ABSTRACT
In the second act of Hamlet, Hamlet wonders if the ghost he has seen is in fact a delusion produced by the devil acting on his “weakness and [his] melancholy” to incite him to murder and so to damn him.1 The association between the devil and melancholy was a common way of accounting for the apparently deluded, and sometimes sinful, beliefs which melancholic persons tended to have; here, Hamlet conveniently uses it to bypass once more his obligation to act courageously to avenge his father’s death and punish Claudius. Similarly, individuals suffering from specifically religious fear and sorrow in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had their suffering dismissed en toto as melancholic by Renaissance wits familiar with the popularized Galenic dictum that the mind’s temperament followed the body’s temperature. The poet Ben Jonson wrote in To Heaven: “Good, and great God, can I not thinke of thee / But it must, straight, my melancholy bee? / Is it interpreted in me disease / That, laden with my sinnes, I seeke for ease?”2 According to the frequently published narrative of the case of Francis Spira, a sixteenth-century Venetian lawyer and a Protestant, the mental agitation and emotional turmoil produced by his public renunciation of the Protestant religion against his conscience was attributed by some to “his Melancholicke constitution; that overshadowing his judgment, wrought in him a kinde of madnesse.”3
