Although Philip Henslowe's Diary notes a performance of ‘The comodey of Umers’ as a new play on 11 May 1597, with eleven more performances recorded by July 13, he is apparently referring not to a play by Jonson but to George Chapman’s An Humorous Day’s Mirth. Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour seems to have been first acted in September of 1598 at the Curtain theatre in Shoreditch; a letter written by Toby Mathew to Dudley Carleton on 20 September describes how a German visitor lost 300 crowns at ‘a new play called Every man’s humour’ (CSPD 1598-1601, 97). According to John Aubrey, writing long after the event in the later seventeenth century, Jonson, having suffered previous failures at the Curtain, ‘undertook again to write a play and hit it admirably well, viz. Every man . . . which was his first good one’. David Kay (1970-71, 229) has put forward a well-reasoned argument that although Aubrey must be referring to Every Man In in 1598 rather than to Every Man Out in 1599, Every Man In enjoyed only a moderate success on stage and should not be touted as the play that (in C. H. Herford’s words) ‘placed Jonson at a stride in the foremost rank of English playwrights’ (H&S, 1.18). The Case is Altered, probably written originally for Pembroke’s Men in 1597, seems to have been a hit, and Chapman’s An Humorous Day’s Mirth similarly enjoyed a real success in that same year, so that by the time Jonson got around to writing Every Man In in 1598, this contribution to the comedy of humours had been significantly anticipated. Moreover, Every Man Out Of His Humour in 1599 was probably not the stage failure that stage historians have proclaimed it to be; instead, it seems to have ‘established Jonson as the leading humour satirist and began the literary reputation which encouraged him to leave the Globe for the Blackfriars’. Kay thus qualifies the presumed primacy of Every Man In among Jonson’s early comedies. It ‘attracted no special notice when it was first produced’ and ‘did not mark any sudden progress in his [Jonson’s] career as seen by his contemporaries’ (Kay, 1970-71, 224-31). Still, it seems to have enjoyed a moderate success, enough so that Jonson gave it pride of first place, in its revised form, in his 1616 folio.
Every Man In was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 4 August 1600, along with As You Like It, Henry the Fifth, and Much Ado About Nothing, all of them ‘My Lord Chamberlain’s men’s plays’. The first quarto of Every Man In appeared in 1601, offering the play to the reader ‘As it hath been sundry times publicly acted by the Right Honorable the Lord Chamberlain his Servants’ (title-page). A substantially revised edition appeared in the 1616 folio, advertised on its title-page as ‘A Comedy. Acted in the year 1598. By the then Lord Chamberlain his Servants.’ (The reference here is to performance of the quarto Italian version in 1598, even if the phrasing elides the gap between it and the folio version.) A list of actors in the folio text indicates that the original performance took place ‘With the allowance of the Master of Revels’.
On the verso of its title-page, the 1598 quarto lists the characters in two columns, reproduced here in modernized spelling:
The number and names of the Actors.
| Lorenzo Senior | Giuliano |
| Prospero | Lorenzo Junior |
| Thorello | Bianca |
| Stephano | Hesperida |
| Doctor Clement | Peto |
| Bobadilla | Matheo |
| Musco | Piso |
| Cob | Tib |
The list in the 1616 folio reads as follows, again in modernized spelling:
The Persons of the Play.
| Knowell, an old gentleman | Roger Formal, his clerk |
| Ed. Knowell, his son | Kitely, a merchant |
| Brainworm, the father’s man | Dame Kitely, his wife |
| Master Stephen, a country gull | Mistress Bridget, his sister |
| Downright, a plain squire | Cash, Kitely’s man |
| Wellbred, his half-brother. | Cob, a water-bearer |
| Justice Clement, an old merry magistrate | Captain Bobadill, a Paul’s man |
The 1616 folio text also contains, at the back of the play, the following cast list, below the announcement that ‘This Comedy was first acted in the year 1598, by the then Lord Chamberlain His Servants’. Abbreviations are here expanded:
The Principal Comedians were:
| William Shakespeare | Richard Burbage |
| Augustine Phillips | John Heminges |
| Henry Condell | Thomas Pope |
| William Sly | Christopher Beeston |
| William Kemp | John Duke |
Christopher Beeston may have been a hired man; he subsequently joined Worcester’s Men by 1602 and remained with this company when it became Queen Anne’s Men. He later became a leading actor and owned the Cockpit Theatre. John Duke acted with Worcester’s/Anne’s from 1602 to 1609. William Kemp or Kempe, the famous clown, appears to have left the Chamberlain’s Men in 1599. The others in the above list were well known and long-standing members of the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men. Sly died in 1608, having acted in Every Man In, Every Man Out, Sejanus, and Volpone. Shakespeare is named in the actor lists for Every Man In and Sejanus. Burbage, Condell, and Heminges acted in Every Man In, Every Man Out, Sejanus, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Catiline. Phillips is named in the actor lists for the first three of these Jonson plays; he died in 1605 (H&S, 9.259-63; Chambers, 1923, 2.295-350).
The fact that William Shakespeare's name heads the list of actors in the folio version of Every Man In, opposite that of Richard Burbage, has fuelled speculation (first proposed by Thomas Davies, 1785, 2.56) that Shakespeare took the part of Old Knowell; Kitely has also been proposed as a possibility. Such speculations are unsubstantial, as are most attempts on the part of T. W. Baldwin (1927) and others to assign acting roles to Shakespeare on the slender basis of stage traditions that he played ‘some kingly parts in sport’ (John Davies of Hereford, 1610-11, Epigr. 159), along with the Ghost in Hamlet (Rowe, 1709, 1.vi) and ‘a decrepit old man’ who was ‘carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among some company who were eating, and one of them sung a song’, presumably old Adam in As You Like It (William Oldys, quoted in Steevens, 1778, 1.204,, reporting what one of Shakespeare's younger brothers is said to have said. For these allusions to Shakespeare as an actor, see Chambers, 1930, 2.214, 265, and 278.) The ordering of names in the folio list may have little significance. Lorenzo Senior is not a leading role. Indeed, the play is designed for an ensemble acting company, with choice roles of more or less balanced length for about nine actor-sharers: Bobadilla, Musco, Thorello, Prospero, Lorenzo Senior, Lorenzo Junior, Cob, Doctor Clement, and Giuliano. Boys would have played the women’s parts, which are, characteristically for Jonson, less dominant. The relatively minor roles of Piso and Peto could have been doubled, or assigned to hired men. Would Burbage, as leading man, have preferred Bobadilla, or Musco, or Thorello? Was Will Kemp, as the company's leading clown, assigned Cob or Bobadilla? Scholarly guesswork favours Cob, because of the similarities to Bottom and Dogberry, but the fact is that we simply do not know.
