She seems almost an Earth-Mother figure, but, like the other crooks, she should not be over-romanticized by critics: after all, it is she who, as the unofficial, accommodating lavatory-attendant at the Fair, tries to entice Mistress Littlewit and Mistress Overdo into prostitution.

The structure of the comedy appears to be casual – the fresh complications of Quarlous’s disguise and of Dame Purecraft’s falling in love with a madman are brought in almost off-handedly at the closing moments of Act Four – but the underlying design is always clear. Bartholomew Fair ends genially: the sober, hypocritical, and authoritarian figures, the Puritan and the Justice, killjoys both, are discomfited. Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, with his prodigious rhetorical tirade against the theatre, is out-manoeuvred in debate after the puppet-play-within-the-play by Lantern’s puppet, and retires crestfallen. Justice Overdo (whose Christian name Adam suggests that he is a universal figure) sheds his disguise for that final moment towards which all satiric comedy inexorably moves – the judgement:

Now to my enormities: look upon me, O London! and see me, O Smithfield! The example of justice, and mirror of magistrates, the true top of formality, and scourge of enormity. Hearken unto my labours…!

But Overdo is silenced when one of the ‘prostitutes’ is unmasked, and turns out to be Mistress Overdo. The end of the play is good-humoured and forgiving, prolonging the spirit of holiday: Justice Overdo invites all the dramatis personae back to his house for supper. The motives of the ‘upright’ have been questioned; the knaves and the opportunists go free.

The appeal of Bartholomew Fair is in the rich and vivid execution rather than in any moral content. This execution presents difficulties for today’s reader – difficulties that, as in The Alchemist, spring from Jonson’s rich and detailed evocation of Jacobean life through contemporary and local reference, and through specific jargons and slang. Although the modern reader quickly appreciates the vitality of this comedy, its rich comprehensiveness, he is bound to find a good deal of it (Dan Knockem’s ‘vapours’, for example, or Whit’s stage-Irish) very tiresome. And while certain characters spring vividly to life – the Justice, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, Humphrey Wasp, Ursula – others in the large cast of characters nowadays remain obscure. Part of the pleasure for the first audiences must have been that shock of recognition as they saw their own great Fair put vividly and realistically upon the stage of the Hope Theatre at Bankside in October 1614, only a couple of months after the Fair itself had been held as usual at Smithfield.

Kenneth Tynan once called Bartholomew Fair ‘a documentary’1 and another drama critic, Professor Eric Bentley, regards Shakespeare’s major history-sequence as forming with this comedy of Jonson’s ‘the great masterpiece of social realism in English’.1 Jonson, in an almost pedantic way, crammed a great mass of Jacobean life, idiom, and local colour, into Bartholomew Fair. The term ‘documentary’ is a somewhat bleak description of his achievement in this comedy and does scant justice to its exuberance and its richness of caricature. I should prefer to call Bartholomew Fair a cartoon, and to regard as distinctive its animation, its vigour, and its ‘panoramic’ coverage of Jacobean types. Some day, I hope, Miss Joan Littlewood will direct the play in such a way as to bring to life in modern stage terms both its stylization and its realism, and to give us ‘the beauty of it hot’, for, literary and intellectual though Jonson’s desire to cram everything in may have been, the play has analogies with the visual arts. Bartholomew Fair may be inferior to Volpone and The Alchemist, but it links Jonson with that other celebrant of the riotous life of Bartholomew Fair, the great English cartoonist, Thomas Rowlandson.

VI

The aims of the present edition are modest. The text of Volpone and The Alchemist is that of the First Folio Workes (1616) seen through the press by Jonson himself; that of Bartholomew Fair is based upon the posthumous Second Folio (1640), sheets of which Jonson may have seen and partly corrected before his death.

Jonson took great pains to see that his play-scripts were accurately presented to the Jacobean reader, and he adopted a standard method for the printing of the plays. Like other Elizabethan dramatists he did not give locations for his scenes save for a general indication that the action was set in London or in Venice. His practice was to start off at Act 1 Scene 1, and usually to begin a new scene (Scene II, Scene III, etc.) at the entrance of another character, a style which never became standard for printing plays in England as it did in France. At the head of each scene he listed the characters appearing in it: Subtle. Face. Dol. Mammon., etc. The first-named character is always the first speaker, and Jonson never gave any further attribution of the opening speech. He did not indicate the precise point at which a character enters or exits when these entrances or exits do not mark the beginning or end of a scene. He gave few stage-directions (save for Bartholomew Fair, where the largeness of the cast and the ‘busy’ action seems to have made stage-directions more necessary), and these were always printed in the margin. The following conventions have been used in this edition:

SPELLING AND PUNCTUATION

The spelling has been modernized throughout, as has the punctuation, to make the sense clear to the modern reader. Thus I print murder where Jonson used murther, venture for his venter (save where rhyme has to be preserved), and so on. Obvious misprints have been silendy corrected. The minor emendations and corrections which are standard in modern editions have likewise been silently included, but, where a new reading has been adopted from a recent scholarly edition, the fact has been recorded among the critical notes at the back. Jonson’s plays survive in an uncommonly good state, and I have not included a list of textual variants, knowing as I do that scholars and graduate-students who need access to the full bibliographical and textual apparatus will always prefer to use the Folios themselves, or the Oxford edition, or some other old-spelling reprint.