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ABSTRACT
This article shows how Jonson devises a racialized comedy form to navigate the increasingly complex social terrain of early modern London. Reading the avant-garde “comical satire” Every Man Out of His Humour through the lens of Galenic humoralism, I argue that Jonson leverages the physiological discourse within his work to reimagine comedy’s definitive purpose as the knowledge-production of social discernment — that is, a cultural system or logic of “reading” the humoral body as a social sign of one’s status and interiority. Pretenders of wit, tobacco-fiends, and perfumed courtiers — these humor-ridden figures are racialized through Jonson’s comic poetics as immutably inferior readers, inherently lacking in understanding that the rules of social discernment are always fluid, and open to others’ manipulation. And conversely, Jonson begins to explore within the play a conception of the ideal, discerning reader as defined by his white, and ultimately undiscernible, corporeality.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. I have used Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour, ed. Helen M. Ostovich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), except where otherwise noted.
2. Jonsonian criticism on race has tended to focus on his masques, especially The Masque of Blackness and its sequel, The Masque of Beauty. Important criticism by Kim F. Hall, Aasand Hardin, Yunma Siddiqi, and Andrea Bernadette has powerfully illuminated how theatrical conventions of conspicuous spectacle and blackface work to reaffirm, or challenge, English imperialist agendas by organizing necessarily imbricated differences of gender and race. This scholarship has been immensely useful in thinking through the ways in which the discourse of blackness becomes increasingly deployed in a colonial project of racialization. See Hall (Citation1995, Chapter 3), Hardin (Citation1992), and Bernadette (Citation1999).
3. Building on Heng, Patricia Akhimie also defines race as a “‘structural relationship’ between, on the one hand, fluctuating ideas about human differences and, on the other, shifting power relations within a society” (2018, 9). Critics such as Jonathan Burton and Ania Loomba (Citation2007, 2–3), Erikson and Hall (Citation2016, 10–12), Jonathan Burton (Citation2020, 203–5), and Ayanna Thompson (Citation2021, 7–8) have also highlighted in different ways this “structural” quality of race. For examples of scholarship in the field of critical race studies on the ideological construct of race, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant ([1986] 2015), and Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields (Citation2014).
4. According to Adam Zucker, the polemical literature by those such as Philip Stubbes, Stephen Gosson, William Harrison, and Robert Wilson, which castigated “‘the new mingle-mangle’ of apparel and goods appearing in London markets,” at the same time made these same polemicists and their work “paradigmatic participants in the cultural trends they sought to alter” (2011, 12).
5. Variations of this Horatian maxim (Ars Poetica, 343–4) show up throughout Jonson’s works. For examples, see C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson, vol. 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), 420.
6. Since racial difference is constructed by stigmatizing given marks of the body as a sign of inferiority, Jonson’s conception, here, of humoral malleability might appear subversive to an early modern project of race formation. However, it is not that bodily affectations cannot be read at all as indicators of race within Jonson’s play — they often can, according to the situation at hand. Rather, I am emphasizing that Jonson’s strategic deployment of the ambivalence and unwieldiness of humoralism adheres to a racializing project.
7. The relationship of histories of early modern race and comedy is yet understudied. For examples of new work on the subject, see Edward Berry (Citation2022), Geraldo U. de Sousa (Citation2018), and Akhimie (Citation2021).
8. Dawson, in fact, points to this very problem in the study of race and humoralism. Dawson contests models of superseding paradigms of race, arguing that “humoralism facilitated a racism of its own” (2019, 8). While I found his argument that discourses of humoral complexion and social distinction were imbricated quite compelling, my article shifts focus from the theory of humoralism itself to its comic uses to highlight the continuity of race.
9. Puttenham “historicizes” the chronological development of this “forme,” from satire, the “first and most bitter invective against vice and vicious men” when satyrs roamed the land, to the Old Comedy of ancient Greece, a kind of poem “somewhat sharp and bitter after the nature of satire,” to Grecian New Comedy, which is “more civil and pleasant,” yet still contains a “certain generality glancing at every abuse” ([1589] 2007, 120–2).
10. According to Robin Blackburn, “England’s imports of tobacco were worth £60,000 … in 1610, and demand grew apace … By 1613 it was estimated that £200,000 was being spent on tobacco each year” (1997, 223). On tobacco cultivation in the English colonies, see Chapter 6.
11. According to the OED, “poking-stick” can mean “a rod for stiffening the pleats of a ruff (originally made of wood or bone, later of steel so as to be applied hot” (poking, C2.)
12. For an account of the materiality of Jonson’s poetics, see Bruce Thomas Boehrer (Citation1997). Boehrer succeeds in a careful reading of “Jonson’s strategies for alimentary representation” as a very real — and very calculated — “involvement in an organic socioliterary process … that helps shape the modern literary sensibility” (39).
13. For a different analysis of the parenthesis in early modern literature, see Jenny C. Mann (Citation2012, Chapter 3). According to Mann, “the plot of the romance itself is structured by a series of parenthetical interruptions and qualifications.” The parenthesis “also expresses the difficulty of constituting English literary authority in the sixteenth century” (97).
14. Lowenstein argues that the poet’s “imitative poetics” produce a “profoundly articulate poetic individuality” (1986, 496). For a brilliant analysis of Jonson’s construction of a “community of the same,” see Stanley Fish (Citation1984). According to Fish, this community is generated by “providing a relay or network by means of which they can make contact with and identify one another … That is why generation in the world of Jonson’s poetry occurs … by reading, by the reading of like by like” (40).
15. For a different reading of this epigram, see Richard S. Peterson ([Citation1981] Citation2011, 21–7). Peterson especially focuses on Roe’s figuration as “a rounded alembic or retort that is then filled with his experiences, to end as the gold itself, passing through fire and other trials ‘untouch’d’” (25).
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Yunah Kae
Yunah Kae is an assistant professor of English at the College of Charleston. She specializes in English literature and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with particular interests in premodern critical race studies, aesthetics, historical formalism, and the history of comedy. She is currently working on her first monograph, tentatively titled, “Distinguishing Race: Performing Knowledge in Early Modern Comedy.” Her scholarship has been published in Shakespeare Studies (2022), and her research has been supported by the Folger Shakespeare Library.