Bartholomew Fair | The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson

Edited by John Creaser

INTRODUCTION

First performances

Bartholomew Fair is the most ‘occasional’ of Jonson’s plays. Only two contemporary performances are recorded, but these were the first, and there are few stagings of the period about which so much is known. The play opened at the Hope theatre, Bankside, London, on 31 October 1614, and was repeated the next night for the court at Whitehall, in the presence of King James. The records of the royal Treasurer of the Chamber show that the company was paid the standard fee of £10 on 11 June 1615 ‘for presenting a play called Bartholomew Fair before His Majesty on the first of November last past’ (MSR, Collections, 6.60). Both occasions appear in the printed text: the Induction dates and locates the first; direct addresses to the King recall the second.

Plays for the commercial theatre had to prove themselves in public before being vetted for the court by the Lord Chamberlain, and no other newcomer is known to have transferred at once from a public theatre to the court (Blissett, 1974, 81–2). It says much for Jonson’s stature at this time that an untried play was engaged for the King’s entertainment. Since ‘a good deal of time was spent in the discovery and preparation of suitable pieces’ (Chambers, ES, 1.223), Bartholomew Fair must have been chosen well in advance, presumably before rehearsals began (Sturgess, 1987, 170). Moreover, the Revels Office had elaborate scenery to build for the performance (as shown below). Jonson would have had time in hand, and a dual occasion in mind, while finalising the text. The exceptional nature of the play and its occasion is reinforced by its dedication – unique for a commercial play – to the King (title-page, 8n.).

Bartholomew Fair is a play about a festivity prepared for a festivity. Various ancient festivals coincided on 1 November and had been absorbed into All Saints’ Day. Halloween, 31 October, traditionally the most uncanny night of the year, was already a time of feasting and pranks. These dates were selected because All Saints’ Day was the beginning of the winter season at court, when the King officially returned to residence at Whitehall. James had restored the custom of marking this with some celebration, often the performance of a play.

That this play was prepared as something worthy of a special occasion is borne out by the exceptional length of the text and size of the cast. The Induction requires the audience to pay patient attention ‘for the space of two hours and an half and somewhat more’ (59–60). Public theatre plays averaged 2,250 lines and (apart from musical interludes or a final jig) performances lasted little more than two hours; even in winter the afternoon performances ended by dusk. At almost twice this length, Bartholomew Fair is the longest professional play text of its period, and will have been cut for performance, but Jonson’s addition of a third to the standard length of performance indicates that he sees his play as meriting an extended span of time.

With 36 named characters, Bartholomew Fair requires an exceptionally, although not uniquely, large cast for the professional theatre of the time. Shakespeare generally wrote for a cast of 12 men and 4 boys, but Bartholomew Fair has speaking roles for at least 22 actors, and there are so many minor roles and supernumeraries that even with doubling the cast in 1614 probably approached 30 (The Persons of the Play, first commentary note). The many parts suitable for boys, and the distinctive physiques required for some parts, suggest that Jonson was responding to the unusual company of performers, the result of a merger in 1613 between the Lady Elizabeth’s Company and the Children of the Queen’s Revels. Since 1603, all his plays except Epicene had been written for Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, and Jonson presumably sought or welcomed this departure because of his friendship with the new company’s leading actor, Nathan Field (5.3.67n.).

Bartholomew Fair was to prove the high point of the existence of a company that was always to be insecure. It is the only play known to have been performed at the company’s Hope theatre, the newest playhouse in London, though it was not, as often assumed, written as a festive opening (5.3.61–2n.). The Hope, which straddled the modern Bear Gardens in Southwark, was both conservative and innovative. Indoor ‘private’ theatres with performances by candlelight had become fashionable, and the Hope was the last to be built of the ‘public’ theatres, wooden amphitheatres open to the skies. It was innovative, however, in being specifically designed for both plays and bear-baiting (although some older buildings, such as Paris Garden, had been used for both entertainments). On 29 August 1613, the theatre entrepreneur Philip Henslowe and Jacob Meade, the leading impresario of bull- and bear-baiting, commissioned Gilbert Katherens, a carpenter, to pull down the old Beargarden and erect the Hope and its ancillary buildings, as ‘one other game place or playhouse fit and convenient in all things, both for players to play in, and for the game of bears and bulls to be baited in the same, and also a fit and convenient tire-house and a stage to be carried or taken away, and to stand upon trestles good, substantial, and sufficient for the carrying and bearing of such a stage’. Katherens was also ‘to build the heavens [protective canopy] all over the said stage, to be borne and carried without any posts or supporters to be fixed or set upon the said stage’ (Chambers, ES, 2.466–7, as corrected by Wickham, 1972, 72).

In other respects the Hope was to be based upon the existing Swan theatre. The general appearance of the auditorium can, therefore, be inferred from the famous sketch of the interior of the Swan made about 1596 by Johannes de Witt, copied by his friend Aernout van Buchel (Foakes, 1985, 52), though the stage at the Hope was uncluttered by pillars supporting the heavens. It offered a very large acting area, some 43 feet wide and 27 feet 6 inches deep (Orrell, 1983, 101–5, and 1988, 63–4).

The Henslowe/Meade venture was a limited success. Tensions created by the building’s dual purpose are already evident in Jonson’s Induction, with its scornful references to the bears and the stink they created. A conflict of interest was soon apparent, and no acting company would stay long at the theatre, so it became primarily a place for bear-baiting, sword-fencing, and other exhibitions (Bentley, JCS, 6.207–14).

Bartholomew Fair’s second performance enjoyed a far more salubrious setting. Of the several royal sites for such entertainments, it almost certainly took place in the largest and grandest, the Banqueting House — the King’s audience-chamber and place of state and judgement (MSR, Collections, 6.111), the immediate predecessor of Inigo Jones’s surviving masterpiece in Whitehall. The Banqueting House was fitting for a play dedicated to the King, since it was built at his initiative in 1607, and he took pride in it. The substantial hall, 120 feet by 53, could accommodate an audience of about 600, and was designed as a display of royal magnificence. (Fuller accounts of the Hope, the Banqueting House, and all aspects of the first performances will be found in the Stage History in the electronic edition.)

Jonson had a clear vision of the play onstage. As well as requiring particular physiques for certain roles, he specifies clothing precisely for its social significance. Creating a recognizable picture of the Fair’s swarming activity ‘probably requires more props than any other contemporary play’ (Sturgess, 1987, 180), the paraphernalia of the Fair as well as items important in the plot. Besides these and props of larger size, such as Trash’s basket, there are four substantial structures: (1) Leatherhead’s ‘shop’, as it is usually called; (2) Ursula’s booth, with its chairs and benches; (3) the stocks; (4) Leatherhead’s puppet theatre. Accordingly, the 1614–15 accounts of the Master of Revels (who was responsible for scenery, costumes, and stage hangings at court plays) include the entry: ‘Canvas for the booths and other necessaries for a play called Bartholomew Fair, forty-one shillings sixpence’ (MSR, Collections, 13.70). These booths must have been free-standing, since characters find themselves at the ‘backside’ of Ursula’s (4.3.104).

Leatherhead’s ‘shop’ will have been a stall for display rather than a booth that can be entered. It must have been substantial compared to Trash’s basket, since he charges Cokes six times as much as she does for his wares and his rent (3.4.117–21). On the other hand, it must be transportable, like her basket, because Cokes wants to buy ‘thy whole shop, case and all’ (3.4.115–16), and Leatherhead is able to ‘pack up all, and be gone’ (3.6.16) in a trice. It is likely he was a ‘barrow-boy’ with a small cart as a stall.

Ursula’s booth will have been much more substantial: a standard stage booth, a skeleton of poles and lath covered with canvas, sometimes suspended as curtains (Egan, 1998, 44). Such properties were simply drawn or carried on- and offstage by stage-keepers or attendant players at need, within full view of the audience. It may well have been larger than usual — at 4.4 as many as seven revellers are discovered within it —and must have had two sections, with guests welcomed at the front and cooking and other services supposedly active within. Curtains would have been used to conceal those within from the other characters.

The stocks must also have been larger than usual, since in 4.6 they have to restrain three prisoners at once. They need not have been bulky, however, since each prisoner is locked in by only one leg (4.1.27n.). Lantern’s puppet show seems to have used glove-puppets (5.3.55 SDn.), and so will have required a simple kiosk like the future Punch-and-Judy theatre. This presumably stood within a large booth, since a defined structure is required around the puppet theatre itself, although as the action proceeded the cast no doubt spread themselves over the main stage.

R. B. Parker has suggested that these larger properties were deployed in an elaborate, static, and emblematic layout, with Ursula’s booth symbolizing hell in the traditional ‘sinister’ position, stage left, the puppet theatre standing in as a comic heaven in the traditional position of stage right, and with the stocks downstage centre ‘as an emblem of the trials that this world imposes on the virtuous’ (1970, 295). Since the puppet theatre is not required until Act 5, it does duty as the Littlewits’ house in Act 1, and has the stands of Leatherhead and Trash in front of it during Acts 2 and 3. This layout is not persuasive: the domestic action of Act 1 would seem to be taking place in the Fair, while one large booth, dominating up to half the stage, is then left unused for three acts, with its alleged (and totally inexplicit) symbolic function unknowable. The stocks are required only in Act 4, and for most of the play would simply be a dead space and an obstacle.

In fact, the play is designed to work within a simple and flexible use of the larger props, with changes occurring only when the stage is cleared at the ends of the acts. A bare stage is sufficient for Act 1, and Act 5 requires only the puppet theatre within its booth (scene 2 takes place just outside), presumably placed upstage centre, so the audience can follow both the puppets and the characters’ reactions. In Acts 2 and 3, there are three principal settings: Ursula’s booth (which is the focus of half the scenes), the ground occupied by Leatherhead and Trash — it is clear from 2.2 that they are close together — and unlocalized episodes. Apart from the Justice’s soliloquies in 2.1 and 3.3 (spoken downstage, with the Fair stirring behind him), there are only two unlocalized scenes: Overdo’s speech as ‘Mad Arthur’ and Nightingale’s ‘Caveat for Cutpurses’ (2.6 and 3.5). Each is a crowded scene, the climax of its act, and requires centre stage. So in these acts the action flows between three stage-areas, presumably with Ursula’s booth and Leatherhead’s shop standing at opposite sides somewhat upstage — casual chatter does not need them to be close together — with the central downstage area free for the climactic scenes. If Ursula’s booth were central, it would cramp the staging of the climaxes. Act 4 works on similar lines, but with the stocks onstage throughout, presumably replacing Leatherhead’s shop and leaving the centre free for the two unlocalized scenes.

This simple and almost symmetrical scheme becomes even simpler if, as is likely, what had for three acts been Ursula’s booth became the puppet theatre. At the end of Act 4, the stocks are removed, the booth is moved to centre stage, the puppets’ kiosk installed inside, and Ursula’s sign removed, to be replaced by Lantern’s at the start of Act 5. It appears from 3.2.45–6 that Ursula’s booth is covered with boughs as shade; these were presumably removed in Act 5 to distinguish the two purposes of the booth and to clear the sightlines for the puppet show.

It follows that whatever elaborations there may have been around the written text in the early performances — and the silent characters in ‘The Persons of the Play’ show there was background activity — the unusually complicated action of the play works with very economical means. Modern productions tend to confirm that the play works best when the staging is less elaborate.

Literary sources and background

Although it is a very literary play, Bartholomew Fair has no guiding narrative source or conventions. It is a comedy against comedies. This is explicit when the Induction distances the play from both the knockabout of Elizabethan farce and the romances of Shakespeare. The comedy is also a realistic corrective to Shakespeare’s earlier fantasy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: both begin with an act of exposition in the capital, followed by three acts of confusion outside the city and away from daily routine, and both conclude with the cast brought together around a ludicrous performance, a popular travesty of ancient legend.

More generally, Bartholomew Fair mocks and outdoes comic traditions even when invoking them. Its obedience to the unities of time and place merely underlines its flouting of the unity of action: there is no main plot but a fugue of several subplots, of unprecedented complexity. Distortions of traditional comedy surface in the flood of action: Overdo, for instance, as the elderly ‘blocking figure’ who obstructs the sexual fulfilment of a young couple by oppressing the desirable maiden and favouring a maladroit wooer; Grace and Winwife as a loveless pair of young lovers; Wasp as an obtuse version of the servus delusus, the witty servant, now attached to the wrong young man; Busy as the ‘alazon’, the braggart and pretender, a hypocritical variant of the boastful soldier. Such vestiges of theatrical traditions reaching back to Greek and Roman comedy are brought up against the immediacy of contemporary London. The play appears to end conventionally with everyone invited to the archetypal feast, but there are so many discords within the last scene that we are left with merely a disquieting recall of comic harmony.

The more specific literary allusions are also pointed. The naive idealism of the previous year’s lord mayor’s pageant comes in for mockery, as does the mayor himself, Sir Thomas Myddelton (see Longer Notes at the end of the play text, Ind. 106–7, and 2.1.9–20). Jonson expects the audience to sense, and the reader to spot, the precise local allusions, such as the presence of the classics in Justice Overdo’s speeches or the Bible in Busy’s, and to realize how these authoritarians abuse the texts from which they draw their authority. Other allusions are more generic: in the Fair scenes there is a pervasive evocation of the literature of roguery, led by the coney-catching pamphlets made popular by Robert Greene. These are full of the kind of tricks endured by Cokes at the Fair: in particular, collusion between ballad-singers and cutpurses is a recurrent motif (3.5.69–70n.). Such literature condemns rogues and tricksters while revelling in their inventiveness and audacity; it stumbles between moral and amoral attitudes. By contrast, Bartholomew Fair keeps its moral balance: the familiar peccadilloes of Edgworth and his crew are put in perspective by the play’s genuine ‘enormities’, which include the pimps’ subversion of Win Littlewit and Dame Overdo but otherwise are committed by the respectable middle-class characters. The play untangles the usual confusions of righteousness, self-righteousness, and amoral zest.

Some of the ironic evocation of literary hinterland is more complex. Justice Overdo’s plan of spying out ‘enormities’ recalls the ‘disguised duke’ plays that had been fashionable at the beginning of James’s reign, such as Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Marston’s The Malcontent. These concentrate on the experience of a ruler who haunts his own court or city in disguise — whether through choice like Shakespeare’s Vincentio or under duress like Marston’s Altofronto — so as to gather knowledge and re-establish his rule. Bartholomew Fair is often termed a parody of such plays, and in a comedy performed before and dedicated to the King whose accession stimulated their production, Overdo’s minuscule ambitions and abject failure can be seen as cutting them down to size. But equally, the political and social gravity of these plays is the standard by which Overdo’s pettiness is all the more vividly revealed.

The most specific of the prolonged literary allusions is similar in effect: John Littlewit’s revision of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander is, as Edmund Wilson says, a ‘filthy travesty’ (Wilson, 1962, 257), but does that mean, as he suggests, that ‘Jonson took an ugly delight in defiling a beautiful poem which he could not hope to rival’? Marlowe’s impeccable original also gives the perspective from which we can bring the squalor of John’s invention into sharper focus. The deep ambiguity of such allusions is at the heart of the play.

Bartholomew Fair in 1614

Whether as script in performance or text on the page, Bartholomew Fair is a highly self-conscious artefact. It begins with an Induction or Prologue inviting the audience to critical alertness, and leads up to a play within the play reflecting the outer play. The multiple plotting is elegantly arranged: each act has six scenes in a distinctive and uninterrupted arc of action, with the stage decisively cleared only at the end. There are many internal symmetries (e.g. R. Levin, 1965b). Early audiences, however, would have been as struck by the play’s exceptional realism and topicality as by its formal resourcefulness, since no comedy had been so ‘near and familiarly allied to the time’ (EMO, 3.1.410–11) in its images of contemporary London and its down-to-earth characters, speech, and action. The play offers its original audiences, especially the commoners at the Hope, the pleasures of recognition and the intimacies of shared experience, made strange only by selective representation. They would have recognized not only the layout of the city and the features of the Fair but also many topical immediacies of London life, as recorded below in the commentary. Jonson’s imitation of the familiar, however, transcends such particularities of event, place, and person. Bartholomew Fair was written and produced during a state of political impasse between King and Parliament, and through its inexhaustible comedy of language and action it is reworking such fundamental questions of the period as where does authority lie? and what are the grounds for valid judgement?

King James was to boast in 1624 that he had ‘broken the necks of three parliaments’ (Jansson, 1988, xviii), and the first two of these dislocations — in 1610 and the spring of 1614 — are the larger background to Bartholomew Fair. The play came at a time of profound constitutional crisis, created by the King’s desperate shortage of funds and the House of Commons’ suspicions of this need for more funding, as of his large claims for the royal prerogative. Relations between James and his parliaments had been strife-ridden from the start, and the first, which met intermittently in 1604–10, came to a bitter end with the failure to agree over the ‘Great Contract’, by which the King would have ceded certain of his traditional prerogatives in return for a greatly enhanced annual income from parliamentary taxation. In 1614, yet deeper in debt, James reluctantly summoned what was to be known as the ‘Addled’ Parliament, because he was to dismiss it in fury early that June when it had sat for only nine weeks, before anything of significance could become law.

This second Parliament was essentially a brief and even more bitter reprise of the first. The House of Commons was again unable to grasp the urgency and scale of James’s financial needs as the ruler of a modern state, partly because it was misled by his real extravagance and partly because, through inflation and the growing demands of government, the sums required seemed inconceivably vast. To traditionalists, the monarch was supposed, except in emergency such as war, to ‘live of his own’, on his established sources of income, such as customs and excise. To James, the Commons’ reluctance to raise taxes for the large subsidies he needed to govern was mere sedition, treasonable opposition to the Lord’s Anointed. The crucial issue in 1614 was ‘impositions’, the King’s claim to be able to initiate taxes without parliamentary authority. To James, this was both a financial necessity and his right as a divinely appointed ruler; to many in the Commons, impositions would make Parliament redundant and set up an absolute monarchy. After a series of unruly debates and threatening speeches on both sides, the Commons for the only time in James’s reign refused to vote funds for the King unless he first renounced the right to levy impositions, while the King refused to abandon impositions unless he was first guaranteed adequate funding. To the Commons, Parliament was an inalienable voice of counsel to the King and a guarantee of the rights of the subject; to the King, he alone was the government, and Parliament was a dangerous inconvenience. They might as well have been speaking different languages. After the dissolution in June 1614, James sought to rule alone, and survived without Parliament for the exceptional period of seven years, but this still left the nature of his sovereignty in dispute. (See Moir, 1958, Lindquist, 1985, Jansson, 1988, Clucas and Davies, 2003, and especially Russell, 1991.)

Jonson was unusually well placed to appreciate both sides of this deadlock, and his dual allegiance and perspective carry over into the play. As the leading court poet, he had friendly although not uncritical relations with the King and some leading courtiers. But he was also an associate and sometimes a close friend of the leaders of the parliamentary ‘opposition’, those men most critical of royal policies, such as John Hoskins, Richard Martin, and Sir Edwin Sandys, in whose circles at the Inns of Court and in intellectual society he had moved for at least fifteen years. Hoskins, in particular, was so inflammatory in his criticism of royal policies that for a year after the 1614 dissolution the King, overriding the Commons’ claim to liberty of speech, imprisoned him in the Tower. Sandys, a formidable debater and tactician whom in 1620 the King was to call his greatest enemy, was also summoned before the Privy Council in 1614, especially for arguing that there was ‘almost a tyrannical government in England’ and that all kingship was originally elective, so that rule depended on the consent of the governed (Jansson, 1988, 312, 316). It was Sandys who defined the crucial principles: ‘Every man . . . not to be governed by laws whereunto they no parties’, for ‘if the King may impose by his absolute power, then no man certain what he has’ (ibid., 95, 235). The King had his papers burnt. After the first Parliament, Martin felt himself too marked a man to sit in 1614, but even so he provoked outrage by an address to the Commons in which he criticized it for slow progress. Anthony à Wood records that Jonson was ‘beloved of . . . Hoskins, Martin, etc.’ (Athenae Oxonienses, 1691, 1.518). According to Aubrey (Electronic Edition, Early Lives), Jonson regarded Hoskins, about six years his senior, as his intellectual ‘father’, and the two were close friends for decades. Jonson is said to have entrusted his verses to Hoskins for polishing, and cites his Directions for Speech and Style favourably and at length in Discoveries. Preparing F1 in 1616, he confirmed his lasting regard for Martin by dedicating Poetaster to him. Sandys seems not to have been an intimate of Jonson’s, but he is briefly praised in Discoveries and they moved in similar circles.

Although the political crisis is superficially a long way from Jonson’s day at Bartholomew Fair, it pervades the play. Words such as ‘judgement’, ‘authority’, ‘warrant’, and ‘licence’ echo throughout — ‘judge’ and its cognates occur nine times in the Induction alone — and the comedy is crammed with abuses of authority. Almost the whole cast regard themselves as authorized by place or convention to affect, like Zeal-of-the-land Busy, ‘the violence of singularity’ (1.3.108–9) — they feel themselves licensed to be licentious (5.5.12n.). Busy, the baker turned ‘prophet’, exploits the authority of his new role to reject tradition and indulge his ego. Wasp, a servingman given temporary rule over his gentleman, assumes this justifies his bullying and foul temper. Adam Overdo, the former clerk, feels authorized by his place as a very minor magistrate to pamper his inflated self-esteem. As a proctor, John Littlewit feels sanctioned to claim social standing, as a performed author to authority as a judge of wit, and as a married man to the unquestioning devotion of his wife. The fair-folk feel free to cheat because they are licensed traders at the Fair; they operate by convention, competing for custom but collaborating against outsiders. There is a broad parallel here with the parliamentary debate where, as David Colclough has written, ‘liberty and licentiousness had an alarming tendency to merge into one’ (Clucas and Davies, 58). Sir Henry Wotton grumbled that his forthright friend Hoskins had been arrested ‘for more wit, and for licentiousness baptized freedom . . . In our House . . . no excesses want precious names’ (Life and Letters, ed. Smith, 1907, 2.37).

Moreover, Jonson emphasizes the larger resonances of his comedy by more specific allusion to contemporary crises, especially as the play draws to a close. Justice Overdo’s final words — ‘my intents are ad correctionem, non ad destructionem; ad aedificandum, non ad diruendum’ — recall a passage of royal condescension. They echo the King’s conciliatory speech to Parliament in March 1610, when there was still some hope that monarch and Commons could reach agreement (5.6.93–4n.). Even though James insisted that ‘Kings are justly called Gods’, he conceded that in practice his absolutist theory bent to his respect for the common law. Moments before, words often seen as the keynote to the play (Quarlous’s ‘remember you are but Adam, flesh and blood! — you have your frailty’) echo Archbishop Grindal’s dignified and well-remembered rebuke to Queen Elizabeth: ‘Remember, madam, that you are a mortal creature. Look not only . . . upon the purple and princely array . . . but consider withal what is that that is covered therewith. Is it not flesh and blood?’ (See Longer Notes, placed at the end of this text.)

These passages of qualified absolutism cap a series of politically charged allusions among the many topical echoes in the play. The later speeches of Busy, for example, repeatedly reproduce inflammatory words cited from revolutionary Presbyterians in Richard Bancroft’s Dangerous Positions (1.3.107n.; Longer Notes, 4.6.67–9, 4.6.91, and 5.5.16–18), a ‘scaremonger’s handbook’ (DNB). Though these date from the early 1590s, Bancroft as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1604–10 brought such combative and uncompromising attitudes into James’s reign, at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 and its aftermath (Longer Notes, 1.2.52–3).

Bartholomew Fair’s most significant recall of the crisis in government is the wardship of Grace Wellborn. The injustice of her plight is beyond doubt, and brings forcefully to mind the profitable scandal of the royal Court of Wards, the abuse that solidified opposition to the King in the first half of his reign. Antagonism to royal authority was principally expressed through hostility to this court throughout the 1604–10 Parliament, and this continued in 1614 (Longer Notes, 3.5.230). Its forthright presence in the play is audacious, even though there had been suggestions that the King was prepared to make concessions over the court in return for enhanced funding.

The prominence of this controversial topic means that even a play commissioned for immediate performance before the King, and eventually dedicated to him, cannot be mere flattery. This is confirmed by the many glancing allusions to him and his interests, from the trivial, such as his detestation of pork and tobacco, to the major, such as his wariness at puritan extremism. Some are engaging in-jokes, such as the superfluous presence of a character with the King’s favoured honorific name ‘Solomon’; some are sympathetic, such as the recall of the King’s recent opposition to duelling in the ridiculous aggression between Quarlous and Winwife when the friends turn rivals (4.3.8n.). Others are less comfortable, such as the failure of new coinage sponsored by James, the reminder in Whit’s presence of the intractable Irish problem, the delicate hint that the great project advanced by Alderman Cokayne and fostered by James belongs to never-never land, and James’s failure with the heretic Bartholomew Legate (notes to 1.4.71 and 3.1.1–5, Longer Notes, 3.2.60, 4.2.58). Some are ambiguous in a characteristic manner: is James being teased by Justice Overdo’s counterblast to tobacco (because of their shared obsessiveness) or praised (because James is much the more intelligent)? Certainly the play does not invite an unquestioning veneration: the blunderings of the Justice and his watch can make ‘the King’s name’ seem ludicrous.

What probably seemed the climactic phrase of the court performance — ‘This is your power to judge’, in the Epilogue’s address to the King — is coloured by this ambivalence. The statement, made outside the main body of the text, can be taken as setting the King beyond the fallibilities of the ‘flesh and blood’ world in a quasi-divine court of judgement. This may well be how it was taken by a tired King in the early hours of 2 November 1614. Here, after all the injudicious judgements and the countless abuses of authority within the play, is the real thing. Moments before, however, Quarlous was insisting on the universal frailty of man in language recalling Archbishop Grindal’s rebuke, while Overdo was echoing James’s acknowledgement that he bent his rule to established law. The Epilogue, with its play on ‘rage or licence’, shows Jonson in a teasing vein, setting the King verbal puzzles, and confident that the King won’t be able to withhold his approval (2n., 6–12nn.); rhetorically, Jonson is in command. James may enjoy supreme social power to pass judgement, but he can only show the insight to make a valid appraisal of Jonson’s play on Jonson’s terms. After a play packed with human fallibilities, emphasized by the frequency of words such as ‘judge’, even the King’s ‘power to judge’ can be seen sceptically.

Bartholomew Fair does not offer guidelines or solutions. It grows out of a political impasse and it presents a critical impasse. Even the Epilogue invites two readings, one flattering and one teasing, and the play as a whole invites, and has received, much more diverse and even antagonistic interpretations. To some, it is a genial and saturnalian festive comedy, to others a harsh and satirical exposure of vice and pettiness, comparable to King Lear in its bleakly radical questioning of authority. The peculiarity of the play is that such readings are at once incompatible and equally valid, and Jonson’s recall of the original performances alerts us to how the play changes with the onlooker’s perspective. At court, it might well seem mellow and festive, as the audience looks down on piquant sights and comic aberrations. At the Hope, it would — despite all the verbal comedy and the farcical episodes — more readily seem realistic, satirical, and bitter (Creaser, 1994, 112–16).

Just as allusions to ‘disguised duke’ plays and to Hero and Leander work in opposed manners — the targets of parody becoming the touchstones of judgement — so the parallels between, for example, James and Overdo both mock and aggrandize the King, since the two are so alike and yet so different. This is the peculiar irony at the enigmatic centre of Bartholomew Fair: the mockery is mocked, the parody is parodied. The working hypothesis of very many critics is that social authority is both embodied and mocked in the middle-class characters, so Overdo, Busy, and Wasp represent the law, the church, and education. Consequently, to cite two instances among dozens: ‘The play exposes law and authority as merely further forms of aggression’ (Parker, 1970, 299); ‘In this play laughter is thoroughly skeptical, directed at all sources of authority that might sanction notions of decorum and standards of instruction’ (Martin, 2001, 133). The play can therefore be said to dramatize a levelling down to the lowest common denominator of ‘Adam, flesh and blood’, and abuses of authority are so pervasive that the collapse of true judgement seems universal. But Overdo is a petty magistrate failing to do his job, Busy a puritanical hypocrite, and Wasp an illiterate minder. They are pretenders to or travesties of authority rather than embodiments or representatives of it. The standards properly expected of judge, preacher, and teacher are norms by which we can perceive these characters’ all too common abnormality: in this turn of the alternating current of irony, orthodox sources of authority are not undermined but reaffirmed.

Bartholomew Fair both questions and affirms such orthodoxy. The ‘power to judge’ is what it both demands and makes teasingly impossible. It is characteristic, for example, that so much is left uncertain as the play draws to a close. On a genial reading, the middle-class authoritarians visiting the Fair are brought to acknowledge their pretensions and follies and to share in the common humanity of a communal meal. Yet their actual moments of insight are perfunctory — even Overdo is quick to start buoying up his authoritarian self with Latin quotations. Much is left inexplicit. What is one to make, for example, of the silent Busy in the last scene, or of the virtual silence of the Littlewits after John learns that the ‘green madam’ is his Win? How do Winwife and Grace react to the news that they are free to marry, but at a stiff price? How credible a conclusion is Overdo’s supper? Can we envisage, say, Grace and Ursula, Dame Purecraft and Punk Alice, sharing a meal?

The indeterminable ambivalences of the play are epitomized in Quarlous’s last words: ‘And no “enormities”’ (5.6.91). On a mellow reading, this is a sane reaffirmation that the Justice has found nothing but peccadilloes; it urges a humane sense of proportion that most of the bourgeois characters have lacked. It helps us round off the play in popular festivity. Yet there have been genuine enormities — the puritans’ long-running fraud, the threatened misalliance of Grace, the virtual prostitution of the two wives — and Quarlous is implicated. His deterioration is as sour as anything in the play: his critique of widow-hunting in 1.3 is its most morally impassioned and authoritative speech, while his outraged soliloquy in 4.6 after Edgworth has addressed him as a fellow debauchee is its most revealing piece of self-righteousness and self-deception. At the end, despite his authority in 1.3, he has married an elderly widow for her criminal gains, and is about to cheat his friend Winwife and the woman he sought to marry of much of her estate, just as Overdo would have done. Dramatic authority rests with the most intelligent character in the play, and he is also the most unscrupulous. Step back from the bonhomie, where the last word is given fittingly to Bartholomew Cokes, and a much more satirical and sour ending becomes perceptible. Such ‘duplicity’ pervades the text: from one perspective the puppet play is an amusing image of naive theatre — in the theatre it tends to become the comic highlight of the performance — but from a perspective more responsive to the parodic language, it is a foul travesty of art, festivity, and love. Even Cokes’s innocent enthusiasm to ‘ha’ the rest o’the play at home’ has its bitter after-taste.

Faced with a play that is insolubly ambivalent under its surface of exuberant comedy, what is the audience or reader to think? Jonson presents the unparalleled complexities of this gargantuan play with such mastery that the authority of the author cannot be doubted, yet he persistently frustrates the impulse to find a coherent meaning. The ideal of textual unity defined by Coleridge as ‘the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’ (1983, 2.16) is flouted. The play is antithetical to its single-minded characters’ reliance on a guiding ‘licence’ or warrant. It demands a double vision, leaving us bereft of the characters’ sense of certainty, but also without their blinkers. The Induction requires and trusts us to respond flexibly (65–6n.). The play encourages us to hold the ‘discordant qualities’ of incompatible meanings not in synthesis but in suspension, and it is exhilarating as well as disturbing to have our expectations and our judgement so disrupted.

This is how Bartholomew Fair speaks to the crisis of James’s reign. Intimate with both sides in the political impasse, Jonson — consciously or otherwise — requires his audience to live between incompatibles. The play offers inviting lines of approach, but there is no resolution and it remains enigmatic. It undermines intellectual complacency by bringing home how any one judgement is limited and partial, and encourages openness to uncertainty and multiple possibilities. It fosters a sense of perspective and proportion so markedly lacking both in the characters and in the political hostilities of the day. At a time of entrenched attitudes, with opponents lacking a common language or ground of understanding, it was, as it remains, a comic experience of perplexity to be valued.

