The topic of melancholy courts a suitable exhaustion at the present moment. Faced with the prospect of a sequence of readings of early modern representations of this all-too-familiar emotional stance, one might well wonder whether anything could have gone unnoticed about this particular quintessence of scholarly dust. If, to take up the Ashbery poem’s sharp formulation, the dark gardens of history are rendered faintly slapstick by the humoral stain of “false melancholy” squirted upon them, one might well ask: Given the now ascendant functionalist understanding of emotions as neurochemical events, was melancholy evernot false? What is to be done...

Melancholy arises through the composition and recomposition of bodies: substances flowing, heating, and cooling within the somatic interior, limbs and extremities falling into attitudes or taking up postures, skin surfaces growing taut or slack, tiny expressive muscle systems arranging themselves into legible states of display. Over time and across culture, the smooth spectrum of bodily affect is territorialized into a striated repertoire of characteristic zones. These zones are given names and classified into emotions, a historical and material process of inscription which belies the volatility and fluctuation of its embodied support.¹ Across a chasm, presentation and representation presume and reinforce...

Love’s Labour’s Losthas irritated playgoers for centuries. Coming to grips with this slippery, curious play in hisRemarks on the Plays of Shakespear(1710), Charles Gildon first pulls, then throws, his punch: “[ … ] [S]ince it is one of the worst of Shakespear’s Plays, nay I think I may say the very worst, I cannot but think that it is his first, notwithstanding those Arguments, or that Opinion, that has been brought to the contrary.”¹ One hundred years later, Hazlitt demurs on the date but concurs in his review: “If we were to part with any of the...

Foreclosing knowledge from its first line,The Merchant of Venicemay begin but it does not quite open. We start out startled, at impasse, greeted by this concession of defeat:

ANTONIO: In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.

It wearies me, you say it wearies you;

But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,

What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,

I am to learn;

And such a want-wit sadness makes of me

That I have much ado to know myself. (1.1.1–7).¹

For Antonio, melancholy is not only an illness—it...

In a farcical piece of stage business with a flute, Hamlet issues a famous rebuke to the courtier spies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that applies equally to the spectators, readers, and critics who attempt to cash out the meaning of his melancholy:

HAMLET: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from the lowest note to [the top of] my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ,...

Imagine a book. This book fixates upon a particular cultural phenomenon, one not entirely marginal but far from obvious as a suitable subject for its imposing size. The book drifts from its stated occasion, relentlessly, and uses the explanation of its ostensibly modest topic to digress at great length across the entirety of the surrounding world, pursued to its stoppages and endpoints in metaphysical speculations and skeptical aporias. At each local point in the book, the overarching theme is sounded, and yet the very multitude of examples of this motif proliferate to such an extent that, gradually, one begins to...

Concluding our sequence of portraits in black, it must be said that Samson makes an unlikely candidate for melancholy. If we take up Robert Burton’s portable definition of this condition as “feare, and sadnesse without any apparant occasion,” then the application of this modish misfortune of early modernity to the Biblical hero from the Book of Judges seems, literally, woefully inadequate.¹ However densely overdetermined, Samson’s causes for fear and sorrow are all too obvious: his compromising relationship with Dalilah; his disastrously credulous confession of the secret of his strength; the subsequent shaving of his hair and putting out of his...

Melancholy never stops, but this book must. Before it does, I wish to both recapitulate and extend my argument, placing a final pressure upon the question of melancholy as “matter,” in order to think about how and why melancholy still matters, and where it continues to circulate, today. At the risk of droning melancholically on, I hope to do four things: First, I hope to simply rehearse the multiple definitions of the phrase “melancholy assemblage” in play throughout this book. Second, I hope to locate melancholy’s curiously polychronic position within neuro-reductionist research into the brain science of emotion. Third, I...