Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Spring 1995 v35 n2 p345(15)

'Bartholomew Fair' and Jonsonian tolerance. Pinciss, G.M.

Abstract: Playwright Ben Jonson disguised the pro-Catholic message in his play 'Bartholomew Fair' by designating several characters as residents of Harrow on the Hill, a suburb of London, England. English Catholics were systematically persecuted by Protestants after the ascendance of Elizabeth I and then James Stuart to the throne. This is reflected in the play when the characters are frequent victims of thefts and exhibit an irrational view of the law.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1995 Rice University

By the time Bartholomew Fair was staged in 1614, Ben Jonson understood from more first-hand experience than most of his fellow playwrights the dangers of stage censorship. The bitter memories of his entanglement with the authorities over The Isle of Dogs (1597), Poetaster (1601), Sejanus (1603), and Eastward Ho (1605) would have taught him the importance of subtlety and discretion when touching on matters of church and state. For although the theater was prohibited by statute from dealing directly with issues that involve religion or government, these were subjects often of the greatest interest to an audience. As a consequence, Jonson and his colleagues developed strategies of indirection and allusion, of ambiguity and suggestion, of hinting through seemingly trivial facts to accomplish what Martin Butler, in a fine phrase, has called, "signaling according to cautious codes."(1) By using such "signals," a playwright might hope to stay out of trouble, for these were the ways that he could imply meaning, enabling him to express himself on subjects that, though forbidden, were of intense concern.

With these facts in mind, we should question why in Bartholomew Fair Jonson chooses to emphasize what seems to be a minor detail: that Bartholomew Cokes and his tutor, Humphrey Wasp, come from Harrow on the Hill. After all, through reiteration, an unimportant fact can be suspected of functioning as a clue to a larger or covert meaning; what at first looked innocuous can prove to be highly suggestive, giving a work a new coloration or altering its implications. Moreover, Jonson is a writer who leaves nothing to chance. What might seem to be random or haphazard is never without meaning in his work; as we have come to appreciate, the Jonsonian universe is truthful, just, and consistent.(2) So we ought to consider why in almost every act of the play the author takes pains to tell us that Cokes is "an esquire of Harrow" and that he and "his man" Wasp have left Harrow to come to the Fair. References to this location as their home are repeated often, and one is reminded of the fact periodically. In the very first speech in the play, we learn that "Cokes of Harrow o'th'Hill" has ordered a marriage license to marry Grace Wellborn on St. Bartholomew Day, 24 August, the day when the action is set (I.i.3).(3) At the midpoint of the play, Wasp, exasperated by Cokes's stupidity, regrets coming to the Fair: "Lord send me at home once, to Harrow o'the Hill again . . . If I travel any more, call me Coriat; with all my heart" (III.v. 213-5). Before he is robbed for the third and final time by Nightingale and Edgworth, Cokes admits that he does not "know the way out" of the Fair "to go home . . . 'Dost thou know where I dwell, I pray thee?'" he asks the ballad-singer (IV.ii.23-6). And the matter of his residence is raised one last time when, near the close of the play, Wasp seeks Cokes at the puppet show, describing him as "a tall young squire of Harrow o'the Hill" (V.iv.81).

Perhaps for them, as for other characters in the world of this play, geographical origins can reveal qualities of mind and spirit. For example, the hypocritical Puritan, Rabbi Zeal of the Land Busy, hails from an appropriate location for one so fanatic in his religious persuasion. Rabbi Busy is a former baker from Banbury, a town in Oxfordshire closely identified in the public mind with both cakes and Puritan extremism. "A noted haunt of Puritans" is how Herford and the Simpsons describe it in their edition.(4) And Adam Overdo, justice of the peace and judge of the temporary court that administers law at the Fair, is a London resident and a stalwart member of the Church of England, though in all honesty he confesses that faulty intelligence has caused him from time to time "to mistake an honest zealous pursuivant for a seminary" (II.i.30-1).(5) As Richard Levin has pointed out, the crucial difference between Busy and Overdo as critics of the Fair is not so much "that one represents the church and the other the state, . . . or that one is a Puritan and the other an Anglican, but that the Puritan prophet cynically uses his brand of ideology . . . to delude others, while the ideology of the Anglican judge . . . has no other purpose than to delude himself."(6) That is an especially revealing observation, for it suggests not only that this justice may be easily confused - a truth we come to discover for ourselves - but also that one form of Christianity may not be so easily distinguished from another. If Overdo is the representative figure for the Church of England and Busy for the arch-Puritan faction, one a "conscientious Anglican judge" and the other a "fanatical Puritan preacher," as Henry Wells labels them,(7) then Wasp, the third character who later gets placed in the stocks along with them, represents the Old Religion, that third party of Christians in England, the Catholics.

