An Image of the Times: An Irreverent Companion to Ben Jonson’s Four Humours and the Art of Diplomacy 9781898823315

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AN IMAGE OF THE TIMES

The title is taken from the Prologue to Every Man in his Humour by Ben Jonson (line 24). The jacket design is The Ambassadors, oil and tempura on oak, 1533, by Hans Holbein the Younger. With kind permission from the Image and Picture Library of the National Gallery, London.

An Image of the Times An Irreverent Companion to Ben Jonson’s Four Humours and the Art of Diplomacy Z

By

NILS-JOHAN JØRGENSEN

AN IMAGE OF THE TIMES: AN IRREVERENT COMPANION TO BEN JONSON’S FOUR HUMOURS AND THE ART OF DIPLOMACY

First published 2015 by RENNAISANCE BOOKS PO Box 219 Folkestone Kent CT20 2WP Renaissance Books is an imprint of Global Books Ltd © Nils-Johan Jørgensen 2015 ISBN 978-1-898823-17-9 ISBN 978-1-898823-31-5 [eBook] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library

Set in Bembo 12 on 13.5 by Dataworks Printed in England by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wilts

In memory of John B. Bamborough (Bam) who possessed the gift of humour

OTHER WORKS IN ENGLISH BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Culture and Power in Germany and Japan: The Spirit of Renewal (2006) Four Days in January: A Letter to Jillsan (2009) North of the North Wind (2011) East of the East Wind (2012) West of the West Wind (2014)

CONTENTS Z Acknowledgements Induction

xi xiii

Chapter 1: BEN JONSON AND HIS SOURCES Classical literary sources (Decorum, the comedies of Plautus and Terence, the Ridiculous) Medieval Sources: Mystery, Morality and Interlude The Great Chain and Man as Microcosm Ancient medical theory and Renaissance psychology

1

1 17 20 27

The character sketch

38

Early Humour plays (George Chapman, Henry Porter)

45

Chapter 2: HUMOROUS CHARACTERIZATION IN THE COMEDIES OF BEN JONSON In humour Out of humour Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair

vii

55 55 67 84

viii

Chapter 3:

AN IMAGE OF THE TIMES

THE INFLUENCE OF JONSON ON SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTHCENTURY COMEDY

Richard Brome James Shirley Thomas Shadwell Colley Cibber The Sons of Ben Margareth Cavendish Aphra Behn James Miller Oliver Goldsmith Richard Brinsley Sheridan

92

92 95 99 106 109 110 111 111 113 116

Chapter 4: THE INTRUSION OF HUMOROUS CHARACTERIZATION INTO THE ENGLISH NOVEL Henry Fielding Tobias Smollett

118 118 123

Chapter 5: THE MEANING OF THE COMIC

125

Chapter 6: NOMADIC HUMOURS Where did the humours go Berlin 1900 Fabulous Hilarious An ever-closer union Identity mix-up Chameleon An exchange of notes Visiting card Holy See Sisyphean diplomatic challenge Laughter above The laughing philosopher

137 146 149 156 160 165 167 168 170 172 174 175 177 180

CONTENTS

ix

Chapter 7: UNCONSCIOUS REVELATION

184

Postscript Index

195 197

We hope to make the circles of your eyes Flow with distilled laughter. If we fail, We must impute it to this only chance: ‘Art hath an enemy called Ignorance’.1

1

Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour, Induction, 214–17.

xi

INDUCTION Z Faust enters the study together with his dog, opens the Bible and begins to agonize over the line ‘Im Anfang war das Wort!’ (In the beginning was the Word).2 He decides that Word does not convey a true meaning, abandons it, and seeks a new concept that effects and creates everything. He bypasses Sinn3 and Kraft4 as irrelevant. Then all at once he sees it clearly: Im Anfang war die Tat! (In the beginning was the Deed). Plini the Elder wondered at what age infants begin to laugh.5 Watching my new-born daughter parting her lips into a pleased and gentle expression for the first time I suggest, irreverently, that the silent beginning of life, is the smile. Any deed comes after the first smile. But is the Renaissance smile, forever present in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, not significant in Greek and Roman culture? Is smiling, as we understand it, an invention of the Middle Ages,6 emerging in the Renaissance? We can rest 2

3 4 5

6

Erich Trunz (ed), Goethe, Faust, ‘Studierzimmer’ Erster Teil, ll. 1224–37, (Wort, Logos, means Weltgeist, Weltvernunft in Greek philosophy and it was adopted by Christianity to mean die göttlische Vernunft, footnote p. 505), Christian Wegner Verlag, 1963. Mind, intellect, understanding, observation. Ability, strength Mary Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome, University of California Press, 2014, 24–5. Ibid., 73–5. In Greek, Norwegian and English the words smile and laugh come from separate etymology ( cf smîlen, hleahtor) but languages descending from Latin like French and Italian do not. xiii

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assured that the Greek and Roman infants also smiled, even if they grew up without a sense of the cultural significance. Homer gave Odysseus only a ‘grim and angry’7 smile. Jesus must have smiled as an infant and as a child in Nazareth, but the New Testament lacks references to him smiling or laughing, even as teacher and prophet.8 The former Danish Prime Minister, Jens Otto Krag, quoted Gladstone in his Diary 1971–1972, ‘politics are like a labyrinth, from the ironic intricacies of which it is even more difficult to find the way of escape, than it was to find the way into them’ then added a significant line, ‘it is as accurate as an evil smile’.9 A smile can contain and disguise any emotion, it needs interpretation, laughter reveals the emotion more openly, a quiet evil smile is more deadly than cruel laughter, a hidden smile is always secret and may be a concealed, undetected sardonic laughter. When did I become aware of the spirit and power of the smile and laughter, the culture of humour? To answer that I return to Wadham College, Oxford, in 1961. I arrived as Norway Scholar for Michaelmas term at the entrance to Dorothy Wadham’s old home that had become one of the University’s outstanding colleges, then led by the illustrious Warden, Sir Maurice Bowra, and supported by Fellow and Senior Tutor, J.B. Bamborough. Both of these men possessed the gift of humour but it was Bam (as he was called) who had studied its presence in Renaissance literature. Bam was my tutor. His book The Little World of Man gave an account of Renaissance psychological theory illustrated from contemporary sources. Psychology in the Renaissance

7 8 9

The etymology of ridere is uncertain but its root may be associated with brightness (a bright smile?). Homer, The Odyssey, OUP, 1980, XX, 301–302. Stephen Halliwell, Greek Laughter, CUP, 471. Gyldendal, 1973, 175.

INDUCTION

xv

was part of the study of medicine, philosophy and theology. It provided material for Renaissance literature, including methods and conventions of characterization. Iacta alea est. I crossed the Charwell to the Renaissance riverbank. The four humours would open the door and begin to unravel the mystery of laughter. It had taken me more than twenty years to reach the point where I began to disentangle it. I found my way to the Duke’s Room in the Bodleian Library. It led to an unwritten book and now half a century later as I blow the dust off old notes and start again, I am encouraged by the knowledge that in the good old days at Oslo University we recognized the concept of the eternal student (evighetsstudent), of Renaissance man, as something positive, even something to aim for. And, talking about Faust, it took Goethe sixty years to complete it. Faust is written in verse. Goethe creates, by using a range of different verse forms (from blank verse to alexandrines), a fundamental sound symbolism to fit and expand the images. The classical world, old German society, politics, religion, magic and love – the themes of the work are enhanced by the sound implicit in the verse. Soon after arriving in Oxford I went to Blackwell’s, bought my first book and opened an account. The temptation not just to browse in this famous book-haven, but constantly to buy new books was irresistible. Inevitably, after some time a polite letter from Broad Street would arrive in my pigeon-hole ending with a question (and not an exclamation mark): ‘May we have your cheque now?’ But the letter from the famous academic bookseller also included a moral reminder from Plato: How then, Socrates, shall we recognize the truly just and generous man? It is he who, being reminded of an obligation, is able gracefully to thank his creditor for prompting him to do his duty.10 10

Dial. Frag. Apoc.

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I thought of writing a letter of apology for the late payment but then in my bundle of notes I found one from an essay published in 1616, ‘That it is good to be in debt.’ Debt is praised for its diplomatic flexibility and interchange, ‘concord and coniunction’, of the elements. It was too good not to use it in my reply: The Elements who are linked together by a league of association, and by their symbolizing qualities, doe barter and truck, borrow and lend one to another, as being the Bursse and Royal-Exchange of nature:They are by this traffique and intercourse, the very life and nourishment of all sublunary bodies, and therefore are called Elimenta quasi alimenta.11

I duly posted the letter with my cheque. A few days later I received this reply from Sir Basil Blackwell himself: Thank you for your cheque and for your quotation from ‘Essayes of Certaine Paradoxes’. This clearly is a book on which the severest censorship should be imposed!

The four elements had caused laughter, befitting an old book-house on the Broad, still the epistolary time, before the electronic invasion. Ridiculum acri fortius et melius magnus plerumque secat res (a good joke often cuts an important deal strongly and sweetly).12 I approach the theme of laughter by looking at the development of humorous characterization in English comedy, starting at the time of Ben Jonson. I begin by looking at his sources and his comedies and trace his influence on 11

12

Essayes of Certaine Paradoxes, ed. Th. Thorp, London, 1616 (Wood 498, Bodleian). Horace, quoted on the title page in James Miller, The Humours of Oxford, 1730 (printed by S. Powell, reproduction from the British Library).

INDUCTION

xvii

seventeenth and eighteenth century comedy and the flight of his humorous characterization into the English novel. I draw parallels between the laughter in Jonson and Bergson. Laughter is now taken into neuropsychology as ‘humor works on the whole physiology and psychology of an individual, or a group. Laughter activates the entire cortex sending waves of positive and negative polarization through both hemispheres.’13 Modern psychological studies of the structure of incongruity in humour and laughter seem separated from the classical and Renaissance origins and foundations of the four elements and humours as psychological and creative instruments. This secession from the past leads into a no-man’s-land of theory. I aim to remedy that incongruity, to bridge the lacuna, by bringing back the culture of the four humours. In the second part of the book I search for the ridiculous in diplomacy, building on the insights of the first part and my own experience in, arguably, the oldest profession in the world. The four humours have moved, smoothly and almost unnoticeably, into modern psychology and diplomatic leadership and behaviour. In recent years symposia have been organized to address the relationship between diplomacy and literature, bringing practitioners and scholars, the ambassador and the author together and inviting writer-diplomats to the events, looking at the role of the envoy past and present.14 A colourful group of people appear on my stage in supporting roles, but the main actors are the playwrights and novelists, their characters in plays and novels and the non-fictional types from the diplomatic theatre of the absurd. They have much in common in a shared persiflage. 13

14

Peter Derks, ‘Twenty Years of Research on Humor: A View from the Edge’, in Chapman and Foot, Humor and Laughter, Theory, Research and Application, Transaction Publishers, 2007, xvii. The Ambassadorship of Literature, symposium at New York University, 2012.

Chapter 1

BEN JONSON AND HIS SOURCES Z CLASSICAL LITERARY SOURCES Decorum

Who soever hath bene diligent to read advisedlie over, Terence, Seneca, Virgil, Horace … he shall easily perceive, what is fitte and decorum in evrie one.15

Decorum sets down that characters in plays must behave according to their age and social position, to be defined in a fixed way by the playwright and remain within these limits.16 Cicero defined the Latin term decorum, based on a Greek word used by Pythagoras to indicate balance and appropriateness: ‘In an oration, as in life, nothing is harder than to determine what is appropriate. The Greek call it kairos; let us call it decorum.’17 Aristotle had used a similar concept, to prepon, to denote decorum. The static identity of decorum may seem anathema to serious characterization and development, what you see in the beginning is what you get in the end. Indeed, such dramatic propriety could appear suffocating, a limitation and 15 16 17

Roger Asham, Scholem, 1568. George Whetstone, ‘Dedication’ to Promos and Cassandra, 1578. De Oratore.

1

2

AN IMAGE OF THE TIMES

fencing in of the creative process, but inside the wall great comedy appeared as the expanding elements fused with a new artistic decorum. The search for Jonson’s sources begins in his library, but as Vulcan (fire) and Necessity (poverty), as he himself admits, took an unfair share of the grant he had received from Lord Pembroke, many books in the original library collection have disappeared from the records. What remains is still comprehensive and impressive. This rare stage scholar was an omnivorous reader. At the same time, his approach to books and sources made him both selective and dogmatic. His choices reveal distinct preferences and an essential part of the focus lies in the field of classical literature and neo-classical literary theory. Works by Aristophanes, Terence, Aelius Donatus, Erasmus, Julius Caesar Scalinger, Martin de Roa, Juan Luis Vives, Daniel Heinsius and George Puttenham were found on the shelves, as were works by Aristotle, Cicero and Horace.18 Of particular interest is the annotated fifteenth century manuscript of Horace’s Ars Poetica, a letter, an epistle, a reflection on art and literary propriety. The closest I got inside Jonson’s own library was to hold in my hand this book from his collection. It is an important source to help understand his preoccupation with the ancient masters of Greece and Rome, how they would influence his writing and his humorous characters. ‘At his death in 1637 he was celebrated as the founder and chief representative of an English literary culture to rival that of the ancients.’19 18

19

Apart from St. John’s College, Oxford, some of the books from Jonson’s library are now in the University Library, Cambridge; three books, Aristotle, De Poetica, Martin Roa, Singularium locorum ac rerum libri V, Cordova, 1600 and Juan Luis Vives, Opera, Basel, 1555, are held by the Library of St John’s College, Cambridge; and Scaliger’s Poetics Libri septem, Lyons, 1561, is kept by the University of Chicago Library. D.H. Craig, Ben Jonson. The Critical Heritage, Routledge, 1990, 1.

BEN JONSON AND HIS SOURCES

3

I was welcomed to the library of St. John’s College, Oxford. The annotated fifteenth century manuscript was carefully placed in front of me at the desk.20 It had Ben Jonson’s own signature. This was a renaissance moment for an enthusiastic student. It was more than circumstantial evidence, not only of ownership, but a book that Jonson had studied in detail. His confident underlinings proved his presence. In the second part of the manuscript there are annotations and monograms both by Sir John Radcliffe and Ben Jonson.21 I could detect Jonson’s hand; he had even corrected grammar and spelling. The underlinings, as in this example, indicated critical curiosity, insight and moral purpose: Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons rem tibi Socraticae poterunt ostendere chartae, verbaque provisam rem non invita sequentur. (The source and fount of good writing is wisdom. The Socratic pages can show you the matter and when it is in hand words will not be loath to follow.) Jonson highlights the qualities the playwright must establish to maintain the illusion and the attention of the audience: Non satis est pulchra esse poemata; dulcia sunto Et quocumque volent animum auditoris agunto. Ut ridentibus arrident, ita flentibus adsunt Humani vultus: si vis me flere, dolendum est Primu¯m ipsı¯ tibi; tu¯nc tua me ¯ınfortunia laedent. (It is not enough for poems to have beauty; they must have charm and lead the hearer’s soul where they will. As men’s faces smile on those who smile, so they respond to those who weep. If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself.) 20

21

Juvenalis Satyre & Horat: de Arte Poetica; It reads Sum. Ben: Jonsony. Ex dono D. Jo. Radcliffe equ: Aurati; MS 192. Entitled Horati flacci uenusinii poetae de arte poetica liber incipit.

4

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Then follows the fundamental Horatian comment on decorum in art, expressing the proper relation between speech and situation and the distinct differences between a god and a hero, an old man and a young man, a housewife and a nurse, a merchant and a farmer, and between men from different places and countries: Si dicentis eru¯nt fortunis absona dicta: Romani tollent equites peditesque cachinnu¯m. Intererit multu¯m divusne loquatur an heros: Maturusne senex an adhuc florente iuve¯ nta Fervidus: & matrona potens an sedula nutrix: Mercatorne vagus cultorne virentis agelli. Colchus an Assyrius, Thebis nutritus an Argis. (If the speaker’s words sound discordant with his fortunes, the Romans, in boxes and pit alike, will raise a loud guffaw. It will make a vast difference, whether a god be speaking or a hero, a ripe old man or one still in the flower and fervour of youth, a dame of rank or a bustling nurse, a roaming trader or the tiller of a verdant field, a Colchian or an Assyrian, one bred at Thebes or at Argos.)

Another aspect of the principle of appropriateness, decorum of genre, is given attention. This is indeed a rule that Jonson strictly obeyed as critic and dramatist. The comic and the tragic should not be mixed; the genre must remain within its appropriate frame: Versibus exponi tragicis res comica non volt: Indignatur ite¯ m privatis ac prope socco Dignis carminibusi narrari cena Thyestae: Singula quaeque locu¯m tenea¯nt sortita decentem. (A theme for comedy refuses to be set forth in verses of tragedy; likewise the feast of Thyestes scorns to be told in

BEN JONSON AND HIS SOURCES

5

strains of daily life that well nigh befits the comic sock. Let each style keep the becoming place allotted it.)

But Horace adds that sometimes the tragic and the comic laguage may overlap to convey the right feelings, ‘at times even comedy raises her voice’. Jonson had also marked the section on tradition and originality in art, which gives preference to conventional models in artistic imitation: Si quid inexpertum scenae committis et audes Personam formare novam, servetur ad imum: Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet. (If it is an untried theme you entrust to the stage, and if you boldly fashion a fresh character, have it kept to the end as it came forth at the first, and have it self-consistent.)

The remarks on convention in imitation is part of the whole concept of decorum in character and links up perfectly with the next annotation which expands the section on decorum of age to express the psychological features appropriate to the four ages of Man – childhood, youth, maturity and old age: Multa ferunt anni venientes commoda secum, Multa recedentes adimunt. Ne forte seniles Mandentur iuveni partes pueroque viriles: Semper in adiunctis aevoque morabimur aptis. (Many blessings do the advancing years bring with them; many as they retire, they take away. So, lest haply we assign a youth the part of age, or a boy that of manhood, we shall ever linger over traits that are joined and fitted to the age.)

Added to the psychological appropriateness of age the manuscript outlines the correct behaviour for the child, the unbearded youth, the grown man and the old man.

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The section on the principle of dramatic unity, the unity of beginning, middle and end, is clearly annotated with stress on the line Primo ne medium, medio ne discrepet imum (the middle is not discordant with the beginning, nor the end with the middle). Further, the parallels between creative writing and painting are noted, ut pictura, pöesis (a poem is like a picture), and the way art pleases, Haec placuit semel, haec deciens repetita placebit (this pleased but once; that, though ten times called for, will always please). The warning against the average and minor poet and publication of inferior works, Nescit vox missa reverti (the word once sent forth can never come back) is also underlined. Jonson’s translation of the Ars Poetica and the frequent references to Horace and his works both in the conversations with Drummond and in the Discoveries defines Horace as the classical inspirator who had been selected to play a main part. The Horatian rules, decorum of speech, age (and the relevant psychology and behaviour for each age), occupation, social position, nationality and genre were not challenged. To Jonson, Horace was the master of virtue and wisdom: Either follow tradition or invent what is self-consistent. If haply, when you write, you bring back to the stage the honouring of Achilles, let him be impatient, passionate, ruthless, fierce; let him claim that laws are not made for him, let him ever make appeal to the sword. Let Medea be fierce and unyielding, Ino tearful, Ixion forsworn, Io a wanderer, Orestes sorrowful. If it is an untried theme you entrust to the stage, and if you boldly fashion a fresh character, have it kept to the end even as it came forth at the first, and have it self-consistent.22

But Horace was not the only guide among the ancients. Horatian theories reached back to similar concepts in the 22

Ars Poetica.

BEN JONSON AND HIS SOURCES

7

Aristotelian writing. Jonson had strong views on ancestry and the importance of mentors and masters. Few men, he insisted, were wise by their own counsel or learned by their own teaching. Jonson’s signature and even his motto are found in some of the copies of Aristotle’s works in his library without annotations and underlining, but the importance of Aristotelian critical theory was made perfectly clear by Jonson: Aristotle was the first accurate Criticke, and truest Judge; nay, the greatest Philosopher, the world ever had: for, hee noted the vices of all knowledges, in all creatures, and out of many men’s perfections in a Science, has formed still one Art. So hee taught us two Offices together, how we ought to judge rightly of others, and what wee ought to imitate specially in our selves.23

Again, the focus is on judgment and imitation according to a set of rules. The Aristotelian comment on decorum of age, sex and nationality comes very close to the later Horatian ideal. The same standard is apparent in the four Aristotelian qualities of the dramatic character. The first point is that the character must be good. Natural goodness can be found in any type of person, independent of birth, rank and position. Thus, a slave may be portrayed as good. It is only in the ‘dramatic picture of the Ridiculous’ that the bad, unworthy or ugly characters appear. The second quality is appropriateness that outlines the differences between the sexes and, for example, rules out cleverness in a woman, but Jonson portrayed the intelligent woman (cf Sempronia in Catiline). The third requirement is to identify character with reality, the obedience to an accepted pattern of man 23

Ben Jonson, Timber: Or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter, ed. Hereford and Simpson, Vol. VIII, 640.

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in society. The final point is consistency in characterization. It rules out any change or development of character away from the original conception: ‘Even if inconsistency be part of the man before one for imitation as presenting that form of character, he should still be consistently inconsistent.’24 Hippocrates’25 essay on decorum has reference to the medical science and sets out to instruct physicians in correct manners and behaviour. The didactic aim in the treatise is moral as well as practical and the author identifies wisdom with the qualities of medicine: Between wisdom and medicine there is no gulf fixed; in fact medicine possesses all the qualities that make for wisdom. It has disinterestedness, shamefastness, modesty, reserve, sound opinion, judgment, quiet, pugnacity, purity, sententious speech, knowledge of the things good and necessary for life…26

The members of the medical profession should behave in a way proper to the religious and cultural beliefs of their society. The physician was no rebel against the religion of his day, but had ‘given place to the gods’. Hippocrates also highlights the importance of good manners and conduct by the phycisian in his relationship with the patient. The essay is not limited to the rules of conduct for the medical profession, but favours a behaviour which ‘make for good reputation and decorum … in the arts generally’.27 He issues a warning against the misuse of wisdom and the love of unseemliness, vulgarity and hypocrisy. He portrays the hypocrites in this way: 24 25 26

27

Ibid. Of Kos (460–357) Hippocrates, Works, ed.W.H.S. Jones and E.T. Wittington, Heinemann, 1923–1931, Vol.II, 287. Ibid., 299

BEN JONSON AND HIS SOURCES

9

You should mark them by their dress, and by the rest of their attire; for even if magnificiently adorned, they should much more be shunned and hated by those who behold them.28

In contrast, he highlights the ideal of a Stoic balance and modesty of behaviour. This ideal reflects the idea of the Golden Mean and points forward to the Renaissance concept of the perfectly balanced man in whom the elements and humours are equally mixed. The gang of four mainly responsible for the introduction and elaboration of the term decorum, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Cicero and Horace, did not make a distinction between a general and social, and a particular and aesthetic use of the term. The Ciceronian account of decorum is closely related to the ideas set down by Aristotle, but Erasmus, as Terentian commentator, pointed to two types of decorum of character. On the one hand was social decorum, the established rules and mirror of custom and on the other the aesthetic or artistic decorum which gave the writer the freedom of judgement to distinguish between characters, to present characters of the same general type differently, he might present two old men, of the same rank, but of opposite temperament and disposition. This difference between a social and an aesthetic approach was formulated by Erasmus in De Ratione Studii (1511). The comic writer created a vast variety of characters and situations and Erasmus illustrates this with particular reference to Terence (Andria and The Brothers). The playwright must use his own judgment: In comedy, first of all decorum must be preserved, and the imitation of common life; the emotions milder, pleasant rather than sharp. Not only must a general decorum be 28

Ibid., 281.

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regarded, namely that young people fall in love, panders swear falsely, the courtesan flatter, the old man chide, the servant cheat, the soldier brag, but also that other particular kind of decorum which the poet uses at his own judgment to distinguish a certain character from others. Just so, in the Andria he introduces two old men of wildly different natures…in The Brothers, Michio is mild in the face of chiding, and merry; Demea spiteful even towards flattery. 29

Social decorum dictates a perfect balance in manners, moral behaviour and habits and fixes rank, status, and place in society. In the ‘Prologue’ to the comedy Damon and Pithias (first acted 1565) Richard Edwardes confirms the general and social meaning of decorum even for comedy: In Commedies, the greatest Skyll is this, rightly to touché all thynges to the quicke: and eke to frame eche person so, that by his common talke, you may his nature rightly knowe: A Royster ought not preache, that were to strange to heare, but as from vertue he doth swerve, so ought his wordes appeare: The olde man is sober, the young man rashe, the lover triumphing in ioyes, the Matron grave, the Harlot wilde and full of wanton toyes.30

The stage character was given a ‘signifying badge’ by the playwright. Edwardes included the Italian pastoral poet Guarini in the list of writers who violated the doctrine: ‘Guarini in his Pastor Fido kept not decorum in making shepherds speak as well as himself could.’31 29 30

31

De Ratione Studii. Richard Edwardes, Prologue to Damon and Pithias (acted 1565), ed. E.K. Chambers, OUP, 1923. Ibid.

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Social decorum may seem an unfortunate turn towards stock attitudes and stereotype in drama, leading to limitations in characterization. The influence of this critical standard is not an error or accidence isolated from the wider intellectual climate of the day but very much a part of it. Jonson had confidently criticized even an adherent observer of classical standards like Sidney for the lack of social decorum and he did not only expect decorum of class and speech from his contemporaries but was insistent and dogmatic enough even to correct the Ancients, for example, Lucian, if the standard was not observed. Lovewit, the master of the London house in Jonson’s The Alchemist, apologizes for his breach of decorum (‘if I have outstript an old man’s gravity, or strict canon’) and Face in the same scene admits that his part ‘a little fell in this last scene, yet ‘twas decorum’.32 The demand for social decorum was strongest in tragedy, for consistency in the characterization of historical characters, but because comedy portrayed fictional characters as they appeared in real life in society it encouraged different and more flexible rules. The two kinds of decorum of characterization, social and artistic, were easily confused, mixed and ignored among commentators and playwrights alike. Shakespeare’s Falstaff violates the rules of social decorum but he is fresh and consistent within an adopted aesthetic decorum. The comedies of Plautus and Terence

Latin and Latin plays by Plautus and Terence were part of the curriculum of classical education that Jonson received at Westminster School. This was to be a fundamental inspiration for his creative development, tanquam explorator (as an explorer)33 of Greek and Latin ancestry. 32 33

V,v. Ben Jonson’s motto (taken from Seneca’s Epistles).

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Twenty (of more than fifty) plays by Plautus have survived. Pyrgopolynices in The Braggart Soldier (Miles Gloriosus) continues as Thraso in Terence’s The Eunuch and finds a successor as Captain Bobadill in Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is perhaps the most memorable braggadocio of them all. Jonson’s The Case is Altered is modelled on two comedies by Plautus, Captivi (The Captives) and Aulularia (The Pot of Gold). In this play he came closer to Shakespearean comedy like The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado about Nothing. Jonson had obtained a fifteenth century manuscript which contained the six known plays by Terence, Andria (The Girl from Andros), Hecyra (The Mother-in-Law), Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor), Phormio, Eunuchus (The Eunuch) and Adelphoe (The Brothers), now in the possession of St. John’s College Library, Oxford. Each play is preceded by a prologue.34 The influence of Terence is clearly discernible in Epicoene and The Magnetic Lady. Jonson quotes, in Epicone, the fundamental idea expressed in the Prologue to Andria that comedy must please, ‘content the people’ and again in The Magnetic Lady, he repeats populo ut placerent. Jonson adopted the thesis introduced by Aelius Donatus that the comedies of Terence divided into four parts and movements: prologue, protasis, epitasis and catastrophe. The Magnetic Lady, Epicoene and Volpone follow this structure. The plays begin with the prologue, the introductory explanation or apology from the playwright. The protasis is the introduction of the characters and the beginning of the action. 34

Hanna Ralph, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Western Medieval Manuscripts of St. John’s College, Oxford, OUP, 2002.

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The catastasis is the continuation of the conflict. The catastrophe creates resolution and restoration.35 Jonson adapted the common types of characters in Terentian comedy: young man, senex (old man), servant, parasite, soldier and courtesan, into his own plays. Carlo Buffone in Every Man Out of His Humour is a Terentian parasite. The conflicts between the generations in Every Man in His Humour reveal a strong Terentian influence but Jonson is more generous both in the treatment of the young and the old than Terence. The father is strict, but not a tyrant, and his son is intelligent and witty, but not immoral. While the love story is central in a Terentian comedy Jonson plays down this aspect and gives more space to the clever servant and the braggart soldier. It is only in The New Inn that the love story takes centre stage. The ‘old comedy’ of Aristophanes focused on social and political themes while the ‘new comedy’ of Menander, Plautus and Terence was directed more towards home and family and the father and son relationship. Scaliger helped to restore Aristophanes to his rightful position as mentor for comic drama36 and Jonson included Aristophanes in his circle of influences. Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto,37 wrote Terence. Jonson exposed society in that spirit. His knowledge of Latin saved his life after he killed Gabriel Spencer in a duel. As a literate in court he could read from the Bible in Latin and this saved him from the gallows but he was branded with the

35

36 37

Marvin T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century, University of Illinois Press, 1964, 116–29; J.B. Bamborough, Ben Jonson, Hutchinson, 1970, 137. Marvin T. Herrick, op. cit., 86. I am human, I consider nothing human is alien to me.

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letter M on his right thumb. In other words, Latin will not help you if you do this again. The Ridiculous38

It is one thing to call someone ridiculous, or insist that you are ridiculous yourself,39 but what did the Elizabethans understand by the term? The search for the source of laughter would seem to the Renaissance, as it is to us, as elusive as Livingston’s search for the origin of the Nile. Cicero introduces Julius Caesar as one of the speakers in De Oratore and he concludes, after studying the Greek masters, that anyone who tried to extract a theory of laughter could appear laughable. But Cicero lets Caesar make a suggestion that was to remain a core definition, namely that the seat 38 39

Laughable (ride¯re – laugh) ‘I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before. But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now, even when they laugh at me – and, indeed, it is just then that they are particularly dear to me. I could join in their laughter – not exactly at myself, but through affection for them, if I did not feel so sad as I look at them. Sad because they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth! But they won’t understand that. No, they won’t understand it. In old days I used to be miserable at seeming ridiculous. Not seeming, but being. I have always been ridiculous, and I have known it, perhaps, from the hour I was born. Perhaps from the time I was seven years old I knew I was ridiculous. Afterwards I went to school, studied at the university, and, do you know, the more I learned, the more thoroughly I understood that I was ridiculous. So that it seemed in the end as though all the sciences I studied at the university existed only to prove and make evident to me as I went more deeply into them that I was ridiculous.’ Fyodor Dostoevsky, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’. De Poetica, ed. W.D. Ross, Vol. XI, OUP, 1946.

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of the laughable (ridiculum) ‘lies in a certain ugliness and deformity’. When the definition by Aristotle became available in Latin (1536) it appears, not surprisingly, that Cicero’s inspiration had come from Aristotle: As for Comedy, it is (as has been observed) an imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others…40

Plato, speaking for Socrates, considered the ridiculous a revelation of ignorance and lack of self-knowledge. The principle of decorum, together with a recognition of the classical concept of the ridiculous, fundamentally make Jonson a pupil of Horace, Cicero and Aristotle. Jonson’s exposure of the ‘thoroughly ridiculous’ and his sport with human follies had solid support from the Ancients. He knew that the source of laughter was hidden in deception and surprise, but true to Aristotle he did not seek it in excess and vulgarity. He vied laughter as catharsis, to show an image, and imitate his time, with distilled laughter. Renaissance commentators on the Ancients linked concepts like admiratio (astonishment, wonder) and nova (unexpected) to the original Aristotelian turpitude. Together, these elements point forward to the suspense and the absurd turn, the incongruous behaviour that is the source of laughter in Jonson: In a feareles humor, I have anatomized the humors of mankinde, to the mouth of the honest man, it hath a most 40

Plato, Philebus, Hackett, Cambridge, 1993.

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delicate and sweet taste, but to the wicked, it is bitter as gall or wormwood.41

This is revealing at two levels. The first is the immediate link to medicine, the anatomizing of the humours. The second is the recognition that the humours can be bitter and sweet, thus embracing the idea of laughter as a bitter and salty fluid later expanded by Bergson. Jonson’s grasp of the ridiculous as the essence of comedy was defended more than a hundred years after the first appearance of Volpone: Comedy instructs and pleases most powerfully by the Ridicule, because that is the Quality which distinguishes it from every other Poem. The Subject therefore of every Comedy ought to be ridiculous by its Constitution; the Ridicule ought to be of the very Nature and Essence of it. Where there is none of that, there can be no Comedy. It ought to reign both in the Incidents and in the Characters, and especially in the principal Characters, which ought to be ridiculous in themselves or so contriv’d, as to shew and expose the Ridicule of others. In all the Masterpieces of Ben Jonson, the principal Character has the Ridicule in himself, as Morose in The Silent Woman, Volpone in The Fox, and Subtle and Face in The Alchemist. And the very Ground and Foundation of all these Comedies is ridiculous.42

It is this confidence of authority, which makes Henry Fielding declare, in Joseph Andrews, that ‘the ridiculous only…falls within my province in the present work’ and he

41

42

Simion Grahame, ‘The Anatomie of Humors’, 1609, Bodleian, Malone 645 (1). John Dennis, ‘A Defence of Sir Fopling Flutter’, pamplet, 1722.

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observed with great assurance that Ben Jonson ‘of all men understood the Ridiculous the best’.43 MEDIEVAL SOURCES: MYSTERY, MORALITY AND INTERLUDE

The first mystery plays were seen in England at the beginning of the twelfth century. Liturgical texts, sermons and devotional writing, the homiletic art, formed the basis for dialogue in Latin and rudimentary dramatic acting emerged. When Pope Innocent III, in 1250, restricted clergy to act on a public stage the organization of the mystery plays was taken over by the town guilds. The Pope’s intervention enhanced the freedom of the stage. Vernacular texts replaced Latin, actors replaced the priests and comic scenes began to appear (as in Secunda Pastorum, preserved in the Wakefield collection, one of four English anthologies). Scenes from English life, comedy and farce, were introduced. Soon these performances would move outside the church to the marketplace and the village green to reach a larger audience. Travelling companies caught and expanded the popularity. A play was often performed on a decorated cart (pageant), which was moved among different parts of town to meet public demand. The morality play originated in the folk plays, tropes, liturgical plays, miracle and mystery plays of the Middle Ages. The Castle of Perseverance44 is the earliest full-length, English, morality play (written in the first quarter of the fifteenth century) and the manuscript contains a circular stage diagram with the castle in the middle surrounded by a moat and five scaffolds. The main character Humanum 43 44

Preface. Manuscript V.a.354, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. Four Morality Plays, Penguin English Library (ed. Peter Happe), 1979.

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observed with great assurance that Ben Jonson ‘of all men understood the Ridiculous the best’.43 MEDIEVAL SOURCES: MYSTERY, MORALITY AND INTERLUDE

The first mystery plays were seen in England at the beginning of the twelfth century. Liturgical texts, sermons and devotional writing, the homiletic art, formed the basis for dialogue in Latin and rudimentary dramatic acting emerged. When Pope Innocent III, in 1250, restricted clergy to act on a public stage the organization of the mystery plays was taken over by the town guilds. The Pope’s intervention enhanced the freedom of the stage. Vernacular texts replaced Latin, actors replaced the priests and comic scenes began to appear (as in Secunda Pastorum, preserved in the Wakefield collection, one of four English anthologies). Scenes from English life, comedy and farce, were introduced. Soon these performances would move outside the church to the marketplace and the village green to reach a larger audience. Travelling companies caught and expanded the popularity. A play was often performed on a decorated cart (pageant), which was moved among different parts of town to meet public demand. The morality play originated in the folk plays, tropes, liturgical plays, miracle and mystery plays of the Middle Ages. The Castle of Perseverance44 is the earliest full-length, English, morality play (written in the first quarter of the fifteenth century) and the manuscript contains a circular stage diagram with the castle in the middle surrounded by a moat and five scaffolds. The main character Humanum 43 44

Preface. Manuscript V.a.354, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. Four Morality Plays, Penguin English Library (ed. Peter Happe), 1979.

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Genus (Mankind) is led astray by Malus Angelus (the Bad Angel) to serve World and his companions, Lust and Folly. Mankind is dressed up in fine clothes, led to the scaffold of Covetousness and accepts the seven deadly sins. Shrift and Penance intervenes and Mankind is sent to the castle of Perseverance for repentance and protection. The castle is stormed by World, Flesh and the Devil but the Seven Moral Virtues fight them back. As Mankind is about to accept an offer of wealth from Coveteousness, Death throws a dart and kills him. God accepts the intervention from Mercy and Peace, pardons Mankind and saves him from Hell. The play has a Faustian quality and the appearance of Lust, Folly, Pride, Anger, Envy, Flesh, Gluttony, Lechery, Sloth and Avarice on the stage points forward to the Jonsonian humours. The morality play, a dramatized moral allegory, was a natural progression from the mysteries but now dealing with personified abstractions of virtues and vices and not with biblical stories. The focus was on the seven deadly sins of which the early sixteenth century allegorical play Everyman (from a Dutch play Elckerlijc) is the best known. Hugo von Hofmannsthal created a similar play Jedermann. Das Spiel vom Sterben des reichen Mannes (1911) and Philip Roth, took the title for his 2006 novel. Man moved from innocence to temptation and fall, to repentance and salvation. We meet personified abstractions of virtues and vices in a battle for the soul, the psychomachia. The plays aimed to enlighten, instruct and discipline in encompassing titles like Everyman, Mankind, Wisdom and Ship of Fools45 but the moralities gradually developed more independent writing and the vices begin to enter the stage as real villains often in rude colours of comedy.46 45

46

Translated from Sebastian Brandt, Narrenschiff, 1494. The 1965 film Ship of Fools was based on the novel by Katherine Anne Porter. A version of The Mysteries (‘Nativity’) was staged at the National Theatre in 1977 (and in more recent productions).

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The interlude, the play between, developed from the moralities in the early sixteenth century. We see the beginning of comedy or at least of scabrous farce on the stage. These plays were set in private houses, in town halls and at banquets. The Vice (as opposed to vices) now appeared as a central rogue and jester, the predecessor to the Elizabetan clown and gallant. John Heywood created interludes that were close to themes in Chaucer and to the French short narratives, the fabliaux. The combination of character and type with an abstract folly and vice was already present in the moralities and the playwright could then begin to move out of abstraction into comic reality: The characters in the moralities, though called by abstract names, are often from life, and each character has a motive of action to distinguish it from the rest … by the greater nearness to actual life, by the concreteness and individualization that the abstractions take on. It is this side of medieval literature that influenced Jonson most strongly in his conception of comedy and of the types appropriate to it.47

The seven deady sins of the sermons, devotional and moral writing, the allegorical way of thinking, provoked a static and clear-cut picture of man and his behaviour and he could become indecorous or humorous if he committed one of the seven deadly sins. Pride, envy, avarice and ire emerged from a choleric humour, the indolence and inactivity of sloth corresponded to a phlegmatic humour, intemperance suggested a sanguine temper and lust, surprisingly, was nearest to a melancholy humour.

47

Charles Read Baskervill, ‘English Elements in Jonson’s Early Comedy’, Bulletin of the University of Texas, No. 178, 1911, 41.

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THE GREAT CHAIN AND MAN AS MICROCOSM

The hand-coloured map Planisphaerium by Andreas Cellarius Palatinus (1661), showing the structure of the entire world according to Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), with globus terra in the centre, illustrates a fixed Renaissance order compared to the open-ended celestial charts of the galaxies and universe(s) today.48 Cosmologists now grapple with dark energy in an expanding universe and dark matter may continue in an infinite number of universes, not ending in a gigantic circle, but in an eternal inflation and flat expansion without a final edge. Darkness is upon the face of the deep, then and now. The Chain

Man’s position in the Universe in the Elizabethan age was an integral part of the Great Chain of Being, the world picture inherited from the Middle Ages (derived from Plato and the Old Testament), then adapted in a simplified version by the Renaissance (and not yet overturned by Copernicus), ‘only the earth doth stand for ever still’.49 It is a divinely ordered, theocentric and geocentric Universe, the earth is set in the middle of heaven. God had created the elements and one element ‘is fastned in that other in such manner one susteyned the other’.50 The elements in the great chain were bound by a strict hierarchy, starting with the cold and dry earth, then the cold and moist water (the sea), the hot and moist air and finally the hot and dry fire (the stars). The elements formed ‘a circle with joined hands, continually kept in motion by their 48

49 50

Cf. dark matter in the sky map from the Planck space mission released March 2013. Sir John Davies, Orchestra, 1596. William Caxton, The Mirrour of the World or thymage of the same, 1481 (S.Seldon, d.5 Bodleian)

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mutual attraction’.51 Everything was included and connected ‘in degree, priority and place’.52 Man was placed next to the angels in a system of gradation, a hierarchy of four progressive classes. The inanimate class was at the bottom of this vertical bond, but there existed, even among inanimate objects, a marked difference in virtue and position. Thus water was of a nobler substance than earth, and gold ranked higher than lead. Indeed, gold was the King of Metals in a perfect balance of the elements. It was suggested that an artery ran down the ring finger of the left hand and a gold ring would carry the positive influence of the metal to the heart.53 The quest of the alchemists was to discover, through successive processes of refinement, the elexir that would turn base metals to gold, while simultaneously restoring the possessor’s health and beauty, and in the full-blown version of the dream, conferring eternal life.54

Thomas More was influenced by the satires of Lucian. When the Anemolian ambassadors arrive in Amaurot, the capital of Utopia, in ‘splendid adornment’ it sets the scene for a reflection on the worth of gold, used in Utopia to make chamber pots: I never saw a more remarkable instance of the opposite impressions which different manners make on people, than I observed in the Anemolian ambassadors, who came to Amaurot when I was there. Coming to treat of affairs of great consequence, the deputies from several cities met to await their coming. The ambassadors of countries lying 51 52 53

54

J.B. Bamborough, op. cit., 24. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, I. Iii. Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature, 1571 (quoted in J.B. Bamborough, The LittleWorld of Man, Longmans, 1952). Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson. A life, Oxford, 2011, 246.

