Comedy of humour

The comedy of humours is a genre of dramatic comedy that focuses on a character or range of characters, each of whom exhibits two or more overriding traits or 'humours' that dominates their personality, desires and conduct. This comic technique may be found in Aristophanes, but the English playwrights Ben Jonson and George Chapman popularized the genre in the closing years of the sixteenth century. In the later half of the seventeenth century, it was combined with the comedy of manners in Restoration comedy.The term “humour” comes from the ancient Greek physicians and, later, from the medieval system of medicine. This system envisaged four major humours corresponding with the four elements (fire, air, earth, and water) and possessing the quality respectively of heat, cold, dryness, and moisture.

The “complexion,” “temperament,” or constitution of a man depended on the proportionate alliance of the four humours or subtle juices in his body. The predominance of the moist humour caused a man to grow sanguine, of the hot to grow choleric, and so on. The prevailing idea with the physiologist was that in a healthy body there was a natural balance of all the four humours and that a disturbance of the balance was dangerous and needed to be checked. “In Elizabethan times”, says Ifor Evans in A Short History of English Drama, “this medieval physiology was not treated with complete seriousness, but its vocabulary became a popular fashion in sophisticated conversation and this again Jonson exploited.”

Ben Jonson dissociated himself from this degenerate meaning of the word “humour”, took it back to its original physiological sense and fitted it into the context of his concept of the nature and function of comedy. Just as a man has in his physique a dominant humour, similarly he has in his psyche a dominant passion. Under the influence of this dominant passion a man may become, as the case may be, greedy, jealous, cowardly, deceptible, foolhardy, and so forth. As Jonson clarified in the Prologue to Every Man out of His Humour, he was taking the word “humour” from medicine and was using it as a metaphor for the general disposition of a man—that is, his psychological set-up. He explains that

When some one peculiar quality,

Doth so possess a man that it doth draw 

All his effects, his spirits, and his powers, 

In their confluctions, all to run one way;

This may truly be said to be a humour.