II

In fact, the association of Harrow on the Hill and covert Catholicism would have been as evident to Jonson's audience as Banbury with Puritans. A convenient seven miles from London, the settlement at Harrow was notorious for its recusants - Catholics who refused to attend Anglican services. Believing in the absolute position of the Pope, they refused to take the Oath of Supremacy to the crown. As an especially notable example we might consider the infamous Bellamy family whose manor house of Uxendon, Harrow on the Hill, became a center for missionary priests.(8) There and at Preston manor house, also at Harrow, they maintained no little notoriety over a thirty-year period. Even into the first decade of the seventeenth century every important Catholic priest or plotter seems to have passed through their care: Edmund Campion was entertained at Uxenden shortly before his arrest in 1581; Richard Bristow, the author of Motives Inducing to the Catholic Faith, was a resident in the house for some time; Anthony Babington was captured there in 1586 and the Jesuit Robert Southwell in 1592. The members of the Bellamy family were quite prepared to suffer for their faith. Catherine Bellamy, widowed in the early 1580s, ultimately died in the Tower; her son Jerome was hanged for aiding conspirators; and two other sons died in prison. Another son, Richard, continued the family tradition. In 1587, he, his wife, and two of his sons were indicted for recusancy, and in 1592 his daughter, Anne, imprisoned in the Gatehouse of Westminister, was seduced by Robert Topcliffe, a notorious pursuivant. She was "forced to betray . . . Southwell . . . [Later] Richard and Catherine, charged with receiving 15 or 16 priests, were committed to the Gatehouse . . . After ten years' 'persecutions of extreme barbarity' Richard conformed and was released, selling his Uxendon estates and dying in poverty in Belgium."(9) The Bellamy-Catholic alliance and their association with Harrow continued into James's reign, for "Catherine Bellamy, widow, late wife of Richard Bellamy" figured in a mortgage of Preston manor house in 1609.(10)

Well before 1609, however, their activities as well as those of other English Catholics were hardly a real threat to the establishment, and many of their coreligionists had found their way into secure positions at court. Indeed, the composition of the Stuart court - the ethnic origins, religious affiliations, and social class of its members - was anything but uniform. Surrounding the king was a "conglomeration of Scots and English, old and new nobility, learned and unlearned, Catholics, Puritan sympathizers, and Established Churchmen, sophisticates and provincials."(11) By 1614 when Bartholomew Fair was acted, English Catholics were not a danger to the stability of the government or the crown.

For the better informed members of Jonson's audience, who might have attended Bartholomew Fair's second performance before the king, the issue of the place of Catholic citizens in English society was, in fact, just then receiving some sympathetic attention. And Jonson's portrayal of the fairgoers from Harrow on the Hill would have reinforced these feelings.(12) The subject was one that had long been debated. As Alan Dures has observed,

In the years between 1610 and 1613 foreign affairs, and in particular England's relations with Spain, were an important element in shaping domestic policy . . . The arrival in August 1613 of . . . Count Gondomar as Spanish ambassador of London signalled a closer relationship between England and Spain. [Under Gondomar's influence] the severity of the persecution [of English Catholics] appears to have lessened after 1613, and there are fewer complaints from the Catholics. [Moreover,] between 1613 and 1621 . . . the vigour of the king's anti-Catholic policy fluctuated, partly in response to relations with Spain, and partly at the personal whim of James.(13)

But in reaction to the increasingly favorable response to English Catholics at court, parliament felt uneasy and feared their growing influence on the king. Parliamentary distrust became so great that "in 1614 Sir Peter Bucke was hauled before Star Chamber for claiming that Northampton and other court Catholics had petitioned the king for a formal toleration for their co-religionists."(14) As a sign of their continued hostility, parliamentary and ecclesiastical authorities continued to impose fines and restrictions on English Catholics despite the opposition of James, like Elizabeth before him. For the more vindictive Anglicans and the more fanatical Puritans, these penalities were all too easy a source of income, and the satisfaction of victimizing Catholics was all too rewarding.(15) In effect, English Catholics were legally and systematically plundered.

