New Directions: The Alchemist and the Lower Bodily Stratum
BRUCE BOEHRER
The world of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist seems composed equally of gold and precious materials on one hand and of excrement and sewage on the other. Sir Epicure Mammon fixates on the precious substances, imagining that when he has acquired the philosopher’s stone, his ‘meat shall all come in in Indian shells, | Dishes of agate, set in gold and studded | With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies’ (2.2.72–4). Dapper fantasizes that he will ‘win ten thousand pound’ at gambling (1.2.136). Drugger dreams of becoming ‘a great distiller’ and making his own ‘assay . . . at the philosopher’s stone’ (1.3.78–80). The puritan Tribulation Wholesome aims to ply ‘the civil magistrate’ with drinkable gold – aurum potabile – as a sort of bribe or lobbyist’s gift on behalf of the reformed faith (3.1.41–2). And so on.
Indeed, the obsession with gold and its surrogates may comprise the single most obvious feature of Jonson’s comedy, providing the motive force behind virtually all its events. But The Alchemist attends equally to matters of a more fundamental nature, too. Its opening line ends with the phrase ‘I fart at thee’ (1.1.1) and serves as only the first of many such eruptions to afflict the play. Face recalls Subtle’s appearance at their first meeting, ‘at Pie Corner’ where the alchemist walked ‘Piteously costive’, ‘pinned up in the several rags | [He]’d raked and picked from dunghills’, and shivering under ‘a thin threaden cloak | That scarce would cover [his] no-buttocks’ (1.1.28, 33–4, 36–7). For his part, Subtle describes Face as a ‘scarab’, as ‘vermin’, a creature he has raised ‘out of dung’, the fit companion of ‘brooms and dust and wat’ring pots’ (1.1.59, 64, 67). Dapper spends the play’s last two acts locked in ‘Fortune’s privy lodgings’ (3.5.79) – the outhouse adjoining Face and Subtle’s laboratory. And the laboratory’s own explosion in act 4, scene 5 serves as a great and sour echo of act 1’s ‘I fart at thee.’
In fact, The Alchemist depicts excrement and gold as interchangeable. According to Subtle, the latter may be refined out of something very like the former – a liquid substance called Number One (‘the one part’) and a solid substance called Number Two (‘th’other part’):
It is, of the one part,
A humid exhalation which we would call
Materia liquida, or the unctuous water;
On th’other part, a certain crass and viscous
Portion of earth; both which, concorporate,
Do make the elementary matter of gold[.]
(2.3.142–7)
Thus the transformation of base matter to precious metal follows a logic already manifest in the cycle of nature:
[W]ho doth not see in daily practice
Art can beget bees, hornets, beetles, wasps
Out of the carcasses and dung of creatures[?]
. . .
And these are living creatures, far more perfect
And excellent than metals.
(2.3.171–6)
But if Subtle presents sewage as unrefined gold, Surly sees alchemy as unalloyed sewage, an assemblage ‘Of piss and egg-shells, women’s terms, man’s blood, | Hair o’the head, burnt clouts, chalk, merds, and clay’ (2.3.194–5). These opposed points of view energize Jonson’s comedy from beginning to end.
As it develops, The Alchemist draws its most basic social distinction between characters who recognize shit for what it is and those who mistake it for treasure. The former group consists of Subtle, Face and Doll Common – the play’s premier purveyors of excrement – together with Lovewit and to a lesser degree Surly; the latter group includes Mammon, Dapper, Drugger, Kastril and the Puritans. Thus, it makes perfect sense that Dapper’s sojourn in the privy should be presented as the climax of an elaborate ritual of cleansing whereby the clerk is to be ‘bathed and fumigated’ before being ushered into the presence of the Queen of Fairy (1.2.145; see also 3.5.80–1). When the noisome business concludes in a fraudulent interview with Doll Common in the guise of the Fairy Queen, Dapper stoops to ‘Kiss her departing part’ (5.4.57), still unable to distinguish between purity and filth.
Likewise, Mammon imagines himself in glory, made fabulously rich by the philosopher’s stone and surrounded by admirers:
my flatterers
Shall be the pure and gravest of divines
That I can get for money; my mere fools,
Eloquent burgesses; and then my poets
The same that writ so subtly of the fart,
Whom I will entertain still for that subject.
