The Alchemist: A Critical Reader

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• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780938295
• eBook ISBN: 9781441176257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The eponymous alchemist of Ben Jonson's quick-fire comedy is a fraud: he cannot make gold, but he does make brilliant theatre. The Alchemist is a masterpiece of wit and form about the self-delusions of greed and the theatricality of deception. This guide is useful to a diverse assembly of students and scholars, offering fresh new ways into this challenging and fascinating play.

CHAPTER ONE

The Critical Backstory

DAVID BEVINGTON

‘Upon my word’, declared Coleridge in 1834, ‘I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, The Alchemist, and Tom Jones the three most perfect plots ever planned.’¹ This is not to say that Coleridge was perfectly satisfied with The Alchemist. He held to the common view that, although Jonson has a remarkable gift for creating ‘humorous’ characters, those characters tend to be abstractly generic and for that reason are not persons ‘in whom you are morally interested’.² Jonson’s intellect is arrestingly original, for Coleridge, but fails to rise to the level of genius. Jonson thereby suffers by comparison with Shakespeare, even if he excels in gifts that are peculiarly his own, and nowhere better, in Coleridge’s view, than in his construction of The Alchemist.

By 1834, the comparison of Jonson and Shakespeare had become a commonplace. Milton, in his brief survey of ‘the well-trod stage’ in L’Allegro (c.1631–2), contrasts ‘Jonson’s learned sock’ with ‘sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child’, who is so beautifully able to ‘Warble his native wood-notes wild’.³ In 1667, John Dryden, while grouping Jonson with Shakespeare and Fletcher as the old ‘poets . . . whose excellencies I can never enough admire’,⁴ distinguishes among the three by giving Fletcher Wit, Shakespeare Nature, and Jonson Art and Judgement.⁵ Samuel Butler, pursuing the same comparison of Art and Nature in the contest of Shakespeare and Jonson in the late 1660s, gives Jonson the edge, since ‘he that is able to think long and judge well will be sure to find out better things than another man can hit upon suddenly’.⁶ Thomas Fuller, conversely, compares Jonson to a Spanish great galleon and Shakespeare to an English man-of-war, the one ‘built far higher in learning, solid but slow in his performances’, the other built lighter and thus able to ‘turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention’.⁷ To Aphra Behn, Shakespeare’s plays have ‘better pleased the world’, while Jonson inspires his auditors ‘to admire him most confoundedly’, as in the case of one spectator who has been observed to ‘sit with his hat removed less than a hair’s breath from one sullen posture for almost three hours at The Alchemist’.⁸ Samuel Johnson, in 1747, juxtaposes ‘Jonson’s art’ with ‘Shakespeare’s flame’.⁹

Critical praise of Jonson and The Alchemist throughout the seventeenth century focuses on brilliance of plot construction and on characterization. Dryden singles out The Alchemist for the design and architectonic beauty of its plot: ‘If then the parts are managed as regularly that the beauty of the whole be kept entire, and that the variety become not a perplexed and confused mass of accidents, you will find it infinitely pleasing to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see some of your ways before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it.’¹⁰ No less impressively, The Alchemist, along with Epicene and Volpone, is for Dryden Jonson’s supreme achievement in the creation of character in the genre of comedy devoted to observing the town and studying the court. Wherever ‘various characters resort’, writes Dryden, Jonson in his art has ‘borne away the crown’. Jonson’s refusal to debase his plays with ‘low farce’ or to adulterate his sublime wit with ‘dull buffoonery’ is at its best in The Alchemist, even more so than in Volpone; ‘When in The Fox I see the tortoise hissed’, writes Dryden, ‘I lose the author of The Alchemist.’¹¹

Often the praise is broadly stated in terms of superlatives. For James Shirley, The Alchemist is ‘a play for strength of wit | And true art made to shame what hath been writ | In former ages’, not excepting what ‘Greeks or Latins have brought forth’.¹² Sir John Suckling praises Jonson, albeit sardonically, for his presumptuous boast of having ‘purged the stage | Of errors’ and for having laid out his claim that ‘The Silent Woman, | The Fox, and The Alchemist’ were ‘outdone by no man’.¹³ James Howell writes to Jonson in a letter dated c.1632 that ‘you were mad when you writ your Fox, and madder when you writ your Alchemist’, going on to explain that ‘The madness I mean is that divine fury, that heating and heightening spirit which Ovid writes of.’¹⁴ An anonymous broadside penned in 1660, ‘Prologue to the Reviv’d Alchemist’, proudly announces a revival of that play, brought to Oxford on the wings of Pegasus, ‘our winged sumpter’, ‘Who from Parnassus never brought to Greece | Nor Roman stage so rare a masterpiece’.¹⁵