Victimization and plundering also describe rather accurately what happens to Bartholomew Cokes as a consequence of his visit to the Fair, for he is systematically pillaged throughout the action of the play. In act II, Cokes is relieved of his silver purse; in act III his gold purse is stolen along with "Mistress Grace's handkercher, too, out o' the tother pocket"; and in act IV he loses his sword, cloak, and hat. One of the thieves remarks of Cokes that like a true martyr of the Fair, "a man might cut out his kidneys, I think, and he never feel 'em, he is so earnest at the sport" (IV.ii.39-40). At the end of the play we realize that Cokes is bereft of everything - money, toys, expensive clothes, sword, and even his fiancee. But just possibly in his losses he has also gained an unexpected freedom, for once Cokes has learned that Wasp was put into the stocks, his guardian's moral authority over the young man is over; Wasp knows he "must think no longer to reign, my government is at an end" (V.iv.97-8).

Just as Cokes recalls the situation of English Catholics - who might all break free of Rome - Humphrey Wasp manifests the dogmatism of the Renaissance Catholic hierarchy as it might have looked from the Anglican point of view: an administration that combined absolutism with illogicality and mixed matters of faith with irascibility. Without too much straining one could find in Wasp's language and behavior elements that suggest a parody of a papal edict or the ex cathedra pronouncements of Rome: "I have no reason, nor I will hear of no reason, nor I will look for no reason, and he is an ass that either knows any or looks for't from me" (IV.iv.39-41). With an exasperated shout at the proctor John Littlewit, Wasp behaves with characteristic contradiction almost at the moment of his very first appearance in the play: "I know? I know nothing, I. What tell you me of knowing? Now I am in haste, sir, I do not know, and I will not know, and I scorn to know, and yet (now I think on't) I will and do know as well as another" (I.iv.18-21). As Eugene Waith points out, Wasp is "like Cokes, but for different reasons, his mind is in such endless motion that there is never time to establish a fixed center. Instead of embracing all the world he rejects it all, thereby showing no more discrimination than Cokes."(16) How appropriate that Wasp takes such particular relish in the game of "vapours" - "every man to oppose the last man that spoke, whether it concerned him or no" (IV.iv.27-8) - for it is a pastime that suggests the argumentativeness of Rome enveloped in the clouds of incense that form part of the celebration of the mass. Again, in appropriate fashion, Wasp maintains that he would never try to pass himself off as an Anglican minister by pleading benefit of clergy: "I scorn to be saved by my book, i'faith I'll hang first" (I.iv.6-7): this tutor would not claim that by reading a Latin verse he could function as a Church of England minister and so escape the death penalty.

III

That all three authority figures - Overdo, Busy, and Wasp - are placed simultaneously in the stocks raises doubts about their moral validity and reduces them all to a common footing. None is superior, whether we regard each man as a representative of a basic value such as law (Overdo), religion (Busy), and learning (Wasp), or of a religious party such as Established Church, Puritan, and Catholic, or both. In terms of their success at dealing with life - and Bartholomew Fair is surely a good imitation of life - none has the advantage. In various disguises, Justice Adam Overdo wanders the Fair searching for "enormities," but he mistakes the innocent for the guilty and confuses minor offenses with major crimes. In the end, he acknowledges the wisdom that comes when Quarlous's injunction "hath wrought upon my judgment, and prevailed" (V.vi.104-5). For Quarlous gives Overdo sound advice respecting human fallibility and weakness: "You are but Adam, flesh and blood! You have your frailty" (V.vi.95). In a similar vein, Rabbi Busy, for his part, finds the Fair an "abomination" (V.v.87).(17) But in his zealous attacks on the "merchandise of Babylon" (III.vi.84) for sale at the Fair, Busy engages with the puppet Dionysus in a debate over the religious offensiveness of plays, a debate that is as contradictory as the game of vapours. Ultimately, Busy is "confuted" by the sexlessness of the puppet and, ironically, by the qualities they share: "I'll prove, against e'er a Rabbin of 'em all, that my standing is as lawful as his; that I speak by inspiration as well as he; that I have as little to do with learning as he; and do scorn her helps as much as he" (V.v.97-100). In the end, Busy, too, admits defeat - "the cause hath failed me" - and with his last words he accepts conversion: "I am changed, and will become a beholder with you!" (V.v.101; 104-5).

