Every Man in His Humour (New Mermaids)

by Ben Jonson (Author), RobertN.Watson (Editor)

• New

  Illustrated
  1998

  $15.02

  Like all of Jonson's city comedies, this play - here given in the 1616 Folio version, in which Jonson rewrote and set it in England, not Italy - is a kind of dramatised Do-It-Yourself kit on how to bluff one's way in Elizabethan London. Although Roman New Comedy, in which a crafty slave helps a wild youngster to marry the girl of his choice against his father's wishes, supplies Jonson with his basic plot, the world that he presents here is thoroughly contemporary and mundane. The characters' 'humours' - their driving obsessions - may vary, but all of them strive to represent something greater, nobler, cleverer than their real selves. The joke of the play, this editor suggests, is 'finally on all of us who unconsciously equate the universe with a story in which we play the hero'.

• Used

  Paperback
  1986

  $3.28

  In the late sixteenth century, English playwright Ben Jonson revitalized an ancient style of comedic theater known as comedy of humours. Drawing on the theory that each person has a particular trait - or humour - that defines their personality and perspective, Every Man in His Humour explores what happens when people with diametrically opposed humours are forced to interact with each other.