Bartholomew Fair (Drama Classics) by Ben Jonson

by Ben Jonson

"Bartholomew Fair is the climactic play of Ben Jonson's great comic period. Using the Fair as a symbolic representation of religious, social and political conflicts in Jacobean England, Jonson satirizes Puritans, fortune hunters, country bumpkins and inept representatives of the justice system, along with sharpsters and conmen who inhabit the Fair. Rich in unforgettable characters like Ursla the pig woman, Adam Overdo the disguised JP and Troubleall the wandering madman, Bartholomew Fair combines a celebration of festivity with an attack on the excesses of natural life. The play was produced simultaneously at Court and the Hope Theatre, site of bear-baiting, and through his and the puppet-show with which the play concludes, Jonson reflects on drama, actors, the theatre and his rivals Marlowe and Shakespeare." "Based on E. A. Horsman's original Revels Plays text this edition is the first to use the findings of feminist scholarship in examining the play's concern with forced marriage, pregnancy, sexual commerce and widowhood. Glosses and notes are intended for students and playgoers, clarifying the special languages and dialects Jonson employs to individualize the characters in this prose masterpiece."--BOOK JACKET.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Classics, Theatre, Fiction, Renaissance, Read For School

Paperback

First published January 1, 1631

About the author

Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems. A man of vast reading and a seemingly insatiable appetite for controversy, Jonson had an unparalleled breadth of influence on Jacobean and Caroline playwrights and poets. A house in Dulwich College is named after him.

See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Jonson

Reviews

[BJ Lillis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can see this being tons of fun to watch and even more fun to act in. The humor—clever, dirty, and slapstick—evokes contemporary improv and sketch comedy. And the satire still bites. Jonson leans into the fair as a topsy-turvy world where the hierarchies of daily life are overturned, skewering pomposity in all its forms. But where Jonson’s verse plays—The Alchemist, Volpone—were fun to read, this long play in prose was interminable. Without the inherent forward momentum of meter and relative economy of verse, I felt bogged-down in the wordplay and had trouble following the action. Which goes on and on. On stage, I suspect, the hours would fly by in rapid-fire repartee, but I found it hard to capture that energy as a reader.

Act 5—in which a dirty-minded puppet-show parody of Hero and Leander descends into mayhem, culminating in a debate between puritan spoilsport Zeal-of-the-Land Busy and a puppet of Dionysius, which the puppet wins by lifting up his clothes and proving that he is neither man nor woman and therefore can’t be accused of amoral cross-dressing—is legitimately hilarious. But even so, my overwhelming feeling on turning the last page was relief.

All in all, a fascinating play with much to recommend it, but as a reading experience it fell flat for me.

[M.L. Rio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Every time I have to read this play I find myself wishing I could time-travel for the express purpose of going back to 1614 to punch Ben Jonson in the face.

*Update*: Every time I have to read this play I promise myself it’s the last time and I’ll never have to read it again and I’m always wrong about that, which makes me hate it even more. How do I give this negative stars? You deserve it, Ben Jonson, you know what you’ve done.

[lyell bark · Rating 5 out of 5]

in his depiction of all ppl as obese, grease covered, or venal and reprehensible, jonson not only invented [post:]modernism but also presaged modern america 400 years before it happened. whoa.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This text was required reading for my Studies in Renaissance Literature course at the University of Utah.

Jonnson once again proves himself a master of subversive comedy as we follow a band of middle class characters to the debauchery of the annual Bartholomew Fair. Cut-purses abound, judges are put into the stocks, gentlewomen are convinced into masquerading as prostitutes, and Puritan ministers are converted to worldly pleasures through the wit of a puppet. All in all - the Fair is not to be missed!

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

pepys saw this twice and loved it with the puppet show, wherein the Anabaptist loses an argument with a puppet.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the weirdest play I have ever read. Hoping that my seminar today will help to shed some light on what on earth this text was about because I spent most of my time reading it staring blankly at the pages. Between pig-women, puppet-shows and a terrible Irish accent, this play has me stumped.

[kate j · Rating 1 out of 5]

no. jesus. what was this why did i have to read this play.

[jules · Rating 2 out of 5]

two stars for a couple banger female characters but ohhhhhhhhh my god i am so bored. why is this play so long.

