The Alchemist

Subtle is an older man who pretends to be skilled in a variety of pseudo-sciences, such as alchemy and fortunetelling. Subtle is a foil to Face: He lacks Face’s wit and extroverted ability to acquire customers. For this reason, he and Face are a kind of double act, a comedic performance in which two characters match their performances to enhance the humor of scenes. Unlike the sanguine Face, Subtle is presented as “choleric,” meaning he is quick to anger. Throughout the play, he regularly fights with Face and yells at Dapper, Ananias, Wholesome, and Kastril. Nonetheless, Subtle is “lusty” enough to try to marry Pliant, whom he finds sexually appealing, as his lewd jokes make clear.

The play’s title foregrounds Subtle, whose job is to create and sustain the appearance of magic and science for the customers. While Face is the barker who brings in customers, Subtle—as his name suggests—is the more nuanced liar who must convince them that he has supernatural powers. Jonson presents Subtle as a huckster audience should recognize—a peddler of unrealistically fantastical solutions to people’s problems. In the end, Subtle allows himself to be tricked by Face; as befits The Guilt of the Deceived, he is punished for not seeing through Face and for believing the myth of honor among thieves—he planned to betray his companions, but ends up duped.

Dol Common is a sex worker who has aligned herself with Subtle and Face. Her phlegmatic temperament befits her apathetic demeanor and background role. Her role in the trio plays into several stereotypes about women: She must balance Face and Subtle’s temperaments and stop their fighting; at the same time, she is sexually objectified, playing both the alluring Queen of Fairy to trick Dapper, and a noblewoman with a mental illness to hook Mammon. Dol’s facility with these roles shows her intelligence. Despite her name’s assertion that she is “common,” or lower class, Dol tricks Mammon into believing that she is educated. However, the men in the trio primarily value her sexual availability as a sex worker; it is clear that she is in a sexual relationship with each of them.

Dol demonstrates the dangers of associating with conmen and of giving in to lust. Just like many women in the theater, Dol is a sex worker; so her betrayal at the hands of Subtle and Face shows her vulnerable status. At the same time, Dol’s ability to play on men’s uncontrollable sexual desire is a warning to men in the audience—another way of seeing The Play as Analogy for the Theater.

Dapper is the consummate “fool” of the play—the most gullible customer that the trio has. Unlike the other customers, who want physical wealth or power, Dapper only wants to cheat at gambling; his outlandish desire for a familiar and his belief in the Queen of Fairy further characterizes Dapper as a nitwit, as does his trust that Subtle is that Queen’s nephew.

As a sanguine, optimistic, and friendly character, Dapper is another foil to Face: Dapper’s sanguinity makes him an easy mark, while Face’s allows him to deceive others. Unlike Face, whom the audience can’t help but admire, Dapper is at all times a figure of fun—a mockable buffoon whose eventual punishment for allowing himself to be conned seems just. However, Dapper ends the play the same sanguine man he has always been, tricked so completely that he leaves with the optimism that Subtle’s magic has worked.

Drugger, a businessman, comes to the trio looking for advice on how to arrange his shop to encourage more sales and how his horoscope predicts the future. Drugger’s temperament is phlegmatic, as his pessimism in business indicates. Eager to go along, Drugger becomes an errand person for Face: He is unable to provide large sums of money to the group, but he does get them clothing and tobacco, both valuable commodities at the time.

While Dapper has been tricked because of his amiable nature, Drugger is susceptible to commands because of his conflict avoidance. Drugger needs help dealing with Kastril and the widow Pliant—tenants in his house that he doesn’t know how to deal with. When Face tells Drugger to get tobacco and clothes, Drugger asks no questions; similarly, when Face tells Drugger to confirm his stories about Surly to instigate Kastril’s anger, Drugger plays along without question. This is why Drugger’s fate, unlike that of the other characters, is a physical beating. Since Drugger is the least consumed with appearances, shame or poverty would not affect him as much as physical harm.

Sir Epicure Mammon is a knight—not a sword-wielding warrior, but a landowning aristocrat most likely involved in politics. In the play, Mammon is defined almost entirely by his sanguine appetites and desires—as his name makes clear, he is fixated on good food to the point of gluttony (an “epicure” is someone obsessed with luxurious consumption) and on wealth to the point of excessive greed (“mammon” is a biblical term for the evils of money). Mammon is also a hypocrite: He wants the trio to make him a philosopher’s stone so that he can amass wealth, women, power, and immortality; he claims that he will use the stone for the public good, but this is only a ploy to gain political power.

