ABSTRACT
Ben Jonson is the explosive creator of grand carnivals, giant belches, flowing lavatorial humour, strict classical learning, sublime lyrics, surreal rhetoric and mighty verse. At the heart of his work is Bartholomew Fair, a massive fresco, packed with thirty-two characters, all shouting for attention, plus some six competing storylines. There are Puritans, middle-class idiots, fat ladies selling pork, ballad singers, gingerbread women, hobby-horse sellers, pickpockets, con-men, prostitutes, puppeteers, roving magistrates, madmen, policemen, seducers and drunks. In some ways Bartholomew Fair is a reconstructed comic documentary on the condition of society at a given moment. Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson did not give his nobles verse to speak and his common folk prose. There are thankfully few, if any, nobles in Jonson, yet whilst The Alchemist, a tale about three crooks, is in verse, the great fresco of Bartholomew Fair is in prose.
