Theatre of Judgment: Space, Spectators, and the Epistemologies of Law in "Bartholomew
Fair"
Author(s): Andrew Brown
Source: Early Theatre, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2012), pp. 154-167
Published by: Early Theatre: A Journal Associated with the Records of Early English
Drama
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43499631
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154 Issues in Review
Theatre of Judgment: Space, Spectators, and the Epistemologies of Law
in Bartholomew Fair
The cultural crucible that was early modern London ignited innovations in
both drama and the law, and the two fields often coalesced around similar
epistemologica! and social concerns. Ben Jonson s Bartholomew Fair (1614)
explores the contemporary connections between these spheres by employing
the physical and conceptual dimensions of the playhouse to interrogate the
law's increasingly professionalized discourses of investigation, evidence, and
judgment. Although the play s metatheatrical induction figures the performance
in the legal model of a contractual agreement, Jonson's dramaturgy does
not simply mirror the structure of the law court or position his audience as
a convened jury. Instead, the choreographed staging of the play establishes a
richly visual arena in which various methods of seeing and knowing, from
the strictly legal to the broadly social, are put to the test. Bartholomew Fairs
characters employ these strategies to negotiate the fair s rhetorical, gestural,
social, material, and spatial dimensions for their own gain, but by doing so
they also become unwitting objects of evaluation. In this way, Bartholomew
Fair transforms the playhouse into a theatre of judgment where characters
use both the investigative methods of the law and the flexible power of wit
as they vie for advantage. However, as these fairgoers cluster and collude on
the stage Jonson also encourages his spectators to identify with, assess, and
even ridicule their struggles for information and authority, daring this corresponding
assembly of loosely formed, impromptu groups of theatregoers
to venture their own revealing judgments on the play. Through its staging
of the densely layered spaces of the early modern city, Bartholomew Fair
works to create a distinctively spatialized forum of participatory inquiry and
response - the vital seeds of London's burgeoning public sphere.
As in many of Jonson s works, Bartholomew Fairs prefatory material
stakes out the confines of the ensuing performance. The inductions Articles
of Agreement' deploy mock-legal language to institute a satiric contract
among playgoers, the acting company, and the poet that defines the boundaries
of audience judgment in the terms of physical space (ind.55).1 When the
Stage-keeper is questioned about his business onstage, he warily replies, 'the
understanding gentlemen o' the ground here asked my judgment' (ind.4l-
2)ê This appeal to the denizens of the physical ground' of the playhouse
yard is twisted into a term of social disparagement by the Book-holder, who
sardonically observes that Jonson has written the play 'just to his [ie, the
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Issues in Review 155
Stage-keeper s] meridian, and the scale of the grounded judgements here, his
play-fellows in wit', but the Scrivener also adopts the term as a piece of legal
cant: 'the said spectators and hearers ... as also the grounded judgments and
understandings, do for themselves severally covenant' (ind.63-6). In this
way, Jonson successively weaves the term ground' into a series of discursive
frameworks - the earth beneath the humblest playgoers' feet becomes
the ultimate referent for a contract of judgment that binds everyone in the
theatre.
The 'Articles of Agreement' further reinforce this link between physical
space and the shaping force of law as the Scrivener specifies that each playgoer
must ťbe fixed and settled in his censure ... not to be brought about
by any that sits on the Bench with him, though they indict and arraign
plays daily' (ind.86-90). Jonson's figuration of 'the Bench' as legal and theatrical
object invokes the contemporary context of the common law jury trial,
which operated on the premise that all men possessed a natural ability to pass
reasoned judgment on evidence.2 However, the precise epistemological and
social role of the jury was much debated in Jonson's time. Before 1533 jury
members had been chosen primarily for their direct perceptual knowledge of
a crime, like witnesses today, but Lorna Hutson notes that over the course
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 4 jurors ceased to be self-informing
and became entirely reliant on testimony presented in court', in part due to
'the rise of the justice of the peace as pretrial investigator'. In this new paradigm,
a hierarchy of legal professionals gathered facts and presented cases to
jury members who served solely as ' evaluators of evidence ? This transition
was still unfolding when the play debuted in 1614, and the juristic model
of judgment that Jonson offers his audience was therefore a contested space
in which the role of citizens in collecting and evaluating proofs coexisted
tensely with that of justices and other officials. Indeed, by placing his spectators
on 'the Bench', Jonson comically figures them not as a receptive jury, but
as a competing crowd of would-be judges. As Bartholomew Fairs induction
unfolds, however, it even more keenly echoes the vexed status of popular
legal participation in the period. With characteristic slyness, Jonson extends
the empowering forms and conventions of the common law only if spectators
are able to raise enough capital for the price of admission.
