They dressed in black. The women wore white face paint and blood red lipstick. They all wrote morbid poetry and pined away in sorrow for lost love, unrequited affection, or simply for the unfairness of the world. On the other hand, many of them boiled over with rage, and challeneged their rivals to duels. Suicide was almost trendy. Most of them dabbled in the occult. They were mad, bad, and dangerous to know. And oh, yes – they adored music. If music was the food of love, play on.
Goths?
Yes. Goths…in the sixteenth century.
The cult of melancholy was a subcultural fad among the upper classes. It had its roots in alchemical and medical philosophy, but the disease of melancholy became trendy due to “coolness” factors. Melancholy was one of the four humoural dispositions (the others being choler, sanguinity, and phlegm) and scholars and artists were all reputed to be melancholic by nature. So, actually, were women, because their monthly flow bled them of the necessary balancing agent of black bile. Too, there was the attraction of madness – Elixabethans were quite fascinated by insanity, and melancholia at its most extreme was completely barking mad.
Pick up your copy of Hamlet and read it again. Shakespeare spoofed the courtly melancholics. He provided a fully fleshed out melancholic (Hamlet) and then, as a foil, provided a stereotypical melancholic (Ophelia). When you read, pretend that the action take place not in the castle of Elsinore, but in a gothic nightclub. It works. Would I lie?
– The Grand Poobah
(Note: I almost wrote a seventy page master’s thesis on this. This article is, shall we say, very condensed.)