“Something in me dangerous”: Hamlet, melancholy, and the early modern scholar

Abstract

This essay situates Hamlet in the history of theatrical representations of melancholy. Traditionally, early modern stage melancholics were dramatically distanced from other characters on stage either by the isolating effects of their condition, or by the dramatic irony that made their lack of self-awareness ridiculous, as with the melancholy Jaques. Hamlet, uniquely, assigns dramatic control over this curious dramatic space to the melancholic himself. In exaggerating his melancholy, Hamlet manipulates stage conventions associated with melancholy to exploit this dramatic space as a protective form of privacy from authority, even in that authority's surveilling midst. This exaggerated version of “the scholar's disease” links Hamlet with the rebellious Earl of Essex, whom Francis Bacon counselled to “pretend to be as bookish and contemplative as ever you were” in order to disarm Elizabeth's growing distrust. Hamlet's metatheatrical representation of melancholy, and its relevance to Essex's rebellion, partakes in the collapse of melancholy's medical conception and the diffusion of its signification into literary, social and political realms. It also dramatizes how this concept's collapse and diffusion could be exploited by disaffected scholars as a means of concealing resistance to authority as apolitical disposition or disease.