Front Matter

Cambridge University Press 0521834694 - The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England Douglas Trevor Frontmatter More information

The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England

The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England explores how attitudes toward, and explanations of, human emotions changed in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Typically categorized as “literary” writers, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Robert Burton, and John Milton were all active in the period’s reappraisal of the single emotion that, due to their efforts, would become the passion most associated with the writing life: melancholy. By emphasizing the shared concerns of the “non-literary” and “literary” texts produced by these ﬁgures, Douglas Trevor asserts that quintessentially “scholarly” practices such as glossing texts and appending sidenotes shape the methods by which these same writers come to analyze their own moods. He also examines early modern medical texts, dramatur- gical representations of learned depressives such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the opposition to materialistic accounts of the passions voiced by Neopla- tonists such as Edmund Spenser. By so doing, he details the growing cultural signiﬁcation of sadness in Renaissance England, and considers what the wide- ranging writings of self-described melancholics tell us about the era in which they lived.

douglas trevor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is co-editor of Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Cul- ture (2000), and has published articles on Michel de Montaigne, Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert, and other early modern writers. He is also a contributing editor to The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (2002), and serves on the Editorial Board of the Shakespeare Yearbook.

Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

General Editor STEPHEN ORGEL Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities, Stanford University

Editorial board Anne Barton, University of Cambridge Jonathan Dollimore, University of York Marjorie Garber, Harvard University Jonathan Goldberg, Johns Hopkins University Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame Kate McLuskie, University of Southampton Nancy Vickers, Bryn Mawr College

Since the 1970s there has been a broad and vital reinterpretation of the nature of literary texts, a move away from formalism to a sense of literature as an aspect of social, economic, political, and cultural history. While the earliest new historical work was criticized for a narrow and anecdotal view of history, it also served as an important stimulus for post-structuralist, feminist, Marxist, and psychoanalytical work, which in turn has increasingly informed and redirected it. Recent writing on the nature of representation, the historical construction of gender and of the concept of identity itself, on theatre as a political and economic phenomenon, and on the ideologies of art generally, reveals the breadth of the ﬁeld. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture is designed to offer historically oriented studies of Renaissance literature and theatre which make use of the insights afforded by theoretical perspectives. The view of history envisioned is above all a view of our own history, a reading of the Renaissance for and from our own time.

Recent titles include

38. Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory 39. Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre 40. Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities 41. Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Works and English Identity in Early Modern Drama 42. Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England 43. Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship 44. William N. West, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe 45. Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 46. Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670 47. Deanne Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare

A complete list of books in the series is given at the end of the volume

The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England

Douglas Trevor

published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011–4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarc´on13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org

C Douglas Trevor 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Times 10/12 pt. System LATEX2ε [tb]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 521 83469 4 hardback

In memory of my sister, Jolee

Contents

List of illustrations page x Acknowledgments xi

1 The reinvention of sadness 1 The margins of learning 24 2 Detachability and the passions in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender 34 Sadness in The Faerie Queene 47 3 Hamlet and the humors of skepticism 63 4 John Donne and scholarly melancholy 87 Biathanatos: the sidenote as symptom 105 5 Robert Burton’s melancholic England 116 Burton’s scholarly method 130 6 Solitary Milton 150 The scholarly method of the antiprelatical and divorce tracts 164 Isolated temptations in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained 180 Epilogue. After Galenism: angelic corporeality in Paradise Lost 193

Notes 196 Bibliography 229 Index 246

Illustrations

1. Page 172 from the 1621 edition of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. page 134 2. Page 114 from the 1624 edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy. 135 3. Page 322 from the 1621 edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy. 138 4. Page 285 from the 1624 edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy. 139 5. Pages 322–323 from the 1628 edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy. 142 6. Page 11 from John Milton’s Of Prelatical Episcopacy (London, 1641). 168 7. Page 8 from James Ussher’s Judgement of Doctor Rainholdes Touching the Originall of Episcopacy (London, 1641). 169 8. Page 19 from Milton’s Animadversions Upon The Remonstrants Defence Against Smectymnuus (London, 1641). 172 9. Page 14 from Joseph Hall’s A Defence of the Humble Remonstrance (London, 1641). 173

