The Alchemist, 1612
1612
- british and irish drama (dramatic works by one author)
- fiction
- drama
- alchemists
- city and town life
- london (england)
- comedies
- literature: classics
- alchemist (jonson, ben)
- women, employment, great britain
The story
[Samuel Taylor Coleridge](/authors/OL26099A/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge) said of Ben Jonson's _The Alchemist_ that it had one out of the three most perfect plots in literature. This play, with its sharp portrayal of human folly, is considered by many to be Jonson's best comedy. First performed 1610, its popularity has endured to this day.
What it’s like
Crowded, bustling, and sharp-tongued, this is a Jacobean comedy that reads like eavesdropping on a noisy London house where everyone is talking over everyone else. The prose moves between rattling prose and rhythmic verse, with cant, street slang, and the clipped banter of people who are always half a step ahead of each other. The sensory world lives in cluttered rooms, glowing furnaces, and the stink and bustle of the city just beyond the door. Its vibe is brisk, cynical, and gleefully mischievous, with a bawdy streak that surfaces in wordplay more than in explicit content. Pacing accelerates steadily, the comedy building through reversals and escalating schemes that keep turning back on their makers. Emotional register stays satirical and detached rather than warm, and the central figures are vivid, greedy, and self-deceiving, so their unravelling feels deserved rather than sad. The intensity is low: there is some sharp verbal cruelty, sexual innuendo, and threatened rough-housing, but no real gore and little genuine menace. It suits a rainy afternoon, a read-aloud with friends, or anyone who loves biting satire, quick wit, and characters who get exactly what they are angling for.
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