Bartholomew Fair Research Articles

벤 존슨의 『바톨로뮤 장날』에 재현된 르네상스 시대의 광기

This paper aims to explore Renaissance perspectives on madness in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. As Carol Thomas Neely indicated, Renaissance England was fascinated with madness, and this play also reflects an interest in madness. It should be noted that the meaning of madness in the context of the Renaissance was mixed with folly, which implies the characters in Bartholomew Fair were described as fools and madmen. Moreover, the act of these characters heading to the fair is compared to a “voyage”, which reminds us of the “ship of fools” that separated madmen from society during the Renaissance period. This suggests that the Batholomew fair is a place that separates madmen from society, just like the ship of fools. The characters commit “enormity”, which implies folly and madness in the play. The acts of the characters that convey folly and madness are described as evil. This is related to the negative perception of madness in the Middle Ages. But it is worth noting that madness in the Renaissance period was not treated negatively only, and there were positive aspects associated with it as well. Michel Foucault emphasizes the positive aspects of madness, noting that madness is closer to truth and happiness than reason. Erasmus also argues that there is wisdom in the nature of folly. The positive aspects of madness are further highlighted through the voyage of the ship of fools. This is because the madmen on board monopolize the ship, which then becomes a place where madmen enjoy as much freedom as they please. Similarly, the Bartholomew fair is also a place where characters can express folly and madness and enjoy freedom.

The Excremental Ecology of Ben Jonson's "Bartholomew Fair"

The Excremental Ecology of Ben Jonson's "Bartholomew Fair"

“What do you lack? What is’t you buy?”: Commodity and Community in Bartholomew Fair

Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair uses the comic representation of criminality to comment on the urban culture of commodities. The variety of goods bought, sold, circulated, stolen and exchanged in the fair become a trope for the fluidity and malleability of the commodity form, not tied to particular material histories or uses, but part of an emerging fluid ideological space of the market. Against the decay of traditional notions of community, the play proposes a new and radical model of temporary, tactical, mobile and fluid alliances – a community of rogues based on the trope of the commodity form and the economic contract.

Caliban at the Fair: Figuring Nonhumanity in The Tempest and Bartholomew Fair

Previous articleNext article No AccessCaliban at the Fair: Figuring Nonhumanity in The Tempest and Bartholomew FairToria JohnsonToria JohnsonUniversity of Birmingham, UK Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 50, Number 1Spring 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/719933 Views: 120Total views on this site © 2022 Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The First Shakespearean Forgeries

Abstract The term ‘Shakespearean forgery’ generally conjures up nineteenth-century figures such as J.P. Collier or W.H. Ireland. This paper proposes an alternative history of Shakespeare and forgery, by establishing the prevalence of forgery as a crime in Shakespeare’s own lifetime. This had a material impact on early modern players, who were frequently accused of forging documents of authentication when touring. Bringing together legislation and actual cases of forgery, I demonstrate a symbiotic relationship between authors and forgers, which then makes its presence felt in the literary output of the time, from Nashe’s pamphlet war with Gabriel Harvey to Jonson’s suspect documentation in Bartholomew Fair. For Shakespeare, examples from Hamlet, King Lear, and Twelfth Night are paired with historical cases to show how Shakespeare’s forgeries are more than just a plot device. I finish by drawing parallels between Malvolio and the Earl of Essex, himself a prominent victim of forgery, to reveal new connections made possible through a serious consideration of forgery.

Influence of “thematic parks” to the development of tourism in Uzbekistan

Fairs in medieval Europe (for example, St. Bartholomew's Fair, founded in 1543 in London), were one of the origins of modern amusement parks. Ever since the Elizabethan era, fairs have become centers of fun for people with entertainment, food, games. They have become the natural birthplace of various forms of fun entertainment. Since 1810, Oktoberfest in Germany has become not only a beer festival, but also a place of folk festivals. For example, the structure of water parks is becoming more and more relevant, which has so far received little attention. This article analyzes and examines the possible impact of "Theme Parks" in Uzbekistan. The development of not only local tourism in the country, but also in the cities of neighboring republics is studied on the example of water parks. The authors have placed questionnaires in student dormitories and hotels in the capital of Uzbekistan.

