ABSTRACT
This chapter mainly considers the legitimacy of the teacher's authority status against the background of the ethos of the fairground. In particular, its festive disordering of conventional social hierarchies and codified relations demolishes authorizing institutions and procedures in ways that ridicule and subvert their symbolic representatives. Among the fallen authorities, moral governor Humphrey Wasp performs as Jonson's iconoclastic device for invalidating the humanist educational agenda and adumbrating the growing scepticism around its methods and outcomes. Representing the educational system, Wasp's display of tutorial insufficiencies and enormities alongside his dysfunctional interactions with his foolish and incorrigible pupil Bartholomew (Bat) Cokes are magnified within the fair's milieu. They also betray Jonson's disillusionment on a personal level in connection with his acute embarrassment at the causes of his failed tutorship of Wat Raleigh and, perhaps, on a wider level regarding his own conflicted relationship with humanist doctrine. The play engages implicitly with the debate about social humanism and its pragmatic failings by exaggerating the negative aspects of schooling the gentry within the context of economic development as reflected metaphorically in the indulgences characterizing the business of the fair. In Fair, humanist culture is a shadowy presence and although not completely vanquished, its traces linger on the sidelines. Yet, despite Jonson's, partly self-directed, derision, he sought to preserve the liberal-arts curriculum for scholars who were able to profit from it and, hence, his play resists being read as a straightforward condemnation of the project. Acting as corrective force, his festive experiential schoolroom seems to offer some hope for the reform of authorizing agencies beyond the topsy-turvy culture of the fairground through humanistic education and its foundation in the dignity of mankind.
