[In the following essay, Redwine contends that Jonsonian humors characterization, whether considered as an account of human behavior or a form of dramatic characterization, has its basis not in psychology or aesthetics but in morality.]

One critic has recently averred that Jonson's humours are among the most stifling subjects in literary history.¹ That is very stifling indeed. Nevertheless, it is with his humours that an analysis of Jonson's theory of characterization must begin. As Enck himself goes on to point out, “no other psychology prevails” in the comical satires, or at least in the first two of the three comical satires. Whether Jonsonian humours actually constitute a “psychology” and whether they prevail in two or four or all of Jonson's plays are problems that must be taken up in due course.

The place to begin an investigation of Jonson's theory of humours is neither the work of Hippocrates nor the work of Galen, but the induction to Jonson's first comical satire, Every Man out of His Humour. The locus classicus is not at all stifling, and it ought to be quoted in full:

MIT.
In faith, this Humour will come ill to some,
You will be thought to be too peremptorie.
ASP.
This Humour? good; and why this Humour, Mitis?
Nay, doe not turne, but answere.
MIT.
Answere? what?
ASP.
I will not stirre your patience, pardon me,
I vrg'd it for some reasons, and the rather
To giue these ignorant well-spoken dayes,
Some taste of their abuse of this word Humour.
CORD.
O, doe not let your purpose fall, good Asper,
It cannot but arriue most acceptable,
Chiefly to such, as haue the happinesse,
Daily to see how the poore innocent word
Is rackt, and tortur'd.
MIT.
I, I pray you proceede.
ASP.
Ha? what? what is't?
COR.
For the abuse of Humour.
ASP.
O, I craue pardon, I had lost my thoughts.
Why, Humour (as 'tis ens) we thus define it
To be a quality of aire or water,
And in it selfe holds these two properties,
Moisture, and fluxure: As, for demonstration,
Powre water on this floore, 'twill wet and runne:
Likewise the aire (forc't through a horne, or trumpet)
Flowes instantly away, and leaues behind
A kind of dew; and hence we doe conclude,
That what soe're hath fluxure, and humiditie,
As wanting power to containe it selfe,
Is Humour. So in euery humane body
The choller, melancholy, flegme, and bloud,
By reason that they flow continually
In some one part, and are not continent,
Receiue the name of Humours. Now thus farre
It may, by Metaphore, apply it selfe
Vnto the generall disposition:
As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possesse a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to runne one way,
This may be truly said to be a Humour.
But that a rooke, in wearing a pyed feather,
The cable hat-band, or the three-pild ruffe,
A yard of shooetye, or the Switzers knot
On his French garters, should affect a Humour!
O, 'tis more then most ridiculous.
CORD.
He speaks pure truth now, if an Idiot
Haue but an apish, or phantasticke straine,
It is his Humour.
ASP.
Well I will scourge those apes;
And to these courteous eyes oppose a mirrour,
As large as is the stage, whereon we act:
Where they shall see the times deformitie
Anatomiz'd in euery nerue, and sinnew,
With constant courage, and contempt of feare.(2)

This is where we begin, but not where we end; for Jonson often alludes to the humours elsewhere in the early criticism, and he occasionally alludes to them in his later criticism. Nevertheless, this passage from the induction to Every Man out constitutes the basic definition, a sort of keystone which supports Jonson's theory of humour characterization.

In its strictest denotation, says Jonson, the term “humour” belongs to physics and is simply the demonstrable natural quality of air or water, either one of which elements will be found to be always moist and in flux, which is to say “wanting power to containe it selfe.” By extension, the term “humour” also belongs to physiology, since the four vital ingredients of the human blood stream—choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood—are always in flux and want power to contain themselves. Though Jonson uses the “psychological” names for two of the four humours (choler for yellow bile, melancholy for black bile), it is clear that his conception of the four humours is, up to this point, exclusively physiological in its orientation. By considerable extension, Jonson says finally, the term “humour” may also be applied to a man's “disposition” (the prevailing aspect of one's mind as shown in behavior and in relationships with others) when a man becomes so possessed by “some one peculiar quality” that all his “affects, his spirits, and his powers” flow uncontrollably in one direction. Succinct as this definition is, it constitutes a more or less precise summary of the best that had been thought and said on the subject of the “psychological” humours.³ The four physiological humours (Black Bile, Blood, Yellow Bile, and Phlegm) have their “peculiar qualities” (Cold & Dry, Hot & Moist, Hot & Dry, and Cold & Moist); when any one of these “qualities” gets out of equilibrium with the others and gains an unhealthy ascendancy, it possesses a man so that his “affects” (affections, passions), his “spirits” (“Spirit is a most subtle vapour, which is expressed from the blood, and the instrument of the soul, to perform all his actions; a common tie or medium betwixt the body and the soul, as some will have it”⁴), and his powers” generally flow uncontrollably in one direction (Melancholic, Sanguine, Choleric, or Phlegmatic).

