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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

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