SOURCE: Gardiner, Judith Kegan. “Elizabethan Psychology and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.” Journal of the History of Ideas 38, No. 3 (July-September 1977): 373-88.

[In the essay below, Gardiner explores the dimensions of Burton's psychological method in The Anatomy of Melancholy, concluding that “Burton digests his medieval and Renaissance science and other material available to him to create a humanistic psychology that is both comprehensive and reasonably coherent.”]

In 1946 Louise C. Turner Forest wrote “A Caveat …” to warn against the dangers of applying Elizabethan psychology to literary characters. The psychological tracts of the English Renaissance were “a chaotic jumble of ambiguous or contradictory fact and theory,” often more physiological than psychological. Forest concluded that Elizabethan psychology did not exist as a coherent body of belief. Contemporary dramatists could choose illustrations at will from bits and pieces of outmoded medieval scientific “facts” or from “vague general notions” or personal observations.¹ Like the bumblebee, proved incapable of flight, however, Elizabethan psychology continues to hover about. But study of that psychology seems now much less simple than it did in 1946. Then there was one question: what did the psychological tracts say? We now wish to know more. What did Elizabethans believe to be true of mental functioning and personality development? How did their beliefs affect their creations as authors and their responses as audiences? We also wonder what the actual psychology of Renaissance persons was and how, if at all, it differed from ours. An analysis of Robert Burton's massive psychological treatise, The Anatomy of Melancholy, may clarify Elizabethan psychology for us and suggest some possible solutions to these questions.²

When she denied the existence of Elizabethan psychology, Forest was reacting against several earlier studies which oversimplified Shakespearean characterization as the direct transcription of Renaissance formulae. For example, Ruth L. Anderson posited that “Shakespeare thought with his contemporaries on subjects of mind and ethics. His psychology was a crude explanation of observable facts, based on the science of the Middle Ages. …” Such criticism chiefly consisted of quotation or paraphrase from a Renaissance treatise followed by quotations from Shakespeare which both illustrated the psychology and explained the character. Before Forest, such analysis of Elizabethan psychology concentrated on humor theory and the physiology of emotions like love and fear.³ After her, the major critical work using this psychology is Lily B. Campbell's Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion. Stressing the “common agreement” of Renaissance authors about psychology, Campbell described their views of the emotions seen as “passions” or “perturbations” which war against reason.⁴ Although he, too, accepted the influence of Elizabethan psychology on dramatic characterization, Hardin Craig believed that this “mechanistic physiology” and crude psychology damaged Renaissance literature by encouraging the sensational and perverse.⁵ After the 1950's, critical interest in Elizabethan psychology waned. Humor theory remained as something to be discussed slightingly by Jonson scholars and as the subject of specialized studies, particularly of melancholy.⁶

Meanwhile, early psychoanalytic critics analyzed Renaissance works in the belief that psychoanalysis was an experimentally verified science, universally applicable. Bergen Evans in consultation with George J. Mohr, M.D., described Burton as a prescient “psychiatrist” who foreshadowed twentieth-century discoveries, and analyzed Burton via his book to discover his “unhealable narcissistic injury,” probably caused by a mother who was “an aggressive woman antipathetic to her retiring and diffident son.”⁷ Analyzing a few authors, these critics also frequently discussed character. Shakespeare was easily the favorite author for such study, and the theory of Hamlet's Oedipus complex goes back to Freud himself.⁸ Recent, more sophisticated psychoanalytic literary criticism analyzes audience responses to works of art, without assuming that literary characters are real, although Norman Holland quips that such old-fashioned character criticism “should not work but it does.”⁹

In direct contrast to the psychoanalytic critics are those who emphasize the artifice and conventionality of Renaissance literature. For example, Bernard Spivack treats Iago not as a latent homosexual but as a character incorporating aspects of the medieval vice figure.¹⁰ One recent development in the criticism of literary artifice has returned attention to the psychological, although in a direction different from that of either Elizabethan or psychoanalytic theory. Stanley E. Fish states that his method of rhetorical analysis “has as its focus the ‘psychological effects’ of the utterance.”¹¹ Rhetorical critics, like those who describe literary “tone,” often make the same assumption of psychological universality as the psychoanalysts. The critic who tells us that we are frustrated or bewildered by a passage of The Anatomy of Melancholy, for instance, assumes that the passage produces the same effect on us now as it did on its original readers.

