That the solution to the authorship mystery lies in the rather boring sounding category of the 'history of manners' I have no doubt. Ben Jonson had equated manners and humours, and in his attempts at social reform he seems to have used the terms interchangeably. For Jonson the history of manners was interwoven with humoral history, and it was in his self-appointed role as censor or corrector of manners/humours that he based his assaults on the fame of the Earl of Oxford.
The following is an extended passage from Gail Kern Paster's book, _Humouring the Body_ that introduces a concept that is (IMO) critical to the authorship question - that of 'humoral privilege'.
What is humoral privilege? Basically, in the context of the authorship problem, it's the Earl of Oxford claims to emotional privilege and individuality - a sort of early modern version of Sinatra's 'I Did it My Way'. It's what Benedick lays claim to in Much Ado when he says:
I'll tell thee what, prince; a college of
wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humour. Dost
thou think I care for a satire or an epigram? No:
if a man will be beaten with brains, a' shall wear
nothing handsome about him. In brief, since I do
purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any
purpose that the world can say against it; and
therefore never flout at me for what I have said
against it; for man is a giddy thing, and this is my
conclusion.
Benedick accepts the 'giddiness', changeability and passionate nature of man. It seems that Ben Jonson never did. Jonson's stern view of human nature can be seen in Augustus Caesar's description of the virtuous man in Poetaster- a moral vision that highlights the necessity for self-rule and self-restraint:
Augustus Caesar.
There is no bounty to be shew'd to such
As have no real goodness: bounty is
A spice of virtue; and what virtuous act
Can take effect on them, that have no power
Of equal habitude to apprehend it,
But live in worship of that idol, vice,
As if there were no virtue, but in shade
Of strong imagination, merely enforced?
This shews their knowledge is mere ignorance,
Their far-fetch'd dignity of soul a fancy,
And all their square pretext of gravity
A mere vain-glory; hence, away with them!
I will prefer for knowledge, none but such
As rule their lives by it, *and can becalm
All sea of Humour with the marble trident
Of their strong spirits*: others fight below
With gnats and shadows; others nothing know.
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Gail Kern Paster describes humours as the 'fluids most directly associated with impulsiveness, and thus (are) a key part of the narrative of social reform...':
Would he had blotted a thousand...
Hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free na-ture: had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein hee flow'd with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop'd: Sufflaminandus erat; as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his owne power; would the rule of it had beene so too. (Timber, Jonson on Shakespeare)
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Gail Kern Paster
Humoring the Body
...I want to expand on the problematic relationship between the social and the emotional hierarchies of early modern England, with particular attention to the issue of male humors and passions - and especially the social privileges both requited by and often assumed in the expression of male anger. First, though, it is important to suggest how contemporary rhetoric of the passions and the humors functions in two discourses that work together to express, manage, and adjudicate among claims to emotional privilege. One, the biological discourse we have seen earlier, describes the humors as a psychophysiological determinant of gentlemanliness, in a more or less socially recognized system classification; the other, a discourse of literary satire, describes the humors as an agreed-upon social fiction by which men describe and claim individuality. The first discourse borrows heavily from Galenic theory and carries with it the semantic authority of literal meaning. In the second discourse, the bodily humors are recognized as part of a self-interested claim to emotional privilege and peremptory interiority - a way of demanding the humoral right of way in order to have something of the emotional unconstraint that Guazzo saw as possible only for a man secure in his preeminence among inferiors. In this discourse, the usefulness and meaningfulness of the concept of the humors - hence a traditional way of appraising the behavior of others - is represented as at issue. In the induction to Every Man out of His Humour, the two choric characters Cordatus and Asper lament how the "poor innocent word" humor "I racked and tortured" through misuse when it referes properly to a set of biological givens:
...we thus define it,
To be a Quality of Air, or Water,
And in it self holds these two Properties,
Moisture and Fluxure;
......................