The last of these representative figures, Wasp, finds himself shocked and appalled to discover that like Cokes, he, too, has been robbed: indeed, the robbery was effected so artfully that the marriage license Wasp guarded was stolen right out of the box he carried. There is now nothing to distinguish the martinet from his pupil. Humphrey Wasp is speechless, possibly for the first time in his life. But Adam Overdo, the most humane of the three, having learned his lesson, understands that Wasp's experience is now similar to his own and Busy's: all three have failed. As Overdo has come to realize, since failure is basic to the human condition, they must all exercise patience and forebearance toward themselves and others: "Nay, Humphrey, if I be patient, you must be so too" (V.vi.102). And it is at this point, in the closing minute of the play, that Jonson has Overdo repeat a Latin tag as he invites Wasp and Busy home with him to dinner: "ad correctionem, non ad destructionem; ad aedificandum, non ad diruendum" - "for correction, not for destruction; for building, not ruining" - (V.vi.108-9). What is of special interest is that these are the words James himself had used in one of his published speeches, To the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at White-Hall, of 21 March 1609/10.(18) The point is that James's justice of the peace, who is like James in so many ways, has now come to practice his monarch's more benevolent view of English law. In Overdo, Jonson was not presenting a parody of James.(19) Instead the playwright seems to have been signaling for the king and the court the benefits of adopting a more tolerant policy in matters of religion. And indeed in the epilogue to the play addressed to James, Jonson stresses the seriousness of his intent: to "have used . . . well" "the scope of writers, and what store / Of leave is given them."

The suggestion that Bartholomew Fair is a play about the need for religious tolerance gives a rather new meaning to Jonson's choice of setting, for the fair celebrated on St. Bartholomew's Day is a particularly appropriate date and place for Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans to receive a lesson on the need for understanding and charity. Since nearly all the pleasures and dangers of life can be experienced at the Fair, it obviously provided a testing ground for one's moral or spiritual values. But what is perhaps even more important, making it especially relevant to this interpretation, is the fact that in its history the St. Bartholomew's Day celebration involved all three of these branches of Christianity.(20) The Fair was held in an open, flat area of some three acres just beyond the medieval walls of the city and near the Priory Church of St. Bartholomew the Great from which it took its name. This fairground at Smithfield was formerly the site of the burning of Catholic martyrs under Henry VIII and, a few years later, of Protestant martyrs under his daughter, Mary. It seems that St. Bartholomew, an apostle who had been flayed alive, had given his name to a continuing tradition of religious persecution. How fitting that the last person to be executed at Smithfield was named Bartholomew: one Bartholomew Legate, a radical separatist who was burned to death in 1611.(21) Clearly, religious persecution and punishments had been carried out recently enough at Smithfield to be in everyone's memory. In addition, for Jonson to choose to set the action of his play on 24 August, the Feast Day of St. Bartholomew, would surely remind his audience of two more practices: first, since the accession of Elizabeth it was the day established for burning Catholic relics and religious icons, in effect purifying places of worship of vestiges of the Old Religion. Second, and more importantly, since 1572 it was the day for commemorating the St. Bartholomew Massacre in France, when Catholics there massacred thousands of Huguenots. Among English Protestants it was considered the bloodiest day since Herod slaughtered the Innocents.(22)

These associations would surely offer members of the Church of England as well as English Catholics grounds for responding to the Fair and its holiday celebration. But the Fair itself would also provide the basis for a much more violent reaction from radical Protestants. At Smithfield, Rabbi Busy finds much to attack: among the things that appall him, two are particularly significant. The gingerbread sold at the Fair, that is baked in the traditional shapes of saints, icons, or even storybook characters like Goldylocks, makes Joan Trash's goods detestable to his mind. These objects are "the merchandise of Babylon," and "the peeping of popery upon the stalls." (He describes Goldylocks as a "purple strumpet . . . in her yellow gown and green sleeves.") In Busy's view the gingerbread-seller's booth is "a shop of relics," an "idolatrous grove of images" (III.vi.84-90).