Stage history

Oddly, it is often assumed that Bartholomew Fair was a great success but was performed only twice, on the recorded occasions. In fact, the play must have held the stage, because it was well known long before publication in 1640. It was echoed and imitated by other playwrights, such as Middleton in Hengist, 1619–20 (3.5.29n.); allusions such as Jonson’s own at The Staple of News, 3.Intermean, 40, and Brome’s in The Weeding of the Covent Garden (2.1.1n.) assume the audience’s familiarity with the major characters; elegies on Jonson by Taylor the ‘water poet’ and Henry Ramsay (who was not born until c. 1618) show knowledge of the play onstage (see Literary Record, and Stage History, Electronic Edition, for full evidence). It is probable that, with Lady Elizabeth’s Men virtually defunct, the King’s Men had taken it over, since in 1669 it is included in a list of over 100 King’s Men plays (Bentley, JCS, 1.121). That Jonson prepared a lost ‘Apology’ for it (Informations, 59) suggests Bartholomew Fair was not universally appreciated; indeed, Taylor’s elegy says it ‘gave much delight / To all but such as understood not right’ (93–4). Pepys was to record that a 1661 performance was the first to include the puppets for 40 years, ‘(it being so satirical against puritanism, they durst not till now)’. This cannot be taken literally (5.5.0n.), but it does confirm the puritan hostility.

Bartholomew Fair continued to be frequently performed for some 70 years after the Restoration in 1660. Pepys records seeing it many times in the 1660s, and sometimes thought it ‘the best comedy in the world’ (Craig, 1990, 239–40), even though the satire of the puritans made him uneasy. But its stock fell with changes of theatrical taste in the 1720s, and the play seems never to have been performed between 1731 and a conscious revival by the Phoenix Society at Oxford in 1921.

Its modern return to the repertoire effectively began with the Old Vic Company’s elaborate production, directed by George Devine at the Edinburgh Festival in 1950, revised into a simpler and more successful form for the Old Vic itself at the end of the year. There have now been more than 50 modern productions — listed together with the earlier productions in the Stage History, electronic edition — notably two by the Royal Shakespeare Company (1969 and 1997, directed by Terry Hands and Laurence Boswell, respectively), while Richard Eyre began his period in charge of the National Theatre Company with a spectacular production in 1988.

The dichotomy in critical interpretations of the play, noted above, is borne out in the theatre. Many productions, such as those by Devine, present a mellow and genial experience, and play up the comedy and farce. A revealing and troubling moment, such as Quarlous’s 4.6 soliloquy, is cut short, while the discords of the ending are lost in a prevailing bonhomie. Boswell’s RSC production, on the other hand, was more disturbing, though without sacrificing laughter. Quarlous was a menacing figure, and when he announced to Winwife that Grace ‘must pay me value’, she stalked offstage in dignified disgust, leaving Winwife alone and shell-shocked (5.6.70n.).

Text

Bartholomew Fair was not published until 1640, after Jonson’s death, and only then in a text he had not authorized. He had chosen not to include the play in F1, possibly because he could not then have dedicated it to the King without the prominence of such a dedication disrupting the plan of the volume. In 1631, however, he made it appropriately the opening play of what was presumably intended as a second Folio, to be printed by John Beale and published by Robert Allott. Bartholomew Fair, The Devil Is an Ass, and The Staple of News reached print, but were not published, although a few presentation copies were circulated. Jonson must have refused to pass Beale’s work — in a letter to his patron, the Earl of Newcastle, he complains of the ‘lewd printer’ and his delays and vexations (Letter 15). Allott was left with the printed sheets on his hands until his death in 1635. Eventually, after litigious exchanges of extreme complexity, the sheets of the three plays were bound together as volume 2 of Jonson’s Works and appeared in 1640 with a new general title-page.

Beale set the plays out handsomely on the page, but — like his other commercial plays and unlike what he would have seen as more respectable work — his text was marred by hundreds of small errors. Even after stop-press corrections, there is not a single page of Bartholomew Fair without errors of spelling or punctuation, sometimes over twenty to a page. Perhaps, too, Jonson’s manuscript was difficult for the compositors, since analysis reveals that the text was set either from Jonson’s ‘foul papers’ of seventeen years earlier or an uncritical copy of them, rather than from a manuscript polished after performance. There are, for example, frequent although minor loose ends.

Jonson himself, who lacked the mobility to supervise work at the printing house, intervened at only one stage in the printing of Bartholomew Fair, when, early in the text, a few sheets were being prepared for large-paper presentation copies. He made, notably, as many as 60 corrections to two adjacent pages (Longer Notes, 1.3.4). Had the rest been worked over with such minuteness there would have been approaching 3,000 corrections, but instead only a handful were made, while the setting of the two later plays continued to be unreliable. Fortunately, most of Beale’s inadequacies are readily corrected in producing a modernized text. The Textual Essay in the electronic edition gives a full account of the textual problems and how they are handled in this modernized text.

The Prologue to the King’s Majesty

Your Majesty is welcome to a fair:

Such place, such men, such language, and such ware

You must expect; with these, the zealous noise

Of your land’s faction, scandalized at toys,

As babies, hobby-horses, puppet plays, 5

And such-like rage whereof the petulant ways

Yourself have known and have been vexed with long.

These for your sport — without particular wrong,

Or just complaint of any private man

Who of himself or shall think well or can — 10

The maker doth present, and hopes tonight

To give you, for a fairing, true delight.

The Persons of the Play

JOHN LITTLEWIT: a proctor
[ SOLOMON: his man]
WIN[-THE-FIGHT] LITTLEWIT: his wife
DAME PURECRAFT: her mother and a widow
ZEAL-OF-THE-LAND BUSY: her suitor, a Banbury man 5
[ NED] WINWIFE: his rival, a gentleman
[TOM] QUARLOUS: his companion, a gamester
BARTHOLOMEW COKES: an esquire of Harrow
HUMPHREY WASP: his man
ADAM OVERDO: a justice of peace 10
DAME [ALICE] OVERDO: his wife
GRACE WELLBORN: his ward
LANTERN LEATHERHEAD: a hobby-horse seller
JOAN TRASH: a gingerbread-woman
EZEKIEL EDGWORTH: a cutpurse 15
NIGHTINGALE: a ballad singer
URSULA: a pig-woman
MOONCALF: her tapster
JORDAN KNOCKEM: a horse-corser, and ranger o’ Turnbull
VAL CUTTING: a roarer 20
CAPTAIN WHIT: a bawd
PUNK ALICE: mistress o’ the game
TROUBLEALL: a madman
WATCHMEN, three [BRISTLE, HAGGIS, and the beadle, POACHER]
COSTERMONGER: 25
TINDERBOX-MAN
[CORN-CUTTER]
CLOTHIER [NORDERN,: a northern man]
WRESTLER [PUPPY,: a western man]
PORTERS: 30
DOORKEEPERS [at puppet show, SHARKWELL and FILCHER]
PUPPETS
[PASSENGERS and BOYS]
[STAGE-KEEPER]
[BOOK-HOLDER]: 35
[SCRIVENER]

THE SCENE: SMITHFIELD

The Induction on the Stage

[Enter] STAGE-KEEPER.

STAGE-KEEPER

Gentlemen, have a little patience, they are e’en upon coming

instantly. He that should begin the play, Master Littlewit, the proctor, has

a stitch new fall’n in his black silk stocking: ’twill be drawn up ere you can

tell twenty. He plays one o’the Arches, that dwells about the Hospital, and

he has a very pretty part. But for the whole play, will you ha’ the truth on’t? 5

— I am looking lest the poet hear me, or his man, Master Brome, behind the

arras — it is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English. When’t

comes to the Fair once, you were e’en as good go to Virginia, for anything

there is of Smithfield. He has not hit the humours: he does not know ’em;

he has not conversed with the Barthol’mew-birds, as they say; he has ne’er a 10

sword-and-buckler man in his Fair, nor a Little Davy to take toll o’the bawds

there, as in my time; nor a Kindheart, if anybody’s teeth should chance to

ache in his play. Nor a juggler with a well-educated ape to come over the

chain for the King of England and back again for the Prince, and sit still on

his arse for the Pope and the King of Spain! None o’these fine sights! Nor 15

has he the canvas-cut i’the night for a hobby-horse-man to creep in to his

she-neighbour and take his leap there! Nothing! No, an some writer that I

know had had but the penning o’this matter, he would ha’ made you such a

jig-a-jog i’the booths, you should ha’ thought an earthquake had been i’the

Fair! But these master-poets, they will ha’ their own absurd courses; they 20

will be informed of nothing! He has, sir-reverence, kicked me three or four

times about the tiring house, I thank him, for but offering to put in with

my experience. I’ll be judged by you, gentlemen, now, but for one conceit

of mine! Would not a fine pump upon the stage ha’ done well for a property

now? and a punk set under upon her head with her stern upward, and ha’ 25

been soused by my witty young masters o’the Inns o’ Court? What think you

o’this for a show now? He will not hear o’this! I am an ass! I! and yet I kept the

stage in Master Tarlton’s time, I thank my stars. Ho! An that man had lived to

have played in Barthol’mew Fair, you should ha’ seen him ha’ come in and ha’

been cozened i’the cloth-quarter so finely! And Adams, the rogue, ha’ leapt 30

and capered upon him, and ha’ dealt his vermin about as though they had

cost him nothing. And then a substantial watch to ha’ stol’n in upon ’em and

taken ’em away, with mistaking words, as the fashion is in the stage-practice.

[Enter] BOOK-HOLDER [and] SCRIVENER, to him.

BOOK-HOLDER

How now? What rare discourse are you fall’n upon, ha? Ha’ you

found any familiars here, that you are so free? What’s the business? 35

STAGE-KEEPER

Nothing, but the understanding gentlemen o’the ground here

asked my judgement.

BOOK-HOLDER

Your judgement, rascal? For what? Sweeping the stage, or gathering

up the broken apples for the bears within? Away, rogue, it’s come

to a fine degree in these spectacles when such a youth as you pretend to a 40

judgement. [Exit Stage-keeper. ]

And yet he may, i’the most o’this matter, i’faith, for the author hath writ

it just to his meridian and the scale of the grounded judgements here, his

play-fellows in wit. — Gentlemen, not for want of a prologue but by way of

a new one, I am sent out to you here, with a scrivener and certain articles 45

drawn out in haste between our author and you; which if you please to hear,

and as they appear reasonable to approve of, the play will follow presently.

Read, scribe, gi’ me the counterpane.

SCRIVENER

Articles of Agreement indented between the spectators or hearers

at the Hope on the Bankside in the County of Surrey on the one party, and 50

the author of Barthol’mew Fair in the said place and county on the other party:

the one and thirtieth day of October, 1614, and in the twelfth year of the reign

of our sovereign lord, James, by the grace of God King of England, France,

and Ireland, Defender of the Faith. And of Scotland the seven and fortieth.

IMPRIMIS, It is covenanted and agreed by and between the parties abovesaid 55

that the said spectators and hearers — as well the curious and envious as the

favouring and judicious, as also the grounded judgements and understandings

— do for themselves severally covenant and agree to remain in the places

their money or friends have put them in, with patience, for the space of two

hours and an half and somewhat more. In which time the author promiseth 60

to present them by us with a new sufficient play called Barthol’mew Fair, merry

and as full of noise as sport, made to delight all and to offend none — provided

they have either the wit or the honesty to think well of themselves.

It is further agreed that every person here have his or their free-will of censure,

to like or dislike at their own charge, the author having now departed with 65

his right. It shall be lawful for any man to judge his sixpenn’orth, his

twelvepenn’orth, so to his eighteen pence, two shillings, half a crown, to

the value of his place — provided always his place get not above his wit. And

if he pay for half a dozen, he may censure for all them, too, so that he will

undertake that they shall be silent. He shall put in for censures here as they 70

do for lots at the lottery: marry, if he drop but sixpence at the door and will

censure a crown’s worth, it is thought there is no conscience or justice in that.

It is also agreed that every man here exercise his own judgement, and not

censure by contagion or upon trust from another’s voice or face that sits by

him, be he never so first in the Commission of Wit; as also that he be fixed 75

and settled in his censure, that what he approves or not approves today he

will do the same tomorrow, and if tomorrow the next day, and so the next

week (if need be), and not to be brought about by any that sits on the Bench

with him, though they indict and arraign plays daily. He that will swear

Jeronimo or Andronicus are the best plays yet shall pass unexcepted at here, as 80

a man whose judgement shows it is constant and hath stood still these five

and twenty or thirty years. Though it be an ignorance, it is a virtuous and

stayed ignorance, and, next to truth, a confirmed error does well: such a one,

the author knows where to find him.

It is further covenanted, concluded, and agreed, that how great soever the 85

expectation be, no person here is to expect more than he knows, or better

ware than a fair will afford: neither to look back to the sword-and-buckler age

of Smithfield, but content himself with the present. Instead of a Little Davy

to take toll o’the bawds, the author doth promise a strutting horse-corser,

with a leer drunkard — two or three to attend him in as good equipage as 90

you would wish. And then for Kindheart the tooth-drawer, a fine oily pig-woman

with her tapster to bid you welcome, and a consort of roarers for

music. A wise justice of peace meditant, instead of a juggler with an ape. A

civil cutpurse searchant. A sweet singer of new ballads allurant, and as fresh an hypocrite

as ever was broached, rampant. If there be never a servant-monster 95

i’the Fair, who can help it? he says — nor a nest of antics? He is loath to make nature

afraid in his plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such-like

drolleries, to mix his head with other men’s heels — let the concupiscence of

jigs and dances reign as strong as it will amongst you. Yet if the puppets will

please anybody, they shall be entreated to come in. 100

In consideration of which, it is finally agreed by the foresaid hearers and

spectators that they neither in themselves conceal, nor suffer by them to be

concealed, any state-decipherer or politic picklock of the scene so solemnly

ridiculous as to search out who was meant by the gingerbread-woman, who

by the hobby-horse-man, who by the costermonger, nay, who by their wares. 105

Or that will pretend to affirm (on his own inspired ignorance) what ‘Mirror

of Magistrates’ is meant by the Justice, what great lady by the pig-woman,

what concealed statesman by the seller of mousetraps, and so of the rest. But

that such person or persons so found, be left discovered to the mercy of the

author, as a forfeiture to the stage and your laughter aforesaid. As also such 110

as shall so desperately, or ambitiously, play the fool by his place aforesaid to

challenge the author of scurrility because the language somewhere savours

of Smithfield, the booth, and the pig-broth, or of profaneness because a

madman cries ‘God quit you’ or ‘bless you’. In witness whereof, as you have

preposterously put to your seals already — which is your money — you will 115

now add the other part of suffrage, your hands. The play shall presently

begin. And though the Fair be not kept in the same region that some here

perhaps would have it, yet think that therein the author hath observed a

special decorum, the place being as dirty as Smithfield, and as stinking every

whit. 120

Howsoever, he prays you to believe his ware is still the same, else you will

make him justly suspect that he that is so loath to look on a baby or an

hobby-horse here would be glad to take up a commodity of them at any

laughter or loss in another place. [Exeunt. ]

1.1 [Enter JOHN] LITTLEWIT [reading a marriage licence].

JOHN

A pretty conceit, and worth the finding! I ha’ such luck to spin out these fine

things still, and, like a silkworm, out of myself. Here’s Master Barthol’mew

Cokes, of Harrow o’th’ Hill, i’th’ County of Middlesex, Esquire, takes forth

his licence to marry Mistress Grace Wellborn of the said place and county.

And when does he take it forth? Today! The four and twentieth of August! 5

Barthol’mew day! Barthol’mew upon Barthol’mew! There’s the device! Who

would have marked such a leapfrog chance now? A very less than ambs-ace

on two dice! Well, go thy ways, John Littlewit, Proctor John Littlewit: one

o’the pretty wits o’ Paul’s, the ‘Little Wit of London’ — so thou art called —

and something beside. When a quirk or a quiblin does scape thee and thou 10

dost not watch and apprehend it and bring it afore the constable of conceit —

there now, I speak quib, too — let ’em carry thee out o’the archdeacon’s court

into his kitchen and make a Jack of thee instead of a John — there I am again,

la!

[Enter] to him WIN [LITTLEWIT, showily dressed].

Win, good morrow, Win. Ay, marry, Win! Now you look finely indeed, Win! 15

This cap does convince! You’d not ha’ worn it, Win, nor ha’ had it velvet,

but a rough country beaver with a copper band, like the coney-skin-woman

of Budge Row! Sweet Win, let me kiss it! And her fine high shoes, like the

Spanish lady! Good Win, go a little; I would fain see thee pace, pretty Win!

By this fine cap, I could never leave kissing on’t. 20

WIN

Come, indeed la, you are such a fool still!

JOHN

No, but half a one, Win, you are the t’other half: man and wife make one

fool, Win — Good! Is there the proctor, or doctor indeed, i’the diocese that

ever had the fortune to win him such a Win! — There I am again! I do feel

conceits coming upon me more than I am able to turn tongue to. A pox o’these 25

pretenders to wit: your Three Cranes, Mitre, and Mermaid men! Not a corn

of true salt nor a grain of right mustard amongst them all. They may stand

for places or so again’ the next wit-fall, and pay twopence in a quart more for

their canary than other men. But gi’ me the man can start up a Justice of Wit

out of six-shillings beer and give the law to all the poets and poet-suckers i’ 30

town. Because they are the players’ gossips! ’Slid, other men have wives as

fine as the players, and as well dressed. Come hither, Win.

[He kisses her.]

1.2 [Enter] WINWIFE.

WINWIFE

Why, how now, Master Littlewit! Measuring of lips, or moulding of

kisses? Which is it?

JOHN

Troth, I am a little taken with my Win’s dressing here! Does’t not fine,

Master Winwife? How do you apprehend, sir? She would not ha’ worn this

habit. I challenge all Cheapside to show such another — Moorfields, Pimlico 5

Path, or the Exchange in a summer evening — with a lace to boot, as this has.

Dear Win, let Master Winwife kiss you. He comes a-wooing to our mother,

Win, and may be our father perhaps, Win. There’s no harm in him, Win.

WINWIFE

None i’the earth, Master Littlewit.

[He kisses her.]

JOHN

I envy no man my delicates, sir. 10

WINWIFE

Alas, you ha’ the garden where they grow still! A wife here with a

strawberry breath, cherry lips, apricot cheeks, and a soft velvet head like a

melocoton.

JOHN

Good, i’faith! [Aside] Now dullness upon me, that I had not that before him,

that I should not light on’t as well as he! Velvet head! 15

WINWIFE

But my taste, Master Littlewit, tends to fruit of a later kind: the sober

matron, your wife’s mother.

JOHN

Ay! we know you are a suitor, sir. Win and I both wish you well. By this

licence here, would you had her, that your two names were as fast in it as here

are a couple. Win would fain have a fine young father-i’-law with a feather, 20

that her mother might hood it and chain it with Mistress Overdo. But you

do not take the right course, Master Winwife.

WINWIFE

No? Master Littlewit, why?

JOHN

You are not mad enough.

WINWIFE

How? Is madness a right course? 25

JOHN

I say nothing, but I wink upon Win. You have a friend, one Master Quarlous,

comes here sometimes?

WINWIFE

Why? He makes no love to her, does he?

JOHN

Not a tokenworth that ever I saw, I assure you. But —

WINWIFE

What? 30

JOHN

— he is the more madcap o’the two. You do not apprehend me.

WIN

You have a hot coal i’your mouth now, you cannot hold.

JOHN

Let me out with it, dear Win.

WIN

I’ll tell him myself.

JOHN

Do, and take all the thanks, and much good do thy pretty heart, Win. 35

WIN

Sir, my mother has had her nativity-water cast lately by the cunning-men

in Cow Lane, and they ha’ told her her fortune, and do ensure her she shall

never have happy hour unless she marry within this sennight, and when it

is it must be a madman, they say.

JOHN

Ay, but it must be a gentleman madman. 40

WIN

Yes, so the t’other man of Moorfields says.

WINWIFE

But does she believe ’em?

JOHN

Yes, and has been at Bedlam twice since, every day, to inquire if any

gentleman be there, or to come there, mad!

WINWIFE

Why, this is a confederacy, a mere piece of practice upon her by these 45

impostors!

JOHN

I tell her so; or else say I that they mean some young madcap gentleman —

for the devil can equivocate as well as a shopkeeper — and therefore would I

advise you to be a little madder than Master Quarlous hereafter.

WINWIFE

Where is she? Stirring yet? 50

JOHN

Stirring! Yes, and studying an old elder come from Banbury, a suitor that

puts in here at mealtide, to praise the painful Brethren, or pray that the sweet singers

may be restored; says a grace as long as his breath lasts him! Sometime

the spirit is so strong with him, it gets quite out of him, and then my mother

or Win are fain to fetch it again with malmsey or aqua coelestis. 55

WIN

Yes indeed, we have such a tedious life with him for his diet, and his clothes,

too: he breaks his buttons and cracks seams at every saying he sobs out.

JOHN

He cannot abide my vocation, he says.

WIN

No, he told my mother a proctor was a claw of the Beast, and that she had

little less than committed abomination, in marrying me so as she has done. 60

JOHN

Every line (he says) that a proctor writes, when it comes to be read in the

Bishop’s Court, is a long black hair, kembed out of the tail of Antichrist.

WINWIFE

When came this ‘proselyte’?

JOHN

Some three days since.

1.3 [Enter] QUARLOUS.

QUARLOUS

Oh, sir, ha’ you ta’en soil here? It’s well a man may reach you after

three hours’ running, yet! What an unmerciful companion art thou, to quit

thy lodging at such ungentlemanly hours! None but a scattered covey of

fiddiers, or one of these rag-rakers in dunghills, or some marrowbone-man

at most, would have been up when thou wert gone abroad, by all description. 5

I pray thee, what ailest thou, thou canst not sleep? Hast thou thorns i’thy

eyelids, or thistles i’thy bed?

WINWIFE

I cannot tell: it seems you had neither i’your feet, that took this pain

to find me.

QUARLOUS

No, an I had, all the lyme-hounds o’the city should have drawn after 10

you by the scent rather. — Master John Littlewit! God save you, sir. ’Twas

a hot night with some of us last night, John. Shall we pluck a hair o’the same

wolf today, Proctor John?

JOHN

Do you remember, Master Quarlous, what we discoursed on last night?

QUARLOUS

Not I, John; nothing that I either discourse or do at those times: I 15

forfeit all to forgetfulness.

JOHN

No? Not concerning Win? Look you, there she is! and dressed as I told you

she should be. Hark you, sir, had you forgot?

QUARLOUS

By this head, I’ll beware how I keep you company, John, when I drink,

an you have this dangerous memory! That’s certain. 20

JOHN

Why, sir?

QUARLOUS

Why? [He turns to include the others.] We were all a little stained last

night, sprinkled with a cup or two, and I agreed with Proctor John here to

come and do somewhat with Win (I know not what ’twas) today; and he puts

me in mind on’t now: he says he was coming to fetch me. Before truth, if you 25

have that fearful quality, John, to remember when you are sober, John, what

you promise drunk, John, I shall take heed of you, John. For this once, I am

content to wink at you. Where’s your wife? Come hither, Win.

He kisseth her.

WIN

Why, John! Do you see this, John? Look you! Help me, John.

JOHN

Oh, Win, fie, what do you mean, Win? Be womanly, Win. Make an outcry 30

to your mother, Win! Master Quarlous is an honest gentleman, and our

worshipful good friend, Win; and he is Master Winwife’s friend, too. And

Master Winwife comes a suitor to your mother, Win, as I told you before,

Win, and may, perhaps, be our father, Win. They’ll do you no harm, Win,

they are both our worshipful good friends. Master Quarlous! You must know 35

Master Quarlous, Win; you must not quarrel with Master Quarlous, Win.

QUARLOUS

No, we’ll kiss again, and fall in.

JOHN

Yes, do, good Win.

[Quarlous resumes kissing her.]

WIN

I’faith, you are a fool, John.

JOHN

A fool-John she calls me, do you mark that, gentlemen? Pretty Littlewit of 40

velvet! A fool-John!

QUARLOUS

She may call you an apple-john, if you use this.

WINWIFE

[To Quarlous, while John and Win talk apart] Pray thee, forbear, for my

respect, somewhat.

QUARLOUS

Hoy-day! How respective you are become o’the sudden! I fear this 45

family will turn you ‘reformed’, too — pray you, come about again. Because

she is in possibility to be your daughter-in-law, and may ask you blessing

hereafter when she courts it to Tott’nham to eat cream! Well, I will forbear,

sir, but, i’faith, would thou wouldst leave thy exercise of widow-hunting

once, this drawing after an old reverend smock, by the splay-foot! There 50

cannot be an ancient tripe or trillibub i’the town but thou art straight nosing

it, and ’tis a fine occupation thou’lt confine thyself to, when thou hast got

one: scrubbing a piece of buff, as if thou hadst the perpetuity of Pannier Alley

to stink in; or perhaps worse: currying a carcass that thou hast bound thyself

to alive. I’ll be sworn, some of them that thou art, or hast been, a suitor to 55

are so old, as no chaste or married pleasure can ever become ’em; the honest

instrument of procreation has — forty years since — left to belong to ’em. Thou

must visit ’em as thou wouldst do a tomb, with a torch, or three handfuls of

link, flaming hot, and so thou mayst hap to make ’em feel thee, and, after,

come to inherit according to thy inches. A sweet course for a man to waste 60

his brand of life for, to be still raking himself a fortune in an old woman’s

embers! We shall ha’ thee, after thou hast been but a month married to one

of ’em, look like the quartan ague and the black jaundice met in a face — and

walk as if thou had’st borrowed legs of a spinner and voice of a cricket. Afore

I would endure to hear fifteen sermons a week for her — and such coarse and 65

loud ones as some of ’em must be — I would e’en desire of fate I might dwell

in a drum, and take in my sustenance with an old broken tobacco-pipe and

a straw! Dost thou ever think to bring thine ears or stomach to the patience

of a dry grace as long as thy tablecloth? And droned out by thy son here —

that might be thy father — till all the meat o’thy board has forgot it was that 70

day i’the kitchen? Or to brook the noise made in a question of predestination

by the good labourers and painful eaters assembled together, put to ’em

by the matron, your spouse, who moderates with a cup of wine, ever and

anon, and a sentence out of Knox between? Or the perpetual spitting before

and after a sober drawn exhortation of six hours, whose better part was the 75

‘hum-ha-hum’? Or to hear prayers groaned out over thy iron chests, as if they

were charms to break ’em? And all this for the hope of two Apostle spoons,

to suffer! and a cup to eat a caudle in! For that will be thy legacy. She’ll ha’

conveyed her state safe enough from thee, an she be a right widow.

WINWIFE

Alas, I am quite off that scent now. 80

QUARLOUS

How so?

WINWIFE

Put off by a Brother of Banbury, one that, they say, is come here and

governs all, already.

QUARLOUS

What do you call him? I knew divers of those Banburians when I was

in Oxford. 85

WINWIFE

Master Littlewit can tell us.

JOHN

Sir! — Good Win, go in, and if Master Barthol’mew Cokes his man come for

the licence (the little old fellow) let him speak with me. [Exit Win.]

What say you, gentlemen?

WINWIFE

What call you the reverend elder you told me of? Your Banbury man? 90

JOHN

Rabbi Busy, sir. He is more than an elder, he is a prophet, sir.

QUARLOUS

Oh, I know him! A baker, is he not?

JOHN

He was a baker, sir, but he does dream now, and see visions; he has given

over his trade.

QUARLOUS

I remember that, too — out of a scruple he took, that (in spiced 95

conscience) those cakes he made were served to bride-ales, maypoles, morrises,

and such profane feasts and meetings. His Christen name is Zeal-of-the-land.

JOHN

Yes, sir, Zeal-of-the-land Busy.

WINWIFE

How, what a name’s there!

JOHN

Oh, they have all such names, sir; he was witness for Win here — they will 100

not be called godfathers — and named her Win-the-fight. You thought her

name had been Winifred, did you not?

WINWIFE

I did indeed.

JOHN

He would ha’ thought himself a stark reprobate, if it had.

QUARLOUS

Ay, for there was a blue-starch-woman o’the name at the same time. 105

A notable hypocritical vermin it is — I know him: one that stands upon his face

more than his faith at all times; ever in seditious motion, and reproving for

vainglory; of a most lunatic conscience and spleen, and affects the violence of

singularity in all he does. (He has undone a grocer here, in Newgate Market,

that broke with him, trusted him with currants, as arrant a zeal as he 110

— that’s by the way.) By his profession, he will ever be i’the state of innocence,

though, and childhood; derides all antiquity; defies any other learning than

inspiration; and what discretion soever years should afford him, it is all

prevented in his ‘original ignorance’. Ha’ not to do with him, for he is a

fellow of a most arrogant and invincible dullness, I assure you. — Who is this? 115

1.4 [Enter] WASP [with WIN].

WASP

By your leave, gentlemen, with all my heart to you, and God you good

morrow — Master Littlewit, my business is to you. Is this licence ready?

JOHN

Here, I ha’ it for you in my hand, Master Humphrey.

WASP

That’s well — nay, never open or read it to me; it’s labour in vain, you know.

I am no clerk, I scorn to be saved by my book: i’faith, I’ll hang first. Fold it up 5

o’your word and gi’ it me. What must you ha’ for’t?

JOHN

We’ll talk of that anon, Master Humphrey.

WASP

Now or not at all, good Master Proctor: I am for no anons, I assure you.

JOHN

Sweet Win, bid Solomon send me the little black box within in my study.

WASP

Ay, quickly, good mistress, I pray you, for I have both eggs o’the spit and 10

iron i’the fire. [Exit Win.]

Say what you must have, good Master Littlewit.

JOHN

Why, you know the price, Master Numps.

WASP

I know? I know nothing, I. What tell you me of knowing, now I am in haste?

Sir, I do not know, and I will not know, and I scorn to know, and yet — now 15

I think on’t — I will and do know as well as another: you must have a mark

for your thing here and eightpence for the box. I could ha’ saved twopence

i’that, an I had bought it myself, but here’s fourteen shillings for you. Good

Lord! how long your little wife stays! Pray God, Solomon, your clerk, be not

looking i’the wrong box, Master Proctor. 20

JOHN

Good, i’faith! No, I warrant you. Solomon is wiser than so, sir.

WASP

Fie, fie, fie, by your leave Master Littlewit, this is scurvy, idle, foolish and

abominable, with all my heart. I do not like it.

[He walks aside.]

WINWIFE

[To Quarlous] Do you hear? — Jack Littlewit, what business does thy

pretty head think this fellow may have, that he keeps such a coil with? 25

QUARLOUS

More than buying of gingerbread i’the Cloister here — for that we

allow him — or a gilt pouch i’the Fair?

JOHN

Master Quarlous, do not mistake him; he is his master’s both-hands, I

assure you.

QUARLOUS

What, to pull on his boots a-mornings, or his stockings, does he? 30

JOHN

Sir, if you have a mind to mock him, mock him softly, and look t’other

way, for if he apprehend you flout him once, he will fly at you presently. A

terrible testy old fellow, and his name is Wasp, too.

QUARLOUS

Pretty insect! Make much on him.

WASP

[Rejoining the others] A plague o’this box, and the pox, too, and on him that 35

made it and her that went for’t, and all that should ha’ sought it, sent it, or

brought it! Do you see, sir?

JOHN

Nay, good Master Wasp.

WASP

Good Master Hornet, turd i’your teeth, hold you your tongue. Do not I

know you? Your father was a ’pothecary and sold clysters, more than he gave, 40

I wusse. And turd i’your little wife’s teeth, too — here she comes — ’twill make

her spit, as fine as she is, for all her velvet custard on her head, sir.

[Enter WIN, with the box.]

JOHN

Oh, be civil, Master Numps!

WASP

Why, say I have a humour not to be civil, how then? Who shall compel me?

You? 45

JOHN

Here is the box now.

WASP

Why a pox o’your box, once again; let your little wife stale in it, an she

will. Sir, I would have you to understand, and these gentlemen, too, if they

please —

WINWIFE

With all our hearts. Sir. 50

WASP

— that I have a charge. Gentlemen!

JOHN

They do apprehend, sir.