(2.2.59–64)
The fart in question was introduced into the proceedings of the House of Commons on 4 March 1607 by Sir Henry Ludlow, in response to Sir John Croke’s delivery of a message from the House of Lords on the subject of Scottish naturalization.1 According to earwitness testimony, Ludlow’s comment issued fittingly from ‘the nether end of the House . . . whereat the Company laughing the Messenger was almost out of Countenance’.2 Noting that Sir Henry’s father, Sir Edward, had also distinguished himself by farting in Parliament, contemporaries excused the son’s performance as the product of ‘Infirmity Naturall, not Malice’.3 But Sir Henry’s emission migrated swiftly into the public sphere, where it became the subject of various literary productions. Hence, its reappearance in Mammon’s fantasies to mark the acme of poetic expression, while at the same time signalling the debased quality of Mammon’s own tastes and aspirations.
With Tribulation Wholesome and his band of true believers, the story remains much the same. On one hand, the Puritans’ sense of spiritual election attaches itself naturally to the qualities of cleanliness and godliness; as Ananias insists, ‘The sanctified cause | Should have a sanctified course’ (3.1.13–14). But Tribulation offers a more nuanced and self-serving perspective. Drawing inspiration from a scripture passage popular among reformers – the Pauline declaration that ‘Unto the pure all things are pure’ (Titus 1.15) – he argues that ‘The children of perdition are ofttimes | Made instruments even of the greatest works’ (3.1.15–16). This logic permits the reformed brethren to mingle with such questionable figures as Subtle and Face, for such questionable purposes as the counterfeiting of coin. Taken to its limits, Tribulation’s casuistry even enables him to imagine Subtle as a man of God:
It may be so.
Whenas the work is done, the stone is made,
This heat of his may turn into a zeal
And stand up for the beauteous discipline
Against the menstruous cloth and rag of Rome.
(3.1.29–33)
Thus Jonson excrementalizes each of his major gull-figures. But The Alchemist’s principal social distinction – as put above, that between shit-recognizers and shit-misrecognizers – conforms less to the dyad of virtue and vice than to that of knavery and folly. Fittingly, Jonson’s figures of judgement acquire the same cloacal associations as do the gulls on whom they prey. A vocabulary that equates physical with spiritual pollution tars all the play’s characters with the same brush, more or less. The parallel grows most obvious with Subtle and Face, whose dunghill origins we have already paused to consider. Doll Common, however, deserves equal notice as an emblem of what might be called the Feminine Excremental. When Dapper is not kissing her nether parts, Mammon – typically mistaking her for ‘a great lady’ (4.1.24) – prepares to court her in the aureate terms of classical myth:
Now, Epicure,
Heighten thyself. Talk to her all in gold;
Rain her as many showers as Jove did drops
Unto his Danaë: show the god a miser
Compared with Mammon. What? The stone will do’t.
She shall feel gold, taste gold, hear gold, sleep gold,
Nay, we will concumbere gold.
(4.1.24–30)
But as Surly suggests elsewhere, Doll’s choice of profession associates her with a different kind of golden shower entirely:
Yes, when I see [alchemical projection work], I will [believe it].
But if my eyes do cozen me so – and I
Giving ’em no occasion – sure I’ll have
A whore shall piss ’em out next day.
(2.1.42–5)
This passage remains one of the more inscrutable in The Alchemist. Editors seldom gloss it, and its specific meaning remains unclear. Gail Paster links it to a ‘now-obscure semiotics of urine and whores’ occasioned by ‘urine’s unreliability as a diagnostic tool’, which quality allies it emblematically with the deceitfulness of harlots.4 Yet, the exact relation between Surly’s eyesight and the whore’s urinary function remains uncertain for all that. It may involve the ravages of syphilis; thus Shakespeare’s Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida imagines his auditors losing their eyesight as the lesions of tertiary syphilis eat away at their facial tissues: ‘As many as be here of Pandars’ hall, | Your eyes, half out, weep out at Pandar’s fall.’5 But even so, the corrosive effect of Surly’s whore’s urine – and more broadly, the mechanical relation of the whore’s piss to the extinction of Surly’s eyesight – calls for a better explanation than any yet advanced. On a general level, however, Surly’s language trades on a traditional association of sex-workers with the lower bodily stratum, and this same association comes likewise into play when Doll Common conducts Dapper forth ‘by the back way’ (1.2.163) to his outhouse, or when Dapper kisses her ‘departing part’, or when Mammon refers to her as ‘Madam Suppository’ (5.5.13) – this last phrase glancing at her supposititious identity as ‘a great lady’ but equally at the medical consequences of keeping her company.