Casting himself as one of those saints martyred for his faith, Busy violently attacks the baked goods, boldly welcomes his arrest, and absurdly faces his punishment in the stocks, mocked for his false heroism. In a similar manner Busy later in the play tries to stop one of the puppet shows customarily performed at the Fair. Here, too, as we have seen, he finds himself in a losing battle, outdebated by the handpuppet Dionysus, the god not only of wine and celebrating but also of the theater. The Fair, then, offers Jonson both a title and a symbol. As the setting for bringing together his three opposing religious groups, it serves to remind his audience of the sad history of persecution and intolerance that each has practiced, and, what is even more to the point, it suggests the absurdity and futility of their past behavior.

IV

Once at the Fair, much of the action of the play revolves in and around the booth where roast pig is sold - one of the traditional delicacies of this holiday.(23) Through its extended range of activities, Ursula's roast pig booth provides a home for nearly all the sins of the flesh - wrath (the quarreling that makes up the game of "vapours"); gluttony (pig, bottled ale, and tobacco); greed (as a front for fencing stolen property); and especially the physical (the back room functioning as a bawdy house). Indeed, Ursula herself, gross and sweaty, is summed up by Rabbi Busy as one who "is above all to be avoided, having the marks upon her of the three enemies of man: the world, as being in the Fair; the devil, as being in the fire; and the flesh, as being herself" (III.vi.33-5). When she enters into the quarreling, Ursula first appears brandishing a firebrand; later in the scene (II.v) she burns her leg with a scalding pan. By this means, as Jackson Cope has pointed out, Jonson transforms the pig woman into the figure of Ate or Discordia - "the very champion of discord, of the lust, theft, fighting, and litigation which dominate a legalistic world gone beserk" - for in this form she was depicted in the emblem books of Cesare Ripa and Vicenzo Cartari, "holding high a firebrand, goading on the quarrels, scalding her own 'gambe torte.'" Jonson was, in fact, well acquainted with the imagery of such iconographical studies since he had turned to them as sources for the designs of his court masques.(24) After studying Ursula and the events at the fair, Cope concludes that what we are to learn from the play is "that law, strict justice, is more and less than flesh and blood can either abide or profit from."(25)

Yet the theme of "strict justice" is not of sufficient dramatic weight to give coherence to so sprawling a work.(26) Actually, as Leo Salingar has written, this deficiency is also true of most of the other theses put forth as the central argument of the play:

It has been maintained that the governing idea of the play is the ridicule of false authority, or else the lapse of authority in social life, or else (with the court performance in mind) that the very 'absence' of order within the play is meant to point toward an ideal order embodied in the audience, James and his court. But the court, ex hypothesi, were [sic] absent from the Hope; and, while it is clear that pretensions to authority form an important component theme, they do not account . . . for the meanders of the plot. Nor does Jonson suggest what established authority, legal, religious, or scholastic, could or should do to correct the follies on display.(27)

Moreover, as a comedy it is unusually easygoing, maintaining "a prevailing mood of benevolence and acceptance that represents a departure for Jonson from the more bitterly satiric spirit of most of his earlier productions."(28) This tone of geniality, rather uncharacteristic of earlier Jonson drama, is in keeping with what we are arguing is a central concern of the play: the importance of tolerance, of practicing a live-and-let-live attitude among Christians of whatever sort.

Through still another sequence of events in the plot and another group of characters Jonson again makes the point that no particular Christian church or sect can claim superiority. In this case the incidents involving the figure of Grace Wellborn serve as an additional means of stressing the theme of the equality of religious beliefs. Although Grace seems to have no identifiable religious affiliation, her name suggests that she represents a quality that all are in need of; as Anne Barton has observed, Jonson was dedicated "to the idea of the revelatory name."(29) Independent, spirited, and intelligent, Grace is "the only sensible peace-maker at the Fair."(30) Yet she remains beyond anyone's ultimate dominance or control. Adam Overdo has become her legal guardian, having purchased from the crown the right to act in this capacity since she was a royal ward. As her guardian Overdo has prepared for her to wed his brother-in-law Cokes, since this would keep her valuable estates in the Overdo-Cokes family.(31) Should she refuse, Grace would be subject to a steep penalty - the "value o' my land" (III.v.254).(32) But, as it turns out, Grace is amazingly rescued from so unfortunate a wedding. Quarlous and Winwife, two gentlemen in search of wealthy wives, manage to get the marriage license stolen so that Cokes's name can be replaced by that of another. And since Quarlous and Winwife are rivals for her hand, Grace decides to have "the next person that comes this way (because destiny has a high hand in business of this nature)" (IV.iii.47-8) choose which of the two young men she will marry.

