The Alchemist Analysis

Welcome to 1610 London, Shmoopers. We drop in on the house of some rich dude (Master Lovewit) who has hightailed it out of the city because the plague is totally raging and he's not interested in d...

Big Willy Shakespeare may have put English comedy on the map but, Ben Jonson is famous for being one of the younger 16th-17th Century playwrights who came along and helped reshaped the genre into s...

Just like every single episode of The Simpsons, Ben Jonson's The Alchemist is all about satire. That means Jonson uses a boatload of humor, irony, and sarcasm to make fun of his characters and thei...

The Alchemist is mostly written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Hey, Will Shakespeare wasn't the only playwright getting his blank verse on in the 16th and 17th Centuries. What does that mean, exact...

So, you probably noticed there's no real "alchemist" in this play. Subtle tries to perpetrate like he can change base metals into gold but we all know he can't…which is why his scams eventually b...

On the one hand, we could argue that Jonson offers up what's considered a very traditional (and very Shakespearean) kind of ending for a comedy, which will usually end with a marriage or the promis...

You've probably noticed that there's a boatload of alchemy jargon in this play. When our con artists (Subtle and Face) start tossing around a bunch of scientific-y sounding words related to the mag...

When the Cat's Away the Mice Will PlayDuring the exposition, we meet Face, Subtle, and Doll and find out that they've been running a bunch of scams out of Lovewit's house while the dude's been away...

Subtle, Face, and Doll Common concoct a bunch of schemes to swindle people out of their money.Our favorite con artists proceed to swindle a bunch of chumps out of their money.The schemers get total...

Ben Jonson wrote a poem in honor of Will Shakespeare's memory. (You've probably heard one of the most famous lines from the piece: "He was not of an age, but for all time!") You can read the whole...

There's no sex on stage, Shmoopers, but there's plenty of dirty talk in The Alchemist. But hey, that's pretty much what we expect from a play that includes a character who fantasizes about having a...

Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (4.7.69-73)Hugh Broughton's, A Concent [sic] of Scripture (4.5.1-34)The Plague of 1609-1610 (The Argument, Line 1)John Dee (1527-c.1608), the famous alchemist /astr...