Indeed, The Alchemist’s various excremental associations extend even to the house in which Subtle, Face and Doll receive their guests. Not only is this structure replete with ‘back way[s]’ and ‘privy lodgings’, not only does it host a flatulent explosion of alchemical apparatus, but it is also full of foul smells and vapours. As Face laments after the explosion, ‘All [our] works | Are flown in fumo’ (4.5.58), and again ‘All [is] flown, or stinks’ (4.5.89). As Ananias declares later, ‘Your stench, it is broke forth. Abomination | Is in the house’ (5.4.45–6). Kastril threatens to turn the place over to the public sanitation authorities: ‘Yes, I will fetch the scavenger and the constable’ (5.4.48). And Lovewit’s closing description of his home’s interior further cements its association with various kinds of filth:
Here I find
The empty walls, worse than I left ’em, smoked,
A few cracked pots and glasses, and a furnace,
The ceiling filled with poesies of the candle,
And madam with a dildo writ o’the walls.
(5.5.38–42)
The phrase ‘poesies of the candle’ is usually taken to refer to smoke-stains caused by burning candles, but it has also been glossed as graffiti scrawled with charcoal or candle smoke.6 As for the mysterious ‘madam with a dildo’, this might refer either to an obscene picture or to a lewd jingle.7 In the latter vein, we might associate it with the most notorious pornographic poem of Elizabethan England, Thomas Nashe’s ‘The Choise of Valentines’.8 Known to contemporaries as ‘Nashe’s Dildo’, this erotic verse narrative reaches its climax, in at least two senses of the word, when its heroine impales herself on the aforementioned sex toy. But specific references aside, the general sense of Lovewit’s remarks is clear: his house has been trashed both literally and figuratively, transformed into the equivalent of an urban rubbish dump.
In fact, as The Alchemist progresses we may gradually come to feel that for all the play’s discriminatory zeal, its gold and its sewage remain intimately related. Jonson may insist that the translation of base matter to precious metal is a hoax – what we would now call bullshit – but his comedy takes real delight in the opposite gesture: that of reducing gold to excrement. Mammon’s schemes, Tribulation’s plans, the glittering hopes of Dapper and Drugger, all are eventually diminished to the humblest of materials. And if we may say this about the play’s visions of worldly riches, we may say much the same thing about its treatment of spiritual wealth: the treasure of faith. That, at least, is the logic behind Surly’s self-description as ‘somewhat costive of belief’ (2.3.26) – a phrase echoed in Face’s reference to Surly as ‘Yon costive cheater’ (3.3.1). Such language would set Surly and Tribulation at the opposite extremes of a continuum of faith-troped-as-peristalsis, with Surly’s constipation offset by the Puritan’s credulity – his spiritual diarrhoea. The self-proclaimed sceptic and the self-announced man of God thus emerge as complementary figures presiding over an urban landscape whose only stable, enduring quality is its faeculence. Inter faeces et urinam nascimur, as Saint Augustine’s proverb affirms: we are born amidst urine and faeces.
Jonsonian shit: The scholarly heritage
So whence this copromania? If we pose the question in strictly literary terms, the answer seems obvious: classical antiquity. Jonson earned distinction in his day as the foremost English exponent of a neoclassical literary order that saw itself as extending Graeco-Roman tastes and preoccupations. Graeco-Roman writers, in turn, make frequent, flamboyant use of cloacal language and motifs, especially in the genres with which Jonson himself was most closely associated: satire and epigram. Martial’s epigrams offer a useful case in point. Jonson knew them well and admired them enough to incorporate matter from three of them (5.78, 10.48 and 11.52) into his own Epigram 101 (‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’); likewise three copies of different editions of Martial have survived from Jonson’s own library, replete with marginalia in the later poet’s hand.9 And as it happens, these marginalia include a series of notes on specific passages in the Roman poet’s work that conflate the functions of mouth and anus/genitals, passages associated with the motif of os impurum – ‘the unclean mouth that supposedly results from oral intercourse’.10 So in this specific case we have a record of Jonson’s interest in Roman satirical language involving the lower bodily stratum, a record that has survived in Jonson’s own handwriting. Even a cursory inspection of the poet’s broader literary output will confirm that this interest is no isolated thing.
