Although Philip Henslowe's Diary notes a performance of ‘The comodey of Umers’ as a new play on 11 May 1597, with eleven more performances recorded by July 13, he is apparently referring not to a play by Jonson but to George Chapman’s An Humorous Day’s Mirth. Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour seems to have been first acted in September of 1598 at the Curtain theatre in Shoreditch; a letter written by Toby Mathew to Dudley Carleton on 20 September describes how a German visitor lost 300 crowns at ‘a new play called Every man’s humour’ (CSPD 1598-1601, 97). According to John Aubrey, writing long after the event in the later seventeenth century, Jonson, having suffered previous failures at the Curtain, ‘undertook again to write a play and hit it admirably well, viz. Every man . . . which was his first good one’. David Kay (1970-71, 229) has put forward a well-reasoned argument that although Aubrey must be referring to Every Man In in 1598 rather than to Every Man Out in 1599, Every Man In enjoyed only a moderate success on stage and should not be touted as the play that (in C. H. Herford’s words) ‘placed Jonson at a stride in the foremost rank of English playwrights’ (H&S, 1.18). The Case is Altered, probably written originally for Pembroke’s Men in 1597, seems to have been a hit, and Chapman’s An Humorous Day’s Mirth similarly enjoyed a real success in that same year, so that by the time Jonson got around to writing Every Man In in 1598, this contribution to the comedy of humours had been significantly anticipated. Moreover, Every Man Out Of His Humour in 1599 was probably not the stage failure that stage historians have proclaimed it to be; instead, it seems to have ‘established Jonson as the leading humour satirist and began the literary reputation which encouraged him to leave the Globe for the Blackfriars’. Kay thus qualifies the presumed primacy of Every Man In among Jonson’s early comedies. It ‘attracted no special notice when it was first produced’ and ‘did not mark any sudden progress in his [Jonson’s] career as seen by his contemporaries’ (Kay, 1970-71, 224-31). Still, it seems to have enjoyed a moderate success, enough so that Jonson gave it pride of first place, in its revised form, in his 1616 folio.

Every Man In was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 4 August 1600, along with As You Like It, Henry the Fifth, and Much Ado About Nothing, all of them ‘My Lord Chamberlain’s men’s plays’. The first quarto of Every Man In appeared in 1601, offering the play to the reader ‘As it hath been sundry times publicly acted by the Right Honorable the Lord Chamberlain his Servants’ (title-page). A substantially revised edition appeared in the 1616 folio, advertised on its title-page as ‘A Comedy. Acted in the year 1598. By the then Lord Chamberlain his Servants.’ (The reference here is to performance of the quarto Italian version in 1598, even if the phrasing elides the gap between it and the folio version.) A list of actors in the folio text indicates that the original performance took place ‘With the allowance of the Master of Revels’.

On the verso of its title-page, the 1598 quarto lists the characters in two columns, reproduced here in modernized spelling:

The number and names of the Actors.

Lorenzo Senior	Giuliano
Prospero	Lorenzo Junior
Thorello	Bianca
Stephano	Hesperida
Doctor Clement	Peto
Bobadilla	Matheo
Musco	Piso
Cob	Tib