by Ben Jonson
When Sir Tyrone Guthrie directed The Alchemist at London’s Old Vic in 1962, the play was performed in modern dress. In part this was because the desire for wealth still makes people gullible today, so that the theme of the comedy remains universal. Guthrie gave a further reason in his programme-note: ‘… modern dress gives more point to the frequent disguises and impersonations used by the trio of rogues. In Jacobean dress, who would know when Face was a Captain or a House Servant? Whether Subtle was a Divine or a Doctor?’ The point was well taken, and Guthrie’s production was fast and farcical and marvellously entertaining, reminding us, perhaps, that of Jonson’s three best comedies this one shone longest and brightest on the English stage. But because Jonson used contemporary idiom and place-reference so vividly, some obscurity is nowadays unavoidable, and a director may well want to make cuts. This is not a recent problem. David Garrick’s acting version, shortened and with most of the limelight on the Little Tobacconist, had – according to the Jonsonian stage-historian Robert Gale Noyes – ‘one hundred and fifty four cuts, varying from one line to three pages’1 – though not all were made because of obscurity. Two hundred and fifty lines were excised from Sir Epicure Mammon’s part, including the one about ‘the swelling unctuous paps of a fat pregnant sow’. The problem the men of the theatre still need to solve – Guthrie no less than Garrick – is how to do justice to Jonson’s fusion of farce and intellectual satire. Guthrie certainly did well by Sir Epicure, who emerged in his production as a Jonsonian ‘humour’, a monumental caricature, but elsewhere his version, rightly hilarious, missed the moral comment which is implicit in the play’s language and structure. Guthrie’s Alchemist was great fun; Jonson’s Alchemist is a great comedy. Dryden regarded it as Jonson’s highest achievement, although Volpone now claims first place. Between them they demonstrate Jonson’s variety within the narrow range of satirical comedy.
V
There remains Jonson’s later prose-comedy, Bartholomew Fair. When in 1950 the Old Vic Company revived this entertainment on the open stage of the Assembly Hall at Edinburgh and later in London, Mr T. C. Worsley, usually a sympathetic critic, found the play ‘the most crashing old bore’2 and Mr Kenneth Tynan announced that ‘the play, to stand up, certainly needs crutches’.3 Part of their dissatisfaction may be attributed to the production by George Devine which, though enjoyable, was insufficiently serious, substituting a riot of false noses and actors laughing at their own stale jokes for Jonson’s contemporary realism. The reviewers prompted a critical revaluation of this play. It is, of course, a lesser work than either Volpone or The Alchemist, although some academic critics rate it more highly.
Bartholomew Fair is a ‘panoramic’ structure, looser and more comprehensive than Jonson’s other great comedies. It is a festive entertainment in the literal sense that it dramatizes a popular holiday, and into it Jonson packed a great deal of London life and London idiom. The first act, which is almost a prologue to the four which follow, is essentially expository. It introduces one segment of the large cast of characters, those people who, though already united through kinship, friendship, business, or Puritanical religious zeal, are really linked by one thing: their desire to go to the Fair. They are presented in ones and twos – an idiosyncratic, well-drawn gallery of types – and the opening act culminates in the entrance of the monstrous, black figure of the Puritan-hypocrite, Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. In the second act we move to the Fair (or rather, in the Elizabethan theatre, the Fair moves to us), where another monstrous, authoritarian figure, Justice Overdo, is disguising himself in order to move, like a good Governor or Magistrate in the Elizabethan drama, unrecognized among the people. But this Justice, so bent on uncovering ‘enormities’, learns very little from his experience. The people of the Fair who are introduced in the second act have something in common with the trio in The Alchemist – they live by their wits. The prose-pamphlets of Thomas Nashe and others1 testify to the Elizabethans’ intense interest in the sheer mechanics of roguery, but the moral drift of this festive comedy is that the dupes are no better than the confidence-tricksters and villains. As the comedy progresses, the people of Act One meet and mingle with the folk of the Fair, itself a symbol of the world. There seems little to choose between the fools and the knaves, especially as some of the latter have a touch of the agility and roguish skill of Face, Subtle, and Dol. At the centre of the Fair and of the comedy stands Ursula, the Pig Woman, raucous, sweating, Falstaffian. She seems almost an Earth-Mother figure, but, like the other crooks, she should not be over-romanticized by critics: after all, it is she who, as the unofficial, accommodating lavatory-attendant at the Fair, tries to entice Mistress Littlewit and Mistress Overdo into prostitution.
