[In the following essay, McCabe argues that the Greek writer Theophrastus was the dominant influence on Jonson's theory of humors as displayed in Every Man in His Humour.]

I

The Characters of Theophrastus were tolerably well known throughout the sixteenth century, but their popularity was greatly enhanced in 1592 by the publication at Lyons of Isaac Casaubon's scholarly edition, Characteres Ethici, sive Descriptiones Morum, in which the Greek text was complemented by a Latin translation of notable concision and eloquence.¹ Reissued in 1599 in a slightly enlarged form and with the translation running parallel to the original, Casaubon's edition was destined to supplant its predecessors as the most authoritative and accessible text available. It inspired the first formal English character-book, Joseph Hall's Characters of Virtues and Vices (1608), and served as the basis for the first English translation of Theophrastus by John Healey (better known for his celebrated version of St. Augustine's City of God) in 1616.²

Any assessment of Casaubon's impact, however, must come to terms not merely with his establishment and translation of the Theophrastan text, but also with the highly influential prolegomena responsible for the pervasively moral interpretation of the work by its early imitators. Casaubon accepted the authenticity of the moralizing preface, supposedly appended by Theophrastus himself, which asserts the wholly didactic intention of the Greek characters. In his ninety-ninth year, having ‘conversed with all sorts of natures bad and good’ and compared the two, the ‘author’ has decided to ‘set down in this discourse their severall fashions and maners of life’ in the hope that ‘our children will prove the honester and better conditioned, if we shall leave them good precedents of imitation: that of good children they may prove better men’.³ This was at least plausible since Theophrastus was the pupil of Aristotle and analagous ‘characters’ were perceived to occur both in the Rhetoric and the Nicomachaen Ethics.⁴ Casaubon also accepted the late moralizing conclusions which had become attached to eight of the characters. The caviller, for instance, is to be avoided like a serpent, the inventor of bogus news is a liar whose occupation is ‘entirely pitiable’ (misera est istorum vita et conditione), and the garrulous man should be shunned like the carrier of fever.⁵ It was undoubtedly this exaggerated note of high seriousness that persuaded Ben Jonson, always so anxious to defend his aesthetic labours on moral grounds, of the potential value of the Theophrastan character as a partial antidote to the Puritan attack upon the alleged obscenity of the contemporary stage.

It has long been believed, however, that the text of Theophrastus was not readily available in England before 1600, too late to have substantially influenced the published versions of either Every Man out of his Humour (1600) or Cynthia's Revels (1601). Thus Volpone (1606/07) is normally cited as the earliest instance of such influence. Even Benjamin Boyce who produced the most thorough study of the whole matter gave only grudging attention to the possibility that the earlier plays might be similarly indebted.⁶ J. W. Smeed, author of the most recent study of the Theophrastan genre, essentially endorses Boyce's opinion.⁷ Yet there is no good reason to suppose that a major classical text published at Lyons in 1592 by a scholar of international repute would remain unknown to English readers for over a dozen years, and in any case there were many earlier editions of the characters incorporating both the spurious preface and the moralizing interpolations.⁸

Whereas one might grant that a number of other classical influences ranging from Horace to Martial may have helped to inspire the list of ‘characters of the persons’ appended to Every Man out of his Humour, Theophrastus undoubtedly served as the dominant model. Jonson's attempt at precisely defining the nature of each character's ‘humour’ in advance, is not one we have encountered before and certainly suggests the more rigorous methods of the character form. That the resulting sketches are not in fact as precise as those of Overbury or Earle is a matter of little consequence since the same might with some justice be said of Theophrastus himself. Nor is the theory of humours by any means inconsistent with the requirements of the Theophrastan genre, for according to Jonson's Asper, a humour is essentially ‘a quality of air, or water’ with the two ‘properties’ of ‘moisture and fluxure’:

                    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.(9)

