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    The Alchemist
    The Alchemist
    The Alchemist
    Ebook274 pages4 hours

    The Alchemist

    By Ben Jonson

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    About this ebook

    Ben Jonson (1572-1637) was an English playwright best known for writing satirical plays such as The Alchemist and Every Man in His Humour.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKrill Press
    Release dateDec 18, 2015
    ISBN9781518341038
    Author

    Ben Jonson

    Benjamin Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 16 August 1637 was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone, or The Fox (c. 1606), The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry. He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare.

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      Book preview

      The Alchemist - Ben Jonson

      THE ALCHEMIST

      ..................

      Ben Jonson

      YURITA PRESS

      Thank you for reading. In the event that you appreciate this book, please consider sharing the good word(s) by leaving a review, or connect with the author.

      This book is a work of nonfiction and is intended to be factually accurate.

      All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

      Copyright © 2015 by Ben Jonson

      Interior design by Pronoun

      Distribution by Pronoun

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      The Alchemist

      INTRODUCTION

      THE ALCHEMIST TO THE LADY MOST DESERVING HER NAME AND BLOOD: LADY MARY WROTH.

      TO THE READER.

      DRAMATIS PERSONAE.

      SCENE,—LONDON.

      ARGUMENT.

      PROLOGUE.

      ACT 1. SCENE 1.1.

      ACT 2. SCENE 2.1.

      ACT 3. SCENE 3.1.

      SCENE 3.2. A ROOM IN LOVEWIT’S HOUSE.

      ACT 4. SCENE 4.1.

      SCENE 4.2. ANOTHER ROOM IN THE SAME.

      SCENE 4.3. ANOTHER ROOM IN THE SAME.

      SCENE 4.4. ANOTHER ROOM IN THE SAME.

      ACT 5. SCENE 5.1.

      SCENE 5.2. A ROOM IN THE SAME.

      SCENE 5.3. AN OUTER ROOM IN THE SAME.

      GLOSSARY

      The Alchemist

      By

      Ben Jonson

      The Alchemist

      Published by Yurita Press

      New York City, NY

      First published circa 1637

      Copyright © Yurita Press, 2015

      All rights reserved

      Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

      About Krill Press

      Krill Press is a boutique publishing company run by people who are passionate about history’s greatest works. We strive to republish the best books ever written across every conceivable genre and making them easily and cheaply available to readers across the world. Please visit our site for more information.

      THE ALCHEMIST

      ..................

      INTRODUCTION

      ..................

      THE GREATEST OF ENGLISH DRAMATISTS except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in his age.

      Ben Jonson came of the stock that was centuries after to give to the world Thomas Carlyle; for Jonson’s grandfather was of Annandale, over the Solway, whence he migrated to England. Jonson’s father lost his estate under Queen Mary, having been cast into prison and forfeited. He entered the church, but died a month before his illustrious son was born, leaving his widow and child in poverty. Jonson’s birthplace was Westminster, and the time of his birth early in 1573. He was thus nearly ten years Shakespeare’s junior, and less well off, if a trifle better born. But Jonson did not profit even by this slight advantage. His mother married beneath her, a wright or bricklayer, and Jonson was for a time apprenticed to the trade. As a youth he attracted the attention of the famous antiquary, William Camden, then usher at Westminster School, and there the poet laid the solid foundations of his classical learning. Jonson always held Camden in veneration, acknowledging that to him he owed,

      All that I am in arts, all that I know;

      and dedicating his first dramatic success, Every Man in His Humour, to him. It is doubtful whether Jonson ever went to either university, though Fuller says that he was statutably admitted into St. John’s College, Cambridge. He tells us that he took no degree, but was later Master of Arts in both the universities, by their favour, not his study. When a mere youth Jonson enlisted as a soldier, trailing his pike in Flanders in the protracted wars of William the Silent against the Spanish. Jonson was a large and raw-boned lad; he became by his own account in time exceedingly bulky. In chat with his friend William Drummond of Hawthornden, Jonson told how in his service in the Low Countries he had, in the face of both the camps, killed an enemy, and taken opima spolia from him; and how since his coming to England, being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversary which had hurt him in the arm and whose sword was ten inches longer than his. Jonson’s reach may have made up for the lack of his sword; certainly his prowess lost nothing in the telling. Obviously Jonson was brave, combative, and not averse to talking of himself and his doings.

