ABSTRACT
Jean Starobinski writes that “the Renaissance is the golden age of melancholy.”1 The intense interest in melancholy we find in this period is due partly to the revival and popularization in the Florentine Renaissance of the ancient association of melancholy with genius found in the Aristotelian Problemata 30.1.2 Fed by the Florentine tradition and by aristocratic pretensions to refined sensibility, melancholy also became fashionable as a sign of nobility of mind. (Jacques in William Shakespeare’s As you like it exhibits such refined, and self-indulgent, melancholy, claiming to be able to “suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs”3). Melancholy was the “crest of courtiers’ arms,” as a character in John Lyly’s Midas (1592) puts it.4 And it was, as a crest, displayed in both behavior and dress. Hamlet, himself one of the more famous Elizabethan figures of melancholy, gives an eloquent catalog of the “forms, moods, shapes” of fashionable melancholy in one of the opening scenes of the play: “customary suits of solemn black,” windy suspiration of forced breath,” “the fruitful river of the eye,” “the dejected haviour of the visage.”5
