What's fascinating about Jonson's Bartholomew Fair is not that it's about the fair, but rather that it is the fair -- fully captured and enacted on the stage.
As the fair enacted, the play lacks a visible center and casts no particular character as its primary focus or lens. We are not carried through the play by our attachment to a single character, but rather moved along, tossed about, and indeed taken over by the mill of the crowd and the flow of the action.
If you've ever been to a Renaissance Faire, the experience is awfully similar to the play -- there's a sense that something is happening in the background (there's always a plot which develops over several days and its events and actions are mixed in with the regular business / busy-ness of the fair itself). A variety of goods are on sale, with some merchants striking you as more or less trustworthy. And victualers (to borrow a term from Bennett) are usually the worst of the price gougers. The world of the fair is perceived differently depending on one's place in the economy -- merchants and vendors as well as the criminal element are privy to a side of things which the general public as patrons and customers/consumers miss (so attests a good friend of mine who worked as a puzzle vendor in the Ren Faire circuit for several years). Evidently some things haven't changed since Ben Jonson's days.
While the Carnival seems the most immediate or pertinent point of discussion for us with this play, I found a few other points which also struck me as noteworthy.
1. Alewives and Witches. In the play Ursula comes across as the full embodiment of the prevailing ideas of the alewife (though she is the pig woman, she also sells alcohol and tobacco) - corpulent, crude, lewd, crafty, dishonest in her measures, and proprietor of sins. I'm beginning to wonder what connection might between the figure of the alewife and the figure of the witch -- are they separate social phenomenon, or are they in fact two sides of the same misogyny? Is part of the hatred of alewives due to a conflation of the two? Is Ursula's pig booth in some way reminiscent of the cauldron in how it brings together unlikely and unclean from all classes, the resultant brew producing an effect which spills out and transforms the fair causing mischief and disorder?
2. Agency, the Market, and the Consumer. In looking at the depiction of Cokes as a consumer gone wild in the marketplace, there is a clear sense of his being taken over -- possessed by the need to own. Wasp notes that Cokes is enthralled with the signs and the vendors calls -- with advertising:
Why, we could not meet that heathen thing, all day, but stayed him; he would name you all the signs over, as he went, aloud; and where he spied a parrot or a monkey, there he was pitched, with all the little long-coats about him, male and female; no getting him away! (I.iv.107-112)
Here in the "free" market where Cokes as consumer has a seemingly infinite number of purchasing choices, the sheer amount of choice paradoxically leads to a paralysis of will, an abdication of will to whatever voice will finally resolve an inability to decide. Cokes is "possessed" by consumer lust to the point of "dispossession" -- by the end of the play he is robbed numerous times, cheated by various merchants, has the wedding license and the potential bride taken from him, and even his fine clothes stolen. His desire to own drives him to the point of even purchasing a shop in its entirety.
By Act IV we encounter Cokes in such a bewildered state of possession that he has become completely confused:
"By this light, I cannot find my gingerbread-wife nor my hobby-horse man in all the Fair, now, to ha' my money again. And I do not know the way out on't, to go home for more. . . . Dost thou know where I dwell?" (IV.ii.23-25, 29).
Cokes spends his way out of house and home to become at last a commodity, a thing to be traded and consumed by vendors, swindlers, and thieves.
When Cokes falls trying to chase after Nightingale who has run off with his hat, cloak, and gloves, Nightingale remarks:
"His soul is halfway out on's body, at the game." (IV.ii.44)
Cokes' dispossession/possession is complete by the time he encounters Trouble-All:
"Friend, do you know who I am? Or where I lie? I do not myself, I'll be sworn." (IV.ii.79-80)
To be sworn is be bound in contract, but even the contracts (marriage, social, and market) have gone missing or been subverted.
I really like what Neil has to say about Alewives and Witches. From what we read in the Bennett piece, we do know that alewives were distrusted, even more so than male "victualers". If we can establish that there is some connection between the alewife and the witch--and I think Neil makes a convincing case--I wonder if we can't the analogy a bit more broadly to female entrepreneurs. Trash, for example, threatens revenge on Leatherhead when he says that he will "mar her wares":
"An thou wrongst me, for all thou art parcel-poet and an engineer, I'll find friend shall right me and make a ballad of thee and thy cattle all over" (2.2.15-18).