Nicholas Rowe, in his ‘Some Account of the Life etc. of Shakespear’ prefixed to his edition of 1709, reports a tradition, handed down by word of mouth in the theatre, that Shakespeare intervened on Jonson's behalf when the Chamberlain’s Men had originally declined the opportunity to stage Every Man In because its author was ‘at that time altogether unknown to the world’. The persons ‘into whose hands it was put’, having ‘turned it carelessly and superciliously over’, were on the point of returning the play to Jonson ‘with an ill-natured answer, that it would be of no service to their company’, when Shakespeare, having ‘luckily cast his eye upon it’, persuaded his colleagues to change their minds. ‘After this’, Rowe concludes, ‘they were professed friends, though I don’t know whether the other [i.e. Jonson] ever made him an equal return of gentleness and sincerity’ (1.xii-xiii: see Electronic Edition, Early Lives). The account, though unsupported by other evidence, quickly became part of a legend about differences in temperament between two authors, one of them genial and visionary, the other judgmental, envious, and classically severe.
The play was favoured with a court performance by the King’s Men on 2 February 1605; the account of the Office of Revels for this date notes a performance ‘By His Majesties Players’, ‘On Candlemas night. A playe Euery on In his Vmor’ (A.O. 3/908/13). The text may have been the quarto or the folio version or some intermediate stage of revision; the record of performance does not specify. At all events, the quarto was replaced on stage by the folio text, if not already by 1605, and it was in this form (though often severely adapted) that the play enjoyed considerable popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, doing much to establish Jonson’s literary reputation.
The King’s Men gave a benefit performance at the Blackfriars playhouse on 17 February 1631 for Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, as an instalment of their regular practice of giving the benefit of two performances to Herbert every year, one in the summer at the Globe and one in the winter at the Blackfriars. Herbert’s office book notes the occasion as follows: ‘Received of Mr. Taylor and Lowins, in the name of their company, for the benefit of my winter day, upon the second day of Ben Jonson’s play of Every Man In His Humour, this 18 day of February, 1630 [i.e. 1631] –12l. 4s. 0d’ (Bawcutt, 1996a). Herbert’s records for the years 1628 to 1633 list ten plays as performed by the King’s Men, with Every Man In in fourth place in earnings: it was outstripped by Fletcher and Massinger’s The Custom of the Country, Fletcher’s The Wild Goose Chase, and Jonson’s own The Alchemist, but did better than Shakespeare’s Richard II and Othello (Bentley, 1941-68, 1.28-9; Miola, 2000, 42).
The play was not forgotten in the Restoration period; it was an ‘old stock play’ (according to John Downes, 1708) allotted in January 1669 to the King’s Company under Thomas Killigrew at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. Prior to that date, on 9 February 1667, Samuel Pepys noted in his diary that he had ‘read a piece of a play, Every Man In His Humour, wherein is the greatest propriety of speech that ever I read in my life’, but his diary stops at about the time the play was acquired by Killigrew, so that no performance is recorded. Presumably Pepys would have gone to a performance with high expectations. John Dryden, in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (published 1668) and The Dramatic Poetry of the Last Age, characterized Every Man In as Jonson’s first successful play (albeit marred by what Dryden calls ‘clenches’, or puns). In Dryden’s view, Every Man In was one of the plays for which Jonson deserved to be celebrated as ‘the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had’. If Shakespeare was for Dryden the Homer of the English literary tradition, then ‘Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing’. Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, wrote an epilogue for a performance in March 1670, ironically inveighing against the acting company for having chosen a play set entirely in England in which ‘No gods descend, nor dancing devils rise’, etc., and then bringing Jonson’s Ghost onstage to curse those benighted critics who had condemned Sejanus and Catiline. (The epilogue was printed in A Collection of Poems Written upon Several Occasions by Several Persons, 1673, 29-32, and in the Earl of Dorset’s Poems upon Several Occasions, 1675, 29.) According to Gerard Langbaine (1691, 290), Every Man In ‘was received with general applause’ in the Restoration years, though records of actual performance are scarce in comparison with those for Epicene, Volpone, Bartholomew Fair, and The Alchemist.
A revival at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on January 11, 12, and 13, 1725 by John Rich was advertised in the Daily Post of 12 January as ‘never acted before’ and ‘revised with alterations’. This production extensively revised the text by excising seven characters (Matthew, Cash, Cob, Formal, Bridget, Tib, and Wellbred’s servant) to make room for three new characters named Marwit, Clara, and Lucinda. The cast list (Noyes, 1935, 250-1) included the following:
| James Quin | Old Knowell |
| Lacy Ryan | Edward Knowell |
| James Spiller | Brainworm |
| William Bullock | Stephen |
| Charles Hulet | Downright |
| Thomas Walker | Wellbred |
| Christopher Bullock | Justice Clement |
| John Hippesley | Kitely |
| Mrs Bullock | Dame Kitely |
| Egleton | Marwit |
| Mrs Moffett | Clara |
| Mrs Butcher | Lucinda |
| John Hall | Bobadill |
William Bullock, aged sixty-eight, was better known for playing older men. Hippesley was more usually cast as the buffoon. The receipts for three nights’ performances were £51 18s, £28, and (a benefit night) £100 15s 6d.