WASP

Pardon me, sir, neither they nor you can apprehend me yet — you are an

ass. I have a young master, he is now upon his making and marring; the

whole care of his well-doing is now mine. His foolish schoolmasters have 55

done nothing but run up and down the country with him to beg puddings

and cake-bread of his tenants and almost spoiled him; he has learned nothing

but to sing catches, and repeat ‘Rattle bladder rattle’ and ‘O Madge’. I dare

not let him walk alone for fear of learning of vile tunes, which he will sing

at supper, and in the sermon-times! If he meet but a carman i’the street, and 60

I find him not talk to keep him off on him, he will whistle him and all his

tunes over at night in his sleep! He has a head full of bees! I am fain now (for

this little time I am absent) to leave him in charge with a gentlewoman. ’Tis

true, she is a justice of peace his wife, and a gentlewoman o’the hood, and his

natural sister — but what may happen under a woman’s government, there’s 65

the doubt. Gentlemen, you do not know him; he is another manner of piece

than you think for! — but nineteen year old, and yet he is taller than either of

you by the head, God bless him.

QUARLOUS

[Aside to Winwife] Well, methinks this is a fine fellow!

WINWIFE

He has made his master a finer by this description, I should think. 70

QUARLOUS

Faith, much about one; it’s cross and pile, whether for a new farthing.

WASP

I’ll tell you, gentlemen —

JOHN

Will’t please you drink, Master Wasp?

WASP

Why, I ha’ not talked so long to be dry, sir; you see no dust or cobwebs come

out o’my mouth, do you? You’d ha’ me gone, would you? 75

JOHN

No, but you were in haste e’en now, Master Numps.

WASP

What an I were? So I am still, and yet I will stay, too. Meddle you with your

match, your Win there — she has as little wit as her husband, it seems; I have

others to talk to.

JOHN

She’s my match indeed, and as Littlewit as I. Good! 80

WASP

We ha’ been but a day and a half in town, gentlemen, ’tis true; and yesterday

i’the afternoon we walked London, to show the city to the gentlewoman he

shall marry, Mistress Grace; but afore I will endure such another half-day

with him, I’ll be drawn with a good gib-cat through the great pond at home,

as his uncle Hodge was! Why, we could not meet that heathen thing all day 85

but stayed him: he would name you all the signs over as he went, aloud, and

where he spied a parrot or a monkey, there he was pitched — with all the little

long-coats about him, male and female — no getting him away! I thought he

would ha’ run mad o’the black boy in Bucklersbury that takes the scurvy,

roguy tobacco there. 90

JOHN

You say true, Master Numps: there’s such a one indeed.

WASP

It’s no matter whether there be or no. What’s that to you?

QUARLOUS

[To Winwife] He will not allow of John’s reading at any hand.

1.5 [Enter] COKES, Mistress OVERDO, [and] GRACE.

COKES

Oh, Numps! are you here, Numps? Look where I am, Numps! and Mistress

Grace, too! Nay, do not look angerly, Numps: my sister is here, and all. I do

not come without her.

WASP

What the mischief! Do you come with her, or she with you?

COKES

We came all to seek you, Numps. 5

WASP

To seek me? Why, did you all think I was lost? Or run away with your

fourteen shillings’ worth of small ware here? Or that I had changed it i’the

Fair for hobby-horses? ’Sprecious — to seek me!

MRS OVERDO

Nay, good Master Numps, do you show discretion, though he be

exorbitant — as Master Overdo says — an’t be but for conservation of the peace. 10

WASP

Marry gip, Goody She-Justice, Mistress French Hood! Turd i’your teeth,

and turd i’your French hood’s teeth, too, to do you service, do you see? Must

you quote your Adam to me! You think you are Madam Regent still, Mistress

Overdo, when I am in place? No such matter, I assure you: your reign is out

when I am in, dame. 15

MRS OVERDO

I am content to be in abeyance, sir, and be governed by you — so

should he, too, if he did well. But ’twill be expected you should also govern

your passions.

WASP

Will’t so, forsooth? Good Lord! how sharp you are! — with being at Bedlam

yesterday? Whetstone has set an edge upon you, has he? 20

MRS OVERDO

Nay, if you know not what belongs to your dignity, I do yet to

mine.

WASP

Very well, then.

COKES

[Pointing at the box] Is this the licence, Numps? For love’s sake, let me see’t.

I never saw a licence. 25

WASP

Did you not so? Why, you shall not see’t, then.

COKES

An you love me, good Numps.

WASP

Sir, I love you, and yet I do not love you i’these fooleries. Set your heart at

rest, there’s nothing in’t but hard words. And what would you see’t for?

COKES

I would see the length and the breadth on’t, that’s all — and I will see’t 30

now, so I will.

WASP

You sha’ not see it, here.

COKES

Then I’ll see’t at home, and I’ll look upo’ the case here.

WASP

Why, do so. [He shows Cokes the box.] — A man must give way to him a little

in trifles, gentlemen. These are errors, diseases of youth, which he will mend 35

when he comes to judgement and knowledge of matters. I pray you, conceive

so, and I thank you. And I pray you, pardon him, and I thank you again.

QUARLOUS

[To Winwife] Well, this dry-nurse, I say still, is a delicate man.

WINWIFE

And I am for the cosset his charge! Did you ever see a fellow’s face more

accuse him for an ass? 40

QUARLOUS

Accuse him? It confesses him one without accusing. What pity ’tis

yonder wench should marry such a ‘cokes’!

WINWIFE

’Tis true.

QUARLOUS

She seems to be discreet, and as sober as she is handsome.

WINWIFE

Ay, and if you mark her, what a restrained scorn she casts upon all his 45

behaviour and speeches!

COKES

Well, Numps, I am now for another piece of business more: the Fair,

Numps, and then —

WASP

Bless me! Deliver me, help, hold me! The Fair!

COKES

Nay, never fidge up and down, Numps, and vex itself. I am resolute 50

Barthol’mew in this; I’ll make no suit on’t to you. ’Twas all the end of my

journey, indeed, to show Mistress Grace my fair: I call’t my fair, because of

Barthol’mew: you know my name is Barthol’mew, and Barthol’mew Fair.

JOHN

[To Winwife and Quarlous] That was mine afore, gentlemen — this morning.

I had that, i’faith, upon his licence, believe me; there he comes after me. 55

QUARLOUS

Come, John, this ambitious wit of yours (I am afraid) will do you no

good i’the end.

JOHN

No? Why, sir?

QUARLOUS

You grow so insolent with it and overdoing, John, that if you look

not to it and tie it up, it will bring you to some obscure place in time, and 60

there ’twill leave you.

WINWIFE

Do not trust it too much, John; be more sparing, and use it but now

and then. A wit is a dangerous thing in this age; do not overbuy it.

JOHN

Think you so, gentlemen? I’ll take heed on’t hereafter.

WIN

Yes, do, John. 65

COKES

A pretty little soul, this same Mistress Littlewit! Would I might marry

her.

GRACE

[Aside] So would I, or anybody else, so I might scape you.

COKES

Numps, I will see it, Numps, ’tis decreed — never be melancholy for the

matter. 70

WASP

Why, see it, sir, see it, do see it! Who hinders you? Why do you not go see

it? ’Slid, see it.

COKES

The Fair, Numps, the Fair!

WASP

Would the Fair and all the drums and rattles in’t were i’your belly, for me:

they are already i’your brain. He that had the means to travel your head now 75

should meet finer sights than any are i’the Fair, and make a finer voyage on’t:

to see it all hung with cockle-shells, pebbles, fine wheat-straws, and here and

there a chicken’s feather and a cobweb.

QUARLOUS

[To Winwife] Good faith, he looks, methinks, an you mark him, like

one that were made to catch flies, with his Sir Cranion legs. 80

WINWIFE

And his Numps to flap ’em away.

WASP

God be wi’ you, sir, there’s your bee in a box, and much good do’t you.

[He hands the box with the licence to Cokes and threatens to leave.]

COKES

Why, ‘your friend and Barthol’mew’, an you be so contumacious.

QUARLOUS

What mean you, Numps?

WASP

I’ll not be guilty, I, gentlemen. 85

MRS OVERDO

You will not let him go, brother, and lose him?

COKES

Who can hold that will away? I had rather lose him than the Fair, I wusse.

WASP

You do not know the inconvenience, gentlemen, you persuade to, nor what

trouble I have with him in these humours. If he go to the Fair, he will buy

of everything to a baby there, and household-stuff for that, too. If a leg or an 90

arm on him did not grow on, he would lose it i’the press. Pray heaven I bring

him off with one stone! And then he is such a ravener after fruit! You will

not believe what a coil I had t’other day to compound a business between a

Cathern-pear-woman and him about snatching! ’Tis intolerable, gentlemen.

WINWIFE

Oh! but you must not leave him now to these hazards, Numps. 95

WASP

Nay, he knows too well I will not leave him, and that makes him presume.

[To Cokes] Well, sir, will you go now? If you have such an itch i’your feet to

foot it to the Fair, why do you stop: am I your tarriers? Go, will you go? Sir,

why do you not go?

COKES

Oh, Numps! have I brought you about? Come, Mistress Grace, and sister, 100

I am resolute Bat, i’faith, still.

GRACE

Truly, I have no such fancy to the Fair, nor ambition to see it: there’s none

goes thither of any quality or fashion.

COKES

O Lord, sir! You shall pardon me, Mistress Grace, we are enough of ourselves

to make it a fashion. And for qualities, let Numps alone, he’ll find 105

qualities. [Exeunt Cokes, Grace, Mistress Overdo, and Wasp.]

QUARLOUS

[To Winwife] What a rogue in apprehension is this! To understand her

language no better!

WINWIFE

Ay, and offer to marry to her? Well, I will leave the chase of my widow

for today, and directly to the Fair. These flies cannot this hot season but 110

engender us excellent creeping sport.

QUARLOUS

A man that has but a spoonful of brain would think so. — Farewell,

John. [Exeunt Quarlous and Winwife.]

JOHN

Win, you see, ’tis in fashion to go to the Fair, Win. We must to the Fair, too,

you and I, Win. I have an affair i’the Fair, Win, a puppet play of mine own 115

making — say nothing! — that I writ for the motion-man, which you must see,

Win.

WIN

I would I might, John, but my mother will never consent to such a ‘profane

motion’, she will call it.

JOHN

Tut, we’ll have a device, a dainty one: now, Wit, help at a pinch, good Wit, 120

come, come, good Wit, an’t be thy will. I have it, Win, I have it, i’faith, and ’tis

a fine one. Win, long to eat of a pig, sweet Win, i’the Fair — do you see? — i’the

heart o’the Fair, not at Pie Corner. Your mother will do anything, Win, to

satisfy your longing, you know. Pray thee, long presently, and be sick o’the

sudden, good Win. I’ll go in and tell her. Cut thy lace i’the meantime, and 125

play the hypocrite, sweet Win.

WIN

No, I’ll not make me unready for it. I can be hypocrite enough, though I

were never so strait-laced.

JOHN

You say true, you have been bred i’the family, and brought up to’t. Our

mother is a most elect hypocrite, and has maintained us all this seven year 130

with it like gentlefolks.

WIN

Ay, let her alone, John, she is not a wise wilful widow for nothing, nor

a sanctified sister for a song. And let me alone, too, I ha’ somewhat o’the

mother in me, you shall see. Fetch her, fetch her. [Exit John.]

[She groans in feigned sickness.] Ah, ah! 135

1.6 [Enter Mistress] PURECRAFT [and] JOHN.

PURECRAFT

Now the blaze of the beauteous discipline fright away this evil from

our house! How now, Win-the-fight, child, how do you? Sweet child, speak

to me.

WIN

Yes, forsooth.

PURECRAFT

Look up, sweet Win-the-fight, and suffer not the enemy to enter you 5

at this door. Remember that your education has been with the purest. What

polluted one was it that named first the unclean beast, pig, to you, child?

WIN

Uh, uh!

JOHN

Not I, o’my sincerity, mother; she longed above three hours ere she would

let me know it. Who was it, Win? 10

WIN

A profane black thing with a beard, John.

PURECRAFT

Oh, resist it, Win-the-fight, it is the Tempter, the wicked Tempter!

You may know it by the fleshly motion of pig: be strong against it and its

foul temptations in these assaults, whereby it broacheth flesh and blood, as

it were, on the weaker side, and pray against its carnal provocations, good 15

child, sweet child, pray.

JOHN

Good mother, I pray you that she may eat some pig, and her bellyful, too.

And do not you cast away your own child, and perhaps one of mine, with

your tale of the Tempter. How do you, Win? Are you not sick?

WIN

Yes, a great deal, John — uh, uh! 20

PURECRAFT

What shall we do? Call our zealous Brother Busy hither, for his

faithful fortification in this charge of the Adversary. [Exit John.]

Child, my dear child, you shall eat pig, be comforted, my sweet child.

WIN

Ay, but i’the Fair, mother.

PURECRAFT

I mean i’the Fair, if it can be any way made, or found, lawful. 25

[Enter JOHN.]

Where is our Brother Busy? Will he not come? — Look up, child.

JOHN

Presently, mother, as soon as he has cleansed his beard. I found him fast

by the teeth i’the cold turkey pie i’the cupboard, with a great white loaf on

his left hand, and a glass of malmsey on his right.

PURECRAFT

Slander not the Brethren, wicked one. 30

JOHN

Here he is now, purified, mother.

[Enter ZEAL-OF-THE-LAND] BUSY.

PURECRAFT

Oh, Brother Busy! your help here to edify and raise us up in a scruple:

my daughter Win-the-fight is visited with a natural disease of women, called

‘A longing to eat pig’.

JOHN

Ay, sir, a Barthol’mew pig, and in the Fair. 35

PURECRAFT

And I would be satisfied from you, religiously-wise, whether a

widow of the Sanctified Assembly, or a widow’s daughter, may commit the

act without offence to the weaker Sisters.

BUSY

Verily, for the disease of longing, it is a disease, a carnal disease, or appetite,

incident to women; and as it is carnal, and incident, it is natural, very natural. 40

Now pig, it is a meat, and a meat that is nourishing, and may be longed for,

and so consequently eaten; it may be eaten, very exceeding well eaten. But in

the Fair, and as a Barthol’mew pig, it cannot be eaten, for the very calling it

a Barthol’mew pig, and to eat it so, is a spice of idolatry, and you make the

Fair no better than one of the high places. This, I take it, is the state of the 45

question: a high place.

JOHN

Ay, but in state of necessity, place should give place, Master Busy. [Aside]

I have a conceit left yet.

PURECRAFT

Good Brother Zeal-of-the-land, think to make it as lawful as you

can. 50

JOHN

Yes, sir, and as soon as you can, for it must be, sir: you see the danger my

little wife is in, sir.

PURECRAFT

Truly, I do love my child dearly, and I would not have her miscarry

or hazard her first fruits, if it might be otherwise.

BUSY

Surely, it may be otherwise, but it is subject to construction — subject — and 55

hath a face of offence with the weak, a great face, a foul face, but that face may

have a veil put over it, and be shadowed, as it were; it may be eaten, and in the

Fair, I take it, in a booth, the tents of the wicked. The place is not much, not

very much; we may be religious in midst of the profane, so it be eaten with a

reformed mouth, with sobriety and humbleness, not gorged in with gluttony 60

or greediness — there’s the fear, for should she go there as taking pride in the

place, or delight in the unclean dressing, to feed the vanity of the eye or the

lust of the palate, it were not well, it were not fit, it were abominable, and

not good.

JOHN

Nay, I knew that afore, and told her on’t; but courage, Win, we’ll be humble 65

enough; we’ll seek out the homeliest booth i’the Fair, that’s certain. Rather

than fail, we’ll eat it o’the ground.

PURECRAFT

Ay, and I’ll go with you myself, Win-the-fight, and my Brother

Zeal-of-the-land shall go with us, too, for our better consolation.

WIN

Uh, uh! 70

JOHN

Ay, and Solomon, too, Win — the more the merrier. [Aside] Win, we’ll leave

Rabbi Busy in a booth. — Solomon, my cloak!

[Enter] SOLOMON [with the cloak].

SOLOMON

Here, sir.

BUSY

In the way of comfort to the weak, I will go and eat. I will eat exceedingly,

and prophesy. There may be a good use made of it, too, now I think on’t: 75

by the public eating of swine’s flesh, to profess our hate and loathing of

Judaism, whereof the Brethren stand taxed. I will therefore eat, yea, I will eat

exceedingly.

JOHN

Good, i’faith, I will eat heartily too, because I will be no Jew: I could never

away with that stiff-necked generation. And truly I hope my little one will 80

be like me, that cries for pig so i’the mother’s belly.

BUSY

Very likely, exceeding likely, very exceeding likely. [Exeunt all.]

2.1 [ Enter] JUSTICE OVERDO [disguised as mad Arthur of Bradley ].

JUSTICE

Well, in justice’ name, and the King’s, and for the commonwealth!

Defy all the world, Adam Overdo, for a disguise, and all story; for thou hast

fitted thyself, I swear. Fain would I meet the Lynceus now, that eagle’s eye,

that piercing Epidaurian serpent (as my Quint. Horace calls him) that could

discover a justice of peace — and lately of the Quorum — under this covering. 5

They may have seen many a fool in the habit of a justice, but never till now

a justice in the habit of a fool. Thus must we do, though, that wake for the

public good, and thus hath the wise magistrate done in all ages. There is

a doing of right out of wrong, if the way be found. Never shall I enough

commend a worthy worshipful man, sometime a capital member of this city, 10

for his high wisdom in this point, who would take you now the habit of

a porter, now of a carman, now of the dog-killer in this month of August,

and in the winter of a seller of tinderboxes. And what would he do in all

these shapes? Marry, go you into every alehouse, and down into every cellar,

measure the length of puddings, take the gauge of black-pots and cans, ay, 15

and custards with a stick, and their circumference with a thread; weigh the

loaves of bread on his middle finger; then would he send for ’em home,

give the puddings to the poor, the bread to the hungry, the custards to his

children; break the pots, and burn the cans himself: he would not trust his

corrupt officers, he would do’t himself. Would all men in authority would 20

follow this worthy precedent! For, alas, as we are public persons, what do

we know? Nay, what can we know? We hear with other men’s ears; we see

with other men’s eyes! A foolish constable or a sleepy watchman is all our

information; he slanders a gentleman by the virtue of his place (as he calls it)

and we by the vice of ours must believe him. As, a while agone, they made 25

me — yea, me — to mistake an honest zealous pursuivant for a seminary, and a

proper young bachelor of music for a bawd. This we are subject to that live in

high place: all our intelligence is idle, and most of our intelligencers knaves

— and, by your leave, ourselves thought little better, if not arrant fools, for

believing ’em. I, Adam Overdo, am resolved, therefore, to spare spy-money 30

hereafter, and make mine own discoveries. Many are the yearly enormities

of this Fair, in whose Courts of Piepowders I have had the honour during the

three days sometimes to sit as judge. But this is the special day for detection

of those foresaid enormities. Here is my black book for the purpose, this

[Indicating his disguise] the cloud that hides me: under this covert I shall see 35

and not be seen. On, Junius Brutus! And as I began, so I’ll end: in justice’

name, and the King’s, and for the commonwealth!

[He stands to one side.]

2.2 [Enter] LEATHERHEAD [and] TRASH [and arrange their wares]. PASSENGERS [gather gradually].

LEATHERHEAD

The Fair’s pest’lence dead, methinks; people come not abroad

today, whatever the matter is. Do you hear, Sister Trash, Lady o’the Basket?

Sit farther with your gingerbread-progeny there, and hinder not the prospect

of my shop, or I’ll ha’ it proclaimed i’the Fair what stuff they are made on.

TRASH

Why, what stuff are they made on, Brother Leatherhead? Nothing but 5

what’s wholesome, I assure you.

LEATHERHEAD

Yes, stale bread, rotten eggs, musty ginger, and dead honey, you

know.

JUSTICE

[Aside] Ay! Have I met with enormity so soon?

LEATHERHEAD

I shall mar your market, old Joan. 10

TRASH

Mar my market, thou too proud pedlar? Do thy worst: I defy thee, ay, and

thy stable of hobby-horses. I pay for my ground as well as thou dost, and thou

wrong’st me, for all thou art parcel-poet, and an engineer. I’ll find a friend

shall right me, and make a ballad of thee and thy cattle, all over. Are you

puffed up with the pride of your wares? Your arsedine? 15

LEATHERHEAD

Go to, old Joan, I’ll talk with you anon, and take you down,

too, afore Justice Overdo: he is the man must charm you; I’ll ha’ you i’the

Piepowders.

TRASH

Charm me? I’ll meet thee face to face afore his worship, when thou dar’st:

and though I be a little crooked o’my body, I’ll be found as upright in my 20

dealing as any woman in Smithfield, I. Charm me!

JUSTICE

[Aside] I am glad to hear my name is their terror yet: this is doing of

justice.

LEATHERHEAD

[To Passengers] What do you lack? What is’t you buy? What do you

lack? Rattles, drums, halberds, horses, babies o’the best? Fiddles o’the finest? 25

Enter COSTERMONGER [and NIGHTINGALE].

COSTERMONGER

Buy any pears, pears, fine, very fine pears!

TRASH

Buy any gingerbread, gilt gingerbread!

NIGHTINGALE

[Sings] Hey, now the Fair’s a-filling!

O, for a tune to startle

The birds o’the booths here billing, 30

Yearly with old Saint Bartle!

The drunkards they are wading,

The punks and chapmen trading;

Who’d see the Fair without his lading?

Buy any ballads, new ballads? 35

[Enter] URSULA [from her booth].

URSULA

Fie upon’t! Who would wear out their youth and prime thus, in roasting

of pigs, that had any cooler vocation? Hell’s a kind of cold cellar to’t, a very

fine vault, o’my conscience! What, Mooncalf!

[Enter] MOONCALF [from her booth].

MOONCALF

Here, mistress.

NIGHTINGALE

How now, Urs’la? In a heat, in a heat? 40

URSULA

[To Mooncalf] My chair, you false faucet you; and my morning’s draught,

quickly: a bottle of ale to quench me, rascal. [Exit Mooncalf into the booth.]

I am all fire and fat, Nightingale; I shall e’en melt away to the first woman,

a rib again, I am afraid. I do water the ground in knots as I go, like a great

garden-pot: you may follow me by the S’s I make. 45

NIGHTINGALE

Alas, good Urs. Was Zekiel here this morning?

URSULA

Zekiel? What Zekiel?

NIGHTINGALE

Zekiel Edgworth, the civil cutpurse; you know him well enough:

he that talks bawdy to you still — I call him my secretary.

URSULA

He promised to be here this morning, I remember. 50

NIGHTINGALE

When he comes, bid him stay; I’ll be back again presently.

URSULA

Best take your morning’s dew in your belly, Nightingale.

MOONCALF brings in the chair [and the ale].

Come, sir, set it here. Did not I bid you should get this chair let out o’the

sides for me, that my hips might play? You’ll never think of anything till

your dame be rumpgalled. ’Tis well, changeling — because it can take in your 55

grasshopper’s thighs, you care for no more. [He quails before her anger.] Now

you look as you had been i’the corner o’the booth, fleaing your breech with a

candle’s end, and set fire o’the Fair. [She points to the ale.] Fill, stoat, fill.

JUSTICE

[Aside] This pig-woman do I know, and I will put her in for my second

enormity; she hath been before me, punk, pinnace, and bawd, any time these 60

two and twenty years, upon record i’the Piepowders.

URSULA

Fill again, you unlucky vermin.

MOONCALF

Pray you, be not angry, mistress; I’ll ha’ it widened anon.

URSULA

No, no, I shall e’en dwindle away to’t ere the Fair be done, you think, now

you ha’ heated me? A poor vexed thing I am, I feel myself dropping already, 65

as fast as I can; two stone a’ suet a day is my proportion; I can but hold life

and soul together with this [Indicating her ale] — here’s to you, Nightingale —

and a whiff of tobacco, at most. Where’s my pipe now? Not filled, thou arrant

incubee?

NIGHTINGALE

Nay, Urs’la, thou’lt gall between the tongue and the teeth with 70

fretting, now.

URSULA

How can I hope that ever he’ll discharge his place of trust — tapster, a

man of reckoning under me — that remembers nothing I say to him?

[Exit Nightingale.]

[To Mooncalf] But look to’t, sirrah, you were best: threepence a pipeful I will

ha’ made of all my whole half-pound of tobacco, and a quarter of a pound of 75

coltsfoot mixed with it too, to itch it out. I that have dealt so long in the fire

will not be to seek in smoke now. Then six and twenty shillings a barrel I will

advance o’my beer, and fifty shillings a hundred o’my bottle-ale. I ha’ told you

the ways how to raise it. Froth your cans well i’the filling at length, rogue, and

jog your bottles o’the buttock, sirrah; then skink out the first glass, ever, and 80

drink with all companies, though you be sure to be drunk — you’ll misreckon

the better, and be less ashamed on’t. But your true trick, rascal, must be to

be ever busy, and mis-take away the bottles and cans in haste before they be

half drunk off, and never hear anybody call (if they should chance to mark

you) till you ha’ brought fresh, and be able to forswear ’em. Give me a drink 85

of ale.

JUSTICE

[Aside] This is the very womb and bed of enormity! Gross as herself! This

must all down for enormity, all, every whit on’t.

One knocks.

URSULA

Look who’s there, sirrah! Five shillings a pig is my price, at least; if it

be a sow-pig, sixpence more; if she be a great-bellied wife, and long for’t, 90

sixpence more for that.

JUSTICE

[Aside] O tempora! O mores! I would not ha’ lost my discovery of this one

grievance for my place and worship o’the Bench. How is the poor subject

abused here! Well, I will fall in with her, and with her Mooncalf, and win

out wonders of enormity. [To Ursula, as he comes forward] By thy leave, goodly 95

woman, and the fatness of the Fair — oily as the king’s constable’s lamp, and

shining as his shoeing-horn! — hath thy ale virtue, or thy beer strength, that

the tongue of man may be tickled, and his palate pleased in the morning? Let

thy pretty nephew here go search and see.

URSULA

What new roarer is this? 100

MOONCALF

O Lord! do you not know him, mistress? ’Tis mad Arthur of Bradley,

that makes the orations. Brave master, old Arthur of Bradley, how do you?

Welcome to the Fair. When shall we hear you again, to handle your matters,

with your back again’ a booth, ha? I ha’ been one o’your little disciples, i’my

days! 105

JUSTICE

Let me drink, boy, with my love, thy aunt, here, that I may be eloquent

— but of thy best, lest it be bitter in my mouth and my words fall foul on the

Fair.

URSULA

Why dost thou not fetch him drink, and offer him to sit?

MOONCALF

Is’t ale or beer, Master Arthur? 110

JUSTICE

Thy best, pretty stripling, thy best: the same thy dove drinketh and thou

drawest on holy-days.

URSULA

Bring him a sixpenny bottle of ale: they say a fool’s handsel is lucky.

JUSTICE

Bring both, child: ale for Arthur and beer for Bradley. Ale for thine aunt,

boy. 115[Exit Mooncalf into the booth.]

[Aside] My disguise takes to the very wish and reach of it. I shall by the benefit

of this, discover enough, and more, and yet get off with the reputation of

what I would be: a certain middling thing between a fool and a madman.

2.3 [Enter] KNOCKEM to them.

KNOCKEM

What! My little lean Urs’la! My she-bear! Art thou alive yet, with thy

litter of pigs, to grunt out another Barthol’mew Fair? Ha!

URSULA

Yes, and to amble afoot, when the Fair is done, to hear you groan out of

a cart, up the heavy hill.

KNOCKEM

Of Holborn, Urs’la, mean’st thou so? For what? For what, pretty Urs? 5

URSULA

For cutting halfpenny purses, or stealing little penny dogs out o’the

Fair.

KNOCKEM

Oh! good words, good words, Urs.

JUSTICE

[Aside] Another special enormity: a cutpurse of the sword, the boot, and

the feather! Those are his marks. 10

[Enter MOONCALF with the ale.]

URSULA

You are one of those horseleeches that gave out I was dead, in Turnbull

Street, of a surfeit of bottle-ale and tripes!

KNOCKEM

No, ’twas better meat, Urs: cows’ udders, cows’ udders!

URSULA

Well, I shall be meet with your mumbling mouth one day.

KNOCKEM

What? Thou’lt poison me with a newt in a bottle of ale, wilt thou? 15

Or a spider in a tobacco-pipe, Urs? Come, there’s no malice in these fat folks;

I never fear thee, an I can scape thy lean Mooncalf here. Let’s drink it out, good

Urs, and no vapours! [Exit Ursula into her booth.]

JUSTICE

[Aside to Mooncalf, giving him money] Dost thou hear, boy? — there’s for

thy ale, and the remnant for thee — speak in the faith of a faucet now: is this 20

goodly person before us here, this ‘vapours’, a knight of the knife?

MOONCALF

What mean you by that, Master Arthur?

JUSTICE

I mean a child of the horn-thumb, a babe of booty, boy: a cutpurse.

MOONCALF

O Lord, sir! Far from it. This is Master Dan Knockem: Jordan, the

ranger of Turnbull. He is a horse-corser, sir. 25

JUSTICE

Thy dainty dame, though, called him cutpurse.

MOONCALF

Like enough, sir, she’ll do forty such things in an hour (an you listen

to her) for her recreation, if the toy take her i’the greasy kerchief : it makes

her fat, you see. She battens with it.

JUSTICE

[Aside] Here might I ha’ been deceived now, and ha’ put a fool’s blot 30

upon myself, if I had not played an after-game o’ discretion.

URSULA comes in again, dropping.

KNOCKEM

Alas, poor Urs, this’s an ill season for thee.

URSULA

Hang yourself, hackney-man.

KNOCKEM

How? How? Urs, vapours! Motion breed vapours?

URSULA

Vapours? Never tusk, nor twirl your dibble, good Jordan; I know what 35

you’ll take, to a very drop. Though you be captain o’the roarers, and fight

well at the case of piss-pots, you shall not fright me with your lion-chap, sir,

nor your tusks. You, angry? You are hungry: come, a pig’s head will stop your

mouth and stay your stomach at all times.

KNOCKEM

Thou art such another mad merry Urs still! Troth, I do make 40

conscience of vexing thee now, i’the dog days, this hot weather, for fear of

foundering thee i’the body, and melting down a pillar of the Fair. Pray thee,

take thy chair again, and keep state; and let’s have a fresh bottle of ale and

a pipe of tobacco — and no vapours. I’ll ha’ this belly o’thine taken up, and

thy grass scoured, wench. Look! Here’s Ezekiel Edgworth, a fine boy of his 45

inches as any is i’the Fair! Has still money in his purse, and will pay all, with

a kind heart — and good vapours.

2.4 [Enter] to them EDGWORTH [and] NIGHTINGALE, [followed by] CORN-CUTTER, TINDERBOX-MAN, [and] PASSENGERS.

EDGWORTH

That I will, indeed, willingly, Master Knockem. [To Mooncalf] Fetch

some ale and tobacco. [Exit Mooncalf into the booth.]

LEATHERHEAD

[To Passengers] What do you lack, gentlemen? Maid, see a fine

hobby-horse for your young master — cost you but a token a week his

provender! 5

CORN-CUTTER

Ha’ you any corns i’your feet and toes?

TINDERBOX-MAN

Buy a mousetrap, a mousetrap, or a tormentor for a flea!

TRASH

Buy some gingerbread!

NIGHTINGALE

Ballads, ballads! fine new ballads:

Hear for your love, and buy for your money: 10

A delicate ballad o’ ‘The Ferret and the Coney’;

‘A Preservative again’ the Punk’s Evil’;

Another of ‘Goose-green Starch and the Devil’;

‘A Dozen of Divine Points’, and ‘ The Godly Garters’;

‘The Fairing of Good Counsel’, of an ell and three-quarters. 15

— What is’t you buy? —

‘The Windmill blown down by the Witch’s Fart!’

Or ‘Saint George, that Oh! did break the dragon’s heart!’

[Enter MOONCALF with the ale and tobacco.]

EDGWORTH

Master Nightingale, come hither, leave your mart a little.

NIGHTINGALE

Oh, my secretary! What says my secretary? 20

[They talk apart.]

JUSTICE

[Aside to Mooncalf] Child o’the bottles, what’s he, what’s he?

MOONCALF

A civil young gentleman, Master Arthur, that keeps company with

the roarers, and disburses all still. He has ever money in his purse; he pays

for them, and they roar for him: one does good offices for another. They call

him ‘the secretary’, but he serves nobody. A great friend of the ballad man’s: 25

they are never asunder.

JUSTICE

What pity ’tis, so civil a young man should haunt this debauched

company! Here’s the bane of the youth of our time apparent. A proper penman,

I see’t in his countenance; he has a good clerk’s look with him, and I

warrant him a quick hand. 30

MOONCALF

A very quick hand, sir. [Exit.]

EDGWORTH

[To Nightingale] All the purses and purchase I give you today by

conveyance, bring hither to Urs’la’s presently. Here we will meet at night in

her lodge, and share. Look you choose good places for your standing i’the

Fair when you sing, Nightingale. 35

This they whisper, that Overdo hears it not.

URSULA

Ay, near the fullest passages; and shift ’em often.

EDGWORTH

And i’your singing, you must use your hawk’s eye nimbly, and fly

the purse to a mark still — where ’tis worn, and o’which side — that you may

gi’ me the sign with your beak, or hang your head that way i’the tune.

URSULA

Enough, talk no more on’t: your friendship, masters, is not now to 40

begin. Drink your draught of indenture, your sup of covenant, and away.

The Fair fills apace, company begins to come in, and I ha’ ne’er a pig ready

yet.

KNOCKEM

Well said! Fill the cups, and light the tobacco: let’s give fire i’th’ works,

and noble vapours. 45

EDGWORTH

And shall we ha’ smocks, Urs’la, and good whimsies, ha?

URSULA

Come, you are i’your bawdy vein! — the best the Fair will afford, Zekiel,

if bawd Whit keep his word.

[Enter MOONCALF.]

How do the pigs, Mooncalf?

MOONCALF

Very passionate, mistress: one on ’em has wept out an eye. 50

[Exit Ursula into her booth.]

Master Arthur o’ Bradley is melancholy here: nobody talks to him. Will you

any tobacco, Master Arthur?

JUSTICE

No, boy, let my meditations alone.

MOONCALF

He’s studying for an oration, now.

JUSTICE

[Aside] If I can, with this day’s travail and all my policy, but rescue this 55

youth here out of the hands of the lewd man and the strange woman, I will

sit down at night and say with my friend Ovid, Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis

ira, nec ignis, etc.

KNOCKEM

Here Zekiel, here’s a health to Urs’la, and a kind vapour. Thou hast

money i’thy purse still, and store! How dost thou come by it? Pray thee, 60

vapour thy friends some, in a courteous vapour.

EDGWORTH

Half I have, Master Dan Knockem, is always at your service.

JUSTICE

[Aside] Ha, sweet nature! What goshawk would prey upon such a lamb?

KNOCKEM

Let’s see what ’tis, Zekiel! Count it. [To Mooncalf] Come, fill him to

pledge me. 65

2.5 [Enter] WINWIFE [and] QUARLOUS to them [at a distance].

WINWIFE

We are here before ’em, methinks.

QUARLOUS

All the better: we shall see ’em come in now.

LEATHERHEAD

What do you lack, gentlemen, what is’t you lack? A fine horse?

A lion? A bull? A bear? A dog, or a cat? An excellent fine Barthol’mew-bird?

Or an instrument? What is’t you lack? 5

QUARLOUS

’Slid! Here’s Orpheus among the beasts, with his fiddle and all!

TRASH

Will you buy any comfortable bread, gentlemen?

QUARLOUS

And Ceres selling her daughter’s picture, in ginger-work!

WINWIFE

That these people should be so ignorant to think us chapmen for ’em!

Do we look as if we would buy gingerbread, or hobby-horses? 10

QUARLOUS

Why, they know no better ware than they have, nor better customers

than come. And our very being here makes us fit to be demanded as well as others.

Would Cokes would come! There were a true customer for ’em.

KNOCKEM

[To Edgworth] How much is’t? Thirty shillings? Who’s yonder! Ned

Winwife, and Tom Quarlous, I think? Yes! Gi’ me it all, gi’ me it all. — Master 15

Winwife! Master Quarlous! Will you take a pipe of tobacco with us? [Aside to Edgworth]

Do not discredit me now, Zekiel.

WINWIFE

[Aside to Quarlous] Do not see him! He is the roaring horse-corser; pray

thee, let’s avoid him: turn down this way.

QUARLOUS

’Slud, I’ll see him, and roar with him, too, an he roared as loud as 20

Neptune. Pray thee, go with me.

WINWIFE

You may draw me to as likely an inconvenience, when you please, as

this.

QUARLOUS

Go to, then, come along: we ha’ nothing to do, man, but to see sights

now. 25

[They approach the others.]

KNOCKEM

Welcome, Master Quarlous, and Master Winwife! Will you take any

froth and smoke with us?

QUARLOUS

Yes, sir, but you’ll pardon us, if we knew not of so much familiarity

between us afore.

KNOCKEM

As what, sir? 30

QUARLOUS

To be so lightly invited to smoke and froth.

KNOCKEM

A good vapour! Will you sit down, sir? This is old Urs’la’s mansion:

how like you her bower? Here you may ha’ your punk and your pig in state,

sir, both piping hot.

QUARLOUS

I had rather ha’ my punk cold, sir. 35

JUSTICE

[Aside] There’s for me: punk! and pig!

URSULA

(She calls within.) What, Mooncalf, you rogue!

MOONCALF

By and by, the bottle is almost off, mistress. — Here, Master Arthur.

URSULA

I’ll part you and your playfellow there i’the guarded coat, an you sunder

not the sooner. 40

KNOCKEM

Master Winwife, you are proud, methinks. You do not talk, nor drink.

Are you proud?

WINWIFE

Not of the company I am in, sir, nor the place, I assure you.

KNOCKEM

You do not except at the company, do you? Are you in vapours, sir?

MOONCALF

Nay, good Master Dan Knockem, respect my mistress’ bower, as you 45

call it. For the honour of our booth, none o’your vapours here.

[URSULA] comes out with a firebrand.

URSULA

Why, you thin lean polecat, you: an they have a mind to be i’their

vapours, must you hinder’em? What did you know, vermin, if they would

ha’ lost a cloak, or such a trifle? Must you be drawing the air of pacification

here, while I am tormented within i’the fire, you weasel? 50

MOONCALF

Good mistress, ’twas in the behalf of your booth’s credit that I spoke.

URSULA

Why? Would my booth ha’ broke, if they had fall’n out in’t?

Sir? Or would their heat ha’ fir’d it? In, you rogue, and wipe the pigs and mend the

fire, that they fall not, or I’ll both baste and roast you, till your eyes drop out,

like ’em. Leave the bottle behind you, and be cursed a while. 55

[Exit Mooncalf into the booth.]

QUARLOUS

Body o’the Fair! What’s this? Mother o’the bawds?

KNOCKEM

No, she’s mother o’the pigs, sir, mother o’the pigs!

WINWIFE

Mother o’the furies, I think, by her firebrand.

QUARLOUS

Nay, she is too fat to be a fury — sure, some walking sow of tallow!

WINWIFE

An inspired vessel of kitchen-stuff! 60

She drinks this while.

QUARLOUS

She’ll make excellent gear for the coachmakers here in Smithfield,

to anoint wheels and axle-trees with.

URSULA

Ay, ay, gamesters, mock a plain plump soft wench o’the suburbs, do,

because she’s juicy and wholesome. You must ha’ your thin pinched ware

pent up i’the compass of a dog-collar — or ’twill not do — that looks like a long 65

laced conger set upright, and a green feather like fennel i’the jowl on’t.

KNOCKEM

Well said, Urs, my good Urs, to ’em, Urs.

QUARLOUS

Is she your quagmire, Dan Knockem? Is this your bog?

NIGHTINGALE

[Aside to Edgworth] We shall have a quarrel presently.

KNOCKEM

How? Bog? Quagmire? Foul vapours! Humph! 70

QUARLOUS

Yes, he that would venture for’t, I assure him, might sink into her

and be drowned a week, ere any friend he had could find where he were.

WINWIFE

And then he would be a fortnight weighing up again.

QUARLOUS

’Twere like falling into a whole shire of butter: they had need be a

team of Dutchmen should draw him out. 75

KNOCKEM

Answer ’em, Urs, where’s thy Barthol’mew-wit now? Urs, thy

Barthol’mew-wit?

URSULA

Hang ’em, rotten, roguy cheaters, I hope to see ’em plagued one day —

poxed they are already, I am sure — with lean playhouse poultry that has the

bony rump sticking out like the ace of spades or the point of a partizan, that 80

every rib of ’em is like the tooth of a saw, and will so grate ’em with their hips

and shoulders as — take ’em altogether — they were as good lie with a hurdle.

QUARLOUS

Out upon her, how she drips! She’s able to give a man the sweating

sickness with looking on her.

URSULA

Marry, look off, with a patch o’your face, and a dozen i’your breech, 85

though they be o’ scarlet, sir. I ha’ seen as fine outsides as either o’yours bring

lousy linings to the broker’s ere now, twice a week!

QUARLOUS

Do you think there may be a fine new cucking-stool i’the Fair to be

purchased? — one large enough, I mean. I know there is a pond of capacity for

her. 90

URSULA

For your mother, you rascal. Out, you rogue, you hedge-bird, you pimp,

you pannier-man’s bastard, you!

QUARLOUS

Ha, ha, ha!

URSULA

Do you sneer, you dog’s-head, you trundle-tail! You look as you were

begotten atop of a cart in harvest-time when the whelp was hot and eager. 95

Go, snuff after your brother’s bitch, Mistress Commodity, that’s the livery

you wear — ’twill be out at the elbows, shortly. It’s time you went to’t, for the

t’other remnant.

KNOCKEM

Peace, Urs, peace, Urs. [Aside to Nightingale and Edgworth] They’ll kill

the poor whale, and make oil of her. [To Ursula] Pray thee, go in. 100

URSULA

I’ll see ’em poxed first, and pilled, and double piled.

WINWIFE

Let’s away, her language grows greasier than her pigs.

URSULA

Does’t so, snotty nose? Good Lord! Are you snivelling? You were engendered

on a she-beggar in a barn when the bald thresher, your sire, was scarce

warm. 105

WINWIFE

Pray thee, let’s go.

QUARLOUS

No, faith, I’ll stay the end of her now: I know she cannot last long; I

find by her similes she wanes apace.

URSULA

Does she so? I’ll set you gone. Gi’ me my pig-pan hither a little. I’ll scald

you hence, an you will not go. 110[Exit into her booth.]

KNOCKEM

Gentlemen, these are very strange vapours! And very idle vapours! I

assure you.

QUARLOUS

You are a very serious ass, we assure you.

KNOCKEM

Humph! Ass? And serious? Nay then, pardon me my vapour. I have

a foolish vapour, gentlemen: any man that does vapour me the ass, Master 115

Quarlous —

QUARLOUS

What then, Master Jordan?

KNOCKEM

— I do vapour him the lie.

QUARLOUS

Faith, and to any man that vapours me the lie, I do vapour that.

[He strikes Knockem.]

KNOCKEM

Nay, then, vapours upon vapours. 120

URSULA comes in with the scalding-pan [followed by MOONCALF].

EDGWORTH [and] NIGHTINGALE

’Ware the pan, the pan, the pan, she comes

with the pan, gentlemen!

They fight. She falls with it.

God bless the woman.

URSULA

Oh! [Exeunt Quarlous and Winwife.]

TRASH

What’s the matter? 125

JUSTICE

Goodly woman!

MOONCALF

Mistress!

URSULA

Curse of hell, that ever I saw these fiends. Oh! I ha’ scalded my leg, my

leg, my leg, my leg. I ha’ lost a limb in the service! Run for some cream and

salad oil quickly. [To Mooncalf] Are you under-peering, you baboon? — Rip off 130

my hose, an you be men, men, men.

MOONCALF

Run you for some cream, good mother Joan: I’ll look to your basket.

[Exit Trash.]

LEATHERHEAD

Best sit up i’your chair, Urs’la. Help, gentlemen.

[They lift her into the chair.]

KNOCKEM

Be of good cheer, Urs, thou hast hindered me the currying of a couple

of stallions here that abused the good race-bawd o’ Smithfield; ’twas time for 135

’em to go.

NIGHTINGALE

I’faith, when the pan came — they had made you run, else.

[To Edgworth] This had been a fine time for purchase, if you had ventured.

EDGWORTH

Not a whit: these fellows were too fine to carry money.

KNOCKEM

Nightingale, get some help to carry her leg out o’the air; take off her 140

shoes; body o’me, she has the malanders, the scratches, the crown-scab, and

the quitter-bone i’the t’other leg.

URSULA

Oh! The pox, why do you put me in mind o’my leg thus, to make it prick

and shoot? Would you ha’ me i’the Hospital afore my time?

KNOCKEM

Patience, Urs. Take a good heart, ’tis but a blister as big as a windgall. 145

I’ll take it away with the white of an egg, a little honey, and hog’s grease, ha’

thy pasterns well rolled, and thou shalt pace again by tomorrow. I’ll tend thy

booth, and look to thy affairs the while; thou shalt sit i’thy chair, and give

directions, and shine Ursa Major.

[Ursula, in her chair, is carried into her booth and out of sight by Knockem, Leatherhead, and Mooncalf.]

2.6 [Enter] COKES, WASP, Mistress OVERDO, [and] GRACE.

[Justice Overdo takes up position to deliver an oration.]

JUSTICE

These are the fruits of bottle-ale and tobacco: the foam of the one, and

the fumes of the other! [To Edgworth] Stay, young man, and despise not the

wisdom of these few hairs, that are grown grey in care of thee.

EDGWORTH

Nightingale, stay a little. Indeed, I’ll hear some o’this!

COKES

Come, Numps, come, where are you? Welcome into the Fair, Mistress 5

Grace.

EDGWORTH

[To Nightingale] ’Slight, he will call company, you shall see, and put

us into doings presently.

JUSTICE

Thirst not after that frothy liquor, ale, for who knows, when he openeth

the stopple, what may be in the bottle? Hath not a snail, a spider, yea, a newt 10

been found there? Thirst not after it, youth, thirst not after it.

COKES

This is a brave fellow, Numps, let’s hear him.

WASP

’Sblood, how brave is he? In a guarded coat? You were best truck with him,

e’en strip and truck presently; it will become you. Why will you hear him?

Because he is an ass, and may be akin to the Cokeses? 15

COKES

Oh, good Numps!

JUSTICE

Neither do thou lust after that tawny weed, tobacco —

COKES

Brave words!

JUSTICE

— whose complexion is like the Indian’s that vents it!

COKES

Are they not brave words, sister? 20

JUSTICE

And who can tell if, before the gathering and making up thereof, the

alligator hath not pissed thereon?

WASP

Heart! Let ’em be brave words, as brave as they will! An they were all the

brave words in a country, how then? Will you away yet? Ha’ you enough on

him? Mistress Grace, come you away, I pray you, be not you accessary. If you 25

do lose your licence, or somewhat else, sir, with listening to his fables, say

Numps is a witch — with all my heart, do, say so.

COKES

Avoid, i’your satin doublet, Numps.

JUSTICE

The creeping venom of which subtle serpent, as some late writers

affirm, neither the cutting of the perilous plant, nor the drying of it, nor 30

the lighting, or burning, can any way persway or assuage.

COKES

Good, i’faith! is’t not, sister?

JUSTICE

Hence it is, that the lungs of the tobacconist are rotted, the liver spotted,

the brain smoked like the backside of the pig-woman’s booth here, and the

whole body within black as her pan you saw e’en now without. 35

COKES

A fine similitude, that, sir! Did you see the pan?

EDGWORTH

Yes, sir.

JUSTICE

Nay, the hole in the nose, here, of some tobacco-takers, or the third

nostril (if I may so call it) which makes that they can vent the tobacco out like

the ace of clubs, or rather the flower-de-luce, is caused from the tobacco, the 40

mere tobacco! When the poor innocent pox, having nothing to do there, is

miserably, and most unconscionably, slandered.

COKES

Who would ha’ missed this, sister?

MRS OVERDO

Not anybody, but Numps.

COKES

He does not understand. 45

EDGWORTH

[Aside] Nor you feel.

He picketh his purse.

COKES

What would you have, sister, of a fellow that knows nothing but a basket-hilt,

and an old fox in’t? The best music i’the Fair will not move a log.

EDGWORTH

[As he passes the purse to Nightingale] In, to Urs’la, Nightingale, and

carry her comfort: see it told. This fellow was sent to us by fortune for our 50

first fairing. [Exit Nightingale.]

JUSTICE

But what speak I of the diseases of the body, children of the Fair?

COKES

That’s to us, sister. Brave, i’faith!

JUSTICE

Hark, O you sons and daughters of Smithfield, and hear what malady

it doth the mind: it causeth swearing, it causeth swaggering, it causeth 55

snuffling, and snarling, and now and then a hurt.

MRS OVERDO

He hath something of Master Overdo, methinks, brother.

COKES

So methought, sister, very much of my brother Overdo — and ’tis when he

speaks.

JUSTICE

Look into any angle o’the town — the Straits or the Bermudas — where 60

the quarrelling lesson is read, and how do they entertain the time but with

bottle-ale and tobacco? The lecturer is o’one side and his pupils o’the other,

but the seconds are still bottle-ale and tobacco, for which the lecturer reads,

and the novices pay. Thirty pound a week in bottle-ale! Forty in tobacco! And

ten more in ale again! Then for a suit to drink in, so much, and (that being 65

slavered) so much for another suit, and then a third suit, and a fourth suit!

And still the bottle-ale slavereth, and the tobacco stinketh!

WASP

[To Cokes] Heart of a madman! Are you rooted here? Will you never away?

What can any man find out in this bawling fellow to grow here for? He is a

full handful higher sin’ he heard him. Will you fix here, and set up a booth? 70

Sir?

JUSTICE

I will conclude briefly —

WASP

Hold your peace, you roaring rascal, I’ll run my head i’your chaps else.

[To Cokes] You were best build a booth and entertain him, make your will, an you

say the word, and him your heir! Heart, I never knew one taken with a mouth 75

of a peck afore. By this light, I’ll carry you away o’my back, an you will not

come.

He gets him up on pickpack.

COKES

Stay, Numps, stay, set me down: I ha’ lost my purse, Numps. Oh, my

purse! One o’my fine purses is gone.

MRS OVERDO

Is’t indeed, brother? 80

COKES

Ay, as I am an honest man, would I were an arrant rogue else! A plague of

all roguy, damned cutpurses for me!

WASP

Bless ’em with all my heart, with all my heart, do you see! Now, as I am

no infidel that I know of, I am glad on’t. Ay, I am — here’s my witness! — do

you see, sir? I did not tell you of his fables, I? No, no, I am a dull malt-horse, 85

I, I know nothing. Are you not justly served i’your conscience now? Speak,

i’your conscience. Much good do you, with all my heart, and his good heart

that has it, with all my heart again.

EDGWORTH

[Aside] This fellow is very charitable — would he had a purse too! But

I must not be too bold all at a time. 90

COKES

Nay, Numps, it is not my best purse.

WASP

Not your best! Death! Why should it be your worst? Why should it be any,

indeed, at all? Answer me to that, gi’ me a reason from you why it should be

any?

COKES

Nor my gold, Numps — I ha’ that yet, look here else, sister. 95

[He shows his second purse.]

WASP

Why so, there’s all the feeling he has!

MRS OVERDO

I pray you, have a better care of that, brother.

COKES

Nay, so I will, I warrant you; let him catch this, that catch can. I would

fain see him get this, look you here.

WASP

So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so! Very good. 100

COKES

I would ha’ him come again now, and but offer at it. Sister, will you take

notice of a good jest? I will put it just where th’other was, and if we ha’ good

luck, you shall see a delicate fine trap to catch the cutpurse nibbling.

EDGWORTH

[Aside] Faith, and he’ll try ere you be out o’the Fair.

COKES

Come, Mistress Grace, prithee, be not melancholy for my mischance: 105

sorrow wi’ not keep it, sweetheart.

GRACE

I do not think on’t, sir.

COKES

’Twas but a little scurvy white money, hang it — it may hang the cutpurse

one day. I ha’ gold left to gi’ thee a fairing yet, as hard as the world goes.

Nothing angers me but that nobody here looked like a cutpurse, unless 110

’twere Numps.

WASP

How? I? I look like a cutpurse? Death! Your sister’s a cutpurse! and your

mother and father, and all your kin were cutpurses! And here is a rogue is

the bawd o’the cutpurses, whom I will beat to begin with.

They speak all together, and Wasp beats the Justice.

COKES

Numps, Numps! 115

MRS OVERDO

Good Master Humphrey!

WASP

You are the patrico, are you?

The patriarch of the cutpurses?

You share, sir, they say: let them share this with you. Are you i’your hot fit of preaching again? I’ll cool you!

JUSTICE

Hold thy hand, child of wrath 120

and heir of anger, make it not

Childermas day in thy fury, or the

feast of the French Barthol’mew,

parent of the Massacre!

JUSTICE

Murder, murder, murder! [Exeunt.]

3.1 [ Enter] WHIT, HAGGIS, [and] BRISTLE., LEATHERHEAD [and] TRASH [return to their wares].

WHIT

Nay, ’tish all gone now! Dish ’tish, phen tou vilt not be phitin call, Master

Offisher. Phat ish a man te better to lishen out noishes for tee, an tou art in an

oder ’orld, being very shuffishient noishes, and gallantsh, too? One o’their

brabblesh would have fed ush all dish fortnight. But tou art so bushy about

beggarsh still, tou hast no leshure to intend shentlemen, an’t be. 5

HAGGIS

Why, I told you, Davy Bristle.

BRISTLE

Come, come, you told me a pudding, Toby Haggis, a matter of nothing

— I am sure it came to nothing! You said, let’s go to Urs’la’s, indeed, but then

you met the man with the monsters, and I could not get you from him. An

old fool, not leave seeing yet? 10

HAGGIS

Why, who would ha’ thought anybody would ha’ quarrelled so early,

or that the ale o’the Fair would ha’ been up so soon?

WHIT

Phy? Phat a’clock toest tou tink it ish, man?

HAGGIS

I cannot tell.

WHIT

Tou art a vishe vatchman, i’te meanteeme. 15

HAGGIS

Why? Should the watch go by the clock, or the clock by the watch, I

pray?

BRISTLE

One should go by another, if they did well.

WHIT

Tou art right now! Phen did’st tou ever know or hear of a shuffishient

vatchman but he did tell the clock, phat bushiness soever he had? 20

BRISTLE

Nay, that’s most true, a sufficient watchman knows what a’clock it is.

WHIT

Shleeping or vaking! Ash well as te clock himshelf, or te jack dat shtrikes

him!

BRISTLE

Let’s inquire of Master Leatherhead or Joan Trash here. — Master

Leatherhead, do you hear, Master Leatherhead? 25

WHIT

If it be a Ledderhead, ’tish a very tick Ledderhead, tat sho mush noish vill

not piersh him.

LEATHERHEAD

I have a little business now: good friends, do not trouble me.

WHIT

Phat? Because o’ty wrought neetcap, and ty phelvet sherkin, man? Phy, I

have sheen tee in ty ledder sherkin ere now, Mashter o’ de Hobby-horses, as 30

bushy and as stately as tou sheem’st to be.

TRASH

Why, what an you have, Captain Whit? He has his choice of jerkins, you

may see by that, and his caps too, I assure you, when he pleases to be either

sick or employed.

LEATHERHEAD

God-a-mercy Joan, answer for me. 35

WHIT

[To the Watchmen] Away, be not sheen i’my company: here be shentlemen

and men of vorship. [Exeunt Haggis and Bristle.]

3.2 [Enter] QUARLOUS [and] WINWIFE.

QUARLOUS

We had wonderful ill luck to miss this prologue o’the purse, but the

best is, we shall have five acts of him ere night. He’ll be spectacle enough! I’ll

answer for’t.

WHIT

O Creesh! Duke Quarlous, how dosht tou? Tou dosht not know me, I fear?

I am te vishesht man, but Justish Overdo, in all Barthol’mew Fair now. Gi’ 5

me twelvepence from tee, I vill help tee to a vife vorth forty marks for’t, an’t

be.

QUARLOUS

Away, rogue, pimp, away!

WHIT

And she shall show tee as fine cut-’ork for’t in her shmock, too, as tou

cansht vish, i’faith. Vilt tou have her, vorshipful Vinvife? I vill help tee to her 10

here, be ant be, in te pig-quarter: gi’ me ty twel’pence from tee.

WINWIFE

Why, there’s twel’pence: pray thee, wilt thou be gone?

WHIT

Tou art a vorthy man and a vorshipful man still.

QUARLOUS

Get you gone, rascal.

WHIT

I do mean it, man. Prinsh Quarlous, if tou hasht need on me, tou shalt find 15

me here, at Urs’la’s. I vill see phat ale and punk ish i’te pigshty for tee, bless

ty good vorship. [He withdraws to Ursula’s booth.]

[Enter] BUSY, JOHN, [Mistress] PURECRAFT, [and] WIN.

QUARLOUS

Look who comes here! John Littlewit!

WINWIFE

And his wife, and my widow, her mother: the whole family.

QUARLOUS

’Slight, you must gi’ ’em all fairings now! 20

WINWIFE

Not I, I’ll not see ’em.

[He draws Quarlous aside.]

QUARLOUS

They are going a-feasting. What schoolmaster’s that, is with ’em?

WINWIFE

That’s my rival, I believe, the baker!

BUSY

So, walk on in the middle way, foreright; turn neither to the right hand

nor to the left; let not your eyes be drawn aside with vanity nor your ear with 25

noises.

QUARLOUS

Oh, I know him by that start!

LEATHERHEAD

What do you lack? What do you buy, pretty mistress? A fine

hobby-horse, to make your son a tilter? A drum, to make him a soldier?

A fiddle, to make him a reveller? What is’t you lack? Little dogs for your 30

daughters? Or babies, male or female?

BUSY

Look not toward them, hearken not: the place is Smithfield, or the field

of smiths, the grove of hobby-horses and trinkets; the wares are the wares of

devils. And the whole Fair is the shop of Satan! They are hooks and baits,

very baits, that are hung out on every side to catch you, and to hold you as it 35

were by the gills and by the nostrils, as the fisher doth: therefore, you must

not look nor turn toward them — The heathen man could stop his ears with

wax against the harlot o’the sea: do you the like with your fingers against the

bells of the Beast.

WINWIFE

[To Quarlous] What flashes comes from him! 40

QUARLOUS

Oh, he has those of his oven! A notable hot baker ’twas, when he

plied the peel. He is leading his flock into the Fair now.

WINWIFE

Rather driving ’em to the pens, for he will let ’em look upon nothing.

[Enter] KNOCKEM [and] WHIT [from Ursula’s booth.]

KNOCKEM

Gentlewomen, the weather’s hot! Whither walk you? Have a care

o’your fine velvet caps, the Fair is dusty. Take a sweet delicate booth, with 45

boughs, here i’the way, and cool yourselves i’the shade — you and your friends.

Littlewit is gazing at the sign, which is the pig’s head

with a large writing under it.

The best pig and bottle-ale i’the Fair, sir. Old Urs’la is cook, there you may

read: the pig’s head speaks it. Poor soul, she has had a stringhalt, the

maryhinchco, but she’s prettily amended.

WHIT

A delicate show-pig, little mistress, with shweet sauce, and crackling, like 50

de bay-leaf i’ de fire, la! Tou shalt ha’ de clean side o’ de table-clot and di glass

vashed with phatersh of Dame Annessh Clear.

JOHN

This’s fine, verily: ‘Here be the best pigs, and she does roast ’em as well as

ever she did’, the pig’s head says.

KNOCKEM

Excellent, excellent, mistress, with fire o’ juniper and rosemary 55

branches! [To John] The oracle of the pig’s head, that, sir.

PURECRAFT

Son, were you not warned of the vanity of the eye? Have you forgot

the wholesome admonition so soon?

JOHN

Good mother, how shall we find a pig, if we do not look about for’t? Will

it run off o’the spit into our mouths, think you, as in Lubberland, and cry, 60

‘Wee, wee’?

BUSY

No, but your mother, religiously wise, conceiveth it may offer itself by

other means to the sense, as by way of steam, which I think it doth, here in

this place — huh! huh! — yes, it doth. (Busy scents after it like a hound.) And it were

a sin of obstinacy, great obstinacy, high and horrible obstinacy, to decline or 65

resist the good titillation of the famelic sense, which is the smell. Therefore

be bold — huh! huh! huh! — follow the scent. Enter the tents of the unclean

for once, and satisfy your wife’s frailty. Let your frail wife be satisfied; your

zealous mother, and my suffering self, will also be satisfied.

JOHN

Come, Win, as good winny here as go farther and see nothing. 70

BUSY

We scape so much of the other vanities by our early entering.

PURECRAFT

It is an edifying consideration.

WIN

[Aside to John] This is scurvy, that we must come into the Fair and not look

on’t.

JOHN

Win, have patience, Win, I’ll tell you more anon. 75

KNOCKEM

Mooncalf, entertain within there! The best pig i’the booth, a pork-like

pig! These are Banbury-bloods, o’the sincere stud, come a-pig-hunting.

Whit, wait, Whit, look to your charge.

BUSY

A pig prepare presently, let a pig be prepared to us.

[Exit Whit, guiding Busy, Mistress Purecraft, John, and Win into the booth.]

[Enter] MOONCALF [and] URSULA [from the booth].

MOONCALF

’Slight, who be these? 80

URSULA

Is this the good service, Jordan, you’d do me?

KNOCKEM

Why, Urs? Why, Urs? Thou’lt ha’ vapours i’thy leg again presently;

pray thee, go in: ’t may turn to the scratches else.

URSULA

Hang your vapours, they are stale, and stink like you. Are these the

guests o’the game you promised to fill my pit withal today? 85

KNOCKEM

Ay, what ail they, Urs?

URSULA

Ail they? They are all sippers, sippers o’the city: they look as they would

not drink off two penn’orth of bottle-ale amongst ’em.

MOONCALF

A body may read that i’their small printed ruffs.

KNOCKEM

Away, thou art a fool, Urs, and thy Mooncalf, too, i’your ignorant 90

vapours now! Hence! Good guests, I say, right hypocrites, good gluttons. In,

and set a couple o’ pigs o’the board, and half a dozen of the biggest bottles

afore ’em, and call Whit. [Exit Mooncalf into the booth.]

I do not love to hear innocents abused: fine ambling hypocrites! And a stone-puritan,

with a sorrel head and beard, good-mouthed gluttons — two to a pig. 95

Away!

URSULA

Are you sure they are such?

KNOCKEM

O’the right breed, thou shalt try ’em by the teeth, Urs.

[Exit Ursula into her booth.]

Where’s this Whit?

[Enter WHIT.]

WHIT

Behold, man, and see, what a worthy man am ee! 100

With the fury of my sword, and the shaking of my beard,

I will make ten thousand men afeared.

KNOCKEM

{Well said, brave Whit! In, and fear the ale out o’the bottles into the

bellies of the Brethren and the Sisters. Drink to the Cause and pure vapours.

[Exeunt Whit and Knockem into the booth.]

QUARLOUS

My roarer is turned tapster, methinks. Now were a fine time for thee, 105

Winwife, to lay aboard thy widow — thou’lt never be master of a better season

or place. She that will venture herself into the Fair, and a pig-box, will admit

any assault, be assured of that.

WINWIFE

I love not enterprises of that suddenness, though.

QUARLOUS

I’ll warrant thee then, no wife out o’the widows’ hundred. If I had 110

but as much title to her as to have breathed once on that strait stomacher

of hers, I would now assure myself to carry her yet, ere she went out of

Smithfield. Or she should carry me, which were the fitter sight, I confess.

But you are a modest undertaker, by circumstances and degrees. Come, ’tis

disease in thee, not judgement — I should offer at all together. Look, here’s 115

the poor fool again that was stung by the wasp erewhile.

[They stand aside.]

3.3 [Enter] JUSTICE [OVERDO].

JUSTICE

I will make no more orations, shall draw on these tragical conclusions.

