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The Folger is closing at 4:30pm on Sunday, February 23, for a staff training exercise. Normal hours will resume when the Folger opens on Tuesday, February 25, at 11:00am.

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Mary Ann Lund

is Associate Professor in Renaissance English Literature at the University of Leicester and the author of A User’s Guide to Melancholy (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Better than laughing: Renaissance melancholy
Shakespeare and Beyond

Better than laughing: Renaissance melancholy

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Mary Ann Lund

The most famous book about Renaissance melancholy, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), celebrates its four hundredth anniversary this year. Though it was published five years after Shakespeare’s death, it gathers together ideas about melancholy from antiquity right through…