Jonson Ben - The alchemist: a critical reader

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides

Series Editors:

Andrew Hiscock

University of Wales, Bangor, UK and Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offers practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performative contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Each guide not only introduces the texts critical and performance history but also provides students with an invaluable insight into the landscape of current scholarly research through a keynote essay on the state of the art and newly commissioned essays of fresh research from different critical perspectives.

1 Henry IV edited by Stephen Longstaffe

The Alchemist edited by Erin Julian and Helen Ostovich

Doctor Faustus edited by Sarah Munson Deats

The Duchess of Malfi edited by Christina Luckyj

Tis Pity Shes a Whore edited by Lisa Hopkins

The Jew of Malta edited by Robert A Logan

King Lear edited by Andrew Hiscock and Lisa Hopkins

A Midsummer Nights Dream edited by Regina Buccola

Richard III edited by Annalise Connolly

Women Beware Women edited by Andrew Hiscock

Volpone edited by Matthew Steggle

THE ALCHEMIST

A Critical Reader

Edited by

Erin Julian and

Helen Ostovich

CONTENTS

The drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has remained at the very heart of English curricula internationally and the pedagogic needs surrounding this body of literature have grown increasingly complex as more sophisticated resources become available to scholars, tutors and students. This series aims to offer a clear picture of the critical and performative contexts of a range of chosen texts. In addition, each volume furnishes readers with invaluable insights into the landscape of current scholarly research as well as including new pieces of research by leading critics.

This series is designed to respond to the clearly identified needs of scholars, tutors and students for volumes which will bridge the gap between accounts of previous critical developments and performance history and an acquaintance with new research initiatives related to the chosen plays. Thus, our ambition is to offer innovative and challenging Guides which will provide practical, accessible and thought-provoking analyses of Early Modern Drama. Each volume is organized according to a progressive reading strategy involving introductory discussion, critical review and cutting-edge scholarly debate. It has been an enormous pleasure to work with so many dedicated scholars of Early Modern Drama and we are sure that this series will encourage you to read 400-year-old playtexts with fresh eyes.

Andrew Hiscock and Lisa Hopkins

David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. His books include From Mankind to Marlowe (1962), Tudor Drama and Politics (1968), Action Is Eloquence (1985), Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience (2005), This Wide and UniversalTheater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now (2007), Shakespeares Ideas (2008) and Shakespeare and Biography (2010). Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages (2012). He is the editor of Medieval Drama (1975), The Bantam Shakespeare and The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 6th edition (2008). He is Senior Editor of the Revels Student Editions, the Revels Plays, The Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama and The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson.

Bruce Boehrer, Bertram H. Davis Professor of English and Frances Cushing Ervin Professor of English, teaches at Florida State University and has published five single-author books including The Fury of Mens Gullets: Ben Jonson and the Digestive Canal (University of Pennsylvania, 1997). His recent scholarship has investigated animals: Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings inEarly Modern Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), Parrot Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama ofEarly Modern England (Palgrave/St. Martins Press, 2002).

Emma Cox is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published a number of scholarly essays in two main research areas: Australian and New Zealand performances of Shakespeares plays, particularly Aboriginal and Maori productions on stage and film; and the representation and participation of asylum seekers in contemporary theatre, film, writing and activism. She is the author of Theatre & Migration, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2013, and Across the Borderlines: Cultural Responses to Asylum Seekers inTwenty-First Century Australia, forthcoming with Anthem Press in 2013. At Royal Holloway she is the Co-ordinator of the Performance and Asylum Transnational Research Network, and the Associate Editor of the British journal Australian Studies.

Mark Houlahan is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, where he teaches Renaissance literature and critical theory. He has published many essays on Renaissance playwrights, prophets and polemicists, including his chapter deconstructing John Ford in the 2009 Continuum volume on Tis Pity Shes a Whore (ed. Lisa Hopkins). He is currently editing, with David Carnegie, an edition of Twelfth Night for Broadview and the Internet Shakespeare Editions series (www.ise.uvic.ca).

Erin Julian is a doctoral candidate at McMaster University. Her MA thesis was Dangerous Boys and City Pleasures: Subversions of Gender and Desire in the Boy Actors Theatre, McMaster University, 2010. She is now writing her Ph.D. dissertation, Laughing Matters: Representations of Sexual Violence in Jacobean and Caroline Comedy. She has co-written a review essay, Seduction and Salvation: Chester 2010 in Review, for Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama 49 (2010): 11027.

Ian McAdam is Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge, and the author of The Irony of Identity: Self and Imagination in the Drama of Christopher Marlowe (1999) and Magic and Masculinity inEarly Modern English Drama (2009). He is currently working on a project titled Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Secular Christ.

Mathew Martin is Professor of English Language and Literature at Brock University, Canada. Author of Between Theatre and Philosophy:Skepticism in the Major City Comedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton (2001), he has edited Christopher Marlowes Edward the Second and The Jew of Malta for Broadview Press. His current projects include editions of Doctor Faustus for Broadview Press and The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth for Queens Men Editions, and a book on psychoanalysis and textual criticism.

Helen Ostovich is Professor of English at McMaster University and Editor of Early Theatre: A Journal associated with REED; a Senior Editor for the Revels Plays; General Editor of Queens Mens Editions