David Garrick, at Drury Lane in 1751 and then in every season but three until 1776, excelled as Kitely: he appeared in that role in all but one of eighty-two performances. The popularity of Every Man In during this period was truly extraordinary: Noyes (1935) reports that not a year went by without a performance in one or the other of London’s theatres, averaging six performances a season. The cast for the original production on 29 November included the following:
| Edward Berry | Old Knowell |
| David Ross | Edward Knowell |
| Richard Yates | Brainworm |
| Edward Shuter | Stephen |
| Richard Winstone | Downright |
| William Palmer | Wellbred |
| Taswell | Justice Clement |
| Costello | Formal |
| David Garrick | Kitely |
| Mrs Genevieve Ward | Dame Kitely |
| Miss Minors | Bridget |
| Henry Vaughan | Matthew |
| Charles Blakes | Cash |
| Thomas Mozeen | Cob |
| Mrs Cross | Tib |
| Henry Woodward | Bobadill |
Garrick substantially cut and restructured the folio text into fewer scenes (from thirty-three down to sixteen) with a view to highlighting the more refined and pathos-laden portions of the script, not coincidentally highlighting his own role in the process. As he explained, ‘the distance of 150 years from the time of writing it [has] occasioned some of the humours to be too obsolete and dangerous to be ventured in the representation at present’ (1752 edition, cited in Noyes, 1935, 259). According to an announcement printed in The General Advertiser for 29 November 1751, ‘the characters will be dressed in the old English manner’. As Herford and Simpson note (9.172), this is ‘an early example, perhaps even the earliest, of the use of historic costume at the theatre’. A painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, now at Windsor Castle, shows Garrick as Kitely in ‘a Spanish cloak, a satin doublet embroidered and slashed with white lace, a pointed lace collar, with a dark wig parted down the middle and fuzzed out at the sides’ (H&S, 9.172; see the reproduction in the present Performance Archive; it also can be found in the ODNB). The artistic intent, as a prologue by the future Poet Laureate William Whitehead put it, was to urge audiences to be tolerant and even enthusiastic about a play now being rescued from the occasional barbarities of the Elizabethan original. ‘Yet let not prejudice infect your mind’, the Prologue insists, ‘Nor slight the gold, because not quite refined; / With no false niceness this performance view, / Nor damn for low whate’er is just and true’. Out went most of Cob’s earthy humour about fasting days and herring ancestry (1.4, 3.4), together with all that was considered indecorously bawdy. Gone too were topical references to the London scene of 1598, including the mention of ‘Drake’s old ship at Deptford’ (1.3), the Windmill tavern, the ‘Spital’, the seedy neighbourhood of ‘Pict-hatch’ (1.2), and the like, along with Jonson’s mordant observations on the contemporary literary scene: ‘Go by, Hieronimo’ (The Spanish Tragedy), Matthew’s plagiarisms from Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (4.2), and still more. Garrick issued no fewer than fifteen editions of the play between 1752 and 1757, each with its own alterations and additions, some of them omitting entirely such secondary characters as Cob, Tib, Formal, Cash, and even Matthew. Instead, Garrick’s versions melodramatically played up Kitely’s jealous rages and eventual repentance for his folly, in a portraiture that was at once comic and probingly psychological.
Garrick’s work with Every Man In was greeted by a nearly universal acclaim. There were nine performances in 1751, ten the next year, and six apiece in 1753, 1754, and 1755, all at Drury Lane, outdistancing during this period every other Jonson play. Theophilus Cibber, ordinarily no great admirer of Garrick, declared Garrick’s performance as Kitely to be ‘so excellent a piece of nature – so truly comic – it makes amends for all the farce with which that indelicate piece of low humour abounds’ (Two Dissertations on the Theatres, cited in Noyes, 1935, 267). Obviously Cibber was in accord with Garrick’s desire to purge Every Man In of its alleged coarseness, in much the way that Shakespeare’s texts were also being given the new refinement that the eighteenth century so generally desired. Horace Walpole thought Garrick’s performance to be ‘as capital and perfect as action could be’ (Plays of Garrick, 1982, 6.372, cited in Miola, 43). Other actors came in for warm praise as well, including Henry Woodward as Bobadill (see the engraving in the Performance Archive) and Ned Shuter as Stephen. Indeed, Woodward was so funny in the role of Bobadill that when he amused the acting company during a morning rehearsal with his improvising, Garrick (who had been absent up to this point) came unperceived into the playhouse and was so taken with Woodward’s interpretation that he insisted that it be kept (Davies, 1783-4, 2.69). Charles Churchill, ordinarily hostile toward Woodward’s acting style, allowed that ‘Hence he in Bobadill such praises bore, / Such worthy praises; Kitely scarce had more’ (The Rosciad, 1761, in Poetical Works, 1892, 1.393-4). Ned Shuter, also singled out for criticism on other occasions, earned from The Rational Rosciad, by ‘F– B– L–’, 1767, the following tribute: ‘Shuter, the muse a perfect master deems, / Who is in every part the thing he seems . . . What beauties he exhibits to the sight / When Master Stephen is in fearful plight’ (p. 30, quoted in H&S, 9.176-7). In Arthur Murphy’s opinion (1801, 1.208), ‘a comedy so completely acted was hardly ever seen on the English stage’ (Noyes, 1935, 265).
The production was taken on tour in 1752 and 1754. At Richmond (in Surrey) on 15 July 1752 the cast included the following (Avery, 1937):
| John Burton | Old Knowell |
| Scrase | Edward Knowell |
| Ned Shuter | Brainworm |
| Cross | Stephen |
| Thomas Davies | Downright |
| Ackman | Wellbred |
| Phillips | Justice Clement |
| Cross | Kitely |
| Miss Ibbot | Dame Kitely |
| Miss Helm | Bridget |
| Henry Vaughan | Matthew |
| Macgeorge | Cash |
| Charles Blakes | Bobadill |
The same cast performed the play at the Twickenham Theatre on 21 July. At the Jacob’s Wells Theatre, Bristol, on 2 August 1754, in a benefit performance for Charles Blakes, the cast included:
| Edward Berry | Old Knowell |
| Thomas Mozeen | Edward Knowell |
| Barrington | Brainworm |
| Green | Stephen |
| Richard Winstone | Downright |
| White | Wellbred |
| Arthur | Justice Clement |
| William Palmer | Kitely |
| Mrs Bland | Dame Kitely |
| Mrs Simson | Bridget |
| William Smith | Matthew |
| Olivier | Cash |
| Cox | Cob |
| Mrs Pit | Tib |
| Charles Blakes | Bobadill |
Henry Woodward had left Drury Lane for Covent Garden in 1758, at which point Richard Yates, originally in the role of Brainworm, shifted over to Bobadill. Garrick’s own final appearance was on 25 April 1776.
