Robert Burton
Born in 1577 to a comfortably well-off family of the landed gentry, Burton attended two grammar schools and matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford in 1593, age 15.
Though he never fully succeeded, he managed to obtain the living of St Thomas the Martyr's Church, Oxford through the university, and external patronage for the benefice of Walesby and the rectorship of Seagrave.
[5] He was the second of four sons and fourth of ten children; his elder brother, William, is the only other member of the family for whom we know more than minor biographical details, as he later became a noted antiquarian and topographer.
More modern biographers, such as R. L. Nochimson and Michael O'Connell, have regarded it as Burton merely presenting what was a popular sentiment, rather than hinting at any personal dislike or source of childhood melancholy.
[15] Record has been found of one "Robart Burton of 20 yeres", a patient of London doctor and astrologist Simon Forman, who was treated for melancholy over a period of five months in 1597.
The queen consort and her ladies took offence at several "almost naked" male actors, probably portraying satyrs,[29] and the king was so displeased by the production that the chancellors of both Oxford and Cambridge had to plead for him to stay, as otherwise he "would have gone before half the Comedy had been ended".
The play cast the son of John King, then Dean of Christ Church, in a leading role, and departed from Alba's controversial mythological themes for the less contentious ones of an academic satire.
[13][26] Burton held this vicarage at St Thomas's, until his death; he was responsible for the building or rebuilding of the church's south porch in 1621, where his arms were placed on the gable.
This right necessitated that the holder of the advowson pick a candidate other than himself, but three days later Burton assigned three of his family members to this position, so he could procure his own future appointment.
[38] This exasperation seems to have been passing; by the Anatomy's final edition, he had revised the passage in praise of his "monastick life [...] sequestered from those tumults & troubles of the world", unindebted for his lack of preferment.
[3][46][47] This occupation has been cited by two biographers, O'Connell and Nochimson, to suggest, contrary to the bookish image given by his Anatomy, Burton had some knowledge of the day-to-day affairs of Oxford.
[55][33] Burton, as he claims in the preface, was "as desirous to suppress my labours in this kind, as others have been to press and publish theirs", but admits that melancholy is the subject upon which he is "fatally driven", and so he was compelled to compose the work.
The students, according to the testimony of Wood, embellished the story to the point that Burton was supposed to have "sent up his soul to heaven thro' a slip about his neck" in order that the date of his death would fit his exact astrological calculations.
In the comic climax, the fraudsters are branded and exiled, two characters marry, and the play concludes with a "hymn in praise of philosophy [...] to the tune of Bonny Nell".
[88] Stylistically, Philosophaster is declared on the title page to be a Comoedia Nova (or New Comedy) a satirical genre Kathryn Murphy describes as "in the tradition of Plautus and Terence.
[90] Burton also borrows episodes from contemporary academic satires—dealing with the perennial feuds between town and gown, the distinction between "true" and "false" scholars, the ridicule of pedants—and characters from humanist satirists, chiefly Erasmus and Giovanni Pontano.
[92] Angus Gowland, describing the University of Osuna as a "thinly disguised Oxford",[m] asserts that "the purpose of the play was to ridicule contemporary scholarship and provoke reform", in anticipation of the Anatomy's satirical themes.
[95] This much is obvious in certain characters—such as Theanus, an elderly college administrator who has forgotten all his scholarship, but still earns an exorbitant salary tutoring the sons of the gentry—whom the audience were expected to be familiar with within academia.
Murphy has suggested these themes reflect the pervading cultural influence of the Gunpowder Plot in Burton's lifetime, which took place a year before the play was set.
[3] Wood also notes that Burton's unsurpassed skill at including "verses from the poets or sentences from classical authors" in his everyday speech, "then all the fashion in the university", allowed him some popularity.
Bishop Kennett, writing somewhat later in the 18th century, recorded that Burton could flit between "interval[s] of vapours", in which he was lively and social, and periods of isolation in his college chambers where his peers worried he was suicidal.
Faunt's godson and Burton's brother, William, spoke admiringly of Faunt as "a man of great learning, gravity and wisdome";[103] William was a vigorous supporter of Laudian reforms in his home county, siding with High Church Anglicanism, which was sometimes seen as Catholic-sympathising[104][8] and at St Thomas's, Burton was apparently one of the last 17th-century Church of England priests to use unleavened wafers in the Communion, an outmoded Laudian practice.
[97] Burton also claimed part of his reasoning in not proceeding to a DD (Doctor of Divinity) was his reluctance to participate in the endless argument surrounding religion, for which he "saw no such great neede".
Burton seems to have been uncomfortable reading outside these two primary languages; he owned only a handful of titles in Italian, German, Spanish, and Hebrew, and none in Greek, the last despite his humanist reputation and the recurring Grecian references in the Anatomy.
He owned hundreds of cheap pamphlets, satires, and popular plays: all works which had been excluded from the recently founded Bodleian Library, perhaps why Burton felt the need to purchase them.
[122] Richard Holdsworth, when Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (1637–43), recommended it as a comprehensive digest to "serve for [the] delight and ornament" of young gentlemen, bestowing that learning expected of a gentleman rather than that of a serious scholar.
[115] Following Osler's influence, Burtonian studies were primarily bibliographical in the early 20th century, with the exception of an influential essay by critic Morris Croll on the "Senecan style" in Burton's late Renaissance prose.
[144] The eminent literary critic Northrop Frye was an admirer of the Anatomy; he characterized it as "an enormous survey of human life" which "ranks with Chaucer and Dickens, except the characters are books rather than people".
[151] O'Connell has, however, described it as "perhaps the most appealing of Burton's Latin works", he notes that the "liveliness in its representation of university life" redeems the "weak plotting and flat characterization.
"[152] The 19th-century critic of Elizabethan drama Arthur Henry Bullen wrote of it that the philosophasters "are portrayed with considerable humour and skill, and the lyrical portions of the play are written with a light hand".
