DEATH AND MELANCHOLIA IN HAMLET, OTHELLO, AND ROMEO AND JULIET
by
Fatemeh Namaei
B.A., Karaj Azad University, 2008
M.A., Alborz Institute of Higher Education, 2013

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
IN
ENGLISH

UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA
July 2019
© Fatemeh Namaei, 2019

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Abstract

This thesis analyzes the effects of love and melancholia on male and female characters along
with their responses to melancholia which fluctuate among choler, revenge, murder, suicide,
homicide, madness, never-ending mourning, and lovesickness in Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo
and Juliet. My analysis draws on a composite theoretical framework that combines new
historicist or cultural materialist perspectives and psychoanalytic approach, focusing on Sigmund
Freud’s conceptualization of mourning and melancholia and Julia Kristeva’s meditations on
depression and melancholia. Having examined these three plays in terms of their creative
symptomatology revealed in the characters’ melancholic dispositions––thus viewing
Shakespeare as creative symptomatologist, I arrived at establishing a range of gendered
melancholic states, namely love melancholia, virgin melancholy or greensickness, and choleric
melancholia. Furthermore, while in Shakespearean dramatic universe the cure for individual
melancholia is administered, stereotypically, through marriage and sex, the suffering from social
melancholia can be resolved in nothing but death.

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Table of Contents
Abstract

ii

Table of Contents

iii

Acknowledgments

iv

Introduction

1

Chapter One

Gendering Melancholic Nature in Hamlet

15

Chapter Two

Bonds of Love and Melancholia in Othello

43

Chapter Three

The Interrelationship Between Death and
Melancholia in Romeo and Juliet

69

Conclusions

96

Works Cited

101

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to a number of individuals without whose support I
could have never accomplished my thesis.
First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to my dearly loved parents for their unfailing devotion
and support in my aspirations. I am also thankful to my husband and my siblings for their love and
encouragement in every phase of my life.
The last but not the least, I am grateful to my supervisors, Dr. Lisa Dickson and Dr. Maryna
Romanets, who guided me step by step and provided me with their invaluable and perceptive
remarks endlessly throughout this thesis. Special thanks are owed to Dr. Dana Wessell Lightfoot,
my advisory committee member, for her thorough reading of my thesis.
I would like to dedicate my thesis to my little daughter, Artemis, who is the fruit of my love
and the apple of my eye.

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Introduction

According to John Drakakis, all discussions regarding tragedy, be it Shakespearean or any other,
sooner or later, get back to Aristotle and to the universal and problematical source of tragic
conflict, but also, more precisely, to the question of the affective power of tragedy (1). For
example, what is it in Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet that does not stop affecting us,
even long after the historical specificity of these plays has been obscured (Drakakis 1)? In many
respects, these considerations are obscured by the theory of tragedy, leading to other questions
which are rooted in a familiar Aristotelian model (Drakakis 2), questions such as the following:
can the origin of tragic experience itself be considered as metaphysical or anthropological, and
how is it possible for the theatrical representation of death and catastrophe, as found in
Shakespearean tragedies, to produce the kind of pleasure in the audience that these tragic plays
continue to affect them (Drakakis 2)? Addressing these questions, I endeavor to look at
Shakespearean characters’ states of mind along with their influence and significance, and their
mutual effects on one another. Indeed, in addition to death and melancholia that seem to be
inseparable from the tragic flow of the life of these Shakespearean characters, there is also a
special type of similarity among all male and female characters in the three aforementioned
Shakespearean tragedies, which is undoubtedly their subtle or even direct effect on their own
tragic destiny and the fate of characters around them. This thesis analyzes important melancholic
male and female characters and their mental and spiritual influence on their counterparts in
Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet.
My fundamental reason for including tragedies draws on the argument presented by George
Steiner. Steiner explains that the concept of tragedy involves a narrative of violence and also, he

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emphasizes, what he describes as the re-portrayal of “private anguish on a public stage,”
claiming that it would appear to address a particular and problematic vision of the place of the
human in a metaphysical order (3). To this extent, tragedy as a dramatic form may be believed to
fulfill a cognitive function in so far as it offers us a knowledge of ourselves (Drakasis 2).
Moreover, the idea behind examining melancholia in these plays is that all leading characters—
men and women—within these tragedies experience the melancholic temperament at some
particular points in their lives and their melancholic nature is very well defined as influential in
their ultimate fate—death—as the tragedy moves forward.
Literature Review
It is true that psychologists speak of the broken heart hypothesis as the main cause behind
such grief which may lead to melancholy or even mortality (Heaton 1337-8). The concepts of
death and dying have always been intertwined with the concept of melancholia since, if someone
loses the meaning of life, they can easily lose the life itself due to the fact that when the meaning
of living is fragmented, then life no longer is important to the depressed individuals who might
even unknowingly fall to the state of melancholia (Kristeva 6). In the characters created by
Shakespeare in his plays and long narrative poems, there are similar episodes often involving
actual loss of consciousness, and even several cases of sudden death, all occasioned by strong
emotion (Heaton 1335). According to Kenneth W. Heaton, these characters undergo both mental
changes, usually considering themselves as real philosophers, and bodily changes induced by
emotion (1335). Also, one argument for the broken heart hypothesis is the increased incidence of
suicide after bereavement and here, again, Shakespeare has something to contribute, in the
reported fates of Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Ophelia.

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Human emotions, in Steven Mullaney’s words, “are no more free from historical and cultural
structures than are genders or ideologies or gestures” (140); that is to say, “emotions and other
forms of human feelings have a history, or rather histories, since the differences traced by
cultural historians, historical psychologists, and anthropologists must be charted along specific
cultural, regional, communal, and geopolitical axes as well as temporal ones” (140). In
Mullaney’s words, “when dealing with a contemporaneous or ‘living’ culture, an anthropologist
may not only be able to discriminate between a wink and a blink, but may also be able to
postulate with some success, through interviews with informants, the ‘structures of feeling’ that
invest ostensibly common or shared human emotions with cultural difference” (140). Central to
these emotions is melancholy. In her book, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Julia
Kristeva addresses the subject of melancholia, examining this phenomenon in the context of art,
literature, philosophy, the history of religion and culture, through the lens of psychoanalysis.
Kristeva describes the depressive as one who perceives the sense of self as a crucial pursuit and a
nearly unattainable goal and explains how losing a beloved one lies at the very core of
depression’s dark heart (8). Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia takes the view that
depression is a discourse with a language to be learned, rather than strictly a pathology to be
treated. I agree with Kristeva on this point that melancholy involves losing the meaning of life:
“Hence if the meaning of life is lost, life can easily be lost: when meaning shatters, life no longer
matters. In his doubtful moments the depressed person is a philosopher” (Kristeva 6). According
to her, this perception of melancholia, which can be looked upon as an extreme state as well as a
uniqueness that divulges the true nature of being, undergoes a deep transformation within the
Middle Ages (Kristeva 8). From Kristeva’s point of view, “the terms melancholia and depression
refer to a composite that might be called melancholy/depressive, whose borders are in fact

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blurred, and within which psychiatrists ascribe the concept of melancholia to the illness that is
irreversible on its own” (10).
According to Bridget Gellert, the concept of melancholy in the Renaissance was complex;
however, as can be seen even in the multiple references of the graveyard scene of Hamlet, an
important basic duality in it has now been made familiar to us by scholars of the subject (59).
Gellert believes that, on the one hand, Galenic medical tradition defined melancholy as the
humor whose coldness and dryness were inimical to life, as the most difficult of the
temperaments and, at worst, a dangerous disease requiring alleviations and cures. On the other
hand, by extension and elaboration of an Aristotelian maxim, melancholy was considered the
temperament of people exceptionally gifted in politics and the arts (58-59).
The melancholy temper proliferates throughout Elizabethan literature. In Shakespeare’s plays,
the melancholic figures are easily recognized. In As You Like It, while Jaques constantly reminds
Duke Senior and his cohorts of all their reasons to be unhappy in the forest, they have a positive
attitude toward their exile to the forest of Arden (Fahey 10). Here, the comic relief introduced by
ridiculing the notion of the melancholy temperament is served by Jaques, acting to frustrate the
sanguine characters of the play, particularly Rosalind (Fahey 10). Nevertheless, this temperament
did not always raise laughter. Ruth L. Anderson asserts that “melancholy, sometimes called
black choler, is earthy and gross, thick, black, and sour” (34).
In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton explains that melancholic people are
consumed by “irresolution, inconstancy, [and] vanity of mind” and that “their fear, torture, care,
jealousy, suspicion, etc., continue and they cannot be relieved” of the grief and sorrow they are
suffering from (139). In line with this argument, Hamlet in Act II, Scene II remarks that
The spirit that I have seen

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May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: I’ll have grounds
More relative than this: the play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.
(2.2.52-9)
Considering the above soliloquy, one can deduce that Hamlet is totally undecided in recognizing
the Ghost’s identity, and one might sense Hamlet’s fear, self-torture, suspicion, and sorrow in his
indecisiveness. Besides, one would assume that Hamlet is completely undermining the stability
of his own mind by attributing devilish identity to the spirit, and weakness, and melancholy to
himself. All in all, Hamlet, as the hero of this tragedy, suffers. He is in far too much mental
agony. In his book, Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud states that
The hero of the tragedy must suffer; to this day that remains the essence of a tragedy. He
had to bear the burden of what was known as tragic guilt; the basis of that guilt is not
always easy to find, for in the light of our everyday life it is no guilt at all. As a rule it lay
in rebellion against some divine or human authority; and the Chorus accompanied the
Hero with feelings of sympathy, sought to hold him back, to warn him and to sober him,
and mourned over him when he had met with what was felt as the merited punishment for
his rash undertaking. (218)
Furthermore, melancholy that is the most referenced temperament is also the most frequently
mentioned mental illness in Elizabethan literature (Overholser 344). In Early Modern England,

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the word “psychiatry” did not exist; however, types of people suffering from mental illness were
nonetheless categorized “as maniacs, as melancholics, as suffering from phrenitis, frenzy,
lunacy, or demoniacal possessions” (Overholser 335). Melancholy was classified among several
types of mental illness and was taken very seriously. Melancholy was linked to madness and
associated with the effects of insanity, including hallucinations and frenzies (Fahey 15).
Overholser states that “it was generally believed also that the melancholy individual was
particularly subject to demonic influence” (343). Thus, expanding on such an idea, I endeavor to
look at the mental and spiritual struggles of some melancholic tragic heroes and heroines—
Hamlet, Othello, Romeo, Ophelia, Desdemona, and Juliet—and the way in which these
characters are mutually affected mentally and spiritually by the presence of one another in the
plays. Indeed, I found a similarity among all the aforementioned male and female characters: all
of them at some points of their tragic lives have to struggle with melancholy.
Conceptual Framework
To demonstrate the melancholic tragic protagonists’ states of minds requires defining the idea
of melancholy. Thus, the definition of melancholy through the lens of Kristeva’s idea of
melancholy as well as that of Freud’s theory of melancholy and mourning will be presented, and
all of aspects regarding theses characters’ state of mind and spirit will be discussed based on
them. For Freud, Hamlet, for instance, as a melancholic tragic hero, diagrams the development of
suppressed mental material in a displaced form (Drakakis 4). According to John Drakakis,
Shakespeare intends to infect spectators with the same illness in order for them to follow its
course along with the tragic protagonist (4). In this way, the audience is collectively encouraged
to sympathize and even empathize with the tragic hero, to go through the same experience as a
figure such as Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo in order to reach a point where the working out of the

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character’s obsession in the play produces a certain relief of tension in the audience (Drakakis 4).
In his important essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” by linking the two concepts, Freud
suggests that “the Melancholia, whose definition fluctuates even in descriptive psychiatry, takes
on various clinical forms the grouping together of which into a single unity does not seem to be
established with certainty; and some of these forms suggest somatic rather than psychogenic
affections” (243). He continues in this way that by the general picture of the two conditions of
melancholia and mourning, the correlation between these two seems reasonable (Freud 243).
Moreover, the existing causes due to environmental influences are, so far as we can distinguish
them at all, quite similar for both conditions (Freud 243). Mourning is regularly the reaction to
the loss of a loved person or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one,
such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on (Freud 243). In some people, the same
influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a
pathological disposition. It is also well worth noticing that, although mourning involves grave
departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological
condition and to refer it to medical treatment. We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse
of time, and we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful (Freud 243-244).
Besides, Freud argues that “the distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly
painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition
of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in
self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment”
(244). One might ascertain that all of Freud’s aforementioned characteristics delineate the mental
and spiritual states of the leading characters in Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet carefully
and clearly. In juxtaposition with Freud’s attitudes toward melancholy and mourning, Kristeva,

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in Black Sun, offers a scientific definition of the phenomenon when she refers to melancholia as
“the institutional symptomatology of inhibition and asymbolia that becomes established now and
then with the manic phase of exaltation” (9). In fact, Kristeva, in her explanation, attempts to
“address an abyss of awe and sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a
long-time basis, lays claim upon the depressed individuals to the extent of having them lose all
interest in words, actions, and even life itself” (3). As opposed to Kristeva, Christian Riegel
expresses reservations about “the application of contemporary theory to Renaissance texts in
favour of a more historical, contextualized approach” (55). Whereas, as Zlavoj Žižek wittily
observes, “history has to be read retroactively: the anatomy of man offers the key to the anatomy
of the ape, as Marx put it” (89). Thus, in addition to historical analysis that some scholars
consider to be the only valid approach in Renaissance studies, I am using psychoanalysis because
I believe that a combination of both psychoanalytical and new historicist or cultural materialist
perspectives is productive and I, therefore, intend to deploy this composite theoretical framework
in my discussion of the three Shakespearean tragedies. I think that, by applying both
psychoanalytical and historical ideas to Shakespeare’s characters, we can better understand their
mental struggles and appreciate the reason why the melancholy temperament causes them to
think when they should act, or conversely, to act when they should think.
Chapter One
In this chapter, I focus on Hamlet’s state of melancholy, as one example for the broken heart
hypothesis, in order to address the question: What is the relationship between Hamlet’s
melancholic nature and his hesitation in avenging his father’s death and in what ways is
Hamlet’s multifaceted character affected by two female leading characters in this process? In
Early Modern England, a melancholy temperament bore serious consequences (Fahey 10). In

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Hamlet, the leading character is constantly worried and anxious about matters that infuriate him
deeply throughout the tragedy: He suffers greatly from the recent loss of his father, the recent
and hasty remarriage of his mother to his uncle, and his uncontrolled love affair with Ophelia.
The other characters consider him mad, and struggle to discover the reason behind his madness.
The emotional upset makes Hamlet worry, hesitate, and question everything. Ultimately, this
emotional upset destroys him and all people around him. Death is Hamlet’s end of the story.
Thus, it can be deduced that death and melancholy are two inseparable motifs within the tragedy
of Hamlet. Andrew C. Bradley, who was the first scholar to discuss Hamlet as a melancholic
tragic hero, asserts that “by temperament [Hamlet] was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid
and perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood” (110). In actual fact, melancholy has such a
big effect on Hamlet throughout the play that all his actions during the play are affected by this
spirit, making him embark upon actions that are as unsteady as his mind, in the way that, as
Bradley claims, “the whole story [of Hamlet] turns upon the peculiar character of the hero” (89).
In his What Happens in Hamlet?, Dover J. Wilson studies Hamlet’s melancholy in the light of
Renaissance beliefs to which Shakespeare seems to have been indebted for a number of ideas as
well as turns of phrase. Significantly, Wilson’s definition operates on a more descriptive level as
he states that the melancholy man was not only “prone to spectral visitations,” but was also
aggravated in his condition by thwarted ambition; further, he “ponders and debates long, and
does not act until his blood is up: then acts vigorously” (207). Therefore, we can reasonably
agree on the point that a knowledge of the contemporary corpus of doctrines and beliefs is
important for an understanding of Hamlet’s character and motivation, in which the thread of
melancholy evidently connects several important elements (Stabler 207).

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Now, what is Ophelia to Hamlet, indeed, and what is her role in shaping Hamlet’s destiny—
death? In order to find the best answer to the above question, a combination of questions
regarding Ophelia’s rather complicated character needs to be answered, “if her madness is to be
explained” (Camden 247). Ophelia’s character is closely intertwined with the concept of
madness the same as Hamlet’s character that is inseparable from the concept of melancholia.
After all, Ophelia’s character is rather insignificant until the mad Ophelia appears on the stage.
Therefore, answering some questions in relation to her madness would help elucidate some
crucial points with regard to her character: “Is her madness occasioned by her father’s death? by
her rejected love for Hamlet? or by both, in varying degrees?” (Camden 247). Thus, the second
part of this chapter focuses on this important woman and the complex interaction between her
and her male counterpart, Hamlet, on one hand and the relationship between her madness and his
melancholia on the other hand. The second part of this chapter also takes a brief look at another
important woman in Hamlet’s life, the Queen Gertrude, whose hasty marriage in juxtaposition
with the king’s death is one of the two main reasons that are to blame for her son’s “distemper”
(2.2.55): “I doubt it is no other but the main— / His father’s death and our o’erhasty marriage”
(2.2.56-7).
Chapter Two
This chapter scrutinizes whether the conception of melancholia is applicable to Othello,
Desdemona and their matrimonial relationship. According to Perry D. Guevara, “the human
condition is predicated on this precarious interdependence: we live for each other at the risk of
losing each other” (1). Now, the question is why Desdemona’s life leads her to a sudden and
unexpected death by the person who is most unlikely to end her life, and probably most afraid of
losing her. Desdemona is a decent woman who loves Othello and is loved by him. The person

10

who kills her is her own husband for whom she makes the biggest sacrifices. She abandons her
own aristocratic father because she is deeply in love with Othello. Then, what is the reason
behind Othello’s violent act against his beloved wife especially after what Desdemona has done
for him? What happens to Othello during his particular journey from being a lover to becoming a
cold-blooded murderer? Is this Othello’s potential melancholy that makes him so vulnerable and
easy to be beguiled? Is he admittedly melancholic at the time of suffocating his wife or before or
after that? Is this the potential melancholy within him that becomes choleric as soon as the
physical proof of his wife’s betrayal, the handkerchief, gets revealed? As Freud suggests, a
melancholic person and the one who is engaged with profound mourning share the same reaction
to the loss of a loved one, “the same painful frame of mind,” and “the same loss of interest in the
outside world” (244). Unquestionably, Othello’s deep mourning for his wife exhibits his
melancholic state of mind: “the same traits [found in melancholia] are met with in mourning”
(Freud 244).
Analyzing Desdemona’s behavior, one can assume that she also experiences melancholy in
her journey of life. Gail Kern Paster’s analysis of Desdemona emphatically sheds some light on
this assumption: “the journeys of figures such as Rosalind and Desdemona from maidenhood to
the heterosexual enclosure of marriage are marked by dramatic emotional changes from sadness
and inactivity to a bald adventurousness hardly predictable from their first appearances” (86).
With regard to Desdemona’s nature of melancholia, I agree with Douglas Trevor and Paster who,
in order to provide a historical context by which to explain the remarkable alterations of women
like Desdemona, put emphasis on the Early Modern period’s idea of “virgin melancholy,” also
known as the “green sickness,” based on which the virgin’s body could literally get poisoned by
itself via producing more blood than the heart could hold (113). This poisoning could be resolved

