Bartholomew Fair Cover.indd - Stratford Festival

surprising capacity to pull together and help each
other when trouble strikes. They may be a temporary
community, but they are a community. And their
appeal to the physical side of life makes us confront
a basic truth about ourselves. Quarlous at the end of
the play tells Adam Overdo: “Remember you are but
Adam, flesh and blood! . . . Forget your other name
of Overdo, and invite us all to supper.” Overdo agrees,
and the final promise of a communal feast in which
everyone will join reminds us that what we have in
common is the body, with its appetites, its exposure
to pain and sickness, and its tendency to embarrass
us at inconvenient moments. The Fair deals in flesh
and blood, particularly flesh, and to that reality
no one, not even the most respectable theatre
audience, is immune.
Alexander Leggatt is professor emeritus of English at the
University of Toronto.
The Story
On the morning of the annual Bartholomew’s Day
fair, proctor John Littlewit is visited by Ned Winwife
and his companion Tom Quarlous. Winwife is wooing
Littlewit’s widowed mother-in-law, Dame Purecraft;
he has a rival, however, in the form of a Puritan
named Zeal-of-the-Land Busy.
Next arrives Humphrey Wasp, manservant to
Bartholomew Cokes. Cokes intends to wed Grace
Wellborn, the ward of his brother-in-law Justice
Adam Overdo, and Wasp has come to pick up the
marriage licence. Cokes himself then appears,
accompanied by Grace and Mistress Overdo, and
announces his desire to visit the fair. The entire
party, including Littlewit, who has written a puppet
show to be performed there, decide to go as well.
Meanwhile, unknown to all the others, Justice
Overdo also goes to the fair – in disguise, so that he
may see for himself what “enormities” are perpetrated
upon its grounds.
Soon, all these fairgoers are swept up in the
crimes and confusions of a world inhabited by the
likes of the ruffian Jordan Knockem, the cutpurse
Ezekiel Edgworth and the pig-woman Ursla. By the
end of the day, none remain untouched by their
experiences.
Ben Jonson – playwright
Benjamin Jonson was
born in June 1572, a
month after the death of
his father, a minister. He
attended Westminster
School but was unable
to afford a university
education. Instead, he
became apprentice
to his stepfather, a
bricklayer. He soon
left this employment,
however, to join the English Expeditionary Force
in Flanders, where he claimed to have killed an
opponent in single combat. In 1594, he married Anne
Lewis, who bore him four children, none of whom
survived childhood.
By 1597, Jonson had become an actor in London
and had begun writing plays for the theatre
manager Philip Henslowe. In 1598, he was arrested
for killing fellow actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel and
narrowly escaped hanging – though he was fined
and branded on his thumb. The same year saw his
first big success as a playwright, Every Man in His
Humour, followed in 1599 by a sequel, Every Man out
of His Humour.
Jonson was imprisoned for his outspokenness in
the 1604 satire Eastward Ho! which he co-wrote with
George Chapman and John Marston. He also wrote
two Roman tragedies, Sejanus (1603), the content
of which brought him before the Privy Council to
answer charges of treason, and Catiline (1611). His
finest works, though, are considered to be the four
great comedies Volpone (1606), Epicoene (1609), The
Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614).
Despite his brushes with the law, Jonson became
a favourite at the court of King James I, where, in
partnership with the designer Inigo Jones, he became
the era’s greatest deviser of the spectacular form
known as the masque. In 1616, the year he published a
collected edition of his works, he was granted a royal
pension and became unofficial poet laureate.
After Charles I replaced James on the throne in
1625, Jonson ceased to be a regular provider of
masques. He was appointed to the post of city
chronologer in 1628, but the same year suffered the
first in a series of strokes that left him paralysed. He
died on August 6, 1637, at the age of 65, and is buried
in Westminster Abbey, where a marble plaque bears
the inscription “O Rare Ben Jonson.”
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