Mourning and Mental Illness

Written by Samantha Clark

Mourning Practices in
Elizabethan England

Attire

Much like today, black was the color of mourning during the Elizabethan Era.

The Funeral Procession of Queen Elizabeth I, 1603.
Elizabeth’s funeral effigy is now part of the Westminster Abbey effigy collection.

According to elizabethan.org:

Mourning gear helped to distinguish the actual mourners from mere on-lookers […] Wills often specify certain people to have mourning rings made for them. These were always purpose-made, usually memento mori: a remembrance of death, in the form of skulls, coffins, skeletons and crosses […] Attendants were dressed in black and carried black staves.

The range kinship for mourning purposes extended beyond the immediate family to include servants and other dependants, whether or not they were related by blood.”

Mourning Period and Grief

Alison Ruth, the recent dramaturg for the recent Delaware Shakespeare Festival discussed the appropriate period for morning related to Gertrude’s marrying of Claudius in Hamlet:

It seems that the mourning period for a king would have been sometime between 6 months and 1 year.  In general, it was not uncommon for widows to remarry within the first year of their husband’s death. Gertrude’s period of being a widow would have been considered quite short, though.

However, complicating the situation is the fact that English culture in the last half of the sixteenth century witnessed an intense Protestant campaign against both the expression of grief and the expression of comfort or condolence toward those in mourning. Sixteenth Century treatises on mourning “regard grief as a sign of irrationality, weakness, inadequate self-control and impiety” (Mullaney) (Note: impiety means a lack of reverence for God.) This trend is represented in Ben Jonson’s (1572- 1637) poem Of Death:

He that feares death, or mournes it, in the iust,
Shewes of the resurrection little trust

The degree to which such strictures affected how people felt grief in the period of course uncertain, for a brief period of time however, “they clearly altered the decorum of bereavement, casting a moralizing and religiously charged pall over traditionally available expressions of grief, whether public rites or private rituals and practices.” (Mullaney) This sheds light on Claudius and Gertrude’s reprimand of Hamlet’s grief. Criticism of one’s expressions of sadness may have been a society-wide practice.

Ruth is referring to Steven Mullany’s chapter “Mourning and Misogyny” in Political Shakespeare who writes in exploration of mourning under a patriarchy. He writes that much of what we know about grief during the Elizabethan era is through private journals, which even then was still controlled rather than a natural catharsis of emotions:

The expressions of individual grief which do exist can easily strike the modern reader as remote and unfeeling

Mullany finds this interesting, because regardless of gender, there are always anthropological rituals for grief and mourning. We know a lot about ceremonies of the era and narrative or artistic exemplification, but not many sources of literal grief-stricken people of the time. Therefore, he suggests that it is Elizabeth herself that influenced the era with her stoicism. Perhaps Shakespeare’s representation of Gertrude in Hamlet reflected his view of the queen: so stoic in the face of horror that she seemed unfeeling, and then, perhaps Olivia is the opposite of this which is why no character can understand her grief; it is an unusual display for the women of the era.

Issues Regarding Mental Health
Represented in Twelfth Night

Olivia’s Grief

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Olivia is mourning the death of her brother. The first scene of the play discusses that she will not allow anyone to enter her home as she is to mourn for seven years. After Valentine is denied access, he tells Duke Orsino of what Maria has told him:

But from her handmaid do return this answer:

The element itself, till seven years’ heat,

Shall not behold her face at ample view,

But like a cloistress, she will veiled walk

And water once a day her chamber round

With eye-offending brine—all this to season

A brother’s dead love, which she would keep fresh

And lasting in her sad remembrance. (1.1. 24-31)

The other characters of the play describe her mourning as dramatic and unnecessary. Sir Toby Belch, her uncle, questions if there’s a medical reason for her fashion of mourning:

What a plague means my niece, to take the death of her brother thus?  (1.3.1-3)

Today, we have words for this: prolonged grief. In his article, “Grief, Depression, and the DSM-5,” Richard A. Friedman states that grief resembles mild to major depression and usually persists for 2-6 months, and sometimes even longer:

10 to 20% of bereaved people do not get over their grief easily and go on to develop a syndrome of complicated grief, characterized by an intense and persistent longing for the deceased, a sense of anger and disbelief over the death, and a disturbing preoccupation with the lost one (Friedman).

So, yes, as Toby Belch says, it is an ailment of its own.

Drunkenness and Alcoholism

While Sir Toby Belch mocks Olivia’s mourning composure, he is visiting her home in leu of his nephew’s death (as well as for the death of Olivia’s father), and happens to “celebrate” with his friend, Sir Andrew through frequent drunkenness. Maria even comments on the possible effect of how frequent he drinks:

“That quaffing and drinking will undo you” (1.3.32)

This shows Sir Toby Belch frequenting the definition of a diagnosis with alcoholism.

Narcissism

Duke Orsino views Olivia’s reclusiveness as unnecessary and states that he “cannot be so answer’d” at the idea of Olivia turning him away along with her other suitors (2.4). According to information provided in a study by Marta Malesza and Magdalena Claudia Kaczmarek, Duke Orsino follows the patterns of grandiose narcissism:

Grandiosity is characterized by dominance, aggression, self-assurance, arrogant attitudes, inflated self-esteem, exploitativeness, entitlement, and a strong need for the admiration of others.

With this in mind, though, we can characterize Olivia with vulnerable narcissism through her aggressive fantasies about Cesario, fear of what he thinks of her, and impulsive behavior to marry Sebastian:

Vulnerability, in contrast, is characterized by fragile self-esteem, emotional instability, introversion, negative affect, hostility, need for recognition, entitlement, egocentricity, and preoccupation with grandiose fantasies, oscillation between feelings of superiority and inferiority (Marta Malesza and Magdalena Claudia Kaczmarek).

 

The Elizabethan era was long before discussions of mental illness and metadiscourse on grief, therefore we cannot assume that Shakespeare was directly writing of these topics in his plays, but we can surmise that he wrote of the people and political scenes around him.

 

Works Cited:
Friedman, Richard A. “Grief, Depression, and the DSM-5.” The New England Journal of
           Medicine, vol. 366, no. 20, 2012, pp. 1855–1857.
“Funerals and Mourning.” Life in Elizabethan England,
elizabethan.org/compendium/83.html.
Malesza, Marta, and Magdalena Kaczmarek. “Grandiose Narcissism versus Vulnerable
Narcissism and Impulsivity.” Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 126,
2018, p. 61.
Mullany, Stephen. “Mourning and Misogyny.” Political Shakespeare, edited by Stephen
Orgel and Sean Keilen, Garland Publishing, 1999, pp. 139–156.
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Twelfth Night. Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1928.