Melancholy and Music
The Mad Lover, as its title indicates, deals with a case of "melancholia" or depression due to an unsatisfactory romantic attachment. In this respect, it relates to a number of other dramas of its historical era that include the same or similar subject matter, including Fletcher's The Noble Gentleman, The Nice Valour, and John Ford's The Lover's Melancholy. The Mad Lover has been noted for its use of music as a treatment for mental illness; the play has been called "the most extensive example within a single play of the use of musical sound and imagery in the depiction and cure of madness." The characters in the play stage a masque in their attempt to treat the mad general, Memnon; drawing on the myth of Orpheus, it is a Masque of Beasts and Trees, with an ape, dog, lion, and dancing trees — all former men and foolish lovers.
Read more about this topic: The Mad Lover
Famous quotes containing the words melancholy and, melancholy and/or music:
“I shall speak of ... how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another.... Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next.... Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.”
—Günther Grass (b. 1927)
“The shadow of the Venetian blind on the painted wall,
Shadows of the snake-plant and cacti, the plaster animals,
Focus the tragic melancholy of the bright stare
Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Music is either sacred or secular. The sacred agrees with its dignity, and here has its greatest effect on life, an effect that remains the same through all ages and epochs. Secular music should be cheerful throughout.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)