Melancholy was a source of fascination to artists and literary writers, being seen as closely associated with creative genius but also as a danger to them: melancholics might excel in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts (as the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems explained), but they could also be seized by illness and even tipped into madness. The vast size of Burton’s project – over half a million words by the time he died in 1640 – is testimony to the astonishingly wide spectrum of experience that the word ‘melancholy’ encompassed, to the hundreds of case histories of melancholics treated by Renaissance physicians, and to its dark glamour. The tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues, as the chaos of melancholy doth variety of symptoms’.
It could manifest in such varied and contradictory ways that, as Burton puts it, there are ‘scarce two of two thousand that concur in the same symptoms. This perplexing and slippery condition was seen as a disease of mind, body, and soul which escaped easy definition. Though it was published five years after Shakespeare’s death, it gathers together ideas about melancholy from antiquity right through to the seventeenth century. The most famous book about Renaissance melancholy, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), celebrates its four hundredth anniversary this year. But what are Rosalind and Jaques’s shared assumptions about what melancholy is like, and how you might spot a melancholic? Title page of Robert Burton’s The anatomy of melancholy, what it is. Jaques not only acknowledges the truth of this, but embraces his reputation in a knowing fashion: ‘I do love it better than laughing’ ( As You Like It, 4.1.3-4, 5). When the disguised Rosalind meets Jaques in the Forest of Arden, she mentions that people say he is a ‘melancholy fellow’.
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