72

RENAISSANCE

QUARTERLY

quisition (save very briefly) with its twin weapons of torture and confiscation, and the basic differences between Anglo-Saxon and continental law and court procedures. And Dr. Thomas too lightly absolves the
Establishment in encouraging trials: he avoids the intervention of the
Attorney General (Sir Gilbert Gerard) in the 1566 Chelmsford trial;
the role of the returned bishops in furthering acceptance of witchcraft
prosecutions; or the bigotry of ChiefJustice Sir Matthew Hale, who obtained convictions at the Bury St. Edmunds trial only by unethical
conduct.
Despite these fundamental and other minor reservations, I consider
Religion and the Decline of Magic a most important study, eminently
readable and often provocative, full of suggestive insights, to be digested
by all students of witchcraft and of the history of ideas.
RosseIl Hope Robbins
THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
AT ALBANY

Bridget Gellert Lyons. Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance Engknzd. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971. 6 pls. xvii+ 189 pp. $9.50.
John F. Sena. A Bibliography of Melancholy: 1660-1800. Nether Press
Bibliographies, Miscellaneous Series, no. 102. London: Nether Press,
1970* 70 pp* &*

Professor Lyons book undertakes to enrich our understanding of the

Renaissance concepts and conventions associated with melancholy as
they appear in Marstons satires and plays, Shakespeares Hamlet, Burtons Anatomy of Melancholy, and Miltons LAllegro and II Penseroso.
Marston, she says, was fascinated by melancholy and its literary possibilities (p. 58). He evidently was conscious of the difference between
the melancholy of medical theory (characterized by bizarre mental
aberrations) and the Aristotelian idea of melancholy (according to
which, melancholy engendered admirable intellectual abilities). In the
Proemium of The Scourge of Villainy, he implores the grave assistance
of Melancholy, nursing mother of fair Wisdoms lore, and thus defines
his satiric persona- a critic of men and morals whose perceptions are
sharpened and whose indignations are heightened by the nobler melancholy of the Aristotelian concept. Marston is drawing a clear distinction
between his own satiric denunciations and the senseless railings of the

REVIEWS

73

attitudinizing melancholy malcontent. The authors discussion of Marstons plays is concerned principally with his difficulties in fitting melancholy roles to plot. He succeeds completely in overcoming these difficulties only in The Malcontent.
Mrs. Lyons shows that in Hamlet Shakespeare has fused the two semicontradictory concepts of melancholy (an unsocial, life-negating disease and the source of superior imaginative wisdom, p. 79). She
supplies convincing explanations for the heros gloomy lassitude, for his
playing of roles, for his satiric cruelties, and for the acuteness and sensibility of his comments on the human condition. She seems to assume a
painstaking concern with detail (e.g., in the graveyard scene) which one
would hardly expect of a playwright who never blotted out line. Yet
her analysis is subtle and perceptive, and on the whole it seems to me
accurate.
She makes two principal points concerning Burtons Anatomy. One is
that Burton has read more of English literature and has learned more
from it than he is inclined to admit. (His references to English literature
are relatively few and are sometimes condescending.) For example, she
fmds that, because of his use of melancholy in creating a satiric persona,
Burton shows affinity with Marston (p. 117). The second point is that
Burton, having declared himself a melancholy patient, demonstrates his
melancholy throughout the book by a planned display of melancholy
traits, such as his ambition and self-deprecation, his curiosity, doubt,
restlessness and love of projecting himself into different parts and fantasies (p. 140). Although it seems to me weakened by the authors determination to regard every detail as artful, her discussion of the Anatomy is interesting, revealing, and for the most part valid.
The chapter on Miltons companion poems is devoted to the idea that
they express unobtrusively . . . one of the melancholics most essential
characteristics, his heightened awareness of time (p. 151). The speaker
of II Penseroso has an imagination of himself as existing in time
which is lacking in his counterpart of LAllegro (p. 152).
Like many others who have written on the literary uses of Elizabethan psychology, Mrs. Lyons tries to explain too much. But at least
she does not make the common mistake of assuming that Renaissance
English authors were familiar with the particulars of physiological and
psychological theory. She writes clearly and pleasantly. Though her
book might seem miscellaneous, it derives a unity from the fact that it
deals with the most notable of the manifestations of melancholy in

74

RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

Elizabethan and early Stuart literature. All of these have been discussed
before, but she offers many fresh and enlightening observations.
John Senas bibliography is concerned with a later period, the Restoration and eighteenth century. It includes lists of pertinent medical
works, of English literary works in which melancholy (hypochondria,
hysteria, spleen, vapors) appears, and of modem commentaries (including selected studies dealing with Renaissance melancholy). Cornpleteness in such an undertaking is quite impossible, yet nothing of consequence seems to have been omitted. The Bibliography is carefully
compiled and clearly presented. It will be very useful for any future
student of neoclassical melancholy.
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
Lawrence Babb

J. A. van Dorsten. The Radical Arts: First Decade of an Elizabethan Renaissance. (Publications of the Sir Thomas Browne Institute, Special
Series, no. 4.) Leiden: The University of Leiden Press, and London:
Oxford University Press, 1970. 8 pls. xii+146 pp. $10.50.
Dr. van Dorstens earlier work has established him as an extremely
careful and competent researcher into many different fields; he is, really,
a special type of cultural historian. He has made a study of one of Leidens prominent printers in the sixteenth century, Thomas Basson
(lg61), and the following year published a study of some of the ramifications, via Basson and other printers, of Anglo-Dutch connections in
the early Renaissance (Poets, Patrons, und Professors). With Roy Strong,
he has examined in detail Leicesters reception by the Netherlands he
was sent to help and so singularly failed to relieve (Leicesters Triumph,
1964). With this book, he has made a significant contribution to various
forms of cultural history by studying the work of lowlanders in England
in the 1560s. That the decade was a low point between waves of the
English Renaissance can hardly be disputed; in a radical reinterpretation
of events, based on his scrupulous assembly of varied tesserae into a coherent mosaic pattern, Dr. van Dorsten suggests that the efflorescence of
the English arts in the 1570s and 80s owes much to what he calls the
France-Flemish enterprise.
Into his pattern, the author has organized the many intellectual and
cultural interests of a loose group of men-many of them Netherlanders-concerned for religious conciliation and political cooperation
in a period when such post-politique notions were hardly ascendent. It is