Melancholy

One of the four temperaments in Greek ancient medicine, melancholy represents a disease of the mind, body and soul. The word 'melancholy' derives from the Greek word for the humour black bile (μελαν- dark,+ χολή bile), a constitution that was linked to a host of symptoms including delusions, anxiety, griefs, phobia, stomach-aches, migraines, and skin rashes. While it was already discussed by the Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, melancholy reached its highest prominence during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the illness came to be perceived as a European epidemic. In Problems Pseudo-Aristotle had posed the question, "Why is it that all those men who have become extraordinary in philosophy, poetry or the arts are obviously melancholic?“ This link between genius and melancholy was given a special place in the work of Renaissance scholars such as Robert Burton, who translated and reinterpreted Greek philosophical and medical texts. In Elizabethan England, melancholy retained its status as a highly fashionable albeit elusive malady, and the association between melancholy and artistic genius remained a powerful one. Numerous artists and writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries explored the creative side of melancholy, while also stressing the inevitable pain and frustration that accompanied greatness. Shakespeare is a case in point. Among the melancholic characters in his canon, Hamlet – caught up in morbid philosophical ruminations – is perhaps the most famous one, but the condition can also be linked to love-sick Romeo, Jacques, reflecting on the seven ages of man in As You Like It, as well as Don John and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, who are described as being „of a very melancholic disposition“ (Act Two, scene 1).

Aristotle. 'Book XXX.' Problemata I Problems II. Books XXII-XXXVIII. Trans. W. S. Hett. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 196S [c.350 BC]. 154-81.

Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Ed. and introd. by Angus Gowland. London: Penguin, 2021 [1621].

Lund, Mary Ann. A User's Guide to Melancholy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021.

Shakespeare, William. Much Ado about Nothing. London; New York: Penguin, 2005.