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near Utopia, knowing their manners – that fine clothes are in no esteem with them, that silk is despised, and gold a badge of infamy – came very modestly clothed. But the Anemolians, who lie at a greater distance, having had little intercourse with them, understanding they were coarsely clothed and all in one dress, took it for granted that they had none of that finery among them, of which they made no use. Being also themselves a vain-glorious rather than a wise people, they resolved on this occasion to assume their grandest appearance, and astonish the poor Utopians with their splendour. Thus three ambassadors made their entry with 100 attendants, all clad in garments of different colours, and the greater part in silk. The ambassadors themselves, who were of the nobility of their country, were in clothes of gold, adorned with massy chains and rings of gold. Their caps were covered with bracelets, thickly set with pearls and other gems. In a word, they were decorated in those very things, which, among the Utopians, are either badges of slavery, marks of infamy, or play-things for children. It was pleasant to behold, on one side, how big they looked in comparing their rich habits with the plain clothes of the Utopians, who came out in great numbers to see them make their entry; and on the other, how much they were mistaken in the impression which they expected this pomp would have made. The sight appeared so ridiculous to those who had not seen the customs of other countries, that, though they respected such as were meanly clad (as if they had been the ambassadors), when they saw the ambassadors themselves, covered with gold and chains, they looked upon them as slaves, and shewed them no respect. You might have heard children, who had thrown away their jewels, cry to their mothers, see that great fool, wearing pearls and gems as if he was yet a child; and the

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mothers as innocently replying, ‘peace, this must be one of the ambassador’s fools’.55

In a scene of artistic freedom and dramatic indecorum Shakespeare lets Bassanio challenge the ‘outward shows’, the deception, vice and falshood, the entrapment and ‘guilded shore to a most dangerous sea’ represented by gold and choose the casket of the ‘meagre lead’56 instead. The next class in the ladder, the vegetative, contained the qualities of life and growth. Again, the subtle ranking of the objects made each position clear, the oak ranked higher than any other tree. The Lion was the King of Animals and ‘naturally a man is hardy as the Lion’.57 The sensitive class with the higher faculties of feeling and memory led to the rank of Man and the gift of learning and understanding. ‘Man is above all a political animal.’58 Man summed up the universe in himself. ‘Man is called a little world not because he is composed of the four elements … but because he possesses all the faculties of the universe … he possesses the godlike faculty of reason.’59 The spiritual class, represented by the angels, was linked to Man, but had no other links with the classes below. The Great Chain of Being and the elements, hot, cold, dry and moist, interacted and embraced everything: In this order hot things are in harmony with cold, dry with moist, heavy with light, great with little, high with low. 55

56 57 58 59

In Arthur Cayley, Memoirs of Sir Thomas More, London, 1808 (Utopia, Book Two, ‘On the Travels of the Utopians’). Utopia was first published in Latin in 1516 (and translated into English in 1551). The Merchant of Venice, III, ii. Godfridus, op. cit. Aristotle, Politics. Photius (810–93), Life of Pythagoras.

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In this order angel is set over angel, rank upon rank in the kingdom of heaven; man is set over man, beast over beast, bird over bird, and fish over fish, on the earth in the air and in the sea … nor from man down to the meanest worm is there any creature which is not in some respect superior to one creature and inferior to another. So that there is nothing which the bond of order does not embrace.60

Design, cosmology and ontology came together. Microcosm

The Great Chain was a vertical order with complicated rules, indeed a hierarchical class system, but it was accompanied by a horizontal net of correspondences, the concept of Man as Microcosm, which emphasized the analogy and harmony between Man and Cosmos: Man is called the lesser world, in regard of the perfect analogie and similitude, betwixt him and this greater world, wherein there is nothing whose likenesse and resemblance may not be seene in man; and this you may call the Analogicall world.61

Parallels were created between different levels in microcosm and between man, the state and the universe, between cosmic and political order.62 ‘Rain of tears’ and ‘eyes as stars’ were 60

61

62

Sir John Fortescue, Works, ed. Lord Clermont, London 1869. Quoted by E.M.W. Tillyard in The Elizabethan World Picture, Peregrine Books, 1943, 39. Henrie Cuffe, The Differences of the Ages of Man’s Life: Together with the Originall causes, Progresse, and End thereof, Merton College, Oxford, 1600, printed 1607. Cf, Thomas Blundeville’s poem ‘The learned prince’, 1580.

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popular correspondences. ‘This little World, this wondrous Ile of Man.’63 The head of man is ‘the Castle and tower of the Soule’ the sun is ‘the heart of the world, and the heart the Sunne of man’s bodie’.64 Because man, like cosmos, was a mixture of the four elements a web of correspondences and parallels appeared between microcosm, the soul and body of man, and macrocosm, (‘wilt thou see in this Microcosme or little world, the wandering planets’),65 between body politic (the state or the king) and macrocosm. As the King was the head of the State and the heart was the most vital part of Man, the King would be referred to as the Heart of the State. Each of the four humours was linked to a planet; the sanguine humour to Jupiter (‘in man’s body Jupiter helpeth to fairnesse and honestie’),66 the phlegmatic humour to the Moon, the choleric humour to Mars and the melancholy humour to Saturn (the saturnine humour). The position of each planet was seen as its house (home), ‘Jupiter’s house is good in all things, namely to peace, love, and accord’.67 The planets would influence the four elements and complexions in Man differently: In each men and women, raigneth the Planets, and every signe of the Zodiacke, and every Prime qualitie, and every Element, and every Complexion, but not in every one alike: 63

64

65 66 67

Iohn Davies, Microcosmos. The Discovery of the Little World, with the gouvernment thereof, Oxford 1603. Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia. A Description of the Body of Man. Together with the Controversies and Figures thereto belonging collected and translated out of all the best Authors of Anatomy, especially out of Gasper Bauhinus and Andreas Laurentius, 1618, 6. Ibid., 7. Stephen Bateman, 1582. Godfridus, The knowledge of things unknowne. Shewing the effects of the Planets, an other Astronomicall constellations: : : With the strange events that befall Men, Women and Children, borne under them, London, 1619 (Bodleian).

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for in some men raigneth one more, and in some raigneth another: and therefore men be of divers manners, as shall be made apparent.68

The use of manners is here identified with the original meaning of humours and not with the fashionable all inclusive cant term. The movements of the elements were seen as a dance in the universe, ‘framed by a kind of harmony of sounds’,69 an orchestra in the heavens inviting the elements to dance: Dauncing, bright lady, then began to be, When the first seedes whereof the world did spring, The Fire, Aire, Earth and Water, did agree By Love’s persuation, Nature’s mighty King, To leave their first disordered combating, And in a dance such measure to observe, As all the world their motion should preserve.70

Jonson in his plays observes and respects the ‘bond of order’ to the extent that his characters remain unchanged throughout the play. The Great Chain, fundamentally, supported his obedience to decorum. Jonson surveyed the vertical ladder of order and degree, the horizontal comparisons and the universal dance, as the collective habit of mind and incorporated the Elizabethan world picture as a fundamental poetic reference in his creative writing. Queen Elizabeth was a keen observer of astrology and astral influences. Jonson turned his interest to Galileo’s telescope (1609) and the new astronomical discoveries but allowed a light ridicule of the excesses of astrology in Volpone and Bartholomew Fair. 68 69 70

Ibid. Isidore of Seville. Sir John Davies, op. cit.

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ANCIENT MEDICAL THEORY AND RENAISSANCE PSYCHOLOGY

And much adoe, and many words are spent in finding out the path that humours went.71

The theory of humours has its roots in early Greek medicine and natural philosophy and springs from a fundamental search for the primal material, substance or element in the Universe. Thales (636–546), the astronomer and mathematician from Milet, introduced Water as the first principle and original substance. Anaximander suggested Air, Heraclitus Fire and Empedocles, the physician and philosopher, added Earth but accepted all four as equals. Heraclitus recognized the eternal change of fire into different and separate forms, ‘the transformations of Fire are, first, sea; of sea half is earth and half fiery storm-cloud’. He reasoned that everything in the world is subject to perpetual change and decay caused by inevitable clash of opposites. He unwrapped the two basic ideas of the historian’s trade, change over time and causation.72 His favourite aphorism was, ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’. He also studied human nature, dreams and emotions. ‘I went in search of myself … you will not find out the limits of the soul by travelling, even if you travel over every pole.’73 The word ‘psychology’ springs to mind. Hippocrates (460–357) separated medicine from religion and magic.74 The four elements continued in a new medical 71

72 73

74

Samuel Rowlands, Humors Looking Glasse, London, 1608 (Bodleian, Malone 598). Norman Davies, Europe. A History, OUP, 1996, 122. Quoted in Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation, Atlantic Books, 2006, 221–2. Norman Davies, op. cit., 122.

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system as the four humours in the body. The humours were conceived in exact analogy with the cosmic elements and a perfect harmony in body and soul depended on a balanced and evenly proportioned distribution. The balance of health could be disturbed by a deficiency or excess of elements and by isolation of one element from the rest of the group. The constituents would vary with the four seasons, ‘as the year goes round they become now greater and less, each in turn and according to its nature’.75 Phlegm contained the primary quality of Cold in analogy with its parental element Water and was associated with the coldest time of the year. In the same way Blood and the Sanguine humour would increase during the spring because its corresponding element Air contained the qualities of Moisture and Heat which were the qualities of the seasonable weather. With the hot weather in the summer, yellow bile or Choler developed its natural disposition to Heat, the primary quality of the corresponding element Fire: ‘And in summer blood is still strong, and (yellow) bile rises in the body and extends until autumn.’76 Finally, the dry weather in the autumn exhausted the quality of Moisture contained in the blood and black bile or Melancholy would then dominate the constitution of man. Black bile gained its distinction of dryness from the primary quality of the corresponding element Earth. ‘In autumn blood becomes least in man, for autumn is dry and begins from this point to chill him. It is black bile which in autumn is the greatest and strongest.’77 The humoral theory, introduced and explored by the Hippocratic medical school, became the central aspect of medicine for more than two thousand years. The theory 75

76 77

Hippocrates, ‘Nature of Man’, Works, ed. W.H.S. Jones, London, 1953, Vol. IV, 15. Ibid. Ibid.

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spread within the Hellenistic world and continued in Roman, Byzantine, Arabic and Chinese medicine. It finally obtained a new wave of popularity in European medicine with the Renaissance rediscoveries of ancient medical sources. The theory was not always accepted without discussion and opposition among the ancients. The Greek physician, Erasistratus, whose medical skill became known in Alexandria in the middle of the third century B.C., is the first on record to refute the humoral theory completely. The very prominent Greek medical scholar, Asclepiades, who introduced Greek medicine to the Romans at the beginning of the first century B.C., was also hostile to the doctrine. The second century (A.D.) scientist and logician, Claudius Galenus deserves the credit for preserving the theory of humours.78 His explanations became the accepted authority for successive students of medicine until William Harvey’s circulation theory. Galen’s findings were introduced into Arabian medicine and made the basis for further elaborations in the eleventh century. These extensions were translated back into Latin from Arabic. Thus the medieval European humoral tradition was linked to Galenic (and Hippocratic) theories often sifted through an Arabian temperament and scholarship. Galen’s own interpretations and explanations of the humoral theory started from a recognition of ancestry: Of all those known to us who have been both physicians and philosophers Hippocrates was the first who took in hand to demonstrate that there are, in all, four mutually interacting qualities … Hippocrates was also the first to recognize that all these qualities undergo an intimate mingling with one another.79 78

79

He was of Greek origin and his preferred written language was Greek. Galen, On the Natural Faculties, ed. A.S. Brock, London, 1916, 9.

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According to Galen moderate heat would produce blood and a sanguine complexion. Excessive heat developed yellow bile and a choleric complexion. Phlegm occured in the lungs when the quality of heat was weak and accordingly produced a phlegmatic complexion. Black bile in the spleen would abound in the autumn and promote a melancholic complexion. Galen used dissections regularly in his research. He quoted Aristotle and Plato and members of the Hippocratic school, Diocles, Philistion and Praxagoras, among authorities on humours. He points out that Praxagoras listed as many as eleven humours, but explains that this was only a refining and elaboration of the Hippocratic quartet. This kind of minutiae of the humoral theory is just a forewarning of the many Renaissance deviations into elemental obscurity.80 In ‘The Prologue’ to The Canterbury Tales a doctor appears and links medicine to astronomy: ‘The cause of every malady you’d got he knew, and whether dry, cold, moist or hot; he knew their seat, their humour and condition.’ With the discoveries of the original Galenic manuscripts in the mid-fifteenth century first-hand material became the point of departure for investigation and research in the field of humoral medicine. Galen’s genius and judgment was praised by Erasmus and mentioned by Rabelais and studied intently by Harvey as a prelude to his discovery. Thomas Linacre’s translation of Galen into Latin, in particular De Temperamentis (1517) and De Naturalibus Facultatibus (1523), introduced the humoral theory to a larger reading public in England.81 Linacre sums up the diverse field of learning which helped to shape the intellectual climate of the English Renaissance. He was a Greek scholar, physician 80 81

John Jones, Galen’s Bookes of Elements, 1574. W.T. Williamson, English Physicians of the Past, Newcastleupon-Tyne, 1923; The Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. XI; Madison, Pelling and Webster, Essays on the Life and Work of Thomas Linacre,1460–1524, OUP, 1977.

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and theologian. By combining three vast subjects Linacre epitomizes the intellectual mood of his time, the enthusiasm to add fresh and exciting detail to the theological universe. The Greek New Testament was as important to Linacre as Galen’s Hippocratic theories. The recognition of the proper relation between religion and medicine is illustrated in Simon Kellwaye’s medical treatise, A Defensative against the plague (1593). The author quotes from Ecclesiasticus on the title page, ‘God hath created meddesens of the earth, and he that is wise will not contemne them.’ A similar association between religion and medicine is found in John Jones’s work The Bathe of Bathes Ayde (1572) and The Arte & Science of preserving Bodie and Soule in Healthe, Wisdome, and Catholike Religion (1579). The works are dedicated to Queen Elizabeth because the ruler is seen as the divinely inspired protector of medicine through her rank in the universal chain. Sir Thomas Elyot’s Regimen Sanitatis Salerni (1541) was made for ‘the most noble and victorious kyng of England, and of France’. Elyot was not a physician by profession, but his reading of Galen and other ancient medical writers and his early association with Linacre inspired a medical essay ‘The Castel of Helth’ (1534). The elaboration of the humoral theory takes a marked step forward in his work, but the link with the original ancestry remains unbroken. Elyot explores the elemental Hippocratic system, the qualities of the four elements, the purifying role of Fire and introduces a new word Complexion to describe the dual composition of each element: Combination of two dyuers qualities of the foure elements in one bodye, as hotte and drye of the Fyre: hotte and moyste of the Ayre, colde and moyste of the Water, colde and dry of the Earth.82 82

Tanner 272, Bodleian.

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In this way, all four elements with their assigned qualities would be present in any person, but would be defined either as Sanguine, Fleumatike, Cholerike or Melancolyke depending on the signifying qualities. Each complexion was given a list of medical as well as emotional characteristics. This suggests a new and more conscious psychological approach to the old theory. The sanguine complexion would develop from the hot and moist element Air. Among the idiosyncrasies of the sanguine person were ‘flesshynesse, plenty and redde hair, the visage white and ruddy’ and he was likely to experience ‘dreames of blouddy thynges, or thinges pleasdant’ and he would be ‘angry shortly’. The phlegmatic complexion would arise from the cold and moist element Water and a man dominated by this complexion would show signs of ‘fatnesse, slownesse, dulnesse in learning’ and ‘slownesse of courage’. The choleric complexion came from the hot and dry element Fire and this mix would create ‘leannesse of body, blacke or darke aburne curled hair’, the person would get ‘lytell sleape’ and would dream of ‘fyre, fyghtynge, or anger’ but he would be ‘hardy and fyghtynge’ and display a ‘sharpe and quycke wit’. The ‘melancolyke’ complexion had its origin in the cold and dry element Earth and combined ‘leannesse with hardnesse of skynne’ and he appears with a white or ‘duskish’ colour of skin, his dreams would be ‘fearfull’ and he would give a ‘tymerous’ impression. He would rarely be seen ‘lawghynge’ and his angry mood would be ‘longe and frettinge’. Elyot introduces the term Humours into his work much in the sense later coined by John Jones as ‘the sonnes of Elements’, existing in the body as a kind of elemental hormones. The health of a person would depend on a fair balance of the four humours and any distortion of their distribution would upset the harmony of the body. Elyot goes on to introduce a distinction between natural and unnatural humours as when a specific humour get mixed up and is

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contaminated by one or more of the others. The sanguine humour escapes the distortion of the other humours and ranks as the natural captain in Elyot’s team of four. After all, Blood is ‘the treasure of life’. ‘Ages be foure’ in Elyot’s system links up with the principle of decorum of age in the Horatian theory. Horace had outlined the decorous behaviour of the four stages of man and Elyot adds the prevailing elemental qualities of the different ages. Together the two approaches promote an understanding of the psychological changes of age: ‘The man, whiche is sanguine, the more that he draweth into age wherby naturell moisture decayeth, the more is he colerike.’ Even the otherwise favourable sanguine humour does not escape unnatural distortion in old age. The four humours also related to the four seasons and Elyot explored this relationship in great detail for each humour, even with exact dates for their abundance and decline. Anatomy and medical science associated with Renaissance cosmography and the word anatomy was used to demonstrate any physical or abstract quality. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is an example of this use. A similar application is apparent in Simion Grahame’s The Anatomie of Humours and John Donne’s eulogy, ‘An Anatomy of the World’. The contemporary language was ‘anatomiz’d’ and the characteristics of, for example, folly, vanity, absurdity, wit, fortune, baseness and abuse were expressed in terms of anatomy. Henry Hutton’s, Follies Anatomie, T. Garzoni’s The Hospitall of Incurable Fools, Richard Braithwaite’s Times Curtaine Drawne, or the Anatomie of Vanitie, Thomas Nashe’s The Anatomie of Absurditie, John Lyly’s The Anatomie of Wit, Robert Greene’s The Anatomie of Fortune, John Andrewes’, The Anatomie of Basenesse and Philip Stubbe’s The Anatomie of Abuses are examples of the popular application of the term. ‘De corpore politico’ like Man’s body needed a diagnosis before a cure could be suggested. John Taylor’s peace

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pamphlet, ‘The Causes of the Diseases and Distempers of this Kingdom’, illustrates the application of medical terms to the state. We also find contemporary medical satires like ‘A Cure for the State’ which set out to find medical prescriptions for political disturbances. The word body is used as a collective term for the art of warfare in R. Elton’s The Compleat Body of the Art Military.The Church was included as body theologie and John Taylor’s Rare Physick for the Church sick of an Ague demonstrates neatly the extension of medical analogies. There are still stirrings of the old analogies in terms like governing body, in the Prime Minister’s image of himself as the family doctor and in a recent book title, The Elements of Eloquence.83 When Shakespeare and Jonson began to write they had at hand a humoral theory that looked like this: The elements were found in the universe as Earth, Water, Air and Fire, each element possessed two of the four primary qualities Cold, Moisture, Dryness and Heat. The four humours or complexions were the children of the elements. The melancholic humour was cold and dry like earth, formed by the gall bladder and a constituent of black bile; the phlegmatic humour was cold and moist like water, formed in the lungs and a constituent of phlegm; the choleric humour was like fire, hot and dry, formed in the spleen and a constituent of yellow bile; the sanguine humour was like air, hot and moist, formed in the liver and a constituent of blood. Each ‘roving humour’ was mingled and carried with the blood in the body. Each humour would cause distinct physical characteristics, change during the seven ages of man and be affected by food and drink. Women were seen as phlegmatic, but the playwrights made memorable exceptions. The Germans were viewed as very choleric, and

83

Mark Forsyth, Icon, 1913.

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the Frenchmen were seen as phlegmatic, slow and weak.84 The climate of the northern nations was moist and cold but the qualities of the people were ‘ample, strong, courageous, martiall, bold’.85 There is a slight paradox here as they were given choleric elements in spite of the phlegmatic climate. Fortinbras (in Hamlet) enters the stage as a very resolute and choleric Norwegian character. The Elizabethans thought that the right blend of the humours would establish the supreme character, just as the alchemist believed that a perfect metallic blend would give gold. The state of a perfect balance and harmony of the elements or humours was very rarely found in Man but the ideal established a contrast to the living reality of the four humours. The perfect, well-balanced temperament was very rare. Brutus in Julius Caesar and Mercury in Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels fits the elusive perfection: A creature of a most perfect and divine temper. One, in whom the humours and elements are peacably met, without emulation of precedencie: he is neither to phantastickely melancholy, too slowly phlegmaticke, too lightly sanguine, or too rashly cholericke, but in all so composde & order’d, as it is cleare, Nature went about some ful worke, she did more then make a man, when she made him.86

The two most extrovert humours and characters were the sanguine and the choleric while the melancholic and the 84

85 86

Arcandam (Richard Roussat?), The most excellent, profitable and pleasant book, of the famous Doctor and expert Astrologian, Arcandam or Alcandren, to finde the total destiny, constellation, complexion, & natural inclination of every man and child, by his birth. With an addition of Phisiognomy of the body humaine, tr. from French by William Warde, 1592 (Bodleian, Ashmole 556) Iohn Davies, op. cit., 63. Cynthia’s Revels, II, iii.

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phlegmatic clearly listed towards introversion. The sanguines were generous, brave, merry and amourous (‘his red lips, after fights, are fit for Ladies’).87 This humour was close to the feeling and thinking heart. As the sun was the heart of the world, the heart was the sun of the body, the seat and fountain of life, of joy, grief, anger and love. The cholerics were bold, ambitious, rash, arrogant and lecherous (‘crosse not my humor, with an ill plac’d worde, for if thou doest, behold my fatall sworde’).88 The phlegmatics were slow, lazy, cowardly and witless, but also amiable and good-tempered. The melancholics were the ‘fullest of varietie of passion’89 and appeared unsociable, suspicious, jealous, revengeful and amorous. The psychological effects of the four humours, the ‘phisiognomie of the body humaine’ was neatly summed up in 1592: The blood maketh men moderate, merry, pleasant, fayre, and of a ruddy colour, which he (i.e. Arcandam) called sanguine men. The fleame maketh men sloathfull, sluggish, negligent …and soone to have grave hayres. The choler maketh them angry, prompt of wit, nimble, inconstant, leane and of quick digestion. The melancholic humor which as it were the substance, the bottome, and lees of the blood maketh men rude, churlish, careful, sad, avaritious, deceivers, traytors, envious, fearful, weake hearted and dreamning, and imagining evill things, vexed with the trouble of the minde, as though they were haunted with a malignant spirite. These humours then may be referred unto the Phisiognomie: for by them a manne may know the naturall inclination of men.90 87 88 89 90

Shakespeare (and Fletcher?), The Two Noble Kinsmen, IV, ii. Samuel Rowlands, op. cit. ‘Epigram’. Bright, Timothy, A Treatise of Melancholy, 1586, 99. Arcandam, op. cit.

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A hot, dry, moist and cold temperament and a sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholy humour were synonymic. An Elizabethan could speak of an earthly temperament and a melancholy humour, a melancholy element and a dry humour and have essentially the same image. Robert Burton later confirmed that ‘these four humours have some analogy with the four elements, and to the four ages in man’.91 The terms decorum and humour applied to two distinct spheres of human thought; decorum was a central idea in ethics and aesthetics and the humour proper was a well-defined descriptive term in medicine (and psychology). The antique interchange between science, philosophy, theology and art gave quality to the union of decorum and humour and it also distinguishes the relationship between the two theories in the Renaissance. Hippocrates explored and defined the humoral theory but he also produced a treatise on decorum with special reference to the character and conduct of the phycisian. Aristotle had laid down the principle of decorum in De Poetica and Rhetorica and he compiled a medical treatise that observed the humoral theory. His friend Theophrastus obeyed the moral and medical theories in creating the social types of his character sketches, incorporating decorum and humour in fictional characters. Medicine, philosophy and creative writing worked hand in hand to the extent that the phycisian became a commentator on social behaviour and ultimately on aesthetics, the philosopher explored the humoral theory and expressed his theories on moral issues in harmony with medical knowledge and the writer applied these theories and combined them in his portrayal of character. The humours were growing up fast and often indecorously, with all sorts of demands and manners.92 The purity of the humours was challenged by a rich language 91 92

The Anatomy of Melancholy, New York, 2001, I, 148. As John Marston illustrates in The Fawn.

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that demanded freedom and flexibility of expression. In doing so it added to the richness and freedom of speech and preserved the variety and complexity of the four complexions. The four humours made a link between science and the humanities and gave the creative writer a new and deep pool of ideas. The ship of elements arrived, entered under London Bridge, sailed past the playhouses on both sides of the Thames, docked near Jonson’s library, entered the stage and society and began to expand as psychological humours. In his Oxford Notebooks Oscar Wilde reminded us of the wide conceptions and imagination of the classical Greek masters and how they had ‘mystic anticipations of nearly all great modern scientific truths’.93 Ancient learning was reintroduced and it meant a revaluation of the great Roman and Greek literary figures and of ancient science, in particular medical science (‘How profitable Anatomy is to Philosophers’),94 but the new ideas did not break drastically with medieval thought. The Renaissance was ‘an intensification of medieval traditions of humanistic learning and reverence for classical antiquity’.95 The elements formed a circle with joined hands, continually kept in motion and always changing. THE CHARACTER SKETCH

Theophrastus was Plato’s pupil and Aristotle’s friend. His portrayal of thirty moral types in The Characters (319 B.C.) ‘can be seen as the founding text of analytical psychology’.96 Twenty-eight of the sketches were translated into Latin by 93

94 95

96

Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks. A Portrait of Mind in the Making, Philip E. Smith, Michael S. Helfand, OUP, 1989, 12. Helkiah Crooke, op. cit., (in Chapter VII). Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492. The Year Our World Began, Bloomsbury, 2010, 141. Norman Davies, op. cit., 122.

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that demanded freedom and flexibility of expression. In doing so it added to the richness and freedom of speech and preserved the variety and complexity of the four complexions. The four humours made a link between science and the humanities and gave the creative writer a new and deep pool of ideas. The ship of elements arrived, entered under London Bridge, sailed past the playhouses on both sides of the Thames, docked near Jonson’s library, entered the stage and society and began to expand as psychological humours. In his Oxford Notebooks Oscar Wilde reminded us of the wide conceptions and imagination of the classical Greek masters and how they had ‘mystic anticipations of nearly all great modern scientific truths’.93 Ancient learning was reintroduced and it meant a revaluation of the great Roman and Greek literary figures and of ancient science, in particular medical science (‘How profitable Anatomy is to Philosophers’),94 but the new ideas did not break drastically with medieval thought. The Renaissance was ‘an intensification of medieval traditions of humanistic learning and reverence for classical antiquity’.95 The elements formed a circle with joined hands, continually kept in motion and always changing. THE CHARACTER SKETCH

Theophrastus was Plato’s pupil and Aristotle’s friend. His portrayal of thirty moral types in The Characters (319 B.C.) ‘can be seen as the founding text of analytical psychology’.96 Twenty-eight of the sketches were translated into Latin by 93

94 95

96

Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks. A Portrait of Mind in the Making, Philip E. Smith, Michael S. Helfand, OUP, 1989, 12. Helkiah Crooke, op. cit., (in Chapter VII). Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492. The Year Our World Began, Bloomsbury, 2010, 141. Norman Davies, op. cit., 122.

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Casaubon in 1592. Among the types Theophrastus selected for scrutiny we find the flatterer, the arrogant man, the ambitious man and the avaricious man, all popular humorous characters in Jonson: The Avaricious man is one who, when he entertains, will not set enough bread upon the table….When he sells wine, he will sell it watered down …. If a friend, or a friend’s daughter, is to be married, he will go abroad a little while before, in order to avoid giving a wedding present.

The Characters acted as a reminder and wake up call, renewing a long-standing native tradition of character writing in education and literature (in Ancrene Riwle, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales). It was taught in the grammar schools and character sketches appeared in sermons, in miracle and morality plays, in the interludes, in imitations of classical satirists and in the rogue pamphlets. Thomas Harman first used the word rogue in A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors Vulgarly Called Vagabonds (1566). Joseph Hall, Sir Thomas Overbury and John Earle imitated and refined the tradition and Hall’s Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608) was particularly popular. George Eliot later mocked the genre in Impressions of Theophrastus Such. The conventional habit of writing character sketches influenced the portrayal of character in Elizabethan drama. A playwright like Webster was a great writer of the conventional sketch. This interest in ‘character’ gave rise to a stream of books on the subject. Sir Thomas Elyot recommended that this type of character study should form part of the general education. The convention of hypotyposis, of vivid description of characteristic behaviour, provided stock material for the playwright. New and original characters appeared, but there are accepted rules of conduct laid down for each type; decorum is observed: ‘Words are the

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pensils, whereby drawne we finde the picture of the inward man, the minde, such thoughts, such words; such words, such is the man.’97 The braggadocio, the argumentative boaster, coleric and cowardly, was a popular type both in character sketches and in Elizabethan plays: Athraso or Braggadotia, is a boisterous fellow in a Buffe-Coat, swelling like Eolus, in windy words, whose tongue is still applauding himselfe, and detracting from others; and by grim lookes and sterne language idolizeth his owne ignominious actions. One that makes all his frayes with his unctious Tongue, and then is forc’d sometimes (unwittingly) to maintaine and defend them by his timorous hands … for hold but his fained Choller up to its feeble height, and begin but where hee ends, and hee’ll quake like an Aspen leafe, or grow so flegmaticke and coole, that he will take your wickes for courtesies … hee’ll strike none but those he knows will not resist.98

The neo-classical input enhanced the taste acquired from popular preaching and humorous sermons. The new humanism charged with the deadly explosive of laughter, that laughter which – to borrow a significant phrase of M. Bergson – in its very beginnings ‘indicates a slight revolt on the surface of human life’… the humorous sermon-tale is … clearly an important antecedent of the humourous episodes in our Renaissance drama.99 97

98

99

Nicholas Breton, The Good and the Badde, London, 1616, ‘In Laudem Operis’. Francis Lenton, Characterismi or Lentons Leasures. Expressed in Essayes and Characters, London 1631 (Bodleian, a very rare work…of which only two copies appear to be known). G.R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, CUP, 1933, 167–8.

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The popularity of character writing was sustained and developed, not only by a long ancestry before the Theophrastan intrusion but by the new focus on decorum and humours in the ‘comicall satyres’ of Ben Jonson. The characters are both in and out of humours. The Moralities described abstract vices or virtues, for example Gluttony and Jealousy, the way a preacher might describe these vices in a sermon, but the character sketch did not create allegorical abstractions. The art was to formulate types, giving a clear picture of a gluttonous man or a jealous man. The characters were portrayed in the light of their innate mental characteristics and as formed by their position and status in society. The Elizabethan woman was drawn in black and white. She was either virtuous or of a very easy virtue. A virgin was praised as a most divine creature: Her studie is Holinesse, her exercise Goodnesse, her grace Humility, and her love is Charity: her countenance is Modesty; her speech is Truth, her wealth Grace, and her fame Constancy … She is of creatures the Rarest, of Women the Chiefest, of nature the Purest, and of Wisdome the Choysest … She is the daughter of Glory, the mother of Grace, the sister of Love, and the beloved of Life.100

The perfect wife was both an efficient house-manager and a perfect ‘chamber comfort’ and it was thought to be right and virtuous not to remarry. A widow should live for her children and not supplant her husband, but keep his memory alive comes close to the sketch of the Worthy Wife. When we move from such high peaks of virtue in the virgin and the ideal wife (as Sophia in Massinger’s The Picture)101 to the wanton woman and the whore we come 100 101

Breton, op. cit., 27. I, i, ed. Gifford, London, 1805, 114–16.

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to the witch and the devil who will betray and deceive. The whore would bring disaster to any man: ‘A hie way to the Divell, hee that lookes upon her with desire, begins his voyage: he that staies to talke with her, mends his pace, and who enioies her is at his iourneies end.’102 The modern idea that a wanton woman also have good qualities was not pervasive in this age, but the concept of the honest whore and golden-hearted tart was not entirely ruled out in the game of humours. The idea that the good wife should be seen and not heard had Royal approval, but in Ben Jonson’s plays Epicoene: or, the Silent Woman and in Volpone the women have a voice. Morose is a gentleman ‘that loves no noise’, whose servant is called Mute, but Epicoene, the supposedly silent woman, challenges him: Why, did you think you had married a statue, or a motion only? One of the French puppets, with the eyes turn’d with a wire? Or some innocent out of the hospital, that would stand with her hands thus, and a plaise mouth, and look upon you? I confess it doth bate somewhat of the modesty I had, when I writ simply maid: but I hope I shall make it a stock still competent to the estate and dignity of your wife.103

The character writers frequently ridiculed the appearance of the melancholiacs, their pale faces and morbid expressions: A Melancholic man is one … that nature made sociable, because she made him a man, and a crazed disposition hath altered. Impleasing to all, as all to him, stragling thoughts 102

103

Thomas Overbury, New and Choice Characters, ed. Thomas Creede, London, 1615 (no page numbering). III, ii.

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are his content, they make him dreame waking, there’s his pleasure….He carries a cloud in his face, never faire weather; his outside is framed to his inside, in that he keepes a Decorum, both unseemely …. He hewes and fashions his thoughts, as if he meant them to some purpose, but they prove unprofitable; as a piece of wrought timber to no use. His Spirits and the Sunne are enemies, the Sunne bright and warme, his humour blacke and colde.104

The melancholy man had a strong visionary faculty and ghosts and spirits frequently haunted him: His head is haunted, like a house, with evil spirits and apparitions, that terrify and fright him out of himself till he stands empty and forsaken. His sleeps and his wakings are so much the same that he knows not how to distingusish them, and many times when he dreams he believes he is broad awake and sees visions … His soul lives in his body like a mole in the earth, that labours in the dark, and casts up doubts and scruples of his own imaginations to make that rugged and uneasy what was plain and open before …The temper of his brain being earthly, cold and dry, is apt to breed worms, that sink so deep into it, no medicine in art or nature is able to reach them.105

The increasing curiosity about the melancholy state of mind was part of a new interest in mental and psychological studies based on the theory of humours. No detailed study of melancholy existed in England before 1500 but many characters, among them Hamlet, entered the stage before Burton’s work. The scholar was a man of great knowledge and learning, but rather unrefined and awkward in manners and behaviour. 104 105

Overbury, op. cit. Butler, A Book of Characters, Edinburgh, 1865, 276–7.

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He was too much occupied with his studies to have time for the more pleasant sports of the courtier. He lived too long in the limited world of his College and long studies in a dark room made him unfit to face the sharp light of the world outside. He appeared shy and silly and was frequently ridiculed, but the innate qualities of the character and his intellect were qualities that weighed heavier than the outward signs. Frederick in Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure is an appropriate representation of the scholar in comedy. The appearance of Sordido in Jonson’s Every Man out of his Humour, fits the character sketch of the ‘Almanack-maker’, referred to as an annual author.106 The conventional sketch and the stage character have much in common. Barabas and Shylock come close to the sketch of the Usurer. Antonio displays some of the characteristics of A Worthy Merchant. The sketches of the Virgin, the Wanton Woman, the Whore, the Wife, the Widow, the Melancholy Man, the Prince, the Scholar, the King and the Hypocrite help to define the types of characters in conflict in a play like Hamlet. The interplay of Ophelia, Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius is, at one level, a clash between qualities found in the character sketch. Ophelia is ‘of nature the Purest’ who still may appear a ‘feare of destruction’ to Hamlet. Gertrude has remarried as a widow and thus shattered the picture of ‘the purest gold’ expressed in the sketch. To Hamlet she is has become the Wanton Woman and is not the Worthy Wife. Claudius is a Hypocrite, a Usurper and an Unworthy King. Hamlet is the Melancholy Man, the Scholar and the Good Prince. Othello is the General, the Lover, the Jealous Man, and the Honest Man and Iago is the Machiavellian villain, the Soldier and the Hypocrite. Between them is the Honest Wife who appears wanton and unfaithful to the hero. The sketch of the ideal soldier creates 106

Whimsies, or, A New Cast of Characters, London, 1631, (Bodleian).

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a contrast to stage characters like Iago, Falstaff and Bobadill. Iago is sinning against the virtues of Truth and Honesty ascribed to the soldier type and Bobadill as well as Falstaff lack the courage of the ideal military man. EARLY HUMOUR PLAYS

A closer look at two key humorous comedies shows that the playwrights fitted the four humours and their advancing variety of meanings into the very action and spirit of the plays. The four complexions were used to hilarious effect, but the comic exuberance implied a warning as it unmasked the hypocrisy and vanity of man. George Chapman

A new play by George Chapman was first performed at the Globe on 11 May 1597 and the title page of the text, printed by Valentino Synis two years later, reads: ‘A pleasant Comedy entituled An Humorous dayes Myrth as it hath beene sundrie times publikely acted by the right honourable the Earle of Nottingham Lord high Admirall his seruants.’ Although set in France it is the humours, manners and vanities of contemporary London that Chapman unmasks. The title links the words humorous and mirth. The display of humours during the day creates mirth and a pleasant comedy. The words humour and humorous are applied about twenty times thus giving examples of the scientific and psychological as well as of the popular cant use of the term. The play is divided into thirteen scenes and connects the life of four families during one day. Count Labervele, his wife Forilla and Dowsecer, the melancholy son from his first marriage, is the first family in the play. The second family is Justice Foyes and his beautiful daughter Martia who resists being married off to the rich

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a contrast to stage characters like Iago, Falstaff and Bobadill. Iago is sinning against the virtues of Truth and Honesty ascribed to the soldier type and Bobadill as well as Falstaff lack the courage of the ideal military man. EARLY HUMOUR PLAYS

A closer look at two key humorous comedies shows that the playwrights fitted the four humours and their advancing variety of meanings into the very action and spirit of the plays. The four complexions were used to hilarious effect, but the comic exuberance implied a warning as it unmasked the hypocrisy and vanity of man. George Chapman

A new play by George Chapman was first performed at the Globe on 11 May 1597 and the title page of the text, printed by Valentino Synis two years later, reads: ‘A pleasant Comedy entituled An Humorous dayes Myrth as it hath beene sundrie times publikely acted by the right honourable the Earle of Nottingham Lord high Admirall his seruants.’ Although set in France it is the humours, manners and vanities of contemporary London that Chapman unmasks. The title links the words humorous and mirth. The display of humours during the day creates mirth and a pleasant comedy. The words humour and humorous are applied about twenty times thus giving examples of the scientific and psychological as well as of the popular cant use of the term. The play is divided into thirteen scenes and connects the life of four families during one day. Count Labervele, his wife Forilla and Dowsecer, the melancholy son from his first marriage, is the first family in the play. The second family is Justice Foyes and his beautiful daughter Martia who resists being married off to the rich

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and stupid gull, Labesha. The third unit is Count Moren married to a much older Countess who suffers from a jealous disposition. The fourth family is the King and Queen of France. The King has his eyes on Martia. Into this mix Lemot arrives, a young gentleman, gallant and trickster who plays games with all, beginning with Labervele and Florilla. A handful of gallants echo the action. In the opening scene the elderly Count Labervele enters the garden in his shirt and nightgown, holding two jewels. It is early in the morning and still not light. He has a plan. Next to his garden is his wife’s private garden. He intends to get in using a counterfeit key and place the engraved jewels there as a gift from God. Labervele is unable to give his young and pretty wife, Florilla, a child. ‘She longs to have a child, which yet, alas I cannot get, yet long as much as she.’ She has retreated into religious contemplation. Why? Is Florilla’s state of mind brought on by Labervele’s impotence or vice versa? Perhaps Florilla has simply come to realize the mistake of her marriage and is escaping into religion as a disguise? Then to the key passage in Labervele’s nightly contemplation: ‘Tis to be doubted (i.e. feared) that when an object comes fit to her humour, she will intercept religious letters sent unto her mind, and yield unto the motion of her blood.’ Florilla’s humour refers to the original medical and by extension to the psychological use of the term. She has the sanguine humour of a young woman that fits the motion of her blood. The psychological consequences of her humour worries Labervele because if an object in the shape of a young and attractive man comes along she may well ‘intercept religious letters sent into her mind’, and yield to temptation: Her puritanism and religious ideas could easily succumb to natural attraction and passion. After all, Florilla’s garden may be ‘the holy green’ in Labervele’s wishful thinking, a place for spiritual thinking, but such gardens were also used for lovers’ meetings. The idea of a

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sinful Lustgarten and Lusthaus is found for example in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s morality play Jedermann, (‘Dazu richt ich den Garten mit Fleiss und stell inmitten ein Lusthaus hin, das bau ich recht nach meinem Sinn’).107 In the film Notting Hill, the old image is upheld as the lovers steal into a secluded London garden. After the sophisticated interpretation of Florilla’s humour by Labervele we meet Lemot and Colinet contemplating a fair day of fun. Colinet says ‘the sky hangs full of humour, and I think we shall have rain’, a faithful reference to Milet’s first principle and the original medical meaning of humour as water, using the word in singular to stress that all humours come from the essence of moisture. Lemot then picks up on Colinet’s expectation of an abundance of humours and hints that ‘when it rains humours’ (now in plural to be specific) the impact on behaviour can be extraordinary and ‘men, like hot sparrows and pigeons, open all their wings to receive them’. The rain of humours may become a reign of humours as men are trapped into wanton and amorous acts. Then we will indeed have a chance of a fair day, says Colinet, to spend with our acquaintances who represent a lifetime of humours. And Lemot, the puppet master, declares that he will sit like a king in a play and ‘point out all my humorous companions’. Humour and humorous here indicate the four humours and the manifold behaviour emerging from each. The two gallants and friends now meet up with two other gallants, Catalian and Blanuel. Colinet asks Lemot before the arrival of Blanuel ‘what humour hath this gallant in his manner of taking acquaintance?’ In other words what humour is reflected in his social behaviour or attitude when meeting people? Lemont’s reply is in the form of a character sketch of the affected courtier: 107

Jedermann. Das Spiel vom Sterben des reichen Mannes (1911), S. Fisher Verlag, 1964, 18.

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Marry, thus, sir: he will speak the very self-same word, to a syllable, after him of whom he takes acquaintance: as if I should say, ‘I am marvellous glad of your acquaintance’, he will reply, ‘I am marvellous glad of your acquaintance’; ‘I have heard much good of your rare parts and fine carriage’; ‘I have heard much good of your rare parts and fine carriage.’ So long as the complements of a gentleman last, he is your complete ape.108

The use of humour and manner(s) reflect the gradual identification of the two terms, a moving away from the original meaning of humour. Lemot explains that Blanuel after the first greeting will retire to a wall or a chimney, fold his arms and just stand still. It is impossible to get him from this ‘most gentlemanlike set or behaviour’; the folding of arms and silent withdrawal point to a melancholy behaviour. Colinet immediately senses the fun in Lemot’s description and adds that ‘this makes his humour perfect’. Lemot and Colin have interpreted that behind Blanuel’s folded arms and withdrawal symptons lie a melancholy disposition carried by a phlegmatic humour. The gang, led by Lemot, selects Justice Foyes as their target. Colinet is in love with Foyles daughter, Martia. But ‘the old churl be so jealous’ that no man except the vain and foolish Labesha may come near her. The plan is that Colinet, who is Lord Moran’s cousin, will go to Foyes’ house pretending to come in Countess Moran’s name and then hoping to see Martia. The next target under discussion is Count Lebervele and his young wife Florilla. Lemot is determined to ‘heat his jealous humour’. Jealousy is one of the psychological effects of the sanguine humour. The two schemes are set in motion. 108

Charles Edelman (ed.), 2010, Scene 2, 35–42.

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Labervele believes that his wife has turned melancholy because she is isolated and has shut herself off in the house. When he at first reacts positively to Florilla’s idea to ‘use resort’, to go out more and seek company, he panics: ‘God’s my passion what have I done?’ Labervele is now at his wits end. ‘O vanity of vanities!’ Lemot adds: ‘So now he is start mad, I’faith,’ and says to Catalian, ‘as this is an old lord jealous of his young wife, so is ancient Countess Moren jealous of her young husband’. They are off ‘to have some sport’ there. Enter the King together with Lemot, Colinet, Catalian and Blunuel at Labervele’s. The King says that the young Dowsecer (Labervele’s son by a previous marriage) is ‘rarely learned and nothing lunatic … but hateth company and worldly trash … And his rare humour come we now to hear.’ This is as close to the original melancholy humour as we can get. Lemot then replies: ‘I’ll tell you a better humour than that. Here presently will be your fair love Martia to see his humour, and from thence fair countess Florilla and she will go unto Verone’s ordinary, where none but you and I and Count Moren will be most merry.’ Lemot will keep Moren there until his wife arrives. ‘That will be royal sport,’ says the King. This is a double humour, first Martia observing Dowsecer’s disposition and then a sanguine merriment at Verone’s. Dowsecer enters, in the real pose of the melancholy man, reading and quoting Cicero. Lemot asks the King: ‘How like you this humour, my liege?’ and the King replies: ‘This is no humour, this is but perfect judgement.’ Perhaps the King refers to the ideal of the perfectly balanced man where all the four humours are in harmony? Martia seems utterly taken (and fooled) by Dowsecer: ‘Oh, were all men such, men were no men but gods, this earth a heaven.’ Dowsecer, having first contemplated the picture of the woman carried by his friend, ‘this figure of man’s comfort’, suddenly notices Martia and is immediately smitten: ‘What

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have I seen? How am I burnt to dust with a new sun, and made a novel phoenix!’ Labervele, for once very pleased with events, says: ‘Good son, go forward in this gentle humour.’ He senses a hope for the sanguine temperament to replace the melancholy disposition. When Lemot asks the King: ‘How like you his humour yet, my liege?’ the King replies, ‘as of a holy fury’. Dowsecer’s change is not quite convincing yet but his melancholy is falling as fast as he is falling in love. Florilla makes the excuse to Labervele that Dowsecer has made her ‘melancholy with his humour’ and she will retire until supper. So the scene is set at the ordinary and all the players start to appear for the final showdown. We first meet the proprietor Verone, his son, his servant and his maid before Catalian’s cousin Rowly and the gallant Berger enter and asks Verone for ‘a pipe of good tobacco’. This is a very early reference to tobacco in an Elizabethan play. The new fashion of tobacco was embraced as beneficial: It cureth any griefe, dolour, opilation, impostume, or obstruction, proceeding of cold or winde: especially in the head or breast … the fumes taken in a Pipe is good against Rumes, Catarrhs, horsenesse, ache in the head, stomache, lungs, heart: also in want of meal, drinke, slepe, or rest.109

Lemot lures Martia away from her father to meet the King, tells the Queen that the King had abducted Martia and that Dowsecer had made a jealous attack on the King. Labesha decides: ‘I will in silent live a man forlorn, mad and melancholy as a cat.’ Florilla realizes that the man she was tricked to fall in love with has only interest in the game he is playing. Lemot shrugs his shoulders: ‘Well, an you do 109

Henry Buttes, Dyets Dry Dinner. Consiisting of eight severall Courses, London, 1599, Bodleian Douce B.307 (extremely rare).

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not like my humour, I can be but sorry for it.’ This is an extended use of humour to encompass his whole gameplan. Lemot simply says ‘so be it’. Florilla concludes ‘surely the world is full of vanity’. Lemot will not be distracted from his ploy, ‘he that mends my humour, take the spurs, sit fast’. His humour is sanguine with a twist of malice. Catalian reports that Labesha has ‘grown marvellous malcontent upon some amorous disposition of his mistress … and he hath taken on him the humour of the young lord Dowsecer … we will set a mess of cream, a spice-cake, and a spoon … which I doubt not but will work a rare cure upon his melancholy’. Malcontence is closely related to the original melancholy humour. The cure makes for a hilarious scene as Labesha gobbles the cream and ‘his melancholy is well eased’. Lemot enters with the Queen and the countess. He tells the Queen that the King is ‘enamoured of another lady’ and refers to the radiant eyes and fervent beams that so bewitched the King. This is a reference to the Renaissance belief that the eyes had an influence similar to the stars and the lover is stricken by rays like cosmic light. It is a play of humours, exposing manners, habits, social pretentions and human follies. Chapman is the most erudite of Elizabethan dramatists, uniting English Renaissance learning and English Renaissance poetic genious.110 The play is an innovation in the field of psychology. Chapman commended Jonson’s Sejanus and Volpone but later turned against the ‘greate-learned wittie Ben’, accused him of lying about all the work he had lost in a fire and reacted, perhaps with envy, to the growing club of Ben.111 110

111

T.S. Eliot, ‘The Sources of Chapman’, Times Literary Supplement, 10 February 1927. MS Ashmole 38, Bodleian.

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Henry Porter

Ben Jonson and Henry Porter were friends and Jonson had assisted in the writing of a (now lost) comedy called Hot Anger soon Cold but there is no evidence of him cooperating on Porter’s (only remaining) play, The Pleasant History of the Two Angry Women of Abingdon. With the humorous mirth of Dick Coomes and Nicholas Proverbs, two Servingmen, staged in 1599, the same year as Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humour, also the year of Porter’s untimely death in a duel with John Day. The play was printed the same year and copies were sold at his shop on the corner of Coleman Street near Loathbury. The ‘Prologue’ to the play sets the moral tone against the spendthrifts and braggadocios ‘that lacks and would borrow … this new world’s new-found beggars, mis-termed soldiers’ who expect some benefactor ‘to keep him a true man in wit, and to pay for his lodging among the Muses!’ The Clown, Nicholas, alias Proverbs, promotes decorum of speech and behaviour: Good words cost nought: ill words corrupt good manners … for a hasty man never wants woe … I see all is not gold that glitters; there’s falsehood in fellowship, amicus certus in re certa cernitur; time and truth tries all; and ‘tis an old proverb, and not so old as true, bought wit is the best.

Dick Coomes, the servant to Master Goursey, senses the family conflict and is suspicious of Goursey’s son Francis and his friend Philip, the son of Master Barnes: ‘Sblood, I do not like the humour of these springals; they’ll spend all their father’s good at gaming. But let them trowl the bowls upon the green. I’ll trowl the bowls in the buttery by the leave of God and Master Barnes: an his men be good fellows, so it is; if they be not, let them go snick up.

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Philip asks Francis what good horses he has for the hunt this summer and the stable boy replies and reminds Francis that the best horse has a particular colour or ‘complexion’. That makes Francis ask: ‘What’s that ye call complexion in a horse?’ and the Boy replies: ‘The colour, sir.’ This is a rare use of the word to describe the appearance of an animal. Philip says: ‘Dick Coomes, methinks thou art very pleasant: Where got’st thou this merry humour?’ Coomes replies: ‘In your father’s cellar, the merriest place in th’ house.’ Francis, annoyed, describes the drunken Coomes: ‘Why, what a swearing keeps this drunken ass? Canst thou not say but swear at every word.’ Philip intercepts: ‘Peace, do not mar his humour.’ His humour is being drunk, merry and foolish but in terms of contemporary theory drunkenness would undermine the control of Reason. Philip, talking about his servant Nicholas alias Proverbs, says ‘he is not humoured bluntly as Coomes is, but he creates merriment with the style of his garters, hose, shoes and hat and constant proverbs.’ Mistress Barnes refuses to be friends with mistress Gournsey. Master Barnes, exasperated, says: ‘I held ye for more wise, discreet, and of more temp’rature in sense, that in a sullen humour to affect that woman’s will-born, common scholar phrase.’ This madam is clearly choleric and Master Barnes ponders that he ‘could be angry with her … if it bie so. I shall put a link unto a torch, and give greater light to see her fault. I’ll rather smother it in melancholy.’ He is not suffering from melancholy but thinks he can put it on for sport. Coomes tells Francis that ‘I do not like this humour in ye, I tell you true.’ He mocks Hodge, another servant, who had fallen into a well. This is laughter in a Bergsonian spirit, without compassion. Master Goursey, reading a letter from Master Barnes, contemplating the animosity between their wives, adds that

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‘I have sought the Galen of advice.’ Mistress Goursey calls Mistress Barnes ‘a jealous, slandering, spiteful quean’. The humour of jealousy gets extra bile from the added words. Coomes challenges Nicholas to fight with the words: ‘Now I am in my quarreling humour, and now can I say nothing but, zounds, draw!’ Again, a cant use of the term but with reflections of choler. Porter’s play is grounded in the realism of domestic manners ‘and its romance is no fairy-tale dream of true love overriding differences of rank and wealth’.112 The family quarrel, the witty intrigues and plotting, the realism of the local setting in an English village, Abingdon, and the fields and forests of the neighbourhood, are themes carried forward by Jonson. The learned Ben appreciated and accepted the new opening to the world of the ancient masters and made them his Renaissance tutors without discarding the medieval mysteries and moralities. He would explore the elements and the humours of the mind and make the comedy of humours his larger stage.

112

Madeleine Doran, Endeavours of Art: A Study of form in Elizabethan drama, Wisconsin, 1964, 364.

Chapter 2

HUMOROUS CHARACTERIZATION IN THE COMEDIES OF BEN JONSON Z EVERY M AN IN His Humour113 and Every Man Out of His Humour114 reveal an extensive use of the word humour, it enters and detonates into everyday speech, describes and defines situations, behaviour and character. The concept enriches the language and becomes a synonym for a not yet invented word – psychology.115 ‘The Comedy of Humours is simply based on that response to humanity evinced when an Englishman says of another that “he is a character”; it is the expression of an instinctive relish for oddity and absurdity.’116 In Humour

The title page of Every Man in His Humour contains two lines from Juvenal: Quod non dant proceres, dabit histrio 113 114 115

116

First acted in 1598 by the Lord Chamberlaine’s men. First acted in 1599 by the Lord Chamberlaine’s men. Psychology as a field of experimental study began in 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt founded a laboratory in Leipzig dedicated exclusively to psychological research. Wundt referred to himself as a psychologist and wrote the first textbook on psychology. J.B. Bamborough, Ben Jonson, London, 1970, 173–4.

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(what no great men give, the actor will) and haud tamen invidias vati, quem pulpita pascunt (you need not envy the poet, whom the stage feeds). Shakespeare appeared on the cast list of the play. It is possible that Shakespeare rescued the play from oblivion when the still unknown Jonson attempted to present it to Shakespeare’s theatre company: ‘Shakespeare luckily cast his eye upon it, and found something so well in it as to engage him first to read it through, and after this to recommend Mr Jonson and his writings to the publick.’117 In the ‘Prologue’ Jonson sets down his focus; he is creating something new. The play has to have a contemporary setting, observe decorum, ridicule vices and follies as well as instruct and delight: He rather prays you will be pleased to see One such today, as other plays should be; …deeds, and language, such as men do use, And persons, such as comedy would choose, When she would shew an image of the times, And sport with human follies, not with crimes. Except we make them such, by loving still Our popular errors, when we know they’re ill. I mean such errors, as you’ll all confess, By laughing at them, they deserve no less.118

He defines and honours comedy as She but the glass of custom dictated that comedy was of a lower order than tragedy and the 117

118

Nicholas Rowe, ‘Some Account of the Life of Mr William Shakespeare’, 1709, (quoted in John Cross, The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, OUP, 2006, 7). Alfred Guy Kingan L’Estrange, History of English Humour, Vol. 1, London, 1878, 112. I am using the revised English as opposed to the original Florentine setting.

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playwright should therefore only ‘sport with human follies, not with crimes’. He did both, foolish acts lead to crimes. In the opening scene Knowell asks his servant Brainworm to contact his son, Edward. Knowell believes that his son is doing well in ‘both universities’ (Oxford and Cambridge). As a student he was ‘fed with the self-same humour’ as his son, ‘dreaming on nought but idle poetry’ but he had since learnt ‘to distinguish the vain from the useful learnings’. Stephen, Edward’s cousin, enters, declaring that he wants to study and practise hawking and hunting. ‘Oh, most ridiculous’, says Knowell, but Stephen insists that these skills ‘are more studied than the Greek or the Latin’. It is a skill needed to seek ‘a gallant’s company’. Knowell asks him to get lost: ‘You are a prodigal absurd coxcomb. I see you are e’en past hope. Learn to be wise … and not to spend your coin … on every bauble that you fancy, or every foolish brain that humours you’ and do not let ‘your sail be bigger than your boat’. Stephen maintains that he is Knowell’s ‘next hair’ after Edward, hoping Edward will die soon. When the servant says, ‘In good time, sir’, Stephen gives him a severe telling off. Knowell appears again and calls Stephen ‘a peremptory gull’. A servant enters with a letter for Edward from Master Wellbred. As Knowell’s first name is also Edward he opens the letter, reads it and finds Wellbread nothing less than a ‘profane and dissolate wretch’. He has to admit that affections make a fool of any man, ‘too much the father’. He asks Brainworm to have the letter delivered to his son without revealing that it has been opened. He intends to detect the actions of his son, ‘winning more by love’ and example than by fear and force. Edward learns from Brainworm that his father has read the letter. Stephen is still reeling about the servant who first brought it and just left, but then he becomes more obsessed with his leg and thinks it would look good in a silk hose.

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Brainworm plays along with this affectation. The letter from Wellbred, intercepted by Knowell, amuses Edward and he thinks his father will show patience about its content. Stephen enters and admits that he is a bit melancholy. Edward invites Stephen to accompany him and gives him encouragement, ‘hold up your head’. Stephen agrees to ‘be more proud, and melancholy, and gentleman-like’. Edward reckons (aside) that this ‘will do well for a suburb humour: we may have a match with the City, and play him for forty pound’. Master Matthew, the town gull, is searching for Captain Bobadill and first meets the servant Cob who rambles on about his lineage from ‘Herring the King of fish’. Master Kitely who is in love with Bobadill’s sister, Mistress Bridget, is in the Old Jewry. Cob asks another servant, his own wife Tib, to accompany Matthew to meet Bobadill. Matthew finds Bobadill sleeping on a bench and sees that he is carrying Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Then a united condemnation of the play ensues. Bobadill finds the characters ‘shallow, pitiful, barren fellows’ and Matthew mocks the language. Matthew says, ‘that boot becomes your leg passing well, Captain’. Matthew relates how he and Squire George Downright, Wellbred’s half-brother, have fallen out ‘exceedingly’ because of a ‘dicourse of a hanger’ (the loop holding a sword). Bobadill says of Downright that ‘he has no more judgment that a malt-horse … he should eat nothing but hay’ and insists that Matthew must challenge him to a duel. They will go to a tavern, meet fencers who will teach Matthew, but first they ‘will have a bunch of radish and salt, to taste our wine; and a pipe of tobacco’. In Act II Merchant Kitely is about to go to the Royal Exchange with Spanish gold. He tells his brother, Squire Downright, how he took Thomas Cash in as a child and ‘gave him mine own name’. This hints at a sterile marriage and the suspicion that his wife may be looking elsewhere.

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In addition, Dame Kitely’s brother, Wellbred, ‘of late is much declined in what he was’ and makes his house a place ‘for giddy humour, and diseased riot’. Downright shares the frustration over Wellbred. Kitely then asks if Downright could speak to him as the elder brother. If Kitely should confront him ‘he would be too ready from his heate of humour’ to inform negatively to his friends about him. Matthew and Bobadill appear and Bobadill calls Downright a scavenger. Kitely has to restrain Downright who shouts: ‘These are my brother’s consorts … I am grieved it should be said he (Wellbred) is my brother … as he brews, so he shall drink.’ Kitely calms him down: ‘But … let your reprehension, then, run in an easy current, not o’er high, carried with rashness, or devouring choler.’ But he himself is nudged by the passion of jealousy and suspicion of his wife: ‘Why’t cannot be, where there is such resort of wanton gallants, and young revellers, that any woman should be honest long.’ But he will observe and detect: ‘Yea, every look or glance mine eyes ejects shall check occasion.’ The jealousy keeps a firmer and firmer hold of him: ‘A new disease? … like a pestilence, it doth infect the houses of the brain …as a subtle vapour, spreads itself … through every sensitive part, till not a thought or motion of the mind be free from the black poison of suspect.’ This is a true description of the humour of jealousy as a disease with vapours reaching the brain and affecting the mind. Brainworm enters, disguised as an injured soldier on the Moorfields, ready to ‘create an intolerable sort of lies’. He has been instructed by Edward to ambush and stop Knowell on the way to London. Edward and Stephen appear, not recognizing Brainworm, who offers them his rapier for a few crowns because ‘it is the humour of necessity’ to sell it. Stephen buys it because he thinks it is ‘a field rapier’. Knowell is contemplating the letter sent to his son in a long soliloquy, ‘the change of manners, and the breeding of

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our youth … since myself was one …. When I was young … age was authority … a man had, then, a certain reverence paid unto his years’. But then he reflects that the parents are responsible and ‘destroy the hopes in our own children … it stains, unto the liver … we call them into fellowship of vice … and teach’em all the ways, to buy affection’. But ‘I never yet was he’, who corrupted his son, ‘but, let the house at home ne’er so clean, a son may still be corrupted by his contemporaries and choose to live in dung’. Brainstorm now enters in the same disguise and begs Knowell to give him ‘a small piece of silver’. Knowell resists and asks: ‘Art thou a man? And sham’st thou not to beg?’ It ends with Knowell offering Brainworm employment. As Knowell leaves, Brainworm ‘is ready to burst with laughing … I shall abuse him intolerably.’ Act III begins with Matthew, Wellbred and Bobadill followed by Edward and Stephen. Matthew introduces Wellbred and Bobadill as the gallants described in his letter and says to Edward’s silence: ‘Nay what a drowsy humour is this now?’ Edward explains that the letter was intercepted by his father. Wellbred wonders about Bobadill who has remained silent and Edward only says: ‘Oh, sir, a kinsman of mine, one that may make your music the fuller, an’ he please: he has his humour, sir.’ Stephen introduces himself and insists: ‘I am mightily given to melancholy.’ Matthew butts in: ‘Oh, it’s your only fine humour, sir, your true melancholy breeds your perfect wit, sir: I am melancholy myself divers times.’ He offers Stephen the use of his study, and Stephen asks, ‘have you a stool there, to be melancholy upon?’ Matthew confirms that he possesses the fashionable stool to practise melancholia. Stephen still wonders: ‘Am I melancholy enough?’ Edward informs Wellbred that Bobadill is melancholy, too. Bobadill tells Stephen that he has bought an inferior rapier. Now Brainworm, in the same disguise, joins the group and Stephen immediately complains about the rapier. Brainworm

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reveals his true identity and relates that Knowell is searching for Edward and is at present in Justice Clement’s house. Kitely, in conversation with Cash, discloses his suspicious attitude towards his wife and his fear that someone will attempt ‘to taste the fruit of beauty’s golden tree’. If he gives her time and place it ‘compels her to be false’. Cash is sworn to secrecy and wonders about Kitely’s mood and where it comes from: ‘Whence should this flood of passion (throw) take head? Ha? Best dream no longer of this running humour.’ Cob enters in a foul mood and when Cash asks, ‘what moves thee to this choler?’ Cash explain that he is not allowed to eat meat because of the fast: ‘I have my rheum, and I can be angry as well as another, sir.’ Cash asks: ‘Thy rheum, Cob? Thy humour, thy humour! Thou mistak’st.’ Cob agrees: ‘Humour? Mack, I think it be so, indeed, what is that humour? Some rare thing, I warrant.’ Cash then says: ‘Marry, I’ll tell thee, Cob: it is a gentleman-like monster, bred, in the special gallantry of our time, by affectation; and fed by folly.’ Cob asks: ‘How? Must it be fed?’ Cash explains: ‘Oh, aye, humour is nothing, if it be not fed. Didst thou never hear that? It’s a common phrase, “Feed my humour.”’ Cob rejects the monster: ‘I’ll none of it: humour, avaunt, I know you not, begone.’ Wellbred, Edward, Brainworm, Bobabdill, Matthew, Stephen, Cash and Cob gather. Wellbred praises Brainworm’s ‘absolute good jest’ of disguise. He asks Cash where Kitely is and is told at Justice Clement’s house. Wellbred adds that the city magistrate will punish anything ‘if it comes in the way of his humour’. Bobadill makes out that he knows all about tobacco, even as an antidote: ‘I could say what I know of the virtue of it, for the expulsion of rheums, raw humours.’ Cob comments: ‘By God’s me, I mar’l what pleasure or felicity they have in taking this rougish tobacco! It’s good for nothing but to choke a man, and fill him full of smoke and embers. It is no better than rat poison and arsenic.’ How true looking at it in the twenty-first century.

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Edward prevents a quarrel between Cash and Bobadill: ‘Nay, good Captain, will you regard the humour of a fool?’ Kitely and Cob enter a room in Justice Clement’s house. Kitely still wonders about his wife: ‘What meant I to marry?’ He once was master of his ‘own free thoughts, and now become a slave’. Then Clement, Knowell and his clerk Formal enter. Cob complains to Clement about Bobadill who attacked him ‘only because I spake against their vagrant tobacco’. But Clement instructs Formal to tell Cob that he is going to jail because he has dared ‘to deprave and abuse the virtue of an herb so generally received in the courts of princes.’ With the help of Knowell Clement lets him go. Clement then tells Knowell: ‘Your son is old enough to govern himself: let him run his course’. In Act IV Downright and Dame Kitely enter a room in Kitely’s house. She makes excuses that her brother, Wellbred, is responsible for inviting all his friends to the house. Downright is furious and maintains that these friends tempt Wellbred ‘to all manner of villany’. Dame Kitely thinks he talks ‘without any sense or reason!’ Then Bridget, Matthew and Bobadill enter followed by Wellbred, Stephen, Edward and Brainworm. It comes to light that Matthew has written an elegy and he says: ‘Faith, I did it in an humour.’ Downright re-enters, quarrels with Wellbred and a general fight starts as they all draw their rapiers. Kitely enters and asks them to ‘put off this rage’. Wellbread says: ‘Come, let’s go: this is one of my brother’s ancient humours’ and Stephen adds: ‘I am glad nobody was hurt by his ancient humour’. Bridget talks to Downright: ‘Brother, indeed, you are too violent, too sudden, in your humour’. Dame Kitely, referring to one of the friends in particular: ‘Indeed, he seemed to be a gentleman of an exceeding fair disposition, and of very excellent good parts!’ Kitely exasperated: ‘My wife’s minion!’ He learns from Cash that she referred to Edward.

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Cob accuses his wife Tim of a relationship with Bobadill, shows her a warrant for Bobadill’s arrest and asks her not to let Bobadill into the house because ‘you are a woman, you have flesh and blood enough in you to be tempted’. Edward, Wellbred and Brainworm still in disguise meet in a room in the Windmill Tavern. Brainworm agrees to play the game as agreed. Wellbred asks Edward if he loves Bridget and promises his support. Formal and Knowell meet in The Old Jewry as Brainworm enters and relates how he has been forced to reveal that Knowell is in town looking for his son. Brainwworm leads Formal to the Windmill. Matthew, Edward, Bobadill and Stephen meet in the Moorfields. Matthew refers to Downright as a clown and Bobadill insists: ‘You shall kill him, beyond question; if you be so generously minded.’ Bobadill relates how ‘three or four’ rivals had invited him to their schools but he ‘was ashamed of their rude demeanour’ and told them that ‘it was opposite, in diameter, to my humour’ to join them. Bobadill the braggart soldier is now in full flow about his bravery but when Downright enters and challenges, beats and disarms him, his only comment is: ‘I was bound to the peace’. Edward laments: O, manners! That this age should bring forth such creatures! That nature should be at leisure to make them.’ Stephen puts on Downright’s coat that he had left behind. Kitely blaims Wellbred for the disturbances at his house but Wellbred insists that no harm has been done. Kitely believes that his wife has poisoned him, he imagines he is ill: ‘Oh, I am sick at heart! I burn, I burn.’ Wellbred comments: ‘Oh, strange humour! … His jealousy is the poison he has taken.’ Brainworm enters dressed in Formal’s clothes and tells Wellbred how he made Formal drunk, stripped him and borrowed his suit. Wellbred instructs him to go and tell Edward and Bridget to come to the Tower.

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Kitely instructs Cash to ‘note every gallant, and observe him well, that enters in my absence’. Wellbred tells Dame Kitely that her husband often visits Cob’s wife, who is ‘an excellent bawd’ and he tells Bridget about Edward: ‘On my soul he loves you’ and informs Kitely that his wife has gone to Cob’s house. Kitely again goes mad with jealousy: ‘She’s gone a purpose, now to cuckold me.’ Wellbred adds: ‘Come, he’s once more gone.’ Matthew and Bobadill meet in a street. They discuss how Bobadill can be ‘revenged by law’ for the beating. Brainworm enters still disguised as Formal and he is asked to produce a warrant to bring Downright before Justice Clement. Knowell appears in the lane before Cob’s house. Tib opens the door to him and asks if his son is there. As Dame Kitely and Cash also enter, Knowell thinks Dame Kitely is his son’s companion. Tib re-enters and Dame Kitely asks after her husband but Tib insists: ‘Neither for need, nor pleasure, is he here.’ Kitely appears and Dame Kitely runs towards him in anger and accuses him with Tib: ‘I have smoked you yet at last!’ Kitely points to Knowell and calls him ‘a hoary-headed lecher and his wife’s ‘old goat’. Kitely says that he will have all of them ‘before a justice’. Knowell ‘taste this as a trick, put on me to punish my impertinent search – and justly’. When Cob enters, Kitely says that his house has become a bawd: ‘Bawd? Is my house come to that?’ Cob blames Tib for not keeping the house shut and beats her. Brainworm now appears disguised as a city sergeant as Matthew, Bobadill and Stephen, in Downright’s cloak, appear. Stephen is arrested as Downright before the real Downright enters and is also arrested. Stephen remains arrested for stealing the coat. Act V takes place in a Hall in Justice Clement’s House as Clement, Knowell, Kitely, Dame Kitely, Tib, Cash and Cob first enter. Clement quickly detects after hearing their stories

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that ‘you are gulled in this most grossly, all’. A servant informs Clement that a soldier wishes to speak with him. Clement puts on his armour and sword. Bobadill and Matthew enter. Bobadill explains how they had been beaten by Downright while he himself is ‘a man in no sort given to this filthy humour of quarreling’. Clement says: ‘Here, take my armour off quickly, ‘twill make him swoon.’ Downright, Stephen and Brainworm (still disguised as a city sergeant) ask to enter. Clement questions Stephen about the coat and threatens Brainworm who then pulls off his disguise. He is pardoned by Knowell. Formal enters in the suit of armour left by Brainworm. Edward, Wellbred and Bridget enter. Clemet burns Matthew’s poems and Knowell says to Edward: ‘Here is an emblem for you, son, and your studies.’ Clement asks them ‘to put off all discontent’, Downright’s anger, Knowell’s worries and Kitely and Madame Kitely their jealousy: ‘Horns i’ the mind are worse than o’ the head.’ Clement concludes: ‘This night we’ll dedicate to friendship, love, and laughter’ (Matthew and Bobadill excluded). He asks Edward to take his bride Bridget and lead, and gives a last reference to Brainworm: ‘Whose adventures this day, when our grandchildren shall hear to be made a fable, I doubt not but it shall find both spectators and applause.’ The play established Ben Jonson’s reputation as a leading humour satirist. He originally set the play in Florence but in the revised version moved it to London. The success was also a defence of stage plays (which he referred to as poems) as true creative writing. The playwright was a Maker. It was bad writing Jonson attacked, illustrated by Justice Clement’s attack on the plagiarized poetry of Matthews and the ‘paperpedlars’ and ‘ink-dabblers’.119 119

Cf. Karl von Moor, Mir ekelt vor diesem Tintenklecksenden Säkulum wenn ich in meinem Plutarch lese von grossen Menschen, in Shiller’s die Räuber (I,ii). Jonson would have appreciated that line.

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Jonson modelled his play, loosely, on the comedies of Terence, in the conflict between generations, Knowell’s spying on Edward, Brainworm’s playful tricks in many disguises, Kitely’s jealousy and Dame Kitely’s suspicions, Bobadill’s friendship with Matthew and Stephen, his quarrel with Downright and the love between Edward and Bridget. He divides the play into four distinct parts or movements, the four-fold structure, apparent in Terentian comedies, but this design is no more than prologue, beginning, middle and end, as stipulated by Aristotle. Jonson had also found inspiration in plays by Plautus (Aulularia and Captivi). The Danish/Norwegian writer Johan Herman Wessel (1742–85) mocked the Aristotelian unity of time in his comedy, Kierlighed uden Strømper (Love without stockings) when Grete, who is engaged to Johan, wakes up from a nightmare and says: Du aldrig bliver gift, hvis det i Dag ei skjer! (You will never get married unless it happens today). The three classical (and neo-classical) unities of time, place and action are only observed in a relaxed way in Jonson’s play. The time frame is more than twenty-four hours. They meet in different locations in London (The Windmill Tavern, Kitely’s house, Cod’s house, and Clement’s house). The action is complex, combining several plots. In a combination of Roman and native comedy and applying the humours in a strict medical definition (Kitely’s jealousy and Downright’s anger), as well as in the varied and popularized term of the 1590s (Stephen wishing to be a gentleman, Matthew attempting to be a poet, both affecting melancholy, and Bobadill pretending to be brave and choleric) he created an original urban comedy, exposing the social climbing and the affectations in dress and behaviour. The humour is pretence and disguise, but, with the exception of Matthew and Bobadill, Jonson has sympathy for his characters, especially Brainworm. Lemot, the gallant and trickster in Chapman’s An Humerous Days Mirth, which appeared a year before

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Jonson’ play, is a less admirable character than the intriguer Brainworm. It may be true that Jonson’s plot and characters rely on display and intersection rather than interaction120 but that was in accordance with decorum. The jokes and irony fall on the fakes and hypocrites in the play and by implication on the spectators; by laughing at ‘our popular errors’ we laugh at our humours and ourselves. In the original version Lorenzo says: ‘Call blasphemy, religion; call devils, angels; and sin, piety: let all things be preposterously transchanged.’121 Jonson attacks the inversion of order and makes it look absurd and ridiculous. He focused on the relationship between criminal law and the theatre and exposed the manipulation of justice on the stage.122 Jonson had entered ‘wits theatre of the little world’123 and in his next play he advanced from being in his humour to coming out of his humour. It is a very different play where he, much more assertively, seeks to define comedy. Out of Humour

The title of the play is The Comicall Satyre of Every Man Out of His Humour. It was printed by William Holme in 1600 and sold at his shop in Fleet Street. The quotes from Horace on the title-page make Jonson’s independence and intentions clear: Non aliena meo pressi pede (I did not follow in the footsteps of others) and Te capiat magis, decies repetita placebit (if you examine it up close, it will please you more). In fact Jonson was so Horatian that 120 121 122

123

Robert S. Miola (ed.), Every Man in His Humour, Introduction, 51. Act V. Lorna Hutson, ‘Law, crime and punishment’, in Julie Sanders (ed.), Ben Jonson in Context, CUP, 2013, 221–7. Title of a ms in the Bodleian Library (Malone, 540, 1599).

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Jonson’ play, is a less admirable character than the intriguer Brainworm. It may be true that Jonson’s plot and characters rely on display and intersection rather than interaction120 but that was in accordance with decorum. The jokes and irony fall on the fakes and hypocrites in the play and by implication on the spectators; by laughing at ‘our popular errors’ we laugh at our humours and ourselves. In the original version Lorenzo says: ‘Call blasphemy, religion; call devils, angels; and sin, piety: let all things be preposterously transchanged.’121 Jonson attacks the inversion of order and makes it look absurd and ridiculous. He focused on the relationship between criminal law and the theatre and exposed the manipulation of justice on the stage.122 Jonson had entered ‘wits theatre of the little world’123 and in his next play he advanced from being in his humour to coming out of his humour. It is a very different play where he, much more assertively, seeks to define comedy. Out of Humour

The title of the play is The Comicall Satyre of Every Man Out of His Humour. It was printed by William Holme in 1600 and sold at his shop in Fleet Street. The quotes from Horace on the title-page make Jonson’s independence and intentions clear: Non aliena meo pressi pede (I did not follow in the footsteps of others) and Te capiat magis, decies repetita placebit (if you examine it up close, it will please you more). In fact Jonson was so Horatian that 120 121 122

123

Robert S. Miola (ed.), Every Man in His Humour, Introduction, 51. Act V. Lorna Hutson, ‘Law, crime and punishment’, in Julie Sanders (ed.), Ben Jonson in Context, CUP, 2013, 221–7. Title of a ms in the Bodleian Library (Malone, 540, 1599).

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he introduced the name Horace for himself in The Poetaster, similar to Robert Burton adopting the name Democritus Junior as his pseudonym and honorary name. He does follow in old footsteps to make his own. In Discoveries Jonson recommended the study of the classical masters as an inspiration to an independent writer: Non minimum credendum antiquitati. I know nothing can conduce more to letters than to examine the writings of the ancients, and not to rest in their sole authority, or to take all upon trust from them, provided the plagues of judging and pronouncing against them be away; such as are envy, bitterness, precipitation, impudence, and scurrile scoffing. For to all the observations of the ancients we have our own experience, which if we will use and apply, we have better means to pronounce. It is true they opened the gates, and made the way that went before us, but as guides, not commanders: Non domini nostri, sed duces fuere. Truth lies open to all; it is no man’s several. Patet omnibus veritas; nondum est occupatas. Multum ex illa, etiam futurus relictum est.124

He adds that a ‘requisite in our poet … is … imitatio, to be able to convert the substance or riches of another poet to his own use’, but, ‘not to imitate servilely’. Jonson’s epigrammatic sketches of the Characters in this critical satire, introduced before the Induction, seek to highlight their humour and master passion and he gives them names that reveal their disposition. The tradition of character writing is present in the elaborate and fixed ‘characters of the persons’. According to Horace, the playwright should define his players before they enter the stage and they should remain in character to the end: O, servetur ad imum, qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet (Oh, he is preserved 124

Much of it is left also for those who come.

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at the end in the same condition as he had appeared from the beginning and has consistently maintained) but Jonson objected to the neo-classical decorum limiting the number of actors that could appear on the stage at the same time. The stage is set for the sharp and noble Asper (Sharp, no less), the Presenter and perfectly balanced man, ‘he is of an ingenious and free spirit, eager and constant in reproof, without fear controlling the worlds abuses; one whom no servile hope of gain or frosty apprehension of danger can make to be a parasite, either to time, place, or opinion’; Macilente, the envious scholar and melancholiac (Asper plays the part of Macilente); Puntarvolo, the vain-glorious knight; Carlo Buffone, the Plautine back-biting, profane parasite, an impudent common jester, a violent railer, and an incomprehensible epicure: one whose company is desired of all men, but beloved of none, he will sooner lose his soul than a jest, and profane even the most holy thing to excite laughter; Fastidius Brisk, the affecting, extravagant, would-be courtier; Deliro, the doting and hood-winked citizen; Fallace, the dishonest wife; Saviolina, the court-lady with a light wit, admired only by herself; Sordido, the avaricious man, the speculator and a wreched reader of almanacs; Fungoso, the student who follows fashion and wants to be dressed like Brisk; Sogliardo, the essential clown who wants to be a gentleman and takes Shift as his mentor; Shift, the thread-bare shark; Clove and Orange, two city-born coxcombs. In addition, Cordatus, the moderator, ‘the authors friend; a man inly acquainted with the scope and drift of his plot; of a discreet, and understanding iudgment; and has the place of a moderator’, makes up the chorus with Mitis, ‘a person of no action, and therefore we afford him no character’. Quid sit comedia? (What should comedy be?) If one cannot define comedy, answers Cordatus, one should be content with Cicero’s definition, imitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis (the imitation of life, the mirror of custom, and

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the image of truth) and he adds ‘a thing throughout pleasant, and ridiculous, and accommodated to the correction of manners’.125 Jonson favourerd the original meaning of ridiculus as laughable, witty and tolerant, not sardonic, bitter and hateful. He was influenced by the satirical and socially critical work of John Donne. Behind them were the satires of Horace as he penned the provoking term comicall satyre for the play. The social behaviour of hybris introduced so successfully by Aristophanes continued in Jonson’s humours. The comic invective, the verbal attacks, the crude, obscene and bawdy language used to expose pretentiousness are of Aristophanic origin and vintage. He also took the chorus idea from Aristophanes but Jonson is the first playwright to introduce it in the Induction to the play. Cordatus and Mitis (Grex) are placed at the front of the stage in a double act as both actors and spectators, commentators, moderators and ‘spin-doctors’ to explain and defend the playwrights principles and intentions. The Elizabethan techniques of farce are applied successfully in the exposure of pretentious characters. The ancient satyr plays had influenced Aristophanes and Jonson picked up this link in Every Man Out Of his Humour. This genre, says Cordatus, is ‘of a particular kind by itself, somewhat like Vetus Comedia’ (the former or ‘old’ comedy of Aristophanes and not the later, ‘new’ Greek and Roman comedies). Cordatus points out that comedia to begin with was only ‘a simple and continued satire, sung by only one person’, but gradually more actors were introduced until Aristophanes listed a rich variety of characters. Such change and development must continue after Aristophanes: And, though that in him this kind of poem appeared absolute and fully perfected, yet how is the face of it changed since in Menader, Philemon, Caecilius, Plautus, and the rest, who have utterly excluded the chorus, altered the property of the 125

Act III, scene 1.

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persons, their names, and natures, and argumented it with all liberty, according to the elegancy and disposition of those times where they wrote! I see not then but we should enjoy the same licentia or free power to illustrate and heighten our invention as they did, and not to be tied to those strict and regular forms which the niceness of a few (who are nothing but form) would trust upon us.126

In the Induction Asper makes clear his intention to ‘strip the ragged follies of the time naked as their birth’ and ‘with a whip of steel print wounding lashes in their iron ribs’. The whip at hand is the four humours and satire. The central theme before Act I starts is to explore a definition of the word Humour and of the Comedy of Humours. Mitis first uses the word in a reference to Asper’s speech on the vices and follies of the day: ‘In faith, this Humour will come ill to some, you will be thought to be too peremptory.’ Asper immediately asks ‘why this Humour, Mitis?’ and challenges the casual use of the term. He then explains that he will ‘give these ignorant well-spoken days some taste of their abuse of this word humour’. Cordatus also regrets the abuse of humour, ‘daily to see how the poor innocent word is racked and tortured’. Asper then begins by explaining the correct ancient definition of humour as fluid: To be a quality of air, or water And in itself holds these two properties, Moisture and fluxure: as for demonstration, Pour water on this floor, ‘twill wet and run: Likewise the air, forced through a horn or trumpet, Flows instantly away, and leaves behind A kind of dew: and hence we do conclude, That whatsoe’er hath fluxure and humidity, 126

Induction, ll. 254–65.

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As wanting power to contain itself, Is humour.

From this physical and elemental origin of the word Asper goes on to explain the medical use of the term: So in every human body, The choler, melancholy, phlegm and blood, By reason that they flow continually In some one part, and are not continent, Receive the name of humours.

Asper then adds that the term Humour may be applied metaphorically to an overriding ‘psychological’ disposition or passion: 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.

He then turns disapprovingly to the popular cant use of the word which had degenerated to mean only mannerism, whim, idiosyncrasy and affectation: But that a rooke in wearing a pyed feather, The cable hat-band, or the three-pild ruffe, A yard of shoetyre, or the Swizers knot On his French garters, should affect a Humour! O, ‘tis more then most ridiculous.

Cordatus enthusiastically adds his approval and his own example: ‘He speaks pure truth. Now if an idiot have but an apish or fantastic strain it is his humour.’

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Asper means to ridicule and ‘scourge those apes’ and hold up a mirror to the audience ‘as large as is the stage whereon we act, where they shall see the time’s deformity anatomised in every nerve and sinew’, to expose those who affect a peculiar quality in order to make themselves important. His real interest is ‘to seize on vice and with a grip crush out the humour of such spongy souls, as lick up every idle vanity’. The didactic spirit, the moral and corrective purpose, is in full play. The comedy had a function, a purpose. ‘The stage was a vast mirror of human life exhibiting the times deformitie.’127 Scaliger had highlighted the role and value of comedy in exposing vice: ‘In comedy we have jests, reveling, weddings with drunken carousals, tricks played by slaves, drunkenness, old men deceived and cheated of their money … So those comedies should be prized which make us condemn the vices which they bring to our ears.’128 The Prologue (‘what a humerous fellow is this?’) now appears as part of a jest that abandons the prologue. Act I of the satirical comedy in five acts can begin. We first meet Macilente (played by Asper), physically lean and gaunt and psychologically consumed with envy and jealousy, rejecting the stoics and the cynics in equal measure, unable to control his choleric humour (‘I strive in vain to cure my wounded soul’). Envy and jealousy has flooded the body with yellow bile and disrupted his mind. The Chorus (Cordatus and Mitis) can only confirm with a reference to Virgil that he sighs, groans, grinds his teeth and his sweat runs cold, gazing at what he hates. He is indeed ‘violently impatient of any opposite happiness in another’. 127

128

Percy Simpson (ed.), Ben Jonson, ‘The Portraiture of Humours’, OUP, 1919, III, liv. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetica, tr. by F.M. Padelford, 1561, 57–9 (Bodleian).

