[In the following essay, Enck claims that the Jonsonian concept of humors has been misinterpreted and misapplied, and maintains that the humors are less prevalent in Jonson's plays than critics have claimed.]

With Every Man out of His Humour Jonson unveiled his decisive exercise in what a play with a singleness of purpose throughout ought to be. As such, it remains one of those focal points which reinforce all an author's undertakings. Its strengths, further refined, run as supports through most later achievements; its weaknesses may account for collapses where undue weight burdens a slight prop. The danger of taking the crucial work itself as a mere elevation from which to trace forth designs or of judging all ensuing plays by this single standard can be avoided once one recognizes the threat. All this apology does not champion the view that Every Man out of His Humour quite succeeds as drama.

Jonson took elaborate pains in preparing this, his first published volume, for the press. By it he bid to be both learned and popular, the diametric qualities which he strove to unite and which, even under his urgings, pulled always in opposite directions. The failures perplexed him. This time he undoubtedly went out of his way to dazzle readers by sprinkling claims of novelty over the title page. The drama is a “comicall satyre,” the circumlocution for satire itself. The second bait, that of offering more than acted on the stage, may have stimulated literary curiosity.¹ The Latin motto seems a quaint flourish, but Jonson's example helped launch the practice later popular in printed drama.² The kinds of books most highly respected at the time served as models. For a dramatist to publish his script was infra dig; serious works, of course, deserved Latin mottoes, but not a popular playbook, which, among the literate, enjoyed a reputation not much higher than collections of comic strips command at present. Finally, the text is prefaced by a series of sketches setting forth attributes of the characters. Whatever indirect aspersions such portraits throw on the playwright's ability, they do exploit another vogue. The character sketch was a new genre in England, one to continue throughout the seventeenth century. These early ones list salient traits in perfunctory order. These paraphernalia on the title page, which booksellers tacked up on their stalls for advertisements, must have appeared insufferably pompous.

The decorations served as a prelude to the play itself, which has a prologue to explain the rationale, the humours. Much has rightly been made of them, but the context in which they place the action has been misunderstood or taken for granted. The humours describe precisely this play and Cynthia's Revels; by Poetaster they have already begun to wane. Extended too insistently into later plays, inflexible notions about them will mislead seriously. Mentioning this topic at all demands an apology. Jonson and his humours are among the most stifling subjects in literary history. The trouble, though, is that his concept has been misinterpreted and misapplied. Humours flow less pervasively throughout the plays than is commonly assumed, but in those where they dominate, no other psychology prevails. Dull as the topic may sound, through it alone one must approach these two plays.

In christening his psychology humours Jonson took over a term in common use for centuries with varying degrees of precision. Although modern theories of education disapprove of teaching any hocus-pocus except that having current credence, a few decades ago it was a schoolboy's cliché that Elizabethans believed the body contained four humours. Accepted as a kind of image, they continue at present in various arts and philosophies; in psychology Jung does not dismiss their usefulness as labels, and in music (and ballet) Hindemith (and Balanchine) based Four Temperaments upon them. Blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, or the hot and moist, cold and moist, hot and dry, and cold and dry, should blend equally in the body. When one gains ascendancy, physical and psychic diseases result. Much Elizabethan drama can be explained only by a belief in the reality of such distempers. Many commentators have misconstrued Marlowe's portrait of Tamburlaine because they forget the Asiatic conqueror displays a textbook fidelity to the symptoms of Melancholy Adust,³ the most dreaded disturbance of the humours. Later Jacobean drama is puzzlingly pathological, if one discounts its origins in a physiological malady. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy says the last word on the subject; by his time respectable medical knowledge already discounted the actuality of humours. Popular extensions of the term, as the original theory faded, mistook in the Restoration and eighteenth century any mild aberration for a humour. Jonson's working definition falls somewhat between the two extremes of theory and catchall; in his plays psychological manifestations turn into physical quirks. Although analogies often mislead, one might compare the range of meaning in humours with the usages of neurosis at the present time.⁴

The word neurosis has a reputable history and a fairly precise clinical definition. Recent extensions distort it. It becomes chic in the comment that “‘Thoreau as a neuro’ sounded like a song by Cole Porter.”⁵ In fact, it crops up repeatedly in urban entertainments; the future play reviewer for the New Yorker entitled a collection of his essays, first published in that magazine, Bed of Neuroses. Intimate reviews on Broadway invoked it as a label of sophistication, e.g., the parody of love songs in Lend an Ear, “Neurotic Me and Psychopathic You,” or Small Wonder, whose sketches were strung together by a twentieth-century everyman called The Normal Neurotic. Watered down, it has spread across many areas. In one sense of the word, neurosis has become the norm in the United States during its Age of Anxiety (poem [W. H. Auden], musical composition [Leonard Bernstein], and ballet [Jerome Robbins]). Positing that the denotations of neurosis in all these instances are identical would be foolish; presumably it does communicate similar connotations. Without arguing too fine a parallel, one may discern a similar variety, bordering on confusions, in the shades of meaning which the humours bore during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Jonson himself pledged the concept loyalties of different enthusiasms. As has been noted, in the first two plays it floated about mostly as a casual term which predominantly condemned eccentric behavior. For Every Man out of His Humour, Cynthia's Revels, and, partially, Poetaster, he did arbitrarily restrain its associations within a moderately confined range. From Sejanus through The Alchemist he improvised upon the definition without tying the term steadily to one point; afterwards, The Magnetic Lady notwithstanding, he became indifferent to both word and concept. For these two comedies, however, the humours must be understood in a rigorously Jonsonian sense. Other dramatists and satirists of the period,⁶ notably Chapman, resorted to the same device, but one quotation from An Humorous Day's Mirth measures the discrepancy between the two authors' concepts: “The skie hangs full of humour, and I thinke we shall haue raine … for we shall spend it with so humorous acquaintance, as raines nothing but humor al their life time.”⁷ Jonson was incapable of writing or of thinking anything which compares these two topics, atmospheric and human disturbances. For him humours never exist apart from the manifest behavior of the afflicted; stupidities spill out from an individual and cannot rain down upon him.

Humours, as Jonson fully expanded the term, have two extended meanings,⁸ in addition to the nearly literal one of a fluid in the body. In its first enlargement a humour propels, helter-skelter, all one's endeavors in a single, and vain, direction. Time and again humour floods like a current of water, an association made casually before, or it resembles a flame but, unlike the explosion which unsettled Ferneze, spreads steadily on its victim until it has slowly consumed him. The traditional phrase, feed a humour, becomes thus literally true, but devourer and the devoured are identities. At first it resembles the indulgence of a minor vice which dominates the deluded in one aspect of his behavior. With practice, however, the stream of humour running through anyone cannot find sufficient outlet in an occasional exercise so that, like a raging river, it breaks forth and sweeps away all inhibitions. The partial eccentricity becomes a whole mania; it twists the powerless into freaks and the strong into tyrants. The spectacle of the minor's becoming the major must simultaneously appall and amuse any who can appreciate Jonsonian comedy.

