Women’s Souls: The Duchess of Malfi and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

Abstract

The intensity of the early seventeenth-century interest in the body by no means precluded an equally eager interest in the soul. Even a work like Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy , for all the resonances of the overtly medical underpinnings invoked by its title, postulated the mind as influenced by the body but by no means entirely constituted by it. In John Ford’s 1629 tragicomedy The Lover’s Melancholy , which openly acknowledges its debt to Burton, 1 the physician Corax explicitly denies that the primary cause of melancholy is physiological, or at least avers that it is so only in a highly complex way: Melancholy Is not as you conceive, indisposition Of body, but the mind’s disease. So ecstasy, Fantastic dotage, madness, phrenzy, rapture Of mere imagination, differ partly From melancholy, which is briefly this: A mere commotion of the mind, o’ercharged With fear and sorrow, first begot i’th’brain, The seat of reason, and from thence derived As suddenly into the heart, the seat Of our affection. 2 Similarly Bacon, also an influence on Ford (who used him as a source for his play Perkin Warbeck ), argued that These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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