Robert Burton portrait in oil by Gilbert Jackson, 1635, in the collection of Brasenose College, University of Oxford.
CHAPTER III
25 January 1640, Christ Church College, Oxford. A sixty-three-year-old man in a senior scholar’s gown, mortar board and ruff sits at his desk in his well-positioned rooms off the main quad, his topiary beard forming a promontory, writing something important which requires his full attention. He is taking his time, concentrating on the task with doleful brown eyes over an aquiline nose and a faint smile. If you could look over his shoulder you would see that these are the words for an epitaph. It’s his own tribute, and it’s to be displayed in the north aisle of the cathedral at Christ Church after his death, beneath his likeness, a bust, which will be brought to life in naturalistic paint colours.
Now he carefully begins to transcribe something: a horoscope. He calculated it for himself some years before, capturing the stars’ alignment at the time of his birth. He leaves instructions that these documents should go to his elder brother, William, who will see to their commission when the time comes.
He removes his mortar board and gown, and the starched white ruff, then takes the embroidered runner from his desk and fashions it in such a way that it creates a slip knot. This serves as a noose which he places around his neck. And then he hangs himself, there in the very room in which he has spent a working lifetime revising his magnum opus − an encyclopedia of melancholia and associated delusions.
Anyone who stumbled on the scene, and could read the geometry and symbols in a horoscope, would see that according to the diagrammatic representation on the desk Burton’s climacteric year (sixty-three) would be his last. It would ‘prove fatal’, as the saying went. Once they learned that the dead man was sixty-three years old, they would have to conclude that he had died at the age predicted. The forecast had been accurate, or at least Burton had believed it so strongly that he had taken it upon himself to prove it correct. Everyone said he had been in good health up until that day. So the rumours went, anyway, disseminated in whispers by the students.
By the time of his death, the obsessional Oxford don Robert Burton had assembled what is still to this day the most important compendium of mental disturbance and accompanying delusions: The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621 in several volumes.1 In his book Burton was open about the fact that he suffered with bouts of melancholy, but did a learned man like him really believe that a horoscope had prefigured his death? Is it possible that he even brought the prediction about on the appointed day? He’s certainly the subject’s great collector, but do we have a case of delusion in Burton himself?
Burton is writing for an early modern Christian audience, but he draws extensively on classical sources for his case studies, as well as on examples from his own day. It is because of his magpie-like collecting habits that we still have such early delusion cases to refer to at all. Many of these stories had already been recycled over hundreds of years when Burton fell upon them (he didn’t travel far in terms of distance – these were voyages around the bookshelves of England: he ‘turned over such physicians as our libraries would afford, or my private friends impart, and have taken this pains’.2 The most intriguing stories from any era which caught his eye made it into this book. The title page announces an exploration of melancholy ‘with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it…philosophically, medicinally, historically opened and cut up’. This remains the organising work on a sprawling topic. He writes of the myriad ways in which the ‘chaos of melancholy’ symptoms express themselves. ‘They will act, conceive all extremes, contrarieties and contradictions, and that in infinite varieties… Scarce two of two thousand that concur in the same symptoms. The Tower of Babel never yielded such a confusion of tongues, as this chaos of melancholy doth variety of symptoms.’ But he chases them, a maelstrom of reference, determined to guide them into order. The Anatomy became a publishing sensation within his lifetime, and built a readership well beyond it. The fancy, and pricey, folio made eight editions over the course of the seventeenth century alone. Laurence Sterne borrowed entire passages for his novel of 1759, Tristram Shandy. In 1650 the astrologer and influential almanac producer John Gadbury was reading it in bed when a reference to horoscopes jumped out at him and decided for him what he would do for a living.
The rumours as to the mode and meaning of Burton’s death persisted. Speculation was rife in Oxford for decades, and repeated through several channels. Anthony à Wood, a chronicler of Oxford life writing fifty years after the event, reported that the students still gossiped about how Burton had died. They said it was ‘at, or very near the time, which he had some years before foretold from the calculation of his own nativity’.3
According to William Tegg’s 1863 edition of the Anatomy, which quotes Wood extensively to borrow some of his colour, it went like this: ‘In his chamber in Christ Church College, he departed this life, at or very near the time which he had some years before foretold, from the calculation of his own nativity, and which, says Wood, “being exact, several of the students did not forbear to whisper among themselves, that rather than there should be a mistake in the calculation, he sent up his soul to heaven through a slip about his neck.”’4
The biographer John Aubrey, picking up the tale later in the seventeenth century, offers the following version of events via Robert Hooke, the very same Enlightenment polymath who designed the Bethlem hospital at Moorfields. ‘Mr Robert Hooke of Gresham College told me that he lay in the chamber in Christ Church that was Mr Burton’s, of whom ’tis whispered, non obstante all his astrology and his book on Melancholie, he ended his days in that chamber by hanging himself.’5 The insinuations in the italics here are whispered behind discreet hands.
Robert Burton adopted a nom de plume for the Anatomy and stamped it across the title page. This name was ‘Democritus Junior’. The Greek philosopher he chose to hide behind was famous for finding the follies of the world so absurd that all he could do was laugh. How serious is Burton being?
The plaque beneath the memorial bust of Burton on the wall of Christ Church, Oxford, bears the epitaph he requested, inscribed by his brother as per his instructions. It’s an enigmatic signing off:
Memorial bust of Robert Burton, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.
Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus, hic jacet Democritus Junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem Melancholia
This translates as: ‘Known to few, unknown to fewer, here lies Democritus Junior, to whom Melancholy gave life and death.’
