ABSTRACT
Of his fourteen extant plays 'of the comic thread', Jonson designated only three as 'comical satires', Every Man out of his Humour, Cynthia 's Revels and Poetaster. The others he referred to simply as comedies. Through the mouth of Cordatus in the Induction to Every Man out of his Humour, Jonson tried to establish that this play was 'strange, and of a particular kind by itself, somewhat like Old Comedy': the Aristophanic prototype of formal Roman satire, in other words . This in itself sets the play apart from its predecessor Every Man in his Humour, which has none of the distinctive marks of formal satire. In fact the links between these two dramas are purely extrinsic, resulting from two of Jonson's classic post hoc decisions, first to give Every Man in his Humour a special and spurious status as his first 'real' play, and, second, to capitalize on the interest aroused by Every Man in his Humour by closely echoing its title in the subsequent work. In reality, then, although the similarity of the two titles has led to the plays being taken as a pair there is the strongest possible break between them. Jonson's initial experiments with the comedy of humours had alerted him to their potential as agents of comic and satiric enquiry. In refining and extending the concept of humours while sacrificing none of its flexibility, Jonson wrote himself into a new and distinctively different phase of his career. In the first of these two plays he glimpsed the link between humours and satire; in the second, he forged the humours into an unprecedentedly effective satiric weapon.
