SOURCE: Sawday, Jonathan. “Shapeless Elegance: Robert Burton's Anatomy of Knowledge.” In English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, edited by Neil Rhodes, pp. 173-202. Tempe: Arizona State University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Sawday describes The Anatomy of Melancholy as the foundation of a theory of knowledge that never fully developed, particularly after the formation of The Royal Society in 1660 with its markedly different approach to scientific investigation.]

I. THE CATHEDRAL

Has Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy always been a historical and critical puzzle? In 1945, when Douglas Bush published his influential survey of English literature in the seventeenth century, The Anatomy of Melancholy represented the latent “intellectual confusion” of its age. Bush chose to understand Burton as a scientist manqué. So, although the Anatomy was a “traditional bedside book” which “we read for fun,” it nevertheless appeared in the chapter of English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century devoted to the “evolution” of seventeenth-century science—the moment which “gave birth to the modern world.”¹ But Burton was not quite of that world. In his “loose and eccentric fashion” Burton embodied the “religious and ethical assumptions of Renaissance humanism” rather than the empirical world of Bacon and Hobbes. Burton was, therefore, a continental writer rather than a specifically English thinker working within the native tradition. Whether such a tradition ever existed is open to debate; but, in Bush's telling simile, it was Bacon and Hobbes who established just how antique and unfamiliar Burton was supposed to appear even to his contemporaries: “sitting between Bacon and Hobbes, he appears as a kind of gargoyle between the two spires of the cathedral of English scientific thought.”² As a gargoyle squatting between the two spires of empiricism, Burton belonged on the facade of Nôtre Dame, rather than Westminster or Old St. Pauls.

Bush's view of Burton as a literary gargoyle (grotesque, quaint, entirely non-functional) still predominates. A more recent account of Burton concludes that the Anatomy is “digressive, an accumulation of facts, opinions, misinformation, absurdities, and sensational stories”—evidence of a Jacobean love of “obscure learning” which can have little to do with an emergent scientific rationalism.³ In the 1960s however, the author of the Anatomy seemed about to be rescued from his uncomfortable perch by the advent of literary theory. The appearance of an essay on Burton in 1962 by Jean Starobinski in the avant-garde theoretical journal Tel Quel probably marks the first reappearance of the Anatomy in the garb of literary theory rather than antiquarianism.⁴ But the makeover could not be considered complete until the publication of Stanley Fish's Self-Consuming Artifacts (1972) where Burton was located, alongside Bacon, Herbert, Bunyan, and Hooker, as the author of a text which “undermines the reader's ability to make judgments and determine value.”⁵ Suddenly, the Anatomy was revealed as an example of postmodernism avant la lettre—a mocking, self-parodic exploration of the disorganized and fragmentary nature of the world in which it refused to be located. Though Fish's exercise in re-creating Burton as a reader of his own text was enormously influential (not least on this present essay), it never quite dislodged the Anatomy from its preeminent position within a more traditional, source-based scholarship.⁶ Burton, it was true, had become the great ironist, but even behind the mask of irony, he could still be considered the patron saint of that quintessentially Burtonian journal Notes and Queries.⁷

In this essay, rather than approach the Anatomy as either a source text, or as a pure exercise in fictive self-creation, I want to account for the evolution of Burton's text, and for the very different fortunes it has enjoyed since its first appearance in 1621. Central to my argument, therefore, is the “fact” of literary history—that in the eighteenth century, the Anatomy became virtually unreadable. In what follows, I shall argue that the reasons for this “unreadability” (against which latter-day readers of Burton are still struggling) are derived from the theory of speech and language which Burton shared with his seventeenth-century contemporaries. That theory (itself central to our understanding of seventeenth-century writing) was displaced by the advent of Locke's influential account of language in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). At the same time, as I hope the conclusion to this essay will demonstrate, Burton was by no means “unscientific.” Rather, he worked within the paradigms of natural science which were available to him prior to the 1640s. From this follows the larger claim of the essay: that, in many ways, Burton was actually in the vanguard of the scientific movement of the earlier seventeenth century, the period before Harvey and the advent of the Royal Society. This is the age associated with the French sixteenth-century “encylopaediasts” and their English counter-parts: John Norden, Henoch Clapham, John Hagthorpe, the mysterious “Ro. Un.,” and John Davies of Hereford.⁸ The Anatomy represented just the first stage of a vast intellectual project which was never completed. Why it should never have been completed will, I hope, be self evident in the essay's conclusion. My intention, then, is to show that, far from being a gargoyle, Burton's Anatomy was one of the foundation stones of a “cathedral” of scientific thought. But this great edifice was never to be built. In common with other encyclopedic projects of the age, the Anatomy represented what was eventually to become a blind alley. But in order to substantiate this claim we must return to 1640/41, the year in which Robert Burton died, and to the work of a contemporary of Burton's, Ben Jonson, with whom the author of the Anatomy would appear, at first glance, to share very little.

II. MORPHOLOGY

Ben Jonson's commonplace book, Discoveries, was published in the same year in which Burton died. Jonson provides us with the Renaissance paradigms by which the vast lifework which was Burton's Anatomy may begin to be understood. As a dramatist, Jonson was concerned with the morphology—the shape and structure—of his art. And it was with an account of structure that Jonson concluded his brief treatise on poetry to be found at the end of Discoveries. “For the whole,” Jonson observed:

… as it consisteth of parts, so without all the parts it is not the whole; and to make it absolute is required not only the parts, but such parts as are true. For a part of the whole was true, which, if you take away, you either change the whole, or it is not the whole. For if it be such a part, as being present or absent, nothing concerns the whole, it cannot be called the part of a whole.⁹

Had Burton known Jonson's definition, he would undoubtedly have quoted it, not just because he seemed to quote everything that drifted past him in his copious reading, but because his own project was so entirely concerned with the relationship between wholeness and partition; a concern we might expect in a text which announces itself as an “anatomy” of its subject.¹⁰ But would he have quoted Jonson's words approvingly? Behind Jonson's definition of the relationship between wholeness and segmentation lay the Renaissance and medieval tradition of Aristotelian interpretation—a tradition in which Burton was well versed. What is a whole, asks Jonson. It is made up of parts. How do we know whether or not a part forms part of the whole? Because if we were to take that part away from the whole, and the whole remained unchanged, then the removed part could never have formed a part of that whole from which it had appeared to have been removed. Either the whole is altered by the removal of a part, or it remains the same, in which case the removed segment is superfluous to the organic unity of the larger structure. And the proof (though Jonson does not enlarge on his syllogism, since it was presumably too obvious) must lie in the corollary: that to add a part to a whole is to establish that the original whole was incomplete, and not, therefore, truly whole.

What was Burton's sense of morphology? “Burton's genius lay in expanding rather than contracting,” James Roy King has observed, implying that Burton had no sense of morphology whatsoever. It was this delight in expansion, in King's view, which led to the conclusion that Burton possessed:

an almost comic inability to manage the most fundamental problems involved in writing a book: an unwillingness to decide once and for all what was significant and what had to be eliminated.¹¹

The print history of the Anatomy seems to substantiate this view.¹² In 1628 the third edition of the Anatomy appeared in a folio volume of 762 pages and something over 470,000 words. Burton seems to have believed that, with the publication of this edition, the gigantic work was complete. His enquiry into “Melancholy, what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptomes, prognostickes and severall cures of it” (titlepage, 1628 ed.) was, at last, at an end:

But I am now resolved never to put this Treatise out againe, Ne quid nimis, I will not hereafter adde, alter, or retract, I have done.¹³

The whole needed no further addition. But here was the first of that “series of false promises” which Stanley Fish has claimed as being the end of the complete Anatomy.¹⁴ For the resolve “never to put this Treatise out againe” was to be made again and again (this statement was retained in each subsequent edition), and its terms were to be just as comprehensively ignored. The 1628 edition was followed by a fourth edition (1632) containing a further 28,000 words, a fifth edition (1638) which added over 8,000 words, and a sixth (posthumous) edition (1651) which included yet more words—2,200 more. Words were piled upon words, in a promiscuous heap. If Jonson was correct in his description of the relationship between parts and wholes, then the Anatomy was either unfinished before 1651, or it existed in six entirely different versions. In any event, from its first appearance in 1620/21, the Anatomy had grown by over 160,000 words, so that, over a thirty year period, it had increased in size by just over thirty per cent.

The numerical symmetry would have appealed to Burton, the “learned mathematician,” who, so it was rumoured by the students of Christ Church College Oxford, having calculated from his birth-date the date of his death, “rather than there should be a mistake in the calculation … sent up his soul to heaven through a slip about his neck.”¹⁵ It is just the kind of seemingly pointless correspondence that Burton delighted in teasing out of the world around him, and would certainly have been worthy of a Burtonian footnote, or, perhaps, the dignity of a digression. In the case of the Anatomy our awareness of its vegetative growth is fundamental to our attempts at interpretation. The Anatomy is the nearest we can come, in the world of texts, to a process. To read it is not to move through narrative time and space from a point of (supposed) origin to a point of (supposed) finality, but to be aware of something potentially limitless. In this sense, the Anatomy itself may be thought of as a cathedral, but gothic rather than baroque—a vast creation continually evolving as new architectural forms come into vogue and are incorporated into the larger structure. It is this (potentially) limitless quality which is suggested (with all the flourishes characteristic of the Burtonian persona—Democritus Junior) by the last phrase of the preface to the Anatomy, “Democritus to the Reader”: “I will begin.” This beginning is announced only at the end (in the 1628 edition) of nearly 52,000 words. In similar measure, the end of the Anatomy is a desperately provisional affair. There is no grand conclusion to the whole, no summation, no peroration, no word of final advice to the reader. Instead, the Anatomy simply stops speaking: “I can say no more, or give better advice … than what I have given and said” (739). A precursor to Finnegans Wake, the Anatomy turns the reader back to the beginning by way of concluding. A further quotation follows (from St. Augustine), and the work is at an end. Thus the Anatomy appears to establish a pattern, an order, a symmetry; but the symmetry may be an illusion. The equation, once it has been run, guarantees nothing more than a dizzying mise en abîme: a prospect of infinite regression and thus infinite production.

“The beginning of a narrative, of a discourse, of a text, is an extremely sensitive point,” Roland Barthes has (famously) observed by way of a preface to his own analysis of narrative. “The said must be torn from the not-said, whence a whole rhetoric of beginning markers.”¹⁶ Robert Burton found the separation of the “said” from the “not-said” an all but impossible struggle, and his Anatomy is everywhere scarred by “markers” of commencement. The establishment of a deferred beginning, and a simple cessation in lieu of an ending was not, however, how the Anatomy first began its sequence of public appearances. In 1620/21, the Anatomy ended with a “conclusion of the Author to the Reader” dated “From my Studie in Christ-Church Oxon. Decemb 5. 1620.” With the second edition of 1624, however, this conclusion was reworked so that it could become the bulk of the material in “Democritus Junior to the Reader.” As bibliographic evidence further suggests, the new introduction was printed last, and was probably still being written whilst the rest of the book was being printed. Thus, between the 1620/21 (first) and the 1624 (second) editions the morphology of the Anatomy underwent a fundamental revision. Its ending became its beginning, and that beginning was printed only after the larger whole had been finished.

Burton must have represented a print-shop nightmare, the personification of a compositor's worst fears, and a distant ancestor of James Joyce in his ability to forward copy and still demand revision beyond the normal stages of print production. Once he had found a way to begin, moreover, it was as though this obsessive author could not, somehow, stop talking. The delivery of manuscript copy to the printer usually represents the (albeit often temporary) silence of the author. Speaking (to explore a metaphor that is vital to the Anatomy) has stopped, and the process of transforming words from the transient and semi-private world of the manuscript into the more rigidly determined, and public, arena of print has begun. But in the seventeenth century such a relationship was still in its infancy. And Burton either did not know the rules, or (more likely) decided to bend the rules to his own peculiar advantage. Contemporary practice was to deliver proof sheets of a text to the author for correction as they came off the press. Often, indeed, the author was expected to be physically in proximity to the machines.¹⁷ Such a system, it might be thought, allowed little enough time for the author to attempt to incorporate second thoughts into the text. But Burton was an adept at the process of revisionary rewriting, and he rebelled against the emerging system of print production. In 1621, in the “Conclusion of the Author to the Reader,” Burton complained that he had been unable to attend the press in order to correct the proofs of the first edition of the Anatomy. By 1638, and the fifth edition of the Anatomy, the mechanics of print production—the very process which Burton had claimed was so uncongenial to him—had been incorporated into the structure of the whole work, to the extent that it was now possible for Burton to argue with the very idea of authorship. In 1638, Burton wrote yet another form of opening (which was also a closing): the latin address to the reader placed (how typical of Burton!) over the errata list, on the last leaf of the text. The address begins with the admonition to “listen”:

Listen, good friend! This edition was begun not very long ago at Edinburgh, but was suppressed on the spot by our Printers. Subsequently, it was continued at London with their permission, and last it was completed at Oxford; now for the fifth time it comes into the light as whatever kind of an edition it is. In truth, if the first part does not indeed fit, nor the middle part with either the beginning or the end, on account of the frequent mistakes and omissions, whom do you blame?¹⁸

Here is an answer to Jonson's argument over wholeness and division. How can such antique distinctions hold good in the age of mechanical reproduction? Wherein lies the authenticity of the text? Aristotle, of course, had observed that an epic poem should have a “beginning, a middle, and an end, so that like a single complete organism the poem may produce its own special kind of pleasure.”¹⁹ Burton, it is true, was not writing a poem, but sensitive to classical authority, he shrugged off his violation of Aristotle's dictum by refusing the responsibility of authorship. The Anatomy has a beginning, a middle, and an end (he seemed to say), but not necessarily in that order, and in that lay its “special kind of pleasure.” This was the pleasure of the manipulation of print—the jouissance of technology. It was the technology of print which enabled Burton to revise his text so continuously, and, in this, Burton—the closeted Oxford scholar—discovered a truth which Walter Benjamin was to display over three hundred years later: “the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.”²⁰ But there was to be no “original” Anatomy, and hence no truly “authentic” text. All was to be provisional.

Burton, then, had become adept at evading the prescriptive role of author. Not only was this to be a text which never quite entered the world as the author claimed he wished it to emerge, it was to straddle geography as well as time. The imprimatur “From my Studie in Christ-Church Oxon. Decemb 5. 1620” seems to mark a point in time and a place, a means of locating, for the reader, the speaking voice of the text. This was the locus of the words which comprise the whole. But such fixity (as we would expect) was entirely alien to the Burton persona. Burton was, notoriously, an author bound to a narrow circuit: “I never travelled but in map or card” (3), he writes, before affirming that his imagination, like his text, expatiates as widely as the long-winged hawk which soars aloft at the beginning of the “Digression of the Air.” But for all his fixity, Burton's text could trace its origins (in a mechanical sense, once more) to a mobile geography. Thus, the 1651/52 (posthumous) edition of the text began life in the print shop of Robert Young, the King's printer for Scotland. Some 346 pages were printed in Edinburgh, before the task was transferred to Young's partner in London, Miles Flesher, who printed a further sixty-eight leaves. Still incomplete, the work was sent down to Oxford, where it was completed by two printers—Leonard Lichfield and William Turner. Like Joyce's codicil to Ulysses “Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921,” the 1651/52 edition of the Anatomy was re-compacted, over a period of time, from fragments scattered over the kingdom: Edinburgh-London-Oxford, 1620-1652.

With the death of Burton in 1640, the author's voice might, at last, have been supposed to have been stilled. Inevitably, such was not the case. Though Burton was dead, he had not quite stopped talking, and the Anatomy was still growing. The posthumous sixth edition of the work contained an address from the publisher to the reader, in which Burton's ghostly voice could still be heard:

Be pleased to know (Courteous Reader) that since the last Impression of this Book, the ingenious author of it is deceased, leaving a copy of it exactly corrected, with several considerable Additions by his own hand; This Copy he committed to my care and custody, with directions to have those Additions inserted in the next edition; which in order to his command, and the Publicke Good, is faithfully performed in this last Impression.²¹

Now, at last, the Anatomy appeared to have ended. Thirty years in the making, it had straddled the realm, the reigns of James I and Charles I, the cataclysm of a civil war, the advent of a republic, and the author's own death.

These bibliographical data, unusual as they are even for a seventeenth-century text, underline one of the chief formal characteristics of the Anatomy: the fact that it appears to be random in its development. To return to Jonson's part/whole distinction, the parts of the Anatomy could, it seems, be re-arranged, or reordered, and the whole would remain the same. In other words, the Anatomy does not appear to possess “linearity.” Instead, it seems to merely move forward, “heaping” (a word Burton liked enormously) exempla on exempla, illustration on illustration, words upon words. The reasons for this structure will become clearer later in this essay, but for the moment it is enough to note that Burton was self-consciously aware of this quality. Writing in the persona of Democritus Junior, he explained the genesis of the Anatomy as follows:

enforced, as a Beare doth her whelps, to bring forth this confused lumpe, I had not time to licke it into forme, as shee doth her young ones, but even so to publish it, as it was first written quicquid in buccam venit, in an extemporean stile, as I doe commonly all other exercises, effudi quicquid dictavit Genius meus, out of a confused company of notes, and writ with as small deliberation as I doe ordinarily speake, without all affectation of big words, fustian phrases, jingling termes, tropes, strong lines, that like Acesta's arrowes cought fire as they flew; straines of wit, brave heats, elogies, hyperbolicall exornations, elegancies, & c. which many so much affect.

(11)

Here is the classic Burtonian formulation: a grumpy sentence which winds compulsively back on itself to deny, through its own rhetorical strategies, what it had set out to enunciate. Born like a bear-cub, half-formed, the Anatomy is, nevertheless, “extemporean” or out of time.

To claim that a text that was thirty years in its fashioning is “extemporean” is, it might be thought, stretching the boundaries of a reader's credulity. But the “extemporean” quality of the Anatomy is not only a function of its development over time. It is also a function of the careful manipulation of the illusion of a speaking voice. Here, Burton drew on classical precedent.²² But Burton also claimed a different form of authority for his text. If the work refused authenticity in one guise, then it gleefully claimed a different kind of authenticity: that of speech over writing. The Anatomy was written, Burton tells us, “as I doe ordinarily speake,” and Burton was a great speaker. Anthony à Wood recorded hearing the “ancients of Christ Church” describe Burton as:

very merry, facete, juvenile; and no man in his time did surpass him for his ready and dexterous interlarding his common discourses among them with verses from the poets, or sentences from classic authors.²³

If we are to trust Wood (a risky prospect) Burton appears to have spoken as he wrote. And if we are to trust the Burton of the Anatomy (even more risky), he wrote as he spoke. His speech was a palimpsest, an inter-weaving of memories of written texts with his own observation. This was the speech of the commonplace book, a collection of parts and fragments, ordered only by the writer's (or speaker's) memory of the significance of the components. To the outward observer (or listener) it was the Burtonian persona—itself a fictive creation—which endowed the whole with coherence, a semblance of rational progression. Yet, to the modern reader, there is something shifty in this “interlarding” distributer of the words of others. The “Burton” who spoke in the common room of Christ church, as Wood recalls hearing others recollect, was remembered for his evasive habit of sheltering behind memories of words other than his own. When did “Burton” stop talking, and start remembering? Who was speaking, and what ontological status did the speaking voice possess?

Burton was trained (as were his listeners and his contemporary readers) as a rhetorician. As such, Burton was versed in the arts of imitation, and imitation theory (as Terence Cave reminds us) offered a complex account of the process of the generation of discourse, particularly literary discourse. If we set about “subtracting” (as Cave describes the process) the source materials from Burton's text, reversing the “interlarding” technique for which Burton was famous, then, to a literary historian, the “residue” which remains might be thought of as the authentically Burtonian word, with its “source or origin in the author's mind … produced by an act of creation.” But such a theory of origin (and hence authenticity) was entirely alien to a rhetorician such as Burton. In Renaissance imitation theory, (as Cave goes on to demonstrate) “the writer is always a re-writer”:

the problem then being to differentiate and authenticate the re-writing. This is executed not by the addition of something wholly new, but by the dismembering and reconstruction of what has already been written.²⁴

The figure of dismemberment is entirely appropriate to a text which was ordered into a system of partitions, sections, members, and subsections. Indeed, the “dismembering and reconstruction of what has already been written” fairly accurately represents the growth of the Anatomy over its thirty-year period of composition. The Anatomy was, after all, a feat of memory, an incorporation of remembered fragments into a larger whole. But this reconstructive process is not (paradoxically) evidence of a writer with more and more things to say. On the contrary, Burton had less and less to say, but more and more to digest. Jonson's part/whole distinction is again relevant. Each text encountered in the author's copious reading had to find its proper place in the digest of the whole, an endeavor which would either have necessitated the continuing reconstruction of the text, or the creation of a structure architecturally fluid enough to accommodate the never-ending process of accretion which, as the genesis of the Anatomy indicates, was the reality of the text's growth.

III. THINKING AND SPEAKING

By concentrating on the properties of speech as opposed to writing, we can begin to understand the formal structures of the Anatomy. Speech was what Burton was famous for amongst his contemporaries, and speech was a quality in the Anatomy that his readers have often noted. But speech (speaking historically) has often been seen as the poor cousin of writing. If it is true, as Bush claimed, that the “popularity of the Anatomy lapsed during the eighteenth century,” then that lapse into desuetude had much to do with the Anatomy's status as a spoken as opposed to written artifact.²⁵ It was Burton's determination to prioritize speech over and above writing which caused eighteenth-century readers such difficulty. Thus, Thomas Warton, the historian of English poetry, in his edition of Milton's poetry (1785), termed Burton's Anatomy a work of “shapeless elegance.”²⁶ Warton's epithet is worth pausing over for a moment. How could a work be pronounced both “elegant” and “shapeless” at the same moment, particularly within the paradigms of late eighteenth-century attention to neoclassical form? The critical oxymoron is only explicable if we understand that what Warton was describing was not so much the Anatomy as an artistic work, but the effect that it had on later readers.²⁷ That effect was one which is best characterized as being the product of attending to the spoken as opposed to the written word. To an eighteenth-century reader Burton's text possessed some of the characteristics of speech—a certain elegance of phrasing could be admired, but it existed in a world in which writing and speech should be divorced from one another. Writing presupposed order or shape, while speech was evanescent, transient, a fading medium. The very essence of speech was that its “shape” was provisional, relying on the interplay of conversation, rather than (as in writing) the formal organization of a mind in a different form of conversation with itself.

