DAVID BEVINGTON
‘Upon my word’, declared Coleridge in 1834, ‘I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, The Alchemist, and Tom Jones the three most perfect plots ever planned.’1 This is not to say that Coleridge was perfectly satisfied with The Alchemist. He held to the common view that, although Jonson has a remarkable gift for creating ‘humorous’ characters, those characters tend to be abstractly generic and for that reason are not persons ‘in whom you are morally interested’.2 Jonson’s intellect is arrestingly original, for Coleridge, but fails to rise to the level of genius. Jonson thereby suffers by comparison with Shakespeare, even if he excels in gifts that are peculiarly his own, and nowhere better, in Coleridge’s view, than in his construction of The Alchemist.
By 1834, the comparison of Jonson and Shakespeare had become a commonplace. Milton, in his brief survey of ‘the well-trod stage’ in L’Allegro (c.1631–2), contrasts ‘Jonson’s learned sock’ with ‘sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child’, who is so beautifully able to ‘Warble his native wood-notes wild’.3 In 1667, John Dryden, while grouping Jonson with Shakespeare and Fletcher as the old ‘poets . . . whose excellencies I can never enough admire’,4 distinguishes among the three by giving Fletcher Wit, Shakespeare Nature, and Jonson Art and Judgement.5 Samuel Butler, pursuing the same comparison of Art and Nature in the contest of Shakespeare and Jonson in the late 1660s, gives Jonson the edge, since ‘he that is able to think long and judge well will be sure to find out better things than another man can hit upon suddenly’.6 Thomas Fuller, conversely, compares Jonson to a Spanish great galleon and Shakespeare to an English man-of-war, the one ‘built far higher in learning, solid but slow in his performances’, the other built lighter and thus able to ‘turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention’.7 To Aphra Behn, Shakespeare’s plays have ‘better pleased the world’, while Jonson inspires his auditors ‘to admire him most confoundedly’, as in the case of one spectator who has been observed to ‘sit with his hat removed less than a hair’s breath from one sullen posture for almost three hours at The Alchemist’.8 Samuel Johnson, in 1747, juxtaposes ‘Jonson’s art’ with ‘Shakespeare’s flame’.9
Critical praise of Jonson and The Alchemist throughout the seventeenth century focuses on brilliance of plot construction and on characterization. Dryden singles out The Alchemist for the design and architectonic beauty of its plot: ‘If then the parts are managed as regularly that the beauty of the whole be kept entire, and that the variety become not a perplexed and confused mass of accidents, you will find it infinitely pleasing to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see some of your ways before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it.’10 No less impressively, The Alchemist, along with Epicene and Volpone, is for Dryden Jonson’s supreme achievement in the creation of character in the genre of comedy devoted to observing the town and studying the court. Wherever ‘various characters resort’, writes Dryden, Jonson in his art has ‘borne away the crown’. Jonson’s refusal to debase his plays with ‘low farce’ or to adulterate his sublime wit with ‘dull buffoonery’ is at its best in The Alchemist, even more so than in Volpone; ‘When in The Fox I see the tortoise hissed’, writes Dryden, ‘I lose the author of The Alchemist.’11
Often the praise is broadly stated in terms of superlatives. For James Shirley, The Alchemist is ‘a play for strength of wit | And true art made to shame what hath been writ | In former ages’, not excepting what ‘Greeks or Latins have brought forth’.12 Sir John Suckling praises Jonson, albeit sardonically, for his presumptuous boast of having ‘purged the stage | Of errors’ and for having laid out his claim that ‘The Silent Woman, | The Fox, and The Alchemist’ were ‘outdone by no man’.13 James Howell writes to Jonson in a letter dated c.1632 that ‘you were mad when you writ your Fox, and madder when you writ your Alchemist’, going on to explain that ‘The madness I mean is that divine fury, that heating and heightening spirit which Ovid writes of.’14 An anonymous broadside penned in 1660, ‘Prologue to the Reviv’d Alchemist’, proudly announces a revival of that play, brought to Oxford on the wings of Pegasus, ‘our winged sumpter’, ‘Who from Parnassus never brought to Greece | Nor Roman stage so rare a masterpiece’.15
During the Restoration period, when the play enjoyed great popularity, Samuel Pepys saw it twice at the Vere Street Theatre, on 22 June and on 14 August 1661, on the first of which occasions Pepys pronounced it ‘a most incomparable play’, and again on 2 and 4 August 1664, when he praised Walter Clun of the King’s Company for his performance of Subtle as ‘one of his best parts that he acts’.16 On 17 April 1669, Pepys saw the play yet again, judging it ‘still a good play’, though suffering this time from the absence of Clun.17 Edward Phillips declares, in 1675, that Jonson, for his authorship of his three main comedies, ‘may be compared, in the judgment of learned men, for decorum, language, and well humouring of the parts, as well with the chief of the ancient Greek and Latin comedians as the prime of modern Italians’.18 Examples multiply in the pages of G. E. Bentley’s Shakespeare and Jonson, and in The Jonson Allusion-Book assembled by Jesse Franklin Bradley and Joseph Quincy Adams, still further expanded in C. B. Graham’s ‘Jonson Allusions in Restoration Comedy’.19
Throughout most of the seventeenth century, in fact, as Bentley has shown, Jonson was the more acclaimed writer of the two by a considerable margin, in sheer numbers of allusions and as measured by standards of literary greatness. Even though Aphra Behn judged Shakespeare’s writings to have ‘better pleased the world than Jonson’s works’,20 Jonson turns up more often on lists of major English writers. He is more often quoted. Performances of his plays are noted twice as often as are those of Shakespeare’s plays. The Alchemist remained actively a part of the repertory of the King’s Men until the closing of the theatres in 1642, with Richard Burbage as Face until his death in 1619 and with Joseph Taylor in the part thereafter. Robert Armin excelled in the role of Abel Drugger. The Alchemist was apparently the only Jonson play to provide materials for the ‘drolls’ or farcical sketches that persisted in a marginal status during the Interregnum. Allusions to Jonson outnumber those to Shakespeare by a factor of three to one throughout most of the century, especially in the first fifty years. Only in the creation of vital dramatic characters like Falstaff and Cleopatra and Hamlet does Shakespeare surpass Jonson. From such numbers begins to emerge a durable polarity: Jonson is more widely imitated and discussed, but Shakespeare is seen as the more endearing and inspired writer. To admire Jonson and love Shakespeare becomes the rallying cry of criticism for centuries to come.
