The Alchemist - Ben Jonson

 

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One of literature’s greatest comedies, The Alchemist is among Ben Jonson’s funniest and most masterful plays. Samuel Taylor Coleridge considered it, along with OEDIPUS and Tom Jones, “the three most perfect plots ever planned,” while the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne enthused that in The Alchemist “All the distinctive qualities which the alchemic cunning of the poet has fused together in the crucible of dramatic satire for the production of a flawless work of art, have given us the most perfect model of imaginative realism and satirical comedy that the world has ever seen.” The Alchemist, as its title indicates, is a play about transformation. It is Jonson’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM in which the confusion between appearance and actuality, desire and reality is enacted, not in a fantastical forest outside Athens but in a townhouse in London’s Blackfriars. In The Alchemist the agents of the play’s many magical transformations are not fairies scrambling the affections of confused lovers but a trio of con artists fleecing the gullible and self-deluded. In its contemporary London setting Jonson assembles a cross-section of Elizabethan society— clerk, shopkeeper, country squire, rich widow, parson, nobleman, gamester, servant, charlatan, and prostitute. They are all frauds, either pretending to be what they are not or aspiring to become someone else. The play’s gulls are shown susceptible to the promise of the cozeners that they can in fact possess all their desires largely because they are victims of their own delusions, and the play offers an unrelentingly unflattering but undeniable examination of human nature in the grips of greed, vanity, and our preference for illusion over reality. The Alchemist, with Jonson’s broadest social canvas and its universally relevant theme of humankind’s capacity for self-delusion, is arguably, the playwright’s most ambitious and profound play that, along with VOLPONE, helped establish a new standard of dramatic construction and a realistic method and subject for the theater. 

           Written at the height of Jonson’s dramatic powers, following two of his best comedies, Volpone (1606) and Epicoene (1609), The Alchemist was first performed by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, in 1610 and stands out in marked contrast to other Elizabethan dramas. It shows Jonson turning the focus of comedy from romantic intrigue in fanciful settings that Shakespeare had patented as the standard of Elizabethan comedy to contemporary life and an “Image of the time.” The play’s prologue announces: 

Our scene is London, ’cause we would make known No country’s mirth is better than our own: No clime breeds better matter for your whore, Bawd, squire, imposter, many persons more, Whose manners, now called humors, feed the stage; And which have still been subject for the rage Or spleen of comic writers. 

          Contemporary London life and “the vices that she breeds” are Jonson’s subjects, and for the first time in English drama to such a degree the teeming diversity of contemporary urban life, a city’s various denizens, their accents and obsessions take center stage. Countering what Jonson saw in his contemporaries’ plays as violations of probabilities in characters and action, The Alchemist offers a new dramatic realism based on Jonson’s intimate, firsthand experience of middle- and lower-class London life. Characters easily recognized on the streets inside and outside the theater, not the high-born or idealized paragons expected on stage, are shown behaving with psychological consistency in a series of motivated, plausible actions. Additionally Jonson harnesses the play’s robust vitality with the disciplined structure, concentrated focus, and serious moral purpose derived from classical comedy. Set during an outbreak of the plague that has caused a London property owner, Lovewit, to escape contagion to the country, The Alchemist is confined to the single setting of Lovewit’s abandoned house, now taken over as a base of swindling operations by a trio of cozeners: Jeremy, Lovewit’s butler, known as Face; Subtle, a charlatan posing as an alchemist and necromancer; and the prostitute Doll Common. There they lure the gullible with promises of wealth, power, and success through their mastery and demonstration of the arcane. To the play’s unity of place Jonson adds a unity of action in a series of variations on the same circumstance: the cozening of the trio’s succession of marks, along with a unity of time in which the play’s action transpires in close to “real time,” the duration of the play’s performance. The result is a concentrated, intense dramatic vehicle that accelerates to a breakneck speed before its inevitable collision and catastrophe. In a sense The Alchemist is the prototypical modern well-made play, an artfully crafted, smoothly running dramatic machine so contrary to the often discursive multiplicity and improvisations of other Elizabethan dramas. The Alchemist shows what can be done on stage when, as Jonson advised, “parts are so joined, and knit together, as nothing in the structure can be chang’d, or taken away, without impairing, or troubling the whole.” 

