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tiffany rings market. ars to sense that the market may be a selfregulating mechanism, capable of bringing peace to a society that seems otherwise to be tearing itself apart in religious and political conflicts. Nearly a year and a half after writing the first draft of this essay, I discovered that its central claim had already been advanced by Jean Christophe Agnew, who writes of Bartholomew Fair in his Worlds Apart, pp. 12021: There are plenty of plots in the play but no plot to it; no one, villainous or virtuous, appears to be tiffany bracelets in charge.... The fair itself is the engine that precipitates the action of the play ... Jonson's market operates, in effect, as an "invisible hand," diverting private vices to the public benefit.... The forms and conventions that Jonson introduced to achieve his dramatic purposes in the play do adumbrate the solutions that Adam Smith would later propose tiffany pendants to those who feared the divisive social consequences of unrestricted competition. Like The Wealth of Nations, Bartholomew Fair imagined the market as a power capable of tiffany necklaces generating its own legitimacy through a negotiated process of mutual authorization. By making the fair itself tiffany cuff link the occasion of countless private calculations and, at the same time, the vehicle of their ultimate public reconciliation, Jonson was taking a step, however tentative, tiffany outlet toward a functionalist legitimation of a free and placeless tiffany rings market. I thank my colleague Katharine Eisaman Maus for calling my attention to this passage and for other help with this essay. My analysis may be regarded as a working out in detail of Agnew's original insight, although, for what it is worth, I did arrive at the point independently, and my use of Austrian economics, rather than Marxist, to analyze Jonson's view of the market leads me to emphasize different aspects of the play. The characters who stand up for religious and political principles in Bartholomew Fair turn out to be the divisive forces in the play, while the seemingly lawless participants in the fair work to bring about a kind of civil harmony, based on the satisfaction of fundamental economic needs and natural human desires. Jonson exposes all the faults of an unregulated marketplace, but he more profoundly subjects its wouldbe regulators to a withering critique. He reveals their selfinterested motives for wanting to regulate the fair and, more importantly, he lays bare their sheer incompetence to manage the marketplace successfully. In contrast to what happens in Jonson's earlier master

tiffany outlet Lisa at work in the content as well. In recreating Bartholomew Fair on the stage, the play offers a remarkable portrait of one of the great marketplaces of Renaissance London. For information on the actual Bartholomew Fair and Renaissance fairs in general, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics tiffany pendants and Poetics of Transgression Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986, especially chapter 1. Stallybrass and White correctly emphasize the modernity of the fair and its role as a harbinger of developing market principles, and they criticize tiffany bracelets a nostalgic view of the fair as a backwardlooking medieval institution. For the role of fairs in the developing market economy of the Renaissance, see JeanChristophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 15501750 Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 1756, and especially for Bartholomew Fair, p. 47. For more general discussions of the new commercial developments in tiffany cuff link the Renaissance, see Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, tiffany necklaces 140018X, Miriam Kochan, trans. New York: Harper Row, 1973 and tiffany outlet Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Throughout his career, Jonson was fascinated by the emerging market economy in Renaissance Europe. He was intrigued by the new categories of human identity the market was creating the roles of merchants, bankers, financiers, and entrepreneurs and he was evidently troubled by the new forms of corruption and vice endemic to protocapitalist life. Bartholomeiv Fair gave Jonson a chance to anatomize the lawlessness of the marketplace. Through the comments of his Puritan characters, Jonson shows how the fair violates religious law, and he uses Adam Overdo, a Justice of the Peace, to rail against the ways the merchants continually violate the criminal law as well. As Jonson presents it, Bartholomew Fair is the original home and headquarters of all the charlatans, cheaters, and thieves in London. And yet, for all his criticism of the marketplace in Bartholomew Fair, Jonson ends up being more critical of its critics. See Waith, Bartholomew Fair, p. 3 and William W.E. Slights, Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, pp. 149, 152, 211, n. 34. From the standpoint of traditional religion and politics, the market may look lawless, but Jonson explores tiffany rings the possibility that it may obey laws of its own. In a remarkable anticipation of later economic theory, he appe

