Ben Jonson’s Comedy of Humours

The Word “Humour”:

The term “humour” comes from the ancient Greek physicians and, later, from the
medieval system of medicine. This system envisaged four major humours corresponding
with the four elements (fire, air, earth, and water) and possessing the quality respectively
of heat, cold, dryness, and moisture.
The “complexion,” “temperament,” or constitution of a man depended on the
proportionate alliance of the four humours or subtle juices in his body. The
predominance of the moist humour caused a man to grow sanguine, of the hot to grow
choleric, and so on. The prevailing idea with the physiologist was that in a healthy body
there was a natural balance of all the four humours and that a disturbance of the balance
was dangerous and needed to be checked. “In Elizabethan times”, says Ifor Evans in A
Short History of English Drama, “this medieval physiology was not treated with
complete seriousness, but its vocabulary became a popular fashion in sophisticated
conversation and this again Jonson exploited.”

Elizabethan Interpretation:
“Humour”, apart from its currency in the medieval profession, was also a
catchword when Ben Jonson began to write. But his contemporaries used the word for
any passing mood, whim, fancy, or caprice and not, as Ben Jonson did, for a more a less
permanent and predominant peculiarity of disposition. Shakespeare, like the rest, used
the word in the sense of mood or fancy. For instance, in the Richard III we have:
Was ever -woman in this-humour wooed?
Was ever -woman in this humour won?
Again, in The Merchant of Venice, when Shylock is asked why he prefers a pound of the
flesh of Bassanio’s heart to the sum of three thousand ducats, he replies:
It is my humour
Jonson’s Interpretation:
Ben Jonson dissociated himself from this degenerate meaning of the word
“humour”, took it back to its original physiological sense and fitted it into the context of
his concept of the nature and function of comedy. Just as a man has in his physique a
dominant humour, similarly he has in his psyche a dominant passion. Under the influence
of this dominant passion a man may become, as the case may be, greedy, jealous,
cowardly, deceptible, foolhardy, and so forth. As Jonson clarified in the Prologue to Every
Man out of His Humour, he was taking the word “humour” from medicine and was using
it as a metaphor for the general disposition of a man—that is, his psychological set-up. He
explains that
When some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man that it doth draw
All his effects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way;
This may truly be said to be a humour.
The Purpose of Comedy:
Ben Jonson’s comedy is called the comedy of humours as it aimed primarily at the
representation of such characters as were motivated mainly or entirely by their peculiar,
dominant passions or humours. Jonson felt that, in the words of a critic, “the purpose of
comedy is to note those elements in human character which are either naturally and
permanently dominant in each man, or which on occasion, in the hazard of life, overflow
and exceed their limits at the expense of the other contributing elements to represent a
number of characters differently humoured; and in the clash of contrasts to paint with
pleasant laughter, the moral of these disorders. A man whom we call avaricious because
avarice to us is his most striking characteristic and to him his most absorbing humour
may either preserve the established proportion of his dominating quality in all his
dealings, or under stress of living in a peculiar set of circumstances, let it grow at he
expense of other qualities. In the first case, he may be said to be’ in his humour’ and in
the second, to be ‘out of his humour.’ Both are excellent material for comic dramatisation
and the question is one of degree. The latter is the more tempting to the playwright not
merely because excess gives him more striking stage effects, but because it serves his
ethical purpose better because of the enormity of its magnitude.” The comedy of humours
had a highly didactic aim which was sought to be realised through satire levelled at various
humours. Volpone is a satire on cupidity and depravity of human character. The
Alchemist on greed, Bartholomew Fair on hypocritical Puritans, The Silent Woman on
jittery melancholiacs afraid of noise, The Staple of News on irresponsible newsmongering
and the uncultured craving for thrills, and so on. It was not without reason that Ben
Jonson characterised more than one of his comedies as “comical satires.”
Is Jonson an Imitator?:
We have not so far referred to Jonson’s indebtedness to classical dramatists in
arriving at his concept of the comedy of humours. It was partly his classical instruction
andxtaste which led him to this concept. But it is a popular misrepresentation to assert
than Jonson was a mechanical imitator of the Roman comic dramatists-Plautus and
Terence. “There is no doubt that in Latin comedy,” to quote Ifor Evans, “each character
belonged to a recognizable type, and maintained throughout certain well-defined
attributes.” However, as a critic observes, “it is really a strange critical error to hold that
the Jonsonian conception of the dramatic humour is only an English copy of Plautine and
Terentian types and that his braggarts and gulls and misers were but Romans in doublet
and ruff…” Jonson was no transcriber. He acknowledged “no man” his “master.” His
dramatic art came not from the study of literature but the study of life. His insistence that
comedy should be real and English comedy should be English and real was meant partly
to dispel the charge that his comic art was merely literary, far removed from life and only
a scholar’s affair. His native vigour and originality save him from being treated as a
