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Comedy Analysis: Every Man in His Humour
Introduction & Background
The earliest dramatic representation in England is believed to have been the
performance of a Latin play in honour of St. Katherine in 1110. Drama originated from
the rich symbolic ceremonial of the Church. It was the work of priests who used it as a
means of conveying the truths of their religion to the illiterate masses. To begin with,
Church had this drama completely under control. Performances were given inside the
Church buildings; and the priests were the actors. The form of drama was known as the
Miracle or Mystery plays, and the material for it was taken from the Bible. While the
basis of these plays was the Bible, the treatment was a free one. Particularly in the
direction of humour, the popular imagination began to fill in details (Critchley 2002).
Noah’s wife was, for instance, made a comic figure, for she was shown very realistically
as a scolding woman, refusing to enter the Ark and ridiculing Noah’s prophecy of
destruction. Into the scene where the shepherds watch their flocks by night on Christmas
Eve, there was introduced a comic sheep-stealing episode. Herod was a ranting figure of
melodrama. Where Satan appeared, there was plenty of horse-play, with the yelling and
belabouring of devils whose parts were taken by small boys (Critchley 2002).
A later introduction of much importance in these plays was the so-called Vice,
who was a humourous personification of evil taken on the comic side (Smirgel 1988).
Vice was the recognized fun-maker of the piece. This character often scored a
tremendous popular success by jumping on the Devil’s back, sticking thorns into him,
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beating him with a stick and making him roar with pain. This figure of Vice is the
ancestor or direct forerunner of the Elizabethan clown (Smirgel 1988).
By the second quarter of the sixteenth century, the Moralities had reached a
transitional stage. Human figures were mixed with allegorical figures. As a result, we
have plays which, according to their dominant tone, may be called Comedy Moralities,
Tragedy Moralities, and History Moralities (Wagg 1998). Some of the shorter of these
transitional Moralities are called Interludes. The Interludes are particularly associated
with the name of John Heywood (1497-1580), whose plays dropped the allegory and
didacticism of the Moralities and were intended for the aristocracy, not for the middle or
lower classes (Wagg 1998).
The earliest regular English comedy is Gammer Gurton’s Needle, the authorship
of which is not known. It was written about 1550 and acted not long after that date at
Christ’s college, Cambridge. And then from “Ralph Roister Doister” by Nicholas Uddal
to John Lyly’s (1544-1606) best are Compaspe, Endymion, and Gallanthea, from George
Peele’s (1558-1597) “The Old Wives’ Tale” to The Knight of the Burning Pestle1 by
Beaumont and Fletcher (Double 1997).
Shakespeare’s comedies are essentially Romantic comedies, not only because of
the mingling in them of the romantic love-interest with mirth and fun, but because they
are also a mixture of serious, and even tragic, elements and comic elements, and, further,
The knight of the Burning Pestle is a comic play by Beaumont and Fletcher. It is at once a burlesque of knighterrantry and of Thomas Heywood’s The Four of London, and thus the first English parody plays, and a comedy of
manners.
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because they do not observe any of the classical unities (of time, place, and action). They
are rich in characterization both as regards range or variety, and depth (Smirgel 1988).
In a different key altogether are the comedies of Ben Jonson (1573-1637). Not
only did Jonson call for an observance of the three classical unities, but he made was
upon the fantastic and extravagant qualities of the romantic imagination, trying to replace
them with classical sanity and restraint. In one respect at least the classical quality of
Jonson’s comedies gives them an interest that is permanent, and an influence that was
far-reaching. One difference between the romantic spirit and the classic is that the former
tends towards escape from the actual conditions of life, while the latter tends to work
realistically within them. This appears clearly when we compare Twelfth Night with
Every Man in His Humour. Shakespeare’s comedies are full of glancing imagination and
irresponsible fancy; Jondon’s move in the hard light of every-day London. This realism,
the vivid picture of London life, makes his comedies among the most informative plays
of the period. From Jonson’s comedies alone, it would be possible to reconstruct whole
areas of Elizabethan society. A study of them is indispensable if we have to get
acquainted with the brilliant and amusing surface of the most colourful era in English
history.
Ben Jonson was temperamentally a satirist, and his education made him a realist.
