The Themes and Staging of Bartholomew Fair

Abstract

We know rather more about the original production of Bartholomew Fair on 31 October 1614, than we do about most productions of the time. The play was written after the failure of Jonson's painstakingly classical tragedy Catiline (Kings Men, 1611), and is a deliberate, but highly ambivalent, adaptation of 'popular' forms. It was put on, not at the fashionable Globe or Blackfriars, but at a new theatre called the Hope, two facts about which are very important: it was modelled On the Swan, which is the one Elizabethan theatre of which we possess a contemporary sketch; and it was designed to be used as a bear-baiting pit at least once every fortnight. Jonson refers to the stage-keeper 'gathering up the broken apples for the bears within' (Induction, 46) and his disdainfully pragmatic attitude to the situation appears at the end of the Induction:

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