CHAPTER FIVE The Alchemy of Ben Jonson Introduction In the foregoing chapters I have offered ...

49 Pages·2006·0.21 MB·English

CHAPTER FIVE

The Alchemy of Ben Jonson

Introduction

In the foregoing chapters I have offered evidence that alchemy was considered
a noble and credible field of study by many of the foremost Renaissance
scholars and philosophers. I will argue in this chapter that, given Ben Jonson’s
own pronouncements on the nature and value of reading and learning, it is
almost impossible to trivialise or dismiss his use of alchemy as the informing
philosophical precept and structural imperative of The Alchemist. To do this, I
shall engage with Robert Evans’s examination of Jonson’s reading and
marginalia, always keeping in mind that Jonson’s was a complex and ambiguous
personality. It is therefore necessary to take into consideration evidence
garnered from various sources, while assessing this evidence with the same
subtlety and shrewdness that Jonson himself applied to his reading and writing.
I will then proceed to a reading of the play itself to substantiate and illustrate
my proposal that alchemy was far more than a convenient figure for Jonson’s
most popular comedy. I will thus attempt to show that while Jonson overtly
satirises alchemy as fraudulent and deceptive, he nevertheless covertly affirms
the alchemical goal of transformation on various levels.

Firstly, I will investigate Jonson’s commitment to what he perceives as the
artist’s responsibility towards society. Especially I will focus on this
commitment as it embodies his philosophy of writing as a creative and creating
act. In other words, the act of writing is itself a specific kind of ‘alchemical’
transformation of discrete ‘base’ elements into the complete and ‘perfect’
artistic philosopher’s stone – the drama. Secondly, in The Alchemist Jonson
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seems to apply a type of ‘linguistic alchemy’, particularly in relation to the
internal dynamics of the play. Finally, in his presentation of different characters,
Jonson artfully though indirectly subverts the Christian humanist ideal of
perfectibility. Instead of suggesting characters who develop towards the
quintessential humanist archetype of knowledge-as-virtue, he offers a
perspective on Machiavellian utilitarianism – knowledge-as-power – which
encompasses a shrewd and unromanticised assessment of both oneself and
others. Jonson delineates an alchemically ‘transmuted’ pseudo-Adamic figure.
This ‘perfected’ man not only apprehends himself and the world around him,
but can also utilize this knowledge to assess accurately the conditions necessary
for the purposes of survival and self-promotion. I will refer to two non-
dramatic Jonsonian texts – the Discoveries and William Drummond’s
‘biographical’ Conversations – to illustrate what I perceive to be Jonson’s
alchemical quest to raise individual awareness and to realise social
transformation, by bringing audiences hard up against reality, or, in other
words, ‘life as it is’.

To conclude this chapter, I will adopt the role of devil’s advocate. I will argue
that while I am convinced that Jonson, at some levels, endorses alchemical
philosophies, his own ideologies, often expressed quite vehemently and
sometimes intolerantly in the two abovementioned non-dramatic texts, tinge
and limit his view and acceptance of alchemy as a whole. This kind of paradox
is not exceptional. As Haydn points out, “It is not unusual to find a strident,
even bawling, reformer taking evident pleasure in the depiction of the very
vices which he most condemns” (6). Moreover, in comparing Jonson’s The
Alchemist and Shakespeare’s The Tempest within the context of the Renaissance
conception of alchemy, I have become more and more convinced that while
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Jonson’s play sets forth a largely pessimistic and resigned – some would say
realistic – appreciation of the human situation, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, on
the whole, offers a more hopeful outlook on the possible fate of humanity. In
the following chapter, I will more fully explore this last point.

Will the ‘real’ Ben Jonson please stand up?

In Habits of Mind, Robert Evans states that “The marked books … selected for
discussion are a deliberately mixed lot” (12). However, his selection seems to
have been carefully predetermined by an intention to present a specific image
of Jonson – as learned; intellectually curious and catholic, yet mentally rigorous;
morally uncompromising and settled; and psychologically integrated. Evans,
however, is not the only critic to offer a neat and rounded characterization of
Ben Jonson. According to Ian Donaldson, this particular portrayal of Jonson
may be traced back to the Herford and Simpson edition of Jonson’s works,
which for a very long time was seen to offer the most authoritative insights into
his life and career:

The personality of Ben Jonson which they [Herford and Simpson]
invoke is coherent, stable, singular, and sharply defined … the
‘Jonsonian personality’ that is invoked is in every sense a continuum …
No attempt is made to distinguish between Jonson’s own tactical
declarations of personal constancy and imperturbability, and the actual
shifts, transformations, experiments, back-trackings, and inconsistencies
which might be revealed by a closer scrutiny of his work as a whole (27).
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Although some of the characterizations put forward by Evans in Habits of Mind
are evidently valid, there are instances in which his depiction seems to consider
only a limited aspect of Jonson’s personality. I believe that a more liberal and
accommodating consideration of alternative aspects may enrich our
understanding of the man and his work. By all accounts, Jonson was a
complicated character, never fully at ease with either himself or with his society.
In this Jonson was not unique. It has been established in earlier chapters that
this was an age of upheaval and restlessness. Haydn explains how the literature
of a period inevitably mirrors the intellectual and social currents that shape a
particular historical milieu:

