SOURCE: Webber, Joan. “Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Democritus, Jr.” In The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose, pp. 80-114. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968.

[In the essay below, Webber discusses how the “I” persona of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy combines the two distinct modes of life and art by manipulating the reader through an anecdotal and gossip-oriented analysis of sources rather than through a methodical investigation of the facts.]

We have seen in Donne the Anglican's persistent effort to turn life into art and to find in art among other things a means to anticipate one's own death and look back upon his life. The same dizzying confusion of one mode of being with another occurs in the life and work of Robert Burton, onetime fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, and author of that huge 842-page folio volume, The Anatomy of Melancholy.¹ The epitaph which he composed for himself, and which is inscribed upon his bust in Christ Church Chapel, reads as follows: “Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus, hic jacet Democritus Junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem Melancholia.”²

If Democritus Junior is a made-up character, the persona in whose name Burton wrote the Anatomy of Melancholy, then this epitaph is nonsense. A fictitious character does not die just because his author does. But if Burton is Democritus Junior, then he is both a “real” person and a persona, hence both mortal and immortal. Known to few as Burton, unknown to fewer as Democritus, he was given life and death by Melancholy. Here the possible meanings are numerous. The malady of melancholy was Burton's life. Writing the Anatomy of Melancholy was Burton's life. The Anatomy gave life to Democritus Junior. But Melancholy, man's portion in life, finally brought Burton to his death, and in some sense (for example, the sense in which Democritus lived through successive editions or stages of growth of the book) Democritus Junior died with him.

From all the available evidence, it would seem that the Anatomy was Burton's life. It might even be said that the book is a prototype for the transformation of man into art, and Burton was, I think, as conscious of what he was doing as a seventeenth-century writer could be. At present, at least, it would be impossible to write a conventional biography of him: Douglas Bush put almost all the facts we have into a footnote in his English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century.³ With the help of a few more details, some consideration of Burton's literary methods, and some responsible speculation, M. Jean Simon was able to write a biographical chapter; but Simon calls Burton's life “le désespoir du biographe.”⁴ Burton was born in Leicestershire in 1577, entered Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1593, was elected a Student of Christ Church in 1599, and lived at Christ Church for the rest of his life. He was granted the B.A. in 1602, the M.A. in 1605, and the B.D. in 1614. In 1616 he became Vicar of St. Thomas's in Oxford. The force and passion, subtlety and wit of his nature are more fully realized in his book than they seem ever to have been in his daily life.

Burton's age was Janus-faced, among other reasons, because of the way it stood between the oral past and the printed future.⁵ A man could “live” in print, and in several ways. For the first time he could really have access to a world of books of all kinds: he could read both Aristotle and the latest news out of Brazil, and thus control the world and time without leaving his study.⁶ Certainly the opening up of such a world amidst the great intellectual excitement of the period made possible what might seem to us an extravagant affection for reading, not as the good substitute for experience that earlier writers had found it, but as experience itself, both dangerous and compelling. Donne's “Hydroptique immoderate desire of humane learning and languages”⁷ comes at once to mind. And if reading is experience, writing is life, and the life of the book indistinguishable from the life of the man. Pepys thought himself half-dead when he could no longer see to make his own journal entries,⁸ and Burton tells us that the seventeenth century is such a “scribbling age” because men write to prove themselves alive (Pt. I, pp. 22-23).

In his own effort to live in prose, Burton adopts the pseudonym of Democritus Junior, but he does not maintain that pseudonym consistently. The shifting back and forth among his various selves and the commentary upon these selves constitute the most important and complex stylistic technique in the Anatomy. The “I” is not always the same “I,” nor is it possible always to be sure who is supposed to be speaking at any particular time.

Burton's most limited “I” is Robert Burton the historical being, who provides simple autobiographical details: I was born in Warwickshire; my patroness is Lady Frances, Dowager Countess of Exeter (Pt. II.2.3); I drink no wine (Pt. II.5.1.5); at Oxford we use smoke of juniper to sweeten our chambers (Pt. II.2.3); I have no wife or children (Pt. I, p. 18). These comments are introduced in scattered places throughout the book, and have been found sufficient by more than one critic for a full-scale psychological portrait of Burton the man.⁹ At the same time, Burton in his second edition and thereafter deletes his name from the title page (although from the third edition on he included his picture), and asks us to believe that his book has no author at all, that it was written by the man-in-the-moon, or by no one (Pt. I, p. 15). In the course of this shift, he actually moves from no one to no one, from the nobody that is Robert Burton, M.A., to the book so comprehensive in scope that it can have been written by no one, because everyone is included in it.

This shift from anonymity to anonymity is effected partly by the creation of Democritus Junior. He is the supposed author of the book, as is explained in the very long preface, “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” in which Burton discusses his style, his persona, his reasons for writing his book, and his attitudes toward the reader. Burton says he adopted this pseudonym for the obvious reason that it gives him more “liberty and freedom of speech”—that is, it stretches the private man into a public and ageless creature, the son of an ancient Greek, who can laugh at folly without fear of reprisal. He intends also to continue the work of Democritus the anatomist, who dissected animals in order to find out more about the nature of man.

Knowing something about Democritus the atomist as well as about Burton's method of procedure, we can add at least one other reason for the pseudonym. The atoms of Democritus fell ceaselessly through space, combining and recombining by chance—and thus the world of men came into being. Burton, too, combines atoms—fragments from the books of other men that came to him by chance as well as choice—and thus the world of the Anatomy is created, haphazardly, though also, of course, at Burton's whimsical pleasure. Lucretius, Democritus' apostle, stressed the liberating power of the atomic theory to free men's minds from superstitious fears, and Burton's book is partly inspired by the same intent. Both the malevolent will of Satan and the old humoural system are shown in this anatomy to be often less significant than they had been thought in determining a man's destiny—and a proper knowledge of physic and psychology, meanwhile, can help a man to rule himself.¹⁰

Certainly, the explicit and implicit rationale of this persona is impressive, but Burton's intentions are too complex to allow him to give the persona full independence. The very fact that he has to explain his choice of the name undercuts Democritus' plausibility, and makes us conscious of Burton the author. Again, the technique mingles life with art. Melancholy is Burton's subject. But melancholy is equated with nothing less than the whole mind of man, which is represented in this book by Burton's mind. Since Burton's mind, or life, is both the book and the writing of the book, then the book and its writing must become the subject matter of the book and its writing. As usual with Anglican writers, one is forced to resort to the analogy of mirrors within mirrors.

The creation of the book life is the means by which Burton says he can overcome the melancholy of his worldly life: “I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy.” “This playing labour,” he calls the business of writing, and explicates his pun by describing authorship as a kind of parallel to the labor of childbirth (or of excretion): “I had gravidum cor, foedum caput, a kind of imposthume in my head, which I was very desirous to be unladen of, and could imagine no fitter evacuation than this” (Pt. I, pp. 20-21). In the highly important pages on his own style in the preface, he tells us that the book would have been written in Latin if he could have found a publisher willing to undertake the task. And he also pretends to apologize for its disheveled condition—like that of an unlicked bear cub; he says there was no time for the polishing he would like to have done.¹¹ But six editions and twenty years later, when the book is 60 per cent longer than it was and many changes have been made, the dishevelment is as much as ever a part of its character.¹² Now he says that he could not revise because it would just have been too difficult: he would rather start over with another book than attempt to correct this one.¹³ All these comments, of course, encourage us to think of the book itself as a living person—by accident of birth English rather than Roman, full of faults that multiply as he grows older, able to increase his knowledge more easily than he can improve his character. In growing as it does over this extended period of time, the book literally imitates the growth of a living being. And since it is, in effect, Burton's collected works, it must have taken up a good deal of his actual life span.

The question of how to name this book-personality cannot be simply answered, and not just because Democritus is rarely mentioned beyond the preface. There is in the book a sense of universality that is almost more than can be defined by the term “cosmic personality” if that term is only to describe the mind of Burton or Democritus. It is, of course, literally the mind of Burton that is expressed here. But it is the mind of Burton, not at any one point in history, but at six different points all combined. And when we add up these six different views, we are including in them the omnivorous reading of a lifetime. This quantitative and spatial presentation of what could not have simultaneous literal existence is perhaps the main reason why one constantly has the sense of a third person, besides Burton and Democritus, a person who is represented by them but is larger than the sum of his parts. The cosmic personality is given its nature and scope primarily by quotations, by the use of resonant oral material, and by the specific cultivation of cosmic language and imagery. Each of these techniques reflects this odd blurring of focus between Burton in one or another of his roles and the larger totality into which he seems to be absorbed.

The book grows, most notably, by absorbing quotations. Burton accuses himself of plagiarism, though he defends his right to “this my Macaronicon” on the grounds that he has made sufficient acknowledgment of his borrowings (by and large he has), and that “the matter is theirs most part, and yet mine, apparet unde sumptum sit (which Seneca approves), aliud tamen quam unde sumptum sit apparet; which nature doth with the aliment of our bodies incorporate, digest, assimilate, I do concoquere quod hausi, dispose of what I take” (Pt. I, p. 25). The suggestion of organic growth is purposeful; the “I” digests and assimilates other writings into himself. Dom Jean Leclercq has reminded us of the similarity between eating and talking in an oral culture.¹⁴ Here Burton takes advantage of a typographical age to dramatize an oral-age phenomenon.

The use of quotation extends the personality in another dimension. If the book's basic character is necessarily English, it is nevertheless a macaronic English; the character becomes a world citizen through quoting Greek, Latin, and Italian, and referring to sources representing many other countries and times as well.¹⁵ There are places where it is difficult to tell where Burton's “I” leaves off and the source begins, or vice versa, partly because the assimilation is effective, partly because he sometimes has parallel sentences alternating within a single period, partly because he often provides free translations of passages that have already been partly quoted in the original, so that the progression may be from the original, to the original paraphrased, to Burton, or some more complex version of that sequence. Quotations are often misquoted, to produce a further blurring. Some of his more endearing uses of quotation occur in passages that would seem to be very immediate or very personal, as in the passage given above where he defends his style, or when he says of himself, “I have no wife nor children good or bad to provide for” (Pt. I, p. 18). Such employment of quotation warns us that even in Burton on his lowest or most specifically autobiographical level, we are dealing with a person whose life is books. “The mind is all” (Pt. II.3.3), he says; and his mind is this storehouse and assimilator of learning.

