Ben Jonson’s Imitation Games

Abstract

Abstract This chapter considers why sartorial affectation holds exemplary status as a “humor” to be purged through humiliating exposure in humors comedies. This exemplarity carries over to city comedy’s depiction of masculinity when Ben Jonson creates a bridge between the genres in his Every Man in His Humour. The play has been traditionally understood as drawing on humoral theory to reaffirm class hierarchies and align masculinity with competitive individualism. However, this chapter demonstrates that when this play is situated in relation to other humors comedies by George Chapman as well as Jonson’s other non-dramatic writings, the distinction between the authentic masculinity of the city gallant, true poet, and trickster servant and its inauthentic imitation in the gull, plagiarist, and braggart soldier falls apart. The chapter draws on the overlap of accounts of nonnormative embodiment within disability and queer theory to help reveal that Jonson’s play encourages a broader range of acceptable variations in masculine embodiment than modern post-Cartesian forms of selfhood permit. These nonstandard forms of embodiment, in turn, are the basis for attachments between men and attachments to the objects of material culture, especially clothing.