and hence we do conclude,
That whatsoe're hath Fluxure and Humidity,
As wanting power to contain it self,
Is Humour. So in every Humane Body,
The Choler, Melancholy, Phlegm, and Blood,
By reason that they flow continually
In some one Part, and are not continent,
Receive the name of Humours." (induction, 88-91, 95-102)
Here Jonson introduces humor in its largest sense - as the name for the two liquid elements helping to compose all things - and then applies it to the more complex liquids in the human body. He is even willing to acknowledge that the word humor may extend to characterize the "general disposition" of a person "by metaphor" (104,103). A metaphorical transfer of terms is required here in that a disposition is not a liquid itself but is rather the result, Jonson says, of a "peculiar" quality's power to
draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way. (106-8)
But even though disposition may not literally be liquid, Jonson does conceptualize affects, spirits, and powers to flow - sometimes in a single direction, as in the behaviour of one ruled by a single affect, but more often (he implies) in the changeable currents of felling characteristic of most individuals. But Jonson's spokesman Asper is unwilling to extend the proper meanings of humor to include such behavioural signs as transient social affectations of dress and adornment:
But that a rook, in wearing a pied feather,
The cable hatband, or the three-piled ruff,
A yard of shoetie, or the Switzers' knot
On his French garters, would affect a humour! (110-13)
Asper's rapid rhetorical descent from the overarching dignity of the elements to a "yard of shoetie" or "three-piled ruff" suggests Jonson's overall line of attack on contemporary forms of masculine desire. In this contemptuous (and ultimately circular) formulation, the rook borrows from the order of things as if it were available to him as an additional resource in his process of self-adornment, as if the cosmological framework were his for the taking or could be demonstrable in clothes, feathers, and other forms of decoration. Such affectation is not merely narcissism in a socially conspicuous form - indeed narcissism for the sake of conspicuous form - but colossal misrecognition of one's place in the world. For Jonson, there is nothing humanly voluntary, nothing chosen about the cosmological framework or the human frame that reproduces it in little. Presumable that is why he begins by defining humor as a function of the cosmos first and the human body later. Thus Jonson seeks to distinguish between the universal givens and the arbitrary range of human social practice, to place human passions within their proper cosmological framework. The signs of the order of things are not subject to human manipulation or to the vagaries of fasion; they cannot be lodged in ruff, feather, or shoelaces. ...but there is nothing similarly inevitable or cosmically demonstrable, Jonson wants to insist, in one's petty range of choice in what to wear, or eat, or take as medicine, especially when that choice is itself preceded by an exaggerated insistence on its importance as a signifier of one's peremptory humorality. The offense is, among other things, one of proportion and scale. Jonson's sense of the alarming downward mobility or diminution of the term humor is clear in the prologue to The Alchemist when he introduces his topic as "manners, now call'd humours" -- as if the universal were now being subsumed by the particular, interiority by exteriority, the timeless by the ephemeral.
For Jonson, the fashionable discourse of the humors thus arises as an offense to the order of things, as when, in Every Man in his Humour, Cash seeks to inform the water-carrier Cob of what it means to have a humor: "I'll tell thee, Cob; it is a gentleman-like monster, bred in the special gallantry of our time by affectation; and fed by folly" (3.4.18-20). Humorality in this sense is monstrous, as Peter Womack has explained, because it represents "incompleteness and difference" as opposed to the self-sameness of the universal order. Although as a liquid, any humour wants "power to contain itself, "it's status as an "incontinent" part requiring containment is not in itself problematic except when self-containment fails, as it does for humorous gentlemen who, like th eprototypical gull in Dekker's Gull's Hornbook, "desires to pour himself into all fashions" and abandons the quest for identity as self-sameness. Humors can be yoked to accomplishment - as Hal's specification of his own humor early in 1 Henry IV as "unyok'd" implies. So it is lack of containment, lack of manly fixity and yoking to worthy activity, that produces the "gentleman-like monster," that emblem of uncontainment and Bakhtinian grotesqueness. (Kern Paster, 197-200)
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The humorous 'gentleman-like monster' appears in Oxford's stead in Harvey's _Speculum Tuscanism_; he appears again in Oxford's form in Chapman's Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois as Oxford peremptorily demands the humoral right of way; he appears as the enraged and out-of-control aristocrat in Greville's account of the tennis court quarrel and in the libellous accounts of Howard and Arundel; and most recently, the gentleman-like monster, 'that emblem of uncontainment and Bakhtinian grotesqueness' appropriates Oxford's fame in Alan H. Nelson's 'Monstrous Adversary'.
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O MANNERS! that this AGE should BRING FORTH such creatures! that
Nature should bee at leisure to make 'hem
(Jonson, Every Man In, IV.viii. 146-7)
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Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur
"The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived."
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Harlequin-Horace
or, The Art of Modern Poetry
James Miller
...you can by the single wave of a HARLEQUIN'S WAND, conjure the whole Town every night into your Circle; where like a true Cunning Man, you amuse 'em with a few Puppy's Tricks while you juggle 'em out of their Pelf, and then cry out with a Note of Triumph,
Si Mundus vult Decipi, Decipiatur.
And now, Sir, having given you a full and true account of your self, we come to say something of our selves, with a Word upon our Performance.
As to the following Piece, it is a System of the Laws of Modern Poetry establish'd amongst us by the Authority of the most successful Writers of the present Age, by which it appears that the Rules now follow'd, are in all Respects exactly the Reverse of those which were observ'd by the Authors of Antiquity, and which were set forth of old by Horace in his Epistle de Arte Poetica. In a word, Sir, it is *Horace turn'd Harlequin, with his Head where his Heels should be*; in which Posture we ween not but he will be well receiv'd by your worship, and in Consequence of that, by the whole Town.
--Nec Phoebo gratior ulla est Quam sibi quoe Vari prescripsit pagina Nomen. (To Phoebus is no page more welcome than that which is inscribed on its front with the name of Varus.) Virgil, Eclogue 6.11-12
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Bartholomew Fair: Jonson
T H E
I N D u C T I O N
O N T H E
S T A G E.