But there is something unsatisfying about viewing Jonson’s fascination with the gutter as simply an extension of earlier literary practice, as if he only focused upon sewage because others had done so before him. In essence, this explanation just kicks the question of origins down the road a couple of millennia without directly addressing it, whereas various schools of theory – whether the psychoanalytic, Bakhtinian or post-structuralist – aim for a broader resolution of the problem. In the case of Jonson, psychoanalysis weighed in first, with Edmund Wilson describing the poet as ‘an obvious example of a psychological type which has been described by Freud and designated with a technical name, anal erotic’.11 Freud’s description of anal eroticism, first advanced in 1908, leaves no doubt that he regarded the condition as a neurosis associated with – what else? – unresolved sexual issues:
The people I am about to describe are . . . especially orderly, parsimonious, and obstinate. Each of these words actually covers a small group or series of interrelated character-traits. ‘Orderly’ covers the notion of bodily cleanliness, as well as of conscientiousness in carrying out small duties and trustworthiness. . . . Parsimony may appear in the exaggerated form of avarice; and obstinacy can go over into defiance, to which rage and revengefulness are easily joined. . . . [S]uch people are born with a sexual constitution in which the erotogenicity of the anal zone is exceptionally strong[,] . . . and . . . the regularity with which this triad of properties is present in their character may be brought into relation with the disappearance of anal erotism.12
In short, the anal-erotic personality develops as a product of sublimation, emerging when the kinds of sexual pleasure associated with the anal region are energetically repressed. Thus Wilson’s anal-erotic portrait of Jonson tends to present him, too, as a signally damaged individual, with his work and personality both marred by such ‘glaring defects’ as an obsession with hoarding and cataloguing, a tendency to use excrement as an instrument of shaming and aggression, and an inclination to meanness and stinginess.13 The Alchemist’s scatological moments would seem to conform well with this diagnosis. Still, it seems most inadequate – and in an all-too-typical psychoanalytic way – to dismiss one of the triumphs of the early modern stage as a product of mental maladjustment, as if it were the emotional equivalent of a kidney stone or a plantar wart.
Bakhtinian theory approaches the matter from a different angle, concentrating on what might be called the cultural or folkloric dimensions of excrement. Bakhtin conceptualizes these through opposed models of body-image which he allies to more broadly opposed social configurations: the grotesque and the classical. Thus ‘the unique yet complex carnival experience of the people’ finds its somatic counterpart in a grotesque body that ‘transgresses . . . its own limits’, that ‘swallows, devours, rends the world apart, is enriched and grows at the world’s expense’, that defies categories and reverses hierarchies such that ‘the buttocks [is] persistently trying to take the place of the head and the head that of the buttocks’.14 By contrast, ‘the literary and artistic canon of antiquity’ asserts itself through a classical body that is ‘isolated, alone, fenced off from other bodies’, and that serves as a model for more figurative acts of fencing-off as these occur, for instance, in systems of social and professional precedence.15
Bakhtin develops his canons of the grotesque and the classical via critical engagement with the work of Rabelais – a French author of some importance for Jonson.16 Moreover, Jonson’s own work is manifestly preoccupied with various kinds of social distinction comparable to that between classical and popular cultures. But in Jonson, the relation between the classical and the popular proves far less stable than Bakhtin imagines it to be in the case of Rabelais. Mammon’s fantasies of wealth and privilege dissolve into rubbish, while Jonson’s own efforts to forge a laureate identity for himself repeatedly involve the staging of popular festive forms such as fairs and charivaris. Hence, the most celebrated application of Bakhtinian theory to Jonson’s work – that of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White – presents the poet as deeply conflicted, drawn to fantasies of social advancement like those of a Mammon or a Dapper but equally obsessed by the humbler social forms from which he seeks to extricate himself:
A recurrent pattern emerges: the ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other . . ., but also that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life. The result is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear, and desire in the construction of subjectivity: a psychological dependence upon precisely those Others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level.17
In its emphasis upon ‘psychological dependence’, upon the erotic character of social fantasy, and upon the obsessive yet futile nature of efforts at social discrimination, this view of Jonson remains uncomfortably similar to Freud’s medically condescending portrait of the anal-erotic.