The assimilation of the quotations could not be complete unless Burton were really willing to plagiarize. Since he is not, he acknowledges his sources by calling attention to them in an unequalled stream of varied synonyms for “as so and so says”: “approves,” “declares,” “hath commented,” “gives an instance,” “relates,” “observes,” “holds,” “repeats,” “supposed,” “confirms,” “condemns,” “cries out on,” “prescribes,” “rings,” “explodes,” “laughs to scorn,” “cracks,” “scoffs,” “witnesseth,” “denounced,” “subscribes,” “mutters.” The endless list represents a kind of mastication, Burton or the book chewing on the approval or muttering of others, reminding us that assimilation is in process. Very often Burton neglects to say in the text whose crying out or ringing he has cited, identifying the author only as “he”—“as he says.” One can find the reference in a note, but the text suggests such familiarity with the source that again one experiences it as being more than half assimilated.

There are inevitably a number of unacknowledged quotations, many of them representative of the furnishing of a seventeenth-century mind: “If he be in sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity” (Pt. I.1.1.); “the remembrance of it is most grievous unto us” (Pt. II.3.5); “death is but a perpetual sleep” (Pt. II.3.5); “O quam te memorem” (Pt. II.2.4). Some phrases recur again and again, in changing contexts. “Spretaeque injuria formae,”¹⁶ for example, is to Burton an enormously evocative line because it recalls an archetypal example of action and psychological reaction. These phrases, recurrent and reminding, help to establish the impression that the book is a living mind, containing familiar echoes. In our own time, stream-of-consciousness writers have made more disciplined and structural use of such material.

Burton's constant and massive use of authorities, directly and indirectly quoted, has frequently evoked the critical comment that he is so busy giving all the arguments on all sides of a subject that he has no time to be on any side himself, or that his own position is weakened or buried.¹⁷ There are several answers to this objection, at least one of which directly bears on the suggestion that the book-personality encompasses its personae.

Burton himself, and perhaps Burton when represented as Democritus, is antagonistic toward useless or theologically impertinent questions: “I will end the controversy in Austin's words, ‘Better doubt of things concealed, than to contend about uncertainties, where Abraham's bosom is, and hell-fire’” (Pt. II.2.3); “But why should the sun and moon be angry, or take exceptions at mathematicians and philosophers, whenas the like measure is offered unto God Himself, by a company of theologasters?” (Pt. II.2.3). He will mention such issues both as illustrative of the means to certain kinds of melancholy, and as enjoyable subjects for speculation when one is in the right mood. But, like Sir Thomas Browne, he is more interested in the speculation than in the conclusion.

When there are practical problems—controversies over the efficacy of medicines, for example—he also often hesitates to give unequivocal answers, and here his position is a kind of relativism. While he believes in authority, he has no belief that one authority can know everything, or that one medicine can heal all men. He is most skeptical about absolute, generalizing statements on any subject. And he will try to find the relationship between the absolute statements and specific cases: for example, some say carp are good to eat; some say they are bad; the solution may be that it depends on where they have grown and fed. Some say one medicine is good for melancholy; some say another: the solution may be that every melancholy man is a special case, and must find his own cure. He will find the cure in books. But Burton's amassing of authorities is done not just for the sake of thoroughness, but because he sees that not all authorities are relevant to the needs of all. Repeatedly, he suggests that one of the merits of his book is its gathering into one place the varied views that might otherwise be difficult for a reader to come by (D., p. 297; Pt. III.4.2.6). Thus, here is another Janus-point: this all-inclusive, encyclopedic, Renaissance mind of a book is an advertisement for the age of specialization. Doctors, says Burton, who claim the ability to cure all kinds of ills are quacks.

Burton, nevertheless, as Burton, does express his opinion constantly on all sorts of subjects. The reason his opinions are not more evident is that he is only one among innumerable characters and points of view represented in the book. The defense for his inclusiveness on the most comprehensive level is that the book-mind is a universal one, including all sorts and conditions of men and arguments, and taking sides with none. It becomes no one by being everyone. On both its most important levels, when we consider the Anatomy as a medical book and when we consider it as a universal mind, the answer to the objection that Burton weakens his own position is that he does not have a position in the same sense in which the authors whom he quotes do. His whole purpose is to include as many different positions and possibilities as he can.

Words from a thousand books are assimilated by the speaker, as if he were eating and growing fat on them. The oral past is joined with the written present, the encyclopedic present with the specialist future. A second important way in which the book achieves life and cosmic extension involves another Janus-use of oral and print cultures. The “life of the mind” is the opposite of sterile or quiescent because the “I” is so colloquial and gossipy in manner, and because many of the sources upon which this lively mind loves to feed are resonantly oral.

These are not entirely separable points. The “I” controls the tone of the book, and, as we shall see, his tone, even when he is reporting on the contents of quite sober and scholarly books, is robustly anecdotal, rather than analytical. He proceeds by telling stories.¹⁸ Thus, even sources which one could never think of as oral in themselves become so in Burton's handling of them. And yet it is clear that he is gossiping about books. Typically, he justifies his lowbrow gossiping with a Latin quotation: “I say farther with him yet, I have inserted (levicula quaedam et ridicula ascribere non sum gravatus, circumforanea quaedam e theatris, a plateis, etiam e popinis) …” (Pt. III.1.1.1). That he sees no contradiction in his choice of a Latin quotation to defend his description of current levities is explained by the fact that for him current levities may be fetched from Homer as well as from modern medical books, but very rarely direct from life. The book-personality, feeding on this material, spans the centuries and also enjoys the freedoms and the peculiar resonances both of sound and print.

Burton supplies sound effects to illustrate his stories: “Sound trumpets, fife and drums” (Pt. I.2.2.2); “he will ride a gallop, a gallop, etc.” (Pt. II.3.3); “let drums beat on, trumpets sound taratantarra” (Pt. II.3.7). And sometimes, as I shall show at length later on, he constructs scenes made up of dialogue direct and partly direct. In other words, he uses the printed page to evoke sound. That he thinks both in speech and print is evident from the way he habitually couples the two in speaking of his own work: “These following lines, when they shall be recited or hereafter read” (Pt. I, p. 38); “facite haec charta loquatur anus” (Pt. III.1.1.1); “I am not willing to publish it [a last remedy for jealousy]; if you be very desirous to know it, when I meet you next I will peradventure tell you what it is in your ear” (Pt. III.3.4.2). We, of course, use words like “speak” and “write” interchangeably, but more as dead metaphors than with conscious intent. Burton's language is clearly designed to call attention to itself, and has the effect of presenting him as a gossip, chattering like an old woman, or whispering in his listener's ear.

Although he sometimes sneers at contemporary literature like “English chronicles, playbooks, news sheets” (Pt. I.1.1.4), his own library was full of such reading matter, and his book contains innumerable references to plays both classical and contemporary. Role-playing is important for him, and for the cure of the melancholy patient, and, of course, he reiterates the familiar metaphor of life as a play: “We must so be gone sooner or later all, and as Calliopius in the comedy took his leave of his spectators and auditors, Vos valete et plaudite, Calliopius recensui, must we bid the world farewell (exit Calliopius), and having now played our parts, for ever be gone” (Pt. II.3.5). Typically, he stuffs the quotation into his own sentence, without wholly assimilating it. It is engulfed, trapped, his property, yet it retains its own life and dramatic worth—and typically he includes a stage direction, so that the dialogue is supplemented by action.

I shall have considerably more to say about Burton's various dramatic poses in my discussion of his relationship with his readers. In this consideration of his enlivening of written sources, the relevant role is that of gossip. Some of the best illustrations of Burton's colloquial manner are in the section on love-melancholy, a section which was very dear to him and upon which he lavished particular attention in the successive editions of the Anatomy, so that its growth in volume is greater than that of other parts:¹⁹

I could tell you such another story of a spindle that was fired by a fair lady's looks, or fingers, some say, I know not well whether, but fired it was by report, and of a cold bath that suddenly smoked and was very hot when naked Caelia came into it: Miramur quis sit tantus et unde vapor, etc. But of all the tales in this kind, that is the most memorable of Death himself, when he should have stroken a sweet young virgin with his dart, he fell in love with the object. Many more such could I relate which are to be believed with a poetical faith.

(Pt. III.2.2.2)

It is not unusual for Burton to treat a source thus casually, with a “some say” or “by report,” or even to pretend or to admit that he is ignorant of or has forgotten his source. These devices and his willingness to mingle fact with fiction combine with the liveliness and intrinsic interest of his stories to produce in the reader just that blend of belief and disbelief with which one so often listens to gossip. His intimate address to the reader, “I could tell you,” is typical, and increases one's sense of listening to confidences. The nature of the material itself in this section heightens an effect which Burton achieves everywhere in the Anatomy.

His own faith in the printed page sometimes seems absolute. In one of his personal comments, he tells us that his mother had a talent for healing the sick. One of her remedies involved a spider and an amulet, comprising a cure which Burton thought “most absurd,” “till at length, rambling amongst authors,” he “found this very medicine in Dioscorides, approved by Matthiolus, repeated by Aldrovandus,” whereupon he “began to have a better opinion of it” (Pt. II.5.1.5). Having listed a number of writers who speak of palm trees falling in love, he evidently still feels some doubt himself, and hastens to add these comments:

If any man think this which I say to be a tale, let him read that story of two palm-trees in Italy, the male growing at Brundusium, the female at Otranto (related by Jovianus Pontanus in an excellent poem, sometime tutor to Alphonsus Junior, King of Naples, his secretary of state, and a great philosopher), “which were barren, and so continued a long time,” till they came to see one another growing up higher, though many stadiums asunder. Pierius, in his Hieroglyphics, and Melchior Guilandinus, mem. 3, tract. de papyro, cites this story of Pontanus for a truth. See more in Salmuth, Comment, in Pancirol. de nova repert. tit. 1, de novo orbe, Mizaldus, Arcanorum lib. 2, Sandys' Voyages, lib. 2, fol. 103, etc.

(Pt. III.2.1.1.)²⁰

Philosophy supported by poetry, and poetry by travel books! In another place, he interrupts a listing of successful love baits to say, “Who cannot parallel these stories out of his experience?” (Pt. III, 2.2.4). But what follows this question is an anecdote about a gallant named Speucippus, taken from “that Greek Aristaenetus,” and Burton never does get around to telling us about his own experience (except that by this time the reader expects Burton's experience to be of this or that Greek writer, rather than of daily life).