mechanical transcriber. He was a redoubtable scholar, but, what is more important, “he
was”, in the words of David Daiches in A Critical History of English Literature, “also a
rugged Englishman with a sardonic relish for the varied and colourful London life of his
day…he showed enormous and impressive originality even when most closely following
classical models or applying rules from classical theory or practice.” Take an-example.
 Most of the humours in his first important comedy Every Man in His Humour have their
prototypes in the classical comedy of Plautus and Terence. But all of them are Londoners,
not Romans,.and are drawn not from books but observation. The jealous husband, the
timid father, the corrupt son, the cunning slave or parasite, the simple gull, and the
boasting but cowardly soldier of Plautus and Terence have suggested Ben Jonson’s Kitely
the merchant, the elder Knowell, the younger Knowell (he is not corrupt indeed but it
is.supposed by his father to be so), Brainworm, Matthew and Stephen (the town and the
country gull respectively), and Bobadill. All of them are no mere copies but represent a
lively cross-section of London society of the age of Ben Jonson. A critic observes regarding
these characters : “No more genuine sketches of London character are to be found in the
annals of the drama.” They are children of Jonson’s own observation; and as an observer,
he had, save Shakespeare, few rivals among his contemporaries.
Advantages of the Humour Technique:
There were some obvious advantages Jonson derived from the adoption of the
humour technique. The chief among them are given below:
(i) First, it allowed him to dispense with the traditional clown or jester. The farcical laughter
arising from the grotesque and slapstick farce of clownery could be substituted by the
clash of humours.
(ii) Secondly, it provided a meeting-ground between classical theory and modern life.
(iii) Thirdly, as the introduction of humours put the dramatic emphasis on character at
the cost of incident, it threw out of favour, once and for all, the comedy of mere intrigue.
(iv) Lastly, it rendered it possible for the master of satiric comedy, the doughty champion of
classicism, and the most powerful of Elizabethan realists to be united in the same man.
Jonson threw the massive weight of his dramatic genius against the current of popular
taste and succeeded in pruning the romantic excesses of Elizabethan comedy.
The Disadvantages:
A very grave danger inherent in the envisagement and representation of humours
was the possibility of a falsification of human nature. The characters were apt to grow
wooden and monotonous. Gregory Smith observes in this connexion : “In the first place,
the presentation of certain selected humours throughout a long play involves the
playwright, as it does novelists like Dickens, in one .offfte two risks: either of making the
characters too rigid or uniform in habit, puppet-like after the fashion of the personages
in the old Morality, and dramatically unreal or in the consciousness of this danger, of
striving to escape from it by exaggeration…In the second place…characters thus fixed tend
to become too simple. Even when the humour is not plain study of a single folly, but a
complex impression of several with one only slightly overtopping the rest, it is hard to
sustain the combination throughout the action.” Jonson does manage, thanks to his
vigour and originality, to negotiate these dangers pretty safely. It cannot be said that his
characters are only wooden figures, representatives of types and embodiments of specific
traits as are the characters of the morality plays of the Middle Ages. He does manage to
breathe into them a life of their own. As T. S. Eliot maintains, rather partially, in The
Sacred Wood, Shakespeare’s characters are “no more alive than are the characters of
Jonson.”
 In spite of their realism and vividness Ben Jonson’s humours are open to the
charge of being psychologically too simple. It-is’often said that he was not acquainted with
man in his fulness and that he built on the surface and built but a single storey. The
complexities of human psyche find no expression. “There is,”-says a critic, “no light and
shade, the cross-play of motives is apt to be neglected; and above all, he misses the-
inconsistency which is so powerful an element in the nature of us all.” “He,” says another
critic, “chooses a general idea-cunning, folly, severity, Itlst-and makes a person out of it.
He takes an abstract quality, and putting together all the acts to which it may give rise,
trots it out on the stage in a man’s dress. Now it is a vice selected from the catalogue of
moral philosophy sensuality thirsting for gold: the perverse double inclination becomes a
personage, Sir Epicure Mammon; before the alchemist, before his friend, before his
mistress, In public or alone, all his words denote a greed of pleasure and of gold, and they
express nothing more. Now it is a piece of madness gathered from the old sophists, a
tremendous horror of noise; this form of mental pathology becomes a personage,
Morose.” To have a humour is almost a whole-time profession. It is to some extent, an
over-simplification of human nature amounting to its falsification. Ben Jonson’s
characters are, to adopt R. M. Forster’s phraseology in his Aspects of the Novel, flat and
not round characters. They are all predictable and are “‘not capable of surprising us in a
convincing way.” They do not have the unpredictability of life, though they are lively and
arresting.

What is Comedy of Humours?

Introduction
Comedy of Humours was introduced by Ben Jonson, in English Drama. The
Comedy of Humours was the natural expression of his genius.
The term ‘humour’ as used by Ben Jonson is based on an ancient
physiological theory of four fluids found in the human body.

