New Directions: Waiting for the End? Alchemy and Apocalypse in The Alchemist
MARK HOULAHAN
Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
What is there to be or do?
What’s become of me or you?
Are we kind or are we true?
Sitting two and two, boys, waiting for the end.
Shall I build a tower, boys, knowing it will rend
Crack upon the hour, boys, waiting for the end?
Shall I pluck a flower, boys, shall I save or spend?
All turns sour, boys, waiting for the end.1
In the winter of 1979, I played the part of Dapper in an Auckland University production of The Alchemist. As publicist for the show, I found Jonson’s brilliant farce a harder commodity to shift in the market than our company’s annual outdoor Shakespeare, which always sold out. Few people came to the Jonson show, and fewer still had any real grasp of what it was about – doubtless this was more our fault than Jonson’s. We did however attract one very keen audience member, a self-proclaimed local alchemist. This was the end of the 1970s, and such flaky remnants of the 1960s’ ‘Age of Aquarius’ still floated about. He was very disappointed in our production, not because the acting was unconvincing or the direction uncertain, but rather because our publicity had misled him into thinking the play would demonstrate and celebrate the arts of alchemy. Instead, we clearly used Jonson’s script to disrespect the practice of alchemy. Moreover, we demonstrated no alchemy at all on stage.
Now this production had made a virtue of necessity. It was far easier to use modern dress and a bare stage than to simulate on a tiny budget Lovewit’s substantial Jacobean townhouse in the Blackfriars, with its TARDIS-like capacity to suggest so many more rooms and hiding spaces than we see on stage. The trio of tricksters, Doll, Face and Subtle, were likewise very low-rent. Throughout, the stage was littered not with allusions to alchemy, but rather with the detritus of modern life. Aptly enough for the mostly student audience, the stage resembled an unruly student flat, with empty takeout boxes (pizza, fried chicken) strewn everywhere.
In this respect, at least, the production design was responsive to Jonson’s original published text of the play, where only two places indicate any evidence of alchemy as specifically called for. In the first scene (1.1.115.1), Doll resorts to violence to bring Face and Subtle to heel, and to do so, according to the stage directions in the 1616 Folio, ‘She catcheth out Face his sword, and breakes Subtle’s glass’.2 The ‘glass’ here would be something like a modern test tube, borne out of the back room from whence the quarrel erupts as the play begins, and containing most likely some kind of weirdly viscous liquid, with which Subtle earlier in the scene threatens Face to ‘gum your silks | With good strong water, an you come’ (1.1.6–7). The only other direct evidence of ‘alchemy’ comes at the end of act 4, when we hear ‘A great crack and noise within’ (4.5.55.1),3 the simulated sound of the non-existent alchemical still falling apart. This is the climax of a sequence not only essential, of course, for the unravelling of the elaborate cons of the earlier acts of the play, but also for grasping the force of apocalypse as a term for a play ostensibly preoccupied with alchemy; accordingly, this chapter will return to this scene in detail later. In the meantime, it is enough to note that, to stage this scene effectively, all you would need is a really loud clanging noise (very easily managed in even the poorest of theatres). One of the many layers of irony in the play, then, is that it persuades us that more ‘alchemy’ is more present than is in fact the case. The sense in which alchemy pervades the play would have eluded the literal reading of the Auckland alchemist who attended our production a generation ago. Pepys famously sneered that Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was a ‘silly play’ having nothing at all to do with the ‘name or the day’ (the ‘Twelfth-night feast’ of Epiphany on 6 January). Likewise, the Auckland alchemist discovered that, on first viewing, Jonson’s play had really nothing much to do with alchemy either.
