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.