stage. Jonson never again produced so fresh and lovable a feminine
personage as Rachel, although in other respects "The Case is Altered" is
not a conspicuous play, and, save for the satirising of Antony Munday in
the person of Antonio Balladino and Gabriel Harvey as well, is perhaps the
least characteristic of the comedies of Jonson.

"Every Man in His Humour," probably first acted late in the summer of 1598
and at the Curtain, is commonly regarded as an epoch-making play; and this
view is not unjustified. As to plot, it tells little more than how an
intercepted letter enabled a father to follow his supposedly studious son
to London, and there observe his life with the gallants of the time. The
real quality of this comedy is in its personages and in the theory upon
which they are conceived. Ben Jonson had theories about poetry and the
drama, and he was neither chary in talking of them nor in experimenting
with them in his plays. This makes Jonson, like Dryden in his time, and
Wordsworth much later, an author to reckon with; particularly when we
remember that many of Jonson's notions came for a time definitely to
prevail and to modify the whole trend of English poetry. First of all
Jonson was a classicist, that is, he believed in restraint and precedent in
art in opposition to the prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance
spirit. Jonson believed that there was a professional way of doing things
which might be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these
examples for the most part among the ancients. To confine our attention to
the drama, Jonson objected to the amateurishness and haphazard nature of
many contemporary plays, and set himself to do something different; and the
first and most striking thing that he evolved was his conception and
practice of the comedy of humours.

As Jonson has been much misrepresented in this matter, let us quote his own
words as to "humour." A humour, according to Jonson, was a bias of