When Ben Jonson placed Every Man in His Humor at the head of his collected works and alluded to it in his dedication as his first-fruits, both position and allusion were symbolically appropriate, as he was no doubt fully aware. He had earlier dramatic writing to his credit, including at least one full-length comedy; but unlike what had come before, this springtime production held all the flavors of the mature harvest. All Jonson's characteristic concerns, values, turns of mind and phrase, dramatic techniques, structural designs—all are here, ready to be selected, developed, recombined. The very copiousness is, from the point of view of dramatic consistency, this play's disability: it offers too much simultaneously, sometimes contradictorily. It exceeds itself, and so displays its author better than almost any single later play. It is quintessential Jonson.

Jonsonian comedy is the comedy of non-interaction. In the characteristic Jonsonian plot, a group of personages in a state of chronic introspection is brought together by a central action which loosely unites them, or rather, brings them into proximity. Each character, though responsive in his own way to outside stimuli, acts essentially alone; he moves along the line of force directed by his nature, and comes into collision, when time or a manipulator decrees, with another character moving along an intersecting line. It follows that Jonsonian plot is not plot in the ordinary sense. It does not develop outward from a coherent center, but moves inward from widely separated points to an accidental, as opposed to essential, meeting point—accidental in terms of action, though at its best essential in significance. For this reason, the plot of a Jonson comedy is peculiarly hard to recall; we remember individual characters and confrontations, as though the story were a means to achieve certain juxtapositions. These moments of intersection constitute characteristic Jonsonian comedy; the design is not organic but geometric.

A Jonsonian comic plot is a group of subplots collected in one place. How deeply this comedy of non-interaction differs from comedy of interaction is evident if we think of Shakespeare's comic plots: where subplot and main plot meet, they merge into one another, each clarifying the other: the moment of meeting is the moment of resolution—consider the confrontation of Portia and Shylock, the Duke and Malvolio, Oliver and Orlando, or Theseus joined in celebration with the midsummer-night's lovers and the workmen. The motto for Shakespeare's comedy could well be taken from this last play: “All the story of the night told over, / And all their minds transfigured so together, / … / … grows to something of great constancy.” In Jonson there is no together: each mind is transfigured separately. If these separate transfigurations are simultaneous, their crisscrossing only exhibits more strikingly the need to avoid gullibility. They teach, perhaps, the source of transfiguration and the means of escaping it, but the condition itself contains nothing valuable. No mutual element of great constancy can be deduced from the interweaving of confusions. On the contrary, the moment when Jonson's subplots coincide is a moment of chaos; instead of merging, they rebound from one another; instead of clarifying, they confound. The chaos is funny to the observer, who, aware of all the motivations which compose it, laughs at the disparities he, but not the characters, can perceive—for the audience, too, is detached. This comedy of non-interaction is what Theseus expressly rejects; when his master of ceremonies predicts that he will enjoy the workmen's botched play only if he “can find sport in their intents,” he rebukes him: “Our sport shall be to take what they mistake.” In Jonson the sport of those who play audience is all in the performers' intents; as Wellbred says when he has aroused Dame Kitely's jealousy, “This may make sport anon.”

Furthermore, the coming together of plots in Shakespeare is a moment of resolution and merging because the plots are already organically connected by the relationships between their central figures. Oliver and Orlando are brothers; the Duke and the midsummer lovers are court and courtiers, and besides the Duke's group includes Hermia's father; Olivia and Malvolio are two halves of a household; Portia defends her husband's best friend. When the plots make contact we experience relief and release, for what has been artificially fragmented is reassembled. It is what we have been waiting for. In Jonson, on the other hand, although families do exist, they occupy the same subsection of plot to begin with, so that the meeting of two or more plot lines has no reason to bring a sense of fitting union. The separate subplots are not interconnected by previous personal relationships. Corvino and Corbaccio happen to be fellow citizens, and the Would-bes happen to be visiting their city; Drugger and Dapper and Sir Epicure Mammon happen to encounter Face at different times; Cokes (or Wasp) happens to choose John Littlewit to draw up a marriage license. Of course, in these great plays the characters are brought together by a far more subtle relationship than that of family ties: they have similar complexions of soul. The “something of great constancy” which transfigures their minds is a capacity for similar evil (or folly—which Jonson always sees as weak evil). But since the evil is invariably such as to cut them off from other men, what metaphorically unites them actually divides them.

Now I do not think that Jonson was yet aware, when he wrote Every Man in His Humor, that his great comic genius lay in documenting and exploring this division; nor could he possibly foresee that the triumphs of that genius would be reserved for a time when he would find dramatic correlatives for his ultimately metaphysical belief that, while pursuit of an absolute good leads to unity and a constructive ordering of society, pursuit of evil leads to fragmentation and absolute isolation. But in Every Man In he is already attempting to introduce such a dramatic correlative in the debate about poetry; he sees, though perhaps but hazily, the direction in which he will have to move. The debate about poetry frames the play, whether one begins with the dedication to Camden, with the Prologue, or with Knowell's opening speech. Its settlement at the end by Clement, whose word is in every sense law, immediately precedes the proper ordering of society metaphorically (“I will do more reverence to him [a true poet], when I see him, than I will to the Mayor”) and in fact (in the arrangements for rewards and punishments). General unification follows: Clement exhorts each participant to put off his divisive humor, to enjoy the symbolically unifying banquet; and he insists on a final procession properly emblematic of unity: “every one, a fellow!” (The occasion, of course, is a wedding.) So the identification of a metaphysically valid ideal, poetry, is forced into linkage with constructive organization of society—forced, because the society has no more than the most tangential concern with poetry and seems unlikely either to be constructive or to remain, under pressure, organized. Clement has to push and shove to make them “put off all discontent”: “You, Mr. Downright, your anger; you, Master Knowell, your cares; Master Kitely and his wife”—this is hard work. The picture of a society in the process of being constructively organized is always the weakest part of Jonson, and in his most satisfying plays he cuts it down to a minimum. In his least satisfying, Catiline and Cynthia's Revels, he makes it, alas, the major part of the proceedings. In these two plays and in Poetaster he tried again to use poetry as the ideal which could unite society, in all three works making eloquence a centrally important part of the plot, whereas in Every Man In it is very lightly dealt with in the action, though given disproportionate symbolic weight to bear. The relationship between the value of a society and the position of poetry within it was a theme dear to Jonson, but perhaps too indirectly dramatic to make a really great play, since poetry itself is still only a symbol for the moral and spiritual qualities it embodies.

