Every Man in His Humour - Book Report/Review Example

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, 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, 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 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 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; but Bobadill is stained with no inordinate vice, and is besides so frugal, that "a bunch of radishand 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). 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 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. 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 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 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 jealousyMaster 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 grand-childred 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 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, non-interaction, 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 - 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 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 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). 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). 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. 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) Read More