Most likely those encountering the play for the first time do so in the context of undergraduate surveys of Renaissance drama, especially those which emphasize non-Shakespearean material.4 Students might well access the play by turning to terms more normally invoked for the formalist ‘close’ reading of poetry, ‘the “tenor” (or the “general drift”, the underlying idea which the metaphor expresses) and the “vehicle” (the basic analogy which is used to embody or carry the tenor)’.5 In these terms, they readily grasp the tenor or general drift of the play perceiving the alchemy scam as a precursor to internet-based frauds, alert to the energetic greed of the fraudsters and the stupefying yet hilarious gullibility of their prey. You can perceive the ‘tenor’ of the play then (as you can with Jonson’s earlier Venetian farce Volpone) while more or less ignoring the context of alchemy. The minimal alchemical requirements Jonson’s stagecraft calls for assists this ignorance. And yet the main contention of this chapter will be to show that to neglect the context of alchemy and apocalypse in the play is to miss crucial ways in which Jonson speaks through the play to his own culture. Moreover, alchemy and apocalypse are inextricably linked: if apocalypse proposes a form of alchemical morphing of the world to some higher state, so too the fulfilment of the alchemical project would result in the apocalyptic transformation of the world. I will review the range of meanings these terms might have for Renaissance audiences and readers, and then show how these terms resonate through the play. The resulting ‘reading’ or interpretation would be not a New Historicist interpretation but rather a newly invigorated historical approach to the text.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Jonson’s plays were perhaps less attended to than his poems and masques. Those decades were the peak of ‘New Historicism’ as a school of interpretation which promoted a vigorously political ‘interrogation’ of literary texts, showing how they (and their authors) were implicated by the politics of the Renaissance. Renaissance writers were often then seen to be complicit in the projects of the Renaissance state. In these terms, Jonson’s country house poem ‘To Penshurst’ and his masques for the court of James I showed him a willing and anxious servant, all too ready to service a proto-absolutist, elitist ideology. Plays like The Alchemist, written for public performance, were less easily interpreted as offering commentary on the actions of the monarch and his courtiers. When Face announces in his epilogue speech that ‘I put myself | On you, that are my country’ (5.5.162–3), he clearly suggests a wider audience than the court of James itself. Then too the placement of these lines suggests we might take him as a spokesperson for Jonson. The term ‘country’ might of course be interpreted in a political sense, but not, I think, in terms of encouraging any communal kind of movement. Rather, viewing the play through the perspectives of alchemy and apocalypse shows how much Jonson valued the individual; alchemy and apocalypse are represented as follies each of us ought best to avoid.
Alchemy is an ancient practice, one of the many practices from classical times reinvigorated in the late medieval and Renaissance Europe. Alchemical lore derived partly from ancient Greece and, in particular, ancient Egypt, for the longevity of Egyptian society commanded great respect throughout Europe. Although the skill of actually reading Egyptian hieroglyphs was not unlocked until the early nineteenth century, many were taken with the thought of comprehending the universe through hieroglyphic figures. The writings of Hermes Trismegistus (an apocryphal figure) were thought especially fertile in this regard, and were crucial for the dissemination of alchemical concepts. Though alchemy is in fact a pseudo-science (as its assumptions about the nature of matter have been discredited since the middle of the seventeenth century), its adepts behaved as if they were what we would think of as ‘scientists’, what in the seventeenth century would be thought a ‘natural philosopher’. The surface activity in an alchemist’s cell, at first glance, would resemble the goings-on in a chemical or biological laboratory. The term ‘adept’ is appropriate for followers of alchemy, because alchemical tracts are swathed in a mystical, gnomic, quasi-religious language. You could not achieve perfection as an alchemist unless you yourself were pure in spirit. If alchemy were to work (though of course it never could), you would be refined without and within. H. J. Sheppard explains that:
Alchemy is the art of liberating parts of the Cosmos from temporal existence and achieving perfection, which, for metals is gold, and for man, longevity, then immortality and, finally, redemption. Material perfection was sought through the action of a preparation (Philosopher’s Stone for metals; Elixir of Life for humans), while spiritual ennoblement resulted from some form of inner revelation or other enlightenment.6
Friar Bacon, the famous twelfth-century Franciscan, puts it his way in his Mirrour of Alchemy, in a translation published in 1597 (and which very likely Jonson consulted while drafting The Alchemist):