That Jonson had not yet clearly perceived the drift of his own creativity is plain in his attempt to superimpose an organic unification on the arbitrary unification demanded by Justice Clement. The marriage between Edward and Bridget literally makes the “worthwhile” characters one big family. Even Cob and Tib are worked in as household retainers, with their allotted place in the buttery. Clement, who might be considered an exception, has his special role above and outside of the action, sanctioning and repairing family ties and providing the family mansion and the family dinner. Only Matthew and Bobadill remain literally unrelated on either side of the family; their position is evidently intended to correspond to their moral state, for they are specifically excluded from humanitarian concern as unsalvageable (“these two have so little of man in 'em, they are not part of my care”). Since they do not share in the communion of humanity they get no organic dinner, either. But while this gesture toward a discriminating interactive comedy provides an agreeable and symbolically correct ending to the played-out action, it is utterly mechanical. The marriage, a most unconvincing piece of work patched up by Wellbred (“Hold, hold, be temperate,” the fortunate bridegroom begs him), is as much of a contrivance as Clement's final procession. Clement dedicates “this night … to friendship, love, and laughter” as though he were articulating the elements of the action, three motivations joined to bring about the final success. But major laughter in Every Man In, when connected with these two emotions at all, is based—as laughter typically is in Jonson—on perversions or negations of love (Kitely's for his wife, Knowell's for his son, Matthew's courtship of Bridget) and friendship (Kitely's suspicions of Cash, Brainworm's deception of Knowell, Edward's baiting of Stephen, and Wellbred's of Bobadill and Matthew). Clement is asking for the simultaneous celebration of effects opposed at the very root. All Brainworm's laughter-making talents have been dedicated, as talents in Jonson always are, to the pleasant task of self-aggrandizement, which separates father from son, brother from sister, husband from wife (with the false message delivered to Kitely), master from servant (Formal from Clement as much as Brainworm from Knowell), for as long as the laughter is able to continue.

To be sure, there is not much separation needed; as in the great comedies, all that is wanted is judicious intensification of a spiritual state that already exists. And Clement's conjunction of friendship, love, and laughter is only unconvincing, not, as it might be, offensive, for Brainworm is not yet Mosca or Face, the non-understanding between Knowell and Edward is not yet the deadly opposition of Corbaccio to Bonario, Kitely's treatment of his Dame is not Corvino's treatment of Celia, Brainworm's deception of Knowell is not Mosca's betrayal of Volpone, and to counterfeit a London Justice's warrant is not to pervert the Venetian courts. But as folly is a weak evil, so Every Man In is an incipient Volpone or Alchemist. The situations are basic to Jonsonian humanity: bonds of relationship are always denied by separation of spirit.

Clement, thus circumscribed by human nature itself, can only create, as family relationships do, a tenuous physical pairing. The characters Jonson would like, in Every Man In, to present as “fellows” are incapable of fellowship. Can there be anywhere in literature a more tedious pair of friends than Edward and Wellbred? Their sterile interchange of witticisms is outgone only by the silence of the stony young lovers, who exchange not a single remark either before or after marriage. The place for emotional activity is in soliloquy; there old Knowell can protest his paternal affection, but confronted with his newly-married son he does not address a word to him, until the opportunity to mock Edward's poetic inclination unseals his lips. His one disagreeable sentence is the sum total of communication between them. Kitely, even more lavish of passion in soliloquy, dredges up four direct remarks to his wife (one is “How now? What?”), of which the last seems promising: “Kiss me, sweetheart”; but his final pronouncement, “When air rains horns, all may be sure of some,” does not augur well for the harmony of his union. Indeed, the Quarto text, continuing to the very end Kitely's suspicious questions—intermixed with his assurances that he is cured of jealousy—makes explicit the rocky future of his marriage.

The natural conclusion of Jonsonian comedy is complete fragmentation, coupled with (since this is comedy and not tragedy) an arbitrary reconstitution of some kind of society—the ending of The Alchemist, Volpone, Bartholomew Fair. It is the conclusion of Every Man In, too, but here the fragments are unstably glued together in the hope that the traditional judgment, marriage, and banquet may retain their face value. Jonson continued to use them: marriage and banqueting (projected in the epilogue) conclude The Alchemist: judgment imposed from without, Volpone: a combination of the two, Bartholomew Fair. But in these, conventional comic form no longer compromises, but rather illuminates, the inner logic of Jonson's individual comic content: two of the three marriages are frankly utilitarian, the third emotionally insignificant (while the clear mandate for romance between Celia and Bonario is ignored); one banquet celebrates the success of manipulation (“laughter,” but certainly not love or friendship), the other a recognition of general inability to amend—and in The Silent Woman, the banquet celebrates Morose's un-marriage. As for judgment, in Volpone it merely confirms the special isolation each character has selected for himself; in Bartholomew Fair, it is abandoned as unsuited to a society in which all human relationships turn out to be deceptive. The great Jonsonian ending is a parody of the traditional ending of interactive comedy: its symbols of unity become affirmations of fragmentation. On a large scale as on a small (Volpone's morning hymn, Face's catechism), Jonson is a master of revelation through ironic form.

Although in Every Man In 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 exhibits itself everywhere. From the moment Knowell strikes the keynote 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. 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, whom 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.

Further, the most powerful fear of the characters is the development elsewhere of an unmediated relationship. All the primary action of the play springs from this anxiety. Knowell's trip to town is prompted by his dismay at the friendship of Edward and Wellbred; Wellbred, though with less animus, would like to pry Edward loose from his father: “change an old shirt for a whole smock with us. … Leave thy vigilant father alone to number over his green apricots.” Kitely and Dame Kitely need no commentary. Brainworm, besides wishing to prevent a specific confrontation (between Knowell and Edward), is concerned to avoid confrontations in general (for example, between Downright and Stephen), since interaction is the natural enemy of manipulation. But the most striking exponent of non-interaction is kindly old Knowell, who first comes to town in vague hopes of somehow counteracting his son's friendship, then rushes to prevent his rendezvous, and finishes by exclaiming: “My son is not married, I hope!”

This intense recoil from any form of direct emotional contact appears more subtly in the later comedies, though Mosca's ingenuity in dividing families, Subtle's and Face's voluble resistance to their own “indenture tripartite,” and Morose's obsessive self-insulation sufficiently show that it can still give direct impetus to plot developments. More typically it becomes a psychological quantity fused with and expressed by cruder forms of self-interest, but casts against the backdrop a shadow under which all action takes place. Structurally, it presents itself as that recoil in the action which I have before described as occurring when two or more plot lines meet. The shock of contact, instead of impelling the action in a new direction, brings it to a temporary or even permanent standstill. After the successful courtroom scene, as after the debacle of Volpone's attempt at seduction, Mosca and Volpone have to start the action going all over again; the accidental conjunction of all plots at the end of The Alchemist finishes Face's comic action; just as the appearance of half the cast at Cob's house in Every Man In leaves each person present powerless except to shift the responsibility for action to a magistrate. The need to interact is a challenge Jonson's characters cannot meet, and it is just this disability which really interests Jonson.