Even as the Scrivener addresses his contract to all 'the Spectators or Hearers,
at the Hope on the Bankside', he establishes a hierarchy of evaluation
in specifying that 'It shall be lawful for any man to judge his six pennorth,
his twelve pennorth, so to his eighteen pence, two shillings, half a crown, to
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156 Issues in Review
the value of his place' (ind.75-7).4 But the true weight of this provision lies
in the Scrivener s resounding caveat: each spectator may judge according to
his place, 'Provided always his place get not above his wit' (ind.77-8). As a
counterweight to the abundant conceptual resources of the law, wit' supplies
a crucial theoretical dimension of Bartholomew Fair. Scholars have aptly
noted that the early modern conception of wit is endlessly polyvalent, bearing
strong associations with elite culture as well as with more pragmatic forms of
perceptiveness or discretion.5 Current criticism places particular emphasis on
what Adam Zucker calls 'the social logic of wit'.6 As Zucker explains in his
study of Jonson's Epicoene, performances of wit ... are constantly in tension
with and made meaningful by a vast field of objects, spaces, and knowledge
that produce social power or make status recognizable'.7 In much the same
way, as Bartholomew Fair invokes the idea of wit - roughly taken to include
visual acuity, intelligence, and social aptitude - the play also challenges
theatregoers to disclose their own revealing verdict on the spectacle before
them: the Scriveners jibe that those who will swear Jeronimo or Andronicus
are the best plays yet shall pass unexcepted ať only affirms that the very act
of evaluation necessarily leaves one open to contention and critique (ind.90l).8
Through these metatheatrical conceits, the plays induction charges the
deeply visual field of the Jacobean public theatre with the force of interwoven
judgments, establishing a volatile economy of knowledge and social
advantage in which spectators may gain or lose in an instant. Throughout
the subsequent performance, Jonson exploits the physical properties of the
early modern playhouse to transform the multilayered urban spatiality of
Bartholomew Fair into an arena where these epistemologies of law and wit
are themselves put on trial.
Bartholomew Fair almost certainly debuted at the Hope, a public playhouse
with a removable stage that also allowed it to host animal-baiting and other
paratheatrical spectacles. This eclectic, even competitive multifunctionality
is mirrored by the play-world s maze of inset structures and performative
spaces, including the fair booths, the stocks, and the puppet-theatre.9
Jonson generates much of the play s humour from the squabbles for spatial
and visual prominence among the fairs proprietors, as when Leatherhead
demands that Joan Trash cSit farther with your gingerbread-progeny there
and hinder not the prospect of my shop' - like the spectators, these figures
are keenly aware that they too pay for [their] ground' (2.2.3-14). Alongside
these structural requirements, the plot of Bartholomew Fair also hinges on
the apprehension and exchange of legally significant objects. For example,
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Issues in Review 157
in the play s opening lines the proctor Littlewit carries a marriage license
onstage as he marvels at his ability 'to spin out these fine things still and like
a silk-worm, out of myselP (1.1.1-2). In contrast, Humphrey Wasp brusquely
insists, 'never open or read it to me ... fold it up o' your word and gi' it me'
(1.4.5-7), while the insatiable Bartholomew Cokes must be content to 'look
upo' the case' in which the license is carried (1.5.38). The extended deliberation
over this case' strongly underscores spectators' sense of the document s
materiality and spatial presence; indeed, Wasp even grudgingly pays Littlewit
an extra eight pence' for it (1.4.20). The ťhard words' of the marriage
licence, as Wasp dismissively calls them - the commanding utterances of
the law made tantalizingly and corruptibly material - thus serve as instrumental
cues for Jonson's fairgoers to disclose their stances towards visuality,
knowledge, and social relations (1.5.33).
