Bartholomew Fair:: Ben Jonson’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

B artholom ew Fair: Ben Jonson’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” John Scott Colley Ben Jonson did write about dreams and dreamers, although Jonson’s visionaries strike us quite differently from Shakespeare’s lunatics, lovers and poets. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream celebrates the special transforming power of a madness that is induced by love and poetry. In the majority of Jonson’s plays, on the other hand, the characters most prey to imagina­ tion and fantasy are neither cleansed nor purified by their mid­ day flights into unreality. Jonson’s day-dreamers characteris­ tically become immobilized within the deep mire of their visions and fantasies. Shakespeare’s comic characters frequently triumph precisely because of their apprenticeship in folly and delusion. Yet Jonson’s comic world is not simply a world with no exit from the prison-house of folly and knavery. Bartholomew Fair presents a vision of comic release and comic celebration that is unique in Jonson’s canon. In Bartholomew Fair Jonson resorts to a kind of magic to transfigure madmen, opportunistic suitors and poetasters so that they can become fellow celebrants at the final banquet of comic harmony. Shakespeare wrought his magic in the hazy half-light of an enchanted forest. Jonson’s fairyland is the dusty, noontime chaos of Smithfield hucksters, pickpockets and bawds. In his unique style, and in his unique setting, Jonson finally accepts the transforming and regenerative powers of the comedy of forgiveness.1 The daylight comic magic of Bartholomew Fair works wonders almost equal to the eyedrops and confusions mischievously administered by the in­ visible Puck. The conclusion reached at the end of the play by Jonson and his spokesman Quarlous is quite simple: while the world is clearly a sordid place, even decent folk have to remember 63 64 Comparative Drama that they too play parts on this stage of fools. To be human is to be foolish, and for the first time in Jonson’s comedy, the ac­ ceptance of one’s folly becomes the prelude to self-knowledge and ultimate comic transcendence. Quarlous stills the thunder­ ing judgmental voice of Justice Overdo when he reminds the would-be exposer of enormities: “remember you are but Adam, Flesh, and blood! you haue your frailty, forget your other name of Ouerdoo, and inuite vs all to supper.”2 Quarlous’s command is like a magic spell, and suddenly the noise and confusion of the fair are made to vanish. Husbands are reunited with their wives; each Jack takes his Jill; and even the pea-brained simple­ ton Cokes, hardly the worse for his misadventures, can lead the throng as it trails off to supper. No legal nor purely rational judgment is pronounced. There is no Justice Clement to un­ tangle the knots; no grey-bearded Avocatori to separate the innocent from the guilty; nor even a Lovewit to come home and cash in on the corruption of less resourceful rogues. Somehow, magically, the play is over and the characters are ready to cele­ brate, with feasting and with marriages, the transformations that are wrought by the daylight magic of the fair. Jonson’s typical even-handed satiric justice gives way to an inexplicable universal pardon and, for no apparent reason, his ship of fools is guided smoothly into safe harbor. The almost magical power of Quarlous’s reminder of our shared human frailty resembles the actual magical transforma­ tions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Shakespeare’s Dream there is similarly no attempt to explain all of the accidents and all of the transformations which contribute to the festive ending. Even Puck’s love-juice is only a prop and is not the real magic of the play. The real magic of the dream is more elusive. The plain-speaking Bottom, in fact, specifically avoids rational understanding of his own experience of comic magic: I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. . . . The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue...