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 to the suspense and the absurd turn, the 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
