Discuss Ben Johnson theory and Practice of humour?
Answers
Explanation:
Ben Jonson's comedy is called the comedy of humours as it ... models or applying rules from classical theory or practice.
Answer:
Ben Jonson's Comedy of Humours
The Word "Humour":
The term "humour" comes from the ancient Greek physicians and, later, from the medieval system of medicine. This system envisaged four major humours corresponding with the four elements (fire, air, earth, and water) and possessing the quality respectively of heat, cold, dryness, and moisture.
The "complexion," "temperament," or constitution of a man depended on the proportionate alliance of the four humours or subtle juices in his body. The predominance of the moist humour caused a man to grow sanguine, of the hot to grow choleric, and so on. The prevailing idea with the physiologist was that in a healthy body there was a natural balance of all the four humours and that a disturbance of the balance was dangerous and needed to be checked. "In Elizabethan times", says Ifor Evans in A Short History of English Drama, "this medieval physiology was not treated with complete seriousness, but its vocabulary became a popular fashion in sophisticated conversation and this again Jonson exploited."
Elizabethan Interpretation:
"Humour", apart from its currency in the medieval profession, was also a catchword when Ben Jonson began to write. But his contemporaries used the word for any passing mood, whim, fancy, or caprice and not, as Ben Jonson did, for a more a less permanent and predominant peculiarity of disposition. Shakespeare, like the rest, used the word in the sense of mood or fancy. For instance, in the Richard III we have:
Was ever -woman in this-humour wooed?
Was ever -woman in this humour won?
Again, in The Merchant of Venice, when Shylock is asked why he prefers a pound of the flesh of Bassanio's heart to the sum of three thousand ducats, he replies:
It is my humour
Jonson's Interpretation:
Ben Jonson dissociated himself from this degenerate meaning of the word "humour", took it back to its original physiological sense and fitted it into the context of his concept of the nature and function of comedy. Just as a man has in his physique a dominant humour, similarly he has in his psyche a dominant passion. Under the influence of this dominant passion a man may become, as the case may be, greedy, jealous, cowardly, deceptible, foolhardy, and so forth. As Jonson clarified in the Prologue to Every Man out of His Humour, he was taking the word "humour" from medicine and was using it as a metaphor for the general disposition of a man—that is, his psychological set-up. He explains that
When some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man that it doth draw
All his effects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way;
This may truly be said to be a humour.