Importantly, these material and spatial engagements occur not just
between individual characters, but between the ever-shifting groups of Londoners
that become entangled in the fair's spectacles.10 Leo Salingar incisively
claims that 'the assembly of people at the Fair constitute not only a
crowd but a public', akin to 'the real spectators in the Hope'.11 I want to
argue, however, that the provisional unions formed by Jonson's fairgoers suggest
not a unitary public' so much as the fertile beginnings of coexistent
publics', recently defined by Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin as Voluntary
groupings built on the shared interests, tastes, commitments, and desires
of individuals'.12 With its enticing offers of pears', gilt gingerbread', and
ballads' (2.2.30-9), Bartholomew Fair depicts a realm where the common
pursuit of pleasure gathers diverse people into new forms of association, as
when the easygoing Littlewit and the hypocritical Zeal-of-the-Land Busy
alike are drawn into Ursula's pig-booth by 'the good titillation of the famelic
sense' (3.2.71-2). More significantly, in much the same way that publics
collectively pursued 'new kinds of expertise and evaluative standards ... of
analysis and judgment', the most successful characters in the play employ
tactics of makeshift cooperation as they seek knowledge and advantage in
the spaces of the fair.13 As such, while Bartholomew Fair cannot be said to
exhibit coherent, lasting publics' in the strictest sense, Jonson's dramaturgy
develops a constantly shifting field of opportunities for both characters and
spectators to participate in newly public ways of seeing and knowing, modelling
strategies of epistemic collaboration through the shared efforts of these
deftly grouped figures.
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158 Issues in Review
For instance, when the disguised Justice Adam Overdo delivers the
knowing aside that he will put [Ursula] in, for my second enormity', readers
are reminded that he is lingering near the fair's booths while clandestinely
scribbling a list of offenses in his black book (2.2.64-5). More than
just a detached observer, Justice Overdo also actively collaborates with city
dwellers like Mooncalf in his search for legal proof, as when he slips into
thieves' cant to ask the cunning boy whether Knockem is 'a knight of the
knife' (2.3.22-3). For an audience primed by the play's induction to seek
out and pass judgment upon staged events, Overdo's inquisitive presence on
the periphery of the action constructs Ursula's booth as a tempting, trasgressive
space in much the same way that the richly evoked scent of roasting
pig attracts fairgoers to its door.14 Over the course of Bartholomew Fair
such framing devices - effected largely through Jonson's manipulation of
physical and social space - enable some characters to directly engage the
audience, encouraging spectators both to consider events through onstage
observers' eyes and to evaluate the legitimacy of those observations.15 The
fair's spectacles thus anchor moments of heightened publicity in which characters
and theatregoers alike are dared to participate. As in the induction,
however, this participation inevitably opens up the electrifying possibility
that one will find oneself an object of the public gaze and judgment that
rules the play.
As they navigate the beckoning interiors and open venues called up by
Jonson's spatializing dramaturgy, figures like the grandiloquent Justice
Overdo, the witty gallants Quarlous and Winwife, and the coolly perceptive
Grace Wellborn act out a range of strategies for acquiring and leveraging
social knowledge. But if audience members are continually encouraged to
self-reflexively critique these characters' endeavours, Justice Overdo's criminal
investigation represents perhaps the most overt demand for playgoers'
appraisal in Bartholomew Fair. As the play's chief representative of London's
professional legal establishment, Overdo is central to Jonson's interrogation
of early modern concepts of judgment.
From his first appearance, the justice's compelling invocations of urban
space lend him a unique ability to attract spectators' notice. As he strides
onto the stage, Overdo proclaims his goal of being 'a capital member of this
city . . . who would take you, now the habit of a porter; now of a carman; now
of the dog-killer ... into every alehouse, and down into every cellar' (2.1.11-
16). In an echo of Michel de Certeau's notion of the 'tour' - an experiential
account of place comprised of a series of spatializing actions' - the justice
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Issues in Review 159
here invites spectators to accompany him on an imaginative journey into the
cloistered inner spaces of Bartholomew Fair, where one may measure the
length of puddings . . . and custards with a stick, and their circumference
with a thread' (16-18).16 Justice Overdo explains that he has undertaken this
'special day of detection' in order to document ťthe yearly enormities of the
fair' as evidence for the punitive 'Piepowders' court that haunts the periphery
of the play (35-7). Overdo thus specifically defines his mission as an official
process of evidence-gathering; in de Certeau's terms, his tour conditions'
the creation of an epistemological map' that promises to record a totalized
and legally actionable image of the fair's crimes.17 But as he laments, alas, as
we are public persons, what do we know? Nay, what can we know' (23-4),
the justice also underscores the foundational paradox of his project: he must
adopt the disguise of a private person to bring evidence to light in a publicized
ritual of arraignment and sentencing.
