Death and melancholia in Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet

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,