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by marriage because marriage provides the virgin body with “an opportunity to copulate and so
unburden the heart of the surplus” (Trevor 113). Thus, Desdemona’s character somehow
transforms from a reserved virgin, in the beginning of the play, to a surprisingly audacious and
powerful woman after marriage, only to become reserved again and even so accepting her fate,
by the end of the play (Trevor 113). Paster accounts Desdemona’s withdrawal from her furious
husband as a “retreat to that earlier affective state of female pallor and reluctance associated with
the unmarried woman” (113). Terrified by her enraged husband, and by the nature of marriage
itself after experiencing that, Desdemona throws herself back at her premarried status, making
her body and soul comply with its earlier lethargic melancholy (Trevor 113). Therefore,
Desdemona is released from the virgin melancholy only temporarily at the beginning of Othello
and she, due to the circumstances, has to project herself back into her melancholic state again. As
a matter of fact, melancholy seems to be inseparable from her destiny and her conjugal
relationship with Othello.
Chapter Three
This chapter looks at the way the conception of melancholia is applicable to Romeo and Juliet
and the nature of their love. I also study and analyze the role of death in Romeo and Juliet in this
chapter. According to Paul N. Siegel, Romeo and Juliet is a drama of fate or of sheer misfortune
in which the lovers are not at all responsible for the catastrophe they suffer (371). In Tales of
Love, Kristeva considers Romeo and Juliet as wholly Shakespearean on account of death’s
inherent occurrence within love (212). She refers to death as an ultimate orgasm or a full night,
waiting for the end of the play (215). She believes that when death appears in the text as such
and not simply as an allusion, it is a death that mistakes its object (214). Shakespeare’s play does
not attempt to present a simple image of naïve romance cut down in full bloom by the sudden

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appearance of death (MacKenzie 23). Its journey is more complex and, perhaps, more perplexing
than that (MacKenzie 23). The play’s thesis, in my point of view, is built upon the
interrelationship between death and melancholia, summarized, for instance, in Romeo’s
melancholic nature since his first appearance in the play. One might assume that Romeo’s
reluctance to take part in the games of feud between the two households introduces him as a selfinvolved, melancholic person. Romeo, emphatically, appears on the stage as a lover and proves
himself as a melancholy lover through his subsequent acts in the play, especially the ones after
his first encounter with Juliet.
Juliet, as another side of this zealous and yet dangerous love, is not standing so far from
melancholy. I believe that the Early Modern conception of “virgin melancholy,” or the “green
sickness,” is also applicable to Juliet in the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. The “green sickness”
(Trevor 113) could be the most compelling illustration of how the sudden arrival of Romeo
makes Juliet, similarly to Desdemona, transform from a demure virgin sunk in lethargic
melancholy to the most passionate lover that ever existed at the time. Assuming that Juliet is
potentially suffering from virgin melancholy, an aptitude for alteration could be considered for
her and the appearance of Romeo in her life gives Juliet a space for her sexual arousal and her
self-progression “from adolescence to womanhood” (Scott 138). In spite of the fact that
Shakespeare’s female lead “hath not seen the change of fourteen years” (1.2.9), critics argue that
Juliet’s way of using language would have made it easy for an Elizabethan audience to “grasp
her sexual knowledge and her consciousness of carnal desire” (Bly 99). All things considered, I
believe that Juliet’s eternal melancholia gets hidden by her engagement with Romeo’s love
throughout the play, but at the end of their tragic tale of love, it is the same reticent and yet
powerful melancholia that leads her to death. Therefore, there seems to be nothing but death to

13

be able to transport the young, melancholic lovers from fatal melancholy into the secure realm of
everlasting bliss.

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Chapter One
Gendering Melancholic Nature in Hamlet
How long will a man lie i’th’earth ere he rot?
(5.1.154)

When studying William Shakespeare’s plays and focusing on the effects of female characters on
the male leading characters, one might assume that, except for a few illustrious women, most
female characters did not have such great effects on men in his plays. It can be ascertained that
Hamlet’s multifaceted character is affected by two female leading characters, Gertrude and
Ophelia, throughout the process Hamlet undergoes in the play. I believe that a focus on Gertrude
and Ophelia—as the only female leading characters in the play—can be an efficient way of
understanding Hamlet’s paradoxical character; furthermore, it can help to shed some light on
Hamlet’s hesitation in avenging his father’s death.
Hamlet’s temperament changes throughout the play. The revengeful, daring Hamlet at the end
is not the same reticent version of him we see at the beginning. In fact, if we divided the play
into two parts, before and after “The Mousetrap,” Hamlet’s change of temperament would be
more understandable. For the first half of the play, Hamlet displays the characteristics of a
sentimental, immature young woman “in constitution and in conduct” (Garret 3). That is why he
shows hesitation and fear over matters that are there to lead him toward his destiny, and this sort
of hesitation and fear is clear in Hamlet’s lines as he takes time to come to believe in the Ghost
of his father:
The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil, and the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
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Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me.

(2.2.587-92)

Hamlet, who is suffering from melancholia during the first half of the play, displays more
feminine features. Camden speaks about prevailing gender understanding in Shakespeare’s time
when she asserts that men are more likely to act but women are more inclined to lethargy and
idleness (19). Hamlet is unwilling to embark upon any sort of serious actions until his
melancholia—the source of his “indolence and laziness” (Camden 19)—turns into choler.
Attributing female characteristics to Hamlet makes his delay in avenging his father’s murder
even more justifiable because, after all, he is imprisoned within his own fears and hesitations just
as a feminine nature orders him to be wandering aimlessly in the state of indecisiveness. He just
waits for the irritation and anxiety to subside and when the tension eventually fades a bit, he
attempts to find an appropriate time for his act of vengeance to be embarked upon.
Now the question is whether Hamlet bears any misogynist rage against the female characters
in the play and if so, how can we justify his fury against his mother, Gertrude, and even more
importantly, the love of his life, Ophelia? Besides, how does it stand to reason that this character
is misogynist and at the same time shows feminine characteristics himself? First of all, the
question is whether Hamlet sincerely loves Ophelia in the first place, or he desperately pretends
he is in love with her as a part of his clandestine plan. If he loves her truly, why does he abstain
from her? If it is just a big lie, why does he get so distraught at her funeral that he rails at Laertes
at Ophelia’s grave?:
What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wand’ring stars, and makes them stand
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Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.

(5.1.244-8)

And a little bit later on, he even shouts his love for Ophelia and one would say he even
exaggerates his love for her (if there is any) and simultaneously humiliates Laertes’ brotherly
affection for his sister:
I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum—What wilt thou do for her?

(5.1.260-2)

What is Ophelia to Hamlet, indeed, and what is her role in leading Hamlet to his destiny—death?
One might assume that Hamlet’s love and affection for Ophelia have something to do with
Ophelia’s madness. According to Camden, Ophelia, “as a minor personage of the tragedy,”
seems to have remained a puzzle to numerous critics who have written about the play (247),
perhaps because her role in the play has never been unambiguous to critics who have attempted
to answer the countless questions which exist around Ophelia’s character and her relations with
her father, Polonius, and with her lover, Hamlet: “questions which must be answered if her
madness is to be explained” (Camden 247). Just as Hamlet’s character is inseparable from the
concept of melancholia, Ophelia’s character is tightly intertwined with the notion of madness.
After all, Ophelia’s “minor” (Camden 247) character becomes major as soon as the mad Ophelia
appears on the stage. Therefore, answering some questions vis-à-vis her madness would help
illuminate some essential aspects about her character: “Is her madness occasioned by her father’s
death? by her rejected love for Hamlet? or by both, in varying degrees?” (Camden 247). These
questions are tough ones to answer. Gabrielle Dane asks: “How can I read Ophelia’s madness?
How might I read ‘both as mad and as not mad,’ as neither associated with nor dissociated from
17

Ophelia’s cryptic ramblings?” (405). In this regard, one might presume that, although Polonius is
speaking of Hamlet and not Ophelia when he says that “Though this be madness, yet there is
method in’t” (2.2.204-5), his interpretation of madness is very much applicable to Ophelia, as
well.
There is a wide range of critics who comment on the reason behind Ophelia’s madness and,
according to Camden, many of them seem to have misinterpreted Ophelia’s tragedy by laying
emphasis on her father’s decease as the main reason behind her madness (247). For example,
John Draper suggests that Ophelia’s madness results from her father’s death, the one person
whom she loved so dearly and whose life came to an unexpected and awful end (61). Levin L.
Schucking states that “[g]rief at her father’s sudden and unexplained death has unbalanced her
mind” (153). Schucking also argues that modern spectators, who agree on the matter that
Ophelia’s madness has roots in her broken relations with Hamlet, are totally proved to be wrong
by Claudius’ remarks, confirming expressly that her madness is due to Polonius’ death (153):
“O, this is the poison of deep grief; it springs / All from her father’s death” (4.5.72-3). In the last
century, Roderick Benedix remarks that Polonius’ death, as long as it is believed to be the chief
cause of Ophelia’s madness, serves a dramatic purpose in the play, but at the same time he
asserts that “[n]o girl becomes insane because her father dies, least of all Ophelia” (Benedix as
qtd. in Camden 247-8). Even Laurence Babb considers “grief for her father’s death” as “chiefly
responsible” for Ophelia’s condition (129). Despite the arguments to the contrary as well as that
of G. L. Kittredge that “it is the mysterious tragedy of her father’s death that has driven her mad”
(1086), Camden continues to contend that “it can be shown that the overriding cause of
Ophelia’s madness is clearly spelled out in the play; it is more ‘the pangs of despiz’d love’ which
cause her tragic fate than the death of Polonius” (248).

18

According to Gabrielle Dane, Ophelia’s psychic personality, from the very beginning of the
play, materializes as “externally defined, socially constructed” (405). Dane writes: “Although
every human psyche might be said, from a psychoanalytic perspective, to be constructed largely
as a result of social interactions, Ophelia’s unique development has given her an especially
permeable psyche” (405). The first spectators see of Ophelia is the time when Laertes, who
thinks of himself “as a worldly-wise young man,” gives her some parting advice as he prepares
himself to go abroad (Camden 248). He warns her that she must not consider Hamlet’s attentions
seriously because Hamlet is only playing with her emotions without having serious intentions
(Camden 248). I agree with Camden that by these speeches, Laertes unintentionally instigates
what he is confidently trying to allay in Ophelia’s mind since, in spite of all his efforts to distract
Ophelia’s thoughts of love, her thoughts, already inspired by her own embryonic yearnings, seem
to be even more aroused after receiving her brother’s pieces of advice (248). Also, Polonius is,
even though unknowingly, a special sort of assistance to Ophelia’s profound interest in matters
concerning love as he specifies “how the senses of youth are easily inflamed” and that “she must
not take the heat of Hamlet’s desire as true love” (Camden 248). Then to crown it all, Polonius
“delivers the blow” that has devastated the lives of many girls throughout centuries as he
commands his daughter to break off with Hamlet and never talk with him again (Camden 248).
Dane asserts that “[m]otherless and completely circumscribed by the men around her, Ophelia
has been shaped to conform to external demands, to reflect others’ desires” (405). According to
Dane, both Polonius and Laertes as her father and brother insist on stifling Ophelia’s emotions
and feelings “in an incestuous stranglehold,” as if each of them considered himself as “the selfappointed tutor of her moral, intellectual, even psychological development” (406). Thus, Dane
illustrates Ophelia’s character as “condemned to martyrdom on the altar of male fantasies and

19

priorities” (405). All in all, one might deduce that Ophelia’s madness is more the product of this
cruel circumscription of her own desire than of her love for Hamlet.
Now, considering all these aspects regarding Ophelia’s identity, what role does she play in
Hamlet’s fate? Concerning her role in Hamlet’s destiny, Jacques Lacan states that “Ophelia is
present, to be sure, from the beginning of the legend on” (11). He refers to her “as the bait in the
trap that Hamlet doesn’t fall into” because, first of all, he is informed beforehand, and then
because Ophelia herself refuses to have any extensive part in the plot against the prince since she
has long been in love with him (Lacan 11-12). There might also be another justification to
explain why Hamlet does not fall for Ophelia. Camden argues that critics can never be sure
whether Hamlet really loved Ophelia or not, but the obvious point here is that “whether he did or
not, Ophelia thought he did” (248). Maybe that is why Lacan calls the young woman “that piece
of bait named Ophelia” (as qtd. in Dane 405) who is “used, abused, confused, and utterly
manipulated” by all men in her life with no exception, including her father, her brother, the king,
and even her lover: “scoffed at, ignored, suspected, disbelieved, commanded to distrust her own
feelings, thoughts, and desires, Ophelia is fragmented by contradictory messages” (Dane 405).
Even though Ophelia has evidently been “exiled on a barren island of male circumscription”
(Dane 405), Camden rebukes Hamlet and only Hamlet for her madness: “it is upon Hamlet that
her mind in its madness dwells” (250). When mad Ophelia sings, “How should I your true love
know / From another one? / By his cockle hat and staff, / And his sandal shoon” (4.5.23-26), by
“true love,” Ophelia surely does not mean Polonius: “The point is that Polonius makes an
unlikely candidate to appear among verses on true love” (Camden 251). However, Camden finds
this quite logical for Ophelia to bear certain degrees of love for her father and she considers
Polonius’ death as “a traumatic experience” for Ophelia (252-3). Yet again, Camden’s brief

20

analysis in terms of the relationship between Polonius and Ophelia, as the only father and
daughter in the play, is quite in line with that of Katherine Mansfield who says concerning
Polonius: “Who can believe that a solitary violet withered when that silly old Pomposity died?
And who can believe that Ophelia really loved him, and wasn’t thankful to think how peaceful
breakfast would be without his preaching” (182). In that case, Polonius’ death may well have
been only the last in the list of shocks to Ophelia’s fundamentally fragile personality (Camden
253). Camden, furthermore, lists “the overt causes of Ophelia’s madness” in this way:
First the love that Hamlet had declared for her, the warning of her brother and her
father, her father’s orders not to receive Hamlet or talk with him or accept
messages or gifts from him, Hamlet’s visiting her closet and indicating that she
herself is responsible for his madness, the return of Hamlet’s tokens and his
unseemly language to her in the nunnery scene, his refusal of her, his gross
proposal to her (though perhaps spoken facetiously or to confuse Claudius) and
his indecent speech at the play scene, together with the constant references made
in her presence throughout the tragedy to such matters as ‘a fashion and a toy in
blood’, ‘blazes’, ‘mad for love’, ‘desperate undertakings’, ‘are you honest?’, ‘I
loved you not’, ‘believe none of us’, ‘make your wantonness your ignorance’,
‘country matters’, ‘lie between a maid’s legs’, ‘be not you ashamed to show’,
‘brief . . . as woman’s love’. (253)
Taking a brief look at a series of shocks to Ophelia which together cause her madness, and
eventually her death, Hamlet seems to be more to blame for Ophelia’s devastation than she is for
Hamlet’s tragic melancholy and demise. Worse still, in Dane’s words, Gertrude, as the
motherless Ophelia’s one and only “mother figure,” appears to be pretty reluctant to offer any

21

kind of empathy, or even sympathy at the time of her “most dire need,” as well (405). All in all,
due to all the above-mentioned causes, the already fragile and even feeble-minded Ophelia feels
more and more alienated and, while being surrounded by all male figures, she finds herself
“osmotically open to external suggestion; that is, she appears to lack clear psychic boundaries”
(Dane 405-6). All things considered, one might assume that Ophelia’s character is too weak and
pathetic to be able to have even the slightest effects on Hamlet’s tragic fate. Also, blaming
Hamlet for Ophelia’s devastation seems to be more logical, due to a list of his wrongdoings
which indisputably bear the most serious consequences for Ophelia and her life and her fate,
including using Ophelia slyly, leading her on, confusing her about his true feelings for her,
shattering her hopes, her confidence (if she had any in the first place), her dreams, and her
fantasies. Moreover, it is Hamlet again who exacerbates her unstable mental conditions by
murdering her father, and in this way, he accelerates the process of transforming her state of
shattering nerves into the state of madness. Considering these facts, I believe that nobody can
deny that it is Hamlet who hits the final nail in Ophelia’s coffin, but at the same time, Ophelia’s
effects on Hamlet’s actions and intentions are undeniable, as well.
First of all, what makes this female character more distinguishable and more affective in
Hamlet’s destiny is the fact that she is the very first person to identify Hamlet’s change. As a
matter of fact, Ophelia is the first person in the play who expresses her feelings of great sadness
over Hamlet’s transformation of character: “Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown, / The
courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue sword, / Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state”
(3.1.151-3). Even though Hamlet’s weird behavior makes his change of temperament more and
more obvious in the eyes of the public along with all the people surrounding him, the only person
who seems to be able to describe his state of mind clearly and recognize his internal involvement

22

with himself immediately is Ophelia. Of course, the state of melancholia is so complicated in
essence that even melancholic people, themselves, sometimes could find it hard to realize what is
actually happening to them. Probably that is what is happening to Hamlet and that is the primary
reason behind all his indecisions and hesitations, but Ophelia understands. She realizes what
Hamlet is dealing with just because she is already there. She has already been in struggle with
melancholia even before Hamlet reaches this point and probably long before king Hamlet is
killed by Claudius. Ophelia’s version of melancholia could, too, be interpreted through the lens
of previously mentioned “virgin melancholy” (the “greensickness”), but not only that; Ophelia
has enough other reasons to feel melancholic even before Hamlet reaches that point. The fact is
that the tragic figure of Ophelia, either when represented as the “dutiful daughter” or when
represented as the “madwoman” (Rhodes 8), is trapped in the state of melancholia, unlike
Hamlet who figures out a way to escape from melancholia by channelling it toward choler,
resulting in revenge. Thus, one might presume that although death is the anticipated final point
for both of these characters, Hamlet seems to be free from melancholic emotions at the time of
dying while Ophelia, who dies melancholic, is definitely the only real victim of melancholia in
the play.
As a character, she does not have many lines in the play and even her death, which is “her
most significant action” (Fitzgerald 6), does not occur on the stage. According to Kimberly
Rhodes, Ophelia is nothing but “a blank page on which patriarchy can inscribe and project its
desires” (8). Even her meeting with Hamlet is carefully arranged by Polonius:
Ophelia, walk you here.—Gracious, so please you,
We will bestow ourselves.—Read on this book,
That show of such an exercise may colour
Your loneliness. We are oft to blame in this,
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’Tis too much proved, that with devotion’s visage
And pious action we do sugar o’er
The devil himself.

