Epilogue

Abstract

Although Jonson excluded Bartholomew Fair (1614) from the First Folio, when suffering from ill-health and the threat of financial ruin later in life, he did attempt to have the play published. While a folio containing Bartholomew Fair was planned, however, Jonson was forced in 1631 to abandon the project. This hinged partly on the disastrous contribution of John Beale, a ‘Lewd Printer’, who refused to ‘perfect’ his work to Jonson’s satisfaction and who was happy for sheets of the play to go forward with, in E. A. Horsman’s words, ‘oddities of spacing, changes of type, mispunctuation and textual errors’.¹ The play, it seems, had become a more ‘monsterized’ version of its already ‘monstrous’ self. If Jonson was defeated in his endeavour to produce Bartholomew Fair in ‘perfect’ form, those involved in the dissemination of Marlowe and Shakespeare might have applauded themselves for having been more successful. In his 1590 address to the readers, Richard Jones, the printer of Tamburlaine the Great (1587–88), states:

I have (purposely) omitted and left out some fond and frivolous jestures, digressing and (in my poor opinion) far unmeet for the matter, which I thought might seem more tedious unto the wise than any way else to be regarded — though, haply, they have been of some vain conceited fondlings greatly gaped at, what times they were showed upon the stage in their graced deformities.²

The suggestion that the play functioned as a type of ‘monster’ to be viewed by the multitude carries in its wake a class-sensitive criticism, even a hint of the ethics of ‘decency’ that were, eventually, to bring about the disappearance of the ‘monster’ exhibition as popular entertainment.