Now Asper's disquisition on humours is usually separated from its induction context and treated as if it were a digression, an erudite digression to be sure but a digression, on “psychology” or “psychological characterization.”⁵ If it were merely a digression, some such paraphrase as the foregoing would suffice, and one could move on to other matters. But Asper's disquisition is not a digression, and the foregoing paraphrase does not begin to touch upon the real significance of Jonsonian humours. Asper's lecture on humours falls squarely in the center of the induction to Every Man out. Far from being a digression, his theory is almost meaningless when it is removed from its induction context and studied as an independent brief essay; his remarks elucidate and are elucidated by the critical ideas which surround them. As will be seen, it is actually the failure of man's reason and free will, not of his body, that is responsible “when some one peculiar quality / Doth so possesse a man, that it doth draw / All his affects, his spirits, and his powers, / In their confluctions, all to runne one way.” Jonson's humour characters are conceived as responsible free agents, not somapsychotic automatons, though Asper's disquisition seems to say otherwise when it is taken out of the context which Jonson gave it.

In the first place, Asper is not a psychologist, not even a sixteenth-century one. He is a moralist. His first speech in the induction leaves no room for mistakes on that point:

Who is so patient of this impious world,
That he can checke his spirit, or reine his tongue?
Or who hath such a dead vnfeeling sense,
That heauens horrid thunders cannot wake?
To see the earth, crackt with the weight of sinne,
Hell gaping vnder vs, and o're our heads
Blacke rau'nous ruine. …

(E. M. O., Induction, ll. 4-10)

Of “Humorists,” some of whom are to inhabit his play and to be exposed there, he says:

And yet, not one of these but knowes his workes,
Knowes what damnation is, the deuill, and hell,
Yet, hourely they persist, grow ranke in sinne,
Puffing their soules away in perj'rous aire,
To cherish their extortion, pride, or lusts.

(E. M. O., Induction, ll. 32-36)

This is Asper the moral philosopher, and there would appear to be no very good reason for denying that Asper is Asper still when he says:

… when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possesse a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to runne one way,
This may be truly said to be a Humour.

In fact, Asper does not leave it to his auditors to make the connection between those who “persist, grow ranke in sinne” and those who are so possessed by “some one peculiar quality” that all their powers run one way. Asper himself makes the connection:

… my strict hand
Was made to ceaze on vice, and with a gripe
Squeeze out the humour of such spongie natures,
As lick up euery idle vanitie.

(E. M. O., Induction, ll. 143-46)

Psychology, ethics, and moral theology all deal with human conduct, of course. But psychology deals with the human act only in its nature and characteristics. Ethics deals with the human act as it ought to be; it has to do with what is right and good or wrong and bad in human conduct. And as ethics deals with human conduct in relation to man's natural ends, so moral theology has to do with human conduct in relation to man's supernatural ends. It may be that Jonson's theory of humours as it is delineated by Asper swings somewhat arbitrarily between ethics and moral theology, for the distinction is not a vital one in a Christian age; but to call Jonson's theory of humours a “psychology” is to risk serious misunderstanding, especially in this day and age. And to liken “humour” to “neurosis”—even “by Metaphore”⁶—is to compound the danger, since it is precisely because he misuses his reason and free will that a man gets himself into this or that darkling humour and that he is considered by Jonson to be morally responsible for his sad predicament. A neurotic person may become so sick that he acts “wrongly”; a humourous person has acted wrongly so often that he has become “sick.”

Crites, Asper's successor in Cynthia's Revels, describes the process of a humour in some detail, and in unmistakably moral terms. Indeed, there is an instructive similarity between Crites on humours and the Church Fathers on concupiscence. In Cynthia's Revels, I, v, 24-64, Crites says:

                                                                                                              O vanitie,
How are thy painted beauties doted on,
By light, and emptie ideots! how pursu'de
With open and extended appetite!
How they doe sweate, and run themselues from breath,
Rais'd on their toes, to catch thy ayrie formes,
Still turning giddie, till they reele like drunkards,
That buy the merrie madnesse of one houre,
With the long irkesomenesse of following time!
O how despisde and base a thing is a man,
If he not striue t'erect his groueling thoughts
Aboue the straine of flesh! But how more cheape
When, euen his best and vnderstanding part,
(The crowne, and strength of all his faculties)
Floates like a dead drown'd bodie, on the streame
Of vulgar humour, mixt with commonst dregs?
…
Tut, she [Vice] is stale, ranke, foule, and were it not
That those (that woo her) greet her with lockt eyes,
(In spight of all the impostures, paintings, drugs,
Which her bawd custome dawbes her cheekes withall)
Shee would betray, her loth'd and leprous face,
And fright th'enamor'd dotards from themselues:
But such is the peruersenesse of our nature,
That if we once but fancie leuitie,
(How antike and ridiculous so ere
It sute with vs) yet will our muffled thought
Choose rather not to see it, then auoide it:
And if we can but banish our owne sense,
We act our mimicke trickes with that free licence,
That lust, that pleasure, that securitie,
As if we practiz'd in a paste-boord case,
And no one saw the motion, but the motion.

To get oneself caught up in the stream of vulgar humour is to subordinate the “best and vnderstanding part, / (The crowne, and strength of all his faculties)” to “the straine of flesh,” which is “the peruersenesse of our nature.” It is to “banish our owne sense,” “muffle thought,” run after “ayrie formes” until we “reele like drunkards”; it is to allow the “peruersenesse of our nature” to blind us to the tricks of habit (Bawd Custom). It is, in Augustine's great phrase, to be “shackled by an inferior love.” It is interesting to compare Crites on the stream of vulgar humour with Article IX of the Church of England's “Articles of Religion”⁷ or, since it is better reading and since Jonson is, at this period, a Roman Catholic of recent conversion,⁸ with Augustine on concupiscence in De doctrina Christiana, XXIV, 25. It is not so much a question of influences⁹ as of kindred interests. Like Crites, Augustine is speaking of morality, not psychology:

‘The flesh lusteth against the spirit: and the spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary to one another.’ … Not that the body should be destroyed, but that its concupiscence, which is its evil habit, should be completely conquered so that it is rendered subject to the spirit as the natural order demands. Since after the resurrection the body will thrive in complete peace immortally in subjection to the spirit, in this present life we should seek that the habit of the flesh should be changed for the better lest it resist the spirit with inordinate demands. … The spirit does not resist in hate but in a desire for dominion, because it wishes what it loves to be subjected to something better; neither does the flesh resist in hate but because of the fetters of habit in which it is involved inveterately by the law of nature as an inheritance. Thus the spirit acts in dominating the flesh that it may destroy the evils of habit as if they constituted a perverse covenant, and it creates the peace of good custom.¹⁰

Crites is more vehement and employs different words, but it is clear enough that he conceives of a humour as the subjection of spirit (“The crowne, and strength of all his faculties”) to the evil habit of the flesh, concupiscence (“the straine of flesh,” “the peruersenesse of our nature”).

As Crites goes on to say in Cynthia's Revels, V, iv, 625-48, the man who falls into a humour becomes “effeminate,” which is, in the traditional trope of the moral philosophers, to subvert the proper order of things by subjecting the rational soul to the appetitive soul. The humourous man dwells upon the deceptive surfaces of things, puts self-love before the love of God. (The sub-title of Cynthia's Revels is, of course, The Fountain of Self-Love; it is more than a description of the mere externals of plot). In a word, as Crites himself concludes, the man who falls into a humour commits “sacrilege.” Mercury has assured Crites that anyone worth the title of a man has only to be shown that he is shackled by an inferior love in order to escape his chains, but Crites is dubious:

Though they may see it, yet the huge estate
Phansie, and forme, and sensuall pride haue gotten,
Will make them blush for anger, not for shame;
And turne shewne nakednesse, to impudence.
Humour is now the test, we trie things in;
All power is iust: Nought that delights is sinne.
And, yet the zeale of euery knowing man,
…
Cannot but vent the Ætna of his fires,
T'enflame best bosomes, with much worthier loue
Then of these outward, and effeminate shades:
That, these vaine ioyes, in which their wills(11) consume
Such powers of wit, and soule, as are of force
To raise their beings to æternitie,
May be conuerted on workes, fitting men.
And, for the practice of a forced looke,
An antique gesture, or a fustian phrase,
Studie the natiue frame of a true heart,
And inward comelinesse of bountie, knowledge,
And spirit, that may conforme them, actually,
To Gods high figures, which they haue in power:
Which to neglect for a selfe-louing neatnesse,
Is sacrilege, or an vnpardon'd greatnesse.

In point of fact, Crites, the master of these humourous revels, is a moralist to the end. To “conforme them, actually, / To Gods high figures, which they haue in power,” Crites's cure for the humourous courtiers is neither more nor less than the Sacrament of Penance,¹² of which Chaucer's Parson tells us:

Manye been the weyes espirituels that leden folk to oure Lord Jhesu Crist, and to the regne of glorie. Of whiche weyes, ther is a ful noble wey and a ful covenable, which may nat fayle to man ne to woman that thurgh synne hath mysgoon fro the righte wey of Jerusalem celestial; and this wey is cleped Penitence. …

The roote of this tree is Contricioun. … Of the roote of Contricioun spryngeth a stalke that bereth braunches and leves of Confession, and fruyt of Satisfaccioun.¹³

Contrition, confession, and satisfaction (the performance by a penitent of the penal acts enjoined by the Confessor) constitute the catastrophe of Cynthia's Revels:

CRI.
…
You are offenders, that must be confest,
Doe you confesse it?
ALL.
We doe.
CRI.
And, that you merit sharpe correction?
ALL.
Yes.

(C. R., V, xi, 135-37)

Here, Crites enjoins the penitents to undertake a penitential pilgrimage, the satisfaction of which penal act will result in that “fruict” unto which the “wise mirth” of his revels was bent (C. R., V, xi, 138-60). The play actually ends as the humourous courtiers sing their songs of contrition, before they undertake their pilgrimage.

There is only one passage in Cynthia's Revels which might be thought to show that Jonson's theory of humours is a “psychology.” Mercury begins his character sketch of Crites:

CRITES.
A creature of most perfect and diuine temper. One, in whom the humours and elements are peaceably met, without emulation of precedencie: he is neyther to phantastikely melancholy, too slowly phlegmaticke, too lightly sanguine, or too rashly cholericke, but in all, so composde & order'd, as it is cleare, Nature went about some ful worke, she did more then make a man, when she made him.

(C. R., II, iii, 123-30)

This is, I take it, a “psychological” description of Crites. But in these few opening lines, usually the only ones quoted, Mercury is just beginning, and it is clear that his primary interest is Boethian rather than Galenian:

… In summe, he hath a most ingenuous and sweet spirit, a sharp and season'd wit, a straight iudgment, and a strong mind. Fortune could neuer breake him, nor make him lesse. He counts it his pleasure, to despise pleasures, and is more delighted with good deeds, then goods. It is a competincie to him that hee can bee vertuous. He doth neyther couet, nor feare; he hath too much reason to doe eyther: and that commends all things to him.

(C. R., II, iii, 137-45)

If Mercury begins with psychology, he rather quickly forgets it as he gets into his real subject, the moral character of Crites. Perhaps this is the fairest thing to say of Jonson's theory of humours in general: if it begins with psychology, it gets rather quickly into moral philosophy, where (one supposes) it was headed all the time.

Certainly it should come as no surprise that Jonsonian humours, whether considered generally as an account of human behavior or particularly as an account of dramatic characterization, are deeply rooted in moral philosophy. The two most popular explanations of Jonson's humours have been that they constitute a psychology or that they constitute Jonson's version of aesthetic decorum.¹⁴ Herford and Simpson synthesize the conventional explanations when they say that Jonson “not only accepted but insisted on the doctrine of ‘Humours,’ in that stricter sense of the term which made this doctrine a proximate physiological and psychological counterpart of the aesthetic doctrine of decorum.”¹⁵ But what the commentators have not made clear is that, in the Renaissance, “psychology” and “decorum” were elements of moral philosophy. Having examined in great detail Renaissance theories of Passions and Humours, Lily B. Campbell concludes:

The moral philosophy of the Renaissance was thus built upon a definite and detailed physiological explanation, and no modern psychologist has more strenuously insisted upon the fundamental relationship between body and mind or body and soul than did these writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. That to a great extent this moral philosophy came to centre about the struggle between the sensitive appetite and the reason meant that to the moral philosopher as well as to the physician the abnormal or diseased conditions of mind and body, where the connection of mind and body was most apparent, were of absorbing interest.¹⁶

Miss Campbell also reminds us that “decorum was in drama not a law of aesthetic theory but a law of moral philosophy”:

Yet if we understand decorum as the Renaissance understood it, we will see it as a matter of great moral significance, treated in practically every work on moral philosophy. The secret seems to lie in the much reverenced and frequently cited passage in Cicero's De Officiis, in which he treated the subject of decorum, asserting definitely that “it is inseparable from moral goodness; for what is proper is morally right, and what is morally right is proper.”¹⁷

There is one book of Renaissance “psychology” which Jonson almost certainly knew: Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Minde in Generall. Written in 1597-98 and pirated in 1601, the book was finally seen through the press in a corrected edition by Wright himself in 1604.¹⁸ Whether or not Wright was the priest, a Jesuit and noted controversialist, who converted Jonson to Roman Catholicism in 1598,¹⁹ it is certain that Wright's anatomy of the mind is preeminently a moral study²⁰ and that the authorized version opens with Jonson's tribute to the author and the book:

IN Picture, they which truly vnderstand,
          Require (besides the likenesse of the thing)
          Light, Posture, Height'ning, Shadow, Culloring,
All which are parts commend the cunning hand;
And all your Booke (when it is throughly scan'd)
          Will well confesse; presenting, limiting,
          Each subt'lest Passion, with her source, and spring,
So bold, as shewes your Art you can command.
          But now, your Worke is done, if they that view
The seuerall figures, languish in suspence,
          To iudge which Passion's false, and which is true,
                    Betweene the doubtfull sway of Reason, and
                              sense;
                    'Tis not your fault, if they shall sense preferre,
                    Being tould there, Reason cannot, Sense may
                              erre.(21)

Jonson on the passions sounds like Asper and Crites on the humours; what is more important, Asper and Crites on humours sound like Wright on passions. Of passions and the way they work, Wright says:

Those actions then which are common with vs, and beasts, we call Passions, and Affections, or perturbations of the mind. … They are called perturbations, for that (as afterward shall be declared) they trouble wonderfully the soule, corrupting iudgement & reducing the will, inducing (for the most part) to vice, and commonly withdrawing from vertue, and therefore some cal them maladies, or sores of the soule.²²

… He that loueth, hateth, or by any other passion is vehemently possessed, iudgeth all things that occur in fauour of that passion, to be good and agreeable with reason, … for in very deede, while the Passion is a floate, the execution & performance thereof, is conformable and very conuenient vnto our beastly sensuall appetite, and therefore all beasts stinged by such passions, presently proceede vnto execution, but men hauing vnited in the same sensitiue soule, reason and discourse, are bound, both by the law of Nature, and commaundement of God, diuers times to represse and resist such vnreasonable and beastly motions.²³

Actually, it was conventional among the moral philosophers of the day to point up the intimate relationship between the passions and the humours.²⁴ Wright himself observes at one point:

There be foure proprieties consequent to inordinat Passions, blindnesse of vnderstanding, peruersion of will, alteration of humours; and by them maladies and diseases, and troublesomnesse or disquietnes of the soule.²⁵

Not only do inordinate passions cause “alteration of humours”; as Wright goes on to say, “Passions ingender Humors, and Humors breed Passions.”²⁶ As Asper had said at the outset, one of the effects of a humour is that it draws the passions (“affects”²⁷) all to run one way. Just so, in his masque Hymenaei, Jonson creates a symbolic antimasque in which the “foure vntemp'red Humors … with their wild affections” issue forth “out of a Microcosme, or Globe, (figuring Man)” and threaten to disrupt the sacred rites of marriage. Hymen explains the symbolism (ll. 121-28):

The foure vntemp'red Humors are broke out,
And, with their wild affections, goe about
To rauish all Religion. If there be
A Power, like Reason, left in that huge Bodie,
Or little world of Man, from whence these came,
Looke forth, and with thy bright and numerous flame
Instruct their darknesse, make them know, and see,
In wronging these, they haue rebell'd 'gainst thee.

At this, Reason, “seated in the top of the Globe (as in the braine, or highest part of Man),” spoke, and “the Humors and Affections sheathed their swords, and retired amazed.”

Indeed, Miss Campbell observes that to the moral philosophers of the times certain “dispositions” (to use Asper's term) were called “humours” and “passions” interchangeably.²⁸ In this connection, it is interesting to note that in 1600, Jonson, who does not usually employ his terms carelessly, introduces Nicholas Breton's Melancholike Humours as a study of “true passion”:

THou, that wouldst finde the habit of true passion,
          And see a minde attir'd in perfect straines;
Not wearing moodes, as gallants doe a fashion,
          In these pide times, only to shewe their braines,
Looke here on Bretons worke, the master print:
          Where, such perfections to the life doe rise.(29)

The contrast that Jonson makes between true and affected passions recalls Asper's similar contrast between true and affected humours. But whatever Jonson's view of the precise relationship between the passions and the humours, it is clear that he thinks of the relationship as intimate and that his interest in humours, like Wright's interest in passions, is primarily moral. Wright's definition of passions—“They are called perturbations, for that … they trouble wonderfully the soule, corrupting the indgment & reducing the will, inducing (for the most part) to vice, and commonly withdrawing from vertue, and therefore some cal them maladies, or sores of the soule”—will serve as a definition of Jonsonian humours without the slightest alteration. One need only compare Crites's characterization of humourous men: “their wills consume / Such powers of wit, and soule, as are of force / To raise their beings to aeternitie.” The real subject of Jonson's theory of humours is neither psychology nor aesthetics, but moral goodness. And moral goodness, after all, was what critics since Cicero had been saying the subject of decorum should be. As Jonson pointed out quite early in his career.

… my strict hand
Was made to ceaze on vice, and with a gripe
Squeeze out the humour of such spongie natures,
As lick up euery idle vanitie.

In the strictest sense, then, a Jonsonian humour is not simply an abnormal psychological condition; ultimately, it is that evil moral condition that occurs when man's carnal appetite gains ascendency over his reason. It is a state not merely of sickness, but, as Crites says, of “sacrilege.” But it is clear from Asper's basic definition of humours in the induction to Every Man out that Jonson is not interested only in humours in the strictest sense. Asper's disquisition is threefold: in addition to genuine humour characters, there are characters who abuse the word “humour” by reducing it to fashionable and meaningless jargon, and there are characters who affect humours, ignorantly attributing petty whims, quirks, or idiosyncrasies to their “humours.” Significantly, Asper's definition of comical satire—a mirror wherein the times' deformities are anatomized in every nerve and sinew—follows hard upon his threefold disquisition on humours. He means primarily “humourous” deformities the three general types of which he has just delineated. As he says at the end of the induction, just before he departs to assume one of the roles in the play, “I goe / To turne an actor, and a Humorist” (E. M. O., Induction, ll. 213-14). Assuming that a “Humorist” is a character who either has a humour, affects a humour, or compulsively abuses the word “humour,” any actor in Every Man out might have said the same thing. All three sorts of “Humorists” people the comical satires,³⁰ and it is only a slight exaggeration to say that Jonson's exclusive artistic concern in the comical satires is to create a variety of “Humorists.”³¹

In the chorus at the end of Every Man out, II, iii, 288-301, Jonson faces the problem created by the character-centered, as opposed to the plot-centered, drama candidly and perhaps somewhat apologetically:

MIT.
Me thinkes, CORDATVS, he dwelt somewhat too long on this Scene; it hung i' the hand.
COR.
I see not where he could haue insisted lesse, and t'haue made the humours perspicuous enough.
MIT.
True, as his subiect lies: but hee might haue altered the shape of his argument, and explicated 'hem better in single Scenes.
COR.
That had beene single indeed: why? be they not the same persons in this, as they would haue beene in those? and is it not an obiect of more state, to behold the Scene full, and relieu'd with varietie of speakers to the end, then to see a vast emptie stage, and the actors come in (one by one) as if they were dropt downe with a feather, into the eye of the spectators?

For a change, Mitis's suggestion is not as foolish as it seems. Indeed, given characterization (to make the humours perspicuous enough) as the soul of the play, why could Jonson not have “explicated 'hem better in single Scenes”? Exigencies of plot—the answer that one might expect—do not greatly influence such a static, character-centered play as Every Man out, and Cordatus honestly refrains from obscuring the issue. Instead, he says in effect that Mitis's suggestion may make good sense, but that it makes for very bad theater. A stage crowded with humourists does not necessarily ensure a dynamic play, but it ensures “state” and “variety”; Mitis's “single Scenes” necessarily prohibit even those. But as Cordatus himself says, the characters would be the same whether “explicated” one by one or on a crowded stage, and this after all is precisely the point that Mitis is making.

However, characterization, humourous or otherwise, does not long remain at the center of Jonsonian comedy. With the appearance of Volpone, Jonson dedicates himself to the task of writing “quick comoedie, refined, / As best Criticks haue designed” (Volpone, Prologue, ll. 29-30); and the best critics had placed plot at the center of the drama. From Volpone onward, Jonson's criticism is taken up increasingly with problems other than characterization. Nevertheless, in two separate pieces of his later criticism Jonson alludes to characterization, and when he does so he alludes to “humours” as a matter of course.³² If Jonson's theory of characterization changes after the early comical satires, there is certainly no evidence for it in his criticism.

In the prologue to The Alchemist (ll. 5-11), Jonson says:

Our Scene is London, 'cause we would make knowne,
          No countries mirth is better then our owne.
No clime breeds better matter, for your whore,
          Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more,
Whose manners, now call'd humors, feed the stage:
          And which haue still beene subject, for the rage
Or spleene of comick-writers.

“Manners, now call'd humors” may seem to modern readers an offhand repudiation of Jonson's earlier theory of humours, but to Jonson's contemporaries the equation of “humors” and “manners” would have seemed precise and apt. I quote the New English Dictionary on “manners”:

Conduct in its moral aspect; morality as a subject of study; the moral code embodied in general custom or sentiment.

1589. Nashe Anat. Absurd. 42 Socrates who reduced all Philosophy vnto the manners, sayd, that this was the greatest wisedome, to distinguish good and euill thinges.

1644. Milton Areop. (Arb.) 4 Nothing … contrarie or infectious to the state of Religion, or manners.³³

The N. E. D. might also have quoted Jonson's Discoveries (ll. 1813-15), where Jonson says that one should read the best authors when young: “Tragicke, and Liricke Poetry is good too: and Comicke with the best, if the manners of the Reader be once in safety.”

Much later, in the induction to The Magnetic Lady, Jonson again refers to characterization, and again characterization means “humours … or manners”:

The Author, beginning his studies of this kind, with every man in his Humour; and after, every man out of his Humour: and since, continuing in all his Playes, especially those of the Comick thred, whereof the New-Inne was the last, some recent humours still, or manners of men, that went along with the times, finding himselfe now neare the close, or shutting up of his Circle, hath phant'sied to himselfe, in Idæa, this Magnetick Mistris. … who having a young Neice, ripe for a man and marriageable, hee makes that his Center attractive, to draw thither a diversity of Guests, all persons of different humours to make up his Perimeter.

(M. L., Induction, ll. 99-111)

All of Jonson's plays, especially the comical satires and the comedies, have been “humour plays.” That is, there has been a continuity of characterization if not of form in all of Jonson's plays.

Thus, not only does Jonson's criticism of comic characterization begin with his theory of humours; it ends there too. Nor should this be surprising. Renaissance theorists were unanimous in saying that decorum is based in good part upon moral philosophy, and decorum is nowhere more important than in characterization. Not only had Cicero observed that the subject of decorum is nothing more nor less than moral goodness. Horace's interpreters invariably pointed to Ars Poetica, 309-22, as an authoritative description of decorum.³⁴ The passage begins by saying that the source and fount of writing well is moral philosophy, a good example of which is Socratic writing; it concludes by saying that a play which is marked by moral passages and manners or characters rightly drawn is sometimes better received, even if it lack charm and force of art, than are sonorous trifles void of thought:

          Scribendi rectè, sapere, est & principium & fons.
Rem tibi Socraticæ poterunt ostendere chartæ:
Verbaque provisam rem non invita sequentur.
…
Interdum speciosa locis, morataque rectè
Fabula, nullius veneris, sine pondere, & arte
Valdius oblectat populum, meliusque moratur,
Quàm versus inopes rerum, nugæque canoræ.(35)

Franciscus Luisinus, a prominent commentator of the sixteenth century, summarized this passage: “He says that invention, style, and poetic decorum flow from the founts of that philosophy which treats morals (mores); for no one, indeed, can doubt that a richer invention is provided by philosophy.”³⁶ Marvin Herrick summarizes what the Horatian passage came to mean to Renaissance critics in general: “The ‘learned imitator’ should possess a knowledge of ethics, of human virtues, vices, emotions, and he should know how to use this knowledge with propriety in his portrayals of every human condition, rank, and age.”³⁷ The passage presumably meant all of this to Jonson, and it is instructive to note that in Jonson's own translation of the passage, Horace's classical pronouncement on decorum which is rooted in moral philosophy becomes, among other things, a defense of Jonsonian humours. Jonson's translation of the Ars Poetica passage concludes:

                                                                                For, sometimes,
A Poëme, of no grace, weight, art, in rimes,
With specious [i. e., fair] places, and being humour'd right,
More strongly takes the people with delight,
And better stayes them there, then all the fine noise
Of verse meere-matter-lesse, and tinckling toies.

(Horace His Art of Poetry, ll. 455-60)

The italics are mine, but the words are Jonson's. In Jonson's hands, Horace's decorum begins in the moral philosophy of Socrates and ends in the humour characterization of Jonson himself. Here is the great context in which Jonson viewed his theory of humours. Socrates is at least as relevant to Jonson's theory of characterization as is Galen. How else could characterization serve “the principall end of poesie,” which, as Jonson says in the Volpone epistle (ll. 108-09), is “doctrine … to informe men, in the best reason of liuing”?

Notes

1. John J. Enck, Jonson and the Comic Truth (Madison, 1957), p. 45; see also pp. 46-49.

2. Every Man out of His Humour, Induction, ll. 73-122. Unless otherwise specified, all quotations of Jonson's works are from C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925-52).

3. Readers will find an invaluable treatment of the humours and their implications for drama in Section II, “Moral Philosophy in Shakespeare's Day,” of Lily Bess Campbell's Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (New York, 1959), pp. 47-106. See especially Chapters Four, Five, Seven, and Ten. Miss Campbell is primarily if not exclusively interested in Renaissance theories of the passions and their implications for tragedy, but the intimate relationship between humours and passions fortunately leads her over much material that is central to an understanding of the rich implications of Jonsonian humours. Miss Campbell of course does not take up these implications, but she has made it easier for us to do so.

4. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. A. R. Shilleto (London, 1893), I, 170.

5. See Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, I, 342; John Enck, Jonson and the Comic Truth, p. 45; Charles Read Baskervill, English Elements in Jonson's Early Comedy (Austin, 1911), p. 35. Baskervill (p. 34) points out, rightly I think, that Jonson's humours may also “represent any decided moral inclination,” but then he goes on to discuss the humours almost exclusively as “something temperamental, something more or less permanent in character bent.”

6. Cf. Enck, Jonson and the Comic Truth, pp. 46-47. Enck warns that “analogies often mislead,” and his analogy between humours and neuroses is intelligently and carefully done. Nevertheless, the psychological tenor of the analogy does, ultimately, mislead. Harry Levin, ed., Ben Jonson Selected Works (New York, 1938), p. 6, speaks of Jonson's “darkly deterministic” view of character. This would seem to be the logical conclusion toward which all “psychological” interpretations of Jonson's humours misdirect the reader.

7. “Article IX,” in The Thirty-nine Articles and the Age of the Reformation, ed. E. Tyrrell Green (London, 1896), p. 68:

   Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk) but it is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit, and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God's wrath and damnation. And this infection of nature doth remain, yea, in them that are regenerated, whereby the lust of the flesh, called in Greek Φρόυημα sαρaὸς (which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire, of the flesh), is not subject to the law of God. And although there is no condemnation for them that believe, and are baptized, yet the Apostle doth confess, that concupiscence and lust, hath of itself the nature of sin.

8. Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, I, 19, 139; XI, 577-80.

9. Unfortunately, we do not know which of the Church Fathers Jonson studied—only that the infamous 1623 fire destroyed

   … twice-twelve-yeares stor'd up humanitie,
   With humble Gleanings in Divinitie,
   After the Fathers, and those wiser Guides
   Whom Faction had not drawne to studie sides.

   (“An Execration upon Vulcan,” ll. 101-04)

10. Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, translated by D. W. Robertson, Jr., Liberal Arts Press, No. Eighty (New York, 1958), p. 21.

11. “Will” here is “Carnal desire or appetite” (N. E. D., X, Part 2, p. 129). The N. E. D. cites, among other examples, Shakespeare's Lucrece, 247: “Thus … holds he disputation, Tweene frozen conscience and hot burning will.”