COR.
O, hee's a fellow of a strange nature. Now do's hee (in this calme of his humour) plot, and store vp a world of malicious thoughts in his braine, till hee is so full with 'hem, that you shall see the very torrent of his enuie breake forth like a land-floud: and, against the course of all their affections oppose it selfe so violently, that you will almost haue wonder to thinke, how 'tis possible the current of their dispositions shall receiue so quick, and strong an alteration.

(IV. viii. 152-59)

Jonson wrote two endings for Every Man out of His Humour; in the one, humour is compared with a flame, in the other, with a current, but the results of visitation by holocaust or deluge are equally destructive. Such, then, is the full range of the first variation wrought upon the basic term. The second effect of humours is the affectation of a humour in speech. On the stream the word itself is nakedly released again and again, almost like flotsam on a wave, where it whirls about by itself until it loses any direction. This parody suits the satire, which is not only to show actual and copied humours in their manifestations but also “to giue these ignorant well-spoken dayes, / Some taste of their abuse of this word Humour.” (Second Sounding, 79-80) The didactic and semantic elements cannot be separated.

While bandying the term loosely, the speakers, all unaware, exemplify their own humours. At the opening Sogliardo, a social pretender, mouths the word constantly: “Why, this fellowes discourse were nothing, but for the word Humour.” (II. i. 56-57) From him it spreads like an epidemic to every character on the stage, including a dog. Therefore, by drawing upon three senses, a nearly traditional interpretation of distemper incurred with imbalance of the four fluids, the pampering of a humour, and, finally, the reduction of the word to jargon, Jonson fitted together a mordantly complex play. One is surprised after a careful reading that the levels blend into one another as nicely as they do. One might again think of a play about neurotics: those needing an analyst, those who are analysans because it is fashionable, and those sprinkling their conversation with Freudian clichés. If one protests that such a full-scale comedy would frequently be shocking or morbid in English (but hardly in French), the answer is that so was Jonson's until age softened the connotations. It was his biggest hit, nearly as popular, to judge by the book's sales,⁹ as a Broadway review. Had Jonson regarded the four humours as absolutes in their control over men, he could not have considered them comic; if modern audiences took Freudian hypotheses quite literally, they would demand tragedies, not musical sketches, based on such material. Comedy utilizes its brand of truth when theories, e. g., of humours or the unconscious, have just been announced or have started to wane, or, as with the French attitude toward psychoanalysis, when one counts oneself in a group immune from foreign foolishness. At this level comedy exhibits possibilities falsely erected as idols to be worshiped in bondage. Multiplying the troubles which comedy must face, it cannot preach its truths but must dramatize them. Whatever caused the popularity of Every Man out of His Humour, the dialogue provides its vitality.

The language portrays eloquent thoughtlessness; the speech patterns echo manias. The stream of humour rushes like a river, carving a channel which, the more deeply cut, the more confining it is. If a later, comparatively sluggish style, the stream of consciousness, spreads everywhere to connect disparate associations, the stream of humour shoots toward only one end but in its course picks up much debris.¹⁰ Meanwhile, the characters rant with a vigor which, whatever its peculiarities, obeys a pattern. All their thoughts force them back to one subject. No matter how far they roam, they inevitably return to their obsession. The preoccupation bulks most obviously in a long diatribe by the soldier Shift during which the phrase, “Sell my rapier?” (III. vi. 48-68), keeps intruding itself into a ramshackle monologue. Try as he will to drop the topic, he is dragged back to it. Another instance, of another sort, occurs when the miserly farmer, Sordido, chuckles with malicious joy that the almanac forecasts of innumerable days of rain, which he chants, will ruin all crops so that his hoarded stores will be worth more. Or, another, Fungoso and Fallace (a man and woman respectively) find different aspects of a fashionable courtier, Briske, so engrossing that, although they converse about him, they communicate nothing to each other because their attention can focus only on the single attraction which hypnotizes them. Similarly, at the end of the fourth act, and comparable with the three shouting men of The Case Is Altered, no one hears the requests of anyone else. The style fits this kind of affliction smoothly.

Jonson's proficiency with resemblance detaches one aspect, names it promptly, and moves on to a second object from which another single, and cognate, trait is selected. The process does not, as with the metaphysical poets, keep uncovering more and more connections between two items and continue probing further into their complex natures. Verse as compact as his needs constant neatness and clarity. Often, indeed, the underlying quality is not named, but incongruous objects, which share one resemblance, are reeled off in succession so ordered that the crucial part which links them gradually emerges. A related trick catalogues negatives for the same purpose, and by the elaboration of what it is not the silhouetted attribute emerges. Each syllable of this seeming babbling must be carefully constrained because the stratified levels of humour demand their distinctive sorts of verse or prose. For this task Jonson usually could modulate his effects as he wished. Although the characters are gripped by fixations and their discourse must be disjointed, the guiding reins never relax. Just as the stream of consciousness reveals by disguises and maskings, the stream of humour uncovers by distorted resemblance and false identity.

The most idle utterances have behind them a thorough logic within a demented pattern. Nevertheless, granted all Jonson's care with publication, with rationale, with characterization, and with language, the finished work fails to combine economically its fine parts and high standards. Aspects of this blemish may be blamed on the added sections which extravagantly distend the incidents beyond dramatic limits. Principally, though, no editing would rescue the ingenuity from its own caprices. The cause of the weakness boils down to one point: whatever else it may be, Every Man out of His Humour is hardly a play. To consider what it is predicates, at the same time, an understanding of what it is not. The plot resists condensation not because so much happens but because so little does, at least so little which coheres around traceable causes and effects.¹¹ This structural discontinuity does not mean that Jonson wanted the deftness to elaborate a plot; on the contrary, the overly ingenious design of The Case Is Altered, to say nothing of later plays, proves that contriving action was one area in which he unquestionably excelled. If this humour comedy lacks connections, they did not necessarily lie beyond the author's skill. His search for materials extracted richer effects elsewhere. Two axioms apply to all his writing: nothing is accidental, and deliberateness does not guarantee results.

