Volpone and Other Plays
Page 16
90 This, his own knave; this, avarice’s fool;
This, a chimera of wittol, fool, and knave.
And, reverend fathers, since we all can hope
Nought but a sentence, let’s not now despair it.
You hear me brief.
CORVINO: May it please your fatherhoods –
COMMENDATORE: Silence.
1ST AVOCATORE: The knot is now undone by miracle!
2ND AVOCATORE: Nothing can be more clear.
3RD AVOCATORE: Or can more prove
These innocent.
1ST AVOCATORE: Give ’em their liberty.
BONARIO: Heaven could not long let such gross crimes be hid.
2ND AVOCATORE: If this be held the highway to get riches,
May I be poor!
100 3RD AVOCATORE: This’s not the gain, but torment.
1ST AVOCATORE: These possess wealth as sick men possess fevers,
Which trulier may be said to possess them.
2ND AVOCATORE: Disrobe that parasite.
CORVINO, MOSCA: Most honoured fathers –
1ST AVOCATORE: Can you plead aught to stay the course of justice?
If you can, speak.
CORVINO, VOLTORE: We beg favour.
CELIA: And mercy.
1ST AVOCATORE: You hurt your innocence, suing for the guilty.
Stand forth; and first the parasite. You appear
T’ have been the chiefest minister, if not plotter,
In all these lewd impostures; and now, lastly,
110 Have with your impudence abused the court,
And habit of a gentleman of Venice,
Being a fellow of no birth or blood.
For which our sentence is, first thou be whipped;
Then live perpetual prisoner in our galleys.
VOLPONE: I thank you for him.
MOSCA: Bane to thy wolfish nature.
1ST AVOCATORE: Deliver him to the Saffi.
[MOSCA is led out.]
Thou, Volpone,
By blood and rank a gentleman, canst not fall
Under like censure; but our judgement on thee
Is that thy substance all be straight confiscate
120 To the hospital of the Incurabili.
And since the most was gotten by imposture,
By feigning lame, gout, palsy, and such diseases,
Thou art to lie in prison, cramped with irons,
Till thou be’st sick and lame indeed. Remove him.
VOLPONE: This is called mortifying of a Fox.
1ST AVOCATORE: Thou, Voltore, to take away the scandal
Thou hast giv’ n all worthy men of thy profession,
Art banished from their fellowship, and our state.
Corbaccio, bring him near! We here possess
130 Thy son of all thy state, and confine thee
To the monastery of San Spirito;
Where, since thou knew’st not how to live well here,
Thou shalt be learned to die well.
CORBACCIO [not hearing]: Ha! What said he?
COMMENDATORE: You shall know anon, sir.
1ST AVOCATORE: Thou, Corvino, shalt
Be straight embarked from thine own house, and rowed
Round about Venice, through the Grand Canal,
Wearing a cap with fair long ass’s ears
Instead of horns; and so to mount, a paper
Pinned on thy breast, to the Berlina –
CORVINO: Yes,
140 And have mine eyes beat out with stinking fish,
Bruised fruit, and rotten eggs – ’Tis well, I’m glad
I shall not see my shame yet.
1ST AVOCATORE: And to expiate
Thy wrongs done to thy wife, thou art to send her
Home to her father, with her dowry trebled.
And these are all your judgements.
ALL: Honoured fathers!
1ST AVOCATORE: Which may not be revoked. Now you begin,
When crimes are done and past, and to be punished,
To think what your crimes are. Away with them!
Let all that see these vices thus rewarded,
Take heart, and love to study ’em. Mischiefs feed
Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed.
[Exeunt.]
[VOLPONE comes forward.]
VOLPONE: The seasoning of a play is the applause.
Now, though the Fox be punished by the laws,
He yet doth hope there is no suff’ ring due
For any fact which he hath done ’ gainst you.
If there be, censure him; here he doubtful stands.
If not, fare jovially, and clap your hands.