The successful pursuit of this interest raises formal problems of coherence in the play as artifact, which Jonson solves by the strictest economy and unity of structure. What he erects in the Prologue into a universal creed is really the intuitive perception by an individual artist of the form he needs. The formal Unities take over the role which in interactive comedy is played by motivation, while motivation performs the splintering which in interactive comedy can be accomplished by separation in time and space. The implications as to what is the essence and what the accident in human behavior are, of course, precisely opposite. The frequent presence of a manipulator like Brainworm serves exactly the same purpose. Not only does his puppeteer-like control of the disparate actions tie them into an artistic whole—his feverish sleight-of-hand, without which there would be no plot at all, emphasizes the artificiality of simultaneous motion.

The characters themselves cohere by contrast—not only the general, and therefore structurally loose, contrast between a Downright and a Matthew, but the detailed and therefore structurally unifying contrast between, say, Matthew and Stephen. Whether or not the characters have met is immaterial; what is important is that Jonson, through parallels in their situations, puts them conceptually side by side. They throw psychological and moral light on one another by means of this non-personal unification, which in interactive comedy may reinforce the personal unification of emotional relationship, but in Jonsonian comedy replaces it. Jonson's balanced pairing sets off against one another those who seem identical and links those who seem opposite. Only when we meet the town gull, aping the fashion just coming in (rapier dueling) and praising the configuration of a friend's leg in a boot, can we comprehend the full idiotic pathos of the country gull, aping the fashion just going out (hawking) and praising the configuration of his own leg in a woolen stocking. Only beside his carefree “double” Wellbred can Edward be clearly seen as his father's serious-minded son, urging upon his counterpart temperance, abstention from oaths, and the gravity of their situation; Edward's sexual purity—or indifference—which keeps him from ever making an indecent remark stands out against Wellbred's penchant for bawdry as the latter seizes every opportunity for playing a heavy-handed Mercutio to Edward's anemic Romeo.

More telling still, because they reveal not so much character as the ultimate significance of character, are those surprising juxtapositions of the apparently unconnected or antithetical which pin-point a character's position in a universal pattern. In the great plays such unifying contrast is a major source of ironic illumination. Consider Corbaccio, the old man who obsessively pretends that he is young and vigorous, target of scorn for Volpone, the young man who obsessively pretends that he is old and impotent. Or Tribulation Wholesome, whom Subtle the Alchemist wittily baits for serving a false and self-seeking religion. Or Trouble-all and Quarlous, Bartholomew Fair's real and pretended madmen, of whom the real seeks a “warrant” for his every action and the pretended does whatever self-involvement directs. In Every Man In, Jonson is already intrigued with the structural balance to be obtained through such mirror images, but, as I have noted before, his sense of irony is not yet equal to his intuitive perception of ideal form. Whatever ironic insight could be provided by identification of Brainworm (the fake fake soldier) as a version of Bobadill (the real fake soldier) is denied by the straightforward view of Brainworm we are required to take; and Bobadill as a version of Brainworm is either obvious or untrue. What we do already get from this doubling is a forceful sense—forceful because of the surprise with which we recognize the likeness—that the play operates in a unified world, where the bases of unification lie in the realm of disguise and deception. The unexpected conjunction of Brainworm and Bobadill jolts us into the characteristic universe of Jonsonian comedy, though it is not yet, as by later conjunctions, brilliantly particularized.

Yet there are certain kinds of particularity and invitations to evaluate in this comedy which are in essence the same as the structural interplay of later work. These characters, while going about their unrelated business, parody one another's behavior in as effective, if not as far-reachingly significant, a way as they do in the great plays. Not only is Cob, in his jealousy, a burlesque of Kitely; both are travesties of the troubled, spying Knowell, distorted mirror images which come together in the grand superimposition before Cob's house. Further, Knowell's acquaintanceship with the eccentric and easygoing Clement, the worried father's only reassurance, is an exact replica of the source of his worries: Edward's acquaintanceship with Wellbred—which is in its turn caricatured by that of Matthew with Bobadill (for Edward “is almost grown the idolator / Of this young Wellbred”). The cautious and unimaginative will always attach themselves respectfully to Pharaoh's foot. And so Stephen, who is even more cautious and less imaginative than Matthew, joins the pattern by giving his allegiance to that gentleman, and via him to Bobadill—for which Edward very rightly scoffs at him; while Edward's father muses in disbelief over Wellbred's letter, “Is this the man / My son hath sung so for the happiest wit, / The choicest brain the times hath sent us forth?” Everything depends on where one stands.

Knowell himself, despite his name, does not stand in the position of final authority. Personally he is appealing: the archetypal fond parent (“but why does he pick such inferior friends?”), he gives careful thought to his son's upbringing, exercises restraint and psychological insight in his discipline, puts himself to a good deal of trouble to follow his paternal course; a kindly and humane master, he risks an obviously poor investment in the begging Fitzsword, then forgives him immediately when he turns out to be Brainworm making a laughing stock of his employer; he is human enough in his customary moralism to stretch a moral point (“This letter is directed to my son; / Yet I am Edward Knowell, too …”), human enough in his customary generosity to be stung by the imputation of pettiness (“Why should he think I tell my apricots?”), and generous enough to recognize spontaneously that he deserves tricking, “to punish my impertinent search—and justly.” But when he is placed in perspective, now with regard to this piece of similar behavior, now with regard to that, his actions lose their individuality and their coherence; he becomes depersonalized. The effect is just the opposite of that in interactive comedy, where the more links a character forms with others, the more personal qualities he displays. Knowell is instead subjected again and again to partial re-evaluation through people he has never met. His kinship with Kitely and Cob forces his reasoned solicitude to fall under the shadows of irrationality and possessiveness; his benign incomprehension of Brainworm's character must take its overall place beside Kitely's malign incomprehension of Cash's; his understandable outburst at Stephen's idiocy, “'fore heaven, I am ashamed / Thou hast a kinsman's interest in me,” is qualified by Downright's excessive outburst over Wellbred's pranks: “I am grieved it should be said he is my brother, and take these courses”—an unpleasantly similar refusal of indulgence on the grounds of personal dignity. Indeed, though Knowell has never set eyes on any member of Kitely's household, what he thinks he is doing is constantly compromised by what we know they are doing. How can we retain faith in his admirable theory of discipline when we hear it parroted by futile Kitely to incompetent Downright? Here is Knowell's original: “I am resolved I will not … / … practice any violent mean to stay / The unbridled course of youth in him; … / … / There is a way of winning more by love / And urging of the modesty, than fear: / … / [he will] By softness and example, get a habit.” And an act later, here is Kitely: “But, brother, let your reprehension, then, / Run in an easy current, not o'er-high / Carried … / But rather use the soft persuading way, / Whose powers will work more gently, and compose / Th'imperfect thoughts you labor to reclaim: / More winning, than enforcing the consent.” We know how to value Downright's “Aye, aye, let me alone for that, I warrant you”; and Knowell's psychological validities are integrated into a pattern of useless educational theory. These implied equivalences between Knowell and others—particularly his major counterpart, Kitely—produce an interesting complication of value judgment. We are forced to look at a piece of behavior first in isolation and then all over again in juxtaposition. The positive values projected by a Knowell seen as complete in himself are as true as, but no truer than, the negative values acquired by a Knowell divided into spiritual parts with matching doubles. Who would not live in kindly, generous, soft-hearted Knowell's household? And yet all over London men like him are misunderstanding their servants, denying their relatives, failing their juniors, and beating their wives.