Since that faith that can secure grace for its adherents would surely have a validity greater than any other, Jonson has organized the action of Bartholomew Fair in such a way that Grace, a sometime ward of the king's in the keeping of Overdo, escapes the control of any recognizable religious belief. She is rightly anxious to avoid a liaison with Cokes, admitting early in the play that she would marry "anybody else, so I might 'scape" (I.v.80-1). By leaving the choice of a husband to "the next person that comes this way," Grace enables Providence to become manifest in the appearance of the madman, Trouble-all. For his part, Trouble-all has about him something approaching the divine intervention embodied in one possessed by a kind of divine madness; he even acts with what seems to be heavenly inspiration. This disturbed individual was "put out on his place by Justice Overdo . . . and's run mad upon't. So that ever since, he will do nothing but by Justice Overdo's warrant; he will not eat a crust, nor drink a little, nor make him in his apparel ready. His wife, sir-reverence, cannot get him make his water or shift his shirt without his warrant" (IV.i.49-55). Fixated and compulsive in his insanity, Trouble-all is someone whose actions are governed by a power beyond human understanding. Grace's fate, then, seems to be determined not so much by what Leo Salingar calls "a zany persona ex machina" but rather by one whom Jackson Cope rightly labels "destiny's agent."(33) Grace herself logically reasons that she cannot choose between Quarlous and Winwife, for she knows them so slightly; since they "are both equal and alike" (IV.iii.30), she will have the name of the man she will marry chosen arbitrarily by the next passer-by. And the "high hand" (IV.iii.47) of Providence sends Trouble-all appearing at exactly the moment he is needed; as Quarlous realizes, "here's a fine ragged prophet, dropped down i'the nick!" (IV.iii.72-3). So Trouble-all chooses Grace a husband, the appropriately named Winwife, freeing her from the exclusive guardianship of Overdo as well as from the intended marriage to Cokes. Though Winwife seems to be little more than his name, nothing more is needed. And Trouble-all, in his dementia, chooses Winwife as the more desirable suitor: "I do like him there, that has the best warrant. Mistress, to save your longing (and multiply him), it may be this" (IV.iii.87-8). For her part, Grace answers to a higher authority of unclear religious affiliation, and she identifies with no particular faith.

Trouble-all's role as divine agent does not end with selecting a husband for Grace. In fact, like a true deus ex machina, Trouble-all directly or indirectly provides the means to effect the play's resolution. By distracting the Watch, he enables Overdo and Busy to escape from the stocks. By arousing Overdo's pity for his misfortune, Trouble-all teaches him the need to put into practice a more sympathetic administration of the rule of law; Overdo promises, "I will be more tender hereafter. I see compassion may become a justice" (IV.i.74-5). And when Overdo, in an effort to make amends, hands Quarlous, who is disguised as Trouble-all, a signed blank warrant, Quarlous is able to charge Winwife a commission for his marriage to Grace, marry the rich widow Dame Purecraft, and dictate the terms of the happy ending.

V

Though his play is not an allegory in which everyone embodies an abstract idea and every action masks a principle, nevertheless as we have seen, Jonson does establish particular religious associations for a few characters. And the three who serve as representatives of particular religious positions experience similar fates, finding themselves confined to the stocks, acknowledging their failure, and promising reform. Each has been guilty of persecuting the others, yet none has a special claim to grace. As Ian Donaldson has suggested, with Wasp's realization that "He that will correct another, must want fault in himself" (V.iv.99), "we are at the heart of the comedy; the farcical, festive reversals are allowed to carry profounder, Christian implications."(34)

By questioning various claims to religious authority, Jonson makes the case for equality among them.(35) This is surely not the only theme of the play, and, in fact, it is an aspect of the geniality of the work that might well escape an inattentive audience. But since, after all, the stage was legally prohibited from touching on matters of religion, this point must be suggested in indirect ways and treated as an aspect of a larger and more diffuse subject. The liberal position Jonson was advocating - whether from disillusionment with all religions or from his belief in the need for a greater common understanding among his countrymen - would be expressed indirectly through information left open to ambiguous and subtle interpretation. Still, once we decipher the code, we should have no difficulty tracking Jonson today, even through the old, hectic by-ways of Bartholomew Fair.

