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Robert Burton's Frontispiece

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

William R. Mueller
William R. Mueller*
Affiliation:
University or California Santa Barbara College
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Extract

In his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton acknowledges the wide diversity of taste in a reading audience and suggests that there are those who desire “a fine frontispiece, enticing pictures.” In the third edition of 1628, there appeared a frontispiece engraved by one Christian Le Blon, little known except for his contribution to the Anatomy. Le Blon's work was probably directed by Burton, for the engravings suggest a detailed knowledge of Burton's text and of the relationship which certain birds, beasts, herbs, and planets bore to the very prevalent disease of melancholy. The frontispiece contains ten “enticing pictures”, and centered within their rectangular mass is the title-page of the two earlier editions; the only significant change in the title-page is in motto—from Macrobius's Omne meum, Nihil meum to Horace's Omne tulit punclum, qui miscuit utile dulci. Burton finds the latter more complimentary to his life's work; he asserts at the beginning of the third partition that his “earnest intent is as much to profit as to please.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 64 , Issue 5: Issue 1 part 1 , December 1949 , pp. 1074 - 1088
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1949

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References

1 Ed. A. R. Shilleto, 3 vols. (London, 1903), I, 25. Subsequent references to the Anatomy will assume this edition. For the photographed frontispiece I am indebted to Mrs. Mary L. Richmond, Custodian of the Chapin Library, Williams College.

2 Both mottos appear in the text itself: see Anatomy, i, 22, and iii, 6.

3 Ibid., in, 6; see also i, 18.

4 See Edward Bensly, “Some Alterations and Errors in Successive Editions of The Anatomy oj Melancholy” Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings and Papers, vol. I, pt. 3 (1925), 201, and Edward Gordon Duff, “The Fifth Edition of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy? Library, iv (1923), 99–100.

5 (London, 1582), bk. 18, chs. 27 and 94.

6 The Historié of Fovre-Footed Beasles (London, 1607), pp. 60–65.

7 The concluding two lines might more appropriately accompany Plate Two, where we have noted the absence of the “two roaring Bulls.” But as we have seen, the “Cutter” must be acquitted of any error.

8 Bk. 12, ch. 5; bk. 18, chs. 57 and 27.

9 Bk. 18, ch. 76. Falstaff at one point confesses to Hal that he is “as melancholy as a gib-cat”; a few lines later Hal replies, “What sayest thou to a hare, or the melancholy of Moor Ditch?” / Henry IV, I, ii, 82, 87. Burton points out also that the Egyptians “in their Hieroglyphicks expressed a melancholy man by a hare sitting in her form as being a most timorous and solitary creature” (i 455).

10 Op.cit.,p. 267.

11 According to Bensly (p. 200), Burton's Inamorato of the frontispiece might have been suggested by John Earle's character of “A Discontented Man”, also first published in 1628.

12 The gap caused by my own ignorance of practical astrology has been kindly filled by Mrs. Marion Drew, Secretary of the Society for the Advancement of Astrology, Cold Spring, New York. I am deeply indebted to Mrs. Drew for her help.

13 The first and seconde partes of the Herbal of William Turner (Collen, 1568), 1st pt., p. 96; Dodoens, A Nievve Herball, tr. by H. Lyte (London, 1578), p. 12.

14 The Herball or Generall Historié of Plants (London, 1597), p. 654.

15 A Nievve Herball, p. 352.

16 The Herball, p. 827.