His first celebrated work, revealed his true tendencies. According to Holdsworth, the
word “humour” in this context means a man’s prevailing mood or rather his oddity,
mental habit, or fad (1978). Each of the characters in this play has his particularly
humour; and Jonson’s portrayal of the various humours constitutes the comedy in the
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play. Jonson is here ridiculing the oddities of human character, and in his capacity for
ridicule lies Jonson’s chief strength as a comic dramatist.
A Magnificent and Perfect Comedy:
It must be with regret as well as with wonder that we find ourselves constrained to
recognize the indisputable truth that this first acknowledged work of so great a writer is
as certainly his best is not his greatest. Never again did his genius, his industry, his
conscience and his taste unite in the triumphant presentation of a work so faultless, so
satisfactorily, so absolute in achievement and so free from blemish or defect. The only
three other among all his plays which are not unworthy to be ranked beside it are in many
ways more wonderful, more splendid, more incomparable with any other produce of
human intelligence or genius: but neither The Fox, The Alchemist, nor The Staple of
News, is altogether so blameless and flawless a piece of work, so free from anything that
might as well or better be dispensed with, so simply and thoroughly compact and
complete in workmanship and in result. Moliere himself has no character more
exquisitely and spontaneously successful in presentation and not unworthily surrounded
and supported by the many other graver or lighter characters of his magnificent and
perfect comedy (Holdsworth 1975).
The Portrayal of Kitley; no more imitation
Jealousy is the humour of Kitley, but it is no more the jealousy of Ford2 than of
Othello: original it neither is nor can be, for it is a passion as common as the air, and has
Ford is the name of a character in Shakespeare’s play, Merry Wives of Windsor, while Othello is the chief
character in the play of the same name.
2
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been the property of the stage from the earliest times; yet what but a jaundiced eye can
discover any servile marks of imitation? Kitley’s alarms are natural, for his house is made
the resort of young and riotous gallants; yet he opens his suspicions with great delicacy,
and when circumstances “light as air” confirm them, he does not bribe a stranger to
complete his dishonour, but places a confidential spy over his wife, to give notice of the
first approaches to familiarity (Robert 1926). In a word, the feelings, the languages, and
the whole conduct of Kitely are totally distint from those of Ford, or any preceding stage
character whatever. The author drew from nature; and has her varieties are infinite; a man
of Jonson’s keen and attentive observation was under no necessity of borrowing from at a
second hand (Robert).
Jonson’s originality in his portrayal of Bobadill Jonson’s originality
Bobadill has never been well understood, and, therefore, is always too lightly
estimated: because he is a boaster and a coward, he is curiously dismissed as a mere copy
of the ancient bully, or what is infinitely more ridiculous, of Pistol; but Bobadill is a
creature absolutely original and therefore unique – and perfectly original. The soldier of
the Greek comedy, from whom Whalley3 to derive him, as far as we can collect from the
scattered remains of it, of from its eternal copyists, Plautus and Terence, had not many
traits in common with Bobadill. Pyrgapolonices4, and other captains with hard names, are
usually wealthy; all of them keep a mistress, and some of them a parasite: but Bobadill is
poor, as indeed are most of his profession, which, whatever, it might be in Greece, has
never been gainful one is this country (Robert 1926). They are profligate and luxurious;
3
4
the name of a critic who edited Jonson’s work s in 1756
The name of the character in Playtus’s play Miles Glorious
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but Bobadill is stained with no inordinate vice, and is besides so frugal, that “a bunch of
radish…and a pipe of tobacco, to close the orifice of the stomach”, satisfy all his wants
(Robert 1926). Add to this, that the vanity of the ancient soldier is accompanied with
such deplorable stupidity, that all temptation to mirth is taken away; whereas Bobadill is
really amusing. His gravity, which is of the most inflexible nature, contrasts admirably
with the situations into which he is thrown; and though beaten, baffled, and disgraced, he
never so far forgets himself as to aid in his own discomfiture. He has no soliloquies like
Bessus and Parolles5, to betray his real character, and expose himself to unnecessary
contempt; nor does he break through the decorum of the scene in a single instance. He is
also an admirer of poetry, and seems to have a pretty taste of criticism, though his reading
does not appear very extensive, and his decisions are usually made with somewhat too
much promptitude (Robert 1926). In a word, Boball has many distinguishing traits, and
till a preceding braggart shall be discovered with something more than big words and
beating to characterize him, it may not be amiss to allow Jonson the credit of having
depended entirely on his own resources (Robert).
