The Anatomy of 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.”