Introduction to Every Man in His Humour: A Parallel-Text Edition of the 1601 Quarto and the 1616 Folio
[In this essay, Lever offers an overview of the changes Jonson made to the original Quarto version of Every Man in His Humour.]
DATE
On the title page of the Folio (F [the first folio of Jonson's Works, 1616]), the date of the original version of the play (Q [the quarto of 1601]) is given as 1598. This is confirmed by a letter from Toby Matthew to Dudley Carleton dated September 20, 1598, which mentions a German who lost three hundred crowns at “a new play called, Euery mans humour.” Moreover, Cob's description of Bobadilla as “that fencing Burgullion” (III.v.15, Q) recalls a Burgundian fencer, recently arrived in England, who was executed in July, 1598, for killing an officer of the City who had tried to arrest him for debt.1 It seems clear that the play was first performed between July and September, 1598.
The date of the revision is less certain. Herford and Simpson believed that the play was specially revised for publication in the Folio, and suggested that Jonson worked over it in or about 16122 (though there is no concrete evidence for such a late revision). E. K. Chambers thought that the “natural time for a revision” would have been prior to February 2, 1605, when Every Man in His Humour was revived for performance at court.3 Supporting this date are references to the siege of Strigonium (Észtergom) in 1595 as “some ten years now” (III.i.105), and to a present to “the Grand Signior” from “our Turkey Company” (I.i.162-163), which had been reconstituted as the Levant Company in 1605. Alternatively Chambers argued for a 1606 date for the revision, citing a large gift to the Sultan at Christmas, 1605;4 however, the practice of sending lavish bribes in return for trading concessions had continued for years and was commented on by Dekker in The Wonderfull Yeare (1603).
The expunging of oaths from the Folio text has been seen as proof that the play was revised after the passing of the Act against Abuses of Players (1606) in readiness for publication in the Folio.5 However, the Act, which forbade blasphemy on the stage, was not concerned with printed plays and need not have occasioned Jonson's painstaking alterations. In any case the widespread removal of even remote religious or biblical allusions went far beyond what legislation required. These deletions are a strong argument that the play was revised, as Chambers thought, in preparation for its performance at court. February 2, 1605, was Candlemas, a church festival, when not only oaths but all religious references in the context of light comedy might have been deemed irreverent. The date accords well with the contemporary references introduced in F, and fits in with Jonson's early experiments in the use of an English setting undertaken in collaboration with Chapman and Marston in Eastward Ho! (1605).
THE PLAY
Firmly constructed, and charged with new-found energy, Every Man in His Humour marked Jonson's first undoubted success. It was performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1598, with Shakespeare, Burbage, and Kemp in the cast, and revived at court by the same company, now the King's Men, early in 1605. The play kept its appeal after the Restoration and through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Garrick was celebrated for his interpretations of Kitely, with Woodward as Bobadill. Kean performed in it in 1816, and Charles Dickens took the part of Bobadill in a series of amateur productions between 1845 and 1848. In our own time Jonson's comedy still shows its vitality on the stage.
This edition offers the play in two versions: that of the 1601 Quarto (Q), with a Florentine setting and Italian names; and in the revised form that appeared in the 1616 Folio (F), where the action was located in and around London and the characters were unequivocally drawn from the English scene. To simplify comparison, the text and footnotes are printed on facing pages, with notes relevant to both versions under the Folio text. In this section of the introduction, references and quotations are taken from the Folio version.
Capitalizing on the fortunes of Every Man in His Humour, Jonson echoed the title in his next play, Every Man out of His Humour. The effect has been to promote a coupling of two works which have very little in common. Critics in the past have fastened upon the discussion of humours in the Induction to Every Man out as a master-key to Jonson's earlier as well as later intentions. Actually the plays belong to two distinct dramatic genres, as their title pages indicate, Every Man in His Humour being described as “A Comœdie,” and Every Man out of His Humour as “A Comicall Satyre.” Today the substantial differences between these so-called “humour plays” are recognized, and it is generally agreed that the light comedy of 1598, aiming “to sport with human follies,” has only tenuous links with the series of grim satires that followed. There can be little doubt that, whatever meaning it was later to acquire, in the present play Jonson merely took up the term “humour” as a current vogue-word. Cash's remark to Cob is indicative, describing “humour” as “a gentlemanlike monster, bred in the special gallantry of our time by affectation, and fed by folly.” Taking the word as a vague portmanteau term for mood, eccentricity, or whim, Jonson followed in the footsteps of Chapman, whose comedy An Humorous Day's Mirth had been performed in the previous year; and the more witless characters in his own play bandy the term about much after the fashion of Shakespeare's Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph. Such claimants to “humour” were of a different order from the pathologically obsessed figures of true Jonsonian satire. In fact, as C. R. Baskervill's pioneer study established clearly, the characters of Every Man in His Humour stem from the rich comic tradition of the Elizabethan age.6 Antecedents to the gulls and rogues are to be found in the plays, pamphlets, and verse satires of the period; indeed, as far back as the Tudor interludes. More worthy characters such as Kno'well and Downright, or simple folk like Cob and his wife, are likewise familiar types. Kitely and Bobadill, it is true, show a distinctive complexity and depth; but these very qualities distinguish them from the schematically-drawn caricatures of Every Man out of His Humour and the group of plays that followed.
