ABSTRACT
Jonson's plays, in fact, can be read as vigorous attempts to sound out the imagined social and topographical margins of early Jacobean London. It is curious that Jonson's lifelong obsession with the cultivation of proper expression disappears within his great comedies which rather focus on corrupting speech and on damaging aural reception. At the prime of his dramatic career, Jonson's fondness of eloquent expression gives way to an amusing but essentially 'vaporous' array of noisy chatter. Both critics suggest that the dynamic chatter in each play legitimizes a privilege of entering into peculiar modes of city talk and socializing, which reflects the greater social freedoms. He observes that Bartholomew Fair and Epicene render an acoustic panorama of the city through fashionable, often idiosyncratic language that veers into a nonsensical dramatization of the shifting socio-economic fabric of the metropolitan terrain. Jonson's works extends the symbolic domain of the warrant issued mockingly in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair to police.