(3.1.45-50)

Significantly, Ophelia is being coached by all the men surrounding her in all her manners and
actions even in what to say to Hamlet when she simply greets him. Bridget Gellert Lyons states
that “[t]he book she is given provides her with an excuse for being in the lobby alone, but more
specifically, in Polonius’ plan, it serves to convey an impression of prayerful devoutness” (60).
While Lyons assumes that “a reading woman showed religious devotion rather than intellectual
curiosity” (61), I believe that Ophelia’s image of a solitary woman holding a book can
conventionally be interpreted as representing an attitude of melancholy. A book could generally
be taken for granted as a symbol of intellectuality, and intellectuality does not stand so far away
from melancholy. Supriya Nair asserts that the melancholic condition of intellectuals “has been
both totalized and masculinized in much fiction” (131). Even though Nair specifically attributes
masculinity to the melancholic conditions of intellectuals, I believe that the relationship between
intellectuality and melancholic conditions is also attributable to women. Although being an
intellectual does not necessarily put one in a melancholic condition, the relationship between
individuals and education can always be a complicated issue in such a way that the more they
know, the sadder they become, and thus, “the material benefits of education are suspect, at best,
self destructive, at worst” (Nair 131). Education here could be interpreted as gaining knowledge
through wisdom—the knowledge which can be transferred through a book. That is why one
might assume that even though Ophelia is just holding a book and is only pretending to read it in
this make-believe scene, the book held by her says a lot about her character. It is not simply a
book; rather, it is a melancholic sign, representing a knowledgeable and yet melancholic woman

24

who is the only one who has much knowledge about Hamlet’s secret and the exact cause behind
his mental and spiritual pain, and this knowledge puts Ophelia, more than any other character in
the play, closer to Hamlet and his mental condition.
Another point about this special scene is that even though the scene is arranged by Polonius,
he is unable to predict Hamlet and Ophelia’s dialogue. Then, when Hamlet asks, “Where’s your
father?” (3.1.131), she lies: “At home, my lord” (3.1.132). In fact, her lie is the most excusable
one since she does not have anything else to say. She is not the director of this show. She is just a
puppet. She sounds like a powerless, miserable creature when Hamlet asks her about honesty and
she embarrassingly refrains from answering directly: “Could beauty, my lord, have better
commerce than with honesty?” (3.1.110-11). Ophelia loses her integrity by having to lie to her
beloved Hamlet. Hamlet makes the situation worse by remarking that “I did love you once”
(3.1.115-6), and the further the conversation continues, the closer Ophelia gets to the belief that
just as she lost Hamlet to melancholia, she is losing Hamlet’s love, as well, and this is the time
when she has to admit that she has been misled: “Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so”
(3.1.117). Hamlet exacerbates her pain: “You should not have believed me. For virtue cannot so
inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. I loved you not” (3.1.118-20). I believe that
Ophelia dies at this moment both mentally and spiritually, and when she finally confesses to her
naivety—“I was the more deceived” (3.1.121)—she makes the only decision in her entire life
without the interference of any man whether it be a father or a brother or even a melancholic
lover, and this decision is nothing but to end her physical being as the only thing which remains
for her.
According to Kristeva, melancholia at its extreme level leads to “the fatality of death” (82),
and I think that death could be predicated from the very first time we see Ophelia in the play as

25

something inseparable from her destiny. She realizes that either to die or to go mad could be two
channels to escape from the situation she is dealing with. In other words, she finds either death or
madness as the only two channels to freedom. Considering Ophelia’s melancholic state of mind,
one might notice the difference between male and female melancholia and the difference
between the masculine and the feminine escape from melancholia. According to Lesel Dawson,
male and female melancholia are distinct illnesses, indicating separate cultural interpretations
(95). Dawson also states that “a number of studies have either stated or implied that women
almost never suffered from melancholy” (95), while the same studies consistently take the male
gender of the melancholic sufferer for granted (Skultans 81). One interpretation is that the
discourse of melancholy does not exclude women; rather, they are so familiar with this feeling
that they do not seem to be bothered by it, or even to notice it anymore. This difference is also
obvious in the case of both Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s melancholia in such a way that, on the one
hand, Hamlet’s great suffering from melancholia makes him so miserable that it leaves him no
other option but to direct his strong melancholic feelings and emotions toward one particular
thing in order to escape from them—revenge. Thus, he channels his melancholia toward another
temperament, choler, which makes it easier for him to escape from his great suffering, caused by
melancholia. On the other hand, Ophelia, whose soul is completely intertwined with
melancholia, seems not to be suffering from her own melancholia since, according to what has
been mentioned above about her, this feeling is part of her identity; rather, what really torments
her is coming to the strong realization that Hamlet is going through the same pain and, as
Ophelia notices, this pain is beyond his level of tolerance. Although melancholy directs them
both toward self-destruction, Hamlet does something before destroying himself. He acts and
escapes from melancholy through his own action. He manages to end his suffering by directing

26

his melancholic attitude toward his own goal, which is revenge. Hamlet is no longer melancholic
at the time of his death. He toughened through the pain, and now he is satisfied. In fact, even
though it costs him his life, he copes with his melancholy and reveals the clandestine, which
means he reaches his destination, or, in other words, he fulfills his desire. He takes his revenge
and there is no doubt that the pain and suffering push him forward. However, Ophelia is not
bothered by melancholia. After all, melancholia is a part of who she is. Rather, as mentioned
above, what troubles her most is to see that Hamlet is suffering, and what else has Ophelia in her
restricted life except for Hamlet’s love? Moreover, if we consider Hamlet’s love as her final
destination or desire, she does not even reach it. That is why I believe that Ophelia dies twice in
the play: before she dies physically, her soul dies once she realizes that she is losing Hamlet’s
love. Being imprisoned in a masculine power-stricken environment, all she has is Hamlet’s love
and she counts on it to help her reach her freedom of soul and her freedom of will. Thus, she
loses confidence, interest, and hope as she loses Hamlet’s love and there remains nothing left of
her. Finally, she dies melancholic because melancholia has always been her lifelong, inseparable
friend. Hence, Ophelia’s internalized melancholia is the silent killer that devastates her gradually
without even being the main cause of her suffering, while Hamlet is the one who overcomes his
melancholia and even makes the most of it by transforming it into choler in order to take his
revenge and put an end to all his suffering.
I believe that what the audience probably misses about Ophelia is that she is melancholic both
when she is acting subserviently toward all the male characters around her and when she is
considered to highly likely harm herself and others in her madness. Lyons interprets her exertion
of independent behavior at the end of the play as “emblematic rather than consequential” (62),
but with regard to the effects of her behavior and actions on Hamlet, I beg to differ. Even though

27

none of the characters in the play seem to be worried much about the effects of her actions, I can
assert the importance of the effects of her behavior at least on Hamlet. I think that her acts and
behavior are almost always ambiguous from Hamlet’s perspective. He seems to be confused
about the meaning of her gestures as well as her speech. For instance, in the scene of their
encounter arranged by Polonius, Hamlet seems to be “forced to wonder if she is really what she
appears to be” (Lyons 62). Hamlet exhibits his confusion over Ophelia’s behavior by asking
questions, such as “Ha, ha? Are you honest?” (3.1.104), and “Are you fair?” (3.1.106). Even
Ophelia’s death, regardless of whether it was a suicide or not, has enough effects on Hamlet. It is
the first time we see him mourning and shouting his big grief:
What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wand’ring stars, and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.

(5.1.244-8)

Even in the case of his father’s decease, he does not express his pain in the same manner that he
does for Ophelia’s death. The interesting difference that Hamlet shows in the way he reacts to
two of his beloved ones’ demise tells us a lot about how much he cares about both of them. I
believe that Ophelia’s death doubles the mental and spiritual agony caused by his father’s death.
Now is the time when he confesses that he loved her—“I loved Ophelia” (5.1.259)—as opposed
to the time when he denies any feeling for her during his earlier encounter with her: “I loved you
not” (3.1.119-20). It seems that not only Ophelia but also Hamlet are in disguise when it is about
expressing their sincere feelings toward one another. I mentioned that Hamlet kills Ophelia both
mentally and spiritually when he denies any sort of affection toward her, and now, it is his
conscience that shouts:
28

’Swounds, show me what thou’lt do.
Woo’t weep? Woo’t fight? Woo’t fast? Woo’t tear thyself?
Woo’t drink up easel, eat a crocodile?
I’ll do it. Dost thou come here to whine,
To outface me with leaping in grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I.
And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw
Millions of acres on us, till our ground,
Singeing his pate against the burning zone,
Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, an thou’lt mouth,
I’ll rant as well as thou.

(5.1.264-274)

Even though Claudius calls this “mere madness” (5.1.275), I would rather call it the golden
moment of a big change in Hamlet. Hamlet is witness to two of the biggest losses any normal
person could find difficult to tolerate in a short period of time: the loss of his father and the loss
of the love of his life. I believe that this is the very moment when his lethargic melancholy turns
into a wild choler, and Hamlet shows this choler in his most significant soliloquy at the funeral
mentioned above when he insists on “leaping in grave” (5.1.268), and demands to “be buried
quick with her” (5.1.269). I assume that the climactic display of his choler in the play is when he
decides to finally act to avenge his father’s and also Ophelia’s death for, if it were not for
Claudius’s sin, he would achieve the fruits of the life. He wanted to live with the person he
dearly loved, but he failed in all his dreams, and now, there seems to be nothing left to offer the
lovers their idyllic marital bliss but death and they both realize that. Hamlet blames Claudius for
all this. Thus, Ophelia’s death also plays a central role in his deciding firmly to take revenge on
Claudius for not only killing his father, but also for ruining his whole life. Also, as a sign of his

29

movement away from melancholy, his grief over the loss of Ophelia is an assertion of self rather
than a melancholic negation of self.
Certainly, Hamlet is fully aware of the fact that he has to accept death as an inseparable part
of his revenge throughout the process. Hamlet reaches the highest point of his rage when he
accepts a competition against Laertes—a much better competitor—who is highly likely to defeat
him. In spite of knowing that he “will lose this wager” (5.2.156), he trusts that it is part of his
fate to scarify himself in order to satisfy his choler: “If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to
come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come” (5.2.167-9). It seems that he has made
himself prepared to accept his destiny and put an end to all his suffering: “The readiness is all.
Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be” (5.2.169-70).
Thus, one can argue that Ophelia, in spite of being a submissive young woman from the outset of
the story, affects not only Hamlet’s destiny as a whole, but also some of his most remarkable
thoughts, decisions, and acts. What is significant is that even if these effects seem to be subtle
and ephemeral, it is undeniable that they mark the onset of Hamlet’s revolutionary decisions and
acts.
Another person who cares about Hamlet and notices change in him is his mother, Gertrude.
However, she, unlike Ophelia, cannot possibly decipher what kind of change exactly her son is
experiencing. Thus, when Gertrude welcomes Hamlet’s schoolmates, Guildenstern and
Rosencrantz, she remarks, “And I beseech you instantly to visit / My too much changed son”
(2.2.35-6), and she does not say, for instance, my melancholic son. She realizes that something is
changed in Hamlet and she knows the reasons behind this change, but she is totally unable to
figure out that her son is actually suffering from melancholia, and this is where the point of
difference lies between Gertrude and Ophelia, who on the spot diagnoses Hamlet with

30

melancholia for, as mentioned earlier, she is already struggling with melancholic thoughts and
obsessions, being a puppet at the hands of male figures surrounding her, even at the time Hamlet
was a blissful, carefree lad. Yet at the same time, Ophelia is not alone in affecting Hamlet’s life
deeply, since Gertrude is another female figure who has a profound impact on Hamlet’s destiny.
According to a wide range of critics, Gertrude has a fundamental role in the progression of the
play. As a matter of fact, she is the only character who has more than one role. She is Hamlet’s
mother, the deceased King Hamlet’s widow, and the current Queen of Denmark. No matter how
passive her role is in the series of events, and how much she keeps being overshadowed by her
new husband’s decisions and actions, what makes her important is her crucial decision to marry
hastily the late King Hamlet’s brother and the effects and the results of her decision on the hero.
Carolyn Heilbrun argues that “[n]one of the critics of course has failed to see Gertrude as vital to
the action of the play; not only is she the mother of the hero, the widow of the Ghost, and the
wife of the current King of Denmark, but the fact of her hasty and, to the Elizabethans,
incestuous marriage, the whole question of her ‘falling off’, occupies a position of barely
secondary importance in the mind of her son, and of the Ghost” (201). In Muller’s view, the
play’s recurring subjects of mourning, madness, and melancholia cause the much-discussed
oedipal nature of the play to emerge (147), “for Lacan says it is with the decline of the Oedipus
complex that the loss of the phallus is mourned: it is the original lost object” (Muller 147).
Muller also remarks that, in Lacan’s terms, “[i]n mourning, images rush in to fill the gap in the
real caused by someone’s death, much as in psychosis the imaginary reshaping of signifiers
attempts to fill the hole in the symbolic order caused by the foreclosure of the Name-of-theFather” (147). In fact, according to some critics, including Ernest Jones and Sigmund Freud,
Gertrude serves as “the object of Hamlet’s Oedipus complex,” which is of course “central to the

31

motivation of the play” (Heilbrun 201). Dover J. Wilson, according to whom “Gertrude is always
hoping for the best,” refers to the Queen as a powerful and influential character, and he finds the
Ghost’s reluctance to distress her with the knowledge of his murder to be one of the most
essential motivations of the play (125). Thus, it can be assumed that, although some critics who
have specifically studied the character of the Queen have customarily seen her as “well-meaning
but shallow and feminine, in the pejorative sense of the word: incapable of any sustained rational
process, superficial and flighty” (Heilbrun 201), they all are agreed that Gertrude, by
representing the object of Hamlet’s desire driven by Oedipus complex, on the one hand, and by
being guilty of an “o’erhasty marriage” (2.2.56), on the other hand, has the most crucial effects
on her son’s tragic end. Even the Queen, herself, cannot deny it: “I doubt it is no other but the
main— / His father’s death and our o’erhasty marriage” (2.2.56-7).
The way Hamlet looks at this too-hasty marriage is also worthy of consideration:
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears, why she, even she—
O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer—married with my
Uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules; within a month,
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not, nor it cannot come to good.
32

But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.

(1.2.147-158)

In these lines, Hamlet for the first time shows how heart-broken he is due to his mother’s hasty
marriage to his uncle, who he thinks is far from the noble personality of his father. This soliloquy
by itself shows how much Gertrude is to blame for Hamlet’s taking a melancholic turn.
Accepting Gertrude of committing another sin, which is having incestuous relationships with
Claudius before her husband’s death, makes her even more responsible for her son’s gradual
self-destruction. Also, with regard to the other accusation against Gertrude, however, critics
almost unanimously agree that Gertrude was not Claudius’ accomplice in murdering the late
King, and did not even know the first thing about it. Furthermore, Gertrude becomes clear of
such accusations as the revengeful Ghost of the King, attempting fruitlessly to circumscribe the
scope of revenge, cares that she not be attacked by Hamlet. One can deduce that the Ghost’s care
that she not be harmed is a strong evidence to prove that Gertrude did not have any role in
murdering the King. As a matter of fact, Gertrude is not at all a murderer. She is just a naïve,
immature woman who is not ready to grow up. Harley Granville-Barker refers to her as “a pretty
creature, as we see her, desperately refusing to grow old” (227). As I see her, she is just a woman
who believes that it is too early for her to be stamped as a widow. In fact, the Queen is not an
evil Queen at all. She cannot even think of murder since she sees the world as a happy and
comfortable place to stay in. Most likely that is why she is unable to understand Hamlet’s grief
and wonders why he insists on remaining in grief and mourning for his father instead of
marrying Ophelia blissfully—like what she did with Claudius—and letting everything be back to
normal:
Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
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Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust.

(1.2.68-71)

She considers this very normal for every person to live happily and then to die calmly according
to the common law of the nature: “Thou know’st ’tis common—all that lives must die, / Passing
through nature to eternity” (1.2.72-3). Murder does not even occur to her, let alone being
committed by her. Bradley describes her as “a sheep in the sun” (167), who loves to be happy
and the very first thing her mind is engaged with is her own happiness.
But even if, according to the critics, we consider her clear of some charges, such as murder
and adultery, still it does not purify her blameworthy figure as a mother. After all, her hasty
marriage in juxtaposition with the King’s death is one of the two main reasons that are to blame
for her son’s “distemper” (2.2.55). If we consider Gertrude’s hasty marriage as her sin, then her
sin has a direct effect on Hamlet’s turning from feminine melancholia to masculine choler, the
choler that drives him to take his revenge. Certainly, this revenge, in particular, gives him a
strong motivation that acts as the centripetal force that provides him with a channel of escape
from melancholia, unlike Ophelia and Gertrude, who have no recourse to choler in order to gain
enough power to change their emotional and/or social positions. All in all, melancholia is the
point of difference between Gertrude and Ophelia in such a way that unlike Ophelia, who has
constantly been struggling with melancholia, what the audience sees of Gertrude is a carefree
woman who encourages her son to stop mourning, maintaining that death has to be accepted as
an inseparable part of life. According to Lily B. Campbell, Gertrude asks her son not to give way
to the passion of grief, a passion of whose force and dangers the Elizabethans were aware (112).
One might interpret that Gertrude, herself, is the one who never gave way to grief and now, she
gives her son the same advice. Her distance from grief makes her unfamiliar with melancholia so
34

that, as opposed to Ophelia, she cannot realize the main cause behind her own son’s change of
behavior. So, Hamlet’s and Gertrude’s responses to loss highlight the distinction Freud and
Kristeva make between pathological melancholy and healthy, non-pathological mourning. Thus,
the reason behind Gertrude’s failure in recognizing Hamlet’s problem is not that she is diseased
but that she did not allow the necessary element that distinguishes grief from melancholia in
Freud’s model: time—the same element that pushes Hamlet into melancholy.
At another point in Act III, we see Gertrude sharing her wishful thinking with Ophelia, “the
unhappy tool of the King and Polonius” (Heilbrun 203):
And for your part, Ophelia, I do wish
That your good beauties be the happy cause
Of Hamlet’s wildness. So shall I hope your virtues
Will bring him to his wonted way again,
To both your honors.

