Critical History

Seventeenth-century readers and theatre-goers had eyes only for Malvolio. As mentioned above, John Manningham’s short eyewitness account of the production that took place on 2 February 1602 in the Great Hall at the Middle Temple (see Contextual Overview, p. 7 ) pays almost undivided attention to the ‘good practice’ perpetrated by Maria and her associates at Malvolio’s expenses. Also significant is the fact that in King Charles I’s copy of the Second Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays (1632) the title is crossed out and replaced by Malvolio’s name. Similarly, when Leonard Digges, an admirer of Shakespeare who had contributed a dedicatory poem to the First Folio of 1623, wrote more prefatory verses for Benson’s 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems , he reported that ‘The Cockpit 1 Galleries, Boxes, all are full / To heare Maluolio that crosse garter’d Gull’. 2 Malvolio’s popularity was at least partly due to the rise of the so-called ‘comedy of humours’, a dramatic form first introduced by Shakespeare’s fellow dramatist Ben Jonson in the early 1600s, which aimed to expose the psychological excesses induced by a physiological imbalance in the bodily fluids identified by Galenic medical lore as ‘humours’ (see Contextual Overview, pp. 10–11 ).