Bartholomew Fair Cover.indd - Stratford Festival

honey.” As the ballad-singer Nightingale entertains
the crowd, the cutpurse Edgworth moves among
them, plying his trade.
Though four centuries separate us from Jonson’s
world, the Fair is a place we can still recognize:
for us it calls up memories of hot lights, candy
floss, calliope music, big fuzzy stuffed bears, hot
dogs whose ingredients we would prefer not to
know about and, in the thickest part of the crowd,
pickpockets. Its climactic entertainment is a puppet
show in which a classic love story is reduced to
raucous obscenity. Rowdy, sleazy and dangerous, it
provokes the question: who would want to go there?
The answer, it seems, is nearly everybody. The play
opens in a Puritan household, a place we might
think was as far removed as it could be from the
carnival licentiousness of the Fair. But even in that
household the Fair exerts a magnetic pull. Littlewit,
author of the puppet play, wants to see it performed,
and circumvents his Puritan in-laws by getting his
pregnant wife, Win, to pretend a longing for roast
pig so that they can visit the Fair for the sake of her
health. The family’s resident spiritual advisor, Zealof-the-Land
Busy, not only goes along with the idea
but goes along to the Fair, where he plans to indulge
in his two favourite pastimes: “I will eat exceedingly,
and prophesy.” Littlewit has drawn up a licence for
the marriage of Bartholomew Cokes and Grace
Wellborn, but Cokes, an amiable idiot with a thirtysecond
attention span and a childlike delight in
everything around him, is more interested in going
to the Fair than in his approaching marriage. Cokes’s
servant Wasp, whose futile attempts to control his
master leave him in a state of perpetual rage, and
Grace, who is too dignified for the Fair, both resist
going; but they are swept along by the tide. Two
men-about-town, Quarlous and Winwife, go along
as the audience does, to watch the fun. And besides,
they both have their eyes on Grace.
Everyone, in short, goes to the Fair, whether they
want to or not, and it is not just an afternoon’s
outing after which normal life resumes. Virtually
everyone who goes there is in some way
transformed, sometimes in ways that reveal a
disconcerting affinity between clean-living London
and disreputable Smithfield. Two respectable city
wives are recruited as prostitutes, and Jonson drops
hints that their new roles are just a more direct
expression of the lives of women in the conventional
world. At the start of the play, Littlewit shows off
3