ABSTRACT
Every Man Out of His Humour’s opening discussion of the “humours” that define the play’s characters implicitly links those characteristics with Aristotle’s description of phauloi characters’ comic errors. Both are compulsive moral failings for which characters nonetheless remain responsible, and both are extremes that depart from a virtuous mean. Through the tricksters Carlo Buffone and Macilente, the play first exposes comic error by representing it in static, tableau-like scenes, and then corrects that error through hoaxes that leave the phauloi characters disgraced. Yet despite the play’s simplistic structure, it repeatedly questions the nature of dramatic representation and the degree to which the tricksters share the humours of those they expose. While Epicoene is a more urbane, new-comedic play, its phauloi characters share the humours basis of their counterparts in Every Man Out. Jonson portrays their error more subtly, though, through themes of painting and disguise, and inverted gender roles. While Truewit and Clerimont’s hoaxes succeed in exposing the fools’ errors, these tricksters lack a motive for their hoaxes. Their aimlessness leads to their own gulling by their fellow wit Dauphine.
