An Image of the Times. Nils-Johan Jorgensen
incongruous behaviour that is the source of laughter in Jonson:
In a feareles humor, I have anatomized the humors of mankinde, to the mouth of the honest man, it hath a most delicate and sweet taste, but to the wicked, it is bitter as gall or wormwood.41
This is revealing at two levels. The first is the immediate link to medicine, the anatomizing of the humours. The second is the recognition that the humours can be bitter and sweet, thus embracing the idea of laughter as a bitter and salty fluid later expanded by Bergson.
Jonson’s grasp of the ridiculous as the essence of comedy was defended more than a hundred years after the first appearance of Volpone:
Comedy instructs and pleases most powerfully by the Ridicule, because that is the Quality which distinguishes it from every other Poem. The Subject therefore of every Comedy ought to be ridiculous by its Constitution; the Ridicule ought to be of the very Nature and Essence of it. Where there is none of that, there can be no Comedy. It ought to reign both in the Incidents and in the Characters, and especially in the principal Characters, which ought to be ridiculous in themselves or so contriv’d, as to shew and expose the Ridicule of others. In all the Masterpieces of Ben Jonson, the principal Character has the Ridicule in himself, as Morose in The Silent Woman, Volpone in The Fox, and Subtle and Face in The Alchemist. And the very Ground and Foundation of all these Comedies is ridiculous.42
It is this confidence of authority, which makes Henry Fielding declare, in Joseph Andrews, that ‘the ridiculous only…falls within my province in the present work’ and he observed with great assurance that Ben Jonson ‘of all men understood the Ridiculous the best’.43
MEDIEVAL SOURCES: MYSTERY, MORALITY AND INTERLUDE
The first mystery plays were seen in England at the beginning of the twelfth century. Liturgical texts, sermons and devotional writing, the homiletic art, formed the basis for dialogue in Latin and rudimentary dramatic acting emerged. When Pope Innocent III, in 1250, restricted clergy to act on a public stage the organization of the mystery plays was taken over by the town guilds. The Pope’s intervention enhanced the freedom of the stage. Vernacular texts replaced Latin, actors replaced the priests and comic scenes began to appear (as in Secunda Pastorum, preserved in the Wakefield collection, one of four English anthologies). Scenes from English life, comedy and farce, were introduced. Soon these performances would move outside the church to the marketplace and the village green to reach a larger audience. Travelling companies caught and expanded the popularity. A play was often performed on a decorated cart (pageant), which was moved among different parts of town to meet public demand.
The morality play originated in the folk plays, tropes, liturgical plays, miracle and mystery plays of the Middle Ages. The Castle of Perseverance44 is the earliest full-length, English, morality play (written in the first quarter of the fifteenth century) and the manuscript contains a circular stage diagram with the castle in the middle surrounded by a moat and five scaffolds. The main character Humanum Genus (Mankind) is led astray by Malus Angelus (the Bad Angel) to serve World and his companions, Lust and Folly. Mankind is dressed up in fine clothes, led to the scaffold of Covetousness and accepts the seven deadly sins. Shrift and Penance intervenes and Mankind is sent to the castle of Perseverance for repentance and protection. The castle is stormed by World, Flesh and the Devil but the Seven Moral Virtues fight them back. As Mankind is about to accept an offer of wealth from Coveteousness, Death throws a dart and kills him. God accepts the intervention from Mercy and Peace, pardons Mankind and saves him from Hell. The play has a Faustian quality and the appearance of Lust, Folly, Pride, Anger, Envy, Flesh, Gluttony, Lechery, Sloth and Avarice on the stage points forward to the Jonsonian humours.
The morality play, a dramatized moral allegory, was a natural progression from the mysteries but now dealing with personified abstractions of virtues and vices and not with biblical stories. The focus was on the seven deadly sins of which the early sixteenth century allegorical play Everyman (from a Dutch play Elckerlijc) is the best known. Hugo von Hofmannsthal created a similar play Jedermann. Das Spiel vom Sterben des reichen Mannes (1911) and Philip Roth, took the title for his 2006 novel. Man moved from innocence to temptation and fall, to repentance and salvation. We meet personified abstractions of virtues and vices in a battle for the soul, the psychomachia. The plays aimed to enlighten, instruct and discipline in encompassing titles like Everyman, Mankind, Wisdom and Ship of Fools45 but the moralities gradually developed more independent writing and the vices begin to enter the stage as real villains often in rude colours of comedy.46
The interlude, the play between, developed from the moralities in the early sixteenth century. We see the beginning of comedy or at least of scabrous farce on the stage. These plays were set in private houses, in town halls and at banquets. The Vice (as opposed to vices) now appeared as a central rogue and jester, the predecessor to the Elizabetan clown and gallant. John Heywood created interludes that were close to themes in Chaucer and to the French short narratives, the fabliaux.
The combination of character and type with an abstract folly and vice was already present in the moralities and the playwright could then begin to move out of abstraction into comic reality:
The characters in the moralities, though called by abstract names, are often from life, and each character has a motive of action to distinguish it from the rest … by the greater nearness to actual life, by the concreteness and individualization that the abstractions take on. It is this side of medieval literature that influenced Jonson most strongly in his conception of comedy and of the types appropriate to it.47
The seven deady sins of the sermons, devotional and moral writing, the allegorical way of thinking, provoked a static and clear-cut picture of man and his behaviour and he could become indecorous or humorous if he committed one of the seven deadly sins. Pride, envy, avarice and ire emerged from a choleric humour, the indolence and inactivity of sloth corresponded to a phlegmatic humour, intemperance suggested a sanguine temper and lust, surprisingly, was nearest to a melancholy humour.
THE GREAT CHAIN AND MAN AS MICROCOSM
The hand-coloured map Planisphaerium by Andreas Cellarius Palatinus (1661), showing the structure of the entire world according to Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), with globus terra in the centre, illustrates a fixed Renaissance order compared to the open-ended celestial charts of the galaxies and universe(s) today.48 Cosmologists now grapple with dark energy in an expanding universe and dark matter may continue in an infinite number of universes, not ending in a gigantic circle, but in an eternal inflation and flat expansion without a final edge. Darkness is upon the face of the deep, then and now.
The Chain
Man’s position in the Universe in the Elizabethan age was an integral part of the Great Chain of Being, the world picture inherited from the Middle Ages (derived from Plato and the Old Testament), then adapted in a simplified version by the Renaissance (and not yet overturned by Copernicus), ‘only the earth doth stand for ever still’.49 It is a divinely ordered, theocentric and geocentric Universe, the earth is set in the middle of heaven.
God had created the elements and one element ‘is fastned in that other in such manner one susteyned the other’.50 The elements in the great chain were bound by a strict hierarchy, starting with the cold and dry earth, then the cold and moist water (the sea), the hot and moist air and finally the hot and dry fire (the stars). The elements formed ‘a circle with joined hands, continually kept in motion by their mutual attraction’.51 Everything was included and connected ‘in degree, priority and place’.52 Man was placed next to the angels in a system of gradation, a hierarchy of four progressive classes. The inanimate class was at the bottom of this vertical bond, but there existed, even among inanimate objects, a marked difference in virtue and position. Thus water was of a nobler substance than earth, and gold ranked higher than lead. Indeed, gold was the King of Metals in a perfect balance of the elements. It was suggested that an artery ran down the ring finger of the left hand and a gold ring would carry the positive influence of the metal to the heart.53
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