The numerous characters, each of whom pursues his special fancy nearly in defiance of milieu, do not waste time considering others. As their paths cross, a kind of mutual recognition permits nodding disrespect based, however, not upon friendship or conflict but upon the struggle within themselves: either to keep the stream of humour within a semblance of control or to have it flow forcefully enough to gain recognition from society, the true humour and the affectations of humour. The major devices hark back to the two preceding plays, but they are here turned inside out. In place of Musco at the core of activity, a chorus, an approximation of classical models, stands to one side and comments on the menagerie of gulls who populate the scene. The resulting remoteness approaches the quality of an abstract ballet in which the pattern is supreme. One main thread of the story can be simply extracted. It concerns a farmer, Sordido, who has two children, Fallace and Fungoso. The father, being a miser, refuses to support Fungoso in town. In order to remain near his idol Briske, a dandy prancing on the court side lines, he seeks aid from his sister, Fallace, but she, also doting upon Briske's graces, refuses him. Her husband, Deliro, thoroughly devoted to his indifferent wife, becomes ridiculous through proffering her unwanted gifts. Sogliardo, Sordido's brother, also affecting city manners, is, a older generations are inclined to be, less knowledgeable in modish scandals and affairs. Singling out this feature does distort the play, just as, to a lesser extent, stressing the Lorenzo household does Every Man in His Humour. Outside groups in both frequently loom as more important; yet, the Sordido tribe's frantic drives compose a hunchbacked spine for the episodes. The five tell much of the humours. They form no family: no father named his sons Sordido and Sogliardo, nor did anyone, even if named Sordido, revenge himself by christening his daughter and son Fallace and Fungoso, nor did Fallace prolong the farce by marrying Deliro.¹² Their whole situation is a trenchant, almost distressing, parody of human disaffections, and it casts forth twisted supports from which the other characters dangle. At the end, unlike the Ferneze household, they cannot unite as a group in their family circle.

Around this grotesque clan the other characters clash or run off on their own tangents. The more important can be listed briefly. Macilente, the malcontent, whose role assumes most prominence, is the man whom nothing pleases and who ridicules all, hoping by railing to alleviate his envy. In these projects he is seconded by Buffone, whose pranks have less personal animus and aim at targets indiscriminately. Puntarvolo, a knight quixotically honoring the courtly decorum of a former age and boasting of his travels, and Saviolina, the determinedly smart court lady, round off the upper social reaches. Shift, like Bobadilla an impoverished soldier, who is always glad to earn a shilling by initiating outsiders into smoking and other arcana, completes the main hangers-on. The whole resembles a series of superior vaudeville skits by comedians who improvise on any theme. As such, if performed in a repertory company accustomed to ensemble playing before an audience able to appreciate nuances, the result might hit its targets.

Jonson left no doubt about what he meant. The care expended on the text relates to the central design. This labor includes a page devoted to “the names of the actors.”¹³ In the quarto the intended arrangement appears plainly, but in the folio, because of modifications for uniformity throughout the volume, the signs were somewhat blurred. Across the top of the quarto page are the names of Macilente, Saviolina, and Sordido. These three venerate their peculiarities most devotedly; their humours have cut so deeply that no escape from the confines of eccentricity exists. They have fed humours assiduously; the domination is total. Below them, those on the right represent townspeople or social climbers not wholly bereft of their wits, and on the left are rustics or those of no position trying to wedge a toehold on the fantastic ladder. This diagram further illustrates why the humours cannot indulge in a complicated plot; the afflicted are neither perceptive nor conceited enough to observe anything. Were anyone less obsessed present—a nightmare for him—he could establish no contact because no one is alive. The failures of The Case Is Altered, not recognizing the truth about one's self, predominate here; the saving grace of there being some sort of truth has disappeared. The dramatis personae are paired or balanced monsters who perform their tricks before any audience in the neighborhood. The plot does have a crab-like progression. It seeks to remove the characters from their humours, that is, to relieve the pressures of affectations. The emphasis on in His Humour stresses showing the behavior and on out of His Humour removing the excess, but the titles do not entirely suit the action. Here the equation, somewhat optimistically, permits the humours to cancel each other. Once they have nothing left on which to feed, they starve and presumably disappear. Jonson, whose aversion for puritanical capitalism increased, did not long harbor faith in so naïve a balance of trade.

The ways by which humours assert themselves depend, as usual, upon mistaken identity or the assumption that by mere appearance an underlying reality can be disguised, except that, a further irony, these shadows have no reality. The three most confirmed in humours have closed their minds upon all but the one force chaining them. Like the miser Jaques, Sordido seeks to hide his treasure, in this instance his grain, in the earth and to present himself to the world garbed in poverty. When the predicted floods do not blast the crops of less conniving farmers, he hangs himself. Several poor neighbors discover the suicide and cut him down. At the moment between life and death, the stream of humour continues to flow, and he protests that, if they had to rescue him, they might at least not have split the valuable halter on which he was dangling. This complaint is a last gasp; he decides arbitrarily to reform, but, as far as his performing personality goes, he may as well be dead. Saviolina, whose wit establishes her claim to be “the wonder of nations” (III. ix. 75), is demolished when she declares that Sogliardo, the farmer presented to her as a gentleman who, to test her, is masquerading in the guise of a rustic, must be a true gentleman. Such confusions of disguise proceed as far as they can here. Embarrassment because of this mistake does not work a permanent change on her: nothing could. Macilente, most venomous of all, vents indiscriminate hatred on whatever happens to be at hand. In this savoring of mischief he devises pranks to keep the action going. His images of loathing swell to cataclysmic proportions to become thoroughly impossible and, by this disproportion, comic.

                                                                                                    Would to heauen
(In wreake of my misfortunes) I were turn'd
To some faire water-Nymph, that (set vpon
The deepest whirle-pit of the rau'nous seas,)
My adamantine eyes might head-long hale
This iron world to me, and drowne it all.

(II. iv. 161-66)

As has frequently been observed, the ambitions of Renaissance man recognized no bounds. Just as Bobadilla's speeches keep a delicacy on the frontier of despair, so, too, Macilente in the progression of this resounding tirade would have the water nymph be, after all, fair. The stream of humour is not so deep that an idiosyncratic pebble cannot now and then ripple its surface. In spite of his affecting a melancholy black and protesting against the ostentations of others, he is not without vanity. He longs for a handsome face and, like Juniper and Onion, boasts that clothes will make him nearly a courtier. Humour so strong, for his is the stream only the Thames can check, requires a special destruction. In the original version Macilente was cured by the sight of Queen Elizabeth herself. If Jonson's tastes miss, they do not fall a little beside the mark. In the period when the English monarch was believed to possess a magic, medicinal touch, the fabulous denouement may have sounded less improbable. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed. A revised Macilente is righted because, all the other characters having been put out of their humours, his has nothing more upon which to feed. Nevertheless, Jonson, whose stubbornness sometimes drove him to fight battles long after the other participants had yawned and walked away, printed both endings in the folio.

