SOURCE: Summers, Claude J., and Ted-Larry Pebworth. “The Comedies.” In Ben Jonson Revised, pp. 27-44. New York: Twayne, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Summers and Pebworth offer a thematic and stylistic overview of Every Man in His Humour and assert that the play is not one of Jonson's more successful comedies.

Ben Jonson is among the premier writers of comic drama in the English language. Energetic and vital, gritty and satiric, Jonson's comedies are the product of a self-conscious artist who took seriously the Horatian maxim that poetry should entertain and instruct. Best known today as the author of Every Man in His Humour, [E. M. I.] Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, Jonson actually wrote many comedies during the course of a career that spanned 40 years. The 14 complete comedies that survive are extraordinarily varied, for throughout those four decades Jonson restlessly experimented with approach, point of view...