It is further covenanted, concluded and agreed, That how great soever the expectation be, no Person here is to expect more than he knows, or better Ware than a Fair will afford: neither to look back to the Sword and Buckler-age of Smithfield, but content himself with the present. Instead of a little Davy, to take Toll o' the Bawds, the Author doth promise a strutting Horse-courser, with a leer-Drunkard, two or three to attend him, in as good Equipage as you would wish. And then for Kind- heart, the Tooth-drawer, a fine Oily Pig-woman with her Tapster, to bid you welcome, and a Consort of Roarers for Musick. A wise Justice of Peace meditant, instead of a Jugler, with an Ape. A civil Cutpurse searchant. A sweet Singer of new Ballads allurant: and as fresh an Hypocrite, as ever was broach'd, rampant. If there be ne- ver a Servant-monster i' the Fair, who can help it, he says, nor a Nest of Antiques? He is loth to *make Nature afraid* in his Plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries, to MIX HIS HEAD with other MENS HEELS; let the concupiscence of Jigs and Dances, reign as strong as it will amongst you: yet if the Puppets will please any body, they shall be entreated to come in.
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Harlequin-Horace:
Or, the
Art of Modern Poetry
To grand Beginnings full of Pomp and Show,
Big Things profest, and Brags of what you'll do,
Still some gay, glitt'ring, foreign Gewgaws join,
Which, like gilt Points on Peter's Coat, may shine
Descriptions which may make your Readers stare,
And marvel how such pretty Things came There
(snip)
Suppose you're skill'd in the Parnassian Art,
To purge the Passions, and correct the Heart,
To paint Mankind in ev'ry Light, and Stage,
Their various Humours, Characters, and Age,
To fix each Portion in its proper Place
And give the Whole one Method, Form and Grace;
What's that to us? who pay our Pence to see
The great Productions of Profundity,
Shipwrecks, and Monsters, Conjurers, and Gods,
Where every Part is with the whole at odds.
With Truth and Likelihood we all are griev'd,
And take most Pleasure, when we're most deceiv'd,
Now wrote obscure, and let your Words move slow,
Then with full Light, and rapid Ardor glow;
In one Scene make your Hero cant, and whine,
Then roar out Liberty in every Line;
Vary one Thing a thousand pleasant Ways,
Shew Whales in Woods, and Dragons in the Seas.
To shun a Fault's the ready Way to fall,
Correctness is the greatest Fault of all.
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Ruling/Holding/Restraining Shakespeare:
From To the Deceased Author of these Poems (William Cartwright)
by Jasper Mayne
…And as thy Wit was like a Spring, so all
The soft streams of it we may Chrystall call:
No cloud of Fancie, no mysterious stroke,
No Verse like those which antient Sybils spoke;
No Oracle of Language, to amaze
The Reader with a dark, or Midnight Phrase,
Stands in thy Writings, which are all pure Day,
A cleer, bright Sunchine, and the mist away.
That which Thou wrot’st was sense, and that sense good,
Things not first written, and then understood:
Or if sometimes thy Fancy soar’d so high
As to seem lost to the unlearned Eye,
‘Twas but like generous Falcons, when high flown,
Which mount to make the Quarrey more their own.
For thou to Nature had’st joyn’d Art, and skill.
In Thee BEN JOHNSON still HELD Shakespeare’s QUILL:
A Quill, RUL'D by sharp Judgement, and such Laws,
As a well studied Mind, and Reason draws.
Thy Lamp was cherish’d with suppolied of Oyle,
Fetch’d from the Romane and the Graecian soyle. (snip)
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O manners! that this AGE should BRING FORTH such creatures! that
Nature should bee at leisure to make 'hem
(Jonson, Every Man In, IV.viii. 146-7)
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Jonson. Verse Prologue, _Every Man in His Humor _
SCENE,---LONDON
PROLOGUE.
[The Scene: London]
P R O L O G U E.
THough Need make many Poets, and some such
As Art and Nature have not better'd much;
Yet ours, for want, hath not so lov'd the Stage,
As he dare serve th'ill Customs of the Age,
Or purchase your delight at such a rate,
As, for it, he himself must justly hate:
To make a child now swadled, to proceed
Man, and then shoot up in one beard and weed,
Past threescore years: or, with three rusty swords,
And help of some few foot-and-half-foot words,
Fight over York, and Lancasters long jars,
And in the Tyring house bring wounds to scars.
He rather prays, you will be pleas'd to see
One such to day, as other plays should be;
Where neither Chorus wafts you o're the seas,
Nor creaking Throne comes down, the boys to please;
Nor nimble Squib is seen, to make afeard
The Gentlewomen; nor roul'd Bullet heard
To say, it Thunders; nor tempestuous Drum
Rumbles, to tell you when the Storm doth come;
But Deeds, and Language, such as men do use:
And Persons, such as Comœdy would chuse,
When she would shew an Image of the Times,
And sport with Humane Follies, not with Crimes.
Except, we make 'em such by loving still
Our popular Errors, when we know th' are ill.
I mean such Errors as you'll all confess
By laughing at them, they deserve no less:
Which when you heartily do, there's hope left, then,
You, that have so grac'd Monsters, may like Men.
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