action deal with
one single series of events, and the time it represented as elapsing be
no greater than the time it took in playing. He was always pre-eminently
an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather than a poet's
temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, and only limited
because in ruling out these things he ruled out much else that was
essential to the spirit of the time. As a craftsman he was
uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes of the public and never
veiled his scorn of those--Shakespeare among them--whom he conceived to
do so; but he knew and valued his own work, as his famous last word to
an audience who might be unsympathetic stands to witness,

"By God 'tis good, and if you like it you may."

Compare the temper it reveals with the titles of the two contemporary
comedies of his gentler and greater brother, the one _As You Like It_,
the other _What You Will_. Of the two attitudes towards the public, and
they might stand as typical of two kinds of artists, neither perhaps can
claim complete sincerity. A truculent and noisy disclaimer of their
favours is not a bad tone to assume towards an audience; in the end it
is apt to succeed as well as the sub-ironical compliance which is its
opposite.

Jonson's theory of comedy and the consciousness with which he set it
against the practice of his contemporaries and particularly of
Shakespeare receive explicit statement in the prologue to _Every Man Out
of His Humour_--one of his earlier plays. "I travail with another
objection, Signor, which I fear will be enforced against the author ere
I can be delivered of it," says Mitis. "What's that, sir?" replies
Cordatus. Mitis:--"That the argument of his comedy might have been of
some other nature, as of a duke to be in love with a countess, and that
countess to be in love with the duke's son, and the son to love the
lady's waiting maid; some such cross-wooing, better than to be thus near
and familiarly allied to the times." Cordatus: "You say well, but I
would fain hear one of these autumn-judgments define _Quin sit
comoedia_? If he cannot, let him concern himself with Cicero's
definition, till he have strength to propose to himself a better, who
would have a comedy to be _invitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis,
imago veritatis_; a thing throughout pleasant and ridiculous and
accommodated to the correction of manners." That was what he meant his
comedy to be, and so he conceived the popular