Thus Elizabethan psychology has been treated differently by different kinds of literary critics. Historical scholars have described theories of humors and the passions. Freudians have analyzed Renaissance authors and characters as though they were patients, rarely convincing nonpsychoanalytic scholars, and rhetorical critics have described the psychological effects of Renaissance literature on themselves as a paradigm for the works' inherent characteristics. Recently some critics have found all of these approaches partial and inadequate. Hugh M. Richmond, like Zevedei Barbu fifteen years earlier, calls for a “valid discipline” to be called “historical psychology” to trace the “evolution of human sensibility and mental process.”¹²

It has perhaps impeded the study of Elizabethan psychology up to now that its methodology has been naive—paraphrase of the original authors or simple translation into Freudian terminology—and that its subject matter has been so restricted. The overwhelming emphasis on Shakespearean characters, in particular, complicates the already difficult task of disentangling a useful approach to Elizabethan psychology. And not even on all Shakespearean characters. Psychoanalytic critics originally concentrated on tragedy, following the early analysts whose concern was “almost exclusively with neurotic, tragic, self-damaging behavior.”¹³ And many have found Hamlet the convenient epitome of both the seventeenth-century mind and afflicted modern personality. But it is not yet clear that Shakespearean characters either transcribe the personalities and motivations of Renaissance persons or are based on generally accepted Elizabethan theory. Nor is it clear that they usefully represent all other contemporary literary characters. Shakespeare's transcendent powers tempt our trusting projections. Richmond, like many before him, sees Shakespearean characters as “wonderfully vivid and active personalities whose minds are as convincing as those of Paul and Augustine and far more immediately accessible, not to say contemporary.”¹⁴ Shakespeare takes one the long way round for a first understanding of Elizabethan psychology. I suggest instead starting an investigation of that psychology with the one comprehensive psychological text of the English Renaissance generally considered representative of the period, enormously popular in its own day, and a significant literary work in its own right—The Anatomy of Melancholy. The Anatomy has been treated in several relevant ways by modern scholarship. Burton's personality has been analyzed, our own responses have been explained, and Burton's theory has been applied to other authors, including Shakespeare, Ford, and Milton. As Nicholas Dewey shows, Burton's book was originally regarded as a treatise “Of Melancholy” and later became known as “The Anatomy” as interest shifted from its content to its style and method.¹⁵ After Charles Lamb praised it as a handy quarry of anecdotes by a quaint old man, the Anatomy was rarely seen as a serious or coherent literary work. Recently, it has been regarded as serious but not necessarily coherent. William R. Mueller and J. Max Patrick discuss Burton as a social critic, relying heavily on his Utopia in the opening “Democritus Junior to the Reader.”¹⁶ The good rhetorical critics, too, emphasize this opening section and ignore much of the text of the Anatomy; they concentrate on Burton's creation of a narrative persona to manipulate reader response.¹⁷ Except for Evans' Freudian interpretation and the cautious assessment of Jean Simon, there has been no substantial attempt to understand Burton's psychology.¹⁸ A review of Burton criticism in 1971 did not even list a category for Burton's subject matter, choosing instead “canon,” “prose style,” “sources and influences,” and “miscellaneous.”¹⁹

Despite Sir William Osler's encomium of the Anatomy as “a medical treatise, the greatest indeed written by a layman,”²⁰ Burton's critics have found many flaws in his psychology. The severest among them saw Burton's book as an incoherent and self-contradictory hodgepodge: to James R. King, Burton is an unpleasant determinist with an “almost comic inability” to solve the elementary tasks of writing a book.²¹ To many, Burton is a witty compiler of others' works, incapable of formulating his own theory. For Paul Jordan-Smith, “this book is a whole man,” unified not by its subject but by Burton's vital personality.²² Dennis G. Donovan casts him as an orthodox Anglican minister; Merritt Y. Hughes, as a Spenserian Christian Platonist. In contrast, Fish sees the Anatomy as devoid of Christian faith or any anchoring normative viewpoint.²³ According to Craig, Burton “was obviously intelligent beyond almost any man of his age,” yet “completely unscientific.” He “epitomizes the learning of the Renaissance.”²⁴ Even Lawrence Babb says that the book is only one quarter about its ostensible subject, and finds Burton's sanity and compassion for humanity's self-inflicted misery more important than his “discredited medical practices.”²⁵ David Renaker concludes that the Anatomy must be “an unusually ambiguous book” to provoke such divergent responses, and he sees Burton employing Ramist method only to revenge himself against Ramist logic and order.²⁶ Rosalie L. Colie, too, decides that Burton “pulverizes the structural schemes of the psychology of humors.”²⁷

A few central paradoxes relevant to our inquiry can be gleaned from this Burtonian catalogue of contradictory authorities. Burton is a humoral behaviorist, but he confuses and subverts all its doctrines; he is an orthodox Christian moral psychologist, but he undermines our faith; he is a prophet of Freudian psychoanalytic insight, but his psychology is incorrect, outmoded, and completely conventional without being consistent. We may accept Burton as shifty and paradoxical, as many current critics do, and so accept our own place in the universal confusion of humankind. However, succumbing to delirium is not the only way to read Burton. Instead, let us consider some of the characteristics of the psychology of the Anatomy without simply resorting either to paraphrase of Burton's discussion or to a translation of it into Freudian terminology.

