"Sit Down. Take Pen and Ink and Write. Are You Ready?" Sitting in the Early Modern Imagination

Abstract:Sitting might be associated in our minds with a break in action; less a gesture than a slump into inertia. However, by analyzing John Milton's Samson Agonistes (1671), John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1614), and texts on melancholy and Hercules's attack on the Pygmies, we argue that manifold ideas about madness and melancholy are encapsulated in the early modern sitting body. Hercules, Samson, and the Duchess are explicitly written—or can be read—as mad and melancholy. Like Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer's depictions of Melancholia, these characters are seen in a sitting posture. By sitting decisively, the Duchess and Samson alert us to their early modern context which is rife with visual and textual depictions of sitting. Thereby, they invite us to read their sitting bodies as sites where madness and rationality, power and dependency, and different genders, incline into and towards each other.