The words commonly overlooked in this definition are ‘by Metaphore’—at no point in the play does Jonson engage in a technical analysis of the traditional four humours, and they are never even mentioned in his list of ‘characters’. What is emphasised, however, is the one ‘peculiar quality’ which so possesses a man as to cause his ‘affects’, ‘spirits’ and ‘powers’ ‘all to run one way’. This, of course, was the stock-in-trade of Theophrastus for whom slander is ‘a bias of the mind towards evil-speaking’ (my emphasis) and all of whose subjects seem incapable of freeing themselves from various ingrained habits of thought.¹⁰ The author of the spurious preface asserts that he will demonstrate ‘one by one, all the various types into which men are divided, and show how they manage their affairs’.¹¹ This is the essence of the Theophrastan character: to display a fixed or obsessive state of mind in action—and this is also what we find in Jonson. In the case of Macilente, for example, we are presented with a man who has all the advantages of being ‘well parted, a sufficient Scholler, and trauail'd but whose failure to obtain a position suitable to his abilities has caused him to fall into ‘such an enuious apoplexie, with which his iudgement is so dazeled, and distasted, that he growes violently impatient of any opposite happinesse in another’ (III, 423). Similarly, Deliro's malady is attributed not to an excess of bile or phlegm but to his being so ‘besotted on his owne wife, and so rapt with a conceit of her perfections, that he simply holds himselfe vnworthy of her. And in that hood-winkt humour, lives more like a suter then a husband’ (III, 424). Jonson also draws a further distinction between real and ‘affected’ humours, between an actual bias of the mind and a completely conscious affectation:

ASPER:
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.
CORDATUS:
He speakes pure truth now, if an Idiot
Haue but an apish, or phantasticke straine,
It is his Humour.

(III, 432)

Many of the protagonists in Every Man Out of his Humour are of this second type. So too are many of the characters described by Overbury, whose ‘Affected Traveller’ is ‘a speaking fashion; he hath taken paines to bee ridiculous’.¹² Indeed the character-writers often refer to their types as ‘humours’. Translating Theophrastus' garrulous man, for example, Healey writes that ‘so his humour be advanced, he's contented to be flouted by his very boyes.’¹³ Of Hall's ‘Vaine-glorious’ we learn that ‘all his humour rises up into the froth of ostentation’ and other characters from the same collection are sufficiently ‘humour’-ridden to be cited in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.¹⁴ Earle's ‘Staid Man’ is ‘well poised in all humours’ while, his ‘Blunt Man’ is ‘one whose wit is better pointed than his behaviour, and that coarse and unpolished, not out of ignorance so much as humour’, and is moreover ‘exceedingly in love with his humour.’¹⁵ In the prologue to The Alchemist (l. 9) Jonson puts the matter in proper perspective when he asserts that the term ‘manners’ has been virtually displaced of recent years by the more fashionable ‘humours’.

According to Benjamin Boyce the function of Jonson's ‘characters’ was ‘primarily practical, not aesthetic’ and ‘the word used was “character” in the ordinary sense, not “Character”.’¹⁶ The titlepages of the first, second, and third quartos, however, announce ‘the seuerall Character of euery Person’ as a special feature of volumes specifically designed to present ‘more than hath been publickely spoken or acted’. In all cases the characters concerned supplement a separate list of dramatis personae. Their very presentation distinguishes them from a mere list of ‘characters’ in the ordinary sense of that term. Moreover, the closer one examines the resulting sketches, the clearer it becomes that the descriptions go far beyond the merely practical exposition of information deemed necessary for our understanding of the play. It is not simply a question of defining different qualities but of presenting a skilful series of the ‘character-in-action’ vignettes so beloved of Theophrastus. Indeed, we hear that Mitis is ‘a person of no action, and therefore we haue reason to affoord him no Character’ (III, 427, my emphasis). The ‘character’ of Shift is a case in point:

