Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/111

Rh allied to the times."  Cordatus.  "You say well, but I would fain hear one of these autumn-judgments define once Quid sit comœdia?  If he cannot, let him concern himself with Cicero's definition, till he have strength to propose to himself a better, who would have a comedy to be imitatio vitæ, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis; a thing throughout pleasant and ridiculous, and accommodated to the correction of manners. If the maker have failed in any particular of this, they may worthily task him, but if not, why! be you that are for them silent." So Jonson condemns the comedy which had, with all its frequent absurdity, produced Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night, and defines his own endeavour.  Comedy was to be, in Mr Elton's happy phrase, "medicinal"; its work to purge the evil "humours" of society—its follies in the first instance, but in the greatest of his plays the scope was enlarged to include folly that has festered into crime.  Of the means by which this end was to be achieved Jonson's conception was equally definite.  A regular and elaborately constructed plot—deferential but not slavishly obedient to the Unities—exhibits a variety of characters, each the embodiment of a single humour or folly, suddenly, and when the "humours" are at the top of their bent, outwitted, befooled, and exposed.  The style, whether verse or prose be the medium, is a style "such as men do use," not heightened with poetical bombast; reproducing current slang, the technicalities of particular arts and professions, the cant of the beggar and the Puritan; but showing