Meanwhile, the minor characters run through traits observed before, or new ones which vary familiar themes. The principle of selecting misconduct hinges upon consciousness of the ideal conditions of society. Briske, the courtier, lives beyond his means in order to lead the forefront with the latest novelty in dress, speech, behavior, and opinion. He possesses no innate characteristics of his own and seeks a personality by allying himself with the newest fad. In contrast with this bent toward modernity, Puntarvolo molds himself on older customs. When he returns to his own home, he pretends to be a lost, wandering knight; his wife shelters him as she would a stranger, with protestations of honorable conduct on both sides. The lines they speak to each other have a flat, stilted quality, the sort that did duty as discourse in The Case Is Altered but that here mocks it. Invariably a style which once implied conviction turns up later in parody, another example of how Jonson's talent, if limited, wasted nothing. Later Puntarvolo decides to tour, a pastime often ridiculed, and embarks upon a primitive scheme of travel insurance; the transaction is really betting with a number of people on the odds of returning alive with his wife and dog. Buffone represents, at further remove, Macilente, the man of at least rudimentary feeling who lacks judgment. His refusing any improvement makes his bluntness as affected as the aspirations for too much subtlety. Deliro and Fallace, the citizen and his wife, expound a more familiar dilemma. She seeks an affair with Briske, while her husband, perhaps the most deluded of all, tries to change nature itself, perfuming the house and grounds, to please her whim. These five, occupying the left column, are advancing ideals which, however wrongly applied, bear better pedigrees than those on the right, who copy the copies. Fungoso's doomed race to model himself on Briske always falls behind the whirlwind pace; by the time he has a suit duplicated his hero appears in a new one. The less glaring manifestations he never detects. His uncle, Sogliardo, does not achieve this level, and he stalks down amenities already discarded by the town as old-hat, such as smoking. The soldier Shift, like his name, will revert to any profession for money; of all chicanery he prefers parading himself as a brave fighter. A few minor figures complete the sketches.

All these eccentricities, improbable as they sound, in performance look more sinister than the self-indulgence of fools. The metaphoric strands begin to establish a pattern for criticizing conduct. Often desire for the recherché is linked with disease, “Plagu'd with an itching leprosie of wit” (Second Sounding, 68), so that it balloons in time as more than a quirk, an identification reinforced by the figurative feeding of humour and by the widespread translation of vanity into gluttony. A third condemnation through metaphor, the invective of animal names, a touch glancingly present in the first two plays, here emerges with a suggestion of the ferocity which turns Volpone into the snarling pit it is. In the image of the humours as a flood, on whatever level they are manifest, Jonson happened upon a device which, if one accepts Bergson, underlies most comedy: the mechanical. This term, within a range of meanings, has defined the comic from Dryden to the present. A stream of humour is, perhaps, the quickest explanation of the inability to adjust one's behavior. Taking his cue from this figure, a director might still gather together a troupe of comedians dedicated to their art who could subject themselves to the rigorous demands of this play and by stylization surmount its imperfections. If the suggestion sounds like armchair strategy, consider who would have seen in Le chapeau de paille d'Italie quite the comedy René Clair coaxed from the Labiche farce by converting the bourgeois into billiard balls bumping each other as they chase under the propulsion of their private drives.

The possibilities of Jonson's talent do not culminate at so easy a level; the very arrogance with which he shoved his plays before the public betrays uncertainty about their pedigrees. Every Man out of His Humour is scarcely a play, but that effect in itself may be not unintentional. The Elizabethan theater surely was less illusionistic than the picture-frame stage is; its very structure carried elements of abstraction which tended to push it toward allegory.¹⁴ Jacobean dramatists thrashed around as tortuously to carry off a realistic representation of action as modern ones do to revive myth and symbol behind the proscenium arch. In the construction of the humour comedies the problem is to rule out cosmic overtones but to keep unobtrusively present the realization that these monsters are men. A chorus helps to mediate between the antitheses; it both creates the scene and believes in it. Unlike the Greek chorus, it does not suffer indirectly; unlike a Chinese stage manager, it does not control the plot. It is the function of the three men to comment on the bizarre behavior of those upon the stage. The give and take between the two groups is quite free. For example, the play begins with a discussion by the three, Mitis, Cordatus, and Asper. Asper himself, who rails heavily against audiences, becomes the actor playing Macilente, the principal humour figure. At the end of the play he rejoins the chorus in Macilente's garb but claims his identity as Asper. The theatrical impact of this doubling is obscure. An extended study of the considerable number of Elizabethan plays-within-plays and of the stage used as a stage ought to establish a more nearly just view of the drama beyond the crude interpretations based on only realistic representations.¹⁵ Here, without worrying too nicely, one can distinguish several advantages which accrue to this shifting of stage effects. With the chorus Jonson tried to hold together the nearly footling pile. Rather than ignore this potential limitation, he capitalized upon it. Two characters named Clove and Orange once amble into view. Although they indulge themselves in some pretentious nonsense, nobody, thanks to his domination by the humours, hears them. They are explained by the chorus.

MIT.
What be these two, signior?
COR.
Mary, a couple sir, that are meere strangers to the whole scope of our play; only come to walke a turne or two, i' this Scene of Paules, by chance.

(III. i. 16-19)

One may safely assume that Jonson was not just filling up a page by the explanation. It has an ulterior purpose. The loose construction fits in with the rationale, indeed serves to point it up. Although it emerges strongly from the play itself, because it has so long been missed, an indication of the background may localize it more effectively. In spite of all that has been made of Jonson's reading, the really influential impact it made on his dramaturgy has been overlooked.

From a plethora of echoes one can deduce that Jonson was devoting not a little of his study to the works of Erasmus, chiefly Moriae Encomium, for Every Man out of His Humour and Cynthia's Revels. The sort of borrowing he did relies less on the type already swelling footnotes, that of lifting now and then a few lines or of adapting an extended scene, than of taking over a formal abstraction and giving it a human shape. For example, the setting of Every Man out of His Humour is the Insula Fortunata, a label usually read as a cipher for England. Folly, however, also claims the Fortunate Isles as her birthplace:

Quod si locum quoque natalem requiritis, quandoquidem id hodie vel inprimis ad nobilitatem interesse putant, quo loco primos edideris vagitus, ego nec in erratica Delo, nec in undoso mari, nec ἐν σπέσσι γλαφυροῖσι sum edita, sed in ipsis insulis fortunatis, ubi ἄσπαρτα καὶ ἀνήροτα omnia proveniunt.¹⁶

Jonson's style might have copied the trick of piling on details from Erasmus' slyly mocking prose. Amplification as a rhetorical flourish distinguishes both high medieval and early Renaissance Latin; the influence cannot be isolated as distinctly Erasmian. One idea, however, seems to have fathered a direct descendant.

