Humorous Humors: Ben Jonson's Early Comedies

Today, I look askance at two plays by Ben Jonson, whom many see (not me, though) as the greatest English playwright bar Shakespeare: Every Man In His Humour and Every Man Out of His Humour.  These have become the paradigmatic examples of the 17th century "comedy of humours."

Thank you to the Internet Archive for providing public domain recordings of The Benny Hill Show and Fawlty Towers theme songs.

Transcript

All right, cats and kittens, here we are again for another episode of The Classic English Literature Podcast, the Interweb’s premiere venue for probing literary analysis and ASMR vocalization:  I’m awfully glad you’ve come and I really, really hope you love today’s program.  

OK, look, that gentle stuff isn’t going to work for this episode.  We’re going to look at a guy who had quite the rambunctious life.  We are used to thinking of 17th century poets and playwrights as, perhaps, somewhat effete – think of the Droeshout (drews-hut) portrait of Shakespeare from the first folio: large, fleshy head, long, flowing, yet thin-looking hair, forehead like a landing strip, lacy collar.  Today’s writer is none of that.  Ben Jonson’s portrait – thick-necked, leathery face, heavy features, confrontational stare – Ray Winstone would play him in the biopic.  He looks like a half-drunk bricklayer.  Which is convenient, since that’s what he was.  I mean, he was a soldier, too, campaigning in the Netherlands.   And a convicted murderer (killed an actor in a duel – got branded and thrown into the tank for that).  Actually, Bad Ben was rather familiar with the inside of a jail cell.  He had his standards though, and for a while, young Ben would only sleep with married women.  He feuded with uber-architect Inigo Jones and with fellow dramatists John Marston and Thomas Dekker.  Became a Catholic for a while when that was not at all fashionable and by the end of his storied career presided over a literary group, a tribe of followers, and really became something of a critical bully.

So, you see, Big Ben wouldn’t be the kind of fella into mindfulness and self-care.  He was well-educated, attending the Westminster School under the tutelage of William Camden, a scholar responsible for the first topographical survey of England and the first full history of the Elizabethan period.  At Westminster School, Jonson studied the classical curriculum, which included Latin and Greek literature, rhetoric, and philosophy. This education provided Jonson with a solid foundation in the humanities, which is evident in his later works, where he frequently referenced classical texts and employed classical forms and themes.

However, his step-father’s bricklaying business did not produce enough of the readies to send the precocious Ben to university, and I wonder if this lack of formal credential is why Jonson’s writing so conspicuously wallows in classical allusion and structure.  To show that he was as good as the so-called University Wits.  By the by, Jonson wrote the dedicatory poem to Shakespeare’s First Folio called “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare,” in which we get some of the most famous epithets for Shakespeare: “sweet swan of Avon” and “soul of the Age”!  But there’s also a cheeky little line about Shakespeare’s education: “thou hadst small Latin and less Greek.”  Hmm . . . the generous reading of this is Jonson’s awe at his friend’s natural gift despite the paucity of education, or it could be a humble-brag about Jonson’s own knowledge, and another reminder to all those that though he never took a degree, he was indeed thoroughly educated, unlike that Warwickshire yokel and his warblings wild..  Probably a bit of both.  ‘Cause, yeah, Jonson had a towering arrogance and, I suspect, like most such temperaments, felt the need to remind others of his exceptionality.  

It’s become commonplace, actually, to see Jonson and Shakespeare as the yin and yang of 17th century theater.  Shakespeare often disregarded conventionalities, played loosely with classical dramatic structure (when not ignoring it altogether), and would not be too precious about scansion when it better served dramatic effect.  Jonson, on the other hand, was rather scrupulous about such things.  John Dryden, a literal big wig of late 17th century letters, summed up the distinction:  Jonson is “the more correct poet, but Shakespeare the greater wit”.

Is such a contrast perhaps somewhat exaggerated and overdetermined as a critical framework?  Undoubtedly.  But Jonson himself was not too shy to point it out.  In the 1616 prologue of his 1598 play, Every Man in His Humor, a chorus-like figure promises a good old fashioned classical romp and takes to task those rival poets who “hath not so loved the stage” that they would “dare serve the ill customs of the age.”  Well, who are these wretched traitors to the Thalian muse?  Principally, of course, Shakespeare.  Jonson throws some shade on the Henry VI plays, Pericles, Henry V, and King Lear.  Marlowe gets swiped too with a jab at Dr. Faustus.