More recently, scholars have sought to account for Jonson’s excremental moments by approaching them through various kinds of post-modern or post-structuralist theory. Gail Paster has drawn on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological analysis of the habitus to place Jonson in a history of manners that constructs masculinity around various models of self-control to which moments of urinary and faecal incontinence may be invidiously contrasted.18 I have invoked the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – especially their notion of becoming – to account for the instability that characterizes Jonson’s language of praise and of satire.19 Jonathan Gil Harris has employed the anthropological theory of Emile Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, and others to depict Jonson’s tropes of bodily invasion and expulsion as metaphors for the social body or body politic more generally.20 Whatever the merits or demerits of these various approaches to Jonson’s excrementality, they all agree in deriving the poet’s scatological tendencies from his mental constitution, as an expression of issues with body control, personal advancement, or the definition of social groups. For all of these commentators, from Freud to Harris, Jonsonian shit remains primarily and paradoxically a psychic phenomenon.
But it need not. We might also account for Jonson’s fascination with excrement another way, not by viewing it as an expression of a distinctive (and usually morbid) literary personality but rather as a reasonable response to changing conditions in the poet’s physical environment. This approach to the subject would align with current efforts in the literary profession to develop an environmentally responsible critical practice, an eco-criticism that shows proper respect for the natural world’s changing role in the production of literary art. Such criticism would have the advantage of understanding that before shit can evolve into metaphor, or habitus, or reaction-formation, it must start out as shit, pure and simple. And an eco-critical approach to Jonsonian scatology would return the poet’s literary practice to the material conditions of his life. In what remains of this essay, I shall therefore try to outline the general form that an eco-critical account of Jonson’s fascination with excrement might take.
In keeping with its derivation from the Greek oikos, or home, ecology is all about place: specifically, about the systemic relations between life forms and their surroundings in a single definable habitat. As it happens, Ben Jonson spent most of his life within such a habitat area: what we might now call the London-Westminster metroplex. And as it further happens, that area suffered far-reaching environmental change during the poet’s lifetime. Jonson’s work should thus prove amenable to eco-critical study, and his preoccupation with sewage provides a case in point.
Between the poet’s birth in 1573 and his death in 1637, the population of London roughly doubled, from about 150,000 to about 300,000.21 In 1610 – the year of The Alchemist’s first performance, and also the year in which the play’s action is set – the number of the city’s inhabitants hovered around a quarter of a million. This rate of growth was unprecedented both for Britain and for Europe as a whole, and it had risen steadily since 1500, when London was home to only some 50,000 people. While such figures seem puny from the twenty-first-century standpoint, they placed a grievous burden on the city’s resources and infrastructure. They also mark the beginnings of London’s modern population explosion, and to this extent they set the stage for cultural developments to come.
The environmental consequences of this growth cannot be fully enumerated in the space available here. On the most basic level, they involved a sharp increase in local demand for shelter, energy, foodstuffs and water; an equally sharp increase in various health risks related to urban overcrowding; and the beginnings of a set of modern pollution problems that continue to this day to affect the quality of the city’s land, water and atmosphere. All these changes were visible to Jonson’s contemporaries, at least some of whom regarded them with deep consternation. John Stow’s A Survey of London, the classic account of the city’s growth during the early modern period, thus repeatedly laments the environmental degradation attendant upon runaway urban development. According to Stow, the ditch encircling the city walls since medieval times had by the early 1600s been ‘forced either to a verie narrow, and the same a filthie channell, or altogither stopped up’; the city’s streets were blighted with ‘filthy passage[s]’; and the suburban liberties had devolved into ‘a continuall building of tenements’.22 As might be expected, in other words, London’s growth was manifesting itself on the ecological level in part through an unprecedented accumulation of urban sewage and rubbish. The 300 per cent growth in the city’s population that occurred 75 years prior to Jonson’s birth entailed a comparable increase in the quantities of human waste deposited into its environs; likewise, the even steeper growth rates of the poet’s own lifetime entailed even greater volumes of waste production. These increases, in turn, paralleled a comparable rise in the production of related rubbish such as the runoff from tanneries situated north of the city walls.
It would be a mistake to claim that London’s waste management system was overwhelmed by this increase, because to say so would imply that something like a coherent system actually existed. In fact, the city’s Metropolitan Commission of Sewers would not be established until 1848; in the meantime, Londoners continued to deal with their waste haphazardly, in ways developed during the previous centuries. Citizens lucky enough to reside alongside the Thames or another one of the local waterways deposited their filth straight into the river’s estuary. Less fortunate Londoners dug privies into the ground, and as the solid matter contained in such repositories accumulated, the city’s scavengers exhumed it and either dumped it in the local rivers or transported to laystalls outside the city walls. Admittedly, some adjustments were made, as when, during the reign of Henry VIII, the city’s ‘main streets were paved for the first time . . ., with runnels to permit sewage to escape more rapidly to the Fleet River and to the Thames’.23 But by channelling runoff more efficiently into the local waterways, these conduits arguably did as much harm as good. In any case, Jonsonian London was settling bit by bit into a self-created morass of refuse and sludge.