The structure of the comedy appears to be casual – the fresh complications of Quarlous’s disguise and of Dame Purecraft’s falling in love with a madman are brought in almost off-handedly at the closing moments of Act Four – but the underlying design is always clear. Bartholomew Fair ends genially: the sober, hypocritical, and authoritarian figures, the Puritan and the Justice, killjoys both, are discomfited. Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, with his prodigious rhetorical tirade against the theatre, is out-manoeuvred in debate after the puppet-play-within-the-play by Lantern’s puppet, and retires crestfallen. Justice Overdo (whose Christian name Adam suggests that he is a universal figure) sheds his disguise for that final moment towards which all satiric comedy inexorably moves – the judgement:
Now to my enormities: look upon me, O London! and see me, O Smithfield! The example of justice, and mirror of magistrates, the true top of formality, and scourge of enormity. Hearken unto my labours…!
But Overdo is silenced when one of the ‘prostitutes’ is unmasked, and turns out to be Mistress Overdo. The end of the play is good-humoured and forgiving, prolonging the spirit of holiday: Justice Overdo invites all the dramatis personae back to his house for supper. The motives of the ‘upright’ have been questioned; the knaves and the opportunists go free.
The appeal of Bartholomew Fair is in the rich and vivid execution rather than in any moral content. This execution presents difficulties for today’s reader – difficulties that, as in The Alchemist, spring from Jonson’s rich and detailed evocation of Jacobean life through contemporary and local reference, and through specific jargons and slang. Although the modern reader quickly appreciates the vitality of this comedy, its rich comprehensiveness, he is bound to find a good deal of it (Dan Knockem’s ‘vapours’, for example, or Whit’s stage-Irish) very tiresome. And while certain characters spring vividly to life – the Justice, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, Humphrey Wasp, Ursula – others in the large cast of characters nowadays remain obscure. Part of the pleasure for the first audiences must have been that shock of recognition as they saw their own great Fair put vividly and realistically upon the stage of the Hope Theatre at Bankside in October 1614, only a couple of months after the Fair itself had been held as usual at Smithfield.
Kenneth Tynan once called Bartholomew Fair ‘a documentary’1 and another drama critic, Professor Eric Bentley, regards Shakespeare’s major history-sequence as forming with this comedy of Jonson’s ‘the great masterpiece of social realism in English’.1 Jonson, in an almost pedantic way, crammed a great mass of Jacobean life, idiom, and local colour, into Bartholomew Fair. The term ‘documentary’ is a somewhat bleak description of his achievement in this comedy and does scant justice to its exuberance and its richness of caricature. I should prefer to call Bartholomew Fair a cartoon, and to regard as distinctive its animation, its vigour, and its ‘panoramic’ coverage of Jacobean types. Some day, I hope, Miss Joan Littlewood will direct the play in such a way as to bring to life in modern stage terms both its stylization and its realism, and to give us ‘the beauty of it hot’, for, literary and intellectual though Jonson’s desire to cram everything in may have been, the play has analogies with the visual arts. Bartholomew Fair may be inferior to Volpone and The Alchemist, but it links Jonson with that other celebrant of the riotous life
of Bartholomew Fair, the great English cartoonist, Thomas Rowlandson.
VI
The aims of the present edition are modest. The text of Volpone and The Alchemist is that of the First Folio Workes (1616) seen through the press by Jonson himself; that of Bartholomew Fair is based upon the posthumous Second Folio (1640), sheets of which Jonson may have seen and partly corrected before his death.