Knowell; Brainworm; and some other characters
Knowell is a scholar and a gentleman; his humour is overstrained solicitude for
the purity of his son’s morals, amidst an indulgence of lighter foibles: he is an amiable
and well-drawn character, and very artfully contrasted with the rude, but manly and
consistent Downright (Martin 1966).
5
the name of the characters in Play by Beumant and Fletcher, and by Shakespeare respectively.
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Brainworm is evidently a favourite of the authors; he is sufficiently amusing, and
his transformations contribute very naturally to the perplexity of the scene: he is most
successful in the mendicant soldier, a character not uncommon in those days either in the
streets, or on the stage (Martin 1966).
The females, as is usually the case, occupy but a small part of the poet’s care; yet
they are correctly drawn, and probably such as the family of a respectable merchant, in
Jonson’s time, would readily supply (Martin 1966). Dame Kitley is a very natural
character; unsuspicious in herself, but, having her fear once awakened, credulous and
violent in the extreme. Bridget is merely a sensible young woman; not so vain of the
attentions of her poetical lover as not to sacrifice them to a more rational courtship; won,
as was then the case, with little wooing, and easily persuaded to follow her own
inclinations. The two young gentlemen fill the parts allotted to them with perfect
propriety, and play upon the vanity and imbecility of the other characters with very
laughable effect: as for the two gulls, as they called, they enhance and set off the
absurdities of each other; and, as natural deficiency cannot be supplied, are dismissed
with a simple exposure, by way of punishment: indeed, nothing can be more admirable,
or consonant with justice, than the winding up of this drama, and the various
dispensations dealt out to the different characters (Martin 1966).
The Wonderful Portrayal of Brainworm, Essentially Classical But Partially Original
The two-faced, intriguing servant is an indispensable factor in Roman comedy,
and no play belonging to it is without him. No obligation or relation is sacred to him. A
servant to a father and a son, he may be faithful to one and untrue to the other, aid one to
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bring about the other’s discomfiture, or be untrue to both. If a plot-complication is
needed, he stands ready to assume a disguise, conceive and execute a trick, fail to
perform a duty assigned to him, and thus effect the proper entanglement (Martin 1966). If
not convenient resolution of the plot is available, the servant, again, may enter with the
necessary information and disclosures to make all clear. The many-sidedness of his
nature must have created an unfailing atmosphere of interest around him, and made the
audience regard him with ever-expectant eyes. The variety of his escapades, too, made
him a perennial fun-maker. In these several capacities, Brainworm is equally useful a
character in this play (Martin 1966). Without him, the slender plot of this play could
hardly hold together. The first hint of action in the play comes with Brainworm’s
juggling with Wellbred’s letter to Young Knowell. He next appears disguised as a
soldier, and imposes upon Stephen’s simplicity by selling him a rapier. Shortly after this,
in the same disguise, he deceives Old Knowell, who takes him into his service. Filled
with merriment over his own duplicity, he hastens to The Windmill Tavern to tell Ned
Knowell and his companions of his latest trick. To complete the father’s mystification,
Brainworm tells him his son has learned that he has followed him to town, and sends him
to Cob’s house on a fruitless search for the culprit. Brainworm follows, with a new plan
on foot to gull Formal. His services are much in demand, for he is next engaged by
Wellbred, disguised in Formal’s clothes, to tell Young Knowell to meet him in Bridget at
the Tower. One the way Mathew and Bobadill meet him, and engage him to arrest
Downright for assault; this he accomplishes in another disguise, at the same time
arresting Stephen for stealing Downright’s cloak. Finally, the speedy unraveling of the
plot in the last Act is made possible only by Brainworm’s disclosures of his many tricks.
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Jonson has shown splendid originality in working out the details of Brainworm’s
character for the present purpose, but its essential elements, and his basic functions in the
play, are strictly classical (Martin 1966).
