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The Comic Humours: A New Interpretation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The Induction to Every Man out of his Humour, which contains Jonson's most significant statement about humorous characterization, has been universally interpreted by critics as follows: Jonson rebelled against the “abuse of this word Humour,” which had come to be used popularly to denote whim, affectation, or eccentricity. That spectators and readers of his comedies might understand the basis of his own comic characterization, he carefully defined humour in the strictly psychological sense:
- As when some one peculiar quality
- Doth so possesse 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.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1947
References
1 In essence this is the interpretation in the following representative studies: Elisabeth Woodbridge, Studies in Jonson's Comedy (Boston, New York & London, 1898), pp. 35-36; F. E. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama (Boston & New York, 1908), i, 470-471; Maurice Castelain, Ben Jonson, L'homme et L'œuvre (Paris, 1907), p. 84; C. R. Baskervill, English Elements in Jonson's Early Comedy (Austin, Texas, 1911), pp. 34-36; Percy Simpson, ed., Every Man in his Humour (Oxford, 1919), p. liv; G. Gregory Smith, Ben Jonson (London, 1919), pp. 80-84; C. H. Herford & Percy Simpson, Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1925), i, 340-343; John Palmer, Ben Jonson (New York, 1934), pp. 29-30; T. M. Parrott & R. H. Ball, A Short View of Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1943), p. 134.
2 Op. cit., pp. 34-36.
3 Smith, op. cit., pp. 83-84.
4 Parrott & Ball, op. cit., p. 134.
5 Paul Mueschke & Jeannette Fleisher, “Jonsonian Elements in the Comic Underplot of Twelfth Night,” PMLA, xlviii (1933), 722-740.
6 The latter part is quoted above.
7 Jonson consistently uses ridiculous in this sense; e.g., in Every Man out of his Humour, in, vi, 207-209, Cordatus speaks of comedy as “a thing throughout pleasant, and ridiculous, and accommodated to the correction of manners.” See also Masque of Queenes, Jonson's notes on lines 183 and 249.
8 iii, i, 156-158.
9 Cynthia's Revels, v, xi.
10 Every Man out of his Humour, “The Character of the Persons.”
11 Linge's Quarto of 1600, ed. by Bang & Greg (Louvain, 1907), p. 126.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Cf. J. W. Draper, The Humours and Shakespeare's Characters (Durham, N. C., 1945), pp. 106 ff.
15 An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (Essays of John Dryden, ed. by W. P. Ker, i, 85).
16 Another passage in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy confirms this interpretation of Dryden's definition. “[Critics] say, it is not enough to find one man of such a humour [as that of Morose in Epicoene]; it must be common to more, and the more common the more natural… . But to convince these people, I need but tell them, that humour is the ridiculous extravagance of conversation, wherein one man differs from all others. If then it be common, or communicated to many, how differs it from other men's? or what indeed causes it to be ridiculous so much as the singularity of it?” Cf. N. B. Allen, The Sources of John Dryden's Comedies (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1935), p. 11.
17 Preface to Troilus and Cressida.
18 In the Epilogue to The Humorists (Complete Works, ed. by Summers, i, 254).
19 Dedication to The Virtuoso (Works, iii, 101-102). A similar statement appears in the Preface to The Humorists (Works, I, 184): The “proper subject of a Satyr” is “the affected vanities, and the artificial fopperies of men, which (sometimes even contrary to their natures) they take pains to acquire.”
20 Ibid., p. 102.