What marks Every Man in His Humour as Jonson's first mature achievement is not its treatment of “humours” but its fine coordination of the basic elements of comedy. “The life of the character is inseparable from the life of the drama”: T. S. Eliot's comment on Volpone already holds good.7 Plot structure, formative ideas, and characterization are woven into an integral fabric. No earlier English dramatist had produced this singleness of texture, and Jonson himself, in his search for more pointed satirical effects, would not regain it until his greatest plays. Classical and contemporary techniques, literary tradition, and direct observation come together in a finely-knit amalgam.
For the framework of his plot Jonson chose a familiar outline from Roman comedy. This presented an agreeable young man of good family involved in a demi-monde of courtesans, parasites, and pimps. The irate father, seeking to track him down, is duped by a witty household slave who allies himself to the young man and his mistress. After various amusing complications, some authority, either human or divine, intervenes as mediator; the mistress is found to be socially acceptable, and the father and son are happily reconciled. Within this framework there was plenty of scope for putting a variety of comic types on the stage, the most popular being the miles gloriosus or braggart soldier. Inherited by the Romans from the Greek New Comedy, the design was elaborated in a wide range of improvisations by Renaissance Italian commedia dell'arte. The father was burlesqued as a senile lecher; the absurd antics of a jealous husband, the Pantalone dei Bisognosi, made their appearance; new tricks were devised for the roguish servant Arlecchino, and topical rant for Signor Capitano, the boastful officer. Jonson was acquainted with the commedia dell'arte, but he aimed mainly at a contemporary version of the classical model, reserving most of the Italian exuberance for the subjective fancies rather than the actual behavior of his characters. Only in his own heated imagination was Kitely identified with the ridiculous cuckolds of the scenari. Only through the haze of misunderstandings in Act IV does the elder Kno'well take on the distorted shape of a lecherous ancient. Brainworm borrows certain traits from Arlecchino, not unlike those of the Vice in earlier English comedy; but he remains essentially the canny country-house servant who keeps his roguery within cautious limits. Even Cob and Tib are not in fact brothel-keepers but decent Cockney householders.
In the world of the play Jonson was concerned to adapt his pagan story to Elizabethan propriety. Instead of locating the main action in a courtesan's dwelling, he chose the middle-class home of Kitely, where the womenfolk's only indulgence is to attend Matthew's poetry readings. The gallants in Kitely's warehouse are fools rather than knaves; Wellbred's letter to Edward Kno'well, with its gay ribaldry, is not an invitation to debauchery but a call to amuse himself as a spectator of folly. These young men are licentious only in words; their conduct will prove unexceptionable. Clement's task as a mediator is therefore a light one: he has only to clear away the mental cobwebs of jealousy and distrust, leaving husband and wife, father and son to find their own way to reconciliation.
But while he reshaped the ancient plot to fit the moral standards of his time, Jonson was careful to preserve classical decorum against the artistic wantonness of the Elizabethan stage. In the Prologue to the Folio version he gives an assurance that comedy and history will not be jumbled together. There will be no battles, “creaking throne,” or “roll'd bullet.” Doubtless he was aware of the resemblances between his design and that of Shakespeare's Henry IV, where Prince Hal dismayed his royal father by consorting with the roisterers of Eastcheap. Edward Kno'well, like the Prince, appears irresponsible but in fact studies his associates with careful detachment. Jonson for his part kept strictly to the prescriptions of comedy. Limiting his range of characters to persons of the middle and lower ranges of society, he excluded the “tragic” themes of politics and warfare. Instead of battles on stage and charges into the breach, there are only Bobadill's hazy recollections of the beleaguering of Strigonium and other dubious exploits. On similar aesthetic grounds, romance is not allowed to trespass upon comedy. Edward Kno'well's courtship of Bridget is exiguous; his eligibility as a husband is taken for granted on the strength of his social standing, gentlemanly behavior, and friendship with her brother. Above all, the traditional “unities” are observed. The action is located within or in walking distance of one city, and the duration limited to twelve hours of a single day. Time intervals are clearly marked with references to early rising, morning business, the bell calling for breakfast, the opening of the Exchange, the false message delivered after two, the afternoon gathering at Clement's house, and finally the departure of the company for supper. No earlier Elizabethan play had so fastidiously applied classical principles to contemporary reality.
On this basis, the “life of the play” takes shape in terms of social comedy, a theme of unflagging interest to English audiences. Plautus and Terence had focussed almost exclusively on personal or domestic relationships: Jonson left the conventions of family life unquestioned, to concentrate on the absurdities of social climbing. Snobbery is the universal folly derided in Every Man in His Humour, whose real key word is not “humour” but “gentleman.” Through all the class gradations of its characters, from squire's nephew to shopkeeper's son, from seedy gallant to small clerk and semiliterate water-bearer, the aspiration to gentry typifies the fool. The fashionable cults of the day—hunting, duelling, tobacco-smoking, vociferous oaths—are ridiculed chiefly because they are practiced as short cuts to the status of a gentleman. Stephen's eagerness to learn “the sciences of hawking and hunting” springs from his conviction that “a gentleman mun show himself like a gentleman.” Matthew practices fencing in hope of acquiring “a more sweet, comely, gentlemanlike guard.” Cob is ironically rebuked by Clement for speaking against tobacco; whatever its ills, it is “receiv'd in the courts of princes, the chambers of nobles, the bowers of sweet ladies, the cabins of soldiers.” Bobadill's oaths are admiringly copied by Stephen, who longs for the right to swear “as I am a gentleman and a soldier”; even by Cob, in the belief that this raises him above the common run of water-bearers. Social ambition is the real impulse behind the cultivation of pseudohumours. Stephen flourishes his melancholy as a passport for admission into the company of gallants. For Matthew, the son of a “worshipful fishmonger,” melancholy and poetry go together as means to “creep and wriggle into acquaintance with all the brave gallants about the town.”
Braggarts and gulls were the stock-in-trade of Elizabethan authors; Jonson's individual contribution was to trace in minute detail their unending quest for social status. Stephen, while parroting his uncle's warning not to stand on his gentility, is so sensitive to possible slights that he vulgarly bullies Wellbred's servant for an innocuous remark. Edward Kno'well retaliates by derisive play on Stephen's own phrase, “I speak to serve my turn”:
Your turn, coz? … A gentleman of your sort, parts, carriage, and estimation, to talk o' your turn … like a tankard-bearer at a conduit. …
Cob implicitly burlesques such pretensions by his claim to fetch his pedigree from “the harrots' books,” being descended from “Herring, the King of fish.” A mixture of shrewdness and naivety, he despises Matthew's gentlemanly affectations, his poeticizing and talk of “interludes,” but is impressed by Bobadill's verbal flourishes. In turn, Bobadill and Matthew agree to despise Downright for his blunt language and rejection of shams, declaring that he lacks “any gentlemanlike part” and fails to “carry himself like a gentleman of fashion.” While gull and gallant are portrayed in terms of their snobbery, the rogue succeeds by appealing to the common weakness. Brainworm's patter as a begging ex-soldier is laced with appeals to his victims' social vanity. “I am a poor gentleman, a soldier. … You seem to be gentlemen well affected to martial men.” Stephen's desire to obtain a Spanish sword at a low price is whetted by Brainworm's deferential “you are a gentleman, give me what you please.” Even old Kno'well is not impervious. Brainworm's obsequiousness gradually melts his caution; having enjoyed the satisfaction of delivering a moral lecture, he is willing to take the counterfeit soldier on trust. After Kno'well, the lawyer's clerk Formal is easy game, happy to pay good money for the privilege of hearing a military man's discourse.
Unlike satire, comedy functions through a system of checks and balances. Instead of upholding a norm of good sense against foolish aberrations, it offsets one extreme by another, leaving the norm to build itself in the minds of the spectators. Old Kno'well represents not exemplary wisdom but a limited degree of knowledge—the knowledge of his own generation, which borders on complacency as that of his son's generation tends to frivolity. Clement, the arbiter of other men's fortunes, is himself a random deus ex machina, who rewards Brainworm's rascality by making him partner at the evening's festivity. To infer a bitter scorn for authority, comparable with that shown in Volpone, would be unwarranted here; balanced scepticism is an attitude more fitting to comedy. Downright growls his contempt for Bobadill and Matthew, to be rebuked for intemperance by Kitely, whose own intemperance is presently shown. Each character undercuts the absurdities of the other, to be exposed for his own failings in turn. At the bottom of the scale, Cob is no mere target for laughter, but has the active function of burlesquing his superiors, mocking Stephen's pretensions through boasts of his royal lineage, and parodying Kitely's jealous outcries with his stage rant “Revenge: vinegar revenge: vinegar and mustard revenge.” All through the play the patter of comic interaction weaves back and forth.
Standing out from the more type-cast figures are Bobadill and Kitely, whose inner vitality gives the appearance of existence “in their own right.” Yet both are organically related to their wider setting. In a line of descent from Plautus's miles gloriosus, the Italian Signor Capitano, and Shakespeares' Falstaff, Bobadill's distinct personality has emerged from the overall theme. His peculiar trait is neither his boasting nor his cowardice but his craving for social esteem. The cherished image of himself as a soldier and a gentleman is projected in a jargon of rhetorical clichés, fencing terms, and army slang. Behind this verbiage he seeks to defend himself against the many slights and humiliations inflicted by life. His first appearance, drunk in the morning on a bench behind the curtain, reproduces that of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part One. But while Falstaff's natural buoyancy keeps him unperturbed in the presence of the king's son, Bobadill suffers acute dismay at the encounter with Matthew, son of a London fishmonger. Groping for his verbal armory he desperately struggles not to lose face. The threadbare lodgings become a convenient “cabin,” chosen to avoid unwelcome publicity. His great love is for privacy, “above all the tumult and roar of fortune.” At last he regains his poise in a flow of Italian duelling terms and through a fencing lesson improvised with bedstaffs. Unlike the braggart soldier of tradition, Bobadill hedges his boasts with genteel modesty. He has “no skill i'the earth,” only “some small rudiments,” practiced “for noblemen's and gentlemen's use.” Concerning past exploits he is ostentatiously careful not to claim sole credit for himself. True, he was the first to enter the breach at Strigonium; but only after seven hundred resolute gentlemen had lost their lives in the attempt. The enemy gunner whom he shot at point-blank range was “a man of no mean skill and mark.” His plan to save the nation from war involves the training of a team of nineteen other gentlemen “till they could all play very near or altogether as well as myself.” Unfortunately no venture of Bobadill's is secure from other men's ungentlemanly conduct—treason in war, hailshot in a duel, Downright's beating with a stick. Somewhere there must be a place where Bobadill's dream status as a soldier and a gentleman would be accepted: in Venice, no doubt—“you shall have there your Nobilis, your Gentilezza.” At home, justice, embodied in the thick-skinned personality of Clement, laughs at his claims. Declared a sham, he is excluded from the company at supper and sent with his poor disciple Matthew to fast it out in the courtyard. Harsher punishments were laid on him in the quarto version; by the time of the revision Jonson realized that the worst disgrace for Bobadill was the fate of an outsider.
Kitely too is part of the social comedy. It is important to recognize that his jealousy is differently motivated from that of the stock domestic cuckold. Kitely is not in fact deceived by his wife and sister; he only deludes himself into a belief in his own cuckoldry; and the delusion has grown up in the conditions of his life as a merchant. With a realism comparable to Middleton's, the daily routine of the Elizabethan business man is carefully sketched in—the bustle of transactions, impending deals, appointments at the Exchange—set against the enigmatic feminine confines of breakfast-room and parlor, and the alien roistering of gallants in the warehouse. Kitely's insecurity originates in his merchant's fear of seditious elements within his cherished domains; only gradually does it come to center upon the morals of his womenfolk. He worries as much about his business reputation as his marital peace. Should Cash reveal his secret, he will be “gone, Lost i' my fame forever; talk for th'Exchange.” The comic situation is fully exploited, with Kitely's dashings on and off stage, his misconstructions of his wife's most innocent words, his sudden conviction that he has been poisoned. But in its unfolding the comedy takes on a psychological dimension. Freudian symbols and psychopathic beliefs need not be teased out of Kitely's quite usual Elizabethan idioms.8 What he undoubtedly manifests is a state of abnormal anxiety. It appears in his overcautious, circuitous mode of address with both Downright and Cash; in his tortuous introspection; in his loss of capacity to make simple decisions. When not overcome by jealousy he is a kindly, intelligent figure, considerate towards his manager Cash, proud of Wellbred's accomplishments, mildly reproachful of Downright's outbursts, which ironically he seeks to restrain by an appeal to reason. His fears for his wife are voiced in grave reflections on the vulnerability of beauty; in his analysis of his own mental state he is dispassionate and well informed in the psychology of his time. As the play mounts to a farcical climax outside Cob's house, Kitely is manipulated, like the other characters, into the role of a puppet, to be jerked back into sanity by Clement's commonsense advice. He remains nevertheless a character of intrinsic interest, called into being by the social context of the play, yet fully individualized by Jonson's imaginative grasp.
The eighteenth-century theater, devoted to character acting, found the sole justification of Every Man in His Humour in Kitely and Bobadill. Garrick's production cut out whole scenes of the play while expanding Kitely's part by an extra 270 lines written for the occasion. Without minimizing Jonson's achievement in creating these characters, our own age is more likely to recognize the worth of the drama as a whole, with its tight construction, its development of all the latent comedy in the social scene, its deep yet unsentimental understanding of diverse attitudes in men of disparate conditions and ages. Many years of experiment lay ahead before Jonson's genius came into full flower, but this first mature work may stand in its own right as a fully realized dramatic creation.
QUARTO AND FOLIO
The outstanding changes made in Jonson's revision of the Quarto are described in H. H. Carter's parallel-text edition of 1921. They may be summed up as follows: the substitution of an English setting for the Italian, with English or anglicized names for the characters; a number of cuts in the action, chiefly in the last scene; and a general purging of oaths and references to the deity.9 Such an account, however, minimizes the importance and subtlety of the revision, which reshaped almost every aspect of the play. A close, critical comparison of style and characterization in the two versions has been made by Jonas A. Barish in his valuable book Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy.10 But no account can do full justice to a revision which can only be appreciated by reading the two texts together, page by page and line by line.
Of Jonson's alterations, the least important are those made to the structure. Two unnecessary entrances in the Quarto, that of Clement with Thorello in IV.iii and of Giuliano in V.i, are eliminated, and the finale is shortened, with Musco's superfluous account of his day's deeds (V.iii.145-174, 186-196) and Clement's dealings with Matheo, Giuliano, and Thorello substantially reduced. Lorenzo Junior's eloquent defense of poetry (V.iii.294-325) is omitted, and a brief eulogy of true poets given to Clement instead. It is likely that these abbreviations had already been made in the acting version of the Quarto text and were carried over by Jonson into his revision. They are such as would be required by any director anxious to prevent an audience's becoming restless at long speeches and explanations towards the end of the play. It is unlikely that Jonson would have cut out his finely composed apology for poetry for other than compelling theatrical reasons.
The change of setting is far more significant. Influenced by the growing popularity of citizen comedies, it places the action firmly in the familiar realities of London and its environs. The Florence of the Quarto version was a purely conventional backcloth for English characters and manners. Cob and his wife were undisguised Cockneys; even references to the Exchange, the Mermaid Tavern, pence and shillings, intruded. With the action transferred to London, the play becomes crowded with off-stage life and activity—the archers of Finsbury, the citizens a-ducking at Islington Ponds, the musters at Mile End, the brokers of Houndsditch, the porters and carmen of Thames Street and Customs House quay. The English setting, moreover, suggests a more vivid, concrete use of language and figures of speech. “Then will I be made an eunuch, and learn to sing ballads” becomes “I'll be gelt, and troll ballads for Master John Trundle yonder.” Instead of “I'll ne'er draw my sword in the sight of man,” the Folio has “… in the sight of Fleet Street”; and, for the stilted “stuff peasants' bosoms with proud Caesar's spleen,” “make a porter leap you with his burden.” Q's absurd “Rashero Baccono” becomes F's “rasher bacon,” with an enforced pun on Roger Bacon. Except for special comic effect, the everyday word or phrase takes the place of the literary one. “Virgin” is changed to “maid,” “scarab” to “beetle,” “zanies” to “hang-bys,” “sublated” to “removed,” “rimarum plenus” to “a chink in him.” Clement, changed from an eccentric Italian doctor to a bluff English magistrate, sheds his Latin quotations, and in so doing removes an element of pedantry from the play.
The excision of religious oaths was, as Barish remarks, turned from weakness to strength by a use of fantastic expletives on the part of Bobadill and his imitators.11 However, it should be noted that this purge went so far as to include an extraordinary range of terms and phrases, some with only a remote biblical or religious connotation. “Rex regum,” though probably a classical allusion, is changed to “veni, vidi, vici”; “free election of the soul” becomes “the mind's erection”; “build a tabernacle” is modified to “build and breed.” Such alterations can hardly be explained by reference to the Act of Abuses, which aimed at prohibiting oaths and blasphemy on the stage. They point rather to the requirements of a special occasion (see above, p. xii). Some of the changes had a weakening effect, as when “strike fire from ice” replaces “put glowing fire in an icy soul.” On the other hand, Bobadill's lordly posturing is comically suggested in the change from “as I have a soul to be saved” to “as I have a thing to be saved about me”; and the London setting of the revision provides an effective substitute for Prospero's vow that he and his friend would
never see the face of any true spirit again, but be perpetually haunted with some churchyard hobgoblin in secula seculorum,
replaced in F by:
serve out the remnant of our days in Thames Street or at Custom House quay, in a civil war against the carmen.
By countless skilful touches Jonson's revision adds fresh insights to the characterization. Kno'well is made into a wiser, more sympathetic old man than Lorenzo Senior, though still fallible in his dealings with youth. His comment on gentility as “an aery and mere borrow'd thing” strikes the keynote of the whole play, and his remark that “There is a way of winning more by love / And urging of the modesty, than fear” distinguishes him from the stock irate parent. Even the opening of his son's letter is a little extenuated by his free admission that “old men are curious.” The long monologue in II.iii makes him less of an abstract theorist and more the spokesman of traditional views of education—an attitude rebuked in turn by Clement at the end of Act III. Stephen's obtuseness and conceit are heightened in his exchanges with Brainworm and Edward Kno'well, whose mockery takes on a sharper edge than in the Quarto version. In keeping with the omission of Edward Kno'well's defense of poetry in Act V, the allusions to his service of Apollo and the Muses are cut from Wellbred's letter. He remains an intelligent, discerning young man, but without uncommon aspirations, whose main function is to offset the pretentiousness of the gulls. (Significantly, his acceptance of tobacco from Bobadill at III.ii.121 in Q is deleted in F.) Downright, whose growling contempt for affectation serves a similar purpose, is given an additional comic trait with his flow of rustic proverbs, making him less a specimen of choleric humor than a distinct social type. To match the character of a blunt-spoken countryman, his exclamation “it frets me to the gall to think on it” is changed to “I can endure the stocks better.” While Bobadill now comments on this rusticity, “By his discourse he should eat nothing but hay,” Downright in return shows a more round contempt for city manners and foreign fads alike: “your poets and your cavaliers and your fools” becomes “your poets and your potlings, your soldados and foolados.” In keeping with the spirit of social comedy, one ludicrous attitude is balanced against the other, with the object of implying a mean rather than, as in satire, propounding a standard to be rigidly upheld.
Barish has written12 perceptively of the elaborations on Bobadill's speech and manner in F, his “vocabulary of cant” and “elegant periphrases,” which turn “lend” to “accommodate,” “challenge” into “chartel,” and swell into the full-blown pomposity of “a most proper and sufficient dependence, warranted by the great Carranza.” Matthew's foppishness is underscored in his talk of a “most peremptory-beautiful” hanger and his praise of Bobadill's “un-in-one-breath-utterable skill.” By a masterly addition, Bobadill is made to pass off the poverty-stricken breakfast they buy with Matthew's two shillings as an exercise in fastidious living: “We will have a bunch of radish and salt, to taste our wine, and a pipe of tobacco, to close the orifice of the stomach.” Unlike Falstaff, Bobadill feeds body as well as spirit on a diet of words.
Kitely acquires even more depth and complexity in the Folio version. Again Jonson shows his skill in turning difficulties to advantage. Thorello on his first appearance had declared an absolute confidence in his assistant Piso. By questioning such faith in a bastard, Giuliano clearly warned the audience to expect Piso's emergence as a deceiver analogous to Musco. Yet in fact Piso remains loyal, and no more is said of his illegitimate origin. Evidently Jonson decided as the play progressed that one rogue was sufficient, and left the hint undeveloped. In the revision, instead of removing the anomaly, Downright's scepticism is made the occasion for an account by Kitely of how he found Cash as a child, educated him, and trained him to manage his affairs. Kindness and trust are established as Kitely's deep-rooted characteristics before the first intimation of his jealousy. In other respects his presence is made more vivid with additional details of his business routine, his pieces of eight, silver stuffs and grograns, and by the reference to his flat cap and shining shoes. His talk with Cash in III.ii shows more warmth than in the Quarto version: before alluding to his secret he prefixes his remarks with “I thank you heartily, Thomas; gi' me your hand; / With all my heart, good Thomas.” The hesitancy and doubt that follow are rendered less comic and more pathetic. At the end of the play the need for brevity is partly met by cutting out Thorello's senseless persistence in his suspicions. Kitely instead lightly casts off his unfounded jealousy and in so doing regains the sympathy of the audience.
While tending here and there to tinker unnecessarily with the dialogue, the revision as a whole vastly enriches the play. Every Man in His Humour emerges in the Folio text more fully developed as a social comedy, essentially genial in tone. The penalties Clement imposes on Bobadill and his gulls are less vindictive and more in keeping with the prevailing mood of magnanimity. The main comic characters have a solidity that makes them memorable as persons. Jonson's strong instinct for artistic unity reveals itself in every aspect of the drama, and his acute perception of social pretense informs the attitudes and behavior of each character. Class affectations have been the stuff of English comedy from Jacobean times until the present day; and Every Man in His Humour stands out as the first truly satisfactory representative of this never exhausted line.
THORELLO AND OTHELLO
Before Othello, Kitely—or Thorello in the Q version—was the subtlest and most sympathetic study in jealousy to be found in Elizabethan drama. It is not strange that Shakespeare, who was closely involved in the 1598 production of Every Man in His Humour, borrowed a number of Othello's attitudes and turns of speech from Jonson's character. Thorello's first intimations of jealousy,
They would give out, because my wife is fair,
Myself but lately married, and my sister
Here sojourning a virgin in my house,
That I were jealous!
(I.iv.91-94, Q)
are recalled in
'Tis not to make me jealous
To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company.
(Othello, III.iii.187-188)
Thorello's lament,
… what meant I to marry?
I that before was rank'd in such content,
My mind attir'd in smooth silken peace,
Being free master of mine own free thoughts …
(III.iii.15-18, Q)
is echoed in Othello's exclamations,
Why did I marry? …
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
(Othello, III.iii.246, 352)
Thorello's simulated disease, with its play on cuckoldry, is also paralleled:
BIANCHA.
What ail you, sweetheart? Are you not well? Speak, good muss.
THORELLO.
Troth, my head aches extremely, on a sudden.
(I.iv.185-187, Q)
DESDEMONA.
Why do you speak so faintly?
Are you not well?
OTHELLO.
I have a pain upon my forehead here.
(Othello, III.iii.286-288)
The conception of cuckoldry as a disease of the psyche likewise appears in both plays, though Jonson's scientific reference to “the houses of the brain” becomes in Shakespeare a more general and evocative image.
THORELLO.
A new disease? I know not, new or old,
But it may well be call'd poor mortals' plague;
For like a pestilence it doth infect
The houses of the brain.
(I.iv.200-203, Q)
OTHELLO.
Yet 'tis the plague of great ones. …
(Othello, III.iii.277)
O, it comes o'er my memory
As doth the raven o'er the infected house.
(IV.i.20-21)
Every Man in His Humour was revived at court by the King's Men three months after the first known performance of Othello in November, 1604. If the parts of Thorello and Othello were taken by the same actor, resemblances on the stage would be more noticeable than they are to a reader of the two plays. It is a fair conjecture that the name Thorello suggested to Shakespeare the near-anagram Othello for a character with no name in the source-story.
TEXT
Every Man in His Humour was entered in the Stationers' Register on August 4, 1600, together with As You Like It, Henry V, and Much Ado About Nothing, as “a booke … to be staied.” On August 14 there was a second entry:
Master Burby | Entred for yeir copie vnder the handes of |
Walter Burre | master Pasvil and ye Wardens. |
a booke called Euery man in his humour. vi d. |
In 1601 the play was printed in quarto for Walter Burre: “As it hath beene sundry times publickly acted by the right Honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by Ben. Iohnson.” A revised version was printed in 1616 by William Stansby as the first play in Jonson's Folio, entitled “Every Man In His Humour. A Comoedie. Acted in the year 1598. By the then Lord Chamberlaine his Seruants. The Author B. I.”
