“What do you lack? What is’t you buy?”: Commodity and Community in Bartholomew Fair

Abstract

Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair uses the comic representation of criminality to comment on the urban culture of commodities. The variety of goods bought, sold, circulated, stolen and exchanged in the fair become a trope for the fluidity and malleability of the commodity form, not tied to particular material histories or uses, but part of an emerging fluid ideological space of the market. Against the decay of traditional notions of community, the play proposes a new and radical model of temporary, tactical, mobile and fluid alliances – a community of rogues based on the trope of the commodity form and the economic contract.