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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

Reading language

The Prognosis of Love Melancholy

As soon as Euryalus left Siena, his lover Lucretia “never lifted her spirits; no jokes could cheer her sorrowful mind, no pleasures comfort her wounded and distressed soul. Soon afterwards she fell ill and died.” But this is a gentle end, a natural death: such people commonly kill themselves.

And, glad amid his own blood, Poured his indignant soul into the empty air.

So did Dido: “But let us die, she says; thus, thus it pleases me to go among the shades”; Pyramus and Thisbe, Medea, Coresus and Callirhoe, Theagines the philosopher, and countless thousands besides—and so they always will.

I too have a strong hand, And love as well; love will give strength to strike the wounds.

Who ever heard a story of more woe Than that of Juliet and her Romeo?

Read Parthenius’s Love Stories and Plutarch’s Amatory Narratives, or tales of love: almost all end in this way. Valleriola, in book 2, observation 7, gives a lamentable account of a merchant who was his patient: “Raving because he could not endure his love, he would repeatedly have harmed himself had he not been watched.”

Amatus Lusitanus, century 3, cure 56, has another such story, and Felix Plater, Medical Observations, book 1, a third: a young gentleman studying medicine, in love with a doctor’s daughter and without hope of attaining his desire, poisoned himself. In 1615 a barber in Frankfurt, because his sweetheart was betrothed to someone else, cut his own throat.

At Neuburg that same year, a young man, unable to obtain his sweetheart’s parents’ consent, killed her and then himself. As he was dying he asked the magistrate that they might be buried in one grave,

And let what remains from the funeral pyres rest in one urn,

as Gismunda begged her father Tancred that she too might be buried with her lover Guiscardo. Then their bodies might lie together in the grave, as their souls wander through “the Fields of Mourning” in the Elysian fields—“those whom cruel love consumed with wasting misery”—in a myrtle grove:

And a myrtle wood shelters them all around: Their cares do not leave them even in death.

You have not yet heard the worst. In this frenzy of lust they harm not only themselves but others, their nearest and dearest friends. Catiline killed his only son, “and sent him to Orcus’s pale regions, clouded by death and overgrown with darkness,” for love of Aurelia Orestilla, “because she refused to marry him while his son was alive.”

Laodice, Mithridates’s sister, poisoned her husband to please a low-born fellow whom she loved. Alexander set Persepolis on fire to please Thais, a concubine of his. Nereus’s wife, a widow and ruler of Athens, betrayed the city for love of a Venetian gentleman; and for her sake he murdered his wife, the daughter of a Venetian nobleman.

Constantine the despot killed his wife Catharine and turned his son Michael and his other children out of doors, for love of the daughter of a lowly scrivener in Thessalonica, whose beauty had captivated him.

Leucophrye betrayed the city where she lived for the sake of her sweetheart in the enemy camp. Pithidice, the governor of Methinia’s daughter, betrayed the whole island to Achilles, her father’s enemy, for love of him. Diognetus did as much in the city where he lived for love of Polycrite. For love of Jason, Medea taught him to tame the fire-breathing bulls with brazen feet and kill the mighty dragon guarding the Golden Fleece; she tore her little brother Absyrtus to pieces so that her father Aeetes would have something to delay him while she fled with her beloved Jason. Such are the acts and scenes of this tragicomedy of love.

10454.Senes is Siena. This is the conclusion Burton gives to Aeneas Sylvius’s fictional love story, not an independent clinical case. “Never looked up” means that Lucretia never recovered her spirits. The unmarked Aeneas Sylvius margin is displaced upward on the printed page and is attached to this passage by content.

10455.The two Latin lines speak grammatically of a male figure; that gender is retained before Burton moves to Dido. Their precise source or combination of sources remains unresolved. They should not silently be rewritten as Dido’s direct speech.

10458.Dido’s words are from Aeneid 4.660, with Burton’s per for sub. Pausanias 7.21.1–5 tells how Coresus, priest of Dionysus, dies in Callirhoe’s place; she then kills herself from pity and shame. This supplies Burton’s paired example, as distinct from his other compressed literary deaths. Medea’s inclusion and the Lucian reference for Theagines remain unresolved.

10460.Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.149–150: Thisbe resolves to follow Pyramus in death. Burton’s margin says book 3, and his Latin compresses the original wording. Thisbe, rather than Dido, is the speaker.

10461.The couplet echoes the closing lines of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, with Burton’s own wording. It is a new example, not a translation of the preceding Ovid. The precise early Shakespeare text behind Burton’s form remains to be collated.

10463.“Impatience” means inability to endure, not merely irritation at delay. Valleriola is François Valleriola. The margin adds the patient’s imagined sight and speech of the beloved. Burton gives an observation number; the case itself remains to be checked in the cited edition.

10467.A century is a hundred medical cases. The scan reads car. 56., apparently for cur., rendered “cure.” Amatus Lusitanus and Felix Plater are the physicians; the u margin describes a young Jewish man. “Compass” means attain. The date 1615 begins the Frankfurt report, not Plater’s case. All three reports require source collation.

10469.Neoburge is rendered Neuburg, without identifying which town beyond what the source establishes. The margin specifies both parents’ refusal; the prose refers to her parents. The account reports a murder followed by suicide, even though Burton places it among tales of love. The chronicle report remains unverified.

10470.Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.166, concludes Pyramus and Thisbe’s story. The consulted text has requiescit, “rests”; Burton prints requiescat, “let it rest,” fitting his preceding request for burial together. The cremation urn comes from the classical quotation, not necessarily the Neuburg account.

10473.Gismunda/Ghismonda and Guiscardo belong to Boccaccio’s Decameron 4.1. The Virgil excerpts are Aeneid 6.441–444, the Fields of Mourning; Burton loosely calls them Elysian. The myrtle, associated with Venus, shelters those who died of love. The exact Boccaccio version Burton used remains unverified.

10475.The margin abbreviates Sallust and Valerius Maximus. Sallust, Catiline 15, reports the killing as something generally believed; Burton states it directly. Orcus is the underworld. The source of the intervening Latin phrase about its dark regions remains unresolved.

10479.“Base” can indicate low social rank, as here. Burton cites Sabellicus, Curtius and Chalcocondylas for these compressed anecdotes. The Laodice claim, Thais’s relationship to Alexander, and Nereus’s identity require checking against those sources; the modernization does not silently replace them with a different account.

10481.Despot is a title, not simply a judgement of tyranny. A scrivener is a professional writer or clerk; the margin instead names a protonotary, a senior notarial office. That difference and the claimed killings must be checked in Nicephorus Gregoras, History 8; Burton’s body and margin are both preserved.

10485.Parthenius 5 gives Leucophrye’s betrayal; 21 calls the girl Pisidice and the city Methymna, where Burton prints Pithidice and Methinia and enlarges the betrayal to an island. In Parthenius 9, Diognetus betrays the besieging forces to save Polycrite’s city, rather than betraying his own city. Burton’s compressed versions remain in the text. His Medea narrative combines familiar episodes; its precise source is unlocated.