The Alchemist

Ben Jonson

may 2020 · Broadview Press

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The Alchemist has long been admired as one of Ben Jonson’s best dramas; its satiric cleverness and metatheatricality have delighted audiences from its first performance to the present day. Audiences are swept up in the schemes of a fake alchemist and other determined fraudsters whose scams appear to offer easy wealth and immortality. While no characters emerge unscathed by Jonson’s satire, and while alchemy itself is revealed as most likely a sham, the play is nonetheless a tribute to the transformative—indeed, the alchemical—powers of the theater. This edition features a helpful introduction to the play, thorough annotations, and contextual materials including a selection of Jonson’s sources, further materials on alchemy, and an example of “rogue” or “coney-catching” literature.

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John Greenwood is an instructor at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo.