The Anatomy of Melancholy

Prognostics of jealousy: despair, madness, killing themselves and others.

Those who are jealous generally, unless otherwise relieved, “proceed from suspicion to hatred, from hatred to frenzy, madness, violence, murder and despair.”

A plague whose most damnable effect Has made many in deep despair seek death, And brings a man close to madness Through groundless as well as justified suspicion.

In their madness, Vives says, they often kill themselves and others. This leads Cyprian to call it “a prolific and manifold source of ruin, a fountain of disasters and a seedbed of crimes”: a fruitful evil, the nursery of offences and fountain of murders.

Tragic examples of this kind are all too common, ancient and recent, in every age: Cephalus and Procris, Phaerus of Egypt, Tereus, Atreus and Thyestes. Alexander of Pherae was murdered by his wife “on suspicion of keeping a mistress,” Cicero says. Antoninus Verus was similarly killed by Lucilla; Demetrius, son of Antigonus, and Nicanor by their wives. Hercules was poisoned by Deianira; Caecinna murdered by Vespasian; and Justina, a Roman lady, by her husband.

Amestris, Xerxes’s wife, because she found her husband’s cloak in Masista’s house, “cut off the breasts of Masista’s wife and gave them to the dogs, flayed her besides, and cut off her ears, lips and tongue, and slit the nose of her daughter Artaynta.” Our recent writers are full of such outrages.

In his History of France, Paulus Aemilius tells a tragic story of the death of Chilperic I, killed through the agency of his queen, Fredegund. In a jealous mood he returned from hunting, crept behind his wife as she was arranging and combing her hair in the sun, and gave her an intimate tap with his rod. Mistaking him for her lover, she said, “Ah, Landre, a good knight should strike from the front, not from behind.” But when she saw that his presence had betrayed her, she immediately arranged to have him killed.

In book 11 of the Deeds of Emanuel, King of Portugal, Jerónimo Osório tells a tragic story to the same effect about a certain Ferdinandus Chalderia. At Goa in the East Indies he wounded Gotherinus, a nobleman from his own country, “and cut off one of his legs because, as he thought, the man looked too familiarly at his wife. This later caused many quarrels and much bloodshed.”