So, what is Grumpy Ben complaining about?  Well, Aristotelian aesthetics, basically.  In his book on Poetics, Aristotle defines what are called the unities – the rules of classical drama: the unities of place, time, and action.  So, the unity of action demands that the plot focuses on a single dramatic motion: “we may say that the proper magnitude is comprised within such limits, that the sequence of events, according to the law of probability or necessity, will admit of a change from bad fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad.”  Unity of time: well, you got one day for the action of the story: it should “exist during a single daylight period, or to vary but little.”  And unity of place?  Well, one place, no globetrotting changes of location: “since the plot is an imitation of an action, the latter ought to be both unified and complete, and the component events ought to be so firmly compacted that if any one of them is shifted to another place, or removed, the whole is loosened up and dislocated.”

So, in the prologue to Every Man in His Humor, hipster Ben wants to take it back to the roots.  He excoriates writers – read Shakespeare – who

make a child, now swaddled, to proceed

Man, and then shoot up in one beard and weed

Past threescore years; or with three rusty swords,

And help of some few foot-and-half-foot words,

Fight over York and Lancaster’s long jars,

And in the tyring-house bring wounds to scars,

thus breaching the unity of time by having a character go from child to old man or collapsing the Wars of the Roses in a couple of sword fights.  Ben will have no “chorus waft you o’er the seas” to exotic locales and mystical.  No, sir.  Feet on the ground, right here.  We’ll pass over the uncomfortable notion that this prologue is itself a bit chorus-like.

The prologue then shifts to something of a manifesto for comedy – what comedy is for.  Turns out, it’s for moral instruction and edification.  The proper comic playwright employs:

deeds and language such as men do use;

And persons such as comedy would choose,

When she would show an image of the times,

And sport with human follies, not with crimes.

In the dedication to Volpone, a play of his we’ll cover in another episode, Jonson doubles down on such a brief: “The office of the comic poet is to imitate justice and instruct to life.”  Note that Jonson is concerned with imitating justice and instructing to life, not imitating life.  Well, he claims to show an “image of the times,” but like a fun house mirror image: we’re not talking kitchen sink drama social realism here.  Unless that’s really what he meant, in which case he rather screwed the pooch.  He went in for what is now called the comedy of humors.

Sounds redundant, you may say.  Well, not that kind of humor.  A "comedy of humors" focuses on characters who are each dominated by a particular trait, or humor, usually to an exaggeratedly absurd degree. The notion comes from the ancient theory of the four humors – kind of a proto-psychological and medical theory which held that human behavior and health were governed by four bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. These fluids are the humors (from the Latin umor meaning . . . well, bodily fluid).  Each humor was thought to be associated with specific personality traits:

1. Sanguine (blood): Optimistic, sociable, and cheerful.
2. Phlegmatic (phlegm): Calm, unemotional, and reliable.
3. Choleric (yellow bile): Ambitious, leader-like, and easily angered.
4. Melancholic (black bile): Thoughtful, introverted, and often depressed.

So, in a comedy of humors, one dominant humor drives a character’s actions and interactions, leading to humorous (the funny sort, this time) situations and conflicts. The upshot is that such exaggeration points out the flaws in human nature so that they may be remedied.

So, a play such as Every Man in His Humour highlights the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of human behavior, hoping, by the denouement, to imitate justice by instructing to life.  The play was probably first performed in 1598 by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – remember them?  Yes, Shakespeare’s company.  Legends have that Big Bill actually championed the play and may have played the character Know’ell (the paranoid father) or Kitely (the jealous husband).  Originally, Jonson set the play in Italian with, appropriately, Italian characters.  However, by the 1616 folio edition, he revised it, resetting the action to London with English characters.  Here’s the quick and dirty.

The play opens in the chaotic streets of Elizabethan London, a city pulsing with the raw energy of human vice and virtue. We meet Old Knowell, a man teetering on the brink of paranoia about his son, Edward, who’s being lured into the hedonistic whirlpool of city life by the likes of Wellbred, a charismatic rogue, and Knowell’s servant, Brainworm, a shape-shifting hustler moving like quicksilver between roles—a servant here, a military man there—sowing chaos and confusion.  Edward falls in love with Bridget, whose brother, Kitely, fears he will be cuckolded by Bobadill, a strutting peacock of a soldier and other wastrels introduced by Wellbred. There’s Master Stephen, a country bumpkin lost in the big city, and Matthew, the city fool, and Cob, a water-carrier – literally, too.  Everyone seems concerned that someone is having the sex that they’re not.  Justice Clement, an eccentric judge, presides over this madhouse with a mix of bewildered authority and bemused detachment, as if aware that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.  The play is a madcap rush of mistaken identities, deceptions, and slapstick chaos, culminating in a courtroom showdown that’s more circus than trial. Old Knowell finally comes face to face with his son, revealing truths wrapped in layers of absurdity and farce, and Brainworm’s schemes unravel in a blaze of lunacy.  Justice Clement basically says, “oh, forget about it! Let’s dance!”