1) Burton's psychology is moral and evaluative. The physical conditions of the body, its humoral balances and symptoms, are consistently considered in terms of their effect on the passions or emotions, and the passions are important because of the misery they cause when they overrule reason. Although Burton is always aware of the physical, he treats our human susceptibility to disease as an aspect of our fallen moral condition: “concupiscence and original sin, inclinations, and bad humours are radical in every one of us …” (I,374). His purpose is both to inform and to console. Through knowledge of ourselves, we may moderate our passions. As Michel Foucault notes, folly and vice were illusions in the moral universe of Christian humanism.²⁸ Therefore, we must learn to see ourselves clearly: “remember our miseries and vanities, examine and humiliate ourselves, seek to God, and call to Him for mercy … and by our discretion to moderate ourselves, to be more circumspect and wary in the midst of these dangers” (I,409). His sense of the moral depravity of the fallen human condition is a reason for Burton's insistence that we are all mad, that none of us should feel himself an exception.

Now go and brag of thy present happiness, whosoever thou art … thou seest in what a brittle state thou art. … “Humble thyself therefore under the mighty hand of God” … know thyself, acknowledge thy present misery, and make right use of it.

(I,381)

Although each person needs to look to God for faith and guidance, Burton's focus is on our common humanity. “If this my discourse be over-medicinal, or savour too much of humanity” (I,38), he apologizes, he may write of divinity some other time. According to Paul H. Kocher, in the Anatomy, “human personality seems a fundamentally self-bounded order, to which grace served as but a foreign and incidental addition.”²⁹

Although his approach is moral, Burton is not petty or dogmatic. Most critics praise his compassion, particularly in the treatment of religious despair and suicide. Those who defend suicide intellectually are “impious, abominable, and upon a wrong ground” (I,438), yet we are not to limit God's mercy or try to judge the hearts of others.

This only let me add, that in some cases those hard censures of such as offer violence to their own persons … are to be mitigated. … What shall become of their souls, God alone can tell: His mercy may come … betwixt the bridge and the brook. … It is his case, it may be thine: … charity will judge and hope the best. …

(I,439)

Similarly, Burton is more lenient in treating the erotic passions than many of his predecessors; “the last and best Cure of Love-Melancholy is, to let them have their Desire” (III,228). He counsels moderating the passions, yet he is no impossibility-preaching Stoic. The Italian woman whose husband flaunts a whore before her face has as much right to feel jealous as the enslaved or hard-working poor to complain justly of their doleful lot. This overlapping of Renaissance morality and psychology troubles many critics. Babb says that Burton treats the passions as a moralist, not as a psychologist. Barroll strains to keep his epistemological description of Renaissance psychology separate from its morality: “we need not become lost in the inevitably evaluative matrices within which discourse about the human mind was available.” In contrast, Kocher accepts that Renaissance psychology was useful as “applied divinity” developed to counsel the sick of soul.³⁰

2) Burton is neither a dualist nor a determinist. He stresses the interaction of mind and body at all times. Diseases will strike us to which we are susceptible by heredity or temperament, attacking our weakest organ. They may inflame our passions, as our passions may create disease: “For as the distraction of the mind … alters the temperature of the body, so the distraction and distemper of the body will cause a distemperature of the soul, and 'tis hard to decide which of these two do more harm to the other” (I,374). Despite his minute dissection of separate causes and symptoms, Burton always recognizes that these only make sense when applied to the whole patient. We need to know the complete person before we know which of all the possibilities he catalogues will apply. Often a disease may be overdetermined, with many causes concurring in an individual to take effect.

3) Burton treats the human, but the nature of the human is defined by its relation to the divine. Burton's Biblical quotations, his consolations, prayers, and exhortations make clear the transcendent values and norms against which human activity is judged. God's “incomparable love and goodness … is that Homer's golden chain, which reacheth down from heaven to earth, by which every creature is annexed, and depends on his Creator” (III,17). Conversely, all our affections should “proceed from a sanctified spirit, that hath a true touch of religion and a reference to God” (III,31). Burton's description of the human condition is familiar from Hamlet: “Man, the most excellent and noble creature of the world” is now “so much obscured by his fall that (some few relics excepted) he is inferior to a beast …” (I,130). Yet we are not left helpless. Our intellect is not completely impaired: our purer “conscience, is an innate habit” (I,166), and “education is another nature, altering the mind and will” (I,335). Most important, our will is free: “we may frame ourselves as we will” (II,106). The will is more important than our actions, since even if we cannot achieve the good, God “accepts the will for the deed” (III,415). Since we are free to choose good or evil, we are morally responsible, and our integrity depends upon our acceptance of this responsibility. After describing many abuses of the English church and of scholarship and its patrons, Burton, as scholar and churchman, admits that “this is the fault of all of us, and especially those of us who belong to a university” (I,327).

