Eve’s Flesh and Blood in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair

Eve’s Flesh and Blood in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair Renu June]a Jonson’s attitude to women has remained an enigma to most Jonsonian scholars. “A shrew yet honest,” Jonson’s only surviv­ ing remark about his wife, captures the tensions and the duality of attitude his critics find in his portrayal of women. Swinburne reacted so violently to this duality that he could only explain it by regarding Jonson as a woman-hater who flattered particular women from suspect motives. More recently, Parfitt has specu­ lated that “Jonson’s marriage may have encouraged not only that painful sense of schism which marks his treatment of rela­ tionships, but also the notable split in his literary attitudes to women.”l Such amateur psychological explanations, however, lead into hazardous and unnecessary guesswork, especially when we can account for the duality as a literary commonplace having its basis in much medieval and Renaissance literature and match it with a similar polarization of attitude in the popular pam­ phlets on the position of women in society. Equally unconvinc­ ing is the assumption of an enduring dichotomy in Jonson’s attitude to women, that all women in his plays are stereotypical, either daughters of Eve, temptresses and shrews, or Platonic patterns of virtue. The stereotypes are broken certainly in Bar­ tholomew Fair, and the play may be seen as an attitudinal transi­ tion in Jonson’s interest in female characters.2 The play is re­ markable for both the prominence and complexity of its women and the sympathetic understanding of social pressures exerted on the women of his times. There are several indications that with Bartholomew Fair women have gained a new stature in Jonson’s comic world. Fallace in Every Man out of His Humour is proud and foolish, and only wants the face to be dishonest. Saviolana in the same play 340 Renu Juneja 341 and the female courtiers in Cynthia’s Revels are vain, selfish, and shallow. Julia in Poetaster is similarly flawed by her irrational and indiscreet passion for Ovid. Doll Common in The Alchemist is unequivocally a whore, while Dame Pliant is so lacking in character that she is easily and willingly pushed first into Surly’s and then into Lovewit’s arms. The collegiates in Epicoene are both the temptresses and the tempted, while Mrs. Otter ruth­ lessly dominates her husband. Indeed, after the shadowy Bridget of Every Man in His Humour, Grace Wellborn is the first good woman to achieve a union with a man who is her equal in wit if not in moral worth. Though virtuous, Grace is hardly fash­ ioned in the same mold as Cynthia and Arete of Cynthia’s Revels or Celia of Volpone. Celia and Cynthia, like the aristocratic women of the Epigrams, are more divine than human; Grace is living flesh and blood. Similarly, though Ursula is cast in gigantic proportions, she too is a woman of much flesh and more blood, albeit the flesh has a tendency to melt and the blood to become overheated. Bartholomew Fair is exceptional not only for the manner in which Jonson conceives his female characters but also for the preeminence he allows them in the play. Till Bartholomew Fair, a woman’s marriage is not decisively central to the plot. The deceptive The Silent Woman is a case in point, for the woman in this play turns out to be no woman. In Bartholomew Fair there are two marriageable women—Grace and Widow Purecraft —and all the actions that set the plot in motion, further it, or bring it to conclusion are in some measure related to the marriage of these women. Since plot and theme are inextricably interwoven, it follows that women will also be thematically cen­ tral. The opening speech by Littlewit establishes within the first few lines that the engagement of Grace to Bartholomew Cokes will be a major dramatic force in the action, while, simultane­ ously, the mention of the licence that Cokes has come to pro­ cure establishes a major leitmotif that will reverberate through­ out the play.3 If, as Heffner persuasively argues, “warrant” or “licence” represents the unifying theme of the play, then we must...