As You Like It to avoid being the spectre at the feast, Dowsecer’s melancholy is cured by the shock of seeing Martia. Dowsecer is therefore cured of his melancholy by love, even if his initial melancholy is not a love-melancholy itself – Dowsecer is therefore allowed to gain the marriage resolution according to the dictates of dramatic comic tradition. For Claudio, the shock of Hero’s apparent “death” begins his cure, but he is finally healed by taking possession of her at the end of the play – the comic ending becomes part of his cure. The possession of the beloved is an important part of the cure of love melancholy: Ferrand gives us an anecdote of a lovesick young man who will ‘consent only to be cured by the one who had wounded him.’440 Burton also suggests that the ‘last and best Cure of Love Melancholy, is, to let them have their Desire.’441 Thus, in Humorous Day’s Mirth, Dowsecer’s friends believe that only the possession of Martia, who is ‘[a]ble to work the chaos of the world into / digestion’ will finally cure Dowsecer’s melancholy (Humorous, 7.212-213). However, Ferrand does also suggest that sometimes ‘the actual enjoyment of the lady is not always necessary to cure the disease [….] Occasionally, just dreaming of it will work.’442 Such is the case for Dowsecer, whose cure begins as soon as he sees Martia. Claudio’s cure begins in 5.1 as he hears Borachio’s confession. ‘Runs not this speech like iron through your blood?’ Don Pedro asks Claudio (MA, 5.1.235). Claire McEachern glosses this as ‘as a sword:’ a literal definition which fails to acknowledge the recurring theme of blood throughout Much Ado.443 Prior to his love melancholy forming, Claudio is of a sanguine nature, the humour associated with blood, which Du Laurens describes as belonging to those ‘borne for to be sociable and louers of 440 Ibid. 441 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.242. Italics Burton’s. 442 Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, p.273. 443 Claire McEachern, footnote 1, line 235, in Much Ado About Nothing, ed. by Claire McEachern, 5.1.235. 120 companie […] they loue to laugh and bee pleasant.’444 We know from the reports from the Messenger that Claudio is ‘most in the company of’ Benedick, and Claudio’s enthusiasm for Don Pedro’s Herculean labour of bringing ‘Signor Benedick / and the Lady Beatrice into a mountain of affection / th’ one with th’other’ suggests he does love to laugh and enjoys these pleasantries (MA, 1.1.79, 2.1.337-339). John W. Draper has noted that Shakespeare’s young lovers, particularly his male lovers, are commonly sanguine in temperament, although Draper fails to include Claudio among the number. There is, however, little doubt that Claudio fits Draper’s argument that a ‘young lover,’ like Orsino in Twelfth Night, or Claudio, ‘should be’ sanguine, but that their humour is often changed to melancholy through unrequited love.445 We have already seen in Chapter One that a similar transformation happens to the young lovers in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Draper goes on to acknowledge that the sanguine temperament is the one most likely to change into a melancholic humour.446 There is a kind of melancholy which comes from ‘blood adust,’ the symptoms of which include a propensity for ‘musicke, dancing,’ and being in ‘womens company.’447 Such symptoms sound like those Benedick gives us in regards to Claudio as ‘Monsieur Love’ – listening to the ‘tabor’ and ‘the pipe’ for instance (MA, 2.3.34, 14, 15). Claudio’s blood, burnt and forming the melancholic humour, is responsible for the crisis of Much Ado, despite his mistaken belief that the crisis is down to Hero’s guilty ‘intemperate’ blood (MA, 4.1.58). 5.3 acts as both a climax to the less comic parts of Much Ado, making way for the comic resolution, and as the climactic moment of Claudio’s journey through melancholy. After this scene Claudio will be brought face-to-face with Hero, who will restore him to happiness. Claudio will no longer doubt Hero’s virtue, and will no longer be full of the ‘feare, anxiety, doubt, care, peevishnesse, [and] suspicion’ which has been the basis for all the problems of the play.448 James R. Simeon also suggests that Hero’s resurrection is a reward for Claudio, although in Simeon’s discourse on iconoclasm Hero acts as a reward for Claudio ‘accept[ing] her unseen,’ in a pro-Protestant, anti- statuary reading.449 But Claudio’s reward is also for overcoming his love melancholy. In 444 Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.85. 445 John W. Draper, The Humours and Shakespeare’s Characters (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1945), p.13. 446 Ibid., p.109. 447 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.399. 448 Ibid., p.149. 449 James R. Simeon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (London: University of California Press, 1985), p.35. 121 accepting Hero unseen, Claudio also proves that he is no longer in ‘continuall […] suspicion,’ since he agrees to take an unknown woman to wife without questioning her virtue as he once did Hero’s.450 Hero’s final resurrection from death, when she unveils, comes as a reward for the final dissipation of Claudio’s melancholy and the jealousy it caused. The woman is tokenised as both the inspirer and curer of love melancholy: in living, she inspires love melancholy, in isolating and solitary “death” she cures, and in rebirth she rewards. Hero’s dramatic reaction to Claudio’s accusations of infidelity is not without precedent in the medical texts of the period. Recently, Sullivan has highlighted the case of Margaret Radcliffe, ‘a lady in waiting to Queen Elizabeth who was widely believed to have died from sorrow in 1599’ after the death of her brother.451 Radcliffe’s autopsy, Sullivan notes, did not stop at listing her cause of death as starvation, but went on to note the stripes on the young woman’s heart, which were taken as physical manifestations of her grief. Sullivan links Radcliffe’s death to the frequent deaths of various tragic figures in Shakespeare’s canon: ‘Lady Montague in Romeo and Juliet; Brabantio, father of Desdemona in Othello; Gloucester in King Lear, as well as Lear himself,’ all of whom are supposed to have died from grief.452 Such contemporary real- life examples also call to mind the tragic fate of Penthea in Ford’s The Broken Heart, who, after a forced marriage to a jealous husband, becomes ‘over-sad,’ a ‘miserable creature, led to ruin’ and dies ‘[s]tarved to death’ in a suicide clearly linked to her grief, which is discussed in further detail in Chapter Four (BH, 2.1.74a; 3.2.51; 4.4.4b). Because of the dictates of the genre, however, Hero does not truly die. Instead, she retreats from society into an imposed exile. The course of action taken with Hero’s faux-death, for her to be ‘secretly kept in’ whilst it is published that ‘she is dead indeed’ is an extreme social isolation (MA, 4.1.203, 204). This element of darkness continues as Hero walks to meet Claudio at their second wedding, as she walks veiled. Claudio does not know which woman he is to marry – all the women in the train are interchangeable according to Claudio’s question: ‘Which is the lady I must seize upon?’ and Benedick’s follow-up question as to which of the women ‘is Beatrice’ confirms their lack of distinct identity (MA, 5.4.53, 72). Melancholy was strongly associated with darkness in 450 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.156. 451 Erin Sullivan, ‘Shakespeare and the History of Heartbreak,’ The Lancet, 382 (2013), 933-934 (pp.933-934). 452 Ibid, p.934. 122 this period, as it was meant to cause a ‘darke blacke bloud which maketh darknesse in a bodies mind,’ according to physician Christof Wirsung, in a text translated into English in 1605.453 Bright likewise identified the ‘thicke, blacke’ melancholic humour as predominating in ‘dimme and dark’ habitations.454 Data gained from the Visualising English Print online corpus of early modern drama shows that “night” is the 38th most common bigram associated with melancholy in the available dramatic corpus alone, suggesting a common awareness of the link between darkness and melancholia.455 Hero’s melancholic isolation is directly linked to the melancholy of Claudio: his melancholy must, therefore, be overcome for Much Ado to gain the required comic ending. In Chapman’s Monsieur D’Olive, we are likewise presented with the linked tropes of melancholy and darkness in the character of the Countess Marcellina. Marcellina has, like Hero, removed herself from society, shunning even the sunlight, and consecrating her beauty to ‘Batts and owles,’ because of her grief over her husband’s false accusations of infidelity.456 Marcellina shies away from the sunlight to the extent that she makes her household nocturnal: ‘Eleuen a clocke at night / is our Ladies morning, and her houre to rise at,’ the audience is told (Monsieur, 2.2.1-2). The internally felt darkness of Marcellina’s melancholy becomes actualised in the darkness of her home and habits. Monsieur D’Olive was, we are informed on the 1606 title page, performed at the Blackfriars [See Figure 2]. As an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars would have been able to create the darkness of Marcellina’s home in a much more realistic fashion than theatres such as the Globe Theatre, whose outdoor stages were at the mercy of the weather.457 453 Christof Wirsung, The General Practice of Physicke, trans. Jacob Moson (London, 1605), p.131. 454 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.30. 455 Data gained at the Centre for Textual Studies, De Montfort University, Leicester at the 2017 ‘Textual Hackathon,’ 10th November – 12th November 2017. 456 George Chapman, Monsieur D’Olive (London: T.C. for William Holmes, 1606), Act 3, Scene 1, Line 86. All further references will be to this edition, and will be made in-text with the short title Monsieur. 457 For an insightful description of the uses of the interior space of Blackfriar’s Theatre, see Julie Sanders, ‘“In the Friars”: The Spatial and Cultural Geography of an Indoor Playhouse’, Cahiers élisabéthains, 88 (2015), 19-33. 123 Figure 2: Title page of the 1606 edition of George Chapman’s ‘Monsieur D’Olive.’ Marcellina fights her husband’s jealousy and belief in her infidelity in the same way Hero does – by refusing him access to her. Marcellina knowingly and aggressively fosters this narrative of domestic disharmony and melancholia. Hero’s exile is imposed upon her by the patriarchal authority figures of her father Leonato and the Priest, but Marcellina’s exile is self-imposed, allowing her to enact her own story of female melancholy. In Much Ado, it is Claudio’s melancholy which must be overcome for the comic marriage ending to be reached, but in Monsieur, it is Marcellina’s own which must be rebalanced so that the play can end with no suggestion of domestic disharmony. Vandome brings Marcellina’s melancholy to a crisis by cunningly inverting the false belief in Marcellina’s infidelity which has caused her retreat from the world. By creating a falsified world in which Marcellina’s husband is the unfaithful one, Vandome drives Marcellina out of her self-imposed exile, and therefore out of her self-imposed performance of melancholy – out of the darkness and into the light. Shakespeare explores the link between darkness and melancholy throughout Twelfth Night, especially through the characterisation of Malvolio and Olivia. Grieving from the death of both her brother and her father, who have died within a 124 ‘twelvemonth’ of one another, Olivia has vowed that she will ‘like a cloistress’ walk veiled, and that the ‘element, till seven years heat / Shall not behold her face at ample view’ (TN, 1.1.34, 27, 25-26). Olivia’s vow to remain hidden from the sun is well known among the various characters in the play, since even the Captain, who has been at sea, knows of Olivia’s determination to abjure ‘the company / And sight of men’ (TN, 1.2.37-38). Although Olivia initially appears to Cesario veiled, she eventually ‘draw[s] the curtain’ to reveal herself, and eventually must allow the ‘element’ to behold her face, since she must be in public to encounter Sebastian, whom she goes on to marry (TN, 1.5.226, 1.1.25). Ironically, it is when Olivia draws the curtain of the veil, and allows herself to come out of the darkness it provides, that she is struck with love – ‘Even so quickly may one catch the plague?’ she asks, and suggests that she has been infected through her ‘eyes,’ now on view and able to view without the barrier of the veil (TN, 1.5.287, 290). Ferrand, drawing on medical knowledge which had been around since the thirteenth century, termed the eyes ‘windows by which love enters to attack the brain,’ citing Marsilio Ficino as a source.458 For Ferrand, the eyes are an important vessel for the ‘disease’ of love melancholy, which uses the eyes to slip ‘into the entrails of the body;’ the eyes also work as a useful diagnostic tool for the presence of the disease, since when the patient is infected, ‘the eyes take on a certain soft cast.’459 This belief has its origins in the theory that eyes cast forth rays which could affect the subject of the gaze. Du Laurens listed some of the ways this can happen, including the idea that ‘women hauing their natural courses, infect the lookin-glasses vpon which they cast their eyes,’ and also notes that men have often thought ‘that with the looke one might be bewitched and inchanted.’460 Olivia seems to refer to the tradition that eyes could infect the onlooker with love when she speaks of her sudden, passionate love for Cesario, invoking the possibility that Cesario, who is actually the disguised female Viola – perhaps ‘hauing [her] natural courses’ – may have infected or enchanted Olivia through her gaze.461 Both Olivia and Marcellina therefore make vows to never grace the day with their presence – and both women put on a great show of their melancholic symptoms, being conspicuous in their grief in a way which contrasts sharply with 458 Ferrand, Treatise of Lovesickness, p.233. 459 Ibid., p.269. 460 Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.38. 461 Ibid. 125 Cesario’s imagined sister, who sat patiently ‘smiling at grief’ (TN, 2.4.115). In comparison, the ostentatious show of grief displayed by Olivia and Marcellina adds a suggestion of performativity to their melancholy compared to the anatomical emotion in Viola’s story, which affects the sufferer to the point of death. The grandeur of Olivia and Marcellina’s seemingly performative female melancholy could be attributed to perceived female weakness (a weakness perhaps shared by the gull Labesha): ‘women are most weake,’ Burton reminds us, because their emotions are too overpowering – ‘[t]hey love or hate, no medium amongst them.’462 A woman’s susceptibility to deeply felt emotions may perhaps lead to their theatrical displays of melancholy. This continues to complicate the distinction between the performative melancholy of the gulls, who we are encouraged to mock, and the discontents, who are our protagonists. Orsino’s love melancholy can likewise be seen as performative. Orsino opens the play with a demand that musicians continue to play. Orsino is concerned with proving how much he loves Olivia: for him she purges ‘the air of pestilence,’ his love is ‘all as hungry as the sea, / And can digest as much’ (TN, 1.1.19, 2.4.100-101). Orsino’s overblown statements and single-minded pursuit of Olivia suggest that there is an element of the same performativity in Orsino as there is in Labesha. In 1.1, he tells Curio that when ‘mine eyes did see Olivia first’ then ‘[t]hat instant was I turned into a hart / And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds / E’er since pursue me’ (TN, 1.1.18, 20-22). Orsino’s insistence on placing himself at the middle of the story may suggest that his love for Olivia – and the love melancholy it engenders – is not real, and is instead a performed emotion, one which he may identify with and wish to perform, but not one which correlates with his anatomical emotion. For a love melancholic, Burton suggests, the woman is ‘his only joy and content,’ and they are ‘ready to hang themselves if they may not have her.’463 Orsino’s sudden change in attitude, from loving Olivia to loving Viola, whereby Olivia goes from being ‘[g]racious Olivia,’ to ‘uncivil lady,’ to ‘sweet sister,’ and Viola goes from ‘dissembling cub’ to ‘Orsino’s mistress, and his fancies queen’ within a short timeframe also suggests that his love is a ‘form of action or behaviour’ rather than a deeply held affection (TN, 5.1.101, 108, 377, 160, 381).464 That his love melancholy is performative is perhaps why Orsino attempts to 462 Burton, Anatomy, vol. 1, p.265. 463 Ibid., vol.3, p.53, 104. 464 Derek Dunne, ‘Blushing on Cue: The Forensics of the Blush in Early Modern Drama’, Shakespeare Bulletin 34:2 (2016), 233-52 (p.234). 126 cure himself through music, when it is unlikely to be effective, for as we have seen, music is ‘extremely dangerous’ for those suffering from love melancholy.465 Thus it proves for Orsino, who, far from having his love surfeit ‘and so die’ has his love melancholy increase (TN, 1.1.3). Chapman likewise presented a correlation between seclusion from society, darkness, and performative female melancholy in his earlier play, Humorous Day’s Mirth. Florilla is identified from the outset of the play as suffering from melancholy. Florilla’s elderly husband, Labervele, believes that his wife’s habit of keeping indoors makes her ‘melancholy,’ and attributes this temperament to the barrenness of their marriage: Florilla’s supposedly unfulfilled “feminine” desire for a family is assumed to cause her distress (Humorous, 4.59). Burton would later suggest that being ‘faire but barren’ can be a cause of melancholy, and that the melancholy of ‘Maides, Nunnes, and Widowes’ is ‘more familiar’ with ‘barren Women.’466 Florilla performs her melancholy by keeping a ‘close walk,’ which she customarily uses alone as a place of contemplation, linking her melancholy to that exemplified by solitude – and solitude, as Ficino reminds us, draws people ‘under the influence of Saturn,’ and thus towards melancholia (Humorous, 1.7).467 As we have seen, ‘solitarines’ was a cause and symptom of melancholy in many early modern medical texts.468 For the other characters onstage, Florilla’s solitude is indicative of her melancholy state, similar to the solitude that Olivia and Marcellina likewise impose upon themselves. Florilla’s ‘close walk’ and melancholy temperament lead her husband, the elderly and impotent Count Labervele, to worry that her constancy to him will crumble, that she will ‘yield unto the motion of her blood’ and make him a cuckold through her supposed desire to bear children (Humorous, 1.7, 20). However, it is precisely Labervele’s fear which causes Florilla’s unchastity, as it leads him to ask the gallant Lemot to ‘prove at full [her] spirit;’ Lemot does convince Florilla to sin, and Florilla is left humiliated after realising Lemot does not love her (Humorous, 6.57). In the process, Florilla’s melancholy is proven to be performative, along with her Puritanism. One of the main indicators of Florilla’s melancholy is her religious mania, as we also saw with Faustus, and which, we will see in Chapter Four, is a key part of Giovanni’s melancholy in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Labervele tells us that 465 Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, p.233. 466 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.370, 414. 467 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.253. 468 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.121. 127 Florilla is ‘too religious in the purest sort’ (Humorous, 1.14). Charles Edelman has shown that Florilla was the first character on the English stage ‘to be given the description “puritan”; the stereotype […] begins with her.’469 Brian Walsh has suggested that the term “Puritan” ‘has most often registered as a uniform identity: the joyless, sanctimonious busybody who was above all else a phony,’ and he suggests that it was the stage which acted as a ‘crucial conduit’ to disseminate the image of the hypocritical, ‘socially disruptive’ Puritan.470 As the “first” English stage Puritan, Florilla exemplifies anti-Puritan satire. Florilla is hypocritical in her Puritanism, and her melancholy is disingenuous and performative. Florilla’s religious beliefs are a performance created to fool her husband, and her eagerness to quote scripture is only matched by her lack of knowledge. Florilla often misquotes biblical passages and misapplies the lessons they are intended to deliver: she explains in scene 5, for example, that we must ‘pass / to perfection through all temptation,’ ascribing the aphorism to ‘Habakkuk, the / fourth’ (Humorous, 5.242-243, 243-244). As Edelman reminds us in his introduction to the play, however, ‘the Book of Habakkuk has only three chapters,’ not four, and none contains any moral lesson which ‘bears even the slightest resemblance to the words [Florilla] quotes.’471 Our laughter at Florilla is therefore similar to our laughter at the melancholic gulls Stephen and Matthew in Every Man In. Our laughter comes at Florilla’s initial hypocrisy, but more specifically at her downfall, as her hypocrisy is exposed. As Florilla’s desire for Lemot proves her downfall, in Twelfth Night the desires of the gull Malvolio lead to his downfall: either his desire for Olivia, or a desire for the position that being her husband would grant him – he dreams of sitting in ‘state’ in his ‘branched / velvet gown’ even before he reads the letter supposedly from Olivia (TN, 2.5.42, 44-45). Like Florilla, Malvolio is also accused of Puritanism. Maria suggests that Malvolio is a ‘kind of Puritan,’ but this is not expected to be long-lived, as Malvolio is actually an ‘affectioned ass,’ who changes his temperament when it suits him (TN, 2.3.136, 137). Edward Cahill believes that Malvolio is explicitly identified as a ‘kind of Puritan,’ not because he is supposed to represent Puritanism as a form of religious belief, but because in his ‘hypocritical, self-absorbed pomposity’ Malvolio is 469 Charles Edelman, ‘Introduction’, in An Humorous Day’s Mirth, ed. by Charles Edelman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 1-46 (p.30). 470 Walsh, Unsettled Toleration, p.39 471 Edelman, ‘Introduction,’ p.30 128 like a Puritan.472 Malvolio is characterised as a consummate actor, picking up new roles throughout the play, and discarding them when it suits him: first his Puritanical façade, then the role of lover which he assumes after reading the letter from “Olivia,” and then finally the role of revenger, which he attempts to take on at the end of the play. Whether or not Malvolio is meant to be an accurate representation of Puritan reform – and I am inclined to agree with Cahill that Shakespeare is using no ‘narrowly defined religious or political connotations,’ especially as Maria identifies Malvolio as not truly a Puritan but only a ‘time-pleaser,’ – Malvolio is nevertheless intended to be a Puritan, in the performative form of a melancholic stage gull (TN, 2.3.142).473 Walsh has also recently noted that the Puritan religious identity is ‘represented as a social problem more prominently than it is an ecclesiastical one.’474 The social problem posed by Puritans is much like the social problem posed by melancholics – standing in the way of the joy of performance, and the ‘cakes and ale’ which Sir Toby represents (TN, 2.3.113). Like so much of his character, Malvolio’s Puritanism is simply a performance, and therefore his melancholy may be also. Gary Kuchar has characterised Christianity as a whole as a ‘vast technology of mourning,’ and noted that in ‘early modern England […] religious sorrow remained ubiquitous – be it the godly sorrow that works repentance, the sadness for Christ’s agony, called compassion, or the despair of perceived damnation.’475 There is an connection between sadness and this kind of religious belief, as we also saw with Florilla. Katherine Hodgkin has suggested in her study on women’s melancholy that ‘religion is central to early modern accounts of melancholy’ and that mental disorders were ‘shaped by and articulated through assumptions about God and the devil, providence and divine punishment, religious melancholy and despair.’476 We saw that the faux-melancholy of Florilla was indeed connected to a religious belief, albeit one she did not believe faithfully, but this connection can be seen in many stage melancholics from the period. Malvolio’s performance of Puritanism relates to his performative melancholy: that the first is untrue suggests a superficiality in the second. As with Florilla, we are 472 Edward Cahill, ‘The Problem of Malvolio’, College Literature, 23.2 (1996), 62-82 (p.69). Emphasis mine. 473 Ibid. 474 Walsh, Unsettled Toleration, p.7. 475 Gary Kuchar, The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p.1. 476 Katherine Hodgkin, ‘Scurvy Vapors and the devil’s claw: Religion and the body in seventeenth- century women’s melancholy’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 44.2 (2011), 1-21 (p.8) 129 encouraged to laugh when Malvolio’s hypocrisy is exposed. His faux-melancholy is discarded as he comes ‘smiling’ to Olivia, no longer ‘black in [his] mind’ but ‘yellow in [his] / legs’ (TN, 5.1.331, 3.4.25, 25-26). Our laughter at Malvolio, however, is complicated as we witness his torment at the hands of Feste and company, and particularly by his appearance in 5.1. Malvolio’s torment might initially be the comic butt of the play, but his abuse becomes no laughing matter: his melancholy is not overcome, like that of Marcellina or Olivia, but nor does it continue to be the subject of laughter, like that of the other comic gulls. Malvolio is initially accused of affecting melancholy, and at the beginning of Twelfth Night it appears that Malvolio is being set up as a gull – Maria even calls him ‘[y]on gull Malvolio,’ – and the audience is encouraged to laugh along with Maria, Sir Toby, and Fabian as they torment Malvolio for his affectation of puritanical melancholy (TN, 3.2.65). Malvolio’s torment is intended, superficially, to act as a cure for his “madness,” as Malvolio is branded a ‘lunatic’ (TN, 4.2.22). In truth, Malvolio’s torment is a pseudo-purgation for his melancholy, one intended to ‘make him mad indeed,’ not to cure him (TN, 3.4.129). Maria refers to her plan to torment Malvolio as ‘physic’ which she knows will ‘work with him’ but the intended outcome is madness, not cure (TN, 2.3.167, 168). Malvolio’s treatment involves being locked in a room of ‘hideous darkness,’ and the fool – or the madman – Feste, is sent to speak with him in the character of a priest, adding an extra layer of theatricality (TN, 4.2.30). David Carnegie has noted the importance of darkness in the treatment of both ‘lunacy and possession’ in this period, and we have seen its importance in the cases of Hero, Florilla and Marcellina.477 Kier Elam notes that a ‘means of setting apart Malvolio’s dark room is needed in 4.3: in modern productions, this requirement can be met by lighting, whereas on the Elizabethan stage the likeliest solution was the trap (as sometimes in modern productions).’478 As with Monsieur D’Olive, Twelfth Night was first performed indoors: the first recorded performance was at Middle Temple Hall on Candlemas Night in 1602, where John Manningham noted the ‘good practice in [the play]’ of making Malvolio believe ‘his lady-widow was in love with him’ and then convincing him that ‘they took him for mad.’479 Since Twelfth Night was originally performed at an indoor theatre, as 477 David Carnegie, ‘“Maluolio within”: Performance Perspectives on the Dark House’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52 (2001), 393-414 (p.410). 