And I begin now to think that, by a spice of collateral justice, Adam Overdo

deserved this beating; for I, the said Adam, was one cause (a by-cause) why

the purse was lost — and my wife’s brother’s purse, too — which they know

not of yet. But I shall make very good mirth with it at supper — that will be 5

the sport — and put my little friend Master Humphrey Wasp’s choler quite

out of countenance: when, sitting at the upper end o’my table, as I use, and

drinking to my brother Cokes and Mistress Alice Overdo, as I will, my wife,

for their good affection to old Bradley, I deliver to ’em it was I that was

cudgelled, and show ’em the marks. To see what bad events may peep out 10

o’the tail of good purposes! The care I had of that civil young man I took

fancy to this morning (and have not left it yet) drew me to that exhortation;

which drew the company, indeed; which drew the cutpurse; which drew the

money; which drew my brother Cokes his loss; which drew on Wasp’s anger;

which drew on my beating — a pretty gradation! And they shall ha’ it i’their 15

dish, i’faith, at night for fruit — I love to be merry at my table. I had thought

once, at one special blow he ga’ me, to have revealed myself! But then (I thank

thee, fortitude!) I remembered that a wise man (and who is ever so great a part

o’the commonwealth in himself) for no particular disaster ought to abandon

a public good design. The husbandman ought not, for one unthankful year, 20

to forsake the plough; the shepherd ought not, for one scabbed sheep, to

throw by his tar-box; the pilot ought not, for one leak i’the poop, to quit the

helm; nor the alderman ought not, for one custard more at a meal, to give up

his cloak; the constable ought not to break his staff and forswear the watch,

for one roaring night; nor the piper o’the parish — ut parvis componere magna solebam — 25

to put up his pipes, for one rainy Sunday. These are certain knocking

conclusions: out of which I am resolved, come what come can, come beating,

come imprisonment, come infamy, come banishment, nay, come the rack,

come the hurdle — welcome all! — I will not discover who I am till my due

time; and yet still, all shall be, as I said ever, in justice’ name, and the King’s, 30

and for the commonwealth. [Exit.]

WINWIFE

What does he talk to himself, and act so seriously? Poor fool!

QUARLOUS

No matter what. Here’s fresher argument: intend that.

3.4 [ Enter] COKES, Mistress OVERDO, [and] GRACE, [followed by] WASP [loaded with purchases]

Leatherhead [and] Trash [display their wares].

COKES

Come, Mistress Grace, come, sister, here’s more fine sights yet, i’faith.

God’s lid, where’s Numps?

LEATHERHEAD

What do you lack, gentlemen? What is’t you buy? Fine rattles?

Drums? Babies? Little dogs? And birds for ladies? What do you lack?

COKES

Good honest Numps, keep afore: I am so afraid thou’lt lose somewhat — 5

my heart was at my mouth when I missed thee.

WASP

You were best buy a whip i’your hand to drive me.

COKES

Nay, do not mistake, Numps, thou art so apt to mistake — I would but

watch the goods. Look you now, the treble fiddle was e’en almost like to be

lost! 10

WASP

Pray you, take heed you lose not yourself: your best way were e’en get up

and ride for more surety. Buy a token’s worth of great pins to fasten yourself

to my shoulder.

LEATHERHEAD

What do you lack, gentlemen? Fine purses, pouches, pin-cases,

pipes? What is’t you lack? A pair o’ smiths to wake you i’the morning? Or a 15

fine whistling bird?

COKES

Numps, here be finer things than any we ha’ bought, by odds! And more

delicate horses, a great deal! Good Numps, stay, and come hither.

WASP

Will you scorse with him? You are in Smithfield, you may fit yourself with

a fine easy-going street-nag for your saddle again’ Michaelmas Term, do. Has 20

he ne’er a little odd cart for you to make a caroche on i’the country, with four

pied hobby-horses? Why the measles should you stand here with your train,

cheaping of dogs, birds, and babies? You ha’ no children to bestow ’em on,

ha’ you?

COKES

No, but again’ I ha’ children, Numps, that’s all one. 25

WASP

Do, do, do, do: how many shall you have, think you? An I were as you, I’d

buy for all my tenants, too: they are a kind o’ civil savages, that will part with

their children for rattles, pipes, and knives. You were best buy a hatchet or

two, and truck with ’em.

COKES

Good Numps, hold that little tongue o’thine, and save it a labour. I am 30

resolute Bat, thou know’st.

WASP

A resolute fool, you are, I know, and a very sufficient coxcomb, with all my

heart! Nay, you have it, sir, an you be angry: turd i’your teeth, twice (if I said

it not once afore) and much good do you.

WINWIFE

[To Quarlous] Was there ever such a self-affliction? And so impertinent? 35

QUARLOUS

Alas! His care will go near to crack him; let’s in, and comfort him.

[They join the others.]

WASP

Would I had been set i’the ground, all but the head on me, and had my

brains bowled at or threshed out, when first I underwent this plague of a

charge!

QUARLOUS

How now, Numps! Almost tired i’your protectorship? Overparted? 40

Overparted?

WASP

Why, I cannot tell, sir, it may be I am. Does’t grieve you?

QUARLOUS

No, I swear does’t not, Numps: to satisfy you.

WASP

Numps? ’Sblood, you are fine and familiar! How long ha’ we been

acquainted, I pray you? 45

QUARLOUS

I think it may be remembered, Numps, that! ’Twas since morning,

sure.

WASP

Why, I hope I know’t well enough, sir. I did not ask to be told.

QUARLOUS

No? Why then?

WASP

It’s no matter why. You see with your eyes now what I said to you today? 50

You’ll believe me another time?

QUARLOUS

Are you removing the Fair, Numps?

WASP

A pretty question! and a very civil one! Yes, faith, I ha’ my lading, you see,

or shall have anon: you may know whose beast I am by my burden. If the

pannier-man’s jack were ever better known by his loins of mutton, I’ll be 55

flayed and feed dogs for him, when his time comes.

WINWIFE

[To Quarlous] How melancholy Mistress Grace is yonder! Pray thee,

let’s go enter ourselves in ‘grace’ with her.

[They draw her aside and talk apart with her.]

COKES

[To Leatherhead] Those six horses, friend, I’ll have —

WASP

How! 60

COKES

And the three Jews’ trumps; and half-a-dozen o’ birds, and that drum

(I have one drum already) and your smiths — I like that device o’your smiths

very pretty well. And four halberds — and (le’ me see) that fine painted great

lady, and her three women for state, I’ll have.

WASP

No, the shop; buy the whole shop, it will be best, the shop, the shop! 65

LEATHERHEAD

If his worship please.

WASP

Yes, and keep it during the Fair, bob-chin.

COKES

Peace, Numps. [To Leatherhead] Friend, do not meddle with him, an you

be wise, and would show your head above board; he will sting thorough your

wrought nightcap, believe me. A set of these violins I would buy, too, for a 70

delicate young noise I have i’the country that are every one a size less than

another, just like your fiddles. I would fain have a fine young masque at my

marriage, now I think on’t — but I do want such a number o’things. And

Numps will not help me now, and I dare not speak to him.

TRASH

Will your worship buy any gingerbread, very good bread, comfortable 75

bread?

COKES

Gingerbread! Yes, let’s see.

He runs to her shop.

WASP

There’s the t’other springe!

LEATHERHEAD

Is this well, Goody Joan? To interrupt my market, in the midst,

and call away my customers? Can you answer this at the Piepowders? 80

TRASH

Why, if his mastership have a mind to buy, I hope my ware lies as open

as another’s: I may show my ware, as well as you yours.

COKES

Hold your peace; I’ll content you both: I’ll buy up his shop, and thy

basket.

WASP

Will you, i’faith? 85

LEATHERHEAD

Why should you put him from it, friend?

WASP

Cry you mercy! You’d be sold too, would you? What’s the price on you,

jerkin and all as you stand? Ha’ you any qualities?

TRASH

Yes, Goodman Angry-man, you shall find he has qualities, if you cheapen

him. 90

WASP

God’s so, you ha’ the selling of him! What are they? Will they be bought

for love or money?

TRASH

No, indeed, sir.

WASP

For what then? Victuals?

TRASH

He scorns victuals, sir, he has bread and butter at home, thanks be to God! 95

And yet he will do more for a good meal, if the toy take him i’the belly — marry

then, they must not set him at lower end; if they do, he’ll go away, though he

fast. But put him atop o’the table, where his place is, and he’ll do you forty

fine things. He has not been sent for and sought out for nothing at your great

city-suppers, to put down Coryate and Cokeley, and been laughed at for his 100

labour; he’ll play you all the puppets i’the town over, and the players, every

company, and his own company too: he spares nobody!

COKES

I’faith?

TRASH

He was the first, sir, that ever baited the fellow i’the bear’s skin, an’t like

your worship: no dog ever came near him since. And for fine motions! 105

COKES

Is he good at those, too? Can he set out a masque, trow?

TRASH

O Lord, master! Sought to far and near for his inventions. And he

engrosses all, he makes all the puppets i’the Fair.

COKES

Dost thou, in troth, old velvet jerkin? Give me thy hand.

TRASH

Nay, sir, you shall see him in his new velvet jerkin, and a scarf, too, at 110

night, when you hear him interpret Master Littlewit’s motion.

COKES

Speak no more, but shut up shop presently, friend. I’ll buy both it and

thee, too, to carry down with me, and her hamper beside. Thy shop shall

furnish out the masque and hers the banquet: I cannot go less to set out

anything with credit. What’s the price, at a word, o’thy whole shop, case and 115

all, as it stands?

LEATHERHEAD

Sir, it stands me in six-and-twenty shillings sevenpence halfpenny,

besides three shillings for my ground.

COKES

Well, thirty shillings will do all, then! And what comes yours to?

TRASH

Four shillings and eleven pence, sir, ground and all, an’t like your 120

worship.

COKES

Yes, it does like my worship very well, poor woman. That’s five shillings

more. [He counts out the money to them in turn.] What a masque shall I furnish

out for forty shillings — twenty pound Scotch — and a banquet of gingerbread!

There’s a stately thing! Numps! Sister! And my wedding gloves too — that I 125

never thought on afore! All my wedding gloves, gingerbread! Oh, me! What a

device will there be, to make ’em eat their fingers’ ends! And delicate brooches

for the bridemen, and all! And then I’ll ha’ this posy put to ’em: ‘For the best

grace’, meaning Mistress Grace, my wedding posy.

GRACE

I am beholden to you, sir, and to your Barthol’mew-wit. 130

WASP

You do not mean this, do you? Is this your first purchase?

COKES

Yes, faith, and I do not think, Numps, but thou’lt say it was the wisest

act that ever I did in my wardship.

WASP

Like enough! I shall say anything, I!

3.5 [ Enter] EDGWORTH [and] NIGHTINGALE, [followed by] JUSTICE [OVERDO].

JUSTICE

[Aside] I cannot beget a project, with all my political brain, yet; my

project is how to fetch off this proper young man from his debauched

company. I have followed him all the Fair over, and still I find him with this songster.

And I begin shrewdly to suspect their familiarity, and the young man of

a terrible taint: poetry! — with which idle disease if he be infected, there’s no 5

hope of him, in a state-course. Actum est of him for a commonwealth’s-man,

if he go to’t in rhyme, once.

EDGWORTH

[Aside to Nightingale] Yonder he is buying o’ gingerbread: set in

quickly, before he part with too much on his money.

NIGHTINGALE [SINGS]

My masters and friends and good people, draw near, etc. 10

[A crowd begins to gather.]

COKES

Ballads! Hark, hark! (He runs to the ballad man.) Pray thee, fellow, stay a

little. — Good Numps, look to the goods. — What ballads hast thou? Let me

see, let me see myself.

WASP

[To Quarlous and Winwife] Why so! He’s flown to another lime-bush; there

he will flutter as long more, till he ha’ ne’er a feather left. Is there a vexation 15

like this, gentlemen? Will you believe me now? Hereafter shall I have credit

with you?

QUARLOUS

Yes, faith, shalt thou, Numps, and thou art worthy on’t, for thou

sweatest for’t. [Aside to Winwife; Grace overhears] I never saw a young pimp-errant

and his squire better matched. 20

WINWIFE

Faith, the sister comes after ’em well, too.

GRACE

Nay, if you saw the Justice her husband, my guardian, you were fitted for

the mess. He is such a wise one his way —

WINWIFE

I wonder we see him not here.

GRACE

Oh! He is too serious for this place, and yet better sport than the other 25

three, I assure you, gentlemen, where’er he is, though ’t be o’the Bench.

COKES

How dost thou call it? A Caveat against Cutpurses! — a good jest, i’faith. I

would fain see that demon, your cutpurse you talk of, that delicate-handed

devil. They say he walks hereabout — I would see him walk now. Look you,

sister, here, here, let him come, sister, and welcome. (He shows his purse boastingly.) 30

Ballad man, does any cutpurses haunt hereabout? Pray thee, raise me

one or two; begin, and show me one.

NIGHTINGALE

Sir, this is a spell against ’em, spick-and-span new, and ’tis made

as ’twere in mine own person, and I sing it in mine own defence. But ’twill

cost a penny alone, if you buy it. 35

COKES

No matter for the price, thou dost not know me, I see — I am an odd

Barthol’mew.

MRS OVERDO

Has’t a fine picture, brother?

COKES

Oh, sister, do you remember the ballads o’er the nursery chimney at home

o’my own pasting up: there be brave pictures! [To Nightingale] Other manner 40

of pictures than these, friend.

WASP

Yet these will serve to pick the pictures out o’your pockets, you shall see.

COKES

So I heard ’em say. Pray thee, mind him not, fellow: he’ll have an oar in

everything.

NIGHTINGALE

It was intended, sir, as if a purse should chance to be cut in my 45

presence now, I may be blameless though — as by the sequel will more plainly

appear.

COKES

We shall find that i’the matter. Pray thee, begin.

NIGHTINGALE

To the tune of Pagington’s Pound, sir.

COKES

[Sings] Fa, la la la, la la la, fa la la la. Nay, I’ll put thee in tune and all! Mine 50

own country dance! Pray thee, begin.

NIGHTINGALE

It is a gentle admonition, you must know, sir, both to the purse-cutter

and the purse-bearer.

COKES

Not a word more out o’the tune, an thou lov’st me: Fa, la la la, la la la, fa la la la.

Come, when? 55

NIGHTINGALE

[Sings] My masters and friends, and good people draw near,

And look to your purses, for that I do say;

COKES

Ha, ha, this chimes! Good counsel at first dash.

NIGHTINGALE

And though little money in them you do bear,

It cost more to get than to lose in a day 60

You oft have been told,

Both the young and the old,

And bidden beware of the cutpurse so bold:

Then if you take heed not, free me from the curse,

Who both give you warning, for and the cutpurse. 65

Youth, youth, thou hadst better been starved by thy

nurse,

Than live to be hangèd for cutting a purse.

{COKES

Good!

{COKES

Well said! He were to blame that would not, i’faith.

COKES

Good, i’faith, how say you, Numps? Is there any harm i’this?

NIGHTINGALE

It hath been upbraided to men of my trade

That oftentimes we are the cause of this crime. 70

Alack and for pity, why should it be said?

As if they regarded or places or time.

Examples have been

Of some that were seen

In Westminster Hall, yea the pleaders between. 75

Then why should the judges be free from this curse

More than my poor self, for cutting the purse?

Youth, youth, thou hadst better been starved by

thy nurse,

Than live to be hangèd for cutting a purse.

{COKES

The more coxcombs they that did it, I wusse.

{COKES

God-a-mercy for that! Why should they be more free, indeed?

COKES

That again, good ballad-man, that again. (He sings the burden with him [as 80

Nightingale repeats it.]) Oh, rare! I would fain rub mine elbow now, but I dare

not pull out my hand. On, I pray thee — he that made this ballad shall be poet

to my masque.

NIGHTINGALE

At Worcester ’tis known well, and even i’the jail,

A knight of good worship did there show his face, 85

Against the foul sinners in zeal for to rail,

And lost (ipso facto) his purse in the place.

Nay, once from the seat

Of judgement so great,

A judge there did lose a fair pouch of velvete. 90

O Lord for thy mercy, how wicked or worse,

Are those that so venture their necks for a purse!

Youth, youth, thou hadst better been starved by thy nurse,

Than live to be hangèd for cutting a purse.

{COKES

Is it possible?

{COKES

I'faith?

COKES

[Singing along again] Youth, youth, etc! Pray thee, stay a little, friend, yet. — 95

O’thy conscience, Numps, speak, is there any harm i’this?

WASP

To tell you true, ’tis too good for you, ’less you had grace to follow it.

JUSTICE

[Aside] It doth discover enormity, I’ll mark it more: I ha’not liked a

paltry piece of poetry so well a good while.

COKES

[Singing] Youth, youth, etc! Where’s this youth now? A man must call upon 100

him for his own good, and yet he will not appear. Look here, here’s for him.

(He shows his purse.) Handy-dandy, which hand will he have? On, I pray thee,

with the rest. I do hear of him, but I cannot see him, this Master Youth, the

cutpurse.

NIGHTINGALE

At plays and at sermons, and at the sessions, 105

’Tis daily their practice such booty to make.

Yea, under the gallows at executions,

They stick not the stare-abouts’ purses to take.

Nay one without grace,

At a far better place, 110

At court and in Christmas, before the King’s face.

Alack then for pity, must I bear the curse,

That only belongs to the cunning cutpurse?

{COKES

That was a fine fellow! I would have him now.

COKES

But where’s their cunning now, when they should use it? They are all

chained now, I warrant you. Youth, youth, thou hadst better, etc. The rat-catcher’s 115

charm! — are all fools and asses to this? A pox on ’em that they will not come!

That a man should have such a desire to a thing, and want it.

QUARLOUS

[To Winwife] ’Fore God, I’d give half the Fair, an ’twere mine, for a

cutpurse for him, to save his longing.

COKES

Look you, sister, here, here, where is’t now? Which pocket is’t in, for a 120

wager?

He shows his purse again.

WASP

I beseech you leave your wagers, and let him end his matter, an’t may be.

COKES

Oh, are you edified, Numps?

JUSTICE

[Aside] Indeed, he does interrupt him too much. There Numps spoke to

purpose. 125

COKES

Sister, I am an ass! I cannot keep my purse! [He shows it(again.) ] On, on, I

pray thee, friend.

[ As Nightingale sings the next verse, ] Edgworth gets up to [Cokes], and tickles him in the ear with a straw twice to draw his hand out of his pocket [first finding a handkerchief and next the purse].

NIGHTINGALE

But O you vile nation of cutpurses all,

Relent and repent, and amend and be sound,

And know that you ought not, by honest men’s 130

fall,

Advance your own fortunes, to die above ground,

And though you go gay,

In silks as you may,

It is not the high way to heaven (as they say).

Repent then, repent you, for better, for worse, 135

And kiss not the gallows for cutting a purse.

Youth, youth, thou hadst better been starved by thy nurse,

Than live to be hangèd for cutting a purse.

WINWIFE

Will you see sport? Look, there’s a fellow gathers up to him, mark!

QUARLOUS

Good, i’faith! Oh, he has lighted on the wrong pocket.

WINWIFE

He has it. ’Fore God, he is a brave fellow; pity he should be detected.

ALL

An excellent ballad! an excellent ballad!

EDGWORTH

Friend, let me ha’ the first, let me ha’ the first, I pray you. 140

[He slips the purse and handkerchief to Nightingale.]

COKES

Pardon me, sir: first come, first served. And I’ll buy the whole bundle,

too.

WINWIFE

[To Quarlous] That conveyance was better than all, did you see’t? He

has given the purse to the ballad singer.

QUARLOUS

Has he? 145

EDGWORTH

Sir, I cry you mercy: I’ll not hinder the poor man’s profit. Pray you,

mistake me not.

COKES

Sir, I take you for an honest gentleman, if that be mistaking. I met you

today afore — Ha! humph! O God! My purse is gone, my purse, my purse, etc.

WASP

Come, do not make a stir and cry yourself an ass thorough the Fair afore 150

your time.

COKES

Why, hast thou it, Numps? Good Numps, how came you by it? I mar’l!

WASP

I pray you, seek some other gamester to play the fool with; you may lose it

time enough, for all your Fair-wit.

COKES

By this good hand, glove and all, I ha’ lost it already, if thou hast it not — 155

feel else — and Mistress Grace’s handkerchief, too, out o’the t’other pocket.

WASP

Why, ’tis well, very well, exceeding pretty and well.

EDGWORTH

Are you sure you ha’ lost it, sir?

COKES

O God! Yes. As I am an honest man, I had it but e’en now, at ‘Youth,

youth’. 160

NIGHTINGALE

I hope you suspect not me, sir.

EDGWORTH

Thee? That were a jest indeed! Dost thou think the gentleman is

foolish? Where hadst thou hands, I pray thee? Away, ass, away!

[Exit Nightingale.]

JUSTICE

[Aside, sneaking away] I shall be beaten again, if I be spied.

EDGWORTH

Sir, I suspect an odd fellow yonder is stealing away. 165

MRS OVERDO

Brother, it is the preaching fellow! You shall suspect him. He was

at your t’other purse, you know! [Overdo is caught.] Nay, stay, sir, and view

the work you ha’ done. An you be beneficed at the gallows and preach there,

thank your own handiwork.

COKES

Sir, you shall take no pride in your preferment; you shall be silenced 170

quickly.

JUSTICE

What do you mean, sweet buds of gentility?

COKES

To ha’ my pennyworths out on you, bud. No less than two purses a day

serve you? I thought you a simple fellow when my man Numps beat you i’the

morning, and pitied you — 175

MRS OVERDO

So did I, I’ll be sworn, brother; but now I see he is a lewd and

pernicious enormity (as Master Overdo calls him).

JUSTICE

[Aside] Mine own words turned upon me, like swords.

COKES

Cannot a man’s purse be at quiet for you i’the master’s pocket, but you

must entice it forth and debauch it? 180

WASP

Sir, sir, keep your ‘debauch’ and your fine Barthol’mew-terms to yourself,

and make as much on ’em as you please. But gi’ me this from you, i’the

meantime: I beseech you, see if I can look to this.

[He tries to take the box from Cokes.]

COKES

Why, Numps?

WASP

Why? Because you are an ass, sir — there’s a reason the shortest way, an 185

you will needs ha’ it. Now you ha’ got the trick of losing, you’d lose your

breech, an ’twere loose. I know you, sir: come, deliver. (Wasp takes the licence from him.)

You’ll go and crack the vermin you breed now, will you? — ’tis very

fine. Will you ha’ the truth on’t? They are such reckless flies as you are, that

blow cutpurses abroad in every corner; your foolish having of money makes 190

’em. An there were no wiser than I, sir, the trade should lie open for you, sir,

it should, i’faith, sir. I would teach your wit to come to your head, sir, as well

as your land to come into your hand, I assure you, sir.

WINWIFE

Alack, good Numps.

WASP

Nay, gentlemen, never pity me, I am not worth it. Lord send me at home 195

once to Harrow o’the Hill again; if I travel any more, call me Coryate, with

all my heart.

[Exeunt Cokes, Mistress Overdo, and Wasp, with Justice Overdo.]

QUARLOUS

[To Edgworth] Stay, sir, I must have a word with you in private, do

you hear?

EDGWORTH

With me, sir? What’s your pleasure, good sir? 200

QUARLOUS

Do not deny it: you are a cutpurse, sir. This gentleman here and I

saw you — nor do we mean to detect you (though we can sufficiently inform

ourselves toward the danger of concealing you), but you must do us a piece

of service.

EDGWORTH

Good gentlemen, do not undo me; I am a civil young man, and but 205

a beginner, indeed.

QUARLOUS

Sir, your beginning shall bring on your ending, for us. We are no

catchpoles nor constables. That you are to undertake is this: you saw the old

fellow with the black box here?

EDGWORTH

The little old governor, sir? 210

QUARLOUS

That same: I see you have flown him to a mark already. I would ha’

you get away that box from him, and bring it us.

EDGWORTH

Would you ha’ the box and all, sir? Or only that, that is in’t? I’ll get

you that, and leave him the box to play with still — which will be the harder

o’the two — because I would gain your worships’ good opinion of me. 215

WINWIFE

He says well: ’tis the greater mastery, and ’twill make the more sport

when ’tis missed.

EDGWORTH

Ay, and ’twill be the longer a-missing, to draw on the sport.

QUARLOUS

But look you do it now, sirrah, and keep your word, or —

EDGWORTH

Sir, if ever I break my word with a gentleman, may I never read 220

word at my need. Where shall I find you?

QUARLOUS

Somewhere i’the Fair hereabouts. Dispatch it quickly.

[Exit Edgworth.]

I would fain see the careful fool deluded! Of all beasts, I love the serious ass:

he that takes pains to be one, and plays the fool with the greatest diligence

that can be. 225

GRACE

Then you would not choose, sir, but love my guardian, Justice Overdo,

who is answerable to that description in every hair of him.

QUARLOUS

So I have heard. But how came you, Mistress Wellborn, to be his

ward, or have relation to him at first?

GRACE

Faith, through a common calamity: he bought me, sir; and now he will 230

marry me to his wife’s brother, this wise gentleman that you see, or else I

must pay value o’my land.

QUARLOUS

’Slid, is there no device of disparagement, or so? Talk with some

crafty fellow, some picklock o’the law! Would I had studied a year longer

i’the Inns of Court, an’t had been but i’your case. 235

WINWIFE

[Aside] Ay, Master Quarlous, are you proffering?

GRACE

You’d bring but little aid, sir.

WINWIFE

[Aside] I’ll look to you, i’faith, gamester. — An unfortunate foolish tribe

you are fall’n into, lady. I wonder you can endure ’em.

GRACE

Sir, they that cannot work their fetters off must wear ’em. 240

WINWIFE

You see what care they have on you, to leave you thus.

GRACE

Faith, the same they have of themselves, sir. I cannot greatly complain,

if this were all the plea I had against ’em.

WINWIFE

’Tis true! But will you please to withdraw with us a little, and make

them think they have lost you. I hope our manners ha’ been such hitherto, 245

and our language, as will give you no cause to doubt yourself in our company.

GRACE

Sir, I will give myself no cause: I am so secure of mine own manners as I

suspect not yours.

QUARLOUS

Look where John Littlewit comes.

WINWIFE

Away, I’ll not be seen by him. 250

QUARLOUS

No, you were not best: he’d tell his mother, the widow.

WINWIFE

Heart, what do you mean?

QUARLOUS

Cry you mercy, is the wind there? Must not the widow be named?

[Exeunt Quarlous, Winwife, and Grace.]

3.6 [ Enter] JOHN [and] WIN [from Ursula’s booth].

JOHN

Do you hear, Win, Win?

WIN

What say you, John?

JOHN

While they are paying the reckoning, Win, I’ll tell you a thing, Win: we

shall never see any sights i’the Fair, Win, except you long still, Win. Good

Win, sweet Win, long to see some hobby-horses, and some drums, and rattles, 5

and dogs, and fine devices, Win: the bull with the five legs, Win, and the great

hog. Now you ha’ begun with pig, you may long for anything, Win, and so

for my motion, Win.

WIN

But we sha’ not eat o’the bull and the hog, John: how shall I long, then?

JOHN

Oh, yes, Win! You may long to see as well as to taste, Win: how did the 10

’pothecary’s wife, Win, that longed to see the anatomy, Win? Or the lady, Win,

that desired to spit i’the great lawyer’s mouth after an eloquent pleading? I

assure you they longed, Win: good Win, go in, and long.

[John and Win return to the booth.]

TRASH

I think we are rid of our new customer, brother Leatherhead; we shall

hear no more of him. 15

They plot to be gone.

LEATHERHEAD

All the better: let’s pack up all, and be gone before he find us.

TRASH

Stay a little, yonder comes a company: it may be we may take some more

money.

[Enter] KNOCKEM [and] BUSY.

KNOCKEM

Sir, I will take your counsel, and cut my hair, and leave vapours: I see

that tobacco, and bottle-ale, and pig, and Whit, and very Urs’la herself, is all 20

vanity.

BUSY

Only pig was not comprehended in my admonition, the rest were. For

long hair, it is an ensign of pride, a banner, and the world is full of those

banners, very full of banners. And bottle-ale is a drink of Satan’s, a diet-drink

of Satan’s, devised to puff us up, and make us swell in this latter age of vanity, 25

as the smoke of tobacco, to keep us in mist and error. But the fleshly woman

( which you call Urs’la) is above all to be avoided, having the marks upon her

of the three enemies of man: the World, as being in the Fair; the Devil, as

being in the fire; and the Flesh, as being herself.

[Enter Mistress] PURECRAFT.

PURECRAFT

Brother Zeal-of-the-land, what shall we do? My daughter Win-the-fight 30

is fall’n into her fit of longing again —

BUSY

For more pig? There is no more, is there?

PURECRAFT

— to see some sights i’the Fair.

BUSY

Sister, let her fly the impurity of the place swiftly, lest she partake of the pitch

thereof. Thou art the seat of the Beast, O Smithfield, and I will leave 35

thee. Idolatry peepeth out on every side of thee.

KNOCKEM

[Aside] An excellent right hypocrite! Now his belly is full, he falls

a-railing and kicking, the jade. A very good vapour! I’ll in, and joy Urs’la

with telling how her pig works: two and a half he ate to his share. And he has

drunk a pailful. He eats with his eyes, as well as his teeth. 40 [Exit.]

LEATHERHEAD

What do you lack, gentlemen? What is’t you buy? Rattles, drums,

babies —

BUSY

Peace, with thy apocryphal wares, thou profane publican: thy bells, thy

dragons, and thy Toby’s dogs. Thy hobby-horse is an idol, a very idol, a fierce

and rank idol, and thou the Nebuchadnezzar, the proud Nebuchadnezzar of 45

the Fair, that sett’st it up for children to fall down to and worship.

LEATHERHEAD

Cry you mercy, sir, will you buy a fiddle to fill up your noise?

[Enter JOHN and WIN.]

JOHN

Look, Win, do, look, a God’s name, and save your longing. Here be fine

sights.

PURECRAFT

Ay, child. So you hate ’em, as our Brother Zeal does, you may look 50

on ’em.

LEATHERHEAD

Or what do you say to a drum, sir?

BUSY

It is the broken belly of the Beast, and thy bellows there are his lungs, and

these pipes are his throat, those feathers are of his tail, and thy rattles the

gnashing of his teeth. 55

TRASH

And what’s my gingerbread, I pray you?

BUSY

The provender that pricks him up. Hence with thy basket of popery, thy

nest of images, and whole legend of ginger-work.

LEATHERHEAD

Sir, if you be not quiet the quicklier, I’ll ha’ you clapped fairly

by the heels for disturbing the Fair. 60

BUSY

The sin of the Fair provokes me, I cannot be silent.

PURECRAFT

Good Brother Zeal!

LEATHERHEAD

Sir, I’ll make you silent, believe it.

JOHN

[Aside to Leatherhead] I’d give a shilling you could, i’faith, friend.

LEATHERHEAD

Sir, give me your shilling — I’ll give you my shop if I do not, and 65

I’ll leave it in pawn with you i’the meantime.

JOHN

[Giving the money] A match, i’faith, but do it quickly then. [Exit Leatherhead.]

BUSY

(He speaks to the widow.) Hinder me not, woman. — I was moved in spirit, to

be here this day in this Fair, this wicked and foul Fair — and fitter may it be

called a Foul than a Fair — to protest against the abuses 70

of it, the foul abuses of it, in regard of the afflicted Saints, that are troubled,

very much troubled, exceedingly troubled, with the opening of the merchandise of Babylon again,

and the peeping of popery upon the stalls, here, here, in the high places. See

you not Goldilocks, the purple strumpet, there in her yellow gown and green

sleeves? The profane pipes, the tinkling timbrels? A shop of relics! 75

JOHN

[Protecting Leatherhead’s wares] Pray you, forbear: I am put in trust with ’em.

BUSY

And this idolatrous grove of images, this flasket of idols! which I will pull

down —

Overthrows the gingerbread.

TRASH

Oh, my ware, my ware, God bless it!

BUSY

— in my zeal, and glory to be thus exercised. 80

LEATHERHEAD enters with OFFICERS [led by POACHER].

