The Alchemist (play)

First performed in 1610 by the King's Men, it is generally considered Jonson's best and most characteristic comedy; Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed that it had one of the three most perfect plots in literature.

Only one of the University Wits who had transformed drama in the Elizabethan period remained alive (this was Thomas Lodge); in the other direction, the last great playwright to flourish before the Interregnum, James Shirley, was already a teenager.

The theatres had survived the challenge mounted by the city and religious authorities; plays were a regular feature of life at court and for a great number of Londoners.

The venue for which Jonson apparently wrote his play reflects this newly solid acceptance of theatre as a fact of city life.

the King's Men) had been denied permission to use the theatre in Blackfriars as a winter playhouse because of objections from the neighbourhood's influential residents.

Their delayed premiere on this stage within the city walls, along with royal patronage, marks the ascendance of this company in the London play-world (Gurr, 171).

Their first customer is Dapper, a lawyer's clerk who wishes Subtle to use his supposed necromantic skills to summon a "familiar" or spirit to help in his gambling ambitions.

After this, a wealthy nobleman, Sir Epicure Mammon, arrives, expressing the desire to gain himself the philosopher's stone, which he believes will bring him huge material and spiritual wealth.

Drugger returns and is given false and ludicrous advice about setting up his shop; he also brings news that a rich young widow (Dame Pliant) and her brother (Kastril) have arrived in London.

He mocks human weakness and gullibility to advertising and to "miracle cures" with the character of Sir Epicure Mammon, who dreams of drinking the elixir of youth and enjoying fantastic sexual conquests.

The trio of con-artists – Subtle, Face and Doll – are self-deluding small-timers, ultimately undone by the same human weaknesses they exploit in their victims.

In a metaphor which runs through the play, the dialogue shows them to exist in uneasy imbalance, like alchemical elements that will create an unstable reaction.

Barely ten lines into the text, Face and Subtle's quarrelling forces Doll to quell their raised voices: "Will you have the neighbours hear you?

The result, in structural terms, is an onstage base of operations in Friars, to which can be brought a succession of unconsciously comic characters from different social backgrounds, who hold different professions and different beliefs, but whose lowest common denominator – gullibility – grants them equal victim-status in the end.

Tellingly, of all those gulled in the play, it is the Puritans alone whom Jonson denies a brief moment of his audience's pity; presumably, he reckons their life-denying self-righteousness renders them unworthy of it.

Lovewit adroitly exploits Mammon's reluctance to obtain legal certification of his folly to hold on to the old man's money.

Evidence of a more ambiguous kind is presented by the case of Thomas Tomkis's Albumazar, performed for King James I at Cambridge in 1615.

Albumazar is, primarily, an adaptation of Giambattista della Porta's "L'Astrologo"; however, both the similarity in subject matter and Tomkis's apparent familiarity with commercial dramaturgy make it possible that he was aware of The Alchemist, and may have been responding to the play's success.

The play continued onstage as a droll during the Commonwealth period; after the Restoration, it belonged to the repertory of the King's Men of Thomas Killigrew, who appear to have performed it with some frequency during their first years in operation.

Trevor Nunn's 1977 production with the Royal Shakespeare Company featured Ian McKellen as a "greasy, misanthropic" Face, in a version adapted by Peter Barnes.

The original was played at the Royal National Theatre, with Alex Jennings and Simon Russell Beale in the central roles, from September to November 2006.

A contemporary dress production directed by Michael Kahn opened the 2009/2010 season at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC.

Another contemporary dress production was directed by Tariq Leslie and produced by the Ensemble Theatre Co-operative at the Jericho Arts Centre, Vancouver, Canada in the summer of 2012.

[2] The Stratford Shakespeare Festival's 2015 season included a production directed by Antoni Cimolino with Stephen Ouimette as Subtle, Jonathan Goad as Face and Brigit Wilson as Dol.

[3] A new RSC production directed by Polly Findlay and featuring Ken Nwosu as "Face", Hywel Morgan as "Lovewit", Siobhan McSweeney as "Dol" and Mark Lockyer as "Subtle" was scheduled to open at London's Barbican Theatre on 2 September 2016.

A quarto of the play appeared in 1612 published by Walter Burre, printed by Thomas Snodham and sold by John Stepneth.