Bartholomew Fair

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.

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. 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.”

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. 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:

"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[.]"

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.

Ownership

Following Robert Allot’s death in 1635, ownership of his copies were passed onto his widow Mary Allot. When Mary Allot planned to remarry outside the Stationers’ Company, which she believed would invalidate her ownership of Robert Allot’s copyrights, her future husband Philip Chetwin requested a transfer in ownership to Andrew Crooke, a bookseller and “servant” of the Allots, and John Legatt, a printer. Crooke and Legatt entered a list of titles from Allot into the Stationers’ Company in 1637, including Bartholomew Fair. Only in 1637 was Bartholomew Fair finally published, in its rejected 1631 form.

Material Analysis of the 1631 Codex

Starting from the unopened book, the copy appears to be rebound by bookbinder Alfred Smith, whose stamp is on the verso of the front free endpaper, likely during the early 20th century at the request of the last owner, Henry H. Bonnell (1859-1926). Bonnell was an author and American book collector who gifted this copy of Bartholomew Fair to the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater and where he served as a member of the Board of Managers of the Museum.