The Alchemist (Arden Early Modern Drama) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1472532597 ISBN 13: 9781472532596

Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare, 2023

Synopsis

A fast-paced whirlwind of fantasy and mockery confined to a single room, The Alchemist offers a witty culmination of Jonson's experiments with city comedy. The play has been widely recognized as one of the most impressive achievements of the period's theatre; Coleridge famously described it as one of the three most perfect plots in literature. Yet it is a notoriously difficult play: its alchemical language has aged into obscurity, and its insiderly humour can seem impenetrable to students approaching it for the first time. This comprehensively annotated edition translates and illuminates the play's many pleasures and shows how Jonson's cynical, street-wise wit resonates with our contemporary sensibilities. Pollard highlights the play's witty ingenuity, while offering the information and guidance to enable students to understand and enjoy The Alchemist fully.

About this title

About the Authors

Tanya Pollard is Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, she has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale, and has received awards including a Rhodes Scholarship, Guggenheim Fellowship, NEH Fellowship, NEH Public Scholars Grant, Mellon Fellowship, Whiting Fellowship, and Frances Yates Fellowship at the Warburg Institute. Her most recent monograph, Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford, 2017), was warmly reviewed in periodicals including the TLS, the LRB, and numerous scholarly journals, and received the 2017 Roland H. Bainton Literature Book Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference for the best book published in English on early modern literature.

Tanya has given talks at Oxford, Cambridge, Shakespeare Institute, York and Sheffield – as well as post-show talks at Globe and RSC productions that travelled to New York. She is on American board of trustees for Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Suzanne Gossett (Ph.D. Princeton) is Professor Emerita of English at Loyola University Chicago. She is a General Editor of Arden Early Modern Drama and has recently served as president of the Shakespeare Association of America.

Gordon McMullan is a professor of English at King's College London, UK.

John Jowett is Emeritus Professor at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1472532597
• ISBN 13: 9781472532596
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416
• Editor: Pollard Tanya