[Matty Cameira]

surely one of the plays of all time

[Jiang Yuqi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insanely good. So looooooong a play, but is brilliant every single page.
The Tempest is among my top 10 fav Shakespeare plays.
This play is three times better than the Tempest.

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ben Jonson looks like he's one of those guys who can do everything, but does everything in such a strongly-flavored way that you're not sure how to characterize him. He's got beautiful lyric poems, long gentle place poems, and these bizarre possibly moralistic plays which so far as I know fit in no genre whatsoever. In this one, the plot is generally unimportant, which is good, because it is more or less impossible to ascertain. The important thing seems to be that everyone is either gleefully, remorselessly bad or secretly, hypocritically bad, and possibly it's best to be the former?
A weird one, in which the non-word "superlunatic" is used. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is the historical markers it gives us: the prologue mocks people who still think "Andronicus" is the best play on the market, and the two Puritan characters in the play are still stinging caricatures three four centuries later.

[Rex Libris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I downloaded the title from Project Gutenberg, and it appears (sadly) that they do not quality check the job they in converting titles. The play portion of the book was so garbled that is was almost unreadable. Which is unfortunate because the paerts that were readable we quite good, including the puppet show where Hero and Leander call each other whoremaster and whore. The show is interrupted by the Puritan who attempts to close the show, but is outargued by one fo the puppets.

The introductory material is readable, and it does give a fair and balanced introduction to the play. The play is a satire of Puritanism. That Jonson did not like Puritanism is well known, but the editor calls into the question the justification for Jonson's dislike. Individual Puritans were certainly guilty of the hypocrisy that Jonson lampoons, but as a group much of Jonson' vitriol was unwarranted.

[Charlye Mondak]

Good play, not really equipped to read these on my own though. I need a professor who’s prodding me along and pointing things out that I would never know. Then I appreciate the clever writing. Would be cool to see this staged.

[Amy Wolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious, from one of Shakespeare's contemporaries & a damned fine playwright himself. The metaphor of cooking pigs as Hell and the puppets ("mechanicals") telling off the authorities is priceless. A fun, farcical romp.

[Indigo Wayworth · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not like this. I'm just... what even happened here? It's a mess.

Read for ENGL 3015: Renaissance Drama

[chloe]

fuck knows how i'm meant to write an essay about this

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

certainly entertaining, and apt in its sociopolitical commentary. literary skill? not so sure about that.

[cait · Rating 2 out of 5]

my humors are discombobulated after reading this

[Marissa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe this rating is too harsh but I didn't have enough time to fully understand the chaos that this play is.

[Esdaile · Rating 4 out of 5]

My edition of Ben Jonson's pandemonious construct called Bartholomew Fair is in the New Mermaids series published Ernest Benn Limited and is edited by Maurice Hussey. Jonson poses a special challenge to the modern reader. I forget who it was who pointed out, but very truly, that slang is more ephemeral than standard or “correct” speech. Was it the other Johnson with an h who provided a list of neologisms in English which he roundly condemned? Nearly all of those neologisms so lauded and fashionable in the eighteenth century are forgotten and unknown today, while the language of Doctor Johnson is still easy to understand. Thus it is that paradoxically, Shakespeare's works are much easier to read than Ben Jonson's.


Maurice Hussey did a poor job of editing the play. His introduction is sparse and does not put the play in the context of the drama of the time. The notes to the text are inadequate. The Latin quotations are translated without explanation as to why Jonson chose them. It strikes me that many editors of classic works published by British publishing houses offer the reader little in return for the commission they were paid. Compared to their French and even German and American colleagues British literary editors seem to me to do a very disappointing job at clarifying the text in front of them. Those compfortable and in my opinion very complacent and tunnel visioned expert editors of Penguin and Shakespeare classics-a murrain take 'em! The introduction to the Arden Shakespeare plays are (I have found no exception to date) pedantic, boring, fusty and obsessed with minutiae which could not possibly interest most university students let alone school sixth formers. This is especially problematic in the case of a writer of Ben Jonson's ilk. Ben Jonson's language is a Vesuvian eruption of dog Latin, deprecations, expletives and insider jokes. A modern reader needs considerable help and extensive notes to make sense of Jonson's difficult language . Hussey should be holding the reader's hand but isn't. Maybe the Revels Edition does a better job. Here is a taste of Jonson's language in Bartholomew Fair.