The horoscope has been painted onto a gilded boss to the right of the bust. It is a geometric image of intersecting diamonds, the lines radiating out like a star, with the date of 8 February 1576 at the centre. Around it numerals and astral positionings hang in delicate hand-scribed calligraphy. A decorative portrait of his fate. The public position of this horoscope ensures that he will be associated with it for ever. Burton’s elder brother saw to all the arrangements but the orders were all Burton’s, Anthony à Wood confirms. This was a man hooked on astrology.6
The opening to the epitaph is playful. He refers to himself as ‘known to few, unknown to fewer’, acknowledging with a coy smile that he may be awfully famous, but he is also a man of such complexity and mystery it’s impossible to understand his hidden depths. Another joke? There’s more. The epitaph goes on to name the other guiding force in his life and death, melancholy. He has been its child and its slave, always under its control. Melancholy and astrology are his twin masters. This memorial represents his life pared back to the key structural elements. It publicly ties his mental state to horoscopes. It’s a sombre admission.
It seems he did believe, but a renowned scholar like Burton telling the world he is under the influence of the stars is risking his academic reputation. Where did this conviction come from? At first glance, the belief declared on the wall at Christ Church Cathedral seems an unlikely one for a man in his position. What’s it offering him?
Burton offers an intimate portrait of his daily routines in his preface to the Anatomy. He is in his mid-forties, living a ‘silent, sedentary, solitary private life…penned upmost part in my study’.7
… I live still a collegiate student, as Democritus in his garden, and lead a monastic life, sufficient entertainment to myself, sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world… I hear and see what is done abroad, how others run, ride, turmoil, and macerate themselves in court and country, far from those wrangling lawsuits, I laugh to myself at the vanities of the court, the intrigues of public life, I laugh at all…those ordinary rumours of war, plagues…massacres, meteors, comets…heresies… Today we hear of new lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed…amidst the gallantry and misery of the world… I rub on in complete privacy; as I have still lived, so I now continue, left to a solitary life and mine own domestic discontents: saving that sometimes, not to conceal anything, as Diogenes went into the city and Democritus to the haven to see fashions, I did for my recreation now and then walk abroad, and could not choose but make some little observation, less by way of shrewd remark than of simple statement of fact, not as they did, to scoff or laugh at all, but with mixed passion.8
With a wink he admits to a little ‘recreation’ time, but only to emphasise that he doesn’t enjoy it too much. We are invited to picture him, in self-imposed isolation, living an ascetic existence, hunched over his desk, researching and revising. He is trying to define the societal scourge of ‘melancholia’ and its attendant delusions for the public: ruminating on the causes, setting down the symptoms and dedicating the whole of the second part to possible cures.
Anthony à Wood paints a rather different picture. His Robert Burton is a rather jolly sort. Wood apparently ‘heard some of the ancients of Ch.Ch. often say that his company was very merry…and juvenile, and no man in his time did surpass him for his ready and dextrous interlarding his common discourses among them with discourses from the poets or sentences from classical authors. Which being then all the fashion in the university, made his company more acceptable.’9 He was the life and soul of the Common Room classics party.
The English diarist and antiquarian Thomas Hearne corroborates this version of Burton’s character (although Hearne wasn’t born until after Burton’s death, and does not quote his source. He may have been relying on Anthony à Wood). ‘Mr Burton was one of the most facetious [jolly] and pleasant companions of that age, but his Conversation was very innocent. It was the way then to mix a great deal of Latin in discoursing, at which he was wonderfully ready (in the manner his book is wrote) which is now looked upon as pedantry.’10 His party trick of slipping between Latin and English seems to have gone down a storm. Burton’s posture as a recluse appears even more misleading in light of the fact that he was at one point a college librarian as well as a vicar – he even joined the fray for a period as clerk of the busy Oxford market.
College rules did not allow him to marry, but a Latin poem prefacing the Anatomy divulges the author’s fondness for any dainty damsels who might read his book and whom he loves ‘dear as life…would he were here to gaze on they sweet look’. While he ‘never travelled but in map or card, in which mine unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated’. He stayed put, but went anywhere and everywhere in his imagination.
There are key moments in the sprawling text of the Anatomy where Burton addresses the matter of his belief in astrology directly. In one scathing aside he warns his reader to be sceptical and beware of charlatans: ‘what is astrology but vain elections, predictions? All magic, but a troublesome error, a pernicious foppery?’11
But at another point, he is ambivalent about the merits, both in terms of what were termed its ‘naturall effects’ in areas such as the weather and disease; and its ‘judicial’ or predictive powers in the form of horoscopes. He claims diplomatic neutrality on the matter. ‘I will not here stand to discuss obiter, whether stars be causes, or signs; or to apologize for judicial astrology.’ He doesn’t want to be dragged into the astrology-as-science-or-quackery fight, let alone to arbitrate, but he lists the defenders as well as the attackers. Certain figures, Sextus Empiricus, Picus Mirandula, Chambers, for example, present the spheres on an astrological chart as no more significant than a street hoarding ‘he will attribute no virtue at all to the heavens, or to sun, or moon, more than he doth to their signs, at an innkeeper’s post, or tradesman’s shop’. But some prominent physicians successfully use the stars to predict a person’s susceptibility to certain diseases; there’s Bellantius, Pirovanus, Marascallerus. And, of course, then there is the respectable public figure of Christopher Haydon to consider. Haydon is a Member of Parliament, and a defender of astrology as a science that is not only valid but entirely compatible with Christianity. Just as he seems to be about to side with the astrology-as-science lot, he steps back again. Regarding the stars, ‘If thou shalt ask me what I think, I must answer, for I too am conversant with these learned errors, they do incline, but not compel; no necessity at all…and so gently incline, that a wise man may resist them…they rule us, but God rules them.’12 The stars ‘do incline, but not compel,’ he concludes, tactfully. The influence is so subtle that missing the evidence doesn’t make you stupid. Burton finds a vantage point with a strategic view. It’s bifocal: a belief in the predictive power of astrological forces running in parallel with a strong Christian faith. The stars rule us, but God rules them. God is still at the top. Burton wanders away from the topic again into the shadows.