478 Kier Elam, ‘Introduction’ in Twelfth Night, ed. by Kier Elam (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2008), 1-152 (p.91). 479 John Manningham, ‘Diary Entry, February 2, 1602’ in Harleian MS 5353, fol. 12v., 130 we saw Monsieur D’Olive was, it may have been possible to actualise the gloom of Malvolio’s dark-house on stage. It is also of note that the trap door, which may have functioned as a means of representing Malvolio’s dark-house, often functioned as an entrance for devils and ghosts, as an indicator for hell. This may add further weight to the insistence of “Sir Topas” that there is ‘no darkness / but ignorance,’ and Carnegie has therefore argued that the darkness utilized in Malvolio’s punishment is symbolic of ‘the ignorance of the damned’ (TN, 4.2.42-43).480 Carnegie’s persuasive reading suggests a link between the treatment for Malvolio’s lunacy and the ignorance of the non-Elect. Bright was certainly aware of the theological importance of darkness in his discussion on melancholy: he refers to the ‘darke midnight of ignorance’ suffered by those who are in despair, and suggests that nations who do not follow Christianity are led with a spirit of ‘errour, and darknesse.’481 That darkness also links to the ‘darke midnight of ignorance,’ is significant since it is because of his affectation of Puritanism that Malvolio is tortured – as Aguecheek states, it makes him want to beat Malvolio ‘like a dog,’ and goes on to say he could ‘so beat the rogue’ when watching Malvolio’s performative daydream during the letter scene (TN, 2.3.137; 2.5.30).482 The inclusion of ‘hideous darkness’ in Malvolio’s torment therefore signifies a link both to his melancholy, which is supposed to be cured through this ‘physic,’ but also to his Puritanism, and the idea that he may be in ‘errour, and darknesse,’ for pretending to espouse these religious views (TN, 4.2.30, 2.3.168).483 Walsh has suggested that the ending of Twelfth Night ‘enacts a fundamental hesitation in response to the problem of religious differentiation,’ since where the clowns ‘despise [Malvolio] for his supposed Puritanism,’ Olivia values him because of it.484 The unsuccessful attempt by Toby, Maria, Feste, and Fabian to “cure” Malvolio of his hypocritical puritanism is, for Walsh, a question over ‘what, exactly, is objectionable about Puritanism.’485 The questionable ending of the play, in which Malvolio’s mistreatment is brought to light, and the melancholic promises revenge, certainly suggests that Shakespeare may be questioning the typical representation of Puritanism mention-twelfth-night-and-shakespeare-anecdote> Contributed to the Folger website by The British Library [Accessed 21/02/2019] 480 Carnegie, ‘“Maluolio within”’, p.410. 481 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.240. 482 Ibid. 483 Ibid. 484 Walsh, Unsettled Toleration, p.87. 485 Ibid. 131 on the early modern stage. Yet, Malvolio never gains his revenge, and the play ends on a jubilant note, with Feste singing, Toby and Maria married, and Fabian apparently unpunished for his part in the plot. Malvolio is banished from the stage – it seems clear that Shakespeare does answer the question of ‘whether it is possible for Puritans and conformists to coexist’ with a resounding no.486 Walsh also overlooks the melancholy which is such an important part of Malvolio’s performance of Puritanism. Alongside such numerous examples of melancholic curing on the early modern stage, the attempted cure by Toby et al must be considered in a medical as well as religious light – ‘there is no darkness / but ignorance,’ and black bile (TN, 4.2.42-43). This connection with darkness means that Malvolio’s melancholy becomes much more like the cases of authentic melancholia which we see in other dramas, and this connection is therefore our first indication that Malvolio’s character is more than an affected, melancholic gull like Stephen and Matthew. The link between Malvolio’s melancholy and darkness suggests that Malvolio is not merely the ‘gull’ Maria and Sir Toby wish to think of him as, but that he is more closely connected with the protagonists, the melancholic discontents, than we might wish to believe. It seems that Fabian is correct when he states that their torment will ‘make [Malvolio] mad indeed’ (TN, 3.4.129). The intense isolation which is forced upon Malvolio – ‘we’ll have him in a dark room and bound’ – seems to cause a genuine melancholy (TN, 3.4.131). Malvolio’s condition is no longer affected, or changeable, but persistent and chronic. Ficino notes that through ‘solitude’ people are apt to be brought ‘under the influence of Saturn:’ Malvolio’s faux-melancholy is brought to life as a genuine humour as the forced isolation causes his melancholy ‘indeed’ (TN, 3.4.129).487 Malvolio’s melancholy becomes authentic throughout the course of the play, as he is mocked and mistreated. With the revelation of his final, anatomical melancholy, when the audience are expecting it to potentially remain performative, the audience is left in the uncomfortable position of empathizing with the man whose torment we have laughed at. What the audience had initially taken as the amusing and unconvincing performance of emotion, reveals itself to be an ‘anatomical’ emotion, in the Butlerian sense.488 Malvolio’s punishment at the hands of Maria, Toby, Feste, and Fabian can be read as a symbolic need to purge his puritanical melancholy in order that ‘cakes and 486 Ibid. 487 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.253. 488 Butler, Gender Trouble, p.175. 132 ale’ may rule, albeit an attempt which is done through the wrong methods, possibly deliberately (TN, 2.3.113). Much as Malvolio’s still-present melancholy, exacerbated by his isolation in the dark-house, lingers over the end of Twelfth Night, complicating the otherwise amusing comic ending, where disguisings and misunderstandings are revealed and marriages are confirmed, in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Antonio’s melancholy severely complicates the comic resolution. Antonio, whose opening line indicates that he is ‘so sad,’ but that he does not know why, is forbidden the happy ending of his companions because his melancholy is not purged (Merchant, 1.1.1). Antonio’s melancholy, as Bernard has noted, ‘both assists and impedes comic resolution,’ since Bassanio cannot win Portia without Antonio’s assistance, but the ‘need to purge melancholy from the stage forcefully manifests itself’ in the trial scene, as the comic resolution is disrupted when melancholy hovers over the protagonists.489 Just as it is never cured, no reason for Antonio’s melancholy is discovered in the action of the play. Cynthia Lewis has observed that Antonio never admits a ‘plausible cause for the vague, inscrutable feeling he initially describes as preventing him from knowing himself,’ and there does seem to be no obvious cause for Antonio’s melancholy state, although I believe this opening line is less about knowing himself and more about knowing the root cause of his own melancholy feelings.490 That melancholy can exist without an obvious cause is well-known: Hamlet explains to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he does not have a reason for his melancholy – ‘I have of late, but / wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth,’ and his friends accept this as a possibility (Hamlet 2.2.261-262). Bright likewise reported that melancholy people are ‘in heauiness’ when ‘no cause requireth it.’491 Salarino and Salanio, ignoring this possibility, immediately suggest that Antonio’s sadness may be due to financial anxiety, since his argosies are ‘tossing on the ocean’ (Merchant, 1.1.8, 7). When Antonio denies that this is the cause of his grief, Salanio suggests that the only other alternative is that Antonio is ‘in love’ and that this is causing his melancholy (Merchant, 1.1.45). Although Antonio himself dismisses the idea that he is ‘in love,’ and suffering from a love melancholy, with a brisk ‘[f]ie, fie,’ many scholars, directors, and actors have interpreted Antonio’s melancholy as a love melancholy stemming from unrequited 489 Bernard, ‘Shakespeare’s sense of humour(s)’, p.649. 490 Cynthia Lewis, ‘Antonio and Alienation in The Merchant of Venice’, South Atlantic Review, 48.4 (1983), 19-31 (p.21). 491 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.98. 133 love for Bassanio (Merchant, 1.1.45, 46). Love would explain why Antonio so freely gives his ‘purse,’ ‘person,’ and ‘extremest means’ to Bassanio before knowing the nature of the favour Bassanio is asking of him, and it also explains why he takes on a dangerous, life-threatening bond with his worst enemy to supply his friend with money (Merchant, 1.1.138). Steve Patterson, in his discussion of homoeroticism in Merchant, noted that Antonio ‘exhibits an exemplary generosity in his willingness to help fund Bassanio’s venture,’ and, more recently, Drew Daniel has suggested that in offering his body to be sacrificed under Shylock’s knife, Antonio wishes to be castrated ‘a second time,’ a fate Antonio feels he deserves because his ‘disabled melancholic body [is] somehow not generative, infertile, incapable (and therefore unworthy) of breeding.’492 Antonio’s body is infertile, Daniel implies, because Antonio is homosexual, and from this sexuality stems his exemplary generosity to Bassanio, as Patterson suggests. Textually, all we know of Antonio, as John Wilders has succinctly pointed out, is that he ‘only loves the world’ for Bassanio’s sake, and that Antonio’s sadness coincides with his friend’s desire to leave Venice and seek a wife.493 However, Wilders’ suggestion that Antonio is only sad when he knows Bassanio is leaving glosses over the fact that Antonio’s melancholy is present from the first line of the play, long before Bassanio enters and tells Antonio of his plan to woo Portia. But it is indisputable that the close friendship between Antonio and Bassanio drives the plot. Apart from his initial conversation with Salarino and Salanio, where Antonio establishes that he is melancholy, and his hostile encounter with Shylock in 1.3 where, despite the fact Antonio is asking Shylock for money, Antonio is unable to resist insulting Shylock, we do not see Antonio have contact with anyone other than Bassanio until the trial scene. As Patterson has commented, Antonio is ‘repeatedly unable to connect with those he encounters’ throughout the play, even with Bassanio whom he seems closest to.494 Such an inability to create and maintain human social bonds is a symptom of melancholy, which is by nature a solitary disease – Burton tells his reader that we call men melancholy when they are ‘dull, sad […and] solitary.’495 Antonio’s solitariness throughout Merchant is indicative both of his melancholia and his reliance 492 Steve Patterson, ‘The Bankruptcy of Homoerotic Amity in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 50 (1999), 9-32 (p.16); Daniel, ‘Melancholy Epistemology’, p.226. 493 John Wilders, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice, A Casebook, ed. by John Wilders (London: Macmillan, 1969), 11-22 (p.18). 494 Patterson, ‘Bankruptcy of Homoerotic Amity’, p.9. 495 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.136. 134 on Bassanio for companionship, platonic or otherwise. Antonio’s melancholy, set up as an motivator for the plot from the outset, goes on to impede the comic resolution in the form of the trial, which takes Bassanio and Gratiano away from Belmont. As Bernard notes, the ‘need to purge melancholy from the stage forcefully manifests itself’ in the trial scene, as the comic resolution cannot occur when melancholy still hovers.496 The trial of 4.1, an unusually violent insertion into the comedy, should be the purging that dissipates Antonio’s melancholy but it is unsuccessful. 4.1 is associated with mental disease from the moment of Shylock’s entrance. When asked to reconsider his threat to Antonio, and to instead take the money offered to him, Shylock refuses, citing his ‘humour’ as the reason (Merchant, 4.1.42). It is not clear to which humor Shylock attributes his anger. Floyd-Wilson, in her discussion of occultism and gender on the early modern stage, believes that choler is the humour to which Shylock refers, but suggests that Shylock’s anger is a more ‘peculiar and more irrational animosity than what choler can produce.’497 John W. Draper, however, suggests that Shylock is naturally melancholic: Draper cites Dariot as believing Jews to be melancholy, and argues that ‘Shylock’s melancholy, native to a Jew, becomes heated by wrath at Jessica’s elopement, and turns to choler.’498 Burton suggested that Jews are naturally affiliated with religious melancholy in ‘excesse’ – a condition he attributes to all ‘superstitious Idolators, Ethnickes, Mahometans, Jewes, Heretickes, Enthusiasts, Divinators, Prophets, Sectaries, and Schismatickes.’499 Rather than choler, Shakespeare is most likely referring here to Shylock’s “native,” natural melancholy. Melancholy is also the humour most often portrayed in the ‘farcical descriptions’ of madmen, which make a significant contribution to Antonio’s trial scene.500 Shylock’s reference to a ‘gaping pig’ is possibly a reference to the Jewish religious practice of abstaining from pork, but also references Thomas Nashe’s earlier work Pierce Penniless (1592): ‘Some will take on like a mad man, if they see a pigge come to the table.’501 This list of examples of madness connects directly with the ‘outlandish and even farcical descriptions of melancholic patients’ included in the work of Du Laurens 496 Bernard, ‘Shakespeare’s Sense of humour(s)’, p.649. 497 Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, p.10. 498 Draper, The Humours and Shakespeare’s Characters, p.7, 15. 499 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.338. 500 Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, p.110. 501 Thomas Nashe, ‘Pierce Penniless’, in Works of Thomas Nashe, vol.1, ed. by Ronald B. McKerrow (London: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd., 1904), 153-245 (p.188). 135 and other medical writers, as we have seen above.502 Even in medical works, melancholy was a disease which lent itself to dramatic story telling, and it seems that Shakespeare is using it in a similar manner here in Merchant. The melancholy felt by Antonio, ostensibly a protagonist, is therefore a humour shared with the play’s antagonist, Shylock. This makes the dynamics of the trial scene even more interesting: one melancholic, possibly inflamed and heated with choler, is attempting to take the life of another melancholic in a pseudo-purgation. The importance of humours to the scene is highlighted from the beginning, with references to ‘affection’ and ‘passion’ confirming the importance of this bodily discourse (Merchant, 4.1.49, 50). Burton, amongst others, commonly uses the term ‘affection’ to refer to emotional or humoral disease, and he holds that ‘all’ melancholy is a ‘passion of the braine.’503 This terminology is used throughout this scene to highlight the importance of melancholy – both Antonio’s and Shylock’s. Du Laurens groups the ‘letting of blood, or purgation’ under the category of diminutive cures for melancholic patients, and Burton also finds it useful in cases of melancholy.504 Burton describes the blood-letting procedure as ‘opening a Veine in the arme with a sharpe knife, or in the head, knees, or any other part which is thought fit.’505 In Merchant, however, the “surgeon,” Shylock, wishes not to open, but to remove an entire pound of flesh from the patient, with the intention of having the procedure kill Antonio. So although Shylock is ‘furnished with [the] things necessary’ to perform the operation, like a sharp knife, the purging of Antonio would never work, because Shylock’s intent is to kill not to cure.506 Edward Edwards, who wrote The Whole Art of Surgery, a book specifying in great detail the methods and proper equipment required for various surgical procedures, including purgations, in the late 1640s, requires that the person performing the operation ‘know perfectly’ the ‘manner how to doe it,’ and to have obtained the ‘counsell of the learned Physitian’ before attempting it themselves.507 This is a more literal interpretation of the purgations we have seen in other comedies – it is more like the melancholic drive towards death which we saw characterised in the melancholy of the revenger. Indeed, Shylock is on a kind of quest for vengeance against 502 Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, p.110. 503 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.59, 58. 504 Du Laurens, Preservation of the Sight, p.108. 505 Burton, Anatomy, vol.2, p.237. 506 Edwards, VVhole art of Chyrurgery, p.41. 507 Ibid. 136 the man who ‘spit upon [his] Jewish gabardine,’ which could make him the melancholic anti-hero in the same vein as Vindice or Hieronimo (Merchant, 1.3.108). In placing such an explicit, almost tragic, purgation at the epicentre of his play, Shakespeare highlights the role of melancholy, and the liminality of genre: how easy it would be to make this comedy a tragedy, purely through the outcome of this purgation. Portia asks Shylock to consider having ‘some surgeon’ standing by, to help save Antonio, but Shylock gleefully refuses the counsel of any learned physician (Merchant, 5.1.255). Antonio’s blood-letting is never going to function as a true purgation, and therefore Antonio’s melancholy is never cured. It is also, therefore, thought-provoking to consider that the close relationship in humoral temperament between Shylock and Antonio also calls into question the blurred distinction between villain and protagonist. We have already seen how the comic gull, like Malvolio, can become an unfairly-used – or, to use his own terminology, ‘madly used’ – protagonist, who is treated appallingly at the hands of his tormentors (TN, 5.1.305). The melancholic discontents of these plays likewise suffer with an almost tragic melancholy and must be cured before the marriage resolution takes place. Melancholy itself could be viewed as the antagonist for these discontents, whose melancholy must be rebalanced so the comic ending may occur. In Much Ado, we are presented with another melancholic villain in Don John, and, as we saw in Chapter Two, Gellert Lyons has noted that the ‘possibility of villainy has always been connected with melancholy through the sinister personality and attributes of Saturn,’ as we have seen in the case of the revenge tragedies.508 Interestingly, Bernard suggests that Don John and Antonio share a sense of unredeemable ‘inertia.’509 Both Antonio and Don John, Bernard suggests, have the possibility for ‘remediation,’ or purgation of their melancholy, but ultimately the apathy of both ‘leads to their failure to fully integrate’ with the society and world in which they live.510 This connects with the above discussion on Antonio’s inability to make meaningful personal connections, and the melancholy that stems from and is a symptom of this isolation. The relationship between villainy and melancholy might complicate our view of Antonio as a discontent, whose melancholy is not successfully purged, as is the melancholy of the other discontents like Claudio and Marcellina. If we accept Draper’s 508 Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy, p.35. 509 Bernard, Shakespearean Melancholy, p.95. 510 Ibid. 137 suggestion that Shylock is inherently melancholic, and accept that Antonio is too, Antonio must be considered on the same spectrum as many antagonists and villains, including Shylock. Melancholy itself can be seen as villainous, and as we have seen melancholy must be removed from the play by the end, forcibly through a purgation or otherwise. Antonio’s continued melancholic status casts doubt on whether he should remain a part of the group by the ending – or should he, like his fellow melancholic, Shylock, be removed? Antonio does act as an obstacle between the lovers and their happy ending, at least momentarily: the lovers are all required to give up their wedding night to rescue Antonio. Antonio’s melancholy even mars the otherwise standard comic marriage resolution at the end of Merchant. Whether it is caused by love or stems from another, unknown, cause, Antonio’s melancholy creates a strain in the atmosphere of Belmont, just as Malvolio’s revengeful melancholy seems out of place amongst the happy reunions of Twelfth Night. Even Antonio’s response to Portia’s discovery that three of his ships are not lost, but ‘richly’ returned to him strikes us as unusual (Merchant, 5.1.227). ‘I am dumb!’ he exclaims, but this is all (Merchant, 5.1.299b). Lorenzo’s response to Portia’s news for him and Jessica – ‘[f]air ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starved people’ – is more verbose, poetic, and fitting for the joyful news (Merchant, 5.1.294-295a). Antonio’s reaction is more reminiscent of Claudio’s ‘[s]ilence is the perfectest herald of joy’ in Much Ado - Antonio would perhaps consider himself ‘little happy’ if he could say how much (MA, 2.1.281, 282). However, even Claudio, mute as he suggests he is, goes on to elaborate, speaking directly to Hero for the first time in the play to further articulate his happiness. Likewise, in Humorous Day’s Mirth, when the melancholy Dowsecer sees the beautiful Martia for the first time, he has a moment of silence whilst he ‘makes him[self] fine,’ but he then delivers a poetic speech on the divinity of Martia’s beauty (Humourous, 7.202). Antonio’s reticence is as overwhelming as it is unnerving, and it adds another level of strangeness to his spectral ending at Belmont. The threat of Antonio’s melancholy, and indeed, of the potential for homoerotic relations between Antonio and Bassanio, is never quite erased. Melancholy has no place in the comic resolution, and must therefore either be rebalanced, or purged, as it is for many of the lovesick discontents, or it must absent itself as Jaques does at the end of As You Like It. Antonio does none of these things, and his presence at the end of the play strikes an odd note of 138 dissonance in the otherwise straightforward ending – as does Malvolio’s cry for revenge in Twelfth Night. Antonio cuts an odd figure amongst the three happy couples. Antonio’s only true friend in the tableau is Bassanio, and the staging and text make it quite clear that Bassanio is now aligned with Portia – he sees himself in her ‘fair eyes,’ a phrase which suggests their ultimate connection as one flesh, man and wife, since Bassanio sees himself as a part of her (Merchant, 5.1.242). Love melancholy is common in comedies, providing an obstacle for the young lovers to overcome in order to pass on to the marriage ending, as we have seen in the case of Claudio and Dowsecer. The love melancholic has a long literary history, but unlike most love melancholics in the late Elizabethan era, Antonio is not a ‘figure of fun,’ as Gellert Lyons has shown they typically were, at least until ‘later plays, like Ford’s’ made love melancholics a much more tragic figure.511 Until these later plays, Gellert Lyons suggests, male love melancholics were used on the stage to ‘express […] a certain amount of self-indulgence’ which could be used for good-natured teasing: we have seen such teasing in the cases of Claudio and Benedick in Much Ado and, less good-naturedly, in Humourous Day’s Mirth.512 But Gellert Lyons fails to acknowledge the way that this love melancholy almost causes tragedy. The reuniting of the lovers at the end of Merchant is not without conflict. Antonio acknowledges that he is the unhappy cause ‘of these quarrels’ between the reunited couples. Antonio offers to fix the supposed breach between Portia and Bassanio by offering his ‘soul’ as surety for Bassanio’s faithfulness, in the same way that he ‘did lend [his] body for [Bassanio’s] wealth’ (Merchant, 5.1.252, 249). In his melancholy, Antonio does the only thing he can do – offer himself once again as a sacrifice for his friend. Antonio offers to enter into a more theologically serious bond than before, since the body is merely ‘the servant of the soul,’ and therefore lower in the hierarchy of Galenic medicine.513 Socratic philosophy, as articulated in Plato’s Phaedo, argues that the soul is more valuable than the body, since the body ‘affords us countless distractions’ and in order to know anything ‘purely’ we ‘must be rid of it.’514 Daryl Kator has convincingly shown that by 1605, Shakespeare 511 Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy, p.25. 512 Ibid. 513 Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, ‘Introduction’, in Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. by Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996, 1-10 (p.5). 514 Plato, Phaedo, trans. by David Gallop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.12. 139 was recalling both ‘the Symposium and the Phaedo simultaneously’ in his portrayal of Apemantus, the churlish philosopher of Timon of Athens (first performed 1607).515 It is possible, therefore, that just a few years earlier, Shakespeare was using this knowledge of the Phaedo when he created Antonio’s character in Merchant. Just as Shakespeare uses Antonio’s near-death experience in the trial scene as a failed or pseudo-purgation for Antonio’s melancholy, Plato has Socrates term death a ‘purification’ – a parting ‘of the soul from the body as far as possible,’ which he likens to being released ‘from fetters.’516 Antonio is released from fetters in a literal way when Portia saves him from Shylock’s knife, but Antonio actually seems to welcome the fate which Shylock represents. The idea that his soul will part ‘as far as possible’ from his body does not terrify Antonio, rather, he seems resigned and accepting, much as Socrates is in the Phaedo – ‘Let me have my judgement, and the Jew his will’ (Merchant, 4.1.82). Such a statement implies a melancholic resignation to death, but also that Antonio may await a purification process – he calls himself a ‘tainted wether’ and ‘the weakest kind of fruit’ and insists that because of this he is ‘[m]eetest for death’ (Merchant, 4.1.113, 114). Perhaps Antonio is suffering from what Jeremy Schmidt has identified as the ‘stigma of insanity in the early modern period,’ which is that madness is not only ‘bereft of reason, and therefore of humanity,’ but that the cause of that loss of reason ‘was in fact a moral weakness of the soul.’517 Perhaps this is why Antonio is so keen to wager his soul – feeling that his soul’s weakness is the cause of his madness and his melancholy, he would perhaps prefer to be rid of it altogether. Antonio, unable to purge his melancholy, seems to wish to discard the thing which may have caused it – his soul. The purging of the melancholic discontent is an important trope in comedies, as it rids this society of potential discord and solitude, making way for the joyful union of marriage. For female discontents, like Marcellina, Olivia, Hero, and even for female gulls such as Florilla, comic love melancholy keeps them locked away from the sun, in ‘close,’ solitary walks (Humorous, 1.7). This type of melancholy can be performative, involving rash vows, which are extravagant and unrealistic, to stay hidden for a given number of years, or keeping the truth hidden and acting as though the beloved woman has died until repentance is reached in the male 515 Daryl Kator, ‘Shakespeare’s Political Philosophy: A Debt to Plato in Timon of Athens,’ Philosophy and Literature, 36 (2012), 136-152 (p.140). 516 Plato, Phaedo, p.13. 