FEW works of literature from the English Renaissance have posed problems of interpretation to modern readers in such acute form as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (first edition, 1621). In the later twentieth century, since Northrop Frye’s influential classification of the Anatomy as a type of ‘Menippean satire’ in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), and especially since Stanley Fish’s reader-response analysis in Self-Consuming Artifacts (1972), Burton studies have been haunted by the question of how to approach its apparently extraordinary prose.1 In a sense, this is nothing new. As a work that presents a huge quantity of heterogeneous textual content and blends serious and humorous modes, the Anatomy has been read in many different ways since its publication.2 But when Frye identified Burton’s book as a satirical ‘anatomy’ within a Menippean tradition that culminated with Swift and Sterne, and when Fish portrayed his experience of being offered ‘a series of false promises’ by a work which systematically undermined the reader’s confidence ‘in himself and everything else’, it came to be seen as virtually the model of a text in which all was intentionally not what it seemed.3 Literary studies since Frye and Fish have wrestled with a range of questions about the work—its quotational method, its organization, and its employment of satire and irony alongside scholarly discourse—many of which reflect a prevailing confusion about Burton’s authorial status. Is he a serious writer of relatively modest ambition, whose fundamental purpose is to communicate a more or less coherent body of useful knowledge to his readers? Or is he given to irony and sophisticated trickery, interleaving the serious parts of his work with clues indicating a deeper layer of meaning that undercuts or adds to its literal sense, introduces ambiguity or incoherence, and is accessible only to readers who are prepared to do the work?4 After a brief biographical sketch, in the first part of what follows I shall outline the principal interpretative problems posed by the Anatomy to modern readers, offering some suggestions about how these can be approached and possibly resolved. In the second part, I shall draw attention to some of the key features of the book—particularly the relationship between its medical psychology and literary rhetoric—as Burton himself conceived them. No single study will ever be able to provide an exhaustive account of the contents of this lengthy and complex work, but as I hope to show, the author’s own remarks about his enterprise, and its intended effects on its readership, do help us to anchor our reading of a text that sometimes seems to have been designed to beguile and confuse, just as it informs and entertains.
Robert Burton was born on 8 February 1577 in the village of Lindley, Leicestershire, into the ranks of the landed gentry, and attended grammar schools in Sutton Coldfield and Nuneaton before proceeding to Brasenose College in Oxford in 1593. As he tells us in the Anatomy (‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, vol. 1, p. 3), 5 he spent most of his life as a scholar in Oxford at Christ Church, where in 1599 he was elected to a Studentship—subsequently receiving his BA in 1602, his MA in 1605, and his BD in 1614—and where, from 1624 until his death in January 1640, he acted as librarian. As well as serving for three years as clerk of the Oxford Market, in 1616 his career as a divine proceeded with his appointment to the benefice of St Thomas in Oxford, a position that was supplemented in 1624 by the Rectorship of Walesby in Lincolnshire. He resigned this position in 1631, but in 1633 (or possibly 1634), thanks to the patronage of the dedicatee of the Anatomy, Lord Berkeley of Seagrave, he received the Rectorship of Seagrave in Leicestershire.
Burton’s literary career seems to have had an inauspicious beginning in August 1605, when his Latin pastoral comedy Alba—performed before James I at Christ Church—was described by an observer as ‘very tedious’ and boring to the King.6 In the following year, he composed a comedy satirizing false philosophy and pseudo-scholarship, Philosophaster, a work now usually treated as a minor precursor of the Anatomy, but which has now begun to attract serious interpretations in its own right.7 By the time Philosophaster was performed in February 1618, however, Burton had almost certainly begun his composition of the work which would dominate the remainder of his writing life and by which he would become famous, The Anatomy of Melancholy. This appeared in its first edition in 1621; but he continued to expand and modify the book in versions issued in 1624, 1628, 1632, and 1638. A final edition with the last set of additions and corrections from the author’s hand was published posthumously in 1651. By this time, the book was almost one and a half times its original size, a considerable expansion for a work which was over 350,000 words in length when it first appeared in print.
Unfortunately, we know little about Burton’s life in Oxford—there is perhaps some truth in his claim to have ‘liv’d a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life … penned up most part in my study’ (DJR, vol. 1, p. 3)—but we do at least have ample information about his scholarly activities and preferences. Burton bequeathed a total of around 1,700 titles from his large personal library to the Bodleian and Christ Church, and the surviving contents of this library now not only give us valuable insight into the authors and subjects which interested him, but also reveal his reading habits in the form of copious annotations and marginalia.8 Most importantly, however, Burton’s library confirms the most striking first impression about the author gleaned from the Anatomy by generations of readers: he was a scholar with truly encyclopaedic interests, not only well-versed in medicine and theology (the two disciplines then most obviously related to the subject of melancholy), but fascinated by works of history, politics, geography, astronomy, astrology, mathematics, agriculture, law, poetry, and other forms of popular literature, as well as by contemporary news pamphlets. This ‘roving humor’, as Burton refers to his eclectic interests, is attested by nearly every page of the work, where he conducts his discussions ‘like a ranging Spaniell, that barkes at every bird he sees’ (DJR, vol. 1, p. 4).
