Note 137:2 — Chapter VI · Mad Folk in Comedy and Tragedy. (iii.) Melancholy.

A medical friend reminds me that there is, properly speaking, no such thing as “melancholy false,” and that the characters mentioned under this head are not suffering, in his opinion, from any form of mental disease. I will therefore repeat here that the classification of “melancholy” adopted in this chapter is not a scientific one, that it is made on a seventeenth century, rather than on a twentieth century basis—we are trying, that is, to take up the positions of the several dramatists. Few specialists of to-day would consider Jacques, Achilles or Antonio to be in a state of disease, but that the Elizabethan doctor would have diagnosed their malady as “melancholy” I have little doubt. The ordinary spectator would probably not consider the question in any detail.