Competing Melancholies: (En-)Gendering Discourses of Selfhood in Early Modern English Literature

When the shepherdess Urania in Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) enters a cave where she hopes to be alone with her sorrows, she is in for a nasty surprise: there is already another occupant. A man who calls himself Perissus, the lost one, has stretched himself out on a bed of leaves and is waiting for death. What then ensues is a near-comical quarrel for the right to the cave with each candidate trying to come up with the most convincing claim to suffer the most: “...