(3.1.38-42)

Bradley sees “the gushing shallow wish of a sentimental woman” in this speech (as quoted in
Heilbrun 203). I see a woman who is so full of false hopes and who believes that what she wants
to happen will definitely happen. This hopeful woman is undoubtedly a stranger to melancholia
since hope and melancholia are far apart. Nevertheless, what is mentioned earlier with regard to
the affective roles of the female characters in the play are not the only points that could be
considered as influential in Hamlet’s choice of his destiny.
In addition to the important roles these two women play in shaping Hamlet’s destiny and in
fulfilling his self-assigned duty in avenging his father’s death is the role played by the informant,
who makes Hamlet cognizant of the cause of his father’s sudden, unexpected, and quite tragic
death. Arthur. P. Stabler states that in the majority of literature arisen in connection with all
possible features of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a highly regarded percentage is found to deal with the
35

Ghost (208). What makes the Ghost crucial in the development of events is its effects on creating
Hamlet’s avenue of escape via vengeance. Of course, it is the Ghost who informs Hamlet of the
hitherto concealed past event, and Hamlet, well aware of the danger implicit in his melancholy
humor, therefore suspects the Ghost of being a devil (Stabler 208). However, he takes his own
time to come to believe in the Ghost. Moreover, it is the Ghost who instigates Hamlet’s revenge
as his natural right. Hamlet, still suffering from the state of melancholia, now being full of
righteous indignation, comes to believe in the Ghost. Although still heart-broken due to his
father’s murder, this strong feeling of grief does not impede his progress in terms of his plan.
Hamlet is fully aware that taking this revenge could likely cost him his life, yet again it does not
stop him. In fact, loss of his father is another birth for Hamlet. This character actually grows up
in losing. Young, inexperienced, and immature Hamlet becomes a mature one while undergoing
this process, beginning with his beloved father’s physical absence, causing him to be known as
the Prince of melancholy, to encountering the Ghost who informs him of the actual happening
and persuades him to embark upon the righteous act of vengeance: “Revenge his foul and most
unnatural murder” (1.5.25).
Whether or not one considers Hamlet’s revenge a sin, the first and foremost factor that pushes
him toward his taking revenge on his father’s murder is his melancholia, caused by a broken
heart. In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Kristeva asserts that grief could be one of the
most important things in anyone’s life (220). I believe that Hamlet is reborn through grief. He
reaches the point when he finds himself all alone. He realizes that he has lost all people he loved
dearly one by one and in a very short period of time: his father, his beloved Ophelia, and even
his mother in such a way that his father is dead and he has to shut his eyes on his passionate love
for Ophelia and deny it right in front of her eyes. It is unimaginable how painful it is for both of

36

them, but he has to do that because he is fully aware of the fact that he already accepted death as
his final destination and now he is rushing toward it. He does not want to get Ophelia involved,
but it is unknown to him that Ophelia is already involved deeply with him and all his thoughts
and decisions. Finally, in the case of his mother, I believe that he considers her lost and gone as
soon as he sees her hand in hand with his uncle at the marriage ceremony. That is how he lost all
the people he had a reason to love. Kristeva also states that “[t]he implosion of love into death
and of death into love reaches its highest expression in the unbearable grief of madness” (233). It
is undeniable that this grief is the main motive behind his melancholy: a kind of melancholy that
makes him even stronger than ever in his firm decision. He strongly believes that his father was
innocent. His grief makes him stronger in heart and soul. The point that Hamlet gains strength
through grief is indisputable at the beginning of the play, when he is clearly prone to suicide:
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! O fie, fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.

(1.2.129-137)

In this soliloquy, he wishes his “too too solid flesh would melt” if only “self-slaughter” were not
considered a sin in the eyes of God. In other words, the world he lives in seems to be so “weary,
stale, flat, and unprofitable” that he prefers not to be in it. But he goes through grief throughout

37

the play and gradually gains strength in such a way that, in his later soliloquies, he seems to be
distant from the idea of “self-slaughter”:
To be, or not to be—that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
(3.1.64-68)
In this later soliloquy, he seems to be confident enough to question people’s intent to continue
living in general, instead of being obsessed with the idea of his own non-existence in the world.
However, he appears to be restless as he speaks about “[t]he slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune” and “a sea of troubles.”
Even before encountering the Ghost who makes everything clear for him, Hamlet is feeling
the restlessness deep in his soul that moves him toward an offbeat communication with the souls
of the dead. Hamlet’s melancholia makes his eyes wide open to the bitter truth in front of him.
This grim reality of his innocent father’s murder by his uncle’s hand bites his broken heart
harshly. Then, he recognizes how naïve he was not realizing the fact himself, even without
running into the fully-aware Ghost. Thus, I believe that even before it was the Ghost’s order for
Claudius to be punished by Hamlet for his unforgivable sins, it had been Hamlet’s own desire to
get rid of him, but he was just seeking the best reason to do this. It is clearly evident in Hamlet’s
speech in which he disparages Claudius in comparison to King Hamlet:
So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly.

(1.2.139-42)
38

And now Hamlet, after encountering the Ghost, does well in justifying his decision fairly:
Does it not, think’st thee, stand me now upon—
He that hath killed my king and whored my mother,
Popped in between th’election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage—is’t not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is’t not to be damned
To let this canker of our nature come
In future evil?

(5.2.63-70)

And thus, he decides to punish Claudius for the sake of personal revenge. And not only that, but
also he makes this decision in order to purify Denmark’s realm by removing evil since it is not
just Hamlet, but also other people such as Marcellus who agree on the point that “Something is
rotten in the state of Denmark” (1.4.65). It is the Ghost that enables Hamlet to take his revenge,
whether it is personal or on behalf of Denmark, by providing him with an avenue of escape from
the lassitude of melancholy through vengeance.
But on the other hand, Hamlet’s mind is revolving around death so much that he cannot
complete the process without getting himself and others killed. In fact, Hamlet’s obsession with
death is obvious in several scenes of the play, but it is the graveyard scene in which Hamlet’s
attitudes toward death are more clearly displayed. I agree with Bridget Gellert on the point that
“[t]he graveyard scene in Hamlet provides a kind of emblematic epitome for several of the
important themes in the play” (58). Gellert assumes that “[g]raves and graveyards were
traditionally the subject of melancholy dreams” (58). Based on what happens during the
graveyard scene in Hamlet, Gellert’s assumption seems to be perfectly reasonable. For instance,

39

in the graveyard scene, which definitely represents a kind of melancholy atmosphere, Hamlet
holds the skull of Yorick in front of him as if he were looking at a mirror and passes some
comments that show how close he is to the concept of death: “Alexander died, Alexander was
buried, Alexander returneth into dust. The dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that
loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel?” (5.1.199-202). In his
Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton finds a connection between melancholy and the law in this
scene, “especially with the negative connotations Hamlet gives it” (62): “Why, might not that be
the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his
tricks? Why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty
shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery?” (5.1.93-7). I believe that Hamlet, in this
scene, more prominently refers to everyone’s destiny no matter what origin, how much power,
riches, and skills, and what kind of brilliant past that person could have had: “This fellow might
be in’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double
vouchers, his recoveries” (5.1.98-100). He also refers to the unfairness of this destiny: “Is this
the fine of his fines and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt?”
(5.1.100-2). In addition to the symbolic connection between crime and punishment that might be
sensed in Hamlet’s remarks, according to his words, it might also be assumed that he already
embraces death as his final destiny even before it comes to him, or, symbolically put, he knows
for sure that the gallows are shouting for him, and yet at the same time, he admits the fact that
this destination would be unfair for everybody: “Will his vouchers vouch him no more of his
purchases, and double ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very
conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more,
ha?” (5.1.102-6).

40

As a matter of fact, Hamlet’s decision causes not only his own death, but also the death of
some most important people who are central figures in his life, people who are so precious to
him, namely Gertrude, his mother, and then even more importantly, Ophelia, the one and only
love of his life. Moreover, due to the fact that Hamlet allocates a large amount of his time to
watching, analyzing, and scrutinizing his target’s behavior, it may be assumed that he has no
rush to do his act. In Wilson’s view, the prince “ponders and debates long, and does not act until
his blood is up: then acts vigorously” (207). Truly, Hamlet, in contrast with several other
Shakespearean characters, is not a typical tragic hero. Hamlet is powerful in his own demands.
He is powerful enough not to step beyond his own moral structures. This means that even though
he is strongly determined to punish Claudius for his sin, he is not willing to do this at any price
and under any sort of circumstances. That is why he refrains from killing Claudius while he is
busy praying. Certainly, Hamlet completes his mission with some success, but this
accomplishment comes with a price since the chief casualty in the process is Hamlet’s own
precious life, for it is only through losing the hero’s life that Shakespeare can construct his
tragedy of Hamlet so effectively.
In short, what makes Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s melancholia different is that Hamlet finds a
channel of escape that is vengeance. Vengeance is available to him because, as a male
melancholic, he has the capacity of determination. By contrast, Ophelia’s lack of willpower, due
to the constraining conditions of family and society, leaves no escape for her. Therefore, even
though death is the end for both of them and melancholy is something they both share, death and
melancholy mean differently because of their gender. Hamlet may have a feminine hesitation
but, as a man, he finds a way out of it, whereas Ophelia’s constrained madness shows what
happens when there is no channel of escape from melancholia.

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Chapter Two
Bonds of Love and Melancholia in Othello
And have not we affections?
Desires for sport? and frailty? as men have?
Then let them use us well; else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.
(4.3.103-6)

Othello is the tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, who falls in love with Desdemona, a girl
from a family who willingly elopes with him. She decides to forget her aristocratic origins,
voluntarily abandons her upper-class family and shuts her eyes on her would-be brilliant future
in her family in order to be with the person she loves dearly. For the sake of earnest love, and in
order to satisfy her beloved Othello, and probably herself even before Othello, Desdemona
makes big sacrifices. Wilson G. Knight describes Desdemona as “gentle, loving, brave in her
trust of her warrior husband” (117). It is her bravery and her trust in her warrior husband that
makes her regard him as her main priority and even to prioritize him over her own father:
My noble father,
I do perceive here a divided duty.
To you I am bound for life and education.
My life and education both do learn me
How to respect you: you are the lord of duty,
I am hitherto your daughter. But here’s my husband;
And so much duty as my mother show’d
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor my lord.

(1.3.180-9)
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She has the skills to choose the words that her father expects to hear. She appreciates her father,
as well, but she acknowledges her “lord” more by displaying her devotion to him.
But what does Othello do in return? Does Othello repay her favors in kind, fairly? As a matter
of fact, he does nothing because his mind is absolutely poisoned with the idea of his noble wife’s
adultery, and finally this polluted mind takes control of him, and he kills his innocent wife to
create the most tragic end for this love story. However, Desdemona’s unfair death is not yet the
end of the tragedy. In the last scene, Iago’s wife, Emillia, after revealing her husband’s dirty
plan, referring to Desdemona, remarks that “Moor, she was chaste. She lov’d thee, cruel Moor. /
So come my soul to bliss as I speak true. / So speaking as I think, I die, I die” (5.2.249-51). The
tragedy thickens when Othello stoically and readily accepts his fate: “Here is my journey’s end,
here is my butt / And very sea-mark of my utmost sail” (5.2.267-8).
The first person who proclaims Desdemona’s innocence, Emilia, calls Othello “cruel Moor”
(5.2.249), thus undermining her husband’s insinuations about Desdemona’s infidelity. But the
audience is left wondering: How would it be possible for Othello to be so easily beguiled by
some words and, of course, just a handkerchief? Othello seems to love Desdemona dearly and
apparently, he believes that she loves him back: “She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d, /
And I lov’d her that she did pity them” (1.3.167-8). Considering Othello’s remark about
Desdemona’s love for him, one might deduce that he believes that she loves the dangers he had
been through rather than him per se. Therefore, he is already far more uncertain of her love than
he seems, since he connects her love to pity and detaches it from himself, thus seeing it as
fleeting and delusive. In fact, he does not truly believe in Desdemona’s love for him even though
he might not be aware of that. He seems to be so convinced that Desdemona is faithful to him
only because she has sympathy for him, describing her role in the courtship as follows: “She

43

gave me for my pains a world of sighs” (1.3.159). Then, how does Desdemona, who once was a
relief to his pains, make him be in far too much spiritual, mental, and even physical agony? Or in
other words, what happens to Othello that he sees Desdemona as the intolerable pain in his life,
which needs to be eradicated as soon as possible so he can breathe again? What kind of powerful
force shatters all his dreams and makes him, like a cold-blooded slayer, commit such a sin that
nobody would ever expect him to do: to execute his pure wife without giving her the slightest
opportunity to defend herself? What makes Othello so susceptible to Iago’s influence?
Addressing these questions, Andrew C. Bradley writes of the noble Moor of Venice, “his whole
nature was indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such that he was unusually open to deception,
and, if once wrought to passion, likely to act with little reflection, with no delay, and in the most
decisive manner conceivable” (154). Undoubtedly, the “indisposed to jealousy” Othello takes a
special journey from a lover to a murderer.
Some scholars like Elmer Edgar Stoll claim that Iago, as the villain of the play, plays the role
of a mechanical device in that the flow of the plot is only contingent upon him (8). In line with
this claim, Virginia Mason Vaughan also states that “no internal motive is needed” (19) to drive
the play to its tragic end. By contrast, Tanya Pollard says that Othello is deeply involved in
internal struggles and refers to Othello’s troubled interior as “a muddy cesspool” (357). Also,
Gail Kern Paster refers to Desdemona’s description of Othello’s troubled interior as Othello’s
“puddled spirit” (47). What I believe is that although it is undeniable that Iago, as the antagonist,
plays the most crucial role in tempting Othello to suspect strongly that his wife is betraying him,
this external force is not enough for a lover such as Othello to overlook whatever his beautiful
and virtuous woman has given to him and suspect her to the extent that leads him to murder her.
But the question remains: When does an external force—Iago’s temptation—become more

44

powerful than Othello’s own internal emotion—his love for Desdemona? One might assume that
there is something else that acts as a catalyst, something that irritates Othello long before Iago as
the tempting force appears on the stage. I argue that our hero is melancholic, and his melancholic
nature makes him too feeble to survive Iago’s incessant and wild accusations against
Desdemona. As a matter of fact, I believe that his internal wound, caused by his hidden
melancholia, makes him more agitated and restless even in comparison with the sore Iago causes
by callously wounding his mind and brutally torturing his soul.
Kristeva asserts that “inconsolable sadness often conceals a real predisposition for despair”
(33). Othello seems to be so sad from the very beginning of the play. This sadness could be
rooted in all the dangers he had experienced. Ironically, these are all those dangers that
Desdemona fell for: “She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d” (1.3.167). Thomas Rymer refers
to all the heroic and adventurous memories that Othello shares with Desdemona as “the Charm,
the philtre, the love-powder that took the Daughter of this Noble Venetian” (133). According to
him, “this was sufficient to make the Black-amoor White, and reconcile all, tho’ there had been a
Cloven-foot into the bargain” (133). Undoubtedly, Othello had been through a lot:
From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes
That I have pass’d
I ran it through, even from my boyish days
To th’ very moment that he bade me tell it.
Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth ’scapes i’ th’ imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my traveller’s history.
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Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak (such was the process),
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropopaghi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

(1.3.130-145)

By paying enough attention to Othello’s above speech, one might notice how he undercuts the
idea of his heroism by the language he applies while describing his adventures: “chances,
accidents, being taken, sold to slavery.” In fact, his remarks show that the way he sees himself is
far from a cheerful hero. Rather, he sees himself as a sad little person who has always been
struggling to overcome unfortunate events and this constant struggle for survival has made him
weak, sad, and doubtful. In other words, Othello’s lack of confidence makes him so sad and so
unprepared to accept someone else’s love because he does not have any love and respect for
himself. As a matter of fact, his sadness makes him sell himself short and underestimate his
abilities and qualifications. Even when Desdemona shows her honest and pure devotion to him
through her actions and words, he seems to be unable to dispose of his inner sadness; besides,
there appears to be a kind of doubt he is constantly struggling with.
Othello’s doubt is exacerbated by other people’s comments on their matrimonial bond.
Brabantio’s warning seems to penetrate to his marrow when he says that “Look to her, Moor, if
thou hast eyes to see: / She has deceiv’d her father, and may thee” (1.3.292-3), even though he
pretends not to be offended by his words: “My life upon her faith!” (1.3.294). After all, he is a
warrior and has been taught to keep a stiff upper lip even under the most serious circumstances.
But the fact is that now he is in such an extremely confused state of mind that he is unable to
trust even his own emotional state let alone that of any other person whether that person be
46

Desdemona or any other ordinary woman. Moreover, although Iago could easily be referred to as
the main source of the external persuasion influencing Othello’s mind set, other characters in the
play are doing much the same as Iago does. For instance, the idea of Desdemona’s supremacy
over Othello is shown by others through their behavior and language “in their own characteristic
idioms” (Altman 4). For example, before the Venetian Duke at the Senate, Brabantio reviews the
signs of Desdemona’s condition to persuade the Duke that his daughter has definitely been
deceived by the Moor, and declares that
Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy,
So opposite to marriage that she shunn’d
The wealthy curled darlings of our nation,
Would ever have (t’incur a general mock)
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou—to fear, not to delight.
(1.2.66-71)
In this way, Brabantio refers to his daughter’s much higher position than that of the Moor both in
looks and origins. Then, he wants everyone to be the witness to the truth he is talking about as if
he were fully certain that his judgment represents a unanimously agreed-upon fact:
Judge me the world, if ’tis not gross in sense
That thou hast practis’d on her with foul charms,
Abus’d her delicate youth with drugs or minerals

(1.2.72-4)

If Othello finds Iago’s words of temptations and accusations against Desdemona persuasive
enough to shut his eyes on everything and adopt the role of a cruel, tormenting husband, how
would it be possible for him to ignore Brabantio’s words questioning Desdemona’s chastity? The
fact is that those words are clearly stuck in his mind and soul, preparing him to suspect his poor
47

wife. Here, Kristeva’s description of a melancholic person seems to be in concord with Othello’s
state of mind:
A repetitive rhythm, a monotonous melody emerge and dominate the broken logical
sequences, changing them into recurring, obsessive litanies. Finally, when that frugal
musicality becomes exhausted in its turn, or simply does not succeed in becoming
established on account of the pressure of silence, the melancholy person appears to stop
cognizing as well as uttering, sinking into the blankness of asymbolia or the excess of an
unorderable cognitive chaos. (33)
Othello is suffering from this “unorderable cognitive chaos” since the outset of the play, both due
to all the rough experiences he has been through during his entire life as a warrior and all the
provocative words of people, such as those of Brabantio and Iago, against his wife’s virtue.
The melancholic temperament that eats Othello in the inside makes Iago’s job in instigating
him much easier. However, this melancholic temperament becomes choleric when Othello
crosses the line in cruelty and violence so that he strikes his noble wife in public viciously, and
this choler reaches the highest point when he, being drowned in jealousy and anger, attempts to
suffocate his wife without even letting her have her last word. This way he ends Desdemona’s
breath forever, but this hasty act of so-called punishment barely soothes his soul because there is
someone who speaks for Desdemona and ascertains her purity, and when Othello falls on the
bed, as if falling from the acme of choler to the depth of melancholia again, it is Emilia who
laments Desdemona’s innocence: “Nay, lay thee down and roar, / For thou hast kill’d the
sweetest innocent / That e’er did lift up eyes” (5.2.197-9). In fact, Othello begins from
melancholia and ends with melancholia; even his death is a melancholic one. It seems that
melancholia is inseparable from him, of course with the exception of that short phase of choler

48

he experiences, which makes him lose his temper violently. But Othello is not the only character
in the play who suffers from melancholia. Desdemona is not unfamiliar with melancholia, either.
Like Othello, Desdemona begins from sadness, although the nature of her sadness is different
from his since Othello’s melancholy is also a matter of social and psychological forces,
considering his past, his doubt, his weakness, his lack of confidence, his low self-esteem, his
humoral and mental imbalances, and the social and racial pressures he faces.
With regard to Desdemona’s melancholia, one might assume that the Early Modern idea of
“virgin melancholy” (the greensickness) is applicable not only to Desdemona, but also to any
other virgin body and soul as evidenced by my discussions of Juliet and Ophelia. According to
Winfried Schleiner, in Early Modern medicine, greensickness was understood to be a gendered
disease, namely a disease of women, and particularly a disease of young women (661). Schleiner
considers greensickness as a form of lovesickness and relates it to love melancholy (661).
According to Helen King, Gail Kern Paster who has taken a big step in studying greensickness in
relation to English literature, “has made a particular early modern understanding of the body
(that fused the physiological with psychological) applicable to literary interpretation, particularly
Shakespeare” (Schleiner 662-3). As Trevor states, “[t]he green sickness is Paster’s most
compelling illustration of how an ideological construct such as marriage is reinforced in the early
modern period by recourse to the psychophysiological” (113). According to Pollard, Paster
distinguishes between melancholic tempers and implications based on gender distinctions:
“Inherently cold and damp, women lack not only vitality but also the humors and passions
necessary for individuality” (Pollard 357). Also, Paster refers to “the thermal transformations
wrought by desire” (109) in some Shakespearean female characters, including Desdemona who
gets passion, heat, and independence in her love for Othello, only to lose them all to his jealousy

