art in opposition to the prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance spirit.  Jonson believed that there was a professional way of doing things which might be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these examples for the most part among the ancients.  To confine our attention to the drama, Jonson objected to the amateurishness and haphazard nature of many contemporary plays, and set himself to do something different; and the first and most striking thing that he evolved was his conception and practice of the comedy of humours.

As Jonson has been much misrepresented in this matter, let us quote his own words as to “humour.”  A humour, according to Jonson, was a bias of disposition, a warp, so to speak, in character by which

    “Some one peculiar quality
    Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
    All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
    In their confluctions, all to run one way.”

But continuing, Jonson is careful to add: 

    “But that a rook by wearing a pied feather,
    The cable hat-band, or the three-piled ruff,
    A yard of shoe-tie, or the Switzers knot
    On his French garters, should affect a humour! 
    O, it is more than most ridiculous.”

Jonson’s comedy of humours, in a word, conceived of stage personages on the basis of a ruling trait or passion (a notable simplification of actual life be it observed in passing); and, placing these typified traits in juxtaposition in their conflict and contrast, struck the spark of comedy.  Downright, as his name indicates, is “a plain squire”; Bobadill’s humour is that of the braggart who is incidentally, and with delightfully comic effect, a coward; Brainworm’s humour is the finding out of things to the end of fooling everybody:  of course he is fooled in the end himself.  But it was not Jonson’s theories alone that made the success of “Every Man in His Humour.”  The play is admirably written and each character is vividly conceived, and with a firm touch based on observation of the men of the London of the day.  Jonson was neither in this, his first great comedy (nor in any other play that he wrote), a supine classicist, urging that English drama return to a slavish adherence to classical conditions.  He says as to the laws of the old comedy (meaning by “laws,” such matters as the unities of time and place and the use of chorus):  “I see not then, but we should enjoy the same licence, or free power to illustrate and heighten our invention as they [the ancients] did; and not be tied to those strict and regular forms which the niceness of a few, who are nothing but form, would thrust upon us.”  “Every Man in His Humour” is written in prose, a novel practice which Jonson had of his predecessor in comedy, John Lyly.  Even the word “humour” seems to have been employed in the Jonsonian sense by Chapman before Jonson’s use of it.  Indeed, the comedy of humours itself is only a heightened variety of the comedy of manners