Elsewhere in the Anatomy he comes out of hiding for a very candid outburst on the subject. This is a warning about the dangers of learning about your future. You can, he warns, make something come true just by fearing it:
They are so much affected that, with the very strength of imagination, fear, and the devil’s craft, ‘they pull those misfortunes they suspect upon their own heads, and that which they fear shall come upon them,’ as Solomon foretelleth… ‘The thing that I feared,’ saith Job, ‘is fallen upon me.’ … the foreknowledge of what shall come to pass crucifies many men… There was a fountain in Greece, near Ceres’ temple in Achaia, where the event of such diseases was to be known… Amongst those Cyanean rocks at the springs of Lycia, was the oracle of Thryxeus Apollo, ‘where all fortunes were foretold, sickness, health, or what they would besides’: so common people have been always deluded with future events…if he foretell sickness such a day, that very time they will be sick…and many times die as it is foretold.13
Burton grabs his audience by the shirt collar. This is not a rhetorical set piece, it is the kind of zealous advice forged from lived experience. He is positively evangelical about the dangers of becoming ‘deluded with future events’. He cites Job, the Bible’s most famous victim of a celestial wager about the strength of a man’s faith, as well as those poor souls destroyed by what they learned at Apollo’s Oracle. In a sense he implicates all futurology, both before and after his time, from the Druids reading entrails to twentieth-century tea-cup twisters reading the leaves, to palm and tarot card readers. He is well versed in how the imagination can get the better of a person when they hear what’s supposedly in store for them, and knows that the consequences can be deadly.
But Anthony à Wood repeats the rumours that Burton didn’t heed his own advice. He was ‘by many accounted a severe student, a devourer of authors, a melancholy and humorous person; so by others who knew him well, a person of great honesty, plain dealing and charity’. But this esteemed and sensible scholar was, on occasion, a ‘curious calculator of nativities’. Burton couldn’t stay away, it seems. He couldn’t resist looking into the future, even though he understood this knowledge had the power to ruin a person.
It’s a talking point on the streets. In 1605 or thereabouts, while Burton was working away at Christ Church and struggling to take a definitive line on astrology, another writer was offering his assessment to theatre audiences. Shakespeare’s King Lear is a savage dismantling of the credulous enthusiasts of astrology. Edmund, the malcontent illegitimate son of Gloucester, mounts a critique of believers like his father. Gloucester has been wringing his hands about how eclipses portend bad things. His son rails: ‘This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune – often the surfeit of our own behavior – we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence.’ Edmund charges on, Shakespeare lacing his words with dark sarcasm: ‘My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.’
In the wider culture, the astral code is starting to seem quaint. The power of the stars is being questioned in public. Believers are lampooned on the London stage as gullible. It would be more tempting than ever for a person who kept faith with the old celestial principles to keep the fact a secret.
There are a few moments in the Anatomy where Burton explicitly attributes his own melancholy to the arrangement of these stars, and several volumes belonging to Burton in the Bodleian Library in Oxford show that Burton was never really on the fence. One of these volumes is marked with his autograph, and the date 1603, when he was twenty-six. The margins of the books are filled with his annotations. These annotations all relate to astrological practice. The notes in his copy of Stadius’s Ephemerides, a handbook for astrologers for the dates 1554–1606, cover the period he was a student at Oxford and in his twenties. There’s also a treasured edition of Ptolemy. These are detailed scribblings about precisely of the sort of ‘judiciall’ astrology he warns against in the Anatomy.14 A notebook includes tables as well as related jottings on astrological topics. There’s even a horoscope for Queen Elizabeth I in there. This notebook is also where he drew up his own horoscope. He notes down his birth, at 8.44 a.m. on 8 February 1576. This matches what’s written above his epitaph in Christ Church Cathedral. He’s also recorded the time and date of his ‘conceptio’, or conception. This is down as nine o’clock in the evening of 25 May 1575. If his parents shared precise details like this with their son, the suggestion is that they, too, had an interest in horoscopes.
Astrology was still popular, both for its ‘naturall effects’, weather and disease forecasting, and its ‘judiciall’ horoscopes, and an astrologer might be called in not only to forecast the life of an infant, but to learn the whereabouts of a missing person or property. The practice of future-telling by the arrangement of the stars was by definition at odds with Catholic teachings in that it removed the onus on an individual to lead a pious life in the hope of salvation. Burton was in good company, though, in accommodating devout Christian faith with an interest in astrology. Prophetic almanacs were published annually and sold in large numbers and almost everyone would have been going to church.
By the sixteenth century the Oxford colleges were flourishing in terms of both population and prosperity, having undergone a revival during the reign of Elizabeth I. James I visited Oxford while Burton was ensconced at Christ Church, in 1603 and 1605, and he and his queen were presented with cups of money.15 Plague menaced the city on and off, a major outbreak occurring in 1603, when the churches were closed and grass grew in the market place. In 1593, precautionary measures sanctioned by the mayor included the removal of rubbish and pigs from the streets, restrictions on lodging strangers, especially from London, and a ban on plays. The mass gatherings at the university were blamed for the outbreak of plague that year.
