Greene, in his admonition to his brother sinners of the stage, tells them that "there is an vpstart crow beautified with our feathers an absolute Johannes factotum, in his own conceyt the onely Shake-scene in a countrey," and in truth these olden writers are principally interesting as having laid the foundations upon which Shakespeare built some of his earliest plays. The genius of our great dramatist was essentially poetic, and some of his plays, which we now call comedies, were originally entitled "histories." How seldom do we hear any of his humorous passages quoted, or find them reckoned among our household words! From some of his observations we might think he was altogether averse from jocosity. Henry V. says

In "Much ado about Nothing," Beatrice speaks as follows—

But notwithstanding all this condemnation Beatrice is herself the liveliest character in Shakespeare, and her lady's wit is some of the best he shows—

In the "Merchant of Venice" Lorenzo thus answers Launcelot—

Again Lorenzo—

"Oh, dear discretion, how his words are suited,
The fool hath planted in his memory
An army of good words: And I do know
A many fools that stand in better place
Garnished like him, that for a tricksie word
Defie the matter."

Comedians from Aristophanes downwards have been wont to complain in one place of that which they adopt in another—their object not being to adopt fixed principles so much as to show the varying shades of human thought. Shakespeare required something light to bring his deep reflections into bolder relief, and therefore frequently had recourse to humour. We are not surprised that he had no very high estimate of it, when we find him so much dependant upon "the alms-basket of words." There is so much of this in his plays, that it is almost superfluous to quote, but a few instances may be taken at random. Falstaff to Poins—

Falstaff to Prince Henry. Act I. Scene II.

In Love's Labour Lost. Act I. Scene II.

In the musicians scene, in Romeo and Juliet, Act IV. Scene V. we find—

We may here observe that the puns of Shakespeare are never of the "atrocious" class; there is always something to back them up, and give them a shadow of probability. The tournaments of humour which he is fond of introducing, although good in effect upon the stage, are not favourable for any keen wit. Such conflicts must be kept up by artifice, cannot flow from natural suggestion, and degenerate into a mere splintering of words. One cause of the absence of "salt" in his writings is that he was not of a censorious or cynical spirit; another was that his turn of mind was rather sentimental than gay. Shakespeare evidently knew there might be humour among men of attainments, for he writes,—

"None are so surely caught, when they are catched,
As wit turned fool; folly is wisdom hatched,
Hath wisdom's warrant and the help of school
And wits' own grace to grace a learned fool."

But with him, those who indulge in it are clowns, simpletons, and profligates. Few of his grand characters are witty. Perhaps he was conscious of the great difficulty there would be in finding suitable sayings for them. Indelicacy and hostility would have to be alike avoided, and thus when the sage Gonzalo is to be amusing, he sketches a Utopian state of things, which he would introduce were he King of the island on which they are cast. He would surpass the golden age. Sebastian and Antonio laugh at him, and cry "God save the King," Alonzo replies "Prythee, no more, thou dost talk nothing (i.e. nonsense) to me." Gonzalo replies that he did so purposely "to minister occasion to those gentlemen, who are of such sensible and nimble lungs that they always use to laugh at nothing." They retort that they were not laughing at his humour, but at himself. "Who," he replies, "in this merry fooling am nothing to you" meaning, apparently, that he is acting the fool intentionally and out of his real character.

Hamlet, when his mind is distraught, "like sweet bells jangled," is allowed to indulge in a little punning, and Biron is humorous, for which he is reproached by Rosalind, who tells him that he is one

"Whose influence is begot of that loose grace
Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools;"

that only silly thoughtless people admire wit, and that

"A jest's prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it—never in the tongue
Of him that makes it."

Here the variable character of humour is recognised, but it is not to be supposed that Rosalind's arguments were intended to be strictly correct. Very much must depend upon the form in which a jest is produced, and without the tongue of the utterer, it cannot exist though the sympathy of the listener is required for its appreciation.

In Shakespeare's plays, and in most comedies we find humour in the representation of ludicrous characters. Words, which would be dull enough in ordinary cases, become highly amusing when coming from men of peculiar views. Sometimes people are represented as perpetually riding their hobby, or harping on one favourite subject. We have an instance of this in Holophernes and his pedantry; and the conversation between the two gravediggers in Hamlet, is largely indebted for its relish to the contrast between the language of the men and their occupation. In the same way, the ignorance and misrepresentations of rustics in play acting, which Shakespeare had probably often observed in the provinces—gives zest to the exaggerated caricature in "Midsummer Night's Dream."—

When the play comes on for performance and Snug the joiner roars "like any sucking dove," the Duke Theseus remarks—

The enigmas and logical quibbles, which he occasionally intermingles with his verbal conceits, remind us of the old philosophic paradoxes. Sometimes a riddle is attempted; thus, he asks—"What was a month old at Cain's birth, that's not five weeks old now?" Answer—"The Moon."

