An Image of the Times. Nils-Johan Jorgensen
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
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.
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. 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 letter M on his right thumb. In other words, Latin will not help you if you do this again.
The Ridiculous 38
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 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