What does he mean when he says, “Many more such could I relate which are to be believed with a poetical faith?” For one thing, he means to qualify his faith in books in at least one important way. He is not trying to prove anything by the scientific method. Rather, he wants to set down those tales which best illustrate the human condition, by means of the universal human method of gossip. Source and accuracy of information are less important than vividness, and illumination of what the gossiper would have us believe. Even the palm trees serve in this respect as illustrations both of the human desire for marvels and of the fierceness of human love, for “if such fury be in vegetals, what shall we think of sensible creatures? how much more violent and apparent shall it be in them!” (Pt. III.2.1.1). This theory of Burton's is precisely spelled out many times in such comments as these: “These are tales, you will say, but they have most significant morals, and do well express those ordinary proceedings of doting lovers” (Pt. III.2.2.4); “Whether this be a true story, or a tale, I will not much contend; it serves to illustrate this which I have said” (Pt. III.2.2.4).

Burton's most habitual, characteristic, and interesting kinds of sources are proverbs, myths, fables, and superstitions. He gathers in this material avidly and aptly, to such an extent that sometimes his whole style seems directly shaped by that of the proverb:

If thou be in woe, sorrow, want, distress, in pain, or sickness, think of that of our apostle, “God chastiseth them whom he loveth.” “They that sow in tears, shall reap in joy” (Ps. cxxvi, 6). “As the furnace proveth the potter's vessel, so doth temptation try men's thoughts” (Ecclus. xxvii, 5); 'tis for thy good, periisses nisi periisses: hadst thou not been so visited, thou hadst been utterly undone; “as gold in the fire,” so men are tried in adversity.

(Pt. II.3.1.1)

And so on. Again, it is clear that his book is not intended to prove in a “scientific” way; what Burton intends is to be true to human experience, and proverbs as the reflection of what has most frequently been thought and said would seem to him the quintessence of human experience.

His tales, like some of the phrases discussed earlier, often seem archetypal; they are familiar to most men as dream, nightmare, fear, or wish, e.g., the story of a man lost in a strange city who asks for lodging and is directed to a whorehouse (Pt. III.2.2.5); the man who jumped into the river when his sweetheart asked him for this proof of love, and then drowned because he could not swim (Pt. III.2.3); the poor drunk who was persuaded for a day, as a joke, that he was a great lord (Pt. II.2.4); the man who burned his birthplace (Pt. II.3.2). Of course there are madder tales as well (though still standard types), as he moves into the realm of the psychotic: the man who would not urinate for fear he would drown the city (Pt. I.3.1.3); the man who thought he was butter and would be melted by the sun (Pt. I.3.1.3). He is trying to delineate the range of human experience in melancholy by providing the illustrations that seem most evocative, that in fact achieve an almost mythic status by their very nature as well as by their occurrence in literature before and after Burton.

And while these tales have the quality of oral literature, they also share the distinction of having been written down. At the end of his longest listing of proverbs, Burton says, “Look for more in Isocrates, Seneca, Plutarch, Epictetus, etc., and for defect, consult with cheese-trenchers and painted cloths” (Pt. II.3.8). That is to say, if you are still not satisfied, look for popular proverbs written on wooden bowls and samplers. Burton's literary mind is a very inclusive one, and a kind of parallel to Jung's collective unconscious. All his tales are at least relatively sophisticated: the collective conscious has its life in print.

While he rejects superstitions with the zeal of a Lucretius, he frequently employs the myths that we might include under superstition: in illustrating one human vagary or another, he indiscriminately mingles tales of classical gods with those of men, their lives and loves being made to seem as relevant as ours. At the other end of the scale, his use of the fables of Aesop and others compares men to animals. He tests the range of humanity. Man, though a poor creature comparable to dog and pig, is also a fabulous and mythic creature, sharing even his faults with those of gods. And the book-mind is a cosmic personality, which itself includes and suffers the range of human possibility, time, and experience.

Burton's indifferent use of fact and fiction absolves him from the controversy as to whether history or poetry is a higher form. To him, all is equal so long as it is true to experience, in a way that is representative or symbolic, as is the case with the man who burned his birthplace. The oral-literary gossip technique mediates between fact and fiction, by its very rhetoric promising only that the speaker is intensely interested in human affairs. This technique gives Burton more freedom of range of experience and tone than would ordinarily be possible in a single work of art.

A related point which need not be exhaustively considered is that Burton's world is not only oral and literary: he makes constant reference in very specific ways to painting, sculpture, hieroglyphics, emblems, and music. Sometimes such references simply announce that no artist could describe the symptoms of melancholy, and thereby intensify our sense of the difficulty of his work. But even when this intention is present it may be combined with his desire to add another dimension to a description, as here:

What therefore Timanthes did in his picture of Iphigenia, now ready to be sacrificed; when he had painted Calchas mourning, Vlysses sad, but most sorrowful Menelaus, and shewed all his Art in expressing variety of affections, hee couered the maides father, Agamemnons head with a vaile, and left it to euery spectator to conceiue what he would himselfe, for that true passion & sorrow in summo gradu, such as his was, could not by any art be deciphred. What he did in his picture, J will doe in describing the Symptomes of Despaire, imagine what thou canst, feare, sorrow, furies, griefe, paine terror angor, dismall, gastly, tedious, irksome, & c. it is not sufficient, it comes farre short, no tongue can tell, no heart conceiue it.

(D., p. 279; Pt. III.4.2.4)

Both here and in the following passage, the painting provides a kind of emblem for Burton's commentary: “… Albertus Durer paints Melancholy, like a sad woman leaning on her arm with fixed looks, neglected habit, etc.; held therefore by some proud, soft, sottish, or half-mad, as the Abderites esteemed of Democritus, and yet of a deep reach, excellent apprehension, judicious, wise and witty …” (Pt. I.3.1.2). Probably his most frequent references are to emblems, both because they combine words and pictures, and because the emblem books would have been much more available to a non-traveller than any other kind of art.

For just as the oral character of Burton's work is largely Burton's invention, so, with most of the other art works mentioned, his source is literary. The emblems are easy for him to see for himself. Otherwise, he must generally rely on the descriptions of others. Hence, his references to the other arts are often embedded in anecdotes of some sort, sometimes having to do with the artist's life, or with the particular reaction to the work of some melancholy viewer. Of all the seventeenth-century writers whose universe is made of words, Burton may have had the most limited personal life and the largest reading life; of all these writers, he may have known the greatest variety of ways to experience and extend the world in language.

When we turn to Burton's own comments upon his task and its requirements, it becomes clear that while Democritus is allowed to be superior to time and space, this superiority is finally not enough; and since one Democritus is not adequate to his task, the cosmic personality must be mankind. We are often asked to follow in the footsteps of Democritus, who gives his credentials thus, in a passage which typically blurs Democritus with Burton:

I ward all with Democritus' buckler, his medicine shall salve it; strike where thou wilt, and when: Democritus dixit, Democritus will answer it. It was written by an idle fellow, at idle times, about our Saturnalian or Dionysian feasts, when, as he said, nullum libertati periculum est, servants in old Rome had liberty to say and do what them list. When our countrymen sacrificed to their goddess Vacuna, and sat tippling by their Vacunal fires, I writ this and published this.

(Pt. I, p. 122)

Democritus of old could not know all. Burton speculates about what might happen “if every man had a window in his breast … or … that he could cubiculorum obductas foras recludere et secreta cordium penetrare, which Cyprian desired, open doors and locks, shoot bolts, as Lucian's Gallus did with a feather of his tail: or Gyges' invisible ring, or some rare perspective glass, or otacousticon, which would so multiply species that a man might hear and see all at once …” (Pt. I, pp. 68-69). This is really what Burton-Democritus is trying to do, and he sees his task as infinite.

He tries to visualize what it means to see all men and all times, not just by strolling through pleasant landscapes or gathering anecdotes from a hundred different countries, but also by compiling statistics. To learn how men suffer in war, for example, one may try to add up the number of men who have died in wars, or fought, or received wounds or decorations. How many men are all men? Consider in this typical passage the apparently intimate knowledge and concern, the fingertip information combined with occasional uncertainty:

The siege of Troy lasted ten years, eight months; there died 870,000 Grecians, 670,000 Trojans at the taking of the city, and after were slain 276,000 men, women, and children of all sorts. Caesar killed a million, Mahomet the second Turk 300,000 persons; Sicinius Dentatus fought in an hundred battles, eight times in single combat he overcame, had forty wounds before, was rewarded with 140 crowns, triumphed nine times for his good service. M. Sergius had 32 wounds; Scaeva, the centurion, I know not how many; every nation had their Hectors, Scipios, Caesars, and Alexanders. Our Edward the Fourth was in 26 battles afoot: and as they do all, he glories in it, 'tis related to his honour. At the siege of Hierusalem, 1,100,000 died with sword and famine. At the battle of Cannae, 70,000 men were slain, as Polybius records, and as many at Battle Abbey with us; and 'tis no news to fight from sun to sun, as they did, as Constantine and Licinius, etc.

(Pt. I, pp. 56-57)

In this passage, too, he goes back and forth between general statistics concerning dead and wounded in single battles, and individual statistics about how many wounds one man received in his career. The disparate character of the figures makes its own contribution to the cosmic range. The method of narration is saga-like, with its nearly omniscient and all-present “I,” but it is clear that this narrator's omnipresence is, as always, in his books, even though he has absorbed them as experience. Although he piles up numerous accounts, tabulating the deaths of millions of men, he cannot reach an end, and the sentence stops, as Burton's typically do, with an “etc.” Although he has worn himself out, he accepts the fact that the subject is not exhausted: he cannot hold in his mind at once or set down on a page at once all the vicissitudes of man. The next best thing is to admit it by using the “etc.,” letting the openness of the sentence suggest the infinity that the page cannot contain.

This sense of openness is not confined to a single technique. At the end of paragraph or section, we are constantly confronted by lines like “Read more in Poggius Florentinus, Valdanus, Plutarch, etc.” His massive footnotes interlarding every page and almost every sentence perform a like function in supplying further details and references. And so we see that while so much literature, so much of time and space is being constantly assimilated into the book, the reader is also invited to move in the other direction and for both reasons to sense that the book is lacking in conventional boundaries. This openness of form is essential just because statistics cannot enclose infinity.

