2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage

Summary

New fragments of information, conjectures and odd fancies are still abundant concerning the details of Shakespeare’s life, but the longer and perhaps now more valuable studies are concerned with helping us to see the dramatist in relation to his fellow-writers and the general current of Elizabethan thought and feeling. To such studies Lawrence Babb has notably contributed in his account of melancholy as it was presented by the scientific writers and the dramatists of the time. He has shown that the tradition derived from Galen presented melancholy as a dreaded disease: in the medical literature this attitude was dominant, but simultaneously, through Aristotle’s influence, melancholy was seen as a privileged condition, the almost inevitable mark of the highly endowed. This opposition is at its clearest in Milton’s companion poems: L’Allegro presents the Galenic picture of melancholy, Il Penseroso the Aristotelian. And love, intimately associated with melancholy, was a disease to be cured, and yet, through the inheritance of the Courtly Love tradition, was an honourable state. The more the age is studied, the more such contradictions seem to abound. This book should increase our reluctance to see any seventeenth-century drama as embodying a thesis: even Ford, in many respects closer than his fellows to the medical writers, presents Giovanni not merely as a pathological case but also as a man raised above his fellows, demanding horrified respect.