517 Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Madness in the Early Modern Period (Surrey: Ashgate, 2007), p.77. 140 discontent. For some, like Florilla, this melancholy can be entirely falsified, highlighting melancholy’s status as a theatrical emotion. The male discontents are usually melancholy because of what is perceived as an unrequited love: Claudio refuses to believe Hero could love him, Antonio appears to pine for a love which can never exist, Malvolio longs for a woman high above him in the social hierarchy. Both male and female discontents must undergo a purging in order for the comic ending to occur: it is when the purging is unsuccessful that we experience what Bernard calls an ‘ambivalent closing tableau,’ where melancholy threatens the stability promised by the marriage conclusion.518 The comic drama presents us not only with the melancholic discontents but also with the melancholic gulls, whose melancholy we are encouraged to laugh at as a ridiculous affectation. John Webster mentions the fashion for affecting melancholy as late as 1613, in Duchess of Malfi: in Webster’s play the protagonist, Antonio, encourages the malcontent, Bosola, to leave his ‘out-of-fashion melancholy.’519 By 1613, the novelty of this affected humour had worn off, and we can see the beginning of this in the gulls. Gulls like Labesha, Matthew, and Stephen, are a part of the comedy of this drama. Their melancholy is inherently performative, an act which they create and perform in order to fit in with the gallants they are friends with. These friends tend to mock the gull, and not in the friendly way which the friends of the discontent may tease him. Benedick’s friends, for example, mock and taunt him with references to knowing ‘who loves him’ after they have gulled him into admitting his love for Beatrice, just as Labesha’s friends mock and taunt him with the ‘mess of cream, a spice-cake, and a spoon’ (MA, 3.2.57; Humorous, 10.26). The difference is the intention behind the laughter. Whereas Leonato, Don Pedro, and Claudio laugh because they know that Benedick is finally confronting his love for Beatrice, and that the pair will most likely soon unite, Labesha’s companions have a more satiric intention: they do not care whether Labesha recovers from his sudden bout of melancholy – their prime concern is to laugh at Labesha, and they encourage the audience to do so as well. Gulls like Labesha, Stephen, and Matthew are denied the marriage ending because their performative melancholy, which is unpurged and not discarded, shows the “sufferers” as unworthy of true love. They are therefore nowhere to be seen at the ending of the 518 Bernard, Shakespearean Melancholy, p.95. 519 Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 2.1.91. 141 play, other than as figures of mockery, as the discontents are rewarded for the dissipation of their melancholy. Without a successful purgation, the ending of these plays would not be truly comic, and there are instances where these dramatists use melancholy to complicate the ending of these otherwise comic plays. The righteous anger of Malvolio in Twelfth Night disturbs the happy ending – despite Fabian’s wishes, Malvolio’s anguished cry that he will be ‘revenged on the whole pack’ of the society – tormentors and innocents alike – does indeed ‘taint the condition of this present hour,’ and the ‘sportful malice’ of the drunkards leaves a bitter note which does not dissipate with the marriage ending (TN, 5.1.371, 351, 359). Similarly, the unspecified melancholy suffered by Antonio in Merchant complicates the seemingly happy ending of the play. Antonio’s presence reminds both the onstage and offstage audiences that the potential for tragedy – and the tragic melancholy which accompanies it – lies close to the surface of comedy, close enough to almost bring ruin. 142 ‘Rapes, Incests, Murders’: Love melancholy in John Ford’s Caroline tragedies.520 The comedies of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods attempted to purge melancholy from the stage, as we have seen in examples such as Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It, and the humours comedy of Chapter Three. Affected melancholy, that which is ‘most ridiculous’ to Ben Jonson, is denied a place in the comic resolution (Every Man Out, Induction, 112). The discontents, the play’s protagonists, must redress the balance of their melancholia in order to gain the comic resolution, or run the risk of complicating the marriage ending, as Antonio and Malvolio both do in Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night. Ian Frederick Moulton has discussed the ‘notion that love should be understood primarily as a disease,’ a notion he describes as particularly important to ‘the public stage.’521 We have seen in previous chapters that love can be considered a disease. Burton describes love as ‘a plague, a torture, an hell, a bitter sweet passion at last,’ which causes lovers to live a life ‘full of agony, anxiety, feare and grief, complaints, sighes, suspitions, and cares.’522 This holds true for the later tragedies of John Ford, where many of the protagonists suffer from love melancholy. The tragedies I discuss in this chapter combine many elements of the melancholia we have seen presented in earlier works. Like the scholars of Chapter One, the protagonists of some of these love tragedies suffer with a sense of their own sin, and with the prospect of their potentially predestined reprobation. Ford shows an interest in representing scholarly melancholy in several of his plays, such as The Broken Heart and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. As we shall see, in ’Tis Pity the anti-hero protagonist, Giovanni, who suffers from a scholarly melancholy, is determined throughout to create a sensual heaven on earth with his lover, his sister Annabella: this leads to his descent into a suicidal religious despair. The drive to suicide is a significant motivating factor in these love tragedies, and, much as we saw in the revenge tragedies of Chapter Two, often leads to hugely destructive theatrical spectacles, with bloody and fatal results. The murderous, suicidal, and consequently sinful, drives of these protagonists mean that without a successful purging, society is threatened. The suicide and/or execution of the protagonist therefore acts as the purgation necessary for catharsis. Unlike in Chapter Three, where the purgation was symbolic, the purgation in these love tragedies often 520 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.54. 521 Ian Frederick Moulton, ‘Catching the Plague: Love, Happiness, Health, and Disease in Shakespeare’ in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. by Sujata Iyengar (New York: Routledge, 2015), 212-222 (p.214). 522 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.148, 151. 143 occurs through the actual death of the protagonist – here, even allowing the protagonist to live threatens the cohesive society which the remaining characters now wish to rebuild. These love tragedies therefore represent a climax in early modern dramatic representations of melancholia, encapsulating many of the theatrically represented symptoms and causes from the previous three decades. These tragedies are highly medical and psychological, taking inspiration from both the dramatic and medical representations of melancholy which preceded them. G. F. Sensabaugh noted over 80 years ago the extraordinarily close relationship between Burton’s Anatomy and the works of Ford, particularly The Lover’s Melancholy, stating that ‘no other playwright leaned more heavily upon this psychology than did Ford, and no other play, as far as I know, is more illuminated by a study of this psychology than The Lover’s Melancholy.’523 Modern criticism on Ford’s work has reached almost a consensus that Ford read Burton’s work extensively: Farr’s research has shown that Ford acknowledges ‘his debt to The Anatomy of Melancholy in a marginal note in [The Lover’s Melancholy].’524 Farr suggests that Ford’s interest in Burton’s work was one which was shared by many – ‘Burton had caught the public fancy,’ Farr proposes, and calls Ford’s Lover’s Melancholy ‘a first study in the application of the psychological method to the conception of character.’525 Ford’s work represents a peak in dramatic and literary interest in melancholy, and his plays show a particular interest in the disease of melancholy, and the terrible effects of such – and thus, its need for purgation. Ford’s close engagement with Burton is key to this peak of interest in the dramatization of melancholy – and the medicalization of drama – and this chapter therefore focuses on his tragedies. This chapter examines the ways in which melancholy was being represented onstage during a later phase of the early modern period. In attempting to show the variety of ways in which Ford was using melancholy, we must necessarily look at a variety of disparate themes, including suicide, jealousy, and theatricality. I shall begin by discussing some of the representations of melancholy in Ford’s work which are not a love melancholy in the strictest sense of the term. Palador from Lover’s Melancholy, Giovanni from ’Tis Pity, and Mauruccio from Love’s 523 G. F. Sensabaugh, ‘Burton’s Influence on Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy’, Studies in Philology, 33.4 (1936), 545-571 (p.546). 524 Farr, Ford and the Caroline Theatre, p.110. 525 Ibid. 144 Sacrifice all ostensibly suffer from love melancholy, but Ford uses symptoms and characteristics from other kinds of melancholy to deepen the characterization of the melancholic. In doing so, Ford perhaps suggests that different types of melancholy can combine in those predisposed to the humour. In ’Tis Pity, we are first introduced to the protagonist Giovanni as a scholar, and an exemplary one at that. In the first scene the Friar, who has acted as both a friend and a tutor to Giovanni, reminds his charge ‘[h]ow did the university applaud / Thy government, behaviour, learning, speech, / Sweetness, and all that could make up a man’ (TP, 1.1.50-52). We have seen, in Chapter One, how scholars were thought to be particularly susceptible to the melancholic humour. Marsilio Ficino tells us that scholars get ‘too little exercise,’ and consequently the ‘thick, dense, clinging, dusky vapors [of melancholy] do not exhale’ from the body.526 Melancholy was, as Lawrence Babb memorably termed it, ‘the malady of great minds,’ and ‘the scholar’s occupational disease.’527 As a scholar, Giovanni might be naturally given to contemplation and meditation, and therefore may be considered vulnerable to being overtaken by a Saturnine nature: Ficino admonishes scholars to ‘shun Saturn in that secret and too constant pleasure of the contemplative mind; for there he frequently devours his own children.’528 Given that both his status as recent student, and his current melancholia, are some of the first things we learn about Giovanni, it seems that Ford leads us to draw this conclusion: in 1.1 the Friar discusses Giovanni’s late position at the university, the ‘schools / Of knowledge,’ and in 1.2 his ‘sad aspect’ leads Annabella to refer to him as ‘some woeful thing.’ (TP, 1.1.57b-58; 1.2.129, 132). We might, therefore, suggest that melancholy is Giovanni’s anatomical emotion, based on Butler’s theory which we have been using throughout this thesis. Giovanni’s scholarship, which the Friar implies was exceptional, apparently lauded by the university and Giovanni’s peers (although the Friar’s praise is perhaps to be considered biased, since the Friar was Giovanni’s tutor) would have required a solitary lifestyle. This, therefore, may have caused Giovanni to take too much pleasure in his ‘contemplative mind’ rather than in the delights of company.529 Solitariness itself was a symptom of melancholy. Burton notes that melancholy is common to ‘those that fast, 526 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.115. 527 Babb, Elizabethan Malady, p.74, 25. 528 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.213. 529 Ibid. 145 are solitary, given to contemplation, overmuch solitariness and meditation.’530 In 3.4 of ’Tis Pity it is confirmed that Giovanni has previously suffered from melancholy because of his scholarship. Giovanni’s father, Florio, not realising at this point that Giovanni has begun his incestuous, sinful relationship with his sister, mistakes Giovanni’s melancholy for a continuation of the ‘over-bookish humour’ which he has already been known to suffer from (TP, 2.4.119). Given Giovanni’s association with scholarship, the audience may be predisposed to view Giovanni, and his subsequent actions, through the lens of melancholy. Towards the end of the play, in Act 5, Giovanni announces his intention to ‘let poring bookmen dream of other worlds,’ indicating that he now completely renounces his former life as a scholar, and the tutelage he has previously received under the Friar (TP, 5.3.13). That Giovanni means us to think of the Friar when he mentions ‘poring bookmen’ is clear: when we are first introduced to the Friar, his emphasis is on ‘philosophy,’ and we see that he takes great pride in his ‘tutelage’ of Giovanni (TP, 5.3.13; 1.1.2, 53). In doing so, Ford sets up an expectation that the Friar will act in a way which is consistent with his status as a tutor and a ‘bookman’ (TP, 5.3.13). The Friar even mentions that he has been a scholar himself, stating that he chose to ‘leave [his] books’ rather than part with Giovanni, just as Giovanni is now leaving his books, and the knowledge and scholarship which they represent, so that he does not have to part with Annabella (TP, 1.1.53). If we compare the Friar of ’Tis Pity with Friar Laurence, from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (approx. 1595) a play which shares many thematic similarities with ’Tis Pity, we can see a clear difference. Both friars offer advice to the lovesick protagonists, but Friar Laurence is sought out by Romeo, rather than leaving his work to seek Romeo. Romeo refers to Friar Laurence’s cell as ‘close,’ suggesting it is a confined, closed space: this is the only place in the play where we see Friar Laurence, other than the crypt where Juliet and Romeo’s bodies lie at the end of the play, and this is very much the opposite of the Friar of ’Tis Pity, who roams freely to several locations throughout the play.531 The closeness of Friar Laurence’s cell might call to mind Malvolio’s dark house from Twelfth Night or Marcellina’s self-conscious portrayal of melancholy through the darkness of her house in Monsieur D’Olive: we saw in Chapter 530 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.361. Emphasis mine. 531 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.193. 146 Three how the darkness of closed doors and windows might relate to the ‘dimme and dark’ habitations where melancholy is wont to reside.532 Romeo’s willingness to speak to Friar Laurence, and his apparently close relationship with the holy man, might indicate a willingness to return to the darkness of melancholia. Friar Laurence is also represented alongside educational tropes throughout Romeo and Juliet, meditating alone in 2.3 on the ‘precious-juiced flowers’ which he has made his study – studies which the Friar in ’Tis Pity has left.533 The Friar in ’Tis Pity hypocritically counsels Giovanni to return to his books and leave Annabella when he himself has abandoned scholarship entirely for the love of Giovanni. Ford seems to suggest that leaving scholarship was a poor decision for both the Friar and Giovanni, since they both find themselves in compromising moral positions following their abandonment of scholarly life. The Friar here seems to counsel a return to scholarly melancholy over love melancholy – that scholarly melancholy is in this instance less dangerous than love melancholy. Giovanni’s melancholy does, however, become a love melancholy as the play progresses despite the Friar’s warnings. After the Friar has confirmed that Giovanni’s love for Annabella is forbidden by the Church as a ‘leprosy of lust, / That rots [Giovanni’s] soul,’ Giovanni’s melancholy moves towards a love melancholy (TP, 1.1.74-75). In 1.2, Giovanni’s entrance is, according to Annabella, that of a melancholic man, ‘[w]rapped up in grief’ and ‘drowned all in tears’ (TP, 1.2.133, 135). Giovanni’s solitariness seems to imbue him with a melancholic aura even from afar. This solitude may still be linked with Giovanni’s scholarship: in requiring a ‘withdrawal from human affairs,’ scholarship can draw a student ‘under the influence of Saturn,’ which Ficino suggested could be deadly, for Saturn ‘devours his own children.’534 We have seen the way this happened in Doctor Faustus, where Faustus’s scholarly ambition led him to study magic, and into a melancholy, and finally a despair, where he feared he ‘must be damned perpetually,’ and where he hallucinates a vision of Christ’s blood streaming ‘in the firmament’ (Faustus, 5.2.67, 68). Faustus’s melancholy is linked very clearly to his blood – both when it ‘congeals’ in what seems to be his body rebelling against the signing of Lucifer’s contract, and then later when Faustus’s melancholy makes him hallucinate the blood of Christ (Faustus, 2.1.62). For Giovanni, his blood and that of 532 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.30 533 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 2.3.4. 534 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.253, 213. 147 Annabella, linked in their siblinghood and aroused by passion for each other, becomes the reason his scholarly melancholy moves into that of a lover’s melancholy. In Ford’s earlier play, Lover’s Melancholy, the melancholy of Palador, eventually diagnosed as the lover’s melancholy of the title, also contains elements of scholarly melancholy. Palador’s melancholy is seen by his courtiers as a destructive force, as Giovanni’s passion is, which has made the ‘commonwealth’ ‘sick’ (LM, 2.1.1). Palador is accused of ‘pursu[ing] disease’ by the physician Corax, who suggests that the Prince actively seeks out situations which are liable to worsen his melancholia, like reading a ‘book’ instead of ‘following health’ by dispelling his melancholy through ‘myrth’ with his ‘great horse’ ‘hounds,’ and ‘set at tennis’ (LM, 2.1.49, 50, 52).535 It was suggested by physicians like Andrew Boorde, that ‘honest pastime’ like ‘sport, play, and musicall instruments’ could help to ‘purge melancholy,’ for ‘ther is nothing that doth hurt this impediment so much as doth musing and solicitudeness’ which should therefore be avoided.536 This is what Corax has prescribed to rid Palador of his melancholy, but Palador instead engages in scholarly activities like reading – refusing to have his melancholy cured, and performing his melancholy, not ostentatiously, but clearly for all to see. Since scholarship could be linked to melancholy, Palador does seem to be actively engaging with his own illness: perhaps, as Corax says, Palador ‘pursue[s] disease’ (LM, 2.1.51). Love melancholy itself can cause such symptoms, with Burton suggesting that many love melancholics are ready to ‘hang themselves if they may not have’ their lover, rather than be cured.537 In Ferrand, likewise, a lovesick patient ‘would consent only to be cured by the one who had wounded him’ – the beloved object herself.538 Palador may have a similar motivation in refusing the treatment of Corax: in believing Eroclea to be lost, it may be that Palador wishes for death in the way that Burton’s melancholics do, or it may be that he believes he can only be truly cured by Eroclea herself, or a combination of both motivations. We have seen other stage melancholics engage in this kind of behaviour. In Faustus, for instance, the melancholic doctor deliberately shuns the company of his fellow scholars, who fear he has ‘grown into some sickness, by being / over-solitary’ (Faustus, 5.2.7-8). Palador likewise fosters this narrative of solitary melancholy, avoiding the court and his duties 535 Boorde, Breuiarie of Health, p.74. 536 Ibid., p.78. 537 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.104 538 Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, p.273. 148 as prince in favour of reading. The holding of a book is often linked to melancholy on the stage. In Hamlet, whilst performing his madness, Hamlet enters reading, and discusses the contents of the book with Polonius – ‘words, words, words’ is all he reads (Hamlet, 2.2.189). Polonius mistakes Hamlet’s scholarly melancholy for a love melancholy, noting that he himself had, in the past, ‘suffered much extremity for love, very near’ what Hamlet now appears to suffer (Hamlet, 2.2.187). The slippage between types of melancholy is common, then, across stage representations of melancholy. This is explainable in several ways. Firstly, this is no authentic melancholia: by definition these are actors playing characters, the dramatists are writing for effect and not necessarily strict medical accuracy. Secondly, whilst early modern medical writing agreed that the different types of melancholy were ‘divers and confused,’ Burton also suggests that ‘what these men speake of species, I thinke ought to be understood of Symptomes.’539 Instead of species, then, the different forms of melancholy could be considered as differing sets of symptoms of the same disease, rather than as different diseases. To relate this to the theory of emotion which we have adapted from Butler, ‘anatomical’ emotion can just be “melancholy,” and the species of melancholy, it could be suggested, relates more to the performance of emotion or even the emotional identity of the character.540 If the disease underneath is one and the same, especially in cases such as Palador’s, where we are encouraged to see the melancholy as authentic, as an anatomical emotion, then the fact that symptoms overlap and show as what we have called different “types” of melancholy, is unsurprising. These different symptoms therefore highlight true emotion underneath, which is melancholy. Just as Polonius suspect’s Hamlet’s melancholic symptoms suggest he is suffering from a melancholy caused by his love for Ophelia, Palador’s scholarly symptoms are a part of his love melancholy for Eroclea. Giovanni displays similar symptoms of melancholy for his sister Annabella, and it is likewise connected to his anatomical emotion of scholarly melancholy. Giovanni’s melancholy begins to turn to a lover’s melancholy as soon as he learns that his love for his sister is forbidden: the Friar tells Giovanni that he ‘converse[s] with lust and death’ by leaving ‘the schools / Of knowledge’ (TP, 1.1.57-58). This seems to uphold the idea that scholarship, and the ‘over-bookish humour’ that is associated with it, is far 539 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.169, 169. 540 Butler, Gender Trouble, p.175. 149 preferable to the sinful life of passion which Giovanni abandons himself to (TP, 2.4.119). In 2.2, the first scene we see between the siblings, Giovanni’s melancholy makes him offer a show of love to Annabella which is itself theatrical: by offering Annabella his dagger, protesting ‘here’s my breast: strike home. / Rip up my bosom,’ Giovanni does not mean that Annabella should actually kill him, he is performing the role of melancholic lover as passed down from medieval poetic tradition, who without the good will of his lady would die (TP, 1.2.205b-206a). This tradition was long- standing by the time Ford wrote ’Tis Pity, extending back to medieval works and having many manifestations in early poetry. For example, the lover of Bernart De Ventadorn (1135-1194)’s medieval troubadour poem ‘Non es meravelha s’eu chan’ states ‘Aquest amors me fer tan gen / Al cor d’una dousa sabor: / Cen vetz mor lo jorn de dolor / E reviu de joi autras cen’ (This love wounds me in the heart gently with a sweet savour; a hundred times a day I die of sorrow, and I revive with joy another hundred).541 Ford relies on the potency of such imagery, and the connection the audience will make between its use and romantic love poetry. Giovanni’s performance of his emotions might make them seem illusory or artificial, in the way that Butler suggests that claiming gender is ‘constructed’ might make it seem as though we’re asserting ‘its illusoriness or artificiality,’ because it is so clearly constructed in relation to this long-standing tradition of discourse around love melancholy.542 The knowledge we have gained of Giovanni’s scholarship, and the relation to the Saturnine humour which this brings, helps the audience understand that Giovanni’s anatomical emotion is melancholy, and his performance, even in its stylization, is merely reflective of his inner self. In this scene, Ford also foreshadows the important role which religion will come to play in Giovanni’s melancholy by having Giovanni fixate on Annabella’s anatomy as a holy site. Ford’s representation combines classical and Christian religious imagery throughout ’Tis Pity Giovanni’s praise of Annabella’s beauty begins conventionally, with references to the ‘lily and the rose’ (TP, 1.2.195). As well as being conventional flowers used in poems to refer to women, the lily and the rose have iconographical significance, as both are linked with the Virgin Mary in her mystical participation in the 541 Bernart De Ventadorn, ‘Non es meravelha s’eu chan’, in The Songs of Bernart De Ventadorn ed. by Stephen G. Nichols Jr, A. Galm, & Bartlett Giamatti (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 132-134 (p.133). 542 Butler, Gender Troubele, p.43. 