           The Alchemist opens with a quarrel among the play’s three tricksters. Lovewit, the play’s principle of law and order, has departed, and chaos, confusion, and misrule reign in his house. The servant, Jeremy, is now, as Face, the presumptive master of men, the chameleon actor of many roles, who revels in his manipulative powers. He has established the pseudo-scholarly Subtle, an expert in the jargon and processes of alchemy, palmistry, astrology, demonology, and theology in Lovewit’s house, and the pair of swindlers have been so successful that they begin to believe their own con. If Subtle is unable to transmute base metal into gold as he claims, he is adept at transforming men by causing them to act out their desires and ignore or misperceive the reality of their situations and motives. Face counters Subtle’s claim of priority in the scams by arguing that he has worked the greater magic by transforming Subtle from a penniless nonentity, “pinned up in the several rags / You had raked and picked from dunghills” to his present position. “I gave you countenance,” Face asserts, “. . . Built you a furnace, drew you customers / Advanced all your black arts.” Face and Subtle’s quarrel establishes the play’s central theme of self-delusion in which the characters readily ignore the reality of who they are for the far more pleasing illusion of who they would like to be. Doll Common plays peacemaker—flattering both and playing on each man’s inflated self-conception, calling Subtle “Sovereign” and Face “General”—and manages to negotiate a temporary truce between the pair in the interest of their present scheming. Despite her common sense, Doll is not immune from self-deception herself and will eventually begin to believe that she can become in fact the great lady she pretends to be. 

               With an uneasy alliance established among the trio that could collapse at any moment due to their enmity and hubris, the play begins its parade of gulls, each arriving to profit from the illusions that the three con artists inventively supply, based on their insights into the nature of human folly and greed. Each gull, in Face’s diagnosis, is afflicted with an “itch of the mind,” a dissatisfaction with his or her identity and circumstance, that the trio will scratch with various promises of transformation. Jonson avoids repetition by masterfully differentiating the gulls with varying social stations, motives, and degrees of intelligence and sophistication. The first to arrive is Dapper, a young law clerk who, stifled by his dull routine, wants help in becoming a successful gambler. Exploiting Dapper’s romantic sensibility as one who “consorts with the small poets of the time,” Subtle claims to recognize him as a favorite nephew of the Fairy Queen who, if he will endure “a world of ceremonies,” will gain an audience with his aunt and a guarantee of gambling luck. Dapper reveals himself as a victim of his own stupidity and greed and is complemented by Abel Drugger, a slow-witted young man setting up a new tobacco shop who desires to know “by necromancy” how best to arrange his shop and advertise. Drugger is easily satisfied by Subtle’s nonsensical revelations from astrology and palmistry of the route to certain success in business.

 Ascending the social ladder, the trio is introduced by Drugger to a country squire, Kastril, and his sister, the 19-year-old beautiful, but empty-headed wealthy widow Dame Pliant. Kastril has come up to London “to learn to quarrel, and to live by his wits,” and Subtle is to provide him with the “grammar and logic / And rhetoric of quarreling.” Kastril’s aspirations to master city vices are revealed as springing from malice and a desire to lord over his country tenants and neighbors. Dame Pliant has come to town “to learn the fashion” and “to know her fortune.” Subtle uses his crystal ball to predict “some great honor” for her, namely, his own marriage to her, and Dame Pliant becomes a contentious object of desire for more than one of the conspirators and their victims. These four somewhat simple victims of their own lack of sophistication and craven motives are contrasted with two other, more clever and distinguished gulls—the pastor of an exiled congregation of English Anabaptists, Tribulation Wholesome, and the voluptuarian Sir Epicure Mammon. For these two no simple conjuring tricks are sufficient. They require nothing less than the holy grail of transmutation, the philosopher’s stone, the ultimate means to allow man to control reality. Tribulation Wholesome desires the stone as a tool for “the glorious cause,” to restore “the silenced Saints” of his congregation to the pulpits of England. However, Wholesome’s spiritual zeal and altruism are exposed as shams, disguising his lust for secular power. Wholesome’s hypocrisy is evident as he eventually accepts Subtle’s offer of the more immediate temptation of success as a counterfeiter while awaiting possession of the all-powerful philosopher’s stone. 

