Maximal and Minimal Texts: Shakespeare v. the Globe

Summary

In the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, staged at the new Hope in 1614, Jonson set up a mock covenant by which the ‘Spectators, and Hearers’ waiting for the play would accept the performance and ‘agree to remaine in the places, their money or friends have put them in, with patience, for the space of two houres and an halfe, and somewhat more’. Such a specific timing for a mock-legal contract probably reflects the likelihood that Jonson, unlike most of his contemporaries, owned a watch. More likely it reflects his selfconscious awareness of the length of time the performance was expected to take, and possibly some discomfort at its likely duration. Two hours was the standard time for a performance. For The Alchemist with the King’s Men his prologue boasted that it took only ‘two short houres’. The distinctly apologetic tone with which he proclaimed the extra half-hour, and the reluctant admission that it might be even longer, is as explicit an apology for excessive length as the convoluted Jonson would ever allow himself to make. Since Bartholomew Fair has as many words as the Folio text of Hamlet, making them the longest plays of the time, his proclamation that the performance would run to less than two and three-quarter hours must have been defensive. Jonson knew what he was saying, however little he may have expected it to be swallowed whole.