Closing the Sea - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 36

documents from Oriental traditions simultaneous with the Biblical tradition - and
being able to read them in the original language - gave the informed scholar new
tools to break old puzzles that remained locked as long as they were looked at on
their own terms and not from the outside.
The mention of being 'busy' is a sly nod to Bartholomew Fayre . Ben Jonson
set his play, written four years earlier, at the notorious cloth trade fair held every
AugustintheparishofStBartholomewtheLess.Accordingtooneexcitedpamph-
leteer, the carnival attracted
peopleofallsorts,HighandLow,RichandPoore,fromcities,townes,andcountrys;
of all sects, Papists, Atheists, Anabaptists, and Brownists; of all conditions, good
and bad, vertuous and vitious, Knaves and Fooles, Cuckolds and Cuckoldmakers,
Bauds and Whores, Pimpes and Panders, Rogues and Rascalls, the little Loud-one
and the witty wanton.
It was the perfect setting for Jonson to mock the ignorant and self-righteous by
having them laid low by the quicker wits of those who had no pretentions to vir-
tue. In a late scene in the play a recently converted Puritan zealot by the name of
Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy condemns the wooden puppet Dionysius for being
an idol; Catholics were idolaters, good Protestants were not. The two get into a
roaring argument about whether being an idol is a profane occupation. Busy then
moves on and chides the boy puppet for being an abomination on the grounds that
he can dress as a male or a female, depending on the parts he plays. This refers to
a popular Puritan canard that cross-dressing is condemned in Deuteronomy 22:5.
Dionysius dismisses it as the 'stale old argument' against male actors cross-dress-
ing to play female characters on stage, 'but it will not hold against the puppets; for
we have neither male nor female amongst us. And that thou may'st see.' The script
then directs the puppet to lift his garment, flashing his non-existent genitals. The
joke was on Busy.
Selden loved the joke, and returned the favour two years later by writing for
Jonson a deliriously academic treatise on the passage in Deuteronomy that Purit-
ans liked to cite to attack the theatre. He drags Jonson through a bewildering lat-
tice of texts in Latin, Greek and Hebrew in what is both a perfect example of in-
formed antiquarian scholarship and a complete send-up of Puritan intellectual in-
competence. The point he drives into the ground is that the passage means nothing
ofthe kind. What was originally a reference to the Hebrew God'scondemnation of
rites performed to bisexual deities such as Venus and Baal - rites in which women