Before proceeding to the text, we should note one unmistakable characteristic of its intellectual complexion. The Anatomy is a product of the humanism of late Renaissance Europe, and one of Burton’s aims was undoubtedly to make the fruits of this movement available to an English audience in the vernacular.9 He had no time for puritans who thought that ‘nothing must be read but Scriptures’ and who therefore rejected classical learning (3.4.1.4, vol. 3, p. 391, n. k), and the prominent role of ancient Greek and Roman authors in the work is very difficult to miss.10 Most studies of the Anatomy have noted the way in which Burton has ‘mingled Sacra prophanis’ and quoted both ‘Neotericks’ and ‘Antients’ (DJR, vol. 1, p. 19) in a ‘Maceronicon’ that mixes English with (mainly) scholarly Latin (DJR, vol. 1, p. 11). There has also been some discussion of his redeployment of the traditional humanist polemics about the futility and obscurity of scholasticism.11
Yet, if Burton’s humanistic credentials are clear, it must be admitted that our grasp of the intellectual setting of his work is currently very far from complete. In England in the early decades of the seventeenth century, Galenism continued to dominate orthodox learned medicine, but the intellectual environment generally was highly eclectic and fluctuating. In late humanist scholarship, where the disciplines of moral philosophy, rhetoric, philology, history, and poetry retained their traditional priority, the forms of learning and discursive production rooted in the university arts course contended with the more pragmatic strains of ‘vernacular’ humanism; in philosophy, persisting and revived elements of scholastic Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism rubbed up against, and sometimes blended with, theological currents that were becoming increasingly contentious and diversified after the Reformation; and all these systems of thought were increasingly being confronted by challenges posed by new forms of scepticism and the nascent ‘new science’.12 It does not seem unreasonable to make it a minimal requirement of interpretations alleging the incoherence (or otherwise) of the Anatomy that they should be based in a reasonably solid grasp of this intellectual environment—which unfortunately has not always been the case.13 However, it is not easy to situate Burton precisely in this complex world, and indeed, it is often difficult to identify his opinion in his detailed dissections of scholarly controversies. The proliferation of diverse and often starkly contradictory authorities found throughout the Anatomy stands as an eloquent, if sometimes chaotic, testament to an intellectual world in extreme ferment.
Criticism of the Anatomy in recent years has tended to be polarized between interpretations that emphasize its literary aspects—leading to a view of the work as quintessentially playful, ironic, satirical, and perhaps parodic—and those focusing on its intellectual content—in which case, it is presented as fundamentally a learned encyclopaedia of doctrines about melancholy. There are legitimate grounds to both approaches, and the most interesting studies have fully acknowledged that it is a work of scholarship that implements the Horatian goals printed on the illustrated title page from the third edition onwards: Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci— it is designed to entertain, as well as inform its readership. It has been a long-running problem, however, to separate the genuinely satirical, ironic, or parodic elements in the text from those which reflect conventional practice in the world of contemporary humanist scholarship.
At the centre of this difficulty lie Burton’s compositional methods. The classification of the Anatomy as a Menippean satire, or, at least, as something more than a straightforwardly serious work of medical and philosophical learning, has usually depended at least partially upon an interpretation of his methods as being categorically different from those employed by contemporary scholars writing about the same or similar subjects, whether they be learned physicians, philosophers, or theologians. Here we can usefully distinguish three aspects of the Anatomy that are illustrative of Burton’s methods and also reveal some of the playful literary elements of the text: its presentation and organization; the relationship between the explicitly satirical introduction, ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, and the main body of the Anatomy; and finally, the quotational form of Burton’s prose throughout.
To start, then, with the arrangement of the work. The Anatomy is a large and, to some eyes, unwieldy book, and although Burton is always directly or indirectly concerned with the subject of melancholy, a significant body of scholarship has emphasized the ways in which its varied content and occasional digressions create the impression of an intentionally disorganized and even chaotic text. For modern readers, this impression is created perhaps most strikingly by the synoptic tables which Burton inserted before the beginning of each of the three Partitions of the Anatomy. For some critics, who find that the elaborate structure and detail of the tables hinder, rather than assist, the reader’s passage through the book, they are a deliberate representation of the labyrinthine character of the Anatomy—and perhaps playful, ironic indications of the disorderly discourse that follows.14 The tables have also been seen more specifically as late, ‘somewhat decayed’ examples of the dichotomizing method espoused by Petrus Ramus and his followers, promising clarity and structure, but delivering a fair amount of obscurity and confusion.15
Now that we are used to different presentational techniques, it is a legitimate question whether they remain as useful now as they were in the 1620s, but when viewed alongside contemporary examples there is no reason to think that they were intended by Burton to be anything other than helpful guides through a long and complex book. Even if their occasionally excessive detail reflects Burton’s predilection for copious prose, the tables are accurate summaries of the structure and content of the three Partitions, and any perception that they are poorly organized dissipates when they are compared with contemporary examples (for example, the tables in Theodor Zwinger’s Methodus Apodemica [1594]). The notion that Burton’s tables are Ramist, moreover, is hard to maintain in the light of the fact that synoptic tables of the kind found in the Anatomy had been used by humanists for many decades before Ramus, at least, from the beginning of the sixteenth century, and were commonplace in contemporary medical texts.16 A similar point holds for Burton’s Index (first appearing in the second edition), which can look peculiarly unhelpful now, but which is very similar to the indexes used by other late humanist encyclopaedists.17
Nevertheless, there are significant elements of the presentation and structure of the Anatomy that mark it as something more than a purely pedagogical or scholarly work and clearly indicate Burton’s desire to provoke the imagination of his readership. The first hints of this can be found in the full title of the book, which refers to the procedures of dissection (‘Medicinally, Historically, Philosophically Opened and Cut up’). And the same goes for the names of the different parts of the main text. It is not difficult to find works of medical practica following the traditional Hippocratic sequence of kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and cures, or Renaissance texts organized into parts and sections; but Burton’s terms of ‘Partition’, ‘Section’, ‘Member’, and ‘Subsection’ suggest elegantly that the structure of the book has been produced by the ‘cutting’ method of an anatomist.
