Play: Bartholomew Fair

Setting and Frame
Bartholomew Fair unfolds over a single riotous day at Smithfield’s famous late-summer fair, London’s great marketplace of food, toys, puppets, pickpockets, and petty swindles. Jonson frames the action with an Induction in which a scrivener and stage-keeper set terms for spectatorship, promising a “day” of comedy if the audience will suspend expectations and take the fair as it comes. That tease mirrors the play’s design: a panoramic city comedy where appetites, credulity, and zeal collide in a carnival of noise and bargaining.

Plot Overview
Justice Adam Overdo, a painfully conscientious magistrate, disguises himself as a humble porter to root out “enormities” at the fair. Eager to catch offenders and to test his own wisdom, he prowls the booths and ale-stalls, only to be cuffed, mocked, and repeatedly misled. His wife’s whereabouts nag at him, turning his crusade into a comedy of self-deception.

Among the crowds arrive John Littlewit, a clever proctor and the fair’s resident wit, his pregnant wife Win, and Win’s wealthy, puritanical mother Dame Purecraft. Win craves roast pig from Ursula’s greasy booth, so Littlewit obligingly steers the party through the fair while trying to keep them respectable. Their spiritual shepherd, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, denounces the fair’s sensuality and theatricality, yet cannot resist arguing with everyone in reach. When Busy later assaults a puppet show as idolatry, the puppets themselves silence him with cheerful logic and a revelation of their sexless bodies, exposing his anti-theatrical fury as comic hypocrisy.

A broader current of gullery runs through Bartholomew Cokes, a childlike heir betrothed to Grace Wellborn. Shadowed by his choleric guardian Wasp, Cokes ricochets from toy-stall to gingerbread to roast pig, buying trinkets and losing purses. He is easy prey for Edgworth the cutpurse, aided by Nightingale the ballad-singer, and for the swaggering fair habitués Knockem and Whit. In the tumult, Cokes’s marriage license and gifts disappear, his wedding plans unravelling in public farce.

Parallel to this, the gallants Winwife and Quarlous circle the fair, at first rivals for Dame Purecraft’s fortune under Busy’s stern watch. The marketplace scrambles their aims. Quarlous, sharper and cooler, drifts toward the virtuous Grace, whose patience with Cokes highlights her worth. A chain of quick wits and opportunism, fed by stolen documents, mistaken identities, and a hasty ceremony at the puppet booth scripted by Littlewit, redirects the matches. Quarlous secures Grace, while Winwife ends with Dame Purecraft, whose puritan certainties prove surprisingly pliable when wealth, prophecy, and convenience intermix.

Characters and Scenes of the Fair
Jonson stitches together the fair’s denizens with vivid comic precision: Ursula the porcine pig-woman sweating over her fires; Joan Trash with gingerbread; Leatherhead, a toy-seller turned showman; and a rabble of tapsters, watchmen, and roaring boys. The fair acts as both stage and solvent, dissolving pretenses and exposing private motives, hunger, desire, vanity, greed, under the pressure of noise and barter.

Resolution and Significance
By evening, the disguises shed and bargains struck, Overdo publicly reveals himself, discovers how much folly his zeal has wrought, and magnanimously invites all to supper. The gesture closes the fair with a note of comic amnesty. Bartholomew Fair celebrates the bustling plurality of London, satirizing puritan rigor, pedantic justice, and fashionable credulity while reveling in the theater’s own power to mirror a city’s appetites. Its sprawling, episodic action, prose rhythms, and emblematic names create a living map of a culture where performance and commerce are inseparable.