Not to be outdone, Covent Garden staged the play some seventy-four times during this same twenty-five-year period from 1751 to 1776. (See the Performance Calendar, Electronic Edition, for detailed listings.) William Smith was Kitely at Covent Garden in October 1762; subsequently he moved to Drury Lane, and won much praise in the part. Charles Churchill lauded him in The Rosciad (Poetical Works, 1. 627) as ‘Smith the genteel, the airy, and the smart’. The cast for the 1762 revival at Covent Garden, opening October 25 and running for sixteen nights, included the following:
| Luke Sparks | Old Knowell |
| Dyer | Edward Knowell |
| John Dunstall | Brainworm |
| John Walker | Downright |
| Mattocks | Wellbred |
| Marten | Justice Clement |
| William Smith | Kitely |
| Miss Miller | Bridget |
| Hayes | Matthew |
| Perry | Cash |
| Buck | Cob |
| Mrs Pitt | Tib |
| Henry Woodward | Bobadill |
With Henry Woodward at Covent after 1758, and with Shuter, Costollo, and Mrs Ward also acting at Covent Garden at the time of the play’s revival in 1762, performances at Drury Lane lagged behind. A performance at Drury Lane on 22 May 1766 was the first there in three years. And then from 9 October 1767 until 25 April 1776, although Drury Lane staged Every Man In some nineteen times, Covent Garden put on roughly twice as many performances during that same period. Still, the combined roster of performance at Drury Lane and Covent Garden during this era is indeed something of a record, outdistancing all rivals. Woodward, as Bobadill at both theatres, acted in Every Man In more often than any other actor, with a total of 131 performances as compared with ninety for Garrick. Edward Shuter starred as Stephen in both theatres over a period of twelve years with no rival in the role. Even after Garrick’s last performance of Kitely in 1776, the play was performed some twenty-eight times down through the end of the century, and continued to hold an occasional place in the repertory in the new century. To be sure, the popularity was largely owing to a remarkable series of star performances. Critics sometimes complained of the play itself; The General Evening Post, 13-16 February 1773, denounced it as a ‘heap of theatrical rubbish’ redeemed only by the performances of Garrick, Woodward, and Shuter (H&S, 9.177-8, Noyes, 1935, 288). William Smith glittered in the role of Kitely, appearing in that role at Drury Lane for sixteen performances from 2 January to 23 May in 1778. Meantime, in the 1780s and 1790s, Every Man In disappeared from Covent Garden’s repertory until it was revived there on 15 May 1798, with Joseph George Holman as Kitely, J. S. Munden as Justice Clement, and John Fawcett as Bobadill.
The cast list for Bell’s Edition of the play published in 1776 gives some indication of how the rival companies cast parts for the play in these competitive years:
| Drury Lane | Covent Garden | |
| Hirst | Thomas Hull | Old Knowell |
| James Aickin | L. Lewes | Edward Knowell |
| Robert Baddeley | John Dunstall | Brainworm |
| James William Dodd | Edward Shuter | Stephen |
| Robert Bransby | Gardiner | Downright |
| John Palmer | Mattocks | Wellbred |
| William Parsons | Kniveton | Justice Clement |
| James Wright | Baker | Formal |
| David Garrick | William Smith | Kitely |
| Mrs Greville | Mrs Bulkley | Dame Kitely |
| Mrs Davies | Mrs Baker | Bridget |
| John Burton | Cushing | Matthew |
| William Brereton | Thompson | Cash |
| John Moody | Bates | Cob |
| Mrs Bradshaw | Mrs Pitt | Tib |
| Thomas King | Henry Woodward | Bobadill |
Woodward’s last performance of Bobadill for Drury Lane had been on 31 May 1758; his defection to Covent Garden the following season was a major blow to Garrick’s company. He played Bobadill at Covent Garden until 21 January 1774. Shuter similarly had been famous as Stephen at Drury Lane from 1751 to 1754; then he too became a Covent Garden player. James William Dodd was Stephen at Drury Lane from 1766 to 1788. Mrs Baddeley had been the original Dame Kitely in October 1776 and kept the part for three years; thereafter she was succeeded by Miss Younge and Mrs Greville. The part of Matthew had originally gone to Wingfield in October 1776.
Garrick, having managed something of a comeback on 9 October 1767, played Kitely some nineteen times (in heavy competition with Covent Garden) until his final performance on 25 April, 1776. He died on 20 January, 1779, less than three years later.
One measure of Every Man In’s spectacular popularity, especially in the latter half of the eighteenth century, is to survey the number of printed editions. Noyes (1935) provides in an appendix a list of Jonson publications from 1660 to 1777. Every Man In took its place in collections of Jonson’s works in 1692, 1716, 1729, and 1756 (the Whalley edition). As an individual text, it appeared in 1752, 1754, 1755, 1759, 1768 (thrice), 1769, 1774, and 1776 (twice). All of these are associated with Garrick stage productions of the play; they are generally identified on their title pages as ‘With Alterations and Additions by D. Garrick’, usually adding ‘As it is Performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane’. We should note, however, that Every Man In was not included in select collections, such as in The Favourite and Celebrated Comedies of That Excellent Poet Ben Jonson in 1740 (Volpone, The Alchemist, Epicene, Bartholomew Fair), Three Plays of Ben Jonson in 1752 (Volpone, The Alchemist, Epicene), and Ben Jonson’s Plays: Viz., Volpone, The Alchemist, Epicene in 1766. Every Man In owed its success during this period to the theatrical genius of David Garrick.
