Cynthias Revels | Page 7

most persistent species of comedy in the language. None the
less, Jonson's comedy merited its immediate success and marked out a
definite course in which comedy long continued to run. To mention
only Shakespeare's Falstaff and his rout, Bardolph, Pistol, Dame

Quickly, and the rest, whether in "Henry IV." or in "The Merry Wives
of Windsor," all are conceived in the spirit of humours. So are the
captains, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish of "Henry V.," and Malvolio
especially later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of
humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that
many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated,
that is, degrade "the humour: into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity
of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play
called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A
Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out of Breath," Fletcher later,
"The Humourous Lieutenant," and Jonson, besides "Every Man Out of
His Humour," returned to the title in closing the cycle of his comedies
in "The Magnetic Lady or Humours Reconciled."
With the performance of "Every Man Out of His Humour" in 1599, by
Shakespeare's company once more at the Globe, we turn a new page in
Jonson's career. Despite his many real virtues, if there is one feature
more than any other that distinguishes Jonson, it is his arrogance; and
to this may be added his self-righteousness, especially under criticism
or satire. "Every Man Out of His Humour" is the first of three "comical
satires" which Jonson contributed to what Dekker called the
poetomachia or war of the theatres as recent critics have named it. This
play as a fabric of plot is a very slight affair; but as a satirical picture of
the manners of the time, proceeding by means of vivid caricature,
couched in witty and brilliant dialogue and sustained by that righteous
indignation which must lie at the heart of all true satire -- as a
realisation, in short, of the classical ideal of comedy -- there had been
nothing like Jonson's comedy since the days of Aristophanes. "Every
Man in His Humour," like the two plays that follow it, contains two
kinds of attack, the critical or generally satiric, levelled at abuses and
corruptions in the abstract; and the personal, in which specific
application is made of all this in the lampooning of poets and others,
Jonson's contemporaries. The method of personal attack by actual
caricature of a person on the stage is almost as old as the drama.
Aristophanes so lampooned Euripides in "The Acharnians" and
Socrates in "The Clouds," to mention no other examples; and in
English drama this kind of thing is alluded to again and again. What
Jonson really did, was to raise the dramatic lampoon to an art, and

make out of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of
literary pretensions and permanency. With the arrogant attitude
mentioned above and his uncommon eloquence in scorn, vituperation,
and invective, it is no wonder that Jonson soon involved himself in
literary and even personal quarrels with his fellow-authors. The
circumstances of the origin of this 'poetomachia' are far from clear, and
those who have written on the topic, except of late, have not helped to
make them clearer. The origin of the "war" has been referred to satirical
references, apparently to Jonson, contained in "The Scourge of
Villainy," a satire in regular form after the manner of the ancients by
John Marston, a fellow playwright, subsequent friend and collaborator
of Jonson's. On the other hand, epigrams of Jonson have been
discovered (49, 68, and 100) variously charging "playwright"
(reasonably identified with Marston) with scurrility, cowardice, and
plagiarism; though the dates of the epigrams cannot be ascertained with
certainty. Jonson's own statement of the matter to Drummond runs: "He
had many quarrels with Marston, beat him, and took his pistol from
him, wrote his "Poetaster" on him; the beginning[s] of them were that
Marston represented him on the stage."*
[footnote] *The best account of this whole subject is to be found in the
edition of "Poetaster" and "Satiromastrix" by J. H. Penniman in "Belles
Lettres Series" shortly to appear. See also his earlier work, "The War of
the Theatres," 1892, and the excellent contributions to the subject by H.
C. Hart in "Notes and Queries," and in his edition of Jonson, 1906.
Here at least we are on certain ground; and the principals of the quarrel
are known. "Histriomastix," a play revised by Marston in 1598, has
been regarded as the one in which Jonson was thus "represented on the
stage"; although the personage in question, Chrisogonus, a poet, satirist,
and translator, poor but proud, and contemptuous of the common herd,
seems rather a complimentary portrait of Jonson than