The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Your lusts cannot be confined within nature’s own bounds: like an overflowing river, they breed hideous foulness, disorder and confusion of nature in sexual matters. For men and women have coupled with goats, pigs and horses, burning with mad love of beasts; hence Minotaurs, Centaurs, woodland spirits, Sphinxes and the rest.”

But lest by refuting these things I teach them, or publish matters that it is not fitting for everyone to know—for I intend these words only for the learned, as Rodrigo does for a similar reason—and lest I give frivolous minds and depraved spirits knowledge of the foulest crime, and so forth, I do not wish to soil anyone further with this filth.

I come at last to that heroic love which belongs specifically to men and women, is a frequent cause of melancholy, and deserves to be called burning lust far more than to bear so honourable a title.

There is, I admit, an honourable love which is natural: “a hidden snare that captures men’s hearts, so that they cannot be separated from women”—a secret snare to capture men’s hearts, as Cristóbal de Fonseca demonstrates; a strong attraction with a most compelling, hidden, magnetic quality and powerful force, which no living man can escape.

“And he who does not feel the force of love is either a stone or a beast.” He who has not felt its power is no man but a block, a very stone, “either a god or a Nebuchadnezzar”; he has a gourd for a head and a melon for a heart. A rare creature indeed, one in an age,

Who has never burned with love for a girl he has seen.

For “we have all been mad once”: we become infatuated either young or old, as the poet said; none are exempt except Minerva and the Muses. So Cupid complains to his mother Venus in Lucian that, alone among all the rest, they could not be pierced by his arrows.

But this married love is a common and honourable passion: people loving with marriage in view. “As matter desires form, so woman desires man.” You know that marriage is honourable, a blessed calling instituted by God himself in Paradise. It produces true peace, tranquillity, contentment and happiness: “No union is, or ever was, more sacred,” as Daphnaeus in Plutarch could readily prove, “and it provides immortality for the human race”—when the couple live without quarrelling or scolding, lovingly, as they should.

Three times happy, and more, Those held by an unbroken bond, whose love, Untorn by any quarrels, Releases them no sooner than their final day.

Three times happy, and more than that, Are those whom love’s bonds hold so firmly That, free from quarrels until death parts them, Their love remains unbroken and never dies.