It’s an early play, as I say, and so one shouldn’t be too surprised if it feels a bit unsatisfactory, but then again the version we read here is 1616 revision, almost 20 years after the first performance.  So why don’t I like it?  I don’t know.  Easy answer: it’s not funny.  Well, that’s true.  There’s plenty of farce-like silliness, but no real great lines, quips, or jokes.  Most of the play is in prose, so we don’t even get much in the way of memorable poetry.  

Jonson seems very much enslaved by his own project.  Many have noted his indebtedness to the Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence and the influence of the Greek New Comedy style, which toned down the rather biting and risky satire of writers like Aristophanes in favor of less offensive, and therefore really, less weighty, stories of everyday life.  Think of these guys as toga-sporting sit-com writers.  

OK, not that I’m doing a high-brow, low-brow thing here.  Sit-com writing can be every bit as challenging and rewarding as any theater.  The 1970s series Fawlty Towers by John Cleese and Connie Booth could stand very comfortably beside anything by Oscar Wilde or Bernard Shaw – in fact, with the possible exception of Wilde’s IOBE, would often stand above.  Seriously, the scripts to that show are masterpieces of comic writing – so tight you could bounce a quarter off them.

And Jonson was after that ideal, too.  He says in Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter, a miscellany of essays and poems, that “a strict and succinct style is that where you can take away nothing without loss, and that loss to be manifest.”  While I usually abjure comments by students and readers to the effect that, “well, that was too long,” or “so much unnecessary description,” or whatever, I kind of feel that way about Every Man in HIs Humor.  Right, I don’t think you can whine about Hamlet, as a text, a poem, being too long because every single item contributes to the complex intellectual, emotional, and psychological effect it creates in the reader.  Remove something – and of course, you must if you are a director.  You can’t possible stage an unexpurgated performance of the text.  It would run over four hours – but when directors make necessary cuts, the play becomes a version of Hamlet, a somewhat different (though perhaps no less great) experience.  But with Every Man in HIs Humor?  I’m not sure of the effect I’m supposed to get, except perhaps the moral/intellectual one that Jonson presented in the prologue.  And if that’s the case, well, you gotta tighten ‘er up, Benny.  This one’s flabby.  If I’m really only supposed to chuckle occasionally at some silliness, and then at the end reflect that well, people are silly, and we should really be more temperate, then I don’t know that I need all 11 scenes of Act 4.  And one use of the “tricks” pun would suffice.    

Furthermore, in preferring to present “images of life” rather than imitating life, the play deprives us of all human sympathy – we can’t find ourselves in any of the characters because the characters are not human, they’re personality quirks: Downright is choleric, Stephen is melancholic, Knowell is anxious, Bobadil is bragadocious.  That’s it, that’s all they do.   Brainworm plays like 4 different people – like identity or psychological roundness and dynamism is merely a cloak to put on and take off.  Even suspending our disbelief and accepting so glamor of humanity about them would fail to elicit any fellow feeling – the prologue tells us they are here to be ridiculed and judged, but not too harshly.  Very much an us/them thing going on, quite unlike Shakespeare who always says of his characters, all of them: they are me, they are you, we are them.

Did anyone notice that this play kind of felt like a Benny Hill version of a medieval morality play?  Would you believe me if I said only at this moment did I realize that its title – Every Man in His Humor – only appends a prepositional phrase to the 15th century blockbuster Everyman (rewind to episode 28 to refresh your memories)?  Of course you would.  Even the names of the characters, with the sole exception of Edward, have ironic allegorical names:  Knowell (who doesn’t), Wellbred (who isn’t, really), Downright, the aforementioned Brainworm.  Cob, the water-carrier who hates smoke (there’s some elemental dynamism for you) is named for the sturdy, stout type of draft pony.

The sense of almost Juvenalian reprimand intensifies in the following play: Every Man Out of HIs Humor from 1599.  Because, yeah, the first play was such a smash that a sequel had to be whipped up and perhaps, in an alternate history, a Jonsonian Theatrical Universe, spooling endless reworkings of humors comedy with varying prepositional phrases and vertically integrated marketing.

At any rate, this play was a volley in the so-called War of the Theatres, a bickering between Jonson and rival playwrights Thomas Dekker and John Marston, rooted mostly in thin skins and sharp tongues, principally about the contrast between Jonson’s classicism and the others’ more experimental writing styles, but also business competition, Jonson writing for a so-called boys’ company The Children of the Chapel.  There was a vogue for such children’s troupes, in which, yes, young boys played all the parts, and this cut into the more conventional companies’ revenues.  Shakespeare has Hamlet complain about the boys’ companies just before the play-within-a-play.  

Every Man Out of HIs Humor responds to Marston’s digs at Jonson in his play Histriomastix, in which Ben is lampooned in the character Chrisoganus.  Here’s a plot summary of Every Man Out, such as it is:

Open with Asper, a sort of master of ceremonies, explaining the purpose of the play and the types of characters the audience will encounter, each representing a different "humor" or folly. For instance:

• Sogliardo is a country gull who aspires to be a gentleman with a coat of arms.
• Puntarvolo, the vain knight preoccupied with his reputation and his wife's fidelity.
• Carlo Buffone: professional jester 
• Fastidious Brisk, a foppish social-climbing courtier.