Mammon in the Market; or, How Ben Jonson Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Capitalism

I will argue that the “middle comedies” of Ben Jonson, specifically The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, address concerns that are not only social and economic but also political in nature. Or, to put it another way, the economic issues that these plays address are also political. As the economic landscape shapes social life in city comedy, so too do political concerns exert an important, if perhaps less apparent, influence over the plays that I will examine here. In The Alchemist, Sir Epicure Mammon fantasizes about relocating to a “free state” so that he may enjoy the pleasures that his newly acquired capital can afford him without drawing the ire and suspicion of the monarch (4.1.156). In Bartholomew Fair, Justice Overdo proclaims that he acts on behalf of king and commonwealth when trying to regulate the capitalistic chaos of the local fair. The prevalence of the language of politics (of commonwealth, monarchy, republicanism) in these plays suggests that their economic concerns have significant political implications. Each play offers a resolution to this conflict in accordance with dramatic propriety, what is appropriate given the circumstances. The justice that is done and the order that is achieved at the conclusion of each play is not carried out by politicians or magistrates but rather shaped by the market society in which the characters operate. The characters who try to regulate the market or expose its corruption fail miserably, while the characters who triumph at the end of each play work the system and manipulate the circumstances to their advantage.

Thinking through Place on the Early Modern English Stage. Andrew Bozio. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xi+213.

<i>Thinking through Place on the Early Modern English Stage</i>. Andrew Bozio. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xi+213.

Bartholomew Abominations

Reviewed by: Bartholomew Abominations Rob Conkie Bartholomew Abominations Presented by Graeae Theatre Company and Naked Productions on BBC Radio 4 from 7 November 2020. Written by Paul Sirett. Directed by Jenny Sealey and Polly Thomas. Sound Recording by Louis Blatherwick. Sound design and production by Eloise Whitmore. Original music by Oliver Vibrans. British Sign Language Interpretation by Caroline Richardson, Jeni Draper, Vikki Gee-Dare, and Chandrika Gopalakrishnan. Executive Production by Jeremy Mortimer. With Liz Carr (Mrs. Purecraft), Jack Hunter (John), Chloe Ewart (Ursula), Stacey Ghent (Alice), Stephen Collins (Tom), Michael Golab (Ned), Garry Robson (Best), and Mina Anwar (Hobbs). When was the last time you experienced theater that turned you inside out? For me, this one did. When was the last time a theatrical production changed not just the way you view the world, but how you operate within it? For me, this one did. Bartholomew Abominations, a radio play co-production between the Deaf and disabled theater company Graeae and audio production company Naked Productions, uses Ben Jonson’s riotous Bartholomew Fair as a launchpad for a much darker, anti-carnivalesque tale. In brief, the abominations are the political energies that facilitate two hundred wedding fairs spread across England in the year 2032. The action of the radio play is set at the “St. Bartholomew Exhibition and Conference Centre in London,” where one such wedding fair takes place. The flesh that is traded at the fairs is that of marriage hopefuls, individuals prepared to undergo speed dating and arbitrary matrimony in order to secure an English-born partner and therefore escape the punishment promised to those who do not march to the New Puritan Party’s ideological drum. Thus, the Home Secretary Sir Michael Best, beautifully and skin-crawlingly played by Garry Robson, broadcasts to those at the fair a rhetoric both horrifically dystopian and yet all-too-familiar: At midnight tonight all non-English born persons and deaf, blind, disabled, and neurodiverse persons without proof of intended marriage to an English-born, able-bodied English person are to be rounded up [. . .]. Those of foreign blood will be deported to the country of their birth. Those with disabilities will be re-located to one of the government’s new facilities where they will be held until our proud country is free from the taint of disability forever [. . .]. People of England, the New Puritan Party is ready. Are you ready? Because together we will be free. We will make England English again! [End Page 310] Opposed to this abhorrent viciousness are a number of covert activists, chief among them the so-called Voice. The Voice—reader, you must expect SPOILERS from here on, and I recommend you listen to the recording before continuing with this review—is the first voice that we hear. It is a distorted voice, audio scrambled to preserve dissident anonymity. The Voice tests this distortion by anticipating the first phrase of Sir Michael’s speech, but with an additional clarification: “At midnight tonight, mass deportations begin.” The only hints that the person changing their voice might not be sinister are the ironic responses to the initial attempts: “I sound like Satan” and then “that’ll do.” But in the experience of listening to the play for the first time, and without reading along with the script, this is a disconcerting opening, a promise of danger and violence. The next sounds are harmonious, if anodyne: chamber music designed to establish a wedding fair atmosphere. Here, two women—Ursula and Alice—attempt to set up their marriage booth. They are interrupted by a police officer and their authorization to be there is questioned. Just as the police officer threatens to expose them, “The sound of several text, WhastApp, Facebook, Instagram alerts go[es] off at the same time” and the Voice hack broadcasts the message tested earlier to mobile devices and through the wedding fair public address system. The police officer, realizing this is serious but not sure why, excuses himself. As the play progresses, the audience soon learns that Ursula and Alice, who regularly and tenderly express their love for one another, are in league with the Voice, and have infiltrated the marriage-selling operation in order...

