This paper aims at investigating how Ben Jonson ruminates on his dramatic art, contemporary theatrical practices, and audience responses in Bartholomew Fair, focusing on the seemingly peripheral Induction and the Puppet Show. Jonson often infuses self-reflexive comments and metadramatic reflections on theatre through paratexts (such as prologues or inductions). Jonson incorporates a prologue-like speech in the Induction delivered by the Book-holder. On behalf of the Author, the Book-holder clearly sets up several key play-going agreements between the audience and the author. The play concludes with a puppet show that calls attention to the play-going experiences, offering Jonson’s reflection on the theater, audience’s taste and knowledge (or ignorance), and Puritan attacks. The puppet show offers a forum for different parties (author, gallant, actor, and puritan) to engage in debates and resolves their disputations. It later turns into a mock trial presided by Justice Adam Overdo on numerous “enormities” at the Fair. Though constantly being disrupted, the inset play draws the main plot to a climatic harmony, indicating Jonson’s changing and less cynical attitudes to unsophisticated audience, hostile critics and hypocritical puritans to whom he used to be opposed. Instead of receiving punishments, humiliations or derisions for knavish or foolish characters, all are invited to have a celebratory feast at Justice Overdo’s home. In Bartholomew Fair, Jonson endeavors to mediate and bridge the differences and gaps between the play and the play-goers, the fiction and the reality, his authorship and his critics.

Authors:
Hsiang-Chun Chu, National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Hsiang-chun Chu is Professor of the Department of English, National Changhua University of Education, Changhua, Taiwan. Dr. Chu holds a Ph.D. (English) from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. Her research interests are Shakespeare and early modern English drama. She is the author of Metatheater in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: Four Forms of Theatrical Self-reflexivity (Edwin Mellen P) and Violence, Spectacle, and Cultural Commodity: Studying Three Postmodern Shakespearean Films (Bookman Books). She is currently working on a book of early modern indoor playhouses and their reconstructed modern re-creations.

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