They Variety of Dupes in the Play
Almost an essential to classical comedy as the intriguing servant is the gull or
dupe. There must be somebody to fool, and somebody to be fooled. A variety of people
may serve in the latter capacity. The father is duped by his son; the wide by her husband;
the procurer by the youth who patronizes him; or the parasite is himself sometimes
rebuffed. The degrees of gullibility range from cases where the deception is
accomplished only by the inordinate cleverness of the intriguer to those where the butt of
the joke is mentally deficient. So, in Every Man in His Humour, Old Knowell is deceived
by his son, and both the son and father are fooled by Brainworm through the latter’s
unusual skill in subterfuge, while Stephen is gulled on all sides because of his own
stupidity.
It’s Plot, the Principal Weakness of This Play
The merit of the play, then, lies in it vigorously-drawn, playable caricatures. But
by no reasonable canon art can a mere array of caricatures be said to constitute a good
comedy. One other ingredient at least is essential – a clear, more or less ingenious and
entertaining, story. Nothing of the sort is to be found in Every Man in His Humour. I defy
anyone to relate comprehensible or to make credible the wholly uninspired and
uningenious comings and goings and to-ings and fro-ings of which the story consists. The
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machinations of Brainworm supply its motive force; and, except as vehicles for virtuosity
in acting, they are devoid of interest or plausibility. A worse-conducted play could not
easily be discovered, outside of Jonson’s works (Wimsatt 1954). What a masterpiece is
The Merry Wives of Windor in comparison with it! Yet how unquestionably one of
Shakespeare’s poorest plays! Or compare it with She stoops to Conquer or The School for
Scandal! These are delightful inventions; the mere stories, the situations, enrich our
memories. Who ever could, or ever wanted to, recall the story of Every Man in his
Humour? (Wimsatt 1954)
The Various Intrigues, and the Characters involved in Them
By the end of Jonson’s first Act, there are four major intrigues under way: the
deception of the elder Knowell by his son; the gulling of Stephen; the trials of Cob; the
gulling of Mathew and Bobadill (Wimsatt 1954). With Act II, the fifth compilation, the
Kitely affair, begins. Other characters are successively presented, and always in such a
way as to involve them in intrigues already begun, just as characters already active in one
intrigue become auxiliaries in another (Wimsatt 1954). Thus Downright is involved both
with the escapades of his brother, Wellbred, and with the discomfiture of Bobadill. Cob,
besides having his own humour, is brought into Kitely situation, and is involved with
Bobadill and Mathew. Young Knowell and Wellbred do much more than gull
respectively father and brother, for they pipe the tunes to which Stephen, Mathew, and
Bobadill dance. Brainworm, not content with helping young Knowell to outwit his father,
involves in his network of tricks Kitely, Dame Kitely, Stephen, Cob, Tib, Downright,
Bobadill, and Mathew (Wimsatt 1954). The climax of Brainworm machinations occurs at
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the end of the fourth Act, when he successively sends to Cob’s house the elder Knowell,
Kitely, and Dame Kitely; and when, disguised as Formal, he jubilantly issues warrants
against Downright. Justice Clement’s separate dealing with the various cases brought
before him emphasizes the separate nature of these intrigues:
Come, I conjure the rest, to put off all discontent. You Mr.
Downright, your anger; you, Master Knowell, your cares; Master
Kitely, and his wife, their jealousy…Master bridegroom, take your
bride, and lead; everyone, a fellow. Here is my mistress.
Brainworm! To whom all my addresses of courtship shall have
their reference. Whose adventures, this day, when our grandchildred shall hear to be made a fable, I doubt not, but it shall find
both spectators and applause (Wimsatt 1954).
Clement’s laughing tribute to the chief machinator, Brainworm, may seem to
point to a Latin model, but no wily slave ever had so many strings to his bow, nor so
many gulls to make sport of.
