The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (review)

Tragedies of "overliving," for Wilson, compose a neglected subgenre. The theme itself crosses historical and national boundaries. Discussing major canonical works from Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus through Milton's Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, she stimulates her readers' consideration of the phenomenon of living too long, for characters of any age who view their useful lives as finished or who face unbearable pain.

Wilson emphasizes issues related to characters' perception of time: problems making sense of events, repeating, and longing for literal rather than spiritual death. The exposition challenges Aristotelian ideas of tragic structure, catharsis, and conventional heroism. Throughout the discussion, especially as she concludes with Milton's Adam, Wilson suggests that the audience draws close to the characters' experience: "Tragedies of overliving remind us of the illegibility of life when we are in it, and the difficulty . . . of making sense of our stories as a coherent narrative" (11).

Chapter 1, "O darkness," emphasizes Oedipus's refusal to die after he has discovered his multiple roles as father, son, brother, ruler, and destroyer. Neither he nor the audience knows his full identity and purpose. This section and the next, "Never to have lived is best," emphasize the pain of his surviving children as tragic. In the Coloneus Oedipus attains power and release at the expense of his daughters' grief and his sons' strife. An even closer identification of the hero with ordinary human suffering appears in Euripides' Heracles in chapter 3, "Enslaved to fate." Like Oedipus, Heracles is offered sanctuary in Athens, but he must live on as the killer of his family as well as the benefactor of mankind, a kind of living death.

A sense of literary and political belatedness in Imperial Rome provides the focus for Seneca's Epistles and Hercules Furens in chapter 4, "Let us live." The epistles are ambivalent about evaluating the proper time to die, and their structure, like that of Seneca's play, is episodic. Unlike Euripides' figure, Hercules does not change his behavior, the horrors of the underworld become literal, and overliving is associated with suppressing desire.

Moving to seventeenth-century England, Wilson considers the effect of cultural and religious differences on living too long. She notes that a character may fit into a divine plan but may suffer with uncertainty in the present. In King Lear she emphasizes images of the body in pain and characters' painful awareness of social injustice. Her evocation of pity for Lear's living death and his confusion about Hell's location reinforces an audience's participation in the play's overliving. I think that her evaluation of Edgar is harsh, given the dangers characters face in revealing their identities even to each other. Her allusions to the play's nearness to Elizabeth's death do not fit the context as neatly as the royal Scottish reference to Macbeth, the topic of chapter 6, "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow." Macbeth, with his life yet to live, often treats his experience as if the present were the past. Here and earlier Wilson's very effective attention to details of rhythm and diction strengthens her argument. She also makes a stimulating contrast of Macbeth as a stage player with repetitive performances to Malcolm, whose new and courtly masque augurs a hopeful, more settled, future.

Both chapter 7, "A moving grave: Samson Agonistes," and 8, "Why do I overlive?: Paradise Lost," consider the disparity between human views of time and the larger historical and divine perspective from which Samson and Adam live their brief individual lives. Her examination of "Christian tragedy" in light of Milton's statements and his characters' painful experience contributes to discussion of this genre. She also links tragic overliving with revenge tragedy in both works. Samson Agonistes fits the pattern better than Paradise Lost, in which divine revenge on Satan is spiritual rather than literal.

Tracing Samson...