Nowhere in the Jonson canon are the criteria of admiration and imitation more at work than in critical commentary on The Alchemist. Characters like Subtle, Face and Doll become household names. In Richard Brome’s The Asparagus Garden, 1640, a man greets his friend with as much friendliness and closeness ‘as ever Subtle and his Lungs [i.e. Face] did’.21 The verbal pyrotechnics in Jonson’s play offer a vivid metaphor for emotional excess in William Cavendish’s The Country Captain, 1649, when one character exclaims to another: ‘Is thy head to be filled with proclamations, rejoinders, and hard words beyond The Alchemist?’22 An allusion to ‘mad Bess Broughton’ by Henry Tubbe in 1655 makes its humorous point by asking the audience to recall Jonson’s depiction of Broughton’s works as the ravings of a zealous Puritan divine.23 The actor John Lowin of the King’s Men was celebrated for his portrayal of Sir Epicure Mammon, along with Morose in Epicene, Volpone and Falstaff. Even negative comments testify to the English nation’s continued absorption in the antics of Jonson’s rogues; as Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, writes, ‘Can any rational person think that The Alchemist could be the action of one day, as that so many several cozenings could be acted in one day by Captain Face and Doll Common? And could the Alchemist make any believe they could make gold in one day?’24 The famous jibe at Jonson for presuming to write Works ‘where others were but plays’ aims its satirical venom at Jonson’s self-importance even while acknowledging his supremacy in the field of English literature.25
At the same time, The Alchemist was also perceived by early critics to represent the summit of Jonson’s achievement from which he soon descended. ‘Thy comic muse from the exalted line | Touched by The Alchemist doth since decline | From that her zenith’, cautioned Thomas Carew.26 This implicit consignment of Jonson’s later plays, including The Staple of News (1626) and The Magnetic Lady (1632), to the category of Jonson’s ‘dotages’ is thus of early date.
The critical method of assessing the literary greatness of The Alchemist by measuring its extraordinary skill in characterization and plot construction persists, by and large, throughout most of the eighteenth century. William Burnaby, in 1701, opines that ‘Our famous Ben Jonson’s Silent Woman, The Fox, and the Alchemist, and most of Molière’s plays, are the surest standards to judge of comedy.’27 For Richard Steele, The Alchemist, as performed on 11 May 1709, ‘is an example of Ben’s extensive genius and penetration into the passions and follies of mankind’.28 John Dennis agrees, writing in 1702: ‘The Fox, The Alchemist, the Silent Women of Ben Jonson are incomparably the best of our comedies.’29 Charles Gildon, in The Laws of Poetry, 1721, focuses on The Alchemist’s remarkable cleverness in ‘letting the audience into the knowledge of all that was necessary for them to be informed in, in relation to what was antecedent to the opening of the play, by that comical quarrel between Face and Subtle, in which the sage Doll Common is the prudent moderator’.30 Theophilus Cibber and Robert Shiells note in 1753 that ‘The Alchemist, The Fox, and The Silent Woman have been oftener acted than the rest of Ben Jonson’s plays put together’, having been ‘performed to many crowded audiences in several separate seasons, with universal applause’.31 Richard Hurd (1753–7) praises Volpone and The Alchemist as most worthy of serious criticism among English comedies, even though The Alchemist falls short of Molière’s The Misanthrope and Tartuffe in achieving the ‘genuine unmixed manner’ of those French comedies, by which Hurd means comedy without the ‘impure mixture’ of farce.32 David Erskine Baker, in 1764, hails The Alchemist, along with Volpone and Epicene, ‘as the Chef d’Oeuvres of this celebrated poet’.33 David Garrick’s portrayal of Abel Drugger, extending over many years until shortly before his death in 1776, was such a phenomenal success as to make The Alchemist a favourite play of that era, able to make us ‘shake our sides with joy’, as one rapt spectator put it, and to demonstrate vividly the combined skill of the dramatist and the actor in portraying ‘humorous’ character.34 Horace Walpole does not hesitate to aver that ‘The Alchemist is his [Jonson’s] best play.’35
Yet by 1776, George Colman could complain that ‘The subtle Alchemist grows obsolete, | And Drugger’s humour scarcely keeps him sweet.’36 Some critics indeed were inclined to assign the credit for Garrick’s success in playing Abel Drugger more to the actor than to the dramatist. After Garrick’s death in 1776, The Alchemist went into a rapid decline on the London stage. Apart from a few heavily adapted productions, one of them with Edmund Kean as Drugger in 1814–15, the play was dropped from the repertory until William Poel’s 1899 revival for the Elizabethan Stage Society. Apart from Coleridge’s great praise of The Alchemist, Charles Lamb’s assessment that ‘If there be no one image which rises to the height of the sublime, yet the confluence and assemblage of them all produces an effect equal to the grandest poetry’, and William Hazlitt’s fervent wish that Jonson could create more sympathetic characters, the play fared poorly in the nineteenth century.37
Belatedly in the century, Algernon Charles Swinburne, in A Study of Ben Jonson in 1899, does present at last a serious study of Volpone and The Alchemist in order to show how the two plays come to stand as ‘the consummate and crowning result’ of Jonson’s genius.38 Yet, Swinburne does so at the expense of The Alchemist; although it is ‘perhaps more wonderful in the perfection and combination of cumulative detail, in triumphant simplicity of process and impeccable felicity of result’ (thus essentially agreeing up to this point with Coleridge’s analysis), The Alchemist must yield precedence, in Swinburne’s view, to Volpone as the more graced with ‘imagination’ and ‘romance’. Swinburne’s chief objection to The Alchemist is ‘the absolutely unqualified and unrelieved rascality’ of its various manipulators and schemers. The dupes are, to Swinburne, ‘viler if less villainous figures than the rapacious victims of Volpone’. The ‘imperturbable skill’ of villainy in Face and Subtle cannot sufficiently compensate for the ‘immoral sympathy’ that draws us as audience unwillingly into a conspiratorial collaboration with the rogues. The ‘incomparable skill’ and ‘indefatigable craftsmanship’ of the villains cannot satisfy audiences with what is ultimately no better than ‘intellectual or aesthetic satisfaction’. Coleridge is wrong, in Swinburne’s view, if only because he has had the temerity to pair Oedipus Tyrannus with Fielding’s Tom Jones! Perhaps, we can see in this essay by Swinburne a profound reason why The Alchemist fell out of favour in the age of Queen Victoria and even shortly before: the play seems to endorse a sort of anarchic amorality that the play’s ending merely confirms rather than (as, arguably, in Volpone) endorsing some sort of moral standard.
John Addington Symonds, on the other hand, is more tolerant of Jonson’s satirical purpose. Symonds celebrates the play’s ending as one that is truly ‘comic’ in the Jonsonian sense of castigating not crimes but follies. Mammon is, for Symonds, ‘the twin-brother of Tamburlaine in his extravagant conceits’. The play, for all its local colour, ‘remains true to the permanent facts of human roguery and weakness’.39 Perhaps the end of the nineteenth century and its pointed ignoring of Jonson are about to end.
With the advent of the twentieth century, scholarly and critical discussion of The Alchemist and of other of Jonson’s works (as also in Shakespeare criticism) turns its attention away from character study and broadly generalized neoclassical appreciation for the play’s structural beauties to historical research. One important result of this new emphasis is to be found in the editing of Jonson, and particularly, for our present purposes, of The Alchemist. Of special note here are the editions of Herford and Simpson, spanning a 27-year publication period, presenting The Alchemist in volume 5 in 1937, and F. H. Mares’s 1967 edition for the Revels Plays.40
Prior to Herford and Simpson, the play had of course its own history of publishing. The Alchemist was registered to Walter Burre on 3 October 161041 and appeared in quarto in 1612 as printed (rather carelessly) by Thomas Snodham, with John Stepneth as Burre’s partner in the enterprise, at the sign of the Crane in St Paul’s Churchyard. Folio publication followed in 1616, as printed by William Stansby, with fairly minor textual changes other than the correcting of some printing errors and a toning down of phrases that might seem to violate prohibitions against profanity. Burre, as one who controlled seven of the nine plays included in the 1616 Folio, ultimately came to an agreement with Stansby over the rights to those seven plays, one of them The Alchemist. By the time Jonson died in August of 1637, most of the original owners were dead. Subsequent folios appeared: a second folio in 1640–1 with as many of Jonson’s writings as were then available, and a third folio in 1692 adding a few new Jonson texts but generally a reprise of its predecessor.
Peter Whalley’s edition of the Works in 1756 provided, for the first time, annotation other than Jonson’s own, and added a few new texts.42 The Folio was his choice of text for The Alchemist, as it was for most of the plays. David Garrick published his adaptation in 1763; owing no doubt to Garrick’s stunning performance as Abel Drugger, this version was for some time the most frequently republished of the adaptations.43 Francis Gentleman put forth a burlesque version for Drury Lane in 1770, providing a Prologue to a two-act farce called The Tobacconist that gave renewed attention to Abel Drugger (honouring the actor Thomas Weston, who, like Garrick, starred in this role; they both died in 1776).44 William Gifford’s edition of the Works in 1816 took Whalley to task for numerous perceived deficiencies, but the improvements were chiefly in the annotation and in a ‘Biographical Memoir’;45 the Folio text offered and continues to offer a reliable guide for editing of The Alchemist, so that the emendations duly noted in modern editions derived from Whalley and Gifford are chiefly the corrections of fairly obvious typographical and copying errors. Gifford served as the model for most subsequent editions in the nineteenth century. Barry Cornwall’s 1838 edition reprinted Gifford’s text.
With the twentieth century came the so-called New Bibliography, emphasizing the importance of methodological investigation of all early texts, quartos and folios, along with manuscript sources, in order to determine as precisely as possible the process by which an author’s writings have been transformed into various stages that could include fair copy, a playhouse script, copy for the printer, proofreading sheets, revision for later publication, and so on. Early editions during the century included C. M. Hathaway’s 1903 edition, F. E. Schelling’s in 1904, and G. A. Smithson’s in 1907, all in modern spelling. Although Smithson introduced some new editorial stage directions, the textual advances among these editions were minor. The 1616 Folio, fortunately, offered a reliable textual guide for all these editions. Later editions, by G. E. Bentley in 1947, Douglas Brown in 1966, J. B. Bamborough in 1967, J. B. Steane in 1967, S. Musgrove in 1968, Alvin B. Kernan in 1974, and still others did not materially change the intellectual landscape of textual editing of The Alchemist.46 (Helen Ostovich’s more innovative editing would not arrive until 1997.)47
The field was thus free for Herford and Simpson to produce a thoroughly scholarly edition of Jonson in the spirit of the New Bibliography as pioneered by R. B. McKerrow and W. W. Greg, and this they did.48 The result is an impressively scholarly edition, in old spelling, with a minimum of added stage directions or indeed anything not appearing in the original published texts, and with learned notes on sources and background. The monumental format included occasional black-letter, archaic spellings, new scenes generally marked in the ‘continental’ fashion at the appearance of each significant new character with a massed header of personae at the head of each scene, parentheses used to mark asides, elaborate marginalia often in Latin and Greek, numerous commendatory verses, and still more. All of this material, the editors presumed, enjoyed the author’s endorsement. Percy Simpson especially, who took over the task with the abundantly valuable assistance of his wife Evelyn after Herford’s death in 1931, made it his task to trumpet the textual virtues of the 1616 Folio as the primary textual source for the plays appearing in that collection. Surely, Simpson argued, the Jonson First Folio was the work of Jonson himself and should reflect in its textual method that towering presence of the author. Indeed, Jonson was undoubtedly intent on presenting his 1616 Folio as an instant classic worthy of being shelved next to the collected and annotated works of Homer, Aristotle, Virgil, Seneca, and the rest. Jonson certainly did rewrite for that folio publication. He welcomed dedicatory letters and poems from his friends and admirers, and was responsible for a large number of corrections introduced into the printed text as it made its way through the press. These would all seem to be potent reasons for privileging the 1616 Folio in a modern edition of the plays it contains (though of course the editor would need to consult the quartos as well for any hints of authorial intent misinterpreted by the Folio editors and printers). Yet, as more recent work has shown (to be discussed further in another chapter in the present volume), Simpson has overstated the case for Jonson as supervisor and proofreader of the 1616 Folio. Although many press corrections were Jonson’s, many others were presumably the work of press personnel. The amount of correction tails off towards the end of the 1616 Folio, as though Jonson ran out of time and energy. Simpson was not always able to distinguish accurately between uncorrected and corrected states. Both W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers have observed in commenting on the edition that it tends to be more an edition of the 1616 Folio itself than of what Jonson wrote.49
All of this has limited application to The Alchemist, as it happens, since its 1616 Folio text differs so little from the 1612 quarto and, though marred with misprints, seems fundamentally sound. Simpson’s collation of six 1616 copies turns up essentially no interesting variants: except in the Dedication ‘To the Reader’, all the 37 or so variants noted are minor matters of punctuation. Thus, although Simpson’s call for fidelity to the 1616 Folio in Jonson editing is substantially flawed as an argument in the case of some other works, The Alchemist remains unaffected because its text is so reliable and so close to the 1612 quarto. Some classicized spellings like ‘praeuaricate’ and ‘precise’ are modernized in the 1616 Folio, and, as noted earlier, a few profanities are ameliorated, but the changes are slight. The 1640–1 second Folio is essentially a reprint. Simpson’s chief contribution to editing The Alchemist lies in the learned commentary. The work is philologically conservative and turns a deaf ear to matters of staging in many cases. Its presenting of sources and analogues normally settles for the Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian (etc.) originals without translation, as though assuming that the edition is chiefly for the learned. The pages of the text are not reader-friendly. Still, the work is impressively knowledgeable.