Jonson took great pains to see that his play-scripts were accurately presented to the Jacobean reader, and he adopted a standard method for the printing of the plays. Like other Elizabethan dramatists he did not give locations for his scenes save for a general indication that the action was set in London or in Venice. His practice was to start off at Act 1 Scene 1, and usually to begin a new scene (Scene II, Scene III, etc.) at the entrance of another character, a style which never became standard for printing plays in England as it did in France. At the head of each scene he listed the characters appearing in it: Subtle. Face. Dol. Mammon., etc. The first-named character is always the first speaker, and Jonson never gave any further attribution of the opening speech. He did not indicate the precise point at which a character enters or exits when these entrances or exits do not mark the beginning or end of a scene. He gave few stage-directions (save for Bartholomew Fair, where the largeness of the cast and the ‘busy’ action seems to have made stage-directions more necessary), and these were always printed in the margin. The following conventions have been used in this edition:
SPELLING AND PUNCTUATION
The spelling has been modernized throughout, as has the punctuation, to make the sense clear to the modern reader. Thus I print murder where Jonson used murther, venture for his venter (save where rhyme has to be preserved), and so on. Obvious misprints have been silendy corrected. The minor emendations and corrections which are standard in modern editions have likewise been silently included, but, where a new reading has been adopted from a recent scholarly edition, the fact has been recorded among the critical notes at the back. Jonson’s plays survive in an uncommonly good state, and I have not included a list of textual variants, knowing as I do that scholars and graduate-students who need access to the full bibliographical and textual apparatus will always prefer to use the Folios themselves, or the Oxford edition, or some other old-spelling reprint. In past participles Jonson’s ’d has been extended to ed, and his ed has been stressed èd. Jonson’s th’, i’, ha’, gi’, etc. (for the, in, have, give, etc.) have been retained; they reflect the idiomatic usages and the pronunciation of his own day, and in dialect speeches especially they are necessary – and helpful – to the actor. The colloquial an (if), which Jonson spelt and or an’, has been spelt an’. Jonson habitually used italics for outlandish and technical words. These have usually been dispensed with. Capitals have sometimes been introduced for clarity or emphasis, and to guide the reader or the actor.
ACT-AND SCENE-DIVISION
It would be pedantic to adhere rigidly to Jonson’s scene-divisions in a modern edition, especially as so much of the action in his comedies is continuous. Editorial scene-divisions have been made only when a change of location has to be indicated (see below), and all these are printed in square brackets: [SCENE TWO]. Jonson’s own scene-divisions have been retained in abbreviated form and placed towards the margin: 1, i, 1, ii, 1, iii, etc. The reader can thus appreciate at a glance the scenic structure of the comedies, while not experiencing the sense of a break in the action. Also, there is an advantage in preserving Jonson’s scene-divisions for students who wish to use this text while referring to the commentaries in, say, the Oxford edition. The running-titles throughout use the editorial scene-divisions, though square brackets are here dispensed with.
LOCATIONS AND STAGE-DIRECTIONS
At the top of the first page of the original prompt-copy for the King’s Men’s performances of Volpone there may well have been scrawled ‘A bed thrust out. Volpone in it’. In this edition locations are added in square brackets: [Volpone’s house.] or [The Fair.]. These locations have been kept brief, and it is emphasized that they are sometimes conjectural. In the front-matter to the individual comedies I have summarized the sort of problems that occasionally arise about the precise location of particular scenes – problems which a director or a stage-designer can solve by adopting a composite-set.
Jonson’s marginal stage-directions have usually been retained, though seldom kept in the margin. Square brackets indicate editorial stage-directions (many of them stemming from nineteenth- and twentieth-century editors), but sometimes a cryptically brief authorial stage-direction has been superseded by one in square brackets. Occasionally a stage-direction by Jonson has been placed in round brackets within a speech.
SPEECH-TAGS
The names of speakers are usually printed as contractions in the Jacobean editions of Jonson’s comedies. These have here been expanded throughout, so that similar speech-tags like Volp. and Volt., Corb. and Corv., no longer confuse the reader, but are replaced by Volpone, Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino. The Win. and Winw. (which muddled the first printers of Bartholomew Fair) are here replaced by Mistress Littlewit and Winwife.
