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Loading... The Alchemist (The Yale Ben Jonson Series) (edition 1974)by Ben Jonson
Work InformationThe Alchemist by Ben Jonson
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A wench is a rare bait, with which a man No sooner's taken, but he straight firks mad. Funny that firk, it means many things: to both expel and to fuck as well as become or carry. I felt only the fervor of the former in my experience with brother Ben Jonson. Anthony Vacca has noted here on GR that Jonson was the Marty Amis of the Elizabethan underbelly. That might just be correct. It didn't help my flailing. Such wasn't pretty or becoming. Despite the title and subject matter, there's nothing much of esoteric interest in this play. (Well, if you take Face as Yesod, Subtle as Hod, and Dol as Netzach ... but, no.) It is a fairly fascinating Elizabethan satire, though. It would be great fun to see it staged, though I can't recall having noted any productions in recent memory. It's probably confined to academic stages these days. This edition features notes and glosses by English professor John McCollum, who reliably explains the obvious, and leaves the obscure unremarked. Alchemical jargon is called out as "alchemical jargon," without any effort to clarify what it might actually mean in an alchemical context. McCollum also provides some useful biographical notes on Jonson. no reviews | add a review
Is contained inCavalcade of comedy; 21 brilliant comedies from Jonson and Wycherley to Thurber and Coward by Louis Kronenberger Elizabethan Drama, Volume II: Dekker; Jonson; Beaumont and Fletcher; Webster; Massinger by Charles William Eliot Elizabethan Drama in Two Volumes [set] by Charles William Eliot (indirect) The Harvard Classics [50 Volume Set] by Charles William Eliot (indirect) Has as a student's study guideNotable Lists
Drama.
Fiction.
HTML: Samuel Taylor Coleridge said of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist that it had one out of the three most perfect plots in literature. This play, with its sharp portrayal of human folly, is considered by many to be Jonson's best comedy. First performed 1610, its popularity has endured to this day. .No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)822.3Literature English & Old English literatures English drama Elizabethan 1558-1625LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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It has the one-dimensional characters of a morality play. The language is uninteresting; the wordplay is not clever enough to have an enduring quality. The plot is barely worth mentioning: an academic, a bawd, and a butler perpetrate a series of frauds based around the claim they can produce The Philosopher's Stone.
Clearly a base crowd-pleaser that hasn't aged well. Jonson can do so much better. ( )