Alchimy is a Science, teaching how to transforme any kind of mettall into another: and that by a proper medicine, as it appeareth by many Philsophers Bookes. Alchimy therefore is a science teaching how to make and compound a certain medicine, which is called Elixir, the which, when it is cast upon metals or imperfect bodies, doth fully perfect them in the verie projection.7
All matter, alchemy assumed, was compounded from the four fundamental elements: earth, water, air and fire. Under certain conditions the compound of any metal could be remingled with the addition of the vital fifth element, the stone. Paradoxically, this stone came in liquid form, like mercury, a viscous element much discussed in alchemical tracts and frequently deployed in alchemical experiments, as was also sulphur, since its power to corrode objects rapidly was helpful for simulating the appearance of alchemical transformation. The morphing ideally worked through 12 phases (which Bacon’s Mirror delineates), climaxing with the act of ‘projection’. Here the ‘philosopher’s stone’ would be introduced in its liquid state to baser metals. The result would be the most perfect of all metals, gold. Nature was assumed to be generative, literally a fertile ‘matrix’. The application of the alchemist’s art would lead to the breeding of a more perfect nature than the one provided in the Genesis account of the creation of the world, for alchemists were driven by the certain knowledge that
metals were living substances, that natural gold was the end result of long ‘gestation’ within earth’s womb; and, adopting the metaphor of human and divine sexual differentiation and conjunction, that sulphur and mercury were the ‘reproductive fluids’ from which metals arose.8
Friar Bacon’s Mirror synthesized a heritage of Egyptian, Greek and Arabic alchemical learning which was available in manuscript and then printed books throughout Europe from the twelfth century onwards. The print revolution meant that the small minority, at least, who could read Latin and Greek, as well as the larger group who could read books in their native tongues, could gain the secrets of the philosophers. In England, the interest in such publications climaxed in the period during and immediately after the English civil wars, for more ‘books on alchemy were published in England between 1650 and 1680 than before or afterwards’.9 As modern histories of science have shown, not coincidentally, this same period sees the rise of the Royal Society and the beginning of true modern science based on accurate recording of experimentation, enabling the real understanding of the fundamental elements of which our cosmos is constructed. If you experimented using alchemical methods in the same way, as most famously, Sir Isaac Newton did, you would discover experimentally what Jonson had theatrically shown earlier: that alchemy was a fraud.
In the late sixteenth century, however, alchemy’s grandest claims could still be maintained and in certain circles, more illustrious by far than even those Sir Epicure Mammon might wish to frequent, were given a great deal of credibility and support. John Dee, perhaps the greatest polymath of sixteenth-century England, published an alchemical tract, the Monas Hieroglyphica in 1564. The extraordinary library collection Dee assembled was steeped in hermetic lore and consulted by many; through the support of influential nobles at the court, his views gained the attention of Elizabeth herself.10 A thousand miles from London, the court of Rudolph II in Prague became the seat of magical, hermetical, Rosicrucian and alchemical speculation. Dee was a noted figure there also, as was the famous Edward Kelley, an outright charlatan. With his mordant ear for the current and the popular, Jonson’s packed text assimilates both Dee and Kelley within its alchemical patina. Compared to such figures, Face, Subtle and Doll are small-town crooks. If you could harness the wealth of an entire kingdom, what could you not achieve? Turning such wealth ‘As fits a king’s remembrance’ (as Gertrude puts it11) into gold would satisfy even Epicure Mammon’s avaricious desire to magic up the entire wealth of South America’s gold and silver mines in the course of a single day.
Jonson, like Chaucer before him, clearly loved, perversely, the alchemy his play teaches us to despise. His views are clearer in the text of his 1615 masque, Mercury Vindicated, where alchemy is the bogus ‘art’ and mercury the voice of the truth of nature in its unaltered state. Jonson was not alone in his interest; in his 1605 collaboration with Marston and Chapman, Eastward Ho!, the ‘names of the principal characters are derived from alchemy’,12 and frame the wealth and wife-hunting quests which dominate their desires. A host of Renaissance writers used alchemy as a metaphorical frame, not because they thought it would truly transform the external world but rather, as Stanton J. Linden shows in Dark Hieroglyphicks, because it was a powerful way of evoking the poetic transforming of the inner self. Shakespeare, Marvell, Vaughan and Milton use the jargon for this purpose.13 It is the inner transformation the would-be adepts on the day of The Alchemist seek, and which they conspicuously fail to achieve.