LEATHERHEAD

Here he is: pray you, lay hold on his zeal — we cannot sell a

whistle, for him, in tune. Stop his noise first!

BUSY

Thou canst not: ’tis a sanctified noise. I will make a loud and most strong

noise, till I have daunted the profane enemy. And for this Cause —

LEATHERHEAD

Sir, here’s no man afraid of you, or your Cause. You shall swear 85

it i’the stocks, sir.

BUSY

— I will thrust myself into the stocks, upon the pikes of the land.

LEATHERHEAD

[To Officers] Carry him away.

PURECRAFT

What do you mean, wicked men?

BUSY

Let them alone; I fear them not. 90

[Exeunt Officers with Busy, followed by Mistress Purecraft.]

JOHN

[To Win] Was not this shilling well ventured, Win, for our liberty? Now we

may go play, and see over the Fair where we list ourselves. My mother is gone

after him, and let her e’en go, and loose us.

WIN

Yes, John, but I know not what to do.

JOHN

For what, Win? 95

WIN

For a thing I am ashamed to tell you, i’faith, and ’tis too far to go home.

JOHN

I pray thee, be not ashamed, Win. Come, i’faith, thou shall not be ashamed.

Is it anything about the hobby-horse-man? An’t be, speak freely.

WIN

Hang him, base bob-chin, I scorn him; no, I have very great what’sha’-

call’um, John. 100

JOHN

Oh! Is that all, Win? We’ll go back to Captain Jordan, to the pig-woman’s,

Win. He’ll help us, or she with a dripping pan, or an old kettle, or something.

The poor greasy soul loves you, Win, and, after, we’ll visit the Fair all over,

Win, and see my puppet play, Win — you know it’s a fine matter, Win.

[Exeunt John and Win.]

LEATHERHEAD

Let’s away: I counselled you to pack up afore, Joan. 105

TRASH

A pox of his Bedlam purity. He has spoiled half my ware: but the best is,

we lose nothing, if we miss our first merchant.

LEATHERHEAD

It shall be hard for him to find or know us when we are

translated, Joan. [Exeunt Leatherhead and Trash with their wares.]

4.1 [Enter] TROUBLEALL, BRISTLE, [and] HAGGIS, [followed by OFFICERS with] JUSTICE [OVERDO, accompanied by] COKES.

TROUBLEALL

My masters, I do make no doubt but you are officers.

BRISTLE

What then, sir?

TROUBLEALL

And the King’s loving and obedient subjects.

BRISTLE

Obedient, friend? Take heed what you speak, I advise you: Oliver Bristle

advises you. His loving subjects, we grant you, but not his obedient, at this 5

time, by your leave: we know ourselves a little better than so. We are to

command, sir, and such as you are to be obedient. Here’s one of his obedient

subjects [Indicating Justice Overdo] going to the stocks, and we’ll make you such

another, if you talk.

TROUBLEALL

You are all wise enough i’your places, I know. 10

BRISTLE

If you know it, sir, why do you bring it in question?

TROUBLEALL

I question nothing, pardon me. I do only hope you have warrant

for what you do; and so, quit you, and so, multiply you. He goes away again.

HAGGIS

[to officers] What’s he? Bring him up to the stocks there. Why bring you

him not up? 15

[TROUBLEALL] comes again.

TROUBLEALL

If you have Justice Overdo’s warrant, ’tis well: you are safe. That is

the warrant of warrants. I’ll not give this button for any man’s warrant else.

BRISTLE

Like enough, sir, but let me tell you: an you play away your buttons

thus, you will want ’em ere night, for any store I see about you. You might

keep ’em, and save pins, I wusse. [Troubleall] goes away. 20

JUSTICE

[Aside] What should he be that doth so esteem and advance my warrant?

He seems a sober and discreet person! It is a comfort to a good conscience, to

be followed with a good fame in his sufferings. The world will have a pretty

taste by this how I can bear adversity; and it will beget a kind of reverence

toward me hereafter, even from mine enemies, when they shall see I carry 25

my calamity nobly, and that it doth neither break me nor bend me.

HAGGIS

Come, sir, here’s a place for you to preach in. Will you put in your leg?

JUSTICE

That I will, cheerfully.

BRISTLE

O’my conscience, a seminary! He kisses the stocks.

They put him in the stocks.

COKES

Well, my masters, I’ll leave him with you. Now I see him bestowed, I’ll 30

go look for my goods, and Numps.

HAGGIS

You may, sir, I warrant you. [Exit Cokes.]

[To Officers] Where’s the t’other bawler? Fetch him, too. You shall find ’em

both fast enough. [Exeunt Officers.]

JUSTICE

[Aside] In the midst of this tumult, I will yet be the author of mine own 35

rest, and, not minding their fury, sit in the stocks in that calm as shall be able

to trouble a triumph.

[TROUBLEALL] comes again.

TROUBLEALL

Do you assure me, upon your words? May I undertake for you, if I

be asked the question, that you have this warrant?

HAGGIS

What’s this fellow, for God’s sake? 40

TROUBLEALL

Do but show me ‘Adam Overdo’, and I am satisfied. Goes out.

BRISTLE

He is a fellow that is distracted, they say: one Troubleall. He was an

officer in the Court of Pie-powders here last year, and put out on his place by

Justice Overdo —

JUSTICE

[Aside] Ha! 45

BRISTLE

— upon which he took an idle conceit, and’s run mad upon’t. So that

ever since he will do nothing but by Justice Overdo’s warrant: he will not

eat a crust, nor drink a little, nor make him in his apparel ready. His wife —

sir-reverence — cannot get him make his water or shift his shirt without his

warrant. 50

JUSTICE

[Aside] If this be true, this is my greatest disaster! How am I bound to

satisfy this poor man, that is — of so good a nature to me — out of his wits,

where there is no room left for dissembling!

[TROUBLEALL] comes in.

TROUBLEALL

If you cannot show me ‘Adam Overdo’, I am in doubt of you: I am

afraid you cannot answer it. Goes again. 55

HAGGIS

Before me, neighbour Bristle, and now I think on’t better, Justice Overdo

is a very parantory person.

BRISTLE

Oh! are you advised of that? And a severe justicer, by your leave.

JUSTICE

[Aside] Do I hear ill o’that side, too?

BRISTLE

He will sit as upright o’the bench, an you mark him, as a candle i’the 60

socket, and give light to the whole court in every business.

HAGGIS

But he will burn blue, and swell like a boil — God bless us — an he be

angry.

BRISTLE

Ay, and he will be angry, too, when him list, that’s more: and when he

is angry, be it right or wrong, he has the law on’s side, ever. Ay, mark that, 65

too.

JUSTICE

[Aside] I will be more tender hereafter. I see compassion may become a

justice, though it be a weakness, I confess, and nearer a vice than a virtue.

HAGGIS

[To Bristle] Well, take him out o’the stocks again; we’ll go a sure way to

work, we’ll ha’ the ace of hearts of our side, if we can. 70

They take the Justice out.

[Enter] POACHER [and Officers, with] BUSY [followed by Mistress] PURECRAFT.

POACHER

Come, bring him away to his fellow there. — Master Busy, we shall

rule your legs, I hope, though we cannot rule your tongue.

BUSY

No, minister of darkness, no, thou canst not rule my tongue: my tongue it

is mine own, and with it I will both knock and mock down your Barthol’mew-

abominations, till you be made a hissing to the neighbour parishes round 75

about.

HAGGIS

[To Poacher] Let him alone; we have devised better upon’t.

PURECRAFT

And shall he not into the stocks, then?

BRISTLE

No, mistress, we’ll have ’em both to Justice Overdo, and let him do over

’em as is fitting. Then I and my gossip Haggis and my beadle Poacher are 80

discharged.

PURECRAFT

Oh, I thank you, blessed, honest men!

BRISTLE

Nay, never thank us, but thank this madman that comes here: he put

it in our heads. [Exeunt the Watchmen and their two prisoners.]

[TROUBLEALL] comes again.

PURECRAFT

Is he mad? — Now heaven increase his madness, and bless it, and 85

thank it! — Sir, your poor handmaid thanks you.

TROUBLEALL

Have you a warrant? An you have a warrant, show it.

PURECRAFT

Yes, I have a warrant out of the Word, to give thanks for removing

any scorn intended to the Brethren.

TROUBLEALL

It is Justice Overdo’s warrant that I look for. If you have not that, 90

keep your word, I’ll keep mine. Quit ye, and multiply ye.

[Exeunt all but Troubleall.]

4.2 [Enter] EDGWORTH [and] NIGHTINGALE.

EDGWORTH

Come away, Nightingale, I pray thee.

TROUBLEALL

Whither go you? Where’s your warrant?

EDGWORTH

Warrant? For what, sir?

TROUBLEALL

For what you go about: you know how fit it is. An you have no

warrant, bless you, I’ll pray for you, that’s all I can do. Goes out. 5

EDGWORTH

What means he?

NIGHTINGALE

A madman that haunts the Fair — do you not know him? It’s

marvel he has not more followers after his ragged heels.

EDGWORTH

Beshrew him, he startled me: I thought he had known of our plot.

Guilt’s a terrible thing! — ha’ you prepared the costermonger? 10

NIGHTINGALE

Yes, and agreed for his basket of pears; he is at the corner here,

ready. And your prize, he comes down sailing that way, all alone, without

his protector: he is rid of him, it seems.

EDGWORTH

Ay, I know; I should ha’ followed his Protectorship for a feat I am

to do upon him, but this offered itself so i’the way, I could not let it scape. 15

Here he comes: whistle. Be this sport called ‘Dorring the Dotterel’.

[Enter] COKES.

NIGHTINGALE

(Whistles) Wh, wh, wh, wh, etc.

COKES

By this light, I cannot find my gingerbread-wife nor my hobby-horse-man

in all the Fair now to ha’ my money again. And I do not know the way out

on’t to go home for more. Do you hear, friend, you that whistle: what tune is 20

that you whistle?

NIGHTINGALE

A new tune I am practising, sir.

COKES

Dost thou know where I dwell, I pray thee? — nay, on with thy tune, I ha’

no such haste for an answer. I’ll practise with thee.

[Enter] COSTERMONGER [followed by BOYS].

COSTERMONGER

Buy any pears, very fine pears, pears fine! 25

Nightingale sets his foot afore him and he falls, with his basket.

COKES

God’s so! A muss, a muss, a muss, a muss!

[Cokes leads the scramble.]

COSTERMONGER

Good gentleman, my ware, my ware, I am a poor man. Good

sir, my ware.

NIGHTINGALE

Let me hold your sword, sir: it troubles you.

COKES

Do, and my cloak, an thou wilt; and my hat, too. 30

Cokes falls a-scrambling [again] whilst they run away with his things.

EDGWORTH

A delicate great boy! Methinks he out-scrambles ’em all. I cannot

persuade myself but he goes to grammar school yet, and plays the truant

today.

NIGHTINGALE

Would he had another purse to cut, Zekiel.

EDGWORTH

Purse? A man might cut out his kidneys, I think, and he never feel 35

’em, he is so earnest at the sport.

NIGHTINGALE

His soul is halfway out on’s body at the game.

EDGWORTH

Away, Nightingale: that way. [Exit Nightingale.]

COKES

I think I am furnished for Cathern pears for one undermeal. Gi’ me my

cloak. 40

COSTERMONGER

Good gentleman, give me my ware.

COKES

Where’s the fellow I ga’ my cloak to? My cloak! And my hat! Ha! God’s

lid, is he gone? Thieves, thieves, help me to cry, gentlemen! He runs out.

EDGWORTH

Away, costermonger, come to us to Urs’la’s. [Exit Costermonger.]

Talk of him to have a soul? Heart! If he have any more than a thing given him 45

instead of salt only to keep him from stinking, I’ll be hanged afore my time,

presently. Where should it be, trow? In his blood? He has not so much to’ard

it in his whole body as will maintain a good flea. And if he take this course, he

will not ha’ so much land left as to rear a calf within this twelvemonth. Was

there ever green plover so pulled! That his little overseer had been here now, 50

and been but tall enough, to see him steal pears in exchange for his beaver

hat and his cloak thus? I must go find him out next, for his black box and

his patent (it seems) he has of his place — which I think the gentleman would

have a reversion of, that spoke to me for it so earnestly. [Exit.]

[COKES] comes again.

COKES

Would I might lose my doublet and hose, too, as I am an honest man, 55

and never stir, if I think there be anything but thieving and cozening i’this

whole Fair. Barthol’mew Fair, quoth he: an ever any Barthol’mew had that

luck in’t that I have had, I’ll be martyred for him, and in Smithfield, too. I ha’

paid for my pears, a rot on ’em: I’ll keep ’em no longer. (Throws away his pears.)

You were choke-pears to me; I had been better ha’ gone to mumchance for 60

you, I wusse. Methinks the Fair should not have used me thus, an ’twere but

for my name’s sake: I would not ha’ used a dog o’the name so. Oh, Numps

will triumph, now!

TROUBLEALL comes again.

Friend, do you know who I am? Or where I lie? I do not myself, I’ll be sworn.

Do but carry me home, and I’ll please thee: I ha’ money enough there. I ha’ 65

lost myself, and my cloak and my hat, and my fine sword, and my sister, and

Numps, and Mistress Grace (a gentlewoman that I should ha’ married) and a

cut-work handkerchief she ga’ me, and two purses today. And my bargain o’

hobby-horses and gingerbread, which grieves me worst of all.

TROUBLEALL

By whose warrant, sir, have you done all this? 70

COKES

Warrant? Thou art a wise fellow, indeed. As if a man need a warrant to

lose anything with.

TROUBLEALL

Yes, Justice Overdo’s warrant, a man may get and lose with, I’ll

stand to’t.

COKES

Justice Overdo? Dost thou know him? I lie there: he is my brother-in-law, 75

he married my sister. Pray thee, show me the way — dost thou know the

house?

TROUBLEALL

Sir, show me your warrant: I know nothing without a warrant,

pardon me.

COKES

Why, I warrant thee, come along: thou shalt see I have wrought pillows 80

there, and cambric sheets, and sweet-bags, too. Pray thee, guide me to the

house.

TROUBLEALL

Sir, I’ll tell you: go you thither yourself first, alone; tell your

worshipful brother your mind; and but bring me three lines of his hand, or

his clerk’s, with ‘Adam Overdo’ underneath; here I’ll stay you, I’ll obey you, 85

and I’ll guide you presently.

COKES

’Slid, this is an ass; I ha’ found him. Pox upon me, what do I talking to

such a dull fool? Farewell, you are a very coxcomb, do you hear?

TROUBLEALL

I think I am: if Justice Overdo sign to it, I am, and so we are all;

he’ll quit us all, multiply us all. 90[Exeunt.]

4.3 [Enter] GRACE, QUARLOUS, [and] WINWIFE.
[ The men] enter with their swords drawn.

GRACE

Gentlemen, this is no way that you take: you do but breed one another

trouble and offence, and give me no contentment at all. I am no she that

affects to be quarrelled for, or have my name or fortune made the question

of men’s swords.

QUARLOUS

’Slood, we love you. 5

GRACE

If you both love me, as you pretend, your own reason will tell you but

one can enjoy me; and to that point, there leads a directer line than by my

infamy, which must follow if you fight. ’Tis true (I have professed it to you

ingenuously) that rather than to be yoked with this bridegroom is appointed

me, I would take up any husband, almost upon any trust — though subtlety 10

would say to me (I know) he is a fool, and has an estate, and I might govern

him, and enjoy a friend beside. But these are not my aims: I must have a

husband I can love, or I cannot live with him. I shall ill make one of these

politic wives!

WINWIFE

Why, if you can like either of us, lady, say which is he, and the other 15

shall swear instantly to desist.

QUARLOUS

Content, I accord to that willingly.

GRACE

Sure you think me a woman of an extreme levity, gentlemen, or a strange

fancy, that (meeting you by chance in such a place as this, both at one instant

and not yet of two hours’ acquaintance, neither of you deserving afore the 20

other of me) I should so forsake my modesty (though I might affect one more

particularly) as to say: This is he, and name him.

QUARLOUS

Why, wherefore should you not? What should hinder you?

GRACE

If you would not give it to my modesty, allow it yet to my wit: give me

so much of woman and cunning as not to betray myself impertinently. How 25

can I judge of you so far as to a choice, without knowing you more? You are

both equal and alike to me yet, and so indifferently affected by me as each

of you might be the man, if the other were away. For you are reasonable

creatures, you have understanding and discourse. And if fate send me an

understanding husband, I have no fear at all but mine own manners shall 30

make him a good one.

QUARLOUS

Would I were put forth to making for you then.

GRACE

It may be you are: you know not what’s toward you. Will you consent to

a motion of mine, gentlemen?

WINWIFE

Whatever it be, we’ll presume reasonableness, coming from you. 35

QUARLOUS

And fitness, too.

GRACE

I saw one of you buy a pair of tables e’en now.

WINWIFE

Yes, here they be, and maiden ones too, unwritten in.

GRACE

The fitter for what they may be employed in. You shall write either of

you here a word, or a name, what you like best — but of two or three syllables 40

at most; and the next person that comes this way — because destiny has a

high hand in business of this nature — I’ll demand which of the two words he

or she doth approve; and according to that sentence, fix my resolution and

affection, without change.

QUARLOUS

Agreed, my word is conceived already. 45

WINWIFE

And mine shall not be long creating after.

GRACE

But you shall promise, gentlemen, not to be curious to know which of

you it is, is taken; but give me leave to conceal that till you have brought me

either home, or where I may safely tender myself —

WINWIFE

Why, that’s but equal. 50

QUARLOUS

We are pleased.

GRACE

— because I will bind both your endeavours to work together friendly and

jointly, each to the other’s fortune, and have myself fitted with some means

to make him that is forsaken a part of amends.

QUARLOUS

These conditions are very courteous. Well, my word is out of the 55

Arcadia then: ‘Argalus’.

WINWIFE

And mine out of the play: ‘Palamon’.

[While they are writing in the tables,] TROUBLEALL comes again.

TROUBLEALL

Have you any warrant for this, gentlemen?

QUARLOUS, WINWIFE

Ha!

TROUBLEALL

There must be a warrant had, believe it. 60

WINWIFE

For what?

TROUBLEALL

For whatsoever it is, anything indeed, no matter what.

QUARLOUS

’Slight, here’s a fine ragged prophet, dropped down i’the nick!

TROUBLEALL

Heaven quit you, gentlemen.

QUARLOUS

Nay, stay a little. Good lady, put him to the question. 65

GRACE

You are content, then?

QUARLOUS, WINWIFE

Yes, yes.

GRACE

Sir, here are two names written —

TROUBLEALL

Is ‘Justice Overdo’ one?

GRACE

How, sir? I pray you, read ’em to yourself — it is for a wager between these 70

gentlemen — and with a stroke or any difference, mark which you approve

best.

TROUBLEALL

They may be both worshipful names for aught I know, mistress,

but ‘Adam Overdo’ had been worth three of ’em, I assure you, in this place —

that’s in plain English. 75

GRACE

This man amazes me! — I pray you, like one of ’em, sir.

TROUBLEALL

I do like him there that has the best warrant. Mistress, to save your

longing — and multiply him — it may be this. [He marks one of the names.] But I

am still for Justice Overdo, that’s my conscience. And quit you. [Exit.]

WINWIFE

Is’t done, lady? 80

GRACE

Ay, and strangely as ever I saw! What fellow is this, trow?

QUARLOUS

No matter what, a fortune-teller we ha’ made him. Which

is’t, which is’t?

GRACE

Nay, did you not promise not to inquire?

QUARLOUS

’Slid, I forgot that, pray you, pardon me. 85

[Enter] EDGWORTH.

[To Winwife] Look, here’s our Mercury come: the licence arrives i’the finest

time, too! ’Tis but scraping out Cokes his name, and ’tis done.

WINWIFE

How now, lime-twig? Hast thou touched?

EDGWORTH

Not yet, sir: except you would go with me and see’t, it’s not worth

speaking on. The act is nothing without a witness. Yonder he is, your man 90

with the box fall’n into the finest company, and so transported with vapours:

they ha’ got in a northern clothier, and one Puppy, a western man that’s come

to wrestle before my Lord Mayor anon, and Captain Whit, and one Val Cutting

that helps Captain Jordan to roar, a circling boy — with whom your Numps

is so taken that you may strip him of his clothes, if you will. I’ll undertake to 95

geld him for you, if you had but a surgeon ready to sear him. And Mistress

Justice there is the goodest woman! She does so love ’em all over, in terms of

justice, and the style of authority, with her hood upright — that I beseech you

come away, gentlemen, and see’t!

QUARLOUS

’Slight, I would not lose it for the Fair. What’ll you do, Ned? 100

WINWIFE

Why, stay here about for you. Mistress Wellborn must not be seen.

QUARLOUS

Do so, and find out a priest i’the meantime. I’ll bring the licence.

— Lead, which way is’t?

EDGWORTH

Here, sir, you are o’the backside o’the booth already: you may hear

the noise. 105[Exeunt Winwife and Grace.]

4.4 [Enter] KNOCKEM, NORDERN, PUPPY, CUTTING, WHIT, [Mistress] OVERDO, [and] WASP.
[Ursula’s booth opens, revealing the characters talking noisily.]

KNOCKEM

[Aside to Whit at a lull in the uproar] Whit, bid Val Cutting continue the

vapours for a lift, Whit, for a lift.

NORDERN

I’ll ne mare, I’ll ne mare, the eale’s too meeghty.

KNOCKEM

How now, my Galloway-nag, the staggers? Ha! Whit, gi’ him a slit

i’the forehead. Cheer up, man — a needle, and thread to stitch his ears! I’d 5

cure him now an I had it, with a little butter and garlic, long pepper and

grains. Where’s my horn? I’ll gi’ him a mash presently shall take away this

dizziness.

PUPPY

Why, where are you, zurs? Do you vlinch, and leave us i’the zuds, now?

NORDERN

I’ll ne mare, I’s e’en as vull as a paiper’s bag, by my troth, I. 10

PUPPY

Do my northern cloth zhrink i’the wetting? Ha?

KNOCKEM

Why, well said, old flea-bitten. Thou’lt never tire, I see.

They fall to their vapours again.

CUTTING

No, sir, but he may tire, if it please him.

WHIT

Who told dee sho, that he vuld never teer, man?

CUTTING

No matter who told him so, so long as he knows. 15

KNOCKEM

Nay, I know nothing, sir, pardon me there.

[Edgworth and Quarlous approach, but stand to one side.]

EDGWORTH

[To Quarlous] They are at it still, sir: this they call vapours.

WHIT

He shall not pardon dee, captain, dou shalt not be pardoned. Pre’de,

shweet heart, do not pardon him.

CUTTING

’Slight, I’ll pardon him, an I list, whosoever says nay to’t. 20

QUARLOUS

[To Edgworth] Where’s Numps? I miss him.

WASP

Why, I say nay to’t.

QUARLOUS

Oh, there he is!

KNOCKEM

To what do you say nay, sir? Here they continue their game of

WASP

To anything, whatsoever it is, so vapours, which is nonsense: every 25

long as I do not like it. man to oppose the last man that

WHIT

Pardon me, little man, dou musht like it spoke, whether it concerned

a little. him or no.

CUTTING

No, he must not like it at all, sir: there you are i’the wrong.

WHIT

I tink I be: he musht not like it, indeed. 30

CUTTING

Nay, then he both must and will like it, sir, for all you.

KNOCKEM

If he have reason, he may like it, sir.

WHIT

By no meansh, captain, upon reason, he may like nothing upon reason.

WASP

I have no reason, nor I will hear of no reason, nor I will look for no reason,

and he is an ass that either knows any, or looks for’t, from me. 35

CUTTING

Yes, in some sense you may have reason, sir.

WASP

Ay, in some sense, I care not if I grant you.

WHIT

Pardon me, thou ougsht to grant him nothing, in no shensh, if dou do

love dyshelf, angry man.

WASP

Why then, I do grant him nothing, and I have no sense. 40

CUTTING

’Tis true, thou hast no sense indeed.

WASP

’Slid, but I have sense, now I think on’t better, and I will grant him

anything, do you see?

KNOCKEM

He is i’the right, and does utter a sufficient vapour.

CUTTING

Nay, it is no sufficient vapour, neither, I deny that. 45

KNOCKEM

Then it is a sweet vapour.

CUTTING

It may be a sweet vapour.

WASP

Nay, it is no sweet vapour neither, sir: it stinks, and I’ll stand to’t.

WHIT

Yes, I tink it dosh shtink, captain. All vapour dosh shtink.

WASP

Nay, then it does not stink, sir, and it shall not stink. 50

CUTTING

By your leave, it may, sir.

WASP

Ay, by my leave, it may stink, I know that.

WHIT

Pardon me, thou knowesht nothing: it cannot, by thy leave, angry man.

WASP

How can it not?

KNOCKEM

Nay, never question him, for he is i’the right. 55

WHIT

Yesh, I am i’ de right, I confesh it; so ish de little man, too.

WASP

I’ll have nothing confessed that concerns me. I am not i’the right, nor

never was i’the right, nor never will be i’the right, while I am in my right

mind.

CUTTING

Mind? Why, here’s no man minds you, sir, nor anything else. 60

They drink again.

PUPPY

[Pressing drink upon Nordern] Vriend, will you mind this that we do?

QUARLOUS

[To Edgworth] Call you this vapours? This is such belching of quarrel

as I never heard. Will you mind your business, sir?

EDGWORTH

You shall see, sir.

NORDERN

[To Puppy] I’ll ne maire, my waimb warks too mickle with this auready. 65

EDGWORTH

[Coming forward] Will you take that, Master Wasp, that nobody

should mind you?

WASP

Why? What ha’ you to do? Is’t any matter to you?

EDGWORTH

No, but methinks you should not be unminded, though.

WASP

Nor I wu’ not be, now I think on’t. Do you hear, new acquaintance, does 70

no man mind me, say you?

CUTTING

Yes, sir, every man here minds you, but how?

WASP

Nay, I care as little how, as you do. That was not my question.

WHIT

No, noting was ty question. Tou art a learned man, and I am a valiant man,

i’faith, la: tou shalt speak for me, and I vill fight for tee. 75

KNOCKEM

Fight for him, Whit? A gross vapour, he can fight for himself.

WASP

It may be I can, but it may be I wu’ not. How then?

CUTTING

Why, then you may choose.

WASP

Why, and I’ll choose whether I’ll choose or no.

KNOCKEM

I think you may, and ’tis true; and I allow it for a resolute vapour. 80

WASP

Nay, then, I do think you do not think, and it is no resolute vapour.

CUTTING

Yes, in some sort he may allow you.

KNOCKEM

In no sort, sir, pardon me, I can allow him nothing. You mistake the

vapour.

WASP

He mistakes nothing, sir, in no sort. 85

WHIT

Yes, I pre dee now, let him mistake.

WASP

A turd i’your teeth, never ‘pre dee’ me, for I will have nothing mistaken.

KNOCKEM

Turd, ha, turd? a noisome vapour — strike, Whit.

They fall by the ears.

[Edgworth steals the licence from the box, and exit.]

MRS OVERDO

Why, gentlemen, why, gentlemen, I charge you upon my authority,

conserve the peace! In the King’s name, and my husband’s, put up your 90

weapons! I shall be driven to commit you myself else.

QUARLOUS

Ha, ha, ha.

WASP

Why do you laugh, sir?

QUARLOUS

Sir, you’ll allow me my Christian liberty. I may laugh, I hope.

CUTTING

In some sort you may, and in some sort you may not, sir. 95

KNOCKEM

Nay in some sort, sir, he may neither laugh nor hope in this company.

WASP

Yes, then he may both laugh and hope in any sort, an’t please him.

QUARLOUS

Faith, and I will then, for it doth please me exceedingly.

WASP

No exceeding neither, sir.

KNOCKEM

No, that vapour is too lofty. 100

QUARLOUS

Gentlemen, I do not play well at your game of vapours, I am not very

good at it, but —

CUTTING

Do you hear, sir? I would speak with you in circle?

He draws a circle on the ground.

QUARLOUS

In circle, sir? What would you with me in circle?

CUTTING

Can you lend me a piece, a Jacobus, in circle? 105

QUARLOUS

’Slid, your circle will prove more costly than your vapours, then. Sir,

no, I lend you none.

CUTTING

Your beard’s not well turned up, sir.

QUARLOUS

How, rascal? Are you playing with my beard? I’ll break circle with

you. 110

They draw all, and fight.

PUPPY, NORDERN

Gentlemen, gentlemen!

KNOCKEM

Gather up, Whit, gather up, Whit, good vapours.

[Knockem and Whit steal and hide the cloaks discarded in the fighting, and exeunt.]

MRS OVERDO

What mean you? Are you rebels? Gentlemen! Shall I send out a

sergeant-at-arms or a Writ o’ Rebellion against you? I’ll commit you, upon

my womanhood, for a riot, upon my justicehood, if you persist. 115

[Exeunt Quarlous and Cutting.]

WASP

Upon your justicehood? Marry, shite o’your hood! You’ll commit? Spoke

like a true justice of peace’s wife, indeed, and a fine female lawyer! Turd

i’your teeth for a fee now.

MRS OVERDO

Why, Numps, in Master Overdo’s name, I charge you.

WASP

Good Mistress Underdo, hold your tongue. 120

MRS OVERDO

Alas! poor Numps.

WASP

Alas! And why ‘alas’ from you, I beseech you? Or why ‘poor Numps’, Goody

Rich? Am I come to be pitied by your tuftaffeta now? Why, mistress, I knew

Adam the clerk, your husband, when he was Adam scrivener and writ for

twopence a sheet, as high as he bears his head now, or you your hood, dame. 125

The WATCH comes in [led by BRISTLE and followed by WHIT].

What are you, sir?

BRISTLE

We be men, and no infidels. What is the matter here, and the noises?

Can you tell?

WASP

Heart, what ha’ you to do? Cannot a man quarrel in quietness, but he must

be put out on’t by you? What are you? 130

BRISTLE

Why, we be His Majesty’s watch, sir.

WASP

Watch? ’Sblood, you are a sweet watch, indeed. A body would think, an you

watched well a-nights, you should be contented to sleep at this time a-day.

Get you to your fleas and your flock-beds, you rogues, your kennels, and lie

down close. 135

BRISTLE

Down? Yes, we will down, I warrant you: down with him in His

Majesty’s name, down, down with him, and carry him away to the pigeon-

holes.

[Some of the Watch seize Wasp, and carry him off.]

MRS OVERDO

I thank you, honest friends, in the behalf o’the crown and the

peace, and in Master Overdo’s name, for suppressing enormities. 140

WHIT

[Indicating Nordern and Puppy, drunk and asleep] Stay, Bristle, here ish anoder

brash o’ drunkards, but very quiet, special drunkards, will pay dee five

shillings very well. Take ’em to dee, in de graish o’ God: one of ’em does

change cloth for ale in the Fair here; te toder ish a strong man, a mighty

man, my Lord Mayor’s man, and a wrestler. He has wreshled so long with 145

the bottle here, that the man with the beard hash almosht streeke up hish

heelsh.

BRISTLE

’Slid, the clerk o’the market has been to cry him all the Fair over here,

for my lord’s service.

WHIT

Tere he ish, pre de taik him hensh, and make ty best on him. 150

[Exeunt Bristle and Watch, with Puppy and Nordern.]

How now, woman o’ shilke, vat ailsh ty shweet faish? Art tou melancholy?

MRS OVERDO

A little distempered with these enormities. Shall I intreat a courtesy

of you, captain?

WHIT

Entreat a hundred, velvet voman, I vill do it, shpeak out.

MRS OVERDO

I cannot with modesty speak it out, but — 155

[She whispers in his ear.]

WHIT

I vill do it, and more, and more, for dee. — [Loudly] What, Urs’la, an’t be,

bitch, an’t be, bawd, an’t be!

[Enter URSULA.]

URSULA

How now, rascal? What roar you for, old pimp?

WHIT

[Aside to her, indicating the stolen goods] Here, put up de cloaks, Ursh, de

purchase. — Pre dee now, shweet Ursh, help dis good brave voman to a jordan, 160

an’t be.

URSULA

’Slid, call your Captain Jordan to her, can you not?