150 Holy Trinity as the Rose of Heaven.543 Giovanni goes on to compare Annabella to ‘Juno,’ and Annabella’s eyes to ‘Promethean fire’ (TP, 1.2.188, 192). These references are both pagan in origin. Juno is a complex deity in Roman mythology, but two of her many roles included Juno Pronuba and Juno Lucina, as which she presided over marriage and childbirth.544 Since the crisis of ’Tis Pity revolves around Annabella’s marriage to Soranzo, which the Friar frames as Annabella’s saving ‘grace,’ offered from a ‘merciful heaven,’ but which Annabella accepts only for ‘honour’ and ‘not for love,’ since by 3.2 she is pregnant with Giovanni’s child, Giovanni’s comparison with Juno may be significant (TP, 3.4.33; 4.3.23, 22). In her role as Juno Luciana, the comparison of Annabella to Juno foreshadows Annabella’s unfortunately fecund ‘bastard-bearing womb,’ the cause of the crisis of the play (TP, 4.3.13). In Greco-Roman mythology, Juno (Hera) is Jupiter’s (Zeus’) sister as well as his wife, and therefore Giovanni’s invocation of the deity is even more apt. Ford also refers to Juno, and specifically, Juno’s forehead, in The Broken Heart, whose title alone links back to the potentially fatal effects of this humour. Whereas in ’Tis Pity, it is the male lover, Giovanni, who compares his beloved Annabella to Juno’s ‘forehead,’ in The Broken Heart, it is the female lover, Penthea, who swears ‘by Juno’s forehead’ that she is innocent of any ‘wanton error’ which her jealous husband Bassanes accuses her of (TP, 1.2.188; BH, 3.2.176b, 177). For Penthea, and for Bassanes who is, by this oath of Penthea’s, momentarily convinced that Penthea is innocent – he calls her a ‘goddess’ and offers to ‘kneel to her’ – the reference to Juno is a holy one which momentarily persuades Bassanes to cool his jealous love melancholy (BH, 3.2.178a). In ’Tis Pity, the reference may be more ironic – Annabella and Giovanni can never marry because of the closeness of their blood, and it is Annabella’s marriage to Soranzo, whilst carrying Giovanni’s child, that causes the crisis of the play. With his reference to ‘Promethean fire,’ Giovanni continues his classical references (TP, 1.2.192). For stealing the fire of the gods to give to humanity, Zeus condemned Prometheus to eternal torment and damnation. By comparing Annabella’s eyes to something which will cause damnation, Giovanni foreshadows his own later ‘despair [and] tortures of a thousand hells,’ which 543 See Pauly Fongemie, Mary’s Symbols, 151 come after he has “stolen” Annabella from society, and highlights the ‘torture’ he suffers as a love melancholic (TP, 5.3.71).545 Giovanni’s use of these pagan images not only refers to the classical education he would have received but significantly foreshadows the progress of his melancholy from symptoms of scholarly melancholy, through love melancholy for Annabella, to religious despair. Giovanni’s hybrid scholarly love melancholy develops into a religious melancholy, as he becomes weighted down with ‘despair,’ and is unable to escape the spiritual consequences of his love for Annabella (TP, 5.3.71). That this would happen is foreshadowed even in Giovanni’s role as a scholar. As part of his university learning in ‘Bologna’, Giovanni would have come across the teachings of many philosophers, including Epicurus, as would have Ford himself, who spent time at Exeter College, Oxford, before joining the Middle Temple in 1602.546 Epicureanism becomes particularly important to Giovanni has he attempts to find a worldview that will legitimise his carnal love with Annabella. Charles B. Schmitt has noted that, for many educated in the early modern period, ‘Epicureanism was the unacceptable face of classical ethics,’ and the philosophy with ‘the worst reputation and the least influence.’547 Epicureanism aroused ‘the most hostility,’ according to Schmitt, because of ‘the belief that pleasure was the supreme good,’ despite the fact that, for Epicurus, this pleasure was merely ‘the complete absence of bodily pain and mental affliction,’ not sinful pleasures of the flesh.548 In their introduction to Lucy Hutchinson’s (1621- 1681) translations of Lucretius, completed during the Interregnum, whose work De Rerum Natura discussed Epicurean philosophy, Reid Barbour and David Norbrook summarize the tenets of Lucretius’s Epicureanism, including the fact that he believed the soul to be ‘ultimately compounds of atoms and hence mortal,’ that the entire world was made up of atoms: consequently, for Lucretius, there could be no ethereal objects, and no afterlife, and he condemned funerary practices as rooted in ‘irrational beliefs’ 545 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.148. 546 See Michael Neill, ‘Ford, John (bap.1586, d.1639x53?)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., Oct 2007 152 about the existence of an afterlife.549 It is in relation to this type of Epicurean belief that Giovanni begins to fall from God. Like Lucretius, Giovanni rejects the ideas of heaven and hell, and suggests that some religious practices are irrational. In doing so, Giovanni attempts to consolidate Lucretian Epicureanism with his desire for a life of sexual pleasure with Annabella. However, Epicureanism is ultimately incompatible with Giovanni’s views, since for Epicurus, pleasure was not ‘the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality,’ but instead ‘the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the soul.’550 Giovanni agrees that a ‘life of pleasure’ is the ultimate goal, but for Giovanni, pleasure is not the restriction of earthly desires that it is for Epicurus, but is instead that ‘sensuality’ which Epicurus warns specifically against in his letter to Menoeceus (TP, 5.3.15).551 Given that we are introduced to Giovanni as an outstanding scholar, one might expect him to understand the distinction which Epicurus makes in his discussion of pleasure. But Giovanni, whose melancholy is by this point of the play a lover’s melancholy transforming into a religious melancholy, does not seek knowledge from this reference to Epicurus. Giovanni seeks only a moral outlook which will allow him to continue his relationship with Annabella without an accompanying sense of guilt. His scholarly melancholy and love melancholy combine in this misuse of philosophy, which contributes to his denial of religion. Giovanni is unable to find justification for his incest, and therefore cannot overcome the passion of his melancholy, which becomes a ‘destructive passion.’552 The destructive nature of Giovanni’s melancholy causes his descent towards suicide similar to that of the revengers of Chapter Two. In 5.3, Giovani threatens to ‘offer violence’ not only to himself, but to others in order to cause his own death – threatening to ‘strike as deep in slaughter as they all,’ as long as ‘with me they all shall perish’ (TP, 5.3.62, 79).553 Burton, quoting St Augustine, calls this kind of action 549 Reid Barbour and David Norbrook, ‘Introduction’, in The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, Vol.1: The Translation of Lucretius Part 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xv-cxlvi (p.lxxvi). 550 Epicurus, ‘Letter to Menoeceus’, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers Book X, trans. by Robert Drew Hicks 153 ‘homicida animae’ – the murder of the soul.554 It is a specifically religious form of desperation. This links to the fact that Giovanni’s illness is referred to explicitly as despair. When the Friar tells Giovanni that he will ‘leave [him] to despair,’ the audience is made aware of the connection between Giovanni’s illness and his irreligion, and to the fact that Giovanni is not fully aware of his own damnation (TP, 5.3.70, emphasis mine). Until 5.3, Giovanni has not felt the ‘fond, superstitious’ fear of hell because he had yet to come to a full realisation of his own sin, but now, after learning from Annabella’s letter that her ‘conscience now stands up against [her] lust,’ and that she feels her own ‘guilt,’ Giovanni comes to a realisation that this guilt also belongs to him (TP, 5.1.9, 10). Timothy Bright wrote that ‘the affliction of soule through conscience of sinne is quite another thing then melancholy,’ as despair is ‘the greatest cause that worketh misery vnto man,’ whereas melancholy is ‘a mere fancy […] only vpon disorder or humour in the fancy.’555 Burton concurs, stating: ‘Melancholy feares without a cause, this [i.e. despair] upon great occasion.’556 Giovanni, as a love melancholic, has not properly feared God, and ordinarily those suffering from love melancholy have no reason to do so, so long as their melancholy does not lead to sin. Love melancholy is a mere fancy, an indisposition of the humours and temperament, and nothing compared to the greatest misery of all – despair of gaining and keeping God’s love. Giovanni’s love should give him reason to fear God, however, because his love is sinfully incestuous. Ford makes the sinful nature of Giovanni’s love clear from the outset of the play, with the Friar telling us in 1.1 that it is a ‘sin,’ in fact ‘almost blasphemy’ (TP, 1.1.44, 45). Yet throughout the play, Ford has Giovanni repeatedly deny the veracity of Christian teaching because it interferes with his desires (TP, 1.1.44, 45). At one point, Giovanni even seems to have convinced himself that he ‘may love’ Annabella freely, that their union is ‘both fit and good,’ and that Annabella is herself ‘divine’ (TP, 1.2.237, 2.5.13, 36). Giovanni’s love melancholy is the cause of his spiral into a religious melancholy and despair: it is shown to have made him careless of God’s laws, and the realisation of this is what acts as the final catastrophe for Giovanni’s psychological well-being. 554 Ibid. 555 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.182, 183. 556 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.412. 154 It is in 5.3 as the Friar leaves Giovanni, and Giovanni faces his impending death, that Giovanni admits that hell is real, and that it is heaven to which he should have aimed, not ‘Elysium’ (TP, 1.2.259). Yet Burton categorizes ‘despaire’ as a symptom of melancholy, and says that we ‘may guesse at the Prognostickes by the symptoms.’557 Burton distinguishes religious melancholy only in that ‘whilest evill is expected, we feare, but when it is certaine, we despaire.’558 We have seen an example of this in Faustus, whose protagonist moves from scholarly melancholy, to religious melancholy, into despair. Despair for these characters is an advanced, deeply felt, form of religious melancholy. From denying that there is a life to come, which is mere ‘slavish and fond superstitious fear,’ and ‘[b]usy opinion’ designed to keep people in ‘awe,’ Giovanni now rashly dares his fate, professing that he does not care about the torture he knows awaits him in Hell (TP, 5.3.22, 1, 2). Giovanni claims to desire a ‘glorious death,’ a heroical death which hearkens back to his heroical love melancholy, and he seems to accept that death is inevitable (TP, 5.3.76). In this Ford may be influenced by Burton’s suggestion that in some cases of despair, where sinners are in a “kill or be killed” situation, as Giovanni is when he accepts Soranzo’s invitation, the very despair which they suffer from can lead them to ‘take courage.’559 Giovanni embodies a kind of desperate courage to prepare himself for death, and for the murder of Annabella which he knows will happen. Giovanni’s bravado does not disguise the fact that he is in despair, but rather acts as a symptom of his despair and melancholia. In 5.6, Giovanni’s religious mania comes to a climax. This is where Giovanni acts his ‘last and greatest part,’ as he describes it – a nod to the performance of his emotion (TP, 5.5.107). Ironically, during his final performance of melancholy, Giovanni accuses the onstage audience of having ‘no faith’ because they do not credit what he claims are his ‘triumphs’: in horror, the onstage audience tries to deny what the offstage audience knows to be true – that it is ‘Annabella’s heart’ which Giovanni carries on his ‘dagger’s point’ (TP, 5.6.55b, 56, 30, 31). The use of Annabella’s heart as theatrical prop calls to mind the revenge tragedies discussed in Chapter Two, where the presentation of the body to be revenged is frequently used by the melancholic protagonists. In particular, in The Revenger’s Tragedy, the melancholic revenger Vindice uses both the skull of 557 Ibid., p.389. 558 Ibid., p.408. 559 Ibid., p.409. 155 Gloriana, and the body of the Duke as ‘theatrical props,’ as Owens has suggested, an obsession with the concept of memento mori which we can see repeated in Giovanni’s use of the heart on the sword – what better way of remembering love in death than the display of the awful pericardiectomy he has performed on his lover-sister?560 By questioning the audience’s ‘faith,’ Ford turns the tables on both the onstage and offstage audiences, who have questioned Giovanni’s faith throughout the preceding action. Giovanni makes himself the centre of all reasonable understanding – that this is Annabella’s heart the offstage audience must agree with, since we have witnessed all of the events which have led to this: the incestuous relationship, and Giovanni’s murder of his sister ‘in a kiss’ (TP, 5.5.84). Through Giovanni, Ford questions why we deny what is front of our eyes. Those who do not credit what is presented to them are the ones who lack faith. In using Annabella’s heart for this moment, Ford may be implying something significant about Giovanni’s performance of emotion. Hopkins has suggested that ‘rather than functioning simply as a moment of gratuitous, titillating violence,’ the heart on the dagger functions as ‘a neat emblem that aptly encapsulates both the sexual energy and also the image of the heart as the bearer of truth and selfhood.’561 In this theatrical display, Hopkins seems to suggest, Giovanni is, literally, wearing his heart on his sleeve – his, in that he shares blood with its owner, his sister. To go back to Butler’s formulation which we have been using throughout this thesis, Giovanni here is performing his anatomical emotion of love melancholy – wearing his heart on his sleeve and revealing his true self fully for the first time in the play. Giovanni’s melancholy and desperation cause him to take this performance to an extreme state, as his anatomical melancholy is performed publicly for the first time to people other than Annabella. In the character of Giovanni, Ford presents us with a complex and complicated characterisation of melancholy. Initially predisposed to suffer from melancholy because of his scholarship, Giovanni’s forbidden love for his sister soon causes him to suffer from a love melancholy. The sinful nature of this love forces Giovanni to think deeply on his own sense of sin: when his friend and tutor abandons him, and leaves him to ‘despair,’ Giovanni is cast into a deep religious melancholy over 560 Owens, ‘Revenger’s Tragedy as Trauerspiel’, p.414. 561 Hopkins, ‘Speaking Sweat’, p.140. 156 the status of his soul. Giovanni’s melancholy therefore must be removed from the stage through his death – he is too sinful to be allowed to live. We saw in Chapter Three that in comedies, where the characters cannot die, melancholic gulls, or those who do not purge their melancholy correctly, are denied the comic ending through exile or abandonment. The emotional performance of the gulls is something which we are encouraged to laugh at, as it is ‘more then most ridiculous,’ according to Jonson (Every Man Out, Induction, 112). Such melancholy we might consider consigned to the comedies: there might seem little space for amusing melancholy in these tragedies alongside melancholy like Giovanni’s. Yet in Love’s Sacrifice, Ford includes a character who is specifically used as a ‘salve for melancholy’ for the onstage audience – the gull Mauruccio.562 The Duke, who is here still ‘disposed to mirth,’ is regaled with the ‘pleasant humour of Mauruccio’s dotage,’ which is revealed to be an affected melancholy, which the Duke and his courtiers believe to be laughable since Mauruccio is ‘in the winter of his age’ (LS, 1.2.173, 226, 227). Mauruccio’s melancholy is treated in a similar way to that of Stephen and Matthew in Jonson’s Every Man In. This affect is considered ridiculous by the other characters of the play, since Stephen and Matthew are quick to tell you how they are ‘mightily giuen to melancholy,’ and perform this melancholy through elaborate gestures. Where Matthew and Stephen take to sonnet writing to enact their melancholia, Mauruccio devotes his time to devising elaborate schemes to woo Fiormonda, the Duke’s sister. Unlike Giovanni, whose elaborate gestures reveal his true “heart,” or at least, Annabella’s, Stephen, Matthew, and Mauruccio are laughable because their outward performance of emotion does not match their inner, anatomical, emotion. Mauruccio’s melancholy is almost immediately surrounded by a theatrical framework, as the Duke, Fiormonda, Bianca, Fernando, and possibly other members of the court enter ‘above’ to watch his antic behaviour (LS, 2.1.SD). This would potentially have done with the use of a balcony, or raised area, so that the onstage audience could look down on Mauruccio whilst still commenting on his behaviour. A. T. Moore, in his introduction to Love’s Sacrifice suggest that the ‘theatrical overtones’ of this scene highlight Mauruccio’s ‘self-consciousness, his pathetic desire to fashion a 562 John Ford, Love’s Sacrifice, ed. by A. T. Moore (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), Act 2, Scene 1, Line 106. All further references will be to this edition and will be made in-text with the abbreviation LS. 157 stylish new persona.’563 Moore terms Mauruccio an ‘apish imitator,’ a poor copycat who cannot convincingly feign his love melancholy.564 Mauruccio may potentially identify with the emotion of melancholy, because he desires to be known for this once- fashionable humour, but his performance does not disguise the fact he does not truly feel these emotions. Mauruccio’s absurd performance of love melancholy manifests itself through his desire to ‘set out’ himself in an apparently attractive manner, as exhibited by his entrance ‘looking in a glass, trimming his beard’ (LS, 2.1.SD).565 Whereas the gulls in the comedies are mostly forgotten in the play’s resolution, Mauruccio is given a definitive fate: after being released from prison Mauruccio is married to Morona, an old woman with a bastard-born child, and exiled. Unable to come ‘within a dozen miles at court,’ Mauruccio is punished for his affectation of love melancholy: in marrying Morona, Mauruccio is responsible for inflaming the Duke’s jealousy of Bianca and Fernando, who bring bride and bridegroom together in what D’Avolos describes as a good ‘argument to jealousy,’ since the action mirrors Bianca and Fernando making a vow to one another (LS, 4.1.178, 171). Mauruccio is allowed to live at the end of the play only because, in his affectation of melancholy he does not truly threaten society, but he is exiled and therefore punished. Mauruccio therefore becomes one of a few melancholics in these love tragedies who live: he survives the systematic purgation of melancholy from the play. Mauruccio is punished for his affectation of melancholy, for his false performance, but he does at least escape with his life. In the comedies, the gulls are rarely given the reward of marriage: Mauruccio is, but to an old woman who has just given birth to an illegitimate child – he is to forget the ‘public shame of her abused womb,’ and the possibility that she will not be ‘[t]rue’ to his bed (LS, 4.1.157, 160). Mauruccio’s ending is therefore somewhat unusual, and this can be attributed to the fact his love melancholy for Fiormonda was always affected, performed rather than anatomical. The other love melancholics of the play, the Duke, Fernando, and Bianca, all die, and in Ford’s other tragedies this is also the case: Giovanni and Annabella both die in ’Tis Pity, and in Broken Heart the four of the five love melancholics, Orgilus, Penthea, Ithocles and Calantha, all die. In Ford’s tragicomedy, Lover’s Melancholy, the two main sufferers of melancholy, Meleander and Palador, live because their melancholy is cured. 563 A. T. Moore, ‘Introduction’, in Ford, Love’s Sacrifice, 1-107 (p.46). 564 Ibid. 565 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.185. 158 The action of Lover’s Melancholy explicitly centres around the purgation of melancholy – the love melancholy of Palador, whose lover, Eroclea, has been missing for several years, and the melancholy of Eroclea’s father. Palador’s story in Lover’s Melancholy is presented as a spectacle of curing. Just as the protagonists of the comic dramas discussed in Chapter Three must redress the balance of their melancholy, Palador must overcome his ‘sorrow’s / Close-griping grief and anguish of the soul’ (LM, 4.2.9-10). The Prince’s illness is diagnosed by Corax using a theatrical diagnostic tool – a masque of melancholics. Burton reminds us that it was ‘Love’ itself which prompted the very concept of ‘feasts [….] masques, mummings, banquets’ etc., because love is the instigator of all good things, and these spectacles were a way for lovers to show their feelings to the beloved.566 It seems that Corax already suspects the root cause of Palador’s melancholy, and uses the masque to diagnose him in a nod to the cause, as well as being part of the ‘myrth’ which we have seen recommended as a cure for melancholy.567 After Corax introduces several forms of melancholy, he goes on to describe the final type, ‘named Love Melancholy’ (LM, 3.3.97). Palador, however, cannot bear to hear love melancholy spoken of because it cuts to the quick of his own disorder. William Kerwin has suggested that it is Palador who takes the space of this final species of melancholy: One can imagine [Palador] stepping into [the empty space], embodying the category of love melancholy which Corax then describes. Like many Stuart masques, Corax’s depends on participation by the monarch for its completion, but here the incorporation of royalty attempts to alter, rather than glorify, monarchical identity.568 In attempting to change the emotional identity of the monarch, Corax’s ‘challenging’ medical practice, Corax forces him into a recognition of his own part in the Masque of Madmen, his own love melancholy. It suggests that Palador’s anatomical emotion and his emotional identity are not one and the same, and that in order to cure the disease which rests at the core of his anatomical emotion, Palador must accept his identity as a love melancholic. It is particularly significant that Corax uses a masque of madmen to diagnose the love melancholy of the Prince, for it was ‘Love’ itself which prompted the very concept of ‘feasts [….] masques, mummings,’ and ‘banquets.’569 Ford takes this 566 Ibid., p.192. 567 Boorde, Breuiare of Health, p.74. 568 Kerwin, Beyond The Body, p.181. 569 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.192 159 diagnostic method from one well-known in early modern medical theory: feeling a patient’s pulse whilst naming members of the opposite sex. The theory held that, upon hearing the name of the beloved, the patient’s pulse would involuntarily quicken, thereby revealing the cause of their malady, and a potential cure. Ferrand noted the case of a young man, who, having been ‘jovial’ a short time before, fell suddenly into a melancholy.570 Whilst the physician was taking the patient’s pulse, a young woman of the household entered, and the patient’s pulse ‘from that moment went through a series of changes.’571 This proved, for Ferrand, that the man’s illness was a love melancholy, caused by an inordinate desire for the woman. In using the device of the masque, Corax both diagnoses Palador’s disorder by observing the Prince’s emotions – Palador does not ‘dislike the course’ of the masque until love melancholy is mentioned, his emotions are not engaged until they mentioned the illness he suffers from – and begins treatment of that very disorder, through entertainment and good pastime in watching the masque itself (LM, 3.3.48). Palador’s melancholy is finally cured when Parthenophil ‘[d]isrobes the mantel of a feigned sex’ to reveal themselves as Eroclea (LM, 4.3.98). At first Palador refuses to believe the truth of the situation, calling Parthenophil a ‘[c]unning imposter’ and a ‘disdainful boy’ (LM, 4.3.80b, 96). Palador’s refusal to believe the good news in front of him links with a symptom which Burton assigns to those suffering from love melancholy: being ‘unapt to beleeve or entertaine any good newes.’572 Palador’s melancholy refuses to allow him to believe the good news that becomes his cure. It is also a metatheatrical nod to the fact that this is only one of the disguises which the boy actor must remove: he must also shed the character and clothes of Eroclea at the end of the play to transform back into his own male presenting body. By revealing herself as Eroclea, and therefore beginning the process that will lead to their union through marriage, Parthenophil cures Palador’s love melancholy. Burton reminds his readers that ‘the last refuge and surest remedy’ for love melancholy ‘to be put in practice in the utmost place, when no other means will take effect, is to let [the lovers] go together, and enjoy one another.573 Given that Ford was almost certainly reading Burton – as Sensabaugh noted in his study on Burton’s influence on Lover’s Melancholy, Corax ‘takes excerpts from Burton’ when ‘defining 570 Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, p.273. 571 Ibid. 572 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.149. 573 Ibid., p.242. 160 melancholy to Sophronos and Aretus’ – it is likely that Ford had this ‘last refuge and surest remedy’ in mind when writing of Palador’s cure.574 Eroclea’s father, Meleander, is likewise cured through the revelation of Eroclea’s survival, rather than any medical cure such as purgatives or blood-lettings. Like Palador’s, Meleander’s diagnosis and cure both occur in an environment surrounded by theatricality. To cure Meleander, Corax creates a grand metatheatrical spectacle, almost another masque. Having awoken from a sleep induced by a drug-laced wine, Meleander finds himself ‘in a coach, his hair and beard trimmed, habit and gown changed’ (LM, 5.2.SD). Corax hopes that with a simple change of clothes Meleander will be transformed from madman to courtier, that performance will stimulate anatomy, and Corax threatens to ‘burn [his] books’ when Meleander continues to rail that ‘disease sits on [his] heart’ (LM, 5.2.49b, 38). We have seen that Smith has noted that ‘early modern Europe witnessed a movement that asked whether the period’s orthodox remedies for illness only worked (when they worked at all) because of the patient’s emotional confidence in the words and performances of medical practitioners.’575 If orthodox remedies only work if the patients believe they will work, like a placebo, then it is possible that a lack of belief is the reason that Meleander is not immediately cured by Corax’s spectacle. Similar, perhaps, to how Palador is not cured by Corax’s orthodox remedies, but only by the return of Eroclea, Meleander is not to be cured by ‘poring bookmen’ like Corax – he is only truly cured when he receives his ‘eldest blessing,’ Eroclea, back into the family unit (TP, 5.3.13; LM, 5.4.109). Corax and the Friar of ’Tis Pity both ineffectually attempt to cure the melancholy of their charges – Palador and Giovanni, who both suffer from a love melancholy, albeit that Palador’s is far more socially acceptable. Both Corax and the Friar fail because Palador and Giovanni refuse to take part in their curing – Palador will ‘consent’ only to be cured by Eroclea, and Giovanni’s melancholy cannot be treated in the same way: he can never possess Annabella in the way that Palador is able to possess Eroclea.576 Shakespeare used a similar trick of “curing” in the framing narrative of The Taming of the Shrew where Christopher Sly, a drunken tinker, is persuaded that ‘he hath been lunatic,’ that all his memories of his life are mere illusions caused by his ‘lunacy’ – like those men who believe themselves to be earthen pots, who ‘feare to be touched, 574 Sensabaugh, ‘Burton’s Influence’, p.554; Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.242. 575 Smith, ‘Speaking Medicine’ p.197. 576 Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, p.273. 161 less they break,’ who Bartholomew, and his translator, Stephen Batman, describes in De proprietatibus rerum (thirteenth century ACE).577 For Sly, the entertainment of the play Taming of the Shrew is meant to act as a cure for the ‘too much sadness’ which ‘hath congeal’d [Sly’s] blood’ – ‘melancholy,’ they tell Sly, ‘is the nurse of frenzy’ and mirth and merriment are the best cure.578 For Meleander and Palador, the theatrics of the masque, the revelation of Parthenophil as Eroclea, the attempted treatment of Meleander through play-acting, and then the final revelation of Eroclea to her father, all work in the way the Lords pretend the play of Shrew will work for Sly. Whether the “cure” does work on the drunkard of Shrew we do not know, since the framing narrative is mysteriously forgotten by the end of the play, but for Meleander and Palador, the cure works only because Eroclea is truly returned. The initial theatrics are insufficient, and appear at first time worsen the patient’s melancholy – following the masque, Trollio reports that Palador ‘thunders,’ that he ‘roars like a cannon’ and fences the air with ‘a great pole axe;’ and Meleander insists that ‘the weight / Of [his] disease sits on [his] heart so heavy / That all the hands of art cannot remove’ it, and that the initial spectacle has not cured him (LM, 4.2.31, 32, 35; 5.2.37-39). Meleander seems to suggest that art cannot remove melancholy, but it can help to diagnose – the treatment, in Lover’s Melancholy at least, must come from love. The curing of these men is, therefore, a happy one, in which they are returned to a beloved woman and her re- emergence is positioned as the reason for their cure. All the melancholic lovers, therefore, live. In Broken Heart, however, the curing of love melancholy is less cheerful, and more fatal: four of the melancholic lovers die. However, one significant sufferer of love melancholy in this play lives: Bassanes, the jealous husband of Penthea. Bassanes suffers from jealousy, which is, as Burton terms it, a ‘furious passion’ which leads to ‘anxiety of minde, suspition, aggravation, restlesse thoughts, [….] bitter paine [….] madnesse, vertigo, plague, hell.’579 Burton condemns jealousy as a ‘bastard branch’ of love melancholy which ‘deserves therefore to bee rectified alike, [and] requires as much care and industry’ in the cure thereof as does the purer ‘Heroicall Love’ form of love melancholy.580 His jealousy leads Bassanes to have ‘that window next the street damned up,’ so that Penthea cannot be tempted by anything she sees, and 577 William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. by Barbara Hogden (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2010), Act 1, Scene 1; Bartholomaeus, De Proprietatibus rerum, p.97. 