The real tension in Burton’s Oxford, though, was between the old and new church, and as vicar of St Thomas’s he was in the thick of it. Puritan elements existed at the university from the 1580s, and by the early seventeenth century the practices in some of Oxford’s churches were changing: taking sacrament sitting down, for example, instead of kneeling. There was opposition to Whitsun and Mayday sports and celebrations. There was also a revival of the old church, with crucifixes on show in some of the city’s churches. There was even a statue on the porch at St Mary’s, which was cited as proof of Archbishop Laud’s popery at his trial. Burton seems to have been part of this ‘Laudian’ movement, along with others who set themselves against the Puritans and rejected the idea of predestination, finding common ground with the Roman Catholics. Burton was an Anglican, but kept up the Catholic practice of using unleavened wafers for Communion. Burton’s own church, St Thomas’s, was built on land seized from Osney Abbey at the dissolution of the monasteries earlier in the century and given to Christ Church. Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer had been burned in public in Oxford in 1555/6 in the throes of the Reformation. When Elizabeth took the throne after her Catholic sister Mary, most parishes in the city conformed to the settlement and changed their rituals and furnishings once again, but some hedged their bets and kept the vestments and candles just in case.
By the time Robert Burton began collecting material for The Anatomy of Melancholy, James I was on the throne and religious authorities had ordained a direct link between delusions and demonic possession. Delusions as they appear in the Anatomy are caught in a web of philosophical and religious treatises, medical theory and poetry; superstitious, humoral, Christian and psychological perspectives. That’s where most people were, too.
Burton’s Christ Church was a major centre for mathematical study. Few scholars there would have called astrology a delusion. It was too closely allied to the cutting-edge science of astronomy and the rate and scale of the discoveries in that field required a degree of magical thinking anyway, just as the new forces emerging in James Tilly Matthews’s day had.
The revolution in astronomy was gathering pace as Burton was researching, publishing and revising. Western Europe was still reeling from Copernicus’s theory of 1543 that the earth revolved around the sun. In 1572, just before Burton was born, a brilliant ‘supernova’ was spotted by Danish astrologer Tycho Brahe. Brahe proved that the star was moving beyond the earth’s atmosphere and, therefore, that the heavens could change positions. In 1608, when Burton was thirty-two, the Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey produced a refracting telescope. The invention spread rapidly across Europe, with scientists making their own versions, and then German astronomer Johannes Kepler’s laws of planetary motion showed that orbits were elliptical. In 1610 Galileo Galilei published Sidereus Nuncius, describing his observations with a retractable telescope that offered even greater magnification. Galileo backed ‘heliocentrism’, enraging the church by contradicting the belief that all heavenly bodies revolved around the earth.
The planets must suddenly have appeared even more powerful forces than anyone had previously dared to imagine. Galileo pointed out the craters on the moon, stars that could not be seen with the naked eye and even moons circling Jupiter. As Burton developed his understanding of melancholy, new insights about the sky above were swirling around him.
The reference points of astrology had not changed at all for centuries, and offered continuity and reassurance. Astrologers only referred to the planets that were known about at that time: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. No new planets were discovered until 1781 when Sir William Herschel found Uranus. Later in the century the English astronomer and mathematician Isaac Newton demonstrated the physical laws which acted on the planets to define their orbits and dismissed the validity of astrology out of hand. He created a reflective telescope with a mirror instead of a bulky glass lens, making it smaller and more accurate so that more people could have a closer look at the night sky and see for themselves. He was, though, a deeply religious man and saw theology and maths as one project to discover a single system of the world. His secret hobby was alchemy.
When Robert Burton was a boy, in the late sixteenth century, astrology was still a respectable science and an openly popular hobby.
Burton’s birth is not in the official records, but all circumstantial evidence points to the morning of 8 February 1576. He was the fourth of nine children, and the younger of two sons, born into gentry from Lindley in rural Leicestershire. The family lived in the manor house, Lindley Hall. Robert’s brother William was an antiquarian who wrote a historical and topographical survey of the county entitled Descriptions of Leicestershire, which he began in 1597 and published just after the Anatomy in 1622. On the very first page of William’s book he says that he hopes to shine light on the county, by removing ‘an Eclipse from the Sun, without Art or Astronomical calculation’.
Perhaps the family read almanacs, as many families did, or even consulted an astrologer in person for a fee in exchange for advice or answers to questions of the future.
The manor house in which the Burton boys were born is described as a ‘curious mansion with turrets entirely surrounded by a moat, excepting a way or road to the house, and surrounded by an avenue of trees’.16 The turreted seclusion is a rehearsal for his later cloistered life at Oxford. The house was, by the sound of it, completely cut off from the outside world by a watercourse, with acres of inherited land wrapped around. Any prospective visitors had a real challenge getting a horse and carriage to the house; the manor was knocked down in the eighteenth century and the surroundings re-landscaped to allow access and to correct the blight. The Burtons had everything they needed, their own little universe, at Lindley: orchards, stables, even a chapel. Both boys would have had a lot of time to consider the twin sciences of astronomy and astrology, and looking out of their windows at the night sky it would have been hard to separate one discipline from the other, or the science from the magic.
History was very much alive around Lindley. In his homage to Leicestershire, William proudly notes the excellent soil and pastureland, as well as a blessed lack of snakes, and he takes a moment to boast direct Burton family lineage to a nobleman who accompanied Richard I to the Holy Land. The Lindley manor sat near Bosworth Field, where Richard III met his death, and the graves of many who died in that battle are in the local churchyard. Given that they kept hold of their estate after the Reformation, it seems the family stayed on the right side of religious authorities over the decades of flip-flopping to and from Rome. The association of the family with Arthur Faunt, a Jesuit relative of Burton’s mother Dorothy, hints at Catholic sympathies. Dorothy was apparently skilled in ‘chirurgery’ which involved minor surgery and bone setting, and perhaps the medical interests of the younger son were learned at his mother’s knee. Anthony Faunt, another maternal relation, was said to have died from ‘a passion of melancholy’.17
Burton did finally leave Lindley to go to the local grammar school in Nuneaton and later in Sutton Coldfield, just over the county boundary in Warwickshire, where the sciences of astronomy and astrology would both have been on the curriculum. He followed William up to Brasenose College, Oxford, and then to Christ Church to complete his first degree, where he remained.
