An Image of the Times. Nils-Johan Jorgensen
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 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 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 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
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 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 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;