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Sogliardo, the clown, enters together with Carlo, the parasite and jester, and brags that he has land and money and aspires to be a gentleman. ‘This is my humour now.’ Carlo reminds him that if he seeks high society he must ‘observe all the rare qualities, humours, and compliments of a gentleman’. The Chorus dismisses Sogliardo as ‘a gallant’ and ‘a tame rook’. Macilente who has been prostrate listening to the conversation is bursting with fury and questions why Sogliardo, a fool and ‘transparent gull’, should own land and houses: ‘I could eat my entrails and sink my soul into the earth with sorrow.’ Carlo, in devious mood, eggs Sogliardo on and insists that to be an accomplished gentleman he must move to the city, dress fashionably, observe social etiquette and learn to play cards. He is told to ‘sit melancholy’ and when he attends a play he must be seen as ‘humerous’. It is essential to ‘pretend alliances with courtiers and great persons’, to ‘give yourself style enough’. And if he takes offence from someone he must challenge it immediately. ‘I do not like that humour of challenge’, he retorts cowardly, but ‘I’ll tell you what my humour is now.’ He will let his tailor find a (false) letter from a nobleman in a pocket of his suit and thus enhance his status. Macilente still on the ground, listening, fumes. Carlo leads Sogliardo to believe that debt is the same as credit, ‘it is an excellent policy to owe much these days’. ‘My humour is to keep men-servants,’ declares Sogliardo, and give them proper liveries ‘that’s my humour’, but as he lacks a coat of arms Carlo immediately suggests, ‘ride to the city, you may buy one’. Sogliardo declares, ‘I’ll be once a little prodigal in a humour, in faith, and have a most prodigious one.’ Macilente overhearing this, is overcome with despair and he now appears and addresses Sogliardo directly. This leads Carlo to expose his talent as ‘a profane jester’ who

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will ‘transform any person into deformity’ and in an Aside to Macilente declares that Sogliardo is ‘a shallow fool’ with the brain of a butterfly. At the same time he warns Sogliardo against Macilente, ‘a lean mongrel’. Sordido, Sogliardo’s brother, is a miser who reads almanacs obsessively to detect the weather that will suit his own harvest and storage of grain. Consequently, he lets the poor starve, ‘what’s that to me’. Macilente, observing him, calls him ‘a filthy damned rogue that fats himself with expectation of rotten weather … and he is rich for it’. The two-man Chorus enters and Cordatus asks Mitis what he observed in that scene. ‘Have the humourists exprest themselves truly or no?’ Mitis thinks Macilente was cut short, but Cordatus insists, ‘you mistake his humour utterly then’. Mitis, surprised, asks, ‘is ‘t not envy?’ Cordatus then explains that Macilente does not envy Sordido because he is a villain, only because he is rich and fortunate. ‘For the true condition of envy is dolor alienae felicitates, to have our eyes continually fixed upon another man’s prosperity – that is, his chief happiness – and to grieve at that. Whereas, if we make his monstrous and abhorred actions our object, the grief we take then comes nearer the nature of hate than envy, as being bred out of a kind of contempt and loading in ourselves.’ Mitis adds, ‘so you’ll infer it had been hate, not envy in him, to reprehend the humour of Sordido?’ Cordatus elaborates: ‘Right. For what a man truly envies in another, he could always love and cherish in himself, but no man truly reprehends in another, what he loves in himself. Therefore, reprehension is out of his hate.’ Cordatus reminds Mitis that Macilente had made this distinction himself in his speech about Sogliardo earlier: ‘I envy not this Buffone, but I do hate him.’ But would he not have hated Sordido as much as he hated Sogliardo, wonders Mitis. Cordatus then makes a distinction: ‘There was a subject for his envy in Sordido: his wealth. So was there not in the other.’

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When Act 2 begins, Cordatus and Mitis are still with Sogliardo and Carlo as the affecting courtier Fastidius Brisk enters with his Page, Cinedo. Fastidius is described by Cordatus as ‘the Frenchified courtier’, effeminate, ignorant and affected. Is he ‘a humorist too’, asks Mitis. And Cordatus confirms that he is ‘as humorous as quicksilver’. Fastidius insists that the jingle sound made by the rowels on a spur is ‘the only humour now extant’ and Sogliardo refers to a Morris character dancing ‘with as good a humour’ as any man. Carlo asks if Sogliardo has danced ‘since the humour of gentility’ entered. The chorister Mitis concludes that their discourse has been nothing except for the use of the word humour. Sogliardo insists that nobody ‘has the like humours as he for the hobby-horse’ (the Morris dance), and ‘all the humours incident to the quality’. Fastidius says to Carlo, ‘his humour arrides (amuses) me exceedingly’. ‘In avoiding vices, fools run into their opposites,’ comments Cordatus (quoting Horace). Fastidius, refers to Puntarvolo as ‘a gentleman of exceeding good humour’, someone he would wish to visit and ‘take knowledge of his …humour’. Puntarvolo woos his lady in high style, ‘he has his humour for it.’ They all hide to listen as the vainglorious Puntarvolo enters. He admits to the waiting gentlewoman that his complexion is melancholy. Sordido reappears, now with his son, the spungy upstart and law student Fungoso. Sordido and Fungoso withdraw and Fastidius asks, ‘will not their presence prevail against the current of his humour?’ Mitis asks perplexed ‘Is ‘t possible there should be any such humorist?’ as Puntarvolo addresses the Lady in the window pretending to be a knight-errant. Cordatus, looking at the fashionable attire of Fastidius, says sarcastically: ‘There’s another humour has new cracked the shell.’ Puntarvolo declares that he intends to travel with his wife and dog to Constantinople and gamble five thousand pounds. If they return safely they will gain twenty-five thousand.

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There is a change of scene with Deliro, besotted with his wife, and in a ‘hood-winked humour’, who lives more like a suitor than a husband. He welcomes ‘good Macilente’ to his house and asks him how he may ’temper this strange spleen’ in his wife Fallace. Macilente, seeding with envy of Deliro’s wealth, tells him to ‘offer no love rites’, but let her seek them. Then Fallace, as perverse as Deliro is officious, appears and immediately complains about the perfumed garden Deliro has created. Young Fungoso and his father enter, both showing off in their fashionable suits. Now follows ‘a whole volume of humours’ says Cordatus as Act 3 opens with the entry of Shift, the usurper, pimp and con-man, who ‘may hull up and down i’ the humorous world a little longer’. Shift is joined by Orange and then by Clove, the inseparable pair of coxcombs, ‘twins of foppery’. Clove asks Shift when they can ‘sup together, and laugh’ but Shift says he must leave ‘upon a few humours and occasions’. Puntarvolo is obsessed with the safety of his dog and when Shift maintains that he can make the dog smoke and ‘take as many whiffs as I list’ he is very upset. Sogliardo explains that ‘you do not know the humour of the dog as we do’. This is another rare example of a humour attached to an animal similar to the humour used to describe the colour of a horse in Henry Porter’s play The Two Angry women of Abingdon. Puntarvolo complains that his wife is ‘out of her humour’. Sogliardo asks, ‘where shall we dine, Carlo, I would fain go to one of these ordinaries, now I am a gentleman’. Carlo warns that ‘the fashion is, when any stranger comes in amongst ‘em, they all stand up and stare at him as he were some unknown beast brought out of Africa’. Fastitius declares that he pursues his ‘humour still in contempt of this censorious age’. Macilente quotes Juvenal that ‘poverty, harsh in itself, has no effect so unfortunate as that it turns men into butts of jokes’. Sordido has been fooled by the weather and the almanac writers and is now facing a reversal of fortune. He arrives

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carrying a ladder and a halter round his neck. The Chorus is at hand and Mitis asks if he will ‘hang himself’. Cordatus answers in the confirmative and Mitis adds, ‘beshrew me, he will be out of his humours then indeed’. A letter is now delivered to Sordido from his son asking for support for revels and ‘for the setting up of our name in the honourable volume of gentility’. He climbs the ladder and attaches the halter. His attempt fails as he is rescued by a group of rustics who cut him down just in time. Sordido at first curses them for saving him and one of the rustics recognises him as ‘the curse of the poor’. Sordido then declares that ‘out on my wreched humour’ he will make amends for his ‘foul errors past’. The rustics watch the conversion in disbelief: ‘O, miracle! See when a man has grace!’ Macilente and Fastitius, in a new suit and in the grip of the fashion of tobacco, enter. Fastidius refers to the solo, male dancing and the ‘stirring humours’ arising from this that ‘make ladies mad with desire’. Saviolina enters. Macilente watching Fastidius taking tobacco comments aside: ‘Is this the wonder of nations?’ Fastidius takes down the out of tune viola and Macilente insert another wry comment: ‘It makes good harmony with her wit.’ Mitis reckons that ‘this gallant’s humour is almost spent’ but Cordatus assures him that there is more to come and the humour ‘will flow again for all this, till there come a general drought of humour among all the actors, and then I fear not but his will fall as low as any’. Act 4 opens with a melancholy Fungoso who feels let down because he has not had a reply to a letter to his father. Deliro comes in with musicians to impress his wife but in vain as usual. Macilente appears and Deliro asks him about Fastidius and is told that people just ‘deride and play upon his amorous humours’. Puntarvolo enters with a Notary to write the detailed agreement of the wager between him and Fastidius.

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Puntarvolo asks about Sogliardo who has been the victim of a practical tobacco joke. The gallants had ‘opened his nostrils with a poking-stick to give the smoke a more free delivery’. Puntarvolo asks how they could do this to a friend but Carlo retorts: ‘Friend? Is there any such foolish thing i’ the world?’ Puntarvolo replies: ‘Thy humour is the more dangerous.’ Carlo disagrees and says he will oil his tongue when he meets him and that will ‘take away all soil of suspicion… the title of a friend, it’s a vain idle thing, only venerable among fools’. Deliro and Macilente appear and Deliro is again accused of just being an ‘egregious dotard’ about Fallace. Sogliardo and Shift appear and Shift is lauded as ‘the tallest man living within the walls of Europe’. Fastitius enters in a good mood: ‘Good hours make music with your mirth, gentlemen, and keep time to your humours.’ He asks Puntarvolo if the agreement is ready. Fungoso enters with tailor, shoemaker and haberdasher and has to ask the tailor for credit. Cordatus asks: ‘Do you observe the plunges that this poor gallant is put to, signor, to purchase the fashion?’ Puntarvolo tells Fastitius that he is soon ready to depart for Constantinople before Carlo, Sogliardo, Shift and Macilente enter. Carlo says that he has persuaded Sogliardo ‘to turn courtier’. Fastidius insists that his mistress ‘has the most acute, ready and facetious wit’ but Macilente finds her ‘too self-conceited’. Fastidius agrees but adds that ‘twere not for that humour, she were the most-to-be admired lady in the world’. Puntarvolo thinks that ‘it is a humour that takes from her other excellencies’. Sogliardo admits that he has ‘a great humour to the court’ and that his ‘tricks in tobacco will show excellent there’. Fungoso enters in his new outfit. Mitis wonders if Macilente has become more sociable, but Cordatus points to his ‘strange nature’ and ‘in the calm of his humour’ he plots malicious thoughts and ‘the very torrent of his envy breaks forth’. It is therefore difficult to see how

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this disposition can receive a ‘quick and strong alteration’. Mitis thinks the author should call his play Every Man Out of His Humour, ‘when I saw all his actors so strongly pursue and continue their humours’. Cordatus answers: ‘Why, therein his art appears most full of lustre and approacheth nearest the life, especially when, in the flame and height of their humours, they are laid flat.’ Like a tree humours should be ‘felled in a moment’ and ‘not cut down by degrees’. Mitis looks forward to ‘this fall you talk of’. Act 5 starts with Puntarvolo, Fastidius, young Fungoso, Saviolina and the dog, given to a groom to look after. The groom mutters: ‘What a mad, humerous gentleman is this to leave his dog with me.’ Macilente and Sogliardo appear in conversation and Sogliardo is advised to ‘court this allwitted lady most naturally and like yourself’. Sogliardo agrees and says he will ‘begin to her in tobacco’. Macilente begs him to forget that but to ask politely how she is, kiss her hand and tell her how ‘more than fair she is’. Again Sogliardo says: ‘But shall I not use tobacco at all?’ Macilente tells him that it will ‘make your breath suspected’. The groom abandons the dog and Macilente poisons it. ‘A piece of true envy!’ (of Puntarvolo), says Mitis. Saviolina asks after the dog and a cat. Puntarvolo seeks to convince her that Sogliardo ‘is exceedingly valiant, an excellent scholar’, but then adds that ‘his travels have changed his complexion’ and he imitates ‘any manner of person for gesture, action, passion’. Fastidius adds that it is not possible ‘for the sharpest-sighted wit in the world to discern any spark of the gentleman in him’. Macilente enters together with Sogliardo who takes Saviolina’s hand and mutters: ‘Hot and moist? Beautiful and lusty?’ Saviolina insists that he ‘becomes his natural carriage of the gentleman much better than his clownery’. Macilente wonders if she has ‘deciphered him’ and then asks ‘What if he should be no gentleman now, but a clown indeed, lady? Would not your ladyship be out of your

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humour?’ Fungoso comments: ‘She’s out of her humour’ and Puntarvolo’s ‘spleen is great with laughter.’ Shift enters followed by Puntarvolo, Fastidius, Sogliardo, Fungoso and Macilente. Fastidius: ‘The poor lady is most miserably out of her humour’. Puntarvolo adds: ‘There was never so witty a jest broken at the Tilt, of all the court wits christened.’ Puntarvolo looks around for the groom and the dog and stars blaming Fastidius. Fungoso tells him that ‘your dog lies giving up the ghost in the Woodyard’. Macilente wonders, ‘is he not dead yet?’ and comments: ‘Here were a couple unexpectedly dishumoured! … I hope Sir Puntarvolo and his dog are both out of humour to travel!’ Fastitius adds: ‘I am so melancholy for his dog’s disaster’. Carlo is keen to know our gallant’s success at the court and knows that ‘Macilente, that salt villain, plotting some mischieveous device, and lies a-soaking in their frothy humours like a dry crust, till he has drunk ‘em all up’. Carlo gets drunk. Macilente enters and asks: ‘What humour is this?’ Cordatus, quoting Horace, says that Carlos is preserved at the end in the same condition as he had appeared from the beginning. It would not be right to ‘dash him out of humour before his time’. Carlos continues to drink. ‘O, here comes the melancholy mess’, says Macilente as Puntarvolo, Fastidius, Sogliardo and Fungoso enter. Carlo asks Puntarvolo if he had an antidote for his poisoned dog but Puntarvole takes offence at Carlo’s wild suggestion, to take a smaller dog and ‘clap into the skin’ of the other, draws his rapier and asks: ‘So, now, are you out of your humour, sir?’ As a Constable and Brisk enter it is Fastidius who is held ‘for your riot here’. Macilente tells Deliro that he will no longer try to persuade him of his wife’s infidelity as it is ‘so against your humour’. Macilente convinces Deliro to rescue his wife’s brother, Fungoso, and pay for the damage he is accused of at the Mitre tavern. This would please his wife

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and ‘cannot but make her dote and grow mad of your affections’. Macilente tells Fallace of ‘the misfortune that happened to Fastidius, and suggests ‘a bribe to the officer that committed him’. Cordatus says of Macilente: ‘Ay, you shall see the true picture of spite anon!’ Deliro settles the bill and frees Fungoso who declares ‘I am out of those humours now’. Macilente asks Deliro to rescue Fastidius as this again will please Fallace. She meets up with Fastidius and tells him that her husband is preparing to arrest him and Macilente tells Fastidius that Deliro has ‘entered three actions against you’. The Queen enters the stage and the ‘wonder of her presence strikes Macilente to the earth’. Macilente’s new passion thus utters itself: ‘Envy is fled my soul at sight of her, and she hath chased all black thoughts from my bosom, like as the sun doth darkness from the world. My stream of humour is run out of me … I have now a spirit as sweet and clear as the most rarefied and subtle air … and with a a heart as pure as fire (Yet humble as the earth)…. Let Flattery be dumb and Envy blind.’129 Cordatus, in conversation with Asper (as Macilente), says that their ‘censuring’ is over and ‘we’ll imitate your actors and be out of our humours’. Macilente has the last words. ‘I will be out of humour for companie … and … am nothing so peremptory as I was in the beginning.’ The play ends with a quote from Horace: Non ego ventosae plebis suffragia venor (I do not chase after approval from the fickle masses). Jonson made a formal connection between the theory of decorum and the humoral theory, the one supporting the other, to maintain a fixed psychology of behaviour: 129

In the Quarto and the Folio Jonson changed some of the wording, for example: ‘Now is my soul at peace. I am as empty of all envy now … my humour, like a flame, no longer lasts.’

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The classicism of Ben Jonson belongs to the high noon of Rome. He is the truest classic in English letters. Other writers have taken from the surface of Latin poetry; Jonson went to the heart. His powers of close, ironic observation, his salty realism, the urbanity and energy of his statement, show how strongly his turn of mind was related to that of Horace.130

The result is verisimilar and fixed characters, but within these limitations Jonson creates, with a sharp eye, true types from the London scene and exposes the follies, vanities and hypocrisies of men; a new satire on human nature, social criticism maintained by laughter, without sentimentality, but with a truly English tolerance. This reflects the principles of comedy expressed both by Horace and Plautus. Fundamentally, says Horace, writers must instruct, ‘teach life the right’. Against this background Jonson wished to create something new and teach his age the appropriate comic laws and dramatic rules, form and role, built on the classical and the native traditions. The verisimilitude, logic and control of the ancients and the comedy of Aristophanes created a union with the variety and exuberance of the English ancestry. The impostor and the buffoon are unmasqued and expelled, order is restored in society. This was indeed a mixing of the humours. We sense the classical inspiration from Westminster school and the real life experience as a bricklayer and a soldier in his approach to creative writing. In an experimental, episodic, sketchy, learned and witty play Jonson sports with eccentrics, fools, fakes and hypocrates and in the end with firm purpose shakes them out of their humours and affectations and in so doing instructs and teaches the spectators essential lessons of behaviour. The characters change fundamentally at the end, ironically and paradoxically, in contrast to Horace and Jonson’s dictum that they should remain at the end as they 130

George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, Faber and Faber, 1961, 28.

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were in the beginning, but they don’t change during the play. The playwright shows his characters in their different humours and at the end brings them out of their humours and towards a recognition of their vanity and folly. In both cases it is an imitation of the common errors of life. Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair and The Magnetic Lady: Or, Humors Reconcil’d

Jonson was a prolific writer and created eighteen plays, thirty masques, epigrams, poetry and prose (cf. Discoveries). Some works were lost, one early play, The Isle of Dogs was destroyed and the Plautine comedy, The Case is Altered, 1597, was as unsuccessful as was the hurried Poetaster in 1601. Then between 1605 and 1614 Jonson wrote four of his best comedies: Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair. ‘From the beginning to end, he assumed the attitude of a censor and reformer, purposing always through the laughter of comedy to improve morals and correct taste.’131 In the Dedication of Volpone; or, the Fox ‘to the most noble and most equal sisters, the two famous universities’ (Oxford and Cambridge) where the play had been staged, Jonson aims to raise the despised head of poetry. He saw his comedies as ‘poems’ in the sense of being an integral, worthy and even principal part of literature, to ‘inform men, in the best reason of living’. The Dedication, written in a most elegant prose, has references to Horace, Cicero and Erasmus and the play is influenced by classical comedy and the moralities. The lust for gold is penned in an elegant, powerful and blasphemeous language: ‘Good morning to the day; and next, my gold! Open the shrine that I may see my saint.’ 131

Mina Kerr, Influence of Ben Jonson on English Comedy, 1598–1642, University of Pennsylvania, 6.

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were in the beginning, but they don’t change during the play. The playwright shows his characters in their different humours and at the end brings them out of their humours and towards a recognition of their vanity and folly. In both cases it is an imitation of the common errors of life. Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair and The Magnetic Lady: Or, Humors Reconcil’d

Jonson was a prolific writer and created eighteen plays, thirty masques, epigrams, poetry and prose (cf. Discoveries). Some works were lost, one early play, The Isle of Dogs was destroyed and the Plautine comedy, The Case is Altered, 1597, was as unsuccessful as was the hurried Poetaster in 1601. Then between 1605 and 1614 Jonson wrote four of his best comedies: Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair. ‘From the beginning to end, he assumed the attitude of a censor and reformer, purposing always through the laughter of comedy to improve morals and correct taste.’131 In the Dedication of Volpone; or, the Fox ‘to the most noble and most equal sisters, the two famous universities’ (Oxford and Cambridge) where the play had been staged, Jonson aims to raise the despised head of poetry. He saw his comedies as ‘poems’ in the sense of being an integral, worthy and even principal part of literature, to ‘inform men, in the best reason of living’. The Dedication, written in a most elegant prose, has references to Horace, Cicero and Erasmus and the play is influenced by classical comedy and the moralities. The lust for gold is penned in an elegant, powerful and blasphemeous language: ‘Good morning to the day; and next, my gold! Open the shrine that I may see my saint.’ 131

Mina Kerr, Influence of Ben Jonson on English Comedy, 1598–1642, University of Pennsylvania, 6.

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But we soon learn that Volpone is not gripped by a lust for the primate of metals, ‘the world’s soul’, per se, but dominated by a peculiar humour, a restless search and craving, creating the alchemy of a corrupt knave and trickster. He has a dominating Pride in his own cleverness. Gold is the means to an end but Volpone does not have a fixed purpose and goal, except expediency. He is trapped in an evil circle where plot must follow plot: ‘Any device, now, of rare, ingenious knavery, that would possess me with a violent laughter, would make me up, againe.’ The ‘fled moment’ of a plot presents an intolerable dilemma and a new plan must instantly be conceived. He is on the run from excessive pride and melancholy and he needs a never-ending circle of new tricks to feed the humours. Sir Politick Would-Be provides a welcome comic relief from the dark comedy and tragic satire of Volpone and Mosca. Epicoene is close to Every Man in His Humour in the conflict between the generations. In addition, True-Wit, Dauphine and Clerimont are similar to Knowell and Wellbred, Daw and La-Foole are close to Stephen and Mathew and Thomas Otter and his wife reflect the behaviour of Kitely, Cob and their wives. Morose is ‘a Gentleman that loves no noice’ and he has become solitary and anti-social. He enters with his servant Mute, holding a tube in his hand: Cannot I, yet, find out a more compendious method, than by this trunk, to save my servants the labour of speech, and mine ears the discords of sounds? Let me see: all discourses but my own afflict me; they seem harsh, impertinent, and irksome. Is it not possible, that thou shouldst answer me by signs, and I apprehend thee, fellow? Speak not, though I question you.132 132

II, i.

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Mute ‘makes a leg’ to answer Morose’s questions. When Epicoene asks him: ‘How do you, sir?’ the answer is rude and impatient, but perhaps he has a point: ‘Did you ever hear a more unnessesary question? As if she did not see!’ In the ‘discords of sounds’ of contemporary society we can perhaps relate to and understand Morose’s humour. When we arrive at The Alchemist (first acted with Richard Burbadge in 1610) it seems that manners were being identified as humours. Jonson explains this in a mockingly patriotic ‘Prologue’: Our Scene is London, ‘cause we would make known, No country’s mirth is better than our own. No clime breeds better matter for your whore, Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more, Whose manners, now call’d humours, feed the stage.

He further hints that the ‘natural follies’ portrayed in The Alchemist are the new humours. We are introduced to Subtle (the Alchemist), Face, the Housekeeper and their friend Doll Common, in a fast-moving comedy with intense quarrels between Face and Subtle. Kastril has come to town to learn to quarrel. Jonson had studied the available theories of the science of alchemy (which had arrived from Arabia in the twelth century A.D.) and the link to the four elements; he must have been in his element exploring this topic. The laboratory is the Promised Land, the central delusion in the play. Jonson saw the comic element in the intense pursuit of alchemy, the greed, credulity and folly. Jonson promoted an interdisciplinary approach, the relationship between literature and science, ‘how literature drew on and developed contemporary scientific ideas, and also,

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conversely, how science itself was framed by the language and culture of the time’.133 The scene in Blackadder134 when Lord Percy seeks to discover the secret of alchemy is worthy of a scene in The Alchemist. Jonson crowds the play and the stage with nearly fifty speaking parts in Bartholomew Fair with total disregard for the neo-classical restrictions of the number of actors that could appear on the stage at the same time. Humphrey Waspe is the choleric servant to the phlegmatic Bartholomew Cokes, Trouble-All is called a Madman and suffers from advanced melancholia and Zeal-of-the-Land is a vainglorious hypocrite.Jonson creates a colourful picture of everyday London life and unmasks authority, pomposity and pretensions. If you have power, use it wisely: ‘You are but Adam.’ Jonson had a strongly ordered mind and a deliberate and powerful creative faculty and in his charcters can clearly be seen the influence of theory. The sharply defined, fixed and static quality of Jonson’s characterization is the result of his obedience to the critical principle of Decorum combined with the popular use of humours to explain behaviour. He had the four humours in attack position and he certainly chose to use them for his own purpose. He had learned from the Ancients that Man was a mixture of the same four elements that constituted the Universe – Man as Microcosm. Each element possessed two qualities in a permanent coalition, but one held a stronger majority: Earth was dry and cold, Water was cold and moist, Air was moist and cold and Fire (like the stars) was hot and dry. The humours were formed in the liver and each humour corresponded to an element and its composition. In this way the element 133 134

Sally Shuttleworth, Oxford English, 3/14, 6. BBC One, Blackadder II.

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Earth became the dry and cold Melancholy Humour, Water became the cold and moist Phlegmatic Humour, Air became the moist and cold Sanguine Humour and Fire became the hot and dry Choleric Humour. This circle of elements and humours were rarely in perfect harmony and the imbalance created what we would call psychological effects, which at the Elizabethan time was associated with medicine and philosophy. Characters in and out of plays appeared with various complexions of which melancholia was the leader both as a real depression and an affected one. In the Induction to The Magnetic Lady: Or, Humors Reconcil’d, Jonson lets a Boy of the theatre explain the progression of humours: The Author, beginning his studies of this kind, with every man in his Humour; and after, every man out of his Humour; and since, continuing in all his Playes, especially those of the Comic thred, whereof the New-Inne was the last, some recent humours still, or manners of men, that went along with the times, finding himselfe now neare the close, or shutting up of his Circle, hath phant’sied to himselfe, in Idaea, this Magnetic Mistris. A Lady a brave bountifull Housekeeper, and a vertuous Widow: Who having a young Neice, ripe for a man and marriageable, hee makes that his Center attractive, to draw thither a diversity of Guests, all persons of different humours to make up his Perimiter. And this hee hath call’d Humors reconcil’d.

The Usurer, Sir Moth Interest, in the same play is described as ‘a man of a most animadverting humour’ (someone who passes criticism). The concept humour had turned away from its medical roots to become a welcome weapon in the pursuit of satire. ‘I have a great humour to taste of this water.’135 135

Ben Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels, I.

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Shakespeare also used the term humour in his comedies and it appears in The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew but it is after Chapman and Jonson made the term current and fashionable that it appears more frequently in Shakespearean comedies, in Much Ado about Nothing and notably in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The difference may be that Shakespeare releases the word humour into his comedies and they are released by it, Jonson lets the word humour dominate his comedies and they are dominated by it. In the century that followed his death Jonson was praised for his wit, humour and judgment, he had dissected the human kind, and showed their faults ‘that they their faults might find’.136 He lashed ‘the finer follies of the great’137 and his comic humour ‘kept the world in awe, and Laughter frightn’d Folly more than Law’.138 He was a scholar and a playwright, a consummate comic genius, a master of the English language and a reformer of the stage, the father of the English comedy. He was ‘one of the best Comick Poets that ever was in the World ... the Ridiculum was the chief thing in Comedy’.139 Jonson invents both the form and substance of most Restoration comedy, a world of fools and fops and jealous husbands where idle but urbane young gallants, in the process of capturing the most desirable women, wittily expose and exploits various social affectations. In a broader sense, Jonson – paradoxically, by concentrating specifically on Jacobean London – anticipates the centrifugal plotting and the metatheatrical irony of modern absurdist and existential 136 137 138 139

John Dryden, 1672. William Whitehead, 1751. Charles Churchill, 1761. John Dennis, The Comical Gallant, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, 1702.

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dramatists such as Pinter, Beckett, Sartre and Pirandello …. for Jonson (as for Freud), truth is found in laughter and both (not the devil) are found in the details.140

The Norwegian-Danish playwright Ludvig Holberg came to Oxford for two years at the age of twenty-one in 1706. He was clearly inspired by Jonson’s comedies; the portrayal of overpowering humours in his many plays show a lasting influence. He observed that the satires of Jonson ‘castigate and amuse at the same time, and censure not one, but all faults’.141 Jonson’s popularity and reputation waned and faded as the curtains opened more for Shakespeare’s plays but comprehensive editions of his work, biographies and critical appraisals have begun to appear in recent years. It is too early to talk of a Jonsonian revival or renaissance, but as the folly of man remains we need Jonson to remind us of just that. His reading of Virgil, Tacitus, Livi and Cicero encouraged a political focus on democratic values and liberties.142 He said of Shakespeare that he was not of an age, but of all time. This is also true of Jonson. T.S. Eliot argued that ‘he was a literary artist … we must see him unbiased by time, as a contemporary’.143 The portrait of Jonson by Abraham van Blyenberch (1617?) has survived to become the accepted version, but Sir William Borlase, a contemporary of Jonson, also painted him (probably after van Blyenberch) and sent it as a present with ‘an attempt at verse’. Jonson replied and declared his friendship with an eight stanza verse ‘To Burlace’. He admits 140

141 142 143

Robert N.Watson (ed.), Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour, New Mermaid ed., 1998, Introduction, x. Mindre Poetiske Skrifter, Köbenhavn, 1746. Andrew Hadfield, ‘Politics’, in Julie Sanders, op. cit., 237–44. The Sacred Wood, Methuen, 1920, 106, 122.

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that he has a ‘prodigious waist … and the whole lump grows round’, succumbs to the painted image in front of him and accepts that ‘with one great blot you have drawn me as I am’. But then he hasten to add: ‘But whilst you curious were to have it be an archetype for all the world to see, you have made it a brave peece, but not like me.’144 A diplomatic answer? Never say no, only perhaps, which means no. The painting has been lost. Ut pictura poesis? Perhaps not this time.

144

William Copeland Borlase, The Descent, Name and Arms of Borlase of Borlase in the County of Cornwall, George Bell &Sons, London, 1888, 43–4 (Bodleian Library).

Chapter 3

THE INFLUENCE OF JONSON ON SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTHCENTURY COMEDY Z Richard Brome

The satirist and romantic playwright, Richard Brome, began as Ben Jonson’s manservant and literary student. They remained friends after he became a rival writer of altogether twenty comedies. The success of Brome’s (now lost) play The Love-Sick Maid, or the Honour of Young Ladies (1628) which somehow overshadowed Jonson’s play, The New Inn, led to a few less than generous comments from Jonson, but this was a passing phase in a long friendship. In ‘An Encomium in praise of the Author’, before the ‘Prologue’ to Brome’s early and successful play, The Northern Lass: or, A Nest of Fools (1629) Jonson wrote: I had you for a servant, once, Dick Brome And you perform’d a servant’s faithful parts, Now you are got into a nearer room Of fellowship, professing my old arts, And you do them well, with good applause, Which you have justly gained from the stage, By observation of those comic laws, 92

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Which I, your master, first did teach the age. You learn’d well and … it serv’d you time, A prentisship, which few do now a-days.

It is Jonson the mentor giving high-flown praise, with more than a hint of irony to his apprentice, but emphasising that it was he who first introduced and taught the laws of comedy to the age. Brome is succeeding because he has followed in his master’s footsteps to the stage. Jonson is nothing if not confident and assertive and he remains the patriarch to Brome. The Northern Lass is a comedy of love and marriage, interplay between four women and five men which ends happily after plotting, intrigue and disguise. Luckless gets Constance, the Northern lass, Tridewell gets Fitchow, Squelch gets Trainwell and Widgin gets Constance, the whore. The playwright shows sympathy for the underdog, the whore and the servant, and, in observing his Master’s wit and comic laws, he attacks the difference between the written law and its corrupt use in the real world.145 The Antipodes (1638) depicts the difference of manners and morals between the northern and the southern hemisphere. The prefatory poem to censuring critics begins: ‘Jonson’s alive! The world admiring stands.’ Indeed, Jonson had written in Discoveries: ‘How many have I knowne, that would not have their vices hid? Nay, and to be noted, live like Antipodes to others in the same Citie?’ The play was staged at the Globe in 2000. Brome’s last and arguably his greatest play, A Jovial Crew, which appeared (1641) just before the Civil War, is a nostalgic reflection on the values of the countryside set against the gathering political storm. 145

Gale Ecco Print Edition; Matthew Steggle, Richard Brome. Place and politics on the Caroline stage, MUP, 2004.

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The country landlord, Squire Oldrents, his daughters Meriel and Rachel, the steward Springlove and the servant Randall are the core characters in one household and the magistrate, Justice Clack, his son Oliver and ward Amie, in the other. A crew of fifteen beggars, the begging crew, make up the third element. Springlove is the secret leader of this gang of beggars which include an actor, a lawyer, a courtier, a soldier and a pamphleteer. The restless daughters and their boyfriends, Hilliard and Vincent, decide to experience the nomadic life of the beggars and this is easily arranged by Springfield. The sudden disappearance of his daughters drives Squire Oldrents to drink and despair. The daughters find the wandering life a bit more difficult than they had expected and when the gang drifts into the property of the nasty Justice Clack they are arrested. It is only the interception of Squire Oldrents that saves them from a severe whipping. At the end of the play the beggars re-enact their adventure on the stage and it is revealed that Springlove is in fact Oldrents’ son – a forgiving and generous end. As one of the beggars opens The Prologue he admits that the title of the play ‘may seem to promise mirth’ but alas ‘jovial mirth is now grown out of fashion. Strife, private and public, holds the stage’. But in spite of the ‘clash of sword and drum …at our play we hope you may feast long; on wit, device, dance, argument and song’. The courtier’s description of the nine degrees of bowing that his father had taught him is in the same humour as Swift’s description of the decoration ceremony in Gulliver’s visit to Lilliput. The diplomat, appropriately, has a measured bow. Randall uses the term humour in relation to Oldrents’ decision to meet Justice Clack: ‘What humour’s this now? On a whim to undertake a journey of some forty miles to see the lunatic Justice. And then to haul me along for company.’

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Oldrents’ humour is more than a sudden whim and is similar to Knowell’s in Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour, the older generation’s worry about the behaviour of the young. When Oldrents contemplates the behaviour of Justice Clack he says: ‘I have not known a man in such a humour,’ referring to his mean-spirited and cruel behaviour. The play lived to be performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan in Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1992.146 James Shirley

On the colophon page of the first printed edition (1640) of Shirley’s comedy, The Humorous Courtier (first acted 1631), he proudly displays ‘a catalogue’ of his twenty works up to that time. He wrote altogether thirty-six plays of which sixteen are comedies. He belongs to the Caroline period and is perhaps the last truly Renaissance playwright. The title itself gives away his intention and ancestry and Orsello is described as ‘an humerous Lord’ in the dramatis personae. It is a play in the tradition and imitation of the comedy of humours. The classical, Terentian comic sentiment of asteismus, ‘a jesting figure of reply, an urban witty saying’147 is continued in Shirley’s comedies. To Shirley, Jonson was the acknowledged master and The Alchemist a play for strength, wit and true art. He was also a good friend of Brome. Shirley made use of the word humour both as a psychological and a cant term. Volterre tells Orsello to ‘have truce a little with thy spleene’. In the early sixteenth century the idea of a merry spleen was current but towards the end of the century it was perhaps more common to see the spleen as the cause of dark moods, bitterness and melancholy.148 Contarini says, 146 147 148

Adapted by Stephen Jeffreys, Warner Chappell Plays, 1992. Herrick, op. cit., 197. Crooke, op. cit.

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Oldrents’ humour is more than a sudden whim and is similar to Knowell’s in Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour, the older generation’s worry about the behaviour of the young. When Oldrents contemplates the behaviour of Justice Clack he says: ‘I have not known a man in such a humour,’ referring to his mean-spirited and cruel behaviour. The play lived to be performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan in Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1992.146 James Shirley

On the colophon page of the first printed edition (1640) of Shirley’s comedy, The Humorous Courtier (first acted 1631), he proudly displays ‘a catalogue’ of his twenty works up to that time. He wrote altogether thirty-six plays of which sixteen are comedies. He belongs to the Caroline period and is perhaps the last truly Renaissance playwright. The title itself gives away his intention and ancestry and Orsello is described as ‘an humerous Lord’ in the dramatis personae. It is a play in the tradition and imitation of the comedy of humours. The classical, Terentian comic sentiment of asteismus, ‘a jesting figure of reply, an urban witty saying’147 is continued in Shirley’s comedies. To Shirley, Jonson was the acknowledged master and The Alchemist a play for strength, wit and true art. He was also a good friend of Brome. Shirley made use of the word humour both as a psychological and a cant term. Volterre tells Orsello to ‘have truce a little with thy spleene’. In the early sixteenth century the idea of a merry spleen was current but towards the end of the century it was perhaps more common to see the spleen as the cause of dark moods, bitterness and melancholy.148 Contarini says, 146 147 148

Adapted by Stephen Jeffreys, Warner Chappell Plays, 1992. Herrick, op. cit., 197. Crooke, op. cit.

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‘as his gall will suffer him’. The controlling organ for choler was the gall bladder, a symbol of bitterness. Contarini talks about Volterre’s ‘railing humour’ and referring to the elderly Comachio declares, ‘he is constant to his humour’. Laura tells Sancho, ‘I hope your discontent will give you leave to smile … to beate your melancholy off.’ The Duchess asks, ‘was not Orsello’s humour, recreation to thee, Carintha?’ Giotto says, ‘If she have such a poverty in her reason, ith’ humour she may marry him’, and, ‘no humorist is constant to dislike’. This is a rare use of the word humorist, still in the meaning of a person subject to one of the four humours. As the Duchess, Laura and Carintha prepare to unmask the foolish courtiers the Duchess says, ‘but Laura, dost thou not smile to thinke upon the event, we shall be censur’d humorous’ and Laura replies, ‘your grace shall publish your reasons, you will appeare just’. The Duchess says: ‘That ambition should have such feare in humane natures, but court hath beene long sicke; they are mad humours and I must physice them.’ In other words, a diseased humour needs healing; a medical reference. In this contest of humours the resourceful women set the test and win the day and ‘receive each man in’s just character’, in other words, in his right humour. Humour and character are used as synomyms.149 The Lady of Pleasure (1635) is the playwright’s best comedy. The play has a main plot (Sir Thomas Bornwell and Lady Aretina Bornwell) and two sub-plots (the young widow Celestina and the Lord and the comic interludes of Frederick, Alexander Kickshaw and John Littleworth). The scene is the Strand in London and Aretina is overjoyed that she has finally left the country and come to town. Bornwell reflects, ‘I have to such a height fulfilled her humour and promises to give her more presents, buy Greek wine and start entertaining, we will have constant 149

The British Library Historical Collection.

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music’ and have the dining-room enlarged, ‘to invite ambassadors’. The second act opens with Bornwell contemplating his strategy. ‘’Tis a strange humour I have undertaken to dance, and play, and spend as fast as she does; but I am resolved: it may do good upon her and fright her into thrift. Nay, I’ll endeavour to make her jealous too.’ Celestina is ready for the banter and mockery. Haircut elaborates on his’honour and profit’ and Celestina replies: ‘I am charmed, sir, and if you ‘scape (move higher than) ambassador, you cannot reach a preferment wherein I’m against you.’ Bornwell sighs that ‘y’ave hit, and bled me in a master vein’; he compares Celestina’s effect on him to the medical and psychological practice of blood-letting.150 He then insists: ‘I came to try how you can dance.’ Celina, aside, remarks: ‘I’ll try his humour out of breath.’ Decoy visits Lord (‘Unready’) and offers to cure his melancholy and repair his loss of Mistress Bella Maria. Lord admits that since the fair Bella Maria died his blood has gone cold, ‘nor is there beauty enough surviving to heighten me to wantonness’. Kickshaw is led, blindfolded, into a dark room as Act IV starts. As he removes the blindfold he encounters Decoy, disguised and dressed like an old woman and carrying a light. She gives him cold coins and explains: ‘I am mistress of this house, and of a fortune that shall serve and feed thee with delights. ‘Twas I sent for thee, the jewel and the letter came from me … canst thou dwell in my arms tonight? Shall we change kisses and entertain the silent hours with pleasure.’ Kickshaw says in disgust: ‘She is so cold, an incubus would not heat her; her phlegm would quench a furnace.’ This is a reference to the true medical and psychological meaning of a phlegmatic humour. Decoy then asks if he has considered her proposition and 150

Samuel Rowlands, op. cit.

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Kickshaw succumbs. Decoy promises ‘my wealth shall make thee glorious … thou wilt find, by light of thy own sense (for other light is banished my chamber) when our arms tie lovers’ knots and kisses seal the welcome of our lips, I shall not there affright thee, nor seem old’. Kickshaw wonders if she is a devil or a witch. Decoy points to the bed in the next chamber and explains that ‘when you are disrobed, you can come thither in the dark’. And in the dark bed is Aretina. Shirley may lack the rapier sharpness of Jonson’s satire, but he does expose the vanity of London life and society, the recklessly lavish consumption and wasteful behaviour. It is a society where nobody works, except Aretina’s portrait painter, and the attention to detail of wig, dress, décor and furniture is all consuming. It is a world of ‘silk and silver’. At the beginning of the play Bornwell is the only critical voice that questions the artificial and stifling atmosphere of city society. Poor Frederick, on Aretina’s insistence, has to shed his black scholarly outfit and be fitted with the latest fashion befitting a galllant. He suddenly appears ostentatious and ridiculous. In fact Frederick fits the character sketch of the scholar; his outfit may be plain when he arrives, but he has a superiour character and intellect and is soon able to ‘out-balance those glisterers as much as a solid substance does a feather, or gold, gold-lace’.151 Frederick soon seems superior to Kickshaw, Bornwell and Haircut, and Aretina realizes her mistake in trying to convert him and make him a gallant fool. She packs him off back to university. Where Shirley expands on Jonson’s satire is in his focus and treatment of women, Aretina and Celestina, who are part of, and trapped by, the glittering city light and its darkness. We meet two strong and intelligent women using the power of their beauty to survive in a society still denying power to women. 151

John Earle, Microcosmographia, 33.

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Shirley makes the play Aretina’s story. Her search for adventure and freedom, the temptation to rattle the chains of married life leads to infidelity with Kickshaw but she is smart enough to fool both her husband and her lover and thus avoid scandal. The success of her double deception does not lead to a sense of exhilaration but to humiliation and melancholy, enhanced when she realizes what an extreme fool Kickshaw is compared with her husband. Aretina is an existentialist in the sense that she feels a deep responsibility for her own actions. It is a moot point in the play whether Bornwell is told or understands what has been going on. He is too good to be true. Celestina is not going to be trapped into a new marriage and joins a game of Platonic love and abstinence with Lord. She is the character sketch of the perfect widow. When Bubulcus, Gorgon and Jenkin, in Shirley’s first play, Love Tricks, or The School of Complement (1625) all demand to speak the Epilogue to the play it recalls the quarrel about the Prologue in Jonson’s Cynthia Revels. The satire of courtly affectation in this school of complement is worthy of Jonson. Shirley’s last comedy The Sisters (1642) contains a verse dedicated to Jonson in the printed version of 1653. The observance and realism of place, countryside and gardens in the comedies of Chapman, Jonson (Bartholomew Fair) and Brome was continued by Shirley. In Shirley’s comedy Hyde Park (1632) the gentlewoman Carol finds the garden a welcome retreat like Florilla’s private garden in Chapman’s An Humerous Day’s Mirth. Thomas Shadwell

Shadwell’s early prose comedy The Sullen Lovers, or the Impertinents (1668),152 is in imitation of Jonson’s comedy of humours and of Moliere’s Les Facheux. The reverence to 152

Ed. The British Library Historical Collection.

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Shirley makes the play Aretina’s story. Her search for adventure and freedom, the temptation to rattle the chains of married life leads to infidelity with Kickshaw but she is smart enough to fool both her husband and her lover and thus avoid scandal. The success of her double deception does not lead to a sense of exhilaration but to humiliation and melancholy, enhanced when she realizes what an extreme fool Kickshaw is compared with her husband. Aretina is an existentialist in the sense that she feels a deep responsibility for her own actions. It is a moot point in the play whether Bornwell is told or understands what has been going on. He is too good to be true. Celestina is not going to be trapped into a new marriage and joins a game of Platonic love and abstinence with Lord. She is the character sketch of the perfect widow. When Bubulcus, Gorgon and Jenkin, in Shirley’s first play, Love Tricks, or The School of Complement (1625) all demand to speak the Epilogue to the play it recalls the quarrel about the Prologue in Jonson’s Cynthia Revels. The satire of courtly affectation in this school of complement is worthy of Jonson. Shirley’s last comedy The Sisters (1642) contains a verse dedicated to Jonson in the printed version of 1653. The observance and realism of place, countryside and gardens in the comedies of Chapman, Jonson (Bartholomew Fair) and Brome was continued by Shirley. In Shirley’s comedy Hyde Park (1632) the gentlewoman Carol finds the garden a welcome retreat like Florilla’s private garden in Chapman’s An Humerous Day’s Mirth. Thomas Shadwell

Shadwell’s early prose comedy The Sullen Lovers, or the Impertinents (1668),152 is in imitation of Jonson’s comedy of humours and of Moliere’s Les Facheux. The reverence to 152

Ed. The British Library Historical Collection.

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Jonson is clear from the first lines in the Preface, which he calls a Discourse: The success of this play, as it was much more than it deserv’d, so was much more than I expected: Especially in this critical age, when every man pretends to be a judge, and some, that never read three playes in their lives, and understood one, are as positive in their judgment of playes, as if they were all Jonsons.

Shadwell admits his knowledge of Moliere’s Les Fascheux but insists he had written most of his own play before he read Moliere’s and he found the play ‘so little for my use … that I have made use of but two short scenes…. But I freely confess my theft.’ The Dramatis Personae of The Sullen Lovers contains a variety of characters and humours. Stanford is a morose melancholy man, tormented beyond measure with the impertinence of people, and resolved to leave the world to be rid of them. He opens the play in this mood: In what unlucky minute was I born, to be tormented thus where e’re I go? What an impertinent age is this we live in when all the world is grown so troublesome, that I shou’d envy him that spends his dayes in some remote and unfrequented place, with none but bears and wolves for his companions, and never see the folly of mankind.

His friend Lovel is a young gentleman who is ‘pleased with, and laughs at the impertinents, and that which is the others torment, is his recreation’. Sir Positive-At-All is a foolish knight, who pretends to understand everything in the world, and will suffer no man to understand anything in his company, so foolishly positive, that he will never be convinced of an error. Ninny is a conceited poet, always troubling men

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with impertinent discourses of poetry, the repetition of his own verses and the use of affected words. Woodcock is a familiar loving coxcomb that embraces and kisses all men and so used to his familiar endearing expressions that he cannot let them go even in the midst of his anger. Huffe is an impudent cowardly hector that torments Stanford, comes to borrow money but is beaten by him. Lady Vaine is a whore, who calls herself a Lady, very talkative and impertinently affected in her language, always pretending to virtue and honour. A Country Gent is a grave, ill-bred coxcomb, who never speaks without a proverb. Emilia is of the same humour as Stanford and Carolina has the same humour as Lovel. Shadwell quotes Horace’s demand, to keep consistency in characterization; the character must stay until the end as it was in the beginning. (This is one of the passages underlined in the annotated copy of Jonson’s Ars Poetica.) Shadwell adds that ‘in the writing of a humor, a man is confin’d not to swerve from the character, and oblig’d to say nothing but what is proper to it’. He maintains that ‘I have endeavour’d to represent variety of Humours … which was the practise of Ben Jonson … who never wrote comedy without seven or eight considerable humours’, and he cuts the insolent critics short who said that Jonson lacked wit in his plays, good humours required both wit and invention (an argument Shadwell expands more fully in the Epilogue to The Humorists). Shadwell continued to write fifteen plays, noteably The Humorists (1671)153 and Epsom Wells (1672).154 In the Epistle Dedicatory to The Humorists he states that ‘the play was intended a Satyr against Vice and Folly’. The panegyric Preface is for his mentor Jonson and he continues the praise in the Epilogue. 153 154

The British Library Historical Collection. ECCO Print Edition.

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He sets out what he calls the design of his play, that is, ‘to reprehend some of the vices and follies of the age, which I take to be the most proper, and most useful way of writing comedy’. The ultimate aim of the playwright is not only to delight but to correct and instruct and he quotes Horace for support: ‘I confess, a poet ought to do all that he can, decently to please, that so he may instruct. To adorn his images of virtue so delightfully to affect people with a secret veneration of it in others, and an emulation to practise it in themselves: and to render their figures of vice and folly so ugly and detestable, to make people hate and despise them, not only in others, but (if it be possible) in their dear selves.’ It would be ill nature to apply the natural imperfections of men, lunatics, idiots and monstrous men as the proper subject of satire, ‘but the affected vanities, and the artificial fopperies of men, which, (sometimes even contrary to their natures) they take pains to acquire, are the proper subject of a satire’. Shadwell suggests comedy and laughter has a certain edge over tragedy: ‘For the reformation of fopps and knaves, I think comedy most useful, because to render vices and fopperies very ridiculous, is much a greater punishment than tragedy can inflict upon ‘em … here we make them live to be dispised and laug’d at.’ It is not enough or appropriate to focus on one particular and isolated idiocyncrasy, ‘but upon very many of the same kind: for if a man should bring such humour upon the stage (if there be such a humour in the world) as only belongs to one, or two persons, it would not be understood by the audience, but wou’d be thought (for the singularity of it) wholly unnatural, and would be no jest to them neither’. He admits that he has been fortunate ‘to have had a general humour applied to three or four men (whose persons I never saw, or humours ever heard of ) till the play was acted … you must never

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look for a good comedy of humour, for humour (being the representation of some extravagance of mankind) cannot but in some thing resemble some man, or other’. In this context, says Shadwell, Jonson was unfairly criticized for only personating particular men but such is ‘the fate of them, that write the humours of the town, especially in a foolish and vicious age’. Shadwell insists that it cannot be impolite to seek to imitate Jonson, ‘he was the most perfect, and best poet; and why should not we endeavour to imitate him? Because we cannot arrive to his excellence? It is like saying that we should not study mathematics after Archimedes. Men of all professions ought certainly to follow the best in theirs.’ If Jonson is ‘the most faultless poet, I am so far from thinking it impudence to endeavour to imitate him, that it would rather (in my opinion) seem impudence in me not to do it’. Against the critics he also argues, again, that Jonson had ‘more true wit than any of his contemporaries … nor can I think, to the writing of his humours (which were not only follies, but vices and subtleties of men) that wit was not required, but judgment; where by the way, they speak as if judgment were a less thing than wit … nay judgment does indeed comprehend wit, for no man can have that who has no wit. The reason given by some, why Jonson needed not wit in writing humour, is, because humour is the effect of observation, and observation the effect of judgment; but observation is as much necessary in all other plays, as in the comedies of humour’. In the medical psychology of Jonson’s time, wit was seen as a ‘pupil of the soules clear eye and in mans world the only shining starre … and when wit is resolv’d, will lend her power to execute, what is advised by wit … prescribing truth to wit and good to will’. When wit is firm and logical it is called judgement. 155 155

Sir John Davies, Nosce Teipsum, 1599, 48–52.

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The ‘wit of man’156 was intellectual perception, human understanding, consciousness, and memory. Jonson was able ‘to put wit into the mouths of the meanest of people, and which, is infinitely difficult, made it proper for ‘em … Bartholomew Fair is one of the wittiest plays in the world. If there be no Wit required in the rendering Folly ridiculous, or vice odious, we must accuse Juvenal the best satirist, and wittiest man of all Latin writers, for want of it.’ Shadwell insists, referring to his own comedy, that ‘a comedy of humours is the hardest thing to write well … That which (besides judging truly of mankind) makes comedy more difficult, is that the faults are naked and bare to most people, but the wit of it understood, or valued, but by few.’ He ends his Preface by saying that the humours in his play are new and all the words and action of the persons of the play, are always suitable to the characters he has given of them; and in all the play, he has gone according to that definition of humour, which he has given in the Epilogue, in these words: A humor is the bias of the mind, By which with violence, ‘tis one way inclin’d: It makes our actions lean on one side still, And, in all changes that way bends the will.

Shadwell then presents his dramatis personae, a colourful bunch of humorists: Crazy is one that is in pox, in debt, and all the misfortunes that can be, and in the midst of all, in love with most women, and thinks most women in love with him. Drybob is a fantastick coxcomb, that makes it his business to speak 156

Cf. ‘I have had a dream, past the wit of man, to say what dream it was’, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, IV, i, l. 211.

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fine things and wit as he thinks; and always takes notice, or makes others take notice of any thing he thinks well said. Brisk is a brisk airy, fantastick, singing, dancing coxcomb, that sets up for a well-bred man and a man of honour, but mistakes in every thing, and values himself only upon the vanity and foppery of gentlemen. Theodofia is a witty airy young lady, of great fortune, committed to the government of Lady Loveyouth, her aunt, perfected with the love of Crazy, Brisk and Drybob, whom she mimicks and abuses, and in love with Raymond. Lady Loveyouth is a vain amorous lady, mad for a husband, jealous of Theodofia, in love with Raymond. Mrs Errant is one that sells old gowns, petticoats, laces, French fans and toys, jessomine gloves, and a running bawd. Striker is a haberdasher’s wife, a vain fantastick strumpet, very fond and jealous of Crazy. Friske is a vain wench of the town, debauch’d and kept by Brisk. Sneak is a young parson, fellow of a college, chaplain to the Lady Loveyouth, one that speaks nothing but fustian with Greek and Latin, in love with Bridget. Pullin is a French surgeon, originally a barber. Raymond is a gentleman of wit and honour, in love with Theodofia.

In the Epilogue Jonson re-enters as the icon, ‘the Mighty Prince of Poets, learned Ben, who alone div’d into the minds of men: saw all their wandrings, all their follies knew, and all their vain fantastick passions drew … ‘twas he alone true humours understood and with great wit and judgment made them good’. The dramatis personae in Epsom Wells is a distant reflection of the characters in Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour. The local setting in Epsom, Surrey, is in line with the custom of place in previous comedies of humours and Clodpate’s love of the country is similar to Bornwell’s. Clodpate is a country justice, a discontented fop, and immoderate hater of London, but a lover of the country

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above measure, a hearty true English coxcomb. Woodly is a man of wit and pleasure and Mrs Woodly is jilting, unquiet, troublesome and very whorish. Bisket is a gomfit maker, a quiet, humble, civil cuckhold governed by his wife, whom he very much fears and loves at the same time. His wife is an impertinent imperious strumpet. Fribble is a haberdasher, a furly cuckhold, very conceited, and proud of his wife, but pretends to govern and keep her down. His wife, Dorothy Fribble, is a humble submitting wife, who jilts her husband. Mrs Jilt is a filly affected whore, that pretends to be in love with most men, and thinks most men in love with her, and is always boasting of love letters and men’s favours, yet is a pretender to virtue. Kick and Guff are two cheating, sharking, cowardly bullies. Lucia and Carolina are two ladies of wit, beauty and fortune. Colley Cibber

The Restoration comedy, Love’s Last Shift, or The Fool in Fashion (1696)157 was Cibber’s great success. The presentation of the characters immediately has a Jonsonian imagination and flavour. Loveless (a debauch’d life, grew weary of his wife in six months, left her and the town, for debts he did not care to pay, and having spent the last part of his estate beyond sea, returns to England in a very mean condition), Sir Novelty Fashion (a coxcomb that loves to be the first in all foppery), Elder Worthy (a sober gentleman of a fair estate, in love with Hillaria), Young Worthy (of a looser temper, lover to Narissa), Snap (servant to Loveless), Sly (servant to Young Worthy) and Sir William Wisewoud (a rich old gentleman that fancies himself a great master of his passion, Sir Novelty calls him ‘a comical old gentleman’). Amanda (a woman of strict 157

ECCO Print Edition.

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above measure, a hearty true English coxcomb. Woodly is a man of wit and pleasure and Mrs Woodly is jilting, unquiet, troublesome and very whorish. Bisket is a gomfit maker, a quiet, humble, civil cuckhold governed by his wife, whom he very much fears and loves at the same time. His wife is an impertinent imperious strumpet. Fribble is a haberdasher, a furly cuckhold, very conceited, and proud of his wife, but pretends to govern and keep her down. His wife, Dorothy Fribble, is a humble submitting wife, who jilts her husband. Mrs Jilt is a filly affected whore, that pretends to be in love with most men, and thinks most men in love with her, and is always boasting of love letters and men’s favours, yet is a pretender to virtue. Kick and Guff are two cheating, sharking, cowardly bullies. Lucia and Carolina are two ladies of wit, beauty and fortune. Colley Cibber

The Restoration comedy, Love’s Last Shift, or The Fool in Fashion (1696)157 was Cibber’s great success. The presentation of the characters immediately has a Jonsonian imagination and flavour. Loveless (a debauch’d life, grew weary of his wife in six months, left her and the town, for debts he did not care to pay, and having spent the last part of his estate beyond sea, returns to England in a very mean condition), Sir Novelty Fashion (a coxcomb that loves to be the first in all foppery), Elder Worthy (a sober gentleman of a fair estate, in love with Hillaria), Young Worthy (of a looser temper, lover to Narissa), Snap (servant to Loveless), Sly (servant to Young Worthy) and Sir William Wisewoud (a rich old gentleman that fancies himself a great master of his passion, Sir Novelty calls him ‘a comical old gentleman’). Amanda (a woman of strict 157

ECCO Print Edition.

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virtue, was married to Loveless at a very young age and forsaken by him). Narissa (daughter to Sir William, would inherit a fortune), Hillaria (Sir William’s niece), Flarcit (Sir Novelty’s kept mistress). The banter between Narissa and Young Worthy has an interesting, expanding use of the concept humour. Young Worthy: ‘Oh, you need not take such pains, Madam, to conceal your passion for me, you may own it without a blush, upon your wedding day.’ Narissa: ‘My passion, when did you hear me acknowledge any? If I thought you could believe me guilty of such a weakness, tho’ after I had marry’d you, I’d never look you in the face.’ Young Worthy: ‘A very pretty humour this, faith.’ He goes on to say: ‘What a world of unnecessary sins have we two to answer for. She has told more lies to coceal her love, than I have sworn false oaths to promote it. (Aside) Well, Madam, I’ll content myself with your giving me leave to love.’ Narissa replies: ‘Which, if I don’t give, you’ll take, I suppose.’ The word humour embraces their whole relationship, expands, and returns from a cant term to an inclusive passion. Amanda’s last shift, her elaborate ploy, is to act the part of a prostitute to give Loveless a night to remember, only to reveal her true identity in the morning. Loveless is reformed. This trick and act of disguise has similarities with Aretina’s in Shirley’s comedy. It is a bawdy farce and at the end Loveless the spendthrift is reformed out of his humour of betrayal, debauchery and overspending. The Prologue regrets that ‘wit bears so thin a crop this duller age, we’re force’d to glean it from the barren stage’, but ‘ev’n a folly has its growth’. Cibber, in a final plea, gives credit to the ladies of his play: ‘Four acts for your coarse palates were design’d, but then the ladies taste is more refin’d; they, for Amanda’s sake, will sure be kind. Pray let this figure once your pity move.’

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The Careless Husband (1704)158 is similar but milder in tone. The unfaithful Sir Charles Easy is unmasked by Lady Easy as she leaves a lace scarf (steinkirk) on the scene when she finds him asleep with the maid on his lap. Sir Charles detects the steinkirk and understands the tact and disipline of his wife. After all, says Cibber in the Prologue, vice and folly is not confined ‘to the vile scum alone of humane kind’. The play has new interpretations of the word humour. Mrs Edging pretends not to take notice of Sir Charles. He grabs her as she walks past saying: ‘A pretty pert air that – I’ll humour it.’ The verbal use of the word in Shakespeare and Milton means to comply, soothe, gratify or indulge but Cibber adds the meaning to change: Sir William intends to challenge her impertinent behaviour. Lord Foppington refers to ‘the good humour of the company’ in a phrase that is still used in the twenty-first century. The four medical humours mutated to mean a happy mood. In his rambling biography Cibber makes the point that passions are classless: ‘Thus, we see, let the degrees, and rank of men, be ever so unequal, nature throws out their passions from the same motives, ‘tis not the eminence, or lowliness of either, that makes the one, when provok’d, more or less a reasonable creature than the other. The courtier, and the comedian, when their ambition is out of humour, take just the same measures to right themselves.’159 The line ‘their ambition is out of humour’ is a neat revival of Jonson’s ‘every man out of his humour’. The spectacle of an ambition being out of control is always humorous, not least among diplomats. 158 159

British Library Historical Collection. An apology for the life of Mr Colley Cibber, comedian, and late patentee of the Theatre-Royal. With an historical view of the stage during his own time, written by himself, printed by John Watts1740, Ecco Print Edition, 461.

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The Sons of Ben

It took…Ben Jonson’s powerful genius to initiate the tradition, the common heritage, into which a line of later poets could enter.160

In the Caroline period a group of eleven minor playwrights (William Cartwright, William Cavendish, William Davenant, Henry Glapthorne, Peter Hausted, Thomas Killigrew, Shakerley Marmion, Jasper Mayne, Thomas Nabbes, Thomas Randolph and Richard Brome) were known as ‘sons born of many a loyal Muse to Ben’.161 The key was imitation based on Ben’s own recommendations, to convert the substance of a mentor to his own use.162 Richard Brome was the leading light among the sons but they all contributed to the preservation and continuation of Jonsonian satire and comedy. The tribe of Ben also comprised a group of Cavalier poets, among them James Shirley, writing poems (ballads, elegies, songs, prayers, sonnets, odes, rhapsodies and epitaphs) with due reverence to the master Ben. Robert Herrick wrote ‘Upon Ben Jonson’ and ‘An Ode For Him’, Thomas Randolph penned ‘An Answer to Mr Ben Jonson’s Ode, to Persuade Him Not to Leave the Stage’ and Sidney Godolphin wrote this verse in his memory: The Muses’ fairest light in no dark time, The wonder of a learned age, the line Which none can pass; the most proportioned wit To nature; the best judge of what was fit; The deepest, plainest, highest, clearest pen; 160 161 162

F.R. Leavis, Revaluations, Penguin, 1964, 28. Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘The Tribe of Benjamin’. Joe Lee Davis, The Sons of Ben. Jonsonian Comedy in Caroline England, Detroit 1967.

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The voice most echoed by concenting men, The soul which answered best to all well said By others, and which most requital made; Tuned to the highest key of ancient Rome, Returning all her music with his own; In whom, with nature, study claimed a part, And yet who to himself owed all his art: Here lies Ben Jonson. Every age will look With sorrow here, with wonder on his book,163

For good measure Abraham Cowley adds an ‘Ode of Wit’.164 Margaret Cavendish

Two remarkable pioneering women writers of the seventeenth century held Ben Jonson in high esteem: Margaret Cavendish, nee Lucas (1623–73), was a prolific English writer who created more than twenty plays as well as poetry, philosophy and science fiction under her own name. She admitted that her plays were very long but added mockingly that they were not as long as Ben Jonson’s Volpone and The Alchemist. Her admiration for Jonson was profound however and these two plays ‘were his Master-pieces, and were wrought by Wits Invention’. In a subtle comparison between Jonson and Shakespeare she finds the former a master of both English and Latin who ‘could conceive, or judge, what’s right, what’s wrong; his language plain, significant and free’ while Shakespeare had ‘a fluent Wit, although less Learning, yet full well he writ; for all his Playes were writ by Natures light’.165 163

164 165

Hugh Maclean (ed.), Ben Jonson and the Cavalier poets, London, 1974, 279. Ibid., 328, 578. ‘A General Prologue to my Playes’, in Playes (ed. 1662).

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The voice most echoed by concenting men, The soul which answered best to all well said By others, and which most requital made; Tuned to the highest key of ancient Rome, Returning all her music with his own; In whom, with nature, study claimed a part, And yet who to himself owed all his art: Here lies Ben Jonson. Every age will look With sorrow here, with wonder on his book,163

For good measure Abraham Cowley adds an ‘Ode of Wit’.164 Margaret Cavendish

Two remarkable pioneering women writers of the seventeenth century held Ben Jonson in high esteem: Margaret Cavendish, nee Lucas (1623–73), was a prolific English writer who created more than twenty plays as well as poetry, philosophy and science fiction under her own name. She admitted that her plays were very long but added mockingly that they were not as long as Ben Jonson’s Volpone and The Alchemist. Her admiration for Jonson was profound however and these two plays ‘were his Master-pieces, and were wrought by Wits Invention’. In a subtle comparison between Jonson and Shakespeare she finds the former a master of both English and Latin who ‘could conceive, or judge, what’s right, what’s wrong; his language plain, significant and free’ while Shakespeare had ‘a fluent Wit, although less Learning, yet full well he writ; for all his Playes were writ by Natures light’.165 163

164 165

Hugh Maclean (ed.), Ben Jonson and the Cavalier poets, London, 1974, 279. Ibid., 328, 578. ‘A General Prologue to my Playes’, in Playes (ed. 1662).

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Aphra Behn

Aphra (Eaffry) Behn, nee Johnson near Canterbury (Harbledown), 1640, was the first woman in English literature to earn her living by writing. She visited a sugar colony in Suriname and this trip formed the basis for her novel Oroonoko (1688) on the cruelty of slavery. As a dedicated Catholic she volunteered as a spy in Antwerp for King Charles II under the code name Astrea, also used as her pen-name. In the Prologue to her play The Amorous Prince, she divides the audience into two groups, ‘the grave Dons who love no Play, but what is regular, Great Johnson’s way ... for things well said with spirit and soul’ and the others who have come to the theatre for ‘a smutty jest’ rather than to enjoy ‘a Scene of the admir’d and well-penn’d Cataline’. In the Preface to her comedy, The Dutch Lover, she hints at the affectation of Jonson’s supporters, which she calls the ‘Sect’. A gentleman of Wadham College

An undergraduate at Wadham, James Miller, although not part of ‘the tribe of Ben’, wrote a comedy, The Humours of Oxford, (the first of nine plays) which does not make him unworthy of tribal association. In a true Jonsonian spirit he qotes from Horace on the title page: Ridiculum acri fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res.166 (Jesting decides great things stronger and better than earnest can.)167 The first jacket design is an engraving that shows two of the fellows in the play, Haughty and Conundrum, in a dispute with the Vice-Chancellor. The play is dedicated to His Excellency Philip, Earl of Chesterfield, Ambassador Extraordinary to the States-General 166 167

Satires, I, x, 14–15. Traslation by John Milton.

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Aphra Behn

Aphra (Eaffry) Behn, nee Johnson near Canterbury (Harbledown), 1640, was the first woman in English literature to earn her living by writing. She visited a sugar colony in Suriname and this trip formed the basis for her novel Oroonoko (1688) on the cruelty of slavery. As a dedicated Catholic she volunteered as a spy in Antwerp for King Charles II under the code name Astrea, also used as her pen-name. In the Prologue to her play The Amorous Prince, she divides the audience into two groups, ‘the grave Dons who love no Play, but what is regular, Great Johnson’s way ... for things well said with spirit and soul’ and the others who have come to the theatre for ‘a smutty jest’ rather than to enjoy ‘a Scene of the admir’d and well-penn’d Cataline’. In the Preface to her comedy, The Dutch Lover, she hints at the affectation of Jonson’s supporters, which she calls the ‘Sect’. A gentleman of Wadham College

An undergraduate at Wadham, James Miller, although not part of ‘the tribe of Ben’, wrote a comedy, The Humours of Oxford, (the first of nine plays) which does not make him unworthy of tribal association. In a true Jonsonian spirit he qotes from Horace on the title page: Ridiculum acri fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res.166 (Jesting decides great things stronger and better than earnest can.)167 The first jacket design is an engraving that shows two of the fellows in the play, Haughty and Conundrum, in a dispute with the Vice-Chancellor. The play is dedicated to His Excellency Philip, Earl of Chesterfield, Ambassador Extraordinary to the States-General 166 167

Satires, I, x, 14–15. Traslation by John Milton.

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(i.e. France) and was staged at the Theatre Royal in Drury lane in 1730 to considerable success. One of the characters, Lady Science, a great pretender to learning and philosophy, using both uncouth words and terms of art, might have inspired Sheridan’s Mrs Malaprop. The villains in the play are dons and undergraduates.168 Ape-all, is an Oxford scholar, a ridiculous fop, a contemner of learning, affecting dress and lewdness, an epitome of the follies of the age, a fool by birth and a rake by education. Gainlove, is a young fellow of ruined fortune. Haughty is another fellow, an imperious, pedantic and unmannerly pedagogue with vicious principles. Conundrum, also a fellow, is a great pretender to learning. Shamwell is a fortune-hunter, decribed by Gainlove as a knave who is ‘skulking under the pleasing mask of French foppery and affected good humour, he has the skin of a camelion and the poison of a snake. The term an affected good humour is verging on the modern use but it still has stirrings of the Hippocratic and Jonsonian warning of the hypocrisy of affectation. Shamwell is a Renaissance hypocrite, displaying a sneering, deceitful malice, in whom evil is disguised as good because it has overruled his wit and led the will into sin. Perhaps the the dissolute Gainlove is speaking for Miller when he admits: ‘But above all, it is ravishing to get on calm philosophy’s exalted seat; whence we may learn what joys from wisdom flow, and see the Vanity of all below.’169 A year after The humours of Oxford Miller published Harlequin-Horace or the Art of Modern Poetry. Harlequin-Horace is a pseudonym for James Miller, a bit like Jonson calling himelf Horace or Robert Burton Democritus Junior. It was written in imitation of Horace’s The Art of poetry and a Latin quote on the title page, tempora mutantur, & nos mutamur in 168 169

J.Wells, Wadham College, London, 1898, 133–4. I,i.

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illis (the times are changed and we too are changed in them), indicate the need for a new approach to writing. He gives a critical portrait of the theatrical world and poets of his day. Horace’s text is added as footnotes to each page as contrast and comparison. Miller warns against the foes who in envy, ignorance and spite find fault with every text: ‘So fly such critics, trust yourself alone, nor to their Humour, sacrifice your own.’170 The word humour maintains the jealous spitefulness and envy of melancholy. He ends the book with a quote from Horace, risum teneatis, amici? (can you help but laugh, friends?)171 Miller took holy orders after Wadham, worked as a lecturer and preacher and continued to write. Oliver Goldsmith

In 1772 Oliver Goldsmith wrote ‘An Essay on the Theatre; or, a Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy’ and asks ‘which deserves the preference, the weeping sentimental comedy172 so much in fashion at present, or the laughing, and even low comedy, which seems to have been last exhibited by Vanbrugh and Cibber?’ Goldsmith quotes Boileau who asserts that comedy will not admit tragic distress and Terence who stopped short before he came to the downright pathetic. Tragedy and comedy had always run in distinct channels, and ‘never till of late encroached upon the provinces of the other’. All the comic writers of antiquity had aimed only at rendering folly or vice ridiculous. A new type of dramatic composition had been introduced under the name of sentimental comedy, ‘in which the virtues of private life is exhibited, rather than 170 171 172

British Library Edition, 57. Ars Poetica, l. 5. For example, Sir Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers (1722).

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illis (the times are changed and we too are changed in them), indicate the need for a new approach to writing. He gives a critical portrait of the theatrical world and poets of his day. Horace’s text is added as footnotes to each page as contrast and comparison. Miller warns against the foes who in envy, ignorance and spite find fault with every text: ‘So fly such critics, trust yourself alone, nor to their Humour, sacrifice your own.’170 The word humour maintains the jealous spitefulness and envy of melancholy. He ends the book with a quote from Horace, risum teneatis, amici? (can you help but laugh, friends?)171 Miller took holy orders after Wadham, worked as a lecturer and preacher and continued to write. Oliver Goldsmith

In 1772 Oliver Goldsmith wrote ‘An Essay on the Theatre; or, a Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy’ and asks ‘which deserves the preference, the weeping sentimental comedy172 so much in fashion at present, or the laughing, and even low comedy, which seems to have been last exhibited by Vanbrugh and Cibber?’ Goldsmith quotes Boileau who asserts that comedy will not admit tragic distress and Terence who stopped short before he came to the downright pathetic. Tragedy and comedy had always run in distinct channels, and ‘never till of late encroached upon the provinces of the other’. All the comic writers of antiquity had aimed only at rendering folly or vice ridiculous. A new type of dramatic composition had been introduced under the name of sentimental comedy, ‘in which the virtues of private life is exhibited, rather than 170 171 172

British Library Edition, 57. Ars Poetica, l. 5. For example, Sir Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers (1722).

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the vices exposed; and the distresses rather than the faults of mankind’. It is true that amusement is a great object of the theatre, and the sentimental pieces may amuse, ‘but the question is whether the true comedy would not amuse us more?’ If we are permitted to make comedy weep, we have an equal right to make tragedy laugh. Goldsmith also asserts that sentimental comedy is the most easily written; the same abilities that can hammer out a novel are fully sufficient for the production of a sentimental comedy. He regrets that humour at present seems to be departing from the stage. ‘It is not easy to recover an art when once lost; and it will be but a just punishment, that when, by our being too fastidious, we have banished humour from the stage, we should ourselves be deprived of the art of laughing.’ Goldsmith went on to write comedies fit for laughing, then and now. The eccentric Mrs Dorothy Hardcastle in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773) is, like Shirley’s Aretina, bored of country life: ‘Is there a creature in the whole country but ourselves, that does not take a trip to town now and then, to rub off the rust a little?’ But Hardcastle finds it appropriate to respond: ‘Ay, and bring back vanity and affectation to last them the whole year. I wonder why London cannot keep its own fools at home! In my time, the follies of the town crept slowly among us, but now they travel faster than a stagecoach.’ Mrs Hardcastle continues to complain about her ‘old rumbling mansion, that looks for all the world like an inn, but that we never see company’. She is tired of his storytelling and ‘old-fashioned trumpery’. But Hardcastle, the country gentleman, insists: ‘And I love it. I love everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine; and I believe, Dorothy (taking her hand) you’ll own I have been pretty fond of an old wife’. Mrs Hardcastle reacts strongly when Mr Hardcastle suggests that her age must be fifty seven and argues that she was

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only twenty when her son Tony (from a former marriage) was born. (It is understood that when Tony reaches the age of twenty one he will inherit his late father. In fact, Tony is now thirty seven). She adds that her son has a good fortune and ’is not to live by his learning’. Hardcastle adds: ‘Learning … a mere composition of tricks and mischief’. Mrs Hardcastle defends a little mischief: ‘Humour, my dear; nothing but humour. Come, Mr Hardcastle, you must allow the boy a little humour.’ Hardcastle counters: ‘If burning the footmen’s shoes, frighting the maids, and worrying the kittens be humour, he has it.’ Mrs Hardcastles use of humour means youthful spirit but to Hardcastle it is plain idiocy, humour either as sanguine temperament or whim, depending on the point of view. Hardcastle has made arrangements for his daughter Kate to marry Charles Marlowe, the son of Sir Charles. Kate however has to stoop to conquer, that is, to pretend to come from a lower rank in society to put Charles at ease. Charles and his friend George (who is in love with Constance Neville (Mrs Hardcastle’s niece) gets lost on the way to the Hardcastle’s and stops at the alehouse where Toby and his shabby friends are having a jolly time with punch and tobacco. Toby fools them to think they are far away from the manor house but directs them there saying it is an inn for the night. Kate pretends to be serving-maid in dress and speech and Marlowe is hooked. Mrs Hardcastle plots to marry Constance to her son simply to keep all wealth in the family but Tony steals the jewels and Constance can escape with Hastings to France and he is free to woe his favourite barmaid from the alehouse. Tony finally understands that he has come of age and finally gets his inheritance. The play is a comedy of humours, a satire worthy of Jonson. It observes the three unities, the unity of time is in the subtitle, Mistake of the Night, the place is the oldfashioned country home, only interrupted by the scenes

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in the alehouse, The Three Pigeons and the action does not waver much from the main plot. The clash between town and country and between generations are part of the familiar register. Richard Brinsley Sheridan

‘Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen The School for Scandal (1777) in its glory … Its hero … Joseph Surface … the downright acted villainy of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness, the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy.’173 The Dramatis Personae immediately creates mirth, Teazle, Surface, Backbite, Snake and Sneerwell. Lady Sneerwell tells Snake: ‘Wounded myself in the early part of my life by the envenomed tongue of slander, I confess I have since known no pleasure equal to the reducing others to the level of my own injured reputation.’ Joseph Surface warns Lady Sneerwell that Snake ‘hasn’t virtue enough to be faithful even to his own villany’. One early critic found the language and the wit of the play unvarying, the characters are all witty but they talk alike.174 This seems to reflect on the one hand Jonson’s decorum and dictum that characters must remain the same throughout the play but he did not expect them to have the same character and wit. William Hazlitt saw Sheridan as a star among the comic writers: ‘His comic muse does not go about prying into 173

174

Charles Lamb, ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century’, London magazine, 1822, in J.E. Morpurgo (ed.), Charles Lamb & Elia, Carcanet, 1993, 237. J. Brander Matthews, The Scool for Scandal (1877), Appelton’s Journal, New York.

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in the alehouse, The Three Pigeons and the action does not waver much from the main plot. The clash between town and country and between generations are part of the familiar register. Richard Brinsley Sheridan

‘Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen The School for Scandal (1777) in its glory … Its hero … Joseph Surface … the downright acted villainy of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness, the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy.’173 The Dramatis Personae immediately creates mirth, Teazle, Surface, Backbite, Snake and Sneerwell. Lady Sneerwell tells Snake: ‘Wounded myself in the early part of my life by the envenomed tongue of slander, I confess I have since known no pleasure equal to the reducing others to the level of my own injured reputation.’ Joseph Surface warns Lady Sneerwell that Snake ‘hasn’t virtue enough to be faithful even to his own villany’. One early critic found the language and the wit of the play unvarying, the characters are all witty but they talk alike.174 This seems to reflect on the one hand Jonson’s decorum and dictum that characters must remain the same throughout the play but he did not expect them to have the same character and wit. William Hazlitt saw Sheridan as a star among the comic writers: ‘His comic muse does not go about prying into 173

174

Charles Lamb, ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century’, London magazine, 1822, in J.E. Morpurgo (ed.), Charles Lamb & Elia, Carcanet, 1993, 237. J. Brander Matthews, The Scool for Scandal (1877), Appelton’s Journal, New York.

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obscure corners, or collecting idle curiosities, but shows her laughing face and points to her rich treasure – the follies of mankind … her heart runs over with good-natured malice. The School for Scandal is ‘perhaps the most finished and faultless comedy which we have … Besides the wit and ingenuity of this play, there is a genial spirit of frankness and generosity about it that relieves the heart as well as clear the lungs. It professes a faith in the natural goodness as well as habitual depravity of human nature. While it strips off the mask of hypocrisy it inspires a confidence between man and man.’175

175

Lectures on the English Comic Writers, lecture VIII, ‘On the Comic Writers of the Last Century’, delivered at the Surrey Institution, 1818, Wiley and Putnam, New York, 1845.

Chapter 4

THE INTRUSION OF HUMOROUS CHARACTERIZATION INTO THE ENGLISH NOVEL Z Henry Fielding

The work at hand is The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, And of his Friend Mr Abraham Adams. Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote (1742). In the ‘Authors Preface’ Fielding makes a point of defining the ridiculous in a familiar Jonsonian spirit: The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation ….Now, affectation proceeds from one of these two causes, vanity or hypocrisy; for as vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavour to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues.176

Fielding goes on to say that affectation in a vain man ‘sits less awkwardly on him than on the avaricious man, who is the very reverse of what he would seem to be’.177 It is in the 176 177

Joseph Andrews, Chapter XV, Riverside Editions, 1961, 10. Ibid., 11.

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discovery of the affectation that the surprise and pleasure of the ridiculous become apparent. This is strongest when the affectation stems from hypocrisy and not just vanity, because hypocrisy is the exact reverse of what it affects. In this context he gives credit where it is due: ‘I might observe that our Ben Jonson, who of all men understood the Ridiculous the best, hath chiefly used the hypocritical affectation.’178 The author warns against making all imperfections of nature the object of ridicule and derision. Only a warped mind can look on infirmity, poverty or ugliness as ridiculous in themselves but unfortunate circumstances can raise our mirth if we discover sudden indecorous affectations of agility, riches or beauty in the same imperfections. It is the heartless laughter of external circumstances regardless of position and circumstances that Bergson would later explore. It had not been possible to avoid the introduction even of black vices into his own work because it would be difficult to pursue a series of human actions and at the same time keep clear from them. The vices are the object of detestation. In comedy proper it is appropriate to confine the action strictly to nature, ‘from the just imitation of which will flow all the pleasure we can this way convey to a sensible reader’.179 He distinguishes his work from romance and burlesque. ‘Life everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous.’180 Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies: or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1731) is a dramatic burlesque and he therefore defends the burlesque up to a point as it contributes to exquisite mirth and laughter and ‘conduce better to purge away spleen, melancholy, and ill affections, than is generally imagined’.181 178 179 180 181

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 9.

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Fielding is aware of creating something new in English literature, a ‘kind of writing which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language’182 and his take on vanity combines the morality play, the character sketch and Jonson’s humours in a wide novel embrace: O Vanity! how little is thy force acknowledged, or thy operations discerned! How wantonly dost thou deceive mankind under different disguises! Sometimes thou dost wear the face of pity, sometimes of generosity: nay, thou hast the assurance even to put on those glorious ornaments which belong only to heroic virtue. Thou odious, deformed monster! whom priests have railed at, philosophers despised, and poets ridiculed: is there a wretch so abandoned as to own thee for an acquaintance in public? yet, how few will refuse to enjoy thee in private? nay, thou art the pursuit of most men through their lives. The greatest villainies are daily practised to please thee; nor is the meanest thief below, or the greatest hero above, thy notice. Thy embraces are often the sole aim and sole reward of the private robbery and the plundered province. It is to pamper up thee, thou harlot, that we attempt to withdraw from others what we do not want, or to withhold from them what they do. All our passions are thy slaves. Avarice itself is often no more than thy handmaid, and even Lust thy pimp. The bully Fear, like a coward, flies before thee, and Joy and Grief hide their heads in thy presence. I know thou wilt think that, whilst I abuse thee I court thee, and that thy love hath inspired me to write this sarcastical panegyric on thee; but thou art deceived: I value thee not of a farthing; nor will it give me any pain if thou shouldst prevail on the reader to censure this digression as arrant nonsense; for know, to thy confusion, that I have introduced thee for no other purpose 182

Ibid., 7.

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than to lengthen out a short chapter, and so I return to my history.183

Fielding again insists in The History of Tom Jones a Foundling, in four volumes (1749), that he is ‘in reality, the founder of a new province of writing, so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein’.184 In the pursuit of the beauty of virtue ‘I have employed all the wit and humour of which I am master in the following history; wherein I have endeavoured to laugh mankind out of their favourite follies and vices.’185 He deliberately uses introductory chapters ‘as a kind of mark or stamp … to distinguish what is true and genuine in this historic kind of writing’.186 The work is divided into eighteen sections called ‘books’, 207 chapters and is close to 350,000 words over 835 pages (in the Everyman’s Library edition). Fielding is right when he calls the novel ‘this mighty work’187 and ‘a long journey’.188 Fielding applies the technique so familiar in Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour of giving short descriptions, accounts or sketches of the main characters. The characters, virtues, vices and humours are introduced with the help of inductions, introductions and short lectures and we are left with fixed and stock types and personalities. The names and humours of the characters leap out of the Jonsonian register, for example: The perfect Squire Allworthy is ‘a human being replete with benevolence, meditating in what manner he might render himself most acceptable

183 184 185 186 187 188

Ibid., 57. Book II, Chapter 1. In Dedication (or Preface or bill of fare to the feast). Book IX, Chapter I. Book XII, Chapter I. Book XVIII, Chapter I.

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to his creator, by doing most good to his creatures’;189 Mr Twackum, the divine, but essentially a hypocrite; Mr Square, the philosopher, another hypocrite; Master Blifil, yet another hypocrite supported by Twackum and Square; Partridge, a parasite and jester (like Jonson’s Carlo Buffone), but with redeeming qualities, ‘he has again set up a school, in which he meets with much better encouragement than formerly’;190 Seagrim, the gamekeeper and traitor; Mr Nightingale, a young man of leisure; Mr Supple, the curate; Sir John Suckling; Mrs Western, ‘her great learning and knowledge of this world’;191 Honour, Sophia’s unreliable maid; the sceeming Lady Bellaston; Sophia Western, the paragon of beauty and virtue; Tom, his antics make us laugh but the mirth sometimes has a bitter taste. And the pub (the Inn at Upton) plays a part like it does in the comedies of humour. Hypocrisy, a theme in Joseph Andrews and in Tom Jones, was seen as frightening and evil at the time of Jonson. Hypocrisy and deceit meant that evil had masked itself as good, then seduced and corrupted the wit and spirit, subdued the will and caused sinful acts. ‘A deformed mixture, bred betwixt evil nature and false art, and may well be put into the reckoning of those creatures that God never made.’192 Strong words. Fielding takes up this thread and unmasks the hypocrites in his story. There are appropriate references to the ancients, Homer, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil Horace, Thucydides, Livy and Juvenal. He admits that he has ‘often translated passages out of the best antient authors … the antients may be considered 189 190 191 192

Book I, Chapter IV. Book XVIII, Chapter XIII. BookVI, Chapter II. Sir Thomas Overbury (1581–1613), A Book of Characters, Edinburgh, 1865, 2.

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as a rich common, where every person who hath the smallest tenement in Parnassus hath a free right to fatten his muse’.193 The concept humour appears in new ink: The housekeeper Mrs Deborah Wilkins and Mrs Bridget (Allworthy’s sister) contemplate the care of baby Tom, ‘the base-born infant’ and Bridget concludes: ‘Since it was her brother’s whim to adopt the little brat, she supposed little master must be treated with tenderness. For her part, she could not help thinking it was an encouragement to vice; but that she knew too much of the obstinacy of mankind to oppose any of their ridiculous humours.’194 The ridiculous and the humours combined in one element – outstanding! Chaper VII of Book XII is called ‘Containing the whole humours of a masquerade’. In Chapter VIII of Book XII ‘fortune seems to have been in a better humour with Jones than we have hitherto seen her’ – fortune in a good humour, something we all wish for. Fielding set out to invent a good story and to tell it well. He succeeded with a Jonsonian touch and an original hero, Tom Jones. Tobias Smollett

Narissa’s aunt in The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748)195 is suffering from advanced melancholia but there was at least a temporary relief from the malady: ‘Nothing contributed so much to the recovery of her reason, as musick, which was always administered on these occasions by Narissa, who play’d perfectly well on the harpsicord.’ Roderick finds the aunt squatting on the floor, confused and scared, and leaping to the other side of the chamber as he enters. Roderick quickly leaves the room, meets Narissa on the stairs and relates the state of fear and alarm in the aunt’s behaviour. Quietely and 193 194 195

Book XII, Chapter I. Book I, Chapter V. Oxford World Classics, ed. Paul-Gabriel Bouce, 1979.

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as a rich common, where every person who hath the smallest tenement in Parnassus hath a free right to fatten his muse’.193 The concept humour appears in new ink: The housekeeper Mrs Deborah Wilkins and Mrs Bridget (Allworthy’s sister) contemplate the care of baby Tom, ‘the base-born infant’ and Bridget concludes: ‘Since it was her brother’s whim to adopt the little brat, she supposed little master must be treated with tenderness. For her part, she could not help thinking it was an encouragement to vice; but that she knew too much of the obstinacy of mankind to oppose any of their ridiculous humours.’194 The ridiculous and the humours combined in one element – outstanding! Chaper VII of Book XII is called ‘Containing the whole humours of a masquerade’. In Chapter VIII of Book XII ‘fortune seems to have been in a better humour with Jones than we have hitherto seen her’ – fortune in a good humour, something we all wish for. Fielding set out to invent a good story and to tell it well. He succeeded with a Jonsonian touch and an original hero, Tom Jones. Tobias Smollett

Narissa’s aunt in The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748)195 is suffering from advanced melancholia but there was at least a temporary relief from the malady: ‘Nothing contributed so much to the recovery of her reason, as musick, which was always administered on these occasions by Narissa, who play’d perfectly well on the harpsicord.’ Roderick finds the aunt squatting on the floor, confused and scared, and leaping to the other side of the chamber as he enters. Roderick quickly leaves the room, meets Narissa on the stairs and relates the state of fear and alarm in the aunt’s behaviour. Quietely and 193 194 195

Book XII, Chapter I. Book I, Chapter V. Oxford World Classics, ed. Paul-Gabriel Bouce, 1979.

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smiling Narissa goes into her aunt’s room and soon Tobias finds his ears ravished with the effects of her skill: She accompanied the instrument with a voice so sweet and melodious, that I did not wonder at the surpricing change it produced on the spirits of my mistress, which were soon composed to peace and sober reflection.196

Music as a remedy for the melancholy mind and sorrowful heart had been portrayed in detail by Robert Burton and Narissa’s cure of her aunt is in a true Renaissance tradition. Burton says that music ‘is a sovereign remedy against despair and melancholy and will drive away the devil himself’. He quotes the Old Testament, Homer, Aristotle, Plato and a host of others to support the case. Music would revive the languishing soul, restore a sad heart, mitigate anger, and take away hatred and the fear of death.197 Smollett is true to this tradition and belief, as we are today. Like Jonson, Smollett had experienced the effects of war. As a surgeon’s mate on a man-of-war in the conflict between England and Spain he had witnessed close up the brutality of life. This is apparent in both Roderick Random and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle but his last novel Humphrey Clinker is more reconciliatory in tone. He was a follower of Cervantes, translated Don Quixote and wrote, in imitation and admiration, The Adventures of Lancelot Greaves, about a knight errant. His observation of a violent and cruel world is modified by the introduction of eccentric, humorous and comic characters, incidents and situations. In fact we witness ‘a gallery of Jonsonian Humours’198 in his novels. 196 197 198

Ibid., Chapter XXXIX, 222. Robert Burton, op. cit., II, 115–19. David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, Secker & Warburg, London, 1960, 731.

Chapter 5

THE MEANING OF THE COMIC Z Henri Bergson was a polyhistor, a Renaissance man of great learning, combining philosophy, diplomacy, the élan vital199 and the echo of laughter. Bergson was made a professor at the Collège de France in the same year as Le Rire appeared. His lectures attracted a wide following, T.S. Eliot attended. He was sent as an envoy to meet President Wilson in 1913 and represented France on diplomatic missions to Spain in 1917. Bergson then started work with the US government to prepare for The League of Nations and was appointed President of the International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation (the later UNESCO) in 1922, a post he held for five years. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature after the posting. In three articles in Revue de Paris, ‘Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique’ (1899), Bergson outlined a philosophical argument for laughter and the comic imagination. He pointedly asks ‘what does laughter mean?’ What is comic and ridiculous, why do we laugh? He immediately warns that this question has challenged philosophers ever since Aristotle. In view of the elusiveness of the topic Bergson does not wish to ring-fence and define the comic 199

Vital impulse, creative energy.

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spirit, but approach it with an open mind as ‘a living thing’ and treat it with respect. Rather than an abstract definition, Bergson seeks a flexible approach and acquaintance that springs from a long companionship, an understanding of the human imagination in a social context. Laughter is a social gesture. Bergson makes three opening remarks: 1. The comic is an exclusive human activity. 2. Laughter demands an absence of feeling and emotion, it appeals to the intelligence. 3. Laughter needs an echo, it is the shared laughter of a group.

He starts by looking at the comic element in forms and movements, the expansive force of the comic. External circumstances, like a stone on the road that makes a runner fall, or the success of a practical joke, are comic because of a certain absentmindedness of the victims. More importantly, the comic element may lodge in the person himself, revealing the rigidity of a fixed idea: Don Quixote falls into a well because he was looking at the stars. Certain vices may appear as the invisible but central characters in a play, making the visible main character comic in proportion to the display of ignorance of himself – ‘the comic person is unconscious’, lost in absentmindedness, a plaything of the vices with comic effect. This is true in Jonson’s comedies. Thus, we laugh at the rigidity of body, mind and character. ‘This rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective.’ But this formula is neither a definition nor an explanation, says Bergson, only a leitmotiv to accompany the further search for the comic forms and the relation art bears to life. Comic elements can be detected in the human form, in facial expressions and distortions and even in deformities. The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body which reminds us of a mere machine working automatically

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appear comic; the gestures of a public speaker, not laughable by itself, excite laughter by their repetition. A speaker who has to sneeze at a crucial moment in his lecture, or a funeral speaker who describes the deceased as virtuous and plump can expect laughter, however subdued. Every fashion may be laughable and any disguise in man, society and nature may appear comic. The source of the comic may be an affected reaction to natural phenomena: Cassini, the astronomer, had invited a lady to see an eclipse of the moon. She arrived too late and said: ‘M. de Cassini, I know, will have the goodness to begin it all over again, to please me.’ One of Gondiinet’s characters when arriving in town and learning that there is an extinct volcano nearby, exclaimed: ‘They had a volcano, and they have let it go out!’ The central image is something mechanical encrusted on a human being, but we also laugh when a person gives the impression of being a thing himself, like Baron Münchausen turned into a cannon-ball. Bergson then moves from the comic element in forms, attitudes, and movements generally to its presence in actions, situations and words, to the comic playwright and his wit. If the stage is both a magnified and a simplified view of life then comedy is capable of furnishing us with more information than real life. ‘Any arrangements of acts and events is comic which gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement.’ The first type of play is the basic jack-in-the-box, Punch and Judy knockabout show; a spring is bent, released, and bent again, creating laughter. Then Bergson introduces the spring as a moral vehicle, the idea is first expressed, then repressed and continued in a stream of words, one stubborn force counteracted by another. It is a real but rudimentary comedy, the comic repetition in classical comedy. A repressed feeling goes off like a spring and the feeling is repressed again.

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The dancing-jack is the comedy in which the character believes he is speaking and acting freely but is in fact a plaything of another character, a marionette held by a string: ‘Humble marionettes, the wires of which are pulled by fate.’ A comedy may also be compared to a rolling snowball. It increases in size as it moves along. Similarly, a house of cards gathers momentum, rolls and collapses when set in motion. Comedies of this kind contain scenes of increasing acceleration and knock-about, a bit like a child’s game, one mishap rolling on the heels of another. Comic scenes may be obtained by a repetition of events as in Moliere’s Ecole des femmes, an inversion of the roles and reciprocal interference. The meaning of reciprocal interference in this context comes from optics, the superpositioning of two different light-waves: ‘Une situation est toujour comique quand elle appartient en même temps à deux séries d’évênements absolument indépendentes, et qu’elle peut s’interpréter à la fois dans deux sens tout différents.’ 200 In a section on the comic in words Bergson makes a distinction between the comic expressed and the comic created by language. He examines the word esprit and draws a distinction between the witty (spirituel) and the comic. He defines humour as the counterpart of irony, but both are forms of satire. Irony is oratorical, a kind of high-pressure eloquence. Bergson then turns to the comic in character as his main objective. The comic person expresses, above all else, a special lack of adaptability to society. Any individual is comic who automatically goes his own way. The comic can find its way into a movement, a situation or a phrase. It is 200

A situation is invariably comic when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time.

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part of laughter to reprove absentmindedness, to deal with the rigidity of habits. Society holds the prospect of snubbing. Laughter is really and truly a kind of social ragging. The elements of the comic character on the stage and in actual life will be the same, cf Jonson. Harpagon’s avarice is a serious fault. So is Alceste’s earnestness. We laugh at his good qualities. The comic character may be in accord with stern morality. Alceste is an honest man, but he is unsociable and ludicrous. It is the rigidity of Alceste which makes us laugh, although this rigidity stands for honesty. The comic depends on the prejudices of a society. It must not arouse our feelings. Instead of concentrating our attention on actions, comedy directs it to the attitudes, the movements and the language by which a mental state expresses itself, Tartuffe enters thoroughly into the role of a hypocrite. Whether a character is good or bad is of little significance; if he is unsociable, he is capable of becoming comic. The seriousness of the case is of no importance, whether serious or trifling, it is still capable of making us laugh. Unsociability in the performer and insensibility in the spectator are the two essential conditions. The third is automatism. What is essentially laughable is what is done automatically, when the person unwittingly betrays himself, the involuntary gesture or the unconscious remark. Absentmindedness is always comical. Systematic absentmindedness, like that of Don Quixote, is the most comical thing imaginable. A comic character cannot be comical unless there is some aspect of his person of which he is unaware, one side of his nature that he overlooks. The chief cause of rigidity is the neglect to look around and within oneself. Rigidity, automatism, absentmindedness and unsociability are all inextricably entwined and serve as ingredients of the comic in character. Every comic character is a type; every resemblance to a type has something comic in it. To depict general types is the

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object of high-class comedy. Comedy depicts characters we have already come across and shall meet again. The titles of classical comedies are significant, Le Misanthrope, l’Avare, le Joueur, are names of whole classes of people. Comedy accepts social life as the natural environment. An ideally comic type of character is invisible to him, for the comic ever partakes of the unconscious. The chemist of the soul would find the mixture ready-made: The mixture is vanity. There is not a single failing that is more superficial or more deep-rooted. All the vices are drawn into its orbit. It is more universally innate than egoism. True modesty can be nothing but a meditation on vanity. The specific remedy for vanity is laughter, and the one failing that is essentially laughable is vanity. Vanity, that higher form of the comic, is an element we are prone to look for, minutely though unconsciously, in every manifestation of human activity. Jonson would ‘seize on vice ... and lick up every idle vanity’ and Fielding exposed the force of vanity. It is the business of laughter to convert rigidity into plasticity, to readapt the individual to the whole. In the forefront we find professional vanity. Moliere’s doctors treat the patient as though he had been made for the doctors, and nature herself as an appendage to medicine. The logic peculiar to a comic character includes absurdity. The comic in its extreme form is the logic of the absurd. Where we see windmills, Don Quixote sees giants. This is comical, it is also absurd – comic absurdity, comic obsession. Laughter lifts us away from the gravitational force of the absurd. Laughter is a corrective, even intended to humiliate. It would fail if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness. Laughter has a social meaning. It is the result of a mechanism set up in us either by nature or by a long acquaintance with social life. It has no time to look where, or before, it hits. Laughter cannot be absolutely just or kind-hearted. Its function is to intimidate by humiliating. Nature has

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implanted, even in the best of us, a spark of spitefulness and mischief. Lady Sneerwell’s comment in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal reflects Bergson’s spirit: ‘There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill nature: the malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it stick.’201 The ancients had often stressed the sneering, cynical and destructive elements in laughter: Laughter, to them, was not a wholly reputable emotion, in that it tended too much towards the sardonic – that is it was an expression of pleasure in which there was mixed a good deal of envy, hate and bitterness. Thus, while it was useful to the orator to be able to discredit an opponent by making him appear ridiculous, anyone who aimed consistently to make people laugh at others could not be a wholly good man.202

Bergson insists however that it is the good that must engage our attention. The more society improves, the more does laughter force to the surface the disturbing elements, like the interplay between the calm of the deep sea and the restless search of the waves. This is truly Jonsonian and it is also the diplomat’s salt: Such is also the truceless warfare of the waves on the surface of the sea, whilst profound peace reigns in the depths below. The billows clash and collide with each other, as they strive to find their level. A fringe of snow-white foam, feathery and frolicsome, follows their changing outlines. From time to time, the receding wave leaves behind a remnant of foam on the sandy beach. The child, who plays hard by, picks up a handful, and, the next moment, is astonished to find that 201 202

OUP, 1928, ll. 146–8. J.B. Bamborough, Ben Jonson, Hutchinson, 1970, 23–4.

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nothing remains in his grasp but a few drops of water, water that is far more brackish, far more bitter than that of the wave which brought it. Laughter comes into being in the self-same fashion. It indicates a slight revolt on the surface of social life. It instantly adopts the changing forms of the disturbance. It, also, is a froth with a saline base. Like froth, it sparkles. It is mirth itself. But the philosopher who gathers a handful to taste may find that the substance is scanty, and the after-taste bitter.203

In ‘an Apologetical Dialogue’ in The Poetaster Jonson refers to the laughter in classical Greek comedies as salt: Ha! If all the salt in the old comedy Should be so censured, or the sharper wit Of the bold satire termed scolding rage, What age could then compare with those for buffoons? What should be said of Aristophanes, Persius, or Juvenal, whose names are now So glorify in schools, at least pretend it.

Celestina, in James Shirley’s comedy The Lady of Pleasure, tells Kickshaw: ‘Your character will be full of salt and satire.’ In the opening line of Thomas Shadwell’s play Epsom Wells, Bisket declares: ‘I vow it is a pleasurable morning; the waters taste so finely after being fuddled (drunk) last night. Neighbour Fribble, here’s a pint to you.’ Mrs Bisket then asks MrsWoodly, ‘how do the waters agree with your Ladyship?’ and she answers, ‘oh soveraignly; how many cups are you arriv’d to?’ The Epsom wells were discovered in 1620 and the salty water became a fashionable drink, in this case a cure for hangover. The salt from the local well is, in every sense, 203

Henri Bergson, Laughter. An Essay on the Meaning of Comic, tr. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, Wildside Press, 2008.

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a fitting metaphor for the comic behaviour of the fops and fools of the play. The laughter, like the salt, leaves a bitter taste. It has been argued that Bergson in his search for the comic spirit and the ridiculous, the salt and social roots of laughter, echoes Jonson’s comic exploration: He (Jonson) illustrates perfectly Bergson’s theory of Comedy; it is true, for example, that many of his charcters are funny because they behave in a stereotyped, invariable way, like machines, and also that, because of their enslavement by Opinion, they often act in a way inappropriate to the real situation in which they find themselves, and are thus absurd.204

It was seen as indecorous, even a vice, to rely on Opinion, which was seated in the imperfect faculty of the Imagination, a deceitful and dangerous guide that needed to be controlled by Reason. Bergson combines incongruity (the inconsistent, illogical, mechanical, rigid and unexpected turn) and superiority (the pre-eminence) and mingles humour and laughter. Bergson, Hobbes and Freud do not filter sympathy, play, and enthusiasm into the waves of laughter, but the joy of laughter itself is always present. Hobbes admits the surprise element in laughter but in a context of superiority and dominance. He is close to Plato in seeing laughter as basically aggressive, even evil: ‘Sudden glory is the passion which maketh these grimaces called laughter.’205 Glory means triumphant superiority as sudden impact generates surprise and laughter.

204 205

J.B. Bamborough, op. cit., 149. Leviathan, (1651).

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Sarcasm206 is the cutting and insulting mockery accompanied by bitter, heartless, scornful, sneering, cynical and contemptuous sardonic207 laughter. Irony208 is the Socratic method of discussion by professing ignorance and using words of praise as surprise, criticism and ridicule. ‘Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.’209 Satire in epic and dramatic literature (Horace, Rabelais, Swift) is a comination of irony and sarcasm: The laughter of satire is a blow in the back or the face. The laughter of comedy is impersonal and of unrivaled politeness, nearer a smile – often no more than a smile. It laughs through the mind, for the mind directs it; and it might be called the humour of the mind.210

Sigmund Freud took a serious look, not only on dreams, but on the joke and its relation to the unconscious. In his study of the psychology of the comic he relates to Hobbes, Spenser and Bergson. He tells the story from Heinrich Heine’s Reisebilder of the lottery-collector who boasted about his connection with the wealthy Baron Rothschild: ‘And as truly as God will grant me his blessings, Doctor Heine, I was sitting next to Salomon Rothschild and he treated me just like his equal, quite famillionairely.211 206 207

208 209 210

211

Sarkasmos, sarkazo (Gr.), to gnash one’s teeth. Sardonios (Gr.), a Sardinian plant (sardo¯) that screwed up the face and caused a convulsive laughter ending in death. Eiro¯neia (Gr.), simulated ignorance. Byron, 1830. George Meredith, An Essay on Comedy, John Hopkins University Press, 1956, 47. Sigmund Freud, The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, Penguin Books, 2002 (original title Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, 1905).

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William Makepeace Thackeray argued that the comic had to appeal to compassion and George Eliot (Marian Evans) similarly viewed humour as a unification of wit and love. Humour as opposed to satire and irony contained an element of sympathy, a reconciliation between the contradictions of existence.212 The sympathy in humour is also stressed by Kirkegaard and Zappfe. The essayist William Hazlitt contrasted humour and wit. Humour refers to the comic behaviour, the ludicrous, in itself, wit to the sharp and unexpected comment and exposure of it. He anticipates Bergson in his stress on the incongruous as the essence of the laughable and, like Bergson, he finds Don Quixote a perfect example of ‘consistency in absurdity’.213 Hermann Hesse reflects on the duality of talent and tragedy in humour, the shining light, wisdom and uniting power of humour in adversity: Einzig der Humor, die herrliche Erfindung der in ihrer Berufung zum Grössten Gehemmten, der beinahe Tragischen, der höchstbegabten Unglücklichen, einzig der Humor (vielleicht die eigenste und genialste Leistung des Menschentums) vollbringt dies Unmögliche, überzieth und vereinigt alle Bezirke des Menschenwesens mit den Stralungen seiner Prismen. In der Welt zu leben, als sei es nicht die Welt, das Gesetz zu acten und doch über ihm zu stehen, zu besitzen, ‘als besässe man nicht’, zu verzichten, als sei es kein Verzicht – alle diese beliebten und oft formulierten Forderungen einer hohen Lebensweisheit ist einzig der Humor zu verwirklichen fähig.214 212 213 214

Emil Boyson, Literært Leksikon, Tanum, 1965, 74–5. Hazlitt, op. cit., 4–8, 13. Hermann Hesse, Der Steppenwolf, Suhrkamp, 2012, 88–9. My translation: ‘Only humour, that marvellous invention of those who are hindered in their calling to greatness, the tragic and brilliant unfortunate, humour alone (perhaps the most special and brilliant human achievement) accomplish this impossible, covers and unites all areas of human nature in the rays of its prism. To live in the world

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Samuel Beckett came close to this view when he wrote about ‘that smile of the human condition’ in adversity after the devastation of St-Lo in Normandy during the D-Day landings. Simon Critchley makes this observation: For me, it is this smile – deriding the having and the not having, the pleasure and the pain, the sublimity and suffering of the human situation – that is the essence of humour. This is the risus purus, the highest laugh, the laugh that laughs at the laugh, that laughs at that which is unhappy, the mirthless laugh … this smile does not bring unhappiness, but rather elevation and liberation, the lucidity of consolation … we smile and find ourselves ridiculous.215

Deriding the suffering and the inhumanity with a liberating smile? Perhaps the smile was possible because the devastation implied victory, the vanity of human hopes. Anders Breivik took the malice in a smile to a new level of evil.216 He entered the courtroom, made a Nazi salute and smiled; even turning to the relatives of the seventy-seven victims with a smile. It is a smile from the ninth circle, forever immersed in ice. Contrapasso. Can we send a liberating smile back at that and find ourselves ridiculous? No, we find him ridiculous, without liberation.

215 216

as if it were not the world, to respect the law and yet stand above it, to possess as if one possessed nothing, to renounce as if it were no renunciation – all these popular and often worded demands of a higher wisdom of life is only humour able to fulfil.’ Simon Critchley, On Humour, Routledge, 2002, 111. He was responsible for acts of terrorism against the Norwegian Prime Minister’s office and other government buildings and the Labour Party Youth Camp at Utøya, Oslo, killing seventy-seven people and injuring 242, in July 2011. The court found him sane.

Chapter 6

NOMADIC HUMOURS Z Were it not a dishonour to a mighty prince, to have the majesty of his embassage spoiled by a careless ambassador?217

It gives status to a state to have resident ambassadors, as many as possible. I could hardly miss the displeasure of the enduring President Museveni in 1996 when I told him that I was to be accredited to his country from the neighbouring Tanzania. ‘What, Uganda less important than Tanzania? Never. What is Norway thinking of’, he said with his eyes. But as he was meeting with an ambassador from Norway and remembering our development programme he only muttered a vague weasel sentence ‘Oh, from there.’ Diplomatic wisdom prevailed and Norway soon had a resident ambassador in place in Kampala. My mellifluous words speeded the process. Who says that ambassadors are not effective? At least they create more ambassadors. Diplomacy may be the oldest profession in the world but the envoy is not permitted to grow old in the posting. It is the inevitable fate to be moved after settling into a favourite foreign paradise. The Norwegian diplomatic service has a fine euphemistic word for it, flytteplikt, the duty to move. Adam 217

Ben Jonson, Timber.

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was no diplomat, but Eve was. She was both extraordinary and plenipotentiary in the residence eastward in Eden when she told God that she had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil because the serpent had beguiled her. She had immediately understood that the serpent was the common enemy and tried to negotiate. But Adam just blames ‘the woman’. If he had mediated with God they might not have been kicked out after only a bried ad interim posting and been allowed to remain for good as envoys en pied in Eden. What a paradise that would have made. The diplomat is a pilgrim on a journey to a future life, always abroad. It is the condition to be what we do, the movement is a means to an end. Ein ruheloser Marsch war unser Leben und wie des Windes Sausen, heimatlos (Our life was a restless march and homeless like the whistle of the wind). The diplomat, like Schiller after completing Die Räuber, is a citizen of the world, not resident in one village or one town, in one country or one continent. We repair our travelling boots and continue through and past time zones and zone times as Grenzgänger and Grenzüberschreiter, ‘up and down of someone else’s stairs’.218 Diplomatic exchanges existed between Egypt, Assyria and Babylon as early as 2000 B.C. and between China and Japan after 500 B.C. Thus the role of the diplomat/persuader has a long history, and goes far beyond recorded evidence. Demosthenes (384–322) referred to the envoy as a master of hours and occasions but when he invited Macedonian representatives to the theatre in Athens and gave them the best seats the other spectators made clear their objections to such demonstration of privilege.219 The sense of entitlement is still frowned upon. Diplomatic missions (missi) were part of the power game between the city-states in Greece and Italy. 218 219

Dante, ‘Paradiso’, XVII, 60. Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup, Jonathan Cape, 2010, 212.

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The political faction called the Florentine Whites sent a delegation of three envoys to Pope Boniface III in 1301 in an attempt to seek support against the opposition, the Blacks, led by the exiled Corso Donati and supported by Charles of Valois and the French King. What Dante and his co-envoys did not know as they set out for Rome was that the Pope was already in alliance with the Blacks and the meeting was a set-up. Two of the representatives were released, but Dante was kept back as a hostage, probably because he had just been elected to the governing body as a prior and they wanted him out of the way when Donati staged the coup. When Dante returned Donati had taken power and he was falsely accused on a trumped up charge and banished from Florence. His possessions were confiscated and his house pillaged and burned down. The unsuccessful diplomatic mission, the betrayal and the cruelty Dante suffered, inspired the writing of his ‘allegorized autobiography’, Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, the Comedy for all time.220 Comedy is something that ends well. Niccolò Machiavelli had a similar experience in Florence. He was elected Secretary of the Second Chancery in 1498 and continued as Florentine envoy and negotiator with Italian states and other powers. As the Medici returned in 1512 he was accused of conspiracy, imprisoned, tortured and exiled. It was in exile that he wrote Il Principe (The Prince) in just six months (1513/14). The new Magnifience of Florence reappointed Machiavelli as envoy and historian, but he was out of favour again with the next ruler. Il Principe was published in 1532, five years after Machiavelli’s death.221 Jonson refers to Machiavelli in Discoveries and warns that ‘princes that neglect their proper office thus their fortune is 220 221

A.N. Wilson, Dante in Love, Atlantic Books, 2011, 70. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Vintage Books, 2007. See also Jonathan Powell, The New Machiavelli, The Bodley Head, 2010.

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oftentimes to draw a Sejanus to be near about them, who will at last affect to get above them’.222 Thomas More was sent as an envoy to renegotiate treaties with the Netherlands in 1515 and began to write Utopia in Bruges. It was completed and published a year later. He was on a new diplomatic mission to Calais in 1517 before he was promoted to higher office (and as Lord Chancellor charged with high treason). He writes about the Utopian diplomats who were recruited from the upper class of Stywards, but the island of Utopia had no regard for gold, silver and silk and ‘everyone … wore the same sort of clothes’. When the Flatulentine diplomats arrived in the capital, Aircastle, ‘to dicuss a matter of great importance’, they ‘adopted a policy more arrogant than diplomatic, which was to array themselves in positively godlike splendour’.223 Ben Jonson considered More one of the most eloquent scholars the nation had ever known.224 It would seem that ambassadors need to be falsely accused, tortured, exiled and even beheaded to create vintage literary classics. In Jonson’s Volpone, set in Venice, Sir Politick Would-Be asks Peregrine, a traveller from England, ‘You have not been with my lord ambassador?’ Milan and Venice were the first powers in Europe to introduce the system of resident ambassadors. It started in the fifteenth century and the practice soon spread throughout Europe. The title ambasciatore appeared but the word diplomacy was not used in English until the end of the eighteenth century. Tasso’s early morning discussion with a Spirit about angels and ambassadors led him from metaphysics towards a new understanding that language and negotiation were the tools of the diplomatic game. To Tasso 222 223 224

Cf Sejanus His Fall. Penguin, 1965, 68. See Chapter 1 (The Chain) above. Donaldson, op. cit., 179.

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the ambassador was a messenger, a mediator, a go-between, a panderer, an actor, a writer and a pimp; the essential task was to let sophisticated eloquence bring princes together and prevent conflict.225 Honest men were sent as ambassadors to lie abroad for the good of their countries (Legatus est Vir bonus, peregrè missus ad mentiendum Reipublicae causa).226 Latin was the diplomatic language. Spying and deception were added tools of the new trade. Jonson considered spies made of ‘of base stuff’.227 Ambassadors appear in Shakespeare as important messengers. The French ambassador tells King John that King Philip of France ‘lays most lawful claim to this fair island’.228 Again, the French ambassador insults King Henry V by giving him a present of tennis balls from his King and demands that he renounces the dukedoms in France, ‘he sends you … this tun of treasure’. This prompts King Henry’s famous speech ‘When we have match’d our rackets to these balls we will in France, by God’s grace, play a set.’229 Eustache Chapuys, the imperial Ambassador to England, urged in dispatches to Emperor Charles V to take arms against King Henry VIII who had insulted the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope, the Empire and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, by divorcing her. He has a small part in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII under the name of Capucius and visits Katharine with ‘princely commendations’ from Charles V. Claudius sent two of his courtiers, Volkemand and Cornelius, with a message to the ‘impotent and bed-rid’ King of Norway to control his nephew, young Fortinbras, 225 226 227 228 229

Torquato Tasso, Il Messaggiero (The Messenger). Sir Henry Wotton (1604). He had been ambassador to Venice. ‘On Spies’, Epigram 59. King John, I, i. I, ii.

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who had, in a dispatch to Claudius, demanded ‘the surrender of those lands’ lost by his father, the former King. The two envoys returned with good news for Claudius. Fortinbras had made a ’vow before his uncle, never more to give th’ assay of arms against your Majesty’. As part of the deal the old King had offered Fortinbras a generous annual fee, support for his campaign against the Poles and asked Claudius for free passage through Denmark. Polonius announces that ‘th’ ambassadors from Norway, my good Lord, are joyfull return’d’ and Claudius thanks his envoys for their ‘well-took labour’. As one diplomatic mission ends successfully in Hamlet a different and sinister one is set in motion. The courtiers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, ensure the King that they are ready ‘to lay our services freely at your feet’. They are engaged to spy on Hamlet but he confronts Guildenstern: ‘Why do you think that I am easier to be played on, than a pipe?’ Claudius prepares Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for a mission to England and Hamlet ‘shall along with you’. But Hamlet knows ‘there’s letters seal’d, and my two school-fellows, whom I will trust as I will adders fang’d, they bear the mandate’. After the killing of Polonius, Hamlet is sent ‘with fiery quickness’ to England, ‘the bark is ready’. The letters order ‘the present death of Hamlet’ but Hamlet replaces them with his own letter, a new commission, against Rosenkranz and Guildenstern: ‘I had my father’s signet in my purse.’ The pirates provide the channel for Hamlet’s revenge and return. Hamlet is referred to as ‘the ambassador that was bound for England’ by the sailor who brings his letter to Horatio.230 As Hamlet dies the English ambassadors enter and one of them reports that Hamlet’s ‘commandment is fulfill’d, that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’. Dipomacy developed in the Venetian republic. Gradually diplomatic services and permanaent missions were 230

IV, vi, 10.

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established and corps diplomatique with rules of immunity, and not least of precedence, appeared; after all, the ambassador was the representative and symbol of the state power either of the Emperor, the Pope, the King or the President. The Ambassador is still commissioned by the head of state, the bestalling, the commission letter, is (only) countersigned by the prime minister. The accreditation letter the envoy presents from the King is conveyed in a renaissance spirit. The President is requested to receive the Ambassador ‘with benevolence and give entire credence to all he may communicate’. The role is adorned with sophisticated literary language. Communication, rhetoric, oration are the watchwords. Hans Holbein the Younger arrived in England in 1533 with a recommendation from Erasmus of Rotterdam and he was soon commissioned to do a double portrait by, and of, Jean de Dinteville, Seigneur of Polisy, French Ambassador of Henry II to the court of Henry VIII, and of Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur and on different occasions French ambassador to the Emperor, the Holy See and Venice. The painting came to illustrate the double world of Renaissance man and the link between the writer and the painter as Horace had suggested. The two ambassadors are dressed differently; one is in the current fashion of an envoy, the other in clerical robes. In a cabinet behind the envoys, containing two shelves, still-lifes appear. On the top shelf is a globe showing the celestial order together with astronomical and astrological instruments, a torquetum, a quadrant and a polyhedral sundial. On the lower shelf a terrestrial globe is pictured, showing the known world of 1530 next to books and musical instruments (a lute and a flute), a hymnbook and a book of arithmetic (representing the mathematical medieval habit of life). The upper shelf represents the heavens and the lower shelf the living and literary little world of man. The floor mosaic is a design

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from Westminster Abbey and a crucifix can be detected high on the left side of the canvas. Man’s vanity and death is at first hidden from view in an anamorphic skull in front of the painting, undetected and out of proportion unless seen from a perspective on the right hand side of the painting. The broken string of the lute indicates the tension between the medieval world and the new stirrings of discovery. All ambassadors were equal, but as some were more equal, that is more powerful, than others, protocol was needed and established, ‘seul les sots moquent l’etiquette’.231 The Ambassadors of the Russian Tsar demanded precedence over the Emperor’s courtiers. A new ambassador from Moscow arrived, wearing two hats in Warsaw, one to be raised to the King of Poland, the other to be kept on as demanded by the Kremlin.232 Foreign ambassadors were invited to see Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Beauty (1608) but a protocol blunder had left out the French ambassador who was not amused. The Venetian ambassador was much impressed, not only of the masque, but also of the splendid jewels worn by the ladies. He also made a favourable response after seeing Jonson’s Epicoene (1609). ‘I must have my dining-room enlaged, to invite ambassadors’, says Bornwell, and Celestina tells Haircut, ‘I am charmed, sir; and if you ‘scape (move even higher than) ambassador, you cannot reach a preferment wherein I’m against you.’233 Their elevated status was recognized as they began to defend the interests of the nation state. ‘Ambassadors were to create an image of relaxed affability that would assist them in the arts of making useful alliances, sowing the seeds of useful confusion, and procrastinating.’234 231 232 233 234

Talleyrand. Norman Davies, op. cit., 524. James Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure (I.i and II,ii). John North, The Ambassador’s Secret. Holbein and the World of the Renaissance, Hambledon and London, 2004, 40–1.

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‘When come these creatures, the ambassdors’, asks Sempronia in Jonson’s Catiline.235 To Jonson, life was conflict and battle and he had slight regards for ambassadors as he makes plain in Sempronia’s irreverent remark. He had enlisted in the English forces sent to the Low Countries, distinguished himself and even killed an enemy soldier in a one-to-one fight.236 Shunfield, in The Staple of News, makes this derogatory comment: ‘If there be any good meat, as much good wine now, as would lay up a Dutch Ambassador.’237 The ambassadors were quickly seen as imbibers, a reputation upheld. Holding a drink (not a gun) is part of the mission, I hasten to add in self-defence. The Norwegian Diplomatic Service appointed the first woman ambassador as late as 1975, but a woman reached the top as Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2011. The recruitment of women to the service has increased in recent years and women are now regularly appointed to the senior positions at home and abroad. It is interesting that Jonson who had scant time for ‘these creatures’, the male envoys, seem to defend the role of women in diplomacy. Again, it is Sempronia, in Catiline, who is his spokeswoman and makes this observation: ‘I wonder much, that states and commonwealths employ not women to be ambassadors, sometimes: we should do as good public service, and could make as honourable spies, for so Thucydides calls all ambassadors.’ Incidentally, Catherine of Aragon was the first female ambassador in Europe, appointed to the Court of St. James in 1507 before she was Henry VIII’s (first) queen consort. It may be grossly unfair, unreasonable and even inappropriate to call diplomacy and diplomats risible, although 235 236 237

IV, v. Ian Donaldson, op. cit., 93–5. III,i.

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many would, and some aspects of the service and the behaviour of envoys may appear, and even be, comic. My aim is not to find the ridiculous in the system itself, tempting as that may be, but to uncover some of the wit and mirth that diplomats have observed and created past and present. Some excellencies have displayed an excellent comic spirit during their ‘gilded vagabondage’.238 Indeed, die friedlosen Steppenwölfe … ihnen bietet sich, wenn ihr Geist im Leiden stark und elastisch geworden ist, der versöhnliche Ausweg in den Humor.239 First, let me build the bridge between the four humours in the Renaissance Elizabethan period and today’s Elizabethan age. Where did the humours go?

They went into modern psychology and diplomacy. During a cold and phlegmatic week in January 1994, I attended the Foreign Ministry programme for leadership development together with twenty colleagues of the same rank. The course was led by the competent and enthusiastic psychologist, Karl G. Sjödin,240 and was built on a theory of four basic characters, leadership types and styles. As the presentations progressed I was suddenly awakened in the dark Nordic winter and thrown back to the light of the Renaissance and the four elements, humours, complexions and master passions. Sjödin divided the character of man into four main groups or boxes: driver 238

239

240

Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, quoted in Matthew Parris & Andrew Bryson, The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase, Penguin, 2012, 27. Hesse, op. cit., 88. The outlawed steppewolves… are offered, when suffering has made their spirit strong and flexible, the conciliatory solution of humour. Konsult AB.

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many would, and some aspects of the service and the behaviour of envoys may appear, and even be, comic. My aim is not to find the ridiculous in the system itself, tempting as that may be, but to uncover some of the wit and mirth that diplomats have observed and created past and present. Some excellencies have displayed an excellent comic spirit during their ‘gilded vagabondage’.238 Indeed, die friedlosen Steppenwölfe … ihnen bietet sich, wenn ihr Geist im Leiden stark und elastisch geworden ist, der versöhnliche Ausweg in den Humor.239 First, let me build the bridge between the four humours in the Renaissance Elizabethan period and today’s Elizabethan age. Where did the humours go?

They went into modern psychology and diplomacy. During a cold and phlegmatic week in January 1994, I attended the Foreign Ministry programme for leadership development together with twenty colleagues of the same rank. The course was led by the competent and enthusiastic psychologist, Karl G. Sjödin,240 and was built on a theory of four basic characters, leadership types and styles. As the presentations progressed I was suddenly awakened in the dark Nordic winter and thrown back to the light of the Renaissance and the four elements, humours, complexions and master passions. Sjödin divided the character of man into four main groups or boxes: driver 238

239

240

Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, quoted in Matthew Parris & Andrew Bryson, The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase, Penguin, 2012, 27. Hesse, op. cit., 88. The outlawed steppewolves… are offered, when suffering has made their spirit strong and flexible, the conciliatory solution of humour. Konsult AB.

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(leading), amiable (supportive), expressive (enterprising) and analytic. It immediately occurred to me that this modern system had parallels in Elizabethan humoral theory and links to the Ancients. The expressive character seemed to be dominated by the sanguine humour, the supportive by the phlegmatic, the driver by the choleric and the analytic by the melancholic. We were all sitting there as envoys of the elements. Each of the four boxes was divided into four groups, making altogether sixteen subgroups and leadership nuances. No one was in the middle of the square as the ideally composed leader just as the perfectly balanced man was also virtually absent from the Renaissance system. Each core style was influenced by the styles next to it and the qualities of one, good or bad, would influence the others. It was a blend of humours in a modern setting. The Renaissance psychologist, like his modern colleague, was not content with a division into four units. Each humour, already influenced by two elements, could be further divided into four variations, as for example four types of phlegm, sweet, sour, salt and glassy.241 This added up to sixteen subdivisions, just like the modern theory. The distribution and interplay of humours in Renaissance man caused different and sometimes extreme behaviour. Jonson presents characters in plays that fit the psychology of his time. In Sjödin’s modern presentation it was important to detect different personality types to understand how each human being sees himself, his colleagues and friends. The driver sees himself as objective and decisive but the expressive tends to see him as insensitive and distant, the supportive views him as arrogant and aggressive and the analytic observe him as hard and overbearing. 241

Levinus Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions, Thomas Newton (tr.), 1576.

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The expressive considers himself creative, open and optimistic but in the eyes of the driver he is an impractical dreamer, to the amiable he is a manipulating risk taker and the analytic considers him competitive and undisciplined. The amiable sees himself as loyal and considerate but to the driver he is too careful and hesitant, to the expressive he is too indecisive and to the analytic he is trustworthy but cautious. The analytic thinks he is organized and patient while the driver considers him too critical and slow, to the expressive he is reserved and pedantic and to the amiable he appears formal and serious. Jonson’s characters could easily enter Sjödin’s stage and vice versa. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s clausewitzian comment at his Press Conference 12 February 2002 marks him as a Renaissance choleric man and a modern driver: There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.

Blair and Brown on the political stage fit Jonson and Sjödin perfectly. Blair is the expressive initiator and he is dominated by the sanguine humour. Brown is the analytical brooder enchroached by the melancholy humour. It is not surprising that they did not get on. Blair would see Brown as indecisive, pedantic and lacking in imagination while Brown would see Blair as too competitive, manipulating and undisciplined. As Arcandam wrote in 1592, the sanguine man (aka Blair) is merry and pleasant and the melancholy man (aka Brown) is rude, churlish and envious.

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‘The Greek spirit is essentially modern.’242 Old and new humours came nicely together. Berlin 1900

Let me invite you to a small dinner-party at the Italian embassy in Berlin 12 January 1900, to listen to their conversation and spot the similarities and differences to our own day. A young man had also been invited to the dinner. It was his birthday. He was twenty years old. He began by making this observation: ‘Fourteen people, most of whom were going later to a Court ball; the men in uniform and the ladies wearing their finest jewels.’243 The young man was a keen observer of a yet undiscovered world: I regarded the embassy suspiciously as one of those places where one went to receptions dressed up in one’s best clothes, and stood about uncomfortably in doorways, while elder men with chests covered with decorations, and ladies with long trains that tripped one up, pushed past and saluted one another with a formal deference that, like charity, often covered a multitude of sins.

The young guest admits that he learned a lot about the political and social world of Berlin at these diplomatic dinners, invited by Count Lanza, but he also had to listen to conversations about the high cost of flowers. On the occasion of a ball at the embassy the Count had organized a railway-truck loaded with flowers to be sent from the Italian Riviera to him for the occasion. This would 242

243

Oscar Wilde,’The Rise of Historical Criticism’, Essays and Lectures, Pennesylvania State University 2006, 53. Daniele Vare, Laughing Diplomat, John Murray, London, 1938, 1.

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‘The Greek spirit is essentially modern.’242 Old and new humours came nicely together. Berlin 1900

Let me invite you to a small dinner-party at the Italian embassy in Berlin 12 January 1900, to listen to their conversation and spot the similarities and differences to our own day. A young man had also been invited to the dinner. It was his birthday. He was twenty years old. He began by making this observation: ‘Fourteen people, most of whom were going later to a Court ball; the men in uniform and the ladies wearing their finest jewels.’243 The young man was a keen observer of a yet undiscovered world: I regarded the embassy suspiciously as one of those places where one went to receptions dressed up in one’s best clothes, and stood about uncomfortably in doorways, while elder men with chests covered with decorations, and ladies with long trains that tripped one up, pushed past and saluted one another with a formal deference that, like charity, often covered a multitude of sins.

The young guest admits that he learned a lot about the political and social world of Berlin at these diplomatic dinners, invited by Count Lanza, but he also had to listen to conversations about the high cost of flowers. On the occasion of a ball at the embassy the Count had organized a railway-truck loaded with flowers to be sent from the Italian Riviera to him for the occasion. This would 242

243

Oscar Wilde,’The Rise of Historical Criticism’, Essays and Lectures, Pennesylvania State University 2006, 53. Daniele Vare, Laughing Diplomat, John Murray, London, 1938, 1.