Here music is analogous to a sort of spell that Trash will solicit a balladeer's help to cast. The target of the song is Leatherhead and his cattle. Cattle, we know, are popular victims of English witches. I wonder if the witch-figure is then somehow generated by the rise of female agency in the emerging marketplace. Also, can we take this analogy even further? Since it is a balladeer who can grant Trash her "witchy" powers, does Nightingale act as some sort of Devil within the play?
I would also like to return to the Sedgwick piece and habits. It seems that all characters in the play get caught up in the "spirit" of the Fair. Mr. Overdo and Quarlous don the clothing of others. Win and Mrs. Overdo are mistaken for whores: Alice says, "The poor common whores can ha' no traffic for the privy rich ones" (4.5.69-71). Winwife and Quarlous engage in thievery, and Wasp abandons his master to play vapours. Sedgwick says, "a banal but precious opiate, habit makes us blind to--and thus enables to come into existence--our surroundings, ourselves as we appear to others, and the imprint of others in ourselves" (139). To what extent is it the Fair that compels these characters to act in the way that they do? Busy says that he "was moved by the spirit to be here [at the Fair]", and so it is this place that fills him with religious zeal.
Does the Fair encourage bad behavior in the same way that, as Wasp claims, money creates cutpurses:
"They are such retchless flies as you are you are that blow cutpurses abroad in every corner; your foolish having money is what makes 'em" 3.5.238-241).
However, much of this licentious behavior existed in these characters prior to their entrance into the Fair. Purecraft, for example, reveals in 5.2.49-76 that she's been brokering marriages so that young Puritan women steal money from their rich husbands. Does this evidence of prior wrongdoing suggest the presence of the will?
Johnson’ s play thus far is a fantastic synthesis of so many of the opposing ideas we’ve outlined in the course: license and prohibition, religion and commerce, open structures and spaces and spaces/structures that are determined, or even over-determined. In addition to the colorful, polysemous nature of the characters expressed largely through their individualized language, the play creates the pandemonium of the Fair by toggling between these contradictions. Because the introduction in the Revels edition captured my interest , I’d like to pose a few questions and/or topics for discussion drawn from Gossett. 1) What can be said of the claim that Johnson “deconstructs dichotomies”? Not to be overly semantic, or pedantic either for that matter, but is this a valid claim? Not just in the sense of the time-frame being seriously incongruous, but also insofar as the play, in its attempts to replicate the structure of the carnival, of the fair, seems to be, if anything, a panopoly of contrasting and contradictory forces and impulses, a radical aggregate of sorts that seeks to mimic the profusion of complexity at play in society. “Ad correctionem, non ad destructionem; ad aedificandum, non ad direuendum” and all that . . . I don’t know if I see the systemic laying bare by Johnson of all the structures implicit in the play’s organization that the word “deconstruction” would imply, as much as I see the presentation of, again, a sort of profusion. 2) The play’s take on language and representation is highly interesting and sophisticated. The insistence on the part of the author on the democratization of the play, the removal of authorial authority, and the simultaneous insistence on recognizing the play as simply a representation, seems very unusual and evocative of the spirit of carnival. Paradoxically, within the anti-Ciceronian style, and the move toward the empowerment both of audience and fair participant, there remains the prevailing notion that language is inherently connected to thought.
I‘m looking forward as always to tomorrow’s discussion, as well as the opportunity to ground these preliminary observations in the overwhelming amount of detail and subtlety in this text .
It's interesting to note that the fair-dwellers, the cutpurses, the tapsters, the pig women, are not changed during the course of this play; they remain stable, they hold no notions of change, be it for themselves or others; and if anything, they suffer at the hands of the visitors to the play (Ursula's scalded as result of the fight initiated by Quarlous).
