Write a note on Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist.
The
Alchemist was first performed in 1610. The play is set in fashionable
residential London during one of the city’s
recurrent outbreaks of plague. Such
epidemics occurred regularly in the summer months, spread by rat fleas, though
at the time it was thought that the plague was carried in the air. Daniel
Defoe, writing a century later, tells us that perhaps 200,000 people fled the
city during the summer months, mainly the wealthy, leaving their servants behind
to look after their affairs and take their chances with illness.
The
setting of the play ties in with a kind of diseased moral climate, as well. It’s
not just that the epidemic is a physical illness, but it’s
something that goes deep into the fabric of the age. In Jonson’s
play, a wealthy man, Lovewit, has left his town house in the care of his maestro
domo, the master of the household. This man, named Face, exhibits different
faces depending on what the situation requires. Face conspires with a conman,
called Subtle, who pretends to be an alchemist. (Alchemy was sometimes called a
process of subtilizing, or refining.) The third member of this conspiracy is a
prostitute named Dol Common.
This
trio sets out to run a scam on the fools left in the city. They will let it be
known that Subtle has found the philosopher’s
stone and has mastered the process of transmuting base metals into gold. The
grand mystery of alchemy will, in fact, be available to anyone who pays for it.
Puritans, shopkeepers, respectable citizens, and aristocrats all line up to get
rich, while the tricksters compete to be the best “shark.” Face,
Subtle, and Dol encourage their victims’ wild
fantasies of wealth. One example, Sir Epicure Mammon, serves to illustrate the
theme.
The
name Epicure indicates this character’s addiction to
pleasures of the flesh, and “Mammon” means
money. Sir Mammon wants to be rich, and he wants to indulge his appetites on a
gigantic scale. Mammon imagines the
wonderful universe of self-indulgence he will inhabit once he gets the fool’s gold.
His speech here is reminiscent of a speech by Marlowe’s
Faustus, when he has Mephistopheles call up Helen of Troy for his bed partner.
Jonson
outdoes even Marlowe in the lavishness and cloying richness of his blank verse.
But most of all, this speech conveys a
biting satire on human greed. Money is the root, not just of all evil, but of
all human foolishness. The Alchemist ends with a wonderfully
ironic stroke of theater: Out of the blue, Lovewit, the master of the house, returns and witnesses the criminal
activities that have been going on in his household. Does he punish the wicked trio and
return the victims’ cash? No, he laughs good-naturedly, congratulates Face, and
pockets the
profits. Human nature, Jonson tells us, is the same from top to bottom. Cash is
God.