Shakespeare, King Henry V

HUMOUR

This important word, in the Elizabethan and Jacobean context, marked perhaps most noticeably by Ben Jonson’s two related comedies, Every Man In His Humour and Every Man Out of His Humour, originates from Hippocrates and Galen in antiquity, and derives from classical and medieval medical tradition, in which four chemicals or “humours” in the body (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow) were thought to determine, in their various admixtures in any specific human individual, the outlines of personal psychologies. Thus, a person in whose body blood predominated was said to be likely to be sanguine in character, a person with an excess of phlegm was thought apathetic (the connotations of “phlegmatic” differing then from those of today). Those in whom black bile was prominent were thought melancholic (“black bile” being in fact a straight translation of the two Greek words that make up “melancholy”), and those in whom it was yellow bile, choleric.

To proceed from this contextual background to Jonsonian or Shakespearian comedy, as this is present in Henry V (the word “humour” is only used by two comic characters, Pistol and Nym) requires the appreciation of a degree of apparent skepsis in the writers” appropriation of the theory. Thus, the character most frequently associated with “humour” in this play is Nym, but it is clear we are not meant to conclude that it explains anything meaningful about his character. It is a word – a mere word, if you like – that he brandishes on numerous occasions as the token of a “choleric” disposition that he does not in fact possess. It is on full display in Act 2 scene 1 after the entry of Pistol, who has stolen Mistress Quickly and married her despite her being already engaged to Nym. He uses the word on no less than seven occasions in this scene, in relation to Pistol on the first five of these: “I have an humour to knock you indifferent well;” (44-45) “I would prick your guts a little, in good terms, as I may, and that’s the humour of it;” (47-48) “I will cut thy throat one time or another, in fair terms: that is the humour of it;” (56-57) (referring to the money Pistol owes him) “that now I will have. That’s the humour of it’; (78) ([when Pistol agrees to pay up] “Well, then, that’s the humour of it’. (92) But the last two, after Boy’s interruption to the scene with the news that Falstaff, significantly change focus. Of the first of them “the king hath run bad humours on the knight; that’s the even of it”, (97-98) Gurr is unsure whether Nym is referring to the king’s ill-humour (caused by an excess of “choler” or yellow bile) or to Falstaff’s (caused by “melancholy” or black bile), but both Taylor and Craik attribute the “humour” of the reference to the king. But after the second instance, where he puts forward the view that Henry is a good king, but one of moods, who “passes some humours and careers”, (101-102) there can be no doubt that the possibility is raised, from this quarter at least, that Henry, despite his acclaimed maturing, might still need to be considered in conjunction with these other discarded “humour” characters in the play.