Humour

I am in a play, namely Ben Johnson's Every Man Out of His Humour. It is one of the gems of the renaissance, which is why it has been performed roughly twice in the last four hundred years. You chaps in Blightly will be grieved, I'm sure, to miss my star turn in this searing comedy of manners and mordant social satire, so I have put up a link to the text, where you can peruse at leisure the many over-wrought jokes and long gargling speeches. The humour of the work relies to a great extent on the mere existence of the Latin language, which Johnson seems to find intrinsically hilarious. I suppose his was a more classically literate age, but the etymological gags don't exactly run out to meet the modern ear, so that one is left with a slightly impressionistic sense of a work better suited to page than stage. The range of accents among the cast does nothing to ameliorate this, since each has his or her own well-founded and jealously-guarded beliefs about how Classical Greek, Latin, French, Italian and the English of England in the nascent 17th Century ought to be pronounced, which at least means that audience may be lucky enough to miss some of the lamer gags.
At one point there is a minor character called Cinaedo (I notice the editor of the online version has quaintly uploaded Cindedo, whether out of deliberate prudery or a mere tyopgraphical error one can only guess). That, for all you non-classicists out there, means (with apologies for crudity) arsebandit. Oddly, the character in question is a servant boy, so either Johnson was not completely on top of his material here or else social conventions of activity and passivity were radically different down his way. In the former case I can recommend Jim Adams' excellent book The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. This appeared on my first ever reading list in Oxford, along with my dear tutor's wonderfully dry rider "He manages to make it much less interesting than it sounds". Johnson would empathise.