The Alchemist

Overview

About a hundred and thirty pages, a comedy by Ben Jonson, first performed in 1610. While his master Lovewit has fled London to escape the plague, the servant Face sets up shop with the conman Subtle and the prostitute Dol Common in the empty house, posing as an alchemist and his assistants to a stream of gulls, each promised exactly what their own particular desire most wants.

The clerk Dapper, the tobacconist Drugger, the greedy Sir Epicure Mammon, two Puritan brethren, and the angry young Kastril each arrive in turn, each fleeced through language and performance calibrated precisely to their own particular greed. The plot keeps the classical unities of place and time strictly, the entire action confined to a single house across a single day, and collapses when Lovewit returns.

What happens

Setting up the fraud. While Lovewit has fled the plague, Face sets up an elaborate fraud in his master’s empty London house with the conman Subtle and the prostitute Dol Common, the three posing respectively as a servant, an alchemist and an assistant to attract and fleece a stream of gullible visitors.

Dapper and Drugger arrive. The clerk Dapper arrives hoping for a familiar spirit to help him win at gambling, and the tobacconist Drugger seeks occult retail advice for his shop, each an early example of how precisely the con artists tailor their promises to each individual visitor’s specific desire.

Sir Epicure Mammon’s fantasy. Sir Epicure Mammon arrives with a genuinely operatic fantasy of limitless alchemical gold, his greed rendered in language so extravagant that it becomes the play’s most memorable single comic performance, exposing greed’s capacity for self-deceiving grandiosity more fully than any other visitor.

The Puritan brethren and Kastril. Two Puritan brethren arrive seeking religious cover for financial fraud, and the angry young gentleman Kastril seeks instruction in quarreling fashionably, extending the play’s satirical range across a considerable cross-section of London society, wealthy and struggling, religious and secular alike.

The strict unities and mounting pace. The plot maintains the classical unities of place and time strictly, confining the entire action to Lovewit’s single house across the course of a single day, a formal compression that gives the escalating con a mounting, almost mechanical inevitability as more visitors arrive and the scheme grows increasingly difficult to sustain.

Lovewit’s return and the play’s twist. When Lovewit unexpectedly returns and the fraud threatens exposure, the servant Face simply absorbs the entire scheme back into his master’s forgiving household rather than facing genuine consequence, a resolution that refuses comedy’s usual comfortable moral reckoning for the play’s central perpetrators.

How to read it

Read each gull’s specific promised desire, Dapper’s gambling familiar, Mammon’s alchemical gold, the Puritans’ religious cover, as exposing exactly which vice that character actually worships beneath their stated respectable purpose; the play’s genuine satirical target is less alchemy itself than each visitor’s own eager complicity in their own fleecing.

Pay close attention to how Face, Subtle and Dol Common succeed not through outright deception but through sophisticated jargon and theatrical performance precisely calibrated to what each mark’s own greed was already primed to believe, making persuasive language itself the play’s central tool of fraud.

Notice how the strict classical unities of place and time shape the play’s mounting comic pace; confining the entire escalating con to a single house across a single day gives the scheme’s inevitable collapse a mechanical, almost musical inevitability once Lovewit’s return threatens to expose everything.

Consider the play’s unsettling final twist, Face’s fraud simply absorbed back into Lovewit’s forgiving household, as a deliberate refusal of comedy’s usual moral resolution; weigh what this ending suggests about whether the play ultimately condemns its con artists or finds their ingenuity genuinely admirable despite its fraudulent purpose.

Read this play alongside Molière’s Tartuffe to compare how two major European playwrights, working in different national traditions within roughly the same broader period, each built comedy around a central confidence trickster exploiting specific victims’ particular vices and self-deceptions.

Questions it raises

• Does the play’s unsettling final twist, Face’s fraud absorbed back into Lovewit’s household without real consequence, represent a genuine moral failure the comedy leaves unresolved, or does this ending itself constitute the play’s actual satirical point about fraud’s ultimate resilience within a forgiving social system?
• How does each gull’s specific tailored desire, rather than a single uniform con, shape the play’s broader satirical target? Does exposing this range of particular greeds satirize human nature generally, or does it suggest greed takes specifically different forms across different social positions and personality types?
• What does Sir Epicure Mammon’s extravagant alchemical fantasy accomplish that a more restrained portrayal of greed could not achieve? Does the sheer theatrical excess of his language make him more sympathetic, more ridiculous, or both simultaneously?
• How does the play’s strict adherence to the classical unities of time and place shape your experience of its escalating comic pace? Does this formal compression serve the play’s satirical purpose, or does it feel like an external constraint the plot must work around?
• Given that Face, Subtle and Dol Common succeed by giving each victim precisely what their own greed already wanted to believe, what does this suggest about the play’s broader view of deception? Is genuine deception even occurring, or are the gulls essentially deceiving themselves with professional assistance?
• What does the play’s satirical range across London’s social classes, a clerk, a tobacconist, a wealthy knight, religious figures, a young gentleman, suggest about Jonson’s broader view of greed and gullibility’s actual distribution across early seventeenth-century English society?