What does humour mean in Romeo and Juliet?

Answer 1

According to sixteenth century medicine, our bodies contained four fluids called humours which were blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. The interplay of these regulated our health and mental states. The use of the word "humour" by Shakespeare and his contemporaries reflects exclusively this theory. It can have three main meanings:

1. A bodily fluid. This is what Friar Lawrence means when he says "presently through all thy veins shall run A cold and drowsy humour"

2. Personality or Character. People were thought to have personalities based on which of the humours was predominant in their system. We still use the words sanguine, melancholic, phlegmatic, and choleric to describe people with the personality traits associated with blood, black bile, phlegm and yellow bile respectively. Although Shakespeare does not use the word in this sense in Romeo and Juliet, it is the meaning of the word in the title of Ben Jonson's play Every Man in his Humour, in which Shakespeare acted.

3. Mood. It was thought that changes in the balance of your humours could cause your mood to swing. If you had an increase in the amount of black bile in you, you became all depressed and "melancholic"; if it was your blood that increased you became optimistic and happy and "sanguine". Montague uses the word with this meaning in 1,1 when he is talking about Romeo's mopy mood at the beginning of the play: "Black and portentous must this humour prove, Unless good counsel may the cause remove."