Volume 52, Number 10 · June 9, 2005
The Anatomy Lesson
By Charles Rosen
The Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton, with an introduction by William Gass
New York Review Books,1,382 pp., $24.95 (paper)
The Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton. Text in three volumes edited by Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, with an introduction by J.B. Bamborough; commentary in three volumes edited by J.B. Bamborough and Martin Dodsworth
Oxford University Press,
Vol. 1: 675 pp., $250.00
Vol. 2: 464 pp., $218.00
Vol. 3: 807 pp., $250.00
Vol. 4: 384 pp., $190.00
Vol. 5: 382 pp., $170.00
Vol. 6: 480 pp., $210.00
Long ago when reading a lengthy, serious, and technical book was considered an agreeable and even entertaining way of passing the time, Richard Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy was a best seller. This was a curious fate for a superannuated medical treatise written in the early seventeenth century not by a doctor but by a reclusive clergyman and scholar at the University of Oxford who set out to write on melancholy and made it the occasion to take up much else as well. During his lifetime the book went through six editions. From 1621 to 1651 it grew considerably in bulk, starting at 353,369 words and finally attaining 516,384 (a seventh edition with no revisions was published in 1660 shortly before Burton's death). It was not reprinted during the eighteenth century, but there must have been many copies still available from the previous century. Samuel Johnson told Boswell that it was 'the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.'
Review, 5688 words
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