Si quis histrionibus in scena fabulam agentibus personas detrahere conetur, ac spectatoribus veras nativasque facies ostendere, nonne is fabulam omnem perverterit, dignusque habeatur, quem omnes e theatro velut lymphatum saxis ejiciant? … Verum eum errorem tollere, est fabulam omnem perturbare. Illud ipsum figmentum et fucus est, quod spectatorum oculos detinet. Porro mortalium vita omnis quid aliud est, quam fabula quaepiam, in qua alii aliis obtecti personis procedunt, aguntque suas quisque partes, donec choragus educat e proscenio?¹⁷

These sentiments are voiced, of course, by Folly who, whatever her inconsistencies, always favors illusions. Jonson may have been trying by several ways, the diffuse plot, sardonically named characters, blatant chorus, and finally, an assumption comparable with Erasmus', to underline the fact that these humours, affectations though they may be, are, after all, but pretenses in themselves, shadows of shadows of deviations. Rather than weaken the mockery, the device emphasizes the sterility in folly. How the adult actors may have responded to this aspersion is not recorded, but the next plays, Cynthia's Revels and Poetaster, were performed by, and obviously written for, the Children of the Chapel. The differences suggest Jonson realized that, resolute as Every Man out of His Humour might be in its daring, its acrobatics stretch out the humour concept to dangerous limits. Cynthia's Revels has a modified and better integrated axis upon which its episodes turn.

Of all the 1616 folio comedies Cynthia's Revels probably pleases least any modern reader. Jonson's blatant exploitation of an experiment is borne out by the Prologue.

In this alone, his Mvse her sweetnesse hath,
Shee shunnes the print of any beaten path;
And proues new wayes to come to learned eares:
Pied ignorance she neither loues, nor feares.
Nor hunts she after popular applause,
Or fomie praise, that drops from common iawes. …

(Prologue, 9-14)

His innovations might be recognized for what they are, had he polished them less. Instead, they incorporate a host of traditional materials along with the original so smoothly that they look less unusual than they are. For Cynthia's Revels he rearranged the whole stock of effects which stood him in good stead up to this time. The construction displays to advantage the ventures so far explored and, because circumstances unlocked different approaches for him, considerably advances his art. While lacking the exploratory vigor of Every Man out of His Humour, it combines episodes in a painstaking execution seldom congenial to novelties. Those commentators who have heeded the warning of the Prologue have failed to look beneath the immediate implications. They divide the action into three parts: the mythological business involving Cupid and Mercury, a static satire on the court, and the final masque. Properly understood, the play is as much of a piece as the other three. This is not to say that it is good, but its faults stem from flaws less superficial than those allowed it.

In reading any of Jonson's plays one must start from the Elizabethan stage itself. No matter how detailed might have been the preparation of the text for quarto publication and no matter how many emendations he may have appended to the folio, the stage itself first engaged him. The fact that he composed Cynthia's Revels with “the Children of her Maiesties Chappell”¹⁸ in mind and that they first performed it, whereas the preceding two were by the Lord Chamberlain's men, bears directly on the interpretation. The arguments of the children in the Induction, which capitalizes on the arch precociousness of the boy actors, set the theme at once and are caught up by the opening with Cupid and Mercury, two young gods. All these prepare the way for accepting episodes involving human adults in miniature. Although it is hazardous to speculate on what Elizabethans themselves made of these children, Jonson, for his own taste, required special apologies to disguise them acceptably as adults. The Children also acted The Case Is Altered and Epicene. The former, probably, was not originally designed for them, but merely revived later. The second, though, has the same lightness of language and touch which marks Cynthia's Revels. Poetaster, also done by them, is in every sense an exceptional play. Lyly had earlier created a style suitable for the Children; one is always surprised by the felicity with which Jonson pursued and captured the most elusive forms of Elizabethan literature, such as masques and lyrics. In Cynthia's Revels the infants exploit adult failings; the “games” by which the bored courtiers kill time gain a sharper sting if one recalls that boys actually took part. The search for fragile social refinements underscores an immature, ephebic quality. The maskings and unmaskings again expound the theme with the added travesty of children in carnival dress. Just as Every Man out of His Humour has actors portraying people whose affectations make actors out of them, so the children become adults who behave like the young. The main problem of the satirist is fixing a point from which to gauge ridicule, a scale Jonson later abandoned by gliding, as does Swift in A Tale of a Tub, from improbability to improbability so gracefully that no pause exists outside the material for a critical evaluation. Here the children themselves furnish that center. Finally, by employing the boys Jonson apparently felt himself free to give women, whose roles they always performed, a more important function than in any earlier plays or in any later ones until Epicene.

The plot itself at first glance looks slighter than Every Man out of His Humour; it can hardly be traced. The scene is an imaginary kingdom, Gargaphie, specifically the court of a Queen Cynthia, a cipher, as she so often is, for Queen Elizabeth.¹⁹ A group of false courtiers have somehow invaded her palace. Most of the action, if that term is not misleading, shows them waiting for water from the fountain of self-love and for an evening's entertainment, a masque. In the masque itself they impersonate the virtues whose opposing vices they embody. Cynthia discerns the deception and with a sternly maternal attitude punishes them. The affinities with Every Man out of His Humour are numerous, a hint again being furnished by the arrangement of the cast listings in the quarto. This time they are paired across the page by numbers: 3, 5, 7, etc., on the left and 2, 4, 6, etc., on the right.²⁰ Cynthia, as 1, centered on the page, heads both columns. They range downward from demigods, through the loyal courtiers, to the pretenders, and the mutes. An effort to keep the men on the left and women on the right almost succeeds. As before, appearance and social triumphs, those traits which began with the servant Onion and became a major preoccupation, carry the dominant theme. Juniper's vices of speech, rarefied and precious, are likewise scourged. In place of the chorus of Every Man out of His Humour, Crites, the maker of masques, and Arete, Cynthia's favorite, comment upon and eventually manipulate the episodes. Like a less assured Musco, Cupid and Mercury steer along the complications.

