Bartholomew Fair: A Comedy

Bartholomew Fair is a Jacobean comedy in five acts by Ben Jonson. It was first staged on 31 October 1614 at the Hope Theatre by the Lady Elizabeth's Men company. Written four years after The Alchemist, five after Epicœne, or the Silent Woman, and nine after Volpone, it is in some respects the most experimental of these plays.

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—though 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.

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 London life in the early seventeenth century. The one day of fair life represented in the play allows Jonson ample opportunity not just to 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.

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.

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