George Frederick Cooke starred as Kitely in a production that was instrumental in retaining for Every Man In its sometimes faltering place in the revival repertory. He played Kitely at Covent Garden Theatre on 17 December 1800 and on into 1801 for ten performances in all, consciously offering himself as the inheritor of the Garrick tradition. William Dunlap, having seen Cooke in this role, offers the following praise: ‘Every Man In His Humour is the only comedy of Ben Jonson’s which holds its place on the stage, and with all its excellences, its diversity of character and of incident, its humour and its wit, requires the utmost efforts of the best comedians to keep it there’ (Dunlap, 1815, 1.176). Dunlap gives the following cast list for the original production:
| Murray | Old Knowell |
| Brunton | Edward Knowell |
| Joseph Shepherd Munden | Brainworm |
| Knight | Stephen |
| Waddy | Downright |
| H. Johnston | Wellbred |
| Emery | Justice Clement |
| Atkins | Formal |
| George F. Cooke | Kitely |
| Miss Chapman | Dame Kitely |
| Mrs St Ledger | Bridget |
| Simmons | Matthew |
| Farley | Cash |
| Thompson | Cob |
| Mrs Powell | Tib |
| John Fawcett | Bobadill |
Cooke also excelled as Falstaff in the Henry IV plays and in The Merry Wives, as Shylock, and as Iago. His Kitely was praised especially for the scene (3.3) in which Kitely is torn between a desire to share with Thomas Cash his jealous fears about his wife and his hesitation to disburden himself so candidly to a servant whom he cannot be sure will be safe with such a secret. Once again, the key to success appeared to have been a highly rearranged text designed to capitalize on the age’s taste for heightened emotional conflict seasoned with comic irony. John Fawcett played Bobadill, and J. S. Munden was Brainworm.
Mrs Inchbald’s British Theatre (1808, new edn. 1825), vol. 20, presents the play as acted during these years at both Drury Lane and Covent Garden, with the following cast lists:
| Drury Lane | Covent Garden | |
| Hurst | Murray | Old Knowell |
| James Aickin | Brunton | Edward Knowell |
| Robert Baddeley | J. S. Munden | Brainworm |
| James William Dodd | Liston | Stephen |
| Robert Bransby | Waddy | Downright |
| John Palmer | Claremont | Wellbred |
| William Parsons | John Emery | Justice Clement |
| James Wright | Atkins | Formal |
| David Garrick | Frederick Cooke | Kitely |
| William Brereton | Farley | Cash |
| Abbot | John | |
| Jefferies | William | |
| Mrs Greville | Mrs Glover | Dame Kitely |
| Mrs Davis | Mrs St Leger | Bridget |
| John Burton | Simmons | Matthew |
| John Moody | Davenport | Cob |
| Mrs Bradshaw | Mrs Emery | Tib |
| Thomas King | John Fawcett | Bobadill |
In 1802, Drury Lane mounted its own revival with Richard Wroughton as Kitely and John Bannister as Bobadill. Cooke apparently alternated the role of Kitely with John Philip Kemble in 1803 (Wyndham, 1906, 1.302, cited in Miola, 76). Cooke revived the play unsuccessfully in Edinburgh in 1808 (Hare, 1980, 165). Kemble had moved from Drury Lane to Covent Garden in 1802.
Kitely was still the role of choice when Edmund Kean undertook the part in a short-lived revival at Drury Lane that opened on 5 June 1816. This was the period in which Kean was making his mark in a series of major roles, including Richard III and Sir Giles Overreach; adding Kitely to that list gave some new luminosity to Jonson’s play. The cast included the following:
| J. S. Munden | Brainworm |
| William Oxberry | Stephen |
| Edmund Kean | Kitely |
| Hughes | Matthew |
| John Harley | Bobadill |
Yet for William Hazlitt, reviewing that production (1818, 300-3), Kitely no longer seemed the chief centre of interest in the play. Hazlitt found ‘the pathos in the principal character, Kitely’, to be ‘as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage’ (quoting Jaques in As You Like It, 2.7.39-40). Presumably Hazlitt granted Kitely the status of being the chief character because of stage tradition. Although he admired Kean’s versatility and emotional nuance in the role (again, prominently in the scene with Thomas Cash, and also in Kitely’s reconciliation with his wife), Hazlitt preferred the engagingly varied bustle of Brainworm. Then, too, he found the comic characters like Cob, Tib, Stephen (‘not only foolish, but fond of folly’), and Matthew (‘like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring’, quoted from 2 Henry IV, 3.2.307-8) more amusing than Kitely, and insisted most of all that Bobadill should be regarded as ‘the only actually striking character in the play’ and ‘undoubtedly the hero of the piece’. ‘His extravagant affectation carries the sympathy of the audience along with it’, wrote Hazlitt, ‘and his final defeat and exposure, though exceedingly humorous, is the only affecting circumstance in the play’. Bobadill’s turn was coming, though not yet fully realized on stage in the 1810s and 1820s. Again, his appeal would be not simply that of a satiric buffoonish character but one whom an actor could portray with a mix of humour and sympathetic engagement. Probably we can sense here the influence of Maurice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777), in which Falstaff was glorified as a rare individual of courage, dignity, and even honour.
Every Man In remained in the repertory of both Drury Lane and Covent Garden, with performances in 1825, 1828, and 1832, using Garrick’s text. The cast at Covent Garden in May 1825 included the following:
| William Farren | Brainworm |
| E. L. Blanchard | Justice Clement |
| Charles Young | Kitely |
| Mrs Chatterley | Dame Kitely |
| Robert Keeley | Matthew |
George Daniels, observing that Every Man In was the only Jonson play still given any attention by the London acting companies, went on to praise it in such a way as to put Kitely centre stage while at the same time allowing for plentiful variety in the play as a whole. ‘Jealousy is the master-passion here exhibited’, he wrote, "but" this drama is not confined to its illustration [i.e. to the depiction of jealousy] alone: there are a great variety of characters that display their humours, wholly independent of the principal one’ (Cumberland’s British Theatre, 10.7, cited in Miola, p. 76).
