¹ Freda Townsend, Apologie for Bartholmew Fayre (New York, 1947), p. 71. Compare Wallace Bacon, “The Magnetic Field: The Structure of Jonson's Comedies,” HLQ, xix (1956), 145; and H. R. Hays, “Satire and Identification: An Introduction to Ben Jonson,” Kenyon Review, xix (1957), 276.

² See, for example, T. S. Eliot, “Ben Jonson,” Selected Essays (New York, 1932), p. 134; Henry Wells, Elizabethan and Jacobean Playwrights (New York, 1939), pp. 55–56; T. M. Parrott and Robert Ball, A Short View of Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1943), p. 143; and Townsend, p. 73. Wells and Townsend, however, are among the very few who attempt some sort of structural analysis of the play: Wells's brief account of what he calls its “formula” (pp. 204–205) is helpful as far as it goes, but is limited to the relationship of just three of the characters; and Miss Townsend, after asserting that the play is without a plot, produces a list of “five separate actions” she finds in it—a list which seems quite arbitrary (it simply enumerates six of the eleven visitors) and leads to nothing more than an unorganized summary of parts of the action (pp. 73–75).

³ See C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, Ben Jonson, ii (Oxford, 1925), 137–138; Eliot, p. 134; and Harry Levin, Ben Jonson: Selected Works (New York, 1938), p. 29. Bacon objects—quite rightly, I believe—that Miss Townsend's explanation of the unity of the play is much too vague and metaphorical; he prefers to say that it is unified by the fair itself, which “acts as a magnetic center” and somehow “determines the pattern—the structure—of elements, as a magnet will arrange iron filings in a clearly observable pattern” (pp. 123–124, 148, 151–153).

⁴ James Robinson's interesting article, “Bartholomew Fair: Comedy of Vapors,” SEL, i (1961), 65–80, takes off from this same breakdown of the visitors, and anticipates my approach at certain other points, but he emerges with a quite different analysis which ultimately equates all of these characters as instances of a single “universal comic truth” expressed by the play.

⁵ i.v.64–67. Littlewit's reply, harking back to his opening speech, reinforces his connection to Cokes: “That was mine afore, Gentlemen: this morning, I had that i'faith, vpon his Licence” (68–69). Similar anticipatory links between the other parallel characters appear in Act i: Dame Purecraft and Dame Overdo are associated in i.ii.27, Win and Grace in i.v.83–85, and Busy and Wasp at the beginning of scene iv when, immediately after Quarlous' long description of the Puritan prepares us for his entrance, Wasp walks in instead. (The Herford and Simpson edition has been used as the reference text.)

⁶ Even when Dame Overdo is paired with Win as a “Bird o' the game,” some sense of this distinction between the two groups is preserved. We actually see how easily Win is taken in by the pimps in iv.v, whereas Dame Overdo's fall occurs off-stage; and at the puppet-play Win is shown being courted by Edgworth and obviously enjoying her new role, while the older woman remains in a drunken stupor.

⁷ This was pointed out by Jonas Barish, whose study of the two characters is the best I have seen (Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy, Cambridge, Mass., 1960, pp. 197–211). Wells, in his discussion of the fair's enemies, ignores Wasp and finds a crucial contrast between “the conscientious Anglican judge Overdo and the fanatical Puritan preacher Busy” (p. 205); but Overdo is at least as fanatical as Busy, and his religion is irrelevant (although he certainly is not a Puritan, as Oliphant claims in Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists, New York, 1929, ii, 736). John Enck is thrown off here, I think, by his attempt to associate Cokes with Busy and Overdo as the “three visitors [who] seek to alter the Fair,” a grouping which seems to owe more to his own metaphysics (he believes all three make “the wrong assumption that any qualities divide the essences from the elements composing the object”) than to their actual functions and relationships in the plot (Jonson and the Comic Truth, Madison, Wis., 1957, pp. 195–196).

⁸ Quarlous makes the distinction: “I would faine see the carefull foole deluded! of all Beasts, I loue the serious Asse. He that takes paines to be one, and playes the foole, with the greatest diligence that can be” (iii.v.264–267). He is speaking of Wasp, but Grace, who has detached herself from her own party and taken on something of his choric role, adds that Overdo “is answerable to that description, in euery haire of him” (ll. 269–270; see her earlier remarks, ll. 27–33).

⁹ The parallel is reinforced when Quarlous points out that, in asking Trouble-all to mark the tablet, they made him “a Fortune-teller” (iv.iii.101), and both matches are called the work of “fortune” in v.ii.31, 84 (cf. iv.iii.22, 51). The role of chance is emphasized in the way each man has been brought to a complete reversal of his position in Act i, where Winwife came to court Dame Purecraft, and Quarlous read him an impassioned lecture on the evils of “widdow-hunting.”

¹⁰ This sequence, pointed out by Wells (p. 205), is recalled by Cokes himself when he summarizes his losses in iv.ii.81–86.

¹¹ Edgar Knowlton, in “The Plots of Ben Jonson,” MLN, xliv (1929), 77–86, notes how frequently Jonson's plots are brought to an unstable and morally unsatisfactory “solution” of this sort, usually in Act iv (for example, in Volpone's triumph at the Scrutineo, and the defeat of Surly by Face and Subtle), which is then reversed in the last act. But when he comes to Bartholomew Fair (p. 82), he locates this point in Act iii, where Overdo is taken to the stocks, rather than here.

¹² See Enck, pp. 191, 198; Bacon, p. 146; and Barish, pp. 222–224. Barish also believes that the simple fools among the visitors are “vindicated” and “triumph” (pp. 212, 230, 236), and tries to undercut their detractors, Quarlous and Winwife, claiming that they end up “at the comic tribunal of the puppet play … with almost as much to answer for as the rascals of the Fair itself” (p. 195). But Cokes and Littlewit seem even sillier in Act v than they did in Act i; and the two gallants are not accused of anything at the comic tribunal; rather it is Quarlous (as the more articulate of the two) who does the accusing in his definitive attack on Overdo. It seems to me that Robinson (p. 74) also sacrifices the two gallants to his general thesis, which is nearly the opposite of Barish's; and for another, more strained attempt to debase Quarlous, see Ray Heffner, “Unifying Symbols in the Comedy of Ben Jonson,” English Stage Comedy, ed. W. K. Wimsatt (New York, 1955), pp. 94–95.

¹³ This article represents part of a study made possible by a fellowship awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies for 1963–64.