Every Man in His Humour

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...