The Alchemist as a satire.

 MEG – 02: BRITISH DRAMA

ASSIGNMENT 2021 - 2022

4. Can The Alchemist be understood as a satire? Give suitable examples.

Ans.

Ans. Comedy holds the mirror up to nature and reflects things as they are, to the point that society may recognize the extent of its shortcomings and the folly of its ways and set about its improvement. Jonson's greatest plays- Vol,one (1606), Epicoene (1609), The A/chemist (1 610), Bartholomew Falr(1614)--offer a richly detailed contemporary account of the follies and vices that are always with us. The setting (apart from Volpone) is Jonson's own London, and the characters are the ingenious or the devious or the grotesque products of the hunan wish to get ahead in the world. 

The conduct of a Jonsonian comic plot is in the hands of a clever manipulator who is out to make reality conform to his own desires. Sometimes he succeeds, as in the case of the clever young gentleman who gains his uncle's inheritance in Epicoene or the one who gains the rich Puritan widow for his wife in Bartholomew Fair. In Volpone and The A/chemist, the schemes eventually fail, but this is the fault of the manipulators, who will never stop when they are ahead, and not at all due to any insight on the part of the victims. The victims are almost embarrassingly eager to be victimized. Each has his ruling passion, his humour-and it serves to set him more or less mechanically in the path that he will undeviatingly pursue, to his own discomfiture.

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