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Comedy of Humours, According To A F. Scott, Is A Term Applied Especially To The Type

Comedy of humours is a form of comedy popular in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. It features characters dominated by a single trait or passion, referred to as their "humour." Ben Jonson is credited with popularizing this style in England through plays like Every Man in His Humour and Every Man Out of His Humour. Key characteristics include intense realism, a didactic and satirical tone used to ridicule folly, and adherence to classical dramatic unities of time, place, and action. Other notable examples include plays by John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton.

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1K views3 pages

Comedy of Humours, According To A F. Scott, Is A Term Applied Especially To The Type

Comedy of humours is a form of comedy popular in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. It features characters dominated by a single trait or passion, referred to as their "humour." Ben Jonson is credited with popularizing this style in England through plays like Every Man in His Humour and Every Man Out of His Humour. Key characteristics include intense realism, a didactic and satirical tone used to ridicule folly, and adherence to classical dramatic unities of time, place, and action. Other notable examples include plays by John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton.

Uploaded by

Janayitri Mandal
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Comedy of humours is a form of drama which became fashionable at the very end of

the 16th c. and early in the 17th. It is quite opposite to romantic comedy which
pictures man as dominated by one marked characteristic of some kind of whim. It
was first cultivated in Gammer Gurton’s Needle and Ralph Roister Doister and Ben
Johnson popularized it in England. In the comedy of humour, the characters are
types and eccentrics while in Shakespearean comedy “there is rather an attempt to
conceal the presence of the types under a semblance of personality.”

Comedy of Humours Definition

Comedy of Humours, according to A F. Scott, is a term applied especially to the type


of comic drama written by Ben Jonson and John Fletcher, where humour is a
personification of some ‘individual passion or tendency. It is a typical type of comedy
which was first introduced by Ben Jonson. The term comedy is applied to works in
which characters undergo embarrassment of misfortune, in which the action turns
out well for the characters. Comedy of humours is one such variety of comedy.

It is called ‘comedy of humours’ because it presented ‘humorous’ characters whose


actions (in terms of the medieval and Renaissance theory of humours, that
the human body held a balance of four liquids, or humours: blood, phlegm, yellow
bile (choler), and black bile (melancholy). When properly balanced, these humours
were thought to give the individual a healthy mind in a healthy body) were ruled by a
particular passion, trait, disposition or humour.

Basically this was a comedy of ideas physiological interpretation of character and


personality. Though there were ample precedents for this in allegory Tudor Morality
Plays and Interludes, Ben Jonson appears to have been the first person to have
elaborated the idea on any scale.

When Jonson wrote his plays, the word ‘humour’ had a much more extended
meaning than it has now the four humours of the body described by the old
physicians were supposed to exert their influence upon the mind and in course of
time, the mind as well as the body was credited with its own particular humour. It
meant, at that time, predominant mental characteristics.

Characteristic Features of Comedy of Humours

Intense Realism
Intense realism is the greatest characteristic of comedy of humours. The characters
here do not escape into the dreamland of romance rather they tread into
contemporary life with its manners, types, foibles and affectations. Ben Johnson
cannot be forgotten because he freed the English comedy from the shackles of
romantic extravagances of Beaumont and Fletcher. He also presented a real picture
of contemporary England. The story of his comedies can be helpful to us in assessing
the contemporary Elizabethan society.

Didactic and Satiric


The comedy of humour is didactic and satiric with the purpose of exaggerated
eccentricities of their characters and to laugh the audience into good behaviour. This
kind of comedy treats the follies and foibles of men and women in the satirizing
manner to free them from their follies. Ben Jonson has used follies in characters to
excite laughter and to ridicule them.

Wit and Satire


The comedy of humour has no concern with the humour which abounds in
Shakespeare’s comedies. It has wit and satire as the natural resultant of exaggeration
of the types.

Three Unities

All the three unities of time place and action are observed well here. The action is
confined to one spot and it does not extend over the period of twenty four hours. In
Jonson’s The Alchemist, all the incidents take place inside Love wit’s house or in
front of its door and only in twenty four hours. The comedy of homour has classical
cannon of having single plot without having any subplot there. It has no tragic
motive.

Comedy of Humours Examples in Literature

Jonson’s characters usually represent one humour and, thus unbalanced, are
basically caricatures. Jonson distinguished two kinds of humour: one was true
humour, in which one peculiar quality actually possessed a man, body, and soul; the
other was adopted humour, or mannerism, in which a man went out of his way to
appear singular by affecting certain fashions of clothing, speech, and social habits.

His two outstanding works in this kind of comedy are Every Man in His
Humour  (1598) and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599); plus minor works like The
Magnetic Lady: or Humours Reconciled (1632). Following the practice of the
Moralities and Interludes, Jonson named dramatis personae aptronymically: Kitely,
Dame Kitely, Knowell, Brainworm and Justice Clement (in Every Man in His Humour);
Fastidious Brisk, Fungoso, Sordido, and Puntarvolo the vainglorious knight, and so
forth (in Every Man Out of His Humour). The indication of character in this fashion
became a common practice and continued to be much favoured by dramatists and
novelists in the 18th and 19th c.
John Fletcher, a contemporary of Jonson’s, wrote a number of ‘humour’ comedies,
and other plays of note from the period are Chapman’s All Fools (c. 1604),
Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), and Massinger’s A New Way to Pay
Old Debts (1625). Shadwell revived comedy of humours late in the 17th c. with The
Squire of Alsatia (1688) and Bury Fair (1689).

Conclusion

This typical type of comedy is full of contradictory elements. For example, the highly
exaggerated, and therefore, unrealistic characters move about in highly realistic
atmosphere and true to the custom of the society; the turns of speech and the social
peculiarities are realistically brought out in a comedy of humours. In other words, a
comedy of humours, has all the characteristics of a regular comedy, with the
exception of the exaggerated traits or humours of its characters.

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