The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Early Medicine
- Author / Editor
- Heffernan, Carol Falvo.
The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Early Medicine
- Published
- Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 1995.
- Physical Description
- xiv, 185 pp.
- Description
- Summarizes medieval and Renaissance attitudes toward melancholy as a medical disorder and examines literary uses of melancholy in BD, TC, and Shakespeare's "As You Like It" and "Hamlet."
- BD reflects Chaucer's close familiarity with medical scholarship on melancholy and the related disease of lovesickness, from which the narrator of the poem and the Black Knight suffer.
- Heffernan's analysis of TC (a revision of her essay in Neophil 74 (1990): 294-309) also addresses "hereos," or lovesickness, and the way it is "an integral part of the imaginative structure" of the poem.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Book of the Duchess.
- Troilus and Criseyde.