Play and Plague in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist

The Alchemist is Ben Jonson’s meditation on the complexities of the intersections of plague and theater. The play dramatizes plaguestricken London as the space of unlicensed theater in which “the perverse possibilities of the mind […] are localized” (Artaud 30). If, as Foucault argues, the plague enables the utopian but authoritarian imposition of the extraordinary rituals and regimes of plague orders, it also enables the establishment of alternative language-games and epistemologies, sensual and spiritual. The alchemical theater established by Dol, Subtle, and Face in plague-time London is one such rogue epistemology, whose exploitative logic is the logic of romance, capitalist speculation, and ultimately the plague. Jonson uses this theater-within-theater to debunk superstition, alchemy, apocalypse, and the popular theater and literature that provide the narrative structures of everyday fantasy life. The play’s classical poetics creates a causal universe that leaves no room for real alchemical transformation. Lovewit’s return seems to set a period to the rogues’ unlicensed theater and herald a return to public standards and organs of knowledge. Illusion, however, escapes Jonson’s cordon sanitaire. Lovewit dissolves one theater only to enter another, and, as an examination of Surly’s resistance to Subtle’s epistemological seduction shows, Jonson’s own poetics skeptically and perversely turn in on themselves to reveal their own groundlessness and the play’s status as merely one more illusion in the marketplace of competing realities.