Not only is there an infinity of men: the psychological complications common to men are also infinite, even if one limits oneself only to the consideration of melancholy. After all, “if thou shalt either conceive, or climb to see, thou shalt soon perceive that all the world is mad, that it is melancholy, dotes” (Pt. I, p. 39). Almost any Puritan would have objected to Burton's assumption that melancholy is intrinsic to mankind: “You may … as soon find the motion of a bird in the air as the heart of man, a melancholy man” (Pt. I.3.1.4). Nevertheless, this is how Burton sees it, and therefore believes his task to be so labyrinthine and Herculean that one might as well reckon up the motes of the sun or the sands of the sea:

To anatomize this humour aright, through all the members of this our microcosmos, is as great a task as to reconcile those chronological errors in the Assyrian monarchy, find out the quadrature of a circle, the creeks and sounds of the north-east or north-west passages, and all out as good a discovery as that hungry Spaniard's of Terra Australis Incognita, as great a trouble as to perfect the motion of Mars and Mercury, which so crucifies our astronomers, or to rectify the Gregorian calendar.

(Pt. I, p. 38)

Repeatedly, he compares the anatomy of melancholy to the most difficult problems that have been or could be devised, particularly problems having to do with the character of the world itself. It is as hard to figure out man as to map the world, because in the familiar microcosm-macrocosm analogy which he uses here, man is a world.

When Burton speaks of the “world” specifically, it is almost always in such a context as to suggest that the world is at man's mercy. Man creates or disposes of it as he will: “Alexander was sorry because there were no more worlds for him to conquer” (Pt. I, p. 60); man's sins “crucify the world” (Pt. I, p. 97); men “will so long blow the coals of contention till all the world be consumed with fire” (Pt. I, p. 56); men “blear the world's eyes by flattery” (Pt. III.1.3). Clearly what he is saying is that man destroys man by his vanity, for man himself is the only world there is. Men are killed, a million here, five thousand there: by these means, man or the world, and hence Burton as the book, is crucified. Therefore, “'tis not one Democritus will serve turn to laugh in these days; we have now need of a ‘Democritus to laugh at Democritus’; one jester to flout at another, one fool to fleer at another: a great stentorian Democritus, as big as that Rhodian Colossus” (Pt. I, p. 52).

Burton briefly makes the effort to construct his own Utopia, where he can be that Rhodian Colossus, and freely domineer. But although his interest in this project was sustained, as the changes through various editions show,²¹ he could not commit himself to it as the solution to the world's problems. Though his suggestions are practical, he is only able to control his Utopia because it is entirely his own. And the more fruitful effort to be the stentorian Democritus is in his recognition that as men destroy each other, they may also laugh at and pity one another in themselves. Man is his own worst enemy, but men are all members of one body, the world, which is represented by the Rhodian Colossus that is the Anatomy of Melancholy.

The reasons for the fragmentation of Burton's persona become more apparent. He both identifies himself with this concept of man, and rejects it. He can sit apart, a little anatomist in a college garden—a nobody in his own book; or he can be Democritus the cynic, coolly analyzing man's frailties; or he can become the book, and, symbolically, all men.

In turning from Burton's “I” to the relationship between the “I” and the audience, one of the first things a reader is likely to notice is the shiftiness of the pose. Burton is constantly aware of the discrepancy between his own human limitations, and the wider capacities of Democritus and of the book personality. But he capitalizes upon this discrepancy by emphasizing his weakness. For example, after a lengthy exposition of the miseries of single women, he breaks off thus: “But where am I? Into what subject have I rushed? What have I to do with nuns, maids, virgins, widows? I am a bachelor myself, and lead a monastic life in a college …” (Pt. I.3.2.4). This kind of comment is always a sign that Burton is about to become his wiliest, most Chaucerian self. He closes these remarks by saying, “though my subject necessarily require it, I will say no more.” And the paragraph ends. The reader, forced to conclude that Burton is putting his modesty before the demands of his subject, must also realize, even if partly unconsciously, that a bachelor who leads a monastic life may very well have experienced miseries something like those that trouble nuns, maids, virgins, and widows. Burton is using his personal life at this point to give his book-self additional interest and authority, even while he seems to be doing just the opposite. The apology implicitly makes the bridge between the externally restricted life of the unimaginative man, and the wide and rich experience of the imaginative author. Thus, when he continues in the next paragraph, “And yet I must and will say something more,” the reader is relieved and impressed.

One particularly significant example of this technique shows clearly his awareness of the problem of limited versus cosmic personality. Discussing the nature of the universe, in his “Digression of Air,” he has involved himself in a lengthy and satiric discussion of various theologies that attempt to explain the world or God. He then breaks off thus:

But hoo! I am now gone quite out of sight, I am almost giddy with roving about: I could have ranged farther yet, but I am an infant, and not able to dive into these profundities or sound these depths, not able to understand, much less to discuss. I leave the contemplation of these things to stronger wits, that have better ability and happier leisure to wade into such philosophical mysteries; for put case I were as able as willing, yet what can one man do? I will conclude with Scaliger, Nequaquam nos homines sumus, sed partes hominis; ex omnibus aliquid fieri potest, idque non magnum; ex singulis fere nihil.

(Pt. II.2.3)

At the beginning, of course, he is still speaking satirically; and by stressing his weakness really emphasizes his own wisdom as against the follies of those who pry into and make pronouncements upon matters about which they know little or nothing. No one man or group of men can possibly set up to know all, but “ex omnibus aliquid fieri potest”—which is clearly just what Burton has done by setting up his book-personality, made up of his own varied personae together with the minds of men of all times. “Ex omnibus aliquid … idque non magnum”—hence the use of “etc.” Only by including all that he can, and then leaving the book as open as he can, is it possible for him to suggest cosmic Man.

Burton's attitude toward his audience is clarified by his enumeration of the purposes for which he is writing—to avoid melancholy; to make clear, by “showing himself,” that he knows something about melancholy; to make an antidote out of the prime cause of his disease; to help others out of fellow feeling; to make men know themselves; and to bring them to moderation. The first and third reasons imply that he can afford to be indifferent to the popular success his book may achieve. And he often tells us that if he does no one else good, he does good to himself, or that if no one else is interested in a given aspect of his subject, he is (Pt. II.3.1.1). His second reason for writing, though, commits him to appearing in public. “Peradventure [I write] as others do, for fame, to show myself (Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter). I might be of Thucydides' opinion, ‘To know a thing and not to express it, is all one as if he knew it not’” (Pt. I, p. 21). Between “peradventure” and “might be,” the reader cannot help sensing a kind of ambivalence in Burton about the propriety of this reason. The self must be confirmed by the testimony of others. An audience is necessary. But the suggestion of vanity involved in “showing oneself” keeps Burton's tone irresolute.

On the other hand, this ambiguity may be only another Burtonian trick. For if the presence of an audience confirms the book-personality, the book can create the kind of audience it wants, by building into itself a dialogue with that audience, or by employing the kind of manipulative rhetoric that I have already illustrated. Burton anticipates objections to his title, his subject, and his style, and answers them by giving reasons and precedents. He repeatedly and at length apologizes for his incompetence, only by some quick twist to cut the reader's ground from under him:

And for those other faults of barbarism, Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgment, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, phantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry; I confess all ('tis partly affected), thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself. 'Tis not worth the reading, I yield it, I desire thee not to lose time in perusing so vain a subject, I should be peradventure loath myself to read him or thee so writing; 'tis not operae pretium. All I say is this, that I have precedents for it, which Isocrates calls perfugium iis qui peccant, others as absurd, vain, idle, illiterate, etc. Nonnulli alii idem fecerunt, others have done as much, it may be more, and perhaps thou thyself, Novimus et qui te, etc. We have all our faults; scimus, et hanc veniam, etc., thou censurest me, so have I done others, and may do thee.

(Pt. I, p. 26)

His artful listing of his faults is followed by the news that this faulty style is partly affected, which at once partly disarms the critic. Then after encouraging the critic again by his own self-criticism, he says that he has precedents for his style—and then undercuts himself by explaining that his precedents are as worthless as he is. Immediately, however, the bridge is made between worthless precedents and the reader, who may be guilty of similar displays: “thou censurest me, so have I done others, and may do thee.” We will see this final technique used repeatedly in various ways in Burton's relationship with the reader. For if the audience is part of the book-personality, part of “Burton,” then it makes sense for Burton repeatedly to force the audience to change places with him. The reversing of roles connects them, makes everyone see everything from all possible viewpoints, frees Burton from the spotlight, and again forces the question, Which is life and which is art? To put the effect of the technique in another way, since it is clear that Burton's folly reflects the world's (and the reader's), the reader has to accept his reflection or play the hypocrite.

Thus, not only is the making of the book-personality a main theme of the book; the reader's reaction is, too. And the readers, or all men, are part of the book in this way just as they are represented in its corporate personality, and in its infinitude of listings of symptoms, diseases, situations. “How shall I hope to express myself to each man's humour and conceit, or to give satisfaction to all?” he asks, and the question has a double effect. For, in a sense, he means that he wants to do just that: his aim is to include or imply everything. But, of course, he is also open-ending this problem as he does everything else. His book even implies readers who will not read him; no one can please all: “If you like not this, get you to another inn … go read something else” (Pt. I, p. 28).

Once the willing reader permits himself to be drawn into the book, another of its functions becomes clear. When Burton says he wants to make an antidote out of the prime cause of his disease, he means that he will avoid melancholy by writing about it; the construction of the book-self is psychotherapy. The reader is also to avoid melancholy by reading about it. Despite its grandiose typographical outlines, the book's practical purpose is not to make authoritative conclusions about this vast subject, but to act as medicine upon its readers. It is for this reason, obviously, that from edition to edition the creative and anecdotal sections of the book increase at such a disproportionate rate in comparison to the more scientific ones. It is true that Burton includes prescriptions in one or two instances, but he is anxious not to encourage that kind of do-it-yourself medicine. Hence, he is apt to put such passages in Latin, omit part of the technical directions, or refer the reader to another source. The book is to be, not to teach, medicine. That is one reason for such lengthy presentation of opposite viewpoints on various subjects, and another reason why he does not always move directly toward a reasoned and tested conclusion. The opposite viewpoints are interesting in themselves, as an aspect of humanity; and a reader who is able to become interested in humanity may be cured of melancholy.