F. H. Mares’s edition for the Revels Plays in 1967 is more attentive to the non-specialist as well as to specialist readers. In the spirit of the Revels Plays, begun in 1958 under the general editorship of Clifford Leech and with acknowledged indebtedness to the style of editing established by the Arden Shakespeares beginning in 1899 with Edward Dowden’s edition of Hamlet, Mares’s notes and textual collations are at the foot of the page. The text is modernized, with fairly liberal insertion of editorially added stage directions. Square brackets, along with the collations, indicate where the text departs from the copy text. That copy text for Mares, as for his predecessors (and followers), is the 1616 Folio. ‘It is the assumption of this edition’, writes Mares, ‘that the 1616 folio represents Jonson’s considered intention. The text is good, and was almost certainly prepared under his direct supervision. The copy used by the printer would seem to have been the quarto of 1612, as amended by the author.’50 Mares provides convincing particulars demonstrating that indeed certain obvious errors in the quarto have been carried over by the printers into the 1616 Folio. Mares makes more of a case for authorial revision from quarto to folio than had Simpson, including a number of stage directions normally set in the Folio as side-notes but missing, with one exception, in the quarto. Oaths are toned down, as Simpson had noted. More general is a revision of punctuation, which Mares wants to see as authorial, though this is a harder case to make since printers generally took charge of pointing the texts, and the effect in a modern edition is minimal in any case. Differences too in typography are of minor consideration in a modernized text with modernized punctuation and typography.
Thus, in substantive matters, Mares’s text is largely undistinguishable from its predecessors, and for a sufficient reason. The commentary is historically learned, more ready to translate foreign languages into English than was Simpson, and more willing to gloss terms that might be unfamiliar to the academic audience to which the Revels editions are aimed. A substantial introduction, in what is by this time a standard format for Revels or Arden editions, surveys Life and Character, Alchemy, The Play, Jonson’s Verse, Stage History and The Text. All this is in need today of updating, and a new Revels edition is indeed under way in the capable hands of Richard Dutton. A new complete scholarly edition, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (CWBJ), on the scale of the Herford and Simpson Oxford edition but with substantially different aims (modern spelling, chronological arrangement of the works, a searching re-examination of textual authority of the early texts, new commentary, an electronic edition to include extensive materials online, etc.), is near completion as I write in the fall of 2011.
Historical scholarship on The Alchemist establishes itself and rapidly gains momentum in the early years of the twentieth century. In her Studies in Jonson’s Comedy, 1898, Elizabeth Woodbridge Morris compares the structural features of Volpone with those of The Alchemist to show how the intriguers of the earlier play, Volpone and Mosca, are reconfigured in Subtle and Face, and similarly with their victims: Celia changed into a structurally similar but very different character in Dame Pliant, Bonario similarly transmuted into Surly, and so on.51 Morris is interested historically in the evolution of character types and roles. The title of Eleanor Patience Lumley’s The Influence of Plautus on the Comedies of Ben Jonson, 1901, makes clear her commitment to historical method in classical source studies.52 Alfred Remy, in 1906, looks at Jonson’s creative reuse of Spanish, paying particular attention to ‘Verdugoship’ in The Alchemist; he discovers a historical Spanish organist named Verdugo and suggests that the word means ‘hangman, executioner’.53
F. E. Schelling finds several models for Jonson’s alchemical characters in William Lilly’s History of His Life and Times, c.1681.54 C. R. Baskervill, though concerned mainly with plays before The Alchemist, demonstrates how native theatrical traditions influence even a studiously classical dramatist like Jonson and continue to manifest themselves in his greatest comedies.55 Mina Kerr surveys Jonson’s dramatic development as a classicist and student of Terence and Plautus whose satirical types were to prove weightily influential on dramatists like Shirley and Brome.56 To be sure, many of Kerr’s sources-and-influences pieces of information had been gathered together in the notes of Gifford and other earlier editors. In his Ben Jonson (1919), G. Gregory Smith studies Jonson’s development of a dramatist, proposing that The Argument gains some of its freedom from moral constraints from having been written after Epicene.57 Byron Steel’s popularizing O Rare Ben Jonson, 1928, attests to interest in Jonson as a dramatist.58 Huntington Brown’s 1929 note finds a Rabelaisian anecdote in the opening scene of The Alchemist when Face’s ‘Sirrah, I’ll strip you –’ receives Subtle’s vulgar reply: ‘What to do? Lick figs | Out at my –’, thereby recalling Barbarossa’s odd punishment of the Milanese for insulting the Empress in Book 4, chapter 45 of Pantagruel.59 Another resonance may occur when Face tauntingly recalls how he met Subtle ‘at Pie Corner, | Taking your meal of steam in from cooks’ stalls’ (1.1.25–6).60 (To be sure, Anne Lake Prescott reminds us that such Gargantuan references are apt to be from the chapbook hero of that name, not Rabelais’s own text.)61
In the 1930s, Eric Linklater focuses his brief analysis of The Alchemist on Simon Forman, John Dee, Giles Mompessom, and other figures in the shadowy history of alchemy, along with Chaucer, Gower, and literary writers attracted to the story.62 John Palmer purveys similar information about alchemists in history, though he is mainly interested in introducing the play to readers as ‘a better play than Volpone’ because of its lucid brilliance of construction.63 We can see here, perhaps, the influence of the so-called New Criticism, concentrating on the work of art as a thing of poetic construction. Landmark works of criticism by a prominent New Critic are to be found in L. C. Knights’s Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson and his later published ‘Ben Jonson: Public Attitudes and Social Poetry’; here The Alchemist is viewed as a study of greed and lust in which the Puritans symbolize avarice without guilt.64 Harry Levin’s essay on ‘Jonson’s Metempsychosis’, 1943, offers an astute close reading of Mosca’s mountebank scene in Volpone as the ‘germ’ of ‘mature comedy’ out of which the superb gulling in The Alchemist arises. Jonson, says Levin, has discovered that good and evil in this world ‘are matters of opinion’; the world is divided ‘not into good men and bad, but into rogues and fools’.65 Alexander Sackton sees the dazzling display of phony jargon, both in alchemy and Puritanism, as a special kind of rhetoric in The Alchemist.66 The New Critical movement has found Ben Jonson.