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages. Tanya Pollard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+331.

<i>Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages</i>. Tanya Pollard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+331.

Puppets, Sexlessness, and the Dumbfounding of Male Epistemology in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair

Ben Jonson excluded Bartholomew Fair from his momentous Workes (1616), which might have indicated ambivalence in him about the play's social project. In exploring gender and authority, the play's festival setting abandons male vocality and its broadcast of certainty and knowledge. The puppets' sexlessness, revealed at play's end, renders Puritanical arguments about gender and cross-dressing irrelevant and foolish in the space of human affairs. Yet such a conclusion for Jonson, who was slavishly attentive to Classical regulations of the theater, may betray a moment of artistic doubt after the failure of Catiline and uncertainty about his legacy as a dramatist.

Early Modern Cultural Hybridity: Bartholomew Fair as a Heterotopia of Hamlet

Abstract As a contribution to the discussion of Shakespeare’s “appropriability” (Stanley Cavell), this paper examines some aspects of the cultural position of Hamlet on the Jacobean entertainment market, as they are indicated in Ben Jonson’s comedy Bartholomew Fair (1614). The metatheatrical features of Bartholomew Fair may be said to measure the play’s resistance against appropriating the unique and problematic aspects of Hamlet, such as the Ghost or The Mousetrap. These are deconstructed in Jonson’s comedy, which anticipates the Enlightenment views of the social functioning of theatre as a “moral institution”.

Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship. Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+283.

<i>Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship</i>. Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+283.

Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage, by Brian Walsh

In 1605, the Bishop of Lincoln noted that no one would denounce his neighbours for religiously unorthodox opinions ‘unless he be very malicious’. William Chaderton was an enthusiastic pursuer of recusants, and no non-conformist himself, but even someone who spent much of his time dealing with the problem of religious heterodoxy recognised the way in which neighbourliness trumps other ideologies. In this book, Brian Walsh considers the importance of such ‘quotidian ecumenism’ (p. 54) in relation to the stage and argues that ‘the theater helped to create, enlarge, and sustain an open-ended public conversation on the vicissitudes of getting along in a sectarian world’ (p. 2). Walsh draws on a useful phrase from Willem Frijoff—‘the ecumenicity of everyday’—to express what, despite the religious difference on which historians focus, was the lived experience of many: ‘informal daily intercourse and peaceful co-existence among people, regardless of their confessional leanings’ (p. 9). Walsh analyses the language of religious division and queries ‘the cultural work’ (p. 20) done by labels such as Puritan, Papist or Brownist. One interesting example of the malleability of such labels is the name of Jonson’s character Win-the-Fight. Despite her humorously explicit Puritan name, Win-the-Fight goes by the diminutive ‘Win’, and therefore her religious affiliation can be misread—or is she intentionally distancing herself from her mother’s sectarian naming?—for ‘Win’ is also the diminutive of a popular Catholic saint (‘you thought her name had been Winifred, did you not?’ [Bartholomew Fair, 1.3.128–9]).

