Melancholic
Idea-oriented
- Speed: The melancholic is slow to react. Because their reactions are slow in coming, they prefer quiet thought to enthusiastic conversation. One advantage of this temperament is critical insight into the strengths and weaknesses of a project, but one disadvantage is pessimism in the face of all the foreseen difficulties.
- Intensity: This humor’s immediate reaction has a deep intensity that may not be apparent to others. They may seem indifferent in conversation, but they do listen and think over the events of their life. While their intensity for ideas is great, they may forget about serving people and friends.
- Duration: Melancholic reactions endure long after the event. They often remember insults; they can hold onto grudges. Nevertheless, they have a great capacity for rigorous study. Although the long reactions help melancholics to contemplate, they need to learn when to take action.
Examples from Western Literature
Melancholic
The contemplative melancholic reads a book. He also grasps firmly on a bag of money, displaying the avarice that can seize melancholics.
Melancholy in Emma
Jane Austen's Emma, chapter XI:
Isabel: "Papa, if you speak in that melancholy way, you will be giving Isabella a false idea of us all."
Fixing Fanny's Melancholy
Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, chapter XLVI, when the narrator comments on Fanny's melancholy:
There is nothing like employment, active indispensable employment, for relieving sorrow. Employment, even melancholy, may dispel melancholy, and [Fanny Price’s] occupations were hopeful.
Melancholy in A Midsummers Night Dream
THESEUS: Go, Philostrate, / Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments; / Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth; / Turn melancholy forth to funerals; / The pale companion is not for our pomp.
Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1
The Melancholic King in A Winter's Tale
AUTOLYCUS: The king is not at the palace; he is gone aboard a new ship to purge melancholy and air himself: for, if thou beest capable of things serious, thou must know the king is full of grief.
Shakespeare's The Winter’s Tale 4.4
Melancholy in Comedy of Errors
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE: A trusty villain, sir, that very oft, / When I am dull with care and melancholy, / Lightens my humor with his merry jests.
Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors 1.2
Hamlet's Melancholy
THE KING: Love? His affections do not that way tend, / Nor what he spake, though it lack’d form a little, / Was not like madness. There’s something in his soul / O’er which his melancholy sits on brood, / And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose / Will be some danger, which for to prevent, / I have in quick determination / Thus set it down.
Shakespeare's Hamlet 3.1
The Melancholy Jaques
JAQUES: I prithee, pretty youth, let me be better acquainted with / thee.
ROSALIND: They say you are a melancholy fellow.
JAQUES: I am so; I do love it better than laughing.
ROSALIND: Those that are in extremity of either are abominable / fellows, and betray themselves to every modern censure worse than / drunkards.
JAQUES: Why, 'tis good to be sad and say nothing.
ROSALIND: Why then, 'tis good to be a post.
JAQUES: I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is / emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the / courtier's, which is proud; nor the soldier's, which is / ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, / which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all these; but it is a / melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted / from many objects, and, indeed, the sundry contemplation of my / travels; in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous /Sadness.
Ferdinand's Melancholy
FERDINAND: Besieged with sable-colored melancholy, I did commend the black-oppressing humor to the most wholesome physic of thy health-giving air; and, as I am a gentleman, betook myself to walk.
Shakespeare's Love’s Labour Lost 1.1
Much Ado About Nothing
LEONATO: There’s little of the melancholy element in her, my lord: she is / never sad but when she sleeps; and not ever sad then, for I have heard / my daughter say, she hath often dreamed of unhappiness and waked / herself with laughing.
LEONATO: There’s little of the melancholy element in her, my lord: she is / never sad but when she sleeps; and not ever sad then, for I have heard / my daughter say, she hath often dreamed of unhappiness and waked / herself with laughing.
Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing 2.1
Shakespeare's Pericles
PERICLES [To Lords without.]: Let none disturb us. — Why should this change of thoughts, / The sad companion, dull-eyed melancholy, / Be my so used a guest as not an hour / In the day’s glorious walk or peaceful night, / The tomb where grief should sleep, can breed me quiet?
Shakespeare's Pericles 1.2
Juliet's False Death
CAPULET: All things that we ordained festival / Turn from their office to black funeral: / Our instruments to melancholy bells, / Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast; / Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change; / Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse, / And all things change them to the contrary.
Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet 4.5
Shakespeare's "Sonnet 45"
The other two, slight air, and purging fire, / Are both with thee, wherever I abide, / The first my thought, the other my desire, / These present-absent with swift motion slide. / For when these quicker elements are gone / In tender embassy of love to thee, / My life being made of four, with two alone, / Sinks down to death, oppressed with melancholy. / Until life’s composition be recured, / By those swift messengers returned from thee, / Who even but now come back again assured, / Of thy fair health, recounting it to me. / This told, I joy, but then no longer glad, / I send them back again and straight grow sad.