Second, and quite apart from the substantial satirical introduction (to which I shall come shortly), there are several prefatory parerga—some of which were added in the third and fourth editions—which announce the key themes of the main text and make suggestions about how it should be approached by its readers. From the first edition onwards, the Latin poem ‘Lectori male feriato’ acts as a bridge between the satirical preface and the first Partition, warning the ‘idle and frivolous Reader’ not to find fault with the work or its author, and threatening that ‘Democritus Junior’ will, like the Greek philosopher whose tale is told in the preface, return such treatment with interest by demonstrating the folly and madness of his accusers.18 The third edition of 1628 brandished the famous illustrated frontispiece to the Anatomy, engraved by Christof Le Blon the elder, with ten sections containing personified representations of (and a host of symbols relating to) the different species of melancholy, as well as images of Burton and the Greek philosopher Democritus. And from 1632, the illustrated title page was accompanied by an explanatory poem, ‘The Argument of the Frontispiece’, with stanzas glossing and decoding the imagery of each section (‘Ten distinct Squares heere seene apart/Joyned in one by Cutters art’).19
The fourth edition also included three more parergic texts. The first of these, ‘Democritus Iunior ad Libruum Suum’, is another Latin poem. It opens by bidding the book to ‘express the genius’ of its author, and goes on to expand the theme of ‘Lectori male feriato’ with a little more humility, anticipating the diverse responses to the Anatomy by different kinds of reader, and drawing attention to the mixture of useful learning and pleasurable stories and jokes found inside it.20 The second parergon new to the fourth edition was ‘The Authors Abstract of Melancholy diakocijË|’, a poetic composition delivered (one assumes) in the author’s own voice; it expresses the twofold nature of melancholic experience (‘Naught so sweet as Melancholy … Naught so sad as Melancholy …’), incorporating some of the symptomatology discussed in the main treatise, and may well have been an influence on Milton’s ‘L’ Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’.21 Finally, in this edition Burton also inserted another brief Latin poem, this time immediately before the beginning of the first Partition, ‘Heraclite fleas, misero sic convenit ævo’. This recapitulates the main theme of the satirical preface: that the world is mad and so requires the tears of Heraclitus and the laughter of Democritus.
By drawing attention to the heterogeneous materials found in the Anatomy (humorous and serious, learned and popular), to its potentially controversial or even offensive content, and to the curiously aggressive character of its melancholic author, each element of the parergic apparatus reiterates or expands upon themes found in ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’. In short, they reinforce the significance of the preface for understanding the book as a whole. There have been many interpretations of this introductory satire (sometimes it is the only part of the book that is read closely), and only a schematic summary of its principal features is possible here, but it is very clear that Burton considered this very substantial introduction to be an indispensable guide to reading the rest of the Anatomy. On the frontispiece, it is described as ‘a Satyricall Preface Conducing to the following Discourse’, and in the most basic terms, its explanation of the author’s persona, his choice of subject, and the manner in which he presents his materials—taken together—provide us with a number of important thematic and interpretative guidelines for making sense of some of the ostensibly puzzling or obscure features of the main treatise.
When the first edition of the Anatomy appeared in 1621, its title page identified the author as ‘Democritus Iunior’, but his real name was revealed at the end of the conclusion (Fig. 38.1).22 Rather than reflecting a desire for anonymity, then, 23 Burton’s adoption of this pseudonym indicates a penchant for playing with his audience’s expectations—the preface opens by planting the question, ‘Gentle Reader, I presume thou wilt by very inquisitive to know what Anticke or Personate Actor this is … arrogating another mans name …’ (DJR, p. 1)—but more importantly, as he goes on to explain, it is the first step by which the reader is led to interpret the Anatomy within a moralized, satirical framework that is fully appropriate to its subject matter. The significance of Burton’s persona, we are told, relates neither to Democritean atomism nor to popular kinds of ‘Pasquill, or Satyre’ (DJR, p. 1), but to the account of Democritus as the ‘laughing philosopher’ given by the pseudo-Hippocratic Letter to Damagetes. This text had long been the subject of humanistic literary and philosophical interest, and Burton reproduced it ‘verbatim almost’ (DJR, p. 33) within his own preface.24
FIGURE 38.1 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), title page
Burton’s adaptation of the Letter to Damagetes is an exercise in humanistic imitatio and a literary-satirical tour de force. According to ‘Democritus Junior’, his namesake’s investigation of madness (‘to find out the seat of this atra bilis or Melancholy’ [DJR, p. 6]), and equally importantly, his demonstration and ridicule of the madness of humanity, was required even more urgently by ‘this life of ours’ than it was by ‘the World in his time’ (DJR, p. 37). The moral message of the Letter, rooted in a mixture of Stoic, Cynic, and Epicurean themes distancing the philosophical sage from the irrational and absurd passions of the rest of humanity, is reshaped by Burton to become the vehicle for the diagnosis and satirical condemnation of the melancholy of the contemporary world. His relentless analysis of the varied forms of the prevailing melancholic madness—invariably construed in Stoic terms as a form of passionate foolishness—has a universal application: ‘For indeed who is not a Foole, Melancholy, Mad? … Who is not sick, or ill disposed, in whom doth not passion, anger, envie, discontent, feare & sorrow raigne? Who labours not of this disease? Give me but a little leave, and you shall see by what testimonies, confessions, arguments I will evince it’ (DJR, p. 25); only ‘Nicholas nemo, or Mounsieur no-body’ is excepted (DJR, p. 107). Burton’s preface fluctuates between deadly vituperation and light-hearted mockery (even self-mockery), but the moral seriousness appropriate to classical humanist satire persists throughout.
Much can and has been said about the style and content of ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’—particularly about its intriguing utopian interlude25—but fundamentally, its principal task of ‘conducing’ to the main treatise is accomplished by its identification of melancholy as a condition that in a real moral and spiritual sense, at least potentially and to some extent, afflicts everyone, including the author himself (DJR, I, p. 7: ‘I was not a little offended with this maladie …’). If the Renaissance was, in some sense, the ‘golden age’ of melancholy—and its prominence in the dramatic and spiritual, as well as medical, works of this era is well known26—then the preface to the Anatomy offers its own account of this phenomenon. To paraphrase the central argument: we are all afflicted by passions; passions are irrational diseases of the soul; and such irrational diseases of the soul, as he explains many times in the book, are both causes and symptoms of melancholic madness. This is his explanation for the ‘Epidemicall’ proportions of the disease, which has motivated him to perform the ‘generall service’ of ‘prescib[ing] means how to prevent and cure so universall a malady’ (DJR, I, p. 110). As Burton knows and admits, although this moral-psychological conception of melancholy is grounded in his reading of ancient philosophy and scripture, it does not neatly coincide with the more restricted understanding of the disease found in the learned medical works of the Renaissance.27 Nevertheless, it enables him to elaborate an expansive analysis of the condition in its multifarious—indeed, as he says, practically infinite—forms, whilst plausibly maintaining their common moral-psychological basis, and therefore, their relevance to his general readership.
