The most popular of Jonson's comedies, "The Alchemist" is still regularly performed today. But its appeal lies in more than simple speed and verbal dexterity.
At first reading, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) looks like the most impenetrable and inaccessible kind of Renaissance comedy. The text is larded with elizabethan slang, (“’Slight”, “ear-rent”, “doxy”) and obscure occult terminology (“imbibition”, “Hermes’ seal”, “amalgama”), which send the student diving for footnotes and explanations. But in performance this play hums with an irrepressible energy, and rarely sends an audience home without a smile on their face.
Set in an abandoned town-house in Elizabethan London, The Alchemist centres on the escapades of three confidence tricksters: Face the butler, Subtle the alchemist and Dol Common the whore. With the house’s owner having fled town due to the plague, the three attract a string of targets to their premises, to fleece them of their money with promises of Subtle’s occult powers. To Kastril the gallant he promises a charm to help him win at cards; to Drugger the tobacconist, an Elizabethan feng shui for his shop; to Mammon the gentleman, the fabled Philosopher’s Stone to turn metals into gold, and so on. Gradually the house becomes so full of fools, all taking part in different plans, that they are reduced to changing clothes every scene, hiding people in the privy, and blowing up the laboratory to explain why they have failed to discover the supernatural secrets of alchemy. Matters are not simplified by a Spanish Don, who is really a suspicious servant in disguise, hoping to unmask them; a group of hyper-pious Puritans who want the fabulous wealth of alchemy to fund their ministry; and the inconvenient return of Face’s master from his country retreat. The gang have to think fast and talk faster to get out of this scrape...
Whilst The Alchemist is highly enjoyable as a farce in its own right, full of high-speed coincidences and comedy slapstick, it is easy to see another set of meanings behind its robust puns and precision timing. Despite all the cunning patter of the con-men, it is ultimately the clients who fool themselves in this play, blinded by greed and projecting all their desires onto the “cunning-man” they have come to consult. Futhermore, the entire action of the play happens in one shabby room in the house, which serves very change of scene and dream throughout the five acts. This seems very close to an analogy to the theatre, where we come eagerly to be cheated, delighted, fooled and eventually sent away, though rather happier than the fools in the play. We willingly believe every falsehood and nonsense set before us, demanding the alchemy of the theatre, until in the words of Jonson’s prologue:
it, and they, and all in fume are gone.
