July 13, 1633
Being a student of physic much overtaxed by the rigors of study, during these hellish dog-days I have taken to the reading of plays, thereby thinking to distract my wits for a little season, lest I myself wax melancholy from too much contemplation thereof. However, I have found this disease of melancholy to be so infectious that it must make its way not only into the discourses of physicians and philosophers, but also into the fancies of playwrights who, as they hold a mirror up to nature, cannot but reflect this most dangerous and hydra-headed disease which, like that Babelic tower of old, speaks such a confused and many-tongued gibberish that it threatens to sicken the whole world with misunderstanding of itself. Thus I have spent several nights together considering the madness of Duke Ferdinand as John Webster paints it in his most stirring tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, in which melancholy uprears her many ugly heads, most notably her wolfish image, which howls through the love-racked body of Ferdinand, that most lascivious rogue who putrefies the entire court with his foul and incestuous lovesickness, his ravening heroical love, his erotic mania, so fierce and depraved that it degenerates into lycanthropy, or wolf madness, the grimmest form of melancholy known to man, whereby the victim believes himself to be a wolf: he must haunt about graveyards at night, howling and digging up corpses, dismembering them most savagely, and sometimes eating of their putrid flesh, thereby depriving the worms of their proper banquet. One may recognize these lycanthropes by the aforedescribed habits and also by their yellow pallor, their dry and sunken eyes, and by their mouths and tongues which are so dry that they be ever athirst like Tantalus in Hell. Moreover, their legs may be covered with all manner of sores, so putrid that they cannot be healed, which sores these nocturnal wolf-men acquire from frequent stumblings and perhaps dog-bites. These men may also howl and rave such monstrous gibberish that they will not be understood by their physicians, no matter how many ancient languages these disciples of physic may know. This lupine language bears not a trace of any human tongue, not even Latin, that language spoken by Romulus and Remus, those founders of Rome who were suckled by a she-wolf, and who, we may guess, prattled somewhat after the fashion of their foster mother.
So morbid is this disease lycanthropy, which some call insania lupina, or lupine melancholia, or wolves fury, or chatrab or qutrub, as the Arabs call it, or cucubuth as Avicenna has it, or wolf madness as others say, that some will hold that the Devil must have his hand in it. Indeed, the Devils hand, which is cold and dry like melancholy, may play upon the heartstrings of the melancholy man with especial ease, for melancholy, like the devils hand--though it hath passed through wasting fires--is essentially cold and dry. I must stress most vehemently here, that although the Devil may plague the fancies of melancholic men whose brains be tormented with all manner of darksome visions caused by sooty vapors of black bile that swirl through their sickened brains, the Devil hath no power to actually change a man into a beast, but only power sufficient to make him believe he hath been thus transformed. The learned Weyer holds thus most eloquently in his De praestigiis daemonum when he saith,
If Livonia and the neighboring regions seem to have some dangerous wolves roaming about . . . these are almost certainly real wolves, stirred up to this tragic performance by a demon, who meanwhile imbues and impairs the organs of imagination of the raving wolf-men with the random wanderings and actions of these real wolves, so that consequently, because of their corrupted imaginations, they think and admit that they are the ones who perform these wandering excursions and activities. And from a description of the disease involved, lycanthropy, anyone can see that this task is not difficult for the Devil when he sets in motions the humors and spirits suitable for these illusions, especially in the case of persons whose brains are oft impaired by mists of black bile, such as this abnormal and fatuous group of men. Alternately, if they are not real, such wolves must be thought of as demons who have assumed this form the better to trap these gullible men with their snares. . . . Meanwhile, those who believe themselves transformed into wolves are found lying somewhere immersed in deep sleep by the efforts of the Devil.
Reginald Scot rightly asks in The Discovery of Witchcraft, What a beastlie assertion is it, that a man, whom GOD hath made according to his own similitude and likenes, should be by a witch [or demon] turned into a beast? On the nature of lycanthropy, I stand with this selfsame Scot who holds that the transformations, which these witchmongers doo so rave and rage upon, is (as all the learned sort of physicians affirm) a disease proceeding partly from melancholie, wherebie many suppose themselves to be woolves, or such ravening beasts. Thus, while the soul may indeed be infected in the end, lycanthropy, as a melancholic disease of the body and mind, may be rightly considered and treated by physicians.
Although the great and learned Burton, in his vast Anatomy of Melancholy, defines lycanthropy as a species madness, and not of melancholy, he still holds that madness and melancholy differ only by degree: Madness is therefore defined to be a vehement dotage, or raving without a fever, far more violent than melancholy, full of anger and clamour, horrible looks, actions, gestures, troubling the patients with far greater vehemency both of body and mind, without all fear and sorrow, with such impetuous force and boldness, that sometimes three or four men cannot hold them Burton also saith that men diseased with lycanthropy run howling about graves and fields at night, and will not be persuaded but that they are wolves, or some such beasts and thus they lie hid most part all day, and go abroad in the night, barking, howling, at graves and deserts; they have usually hollow eyes, scabbed legs and thighs, very dry and pale.