WHIT

Nay, pre dee leave dy consheits, and bring the velvet woman to de —

URSULA

I bring her, hang her! Heart, must I find a common pot for every punk

i’your purlieus? 165

WHIT

Oh, good voordsh, Ursh: it ish a guest o’ velvet, i’fait, la.

URSULA

Let her sell her hood, and buy a sponge, with a pox to her. My vessel is

employed, sir. I have but one, and ’tis the bottom of an old bottle. An honest

proctor and his wife are at it within. If she’ll stay her time, so.

WHIT

As soon ash tou cansht, shwet Ursh. 170[Exit Ursula into her booth.]

Of a valiant man, I tink I am the patientsh man i’the world, or in all Smithfield.

[Enter KNOCKEM.]

KNOCKEM

How now, Whit? Close vapours, stealing your leaps? Covering in

corners, ha?

WHIT

No, fait, captain, dough tou beesht a vishe man, dy vit is a mile hence,

now. I vas procuring a shmall courtesy for a woman of fashion here. 175

MRS OVERDO

Yes, captain, though I am justice of peace’s wife, I do love men of

war and the sons of the sword, when they come before my husband.

KNOCKEM

Say’st thou so, filly? Thou shalt have a leap presently; I’ll horse thee

myself, else.

[Enter URSULA.]

URSULA

Come, will you bring her in now, and let her take her turn? 180

WHIT

Gramercy, good Ursh, I tank dee.

MRS OVERDO

Master Overdo shall thank her. [Exit Mistress Overdo.]

4.5 [Enter] JOHN [and] WIN.

JOHN

Good Gammer Urs, Win and I are exceedingly beholden to you, and to

Captain Jordan, and Captain Whit. — Win, I’ll be bold to leave you i’this good

company, Win, for half an hour or so, Win, while I go and see how my matter

goes forward, and if the puppets be perfect. And then I’ll come and fetch you,

Win. 5

WIN

Will you leave me alone with two men, John?

JOHN

Ay, they are honest gentlemen, Win — Captain Jordan and Captain Whit

— they’ll use you very civilly, Win. God b’w’you, Win. [Exit.]

URSULA

[Aside to Knockem and Whit] What’s her husband gone?

KNOCKEM

On his false gallop, Urs, away. 10

URSULA

An you be right Barthol’mew-birds, now show yourselves so: we are

undone for want of fowl i’the Fair here. Here will be Zekiel Edgworth, and

three or four gallants with him, at night, and I ha’ neither plover nor quail

for ’em. Persuade this between you two to become a bird o’the game, while I

work the velvet woman within (as you call her). 15

KNOCKEM

I conceive thee, Urs! Go thy ways. [Exit Ursula into her booth.]

[Speaking to be overheard by Win] Dost thou hear, Whit, is’t not pity my delicate

dark chestnut here, with the fine lean head, large forehead, round eyes, even

mouth, sharp ears, long neck, thin crest, close withers, plain back, deep

sides, short fillets, and full flanks — with a round belly, a plump buttock, 20

large thighs, knit knees, straight legs, short pasterns, smooth hoofs, and

short heels — should lead a dull honest woman’s life, that might live the life

of a lady?

WHIT

Yes, by my fait and trot, it is, captain. De honesht woman’s life is a scurvy

dull life, indeed, la. 25

WIN

How, sir? Is an honest woman’s life a scurvy life?

WHIT

Yes, fait, shweetheart, believe him: de leefe of a bondwoman! But if dou

vilt harken to me, I vill make tee a free woman, and a lady; dou shalt live like

a lady, as te captain saish.

KNOCKEM

Ay, and be honest too sometimes: have her wires and her tires, her 30

green gowns, and velvet petticoats.

WHIT

Ay, and ride to Ware and Romford i’ dy coash, shee de players, be in love

vit ’em; sup vit gallantsh, be drunk, and cost de noting.

KNOCKEM

Brave vapours!

WHIT

And lie by twenty on ’em, if dou pleash, shweetheart. 35

WIN

What, and be honest still? That were fine sport.

WHIT

’Tish common, shweetheart, tou mayst do it, by my hand. It shall be

justified to ty husband’s faish now: tou shalt be as honesht as the skin between

his hornsh, la!

KNOCKEM

Yes, and wear a dressing, top and topgallant, to compare with e’er a 40

husband on ’em all for a foretop: it is the vapour of spirit in the wife to cuckold

nowadays, as it is the vapour of fashion in the husband not to suspect. Your

prying cat-eyed citizen is an abominable vapour.

WIN

Lord, what a fool have I been!

WHIT

Mend then, and do everyting like a lady hereafter: never know ty husband 45

from another man.

KNOCKEM

Nor any one man from another, but i’the dark.

WHIT

Ay, and then it ish no dishgrash to know any man.

URSULA

[Within her booth] Help, help, here!

KNOCKEM

How now? What vapour’s there? 50

[Enter URSULA.]

URSULA

Oh, you are a sweet ranger, and look well to your walks! Yonder is your

punk of Turnbull, Ramping Alice, has fall’n upon the poor gentlewoman

within, and pulled her hood over her ears and her hair through it.

ALICE enters, beating the Justice’s wife.

MRS OVERDO

Help, help, i’the King’s name!

ALICE

A mischief on you, they are such as you are that undo us, and take our 55

trade from us, with your tuftaffeta haunches!

KNOCKEM

How now, Alice!

ALICE

The poor common whores can ha’ no traffic for the privy rich ones: your

caps and hoods of velvet call away our customers, and lick the fat from us.

URSULA

Peace, you foul ramping jade, you — 60

ALICE

’Od’s foot, you bawd in grease, are you talking?

KNOCKEM

Why, Alice, I say!

ALICE

Thou sow of Smithfield, thou!

URSULA

Thou tripe of Turnbull!

KNOCKEM

Cat-a-mountain vapours! Ha! 65

URSULA

You know where you were tawed lately: both lashed and slashed you

were in Bridewell.

ALICE

Ay, by the same token, you rid that week, and broke out the bottom o’the

cart, night-tub.

KNOCKEM

Why, lion face! Ha! Do you know who I am? Shall I tear ruff, slit 70

waistcoat, make rags of petticoat? Ha! Go to, vanish, for fear of vapours.

Whit, a kick, Whit, in the parting vapour.

[Exit Alice, kicked out by Knockem and Whit.]

[To Mistress Overdo] Come, brave woman, take a good heart: thou shalt be a

lady, too.

WHIT

Yes, fait, dey shall all both be ladies, and write ‘Madam’. I vill do’t myself 75

for dem: ‘Do’ is the vord, and D is the middle letter of ‘Madam’: D D. Put ’em

together and make deeds, without which all words are alike, la.

KNOCKEM

’Tis true, Urs’la. Take ’em in, open thy wardrobe, and fit ’em to their

calling. Green gowns, crimson petticoats, green women! My Lord Mayor’s

green women! Guests o’the game, true bred. I’ll provide you a coach to take 80

the air in.

WIN

But do you think you can get one?

KNOCKEM

Oh, they are as common as wheelbarrows where there are great

dunghills. Every pettifogger’s wife has ’em, for first he buys a coach that

he may marry, and then he marries that he may be made cuckold in’t: for if 85

their wives ride not to their cuckolding, they do ’em no credit. Hide and be

hidden; ride and be ridden, says the vapour of experience.

[Exeunt Ursula, Win, and Mistress Overdo into the rear section of the booth.]

4.6 [Enter] TROUBLEALL.

TROUBLEALL

By what warrant does it say so?

KNOCKEM

Ha! Mad child o’the Piepowders, art thou there? —

[Calling into the booth]

Fill us a fresh can, Urs, we may drink together!

TROUBLEALL

I may not drink without a warrant, captain.

KNOCKEM

’Slood, thou’ll not stale without a warrant, shortly. Whit, give me 5

pen, ink, and paper: I’ll draw him a warrant presently.

TROUBLEALL

It must be Justice Overdo’s!

KNOCKEM

I know, man. Fetch the drink, Whit.

WHIT

I pre dee now, be very brief, captain, for de new ladies stay for dee.

[Exit, returning at once with the drinks and writing materials.]

KNOCKEM

[Writing] Oh, as brief as can be. Here ’tis already: ‘Adam Overdo’. 10

TROUBLEALL

Why, now I’ll pledge you, captain.

KNOCKEM

Drink it off. I’ll come to thee anon, again.

[Exeunt Knockem, Whit, and Troubleall.]

[Enter] QUARLOUS [and] EDGWORTH.

QUARLOUS

(To the Cutpurse [as he hands over the licence]) Well, sir. You are now

discharged; beware of being spied hereafter.

EDGWORTH

Sir, will it please you enter in here at Urs’la’s, and take part of a 15

silken gown, a velvet petticoat, or a wrought smock? I am promised such,

and I can spare any gentleman a moiety.

QUARLOUS

Keep it for your companions in beastliness; I am none of ’em, sir. If

I had not already forgiven you a greater trespass, or thought you yet worth

my beating, I would instruct your manners to whom you made your offers. 20

But go your ways, talk not to me: the hangman is only fit to discourse with

you; the hand of beadle is too merciful a punishment for your trade of life.

[Exit Edgworth.]

I am sorry I employed this fellow, for he thinks me such. Facinus quos inquinat, aequat.

But it was for sport. And would I make it serious, the getting of this

licence is nothing to me without other circumstances concur. I do think how 25

impertinently I labour if the word be not mine that the ragged fellow marked

— and what advantage I have given Ned Winwife in this time now of working

her, though it be mine. He’ll go near to form to her what a debauched rascal

I am, and fright her out of all good conceit of me — I should do so by him,

I am sure, if I had the opportunity. But my hope is in her temper yet — and 30

it must needs be next to despair that is grounded on any part of a woman’s

discretion. I would give, by my troth, now, all I could spare (to my clothes

and my sword) to meet my tattered soothsayer again who was my judge i’the

question, to know certainly whose word he has damned or saved. For till

then, I live but under a reprieve. I must seek him. — Who be these? 35

Enter WASP with [BRISTLE and some of] the OFFICERS.

WASP

Sir, you are a Welsh cuckold, and a prating runt, and no constable.

BRISTLE

You say very well. Come put in his leg in the middle roundel, and let

him hole there.

WASP

[As Bristle puts him in the stocks] You stink of leeks, metheglin, and cheese.

You rogue! 40

BRISTLE

Why, what is that to you, if you sit sweetly in the stocks in the

meantime? If you have a mind to stink, too, your breeches sit close enough

to your bum. Sit you merry, sir.

QUARLOUS

How now, Numps?

WASP

It is no matter, how. Pray you, look off. 45

QUARLOUS

Nay, I’ll not offend you, Numps. I thought you had sat there to be

seen.

WASP

And to be sold, did you not? Pray you, mind your business, an you have

any.

QUARLOUS

Cry you mercy, Numps. Does your leg lie high enough? 50

[Enter] HAGGIS.

BRISTLE

How now, neighbour Haggis, what says Justice Overdo’s Worship to

the other offenders?

HAGGIS

Why, he says just nothing. What should he say? Or where should he

say? He is not to be found, man. He ha’ not been seen i’the Fair here all

this livelong day, never since seven a’clock i’the morning. His clerks know 55

not what to think on’t. There is no Court of Piepowders yet. — Here they be

returned.

[Enter other OFFICERS with] JUSTICE OVERDO [and] BUSY.

BRISTLE

What shall be done with ’em, then, in your discretion?

HAGGIS

I think we were best put ’em in the stocks, in discretion (there they

will be safe, in discretion) for the valour of an hour, or such a thing, till his 60

worship come.

BRISTLE

It is but a hole matter if we do, neighbour Haggis. [To Wasp] Come, sir,

here is company for you. [To Haggis] Heave up the stocks.

WASP

[Aside] I shall put a trick upon your Welsh diligence, perhaps.

As they open the stocks, Wasp puts his shoe on his hand, and slips it in for his leg.

BRISTLE

[To Busy] Put in your leg, sir. 65

QUARLOUS

What, Rabbi Busy! Is he come?

They bring Busy, and put him in. [When Justice Overdo has also been put in, the Watch stand aside.]

BUSY

I do obey thee: the lion may roar, but he cannot bite. I am glad to be thus

separated from the heathen of the land, and put apart in the stocks for the

holy Cause.

WASP

What are you, sir? 70

BUSY

One that rejoiceth in his affliction, and sitteth here to prophesy the

destruction of fairs and May-games, wakes, and Whitsun ales, and doth

sigh and groan for the reformation of these abuses.

WASP

[To Justice Overdo] And do you sigh and groan, too, or rejoice in your

affliction? 75

JUSTICE

I do not feel it, I do not think of it, it is a thing without me. [To himself]

Adam, thou art above these batteries, these contumelies. In te manca ruit fortuna,

as thy friend Horace says; thou art one quem neque pauperies, neque

mors, neque vincula terrent. And therefore, as another friend of thine says (I

think it be thy friend Persius) Non te quaesiveris extra. 80

QUARLOUS

[Overhearing] What’s here? A Stoic i’the stocks? The fool is turned

philosopher!

BUSY

Friend, I will leave to communicate my spirit with you if I hear any more

of those superstitious relics, those lists of Latin, the very rags of Rome and

patches of popery. 85

WASP

Nay, an you begin to quarrel, gentlemen, I’ll leave you. I ha’ paid for

quarrelling too lately: look you, a device, but shifting in a hand for a foot.

God b’w’you.

He gets out.

BUSY

Wilt thou then leave thy brethren in tribulation?

WASP

For this once, sir. 90

BUSY

Thou art a halting neutral — stay him there, stop him! — that will not endure

the heat of persecution! [Exit Wasp, hobbling rapidly.]

BRISTLE

How now, what’s the matter?

BUSY

He is fled, he is fled, and dares not sit it out.

BRISTLE

What, has he made an escape, which way? Follow, neighbour Haggis! 95

[Exeunt Watch.]

[Enter Mistress] PURECRAFT.

PURECRAFT

Oh, me! In the stocks! Have the wicked prevailed?

BUSY

Peace, religious sister, it is my calling, comfort yourself, an extraordinary

calling, and done for my better standing, my surer standing, hereafter.

The madman enters.

TROUBLEALL

By whose warrant, by whose warrant, this?

QUARLOUS

Oh, here’s my man dropped in I looked for! 100

JUSTICE

Ha!

PURECRAFT

Oh, good sir, they have set the faithful here to be wondered at, and

provided holes for the holy of the land.

TROUBLEALL

Had they warrant for it? Showed they Justice Overdo’s hand? If

they had no warrant, they shall answer it. 105

[The WATCH Enter.]

BRISTLE

Sure, you did not lock the stocks sufficiently, neighbour Toby!

HAGGIS

No! See if you can lock ’em better.

BRISTLE

[Checking the stocks] They are very sufficiently locked, and truly, yet

something is in the matter.

TROUBLEALL

True, your warrant is the matter that is in question. By what 110

warrant?

BRISTLE

Madman, hold your peace: I will put you in his room else, in the very

same hole, do you see?

QUARLOUS

[Aside] How! Is he a madman?

TROUBLEALL

Show me Justice Overdo’s warrant, I obey you. 115

HAGGIS

You are a mad fool. Hold your tongue. [Exeunt Watch.]

TROUBLEALL

In Justice Overdo’s name, I drink to you, and here’s my warrant.

[He] shows his can.

JUSTICE

[Aside] Alas, poor wretch! How it earns my heart for him!

QUARLOUS

[Aside] If he be mad, it is in vain to question him. I’ll try, though. —

Friend, there was a gentlewoman showed you two names, some hour since: 120

‘Argalus’ and ‘Palamon’, to mark in a book. Which of ’em was it you marked?

TROUBLEALL

I mark no name but ‘Adam Overdo’: that is the name of names.

He only is the sufficient magistrate, and that name I reverence: show it me.

QUARLOUS

[Aside] This fellow’s mad indeed; I am further off now than afore.

JUSTICE

[Aside] I shall not breathe in peace till I have made him some amends. 125

QUARLOUS

Well, I will make another use of him, is come in my head: I have a

nest of beards in my trunk, one something like his. [Exit.]

The WATCHMEN come back again.

BRISTLE

This mad fool has made me that I know not whether I have locked the

stocks or no. I think I locked ’em.

[They start checking the lock.]

TROUBLEALL

Take Adam Overdo in your mind, and fear nothing. 130

BRISTLE

’Slid, madness itself, hold thy peace, and take that. [He hits him.]

TROUBLEALL

Strikest thou without a warrant? Take thou that.

The madman fights with ’em, and they leave open the stocks.

BUSY

We are delivered by miracle! Fellow in fetters, let us not refuse the means;

this madness was of the spirit. The malice of the enemy hath mocked itself.

[Exeunt Busy and Justice Overdo.]

PURECRAFT

Mad do they call him! The world is mad in 135

error, but he is mad in truth. I love him o’the sudden — the cunning man said all true — and shall

love him more and more. How well it becomes a man to be mad in truth! Oh,

that I might be his yoke-fellow and be mad with him, what a many should

we draw to madness in truth with us! [Exit, following Troubleall.]

The Watch, missing them, are affrighted.

BRISTLE

How now! All scaped? Where’s the woman? It is witchcraft! Her velvet 140

hat is a witch, o’my conscience, or my key — t’ one! The madman was a devil,

and I am an ass; so bless me, my place, and mine office. [Exeunt.]

5.1 [Enter] LANTERN [LEATHERHEAD, finely dressed], FILCHER, [and] SHARKWELL [with a banner and a drum. They make ready their puppet theatre.]

LANTERN

Well, luck and Saint Barthol’mew! Out with the sign of our invention,

in the name of wit, and do you beat the drum the while! All the foul i’the Fair,

I mean all the dirt in Smithfield — that’s one of Master Littlewit’s carwitchets

now — will be thrown at our banner today, if the matter does not please the

people. Oh, the motions, that I Lantern Leatherhead have given light to i’my 5

time, since my master Pod died! Jerusalem Pod was a master of motions

was a stately thing; and so was Nineveh, and before him.

The City of Norwich, and Sodom and Gomorrah, with the rising o’the prentices

and pulling down the bawdy-houses there upon Shrove Tuesday. But The

Gunpowder Plot: there was a get-penny! I have presented that to an eighteen- or 10

twenty-pence audience nine times in an afternoon. Your home-born projects

prove ever the best, they are so easy and familiar. They put too much learning

i’their things nowadays, and that, I fear, will be the spoil o’this. Littlewit?

I say, Micklewit! If not too mickle! — Look to your gathering there, Goodman

Filcher. 15

FILCHER

I warrant you, sir.

LANTERN

An there come any gentlefolks, take twopence apiece, Sharkwell.

SHARKWELL

I warrant you, sir — threepence, an we can. [Exeunt into the booth.]

5.2 The JUSTICE comes in like a porter.

JUSTICE

This later disguise I have borrowed of a porter shall carry me out to all

my great and good ends, which, however interrupted, were never destroyed

in me. Neither is the hour of my severity yet come to reveal myself, wherein

cloudlike I will break out in rain and hail, lightning and thunder, upon the

head of enormity. Two main works I have to prosecute first: one is to invent 5

some satisfaction for the poor, kind wretch who is out of his wits for my sake,

and yonder I see him coming. I will walk aside, and project for it.

[He steps aside.]

[Enter] WINWIFE [and] GRACE.

WINWIFE

I wonder where Tom Quarlous is, that he returns not. It may be he is

struck in here to seek us.

GRACE

See, here’s our madman again. 10

[Enter separately] QUARLOUS [and Mistress] PURECRAFT.

Quarlous in the habit of the madman is mistaken by Mistress Purecraft.

QUARLOUS

[Aside] I have made myself as like him as his gown and cap will give

me leave.

PURECRAFT

[To Quarlous] Sir, I love you, and would be glad to be mad with you

in truth.

WINWIFE

[Aside] How! My widow in love with a madman? 15

PURECRAFT

Verily, I can be as mad in spirit as you.

QUARLOUS

By whose warrant? Leave your canting. [To Grace] Gentlewoman,

have I found you? — save ye, quit ye, and multiply ye. (He desires to see the book of Mistress Grace.)

Where’s your book? ’Twas a sufficient name I marked, let me

see ’t, be not afraid to show ’t me. 20

GRACE

What would you with it, sir?

QUARLOUS

Mark it again, and again, at your service.

GRACE

Here it is, sir: this was it you marked.

QUARLOUS

‘Palamon’! Fare you well, fare you well.

WINWIFE

How, Palamon! 25

GRACE

Yes, faith, he has discovered it to you now, and therefore ’twere vain to

disguise it longer. I am yours, sir, by the benefit of your fortune.

WINWIFE

And you have him, mistress, believe it, that shall never give you cause

to repent her benefit, but make you rather to think that in this choice she had

both her eyes. 30

GRACE

I desire to put it to no danger of protestation. [Exeunt Grace and Winwife.]

QUARLOUS

[Aside] ‘Palamon’ the word, and Winwife the man!

PURECRAFT

[To Quarlous] Good sir, vouchsafe a yoke-fellow in your madness,

shun not one of the sanctified sisters that would draw with you in truth.

QUARLOUS

Away, you are a herd of hypocritical, proud ignorants, rather wild 35

than mad, fitter for woods and the society of beasts than houses and the

congregation of men. You are the second part of the society of canters, outlaws to

order and discipline and the only privileged church-robbers of Christendom.

Let me alone. [Aside] ‘Palamon’ the word, and Winwife the man!

PURECRAFT

[Aside] I must uncover myself unto him or I shall never enjoy him, 40

for all the cunning men’s promises. — Good sir, hear me: I am worth six

thousand pound; my love to you is become my rack. I’ll tell you all, and the

truth, since you hate the hypocrisy of the parti-coloured Brotherhood. These

seven years I have been a wilful holy widow only to draw feasts and gifts from

my entangled suitors; I am also by office an assisting Sister of the Deacons, 45

and a devourer, instead of a distributer, of the alms. I am a special maker of

marriages for our decayed Brethren with our rich widows, for a third part of

their wealth when they are married, for the relief of the poor elect: as also

our poor handsome young virgins with our wealthy bachelors or widowers,

to make them steal from their husbands, when I have confirmed them in the 50

faith and got all put into their custodies. And if I ha’ not my bargain, they

may sooner turn a scolding drab into a silent minister than make me leave

pronouncing reprobation and damnation unto them. Our elder, Zeal-of-the-land,

would have had me, but I know him to be the capital knave of the land,

making himself rich by being made feoffee in trust to deceased Brethren, 55

and cozening their heirs by swearing the absolute gift of their inheritance.

And thus having eased my conscience and uttered my heart with the tongue

of my love, enjoy all my deceits together, I beseech you! I should not have

revealed this to you, but that in time I think you are mad, and I hope you’ll

think me so, too, sir! 60

QUARLOUS

Stand aside, I’ll answer you presently. (He considers with himself of it.)

Why should not I marry this six thousand pound, now I think on’t? And a

good trade too, that she has beside, ha? The t’other wench, Winwife is sure

of; there’s no expectation for me there! Here I may make myself some saver

yet, if she continue mad — there’s the question. It is money that I want: why 65

should I not marry the money, when ’tis offered me? I have a licence and all:

it is but razing out one name and putting in another. There’s no playing with

a man’s fortune! I am resolved! I were truly mad, an I would not!

(He takes her along with him.) Well, come your ways, follow me; an you will be mad, I’ll

show you a warrant! 70

PURECRAFT

Most zealously, it is that I zealously desire.

The Justice calls him [Aside].

JUSTICE

Sir, let me speak with you.

QUARLOUS

By whose warrant?

JUSTICE

The warrant that you tender and respect so, Justice Overdo’s! I am

the man, friend Troubleall, though thus disguised (as the careful magistrate 75

ought) for the good of the republic in the Fair, and the weeding out of

enormity. Do you want a house or meat, or drink, or clothes? Speak whatsoever it

is, it shall be supplied you. What want you?

QUARLOUS

Nothing but your warrant.

JUSTICE

My warrant? For what? 80

QUARLOUS

To be gone, sir.

JUSTICE

Nay, I pray thee, stay. I am serious, and have not many words, nor much

time to exchange with thee. Think what may do thee good.

QUARLOUS

Your hand and seal will do me a great deal of good — nothing else in

the whole Fair that I know. 85

JUSTICE

If it were to any end, thou shouldst have it willingly.

QUARLOUS

Why, it will satisfy me — that’s end enough — to look on. An you will

not gi’ it me, let me go.

JUSTICE

Alas! Thou shalt ha’ it presently; I’ll but step into the scrivener’s hereby,

and bring it. Do not go away. The Justice goes out. 90

QUARLOUS

[Aside] Why, this madman’s shape will prove a very fortunate one,

I think! Can a ragged robe produce these effects? If this be the wise Justice,

and he bring me his hand, I shall go near to make some use on’t. He is come

already!

And [the JUSTICE] returns.

JUSTICE

Look thee! Here is my hand and seal, ‘Adam Overdo’. If there be anything 95

to be written above in the paper that thou want’st now or at any time hereafter,

think on’t. It is my deed: I deliver it so. Can your friend write?

QUARLOUS

Her hand for a witness, and all is well.

JUSTICE

With all my heart.

He urgeth Mistress Purecraft [and she signs the deed].

QUARLOUS

[Aside] Why should not I ha’ the conscience to make this a bond of a 100

thousand pound now, or what I would else?

JUSTICE

[Handing over the document] Look you, there it is; and I deliver it as my

deed again.

QUARLOUS

[To Mistress Purecraft] Let us now proceed in madness.

He takes her in with him.

JUSTICE

Well, my conscience is much eased; I ha’ done my part. Though it doth 105

him no good, yet Adam hath offered satisfaction! The sting is removed from

hence. Poor man, he is much altered with his affliction, it has brought him

low! Now for my other work, reducing the young man I have followed so long

in love, from the brink of his bane to the centre of safety. Here, or in some

such like vain place, I shall be sure to find him. I will wait the good time. 110

[He steps to one side.]

5.3 [ Enter] SHARKWELL, FILCHER [at the entrance to the puppet theatre; then enter] COKES. The BOYS o’the Fair follow him.

COKES

How now? What’s here to do? Friend, art thou the master of the

monuments?

SHARKWELL

’Tis a motion, an’t please your worship.

JUSTICE

[Aside] My fantastical brother-in-law, Master Barthol’mew Cokes!

COKES

A motion, what’s that? (He reads the bill.) ‘The Ancient Modern History 5

of Hero and Leander, otherwise called The Touchstone of True Love, with as true

a trial of friendship between Damon and Pythias, two faithful friends o’the

Bankside.’ Pretty, i’faith — what’s the meaning on’t? Is’t an interlude? Or

what is’t?

FILCHER

Yes, sir. Please you come near; we’ll take your money within. 10

COKES

Back with these children; they do so follow me up and down.

[Enter] JOHN.

JOHN

[To Filcher] By your leave, friend.

FILCHER

You must pay, sir, an you go in.

JOHN

Who, I? I perceive thou know’st not me. Call the master o’the motion.

SHARKWELL

What, do you not know the author, fellow Filcher? You must take 15

no money of him; he must come in gratis. Master Littlewit is a voluntary: he

is the author.

JOHN

Peace, speak not too loud: I would not have any notice taken that I am the

author till we see how it passes.

COKES

Master Littlewit, how dost thou? 20

JOHN

Master Cokes! You are exceeding well met. What, in your doublet and

hose, without a cloak or a hat?

COKES

I would I might never stir, as I am an honest man, and by that fire: I have

lost all i’the Fair, and all my acquaintance too. Did’st thou meet anybody that

I know, Master Littlewit? My man Numps, or my sister Overdo, or Mistress 25

Grace? Pray thee, Master Littlewit, lend me some money to see the interlude

here. I’ll pay thee again, as I am a gentleman. If thou’lt but carry me home, I

have money enough there.

JOHN

Oh, sir, you shall command it. What, will a crown serve you?

COKES

I think it will. What do we pay for coming in, fellows? 30

FILCHER

Twopence, sir.

COKES

Twopence? There’s twelvepence, friend. Nay, I am a gallant, as simple as

I look now, if you see me with my man about me, and my artillery again.

JOHN

Your man was i’the stocks e’en now, sir.

COKES

Who, Numps? 35

JOHN

Yes, faith.

COKES

For what, i’faith? I am glad o’that — remember to tell me on’t anon; I have

enough now! What manner of matter is this, Master Littlewit? What kind of

actors ha’ you? Are they good actors?

JOHN

Pretty youths, sir: all children, both old and young. Here’s the master of 40

’em —

[Enter] LANTERN.

LANTERN

(Leatherhead whispers to Littlewit) Call me not Leatherhead, but Lantern.

JOHN

— Master Lantern, that gives light to the business.

COKES

In good time, sir, I would fain see ’em; I would be glad to drink with the

young company. Which is the tiring house? 45

LANTERN

Troth, sir, our tiring house is somewhat little: we are but beginners

yet; pray, pardon us. You cannot go upright in’t.

COKES

No? Not now my hat is off? What would you have done with me, if you

had had me feather and all, as I was once today? Ha’ you none of your pretty,

impudent boys now, to bring stools, fill tobacco, fetch ale, and beg money, 50

as they have at other houses? Let me see some o’your actors.

JOHN

Show him ’em, show him ’em, Master Lantern: this is a gentleman that is

a favourer of the quality. [Lantern goes into the booth.]

JUSTICE

[Aside] Ay, the favouring of this licentious quality is the consumption

of many a young gentleman — a pernicious enormity. 55

He brings them out in a basket.

COKES

What, do they live in baskets?

LANTERN

They do lie in a basket, sir; they are o’the small players.

COKES

These be ‘players minors’, indeed. Do you call these players?

LANTERN

They are actors, sir, and as good as any, none dispraised, for dumbshows —

indeed, I am the mouth of ’em all! 60

COKES

Thy mouth will hold ’em all. I think one tailor would go near to beat all

this company with a hand bound behind him.

JOHN

Ay, and eat ’em all, too, an they were in cake-bread.

COKES

I thank you for that, Master Littlewit, a good jest! Which is your Burbage

now? 65

LANTERN

What mean you by that, sir?

COKES

Your best actor: your Field?

JOHN

Good, i’faith! you are even with me, sir.

LANTERN

This is he that acts young Leander, sir. He is extremely beloved of the

womenkind: they do so affect his action, the green gamesters that come here. 70

And this is lovely Hero; this with the beard, Damon; and this, pretty Pythias;

this is the ghost of King Dionysius in the habit of a scrivener, as you shall see

anon, at large.

COKES

Well, they are a civil company; I like ’em for that. They offer not to fleer

nor jeer nor break jests, as the great players do. And then, there goes not so 75

much charge to the feasting of ’em, or making ’em drunk, as to the other, by

reason of their littleness. Do they use to play perfect? Are they never flustered?

LANTERN

No, sir. I thank my industry and policy for it; they are as well governed

a company, though I say it — And here is young Leander: is as proper an actor

of his inches, and shakes his head like an ostler. 80

COKES

But do you play it according to the printed book? I have read that.

LANTERN

By no means, sir.

COKES

No? How then?

LANTERN

A better way, sir — that is too learned and poetical for our audience:

what do they know what Hellespont is, ‘guilty of true love’s blood’? Or what 85

Abydos is, or ‘the other, Sestos hight’?

COKES

Thou’rt i’the right: I do not know myself.

LANTERN

No, I have entreated Master Littlewit to take a little pains to reduce it

to a more familiar strain for our people.

COKES

How, I pray thee, good Master Littlewit? 90

JOHN

It pleases him to make a matter of it, sir. But there is no such matter, I assure

you. I have only made it a little easy and modern for the times, sir, that’s all:

as, for the Hellespont I imagine our Thames here; and then Leander, I make a

dyer’s son about Puddle Wharf and Hero a wench o’the Bankside, who, going

over one morning to Old Fish Street, Leander spies her land at Trig Stairs, 95

and falls in love with her. Now do I introduce Cupid, having metamorphosed

himself into a drawer, and he strikes Hero in love, with a pint of sherry — and

other pretty passages there are o’the friendship that will delight you, sir, and

please you of judgement.

