Contents -- Illustrations -- Ac know ledg ments -- Introduction -- 1. From Dürer's Angel to Harlow's Monkey -- Hanging the Head -- Melancholy and/as Posture from Dürer to Oliver -- Walter Benjamin on the "Idea" as Confi guration -- The Shield as Impresa of Physical Vulnerability -- A Pose Is a Pose Is a Pose -- 2. Three Hundred Years Out of Fashion -- Aff ect and Aff ectation -- Don Adriano de Armado, Walter Benjamin, and the Dialectical Theater of Melancholy Fashion -- Biron, Sigmund Freud, and Melancholy Wit -- "You That Way. We This Way.": Melancholy Transmission from Male Minds to Female Bodies -- 3. Let Me Have Judgment, and the Jew His Will -- Weariness and Wariness -- The "Standing Pool" of Melancholy -- Antonio as the Subject of Masochistic Fantasy -- Sacrifi ce, Subjection, and the Melancholy Pound of Flesh -- 4. That Within Which Passes Show -- Mourning, Melancholy/Melancholia, and "the Hamlet mystery" -- "Less than kin and more than kind": Hamlet's Melancholic Aside -- Seeing Things and Hearing Voices: Epistemology, Spectatorship, Audition -- "Audience to this Act": Assembling the Witnesses -- 5. Rhapsodies of Rags -- A Melancholy Stereoscope -- Burton Criticism as Melancholy Ruin -- Assemblage as Argument: Burton on the "Inward Causes" of Melancholy -- Digression as Argument: Benjamin on the "Mosaic" of Melancholy -- 6. My Self, My Sepulcher -- "Humours Black": Samson as Melancholic -- "O blot to honor and religion": Masculinity and Eff eminacy -- "Choosing Death as Due": Samson as Masochist -- Pathology and/or Redemption -- "Rousing Motions": Aristotle, Galen, and the Materiality of Emotion -- All Passion Spent? -- Epilogue Disassembling Melancholy -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.