The Poetaster | Page 4

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 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: