The Alchemist E-Book

Ben Jonson

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 180

Beschreibung

The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. In The Alchemist Face, Subtle and Dol Common are three rogues intent on conning the gullible out of their money. Setting up a quack-doctor's practice in Lovewit's house they promise miraculous services that cost their customers dear. Everything goes swimmingly, until Lovewit returns and the three turn against each other. Edited by Simon Trussler, with an introduction by Colin Counsell.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

THE ALCHEMIST

byBen Jonson

edited by Simon Trusslerwith an introduction and notes by Colin Counsell

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Note on the Text

Further Reading

Key Dates

Letter to Mary Lady Wroth

To the Reader

Characters

The Argument

Prologue

Act I

Act II

Act III

Act IV

Act V

Glossary

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

Born in London a month after the death of his minister father, Jonson grew up in the care of his mother’s second husband. His stepfather, by profession a builder, apprenticed him to a bricklayer but the young Jonson apparently liked the trade so little that he soon left to join the English forces fighting in Flanders. On his return to England he worked as an actor with a group of strolling players until Philip Henslowe, the manager of the Admiral’s Men, one of London’s leading theatre companies, engaged him as a playwright in 1597. A year later the success of his comedy Every Man in his Humour set Jonson on the road to becoming one of the most popular writers of the London stage. Comedy was to prove his forte, for he followed that play with a string of comic triumphs, including Every Man Out of his Humour (1599), Volpone (1605-6), Epicoene or The Silent Woman (1609-10), The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614). His tragedies Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1614) received a more mixed reception, being thought too wordy and intellectual.

The details of Jonson’s life and work suggest a contradictory personality. On the one hand he was a learned man, having studied at Westminster school under the noted scholar William Camden. A leading neo-classicist of the English Renaissance stage, he filled his plays with references to Greek and Roman myth and quotations from classical authors such as Aristotle and Juvenal, and his work reveals an informed understanding of Greek ‘New Comedy’ as adapted by Roman dramatists such as Plautus. This familiarity with the official ‘high’ culture of the time suggests that Jonson was some thing of an establishment figure, and he did indeed become the leading writer of masques – spectacular and technologically complex court entertainments, produced in stormy collaboration with designer Inigo Jones and devised for James I who granted him the position, if not the name, of poet laureate.

But in stark contrast is Jonson the riotous populist, the chronicler of the life and language of ordinary people. This is the Jonson who was imprisoned three times, once for his part in writing The Isle of Dogs (c.1597), a play condemned as seditious and slanderous, again for Eastward Ho! (1605), whose satire of the Scots unsurprisingly found little favour with the Scots-born King James, and, in between, for the death of actor Gabriel Spencer, whom he killed in a duel. This was not the first time Jonson had slain a man, for during a lull in the conflict in Flanders he had challenged a member of the opposing army to single combat and won.

It is perhaps this second side to the dramatist, the drinker, brawler and raconteur, that we most readily associate with plays such as Bartholomew Fair and The Alchemist, works which depict the coarse but vibrant life and culture of the ordinary people of London’s streets. But however we choose to see him, Jonson is one of the most important figures of the Renaissance theatre, his position after Shakespeare challenged only by Christopher Marlowe. Nor did he go unrecognised in his own time. When he died in 1637 Jonson was granted the extraordinary honour of a burial in Westminster Abbey, and it is reported that his body was followed to its resting place by the greater part of fashionable London society. On his tombstone was inscribed ‘O rare Ben Jonson’.

The Alchemist: What Happens in the Play

Three of the play’s central characters, Face, Subtle and Dorothy ‘Dol’ Common, have entered into a contract by which they agree to work together for their mutual benefit – ‘work’ which consists of relieving the gullible of their wealth. Their headquarters is the London home of Lovewit, a gentleman who fled the city after his wife succumbed to the plague, leaving his house in the care of ‘Jeremy the butler’, in reality Face in one of his many guises. It is there that the three rogues set about their confidence trickery, passing Subtle off as a ‘doctor’ learned in arcane and mystical arts, and welcoming a stream of supplicants, all of whom are more than willing to part with their money on the promise of miraculous services. Abel Drugger, a tobacconist and apothecary, wants to know how to design and arrange his new shop in order to draw in the most lucrative custom, and, later, how to win the hand of the rich young widow, Dame Pliant. The clerk at law, Dapper, wants a ‘familiar’, a personal spirit such as was reputedly kept by witches, to help him win at gambling. Kastril, Dame Pliant’s country bumpkin brother, seeks instruction on how to ‘quarrel’ like the fashionable young gentlemen of London. Most preposterous of all, Sir Epicure Mammon and the Puritans Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome believe Subtle to be an alchemist, possessing the secret of transmuting base metals into gold, both parties paying him large sums to perform the legendary feat for themselves.

The scene is set for a comedy of subterfuge and illusion, of con artists and their potential victims. As the plot develops the trio find ever more devious means of extracting more money from their victims, and the action becomes frenzied as they struggle to keep each of their gambits afloat. But their nefarious activities are brought to a halt with the unexpected return of Lovewit. As the outraged dupes hammer on the door of the perplexed gentleman, demanding justice and the return of their money, the ‘commonweal’ of rogues begins to fall apart and the threesome turn upon each other. It is Face who finally wins. Promising to arrange a marriage between Lovewit and the rich and beautiful Dame Pliant, he enlists his master’s aid in eluding the constable. Subtle and Dol Common are forced to flee, leaving Love wit with his new, rich wife and Face safe and at liberty, the latter proving himself the most accomplished trickster of all.

Cozeners and Alchemists

The figure of the trickster or ‘cozener’ is not an uncommon one in writings from the period, for it obliquely represents a social reality. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw major economic and social upheavals in England, as a series of bad harvests and market fluctuations destabilised the old feudal agricultural order. The resulting financial uncertainties drove up rents, bankrupting tenants and small-holders, whose lands were then gathered into larger estates. For substantial numbers of people this meant destitution. Deprived of their livelihood, they wandered the countryside begging, some times in large bands, or else fled to the rapidly swelling cities in search of work. Such ‘masterless men’, freed from local, communal ties and granted no fixed place in society, were a source of fear for the rest of the populace, and tales of their wrongdoing proliferated. It was in response to such fear that Elizabeth I introduced her Poor Laws in 1597 and 1601, decreeing severe punishment for ‘persistent and able-bodied idlers’.

That the majority of these unfortunates in reality comprised thieves and vagabonds is open to doubt, but they were nevertheless generally perceived as such. So widespread was this perception that it gave rise to a new literary genre, the so-called ‘coney-catching’ pamphlets, which purported to alert their readers to the dangers such ‘villains’ presented but which actually pandered to a public appetite for stories of the underworld. Works of this kind typically classified miscreants into ‘professions’, as ‘fraters’ and ‘rufflers’, ‘palliards’ and ‘priggers of palfreys’, each with their own criminal or immoral speciality, offering a vision of the underclass which ironically mirrored respectable society’s division into guilds, ‘degrees’ and estates. Thus the world represented in The Alchemist, with its little society or ‘commonweal’ formed by the rogues’ contract, would have been familiar to Jonson’s original audience, if only anecdotally. Face, Subtle and the ‘bawd’ Dol Common are denizens of a London in which, it was believed, crime and trickery were rife and cozeners waited round every corner.

Equally familiar to the play’s original audience was the idea, if not the practice, of alchemy. Alchemy originated in Asia and made its first European appearance in Rome in the first centuries AD. Lap sing into obscurity with the fall of the Roman Empire, it became once again an object of enquiry from the eleventh century on. Although its claim of turning base metals into gold may appear unlikely today, the fact that it features in the writings of such intellectual notables as St Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon is testimony to the seriousness with which it was viewed in earlier times.

The practice of alchemy rested upon an entire view of the universe. All matter, alchemists asserted, was built of only one basic stuff, which was however moulded into a variety of different forms to create the multiplicity of substances found in the world – a notion supported by no less an authority than Aristotle. The various sub stances formed a hierarchy, the most ‘perfect’ being gold. Far from seeking to alter nature, alchemy therefore saw itself as furthering a natural process, the refining of less exalted matter in accordance with the real but hidden order of the universe. One result of this view was a tendency for would-be alchemists to try to ‘decode’ ancient tales, texts and even the world itself to find the secret of transmutation, to read physical phenomena for their hidden, metaphysical meanings. When Sir Epicure Mammon interprets Jason’s mythical acts as an allegory of magical formulae, or Subtle purports to design Drugger’s shop and teach Kastril duelling using readings from astrological charts, they act in accordance with a logic which some believed to be at the root of Creation.

Alchemists believed that transmutation had been successfully practised in ancient times – by the Biblical Fathers, the Greeks and, especially, the Egyptians – but the knowledge, it was thought, had since been forgotten. Looking back to a vanished Golden Age in this way, alchemy reiterated an idea common to the period, for in the seventeenth century people believed that the world was in decline, descending from the state of perfection that was the Garden of Eden to its ultimate demise on the Day of Judgement. The ‘ancients’, it was asserted, were taller and wiser and, as Mammon confidently claims, lived longer and were more sexually active, able to father children at an advanced age. From this perspective it was perhaps easier to believe that they also possessed fabulous powers lost to modern times, the alchemical ability to create the ‘Elixir of Life’ and the ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ with its power to transform one substance into another.

Comedy of Deception

Clearly, however, alchemy is not taken seriously in The Alchemist; it is simply a ruse for relieving fools of their money. It is moreover the work’s central metaphor. Although no metal is transformed into gold we do see the continual ‘transmutation’ of the characters as each of the three con artists sheds and dons a variety of disguises. Dol Common adopts the roles of a distressed gentlewoman and the Queen of Faery. Face switches rapidly from a soldierly captain to the bellows operator ‘Lungs’ or Ulen Spiegel, and later to Jeremy the butler. Even Subtle, who remains ‘the doctor’ throughout, changes his garb to better entice whichever victims present themselves. Jonson uses the notion of alchemy ironically, for the play’s only real ‘changes of form’ are also its greatest deceits, the disguises that are employed in the service of illusion and misrepresentation.

But misrepresentation is not limited to the rogues, for most of the characters at some time or another present themselves misleadingly. The puritans Wholesome and Ananias seek to convey an image of themselves as spiritual, unconcerned with matters of the world and the flesh, pious in their strict adherence to Christian law; yet they sanction the sinful act of alchemy precisely for its promise of inexhaustible riches. Sir Epicure Mammon’s speech is filled with classical references and allusions to obscure magical knowledge, and, speaking to Subtle of his desire for the Philosopher’s Stone, he describes his motives as selfless. By such means he hopes to present himself as learned and altruistic, a suitable recipient for such a gift. But Mammon is a fool, easily duped by the trio’s ploys. His motives are revealed to be, as his name suggests, ‘epicurean’, as he lingers over the prospect of the beautiful women, gorgeous clothes and exotic foods – ‘mullets, / Soused in high-country wines’ and ‘shrimps . . . In a rare butter of dolphins’ milk, / Whose cream doth look like opals’ – which he will be able to enjoy once the alchemical ‘projection’ is complete. Most trans parent of all perhaps is Kastril, who by learning the art of aggressive argument and duelling intends to pass himself off as a sophisticated London gentleman; he does not even try to conceal his act of ‘disguise’. Misrepresentation is central not only to the play’s action, but to each of its characters as well.

So it is that when Mammon’s companion, Surly, tries to unmask the rogues’ deception he also uses disguise. The haughty and sceptical Surly is a gambler, used to sleights of hand – the ‘coney-catching’ tricks of professional card players – and so sees through their subterfuge. Arranging that Face learn of the arrival of a rich ‘Don of Spain’, Surly adopts the clothes and speech of a Spanish nobleman, hoping thereby to become himself the subject of one of the trio’s scams and so gain evidence of their trickery.

It is apt that the threesome foil Surly’s plans by using his own disguise against him. Revealing his true identity, the gambler tries to convince the assembled dupes that he sought solely to unmask the rogues, and calls upon Dame Pliant to support his story. But Face turns the tables on him by placing his deception in a different light – indeed, in several different lights. For the puritan Ananias he makes of Surly a devilish Spanish papist, and for Kastril a lecher who is after his sister, a suit able subject on which the oafish countryman can practise his newly learned skills at ‘quarrelling’. Face even draws the foolish Drugger to his aid, explaining that the Spanish disguise, usurped by Surly, was to be the device by which the tobacconist won Dame Pliant’s hand. Face’s skill lies not merely in disguise, in illusion, but in tailoring illusions to fit the desires of the onlooker, and it is by this means that he is able to turn Surly’s ploy against him.

With its disguises, illusions and contrived plots The Alchemist mirrors the devices and conventions of theatre itself. The rogues behave as ‘actors’, taking on roles (donning different costumes and, most likely, using different voices) to convince the dupes, their ‘audience’, that the stories they present are real. Thus each confidence trick is a kind of play within the play. Lovewit’s house functions as a stage for the trio, and even has its own ‘offstage’ area, the room where alchemical projection is supposed to take place – unseen by the real audience, certainly, but also by the tricksters’ victims. The scene in which Dapper at last meets his ‘aunt’ the Queen of Faery is exemplary: its charade, spectacle and contrived drama grant it all the qualities of a piece of theatre.