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages by Tanya Pollard

Reviewed by: Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages by Tanya Pollard Deborah Uman Tanya Pollard. Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. vii, 331. $70.00. ISBN 978-0-19-879311-3. In this clearly written and thoroughly researched book, Pollard argues that ancient Greek tragedies influenced sixteenth-century theater significantly more than previously thought. Pollard offers evidence of their availability and popularity during the early modern period and includes several useful appendices listing sixteenth-century editions of Greek plays in Greek, Latin and vernacular languages as well as performances of plays by or based on Greek playwrights. Pollard finds additional proof in the echoes of Greek tragic icons in a variety of sixteenth-century plays, which she analyzes to better understand the “complex process of literary transmission” and “an explicitly theatrical model for intertextual engagement” (3). Given the prominence of female protagonists in the Greek plays produced in the sixteenth century, Pollard characterizes the early modern understanding of the origins of drama as directly linked to Euripides’ eloquent women whose theatrical power stems from their ability to evoke sympathy from their internal and external audiences. While Hecuba remains the most prominent example, Pollard also examines figures such as Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Jocasta and Alcestis, highlighting the centrality of the mother-daughter dyad and uncovering the links between rhetorical power and women’s status as grieving mothers and sacrificial daughters. Pollard puts Shakespeare at the center of this book, framing the four chapters devoted to Shakespeare with an examination of early modern translations of Greek plays and a lively reading of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. Chapter 1 focuses on Jane Lumley’s Iphigeneia and George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta. Noting the ways in which translators diverged from the source materials, Pollard finds that the plays display “a surprisingly consistent interest in the heroic powers of eloquent sacrificial virgins mobilized by the affective intensity of their grieving mothers” (71). Although English tragedy shifted to focus on male suffering, Pollard contends that Greek women haunt Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy as well as Titus Andronicus, which, Pollard suggests, Shakespeare co-wrote with George Peele, who was more familiar with Greek sources. She also speculates that this collaboration may have “left a Euripidean imprint” on Shakespeare’s tragic imagination (121), leading to the preoccupation with Hecuba that surfaces in Hamlet. Despite its shift to a mourning son who monopolizes the stage, Hamlet’s fascination with Hecuba suggests an acknowledgment of her affective power that Shakespeare hopes to achieve in his own work. The chapters devoted to Shakespeare feature some of Pollard’s most attentive and compelling close reading. For instance, in addressing Shakespeare’s appropriation of Greek tragic women for comic aims, Pollard offers a dazzling explanation of The Comedy of Error’s frequent use of the word “burden” and other etymologically related terms to evoke the tragic potential of paternity that belies the play’s title and tone. Pollard reads The Comedy of Errors alongside Twelfth Night as Shakespeare’s unique form of hybrid comedy, a form that engages with elements of Greek tragedy and highlights women’s ability to elicit sympathy. Next, Pollard groups together Much Ado about Nothing, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale, which all stage a woman’s seeming return from death and can be linked to Euripides’ Alcestis, whose titular heroine represents “the hybrid [End Page 743] possibilities of tragicomic redemption” associated particularly with maternity (173). This chapter is particularly thought-provoking, presenting Alcestis as a model of virtue not linked to vengeance and interpreting The Winter’s Tale’s oracle as “a model for a distinctively female embodied, and poetic form of creative reproduction” (191). Pollard reads Shakespeare’s revived heroines as bold and eloquent in contrast to the silenced Alcestis, offering a perhaps overly optimistic interpretation of each woman’s agency while underplaying the plays’ act of patriarchal violence. Nevertheless, her understanding of the value of female suffering offers useful insight into these dark and often troubling plays. Arguing that Shakespeare’s plays are a “bridge between the theater’s Greek origins and new approaches for engaging audiences’ sympathies” (221), Pollard concludes with a delightfully layered analysis...