And it’s at some point after he starts at Oxford that a brooding relationship with melancholy, the other defining influence on his epitaph, takes hold of him. He was enslaved by it, he says. In the Anatomy he will be good company, gossipy and humorous, but then slam a home truth in front of his reader:
‘All the world is mad… it is melancholy, dotes… ’Tis an inbred malady in every one of us.’18
He is himself ‘melancholy’ while at Oxford. The standard age to graduate at that time is nineteen, but Burton is twenty and still at Oxford and he will not graduate until he’s twenty-six. There is a gap in the records between 1593 and 1599 which may be explained by the depressive illness that’s stalking him.
Pieter Codde’s portrait of a boy, Young Scholar in His Study, Melancholy, could be a young Burton staring blankly back at us:
Young Scholar in His Study, Melancholy,
Pieter Codde, c.1633.
‘Melancholia’ is the thread linking the classical world to the anxieties and preoccupations of Burton’s own day. The concept had already endured over a couple of millennia. Albrecht Dürer distilled its elements in a dramatic engraving featuring a winded personification of Melancholy, staring despondently out into the world, surrounded by astrological instruments. Next to her sits an hourglass, reminding us that time is running out. A comet and a rainbow appear in the sky above.
Burton’s Europe was experiencing a new wave of this old affliction. It could be debilitating but was also, at this point, achingly fashionable. Melancholia was something of an epidemic in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; a distracted gaze off into the middle distance, as you recline by a babbling stream, was a sign of the intellectual refinement which might get you a diagnosis of ‘Scholar’s Melancholy’ (it was also, of course, a sign of money. The rich had more time to be idle, and could afford a physician to record a case in the first place.). Nicholas Hilliard’s moody portrait of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland of c.1594–5 showing him lying on his side, propping his head in his hand with a book at his side, is central casting for a melancholy scholar.
The terms used in antiquity to describe mental disturbance do not transpose neatly to a modern world which frames things in psychological or neurological terms. But the idea of ‘melancholia’ in classical medicine encompassed what we would think of now as depression, as well as delusions. The classical definition of ‘melancholia’ was something like ‘sadness’, but it referred to a severe mental disorder rather than the wistful navel-gazing the word can suggest to the modern ear.
Hippocrates diagnosed the ‘melancholic’ as a person with an excess of one of the four basic ‘humors’ – the elements within the human body that determined a person’s temperament and health. In this case, a melancholic patient had too much black bile (μέλας melas: χολή kholé dark/black) and this led to a mental state, above all, characterised by fear and sadness. He defined ‘melancholia’ as a catch-all for mental disturbance, and put what we would think of now as delusions within its remit.
Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, Nicholas Hilliard, miniature c.1595.
Galen of Pergamon, a physician working in the Roman Empire, developed the thinking around melancholia and argued that, along with depressive symptoms, melancholic patients showed bizarre and fixed ideas. ‘There are patients’, he writes in On Affected Parts, ‘who think to have become a sort of snail so that they must escape everyone in order to avoid having their skull crushed.’19 He also wrote about a man gripped by the belief that Atlas, the Titan god and Bearer of the Heavens, is tiring and might drop the world that he had been holding up.
The most evocative classical medical descriptions of delusion were laid down by a contemporary of Galen, Aretaeus, a Greek physician working in the Roman province of Cappadocia (modern Turkey). In his textbook On the Causes and Signs of Diseases he gives examples of melancholic cases where ‘The patient may imagine he has taken another form than his own. One believes himself a sparrow; a cock or an earthen vase; another a God, orator or actor, carrying gravely a stalk of straw and imagining himself holding a sceptre of the World; some utter cries of an infant and demand to be carried in arms, or they believe themselves a grain of mustard, and tremble continuously for fear of being eaten by a hen; some refuse to urinate for fear of causing a new deluge.’20 The severe mental disturbance described here – nightmares of delusionary hallucinations – are a version of melancholia about as far away from the self-indulgent longing evoked by Romantic poets as it’s possible to be. These people have underdone extreme bodily transformation, finding themselves with exaggerated powers and a responsibility to save the world, or rendered powerless as a baby, small animals, even animal fodder.
Again and again melancholics are discussed in relation to their delusions largely because melancholia was believed to damage the imaginative faculty of the brain. It’s also because they are such bizarre and enchanting stories.
We can allow ourselves a little Burtonian digression to note here that Arateaus was the first to describe those who ‘fear that people wish to give them poison and who develop hatred for mankind, flee into solitude or become surreptitiously addicted to religious practices’.21 He names paranoia and delusions of persecution and religiosity, demonstrating just how eternal the most common delusion types and themes have proved to be.
Burton championed a new enthusiasm for going back over classical records, and brought cases from antiquity to the sixteenth-century audience. He throws another story into the mix of a man ‘that thought he had some of Aristophanes’ frogs in his belly, still crying Brecececex, coax, coax, oop, oop, and for that cause studied physic seven years, and travelled over most part of Europe to ease himself’.
One of Burton’s sources tells of a baker in the Italian city of Ferrara who succumbed to melancholy and became convinced that he was made of butter, so that he dared not go near his own oven or sit in the sun in case he melted. Louis XI of France was convinced that everything around him stank, and not even the sweetest smelling perfumes provided for him by doctors could persuade him otherwise. How could Burton resist stories like these? How could anyone? He attempts to coordinate an unwieldy wealth of material and knowledge and create a working compendium, a companion for fellow sufferers into which future generations could dip for help. He spent ten years or so poring over source material before he put pen to paper, and there is a strong sense that his handwriting can’t keep up with the burst dam of accumulated knowledge that continues to spill out.
