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Every Man in His Humour is a 1598 play by the English playwright Ben Jonson. The play belongs to the subgenre of the humours comedy, in which each major character is dominated by an over-riding humour or obsession. All the available evidence indicates that the play was performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1598 at the Curtain Theatre. That date is given in the play's reprint in Jonson's 1616 folio collection of his works; the text of the play (IV, iv,15) contains an allusion to John Barrose, a Burgundian fencer who challenged all comers that year and was hanged for murder on 10 July 1598. The play was also acted at Court on 2 February 1605.[1] 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, it is almost certain, based on the playlist published in the folio, that Shakespeare played the part of Kno'well, the aged father. This is consistent with Shakespeare's habit of playing older characters, such as Adam in As You Like It. The play was entered into the Register of the Stationers' Company on 4 August 1600, along with the Shakespearean plays As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and Henry V, in an entry marked to be stayed. It is thought that this entry was an attempt to block publication of the four plays; if so, the attempt failed, since the latter three plays appeared in print soon after. Every Man In was re-registered ten days later, on 14 August 1600, by the booksellers Cuthbert Burby and Walter Burre; the first quarto was published in 1601, with Burre's name on the title page. In the 1601 Quarto version, the play was set in Florence. The play was next printed in Jonson's 1616 folio, with the setting being moved to London

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Benjamin Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 - c. 16 August 1637[2]) was an English playwright and poet, whose artistry exerted a lasting impact upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours. He is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour[3] (1598), Volpone, or The Fox (c. 1606), The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry. He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I.[4] Jonson was a classically educated, well-read and cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite for controversy (personal and political, artistic and intellectual) whose cultural influence was of unparalleled breadth upon the playwrights and the poets of the Jacobean era (1603-1625) and of the Caroline era (1625-1642) In midlife, Jonson claimed that his paternal grandfather, who 'served King Henry 8 and was a gentleman', [7] was a member of the extended Johnston family of Annandale in the Dumfries and Galloway, a genealogy that is attested by the three spindles (rhombi) in the Jonson family coat of arms: one spindle is a diamond-shaped heraldic device used by the Johnston family. Jonson's father lost his property, was imprisoned, and suffered forfeiture under Queen Mary; having become a clergyman upon his release, he died a month before his son's birth.[8] Jonson's mother married a master bricklayer two years later.[9][10] Jonson attended school in St Martin's Lane.[3] Later, a family friend paid for his studies at Westminster School, where the antiquarian, historian, topographer and officer of arms, William Camden (1551-1623) was one of his masters. In the event, the pupil and the master became friends, and the intellectual influence of Camden's broad-ranging scholarship upon Jonson's art and literary style remained notable, until Camden's death in 1623. On leaving Westminster School, Jonson was to have attended the University of Cambridge, to continue his book learning but did not, because of his unwilled apprenticeship to his bricklayer stepfather.[5][9] According to the churchman and historian Thomas Fuller (1608-61), Jonson at this time built a garden wall in Lincoln's Inn. After having been an apprentice bricklayer, Ben Jonson went to the Netherlands and volunteered to soldier with the English regiments of Francis Vere (1560-1609) in Flanders.

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