In this classic 1935 book, John Dover Wilson critiques Shakespeare's Hamlet.

The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England explores how attitudes toward, and explanations of, human emotions change in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Typically categorized as 'literary' writers Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Robert Burton and John Milton were all active in the period's reappraisal of the single emotion that, due to their efforts, would become the passion most associated with the writing life: melancholy. By emphasising the shared concerns of the 'non-literary' and 'literary' texts produced by these figures, Douglas Trevor asserts that quintessentially 'scholarly' practices such as glossing texts and appending sidenotes shape the methods by which these same writers come to analyse their own moods. He also examines early modern medical texts, dramaturgical representations of learned depressives such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the opposition to materialistic accounts of the passions voiced by Neoplatonists such as Edmund Spenser.

A detailed study of John Keats's classic volume of poetry published in 1820 considered in the light of the history of melancholyFirst, book-length critical study of John Keats's collection of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820)Considers the anthology as a poetically and thematically unified collection, instead of the more usual method of analyzing the poems in chronological order of writingProposes that the main theme running through the volume is melancholy, a very capacious medical category extending back to ancient Greco-Roman writers, through the Renaissance, and the subject of literary cults in the Romantic ageThe first detailed study of Keats's markings and annotations on his copy of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) which was his favourite book during 1819 when he was writing the poemsThis book examines John Keats's immensely important collection of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820), and is published in the volume's bicentenary. It analyses the collection as an authorially organised and multi-dimensionally unified volume rather than as a collection of occasional poems. R. S. White argues that a guiding theme behind the 1820 volume is the persistent emphasis on different types of melancholy, an ancient, all-consuming medical condition and literary preoccupation in Renaissance and Romantic poetry. Melancholy was a lifelong interest of Keats's, touching on his medical training, his temperament and his delighted reading in 1819 of Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy.

By Shakespeare's time, the debate over legitimate medical practice had become vociferous and public. The powerful College of Physicians fought hard to discredit some and rein in others, but many resisted, denied, or ignored its authority. Dramatists did not fail to notice the turmoil, nor did they fail to comment on it - and no one commented more profoundly on stage than William Shakespeare. Going beyond the usual questions posed about Shakespeare and medicine, this study, which won the first Jay L. Halio Prize in Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies, explores Shakespeare's response to the early modern struggle for control of English medical practice. It does not rehearse the fundamentals of early modern medical thought such as the humoral system that have been more than adequately covered numerous times elsewhere. Instead, it undertakes a reading of popular English medical tracts in an effort to reconstruct the terms in which medical practitioners of all kinds were understood. injury were busy hearing such stories, and in a time of spectacular outbreaks of infectious disease, in a time of religious transition, and in a time of shifting modes of political power, such stories held especial fascination. Todd Pettigrew is an Associate Professor Cape Breton University.

On the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Boston Studies series in 1985, Cohen, Elkana, and Wartofsky wrote in another preface such as this that the time had come for establishing institutions supporting a vision to which the series had been devoted since its inception, namely that of a more broadly conceived, interdisciplinary study of the history and philosophy of science: In recent years it has become evident that, in addition to serious and competent disciplinary work on the specifics of the History of Science, the Philosophy of Science and the Sociology of Science, there is now a growing need to develop a problem oriented approach which no longer distinguishes between these three specialties in a cut and dried way. Since the time has come for such an approach, the institutional tools should be provided. A way to do so would be . . . to organize colloquia and to publish good papers stemming from these, without attempting to organize the papers under the separate rubrics of History of Philosophy or Sociology of Science; and moreover to consider it natural that any fundamental issue of the foundations of the sciences, or their place in a culture and the way they are institutionalized in the societal web, is still our concern, no matter whether we are a professional scientist, historian or philosopher who deals with the problem (p. vii).

Early Modern Emotions is a student-friendly introduction to the concepts, approaches and sources used to study emotions in early modern Europe, and to the perspectives that analysis of the history of emotions can offer early modern studies more broadly. The volume is divided into four sections that guide students through the key processes and practices employed in current research on the history of emotions. The first explains how key terms and concepts in the study of emotions relate to early modern Europe, while the second focuses on the unique ways in which emotions were conceptualized at the time. The third section introduces a range of sources and methodologies that are used to analyse early modern emotions. The final section includes a wide-ranging selection of thematic topics covering war, religion, family, politics, art, music, literature and the non-human world to show how analysis of emotions may offer new perspectives on the early modern period more broadly. Each section offers bite-sized, accessible commentaries providing students new to the history of emotions with the tools to begin their own investigations. Each entry is supported by annotated further reading recommendations pointing students to the latest research in that area and at the end of the book is a general bibliography, which provides a comprehensive list of current scholarship. This book is the perfect starting point for any student wishing to study emotions in early modern Europe.

There is a persistent myth about the British: that we are a nation of stoics, with stiff upper lips, repressed emotions, and inactive lachrymal glands. Weeping Britannia - the first history of crying in Britain - comprehensively debunks this myth. Far from being a persistent element in the 'national character', the notion of the British stiff upper lip was in fact the product of a relatively brief and militaristic period of our past, from about 1870 to 1945. In earlier times we were a nation of proficient, sometimes virtuosic moral weepers. To illustrate this perhaps surprising fact, Thomas Dixon charts six centuries of weeping Britons, and theories about them, from the medieval mystic Margery Kempe in the early fifteenth century, to Paul Gascoigne's famous tears in the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup. In between, the book includes the tears of some of the most influential figures in British history, from Oliver Cromwell to Margaret Thatcher (not forgetting George III, Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, and Winston Churchill along the way). But the history of weeping in Britain is not simply one of famous tear-stained individuals. These tearful micro-histories all contribute to a bigger picture of changing emotional ideas and styles over the centuries, touching on many other fascinating areas of our history. For instance, the book also investigates the histories of painting, literature, theatre, music and the cinema to discover how and why people have been moved to tears by the arts, from the sentimental paintings and novels of the eighteenth century and the romantic music of the nineteenth, to Hollywood weepies, expressionist art, and pop music in the twentieth century. Weeping Britannia is simultaneously a museum of tears and a philosophical handbook, using history to shed new light on the changing nature of Britishness over time, as well as the ever-shifting ways in which we express and understand our emotional lives. The story that emerges is one in which a previously rich religious and cultural history of producing and interpreting tears was almost completely erased by the rise of a stoical and repressed British empire in the late nineteenth century. Those forgotten philosophies of tears and feeling can now be rediscovered. In the process, readers might perhaps come to view their own tears in a different light, as something more than mere emotional incontinence.