The Anatomy of Melancholy

MEMBER 4 Against servitude, loss of liberty, imprisonment and banishment

Servitude, loss of liberty and imprisonment are not the miseries they are thought to be. Even the best of us are slaves and servants. As we honour our masters, so our masters honour their superiors. Gentlemen serve nobles, and nobles are subordinate to kings. “Every kingdom lies beneath a weightier rule.” Princes themselves are God’s servants: “Over kings themselves Jupiter holds power.” They are subject to their own laws, and, like the kings of China, endure confinement worse than slavery to maintain their dignity and greatness: they never go out.

Alexander was a slave to fear, Caesar to pride, Vespasian to his money—“for it makes no difference whether you are a slave to things or to people”—and Elagabalus to his belly; and so with the rest. Lovers are slaves to their mistresses, rich people to their gold, courtiers generally to lust and ambition; we are all slaves to our passions. Evangelus discusses this well in Macrobius, as does Seneca the philosopher, who calls it “unceasing, utter and inescapable slavery”: this continual bondage to vice. Who, then, is free?

Why, then, do you complain? “He is powerful enough,” says Jerome, “who is not forced to serve.” You carry no burdens; you are no prisoner or drudge; thousands lack the freedom and pleasures you have. You are not ill: what more would you have?

But “we strive for what is forbidden”: we must all eat the forbidden fruit. If we were ordered to go to particular places, we would not willingly go; yet once our freedom is barred, the mere fact that we may not go torments our wandering souls. A citizen of ours, says Cardano, was sixty years old and had never gone beyond Milan’s city walls. Hearing of this, the prince ordered him not to go out. Now forbidden what he had neglected all his life, he longed for it intensely; when refused, “overcome by grief, he died.” He died of grief.

What I have said of servitude I say again of imprisonment. We are all prisoners. What is our life but a prison? We are all imprisoned on an island. To some, the world itself is a prison, our narrow seas so many ditches; once they have travelled round the globe, they would gladly go and see what is happening on the moon.

In Muscovy and many other northern regions, throughout Scandinavia, people are imprisoned for half the year in heated rooms, not daring to peep outside because of the cold. At Aden in Arabia they are shut indoors all day by the opposite extreme, heat, and hold their markets at night. What is a ship but a prison? Many cities are merely beehives or anthills. Yet what you abhor, many seek.

Women stay indoors all winter and for most of the summer to preserve their beauty; others do so from love of study. Demosthenes shaved his beard to remove every occasion for going out. How many monks, friars and hermits abandon the world? “A monk in a city is a fish on dry land.” Are you in prison? Make proper use of it and discipline your worldly desires. Where can someone contemplate better than in solitude, or study better than in quiet?