Although lycanthropy, or wolf-madness, may spring from diverse and obscure causes, lovesickness may be a cause, for when lovesickness turns melancholy or maniacal, it may degenerate into lycanthropy. The learned Arab physicians Rhazes and Haly Abbas both declare that at the height of uncured lovesickness, the lover may dash about graveyards howling wolfishly, and Haly Abbas goes so far as to say that melancholy, lycanthropy, and erotic mania are varieties of the same disease and thus should be considered similarly. Moreover, the learned Jacques Ferrand saith in his Treatise on Lovesickness, that love be more difficult to cure when maddened by jealousy, and that a lovesick man disregards all laws, natural and Divine, in his mad pursuit, and that Avicenna teaches that if this disease becomes habitual it is incurable and renders the victim hectical, sottish, dull, and sometimes so savage that he turns lycanthropic or takes his own life. I believe that lovesickness, heightened by jealous passion, be the cause of Ferdinands ravings in Websters tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, for Ferdinand suffers such an agitation of love for his twin sister that his passion flares beyond all bounds, breaking laws both natural and Divine. This love hath scorched his humors and hath given him an unnatural melancholy, or melancholy adust, which may attack a man when his cholor be burnt. Unnatural melancholy occurs when black bilious humors teem from the roasting of normal humors by an unnatural heat which may arise from inordinate passion. As Ferrand saith, the melancholy humor, hot and dry through adustion of yellow bile, blood, or natural melancholy, is the principal cause of erotic melancholy or erotic mania. . . . Moreover, as Ferrand saith, those who are melancholy from adust humors. . . are hot and dry and produce within a variety of flatulent vapors that tickle them, driving them to extremes of lasciviousness. And as Lemnius saith in his Touchstone of Complexions, such melancholy by combustion is farre worse and more pernicious than natural melancholy. Although sanguine men may be prone to erotic mania because of their natural disposition for love (since sanguine men naturally burst with over-much seed for semen is nothing other than blood bleached by natural heat, an excrement of the third digestion ), a man of choleric humor may also be amorous. And because choleric men by nature be rash, when their yellow bile burns up from passion, they may easily grow mad from lovesickness and thus are more prone to its extreme manifestations, lycanthropy among them.
Clearly Ferdinand is of the choleric disposition, for when he discovers that his sister be made pregnant by another man he declares, Rhubarb, oh for rhubarb / To purge this choler. . . (II.v. 12-13). Moreover, Ferdinand saith that the marriage of his sister to her steward Antonio drew a stream of gall quite through [his] heart. . . (IV.ii.285). Thus Ferdinands natural choler, burnt by passion, flies upward and there kindles and corrupts his heart, and then moves yet higher to burn his brain until he grows brainsickly from incestuous love of his sister.
Before I discourse further on Ferdinands love sickness, let me first explain the course this contagion takes, how it enters the body and what effect it has on it. The learned Ferrand describes this process most clearly in his Treatise, so I will quote generously therefrom:
Once love deceives the eyes, which are the true spies and gatekeepers of the soul, she slips through the passageways, traveling imperceptibly by way of the veins to the liver where she suddenly imprints an ardent desire for that object that is either truly lovable or appears so. There love ignites concupiscence and with such lust the entire sedition begins. . . . But fearing her own powers insufficient for overthrowing the reasonthe sovereign part of the soullove turns directly upon the citadel of the heart, and once that valiant stronghold is made subject, she attacks the reason and all the noble forces of the brain so vigorously that she overwhelms them and makes them her slaves. Then all is lost: the man is finished, his senses wander, his reason is deranged, his imagination becomes depraved, and his speech incoherent.
Thus we may clearly see how Ferdinands choleric love rises from his liver to vanquish his heart, and from there it moves on to infect his brain so that he ever hath lewd imaginings of his sister in the act of sin: Methinks I see her laughing, saith Ferdinand, Excellent hyena! Talk to me somewhat, quickly, / Or my imagination will carry me / To see her in the shameful act of sin(II.v.38-41). Nor can Ferdinand help himself, for the image of his sister is imprinted indelibly upon his liver, so that he must ever think on and envisage her
. . . with some strong thighd bargeman; Or one oth wood-yard, that can quoit the sledge Or toss the bar, or else some lovely squire That carries coals up to her privy lodgings. (II.v.43-46)
Indeed, Ferdinand is pricked on to goatishness, ever raving bawdily, casting his crude desires onto the minds of others, holding all women to be lusty like himself: women, saith Ferdinand, like that part, which, like the lamprey, / Hath nevr a bone int (I.ii.256-7). Yet all the while he desires his sister, and wants to Root up her goodly forests, blast her meads, / And lay her general territory as waste. . . (II.v.19-21), for his love hath grown so violent that there is nothing that shall quench [his] wild-fire (II.v.48) save the blood of his sister (which he declares whorish). His wolfish desires grow so strong that he wants to rip her to pieces (II.v.31) as wolves dismember the bodies of men. Clearly Ferdinand waxes erotomaniacal, and sorely needs a cure, yet as Narcissus pines after his own image, Ferdinand casts his own disease upon others. Of his sister he raves, Apply desperate physic, / We must not now use balsamum but fire, / The smarting cupping glass, for thats the mean / to purge infected blood, such blood as hers (II.v.23-6). In fact, it is Ferdinand whose putrid blood must be drawn away by such extreme cures, for as the learned Ferrand saith, if a man doth not expel his seed naturally, it will remain in its reservoirs, turn corrupt, and from there, by means of the back bone and other secret channels, send a thousand noxious vapors to the brain, troubling the faculties and principle virtues. For this reason, there is great utility in drawing off any superfluous blood by bleeding the liver vein of the right arm. In such cases, Ferrand instructs the physician to apply cupping glasses on the thighs near the genitals with the requisite scarification. (It should also be noted that, as Ferrand holds, overly spermatic men oft grow great quantities of hair, and this, I believe, is another reason why lusty men may think themselves wolves.) Thus it is Ferdinand who needs such a bleeding, yet he insists that his twin sister must have it, that his own blood runs through her veins: Damn her! that body of hers, / While that my blood ran pure in it, was worth / Than that which thou wouldst comfort, calld a soul (IV.i.119-121).
