72-4488 FOX, Ruth Amelia, 1942- THE TANGLED CHAIN: THE STRUCTURE OF DISORDER IN THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1971 Language and L iteratu re, modern University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan THE TANGLED CHAIN; THE STRUCTURE OF DISORDER IN THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY DISSERTATION resented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Ruth Amelia Fox, B.A., M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 1971 Approved by V AdviserA 1 < Department of English PLEASE NOTE: Some Pages have indistinct print. Filmed as received. UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS His speech was like a tangled chain; nothing impaired, but all disordered. —Shakespeare, A Mi dsummer—Night1 s Dream And this is that Homer's golden chain, which reacheth down from-heaven to earth, by which every creature i3 annexed, and depends on h is Creator. —Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy PREFATORY NOTE In preparing this thesis I have used the Everyman edition of the Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York, 1952)> 5 volumes. This is an edition of the 1 6^1 Anatomy corrected by the f if th (1658 ) edition. I have given full references in my paper as follows: (I.2.1.6;215) means Partition and Volume I. section 2. mem­ ber 1. subsection 6; page 215* References closely following on a full citation from the same subsection, or in an extended argument concern­ ing one subsection are given as page numbers only. Citations to the Preface in Volume I: (Preface, 97)> except in Chapter iv, where only the page number is given. When quoting from Burton, I have tried where possible to ex­ clude interpolated material, so that Jackson's translations have been regularly and sile n tly expunged; on the other hand, I have sometimes attempted to work paraphrases into my text when Burton himself did not translate and where clarification seemed advisable, and here Jackson's translations served as guide. In a few places I have thought it best to leave the editor's renderings of Burton's Latin in situ, and they appear bracketed as in his text; or I have cited them instead of the Latin, in which case the fact is noted in the parenthetical documen­ tation. In sum, ellipses in quoted passages indicate only matter excised from Burton's text. A few typographical errors in the Every­ iii man text have been silently corrected. I should like to thank Simon and Schuster, Inc., for kindly permitting me to use a passage from Rene Dubos' The Torch of Life. The second chapter of this study was originally written as my master's thesis (The Ohio State University, 1966), under the direction of* Professor Joan Y/ebber. Her comments and those of Professor Robert 0. Jones vfith regard to that chapter aided me greatly in finishing the project. Finally, it is not only meet and salutary, but downright plea­ sant at this point to be able to express appreciation for an adviser's teaching, general aid and comfort, and terrific insight into one's major and minor stupidities. I want to thank Joan Y/ebber for all of these, and fo r her friendship. TABLE OF CONTENTS Pago PREFATORY NOTE....................................................................................... i i i Chapter I . THE CUTTER'S ART.................................................................. 1 ■ I I . THIS NEW SCIENCE.................................................................. 54 i. Knowledge a3 Question: Definition i i . Knowledge in Defect: Cause i i i . Knowledge as Answer: Cure iv . The Pertinence of Knowledge I I I . LOVE'S COMMENT............................................................................102 i. Equivocation: Love is Charity ii. Equivocation: Love i3 Passion iii. Equivocation: Love is God IV. FACTS OF TIME AND SPIRIT ............ 172 i . Argumentum ii. Personae & Materia iii. Modus Operandi V. THE PROSODY OF THOUGHT.......................................................... 255 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY .....................................................248 *«>• v CHAPTER I THE CUTTER'S A.HP Ten distinct squares here seen apart, Are joined in one by cutter's art, —Burton, "The Argument o f the Frontispiece" The Anatomy of Melancholy, a book more often read in part than as a whole, criticized as art yet only with some discomfort approached as an a r tif a c t, less easily comprehended than i t is dissected, th is medical treatise written by an Anglican divine holds a peculiar place in the canon of seventeenth-century English-prose literature, Robert Burton forged the Anatomy out of his Renaissance scholar's familiarity with the literature of Western civilization, working centuries of authors into a compendium of science, philosophy, poetry, history, and divinity which contains examples of