A Thred-bare Sharke. One that neuer was Souldier, yet liues vpon lendings. His profession is skeldring and odling, his banke Poules, and his ware-house Pict-hatch. Takes vp single testons vpon othes, till Doomes day. Falls vnder executions of three shillings, and enters into fiue-groat bonds. He way-layes the reports of seruices, and connes them without booke, damming himselfe he came new from them, when all the while he was taking the dyet in a bawdy house, or lay pawn'd in his chamber for rent, and victuals. He is of that admirable and happy memory, that he will salute one for an old acquaintance, that he neuer saw in his life before. He vsurps upon cheats, quarrels, and robberies, which he neuer did, only to get him a name. His chiefe exercises are, taking the Whiffe, squiring a Cockatrice, and making priuy searches for Imparters.

(III, 426)

For all ‘practical’ purposes Shift's nature might well have been more expeditiously defined—simply as a ‘thred-bare Sharke’, for instance—but Jonson is not interested in mere definition. His aim is that of Theophrastus, to set before us ‘one by one all the various types into which men are divided, and show how they manage their affairs’. He wants to set before us the sort of life a ‘thred-bare sharke’ actually leads and all the local colour, pithiness, vitality, and wit so typical of the Greek characters are surely to be found in the resulting sketch, albeit on a lesser scale. It is true that we detect no verbal echoes of the original but what is important—and was to continue to be of importance throughout the seventeenth century—is the adoption of the Theophrastan method. Compare, for example, the various ‘shifts’ of Theophrastus' ‘Mean Man’:

When he has been shopping he carries the vegetables from the market himself in a fold of his gown. He stays indoors while his coat is at the cleaner's. If a friend of his is raising a public subscription and has mentioned it to him, should he see him coming he will turn down a side street and go home by a roundabout way. If his wife has brought a dowry, instead of buying a maid for her, he hires from the women's market a slave to attend her when she goes out. He wears shoes that are patched, and says they are as strong as horn.¹⁷

Allowing for the different times of composition, the similarity of method is indeed striking and Jonson's sketches of Puntarvolo, Carlo Buffone, Fastidious Brisk, Deliro, and Clove are all cast in the same mould.

II

In the second act of Cynthia's Revels Cupid and Mercury retire to the background to comment upon the various people who pass before them thereby providing another, and this time more elaborate, gallery of characters. In itself, of course, the device of pageant and commentary is not new—it abounds in the formal verse satire of the late fifteen-nineties—but what is unusual here is the sheer length and sophistication of the sketches themselves. Boyce asserts that ‘the familiar Jonsonian interests in constructing characters out of real and imagined “humours” together with the ‘allegorical intention’ of the play and the influence of verse satire sufficiently account for ‘the seven pretentious, static descriptions of people spoken by Mercury’.¹⁸ But the very fact that they are ‘pretentious’—in the sense of deliberately drawing attention to themselves—and ‘static’—in the sense of being deliberately set apart and distanced from the action—indicates just the opposite. Of Anaides, for example, we hear,

Tis impudence it selfe, Anaides; one, that speakes all that comes in his cheekes, and will blush no more then a sackbut. … He will censure or discourse of any thing, but as absurdly as you would wish. His fashion is not to take knowledge of him that is beneath him in clothes. Hee neuer drinkes below the salt. Hee do's naturally admire his wit, that weares goldlace, or tissue. Stabs any man that speakes more contemptibly of the scholler then he. Hee is a great proficient in all the illiberall sciences, as cheating, drinking, swaggering, whoring, and such like: neuer kneeles but to pledge healths, nor prayes but for a pipe of pudding tobacco. He wil blaspheme in his shirt.

(IV, 68-9)

This bears comparison with anything in Theophrastus. All that is missing is the opening definition of the quality itself, its place being supplied by the identification of Anaides with impudence and the singling out of shamelessness (he never blushes) as the essence of the type. Significantly, despite being spoken by a god, the passage is cast in prose, not verse. Jonson is imitating Theophrastus both in style and method: if we reject these characters we must reject much of Overbury and Earle on the same grounds.

