[atari 2600]

Hence, too, the new fascination with the theatre, with its notion of an actor who is different from his or her roles. This is a notion that takes some getting used to; in the early years of the theatre, actors who played the part of villains risked being assaulted by angry playgoers in the streets. Within the theatre, there is a fascination with plots involving further deceptions: Shakespeare's Portia pretends to be a doctor of law; Rosalind disguises herself as a boy; Juliet feigns her own death. Writing a few years after Shakespeare's death, Burton bemoaned the fact that acting was no longer confined to the theatre, for "men like stage-players act [a] variety of parts". It was painful, in his view, "to see a man turn himself into all shapes like a Chameleon ... to act twenty parts & persons at once for his advantage ... having a several face, garb, & character, for every one he meets". The inner self that can change costumes and manners to suit the occasion resembles a skilled craftsperson, too busy and watchful for the pleasures of easygoing conviviality. As for the outer self projected by the inner one into the social world: who would want to "lose oneself" in the communal excitement of carnival when that self has taken so much effort and care to construct?
So highly is the "inner self" honoured within our own culture that its acquisition seems to be an unquestionable mark of progress - a requirement, as Trilling called it, for "the emergence of modern European and American man". It was, no doubt, this sense of individuality and personal autonomy, "of an untrammelled freedom to ask questions and explore", as the historian Yi-Fu Tuan put it, that allowed men such as Martin Luther and Galileo to risk their lives by defying Catholic doctrine. Which is preferable: a courageous, or even merely grasping and competitive, individualism, versus a medieval (or, in the case of non-European cultures, "primitive") personality so deeply mired in community and ritual that it can barely distinguish a "self"? From the perspective of our own time, the choice, so stated, is obvious. We have known nothing else.
But there was a price to be paid for the buoyant individualism we associate with the more upbeat aspects of the early modern period, the Renaissance and Enlightenment. As Tuan writes, "the obverse" of the new sense of personal autonomy is "isolation, loneliness, a sense of disengagement, a loss of natural vitality and of innocent pleasure in the givenness of the world, and a feeling of burden because reality has no meaning other than what a person chooses to impart to it". Now if there is one circumstance indisputably involved in the etiology of depression, it is precisely this sense of isolation. As the 19th-century French sociologist Emile Durkheim saw it, "Originally society is everything, the individual nothing ... But gradually things change. As societies become greater in volume and density, individual differences multiply, and the moment approaches when the only remaining bond among the members of a single human group will be that they are all [human]." The flip side of the heroic autonomy that is said to represent one of the great achievements of the early modern and modern eras is radical isolation and, with it, depression and sometimes death.
But the new kind of personality that arose in 16th- and 17th-century Europe was by no means as autonomous and self-defining as claimed. For far from being detached from the immediate human environment, the newly self-centered individual is continually preoccupied with judging the expectations of others and his or her own success in meeting them: "How am I doing?" this supposedly autonomous "self" wants to know. "What kind of an impression am I making?"
It is no coincidence that the concept of society emerges at the same time as the concept of self. What seems most to concern the new and supposedly autonomous self is the opinion of others, who in aggregate compose "society". Mirrors, for example, do not show us our "selves", only what others can see, and autobiographies reveal only what we want those others to know. The crushing weight of other people's judgments - imagined or real - would help explain the frequent onset of depression at the time of a perceived or anticipated failure. In the 19th century, the historian Janet Oppenheim reports, "severely depressed patients frequently revealed totally unwarranted fears of financial ruin or the expectation of professional disgrace". This is not autonomy but dependency: the emerging "self" defines its own worth in terms of the perceived judgments of others.
If depression was one result of the new individualism, the usual concomitant of depression - anxiety - was surely another. It takes effort, as well as a great deal of watchfulness, to second-guess other people's reactions and plot one's words and gestures accordingly. For the scheming courtier, the striving burgher and the ambitious lawyer or cleric of early modern Europe, the "self" they discovered is perhaps best described as an awareness of this ceaseless, internal effort to adjust one's behaviour to the expectations of others. Play in this context comes to have a demanding new meaning, unconnected to pleasure, as in "playing a role". No wonder bourgeois life becomes privatised in the 16th and 17th centuries, with bedrooms and studies to withdraw to, where, for a few hours a day, the effort can be abandoned, the mask set aside.
But we cannot grasp the full psychological impact of this "mutation in human nature" in purely secular terms. Four hundred - even 200 - years ago, most people would have interpreted their feelings of isolation and anxiety through the medium of religion, translating self as "soul"; the ever-watchful judgmental gaze of others as "God"; and melancholy as "the gnawing fear of eternal damnation". Catholicism offered various palliatives to the disturbed and afflicted, in the form of rituals designed to win divine forgiveness or at least diminished disapproval; and even Lutheranism, while rejecting most of the rituals, posited an approachable and ultimately loving God.
Not so with the Calvinist version of Protestantism. Instead of offering relief, Calvinism provided a metaphysical framework for depression: if you felt isolated, persecuted and possibly damned, this was because you actually were.
John Bunyan seems to have been a jolly enough fellow in his youth, much given to dancing and sports in the village green, but with the onset of his religious crisis these pleasures had to be put aside. Dancing was the hardest to relinquish - "I was a full year before I could quite leave it" - but he eventually managed to achieve a fun-free life. In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, carnival is the portal to Hell, just as pleasure in any form - sexual, gustatory, convivial - is the devil's snare. Nothing speaks more clearly of the darkening mood, the declining possibilities for joy, than the fact that, while the medieval peasant created festivities as an escape from work, the Puritan embraced work as an escape from terror.
We do not have to rely on psychological inference to draw a link between Calvinism and depression. There is one clear marker for depression - suicide - and suicide rates have been recorded, with varying degrees of diligence, for centuries. In his classic study, Durkheim found that Protestants in the 19th century - not all of whom, of course, were of the Calvinistic persuasion - were about twice as likely to take their own lives as Catholics. More strikingly, a recent analysis finds a sudden surge of suicide in the Swiss canton of Zurich, beginning in the late 16th century, just as that region became a Calvinist stronghold. Some sort of general breakdown of social mores cannot be invoked as an explanation, since homicides fell as suicides rose.