numerous lite ra ry genres yet re­ mains oui generis, the singular expression of its author's humane know­ ledge, Unlike other Renaissance "anatomies" generally accounted to be primarily artistic creations—Euphues, for example—the Anatomy of Melancholy actually contains a scientific discourse treating a medical subject by means of tra d itio n a l methodology i n a trad itio n al schema. And unlike other Renaissance studies of melancholy'—Timothy B right's, fo r example—the Anatomy ha3 alwaya been accepted less for what i t say3 about a disease than for what it is, a pleasing and useful encyclopedia of human ideas. It is a book which, when its debts to other authors and its connections with various genres have been acknowledged, still demands to be confronted on its own terms as a unique artistic creation. The reading of the Anatomy presented in the following study is the re­ sult of an attempt to meet that demand. To read the Anatomy on its own terms is to deal with form. Among the premises with which this study necessarily starts is the idea that the art of a literary work like the Anatomy may be described as a conjunction of its themes and its structure, and that such a des­ cription will reveal the artist*s design in the work and allow for our estimation of his artistry. Formal analysis is not, of course, the only method criticism may employ, and i t may not even be universally the best method. But the Renaissance had a great respect for the capa­ bility of the artificial construct and the artificial mode of expres­ sion to say what the merely natural cannot—a respect evidenced, just in Burton's own century, in the conceits, even the shapes, of meta­ physical poetry as in the design of Paradise Lost—and Burton's book is a paradigm among artistic work3 that declare their meaning through artificial structure. We are accustomed to looking, as a recent study of Burton's use of form points out, for qualities of clarity, coherence, and unity in works of a r t, but the Renaissance did not have our p a rti­ cular c ritic a l biases and worked with trad itio n s of composition which allowed for a loose, encyclopedic, rather than a tightly organic ap- proach to the treatment of subjects. Yet the Anatomy, with'its com­ 1 Daniel Henry Finlay, "A Study of Form in the Anatomy of Melan­ choly, 11 Diss. University of Virginia 1966, pp. 11-12 et passim. Fin­ lay '3 dissertation, as my remarks here and elsewhere will indicate', plicated series of partitions and sections, insists upon its structure to the point of having an exoskeleton in the form of its synoptic tables, so that either to recognize a3 we must that Burton's art is not directed toward f u lf illin g modern ideals of a rtis tic unity, or to recognize the undisputedly encyclopedic qualities of his book, does not allow us to ignore the book's highly artificial structure but com­ pels us to question seriously whether Burton did not use that structure as the primary means of artistic statement in the Anatomy. Finlay's answer is negative; he decides that the methods of organization, the definition and division evidenced in the partitions, sections, members, and subsections of the book, provide a framework for the material of ■ the Anatomy without functioning as the means whereby Burton discovers his meaning to himself and his readers (see Finlay, Ch. i i ) . While I do not disagree with some of his argument, my own answer is positive. My reading of the Anatomy forces me to conclude that Burton stressed the explicit structure because it is of the essence of the book. The structure is artificial, a complicated pattern of logical organization modified by the tendency of the subject matter to defy logical control; and the book is thus a statement of i t s e l f , a creation which declares to its readers at every turn the art and the artifice of its form. The Anatomy must be seen as a whole, for the salient feature of touches on some of the same territory as does my reading of Burton's structure, though he is more interested in analogous kinds of writing and in the light these may throw on the Anatomy. His first chapter examines w ritings of Seneca, John of Salisbury, and Montaigne in order to show that unspecialized, moral rather than technical, collective notions of composition were influential in the tradition of which Burton's book became a part, and that shorter units within composite structures were normal. i t s form is i t s a b ility .to comprehend an extreme diversity of statement in a single book: from the pharaocopoeia of a medical treatise to a consolation of philosophy, from satirical denunciations of human folly to sermons on charity and despair, from analyses of man's physiology to descriptions of the cosmos or of the workings of good and evil s p irits , the Anatomy is by its very nature a comprehensive work on a grand scale.