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    A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist"
    A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist"
    A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist"
    Ebook39 pages23 minutes

    A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535834988
    A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist"

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      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

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