Bartholomew Fair: Difference between revisions
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'''''Bartholomew Fair''''' is a comedy written by the English playwright Ben Jonson, first performed by the Lady Elizabeth’s Men at the Hope Theatre in London in 1614. | '''''Bartholomew Fair''''' is a comedy written by the English playwright Ben Jonson, first performed by the Lady Elizabeth’s Men at the Hope Theatre in London in 1614.<ref name="stage">John Creaser, “Bartholomew Fair: Stage History”.</ref> | ||
=Background= | =Background= | ||
==Stage History== | ==Stage History== | ||
There are just two performances on record from Jonson’s lifetime, the second performance being shown for the court in Whitehall and King James on the night after the first performance. With a text almost twice as long as the average play in this period and a large cast of thirty-six named characters, Bartholomew Fair is “the most ‘occasional’ of Jonson’s plays”, implying the existence of special occasions for its performance and within the story itself. <ref | There are just two performances on record from Jonson’s lifetime, the second performance being shown for the court in Whitehall and King James on the night after the first performance. With a text almost twice as long as the average play in this period and a large cast of thirty-six named characters, Bartholomew Fair is “the most ‘occasional’ of Jonson’s plays”, implying the existence of special occasions for its performance and within the story itself.<ref name="stage" /> In fact, the play’s single-column layout and lavish use of ornaments, illumination, scene divisions, and title pages imply that Jonson intended on printing his plays not as “a script for performance, but a literary work mediated through the dignity of print, in keeping with Jonson’s practice of writing plays that were much too long for performance in full and were destined to have an existence independent of the theatre, however well they adapted to the stage.”<ref name="misprinting">John Creaser, “Misprinting Bartholomew Fair: Jonson and 'The Absolute Knave'”.</ref> | ||
==History of Jonson's Folios== | |||
Jonson’s first folio entitled ''The Workes of Benjamin Jonson'' was published in 1616 by William Stansby, consisting of a collection of Jonson’s plays and poems. In 1631, a second volume of Jonson’s works was printed by John Beale for publisher Robert Allot as a collection of three plays: ''Bartholomew Fair'', ''The Staple of News'', and ''The Devil is an Ass''.<ref>William P. Williams, “Chetwin, Crooke, and the Jonson Folios.”.</ref> Given their continuous signatures, Jonson envisioned a distinct folio volume with the three plays printed in alphabetical order with recent masques and poems included at the end. However, very few copies of this second folio were distributed following their printing in 1631. Allot and Beale were both well-known contributors to England’s book trade at the time; Allot was a publisher of Shakespeare’s Second Folio and Beale was a master-printer and senior-member of the Stationers’ Company. Despite their potential, Beale’s printing left Jonson greatly dissatisfied with his work, evidenced by a letter that Jonson sent to his patron William Caventish, Earl of Newcastle, in 1631 with a copy of The Devil is an Ass: | |||
{{Blockquote | |||
|text=It is the lewd printer’s fault that I can send Your Lordship no more of my book done. I sent you one piece before, The Fair, ... and now I send you this other morsel, the fine gentleman that walks in town, The Fiend; but before he [Beale] will perfect the rest, I fear, he will come himself to be a part, under the title of The Absolute Knave, which he hath played with me. My printer and I shall afford subject enough for a tragicomedy, for with his delays and vexation I am almost become blind[.]<ref name="misprinting" />}} | |||
With inaccurate punctuation, wrong page numbers, misspellings, and other errors of detail riddling the pages of Bartholomew Fair, Jonson’s exasperation for Beale’s carelessness are not without strong basis. Even with widespread evidence of stop-press corrections, there are about 400 to 500 uncorrected errors across eighty-eight pages, with over twenty errors on some pages. For reference, the first edition of the King James Bible had 350 slight errors.2 | |||
Revision as of 18:30, 13 April 2022
Bartholomew Fair is a comedy written by the English playwright Ben Jonson, first performed by the Lady Elizabeth’s Men at the Hope Theatre in London in 1614.[1]
Background
Stage History
There are just two performances on record from Jonson’s lifetime, the second performance being shown for the court in Whitehall and King James on the night after the first performance. With a text almost twice as long as the average play in this period and a large cast of thirty-six named characters, Bartholomew Fair is “the most ‘occasional’ of Jonson’s plays”, implying the existence of special occasions for its performance and within the story itself.[1] In fact, the play’s single-column layout and lavish use of ornaments, illumination, scene divisions, and title pages imply that Jonson intended on printing his plays not as “a script for performance, but a literary work mediated through the dignity of print, in keeping with Jonson’s practice of writing plays that were much too long for performance in full and were destined to have an existence independent of the theatre, however well they adapted to the stage.”[2]
History of Jonson's Folios
Jonson’s first folio entitled The Workes of Benjamin Jonson was published in 1616 by William Stansby, consisting of a collection of Jonson’s plays and poems. In 1631, a second volume of Jonson’s works was printed by John Beale for publisher Robert Allot as a collection of three plays: Bartholomew Fair, The Staple of News, and The Devil is an Ass.[3] Given their continuous signatures, Jonson envisioned a distinct folio volume with the three plays printed in alphabetical order with recent masques and poems included at the end. However, very few copies of this second folio were distributed following their printing in 1631. Allot and Beale were both well-known contributors to England’s book trade at the time; Allot was a publisher of Shakespeare’s Second Folio and Beale was a master-printer and senior-member of the Stationers’ Company. Despite their potential, Beale’s printing left Jonson greatly dissatisfied with his work, evidenced by a letter that Jonson sent to his patron William Caventish, Earl of Newcastle, in 1631 with a copy of The Devil is an Ass:
With inaccurate punctuation, wrong page numbers, misspellings, and other errors of detail riddling the pages of Bartholomew Fair, Jonson’s exasperation for Beale’s carelessness are not without strong basis. Even with widespread evidence of stop-press corrections, there are about 400 to 500 uncorrected errors across eighty-eight pages, with over twenty errors on some pages. For reference, the first edition of the King James Bible had 350 slight errors.2