ABSTRACT
This essay tries to historicize the meaning of festivity in Bartholomew Fair. In medieval and early modern Europe festivity was, in the first place, a mode of social expression and organization - a point Bakhtin insists on in his great book on Rabelais,1 although the point is regularly lost as Bakhtin's notion of the festive is imported into Anglo-American criticism, where festivity tends to become a purely symbolic or moral structure. Because it was fundamentally a social phenomenon, the sort of festivity Bakhtin describes disintegrated as its social basis disintegrated, and was
reformulated in conformity with the new social conditions. That reformulation involved, in fact, the limiting of its radical social aspects and emphasis on a more inward and detachable symbolic and moral meaning. Such a process is of course very complex and does not happen overnight; but it seems clear that in 1614 Jonson felt he was writing at the moment of disintegration and reformulation, and intervened with his characteristic energy. At times he is quite polemical about it.
