This book begins with a background on expository books about melancholy in the Renaissance with chapters on the literary uses of melancholy, Marston and melancholy, Melancholy and Hamlet, and the anatomy of melancholy as literature. When Shakespeare, Burton and other Renaissance writers gave melancholy the complex meanings and associations it has in their work, they were drawing on a tradition that had been developing throughout classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, and whose diverse origins made it an especially fruitful subject for literature.

Among the films inspired by Orson Welles's lifelong involvement with Shakespeare, the greatest is "Chimes at Midnight" (1966). It is a masterly conflation of the Shakespearean history plays that feature Falstaff, the great comic figure played by Welles himself in the film. For Welles, the character was also potentially tragic: the doomed friendship between Falstaff and Prince Hal becomes an image of the end of an age. To this epic subject Welles brings the innovative film techniques that made him famous in "Citizen Kane," "The Lady from Shanghai," and "Touch of Evil."

This volume offers a...