Long regarded as the preeminent expositor of human emotions in the Western Literary Tradition, Shakespeare's view of the human body, and the passions that emanate from within it, are in fact shaped—and limited—by the era in which he lived. This era witnessed a fascinating range of medical explanations for the emotions, from the Neoplatonic to the Paracelsian to the Galenic. Of the three, Shakespeare made much use of a Neoplatonic view of the soul—and its most rarefied feelings—as transcending its bodily enclosure throughout many of his early plays, for example Romeo and Juliet (1594). By the early 1600s, however, Shakespeare's interest in darker, more incurable psychic states begins to take hold: in Hamlet (1601) we find ourselves face to face with a prince whose sadness refuses to designate itself unambiguously, while in King Lear (1605) the most esteemed of human passions, love, appears almost nowhere to be found. Shakespeare's turn toward these dark themes, not without foreshadowing in his earlier works, has often been read in light of what we know of his biography at this time: the death of his son, Hamlet and his father, for example, but there are other factors we might consider as contributing to this reconceptualization of the passions, and the human bodies in which they now more firmly, we might say more materialistically, reside. Among these factors are a number of treatises on the human emotions that are being authored in, and translated into, English at this time: tracts that trace the origins of human feeling to humors and phlegm as much as to divine grace and fate. These tracts, routinely referred to as Galenic in light of their ties to the ancient Greek physician Galen's theory of the humors, view the human soul and body as inextricably entwined. In his own work, Shakespeare appears interested in reconsidering what it means to be "human" in the early 1600s and in particular what it means to be melancholic or "sad," particularly when such sadness is not a state of mind we experience as much as a state of our body that cannot be changed.