COKES

I’ll be 100

sworn they shall: I am in love with the actors already, and I’ll be

allied to them presently — they respect gentlemen, these fellows. Hero shallbe my fairing: but which of my fairings? — le’ me see — i’faith, my fiddle! And

Leander my fiddlestick. Then Damon my drum, and

Pythias my pipe, and the ghost of Dionysius my hobby-horse. All fitted.

5.4 [Enter] to them WINWIFE [and] GRACE.

WINWIFE

Look, yonder’s your Cokes gotten in among his playfellows; I thought

we could not miss him at such a spectacle.

GRACE

Let him alone. He is so busy, he will never spy us.

Cokes is handling the puppets.

LANTERN

Nay, good sir.

COKES

I warrant thee, I will not hurt her, fellow. What, dost think me uncivil? 5

I pray thee, be not jealous: I am toward a wife.

JOHN

Well, good Master Lantern, make ready to begin, that I may fetch my wife;

and look you be perfect: you undo me else i’my reputation.

LANTERN

I warrant you, sir, do not you breed too great an expectation of it

among your friends: that’s the only hurter of these things. 10

JOHN

No, no, no. [Exit.]

COKES

I’ll stay here, and see; pray thee, let me see.

WINWIFE

How diligent and troublesome he is!

GRACE

The place becomes him, methinks.

JUSTICE

[Aside] My ward, Mistress Grace, in the company of a stranger! I doubt 15

I shall be compelled to discover myself before my time!

[Enter] KNOCKEM, WHIT, [and] EDGWORTH [with] Mistress OVERDO [and] WIN. [The women are masked, and showily dressed in green gowns.]

The Doorkeepers speak.

FILCHER

Twopence apiece, gentlemen: an excellent motion!

KNOCKEM

Shall we have fine fireworks and good vapours?

SHARKWELL

Yes, captain, and waterworks, too.

WHIT

I pree dee, take a care o’ dy shmall lady there, Edgworth; I will look to dish 20

tall lady myself.

LANTERN

Welcome, gentlemen, welcome, gentlemen!

WHIT

Predee, mashter o’ de monshtersh, help a very sick lady here to a chair to

shit in.

LANTERN

Presently, sir. 25

[The Doorkeepers] bring Mistress Overdo a chair. [She quickly falls asleep.]

WHIT

Good fait now, Urs’la’s ale and aqua-vitae ish to blame for’t; shit down,

shweetheart, shit down, and shleep a little.

EDGWORTH

[To Win] Madam, you are very welcome hither.

KNOCKEM

Yes, and you shall see very good vapours.

JUSTICE

[Aside] Here is my care come! (By Edgworth.) I like to see him in so good 30

company; and yet I wonder that persons of such fashion should resort hither!

The Cutpurse courts Mistress Littlewit.

EDGWORTH

This is a very private house, madam.

LANTERN

Will it please your ladyship sit, madam?

WIN

Yes, goodman. [Aside] They do so all-to-be-madam me, I think they think

me a very lady! 35

EDGWORTH

What else, madam?

WIN

Must I put off my mask to him?

EDGWORTH

Oh, by no means.

WIN

How should my husband know me, then?

KNOCKEM

Husband? An idle vapour: he must not know you, nor you him — 40

there’s the true vapour.

JUSTICE

[Aside] Yea, I will observe more of this. [To Whit] Is this a lady, friend?

WHIT

Ay, and dat is anoder lady, shweetheart; if dou hasht a mind to ’em, give

me twelvepence from tee, and dou shalt have eder-oder on ’em!

JUSTICE

Ay! [Aside] This will prove my chiefest enormity: I will follow this. 45

EDGWORTH

Is not this a finer life, lady, than to be clogged with a husband?

WIN

Yes, a great deal. When will they begin, trow, in the name o’the motion?

EDGWORTH

By and by, madam: they stay but for company.

KNOCKEM

Do you hear, puppet-master, these are tedious vapours! When begin

you? 50

LANTERN

We stay but for Master Littlewit, the author, who is gone for his wife;

and we begin presently.

WIN

[Aside to Edgworth] That’s I, that’s I.

EDGWORTH

That was you, lady, but now you are no such poor thing.

KNOCKEM

Hang the author’s wife, a running vapour! Here be ladies will stay 55

for ne’er a Delia o’ ’em all.

WHIT

But hear me now, here ish one o’ de ladish ashleep. Stay till she but vake,

man.

[Enter] to them WASP.

WASP

How now, friends? What’s here to do?

The Doorkeepers again.

FILCHER

Twopence apiece, sir: the best motion in the Fair. 60

WASP

I believe you lie. If you do, I’ll have my money again, and beat you.

WINWIFE

Numps is come!

WASP

Did you see a master of mine come in here: a tall young squire of Harrow

o’the Hill, Master Barthol’mew Cokes?

FILCHER

I think there be such a one within. 65

WASP

Look he be: you were best — but it is very likely. I wonder I found him not

at all the rest. I ha’ been at the eagle, and the black wolf, and the bull with

the five legs and two pizzles — he was a calf at Uxbridge Fair two years agone

— and at the dogs that dance the morris, and the hare o’the taber, and missed

him at all these! Sure this must needs be some fine sight that holds him so, if 70

it have him.

COKES

Come, come, are you ready now?

LANTERN

Presently, sir.

WASP

[Aside] Hoyday, he’s at work in his doublet and hose. [To Cokes] Do you hear,

sir? Are you employed, that you are bare-headed and so busy? 75

COKES

Hold your peace, Numps: you ha’ been i’the stocks, I hear.

WASP

[To himself] Does he know that? Nay, then the date of my authority is out;

I must think no longer to reign; my government is at an end. He that will

correct another must want fault in himself.

WINWIFE

[Overhearing] Sententious Numps! I never heard so much from him 80

before.

LANTERN

Sure, Master Littlewit will not come. Please you take your place, sir;

we’ll begin.

COKES

I pray thee, do: mine ears long to be at it, and my eyes, too. — Oh, Numps,

i’the stocks, Numps? Where’s your sword, Numps? 85

WASP

I pray you, intend your game, sir; let me alone.

COKES

Well then, we are quit for all. Come, sit down, Numps; I’ll interpret to

thee. Did you see Mistress Grace? — it’s no matter neither, now I think on’t;

tell me anon.

WINWIFE

[To Grace] A great deal of love and care he expresses. 90

GRACE

Alas! Would you have him to express more than he has? That were

tyranny.

COKES

Peace, ho; now, now.

LANTERN

Gentles, that no longer your expectations may wander,

Behold our chief actor, amorous Leander, 95

With a great deal of cloth lapped about him like a scarf,

For he yet serves his father, a dyer at Puddle Wharf,

Which place we’ll make bold with to call it our Abydos,

As the Bankside is our Sestos, and let it not be denied us.

Now, as he is beating to make the dye take the fuller, 100

Who chances to come by but fair Hero in a sculler?

And, seeing Leander’s naked leg and goodly calf,

Cast at him from the boat a sheep’s eye and a half.

Now she is landed and the sculler come back;

By and by you shall see what Leander doth lack. 105

PUPPET LEANDER

Cole, Cole, old Cole!

LANTERN

That is the sculler’s name without control.

PUPPET LEANDER

Cole, Cole, I say, Cole!

LANTERN

We do hear you.

PUPPET LEANDER

Old Cole!

LANTERN

Old coal? Is the dyer turned collier? How do you sell?

PUPPET LEANDER

A pox o’your manners, kiss my hole here, and smell. 110

LANTERN

‘Kiss your hole, and smell’? There’s manners indeed.

PUPPET LEANDER

Why, Cole, I say, Cole!

LANTERN

It’s the sculler you need!

PUPPET LEANDER

Ay, and be hanged.

LANTERN

Be hanged? Look you yonder,

Old Cole, you must go hang with Master Leander.

PUPPET COLE

Where is he?

PUPPET LEANDER

Here, Cole, what fairest of fairs 115

Was that fare that thou landedst but now a’ Trig Stairs?

COKES

What was that, fellow? Pray thee, tell me: I scarce understand ’em.

LANTERN

Leander does ask, sir, what fairest of fairs,

Was the fare that he landed but now at Trig Stairs?

PUPPET COLE

It is lovely Hero. 120

PUPPET LEANDER

Nero?

PUPPET COLE

No, Hero.

LANTERN

It is Hero

Of the Bankside, he saith — to tell you truth without erring —

Is come over into Fish Street to eat some fresh herring. 125

Leander says no more, but as fast as he can,

Gets on all his best clothes, and will after to the Swan.

COKES

Most admirable good, is’t not?

LANTERN

Stay, sculler.

PUPPET COLE

What say you?

LANTERN

You must stay for Leander,

And carry him to the wench.

PUPPET COLE

You rogue, I am no pander. 130

COKES

He says he is no pander. ’Tis a fine language; I understand it now.

LANTERN

Are you no pander, Goodman Cole? Here’s no man says you are.

You’ll grow a hot Cole, it seems. Pray you, stay for your fare.

PUPPET COLE

Will he come away?

LANTERN

What do you say?

PUPPET COLE

I’d ha’ him come away.

LANTERN

Would you ha’ Leander come away? Why, pray, sir, stay. 135

You are angry, Goodman Cole; I believe the fair maid

Came over w’ you a’ trust — tell us, sculler, are you paid?

PUPPET COLE

Yes, Goodman Hogrubber o’ Pict-hatch.

LANTERN

How, Hogrubber o’ Pict-hatch?

PUPPET COLE

Ay, Hogrubber o’ Pict-hatch. 140

Take you that.

The puppet strikes him over the pate.

LANTERN

Oh, my head!

PUPPET COLE

Harm watch, harm catch.

COKES

‘Harm watch, harm catch’, he says — very good, i’faith. The sculler had

like to ha’ knocked you, sirrah.

LANTERN

Yes, but that his fare called him away.

PUPPET LEANDER

Row apace, row apace, row, row, row, row, row. 145

LANTERN

You are knavishly loaden, sculler: take heed where you go.

PUPPET COLE

Knave i’your face, Goodman Rogue.

PUPPET LEANDER

Row, row, row, row, row, row.

COKES

He said ‘knave i’your face’, friend.

LANTERN

Ay, sir, I heard him. But there’s no talking to these watermen: they 150

will ha’ the last word.

COKES

God’s my life! I am not allied to the sculler yet: he shall be ‘Dauphin my

boy’. But my fiddlestick does fiddle in and out too much. I pray thee, speak

to him on’t: tell him I would have him tarry in my sight more.

LANTERN

I pray you, be content; you’ll have enough on him, sir. 155

Now, gentles, I take it here is none of you so stupid

But that you have heard of a little god of love, called Cupid,

Who out of kindness to Leander, hearing he but saw her

This present day and hour, doth turn himself to a drawer.

And because he would have their first meeting to be merry, 160

He strikes Hero in love to him with a pint of sherry,

Which he tells her from amorous Leander is sent her,

Who after him into the room of Hero doth venter.

Puppet Leander goes into Mistress Hero’s room.

PUPPET JONAS

A pint of sack, score a pint of sack i’the Coney.

COKES

Sack? You said but e’en now it should be sherry. 165

PUPPET JONAS

Why so it is: sherry, sherry, sherry.

COKES

‘Sherry, sherry, sherry’! By my troth he makes me merry. I must have

a name for Cupid, too. Let me see — thou mightst help me now, an thou

wouldest, Numps, at a dead lift, but thou art dreaming o’the stocks still! Do

not think on’t, I have forgot it: ’tis but a nine days’ wonder, man; let it not 170

trouble thee.

WASP

I would the stocks were about your neck, sir, condition I hung by the heels

in them, till the wonder were off from you, with all my heart.

COKES

Well said, resolute Numps. — But hark you, friend, where is the friendship

all this while between my drum, Damon, and my pipe, Pythias? 175

LANTERN

You shall see by and by, sir.

COKES

You think my hobby-horse is forgotten, too; no, I’ll see ’em all enact before

I go; I shall not know which to love best, else.

KNOCKEM

This gallant has interrupting vapours, troublesome vapours. Whit,

puff with him. 180

WHIT

No, I pre dee, captain, let him alone. He is a child, i’faith, la.

LANTERN

Now, gentles, to the friends, who in number are two,

And lodged in that alehouse in which fair Hero does do.

Damon (for some kindness done him the last week)

Is come fair Hero in Fish Street this morning to seek: 185

Pythias does smell the knavery of the meeting,

And now you shall see their true friendly greeting.

PUPPET PYTHIAS

You whoremasterly slave, you.

COKES

‘Whoremasterly slave, you’? Very friendly and familiar, that.

PUPPET DAMON

Whoremaster i’thy face, 190

Thou hast lain with her thyself, I’ll prove’t i’this place.

COKES

Damon says Pythias has lain with her himself; he’ll prove’t in this place.

LANTERN

They are whoremasters both, sir, that’s a plain case.

PUPPET PYTHIAS

You lie like a rogue.

LANTERN

Do I lie like a rogue?

PUPPET PYTHIAS

A pimp and a scab.

LANTERN

A pimp and a scab? 195

I say between you, you have both but one drab.

PUPPET DAMON

You lie again.

LANTERN

Do I lie again?

PUPPET DAMON

Like a rogue again.

LANTERN

Like a rogue again?

PUPPET PYTHIAS

And you are a pimp again.

COKES

‘And you are a pimp again’, he says. 200

PUPPET DAMON

And a scab again.

COKES

‘And a scab again’, he says.

LANTERN

And I say again, you are both whoremasters again,

And you have both but one drab again.

They fight.

BOTH PUPPETS

Dost thou, dost thou, dost thou? 205

LANTERN

What, both at once?

PUPPET PYTHIAS

Down with him, Damon.

PUPPET DAMON

Pink his guts, Pythias.

LANTERN

What, so malicious!

Will ye murder me, masters both, i’mine own house? 210

COKES

Ho! well acted my drum, well acted my pipe, well acted still!

WASP

Well acted, with all my heart.

LANTERN

Hold, hold your hands.

COKES

Ay, both your hands, for my sake! For you ha’ both done well.

PUPPET DAMON

Gramercy, pure Pythias. 215

PUPPET PYTHIAS

Gramercy, dear Damon.

COKES

Gramercy to you both, my pipe and my drum.

BOTH PUPPETS

Come now, we’ll together to breakfast to Hero.

LANTERN

’Tis well, you can now go to breakfast to Hero;

You have given me my breakfast, with a ’hone and ’honero. 220

COKES

How is’t, friend? Ha’ they hurt thee?

LANTERN

Oh, no!

Between you and I, sir, we do but make show.

Thus, gentles, you perceive, without any denial,

’Twixt Damon and Pythias here, friendship’s true trial.

Though hourly they quarrel thus, and roar each with other, 225

They fight you no more than does brother with brother.

But friendly together, at the next man they meet

They let fly their anger, as here you might see’t.

COKES

Well, we have seen’t, and thou hast felt it, whatsoever thou sayest. What’s

next? What’s next? 230

LANTERN

This while young Leander with fair Hero is drinking,

And Hero grown drunk, to any man’s thinking!

Yet was it not three pints of sherry could flaw her,

Till Cupid, distinguished like Jonas the drawer,

From under his apron, where his lechery lurks, 235

Put love in her sack. Now mark how it works.

PUPPET HERO

O Leander, Leander, my dear, my dear Leander,

I’ll for ever be thy goose, so thou’lt be my gander.

COKES

Excellently well said, fiddle: she’ll ever be his goose, so he’ll be her gander

—was’t not so? 240

LANTERN

Yes, sir, but mark his answer now.

PUPPET LEANDER

And sweetest of geese, before I go to bed

I’ll swim o’er the Thames, my goose thee to tread.

COKES

Brave! He will swim o’er the Thames and tread his goose tonight, he says.

LANTERN

Ay, peace, sir: they’ll be angry if they hear you eavesdropping, now 245

they are setting their match.

PUPPET LEANDER

But lest the Thames should be dark, my goose, my dear friend,

Let thy window be provided of a candle’s end.

PUPPET HERO

Fear not, my gander: I protest, I should handle

My matters very ill if I had not a whole candle. 250

PUPPET LEANDER

Well then, look to’t, and kiss me to boot.

LANTERN

Now, here come the friends again, Pythias and Damon,

And under their cloaks they have of bacon a gammon.

DAMON and PYTHIAS enter [the alehouse].

PUPPET PYTHIAS

Drawer, fill some wine here.

LANTERN

How, some wine there?

There’s company already, sir, pray, forbear! 255

PUPPET DAMON

’Tis Hero.

LANTERN

Yes, but she will not be taken,

After sack and fresh herring, with your Dunmow bacon.

PUPPET PYTHIAS

You lie, it’s Westfabian.

LANTERN

‘Westphalian’, you should say.

PUPPET DAMON

If you hold not your peace, you are a coxcomb, I would say.

Leander and Hero are kissing.

PUPPET PYTHIAS

What’s here? What’s here? Kiss, kiss, upon kiss. 260

LANTERN

Ay, wherefore should they not? What harm is in this?

’Tis Mistress Hero.

PUPPET DAMON

Mistress Hero’s a whore.

LANTERN

Is she a whore? Keep you quiet, or sir knave, out of door.

PUPPET DAMON

Knave, out of door?

PUPPET HERO

Yes, knave, out of door.

Here the Puppets quarrel and fall together by the ears.

PUPPET DAMON

Whore, out of door.

PUPPET HERO

I say, knave, out of door. 265

PUPPET DAMON

I say, whore, out of door.

PUPPET PYTHIAS

Yea, so say I, too.

PUPPET HERO

Kiss the whore o’the arse.

LANTERN

Now you ha’ something to do:

You must kiss her o’the arse, she says.

BOTH PUPPETS

So we will, so we will.

[They kick her.]

PUPPET HERO

Oh, my haunches, oh, my haunches — hold, hold!

LANTERN [To Puppet Leander]

Stand’st thou still?

Leander, where art thou? Stand’st thou still like a sot, 270

And not offer’st to break both their heads with a pot?

See who’s at thine elbow, there! Puppet Jonas and Cupid.

PUPPET JONAS

Upon ’em Leander, be not so stupid.

They fight.

PUPPET LEANDER

You goat-bearded slave!

PUPPET DAMON

You whoremaster knave.

PUPPET LEANDER

Thou art a whoremaster.

PUPPET JONAS

Whoremasters all. 275

LANTERN

See, Cupid with a word has ta’en up the brawl.

KNOCKEM

These be fine vapours!

COKES

By this good day, they fight bravely! Do they not, Numps?

WASP

Yes, they lacked but you to be their second, all this while.

LANTERN

This tragical encounter, falling out thus to busy us, 280

It raises up the ghost of their friend Dionysius:

Not like a monarch, but the master of a school,

In a scrivener’s furred gown, which shows he is no fool,

For therein he hath wit enough to keep himself warm.

O Damon, he cries, and Pythias, what harm 285

Hath poor Dionysius done you in his grave

That, after his death, you should fall out thus, and rave,

And call amorous Leander whoremaster knave?

PUPPET DAMON

I cannot, I will not, I promise you, endure it.

5.5 [ Enter] to them BUSY.

BUSY

Down with Dagon, down with Dagon! ’Tis I, will no longer endure your

profanations.

LANTERN

What mean you, sir?

BUSY

I will remove Dagon there, I say, that idol, that heathenish idol, that

remains (as I may say) a beam, a very beam: not a beam of the sun, nor a beam 5

of the moon, nor a beam of a balance, neither a house beam, nor a weaver’s

beam, but a beam in the eye, in the eye of the Brethren; a very great beam, an

exceeding great beam; such as are your stage-players, rhymers, and morris

dancers, who have walked hand in hand in contempt of the Brethren and the

Cause; and been borne out by instruments of no mean countenance. 10

LANTERN

Sir, I present nothing but what is licensed by authority.

BUSY

Thou art all licence, even licentiousness itself, Shimei!

LANTERN

I have the Master of Revels’ hand for’t, sir.

BUSY

The Master of Rebels’ hand thou hast: Satan’s! Hold thy peace: thy scurrility

shut up thy mouth. Thy profession is damnable, and in pleading for it thou 15

dost plead for Baal. I have long opened my mouth wide and gaped, I have

gaped as the oyster for the tide after thy destruction, but cannot compass it

by suit or dispute, so that I look for a bickering ere long, and then a battle.

KNOCKEM

Good Banbury-vapours.

COKES

Friend, you’d have an ill match on’t, if you bicker with him here. Though 20

he be no man o’the fist, he has friends that will go to cuffs for him. Numps,

will not you take our side?

EDGWORTH

Sir, it shall not need. In my mind, he offers him a fairer course: to

end it by disputation! Hast thou nothing to say for thyself in defence of thy

quality? 25

LANTERN

Faith, sir, I am not well studied in these controversies between the

hypocrites and us. But here’s one of my motion, Puppet Dionysius, shall

undertake him, and I’ll venture the cause on’t.

COKES

Who? My hobby-horse? Will he dispute with him?

LANTERN

Yes, sir, and make a hobby-ass of him, I hope. 30

COKES

That’s excellent! Indeed he looks like the best scholar of ’em all. — Come,

sir, you must be as good as your word now.

BUSY

I will not fear to make my spirit and gifts known! Assist me, zeal, fill me,

fill me, that is, make me full!

WINWIFE

[To Grace] What a desperate, profane wretch is this! Is there any ignorance 35

or impudence like his, to call his zeal to fill him against a puppet?

GRACE

I know no fitter match than a puppet to commit with an hypocrite!

BUSY

First, I say unto thee, idol, thou hast no calling.

PUPPET DIONYSIUS

You lie, I am called Dionysius.

LANTERN

The Motion says you lie: he is called Dionysius i’the matter, and to 40

that calling he answers.

BUSY

I mean no vocation, idol, no present lawful calling.

PUPPET DIONYSIUS

Is yours a lawful calling?

LANTERN

The motion asketh if yours be a lawful calling?

BUSY

Yes, mine is of the spirit. 45

PUPPET DIONYSIUS

Then idol is a lawful calling.

LANTERN

He says, then idol is a lawful calling! For you called him idol, and your

calling is of the spirit.

COKES

Well disputed, hobby-horse!

BUSY

Take not part with the wicked, young gallant. He neigheth and hinnyeth; 50

all is but hinnying sophistry. I call him idol again. Yet I say, his calling, his

profession, is profane: it is profane, idol.

PUPPET DIONYSIUS

It is not profane!

LANTERN

It is not profane, he says.

BUSY

It is profane. 55

PUPPET DIONYSIUS

It is not profane.

BUSY

It is profane.

PUPPET DIONYSIUS

It is not profane.

LANTERN

Well said, confute him with ‘not’ still. — You cannot bear him down

with your base noise, sir. 60

BUSY

Nor he me, with his treble creaking, though he creak like the chariot wheels

of Satan. I am zealous for the Cause —

LANTERN

As a dog for a bone.

BUSY

And I say, it is profane, as being the page of Pride and the waiting-woman

of Vanity. 65

PUPPET DIONYSIUS

Yea? What say you to your tire-women, then? —

LANTERN

Good.

PUPPET DIONYSIUS

— or feather-makers i’the Friars, that are o’your faction of faith?

Are not they with their perukes and their puffs, their fans and their huffs, as much pages

of Pride and waiters upon Vanity? What say you? What say you? What say you? 70

BUSY

I will not answer for them.

PUPPET DIONYSIUS

Because you cannot, because you cannot. Is a bugle-maker a lawful

calling? Or the confect-makers, such you have there? Or your French fashioner? You’d

have all the sin within yourselves, would you not? Would you not?

BUSY

No, Dagon. 75

PUPPET DIONYSIUS

What then, Dagonet? Is a puppet worse than these?

BUSY

Yes, and my main argument against you is that you are an abomination:

for the male among you putteth on the apparel of the female,

and the female of the male.

PUPPET DIONYSIUS

You lie, you lie, you lie abominably. 80

COKES

Good, by my troth, he has given him the lie thrice.

PUPPET DIONYSIUS

It is your old stale argument against the players, but it will not

hold against the puppets, for we have neither male nor female amongst us. And that

thou mayst see if thou wilt, like a malicious purblind zeal as thou art!

The puppet takes up his garment.

EDGWORTH

By my faith, there he has answered you, friend — by plain 85

demonstration.

PUPPET DIONYSIUS

Nay, I’ll prove against ere a rabbin of ’em all that my standing is

as lawful as his; that I speak by inspiration as well as he; that I have as little to do with

learning as he; and do scorn her helps as much as he.

BUSY

I am confuted; the Cause hath failed me. 90

PUPPET DIONYSIUS

Then be converted, be converted.

LANTERN

Be converted, I pray you, and let the play go on!

BUSY

Let it go on. For I am changed, and will become a beholder with you!

COKES

That’s brave, i’faith: thou hast carried it away, hobby-horse! On with the

play! 95

The Justice discovers himself.

JUSTICE

Stay, now do I forbid, I — Adam Overdo! Sit still, I charge you.

COKES

What, my brother-i’-law!

GRACE

My wise guardian!

EDGWORTH

Justice Overdo!

JUSTICE

It is time to take enormity by the forehead, and brand it; for I have

discovered enough.

5.6 [Enter] to them, QUARLOUS (like the madman) [and Mistress] PURECRAFT.

QUARLOUS

Nay, come, mistress bride. You must do as I do now. You must be

mad with me, in truth. [He indicates the deed.] I have here Justice Overdo for it.

JUSTICE

Peace, good Troubleall; come hither, and you shall trouble none. I

will take the charge of you, and your friend, too. (To the Cutpurse and Mistress Littlewit.)

You, also, young man, shall be my care: stand there. 5

EDGWORTH

[Aside] Now, mercy upon me.

The rest are stealing away.

KNOCKEM

[Aside to Whit] Would we were away, Whit: these are dangerous

vapours! Best fall off with our birds, for fear o’the cage.

JUSTICE

Stay, is not my name your terror?

WHIT

Yesh, faith, man, and it ish for tat we would be gone, man. 10

[Enter] JOHN.

JOHN

O gentlemen! Did you not see a wife of mine? I ha’ lost my little wife, as I

shall be trusted — my little pretty Win. I left her at the great woman’s house

in trust yonder, the pig-woman’s, with Captain Jordan and Captain Whit —

very good men — and I cannot hear of her. Poor fool, I fear she’s stepped aside.

— Mother, did you not see Win? 15

JUSTICE

If this grave matron be your mother, sir, stand by her, et digito compesce labellum;

I may perhaps spring a wife for you anon. — Brother Barthol’mew,

I am sadly sorry to see you so lightly given and such a disciple of enormity,

with your grave governor, Humphrey. But stand you both there in the middle

place; I will reprehend you in your course. — Mistress Grace, let me rescue 20

you out of the hands of the stranger.

WINWIFE

Pardon me, sir, I am a kinsman of hers.

JUSTICE

Are you so? Of what name, sir?

WINWIFE

Winwife, sir.

JUSTICE

Master Winwife? I hope you have won no wife of her, sir. If you have, I 25

will examine the possibility of it at fit leisure. Now, to my enormities: look

upon me, O London! and see me, O Smithfield: the Example of Justice and

Mirror of Magistrates, the true top of formality and scourge of enormity.

Hearken unto my labours, and but observe my discoveries; and compare

Hercules with me, if thou dar’st, of old, or Columbus, Magellan, or our 30

countryman Drake, of later times. Stand forth, you weeds of enormity, and

spread. (To Busy) First, Rabbi Busy, thou superlunatical hypocrite; (To Lantern)

next, thou other extremity, thou profane professor of puppetry, little better

than poetry; (To the Horse-corser, and Cutpurse) then thou strong debaucher and

seducer of youth: witness this easy and honest young man; (Then Captain Whit, and Mistress Littlewit) 35

now, thou esquire of dames, madams, and twelvepenny

ladies; now, my green madam herself, of the price. Let me unmask your

‘Ladyship’.

JOHN

Oh, my wife, my wife, my wife!

JUSTICE

Is she your wife? Redde te Harpocratem! 40

Enter TROUBLEALL [without his gown and hat, and covering himself with a large pan, pursued by] URSULA [and] NIGHTINGALE.

TROUBLEALL

By your leave, stand by, my masters, be uncovered!

URSULA

Oh, stay him, stay him! Help to cry, Nightingale: my pan, my pan!

JUSTICE

What’s the matter?

NIGHTINGALE

He has stol’n Gammer Urs’la’s pan.

TROUBLEALL

Yes, and I fear no man but Justice Overdo. 45

JUSTICE

Urs’la? Where is she? (To Ursula and Nightingale.) Oh, the sow of enormity,

this! Welcome, stand you there; you, songster, there.

URSULA

An please your worship, I am in no fault: a gentleman stripped him in

my booth, and borrowed his gown and his hat, and [Indicating Troubleall]

he ran away with my goods here for it. 50

JUSTICE

Then this is the true madman, and (To Quarlous) you are the enormity!

QUARLOUS

[Removing borrowed clothes and false beard] You are i’the right: I am mad

but from the gown outward.

JUSTICE

Stand you there.

QUARLOUS

Where you please, sir. 55

[Waking,] Mistress Overdo is sick, and her husband is silenced.

MRS OVERDO

Oh, lend me a basin, I am sick, I am sick! Where’s Master Overdo?

Bridget, call hither my Adam.

JUSTICE

How?

WHIT

Dy very own wife, i’fait, worshipful Adam.

MRS OVERDO

Will not my Adam come at me? Shall I see him no more then? 60

QUARLOUS

Sir, why do you not go on with the enormity? Are you oppressed

with it? I’ll help you. Hark you, sir, i’your ear: your ‘innocent young man’

you have ta’en such care of all this day is a cutpurse, that hath got all your

brother Cokes his things, and helped you to your beating and the stocks. If

you have a mind to hang him now, and show him your magistrate’s wit, you 65

may — but I should think it were better recovering the goods, and to save

your estimation in pardoning him. I thank you, sir, for the gift of your ward,

Mistress Grace: [He shows the deed.] look you, here is your hand and seal, by

the way. Master Winwife, give you joy, you are ‘Palamon’, you are possessed

o’the gentlewoman, but she must pay me value: here’s warrant for it. And 70

honest madman, there’s thy gown and cap again; I thank thee for my wife.

(To the widow) Nay, I can be mad, sweetheart, when I please, still: never fear

me. And careful Numps, where’s he? I thank him for my licence.

WASP

How!

QUARLOUS

’Tis true, Numps. 75

WASP

I’ll be hanged then.

QUARLOUS

Look i’your box, Numps. (Wasp misseth the licence) — [To Justice Overdo]

Nay, sir, stand not you fixed here like a stake in Finsbury to be shot at, or the

whipping-post i’the Fair, but get your wife out o’the air — it will make her

worse else. And remember you are but Adam, flesh and blood! — you have 80

your frailty. Forget your other name of Overdo, and invite us all to supper.

There you and I will compare our ‘discoveries’, and drown the memory of all

enormity in your bigg’st bowl at home.

COKES

How now, Numps, ha’ you lost it? I warrant, ’twas when thou wert i’the

stocks. Why dost not speak? 85

WASP

I will never speak while I live again, for aught I know.

JUSTICE

Nay, Humphrey, if I be patient, you must be so, too. This pleasant

conceited gentleman hath wrought upon my judgement, and prevailed.

I pray you, take care of your sick friend, Mistress Alice. And my good friends

all — 90

QUARLOUS

And no ‘enormities’.

JUSTICE

— I invite you home with me to my house to supper. I will have none

fear to go along, for my intents are ad correctionem, non ad destructionem; ad

aedificandum, non ad diruendum. So, lead on.

COKES

Yes, and bring the actors along: we’ll ha’ the rest o’the play at home!

[Exeunt.]

THE END

The Epilogue

Your Majesty hath seen the play, and you

Can best allow it from your ear and view.

You know the scope of writers, and what store

Of leave is given them, if they take not more

And turn it into licence. You can tell 5

If we have used that leave you gave us well,

Or whether we to rage or licence break,

Or be profane or make profane men speak.

This is your power to judge, great sir, and not

The envy of a few. Which if we have got, 10

We value less what their dislike can bring,

If it so happy be, t’have pleased the King.

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

Bartholomew Fair (1614)

Edited by John Creaser

INTRODUCTION

First performances

Literary sources and background

Bartholomew Fair in 1614

Stage history

Text

The Prologue to the King’s Majesty

The Persons of the Play

The Induction on the Stage

The Epilogue