This dramatic guilt by association is not yet the glittering web of corruption woven by characters in the great plays, but it displays the identical complex of personalities, totally disparate in type, unconnected by emotional relationship, yet held together by a single spiritual disorder. But whereas Volpone, The Alchemist, and The Silent Woman are tightly constructed, each around one central spiritual disease, Every Man In resembles Bartholomew Fair in its multiplicity of aberrations, without a connecting character like the latter's Trouble-all to raise one overreaching question with his refrain, “Have you a warrant?” Instead, Jonson here strings the characters together like beads, on thematic threads which hold a few at a time. So the central question of use and misuse of poetry is touched upon by everyone except Wellbred and Brainworm; Stephen, Matthew, Kitely, Edward, and Cob are, each in his own way, ineffectual lovers; Stephen, Matthew, and Cob are foolishly concerned with lineage, on which Knowell has the deciding say; Stephen, Kitely, and Matthew all affect melancholy; and book-learning is honored and dishonored by Knowell, Cob (who likes to bring Roger Bacon and King Cophetua into the conversation), Edward, Matthew, and Stephen—each of the three last being, in his special sense, “at his book.” Jonson, who dedicated this first product of his own muse to Camden, the paragon of true learning, must have enjoyed writing the mischievous counterpoint in Scene 1: “Knowell. Myself was once … / Dreaming on naught but idle poetry, / … / But since, time and the truth have waked my judgment, (Enter Stephen.) / And reason taught me better to distinguish / The vain from th'useful learnings.—Cousin Stephen!”—as gratifying in its way as “the heaven's breath / Smells wooingly here: … / … / The air is delicate. (Enter Lady Macbeth.)”

Distortion of education, of poetry, of love, of social status—Jonson's favorite issues are all here; like the pairing of characters and the unities of time and place, they tie together the action in a delimited realm where the same problems come up over and over again. Taken together, they amount to an enumeration of abuses similar to that formed by the aggregate of Juvenal's satires, or, contemporaneously, Marston's. Jonson, who drew liberally on Juvenal in Every Man In, had in mind a similar anatomizing of a diseased society, though here the disease is so mild as to be merely the common cold. As Juvenal devotes one satire to dramatizing one vice, and Marston follows suit with one central representative character in each such satire, Jonson here assembles a sub-group of his characters around each separate folly and connects the groups into a play. The sum of all the parts is Society, or, more correctly, Humanity in a specific microcosm, built up out of a multitude of local references until the existence of the characters in time and place becomes indisputable.

This definition of an ethical whole by adducing all possible parts is the characteristic additive technique of Jonson's comedy. In Every Man In he still makes some use of the iterative technique favored by interactive comedy, in which a subplot repeats the situation of the main plot, but in the mature comedies he abandons it. Even here the iteration (Cob's and Kitely's jealousy, Edward's and Wellbred's images in their elders' eyes) is subordinate to the introduction of more and more individual examples of varied human folly. Characteristically, instead of a proliferation from one original source—of absurd passions, say, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or of hopeless adorations as in Twelfth Night, or of rulers and usurpers as in The Tempest—Jonson gives us one fox, one fruit-fly, one vulture, one crow, one raven, one parrot-turtle, and adds them together into a definitive summation of human animal life. The play's significance grows inductively, not deductively.

In Every Man In this typical profusion of unlike examples coheres structurally but not essentially. The absence of that pervasive symbolic imagery (e.g. of gold, of alchemy) so integral to the great plays is indicative of the absence of a pervasive metaphysical concern; the play lacks an ethical center. The attempt to make this center a loose, and moreover a practical, concept, society, is not artistically satisfying. Venice, Bartholomew Fair, an alchemical workshop—these set certain symbolic limits on the meaning of “society”; they postulate a select kind of society. The appearance in these settings of an apparently random sample of personages ceases to have sociological significance and instead becomes interpretable much as an emblem with separate constituents is interpretable. “Society” becomes a warped construct of warped spirits, and the accepted temporal values are so many clues to the eternal, world-controlling values which have been flouted. But London is a neutral setting in which society means merely a collocation of varied types; it cannot offer a hard ethical core. The constant insistence upon the locale, by providing a conceptual center, goes some way toward disguising the lack of an evaluative center, but it is no substitute.

In addition to this more or less artificial centralization, Jonson provides a tentative ethical norm in Justice Clement, which with sufficiently ingenious acting might prove palatable in performance. In theory Jonson is proposing a synthesis between excessive devotion to imagination (Brainworm, Wellbred, Kitely) and excessive devotion to practical concerns (Knowell, Downright) as the ordering principle in society. Clement, the orderer, is himself an older man of practical understanding, successful in the world of affairs, who recognizes the desirability of becoming “a staid man” but also sympathizes with youthful energy and excess (thus joining the two generations divided in the rest of the play), and both values and exhibits “mirth,” eccentricity, and nimble wit—not to mention the nominal spiritual criterion of the play, poetry. He is the man of judgment as well as imagination. But Clement is only abstractly a satisfying character. His merry tricks are not among Jonson's happiest strokes. It is hard to be much tickled by his donning armor to meet Bobadill or by his natty scatological quatrain. His treatment of supplicant Cob borders on mild sadism (“I but fear the knave”), and his mechanical invocations of a drink of sack (four times), to signify that jollity has yet again conquered all, have the quality of slightly dipsomaniac reflex. As always, the supposedly constructive norm is by far the weakest part of Jonson's play.