Jonson then capitalizes on two other key attributes of the alchemical tracts. First, on one climactic day of ‘projection’, the process of ‘golding’ the world would be complete. The process of projection is to finish on the day the play unfolds, and thus aligns seamlessly with Jonson’s remorseless application of the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action. Second, the system of alchemy projects a fundamentally gendered view of the world: for the chemical wedding would bring together the great male and female capacities of the universe. Jonson draws on this wittily (sometimes saucily) throughout the play as he freely samples from his range of alchemical readings. In terms of genre, the wedding of ‘male’ and ‘female’ is a brilliant vehicle for the satirical version of the marriage comedy Jonson constructs. Destabilizing the alchemy in act 4 occurs at the precise point in the play where male and female relations are starting to unravel. That unravelling fits perfectly also the strain of apocalypse imagery which is a marked feature of the play. To see how alchemy and apocalypse coalesce together, we need to review the background of apocalypse that underpins the play, before returning to act 4.
Whereas the principles underpinning alchemy have long since been discredited, a cultural process to which Jonson’s play contributed, the prophetic assumptions around ideas of apocalypse have maintained a force. In 2012, the trendiest version of this process will be speculations focused on the Mayan apocalypse, and the assumption that the Mayan calendar, properly decoded, indicates that 2012 will see a series of world-ending events unfold. In the years before the year 2000, pre-millennial anxieties swept the world, notably the fear that, on the stroke of midnight of 31 December 1999, all computer systems would crash.14 Jonson could not have known anything about Mayan civilization, nor of the notorious Y2K bug, but in his culture it was not uncommon to assume that the end of the world might be imminent and that England, fighting of course on the side of the forces of righteousness, would prevail when evil was finally defeated. For such ideas, in Renaissance England, you would turn to the prophetic texts of scripture, most notably the book of Daniel, from the Old Testament, and the book of Revelation, the last book in the New Testament. The term ‘revelation’ is the Englished version of that book’s title in Greek (in which it was composed) and Latin: ‘apocalypsis’. Literally this means the revelation or unveiling. On the Greek island of Patmos, John reports a series of visions. He is taken up to heaven, and sees the whole of the earth. With the gift of prophecy, he grasps what will happen as our world ends and a new heaven and a new earth, perfected now by God’s handiwork, comes into being. The vision is political – he sees the passing away of a whole series of kingdoms, and temporal – he provides a time sequence for the events leading to the end of this world. The Revelation, in these terms, recasts images from the book of Daniel, where Daniel decodes a series of visions dreamt by the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar. Like John of Patmos, Daniel foresees the downfall of earthly kingdoms, followed by a perfected, sanctified kingdom.15
This kind of prophetic apocalypse flourished in the ancient near east from around 700 BC, not just in ancient Jewish culture but in those surrounding, for Jewish and Christian apocalypses have links to Babylonian, Chaldean, and Zoroastrian beliefs and texts.16 Through the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible, as well as through the so-called apocryphal books, such as the book of Esdras and Bel and the Dragon, the peoples of Christian Europe inherited these traditions. Throughout the Middle Ages, the interpretation of these books was dominated in Catholic theology by the writings of St Augustine. It was not for humankind, according to Augustine, to understand the timing of the events Daniel and Revelation predicted. Rather, we should understand that in the fullness of time, according to a timetable God himself would dictate, the world would achieve perfection. In the meantime, the task of humankind was to wait on these events.
During the Reformation in the sixteenth century, protestant thinkers throughout northern Europe advanced a radically different interpretation of these prophetic books. These new ideas were explored by such key protestant theologians as Calvin and Luther. In England, these ideas acquired mainstream respectability. The new interpretation was encoded in the 1560 Geneva Bible, the English translation used in English churches, and the version of scripture which Jonson and Shakespeare knew well. In parish churches, many could read and also visually absorb the many powerful illustrations from John’s Foxe’s famous Book of Martyrs, or in the fulsome and richly informative title it was first published under, his
Actes and Monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happenyng in the Church, with an Universall history of the same, wherein is set forth at large the whole race and course of the Church, from the primitive age to these latter tymes of ours, with the bloudy times, horrible troubles, and great persecutions against the true Martyrs of Christ, fought and wrought by Heathen Emperours, as nowe lately practised by Romish Priests, specially in this Realme of England.17
I have quoted this evocative title at such length because it is such a useful epitome of the Protestant approach to apocalypse which feeds in to the texture of the play.
