This essay explores the concept of melancholy through Shakespeare’s works, especially The Merchant of Venice. Melancholy is a persistent state and takes root just outside of a person’s conscious understanding; the condition, described by the Greek term of “black bile”, is a manifestation of the sensitive and poetic spirit in the Renaissance, rehabilitated by Marsilio Ficino from the negative overtones of the Middle Ages. In Shakespeare’s time, melancholy was a “fashionable diseas”, a pathological mental state peculiar to the mens contemplatrix, both a disease and a spiritual energy, accompanied by symptoms of inexplicable sadness, pessimism, scepticism, decadence, alienation, and introversion.