Describing Amorphus, Cupid tells Mercury that he will give him his ‘character’ (IV, 72) and it is obvious from what follows (a passage identical in style and scope to the description of Anaides) that the word is being used in its technical sense. Similarly, when Mercury sees Phantaste, Moria, and Philautia approaching, he interrupts Cupid's description of Argurion (another character sketch in the by-now-familiar mould) with ‘peace, Cupid, here comes more worke for you, another character or two’ (IV, 76). Just a few moments later he breaks in upon the description of Moria to indicate his appreciation of the genre itself: ‘that was pretty and sharply noted, Cupid’ (IV, 77)—perhaps the first such approval on record of the sort of wit destined to be the hallmark of the character for over a century. There can be no doubt, therefore, as to what is happening. Just as Wycherley borrowed Molière's famous portrait scene for his Plain Dealer many years later, Jonson has constructed a ‘character scene’ in order to dramatize Theophrastus.¹⁹ The original Characters were the product, according to their preface, of observation and wise comment, and here those two elements are presented to us dramatically. The ‘characters’, each of them, as their names indicate, typical of some good or bad quality, appear before us, betray themselves, and depart, leaving the two gods to ‘characterize’ what has been presented. If these descriptions, ‘pretentious’ and ‘static’ as they are, are not ‘characters’ there remains little point to the entire episode.

Within the ‘character scene’ itself Amorphus, Asotus, and Cos travesty the behaviour of their betters when Amorphus undertakes to present, ‘the particular, and distinct face of euery your most noted species of persons, as your marchant, your scholer, your souldier, your lawyer, courtier, etc.’ (IV, 70) What follows is a variation on the Theophrastan genre suggested by the ancient art of physiognomy: a series of swift, witty descriptions of various facial expressions indicative of their owners' characters. But the distinguishing feature between this and the more elaborate survey conducted by the gods is its complete lack of moral purpose. Amorphus, who, as his name indicates, is all things to all men, is not interested in discovering the truth about himself or anyone else. He imitates rather than analyses his chosen subjects, presenting only surface reality since in his philosophy only the surface, the ‘distinct face’, matters:

let your soule be assur'd of this (in any ranke, or profession what-euer) the more generall, or maior part of opinion goes with the face, and (simply) respects nothing else. Therefore, if that can be made exactly, curiously, exquisitely, thorowly, it is inough.

(IV, 71)

By contrast, Cupid and Mercury function, like Theophrastus, to expose their chosen subjects in all their folly, so as soon as Amorphus departs they give us his ‘character’ (such is the term Mercury uses) also: ‘one so made out of the mixture and shreds of formes, that himselfe is truly deform'd’ (IV, 72). In this power of penetration lies the moral use of the Theophrastan genre.

But not all Jonson's characters involve scathing attacks on vice and folly. One, the character of Crites, stands out from the rest as a portrait in temperance and virtue. For this there existed no Theophrastan model, only the assertion of the spurious preface that such characters had formed part of the original design. Casaubon accepted this statement at face value, lamenting the loss of the ideal types. Thus inspired, Jonson inserted amongst his gallery of rogues the character of a virtuous man, a character which, in its insistence upon inner spiritual qualities, was to become the pattern for many later writers:

His discourse is like his behauiour, vncommon, but not vnpleasing; hee is prodigall of neyther. Hee striues rather to bee that which men call iudicious, then to bee thought so: and is so truly learned, that he affects not to shew it. Hee will thinke, and speake his thought, both freely: but as distant from deprauing another mans merit, as proclaiming his owne. For his valour, tis such, that he dares as little to offer an iniurie, as receiue one. In summe, he hath a most ingenuous and sweet spirit, a sharp and season'd wit, a straight iudgment, and a strong mind.