A remedy for melancholy, according to Burton, is to be kept in the company of your friends, not to be left alone (Pt. II.2.6.4). Burton is not always friendly, but he never leaves the reader alone. Almost all his stylistic techniques force us to take an active part in responding to the prose—the apologies that take the drowsy reader unaware, the constant confrontations between Burton and his audience, the necessity of choosing this conclusion or that. Burton often directly challenges the imagination. Let the lover separate his mistress from her gorgeous attire, and then see if he still loves her: “Suppose thou saw her in a base beggar's weed, or else dressed in some old hirsute attires out of fashion, foul linen, coarse raiment, besmeared with soot … wouldst thou affect her as thou dost?” (Pt. III.2.5.3). Let the reader explicate or apply the text: “A mouse (saith an apologer) was brought up in a chest, there fed with fragments of bread and cheese, thought there could be no better meat, till coming forth at last, and feeding liberally of other variety of viands, loathed his former life: moralize this fable by thyself” (Pt. III.2.5.2). Burton consistently speaks to the reader, often in the imperative, either satirically or seriously ordering him to make personal application of the text: “Now go and brag of thy gentility” (Pt. II.3.2); “Be thou such a one; let thy misery be what it will, what it can, with patience endure it; thou mayst be restored as he was” (Pt. II.3.3). These directives are reminiscent of the part of the sermon called the “application,”²² in which the minister applies to his auditory the text that he has previously explained. They are a bit sharper in tone than the application generally is, but they share the oral immediacy that makes the listener sit up and take notice. Like earlier techniques, too, this helps to make of the reader what the book wants—to exercise a control as direct and personal as that of speech over the unseen audience.

Another very central way in which Burton involves the reader in his prose is the apparently informal sentence structure so common in his age.²³ The writer refuses to detach himself from his prose, but insists upon making the sentences appear to mirror his mind, not as that mind presents an ordered argument from which its own confusions and doubts have been abstracted, but rather as the mind struggles with these confusions and doubts from moment to moment.

This may be, in fact, like other techniques that I have mentioned, a means of compensating for the detachment of print. As the writer chooses to seem undisciplined, or to be constructing his order as he goes, he invites the reader to endure with him the pains and gratifications of self-discovery rather than easily reading the conclusions abstracted from the experiment. In a sense, reading the book under these conditions becomes the same task that writing it was; Burton's prose is singularly exhausting to read:

Some are afraid that they shall have every fearful disease they see others have, hear of, or read, and dare not therefore hear or read of any such subject, no, not of melancholy itself, lest by applying to themselves that which they hear or read, they should aggravate and increase it. If they see one possessed, bewitched, an epileptic paroxysm, a man shaking with the palsy, or giddy-headed, reeling or standing in a dangerous place, etc., for many days after it runs in their minds, they are afraid they shall be so too, they are in like danger, as Perkins, cap. 12, sect. 2, well observes in his Cases of Conscience, and many times by violence of imagination they produce it. They cannot endure to see any terrible object, as a monster, a man executed, a carcass, hear the devil named, or any tragical relation seen, but they quake for fear, Hecatas somniare sibi videntur (Lucian), they dream of hobgoblins, and may not get it out of their minds a long time after: they apply (as I have said) all they hear, see, read, to themselves; as Felix Plater notes of some young physicians, that studying to cure diseases, catch them themselves, will be sick, and appropriate all symptoms they find related of others to their own persons.

(Pt. I. 3.1.2)

Typically Burtonian, this period does not seem to contain all the information a speaker wants to present, in its best psychological form, from a given point of view. Rather, it tries to include unlimited possibilities, and the point of view threatens once or twice to shift from speaker to subject. There is no rigid attempt to maintain grammatical consistency, either, since that might require too much limitation of subject or viewpoint: hence, for example, his characteristic listing of parallel examples, including some not in parallel form, e.g., “if they see one possessed, bewitched, an epileptic paroxysm.” The sentence is like a multiple-choice examination: “check one, or if none is applicable, explain under ‘other’ (etc.).” This kind of variety makes the sentence as inclusive as possible, offering the reader every opportunity to find in it his own experience, and to broaden his own experience by taking all this into himself, just as Burton has done. Both the references to other writers and the use of the “etc.” permit an openness of meaning that does not limit the subject to what can be fitted onto the page.

Multiplication of parallel illustrations is, of course, characteristic of Burton's style; and although each writer has his distinctive way of handling this technique, it is also characteristic of the age. Leonard Goldstein has termed its use in Burton an unconscious operation of the quantifying tendency of Galilean science,²⁴ and I am sure that is at least a partial explanation. Wherever the impulse has its roots, it not only contributes in Burton to our sense of cosmic personality, but also becomes a robust literary tendency to try to seem an unpremeditating pioneer in this world of infinite variety—do not take time to choose between this word and that; use them both—the habit speeds up the tempo of the prose, increases its exuberance and plenitude, creating an effect of excited speech at the same time that it actually slows the thought to a conversational pace: “I know there be many base, impudent, brazen-faced rogues, that will nulla pallescere culpa, be moved with nothing, take no infamy or disgrace to heart, laugh at all; let them be proved perjured, stigmatized, convict rogues, thieves, traitors, lose their ears, be whipped, branded, carted, pointed at, hissed, reviled, and derided with Ballio the bawd in Plautus, they rejoice at it: Cantores probos! babae! and bombax! what care they?” (Pt. I.2.3.7). There is sequential, rhetorical, or psychological order in some of these listings, however haphazard they may be in general. To the extent that such order does exist, the staccato progression of the sentence becomes more evident: here Burton describes first the characters of the rogues, then the manner of their conviction, and then their punishment; and within these groupings there are lesser movements. Burton interrupts his sentences, or sharpens the tempo, not only by his staccato listings, but also by the use of imperatives, and by insertion of short clauses, exclamations, and Latin phrases, as notably illustrated in the sentence given above. Of course the usual shifts in point of view occur here too. The reader is not allowed to settle down emotionally; the tension of this kind of sentence structure prevents it, and keeps him in close contact with the book-personality, whose typographical and sentence-structural techniques have the emotional force of pronunciation and gesticulation.

More than most writers, Burton has caused his sentence structure to imitate the content of his sentences.²⁵ His style changes subtly as well as vastly, not just from one general subject to another, but from one mood or passing point to another: “So that as a river runs sometimes precipitate and swift, then dull and slow; now direct, then per ambages; now deep, then shallow; now muddy, then clear; now broad, then narrow; doth my style flow; now serious, then light; now comical, then satirical; now more elaborate, then remiss, as the present subject required, or as at that time I was affected” (Pt. I, p. 32). The river metaphor suggests again both variety and openness of theme. The range of style is, of course, another way of pleasing and including all sorts of men: “He respects matter, thou art wholly for words; he loves a loose and free style, thou art all for neat composition, strong lines, hyperboles, allegories; he desires a fine frontispiece, enticing pictures … that which one admires, another explodes as most absurd and ridiculous” (Pt. I, p. 27). All these, including the fine frontispiece with enticing pictures,²⁶ are represented in the Anatomy. But the primary intent is not to make a display of versatility, impressive as that versatility is, but to let the sentences really be the body of the book, or of mankind, in all man's infinite variety. Let me illustrate with two sentences chosen at random. In the first, the idea requires that the sentence provide a long cumulative buildup punctured rather quickly at the end, to imitate worldly success:

A knight would be a baronet, and then a lord, and then a viscount, and then an earl, etc., a doctor, a dean, and then a bishop; from tribune to praetor, from bailiff to mayor; first this office, and then that; as Pyrrhus in Plutarch, they will first have Greece, then Africa, and then Asia, and swell with Aesop's frog so long, till in the end they burst, or come down with Sejanus ad Gemonias scalas and break their own necks; or as Evangelus, the piper in Lucian, that blew his pipe so long, till he fell down dead.

(Pt. I.1.3.11)

In contrast to the straightforward movement toward a puncturing climax in the above sentence, the one that follows presents a labyrinthine involvement of clauses wound one around the other, to imitate the self-entrapment of increasingly more neurotic men:

So delightsome these toys are at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years alone in such contemplations and phantastical meditations, which are like unto dreams, and they will hardly be drawn from them, or willingly interrupt; so pleasant their vain conceits are, that they hinder their ordinary tasks and necessary business, they cannot address themselves to them, or almost to any study or employment, these phantastical and bewitching thoughts so covertly, so feelingly, so urgently, so continually set upon, creep in, insinuate, possess, overcome, distract, and detain them, they cannot, I say, go about their more necessary business, stave off or extricate themselves, but are ever musing, melancholizing, and carried along; as he (they say) that is led round about a heath with a Puck in the night, they run earnestly on in this labyrinth of anxious and solicitous melancholy meditations, and cannot well or willingly refrain, or easily leave off, winding and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until at last the scene is turned upon a sudden by some bad object, and they, being now habituated to such vain meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can ruminate of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects.

(Pt. I.2.2.6)

In some ways analogous, though flashier, is Burton's use of drama. Life turns out to be a play in Burton, as in so much of the art of this period, but Burton takes the metaphor much more seriously than most writers do, using theater figures on almost every page, making both himself and his readers actors in his tragi-comedy. Burton frequently asserts that he is on stage: “Be it therefore as it is, well or ill, I have assayed, put myself upon the stage” (Pt. I, pp. 26-27); “I am resolved … boldly to show myself in this common stage, and in this tragi-comedy of love to act several parts, some satirically, some comically, some in a mixed tone, as the subject I have in hand gives occasion, and present scene shall require or offer itself” (Pt. III.1.1.2). That he means to act several parts should alert us to the fact that in his dramatic scenes point of view shifts repeatedly, as both Burton and the reader move from one role to another. Burton's dramatic versatility is another way of creating the cosmic personality, and of involving the reader in the work.

When Burton simply shows himself upon the stage, his technique is monologue, with an audience obviously implied, as in the opening pages of the section on religious melancholy:

Giue me but a little leaue, and I will set before your eyes, in briefe a stupend, vast, infinite ocean of incredible madnesse and folly: a Sea full of shelues and rockes, Sands, gulfes, Euripes and contrary tides, full of fearefull monsters, uncouth shapes, roring waues, tempests, and Siren calmes, Halcyonian Seas; unspeakeable miserie, such Comedies and Tragidies, such absurd and ridiculous, ferall and lamentable fitts, that I know not whether they are more to be pittied or derided, or may be belieued, but that we daily see the same still practised in our dayes, fresh examples, nova novitia, fresh obiects, of misery and madness in this kind that are still represented vnto vs, abroad, at home, in the midst of vs, in our bosomes.