4) Burton defines people both in terms of their internal drives and in terms of interpersonal relationships. To be human is to be in contact with others. Burton's persistent advice is “be not solitary, be not idle.” Personal relationships can both cause and cure melancholy. Their treatment by parents, nurses, and tutors affects children's characters, and their children's behavior may depress or hearten parents. In the sections on heroic melancholy and jealousy, most obviously, people are defined by their relationships with others. Ideally, a love relationship is reciprocal: “The husband rules her as head, but she again commands his heart, he is her servant, she his only joy and content …” (III,53). But there are many possibilities for negative symbioses, as in mutually-deceptive suitors, mismatched, jealous spouses, or wife-dominated married couples.

5) Burton sees human personality in the context of natural creation and of social institutions. He has long been recognized as a social satirist, especially because of the Utopia in his preface, but his “digressions” have often been treated as charming excursions on random subjects by an author who tired quickly of his boring medical subject. A look at the formally-labeled “digressions” of the Anatomy, however, will show that they help establish the contexts in which human activity is to be seen. Three relate to man's body, mind, and soul—the digressions, respectively, “of anatomy,” “of the force of imagination,” and “a consolatory digression.” The “digression of the nature of spirits and devils” puts humanity in relation to the supernatural, while the famous “digression of the air” places people spatially in terms of their physical environment. In it Burton surveys the cosmos and the geocosm, examining nationality and climate as influences on human behavior. In the “digression of the misery of scholars” Burton establishes that people's occupational roles and social status are relevant to their personalities and psychology. Even people's psychiatric symptoms, he shows, will be conditioned by their social position: “another great occasion of the variety of these symptoms proceeds from custom, discipline, education, and several inclinations” (I,404). The idle rich are more likely to fall into melancholy than the hard-working poor: “For seldom should you see an hired servant, a poor handmaid … that is kept hard to her work … troubled in this kind, but noble virgins …” (I,417). Burton does not glamorize poverty either. “Want” is a cause of melancholy, and “necessity … drives men many times to do that which otherwise they … cannot endure” (I,233). Burton shows great sensitivity to the differing psychologies of the social classes: the rich man “sits at table in a soft chair at ease, but he doth not remember … that a tired waiter stands behind him … and is silent” (I,277), and he describes the “slavishly humble” and apathetic psychologies of the miserably oppressed (I,351).

Though Burton sees the individual in his social context, he does not expect him to adapt to it or condone it. The society itself may be sick or mad: “kingdoms, provinces, and politic bodies are likewise sensible and subject to this disease …” (I,79). For example, war is intrinsically evil and some nations' sexual codes result in the virtual imprisonment of their women. As Dewey remarks, Burton scorns perverse society while retaining sympathy for the individual sufferer.³¹ Only through the revolution implied by his ideal Utopia would better mental health for all be insured, and that is impossible. However, even though fallen human beings cannot attain perfection, Burton recognizes that institutional change in itself could alter some conditions that create human madness and misery: “If it were possible, I would have such … charitable lawyers should love their neighbours … but this is impossible. … I will therefore have of lawyers … a set number …” (I,102).

6) Burton treats each melancholic as a unique suffering individual. “They dote all, but not alike” (I,46). “'Tis an inbred malady in every one of us … and infinitely varies, as we ourselves are severally addicted …” (ibid.). It has often been noted that Burton uses a scholastic format with an extremely elaborate outline structure, yet he constantly breaks down his own categories, showing the interpenetration of cause and effect, symptom and cure. Symptoms and effective cures will vary from person to person: baths may be good for one melancholic but not for another; and after an extensive disquisition on the effects of many foods, Burton concludes that each person must find the diet suitable for himself. Burton also shows via his casuistry his devotion to the uniqueness of the individual. Madeline Doran notes that the humor character of drama is also not a type but an individual, often an extreme one.³²

To describe the effects of melancholy on various individuals, Burton does no experiments, nor has he firsthand clinical experience, though he can report from personal observations.

I need not be so barbarous, inhuman, curious, or cruel, for this purpose to torture any poor melancholy man; their symptoms are plain … they delineate themselves, they voluntarily bewray themselves …, I meet them still as I go, … I need not seek far to describe them.

(I,382)

He does use the clinical experience of physicians reported in the medical literature, and he searches myth, legend, secular and Biblical history, and travel literature for specific examples of his categories.