Just as Overdo seeks to circumvent the need to 'hear with other men's ears'
and 'see with other men's eyes' by relying on 'a foolish constable, or a sleepy
watchman' (24-5) for intelligence, enterprising justices of the peace in Jonson's
time were both celebrated and denounced for their efforts to scour the
expanding city for legal proof in person.18 The lawyer and author Michael
Dalton begins his influential The Countrey Justice (1618) with an Epistle
arguing that 'the actions and the proceedings of the Iustices of the Peace,
should bee well and duely looked into, and themselues worthie to bee punished,
when through malice, or other corruption they shall doe unjustly'.19
Importantly, Dalton specifically recommends the text as a guide for justices
taking legal action 'priuately, and peraduenture upon the sudden', observing
that these officials 'are farre more able to direct themselues' in 'publique
meetings and assemblies'.20 Overdo may bracket his first soliloquy with the
mantra that he works 'in justice' name, and the king's; and for the commonwealth'
(2.1.1-2, 40-1), but Dalton's sensitive awareness that 'iustice
may be peruerted many wayes' by jps functioning as private persons is staged
throughout Bartholomew Fair.21 As Smithfield's fairgoers overtake the stage
and embroil the disguised magistrate in their own plots and concerns, his
legal investigation becomes firmly entangled in a radically participatory
model of public judgment - a potent alternative to the flawed authority of
the private justice.
While Overdo's soliloquies establish him as an attractive spectacle for the
members of Jonson's audience, this same verbosity also makes him an easy
target of the fair's denizens. His bizarre ejaculations on the evils of 'bottle-ale
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i6o Issues in Review
and tobacco' (2.6.1), provoked by Mooncalf, almost immediately implic
him as an unwitting accessory in Edgeworth s theft of a purse belongin
the oblivious Bartholomew Cokes. But though Overdo s canting speech
render him woefully ignorant of the crime occurring before him, the s
also presents audience members with a sensorially demanding spectacl
When the theft takes place, no less than seven major characters are onst
as well as a number of other figures who may look on in amusement, j
at the sermonizing Overdo, or simply contribute to the general din as t
hawk their wares.23 While the actor playing Edgeworth might farcic
draw spectators' attention through a look or gesture - like an exaggera
tug on Cokes' purse strings - the actual moment of the theft may even
been partially obscured from inattentive playgoers by the sheer accumulatio
and frantic motion of bodies on the stage. As his soliloquies give way to the
spatially embedded orations' (2.2.113), Overdo is thus reduced from a se
fashioned investigator of the fair's enormities to an involuntary participant
incapable of framing viewers' perspectives on the chaotic scene. Far f
allowing him to slip easily into the spaces of the fair, Justice Overdo's 'baw
ing (2.6.77) speech and fool's costume finally lead Wasp to take him f
mad puritanical cutpurse, and he is literally driven off the stage in an a
popular justice.24
In this way, Overdo's authority is subsumed beneath a complex interp
of socially and spatially dispersed judgments - Jonson's feverishly st
array of bodies, props, sounds, and motions here becomes not simply
undifferentiated crowd, but a remarkably responsive network of self-in
ested city-dwellers. Like a witless Hamlet, Overdo pronounces in his se
soliloquy that he will make no more orations shall draw on these trag
conclusions' (3.3.1-2) before reluctantly admitting that he was
one cause (a by-cause) why the purse was lost . . . that exhortation, which d
the company, indeed, which drew the cutpurse, which drew the money, wh
drew my brother Cokes his loss, which drew on Wasps anger, which drew on
beating: a pretty gradation! (4-17)
Overdo's language here parodies early modern forensic rhetor
of legal writing in which authors emphasized causal links b
in order to create evidential narratives of guilt.25 No longer
trate' touring the maze of the city to uphold 'the public good
Overdo in his own account becomes merely 'the said Adam'
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Issues in Review l6i
one entangled actor in a vibrantly connective company' (14) that can scarcely
be rendered by this plodding fragment of legal prose. Unlike his thundering
first soliloquy, Overdo s admission is also witnessed by another set of interpreters
in the gallants Quarlous and Winwife, who summarily dismiss him
as a 'fool' before turning to view 'fresher argument' (36). Where the pedantic
legalism of the justice fails to account for the complexity of deeds and judgments
in urban space, together these characters exploit both wit and the law
as they navigate the fair to their mutual advantage.