‘Look What Market She Hath Made’: Women, Commerce, and Power in &lt;i&gt;A Chaste Maid in Cheapside&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;Bartholomew Fair&lt;/i&gt;

This essay examines the effects of women’s roles in early modern English food marketplaces, highlighting ways that ordinary women could use their participation in food transactions to destabilize (and even subvert) power structures and garner authority. In Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613) and Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), food informs a complete understanding of early modern attitudes toward shifting gender roles in the ever-evolving and expanding food economy.

Reading Bartholomew Fair from the Perspective of Bakhtinian Grotesque Realism

Reading Bartholomew Fair from the Perspective of Bakhtinian Grotesque Realism

“To Corrupt a Man in the Midst of a Verse”: Ben Jonson and the Prose of the World

Ben Jonson's early plays show a marked interest in prose as a counterpoint to the blank verse norm of the Renaissance stage. This essay presents a digital analysis of Jonson's early mixed-mode plays and his two later full-prose comedies. It examines this selection of the Jonsonian corpus using DocuScope, a piece of software that catalogs sentence-level features of texts according to a series of rhetorical categories, highlighting the distinctive linguistic patterns associated with Jonson's verse and prose. Verse tends to employ abstract, morally and emotionally charged language, while prose is more often characterized by expressions that are socially explicit, interrogative, and interactive. In the satirical economy of these plays, Jonson's characters usually adopt verse when they articulate censorious judgements, descending into prose when they wade into the intractable banter of the vicious world. Surprisingly, the prosaic signature that Jonson fashioned in his earlier drama persisted in the two later full-prose comedies. The essay presents readings of Every Man Out of his Humour and Bartholomew Fair, illustrating how the tension between verse and prose that motivated the satirical dynamics of the mixed-mode plays was released in the full-prose comedies. Jonson's final experiments with theatrical prose dramatize the exhaustion of the satirical impulse by submerging his characters almost entirely in the prosaic world of interactive engagement.

Taking Liberties: The Influence of the Architectural and Ideological Space of the Hope Theatre on Jonson's Bartholomew Fair

The performance of Bartholomew Fair at the Hope Theatre in 1614 was the play's first and only recorded public performance in Jonson's lifetime, and the playtext still bears the stamp of this theatrical debut. Using the spatial theories of Foucault, de Certeau, and Lefebvre, I suggest that Jonson takes advantage of the liminal spaces of his performance venue, the ideologically ambiguous space of the Liberty that contained it, as well as his play's fictive setting (the Fair itself), to pass comment on the more ideologically solid and austere environment of the City of London. I also argue that in some ways this first performance can be read as ‘proto-site-specific,’ inasmuch as the play relies on the particularities of its environment to achieve Jonson's aim—to exhort his audience into a more sophisticated ‘understanding’ of the play's action—an understanding that he hoped would, in turn, affect their reading of the real urban space outside the playhouse. The Jonsonian ‘third way’ between represented and representational spaces takes advantage of the heterogeneous environment of the playhouse and elides together the heterotopian environments of Fair and Liberty to invite a correspondingly unstable interpretive response from its audience. This experiential division is enforced in the space of the stage and auditorium, with Jonson's use of inductive techniques, staging, and direct address—which frequently privileges some groups of spectators, to the detriment of others—helping to enforce divisions within the audience. The interpretive openness of Jonson's spatial practice becomes in effect a microcosm for the vast number of spatial practices performed by the inhabitants of the real city beyond the Hope's walls. However, in his emphasis on ‘understanding’ spectators Jonson provides his audience with the cognitive tools to be the actors rather than the acted-upon in the dog-eat-dog environment of London's urban space, and it is within the triangulation between text, playhouse and suburban environment of the play's first performance that this effect is most pronounced.