The inadequacy of Justice Clement is typical of Jonson's drama because at bottom his plays are neither satire nor normative comedy, though they utilize some of the devices of each and Jonson believed them to be both. Satire, and especially social satire, constantly invokes the desirable norm whose violation it portrays. When Pope, for example, presents us with full-dress portraits of Atticus, Bufo, and Sporus in the “Epistle to Arbuthnot,” he not only does it in order to advance our progressive comprehension of his own antithetical, normative self-portrait, but does it by means of allusion to ever-present and ever-recognizable norms of emotional and ethical behavior. “Damn with … praise,” “civil leer,” “timorous foe” are all phrases of crucial, deliberate paradox, which irresistibly invite the mind to contemplate their rationally and ethically coherent opposites. The pervasive technique is inversion of an established conjunction or an established standard: “Words we teach alone,” “Placed at the door of Learning … / We never suffer it to stand too wide”—so in the Dunciad IV anti-education is defined by implicit appeal to the normally expected. The brilliance consists partly in the choice of just those principles which can be inverted to best effect, partly in inventing a totally unexpected form of inversion, and partly in matching the linguistic inversion to the conceptual. Jonson was very familiar with this technique, to be sure; he used it often for local effect. One thinks of the condemnation of youth in The New Inn: “Instead of backing the brave steed, o' mornings, / To mount the chambermaid,” or of Knowell's indictment of upbringing: “only feared / His palate should degenerate, not his manners,” “Can it call ‘whore’? cry, ‘bastard’? Oh, then kiss it,” or, for a compressed paradoxical phrase, “grey gluttony.” But these fine examples of concise sarcasm are, in Jonson, set pieces, not illustrations of the basic principle of design. Jonson's great successes are not posited on the functioning of antithesis, but on the inherent fascination of the thing itself. Bufo's collection of poetic busts contains what might well be taken as an emblem of satirical antithesis: “a true Pindar … without a head.” A headless bust is funny because the concept of a bust depends upon the head. But upon what conceptual norm does the funniness of Bobadill, or even of Stephen, depend? Only upon the broad assumption that human beings behave with a degree of moderation, rationality, and adherence to fact. Even Jonson's powerfully irradiated metaphysical norms operate only as beacons from which to measure the distance to a character's actual location. They illuminate grandly but generally. So Volpone's religious invocation to his gold and Subtle's catechism of Face impart to these characters' actions the thrill of blasphemy, but make them infinitely culpable without instilling any corresponding sense of the desirability of conventional worship or, indeed, of any particular mode of behavior except the avoidance of what we see. Jonson's success, in such moments, is the combination of shudder and laugh.

Just as Jonson's greatest strokes are independent of the support of any precisely defined norm, so it is impossible to deduce a specific norm from them by contrast, as one can deduce Pope from the negation of Atticus, Bufo, and Sporus. This definition of a norm by contrast is a technique satire shares with normative comedy. From Twelfth Night's Duke and Olivia we can deduce the ideal of Viola; from the midsummer-night's lovers, Theseus; from the couples in the Forest of Arden, Rosalind. But Celia and Bonario are not delineated by their opposition to the other characters except insofar as good is the opposite of bad—rather too broad a contrast to serve for integrated dramatic structure. It is not just that Celia and Bonario are unsuccessfully characterized, as Justice Clement is unsuccessfully characterized. True, they are bores, and Justice Clement is a bore, and Crites in Cynthia's Revels is a bore—but so, at times, is Milton's God, without invalidating his normative function. What is peculiar about Jonson's normative characters is that they are extraneous to the real dramatic activity of the play. They are not engaged in the same type of action as the others in a more desirable way (like Viola, Theseus, and Rosalind)—they are simply not engaged in the same type of action. The nature of Jonson's comedy precludes the integrated normative character. Justice Clement is a try at it, but he, too, remains dramatically irrelevant, though his eccentricity is certainly an attempt to show him behaving like the others in a more desirable way. He is intractably extraneous to Stephen and Matthew, if not to Brainworm and Wellbred, and, what is much worse, hopelessly extraneous to the chief ornaments of the play, Kitely and Bobadill. Jonson's attempt to proffer him symbolically as a normative version of Bobadill by making him dress up as a soldier is only embarrassing.

The truth is that Jonson's greatness is not the greatness of satire at all, except in the supremely general sense in which all great comedy is satire because it exposes neglected truths about human behavior. Nor is it the greatness of normative vision. Jonson, in his numerous manifesto-like utterances, has himself been the most diligent obfuscator of his creation. Evidently he regarded himself, and wished to regard himself, as a writer of corrective comedy and satire. Indeed, his compelling moral and ethical bias caused him to punish all his highly imaginative characters for deviation from spiritual and social equipoise—perhaps a form of self-flagellation for his own zest in portraying their feats. But no amount of beating or imprisonment can convince us that Bobadill is less worthwhile than Justice Clement, or that Bonario should have been a model for Volpone. Jonson's devotion to the ideals of correction and satire pulls in a direction contrary to his bent for pure comedy, and creates an unevenness in the progress of his work. His social satire is by turns brilliant, dull, and incandescent: brilliant when it constitutes a beautifully composed aria; dull when it affords merely “an image of the times” (Cob on fasting days); incandescent when it plays into Jonson's comedy of solipsism by giving his characters recognizable objects of obsession. When it is incandescent it is not at all corrective. To lampoon the affectations of fencing or the popularity of tobacco is no more the real point of Bobadill than to decry the disproportionate concentration of wealth among the aristocracy is the point of Volpone. The road of normality from which Bobadill and Volpone have diverged is lost to view, and well lost, behind the picturesque landscape of the territory in which they have arrived.

On the grounds of successful presentation of a comic norm, we would have to give the palm to Poetaster, since Horace, if not lovable, is at least deducible. But this evaluation is manifest nonsense. It is evident that Jonson is writing a different sort of comedy: non-normative comedy. Jonson's success is invariably to be gauged by the strength of the anti-norm. His greatest plays succeed not by enforcing a concept of balance but by impressing upon us the overwhelming force of imbalance. So Every Man In succeeds not insofar as Justice Clement succeeds but insofar as Bobadill and Kitely succeed. For Jonson is not writing about common agreement on the outside world at all. He is writing about diverse and unmergeable inner worlds, about the impossibility of common agreement, about the psychological artificiality of a commonly defined outer world, even when it is a moral necessity. We recognize him as a writer of genius when he exchanges the mandatory optimism of satire for the deep pessimism of comedy.

Jonson's comedy is of the type afforded by a really thoroughgoing marital quarrel or a United Nations debate. It is the comedy of minds which never touch, of confinement within an insurmountable point of view. Jonson's so-called humor characters and his later elaborations upon them are human beings whose minds have become (or have been from the beginning) rigid in a certain position—a phenomenon by no means uncommon. In fact it is the frustrating familiarity of the immovable mind in ordinary life that makes its objectification on the stage so welcome. Anyone who has been much concerned with logical demonstration—anyone who has taught—has bowed to the inert strength of Stephen's type of mind, as pliable and as resilient as rubber. Give him your best twenty-five lines on the social, moral, and logical impossibility of standing upon gentility, and he will yield you the following harvest: “Nay, we do'not stand much on our gentility, friend; yet you are welcome, and I assure you, mine uncle here is a man of a thousand a year, Middlesex land; he has but one son in all the world, I am his next heir (at the common law), Master Stephen, as simple as I stand here … though I do not stand upon my gentility neither in't.”

But it is not only specific types of fixity that we recognize in Jonson. It is the inherent capacity of every mind to retreat, as it does in extreme joy or extreme pain, deep into itself, and there to relate every event to its own pleasure or suffering. It is the impulse which upheld for thousands of years the natural assumption that the sun revolves around the earth. It is the impulse which convinces us that the automobile turning at the same corner with us contains guests for the party to which we are going. When Knowell before Cob's house absurdly mis-sees Kitely (“Soft, who is this? 'tis not my son, disguised?”)—when, unregenerately solipsistic in the very utterance which proclaims his supposed comprehension, he nods wisely, “I do taste this as a trick, put on me / To punish my impertinent search—and justly; / And half forgive my son for the device”—he is the exact comic equivalent of Lear on the heath mis-seeing Edgar: “Didst thou give all to thy two daughters? And art thou come to this? … Nothing could have subdu'd nature to such a lowness, but his unkind daughters. … Judicious punishment!” They are both upholding a sense of personal significance and mental control in the face of a universe suddenly incomprehensible. Since both have chosen to define themselves by their relationships to their children, if they are to see themselves as centrally important they must see outer events as similarly defined. Lear responds to Kent's “He hath no daughters, sir,” with “Death, traitor!” while Knowell reacts to Clement's “Your son is old enough to govern himself” with total deafness. Who can bear to be tangential?