According to this theory, there are four fluids in the human body which
determine a man’s temperament and mental state. These four fluids are-

 Blood,
 Phlegm,
 Choler (Yellow Bile); and
 Melancholy (Black Bile)
A normal man has these four fluids in a balanced proportion. But this excess
of any one of these fluids makes him abnormal and develops some kind of an
oddity in the temperament and behaviour and hence such a person becomes
an object of fun and ridicule.

Excess of different fluids have different effects on the human-

 The Humour of Blood makes a man excessively optimistic even without

the slightest chance of hope or success.
 Phlegm makes one excessively calm and docile.
 Choler makes one highly ill-tempered.
 Black Bile makes one excessively melancholy.
Ben Jonson’s comedies are called Comedies of Humour because the principal
characters in all the comedies are victims of one humour or the other. For
example, he uses Comedy of Humours in his play Every Man in his Action.

Humour and the Theory of Humours

Ben Jonson

omeone told me, after reading my last column, that Volpone did not sound very much like a
comedy at all. I imagine this is true of any work of art taken out of its immediate context. No
comedy can be as funny to a future audience as it is to its contemporary audience. And in the
case of Jonson's work, this is particularly true. There is a certain imbalance in his work
which does not entirely meet the generic expectations of a comedy. Once again, it could be
Jonson's way of asking the audience to forget the type of comedy they have been conditioned
to watching and to transgress the boundaries of labels and genres.
The modern tendency to classify it as a drama, not a comedy, springs from the contemporary
trend of humanising villains and providing context for their villainy in order to project
sympathy and understanding towards every sort of human being. The play has been
sentimentalised to the extent of treating Volpone as a noble and tragic figure. But by
creating, in the character of Volpone, any sort of candour, sincerity or tragic
misunderstanding, we rob Jonson of one of his greatest desperados.

Jonson also greatly favoured the ancient Greek theory of humours. The theory, which can be
traced to ancient times, is that there are four distinct bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, black bile
and yellow bile. An imbalance of these fluids, or humours, causes a personality disturbance.
Although never validated as a psychoanalytical theory, it was frequently referred to in
literature and widely championed by Jonson, especially in plays such as Every Man in his
Humour and Every Man out of his Humour. Jonson explains in one of his introductions that
each humour has its own function: blood makes one excessively optimistic; phlegm makes
one excessively cowardly; yellow bile makes one excessively violent; and black bile makes
one excessively sad. Jonson's characters, then, were defined by the proportions of their
bodily humours.
hile Volpone could fall under the category of dark or black comedy, there is still an aspect
particularly disturbing about Jonson's sardonic approach to the genre, his depiction of
wantonness and his ruthless verdict. Even if we could confidently categorise most part the
play as a comedy, there is still the debatable conclusion of the play. On the one hand, the
ending could provide satisfaction that good has won and that evil has been punished; on the
other hand, it could leave a certain distasteful atmosphere, to know that the protagonist has
been dealt with most brutally.
 Jonson explains in one of his introductions that
each humour has its own function: blood makes
one excessively optimistic; phlegm makes one
excessively cowardly; yellow bile makes one
excessively violent; and black bile makes one
excessively sad. Jonson’s characters, then, were
defined by the proportions of their bodily
humours.
Although Volpone's undoing satisfies the Elizabethan taste for seeing the cheater cheated,
the harsh sentences meted out by the court darken the comic tone. Volpone's appeal in the
epilogue for the audience to distinguish between the legal punishment he deserves as a
character and the delight he has given them as an actor does not fully right the balance, but
the play's rich ironies have kept it on stage continually for four centuries. That the play has
been received well through the ages is apparent enough. We can never be fully certain of how
exactly the play was received during the Elizabethan age, although we know that it had
several successful runs. We can only guess, from this fact, that audiences were enthralled by
the novelty of the play, its unashamed crudeness and its unusual humour.

While the question must have been asked even then as to whether the play was a comedy or a
tragedy, something in Jonson's acerbic wit must have made its comic undertone apparent.
The milieu then was different, and different jokes were well-received and understood. For
example, the Elizabethan audience must have known what we as a modern audience are not
always aware of: that the play is a stylistic parody of the doggerel verse used by the early
Tudor playwrights whom Jonson loved to mock. Throughout the play, in fact, Jonson mocks
all earlier forms of theatre; the Elizabethan audience must have also thoroughly relished the
rivalry that existed between the various playwrights of the court, each trying to outdo the
other and be the luminary of the new Renaissance that had taken England over.

Certainly a comedy, Volpone is also simultaneously a fable, a morality tale and a satire.
Jonson's plays challenged the audience to examine the impact of a society governed by deceit
and subterfuge. His strength lay in his ability to confront his audience. In his ability to
recreate theatrically the contemporary world and identify both general and specific aspects
of the human experience, he was opening new ground that would be further explored in the
ensuing centuries.