A term you'll meet in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
When Hamlet describes himself as melancholy, a modern reader hears "sad." A 1600 audience heard something much more specific: a medical diagnosis, a temperament, and a fashionable pose all at once.
Shakespeare's England inherited Greek humoral medicine. Health was thought to depend on the balance of four fluids in the body:
Black bile was thought to come from the spleen. An excess produced melancholia: a constitutional state of cold, dry heaviness with specific physical symptoms — dark complexion, weight loss, insomnia, obsessive thought.
So when Hamlet says he has "lost all my mirth," he is not just feeling down. He is describing himself as clinically melancholic, a recognized condition that an Elizabethan physician would have tried to treat with diet and bleeding.
Beyond the medical, melancholy was also understood as a type of mind. Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621, just twenty years after Hamlet) catalogues hundreds of variants: love melancholy, religious melancholy, scholarly melancholy.
The "melancholy scholar" was a recognizable Renaissance archetype: a young man who reads too much, thinks too much, sleeps poorly, and broods on death. Hamlet, just back from his studies at Wittenberg, fits the type exactly. The 1600 audience would have recognized the silhouette immediately.
By Shakespeare's time, melancholy had also become a pose. Young gentlemen at the Inns of Court cultivated it. Black clothes, sighs, broken sentences, sudden departures — these were affectations as much as symptoms. Shakespeare mocks the pose in As You Like It through Jaques, who is famously and tediously melancholic by choice.
Hamlet sits between the genuine and the fashionable. He is grieving. He has seen a ghost. But he also knows how a melancholy prince is supposed to behave, and he uses the role — strategically — to buy himself time while he investigates his father's murder. The black clothes are real grief; they are also a costume.
Whenever a character in Hamlet uses the word "melancholy" (or "distemper," "humour," "vapor"), keep three readings in mind:
Polonius and Claudius shift between all three readings, often within the same scene. Reading "melancholy" as simply "sad" flattens the play and misses its central question: is Hamlet ill, philosophical, performing, or all three at once?
Lexio is a free Chrome extension and web app that reads a word's actual context and tells you what it means in this sentence, not from a generic dictionary.
Try Lexio — free →
Read deeper. Understand everything.
© 2026 Lexio · Privacy · Credits