Taken generally, there is such a remarkable uniformity in Shakespeare's humour as must acquit him of all charge of plagiarism in this respect, and may go some way towards proving the general originality of his plays. Certainly, verbal conceits were then in high favour, and the character of Shakespeare's humour is only one of many proofs that pleasantry had not at this time reached its highest excellence.

To Shakespeare's kindness and discretion Ben Jonson owed his first introduction to dramatic fame. The young poet had presented "Every Man in his Humour," to one of the leading players of the company to which Shakespeare belonged, and the comedian upon reading it, determined to refuse it. Jonson's fate was trembling in the balance; he was a struggling man, and, had he been unsuccessful, might have eventually, returned to his bricklayer's work, but he was destined to be raised up for his own benefit and that of others. Shakespeare was present when his play was about to be rejected, asked to be allowed to look over it, and, at once recognising the poet's talent, recommended it to his companions. From that moment Jonson's career was secured. But he was never destined to acquire the lasting fame of Shakespeare. With him the stream of Comedy was losing its deep and strong reflections, and beginning to flow in a swifter and shallower current, meandering through labyrinths of court and city life. Perhaps, also, his large amount of humorous illustration, which must have been mostly ephemeral, tended to cut short his fame. The best of it is interwoven with his several designs and plots, as where, in "The Alchemist," a gentleman leaves his house in town, and his housekeeper fills it with fortune-tellers vagabonds, who carry on their trade there; and in "The Fox" a rich and childless man is courted by his friends, from whom he obtains presents under the pretence that he will leave them his property. In this last play a parasite is introduced, and in general these plays abound with classical allusions, sometimes very incongruously intermixed with modern concerns. An indiscriminating admiration of ancient literature and art was as much one of the features of the day, as was its crude humour—a cleverness joined to folly and attributed to boobies and simpletons. Much of this jocosity scarcely deserves the name of humour, and we may remark that in Jonson's time it did not receive it. With him humour is thus defined—

"To be a quality of air or water,
And in itself holds these two properties,
Moisture and fluxure.... Now thus far
It may by metaphor apply itself
Unto the general disposition:
As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his power."

The social peculiarities of the day are frequently alluded to by Jonson. In "Every Man out of his own Humour," we have complete directions for the conduct of a gentleman of the time. Smoking, then lately introduced, is especially mentioned as one of the necessities of foppery. Cob, a water-bearer says, "Ods me, I marle what pleasure or felicity they have in taking this roguish tobacco. It's good for nothing but to choke a man, and fill him full of smoke and embers: there were four died out of one house last week with taking of it, and two more the bell went for yesternight; one of them they say will never 'scape it: he cast up a bushel of soot yesterday."

In Cynthia's Revels a courtier is thus described—

"He walks most commonly with a clove or toothpick in his mouth: he is the very mint of compliment, all his behaviours are pointed: his face is another volume of essays, and his beard is Aristarchus. He speaks all cream skimmed, and more affected than a dozen waiting women. The other gallant is his zany, and doth most of these tricks after him, sweats to imitate him in everything to a hair, except his beard, which is not yet extant."

But the stamp of the age is especially prominent in the constant recurrence of verbal conceits. Jonson was fond of coining words, and of using such as are long and little known. He evidently found this a successful kind of humour, and may have partly imitated Plautus—

Lady Politick Would-be, to Volpone, supposed sick—

Seed pearl were good now, boiled with syrup of apples,
Tincture of gold, and coral, citron pills,
Your elicampane root, myrobalanes—

In "The Alchemist" Subtle says to Face,

Sirrah my varlet, stand you forth and speak to him
Like a philosopher: answer in the language,
Name the vexations and the martyrizations
Of metals in the work.
Face. Sir, putrefaction,
Solution, ablution, sublimation,
Cohabation, calcination, ceration and
Fixation.

From "Every Man out of his Humour."

The following extracts will give a slight idea of Ben Jonson's varied talent. At the conclusion of a play directed against plagiarists and libellers, he sums up—

"Blush, folly, blush! here's none that fears
The wagging of an ass's ears,
Although a wolfish case he wears.
Detraction is but baseness varlet
And apes are apes, though clothed in scarlet."

From "The Alchemist."

Tribulation. What makes the devil so devilish, I would ask you.
Sathan our common enemy, but his being
Perpetually about the fire, and boiling
Brimstone and arsenic?...
Fastidious. How like you her wit.
Macilente. Her ingenuity is excellent, Sir.
Fast. You see the subject of her sweet fingers there (the viol)
oh, she tickles it so that—she makes it laugh most divinely—I'll
tell you a good jest just now, and yourself shall say it's a good
one. I have wished myself to be that instrument, I think a thousand
times, and not so few by heaven.