NOTES

1 Martin Butler, "Ecclesiastical Censorship of Early Stuart Drama: The Case of Jonson's The Magnetic Lady," MP 89, 4 (May 1992): 469-81, 469. Butler is nicely restating the argument of Annabel Patterson in Censorship and Interpretation (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

2 Gabriele Bernhard Jackson, Vision and Judgment in Ben Jonson's Drama (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), p. 55.

3 Quotations are from Eugene Waith's edition, vol. 2 of the Yale Ben Jonson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963).

4 Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 10:171.

5 I would argue that Busy and the Littlewit party are enough of a satire of Puritans for any play, but in David McPherson's view, Overdo is a composite satiric picture of, among others, "Puritans in general, and George Whetstone, Richard Johnson, and Mayor Thomas Middleton in particular" ("The Origins of Overdo: A Study in Jonsonian Invention," MLQ 37, 3 [September 1976]: 221-33, 229).

6 Richard Levin, "The Structure of Bartholomew Fair," PMLA 80, 3 (June 1965): 172-9, 175.

7 Henry Wells, Elizabethan and Jacobean Playwrights (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), p. 205.

8 Alan Dures, English Catholicism, 1558-1642 (Essex: Longman, 1983), p. 28.

9 Middlesex County Records [1550-1685], ed. J. C. Jeaffreson (1886-92), 4 vols., 1:207. See also Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1591-4: 1593, p. 403; 18 July 1594, p. 528. See also W. D. Bushell, "The Bellamies of Uxendon," in Harrow Octocentary Tracts No. 14 (n.d.). For his help in tracing out the ways of the Recusants of Harrow on the Hill, for his willingness to counsel, read, and reread this text as well as for his unfailing scholarship, generosity, and kindness I am deeply indebted to Dr. Roger Lockyer, Emeritus Reader in History at the University of London.

10 Middlesex Record Office Acc. 853/13.

11 Philip J. Finkelpearl, "'The Comedians' Liberty': Censorship of the Jacobean Stage Reconsidered," ELR 16, 1 (Winter 1986): 123-38, 134-5.

12 For a discussion of Jonson's views on religion (which supports the reading of Bartholomew Fair proposed here) see David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). See especially chap. 7, pp. 175-7.

13 Dures, pp. 49-50.

14 Peter Lake, "Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice," in Conflict in Early Stuart England, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (New York: Longman, 1989), pp. 72-106, 88. Although Northampton was no friend of Jonson's, both men would have welcomed an easing of Parliamentary penalties and restrictions. Jonson, the posthumous son of an Anglican priest, had been a Catholic convert for some nine years, returning to the Church of England in 1610, but throughout his life he maintained very warm friendships with such important and influential English Catholics as Esme Stuart, duke of Lennox; William Parker, the fourth baron Monteagle; Sir Ralph Sheldon; and Sir Kenelm Digby.

15 See the discussion in Dures and in John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570-1850 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976).

16 Waith, p. 12.

17 "The Fair, for one the symbol of everything carnal summed up in the word 'abomination,' is for the other the symbol of everything disorderly summed up in the term 'enormity'" (Jonas A. Barish, Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy [Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970], pp. 209-10).

18 Gillian Manning, "An Echo of King James in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair," N&Q n.s. 36, 3 (September 1989): 342-4.

19 The repetition of James's words is only one of many similarities between Overdo and the king to whom Jonson dedicated this play. Leah Marcus in The Politics of Mirth (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986) thinks Overdo a "distorted shadow of James" and the play "a lucid and elegant defense of royal perogative" (pp. 55, 40). Keith Sturgess, in Jacobean Private Theatre (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), proposes that "in Overdo . . . the court might well have seen a burlesque portrait of James himself. Monarch and magistrate share a tendency towards pedantry, an easy familiarity with classical quotations, an urge to inveigh against tobacco and its evil effects, and even, perhaps, a notably protective attitude towards young favourites" (p. 171).