49

at the end of the tragedy (Pollard 357). King attributes the gender distinctions in this regard to
the discrepancies between male and female bodies and states that “the way in which male and
female bodies are expressed derives from particular social structures and the places of the sexes
within these, but can also reinforce such structures by locating their origin in unquestionable,
‘natural’ facts” (7). Then, as one of those “natural facts,” she refers to Thomas Laqueur’s
argument, asserting that “there was no such thing as the female body. Instead, there was one
body, which if it was cold, weak and passive was female and if it was hot, strong and active was
male” (25). Appreciating Laqueur’s argument, one can deduce that when Desdemona’s cold,
weak and passive body gets exposed to love, it becomes more susceptible to the side effects of
love melancholia in comparison with Othello’s hot, strong and active body. All in all, one can
argue that, although Othello is clearly stricken by a severe melancholic condition, the nature of
his melancholia is certainly different from that of Desdemona. At the same time, both
Desdemona and Othello are also shaped by social forces—he by racism and she by patriarchy.
The naturalizing discourses—blackness and virginity—are where their experience as
melancholics diverge in such a way that his masculinity enables violence, whereas her femininity
enables passivity. In addition, based on the above descriptions, especially the ones offered by
Paster, one might assume that Desdemona’s nature of great sadness before marriage, her virgin
melancholia or greensickness, is comparable in kind to that of Ophelia in Hamlet.
As for some similarities between Desdemona’s conditions of living and those of Ophelia, one
can easily ascertain that Desdemona, like Ophelia, is clearly incarcerated within the
confinements of a patriarchal society. According to Evelyn Gajowski, Desdemona benefits from
her father’s love and affection as long as she is a compliant, obedient daughter and faces his
anger as soon as she reveals her intention in choosing her marital partner independently (98). Yet

50

Desdemona does not challenge her father. She just answers his questions honestly, but the only
problem is that her response certainly does not live up to his expectations. Even though
Desdemona’s language is replete with compassion and respect, it is intolerable for the possessive
Brabantio to accept such a big change in his always reticent and passive daughter. He definitely
cannot let her attempt to “exercise her will in the choice of a marital partner” (Gajowski 98), and
therefore banishes Desdemona from her paternal family and kingdom. Yet in spite of all her
losses, she is happy because she is not aware of the fact that she is just being transferred from the
hands of a possessive father to the hands of an even more possessive husband, both being
explicit representatives of a patriarchal society. According to Joan Lord Hall, “[a]s a domestic
tragedy, Othello exposes power plays within patriarchal society—specifically, in father-daughter
and husband-wife relationships” (12). Undoubtedly, contextualizing Desdemona’s performance
within a profoundly patriarchal society accentuates her bravery and puts her within the wide
range of vivid and vital Shakespearean female characters who “learn the meaning of self
sovereignty for a woman in a patriarchal society” (Dash 1). Nevertheless, despite being
surrounded by patriarchal societal norms, Desdemona breaks the rules rebelliously by deciding
to marry a Moor who belongs to a lower class and is of inferior origins (Hall 12), and thus she
proves to be courageous and outspoken.
Where did she get this unexpected courage? It can be argued that it comes from love.
Desdemona falls in love and this love gives her the power to express herself in public and,
probably even more importantly, in front of her father. According to Pollard, as Paster
demonstrates, Desdemona is a Shakespearean heroine “who acquires heat, passion, and
autonomy in her love for Othello, only to lose them as his jealous rage stifles her” (357). Paster
explains Desdemona’s courageous love for Othello as the humoral transitions ruled by desire

51

(109). Nevertheless, Desdemona’s spirit—unaware of her anticipatory fate—is replete with
happiness and bliss since she is in love, and being in love is another feature she has in common
with Ophelia: “Love both requires and creates heat, however, and falling in love could alter
women, emotionally and physiologically” (Pollard 357). Thus, her passionate love for Othello is
a channel for her to escape from her lethargic virgin melancholy. The language Desdemona uses
when she argues convincingly before the Duke shows her heat and passion for Othello:
dear lords, if I be left behind,
A moth of peace, and he go to the war,
The rites for which I love him are bereft me,
And I a heavy interim shall support
By his dear absence. Let me go with him.
(1.3.255-9)
After finding love with Othello, Desdemona certainly has ample reason to be happy: she is about
to experience her one and only adventure in life which is marriage. One can argue that marriage
is something more than just a marital bond to her. She considers Othello as her one and only
keeper and savior in life, and looks at her marriage to him as the channel to her freedom. That is
why “Desdemona speaks for youth, sexual honesty, and passion” (Dash 108), and connects them
“to conjugal rights—the joys of marriage that include sexual fulfillment” (Dash 108). However,
Desdemona’s love for Othello seems to be rather desperate even from the beginning:
That I did love the Moor to live with him,
My downright violence and storm of fortunes
May trumpet to the world. My heart’s subdu’d
Even to the very quality of my lord.
I saw Othello’s visage in his mind,
And to his honors and his parts
52

Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate.
(1.3.248-54)
Considering the above speech, one can argue that Desdemona devotes herself fully to her
husband and accentuates her obligations as a wife to him and asks desperately for the permission
to stay with him. Clearly, she is fully prepared to abandon everything for the sake of Othello as
though nothing matters except for her earnest love for him. One might imagine how desperate
she must be in her current conditions that she grasps Othello’s love firmly to lead her away from
the position of a reserved, confined, and under-pressure maiden.
Desdemona’s feeling of despair makes her fixated on Othello and this fixation brings more
heat and passion to her love, while Othello, on the other hand, is distrustful of her love due to his
own melancholic diminishment of ego. Desdemona’s desperation in conjunction with Othello’s
melancholic lack of ego makes their love a special sort of love. However, this sort of love is
condemned to be destroyed since love is a mutual process that requires mutual respect, trust, and
understanding. As the play progresses, it becomes more clear that Othello’s love for Desdemona
lacks respect, trust, and understanding in such a way that he becomes susceptible to Iago’s
instigations. One might assume that, had his love for Desdemona been firm, he would have never
fallen for Iago’s insinuations. This lack of trust can also be attributable to Othello’s melancholia
that impedes the progress of love in his heart since melancholia causes the diminishment of ego.
According to Freud, “[w]hat consciousness is aware of in the work of melancholia is thus not the
essential part of it, nor is it even the part which we may credit with an influence in bringing the
ailment to an end. We see that the ego debases itself and rages against itself, and we understand
as little as the patient what this can lead to and how it can change” (257). Thus, based on Freud,
it can be inferred that Othello’s latent melancholia makes him degrade himself so that it is
difficult for him to understand Desdemona’s love for him since, due to the diminishment of his
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ego, he considers himself not deserving such love from Desdemona—the finest lady in Venice—
who is of higher origins, riches, and looks than he is.
In terms of royal origins, according to Hibbard, in spite of being highborn, Othello can hardly
be considered to be the actual or even the potential leader of a kingdom, upon whose fate
depends that of the whole nation (40). Rather, he is a regular warrior whose exceptional bravery
and heroic actions make him prominent among others. In terms of physical appearance, at some
points in the play, Othello directly or indirectly refers to Desdemona’s better position in
comparison with his. For instance, during one scene, Othello uses a particular phrase to address
Desdemona: “Oh my fair warrior” (2.1.183). Othello’s phrase can be interpreted as a sarcastic
reference to the existing sharp distinction between them. The way Othello addresses Desdemona
reveals the extent to which his mind is obsessed with the fact of her fairness as opposed to his
own blackness. At another point in the play, Othello again refers to her whiteness sardonically:
“Was this fair paper, this most goodly book, / Made to write ‘whore’ upon?” (4.2.71-2). Critics
through the centuries have often commented on the color distinction between Othello and
Desdemona. According to Horace Howard Furness, Othello’s exact color—whether he is a darkskinned Moor or a dark African with the features of a negro—sometimes has been looked at even
with racialist connotations (390). Norman Sanders observes that “[a] black/white opposition is
clearly built into the play at every level: factually, physically, visually, poetically,
psychologically, symbolically, morally, and religiously” (14). I also believe that this color
distinction represents the absolutely distinct social status which clearly exists between Othello
and Desdemona. Desdemona is not only of a higher social station, but also in terms of physical,
psychological, and even moral characteristics, her position is much better than that of Othello. In
this regard, Joan Lord Hall suggests that, Desdemona, whether the play endorses or repudiates

54

her defiance as a white upper-class woman, does transgress the norms of her society by choosing
to marry a black man (13). Given that this white versus black distinction could also be
interpreted as the absoluteness of Desdemona’s innocence and purity of the act of adultery versus
Othello’s degree of error, one might assume that Desdemona has been deliberately sanctified
very early in the play in order to provide the audience of the story with an immediate black/white
dichotomy.
In line with this idea, Gajowski states that Shakespeare “exploits the absoluteness of her
devotion to accentuate the contrast between Othello’s reaction to his imagined mistreatment by
her and her reaction to her real mistreatment by him” (103). Thus, one can argue that Othello’s
melancholic and vulnerable mind which, due to his diminished ego, not ready to accept love
from anyone, let alone from a noble Venetian lady, becomes more and more overwhelmed by
Iago’s harsh accusations against Desdemona and his references to “her own clime, complexion,
and degree” (3.3.230). He gradually becomes fully convinced that Desdemona has cheated on
him since his self-degrading melancholia makes him feel inferior to her and, in this way, Othello
even feels genuinely regretful about his marriage to Desdemona:
Haply, for I am black
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have, or for I am declined
Into the vale of years—yet that’s not much—
She’s gone, I am abused, and my relief
Must be to loathe her. Oh, curse of marriage
That we can call these delicate creatures ours
And not their appetites!

(3.3.263-70)

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Hence, Othello’s obsession with Desdemona’s superiority in all matters makes his melancholic
and vulnerable mind too polluted to understand and welcome Desdemona’s love. In lieu of
accepting her love, he accepts Iago’s insinuations and intimations which are much closer to his
preoccupations. But it is also worthy of consideration that Othello at first does not intend to yield
so easily to Iago’s temptations, and endeavours desperately to persuade himself that his wife, in
spite of all of her superiority over him, is honest and pure:
’Tis not to make me jealous
To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,
Is free of speech, signs, plays, and dances well.
Where virtue is, these are more virtuous.
(3.3.183-6)
But the fact is that a combination of the internal force—his melancholic and vulnerable mind—
coupled with the external force—Iago’s constant insinuations—is so strong that makes him
totally unable to appreciate Desdemona’s love.
Thus, one might argue that Iago’s satanically clever temptations along with other people’s
persuasive remarks make Othello’s defenceless mind too agitated to be able to value Desdemona
for her pure love. His inability to understand his wife’s sincere feelings for him makes him
extremely shaky in his trust in her faithfulness, making him too weak to resist the temptation to
revenge himself on her. This shakiness is clear in Act 4 when Othello explicitly remarks that
“Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell” (4.2.38), and when Desdemona asks Othello,
“To whom, my lord? With whom? How am I false?” (4.2.39), Othello only gets more and more
shaky in his trust in her love and more and more drowned in his doubt about her faithfulness.
The shakiness and instability of mind make him so speechless that he can barely answer her
crucial question. All he can do is to react angrily: “Ah! Desdemona! Away, away, away!”
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(4.2.40). Othello’s speechlessness showcases Kristeva’s association of melancholy with an
inability to speak as she refers to melancholia as “a noncommunicable grief that at times, and
often on a long-term basis, lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in
words, actions, and even life itself” (3). One can hypothesize that melancholia carried Othello
“into the solitude of mutism” (Kristeva 47), as Kristeva states that “melancholia then ends up in
asymbolia, in loss of meaning: if I am no longer capable of translating or metaphorizing, I
become silent and I die” (42). In fact, the root of the tragedy could be found in Othello’s
shakiness in belief and lack of understanding which lead to the lack of trust and respect. All these
have roots in Othello’s dormant melancholia which makes him defenceless in the first place,
torments him throughout the play, and gradually becomes active with the development of the
play. Therefore, Othello fails to respond to Desdemona’s love in kind because he fails in
believing her love. George Roy Elliot asserts that Othello is unable to learn to love Desdemona
with the same “fullness” as she does until “her way on earth is ended,” and that is where the
“blackness” of the tragedy lies (67). I insist that it is Othello’s melancholia that prevents him
from both accepting Desdemona’s love and being able to love her to the same extent as she does,
and thus it is true that this desperate love, along with his lack of self-confidence, allows for
Iago’s insinuations to act so effectively on him. As John Money argues, Othello’s love for
Desdemona is “subtly presented from the beginning as inadequate;” “the nature of this
inadequacy,” which becomes gradually apparent with the progress of the play, is “the material
upon which Iago goes to work” (102). In line with this idea, Georges Bonnard accuses Othello of
having a “lack of wisdom in his love” (183). Carol Thomas Neely also refers to Othello’s love as
“his most vulnerable point” (80). There is a dialogue in the play between Othello and
Desdemona to which Tsuneo Hase refers as “the love-duet” (29) between the couple and during

57

which “a striking contrast” (Hase 29) is clear between Desdemona’s amount of love for Othello
and that of Othello for Desdemona. During this scene, Othello says:
If it were now to die,
’Twere now to be most happy, for I fear
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.
And Desdemona replies:

(2.1.189-93)

The heavens forbid
But that our loves and comforts should increase
Even as our days do grow.
(2.1.194-6)
Othello cannot even imagine the vastness of the special kind of love that Desdemona has in her
heart for him, and thus “despite the constancy of her faith in Othello, the foundation of their
relationship is fissured from his loss of faith in her” (Gajowski 101). One might argue that in
addition to Othello’s inability to see himself as deserving Desdemona’s love, which is his real
problem in accepting her love, Desdemona’s love, on the other hand, is so precious and strong
that a depressed, helpless, and poisoned mind like that of Othello could find it extremely hard to
swallow. Desdemona’s powerful love gives her such power to kneel alone in order to declare her
faith in Othello: “Unkindness may do much; / And his unkindness may defeat my life, / But
never taint my love” (4.2.160-2). Othello’s love for her, in contrast, is so fragile that it makes
him come easily to the strong conviction that his wife has committed “the act of shame / A
thousand times” (5.2.210-11) and thus, he kneels alongside Iago, cursing her and affirming his
loss of faith in her: “Damn her, lewd minx! O, damn her!” (3.3.475). Undoubtedly, Desdemona

58

embodies an emotional commitment that Othello seems to be totally incapable of reciprocating:
“The depth and totality of her emotional commitment is such that, having deliberately chosen
Othello for her husband, she bears the consequences of that choice in a way that reanimates the
meaning of the words, ‘for better, for worse,’ from the traditional wedding ceremony” (Gajowski
103).
In line with the idea of Othello’s and Desdemona’s different natures and measures of love,
Lesel Dawson, who, according to Schleiner, has discovered the interconnections among
lovesickness, gender, and Early Modern literature (662), claims that, in view of a number of
modern critics, the category of women’s “lovesickness” is distinct from that which troubles their
male counterparts: “Indeed, it has become something of a truism to claim that in the early
modern period men and women were thought to experience erotic passion in fundamentally
different ways, in which the quality of one’s love, its edifying or degrading affect, and its
potential for spiritual sublimation are all directly dependent on the lovesick sufferer’s gender”
(Dawson 3-4). One can also argue that in addition to the difference between lovers in terms of
the nature and intensity of their erotic love, they diverge in terms of their gendered experience of
melancholy.
In fact, in her melancholic state of virginity, Desdemona craves adventure and finds whatever
she is craving in Othello in such a way that even Othello makes use of Desdemona’s special
attention and interest in his own heroic and adventurous memories in the Senate before the Duke
of Venice:
This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline;
But still the house-affairs would draw her thence,
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch
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She’d come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse.

(1.3.145-50)

In this way, Desdemona falls in love not so much with Othello as with an incarnation, or rather,
place holder of her desire. In “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing,” Žižek contends that “the
object of desire itself coincides with the force that prevents its attainment—in a way, the object
‘is’ its own withdrawal, its own retraction” (96). Here, Othello, being an object of Desdemona’s
desire, could be considered as an example of gender reversal in relation to object-woman of the
classical masculinist scenario. In addition, while explaining such fissures between a real person
and imaginary construct, Dawson observes that “[t]he phantasmic image of the beloved is
detached from the real presence of the amorous object and exists autonomously in the
melancholic’s mind, displacing all other sensory impressions” (Dawson 22). Dawson offers an
aetiology based on which, “the sight of the beloved is so pleasing to the lover that his or her
estimative faculty malfunctions and ‘overestimates’ the object of desire, who is judged to be
more desirable and worthy than s/he actually is” (22). Thus, Desdemona’s already melancholic
mind becomes replete with her anticipated adoration of Othello, imagining him as an absolutely
ideal person who is definitely far from the real person he is. Shirley Nelson Garner notes that
“her mind simply cannot take in what it encounters” (248). Therefore, the mental image of her
beloved that is more pleasing and precious than the real Othello makes her fully capable of
standing up to her father in such a way that for the sake of her desire, the phantasmic image of
her beloved, she changes dramatically from the reticent, reserved Desdemona to the confident,
outspoken one. Thus, she owes this positive change to Othello, or it is better to say, to her
imagined Othello. As Gajowski observes, “[h]er confidence and resilience are based on her new
connection with Othello” (100), and she loses her newly-gained confidence and resilience since,
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as the play goes on, she loses her connection with Othello. Dawson’s idea suggests that this
desire is the one factor that gives Desdemona the power to “transgress the norms of her society”
(13), by insisting upon marrying a black man of a lower social station. In fact, after gaining this
power, she becomes audacious enough to confront her father and disagree with him in public.
Desdemona, who has always been so compliant and obedient, now becomes “transgressive of
dominant ideologies” (Rose 131). Considering Othello’s own feeling of insecurity in which he
detaches his brave acts from himself, one can argue that this aspect of her melancholy feeds into
his melancholic diminishment of ego like a feedback loop, each augmenting the other in such a
way that she sees a fragment of him and he fears she loves only his brave stories and not him.
Thus, her fixation makes her love more intense and his lack of ego makes him distrustful of it.
They are both facing melancholic specters.
Desdemona’s behavior is also in line with Irene G. Dash’s examination of Shakespearean
women who “challenge accepted patterns for women’s behavior” with their “independence, selfcontrol and, frequently, defiance” (1). According to Mary Beth Rose, Desdemona “presents
herself to the Senate as a hero of marriage” (138). One can better appreciate Desdemona’s
strong-mindedness and bravery the moment she takes an oath of allegiance to Othello before the
Venetian Senate in Act 1: “I saw Othello’s visage in his mind, / And to his honors and his valiant
parts / Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate” (1.3.252-4). Georges Bonnard accuses Desdemona
of being “a rebellious child” (183) since she oversteps the bounds of the acceptable feminine
behaviour at the time. This revolutionary new Desdemona who portrays herself as a bravehearted woman and who definitely surpasses her husband’s audacity is the product of love.
Dawson attributes all of these behavioural aspects to “lovesickness,” “its medical construction,”
“its divergent moral meanings,” and “its social and seductive functions” (2). She refers to