Many of the visitors to the fair are the ones who hold illusions of reforming others, but if anything, they are the ones who receive punishment, exposure or are affected by agents of change.
Justice Overdo, after going undercover to expose others, is exposed throughout: he's screaming bloody murder by the close of Act 2, and is subsequently beaten and put in the stocks.
The Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land is holier than thou about the fair at first, then having seconds of roast pig, on Biblical grounds. Busy is then born-again, in a way (My favorite line: "Thou art all license, even licentiousness itself! Shimei!") by a puppet with prodigious debating skills.
Busy, by acknowledging he has been "confuted," offers the play its most memorable moment to me, and calls back on the meta-opening, which has the scrivener warning the audience not to "censure by contagion." It seems also there is something in this opening, with its remarks that you should criticize only in step with the price of your ticket, that Puritans must be watching a lot of plays, if they're criticizing stage practices so vehemently and extensively. How else can they know of what they preach? How can you enjoy "religious profession" and speak against that which has no "religious profession" if you do not first sit through that which has no "religious profession"?
So far so good on all the posts. I really admire Neil’s comprehensive take on the play. I agree that the fair is not a space within the play; the fair is the play. I also admire the Stallybrass and White piece as a companion text to Jonnson’s drama. On page 41, the authors highlight an unusual paradox about the fair and the “oddities” from “colonized cultures” that typically went on display, such as a bipedal pygmy or a manteger who could drink with his “lips like a man.” The authors highlight that “In each case the manners taught imitate European forms of culture or politeness and unusually transgress, as well as reaffirm, the boundaries between high and low, human and animal, domestic and savage, polite and vulgar.” In other words, the fair is a place where the lens used to distinguish self from other is spinning, habitually, and that lens that has the ability to distance and liken, to magnetize and polarize, is constantly in flux.
The oddity of seeing “lesser-humans” act in ridiculous, but human-like fashion does not only reaffirm the colonial presence of hegemonic England at this time, it may in fact show not only the inklings of the romantic impulse to investigate humankind’s relationship with nature, but maybe also even earlier inklings of how this fascination with precivilized primates would inevitably result in the onset of anthropological science and theories in evolution.
This brings me to a fascination that I have with the authors’ use of the term hybridization. Not only does this term reappear in the article frequently, but appears in what would seem their primary argument on page 57, that issues of inversion, hybridization, and/or demonization “foreground diverse ways of manipulating cultural classifications and particularly the relationship between social strata of ‘high’ and ‘low’. Their examples of this lies in the displaced abjection of “low” social groups—Festive Christian revelers wearing masks in The Merchant of Venice” who “turn their figurative and actual power…against those that are even lower (women, Jews, and animals). That play did, after all begin with most of its Christians dressed in the spirit of the Carnival.
Back to Bartholomew Fair: one last thing, I’ve noticed how much Jonson’s play resists the mighty line of blank verse that composed the speech in so many other plays. Rather, the drama is composed in prose, and I wonder if this speaks to Neil’s point: that the play wants to become, not contain, the fair.
Moreover, when a typical act/scene begins and with character’s introduced in renaissance theatre, it’s pretty easy to anticipate the dynamics of speech. What I mean is that in Act 2.2, when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth enter, I anticipate that they are going to refer to a previous scene where they were conspiring to uproot the King. It is not that simple in Jonson’s play. There is a conflation of dialects and interpersonal relations—thus exhibiting just how fair-like this work is.
Signing off with some lines by Plath in a poem called “Night Dances”:
Why am I given
These lamps, these planets Falling like blessing, like flakes
First of all, I apologize for not getting this post in by 9 pm.
I'm going to second Cody -- Neil's identification of the play itself as a recapitulation of the fair is really astute. I don't know about you guys, but I was completely overwhelmed by the experience of reading Bartholomew Fair. First of all, it's unusually long (especially for a comedy) and has an unusually large cast of significant characters -- some of whom assume multiple disguises. Add to that various characters' unintelligible accents, their tricks and cons, and the complicated partnerships and rivalries amongst various contingencies of fair-dwellers and fair-visitors and you end up with (for me, at least) a fairly challenging reading experience. In fact, this play seems singularly unsuited for reading -- it can hardly be appreciated at all on the page. Because it both represents and embodies the topsy-turvy experience of the fair, it itself needs to be experienced. (I bet this would be a riot to see staged -- especially the puppet show at the end. Has anyone ever seen it in a theatre?)