Q is well printed and without serious errors, though a number of minor mislineations, running of words together, and misspellings of foreign words and proper names indicates that the proofs were not read by Jonson. A collation of six copies in the British Museum, Dyce Collection, and Bodleian Library shows a few corrections made in the course of printing, with corrected and uncorrected sheets bound together. The most interesting is “the.” (IV.iii.102) on one British Museum copy (C.34c.59), mistakenly altered on the other copies to “thee.”, but reprinted in F as “the—” (see textual note to Q and explanatory note to IV.vi.105 F).
There is plentiful evidence that Q was set up from the author's draft and not from prompt copy. The inconsistent speech-prefixes, with both Lorenzo Senior and Lorenzo Junior abbreviated as “Lor.”, “Lore.”, or “Lo.”, once (V.iii.410) offering an undifferentiated “Lo.” when both were present on stage, would lead to confusion in rehearsals. There is no stage direction for entries at the beginning of III.ii; instead, the characters' names are marked in the margin near the end of III.i. At IV.ii.86.1 the stage direction “Enter Giuliano and goes out again” (followed by Giuliano's speech at ll. 88-89) is plainly authorial. So, probably, is “Enter … a seruant or two of the Doctors” at the beginning of V.iii. An inadequate “Exit.” marks the exit of Musco after Stephano's speech at I.ii.47; vaguer still is “Exeunt.” for Bobadilla, Matheo, and Peto at V.iii.356. Speech-prefixes for Prospero and Lorenzo Junior are missing at III.iv.60-61. In Acts IV and V only the first scenes are marked. Besides these negative indications, “Rogery' and” at III.iv.157-158 shows the survival of a “Jonsonian” apostrophe to mark elision; and an asterisk after “blood” at III.i.177, directing attention to the marginal stage direction “Pul's out a red Herring,” has almost certainly been taken up from the bookkeeper's note on the author's manuscript in preparing this to serve as basis for a prompt copy.
The revision in F was probably based on the Q text since, as Herford and Simpson pointed out, a few small errors of punctuation in Q were reproduced.13 On account of these, and three instances of prose printed as verse in both Q and F, Herford and Simpson claimed that “the printer of the Folio had before him a printed copy of the 1601 text interlined with corrections in Jonson's handwriting, and not a new manuscript.”14 The inference is somewhat far-fetched. So detailed a revision, with its countless deletions, insertions, and transpositions, would have made the corrected text virtually unreadable. The most patient of compositors might have jibbed at using this as his copy, or, had he attempted to use it, would surely have produced a large crop of fresh errors. It is more plausible to suppose that Jonson had the Quarto before him while preparing his manuscript revision and inadvertently repeated some slightly defective punctuation. As for the three prose passages—each only two lines long—printed as verse in both Q and F, there is a strong likelihood that in both versions the error was based on misreadings of manuscripts. At a time when playwrights rarely used initial capitals for verse, such errors were common enough, and transcription hardly made their recurrence less likely. Significantly, two lines of verse at IV.vi.29-30, correctly printed in Q (IV.iii.29-30), appeared as prose in F, an error far more likely to happen if the printer was working from manuscript copy.
F follows Jonson's practice of “continental” scene-divisions and “massed” entries. The present edition substitutes the more familiar English arrangement introduced by Gifford,15 while marking the original directions in the textual footnotes. Jonson's punctuation has also been modernized. While the F text was certainly prepared and checked by the author, errors were not entirely avoided. F has generally been taken as the best authority where doubtful readings occur in Q, but in a few instances where Q provides an unmistakably better reading, it has been accepted for necessary emendations of F.
Notes
-
E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), III, 359.
-
C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1925-1952), I, 332-335; IX, 334-336.
-
Elizabethan Stage, III, 360; IV, 172.
-
Ibid., III, 360.
-
Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, I, 332.
-
Baskervill, “English Elements in Jonson's Early Comedy,” Texas University Studies in English, I (1911), 107-143.
-
Elizabethan Essays (London, 1934), p. 74.
-
As in M. Seymour-Smith's comments on “mine eye objects,” “erection,” etc. (II.i.197, 236, and elsewhere) (New Mermaid edition, 1966).
-
Carter, Yale Studies in English, LII (1921), lii-lv.
-
(Harvard, 1960), pp. 130-145.
-
Ibid., pp. 133-134.
-
Ibid., pp. 132-133.
-
Ben Jonson, III, 293-294.
-
Ibid., III, 294.
-
The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. William Gifford (London, 1816).
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.