(D., p. 5; Pt. III.4.1.1)

As an introductory soliloquy, this is especially revealing, for while he speaks as an actor to an audience, promising spectacles, comedies, and tragedies, and speaking in macrocosmic terms, eventually he locates the drama in man's bosom. Within the confines of this book, then, which represents Burton, or Burton magnified to cosmic personality, Burton and his readers will be acting out the tragedies and comedies that are played within themselves: again there are mirrors within mirrors. What Burton means to set before the reader is the reader playing himself: “Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse” (Pt. I, p. 16).

The role-playing from one direction evolves out of the techniques Burton uses to manipulate and involve the reader. From another direction, it evolves out of simple quotations, and since I have earlier discussed Burton's use of quotations at some length, I need not go into much detail here. When he uses quotations to support a point that he is making, they do allow another voice to be heard, and his recognition of one value of this technique is apparent: “Divitiae saeculi sunt laquei: so writes Bernard; worldly wealth is the devil's bait: and as the moon when she is fuller of light is still farthest from the sun, the more wealth they have, the farther they are commonly from God. (If I had said this of myself, rich men would have pulled me a-pieces; but hear who saith, and who seconds it, an Apostle.)” (Pt. II.3.3) It is interesting to see him play his fool role against Bernard in such a way that the rich men, as is usual for the auditors of this Burton, end up the losers, men who attend to names but not to wisdom. But the use of the quotation in itself is not really important dramatically.

Much more interesting dramatic passages are those in which Burton allows himself and his reader to take an active part in the drama, and engages in the role-shifting of which we have seen some evidence already. In the following passages, he has been speaking in his priest-role, trying to comfort a victim of despair. He then moves into the other person's consciousness by paraphrase of his thoughts, rather than by direct quotation: “All this is true thou replyest, but yet it concernes not thee, 'tis verified in ordinary offenders, in common sinnes, but thine are of an higher straine, euen against the Holy Ghost himselfe. …” Halfway through this, he pulls back, speaks briefly of the sinner in the third person, and then almost immediately slides completely into the sinner's point of view:

In steed of Faith, Feare, and loue of God, repentance, & c. blasphemous thoughts that haue bin euer harboured in his mind, euen against God himselfe, the blessed Trinity: the Scripture false, rude, harsh unmethodicall: Heauen, hell, resurrection, meere toyes and fables; incredible, impossible, absurde, vaine, ill contriued; Religion, policy, an humane invention, to keep men in obedience, or for profit, invented by Priests and Lawgiuers to that purpose. If there be any such supreme Power, he takes no notice of our doings. …

(D., pp. 316-18; Pt. III.4.2.6)

The seemingly almost unconscious movement from one mind to another demonstrates extraordinary mental flexibility resulting, partly at least, from Burton's cultivated effort to understand a variety of viewpoints.

Two principal techniques used in his longer and more dramatic passages should be illustrated. In one, he plays third person commentator on a scene in which he also acts:

For look into the world, and you shall see men most part esteemed according to their means, and happy as they are rich … Every man seeks his acquaintance, his kindred, to match with him, though he be an oaf, a ninny, a monster, a goosecap, uxorem ducat Danaen, when and whom he will, hunc optant generum rex et regina, he is an excellent match for my son, my daughter, my niece, etc. Quicquid calcaverit hic, rosa fiet, let him go whither he will, trumpets sound, bells ring, etc., all happiness attends him, every man is willing to entertain him, he sups in Apollo wheresoever he comes; what preparation is made for his entertainment! fish and fowl, spices and perfumes, all that sea and land affords. What cookery, masking, mirth to exhilarate his person! … What dish will your good worship eat of? … What sport will your honour have? hawking, hunting, fishing, fowling, bulls, bears, cards, dice, cocks, players, tumblers, fiddlers, jesters, etc., they are at your good worship's command … Though he be a silly soft fellow, and scarce have common sense, yet if he be born to fortunes (as I have said) jure haereditario sapere jubetur, he must have honour and office in his course: Nemo nisi dives honore dignus (Ambros. Offic. 21) none so worthy as himself: he shall have it, atque esto quicquid Servius aut Labeo. Get money enough and command kingdoms, provinces, armies, hearts, hands, and affections; thou shalt have popes, patriarchs to be thy chaplains and parasites. …

(Pt. I.2.4.6)

Burton successively plays the detached observer, the amused observer, the would-be in-laws, and the sycophant. The reader is first invited to play the rich man when Burton begins to play the sycophant, speaking to a you. That role is briefly made unavailable when Burton steps back into his observer role, and then restored, more ironically than ever, when he again turns to the reader with the imperative, “Get money enough.”

Burton's second major theatrical method dispenses with the detached observer, and constructs a kind of dialogue. There may be any number of speakers for a given viewpoint, and Burton shifts roles, or bequeaths roles to the reader at will. Part II, Section 3, Member 3 is wholly constructed in this way. Entitled “Against Poverty and Want, with such other Adversities,” it begins with a fairly long speech on the blessings of poverty, spoken by Burton in his parish-priest role. Frequently signalling a change of speaker in this passage are the words “Yea but,” first voiced thus: “Yea, but he hath the world at will that is rich, the good things of the earth: suave est de magno tollere acervo, he is a happy man, adored like a god, a prince, every man seeks to him, applauds, honours, admires him” (Pt. II.3.3). The argument then moves back and forth, between these two views, with various speakers voicing their discontent with poverty, or, less frequently, their contentment with it. During the course of the debate, Burton, in addition to his parish-priest role plays the part of servant to a lord; a malcontent poor man; an envious man; and a slave. He also addresses various thou's—a lord, a drudge, and a discontented wretch. Here the reader has many opportunities to accept one role or another, and is sometimes really forced to do so by the sharpness of Burton's tone: “That which St. Austin said of himself here in this place, I may truly say to thee, thou discontented wretch, thou covetous niggard, thou churl, thou ambitious and swelling toad, 'tis not want but peevishness which is the cause of thy woes; settle thine affection, thou hast enough” (Pt. II.3.3).

In speaking of love-melancholy, Burton says that “when a country fellow discommended once that exquisite picture of Helen, made by Zeuxis, for he saw no such beauty in it, Nichomachus, a lovesick spectator, replied, Sume tibi meos oculos et deam existimabis, take mine eyes, and thou wilt think she is a goddess, dote on her forthwith …” (Pt. III.2.3). One of Burton's principal efforts in his book has been to enable men to see through one another's eyes, and to recognize themselves in others. If his method has been successful, the conclusion to the first part of his book will have terrific impact. It voices a theme that we have heard expressed several times already, most notably in Donne's meditations on the bells, but Burton has brought us to it in a way that is all his own. He has been speaking of self-murder, which one would ordinarily think the loneliest and most alienating of acts, a purposeful severing of self from self, man from mankind. Even here, Burton insists that the survivor may conceive himself the victim: “Quod cuiquam contigit cuivis potest. Who knows how he may be tempted? It is his case, it may be thine: Quae sua sors hodie est, cras fore vestra potest. We ought not to be so rash and rigorous in our censures as some are; charity will judge and hope the best; God be merciful unto us all!” (Pt. I.4.1).

Finally, the “I” makes himself known through some characteristically Anglican and conservative themes: appearance and reality; discontinuity; time and eternity. Inevitably we have already seen something of them in sidelong glances. But since this is a book of many faces, it would be possible to concentrate on these themes alone as both subject and style of the “I” of Burton's book.

It is impressive evidence of the pervasiveness in the age of the theme of appearance and reality that a scholar like Burton, in many ways so much removed from seventeenth-century life, so thoroughly absorbed this theme into the character of his book. One major vehicle of its expression is Burton's wit: among its many other virtues, the Anatomy is a very funny book,²⁷ and its wit is based almost entirely on appearance-reality jokes. To suggest the range of wit that this theme can encompass, let me simply list a few examples. A rare pun: “bull bellowing pope” (is he bull or pope? what are the bulls that he bellows?). Mistranslation of Latin: Veritas odium parit, “verjuice and oatmeal is good for a parrot.” (The Latin looks like one meaning, but has another.) Bawdy story: when the convent caught fire one night, the nun, in her haste to dress, put the monk's breeches on her head instead of her wimple (as the breeches appeared to her to be her wimple, so she appeared to others to be virtuous). False modesty: Burton claimed that his first edition was signed only at the publisher's insistence, and in subsequent editions removed his name, but put his picture on the title page, and left identifying autobiographical details scattered through the volume.

Burton has his own symbol for his Janus-faced age and for the elusive complexity of his book: “I will determine of them all, they are like these double or turning pictures; stand before which, you see a fair maid, on the one side an ape, on the other an owl; look upon them at the first sight, all is well; but further examine, you shall find them wise on the one side and fools on the other …” (Pt. I, p. 115).²⁸ The double picture has a third face. It is by thus capitalizing upon ambiguity that he solves his own dilemma of how to respond to man's follies: “Fleat Heraclitus an rideat Democritus, in attempting to speake of these Symptomes, shall I laugh with Democritus, or weepe with Heraclitus, they are so ridiculous and absurd on the one side, so lamentable and tragicall on the other, a mixt Sceane offers itselfe …” (D., p. 106; Pt. III.4.1.3). Here again Burton suggests a third face to the coin—the mixed scene, to which he can respond with a mixed passion. The theme of appearance and reality is ideally suited to such an aim, because in its ambiguity of character or tone, it is intrinsically witty, and in its implicit representation of this fallen world of appearances, it is intrinsically grave. A figure based upon this theme, then, always partakes of both elements, and can do so in many varying proportions depending upon whether the author wants to emphasize the comic or the tragic aspects of his subject.

The nun who thought the monk's breeches were her wimple, for example, becomes the subject of a funny story. Behind the bawdy humor, more serious kinds of deception are involved. By day, she appears to be a godly woman; at night, she gives rein to her true (lack of) character. Possibly she is self-deceived about her vocation. In larger terms, the anecdote criticizes the proclaimed purity, the actual corruption both of religious orders and of the Roman church.

