The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

First published: 1621

Type of work: Psychology

The Work:

In the seventeenth century, ideas and theories, old and new, clamored for attention and consideration; rational thought and science had not yet begun to classify, assimilate, accept, and reject the great mass of learning that had accumulated over the centuries since ancient times. More than that, each scholar attempted, in that age before specialization, to master all human knowledge. Such was the age in which Robert Burton, who styled himself Democritus, Jr., wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy, which in many ways exemplifies the times in which it was written.

Burton was more than an educated man; he gave his life to learning, and much of his vast hoard of erudition found its way into his book. Ostensibly a study on melancholy, his work, before it was finished, absorbed into its pages most of the learning of Burton’s time, either through his examination of everything he could associate with melancholy or through his many digressions.

The Anatomy of Melancholy is difficult to categorize. Its organization is complex, almost incoherent. An outline for each of the three “partitions” of the book, complicated though each is, does not indicate all that Burton manages to cram into the pages. The device seems really to be Burton’s way of following a pseudoscientific convention, a style of his times. Perhaps the best way to categorize the book is to regard it as an informal and heterogeneous collection of essays on human dissatisfaction with the universe, as people of the seventeenth century understood the universe, and on ways in which that dissatisfaction could be cured. In that sense, at least, the book is a treatise on psychology, although the digressions Burton makes are so numerous and involved that the reader sometimes wonders whether the author may not have lost his way.

Burton assuredly has no special theme or thesis he is attempting to prove. One critic has said that all The Anatomy of Melancholy proves is that a seventeenth century classical education could produce an astounding amount of recondite learning. Burton presents no set of principles, scientific or otherwise, to be proved, but he does bring to his work a tremendous zest for learning. This sense of gusto often puts the contemporary reader at a disadvantage, for Burton lards his paragraphs heavily, perhaps no English writer more so, with tags of Latin prose and poetry. Too few contemporary readers have enough knowledge of Latin to enable them to read tags in that language. The quotations are from countless authorities, many of them long since forgotten. A typical page, for example, cites Leo Afer, Lipsius, Zuinger, Seneca, Tully, Livy, Rhasis, Montaltus, Celsus, and Comesius. This host of references, allusions, and quotations makes Burton’s style seem heavy. Actually, he writes in the tradition of Francis Bacon, studiously striving for a plain, even colloquial and racy, style. Like Bacon, too, he frequently begins a topic with an allusion, an anecdote, or a quotation as a springboard and from such a start often moves to whimsy and humor.

Sections of The Anatomy of Melancholy are famous for various reasons. The opening letter, a foreword to the reader, is well known for its satirical tone and its catalog of the follies of humanity. Humor and whimsy account for the popularity of the sections on marriage and bachelorhood, on the “love of learning or overmuch study,” and on the nature of spirits. The last “partition,” ostensibly on melancholy growing out of love and religion, has many short synopses of world-famous stories. One contemporary critic has shown that if Elizabethan literature had somehow been lost during the intervening centuries, scholars could reconstruct a good bit of its nature from a study of The Anatomy of Melancholy alone.

The pervading tone of the book is satirical, but Burton’s satire is always realistic, reflecting the point of view of an objective, even detached, observer of human folly. He begins the first “partition” with a contrast between people as they were in the Garden of Eden and people as they have been since the Fall. The result of human transgression, according to Burton, is that humanity has since suffered a universal malady, a melancholy that affects mind and body. Since he regards the individual as a whole, from a humanistic point of view, he proceeds to mingle sympathetically both religion and science. Much of the learning and many of the notions and theories that found their way into the book are nowadays of historical interest only, such as the analysis of the four bodily humors, the discussion of the understanding and the will (as the seventeenth century used those terms), and the discussion of the nature of angels and devils. Still amusing, however, are his discussions of old age, diet, heredity, exercise, and constipation. While admitting that none is a panacea, Burton offers various cures for melancholy, including prayer, practice of the arts, the study of geography, coffee, traditional games, and moderate amounts of wine and other drink.

Like many another learned man in history, the writer often found himself discoursing on subjects on which there is perhaps no answer. Thus it is in his critique on marriage, which he delivers under the heading of “Cure of Love-Melancholy,” that Burton, who himself never married, first quotes twelve reasons in favor of marriage, taking them from Jacobus de Voragine. Those arguments in favor of marriage include statements that a wife is a source of comfort and assistance in adversity, that she will drive away melancholy at home, that she brings an additional supply of the “sweet company of kinsmen,” and that she enables a man to have fair and happy children. Immediately following these arguments, Burton adds an equal number of his contrary arguments. He suggests that a wife will aggravate a man’s misery in adversity, will scold a man at home, bring a host of needy relatives, and make him a cuckold to rear another man’s child. At the last, all Burton can say is that marriage, like much of life, is filled with chance: “ Tis a hazard both ways I confess, to live single or to marry.”

A sound observer of human nature, Burton also shows sympathetic understanding for his fellow beings. Living in an age when religious beliefs maintained a strong hold on men’s and women’s emotions, reinforced by fears of Satan and by Calvinistic doctrines of predestination and the depravity of humanity, Burton advocates that people afflicted by religious melancholy turn from contemplation of the more awful aspects of God and religion to such aspects of God as his infinite mercy and love. Burton also advocates recreation of an honest sort as an antidote to too much religion. In this, as in other ways, Burton stands out as being ahead of his time.

Bibliography

Chapple, Anne S. “Robert Burton’s Geography of Melancholy.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 33, no. 1 (Winter, 1993): 99-130. Examines the influence of the contemporary proliferation of maps and charts, for which Burton had a natural affinity, on the Anatomy, a work that Burton compared to an explorer’s task in its examination of uncharted territories.

Dewey, Nicholas. “Robert Burton’s Melancholy.” Modern Philology 68 (1971): 292-293. Notes the early shift in the preferred abbreviation of the title, from Melancholy to Anatomy. Dewey sees this shift as a move away from scholarly interest in the psychological and toward antiquarian delight in miscellaneous learning.

Gowland, Angus. The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Interprets the Anatomy within the context of Renaissance philosophy, describing Burton’s work as the culmination of that era’s medical, philosophical, and spiritual inquiry into melancholy.

Reid, Jennifer I. M. Worse than Beasts: An Anatomy of Melancholy and the Literature of Travel in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England. Aurora, Colo.: Davies, 2005. Analyzes the derogatory portrayal of foreigners in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, and other travel literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Renaker, David. “Robert Burton’s Tricks of Memory.” PMLA 87 (1972): 391-396. Examines the means by which Burton was able to quote, though often inaccurately, from memory or from sketchy notes. Renaker examines the errors.

Schmelzer, Mary Murphy.’Tis All One: “The Anatomy of Melancholy” as Belated Copious Discourse. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Describes how Burton became frustrated when he modeled his book on Erasmus’s theory of “copious discourse” and chose instead to base the book on observation and experience rather than on theory or pure logic. This decision, Schmelzer argues, demonstrates the change in the intellectual climate of Western Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century.