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

Book Reviews189 CAROL FALVO HEFFERNAN. The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare and Early Medicine. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1995. 200 p. rleffernan promises to place selected works by Chaucer and Shakespeare "against the background of medical prose, letting the latter, mostly unfamiliar to modern readers, serve as subtexts shedding light on the better known literary works" (4), and she indeed collates parallels between medical treatises and four texts: Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess and Troilus and Criseyde; Shakespeare's As You Like It and Hamlet. After reviewing the history of humours theory from Hippocrates through Timothy Bright, Heffernan argues that Chaucer and Shakespeare had considerable medical knowledge. For Chaucer, she relies heavily on the learning ascribed to the Doctor of Physic in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Shakespeare's "interest in medicine" surfaces in several plays, and further, he seems to have been familiar with William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood, though Harvey did not publish his findings until 1628. Most notable is Shakespeare as psychologist, anticipating not only Robert Burton but also modern understanding of schizophrenia. I would summarize Heffernan's stance as follows: Chaucer and Shakespeare knew well the medical treatises of their eras, and thus such documents provide "background " for their literary works; at the same time, their "poetic genius" enables them to present portraits of mental states, particularly varieties of melancholy, more profound than routine medical descriptions. Readers comfortable with this stance will find The Melancholy Muse more persuasive than will those who question its implicit assumptions about relations between "literary" and "non-literary" texts. Still, this book contains much of interest, so I urge readers not to be put off by methodological irritation. The first chapter examines The Book of the Duchess, comparing the narrator 's symptoms with those which various medieval writers outlined for melancholia, mania, and amor hereos (love melancholy). The narrator's symptoms include sleeplessness, typically associated with melancholy, and the measures he takes to cure himself turn out to be those recommended by the standard writers on medicine: reading and talking. (He also engages the mourning knight of his dream in a talking cure.) Chapter 2 focuses on Troilus and Criseyde. Heffernan first demonstrates parallels between descriptions of courtly love and those of amor hereos. That is, something much like "courtly love" appears in medieval medical treatises as an illness. Heffernan argues that "this kind of love introduced into literature by the troubadours of twelfth-century Provence may be thought of as a literary variant of the medical phenomenon" (73). There is a distinction, however. Whereas exponents of courtly love always exalt unfulfilled desire, medical writers take a pragmatic view and argue for coitus as cure. Heffernan then turns to Troilus and Criseyde in order to "explore parallels between Chaucer's description of his character's sufferings and the conventional discussions of the signa of amor hereos in medieval medical treatises" (79). The chapter supports persuasively its thesis: Troilus and 190Rocky Mountain Review Criseyde takes a "double view ... of love: love as disease and love in its purest medieval form" (67). Heffernan's treatment of Jaques in As You Like It supplies some hitherto neglected discussions of Jaques' melancholy. Most intriguing are the statements of two nineteenth-century physicians who use Jaques as an example of someone suffering from the disease of melancholy. As Heffernan says, "they show us early medical practitioners commenting directly on the specific mental features of Shakespeare's Jaques, before the invention of psychiatry as we know it" (97). Otherwise, this chapter focuses on "Jaques' vital position as a fulcrum around which move images and ideas associated with melancholy .... the weeping stag, solitude, time, exclusion from love, travel" (97). Overall, literary and medical texts treat such topics similarly, but Heffernan observes that As You Like It suspects travel as a source of melancholy ; this view is typical of literature but opposed to medical treatises, which offer travel as a cure. As readers of this review have no doubt inferred, The Melancholy Muse tends to discuss Chaucer's and Shakespeare's characters as "real people" whose ailments can be confidently diagnosed. Not surprisingly, this tendency becomes acute in the case of Hamlet...