      In 1592, Jonson returned from abroad penniless. Soon after he married, almost as early and quite as imprudently as Shakespeare. He told Drummond curtly that his wife was a shrew, yet honest; for some years he lived apart from her in the household of Lord Albany. Yet two touching epitaphs among Jonson’s Epigrams, On my first daughter, and On my first son, attest the warmth of the poet’s family affections. The daughter died in infancy, the son of the plague; another son grew up to manhood little credit to his father whom he survived. We know nothing beyond this of Jonson’s domestic life.

      How soon Jonson drifted into what we now call grandly the theatrical profession we do not know. In 1593, Marlowe made his tragic exit from life, and Greene, Shakespeare’s other rival on the popular stage, had preceded Marlowe in an equally miserable death the year before. Shakespeare already had the running to himself. Jonson appears first in the employment of Philip Henslowe, the exploiter of several troupes of players, manager, and father-in-law of the famous actor, Edward Alleyn. From entries in Henslowe’s Diary, a species of theatrical account book which has been handed down to us, we know that Jonson was connected with the Admiral’s men; for he borrowed 4 pounds of Henslowe, July 28, 1597, paying back 3s. 9d. on the same day on account of his share (in what is not altogether clear); while later, on December 3, of the same year, Henslowe advanced 20s. to him upon a book which he showed the plot unto the company which he promised to deliver unto the company at Christmas next. In the next August Jonson was in collaboration with Chettle and Porter in a play called Hot Anger Soon Cold. All this points to an association with Henslowe of some duration, as no mere tyro would be thus paid in advance upon mere promise. From allusions in Dekker’s play, Satiromastix, it appears that Jonson, like Shakespeare, began life as an actor, and that he ambled in a leather pitch by a play-wagon taking at one time the part of Hieronimo in Kyd’s famous play, The Spanish Tragedy. By the beginning of 1598, Jonson, though still in needy circumstances, had begun to receive recognition. Francis Meres—well known for his Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets, printed in 1598, and for his mention therein of a dozen plays of Shakespeare by title—accords to Ben Jonson a place as one of our best in tragedy, a matter of some surprise, as no known tragedy of Jonson from so early a date has come down to us. That Jonson was at work on tragedy, however, is proved by the entries in Henslowe of at least three tragedies, now lost, in which he had a hand. These are Page of Plymouth, King Robert II. of Scotland, and Richard Crookback. But all of these came later, on his return to Henslowe, and range from August 1599 to June 1602.

      Returning to the autumn of 1598, an event now happened to sever for a time Jonson’s relations with Henslowe. In a letter to Alleyn, dated September 26 of that year, Henslowe writes: I have lost one of my company that hurteth me greatly; that is Gabriel [Spencer], for he is slain in Hogsden fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer. The last word is perhaps Henslowe’s thrust at Jonson in his displeasure rather than a designation of his actual continuance at his trade up to this time. It is fair to Jonson to remark however, that his adversary appears to have been a notorious fire-eater who had shortly before killed one Feeke in a similar squabble. Duelling was a frequent occurrence of the time among gentlemen and the nobility; it was an impudent breach of the peace on the part of a player. This duel is the one which Jonson described years after to Drummond, and for it Jonson was duly arraigned at Old Bailey, tried, and convicted. He was sent to prison and such goods and chattels as he had were forfeited. It is a thought to give one pause that, but for the ancient law permitting convicted felons to plead, as it was called, the benefit of clergy, Jonson might have been hanged for this deed. The circumstance that the poet could read and write saved him; and he received only a brand of the letter T, for Tyburn, on his left thumb. While in jail Jonson became a Roman Catholic; but he returned to the faith of the Church of England a dozen years later.