Having once restricted himself to all the limitations of a humour comedy, Jonson did not repeat himself. Perhaps the metaphor of humour as a stream proved too restricting. Whatever the reason, the images with which affectations are compared include more objects. Water recurs figuratively, but as the dedicatory letter to the court announces, it should be a source to refresh the land: “TO THE SPECIALL FOVNTAINE OF MANNERS: The Court. THou art a bountifull, and braue spring: and waterest all the noble plants of this Iland. In thee, the whole Kingdome dresseth it selfe, and is ambitious to use thee as her glasse.” (Dedication, 1-8) A fountain literally introduces the play and figuratively sustains it. Instead of the humours' being dammed up and spilling over, the vice becomes self-love, which a narcissistic gazing must induce. The humours, properly mixed, fulfill their function, but otherwise they incite frantic activity; the fountain, comparably, nourishes self-respect, but it can become a stagnant pool for idleness. If the characters of Every Man out of His Humour often fail to observe others because they are so intent on themselves, those of Cynthia's Revels, because they are so intent on themselves, worry excessively about their impressions on others. Consequently, the voice, whose treachery has been assumed in all the plays since The Case Is Altered, increases its scope. Water and fire most frequently serve as the vehicles in metaphors for humours in Every Man out of His Humour; those of Cynthia's Revels also compare them to air and, sometimes, earth. Like nightingales, these people are vox et praeterea nihil or mere lumpish clods.²¹ They exist as insubstantial pipings or as shapeless matter which tosses back a senseless echo. Within this concept Jonson's style, although not yet refined to its keenest resilience, achieves a convincing drive, a quality whose traits have been described in a wholly different satirist: “Mr. Connolly will invent a character—a Communist pansy, an arch young girl, the hero of an Aldous Huxley novel or a self-immolating member of a future totalitarian state—and allow it to possess him like a demon, carrying him away to lengths that are hilarious and a little hysterical.”²²

Jonson's symbols are rewarding once one investigates them; unfortunately, the most common assumption has simply been that they are so obvious that they require only a nodding glance. For example, after the Induction the story opens with a bit of mythology. Cupid and Mercury, while traveling together, free Echo from being bound to Narcissus. She curses the pool which destroyed him, and it becomes the fountain of self-love. As she fades away, the tourist Amorphus, on his way to Cynthia's court, enters. The belief has run that here Jonson merely indulged himself in a flight of clipped-wing fancy. Actually, by shaping traditional material to his own ends, he points the direction of what he is saying. The demigods do, of course, serve on one level to introduce the subject to the audience through the children, who already were quarreling in the Prologue. This explanation fails to mention why specifically the Echo-Narcissus story was selected; its suitability should be apparent from what has already been said about the water metaphors. One must look deeper to explain the other mythology in this scene: references to Actaeon, whom, when he burst upon Diana bathing in her pool, the shy goddess turned into a stag, and to Niobe, who with ineluctable feminine pride boasted herself superior to a goddess because she had fourteen children, while Leto had but two, and, in consequence, suffered having all her sons and daughters slain and herself turned to a constantly weeping stone. One essay has defined aspects of this business.²³ Actaeon may, indeed, hint a parallel with Essex, who entered Queen Elizabeth's chamber before she was ready to receive him, and Niobe may, likewise, signal that insolence which defies sovereigns who rule by divine right. Analyzing the play and its literary backgrounds tells more about the reason for the choice of these myths than conjectures based on historical intrigues.

When Niobe's children were shot down, Diana (Artemis) and Apollo, the numerically smaller but militarily stronger children of the offended Leto, launched the arrows. In Cynthia's Revels Crites and Arete symbolically perform identical functions for Cynthia. Their association with these gods is pointed out directly. “Chiefe next Diana, virgin, heauenly faire, / Admired Arete” (V. v. 51-52); after this link Crites addresses his prayers for assistance in making the masque to Apollo, his patron. Presenting Echo also permits a rhetorical device, a reply made with the final syllables of the last word spoken. The trick derives from Ovid, “forte puer comitum seductus ab agmine fido / dixerat: ‘ecquis adest?’ et ‘adest’ responderat Echo.”²⁴ This quickly wearisome trope had been well engrained into the English poetry of a period when crude ingenuity was too often prized for its own sake: Gascoigne, Sidney, Lodge, Heywood, Dekker, and Webster, all copying Ovid, indulged in it.²⁵ It achieves a pigeonhole in the rhetoricians' categories: Epanalepsis, or the Echo Sound, otherwise the Slow Return.²⁶ Jonson puts the device through its special paces. By itself this figure of speech could claim to be no more than a momentary flourish. There appear to have been several plays about Narcissus in English; at least one survives and extant notes describe another.²⁷ In both of these a hunting scene, reminiscent of Actaeon's chase, occurs. The combination boasts an honorable pedigree; in Ovid, just before the story of Echo and Narcissus, stands Actaeon's. Here again Jonson pulls together many divergent, but related, strands and shapes them for one coherent effect. The four mythological images at the beginning (Actaeon, Niobe, Echo and Narcissus, and Cupid and Mercury) balance with the four pairs of abstract virtues and vices in the masque of the fifth act, so that symbolic myths enclose the satire on the court of Gargaphie.

Structural coherence does not ensure achievement. The plot itself scarcely moves. What the play, under the new device, gains in unity, it loses in flexibility. After Cupid and Mercury dispatch Echo, they follow Amorphus to Cynthia's court. There the group, upon hearing of the powers of the newly cursed fountain of self-love, send a servant to bring them a sample of its water. It takes an unconscionably long time arriving. Meanwhile, because, Asotus apart, all the courtiers, whose names are adapted from the Moriae Encomium, have achieved whatever they wish, there is none of the frantic climbing which kept Every Man out of His Humour lively. The Echo-Narcissus theme further limits them; they display themselves in static attitudes until at the end they are unmasked. Moreover, in the folio text a number of dreary scenes are inserted so that whatever barbs the original had are weighted down by too many feathers.²⁸ Nevertheless, granting all this, one can isolate the design beyond the wastes of the nearly interminable character sketches of the original second act and the overwhelmingly stuffy “duello” interpolated into the last. The ingenious extension of the Echo-Narcissus story suggests best what Jonson had hoped to accomplish.

A common observation in the satire of the time assigned gulls the habit of repeating phrases. Chapman, for example, exaggerated in An Humorous Day's Mirth:

LE.
Marry thus sir, he will speake the very selfe same word, to a sillable after him of whome he takes acquaintance, as if I should say,
I am marueilous glad of your acquaintance, He will reply,
I am maruailous glad of your acquaintance,
I haue heard much good of your rare parts & fine cariage,
I haue heard much good of your rare parts & fine cariage,
so long as the complements of a gentleman last, he is your complete ape.

(This prediction occurs with a bluntness as deafening to the ear as the preceding typography was flat to the eye.)

LE.
I shall be glad to be commanded by you.
BLAN.
I shall be glad to be commanded by you.
LE.
I pray do not you say so.
BLAN.
I pray do not you say so.(29)

Jonson modulated his passages considerably beyond this crude attack. Echo herself preserves the Ovidian trait; when she leaves, her repetitions are inherited by Amorphus.

