f stage personages
on the basis of a ruling trait or passion (a notable simplification
of actual life be it observed in passing); and, placing these typified
traits in juxtaposition in their conflict and contrast, struck the
spark of comedy. Downright, as his name indicates, is "a plain squire";
Bobadill's humour is that of the braggart who is incidentally, and with
delightfully comic effect, a coward; Brainworm's humour is the finding
out of things to the end of fooling everybody: of course he is fooled
in the end himself. But it was not Jonson's theories alone that made the
success of "Every Man in His Humour." The play is admirably written
and each character is vividly conceived, and with a firm touch based on
observation of the men of the London of the day. Jonson was neither in
this, his first great comedy (nor in any other play that he wrote),
a supine classicist, urging that English drama return to a slavish
adherence to classical conditions. He says as to the laws of the old
comedy (meaning by "laws," such matters as the unities of time and place
and the use of chorus): "I see not then, but we should enjoy the same
licence, or free power to illustrate and heighten our invention as they
[the ancients] did; and not be tied to those strict and regular forms
which the niceness of a few, who are nothing but form, would thrust upon
us." "Every Man in His Humour" is written in prose, a novel practice
which Jonson had of his predecessor in comedy, John Lyly. Even the word
"humour" seems to have been employed in the Jonsonian sense by Chapman
before Jonson's use of it. Indeed, the comedy of humours itself is only
a heightened variety of the comedy of manners which represents life,
viewed at a satirical angle, and is the oldest and most persistent
species of comedy in the language. None the less, Jonson's comedy
merited its immediate success and marked out a definite course in which
comedy long continued to run. To mention only Shakespeare's Falstaff
and his rout, Bardolph, Pistol, Dame Quickly, and the rest, whether in
"Henry IV." or in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," all are conceived in
the spirit of humours. So are the captains, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish
of "Henry V.," and Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare never
employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not
Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing
that he had reprobated, that is, degrade "the humour: into an odd