You, that have so graced monsters, may like men - Every Man in His Humour

Ben Jonson was, like Shakespeare, an actor-playwright from a modest background.  He had a better education, of which he was enormously vain, and had a Horatian, satirical temperament, compared to the Ovidian Shakespeare and Marlowe.  More importantly, he was a born Londoner.  His best plays are full of London. 

Like Every Man in His Humour (1598), not his first play (he did a lot of co-writing) but the earliest he put in the 1616 folio of his collected works, so the earliest play he claimed as his own.  It is just a comedy of types, characters with different monomanias knocking into each other.  It is meant to be current, although the types have never left us.

I mean such errors, as you’ll all confess

By laughing at them, they deserve no less:

Which when you heartily do, there’s hope left, then,

You, that have so graced monsters, may like men.  (Prologue, 8)

The “monsters” bit is a jab at the old-fashioned plays of five years ago, Tamburlaine and The Spanish Tragedy and plays that

                                       With three rusty swords,

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

Fight over York, and Lancaster’s long jars;  (7)

That old stuff.  The poetry of The Spanish Tragedy, barely a decade old at this point, is used throughout Jonson’s play as not exactly an example of bad taste, since it is obviously great for its time, but rather a refusal to keep up.

Anyway, Every Man in His Humour is about men.  It is a hodgepodge of bits of Plautus and Terence but updated to the current moment.  I mean, there is a braggart soldier, and a jealous husband, stock characters going back to Menander, to the origins of theatrical comedy.  But there are also tobacco fanatics (Ralegh sparked a tobacco craze in 1586, again about a decade earlier):

BOBADILL: I have been in the Indies, where this herb grows, where neither myself, nor a dozen gentlemen before, of my knowledge, have received the taste of any other nutriment, in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but the fume of this simple only.  (III.2, 72)

A long list follows of the ailments cured by tobacco.  But Jonson also gives us the anti-tobacconist:

COB:  It’s good for nothing, but to choke a man, and fill him full of smoke, and embers: there were four died out of one house, last week, with taking of it, and two more the bell went for, yesternight; one of them, they say, will ne’er scape it: he voided a bushel of soot yesterday, upward, and downward.  (III.2, 73)

It’s bad poetry that really takes a beating, “idle poetry, / That fruitless and unprofitable art  (I.1, 9), noting that this line is from the utilitarian Kno’well, and even he is more tolerant than his friend Downright who flees when a poetry recital begins:

DOWNRIGHT: Oh, here’s no foppery!  Death, I can endure the stocks better.  [Exits]

KNO’WELL Jr.: What ails thy brother?  Can he not hold his water, at reading of a ballad?

WELLBRED: Oh, no: a rhyme to him, is worse than cheese, or a bagpipe.  (IV.1, 83)

Worse than cheese!  That’s pretty bad.  The poem turns out to be good, because it is just a plagiarized chunk of Hero and Leander.  The bad poets are not just bad, but thieves, and the play ends with the offending poems thrown in the fire.  Every Man in His Humour does not have much of a plot.

The play is a preview of Jonson’s great comedies from a decade later – Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair – lively and London-packed but structured more originally.  In a sense, the text I have been quoting is actually part of this run of plays.  In the 1598 version the characters mostly have Italian names and the setting is Italian, sort of, although a weirdly Londonate Italy.  The Italian version was a big hit, but at some point before 1616 Jonson completely rewrote it, making the setting and characters English, tightening the slacker scenes, sharpening the satire.  I find the later version superior in every way, so that is what I have been quoting.

Text and page numbers are from the 1966 New Mermaids edition.  The editor is obsessed with the idea that the jealous husband is an especially subtle portrayal, beyond his comic type, returning to the idea in note after note, as if he, the editor, has his own humour.  I will also not that if the use of commas in some of the quotations above seems odd, they belong to Jonson, who was unusually attentive to the punctuation in his 1616 folio.  What they are supposed to mean to the actor is up for interpretation.

Assuming I get my writing back on track the next play will be another minor play-as-such but great London play, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.

What I Read in December 2025 – We ain’t gonna eat that.