During the Restoration period, when the play enjoyed great popularity, Samuel Pepys saw it twice at the Vere Street Theatre, on 22 June and on 14 August 1661, on the first of which occasions Pepys pronounced it ‘a most incomparable play’, and again on 2 and 4 August 1664, when he praised Walter Clun of the King’s Company for his performance of Subtle as ‘one of his best parts that he acts’.¹⁶ On 17 April 1669, Pepys saw the play yet again, judging it ‘still a good play’, though suffering this time from the absence of Clun.¹⁷ Edward Phillips declares, in 1675, that Jonson, for his authorship of his three main comedies, ‘may be compared, in the judgment of learned men, for decorum, language, and well humouring of the parts, as well with the chief of the ancient Greek and Latin comedians as the prime of modern Italians’.¹⁸ Examples multiply in the pages of G. E. Bentley’s Shakespeare and Jonson, and in The Jonson Allusion-Book assembled by Jesse Franklin Bradley and Joseph Quincy Adams, still further expanded in C. B. Graham’s ‘Jonson Allusions in Restoration Comedy’.¹⁹

Throughout most of the seventeenth century, in fact, as Bentley has shown, Jonson was the more acclaimed writer of the two by a considerable margin, in sheer numbers of allusions and as measured by standards of literary greatness. Even though Aphra Behn judged Shakespeare’s writings to have ‘better pleased the world than Jonson’s works’,²⁰ Jonson turns up more often on lists of major English writers. He is more often quoted. Performances of his plays are noted twice as often as are those of Shakespeare’s plays. The Alchemist remained actively a part of the repertory of the King’s Men until the closing of the theatres in 1642, with Richard Burbage as Face until his death in 1619 and with Joseph Taylor in the part thereafter. Robert Armin excelled in the role of Abel Drugger. The Alchemist was apparently the only Jonson play to provide materials for the ‘drolls’ or farcical sketches that persisted in a marginal status during the Interregnum. Allusions to Jonson outnumber those to Shakespeare by a factor of three to one throughout most of the century, especially in the first fifty years. Only in the creation of vital dramatic characters like Falstaff and Cleopatra and Hamlet does Shakespeare surpass Jonson. From such numbers begins to emerge a durable polarity: Jonson is more widely imitated and discussed, but Shakespeare is seen as the more endearing and inspired writer. To admire Jonson and love Shakespeare becomes the rallying cry of criticism for centuries to come.

Nowhere in the Jonson canon are the criteria of admiration and imitation more at work than in critical commentary on The Alchemist. Characters like Subtle, Face and Doll become household names. In Richard Brome’s The Asparagus Garden, 1640, a man greets his friend with as much friendliness and closeness ‘as ever Subtle and his Lungs [i.e. Face] did’.²¹ The verbal pyrotechnics in Jonson’s play offer a vivid metaphor for emotional excess in William Cavendish’s The Country Captain, 1649, when one character exclaims to another: ‘Is thy head to be filled with proclamations, rejoinders, and hard words beyond The Alchemist?’²² An allusion to ‘mad Bess Broughton’ by Henry Tubbe in 1655 makes its humorous point by asking the audience to recall Jonson’s depiction of Broughton’s works as the ravings of a zealous Puritan divine.²³ The actor John Lowin of the King’s Men was celebrated for his portrayal of Sir Epicure Mammon, along with Morose in Epicene, Volpone and Falstaff. Even negative comments testify to the English nation’s continued absorption in the antics of Jonson’s rogues; as Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, writes, ‘Can any rational person think that The Alchemist could be the action of one day, as that so many several cozenings could be acted in one day by Captain Face and Doll Common? And could the Alchemist make any believe they could make gold in one day?’²⁴ The famous jibe at Jonson for presuming to write Works ‘where others were but plays’ aims its satirical venom at Jonson’s self-importance even while acknowledging his supremacy in the field of English literature.²⁵

At the same time, The Alchemist was also perceived by early critics to represent the summit of Jonson’s achievement from which he soon descended. ‘Thy comic muse from the exalted line | Touched by The Alchemist doth since decline | From that her zenith’, cautioned Thomas Carew.²⁶ This implicit consignment of Jonson’s later plays, including The Staple of News (1626) and The Magnetic Lady (1632), to the category of Jonson’s ‘dotages’ is thus of early date.

