Everyone Has a Disguise: Jonson's Journey to the Center of the Fair

Ben Jonson’s “Bartholomew Fair” is a play packed to the brim with lies, betrayal, and most of all, disguise. Nearly every character affects a false identity, either physical or metaphorical, in order to achieve their own personal goals; an undertaking that fails both catastrophically and (near) universally. Peter Hyland sees the failure of disguise as the moral heart of “Bartholomew Fair,” as “Folly and crime arise from a lack of self-knowledge, from rejection or loss of identity, usually manifested through play-acting or actual disguise” (127). While such an argument has weight, especially in respect to individual characterization, it neglects the broader implications that the disguises of “Bartholomew Fair’s” denizens have on the culture at large. For a play so wrapped up in the meaning and function of tangible cultural objects and sensory stimulus, it seems important to question what meanings the individual disguises themselves possess beyond simply the characters who adopt them. When viewed through this lens, aspects of disguise such as the enormous power afforded to mad men (whether genuine or ersatz), or ways in which the puppet show (Jonson’s own “disguise” for the actual early modern stage) ultimately seems undermine its own argument, point to a more nuanced and perhaps troubling view of “Bartholomew Fair’s” moral center: that there isn’t one. This is not to say that Jonson has abandoned morality or accepted the “enormities” of his characters; rather that, in attempting to show the contemporary Smithfield in a naturalistic light, he has seen through its disguise and found it neither moral nor immoral, but something much more chaotic in between. In the face of such amorality, Jonson finds only one recourse: to laugh.