The Alchemist | Page 6

play, and, save for
the satirising of Antony Munday in the person of Antonio Balladino and Gabriel Harvey
as well, is perhaps the least characteristic of the comedies of Jonson.
"Every Man in His Humour," probably first acted late in the summer of 1598 and at the
Curtain, is commonly regarded as an epoch-making play; and this view is not unjustified.
As to plot, it tells little more than how an intercepted letter enabled a father to follow his
supposedly studious son to London, and there observe his life with the gallants of the
time. The real quality of this comedy is in its personages and in the theory upon which
they are conceived. Ben Jonson had theories about poetry and the drama, and he was
neither chary in talking of them nor in experimenting with them in his plays. This makes
Jonson, like Dryden in his time, and Wordsworth much later, an author to reckon with;
particularly when we remember that many of Jonson's notions came for a time definitely

to prevail and to modify the whole trend of English poetry. First of all Jonson was a
classicist, that is, he believed in restraint and precedent in art in opposition to the
prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance spirit. Jonson believed that there
was a professional way of doing things which might be reached by a study of the best
examples, and he found these examples for the most part among the ancients. To confine
our attention to the drama, Jonson objected to the amateurishness and haphazard nature of
many contemporary plays, and set himself to do something different; and the first and
most striking thing that he evolved was his conception and practice of the comedy of
humours.
As Jonson has been much misrepresented in this matter, let us quote his own words as to
"humour." A humour, according to Jonson, was a bias of disposition, a warp, so to speak,
in character by which
"Some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw All his affects, his
spirits, and his powers, In their confluctions, all to run one way."
But continuing, Jonson is careful to add:
"But that a rook by wearing a pied feather, The cable hat-band, or the three-piled ruff, A
yard of shoe-tie, or the Switzers knot On his French garters, should affect a humour! O, it
is more than most ridiculous."
Jonson's comedy of humours, in a word, conceived of stage personages on the basis of a
ruling trait or passion (a notable simplification of actual life be it observed in passing);
and, placing these typified traits in juxtaposition in their conflict and contrast, struck the
spark of comedy. Downright, as his name indicates, is "a plain squire"; Bobadill's humour
is that of the braggart who is incidentally, and with delightfully comic effect, a coward;
Brainworm's humour is the finding out of things to the end of fooling everybody: of
course he is fooled in the end himself. But it was not Jonson's theories alone that made
the success of "Every Man in His Humour." The play is admirably written and each
character is vividly conceived, and with a firm touch based on observation of the men of
the London of the day. Jonson was neither in this, his first great comedy (nor in any other
play that he wrote), a supine classicist, urging that English drama return to a slavish
adherence to classical conditions. He says as to the laws of the old comedy (meaning by
"laws," such matters as the unities of time and place and the use of chorus): "I see not
then, but we should enjoy the same licence, or free power to illustrate and heighten our
invention as they [the ancients] did; and not be tied to those strict and regular forms
which the niceness of a few, who are nothing but form, would thrust upon us." "Every
Man in His Humour" is written in prose, a novel practice which Jonson had of his
predecessor in comedy, John Lyly. Even the word "humour" seems to have been
employed in the Jonsonian sense by Chapman before Jonson's use of it. Indeed, the
comedy of humours itself is only a heightened variety of the comedy of manners which
represents life, viewed at a satirical angle, and is the oldest and 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