I feel like earlier posts and the Stallybrass and White article have done a nice job of identifying the many consciously layered elements of the grotesque and carnivalesque in the play, so I won't bring more comments about that up here (though I hope we will talk more about it in class). Instead, I'm interested in looking at something that Stephan pointed out -- that the characters who seem to fare the worst are the ones who come to the fair in order to censure or change it (except Cokes, who comes merely to revel in it, and ends up losing his fiancee, his guardian, his clothes, his purse(s), and his whole identity). Because, by and large, the characters with the most social and political clout are the ones who suffer, the play seems actively engaged in questioning the meaning and location of authority. Who in this play wields any kind of authentic authority? Wasp, Justice and Mrs. Overdo, Busy and Purecraft, even Haggis and Bristle -- all have some kind of state- or religiously-sanctioned authority and all are shown to be hypocrites or fools. But something that stood out even more to me (perhaps because I actually liked the characters of Justice Overdo and Cokes) was the way the play seems to censure enthusiasm. Cokes, Wasp, Justice Overdo, Busy -- all these characters are overly enthusiastic, and all seem to be punished for their excess. The calm and cool criminal element -- the cutpurse and the scheming gingerbread and hobbyhorse sellers -- as well as the cynical, conniving Quarlous seem able to avoid the public humiliation and loss of stature and/or property suffered by the overly enthusiastic characters. I wonder who in this play the audience was meant to identity with or feel sympathy for. Grace? Win? Cokes (like me)? Or does it provide an opportunity to laugh at everyone equally? I'll be interested in hearing everyone's thoughts about this in class tomorrow!
7 comments:
What's fascinating about Jonson's Bartholomew Fair is not that it's about the fair, but rather that it is the fair -- fully captured and enacted on the stage.
As the fair enacted, the play lacks a visible center and casts no particular character as its primary focus or lens. We are not carried through the play by our attachment to a single character, but rather moved along, tossed about, and indeed taken over by the mill of the crowd and the flow of the action.
If you've ever been to a Renaissance Faire, the experience is awfully similar to the play -- there's a sense that something is happening in the background (there's always a plot which develops over several days and its events and actions are mixed in with the regular business / busy-ness of the fair itself). A variety of goods are on sale, with some merchants striking you as more or less trustworthy. And victualers (to borrow a term from Bennett) are usually the worst of the price gougers. The world of the fair is perceived differently depending on one's place in the economy -- merchants and vendors as well as the criminal element are privy to a side of things which the general public as patrons and customers/consumers miss (so attests a good friend of mine who worked as a puzzle vendor in the Ren Faire circuit for several years). Evidently some things haven't changed since Ben Jonson's days.
While the Carnival seems the most immediate or pertinent point of discussion for us with this play, I found a few other points which also struck me as noteworthy.
1. Alewives and Witches. In the play Ursula comes across as the full embodiment of the prevailing ideas of the alewife (though she is the pig woman, she also sells alcohol and tobacco) - corpulent, crude, lewd, crafty, dishonest in her measures, and proprietor of sins. I'm beginning to wonder what connection might between the figure of the alewife and the figure of the witch -- are they separate social phenomenon, or are they in fact two sides of the same misogyny? Is part of the hatred of alewives due to a conflation of the two? Is Ursula's pig booth in some way reminiscent of the cauldron in how it brings together unlikely and unclean from all classes, the resultant brew producing an effect which spills out and transforms the fair causing mischief and disorder?
