Play: Every Man in His Humour

Overview
Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour is a brisk city comedy built on the late Renaissance theory of humours: each character is governed by a dominant temperament or obsession that bends his judgment and behavior. The play interweaves two households, a tangle of gulls and wits, and a cascade of disguises, all steered toward comic exposure and correction under the genial eye of a wise magistrate.

Setting and Premise
In Jonson’s later, Anglicized version the action unfolds in contemporary London; the original 1598 staging used an Italianate setting, but the story and satiric targets remain the same. Old Knowell, an anxious gentleman, intercepts a letter from his son Edward’s friend Wellbred, inviting Edward to meet a pair of foolish town gallants. Fearing corrupt company, Knowell dispatches his crafty servant Brainworm to spy on the young men, then follows after himself, unwittingly stepping into the very comic snare he hopes to avoid. Parallel to this, the merchant Kitely is consumed by jealous suspicion that his wife and sister are vulnerable to seduction, a fear fanned by the riotous comings and goings around Wellbred’s lodgings.

Humours in Motion
Jonson arrays his types with precision: Knowell’s busy suspicion, Kitely’s corrosive jealousy, Wellbred’s sportive wit, Downright’s plain-dealing choler, Edward’s poised virtue, and a gallery of gulls, Stephen, a country coxcomb aping fashion; Master Matthew, a vain would-be poet; and Captain Bobadill, a swaggering braggart soldier lodging with the water-bearer Cob and forever piping praises of tobacco and dueling. Brainworm, the play’s engine, delights in masks and misdirection, turning everyone’s humour against him with nimble improvisation.

Plot
Drawn to Moorfields by Wellbred, Stephen and Matthew fall immediately under Bobadill’s bombast and are schooled in empty fencing jargon and metropolitan affectation, while Wellbred and Edward prick them with satire. Brainworm, seizing his chance, first spins lies for Knowell to delay and mislead him, then reappears as a ragged veteran to wheedle money and information from Matthew and Bobadill. Meanwhile Kitely, tormented by imagined cuckoldry, posts his clerk Cash to guard his house, then repeatedly abandons his post as Brainworm’s forged messages and stage-managed encounters send him racing across the city in pursuit of phantoms.

Tempers fray. Downright rails at Wellbred’s taunting of fools; Bobadill and Matthew are exposed as cowards when challenged. The gull Stephen, proud of a new weapon and an ill-begotten cloak, struts toward disgrace. Domestic suspicion spreads to Cob, who, provoked by Bobadill’s swagger and talk of tobacco, beats his wife and lands in trouble. As pranks and jealous alarms overlap, Brainworm tops his tricks by posing as an officer of Justice Clement, serving warrants and steering all quarrels to the magistrate’s house, where the strands can be untangled at once.

Resolution and Themes
Justice Clement presides with merry authority, stripping away postures to the plain truth. Brainworm throws off his disguises and narrates his stratagems; Knowell blushes at his own credulity; Kitely’s groundless jealousy is cured; and Edward’s honorable suit to marry Kitely’s sister Bridget is acknowledged and blessed. Bobadill and Matthew are shamed, Stephen is laughed out of his borrowed finery, Downright’s blunt honesty is affirmed, and Clement transforms the courtroom into a dinner table, sealing reconciliation with hospitality.

Jonson’s satire targets not vice in the abstract but social folly, affectation, credulous fear, and the itch to seem more than one is. By organizing his comedy around humours, he gives each character a comic magnetism that both propels the plot and invites correction. The play’s mingling of lively street life, sharp dialogue, and a humane magistrate’s justice helped fix the mold of English city comedy and announced Jonson’s cool, exacting comic temperament.