The Butts in the Play
In the language of the butts of this play Jonson scores his first solid triumph. The
styles of the country gull Stephen, the town gull Mathew, and the miles gloriosus
Bobadill are rendered with an exquisite attention to minute degrees of folly. The crudest
of the three, Stephen, betrays a grasp of sequence as weak as Cob’s, whether he is
advertising his own gentility or indulging in fits of childish sulkiness. Encountering
Mathew and Bobadill, he is spurred to instant emulation by the sound of their rich, fruity
diction and bizarre oaths. Mathew, who has moved for some time in Bobadill’s orbit, has
already been working hard to deform his own speech by imitating Bobadill’s (Thayer
1963). Bobadill himself, the fountainhead of eccentricity of this group, has evolved his
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own style, partly through an eclectic use of cant terms from dueling and polite locutions,
partly through his coinage of strange oaths. “Wantonness of language”, it may be noticed,
is here linked firmly to social aspiration and moral slackness (Thayer 1963). Stephen and
Matthew, the mimics, have almost literally no mind of their own, but automatically soak
up the attitudes of their associates, preferably such companions as Bobadill, whose
manner offers a suitably flamboyant object of imitation (Thayer 1963). The moment they
are confronted with moral choice, they collapse into meanness, as in Stephen’s theft of
the dropped cloak, or Matthew’s plagiarisms. Bobadill, who has worked up the language
of dueling from books and learned to cause a stir by swearing picturesquely, uses the first
as a cloak for cowardice and the second as a badge of singularity. A far more
accomplished fools than his pathetic satellites, he becomes contemptible in direct
proportion to the skill and effort he expends on his impostures (Thayer 1963).
Lack of Interaction
Although in Every Man in His Humour, Jonson composes not ironically but
straightforwardly, as if he were writing comedy of temporary, not permanent, noninteraction, the special nature of his characters and plot already exhibit itself everywhere.
From the moment Knowell strikes the kwynote in his opening lines by making
Brainworm the bearer of his own paternal authority, each major character conducts his
important relationships through a go-between (Dutton 1997). Brainworm shuttles back
and forth between Knowell and Edward; Edward’s courtship is conducted by Wellbred;
Kitely sends his reprimand to Wellbred through Downright, whom he also uses as a
stand-in at the connubial breakfast table; Kitely makes Cash his informant about his wife
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– and Cash delegates the position to Cob; Bobadill attacks Downright through a law
clerk, who he approaches through Matthew, and serves the resulting warrant by
intermediary; even Justice Clement deals at one remove with the petitioner standing
before him:
Clement: Tell Oliver Cob, he shall go to the Jail, Formal.
Formal. Oliver Cob, my master, Justice Clement, says you shall go
to the jail (Dutton 1997).
The need to interact is a challenge Jonson’s characters cannot meet, and it is just
this disability which really interests Jonson.
The Links Between Ancient Latin Dramatists, Ben Jonson, and Charles Dickens:
A reader or playgoer coming fresh to Jonson’s first important play Every Man in
His Humour without any pre-knowledge of Elizabeth pseudo-scientific toying with the
notion of “humours” governing a man’s personality, would take it to be a rip=roaring
treatment of a still more hackneyed theme: the differing viewpoints of older and younger
generations. Against the world-weary but mainly acceptable balance or decorum of the
father-figures – old Knowell “of a thousand a year, Middlesex land”, Squire Downright
“of a rustical cut”, even Justice Clement “a great scholar, but the only mad, merry old
fellow in Europe” – there is set a swift-changing set of younger men who are all in their
various ways trying to discover a well-fitting mask or a plausible professional attitude to
life which will lend them some kind of protective identity as they struggle to cut some
sort of dash in young Ben Jonson’s teeming metropolis of London. Captain Bobadill, the
ex-army officer bedazzled by military technical terms which are all his limited wits have
ever mastered in the way of an identity; Master Matthew, the pathetic would-be writer
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who tries to cut some sort of literary figure by plagiarizing other men’s work and
adopting the outward trappings of a camp-follower of letters; Master Stephen, the
provincial hick quite outclassed by his slick Cockney associates, yet gallantly striving “to
make a blaze of gentry in the world” – all these, and the rest, may be matched in our own
London or New York by anyone who cares to stroll down King’s Road Chelsea, or in
Greenwich Village, on a Saturday morning (Dutton 1997). There is so much liveliness
here, so much bubbling over of high-spirited caricature, that a new comer to Ben Jonson
would be more likely to grope forward in time to Charles Dickens, rather than backward
in time to the conventions of Roman comic types, for an analogy. And yet in its original
form (The Quarto of 1601), Jonson was indeed transposing stock types from Latin
dramatists (Enck 1957). The first version of the play was set in Italy, and its characters
had Italian names; only in the text as revised by Jonson for his collected works (The Folio
of 1616) were they given names to fit a well-documented scamper about Jacobean
London. That the “humourous” mode of playwriting and acting was popular is proved by
the author’s rapid production of a sequel, Every Man of His Humour, in the prologue to
which the technical trick is openly avowed:
As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In there confluctions all to run one way,
This may be said to be a humour (Enck 1957).