tiffany rings historical seemingly undisciplined flow which is like the random, haphazard nature of life itself." today's cultural materialists and new historicists, for all their critical sophistication, basically still operate within this tradition.As a doctrine that undermines the idea of individual human agency, Marxism seems inappropriate to the study of art a realm often taken to be the highest form of human selfexpres sion, creativity, and freedom. Marxism is especially inappropriate because it is a species of what Hayek calls scientism. See F.A. Hayek, The CounterRevolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason New York: Free Press, 1958, especially pp. 1316. Captivated by the success of the natural sciences in the nineteenth century, especially their ability to predict events in the physical world, Marx sought to create a science of economic and social phenomena modeled on Newtonian physics, one that could discover tiffany rings historical laws that operate with scientific regularity and hence strict predictability. Marx prided himself on the fact that he was offering for the first time a scientific socialism, as opposed tiffany bracelets to the Utopian socialism of earlier thinkers like SaintSimon and Fourier. See Engels, "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" in Feuer, Basic Writings, pp. 68111. Marx writes in his A Contribution to tiffany cuff link the Critique of Political Economy that "the material transformation of the economic conditions of production . . . can be determined with the precision of natural science."Feuer, Basic Writings,Marxism thus involves a fundamental category error it tries to understand economic and social phenomena on the model of events in the physical world, that is to say, human tiffany necklaces events on the model of nonhuman events. In modeling higher or more complex phenomena in terms of lower or less complex phenomena, Marxism loses sight of what is fundamentally distinctive about human action. In tiffany pendants particular it oversimplifies human history in order to make it seem predictable and above all to make the triumph of communism seem inevitable. Having sought to understand economic phenomena in terms of material forces, Marxism compounds the error by trying to understand cultural phenomena in terms of economic, and thus it becomes doubly reductionist in its treatment of art. In short, in the longstanding conflict between the natural sciences and the humanities, Marxism tiffany outlet leans toward the former, making.The tension between law and spontaneity evident in the form of Bartholomew Fair turns out to be

tiffany bracelets unities in the spotlight to reveal a distinctive way of life. One has to turn to Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Dickens to find a comparable richness in the kaleidoscopic portrayal of human life. What may at first seem to be a weakness of Bartholomew Fair its lack tiffany necklaces of focus turns out to be its great strength its ability to embrace a wide variety of human types and develop them in their full diversity, without imposing any narrowing artistic or moral conceptions upon them. In that sense Bartholomew Fair strikingly anticipates modern drama, resembling at times Brecht, Pirandello, and even Beckett. On parallels to Beckett, see Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981, p. 136. Like Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Bartholomew Fair even seems at moments postmodern, with its theatrical selfconsciousness and its genius in revealing how conventional drama is generated out of the fantasies of its audience. Jonson's play is thus deeply paradoxical. Although calling attention to the dramatic medium itself, it at times creates the illusion of giving an unmediated glimpse into the lives of its characters. Although a highly artful play, it succeeds in concealing its artifice and may at first seem to be just thrown together on the stage like tiffany cuff link an improvisation. Martin Butler says that Jonson manages "to give an illusion of randomness which is carefully and rigorously premeditated." See his The tiffany outlet Selected Plays of Ben Jonson Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989, vol'. 2, p. 147. Although seemingly tiffany rings the most formless of Jonson's plays, it actually obeys the tiffany bracelets unities of time and place as strictly as any of his other works.See Waith, Bartholomew Fair, p. 20. In fact, it comes close to unfolding in real time on stage. Remarkably, in Bartholomew Fair Jonson found a way to remain within the bounds of his neoclassical conception of dramatic form, while still imparting a feeling of spontaneity to the play. In short, the play obeys Jonson's cherished law of the unities, while appearing to be wholly free and above or beyond any formal law. ee Leggatt, English Renaissance Comedy, pp. 13637, E.A. Horsman, ed., Bartholomew Fair Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1960, tiffany pendants p. xi, and Anne Barton, "Shakespeare and Jonson," in Essays, Mainly Shakespearean Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 294: "Bartholomew Fair maintains the most delicate balance between order and chaos, between structure and a