2. Agency, the Market, and the Consumer. In looking at the depiction of Cokes as a consumer gone wild in the marketplace, there is a clear sense of his being taken over -- possessed by the need to own. Wasp notes that Cokes is enthralled with the signs and the vendors calls -- with advertising:
Why, we could not meet that heathen thing, all day, but stayed him; he would name you all the signs over, as he went, aloud; and where he spied a parrot or a monkey, there
he was pitched, with all the little long-coats about him, male and female; no getting him away! (I.iv.107-112)
Here in the "free" market where Cokes as consumer has a seemingly infinite number of purchasing choices, the sheer amount of choice paradoxically leads to a paralysis of will, an abdication of will to whatever voice will finally resolve an inability to decide. Cokes is "possessed" by consumer lust to the point of "dispossession" -- by the end of the play he is robbed numerous times, cheated by various merchants, has the wedding license and the potential bride taken from him, and even his fine clothes stolen. His desire to own drives him to the point of even purchasing a shop in its entirety.
By Act IV we encounter Cokes in such a bewildered state of possession that he has become completely confused:
"By this light, I cannot find my gingerbread-wife nor my hobby-horse man in all the Fair, now, to ha' my money again. And I do not know the way out on't, to go home for more. . . . Dost thou know where I dwell?" (IV.ii.23-25, 29).
Cokes spends his way out of house and home to become at last a commodity, a thing to be traded and consumed by vendors, swindlers, and thieves.
When Cokes falls trying to chase after Nightingale who has run off with his hat, cloak, and gloves, Nightingale remarks:
"His soul is halfway out on's body, at the game." (IV.ii.44)
Cokes' dispossession/possession is complete by the time he encounters Trouble-All:
"Friend, do you know who I am? Or where I lie? I do not myself, I'll be sworn." (IV.ii.79-80)
To be sworn is be bound in contract, but even the contracts (marriage, social, and market) have gone missing or been subverted.
I really like what Neil has to say about Alewives and Witches. From what we read in the Bennett piece, we do know that alewives were distrusted, even more so than male "victualers". If we can establish that there is some connection between the alewife and the witch--and I think Neil makes a convincing case--I wonder if we can't the analogy a bit more broadly to female entrepreneurs. Trash, for example, threatens revenge on Leatherhead when he says that he will "mar her wares":
"An thou wrongst me, for all thou art parcel-poet and an engineer, I'll find friend shall right me and make a ballad of thee and thy cattle all over" (2.2.15-18).
Here music is analogous to a sort of spell that Trash will solicit a balladeer's help to cast. The target of the song is Leatherhead and his cattle. Cattle, we know, are popular victims of English witches. I wonder if the witch-figure is then somehow generated by the rise of female agency in the emerging marketplace. Also, can we take this analogy even further? Since it is a balladeer who can grant Trash her "witchy" powers, does Nightingale act as some sort of Devil within the play?
I would also like to return to the Sedgwick piece and habits. It seems that all characters in the play get caught up in the "spirit" of the Fair. Mr. Overdo and Quarlous don the clothing of others. Win and Mrs. Overdo are mistaken for whores: Alice says, "The poor common whores can ha' no traffic for the privy rich ones" (4.5.69-71). Winwife and Quarlous engage in thievery, and Wasp abandons his master to play vapours. Sedgwick says, "a banal but precious opiate, habit makes us blind to--and thus enables to come into existence--our surroundings, ourselves as we appear to others, and the imprint of others in ourselves" (139). To what extent is it the Fair that compels these characters to act in the way that they do? Busy says that he "was moved by the spirit to be here [at the Fair]", and so it is this place that fills him with religious zeal.
Does the Fair encourage bad behavior in the same way that, as Wasp claims, money creates cutpurses:
"They are such retchless flies as you are you are that blow cutpurses abroad in every corner; your foolish having money is what makes 'em" 3.5.238-241).
However, much of this licentious behavior existed in these characters prior to their entrance into the Fair. Purecraft, for example, reveals in 5.2.49-76 that she's been brokering marriages so that young Puritan women steal money from their rich husbands. Does this evidence of prior wrongdoing suggest the presence of the will?