When William Charles Macready played Every Man In at the Haymarket Theatre and at Bath (with opening performance on 29 July 1838), he again chose the role of Kitely. The reviewer for The Theatrical Examiner was disappointed with the play itself but warm in his praise of Macready for his ‘excluding from Kitely every particle of sympathy or pity’ (29 July 1838, cited in H&S, 9.181) – all the more fresh and surprising in that Macready was generally known for idealizing his characters. Robert Browning, writing to Euphrasia Fanny Howarth, 24 July 1838, praised Macready for getting Kitely exactly right, ‘from his flat cap down to his shining shoes’ (Brownings’ Correspondence, 1984, 4.68). No doubt Macready would have been happy to hear this tribute, for his chief passion in reviving older plays, whether by Jonson or Shakespeare, was for historical verisimilitude. His notes carefully specify that Kitely should wear his hair cropped and should carry at his side a large bunch of keys and a Toledo sword. Only through such attention to details, Macready insisted, could an actor begin to get at the inner character. The cast included:
| Strickland | Brainworm |
| J. B. Buckstone | Stephen |
| W. C. Macready | Kitely |
| Hill | Matthew |
| Worrell | Cash |
| Webster | Bobadill |
Charles Dickens’s decision to play Bobadill instead of Kitely was a notable event. He did so with a company of literary amateurs at Fanny Kelly’s little theatre in Dean Steet, Soho, on 20 September 1845. A charity performance took place at the St James’s Theatre on 15 November, followed by performances at Manchester and Liverpool in July 1847 and then a return to London in May and June of 1848. The cast on opening night included the following:
| H. Mayhew | Old Knowell |
| Frederick Dickens | Edward Knowell |
| Mark Lemon | Brainworm |
| Douglas Jerrold | Stephen |
| Stanfield | Downright |
| Thompson | Wellbred |
| John Forster | Kitely |
| Fortescue | Dame Kitely |
| Hinton | Bridget |
| John Leech | Matthew |
| Percivall Leigh | Cob |
| Bew | Tib |
| Gilbert A’Beckett | Clement’s Servant |
| Charles Dickens | Bobadill |
John Forster was becoming well known as the editor of the Foreign Quarterly Review and then the Daily News; he was to become a biographer of Oliver Goldsmith, Walter Savage Landor, and then Dickens himself. At Manchester and Liverpool, George Cruikshank, the cartoonist, took the part of Formal, while G. H. Lewes was old Knowell, Emmelin Montague was Dame Kitely, Mrs A. Wigan was Bridget, and Mrs Caulfield was Tib. These last two were professional actresses (H&S, 9.183). For the return to London in 1848, the cast at the Haymarket on 17 May included the following:
| Dudley Castello | Old Knowell |
| Augustus Egg | Stephen |
| Frank Stone | Downright |
| Wilmott | Justice Clement |
| J. W. Cole | Formal |
| John Forster | Kitely |
| Miss Kenworthy | Bridget |
| John Leech | Matthew |
| Mary Cowden Clarke | Tib |
| Charles Dickens | Bobadill |
Mary Cowden Clarke’s copy of the play, annotated with the stage business, is in the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds. A prompt book for the 1847 Liverpool benefit performance is located in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
Hazlitt’s foresight about the central importance of Bobadill achieved its full realization in this production. Robert Browning reported on 24 September 1845 in a letter to his sister that there may have been ‘a little too much of the consciousness of entire cowardice’ in Dickens’s portrayal, but ‘the end of it all was really pathetic, as it should be, for Bobadill is only too clever for the company of fools he makes wonderment for’. Browning’s Bobadill, as deftly captured in performance by Dickens, was thus a Falstaffian figure, far more multi-dimensional than the more stereotypical satiric types like Matthew and Stephen with whom he is obliged to keep company: ‘having once the misfortune to relish their society, and to need but too pressingly their “tobacco money” what can he do but suit himself to their capacities?’ (Brownings’ Correspondence, 11.94).
John Forster, whose portrayal of Kitely was, in Browning’s view, ‘very emphatic and earnest’, offered similar praise for the mix of comic exuberance and pathos achieved by his famous fellow-actor: to Forster, Dickens’s Bobadill offered ‘a richly coloured picture of bombastical extravagance and comic exaltation in the earlier scenes’, leading then to ‘tragical humility and abasement’ in the later scenes (Life of Dickens, 1872, 2.182-6, quoted by H&S, 9.181-2). A reviewer for The Times, 22 September 1845, was no less ecstatic over the ‘masterly transformation’ from early to late. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton composed a prologue for the performance at Liverpool in 1847 in the same vein, praising the play’s ‘Pathos and wit, sweet pleasure and sweet pain’ (Fielding, 1960, 102). Mary Cowden Clarke, in her Recollections of Writers (1878) co-written with her husband Charles, has jotted down some of Dickens’s comic stage business, at least in the later performances in which she took part. When he taunted Downright by calling him a ‘scavenger’ (2.2.9), Dickens’s Bobadill made sure that he himself was in a place backstage where he could scamper off to safety. He accentuated his put-down of Stephen’s newly acquired sword – ‘This a Toledo? Pish!’ (3.1.134) – by ‘bending the sword into a curve’. As he solemnly pronounced judgement on the tobacco that he and others were smoking as ‘your right Trinidado’ (3.5.55), he leaned on the shoulder of his interlocutor and emitted great puffs of white vapour. For his famous disquisition on how to defeat an enemy of forty thousand men with a cadre of only twenty soldiers (4.7.56-71), Dickens made invisible sums in the air and scored his figures ‘with an invisible line underneath’. To add comic pathos to his reappearance in act 5 after having suffered a drubbing at the hands of Downright (5.2.1ff.), Dickens’s Bobadill dramatized his crestfallen condition by plucking away some of the feathers in his plume and wetting down the bedraggled ones that remained. His wig was differentiated from that of Matthew by being ‘fuzzed out at the sides and extremely bushy’, whereas Matthew’s was ‘flat at the ears and very highly peaked above his forehead’ (Clarke, 1878, 310-11). The triumph was all the more gratifying in that Dickens had had to be talked into the pathos-laden ending by Forster and Macready (who, though not actively involved in the production, was consulted as a great man of the theatre). No doubt Dickens warmed easily to the sort of satirical character sketch at which he had shown himself so adept in his novels and short stories; as Lois Potter observes (1999, 204), ‘It is hard not to feel that Every Man In His Humour was Dickensian even before Dickens himself played Bobadill’. Still, Dickens knew how to pull heart-strings as well, of course, and put that knowledge to good use in his performance.