tiffany bracelets in Compared to Jonson's earlier comic masterpieces, Volpone and The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair seems unfocused and diffuse.1 The playEliot claimed that the play has "hardly a plot at all." See his "Ben Jonson" in Selected Essays New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950, p. 134. See also Richard Levin, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971, p. 202. In his Introduction to English Renaissance Comedy Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1999, Alexander just seems to exfoliate, with more and more characters introduced in scene after scene and more plots and counterplots hatched as the action unfolds. Bartholomew Fair lacks a pair of central characters around whom the play is organized and who appear to direct its action, such as Volpone and Mosca in Volpone or Face and Subtle in The Alchemist. See Levin, Multiple Plot, p. 208 and Eugene M. Waith, ed., Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963, p. 2. With a verbal exuberance unmatched outside of Shakespeare, the play is constantly threatening to veer off into irrelevance, incoherence, and even absurdity, as the characters get wrapped up in word games that fly in the face of normal dramatic logic. As Jonson's stage directions read at one point: "Here they continue their game of vapours, which is nonsense; every man to oppose the last man that spoke, whether it concerned him or no." Act IV, scene tiffany rings iv, 11. 24ff. All quotations from Bartholomew Fair are taken from the edition of Gordon Campbell in Ben Jonson, The Alchemist and Other Plays Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Just as in Seinfeld, the characters often appear to be talking merely to fill the time and not because they have anything in particular to say.But Bartholomew Fair only appears to tiffany outlet be about nothing. Again like Seinfeld, the play tells us something about its characters by showing them engaged tiffany bracelets in so much meaningless dialogue. And tiffany pendants its apparent formlessness and lack of a center tiffany cuff link reflect a deeper order and sense of form. By liberating the dialogue from the normal constraints of dramatic action, Jonson freed himself to put an unparalleled slice of Renaissance life on the stage. The play may be difficult to follow tiffany necklaces for the reader, but given a decent performance, it can be a brilliant theatrical success,e Campbell, Alchemist, p. xx. as figure after figure comes to life on the stage, each characterized by a distinctive mode of speech and each given his or her momen

tiffany outlet controls of harsh necessity at least until the coming of the Communist Revolution. Thus, for a Marxist to show an artist involved in economic relations and especially in any form of marketplace activity is ipso facto to tiffany jewel expose his lack of freedom. In classic Marxist literary criticism, authors operating in a market system are tiffany and co outlet routinely portrayed as captives of capitalist ideology, and Another of Sancho's decrees puts a ceiling on the wages of servants because he thinks that these wages are rising too fast.Don Quijote, pt. II, chap, liThis echoes the Spanish government's efforts to control labor and wages. Some municipal ordinances "established low wage rates, which had to be observed under pain of severe penalties."Vassberg, Land and Society, p. 195.Intermunicipal unions also imposed labor regulations: in Tierra Segovia in 1514 the unions specified that the workday for salaried rural laborers should start an hour after sunrise and last until sundown.ibid. These wage tiffany outlet controls were more successfully enforced than price controls, but the normal market pricing of labor was, of course, disrupted, so that at times there were serious shortages of workers.Davies, The Golden Century of Spain, p. 68. Some Spanish ordinances were so specific that they can serve as illustrations of the interventionist extremes to which tiffany and co outlet government bureaucrats can go in drafting their laws. In 1599 the Council of Cifuentes Guadalajara mandated a wage ceiling of tiffany jewelry outlet tiffany jewel 34 maravedis for plowmen and pruners in February, 57 in March, 60 in April, and 68 in May and June.Vassberg, Land and Society, p. 195. It tiffany jewelry outlet is probably fortunate that Sancho's tenure as governor did not last long enough to create serious problems. Otherwise his subjects would have soon begun to suffer from the consequences of his interventionist tiffany & co outlet policies. There would have been shortages of footwear in tiffany outlet general and shoes in particular, and their quality would have declined. Shortages and declines in tiffany jewelry on sale the quality of other goods would eventually have occurred as well because the importation of competing goods would have been priced out, or forbidden, until tiffany on sale one day Barataria, now indeed a "cheap island," might have come to resemble Cervantes's Golden Age Spain. Praxeology and the Relationship tiffany on sale Between Don Quijote and Sancho The tiffany jewelry on sale market, its mechanisms, and its benefits, do not pertain to a particular time or place. They are not historical, but inherent to the relations between human beings. Thousands tiffany & co outlet of years before Christ there were market