Bartholomew Fair (play)
Jonson also uses the characters that he creates as a way to comment on the social, religious and political conflicts of London society in Jacobean England.
The contract appears to itemise Jonson's discontentment with his audiences: Members are not to find political satire where none is intended; they are not to take as oaths such innocuous phrases as "God quit you"; they are not to "censure by contagion", but must exercise their own judgment; moreover, they are allowed to judge only in proportion to the price of their ticket.
Perhaps most important, they agree not to expect a throwback to the sword-and-buckler age of Smithfield, for Jonson has given them a picture of the present and unromantic state of the fair.
This colloquy is interrupted by the entrance of Wasp, the irascible servant of Cokes, a country simpleton who is in town to marry Grace Wellborn.
The Renaissance audience, familiar with stage satire of Puritans, would not have been surprised that Busy, far from abhorring the fair and its debauchery, is ready to rationalise his presence there as allowable and even godly.
Win Littlewit and Mistress Overdo are enlisted as prostitutes by the pimp Whit; Zeal-of-the-land Busy is arrested for preaching without license and put into the stocks.
The puppet show, a burlesque of Hero and Leander and Damon and Pythias, proceeds until Busy interrupts, claiming that the play is an abomination because the actors are cross-dressed.
This element of threat was especially notable in the second decade of James's reign, when the tenuous Calvinist consensus in the English Church began to disintegrate.
Hostility to drama was not, of course, limited to separatists or Puritans; preachers of all shades of belief denounced the plays as profane and the theatres as sites of theft, drunkenness, and licentiousness.
The induction allows for a more specific date of performance than is usual for Renaissance plays; the première took place on 31 October 1614 at the Hope Theatre in Bankside.
It retained a degree of esteem in the study even as it disappeared from the boards; both Isaac Reed and Horace Walpole praised its wealth of invention in their accounts of Renaissance drama.
Terry Hands directed the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1969; this production included Ben Kingsley as Winwife and Helen Mirren as Win Littlewit.
The production, which cut the long text and freely mixed period and modern properties, received generally negative reviews.
Featuring Zubin Varla and Poppy Miller, the production attempted to update Jonson's cheerfully downscale milieu with "Newcastle United shirts, garish yellow tweed and plenty of atmospheric sleaze" according to The Times; this review was mildly favourable,[6] as were the others.
The Stratford Shakespeare Festival mounted the New World's first professional production of the play in 2009, directed by Antoni Cimolino with original music composed by Steven Page.
