Comedy of humours

[1][2] This comic technique may be found in Aristophanes, but the English playwrights Ben Jonson and George Chapman popularised the genre in the closing years of the sixteenth century.

In Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (acted 1598), which made this type of play popular, all the words and acts of Kitely are controlled by an overpowering suspicion that his wife is unfaithful; George Downright, a country squire, must be "frank" above all things; the country gull in town determines his every decision by his desire to "catch on" to the manners of the city gallant.

[1] It combatted the competing romantic comedy, as developed by William Shakespeare.

[3] The satiric purpose of the comedy of humours and its realistic method led to more serious character studies with Jonson’s 1610 play The Alchemist.

The name derives from the then-prevalent concept of bodily humours that controlled emotional disposition, but were also associated with psychological characteristics;[2] the result was a system that was quite subtle in its capacity for describing types of personality.