THE END
THE ALCHEMIST
PRELIMINARY NOTE
1. STAGE-HISTORY AND FIRST PUBLICATION
The Alchemist was first acted at the Globe Theatre by the King’s Men in 1610, probably with Richard Burbage as Face and John Lowin as Sir Epicure Mammon. It was first published in quarto in 1612 and reprinted in the Folio Workes four years later. Soon after its London opening, the King’s Men took the play to Oxford, and it was also acted in Dublin. At the Restoration, the comedy was quickly revived, and it was popular throughout the eighteenth century. Colley Cibber played Subtle ‘with great art’, and Theophilus Cibber overplayed Abel Drugger. In 1743 David Garrick first played Drugger, and in the twenty-nine years from 1747 to 1776 in which Drury Lane was, under his management, the greatest theatre in Europe, he appeared each season as the little tobacconist. His acting version cut many of the alchemical terms, lines like Mammon’s ‘the unctuous paps of a fat pregnant sow’ were expurgated, and Abel Drugger became the leading part. In the nineteenth century the play was probably considered too coarse for revival, though Charles Dickens (whose amateur productions of Every Man in his Humour in the years 1845–8 were notable) thought of producing the play for charity in 1848. In 1899 William Poel’s Elizabethan Stage Society mounted the comedy at Blackfriars, and in 1902 at Cambridge, where in 1914 it was acted by the Marlowe Society with the future Professor Sir Dennis Robertson as Subtle. It was also acted by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1916, by the Phoenix Society for two performances in 1923, and at the Malvern Festival of 1932 (with Cedric Hardwicke as Drugger). In 1947 the Old Vic Company gave the play an eighteenth-century setting; Ralph Richardson was Face and Alec Guinness Drugger. Tyrone Guthrie directed the Liverpool Old Vic Company in a modern-dress revival of the play during the Playhouse repertory season, 1944–5; and at the Edinburgh Festival of 1950 he directed The Atom Doctor by Eric Link-later, which turned out to be an adaptation of The Alchemist set in modern Edinburgh. During the Old Vic season 1962–3 Guthrie again produced the play in modern dress, with contemporary ‘gags’; Leo McKern was Subtle, and Lee Montague Face. In 1961 Peter Dews directed a brilliant television version from the B.B.C.’s Midland Studios, and in 1964 there was a production by Frank Hauser at the Oxford Playhouse.
2. LOCATION AND TIME-SCHEME
The Alchemist is set inside Lovewit’s house, and outside his front door. The fluidity of the Elizabethan Theatre or of a modern composite stage-setting is necessary in performance, and the acting-area has to indicate two or three rooms inside the house, the street, and possibly the garden. The pace of the action is fast. Act II follows briskly upon Act I, and perhaps Sir Epicure Mammon and Pertinax Surly should already be coming into the audience’s view in the street when Dol, inside the house, describes Sir Epicure’s approach in the last lines of Act I, so that the action is really continuous. Act IV seems to require several locations – the principal room in Lovewit’s house, two smaller rooms, and the garden, but Jonson did not specify locations, and an ingenious director, following the example of Sir Tyrone Guthrie in 1962, could set the scenes in the main area of traffic, and on the staircase, the balcony, and so on. The décor for The Alchemist, as for any modern farce, requires many doors and exit-points, including the privy in which Dapper is incarcerated. In the Herford-Simpson edition th
e time-scheme has been worked out from internal evidence as follows: 9 a.m.: arrival of Dapper; 10 a.m.: Mammon seen approaching; 11 a.m.: Ananias threatened if he does not return quickly with more money; noon: Ananias returns on the stroke of the hour; 1 p.m.: Dapper comes back as requested; 2 p.m.: Surly arrives in disguise; 3 p.m.: Lovewit returns home unexpectedly.
3. EDITIONS AND CRITICAL COMMENTARY
The Alchemist is reprinted in many editions of Jonson and in anthologies, including Elizabethan and Stuart Plays, edited by C. R. Baskervill, V. B. Heltzel, and A. H. Nethercot (1934). It has been edited by Felix E. Schelling (1903), by C. S. Alden (1904), and by G. E. Bentley (1947). F. H. Mares’ edition for the Revels Plays (1967) appeared after the present volume. The editor for the Yale Ben Jonson is R. B. Young. J. J. Enck and E. B. Partridge both devote chapters to the play. Brian Gibbons in Jacobean City Comedy relates The Alchemist to other comedies satirizing life and to the coney-catching pamphlets. J. A. Barish’s anthology of criticism reprints a section of Paul Goodman’s The Structure of Literature (1954). which is an Aristotelian analysis of its comic plot. It was Coleridge who said ‘Upon my word, I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, The Alchemist, and Tom Jones the three most perfect plots ever planned.’ (Table Talk: 5 July 1834.)
