The Alchemist

Ben Jonson does it again! Writes a play as strange and unique as anything I've read . . . well, okay, maybe not as ANYTHING I've read. Really, Bartholomew Fair was pretty weird. But this was still pretty different.

Three tricksters live in a house that's not theirs, conning people out of money and goods for alchemical and sexual services. Eventually, they are caught when the owner of the house comes back. Two run away, and one makes good by staying behind to help the owner with one last con that sets them both up pretty nicely.

This play really satirizes that old monkey, greed, with a healthy dose of Puritan satire and alchemical parody thrown in. The intro I read said that every victim of the conmen gets his or her moment of pity except for the two Puritans who are greedy, judgmental, and self-righteous to boot. There is some very funny business between Subtle and Ananias, as Ananias cannot resist correcting and chastising Subtle, who takes offense and threatens to undo the alchemical work at hand.

I worked on another alchemical parody once, Chaucer's "Canon's Yeoman's Tale" in which the Canon and his Yeoman attempt to pull alchemical cons, making people believe that they can make precious metals out of base, and failing. In that story, the canon possibly gets conned by another canon, and also runs away when he worries that the yeoman is going to turn him in and expose their tricks (which the yeoman does). The yeoman is the one who gets to stay behind and keep going on the pilgrimage with everyone, sort of the way Jeremy/Face gets to keep his position at the house instead of running away in shame like Subtle and Doll Common. I really enjoyed the way Jonson used alchemical terms in his play; the short dialogues between Subtle and Face as they were pretending to ready their "projection" were really great and convincing because they were so full of jargon that they sounded (as Surly notes) like "canting."

I guess if I had to compare this to anything else, it might be Volpone, which revolves around two tricksters and their greedy victims, all of whom get their comeuppance. That one seems less joyful, though, since this one has a sort of happy (and possibly redemptive) ending. Jeremy helps his employer and makes his apologies to the audience, while Volpone and Mosca never repent.

Anti-Theatrical Prejudice

Jonas Barish's book Anti-Theatrical Prejudice discusses the history of anti-theatrical prejudice dating from ancient Greece until the current day. He introduces the topic by discussing all the negative epithets from theater that have made their way into our discourse: melodramatic, stagey, putting on an act, making a scene, making a spectacle, and, of course, theatrical. I wrote a paper on this subject, specifically Seventh-day Adventist prejudice against the theater, when I was a freshman in college so I was somewhat familiar with most of the arguments. I'll just list them, because that's what the book is about.

Plato:

Poets/actors/painters are "sophists," making counterfeits that look like (but are not) truth.
Drama stirs up our feelings to subvert our judgment.
Imitation is formative, so we must not imitate things that we do not want to become.
Justice and right government involve citizens knowing their place. Any crossing of identity boundaries, even imaginary, can jeopardize this.
Art is slippery; it cannot be put under exact measurements or controls; it is not to be trusted.

Classical Rome:

Actors were foreigners, slaves, and prostitutes.
Entertaining made one ridiculous (ars ludicra).
The dissolution and extravagance of Rome was demeaning to Rome; theater was part of this.

Early Christianity:

Players and mimers might mime sacraments or holy people, thus devaluing religion.
Theater was, like gladiatorial events and beast shows, a decadent extravagance that eroded morality.
Theater aims to provoke frenzy.
Changing our appearance or our names or anything else is a lie against God and blasphemy to think that we can improve on God's work: ourselves (this extends to shaving, exercising, and wearing high heels).
The Lord permits emotion but not wallowing in emotion for its own sake.

Early Lollards:

Although in the medieval period most drama was church-sanctioned, a minority spoke out against miracle and mystery plays.
God hates laughter. Christ never laughed. Amusement is a sin.
When men weep at a story, it is not real so their tears are worthless.
When people see a Bible play enacted on stage and they know it is false, they will be persuaded to believe that the Bible story itself is false as well.

Puritans:

The Catholic church rituals partake of aspects of theater: spectacle, rehearsed lines, costuming.
Playgoing brings one into contact with all kinds of other low entertainments: gambling, bear-baiting, prostitution.
Theater involves cross-dressing, which is not only a lie against a man's identity, but is also proscribed in the Bible. It encourages effeminacy.
Acting is based on hypocrisy and lies.
Theater implies that God's own work has fallen short, if we need fictions and costumes to be satisfied.
If something is true, it is unchangeable; it does not change its appearance and identity at will (Proteanism). To change is to fall.
The early modern theater took people away from work.

Jonson:

Theater-goers are a low sort, uneducated. They either come to be seen in fine dress, or to laugh at dumb shows. They cannot appreciate real poetry.
Theater is impermanent. The experience of going to a play passes away; unlike a painting or a sculpture, it does not last.
Actors on stage are not simple and sincere; you cannot trust their bombast.

The rest of the book goes on with that stuff, but I thought I'd focus on the anti-theatrical feeling up to the early modern period.

Puritanism and Theatre

Margot Heinemann wrote Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama Under the Early Stuarts, a book which largely seeks to align Middleton with what she terms "Puritan Parliamentarianism." She argues that Middleton's plays are part of "opposition drama," a movement in later Jacobean theatre that was anti-establishment, anti-Laudian, anti-aristocratic. She attempts to reconcile the plays of his early career (satirical comedy) to those of his mid- and late career (tragi-comedy and tragedy, respectively) by seeking out a through-line motivated by religion and politics. She also asks how A Game at Chess could have possibly been approved by the censor and produced on stage when it was so obviously a satire on contemporary royal policy.

Her first chapter, "Time and Place," is great; a short and pithy introduction to the economic and political situations of the day and drama's place within them. Her second chapter covers, and dismantles, the traditional assumption that all Puritans were militant anti-theatricalists. The remaining chapters on Middleton discuss his plays, grouping them chronologically and connecting them to major themes and issues taken up by opposition drama, such as Popery, the hopeless state of the poor, the excess of the rich. Hengist, King of Kent seems to show, through the lens of a long-ago British history, the dangers of King James' dalliance with the Spanish, as well as the current wool over-production and how this affects the farmers and peasants.

I was not very convinced, though, by a chapter entitled "How Anti-Puritan are Middleton's City Comedies?" in which her major argument seems to be, When Middleton is making fun of Puritans, he is actually just making fun of all hypocrites, not Puritans especially. One of the reviews I read took her to task for that as well. Her book is also working on the assumption that Middleton is definitely Puritan, a view which Heller disagrees with. Finally, she disputes the authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy.