A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist"
5/5
()
About this ebook
Read more from Gale
A study guide for Frank Herbert's "Dune" Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Study Guide for Louis Sachar's "Holes" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for James Clavell's "Shogun" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for George Orwell's Animal Farm Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's Macbeth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Lois Lowry's The Giver Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Psychologists and Their Theories for Students: ALBERT BANDURA Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Psychologists and Their Theories for Students: JEAN PIAGET Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for James Joyce's "James Joyce's Ulysses" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Business Plans Handbook: Bakery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBusiness Plans Handbook: Furniture Businesses Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for John Rawls's "A Theory of Justice" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Wole Soyinka's "Death and the King's Horsemen" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for George Orwell's 1984 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Study Guide (New Edition) for F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide (New Edition) for William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBusiness Plans Handbook: Auto Detailing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for Shirley Jackson's The Lottery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist"
Related ebooks
A Study Guide for Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for William Congreve's "Love for Love" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "Volpone" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for "Elizabethan Drama" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's "Sonnet 19 (Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws . . .)" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Plays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for Henry Fielding's "Joseph Andrews" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA study guide for Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen (Book Analysis): Detailed Summary, Analysis and Reading Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Anonymous's "Everyman" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Harold Pinter's "The Birthday Party" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hamlet (MAXNotes Literature Guides) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGale Researcher Guide for: Comedy of Manners: The Restoration Wits Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOthello (Annotated by Henry N. Hudson with an Introduction by Charles Harold Herford) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for John Donne's "Song" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Edward Albee's "The Zoo Story" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for Alice Walker's The Color Purple Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5A Study Guide for Sophocles's "Oedipus Rex (aka Oedipus the King)" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStudy Guide to The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide (New Edition) for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for Richard Brinsley Sheridan's "The Rivals" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Literary Criticism For You
The 48 Laws of Power: by Robert Greene | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Reader’s Companion to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As I Lay Dying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/512 Rules For Life: by Jordan Peterson | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Circe: by Madeline Miller | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Novel by Gabriel Garcia Márquez | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Seduction: by Robert Greene | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Man's Search for Meaning: by Viktor E. Frankl | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Secret History: by Donna Tartt | Conversation Starters Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsKillers of the Flower Moon: by David Grann | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Verity: by Colleen Hoover | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.by Brené Brown | Conversation Starters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lincoln Lawyer: A Mysterious Profile Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Letters to a Young Poet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Alone: by Kristin Hannah | Conversation Starters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist"
1 rating0 reviews
Book preview
A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist" - Gale
4
The Alchemist
Ben(Jamin) Jonson
1610
Introduction
The Alchemist is one of Ben Jonson’s more popular comedies. Cony-catching or swindling (a cony was another word for dupe, gull, or victim) was as popular in the seventeenth century as it is in the twentieth. The con or swindle was a familiar theme and one which Jonson found to be a natural topic for comedy. There is little known about audience reaction to any of Jonson’s plays. There were no theatre reviews and no newspapers or magazines to report on the opening of a play. The little that is known is drawn from surviving letters and diaries. But Jonson was not as popular with theatre-goers as William Shakespeare. In general, Jonson’s plays were not well received by audiences, but The Alchemist appears to have been more popular than most, probably because of its topic.
Jonson differed from other playwrights of his period in that he did not use old stories, fables, or histories as the sources for his plays. Instead, Jonson used a plot type
as the basis for most of his drama. In The Alchemist the plot is the familiar one of a farce. The characters are common, a man or men and a woman who set up the swindle. The victims offer a selection of London society. Like the characters from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, there are religious men, a clerk and a shopkeeper, a widow, a knight, and a foolish young man. Jonson’s characters are not well-defined, nor do they have any depth. Instead, they are types
familiar to the audience. The initial popularity of The Alchemist diminished in subsequent years; by the eighteenth century the play was rarely being produced. As is the case with most of Jonson’s plays, The Alchemist has been rarely produced outside of England during the twentieth century.
Author Biography
Jonson was born in about 1572. The date is uncertain, since Elizabethans were very casual about the recording of exact dates. He was a scholar, a poet, and a dramatist. Jonson was born near London shortly after the death of his father. He was educated at Westminster School and for a brief period worked as a bricklayer for his stepfather. Jonson was briefly in the military where he killed an enemy in