Nebuchadnezzar dreamed of a strange beast, with parts comprised of iron, clay, brass, silver and gold. These elements, Daniel informed him, indicated the rise and fall of four kingdoms to be followed by a sanctified fifth: ‘and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed’ (Dan. 7.14). In the Revelation, John describes an even stranger composite beast, with seven heads and ten horns, and on each horn a crown. These two described in prophetic form a political, chronological process: ‘And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come’ (Rev. 17.10). The fallen kingdoms John sees as the realm of the beast, the Antichrist linked with the notorious number 666. This is the realm of the female figure crucial to Doll’s role-playing: the ‘woman . . . arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones. . . . And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH’ (Rev. 17.3–5). John sees the fall of this woman and the city over which she presides as central to the final defeat of the Antichrist.
But when would these events take place? In the ‘time of the end’, Daniel assures us, ‘many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased’ (Dan. 12.4). Those who read the Geneva version of Daniel and Revelation or Foxe’s history of Christian martyrdom could learn that that time might be soon at hand, that they were living through the latter days of this world. This perspective was expanded in overwhelming detail in sermons and tracts which proliferated in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There had been four earthly kingdoms: the Chaldean, Persian, Greek and Roman Empires. The rule of Pagan Rome extended into the rule of the Catholic church, linked in so much protestant imagery with Revelation’s scarlet woman, the whore of Babylon. Rome was a city of seven hills, like ‘the seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth’ (Rev. 17.9). Protestant churches were now set against the Catholic church, and might thus have a key role in the events of the ‘latter days’. Chronicles such as Foxe’s sketched the key events in this long history and forecast the possible timetable. Daniel and Revelation were rich in symbols for sacred time: 1,260 days, three and a half weeks, an hour in heaven, and the millennial (thousand year) period during which the Antichrist would be chained up. If you decoded these correctly, in terms of human time, you would know the timetable for the end of the world. After the millennium of being chained, the Antichrist would be let loose, but then would come the final degradation of evil. If you fought on the side of the saints, you could anticipate the ecstasy of entering the new kingdom at the end of times. In Jonson’s lifetime, many were confident they could so decode prophetic texts but, as they assumed they would be on the winning side, the apocalypse held out not fear for them but ecstatic joy as they awaited the second coming.
The idea that these prophecies were the literal truth of the history of the world has had a continuing influence from Jonson’s time to ours. Oral Roberts, a famous twentieth-century American evangelical preacher, puts it this way in his commentary on Revelation:
I love the thought of Christ’s Second Coming. My heart is thrilled when I think that this may be the year our Lord returns for his own. . . . The drama of the end-time is unfolding. The clouds are lifting. The dawn is breaking.18
Roberts’s joyful expectation of apocalypse links back to the Reformation readings of prophecy I have quickly sketched here. In modern times, this joyous understanding of apocalypse has been pushed aside by the many uses of apocalypse in the popular imagination, where the term apocalypse indicates ‘a disaster resulting in drastic, irreversible damage to human society or the environment, esp. on a global scale’.19 We see this most clearly perhaps in Hollywood films, from Apocalypse Now to Armageddon; in the early twenty-first-century big-screen eco-thrillers have frequently depicted global environmental collapse. In these scenarios, whatever apocalypse portends, it won’t be nice.
The dupes in Jonson’s play hope otherwise. In their fevered imaginations alchemy and apocalypse are deeply linked in material ways. The transformation of base matter into gold would require an apocalyptic rearrangement of the world. This fifth element, newly formed from the dregs of the previous four, would be a metallic version of the fifth kingdom itself. The result, however, would be earthly, not heavenly joy. If you could control the process of alchemy you could certainly know the day and the hour when the transformation would be complete, and be primed to take advantage of it. This would be a day of ultimate promise – precisely of course what Subtle, Doll and Face have been promising their clientele. Culturally, the scenario plays upon the assumption, common to apocalyptic and alchemical thinking, that there would be a single joyous day when all hopes were fulfilled. Dramaturgically, of course, this expectation sets up the scenario played out on stage, the singular day when all dreams of avarice will come true. It thus seems no accident that alchemy and apocalypse are interlinked precisely at the point in the play when those dreams are at their height and when they must be shattered so entertainingly.
