SOURCE: Shenk, Robert. “The Habits and Ben Jonson's Humours.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8, no 1 (spring 1978): 115-36.

In the following essay, Shenk responds to critic James Redwine's analysis of Jonsonian humors characterization as primarily moral, but goes further and shows that the notion of habit or custom, the backbone of seventeenth-century morality, played a key role in Jonson's dramatic theory.

Ill habits gather by unseen degrees,— As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas. 

—Ovid

I

In 1961, ELH published an article by James D. Redwine, Jr., entitled “Beyond Psychology: The Moral Basis of Jonson's Theory of Humour Characterization,” which argued rather convincingly that Jonson's emphasis in characterization by humour was not so much psychological or aesthetical as instead primarily moral.¹ Many things that are known about Jonson and his art support such a view. However, despite the service which this critic performed in opening or widening the...