Bartholomew Fair (play)
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Bartholomew Fair is a
The play was first printed in 1631, as part of a planned second volume of the first 1616 folio collection of Jonson's works, to be published by the bookseller Robert Allot; however, Jonson abandoned the plan when he became dissatisfied with the quality of the typesetting. Copies of the 1631 typecast were circulated, though whether they were sold publicly or distributed privately by Jonson is unclear. The play was published in the second folio of Jonson's works in 1640–41, published by Richard Meighen.[3]
Background
The play is set at Bartholomew Fair, which from 1133 to 1855 was one of London's preeminent summer fairs. It opened on 24 August each year at Smithfield, in the northwestern part of the city. Smithfield, a site of slaughterhouses and public executions, was a fitting place for a fair that was part commerce and part spectacle. At once a trading event for cloth and other goods and a pleasure fair, the four-day event drew crowds from all classes of English society.
Jonson's play uses this fair as the setting for an unusually detailed and diverse panorama of early seventeenth-century London life. The one day of fair life represented in the play allows Jonson ample opportunity to not just conduct his plot, but also to depict the vivid life of the fair, from pickpockets and bullies to justices and slumming gallants. Jonson also uses the characters that he creates as a way to comment on the social, religious and political conflicts of London society in Jacobean England.
Synopsis
The play begins with an extended bit of metadrama; the company's stage-keeper enters, criticising the play about to be performed because it lacks romantic and fabulous elements. He is then pushed from the stage by the book-keeper, who (serving as prologue) announces a contract between author and audience. The contract appears to itemise Jonson's discontentment with his audiences: Members are not to find political satire where none is intended; they are not to take as oaths such innocuous phrases as "God quit you"; they are not to "censure by contagion", but must exercise their own judgment; moreover, they are allowed to judge only in proportion to the price of their ticket. Perhaps most important, they agree not to expect a throwback to the sword-and-buckler age of Smithfield, for Jonson has given them a picture of the present and unromantic state of the fair.
The play proper begins with a proctor and amateur dramatist Littlewit and his friends, Quarlous and Winwife; they are plotting how to win Dame Purecraft (a widow, and Littlewit's mother-in-law) from Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, a canting, hypocritical Puritan.
This colloquy is interrupted by the entrance of Wasp, the irascible servant of Cokes, a country simpleton who is in town to marry Grace Wellborn. Grace is the ward of Adam Overdo, a Justice of the Peace; Overdo's wife is Cokes's sister. All of these characters are at Littlewit's to get a marriage license; having obtained it, they indulge Cokes's wish to visit the fair.
Littlewit and his friends also plan to go to the fair to see a puppet-show Littlewit wrote. To overcome Busy's likely objections, they pretend that Win (Littlewit's wife) has a pregnant craving for roast pork. The Renaissance audience, familiar with stage satire of
The fair propels these characters through experiences that put their social identities under extreme strain. Justice Overdo, well-read in the "disguised prince" tradition, assumes a disguise to ferret out wrongdoing at the fair; he is beaten by Wasp, falsely accused by Edgeworth, a cut-purse, and put in the stocks. Quarlous and Winwife engage Edgeworth to steal the marriage license from Wasp; he does so when Wasp is arrested after starting a fight. Wasp, too, is put in the stocks. Winwife has abandoned his plan to marry Dame Purecraft; instead, he and Quarlous fight for Grace's hand. Win Littlewit and Mistress Overdo are enlisted as prostitutes by the pimp Whit; Zeal-of-the-land Busy is arrested for preaching without license and put into the stocks. Cokes is robbed several times by Edgeworth and other denizens of the fair. All the imprisoned characters escape when Trouble-All, a seeming madman for whom Dame Purecraft has conceived a sudden passion, fights with the guards.
The climax of the play occurs at the puppet show. Madame Overdo and Win are brought in, masked, as prostitutes; Madame Overdo is drunk. Overdo is still in disguise, and Quarlous has disguised himself as Trouble-All; in this guise, he stole the marriage license from Winwife and made it into a license for himself and Purecraft. The puppet show, a burlesque of
At this point, Justice Overdo reveals himself, intent on uncovering the "enormities" he has witnessed at the fair. He is in the process of punishing all of the various schemers and malefactors when his wife (still veiled) throws up and begins to call for him. Abashed, Overdo takes the advice of Quarlous and forgives all parties; Winwife marries Grace, Quarlous marries Purecraft, and all the characters are invited to Overdo's house for supper.