To a seventeenth-century audience, however, the relationship between speech and thought was of a different order. The puritan divine, Thomas Goodwin, for example, offered the following definition of “thoughts” in 1643. Thoughts, he wrote, are “those talkings of our mindes with the things wee know … those same parleys, enterviews, chattings, the mind hath with the things let into it.”²⁸ A thinking mind, then, was a mind in conversation. If, as Descartes was to claim, the mind was a thinking thing, then the mind was in perpetual dialogue not only with itself but with the “things” that it encountered. But the important element in this theory of speech and thinking, and one that informed Burton's work (and foreshadowed Descartes), was that there was no distinction between the two activities. “Oratio imago animi”—“speech, the image of the mind” was Jonson's pre-Cartesian view of the matter in Discoveries, and he continued:

Language most shows a man: speak, that I may see thee. It springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man's form or likeness so as his speech.²⁹

This mode of understanding was fundamental to any view of speech and thought current in the seventeenth century prior to Descartes. For Descartes, thought was what determined the knowledge of existence. For Jonson, speech provided the necessary reflective medium by which thought could be held to exist. Moreover, speech was considered to be more authentic than written discourse for two reasons. First, it appeared to be engendered directly by the mind. If the mind was the true source of all authority, then speech was the medium by which the mind was to be known. Secondly, as Hobbes was to argue in Leviathan (1651), speech was “the most noble and profitable invention of all other … whereby men register their Thoughts” since not only could there be no human society without speech, but speech was divine in its origin:

The first author of Speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his sight; For the Scripture goeth no further in this matter. But this was sufficient to direct him to adde more names, as the experience and use of the creature should give him occasion.³⁰

God, according to Hobbes's formulation, was the author not so much of language per se but of the language-creating facility. The exercise of this facility, indeed, the very copiousness of discourse, could (despite the linguistic disaster of Babel) be understood as the realization of God's intention. Within these paradigms, of course, Burton's renowned copiousness, as well as his deployment of the illusion of a speaking voice in the Anatomy, was a fundamentally fideistic exercise. We can even understand Burton's deliberate manipulation of print technology as an anticipation of Hobbes's view of the relationship between speech, printing, and writing. “The Invention of Printing,” Hobbes observed, “though ingenious, compared with the invention of Letters, is no great matter.” And both paled into insignificance beside the divine origin of speech. The evolutionary descent was clear: speech, then writing, then print.

Such a direct, causal relationship was to be overturned by the theory of language inherited in the eighteenth century from Locke. For Locke, as he explored the problem of language in book 3 of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), the relationship between language and thought was neither direct, nor (as it was for Jonson) an easy reflection of the mind of the speaker. Instead, words were conceived of as standing “for nothing, but the IDEAS in the mind of him that uses them.”³¹ For Locke, the unmediated link between ideas and words, so self-evidently the case for Jonson, was not the reality of how language worked. Instead, Locke posited “a double use of words” in which language served two functions. The first function of language is the “recording of our own thoughts”:

whereby, as it were, we talk to ourselves, any words will serve the turn. For since sounds are voluntary and indifferent signs of any Ideas, a Man may use what Words he pleases, to signify his own Ideas to himself.³²

The second function of language is communication with others, specifically, the communication of ideas. But the relationship between words and ideas is arbitrary, as the example of someone thinking to themselves using “what words he pleases” illustrates. For communication (as opposed to thinking) to take place, both the hearer and the speaker must agree on the precise idea signified by a given word. This level of agreement is not innate within language, but it is a prerequisite for any communicative act. By contrast, writing some forty years earlier than Locke, Jonson observed that “the conceits of the mind are pictures of things, and the tongue is the interpreter of those pictures”—an observation which not only presupposes a commonality of both thought and speech, but was essentially a commonplace of Renaissance thought.³³ For Jonson, then, we think as we speak. For Locke, thinking and speaking are distinct and (often) different undertakings.

Locke's post-Cartesian skepticism, against which, as Tony Crowley observes, he fought “a rearguard action” throughout the Essay, came to inform eighteenth-century views on language.³⁴ Such skepticism, too, had the effect of making Burton's Anatomy a rogue text. Sterne, it is true, was indebted to Burton in composing Tristram Shandy, but such admiration was not the rule.³⁵ To Warton, in a post-Lockean world, Burton's interweaving of thinking and speaking was entirely alien. Hence the “shapelessness” of Burton's work. Even amongst Burton's admirers, the speech-like quality of the Anatomy was a matter of concern. Famously, the Anatomy was said to be the only book that forced Dr. Johnson to rise from his bed “two hours sooner than he wished.”³⁶ Like a latter-day alarm clock, it was as if Johnson had been roused by sound, a speaking voice. For Johnson, that quality was connected to the apparently unmediated nature of Burton's text, as though it possessed the characteristics of speech rather than writing: “there is great spirit and great power in what Burton says when he writes from his own mind” (my emphasis), Johnson is recorded as saying.³⁷ Here, though, was an uneasy relationship. In Johnson's (historical) view, Burton's text could be separated into two segments: the authentic record of the mind possessing “spirit and great power,” and the unauthentic accretion of the words of others. Heard as spoken word, Burton's text was the trace of a mind thinking. Interference in this mental process was a function of the written texts—the authorities, quotations, and references—jostling over the pages of Burton's record of a thinking mind. Thus the Anatomy was also a source of irritation to the lexicographer. Was it speech or was it writing? As a spoken text, the Anatomy, in Johnson's view, was “overloaded” with quotation, a key shift if we compare this description to Wood's notion of the Anatomy's “interlarded” quality. The Anatomy hinted at direct access to mental processes, but denied that access through its reliance on the words of others. To a gatherer of words such as Johnson, Burton's project must have seemed disturbing, even if it was also endlessly fascinating. The Anatomy represented a vast storehouse of definition, etymology, quotation, allusion, and memorabilia of the written word.³⁸ But the Anatomy was also a terrible warning. It appeared to be the result of a mind no longer in control of words, a mind which did not, any longer, know itself, because it could no longer sift the authentic from the unauthentic. It could no longer hear itself, and had confused (in Lockean terms) the private space of the thinking mind and the public space of communicative speech. To Johnson, such a situation was intolerable. Though Johnson drew on the Anatomy over a dozen times for exempla and illustrations in his Dictionary of the English Language, the Dictionary was aimed precisely at remedying such a state of affairs, as the 1747 Plan made quite clear:

By tracing in this manner every word to its original, and not admitting, but with great caution, any of which no original can be found, we shall secure our language from being over-run with cant, from being crouded with low terms, the spawn of folly or affectation, which arise from no just principles of speech.³⁹

The Anatomy, of course, announced itself as the “spawn of folly,” which was also the child of speech. But Burtonian (as opposed to Johnsonian) “speech” contained no such “just principles.” Or so Burton/Democritus (facetiously) claimed: “I have spoken foolishly, rashly, inadvisedly, absurdly, I have anatomized mine own folly” (73).

IV. SPEECH AS SYMPTOM AND CURE

We can account for Burton's fascination with speech, in part, to the Renaissance idea, as we have seen it displayed by Ben Jonson, of speech as the mirror of the mind. Similarly, the divine origin of speech is, clearly, of importance to Burton's project. But neither of these reasons can represent the entire case of the Anatomy, since we also have to acknowledge that no author could, in such a self-contradictory fashion, promise such access to his mind, and then deny access by sheltering so comprehensively behind a mask of facetious parody. If speech was a mirror, then Burton was a master at hiding within the pallid and shimmering reflective surface of spoken language. To say (as Burton says in his nevertheless written text) “I have spoken foolishly” is to deny the authority of speech, even whilst the utterance relies on that authority for any claim on our attention. In other words, is Burton/Democritus speaking foolishly when he says he is speaking foolishly? Whom do we trust? The speech which may be foolish, or the speaker who claims to be a fool?

But what of Johnson, unwillingly rising from his bed to attend to this voice of folly? For contemporary literary theorists, what awoke Johnson (had he but known it) was the tocsin of intertextuality. In its plenitude, its resistance to closure, its copiousness, its interrelationship of body and text, and the alarming presence of an author who, grinning facetiously behind the mask of “Democritus Junior,” warns us of ever taking anything at face value, the Anatomy can easily be understood as a proto-theoretical text. Contemporary theory has reversed the eighteenth-century view of the Anatomy as a “quaint” literary curiosity, and given us, instead, an Anatomy which, self-reflexively, is a fragmented product of a fragmented world.⁴⁰ Nothing, indeed, appears to be more contemporary than the problem which the Anatomy poses in the realm of speech and writing.⁴¹ But speech had a particular quality for Burton which carried him beyond the Jonsonian formulation of speech as a mirror, and beyond the view which was eventually to be developed by Hobbes (and reformulated by Locke) of speech as the medium of social communication. Rather, for Burton, speech was both symptomatic and palliative. Speech, or rather its absence, was one of the symptoms of the burden of melancholy, which it was the task of the Anatomy to unravel.⁴² The Anatomy was a text which, like a mirror, reflected precisely those sentiments which were the reason for its composition. A text born out of melancholy, it rehearsed, in its extraordinary length, the symptoms of melancholy, hinting at (but always deferring) the promised cure.

