e classical and
not romantic, and were pure comedies, admitting {121} no admixture of
tragic motives. There is hardly one lovely or beautiful character in
the entire range of his dramatic creations. They were comedies not of
character, in the high sense of the word, but of manners or humors.
His design was to lash the follies and vices of the day, and his
_dramatis persona_ consisted for the most part of gulls, impostors,
fops, cowards, swaggering braggarts, and "Pauls men." In his first
play, _Every Man in his Humor_ (acted in 1598), in _Every Man Out of
his Humor_, _Bartholomew Fair_, and indeed, in all of his comedies, his
subject was the "spongy humors of the time," that is, the fashionable
affectations, the whims, oddities, and eccentric developments of London
life. His procedure was to bring together a number of these fantastic
humorists, to play them off upon each other, involve them in all manner
of comical misadventures, and render them utterly ridiculous and
contemptible. There was thus a perishable element in his art, for
manners change; and however effective this exposure of contemporary
affectations may have been, before an audience of Jonson's day, it is
as hard for a modern reader to detect his points as it will be for a
reader two hundred years hence to understand the satire upon the
aesthetic craze in such pieces of the present day, as _Patience_ or the
_Colonel_. Nevertheless, a patient reader, with the help of copious
foot-notes, can gradually put together for himself an image of that
world of obsolete humors in which Jonson's comedy dwells, and can
admire the dramatist's solid good {122} sense, his great learning, his
skill in construction, and the astonishing fertility of his invention.
His characters are not revealed from within, like Shakspere's, but
built up painfully from outside by a succession of minute, laborious
particulars. The difference will be plainly manifest if such a
character as Slender, in the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, be compared with
any one of the inexhaustible variety of idiots in Jonson's plays; with
Master Stephen, for example, in _Every Man in his Humor_; or, if
Falstaff be put side by side with Captain Bobadil, in the same comedy,
perhaps Jonson's masterpiece in the way of comic caricature.
_Cynthia's Revels_ was a satire on the courtiers and the _Poetaster_ on
Jonson's literary enemies. The _Alchemist_ was an exposure of
quackery, and is one of his best comedies, but