The old and young characters in the Play
As for poor Downright, everything upsets him and the very present youthful
activity drives him into a tantrum: “A sort of lewd rake-hells, that care neither for God
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nor the devil. And they must come here to read ballads, and roguery, and trash! I’ll mar
the lot of em ere I sleep”. Yet it is all the same of the older men6, who, on the whole, are
wise enough to see through the superficial follies of the young poseurs to some of the
nastier implications behind them. There is more than senile petulance in old Knowell’s
moral stance; one hears a premonition of Jonson’s own fully mature voice in the revised
version, in lies such:
Well, I thank Heaven, I never yet was he
That travell’d with my son, before sixteen,
To show him the Venetian courtesans;
Nor read the grammar of cheating I had made
To my sharp boy, at twelve: repeating still
The rule, Get money; still, get money, boy;
No matter by what means; money will do
More, boy, than my lord’s letter (Enck 1957).
Again Knowell steps quite outside the “humorous” caricature of disapproving
senility when he accepts (in a mood only too familiar today) his own generation’s
responsibility for the errors of youth:
Nay, would ourselves were not the first, even parents,
That did destroy the hopes of our own children;
Or they not learn’d our vices in their cradles,
And such’d in our ill customs with their milk!
There is something in such passages, in short, which has a more modern ring than
we might have expected to find in a comedy of humours based officially on immutable
and statis classical patterns (Edward 1907). It is by contrast with such suppleness of
presentation (as of the verse itself) in Jonson’s first influential play that the few surviving
wooden-American sententious attitudes stand out. They owe as much, perhaps, to the old
Morality plays as to Latin examples (Edward 1907).
6
The older men in the play are Knowell and Clement
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In fact, the briefest acquaintance with Every Man in His Humour will show it to
glow with those rapid flashes of rightness of comic insight, plus a gleeful employment of
the currently fashionable extravagances of language, which have preserved Falstaff or
Molvolio or the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet as lively comic inventions, without burdening
them with symbolic placards or over-learned associations (Edward 1907).
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References:
Double, O Stand-Up: On Being a Comedian, Methuen, 1997
Wagg, S (1998) because i tell a joke or two: comedy Politics and Social
Difference. London Routledge
Smirgel, J.C. (1988). The triumph of Humour: Fantasy Myth and reality. Essays
in honour of Jacob A. Arlow. H Blum., Y. kramer, A. Richards and A Richards.
Madison’s, International University press 197-213.
Critchley, S. (2002). On Humour. London, Routledge.
Holdsworth, R.V. (ed.) (1978). Jonson Every Man in his Humour and The
Alchemist: A Casebook. London: Macmillan
Robert Holden, 1926. Every Man in His Humour. The Fortune Play Books
edition, edited by G.B. Harrison, London.
Seymour-Smith, Martin (ed.) (1966). Every Man in his Humour. London: Ernest
Benn
Wimsatt, W.K (Ed) (1954). English Stage Comedy. Introduction. English
Institute Essays. New York: Columbia University.
Thayer, Calvin Graham (ed.) (1963). Ben Jonson: Studies in the Plays. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press.
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Enck, J.J. (1957). Jonson and the Comic Truth. Revised., 306. Evans, E. Madison
Edward, B. (1907). The Broken Compass: A Study of the Major Comedies of Ben
Jonson, edited by GG Smith. New York: EP Dutton and Company.
Dutton, Richard. (1996). Ben Jonson: Authority, Criticism ed., Ben Jonson –
Longman Critical Reader (2000)