Abstract
The winter season at court began in 1614 on All Saints’ Day with the performance of a new play by Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair. An audience being assembled, and the King being set in expectation, the Prologue steps forward to speak these words:
Your Majesty is welcome to a Fair;
Such place, such men, such language and such ware,
You must expect: with these, the zealous noise
Of your land’s Faction, scandaliz’d at toys,
As babies, hobby-horses, puppet-plays,
And such like rage, whereof the petulant ways
Yourself have known, and have been vex’d with long.
These for your sport, without particular wrong
Or just complaint of any private man
(Who of himself or shall think well or can),
The Maker doth present: and hopes tonight
To give you for a fairing, true delight.1
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Notes
John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (London, 1949), p. 178.
Henry Morley, Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair (London, 1857), p. 114; Edmund Wilson, “Morose Ben Jonson,” in The Triple Thinkers (New York, 1948), p. 216.
See G. P. V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 188–89.
By St. John Chrysostom, quoted without reference by Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London, 1935), p. 314.
Jonas A. Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 87–88, 185.
Harry Levin, “An Introduction to Ben Jonson,” in Jonas Barish, ed., Ben Jonson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963), p. 48; Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York, 1952), p. 284. The play has been taken as something of a moral holiday by Horsman, introduction xiii; Barish, 222, 225; John J. Enck, Jonson and the Comic Truth (Wisconsin, 1957), ch. X; Hussey, ix-x. This view is vigorously challenged by Alan C. Dessen, Jonson’s Moral Comedy (Evanston, Ill., 1971), ch. V.
Edward B. Partridge, The Broken Compass (London, 1958), p. 235.
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© 1974 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Blissett, W. (1974). Your Majesty is Welcome to a Fair. In: Hibbard, G.R. (eds) The Elizabethan Theatre IV. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02343-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02343-1_5
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