I do feel conceits coming upon me, more than I am able to turn tongue to. A pox o' these pretenders, to wit your Three Cranes, Mitre and Mermaid men! Not a corn of true salt, not a grain of right mustard amongst them all. They may stand for places, or so, again the next wit fall and pay two pence in a quart more for their canary than other men. But gi'me the man can start up a justice of wit out of six shillings beer, and give the law to all the poets and poet suckers I' town-because they are the player's gossips!

Now what in the name of confoundedness is that all about?

The following extcerpt is easier to understand but also requires elucidation. Why does one “cour it” in Tottenham “to eat cream”? What is the significance of Pannier Alley? The play is long arguably too long, and abounds with such obscure allusions.

I fear this family will turn you reformed too.; pray you come about again. Because she is in possibility to be your daughter-in-law, and may ask your blessing hereafter, when she courts it to Tottenham to eat cream! Well, I will forbear, sir; but i'faith, would thou wouldst leave thy exercises of widow hunting once, this drawing after an old reverend smock by the splay-foot! There cannot be an ancient tripe or trilibub I' the town, but thou art straight nosing it, and 'tis a fine occupation thou'lt confine thyself to, when thou hast got one; scrubbing a piece of buff, as if thou hadst the perpetuity of Pannier_Alley to stink in; or perhaps worse, currying a carcass that thou hast bound thyself to alive.



The fast, furious and relentlessly demotic tone of Bartholomew Fair makes it impossible for a reader of our time to immediately grasp or perceive what the mad humours of the play are on about. TS Eliot in his essay on Ben Jonson in his collection of critical essays called Elizabethan Essays astutely pointed out that Ben Jonson writes on the surface but not superficially, meaning that Ben Jonson is not a profound, not a readily quotable author but as Eliot very rightly observes “we cannot call a man's work superficial which is the creation of the world.; a man cannot be accused of dealing superficially with the world which he has himself created: the superficies is the world.” (p. 77)

There is hardly a plot to this play. It is rather presented as a mirror of its time and if we want to share the appreciation of what it achieves we have to make the effort, spared Jonson's contemporaries, of learning why he chose the Latin quotations he did, whom he is mocking and lambasting and why.

No review that I have seen here in Goodreads mentions Jonson's constant mocking of Shakespeare in this play and many hints and references or suggestions of a reference to other dramatists. Hero and Leander was a poem by Christopher Marlowe that retells the Greek myth of Hero and Leander completed by George Chapman and a theme in Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing. In Hamlet there is talk of boy actors

“there is an aery of children little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for it: these are now the fashion”

In Bartholomew Fair the ludicrous Bartholomew Cokes is presented with children who are in fact puppets and they will play Hero and Leander:

“They offer not to fleer, nor jeer, nor break jests as the great players do: and then, there goes not so much charge to the feasting of 'em or making 'em drunk, as to the other, by reason of their littleness.” Later
“I am in love with the actors already, and I'll be allied to them presently. (They respect gentlemen these fellows.) Hero shall be my fairing: but which of my fairings?? let me see-i'faith, my fiddle; and Leander my fiddlestick; then Damon my drum,and Pythias my pipe, and the ghost of Dionysisu my hobby-horse. All fitted.”
And the boy players in Bartholomew Fair are just puppets.

King Lear reappears much distorted in Bartholomew Fair, likewise The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth and the reference hints or misquotations usually take the form of persiflage. Captain Whit's seduction of Mrs Littlewit reads to me like a parody of the brothel scene in Pericles. And who will not think of Portia in the lines “so like a Daniel” transposed in Bartholoew Fair horribly
“So like a true Justice of Peace's wife indeed and a fine female lawyer! Turd in your teeth for a fee now.”
As for Hamlet's world as a “foul and pestilent congregation of vapours”. Jonson cant let that one go! I lost count of how many joking refercnes there are to Hamlet's "vapours" in Bartholomew Fair. Here are just a few examples of Jonson's parodying Shakespeare in Bartholomew Fair

Hamlet

Hamlet I would I had been there
Horatio It would have much amazed you.
Hamlet Very like, very like.


Bartholomew Fair

Littlewit
I hope my little ones will be like me, that cries for pig so in the mother's belly.

Busy
Very likely, exceeding likely, very exceeding likely.