As it happens, Jonson himself was unusually well placed to witness this development. As a child, he lived with his mother and stepfather in the suburban liberties west of London proper, in Hartshorn Lane, Westminster. Hartshorn Lane is now known as Northumberland Street, and it occupies a prime piece of Westminster real estate between Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross Station. In the late sixteenth century, however, it was a dodgy neighbourhood full of transients and recent arrivals to the city. According to biographer David Riggs, ‘during Jonson’s lifetime, Hartshorn Lane would become one of the major sewage canals in the greater London area’.24 The cottage in which the poet grew up, moreover, was distinguished by ‘the sewage ditch that ran along the premises’ and upon which Jonson’s stepfather constructed a ‘little garden’ like those that – to John Stow’s dismay – were also obstructing the town ditch to the east.25 So as a child, the poet already found himself in intimate conjunction with the city’s waste, which ran in substantial quantities through his backyard and whose chemical components – if his cottage garden grew vegetables and herbs – would have made their way through his alimentary tract as well.
Beyond Hartshorn Lane, London’s liberties more generally provided the breeding ground for much of the city’s growing environmental blight. It was to the liberties that the area’s steady stream of immigrants relocated, many of them settling into haphazard tenements that had been erected on suburban property expropriated from the church during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Likewise, it was to extramural laystalls in the liberties that the city’s scavengers conveyed much of London’s own sewage and other refuse. The Alchemist was of course first acted by the King’s Men at the Globe, which was of course located in the Bankside liberty of Southwark, and to this extent the play’s scatology seems appropriate not only to its author’s childhood circumstances but also to the space of its own initial performance.
In fact, the same could be said with equal justice of The Alchemist’s setting. The play’s action occurs within Lovewit’s house ‘here in the Friars’ (1.1.17), in the intramural liberty of Blackfriars, more or less directly across the Thames from the Globe. As a space free from the Corporation of London’s supervision, the Blackfriars liberty would have proven naturally hospitable to the schemes of Subtle, Face and Doll. Moreover, this area was at least equally known for its nonhuman trash, for it was through the Blackfriars liberty that London’s most notorious sewer, the Fleet River, found its way to the Thames. One chronicler of the Fleet has described its history as ‘a decline from a river to a brook, from a brook to a ditch, and from a ditch to a drain’.26 Nowadays it is almost invisible, having been completely bricked over in the eighteenth century; at low tide, however, passersby can still glimpse it entering the Thames through a sewer-like concrete aperture underneath Blackfriars Bridge. In Jacobean times, this waterway’s decline was already well advanced, and no one would document its condition more memorably than Jonson himself, in the last of his Epigrams:
Here several ghosts did flit
About the shore, of farts but late departed,
White, black, blue, green,
. . .
[Meanwhile, turds] languishing stuck upon the wall,
Or were precipitated down the jakes,
And, after, swam abroad in ample flakes[.]27
William Slights has claimed that Fleet Ditch was ‘as large a part of the symbolic geography of Jonson’s London as Mary Le Bow, or St Paul’s’.28 Certainly, its repeated appearance in the poet’s work attests to the intensity of his imaginative engagement with it. And with good reason: Jonson not only grew up amidst London’s accumulating sewage, but also spent his adult life surrounded by it as well. He himself lived in Saint Anne’s parish, Blackfriars, and it was ‘From [his] house in the Blackfriars’ that he composed the prefatory epistle to Volpone in 1607, three years before the first performance of The Alchemist.29 Likewise, he seems to have spent 1604–5, as well as the five years from 1613 to 1618, residing with his patron Esmé Stuart, Seigneur d’Aubigny and third Duke of Lennox, at the young nobleman’s town house ‘near Playhouse Yard next to the Blackfriars Theatre’.30 So in composing The Alchemist, Jonson set the play not only in his own city, but even in his own neighbourhood. If the play exhibits an unusual interest in sewers and privies, excrement and rubbish, we need not explain this interest via the poet’s own supposed psychic maladjustment. Instead, we need only do what Jonson himself obviously did while writing: we need only consider his surroundings.
