On the subject of comedy, Baudelaire remarks that ‘pour trouver du comique féroce et très féroce, il faut passer la Manche et visiter les royaumes brumeux du spleen’ (One must cross the English Channel and visit the foggy kingdoms of spleen in order to encounter a ferocious kind of comedy). Baudelaire post-dates this book's period of interest, but his description of England as the kingdom of the spleen (the organ generally thought to produce melancholy) in relation to the native's distinct comic style attests to the paradoxical status of the humour in early modern England. Scientifically, melancholy was a foreign concept that was culturally and intellectually appropriated as a marker of sophistication. The belief that geographical location and climate could help determine an individual's dominant humour, introduced by Hippocrates in On Airs, Waters and Places, was on an almost equal footing with Galen's anatomical model in the Renaissance. Works such as Jean Bodin's Six Bookes of the Commonwealth and William Harrison's The Description of England generally agreed that melancholy was characteristic of southern countries, where the inhabitants’ darker skin was thought to reflect their prevalent humour (black bile). England's northern climate, characterised by cold and moisture was thought to render its population mainly phlegmatic. Harrison writes that

The in-between nature of the phlegmatic, where any positive trait is immediately mitigated by a less desirable one, led the English to seek new ways of representing themselves that went beyond classical humoral descriptions.

England's appropriation of melancholy as a distinctively English trait can be understood as a reactionary effort against such a portrayal. Ethnologically speaking, early modern England was a far cry from Baudelaire's kingdom of spleen.