Jonsonian comedy constantly plays upon its participants the cosmic joke of encouraging each to think himself central, while its author knows that they are every one tangential. This is exactly the joke Wellbred and Edward play upon Matthew and Stephen, Volpone and Subtle upon their visitors, Mosca and Face upon Volpone and Subtle, and Jonson upon Mosca and Face. Furthermore, since the characters, being non-interactive, are all tangential to one another, the action is a continual revelation that centrality is delusion. Volpone and The Alchemist play out the joke most perfectly, for here Jonson produces with inexhaustible copiousness another and yet another variation on the deluded figure of The Chosen, within a situation itself dependent upon the concept. Each of Volpone's dupes believes that “Only you / Of all the rest, are he commands his love,” just as Volpone believes this in regard to Mosca; each dupe believes that the inheritance “is yours without a rival, / Decreed by destiny,” just as Mosca believes this for himself. Each of Subtle's gulls believes not only that Subtle is an initiate, but also that he himself is uniquely selected to share in supernatural benefits, as long as he does not “cause the blessing leave you.” The paradigm case is certainly Dapper, persuaded that “a rare star / Reign'd at your birth” and made him nephew and favorite of the Queen of Fairies; the really important action crowds him into the privy, to drop utterly out of memory for an act and a half. The audience itself becomes an accomplice in the existential joke; we forget him, his gag, his blindfold, his hopes, his illusions—and his sudden return into our consciousness, sick to his stomach, totally irrelevant, unwaveringly committed to his long-obsolete centrality, makes his cri de coeur, “For God's sake, when will her Grace be at leisure?” one of the great triumphs of comedy.

The essence of Dapper is already incarnated in Every Man In: in Stephen, “a wight that (hitherto) his every step hath left the stamp of a great foot behind him, … the true, rare, and accomplished monster—or miracle—of nature”; in Matthew, exemplar of “some peculiar and choice spirits to whom I am extraordinarily engaged”; in Bobadill, singled out for persecution by the multitude “Because I am excellent, and for no other vile reason on the earth”; all bear willingly the burden of unique importance. And the tangential privy is present, too, in the form of the buttery and courtyard to which these indispensable spirits are consigned—Matthew and Bobadill fasting, like Dapper, and urged to “pray there that we may be so merry within as to forgive or forget you.”

Jonson's unwillingness or unreadiness to see his own implications in Every Man In makes him conceal the necessary ending of his joke behind the comforting charade of mutual centrality arranged by Justice Clement for the “worthy” characters; but though he is not yet prepared to admit that Clement himself, in a non-interactive universe, must be tangential in his attempt to impose order (an admission finally made in Justice Overdo of Bartholomew Fair), he is already drawing characters of stature whose claim to dignity is the degree of their delusion. For to accept tangentiality can only be a source of stature when the inner self is so strong and spiritually resourceful that it can afford to secede from what it has come to recognize as centrality, and to rely wholly on itself, or itself in combination with its few spiritual allies. It declares the central principles of the universe tangential to something of greater value which it possesses in itself. This is the condition of Lear in his final address to Cordelia, in which he welcomes their prison as a reflection of the tangentiality he desires. Jonson's “humor” characters counterfeit this condition of spiritual independence by ignoring the central principles of the universe and erecting whatever psychological principle is most crucial to their own inner lives into an objective truth or criterion of value. Having eschewed any painful confrontation with reality, they are subject to have their scheme of values destroyed by its intrusion, as Lear no longer is. Reality, in the very act of destroying what is dearest to Lear, can only confirm its importance. In destroying the humor character's psychological treasure, however, reality would simultaneously wipe out its significance. Consequently there is almost no limit to the amount of delusion Jonsonian characters are willing to accept or invent for themselves to fend off what would be—and in the end often is—psychological annihilation.

This clinging to a subjective construct is much closer to what most men do in real life than the behavior of Lear. Very few of us are willing to die and be born again; we would rather live with all our imperfections on our heads—preferably regarded as special versions of perfection. Who has not marveled at the extraordinary inner jugglings and compromises that human beings prefer to what an observer, with the smugness of detachment, can call “facing the facts”? Such self-delusion is the instinct of self-preservation dictating to the mind; despite all self-righteous superiority, we must recognize survival as victory—and especially survival with panache. Who could do other than applaud Bobadill's virtuoso recovery from the brutality of fact: “Matthew. … But what can they say of your beating? Bobadill. A rude part, a touch with soft wood, a kind of gross battery used, laid on strongly, borne most patiently: and that's all”—or refuse to admire that gallant vision of an ideal world especially constructed for him: “Matthew. Aye, but would any man have offered it in Venice—as you say? Bobadill. Tut, I assure you, no: you shall have there your nobilis, your gentilezza, come in bravely upon your reverse, stand you close, stand you firm, stand you fair, save your retricato with his left leg, come to the assalto with the right, thrust with brave steel, defy your base wood! But wherefore do I awake this remembrance?” Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria—as they say in Venice.

This saving imbalance which invents its self-centralized Utopia (“Knowell. When I was young, he lived not in the stews, / Durst have conceived a scorn, and uttered it, / On a gray head; age was authority / Against a buffon”; “Kitely. See, what a drove of horns fly in the air, / … / Watch 'em, suspicious eyes, watch where they fall. / See, see! On heads that think th'have none at all!”)—this imbalance was fitly imaged by contemporary medicine as physical incompatibility with the elements of the universe. The universe being, to the Elizabethan view, a balanced composition of the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—the little world of man formed a corresponding amalgam of the four “humors,” earth appearing as bile or melancholy (cold and dry), air as blood (hot and moist), fire as choler (hot and dry), and water as phlegm (cold and moist). Predominance of one element produced physical and thus psychological unbalance—the condition of a humor character. It is easy to see how this well-known medical theory would be symbolically suggestive for Jonson, interested as he was in the predominance of one element of the inner self and the ensuing lack of correspondence between the makeup of an individual and the makeup of his surroundings. It is equally easy to see how the simplistic concept of four humors would rapidly become inadequate for dramatic representation of mental convolutions in a character engaged in preserving his psychological existence. So even in Every Man In only Kitely is a true humor character, suffering from a recognizable medical condition of head-melancholy, while in the others “melancholy” is already a metaphor for a spiritual stance, and “humor” shorthand for “identifying aspect of self.”