Johnson’ s play thus far is a fantastic synthesis of so many of the opposing ideas we’ve outlined in the course: license and prohibition, religion and commerce, open structures and spaces and spaces/structures that are determined, or even over-determined. In addition to the colorful, polysemous nature of the characters expressed largely through their individualized language, the play creates the pandemonium of the Fair by toggling between these contradictions.
Because the introduction in the Revels edition captured my interest , I’d like to pose a few questions and/or topics for discussion drawn from Gossett.
1) What can be said of the claim that Johnson “deconstructs dichotomies”? Not to be overly semantic, or pedantic either for that matter, but is this a valid claim? Not just in the sense of the time-frame being seriously incongruous, but also insofar as the play, in its attempts to replicate the structure of the carnival, of the fair, seems to be, if anything, a panopoly of contrasting and contradictory forces and impulses, a radical aggregate of sorts that seeks to mimic the profusion of complexity at play in society. “Ad correctionem, non ad destructionem; ad aedificandum, non ad direuendum” and all that . . . I don’t know if I see the systemic laying bare by Johnson of all the structures implicit in the play’s organization that the word “deconstruction” would imply, as much as I see the presentation of, again, a sort of profusion.
2) The play’s take on language and representation is highly interesting and sophisticated. The insistence on the part of the author on the democratization of the play, the removal of authorial authority, and the simultaneous insistence on recognizing the play as simply a representation, seems very unusual and evocative of the spirit of carnival. Paradoxically, within the anti-Ciceronian style, and the move toward the empowerment both of audience and fair participant, there remains the prevailing notion that language is inherently connected to thought.
I‘m looking forward as always to tomorrow’s discussion, as well as the opportunity to ground these preliminary observations in the overwhelming amount of detail and subtlety in this text .
It's interesting to note that the fair-dwellers, the cutpurses, the tapsters, the pig women, are not changed during the course of this play; they remain stable, they hold no notions of change, be it for themselves or others; and if anything, they suffer at the hands of the visitors to the play (Ursula's scalded as result of the fight initiated by Quarlous).
Many of the visitors to the fair are the ones who hold illusions of reforming others, but if anything, they are the ones who receive punishment, exposure or are affected by agents of change.
Justice Overdo, after going undercover to expose others, is exposed throughout: he's screaming bloody murder by the close of Act 2, and is subsequently beaten and put in the stocks.
The Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land is holier than thou about the fair at first, then having seconds of roast pig, on Biblical grounds. Busy is then born-again, in a way (My favorite line: "Thou art all license, even licentiousness itself! Shimei!") by a puppet with prodigious debating skills.
Busy, by acknowledging he has been "confuted," offers the play its most memorable moment to me, and calls back on the meta-opening, which has the scrivener warning the audience not to "censure by contagion." It seems also there is something in this opening, with its remarks that you should criticize only in step with the price of your ticket, that Puritans must be watching a lot of plays, if they're criticizing stage practices so vehemently and extensively. How else can they know of what they preach? How can you enjoy "religious profession" and speak against that which has no "religious profession" if you do not first sit through that which has no "religious profession"?
It's late, and much still to do. More tomorrow.
So far so good on all the posts. I really admire Neil’s comprehensive take on the play. I agree that the fair is not a space within the play; the fair is the play. I also admire the Stallybrass and White piece as a companion text to Jonnson’s drama. On page 41, the authors highlight an unusual paradox about the fair and the “oddities” from “colonized cultures” that typically went on display, such as a bipedal pygmy or a manteger who could drink with his “lips like a man.” The authors highlight that “In each case the manners taught imitate European forms of culture or politeness and unusually transgress, as well as reaffirm, the boundaries between high and low, human and animal, domestic and savage, polite and vulgar.” In other words, the fair is a place where the lens used to distinguish self from other is spinning, habitually, and that lens that has the ability to distance and liken, to magnetize and polarize, is constantly in flux.
The oddity of seeing “lesser-humans” act in ridiculous, but human-like fashion does not only reaffirm the colonial presence of hegemonic England at this time, it may in fact show not only the inklings of the romantic impulse to investigate humankind’s relationship with nature, but maybe also even earlier inklings of how this fascination with precivilized primates would inevitably result in the onset of anthropological science and theories in evolution.