ANNOTATION
The notes in any edition of plays by Jonson present a problem, for the range of his classical, contemporary, topographical, and other references is immense. The appropriateness of a mythological allusion or the sharpness of a Jacobean reference can often be appreciated by a present-day reader only if he refers to the notes. I have tried to divide notes into two broad categories – glosses on Jacobean expressions and on words that have changed their meaning are printed as footnotes, while explanatory notes on classical and literary references, proper- and place-names, and allusions to Jacobean life appear with the longer critical comments at the back. Occasionally, where the reader might miss the point of a speech, the word ‘Note’ appears at the foot of the page to refer him to the back of this book. Usually no such indication has been considered necessary, and it is hoped that the reader who is puzzled by a particular difficulty will find it explained in a note. At times he will look in vain for this help. Comprehensive annotation of all three comedies would lay too heavy a burden upon Jonson, and most readers will prefer, first time through, being carried forward by the pace of the developing action and by the rhythm and buoyancy of the dialogue, to being slavishly dependent on what S. Potter once called ‘the dispiriting apparatus of notes’.1
As the line-numbering of The Alchemist and of the verse-scenes of Volpone corresponds with that in the standard Oxford edition by Herford and the Simpsons, a zealous reader can make full use of the thorough annotation in their volumes of commentaries. For the prose-scenes of Volpone and for Bartholomew Fair my abbreviations of Jonson’s own scene-divisions (1, i, 1, ii, etc.) should also make for easy reference to massively annotated editions. I have made no attempt to make a comprehensive survey of the numerous parallels with classical and Renaissance authors, nor have I tried to explain every learned allusion. Those who want to know, for example, that in The Alchemist, 1, i, 1, Subtle’s ‘I fart at thee!’ is like the Latin oppedo and the Greek χαταπέρδω will want to make use of Volume X of the Oxford Ben Jonson; others of us will continue to believe that such words were actually heard sometimes on the lips of Jonson’s contemporaries.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In preparing the text and notes I have, of course, benefited greatly from the work of my many predecessors, particularly the labours of C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson. Professor Harry Levin’s excellent one-volume Ben Jonson: Selected Works was, alas, unannotated, but, throughout, I have been guided, enlightened, and occasionally inhibited, by the scholarship of previous editors and by the insight of critics and commentators. Any editor is greatly indebted to others. For example, a casual glance at the editions of Bartholomew Fair by Eugene M. Waith (1963) and Edward B. Partridge (1964) will reveal how deep is their debt to E. A. Horsman’s edition for the Revels Plays (1960); I had the good fortune to be able to consult and make use of the work of
all three gentlemen. I am grateful to Professor David Daiches and Mr R. P. C. Mutter for advice and encouragement.
FURTHER READING
The bibliography on p. 33 and the prefatory matter to the three separate comedies show that there is no lack of critical and scholarly books on Ben Jonson. There has indeed been something of a Jonson revival in the United States with Professor Levin, dedicatee of at least two striking books on the dramatist, as the doyen of American Jonsonians. The general reader must be warned, however, that Jonson’s notorious learning has called forth an answering pedantry in some of his more recent American commentators and scholarly exegetes which is manifested either in a fancy line in chapter headings, ‘Comoedy of Affliction’ and ‘(Although no Paralel)’, or in mandarin prose:
With Zeal-of-the-Land Busy… we are back on the highroad of linguistic caricature, where every cobblestone, every pebble, shrieks affectation, and the whole gives off a lurid phosphorescence more like that of a Martian than an earthly landscape…
Unlike Busy… Overdo is auto-intoxicate.
Scholars who have immolated themselves in some part of ‘The Background’ (Renaissance philosophy, rhetoric, satire, psychology, alchemy, the Great Chain of Being itself) are sometimes slow to get back to Jonson’s marvellous liveliness on the printed page and to the theatrical potentialities of his comedies.