COMEDY

COMIC IDENTITY 43dramatized the errant ways and eventual reformation of a wayward son.Eventually, these influences came to form city, or ‘citizen’, comedy, abranch of comic writing devoted to intrigue plots of love and money andthe struggle between the older and younger generation amongst themerchant classes of contemporary London. A number of circumstances,including rapid population growth and the emergence of apredominantly capitalist economy over an agrarian one, had raised thevisibility of the urban middle classes in England. As a result, thesecitizens are identified solely with their economic interests, and almostevery area of existence is subsumed into their financial dealings,including their sex lives. In city comedy, the slave girl is displaced andthe energetic pursuit of the commodity becomes the new object ofdesire. William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money (1598) isgenerally held to be the first play to fit this description exactly, but itwas Ben Jonson (1572–1637), the dramatist who most aggressivelyasserted his erudition, whose work most clearly exemplified the revivedand anglicized Roman form. Jonson believed that comedy was aweapon aimed at the faults, follies, and hypocrisies of the world. Theprologue to The Alchemist (1610), establishes both his targets and theauthorial tone:Our Scene is London, ‘cause we would make knowne.No countries mirth is better then our owne,No clime breeds better matter, for your whore,Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more,Whose manners, now call’d humours, feed the stage:And which have still beene subject, for the rageOr spleene of comick-writers.(Jonson, 1979: Prologue, 5–11)The prologue lists a number of malefactors, and promises the audience aprocession of types, ‘now call’d humours’. The word ‘humour’ has itsroots in medieval physiognomy, meaning ‘moisture’ or Vapour’.Principally employed to describe animal or vegetal fluids, the word cameto its present meaning of ‘amusement’ via the application of medicaltheory to fictional characterization. Medieval medicine, following Galen(AD 129–99), held that health was regulated by four essential fluids—blood, phlegm, black bile, and choler—existing equally within thehuman body. When balanced, the humours were complementary and thebody enjoyed good health. When disproportionate, and one fluid cameto prominence above the others, the body experienced discomfort or