That he dodges retribution is psychologically right, and reminds the audience that con-men, like the poor, are always with us. Like Flatterie at the end of Sir David Lyndsay’s great morality The Three Estates, Face goes scot-free; the audience must be wary.

When Sir Tyrone Guthrie directed The Alchemist at London’s Old Vic in 1962, the play was performed in modern dress. In part this was because the desire for wealth still makes people gullible today, so that the theme of the comedy remains universal. Guthrie gave a further reason in his programme-note: ‘… modern dress gives more point to the frequent disguises and impersonations used by the trio of rogues. In Jacobean dress, who would know when Face was a Captain or a House Servant? Whether Subtle was a Divine or a Doctor?’ The point was well taken, and Guthrie’s production was fast and farcical and marvellously entertaining, reminding us, perhaps, that of Jonson’s three best comedies this one shone longest and brightest on the English stage. But because Jonson used contemporary idiom and place-reference so vividly, some obscurity is nowadays unavoidable, and a director may well want to make cuts. This is not a recent problem. David Garrick’s acting version, shortened and with most of the limelight on the Little Tobacconist, had – according to the Jonsonian stage-historian Robert Gale Noyes – ‘one hundred and fifty four cuts, varying from one line to three pages’1 – though not all were made because of obscurity. Two hundred and fifty lines were excised from Sir Epicure Mammon’s part, including the one about ‘the swelling unctuous paps of a fat pregnant sow’. The problem the men of the theatre still need to solve – Guthrie no less than Garrick – is how to do justice to Jonson’s fusion of farce and intellectual satire. Guthrie certainly did well by Sir Epicure, who emerged in his production as a Jonsonian ‘humour’, a monumental caricature, but elsewhere his version, rightly hilarious, missed the moral comment which is implicit in the play’s language and structure. Guthrie’s Alchemist was great fun; Jonson’s Alchemist is a great comedy. Dryden regarded it as Jonson’s highest achievement, although Volpone now claims first place. Between them they demonstrate Jonson’s variety within the narrow range of satirical comedy.

V

There remains Jonson’s later prose-comedy, Bartholomew Fair. When in 1950 the Old Vic Company revived this entertainment on the open stage of the Assembly Hall at Edinburgh and later in London, Mr T. C. Worsley, usually a sympathetic critic, found the play ‘the most crashing old bore’2 and Mr Kenneth Tynan announced that ‘the play, to stand up, certainly needs crutches’.3 Part of their dissatisfaction may be attributed to the production by George Devine which, though enjoyable, was insufficiently serious, substituting a riot of false noses and actors laughing at their own stale jokes for Jonson’s contemporary realism. The reviewers prompted a critical revaluation of this play. It is, of course, a lesser work than either Volpone or The Alchemist, although some academic critics rate it more highly.

Bartholomew Fair is a ‘panoramic’ structure, looser and more comprehensive than Jonson’s other great comedies. It is a festive entertainment in the literal sense that it dramatizes a popular holiday, and into it Jonson packed a great deal of London life and London idiom. The first act, which is almost a prologue to the four which follow, is essentially expository. It introduces one segment of the large cast of characters, those people who, though already united through kinship, friendship, business, or Puritanical religious zeal, are really linked by one thing: their desire to go to the Fair. They are presented in ones and twos – an idiosyncratic, well-drawn gallery of types – and the opening act culminates in the entrance of the monstrous, black figure of the Puritan-hypocrite, Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. In the second act we move to the Fair (or rather, in the Elizabethan theatre, the Fair moves to us), where another monstrous, authoritarian figure, Justice Overdo, is disguising himself in order to move, like a good Governor or Magistrate in the Elizabethan drama, unrecognized among the people. But this Justice, so bent on uncovering ‘enormities’, learns very little from his experience. The people of the Fair who are introduced in the second act have something in common with the trio in The Alchemist – they live by their wits. The prose-pamphlets of Thomas Nashe and others1 testify to the Elizabethans’ intense interest in the sheer mechanics of roguery, but the moral drift of this festive comedy is that the dupes are no better than the confidence-tricksters and villains. As the comedy progresses, the people of Act One meet and mingle with the folk of the Fair, itself a symbol of the world. There seems little to choose between the fools and the knaves, especially as some of the latter have a touch of the agility and roguish skill of Face, Subtle, and Dol. At the centre of the Fair and of the comedy stands Ursula, the Pig Woman, raucous, sweating, Falstaffian.