The Reformation’s concept of apocalypse enters the play through the two Anabaptist evangelists: Ananias and Tribulation. Their plan is clear: the profits from projection will be devoted, as Subtle puts it, to ‘rooting out the bishops | Or th’antichristian hierarchy’ (2.5.82–3); and as Tribulation agrees the money will enable them to ‘stand up for the beauteous discipline | Against the menstruous cloth and rag of Rome’ (3.1.32–3). To such puritans as these, the activities of the conservative Anglican church increasingly came to resemble those of the Pope in Rome. Ananias, the junior, is ever vigilant for signs of the Antichrist in the world, perceiving that Subtle ‘bears | The visible mark of the beast in his forehead’ (3.1.7–8). All Roman Catholic countries, from this perspective, would look suspect. Thus, to Ananias, Surly in his Spanish heiress-hunting disguise, ‘look’st like Antichrist in that lewd hat’ (4.7.55). Both Ananias and Tribulation are well read in scripture, and can readily quote from prophecy. ‘The place [Lovewit’s house]’, says Ananias, ‘is become a cage of unclean birds’ (5.3.46–7), recalling the fallen satanic city of Babylon, the ‘cage of every unclean and hateful bird’ (Rev. 18.2); the house he claims as the domain also of ‘Locusts | Of the foul pit’ (5.5.13–14), arising out of the ‘bottomless pit’ whence ‘there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth’ (Rev. 9.2–3). Aptly in this scene Pastor Tribulation makes the more erudite prophetic allusion, to the apocrypha, describing the house as ‘Profane as Bel, and the dragon’ (5.5.14). The wit of quoting scripture, of course, is not quite enough for them to triumph. Jonson shows their motivation to be as degradedly base as anyone else’s in his scheme. The money they ‘invest’ in alchemy is lost to them, remaining (like everything else in the house) in Lovewit’s hands. They cannot contrive a Fifth, sacred Monarchy by these means.
They are a lively pair on stage, and a good dress rehearsal for the figure of Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Bartholomew Fair; yet, they do not seem to have excited Jonson’s satiric inventiveness as much as Sir Epicure Mammon, who pursues with apocalyptic fervour a lavishly material golden age. He is the chief victim, the target of a ten-month ‘long con’. His desire for a golden age is anchored in utopian beneficence. ‘If his dream last’, Subtle tells us, ‘he’ll turn the age to gold’ (1.4.29); he will use his power to heal the sick, ‘Dispensing for the pox . . . walking Moorfields for lepers’ (19–20). Mammon endorses this projection of his virtue: ‘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’ (2.3.49–53). In the light of Jonson’s proto-Dickensian knack for capturing the qualities of his characters in their name,20 it is not surprising to discover that Epicure Mammon is not planning to lead a Christian republic of virtue but rather to use the infinite wealth and eternal youth the ‘stone’ will grant to indulge a lifestyle that would exceed even the worst legends of the feats of Roman emperors:
We’ll therefore go with all, my girl, and live
In a free state, where we will eat our mullets,
Soused in high-country wines, sup pheasants’ eggs,
And have our cockles boiled in silver shells,
Our shrimps to swim again, as when they lived,
In a rare butter made of dolphins’ milk.
. . .
And so enjoy a perpetuity
Of life and lust[.]
(4.1.155–66)
There may be scant ‘alchemy’ staged during the play, but such passages are vivid support for Anne Barton’s claim that the key transformations in the play happen through its language, as here so densely and sickeningly material.21 Epicure disappears, as it were, into the substances in which he takes pleasure but which for the audience become disgusting. There is an additional frisson for us now, as our own emotive responses to dolphins (promoted by eco-tourism and ‘swimming with dolphins’ excursions) render the thought of dolphin’s butter more repellent, perhaps, than even Jonson initially intended. The metaphors evoke the paradoxical state of Mammon’s desires. On the one hand, he seeks here to melt his flesh into all manner of other soft, luxurious substances. On the other, like King Midas he will, if he can, literally turn everything to gold, imagining a fortune that will exceed that of the mines of Solomon and fabled mines of the Spanish Americas combined: ‘I’ll change | All that is metal in thy house to gold’ (2.1.29–30).22 In his metallic paradise, he will eat off ‘Dishes of agate, set in gold and studded | With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies’ (2.2.73–4). In personal terms, he imagines a state like the holy city of New Jerusalem: ‘and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones’ (Rev. 21.18–19). Revelation uses metals from our world to evoke the splendour of the new heaven and earth, after our world has passed away. Epicure has no such spiritual aim in mind. Rather in his own dreamed-of ‘novo orbe’ (2.1.2) or fifth kingdom, he will get to spend the fifth element the final projection will create for him. He will not wait for the world-to-come to claim his reward; and it is the vehement claiming of his reward that proves his downfall. The enacting of this fuses alchemy, apocalypse and the genre of comedy.