The promised cure was speech. Quoting Lucian, Burton/Democritus claims that he wrote only because he had nobody with whom to speak. The alternative was to “recite to trees, and declaim to pillars for want of auditors” (5). Thus the Anatomy is already a substitute text, a trace of what should have been spoken rather than written. But later, we learn that melancholics are pauciloqui “of few words, and oftentimes wholly silent” (258), their friends cannot make them speak, and, tellingly, “they had rather write their mindes than speake” (259). It was not that the pauciloqui had little to say. On the contrary, they were over-stored with words, suffering from an excess which demanded relief. Speech was the remedy. Speech was the opening up of the mind to another. “As a bull that is tied to a fig-tree,” Burton wrote, “becomes gentle on a sudden (which some, saith Plutarch, interpret of good words), so is a savage, obdurate heart mollified by fair speeches” (362). Words, Burton observed, “are cheerful and powerful of themselves” (362), as though words carried within themselves some particular redeeming force—an observation which Locke, of course, was to deny. Words structured into narrative, moreover, offered the prospect of relief. “Simple narration many times easeth the distressed mind” (362), Burton claimed, and in that formulation it is possible to see the emergence of a kind of primitive psychoanalysis—the beginnings of “the talking cure.” This “cure” was to be understood as the alleviation of symptoms which were disturbingly physical in their nature. To “ease” the mind is suggestive (in the seventeenth-century sense) of bodily purgation, a connection which Burton/Democritus makes when he observes that he had “a kind of imposthume in my head, which I was very desirous to be unladen of, and could imagine no fitter evacuation than this” (5). So, the speaker-writer relieves himself against trees and pillars (or readers), or eases himself in the solitude of his study, and the result is the Anatomy—a waste product which is a substitute for speech.

This language of physicality runs deep in the Anatomy, and in this the text alludes to older, Renaissance, views on the art of imitation. What has been voided in retiring solitude can be gleaned by another solitary and incorporated into a new product. It was Erasmus, building on Quintillian, who offered in the Ciceronianus (1528) a digestive metaphor for understanding the process of generating discourse:

You must digest what you have consumed in varied and prolonged reading, and transfer it by reflection into the veins of the mind, rather than into your memory or into your notebook. Thus your natural talent, gorged on all kinds of foods, will of itself beget a discourse … redolent … of your own heart.⁴³

Burton/Democritus, however, transforms this topos into the scatological. Like Plutarch's bull, passified beneath a fig tree where he is occupied with consumption and evacuation, so the writer must become a coprophagist. Dung-hills are scraped in order to “lard” otherwise “lean” books with the “fat of others Workes” (6). The result is that “not only Libraries and Shops are full of our putid [sic] Papers, but every close-stoole and Jakes” (6). The psychoanalytic concept of the “corporeality of language” has been foreshadowed in a metaphor for communication which announces a cyclical process of consumption, digestion, and evacuation.⁴⁴ Nor was this image of speech as a form of evacuation unique to Burton. Francis Bacon, in his essay “Of Friendship” (itself part of a collection which grew in a Burtonian fashion throughout the early part of the seventeenth century) understood with Burton the somatic relief that speech could provide. Speech was not merely the mark of friendship. It allowed for the “ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do induce.” Speech was a kind of self-directed mental scalpel, since, as Bacon wrote:

We know diseases of stoppings and suffocations are the most dangerous to the body; and it is not much otherwise in the mind: you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flowers of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receit openeth the heart, but a true friend, to whom you may impart … whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession.⁴⁵

Needless to say, such public confession (in which the Anatomy and Bacon's Essays seem to share in the urge to make “civil shrift”) would have horrified Johnson the lexicographer, dedicated to scouring the language: ransacking it and tidying it of its waste products at the same time. Against that eighteenth-century view of conversation as a civilized encounter between individuals in the social sphere, Burton's and Bacon's view of speech as the release of an interior blockage would have appeared not merely prolix but somehow undignified, even uncivilized. But Burton's project was closer to Johnson's heart than the lexicographer might have cared to admit, since what more “interlarded” text could there be than a dictionary which sought to impart order to a language which was described as a “confused heap of words without dependence and without relation”?⁴⁶ The “confused lumpe” of the Anatomy, then, had become like the “confused heap” of language itself prior to Johnson's imposition of order.

V. SPEAKING OF THE BODY

But of course the Anatomy was obsessed with order. Indeed, order was its true subject. To understand the order of the Anatomy, we need to pursue the link between writing, speech, and the body. Ben Jonson's account in Discoveries provides us with both the vocabulary with which Burton was familiar, and the underlying stylistic principles which informed the Anatomy. Jonson observed that language, if it was to be used harmoniously, should conform to the most harmonious object in the world. And what was more harmonious than the human body? Language was thus like a building constructed according to Vitruvian principles—constructed, that is, with the proportions of the human body as its pattern.⁴⁷ For Jonson, this analogy structured his account of language at every turn: “as we consider feature and composition in a man, so words in language: in the greatness, aptness, sound, structure, and harmony of it.” The human form, of course, was infinitely variable in its realization, but nevertheless conformed to the divine pattern in its underlying structure, and so with language. Having marked the degree of variation to be observed in different linguistic registers, Jonson continued: “After these, the flesh, blood, and bones come in question.” The flesh, blood, and bones of language are its stylistic qualities:

We say it is a fleshly style, when there is much periphrasis, and circuit of words; and then with more than enough, it grows fat and corpulent … full of suet and tallow. It hath blood and juice, when the words are proper and apt, their sound sweet, and the phrase neat and picked. But where there is redundancy, both the blood and juice are faulty and vicious.⁴⁸

By this definition, of course, the Anatomy—with all its periphrastic circulation of discourse—was not merely corpulent but obese. To a modern reader, Jonson would appear to be deploying nothing more than a fairly strained species of metaphor to describe language. But, to a seventeenth-century reader, this account replicated the inherent structure of language. Moreover, the belief that language and the body intersected in some way ran deep into the heart of the literary culture of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.⁴⁹ Language, like the physical form of the human body, was not only a divine donation, but the very mark of humanity. “Speech is the only benefit man hath to express his excellency of mind above other creatures. … In all speech, words and sense are as the body and the soul,” Jonson wrote.⁵⁰ Or as Hobbes expressed it, without speech there could be “neither Common-wealth, nor Society, nor Contract, nor Peace, no more than amongst Lyons, Bears, and Wolves.”⁵¹

The language of physicality which we encounter in Burton's Anatomy, then, is allied to a complex amalgam of Renaissance beliefs concerning the nature of speech, writing, and language. Writing is a process of digesting and then reproducing the thoughts of others within the discourse which is being generated. Speech is a means of evacuating the mind, easing it of its distressing burden of thought. Language, like the human body, is a divine donation and one of the distinguishing features of humanity. With these three somatic principles in mind, we can begin to see how the Anatomy came into being.

