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Compared to Jonson's earlier comic masterpieces, Volpone and The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair seems unfocused and diffuse.1 It lacks a pair of central characters around whom the play is organized and who appear to direct its action, such as Volpone and Mosca in Volpone or Face and Subtle in The Alchemist.2 With a verbal exuberance unmatched outside of Shakespeare, the play is constantly threatening to veer off into irrelevance, incoherence, and even absurdity. But what seems at first to be a weakness of Bartholomew Fair—its lack of focus—turns out to be its great strength—its ability to embrace a wide variety of human types and develop them in their full diversity, without imposing any narrowing artistic or moral conceptions upon them. The play’s apparent formlessness and lack of a center may reflect a deeper order and sense of form. Bartholomew Fair is in fact deeply paradoxical. Though a highly artful play, it succeeds in concealing its artifice and may at first seem to be just thrown together on the stage like an improvisation.3 Though seemingly the most formless of Jonson's plays, it actually obeys the unities of time and place as strictly as any of his other works.4 In fact, it comes as close to unfolding in real time on stage as any Renaissance drama. Remarkably, in Bartholomew Fair Jonson found a way to remain within the bounds of his neoclassical conception of dramatic form, while still imparting a feeling of spontaneity to the play. In short, the play obeys Jonson's cherished law of the unities, while appearing to be wholly free and above or beyond any formal law.5
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