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“lovesickness” as primarily “a mental malady” and relates it to “green sickness or hysteria” (21).
Based on what has been mentioned above, “lovesickness” could be a reasonable explanation to
justify Desdemona’s big change. Nevertheless, whether she is diagnosed with being sick with
Othello’s love or not, it might be deduced that this sickness depicts her as a stubborn, lionhearted lover and gives her such an extraordinary courage to exceed gender expectations and
overstep the traditional limits predefined in her society. But interestingly, she only oversteps to
champion marriage, not some radical independence. Burton considers marriage to be the most
decent way to cure love urges (as cited in Breitenberg 41). One might assume that Desdemona
looks at marriage as a remedy for her urgent love for Othello and such belief gives her the
courage to overstep the bounds of acceptable behavior expected from a woman at the time. After
all, by undermining the patriarchal objections to her actions, she rebels only in order to fulfill her
desire to marry and be a good wife.
As mentioned earlier, the Early Modern idea of “virgin melancholy” is applicable to
Desdemona’s virgin body and soul. In her Disease of Virgins, Helen King argues that virgin
melancholy or greensickness is intimately associated with an urgent need for sexual activity,
exacerbated by strong sexual desire, and can be cured only through coitus (36). Desdemona
certainly feels this strong desire and thinks of fulfilling this through the institution of marriage.
As a matter of fact, Desdemona takes the most complicated journey in her unique life from a
melancholic virgin to a blissful lover to a doomed wife and then, finally, to a melancholic victim
again in the murder scene. At first, her body and soul are released from the poisonous virgin
melancholy and she delightfully waits for a pleasant future with the one person she loves and is
devoted to. But while she portrays herself as a determined and autonomous woman who stands
against her own father in the Senate before numerous Venetian high-profile people, her marriage

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to Othello that was supposed to secure her freedom and cure her of virgin melancholy, contrary
to all of her expectations, as Dash argues, “subjects her to conventions that regulate her
behavior” (103). In fact, as mentioned before, since she owes her new identity as a courageous
young woman to her love for Othello, or in Gajowski’s words, “her confidence and resilience are
based on her new connection with Othello” and “on her new status as partner in the joint
enterprise of marriage” (100), when she loses her connection with Othello—his love for her and
his trust in her faithfulness—she gradually loses her self-confidence and “abandons her ability to
think for herself” (Vaughan 72). Accordingly, Desdemona’s position as the submissive victim of
a patriarchal paternal family transforms into the submissive victim of a patriarchal marriage.
Therefore, after losing Othello’s trust and love, she reverts to her identity as a reserved virgin.
Paster argues that Desdemona’s disconnection from her infuriated and provoked husband can be
referred to as a “retreat to that earlier affective state of female pallor and reluctance associated
with the unmarried woman” (113). In other words, being bitterly disappointed in her beloved—
who was supposed to be her savior from her melancholic world—she returns to her melancholic
position as a virgin, imprisoned again within the confinements of a patriarchal environment, and
that is how her circumstances make her withdraw her connections with Othello and get back to
her lonely existence. Even though she never dismisses her role as a compliant, obedient wife,
falling from the heights of ecstasy to the depths of despair makes her reverse her policy on
considering Othello her “Lord”:
Emil. How do you, madam? how do you, my good lady?
Des. Faith, half asleep.
Emil. Good madam, what’s the matter with my lord?
Des. With who?
Emil. Why, with my lord, madam.
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Des. Who is thy lord?
Emil.

He that is yours, sweet lady.

Des. I have none.

(4.2.96-102)

As one might notice, Desdemona’s use of the phrase “half asleep” certainly has a strong contrast
with how she describes herself and her love and passion earlier before this break. This language
of lethargy and lack of interest is juxtaposed with her earlier language of vitality and
persuasiveness such as the one she makes use of in the Senate before the Venetian Duke in order
to convince the Duke to allow her to join her husband in Cyprus. One can argue that the
language Desdemona uses in the above-mentioned dialogue reflects her big change from a
passionate lover back to a reserved and lethargic maiden. Besides, her language reveals that she
quits looking at Othello as her lord because she has already become cognizant of the fact that she
has lost her love partner and now there is nothing left of his love for her; rather, what remains is
distrust and abhorrence. One might look at this as Desdemona’s active choice as opposed to a
mere compliance with circumstances. Accordingly, Desdemona’s renouncement could be seen as
a repudiation that is equivalent to her defiance of Brabantio. But I believe that it is more of a
passive acquiescence to Othello’s power over her fate. After all, her devotion to her husband is
so firm that nothing shatters her loyalty to him, and of course her absolute devotion to Othello
makes her strongly resist recognizing the obvious change in him:
Des. Believe me, I had rather have lost my purse
Full of cruzadoes; and but my noble Moor
Is true of mind, and made of no such baseness
As jealous creatures are, it were enough
To put him to ill thinking.
Emil.

Is he not jealous?
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Des. Who, he? I think the sun where he was born
Drew all such humors from him.

(3.4.26-31)

Only when she gets called by “his explicit epithets” (Gajowski 100), namely “impudent
strumpet” (4.2.81) and “whore” (4.2.72), does she fully comprehend the depth of the catastrophe
and, according to Gajowski, the great shock of this comprehension pushes her toward nearly a
catatonic state (100), which drives her immediately to despair. In fact, Othello’s opprobrious
language throws Desdemona back directly into her familiar state of melancholia.
Appreciating Gajowski’s idea that “[women’s] attitudes and feelings toward the men in their
lives sharpen the focus on male treatment of women” (97), suggests that actually, it is
Desdemona’s pure devotion to Othello, even after he addresses her as the “Impudent strumpet”
(4.2.81), that accentuates Othello’s mistreating of his wife. It is her reticence and innocence that
highlight Othello as a harsh, cruel, and callous figure. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud
offers a description for melancholia that follows the model of mourning and would lead to “a
profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to
love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds
utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of
punishment” (244). According to Kristeva, Freud “offered an explanation for melancholia,
which, following the model of mourning, would be caused by the introjections of the lost object,
both loved and hated” (98). Desdemona’s mental traits toward the end of the play, especially
during the murder scene and on her deathbed perfectly match the list of mental features of
melancholia, explained by Freud and elaborated upon by Kristeva. Desdemona looks at Othello’s
love for her as “the lost object” (Kristeva 98) because she knows that she has lost him to a frenzy
of jealousy and suspicion. Besides, she has lost her capacity to love when she stops considering
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Othello as her “Lord.” She also demonstrates the diminishing ego, which according to Freud,
could be considered as the language of melancholia exactly when she begs for her life. I believe
that her begging for her life does not mean that she is still interested in living since she is fully
certain that Othello is determined to end her life; rather, she reaches a point of melancholia that,
according to Freud, “culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (244), even though
in her case, it is not delusional; it is real. One can conclude that her supplication for her life in
front of Othello is more of a degrading treatment which she considers to be well-deserved than a
request for staying longer “in the outside world” (Freud 244) even for “half an hour” (5.2.82). As
it happens, like any other melancholic person, according to the aforesaid descriptions and
explanations offered by Freud, Desdemona expects to receive a punishment since she puts the
blame on herself and her own immaturity: “He might have chid me so, for, in good faith, / I am a
child to chiding” (4.2.113-4). One might assume that she thinks she deserves to be punished for
her naivety, and whether this punishment is inflicted by herself or the other, she accepts this as
part of her fate: “It is my wretched fortune” (4.2.129). Desdemona trusts that the only person she
is likely to receive this punishment from is Othello. Yet again, she does not blame anyone but
herself for her death punishment: “Emil. O! who has done this deed? / Des. Nobody. I myself.
Farewell!” (5.2.122-3). She knows that she committed no such sin to deserve this punishment,
but still, so compliant and accepting her fate, the long-suffering Desdemona—the beautiful and
virtuous woman of Venice—accepts this ending of her life as well, as if it were something she
was expecting from the time she started retreating from her sanguine state to her earlier
melancholic state. And in this way, Othello’s and Desdemona’s tale of love that could lead to a
marriage of mutual love and respect ends in Othello’s tragic loss of faith in fair and honest
Desdemona, making her more and more isolated and vulnerable and making him more and more

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deeply drowned in his jealous frenzy in such a way that he smothers Desdemona on their
wedding bed and after realizing the truth about her virtue and candour, stabs himself, killing
himself “to die upon a kiss” (5.2.359). Thus, Othello’s and Desdemona’s conjugal love ends with
their tragic, melancholic death and leaves the audience of this bitter tragedy alone with an
overwhelming, irresistible urge to cry.

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Chapter Three
The Interrelationship Between Death and Melancholia in Romeo and Juliet
Fain would I dwell on form—fain, fain deny
What I have spoke. But farewell compliment.
(2.2.88-9)

Romeo and Juliet is the tragic story of youngsters from two feuding households—Montague and
Capulet—who fall in love with one another. There is an angry and often violent long-lasting
quarrel between these two clans, and this feud plays the role of the real antagonist in the play
which makes the lovers’ life so hard that they choose death over life at the end of the play. The
audience might find this story-line to be simple and straightforward at first glance, but a wide
range of critics and scholars are at variance with this idea. Frank Kermode et al. state that
“Romeo and Juliet is not a simple play; to suppose that it is would be the most elementary
mistake one could make concerning it” (122). Martha Tuck Rozett asserts that Romeo and Juliet
is different from Shakespeare’s other plays in terms of plot, tone, and characterization (153).
Rozett relates these two lovers’ temporary setbacks and misfortunes to bad timing (154).
Bradley, also, in his Shakespearean Tragedy, observes that “chance” or “accident” has a crucial
role in some Shakespearean tragedies (23), and Romeo and Juliet is certainly one of them. As the
prologue-Chorus declares, the lovers in this tragic love story are referred to as star-crossed: “A
pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life” (1.1.6). Even at the beginning of the play the young
lovers seem subject to malignant astrological influence. In this regard, Rozett states that
everything about the tragic final scenes of Romeo and Juliet “hinges on accidents of timing”
(154), including Capulet’s irrational insistence on an early marriage date for Juliet and Count
Paris, the unexpected plague that puts an immediate stop on the way of Friar Laurence’s letter to
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Romeo, Friar Laurence’s delayed arrival at the tomb, and Juliet’s awakening only twenty-five
lines after Romeo’s poisoning. As we see, they are all examples of bad timing or, in other words,
they are some facts to prove that the poor lovers are definitely star-crossed. In line with this idea,
Clifford Leech concludes that “there is indeed a ‘star-cross’d’ pattern for the lovers” (16). Thus,
one might predict from the onset that the young lovers in this play are indeed unfortunate, and
the result of their love is nothing but death. Even without considering the enmity between the
two rival clans, according to Frank Kermode et al., in spite of being beautiful and valuable, the
kind of love between Romeo and Juliet “is in its very nature the business of the young, with
passions hardly controlled, so is it in its very nature associated with disaster and death” (121).
Besides, the emphasis at the beginning of the play on the two as “a pair of star-crossed lovers”
might also be due to the fact that not only all the accidents, which happen during the final scene,
but almost all prominent and life-changing events in the play happen coincidentally: Romeo
reads the list of the guests of the Capulet’s party by accident and decides to attend the party of
his family’s biggest enemy. At the party, he accidentally runs into Juliet and falls in love with
her. Even his killing of Tybalt, Lady Capulet’s nephew, which exacerbates the enmity between
the two houses, happens by mere accident. Worse still, at the same time the old Capulet promises
Juliet to someone else, the young Count Paris. The sudden occurrence of all of these happenings
within just a few days assures the audience at the beginning of the play that this love is doomed
to failure from the start and the two lovers are doomed to die in the end.
However, one can argue that there are certainly some other factors that are more malignantly
influential than astrological influence in constructing these two lovers’ tragic fate. What are the
roles of these two lovers in building their destiny? Do they yield to the powerful pressure exerted
on them from all the external forces surrounding them or do they resist? In order to address these

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questions, we need to scrutinize the lovers’ characters and states of mind at first and then, we
could move to inspect the dynamics of their love relationship. Examining the lovers’ characters
and states of mind will definitely lead us to the subject of melancholia, and the form of
melancholia that these two lovers are struggling with is lovesickness which is also associated
with the disease of the virgin or greensickness. The solution that the play offers is quenching the
desire for love through the consummation of marriage. But one might assume that even though
the play actually supports this stereotypical usage of greensickness, at some points it also
challenges this instrument of patriarchal control of women. Moreover, considering the tragic end
of the play, the solution that it offers for individual melancholia is not the same as the one it
offers to cure the state since, according to the play, the cure for social melancholia is nothing but
death or, in other words, what cures the individual melancholia cannot necessarily be a
guaranteed cure for social melancholia.
The young and beautiful Juliet who “hath not seen the change of fourteen years” (1.2.9) is
among those Shakespearean female protagonists, such as Ophelia and Desdemona, who struggle
with actual anger from their families. Although Juliet has this prominent feature in common with
the other ladies, there is a big difference between Juliet and the other two. For instance,
Desdemona has the ability and power to speak for herself and express her desires in front of the
most high-profile men in Venice, including her father. Ophelia also argues her points
convincingly even though in her madness. In fact, both Desdemona and, to some extent, Ophelia
owe their subjectivity to their language because they both prove that they are capable of doing an
act that Juliet is incapable of: standing up directly against her family or, in other words, the
pressures of masculinity, in order to reveal her inner desires and intentions. But this lack of
verbal representation of conflict in speech is somehow justifiable since Juliet is just too young to

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be able to undertake such a brave act. Another reason is the fact that, in addition to being
imprisoned in a patriarchal world, Juliet falls in love with a person who belongs to a hostile
family. In terms of the degree of the hostility between the feuding families in Romeo and Juliet,
as Harold C. Goddard describes, it is like a legacy that all members of these two houses inherit as
soon as they are born with either the name Capulet or Montague (27). Thus, a patriarchal family
in combination with an extremely hostile environment doubles Juliet’s difficulties in her love
journey.
The question I would like to address here is: What makes Juliet so sickly in love in the first
place? Right from the very beginning of the love story, it occurs that the Early Modern
conception of lovesickness is applicable to Juliet’s feelings. Juliet, like any other young girl in
her age, is undergoing the most critical change in her life and is experiencing the most special
transition from girlhood to womanhood. Due to her age, she is desperate and vulnerable,
especially when she is exposed to love and emotions, and that is why she succumbs so easily to
the temptations of love and displays symptoms of lovesickness. That is to say, lovesickness is the
one powerful force that pushes her to a nearly melancholic state. While discussing the state of
lovesickness, Laurinda S. Dixon refers to a single “set of symptoms and associations that
connoted a disordered womb” (15), arguing that its cause in women “was the troublesome womb
or ‘mother,’ which, inflamed by the hot passions by abstinence, affected the rest of the body by
corroding organs, exhaling poisonous vapors, or creating sympathetic reactions, depending on
whose theory one followed” (109). Besides, she goes on, “since hysteria was considered an
illness with a purely physical origin in the uterus, physicians spoke of love, when discussing
women, as a thinly disguised euphemism for sexual intercourse” (109). The verbalization of
Juliet’s sexual longing is clear in her “Gallop apace” soliloquy (3.2.1-31):

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Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus’ lodging. Such a wagoner
As Phaeton would whip you to the west
And bring in cloudy night immediately.
Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
That runaway eyes may wink, and Romeo
Leap to these arms untalked of and unseen.
Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties, or, if love be blind,
It best agrees with night. Come, civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron, all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning match,
Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.
(3.2.1-13)
Juliet’s sexual awareness and her open expressions of desire in her first encounter with Romeo
show that she is desperately thirsty for love, as her lips have a craving for a passionate kiss—
“Then have my lips the sin that they have took” (1.5.108)—and one might assume that only a
highly inflamed kind of love would be able to quench her thirst. Juliet’s ripeness, growth, and
sexual awakening as an adolescent girl are clear in this scene. In fact, she is a strong idealistic
young girl who is in dire need of love in order to satisfy her extremely strong desire for love, and
Romeo, from the onset of their love tale, proves to be a good respondent to her need: “O, then,
dear saint, let lips do what hands do. / They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair” (1.5.1034). Thus, Juliet at an early age starts seeking love as a remedy for her serious condition.

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Juliet’s young age and her critical condition are symptomatic of a kind of melancholia which
relates to young girls’ sexual needs and the development of their bodies, termed as virgin
melancholy or greensickness. Speaking of the Renaissance Early Modern medical conception of
greensickness, Paster puts particular emphasis on Burton’s holistic conception of greensickness
in his Anatomy of Melancholy; that is, the connections between physical world and the sociocultural context, between inner and outer influences, between the Galenic “naturals” and “nonnaturals” (97-8). Since non-natural internal and external influences include both physical and
cultural factors, one understands that the reason why such a young girl at an early age is
melancholic is that she becomes greensick as a result of being pressurized by both external and
internal forces whether they are physical or cultural. Paster thus concludes that greensickness
was a social disease among the middling ranks, brought about by physical idleness of pubescent
girls and the prevalence of domineering and socially acquisitive parents (103).
In the case of Juliet, her physiological inactivity as an adolescent girl of nubile age makes her
feel, on the one hand, the great absence of love as though it is a hole in her life, making her ready
to accept and offer love, while her family’s inclination to overbear her, on the other hand,
exacerbates her highly critical condition, pushing her directly into greensickness. According to
Dawson, “in a number of instances, women who refuse to marry or to have sex are vilified as
being green sick” (56). For example, in one scene Juliet’s father, Capulet, who wants his
daughter to marry the suitor he has chosen for her, Count Paris, erupts against his disobedient
daughter and rebukes her angrily for rejecting Count Paris’ proposal, yelling at her and calling
her a greensick: “Out, you green sickness carrion! Out, you baggage! / You tallow face!”
(3.5.156-7). Of course Juliet refuses young Count Paris because she is already married to Romeo
and the second marriage would make her an adulterer; otherwise she would agree to marry Count

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Paris due to her uncontrollable urge to marry. At the beginning of the play, before Juliet’s first
encounter with Romeo, when Lady Capulet and Juliet’s nurse discuss the fact that Paris is
interested in marrying Juliet, she eagerly agrees to meet him. As Robert Greene argues in his
Mamillia, any young woman “being at the age of twentie yeeres, would . . . fall into the greene
sickness for want of a husband” (36). Because of this, greensickness could be applied as a means
of forcing young women to marry (Cokain 481). Of course in the case of Juliet, she is only
fourteen, not even near her twenties, yet she is increasingly so sexually alert that even she,
herself, refers to her virginity and urge for love: “Hood my unmanned blood, bating in my
cheeks, / With thy black mantle, till strange love, grown bold, / Think true love acted simple
modesty” (3.2.14-6). It might be deduced that at that time, virginity, or not being possessed by a
man, was not considered as a natural quality for a girl; rather, it was considered as a
characteristic that was enough to represent an unmarried woman as an abnormal, nonstandard,
and irregular social figure, or, in other words, sick. In line with such deduction, Dawson also
asserts that “[g]reen sickness furnished writers with a negative way in which to view virginity,
allowing predominately male writers to denigrate overly chaste maidens as sickly or stale” (56).
Dawson makes this point that within the context of greensickness “virginity is depicted not as a
quality that elevates a woman, but one that makes her unnatural or diseased” (56). Thus, one
might assume that Juliet, as a virgin, is definitely considered to be suffering from virgin
melancholy or greensickness, and her melancholy links her with Romeo’s love, and that is why
she yields to her inner, strong temptations and lets her emotions take control of her. Hence, she is
truly sincere in describing her affection for Romeo when he asks for the exchange of “love’s
faithful vow” (2.2.127): “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep. The more I
give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite” (2.2.133-5).