A NOTE ON ALCHEMY
The Alchemist is not primarily about alchemy, nor is Subtle a genuine alchemist. Throughout the comedy Jonson exploits alchemy and alchemical language as supreme instances of roguery and the bewitching verbal arts of the confidence-trickster. Although dramatic logic does not demand it, Jonson’s use of alchemical terms, always theatrically telling, is usually accurate also. That Jonson made himself familiar with alchemical scholarship may be a further illustration of that massive erudition and pedantic thoroughness mentioned in the first pages of the introduction. Professor Edgar Hill Duncan has assured us that Jonson’s knowledge of alchemy ‘was greater than that of any other major English literary figure, with the possible exceptions of Chaucer and Donne’. The preoccupation with accuracy may be pedantry on Jonson’s part, but it is surely significant that the various characters within the comedy who use alchemical terms use them more or less correctly – the credulous Sir Epicure, who is willingly dazzled by the lights of perverted science; the quick-talking Subtle, who is not a ‘cunning-man’, but a con-man; and the sceptical Surly, who pours sardonic comments over Subtle’s ill-founded but convincingly expressed pretensions. The main point of Jonson’s satire, in this play as in Volpone, is that human greed and gullibility put men in the power of unscrupulous manipulators, but the accuracy of alchemical reference possibly indicates incidental Jonsonian satire on alchemy itself. Through the speeches of Sir Epicure, Jonson was able to make fun of the claims of the alchemists without having to resort to fantastic inventions of his own; their own claims, reproduced from alchemical treatises, seemed exaggerated enough. And in presenting his audience with Subtle, a bogus alchemist who sounds authentic, Jonson may have been hinting that all authentic-sounding alchemists were bogus also. It was the practice of alchemists to conceal their discoveries in symbolic language and in elaborate pictorial allegories and diagrams which remained mysterious and impenetrable to the un-initiated layman. This complex symbolism has subsequently fascinated historians of ideas and others – for an account by a great modern European mind of the archetypal patterns in the alchemists’ world-picture, see C. G. Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (British edition, 1953). The studiously cultivated mystery and obscurantism of the Renaissance alchemists probably amused and enraged the exact Jonson, who made of it comic poetry in The Alchemist.
Alchemy has a long history which itself forms the pre-history of chemistry. For some fifteen hundred years the alchemists, many of them sincere and dedicated men of science, pursued the hopeless task of transforming such base metals as lead or copper into silver or gold. The first European alchemical treatises date from the third and fourth centuries A.D. Alchemy existed earlier in China and in India, but the main Western tradition originated in Alexandria around A.D. 100. Medieval and Renaissance alchemists believed, as Sir Epicure does in Jonson’s play, that men of former times had possessed the secret of transmuting base metals into gold; their own task was to recover that secret either by experiment or by poring over the mystical writings of their predecessors. The experimental and the scholarly approaches became, increasingly, separate activities, but until the middle of the seventeenth century it was in the laboratories of the alchemists that the apparatus and the experimental techniques of chemistry were developed.
