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Jonson's <I>The Alchemist</I> and the Limits of Satire

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Jonson's <I>The Alchemist</I> and the Limits of Satire Quidditas Volume 21 Article 5 2000 The Repudiation of the Marvelous: Jonson’s The Alchemist and the Limits of Satire Ian McAdam University of Lethbridge Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, History Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Renaissance Studies Commons Recommended Citation McAdam, Ian (2000) "The Repudiation of the Marvelous: Jonson’s The Alchemist and the Limits of Satire," Quidditas: Vol. 21 , Article 5. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra/vol21/iss1/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Quidditas by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. The Repudiation of the Marvelous: Jonson’s The Alchemist and the Limits of Satire Ian McAdam University of Lethbridge ur present conception of alchemy is, at best, shadowy and con- fused. As Charles Nicholl states in The Chemical Theatre, “The Omodern image…tends in two directions: one scientific, the other magical. The first defines alchemy simply and chronologically as early chemistry…out of which modern chemistry began to emerge during the seventeenth century.”1 On the other hand, “alchemy is popularly defined as one of the ‘occult arts’.… To us, the alchemist’s avowed quest for miraculous substances—the Philosopher’s Stone which converts all to gold, the Elixir Vitae which confers immortality—belongs to the realm of magic rather than science.”2 Nevertheless, to consider Renaissance atti- tudes towards alchemy, we have to recognize that in certain circles the magical viewpoint, the one we are now so quick to dismiss, was held in veneration, there being yet no clear distinction between magic and sci- ence. Frances Yates, reminding us of this more reputable tradition, asserts that Alchemy as the Hermetic art par excellence belongs to the Her- metic tradition.… With the advent of Paracelsus, a reformed, renaissance type of alchemy came into being, and to this tradi- tion John Dee made his contribution. The triple strand of “Magia, Cabala, and Alchymia” runs through the Rosicrucian manifestos, typifying their inclusion of alchemy with Hermetic- Cabalist tradition.3 However, if we ask ourselves the question, what specifically is Ben Jonson’s attitude toward alchemy, most readers and commentators would agree with Anne Barton’s assessment, that “Jonson was unequivocal in his contempt for the real-life promises and activities of the alchemists. He addressed them scornfully in his epigram ‘To Alchymists’: ‘If all you boast 1Charles Nicholl, The Chemical Theatre (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 1. 2Nicholl, The Chemical Theatre, 2. 3Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 194. QUIDDITAS 21 (2000) 59 60 Ian McAdam of your great art be true; / Sure, willing povertie lives most in you’” (Epig. vi); in his masque Mercury Vindicated From the Alchemists at Court alchemy “is used to express that deplorable flight from Nature which Jonson thought he saw in the literature and society of his time.”4 While such an attitude seems clearly upheld in the raucous satire of The Alche- mist, Elizabeth Cook has more recently countered that, while Jonson’s great comedy has often been described as a satire which exposes the fraud- ulence of alchemy, the play “is neither exposure nor celebration of alchemy per se: Subtle and Face, the two central characters, though sufficiently learned in alchemical lore to awe their clients, are not alchemists but con men.”5 To this it might be replied that Jonson likely envisaged all alche- mists as belonging to the Subtle and Face variety; in fact Stanton J. Lin- den, probably more familiar with the alchemical tradition than any other literary critic, states categorically, “There is every reason to believe that [Jonson’s] view of the art coincided with that of the satirical writers and that in his mind it was equivalent to the confidence games practiced by Face, Subtle and Dol.”6 The historical allusions to contemporary practi- tioners would seem to support this supposition, since both John Dee and Edward Kelley fall within the orbit of the play’s satirical condemnations: Dee is implicitly ridiculed in the specious rebus that Subtle concocts for Drugger, and Mammon ludicrously describes Subtle as more courted by kings than Kelley. Yet, consistent with Cook’s suggestions, Robert M. Schuler considers a series of critical readings which assume, rightly in his opinion, that “Jonson, like Shakespeare and Donne, saw alchemy as both a legitimate pursuit (and therefore as a source of ‘positive’ metaphor) and as a vehicle for charlatans (and therefore as a source of ‘negative’ metaphor and as an object of ridicule).”7 Whatever Jonson’s attitudes towards the protoscientific endeavors of his day, he clearly deploys alchemy metaphor- ically in The Alchemist, so that the main theme of the play emerges as one of failed transformations, not of base metals into gold, but of (base) people into their wildest imaginings. As Barton crucially asserts, “gradu- ally alchemy is redefined, liberated from stills and ferments, until it comes to seem like an essential way of talking about the self in relation to society, still somewhat suspect, but answering a human need, and possessed of its own covert value.”8 4Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 136. 