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be cheaper than buying them in Berlin, apparently. But the flowers did not arrive in time and turned up the morning after the ball. ‘That sort of thing always happens when I try to economize,’ sighed the ambassador. Attilio Serra (from the embassy) complained about the quality of fruit in Berlin and described with nostalgia the oranges that grew on his own fruit-farms in Italy: ‘His hands made the gesture of holding something the size of a melon.’ The talk then turned to the favourite subject of conversation at dinner-parties in Berlin: the Kaiser. Lady Susan Townley said she had seen a photograph of the Kaiser wearing the ‘very becoming’ dark blue uniform of an honorary colonel of the English Guards. Also at the dinner was de Martino, an Italian painter, a former naval officer who had been appointed marine painter to King Edward VII. An exhibition of his paintings had opened in Berlin the day before. He related that the Kaiser had come to see his paintings and had argued that in the future all German battleships had to carry extra fuel that could be dispersed on the sea in rough weather as the calming would make it easier for the gunners to take aim. De Martino added that after every battle one could then set fire to the ocean and make ‘a fritto misto of the fishes’. He did not think the Kaiser liked his pictures because they depicted battleships of the British Navy. The Kaiser had said that Germany in the twentieth century must have a large navy. Recalling this conversation in later years, the author adds, ‘I have wondered if De Martino and his pictures were not partly responsible for the Great War’. Inevitably, the young man is asked the impossible question, as young men are, if it is best to be a general, an ambassador or just be twenty years old? He said he was studying music and had planned to take up music as a profession but after arriving in Berlin he was beginning to have doubts and he was ‘hesitating now between music and diplomacy’.

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Another guest, a Prussian general, Verdy du Vernois, then burst into action: ‘Young man, let me give you a piece of advice. Don’t become a diplomat, or you will lose your sense of humour among the formulas of official correspondence, and ruin your digestion among the courses of official dinners. Diplomats’ lives are made up of protocols and purgatives.’ ‘And what might the moral be’, the birthday boy asked, ‘for a young man who is thinking of becoming a diplomat?’ ‘This is the moral’, said the general, ‘even after you have donned your livery, do not forget to laugh. Laugh at success and laugh at failure. Laugh at the way the world is governed. Laugh at others and above all laugh at yourself.’ Again, Jonson would agree. The Ambassador looked doubtful: ‘I am an old soldier, like the general, and I have not been long enough in diplomacy to know much about my colleagues as a class. But I have noticed that some of them, and some of their wives, take themselves very seriously indeed. Still you had better be careful whom you laugh at, or you may get turned out of the service. If I were you I should be content to smile within.’ De Martino quoted the proverb: Les heureux ne rient pas, ils sourient. The conversation at the dinner may at first glance appear distant, even irrelevant or comic, particularly the cost of flowers and apples, but if we look again we will find that the topics aired and discussed are still with us today and diplomats and their wives have a keen eye on their representation budget. It would be rare today for an ambassador to appear in uniform but it has not completely gone out of fashion. The last and only time I witnessed a Norwegian ambassador adorned in one was in 1970. The Norwegian envoy in Bonn, Søren Chr. Sommerfelt, accompanying the German president, Gustav Heinemann, on the first visit to Norway

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of a German head of state after the Second World War, was appropriately dressed in the uniform (model 1907) at the state banquet hosted by the King of Norway, Olav V.244 It is true that diplomats need a flakjacket today but perhaps not all the time, and tails are just as cumbersome as uniforms. As for going to a court ball after dinner, this would be unusual now, but I recall, at the embassy in Brussels and accredited to Luxembourg in the early 1970s, that the Duke of Luxembourg invited diplomats to a splendid annual event of this kind. An ambassador may invite to a ball in the residence on a special occasion. This was done in Tokyo at the opening of the new Norwegian compound and chancery in the late 1970s. Very few embassies can display their own ballrooms, but the US residence in Paris, Hotel de Pontalba, can. The host at the Berlin dinner, the Italian ambassador, Count Lanza, was, as he admits, not a diplomat but a General, appointed by King Humbert, in other words a political appointee. The practice of appointing ambassadors from outside the diplomatic service is not uncommon even today. Norway, lacking qualified diplomats after independence in 1905, fell into this practice and never recovered from it, making the separation between the political and diplomatic class blurred, opening the gates for systemic upheaval and silent corruption.245 Gossip is the spice of diplomatic life, then as now. We relish the latest rumours of successful diplomatic promotions, the reward for ‘leaping and creeping’ but more importantly of the behaviour and scandals of politicians that may affect the course of history. At the Berlin dinner 244

245

See the picture of the Ambassador in uniform in his biography, Sendemann, Schibsted, 1997, 97. An account of this practice in Norway is given in Kastevind, Gatelangs i verdens eldste yrke, Solum, 2011, 9–40.

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they talked about the then young Kaiser and his attention to both the German and the British fleet. Today gossip flourishes, for example about President Putin and his intentions. Gossip, already part of intelligence, is the humorous prelude to espionage. The young man had looked in awe at the decorations carried by the guests. In a final chaper of his book, after he himself had become a diplomat, something he had considered at the Berlin dinner, Vare relates this dialogue between him and his daughter, Gianmarina, on the theme of decorations: ‘Papa!’ ‘Yes, dear.’ ‘Why was Mucius Scaevola put into a trunk?’ ‘I never heard that he was.’ ‘Then it must have been Attilius Regulus. I am always mixing them up.’ ‘It was not a trunk that they put him in, but a barrel stuck full of nails with the points inside. And they rolled him down a hill.’ ‘Why? What had he done?’ ‘As far as I remember, the Carthaginians had taken him prisoner, and they sent him off to Rome, to make peace. He went to Rome, and saw the family, but he didn’t make peace. You might call it a diplomatic mission gone wrong.’ ‘But, Papa. You’ve been on lots of diplomatic missions.’ ‘True.’ ‘Didn’t any of them go wrong?’ ‘Some of them.’ ‘They never put you in a barrel with nails in it.’ ‘Times have changed. Nowadays they give us a ribbon and a star.’246 246

‘Envoi’, 445.

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The question of royal orders led to added animosity between Norway and Sweden during the union 1814–1905. The Swedish kings Karl Johan and Carl XIII had refused to grant Norway a separate order but King Oscar I agreed to establish the Order of St Olav in 1847. But there was a snag. It was ranked after the Swedish Order of the Seraphim introduced by King Fredrik I in 1748. This angered many members of the Norwegian parliament at a time of political tension between the two countries. Inferior to Sweden, never! To compensate, King Oscar II introduced a more exclusive order called the Order of the Norwegian Lion but it was only used to decorate emperors, kings, princes and presidents, among them Kaiser Wilhelm II, in 1904. It only added to the frustration at a time when the relationship could spill over into war, but then independence was achieved in 1905 and all was well. After the dissolution of the union it was decided against opposition to maintain the St. Olav’s order as a gesture to the diplomatic service. The Norwegian Lion was not used after independence and was formally repealed in 1952. To maintain the exclusivity of the St Olav’s order, the Order of Merit was introduced in 1985. The St. Olav’s Order is ranked after the Norwegian War Cross, introduced in 1941. Sir Thomas Maitland founded the Order of St. Michael and St. George early in the nineteenth century, and it has become the order for deserving British diplomats. The order is divided into three classes, as befits a class society, Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG), Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (KCMG), and Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (GCMG). This was soon turned into Call Me God (CMG), Kindly Call Me God (KCMG) and God Calls Me God (GCMG). The order ceremony observed by Gulliver in Lilliput is a useful reminder of our shared gong vanity:

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The Emperor lays on a Table three fine silken Threads of six Inches long. One is Blue, the other Red, and the third Green. These Threads are proposed as Prizes for those Persons whom the Emperor hath a mind to distinguish by a peculiar Mark of his Favour. The Ceremony is performed in his Majesty’s great Chamber of State, where the Candidates are to undergo a Trial of Dexterity ... and such as I have not observed the least Resemblance of in any other Country of the old or the new World. The Emperor holds a Stick in his Hands, both Ends parallel to the Horizon, while the Candidates advancing one by one, sometimes leap over the Stick, sometimes creep under it backwards and forwards several times, according as the Stick is advanced or depressed. Sometimes the Emperor holds one end of the Stick, and his first Minister the other; sometimes the Minister has it entirely to himself. Whoever performs his part with most Agility, and holds out the longest in leaping and creeping, is rewarded with the Blue coloured Silk; the Red is given to the next, and the Green to the third, which they all wear girt twice round about the middle; and you see few great Persons about this Court, who are not adorned with one of these Girdles.247

I watched the eminent Paul Scofield as King Lear in 1962, directed by Peter Brook at the new Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) at Stratford. Scofield declined a knighthood and when he won the Oscar in 1966 as Sir Thomas More in A Man for all Seasons he did not attend the ceremony but repaired the barn roof at home instead. When the actor Michael Caine asked his wife what he had said when his name was called in L.A., she said: ‘Isn’t that nice, dear?’248 It takes a master to do that. 247

248

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Penguin, 2003, Part I, Chapter III, 39–40. Michael Caine, The Elephant in Hollywood, Hodder & Stoughton, 2010.

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The novelist Philip Roth has received a long list of literary prizes but he asserts that such honours are of little value: ‘The child in one is always elated … the adult knows better.’249 The Prussian general at the Berlin dinner was right – above all remember to laugh at yourself. The young man had the same feeling of being in an esoteric club looking at diplomatic eccentricity from outside the wall, as many would have today. The ladies are still elegant at an embassy reception and the men may with false modesty display their most treasured order or decoration in the buttonhole. We all do this and think that the King, if not God, has found us deserving. Vanity is our favoured sin.250 Only humour can correct that. Jonson did. Fabulous

A fable is matter indeed that is feigned for the utility or delight of men, as are the fables of the poets and the fables of Aesop.251

Terence used fabula252 to mean both comedy and feigned tale and Donatus also understood the word to mean comedy and a mocking tale. Fabula is close to myth253 and may also feature gods and supernatural creatures. ‘Even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders.’254 Fables are equally wondrous. The fable has become a popular feature of children’s books (cf. Hans Christian Andersen) but as a genre it dates back to 249

Interview in The Times, 17 October 2009.

250

Cf. Goethe’s poem Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!, 1806; Al Pacino in The

251 252 253 254

Devil’s Advocate, 1997 (‘Vanity is my favourite sin’). Dominicus Nanus Mirabellius (ed.), Polyanthea, 1507. (Gr.) little story, fari, to speak. Gr. mythos, story, talk. Aristotle, Metaphysics.

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The novelist Philip Roth has received a long list of literary prizes but he asserts that such honours are of little value: ‘The child in one is always elated … the adult knows better.’249 The Prussian general at the Berlin dinner was right – above all remember to laugh at yourself. The young man had the same feeling of being in an esoteric club looking at diplomatic eccentricity from outside the wall, as many would have today. The ladies are still elegant at an embassy reception and the men may with false modesty display their most treasured order or decoration in the buttonhole. We all do this and think that the King, if not God, has found us deserving. Vanity is our favoured sin.250 Only humour can correct that. Jonson did. Fabulous

A fable is matter indeed that is feigned for the utility or delight of men, as are the fables of the poets and the fables of Aesop.251

Terence used fabula252 to mean both comedy and feigned tale and Donatus also understood the word to mean comedy and a mocking tale. Fabula is close to myth253 and may also feature gods and supernatural creatures. ‘Even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders.’254 Fables are equally wondrous. The fable has become a popular feature of children’s books (cf. Hans Christian Andersen) but as a genre it dates back to 249

Interview in The Times, 17 October 2009.

250

Cf. Goethe’s poem Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!, 1806; Al Pacino in The

251 252 253 254

Devil’s Advocate, 1997 (‘Vanity is my favourite sin’). Dominicus Nanus Mirabellius (ed.), Polyanthea, 1507. (Gr.) little story, fari, to speak. Gr. mythos, story, talk. Aristotle, Metaphysics.

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Aesop’s fables. The genre reappears in the Middle Ages in Europe, was reviwed by Jean de la Fontaine and John Gay in the seventeenth century and famously by George Orwell in Animal Farm (1945). What better animals to anthropomorphize, to give human qualities, than diplomats. They so need and even deserve human qualities and we may draw moral lessons from their little stories. So let me set down a fabula or an apologue,255 about envoys, a short story with animals as characters, observing their behaviour, their human qualities, vices and virtues, and conveying a moral point in a light mocking tone. The annual gathering of heads of mission in Oslo, hosted by the Foreign Minister, a packed week of lectures and pep talks by all the leading lights that the fatherland could muster, including the Prime Minister, was, with a sigh of relief concluded with a grand reception at Akershus Castle, or, in recent years at the Oslo City Hall, the venue for the Nobel Peace Price. After attending these gaudy-nights in harness we continued to be invited after we had been torn away256 from active duty, indeed at the very time when we had finally began to master the art of diplomacy. Presidents (Reagan), Prime Ministers (Churchill), the Popes and, dare I mention, Kings, Queens, and Judges seemed to go on forever, so why not diplomats? The Court upheld our right to carry a diplomatic passport for movement in Ruhestand (as the Germans call retirement). I open my fable at the reception, imagined as a diplomatic savannah. The animals sniffed around, suspiciously, carefully. Gradually and imperceptibly small groups appeared. In one corner the kings of the jungle, the lions, had gathered. They lifted their manes as if to show off the badge of superior postings to 255 256

Lat. apo, off, logos, speech. Retire, tairan (Goth.), to tear.

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Washington, London or Paris. Quintus Fabius, a secure political appointee, stood as primus inter pares in the lions den. At appropriate distance away stood the African elephants indicating with low trunk sounds that they came from Serengeti and not from the polished floors. They had big stations out there; big budgets and therefore influence and power. The elephants were in the room. A few restless giraffes stretched their necks even higher to catch the latest rumours about promotions and postings. In a corner, noticeably, were a group of glowering hippopotami that had been bypassed, or lost, in the latest chess or poker game for advancement. A quiet hierarchy had formed in the egalitarian Nordic landscape. Slowly all the animals, the deserved and the undeserved, the favoured and the forgotten, found their way to the watering holes, to wine and canapés. A buzzing harmony descended as they slurped the nectar and ambrosia, fit for god’s creatures (God calls me God). Those favoured would drink because they were confident and happy, the less favoured because they were less so. An inaudible sound that only the alert would hear made the animals scatter in alarm again in appropriate and safe directions. Perhaps it was the Foreign Minister’s speech that had called them all to attention. The animals, now suitably intoxicated by drinks, revelations and gossip were facing real or imagined dangers of survival and success. The law of the jungle is merciless, but the chosen ones with political support are safer for an allotted time, just like Dante and Machiavelli. The fearless wild dogs from the national press and media were keen observers. We witnessed the old morality play of Everyman in a fabula of hope and dreams at the oldest theatre in the world: Es reden und träumen die Menschen viel Von bessern künftigen Tagen: Nach einem glücklichen, goldenen Ziel

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Sieth man sie rennen und jagen. Die Welt wird alt und wird wieder jung. Doch der Mensch hofft immer Verbesserung. Im Herzen kündet es laut sich an: Zu was Besserm sind wir geboren.257

Indeed, the young man in Berlin had also wondered if he had been born to something better than being a diplomat. He really had wanted to be a musician. In June every year the Norwegian Foreign Minister, very generously (if reluctantly), invites the pensioners from the service to a reception at the elegant official representation residence in Parkveien 45 behind the Royal Palace. Here those of us who were best before a certain date gather ‘like something the world threw away’.258 We who were once, when we were Kings. We talked about the new and strange foreign and diplomatic service in a changed world run by the geeks of technology and the new gods of politics. My retired colleagues do different things now. Some are just playing golf, others are restlessly travelling the world as if new horizons can be found, a few are learning new or old languages, but many seem content just to cut the grass. And there we are, frozen in beautiful suuroundings, holding a last glass of champagne. Remembering our world travelling as part of the service and the postings we had, the good and the bad. We meet people we met in transit. We have arrived at the cabinet de cire and we deserve to be there. ‘The great whirl of exile’ had gone – and just begun. With new electronic speed machines it is difficult for an ambassador to escape the constant intrusion of the Foreign Ministry. It was different not that long ago. Thomas 257 258

From Schiller’s philosophical poem, ‘Hoffnung’. Kris Kristofferson, ‘Somebody nobody knows’.

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Jefferson, the first Foreign Minister of the new United States of America, wondered why it had been two years since he had heard from his ambassador in Madrid. He concluded that he would only write to the ambassador if another year went by without sign of life. Surtout, pas trop de zèle.259 Those were the days of diplomacy but the Internet has changed all that: ‘The Web, like the definition of God first imagined in the twelfth century, sees itself as a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’260 Dark matter. Hilarious

The 1960s were the golden age for creative April fools presentations in the Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Oslo. The tradition dates back to Hilaria in classical Rome and to the Spring Equinox when a sudden change in the weather invited more abandoned behaviour. After a Nordic winter there was every reason to shed the melancholy disposition and celebrate April in a sanguine humour. Usually, an April jest penned by comic writers in the Ministry was communicated to the embassies, consulates and delegations and they in turn were encouraged to reply. In 1967 the inventiveness reached a new level when the Ministry and the British Embassy in Oslo exchanged the following Notes, in Latin no less, concerning some essential questions in the relations between the two states. The first Note came from the British side: Regio Norwegiensi rerum exterarum Ministerio Ambasciata Britannice Maiestatis reuerentiam suam et salutem. 259 260

Talleyrand (1754–1838). Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, Yale, 2008, 322.

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Jefferson, the first Foreign Minister of the new United States of America, wondered why it had been two years since he had heard from his ambassador in Madrid. He concluded that he would only write to the ambassador if another year went by without sign of life. Surtout, pas trop de zèle.259 Those were the days of diplomacy but the Internet has changed all that: ‘The Web, like the definition of God first imagined in the twelfth century, sees itself as a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’260 Dark matter. Hilarious

The 1960s were the golden age for creative April fools presentations in the Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Oslo. The tradition dates back to Hilaria in classical Rome and to the Spring Equinox when a sudden change in the weather invited more abandoned behaviour. After a Nordic winter there was every reason to shed the melancholy disposition and celebrate April in a sanguine humour. Usually, an April jest penned by comic writers in the Ministry was communicated to the embassies, consulates and delegations and they in turn were encouraged to reply. In 1967 the inventiveness reached a new level when the Ministry and the British Embassy in Oslo exchanged the following Notes, in Latin no less, concerning some essential questions in the relations between the two states. The first Note came from the British side: Regio Norwegiensi rerum exterarum Ministerio Ambasciata Britannice Maiestatis reuerentiam suam et salutem. 259 260

Talleyrand (1754–1838). Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, Yale, 2008, 322.

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Ambasciata supradicta litteras Henrici. iij. illustissimi Regis Anglie apud Lambethum decimo die Octobris anno Domini. mccxvij. datas et Haquino serenissimo Regi Norwegie destinatas de pacis federe et amicitia necnon et alligantia inter duo regna eorum faciendis ad memoriam uestram ducere cupid, quia probari non potest Maiestatem Britannicam ad has suas litteras responsum accepisse. Quapropter Ambasciata predicte Maiestatis sperare presumit responsum iamdicti Regis Norwegie in proximo futuro aduenturum esse. Ad meliorem rei cognitionem transumptum predictarum Regis Anglie litterarum his nostris litteris adnexum est. Hanc occasionem nacta sepdicta Ambasciata Maiestatis Britannice Regio Norwegiensi rerum exterarum Ministerior reuerentiam suam maximam denuo exprimer affectat. Translation of the Note: Her British Majesty’s Embassy presents its compliments to the Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs and has the honour to remind the Ministry of the letter from King Henry III of England dated Lambeth 10 October 1217 to King Håkon of Norway concerning peace, friendship and alliance between the two nations, as one is unable to establish if the British Majesty has received a reply to this letter. The Embassy therefore trusts that a reply from the Norwegian King may be expected in the near future. For your information concerning this case a copy of the mentioned letter from the King of England is attached. Her British Majesty’s Embassy avails itself of this occasion to renew to the Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs the assurances of its highest consideration.

The attachment to the Note (King Henry III’s Letter of 10 October 1217 to King Håkon IV of Norway) reads:

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Concerning conclusion of an agreement with Håkon, King of Norway. Henry by the grace of God etc. to Håkon also by the grace of God King of Norway extends his greetings. We extend our heartiest thanks dear cousin for the news you have dispatched to us by letter and through the worthy abbot of Lye monastery, namely that it is Your desire and hope to conclude an agreement of peace and friendship with us and to be united with us by a treaty. It is also and has always been Our wish that Our two countries should be one community so that merchants and other persons under Your jurisdiction will have free and unhindered access to Our country such as Our merchants and other persons will enjoy to Your country, provided a mutual exchange of assurances to this end. In the meantime We are willing to allow merchants, both from Our and from Your country, to arrive in and depart from Our realm, and if there may be anything You want to be done and which we could do, please do not hesitate but let Us know. We have postponed the return of the abbot until now because we wanted to the best of Our ability to refit Your ship and all equipment and we will see to it that the abbot will keep You informed about conditions in Our realm. Written in Lambeth, October the 10th. A corresponding letter has been dispatched to Skule, Duke of Norway.

The Norwegian reply referred in particular to the unsolved territorial question of the Orkney and Shetland islands: Ambasciate Britannice Maiestatis Regni Norwegie rerum exterarum Ministerium reuerentiam suam et salutem dicit litterasque dicte Ambasciate Kal. Apr. anno Domini. mcmlxvij. datas a se acceptas esse agnoscit. Quibus acceptis et perlectis dictum Ministerium deplorat maxime doletque se adhuc litteris Regie Maiestatis Britannice Henrici.iij.

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decimo die Octobris anno Domini. mccxvij. datis et Regie Maiestatis Norwegie Haquino Haquini filio directis respondere non potuisse. Morae longioris causa satis inueniri potest cum in onere atque labore magno regibus Norwegie eorumque cancellariis his ultimis septingentis et quinquaginta annis cottidie et constanter imposito, tum in eo quod in interrelationibus regnorum duorum nostrorum questio quaedam non adhuc soluta superest. Occasione itaque se praebente nos ratione decet prefate Maiestatis Britannice Concilium admonere de indubitato et certo iure Regis Norwegie ad possessiones suas, insulas enim Orcadenses et Shetlandenses, Carone Regno Scocie per tractatus tam anno Domini. mcdlxviij. quam etiam anno sequenti initos hypothecatas et impignoratas pro summa quinquaginta octo milium florenorum Rhenensium soluenda in dotem principisse Norwegiensis filie Regis Christierni Margarete ratione matrimonii eius cum successore Scotico redimendas. Iamdicta autem summa quinquaginta octo milium florenorum Rhenensium ad ualorem nostri temporis calculata ualet pro mille et ducentis et quinquaginta milium coronarum Norwegiensium siue sexaginta duo milibus et quingentis librarum sterlinggorum, et postquam uectigal Britannicum mercibus importandis prius impositum tandem anno Domini. mcmlxvj. abrogatum est, commercatio inter regna nostra ita auxit increueruntque ita redditus regni Norwegie ut summa predicta nunc solui et hypotheca supramemorata uel pignus, insulae scilicet Orcadenses et Shetlandenses, ab instanti redimi possit. Ministerio rerum exterarum Regni Norwegie exploratum certumque est Maiestatis Britannice Concilium grato Iaetoque animo hanc nostram communicationem esse accepturum qua constat possibilitatem nunc demum adesse ut questio ea, quae tot seculis amicabilem relationem uel interconnectionem duorum regnorum nostrorum difficultate quadam adficiebat, facile solui possit. Qua soluta aderit tempus inter duo regna predicta pacem amicitiam fedusque ineundi sicut a Regia Maiestate Britannica iam optatum est desideratumque et litteris chartaque sepedicte Maiestatis expressum.

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Hanc occasionem nactum Regni Norwegie rerum exterarum Ministerium iamdicte Ambasciate Maiestatis Britannice reuerentiam suam maximam exprimer affectat. Datum Osloiae Kal. Apr. anno Domini. MCMLXVII.

Translation of the Norwegian Note: The Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs presents its compliments to Her Majesty’s Embassy and with reference to to the Embassy’s Note of 1 April 1967 deeply regrets that a letter dated 10 October 1217 from His British Majesty Henry III to His Majesty Håkon Håkonsson, King of Norway, could not yet be answered. The delay is explained by the excessive workload that during the last 750 years daily and continuously has burdened Norway’s kings and their chanceries and the fact that an unsolved question remains in the relationship between our two kingdoms. It seems appropriate to remind Her British Majesty’s Government of the undisputable right the King of Norway has to redeem the Norwegian possessions the Orkney Islands and Hjaltland (the Shetland Islands) that by treaties of 1467 and 1469 were pawned to the Kingdom of Scotland for the sum of 58,000 Rhine golden to cover the dowry in connection with the marriage of the Norwegian Princess Margrete to the successor to the Scottish throne. Converted to the present day exchange rate 58,000 Rhine golden amount to 1,250,000 kr. or 62,500 pound sterling. Thanks to the income that has accrued for our kingdom after the abolition of the British import duty in 1966, this amount can now be paid and the pawn redeemed. The Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs feels assured that Her British Majesty’s Government will receive favourably the information that it is now possible to solve this

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problem that over many centuries has complicated the relations between our two kingdoms. When this question is solved it would be the right time to establish peace, friendship and alliance between our two realms in accordance with the wish that at one time was expressed by His British Majesty. The Kingdom of Norway’s Foreign Ministry avails itself of this occasion to renew to Her British Majesty’s Embassy the assurances of its highest consideration.

In the debate over Scottish independence in 2014 voices were heard in the Orkney and Shetland Islands that perhaps the time had come to return to Norway. An ever closer union

Why is Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and not in Kenya? It is said that Queen Victoria gave the mountain to her German grandchild ‘because Wilhelm likes everything that is high and big’. The truth is that Realpolitik, Anglo-German rivalry and cooperation in the 1880s, gave the snows of Kilimanjaro to Tanganika. But Queen Victoria’s comment is a reminder of the often arbitrary colonial border experiments in Africa. A very prominent Norwegian Paris-ambassador, Baron Fritz Wedel Jarlsberg, argued at the Paris conference in 1918 that Norway ought to be granted colonies in East Africa. This would be a reasonable compensation for the losses of the Norwegian Merchant Fleet during the First World War. The British representative asked ironically if Norway wished to obtain a high or a low country in Africa. Wedel replied that the important thing was a harbour, mountains were less important. Wedel’s idea was supported by Prime Minister Gunnar Knudsen but the Foreign Minister, Nils Ihlen, threatened to resign if these negotiations were not

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problem that over many centuries has complicated the relations between our two kingdoms. When this question is solved it would be the right time to establish peace, friendship and alliance between our two realms in accordance with the wish that at one time was expressed by His British Majesty. The Kingdom of Norway’s Foreign Ministry avails itself of this occasion to renew to Her British Majesty’s Embassy the assurances of its highest consideration.

In the debate over Scottish independence in 2014 voices were heard in the Orkney and Shetland Islands that perhaps the time had come to return to Norway. An ever closer union

Why is Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and not in Kenya? It is said that Queen Victoria gave the mountain to her German grandchild ‘because Wilhelm likes everything that is high and big’. The truth is that Realpolitik, Anglo-German rivalry and cooperation in the 1880s, gave the snows of Kilimanjaro to Tanganika. But Queen Victoria’s comment is a reminder of the often arbitrary colonial border experiments in Africa. A very prominent Norwegian Paris-ambassador, Baron Fritz Wedel Jarlsberg, argued at the Paris conference in 1918 that Norway ought to be granted colonies in East Africa. This would be a reasonable compensation for the losses of the Norwegian Merchant Fleet during the First World War. The British representative asked ironically if Norway wished to obtain a high or a low country in Africa. Wedel replied that the important thing was a harbour, mountains were less important. Wedel’s idea was supported by Prime Minister Gunnar Knudsen but the Foreign Minister, Nils Ihlen, threatened to resign if these negotiations were not

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ended immediately. The danger of cabinet crises effectively buried the idea and like many other daring ideas in the foreign service it found its resting place in the ever expanding archive. We did not get a colony in Africa with the esoteric name of Tanganor. Norway was in union with Sweden between 1814 and 1905. Sweden was, and remains, Norway’s big brother, in spite of Norway’s new oil wealth. Many Swedes have not forgiven Alfred Nobel for granting the administration of the Nobel Peace Prize to Norway. The Norwegian people said No to the EC/EU in 1972 and again in 1994. Sweden said Yes in 1994. In a speech to my good colleague in Dar es Salaam in 2001 I gave this irreverent version of Norway’s love affair with Europe: When first Denmark and then Sweden had been in union with Norway they got so hooked on the idea of living in a coalition that they rushed to join the European Project at the first opportunity (in fact Sweden waited until it was called union and not just community) while Norway, having regained independence, repeatedly said no to a third union. Sweden of course, more by luck than by design, managed to retain a semblance of independence through the blue and yellow colours of the EU flag as the cross only changed into little yellow stars. But what happened to the Swedish national anthem ‘Du gamla du fria’? Instead of this famous national anthem, what did you get? The EU has accepted ‘An der Freude’ (Ode to Joy) as the union anthem. Schiller wrote ‘An der Freude’ in a village near Leipzig. He was suffering from a broken love affair and he was also broke. He is reported to have said ein recht schlechtes Gedicht (a right awful poem) about his own poem. It was rumoured that the original title had been ‘An der Freiheit’. It took Beethoven over thirty years to set ‘An der Freude’ to music

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but finally we got Symphony no. 9, first performed in Vienna in 1824 and the composer was also the first conductor. Beethoven being deaf continued to conduct after the music had stopped. So is the union hopelessly in love with integration unable to hear the music of national freedom? The reality is that my friend the Swedish Ambassador is now the proud and very active chairman of a union of fifteen countries in Europe and another twelve waiting to join. He has a political voice and influence that is obvious and impressive. He mentioned in his specch when he took over the Chair that he wished that Norway had been a member. I know that he meant it. When I had a new flagpole put up at the Norwegian residence I insisted that the old one should be left. So you see I am looking at the stars – Freude, Schöner Götterfunken – the brilliant spark of the gods. If we go back to the beginning the EEC was just that in European history, a brilliant spark. In that sense ‘Ja, vi elsker dette landet’ can join ‘An der Freude’ because it is also called ‘An der Freiheit’. Identity mix-up

CNN was quickly on the spot after the terror attack on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998. My Canadian colleague, who is white, was seen observing the wrecked American chancellery and when this was seen on TV it was automatically assumed and reported that it was the American ambassador viewing the destruction. The new American ambassador who was Afro-American and hence black had not yet arrived to take up his post and was still in America. A very good friend of the new ambassador had called him after the CNN report with this one-liner: ‘That must have been some bang that has turned you white.’ Black humour.

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but finally we got Symphony no. 9, first performed in Vienna in 1824 and the composer was also the first conductor. Beethoven being deaf continued to conduct after the music had stopped. So is the union hopelessly in love with integration unable to hear the music of national freedom? The reality is that my friend the Swedish Ambassador is now the proud and very active chairman of a union of fifteen countries in Europe and another twelve waiting to join. He has a political voice and influence that is obvious and impressive. He mentioned in his specch when he took over the Chair that he wished that Norway had been a member. I know that he meant it. When I had a new flagpole put up at the Norwegian residence I insisted that the old one should be left. So you see I am looking at the stars – Freude, Schöner Götterfunken – the brilliant spark of the gods. If we go back to the beginning the EEC was just that in European history, a brilliant spark. In that sense ‘Ja, vi elsker dette landet’ can join ‘An der Freude’ because it is also called ‘An der Freiheit’. Identity mix-up

CNN was quickly on the spot after the terror attack on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998. My Canadian colleague, who is white, was seen observing the wrecked American chancellery and when this was seen on TV it was automatically assumed and reported that it was the American ambassador viewing the destruction. The new American ambassador who was Afro-American and hence black had not yet arrived to take up his post and was still in America. A very good friend of the new ambassador had called him after the CNN report with this one-liner: ‘That must have been some bang that has turned you white.’ Black humour.

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Chameleon

A lion had killed and devoured a bull. This made the lion so proud that it roared loudly and long. A hunter heard the lion’s roar, approached the spot, took aim, fired and killed the lion with one shot. The moral is: ‘If you are full of bull – keep your mouth shut.’261 The story illustrates a basic rule in diplomacy. It is a diplomat’s duty to think twice before he says nothing. The Greek word diplo¯ma means a folded paper, a symbol of caution and ambiguity. Never lie, hide. When a diplomat says yes it only means perhaps and when he says perhaps it means no. A diplomat must never say no. Diplomatic language is filled with long-tongued, colour-changing chameleon words like appropriate (as opposed to rigid weasel words like correct). Diplomacy is a variable chameleon-game. The art is to disguise hostility with politeness, indifference with interest and friendship with caution. A business-like diplomatic conversation means it was cold and ungracious and a discussion of topics of mutual interest had focused on areas of disagreement. If a diplomat expresses concern it means he totally disassociates himself from the topic. In full cooperation with our allies means unilateral action. If a diplomat reports a difficult situation then the embassy is under armed attack. A meeting between Vice-President Cheney and Defence Secretary Rumsfeld illustrates the conscious use of chameleon-speak: Rumsfeld: ‘I liked what you said earlier, Sir. A war on terror. That’s good. That’s vague.’ Cheney: ‘It’s good.’ Rumsfeld: ‘That way we can do anything.’262 When a diplomat reports a frank and open discussion he indicates a jolly good quarrel. A letter from my Spanish 261

262

Ralph Harry, The Diplomat who Laughed, Hutchinson (Australia), 1983, 27. David Hare, Stuff Happens, 2006.

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colleague, Ambassador Jose Maria Sanz-Pastor, to my Dutch colleague, Ambassador Johannes J. Wijenberg, in Dar es Salaam, 2 May 1996, shows an open discussion, a blast from the present, between close European colleagues. The reason for the letter was the establishment of an informal group of fourteen like-minded countries (of which I was a member) to evaluate politics and development in Tanzania, with particular reference to Zanzibar. This made the Spanish ambassador distinctly choleric as this grouping had sidelined the EU and his chairmanship: Dear colleague, Enough is enough!! Even the patience of the saints has a limit and after insisting yourself with the same attitude for eight months, you have by far trespassed mine. On the 31st of October, 1995, I sent you a letter telling you not to call our Embassy to your meetings of the group of fourteen. We did not want and do not want to be involved in your manoeuvres perverting the traditional group of donors into a political forum, or, better to say, into a new inquisitorial obsession against the actual political situation in Tanzania and more specifically in Zanzibar (recently presented under the disguise of human rights defence). During the Spanish presidency of the European Union, I warned you against your policy of discussing important political subjects inside your group of fourteen, tending to convert this atypical group into a policy maker or the conscience of all of us. As a logical result you used to dynamite the EU-meetings by perverting, once again the real meaning of them and its objectives, with a policy of accomplished facts. Finally, I must tell you that we fully sponsor the letter of the Italian ambassador of 30 April 1996, who, by the way, is the President of the Troika and of the EU states members, both institutions that according to your permanent behaviour

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you seem to ignore deliberately. Once again, I beg you to stop this way of acting and return to the normal diplomatic courtesy channels and behaviour, above all when all of us must be restricted by the rules, practice and discipline of The European Union. An exchange of notes

The beaches of Oyster Bay in Dar es Salaam were popular destinations for recreation, but like any human paradise it was infiltrated by criminal elements. A runner or a walker could suddenly be surrounded by a small gang of beach robbers, who, depending on the dress, etc. of the intended victims, would demand money, watches or jewelry and failing that would take their shoes, good running shoes were popular. It might seem like effective international development, a simplification of coordination and recipients’ leadership. The episodes increased and each time the affected embassy would inform the Tanzanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs by note and copy it to the other embassies. The practice continued and the bundle of notes grew higher. On one occation in 1998 I had reported a nasty attack on a Norwgian citizen on Oyster Bay. My new Spanish colleague, Luis Gomez de Aranda Villen, himself a very competent and brave game hunter, had been so impressed by the courage and resistance of the Norwegian, that he sent me the following note: The Embassy of Spain presents its compliments to the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Dar es Salaam and with reference to the esteemed Embassy’s verbal note no. 51/98 is pleased to notice the well keeping of the Viking spirit. Notwithstanding, for other less tall and strong looking, the Spanish Embassy proposes the following text in the spirit of the well known verses of the ‘Hávamál’, The Old Edda:

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you seem to ignore deliberately. Once again, I beg you to stop this way of acting and return to the normal diplomatic courtesy channels and behaviour, above all when all of us must be restricted by the rules, practice and discipline of The European Union. An exchange of notes

The beaches of Oyster Bay in Dar es Salaam were popular destinations for recreation, but like any human paradise it was infiltrated by criminal elements. A runner or a walker could suddenly be surrounded by a small gang of beach robbers, who, depending on the dress, etc. of the intended victims, would demand money, watches or jewelry and failing that would take their shoes, good running shoes were popular. It might seem like effective international development, a simplification of coordination and recipients’ leadership. The episodes increased and each time the affected embassy would inform the Tanzanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs by note and copy it to the other embassies. The practice continued and the bundle of notes grew higher. On one occation in 1998 I had reported a nasty attack on a Norwgian citizen on Oyster Bay. My new Spanish colleague, Luis Gomez de Aranda Villen, himself a very competent and brave game hunter, had been so impressed by the courage and resistance of the Norwegian, that he sent me the following note: The Embassy of Spain presents its compliments to the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Dar es Salaam and with reference to the esteemed Embassy’s verbal note no. 51/98 is pleased to notice the well keeping of the Viking spirit. Notwithstanding, for other less tall and strong looking, the Spanish Embassy proposes the following text in the spirit of the well known verses of the ‘Hávamál’, The Old Edda:

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One foot’s length, One hair’s breath, Be close to your heart Your spear, your strength Call it path of peace, Name it har’s way; At the sea cliff’s side, In the Oysterbay, As young lovers close, Like thumb and nail Follow the jogger The fiend’s claws The dragon’s tail.

The Embassy of Spain avails itself of this opportunity to renew to the esteemed Royal Norwegian Embassy the assurances of its highest consideration. I replied to my friend and thanked him for his courtesy in the same spirit: The Royal Norwegian Embassy presents its compliments to the Embassy of Spain, and with reference to the longstanding friendship and co-operation between the two nations since the marriage of Princess Kristina of Norway to Prince Don Felipe of Castilla in 1258, has the honour to thank the Embassy for the courtesy of its most creative response to an heroic act as set out in note lga/16/09/98. This original poem is a timely reapparaisal of the poetic Edda, a most appropriate interpretation of the Oysterbayumál and the continued bravery of Norwegians, but also of their vulnerability outside the European Union. As a direct result of the poetic investigation by the Spanish Embassy new information has come to light, which further explains and indeed confirms the view put forward by the Spanish Embassy. The Norwegian Embassy is in possession

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of definite information, which proves that the hero in this story is indeed one of the Ylfingas and that he had studied victory runes in accordance with the Sigrdrifumál: Learn victory runes if thou victory wantest, And have them on thy sword’s hilt – On thy sword’s hilt some, on thy sword’s guard some, And call twice upon Týr.

The Embassy is further reliably informed that the hero had taken a glass of special Norwegian ale (mjød) the very same day of the battle (available today only from the northernmost brewery in the world): Ale I bring thee, thou oak-of-battle, With strength i-blent and brightest honour; ’Tis mixed with magic and mighty songs, With goodly spells, wish-speeding runes.

The Royal Norwegian Embassy again thanks the Embassy of Spain for its versatility in this matter and avails itself of this opportunity to renew to the Embassy the assurances of its highest consideration. The journalist Thomas Bartholdsen found this exchange to be both a humorous and nostalgic input from a different time in diplomacy. In a few hundred years literary historians would wonder how a poetic tradition that had been dormant in Northern Europe during the past thousand years had an unexpected revival in southeast Africa in 1999. Visiting card

The visiting card is an integral part of diplomatic protocol. It connects and informs. Sometimes the name itself, from a different language and culture, may seem esoteric. The most

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of definite information, which proves that the hero in this story is indeed one of the Ylfingas and that he had studied victory runes in accordance with the Sigrdrifumál: Learn victory runes if thou victory wantest, And have them on thy sword’s hilt – On thy sword’s hilt some, on thy sword’s guard some, And call twice upon Týr.

The Embassy is further reliably informed that the hero had taken a glass of special Norwegian ale (mjød) the very same day of the battle (available today only from the northernmost brewery in the world): Ale I bring thee, thou oak-of-battle, With strength i-blent and brightest honour; ’Tis mixed with magic and mighty songs, With goodly spells, wish-speeding runes.

The Royal Norwegian Embassy again thanks the Embassy of Spain for its versatility in this matter and avails itself of this opportunity to renew to the Embassy the assurances of its highest consideration. The journalist Thomas Bartholdsen found this exchange to be both a humorous and nostalgic input from a different time in diplomacy. In a few hundred years literary historians would wonder how a poetic tradition that had been dormant in Northern Europe during the past thousand years had an unexpected revival in southeast Africa in 1999. Visiting card

The visiting card is an integral part of diplomatic protocol. It connects and informs. Sometimes the name itself, from a different language and culture, may seem esoteric. The most

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famous example is in the report from His Majesty’s Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr, Moscow, 6 April 1943, addressed to Lord Pembroke in the Foreign Office: My dear Reggie, In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from Heaven. My days are probably darker than yours, and I need, my God I do, all the light I can get. But I am a decent fellow, and I do not want to be mean and selfish about what little brightness is shed upon me from time to time. So I propose to share with you a tiny flash that has illuminated my sombre life and tell you that God has given me a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that he is called Mustapha Kunt. We all feeel like that, Reggie, now and then, especially when Spring is upon us, but few of us would care to put it on our cards. It takes a Turk to do that.263

The appointment of a new finance minister in Tanzania in 2001 gave me a rare chance to reflect Sir Archibald’s idea and I sent this brief report to the Foreign Ministry in Oslo: I was recently instructed by the Ministry to invite the new Finance Minister of Tanzania to a symposium in Oslo. As it happened he was in Oslo during the election riots in Zanzibar 27–28 January and he was given a clear understanding of Norwegian concern, particularly of the excessive use of force by the police. During these dark election days in Tanzania, when so many questions are asked about the future of the union, development cooperation, democracy and good 263

Released in 1990.