But there is a paradox inherent within Burton's development of the term “anatomy,” which has to be traced in some detail in order to appreciate the true morphology of Burton's text. Why did Burton entitle his text the “Anatomy” of Melancholy? Why not (and perhaps more appropriately) the “compendium,” the “encyclopedia,” or (ironically) the “epitome” or “digest”? Burton/Democritus (predictably) offers a plethora of reasons for his choice. Commerce, he claims, is one motive since “it is a kind of policy in these days, to prefix a fantastical title to a book which is to be sold” (4). Fashion is another, and Burton/Democritus reels off the titles he is aping in a footnote: “Anatomy of Popery. Anatomy of Immortality. Angelus Salas, Anatomy of Antimony, & c.” as well as “Anthony Zara, Pap. Episc., his Anatomy of Wit in four sections, members, subsections, & c.,” (4). But the example of Democritus himself is the chief reason for the work's being an “anatomy.” Hippocrates, Burton writes, encountering Democritus the satirical philosopher surrounded by the viscera of dissected animals, was told that these anatomical explorations were aimed at discovering the “seat of this atra bilis, or melancholy, whence it proceeds, and how it was engendered in men's bodies” (4). The psychological and the somatic are thus re-united in the endeavors of Burton/Democritus. But there were other (unstated) reasons for Burton's choice of title, and these return us to the question of morphology.

The period of composition of Burton's work is also the period during which, in a medical sense, the art of anatomy—the scientific reduction of the human body into its composite members—reached its zenith in England. It was precisely during the period of the continual re-composition of Burton's Anatomy that England began to rival the great continental medical schools for proficiency in both anatomical teaching and discovery. The third edition (1628) of the Anatomy, indeed, appeared in the same year that the greatest anatomical discovery of the age was announced with the publication of William Harvey's work on blood circulation in his De Motu Cordis. Thus the public announcement of the discovery of a complex mechanical system of circulation, regulated by cardiac valves operating according to hydraulic principles, was echoed by the re-publication of Burton's text which relied on the mechanics of print production in order to present itself as a circulating text whose end had become its beginning. But such a Burtonian awareness of textual correspondence, striking as it may appear, is deceptive. Harvey is never mentioned in Burton's text, and, as J. M. Bamborough has noted, Burton mentions Vesalius—the founder of “modern” anatomy—only three times, and refers only cursorily to modern, continental anatomists.⁵²

There appears, then, to be a curious silence on the part of the text which could be taken as representative of the Renaissance “culture of dissection”—that obsessive delight in partition and distinction which informed so many areas of intellectual enquiry in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁵³ Why was Burton the anatomist so ill-read in anatomy? That he was learned in medicine is evident from the contents of his library, but the works of the great continental anatomists of the age, whose observations were now being published throughout Europe, were entirely absent from Burton's collections.⁵⁴ In fact, this appearance of silence is deceptive. Anatomical knowledge, in itself, was of little interest to Burton, so that the “Digression of Anatomy” (member 2, subsections 1-4 of the first partition of the Anatomy) is, indeed, a somewhat cursory survey of knowledge in this area, which cites the syncretic texts of Laurentius and Helkiah Crooke as the chief authorities on the structure of the human body.⁵⁵ But what Burton did take from the anatomists was something more important than anatomical information, and that was a compositional method. When, in 1543, Vesalius published his De corporis humani fabrica together with an Epitome of the main text—the founding work of modern anatomy by virtue of its superior illustrations rather than its more detailed observations—he also offered a radically new means of understanding the body as a structure. Vesalius's method of understanding the body, in fact, was far in advance of the available technology. Vesalius proposed that the body should be constructed by the student of anatomy, rather than fractured into its isolated regions, sections, organs, and features. The student who, with the illustrations in front of them to be found in the Epitome, was encouraged to cut out the various organs from the pages and glue them to the male and female forms which the Epitome also, helpfully, provided, was entering into a theoretical engagement with the body of a totally new order. This was the programme, hinted at in Leonardo's anatomical notebooks, of cresciere l'uomo—literally building a human being.⁵⁶

Of course, such a procedure could not be replicated in the anatomy theaters of London, Padua, Paris, Leiden, and (later) Amsterdam which, at the time during which the Anatomy of Burton was being issued and reissued, were drawing crowds of admirers to witness this newest of sciences in the flesh. So, as the print-history of the English editions of Vesalius illustrates, the tendency was to publish the all-important Vesalian illustrations, but accompany these with an older, more traditional text.⁵⁷ These composite texts offered a guide to the received method of dissection whereby the body was investigated according to its rate of decay: first the abdomen, then the thorax, finally, the head and the peripheral members. Burton's actual anatomical knowledge was, then, entirely traditional. His notion of the body was Galenic: a hierarchical structure which was informed by a belief in correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm.⁵⁸

But, in another sense, the Anatomy was a radical experiment in the possibilities of adopting the new form of anatomical investigation to a compendious topic such as melancholy. We have already seen how the Anatomy is a text which, in its morphology, can be understood as an organic entity. In quite the opposite sense to our modern understanding of the term “anatomization,” the Anatomy simply grew and grew. What Burton had realized was that the theoretical ideal of an intellectual construction of the human frame, an anatomy in the intellectual sense proposed by Vesalius, could be adapted to his own endeavor. It was one of Burton's few anatomical sources, Helkiah Crooke's Microcosmographia, that made the distinction between practical and theoretical anatomy. The study of anatomy, Crooke wrote in 1615, “either … signifieth the action that is done with the hand, or the habit of the minde, that is the most perfect action of the intellect.” This “perfect action of the intellect,” Crooke continued, was only to be gained “by reason and discourse.”⁵⁹ Within a very few years (and again the period of time mirrors the republication of Burton's text) the study of anatomy had become iconic of the pursuit of reason in general. In 1649, for example, John Hall in The Advancement of Learning was arguing that the practice of anatomy was akin to the very exercise of reason itself, since reason was “no better way attempted, then if the veynes of things were rightly and naturally cut up.”⁶⁰ This theoretical application of the practical explorations of the anatomists was, clearly, very different from the reduction of the body into a fragmented entity. In essence, theoretical anatomy reversed the procedures of the dissection slab. Theoretically, anatomical reasoning offered a compendious, and ever-growing, fabric of knowledge in place of a scattered corpse. We can understand this morphology as analogous to the familiar Ramist device of creating bracketed tables of dichotomies—the familiar telescopic diagrams (“synopses”) which Burton deployed in the Anatomy at the beginning of each partition of his text. Here, the subject is shown to be progressively divided, resulting in an ever-increasing flow of information over the page which is, strictly speaking, limitless. Just like the Anatomy itself, a branching structure whose fractile possibilities involved Burton in a never-ending attempt at revision, there was no end to the production of knowledge in these spatial diagrams, once the process of anatomization had begun. But, crucially, there was no need to reorder the whole to incorporate new information. Jonson's Aristotelian part/whole distinction had, simply, been collapsed into a structure which could branch, panoptically, forever. This organization of knowledge, in turn, had evolved from earlier attempts at representing knowledge, and even the mind itself, in terms of spatial diagrams. Print culture (as Walter Ong has observed) encouraged the reproduction of such elaborate schema in a way that was not possible under the conditions of manuscript production.⁶¹

If intellectual anatomy relied on print, the new forms of practical anatomy looked to speech, and endeavored to displace the primacy of written texts. For the older, traditional method of understanding the morphology of the human body (inherited from Galen, but eventually challenged by Vesalius and the modern anatomists) relied on the authority of written texts—Galen and commentaries upon Galen—which were themselves mapped onto the body. The body was thus the receptacle, or the blank canvas, upon which the authority of the past was reinscribed within the anatomy theater.⁶² The seventeenth-century anatomist, however, struggled to break free of this burden of past authority. Turning to the body, the anatomist's project was to speak, directly, of the body. His listeners crowded into the anatomy theater to hear the spoken word whose authority was no longer dependent upon a prior written text, but upon the scattered and fragmented criminal body which was stretched out on the dissection slab. Within the ornate, baroque structures of the seventeenth-century anatomy theater, anatomy had emerged as a speaking science. What this science spoke of was a new order of knowledge. The base of this knowledge was the corporeal body, investigated, empirically, by the anatomists' scalpels. But the superstructure—the complex process of ordering knowledge into a scheme whereby what was being uncovered could be recorded and preserved—had to be fashioned into a flexible morphology so that new information could be reincorporated into the whole without the necessity of dismantling the entire structure, and starting out on the laborious business of reconstruction ab intitio. And what more flexible architecture was there than the form of a theoretical anatomy as proposed by Vesalius? Anatomy, then, served three distinct functions. First, it prioritized the spoken word over the written, a priority which appealed to Burton for the reasons we have been exploring throughout this essay. Secondly, the anatomy (in a practical rather than theoretical sense) enabled Burton to appear in the guise of universal satirist, with the scalpel of reason in his hand.⁶³ Thirdly, the emergence of theoretical anatomy, in which the body was constructed out of fragments, offered Burton the perfect model for his own project—which was nothing less than the reconstruction of the complete human being: divine in nature though fallen, an amalgam of reason and madness, the corporeal and the spiritual.

