The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Early Medicine by Carol Falvo Heffernan (review)

REVIEWS CAROL FALVO HEFFERNAN. The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Early Medicine. Duquesne Language and Literature Series, vol. 19. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv, 185. $48.00. The theory ofhumors stimulated far-reaching discourses on erotic love and mental disorders, the psychological and social consequences of which are still with us. Although since Ovid, the signs ofmelancholy and affiliated mania had been widely dispersed in imaginative and moral literature, Carol Falvo Heffernan's book is a reminder that the medical conception ofmelancholy is both prior and persistent. Still, The Melan­ choly Muse strikes this reader more as an extended essay, along the lines of John Livingston Lowes's 1914 article "The Loveres Maladye of Hereos," rather than a deeply scholarly work or a highly imaginative in­ terdisciplinary study. Heffernan says that her aim "to demonstrate that the two poets and the medieval-Renaissance physicians viewed melan­ choly in parallel ways" may seem "too modest" (p. 4). Apart from the problems entailed in compressing fourteenth- and sixteenth-century constructions of melancholy, Heffernan's modesty ofpurpose prevents her from fully developing, for her readers' benefit, relevant issues in med­ ical theory such as the physiology ofthe body's heat, humors burnt to ashes, the rising ofthe spirits from the lower body to the brain, brain cell theory, and the like. To know more about the circulation ofthe doc­ trine of adustion in the sixteenth century might suggest new ways of reading such a line as "Consumed with that which it was nourished by." After a survey ofwritings on melancholy from Galen to Bernard of Gordon, Heffernan analyzes Chaucer's narrator ofThe Book ofthe Duchess, Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's Jaques in As You Like It, and Hamlet. The narrator ofThe Book ofthe Duchess does not suffer from "a clear-cut case oflovesickness" (p. 41), although he must suffer from some form of amor hereos, melancholy, or mania, which causes his insomnia. His attempt to cure himselfwith reading can be derived from medical reme­ dies for "melancholy care" and "mania" that include listening to songs (Avicenna) and reading aloud (Caelius Aurelianus). Moreover, congenial conversation and pleasant surroundings will cure such patients as the black knight and his interlocutor, according to Caelius Aurelianus, Johannes Afflacius, and Bernard ofGordon. Is Dorigen Chaucer's femi­ nine counterpart to these distraught males? Furthermore, what does the medical diagnosis oflovesickness have to do with the noble love of literature and the court? In Avicenna, the medical problem and the psychological state belong to two different 253 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER domains, the former expounded in the Canon ofMedicine, the latter in the Treatise on Love. For relief of the medical ailment of amor hereos, Avicenna prescribes coitus. Heffernan refuses to pursue this medical remedy for Troilus and Criseyde and takes issue with Mary Wack's view (1984) of Criseyde as "a cure for Troilus's lovesickness" on the grounds that "The erotic high point ofthe consummation in book 3, considered from this perspective, is reduced to 'a night in therapeutic intercourse with Criseyde,"' which situation "would seem to make a love poem cap­ tive to-rather than based on-the medical model" (p. 86). But one might ask why we should hesitate to trust this poet to be playing more than one game at once. Despite, or because of, Heffernan's careful map­ ping ofthe transformation of Troilus's lovesickness to the "purest form oflove," her argument stops short ofthe possibilities ofboth the comic aspects of curative sex silently voiced by Criseyde at the end of book 2 and also the religious transcendence of veneal love and earthly death seen in the Troilus of the epilogue. Whereas Heffernan identifies Jaques's "most humorous sadness" as the adust type ofmelancholy, which derives from the burnt-offexcess of humors (pp. 98, 103, 105), Hamlet's melancholy has advanced to the hallucinatory stage by act 3, ifhis mother is right that the ghost he sees is "the very coinage" of his own brain; for melancholy madness in Andrew Boorde's The Breviarie of Health (1547) is, to begin with, "a sickness full offantasies, thinking to here or to see that thing that is not heard nor seene...