Humoralism and Poverty in Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour

Through a reading of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour, this article looks at how city comedy combines discourses on poverty, social (dis)order, and the humors in order to negotiate the place of dispossessed labor within England’s new economy. Jonson’s play is especially sensitive to the experience of vagrancy, using humoralism to depict vagrant subjectivity as an internalization of London’s increasingly harsh and chaotic socioeconomic environment. By exploring the tense relationship between members of London’s dominant classes and the humoral vagrants of the play, this essay seeks to understand how the dramatic representation of the humors – in their domestic, sexual, and economic forms -- allows vagrant subjectivity and agency to emerge out of class antagonism. The article focuses on Brainworm, the deceitful servant who performs a variety of identities in an effort to avoid unemployment and poverty. By translating poverty into humoral discourse, the play, through the figure of Brainworm, explores the subjective dimensions of poverty and dispossession, representing rogue deception as a skillful endeavor, a process of self-crafting, opposing the early modern trend that saw the increasing objectification and brutalization of England’s vagrant population. The article therefore seeks to expand our understanding of the social dimensions of early modern humoralism by reading poverty and economic necessity as the limit point of humoral discourse, as the point at which social and bodily order is undermined by the basic need to survive.