20 "It is a location historically associated with harsh justice against religious nonconformists, both Catholic and Protestants, and with iconoclasm directed against the images associated with worship or devotion - iconoclasm that Busy would extend even further." See Clifford Davidson, "Judgment, Iconoclasm, and Anti-Theatricalism in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair," PLL 25, 1 (Winter 1989): 349-63, 352. I am indebted to Professor Davidson for the discussion that follows.

21 See Frances Teague, The Curious History of "Bartholomew Fair" (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1985). Cokes himself reminds us of these connections: "an' ever any Barthol'mew had that luck in't that I have had, I'll be martyred for him, and in Smithfield too" (IV.ii.65-6).

22 Davidson, p. 354.

23 For a discussion of the staging of the play see R. B. Parker, "The Themes and Staging of Bartholomew Fair," University of Toronto Quarterly 39, 4 (July 1970): 293-309.

24 Jackson Cope, "Bartholomew Fair as Blasphemy," RenD 8 (1965): 127-52.

25 Cope, p. 148.

26 Clifford Davidson agrees: "Such a model does not quite fit the play" (pp. 349-50, n. 3).

27 Leo Salingar, "Crowd and Public in Bartholomew Fair," RenD n.s. 10 (1979): 141-59, 149-50. In place of these readings Salingar proposes that the play's "underlying theme is London society considered as a literary or theatrical public," but this takes no notice of the varied religious and moral positions of the assorted characters (p. 151).

28 Thomas Cartelli, "Bartholomew Fair as Urban Arcadia," RenD n.s. 14 (1983): 151-72, 154-5. Cartelli points out that most Jonson scholars have commented on this, including Barish, pp. 187-239; Richard Levin, pp. 178-9; and John Enck in Jonson and the Comic Truth (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1966), pp. 189-208. Leo Salingar also remarks that Jonson's "tone here is ironic gaiety rather than an earnest spirit of satiric correction" (p. 149).

29 Anne Barton, The Names of Comedy (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 79. Gabriele Jackson also notes that for Jonson's characters "there are indeed essential qualities in names which can be intuitively perceived" (p. 58).

30 Guy Hamel, "Order and Judgment in Bartholomew Fair," University of Toronto Quarterly 43, 1 (Fall 1973): 48-67, 53. Hamel is one of the rare critics of the play to have a just appreciation for Grace's virtues.

31 Perhaps it is worth noting that in the action of the play Grace is not much involved with Rabbi Busy. As an explanation we could point out that the Puritan emphasis on predestination left little room for the operation of grace.

32 Naturally, if Cokes is a Catholic, Dame Overdo might also belong to the same church as her brother. In that case, of course, she would not practice the same religion as her husband. Although such questions move us rather far from Jonson's play and its invented characters, such marriages were not uncommon. In fact, John Bossy has found that in Elizabethan-Jacobean marriages there was a "high incidence of conformable husbands with recusant wives . . . A lot of Protestant or conformist gentlemen had Catholic wives around 1600" (pp. 154-5). "All in all, I think the evidence entitles us to conclude that, to a considerable degree, the Catholic community owed its existence to gentlewomen's dissatisfaction at the Reformation settlement of religion, and that they played an abnormally important part in its early history. This matriarchal era, if one may call it so, seems to have come to an end about 1620" (p. 158).

33 Salingar, p. 148; Cope, p. 146.

34 Ian Donaldson, The World Upside-Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 55.

35 In Distinguishing Jonson: Imitation, Rivalry, and the Direction of a Dramatic Career (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1988) George Rowe makes a slightly different case, arguing that Jonson's attention is directed not at proving equality among religious positions but rather "presents as devastating a critique of various claims to authority as The Clouds directs at Socrates" (p. 147).

G. M. Pinciss is professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Literary Creations: Conventional Characters in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries and Christopher Marlowe; coauthor of Shakespeare's World; and coeditor of the Malone Society edition of The Faithful Friends. This article is part of a longer work on religion and Renaissance drama.