In contrast with Overdo's clandestine investigations, Winwife and Quarlous
are first drawn to the fair primarily by the sheer entertainment to be
found in the excellent creeping sport' of inferior wits (1.5.122). Upon catching
sight of Cokes and his prospective bride Grace Wellborn, Winwife whispers,
ťDid you ever see a fellow's face more accuse him for an ass', while
Quarlous quips, 'Accuse him? It confesses him one without accusing' (44).
The gallants' rhetorical twisting of the law's terminology into witty rejoinder
underscores the close cultural interrelationship between these concepts of
judgment.26 However, this deft mingling of epistemological frameworks also
proves more pragmatically useful as Bartholomew Cokes reveals ' his purse
boastingly in a fit of bravado that predictably attracts Edgeworth and Nightingale
(3.5.34.1). Jonson once more floods the space with fairgoers in this
scene: eleven named characters are onstage, and Busy's party of four has also
joined Mooncalf, Knockem, Whit, and Ursula in the latter's pig-box' for a
clandestine feast (3.2.1 17).27 But where Overdo was previously duped by the
thieves' exploitation of the fair's bustling crowds, this play of bodies allows
Quarlous and Winwife to demonstrate an impressive degree of social perceptiveness.
As Cokes chirps 'Which pocket is't in? For a wager?' (3.5.137),
Edgeworth makes off with yet another purse, but Jonson here includes an
explicit stage direction in which the thief 'gets up to him, and tickles him in the
ear with a straw twice to draw his hand out of his pocket ' (150.1-2). This gesture
supplies comic spectacle for the audience as well as for Winwife, who comments,
'He has it, 'fore God he is a brave fellow; pity he should be detected'
(160-1). Even more remarkably, when Edgeworth silently slips the purse to
Nightingale - a feint wholly unmarked in the text - Winwife marvels,
'That conveyance was better than all, did you see't ? (166, emphasis added).
Although it is difficult to discern how overtly this second action might have
been staged, Winwife's visual acuity provides a striking frame for audience
perspective on the scene: his question is as much addressed to Bartholomew
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i62 Issues in Review
Fairs spectators as it is to his partner Quarlous. Unlike Overdos oration
these terse remarks effectively solicit theatregoers' attention and emulation
If Winwife 's keen eye fulfills one criterion of witty judgment - the abili
to observe and evaluate the behaviour of others - it is Quarlous who co
verts this discernment into tangible social advantage. Briskly approachi
Edgeworth after Cokes' party has left the stage, Quarlous announces,
not deny it. You are a cutpurse, sir, this gentleman here, and I, saw you, nor
do we mean to detect you (3.5.229-30). The pair's proposal to Edgewort
neatly captures the play's ongoing juxtaposition of visual aptitude with
legal discourse of evidence, in a manifestation of what Cynthia Herrup
called the ťlaw as lived': though he asserts that he and Winwife 'saw' the thef
Quarlous vows not to 'detect' it as a legal proof.28 By recruiting the cutpurse
to steal Cokes' marriage license, leaving Wasp only the disputed 'box, to p
with still' (242), Quarlous and Winwife strive to exploit the material a
social implements of the law as they plot to win the hand of Grace Wellborn
The ingenious ward also proves herself an epistemological adept of Barth
mew Fair ; however, manipulating not only these legal objects but also t
very properties of evaluative vision itself.
