Bartholmew Fair

Early modern London - too foggy and Protestant to have a carnival -

offered its inhabitants commercial events during which to indulge their

need for bodily delights and festival exuberance. The fair of St

Bartholmew, held anually in Smithfield on 24 August, served Jonson as

an opportunity to dissect a wide cross-section of Londoners and their

various reasons for spending a day out among the booths, stalls, smells

and noises of the fair. Unusually magnanimous for a Jonsonian city

comedy, the main thrust of the satire is not against fools, madmen,

fortune-hunters, cuckolds or prostitutes, but against hypocrisy and

bigotry. This edition shows that the play can be read as a

comprehensive refutation of puritanism and the London magistracy, both

of whom were attacking the theatre (and the festive culture of which it

was still part) as idolatrous, seditious and disorderly.