(IV, 74)

In order to introduce this sketch Jonson also draws upon the traditional theory of the four humours thereby establishing the physiological background to Crites' ‘perfect and diuine temper’. Like Shakespeare's Horatio, Crites is one, ‘in whom the humours and elements are peaceably met, without emulation or precedencie: he is neyther to phantastikely melancholy, too slowly phlegmaticke, too lightly sanguine, or too rashly cholericke’. In terms of moral contrast, therefore, the character of Crites serves the end ‘Theophrastus’ suggested it should, for before the long-delayed entrance of Cynthia Crites functions to a large extent as the moral norm of the play. His ‘character’, both in action and description, is the one against which all others must be judged.

III

At this stage one might well ask whether contemporary readers were alive to the possibility of Theophrastan influence as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century. Such evidence as we possess would suggest that they were. Writing around 1599-1600, for example, John Hoskins tells us in his Directions for Speech and Style that Sidney had ‘much help out of Theophrasti Imagines’ (the Characters) in writing the Arcadia and proceeds to supply an ethical key to the work with this in mind. We are to find ‘proud valor in Anaxius; hospitality in Kalander; the mirror of true courage and friendship in Pirocles and Musidorus; miserableness and ingratitude in Chremes; fear and fatal subtlety in Clinias' and so on for each of the protagonists. ‘In these persons’, Hoskins adds, ‘is ever a steadfast decency and uniform difference of manners observed’, for in order to ‘truly set down a man in a figured story’ the writer must first learn ‘truly to set down an humor, a passion, a virtue, a vice’.²⁰ If such ideas occurred to a reader of the Arcadia, where the ‘characters’ in question might well be thought too absorbed in the action to display any hint of Theophrastan influence, how much more likely was the association to be made when the author himself offered a ‘static’ gallery of types and, in the case of both plays, used the term ‘character’ to describe them?

Hoskins credits Theophrastus with an entirely ethical or moral influence on the Arcadia; all of the types identified have been drawn, in Hoskins' opinion, with a clear didactic intent. This provides us with an interesting insight into the sort of author Theophrastus was held to be: Hoskins twice couples his name with that of Aristotle. Sidney would doubtless have approved of such a reading since it reflects his own attitude towards classical literature.²¹ It was the universal applicability of imaginative writing (or ‘poetrie’) combined with its power to ‘move’ the passions that in his opinion rendered it superior to philosophy and history, and it must surely have been these same two qualities that recommended the Theophrastan Characters so powerfully to his contemporaries. According to Aubrey's Brief Lives, Jonson warmly acknowledged Hoskins' role in his own aesthetic development even to the extent of presenting himself as his literary ‘sonne’.²² However that may be, his admiration for the Directions for Speech and Style is beyond question since he incorporated sizable sections virtually verbatim into his own rhetorical treatise Timber.²³ Thus there is every likelihood to suppose that Hoskins' work directly inspired the addition of ‘characters’ to the printed texts of Every Man out of his Humour.

There can be little doubt that Jonson knew Theophrastus long before he wrote Volpone and most probably in the edition of Isaac Casaubon.²⁴ There was an old tradition stemming from Diogenes Laertius that Theophrastus was the teacher of Menander, father of the classical style of comedy towards which Jonson himself aspired, at least in theory. Not surprisingly Casaubon emphasised this connection between character-writing and comedy in his prolegomena:

Itaque plurima invenias in his brevibus reliquiis, quae veluti tabulae e naufragio superstites utcunque remanserunt, ex quibus hujus operis cum poetis, scenicis maxime & comicis, quos esse optimos exprimendorum morum artifices scimus, affinitas percipi queat.

(p. 6)

Throughout Casaubon's long and elaborate commentary upon the Characters the reader's attention is often drawn to similarities of thought and style between Theophrastus and the Greek and Roman comedians, and the obvious affinity between characters observed in real life and the dramatic characters seen on the stage is constantly exploited by most of Theophrastus' English imitators. Hall's hypocrite, for example, is ‘the worst kinde of Player, by so much as he acts the better part’ and his ‘Vaine-glorious’ is ‘a Spanish Souldier on an Italian Theater’.²⁵ Overbury tells us of ‘An Excellent Actor’ that, ‘all men have beene of his occupation: and indeed, what hee doth fainedly that doe others essentially’.²⁶ Theophrastus and his imitators drew their ‘characters’ from the theatre of the world. Totus mundus agit histrionem was the motto of the Globe.

