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

garden-pot, you may follow me by the Ss I make.
    She has also a firm line in abuse.
     
    Ursla: You look as you were begotten atop of a cart in harvest-time, when the whelp was hot and eager. Go snuff after your brother’s bitch, Mistress Commodity.
    In the words of the play, she has a hot coal in her mouth.
    The other great character of the fair is Jonson’s parody of the puritan, Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy.
     
    Busy: Look not towards them, hearken not. The place is Smithfield, or the field of smiths, the grove of hobby horses and trinkets … They are hooks and baits, very baits, that are hung out on every side to catch you, and to hold you, as it were, by the gills, and by the nostrils, as the fisher doth …
    He turns out to be, of course, an arrant voluptuary and hypocrite, amply confirming the suspicions that some people conceived of the godly in this period.
    Jonson had said that he wished to present ‘deeds and language, such as men do use’. He knew of what he wrote. By his own report he was ‘brought up poorly’ in London and when his mother took a second husband, a master bricklayer, the small family moved to a house in a lane off the Strand. He attended an elementary school in the neighbourhood before Westminster School and may have been about to attend a college at Cambridge; shortage of funds, however, did not permit the move. Instead he took up his stepfather’s business of bricklaying, in which trade he laboured intermittently for some years. He later saw service in the Low Countries and, on his return to London, entered the world of theatre. So he was a child of the city, and Bartholomew Fair is his tribute to its teeming life.
    Here are your ‘pretenders to wit! Your Three Cranes, Mitre and Mermaid men.’ These three taverns were the haunt of poetasters and men of supposed good taste. ‘Moorfields, Pimlico Path or the Exchange’ are mentioned a few moments later as places of resort for tired Londoners. In the puppet play at the close of the proceedings, the myth of Hero and Leander is set in the city.
     
    Littlewit: 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.
    It is remarkable that ordinary Londoners were supposed to be wholly familiar with the old story, perhaps from Marlowe’s poem published sixteen years earlier.
    Many of the play’s allusions are lost to us, and many of the words are now strange or unfamiliar. A ‘hobby-horse’ was a prostitute. An ‘undermeal’ was a light snack. To ‘stale’ was to urinate. When one character discloses that ‘we were all a little stained last night’, he means that they were drunk. ‘Whimsies’ were the female genitalia. A ‘diet-drink’ was a medicine. A Catholic recusant was derided as ‘a seminary’.
    The visitors to the fair often refer to ‘vapour’ or ‘vapours’ that can mean anything or nothing. To vapour is to talk nonsense or to brag; a vapour is a frenzy or a passing mood or a mad conceit of the town. In the popular ‘game of vapours’ each participant had to deny that which the previous speaker had just said. London seethed with vapours.
     
    Quarlous: Faith, and to any man that vapours me the lie, I do vapour that. [ Strikes him ].
    It is in a sense like watching a foreign world, except that there are still flashes of recognition and understanding. And then once more we are part of the Jacobean city.

7
     
    What news?
     
    The trial of Somerset and his wife marked the beginning of a deterioration at court, where it was believed that the king had become both more cunning and more cowardly; his learning had once been praised but now behind his back he was called a pedant. His new fancy for Villiers provoked scorn, jealousy and even disgust. His own health also showed signs of decline. His doctor wrote subsequently that ‘in 1616 pain and