[In] an optimistic period, one dominated by a single world-view,
literature is apt to embody this largely consistent orthodoxy in a defense
of the status quo…. Conversely, in an age of intellectual unrest and
disenchantment, there is likely to be a corresponding literature,
emphasising the wide gap between the ideal and the actual. And such a
preponderance of the second kind of theme in the Counter-Renaissance
is one of the clearest indications of its transitional nature, its wasteland
character of scepticism and uncertainty, coming as it does between two
highly confident and secure world-views (229).

Jonson seems to have been undeniably affected by the prevailing
‘disenchantment’ and ‘scepticism’ of the time.1 Notwithstanding the probable

1 Wayne Shumaker’s strategy for interpretation is particularly helpful in understanding the nature of
Jonson’s writing. He counsels that: “[It] is impossible to prescribe either an invariable mode of
investigation or a set of criteria for the judgement of evidence. The most that can be done is to suggest a set
of flexible guidelines…. In theory, a better procedure is to search not for influences from but for influences
on – in other words, to speculate where a given writer’s ideas came from, not what effect his ideas
produced on others” (‘Literary Hermeticism’, 295).
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distortions of personal prejudice,2 one has to acknowledge William
Drummond’s digest of Jonson as an interesting contemporary comment on the
man, and one which serves to qualify Evans’s depiction:

He is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of
others, given rather to lose a friend than a jest, jealous of every word and
action of those about him (especially after drink, which is one of the
elements in which he liveth), a dissembler of ill parts which reign in him,
a bragger of some good that he wanteth, thinketh nothing well but what
either he himself or some of his friends and countrymen hath said or
done. He is passionately kind and angry, careless either to gain or keep,
vindictive, but, if he be well answered, at himself (Oxford Authors, 610-
611).

Notwithstanding Drummond’s account, I believe that there is ample evidence
to support Evans’s view that “[Jonson’s] determined self-education was part
and parcel of his whole effort at self-assertion; [that] reading was not an escape
from the ‘real world’ but a means of self-fashioning and self-preparation for
involvement in that world” (24). James P. Bednarz makes a similar point,
arguing that

Jonson’s autobiographical personae are interesting not only in
themselves as symbolic acts of self-fashioning, but also as the first
examples in the history of English drama of a playwright self-consciously

2 It is significant that Drummond had no apparent intention to publish his notes on Jonson, as the
Conversations were only published after Drummond’s death and more than a decade after Jonson’s
renowned walking tour to Scotland.
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defending his status and explicitly defining the literary principles upon
which his art is based (3).

The above provides a portrait of Jonson as a complex, if not chaotic,
personality. More than only being a manifestation of intellectual integrity and
self-assertion, his intensive scholarly pursuits may also be seen to be an
indication of intellectual insecurity, resulting from a restless and unfulfilled
quest for self-knowledge that would inform and shape both his sense of self
and of the world around him.

Donaldson makes more or less the same point in his discussion of the
significance of the recurring motif of the circle in Jonson’s work, seeming to
symbolize a sense of completion, wholeness, and inviolable cohesion. This
reading accords with Ralph’s exposition of the Renaissance conception of
‘circularity’, in which:

[A]ll matter, including living creatures, was acted upon, through
intermediate agencies, by the outer Intelligences, which in turn were
directed by God the absolute Being, perfect Intelligence, and First
Cause. Man could comprehend the universe, it was held, because the
universe is rational, orderly, and perfectly circular, and therefore
amenable to the reasoning faculty implanted in man. But understanding
depended on a process of deduction, inference, and analogy. Man could
know God only through the observed effects of His subordinate agents
(210-211).
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However, even given this understanding of the circular motion of knowledge,
Donaldson goes on to caution that Jonson’s conception of circularity was
somewhat qualified, especially in relation to the contemporary emphasis on
‘roundedness’ and perfectibility. Thus:

It is tempting to assume that the circularity about which Jonson writes
so constantly … relates in some way to the movement of his own life
and the shape of his career…. Because Jonson asserts so often this
notion of the round and gathered self, it seems almost as if his own
integrated character is waiting there on the page (29-30).

