bile; the phlegmatic humour was cold and moist like water, formed in the lungs and a constituent of phlegm; the choleric humour was like fire, hot and dry, formed in the spleen and a constituent of yellow bile; the sanguine humour was like air, hot and moist, formed in the liver and a constituent of blood. Each ‘roving humour’ was mingled and carried with the blood in the body. Each humour would cause distinct physical characteristics, change during the seven ages of man and be affected by food and drink. Women were seen as phlegmatic, but the playwrights made memorable exceptions. The Germans were viewed as very choleric, and the Frenchmen were seen as phlegmatic, slow and weak.84 The climate of the northern nations was moist and cold but the qualities of the people were ‘ample, strong, courageous, martiall, bold’.85 There is a slight paradox here as they were given choleric elements in spite of the phlegmatic climate. Fortinbras (in Hamlet) enters the stage as a very resolute and choleric Norwegian character.
The Elizabethans thought that the right blend of the humours would establish the supreme character, just as the alchemist believed that a perfect metallic blend would give gold. The state of a perfect balance and harmony of the elements or humours was very rarely found in Man but the ideal established a contrast to the living reality of the four humours. The perfect, well-balanced temperament was very rare. Brutus in Julius Caesar and Mercury in Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels fits the elusive perfection:
A creature of a most perfect and divine temper. One, in whom the humours and elements are peacably met, without emulation of precedencie: he is neither to phantastickely melancholy, too slowly phlegmaticke, too lightly sanguine, or too rashly cholericke, but in all so composde & order’d, as it is cleare, Nature went about some ful worke, she did more then make a man, when she made him.86
The two most extrovert humours and characters were the sanguine and the choleric while the melancholic and the phlegmatic clearly listed towards introversion. The sanguines were generous, brave, merry and amourous (‘his red lips, after fights, are fit for Ladies’).87 This humour was close to the feeling and thinking heart. As the sun was the heart of the world, the heart was the sun of the body, the seat and fountain of life, of joy, grief, anger and love. The cholerics were bold, ambitious, rash, arrogant and lecherous (‘crosse not my humor, with an ill plac’d worde, for if thou doest, behold my fatall sworde’).88 The phlegmatics were slow, lazy, cowardly and witless, but also amiable and good-tempered. The melancholics were the ‘fullest of varietie of passion’89 and appeared unsociable, suspicious, jealous, revengeful and amorous.
The psychological effects of the four humours, the ‘phisiognomie of the body humaine’ was neatly summed up in 1592:
The blood maketh men moderate, merry, pleasant, fayre, and of a ruddy colour, which he (i.e. Arcandam) called sanguine men. The fleame maketh men sloathfull, sluggish, negligent …and soone to have grave hayres. The choler maketh them angry, prompt of wit, nimble, inconstant, leane and of quick digestion. The melancholic humor which as it were the substance, the bottome, and lees of the blood maketh men rude, churlish, careful, sad, avaritious, deceivers, traytors, envious, fearful, weake hearted and dreamning, and imagining evill things, vexed with the trouble of the minde, as though they were haunted with a malignant spirite. These humours then may be referred unto the Phisiognomie: for by them a manne may know the naturall inclination of men.90
A hot, dry, moist and cold temperament and a sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholy humour were synonymic. An Elizabethan could speak of an earthly temperament and a melancholy humour, a melancholy element and a dry humour and have essentially the same image. Robert Burton later confirmed that ‘these four humours have some analogy with the four elements, and to the four ages in man’.91
The terms decorum and humour applied to two distinct spheres of human thought; decorum was a central idea in ethics and aesthetics and the humour proper was a well-defined descriptive term in medicine (and psychology). The antique interchange between science, philosophy, theology and art gave quality to the union of decorum and humour and it also distinguishes the relationship between the two theories in the Renaissance. Hippocrates explored and defined the humoral theory but he also produced a treatise on decorum with special reference to the character and conduct of the phycisian. Aristotle had laid down the principle of decorum in De Poetica and Rhetorica and he compiled a medical treatise that observed the humoral theory. His friend Theophrastus obeyed the moral and medical theories in creating the social types of his character sketches, incorporating decorum and humour in fictional characters. Medicine, philosophy and creative writing worked hand in hand to the 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