VI. THE BOOK OF BOOKS

Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, despite its continual reemergence throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, was doomed to an anachronistic half-life within a relatively short period of its first appearance. In the year of the Restoration, the seventh (1660) edition of the Anatomy appeared. There was to be one more edition (1676) and, significantly, the 1679 “edition” of extracts, before Burton's text disappeared for over one hundred years from the print shops which had been kept busy throughout the seventeenth century with the enormous work. No further edition was published until 1800, so that, throughout the eighteenth century, Burtonians found their text only by scouring the second-hand booksellers. The 1679 edition of extracts, however, was significant in that it foreshadowed the reappearance of a new Burton—the author who (in the words of the 1679 titlepage) was to become the “wittie companion,” and compiler of “jests of all sorts.”⁶⁴ The Romantic movement was to rediscover Burton, true, and Keats in particular was to be indebted to the Anatomy, but henceforth Burton's fate was to be remembered more for his “quaintness” than his importance as a philosophical writer.⁶⁵

Thus Burton emerged as a gargoyle. What placed him in his peculiar niche was nothing intrinsic to the work itself, for it was (as Burton himself pointed out in explaining why he had chosen to write an “anatomy”) the fashion of the times to produce such vast syncretic enterprises. What ensured his silence as a philosopher but, ironically, his emergence as a “talker,” was not just the shift in taste associated with eighteenth-century neo-classicism, with all its Lockeian attention to a reformulated theory of language. Rather, in 1660, the year of the seventh edition of the Anatomy, a new enterprise began which was to force Burton's view of endlessly recycled discourse into redundancy. That new enterprise was the formation of The Royal Society, and with it the prospect of a different kind of interrogation of nature. The Royal Society (together with the essentially Lockeian view of scientific language developed by Sprat, Glanvill, Wilkins, and the virtuosi) promised an end to the Burtonian universe in which everything, somehow, was linked to everything else. Abraham Cowley's “Ode to the Royal Society” pronounced the epitaph on Burton's project. To the new empiricism, the Anatomy could be nothing more than a labyrinth “of ever fresh discourse” whose delight in “words, which are but pictures of the thought,” had to be replaced by an attention to “things, the Minds right object.”⁶⁶

In that familiar, self-mocking tone in which he luxuriated, Burton described the Anatomy as no more than a “confused lumpe.” Historians of ideas and of literature, confronting this sprawling work, have often echoed this (nevertheless) self-parodic assessment. But, in reality, Burton's project was a daring one. His holistic enterprise aimed at traversing a divide which, now, appears utterly unbridgeable. The Anatomy looked to one of the newest sciences—the empirical study of the body which was to become the center of post-Cartesian human science—in order to develop a methodology which would unite the centuries of scriptural and classical interpretation which culminated in the humanist undertaking of the Renaissance. In this sense, the claim that Burton looked back to humanism is undoubtedly true. But that is to tell just one half of the story, for the Anatomy looked forwards as well. Burton's aim was nothing less than to produce a syncresis of knowledge, handled in a form which was being developed by a series of interlocking intellectual enterprises in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: the “new” observations and theoretical models of the Vesalian and post-Vesalian anatomists, together with the rhetorical and grammatical innovations of Ramism in the realm of dialectic. The logic of Burton's project (which he followed through with such single-minded determination throughout his life) might remind the twentieth-century reader of a Borgesian fable. For, henceforth, there would only need to be one book, one endlessly redivided and ever-growing anatomy of knowledge. If Burton's telescopically self-generating organization of human knowledge had been carried forward, undoubtedly it would have eventually consumed all other texts which might have existed, for there was room for them all within the fractile structure he had devised. In writing The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton had embarked upon the first chapter of this book which was never to be written—this “extemporean” book which would contain all books.

Notes

1. Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (1945; repr., London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), 296, 272.

2. Bush, 296.

3. Bruce King, Seventeenth-Century English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1982), 81.

4. See Jean Starobinski, “La Melancholie de L'Anatomiste,” Tel Quel 10 (1962): 21-29.

5. Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972), 351.

6. See, in particular: Richard L. Nochimson, “Burton's Anatomy: The Author's Purposes and the Reader's Response,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 13 (1977): 256-84; James S. Tillman, “The Satirist Satirized: Burton's Democritus Jr.,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 10 (1977): 86-96; Cynthia W. Sulfridge, “Intimate Narratives: Narrator-Reader Relationships in Three Renaissance Precursors of Tristram Shandy” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1978).

7. See Joey Conn, Robert Burton and the Anatomy of Melancholy: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 102.

8. John Norden, Vicissitudo rerum (London, 1600) and The Labyrinth of Mans Life (London, 1614); Henoch Clapham, Aelohim-triune (London, 1601); “Ro. Un.” has been identified as Robert Underwood whose The Little World was published c. 1605. John Davies of Hereford (?1565-1618) was the author of three poetic-scientific treatises: Mirum in Modum (1602), Microcosmos (1603), and Summa totalis (1607). On these “scientific” poets see Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 142-45, 295 (note).

9. Ian Donaldson, ed., Ben Jonson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 594.

10. Sections of Discoveries, as Donaldson points out (735) were in circulation by 1623, when Jonson may have used the gatherings of his commonplace book as the basis of lectures at Gresham College.

11. James Roy King, Studies in Six Seventeenth Century Writers (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1966), 77, 83.

12. In tracing the “morphology” of Burton's Anatomy, I am entirely indebted to the bibliographical scholarship to be found in the three volume Clarendon edition of Burton's work. See Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K. Kiessling, Rhonda L. Blair, eds., “Textual Introduction. Publishing History: The Growth of the Anatomy,” in Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Faulkner, Kiessling, and Blair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) 1:xxxvii-lx. This edition will hereafter be cited as Faulkner et. al. On the general question of the “structure” of the Anatomy see: Ruth A. Fox, The Tangled Chain: The Structure of Disorder in the Anatomy of Melancholy (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), passim.

13. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1907), 13. All references to the text of the Anatomy are to this edition.

14. Fish, 304.

15. Anthony à Wood, Athenæ Oxoniensis (London, 1721) 1:627. See also John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), 326.

16. Roland Barthes, “The Struggle with the Angel,” in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana/ Collins, 1977), 129.

17. See H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), 3:211-12.

18. Faulkner et al., “Textual Introduction,” 1:xl.

19. Aristotle, “On the Art of Poetry” in Classical Literary Criticism ed. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 65.

20. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” (1936) in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973), 222.

21. Faulkner et al., “Textual Introduction,” 1:xliii.

22. See George Williamson, The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951), 193-95, 198-200.

23. Wood, Athenæ Oxoniensis, 1:627.

24. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 76.

25. Bush, 295.

26. Thomas Warton, ed., Poems upon Several Occasions, English, Italian, and Latin, with Translations, by John Milton (London, 1785), 93.

27. Warton's discussion of Burton takes place within the context of an account of the effect of the Anatomy on Milton as a reader. In Warton's words, the Anatomy (and particularly the prefatory verses with which it began in the 1628 and subsequent editions) had “taken possession of Milton's mind” when he came to write “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” See Warton, 93-96.