Each of the dupes requires enticement to keep them in circulation: a little piece of what they most desire while they await the final outcome. Face and Doll assume whatever role is necessary to mirror back to the clients their inner desires. The stakes are highest in their traffic with Mammon: he expects the greatest reward, and so, over the preceding ten months, they have milked him the most in advance. Dapper achieves an audience with the Queen of the Fairies, a scenario played out with contempt for its ludicrousness and the baffling stupidity of anyone who would fall for it. Mammon instead is baited with the deranged sister of a lord; she comes equipped with prophetic accessories:
She is a most rare scholar,
And is gone mad with studying Broughton’s works.
If you but name a word touching the Hebrew,
She falls into her fit and will discourse
As you would run mad too to hear her, sir.
(2.3.237–42)
As editors of the play frequently note, the author referred to here is Hugh Broughton, a Puritan minster and theologian, whose Revelation of the Holy Apocalyps was published the same year the play was first performed. Jonson may have read it, along with Broughton’s 1590 Concent of Scripture, which he samples generously in 4.5. Here Doll in role as the aristocratic prophetess lapses (as Subtle foretells in 2.3) into apocalyptic madness in order to forestall Mammon’s advances. He wants his golden age, with its accompanying wanton pleasures, now. Inadvertently, he uses prophetic trigger words, sufficient to set Doll off: ‘Alas I talked | Of a fifth monarchy I would erect | With the philosopher’s stone, by chance, and she | Falls on the other four straight’ (4.5.25–8). Here, at the climax of the play, is the quintessence of its commingling of alchemy and apocalypse.
Mammon’s fifth monarchy would be founded on the successful and perpetual recreation of the fifth element, gold. His vision of a fifth kingdom provokes from Doll a stream of prophetic language narrating the chronology of the four earthly kingdoms that, in Renaissance schemes (like Broughton’s and John Foxe’s) based both on Daniel and Revelation, would precede the final fifth. As many of his fellow commentators did, Broughton set out a divine chronology of the world, which Doll excerpts for her prophetic rant. Jonson would have had other options for illustrating Doll’s madness, as volubly crazed women were stereotypical figures on the Jacobean stage. Then too he could have shown her with the babble of glossolalia, speaking in unknown tongues as if moved to do so by the Holy Spirit. The recourse to Broughton is clearly deliberate.