While the character of Grace initially seems to be a victim of the wa
ship system that would marry her against her will, she reveals a remark
degree of agency by adapting the language and methods of the common
to secure her own liberation.29 In contrast with other characters' unwitt
self-disclosures, Grace attributes her reluctance to choose between the su
offered by Quarlous and Winwife to her wit' and cunning', insisting t
she cannot make her choice, without knowing you more' (4.3.25-8). Ech
ing the law's participatory rhetoric in her suggestion that the two gallants '
reasonable creatures' who possess understanding, and discourse', Grace t
asks if they will consent to a motion that would establish a trial appealing to
the judgment of ordinary Londoners (4.3.30-6). A counterpoint to Jonso
satire on overreaching jps, embodied by the inept Overdo, this device st
an equally deft skewering of the law's dependence on the suspect reason
the commons. As Grace assures Quarlous and Winwife that she will 'fix
resolution, and affection' (47) upon a passerby's choice between two wor
selected by the men and inscribed on wax writing tables, the trio's solic
tion of the lunatic Trouble-all enacts the pitfalls of any truly public pro
of jury selection.30
In the following mock trial, Jonson stages a comic incarnation of the law'
commanding spirit into its supremely pliant letter. Like Bartholomew F
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Issues in Review 163
other legal objects, Graces wax tables suggest the fundamentally imperfect
implementation of human law; in contrast with the stone tablets of the
Mosaic covenant, their impressionable surface presents a potential palimpsest
of misattributed and transitory judgments. And as in the twinned purse
theft scenes, Jonson's deliberate manipulation of stage space is crucial as the
mad officer reluctantly delivers the sentence, 'I do like him there: that has the
best warrant' (4.3.82). Quarlous and Winwife apparently avert their eyes so
as not to witness Trouble-alls choice, perhaps marked according to Grace s
instructions by a stroke' (76) on one of the tablets, but whether theatregoers
would be privy to this information is less clear.31 Regardless of its precise
staging, however, this exchange is intrinsically rich with visuality as each
character bristles with concern at what they can and cannot see - in her
device, Grace most fully exploits the spatially and socially locative relationships
between self-interested characters to stage visual interactions that both
frame and playfully unseat audience perception. The young ward thus compels
and channels spectators' attention precisely because, like Jonson himself,
she cannily manipulates the underlying logic of participatory public judgment
to secure her own liberty and satisfaction.
By shaping the fairs anarchic urban space into an arena where the witty
vision of Quarlous and Winwife can be anticipated and redirected according
to the bounds of a contract between 'reasonable creatures' - as when
she reminds Quarlous that he promise [d], not to inquire' (4.3.92) about the
trial's result - Grace quietly assumes the elusive epistemological authority
laid out in the play's induction. In so doing, she presents playgoers with a
stage-managed spectacle of legal publicity that models how they themselves
might triumph in the contests of perception that animate Jonson's theatre.
The supper invitation that the humbled Overdo finally extends to the
denizens of Smithfield has traditionally led critics to dub Bartholomew
Fair Jonson's most humane play, foregoing acerbic satire or moral didacticism
in favour of a more tolerant account of the limits of individual wisdom.32
But the play's finale cannot simply be said to champion an ideal of
commonsense reckoning; even in these closing moments, Bartholomew Fair
sustains a complex dialectic between the playhouse, the law court, and the
city beyond.33 Although the justice's return to common humanity as ťAdam,
flesh and blood' (5.6.85) dethrones any authoritative account or trial of the
fair's events, through this invitation Jonson creatively bursts open the theatre
of judgment his dramaturgy has so exactingly created. As Quarlous proposes
that he and Overdo compare our discoveries, and drown the memory of all
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164 Issues in Review
enormity in your biggest bowl at home' (87-8), he sets forth a comic model
for extending Bartholomew Fairs persistent play of epistemology beyond the
Bankside theatre. Similarly, if Cokes' request to 'bring the actors along' and
'ha' the rest of the play at home' metatheatrically invokes the Hope's audience
and players spilling out together into the London streets, the pecuniary
and personal victories of Quarlous, Winwife, and Grace Wellborn more
subtly suggest the value of applying the law's practices to the dense entanglements
of the city's competitive social world (100-1).
