Shakespeare’s opportunity of seeing pictures had been very limited. In fact, I am sure that he was not thinking of pictures when he described melancholy as “green and yellow.” Either he had an instinctive dislike of this combination that probably he could not have explained; simply he felt it to be disagreeable; or he may have associated it in his imagination with something he had observed. Perhaps for instance, since he speaks in the next line of a “monument,” he may have been thinking of the green and yellow stains on old tombstones, so that “green and yellow” suggested to him the very opposite of “damask cheek” with its rosiness of healthy life; in fact the signs of wasting and decay. Anyhow, to Shakespeare’s imagination these colors represented something disagreeable. That is the point. Colors, like sounds, may excite feelings of distress or pleasure.