5Elizabeth Cook, “Introduction,” The Alchemist, 2d ed., New Mermaids (London: A & C Black, 1991), xiii. All quotations of the play are from this edition. 6Stanton J. Linden, Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 119. 7Robert M. Schuler, “Jonson’s Alchemists, Epicures, and Puritans,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 2 (1985): 203 n. 2. 8Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist, 137. Repudiation of the Marvelous 61 I consider Barton’s reading crucial because it makes a claim that, while extremely attractive, requires careful reconsideration: is metaphorical alchemy in the play possessed of its own covert value? Such a claim is understandable coming from a well-known Shakespearean, but it is per- haps doubtful since, as Barton herself admits, “at the end of the day, no Shakespearean miracle has occurred”;9 all the transformations in the play fail. Certainly alchemy has in the play come to seem like an essential way of talking about the self in relation to society, but Jonson’s social vision is perhaps less sanguine, and more conservative, than Barton suggests. We might consider instead John S. Mebane’s general assertion that in Ben Jonson’s major plays “the radical individualism, utopian dreams, and anti- authoritarian forces of the Renaissance are the objects of skillful and con- centrated satiric attack.”10 Mebane singles out The Alchemist, which sets out to deflate “the illusion that the individual can realize godlike potential through a series of self-transformations and that this perfection of the soul can lead directly to the radical reformation of nature and society.” Mebane’s argument is largely convincing, since the deflation he identifies is accomplished in part by exposing the revolutionary social changes sought by the Anabaptists Tribulation and Ananias, and even more impor- tantly by Sir Epicure Mammon, as narcissistic dreams of unlimited self- indulgence and personal control. Thus the spiritual dream of a return to a “golden age” entertained both by Puritan “enthusiasts” and believers of alchemy and magic descends bathetically to a very materialist, mundane, and selfish desire for the possession of gold and worldly power. The paral- lel that Mebane draws between the more strictly medical or (al)chemical ambitions of Mammon, and the politico-religious ambitions of the Ana- baptists, receives support from other critics. Schuler’s essay focuses on the “historical links between alchemy, Puritanism, and millenarianism,”11 while Lyndy Abraham has recently argued that “alchemy and chemical medicine were particularly espoused by radical Protestants”; she concludes that the traditions of Protestantism, Hermeticism, and alchemy were “largely in alliance” in early-seventeenth-century England.12 I suggest, however, that while Jonson’s satire is in many ways bril- liantly developed, its edge is dulled somewhat by the fact that the conser- vative social vision Jonson offers as a necessary corrective to the delusions and excesses of his dupes is itself narcissistically grounded in questionable ambition, exploitation, exclusion, and indulgence. There is, for example, the notorious crux concerning the moral or ethical status of Lovewit, who 9Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist, 138. 10John S. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age (Lincoln: Uni- versity of Nebraska Press, 1989), 137. 11Schuler, “Jonson’s Alchemists, Epicures, and Puritans,” 172. 12Lyndy Abraham, Marvell and Alchemy (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), 18, 20. 62 Ian McAdam appropriates the wealth amassed by the “venture tripartite” of the three tricksters and wins the rich widow Dame Pliant for himself—and to this crux I will return at the end of my argument. I begin with the character whom I cannot help imaginatively embracing (indulging for a moment a purely personal response) each time I deal with the text, in spite of his ludicrous self-delusions. While the play’s satirical program reduces the spiritual dream of a return to a “golden age” to a materialist and mundane desire for gold and worldly power, Sir Epicure Mammon’s desires, at least at first, seem anything but mundane, and his discourse turns “worldly” desire into the stuff of fantasy. While the observation has been made by earlier critics, it deserves further emphasis here: in a play where ruthless competition and aggressive self-interest seem the general rule, Mammon is the only character to entertain, at least temporarily, thoughts of human charity.
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