The critical method of assessing the literary greatness of The Alchemist by measuring its extraordinary skill in characterization and plot construction persists, by and large, throughout most of the eighteenth century. William Burnaby, in 1701, opines that ‘Our famous Ben Jonson’s Silent Woman, The Fox, and the Alchemist, and most of Molière’s plays, are the surest standards to judge of comedy.’²⁷ For Richard Steele, The Alchemist, as performed on 11 May 1709, ‘is an example of Ben’s extensive genius and penetration into the passions and follies of mankind’.²⁸ John Dennis agrees, writing in 1702: ‘The Fox, The Alchemist, the Silent Women of Ben Jonson are incomparably the best of our comedies.’²⁹ Charles Gildon, in The Laws of Poetry, 1721, focuses on The Alchemist’s remarkable cleverness in ‘letting the audience into the knowledge of all that was necessary for them to be informed in, in relation to what was antecedent to the opening of the play, by that comical quarrel between Face and Subtle, in which the sage Doll Common is the prudent moderator’.³⁰ Theophilus Cibber and Robert Shiells note in 1753 that ‘The Alchemist, The Fox, and The Silent Woman have been oftener acted than the rest of Ben Jonson’s plays put together’, having been ‘performed to many crowded audiences in several separate seasons, with universal applause’.³¹ Richard Hurd (1753–7) praises Volpone and The Alchemist as most worthy of serious criticism among English comedies, even though The Alchemist falls short of Molière’s The Misanthrope and Tartuffe in achieving the ‘genuine unmixed manner’ of those French comedies, by which Hurd means comedy without the ‘impure mixture’ of farce.³² David Erskine Baker, in 1764, hails The Alchemist, along with Volpone and Epicene, ‘as the Chef d’Oeuvres of this celebrated poet’.³³ David Garrick’s portrayal of Abel Drugger, extending over many years until shortly before his death in 1776, was such a phenomenal success as to make The Alchemist a favourite play of that era, able to make us ‘shake our sides with joy’, as one rapt spectator put it, and to demonstrate vividly the combined skill of the dramatist and the actor in portraying ‘humorous’ character.³⁴ Horace Walpole does not hesitate to aver that ‘The Alchemist is his [Jonson’s] best play.’³⁵

Yet by 1776, George Colman could complain that ‘The subtle Alchemist grows obsolete, | And Drugger’s humour scarcely keeps him sweet.’³⁶ Some critics indeed were inclined to assign the credit for Garrick’s success in playing Abel Drugger more to the actor than to the dramatist. After Garrick’s death in 1776, The Alchemist went into a rapid decline on the London stage. Apart from a few heavily adapted productions, one of them with Edmund Kean as Drugger in 1814–15, the play was dropped from the repertory until William Poel’s 1899 revival for the Elizabethan Stage Society. Apart from Coleridge’s great praise of The Alchemist, Charles Lamb’s assessment that ‘If there be no one image which rises to the height of the sublime, yet the confluence and assemblage of them all produces an effect equal to the grandest poetry’, and William Hazlitt’s fervent wish that Jonson could create more sympathetic characters, the play fared poorly in the nineteenth century.³⁷

Belatedly in the century, Algernon Charles Swinburne, in A Study of Ben Jonson in 1899, does present at last a serious study of Volpone and The Alchemist in order to show how the two plays come to stand as ‘the consummate and crowning result’ of Jonson’s genius.³⁸ Yet, Swinburne does so at the expense of The Alchemist; although it is ‘perhaps more wonderful in the perfection and combination of cumulative detail, in triumphant simplicity of process and impeccable felicity of result’ (thus essentially agreeing up to this point with Coleridge’s analysis), The Alchemist must yield precedence, in Swinburne’s view, to Volpone as the more graced with ‘imagination’ and ‘romance’. Swinburne’s chief objection to The Alchemist is ‘the absolutely unqualified and unrelieved rascality’ of its various manipulators and schemers. The dupes are, to Swinburne, ‘viler if less villainous figures than the rapacious victims of Volpone’. The ‘imperturbable skill’ of villainy in Face and Subtle cannot suffic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Introduction
• 1 The Critical Backstory
• 2 The Alchemist on the Stage: Performance, Collaboration and Deviation
• 3 The State of the Art
• 4 New Directions: Space, Plague and Satire in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist
• 5 New Directions: Staging Gender
• 6 New Directions: The Alchemist and the Lower Bodily Stratum
• 7 New Directions: Waiting for the End? Alchemy and Apocalypse in The Alchemist
• 8 Pedagogical Strategies and Web Resources
• NOTES
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX