The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (review)

For Douglas Trevor, "late Elizabethan and Jacobean England" constitutes an especially "tempestuous emotional terrain" (13) because of Galen's influential theory of bodily humors as humanity's basic ingredient. As Trevor explains, "the literal fluidity of moods makes" self-control difficult (13). Melancholy was the most intellectually modish humor, and most of the writers Trevor considers savored their occupational hazard.

Edmund Spenser is the rare exception. For him, Neoplatonic love is a cure for sorrow (37), sadness is "an essentially hopeful passion" (44), and Contemplation's world-weary tristitia is distinct from Despair's damaging acedia (53-54). Such contrasts are rooted in a broader distinction between "objectal" mourning for a lost object and "dispositional" or temperamental melancholy (13). Trevor cites Freud's treatise on "Mourning and Melancholia" and briefly distinguishes between sadness and melancholy, allowing that sadness caused by "object-loss, is curable" whereas "melancholy, if it is linked with one's disposition, is permanent" (16). Nevertheless, he resorts immediately and confusingly to an "interchangeable use of sadness and melancholy" (17) because he believes that, Spenser excepted, most of the writers under study did the same. Indeed, Renaissance authors "reinvent the locus point of melancholy, shifting it from lost and/or loved objects and mooring it inside their bodies, where it bubbled and burned in the spleen" (32).

Hamlet is the work that "signals a shift in the period's attitude toward dispositional sadness, which is becoming more and more esteemed and in fashion" (63). Trevor claims that Hamlet's melancholy is not only inescapable, but also unaltered by anything he does. A cursory summary of his actions against Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Laertes concludes the chapter, but "these acts do not count" (85) because they are not adequately pondered, and he kills Claudius when he is already half-dead. Hamlet's aggression remains passive throughout, aimed not at agency but sympathy.

John Donne equates "unhappiness with spiritual redemption" (88) and he aspires to a kind of "humoral stability" (92). Yet his verse remains "inherently tempestuous and unstable" (105), and Donne succumbs to humoral and emotional determinism (107), a stance supposedly consistent with a "more rigidly Protestant" (108) sense of predestination. Trevor contradicts himself by rejecting more positive readings of the darker poems as a form of "preventive medicine" (105) yet concluding that his work "proved to be a successful self-therapy for Donne" (115).

Robert Burton's Anatomy is the fullest exploration of melancholy as permanent condition, exulting in endless, aimless immersion. There are hints of scientific, even utopian aspirations, but these are overwhelmed by a "seemingly jumbled mass of speculation" and deliberate "strategies of obfuscation" (129). Burton hopes "that his own verbiage would dampen the sting of his more vituperative comments" (132). By pulling his punches, he mounts a fragmentary but anti-authoritarian attack on orthodox "Christian polemic" and its methods (144).

John Milton is probably the happiest melancholic in Trevor's collection because he embraces isolation from the beginning of his career. "The privileging of solitary experience marks Milton's poetics, polemics, and theology throughout the course of his entire life" (191), but blindness and the defeat of his "Good Old Cause" make such resolute independence essential. Adam's plea for a companion in Paradise Lost is poignant, but Milton makes God's self-sufficiency attractive as well. The Son also chooses solitude by rejecting the world and returning to a "private" house in Paradise Regained.

The Poetics of Melancholy pursues a larger theoretical agenda by combining a Galenic theory of the humors with a Lacanian model of subjectivity that "is always alienated from itself" (29), both implying that melancholy is incurable. Trevor wants to go beyond a once fashionable deconstruction of a self that finds "nothing" at the core of the early modern subject and revive claims for the "viability of personage in the Renaissance" (3). Hamlet is a...