Language Theme Analysis

Every Man in his Humour, arguably Ben Jonson’s most famous play, is ironically one of his works for the stage in which the least action actually takes place. The plot is tenuous and disorientating to a modern reader, with disparate parts and an artificial wrapping-up in the conclusion. To focus too intently on this aspect of the play, though, would be to mischaracterize Jonson’s intentions and to miss what makes it still worth reading. Rather than a tightly woven plot of the sort found in Shakespeare’s work, Jonson was more concerned with giving what he felt to be an accurate rendering of the language and mannerisms of the time and place—Elizabethan London (Jonson revised an earlier version of the play to make London the setting rather than the more conventional Italy). Ultimately, it is language and attitudes toward language that provide the play’s beating heart in lieu of any obviously gripping action, conflict, or adventure. Jonson’s play shows the power of language—how it can accurately record and depict time, people, and places—while also demonstrating to hilarious effect the way language can be abused by people seeking to portray themselves as especially in command of their words.

Jonson clearly aims to bring sixteenth-century London to life through his language. In fact, the prologue that begins the play very keenly stresses the realism of what follows. In this, Jonson seeks to draw a link between his play and those of his contemporaries. He tells his audience that no “Chorus” or “thunders” “from any “tempestuous drum” will make an appearance—that is, the play will eschew the fashionable theatrical elements of the time. Instead, it will employ “deeds, and language, such as men do use: / And persons, such as Comedy would choose / When she would show an image of the times.” The play’s express aim, then, is to give its audience an honest account of the life and language of its characters and their environment. That said, Jonson’s insistence that Every Man in his Humour is a comedy reminds the audience that, within his overall project of realism, the playwright will exercise his license for exaggeration, parody, and satire in the service of capital-c Comedy (that is, in keeping with the long-running traditions of Greek and Roman theater).

Jonson use the play’s form to demonstrate the power of language to accurately depict a time and place. He makes frequent use of prose as opposed to the more fashionable iambic pentameter—metrically organized verse—to bring London and his characters to life in a realistic way. This makes much of the play sound fresh and unstilted even now: if people don’t talk in iambic pentameter, goes the logic, then neither should most of the characters in the play. In this, Jonson takes a different approach to his writing than his contemporary, William Shakespeare. The Elizabethan era was an interesting time for the English language, with Shakespeare making brilliant use of the malleability of the English language by yoking together the different influences exerting themselves on the language and making up words when he needed them. Jonson’s play functions as a kind of counterpoint to this overall project.

With the above in mind, one of the most interesting elements of the play is the way in which Jonson depicts its characters’ attitudes to their own language. In particular, Jonson’s stylistic choices and the characters’ different attitudes showcase the dynamism and diversity that characterized poetry as a much-debated topic of the time. Many of the characters in the play—Old Knowell and his son, Edward Knowell; the two foolish “gulls,” Stephen and Matthew; the water-carrier Cob; even the legal authority Justice Clement—seem to have strong opinions about poetry and its merit (or lack thereof). 

For the younger characters like Edward and the roguish Wellbred, poetry seems to have a kind of currency in the world—it’s an indicator of “the cool,” fashionable, desirable, and refined. This attitude worries Old Knowell, who frets that his son is “dreaming on naught but idle poetry / that fruitless and unprofitable art.” Cob laments the way the gallants of the town use “rascally verses” and “poyetry” (his pronunciation) to entertain and seduce women. Poetry is thus shown to be a powerful force in sixteenth-century London, for better or for worse depending on an individual’s attitude towards the art. Some characters even pass off other writer’s lines as their own in an effort to win the respect of their peers. Overall, then, Jonson conjures a world in which poetry—and language more generally—is a living, breathing force in everyday life.

Language, then, is at the heart of Every Man in his Humour. Close to the end of the play, Justice Clement remarks that poets “are not born every year […] There goes more to the making of a good poet, than a sheriff.” That is, one of Jonson’s closing thoughts—Clement’s remark paraphrases a favorite aphorism of the playwright—is that a good poet is a rare thing that ought to be cherished. In the space of his play, then, Jonson manages both to take aim at “false” poets, praise those who write authentically, and, crucially, make the case for an attentiveness in writing that must be paid to the contemporary moment and environment.