By establishing the character of melancholy in these terms as a widespread psychological, as well as bodily, disease, then, ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ provides an explanation for Burton’s choice of subject whilst preparing his readership for the amalgamation of (principally) medical, moral, and spiritual material that will be encountered in the rest of the book. But, moving from the explicitly satirical preface to the three Partitions of the main treatise, how are we to adjust our expectations of the manner in which Burton will be handling his materials? Here we come to the most significant fissure in modern Burton studies: is the main treatise mainly ‘straightforward and factual’, being devoted to a ‘serious, “scientific” consideration’ of melancholy, 28 or is the work satirical or parodic all the way through?29 Once again, the best guide is Burton himself; and he is deliberately ambiguous. On the one hand, in the closing passages of the preface, ‘Democritus Junior’ is presented as waking ‘as it were out of a dreame’, having had ‘a raving fit’, and ‘now being recovered, and perceiving mine errour, cry with Orlando, Solvite me, pardon (o boni) that which is past, and I will make you amends in that which is to come; I promise you a more sober discourse in my following Treatise’ (DJR, I, p. 112). On the other hand, however, almost immediately he invites us to doubt his ability—or perhaps more accurately, his willingness—to keep this promise. Apologizing in advance, if when ‘anatomizing this surly humor … I launce too deep’ and ‘make it smart’, he explains that ‘’tis a most difficult thing to keepe an even tone, a perpetuall tenor, and not sometimes to lash out’, and he indicates that sometimes, the combination of his subject matter and his own melancholic condition will give him no choice but to adopt a Juvenalian mode: ‘difficile est Satyram non scribere, there be so many objects to divert, inwards perturbations to molest’ (DJR, I, p. 113).30 His readers are thereby prepared for a ‘serious’ discourse punctuated by substantial satirical interludes, but also for discursive modes that will be varied throughout. The dichotomy between viewing the main treatise as either ‘scientific’ and serious or satirical is a false one: ‘one may speake in jest, and yet speake truth’ (DJR, I, p. 111). The Anatomy, in this sense, is the ‘playing labor’ (DJR, I, p. 7)—Burton’s reworking of ‘serious play’ (serio ludere)—of an author whose scholarly-philosophical and literary-satirical purposes are inextricable.
The preface also throws important light upon Burton’s choice of compositional method: ‘it is a Cento collected from others’ (DJR, I, p. 110), an assemblage of quotations stitched together with authorial glosses, comments, and asides. Quotations and citations of authority are ubiquitous in humanistic philosophy and literature, and are also important in contemporary Galenic medical texts, and in this respect, the Anatomy simply accentuates a feature of the learned discourse of the author’s environment. But at the same time, his method is distinct from other forms of learning, since as a cento it is almost exclusively comprised by argumentation from authority and Burton’s own glosses upon his sources, enabling the presentation of a vast body of scholarship accompanied by a detached, idiosyncratic commentary.
In an extended section defending the book against imagined critics (which in later editions incorporated material from the ‘Conclusion’ of 1621 [DJR, I, pp. 8–20]), 31 Burton gives guidance for those who, like many of the Anatomy’s modern readers, find themselves perplexed by the appearance of the text. His book, he says, is yet another symptom of a ‘scribling age’ in which vainglorious writers recycle the work of their predecessors (‘No newes here, that which I have is stolne from others … As Apothecaries we make new mixtures every day, poure out of one Vessell into another … as I have done’ [DJR, I, pp. 8–9]). But the Anatomy also presents itself as a commentary upon that chaos and confusion, and upon the learned procedure by which ‘wee skim off the Creame of other mens Wits’ and ‘lard [our] leane bookes with the fat of others Workes’ (DJR, I, pp. 9, 11). This is precisely what happens when an author composes a cento, a quotational method which Burton here claims is to be commended for its honesty—it does not claim spurious originality—but also as the most appropriate means of expressing his humanistic authorial persona.
I have only this of Macrobius to say for my selfe, Omne meum, nihil meum, ’tis all mine and none mine. As a good hous-wife out of divers fleexes weaves one peece of Cloathe, a Bee gathers Wax and Hony out of many Flowers, and makes a new bundle of all,
Floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant,
I have laboriously collected this Cento out of divers Writers, and that sine injuria, I have wronged no Authors, but given every man his owne … I cite & quote mine Authors, (which howsoever some illiterate scriblers accompy pedanticall, as a cloake of ignorance, and opposite to their affected fine stile, I must & will use) … I can say of my selfe, whom have I injured? The matter is theirs most part, and yet mine, apparet unde sumptum sit (which Seneca approves) aliud tamen quam unde sumptum sit apparet, which nature doth with the aliment of our bodies, incorporate, digest, assimulate, I doe conquoquere quod hausi, dispose of what I take. I make them pay tribute, to set out this my Maceronicon, the method onely is myne owne, I must usurpe that of Wecker è Terentio, nihil dictum quod non dictu priùs, methodus sola artificem ostendit, we can say nothing but what hath beene said, the composition and method is ours onely, and shewes a Schollar. (DJR, I, p. 11)
Although the book is stuffed with material from other books, Burton’s readers (particularly those who have been prepared by the parergic instructions to be attentive) are thereby prompted to notice the author’s rhetorical dispositio of his material and his creative ‘digestion’ of his quotations, 32 showing this ‘Schollar’ at work. We are, in other words, guided to be sensitive to a layer of meaning that may supervene upon the learned assemblage of texts in the main treatise, a layer that may well be ironic. After all, even this discussion of quotations is conducted through quotations.