As the contagion of love first enters through the eyes and thereby infects the rest of the body, the sight of the beloved can be a perpetual vexation for the erotomaniac whose eyes are often sore from the infection: thus Ferdinand saith, I have cruel sore eyes (V.ii.61). Moreover, when Ferdinand visits his sister in her bed-chamber, he hath all the lights extinguished, for he hath rashly made a solemn vow / Never to see [her] more . . . (IV.i.23-4), for sight of her ever scalds him afresh with unwholesome passion. But still he must imprison her to make her mad, and thereby transform her into a proper reflection of himself, and when this will not work he must slay her. As Ferrand saith of the cunning Italian lover, he becomes jealous and wants to keep [his beloved] under lock and key as his prisoner. If he fails in this suit, he hates her and will try to do her any injury in his power. After Ferdinand hath tormented his sister with wax figures likened after corpses of her children and husband, and after he hath gone so far as to bring in all manner of madmen to howl and gibber to bring her to despair (IV.i.115), he finds his fanciful torments useless in moving his beloved into a state like unto his own: thus he must slay her. But even after he kills his twin, the sight of her beauteous corpse vexes him: Cover her face, saith Ferdinand, Mine eyes dazzle: she did young. (IV.ii.263).
So maniacal is Ferdinands love for his twin sister that he must follow her to her tomb and like the wolf find her grave and scrape it up (IV.ii.307). After his sisters death, when Ferdinand may no longer look outward to behold his beloved, his erotomania waxes so fierce that his melancholy rages into lycanthropy, and he removes himself from the world of men, remaining trapped alone inside the bestiality of his madness. Because he cannot imprison his beloved, he himself becomes imprisoned in a wolfish body, daunted by the lookinglass of heaven which gives us a miserable knowledge of the small / compass of our prison (IV.ii.133-4). Whereas before the Duke could not bear that his sister be too much in the light, now he must also shun it and hunt the badger by owl-light: / Tis a deed of darkness (IV.ii.332-3).The doctor in this tragedy gives such a learned description of Ferdinands disease, that I imagine Webster himself must have studied a little physic, for how else could he have crafted such a character? Of Ferdinands disease this doctor saith:
In those that are possessd with t there oerflows Such melancholy humour, they imagine Themselves to be transformed into wolves. Steel forth to churchyards in the dead of night, And dig dead bodies up: as two nights since One met the Duke, bout midnight in a lane Behind St. marks church, with the leg of a man Upon his shoulder; and he howld fearfully: Said he was a wolf: only the difference Was, a wolfs skin was hairy on the outside, His on the inside: bad them take their swords, Rip up his flesh, and try. . . . (V.ii.8-19)
This doctor, though learned, could not know that Ferdinands flood of melancholy bubbles up from his erotomania which springs forth from his unwholesome love for his twin sister. Because the Dukes sister could not love him back, and thereby restore to him that lost part of himself which Plato (through the voice of Aristophanes) saith all men seek through erotic love, Ferdinand must howl away in the prison of his own madness, trapped in a wolfish skin so constricting that it must grow inside his own body, ever pricking his poor innards, which have already been burnt and withered by the fiery passions of his unlawful and beastly love. Nay, so incurable is this extreme form of erotomania, that even after the lover hath removed the object of torment from his sight, his own shadow will torment him, and he will oft cast violent hands upon himself: thus Ferdinand throws himself upon his own shadow as though he will throttle it (V.ii.38). As many physicians hold, the lycanthrope rages so violently that nothing will cure him but death. Therefore, it is fitting that Ferdinand be slain by Bosola, who has acted throughout as Ferdinands agent, his witchy familiar. Thus we may regard this as a species of suicide. Alas, the natural and proper end of the extreme erotomaniac, roasted by the fires of his mad love, is self-combustion.