Chapter The Alchemist Summaries and Commentary of The Alchemist - Study Guide by Ben Jonson

do this. Mammon then, even before his entrance, is revealed as a man most prone to the temptations laid out by the three cozeners. Mammon's dreams have turned the stone into more than a device for the transmutation of metals but into general elixir of life, curing all diseases. Subtle talks of the great dreams of this man who in his excitement has been promising cures to all and sundry and in his greed planned great riches for, "If his dreams last, he'll turn the age to gold" (I.iv.29)

Mammon's vivid imagination coupled with his greed leads to the most fabulously voluptuous speeches, filled with expectation, which is of course ultimately doomed. Note that despite his greed, his arrival is perhaps later than expected, for Subtle "did look for him/ With the sun's rising" (I.iv.11-12). This suggests that even his with the fulfilment of dreams so close he is still lazy, another trait which allows the three, with their 'get rich quick' schemes, to cozen him easily.

Act 2

Act 2. Scene 1

Mammon enters with his friend, the cynical Surly. As they enter the house, Mammon refers to it as "novo orbe", that is the new world, for Mammon believes the Stone will change the world, indeed change nature herself. The house is also his Peru, that being the source of Spanish gold, and 'Great Solomon's Orphir', Orphir being where Solomon made his gold after he had acquired the Stone. All these foreign names and ancient references conjure up images of orientalist grandeur and the exotic opulence of the East, synonymous for Johnson’s audience with passion, excess, otherness and evil. All this implies, as the rogues have before, that the house is a realm unto itself, with its own rules and possibilities. Whilst Mammon believes this because it is to be the starting point of his creation of a new order, for the rogues it is a world of their own creation for inside the house they are the masters claiming to transmute dreams into reality, just as alchemy transmutes base metals into gold. Parallels between the processes of alchemy and various elements of the play, including its structure, are to be found throughout.

This scene is mostly spent with Mammon waxing lyrical about how the stone shall change everything. It is not just to be his route to untold riches for it shall also "confer honour, love, respect, long life/ Give safety, valour: yea and victory" (II.i.50-51). Yet all these things Mammon essentially sees as coming from the creation of gold. He seems to see the satiation of desire as the solution to all his and indeed the world's problems. The stone will satisfy, not just his desire for gold but also his and all men's desires for sexual potency. The connection between money and sex is made in many ways throughout the play as we see it portrayed as a commodity, usable and exploitable.

Surly is "not willingly gull'd", "Your stone" he claims, "cannot transmute me". In an effort to persuade, Mammon points to mythical proof of the power of the stone speaking of "a treatise penn'd by Adam/ O' the philosopher's stone, and in High Dutch" (II.i.83-84). High Dutch it was claimed, by for example Johanes Goropius Becanus in Origanes Anterpianae in 1569, was the original language confused at Babel, giving rise to many different languages. Ian Donaldson suggests that "The Alchemist depicts a new Babel, a house in which different people try in different ways to reach the heaven of their private fantasies, yet are driven further and further from the common language which joins them to each other and to common sense".

Whilst Mammon, then, sees the philosopher's stone as something primitive almost closer to the true reality of the world than the everyday, something that will enable him to herald a new age like the golden ages of the past, for example Adam's time in paradise, his fantasies are in fact taking him further and further from reality. This break from reality is mirrored in the confusion of languages in The Alchemist. The alchemical cant, astrological and numerological jargon, the talk of Hebrew and High Dutch and Surly's later use of Spanish all take language further from truth and reality. The corruption of verbal communication throughout The Alchemist is an important theme and typifies contemporary concerns about language - its purpose is to communicate not to obfuscate, a concern reiterated in Milton’s Paradise