s Rachel, although in other respects
"The Case is Altered" is not a conspicuous play, and, save for the
satirising of Antony Munday in the person of Antonio Balladino and
Gabriel Harvey as well, is perhaps the least characteristic of the
comedies of Jonson.

"Every Man in His Humour," probably first acted late in the summer of
1598 and at the Curtain, is commonly regarded as an epoch-making play;
and this view is not unjustified. As to plot, it tells little more than
how an intercepted letter enabled a father to follow his supposedly
studious son to London, and there observe his life with the gallants of
the time. The real quality of this comedy is in its personages and in
the theory upon which they are conceived. Ben Jonson had theories about
poetry and the drama, and he was neither chary in talking of them nor in
experimenting with them in his plays. This makes Jonson, like Dryden
in his time, and Wordsworth much later, an author to reckon with;
particularly when we remember that many of Jonson's notions came for
a time definitely to prevail and to modify the whole trend of English
poetry. First of all Jonson was a classicist, that is, he believed in
restraint and precedent in art in opposition to the prevalent ungoverned
and irresponsible Renaissance spirit. Jonson believed that there was a
professional way of doing things which might be reached by a study of
the best examples, and he found these examples for the most part among
the ancients. To confine our attention to the drama, Jonson objected to
the amateurishness and haphazard nature of many contemporary plays, and
set himself to do something different; and the first and most striking
thing that he evolved was his conception and practice of the comedy of
humours.

As Jonson has been much misrepresented in this matter, let us quote his
own words as to "humour." A humour, according to Jonson, was a bias of
disposition, a warp, so to speak, in character by which

"Some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way."

But continuing, Jonson is careful to add:

"But that a rook by wearing a pied feather,
The cable hat-band, or the three-piled ruff,
A yard of shoe-tie, or the Switzers knot
On his French garters, should affect a humour!
O, it is more than most ridiculous."

Jonson's comedy of humours, in a word, conceive