In this respect, Burton’s most important predecessors were the humanists Justus Lipsius and Michel de Montaigne, both of whom practised and reflected upon the paradoxical activity of writing a cento, and presented it as a form of self-expressive ventriloquism: in selecting, presenting, and commenting on the words of others, the author reveals not only his erudition, but also his personal judgements. As Lipsius had written in his own famous cento—the Politicorum sive Civilis Doctrinae libri sex (1589)—‘everything is mine, and nothing …’; but, he continues, ‘I have not in fact given bare or scattered maxims’, and so ‘to prevent them from flowing around and being mortar without limestone …, he has used the ‘cement’ of his own words, connecting his quotations ‘fittingly’ and making ‘definitions, distinctions, and selections’. As such, the cento is peculiarly demanding of its readers. They should not only take care to ‘observe the distinctions between my words and those of others’, but should also remember that in this form of writing ‘departures from the original meaning’ of the texts being quoted are ‘always allowed and even praised’.33 Burton’s readers are given similar instructions, as he not only claims to be making ‘a new bundle’ from his ‘divers fleeces’ in which he ‘may likely adde, alter, and see farther then my Predecessors’ (DJR, I, p. 11), but also jokes that ‘it is a Cento collected from others, not I, but they that say it’ (DJR, I, p. 110).
At the same time, we are prompted to detect the ways in which Burton has gone further than the great Flemish humanist and followed in the steps of Montaigne (‘I only quote others the better to quote myself’) by accentuating the stylistic expressivity of the cento.34 If some find the Anatomy to be not to their taste, this is precisely because ‘I have assay’d, put my selfe upon the Stage’; and one consequence of this is that ‘I must abide the censure, I may not escape it. It is most true, stylus virum arguit, our stile bewaies us, and as Hunters find their game by the trace, so is a mans Genius descried by his workes … I have layd my selfe open (I know it) in this Treatise, turned mine inside outward’ (DJR, I, p. 13). Even if many of Burton’s words are taken from the works of others, the prose of the Anatomy bears the indelible imprint of his personality.35 This, at least, partly explains the enduring appeal of a book written ‘in an extemporean stile … with as small deliberation as I doe ordinarily speake’—a rhetorical contrivance not to be taken at face value.36
More specifically, we are encouraged to see the text as the literary expression of the author’s own melancholic ‘malus Genius’ (DJR, I, pp. 7, 17). Burton’s announced intention to ‘expresse my selfe readily & plainely’ without embellishments can be taken as an indication that the fluctuating, wide-ranging, and digressive style is deliberately constructed to create the impression of a textual effusion of its author’s melancholy, mirroring the vast, variegated complexity of the disease itself (1.3.1.4, I, p. 407).37 In his own words, ‘as a River runnes sometimes precipitate and swift, then dull and slow; now direct, then per ambages; now deepe, then shallow; now muddy, then cleare; now broad, then narrow; doth my stile flow: now serious, then light; now Comicall, then Satyricall; now more elaborate, then remisse’. Such modulations are determined by the decorum, not only of the matter in hand, ‘as the present subject required’, but also of the writer’s own unpredictable moods, ‘as at that time I was affected’ (DJR, I, p. 18). We are thereby led to wonder whether the ‘confused lumpe’ of the Anatomy is somehow to be taken as a figuration (or ‘evacuation’) of the melancholic ‘Impostume’, of which Burton says he ‘was very desirous to be unladen’ (DJR, I, pp. 7, 17).
The main treatise is divided into three Partitions, the first two principally discussing the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and therapies of the principal forms of melancholy (of the head, whole body, and hypochondrium), and the third covering the two subspecies of love melancholy—erotic and religious—following the same medical-analytical sequence. A detailed account of their extremely diverse contents is obviously not possible here.38 Instead, I shall now offer a condensed account of some of the key features of the Galenic medical psychology found in the main treatise, before relating them to the literary-rhetorical dimension of the Anatomy. This will lead to some suggestions about Burton’s intentions with regard to his readership.
According to Burton—who here, as usual, follows the majority of his learned medical contemporaries—melancholy is fundamentally a disease of the imagination. Considering whether the affected part in the disease is the brain or heart (a question raised frequently in Galenic accounts), he opts for both: the brain is affected, because ‘being a kinde of Dotage, it cannot otherwise bee’; the heart is also disturbed, because its principal symptoms of ‘feare and Sorrow’, which are passions, ‘be seated in the Heart’. But referring to a number of eminent physicians (including Eliano Montalto, Girolamo Capo di Vacca, and Girolamo Mercuriale), he explains further that ‘the Braine must needs primarily be misaffected, as the seat of Reason, and then [secondarily] the Heart, as the seat of Affection’. More specifically, this is because the psychic source of the melancholic disease is to be found in the brain, namely, in the power of imagination: ‘for as much as this malady is caused by precedent Imagination, with the Appetite, to whom spirits obey’, the affection is ‘communicated to the Heart, and other inferior parts, which sympathize and are much troubled’ (1.1.3.2, I, pp. 163–4). In Burton’s definition of melancholy, then, which appeals to the communis opinio doctorum, it is the imagination that is primarily ‘hurt and misaffected’, with the consequence that, in many cases, the rational powers of understanding are also affected. In other words, the psychological pathology of melancholy originates in what Burton and his contemporaries termed prava or laesa imaginatio (‘depraved’ or ‘damaged’ imagination), with any dysfunctions of reason being secondary or accidental.
