Ben Jonson’s plays are the quintessential examples of “comedy of humours,” a type of drama in which the characters are identified with one or more of the four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile). Jonson suggested that a person had a “true” humour as well as an “adopted” humour, an affectation in mannerism, clothing, speech, etc. Jonson begins Every Man Out of His Humour with an evocation of this theory: “Some one / peculiar quality / Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw / All his affects, his spirits, and his powers, / In their confluctions, all to run one way” (see Prologue, Project Gutenberg e-text of play).
The term “humour” comes from the Latin humor or umor, which means liquid. According to medieval and Renaissance thinking, a person had a healthy mind and body when their humours were balanced. Blood was associated with a sanguine disposition, such as being overly optimistic and very social. Yellow bile, choler, was seen to produce aggression. Black bile produced melancholy and depression. Phlegm was associated with apathy. If these were imbalanced, then a person would be prone to a number of issues and perhaps even be considered mentally ill.
An English professor from Goucher College explains, “The ‘comedy of humors’ . . . depicts emotional states as a psychological drama that might be thought of as a more sophisticated, materialist way to understand our inner workings than the spiritual mechanism of the moralities' allegory.” Dallas Baptist University provides additional analysis, suggesting Jonson’s profound influence on the theater: “the comedy of humours owes something to earlier vernacular comedy but more to a desire to imitate the classical comedy of Plautus and Terence and to combat the vogue of romantic comedy. Its satiric purpose and realistic method are emphasized and lead later into more serious character studies, as in Jonson’s The Alchemist. It affected his plays (Leontes in The Winter’s Tale is a good example)—and most of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes are such because they allow some one trait of character (such as jealousy or fastidiousness) to be overdeveloped and thus to upset the balance necessary to a poised, well-rounded personality. The comedy of humors, closely related to the contemporary COMEDY OF MANNERS, influenced the comedy of the Restoration period.”
