COMEDY

44 COMIC IDENTITYdisease. From this, it followed that a person’s mental qualities,character, and temperament could also be subject to overbearinginfluences. A preponderance of blood produced sanguinity, or a brave,hopeful, and amorous disposition; too much phlegm resulted in apathy;black bile led to melancholia; and disproportionate choler causedirascibility and hot-headedness. At the beginning of Every Man Out ofHis Humour, Jonson tells us how humoral theory may be taken as aprinciple of characterization:It may, by Metaphore apply it selfeUnto the generall disposition,As when some one peculiar qualitieDoth so possess a man, that it doth drawAll his affects, his spirits, and his powers,In their confluctions, all to run one way,This may be truly said to be a Humor.(Jonson, 1920: Induction, 112–118)The concept of dominating ‘confluctions’ is extended even further inJonson’s Volpone (1605–06), where greed has caused the characters tobecome so distorted and dehumanized they take on animal traits,reflected in their names. The old magnifico Volpone is named after afox, his servant Mosca, a fly, and the legacy-chasing flatterers Voltore,Corbaccio, and Corvino after carrion-eating vultures, ravens, and crowsrespectively.Several aspects of Volpone, such as its Venetian setting, reveal theinfluence of not only the commedia erudita but also the commediadell’arte, an improvised, non-scripted form of ‘popular’ theatre firstrecorded in 1545, that based its action around set scenarios that usuallyinvolved love intrigues and bits of comic business called lazzi. Thecommedia dell’arte employed a stable of reusable characters, most ofwhom wore expressive stylized masks, each actor dedicatingthemselves to the study of only one role. The origins of commediadell’arte are obscure, but various types of performance appear to havecontributed to its development: the stereotypes of New Comedy, ofcourse, as well as the Roman fabula (various types of comic interlude),mime and buffoon shows, mountebanks, carnival processions, andmedieval stage devils. The main characters of commedia appear to haveemerged from four principal types, two infuriating vecchi, or old men,usually parents or guardians, and two zanni, or clowns, principallyresponsible for the comedy. These characters came to be fixed into the