What does the condition of melancholic prava imaginatio entail in this account? In the ‘Digression of Anatomy’, Burton provides a clear discussion of the powers of the soul which shows his general adherence to the Aristotelian faculty psychology that had usually been incorporated within medieval and Renaissance Galenic theories of melancholy. The part of his account that is most relevant here concerns the manner in which the ‘inner senses’ of the soul analyse and process perceptual data from the external senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. In the front ventricle of the brain, the common sense receives data in the form of sensory species and ‘discerne[s] all differences of objects’ in terms of their sound, colour, and so on. The common sense passes on the sensory species it has processed in the form of phantasms, communicated through the medium of animal spirits, to the imagination, or ‘phantasie’, in the middle ventricle of the brain, which ‘more fully examine[s]’ the species, ‘and keepes them longer, recalling them to mind againe, or making new [species] of his owne’. The power of the imagination to create its own new sense-species—either from the species received from the common sense or from those stored in the memory in the posterior ventricle—is important, as it explains the role of the imagination in producing hallucinations: ‘[i]n Melancholy men this faculty is most Powerfull and strong, and often hurts, producing many monstrous and prodigious things, especially if it be stirred up by some terrible object, presented to it from common sense, or memory’. The human imagination, he says, ‘is subject and governed by Reason, or at least should be; but in Brutes it hath no superior …’ (1.1.2.7, I, p. 152).
How does the imagination become depraved in melancholy, and with what consequences? It can be subject to interference by demonic spirits which are attracted to the imagination by the superabundant, corrupt black bile in the melancholic body and its darkened animal spirits, which they manipulate to ‘alter’ and disturb ‘the minde’ of the sufferer (1.2.1.2, I, p. 193). But more commonly, the imagination is depraved naturally by the black bile, whose qualities and vaporous emanations cause a variety of mental dysfunctions. The key source here, cited by Burton and discussed at length by contemporary learned physicians, is Galen’s De symptomatum causis II.7.2: ‘For Galen’ here, Burton writes, ‘imputeth all to the cold that is blacke, and thinkes that the spirits being darkned, and the substance of the Braine cloudy and darke, all the objects thereof appeare terrible, and the minde it selfe, by those darke obscure, grosse fumes, ascending from black humours, is in continuall darknesse, feare & sorrow, divers terrible monstrous fictions in a thousand shapes & apparitions occurre, with violent passions, by which the braine and Phantasie are troubled and eclipsed’ (1.3.3.1, I, pp. 418–19). More specifically, he explains that the imagination depraved in this way is ‘the first steppe and fountaine’ of the diversity of mental perturbations that are simultaneously causes and symptoms of melancholy. By ‘mis-conceaving or amplifying’ the sensory species received from the common sense or memory, the imagination produces distorted or disturbing phantasms, which are communicated by means of the spirits to the heart, ‘the seat of affections’, which responds, in turn, by generating emotional perturbations and a corresponding flood of melancholic spirits and humours (1.2.3.1, I, p. 249).
This emphasis on the centrality of the depraved imagination is marked in the Anatomy, not just by Burton’s insistence that ‘[so] great is the force of Imagination [that] much more ought the cause of Melancholy to be ascribed to this alone, then to the distemperature of the body’ (1.2.3.1, I, p. 249), but also by his composition of a digression ‘Of the Force of Imagination’ (1.2.3.2, pp. 250–5).39 Imaginative depravation often triggers the corruption of the powers of the intellect, such as opinion, discourse, and ratiocination (1.1.3.2), and this predicament becomes all the more serious when it is considered that after the Fall the other rational power of soul, the will, is weakened and depraved in all men, leading us to ‘give so much way to our Appetite, and follow our inclination, like so many beasts’ (1.1.2.11, p. 161). Little wonder, then, that ‘imagination’ is, in effect, ‘the rudder of this our ship, which reason should steire, but overborne by phantasie, cannot manage, and so suffers it selfe and this whole vessell of ours to be overruled, and often overturned’ (1.2.3.2, I, p. 254).
There is little in Burton’s account of the role of the imagination in melancholy that cannot be found in contemporary learned medical sources. Arguably, however, one of the main functions of the Galenic medical psychology here—and perhaps in the work as a whole—is to provide the theoretical skeleton for a body of humanistic moral philosophy and practical spiritual guidance. This brings us to the core of Burton’s project in the Anatomy, as we see when we turn to the role of the imagination in his discussion of the therapy of melancholy. ‘As some are so molested by Phantasie’, he writes, ‘so some againe by Fancy alone, and a good conceit, are as easily recovered’, since the imagination affects the motions of the humours, spirits and blood, and thereby ‘imperiously commande[s] our bodies’ (1.2.3.2, I, pp. 253–4).
Because the imagination acts as a hinge between melancholic perturbations and the bodily humours and spirits, it is possible to ameliorate or even cure the condition by purely psychological means. The imaginative disturbances of the disease, Burton urges, should in the first place be resisted by rational measures applied by the force of will: ‘let [the melancholic] oppose, fortify, or prepare himselfe against them, by premeditation, reason, or as we doe by a crooked staff, bend himselfe another way’ (2.2.6.1, II, p. 101). In principle, it should be possible for us to ‘frame our selves as wee will … whatsoever the Will desires, shee may command: no such cruell affections, but by discipline they may bee tamed’ (2.2.6.1, II, pp. 103–4). We are here in the domain of the ancient moral-philosophical cultura animi—and, more specifically, of consolation—but it is not hard to see that Burton’s insistence upon the power of the depraved imagination and the perversity of the will requires the melancholic to have some form of external assistance: ‘’tis not so easily performed. Wee know this to be true, we are led captives by passion, appetite, wee should moderate our selves, but we are furiously carried, we cannot make use of such precepts … you may as well bid him that is diseased, not to feele pain, as a melancholy man not to feare, not to be sad: ’tis within his blood, his braines, his whole temperature, it cannot be removed’ (2.2.6.1, II, p. 103). For postlapsarian melancholics with depraved judgement and feeble reason, he concludes, ‘the best way for ease is to impart our misery to some friend …’, who can address it by ‘counsell … wisdome, perswasion, advise’, and ‘good meanes, which we could not otherwise apply unto our selves’ (2.2.6.1, II, p. 104).