           Sir Epicure Mammon, one of Jonson’s greatest creations, is the most distinguished of the gulls and the most imaginative and complex in his motives. Blind to his own egotism and self-indulgence, Mammon convinces Face, Subtle, and himself that he intends to use the philosopher’s stone for good, to “turn the age to gold,” by eliminating all disease, restoring youth and vigor to the aged, and enriching the poor. His philanthropic rationalizations, however, do not disguise his ruling passion: to live a life of unsurpassable luxury and extravagance. In some of the most audaciously entertaining lines of the play, Mammon charts the apparently boundless nature of his desires, including possessing “a list of wives and concubines / Equal with Solomon” and a back as tough as Hercules’ “to enjoy fifty a night.” To Doll, whom he is introduced as a noble lady driven mad by biblical studies, he promises “a perpetuity / Of life and lust!” Mammon’s magnanimity masks selfishness and a fantasy life so all encompassing that he casts Doll as the ideal noble consort for his wish fulfillment, underscoring his total lack of self-knowledge about his true motives and his preference for his outlandish desires over reality. Mammon is the one gull who has little need of the encouragement offered by the cozeners.

            Both Wholesome and Mammon come accompanied by skeptical companions—Ananias, a zealous Puritan deacon, and Pertinax Surly, a gambler and man about town who prides himself on being too astute to be tricked by the likes of Face, Subtle, and Doll. Both are skeptical about the philosopher’s stone, feel smugly superior to their gullible companions, and try to dissuade them from succumbing to the lures of the con artists. Both also confuse the role they assume as preservers of truth and righteousness with their reality. Ananias is far from the holier-than-thou paragon he sees himself to be and self-servingly rationalizes a justification for the counterfeiting scheme, while Surly, taking on the role of exposer of the trio’s scheme, returns disguised as a Spanish grandee and shows that his “foolish vice of honesty” is just a sham to gain Dame Pliant for himself. 

           With seven separate gulling plots operating concurrently and requiring that no one set of characters should be aware of the others, The Alchemist generates a crescendo of hilarious comic situations in the best farcical manner. The play’s structure has been aptly described by critic Anne Barton as driven forward “by a succession of knocks on the door,” as the cozeners must juggle more and more arrivals and departures. The play becomes a tour de force of Jonson’s stage-managing that pushes Face, Subtle, and Doll to the limits of their ingenious, manipulative resources. The result is some of the funniest complications ever staged, including the blindfolded Dapper being pinched and prodded by Face and Subtle speaking in fairy falsetto, Doll Common’s performance as the Fairy Queen, and Surly trapped in his Spanish disguise and forced to pretend he does not understand the insults heaped upon him. 

             Eventually the deus ex machina arrives in the form of the unexpectedly returned Lovewit, who restores order in his house while standing in marked contrast to all the others by being immune to Face’s deceptions or his own self-delusions. “No more of your tricks, good Jeremy / The truth,” Lovewit commands, “the shortest way.” Lovewit becomes the play’s reality principle who metes out the appropriate justice on the violators. Compared to the punishment Jonson arranges for Volpone and Mosca, who have preyed on innocents, Subtle and Doll escape their fate since their prey are at best co-conspirators and victims of their own illusions. Instead they are allowed to escape direct punishment for a more sobering sentence: the man who would be sovereign over others and the woman who would be a great lady must face the reality of who they truly are: a petty cheat and a whore. Face, the protean master of men, is sentenced to subservience again as the dutiful Jeremy who helps Lovewit gain the prize of Dame Pliant. The various gulls are similarly forced to accept the reality of their circumstances and the identities that they have attempted to deny but with a final ironic suggestion that new illusions are not far away. To Lovewit’s offer to return his swindled property to Sir Epicure if he “can bring certificate that you were gulled of ’em, / Or any formal writ out of a court / That you did cozen yourself, I will not hold them,” Mammon replies that “I’ll rather lose ’em”; that is, he prefers his illusions over facing the facts, whatever the cost. 

               The Alchemist, like all of Jonson’s comedies, instructs through ridicule, establishing serious moral lessons behind its humor. The play makes clear that the best way to avoid succumbing to con men and self-delusion is through self-knowledge, through facing the facts about human nature and human existence. Jonson’s play about transformation uses the theatrical conventions of acting and pretending to reach a serious moral truth. In the bracing wisdom of Jonson’s vision the audience gains the true philosopher’s stone in the form of a mirror to master our world by understanding ourselves.