I am not so interested in writing a longer summary of my year in reading, so I will put that here.  Finishing the massive The Story of the Stone and reading the monstrous Finnegans Wake (here, continuing, ending) were solid accomplishments in reading, if there are such things.  The worst book I read was the instructive I, Robot.  I do not know what the best was. 

My time with Elizabethan writers and books about them has continued to be rewarding.  For example, in December:

MARLOWE AND SO ON

Edward the Second (1592?) &

The Massacre at Paris (1592?) &

Hero and Leander (1593? / 1598), Christopher Marlowe – On Edward II; on The Massacre.

The Old Wives Tale (1593?), George Peele – An hour of fairy tale fluff, a patchwork perhaps written for a wedding.  A cousin of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; just the kind of thing I like.

Edward III (1595?), ??? – One great act.

Titus Andronicus (c. 1593), William Shakespeare

Elizabethan Plays & Players (1940), G. B. Harrison – Well written and outstanding in its use of evidence.

The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (2004), various

Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (2019), Taylor Mac – Okay, now this thing.  Three minor (although they all have lines) characters murdered in Titus Andronicus turn out to have survived, and are given the task of cleaning up the results of the last act (“[t]here is the appearance of at least one thousand corpses on the stage,” 5).  A series of outrageous and disgusting events ensue, ending with “one of the more spectacular moments ever to be seen in the history of theater” (4), which may well have been true.  How I would love to see this travesty.  The line in the title of the post is said by Gary, played by Nathan Lane, p. 70.

FICTION

Lucifer (1654), Joost van den Vondel – Covered overhere.

Sod and Stubble (1936), John Ise – A novel of pioneer days on the Great Plains, set about 45 miles due south of Willa Cather’s Red Cloud, and globally close to the setting of Little House on the Prairie.  Strongly recommended to anyone who loves Cather and Wilder for the details of ordinary life.  It is really Ise writing up his mother’s oral memoir, as close to a primary source as fiction gets.

The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956), W. E. Bowman – A magnificent parody of the Himalayan mountain climbing genre in a classic Wodehouse or Douglas Adams-like English style.

My Death (2004), Lisa Tuttle – A fine little paradoxical time-shift novel.

MEMOIR

Girl to Country (2025), Amy Rigby – One of our greatest living songwriters tries to make it in Nashville, and succeeds, after making it in New York, as covered in the earlier Girl to City (2019).  Making it, succeeding, artistically.  The first volume of memoirs likely has more interest to people who are not already fans, but I will testify that it has been highly rewarding, for more than thirty years now, to be an Amy Rigby fan.

POETRY

On the Slaughter (1891-1933), Hayim Nahman Bialik – Peter Cole’s new translation of Bialik’s poems, an outstanding addition to Bialik’s presence in English.

Five Senses: Selected Poems (1963), Judith Wright – Australian, full of surprises.

That Swing: Poems, 2008-2016 (2017), X. J. Kennedy

The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson (2018), Percival Everett – “So, I kept saying to myself I was gonna write a novel entitled Percival Everett’s Long Overdue Slavery Novel, but this is what came out.”

The Khayyam Suite (2025), Charles Martin – Last seen here as Ovid’s translator.

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Le Château des Carpathes (1892), Jules Verne – I have gotten used to Verne rewriting Poe, but this is more of a Balzac novel, or an adventure novel with a sudden, surprising intrusion of Balzac.  Slow-paced, diffuse, thin in scientific ideas, yet highly entertaining.

L'Effraie (1953), Philippe Jaccottet – The war is over and Surrealism is over, so finally, some fresh ideas in French poetry!  Some resemblance to Rilke, maybe to James Merrill.  I read his second book, too, but it will show up in January’s list.

Uma mão cheia de nada outra de coisa nenhuma: historietas (1955), Irene Lisboa – Tiny little stories about children and their visionary moments by an important figure in Portuguese pedagogy.  These will be easy, right?  Ha ha ha, no, no.  But I guess that is good for me.

Cahiers de l'été 1944 (2025), Jean-Baptiste Duroselle – An angry essay written just before the liberation of Paris by the young man who would become the great historian of 20th century French diplomatic history, author of gigantic (“magisterial”) volumes I will likely never read.  This newly published book is an interesting companion to Marc Bloch’s L'Etrange defaite (1946, written 1940), which he could not have known.