This position has support from Galenic medical authority, scripture, and ancient moral philosophy (2.2.6.2, II, p. 109). But most revealing of the therapeutic dimension of the literary-philosophical enterprise of the Anatomy, I would suggest, is his mobilization here of Cicero to establish the curative potential of rhetoric: ‘Assuredly a wise and well spoken man may doe what he will in such a case’, Burton writes, and ‘a good Orator alone, as Tully holds, can alter affections by power of his eloquence, comfort such as are afflicted, erect such as are depressed, expell and mitigate feare, lust, anger, &c.’ (2.2.6.2, II, p. 110). This has immediate implications for what follows in the book—a lengthy ‘Consolatory Digression’, supplemented from the second edition onwards with a concluding discourse of spiritual comfort—where we see the clearest instances of Burton implementing his conception of the power of language, in the form of philosophical and spiritual philosophical precepts, to remedy melancholy.40 As these parts of the Anatomy show, his view is that for such precepts to be effective, they ought to conform to reason or theological rectitude, but in some cases it may be appropriate to employ manipulative or deceptive linguistic-cognitive strategies. In any case, he argues, it is imperative to ‘divert’ the melancholic from his or her troubling thoughts and counteract the effects of the depraved imagination: ‘prosperity’ must be ‘set … against adversity’, the mind must be ‘recreate[d] … by some contrary object’ (2.2.6.1, pp. 101–2); the melancholic’s ‘cogitations’ must be distracted and their ‘continuall meditations’ diverted ‘another way’ (2.2.4.1, p. 68), ‘for his phantasie is so restlesse, operative and quicke, that if it be not in perpetuall action, ever employed, it will worke upon it selfe, melancholize, and be carried away instantly, with some feare, jealousie, discontent, suspition, some vaine conceipt or other’ (2.2.6.2, p. 107). And in some situations, the only remedy will be to induce a contrary passion in the melancholic, which is tantamount to ‘driv[ing] out one disease with another’, or ‘by some fained lye, strange newes, witty device, artificiall invention, it is not amisse to deceive them’—as in the medical case-history of a ‘melancholy King, that thought his head was off’, who was cured ‘by putting a leaden cap thereon, the waight made him perceave it, and freed him of his fond imagination’ (2.2.6.2, II, pp. 111–12).
As we shall soon see, these therapeutic principles have a direct relationship with Burton’s conception of the capabilities of the text of the Anatomy, for, as many readers have noticed, he claims that the work is concerned not only with presenting knowledge about melancholy, but also with implementing its therapy. It is practical philosophical writing of the most direct kind, whose effects are to be registered on both the author and his readership. In the preface, we are told that Burton is following Democritus in seeking ‘to better cure [melancholy] in himselfe, by … writings and observations’, as well as to ‘teach others how to prevent & avoid it’ (DJR, p. 6). However, the thought here is not simply that learning about melancholy will provide the author and his readers with a body of useful doctrine, but that the activity of writing and reading will themselves have concrete effects upon their souls and bodies. For his own part, Burton describes his book as the product of his experiential ‘melancholizing’—a term he uses to describe the restless melancholic imagination ‘work[ing] upon it selfe’ (2.2.6.2, p. 107); and the process of writing it, as we have already noted, as both a ‘playing labor’ to offset his propensity to idleness and the ‘evacuation’ of a melancholic ‘Impostume’ (DJR, p. 7). As for his readers, Burton is also clear that he is writing, conventionally enough, ‘for the common good of all’ (DJR, p. 8), and he presents himself more specifically as a ‘Melancholy Divine’ offering ‘an absolute cure’ of body and soul, the ‘Spirituall’ therapy of corpus per animam, as well as the ‘Corporall’ therapy of animam per corpus (DJR, pp. 22–3). Yet, it is not just that ‘all men’ will benefit from ‘the knowledge’ of melancholy (DJR, p. 23), but that ‘these following lines’ in the book, ‘when they shall be recited, or hereafter read, will drive away Melancholy (though I be gone)’ (DJR, p. 24). This therapeutic capacity is underlined in the miniature preface to the third Partition on love melancholy, where—in a figure made famous within humanistic literary circles by Erasmus in his letter to Maarten van Dorp—Burton deploys the Lucretian notion of a harsh philosophical discourse with a sweet literary coating. Here, he expresses the hope that his ‘writings … shall take like guilded pilles, which are so composed as well to tempt the appetite, and deceave the pallat, as to helpe and medicinally worke upon the whole body, my lines shall not onely recreate, but rectifie the minde’ (3.1.1.1, p. 5).41
The Anatomy can be interpreted as an intentionally therapeutic text in several different ways. For instance, as many critics have emphasized, to read the Anatomy is to be guided through the world of Renaissance knowledge, and it is hard to miss Burton’s ironic and doubtful attitude towards many of his quotations. Like Montaigne, he revels in distancing himself from his sources by using terms such as ‘perhaps’, ‘somewhat’, ‘some’, ‘they say’, ‘I think’, and so on, in order to ‘soften and tone down’ his propositions, and his habit of leaving contradictions between authorities glaringly unresolved is well known.42 Here we might detect not just a traditional humanistic distrust of speculative philosophy (and a corresponding emphasis on the priority of practical ethics), but also an inclination towards some kind of informal scepticism as a means of attaining tranquillity.43 In a sense, an ironic attitude seems to be intrinsic to the project of the Anatomy, since as a cento it portrays Burton adopting a detached pose, sifting through and commenting on the Renaissance encyclopaedia in search of useful material. But in his discussion of ‘that tyannising care’ of curiosity as a cause of melancholy, his opposition of the ‘trouble’ and ‘torment’ of fruitless philosophical enterprises to the simple ignorance of ‘those barbarous Indians’ (1.2.4.1, pp. 363–4) suggests that, for Burton, the adoption of a sceptical position with regard to the limits of human understanding has some practical utility for alleviating psychic discomfort.
