ABSTRACT
The carnival atmosphere of Bartholomew Fair and its heroless structure help to contrive an almost cinematic flow to its place-related plots. If Jonson had written the play 360 years later, it might have become a shooting script for Fellini, whose Amarcord (1974) relies on a similarly panoramic pastiche of intertwining lives, young and old, in a circumscribed place, overflowing with hilarious, warmhearted, bawdy anecdotes of love, sex, family, neighbours, and politics, all of which conclude in a wonderfully heightened marriage feast, as a classic comedy should. Jonson's fairground has the same evanescently quirky glow of a temporary space that must be enjoyed at the moment or lost-at least for a year, if not forever. His festive crowd, like Fellini's, indulges voraciously in physical and verbal excess: food, drink, abuse, obscenity, and raucous laughter. No authority escapes attack, no hypocrisy eludes hissing, no pretentiousness evades come-uppance. Through reversals and inversions, magnifications and trivialisations, the issues of class, gender, and age blur, and the common denominator, lusty humanity, takes the foreground.
