ABSTRACT
When Claudius becomes worried about the possible political threats masked by Hamlet’s apparent madness in Act III of Hamlet, he proposes a diplomatic journey to England for his melancholic nephew, with the hope that “Haply the seas, and countries different / With variable objects, shall expel / This something settled matter in his heart.”1 The diplomatic mission is a convenient way to dispose of the discontent and seditious prince, but the therapy Claudius suggests was entirely conventional for cases of melancholy. It can be traced back to the writings of the first-century Roman physician Aulus Cornelius Celsus.2 Pleasurable recreation and diversion was also an Epicurean moral philosophical therapy for grief and sorrow, and it was mentioned by Seneca in his De tranquilitate animi as a means of treating taedium uitae.3 Jackie Pigeaud has argued that the symptoms of this philosophical disease of the soul, diagnosed by Seneca and others to be brought about through an incorrect conduct of life and of the passions, are almost identical to the mental symptoms of melancholy described in the Hippocratic corpus and other ancient medical texts.4 “Melancholy,” Pigeaud concludes, “is the point of medical reflection most advanced towards philosophy, as … inversely, the philosophical literature on euthymia [Greek for “well-being of the soul”] is the point of philosophical reflection most advanced towards medicine.”5