The two following are from "Bartholomew Fair."

Ben Jonson has a strange, and I believe original conceit of introducing persons to explain their plays, and make remarks on the characters. Sometimes many interruptions of this kind occur in the course of a drama, affording variety and amusement to the audience, or the reader. In "Midsummer's Night's Dream" we have the insertion of a play within a play. The following taken from Jonson's epigrams have fine complexity, and show a certain tinge of humour.

The Hour Glass.

"Consider this small dust here in the glass,
By atoms moved:
Could you believe that this the body was
Of one that loved;
And in his mistress' flame, playing like a fly,
Was turned to cinders by her eye:
Yes; and in death as like unblest,
To have't exprest,
Ev'n ashes of lovers find no rest."

My Picture.—Left in Scotland.

I now think Love is rather deaf than blind,
For else it could not be
That she,
Whom I adore so much, should so slight me,
And cast my suit behind;
I'm sure my language to her was as sweet,
And every close did meet
In sentence of as subtle feet,
As hath the youngest, he,
That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree.
Oh! but my conscious fears
That fly my thoughts between
Tell me that she hath seen
My hundreds of gray hairs,
Told seven and forty years,
Read so much waste, as she cannot embrace
My mountain belly, and my rocky face,
And all these through her eyes have stopt her ears.

Although fond of indulging in strong language, Jonson is scarcely ever guilty of any really coarse allusion—he expresses his aversion from anything of the kind, and this in the age in which he lived, argued great refinement of feeling.

In Fletcher we mark a progress in humour. Ben Jonson was so personal that he made enemies, and was suspected of attacking Inigo Jones and others, but Fletcher was general in his references, and merely ridiculed the manners of the age. The classic element disappears, and quibbling and playing with words—so fashionable in Shakespeare's time—is not found in this author, whose humour has more point, and generally more sarcasm, but of a refined character.

The name of Fletcher is invariably connected with Beaumont. The two young men lived together in the same house, and it is even said wore each other's clothes. But Beaumont only lived to be twenty-nine, and has left little in comparison with the voluminous works of Fletcher. They were both born in a good position, and, mingling in the fashionable society of their day, filled their pages with love intrigues, in colours not then offensive. Fletcher never married, and those who look for contrasts between fathers and children may learn that his father, who was Bishop of London, was suspended by Elizabeth for taking a second wife. Our author is said to have been himself a comedy, and his death, if we can believe the story, was consistent with his gay life, for we are told that, through waiting in London for a new suit of clothes, he died of cholera, which was raging there at the time.

Here is a specimen of his sketches—the character of a rich usurer—

Sanchio. Thou'art very brave.
Cacafogo. I've reason; I have money.
San. Is money reason?
Cac. Yes, and rhyme too, captain.
If you've no money you're an ass.
San. I thank you.
Cac. You've manners! ever thank him that has money.
San. Wilt thou lend me any?
Cac. Not a farthing, captain; captains are casual things.
San. Why, so are all men:
Thou shalt have my bond.
Cac. Nor bonds, nor fetters, captain:
My money is my own; I make no doubt on't.
Juan. What dost thou do with it?
Cac. Put it to pious uses—
Buy wine—
Juan. Are you for the wars, Sir?
Cac. I am not poor enough to be a soldier,
Nor have I faith enough to ward a bullet;
This is no living for a trench, I take it.
Juan. You have said wisely.
Cac. Had you but money
You'd swear it, colonel. I'd rather drill at home
A hundred thousand crowns, and with more honour,
Than exercise ten thousand fools with nothing;
A wise man safely feeds, fools cut their fingers.

The prurient coarseness of Fletcher is due to the peculiar licentiousness of the period. In his plays, although kissing is sometimes provocative of jealousy, it is generally regarded, even by persons of rank, as of less importance than it is now by boys and girls, who play "Kiss in the ring." In "Rule a wife and have a wife" Margarita says to the Duke

"I may kiss a stranger,
For you must be so now."

This lady is desirous of obtaining a very easy husband, who will let her do whatever she likes. A friend says she has found one for her in Leon, who is forthwith introduced. Margarita puts some questions to him to ascertain his docility, and then says—

"Let me try your kisses—
How the fool shakes!—I will not eat you, Sir.
Beshrew my heart, he kisses wondrous manly!
You must not look to be my master, Sir,
Nor talk i' th' house as though you wore the breeches,
No, nor command in anything. . . You must not be saucy,
No, nor at any time familiar with me;
Scarce know me when I call not."