578 Shakespeare, Taming, 1.1. 579 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.278, 297. 580 Ibid., p.273. 162 Bassanes also threatens to ‘tear’ Phulas’s ‘throat out’ when he suspects Phulas may be encouraging Penthea to look into the street – Bassanes’s jealousy even leads him to believe that Penthea and her brother Ithocles might commit ‘bestial incest’ (BH, 2.1.1, 14b; 3.2.150). When Bassanes interrupts a conversation between the siblings by crying out for ‘vengeance’ for what he assumes is their incestuous meeting, Prophilus is persuaded that Bassanes is ‘distracted,’ Groneas scoffs at the ‘[f]ine humours’ which Bassanes suffers from, and Lemophil calls his humour an ‘admirable lunacy’ (BH, 3.2.124b, 136a, 137). Ferrand warned that ‘when jealousy insinuates its way into the mind, as soon as it reaches the soul, in the guise of friendship it pulls it down and tyrannizes over it, rendering the lover pale, dazed, lean, at times casting him into despair.’581 Such symptoms seem apt to describe the torments Bassanes suffers, and which cause him to inflict torments onto others. Yet Bassanes survives the play. After his ‘melancholies’ make him believe that Penthea and her brother are enacting some ‘filthiness’ behind doors, Penthea’s calm speech helps to purge him of his illness (BH, 3.2.155, 152). Ithocles, outraged at the accusation which Bassanes levels against him and Penthea, urges his sister to ‘[p]urge not [Bassanes’s] griefs,’ but Penthea’s very presence seems to be a ‘balm’ for Bassanes (BH, 3.2.171a, 164). Bassanes must suffer some penance for his melancholy, and the destruction it could have caused, and Penthea is removed into Ithocles’s care, which Bassanes terms a ‘torture,’ to which ‘execution’ would be preferable (BH, 3.2.190a, 189). The next time we see Bassanes he is returned to ‘reason,’ away from his love melancholy which for ‘all lovers’ causes ‘depraved imaginations and corrupted reasoning’ (BH, 4.2.22).582 Bassanes professes to have ‘cast off that cruelty of frenzy,’ but Penthea’s madness prevents him from proving that his jealousy has dissipated, and we can only take Penthea’s word, as a mad ‘oracle’ that Bassanes ‘may live well, and die a good old man’ (BH, 4.2.133, 139). Penthea’s prediction seems to come true, and Bassanes seems to have overcome his melancholy sufficiently not merely to survive the play, but to become ‘Sparta’s marshal,’ an office which Calantha hopes will continue his recovery by ‘set[ting] a peace to private griefs’ (BH, 5.3.46b, 48). Bassanes may live because he recognizes the destructive nature of 581 Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, p.302. 582 Ibid., p.238. 163 his love melancholy and attempts to overcome it and make reparations for the damage he has caused. For most characters in the love tragedies, the outcome of their love melancholy is even less desirable for them – Ford at least allows Bassanes to live. Most are shown as unable to purge their melancholia. In this way, the death of these characters may be considered a cure for society – a way of purging the world of the ultimately destructive emotion of melancholy. The long-suffering wife of the jealous Bassanes, ‘unhappy’ Penthea, starves herself to death after a bout of madness (BH, 3.2.168). Joseph T. McCullen Jr. suggested that Penthea’s suffering ‘becomes increasingly pathetic when she also abandons spiritual consolation because of her conviction that, since she was promised to Orgilus, her life with jealous old Bassanes is adulterous.’583 Penthea certainly seems fixated on the idea of adultery and sinfulness, as McCullen suggests, though her madness is, in a fashion, powerful, rather than pathetic. In 3.5, Penthea uses her ‘melancholy’ to ‘place before’ Calantha a ‘perfect mirror’ to ‘bequeath, in holiest rites of love,’ her brother, Ithocles to Calantha (BH, 3.5.13a, 26b, 27, 77). Yet even in this power Penthea is preoccupied with her own potentially adulterous situation, referring to the time she first ‘lost [her] heart’ and to the fact she feels ‘much old in griefs’ – she leaves one bequest to ‘virgin-wives, such as abuse not wedlock,’ and to ‘married maids’ who prefer ‘honourable issue’ to the ‘flattery of delights by marriage,’ suggesting that she conceives of her own situation as unchaste (BH, 3.5.72, 49, 51, 52, 53). In 4.2, Ford returns to the theme of Penthea’s “adultery,” suggesting that her ‘name is strumpeted’ because of her supposedly adulterous marriage, a possibility which she has been considering since 3.2, where she refers to herself as a ‘spotted whore’ (BH, 4.2.148; 3.2.70). In this way, Penthea’s journey is not unlike Giovanni’s – at first melancholy because she is married to Bassanes, Penthea falls into a madness because of her belief in her own ruin, and this leads her to commit suicide. As we saw in Chapter Two, melancholics often ‘desire death’ and ‘determine to kell them selues’ according to Barrough.584 Penthea reveals that her starvation is a deliberate act when, discussing her belief that her blood has been ‘seasoned by the forfeit / Of noble shame with mixtures of pollution,’ she states that her blood no longer deserves to ‘taste of 583 Joseph T. McCullen Jr, ‘Madness and the Isolation of Characters in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama’, Studies in Philology, 48 (1951), 206-218 (p.217). 584 Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p.35. 164 sustenance,’ and that she will therefore ‘[s]tarve’ (BH, 4.2.149-150, 152). This links with several other instances where we have seen blood and blood-letting become an important part of the discourse surrounding melancholy. As we saw with Giovanni and Faustus, whose thick, melancholic blood becomes significant in terms of their melancholy, the status of Penthea’s blood becomes important here. It is perhaps reminiscent of the supposedly ‘intemperate’ blood of Hero in Shakespeare’s Much Ado which is the reason Claudio abandons her, and simultaneously Hero’s innocent blood which causes her to “die” of shame (Much Ado, 4.1.58). Ferrand suggests that when someone suffers ‘agitations of the soul’ then their blood can become ‘adust, earthy, and melancholy:’ this can cause, according to Ferrand a ‘depraved appetite, a sense of grief […] melancholy, epilepsy, madness.’585 Nothing can cure this, Ferrand suggests, other than the accepted cures for love melancholy. But for Penthea, there is no cure other than her slow ‘creep’ towards a self-inflicted death (BH, 4.2.78). Penthea’s lover, Orgilus, also commits suicide, and it is explicitly categorized as a fatal purging of his love melancholy. Orgilus is sentenced to die by the Princess Calantha, and in that sense his death is not a true suicide, but Calantha allows Orgilus the mercy of choosing ‘what death’ he suffers (BH, 5.2.81). Orgilus chooses to ‘bleed to death,’ but stipulates that it must be by his own hand, not by that of any ‘surgeon,’ much as Shylock refuses to have ‘some surgeon’ standing by at Antonio’s trial in The Merchant of Venice (BH, 5.2.99b; Merchant, 5.1.255). We saw in Chapter Three that Antonio’s treatment at the hands of Shylock could act as a purgation, where by ‘opening a Veine […] with a sharpe knife,’ Antonio’s melancholy may be removed, but Shylock wishes it to be fatal: the failure of this fatal purging is what causes the questionable comic ending of Merchant.586 In both Antonio and Orgilus’s case, the purgation is meant to be fatal. The only concession Orgilus allows is that he may need assistance from someone to ‘prick’ the other arm, when the arm he cuts ‘is bubbling life out’ (BH, 5.2.99b, 100b). Orgilus’s refusal to be killed by anyone other than himself is a way for him to perform the melancholy which has led to this moment: as we have seen, melancholics often ‘desire death’ and ‘determine to kell them selues.’587 Burton also notes that is ‘the common humour’ of lovers ‘to wish for death, to confront death in this case,’ caring for nothing 585 Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, p.229. 586 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.237. 587 Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p.35. 165 – ‘’tis their desire (saith Tyrius) to die.’588 Orgilus’s death as a suicide is complicated by the fact he has been sentenced to death, and therefore would die regardless of his choice of method. However, as well as being responsible for the act which ends his life, Orgilus is also responsible for handing himself over to Calantha – he has murdered Ithocles, and he enters to tell the court that ‘[b]rave Ithocles is murthered, murthered cruelly,’ admitting that it was by his hand, even going so far as to brandish the ‘instrument’ to the murder – and it is his ‘confession,’ as Calantha states, is what ‘dooms [him] a sentence of death’ (BH, 5.2.16, 45, 67, 68). Orgilus is a nobleman who has lived at the court for many years, and he would therefore know the consequences of this confession. His decision to give this confession must be seen as a suicidal impulse. This scene therefore takes on a specifically medical atmosphere, just as the almost-purgation of Antonio does in Merchant. Orgilus is almost clinical in his approach to his own execution: he appears to treat it as a simple operation to purge his melancholic blood, as he ‘prick[s]’ a vein in either arm (BH, 5.2.99b). Boorde, discussing the best way to purge melancholic blood, recommends bleeding the patient from ‘hemorodial veines,’ [veins which are swollen and prominent] whereas Nicholas Gyer’s The English Phlebotomy (1592) suggests that ‘there is a veine in the belly,’ which should be used to purge melancholic blood, not the veins in the arms which Orgilus cuts in his suicidal death.589 Burton, however, suggests that the blood-letting procedure may be done with a vein ‘in the arme […] or in the head, knees, or any other part as shall be thought fit.’590 It is no great leap to see Orgilus’s suicidal execution as a purgation – he himself refers to it in specifically medical terminology, which seems designed to remind the audience of this medical operation. Orgilus justifies his choice of self-murder by saying that he is ‘well skilled in letting blood,’ and instructs Armostes and Nearchus to assist by creating a tourniquet to ‘[b]ind fast / This arm, that so the pipes may from their conduits / Convey a full stream’ as he uses his dagger, which he refers to as his ‘skilful instrument’ to cut open his vein (BH, 5.2.102, 101-103, 103). Orgilus’s ‘skilful instrument’ is reminiscent of the ‘things necessary’ which medical writer Edward Edwards instructed the physician to furnish himself with when preparing for an operation of this kind in 1637.591 Orgilus himself is positioned as the ‘learned 588 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.187 589 Boorde, Breuiarie of Health, p.74; Nicolas Gyer, The English Phlebotomy (London: Andrew Mansell, 1592), p.239. 590 Burton, Anatomy, vol.2, p.237. 591 Edwards, VVhole art of Chyrurgery, p.41. 166 Physitian’ who knows how to perform the operation, for as he reminds us, he is ‘well skilled in letting blood’ (BH, 5.2.102).592 As in the revenge tragedies which we saw in Chapter Two, the revenger, Orgilus, whose melancholy has led to the murder of Ithocles, must literally bleed before the play can end. It is the lack of bleeding in plays such as Merchant that causes the incomplete feeling of the ending, where melancholy remains and threatens the superficial happiness of the protagonists, as we have seen. The revenger must die since they have been unable to successfully purge themselves of their love melancholy. The horror of Orgilus’s slow execution by suicide also has something of the theatrical about it, as he performs his death in front of an onstage audience, so that they may witness both the longevity of his love for Penthea, and the sacrifice Orgilus makes to purge society of the ‘bad blood’ of melancholy.593 Orgilus’s melancholy is presented in another theatrical framework before his suicide. At the beginning of the play, Orgilus leaves for Athens, ostensibly to try and rid himself of his melancholy. Instead, however, he disguises himself as a scholar in order to stay close to Penthea: the fact that Orgilus chooses to change his habit to a scholar, and to use Tecnicus’s ‘oraculous lectures’ as a ‘balm’ for his ‘wounds’ again suggests the scholarly melancholy which we have seen both in the tragedies discussed in Chapter Two, but also in the complex, multi-faceted melancholy of Giovanni in ’Tis Pity (BH, 1.3.11, 10). Although Orgilus tells Tecnicus that he wishes to use his scholarship as a ‘balm’ to comfort his love melancholy, Orgilus reveals the truth to Penthea – ‘’Tis for thy sake / I put on this imposture’ (BH, 2.3.60-61). Whilst Orgilus is disguised as the scholar, the unsuspecting Penthea describes Orgilus’s behaviour as ‘frantic’ and ‘wild,’ suggesting that even in his disguise, Orgilus is acting as though he is melancholic – perhaps like the ‘antic disposition’ which Hamlet puts on over his truly felt melancholy in order to deceive his mother and uncle in Hamlet (BH, 2.3.25a, 33b; Hamlet, 1.5.170). Orgilus performs a different set of symptoms – ‘frantic,’ and ‘wild,’ – but it still reflects the core of his anatomical melancholy. Orgilus’s love melancholy is inextricably linked to ideas about theatricality and spectacle – he cannot resist performing, it seems. We have seen also that the concept of horrific spectacle is presented at the end of ’Tis Pity, where, taking on the role of a revenger, Giovanni creates a gory spectacle in which Annabella’s heart takes centre stage. These ‘striking’ scenes represent the heightened emotional moments 592 Ibid. 593 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.237. 167 of the play – it is little surprise, therefore, that they are linked so firmly and consistently with the melancholy of the lovers.594 Thomas Middleton, a close contemporary of Ford, was likewise interested in the heightened emotions of tragedy, and particularly with melancholy. In The Bloody Banquet (performed 1605), a play which has received little scholarly attention, we are presented with a ‘striking’ theatrical spectacle which, like Giovanni’s, involves dismembered body parts, and which is consistently related to love melancholy. We saw in Chapter Two that Middleton also used the body of the dead beloved woman in Revenger’s Tragedy. Yet, in Bloody Banquet, the beloved man’s body is used as an attempt to cure melancholy. Like the relationship between Bianca and Fernando in Love’s Sacrifice, the love of the Young Queen and Tymethes is doomed because the Young Queen is married. Unlike Fernando and Bianca, however, in Bloody Banquet the adulterous love is consummated – the audience are therefore compromised in that, as the Young Queen and Tymethes are both adulterous, we find it more difficult to sympathise with them as we do for the innocent Bianca and Fernando, since, as Roxano informs the audience, the ‘end of venery is disease or blood,’ again strengthening the connection between melancholy and blood which we have seen throughout the thesis.595 After meeting the Young Queen, who is the stepmother of his betrothed, Amphridote, Tymethes is ‘shot through’ with amazement and lust, which is reciprocated, the Young Queen saying she ‘never knew the force of a desire / Until this minute struck within [her] blood’ (BB, 1.4.38a, 42-43). The Young Queen suffers from love melancholy – she admits in 4.3 that she desires ‘a league / With desolate darkness’ and is full of ‘fear’ and ‘heaviness,’ despite the fact she should be happy, since she believes her tyrannical husband is absent for the evening (BB, 4.3.5-6, 8, 12). Du Laurens tells us that melancholic persons are ‘alwaies fearefull’ and Bright says that melancholy causes ‘monstrous terors of feare and heauinesse without cause,’ just as the Young Queen suffers.596 The love melancholy of this adulterous pair is brought to a fatal end, as Roxano predicts, as, fearing the consequences of Tymethes’s indiscretion in coming +to her bedchamber, the Queen enjoins him to a penance of spending ‘but this hour’ in 594 “spectacle, n.”, OED Online, (Oxford University Press, 2019), 168 prayer, but returns with ‘two pistols’ and ‘shoots him dead’ (BB, 4.3.68, SD). The Queen kills Tymethes in an attempt to rid herself of her melancholy by killing the perceived cause of it: she calls her melancholy a ‘strange ill’ since because of it ‘for our fears we should our comforts kill’ (BB, 4.3.120b, 121). However, the Queen’s purgation of her melancholy does not succeed – melancholy is internal, and it is her own blood which is responsible, not the blood of ‘this poor bleeding body’ (BB, 4.3.122). The Young Queen does not ‘know perfectly’ the ‘manner’ how to rid herself of her ‘doubtful’ and fearful melancholy, and consequently believes that ridding herself of the outward cause will change her inner feelings (BB, 4.3.75).597 In doing so, the Young Queen possibly causes the descent into madness that will, just one scene later, see her enter with ‘her hair loose’ and to eat and drink, without compunction, the flesh and blood of Tymethes (BB, 5.1.SD). The spectacle which the Tyrant prepares in Bloody Banquet is one of cannibalism. The Tyrant could likewise be suggested to be suffering from a love melancholy, since he is ‘very jealous,’ and Burton identifies such jealous love melancholy as occurring when ‘burning lust rageth after marriage,’ going on to suggest it can even cause ‘murders.’ 598 Given that the Young Queen is consistently described as beautiful – ‘beauteous majesty,’ – and that the Tyrant berates his servants for leaving her ‘alone,’ unguarded, even before he suspects her relationship with Tymethes, we can conclude Middleton means us to understand that the Tyrant is suffering from such an affliction (BB, 1.4.70, 100). Gary Taylor believes that what ‘moves The Bloody Banquet beyond mere suspense into horror is the hanging from hooks of a quartered human body.’599 The Young Queen, who by this point has been consumed by her melancholy and is in the throes of madness, is made to ‘eat the flesh, and drink blood from the skull’ of Tymethes, whose body is now hung up in some fashion (BB, 5.1.SD). The violence in Bloody Banquet can be linked to the theatrical violence of the revengers discussed in Chapter Two. As we saw, violence in the revenge tragedies can be considered a ‘cathartic cure,’ an attempt to rid the stage-world of melancholy before the play ends.600 The violence of the revengers, we saw, preceded their suicidal impetus which carried them to death at the end of their plays. 597 Edwards, VVhole Art of Chyrurgery, p.41. 598 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.54. 599 Gary Taylor, ‘Gender, Hunger, Horror: The History and Significance of The Bloody Banquet’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 1 (2004), 1-45, p.21. 600 Langley, Narcissism and Suicide, p.254. 169 The Tyrant does not seem to have a similar impulse, however, since he was not necessarily expecting an onstage audience to witness the degradation the Young Queen. Both he and his wife, however, perform their madness to this unintended audience, and he appears delighted to bid the pilgrims ‘right welcome’ to the castle, and he is likewise happy to ‘discourse’ to the visitors the story of ‘what’s seen’ (BB, 5.1.144, 159). This spectacle is reminiscent of Merchant, where Antonio is almost sacrificed for a ‘pound of flesh’ (Merchant, 4.1.228). Diane Purkiss, likening the role of Antonio to that of Timon in Shakespeare’s later play Timon of Athens (1607), suggests that Antonio is ‘very nearly treated like a side of meat, to be devoured.’601 With just a small change, Antonio too may have ended as Tymethes does in Bloody Banquet, as a grotesque visual of the bleeding body, showcased as a warning for others. Although Shylock, in Merchant, does not literally intend to cannibalise Antonio as the Tyrant does with Tymethes, the single-minded and needlessly violent determination of the villain for the ‘pound of flesh’ seems comparable – in Merchant, Shylock is offered three times the sum which Antonio had initially forfeited and the Tyrant likewise cannot consider any other punishment other than humiliation and death (Merchant, 4.1.228). Taylor suggests that this grotesque sight reminds the audience that it is only ‘taboo’ which prevents us from ‘harvesting the readily available protein supply represented by the other people sitting around us at home.’602 Where Antonio and Shylock’s interaction only gestures towards the breaking of this taboo, Middleton’s Tyrant takes it to its logical conclusion. Antonio, Shylock, Tymethes, and the Tyrant are all melancholy – for Tymethes, the Tyrant, and potentially Antonio, it is a love melancholy. Love melancholy potentially leads to this urge to devour the beloved, to become one, hence the theatricality of separated body parts which we also see in Giovanni’s final spectacle in ’Tis Pity. The theatricality of the spectacle prepared by the Tyrant in The Bloody Banquet is not dissimilar to that which we see prepared by the Duke in Love’s Sacrifice inasmuch as both are done to quell the melancholy of a jealous husband. The Duke’s tyrannous love melancholy leads him to murder his wife, Bianca, because he is ‘very jealous, unapt to beleeve’ that Bianca could be innocent of wrongdoing, and guilty only of falling in love.603 Although they are in love, Bianca and Fernando have sworn not to 601 Diane Purkiss, ‘The Masque of Food: Staging and Banqueting in Shakespeare’s England’, Shakespeare Studies, 42 (2014), 91-105 (p.97). 602 Taylor, ‘Gender, Hunger, Horror’, p.21 603 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.149. 170 ‘profane / This sacred temple’ of Bianca’s body and chastity ‘by wanton appetite’ (LS, 2.4.80-81, 80). The Duke is set on to believe that Bianca is unfaithful by his sister, Fiormonda, who is herself in love with Fernando, and Fiormonda’s minion, D’Avolos. The villains tell the Duke that he has been ‘befooled’ by the ‘sallow-coloured brat / Of some unlanded bankrupt, taught to catch / The easy fancies of young prodigal bloods,’ and the Duke is quick to believe this ‘[e]ndless immortal plague’ (LS, 2.3.127; 4.1.11, 18-20, 39). This marks the Duke as one of those lovers whose melancholy Burton identified as ‘very jealous, unapt to beleeve’ good news, the symptoms of which he identified as occurring when ‘burning lust rageth after marriage,’ and which cause ‘murders.’604 After discovering that Bianca was chaste, the Duke stabs himself at the foot of Bianca’s monument in a suicidal spectacle designed to prove his repentance. The Duke’s suicide is not so explicitly couched in medical terminology as Orgilus’s self-murder, but it does have interesting connotations of purgation. The Duke’s suicide is framed as a semi-religious sacrifice. As he stabs himself, the Duke tells the onstage audience that in order to avenge the wrongs he has done Bianca, he has ‘on her altar sacrificed his life’ (LS, 5.3.116). The Duke wishes that his blood would ‘gather head and make a standing pool,’ which strengthens the links between this suicide and sacrifice. Blood has a redemptive quality in many religious teachings – Leviticus 9 shows Aaron taking a ‘sin offering’ of a calf to an altar, and offering the calf’s blood to atone for his sin, with Aaron dipping his fingers into the calf’s blood and ‘put[ting] it upon the horns of the altar,’ then pouring ‘out the blood at the bottom of the altar.’605 Instead of using a calf as a substitute ‘for himself’ as Aaron does in Leviticus, the Duke uses his own body as the sacrificial offering, and wishes that his blood would pour out to make a pool in front of his ‘altar,’ Bianca’s tomb (LS, 5.3.116).606 By linking his death to this sacrificial offering, the Duke performs his repentance as a call for the onstage, and offstage, audience to heed his mistakes, and the melancholy that has led to them. The linking of blood to sacrifice in this manner is consistent with what we have seen throughout the thesis: beginning with Faustus, whose hallucinatory vision of Christ’s blood reminds us of the sacrifice which is integral to Christian teaching, and also Faustus’s own thick, melancholic blood, to the 604 Ibid, p.54. 605 Leviticus 9:7, 9:9, King James Version. I have used the KJV for dramas post-1611, given the date of that version’s first publication and the likelihood that dramatists working post-1611 would have been aware of its publication. 606 Leviticus, 7:8, King James Version. 171 bloodthirsty, theatrical revenge melancholy we saw in Chapter Two, which we have argued, with Langley, is a kind of ‘cathartic cure of remedial violence’ which ends in the suicidal impetus of the revenger, a kind of sacrifice to purge themselves, since they are ‘tainted by the sickness’ of melancholy.607 The Duke’s sacrifice acts in a similar manner – he sacrifices himself in order to purge the melancholy he feels. In creating this sacrifice the Duke refers to a symptom of his love melancholy: for not only does he desire his blood to make pour out in front of Bianca’s altar, but he wishes that ‘jealous husbands here might bathe in blood’ (LS, 5.3.123). Not only does this describe the jealousy caused as a part of the Duke’s melancholy, it also suggests that is a purgatorial sacrifice, and links his final, tragic, end to the need for a restorative cure for melancholia. The Duke’s death purges melancholy from the society of the play, allowing it hope in the form of the new duke Roseilli. Bathing in blood has an even closer link with the concept of curing, since bathing in blood was, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘taken as a tonic or form of medical treatment,’ although the references are mostly from the eighteenth-century, referring back to medieval tradition.608 Ephraim Shoham-Steiner has noted that there was a correlation between blood and medical curing which dated back to the time of the Pharaohs, which may have been known in the early modern world, whereby ‘human blood’ was considered a cure for diseases like leprosy.609 Shoham-Steiner cites one extreme example of leprosy, where the ‘Pharaoh’s physicians viewed the disease as virtually incurable unless the Pharaoh were to slay 150 Hebrew youths twice a day, in the morning and at nightfall, and bathe in their blood.’610 Bathing in blood as a curative practice may not have been a common medical treatment, but Shoham-Steiner has shown that the concept of blood- bathing as a cure for illness at least in theory continued throughout the medieval manuscript tradition.611 We can also see the example of Elizabeth Báthory, who was imprisoned in 1610 for the murder of hundreds of young women: the legend that she bathed in her victims’ blood appears to have appeared first in 1729 via the Jesuit 607 Langley, Narcissism and Suicide, p.254, 255. 