The alchemist body biography of friar
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The Alchemist: Stage History
The Alchemist has a rich and varied stage history. Over the centuries the play has been treated as both an ensemble piece and a star vehicle, and with the exception of Bartholomew Fair it is the Jonson play that raises the most pressing questions in relation to setting, location, treatment of stage space, and theatrical realism. With Volpone, it is the most adapted of Jonson’s plays, the more radical rewritings including Francis Gentleman’s 1770 farce The Tobacconist, Eric Linklater’s The Atom Doctor (1950), later revised as The Mortimer Touch (1952), and Gregory L. Mortensen’s The Scoundrel (1989), and musicals such as John Waller’s Fiddlers Three (1965), Evelyn Rudie’s adaptation for the Santa Monica Group Theatre (1976), and Phil Whitchurch, Bob Carlton, Bob Eaton, and Julian Littman’s Face: The Musical (1996).
The Alchemist has also been deeply entwined with ideas about how, where, and even whether Jonson’s plays should be performed. During the course of the eighteenth century, only the popularity of Abel Drugger appears to have kept the play on the stage; it disappeared for much of the nineteenth century, and even after a run of fine revivals in the early twentieth century it was often viewed as a museum piece – too c
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Distillations magazine
Lawrence Principe is one of the foremost scholars of alchemy in the world. He earned his first PhD in chemistry and his second in the history of science. We asked him to give our readers a taste of his book The Secrets of Alchemy.
Alchemy is full of secrets. Nevertheless, over the past generation scholars have been revealing more and more of its surprising content and importance. No longer is it dismissed as a waste of time or a fool’s quest. Alchemy is now increasingly recognized as a fundamental part of the heritage of chemistry, of continuing human attempts to explore, control, and make use of the natural world. Alchemists developed practical knowledge about matter as well as sophisticated theories about its hidden nature and transformations. Their hope of discovering the secret of preparing the philosophers’ stone—a material supposedly able to transmute base metals into gold—was one powerful incentive for their endeavors. But at the same time, they contributed to mining and metallurgy, and pharmacy and medicine, and their achievements and aspirations (as well as failures) inspired artists, playwrights, and poets. Their researches and goals had both commercial and scientific aspects, as well as philosophical and theological ones
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