Alchemy and apocalypse share a common gendered language. They envision the unity of the world, and all its matter, as a coming together of the female and male powers that animate the world. When male and female were sacredly conjoined, according to alchemical lore, then you would have the miraculously all-powerful stone. The book of Revelation also forecasts a sacred marriage. The downfall of the whore of Babylon would be succeeded by the marriage of Christ with his church, the New Jerusalem linked forever to her husband/messiah. Jonson upends these sacred longings, using the rhetoric of apocalypse to adorn the farce of sex. The Mammon we see in act 2, with his dreams of world domination, is reduced to begging Doll for sexual favours. ‘There was no unchaste purpose’ (4.5.37), he assures Subtle. We see no impurity on stage, for it is an important part of the overall con-game that none of the gulls be given what they want, but there is no doubt that Mammon’s purposes with Doll are specifically unchaste. Her stream of prophesying, it seems, is triggered at the point when Mammon presses his claims too ardently. The complexities of Doll’s chantings become a kind of prophetic foreplay: ‘and the fourth Beast. | That was Gog-north, and Egypt-south, which after | Was called Gog Iron-leg, and South Iron-leg’ (4.5.4–6). All he can do is stumble after, desperate to interject: ‘Lady . . . Dear lady’ (4.5.7, 14). To no avail. The baseness of his desire has been exposed; and the apocalypse scenario is flourished to bring about his comeuppance. The trio use this moment to bring their ‘great work’ crashing down, purporting that Mammon’s impure desires have impeded it fatally: ‘It has stood still this half hour’ (4.5.42), admonishes Subtle. Purity of intention was crucial for the success of alchemy; only a morally upright adept could prevail; purity too was required for those aiming to survive the end times and enter the New Jerusalem: ‘be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life’ (Rev. 2.10). Mammon’s actions will ‘retard | The work a month at least’ (4.5.51–2). Moments later, the whole bogus experiment totters, with the ‘great crack and noise within’, which Face interprets for
us: ‘Every glass is burst, | Furnace and all rent down, as if a bolt | Of thunder had been driven through the house!’ (4.5.58–60). The ‘bolt of thunder’ is a nice touch, for it suggests some divine judgement has been passed on Mammon. Face, of course, is simulating verbally the signs of divine providence to cover this climactic stage of their scam. Their intertwining of the discourses of alchemy and apocalypse is entirely opportunistic, based on their shrewd grasp of what the credulous, in 1610, might think possible. On the public Jacobean stage, no such direct divine judgement would be shown. Jonson reserved epiphanies of gods, in classical disguise, for his more esoterically contrived court masques. Here the chance for divinely ordained metamorphosis vanishes in this great ‘crack’; in its wake the returning Lovewit can only find
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.
(5.5.39–42)
What then becomes of apocalypse amidst this fifth-act detritus? Empson’s poem, quoted as the outset of this chapter, provides a perspective: ‘Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end. | What is there to be or do?’ Prophesying the apocalypse or projecting alchemy would both be ways of hastening the end. From the perspective of the victorious, in the end times, or the lucky inheritors of alchemy’s unlimited wealth, the result would be a form of divine comedy, as Dante more spiritually describes it in his famous Paradiso, but this is not the kind of comedy produced on the Jacobean stage, nor is our fate beyond the end of this world something with which Jonson is concerned. Rather for him the question, while waiting for the end, is ‘what is there to be or do?’ Here the issue is not whether Jonson personally believed in either alchemy or a coming apocalypse; it is that he uses these tropes to reflect on London life. What Helen Ostovich claims of his breakout humours comedy Every Man Out of His Humour seems true of The Alchemist, written ten years later: ‘In this array of human folly, Jonson musters a mad variety of perspectives that may render the viewers sane.’23 To the chagrin of all the dupes in the play, no alchemy takes place. Rather, in the fifth act, we see a sordid series of asset transfers. First, Face claims all the treasure the trio have been given; then Lovewit claims all these, as the owner of the house, and refuses to acknowledge any other claims of ownership. No fifth kingdom, evidently, is at hand. In the kingdom of James I, in 1610, Lovewit and his sidekick Face will continue to flourish.
All the victims of the scam desperately desire to transform. That applies to the scammers too. Through alchemy they aspire to a higher state. None succeed. The victims cannot transcend their humour; Subtle and Doll are despatched, neither wealthier nor wiser. Face changes back to being the butler Jeremy, reverting to his subservient role, content, yet trapped within Lovewit’s house. In his epilogue, Face turns out to us, the imagined audience: ‘I put myself | On you, that are my country, and this pelf | . . . rests | To feast you often, and invite new guests’ (5.5.162–5). If we let him, he will scam us again. The task is given to us to complete. The puppet-like characters seem incapable of change; hence their desperation to invoke the magic of external assistance to transform. Jonson hopes more for the audience’s power to change than his characters show. For most students of the play, the promises of alchemy or apocalypse will no longer seem credible. Yet, the promise of great wealth and power shimmers still before us, the inducement behind so many contemporary scams. It is important to reflect on the historical and cultural context in which the play was written, as this chapter has shown. But Jonson’s greatest plays remain more than quaint curiosities, no matter how crammed they are with the curious lore of his age. The regularity with which, in our world, people still succumb to schemes which will get you rich quicker than could ever be possible is still a world in which The Alchemist’s scenarios retain a moral force.