SOURCE: Dutton, A. Richard. “The Significance of Jonson's Revision of ‘Every Man in His Humour.’” Modern Language Review 69, no. 2 (April 1974): 241-49.

In the following essay, Dutton contends that the 1616 revision of Every Man in His Humour provides a valuable opportunity to study Jonson's maturation as a dramatist.

A number of major changes marked the development of Jonson's career as a dramatist, but none is more striking than the difference of tone and approach between Volpone (1605) and Epicoene (1609). Professor Harry Levin neatly summed up what has come to be the general attitude to this change in saying: ‘As [Jonson's] powers of realistic depiction came into full play, he gradually relinquished his loudly proclaimed moral purposes.’¹ This interesting assertion—based upon a fanciful analogy between the supposed ‘metempsychology’ of Pythagoras's soul, described in Volpone, i.2.1-62,² and the equally supposed mellowing of Jonson's satiric temper after that play—sees the...