BELGRADE UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
HAMLET’S
MELANCHOLY
Mentor: Prof. dr Vladislava Gordić-Petković
Student: Milica [arenac
Mark:
The theory of humours
1
derived from the ancients. If matter was compounded of
different proportions of the elements – air, earth, fire, water – so mind, or rather
temperament, was made up of varying proportions of basic fluids that, entering the
body, determined the nature of the owner of the body. There were four fluids or
humours, corresponding to the four elements – blood, phlegm, choler or yellow bile and
melancholy or black bile. If blood predominated, a man’s temperament was sanguine; if
phlegm, it was phlegmatic; the choleric or angry and the melancholic or depressed were
the result of the predominance of one or the other of the two biles.
According to J. D. Wilson, the character of Hamlet, like that of many other
dramatic characters of the period, was “a study in malancholy”
2
; and melancholy was a
condition of mind to which men in the late sixteenth century and throughout the
seventeenth gave much thought. The interest found its culminating and classical
expression in
The Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton, published in 1621., which
proved melancholy to be “an inbred malady in every one of us” and so broadened out
into a vast treatise upon human nature in general. The best known text-book on
psychology when Shakespeare was writing
Hamlet
was
A Treatise of Melancholie
by
Timothy Bright, published in 1586., a book from which Burton is thought to have learnt
a good deal and which Shakespeare himself knew. In his work
Shakespeare and
Typography
(1827.), William Blades observed: “It would be an interesting task to
compare the Mad Folk of Shakespeare, most of whom have the melancholy fit, with
A
Treatise of Melancholie
, which was probably read carefully for press by the youthful
poet”
3
. However, Wilson argues that
The Treatise
does not on the whole suggest the
distemper represented by Shakespeare. He claims that Bright’s melancholy man is
“sometimes furious and sometimes merry in apparaunce, through a kinde of Sardonian
and false laughter”; he is “exact and curious in pondering the very moments of things”;
he is “giuen to fearfull and terrible dreams”. These and similar points, according to
Wilson, suggest Hamlet. On the other hand, “Of memory reasonable good, if fancies
deface it not; firme in opinion, and hardly removed wher it is resolued; doubtfull before,
and long in deliberation; suspicious painefull in studie, and circumspect”
4
offers a
1
Note: Comedy of humours is a term applied especially to the type of comic drama written by Ben Jonson,
where a “humour” is the embodiment in one of the characters of some dominating individual passion or
propensity.
The Oxford Companion to English literature
, Margaret Drabble, 5
th
ed. OUP, Oxford, 1932.
2
J. D. Wilson,
What Happens in Hamlet
, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1960, p. 226.
3
Ibid., p. 310.
4
Ibid., p. 310.
loved “object” (person) he has lost, and thus directs toward himself the anger he feels at
the loss of the beloved person. The “lost object” for Hamlet is multiplied, not single-his
lost father, his mother, lost to Claudius; Ophelia who betrays him to her father; his
school-friends who spy on him-so that Hamlet’s melancholic stance is given too many
causes.
One of the first and most obvious characteristics of Hamlet’s melancholy is his
grief, which is excessive and which gradually leads to destruction. Its roots are very
powerful – Hamlet’s black is the black of mourning, he is wretched for the death of his
father. His grief is inconsolable and he fails to be comforted. His first speech is a cry of
grief that will not be consoled:
“ ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play,
But I have that within which passes show-
These but the trappings and the suits of woe ”.
8
(1.2. 77-86.)
His inner sorrow is so great that his dour apperance is merely a poor mirror of it.
Hamlet’s tremendous grief is intensified by the lack of feeling by those around him, and
more significantly, by the cold-hearted actions of his mother, who married her brother-
in-law so quickly. This act of treachery by Gertrude, whom Hamlet obviously loved
greatly at one time, rips the very fabric of his being. When he is alone he pours out his
feeling of total despair and of taedium vitae and he has no wish to continue living after
his father’s sudden death and his mother’s hasty remarriage:
“ O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the everlasting had not fixed
His cannon ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God, God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah fie, ‘tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature
Posses it merely”.
9
(1.2. 129-137.)
In his first soliloquy Hamlet feeds his melancholy with his thoughts of his mother’s
frailty, thus following the accepted formula of being brought to a loathing of the world,
8
Ed., Philip Edwards,
The New Cambridge Shakespeare, “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark”
, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1985., p. 86.
9
Ibid., pp. 88-89.
