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

 Comedy holds the mirror up to nature and reflects things as they are, to the end that society may recognize the extent of its shortcomings and the folly of its ways and set about its improvement. Jonson’s greatest plays, Volpone (1606), Epicoene (1609), The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew Fair(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 human 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 Epicene or the one who gains the rich Puritan widow for his wife in Bartholomew Fair.

In Volpone and The Alchemist, 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 the ruling passion-his humor-and it serves to set him more or less mechanically in the path that he will undeviatingly pursue to his own discomfiture.

English comedy of the later 17th century is cast in the Jonsonian mold. Restoration comedy is always concerned with the same subject-the game of love-but the subject is treated as a critique of fashionable society. Its aim is distinctly satiric, and it is set forth in plots of Jonsonian complexity, where the principal intriguer is the rakish hero, bent on satisfying his sexual needs, outside the bonds of marriage, if possible. 

In the greatest of these comedies Sir George Etherege’s Man of Mode (1676), for example, or William Wycherley’s Country-Wife (1675) or William Congreve’s Way of the World(1700)-the premium is on the energy and the grace with which the game is played, and the highest dramatic approval is reserved for those who take the game seriously enough to play it with style but who have the good sense to know when it is played out.

The satiric import of Restoration comedy resides in the dramatist’s awareness of a familiar incongruity: that between the image of a man in his primitive nature and the image of man amid the artificial restraints that society would impose upon him.

The satirist in these plays is chiefly concerned with detailing the artful dodges that ladies and gentlemen employ to satisfy nature and to remain within the pale of social decorum. Inevitably, then, hypocrisy is the chief satiric target.

The animal nature of man is taken for granted, and so is the social responsibility to keep up appearances; some hypocrisy must follow, and, within limits, society will wink at indiscretions so long as they are discreetly managed.

The paradox is typical of those in which the Restoration comic dramatists delight, and the strongly rational and unidealistic ethos of this comedy has its affinities with the naturalistic and skeptical cast of late 17th-century philosophical thought.

It is generally conceded that Jonson failed as a tragic dramatist, and it is usually agreed that he failed because his genius was for satiric comedy and because of the weight of pedantic learning with which he burdened his two tragic failures.

The second point marks an obvious error of detail; the first is too crude a statement to be accepted; to say that he failed because his genius was unsuited to tragedy is to tell us nothing at all.  Jonson did not write a good tragedy, but we can see no reason why he should not have written one.

If two plays so different as The Tempest and The Silent Woman are both comedies, surely the category of tragedy could be made wide enough to include something possible for Jonson to have done.

But the classification of tragedy and comedy, while it may be sufficient to mark the distinction in the dramatic literature of more rigid form and treatment may distinguish Aristophanes from Euripides—is not adequate to a drama of such variations as the Elizabethans.

Subcribe on Youtube - IGNOU SERVICE

For PDF copy of Solved Assignment

WhatsApp Us - 9113311883(Paid)