Puritans
Zeal-of-the-land Busy is Jonson's second foray, after The Alchemist's Tribulation and Ananais, into a field of satire common in Jacobean drama: satire against Puritans. Various factors combined to make the godly or "precisians" obvious targets of ridicule. Though religious violence was comparatively uncommon in Jacobean England, the memory of such violence was fresh enough to make marginal believers or outsiders potential sources of anxiety or threat. This element of threat was especially notable in the second decade of James's reign, when the tenuous Calvinist consensus in the English Church began to disintegrate. In this context, stage attacks on the godly may have served to channel and release broader anxieties about social trends.
Playwrights also had a more immediate reason for this animosity; Puritans had opposed the public theater almost from its inception. Hostility to drama was not, of course, limited to separatists or Puritans; preachers of all shades of belief denounced the plays as profane and the theaters as sites of theft, drunkenness, and licentiousness. Correctly or not, playwrights treated Puritans as the main source of these attacks. On stage, the Puritan is a hypocritical, judgmental, and long-winded figure, masking his lusts behind a vocal obsession with trivialities; Busy, for example, announces his intention to eat pork at the fair merely to refute the charges of "Judaism" he claims are leveled at Puritans, and he ends up consuming two whole pigs.
Read more about this topic: Bartholomew Fayre: A Comedy
Famous quotes containing the word puritans:
“What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.”
—Wendell Phillips (1811–1884)
“[17th-century] Puritans were the first modern parents. Like many of us, they looked on their treatment of children as a test of their own self-control. Their goal was not to simply to ensure the child’s duty to the family, but to help him or her make personal, individual commitments. They were the first authors to state that children must obey God rather than parents, in case of a clear conflict.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“One wonders that the tithing-men and fathers of the town are not out to see what the trees mean by their high colors and exuberance of spirits, fearing that some mischief is brewing. I do not see what the Puritans did at this season, when the maples blaze out in scarlet. They certainly could not have worshiped in groves then. Perhaps that is what they built meeting-houses and fenced them round with horse-sheds for.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)