12. Penance continued to be practiced in the Church of England, though no longer considered a sacrament in the strictest sense of the term. See Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Paul Elmer More and Frank Leslie Cross (Milwaukee, 1935), pp. 513-20. See also E. Tyrrell Green, ed., The Thirty-nine Articles, pp. 189-94. Miss Campbell notes, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes, p. 72, that Bishop Reynolds' Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Men, 1640, is merely reviewing the conclusions of earlier generations when he says that reason may be evil, it may be ignorant, or it may be confounded, but in all cases repentance and the putting away of lusts are the only effective preparation for true understanding.

13. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Parson's Tale,” ll. 78-80, 112-13, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston, 1957), pp. 229-230.

14. See G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabeth Critical Essays (Oxford, 1904), I, xlv: “The fruit of the doctrines which required decorum in character came early in the Humorous Comedy of Ben Jonson. …” See also J. E. Springarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1908), I, xv.

15. Ben Jonson, I, 342.

16. Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes, p. 79.

17. Ibid., p. 98. See also Marvin T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, vol. XXXIV, Nos. 1-2 (1950), p. 131: “The theory of literary decorum, in other words, was based in good part upon moral philosophy.”

18. Campbell, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes, p. 58.

19. Theodore A. Stroud, “Ben Jonson and Father Thomas Wright,” ELH, XIV (December, 1947), 274-82, argues convincingly that the author and the priest are one and the same man. Stroud suggests (p. 280) that Wright probably showed Jonson the MS of his book as soon as it was completed, in September, 1598, and that this was the prelude to Jonson's conversion.

20. Wright begins by saying of his book: “The Divine herein may first challenge his parte, because the inordinate motions of Passions, their preventing of reason, their rebellion to virtue are thornie briars sprung from the infected root of original sinne.” See Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minds in Generall, 4th Edition (London, 1621), p. 2. I have not been able to consult earlier editions.

21. From The Passions of the Minde in Generall, 2nd Edition (London, 1604), sig. A2^v. Quoted in Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, VIII, 370.

22. The Passions of the Minde in Generall, 4th Edition, pp. 7-8. Subsequent citations are to this edition.

23. Ibid., p. 49.

24. See Campbell, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes, pp. 73-78.

25. The Passions of the Minde in Generall, p. 47.

26. Ibid., p. 64.

27. See N. E. D., I, 151, on “Affect”: “Feeling, desire, or appetite, as opposed to reason; passion, lust, evil-desire.” Middleton's Temple Masque is one of the examples cited: “No doubt affects will be subdued with reason.”

28. Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes, p. 77.

29. From Nicholas Breton's Melancholike Humours (London, 1600), sig. A3^v (in italics). For other passages in which Jonson seems to equate humours with passions, see E. M. O., IV, viii, 157, where humours are called “affections”; E. M. O., V, xi, 54-65, where the cure of humours is salvation attained through repentance. See also Jonson's defense of the original catastrophe of E. M. O. (quoted in Ben. Jonson, III, 602-03), where Jonson not only calls the cure of a humour “Morall and Mysterious” but also calls Macilente's humour “his Passion.”

30. Henry L. Snuggs, “The Comic Humours: A New Interpretation,” PMLA, LXII (March, 1947), 114-22, rightly takes issue with Baskervill, who says, English Elements, p. 35, that Jonson excludes affected humours. Jonson attacks affected humours, in theory and in practice; he does not exclude them.

31. See Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, I, 343: “His more significant innovation lay in making the exhibition of the Humours the sole function of plot.”

32. A third allusion to humours in the later criticism may occur in Volpone. “Humours” as such are not mentioned in the play, the first of the quick comedies refined as best critics have designed, but see Act. V, Scene ii, 20-28, where Jonson makes Volpone and Mosca discuss the “blindness” of their victims—and, one supposes, not of the victims only:

    VOLP.

    Right.

    That, yet, to me's the strangest! how th'hast borne it!

    That these (being so diuided 'mongst themselues)

    Should not sent some-what, or in me, or thee,

    Or doubt their owne side.

    MOS.

    True, they will not see't.

    Too much light blinds 'hem, I thinke. Each of 'hem

    Is so possest, and stuft with his owne hopes,

    That any thing, vnto the contrary,

    Neuer so true, or neuer so apparent,

    Neuer so palpable, they will resist it—

    VOLP.

    Like a temptation of the diuell.

    Asper and Crites could not have improved upon Mosca's diagnosis or upon his description of the humour “syndrome.” With Volpone's observation that the victims resist reason “Like a temptation of the diuell,” the irony of this strange dialogue reaches a mad peak.

33. N. E. D., VI, 129.

34. See Herrick, Comic Theory, pp. 130-32, 136-37.

35. Horace, De Arte Poetica, ll. 309-11, 319-22, as quoted in Jonson's edition and translation of the poem in the Second Folio, 1640.

36. Quoted in Herrick, Comic Theory, p. 130.

37. Herrick, Comic Theory, p. 131.