Melancholy and the Elizabethan Man of Letters

Abstract

EVERY STUDENT of Elizabethan and early-Stuart literature is aware that melancholy was a common characteristic among the scholars and writers of the period.' References to the melancholy lot of the scholar are frequent, the melancholy scholar is a recurrent type in the Elizabethan drama, and various Elizabethan authors refer to their own melancholy. The purpose of the present article is to determine just what the Elizabethans meant when they called the man of letters melancholy,2 to explain in terms of Renaissance medical theory how he became melancholy, and to present illustrations of intellectual melancholy drawn from the drama and from the ranks of actual Elizabethan writers.

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