It was inevitable that the comedy Jonson wrote next after Bartholomew Fair should represent a diminution, a conscious narrowing of the wide perspective of its predecessor. The Fair could scarcely be expanded. Nor would there have been much point in seeking out another, equally inclusive metaphor: a rival mirror reflecting London as a whole. Bartholomew Fair was an irregular and inimitable masterpiece, as Jonson must have known. Significantly, despite its contemporary popularity, he seems to have felt obliged to defend this play. Jonson's preface to his translation of Horace's Art of Poetry in which, as he told Drummond, ‘he heth ane apologie of a Play of his St Bartholomees faire’ (Conv. 83–4) is lost. Presumably, it did not survive the fire of 1623. The preface appears to have been in dialogue form, and John Donne was one of the disputants, under the name of ‘Criticus’. This, of course, was the name Jonson had originally given to the scholar satirist and reformer in Cynthia's Revels. By 1618, Jonsonian comedy had moved a long way from the polemical certainties of the Elizabethan comical satires. It is tempting to speculate that Criticus may well have spoken not only for Donne but for a more rigid, classically inspired view of the form and function of comedy which Jonson had been infringing for some time now, and against which Bartholomew Fair, in particular, transgressed.

The play was, in any case, a culmination.