608 “bloodbath, n.”, OED Online, (Oxford University Press, 2019) 172 scholar László Turó’s Tragica Historia.612 The Duke, in his suicidal death, which is presented as a blood-bath in every sense of the term, seems to suggest that bathing in his melancholic blood could be curative in a similar way to that of the Hebrew youths Shoham-Steiner’s Pharaoh was told to slay. Interestingly, in Tis Pity, the Friar, when urging Giovanni to repent of his lustful feelings, tells Giovanni to ‘wash every word thou utter’st / In tears, and, if’t be possible, of blood.’ The term refers to tears of deep penitence, but it has interesting connotations considering Giovanni’s melancholy (TP, 1.1.72-73). Like the Duke’s blood-bath, by which he hopes to cure future ‘jealous husbands,’ the Friar’s attempt at curing Giovanni is based on language around blood, and specifically this is meant to cure Giovanni of the ‘leprosy of lust’ in his soul, perhaps significant given Shoham-Steiner’s research into blood-bathing as a cure for leprosy (LS, 5.3.123; TP, 1.2.74). The Duke’s melancholic blood is presented as a cure for love melancholy. A. T. Moore, who glosses the Duke’s suicide with a reference to the OED, stating that ‘a bath in warm blood was “a very powerful tonic in great debility from long continued diseases,”’ certainly seems to think that Ford was making use of this medical history at this point of his play.613 As we have seen, the OED references to such practices tend to be seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, so although they refer to older tradition, we cannot state that it was categorically known in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, although Shoham-Steiner’s work seems to suggest there was at least a consciousness of this tradition.614 The disease which the Duke suggests his blood will cure is the love melancholy of ‘jealous husbands’ like him (LS, 5.3.123). In performing this speech to both onstage and offstage audiences, the Duke announces the end of his melancholy, through his death, and gives hope that others, too, may be cured through this death. The Duke’s melancholy therefore becomes a vital part of the cure – as Burton reminds us, love melancholy is almost always accompanied with ‘Fires, Torments, Cares, Jealousies, Suspitions, Feares, Griefs, [and] Anxieties.’615 But the Duke’s melancholy blood offers redemption for sufferers of the disease: a bath in his melancholic, sacrificed blood, may cure the jealous husbands of the future. The Duke’s death is therefore presented as a cure for society’s ills. Through his suicide, the Duke purges his 612 See Tony Thorne, ‘Countess Dracula’: The Life and Times of the Blood Countess, Elizabeth Báthory, (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p.206. 613 Moore, ‘Footnote 121-3’ in Love’s Sacrifice, ed. by A. T. Moore, 5.3. 614 Shoham-Steiner, ‘Pharaoh’s Bloodbath.’ 615 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.196. Emphasis mine. 173 own melancholy, giving society hope in its newly elected Duke. The Duke also offers his blood as a sacrificial cure for future husbands who suffer as he did. The Duke and the Tyrant both devise elaborate spectacles, just as the revengers we saw in Chapter Two did in their determination to make their revenge as spectacular and theatrical as possible. It is significant that this love melancholy is related to ‘feasts,’ ‘masques, mummings [and] banquets’ for Burton tells us love is the cause of all of these.616 In many of these moments, the characters performing the spectacle call upon the onstage audience to witness their actions, to view their final act which is to represent their anatomical feelings of melancholy. In Love’s Sacrifice, upon coming to Bianca’s tomb, Caraffa gives a confession ostensibly to Bianca’s ‘disturbèd ghost,’ but in reality it is performed to the Abbot, Fiormonda, Colona, Julia, Roseilli, Petruccio, Nibrassa, D’Avolos, and the Guards – ‘I am Caraffa,’ he announces, that ‘untimely took [Bianca’s] life’ (LS, 5.3.41, 46, 54). That Caraffa intends his self-sacrifice to be a performative moment is made clear when Fernando denies him the immediacy of suicide in Bianca’s tomb by already being there. The Duke becomes angry that Fernando has ‘robbed / [His] resolution of a glorious name’ – that Fernando, in committing suicide, has stolen the Duke’s chance of creating the spectacle he wanted to, which would have ended in people perhaps praising his ‘resolution’ and actions (LS, 5.3.72-73). In Bloody Banquet, the Tyrant is pleased that an onstage audience will witness his melancholic revenge. His love melancholy causes his blood to become ‘bitter’ and makes him feel as though he will ‘burst with torment’ (BB, 4.2.49, 41a). Burton describes the ‘Prognosticks of Jealousie’ to be ‘Despaire, Madnesse, to make away themselves and others.’617 We can see all of these happening in Tyrant, as he feels ‘a whirlwind’ inside of him, and at the end of the play is concerned only with being the one to kill his ‘jealousy’ in the personage of the Young Queen before he himself is killed (BB, 4.2.42b; 5.1.212). Just as in Love’s Sacrifice, the melancholy of the jealous husband is related to their blood – to the ‘bitter’ blood of the Tyrant and the apparently curative blood of the Duke, sacrificed to cure future jealousies (BB, 4.2.49). The two jealous husbands differ in that the Tyrant has good cause for his jealousy – he knows that the Young Queen and Tymethes are having an affair – whereas the Duke only suspects Bianca and does so wrongly. The Duke is, in his 616 Ibid., p.192. 617 Ibid, p.304. 174 melancholy, more closely aligned with Bassanes, whose jealous love for Penthea causes him to believe that ‘[n]o woman but can fall, and doth, or would’ (BH, 2.1.40). Bassanes, we have seen, lives – he, like the discontents of Chapter Three, overcomes his melancholy. Bassanes is able to put aside his melancholy as his wife, Penthea, in her madness, speaks of her coming death, and how she has gone ‘past child-bearing’ since her marriage to Bassanes (BH, 4.2.94). Bassanes feels the guilt of his actions towards Penthea in a very physical way: ‘Sweats hot as sulphur / Boil through my pores. Affliction hath in store / No torture like to this’ (BH, 4.2.95-97a). Such a torture perhaps accurately reflects the adustion of blood which Ferrand suggests causes love melancholy and the ‘madness […] and other pernicious symptoms’ of jealous love melancholy.618 Bassanes studies to overcome his jealousies, and is consequently rewarded, unlike the Duke, who sees no respite in his melancholy but through death. The Tyrant, on the other hand, is mostly closely comparable to Soranzo, the jealous husband of Annabella in ’Tis Pity. Soranzo has several legitimate reasons to feel his jealousy: firstly, Annabella is cuckolding him; secondly, she marries him only to cover her ‘loose, cunning whoredom’ which has led to her pregnancy; thirdly, it is no ordinary lover that Annabella has taken, but her own brother (TP, 4.3.7). Like the Tyrant in Bloody Banquet, whose ‘bitter’ blood causes him to think of his extreme torture for Annabella, Soranzo’s ‘blood’s on fire’ with righteous anger at his spouse (BB, 4.2.49; TP, 5.2.25). Also like the Tyrant, who tells the Old King that it would have been ‘[m]ore than hell’ if he had died before he could murder the Young Queen, when Giovanni enters in 5.6 with ‘a heart upon his dagger,’ Soranzo’s first concern is that he is ‘forestalled’ in his plan to commit murder (BB, 5.1.213; TP, 5.6.15). For all these jealous, lovesick, husbands, their jealousy is linked to blood. Linking love melancholy, and specifically its symptom of jealousy, to blood, was not unusual, as we have seen. Ferrand suggests that jealousy ‘is the belief that [the loved one will be entirely or partially lost. Because of these agitations in the soul,’ Ferrand suggests ‘the blood becomes adust, earthy, and melancholy.’619 Ferrand therefore suggests that blood adust – or burnt, or heated, blood – causes melancholy, and it certainly seems to occur this way in Middleton’s text, with the Tyrant only suffering from his love melancholy after he is given reason to believe that his wife is a ‘whore’ (BB, 5.1.210b). The jealousy of these love melancholics may be one reason why so 618 Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, p.229. 619 Ibid. 175 many of them create elaborate spectacles, in a simulacrum of the spectacles created in the revenge tragedies discussed in Chapter Two. Their jealous love melancholy causes them to rage, and this ‘begets’ the ‘murders’ which form a part of these spectacles.620 Yet love melancholics who do not display such symptoms of jealousy – Orgilus, Ithocles, and Giovanni, for example – all participate in and create spectacle. Love melancholy is consistently presented with a theatrical framework around it: in Ford’s plays, love melancholy is a severe problem which must be purged, and which is often sinful. Ford demonstrates this through these highly theatrical moments, where love melancholy leads to sin through suicide and murder. We have already seen how, in Broken Heart, Orgilus’s suicidal execution could be seen as a purgation of his melancholy, similar to that offered by the suicidal ideation of the revenger’s in Chapter Two, seen in plays like Revenger’s Tragedy and Spanish Tragedy. However, the act for which Orgilus is condemned to death, the murder of Ithocles, can also be viewed as a purgation, curing Ithocles’s melancholy and helping to rid the play’s society of this disease. Like Orgilus’s suicide, his murder of Ithocles is couched in terms which suggest it is done as a cure for or purgation of melancholy. Orgilus’s revenge for the role which Ithcoles played in Penthea’s marriage to Bassanes involves catching Ithocles in an ‘engine’ – a mechanical device which prevents Ithocles from moving from the chair he is seated in, and then stabbing him (BH, 4.4.SD). Orgilus, in his monologue to Ithocles, suggests that the murder is sacrificial – like the Duke’s monologue in Love’s Sacrifice. Orgilus seems to have had foreknowledge of Penthea’s moment of death, the ‘last act of her life,’ and now intends to use his murder of Ithocles to ‘sacrifice a tyrant to a turtle’ (BH, 4.4.28). The mechanical chair, the wheeling in of Penthea’s corpse, which Orgilus seats between himself and Ithocles, along with Orgilus’s extended monologues, combine to make this scene feel full of vengeful theatricality. The fact that Orgilus’s final act, before his confession and staged suicidal execution, is this theatrical murder, reiterates the importance of spectacle to these plays. Most importantly, however, the conditions surrounding Orgilus’s murder of Ithocles foreshadow Orgilus’s own purgatorial death: there is something about this scene which fits with the idea of purging ‘bad blood’ which becomes a theme at the end of Broken Heart.621 Just as Orgilus’s suicide consists of him ‘opening a Veine in the arme with a sharp knife’ to purge his melancholy, it seems as though Orgilus intends 620 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.54 621 Ibid., p.237. 176 Ithocles’s death to resemble a blood-letting such as those given ‘to such as have need, are full of bad blood, noxious humours, and may be eased by it.’622 Ithocles’s presence in the play has, for Orgilus, been ‘noxious,’ since Ithocles is the reason for Penthea’s marriage to Bassanes.623 Ithocles has also been suffering from ‘bad blood’ since he is lovesick for Calantha, the princess he has deemed out of reach – and for whose love he feels he will die, telling Penthea in 3.2 that ‘Death waits to waft me to the Stygian banks’ (BH, 3.2.90). Orgilus, in a foreshadowing of his own suicide- execution, takes on the role of murderous physician to Ithocles – the same role which Shylock would have undertaken in the trial scene of Merchant, whereby the purging is never intended to cure without killing the melancholic patient. Orgilus even wishes that Ithocles be ‘healthful in [his] parting / From lost mortality’ suggesting that Orgilus hopes that, through his fatal purging – Ithocles will be released from the guilt he feels over Penthea’s madness and suicide, and that death will be a final release for Ithocles from the bad blood of his melancholy (BH, 4.4.58-59). Ithocles will be more ‘healthful’ in parting from his life, since in releasing him from life, Orgilus also releases him from his melancholy (BH, 4.4.58). Orgilus even goes so far as to say that he ‘strive[s] to cure’ Ithocles’s ‘pain,’ thus positioning himself as the merciful physician who takes away pain, not as a murderer who takes away life (BH, 4.4.62). Although the purgations of both Ithocles and Orgilus are not true purgations, in that they do not cure the patient without killing them, they are successful in that they purge society of melancholy: after the deaths of Ithocles, Orgilus, Penthea, and Calantha, their society is able to move on towards a more hopeful future. As in Love’s Sacrifice, the society of Broken Heart is given a new, compassionate, but strong leader in Nearchus, and all the characters are given titles or spouses, to neatly ensure society continues smoothly without the overshadowing presence of the melancholy characters. The “curing” of society requires this kind of purging. Yet after the deaths of Ithocles and Orgilus there remains one final piece of melancholy which must be rebalanced before Nearchus can continue society in a more healthful way – Calantha. 622 Ibid. 623 Ibid. Interestingly, noxious has a double meaning: both ‘irritating’ and ‘poisonous’ – if Ithocles is poison, then this links back to the suggestion we have made that blood is a decidedly important factor in the discussion of melancholy, and the need to “purge” the play of Ithocles becomes stronger. See “noxious, adj. (and n.)”, OED Online, (Oxford University Press, 2003), < https://www-oed- com.ezproxy4.lib.le.ac.uk/view/Entry/128858?redirectedFrom=noxious#eid> [Accessed 01/07/2019]. 177 Calantha’s death is presented as the final cure for society. After receiving messages of terrible news – that the ‘king’ is dead, that ‘poor Penthea’s starved,’ and finally that ‘[b]rave Ithocles is murthered, murthered cruelly’ – Calantha continues to dance in the ‘revels’ that should celebrate her own marriage to Ithocles and Euphranea’s marriage to Prophilus (BH, 5.2.12b, 14a, 16, 3). The joyful festivities become a disturbing danse macabre as Calantha insists that everyone continue until the dance has finished. We have seen already the link between melancholy and theatricality: for Calantha, the danse macabre acts as both a final call to witness her descent into melancholy. We are then called to witness Calantha’s final moments – ‘Bear witness all,’ she commands, as she ‘new-marr[ies]’ Ithocles, insisting that ‘Death shall not separate us’ (BH, 5.3.63, 66, 67). Although Calantha’s death is not suicide – she does not commit self-murder in any traditional form, having no dagger, pistol, or poison– it does come from a suicidal impulse. ‘Let me die smiling,’ she requests, vowing to rid herself of the melancholy which ‘struck home’ as ‘one news straight came huddling on another / Of death, and death, and death’ (BH, 5.3.76a, 71, 68-69). Calantha then commands her heart to ‘[c]rack, crack!’ (BH, 5.3.77). Calantha is not the only person in Ford’s work to die of a broken heart: in ’Tis Pity, the father of the incestuous lovers, Florio, dies, apparently from grief – ‘Monster of children, see what thou has done,’ the Cardinal instructs Giovanni, informing Giovanni that he has ‘[b]roke [his] old father’s heart!’ (TP, 5.6.62-63). Florio is unable to control the overflow of negative emotions that occur when he discovers his children’s incest, whereas Calantha seems to be able to control her emotions, deceiving the eyes of her court with ‘antic gesture’ which keeps her alive until she is ready for her ‘silent griefs’ to ‘cut the heart-strings’ of her life (BH, 5.3.68, 75). Calantha’s actions are in direct contrast to the women’s melancholy we saw in Chapter Three, where the melancholy could be seen as theatrical or performative because ‘women are most weake’ and their emotions are overpowering.624 Calantha’s death, peaceful in comparison to that of the play’s three other love melancholics, is the final purgation of melancholy from the play. Just as Orgilus’s suicide is not a true suicide, Calantha’s death is oddly positioned. Both she and Orgilus die because they wanted to, and by their own hand, but under circumstances that make the appellation of self-murder not quite correct. They are driven by a suicidal impulse to commit acts 624 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.265. 178 which will lead to their death in order to purge themselves, and society, of their melancholy. In a similar manner, in ’Tis Pity, Ford presents us with a Giovanni compelled towards actions which are likely to lead to his death, and yet he does not kill himself. Giovanni is driven by a suicidal impulse to ‘act [his] last and greater part’ – the displaying of Annabella’s heart on his sword during Soranzo’s feast – despite knowing that his invitation is ‘but a plot to train [him] to [his] ruin’ (TP, 5.5.107; 5.3.57). Giovanni suggests that in going on his suicidal course towards death, he is allowing himself a ‘glorious death’ (TP, 5.3.76). Burton links this ‘kill or bee killed’ attitude to a suicidal desperation, which ‘causeth death it self; how many thousands in such distresse have made away themselves, and many others? For he that cares not for his owne is master of another mans life.’625 Giovanni does kill others, for as he says ‘they all shall perish’ with him (TP, 5.3.79). Giovanni is directly responsible for the deaths of Annabella and Soranzo: indirectly, Giovanni’s actions cause the death of Florio, his father, who dies of a broken heart – ‘see what thou has done,’ the Cardinal commands Giovanni, ‘Broke thy old father’s heart’ (TP, 5.6.62, 63). Giovanni’s love for Annabella also leads Putana, Annabella’s maid and confidante, to be condemned to be ‘burnt to ashes’ for supporting their incestuous affair (TP, 5.6.135a). In his ‘distresse,’ and through his suicidal impulse Giovanni makes away with many others.626 The suicidal impulse – the drive to ‘kell them selues’ – is common throughout these love tragedies, as it was for the revengers of Chapter Two like Vindice, Bel- Imperia, and Hieronimo.627 It drives Giovanni, Penthea, Orgilus, and many others. The suicide of these characters becomes a fatal but ultimately cathartic cure for melancholy. These suicides are often inherently theatrical. Farr has noted that large scale spectacles were a ‘natural requirement for an audience who knew all about the masques at Court and in noble houses whether they had witnessed an actual performance or not.’628 This theatricality is something which is inherently linked to melancholy on the stage. In Lover’s Melancholy both the diagnosis and cure of the protagonist, Palador, are a testament to the performative spectacles which Farr identifies as so important to the audience. Parthenophil is said to have been brought to Cyprus to view ‘our young 625 Ibid., p.409. 626 Ibid. 627 Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p.35. 628 Farr, Ford and the Caroline Theatre, p.5. 179 melancholy prince, / Meleander’s rare distractions, the obedience / Of young Cleophila, Thamasta’s glory / [Amethus’s] matchless friendship, and [Menaphon’s] desperate love’ (LM, 1.2.182-185). We eventually learn, of course, that Parthenophil’s motivations are slightly different to what is initially reported, but it is significant that they frame their return in such terminology – to view and watch the amusing show which is these other characters, especially the ones who are considered mad or melancholy. Hopkins has gone so far as to say that, when watching Lover’s Melancholy, it is as if we, along with Parthenophil, are ‘being taken to the zoo to watch these strange creatures perform their emotions.’629 The analogy seems particularly apt in this play. Menaphon has suffered from a love melancholy for Thamasta for some time, a fact we are alerted to from the opening of the play, when Amethus asks whether travelling abroad has ‘[d]isburthened’ Menaphon of his ‘discontents’ (LM, 1.1.50). Burton suggested that the ‘best, readiest, surest way’ of curing love melancholy ‘which all approve,’ is to send the lovers ‘severall waies, that they may neither heare of, see, nor have the opportunity to send to one another aganie.’630 Menaphon has attempted this kind of cure on himself, and Amethus asks whether the cure has worked, to which Menaphon replies in the negative. Knowing of Menaphon’s love melancholy, whilst Thamasta is wooing Partheonphil, Kala leads Menaphon to ‘a room / Where though [he] cannot hear, yet [he] shall see’ what passes between Thamasta and Parthenophil (LM, 3.2.30-31). In this way, Thamasta’s wooing of Parthenophil becomes doubly theatrical, performed to a double audience, off and onstage. There is a further layer of metatheatricality in this scene in its provision of dramatic irony – Menaphon cannot hear the truth of what passes between Parthenophil and Thamasta, and therefore does not know that Parthenophil rejects Thamasta’s advances. The offstage audience, of course, are fully aware of the context of the scene, even knowing that Parthenophil is Eroclea, the lover of Palador and therefore highly unlikely to reciprocate Thamasta’s love. The theatrical framing of this scene becomes significant for Menaphon’s love melancholy, as it establishes a reason for Menaphon to attempt to cure his own love melancholy, his ‘[u]nmanly passion,’ as he calls it, by ‘hurl[ing]’ Thamasta from his 629 Lisa Hopkins, ‘Staging Passion in Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 45 (2005), 443-459 (p.451). 630 Burton, Anatomy, vol. 3, p.211. 180 heart (LM, 3.2.195, 202). This theatrical wooing scene therefore sets up the dramatic crisis of this plot, as Menaphon forswears Thamasta. Through the theatrical framing of much of the play, the audience becomes actively involved in viewing these characters in a way that is somewhat different to how we might ordinarily react to characters onstage – in viewing theatre within theatre presented in a medical light, we are encouraged to become a part of the diagnosis and cure of melancholy. Katherine Eisaman Maus’s reading of spectatorship in Renaissance drama suggests that ‘the art of spectatorship is an art of diagnosis,’ and that the audience are therefore required to diagnose the characters onstage, based on the behaviours we are given – ‘the cause of which may be hidden or withheld.’631 We are especially encouraged to diagnose the subject of our observations in a play like Lover’s Melancholy, where the diagnosis and cure of its characters becomes almost all of the action of the play: Hopkins has remarked that there is a noticeable ‘lack not only of sensational action but also of almost any action’ in Lover’s Melancholy.632 The lack of what Hopkins defines as sensational action – the violent and gory spectacle of Ford’s other plays, such as ‘Giovanni’s cutting out of his sister’s heart’ in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore – means that our attention is completely focused on the diagnosis and cure of the melancholy of the title.633 Whether we agree with Corax’s methods or not, our attention is always on the medical treatment of melancholy, and its successful purgation: at no point in this play, or any other play we have discussed here, does melancholy occur without some kind of meta-theatrical framework. In the later love tragedies of the kind exemplified by Ford, love melancholy inevitably leads to sin, via murder, revenge, or even suicide: the ‘rapes, incests, murders’ which Burton identified as being begotten by ‘Heroicall melancholy.’634 The melancholia which pervades these later love tragedies is undeniable as a motivating force: beginning with his earliest works, like Lover’s Melancholy, the canon of Ford’s drama frequently displays his intense interest in love melancholy, its symptoms, causes, and possible cures. Unlike the discontents of Chapter Three, who also suffer from love melancholy, the love melancholics of Ford and his contemporaries rarely overcome 631 Katherine Eisaman Maus, ‘Horns of Dilemma: Jealousy, Gender, and Spectatorship in English Renaissance Drama,’ ELH, 54 (1987), 561-583 (p.576). 632 Hopkins, ‘Staging Passion’, p.443. 633 Ibid. 634 Burton, Anatomy, vol. 3, p.54. Emphasis Burton’s. 181 their melancholy: Palador in Lover’s Melancholy is an exception, and even his melancholy is perceived as a destructive force which makes the commonwealth ‘sick’ and which could have significant potential for harm (LM, 1.2.1). The love melancholy in these plays is linked firmly to the theatrical, in the sense both of spectacle and meta- theatre, often in a way which resembles the violent, bloody, spectacle which occurs in so many revenge tragedies. Often lovers will die in a gruesome display of performed love melancholy, as Annabella dies to become a mere prop for Giovanni’s final ‘part,’ and as Orgilus sacrifices himself in one of the most theatrical stage suicides in the canon (TP, 5.5.107). The lovers in these tragedies are not unrelated to those in the comedies discussed in Chapter Three. The discontents of Chapter Three also suffer from a love melancholy, and were jealous and full of ‘suspition.’635 However, these lovers do in some respects subvert pre-conceived notions of love melancholy, which have been formed through our access to heroical characters like Claudio, Dowsecer, and even Palador in Ford’s own Lover’s Melancholy, for many of the protagonists of these love tragedies, like Giovanni and Tymethes, are lustful sinners, incestuous, or adulterous. Even when these protagonists are honourable, however, as in the case of Orgilus and Penthea, their melancholia is often too ingrained for them to escape in any way but through death. Bassanes, and his recovery from melancholy, is very much the exception in these love tragedies. We could read some of these later tragedies, therefore, as questioning the veracity of those claiming melancholy as a symptom of love – is lovesickness truly a heroical disease, these plays seem to ask, or is it merely a convenient means to cover sinful adultery, fornication, and even incest? Even when it is not, and the lovers are true, chaste, and therefore empathetic, like Fernando and Bianca, it is presented as a grievous illness that causes ‘feare, anxiety, doubt, care, peevishnesse, suspicion’ as well as the ‘rapes, adulteries, murders’ that we have seen.636 In all instances, love melancholy remains, in these plays, something which must be diagnosed and treated – either through medical intervention, as in the case of Palador, shock, as in the case of Bassanes, or death. This fatal symptom also acts as a purgation: understanding that their love melancholy will not dissipate by any other means, since the beloved is dead and/or society forbids the relationship, the melancholic resorts to 635 Ibid., p.297. 636 Ibid., p.149, 197. 182 the most drastic of remedies – purging themselves through their death and creating moral, medical, cathartic bloodshed. 