Melancholy and Marriage

 The prolific and ever-reliable Anecdotal Evidence has taken as its text The Anatomy of Melancholy the last couple of days, sounding quite Johnsonian as it does as well as being the only thing the good doctor said got him out of bed two hours earlier than he would otherwise have got up.

It's one of that legion of books from university reading lists that I didn't read at the time but ought to catch up with now. In this case, though, I don't think I had to read it because my C17th Lit offering was a dissertatioon on Marvell. You might think there would be plenty of secondhand copies from ex-students who saw no point in hanging on to a 1400 page book they had hardly looked at but there aren't. I can't imagine how graduates can so readily dispose of their books once they've cobbled together their 2:2 and secured employment in a call centre but many seem to. I'd have thought the object of going to university to read one's best subject was very much to enjoy the books, Vanity Fair notwithstanding, but plenty get unloaded.

Not Robert Burton, though. I don't think many bought it in the first place. There are some extracts from it in the first volume of the weighty Oxford Anthology of English Literature that was mandatory in the first year and so I'll look at them. I don't want an abridged version, though, it's all or nothing so I'll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, The Marriage Portrait confirms Maggie O'Farrell as a 'proper writer', one who takes the reader vividly into the experience of her world. Or, the world of Lucrezia, the young Duchess of Ferrara. A proper writer does much more than put the words on the page, they apply them like Vermeer applies paint. I summarily refute the definition of poetry as a 'heightened' form of language when such a definition does nothing to differentiate it from such prose as this. It's as alive as her description of the tiger in its cage 'pouring itself' rather than moving and, like the young Lucrezia's art, it still gives the impression of three dimensions although it has reduced the world to two. 

The surprise hit of Hamnet was no fluke. There is plenty on the reading horizon with books respectfully waiting their turn to be called up but more Maggie will be among them, too, whether or not there's 1400 pages of Melancholy, which I understand to be funny and not all melancholic.