Critics like Richmond have confused the issue of Renaissance individualism by connecting the development of the modern concept of the individual with the ability—particularly Shakespeare's ability—to draw self-conscious and fully-rounded literary characters. But we should heed E. H. Gombrich's warning that changes in artistic style may or may not coincide with changes in underlying psychology: we do not think all ancient Egyptian kings looked alike, despite their statues.³³ In the Anatomy, there are two main characters, each of whom is a unique individual although neither is described for us with the richness we may expect of post-Shakespearean literary characterization. The first is the author, who chooses a shifting and inconsistent role. As Colie says, he pursues a “concealing-revealing” strategy with “self-references to his identity.”³⁴ He does not allow himself or his views to become completely known to us, but does drop numerous biographical hints and adheres to certain broad humanistic values. As physician-therapist, he thus participates in our dilemmas and allows us to project upon him what is most acceptable to us. The second character is the unique but unknown reader who must choose what especially fits him from the plethora of possibilities that Burton holds out. That Burton does have a “modern” concept of the individual personality may also be shown from his treatment of his examples. Throughout the Anatomy, he refers to Socrates, for instance, as a fully-realized or “self-actualized” individual who will be recognized as such by the reader. He does not give us a case history, but does cite Socrates repeatedly as one example of what an imperfect human being, poorly endowed by nature, ugly, unlucky in marriage, attacked and eventually killed by a hostile society, could still manage to make of himself.³⁵

7) According to Burton, melancholy is not static or completely negative. People and their diseases are subject to growth and change. The movement of melancholy is usually downward, but its course might be arrested or reversed. Jealousy succinctly proceeds “from suspicion to hatred, from hatred to frenzy, madness, injury, murder and despair” (III,286). Melancholy in general “is most pleasant at first,” but then “the scene alters upon a sudden” and the patient begins to exhibit doleful symptoms (I,406-07). There is a continuum extending from normal to creative to self-destructive behavior. “Melancholy men are witty … and … all learned men, famous philosophers, and lawgivers … have still been melancholy …” (I,422).³⁶ Melancholics may be geniuses, lovers, or paranoid madmen. The creative and the dysfunctional exist together with possibilities for growth and for drastic regression. Burton's sense of the potential variability of melancholia is most clearly demonstrated in his opening poem, “The Author's Abstract of Melancholy,” with its contrasting refrains, moving from “Naught so sweet as melancholy” and “Naught so sad as melancholy” to “None so divine …” and “Naught so damn'd as melancholy” (I,11-13). Rather than retain Burton's difficult and oscillating balance, Milton discarded the negative half of melancholy to create Il Penseroso, then paralleled it with the separate L'Allegro.

8) Burton's role throughout the book is one of understanding and participation with his afflicted subjects. He, too, has been and may be melancholic. “I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy” (I,20); “I was not a little offended with this malady, shall I say my mistress Melancholy …” (I,21). He empathizes with the intensity of his subjects' suffering: “and if there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man's heart” (I,433). He writes because of “the generality of the disease, the necessity of the cure, and the commodity or common good that will arise to all men by the knowledge of it,” yet perhaps the truly melancholy person should not read about these symptoms lest “he trouble or hurt himself” by applying everything to himself (I,38). We try to avoid feeling ourselves implicated in the universal vice and folly: “Every man thinks with himself, … I am well, I am wise …” (I,69), but we need to know our own faults to have compassion for others. “We cannot accuse or condemn one another, being faulty ourselves …” (I,46). We ought not to “tyrannize over our brother's soul” (III,375). Burton constantly admits his participation in human defect in order to encourage our self-knowledge and hence amendment.

If any man shall ask in the meantime, who I am that so boldly censure others … have I no faults? Yes, more than thou hast, whatsoever thou art. … And though I be not so right or so discreet as I should be, yet not so mad, so bad neither, as thou perhaps takest me to be. … I can but wish myself and them a good physician, and all of us a better mind.

(I,119-20)

He takes on the role not only of potential patient but also of the patient's physician and friend. For the melancholic to improve, he must have a good physician and be a willing patient. “He himself or his friends” must “use their honest endeavours” (II,104) to help curb immoderate passions, and “the best way for ease is to impart our misery to some friend …” (II,107). Sometimes the patient's friend or physician will need to enter his fantasy to help him, as in the case of the man who felt he had no head until his doctor gave him a lead cap. Yet the melancholic should not be treated as though he isn't there: the afflicted should not be mocked or made the butt of jokes, which they will correctly perceive and resent.

