ABSTRACT
A perennial crux in Jonson studies concerns the logic governing his play’s resolutions. Do these endings reveal Jonson to be a conventional moralist or an anarchist who takes delight in exposing the vacuity of established moral codes? Robert N. Watson has written elegantly on behalf of the latter position. In his influential article ‘The Alchemist and Jonson’s Conversion of Comedy,’ Watson characterizes Jonsonian drama as ‘artful bricolage’—plays featuring complex amalgamations of multiple plots propelled by a gallery of diverse comic characters who are united principally through the fact that all ‘suppose themselves central figures in a conventional plot suited to their humors.’1 Watson dissects The Alchemist with impressive skill, methodically itemizing the various conventions in the play’s plots and the stock heroic roles that the main characters construct for themselves. Thus, as Watson illustrates, Dapper, the first to be victimized at the hands of the play’s criminal trio-the whore Dol, the panderer Face, and fake alchemist Subtle-is able to be gulled because he indulges in a vision of himself as ‘the star of a fairy tale,’ the one where a ‘young wastral [is] redeemed by the whimsical affection of a wealthy widow. . . .’2 Because of Dapper’s disposition, he is susceptible to the illusion of Dol as the powerful and benevolent ‘Queen of Fairie’ who-for a price-will bestow on him a familiar spirit for use in gambling. The pattern begun with Dapper extends to Drugger, the play’s second victim, who adopts an opposite yet equally conventional role: he sees himself as ‘as the hero of a Deloney novel from the same period, about a hard-working man propelling himself up through the social classes by shrewd mercantile enterprises, and by the upward misalliance they permit.’3 Imagining himself as a proto-Horatio Alger hero, Dapper expects fate to fulfill his ambition and so assumes that his alliance with Subtle will succeed. The multiple plots of The Alchemist find their structural center in the gullible Sir Epicure Mammon, who, according to Watson, ‘seems to perceive himself as the sort of modern savior who appeared in Jacobean poetry, the spiritual, scientific, or sensual creator of a new world for a new age.’4 Hewing to this critical method, Watson provides a detailed inventory of the play’s characters, in order to make persuasive his contention that in Jonson’s world rewards come not to those who are more ethical but rather to those individuals who are sufficiently aware of their own theatricality that they can deploy it in ways that effectively subsume competing plots. Watson’s methodology can be extended to that
fascinating Jonsonian creation, the whore Dol Common. On the subject of Dol, Watson’s comments are (for my purposes) fortuitously brief. He rightly focuses on the gulling of Sir Epicure Mammon and notes that in this plot Dol Common functions as erotic bait. Yet in Watson’s effort to characterize this specific plot and the character Dol assumes during this element of The Alchemist's bricolage, he offers only the following: ‘Dol spits back at him [Mammon] her own mad concoction of literature, as if she were Spenser’s Dragon of Error vomiting theological tracts on a similarly erroneous knight.’5 Watson’s characterization of the plot is reasonable, but it does not conform to the logic controlling his literary investigation. According to Watson’s basic premise, Dol Common requires an entry in which we see how she casts herself as the heroine in some conventional plot. Dol’s assumed role should be attractive both to her and to Mammon, thus enabling her to subsume his plot into hers. Clearly the Spenserian plot Watson cites is an appropriate analogue that can be productively deployed in relation to Jonson’s drama, but it highlights the negative consequences of what happens to Mammon and therefore cannot serve as the inviting narrative that lured him on. Furthermore, introducing the Spenserian narrative as the interpretative frame for Dol does not provide us with the heroic role she is manipulating in order to gull Mammon.