183 ‘Naught so sweet as melancholy’: Concluding Thoughts. 637 Melancholy is ubiquitous in early modern drama. This thesis has shown how it infected every genre of dramatic writing, with characters in tragedies and comedies alike suffering from melancholia. Its presence spans decades, never disappearing, nor being subsumed by other theatrical plot devices. In some of the drama, its presence is overt, as in Hamlet, whose protagonist has come to embody the spirit of the melancholic man. In other plays, the presence of melancholy may be more covert and subtle, but it is still consistently present, and tends to always have a major impact on the plot or ending of the play. It is, therefore, extraordinarily important to the drama of the early modern period, acting as motivation for the characters behaviour and driving the plot by providing an obstacle to be overcome through the rebalancing of the protagonist’s humours or through the purgation of melancholy from the stage. Melancholy was discussed extensively in medical and religious literature from the period, perhaps more so than any other single affliction, and its importance to the drama stems from this shared interest in the disease. If medical and religious texts had such an interest in discussing melancholy, we must conclude that there was a significant popular interest in hearing about it – either in the theory of melancholy as a disease, or, as I believe likely, a prevalent understanding that many people were melancholy. It is little wonder, given such popular interest in the humour, that dramatists took advantage of the zeitgeist, or as Burton termed it, the ‘Epidemicall’ disease, of melancholia.638 Throughout this thesis, various descriptions of melancholy are examined. However, each description refers to early modern medical or social commentaries that describe melancholy. We have looked at examples of varying types of melancholy, each with their own distinct symptoms and causes, and yet with several commonalities, such as solitariness and fear. Some of these types of melancholy, such as scholarly melancholy and lover’s melancholy, are taken directly from the separate types of melancholy which Burton identified in Anatomy. Revenger’s melancholy, another category used in this thesis, is rarely mentioned in early modern medical tests. However, there are many instances of melancholy apparently leading to sinister personality attributes, and to a propensity towards the kind of plotting, evil, and murderous, deeds which are common to revengers. In De Occulta Philosophia libri III (1531), Agrippa suggested that the Saturnine man is, ‘crafty, witty, a seducer, and murderous,’ as well as being melancholy.639 We see this influence in the revenge tragedies, 637 Ibid., vol.1, p.lxix. 638 Ibid., p.127. 639 Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, p.131. 184 where melancholic characters such as Vindice commit terrible murders in their quest for revenge. Gellert Lyons has noted this connection in her study on literary melancholy: the ‘possibility of villainy,’ Gellert Lyons notes, ‘has always been connected with melancholy through the sinister personality and attributes of Saturn, and through the tenacious, plotting, revengeful nature that was attributed to melancholy types.’640 Burton does give the ‘Desire of Revenge’ as one cause for melancholy, suggesting that revenge ‘aggravate[s] our misery, and melancholy, heape[s] upon us hell and eternall damnation.’641 The wealth of revengers in early modern drama who suffer from melancholy, a kind of melancholy which seems deliberately separate from lover’s melancholy, scholarly melancholy, or any other specific subsets of the illness, make me confident to advance revenger’s melancholy as a distinct category. They also suffer, as Burton suggests, and as we saw in Chapter Two, from a sense of their own sin, and the ‘hell and eternall damnation’ which awaits them.642 This thesis has focused on three main types of melancholy: scholarly melancholy, revenger’s melancholy, and love melancholy. Scholarly melancholy was caused, according to Marsilio Ficino, by ‘frequent agitation of the mind,’ such as that which occurs when studying – it is consequently inflicted upon those ‘learned people’ who spend excessive amounts of time employed in scholarship, getting ‘too little physical exercise’ and even more particularly, is suffered most by those who are employed in studying ‘incorporeal things’ like philosophy.643 This chapter explored what it meant to be a Saturnine scholar, and how that was portrayed on the early modern stage. It was melancholy’s association with those ‘dedicated to learning’ that caused it to become a fashionable humour, but Chapter One did not see evidence of dramatists using scholarly melancholy in this way. Instead, those suffering from a scholarly melancholy in these texts are often denied the traditional happy ending, because their melancholy is never purged. The protagonists do not reach the ‘natural proportion’ of humours which Galen required for health, and the melancholy continues to abound.644 For the scholar-lovers of Love’s Labour’s and for the melancholic Jaques in As You Like It, their plays therefore end in exile. For Faustus and Hamlet, the generic conventions of their tragedies require death. 640 Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy, p.35 641 Burton, Anatomy, vol. 1, p.265. 642 Ibid. 643 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.115. 644 Galen, ‘To Thrasyboulos’, p.75. 185 Chapter One also found that, through characters like Hamlet and Faustus, scholarly melancholy could be used to comment on the continuing calls for reform in the English Church by those who would come to be known as Calvinists or Puritans. It did so by focusing on two possible negative corollaries of scholarly melancholy: ambition and despair. This chapter showed how scholarly melancholy can eventually cause despair, and how dramas could use this to critique Calvinism and its emphasis on predestination doctrine. Despair, an advanced form of religious melancholy, causes the ultimate crisis of some of these plays, as the protagonists are unable to escape their fate as pre-chosen reprobates. Colston, in his study of Macbeth, noted that despair is more than ‘mere hopelessness. It is a living nothingness, spiritual death, the starting point and destiny of all sin.’645 Using contemporary texts such as Bright’s Treatise of Melancholy, which explores the similarities and differences between melancholy and the ‘cóscience of sinne,’ Chapter One extended Colston’s findings in order to show the ways in which melancholy could lead to, and was fed by, these narratives of despair and its ultimate destination – hell.646 This chapter argued that portrayals of scholarly melancholy could feed discussions about religious controversy. In cases like Marlowe’s Faustus, the significant anti-Calvinist sentiment of the work is inherently connected to its discourses on melancholy: if Faustus did not suffer with his scholarly melancholy, his genius may never have aspired to become ‘a mighty god,’ and without the sin of ambition and pride which this represents, Faustus may never have turned towards the path of magic – the question presented in this play is whether Faustus ever truly had a choice, or if his path was pre-determined (Faustus, 1.1.64). Scholarly melancholy as a theatrical trope, therefore, seems to have developed in response to both the emerging fashion of affecting melancholy for its association with men of learning and genius, and as a response to Calvinism: it acts as a warning, since melancholy does not only lead to ‘judgement and wisdom’ but can also ‘becloud the spirit’ and terrify the soul.647 The sinfulness suggested in the despair of these tragic melancholic scholars continues with the protagonists of the revenge tragedies discussed in Chapter Two, as does the need to remove melancholy from the stage through exile or death. This chapter focused on revenge tragedies from the late 1500s to the early 1600s, such as Spanish Tragedy and Revenger’s Tragedy and ended by discussing two tragicomedies – Antonio’s Revenge and Malcontent. Chapter Two was able to showcase that melancholy was crucial as a motivating factor for 645 Colston, ‘Macbeth and the Tragedy of Sin,’ p.85. 646 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p.182. 647 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p.117. 186 revengers in the period, and highlighted melancholy’s emerging status as a performative emotion. Throughout this thesis, we have used Judith Butler’s theory of performative vs. ‘anatomical’ gender to describe the process of emotion: I have suggested that just as the performance of gender does not necessarily accurately reflect anatomical gender, the performance of emotion does not always match the anatomical emotion.648 As Butler states ‘acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect’ of gendered performance, I have noted ways in which acts, gestures, and desire can produce the effect of emotional performance, but significantly this, along with gender, is always ‘on the surface of the body.’649 The performativity of this vengeful melancholy identified in Chapter Two connects it with the fashion for affecting scholarly melancholy mentioned above, but this theatricality becomes particularly apparent in the drive of the revenge tragedies to create bloody spectacles. Chapter Two identified a specific kind of revengeful melancholy, characterised by gory, bloody, and performative spectacle – including plays-within-plays, disguisings, fatal masques, and intense violence. The melancholy of the revenger accounts not only for his long delay in committing the act of vengeance, but this particular melancholy also becomes extraordinarily performative as the revengers take on the role of the malcontent, and use their theatrical melancholy as a means to create their gory spectacle, sinking the revengers deeper into bloodshed, and thus deeper into sin. This revengeful melancholy often leads to the revenger(s) becoming a threat to society. Therefore, the melancholy – and the revenger suffering from it - must be overcome or removed so that society can seem to move towards a better future. This chapter used texts such as Barrough’s Method of Phisicke to discuss the connections between melancholia and madness, and how this may make melancholy seem like a frenzy, or a ‘madnes [sic].’650 The revenger will stop at nothing to avenge their dead loved one, often insisting that entire families must die for the revenge to be complete. This vengeful melancholy must therefore be purged, and this is often achieved through the death of the revenger, often presented as a suicidal impulse towards execution. Melancholy was known to cause a desire for death, leading many sufferers to ‘determine to kell them selues.’651 This suicidal impetus drives the action towards its seemingly inevitable conclusion, as the revengers determine to die in a blaze of theatrical, often bloody, glory. This suicidal 648 Butler, Gender Trouble, p.175 649 Ibid., p.173. Emphasis Butler’s. 650 Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p.17. 651 Ibid., p.35. 187 impulse often acts as a necessary purgation of melancholy, with the bleeding of the villain being followed swiftly by the execution of the revenger themselves – this acts as a final, fatal purging of the melancholic ‘bad blood’ which threatens to overtake the society represented in the play.652 Chapter Two ended by looking at tragicomedies, and the ways in which dramatists ended them. This is still with a purgation, but one which does not involve the death of the revenger, as in the revenge tragedies. Chapter Three went on to explore the ways in which dramatists continued to use purgations in comic drama. Chapter Three therefore differs from Erin Sullivan’s suggestion that melancholy in dramatic comedies is always to be ‘laughed at,’ and instead distinguishes between melancholy as comedy, the gulls, whom we are encouraged to laugh at, and melancholy which acts as a barrier to comedy, which must be overcome, and which is suffered by the discontents.653 The categories used in this chapter were themselves formed in the basis of a distinction Jonson makes in his Induction to Every Man Out of His Humour, between melancholy as a humour of ‘the general disposition,’ which Jonson suggests is to be pitied, and melancholy as an ‘affect,’ practised by those who ‘in wearing a pyed feather’ assume a habit, or humour, which is not their own (Every Man Out, Induction, 104, 113, 111). Those suffering from melancholy as a ‘disposition,’ whose melancholy can become dangerously close to the melancholy already displayed in the tragedies, are generally the protagonists of the play – usually young lovers, often male, and frequently suffering from a love melancholy: Orsino from Twelfth Night, Claudio from Much Ado, and Dowsecer from Humorous Day’s Mirth are particularly pertinent examples of these discontents. The term discontent, which I use throughout Chapter Three to discuss this specific kind of melancholic in comedy, I take from Burton, who suggests that ‘discontent’ is a common symptom of melancholy, saying that sufferers are ‘torne in pieces with suspition, feare, sorrow, discontents, cares, shames, anguish.’.654 The discontent experiences love melancholy to the degree that it becomes almost tragic, and is often the cause of the crisis of comic plays. It must, therefore, be purged from the discontent so that they may gain the comic resolution – the marriage ending and the possession of the beloved. Because of its dangerous similarity to tragic melancholy, this type of melancholy must be purged from the discontent so that they may gain the comic resolution – the marriage ending and the possession of the beloved. The marriage ending, I noted in Chapter Three, serves as a fortification against the solitude of 652 Burton, Anatomy, vol.2, p.237. 653 Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, p.110. 654 Burton, Anatomy, vol.1, p.25, 431. 188 melancholy by providing, as Hopkins terms it, ‘a relationship which is, in theory at least, one of indissoluble bonding.’655 Such purgations can be explicit, such as that which Antonio almost suffers in Merchant of Venice. If not explicitly couched in medical terminology, these purgations can be, and often are, more subtle, like the symbolic death and resurrection of the woman, such as that of Hero in Much Ado. When the melancholy of the protagonist is not overcome, as is the case with Antonio’s melancholy in Merchant, the comic ending is consequently compromised, leading the ending of the play to feel uncomic, even tragic. The other “type,” or species of melancholy which I identified in Chapter Three is the melancholy gull. This section of the chapter suggested that, as an audience, we are encouraged to laugh at the melancholy of the gulls because it is explicitly characterized as inauthentic. The melancholy of the gulls is often highly theatrical, but most importantly, it is not truly felt. It is on this vice of hypocrisy which our laughter finds ‘notable cause to work,’ to borrow Maria’s term for the gulling of Malvolio (TN, 2.3.148). In Chapman’s Humorous Day’s Mirth, for example we saw how Labesha, the gull, is mocked in a satiric version of the cure which is attempted on the play’s discontent, Dowsecer. Dowsecer’s cure is attempted through placing ‘armour, picture, and apparel’ in his room; Labesha, on the other hand, is tempted with the more childish and gluttonous ‘mess of cream, a spice-cake, and a spoon.’ (Humorous, 10.26). Labesha and his fellow gulls are denied the comic ending, and denied possession of the beloved woman, because they are ‘ridiculous,’ in Ben Jonson’s words (Every Man Out, Induction, 114). However, just as with the discontents, some characters can complicate this distinction. Twelfth Night’s Malvolio begins the play as a gull, and we are encouraged to laugh at him, as we are with Labesha, particularly when he takes the stage in his absurd ‘yellow stockings’ (TN, 2.5.166). Yet by the end of the play the audience is encouraged to see Malvolio as ‘notoriously abused,’ a phrase which is repeated several times from the moment the audience sees Malvolio incarcerated in 4.2 (TN, 5.1.375). Malvolio’s faux, theatrical melancholy transforms into a genuine melancholy through the ‘physic’ which the clowns use on him, and at the end of the play his melancholy seems more like that of a discontent, in that it is authentic, and potentially dangerous (TN, 2.3.167). Like Antonio’s melancholy, Malvolio’s uncured melancholy complicates the comic resolution. Malvolio’s cry for vengeance at the end of Twelfth Night – ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you’ – lingers as Olivia and the other protagonists attempt to continue with the comic marriage conclusion (TN, 5.1.372). Awkwardly for the audience, whose laughter may include them in 655 Hopkins, ‘Marriage as Comic Closure’, p.37. 189 the ‘pack’ of tormentors, Malvolio becomes an object of empathy rather than laughter, a discontent rather than a gull (TN, 5.1.372). The idea of empathising with our discontented, melancholic protagonists is challenged in the love tragedies of the Jacobean and Caroline eras which were explored in Chapter Four. In many ways, these love tragedies are the culmination of the disparate themes which I discussed throughout the preceding three chapters: combining a use of religious despair, like the tragedies of Chapter One, the vengeful, bloody, and theatrical spectacles of Chapter Two, and the necessity of purgation which was present throughout. As in Chapter Three, these dramas highlight a tension between the audience’s empathy with and rejection of the protagonist. Like the comedies of Chapter Three, these later tragedies use love melancholy as a source for dramatic motivation. We are at times made to question our empathy with the protagonists of Chapter Four’s love tragedies, however, as many of them are engaged in morally questionable relationships, like Annabella and Giovanni’s incestuous union in Ford’s ’Tis Pity. This chapter drew heavily on the work of Burton, given his close association with Ford, but also Ferrand’s Treatise on Lovesickness, which was an influential text discussing the symptoms, diagnosis, and cure of love melancholy. The melancholy of the lovers is often used in these dramas to create extraordinary spectacle, which can, as in the case of Giovanni’s spectacular entrance in the final scene of ’Tis Pity, where he bears Annabella’s heart aloft on his sword, help the audience forgo empathy with the protagonist so that they can consider the protagonists death a necessity. In some of the tragedies I explored in this chapter, however, the protagonists do have genuinely tragic backstories with which we are encouraged to empathise. Orgilus and Penthea in Broken Heart have such a story, and as an audience we are encouraged to empathise with the hopelessness of their love, and even come to understand their sinful, suicidal death, even as we condemn Orgilus for resorting to murder. Orgilus’s suicide is itself highly theatrical, once again linking with the theatrical melancholy we saw in Chapter Two. Just as in the revenge tragedies, these spectacles also act as a kind of catharsis, as part of the entertainment – ‘myrth, sport, play, and musicall instruments’ – which was thought to be so conducive to the purging of melancholy.656 In striving to showcase these varying “types” of melancholy, and demonstrate that they do not occur in isolation, I attempted in each chapter to provide a cross-section of texts from each rough chronological period, some canonical, some less well-researched, in order to provide a broad spectrum of plays for my analysis, and to prove that the phenomenon of 656 Boorde, Breuiarie of health, p.78. 190 melancholy onstage was no isolated incident. This thesis has attempted to show the widespread importance of melancholy to the dramas and medical literature of the early modern period, not merely to one dramatist or group of dramatists. I believe that this has been a largely successful aspect of this thesis. However, whilst every attempt has been made to discuss a wide variety of both texts and authors, as with any limited study, many worthy examples are sure to have been missed. There is much room for expansion, for example, on the melancholy, medicine, and mental disorder presented in works such as Thomas Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion (1601), and The Whore of Babylon (1606), or Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614). The extent of extant medical literature from the period has inevitably meant that certain texts will have been given more prominence than others. Burton’s Anatomy, Du Laurens’s Preservation of the Sight, Bright’s Treatise on Melancholy, and Ficino’s Three Books on Life have been given the most prominence in this work. In terms of reprintings, these texts were popular: in an era in which printing was an expensive and laborious task, to have reprinted books several times must have meant there was a popular demand for them, and we see this in the work of authors such as Burton, whose Anatomy was republished five times during his lifetime.657 The work of Ficino and Du Laurens became particularly influential on this thesis because of the influence they had during the period in which these dramatists and medical writers were working. With the exception of these notable examples, I have attempted, throughout the chapters, to concentrate on medical works that are roughly contemporary with the dramatic texts under discussion, so we can see the ways in which medical understandings of melancholy were being carried out on the stage and the immediate relationship that may have had with the medical literature of the same period. This, for example, has meant that texts such as Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall, appeared most often in Chapter Two, where we for the most part discuss plays written and performed in the early part of the 1600s. This thesis has presented a cross-generational study of melancholy, charting the ways its presentation on the stage altered from the beginnings of professional theatre in the late Elizabethan period, up to just a few years before the closure of the theatres in 1642. The structure of this thesis was useful in helping to identify which kinds of melancholy were being portrayed on the early modern stage, and we can easily identify the three distinct 657 For discussion of Burton’s work, see Tilmouth, ‘Burton’s Turning Picture’; Lund, Melancholy, Medicine, and Religion. 191 subspecies of melancholy which became most important to this thesis: scholarly melancholy, love melancholy, and vengeful melancholy. Religious melancholy was also highly important but has only occurred in this thesis when in conjunction with another kind of melancholy: the scholarly melancholy of Faustus in Chapter One, the affected melancholy of Malvolio and Florilla in Chapter Three, and the scholarly love melancholy of Giovanni in Chapter Four. In my research for this thesis I found no direct examples of “pure” religious melancholy, where that melancholy was not also linked to another type of melancholy, and is instead entirely focused on religion and the possibility of damnation, on the stage: if such examples exist, then there is much research to be done on identifying them and the role they have to play in the early modern dramatic landscape. In identifying these differing kinds of melancholy, the structure of this thesis also began to answer the question of what these dramatists were doing with melancholy. It proves that melancholy was commonly used throughout the period and in varying dramatic genres, almost always as an obstacle to the protagonist’s happiness. In the comedies, the melancholy of the lover must be overcome before they can gain the happiness of marriage. In the tragedies, melancholy becomes almost personified in the protagonist or anti-hero and therefore they themselves must be purged from the society of the play – usually through death but occasionally, in the tragicomedies, these vengeful, murdering protagonists, are able to overcome their melancholy, and if the melancholy is purged, society can be seen to have hope. There is an idealism about this reading of melancholy, perhaps, that dramatists were concerned with purging the negativity, sadness, fear, and despondency which is represented by melancholy in order to leave society a little brighter, less melancholy, than it was before the play began. Given the strong evidence, which we have seen throughout this thesis, that theatre and plays were often seen as something which could cure melancholy, I do not think the notion impossible. Playwrights were not doctors, but by using the ‘myrth, sport, play’ and ‘honest pastime’ of going to the theatre and being with other people, could they contribute to the overall good mental health of the community?658 The emphasis this thesis places on the performativity of melancholy, and its overlooked connection to theatricality is something unique in early modern medical and dramatic studies. The introduction to this thesis defined spectacle as follows: a ‘specially prepared or arranged display […] forming an impressive or interesting show or 658 Boorde, Breuiarie of Health, p.78. 192 entertainment’ and especially ‘of a striking or unusual character.’659 Throughout this thesis I have used this definition to refer to plays – which are, in themselves, spectacles. But more specifically, we have seen that the plays contain spectacles within spectacles – heightened moments of theatricality, where the world is perhaps more unrealistic than naturalistic, where people commit elaborate, thought-out murders involving mechanical chairs, and where the most memorable moments of the play often occur. We have seen throughout the thesis how often these moments intersect with the melancholy of the protagonists or anti-heroes, providing a moment of crisis or cure, where the melancholic must kill or be killed. This thesis has also shown that melancholy itself can be considered a performative emotion. Melancholy is performative not just for the gulls, who, as we saw in Chapter Three, perform melancholy badly to the amusement of both onstage and offstage audiences, but also for the revengers, and for the lovers who end their star-crossed affairs in a blaze of blood and death. This thesis has shown the inherent importance of melancholy to the early modern stage. It has argued that melancholy is one of the most important motivating factors in the drama, which consistently represents an obstacle which must be overcome – either through the rebalancing of the humours, or through its removal from the stage – in order for catharsis of some kind to take place. Melancholy is present in all types of drama. It is represented in various forms, sometimes to highlight other issues, such as religious reform, but also as an issue in and of itself, a universal antagonist, and a human enemy which audiences both early modern and modern may recognize. Throughout the thesis I have sought to explore what Gowland called the ‘problem’ of early modern melancholy – why there is such a proliferation of discourse on this disease. By focusing on both dramatic and medical literature, this thesis has uncovered the level to which the two, medicine and drama, were intertwined, and has pushed back against Babb’s binary of literary versus scientific melancholy.660 The representation of melancholy on the early modern stage is important because it is so ubiquitous. It is prevalent in every genre, from every dramatist, it infects plays from the Elizabethan period, through the Jacobean period, into the Caroline era, and beyond. Without melancholy, Hamlet might not be the extraordinary exploration of delayed vengeance which it undoubtedly is; Giovanni would never have run into Soranzo’s feast, wielding his sister’s heart on his sword in ’Tis Pity; Twelfth Night’s Orsino and Viola may never have fallen in love. Without melancholy, early modern drama ceases to have the hold on our modern psyche 659 “spectacle, n.”, OED Online, (Oxford University Press, 2019), 193 which it does. I thus close this thesis the same way which it opened, the only fitting way it can be closed – with the words of Robert Burton: ‘all the World is melancholy or mad, dotes, and every member of it, I have ended my task.’661 661 Burton, Anatomy, vol.3, p.109. 