Generally, Burton emphasizes the supportive therapy which the physician or friend can provide. Instead of chiding the victim, the friend is to be positive, sympathetic, and consoling, helping provide such distractions as mirth and good company. He may help the love melancholic by dissuading him from love, by finding him an adequate replacement for an impossible love choice, or even by persuading difficult parents to let the lovers marry.³⁷ Joan Webber stresses the flexibility of the relationship between the author and his audience in the Anatomy: “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 one see everything from all possible viewpoints. …”³⁸

In other words, Burton digests his medieval and Renaissance science and other material available to him to create a humanistic psychology that is both comprehensive and reasonably coherent. As Renaker notes, he similarly digested his sources and authorities, altering quotations and changing facts with an almost total disregard for local accuracy; his attention instead is to the overall approach.³⁹ It is thus inaccurate to consider this particular Elizabethan psychology solely as confused behaviorism based on the outmoded humor model of physiology. On the other hand, despite Evans's attempts to fit him into the mold, Burton's psychology is far different from Freudian theory, even if we grant him insight into such matters as projection, the importance of childhood traumata, and the usefulness of “talking therapy.” If we do wish a modern analogy to validate or explicate Burton's psychology for us, the most appropriate would be contemporary humanistic psychology, which grew up in the 1950's to be a “third force” to mechanistic behaviorist psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis.

The most relevant point about humanistic psychology is that it assumes that psychology is and should be moral and value-oriented. According to one of the founders of modern humanistic psychology, its task is “helping the individual person to have a greater measure of awareness and, therefore, control of his own experience.” His description thus parallels Webber's account of Burton's strategy in the Anatomy: “By putting on display his own weaknesses and paradoxes …, he gives man the opportunity to strive, at least, for self-knowledge and self-control.”⁴⁰ Typically, the modern humanistic therapist is an involved participant in the therapeutic relationship with the patient. Furthermore, humanistic psychology stresses the need to understand people in a context of the natural environment and of their social interactions. The society may be mad and the healthy individual not adapted to it.

These parallels between Renaissance and modern humanistic psychology may be useful in helping to free us from a simplistic view of Elizabethan psychology as restricted to humor theory or the passions. In addition, such an analogy may help us to formulate a sense of Elizabethan psychology as a plausible belief system for sophisticated and intelligent people like the great dramatists. However, there are dangers in using humanistic psychology—or any other twentieth-century ideology—as a model for Elizabethan psychology. I could ingeniously and irresponsibly claim Burton as a Maoist, for example, by citing the frequent repetition of his slogan, “be not solitary, be not idle.” With an author as comprehensive and various as Burton, who states contradictory ideas and examines many possibilities, it is perhaps too easy to pick what seems most accessible to us from the plenitude he offers.

A further danger is that one may mistake a semantic process of relabeling for a deeper understanding. Saying that Renaissance appetite equals Freudian id may not be particularly helpful, for example, and such a translation will always be somewhat inaccurate. It will omit and distort some aspects of the original while losing its defining context. Such translation, too, often assumes that there is nothing new under any sun, that insofar as Burton is right, for instance, he is describing what we know now and what is true of persons now, and all we need to do is to find out how well he has discovered the truth we have.

Moreover, there are some clear differences between Burton's and twentieth-century humanistic psychology. In particular, humanistic psychology tends to be grossly optimistic about human nature. One of its chief objections to both orthodox Freudian and to behaviorist psychology is that they see humanity as inherently defective. In contrast to much American popular psychology, Burton's compendium of Elizabethan popular psychology might be called “I'm not okay, you're not okay.” Although Elizabethan psychology places humanity in the context of the superhuman and holds out a transcendent goal for which humanity does have the potential, this potentiality cannot be realized by purely human powers: divine grace is necessary.

Although it may help us to get a sense of Elizabethan psychology, the analogy between The Anatomy of Melancholy and twentieth-century humanistic psychology has its limitations. The Anatomy is more comprehensive than most modern humanistic psychology in its attempt to integrate psychology, anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, sociology, philosophy, and religion. Those readers who see the Anatomy as an encyclopedia are not wrong—though it is not a random compilation but one in which all subjects are called into play only insofar as they illuminate the human condition. Although the natural science that Burton used to explain the material basis of behavior is incorrect, we can still appreciate his effort at synthesis.

Another comparison that might be helpful in shaping our understanding of Elizabethan psychology is that between the Anatomy and that other comprehensive psychological work of the English Renaissance, The Faerie Queene.⁴¹ Spenser's poem, too, explicitly describes the relation between mind and body, the operation of the passions in the human character, and the role of sexuality in human life. Because of our twentieth-century ideas about personality, we respond, I think, much more easily to individual characters, like the Shakespearean heroes, than to allegory as a method of psychological presentation. Burton is not allegorical since he does not personify the faculties and conditions about which he writes, although many sections of the Anatomy read like a mental Purgatorio in which exemplars of different kinds of melancholy call out to us woefully from the cubbied subsections of Burton's outline. Both Burton and Spenser concentrate on the local unit, the canto or subsection, as an enclosed whole, allowing the reader to half-forget the characters and topics treated much before it. “Burton felt free to regard each part of his world, for the moment he was treating it, as absolute, ignoring or forgetting its relation to the others,” according to Renaker.⁴² Both manipulate myth and history as analogues of recurring human experience. Spenser's use of myth in this sense is well known, but Burton employs the technique too. For example, discoursing on love melancholy he repeatedly cites the triangle of Venus, Vulcan, and Mars as an example of both the magnificent compulsion of erotic love and its ridiculousness.⁴³