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Moreover, Juliet’s vulnerability, due to her melancholic state causes her identity crisis. As
Freud argues, “the melancholic displays an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an
impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale” (246). One might believe that Juliet, who is at the
peak of her biological, spiritual, and mental feminine development, becomes totally confused
about her identity. Dash uses Simone de Beauvoir’s idea of adult female maturity with regard to
the woman’s loss of her identity as an independent being who is in search of her ideal destiny.
Dash shows that Juliet has been portrayed by Shakespeare as a juvenile girl who has not yet
yielded to this common-place socializing process (Rose 310): “Shakespeare’s insistence that
Juliet be fourteen, rather than sixteen or eighteen, indicates his wish to catch that wonderful,
struggling age before docility begins” (Dash 86). Now that she is neither a child nor a complete
woman, she feels a diminution of value within herself, but she does not succumb to this feeling.
One might assume that what enables Juliet’s resistance against this feeling of value diminution is
her capacity for love. In fact, one can argue that love is the strong desire that makes her attempt
to seek something that could compensate for her conspicuous lack of identity. This lack of
identity could most likely be the product of an unquestioned authority over her. This
unquestioned authority, which is the most prominent aspect of the patriarchal environment she
lives in, makes her speak frankly of her loss of identity: “I am not I, if there be such an I, / or
those eyes shut, that make the answer ‘I’” (3.2.48-9). As mentioned above, in spite of her loss of
identity, she remains strong. For this reason Dash asserts that the uniqueness of the play is
embedded within the portrait of this young girl who remains strong during her swift growth to
womanhood (93). This strength derives from her love challenge and supports her greensickness
diagnosis which means that love is both her problem and the solution to her problem.

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It is Juliet’s resistance to the acceptance of the above-mentioned feeling of value diminution
that enables her to stay strong. One might argue that this resistance is a by-product of her ability
to love and be loved. Staying strong, she seeks refuge from this degrading feeling, which
according to Freud, is an outcome of melancholia, and finds it in love. As Dawson says, “[f]or
high-ranking women, melancholy provided a compelling discourse of interiority, through which
they could express feelings of lovesickness, loneliness, or alienation” (97), and greensickness, as
a branch of love sickness, could give a premonition of danger, including “the dangerous
consequences of too rigid an adherence to chastity, fostering the notion that women need sex in
order to remain in physical and psychological health” (Dawson 56). Dawson, moreover, assumes
that “female lovesickness is not the equivalent of green sickness or hysteria; it is a species of
melancholy which can be depicted, not only as a passionate illness which degenerates into
madness, but also as a spiritual and cerebral affliction” (93). Whether lovesickness is defined as
greensickness or hysteria or a species of melancholy, Burton offers a cure: he believes that
marriage could be considered as one of several “remedies of love” that could suggest a cure or at
least a way of avoiding excessive lust, which is the chief quality of “love-melancholy” (as cited
in Breitenberg 41). Burton values marriage and the family both as equivalent to the patriarchal
state and as a perfectly legitimate way to quench male and female sexual desire (Breitenberg 412). Therefore, Romeo’s appearance in Juliet’s life could help her to have a miraculous escape
from the afore-mentioned probable perils by both providing her with the most brilliant
opportunity to satisfy her sexual arousal and making her self-evolution from youth to maturity
possible.
But little by little, it is Juliet who, in her melancholic state, becomes so helpless with Romeo’s
love that she finds herself unable to escape from this new strong desire. She is deeply drowned in

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love and becomes so restless and desirous of Romeo’s love that she sees herself in Romeo. That
is how this powerful love drives her to death because Juliet, in her sexual awareness, possesses
the carnal knowledge of a kind of love in which both life and death intertwine. In other words,
Juliet’s love is both her savior and her killer:
Shall I believe
That unsubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
(5.3.102-5)
With regard to the presence of death at every moment in the play, in her Tales of Love, Kristeva
argues that Romeo and Juliet is a Shakespearean play that “nevertheless remains wholly
Shakespearean on account of death’s immanent presence within love” (213). With regard to
Juliet’s melancholy, Kristeva states that “a certain intrinsic melancholy with Juliet contrasts
sharply with Romeo’s solar eagerness” (215), and her intrinsic melancholy is clear when Juliet
attributes her own brilliance not to the sun, but to the stars and meteors:
Yond light is not daylight, I know it, I.
It is some meteor that the sun exhales
To be to thee this night a torchbearer
And light thee on the way to Mantua.
(3.5.12-15)
According to some scholars, including Gwynne Blakemore Evans, night and darkness are
sympathetic to love and melancholy, while day and light are inimical to them (18-9). Thus,
Juliet’s association with stars and meteors that are representatives of night is completely
reasonable.

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Comparatively, Romeo, although seemingly a contrast to Juliet, shares melancholic qualities
with her. Some scholars believe that melancholy is a disease which is usually gendered female;
some others like Kristeva argue that while Juliet is struggling with melancholy, Romeo is
occupied merely with eagerness, and her melancholy is in sharp contrast with his eagerness
(215). As a matter of fact, Romeo, as another side of this passionate and yet dangerous love, is
not standing so far from melancholy. Rosalie L. Colie contends that “we are introduced to
Romeo, typed as a melancholy lover before he appears onstage” (89). She states that Romeo
enters the story speaking distractedly, running through “the rhetorical exercises of the love-poet
with extraordinary facility” (89): “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love” (1.1.184).
He is also described as showing other prominent symptoms associated with melancholy, such as
hiding indoors and avoiding company in such a way that he is even absolutely reluctant to
intervene in the big quarrel between the two families whatsoever. All of these signs prove that he
is literally being tormented by melancholy. He seems to lack all capacity for any feeling of joy
and all his thoughts revolve around an unattainable love object. Whether this love object be Juliet
or any other girl, Romeo is love-stricken in the first place. Romeo falls in love with another girl
in the play, and probably many others before that, and then comes to Juliet: “Out of her favor,
where I am in love” (1.1.177). Thus, our first image of Romeo is a melancholy lover who seeks
love. It is Romeo’s initial attitude that in the first place cues us to the kind of melancholic love
involved in the play. Romeo literally fits the Early Modern definition of melancholy throughout
his presence in the play. Even at his first appearance during the first scene, when Benvolio finds
him moping and asks him about the reason, Romeo addresses Benvolio, explicating the pain and
suffering caused by love that he is constantly struggling with:
Why, such is love’s transgression.
Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast,
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Which thou wilt propagate, to have it pressed
With more of thine. This love that thou hast shown
Doth add more grief to too much of mine own.
(1.1.194-99)
But before analyzing Romeo’s love, one needs to look into his state of melancholy. The
important point about Romeo is that, from the very beginning, as mentioned above, he does not
seem to be concerned about the feud between the two families; instead, he seems to be more into
himself. For instance, we never see him in the middle of the idiotic fight between Montague and
Capulet servants, Tybalt and Benvolio, which happens at the beginning of the play. Rather, we
meet Romeo when he is revolving around his own melancholy fancies. Romeo’s melancholy is
so obvious that it is not even hidden from the eyes of his friends and family, even when this
family member is the patriarch of the Montague clan, the bitter enemy of the Capulet clan. At the
beginning of the play, Romeo’s father, Montague, expresses his chief concern about his son’s
melancholy:
Many a morning hath he there been seen,
With tears augmenting the fresh morning’s dew,
Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs,
But all so soon as the all-cheering sun
Should in the farthest East begin to draw
The shady curtains from Aurora’s bed,
Away from light steals home my heavy son
And private in his chamber pens himself,
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out
And makes himself an artificial night.
Black and portentous must this humor prove,

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Unless good counsel may the cause remove.
(1.1.140-51)
By “Black and portentous” (1.1.150), Montague definitely refers to his son’s dismal, ominous,
and threatening melancholy. As Michal Altbauer-Rudnik says, “[t]he connection between love
and states of illness and madness has existed since antiquity” (35). Altbauer-Rudnik also states
that “[t]he earliest and most ordered discussions of the subject [of lovesickness] can be found in
the writings of Aretaeus the Cappadocian and Galen, both of whom described the disease as a
depressive illness whose symptoms, but not its aetiology, match those of melancholy” (35). The
cause of Romeo’s lovesickness is unequivocal, and can easily be found in his young age and the
blockage of love invoked upon him by his family. But no matter what the cause is behind
Romeo’s lovesickness or in Altbauer-Rudnik’s terms, “its aetiology” (35), there is no doubt that
he is also as lovesick and as open and welcoming to love as Juliet is. In other words, Romeo’s
love is as righteous, dignified, strong, dynamic, and mad as Renaissance women’s love is often
represented. Considering all of the ideas mentioned above, Romeo clearly introduces himself as
a melancholy lover during the very first scene when he is talking with Benvolio: “Alas that love,
whose view is muffled still, / Should without eyes see pathways to his will” (1.1.180-1). He
seems to be really desperate for love when he goes through his rhetorical description of love so
smoothly and passionately:
Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.
Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O anything of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity!
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still waking sleep, that is not what it is!
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This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
(1.1.184-91)
Romeo’s account of love becomes more serious when he continues defining love in the
following lines:
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears.
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.
(1.1.199-203)
As one might notice, Romeo’s description of love contains obvious oxymorons: “feather of
lead,” “bright smoke,” “cold fire,” “sick health,” and “choking gall” versus “preserving sweet.”
This sense of confused categories could be intimately related to exorbitant mental activity which
is one of the primary symptoms of melancholy: “Excessive mental action, due to constant
meditation on the love object, exacerbates the dominance of melancholy” (Altbauer-Rudnik 36).
As with all diseases, there should be a cure for this sort of love as a disease or lovesickness or
love melancholy, as well, but the question is whether the cure for men is the same as the one
offered for women, namely marriage and sex. According to Burton, “[the disease] is most
evident among such as are young and lusty, in the flower of their years, nobly descended, highfed, such as live idly, and at ease” (657). Both Romeo and Juliet are certainly “young and lusty,
in the flower of their years.” The idea of sex has always been considered as the most convenient
way to quench a burning desire. Thus, it is not illogical for these two lovers to look at sex as a
way to satisfy their very strong desire. Moreover, according to Burton, marriage could be offered
as an antidote or as one of the many ways to prevent this “inordinate lust,” which is the main
characteristic of love melancholy (Breitenberg 41). In line with Burton’s idea, Jacques Ferrand
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declares that “[n]o physician would refuse to someone suffering from erotic mania or
melancholy the enjoyment of the object of desire in marriage, in accordance with both divine and
human laws, because the wounds of love are cured only by those who made them” (334). Both
Ferrand and Burton, being well aware of the social origin of the disease, offer the same
treatment. Sex through marriage could be thought of as the best cure for love melancholy no
matter what the gender of the lovesick person is.
Clifford Leech states that “[f]rom Galen in the second century A. D. there came the idea that
love was a form of ‘melancholy,’ an idea that continues to be held fast in the late sixteenth-and
seventeenth-century mind” (8). Also, Neely in Lovesickness, Gender, and Subjectivity asserts
that, “although lovesickness is a pathology, we can see from its symptoms that it is also too
normal and that both men and women are at risk” (279). Since Neely refers to “unsatisfied
desire” as the primary symptom of lovesickness (280), and both Romeo and Juliet show this
symptom right at the beginning, the audience learns that they both suffer equally from serious
effects of lovesickness. Among symptoms associated with melancholy based on the Hippocratic
writings, Altbauer-Rudnik also refers to fear, irritability, and restlessness (35). Andre Du
Laurens emphasizes fear and sorrow as the most distinguishing symptoms of melancholy (118).
Both Romeo and Juliet suffer from these symptoms of melancholy, as well. They are both
struggling with fear and sorrow throughout the play, and I believe that, as opposed to Othello and
Desdemona, Romeo and Juliet are both equally in love and ready to sacrifice for one another in
such a way that Romeo’s love is definitely in the service of his lady, Juliet: “With love’s light
wings did I o’erperch these walls, / For stony limits cannot hold love out, / And what love can
do, that dares love attempt” (2.2.66-8). And Juliet’s love, also, is in the service of her lord,

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Romeo: “And all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay / And follow thee my lord throughout the world”
(2.2.147-8).
But, although there is evidence that both men and women could be equally exposed to
lovesickness or love melancholy, it is undeniable that there are some discrepancies found
between lovesick men and women: “The word love, when applied to women, did not carry the
same idealistic, Neoplatonic, chivalric connotations as when applied to men” (Dixon 109).
Dawson articulates the distinction between men’s and women’s lovesickness: “Whereas
lovesickness in men is defined as a form of melancholia, in women it is associated with diseases
of the reproductive tract: women’s illnesses are thus constructed as bodily and passionate rather
than intellectual and creative” (93). She challenges this model of gender and illness at the same
time, arguing that “the representation of female melancholy cannot be reduced to a single pattern
that classifies the form of melancholy according to the gender of the sufferer” (93). Thus,
whatever was mentioned with regard to Juliet’s lovesickness, which, according to Dawson, could
be referred to as “a species of melancholy” (93), is applicable to Romeo, which means that
Romeo’s love is the same as that of Renaissance women who, “contrary to common critical
opinion, are often represented, both by themselves and others, as suffering from intellectual
melancholy” (Dawson 93).
Also, based on his descriptions of love, it seems as though Romeo feels the great absence of
love in his life profoundly and is eagerly anticipating that it will come to him to heal him of his
inner pain and sorrow, and that is why he is introduced as a lover from the very beginning of the
play. Romeo is moping around long before seeing Juliet, since he is already lovesick with his
love for another girl, who does not love him back, Rosaline. Gayle Whittier believes that Romeo,
on his first presence in the play, introduces himself as an “apprentice lover-poet” who “yearns

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for a suitably unattainable lady” that is Rosaline (48). In fact, it is Rosaline’s love in the first
place that drags Romeo to Juliet’s love because he accidentally sees Rosaline’s name on the list
of guests to Capulet’s feast and welcomes Benvolio’s suggestion that they should crash the party
so Romeo could compare other girls with Rosaline and get over his lovesickness. Romeo accepts
Benvolio’s suggestion but only in order to see Rosaline in the party and win over her heart. Thus,
“Romeo sticks to the rules of his loving” (Colie 91); that is, when Benvolio suggests that he
replaces Rosaline as the object of his affection, Romeo is shocked. Nevertheless, he sneaks in to
the feast along with Benvolio and Mercutio, wearing masks, where he sees Juliet and forgets all
about Rosaline. Therefore, even though Romeo in a sestet claims that there was no such beauty
as Rosaline since the beginning of the universe and declares a kind of exaggerated loyalty to her,
he falls for Juliet the instant he claps eyes on her and describes his new love exultantly:
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright.
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear —
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.
(1.5.44-7)
And immediately, he denies even the existence of Rosaline in his life and in his heart: “Did my
heart love till now? Forswear it, sight. / For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night” (1.5.52-3).
Now, he is too much in love with Juliet. But the fact is that he attended the feast merely in order
to see “the dazzling but soon eclipsed Rosaline” (Levin 3). Colie suggests that “Romeo’s
Rosaline, always invisible to us, is made up of whole cloth, the texture of which is classical
reference” (90). The “whole cloth” version of Romeo’s Rosaline is similar to Desdemona’s
fantasy version of Othello, but the question is why Desdemona’s makes her love more secure,
while Romeo’s “whole cloth” fantasy makes his love for Rosaline less secure. The reason behind
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this difference is that Romeo’s love has already been rejected by Rosaline, making Romeo’s
fantasy of Rosaline fragile and vulnerable, whereas Desdemona’s love has been welcomed
warmly by Othello in the first place, making her fantasy of him secure and strong. In fact,
invisible Rosaline is Romeo’s mystery beloved and Romeo, at first, seems to be so serious about
his love for her that it would be so hard to believe that he could switch his love from her to
someone else so quickly and so easily:
She’ll not be hit
With Cupid’s arrow. She hath Dian’s wit,
And, in strong proof of chastity bow she lives unharmed.
She will not stay the siege of loving terms,
Nor bide th’ encounter of assailing eyes,
Nor ope her lap so saint-seducing gold.
O she’s rich in beauty, only poor
That, when she dies, with beauty dies her store.
(1.1.217-25)
Whittier asserts that Rosaline “is always a word rather than a presence” (48), and Harry Levin
argues that the only thing we learn about Rosaline in the play is limited to her prior effect on
Romeo; yet this knowledge about her is enough to present Romeo to the audience as “a virtual
stereotype of the romantic lover” (3). Romeo’s opening speeches consist of conventional phrases
and standardized images of Elizabethan eroticism and even a quasi-religious idiom (Levin 3).
Romeo definitely means Rosaline and not Juliet when he says:
When the devout religion of mine eye
Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires,
And these who, often drowned, could never die,
Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars.
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One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sun
Ne’er saw her match since first the world begun.
(1.2.89-94)
Of course, he immediately breaks his “quasi-religious vow” as soon as he runs into Juliet (Levin
3). One might be concerned by how quickly Romeo switches from Rosaline to Juliet, but what is
important about Romeo’s character is that in essence he sets a good example of a melancholy
lover by his behavior. No matter to whom he offers his love, he cannot change this characteristic
about himself: he is a lover and has a strong thirst for love.
In order to better appreciate Romeo’s psychic state, one needs to know about Early Modern
England’s understanding of melancholy. Mark Breitenberg offers that “in its natural, healthy
state—before it might become a disease—melancholy is simply the name given to one of the
four primary humors that comprises the body. Its physical qualities are coldness and dryness, and
its corresponding element is earth” (37). As Breitenberg observes, this normal function of
melancholy in the body has the special capacity for turning into a disease (37). Romeo’s purely
conventional love of a purely conventional and abstract object makes a “natural” melancholy that
transitions to a “diseased” melancholy when he meets the very real and willing Juliet. According
to Breitenberg, there could be a wide range of reasons behind the transformation from natural
melancholy to its diseased form, including emotional, physiological or environmental factors
(37). Romeo seems to embody the very essence of melancholy from the onset of his presence in
the play; however, Breitenberg’s idea with regard to melancholy suggests that he is naturally
melancholic at the beginning and his natural melancholy gradually changes to the diseased form
of melancholy, considering all environmental aspects surrounding him, coupled with all
emotional changes he has to struggle with. For instance, when we meet Romeo for the first time,
he is not interested in the ever-lasting feud between the two rival families, the Montague and the
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Capulet, since he does not participate in the quarrel between the two servants, Tybalt and
Benvolio, and certainly, does not even notice their fight. In other words, he does not define
himself by the feud as Tybalt and Benvolio do. Instead, he is fully engaged with “spinning his
melancholy fancies” (Kermode 119). Besides, “in no sense are we led to think that this young
man is worth our sympathy, for his first speeches are full of remote self-regarding conceits and
affectation” (Kermode 119). That is because at that time, based on Early Modern England’s
understanding of melancholy, he is struggling with a kind of natural melancholy, but when he
passes on to the Capulet feast and faces Juliet, his mind “undergoes sudden translation from
notional to real love” (Kermode 119), and one might assume that is the time when he falls into
the domain of diseased melancholy. Dawson refers to love-melancholy or the disease of love,
also known as lovesickness as “a destructive sickness, which could result in chronic melancholy,
mania, or even death,” since this disease has the exceptional power to provoke extreme emotions
and, in this way, could lead to the disequilibrium of mind, body, and soul (13). This is what
exactly happens to Romeo throughout the love story.
When Romeo falls in love with a serious love, like that of Juliet, he falls into the living power
of a critical and mysterious disease, a disease which could bestow both life and death, love
melancholia. As Dixon asserts, “Male lovesickness . . . was considered a type of heroic
melancholia—‘erotomania’—induced by the hot passion of love igniting the bodily humors and
leaving smoky black remains to settle in the spleen or liver” (109). In line with Dixon’s account
of this sort of melancholia, Romeo’s hot passion of love, already existing in him, ignites his
bodily humors, inducing love melancholia and thus, in his moping melancholy, Romeo is
desperately looking forward to embracing love in his life as soon as possible. Probably that is
why, after being rejected by Rosaline, he immediately falls deeply in love with Juliet as soon as