194 Bibliography Primary Materials Adams, Thomas, The White Devil or The Hypocrite Vncased: In a Sermon Preached at Payls Crosse, March 7 1612 (London: Thomas Snodham, 1613) Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius, Three Books of Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia libri III, 1533), ed. by Donald Tyson (Alberta: Theophania Publishing, 2011) Allin, Ralph, The hauen of hope containing godlie praiers and meditations for diuers purposes. Gathered by R.A. (London: Yareth Iames, 1585) Anonymous, The Lamentable tragedie of Locrine, the eldest sonne of King Brutus discoursing the warres of the Britaines, and Hunnes, with their discomfiture: the Britaines victorie with their accidents, and the death of Albanact. No less pleasant than profitable. Newly set foorth, ouerseene, and corrected, by VV.S. (London: Thomas Creede, 1595) Aristotle, The Problemes of Aristotle with other philosophers and phisitians. Wherein are contained diuers questions, with their answers, touching the estate of mans bodie (Edinburgh: Robert Waldgrave, 1595) Barnes, Jonathan, ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle, 3 vols. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984) Barrough, Philip, The Methode of Phisicke Conteyning the causes, signes, and cures of invvard diseases in mans body from head to the foote. (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1583) Bartholomaeus, Anglicus, Batman vppon Bartholome his booke De Proprietatibus rerum (London: Thomas East, 1582) Beard, Thomas, The Theatre of God’s Judgments (London: Adam Islip, 1597) Boorde, Andrew, The Breuiarie of Health (London: Thomas East, 1587) Bright, Timothy, A Treatise of Melancholy (London: John Windet, 1586) Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. by Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, Rhonda L. Blair, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 195 Calvin, Jean, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. by Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: The Calvin Translation Society, 1845) Carew, Richard, The Examination of Men’s Wits ed. by Rocío G. Sumillera (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2014) Chapman, George, An Humorous Day’s Mirth, ed. by Charles Edelman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010) Chapman, George, Monsieur D’Olive (London: T.C. for William Homes, 1606) Chettle, Henry, The Tragedy of Hoffman or A Reuenge for a Father (London: Hugh Perry, 1631) Dekker, Thomas, Lust’s Dominion (London: F.K, 1657) Edwards, Edward, The vvhole art of Chyrurgery (London: Thomas Harper, 1637) Epicurus, ‘Letter to Menoeceus’, Lives of Eminent Philosophers Book X, Diogenes Laertius, trans. Robert Drew Hicks Ferrand, Jaques, A Treatise on Lovesickness, trans. and ed. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1990) Ferrier, Auger, A Learned Astronomical discourse, of the iudgement of natiuities (London: Richard Watkins, 1593) Ficino, Marsilio, Three Books on Life: A Critical Edition and Translation with Introduction and Notes, ed. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghampton: State University of New York, 1989) Ford, John, Love’s Sacrifice, ed. A. T. Moore (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) Ford, John, The Broken Heart, ed. Brian Gibbons (London: A & C Black, 1965; repr. 1994) Ford, John, The Lover’s Melancholy, ed. R. F. Hill (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985) 196 Ford, John, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ed. Martin Wiggins (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2003; repr. 2015) Foxe, John, The Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church, Galen, ‘To Thrasyboulos’, Galen: Selected Works, ed. P. N. Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 53-99 Guarini, Giambattista, ‘The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry’, trans. Allan H. Gilbert, Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, ed. Allan H. Gilbert (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1940; repr. 1962), 504-533 Goeurot, Jean, The Regiment of Life, whereunto is added a treatise of the pestilence, with the boke of children, newly corrected and enlarged by Thomas Phaire (London: Edward Whitechurch, 1550) Gyer, Nicolas, The English Phlebotomy: or, Method and way of healing by letting blood (London: Andrew Mansell, 1592) Henslowe, Philip, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961) Jonson, Ben, ‘Every Man in His Humour, folio version (1616)’, ed. by David Bevington in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online ed. Jonson, Ben, ‘Every Man out of his Humour (1599)’, ed by Randall Martin in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online ed. Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. by J. R. Mulryne (London: Methuen Drama, 1970; repr. 2009) du Laurens, André, A Discourse on the Preservation of the Sight: of Melancholike Diseases; of Rheumes, and of Old Age, trans. by Richard Surphlet (1599), ed. by Sanford V. Larkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938) Lavater, Lewes, Of Ghostes and Spirites walking by Nyght, ed. by J. Dover Wilson and Mary Yardley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929) Lowe, Peter, The Whole Course of chiurgerie (London: Thomas Purfoot, 1597) Manningham, John, ‘Diary Entry, February 2, 1602’, in Harleian MS 5353, fol. 12v., 197 diary-earliest-mention-twelfth-night-and-shakespeare-anecdote > Contributed to the Folger website by The British Library Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus (A- and B-Texts), ed. by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993; repr. 1995) Marston, John, ‘Antonio’s Revenge’, The Selected Plays of John Marston, ed. Macdonald P. Jackson and Michael Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 97-185 Marston, John, ‘The Malcontent’, The Selected Plays of John Marston, ed. Macdonald P. Jackson and Michael Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Middleton, Thomas, ‘The Bloody Banquet’, Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007; repr. 2010) Middleton, Thomas, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’, Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007; repr. 2010) Middleton, Thomas, The Revenger’s Tragedy (London: G Eld, 1607), Folger STC 24149 Nashe, Thomas, ‘Pierce Penniless’, Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. by Ronald B. McKerrow (London: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd., 1904), 153-245 Nashe, Thomas, The Terrors of the Night, or A Discourse of Apparitions (London: John Danter, 1594) Perkins, William, ‘A Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft’, in The Work of William Perkins, ed. by Ian Breward (Berkshire: The Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), 581-609 Perkins, William, ‘A Golden Chain or the Description of Theology containing the order of the causes of salvation and damnation according to God’s word.’ in The Work of William Perkins, ed. by Ian Breward (Berkshire: The Sutton Courtney Press, 1970), 171-259 Plato, Phaedo, trans. David Gallop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.12 de la Primaudaye, Pierre, The Second Part of the French Academie. (London: GB, 1594) Prynne, William, Histrio-mastix The Player’s Scourge or Actor’s Tragedie (London: E. A and W. I for Michael Sparke, 1632) 198 Scot, Reginald, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. by Hugh Ross Williamson (Arundel: Centaur Press Ltd, 1964) Seneca, De Providentia, trans. by John W. Basore (London and New York: Heinemann, 1928) Seneca, Seneca his tenne tragedies, translated into Englysh (London: Thomas Marsh, 1581) Sidney, Philip, An Apologie for Poetrie (London: Henry Olney, 1595) Shakespeare, William, As You Like It, ed. by Juliet Dusinberre (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2006) Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, ed. by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2006; repr. 2014) Shakespeare, William, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. by H. R. Woudhuysen (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1998) Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, ed. by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2015) Shakespeare, William, Much Ado About Nothing, ed. by Claire McEachern (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2006; repr. 2016) Shakespeare, William, Romeo and Juliet, ed. by Brian Gibbons (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2008) Shakespeare, William, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. by Barbara Hogden (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2010) Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice, ed. by John Drakkis (London: Methuen Drama,2010) Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. by Kier Elam (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2008) Tofte, Robert, Alba: The Months Minde of a melancholy louer (London: Felix Kingston, 1598) de Ventadorn, Bernart, ‘Non es meravelha s’eu chan’, The Songs of Bernart De Ventadorn, ed. by Stephen G. Nichols Jr, A. Galm, & Bartlett Giamatti (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 132-134 199 Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. by Leah S. Marcus (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2009) Weyer, Johann, On Witchcraft: An Abridged Translation of Johann Weyer’s De Praestigiis Daemonum, ed. by Benjamin G. Kohl and H. C. Midelfort, trans. John Shea (North Carolina: Pegasus Press, 1998) Whitgift, Bishop, ‘The Lambeth Articles’ (1595), in Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge, ed. by H. C. Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958) Wirsung, Christof, The General Practice of Physicke, trans. by Jacob Moson (London, 1605) Wright, Thomas, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, (London: Valentine Simmes, 1604) Secondary Materials Anderson, David K., ‘The Theater of the Damned: Religion and the Audience in the Tragedy of Christopher Marlowe’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 54.1 (2012), 79 -105 Anglin, Emily, ‘“Something in me dangerous”: Hamlet, Melancholy, and the Early Modern Scholar’, Shakespeare, 13 (2017), 15-29 Anonymous, ‘Shakespeare’s Quartos: Love’s Labour’s Lost’, British Library Online Babb, Lawrence, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580-1624 (Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1951) Balch, David L. and Carolyn Osiek, eds., Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003) Bamborough, J. B, ‘Burton, Robert (1577-1640)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., Oct. 2009) Barbour, Reid, and David Norbrook, eds., The Works of Lucy Hutchinson Vol. 1: The Translation of Lucretius Part 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Battenhouse, Roy W., ‘The Ghost in Hamlet: A Catholic Linchpin?’, Studies in Philology, 48 (1951), pp.161-192 200 Bell, Gerard, Rochi Rampal, Graeme Rose, Craig Stephens, eds, The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. Adapted for the stage by Stan’s Café (Birmingham: Stan’s Café, 2013) Bernard, J. F., ‘The Merchant of Venice and Shakespeare’s Sense of Humour(s)’, Renaissance Studies, 28 (2013), 643-658 Bernard, J. F., Shakespearean Melancholy: Philosophy, Form, and the Transformation of Comedy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018) Bevington, David, and Eric Rasmussen, eds., Doctor Faustus (A- and B-Text) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993; repr. 1995) Blair, Rhonda L., Thomas Faulkner, and Nicolas K. Kiessling, eds., The Anatomy of Melancholy, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) Bowers, Fredson, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587-1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940) Breward, Ian, The Work of William Perkins (Berkshire: The Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970) Buccola, Regina and Lisa Hopkins, ‘Introduction’ in Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama, ed. by Regina Buccola and Suzanne Dixon (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1-20 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999) Cahill, Edward, ‘The Problem of Malvolio’, College Literature, 23.2 (1996), 62-82 Carnegie, David, ‘“Maluolio within”: Performance Perspectives on the Dark House’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52 (2001), 393-414 Cave, Richard Allen, ‘Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour: A Case Study’, in The Cambridge History of British Theatre Volume 1: Origins to 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 282-297 Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967; repr. 1971) Colston, Ken, ‘Macbeth and the Tragedy of Sin’, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 13 (2010), 60-95 201 Condon, James J., ‘Setting the Stage for Revenge: Space, Performance, and Power in early modern revenge tragedy’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 25 (2012), 62-82 Coyne, John D., ‘Hamlet by William Shakespeare Presented by Surgical Pathology’, International Journal of Surgical Pathology, 21 (2013), 508 Cox, John D., ‘Religion and Suffering in Macbeth’, Christianity and Literature, 6 (2013), 225-240 Cunningham, Andrew, and Ole Peter Grell, eds., Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996) Cunningham, Karen, ‘Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death’, PMLA, 105 (1990), 209-222 Daniel, Drew, ‘“Let me have judgment, and the Jew his will”: Melancholic Epistemology and Masochistic Fantasy in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 61 (2010), 206-234 Davis, Michael, ‘Reading the Bible on the Early Modern Stage’, Early Modern Drama and the Bible: Contexts and Readings, 1570-1625, ed. by Adrian Streete (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Deutermann, Allison K., Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) Dixon, Suzanne, ‘Sex and the Married Woman in Ancient Rome’, Early ChristianFamilies in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue ed. by David L. Balch and Carolyn Osiek (Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003), 111-129 Dollimore, Jonathan, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984) Draper, John W., The Humours and Shakespeare’s Characters (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1945) Dunne, Derek, ‘Blushing on Cue: The Forensics of the Blush in Early Modern Drama’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 34:2 (2016), 233-252 202 Edelman, Charles, ed., An Humorous Day’s Mirth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010) Eisaman Maus, Katherine, ‘Horns of Dilemma: Jealousy, Gender, and Spectatorship in English Renaissance Drama’, ELH, 54 (1987), 561-583 Elam, Kier, ed., Twelfth Night, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2008), 1-152 Entwhistle, Joanne and Ashely Mears, ‘Gender on Display: Performativity in Fashion Modelling’, Cultural Sociology, 7 (2013), 320-335 Farr, Dorothy M., John Ford and the Caroline Theatre (London: Macmillan Press, 1979) Firth-Godbehere, Richard, ‘For “Physitians of the Soule”: The Roles of “Flight” and “Hatred of Abomination” in Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall’, Cerae: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early ModernStudies, 2 (2015), 1-30 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Fongemie, Pauly, Mary’s Symbols, www.catholictradition.org/Mary/marys-symbols.htm Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard, ed. David Cooper (London: Routledge, 1967) Gellert Lyons, Bridget, Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971) Gowland, Angus, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, Past and Present, 191 (2006), 77-120 Gowland, Angus, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Greenblatt, Stephen, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013) Gulstad, William, ‘Mock-trial or witch-trial in King Lear’, Notes and Queries, 41 (1994), 494-516 203 Hirschfeld, Heather, The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare (New York: Cornell University Press, 2014) Hobgood, Allison P., Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Hodgkin, Katherine, ‘Scurvy Vapors and the devil’s claw: Religion and the body in seventeenth-century women’s melancholy’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 44.2 (2011), 1-21 Hoeniger, F. David, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (London: Associated University Press, 1992) Hogden, Barbara, ed., The Taming of the Shrew (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2010) Hopkins, Lisa, John Ford’s Political Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) Hopkins, Lisa, ‘Marriage as Comic Closure’, Shakespeare’s Comedies, ed. Emma Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 36-54 Hopkins, Lisa, ‘Speaking Sweat: Emblems in the Plays of John Ford’, Comparative Drama, 29 (1995), 133-146 Hopkins, Lisa, ‘Staging Passion in Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 45 (2005), 443-459 Iyengar, Sujata, ed, Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (New York: Routledge, 2015) James, K.A., ‘Barrow, Philip, (d. 1600)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.: Oxford University Press, 2008) Jarrett, Joseph, ‘Quantifying death, calculating revenge: mathematical justice in Henry Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman’, Renaissance Studies, 31 (2017), 549-568 Jinkins, Michael, ‘Perkins, William (1558-1603), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, OxfordUniversity Press, 2004; online ed., May 2007 204 Johnson, Laurie, John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble, eds, Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind (London: Routledge, 2014) Kaske, Carol V. & John R. Clark, eds., Three Books on Life: A Critical Edition and Translation with Introduction and Notes, ed. and trans. by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghampton: State University of New York, 1989) Kator, Daryl, ‘Shakespeare’s Political Philosophy: A Debt to Plato in Timon of Athens’, Philosophy and Literature, 36 (2012), 136-152 Kaufman, Peter Iver, ‘Hamlet’s Religions’, Religions, 2 (2011), 427-448 Kerwin, William, Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance Drama (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005) Kiessling, Nicolas K., The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographic Society, 1988) King, Christina Knellwolf, Faustus and the Promises of the New Science, c.1580-1730: From the Chapbooks to Harlequin Faustus (Surrey: Ashgate, 2008) Kohl, Benjamin G., and H. C. Midelfort, eds., On Witchcraft: An Abridged Translation of Johann Weyer’s De Praestigiis Daemonum, trans. John Shea (North Carolina: Pegasus Press, 1998) Knight, Sarah, ‘Fantastical Distempers: The Psychopathology of Early Modern Scholars’, in Early Modern Academic Drama, ed. by Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 129-152 Kuchar, Gary, The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Langley, Eric, Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) Lavagnino, John, and Gary Taylor, eds., Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007; repr. 2010) Leonard, Nathaniel, ‘Embracing the “Mongrel”: John Marston’s The Malcontent, Antonio and Mellida and the Development of Early Modern Tragicomedy’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 12.3 (2013), 60-87 205 Lewis, Cynthia, ‘Antonio and Alienation in The Merchant of Venice’, South Atlantic Review, 48-4 (1983), 19-31 Lucas, F. L., Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle’s Poetics, (London: Hogarth Press, 1927) Lund, Mary Ann, Melancholy, Medicine, and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Lund, Mary Ann, ‘Reading and the Cure of Despair in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, Studies in Philology, 105 (2008), 533-558. Macfarlane, Allan, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970) Maguire, Laurie E., and Emma Smith, 30 Great Myths About Shakespeare (Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2013) Martin, Matthew R., Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015) McAlindon, Tom, ‘Doctor Faustus: Grounded in Astrology’, Literature and Theology, 8 (1994), 384-393 McCabe, Richard A., ‘Ben Jonson, Theophrastus, and the Comedy of Humours’, Hermathena: A Trinity College Dublin Review, 146 (1989) McCann, D., and C. McKechnie-Mason, eds, Fear in the Medical and Literary Imagination: Medieval to Modern (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) McCullen Jr, Joseph T., ‘Madness and the Isolation of Characters in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama’, Studies in Philology, 48 (1951), 206-218 McDowell, Shaun H., ‘Of Quintains, Harts, and Lionesses: Impure Melancholy As Shakespeare Liked It’, Revue de literature et de civilisation, 33 (2018), 1-23 McEachern, Claire, ed., Much Ado About Nothing (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2006; repr. 2016) McKerrow, Ronald B., ed., Works of Thomas Nashe (London: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd., 1904) Moore, A. T., ed., Love’s Sacrifice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) 206 Moulton, Ian Frederick, ‘Catching the Plague: Love, Happiness, Health, and Disease in Shakespeare’ in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. by Sujata Iyengar (New York: Routledge, 2015), 212-222 Murphy, Kathryn, ‘Jesuits and Philosophasters: Robert Burton’s Response to the Gunpowder Plot’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 1 (2009), 2-17 Neill, Michael, ‘Ford, John (bap. 1586, d.1639x53?)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.: Oxford University Press, 2004) Neill, Michael, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) Nicholl, Charles, ‘Marlowe, Christopher (bap. 1564, d.1593), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed: Oxford University Press, 2008) Owens, Margaret E., ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy as Trauerspiel’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 55 (2015), 403-421 Paster, Gain Kern, Humouring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004) Patterson, Steve, ‘The Bankruptcy of Homoerotic Amity in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 50 (1999), 9-32 Pinciss, Gerald M. ‘Marlowe’s Cambridge Years and the Writing of Doctor Faustus’, Studiesin English Literature 1500-1900, 33 (1993), 249-264 Porter, H. C., Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958) Purkiss, Diane, ‘The Masque of Food: Staging and Banqueting in Shakespeare’s England’, Shakespeare Studies, 42 (2014), 91-105 Radden, Jennifer, The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Sachs, Arieh, ‘Religious Despair in Medieval Literature and Art’, Medieval Studies, 26 (1964), 231-256 Sachs, Arieh, ‘The Religious Despair of Doctor Faustus’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 63 (1964), 625-647 207 Sanders, Julie, ‘“In the Friars”: The Spatial and Cultural Geography of an Indoors Playhouse’, Cahiers élisabéthans, 88 (2015), 19-33 Schalkwyck, David, ‘Is Love an Emotion? Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Antony and Cleopatra,’ symplokē, 18 (2010), 99-130 Schmidt, Jeremy, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion: Moral Philosophy, and Madness in the Early Modern Period (Surrey: Ashgate, 2007) Schmitt, Charles B., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Sensabaugh, G. F., ‘Burton’s Influence on Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy’, Studies in Philology, 33.4 (1936), 545-571 Shagan, Ethan H., The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Shoham-Steiner, Ephraim, ‘“Pharaoh’s Bloodbath”: Medieval European Jewish Thoughts about Leprosy, Disease, and Blood Therapy’, Jewish Blood: Reality and Metaphor in Jewish History, Religion, and Culture, ed. by M. Hart (London: Routledge, 2009), 99- 115 Shirilan, Stephanie, Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015) Simeon, James R., Shakespearean Iconoclasm (London: University of California Press, 1985) Singer, P. N., ed., Galen: Selected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) Smith, Emma, ed., Shakespeare’s Comedies, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004) Smith, Molly, ‘The Theater and the Scaffold: Death as Spectacle in The Spanish Tragedy’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 32 (1992), 217-232 Smith, Nathaniel B., ‘Speaking Medicine: A Paracelsian Parody of the Humours in Taming of the Shrew’, in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. by Sujata Iyengar (New York: Routledge, 2015), 195-211 Spinrad, Phoebe S., ‘The Sacralization of Revenge in Antonio’s Revenge’, Comparative Drama, 30.2 (2005), 169-185 208 Stachniewski, John, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) Streufert, Paul D., and Jonathan Walker, eds., Early Modern Academic Drama (Surrey: Ashgate, 2008) Stroup, Thomas B., ‘Doctor Faustus and Hamlet: Contrasting Kinds of Christian Tragedy’, Comparative Drama, 5 (1971-2), 242-253 Sullivan, Erin, Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Sullivan, Erin, ‘Doctrinal Doubleness and the Meaning of Despair in William Perkins’s Table and Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience’, Studies in Philology, 110 (2013), 533-561 Sullivan, Erin, ‘Shakespeare and the History of Heartbreak’, The Lancet, 382 (2013), 933-934 Taylor, Gary, ‘Gender, Hunger, Horror: The History and Significance of The Bloody Banquet’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 1 (2004), 1-45 Taylor, Neil, and Ann Thompson, eds., Hamlet, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2006; repr. 2014) Thorndike, Ashley, ‘The Relations of Hamlet to the Contemporary Revenge Play’, PMLA, 17 (1902), 125-220 Thorne, Tony ‘Countess Dracula’: The Life and Times of the Blood Countess, Elizabeth Báthory, (London: Bloomsbury, 1997) Tilmouth, Christopher, ‘Burton’s “Turning Picture”: Argument and Anxiety in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, The Review of English Studies, 56 (2005), 524-549 Vaught, Jennifer C., ed, Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) Walsh, Brian, Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Wiggins, Martin, ed., ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2003; repr. 2015) 209 Wilders, John, ed., Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice, A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1969) Wilson, Jeffrey R., ‘“To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy’, Shakespeare, 14.4 (2018), 341-359 Wooton, David ‘Scott [Scot], Reginald (d. 1599)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., Sept 2004 Woudhuysen, H. R. ed., Love’s Labour’s Lost (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1998) Wymer, Roland, Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986) 210