Jonson's cosmic joke is the disparity between the psychological need of human beings for this kind of significant identification and the inexorable demands of the universe or society. Refusing reduction of their unique selves to a balanced component of the impersonal universe; refusing the moral equivalent, a Christian self-abnegation for the common salvation; refusing the psychological analogue, yielding up a portion of the self to relationship with another human being—Jonson's comic characters revel in their delusion of freedom. Their solipsistic conviction of centrality renders them infinitely gullible and creates Jonson's special comedy of mutual deception. Sundered from the outside world by urgent attention to an inner clamor, these characters meet in a congenial setting (which fosters their illusions of a reality constructed around their needs) to assume the roles of dupe and manipulator-dupe. For the manipulators are merely solipsists with talent. Perceiving in their superior intelligence that other human beings render themselves cosmically ridiculous by a rigidity calculated as monumentality, they seek their escape into significance by way of volatility. Instead of one mask of self the manipulator assumes many, as though this were a difference in kind. But his varied masks prove to be only alternative ways of making a single statement about himself, for disguises in Jonson's mature plays are always as ironically revelatory of hidden springs of motivation as are the self-presentations of the dupes. The manipulator, though gifted with more consciousness of his surroundings than the people he manipulates, is still rigid in acting out his conviction that he defines the universe, that only the creations of his intellect are really real, and that events are arrangeable for his exclusive benefit. In the end his line of force, too, crosses another, and the collision overthrows him; he discovers that the action to which he is central is itself tangential to another which he did not comprehend. This is the fate of Brainworm. His disguises as manipulator, like the other typically Jonsonian elements in the play, are not ironically exploited, but they are already ironic in their deceptive offer of freedom. Not only is Brainworm entrapped by his disguise into the final accounting, but he has himself had to recognize at the outset—when he was less self-enamored—that disguise is a ruse by which the tangential character renders himself apparently central: “now I, … to insinuate with my young master (for so must we that are … men of hope and service, do …) have got me afore in this disguise.” Whether he be nominally dupe or nominally manipulator, the Jonsonian character is ultimately confronted with the fact that every man's action involves him in, and subordinates him to, the action of others—whereupon Jonsonian man ceases to function.

This active and passive solipsism produces those moments of collision which, together with the inspired portrayal of self-delimited character, are the glory of Jonsonian comedy. Seen from without, a moment of collision is a point at which two (or more) consciousnesses, like billiard balls of different colors, touch surfaces with a perceptible click and part. One might take as its type this interchange between Mosca and Volpone:

MOSCA.
You loathe the widow's or the orphan's tears
Should wash your pavements, or their piteous cries
Ring in your roofs, and beat the air for vengeance—
VOLPONE.
Right, Mosca, I do loathe it.

The pleasures of Volpone's reply are manifold. One is simply the neatness of the collision itself, like a well-executed shot at billiards. Beyond this lies the sudden perception that what appears to be communication is only self-propulsion. Beyond this still, the intellectual pleasure of recognizing, in one sharp instant, the source of the collision, the gap between the ruthless, bored aristocracy of Volpone the Magnifico and the essentially conventional, bourgeois orientation of social-climbing Mosca. And just as the points at which moving objects collide with a stationary one define the outer limits of the latter, so this collision defines the outer limits of Volpone's human comprehension.

The defining collision is already one of the aural satisfactions of Every Man In:

BRAINWORM [disguised as a soldier].
I assure you, the blade may become the side or thigh of the best prince in Europe.
EDWARD.
Aye, with a velvet scabbard, I think.
STEPHEN.
Nay, and't be mine, it shall have a velvet scabbard, cos, that's flat …

Here are fewer overtones, no doubt—less resonance; but that is in the nature of the body struck. Kitely gives off a deeper sound:

KITELY.
                                                                                                                        if thou should'st
Reveal it, but—
CASH.
                                                            How? I reveal it?
KITELY.
                                                                                                                                  Nay,
I do not think thou would'st; but if thou should'st:
'Twere a great weakness.
CASH.
                                                                                          A great treachery.
Give it no other name.
KITELY.
                                                                                Thou wilt not do't, then?
CASH.
Sir, if I do, mankind disclaim me ever.
KITELY.
[Aside.] He will not swear, he has some reservation.

Here the non sequitur bears more clearly the identifying marks of such a moment of collision. Seen from within, it is a point at which one human being (often, though not here, himself the fantasy hero in his own world) enters the delusion of another in a supporting role—a moment when the nearness of outer reality, in the shape of an independent presence, only lights up the cavernous reaches of the deluded self.

It is Jonson's special gift to embody this illumination in an instant, in a single clash of phrase against phrase. But the mental process, which in Jonson always remains implicit, may be clearer if we look at a more expansive treatment. Novelistically seen, the bitter comedy of non-interaction unrolls as follows:

“Remember, we are looking forward to a better sort of happiness even than this … Come, dear, tell me how soon you can be altogether mine.”

There was a serious pleading in Lydgate's tone … Rosamond became serious too, and slightly meditative; in fact, she was going through many intricacies of lace-edging and hosiery and petticoat-tucking, in order to give an answer that would at least be approximative.

… “There would be the house-linen and the furniture to be prepared. Still, mamma could see to those while we were away.”

“Yes, to be sure. We must be away a week or so.”

“Oh, more than that!” said Rosamond, earnestly. She was thinking of her evening dresses for the visit to Sir Godwin Lydgate's, which she had long been secretly hoping for as a delightful employment of at least one quarter of the honeymoon … She looked at her lover with some wondering remonstrance as she spoke, and he readily understood that she might wish to lengthen the sweet time of double solitude.

(Middlemarch, Bk. IV, Ch. xxxvi)

Here is the impenetrability of mind to mind upon which relationship thrives. If Rosamond and Lydgate understood one another, they would instantly part; just so Volpone and Mosca. But each would have to give up a crucial character in his personal drama, or even the drama itself as plotted by the self-creating sensibility. Anything rather than that; so, in the Jonsonian world, fuller than Middlemarch of comedy and hopelessness, incomprehension becomes the only basis of relationship. All important relationships in the plays could be seen as collisions drawn out into the semblance of interaction.