This brings me to a fascination that I have with the authors’ use of the term hybridization. Not only does this term reappear in the article frequently, but appears in what would seem their primary argument on page 57, that issues of inversion, hybridization, and/or demonization “foreground diverse ways of manipulating cultural classifications and particularly the relationship between social strata of ‘high’ and ‘low’. Their examples of this lies in the displaced abjection of “low” social groups—Festive Christian revelers wearing masks in The Merchant of Venice” who “turn their figurative and actual power…against those that are even lower (women, Jews, and animals). That play did, after all begin with most of its Christians dressed in the spirit of the Carnival.
Back to Bartholomew Fair: one last thing, I’ve noticed how much Jonson’s play resists the mighty line of blank verse that composed the speech in so many other plays. Rather, the drama is composed in prose, and I wonder if this speaks to Neil’s point: that the play wants to become, not contain, the fair.
Moreover, when a typical act/scene begins and with character’s introduced in renaissance theatre, it’s pretty easy to anticipate the dynamics of speech. What I mean is that in Act 2.2, when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth enter, I anticipate that they are going to refer to a previous scene where they were conspiring to uproot the King. It is not that simple in Jonson’s play. There is a conflation of dialects and interpersonal relations—thus exhibiting just how fair-like this work is.
Signing off with some lines by Plath in a poem called “Night Dances”:
Why am I given
These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessing, like flakes
Six-sided, white
On my eyes, my lips, my hair
Touching and melting.
Nowhere.
-Cody
First of all, I apologize for not getting this post in by 9 pm.
I'm going to second Cody -- Neil's identification of the play itself as a recapitulation of the fair is really astute. I don't know about you guys, but I was completely overwhelmed by the experience of reading Bartholomew Fair. First of all, it's unusually long (especially for a comedy) and has an unusually large cast of significant characters -- some of whom assume multiple disguises. Add to that various characters' unintelligible accents, their tricks and cons, and the complicated partnerships and rivalries amongst various contingencies of fair-dwellers and fair-visitors and you end up with (for me, at least) a fairly challenging reading experience. In fact, this play seems singularly unsuited for reading -- it can hardly be appreciated at all on the page. Because it both represents and embodies the topsy-turvy experience of the fair, it itself needs to be experienced. (I bet this would be a riot to see staged -- especially the puppet show at the end. Has anyone ever seen it in a theatre?)
I feel like earlier posts and the Stallybrass and White article have done a nice job of identifying the many consciously layered elements of the grotesque and carnivalesque in the play, so I won't bring more comments about that up here (though I hope we will talk more about it in class). Instead, I'm interested in looking at something that Stephan pointed out -- that the characters who seem to fare the worst are the ones who come to the fair in order to censure or change it (except Cokes, who comes merely to revel in it, and ends up losing his fiancee, his guardian, his clothes, his purse(s), and his whole identity). Because, by and large, the characters with the most social and political clout are the ones who suffer, the play seems actively engaged in questioning the meaning and location of authority. Who in this play wields any kind of authentic authority? Wasp, Justice and Mrs. Overdo, Busy and Purecraft, even Haggis and Bristle -- all have some kind of state- or religiously-sanctioned authority and all are shown to be hypocrites or fools. But something that stood out even more to me (perhaps because I actually liked the characters of Justice Overdo and Cokes) was the way the play seems to censure enthusiasm. Cokes, Wasp, Justice Overdo, Busy -- all these characters are overly enthusiastic, and all seem to be punished for their excess. The calm and cool criminal element -- the cutpurse and the scheming gingerbread and hobbyhorse sellers -- as well as the cynical, conniving Quarlous seem able to avoid the public humiliation and loss of stature and/or property suffered by the overly enthusiastic characters. I wonder who in this play the audience was meant to identity with or feel sympathy for. Grace? Win? Cokes (like me)? Or does it provide an opportunity to laugh at everyone equally? I'll be interested in hearing everyone's thoughts about this in class tomorrow!
--Trisha
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