Please explain why Volpone is a comedy of humours.

The word “humours” when applied to this play refers to a
concept that was popular during Ben Jonson’s day. Humors were temperaments or people’s
personalities. The belief was that these personalities flowed through people. The word
“humour” comes from a Latin word, “humor”, which means liquid. In Medieval times, there
was a medical theory that held that the human body was a balance of four humors or
liquids: blood, phelgm, yellow bile (choler) and black bile (melancholy). If these
liquids were balanced in one’s body, then the person was healthy. If they were out of
balance, however, then the person was messed up.

In drama
and literature, this theory translated into four main personality types: melancholic,
sanguine, choleric and phelgmatic. Some believed that all people were primarily one of
these types of personalities, although they could also have elements of the other
three.

A comedy of humors refers to a type of drama that
focused on characters, each character representing a type of personality. Ben Jonson was
one of the main writers of this genre and you can see it in
Volpone. The characters in Volpone are
stereotypes. They represent a character type rather than a flesh-and-blood character
whose mind we can get into when we read the play. In a comedy of humors, the characters
are the most important focus, so Volpone fits this criterion. All
of the characters are imbalanced as well, so their “humors” are out of sync and they
thus act in comical ways. There are some characters in this play that have physical
abnormalities (Nano, Castrone & Androgyno) and yet they are not as out of
balance as the ones who are mentally imbalanced (Volpone, Mosca, Voltore, Corvino,
Corbaccio, etc.)