”The pangs of dispriz’d love” — On some Discourses of Amorous Melancholy in Shakespeare

Before exploring some Elizabethan paradigms of the discourse of love melancholy and some tropes of sensitivity and suffering, I would like to dwell on a thought-provoking statement due to David Schalkwyk in his article, “Love and Service in Twelfth Night and the Sonnets” (The Shakespeare Quarterly Vol. 56, 76). His development — and I must say I fully adhere to his train of thought — begins this way: “Love has all but vanished from current critical discourse. Since the theoretical transformat...