The converse is also true: a moment of collision occurring within what passes itself off, to either or both of the participants, as a relationship reveals its essence, and heralds the inevitable disintegration of its bonds. But it is a failed revelation. It is the moment we remember in retrospect and understand when acrid experience has confirmed it. Jonson's entirely external representation of it shifts the burden of comprehension from actor to observer: as audience, we pre-experience what the speaker may never come to feel. Kitely, who fears nothing so much as pseudo-relationship, is revealed in this moment as doomed to its creation; in his mental deflection from contact with Cash we can foresee the whole unraveling, from “He is a jewel, brother … in his place so full of faith that I durst trust my life into his hands” to “Oh, that villain dors me. … She's gone a'purpose, now, to cuckold me / With that lewd rascal, who, to win her favor, / Hath told her all.” We can foresee it because, as in Volpone's reply, we have heard Kitely fix the limits of his comprehension. “Full of faith” can have no practical meaning for a man himself constitutionally incapable of faith, just as “sweet … solitude” can have no meaning for a woman who derives all sense of personal value from contact with others. Clement dimly perceives Kitely's plight when he offers his truism: “Horns in the mind are worse than on the head”; but Kitely never understands his disability at all, and so preserves his inner construct against the assault of Clement's good sense. Similarly, Stephen remains as impervious to Edward's indirect as to Clement's direct sarcasm, and to the implications of his final allotted place (with Cob and Tib in the buttery) for his gentlemanly pretensions. All his connections are laid open as false; but to Stephen the revelation does not signify, for he is equally happy with relationship or pseudo-relationship—a position self-sufficient in its irony, and typically Jonsonian. Self-absorption is the source of all vital energy; relationship must crumble before it.

The crudest dramatic version of this statement—the leave-taking between Mosca and deaf Corbaccio—serves best as symbolic pattern for these unnoticed collisions which prefigure disruption:

MOSCA.
                                                                                                                                            You are he
For whom I labor here.
CORBACCIO
                                                                                                    Ay, do, do, do.
I'll straight about it.
MOSCA.
                                                                                          Rook go with you, raven.
CORBACCIO.
I know thee honest.
MOSCA.
                                                                                                              You do lie, sir—
CORBACCIO.
                                                                                                                                                      And—
MOSCA.
Your knowledge is no better than your ears, sir.
CORBACCIO.
I do not doubt to be a father to thee.

The closeness necessary to collision often masquerades as a high point of psychological intimacy. Deafness, of course, is essential, but then it is never lacking.

Rosamond thought no one could be more in love than she was; and Lydgate … felt as if already breathed upon by exquisite wedded affection … by an accomplished creature who venerated his high musings … marriage would not be an obstruction but a furtherance.

These are the moments at which relationship becomes evidently hopeless.

Such collisions are undoubtedly the most ironic; yet there is another group of collisions which shares all their basic principles and is even more purely comic—those between people utterly unrelated to one another. Here the disparity between apparent intimate connection and actual indifference is absolute. Here the sole justification for a belief in connection is the construct of the individual mind. So intense is the craving for personal centrality that perception simply gulps down whole anyone who walks into range. One thinks of jealous Lady Wouldbe “unmasking” Peregrine as a harlot, or of pugnacious Kastril, interrupted in a deliberate breach of the peace—his attempt to start a fight with Surly—when Ananias brings Subtle the news of the Puritan capitulation to alchemy: “Ananias. Peace to the household. … Casting of dollars is concluded lawful. Kastril. Is he the constable?” Here the hopelessness of relationship is not grounded in personal difference; it appears rather as a category of experience. Out of the chaotic happenstance of ordinary life the mind constructs an orderly set of relationships—painful perhaps, but also full of meaning. By the end of this latter scene, the accidental convergence of a number of unrelated customers upon the Alchemist's house has been satisfactorily arranged into significant pattern in the mind of each—in each mind, a different significant pattern.

In these collisions the hopelessness of relationship and the mind's circumvention of it are represented dramatically in the sudden encounter between disparate actions. The great example in Every Man In is the scene before Cob's house, the play's climax. The fantasy of interaction can go no further than the mutual “recognition” of Kitely and Knowell, begun when Knowell identifies Dame Kitely (“Oh, this is the female copesmate of my son! / Now I shall meet him straight”), continuing with Knowell's assimilation of Kitely into his private world as Edward, and culminating in the moment of actual collision, as Kitely literally turns around and assimilates Knowell: “This hoary-headed lecher, this old goat, / … / O, old incontinent, dost not thou shame, / When all thy powers' inchastity is spent, / To have a mind so hot?” This is the very parody of Aristotle's “discovery and peripeteia,” the conjunction by which tragic action becomes meaningful to its protagonist. If action has no inherent meaning, but is only a product of individual bent or of manipulation, then pattern in events is the product of the mind's illusion. And under the circumstances coexisting before Cob's house, the logic of delusion is at least as persuasive as the real explanation. We have a choice, momentarily, only between the crazy conclusion of Kitely (“Knowell. What lunacy is this, that haunts this man?”) and the obsessive insistence of Knowell (“Tib. The constable? The man is mad, I think”), wherein either derangement is aesthetically far more satisfying, in its imaginative unity, than the truth. Is it not wholly natural to prefer the organically meaningful, internally consistent plot of either of these imaginary actions to the forced, meaningless machinations of Brainworm? and to prefer to see oneself as the hub of the one rather than a cog in the other? The moment is uniquely Jonsonian in inducting us into the satisfactions of imaginative delusion. The characters have successfully escaped epiphany. Like chaotic Bartholomew Fair's Trouble-All, also haunted by lunacy and also calling for the official representative of law and order, they preserve faith in the “warrant” behind action by retreat into the self. The moment of collision, with its proffer of reality, is a dangerous invitation refused.

The ultimate importance of collision, then, is that it provides the occasion upon which the self is enabled to confirm its refashioning of reality. At these moments the deluded mind ties together events in the outside world, and ties itself to the world by the illusion of human relationship. Since neither connection really exists, commitment to them means further and further progress into fantasy—the typical mode by which action in Jonsonian comedy advances.

Though Jonson professed himself to be writing in the spirit of the ancients, and cited Greek authority for his belief that “The parts of a Comedy are the same with a Tragedy, and the end is partly the same” (Discoveries 2625-26), the premises of his comedy are directly anti-Aristotelian. Aristotle recommends the choice of incidents which have “an appearance of design as it were in them; as for instance the statue of Mitys at Argos killed the author of Mitys' death by falling down on him … ; for incidents like that we think to be not without meaning. A Plot, therefore, of this sort is necessarily finer than others” (Poetics, 1452a). But this sort of fine plot is limited to the imaginations of Jonson's characters. In Jonson's own plot coherence is formal and symbolic, but never personally meaningful. If final coherence is established, it is imposed from without in the name of ethically necessary order—a process not inherently different from manipulation, or from the imposition of psychologically necessary order, but aimed away from, rather than toward, individual freedom. The need for bondage is also very strong. Jonson's comic action appeals to the aspiration for significance; his moral endings, to the conviction of mediocrity—the belief that real strength is social strength, that real meaning is the meaning of the group, the company, the university, the church. Without these saving structures we would live, in a Jonsonian universe, in the midst of the comedy of non-interaction forever. With them, we can join in composing a harmonious balance of which each element is equally unimportant.

Committed to both its comic action and its ending. Every Man In provides conflicting answers to that most basic Jonsonian question: is non-interaction the cause or the effect of the characters' delusions? Jonson the critic and satirist would like us to deduce that it is effect: that a beneficent universe is distorted by, then rescued from, abnormality. But Jonson the comic genius deduces for us, rather, from the premises of an indifferent universe, splendid abnormalities of the protesting imagination.