To be sure, historical criticism continues its study of Jonson during these same years, often with illuminating results. Charles Francis Wheeler’s work on mythology in Jonson shows how Jonson combines classical references in Sir Epicure Mammon’s imaginary ‘Hesperian garden, Cadmus’ story, | Jove’s shower, the boon of Midas, Argus’ eyes’ (The Alchemist, 2.1.101–2).67 Clifford Leech finds Caroline echoes of The Alchemist in Massinger, Fletcher, Brome, Davenant and Randolph.68 Edgar Hill Duncan looks into the play’s ‘scientific’ references by reading learnedly in medieval and Renaissance alchemical treatises that were still current in Jonson’s day, concluding that Jonson did not greatly alter or exaggerate current conceptions of alchemy in what his characters profess.69 Johnstone Parr, in the previous year, follows a similar fascination by looking at ‘Non-Alchemical Pseudo-Sciences in The Alchemist’, discovering in the process that Subtle’s discourses on chiromancy, metoposcopy, astrology, and the like are usually quite accurate in their characterization of much fraudulent learning.70 John Read looks at John Dee and Edward Kelley as likely models for Jonson’s play.71
Freda Townshend argues (somewhat in the spirit of C. R. Baskervill’s study of the early comedies) that The Alchemist owes more to Renaissance satire than it does to the Roman comedy of Plautus and Terence; the classical ‘unities’ offer too constricting a view.72 Lu Emily Pearson’s study of early modern widows looks satirically at Dame Pliant’s adventures in the context of social historical research on young Elizabethan widows forced to submit to a male guardian’s control.73 C. J. Sisson argues that the gullible clerk Dapper is based on a real-life story involving one Thomas Rogers of Dorset.74 Joseph T. McCullen Jr is also interested in Rogers as a prototype of Dapper, as is Franklin Williams.75 (Richard Levin, in a later article, discounts Rogers’s claim as unsubstantial and makes his own case for an anonymous pamphlet he calls The Brideling.)76 The ‘unclean birds’ with their ‘ruff of pride’ alluded to in horror and disgust by Ananias when he sees Surly in Spanish costume (4.7.51–3) are, as M. A. Shaaber demonstrates, familiar emblems as warnings against pride. Malcolm South’s article on this subject (1973) concludes that the ‘vncleane birds’ are Catholic priests.77 Paul Goodman offers a persuasive Chicago-school neo-Aristotelian reading of the play, seeing the action, complete with beginning, middle and ending, as Jonson’s most fully worked out comedy of deflation, in which Lovewit is representative of the play’s daringly amoral sense of comic justice.78
Once we reach the 1950s, historical scholarship seems less in evidence than appreciative literary studies. Marchette Chute, aiming at a general audience, attracted many readers with her engaging portrayal of the dramatist and his work.79 John J. Enck, allowing that The Alchemist is ‘Jonson’s greatest play’, praises it for its construction but faults the play nonetheless for the weakness of Lovewit as an authority figure (as if some theatrical crane were lowering onto the play’s fifth act ‘a ponderous and desperate deus ex machina’), and the disproportionately specialized nature of the satire.80 Maurice Hussey’s essay on Ananias concludes too easily that Christian thought is implicitly the play’s alleged norm of moral judgement.81 Edward B. Partridge, on the other hand, shows the New Critical method at its best. Careful attention to irony in The Alchemist, to inflated rhetoric and explosive epithets that characteristically end in deflation, to martial imagery exposing sexual aggression as a kind of warfare, to alchemical images of a religious, medical, commercial and sexual nature, and to bestial imagery applied to the absurd human condition (as in Volpone also), all results in an illuminating reading of the play. The various people of The Alchemist ‘whose lives are dedicated to the acquisition of gold’, writes Partridge, are doomed to ‘bear some relation to the alchemists of old’.82
By the 1960s, many Jonsonians seem to have learned how to reject the stern admonitions of some zealous New Critics that we should ignore social and political and biographical contexts to focus intent on imagery and tone. Instead, the critical studies of this era often favour a more harmonizing and inclusive approach that can make critical use of background material while still viewing the work of art as a literary and aesthetic whole. An engaging example is William Empson’s essay on The Alchemist that appeared in The Hudson Review. Empson argues against those many critics who are so caught up in moral disapproval of the play’s action that they end up hating and despising the characters as either fools or knaves. Too many teachers, in Empson’s view, are caught up in a mood of moral revulsion that seems to have prompted so many readers and viewers in the nineteenth century to turn away from the play in distaste. Such teachers, observes Empson, regard the play as so morally distressing that it should be kept away from impressionable students. This is nonsense, says Empson. ‘One cannot get on with The Alchemist without accepting its moral’, he writes. Such an acceptance requires that we understand the necessity of our half-sympathizing with the tricksters; we need to agree with Jonson’s implicit view that ‘if a man can be cheated by obvious rogues like this, he deserves it’.83 The play tells us that we are supposed to laugh.
An Empsonian kindred spirit is to be found in C. G. Thayer. ‘The world of The Alchemist’, he writes, ‘is a world turned upside down, a world in which the motivating forces are folly and avarice. Jonson has created a microcosm, complete in itself, not so much a reflection of the world of ordinary experience, as one in which a single aspect of the experiential world, folly, acts as the prime mover for all that occurs.’ Alchemy can be seen as ‘comic art’, one that, like Jonson’s play, ‘reduces itself to its own quintessence and becomes the ultimate sublime impossibility, the universal panacea’.84 Moral judgement thus becomes part of the aesthetic design of the play, not a moral absolute.
To be sure, Gabriele Bernhard Jackson sees Jonson’s ideal individual as ‘a public man’ applying to society’s salvation ‘man’s best intellectual and spiritual qualities: clemency, manliness, critical judgment, poetic understanding’. These are the qualities by which Jonson judges his characters; The Alchemist, like Jonson’s plays generally, is ‘about moral judgment’, and it is a judgement that invites us to disapprove of a character like Mammon who ‘intends to spend his wealth destroying, not upholding, the qualities and relations on which society depends’.85 Robert Knoll too insists on a moral reading of the play: ‘What Jonson objects to is the excessive ambition which offends against God’s ordering of things . . . The Alchemist is a religious, not a social, tract, and it is directed against the impious rather than the antisocial.’86 Myrddin Jones emphasizes no less emphatically that ‘the caricature of religion in the figure of Sir Epicure Mammon is strong and would have been recognized and condemned as such by the contemporary audience’, if only because Mammon identifies himself with Solomon’s sensuality and craving for power in 1 Kings. Jonson’s moral purpose, in Jones’s view, is to display at full ‘the evil at the heart of an acquisitive society’.87 The debate thus goes on, and it is one in which Jonson becomes a profoundly ambivalent figure.
William Blissett’s critical approach to this same difficulty of the play’s morally problematic ending is to see in The Alchemist a tripartite representation of World, Flesh and Devil. Subtle is the Devil, and Doll Common the Flesh; the World is more complicatedly represented by Face (Jeremy), perhaps also Sir Epicure, and, finally, by Lovewit, the man of the world who breaks no laws but triumphs over the schemers and gulls by his shrewdness. The World is like that, declares the play in Blissett’s view; proverbially, ‘The world will love his own.’88 We as audience have to hand it to Lovewit for being smart enough to win. We applaud Face or Jeremy too, as Lovewit’s closest associate. Blissett argues for much the same sardonic and matter-of-fact conclusion as in Empson’s reading. Most tellingly, argues Blissett, Jonson himself holds the ancient dramatists to be on his side, when he insists, in his dedicatory epistle to the Universities prefacing Volpone, that he has followed the example of the ancients, ‘whose comedies are not always joyful, but oft-times the bawds, the servants, the rivals, yea, and the masters are mulcted; and fitly, it being the office of a comic poet to imitate justice and instruct to life’.89 The play imitates life not according to some abstract and idealized moral template, but according to how the world wags.