Hamlet
I am but mad north north west

Bartholomew Fair
I am but mad from the gown upward


Macbeth's
So foul and fair a day I have not seen is echoed by the Puritan:

Hinder me not woman. I was moved in spirit; to be here this day, in this Fair this wicked and foul Fair; and fitter may it be called a Foul than a Fair.
There is a reference to John Marston too, something about Mars being a Malcontent God (capito?) .

Bartholomew Fair is an exhausting work. It would be fun to see it played, hectic and frantic as it is but best enjoyed with full explanatory texts and notes which so far as I know have not been offered.

Jonson is a forthright writer, not without courage. His excessive damnation of tobacco is a protest too much. He is obviously making fun of people who make Tobacco the boo man for every sickness even the pox or syphylis. (Hmm that sounds familiar). Is it possible that the King did not notice that his excretion of tobacco smoking is being lampooned in Bartholomew Fair? Maybe Ben Jonson's ridiculing of puritans enabled him to get away with it or maybe he had friends in the right places to protect him; however it was, these lines cannot be anything but a mocking of extreme anti-smokers and the King was one of them. Tobacco will cause you to get a third nostril in your face. It's not the “innocent” pox but demon tobacco that does that, dumbo. I like this ridiculing of blaming something or someone for every possible misfortune. There is conceivably an echo of scepticism here about all the disasters supposedly caused by witches (another obsession of the King's):

The hole in the nose here of some tobacco takers, or the third nostril (if I may so call it) which makes that they vent the tobacco out, like the ace of clubs, or rather the flower-de-lys, is caused from the tobacco, the mere tobacco! When the poor innocent pox, having nothing to do there, is miserably, and most unconscionably slandered.

Bartholomew Fair is not of the same stature as The Alchemist or Volpone but it is a remarkable comedy for all that. If it is hard to enjoy, that is because we cannot understand most of the jokes, we miss many references, we are poorly versed in the classics and Greek myths. Jonson was a classicist and a master of the demotic. That combination is a rare quality indeed. This play reminds me strongly of “Shakespeare's” Merry Wives of Windsor. Is this another piece of trickery? If someone stole the name of Shakespeare with the kind of trickery and disguise and persiflage which abounds in Bartholomew Fair to promote The Merry Wives of Windsor aka John Falstaff 3? Jonson would have enjoyed the joke.

For all the cynicism and satire, it seems to be Jonson's voice speaking when Adam Overdo, himself a parody of Shakespeare's Duke in Measure for Measure, reassures us that Jonson's will is not ultimately destructive:

I will have none fear to go along, for my intents are ad correctionem, non ad destructionem; ad aedificandum, non ad dirunedum; so lead on.

Now, that much Latin everyone can understand and concur with.

[Jacob Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

PROOF that people joking about farting and peeing and calling eachother whoremongers and knaves is always funny

[Sam Wescott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was fond of many of the characters in this play and, as always, enjoyed Jonson's wit and biting criticisms. I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as the Alchemist, though, because the pacing seemed a bit clumsy. Segments were irritatingly lengthy and others felt underdeveloped. All in all, though, it was an enjoyable read and now I'm depressed that I probably won't ever get to see it staged.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a little strange writing a review of a Renaissance drama. I can at least record some impressions. This play is just so intensely layered, and clever. And in the end I don't find myself really wanting to keep up or play along. Any one of the gags could be just hilarious, except it's taken too far. Entirely too far. And in the end, I find I just want all of it to settle down and end.

[Ygraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

in bartholomew fair, jonson captures the dizzying, colourful and ultimately grubby spirit of carnival, depravity and vice the currents on which the play is directed, avarice, ignorance and gluttony the heart of its characters.

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first Jonson play I have read, and although it is quite humorous, its prose, slang, and Dickens-number of characters often make the play unintelligible. The Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama provides an excellent introduction (which contains a few spoilers).

[Bonnie · Rating 2 out of 5]

first enacted 1614. Reminded me of Monty Python humor-slapstick and sexy.

[rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A friend told me to prepare for agony when reading Ben Jonson, but I actually found this fun.

[Laura Borger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned that Shakespeare's contemporaries could be raunchier than he was - and as clever.

[Anne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ben Jonson was a cocky bastard!

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

One more time...

...too clever for me.