The four bodily humors—blood, bile, melancholy, and phlegm—represented sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic qualities that were thought to determine people’s physical and mental health, as well as their personalities. “Sanguis” (left) and “Cholera” (right)
Minerva Britanna, Henry Peacham, 1612
Courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library
English Renaissance cleric and scholar Robert Burton wrote about the different types of melancholy. He regarded unmarried gentlewomen with little to do as being “torrent of inward humours,” above all, lacking the social purpose conferred only by marriage.
Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton, 1628
Courtesy National Library of Medicine
William Shakespeare created characters that are among the richest and most humanly recognizable in all of literature. Yet the playwright understood human personality in the terms available to his age—the now-discarded theory of the four bodily humors.
William Shakespeare, 1633
Courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library
Shakespeare’s audiences were presented with plays depicting the full range of human behaviors and character types, from the vengefulness of choleric old age to maidenly melancholy.
“Globe Theater,” Londinum florentissima Brittaniae urbs, Claes Jansz Visscher, 1626
Courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library