Brian Gibbons sees this remorseless candour as integral to the spirit of what he calls Jacobean City Comedy. So do Jonathan Haynes and William R. Dynes, each arguing a case for thieves and tricksters of early modern London, vying to see ‘who sharks best’.90 The genre of city comedy, with its relentlessly sardonic and urbane depiction of la comédie humaine, is indeed ideally suited to a satirical portraiture of shystering in a bustling and overcrowded city like London of the early seventeenth century. Arnold Judd similarly sees Lovewit as a seventeenth-century gallant, a type Jonson was inclined to admire, and for whom a programme of reforming humankind was hardly a driving passion.91
Alan Dessen approaches this problem of moral interpretation by invoking the ‘estates’ morality, a late mutation of the genre in the 1580s and 1590s caught up in a satirical portrayal of contemporary life in England and especially London and thus well suited to castigate abstractions like Mercatore, Lucre and Usury. However crude its dramatic method, argues Dessen, this genre offered a useful model for Jonson’s wry depiction of a businesslike ‘venter’ in which ‘the base metal of the Jacobean public can be turned into gold or profit’.92 L. A. Beaurline, similarly persuaded that Jonson was ‘partly indebted to the late moralities’ as well as to Greek comedy, sees The Alchemist as Jonson’s finest example of a philosophical quest for ‘controlled completeness’, a completeness that can ‘bring us a little closer to Jonson’s design’.93 That design is one of plenitude or copiousness, fashioned to solve the play’s tendency to break up into episodes with its many characters and incidents. The encyclopedic inclusiveness is like that of seventeenth-century books on farm husbandry, health, gambling, and the like, bearing comprehensive titles like The Complete Angler, The Complete Gamester, The Complete Parson and The Anatomy of Abuses.94
The end of the 1960s and last three decades of the twentieth century are a time of social and political unrest: a virtual revolution in sexual mores, deconstruction in literary method, a New Historicism, and still more, altering the academic and literary landscape to a degree perhaps never seen before. Jonson criticism predictably embraces a broad scale of responses, from traditionalism to post-modern innovation. A significant figure is Jonas Barish, whose Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy appeared in 1960, to be followed by other significant studies. Jonson is brilliant in identifying language with character, says Barish. Subtle in The Alchemist is one of those ‘who can within limits control their own personae, command their own metamorphoses’, while the butts are those who ‘try to live within an alien persona’ and are doomed to fail because their ambitions exceed their capacities.95 The Alchemist carries ‘the subversion of justice a step farther’ than in Volpone and Epicene, ‘and forecloses even more sharply on the possibility of transcendent standards’. It does so by introducing for the first time ‘the discomfiting element of interested judgment’.96 Lovewit never even pretends to the kind of detachment and impartiality we see in Epicene’s Truewit. Little honour is to be found among thieves. Lovewit candidly admits that he has become accessory to the cheating that has gone on in his house, but hopes that the audience will not judge him too harshly, if only because he promises to redeem himself somehow with the aid of all the plunder. The final decision rests with us. We are urged to follow the line of least resistance. ‘As the Jonsonian equivalence between comedy and feasting comes into sharp focus, comedy loses much of its corrective sting. . . . Only if we wish to be reckoned among the gulls will we protest too loudly.’97 Barish thus strengthens the argument in favour of a sardonically cheerful upending of the norms of justice – much, perhaps, as one would expect from time of upheaval in the late 1960s and the 1970s.
Thomas M. Greene sees the circle or sphere symbolizing harmony and perfection as the great unifying image for Jonson, to such an extent that almost everything he wrote ‘attempts in one way or another to complete the broken circle, or expose the ugliness of its completion’. In the masques, these images are represented as complete, with the king at the centre of the circle; conversely, in The Alchemist, and in Jonson’s other plays shortly before and after it, the circle appears to be broken, leaving the centre to be associated with ‘solitary and upright independence’.98 The manipulating characters like Volpone and Subtle are Protean figures without core or principle or substance. The play’s closest approximation to a moral resolution is Face’s (Jeremy’s) offer to give the role of judgement to the spectators, inviting them to join in a feast of ‘tolerant forgiveness of his shenanigans by their applause’. Jonson’s ‘appreciation of the artist-scoundrel’ thereby qualifies ‘his disapproval of the centrifugal self’.99 Greene thus sides with Barish, Empson, and others for whom the audience is co-opted into an acceptance of the play’s wild concept of poetic justice.
Michael Flachmann bolsters this argument by taking a positive view of the play’s union between alchemy and satire. The play itself is an alchemical experiment. Alchemy is ‘a powerful metaphor that explains his [Jonson’s] conception of the proper relation between a playwright and his audience’. Jonson does not endorse alchemy as a science, of course, but he does see in it a ‘well-wrought image which could portray his own theories on satire’.100 The play is thus about itself, about poetic metaphor.
Alvin Kernan advances a similar case for self-reflexivity. Both the chicanery and the folly of The Alchemist’s characters are ‘defined by Jonson as alchemy’. The characters are not only hoping to become rich, they are intent on transmuting ‘their own base natures into something rich and strange’. Mammon is above all the comic overreacher whose desire for alchemical transformation ‘reaches truly heroic proportions’. Such characters long to ‘overleap nature’.101 Lovewit is a deus ex machina figure whose unexpected and sudden appearance helps to ‘bring the plot to a comic rather than satiric conclusion’, writes Kernan. With good sense and lack of scruple, Lovewit takes advantage of his opportunity. Wit, or common sense, manages at least to ‘achieve what is possible for a limited creature in a limited world’.102 James Shapiro (1991) similarly characterizes Mammon as ‘a secular Faustus . . . an overreacher’.103 We hear in self-referential analyses such as these a hallmark of post-modern criticism.
Richard Levin is no doubt right to observe that in too many moralistic and religious readings of the play, some of which we have glanced at in this survey, The Alchemist has ceased to be viewed as funny and has begun instead to sound ‘very grim indeed’. It is ‘a religious, not a social, tract’, says one critic; it is ‘a cynical play’, says another; and so on. Levin’s useful contribution is to show how such defensively conservative readings go about proving their point by explaining away the play’s seeming Aristophanic irreverence; they argue that the play ‘does not really mean what it seems to mean’. The very absence of reform or retribution, to one critic, ‘serves to emphasize the characters’ depravity’, since ‘they do not seem to be worth saving’. Because Face’s booty is mere rubbish, argues another critic, it ‘is its own best punishment’. Even for Lovewit the new possessions ‘are not unmixed blessings’, since they will not cover the cost of cleaning the house, and the like. Probably none of this will have changed the minds of those who have argued so, but Levin’s irreverence is refreshing and, I would say, right-minded.104
Donald Gertmenian, in ‘Comic Experience in Volpone and The Alchemist’ (1977), argues similarly that the common critical desire to expect moral affirmation from comedy distorts in such a way as to see Volpone and The Alchemist as essentially alike, whereas, in Gertmenian’s view, ‘The Alchemist differs from Volpone by being amoral and delighting.’105 Ian Donaldson is similarly even-handed in his argument that the play’s emphasis on varieties of expression forces the characters into opposing camps of equal ferocity, with plenty of low moral and intellectual stature to pass around among the contestants.106
This is not to say, of course, that The Alchemist is lacking in satirical censure, as Richard Dutton rightly observes, and yet, he freely acknowledges, the play’s complexity lies in its ‘baroque recognition of itself as a play’.107 For Douglas Duncan, Jonson draws heavily on the techniques of Lucianic satire – more so than on the moralities that Alan Dessen writes about. The Alchemist, Duncan writes, ‘is so comprehensively irreverent as to mock all critical solemnity’ – it is ‘rogue fiction’.108 Aliki Lafkidou Dick suggests that Jonson’s appeal to human intelligence is essentially Aristophanic, as when Face’s satiric portrait of Subtle as of a ‘piteously costive’ beggar taking in meals of steam from cooks’ stalls (1.1.28) reminds us of Aristophanes’ depiction of a pale-faced and starving Socrates in Clouds.109 Robertson Davies claims that Jonson’s characters are unlikeable because Jonson’s classically driven intent was to expose and scourge follies.110
The last two decades of the twentieth century have produced a quantitative growth in the number of books and essays on Jonson’s The Alchemist. The play remains central to critical discussions of Jonson’s art. At the same time, the critical explorations are not generally as revisionary or deconstructive as are critical studies of some other literary figures, notably Shakespeare. Even if, as been argued here, critical work on this play in the late twentieth century reveals necessarily some influence of rapid social change and conflict, it does so less stridently and controversially than in the instance of some other literary topics and authors. Women have contributed substantially to critical work on The Alchemist, starting with early pioneers like Elizabeth Woodbridge Morris in 1898, Eleanor Patience Lumley in 1901, and Mina Kerr in 1912 (see above), with a substantial number still to come, but even here, one would be hard put to characterize most of this scholarship or criticism as feminist in its theoretical concerns. Leah Marcus is successfully revisionist in her The Politics of Mirth,111 but most women writing about this play tackle the same questions that have interested men.
Perhaps Jonson’s The Alchemist invites this intellectual caution. Doll Common and Dame Pliant are hardly Moll Frith in The Roaring Girl, or Ophelia or Desdemona or Rosalind, or the Duchess of Malfi. One can soon exhaust the critical possibilities of Jonson’s preference for satirical types in women. Similarly, a deconstructive reading of Jonson seems destined to go nowhere. Jonson is so committed generally to proving his point about how satiric comedy is supposed to work, with Jonson himself as its supreme exemplar for his own generation and upholder of the great classical tradition, that ambiguity is not what he strives for. New Historicism falls under the same constraint as a potential method of analysis: Jonson’s masques can be studied as apt examples in the Geertzian mode of art forms created to enable the monarch to put itself on display and act out royal fantasies of power, but Jonson’s own social and political conservatism is not comfortable with the notion that such power is illusory or that political truth is ineluctably relative.
No, Jonson’s revisionism, if the term can be applied at all, lies in the great perception, of which The Alchemist may be his finest expression, that great dramatic art must not be constrained by conventional moral strictures; it operates according to its own laws, and must not be viewed or judged as one would judge a moral or religious tract. Even here, Jonson’s critical move is humanistically conservative and traditional in the best sense of those terms, since the finest of the ancient comic writers, he insists, were aware that comedy must imitate life not in ideal terms but with a candid awareness of what life is truly like.
Some examples from the last twenty years or so of the twentieth century will, I hope, illustrate the points I’ve been arguing. Anne Barton sees the play as about ‘transformation, as it affects not metals, but human beings’. Although Jonson had no use for real-life alchemists, he found alchemy ‘a metaphoric system’ well suited to his artistic purposes.112 At the same time, his transformations in The Alchemist are not liberating, like those in Shakespeare. No Shakespearean miracle has occurred at the end of The Alchemist. It is, for Barton, ‘the funniest play Jonson ever wrote’,113 because of its delightful cunning and inventive stage situations. The manipulators are without conscience, of course, but Surly is no Criticus or Horace or even Macilente striving to defend poetry, learning and the good life; he is a ‘gamester’ driven not by moral conviction but by professional jealousy and greed for power, like all the rest. Barton’s chapter on The Alchemist is a wonderfully insightful essay, the method and conclusions of which are by and large compatible with those of Empson, Greene, Barish, Blissett, and others who have stood out against a moralistic reading of the play.
Wayne Rebhorn’s assessment of Lovewit in ‘Jonson’s “Jovy Boy”’ seems at first similar: Lovewit, Rebhorn argues, is triumphant at the end by virtue of ‘his mental agility and shrewd ability to calculate his own advantage’. Rebhorn’s analysis of scholarship on the play usefully defines ‘two fundamentally opposed and seemingly irreconcilable camps’, one insisting that we must condemn Lovewit on moral grounds, the other welcoming him as a vital and urbane representative of the play’s compellingly eccentric view of justice as the world adjudicates such matters. Rebhorn’s surprising conclusion is that at the play’s end Lovewit is ‘nothing less than Face’s final dupe’.114 Lovewit is fundamentally egocentric and amoral; he is animated by fantasies of power. Although he thinks of himself as the triumphant trickster, argues Rebhorn, his comic fate is to carry out Face’s plans rather than his own. This argument, perhaps more ingenious than convincing, does show at least the extraordinary extent to which critics keep returning to the same conundrum of comic justice at the end of the play. If Jonson’s intent was to challenge his audiences with a controversial idea, he certainly has succeeded.
One hold on the modern and post-modern literary imagination to which The Alchemist can legitimately lay claim is that it embodies a marked fascination with literary theory, perhaps even more so than in Jonson’s other writings. In The Alchemist, we find Jonson ‘buttressing his work with literary theory’, notes Gordon Sweeney.115 Face (Jeremy) ends the play with an epilogue, defending himself on grounds of ‘decorum’ (5.5.159), as though the invocation of that classical ideal would explain everything. But it doesn’t, and Face is ‘no simple Jonsonian apologist’. How is this ‘decorum’ to be reconciled with a great deal of indecorous behaviour on Face’s part? And, although the play’s prologue promises ‘wholesome remedies’ (line 15) and ‘fair correctives’ (line 18), Lovewit’s defence of his own role flies in the face of such conventional theorizing. If he can plead that he has ‘outstripped | An old man’s gravity, or strict canon’ (5.5.153–4), he has done so to serve what Sweeney calls ‘the value of his own pleasure’. The play may be presumed to have moral significance, as called for in classical practice, but both Face and Lovewit define themselves as unique characters in a unique play, defying classical theory and prospering nonetheless. What is more, they do so by an appeal to the theatre as a vital social organ needing and deserving our support. Most epilogues resolve difficulties of moral judgement in the plays they conclude; Jonson’s do the opposite, and nowhere more so than in The Alchemist. Face’s epilogue is thus a defence of theatre, one that operates by its own rules. Acting is gulling; how can we expect Face to behave otherwise? Sweeney’s astute analysis of the problem of theory in this play has the huge benefit of insisting that we re-examine the value of our own experience in the theatre. ‘Are we to congratulate ourselves as benefactors of the Jacobean theater or to consider ourselves cozened, like Mammon?’ Here as elsewhere, ‘in Jonson’s work theory and practice do not conform’; his insistence elsewhere that poetry improve and educate its spectators and readers seems oddly and yet productively at odds with Face’s and Lovewit’s sardonic disregard of the consequences of their own acts as characters and as actors. ‘It is when we begin thinking about the play that it poses problems for us’, says Sweeney. Here is a critical and theoretical argument that casts The Alchemist in a genuinely illuminating post-modern mode.
