Written at the outset of the seventeenth century and based on accounts of several centuries earlier, Hamlet is often regarded as remarkably modern in its treatment of themes concerning mental health, political health, and spiritual health.
Hamlet describes himself as afflicted with a melancholy which he does not completely understand. English Renaissance audiences of Hamlet based their ideas about psychological disturbances such as melancholy and madness on medieval theories of body humours, or fluids. The humours correlated with the four basic elements of earth, air, fire, and water. The humours consisted of black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. A predominance of one of these humours resulted in a personality type. The person with an excess of blood was called sanguine, or cheerful. The excess of phlegm resulted in a phlegmatic, or passive, inert sort of.....
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