First played in the uneasy year of 1614, it is well attested that Bartholomew Fair presents both a satirical allegory of London life in general, and microcosmic parodies of types of authority in particular. Critical consensus has it that troubled authority is especially embodied and mocked in the play's middle-class characters, and that the play then proceeds to mock this very mockery. This interesting compound duality has, however, led to dichotomous interpretations among critics: as Frances Teague has argued, the play is ‘impossible to agree on’, and it has led, according to John Creaser, to a ‘critical impasse’. Leah S. Marcus describes how the play is either a ‘dark indictment of human irrationality and moral decay’ or a ‘celebration of the rejuvenating energies of folly and festival disorder’. I suggest a middle ground which views the play as a self-conscious offering of its own theatrical folly as both a critique of the decay of moral authority and a self-deprecating admission of complicity in it. Jonson's assertion of the poet's Horatian duty to critique official corruption is well known, but in this case his satire of general social venality very much includes ‘authority like his own’, as Alan Fisher argues. If this is Jonson's friendliest play, as Fisher claims (other critics have also noted the amiability of Jonson's approach), it is surely because of the self-directed cast of its humour and the inclusivity which arises from it. This chapter explores the genial fellowship of metadramatic self-mockery that Bartholomew Fair offers to both commoners and King, which both allows and defuses the play's critique of authority.

Though it was first performed at the Hope theatre in Southwark, Bartholomew Fair was engaged for the King's personal entertainment at court, most probably before rehearsals began. It is not possible to know whether Jonson rewrote parts of the play for this event, or whether the unusual step of such early commission for the court is due simply to circumstance. Somewhat troublingly for Jonson, the play's reworking of the period's fundamental question of where authority lies is energised partly by the royal ‘imposition’ controversies of the time, with which some of Jonson's ‘Mermaid men’ were legally involved.