Puritans
Zeal-of-the-land Busy is Jonson's second foray, after
Playwrights also had a more immediate reason for this animosity; Puritans had opposed the public theatre almost from its inception. Hostility to drama was not, of course, limited to separatists or Puritans; preachers of all shades of belief denounced the plays as profane and the theatres as sites of theft, drunkenness, and licentiousness. Correctly or not, playwrights treated Puritans as the main source of these attacks. On stage, the Puritan is a hypocritical, judgmental, and long-winded figure, masking his lusts behind a vocal obsession with trivialities; Busy, for example, announces his intention to eat pork at the fair merely to refute the charges of "Judaism" he claims are levelled at Puritans, and he ends up consuming two whole pigs.
Performance history
The induction allows for a more specific date of performance than is usual for Renaissance plays; the première took place on 31 October 1614 at the
There is no further record of performance until 1661, although it was likely to have remained in repertory to some degree until its anti-Puritan sentiments made it unwise to revive it. (William Oldys reports a traditional view that the inscription on Jonson's tomb ("O rare Ben Jonson") refers to the applause this play received, after the failure of Catiline,[4] indicating some degree of popularity. Samuel Pepys records seeing it four times in 1661, twice with the puppet show and twice without (8 June, 27 June, 31 August and 7 September 1661). The play appears to have been revived intermittently through the earlier part of the eighteenth century; after that, in keeping with the waning taste for non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama in general and for Jonson in particular, the play fell into obscurity. It retained a degree of esteem in the study even as it disappeared from the boards; both Isaac Reed and Horace Walpole praised its wealth of invention in their accounts of Renaissance drama. John Brown revised the play and offered it to David Garrick; Garrick refused it, however, and Brown's text is lost.
As with many long-ignored plays, Bartholomew Fair returned to the stage in a production by the Phoenix Society—this one, in 1921 at
Richard Eyre produced the play for the National Theatre; his first production as head of the theatre, it was performed on the Olivier Stage in mid-Victorian costume. David Bamber, David Burke, and Stephen Moore were among the cast. Of this production, Eyre himself writes, "What felt as though it might have been a true popular success … shows itself to be dismal and unachieved.[5]
In 1998, Laurence Boswell directed the play for the RSC at the
The
The play was performed in 2019 at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (part of Shakespeare's Globe) in London.[8]
Notes
- ^ Gurr (1992, 233).
- ^ Hibbard, p. xiv.
- ^ Jonson's original 1616 folio collection of his works was reprinted in 1640, a volume sometimes called the second edition of the first folio. Meighen's 1641 volume contained later Jonson pieces, including Bartholomew Fair.
- ^ Herford and Simpson, Vol. 1, p. 183.
- ISBN 978-1-4088-0664-7. Retrieved 17 August 2020.
- ^ albemarle-london.com Archived 27 August 2006 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Nestruck, J. Kelly (9 June 2009). "A daring, energetic Bartholomew Fair". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 31 July 2015.
- ^ Billington, Michael (30 August 2019). "Bartholomew Fair review – a merry muddle of Jonson's carnivalesque satire". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 August 2020.
References
- Barish, Jonas. Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1960.
- Cantor, Paul A. "Ch. 3: In defense of the marketplace: Spontaneous order in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair." In: Paul A. Cantor and Stephen Cox, eds. Literature and the economics of liberty: On spontaneous order in culture. Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, 2009, pp. 167–224.
- Fincham, Kenneth, editor. The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642. Palo Alto, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1992.
- ISBN 0-521-42240-X.
- Goldberg, Jonathan. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Palo Alto, Cal: Stanford University Press, 199
- Herford, C. H. and Percy Simpson. Works of Ben Jonson. Eleven Volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52.
- Jonson, Ben. Bartholomew Fair. G. R. Hibbard, editor. London: A. C. Black, 1977.
- Keenan, Siobhan. Acting Companies and Their Plays in Shakespeare's London. London: Arden, 2014. 120–8.
- Lake, Peter. The Anti-Christ's Lewd Hat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
- Montrose, Louis. The Purpose of Playing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
- Waith, Eugene. "The Staging of Bartholomew Fair." SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 2 (1962).
- Watson, R.N. Ben Jonson's Parodic Strategy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987.