The Anatomy claims to be a clinical enquiry into a distinct mental disturbance, its causes and cures, but it reads something like a stream-of-consciousness with its disorientating breadth of reference and digressive flourishes – a bit of Shakespeare here, a snippet of Chaucer there – and multiple self-contradictions. Burton continues wrestling the chaos into some order and it’s harder and harder to tell if the chaos is inside or outside of himself.
In a twist on the convention, Burton addresses his thoughts on melancholy directly to us. ‘Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse,’ he tells us, turning the mirror on the reader. Burton asks us to do something potentially uncomfortable: look at our own capacity for delusion.
He dedicates the book to his readers, but he perseveres with the project to keep himself busy. Idleness, he explains, is the chief driver of melancholy. ‘And these my writings, I hope, shall take like gilded pills, which are so composed as well to tempt the appetite and deceive the palate, as to help and medicinally work upon the whole body; my lines shall not only recreate but rectify the mind.’22
The Ashmole Collection at the Bodleian Library in Oxford keeps another notebook significant with regard to Robert Burton and his state of mind. It suggests that as a young man, Burton, an enthusiastic advice-peddler in later life, went to someone else for help. The notebook belongs to one of the biggest stars in the firmament of astrology: Simon Forman. Forman was a renowned physician as well as an astrologer, who practised in and around London in the 1590s and 1600s. The appointments diary for 18 June 1597 records a consultation at 5.40 p.m. Forman received a visit from a ‘Robart Burton of 20 yeres’.23
Robert Burton from Lindley’s date of birth makes him around the right age for him and ‘Robart Burton’ to be one and the same person. Other evidence is circumstantial but compelling: letters suggest that our Robert Burton visited his brother William, who had been admitted to the Inner Temple, in London around this time.24
This ‘casebook’, one of hundreds belonging to Forman in the Ashmole Collection, is a well-thumbed, working notebook. It’s a piece of daily ephemera belonging to a busy astrologer – he gets through them quickly – and it’s covered in Forman’s spidery hand and difficult to decipher.
But there’s his name, next to all sorts of what looks like code related to what transpired when Burton came to see Forman on 18 June 1597. The consulting room was in the Stone House, Billingsgate, on the north side of the Thames in the City of London, the street next to Pudding Lane that will be destroyed by the Great Fire. Elizabeth I is still on the throne.
Forman is more than twice the age of the young man across the desk. He has a full beard and a very prominent brow. As a major celebrity in the field, he’s an intimidating proposition. He’s also famous for curing himself of the plague which went round London four years earlier. Forman performs two thousand of these consultations a year, so the encounter is bread and butter to him. He is a society fixture, who associates with other public figures of the day. He regularly attends performances at the Globe Theatre, for instance, and another diary of his, the Book of Plaies and Notes thereof from 1611 contains first-hand accounts of performances of several of Shakespeare’s plays, including a review of the appearance of Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth and a lively response to Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking. The medical establishment are after Forman − they think he’s a quack − but nevertheless he has a reputation for curing chronic conditions so people mostly bring health problems to him.
A portrait of the astrologer that he commissioned himself hangs on the wall behind his desk. The shelves groan with vellum-bound astrological compendia. In front of Forman is an ‘ephermeris’, a table of planetary motions to which he can refer in order to calculate the positions of the planets at any given time. Forman holds up his pen ready to hear Burton’s problem.
According to the casebook, Forman asks a series of standard questions of the young man consulting him: name, age, complaint, etc.25 Burton reports a general malaise and stomach complaints. He wants something to help with his low mood. Perhaps he already thinks it may be the affliction he has heard so much about: ‘melancholia’.
Forman consults the table of planetary positions, looking for the date and time of the consultation, then he plots this onto a chart of the heavens, divided into the twelve signs of the zodiac, or ‘houses’. The horoscope is calculated by the position of the known planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn – the sun and the moon, in relation to the twelve astral sections. There are different kinds of horoscope. A ‘nativity’ maps the positions of the planets’ time of birth. It might be calculated retrospectively based on events in a person’s life. Other horoscopes are drawn up in answer to the question of when it would be a good time to do something, or a horary question with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, but most commonly they are calculated based on the alignments at the time of asking the question. The position of the stars and planets at first consultation is considered important. This is Burton’s first visit and he is here to ask about his health.
Now Forman reads the horoscope, based on a series of rules about position of planets in houses. Each house represents a particular set of categories: for example, a principle such as ‘life or death’ (eighth house), a concept such as ‘home’ (fourth house) or a relationship (seventh house). The first, sixth and eight houses are the most important in relation to questions of medicine, and the attendance of Saturn or Mars in these houses was considered ominous.
Forman then consults the many volumes of rules which line his shelves. Thousands of configurations of star–planet alignment are possible.
Forman diagnoses melancholy, and prescribes various medicines and purges for his symptoms. Burton listens to the diagnosis and then, just as he’s about to go, Forman throws in another piece of information. The student nods, pays and leaves the Stone House, stumbling out into the street. He takes a coach back to Oxford.
In his popular guide to astrology, Forman stressed the importance of the relationship between the physician and the patient, noting that trust could be as important as any treatment prescribed. His consultations were prescient of the ‘talking cures’ of psychotherapy centuries later. The bundles of casebooks reveal that many people come to him for advice on relationship, and even on sex.
By choosing to stay in London during outbreaks of plague in the early 1590s Forman earned himself a public reputation as a courageous man. His medical successes also attracted the College of Physicians, but not in a good way. They consider him a fraud, and he in turn believed they were persecuting him, the belief escalating to such a degree that he told friends they intended to kill him. He came from a Wiltshire family which had been stripped of its entitlement by the dissolution of the monasteries in the previous generation. He was a self-made man, by way of work as a hosier and grocer’s apprentice.
Before the next client arrives, he writes up the notes from the last consultation.