      On his release, in disgrace with Henslowe and his former associates, Jonson offered his services as a playwright to Henslowe’s rivals, the Lord Chamberlain’s company, in which Shakespeare was a prominent shareholder. A tradition of long standing, though not susceptible of proof in a court of law, narrates that Jonson had submitted the manuscript of Every Man in His Humour to the Chamberlain’s men and had received from the company a refusal; that Shakespeare called him back, read the play himself, and at once accepted it. Whether this story is true or not, certain it is that Every Man in His Humour was accepted by Shakespeare’s company and acted for the first time in 1598, with Shakespeare taking a part. The evidence of this is contained in the list of actors prefixed to the comedy in the folio of Jonson’s works, 1616. But it is a mistake to infer, because Shakespeare’s name stands first in the list of actors and the elder Kno’well first in the dramatis personae, that Shakespeare took that particular part. The order of a list of Elizabethan players was generally that of their importance or priority as shareholders in the company and seldom if ever corresponded to the list of characters.

      Every Man in His Humour was an immediate success, and with it Jonson’s reputation as one of the leading dramatists of his time was established once and for all. This could have been by no means Jonson’s earliest comedy, and we have just learned that he was already reputed one of our best in tragedy. Indeed, one of Jonson’s extant comedies, The Case is Altered, but one never claimed by him or published as his, must certainly have preceded Every Man in His Humour on the stage. The former play may be described as a comedy modelled on the Latin plays of Plautus. (It combines, in fact, situations derived from the Captivi and the Aulularia of that dramatist). But the pretty story of the beggar-maiden, Rachel, and her suitors, Jonson found, not among the classics, but in the ideals of romantic love which Shakespeare had already popularised on the stage. Jonson never again produced so fresh and lovable a feminine personage as Rachel, although in other respects The Case is Altered is not a conspicuous play, and, save for the satirising of Antony Munday in the person of Antonio Balladino and Gabriel Harvey as well, is perhaps the least characteristic of the comedies of Jonson.

      Every Man in His Humour, probably first acted late in the summer of 1598 and at the Curtain, is commonly regarded as an epoch-making play; and this view is not unjustified. As to plot, it tells little more than how an intercepted letter enabled a father to follow his supposedly studious son to London, and there observe his life with the gallants of the time. The real quality of this comedy is in its personages and in the theory upon which they are conceived. Ben Jonson had theories about poetry and the drama, and he was neither chary in talking of them nor in experimenting with them in his plays. This makes Jonson, like Dryden in his time, and Wordsworth much later, an author to reckon with; particularly when we remember that many of Jonson’s notions came for a time definitely to prevail and to modify the whole trend of English poetry. First of all Jonson was a classicist, that is, he believed in restraint and precedent in art in opposition to the prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance spirit. Jonson believed that there was a professional way of doing things which might be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these examples for the most part among the ancients. To confine our attention to the drama, Jonson objected to the amateurishness and haphazard nature of many contemporary plays, and set himself to do something different; and the first and most striking thing that he evolved was his conception and practice of the comedy of humours.

      As Jonson has been much misrepresented in this matter, let us quote his own words as to humour. A humour, according to Jonson, was a bias of disposition, a warp, so to speak, in character by which

      "Some one peculiar quality

      Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw

      All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,

      In their confluctions, all to run one way."

      But continuing, Jonson is careful to add:

      "But that a rook by wearing a pied feather,

      The cable hat-band, or the three-piled ruff,

      A yard of shoe-tie, or the Switzers knot

      On his French garters, should affect a humour!

      O, it is more than most ridiculous."

      Jonson’s comedy of humours, in a word, conceived of stage personages on the basis of a ruling trait or passion (a notable simplification of actual life be it observed in passing); and, placing these typified traits in juxtaposition in their conflict and contrast,

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