Ultimately, Bartholomew Fair presents its audience with an image of the
law as living process: a body of ritual, language, and epistemological stances
that can be assumed within and across the spaces of London by diverse social
actors. What Jonson offers in this closing scene is therefore not a simple
ethical corrective but a staging of how the play's self-reflective investigation
of seeing, knowing, and navigating physical and social space might be
continued outside the playhouse walls. In the final words of Bartholomew
Cokes, as Jonson's theatre of judgment opens its doors Bartholomew Fair
encourages its spectators to bear the budding and dynamic public associations
they have formed within the playhouse - defined by a complex 'play'
of adopting, evaluating, challenging, deriding, and exploring their own and
others' assumptions and conclusions - out into the sprawling, thriving
space they call 'home'.
Andrew Brown
Notes
1 This and all subsequent citations of Bartholomew Fair are from H.M. Ostovich (ed.),
Ben Jonson: Four Comedies (London, 1997), 537-688.
2 Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Facts: England, 1550-1720 (Ithaca, 2000), 13.
3 Lorna Hutson, Rethinking the Spectacle of the Scaffold : Juridical Epistemologies
and English Revenge Tragedy', Representations 89 (2005), 37.
4 Keith Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre (London, 1987), 172 observes that the
prices listed by the Scrivener more closely resemble those charged at private theatres
than at the public Hope playhouse. Possibly Jonson here wryly challenges his Bankside
audience to exercise the relative discernment of the private spectator.
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Issues in Review 165
5 See, for example, Ian Munro, knightly Complements: The Malcontent and the Matter
ofWiť, Ençiish Literary Renaissance 40.2 (2010), 216-17.
6 Adam Zucker, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge, 201 1),
42.
7 Zucker, 'The Social Logic of Ben Jonsons Epicoene' Renaissance Drama 33 (2004),
55.
8 I follow Zucker and Munro in linking these models of wit and judgment to Pierre
Bourdieu s idea of cultural competence', established in Distinction: A Social Critique
of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA, 1984). By contrasting his own work with
the old-fashioned tragedies of Kyd or Shakespeare, Jonson invokes the development
of a theatrical culture that made Londoners' opinions of plays one of many new
indicators of their social position in the period.
9 On the Hopes uniquely flexible performance space, see Glynne W.G. Wickham,
Early English Stages , 1330-1600 (London, 1959), 170, and Andrew Gurr, Playgoing
in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge, 1987), 31. On the material aspects of the play s
staging, see especially Eugene M. Waith, 'The Staging of Bartholomew Fair' SEL
2.2 (1962), 183-86, and Gabriel Egan, 'The Use of Booths in the Original Staging
of Jonsons Bartholomew Fair , Cahiers Elizabethains: Late Medieval and Renaissance
Studies 53 (1998), 45-66.
10 Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre , 173-4 suggests that Jonson may have written the
play, with its conspicuously lengthy cast of characters, specifically to take advantage
of the unusually large amalgamated company that gave its first performance, Lady
Elizabeth s Men.
11 Leo Salingar, 'Crowd and Public in Bartholomew Fair' Renaissance Drama 10
(1979), 146 draws on the foundational effort of Richard Levin, 'The Structure of
Bartholomew Fair' pmla 80.3 (1965), 172-9, to determine an overarching pattern
in Jonson s arrangements of characters on the space of the stage. Unlike Levin or
Salingar, however, I am more intrigued by the persistent volatility of the play s staging
practices.
12 Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin, eds., Making Publics in Early Modern Europe :
People y Things y Forms of Knowledge (New York, 2010), 1.
13 Ibid, 2.
14 Egan, 'Booths', 45 and Waith, 'Staging', 188-9 have suggested that Ursula's pigbooth
may actually have been erected onstage during Overdo's delivery of this long
speech - a staging choice that would even more decisively have associated the justice's
rhetorical construction of Bartholomew Fair as a 'womb and bed of enormity'
(2.2.96) with the physical work of creating this space in the theatre.
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1 66 Issues in Review
15 See William Slights, Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy (Toronto, 1994), 21 on Jacobean
'framing' techniques more generally.
16 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984), 119.
