Jonson’s first comedy, Every Man in His Humour, is a key to all his dramas.  The word “humour” in his age stood for some characteristic whim or quality of society.  Jonson gives to his leading character some prominent humor, exaggerates it, as the cartoonist enlarges the most characteristic feature of a face, and so holds it before our attention that all other qualities are lost sight of; which is the method that Dickens used later in many of his novels. Every Man in His Humour was the first of three satires.  Its special aim was to ridicule the humors of the city.  The second, Cynthia’s Revels, satirizes the humors of the court; while the third, The Poetaster, the result of a quarrel with his contemporaries, was leveled at the false standards of the poets of the age.

The three best known of Jonson’s comedies are Volpone, or the Fox, The Alchemist, and Epicoene, or the Silent Woman.  Volpone is a keen and merciless analysis of a man governed by an overwhelming love of money for its own sake.  The first words in the first scene are a key to the whole comedy: 

(Volpone)
Good morning to the day; and next, my gold! 
Open the shrine that I may see my saint.
(Mosca withdraws a curtain and discovers piles of
gold, plate, jewels, etc.)
Hail the world’s soul, and mine!

Volpone’s method of increasing his wealth is to play upon the avarice of men.  He pretends to be at the point of death, and his “suitors,” who know his love of gain and that he has no heirs, endeavor hypocritically to sweeten his last moments by giving him rich presents, so that he will leave them all his wealth.  The intrigues of these suitors furnish the story of the play, and show to what infamous depths avarice will lead a man.

The Alchemist is a study of quackery on one side and of gullibility on the other, founded on the mediaeval idea of the philosopher’s stone,[155] and applies as well to the patent medicines and get-rich-quick schemes of our day as to the peculiar forms of quackery with which Jonson was more familiar.  In plot and artistic construction The Alchemist is an almost perfect specimen of the best English drama.  It has some remarkably good passages, and is the most readable of Jonson’s plays.

Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, is a prose comedy exceedingly well constructed, full of life, abounding in fun and unexpected situations.  Here is a brief outline from which the reader may see of what materials Jonson made up his comedies.

The chief character is Morose, a rich old codger whose humor is a horror of noise.  He lives in a street so narrow that it will admit no carriages; he pads the doors; plugs the keyhole; puts mattresses on the stairs.  He dismisses a servant who wears squeaky boots; makes all the rest go about in thick stockings; and they must answer him by signs, since he cannot bear to hear anybody but himself talk.  He disinherits