Mammon in the Market; or, How Ben Jonson Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Capitalism

I will argue that the “middle comedies” of Ben Jonson, specifically The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, address concerns that are not only social and economic but also political in nature. Or, to put it another way, the economic issues that these plays address are also political. As the economic landscape shapes social life in city comedy, so too do political concerns exert an important, if perhaps less apparent, influence over the plays that I will examine here. In The Alchemist, Sir Epicure Mammon fantasizes about relocating to a “free state” so that he may enjoy the pleasures that his newly acquired capital can afford him without drawing the ire and suspicion of the monarch (4.1.156). In Bartholomew Fair, Justice Overdo proclaims that he acts on behalf of king and commonwealth when trying to regulate the capitalistic chaos of the local fair. The prevalence of the language of politics (of commonwealth, monarchy, republicanism) in these plays suggests that their economic concerns have significant political implications. Each play offers a resolution to this conflict in accordance with dramatic propriety, what is appropriate given the circumstances. The justice that is done and the order that is achieved at the conclusion of each play is not carried out by politicians or magistrates but rather shaped by the market society in which the characters operate. The characters who try to regulate the market or expose its corruption fail miserably, while the characters who triumph at the end of each play work the system and manipulate the circumstances to their advantage.

Bartholomew Fair and the Performativity of Place

This chapter uses Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair to theorize the performativity of place on the early modern stage. The Induction establishes what will be a central concern for Jonson’s play: namely, how can Bartholomew Fair contend with the memories that playgoers have of the fair’s setting in Smithfield, when such memories may reveal the inadequacy of the theatrical enterprise? Tracing the play’s efforts to resolve this problem in its engagement with the perceptions and the memories of playgoers, the chapter shows how the Induction functions as a cognitive system for managing thought within the playhouse, to the specific end of creating a theatrical Smithfield. Similarly, the play’s depiction of Smithfield shows how perception, movement, and other forms of embodied thought work together to bring place into being. Like the atoms of the Lucretian universe, which shape the cosmos through continual swerving, the characters of Bartholomew Fair create Smithfield through their collective movement, revealing that space is not an a priori dimension but rather an emergent entity. By figuring Smithfield as a site in which individuals and ideologies repeatedly collide with one another—most notably in the interaction of Bartholomew Cokes and Zeal-of-the-land Busy—the play foregrounds the generative potential of disruption and displacement to suggest that disorientation can alter the physical contours of a place.