Schemes and plots unfold, appropriate to the characters' absurdities. Puntarvolo wagers his estate on the fidelity of his wife and his own safe return from a journey to Constantinople. Fastidious Brisk tries to woo the ladies and gain favor at court, while Sogliardo continues his efforts to be seen as a gentleman, despite his lack of education and sophistication.

Macilente, the real identity of Asper, discontented and envious (asperity, get it?), plots the downfall of the other characters. We get the requisite chaotic confusion which reveals the vanities and pretensions of his dupes. Puntarvolo's journey ends in farcical failure, and he loses his wager. Fastidious Brisk is arrested for debt, never a boon to social standing. Pretentious Sogliardo is ridiculed. Of course, we can’t have Macilente's schemes succeed, and he offers a final commentary, underscoring the play's moral: the dangers of being "out of one's humor," or consumed by one's own vices and follies.

Sadly for our Ben, this play was a flop, really set him back, actually.  Yes, Marston’s bombastic style gets parodied in the third act by the clown Clove.  There’s a joke, probably at Shakespeare’s expense, in Sogliardo, who receives a coat from the college of heralds of a “boar without a head, rampant.”  Carlo Buffone calls it “cold cuts on a platter” and Puntavarlo suggests the motto: “Not without mustard.”  We reckon Jonson’s mocking Shakespeare, who recently purchased a coat of arms, making his father a gentleman, with the legend: “Non sans droit” – not without right.  

OK, that’s a pretty good joke.  Give him that.  But really it all seems so distant, intellectual.  Jonson is almost too hipster.  Maybe audiences at the time would have gotten the gibes between rival playwrights, like beef between rappers nowadays.  But I bet most didn’t, and certainly it takes a particular kind of book-nerd today to find such arcanely personal sniping entertaining.  Asper opens the play with a perhaps even more didactic mission than the anonymous prologue of the previous play.  One, he gives a pretty concise definition of the humors and what a hunor comedy should do:

Why humour, as 'tis 'ens', we thus define it,

   To be a quality of air, or water,

   And in itself holds these two properties,

   Moisture and fluxure:  as, for demonstration,

   Pour water on this floor, 'twill wet and run:

   Likewise the air, forced through a horn or trumpet,

   Flows instantly away, and leaves behind

   A kind of dew; and hence we do conclude,

   That whatsoe'er hath fluxure and humidity,

   As wanting power to contain itself,

   Is humour.  So in every human body,

   The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood,

   By reason that they flow continually

   In some one part, and are not continent,

   Receive the name of humours.  Now thus far

   It may, by metaphor, apply itself

   Unto the general disposition:

   As when 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,

   This may be truly said to be a humour.

At least it’s blank verse, but maybe that only makes the speech sound even more like a lecture, somehow.  But then Asper gets, well, vengeful:

I will scourge those apes,

   And to these courteous eyes oppose a mirror,

   As large as is the stage whereon we act;

   Where they shall see the time's deformity

   Anatomised in every nerve, and sinew,

   With constant courage, and contempt of fear.

Right, I’m treading dangerously close to confusing the character for the author, but this little manifesto seems much harsher than the sporting with human folly in the first play.

Critic David Daiches says of Jonson: “Pedantic, imitative, and supremely self-confident in his learned art, he is one great example in English of the Renaissance Humanist (in the narrowest sense of that term) turned dramatist and poet.”  Maybe I don’t feel any heart in this play because I’m reading it centuries after the Romantic revolution, and maybe Jonson has no responsibility to conform to post-Romantic conceptions of character.  

But these plays are important in that they represent a genre particular to the Elizabethan stage, and one that will be highly influential on the theatre of the late 17th century.  They also indicate that even during a time of wild flux and development – remember, the guys we’re talking about here, Shakespeare, Kyd, Marlowe, and Jonson are not really working in an established medium.  They’re inventing modern theatre as they go – at this early point, Jonson stands as perhaps a steadying figure, forging a link to the classical theatre not present in the home-grown drama of the Middle Ages.  You should know that Jonson takes this style and refines it and produces some of the best comedies of English literature: Volpone and the Alchemist, which we’ll look at next time.

Till then, thank you for listening.  Hit me up on the Fan Mail link, at my email, or on any of the antisocial media platforms.  If you’d care to donate to the show, you can click the support the show button – I’d really appreciate it.  I’d also love it if you could take two minutes and write a 5 star review of the podcast – that feeds the algorithm and a satiated algorithm makes my show more visible to new listeners.  Be well, talk to you soon.