The Melancholy Earl: Sir William Herbert in the Medical Case Notes of Dr Barker of Shrewsbury
2016; Oxford University Press; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/notesj/gjw214
ISSN1471-6941
AutoresErin Sullivan, Susan Brock, Greg Wells,
Tópico(s)Historical Economic and Social Studies
ResumoDuring his lifetime, William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke (1580–1630), was a noted figure in the courts of Elizabeth and James. He was the head of the second richest landowning family in England, and his political and financial influence was widespread. Of all his many accomplishments, however, he is best remembered today as the greatest arts patron of his generation, with Ben Jonson, George Chapman, George Herbert, Inigo Jones, Nicholas Hilliard, John Dowland, and possibly also William Shakespeare numbering among his beneficiaries. Outside of the royal family, no one in the period attracted as many literary dedications as Herbert: the first, Thomas Moffet’s Nobilis (1593), came when the future earl was just twelve years old, while the most famous, John Heminges and William Condell’s First Folio of Shakespeare’s collected works (1623), arrived after two decades of influence in the Jacobean court.1 As a patron of the arts throughout the 1590s and 1600s, and as a writer of courtly poetry himself, Herbert would have been more than familiar with the vogue for melancholic affectation that left its mark on so many works of the period. From Jonson’s comedies of humours to Hilliard’s delicate portraits to Dowland’s mournful songs, the language and imagery of melancholic yearning infused the creative output of these decades. Melancholy was, in the words of Juliet Dusinberre, ‘a fashionable malady in a fin de siècle world’, and several of the artists to whom Herbert extended his support were major contributors to the trend.2
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