Mammon’s obsession with the fantasy of the stone and his egotism prove to be his undoing. At first, Mammon is easily taken in by Face and Subtle’s performances, even believing that he is at fault for the destruction of the stone; he is a worse judge of character than his servant Surly. Even when Mammon suspects that he has been tricked, he refuses to file a lawsuit because his pride does not allow him to admit in public that he is the victim of a con. Mammon’s high rank and status make him a classic butt of jokes in satire, as audiences enjoy seeing a character who represents the ruling classes brought down a peg.

Mammon’s servant Surly is one of the few characters who does not fall for the group’s tricks. His choleric temperament accords with his name: Surly is aggressive and antagonistic toward Subtle, Face, and even Mammon. However, while Surly is correctly skeptical of the trio, he becomes a figure of fun when he tries to beat the trio at their own game. Unlike the practiced conmen, Surly is bad at pretending to be someone else; his Spanish noble persona is easily seen through. Trying to out-scheme Face is a losing proposition.

While Surly appears at first to be aligned with morality, his choleric anger reveals another, more nuanced vice: Unlike Lovewit, who is amused by Face’s antics, Surly does not love a good jest or trick unless he is the one doing the tricking. Surly’s inexpert deception dooms him to lose his chance to catch Face or marry Pliant. Only skilled professionals like Jonson can turn vices to virtues, the play suggests, asking the audience to leave acting to the professionals.

Anabaptist deacon Ananias, like Surly, doubts Subtle’s magical powers. Ananias is named for Ananias of Damascus, a biblical prophet who cured Saul’s blindness and converted him to Christianity as Paul. Since the Anabaptists’ key belief is thus adult baptism, Ananias’s second vice is opposing Wholesome’s efforts to convert Subtle. Ananias is understandably skeptical that Subtle can harness the same abilities Christianity ascribes only to its most holy figures. However, Ananias’s latent greed and uninterest in conversion emerge when Subtle suggests counterfeiting money. While Christianity was a delicate topic in England during Jonson’s time, as King James I furthered animosity between Catholics and Protestants, the hypocrisy of the clergy had been a subject of satire since the Middle Ages, with Geoffrey Chaucer notably poking fun at religious officials almost 300 years prior. Ananias is thus part of a long tradition of shaming two-faced authority figures.

Ananias’s employer Wholesome, also an Anabaptist, is the only character without a desire for personal wealth or grandeur. Unlike Ananias, a caricature of the greedy cleric, Wholesome satirizes the clergy’s deceptive practices in amassing followers. As Face points out, Tribulation Wholesome is an assumed name—and Face would know, as the consummate actor. The name invokes Christian eschatology, or the myth of the end of the world—in Christian belief, The Great Tribulation is the period after the Rapture, when the earth will be populated only by those left behind after the “wholesome” people go directly to heaven. By using this name, Wholesome primes those he encounters to consider where how they will fair in the Final Judgment—ostensibly because this train of thought will make them more likely to accept conversion. Wholesome accepts all of Subtle’s claims in the hope of Subtle’s conversion—his gullibility stems from a lack of real concern about his flock and an interest only in swelling Anabaptist ranks.

Kastril is a young man with a penchant for arguing and fighting. His name is reminiscent of “kestrel,” a small predatory bird, which fits with his choleric character. Housing his recently widowed sister, whose wealth he controls as her closest male relative, Kastril flies into a rage any time she mentions wanting to remarry. He is characterized as abusive, threatening his sister with violence frequently, even to the point that Face and Subtle are shocked by his demeanor. Rather than wanting to know how to control his temper, Kastril wants Subtle to help him fight and argue more, to gain advantage over other men in town. His anger is easily manipulated—Face uses Kastril’s predictable antipathy to Spain to sic Kastril on Surly in disguise as a Spanish noble.

The widowed Dame Pliant is Kastril’s sister. She is a young, beautiful, and wealthy woman, which implies that she was married off early (probably against her will) to a rich older man. Her passive demeanor and her name mark her as another representation of women as sexual objects in the play, malleable and intended to be shaped by others. Unlike Dol, Pliant lacks almost all agency: She has no specific goal or desire, intrigued by but not invested in Subtle’s prediction that she will soon marry someone of the upper class. Comically, the only bit of spine Pliant shows is when presented with the Spanish noble, whom she declares she cannot love because of the Spanish Armada’s would-be invasion of England in 1588. However, Pliant’s unexpected and thus humorous patriotism fades immediately in the face of Kastril’s threats of violence.

While Dol is a relatively equal partner in the trio’s schemes, Pliant is basically treated as a prize by the play’s men. Face, Subtle, Surly, and Lovewit each assume she could marry them on a moment’s notice. Pliant’s lack of personality carries through to the end of the play, when she ends up as another of Lovewit’s ill-gotten possessions.