Description
Book SynopsisThe Alchemist has long been admired as one of Ben Jonson's best dramas-Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously deemed it one of the most 'perfect' plots in literature. Its satiric cleverness and metatheatricality have delighted audiences from its first performance to the present day; readers and play-goers are swept up in the schemes of a fake alchemist and other determined fraudsters whose scams appear to offer easy wealth and immortality to their morally compromised victims. 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 includes a helpful introduction to the play, including discussion of its performance history and background information on alchemy. Thorough annotations to the text are also provided, as are contextual materials, including a selection of Jonson's sources, further materials on alchemy, and an example of the 'rogue' or 'coney-catching' literature that informs Jonson's portrayal of the grifters in the play.
Trade ReviewIntroducing students to this witty, farcical play will be so much easier with the new Broadview edition. The joy of this play is its topical satire, and to access it students need a thorough grounding in alchemy and in the contemporary culture of early modern London, both of which this edition provides."—Margaret J. Oakes, Furman University
The new Broadview edition of
The Alchemist, edited by John Greenwood, is a delight. The play’s annotations are clear and complete. The edition includes extensive contextual materials, including coney-catching pamphlets, an alchemist’s guide, and some of Jonson’s own commonplace book’s entries. I am looking forward to teaching the play with this exciting new text."—Rebecca Ann Bach, University of Alabama at Birmingham
"John Greenwood’s edition of Ben Jonson’s riotous early modern comedy,
The Alchemist, captures the play’s essentials for student and more advanced scholar alike with its concise and informative introduction, helpful notes, and judiciously chosen appendix material. The edition will be a delight to use in the classroom."—Mathew Martin, Brock University
Table of Contents
- Introduction
-
The Alchemist In Context
- On Alchemy: from Geoffrey Chaucer, 'The Canon's Yeoman's Tale,' from The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400)
- Desiderius Erasmus, 'The Alchemist' (1524)
- from Martin Ruland, A Lexicon of Alchemy (1612)
- On Criminals and 'Coney-Catching': from Robert Greene, A Disputation Between a He Cony-Catcher and a She Cony-Catcher (1592)
- Image: from Thomas Harman, A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors vulgarly called Vagabonds (1566; revised 1567/68)
- On Playwriting: from Aristotle, Poetics
- from Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries made upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his daily Readings, or had their reflux to his peculiar Notion of the Times (1641)