Like any seventeenth-century preacher, Burton suggests that passion, imagination, and the devil are responsible for man's inability to distinguish between appearance and reality. “Love and hate are like the two ends of a perspective glass, the one multiplies, the other makes less” (Pt. I, p. 66, n. 4). Among his many tales illustrating the blindness of love to the reality of its object is this one: “Petrarch hath such another tale of a young gallant, that loved a wench with one eye, and for that cause by his parents was sent to travel into far countries; ‘after some years he returned, and meeting the maid for whose sake he was sent abroad, asked her how and by what chance she lost her eye? No, said she, I have lost none, but you have found yours …’” (Pt. III.2.5.2). Imagination, which in Burton blends into madness, explains delusions: “… if it be extreme, they think they hear hideous noises, see and talk with black men, and converse familiarly with devils, and such strange chimeras and visions …” (Pt. I.3.1.3). But such delusions may also be caused by the devil, who is of course the father of lies. To these other causes, Burton, in his physician role, adds physical ailments. A man bitten by a mad dog sees dogs everywhere, especially in water (Pt. I.1.1.4). For these ailments, Burton has cures. His book is a serious effort to “repair the ruins of our first parents,”²⁹ to free men of the ills that distort and blind their vision.

In his treatment of himself and his book, Burton often seems to be using the theme of appearance and reality merely to play games with the reader. His false apologies fall into this category, as does all his obfuscation of his own identity. Because of his habit of extensive quotation, he can say whatever he likes, and then, if anyone takes umbrage, disclaim responsibility: “'tis all mine and none mine.” The whole book becomes an optical illusion: looked at in one way, it is an encyclopedia; in another, an original treatise; in another, a living organism. All these devices are surely witty and exciting. And they also very clearly express the problem of emerging individuality that is so crucial in the seventeenth century. He appears to court the reader, yet in a way he is not even willing to admit that he wants to be read. He has a sense of separateness and individuality, yet he feels most whole when he is most at one with his learning and his traditions. The question here is not so much one of appearance and reality as of fragmented reality. The three sides of the coin are not simultaneously visible to mortal sight, but they must be made so.

The same kinds of comments may be made upon Burton's multiplicity of roles, his reversals of roles, his involvement of the reader, and his intentional confusion of art with life. Though in one sense he can be himself only, in another he is all the parts he plays, because his book-personality becomes cosmic. In the same way, in the book, he and the reader are one, both being the subject of Burton's discourse. And, as we have already seen, the book is Burton's life, and there is uncertainty about whether “life” and “art” are two different things. From his book, Burton surveys the scene of the world as if he were in a theater. Yet the theater is the book.

The most persistent type of appearance-reality motif, the figure of transformation, is a theme in its own right.³⁰ Some of Burton's uses of it could certainly be illustrated from what I have said of appearance and reality. Furthermore, his fascination with myths, legends, and religions that involve transformation—lycanthropia and metempsychosis, for example—is typical of this general preoccupation. But Burton's most frequent expression of it springs from Chrysostom's comparisons of sinful men to animals.³¹ The causes of transformation for the worse are love, deceit, unbridled passion, poverty, superstition, and the devil. The causes of transformation for the better are love and repentance. Typical descriptions of transformation are these:

“Man in honour that understandeth not, is like unto beasts that perish,” so David esteems him: a monster by stupend metamorphoses, a fox, a dog, a hog, what not?

(Pt. I.1.1.1)

The major part of lovers are carried headlong like so many brute beasts; reason counsels one way, thy friends, fortunes, shame, disgrace, danger, and an ocean of cares that will certainly follow … yet they will do it, and become at last insensati, void of sense; degenerate into dogs, hogs, asses, brutes; as Jupiter into a bull, Apuleius an ass, Lycaon a wolf, Tereus a lapwing, Callisto a bear, Elpenor and Gryllus into swine by Circe.

(Pt. III.2.3)

To see a man turn himself into all shapes like a chameleon, or as Proteus, omnia transformans sese in miracula rerum, to act twenty parts and persons at once for his advantage, to temporize and vary like Mercury the planet, good with good, bad with bad; having a several face, garb, and character for every one he meets; of all religions, humours, inclinations; to fawn like a spaniel, mentitis et mimicis obsequiis, rage like a lion, bark like a cur, fight like a dragon, sting like a serpent, as meek as a lamb, and yet again grin like a tiger, weep like a crocodile, insult over some, and yet others domineer over him, here command, there crouch, tyrannize in one place, be baffled in another, a wise man at home, a fool abroad to make others merry.

(Pt. I, pp. 65-66)

Donne, speaking of his sermon auditory, has very similar things to say of man's character (he too picks up and varies Chrysostom's metaphor): man is a salamander in the fire of his lusts and ambitions, and a serpent in his seditions and indevotions. “How,” asks Donne, “shall we raise this Salamander and this Serpent, when this Serpent and this Salamander is all one person, and must have contrary musique to charme him, contrary physick to cure him?”³² Burton asks, “How shall I hope to express myself to each man's humour and conceit, or to give satisfaction to all?” (Pt. I, p. 28). The answer for both Donne and Burton was to make a contrary music of their prose, holding up to man his mirrored instability.

Appearance-reality, transformation, metamorphosis, fragmentation of reality decisively affect Burton's style, and, as Burton tells us, the style is the man (Pt. I, p. 27). He is what he would seek to cure. By putting on display his own weaknesses and paradoxes, both those that are actual in him and those potential ones that are realized only in the quotations and anecdotes that he assimilates into himself, he gives man the opportunity to strive, at least, for self-knowledge and self-control.

Very close to appearance-reality and sometimes overlapping with it is discontinuity, the expression of a feeling discernible in the seventeenth century that man is not the same person from moment to moment. As Montaigne says, “My selfe now, and my selfe anon, are indeede two.”³³ This is one reason why Proteus and Mercury are such popular figures; it is another reason why the theme of transformation is so popular in the age. Among other reasons, man finds himself confronted by the problem of identity just because his personality is no longer stable and taken for granted, but, rather, needs to be continuously redefined. The sudden shifts in tone and point of view, the leaps from character to character in Burton's book all illustrate this tendency of the age. The restlessness of the style is partly accounted for by Burton's habit of suddenly breaking off one discourse and turning to another, usually with the explanation that he does not know what he is talking about. The additive organization of the book confirms our sense of a personality that remakes itself from one moment to another.

All seems to change, yet nothing changes. Like Sir Thomas Browne, Burton notes that “men are lived over againe.”³⁴ “What Fagos, Epicures, Apiciuses, Heliogables, our times afford! Lucullus' ghost walks still, and every man desires to sup in Apollo …” (Pt. I.2.2.2). Again and again he repeats that below the constant shifting of appearances, all things remain the same:

'Tis not to be denied, the world alters every day; Ruunt urbes, regna transferuntur, etc. variantur habitus, leges innovantur, as Petrarch observes, we change language, habits, laws, customs, manners, but not vices, not diseases, not the symptoms of folly and madness, they are still the same. And as a river, we see, keeps the like name and place, but not water, and yet ever runs, Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum; our times and persons alter, vices are the same, and ever will be; look how nightingales sang of old, cocks crowed, kine lowed, sheep bleated, sparrows chirped, dogs barked, so they do still; we keep our madness still, play the fools still, nec dum finitus Orestes; we are of the same humours and inclinations as our predecessors were; you shall find us all alike, much at one, we and our sons, Et nati natorum, et qui nascuntur ab illis, and so shall our posterity continue to the last.

(Pt. I, pp. 53-54)

Now I think it must be obvious that this description of life is also a description of Burton's book. The central figure is the river metaphor, which, of course, he also used to describe his style. It is ever different, yet ever the same, in constant movement and yet keeps the same name and place. It is never finished, and yet always complete, infinitely open and yet bounded.

The book imitates life under the aspect of melancholy. That is why it begins with the Fall, and that is why one thing that Burton almost never mentions or tries to describe is the eternal life. As many times as Burton describes himself as in a theater beholding the world, or mounted on a high hill, or otherwise possessed of a timeless vantage point, it is always to behold this world and its follies. He is the author and god of the world of this book. It is he, with his mixed passion, who resolves (as well as creates) its ambiguities and discontinuities. But his cosmic vision and his world are finally less than those of God, who began the world with the Creation, not the Fall, and sees it under the aspect of eternity. The only means by which man can attain to God is to reject this world and its follies, as Burton says in a rare passage describing quite a different kind of cosmic vision than that upon which the Anatomy depends:

He cannot (Austin admonisheth) be Gods friend, that is delighted with the pleasures of the world, make cleane thine heart, purifie thine heart, if thou wilt see this beauty, prepare thy selfe for it. It is the eye of contemplation by which wee must behold it, the winge of meditation which lifts vs vp, and reares our soules, with the motion of our hearts, and sweetness of contemplation … he that loues God will soare aloft and take him wings, and leaving the earth flie vp to heauen, wander with Sunne and Moone, Starres and that heauenly troupe, God himselfe being his guide. If wee desire to see him, we must lay aside all vaine obiects, which detaine vs and dazell our eyes, and as Ficinus aduiseth vs, get vs solar eyes, spectacles as they that looke on the sunne … In Ficinus words I exhort and beseech you, that you would embrace and follow this diuine loue with all your hearts and abilities, by all offices and endeauors make this louing God propitious vnto you. For whom alone, saith Plotinus, we must forsake the kingdomes and Empires of the whole earth, Sea, Land, and Ayre, if we desire to be engrafted into him, leaue all and follow him.

(D., pp. 17-19; Pt. III.4.1.1)

Of one thing we may be sure: this is not the voice of Democritus Junior. For his vision is limited to this world, and, like Dante's Virgil, he cannot provide a guided tour of Paradise. From this we learn yet another perspective on one of the ambiguities with which we began. It is very tempting to believe that in the Renaissance, as E. M. Forster put it, “the printing press … had been mistaken for an engine of immortality.”³⁵ But men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had much less need than we to seize upon such a thought, because their immortality was already assured. Burton scoffs at people who think they can find immortality in print, and clearly understands that books, like their authors, die and are forgotten; human fame does not endure (Pt. I, pp. 23-27). It is partly because the book finally has that mortal character that it can be confused with life at all.

“Here lies Democritus Junior, to whom melancholy gave life and death.” Democritus-Burton can no longer preside over his book-world, or see that the river of its growth continues to flow through time. If the book-world did not wholly die with Burton, certainly it began to die of its own mortality, that is to say, of melancholy. And the Democritus Junior part of Burton is also described in this epitaph, the part that wept and laughed over humanity. If he had a soul that by his death, freed of flesh and freed of print, was enabled to forsake the kingdoms of the earth, that is not mentioned in this memorial to his earthly self. Here, as always, the reader is left to draw his own conclusions about Burton, the Anatomy, and the meaning of art and life.