28. Thomas Goodwin, The Vanity of Thoughts Discovered with their Danger and Cure (London, 1646), 5.

29. Donaldson, 574.

30. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 24.

31. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (1975; rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 405.

32. Locke, 476.

33. Donaldson, 577. Donaldson notes (753) that Jonson was following John Hoskyns's unpublished Directions for Speech and Style (c. 1599), and interweaving observations culled from Lipsius and Horace.

34. See Tony Crowley, Proper English? Readings in Language, History, and Cultural Identity (London: Routledge, 1991), 14.

35. Sterne's “borrowings” from the Anatomy were first noted in 1792 by “H. H.” in The European Magazine and (later) by John Ferriar in the Analytical Review (1794). The identification of Sterne's debt to Burton in the 1790s may have much to do with the Romantic “re-discovery” of Burton in the later eighteenth century. See Max Byrd, Visits to Bedlam: Madness and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1974), 119-27.

36. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson ed. George B. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934-50) 2:121.

37. Boswell, 2:440.

38. Johnson drew on the Anatomy over a dozen times for exempla and illustrations in his Dictionary. But, as H. J. Jackson has noted, the demands of lexicography were such that Johnson was not averse to altering those passages of the Anatomy which provided the context for the words whose use he wished to illustrate. See H. J. Jackson, “Johnson and Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy and The Dictionary of the English Language,” English Studies in Canada 5 (1979): 36-48. Johnson owned copies of both the sixth (1651-52) and eighth (1676) editions of the Anatomy. See Edward Bensly, “Dr Johnson's Copies of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy,” Notes and Queries ser. 11, no. 6 (1912): 390 and Notes and Queries ser. 11, no. 10 (1914): 117.

39. Samuel Johnson, “The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language” (1747) in Samuel Johnson, Poetry and Prose, ed. Mona Wilson (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1979), 129.

40. Or, in Stanley Fish's words, the Anatomy operates by a “strategy of inclusion, which collapses speaker, reader, and a thousand or more ‘authorities’ into a single category of unreliability, [which] extends also to every aspect of what we think of as ‘objective reality.’” See Fish, 314.

41. See Derrida's remarks on the “supplement” in his account of speech and writing in Rousseau, to be found in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), 141-64.

42. The importance of speech to the pathology of the Anatomy was recognized in Joseph L. Blau, “Robert Burton on Voice and Speech,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 28 (1942): 461-64. There is, of course, no precise modern equivalent to the term “melancholy.” In the seventeenth century the idea of melancholy could signify a vast range of human conditions, a range which goes some way to justifying the enormous scope of Burton's treatise. Modern terms cognate with Burtonian melancholy would have to include: ennui, sadness, triste, moodiness, depression, anger, sullenness, mournfulness, and even dementia. The most comprehensive modern survey of the topic remains Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College, 1951). But see also: L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Johnson (1937; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 315-32; Andria Beacock, “Notes on Melancholia/Schizophrenia as a Social Disease: Robert Burton, R. D. Laing, and Hamlet,” Massachusetts Studies in English 6 (1979): 1-14. On the distinction between “mania” and “melancholia” see Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1987), 104.

43. Quoted and translated in Cave, 45.

44. See Paul Henry, “On Language and the Body,” trans. Ben Brewster, in Colin MacCabe, ed., The Talking Cure: Essays in Psychoanalysis and Language (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), 70-74.

45. Francis Bacon, Essays, ed. Michael J. Hawkins (1915 repr., London: Everyman, 1994), 68.

46. Johnson, 128.

47. This insistence on the correspondence between harmonious form and language concealed, for Jonson, an important moral truth. In the preface to Cynthia's Revels (addressed to the Court), Jonson wrote: “Beware then thou render men's figures truly, and teach them no less to hate their deformities, than to love their forms.” See Ben Jonson, The Complete Plays, ed. Felix Schelling (1910, repr., London: Dent, 1967) 1:149.

48. Donaldson, 575.

49. On the intersection of language and the body in the realm of the grotesque see Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 11-13.

50. Donaldson, 570-71.

51. Hobbes, 24.

52. See J. M. Bamborough, “Introduction” in Faulkner et al., 1:xxi.

53. For an outline of this culture, see Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, passim.

54. For an account of Burton's library, the meticulous work of Kiessling is invaluable. See Nicholas K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton, Publications of the Oxford Bibliographical Society, n. s., 22 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988). Of course, many of the works cited in the Anatomy were not owned by Burton, since Democritus was a great scourer of Oxford libraries. For citations of works not in Burton's library, see Kiessling, 372.

55. The citations are to Laurentius (André Du Laurens), Historia Anatomica (1595), and Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia (London, 1615). Burton owned neither of these texts.

56. For a detailed account of the Vesalian text and its intersection with the practicalities of dissection in the Renaissance, see Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 100-102.

57. On the English “re-composition” of the Vesalian text, see: S. V. Larkey, The Vesalian Compendium of Geminus, and Nicholas Udall's Translation. Their Relation to Vesalius, Caius, Vicary, and De Mondeville (London: Bibliographical Society, 1933), passim.

58. For all Burton's traditionalism, this did not mean that his conception of the body was significantly different from his contemporaries. When, for example, Burton described the heart as “the sun of our body, the king and sole commander of it … primum vivens, ultimum moriens” (97), he was making an observation undoubtedly derived from the Paracelsian works which featured so prominently in his collections, and which were still circulating in the late 1650s. But this was also an observation with which Harvey would not have disagreed in 1628, since these were the Aristotelian terms in which he addressed the king in the dedicatory preface to De motu cordis. Neither is it entirely fair to charge Burton with ignorance of the theory of blood circulation (as does Bamborough in Faulkner et al. 1:xxi). Harvey's theories were not announced in 1616, but interpolated into the MS of his Praelectiones at a later date. On this question see Geoffrey Keynes (following Gweneth Whitteridge), The Life of William Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 92-93.

59. Crooke, 26.

60. John Hall, The Advancement of Learning (1649), ed. A. K. Croston (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1953), 38.

61. Burton's familiarity with Ramism, indicated by the Ramist works which he bequeathed to the Bodleian and Christ Church College Libraries, has been traced by David Renaker, “Robert Burton and Ramist Method,” Renaissance Quarterly 24 (1971): 210-20. Perhaps because Walter Ong, in his otherwise masterful study of Ramus and Ramism, dismisses the “intellectual” anatomy as a “fad,” investigation of the Ramist influence on Burton has been somewhat neglected. See Walter Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958 repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), 315. An exception to this neglect (besides the work of Renaker) is Karl J. Höltgen, “Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy: Struktur und Gattungsproblematik im Licht der ramistischen Logick” Anglia 94 (1976): 388-403.

62. For an account of the emergence of new forms of anatomical teaching and their symbolic significance see: Jonathan Sawday, “The Fate of Marsyas: Dissecting the Renaissance Body,” in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn, eds., Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660 (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 111-35.

63. On the Anatomy as a satire, see: William R. Mueller, “Robert Burton's ‘Satyricall Preface,’” Modern Language Quarterly 15 (1954): 28-35; Bud Korkowski, “Genre and Satiric Strategy in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy,” Genre 7 (1975): 74-85. On the more general question of the intersection of medical science and satire, see: M. C. Randolph, “The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory: Its Possible Relations and Implications,” Studies in Philology 38 (1941): 125-57.

64. The 1679 edition (Versatile Ingenium) was the precursor of Burton's most popular manifestation throughout the nineteenth and through much of the twentieth century: as the author of “witty extracts” from the larger work. For an anatomy of these anatomies of the Anatomy see Conn, 2-13.

65. For Burton's influence on Keats (who owned and annotated a copy of the Anatomy), see: Claude L. Finney, The Evolution of Keats' Poetry (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963) 2: 562-64, 634-36; Janice C. Sinson, John Keats and the Anatomy of Melancholy (London: Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, 1971).

66. Abraham Cowley, Works, 7th ed. (London, 1681), 38-39.