hamlet contemporary documents quotes (1500-1600)

Question 1

Bright in A Treatise of melancholy

Answer 1

‘the perturbations of melancholy are for the most part sad and fearful … and sometimes merry in appearance”

1586

Question 2

King James VI of Scotland in Daemonologie

Answer 2

‘[the devil is] the source of all ghostly apparitions…. [to] delude the living’’

1597

Question 3

Middleton in The Revenger’s Tragedy

Answer 3

‘when the bad bleed then is the tragedy good’

1606

Question 4

Bacon in the Essays of Revenge

Answer 4

‘revenge is a kind of wild justice’

1625