All illustrations are reproduced by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Acknowledgments

Remarkably few of the scholars, teachers, and writers I wish to thank here exhibit the melancholic tendencies of the intellectuals examined in this book. They represent, on the contrary, a community of energetic, amiable specialists in early modern literature and culture. To have learned from them, and to be able to count them now as friends, is an enormous privilege; I certainly would have never started – much less completed – this book without their support. I began this project at Harvard University, under the unswerving guidance of Barbara Lewalski and a committee of advisors whose influence is everywhere in these pages. My utmost thanks to this doctoral committee, comprised of Tom Conley, Marjorie Garber, John Guillory, and Jeffrey Masten. While at Harvard, the participants in the Department of English’s Renaissance Colloquium offered valuable feedback and encouragement at a formative stage in my career. For their wisdom, I wish to thank specifically David Hillman, Carla Mazzio, Curtis Perry, Kristen Poole, Scott Stevens, and Eric Wilson. In the 1999–2000 academic year, I had the privilege of taking a Folger Seminar on the early modern passions led by Gail Kern Paster, whose work on humoralism has influenced an entire generation of scholars. I wish to thank Gail for her knowledge, understanding, and sense of “humor,” and single out two other participants in that seminar whose work has deeply influenced my own: Mary Floyd-Wilson and Katherine Rowe. The list of my debts to people who heard portions of this project delivered at public forums is too long to record here in full, but I would like to identify at least a few of the scholars whose responses to my work shaped this book: Douglas Brooks, Philip Fisher, Stephen Greenblatt, Dayton Haskin, Helen Marlborough, Arthur Marotti, Earl Miner, Richard Strier, Helen Vendler, Paul Werstine, and the late Michel Simonin. A number of institutions and organizations provided me with research fund- ing at pivotal junctures during this project. My thanks to the Whiting and Mellon Foundations in particular, and to the University of Iowa, which provided me with two Old Gold Summer Fellowships, several supplementary travel grants, and a flexible-load leave assignment in the fall of 2002, during which time I was a fellow at the Obermann Center for Advanced Study. My thanks to Jay

xii Acknowledgments

Semel, the Director of the Obermann Center, and to Deans Ra´ulCurto and Linda Maxson for their unstinting support. The staff at Harvard’s Houghton Library, where I undertook most of the research for this book, was also tremendously helpful, especially Susan Halpert and Denison Beach. As an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, I have been spoiled by the level of collegiality and intellectual effervescence to which I have grown accustomed. My thanks to all of my fellow faculty members but particularly to my chair, Brooks Landon, and the colleagues with whom I discussed this book in the most detail: Huston Diehl, Miriam Gilbert, Kevin Kopelson, Alvin Snider, and Garrett Stewart. Research assistance over the years was provided by Wendy Hyman, Scott Nowka, and Stacy Erickson. Jerry Harp and Christopher Burgess offered insightful, dogged proofreading. I wish also to record my appreciation to all of the wonderful students at Iowa from whom I have learned so much. Finally, my editor Stephen Orgel recommended countless revisions and offered puissant observations that enormously strengthened the claims and clarity of this book. I thank him for his perceptivity, generosity, and friend- ship. My anonymous, second reader provided by Cambridge University Press also brought enormous intelligence to bear on this project, and I am indebted to this person for helping me to improve this book greatly. Also at Cambridge University Press, Victoria Cooper, Mary Leighton, and Margaret Berrill did a fantastic job ushering my book into print. I also wish to thank all of my friends who have offered so much irreverence and good cheer, especially Dan Chiasson, John Ducker, and DeSales Harrison. My parents, Ben and Libby Trevor, have tolerated my interests, not to mention my disposition, for a long time and I appreciate their patience. Theresa, my wife, is my dearest friend, and I am grateful for all of her “Collateral love, and dearest amity.”

A portion of the ﬁrst section of chapter four is reprinted, with permission, from Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, vol. 40, no. 1 (Winter 2000). Part of the second section of chapter two appeared in Reading The Early Modern Passions, edited by Gail Kern Paster, Mary Floyd-Wilson, and Katherine Rowe (2004), and is reprinted by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.