Shakespearean Melancholy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. F. Bernard
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
The Core ◽  
Robert Burton

What’s so funny about melancholy? Iconic as Hamlet is, Shakespearean comedy showcases an extraordinary reliance on melancholy that ultimately reminds us of the porous demarcation between laughter and sorrow. This richly contextualized study of Shakespeare’s comic engagement with sadness contends that the playwright rethinks melancholy through comic theatre and, conversely, re-theorizes comedy through melancholy. In fashioning his own comic interpretation of the humour, Shakespeare distils an impressive array of philosophical discourses on the matter, from Aristotle to Robert Burton, and as a result, transforms the theoretical afterlife of both notions. The book suggests that the deceptively potent sorrow at the core of plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, or The Winter’s Tale influences modern accounts of melancholia elaborated by Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, and others. What’s so funny about melancholy in Shakespearean comedy? It might just be its reminder that, behind roaring laughter, one inevitably finds the subtle pangs of melancholy.

Shakespeare on the Stage in Restoration Dublin

PMLA ◽  
1941 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Bald
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
The Other ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Original Volume ◽  
Timon Of Athens

The Folger Shakespeare Library possesses a number of separate plays, all from the Shakespearian Third Folio, and all bearing unmistakable signs of theatrical annotation. They were acquired by Mr. Folger from a variety of sources: the majority were bought from a bookseller in Munich, one was purchased in London, and another came with the Warwick Castle collection of Shakespeariana. There are nine plays in all: The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, Henry VIII, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello, but three of them—The Merry Wives, Macbeth, and Othello—are imperfect. It soon became clear that they were all from the same original volume, which, apparently, had belonged to Halliwell-Phillipps and was dismembered by him. The bindings of the separate plays—half leather, with boards of marbled paper or purplish-brown cloth—are obviously all the work of one binder, and are similar to the bindings of other books which have passed through Halliwell-Phillipps's hands. In addition, his handwriting is to be found in six of them: in The Merry Wives and Macbeth there is an inscription on one of the preliminary flyleaves, and in the other four there is a mere “C. and P.” on a fly-leaf at the end of the book.

scholarly journals The Matter of Early Modern Female Melancholy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Emma Rayner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
Artistic Representations ◽  
Robert Burton ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Treatises

<p>The Renaissance is often touted as the age of melancholy. For fictional personages like Hamlet as well as for writers like Robert Burton, melancholy served both as a burden and a blessing, facilitating intellectual activity at the expense of psychological and bodily comfort. Precisely because of its Aristotelean associations with brilliance, melancholy was off-limits to early modern women, who were afforded a pathology different not merely in degree but in kind to that of the male melancholic. Female melancholy was understood as an entirely corporeal illness, lacking any semblance of the creative or intellectual fecundity which its male sufferers enjoyed.  Literary critics and cultural historians have long taken the authors of early modern medical treatises at their word, and because of this, the extant scholarship on melancholy projects an overwhelmingly masculinist history of the emotion. Those scholars who have addressed the subterraneous literature of women’s emotion in the Renaissance, moreover, have commonly understood female-voiced articulations of negative affect through the lens of “grief” or “sorrow”. A poetics of female melancholy in the English Renaissance is thus still awaiting formulation, and it is this critical absence that I move to redress.  Putting male-authored, canonical works of literature in dialogue with the poetry of three seventeenth-century women writers, this thesis pursues the topic of a literary melancholy that is specifically female, or female-voiced. Chapter One explores the shape of female melancholic discourse in two Shakespearean texts – Hamlet and The Two Noble Kinsmen – and in the poetry of devotional poet An Collins. Chapter Two considers the telos of self-marmorisation (the female melancholic’s turn to stone) first in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Milton’s Comus, and then in the verse of Hester Pulter. Finally, Chapter Three discusses the presence of postlapsarian melancholy in the elegies of Lucy Hutchinson. All three chapters argue for the significance, the matter, of artistic representations of women’s affect in a period which has traditionally seen male expressions of melancholy raised above female expressions of the same.</p>

Water Memory and the Art of Preserving

2018 ◽  
pp. 205-219
Author(s):  
Julie Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Theory ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

‘Water memory’ was a phrase coined in the late twentieth century to refer to the supposed ability of water to retain a memory of previously dissolved substances even after numerous dilutions. Though now a disproven scientific theory, ‘water memory’ is, as metaphor, a powerful conceptual tool for understanding Shakespeare’s comedies and their engagement with cultures of memory. Plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and All’s Well That Ends Well presage later dramas in the canon, including Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, with their narratives of grief, remembrance and preservation. This essay considers these topics in relation to everyday household practices of pickling and preserving foodstuffs and the deeper traces of customary practice and religious rite in post-Reformation England.

Shakespeare’s Popular Songs and the Great Temptations of Lesser Lyric

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Newman
Keyword(s):  
Popular Song ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Common

This chapter investigates how Shakespeare exploits the possibilities of popular song to foreground lyric’s capacity to condense affect, to model the absorption of his audiences, and to engage with conflicts over ‘the common’—the push of the common-as-vulgar and the pull of the common-as-universal. At the same moment that song collections are attempting to sort out elite lyric from low broadside, Shakespeare repeatedly draws on these lesser lyrics to ask his audiences what they share and what they do not with these singers and songs, and the warrants, real and fantastical, for those identifications and distinctions. These lyric dynamics are most apparent in the comedies (A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night) but also play a key role in history (2 Henry IV), tragedy (Hamlet), and romance (The Winter’s Tale).

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