Even more telling than the probable symbolism of the reiterated figure of the
circle in Jonson’s work, is his adoption of a circle, or compass, for his personal
emblem.3 However, as Donaldson indicates, Jonson’s choice was far more
complicated, and also more revealing, than it may appear at first glance. While
the circle was a common classical and Renaissance signification of wholeness
and perfection, this was an idealization of something that was never or very
rarely realized in the ‘real’ world. In Book VII of Paradise Lost, Milton links the
notion of circularity with the perfection of God’s creation of the world:

Then stayed the fervid wheels, and in his hand
He took the golden compasses, prepared
In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe
This universe, and all created things:
One foot he centred, and the other turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure,

3 See a copy of Jonson’s impresa of the ‘broken compass’ on the title page to the following chapter.
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And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,
This be thy just circumference, O world.
(lines 224-231).

In his Platonic Theology, Marsilio Ficino presents an impressive exposition of his
theory of circularity, which, he suggests, is analogous to self-reflective
knowledge. This kind of knowledge resides in the soul, which “imitates the
most perfect figure … the circular motion” (245).4 Like unending ripples in a
pond, the circle extends beyond itself, though it always returns to and starts
from its own centre:

If this is so, it [the soul] must be aware of itself and what it contains in
itself. If it is aware, it must know. But it knows by understanding as long
as it recognises its essence as spiritual and free from the limitations of
matter. For it is knowledge of such which is called understanding. We
can see in our own case that knowledge is nothing other than spiritual
union with some spiritual form…. Our mind too, having been joined by
our spiritual power with the incorporeal species and reasons of things,
understands objects themselves. Similarly, when the third essence … is
joined to itself, it knows and understands itself by becoming aware of
itself in a spiritual way. It also understands things divine, to which it
clings as closely as possible in a spiritual way, and it understands things
corporeal, to which by nature it also descends. It knows, I say, by a
discursive process over time, since through its activity it is mobile (245).

4 Bouwsma’s reflections on ‘The Liberation of the Self’ serve to clarify this notion of the perfection of the
circle: “The heavenly bodies, themselves perfect and therefore immutable, were seen as arranged in a
hierarchy and were believed to move in perfect circles; linear movement would have signified their ‘need’
to change place and implied some imperfection” (20).
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Yet, like other philosophers, Ficino was proffering a theory, rather than
positing an existential actuality. Ficino himself is aware of the utopian nature of
his teachings, for he acknowledges that “in the sphere of moral philosophy one
must purify the soul until its eye becomes unclouded and it can see the divine
light and worship God” (9). Cesare Vasoli contextualises Ficino’s assertion,
explaining that “[Ficino’s] sapienta was linked to the notion of a revelation
transmitted from the ancients by a chain of inspired thinkers until it achieved a
final synthesis in Christian dogma” (‘Renaissance Concept of Philosophy’, 68).
Of course, this ‘synthesis’ remained to a large extent an elusive ideal.

However, while Ficino might be styled an idealist, there were many others,
including Montaigne, Machiavelli, and Agrippa, who stressed “the discrepancy
between the ideal formulated by theory and the actuality they observed
themselves, [and which] demanded a different approach to truth and certainty”
(Haydn, 84). Jonson seems to belong to this school of scepticism. His choice of
emblem embodies the disjuncture between the real and the unrealistically
optimistic, because his badge is very suggestively a broken compass. Thus
Donaldson points out:

The emblem and its motto serve as reminders of the unattainability of
those qualities of closure, integrity, and perfection which Jonson
simultaneously celebrates and asserts. The gap in the circumference of
the circle is the gap between longing and fulfilment, between the ideal
and the actuality (31).
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Bouwsma provides a helpful perspective on the particular context in which
Jonson was working, and out of which he made his choice of emblem,
observing that “A major clue [to the troubled minds of the age] can be found in
one of its greatest glories: its importance for theatre, the most popular of the
arts, which brings into focus a profound set of discontents released by the
peculiar freedoms of Renaissance culture” (129).

Jonson’s use of Alchemy

Perhaps this background helps us to a better understanding of Jonson’s use of
alchemy as a trope for a society characterised by perplexing, often disorienting,
change and upheaval. It is significant that Jonson was evidently well-informed
about the intricacies of alchemical language and practice. One might assume
that Jonson accumulated his impressive knowledge through extensive and
critical reading, suggesting a far more complex and heterogeneous personality
than the single-minded citizen portrayed by some critics and biographers. As
Donaldson avers, there is a significant and dynamic paradox that exists between
what Jonson professed, and that which obviously held a riveting fascination for
him and provided stimuli for his work. It is this incongruity that reveals “a very
different Ben Jonson, more fractured in temperament and conduct, more
experimental, various, and digressive in his creative processes” (49-50).

Given the above, one could then deduce that the frequent recurrence of the
theme of alchemy in his works, whether overt or allegorical, is evidence of
Jonson’s deep interest in this subject at both a personal and a creative level,
especially where it might suggest an angst that is not out of keeping with the