Robert Burton

English writer

• Born: February 8, 1577
• Birthplace: Lindley, Leicestershire, England
• Died: January 25, 1640
• Place of death: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England

Burton’s major work was The Anatomy of Melancholy, a large book full of learning presented in an informal and engaging prose style, which provided entertainment and education to readers in his own day and in subsequent centuries.

Early Life

Robert Burton was born on February 8, 1577, the fourth of nine children of the landowner Ralph Burton and his wife, Dorothy. Young Robert was educated at two grammar schools in the neighboring county of Warwickshire, one at Nuneaton and one at Sutton Coldfield. He then went on to Oxford University, enrolling in Brasenose College in 1593 and transferring to Oxford’s Christ Church College in 1599. He received a bachelor of arts degree in 1602, a master of arts in 1605, and a bachelor of divinity in 1614.

Because of the long time it took him to obtain his first degree, there has been speculation that Burton withdrew from Oxford for a time owing to illness, perhaps appropriately enough because of a bout of melancholy. There is a record of a twenty-year-old Robert Burton receiving treatment for melancholy in London in 1597, but it is not certain that this was the same Robert Burton.

Life’s Work

Burton lived a quiet, uneventful life. He never married or traveled or took part in the political controversies of his day. Once he entered Oxford’s Christ Church College, he remained there the rest of his life. He became librarian for the college’s library in 1626. He also served as vicar of an Oxford church, the Church of St. Thomas the Martyr, from 1616 until his death. He had two other clerical appointments outside Oxford but delegated the duties and did not attend to either of them in person. One of these was at Walesby in Lincolnshire, from 1624 to 1631, and the other was at Seagrave in Leicestershire, from the 1630’s on.

Burton’s life as an adult consisted mostly of reading and writing. Besides the library in Christ Church College, he spent time in Oxford’s Bodleian Library and also amassed a sizable private library of his own, approximately fifteen hundred volumes, at a time when books were expensive. His earliest published writing was a Latin poem, which he contributed to a collection celebrating the accession of James I to the throne of England in 1603. Two years later he contributed another Latin poem to a similar collection celebrating a visit of King James to Oxford. He also contributed to a not very successful play, Alba (pr. 1605), performed for James during his visit. The following year he began work on another play, Philosophaster (pr. 1618, pb. 1862; the false philosopher), a satire in Latin about life at a Spanish university. It was not performed until a decade later.

At three different times in the 1610’s, Burton served in an administrative position as clerk of the Oxford Market. During this same decade he must also have been at work on his masterpiece, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Throughout the rest of his life, Burton continued to work on this major project, issuing revised and greatly expanded editions in 1624, 1628, 1632, and 1638. A final edition worked on by Burton, but not published until after his death, appeared in 1651. During these revisions, The Anatomy of Melancholy grew from an already sizable 300,000 words to nearly 450,000 words, or approximately twelve hundred pages. It also quoted approximately thirteen hundred different authors.

The Anatomy of Melancholy has a quite formal structure, which, however, is continually undermined by Burton’s tendency to digress. It is divided into three major “partitions” and subdivided into sections, subsections, and “members,” all of which are laid out in synopses at the beginning of each partition. Before the first partition, there is an extended preface, almost a book in itself, called “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” in which Burton adopts the persona of a descendant of the original Democritus, an ancient Greek known as the Laughing Philosopher, and surveys the sad state of humanity. He scoffs at human foibles in the preface but also reveals compassion for sufferers. The preface also contains a depiction of his ideal, Utopian society.

Although his ostensible aim is to analyze and suggest remedies for melancholy, the seventeenth century term for what later became known as depression, Burton says in his preface that everyone and all of society suffers from melancholy, and in the rest of his book he feels free to discuss a wide variety of topics only tangentially connected to psychological problems, from geography and climate to the nature of beauty to astronomy, astrology, religion, lawyers, and love. He does so both learnedly and casually, quoting a variety of authorities, many of them in Latin, but writing in a very informal, colloquial manner, always ready to digress from the supposed subject at hand, and somehow making all the quotations his own.

Always interested in astrology, Burton cast his own horoscope, which appears on his tombstone. After he died, on January 25, 1640, there was a rumor that he had predicted his own death based on his horoscope and had committed suicide in order to make the prediction come true. However, there is no evidence that he died of anything other than natural causes.

Significance

Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy was quite popular in his own day, selling so well that it made his publisher rich. It owed some of its popularity to its subject matter, because melancholy was a popular topic in the early seventeenth century, but Burton went far beyond other writers on the subject in his comprehensiveness and learning. The poet John Milton drew on Burton’s work for his companion poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” (wr. c. 1631, pb. 1645).

The book fell out of favor in the eighteenth century, though it influenced Laurence Sterne’s digressive novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (1759-1767) and was a favorite of the dictionary maker Samuel Johnson. It returned to favor after 1800 and was much admired by Romantic writers such as John Keats, Charles Lamb, and Lord Byron. The nineteenth century saw it mainly as a literary curiosity and a useful repository of quotations; one early twentieth century writer, the physicianSir William Osler, saw it as a serious discussion of depression. In the late twentieth century, postmodernist critics saw Burton’s book as a forerunner of postmodernism because of its internal contradictions and its tendency to create uncertainties instead of providing easy answers.

There is no agreement on the nature of Burton’s achievement in his book, but except for the eighteenth century, which saw it as lacking in order, there has been general agreement through the years that The Anatomy of Melancholy has been an important and entertaining work dealing in a lively way with the complexities of life.

Bibliography

Babb, Lawrence. Sanity in Bedlam: A Study of Robert Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy.” East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1959. An older study providing useful information about Burton’s life, the contents of the Anatomy, and Burton’s revisions to it.

Breitenberg, Mark. “Fearful Fluidity: Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.” In Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Sees the Anatomy’s incessant digressiveness as an example of the impossibility of imposing limits on the passions. Also sees Burton as misogynistic.

Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Edited by Holbrook Jackson. Reprint. London: Dent, 1972. One-volume edition with a wide-ranging introduction by Jackson.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Edited by Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, with commentary by J. B. Bamborough. 6 vols. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1989-2000. A scholarly edition of Burton’s text. Introductory material includes biographical details and information on the growth of the work.

Fish, Stanley E. “Thou Thyself Art the Subject of My Discourse: Democritus Jr. to the Reader.” In Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Argues that the Anatomy creates uncertainty by means of ambiguity and contradiction and by refusing to provide easy answers.

Nochimson, Richard L. “Studies in the Life of Robert Burton.” Yearbook of English Studies 4 (1974): 85-111. Detailed study of various biographical issues in Burton’s life.

O’Connell, Michael. Robert Burton. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Useful study of Burton’s life and work. Includes bibliography, chronology, and index.

Renaker, David. “Robert Burton and Ramist Method.” Renaissance Quarterly 24 (1971): 210-220. Discusses Burton’s methods in the Anatomy.

Sawday, Jonathan. “Shapeless Elegance: Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Knowledge.” In English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, edited by Neil Rhodes. Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997. Sets Burton in the context of seventeenth century science and notes his appeal for postmodernists.

Trevor-Roper, Hugh. “Anatomist of Melancholy.” The Listener 97 (February 10, 1977): 187-189. Discusses Burton’s character and his aim in the Anatomy.