Jonson's Comedies
Cynical Urban Humour from a Shakespeare Contemporary
Writing at the same time as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson developed his own comic style, relying on observation and satire over fantasy and romance.
From the very beginning of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610), his most frequently-performed work, we are pitched into an inimitable comic world, with two characters apparently in the middle of an argument:
Face: Believe ’t, I will.
Subtle: Thy worst. I fart at thee.
From this opening, the play becomes a frenetic farce, filled with satirical portraits of London “types”, such as the swaggering young gallant Kastril, the hypocritical puritan Tribulation and the greedy knight Sir Epicure Mammon. Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson’s style of Reniassance comedy is firmly rooted in Renaissance London – even when they are set in Ancient Rome (Poetaster, 1601) or Venice (Volpone, 1606) they are full of his cynical observations on the lives of his contemporaries. His plots are usually based around fools being cheated, or braggarts getting their comeuppance, in contrast to the romantic entanglements of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or Much Ado About Nothing.
The notoriously quarrelsome Jonson even caricatured other writers in his plays: the characters of Demetrius and Crispinus in Poetaster, two dishonest and parasitic poets, are unflattering portraits of John Marston and Thomas Dekker, who were working for a rival playhouse at the time. At the end of the play, Crispinus is given an emetic, and vomits up the pretentious words which Jonson disapproved of in Marston’s work.
Jonson is credited with having popularised a new style of comedy with his play Every Man In His Humour (1598), which presented a string of characters all ruled by obsessions, such as jealousy or greed. The title refers to the medieval theory of “humours” in which people’s natures and behaviour were ruled by their physiological makeup, specifically the balance of blood and bile. Jonson used this theory as an excuse to present amusingly deranged characters who all acted at cross purposes, pursuing their own obsessions. Though it seemed new on the English stage, in fact this style grew out of Jonson’s studies of Classical comic playwrights like Terence and Plautus, and many of his character types, like the foolish father and the cunning slave, originate in Latin comedy.
Whilst Shakespeare’s comedies have become a central part of our literary heritage, inspiring and influencing writers with their romantic plots set in court and countryside, Ben Jonson’s work represents a parallel and equally vital strand. In his keenly observed and cynical plays, which took the contemporary urban world and exaggerated it to bring it into sharper focus, lie the roots of much of the realistic comedy we see on television today.