He begins by listing the patient’s symptoms: ‘grife & coulde a shouting in his veins/pain had belly. a[nd] the blod is stopt & hath not his course. A gret heavines and drowsines in the hed…moch wind in his bowels…he will have a palsey or a quatrain fever.’
He then records what he’s just told the young man: ‘or yt it is of melancholy prepare 3 dais and purge he carrieth death upon him…& will die suddenly’.26
Simon Forman casebook, 28 June 1597. ‘Robart Barton of 20 Yeres…will die suddenly.’
At 5.30 p.m. on 25 June, Burton returns to Forman for a second consultation about the same symptoms: ‘Robarte Burton…second questo, yt is in his hed noz & belly he took 1 of pills.’27
Three further visits are recorded: ‘Robart Burton of 20 yeres 1597 the 21 July…diz himself…moch pain hed & moch wind and melancoly remn roning to the reins & belly & stopping the vains which will cause a fever & vexation of the mind some 17 days hence/…give him a dietary purge for 4 dais/RC 2 he must have yt for 4 dais and pay a noble’;28 ‘Robarte Burton of 22 yeres 1597 the 19 Aug pm…moch stopping in the stomacke and awind in the belly…he is heavy & unlusti and yt pricks in his hed’;29 ‘Robart Burton of 20 yeres the 11 of Octob am… A burning in his hands & knes & a wind in the belly.’30
Burton returned again and again. He’d been told, after careful calculation, that he ‘carrieth death upon him’ and would ‘die suddenly’. But he still went back for more. Forman offered him something with the horoscope that, in his melancholic state, he found useful.
Burton is erratic in the Anatomy; his tone jumps around, his sense of purpose shifting suddenly from light entertainment to a sober warning. He talks about a fearful illness that will creep up on you ‘so by little and little, by that shoe-ing horn of idleness, and voluntary solitariness, melancholy this feral fiend is drawn on’, leaving a ‘cankered soul macerated with cares and discontents’ and, later still, ‘agony’.31 The next minute he raises a sardonic eyebrow at the pointlessness of human activity, particularly the futile misery of scholars trying for years on end to finish their sprawling books. The publishers demanded English but Burton was much more comfortable with Latin. He was well acquainted with the word ‘delusionem’, which brought us the word ‘delusion’ in the sense of mental derangement meaning ‘a deceiving’: the act of misleading someone, deceit. It contains within it the verb ‘ludere’: literally ‘to play’. There is in the very word itself a sense of leading astray, of a twinkle in the eye. Delusions are a guessing game, but very serious messages are smuggled out of something which feels like a sport.
For fifteen years after his first consultation with Forman, Burton lives and works beneath the reference points in the sky that tell him when he should expect this sudden death. It’s easy to imagine how a prediction like that from a charismatic figure like Simon Forman could cast a shadow over a young life, especially over one already menaced by depression.
Around 1603 Burton draws up his own nativity, in his notebook, using Forman’s guide to astrology for direction. He captures a snapshot of the position of the twelve signs of the zodiac in the night sky at the time of his birth. The ‘sign’ rising in the sky became his first house, and the other eleven houses were allocated anti-clockwise, across an ellipsis, relative to that sign.
He consults his ephermeris tables to establish the position of the planets, the sun and the moon, at the time of his birth, and determines which houses they were sitting in. Each house with a theme: ‘health’ or ‘communication’ or ‘home’, for example. Then he starts to analyse the lines which crisscross the chart, showing how the spheres sit in relation to each other. He begins to tease out the subtler meanings. He returns to Forman’s guide for help with the interpretation. The tables tell him when Saturn or Mercury – the most ominous planets – will be in his eighth house. This house relates to matters of life and death. He shouldn’t look, but…
There it is. The planets will cross his eighth house, and signpost a climacteric event. In the year he is sixty-three.
The belief that he will ‘die suddenly’ now has a date in the calendar. Here is a timeframe that he must work within.
No wonder Burton returned to the literature of the classical world, where supernatural forces had the upper hand and the gods played puppet masters to their mortal pawns’ delusional acts. The poets and playwrights gave expression to man’s powerlessness in the order of things. In this world, delusion is a seductive force. The concept is embodied in classical mythology by a vivacious young female in the pantheon of the gods of ancient Greece. ‘Ate’, daughter of Eris and Zeus, is the personified spirit of delusion and blind folly. In Homer’s Iliad, a work of the eighth century BCE, Agamemnon addresses Achilles: ‘Delusion [Ate] is the elder daughter of Zeus, the accursed who deludes all; her feet are delicate and they step not on the firm earth, but she walks the air above men’s heads and leads them astray. She has entangled others before me. Yes, for once even Zeus was deluded, though men say he is the highest one of Gods and mortals.’32
In Apollonius Rhodius’s Hellenic epic ‘Argonautica’, Hera tells Thetis: ‘Even the Gods are sometimes visited by Ate.’33
Nonnus’s fifth-century poem, ‘Dionysiaca’, features Hera, who in her vendetta against Dionysus sends Ate (delusion) to persuade the god’s young lover Ampelos to ride on the back of a bull. In so doing, she plans to bring about his death: ‘Ate, the deathbringing spirit of delusion, saw the bold youth straying on the mountain away from Lyaios during the hunt; and taking the charming form of one of his agemate boys, she addressed Ampelos with a coaxing deceitful speech…’34 In Agamemnon, Aeschylus refers to delusion when he describes the state of the king’s mind after he sacrifices his daughter: ‘But when he put on the harness of Necessity, breathing an impious, unholy, unsanctified turning of mind, then he changed to a dare-anything purpose. For delusion, evil-counselling, wretched source of evils emboldens mortals. So he dared to become a sacrificer of a daughter, and arousal of woman-reprising war, the first offerings for his ships.’35
The golden age in Athens also saw the inner landscape of the ‘psyche’ being mapped for the first time in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, a landscape and cast of characters Freud returned to. Burton brings into his collection examples of the world’s great love stories from literature that look forward to a modern approach to psychological problems. He was applauded centuries later for being ahead of the game by Dr Johnson, Laurence Sterne and the Romantic poets.