The importance of a sense of place in The Alchemist looms into view as a significant topic in recent years. The play is set in London, or, more particularly, in Blackfriars. Jonson’s move towards London as his theatrical setting had already begun, argues R. L. Smallwood, with Jonson’s collaborative work on Eastward Ho!, 1605, and was to manifest itself still further in the shift from the Italian-based quarto version of Every Man in His Humour (1598) to the London-based Folio version of 1616, and then again in Bartholomew Fair (1614).116 The Alchemist abounds in local place-names. The unities of time and place are observed with special care. As William Armstrong argued earlier, the play ‘achieves a concentration of space unequalled in Elizabethan drama’.117 Certainly, the playhouse must have been the Blackfriars. The play’s characters are all local denizens, and Jonson had lived in the neighbourhood at least in when he signed his Epistle to Volpone ‘From my house in the Blackfriars, this 11 of February, 1607 [1606, new style].’ ‘The Blackfriars of the play and the Blackfriars in which Jonson’s theatre stood are inseparable’, writes Smallwood.118 The sense of immediacy must have been overwhelmingly present to spectators. The likelihood that Robert Armin took the role of Drugger no doubt added resonance to Drugger’s observation to Face’s inquiry as to whether he has ‘credit with the players’: ‘Yes, sir, did you never see me play the fool?’ (4.7.68–9). Much of the play’s dialogue reads like rehearsal or improvisation. The action is often about dressing up. All of this lends itself to theatrical self-awareness, aided by the interchangeability of the art of alchemy and the art of acting. Cheryl Lynn Ross’s ‘The Plague of The Alchemist’ (1989) reinforces the importance of place by observing the care with which the action of the play is set in the plague year of 1610. The city is sick; it stinks with fetid fumes and acrid smoke. The effects are both practical and symbolic.119
Andrew Gurr’s essay on Lovewit strongly supports Smallwood’s thesis of local particularity in The Alchemist, adding the delightful suggestion that in Lovewit we are to see a representation of those theatrical persons who had in fact reclaimed possession of the Blackfriars for the King’s Men in 1608 after ten years of use by a boy company; the owners were none other than Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, John Heminges, Henry Condell, and, ‘last but far from least, that most famous lover of wit, William Shakespeare’.120 W. David Kay adds further local resonances: the deceptions of The Alchemist that are so akin to the spirit of Jacobean City Comedy, the tobacconists and law clerks manifestly on the scene in nearby Holborn at the Dagger Inn, the intellectual presence of Martial, Catullus, Horace, and other authors that were so much a part of Jonson’s schooling in Westminster, the cooks’ stalls of Pie Corner, the Puritan congregation of St Anne’s in Blackfriars, and so on, all of this more important to the play than mere atmospherics.121
Katharine Eisaman Maus argues that The Alchemist belongs to a period of Jonson’s artistic creativity that is increasingly diverse, prompting him to a more heightened and refined consciousness of the need for contexts and generic boundaries for a particular work. Needful rules are more necessary than ever for Jonson, underscoring the differences ‘between his own artistic practices and those of playwrights who abandon moral concerns entirely’. Delight is important, but moral purposes are not to be neglected. Especially at issue, for Jonson, ‘is the complicated theory and practice of what Jonson and his Roman moralist forebears call “decorum”’, or ‘propriety . . . in both its social and artistic manifestations’. To allow ‘too wide a gap’ between virtue and decorum is to invite the danger of a degeneration into ‘relativist expediency’. Hence, Jonson’s emphasis on verisimilitude as an aesthetic criterion, and his solicitousness about the audience’s being able to enjoy pleasure. Mimesis becomes increasingly important for him in comedy. ‘Decorum’ is a synonym for ‘naturalism’, and yet audience pleasure is ‘not necessarily dependent upon artistic verisimilitude’.122 Eros for him tends to become peripheral or non-existent; for Doll Common, as for Ursula in Bartholomew Fair, ‘the conventional comic reward of respectable sexual gratification is unavailable.’123 (As William Slights also insists, ten years later, ‘the days of romantic comedy with its gentle ladies, fairies, queens, and bona fide fairy queens were dead and gone’ by the mid-1600s.124) The possibility of sublimation, or ‘the transference of erotic energy from a base to a noble object’, becomes impossible. Maus is reminded of William Hazlitt’s complaints about Jonson’s close attention to the body and bodily, leading the dramatist to dwell obsessively on low company, ‘like a person who fastens upon a disagreeable subject, and cannot be persuaded to leave it’. Indeed, says Maus, Hazlitt’s distress resembles that of the nineteenth century not only with Jonson, as we have seen, but with many of Jonson’s favourite writers, most of all the satirists Horace, Persius, Juvenal and Martial, who write about things like haemorrhoids and oral sex. The ‘resolute refusal to grant any but narrowly carnal aims’ rules out the possibility of romance or tragedy.125 Comedy in Jonson, as it becomes ‘more and more insistently low-mimetic’, more pessimistic about humanity and yet less rigorously censorious, ‘begins to close the gap between the spectators and the action they witness’.126 The London setting becomes claustrophobic. The Alchemist’s seemingly amoral denouement appears to violate the implicit contract of the play’s start, in which Jonson invites his audience to share in his comic feast. Maus’s essay is especially thoughtful in its way of locating Jonson and The Alchemist in the context of post-modern theory.
Other recent studies that locate Jonson fitly in our post-modern world include Julie Sanders, arguing that The Alchemist’s Blackfriars venue inscribes in the play the ideological values of the marginal world outside of the city walls of London that made such a significant contribution to the ‘symbolic economy’ of Jonson’s urban world as a whole and to a ‘republic of wholesale merchants’;127 Stanton Linden, with his attention to Jonson’s ‘keen awareness of the political and religious associations of contemporary hermetic thought’ and its links to ‘occult interests in radical protestantism’;128 and Richmond Barbour, taking the view that Jonson’s alleged conservatism, misogyny, homophobia and revulsion against the erotic are in fact deeply ambivalent, ‘by turns authoritative and subversive’, and driven by his own ‘fear of engulfment’ by women’s sexuality and a consequent ‘male irrelevance’.129 For critical studies of The Alchemist in the twenty-first century, see Chapter 3 in this present collection.