Behind early alchemical thinking lay Greek assumptions about the relation between form and matter, derived from Aristotle, and about spirit. Aristotle believed that there was ultimately only one matter and that it could take any number of forms. F. Sherwood Taylor, the historian of alchemy, thus describes the task of the earliest alchemists: ‘… their endeavour to change, let us say, copper into gold, was planned as the removal of the form of copper (or, more picturesquely, as the death of copper and its corruption), to be followed by the introduction of a new form, that of gold (which process was pictured as a resurrection)’. The notion of spirit or breath is a difficult one; it indicates the subtle, almost immaterial influence which had to be present to make possible, say, the germination of a plant, or the transformation of matter from one form to another. The sentence quoted from Taylor’s book suggests how readily alchemical thinking lent itself to metaphorical expression. In Medieval and Renaissance times the language and iconography of alchemy became increasingly complex, drawing upon many sources. The early metaphor of the reduction of the metal as the slaying of the dragon was elaborated. Alchemists talked of the marriage of Sol and Luna, gold and silver, which, if it could be effected, would produce the Philosopher’s Stone. The symbolic language frequently drew upon religion. Taylor writes: ‘The death of our Lord Jesus Christ and His resurrection in a glorified body was to the alchemists to be compared to the death of the metals and their rebirth as the glorious Stone.’ These three isolated examples are sufficient to show the range of mythological, analogical, and religious reference in alchemical symbolism.
Alchemy, which had disappeared along with Greek philosophy and science after the fall of Rome, was rediscovered in the Western world in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when scholars busied themselves translating into Latin the scientific and philosophic works of Islam, including Arabic treatises on alchemy. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries such great minds as Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and St Thomas Aquinas, taking all human knowledge as their province, pondered very seriously the alchemists’ explorations of the nature of matter. The attention they gave in their encyclopedic works to the alchemists’ claims contributed to a revival of alchemical activities both through experimental work (notably by Geber or Jabir, a Spanish alchemist) and through the writing of mystical and, indeed, occult treatises on alchemy. In the fourteenth century there appeared more systematic and clearly written alchemical works, usually attributed to Arnold de Vallanova and to Ramón Lull, though on uncertain grounds. In England alchemists, both genuine and bogus, flourished; Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale is a satire on charlatans. A statute of 1403 forbade the multiplying of metals; and there are cases recorded throughout the fifteenth century of people obtaining royal licences to practise alchemy. English alchemists of the fifteenth century included Sir George Ripley who studied in Italy (and who is mentioned in this comedy), Thomas Norton, and Thomas Daulton.
Readers who wish to find out more about the alchemical background to The Alchemist will find a brief, old-fashioned article on Alchemy in Shakespeare’s England (1917). A helpful book-length survey for the general reader, of which I have made use in this short summary, is F. Sherwood Taylor’s The Alchemists: Founders of Modem Chemistry (reprinted 1958). More detailed is John Read’s Prelude to Chemistry: An Outline of Alchemy, Its Literature, and Relationships (1936). Like Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy both these books contain many illustrations from alchemical treatises, many of Read’s
plates being in colour. Edgar Hill Duncan’s closely written article ‘Jonson’s Alchemist and the Literature of Alchemy’ in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, LXI (1946) shows how some speeches in the play become more significant in the light of detailed alchemical knowledge. I have drawn freely on his work in annotating certain passages in The Alchemist.
No edition for the general reader or playgoer can hope to cover the alchemical background thoroughly, and I have not tried to explain all the terms either in the glosses or in the longer explanatory notes. Jonson’s alchemical terms fall into three main classes: (a) materials and substances, (b) alchemical equipment and apparatus, (c) alchemical processes. The following selective glossary may assist the reader and playgoer.
(a) Materials, substances etc.
adrop: the matter out of which mercury is extracted for the Philosopher’s Stone; the Stone itself.
aqua fortis: impure vitriol.
aqua regis: a mixture of acids which can dissolve gold.
aqua vitae: alcohol.
argaile: unrefined tartar.
aurum potabile: liquid, drinkable gold.
azoch: mercury.
azot: nitrogen.
calce: powdered substance produced by combustion or ‘calcination’.
chibrit: mercury.
chrysosperm: elixir.
cinoper: sulphide of mercury.
kibrit: sulphur.
lac virginis: mercurial water.
lato: a mixed metal which looks like brass.
maistrie: the magisterium or Philosopher’s Stone.
realga: a mixture of arsenic and sulphur.
sericon: black tincture.
zernich: auripigment or gold paint
(b) Alchemical equipment and apparatus
alembic: the vessel at the top of the distilling apparatus which holds the distilled material.
aludel: subliming pot.
athanor: a furnace.
balneum: bath; or process of heating a vessel.