AMO.
I am neither your Minotaure, nor your Centaure, nor your Satyre, nor your Hyaena, nor your Babion, but your mere trauailer, beleeue me.
ECC.
Leaue me.

(I. iii. 4-7)

Such phrasing is pursued intentionally at court by Asotus, who eagerly allows Amorphus, the two being a “reciprocall brace of butter-flies” (I. iv. 77), to tutor him for social prominence. Initially he repeats the stilted lines, but if he forgets them, at a loss for words, he echoes himself. When he actually delivers himself of one of his foolish set pieces in public, circumstances suddenly intrude. “Now, by this watch (I marle how forward the day is) I doe vnfeignedly vow my selfe (s'light 'tis deeper then I tooke it, past fiue) yours entirely addicted, Madame.” (IV. iii. 39-41) In preparing for a game of words, Substantives and Adjectives, an adumbration of Cadavre Exquis, Asotus becomes an echo with a short memory:

AMO.
Giue forth your Adiectiue, with the rest; as, prosperous, good, faire, sweet, well—
HED.
Any thing, that hath not beene spoken.
ASO.
Yes, sir: well-spoken, shall be mine.

(IV. iii. 101-4)

Thus the mythological and social, the figurative and literal, again join: the Slow Return.

Ridiculing sound without sense runs through all the acts, observable both by what characters say and by direct judgments. Echo is, literally, “meerely made of voice” (I. ii. 94), but Moria, whose imprecisions of expression match Juniper's and who as the oldest and silliest woman sets the pattern, is “a lady made all of voice, and aire, talkes any thing of any thing.” (II. iv. 14-15) Another woman, Phantaste, is “of a most curious and elaborate straine, light, all motion, an vbiquitarie, shee is euery where. …” (II. iv. 99-101) Argurion, discussed on page 8 above, fits into this same pattern. Narcissism has wide implications for the false courtiers: “His eye and his rayment confer much together as he goes in the street … and when he is most neat, and new, you shall strip him with commendations.” (II. iii. 113-18) Both excesses grow from the pretenders' inability to feel any love for another person, as Echo complains in an elaborate conceit that had Narcissus bothered to regard her, rather than his pool, she would have wept so that, seeing himself in her tears, he would have caught his more nearly true reflection. This self-love extends further to match Niobe's boast: “what neede wee gaze on Cynthia, that haue our selfe to admire?” (V. x. 45-46) The subtle change from the humours, where most of the pretenders were affected so that they might become what they admired, to this, where they are wholly infected with self-love, marks the fine calibration of the Jonsonian scale on which differences of degree merge almost imperceptibly into those of kind. In Every Man out of His Humour, though not before, such elements were implicit in scattered expressions, similar to the echo trope. When Puntarvolo, pretending to be a lost knight, asks for the master of the house before his own home, the comment is that a mirror should be dropped down to him. One anticipation of the echo device shows Sogliardo, swept along by his humour, catching part of a word and immediately turning it into another:

CAR.
You must talke much of your kinred, and allies.
SOG.
Lies! no Signior, I shall not neede to doe so, I haue kinred i'the city to talke of. …

(I. ii. 66-68)

Despite this careful patching into patterns, Jonson does not bring off the whole. Cynthia's Revels remains paralyzed while the characters seek praise from each other for doing nothing. Many comedies of manners display people inherently no brighter who are more amusing. The dogged refusal to allow the empty heads an iota's wit beyond their powers betrays the work, Jonson's only one which can be so blamed, into what one critic has termed the imitative fallacy. Effete boredom, despite the reductio ad absurdum to which it is pushed, produces, in general, boredom. The courtiers spend most of their time praising their past bons mots and devising fairly elaborate encounters in which their pathetic cleverness will become at best a tawdry adornment; many of these include improbably large casts to feed crucial cues. The projected interchanges, puerile as they are, never occur.

The discontinuity between the stream of humour and the fountain of self-love as sources of affectation leaves the motivation nearly inexplicable. The theory of the humours survives in the main. Crites, the good poet, possesses virtue because he is “a creature of a most perfect and diuine temper. One, in whom the humours and elements are peaceably met, without emulation of precedencie. …” (II. iii. 123-25) What actually does determine behavior fades into vagueness. The metaphoric reliance upon humours diminishes, but the fountain of self-love, which was the main title of the quarto version, cannot be substituted forcefully enough. The contradiction that all the cast already is quite intoxicated by self-love detracts from the principal line of what effects the waters may produce. For example, in the concluding masque³⁰ Philautia, standing for self-love, acts Storge, who is “naturall Affection, which giuen vs to procure our good, is somtime called Storge, & as euery one is neerest to himselfe, so this hand-maid of reason, allowable selfe-loue, as it is without harme, so are none without it. …” (V. vii. 26-30) Allowable self-love, if one can quite believe it, becomes analogous with the humours when they mix properly. Just as the humour characters have one kind of excess, which grows with feeding, so too these courtiers, inflated already with pride, can become only more monstrous by, literally and figuratively, drinking the water from Narcissus' fountain. When Cupid's shafts fail to penetrate them, the climax of a process operative at the start is realized.

Otherwise, the standard remains appearance, and the mistaken substitute the clothes for the wearer. The dangers of deception change; earlier, anyone not embroiled in his own preoccupations could detect disguises no matter how lavish the cloth. Unmasking interposes new difficulties. Amorphus promises to demonstrate “how cleerly I can refell that paradox, or rather pseudodox, of those, which hold the face to be the index of the mind, which (I assure you) is not so, in any politique creature. …” (II. iii. 12-15) The extended practice of this duplicity begins the process which, strictly controlled, leads to the great comedies and, when let wander at random, peters out as nearly inexplicable sentimentality. This complexity reverses the standard of The Case Is Altered and Every Man in His Humour where the leading characters were, in the main, capable of working their ways toward positive goals. In Cynthia's Revels each step confirms them more in their follies. The long sketches of the second act, incorporating character portraits like those prefixed to Every Man out of His Humour, often assume the allegorical strain necessary to connect creatures so attenuated with an atmosphere of playful indolence. The idly invented games, while unforgivable dramatically, have a mordant force when understood as ineffectual echoes of learning and manners. The final masque stresses that such temperaments depend upon continual outward change no matter what it embodies. The debilitating effects of travel are harshly ridiculed as another aspect of the desire for novelty. The humourists, at least, find satisfaction in being what they ape; the courtiers need, within their social playground, unending diversions to amuse themselves.