After trying and approving his kisses again, she tells him that he is not to start or be offended if he sees her kissing anyone else. He is to keep in the cellar, when not wanted. The proposed husband promises to be most obedient and accommodating in everything, but as soon as he is accepted and the ceremony performed, he appears in a totally different character. He informs his wife, in whose magnificent house he goes to live—

You've nothing to do here, Madam,
But as a servant to sweep clean the lodgings,
And at my farther will to do me service.
Margarita (to her servants.) Get me my coach!
Leon. Let me see who dare get it
Till I command; I'll make him draw your coach
And eat your couch, (which will be hard duty).

On Cacafogo making some slighting remark, this gentle individual exclaims—

"Peace! dirt and dunghill!
I will not lose mine anger on a rascal;
Provoke me more,—I will beat thy blown body
Till thou rebound'st again like a tennis-ball."

In "Monsieur Thomas" we have the following jovial passage—

Francisco. What hast thou there? a julep?
Hylas. He must not touch it;
'Tis present death.
Thomas. You are an ass, a twirepipe,
A Jeffery John Bo-peep! Thou minister?
Thou mend a left-handed pack-saddle? Out! puppy!
My Friend, Frank, but a very foolish fellow.
Dost thou see that bottle? view it well.
Fran. I do, Tom.
Tho. There be as many lives in it as a cat carries;
'Tis everlasting liquor.
Fran. What?
Tho. Old sack, boy.
Old reverend sack; which for ought that I can read yet
Was the philosopher's stone the wise King Ptolomus
Did all his wonders by.
Fran. I see no harm, Tom.
Drink with a moderation.
Tho. Drink with sugar,
Which I have ready here, and here a glass, boy.

---

Hang up your juleps, and your Portugal possets,
Your barley broths and sorrel soups; they are mangy
And breed the scratches only: Give me sack!

The devil now becomes a constant resource for humour. In "The Chances" Antonio has lost his jewels. His servant suggests that the thieves have "taken towards the ports."

Ant. Get me a conjurer,
One that can raise a water-devil. I'll port 'em.
Play at duck and drake with my money? Take heed, fiddler,
I'll dance ye by this hand: your fiddlestick
I'll grease of a new fashion, for presuming
To meddle with my de-gambos! get me a conjurer,
Inquire me out a man that lets out devils.

Beaumont and Fletcher were great conversationalists, their racy raillery is said to have been as good as their plays. They were members of the celebrated Mermaid Club in Fleet Street, a centre where the wits of the day sharpened their humour in friendly conflict. In his epistle to Ben Jonson, Beaumont writes—

"What things have we seen
Done at the 'Mermaid!' heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whom they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life."

Here it was that Shakespeare and Jonson often contended, the former like "a light English man-of-war" the latter like "a high-built Spanish galleon."

To some portion of the seventeenth century, we must attribute those curious stories called "The Merry tales of the Wise Men of Gotham" although by some they have been attributed to Andrew Gotham, a physician of Henry VIII. They are said to have been suggested by a circumstance which occurred in the time of King John. He intended to pass through Gotham, a village in Northamptonshire, but the inhabitants placed some difficulties in his way. On his expressing his determination to carry out his project, and sending officers to make inquiries about the opposition offered, the inhabitants were seized with a panic and pretended to have lost their senses. This was the tradition upon which, in after-times, these tales were founded, and being unobjectionable they are well adapted for the nursery, but being mere exercises of ingenuity they afford but very slight pleasure to older minds. Although aimless, there is something clever in them. The Wise Men determine to hedge round a cuckoo to keep it in so that it should sing all the year. The bird seeing the hedge flies away. "A vengeance on her," say the Wise Men, "we made not the hedge high enough." There is the story of the young man, whose mother told him to throw sheep's eyes at his sweetheart, and who, literally, performed her bidding. One Good Friday the Men of Gotham consulted what to do with their red herrings, and other salt fish, and agreed to cart them into a pond that the number might increase next year. At the beginning of the next summer they drag the pond, and only find a great eel. "A mischief on him," they say, "he hath eaten up our fish." Some propose to chop him in pieces, but the rest think it would be best to drown him, so they throw him into another pond. Twelve men of Gotham go to fish, and some stand on dry land, and some in the water. And one says "We have ventured wonderfully in wading; I pray that none of us come home drowned." So they begin to count, and as each omits himself he can only count eleven, and so they go back to the water, and make great lamentation. A courtier, who meets them, convinces them of their mistake by laying his whip on each of them, who calls out in turn "Here's one," until twelve are counted. The minister of Gotham preaches that men should not drink in Lent. A man, who comes for absolution, and confesses to having been drunk in Lent, replies that fish should swim. "Yes," returns the priest, "but in water." "I cannot enjoin your prayer," he adds, "for you cannot say your Paternoster. It is folly to make you fast because you never get meat. Labour hard, and get a dinner on Sunday, and I will come and dine with you."

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