Early modern London - too foggy and Protestant to have a carnival -
offered its inhabitants commercial events during which to indulge
their need for bodily delights and festival exuberance. The fair of
St Bartholmew, held anually in Smithfield on 24 August, served
Jonson as an opportunity to dissect a wide cross-section of
Londoners and their various reasons for spending a day out among
the booths, stalls, smells and noises of the fair. Unusually
magnanimous for a Jonsonian city comedy, the main thrust of the
satire is not against fools, madmen, fortune-hunters, cuckolds or
prostitutes, but against hypocrisy and bigotry. This edition shows
that the play can be read as a comprehensive refutation of
puritanism and the London magistracy, both of whom were attacking
the theatre (and the festive culture of which it was still part) as
idolatrous, seditious and disorderly.
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