Notes

1. I speak here of the sixth edition, the last which Burton prepared for the press, and the one which is ordinarily cited. The first edition, in quarto and smaller by more than half, is a much less impressive affair. …

2. “Known to few, unknown to fewer, here lies Democritus Junior, to whom Melancholy gave life and death.” The epitaph is cited by Douglas Bush in English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1962), p. 295, n. 1.

3. Ibid.

4. Jean Simon, Robert Burton (1577-1640) et L'Anatomie de la Mélancolie (Paris, 1964), p. 26. See also William R. Mueller, The Anatomy of Robert Burton's England (Berkeley, 1952), and Laurence Babb, Sanity in Bedlam (East Lansing, 1959).

5. See Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto, 1962), and Walter J. Ong, “Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style,” PMLA, LXXX (June 1965), 145-54.

6. See, for example, Ben Jonson's admiring description of Selden as one who, without leaving home, has learned to know all times and places. “An Epistle to Master John Selden,” in The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson, ed. William B. Hunter, Jr. (New York, Anchor Books, 1963).

7. John Donne, writing to Sir Henry Goodere, in Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, ed. Charles Edmund Merrill, Jr. (New York, 1910).

8. Entry for May 31, 1669, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, transcribed by the Rev. Mynors Bright, ed. with additions by Henry B. Wheatley, 2 vols. (New York, 1946), II, 1086.

9. Bergen Evans, in consultation with George J. Mohr, M.D., The Psychiatry of Robert Burton (New York, 1944), Ch. I, “The Man,” pp. 1-24. He presents a very little supplementary evidence. Jean Simon also attempts this, in his chapter, “La Personnalité de Burton,” in Robert Burton et L'Anatomie de la Mélancolie.

10. See Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, 1966), Ch. XIV.

11. For very similar comments by a writer whom Burton could have had in mind, see the following passages in Thomas Nashe, who quotes a phrase from Martial that Burton uses here “(quicquid in baccam venit)” and praises the “extemporall” style throughout his works: “Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell,” in Ronald B. McKerrow, ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1958), I, 195.17; and 199.4.

12. Burton did undertake considerable stylistic revision in the course of bringing out these editions. Donovan gives the best account of it in his introduction to “Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy: ‘Religious Melancholy’ A Critical Edition” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Urbana, 1965). A fuller but more limited study is Robert G. Hallwachs, “Additions and Revisions in the Second Edition of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy: A Study of Burton's Chief Interests and of His Style as Shown in His Revisions” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1942). The revisions which they discuss are for the most part (aside from the extensive additions, of course) minor alterations intended to polish phrases, improve sentence structure, and clarify ideas. They prove that Burton was concerned with his style, but they do not really affect the over-all air of dishevelment, which is of course intentional.

13. Here one ought to be aware of Montaigne, who is obviously Burton's model. See The Essayes of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, intro. J. I. M. Stewart (New York, 1933), Bk. III, Ch. IX, p. 871: “May it please the gentle reader, to suffer this one part of Essay to run on, and this third straine or addition of the rest of my pictures peeces. I adde, but I correct not: First, because he who hath hypothekised or engaged his labour to the world, I finde apparence, that he hath no longer right in the same: let him, if he bee able, speake better els where, and not corrupt the worke he hath already made sale off; Of such people, a man should buy nothing, but after they are dead: let them throughly thinke on it, before they produce the same. Who hastens them? My book is alwaies one: except that according as the Printer goes about to renew it, that the buyers depart not altogether empty-handed; I give my selfe law to adde thereto (as it is but uncoherent checky, or ill joined in-laide worke) some supernumerall embleme. They are but over-waights, which disgrace not the first forme, but give some particular price unto every one of the succeeding, by an ambitious pety subtility. Whence notwithstanding, it may easily happen, that some transposition of chronology is there-to commixt: my reports taking place according to their opportunity, and not ever according to their age. Secondly, forsomuch as in regard of my selfe, I feare to loose by the exchange: My understanding doth not alwaies goe forward, it sometimes goes also backeward: I in a manner distrust mine owne fantasies as much, though second or third, as I doe when they are the first, or present, as past. We many times correct our selves as foolishly, as we taxe others unadvisedly. I am growne aged by a number of yeares since my first publications, which were in a thousand five hundred and foure score. But I doubt whether I be encreased one inch in wisdome. My selfe now, and my selfe anon, are indeede two; but when better, in good sooth I cannot tell. It were a goodly thing to bee old, if wee did onely march towards amendment. It is the motion of a drunkard, stumbling, reeling, giddie-brain'd, formeles, or of reedes, which the ayre dooth casually wave to and fro, which way it bloweth.”

14. Dom Jean Leclerq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York, 1961), pp. 89-90. This is quoted by McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, pp. 89-90. Bernard of Clairvaux's homilies on the Song of Songs had provided the Middle Ages with both the figure of indigestion arising from overintellectualism and the figure of spiritual assimilation of Christian truth as physical digestion: Sermones in Cantica, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, CLXXXIII (Paris, 1854), Sermon XXVI, ii, and Sermon XXXVII, iv. For further comments, see my Contrary Music: The Prose Style of John Donne (Madison, 1963), pp. 85-86.

15. For a helpful chapter on Burton's sources, use of his sources, and methods of translation, see Simon, Robert Burton et L'Anatomie de la Mélancolie.

16. The sources for these quotations are the Book of Common Prayer (1 and 2), Catullus (3), and Vergil's Aeneid (4 and 5).

17. See, for example, Hardin Craig, The Enchanted Glass (New York, 1936), p. 244.

18. The “fictionalizing” of what would normally be scientific data is carried on in all sorts of ways. For example, because many of the phrases listed on p. 85 of this chapter are emotionally loaded, their use makes the giving of data equivalent to an insistence on the veracity of tales. In this respect, too, note his treatment of hypothesis as fiction in Pt. II.2.3: Tycho and other scientists have hypotheses; hypotheses “be but inventions, as most of them acknowledge”; hence, “Tycho hath feigned I know not how many subdivisions of epicycles in epicycles. …”

19. Burton justifies himself at some length in the preface to the section on love-melancholy: an old discreet man is fittest to discourse of love; love is a species of melancholy; many worthy men have provided precedents; it will provide some relief in this harsh treatise, and will both profit and please; I have yielded to numerous requests in this matter.

20. On mating palm trees, see Robert E. Hallowell, “The Mating Palm Trees in DuBartas' ‘Seconde Sepmaine,’” Renaissance News, XVII (Summer 1964), 89-95.

21. See J. Max Patrick, “Robert Burton's Utopianism,” Philological Quarterly, XXVII (October 1948), 345-58. While claiming that this Utopia is a “significant social document,” Mr. Patrick also points out that Burton is rather vague about the means by which it might be put into effect.

22. Directions for writing sermons are given in numerous manuals, among which are Richard Bernard, The Faithfull Shepheard (London, 1607), and Bartholomew Keckermann, Rhetoricae Ecclesiasticae Sive Artis Formandi et Habendi Conciones Sacras, 3rd ed. (Hanau, 1606). It is sometimes difficult to remember that Burton was an Anglican divine, but he was, and the Anatomy is his homily.

23. George Williamson, The Senecan Amble (Chicago, 1951); Morris Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll, ed. J. Max Patrick and others (Princeton, 1966).

24. Leonard Goldstein, “Science and Literary Style in Robert Burton's ‘Cento out of Divers Writers,’” Journal of the Rutgers University Library, XXI (June 1958), 55-68.

25. William Mueller singles out for special mention a satiric, a lyrical, and a scientific style, in his Anatomy of Robert Burton's England, pp. 27-30. See also Jean Simon's sensitive analysis of Burton's style in Robert Burton et L'Anatomie de la Mélancolie.

26. For discussion of the frontispiece, see William R. Mueller, “Robert Burton's Frontispiece,” PMLA, LXIV (December 1949), 1074-88; and Ellen Hurt, “The Prose Style of Robert Burton: The Fruits of Knowledge” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oregon, 1964), pp. 246-48.

27. Jean Simon devotes a chapter to Burton's wit, in his Robert Burton et L'Anatomie de la Mélancolie.

28. Because the Everyman punctuation of this passage is misleading, I have corrected the punctuation (making no other changes) by reference to the sixth edition of the Anatomy.

29. John Milton, Of Education (1644), Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe and others, 4 vols. to date (New Haven, 1953-), II, 366-67. See also Sidney's Defense of Poesie, for the fullest exposition of the view that this is the task of literature.

30. Leo Spitzer has called this theme central to metaphysical wit. See Leo Spitzer, “Marvell's ‘Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn’: Sources Versus Meaning,” Modern Language Quarterly, XIX (September 1958), 237-40.

31. As such, the figure is very common in the age. For one of countless illustrations, see John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols., ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn Simpson (Berkeley, 1953-61), VI, No. 10, ll.169 ff. I cite this particular example because it is lengthy and acknowledges the debt to Chrysostom. Burton also quotes Chrysostom's transformation passages in the Anatomy, Pt. III.4.2.6. I have not yet found in Chrysostom the passages which Donne and Burton quote. I have seen many analogous ones, however. See the several series of homilies in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff, 14 vols. (New York, 1907-17), Vols. IX-XIV. Examples of beast-transformation passages are in Volume XIV, pages 20 and 130.

32. Donne, Sermons, IV, No. 13, ll.102-12.

33. The Essayes of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, Bk. III, Ch. IX, p. 871.

34. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 4 vols. (Chicago, 1964), I, Pt. I, Section 6.

35. E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest (New York, 1936), p. 190. This is quoted by McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 203.

Note on Documentation

The editions of works cited in the text, and abbreviations used in citing, are given below. I have followed the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of the editions being used, except that in the case of quoted prefatory material italic and roman passages have been reversed.

Robert Burton. The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson, 3 vols. (London, 1932). References give part, section, member, and subsection as applicable, except that references to the preface give page number in Part I. References to the section “Religious Melancholy” are to an as yet unpublished edition of this section by Dennis Donovan [as a Ph.D. dissertation, “Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy: ‘Religious Melancholy’ A Critical Edition” (University of Illinois, 1965)] and are identified by the letter “D.”