Free Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution by Peter Ackroyd Page A

butchers of Aldgate and the brokers of Houndsditch.
    The dress of the Londoner ‘is like a traitor’s body that hath been hanged, drawn and quartered, and is set up in several places: his codpiece is in Denmark, the colour of his doublet and the belly in France: the wing and narrow sleeve in Italy: the short waist hangs over a Dutch butcher’s stall in Utrecht; his huge slops [hose for the legs] speaks Spanish: Polonia gives him the boots’. It is a typical complaint concerning London’s variegated fashions.
    Dekker observes the disagreeable habits of other citizens. He alludes to the various ‘tobacconists, shuttle-cock makers, feather-makers, cobweb lawn weavers, perfumers’ as manifesting the qualities of ‘apishness’; each one is ‘a fierce, dapper fellow, more light-headed than a musician: as fantastically attired as a court jester: wanton in discourse: lascivious in behaviour; jocund in good company: nice in his trencher, and yet he feeds very hungrily on scraps of songs’.
    Dekker abhors the common practice of marrying a young bride to a rich old man, ‘though his breath be ranker than a muck-hill, and his body more dry than a mummy, and his mind more lame than Ignorance itself’. He complains about London landlords ‘who for the building up of a chimney, which stands them not above thirty shillings, and for whiting the walls of a tenement, which is scarce worth the daubing, raise the rent presently (as if it were new put into the subsidy books) assessing it at three pounds a year more than ever it went for before’. This has all the bitterness of personal experience. Welcome to the world of Jacobean London.
    Greed and avarice were also much on the mind of another Londoner. Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair was first performed in the Hope Playhouse at the end of October 1614; it was a long play, of some three hours, and began at two in the afternoon. On that stage the essence of London was quiddified. The Hope was also used for bear-baiting, on which occasions the stage was removed, and in the induction Jonson compares the theatre to the venue of the fair itself, ‘the place being as dirty as Smithfield and as stinking every whit’. The stench of the dead or dying animals still lingered. The hazel nutshells and apple-cores might not have been swept away. Bartholomew Fair has the soul and substance of the Jacobean city somewhere within it. Its characters are the flesh and bone of London, in which all the people are merely players.
    Canvas booths have been erected on the stage to give a simulacrum of the fair. A character comes on, and is soon joined by another, and then another, until a concourse of citizens is visible. They jeer, they swear, they laugh. They fight. They are obscene. They piss. They vomit. They cheat one another. A couple of them burst into song. Various plots and stories emerge only to fall back into the swelling tumult of the fair. Prostitutes and cutpurses rub against ballad-singers and tapsters.
    Some of the characters adopt disguise, but in the end their true identities are revealed and their pretensions crossed or crushed. All authority is reviled. That is the way of the city. There is no real power except that of money, and no real considerations other than those of aggression and appetite. ‘Bless me!’ someone calls out. ‘Deliver me, help, hold me! The Fair!’ Mousetraps and ginger bread, purses and pouches, dolls and puppies, all are for sale. ‘What do you lack, gentlemen? What is’t you buy?’ All the world’s a fair. ‘Buy any new ballads? New ballads?’ A puppet show brings a conclusion to the play that has revealed London to be a panoply and a pageant, a prison and a carnival.
    One of the guardian spirits of the fair is Ursla, the fat seller of ale and roast pig who is also a part-time bawd.
     
    Ursla: 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