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governance, coordination, conditionality and human rights, I am delighted to receive any lightness of being and the Finance Minister has contributed to that. When I first met the Minister in his office, prior to his visit to Norway, we exchanged visiting cards and it appeared that his name was Basil Pesambili Mramba. The middle name Pesambili means ‘two moneys’ in Swahili. It is only a Tanzanian Finance Minister that would put that on his card.264 Holy See

I made a courtesy call to the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Francisco-Javier Lozano, soon after my arrival in Dar es Salaam. It turned out to be a very interesting conversation about the settler and the nomad with reference to the story of Cain and Abel. The word civilization (civitas) is a recognition of the settler culture but our origin and identity is nomadic. Hitler wanted to remove the Jew and the gipsy from his Arian society. We agreed that the traditional life of the masaai was threatened. Was Abel killed because he was a migrant outside civitas? After a big reception hosted by the Nuncio for the catholic bishops in Tanzania and in the presence of the father of the nation, Julius Nyerere, I had the chance to test if deus ludens had been invited. As I was leaving with Jill and our daughter Lisa, who was visiting Tanzania, I thanked the host with these words: ‘This was a perfect reception only with one oversight. You did not serve Chateauneuf-du-Pape.’ My comment was met with the broadest of smiles and he reminded me what a gift it was to have a wife like Jill and a daughter like Lisa. The Archbishop was a keen cyclist and inevitably one day his bike had been stolen near the yacht club in Dar es 264

My translation.

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governance, coordination, conditionality and human rights, I am delighted to receive any lightness of being and the Finance Minister has contributed to that. When I first met the Minister in his office, prior to his visit to Norway, we exchanged visiting cards and it appeared that his name was Basil Pesambili Mramba. The middle name Pesambili means ‘two moneys’ in Swahili. It is only a Tanzanian Finance Minister that would put that on his card.264 Holy See

I made a courtesy call to the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Francisco-Javier Lozano, soon after my arrival in Dar es Salaam. It turned out to be a very interesting conversation about the settler and the nomad with reference to the story of Cain and Abel. The word civilization (civitas) is a recognition of the settler culture but our origin and identity is nomadic. Hitler wanted to remove the Jew and the gipsy from his Arian society. We agreed that the traditional life of the masaai was threatened. Was Abel killed because he was a migrant outside civitas? After a big reception hosted by the Nuncio for the catholic bishops in Tanzania and in the presence of the father of the nation, Julius Nyerere, I had the chance to test if deus ludens had been invited. As I was leaving with Jill and our daughter Lisa, who was visiting Tanzania, I thanked the host with these words: ‘This was a perfect reception only with one oversight. You did not serve Chateauneuf-du-Pape.’ My comment was met with the broadest of smiles and he reminded me what a gift it was to have a wife like Jill and a daughter like Lisa. The Archbishop was a keen cyclist and inevitably one day his bike had been stolen near the yacht club in Dar es 264

My translation.

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Salaam. At a reception hosted by my Swedish colleague the French Ambassador whispered that we ought to organize a collection. During a visit to the neglected Southern coastal region and Kilwa, Lindi and Mtwara in 1998 together with the Canadian High Commissioner and the representative of FAO we had a luncheon meeting with the local bishop. The preparation for the millennium celebrations was a talking point and the bishop wondered how the Catholic Church could best arrange this. I suggested that the simplest solution was to blow the dust off the file from the celebrations in the year 1000 A.D. The papal envoys certainly had humour in themselves and contributed to humour in others, guided no doubt by an omnipresent deus ludens. Sisyphean diplomatic challenge

Development cooperation is an everlasting story of frustration on the part of the donor as well as on the recipient. It would be easy to give vent to the disappointment of failure, the ceaseless rolling of the rock to the top of the aid mountain only to see if fall back again and repeated in an absurd and never ending ritual of optimistic ascent and pessimistic descent. I concluded that the only way to survive this process, to maintain a spirit of endurance against the odds, was to keep a sense of humour, indeed to let the magic of the ridiculous roll with the stone. In this way it was possible to uphold the vision, or at least the illusion, that the effort was not futile and that the struggle was worthy. A colleague who had just arrived in Dar es Salaam paid me a courtesy call. He was, like all of us, curious about the ways of the country and its political and development agenda. I told him that Tanzania was like a beautiful aircraft sitting on the runway. A donor would arrive to fill a measured amount of fuel into its tanks. This was only enough for the

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Salaam. At a reception hosted by my Swedish colleague the French Ambassador whispered that we ought to organize a collection. During a visit to the neglected Southern coastal region and Kilwa, Lindi and Mtwara in 1998 together with the Canadian High Commissioner and the representative of FAO we had a luncheon meeting with the local bishop. The preparation for the millennium celebrations was a talking point and the bishop wondered how the Catholic Church could best arrange this. I suggested that the simplest solution was to blow the dust off the file from the celebrations in the year 1000 A.D. The papal envoys certainly had humour in themselves and contributed to humour in others, guided no doubt by an omnipresent deus ludens. Sisyphean diplomatic challenge

Development cooperation is an everlasting story of frustration on the part of the donor as well as on the recipient. It would be easy to give vent to the disappointment of failure, the ceaseless rolling of the rock to the top of the aid mountain only to see if fall back again and repeated in an absurd and never ending ritual of optimistic ascent and pessimistic descent. I concluded that the only way to survive this process, to maintain a spirit of endurance against the odds, was to keep a sense of humour, indeed to let the magic of the ridiculous roll with the stone. In this way it was possible to uphold the vision, or at least the illusion, that the effort was not futile and that the struggle was worthy. A colleague who had just arrived in Dar es Salaam paid me a courtesy call. He was, like all of us, curious about the ways of the country and its political and development agenda. I told him that Tanzania was like a beautiful aircraft sitting on the runway. A donor would arrive to fill a measured amount of fuel into its tanks. This was only enough for the

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big bird to move a short distance down the tarmac. Then another benefactor arrived and repeated the process and this ritual continued as the givers lined up with their jerrycans. The problem was that the tanks were never filled to a sufficient level for take off. The aircraft just nudged along on the ground after each contribution. What was missing was a coordinated policy and effort to refuel for take off. My colleague enjoyed this parable and often repeated it as he began to experience the reality of development. It was one of many such meetings but this one was led by the Cabinet Secretary in an attempt to improve coordination and good governance. Polite and appropriate cameleon words interrupted by an occasional weasel sentence cast a sleepy fog over the meeting. When I was asked, ‘Do you sleep well all night thinking of Tanzania’, a Jonsonian frankness entered my mind: ‘Yes, I sleep like a baby. But I wake up every three hours and scream.’ My colleagues roared with laughter. The Tanzanian bench remained silent, but a point was made, however irreverently. At a so-called partnership meeting with our Tanzanian counterparts I introduced my statement by referring to the two episodes in ‘The 27th silly olympiad’ from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In the semi-final of the 100 metres for participants with no sense of direction they run off in all directions at the starting shot. At the start of the 1500 metres for the deaf they remain in the starting blocks when the starting pistol is fired. Yes, we had seen much confused development running and deafness towards change. The President complained in the UN that the developing world was bombarded by so many development initiatives. In the end the developing country became deaf and lost direction. My reference to the silly Olympic Games caused liberating laughter, particularly from the British representatives. It was probably the only contribution from that meeting that was remembered. I certainly

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cannot remember anything else. Humour worked. It made the essential point. Sometimes we need a distributor of nonsense, a hythlodeus,265 at meetings that mainly distribute nonsense. The President, Benjamin William Mkapa, was an intelligent, educated and sympathetic human being who held Tanganika and Zanzibar together in the union of Tanzania and strove to promote a less corrupt and a more viable society in both parts of the federation. In a meeting between the President and the diplomatic corps I referred to the line ‘Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past’ from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Burnt Norton’. The President would immediately understand that I referred to his inherited government party still steeped in an undemocratic past resistant to renewal. Later that year at the annual CG-meeting, chaired by the President, he referred to my Eliot reference and then quoted these words of Brutus in Shapkespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.’ He knew the challenges and observed the tide between the mainland and the island for time future. The ambassador must interpose his opinion and judgment if the situation demands it.266 Laughter above

Homerian laughter. The Greek gods sported with human follies and created all kinds of situations to trap the 265 266

Thomas More, Utopia. Michel de Montaigne, ‘A trait of certain ambassadors’, Essais, I, 17, Stanford University Press, 1958, 49.

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cannot remember anything else. Humour worked. It made the essential point. Sometimes we need a distributor of nonsense, a hythlodeus,265 at meetings that mainly distribute nonsense. The President, Benjamin William Mkapa, was an intelligent, educated and sympathetic human being who held Tanganika and Zanzibar together in the union of Tanzania and strove to promote a less corrupt and a more viable society in both parts of the federation. In a meeting between the President and the diplomatic corps I referred to the line ‘Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past’ from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Burnt Norton’. The President would immediately understand that I referred to his inherited government party still steeped in an undemocratic past resistant to renewal. Later that year at the annual CG-meeting, chaired by the President, he referred to my Eliot reference and then quoted these words of Brutus in Shapkespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.’ He knew the challenges and observed the tide between the mainland and the island for time future. The ambassador must interpose his opinion and judgment if the situation demands it.266 Laughter above

Homerian laughter. The Greek gods sported with human follies and created all kinds of situations to trap the 265 266

Thomas More, Utopia. Michel de Montaigne, ‘A trait of certain ambassadors’, Essais, I, 17, Stanford University Press, 1958, 49.

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unexpecting victims for a good laugh. Nobody is spared, not even the lame and slow Hephaestus and the ugly, bowlegged Thersites. Bergson’s dictum that ‘a deformity that a normally built person could successfully imitate’, may become comic, goes back to the Ancients. The Bible warns against laughter. ‘Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that mirth is heaviness.’267 ‘I said of laughter, it is mad: and of mirth, what doeth it?’268 ‘Sorrow is better than laughter for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.’269 ‘For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this is also vanity.’270 But there is some appreciation of the lightness of being: ‘A merry heart is the life of the flesh’271 and ‘Gladness prolongs his days.’272 I have been unable to spot laughter, or even a smile, in The New Testament, but The Old displays over twenty examples. The most sophisticated and first recording of a story of laughter is found in the first book of of the Old Testament (Genesis, Chapters 17, 18 and 21). The Lord appeared before Abraham when he was ninety-nine years old and made a covenant that will make Abraham the father of kings and nations. The Lord springs the surprise. He promises to bless Sarah and give her a son, and she shall be a mother of nations. This was too much for Abraham: ‘Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said to his heart, shall a child be born unto him that is a hundred years old and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?’ God promised that Sarah would bear a son and he would be called Isaac. 267 268 269 270 271 272

‘Proverbs’, 14:13 (The Holy Bible, OUP, 1899). ‘Ecclesiastes’, 2:2. Ibid., 7:3. Ibid., 7:6. ‘Proverbs’, 14: 30. ‘Eccleciastes’, XXX, 22.

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A bit later, we find Abraham in his tent doing nothing in particular as it was a very hot day. Suddenly three men (angels) appeared before him. Abraham immediately seems to understand that they are (from) the Lord and he offers to bring water, wash their feet, let them rest under the tree and give them bread. They accepted and Abraham rushed into the tent and instructed Sarah to bake three measures of bread. Abraham then ran to the herd, fetched a calf and gave it to his servant cook to prepare. He added butter and milk and the meal was soon ready and served under the tree. Then the men asked: ‘Where is Sarah, thy wife?’ Abraham replied that she was in the tent. They then repeat the shock announcement: ’Sarah thy wife shall have a son.’ Sarah overheard this in the tent door. Abraham does not seem to have told her that God had revealed this to him. Genesis explains that Abraham and Sarah were old and ‘it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women’. Sarah ‘laughed within herself’ and she said incredulously: ‘After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?’ Then the Lord addresses Abraham: ‘Wherefore did Sarah laugh? … Is anything too hard for the Lord?’ But Sarah quickly said: ‘I laughed not’; for she was afraid. But the Lord insisted: ‘Nay, but thou didst laugh.’ A boy was born as promised and Abraham called him Isaac and on the eight day he was circumcised. Sarah still saw the funny side of all this: ‘God hath made me to laugh so that all that hear will laugh with me.’ It would seem that the Lord has a bit of Homerian fun with his unexpecting subjects. After Abraham’s outburst of laugher the Lord tells him that the promised son’s name will be Isaac (he who laughs). A chain of events has been set in motion accompanied by laughter. The Lord does not reprimand Abraham for falling about with laughter – only Sarah who has, in the eyes of the Lord, the audacity to laugh ‘inside herself’. Of course, the

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omniscient Lord knew this and it was all perhaps part of his satirical plan. The Lord confirms the patriarchal society, of which he is indeed the head, puts Sarah in her place and even frightens her. This is arguably the first example of discrimination against women in the Bible. After all nobody had even dared to think or smile inside that God might be a woman. There is a sense of women’s liberation in Sarah’s thought that she could have sexual pleasure again. God does not laugh. Was the Lord only a male chauvenist pig or did he plan and expect Sarah’s denial? Was it his subtle way of telling a male-dominated society that political change and equality of laughter would one day be achieved? Whoever wrote this had a fine sense of satire and irony. God is both deus caritatis and deus ludens. Sarah is clear. It was God who made her laugh. She is a clear-sighted diplomat with a liberating sense of the ridiculous. Laughter is both divine and human. God is not just witty in himself but the cause of wit in others. The laughing philosophers

Laughter, what is it, how caused, where, and so suddenly breaks out that, desirous to stay it, we cannot, how it comes to possess and stir our face, veins, eyes, countenance, mouth, sides, let Democritus determine.273

Democritus, a contemporary of Platon and the father of atomism,274 was given the honorary title epiteton ornans (the laughing philosopher). The epithet may at first seem paradoxical as he examined the causes and treatment of melancholy, but that involved the focus on human folly. He attacked ridiculous behaviour with ironic passion. 273 274

Tully, De Oratore. Atomos – a (not), tomos (cut).

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omniscient Lord knew this and it was all perhaps part of his satirical plan. The Lord confirms the patriarchal society, of which he is indeed the head, puts Sarah in her place and even frightens her. This is arguably the first example of discrimination against women in the Bible. After all nobody had even dared to think or smile inside that God might be a woman. There is a sense of women’s liberation in Sarah’s thought that she could have sexual pleasure again. God does not laugh. Was the Lord only a male chauvenist pig or did he plan and expect Sarah’s denial? Was it his subtle way of telling a male-dominated society that political change and equality of laughter would one day be achieved? Whoever wrote this had a fine sense of satire and irony. God is both deus caritatis and deus ludens. Sarah is clear. It was God who made her laugh. She is a clear-sighted diplomat with a liberating sense of the ridiculous. Laughter is both divine and human. God is not just witty in himself but the cause of wit in others. The laughing philosophers

Laughter, what is it, how caused, where, and so suddenly breaks out that, desirous to stay it, we cannot, how it comes to possess and stir our face, veins, eyes, countenance, mouth, sides, let Democritus determine.273

Democritus, a contemporary of Platon and the father of atomism,274 was given the honorary title epiteton ornans (the laughing philosopher). The epithet may at first seem paradoxical as he examined the causes and treatment of melancholy, but that involved the focus on human folly. He attacked ridiculous behaviour with ironic passion. 273 274

Tully, De Oratore. Atomos – a (not), tomos (cut).

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Robert Burton, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the comprehensive study of the philosophical, medical, religious, literary and psychological ideas and theories of his time (nearly 1400 pages in a modern edition), adopted Democritus as mentor and even used the pseudonym Democritus Junior as the author of his treatise. Burton gives this vivid portrayal of Democritus in ‘The Argument of the Frontispiece’ at the beginning of The Anatomy: Old Democritus under a tree, Sits on a stone with book on knee; About him hang there many features, Of cats, dogs, and such-like creatures, Of which he makes anatomy. The seat of black choler to see. Over his head appears the sky, And Saturn, Lord of melancholy.

Burton retold, with relish, the story written down by Hippocrates in The Epistle to Damagetus. Hippocrates had been asked to come to Abdera to evaluate Democritus, who was behaving a bit oddly. As he arrived in Abdera, the people came flocking around Hippocrates, entreating him to do his best. He found Democritus in his garden, sitting on a stone under a tree, without hose or shoes, with a book on his knees, dissecting beasts to find the cause of madness and melancholy. Hippocrates commended his work, his happiness and leasure. Then Democritus asked: ‘Have you not that leisure?’ Hippocrates explained that domestic affairs hindered him and he goes on to list neighbours, friends, expenses, diseases, frailties, mortalities, wife, children and servants as examples of pressures that deprived him of his time.

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This explanation made Democritus laugh profoundly and his friends standing by wept and lamented his disposition. Hippocrates asked why he laughed and got this reply: At the vanities and the fopperies of the time, to see men so empty of all virtuous actions, to hunt so far after gold, having no end of ambition; to take such infinite pains for a little glory, and to be favoured of men; to make such deep mines into the earth for gold, and many times to find nothing, with loss of their lives and fortunes….Do not these behaviours express their intolerable folly?….How many strange humours are in men!275

Hippocrates listened to the words of the world’s vanity, ‘full of ridiculous contrarity’, but he argued the point that necessity compels men to action, avoiding idleness, sloth and negligence. The uncertainty of human affairs and events meant that men must provide for their children and prepare for the future. Democritus found this a poor excuse, laughed again aloud and said that he had been misunderstood. His contemporaries … swell in this life as if they were immortal, and demi-gods, for want of understanding. It were enough to make them wise, if they would but consider the mutability of this world, and how it wheels about, nothing being firm and sure…. Seeing men are so fickle, so sottish, so intemperate, why should not I laugh at those to whom folly seems wisdom, will not be cured, and perceive it not?276

It was getting late and Hippocrates left the garden. People flocked around him to hear the verdict. He told them that 275 276

Robert Burton, op. cit., 48. Ibid., 50–1.

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apart from small neglects of his attire, body and diet ‘the world had not a wiser, a more learned, a more honest man, and they were much deceived to say that he was mad’.277 Burton added that ‘Democritus did well to laugh at old, good cause he had, but now much more; this life of ours is more ridiculous than that of his, or long before….Never so much cause of laughter as now, never so many fools and madmen.’278 Hippocrates had successfully completed his diplomatic mission and promoted a better understanding of the power of laughter. Mirth and merry company may not be separated from music, says Burton, and points to the positive effects of laughter: Mirth (saith Vives) purgeth the blood, confirms health, causeth a fresh, pleasing, and fine colour, prorogues life, whets the wit, makes the body young, lively, and fit for any manner of employment. The merrier the heart the longer the life …Love pleasure, Venus, joy merriment, pleasant conversation, kissing are the true nepenthes.279

Ben Jonson and Robert Burton met at Christ Church College, Oxford. Jonson wrote The Alchemist after Burton’s satire on the gold chemists in Philosophaster. Jonson’s prose style has similarities with Burton’s. They both paraded the folly of man.

277 278 279

Ibid., 52. Ibid. Ibid. (II), 119.

Chapter 7

UNCONSCIOUS REVELATION Z Nature that framed us of four elements.280

In the emerging psychology of the Renaissance the four elements began to appear as humours, reflecting the qualities given to individual elements by the ancient philosophers. The word and concept psychology did not exist in the Elizabethan age and what was understood as the science of the human soul and mind is perhaps best summed up in Robert Burton’s massive work, using one of the leading humours, melancholy, as his title. In any period the way of thinking of the human mind is, consciously or unconsciously, influenced by the collective experience of our cultural group. The relation of the artist to the intellectual climate of his time may be obscured by the freedom and independence underlying all true achievement in art, but even the greatest among them works within a framework of conventions. The process of creating is a mirroring of social structures and attitudes: Even the creative act itself, involves, when anybody decides to write a novel, a sonnet, a five-act play, a great deal of 280

Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great.

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social imitation of forms which already exist as social objects. The world is one thing and the story about it is another, that is true, but it is also true that the stories that already exist, and our attitudes to them, are part of the world.281

The playwright applied the conventions and theories of his day in creating character. Jonson would let his characters fit in with and illustrate the current theories, always with a side-glance at decorum. The ideal of a perfect balance of the elements both in microcosm and macrocosm was maintained, but each element invited new definitions of their characteristics and function as they were interpreted as psychological forces. The element Fire took prime place in a new role as Blood and the Sanguine humour. The humours were not in themselves funny, but they fitted into the study of the nature and the mind of Man, as we would study genes, hormones, neurones and DNA. The two concepts of universal order, the Great Chain of Being and Man as Microcosm, together with the theory that the human character was composed of four humours, had a strong influence on the Elizabethan habit of thought. The humours came out of medicine into the not yet created concept of psychology and found fertile ground. They were substance and effect. In that sense humour is the first theory for the science of the mind. Jonson and Shakespeare had at hand a comprehensive world view explained and upheld through order, rank, degree and parallel. This system provided a rich pool of symbols and ideas for a creative writer. The contemporary Elizabethan world picture incorporating the theory of humours gave the playwrights and poets an imaginary magic world and a rich psychological microcosm. The Elizabethan playwright did not construct his fundamental view of Man on one sphere of learning only, but would fit 281

The Times Literary Supplement, 26 July 1963, 536.

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Man into a comprehensive system of mutually interacting qualities and intimate mingling. Renaissance psychology covered a much wider field than any other system of a later date, not excepting our own. Humour developed to embrace a particular temperament, disposition and inclination and a whim, fancy, fixed idea, mood and caprice. When George Chapman wrote An Humorous Day’s Mirth he had at hand at least seven different physical and mental definitions and meanings of the word humour which had been in circulation since the time of Chaucer. Humour became a slang word for manners and mannerisms, but the new branches came alive because of the ancient roots.282 In the masque Hymenaei (first performed 1606) Jonson introduced the four humours as masquers accompanied by the four affections.283 The system survived into the seventeenth century, but the universal unity was interrupted. Medicine, philosophy and theology went their different ways. Harvey’s treatise De motu cordis (1628), the idea of only one circulatory system as opposed to Galen’s two, gave medicine a new perspective and a new direction.284 The physiological theory that gave birth to the humours is now only of historical interest but the psychology created by the humours may give stirring insights into the nature of the human mind and soul even today. The cardinal emotions, happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust, pride, shame and guilt of modern psychology fit neatly into the Renaissance theory of the four humours or temperaments as defined and 282

283

284

Samuel Rowlands, The letting of Humours Blood in the Head-Vaine, ‘Epigram’, 27, (Bodleian, Malone 273), 1600. P. Ansell Robin, The Old Physiology in English Literature (D.Lit. thesis), London, 1911, 85. Thomas Wright, Circulation, William Harvey’s Revolutionary Idea, Chatto & Windus, 2012.

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explored by Jonson and Shakespeare. They recognized eleven passions, love, joy, desire, sorrow, grief, despair, fear, anger, hate, courage and hope. Diplomacy attempts to unfold the emotions and passions on the international stage. Ben Jonson sported with human follies, idle vanities, pretensions and affectations, he seized on vice and created an image, not only of his time, but of time future as hypocrites, fakes, fools, fops, impostors and buffoons strode the stage in imitation of life and our common errors. Humours could be ‘fantastique follies’.285 The passions and ambitions were enslaved by vanity and hypocrisy and caused ridiculous behaviour. The comedy created by the humours aimed to correct the folly of man. The Elizabethans did not have a sense of humour but a sense of the four humours, and that made them laugh. The word humorist used by Shirley means someone who is affected by the humours. The idea of a sense of humour, humorous and humorist in the modern meaning gradually emerged in the eighteenth century and psychology as a distinct subject was introduced after 1850. In the Preface to Fröken Julie (1888) August Strindberg argued against the fixed portrayal of characters on the stage and anticipates that a multiplicity of motives would be more in tune with the time. He sets the one-sided dominant trait and temperament of past traditions against ‘the skilful navigator on the river of life’, who was much harder to classify. The elementary way of looking at character was found in Moliere and Strindberg extracts the miser Harpagon (in l’Avare, 1664) to illustrate the point. Harpagon remains the same throughout the play, his final line ‘and let me go and see my beloved cash box again’ confirms the immobility of his defect: Harpagon is merely a miser, although he could have been both a miser and an excellent financier, a splendid father, and 285

Samuel Rowlands, op. cit.

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a good citizen. I do not believe in simple stage characters, and the summary judgments that authors pass on people – this one is stupid, that one brutal, this one jealous, that one mean – ought to be challenged by naturalists, who know how richly complicated the soul is, and who are aware that ‘vice’ has a reverse side, which is very much like virtue.286

In contrast, Strindberg’s own stage characters ‘are conglomerates of past and present stages of culture, bits out of books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, torn shreds of once fine clothing now turned to rags, exactly as the the human soul is patched together’. Perhaps not unlike the way the diplomat is put together? Was this something new? The theatrical naturalists and modernists exposed the complexity of the soul and maintained that there may be an opposite side of vice more like virtue. They argued that a different reality of character had entered the stage. But among Strindberg’s vast production of plays, novels, short stories, autobiographies, poetry and political essays we also find a hilarious comedy, Hemsöborna, and a satirical novel, Röda rummet. What brings him even closer to the Elizabethans, Jonson and Burton, is his obsession with alchemy and gold. Strindberg also wrote several histories depicting kings and events from Sweden’s past (e.g. Erik XI and Gustav Vasa). Because of this he was sometimes referred to as Sweden’s Shakespeare. His forceful criticism of past literary traditions in Fröken Julie is at best superficial. The Renaissance view of existence was every bit as complex as his own and had the rich language of poetic drama to express the movements of the soul. It is not enough just to harp about Harpagon. One way to test Strindberg’s theory is to take certain groups of characters of the same general type at the time of Jonson 286

August Strindberg, Miss Julie and Other Plays, OUP, 2008, 59.

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and Shakespeare and show how the elements of conventional characterization exist in them, but are combined in different ways and develop differently. This will show that Shakespeare’s characters are fuller, subtler, and less easily fixed than those of other Elizabethan dramatists. He ‘could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention’.287 This is a most attractive ideal for the diplomat. Shakespeare does not just navigate down a river like Strindberg but on the ocean of life towards the unconscious revelation of character. His plays ‘are like planets which in their endless movement, for a moment come closer to us, then whirl back into orbit’. 288 Each level of the ascending chain in the Great Chain of Being contained the qualities, good and bad, of the stages below. Man’s nature was indeed a trunk of humours. Man was, in Donne’s words, ‘a lumpe, where all beasts kneaded bee’.289 The lower and bestial forms in the chain might challenge the higher orders and Reason itself could be fatally infected leading to humours in extremis, as when a contaminated choler caused an emotional shock, a psychological trauma, like madness or jealousy, or both. Othello kills Desdemona. ‘Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark, what discord follows.’290 The result was chaos, cosmic anarchy, ‘when the planets in evil mixture to disorder wander’.291 Strindberg and Ibsen did not suddenly invent the fragmented human soul. Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear 287

288

289 290 291

Thomas Fuller, Worthies of England, quoted in Stanley Wells, Shakespeare, For All Time, Macmillan, 2002, 204–205. Peter Brook, The Quality of Mercy, Reflections on Shakespeare, Nick Hern Books, 2013, 43. Letter to Sir Edvard Herbert. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, I, iii. Ibid.

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had laid bare the substance, passions, will and spirit of the soul. The idea of vice as virtue may be foreign to the Elizabethan way of thinking but at the end we witness how King Lear’s vice has turned to moral recognition. The crucial difference between a sixteenth century and a late nineteenth century play is that the Elizabethan audience expected to be taken into the confidence of the playwright and to be told all that it needed to know about a character; it would not be prepared, as a modern audience may be prepared, to see through a character and divine motives not made explicit. Thus the soliloquy spoken by an Elizabethan hero reveals his true motives and it is in full accordance with the Elizabethan habit of mind to assume that Hamlet expresses his real thoughts in his speech behind the praying Claudius. Rationalization and unconscious motivation were foreign to the Elizabethan conception of the human mind. The Renaissance Englishman did not have a psychological awareness of such workings of the soul and would therefore have no means of expressing them; the language itself lacked the medium to communicate these concepts. Character would not change much in the conventional Elizabethan play, but we find certain stock ways of development, for example the deterioration in the character of a usurper or tyrant (Macbeth), the madness of an unchecked dominant passion (Othello and Lear) and the last minute conversion and repentance (Edmund in King Lear, ‘Some good I mean to do despite of mine own nature’). We often find an Elizabethan dramatist taking an existing idea of narrative or character as the basis for his play. There was a pool of ideas out of which a playwright could pick his wanted model. ‘Everything was new, so everything could be adapted.’292 The task was to use a given trick, an idea 292

Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary, Methuen, 1965, 284.

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which seemed to make a certain hit, with more skill than any other writer. ‘It is in fact easier to illustrate contemporary psychology from Shakespeare than from any of his contemporaries, not excepting Ben Jonson.’293 In Peter Brook’s production of King Lear (1962) we learn that producer, director and actor were aware of the multiple problems presented by the play. ‘With uncanny precision Shakespeare proceeds as a psychologist, a neurologist and a sociologist.’294 The director, Charles Marowitz, described how the star was grappling with the part during rehearsals: Paul Scofield used the reading mainly as a study-session – struggling with the verse like a man trapped in clinging ivy and trying to writhe free. One was immediately aware of Scofield’s resolve and caution. He circled Lear like a wary challenger measuring out an unbeaten opponent, and it was apparent from the start that this challenger was a strategist rather than a slugger.295

To begin with a fixed idea of King Lear, whether it is based on modern ideas of personality, or any abstraction from the text, and force an interpretation on the words, leads away from the play. The actor must slowly join the Elizabethan fragments together, word-by-word, line-by-line, in bringing a poetic drama, and not a dramatic poem, alive. In a play by Shakespeare there are several levels of significance, plot, character, conflict of character, words, phrasing, rhythm and ‘a meaning which reveals itself gradually’.296 Or in other words ‘it could be said that the central quality of great imaginative work is to be not descriptive, not explanatory, not evaluative, 293 294 295 296

J.B. Bamborough, The Little World of Man, London, 1952, 148. Peter Brook, op. cit., 60. The Observer, 16 December 1962, 17. T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.

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but additive’.297 Jonson presents comic characters who are unconscious of the behaviour that makes them comic. We are verging here on the unconscious revelation of character in which the speaker reveals something in himself of which he is not fully aware. This is something rarely found in Elizabethan drama outside Shakespeare since it was alien to dramatic convention. The actor was winding himself painfully into the part and each new reading was a search for meaning: ‘New answers are constantly presenting themselves, prompting new questions, reversing old solutions, substituting new ones.’298 It is a process not unlike the one facing the diplomat. Shakespeare unmasked the unconscious revelation of character of his protagonists. The diplomat attempts to do the same. In the circular playhouse, the Globe, we meet Asper, a free spirit without fear. He intends to strip the ragged follies of his time naked as their birth, unmask vice, corruption and crimes, the monstrousness and deformity of his time. Jonson had been a soldier and witnessed the evil acts in armed conflict and into Asper’s inspired line, the world’s abuses, we may associate the idea of future international conflicts and crimes. The comical satire Every Man Out of His Humour, in its global reach, relates to the diplomatic world. The diplomat may indeed feel like Asper as he seeks to ‘melt the world and mould it new again’299 and shake it out of its wicked black humour: Who is so patient of this impious world That he can check his spirit, or rein his tongue? Or who hath such a dead unfeeling sense 297 298

299

John Holloway, The Story of the Night, London, 1961, 182. Ibid. The King Lear theme is reflected in Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres. EMO, ‘Induction’, l48.

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That heaven’s horrid thunders cannot wake? To see the earth, cracked with the weight of sin, Hell gaping under us. And o’er our heads Black rav’nous ruin with her sail-stretched wings, Ready to sink us down and cover us: Who can behold such prodigies as these And have his lips sealed up?300

The days are dangerous, full of exception. It is the diplomat’s challenge to skilfully detect and expose the vanities and hypocrisies at play on the world’s political stage. In the ongoing game of ambition, power and gold, who spits on whom? The modern speeches and diplomatic notes may not be as revealing as the renaissance soliloquies. How does the diplomat proceed? Not with condemnation, but with attempted answers. The assignment may be as capricious as the Serengeti but the envoy travels across the endless plains and searches for new magic. And there always is. It is a Shakespearian tragedy humoured by Jonsonian ridicule. In this dichotomy the envoy is seeking new solutions, secretly or openly aided by the soul of satire. Humour, in an ancient, Renaissance or modern understanding, is our cathartic salt, the exposure of ‘follie’s anatomie’. The ideas that gave birth to the humours and the psychological theories and practice they created had a marked influence on literary development and our understanding of the comic spirit. The humours in comical satire, so treasured in the Elizabethan period, survived like changing outlines of waves and moved in their afterlife to the shores of modern psychology, leadership theory and diplomacy. The blend of humours in a modern setting is apparent in the diplomatic world. In the diplomat’s theatre-in-theround he moves among poisonous chameleons. The art of 300

Ibid., ll. 2–11.

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diplomacy is to find a way out of present labyrinths in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Palestine, Somalia and the Central African Republic (the list could go on), face the ironic intricacies and evil smiles and not get lost in the maze. The European Union has developed into a complicated irregular structure with many passages in need of intelligent diplomacy and German humour(s). The scepticism (‘what do I know?’) was at hand in Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, translated into English in 1603, containing reflections on diplomacy based on his own experience as a negotiator. A diplomat is like the actor trapped in ivy, measuring and circling the opponents, looking for unconscious revelation of character on the world stage. He is always optimistic: I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always find’s one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He, too, concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.301

One must imagine the diplomat as happy.

301

Albert Camus, op. cit., 119.

POSTSCRIPT Z Jonas Lie, celebrated as one of Norway’s greatest writers, was born and went to school in a small town north of the Arctic Circle. He wrote an early tale called Den Fremsynte (The Visionary) in1870.302 It gives impressions of a remote society, the violent storms and crushing weight of nature on life in a dark winterland where the sun disappears for three months, but is then replaced by a magic summer where the sun is above the horizon for the whole twenty-four hours. It is as if the sun then kisses nature the more passionately because of the short time they can be together and they both seek to forget that they so soon have to part again. Out of this brutal and beautiful Arctic coast the visionary character is formed. If there is sunshine in your face when you meet there will also be sunshine in his, but don’t be misled by his good nature. Deep in his soul a silent suspicion is always stirring like a watchful seafowl. From childhood he has been used to think of the sudden events in nature as a sword hanging over every peaceful, quiet moment and he carries this instinct in human relations. He eludes you, steals with his imagination and his watchful suspicion in between and around your thoughts and without you suspecting it, he can go with his hands in his pockets, right through your soul. He is born with a talent for obfuscation.

302

Den Fremsynte, Gyldendalske Boghandel, Kjøbenhavn, 1903, 25–37.

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Jonas Lie concludes that he would be uvurderlig (invaluable) as detective and diplomat. I was born and went to school on an island far north of the Arctic Circle. I became a diplomat and it was part of the mission to be a detective.

INDEX Z Bowra, Sir Maurice, xiv Braithwaite, Richard, 33 Breivik, Anders, 136 Brome, Richard, 92–5, 109 Brook, Peter, 155, 191 Brown, Gordon, 148 Burton, Robert, 33, 37, 43, 68, 112, 124, 181–3, 188

Abraham, 178–9 Adam, 137–8 Aesop, 157 Anaximander, 27 Andersen, Hans Christian, 156 Andrewes, John, 33 Aristophanes, 2, 13, 70, 83 Aristotle, 1, 2. 3, 9, 15, 30, 37, 66, 122, 124, 125 Asclepiades of Bithynia, 29

Caine, Michael, 155 Carl III, 154 Cartwright, William, 109 Casaubon, Isaac, 39 Cassini, Giovanni Domenico, 127 Cavendish, Margareth, 109 Cavendish, William, 109 Cervantes, 124, 126, 129, 135 Chapman, George, 45–51, 66, 99 Chapuys, Eustache, 141 Character sketch, 38–45 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 19, 30 Cheney, Richard, 168 Cibber, Colley, 106, 113 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 1, 2, 9, 14, 15, 122, 69, 84, 90, 122 CNN, 167 Comedy of Humours, 55

Bamborough, J.B., xiv Barbage, Richard, 86 Bartholdsen, Thomas, 172 Beckett, Samuel, 136 Behn, Aphra, 111 Bergson, Henri, xvii, 40, 119, 125–36, 178 Blackadder II (BBC One), 87 Blackwell, Sir Basil, xvi Blackwell’s, xv Blair, Tony, 148 Blyenberch, Abraham van, 90 Bodleian Library, xiv Boileau, Nicholas, 113 Boniface III, 139 Borlase, Sir William, 90

197

198

Cowley, Abraham, 109 Critchley, Simon, 136 Dante, Alighieri, 139, 158 Davenant, William, 109 Debt, xvi Decorum, 1, 37, 15, 87 Democritus, 181–3 Demosthenes, 138 Dinteville, Jean de, 143–4 Diocles, Caius Appuleius, 30 Diplo¯ma, 168 Donatus, Aelius, 2, 12, 156 Donne, John, 33, 70 Earle, John, 39 Edwardes, Richard, 9, 10, Elements, 27–38, 88, 185 Eliot, George, 39, 135 Eliot, T.S., 90, 125, 177 Elizabeth I, 26, 31 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 31–3, 39 Empedocles of Agrigentum,, 27 Erasistratus, 29 Erasmus, Deciderius, 2, 9, 30, 84 EU, 166 Eve, 138 Everyman, 18 Evighetsstudent, xv Fabula, 156 Faust, xiii Faust, xv Fielding, Henry, 16, 118–23 Flytteplikt, 137 Fontaine, Jean de la, 157 Freud, Sigmund, 133, 134

INDEX

Galenus, Claudius, 29–30, 54 Galileo, 26 Garzoni, T., 33 Gay, John, 157 Gladstone, William Ewart, xiv Glapthorne, Henry, 109 Godolphin, Sidney, 109 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xv Goldsmith, Oliver, 113–16 Grahame, Simion, 33 Great Chain, 20–4 Greene, Robert, 33 Guarini, Giovanni Battista, 10 Håkon IV, 161 Hall, Joseph, 39 Harman, Thomas, 39 Harvey, William, 30 Hausted, Peter, 109 Hazlitt, William, 116, 135 Heine, Heinrich, 134 Heinemann, Gustav, 151 Heinsius, Daniel, 2 Henry III, 161 Heraclitus of Epheseus, 27 Herrick, Robert, 109 Hesse, Hermann, 135 Heywood, John, 19 Hilaria, 160 Hippocrates, 8, 9, 27–8, 30, 37, 182 Hobbes, Thomas, 133, 134 Hofmannsthal, Hugo, 18 Holbein, Hans the Younger, 143–4 Holberg, Ludvig, 90 Homer, 122, 124, 177

INDEX

Horace, 2, 9, 15, 67, 68, 70, 82, 83, 84, 101, 112, 113, 122, 134 Humours, 27–38, 185–7 Hutton,Henry, 33 Hypotyposis, 39 Ibsen, Henrik, 189 Ihlen, Nils, 165 Innocent III, 17–8, Interlude, 17 Isaac, 179 Jefferson, Thomas, 160 Jesus, xiv Jones, John, 31 Jonson, Ben, general references, xvi, 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 26, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 51, 52, 54, 89, 90, 92–3, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 115, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 131, 132, 133, 139, 140, 141, 144, 145, 147, 148, 183, 185, 188, 192–3; references to particular plays: Every Man in His Humour, Every Man Out of his Humour, 67–84, Volpone, 84–5, Epicoene, 85–6, The Alchemist, 86–7, Bartholomew Fair, 87–8, The Magnetic Lady: Or, Humours Reconcil’d, 88 Juvenal, 55–6, 122 Kairos, 1 Karl Johan, 154

199

Kellwaye, Simon, 31 Kerr, Sir Archibald Clerk, 173 Kilimanjaro, 165 Killigrew, Thomas, 109 Kirkegaard, Søren, 135 Knudsen, Gunnar, 165 Krag, Jens Otto, xiv Lie, Jonas, 195–6 Linacre, Thomas, 30–1 Livi, 90 Livingstone, David, 14 Livy, 122 Lozano, Francisco-Javier, 174 Lyly, John, 33 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 139, 158 Maitland, Sir Thomas, 154 Man as Microcosm, 24–6, 87 Marlowe, Christopher, 44 Marmion, Shakerley, 109 Marowitz, Charles, 191 Massinger, Philip, 41 Mayne, Jasper, 109 Medical theory, 27–38 Menander, 13 Miller, James, 111–13 Mkapa, Benjamin William, 177 Moliere, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 99, 128, 130 Mona Lisa, xiii Montaigne, Michel de, 194 Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 176 Morality play, 17 More, Thomas, 21–3, 140 Museveni, President Yoweri, 137 Mystery plays, 17

200

Nabbes, Thomas, 109 Nashe, Thomas, 33 Necessity, 2 Nobel, Alfred, 166 Nyerere, Julius, 174 Odysseus, xiv Olav V, 152 Orkney Islands, 164 Orwell, George, 157 Oscar I, 154 Oscar II, 154 Oslo University, xv Overbury, Sir Thomas, 39 Oxford, xv Pembroke, Lord, 173 Philistion of Locri, 30 Plato, xv, 15, 124, 133 Plautus, Titus Maccius, 11, 12, 66, 83 Plini, the Elder, xiii Porter, Henry, 52 Praxagoras, 30 Psychomachia, 18 Puttenham, George, 2 Pythagoras, 1 Rabelais, François, 30, 134 Radcliffe, Sir John, 2 Randolph, Thomas, 109 Renaissance psychology, 27–38 Ridiculous, 14, 15, 16 Roa, Marin de, 2 Roth, Philip, 18, 156 Rumsfeld, Donald, 148, 168 Sanz-Pastor, Jose Maria, 169 Sarah, 178–80

INDEX

Scalinger, Julius Caesar, 2, 13 Schiller, Friedrich, 138 Scofield, Paul, 155 Selve, Georges de, 143–4 Shadwell, Thomas, 99–106, 132 Shakespeare, William, 11, 23, 34, 35, 43, 44–5, 89, 90, 110, 141, 142, 155, 177, 189–92 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 116–17, 131 Shetland Islands, 164 Shirley, James, 44, 95–9, 109, 132 Sjødin, Karl G., 146–8 Smollett, Tobias, 123–4 Socrates, 3, 15, 134 Sommerfelt, Søren Chr., 151 Spencer, Gabriel, 13 Spenser, Edmund, 134 St. John’s College, Oxford, 2 St. Olav’s Order, 154 Strindberg, August, 187–9 Stubbe, Philip, 33 Swift, Jonathan, 94, 134, 155 Tacitus, 90 Tanquam explorator, 11 Tasso, Torquato, 140–1 Taylor, John, 33–4 Terence, 2, 9, 11, 66, 113, 156 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 135 Thales of Miletus, 27 Theophrastus, 37, 38–45 Thucydides, 122 To prepon, 1 Vanbrugh, Sir John, 113 Victoria, 165 Villen, Luis Gomez de Aranda, 170

INDEX

Virgil, 90, 122 Vives, Juan Luis, 2 Vulcan, 2 Wadham College, xiv Webster, John, 39 Wedel Jarlsberg, Fritz, 165 Wessel, Johan Herman, 66

Wijenberg, Johannes, 169 Wilde, Oscar, 38 Wilhelm II, 154 Wilson, President Woodrow, 125 Wit, 103–105 Zappfe, Peter Wessel, 135

201