72 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

quisition (save very briefly) with its twin weapons of torture and con-
fiscation, and the basic differences between Anglo-Saxon and continen-
tal 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 ob-
tained 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.
THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK RosseIl Hope Robbins
AT ALBANY

Bridget Gellert Lyons. Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treat-

ments of Melancholy in Renaissance Engknzd. New York: Barnes and No-
ble, 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 Marston’s satires and plays, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Bur-
ton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘II Penseroso.’
Marston, she says, was ‘fascinated by melancholy and its literary pos-
sibilities’ (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 Wisdom’s 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 melan-
choly 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 author’s discussion of Mar-
ston’s plays is concerned principally with his difficulties in fitting melan-
choly roles to plot. He succeeds completely in overcoming these diffi-
culties only in The Malcontent.
Mrs. Lyons shows that in Hamlet Shakespeare has fused the two semi-
contradictory concepts of melancholy (‘an unsocial, life-negating dis-
ease’ and ‘the source of superior imaginative wisdom,’ p. 79). She
supplies convincing explanations for the hero’s gloomy lassitude, for his
playing of roles, for his satiric cruelties, and for the acuteness and sensi-
bility 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 Burton’s 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 fan-
tasies’ (p. 140). Although it seems to me weakened by the author’s de-
termination to regard every detail as artful, her discussion of the Ana-
tomy is interesting, revealing, and for the most part valid.
The chapter on Milton’s companion poems is devoted to the idea that
they express ‘unobtrusively . . . one of the melancholic’s 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 ‘L’Allegro’ (p. 152).
Like many others who have written on the literary uses of Eliza-
bethan 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 Sena’s bibliography is concerned with a later period, the Res-
toration 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 (in-
cluding selected studies dealing with Renaissance melancholy). Corn- .
pleteness in such an undertaking is quite impossible, yet nothing of con-
sequence 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 Ren-

aissance. (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 Dorsten’s 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 Lei-
den’s prominent printers in the sixteenth century, Thomas Basson
(lg61), and the following year published a study of some of the ramifi-
cations, 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 Leicester’s reception by the Netherlands he
was sent to ‘help’ and so singularly failed to relieve (Leicester’s 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 1560’s. 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 co-
herent mosaic pattern, Dr. van Dorsten suggests that the efflorescence of
the English arts in the 1570’s and 80’s 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 Nether-
landers-concerned for religious conciliation and political cooperation
in a period when such post-politique notions were hardly ascendent. It is