‘To informe men, in the best reason of liuing’ (V, 20), one remembers, was the ideal upheld by Jonson in the preface to Volpone, a preface specifically designed to counter allegations that the theatre was a source of moral corruption. It is an ideal not greatly dissimilar to that of ‘Theophrastus’ as set forth in the spurious, if universally accepted, ‘preface’. Casaubon's consolingly moral interpretation of the Characters combined with the traditional insistence on their relationship to Greek comedy must surely account in a large measure, therefore, for Jonson's inclusion of so many characters in Cynthia's Revels, as also for the more boldly self-advertising list of ‘characters of the persons’ appended to Every Man Out of his Humour. The presence in both plays of a stage satirist (Asper/Macilente and Crites) determined on exposing vice wherever he finds it, only serves to make the association all the more potent. But Theophrastus, it has been objected, ‘never departed so far from the role of observer towards that of the reformer’.²⁷ This is quite true, he did not; nor did he ever write the moralising preface which bore his name for so long. The opinions and discoveries of modern classicists must not, however, be anachronistically attributed to the contemporaries of Ben Jonson. Casaubon was internationally acknowledged as one of the finest classical scholars of his day and for the purposes of this discussion his view is the one that matters. The Theophrastus presented to the world by Casaubon was exactly what Boyce denies him to have been, a reformer of manners:

de moribus enim hominum hic agitur, et ad bene honesteque vitam degendam nobis hoc scripto praeire Theophrastus voluit: quo nihil est, φιλοσοφικώτερον, nihil philosopho dignius.

(p. 5)

From Jonson's viewpoint it was not merely the philosophy but its practical application that proved irresistible. Indeed, it may well be that the characters appended to Every Man out of his Humour serve an even more practical purpose than has hitherto been suggested. Like Shaw, his great successor in the theatre of ideas, Jonson was a very precise dramatist, precise in declaring the specific aims and intentions of his art and wary of misguided interpretations. Aubrey tells us that he ‘was never a good Actor, but an excellent Instructor’.²⁸ We know from contemporary evidence that English actors were sometimes tutored in their parts by the dramatists concerned.²⁹ Jonson's characters are generally regarded as intended solely for readers, for those whose acquaintance with the play is primarily of the study, not the stage. Examined from the actors' viewpoint, however, they provide invaluable insight into the nature and motivation of the roles to be undertaken. The traditional relationship between Theophrastus and Menander may thus have alerted Jonson to the possibility of preserving normally ephemeral authorial ‘directions’ within the guise of the Theophrastan genre. If the play is to succeed either in public performance or private imagination the ‘humours’ must be exact: Deliro must be ‘a good doting Citizen’, Sogliardo ‘an essentiall Clowne’, and Sordido ‘a wretched hobnail'd Chuffe’. By proceeding to illustrate such types with reference to contemporary manners after the Theophrastan fashion, Jonson assists both reader and actor to apprehend them in concrete terms. His ‘characters of the persons’ may take us closer to Renaissance ‘direction’—allowing for the obvious anachronism of the term—than any other single document to have survived.

To a lesser extent the same is true of Cynthia's Revels, a play enacted entirely by boys. Here, however, Jonson has developed his technique by attempting to integrate his characters into the body of the text. As a result, they provide much the same insight as before, but tend to impede the dramatic momentum of the play. The experiment was never to be repeated on the same scale. Thereafter, in plays such as Volpone and Bartholomew Fair, Jonson's use of Theophrastus proved a good deal more subtle, but this subtlety is best understood as the product of conscious experiment in earlier dramatic works.

Notes

1. Wendell Clausen, “The Beginnings of English Character-Writing in the Early Seventeenth Century”, Philological Quarterly 25 (1946) 32; 38.

2. Richard A. McCabe, Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (Oxford 1982) 110-31; Healey, Epictetus Manuall, Cebes Table, Theophrastus Characters (London 1616).

3. Characters, translated by Healey, pp. 2-3.

4. Benjamin Boyce, The Theophrastan Character in England to 1642 (Cambridge, Mass. 1947) 11.

5. Theophrasti Characteres Ethici … cum Notis et Emendationibus Isaaci Casauboni et Aliorum, edited by Peter Needham (Cambridge 1712) pp. ix, xix, xliii. All further references supplied in the text are to this edition.

6. Clausen (above n. 1) 38; Boyce (above n. 4) 99-107. For a fuller statement of this outlook see Edward Chauncey Baldwin, ‘Ben Jonson's Indebtedness to the Greek Character-Sketch’, MLN 16 (1901) 193-8.

7. The Theophrastan Character: The History of a Literary Genre (Oxford 1985) 201-2. Smeed dismisses the claims of Every Man out of his Humour but is prepared to consider Cynthia's Revels.

8. For Theophrastus's later influence see Edward Chauncey Baldwin, “The Relation of the English Character to its Greek Prototype”, PMLA 18 (1930) 412-23. On the basis of Baldwin's research (pp. 418-21), Clausen (above n. 1) 38 concludes that ‘Casaubon's 1599 edition, and not, as commonly supposed, his 1592 edition, circulated in England’. However, as none of the parallels quoted for Hall derive from the five characters first added in 1599, the claim is unsubstantiated. In any case, Baldwin's suggestions of indebtedness are sometimes misleading. He finds allusions in John Earle's ‘Sordid Rich Man’ (first published in 1629) to Theophrastus's ‘Avaricious Man’, a character first discovered and published in 1786.

9. Works, edited by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn M. Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford 1925-52), III (1927), 431-2. All further references supplied in the text are to this edition by volume and page.

10. Theophrastus, The Characters, translated by Philip Vellacott, (ed. 2 Harmondsworth 1973) 57.

11. The Characters, translated by Vellacott, p. 61.

12. The Overburian Characters, edited by W. J. Paylor (Oxford 1936) 11.

13. Healey, Characters, p. 31. See also p. 94.

14. Hall, Works (London 1634) 172-3; 176; 180; The Anatomy of Melancholy, edited by Holbrook Jackson, 3 vols (1932), I, 265; 286; 290.

15. Microcosmography, edited by Harold Osborne (London 1933) 95-6; 103.

16. Boyce (above n. 4) 100.

17. The Characters, translated by Vellacott, p. 52.

18. Boyce (above n. 4) 102.

19. Edward Chauncey Baldwin, “The ‘Character’ in Restoration Comedy”, PMLA 30 (1915) 77-8.

20. Directions for Speech and Style, edited with an introduction and notes by Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton 1935) 41-2. See also John Buxton, “Sidney and Theophrastus”, ELR 2 (1972) 79-82. Buxton points out that one of Sidney's Humanist friends, Henri Estienne, had edited the Greek text of the Characters (p. 80).

21. Elizabethan Critical Essays, edited by G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford 1904), I, 165-6.

22. Louise Brown Osborn, The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns 1566-1638 (New Haven 1937) 103.

23. Directions, edited by Hudson, pp. xxvii-xxx, xxxix.

24. For Jonson's knowledge of Casaubon's other works see Works, I, 52, 146; II, 344; VII. 342; X, vii-x, 526.

25. Works (1634) 169, 176.

26. Overburian Characters, edited by Paylor, p. 77.

27. Boyce (above n. 4) 103.

28. Aubrey's Brief Lives, edited by Oliver Lawson Dick (ed. 3 London 1958) 275.

29. David Klein, “Did Shakespeare Produce his own Plays?”, MLR 57 (1962) 556-60. Some of the evidence is drawn from Jonsonian texts including Cynthia's Revels (pp. 556-7).