However, the similarity between Burton and Spenser most useful to our understanding of Renaissance psychology is that both use narrative with didactic and persuasive ends in view. They wish to alter their readers' minds. Both contradict themselves in their long, intricately organized works. For both, each sin is the worst, each passion or monster the most debilitating, as it is encountered: “so may I say of these causes to him that shall require which is the greatest, every one is more grievous than other …” (I,250). “As shoemakers do when they bring home shoes, still cry leather is dearer and dearer, may I justly say of those melancholy symptoms: these of despair are most violent …” (III,404). This characteristic of providing an encyclopedia of possibilities from which the reader chooses marks Burton's therapeutic strategy as well as his prose. Webber notes that his sentences resemble a “multiple-choice examination.”⁴⁴ But Burton is not revealing to us his “comic inability” to organize his material; instead, he is letting us know that for each of us the shoe will pinch differently and to each of us our own pains will be the ones needing remedy. Both authors proliferate examples of the psychological vagaries of fallen human nature, with and without divine guidance. Both, that is, are Christian psychologists, and both are psychological rhetoricians. They are interested not only in sharing their experience of what it means to be fully human, but also in shaping us to conform to that image by manipulating our emotions and directing our wills as we read.

In short, our study of The Anatomy of Melancholy, like the study of any single literary text, cannot tell us much about the psychology of Renaissance persons. About the author we learn with certainty only that at some time he felt he was afflicted with some variety of melancholy. Other psychological “facts” about the author gleaned by his critics, for instance, that he was resentful of his mother, ambitious, or sexually frustrated, depend on modern reading between the lines when it is not clear that we can yet read the lines themselves.⁴⁵ The disagreements among critics, for example, as to whether Burton is habitually serious or facetious just indicate that we don't understand the code to make Elizabethan psychology as filtered through a literary text intelligible. About his audience we only know that enough people found his treatment of melancholy interesting to support multiple editions of the text. We do not learn from the Anatomy, a literary work which is also a popular medical treatise, how widely individualism flourished in the seventeenth century. We do get a sense of Burton himself as an individual who could conceptualize the unique individual personality in a way not utterly alien to our own.

We can gather from the Anatomy, as from many other historical texts, certain clues about social conventions or psychological symptoms of the time. We know that Burton believed it odd and effeminate for a man to play with infants, but we don't know how widespread this belief was or what behavior between fathers and children it reflected. We may say with some assurance that profound personality disturbance in the Renaissance might result in symptoms of obsessive jealousy or in delusions of damnation. But we don't know the exact incidence of these maladies, and for our knowledge of the psychology of Renaissance persons to become more specific, we will need much more information from sociologists, demographers, and historians about such matters as childbearing practices, and we will then need to interpret their facts in the light of first-hand contemporary documents like letters and diaries.

So our investigation has come full circle. We cannot explain Elizabethan literature by an appeal to Elizabethan psychology unless we understand Elizabethan psychology, and that is still difficult. We cannot explain Elizabethan literary characters by modern psychoanalysis without risking anachronistic bias. The discussion here of the greatest and most comprehensive English Renaissance psychological text has, one may hope, helped to describe Elizabethan psychology in intelligible terms. At least it should protect us from certain misunderstandings. Burton was not an inconsistent behaviorist but a consistent humanist creating a comprehensive approach to human experience from a fragmented collage of the knowledge available to him.

Notes

1. Louise C. Turner Forest, “A Caveat for Critics against Invoking Elizabethan Psychology,” PMLA, 61 (1946), 651-72.

2. In this essay I quote from the Everyman edition, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 3 vols. (London and New York, 1932). I use the term “Elizabethan psychology” to include Burton and his predecessors.

3. Ruth L. Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare's Plays (New York, 1964, 1st ed. 1927), 154. Forest also cites, inter alia, Lawrence Babb, “The Physiological Conception of Love in the Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama,” PMLA, 56 (1941), 1020-35. Patrick Cruttwell, “Physiology and Psychology in Shakespeare's Age,” JHI, 12 (1951), 85, finds in the treatise of Thomas Vicary a “psychology that may almost be called behaviorist.”

4. Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (New York, 1952), 63.

5. Hardin Craig, The Enchanted Glass: The Elizabethan Mind in Literature (Oxford, 1950, 1st ed. 1935), 116-19.

6. E.g., James D. Redwine, Jr., “Beyond Psychology: the Moral Basis of Jonson's Theory of Humor Characterization,” ELH, 28 (1961), 316-34; Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London, 1964); Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (London, 1971).

