The Alchemist (play)
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The Alchemist is a comedy by English playwright Ben Jonson. First performed in 1610 by the King's Men, it is generally considered Jonson's best and most characteristic comedy; Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that it had one of the three most perfect plots in literature. The play's clever fulfillment of the classical unities and vivid depiction of human folly have made it one of the few Renaissance plays (excepting of course the works of Shakespeare) with, apart from a period of neglect during the Victorian era, a continual life on stage.
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[edit] Background
The Alchemist premiered 34 years after the first permanent public theatre (The Theatre) opened in London; it is, then, a product of the early maturity of commercial drama in London. Only one of the University wits who had transformed drama in the Elizabethan period remained alive (this was Thomas Lodge); in the other direction, the last great playwright to flourish before the Interregnum, James Shirley, was already a teenager. The theatres had survived the challenge mounted by the city and religious authorities; plays were a regular feature of life at court and for a great number of Londoners.
The venue for which Jonson apparently wrote his play reflects this newly solid acceptance of theatre as a fact of city life. In 1597, the Lord Chamberlain's Men had been denied permission to use the theatre in Blackfriars as a winter playhouse because of objections from the neighborhood's influential residents. Some time between 1608 and 1610, the company, now the King's Men, reassumed control of the playhouse, this time without objections. Their delayed premiere on this stage within the city walls, along with royal patronage, marks the ascendance of this company in the London play-world (Gurr, 171). The Alchemist was among the first plays chosen for performance at the theatre.
Jonson's play reflects this new confidence. In it, he applies his classical conception of drama to a setting in contemporary London for the first time, with invigorating results. The classical elements, most notably the relation between Lovewit and Face, are fully modernized; likewise, the depiction of Jacobean London is given order and direction by the classical understanding of comedy as a means to expose vice and foolishness to ridicule.
[edit] Plot
With his master Lovewit resting in the country to avoid an outbreak of plague in London, a clever servant named Face develops a scheme to make money and amuse himself. He gives Subtle, a charlatan, and a prostitute named Dol Common access to the house. Subtle disguises himself as an alchemist, with Face as his servant; Doll disguises herself as a zealous Puritan. Together, the three of them gull and cheat an assortment of foolish clients. These include Sir Epicure Mammon, a wealthy sensualist looking for the philosopher's stone; two greedy Puritans, Tribulation Wholesome and Ananias, who hope to counterfeit Dutch money; Drugger, a "tobacco man" hoping to marry the wealthy widow Dame Pliant; Dapper, an incredibly suave, fashionable, good-looking 17th century gentleman, and other minor figures looking for a short-cut to success in gambling or in business.
[edit] Analysis
Some people satirize their fellow men reluctantly. Not Johnson: the big, beefy, self-confident playwright who sat for portrait painter Robert Vaughan gives no hint in the resulting canvas that when he puts the boot in, he does so with pained humility. On the contrary, he seems to relish his role as the most ruthlessly funny expositor and critic of the follies, vanities and vices of mankind that Renaissance Comedy produces. Johnson’s colourful life includes bricklaying, soldiering, duelling, murder, imprisonment, conversion to Catholicism (and back again), grilling by the Privy Council (twice), and recusancy. It also includes spectacular artistic successes and failures. All this provides him with uncommonly rich experience of human frailties, and the thrice-incarcerated leisure in which to reflect on them. In The Alchemist, the follies, vanities and vices of mankind are the main targets of his satire. Greed-induced credulity is the biggest target of all. No one is exempt from Johnson’s satirical pen, whatever his social status. In this particular sense, he offers a more convincing, more satisfying, and ultimately more humorous microcosm of society than any other Renaissance playwright, including Shakespeare.
Johnson would have no trouble acclimatising to 21st Century London. One look at its billboards advertising anti-ageing creams containing ‘Factor X’ would tell him that the human weakness and gullibility these adverts seek to exploit is the same human weakness and gullibility which leads Sir Epicure Mammon to seek the elixir of youth, and to dream of the sexual conquests it will bring him.
The Alchemist achieves its universality through Johnson’s focus on what happens when one human being seeks advantage over another. In a big city like London, this process of advantage-seeking is rife. The trio of con-artists - Subtle, Face and Dol - are self-deluding small-timers, ultimately undone by the same human weaknesses they exploit in their victims. Today, they might be internet fraudsters, working the ‘big’ con. Their fate is foreshadowed in the play’s opening scene, which features them onstage together, in the house of Lovewit, Face’s plague-dodging master. In a metaphor which runs through the play, the dialogue shows them to be elements existing together in uneasy imbalance, in a perpetually non-alchemic combination. Barely ten lines into the text, in an opening quarrel-scene inspired by Plautus’ Mostellaria, Face and Subtle’s quarrelling forces Dol to quell their raised voices: “Will you have the neighbours hear you? Will you betray all?” Indeed, their vanities and aspirations are revealed by the very personae they assume as part of their plan. Granted, the scheme necessitates impressive bogus identities, but it is telling that the lowly housekeeper, Face, should cast himself as a sea-captain (a man accustomed to giving orders, instead of taking them), that the egotistical Subtle should cast himself as an alchemist (as one who can do what no one else can; turn base metal into gold), and that Dol Common should cast herself as an aristocratic lady. Their incessant bickering is fuelled by vanity, envy and jealousy, the root of which is Subtle’s conviction that he is the key element in the ‘venture tripartite’:
FACE: ‘Tis his fault. He ever murmurs and objects his pains, and says the weight of all lies upon him.
The ‘venture tripartite’ is as doomed as the Roman triumvirates Johnson studied at Westminster School. The play’s end sees Subtle and Dol slope off to resume their original pairing, while Face resumes his role as housekeeper to a wealthy master. Significantly (the collapse of their scheme aside), neither of the three is severely punished. Johnson’s theatrical microcosm is not a neatly moral one; too much of him is drawn to W. C. Fields’ dictum that one should never give a sucker an even break. This is why, while London itself is a target of Johnson’s satire, it is also, as his Prologue boasts, a cozening-ground worth celebrating: “Our scene is London, ‘cause we would make known/No country’s mirth is better than our own/No clime breeds better matter for your whore…”
The play’s structure is arguably its strongest feature. It shines through impressively, whatever the quality of the production. In part, of course, its tightness stems from Johnson’s education, training and practical experience. But in The Alchemist, as in Volpone, it also stems from the soundness of the basic dramatic concept, which in turn stems from the writer’s absolute grasp of his material, his knowledge of his fellow man. Subtle claims to be on the verge of ‘projection’ in his offstage workroom, but all the characters in the play are overly-concerned with projection of a different kind: image-projection. The end result, in structural terms, is an onstage base of operations in Friars, to which can be brought a succession of unconsciously-comic characters from different social backgrounds, who hold, or aspire to, different professions and different beliefs, but whose lowest common denominator – gullibility - grants them equal victim-status in the end.
Not quite. True, Dapper, the aspirant gambler, loses his stake; Sir Epicure Mammon, convinced that Subtle is on the point of achieving ‘projection’, loses his money and his dignity; Drugger, the would-be businessman, parts with his cash, but ends up no nearer to the success he craves; the Puritan duo, Tribulation and Ananias, never realise their scheme to counterfeit Dutch money. But there is one important respect in which Johnson does not treat his characters equally, and it concerns religion.
Ben Johnson’s loathing for Puritans spans more than one play: Bartholomew Fair has a Holy Joe who gets it in the neck. Here, the life may help to explain the art. Johnson’s boozy, adulterous lifestyle and conversion to Catholicism placed him well within reach of Puritan condemnation, and the Puritans’ deep desire to close the theatres threatened what was for many years his livelihood. Johnson surely felt he knew that they would carry out their threat, if ever they had the chance. In 1642, they had the chance, and they took it; Johnson was right. Tellingly, of all those gulled in the play, it is the Puritans alone whom Johnson denies a brief moment of his audience’s pity; presumably, he reckons their life-denying self-righteousness renders them unworthy of it.
Johnson is one of the theatre’s great haters. He is hard on hypocrisy, and hardest of all on religious hypocrisy, particularly when its most extreme and damning judgements are couched in high-flown language. Tribulation and Ananias, two Amsterdam-based Puritans intent on counterfeiting Dutch coinage, employ just such extreme language and voice just such extreme judgements from their first appearance on stage. Those of their fellow men whom they encounter are either “heathen” or “bear the mark of the beast” or, in one ludicrous instance, wear a hat which suggests the “anti-christ”. Our two representative Puritans are at times aware, and at times unaware of the ridiculousness of the hyperbole they employ; on each occasion, Johnson excoriates them, deeming cynical knowledge and lack of self-knowledge equally worthy of satire.
One key feature of English (indeed European) drama where Johnson notably and commendably subverts tradition concerns the roles played by the different social classes in dramatic resolution. In The Alchemist, Face’s Master, Lovewit, returns, and seems intent, in conventional fashion, on asserting his social (and therefore ethical) superiority to put matters to rights. But when Face dangles before him the prospect of marriage to a younger woman, his master puts his ethical conduct on hold – at least, until he has seen her:
LOVEWIT: Well, let’s see your widow.
Having satisfied himself of her sexual attractiveness, he announces his intention to go ahead and marry her, proving no more ethically-minded than Face. Undeniably, the servant has an acute eye for the main chance, but so has the master: he adroitly exploits Mammon’s reluctance to obtain legal certification of his folly to hold on to the old man’s money. Shakespeare may poke fun at certain upper class characters, but at the end of his plays, there is always an aristocratic character more truly representative of his class, who delivers, if not judgement, then at least a concluding statement from a standpoint of virtue. Johnson is having none of it.
Ben Johnson’s main targets in The Alchemist are human follies, vanities and vices. If he has a single, principal target, it is greed-induced credulity, the form of stupidity that he viewed as common to almost all – even to the supposedly-educated members of the audience, who half-believed that the application of intellect could turn base metal into gold, and who half-believe in horoscopes today.
[edit] Stage History
Internal references indicate that the play was written for performance at Blackfriars; ironically, given its initial scenario, plague forced the company to tour, and The Alchemist premiered at Oxford in 1610, with performance in London later that year. Its success may be indicated by its performance at court in 1613 and again in 1623. Evidence of a more ambiguous kind is presented by the case of Thomas Tomkis's Albumazar, performed for King James I at Cambridge in 1615. A tradition apparently originating with Dryden held that Jonson had been influenced by Tomkis's academic comedy. Dryden may have mentioned Jonson to increase interest in a somewhat obscure play he was then reviving; he may also have been confused about the dates. At any rate, the question of influence now runs the other way. Albumazar is, primarily, an adaptation of Giambattista della Porta's "L'Astrologo"; however, both the similarity in subject matter and Tomkis's apparent familiarity with commercial dramaturgy make it possible that he was aware of The Alchemist, and may have been responding to the play's success.
The play continued onstage as a droll during the Commonwealth period; after the Restoration, it belonged to the repertory of the King's Men of Thomas Killigrew, who appear to have performed it with some frequency during their first years in operation. The play is not known to have been performed between 1675 and 1709, but the frequency of performance after 1709 suggests that it probably was. Indeed, the play was frequently performed during the eighteenth century; both Colley Cibber and David Garrick were notable successes in the role of Drugger, for whom a small amount of new material, including farces and monologues, in the latter half of the century was created.
After this period of flourishing, the play fell into desuetude, along with nearly all non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama, until the beginning of the twentieth century. William Poel's Elizabethan Stage Society produced the play in 1899. This opening was followed a generation later by productions at Malvern in 1932, with Ralph Richardson as Face, and at the Old Vic in 1947. In the latter production, Alec Guinness played Drugger, alongside Richardson as Face.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival staged a fast-paced, nearly farcical production in 1961; Gerard Larson played Face, and Nagle Jackson Face, under Edward Brubaker's direction. The performance received generally favorable reviews; however, a 1973 production set in the Wild West setting did not; the setting was generally considered inconsistent with the tone and treatment of the play.
In 1962, Tyrone Guthrie produced a modernized version at the Old Vic, with Leo McKern as Subtle and Charles Gray as Mammon. Trevor Nunn's 1977 production with the Royal Shakespeare Company featured Sir Ian McKellen as a"greasy, misanthropic" Face, in a version adapted by Peter Barnes. The original was played at the Royal National Theatre, with Alex Jennings and Simon Russell Beale in the central roles, from September to November 2006.
[edit] References
- Craig, D. H. Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1999.
- Donaldson, Ian. Jonson's Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
- Gurr, Andrew. Play-going in Shakespeare's London. 2nd edition; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Lake, Peter, with Michael Questier. The Anti-Christ's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists & Players in Post-Reformation England. Yale University Press, 2002.
- Ouellette, Anthony. "The Alchemist and the Emerging Adult Private Playhouse." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 45 (2005).
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- The Alchemist - Project Gutenberg eText