17 Ibid, 119-20.
18 See Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London
(Cambridge, 1991), 221-25 on the vexed occupational relationship between justices
and constables, particularly in suburbs like the play s Smithfield. David McPherson,
in 'The Origins of Overdo: A Study in Jonsonian Invention', Modern Language
Quarterly 37.3 (1976), 221-33, convincingly argues that the Justice is a pointed satire
of the contemporary Lord Mayor Thomas Middleton, rumoured to have toured
the city in disguise in his previous post as a sheriff. On the often contested civic
fanfare for such achievements in the period, see Kara Northway, '"To Kindle an Industrious
Desire": The Poetry of Work in Lord Mayors' Shows', Comparative Drama
41.2 (2007), 167-73.
19 Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (London, 1618), Early English Books Online
(eeboX A5v.
20 Ibid, A6r.
21 Ibid, 4 (B2v).
22 Eric Wilson, 'Plagues, Fairs, and Street Cries: Sounding out Society and Space in
Early Modern London', Modern Language Studies 25.3 (1995), 13-27, has similarly
argued that Bartholomew Fair stages the perpetual contest for 'sonic authority' that
characterized the early modern urban environment.
23 Alongside Overdo, Edgeworth, Nightingale, and the four members of Cokes' party,
there is no textual indication that Leatherhead and Joan Trash (who enter at 2.2)
or the Corncutter, the Tinder-box Man, and various 'Passengers' (who arrive with
Edgeworth and Nightingale at 2.4) have cleared the stage.
24 Cynthia B. Herr up, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in
Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge, 1987), 198, observes that 'persons who
acted eccentrically or boasted carelessly' were likely to be targeted by the popular
justice of the period.
25 In The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance
Drama (Oxford, 2007), Lorna Hutson posits that such forensic rhetoric, taught
widely in Tudor and Stuart grammar schools, influenced developments in both legal
documentation and dramatic plotting and characterization.
26 Ibid, 304. Hutson suggests important contemporary links between formal legal
techniques and 'those broader contexts of socially refining interlocution in which
we are called upon to grasp allusions, interpret witticisms, and make assessments of
each other's moral worth and social status'.
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Issues in Review 167
27 Waith, 'Staging', 186-7, observes that the booth 'must be large enough to contain at
least the seven characters revealed there at the opening of Act IV, Scene iv'. Possibly,
then, these characters remain within the booth as a source of ambient noise and
eye-catching movement, rather than exiting immediately through the rear of the
structure.
28 Herrup, The Common Peace , 193. The Oxford English Dictionary ( oed
'detect' has borne the specialized legal meaning of 'to inform against,
ca 1449, with a cluster of occurrences around 1600.
29 See Luke Wilson, Theaters of Intention: Drama and the Law in Early M
(Stanford 2000), 131-4 for a summary of the wardship system and o
responses to its perceived abuses by guardians like Justice Overdo.
30 Shapiro, A Culture of Fact, 8-9 notes that despite the assumed universa
reason, in practice strict criteria including 'age, sex, education, social sta
tation', and, of course, soundness of mind, governed authorities' choice o
31 One can imagine a number of potential visual frameworks for this scen
may be turned away from the audience, making Trouble-all's choice a
secret, while the visible choice of a suitor's name would significantly inf
tors' impressions of the subsequent scramble for Grace's favour.
32 See Jackson Cope, ' Bartholomew Fair as Blasphemy', Renaissance Dr
151-2; Richard Burt, Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourse
ship (Ithaca, 1993), 105-6, for examples.
33 Subha Mukherji has offered a similar assessment in 'Jonson's The N
Revisiting of the "Amorous Jurisdiction'", Law and Literature 18.2 (20
'The Hole in the Wall': Sacred Space and 'Third Space' in Th
of Love
The Family or House of Love, a mystical religious fellowship, was founded
by Hendrick Niclaes, a Westphalian merchant, who settled in the northern
German city of Emden around 1540; from there his perfectionist theology
quickly spread across the Low Countries, France, and England.1 Between
1560 and 1580, and again in the years immediately after James Is accession
to the throne, English Familism became visible through a series of pamphlets.2
The play The Family of Love dates from around 1607, when it was
entered into the Stationers' Register, and belongs to the second period of
public debate about the Family in England.3
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