The Melancholy Dane

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“To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there's the rub: For in this sleep of death what dreams may come...” (Shakespeare 278) reflects Prince Hamlet in his famous “to be, or not to be” melancholic soliloquy. In Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Hamlet’s declamations are filled with melancholia, which was an extremely common mood among the literal and intellectual characters of the Elizabethan’s times. One of them, Robert Burton, wrote its greatest depiction in his popular Anatomy of Melancholia at the beginning of the 1600’s. Burton’s work is believed to had been significant to Shakespeare in the sense that it pinpointed the common stereotype of the melancholic individual and, furthermore, delivered the measuring stick Shakespeare’s audiences would have used in their analysis of his more “dismal” characters. Shakespeare’s best work and mother of modern psychology uncovered the veil to one of the most melancholic characters in the history of literature after presenting Hamlet as a picture of a tortured, miserable young man who loses his path in the labyrinth of his sorrowful t...

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