Fifty-five years would elapse between the last performance in 1848 of Dickens’s landmark production of Every Man In and the next staging. Frank Benson, presenting the play at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in late April and early May of 1903, chose, like Dickens, to play Bobadill. The cast on opening night (25 April) included the following:
| Charles Bibby | Old Knowell |
| Walter Hampden | Edward Knowell |
| H. O. Nicholson | Brainworm |
| Cyril Keightley | Stephen |
| B. A. Pittar | Downright |
| J. S. Hamilton | Wellbred |
| Henry Herbert | Justice Clement |
| Eustace Le Grand | Formal |
| Arthur Whitby | Kitely |
| Alice Arden | Dame Kitely |
| Dorothy Green | Bridget |
| P. D. Owen | Matthew |
| G. Wallace Johnson | Cash |
| G. F. Hannam-Clark | Cob |
| Leah Hanman | Tib |
| Frank Benson | Bobadill |
The reviewer for The Times praised especially the acting of Brainworm and Stephen, making the point that Every Man In is ‘essentially an acting play’ ‘which needs the bustle and movement of the stage for its effect’ (cited in H&S, 9.184). This judgement sounded a familiar note, of viewing the play as little more than a vehicle for memorable performances of vividly drawn character sketches while lacking in the substance of a plot.
The English Club at Stanford University mounted an amateur production in March 1905, on a stage built to resemble the Swan Theatre as drawn by Johannes de Witt in about 1596. The event was then documented by an illustrated account in Elizabethan Humours and the Comedy of Ben Jonson (San Francisco, 1905) that included pictures of Bobadill and Cob. In December of 1934 the Literary Society of Birkbeck College, London, staged another amateur production under the direction of Miss Daunt, this time with Elizabethan music.
B. Iden Payne directed Every Man In at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, in 1909, for Miss Horniman’s company. The critics were generally unfriendly toward the play itself as artificial and dated, a ‘medley which irritates rather than attracts people of today’ (quoted in Jensen, 1985, 37). The play was damned for showing very little tolerance or sympathy to ameliorate the effects of its harsh intellectual brilliance. At the same time, the critics allowed some of the posturing and physical violence to be amusing. Charles Bibby’s Cob was well received. The cast on this occasion included the following:
| Esmé Percy | Justice Clement |
| Clifton Alderson | Kitely |
| Edyth Goodall | Dame Kitely |
| Hilda Bruce-Potter | Bridget |
| Charles Bibby | Cob |
| Ada King | Tib |
| Ian Maclaren | Bobadill |
Payne directed the play a second time at Stratford-upon-Avon’s Memorial Theatre on 6 August 1937, as a commemoration of the tercentenary of Jonson’s death. This time the cast was as follows:
| Dudley Jones | Prologue |
| Stanley Howlett | Old Knowell |
| Michael Goodliffe | Edward Knowell |
| Kenneth Wicksteed | Brainworn |
| Patrick Crean | Stephen |
| Clement McCallin | Downright |
| Norman Wolland | Wellbred |
| Andrew Leigh | Justice Clement |
| Richard Blatchley | Formal |
| Godfrey Kenton | Kitely |
| Valerie Tudor | Dame Kitely |
| Rosalind Iden | Bridget |
| George Hagan | Matthew |
| Donald Layne-Smith | Cash |
| Dennis Roberts | Cob |
| Clare Harris | Tib |
| Donald Wolfit | Bobadill |
Some six hundred lines were cut, including topical references and jokes about cuckoldry, to make the play more acceptable to early twentieth-century tastes and to speed up the pace of the comedy. Brainworm’s role was shrunk, along with the play’s strident observations on the state of poetry. Old Knowell (Stanley Howlett) was made up to look like Shakespeare, in accord with the hypothesis of J. P. Collier that Shakespeare took that role in the 1598 original. Some critics complained of the lack of plot and of a fusty, outmoded comic idiom. The reviewer for The Manchester Guardian went so far as to contrast Molière’s perfectly crafted ‘comedy of manners’ with what appeared in this production to be Jonson’s ‘comedy of mannerism’ (30 November 1909, quoted in Jensen, 38). Yet a reviewer for The Times was impressed by the actors in the roles of Cob and Brainworm and by the hilarious comedy of confusion in the climactic scene at Cob’s house in act 5 (H&S, 9.185). Donald Wolfit must have been impressive as a ‘Dickensian’ Bobadill who could show ‘the man beneath the bravado’ (Midland Daily Telegraph, 7 August 1937, and Morning Post, same date, cited by Potter, 1999, 204, 209); he was to become the great Jonsonian performer of the twentieth century. Ivor Brown pronounced the whole event to be ‘a light and nimble masquerade of cozeners, gulls, and pretenders’ (quoted in Jensen, 39). At its best, the production seems to have grasped the advantage of performing Every Man In as a fast-paced, colourful, high-octane romp across the wide social spectrum of Jonson’s London.
The play thus sparked some occasional interest in revival in the era before World War II, and enjoyed during that time a secure status in anthologies of Renaissance Drama for university and college teaching. It was included in Elizabethan Plays, edited by Hazelton Spencer (Boston: Heath, 1933); An Anthology of Jacobean Drama, ed. Richard C. Harrier (New York University Press, 1963); and Elizabethan and Stuart Plays, edited by Charles Read Baskervill, Virgil B. Heltzel, and Arthur H. Nethercot (New York: Holt, 1934). Yet since the 1940s it has suffered a marked decline onstage and in the classroom. In part this is no doubt the result of a broad decline of interest in Renaissance drama outside of Shakespeare, and indeed a decline of interest in early literature generally. Volpone, Epicene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair now command most of whatever attention is given to Jonson; Every Man In certainly fares no worse than Every Man Out Of His Humour, Poetaster, Sejanus, The Magnetic Lady, or most of Jonson’s other plays. The decline in its fortunes is much more noticeable, however, by virtue of the fact that Every Man In reigned for a time, mainly in the eighteenth century, as one of Jonson’s best comedies in the theatre, and indeed for a time a leading choice.
Joan Littlewood’s 1960 Theatre Workshop production, opening on 2 July and running for two weeks, seems not to have been a success. Reviewers complained the lack of a unified acting style. The insertion of contemporary jokes and other attempts to jazz up the production up did not dispel the impression, for most critics, of mouldy antiquarianism. (Jensen, 1985, 40, cites several reviews, only one of which is favourable.)
Two radio productions of Every Man In are recorded in the Performance Calendar of this edition. One was broadcast some time after 1 November 1938 on WQXR in the United States by the Federal Theatre Radio Division as a project of the WPA (Works Progress Administration). The other, an adapted version, was broadcast on BBC radio on 10 October 1955 as directed by R. D. Smith. The Calendar also lists two little known stage productions: one in 1949, by the Toynbee Hall Curtain Theatre in London, the other on 1-2 September 1971 by the Department of Drama at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.
