King Lear and Madness in the Renaissance Shakespeare's depiction of madness has been shown to parallel Bright's Treatise on Melancholia (Wilson 309-20), however the medical model alone is not enough to describe the madness of Shakespeare's King Lear. Shakespeare was not limited to just one book in his understanding of madness; he had at his disposal the entirety of his society's understanding of the problem. Because Lear's madness comes from a mixture of sources, it can only be effectively described in this broader context. Since much Renaissance medical theory was based on premises from the Middle Ages, a starting point for our understanding of Lear's madness can be found in the 1535 translation of De Propriatibus Rerum by the 13th-century monk Batholomaeus Anglicus. This work is based entirely on the traditional model of illness as an imbalance of the four humors: melancholy (or black bile), anger (or yellow bile), blood and phlegm. Batholomaeus classifies melancholy and madness separately, attributing them to different moods and different areas of the brain (1-4). The condition of melancholy is caused by an excess of melancholic mood. It makes a person "fierce without reason, and often apologetic. And this through the melancholic humor that forces and closes the herte" (2). In extreme cases melancholy causes symptoms similar to madness, "some fall into evil suspicions without recovering: and then they hate, blame, and confound their friends, and sometimes strike and kill them" (2). But although Lear may be described as having fallen into "evident suspicions," he is probably not suffering from melancholy. He is choleric by nature and his madness is likely to be... middle of paper... ed1. Bartolomeo Anglico. De Proprietatibus Rerum. Qtd. in the hunter 1-4.2. Brilliant, Timothy. Treatise on melancholy. Hunter 36-37.3. Byrd, Max. Visits to Bedlam: madness and literature in the eighteenth century. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1974.4. Hunter, Richard and Ida MacAlpine, eds. Three hundred years of psychiatry 1535-1860: a history presented in selected English texts. London: Oxford UP, 1963.5. Johnson, Samuel. "Preface." Johnson on Shakespeare. Ed. RW Desai. New Delhi: East, 1985.6. Shakespeare, William. "King Lear." William Shakespeare: the tragedies, the poems. Ed. John D. Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.7. Skultans, Vieda. English Madness: Ideas on Madness, 1580-1890. London: Routledge, 1979.8. Wilson, J. Dover. What happens in Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967.