Satirism in The Alchemist, a Play by Ben Johnson

Literature is known to have always been an adorned mirror of its time, social situation, and life thereof. If a work of literature is to be properly analyzed, we have to go back to the time it was written in and look around through the author’s eyes. Ben Johnson, in his ‘The Alchemist’, paints a vivid picture of his time with colors of satire; and he, sarcastically, chooses the art of alchemy to, simultaneously, unmask the conning profession which was then at large.

Satire is a way of expression where the hypocrisy of ‘civilized’ people is brought in the open shielded only with a transparent veil of comedy. The timeline being that of the Renaissance, the society’s dust under the table was surfacing and there was nowhere to hide the murk.

The rational and democratic society that we know of now, was under the initial phase of construction. With society plunging in diverse ways of extreme contrasts, the pandemonium was too delicious for the writers of the time to resist.

Jonson, a Renaissance man, was a keen observer of the everyday life that went on before his eyes- the people, their interaction with others as they went on with their daily chores, their habits, body language, and attributes that go unnoticed» such that his type characters are a perfect whole of disintegrated human traits, true to their types and the nature of their role. As the play opens, we see that in the absence of the master of the house, who has fled to his country home owing to the onset of plague, the three protagonists, Face (butler of the house), Subtle (a conman) and Doll Common (a prostitute), take over it to inaugurate their business of fooling people with tricks of alchemy and robbing them of their money.

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The characters are the stark naked portrayal of the greed lurking inside the human race, presented in a comical way that induces a pang of conscience in the midst of laughter. Jonson, unabashedly, mocks the vulnerability of mankind, which falls prey to any superstitious belief like alchemy or sorcery, with the ambition of their wishes getting fulfilled. He also ridicules vanity as a masked human trait by showing how a butler dresses as a ship’s captain, giving orders to his crew; the self-obsessed man casts himself as an Alchemist, who can turn base metal into gold; and a prostitute who wears the elegance of an aristocratic woman and that of the ‘Queen of Fairies’. In the end, being a Morality Play of the time, the imposters’ disguises fall off and they suffer the embarrassment of falling from their make- belief height, their once ambition-filled eyes now cast downward with shame, and the riches that they had conned out of people, conned from them instead.