The most notable production of recent times is undoubtedly that of John Caird at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and then at the Mermaid during its inaugural season of 1986. (See Ronnie Mulryne and Margaret Shewring’s celebration of the Swan’s first three years in This Golden Round, 1989, including interviews with John Caird, Tony Church, and Simon Russell Beale.) In a newly designed theatre space that promoted intimate contact between the actors on their unencumbered stage and an audience on three sides and in galleries, the production excelled in rapid motion, simultaneity of action, and improvised stage business. A newly edited script imported some oaths and salty language from the quarto version into the folio text, with the intent, in Caird’s words, of bringing the play ‘nearer to Jonson’s real, earthy and observed intention’. Other verbal substitutions aimed at clarifying what might otherwise seem obscurely Elizabethan. In the finale, Caird’s importations from the quarto text provided reconciliations between Wellbred and Downright and between Kitely and his wife. Quarto material also augmented the inept plagiarizing by the poetaster Matthew. Lorenzo Junior’s defense of poetry in the quarto (Q1, 5.3), which had been taken away from Young Lorenzo’s counterpart, Edward Knowell, in the folio version, was restored. All of this gave to the production a hearty Jonsonian flavour characteristic of Jonson’s early days at the Curtain. (For the revised text, see Trussler, ed. Every Man In, 1986.)
The cast included the following:
| Tony Church | Old Knowell |
| Simon Russell Beale | Edward Knowell |
| David Haig | Brainworm |
| Paul Greenwood | Stephen |
| Jeremy Pearce | Downright |
| Nathaniel Parker | Wellbred |
| Raymond Bowers | Justice Clement |
| Mark Lindley | Formal |
| Henry Goodman | Kitely |
| Jane Galloway | Dame Kitely |
| Joely Richardson | Bridget |
| Philip Franks | Matthew |
| Gary Love | Cash |
| David Troughton | Cob |
| Susie Fairfax | Tib |
| Roger Moss | Servant |
| Pete Postlethwaite | Bobadill |
On the fluid, presentational stage of the Swan Theatre, the actors made the most of their opportunities to change scenes rapidly and to move about from one area to another. Retractable ladders gave access to the upper gallery. Interaction with the spectators became a hallmark of the production, as Peter Holland (1986, 202) and Laurie Maguire (1987, 106) have observed. Henry Goodman as Kitely opened himself up to the audience, inviting the spectators to confirm or deny his fears as he vacillated between jealousy of his wife and uncertain mistrust of his servants. Some of this was in the Garrick tradition, but here without dominating the play or converting it into a showpiece for one star performer. Pete Postlethwaite as Bobadill was no less compelling as a humours character: eccentric, self-glorifying, masterful in the art of inventing new oaths, blustering among his pitiable admirers but craven in the face of any real danger and never quite managing to anything right (Potter, 1999, 207). He was, in other words, the perfect embodiment of the Roman miles gloriosus dressed up in Elizabethan garb. Contrastingly, David Haig as Brainworm was the consummate role-player, enacting disguises of dubious legality with delightful aplomb and ultimately vindicated as the spirit of satirical comedy to which the play dedicates its energies. David Troughton was superb as Cob. Simon Russell Beale was chosen to play the part of Edward Knowell partly because Caird wanted an actor who would look like the young Ben Jonson, even if, as Lois Potter (1999, 199) notes, the effect was lost for the most part on audiences who had no idea what Jonson actually looked like. Beale’s formidable acting talents were largely wasted in a thankless part. Acting style focused on ensemble playing; Goodman, Postlethwaite, and David Troughton stood out as the star turns, but without undercutting the overall effect of a pleasingly varied display of humours types from Jonson’s London. The humours thrust of the comedy was conveyed in part, as Roger Holdsworth noted (TLS, 6 June 1986, p. 620), through multitudinous props for the actors, chosen to represent their various obsessions: tankards and ladles for Cob, various firearms and fencing weapons for Bobadill, cudgels for whoever felt the urge to beat someone over the head, reams of paper inscribed with wretched poetry for Matthew, and still more.
Inevitably some price was paid for all this frantic hilarity. Peter Holland complained in his review (1986) that Jonson’s carefully calibrated social distinctions of city merchant, gruff country squire, naive country simpleton, etc., tended to disappear in favour of delicious farce, though Caird in fact did demand that his cast do research into early Jacobean history as a way of sharpening their awareness that this play belonged to an earlier age, and also retained Jonson’s prologue in order to locate the dramatist in his cultural milieu (Potter, 1999, 201). Perhaps modern audiences could not be expected to care much about the niceties of London geography. The New York Times reviewer, Mel Gussow, voiced a familiar and long-standing complaint that the play lacks any real plot amid its welter of humours characters caught in various poses. ‘It is a sprawling, garrulous work about London life at the turn of the 16th century, dealing with bored sophisticates and easily gulled bumpkins’, wrote Gussow. ‘Seldom have so many people been gathered together on stage to so uneventful purpose; nothing much happens as talk consumes time’ (New York Times, 6 July 1986, p. H3). Dickens had worried about the same thing in a letter to Macready of 2 September 1845: ‘It is such a damned thing to have all the people perpetually coming on to say their part, without any action to bring ’em in, or take ’em out, or keep ’em going’ (Letters, 4.368-9). Caird’s theatrical solution in the Swan Theatre seemed the best stratagem to meet this challenge, and the evidence suggests that it worked as well as could be hoped.
What the modern productions of Payne in 1909 and 1937 and Caird in 1986 seem to show is that Every Man In is a play for an ensemble company well trained in improvisation and fast-paced action. The very history of shifting views on what role should go to the lead actor suggests that Garrick and company were not putting the question properly. There should be no lead actor. Kitely, Bobadill, and Brainworm, to name only those three, are so balanced in their numbers of lines and opportunities for metatheatrical display that they seem to have been written for a company just like the Lord Chamberlain’s Men who were to become the King’s Men in 1603: a group of actor-sharers, dividing among themselves the financial risks and rewards, along with the professional responsibilities as seasoned actors, that would call upon them to play opposite one another as partners. Jonson knew what company he was writing for. He and the acting company were lucky to be able to exploit their shared talents as they did in Every Man In and in the comedies that were to follow.