Finally, we should note one more thing about how Jonson presents those surroundings. He does not focus upon sewage alone, and he seems to regard it more as process than as product. As observed at the outset of this essay, The Alchemist’s scatology occurs in tandem with its avarice, so much so that excrement and gold form something like the comedy’s controlling conceptual binary, its terms at once superficially opposed and yet deeply interdependent. This relationship, in turn, comprises the play’s signal proto-ecological insight, rendered all the more striking for the intuitive manner in which it is presented.
In short, Jonson understood that London had become a city rich in shit, but also understood that it was becoming rich, pure and simple, and that the shit and the wealth were interrelated. To put the matter differently, early modern London’s exorbitant growth not only produced environmental problems such as pollution, overcrowding and epidemic disease, it also led to some of the glories of Western civilization. Under the Tudor and early Stuart monarchs, the city refurbished itself in ways of lasting importance for urban history, art history, architectural history and social history. The improvements in question defy summary here, but consider some examples. The city gates at Ludgate, Aldgate and Aldersgate were rebuilt in 1586, 1608 and 1617, respectively; Ludgate prison was rebuilt in 1585; and Bridewell workhouse was founded in 1553.31 During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a whole series of cisterns and water-conduits was introduced, including, in 1582, the city’s first indoor plumbing system.32 Gresham’s Royal Exchange, built in Cornhill between 1566 and 1568, heralded London’s coming of age as a modern commercial centre. Inigo Jones’s royal banqueting house, constructed at Whitehall roughly a decade after The Alchemist’s first performance, brought Palladianism to London. By the 1630s, the first of London’s great city squares appeared at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Covent Garden. This programme of re-edification took place on an increasing scale throughout the city, in ways that both derived from and contributed to the capital’s growing environmental problems. In effect, London was pitching its mansions in the place of excrement.
For their part, Jonson’s characters in The Alchemist – like Jonson himself – are keenly sensitive to the city’s increasing vitality. As a result, parts of the play read almost like an urban visitors’ guide, packed with references to local tourist attractions and places of interest. Face schedules a rendezvous with Surly ‘i’the Temple Church’ (2.3.289), within walking distance of Blackfriars between the Fleet and the Thames. Urging Dame Pliant to receive the advances of a Spanish grandee (actually Surly in disguise), Subtle and Face tempt her with fantasies of life in London’s smart set:
| SUBTLE | What, when she comes to taste The pleasures of a countess! To be courted – . . . |
|
| FACE | And has her pages, ushers, Footmen, and coaches – |
|
| SUBTLE | Her six mares – | |
| FACE | Nay, eight! | |
| SUBTLE | To hurry her through London, to th’Exchange, Bedlam, the China-houses – |
(4.4.39–40, 45–8)
Confronting an irate mob outside his house, Lovewit exclaims, ‘The world’s turned Bedlam’, to which Face responds, ‘These are all broke loose | Out of Saint Katherine’s, where they use to keep | The better sort of mad-folks’ (5.4.53–6). Lamenting the failure of Mammon’s plans for the philosopher’s stone, Face ironically details his client’s intended acts of charity:
The city new, and made a ditch about it
Of silver, should have run with cream from Hoxton,
That every Sunday in Moorfields the younkers,
And tits and tomboys should have fed on, gratis.