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he lays eyes upon her, rhyming his passionate love-at-first-sight on the spot, and offering to his
new love, seen at her window, “the conventional likeness of eyes to stars” (Colie 92):
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing, and think it were not night.
(2.2.15-22)
As Freud argues, the many and various self-accusations of the melancholic are not at all
applicable to the patient himself; rather with some unimportant adjustments they would fit their
beloved ones (158). In a similar way, I believe that if one listens carefully to the various fervent
descriptions of the beloved ones expressed by the melancholic, one cannot avoid the impression
that most of them are often hardly at all applicable to the person whom the patient loves, has
loved, or ought to love. As it is clear, Romeo also, as a melancholic lover, exaggerates the extent
of beauty and excellence of the person he loves. Romeo’s melancholic soliloquy seemingly
follows figurations of narcissistic projections in courtly love discussed by Žižek. There, the
beloved, as an object of male desire, “loses concrete features and is addressed as an abstract
Ideal” (89). She assumes a sublime quality by occupying the place of the Ideal, thus being
“emptied of all real substance” (89). While examining historical variations on the matrix of
courtly love—the fantasy matrix that first emerged in courtly love and still remains in power,
Žižek argues that the elevation of woman to the sublime object of love turns her into “the screen

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for the narcissistic projection of the male ego-ideal” (108). Being the object around which the
subject’s desire is structured, she belongs entirely to the masculine symbolic economy.
Regardless how tormented his melancholic mind is, Romeo consistently describes Juliet in
exalted and elated idiom, thus molding her into a superb fantasy image. In fact, his soliloquy
reveals how good his melancholic mind is at portraying his beloved. Even though the kind of
love that Romeo is describing is deeply-felt and beautifully-expressed, it is unhappy since the
traces of melancholic sensibility can clearly be felt in his language. For instance, when for the
first time Romeo spots Juliet, he looks at her as she is “Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear”
(1.2.46); besides, he refers to her luminosity as the one that “doth teach the torches to burn
bright” (1.5.44). Also, he likens Juliet’s eyes to “the fairest stars in all the heaven” (2.2.15), and
attributes “brightness” to “her cheek” (2.2.19). Therefore, he describes Juliet as lightness within
the darkness and since, as mentioned earlier, darkness is intimately associated with melancholy
and brightness is considered to have contrast with melancholy, Romeo, being drowned in his
dark melancholic state, sees Juliet and her love as the great saviors that could rescue him from
darkness and lead him to brightness. Juliet’s feelings, likewise, are underlain with the motifs of
darkness and death, as well:
Come, night. Come, Romeo. Come, thou day in night,
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow upon a raven’s back.
Come, gentle night. Come, loving, black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo. And when he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
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(3.2.17-25)
Considering the common juxtaposition of the melancholic behavior and tragic language of the
two young lovers and their love which is set in contrast to brawling and feud, an audience might
sense the poignancy embedded in their love right from the beginning. Besides, the audience
might learn that this bitterness comes from the dark shadow of death that is inextricably
intertwined with the young couple’s love, constantly threatening their precious lives.
These two lovers pay the cost of reconciliation between their families with their lives. Colie
believes that the lovers in this story strive for peace and reconciliation throughout their lifetime
and so it is paradoxical that their deaths prepare a solid base for this reconciliation (97), even
though bringing peace between their clans throws the lovers at the most sepulchral and
melancholic final destiny. According to Goddard, “the theme of Romeo and Juliet is love and
violence and their interactions” (26), and since love and violence are both real enough, “they do
not and cannot coexist in this play’s world: the one destroys the other” (Colie 97). Critics have
different viewpoints with regard to death in this play. For instance, as Colie argues, “[d]eath is
the link between the love-theme and the war-theme, the irreversible piece of action that stamps
the play as tragic” (97), and Kristeva argues: “Death, like a final orgasm, like a full night, waits
for the end of the play” (215). In fact, death appears in the play for the first time when Romeo
penetrates his two love rivals, Tybalt and Paris, by his sword. One might assume that via this act
Romeo uncovers the melancholic layer that underlies his love, the melancholic layer that will
never leave him till the very last moment of his life. Kristeva, however, argues that, in this way,
Romeo releases the choler underlying his love (215). Considering the close functional relation
between these passions, wrath and melancholia, it might be deduced that Romeo confirms his
melancholia by confessing to his fury: “Away to heaven respective lenity, / And fire-eyed fury

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be my conduct now!” (3.1.118-9). Therefore, his fury cannot be set against his internal
melancholy; rather, it can be assumed as being an essential part of it, and that is why as soon as
he lets his choleric melancholia loose death is also set loose.
Juliet also refers to death in her own way even before death comes directly to the couple:
My husband is on earth, my faith in heaven.
How shall that faith return again to earth
Unless that husband send it me from heaven
By leaving earth?

(3.5.206-9)

By “leaving earth,” Juliet refers to Romeo’s death even long before his actual death in the play,
as if she already knows that their love can materialize only in death. One can take this for
granted that the dark, menacing shadow of death is upon the lovers from the moment they fall in
love till the end of the play when Juliet thrusts Romeo’s dagger into both her body and soul, and
Romeo puts an end to his own life by his own hands even after defeating his rivals and removing
all obstacles. In this regard, Levin states that when the lovers first met, “neither had known the
identity of the other; and each, upon finding it out, responded with an ominous exclamation
coupling love and death” (3). Given the choice between death and living apart, Romeo and Juliet
choose the former and their near-death speeches have a special eloquence. In her last moment,
Juliet refers to her body as Romeo’s “sheath”: “This is thy sheath. There rest, and let me die”
(5.3.169), and Romeo in his last words addresses the poison, his quickest route to Juliet:
[to the poison] Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory
Guide,
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark.
Here’s to my love! (drinks) O true apothecary!
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Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.
(5.3.116-20)
In this way, he willingly kisses the lips of death by drinking the poison to prove the claim of
Shakespeare’s contemporary, Michel de Montaigne, that death is a man’s last available card to
play (149). Romeo does not even embrace Juliet properly before taking his own life. Instead, he
warmly embraces death since Romeo, the same as Juliet, finds death as the sole true path that
goes to his beloved. As Leech describes it, “[l]eft alone, with the desire for poison in his mind,
he turns his attention to the apothecary’s shop and to the situation of poor men” (14), and after
giving gold to the apothecary in exchange for the poison, he addresses the poison: “Come,
cordial and not poison, go with me / To Juliet’s grave, for there must I use thee” (5.1.85-6).
Accordingly, one might conclude that, in melancholia, in case of the loss of the love object, even
death could take the place of the beloved.
Even though some critics like Colie consider that “Romeo and Juliet die as much by accident”
(97), it seems more accurate to assume that both passionate lovers knowingly and decisively
choose death over life, or in Kristeva’s words, “there is something autarkic about nightjouissance for each of the two partners of the amorous couple. The dark cave is their only
common space, their sole true community. These lovers of the night remain solitary beings”
(216). They seek shelter in death since with the development of the play, they come to this strong
realization that their precious love has been put erroneously in this universe, and finally, they
cannot find any quicker and more direct way that would be able to transfer them from mortal
melancholy to immortal bliss than death. And one can assume that here is the point that the play
actually challenges the contemporary idea that the cure for love melancholy is only having sex
through marriage.

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The young lovers’ death could also be represented as an attempt to retaliate against the
patriarchal society or, more precisely, against their inflexible parents who are masters in the
social context of customary discipline. After all, the origin of their suffering is in their parents’
obstinacy that sends these innocent children from home into a drifting death. But even though
their love story ends with the two lovers’ tragic death, if we look at its very end from a different
angle, we will be able to see it as a kind of happy ending since the long-lasting feud between the
two clans will be ended and, more importantly, the young lovers will definitely be remembered.
Colie writes that “love, itself is an unstable element: it is flighty, and as such a proper subject for
farce, not for tragedy” (87). From this point of view, love stories like Romeo and Juliet qualify as
romantic comedies, at best, as opposed to tragedies, since they end in beautiful conciliations,
offering “a proper generic habitat for tales of love” (Colie 87). Robert Appelbaum also suggests
that “in Romeo and Juliet the hard realities of life in Verona are apparently healed by the fervid,
heterosexual love of the two main characters” (253). Hence, even though this particular kind of
high-minded and devoted love is doomed to failure from the very beginning, at the same time, it
seems to be the solution to every problem in the play. This Shakespearean tragedy
unquestionably ends with “a suggestion of a return to normality, to peace” (Leech 16), but what
makes this seemingly happy ending a fully achieved tragedy is that this return to normality and
peace is gained at the expense of so many lives including those of Mercutio, Tybalt, Count Paris,
Lady Montague and finally, Romeo and Juliet. Friar Laurence assumes that the young lovers’
marriage might bring peace between these two rival families, but he certainly is not aware of the
high cost of this laborious reconciliation. So, one can argue that while the cure for individual
melancholia could be found in sex and marriage, the cure for social melancholia is nothing but
death or, in other words, what cures the individual melancholia is not guaranteed to cure the

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state. Nevertheless, Romeo’s and Juliet’s love-melancholy or, in Seymour Byman’s terms,
“childhood melancholia, overwhelming depression, and martyrdom” (67), is a kind of lovemelancholia which is excessive, immoderate, and boundless. It is a kind of pure love which
explicitly defines discipline, dignity, dedication, and devotion. In total, it is a love of distinction.
It is a kind of love that does not limit itself to any restrictions. Rather, it is a nomadic, profligate,
dominant, unyielding, and destructive passion that does not know any boundaries, and this
destructive passion is the powerful force that directs the young lovers in our tragic story toward
their self-destruction and, in this way, reduces the brief life spans of the lovers and their even
briefer love. And thus, Shakespeare ends his tragedy about the two lovers who preferred
committing suicide to living without each other with the declaration that “For never was a story
of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo” (5.3.309-10).

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Conclusions

All of the characters in these three Shakespearean tragedies experience melancholic feelings at
some point throughout their life journeys. What makes them different from each other is the way
they channel these feelings. In Othello, Desdemona proves herself as a melancholic lover who is
devoted to her love and convinces her father, Othello, and the Duke of Venice of how she feels.
Even though Othello’s mind becomes poisoned afterwards and he questions his wife’s chastity
by getting affected by first of all, her father’s ominous warning, “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast
eyes to see: / She has deceived her father, and may thee” (1.3.93-4), and then, by Iago’s sarcastic
remarks about Desdemona’s loyalty to him, Desdemona remains devoted to her love. Othello’s
doubt about his wife’s faithfulness does not undervalue Desdemona’s devotion to her love in
such a way that some experts hold an opinion that it is Desdemona’s honest and rather erotic
submission to Othello that troubles him and makes him credulous (Vaughan 73). Besides, I have
argued that Desdemona is a female figure who is constantly challenging patriarchy, once in her
paternal family and then even with Othello. I also argued that marriage is Desdemona’s one and
only adventure in life since from the very beginning of her life she is imprisoned within the
confinements of a patriarchal environment created by her own father, not having the authority to
do anything on her own, and now according to her father, Brabantio, it is unacceptable for her to
choose a husband independently. Thus, melancholic Desdemona thinks of marriage as her unique
channel to freedom, being absolutely unaware of the fact that she is just being transferred from
the hands of a patriarchal man to the hands of another one, Othello, who is the representative of
patriarchy. In fact, on the one hand, all of these patriarchal ideas governing his mind, coupled
with the bitter melancholy he is constantly struggling with could be considered as the main

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reasons why Othello is so easily beguiled into thinking that his virtuous and honourable wife has
cuckolded him. On the other hand, Othello feels greatly inferior to Desdemona and his lack of
confidence, along with his internal melancholy, creates this high capacity in him to doubt his
wife so easily.
In the same way, melancholia plays the central role in another Shakespearean tragedy,
Hamlet, in such a way that melancholia in Ophelia takes the form of madness and in Hamlet
materialises in the form of potential and irresistible choler. As I have argued, Ophelia’s
melancholy, like that of Desdemona, could be attributed to virgin melancholy or greensickness.
Greensickness as a form of lovesickness is directly related to virgin women’s sexual organs and
thus, it was considered as a disease of women, “since women’s ailments received special notice
insofar as they were related to sexual physiology” (Wack 175). Dawson refers to greensickness
or female lovesickness as “a purely physiological disorder” (95), also, stating that, based on a
number of studies, women can never experience melancholy. The rationale behind this idea is
that male and female lovesicknesses are distinct diseases with distinct causes and distinct cultural
backgrounds (Dawson 95). But although, according to a number of studies, Renaissance women
were considered to be free from any form of melancholy, reinforcing the idea that female
melancholy was seen “as biological, and emotional in origins” (Showalter et al. 81), Dawson
states that “[h]istorical examples demonstrate that melancholy was not an exclusively male
domain” (96). The way I presented Ophelia in my work is in line with Dawson’s
conceptualization. As I have discussed, Ophelia is suffering from melancholia even long before
Hamlet touches this feeling and she is undoubtedly the very first person to understand that there
is something wrong with the Prince. As opposed to many other characters in the play, she is the
only one who realises that the new Hamlet is suffering greatly from melancholia just because

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she, herself, is already there. Juliana Schiesari explains that when women experience melancholy
in any form, “they appear more affected by its negative or pathological effects” (14), and as I
have demonstrated, as a consequence of melancholy, Ophelia, who is imprisoned within an
absolutely patriarchal environment, being surrounded and bossed around by all-possessive male
figures, gradually becomes cognizant of the fact that the very only channel to freedom for her
would be either to die or to go mad. Therefore, in this way, she exhibits a more severe and
extreme effect of melancholia.
Another famous Shakespearean character who is dominated by melancholy is Hamlet, known
as the Prince of melancholy. As Dawson suggests, lovesickness as “a destructive malady with
sexual origins” is not only limited to women (103). She refers to men’s melancholy “as a
passionate affliction arising from sexual frustration” (103). I believe that Hamlet’s
disappointment in love on the top of a whole series of bad events, namely his father’s sudden
demise, his encounter with the Ghost of his father, and his mother’s hasty marriage with his
uncle, who is proved to be a murderer, makes him irrational and confused. And thus, Hamlet,
who becomes melancholic after his father is killed, feeling disappointed and lovesick, with the
aid of the paradoxical nature of melancholy that could be represented both as an illness and as a
language to express feelings and emotions, channels his bitter malady into choler and this choler
is the one enormous force that makes him empowered to spring into action against his murderer
uncle.
Another example where melancholy plays a crucial role is germane to Romeo and Juliet. As
Dawson observes, “[f]or high-ranking women, melancholy provided a compelling discourse of
interiority, through which they could express feelings of love sickness, loneliness, or alienation”
(97). What is common among these three female characters, in addition to lovesick melancholy,

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is that all of them come from aristocratic families. Often when such royal women reveal their
melancholy, they do so in a way that presents both their learning and their understanding of
privileged cultural codes at the same time (Dawson 97). Juliet shows her sexual awakening in her
lovesick condition in such a way that she clearly verbalizes her sexual longing in her “Gallop
apace” soliloquy (3.2.1-31). Besides, she understands that she is greensick even long before her
father, Capulet, labels her as “green sickness carrion” (3.5.156).
Shakespeare fashions Romeo as melancholic and lovesick from the outset of the play in his
very first appearance through all his soliloquies and dialogues with other characters. It is
interesting that Romeo is represented as lovesick long before his encounter with Juliet because
he is moping around with melancholy, while his mind is engaged with another girl, who does not
love him back, Rosaline. Considering Romeo’s persistent struggle with melancholy and
lovesickness, one might deduce that he is melancholic in essence and he is a lover no matter to
whom he offers his love. What makes this character special is his unique lovesickness. One
might even assume that Romeo would remain a lover even without having anyone around him to
receive and accept his love because the way he reveals himself: he proves to be a self-torturer,
melancholic lovesick in his own heart and soul even without an external love object.
In my opinion, these plays showcase that melancholy can be a social disease as much as it is
an individual disease. But, the solution that these plays offer to cure the individual melancholia is
not the same as the one they offer to cure the social melancholia in such a way that whereas the
solution they offer to cure the state is nothing but death, what they offer to cure the individual is
the stereotypical usage of marriage and sex. At the same time, even though these plays, at some
points, reinforce the then current idea of sex through marriage as an effective cure for individual
love melancholy, it is strange yet true that they also challenge, and even sometimes refute

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standard stereotypes and etiologies of male and female love melancholy. For instance, the young
lovers’ death in Romeo and Juliet imply this point that even in individual melancholia, under
particular circumstances as in the case of the absence of the loved one, death can be the one and
only cure as opposed to the standard stereotypical ideas of sex and marriage.
Finally, according to Freud, melancholia, whose definition varies even in descriptions in the
field of psychiatry, employs a variety of scientific types the collection of which does not appear
to be able to be established with certainty (243). Freud also correlates melancholia and
mourning, the two conditions that all six characters in these three Shakespearean tragedies
experience at some points in their lives. He attributes more or less the same stimulating reasons
due to environmental, cultural, and emotional impacts to these two conditions, melancholia and
mourning. However, once Freud’s description of mourning and melancholy is challenged, we
shall, therefore, claim that all of these characters are fully revealed as melancholic heroes and
heroines deprived of any authority over their feelings and emotions to the extent that they could
hardly gain any general control over their melancholic emotions to console themselves, and thus,
they reflect their melancholia in terms of various reactions. Therefore, their responses to
melancholia fluctuate among choler, revenge, murder, suicide, homicide, madness, never-ending
mourning, and lovesickness, and that is why it is generally hard to discover common typical
melancholic features among these characters. Hence, even though they demonstrate different
reactions to their inner melancholy, the point that is shared among them is that they all are
suffering from melancholia on a very powerful level throughout their complicated lives.

99

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