Hamlet (Vol. 35) | Alison Findlay (essay date 1994)
Alison Findlay (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: "Hamlet: A Document in Madness," in New Essays on Hamlet, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning, 1994, pp. 189-203.
[In the following essay, Findlay focuses on the "relationship between words, madness and the desire for order" in Hamlet, especially in terms of the discourses of gender and language.]
Some four hundred pages into The Anatomy of Melancholy Robert Burton comes close to admitting that his task is impossible:
Who can sufficiently speak of these symptoms, or prescribe rules to comprehend them? … if you will describe melancholy, describe a phantastical conceit, a corrupt imagination, vain thoughts and different, which who can do? The four-and-twenty letters make no more variety of words in divers languages than melancholy conceits produce diversity of symptoms in several persons. They are irregular, obscure, various, so infinite, Proteus...
[The entire page is 7136 words long]
Navigate
