Richard Levin

Another “Source”for The Alchemist and Another Look at Source Studies

L M O S T all source studies of Ben Jonson’s T h e Alchemist (1610) concentrate on the theory and practice of alchemy, even though this only figures in the gulling schemes aimed at Sir Epicure Mammon and the Puritans, in which Subtle adopts the role of an alchemist and Face is his laboratory assistant, Lungs. The gullings of Dapper, Drugger, and Kastril, where Subtle is simply the Doctor, a “cunningman,”’ and Face becomes the Captain who ropes in customers, have attracted very little attention in these studies, presumably because they are simpler and less important than the alchemical schemes and do not involve any special knowledge that would call for a source. The Dapper sequence is the simplest and the least important, since it is completely isolated, even at the end, whereas all the other schemes are interrelated and come together in a common resolution. As far as I know, only one source has been proposed for it, which I want to discuss as a way into the larger question of source studes, but before doing that it will be necessary to summarize this sequence because I will be referring back to it. Dapper appears in only three episodes. In the first (1.2) he comes to Doctor Subtle, at the urging of Captain Face, for a “jlye’’ or ‘~arniliar” to help him in gambling. He is told that he has the “complexion” the “queene of Fairy loues,” and that she is his aunt and will meet him to bestow favors on him if he distributes “twenty nobles, ’mong her Graces seruants” and performs certain “ceremonies,” which include fasting, anointing himself with vinegar, putting on a shirt of “cleane linnen,” intoning “hum” and “buz ,” and being “bath’d, and fumigated.” He returns in the second episode (3.4-5) with the twenty nobles; Subtle, now