As I have already suggested, however, perhaps the most important aspect of the therapeutic enterprise of the Anatomy is its rhetorical character, and this has rarely been appreciated or analysed. Leaving aside the proliferation of particular figures and tropes throughout the book, Burton makes it clear that his aim is to conjoin philosophical and spiritual wisdom with literary-poetic eloquence—hence, the Horatian maxim on the frontispiece and the ‘earnest intent’ he expresses that his writing will ‘profit’, as well as ‘please’, its readers (3.1.1.1, p. 5)—in a manner that drew, in part, upon a conventional classical understanding of rhetoric as the art of arousing or overcoming the passions. When delivered with eloquence, the wisdom of the Anatomy provides pleasurable means of addressing melancholic perturbations, and, more generally, of assisting readers in search of a healthy moral-psychological equilibrium. In the ‘Consolatory Digression’, where this aspect of the work becomes paramount, Burton states that his aim is to ‘give some content and comfort’ to the ‘distressed’, but also to bring those who are happy ‘to a moderation, and make them reflect and knowe themselves, by seeing the unconstancy of humane felicity, others misery’ (2.3.1.1, p. 125). The digression accomplishes this by presenting an eclectic collection of ‘[p]hilosophicall and Divine precepts’ in prose and poetry, interspersed with vivid rhetorical ‘examples’ of happiness and misery, all gathered together in order to ‘balance our hearts’, ‘counterpoise those irregular motions’ of vices ‘with their opposite vertues’, and ‘then to pacifie our selves by reason’, or else ‘to divert by some other object, contrary passion, or premeditation’—just ‘as Mariners when they goe to Sea, provide all things necessary to resist a tempest’ (2.3.6.1, p. 187).
It should also be clear now that this therapeutic rhetoric also has a more specific function with regard to the disease of melancholy, one that is directly tailored to the depraved imagination at the root of psychic disturbances. ‘As Imagination, feare, griefe, cause such passions, so conceipts alone’, Burton writes, ‘rectified by good hope, counsell, &c. are able againe to helpe’ (2.2.6.2, p. 110). A discourse that rectifies melancholic passions thereby employs philosophical, spiritual, and even medical doctrine in a persuasive fashion, effectively substituting recta ratio (or spiritual truth) for the misleading phantasms of the melancholic imagination. It is true that reading and thinking, as he makes clear in the digression ‘Of the Misery of Schollers’, can cause or worsen the disease by upsetting the body’s physiological balance and aggravating the damaged imagination of the melancholic (1.2.3.15, pp. 303–4, 308).44 But these activities may also be forms of rational and imaginative therapy, fortifying the soul with rational precepts, and displacing the painful or disturbing ‘conceipts’ of the depraved imagination by means of pleasurable and healthy ones. The right kind of book, in other words, can help to ‘expell Idleness and melancholy’—so long as it distracts the melancholic from disturbing thoughts (2.2.4.1, pp. 68, 84), is pleasurable, rather than vexatious, and ‘[p]rovided alwaies that his malady proceede not from overmuch study’ (p. 90).
In this sense, the Anatomy is built upon a conception of the power of language to affect the working of the imagination, specifically in its production of healthy or unhealthy ‘conceipts’. Therapeutic words which deliver harsh rational precepts with eloquence (Burton’s ‘gilded pilles’) can enable the understanding and the will to check or rectify the mistaken sense-images of the diseased imagination, or, more directly, may substitute its pathogenic species for healthy ones. In effect, that is what Burton seeks to do when he is ‘diverting’ himself and his readers with ‘pleasurable’ or amusing imagery to induce ‘contrary passions’, when he entertains or ‘diverts’ them with his digressions, or when, in his ‘Democritean’ satirical mode, he seeks to provoke laughter (see 2.2.6.4, II, p. 117). From this point of view, of course, the fusion of literary and philosophical elements in the work can be explained as the medium for a fairly straightforward therapeutic conjunction of wisdom and eloquence. But it is also tempting to see here not just a standard humanistic conception of rhetoric, with a Quintilianic emphasis on the power of imagery to move the passions, 45 but something akin to the more precise formulation of the goals of rhetoric in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605)—namely, to ‘practise and win the Imagination from the Affection’s part, and contract a confederacy between the Reason and Imagination against the Affections’, or, more concisely, ‘to apply Reason to Imagination for the better moving of the will’.46
We might expect that the Anatomy is consistently tailored to implement such a therapeutic enterprise, and indeed, this seems to be the most common interpretation of the work at present.47 But whilst Burton undoubtedly has benevolent intentions towards his readership, his work does not consistently perform a curative role. In a revealing passage added in the third edition of the work issued in 1628, which illustrates the particular role of literary rhetoric—and its limitations—in the work, he acknowledged that there were substantial parts of the book that were dangerous for melancholics to read:
Yet one Caution let mee give by the way to my present or future Reader, who is actually Melancholy, that hee read not the Symptomes or prognostickes in this following Tract, least by applying that which hee reads to himselfe, aggravating, appropriating things generally spoken, to his owne person (as Melancholy men for the most part doe) hee trouble or hurt himself, and get in conclusion more harme then good. I advise them warily to peruse that Tract, Lapides loquitur (so said Agrippa de occ. Phil.) & caveant Lectores ne cerebrum iis excutiat. (DJR, p. 24)48
Here he is referring to the tendency of the melancholic to ‘melancholize’, for his imagination to ‘worke upon it selfe’ in an erroneous and destructive fashion. And what this passage also shows is an awareness that when he is discussing domains of knowledge where the therapeutic literary-rhetorical ‘gilding’ of the doctrinal ‘pill’ is either inappropriate or ineffective—the most distressing areas of symptomatology and prognostics—the depraved imagination of the melancholic reader may no longer be worked upon or reined in. Put simply, there are some harsh and bitter truths about melancholy that no amount of eloquence can disguise.
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