(5.5.76–80)
The ditch of silver in this scenario may be read as an ironic counterpart to the fetid trench that actually encircled London in Jonson’s day, and whose deterioration Stow had lamented in his Survey. Likewise, the artificial conveyance of potable liquids into the city was an idea whose time had come by the early 1600s. London had been steadily outgrowing and befouling its local sources of drinking water, with the result that by the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign a group of entrepreneurs began planning an aqueduct project known as the New River, designed to convey drinking water into the city from 36 miles away in Hertfordshire.33 In 1609, when Jonson was composing The Alchemist, this undertaking had lain dormant for some time, but that year it was re-energized under the leadership of Sir Hugh Myddelton, construction work began on it in earnest, and in 1613 the New River would finally be opened to London’s thirsty inhabitants. So when Face torments Mammon with the idea of a civic lacteduct built of silver, his vision speaks directly to then-current environmental developments. Nor does The Alchemist’s interest in ditches and conduits end here. Face also twits Drugger for his stinginess by claiming that he fell ill ‘for being ’sessed at eighteen pence, | For the waterwork’ (3.4.123–4), and the waterwork in question might conceivably be any one of three for-profit water-utility projects operating in London by 1610: either the New River project, or the tidal water-wheel installed near London Bridge in 1582 by the Dutch engineer Peter Moryce, or the horse-drawn water-pump erected at Broken Wharf in 1594 by Bevis Bulmar.34 Whichever one of these projects Jonson meant, it – or one of its fellows – also appears earlier in the play, when Mammon indulges in typically grandiose fantasies about piping medicine into the city’s houses, only to have his ambitions ridiculed by Surly:
| MAMMON | I’ll give away so much unto my man Shall serve th’ whole city with preservative Weekly, each house his dose, and at the rate – |
|
| SURLY | As he that built the waterwork does with water? |
(2.1.73–6)
In fact, Mammon, the most vainglorious of Jonson’s dupes in The Alchemist, emerges from his play as something like a grand parody of the impulse to urban development. Thus, he insists to Subtle that his desire for the philosopher’s stone derives from deep-seated philanthropic aspirations:
I assure you,
I shall employ it all in pious uses:
Founding of colleges and grammar schools,
Marrying young virgins, building hospitals,
And now and then a church.
(2.3.48–52)
And Subtle, a far more accomplished bullshit-artist than Mammon will ever be, mocks these same virtuous pretensions in conversation with Face:
Methinks I see him entering ordinaries
Dispensing for the pox, and plaguy-houses,
Reaching his dose, walking Moorfields for lepers,
And offering citizens’ wives pomander bracelets
As his preservative, made of the elixir,
Searching the spital to make old bawds young
And the highways for beggars to make rich.
I see no end of his labours.
(1.4.18–25)
Ironically, Subtle himself sets the play’s standard for faux philanthropy when warning Mammon against the sin of covetousness:
[M]y labours
. . .
Have looked no way but unto public good,
To pious uses and dear charity,
Now grown a prodigy with men. Wherein
If you, my son, should now prevaricate,
And to your own particular lusts employ
So great and catholic a bliss, be sure
A curse will follow[.]
(2.3.11, 16–22)
Since neither Mammon nor Subtle possesses any genuine charitable instinct, these lines take on a strangely prophetic quality, anticipating the misfortunes that await both characters and casting their eventual difficulties in the form of poetic justice.
Thus, The Alchemist forces the rhetoric of urban development and social improvement to occupy the same conceptual space as the language of scatology and execration. This gesture, in turn, seems also appropriate to the civic space within which Jonson set his play, a locale equally distinguished by the close juxtaposition of pious works and the shit they produce. And in broader terms, Jonson remained suspicious of improvement schemes throughout his career, especially when they were coupled with scientific jargon and eleemosynary pretensions. In Volpone, Sir Politic Would-Be conceives an idiotic device to test whether incoming ships are infected with the plague. In The Devil Is an Ass, Merecraft urges Fitzdottrel into a half-witted project for wetland reclamation. In The Staple of News, the London newspaper industry develops as a second-order promotional scam, marketing accounts of of other half-baked marvels as a pretended service to the city’s inhabitants.
This sceptical view of science and progress has been associated with recent developments in environmentalist philosophy and practice – how justly the reader may decide for herself.35 In the short-to-middle-run, however, it placed Jonson on the wrong side of history. The infant news industry he mocked in The Staple of News has grown and prospered on Fleet Street, whereas the sewage-choked river for which that street is named has receded into invisibility. To judge by all the usual metrics – population, life expectancy, standard of living, incidence of disease, and so on – modern London is far larger, healthier, wealthier and cleaner than the city of Jonson’s day, and its good fortune has largely derived from the efforts of people who may be viewed as the heirs of Subtle, Mammon and Tribulation: scientists, civic entrepreneurs, enterprising men of the cloth, and so forth. Nor would it be right to describe Jonson as a conservationist avant la lettre. His is a distinctly urban sensibility, endlessly fascinated by the city’s doings, with little appreciation for the beauties of nature, little interest in rural matters and no real awareness that the natural world might be in need of protection from human interference. But Jonson did share certain broad convictions with many modern environmentalists: that progress only comes at a price; that the price in question can only be known in retrospect and may well be unaffordable; that self-interest is seldom compatible with the public good, however much self-serving individuals might try to confuse the two; and that the filth we produce in service of our dreams generally endures longer than the dreams themselves. To this limited extent, we might credit him with a mode of proto-ecological awareness.