In spite of these darker intrusions, the whole effect produces a lighter comedy than Every Man out of His Humour, commensurate, perhaps, with the more delicate performances which the Children were capable of. For example, the pervasive animal metaphors which fill the great comedies and which begin tentatively in Every Man in His Humour here refer to brightly colored or harmless aspects. The rhythm of the prose itself slows down to explore lazy ingenuity. While the pretenders of the first humour comedy had to vent their manias and drives in vigorous assertions, the victims of self-love appreciate their own discourse and linger over it to shape it while speaking. Behind such bemusement a strong satiric drive prevents Cynthia's Revels from being a mere puppet show by children for relaxing adults. Bitter references to disease throughout the play remind one constantly that bodies are not air and voice, but that they sicken, wither, fail, and rot, just as Narcissus did and as a state governed by stupidity can.

Cynthia's role introduces a new force. She sweeps upon the scene as an absolute power, a ruler whose raised voice chastises or corrects. This sway repeats the one which she claimed at the first ending of Every Man out of His Humour. Jonson's motives in providing Elizabeth this function need not be questioned too persistently. Throughout his career he assigned kings a divine right, which might, under unhappy circumstances, be corrupted, but which, when united with a vigorous mind, bends to itself all possible strengths and virtues. He shared with his waning century a beautiful belief in a fallacy which an historian has described: “Skeptical as to the existence of unicorns and salamanders, the age of Machiavelli and Henry VIII found food for its credulity in the worship of that rare monster, the God-fearing Prince.”³¹

For Jonson the homage transcended ulterior motives, however much royal favor voicing such a creed may have won him. The question was crucial for his art: on what did the authority of his position as poet and satirist ultimately rest? Beneath the surface of the earlier comedies a hesitancy mars the sure style with prosaic moralizing, which rings false, like a poet thinking officially against his better insights. No matter how much or how little he believed or wanted to believe the assertive declamations, they run to excessive lengths. First mere righteousness as common sense sufficed to correct; then a carefree magistrate cajoled the reluctant; finally the humours themselves canceled each other with the queen the final positive. Here, all virtue rests with Cynthia herself; she it is who orders the pseudoliturgical confession of secular sins at the end. The finicky tone throughout Cynthia's Revels hints that Jonson may have found the humours a bit too common, as does Crites' musing on man

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.

(I. v. 36-39)

Perhaps it was well that at this point he had to catch himself up short. He ran the risk of abandoning dramatics for singing hymns to pure goodness.

Notes

1. Claims of this sort by publishers cannot be trusted, but this one must be quite reliable.

2. James G. McManaway, “Latin Title-Page Mottoes as a Clue to Dramatic Authorship,” The Library, Fourth Series, XXVI (1946), pp. 28-36. For an attempt to make a little too much of this evidence see Robert Boies Sharpe, “Title-Page Mottoes in the Poetomachia,” Studies in Philology, XXXII (1935), pp. 210-20.

3. Johnstone Parr, “Tamburlaine's Malady,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, LIX (1944), pp. 696-714.

4. For a discussion of “humour” see James Bradstreet Greenough and George Lyman Kittredge, Words and Their Ways in English Speech (New York, 1901), pp. 30-31.

5. Edmund Wilson, Note-books of Night (San Francisco, 1942), p. 9.

6. Charles Read Baskervill, English Elements in Jonson's Early Comedy (Austin, Texas, 1911), pp. 107-43. This study continues to be useful; various insights that it puts forth have confirmed my generalizations.

7. George Chapman, An Humorous Day's Mirth, edd. David Nichol Smith and W. W. Greg (London, 1937), sig. A_2r.

8. This interpretation of the humours has been, in part, suggested by two articles: Henry L. Snuggs, “The Comic Humours: A New Interpretation,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, LXII (1947), pp. 114-22; and John C. McGalliard, “Chaucerian Comedy: The Merchant's Tale, Jonson, and Molière,” Philological Quarterly, XXV (1946), pp. 343-70.

9. W. W. Greg, “The First Edition of Ben Jonson's Every Man out of His Humour,” The Library, Fourth Series, I (1920), pp. 153-60.

10. After all these years, there seems no point in connecting Joyce's evolution of the stream of consciousness with Jonson's style. Joyce apparently admired Jonson, but too many ancestors for the stream of consciousness have already been championed. See, for example, Leon Edel, The Psychological Novel (New York, 1955), pp. 22-35.

11. Episodes in the plot are borrowed from various sources; see especially Herford and Simpson, IX, pp. 455-57, 472-73.

12. For a study of the names see Allan H. Gilbert, “The Italian Names in Every Man out of His Humour,” Studies in Philology, XLIV (1947), pp. 195-208.

13. Ben Jonson, Every Man out of His Humor (London, 1600), sig. A_1v. All citations of the quartos are from copies in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. The 1616 folio readings are from my copy.

14. George Kernodle, From Art to Theatre (Chicago, 1944). This discussion of the complex background of the Elizabethan stage seems essential for understanding it.

15. An illuminating study of certain aspects appears in the unpublished University of Wisconsin dissertation (1956) by David Laird, “The Inserted Masque in Jacobean Drama.”

16. Erasmus, Stultitiae Laus, ed. I. B. Kan (The Hague, 1898), pp. 10-11.

17. The same, pp. 48-49.

18. Ben Jonson, The Fovntaine of Selfe-Love or Cynthias Revels (London, 1601), title page.

19. Elkin Calhoun Wilson, England's Eliza (Cambridge, 1939), pp. 273-320.

20. The quarto Cynthia's Revels, sig. A_1v.

21. Herford and Simpson, I, p. 406, modify this phrase in the introduction to Cynthia's Revels.

22. Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials (London, 1951), p. 284.

23. Ernest William Talbert, “The Classical Mythology and the Structure of Cynthia's Revels,” Philological Quarterly, XXII (1943), pp. 193-210.

24. Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, p. 150.

25. John Webster, Complete Works, ed. F. L. Lucas (London, 1927; 4 vols.), II, pp. 195-96.

26. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, edd. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936), p. 200.

27. See Clinton H. Collester, “Narcissus Plays Distinguished,” Modern Language Notes, XX (1905), pp. 134-38, and Narcissus, ed. Margaret L. Lee (London, 1893).

28. Ben Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, ed. Alexander Corbin Judson (New York, 1912), pp. viii-ix, discusses some of these changes.

29. George Chapman, An Humorous Day's Mirth, sigs. A_3r-A_3v.

30. Allan H. Gilbert, “The Function of the Masques in Cynthia's Revels,” Philological Quarterly, XXII (1943), pp. 211-30, points out the importance of this part of the play.

31. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York, 1926), p. 102.