Such ironic references to theatre’s own contrivances are legion in the drama of the time. Plays of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries frequently feature women who dress as boys to escape detection, rulers who adopt disguises better to view the working of their realms, and scenes in which characters hide secretly to observe others, a mirror of the situation in which the real audience finds itself. But the strength of Jonson’s use of such devices lies in the way they reflect upon and inform the play’s own themes. The Alchemist is about deception, and the playwright reinforces the message by playfully calling the theatre audience’s attention to the way they also are being ‘deceived’.

Comedy of Language

If disguise is the visual means by which characters effect their deceptions, equally important is their use of language. It is with words that Sir Epicure Mammon seeks to impress and manipulate others, pain ting a gorgeous word-picture for Surly of the delights that will be his once the alchemical process is complete, and tempting Dol Common (in her guise as the ailing gentlewoman) with sensuous images of exotic pleasures in an attempt to seduce her. Ananias accuses Subtle of speaking ‘heathen language’, thus asserting his own religious superiority by denigrating the other’s words. Once again it is Kastril who proves most foolish in this respect, the most lacking in self know ledge. ‘Quarrelling’ is for him an end in itself; the meaning of words, the reasons for any disagreement, are of no importance when com pared to the image of the disputatious duellist he wishes to contrive.

Most important of all are the words used by Subtle in his guise as alchemist. For all Jonson’s accurate use of the many alchemical terms employed, relatively few members of his original audience could have been expected to understand them, for alchemy was a secret and illicit practice with few initiates. For the rest the terms’ meanings would have been unknown, to be guessed at, just as mysterious as they are for most of the characters. This is not a flaw but is crucial to the success of Subtle’s deception, since it is by blinding his victims with impenetrable jargon, demonstrating their supposed ignorance, that he convinces them of his own superior knowledge. Asked by Mammon to convince the doubting Surly of the truth of alchemy, Subtle responds not by explaining but by obscuring. Just as Surly manages to present himself as a Don of Spain by speaking a language incomprehensible to everyone else, so Subtle throws up a mist of impressive-sounding but indecipherable words to conjure the image of a secret knowledge to which only he has access.

Greed and Morality

Although disguise and mystification are the devices the characters employ, their motive for employing them is, as in most of Jonson’s comedies, greed. In this sense the dupes are no different from the con artists, for they too seek riches and are willing to lie and deceive to get them. Mammon describes his motives for seeking the Philosopher’s Stone as altruistic because he knows that the ‘doctor’ will only undertake to make one for a ‘pure’ purpose, but in reality he desires gold. Surly disguises himself to unmask the tricksters, but adapts the ploy to a different end when he comes across a rich widow. Ananias is willing even to cover up the crime of counterfeiting, playing on words to construe illegal ‘coining’ as mere ‘casting’. In the London of The Alchemist almost everyone lies for greed’s sake, and the trio of villains are distinguished only by the skill they bring to the task.

This makes for a play which is morally complex, offering no easy judgement of its characters. Face, Subtle and Dol Common are cheats, criminals whose goal is loot. But our condemnation of them is always qualified by the knowledge that none of their victims is any better, for they too seek to procure wealth by dubious means, whether it be by cheating at gambling, marrying for money or laying their hands on unearned gold. The world of The Alchemist is an ethically murky one, for no one is honest, all are deceivers, and one can only be relatively more moral than another. This is in part a testament to Jonson’s populism, since all his comedies are to some degree critical of the pristine but impractical ideals of officially-sanctioned Christian culture, offering instead a more realistic vision of humankind as fundamentally, but rarely fatally, flawed – ‘only human’. This goes some way to explaining the play’s finale. Throughout, our sympathies are most of all lodged with the confidence tricksters; because of the constant threat that they will be revealed as such, certainly, but also because, unlike their dupes, they are not self-deceivers, they are honest in their dishonesty, and they are at least good at telling lies. And it is Face who is most accomplished in this. He is the ‘director’ of their whole deception, bringing the trio together to form the ‘commonweal’ and providing the ‘stage’ for their show. Thus according to the grey and relative morality of The Alchemist, it is perhaps Face who most ‘deserves’ to win.

Farce

If The Alchemist is a play of words and images, it is also a play of action. It opens with Face and Subtle entering the stage in violent argument, the first armed with a drawn sword and the second with a flask of some unnamed but undoubtedly noxious liquid, both weapons appropriate to their adopted roles as military man and alchemist. As the quarrel continues even Dol Common, who initially tries to mediate between the two, becomes embroiled, snatching away the sword and using it to shatter the flask in Subtle’s hand. This beginning allows Jonson to inform the audience of the agreement the three have made, and of their criminal plans, as well as predicting the final falling-out which will bring the piece to its conclusion. At the same time it establishes the tone of the play, setting the scene for a drama whose pace is fast and whose comedy is physical, a farce.