Taking The Alchemist Seriously: Polly Findlay’s RSC Production as Seen by a Theater Historian

First is the gulling of Dapper, the first dupe to appear and the last to be conned so that his deception frames much of the action.For those in the original audience at the Blackfriars, Dapper’s fate was both a clever reworking of a recent notorious fraud (the fleecing of Thomas Rogers) but also, as with the other dupes, a case study in how wish-fulfillment and pipe dreams of riches and success can trump reality-and in this instance the mechanism for the deceit is a send-up of the availability of rewards from an otherworldly source.Details about the shape or size of this property are not supplied,4 but clearly the weapon is often associated with Jupiter, as spelled out in a dumb show in Heywood’s The Golden Age (1610) where, after Jupiter is awarded Heaven by the Fates, Iris “presents him with his Eagle, Crown and Scepter, and his thunder-bolt” (3: 78 SD).The blindness of Mammon and others to the various cons is designed to entertain us, but to what extent is that laughter conditioned by Jonson’s satiric thrusts?[...]as suggested in Face’s epilogue, as the play ends, are playgoers themselves involved in what has been displayed on stage?