Jonson The Alchemist

Full Text and Introduction (NHB Drama Classics)
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78001-539-2
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 0, 162 Seiten

Reihe: NHB Drama Classi

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price 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. Ben Jonson's classic comedy The Alchemist was first performed by the King's Men in 1610. This edition of the play in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series is edited by Simon Trussler, with an introduction by Colin Counsell.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jonson, Ben

Leseproben

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 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 (1599), (1605-6), (1609-10), (1610) and (1614). His tragedies (1603) and (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 (c.1597), a play condemned as seditious and slanderous, again for (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 and , 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’.

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 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 , 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...