ABSTRACT
As the previous chapter argued, during the years when writers began to discuss it as a separate subject in medicine and poetry respectively, at least two versions of melancholy emerged. For a writer like Timothy Bright, writing about the disease had specifically nationalist implications; his Treatise had been part of a larger effort to bolster an English medical and spiritual program, which itself depended on both an ethnological and linguistic definition of nationality. For Edmund Spenser, melancholy instead was a symptom of an even more pervasive problem with vernacular languages, namely their inherently fallen condition as the effect of divine punishment at the Tower of Babel. Thus, while Bright’s Treatise belonged to a larger project that explicitly sought to promote England as both a spiritual and commercial vanguard, Spensers (admittedly more sporadic and intermittent) use of melancholy wound up unraveling the very concept of nationhood by exposing commonwealths as institutions doomed to failure by the very elements that shaped their existence. If political institutions were the product of human intellect, and human intellect was itself conditioned by languages that were inherently corrupt, it could only follow that there was no political institution that was not in some way involved in this fundamental misprision. Significantly, while Bright and Spenser may well have drawn from similar sources and while their descriptions of melancholy may indeed have overlapped in remarkable ways (both took the surprising step to distinguish melancholy 60from despair, for instance), the effect of their different approaches to language was to assign melancholy very distinct political undertones.
