Every Man in His Humour

All the available evidence indicates that the play was performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1598 at the Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch, London.

[2] A theatre legend first recorded in 1709 by Nicholas Rowe has it that Shakespeare advocated production of the play at a point when the company was about to reject it.

While this legend is unverifiable, there is no reason to doubt that Shakespeare was in the original cast, as claimed on the playlist in the 1616 edition.

The scene was a favourite, praised by Arthur Murphy and others; Kitely became one of Garrick's signature roles, and the play was never long out of his repertory.

Aided by Macready, Dickens took the faintly Dickensian role of Bobadill; George Cruikshank was Cob; John Forster played Kitely.

Bulwer-Lytton wrote a poem as prologue for an 1847 production; in addition to Browning, Tennyson and John Payne Collier attended.

In the subplot, a merchant named Kitely suffers intense jealousy, fearing that his wife is cuckolding him with some of the wastrels brought to his home by his brother-in-law, Wellbred.

The play works through a series of complications which culminate when the justice, Clement, hears and decides all of the characters' various grievances, exposing each of them as based in humour, misperception, or deceit.

He promises to present "deeds, and language, such as men do use:/ And persons, such as comedy would choose,/ When she would show an Image of the times,/ And sport with human follies, not with crimes."

It sticks quite carefully to the Aristotelian unities; the plot is a tightly woven mesh of act and reaction; the scenes a genial collection of depictions of everyday life in a large Renaissance city.

Critics of the nineteenth century tended to credit Jonson with the introduction of "humour" comedy into English literature.

David Garrick brought a revised version to the stage in 1751; the changes he made served chiefly to focus attention on the part of Kitely, which he played.