But try as he might, he can’t contain his own melancholy. When the time comes to appraise his own career, we don’t hear a stoical scholar, we hear a frustrated man: ‘I am not poor, I am not rich; I have little, I want nothing: all my treasure is in Minerva’s Tower. Preferment I could never get, although my friend’s providence, care, alacritie was never wanting to doe me good, yet either through mine owne default, infelicity, want or neglect of opportunity, or iniquite of times, preposterous proceeding, mine hopes were still frustrate, and I left behind, as a dolphin on shore, as Diogenes to his tubbe.’36
He likens himself to the down-and-out Greek philosopher famous for sleeping on the streets of Athens in a broken barrel, overlooked for promotion. He is resentful, critical of himself, maybe a little paranoid, though he says he’s resigned to his lost hopes. In his sketch of daily life earlier in his career he portrayed himself as ‘sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world’, buried in his work at Christ Church in splendid isolation as he had spent his childhood in Lindley Hall encircled by the moat. He can’t hide from the tumults and troubles in his own mind. The melancholia won’t leave him alone.
The death of Simon Forman is documented by William Lilly, another astrologer. It’s Lilly who will predict the Great Fire of London fifteen years before it happens in a woodcut print portraying his vision of houses and people engulfed in hellish talons of flame.
Lilly slips the story of Forman’s demise into an account of his own life and times. He begins with the gossip – a report that one Sunday afternoon in September 1611, when Forman was fifty-two and living in Lambeth to escape the jurisdiction of the city, he told his wife that he would die the following Thursday night.
[M]onday came, all was well. Tuesday came, he was not sick. Wednesday came, and still he was well: with which his impertinent wife did much twit him in the teeth. Thursday came, and dinner was ended, he very well. He went down to the waterside, and took a pair of oars to go to some buildings he was in-hand with in Puddle dock. Being in the middle of the Thames, he presently fell down, only saying, ‘Am impost, an impost,’ and so died.37
Whatever the truth about any events or conversations in the run-up, Forman was dead. Did news of his death make its way to Burton in Oxford? Did he hear the reports that Forman had predicted the precise time it would occur? Burton is thirty-five years old in 1611. He has been researching melancholy for at least ten years, and living with waves of this debilitating, depressive illness. If Forman could predict his own death, it stood to reason he could predict it for others. He has his horoscope as further evidence. Burton throws himself into the project of containing the subject inside the pages of his book, pushing ahead with the organisational work after a decade of collecting scraps. He publishes the Anatomy ten years later when he is forty-five. The book now stretches to three volumes. There are modifications to the stream-of-consciousness with each subsequent edition reflecting changes in his thinking. He adds material over many years, setting a rolling reading exercise for his audience and offering a practical cure for melancholy for anyone who attempts to keep up with the project. And many did. The Anatomy ran to four further editions by the time of his death, Burton stuffing new case studies, symptoms and cures into each, followed by a sixth posthumous edition in 1652 when it had overflowed again into half a million words. The market was hungry for it and he was paid by Henry Cripps, the publisher, to do the rewrites. Burton’s last will and testament was written just five months before he died when he was by all accounts fit and well. It shows that The Anatomy of Melancholy had made him rich. It found its way onto the influential theologian Richard Holdsworth’s seventeenth-century Cambridge reading list for young gentlemen. The work has orbited the world ever since.
How successful it’s been in helping others wrestle their melancholy into submission is hard to judge, but Burton certainly never got the upper hand over his own. On his memorial Burton gives the last word on his life to melancholy. He organised melancholy and melancholy organised him. The circumstances of Burton’s death are not so clear, mired as they are in centuries of gossip. Burton may not have killed himself at all. The rumour may simply have been Chinese whispers at the university. The fact that Burton was buried in the cathedral makes suicide less likely – it wouldn’t have been allowed − but he does seem to allude to the sin on his memorial there when he says in the epitaph that melancholy gave him death. Likewise, we only have William Lilly’s word for the story around Forman’s death. It is all hearsay.
There’s an anecdote about Burton which gives a clear sense of the tightening grip melancholy had him in. Unable to free himself, and on the rare occasions that he could drag himself away from his work, he apparently had a habit of setting off down to the river to watch the lively goings-on where the barges were moored. A Mr Granger is quoted in the ‘Notes on the Author’ in William Tegg’s 1863 edition of the Anatomy. He says that Burton ‘composed this book with a view of relieving his own melancholy, but increased it to such a degree, that nothing could make him laugh, but going to the bridge-foot and hearing the ribaldry of the bargemen which rarely failed to throw him into a violent fit of laughter’. Burton imitates the laughter of his alter ego Democritus in the face of the follies of mankind. But with only one thing left in the world that could coax a smile out of him, the cynical detachment is unconvincing and the laughter sounds hollow.
His horoscope is useful. A sea of melancholy surrounds him. Here is definition, measurement, logic. Burton wasn’t so much ‘deluded with future events’ as hanging onto them as he might cling to a buoy during a storm. The fixed points of an astral chart serve a life-saving purpose in that context. They are something by which to orientate himself. Astrological reference points orbited his capacious mind for most of his adult life, promising to steer him.
Burton tries to hide behind a satirical literary persona. He seeks sanctuary in scholarship in his beloved Christ Church. A few brief notes from an astrologer’s casebook reveal snapshots of a vulnerable young psyche. A man who wants to make sense of a depressive illness. Maybe these notes are the truest voice of Burton’s that we hear.