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; as a piece of wrought timber to no use. His Spirits and the Sunne are enemies, the Sunne bright and warme, his humour blacke and colde.104
The melancholy man had a strong visionary faculty and ghosts and spirits frequently haunted him:
His head is haunted, like a house, with evil spirits and apparitions, that terrify and fright him out of himself till he stands empty and forsaken. His sleeps and his wakings are so much the same that he knows not how to distingusish them, and many times when he dreams he believes he is broad awake and sees visions … His soul lives in his body like a mole in the earth, that labours in the dark, and casts up doubts and scruples of his own imaginations to make that rugged and uneasy what was plain and open before …The temper of his brain being earthly, cold and dry, is apt to breed worms, that sink so deep into it, no medicine in art or nature is able to reach them.105
The increasing curiosity about the melancholy state of mind was part of a new interest in mental and psychological studies based on the theory of humours. No detailed study of melancholy existed in England before 1500 but many characters, among them Hamlet, entered the stage before Burton’s work.
The scholar was a man of great knowledge and learning, but rather unrefined and awkward in manners and behaviour. He was too much occupied with his studies to have time for the more pleasant sports of the courtier. He lived too long in the limited world of his College and long studies in a dark room made him unfit to face the sharp light of the world outside. He appeared shy and silly and was frequently ridiculed, but the innate qualities of the character and his intellect were qualities that weighed heavier than the outward signs. Frederick in Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure is an appropriate representation of the scholar in comedy.
The appearance of Sordido in Jonson’s Every Man out of his Humour, fits the character sketch of the ‘Almanack-maker’, referred to as an annual author.106
The conventional sketch and the stage character have much in common. Barabas and Shylock come close to the sketch of the Usurer. Antonio displays some of the characteristics of A Worthy Merchant. The sketches of the Virgin, the Wanton Woman, the Whore, the Wife, the Widow, the Melancholy Man, the Prince, the Scholar, the King and the Hypocrite help to define the types of characters in conflict in a play like Hamlet. The interplay of Ophelia, Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius is, at one level, a clash between qualities found in the character sketch. Ophelia is ‘of nature the Purest’ who still may appear a ‘feare of destruction’ to Hamlet. Gertrude has remarried as a widow and thus shattered the picture of ‘the purest gold’ expressed in the sketch. To Hamlet she is has become the Wanton Woman and is not the Worthy Wife. Claudius is a Hypocrite, a Usurper and an Unworthy King. Hamlet is the Melancholy Man, the Scholar and the Good Prince. Othello is the General, the Lover, the Jealous Man, and the Honest Man and Iago is the Machiavellian villain, the Soldier and the Hypocrite. Between them is the Honest Wife who appears wanton and unfaithful to the hero. The sketch of the ideal soldier creates a contrast to stage characters like Iago, Falstaff and Bobadill. Iago is sinning against the virtues of Truth and Honesty ascribed to the soldier type and Bobadill as well as Falstaff lack the
