Bartholomew Fair: A Comedy

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Jonson's 1614 comedy is his most sociologically comprehensive: a panoramic depiction of the eponymous annual London fair, with its puppet shows, pig-women, horse-traders, con men, and Puritan zealots, all trapped in the same chaotic space and all exposed as equally foolish. The play has the largest cast in the Jonson canon and the least tightly plotted structure — it is essentially a series of comic variations on the theme of human folly in a public space. Its portrait of London commercial culture is incomparably vivid, and the ending — in which a puppet debates a Puritan about the immorality of theater by exposing itself — is one of Jonson's most audacious theatrical gestures.