7. Bergen Evans in consultation with George J. Mohr, The Psychiatry of Robert Burton (New York, 1944), 100; 6.

8. Freud's first such discussion of Hamlet was in an 1897 letter. An expanded version appeared in The Interpretation of Dreams, reprinted with commentary in The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare, ed. M. D. Faber (New York, 1970), 79-86.

9. Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York, 1968), 267; also his Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York, 1964).

10. Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York, 1958).

11. Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of 17th-Century Literature (Berkeley, 1972), 384. Similar approaches are used by Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, 1966), 430-60, and Joan Webber, The Eloquent I: Style and Self in 17th-Century Prose (Madison, 1968), 80-114.

12. Hugh M. Richmond, “Personal Identity and Literary Personae: A Study in Historical Psychology,” PMLA, 90 (1975), 209-11. Richmond does not cite Zevedei Barbu, Problems of Historical Psychology (New York, 1960); see J. Leeds Barroll, Artificial Persons: The Formation of Character in the Tragedies of Shakespeare (Columbia, S.C., 1974).

13. Faber, 13.

14. Richmond, 215.

15. Nicholas Dewey, “Burton's Melancholy: A Paradox Disinterred,” MP, 68 (1971), 292-93. There is a summary of earlier Burton criticism in Jean Robert Simon, Robert Burton (1577-1640) et l'Anatomie de la Mélancolie (Paris, 1964), 93-103.

16. William R. Mueller, The Anatomy of Robert Burton's England (Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1952) and “Robert Burton's ‘Satyricall Preface,’” MLQ, 15 (1954), 28-35; J. Max Patrick, “Robert Burton's Utopianism,” PQ, 27 (1948), 345-58.

17. This is most true for Fish, least for Colie.

18. Evans; Simon saw Burton's psychology as unoriginal but lively, 222-28.

19. Dennis G. Donovan, “Recent Studies in Burton and Walton,” ELR, 1 (1971), 294-303.

20. Sir William Osler, “Robert Burton: The Man, his Book, his Library,” A Way of Life and Selected Writings of Sir William Osler (New York, 1958), 90.

21. James R. King, Studies in Six 17th-Century Writers (Athens, Ohio, 1966), 83.

22. Paul Jordan-Smith, Bibliographia Burtonia: A Study of Robert Burton's “The Anatomy of Melancholy” (Stanford and London, 1931), 4, 7.

23. Donovan, “Robert Burton, Anglican Minister,” Renaissance Papers (1967), 33-39; Merritt Y. Hughes, “Burton on Spenser,” PMLA, 41 (1926), 547; Fish, 334-36.

24. Craig, 247, 248, 250.

25. Babb, Sanity in Bedlam: A Study of Robert Burton's “Anatomy of Melancholy” (East Lansing, 1959), 9, 73.

26. David Renaker, “Robert Burton and Ramist Method,” Renaissance Quarterly, 24 (1971), 210.

27. Colie, 456.

28. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1965), 27.

29. Paul H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (New York, 1969, 1st ed., 1953), 316. Kocher perhaps overstates the case.

30. Babb, Sanity in Bedlam, 6; Barroll, 50-51; Kocher, 320.

31. Dewey, “‘Democritus Junior’ Alias Robert Burton,” Princeton U. Lib. Chronicle, 31(1970), 105.

32. Colie, 433; Madeline Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison, 1954), 230.

33. E. H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford, 1969), 37.

34. Colie, “Some Notes on Burton's Erasmus,” Renaissance Quarterly, 20(1967), 335.

35. I, 44, 248; II, 134, 187, 193, 199.

36. For the Aristotelian idea that melancholy was the malady of genius, see Klibansky, Panofsky, Saxl.

37. Burton does consider some nasty remedies, like cautery and trepanning, as a last resort, and he allows that a recalcitrant heretic may be excommunicated, restrained, or worse.

38. Webber, 99.

39. Renaker, “Robert Burton's Tricks of Memory,” PMLA, 87(1972), 391-96.

40. James F. T. Bugental, “First Invitational Conference on Humanistic Psychology: Introduction,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 5(1965), 179-81; Webber, 112.

41. When Northrop Frye wrote that the Anatomy “is the most comprehensive survey of human life in one book that English literature had seen since Chaucer …,” Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957), 311, he perhaps did not count The Faerie Queene as “one book.”

42. Renaker, “Robert Burton and Ramist Method,” 219; for a similar view of Spenser, Paul J. Alpers, The Poetry of “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton, 1967), 107.

43. III, 77, 82, 171, 172, 271, 274, 275.

44. Webber, 101.

45. The most psychologically inferential of Burton's critics are Evans and John Middleton Murry, “Burton's Anatomy,” Countries of the Mind: Essays in Literary Criticism, 1st series (London, 1931), 33-53. Simon has more information and is somewhat more balanced, 491-516.