Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

Jennifer R. Rust

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 58, Number 1, Winter

2018, pp. 95-121 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/687349

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Jennifer R. Rust 2018): 95–121
SEL 58, 1 (Winter 95
95
ISSN 0039-3657
© 2018 Rice University

Forms of Governmentality in
The Alchemist
JENNIFER R. RUST

The concept of sovereignty captures the imagination of early

modernists because it addresses the historical reality of central-
ized absolutist monarchies and provides a novel idiom for debating
the perennially popular topic of secularization. In Carl Schmitt’s
influential formulation, the sovereign figure crystallizes the com-
plex processes of early modern secularization as it transposes
theological tropes into political ones.1 In Schmittian political
theology, a monomaniacal monotheism underwrites the reign of
the singular sovereign. It is easy enough to find tropes such as
the singularity of the sovereign exception and the indivisibility of
the sovereign decision inscribed in the cultural work of the early
modern period, for instance, in appeals to divine right monarchy.
However, in this same critical discourse, sovereignty can appear
exempt from time and from history. An urge toward ahistoricism
is inscribed within the concept of sovereignty itself. The appeal
of sovereignty is that it reflects our contemporary world as much
as it describes an early modern reality. From one angle, as the
example of Schmitt reminds us, the concept of sovereignty ar-
ticulates the fatal, never fully repressed, appeal of authoritarian
politics, which always threatens to return in new, virulent forms.
From another angle, the singular sovereign in early modernity
appears to anticipate the sovereign individual of modern liberal
democracy as the bearer of juridical rights and the proprietor of
her own person.
In the premodern world, however, the singular agency of
sovereignty always stood in tension with figures of community

Jennifer R. Rust is an associate professor of English at Saint Louis Uni-

versity. Her most recent book is The Body in Mystery: The Political Theology
of the “Corpus Mysticum” in the Literature of Reformation England (2014).
96 Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

constituted in sacramental and pastoral terms, which mutated

into more secular notions of commonwealth or body politic more
gradually than is usually acknowledged. If sovereignty is not
exactly the right theoretical idiom for analyzing the passage be-
tween the social-sacramental phenomena of the mystical body
and the body politic, then I want to propose that some elements
of Michel Foucault’s analysis of governmentality are potentially
more productive in this regard. Foucault is, of course, associated
with a New Historicist analytics of power, and he is a prominent
interlocutor in Giorgio Agamben’s influential explorations of
sovereignty and biopolitics. However, in his lectures on govern-
mentality (published in English as Security, Territory, Population)
and most notably in his analysis of the premodern Christian pas-
torate, Foucault rehearses his own discontent with the concept
of sovereignty, revealing a more supple notion of power than is
sometimes attributed to his thought.2
The paradigm of governmentality locates the relationship
between politics and theology at the level of the minister rather
than that of the sovereign. Foucault’s analysis downplays the
significance of traditional sovereign figures, arguing that the
“fundamental problem” of religion and politics does not concern
the pope or the emperor but “that mixed figure, or the two figures
who … share one and the same name of minister. The minister …
is … where the relationship between religion and politics, between
government and the pastorate, is really situated.”3 To “minister”
is to mediate between sovereign institutions and citizens, or be-
tween the larger ecclesia and its members, in order to make the
state or church function as a collective body. A minister manages
economies of people, households, or souls rather than sovereignly
deciding exceptions. Ministers coordinate transcendent aspira-
tions, such as salvation or holiness, with principles immanent
and internal to the population or flock, which involve communal
as well as individual bodies.
With this emphasis on the ministerial, Christianity itself
emerges as a dynamic, open field of strategies and tactics for
governing an “economy of souls.”4 The sovereignty of the pastorate
in this field is always open to challenge and reversal, as claims
to theological authority prove pliable. Foucault’s conception of
medieval and early modern Christianity as a field of flexible ac-
tion and strategic governance offers a means of analyzing how the
mystical body becomes the governmentalized body politic, and
how the subject of pastoral interventions becomes the incipient
subject of liberal governance. Rather than the narrative of the
Jennifer R. Rust 97

secularizing transfer of religious values into political concepts that

is the common motif of discourses of sovereignty, Foucault urges
us to think of modern governmentality as arising on the basis of
the “proliferation” and “intensification” of pastoral concerns and
“techniques.”5
In this article, I read Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) in
terms of pastoral governmentality and its discontents, an analytic
that moves beyond the principle of sovereignty as it is usually
conceived. The sovereign challenged by such a reading is primarily
the figure of the sovereign individual, the agent of capitalism and
liberalism that critics frequently discern emerging from Jonson’s
comedy. My analysis questions the secularity and sovereignty of
Jonson’s individuals, particularly insofar as the elaborate alchemi-
cal scam that organizes the action of the play is embedded in a
world organized by pastoral principles. I argue that the rationale
for the alchemical hoax must be conceived in primarily pastoral
rather than protocapitalist terms. The con artists assume roles,
with each other as well as their customers, that are aligned with
pastoral imperatives rather than the prerequisites of sovereign
individualism. Even the figure who is arguably the most sovereign
individual in the play—the master of the house, Lovewit—is in-
extricably entangled in this web of pastoral-alchemical relations.
Modern readers of Jonson’s Alchemist frequently interpret
the play as a satire of emergent capitalism, populated by a cast
of characters preoccupied with the risks and rewards of an ever-
expanding market economy.6 Jonathan Haynes captures the es-
sence of such interpretations in his claim that “[a]lchemy makes
a neat metaphor for nascent capitalism.”7 Such readings observe
that Jonson’s play anticipates Karl Marx’s use of alchemical
transformation as a trope for the mutating power of capitalism:
“Nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of saints can-
not withstand it.” 8 In this association, the entire arc of Jonson’s
Alchemist parallels Marx’s merging of the alchemical process with
the market, which dissolves all other forms of value, including
religious value, into exchange value. This version of alchemy
coordinates the emergence of the entrepreneurial subject with
the rise of the commodity form, a dynamic enclosed within the
grid of the market and the speculative maneuvers of risk, loss,
and gain. From this perspective, the play illuminates the rising
social forms of the capitalist venture and liberal individualism,
and its con artists represent a new entrepreneurial class forging
these endeavors. When Jonson’s portrayal of alchemy is inter-
preted as primarily a parody of capitalistic investment, the play
98 Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

is understood in terms of a familiar modernity; it moves from the

contemporary regime of late capitalism and neoliberalism to find
in Jonson’s early modern con game a primal scene of commodity
fetishism and venture capitalist subjectivity.
While we can discern the shape of current economic concerns
in Jonson’s early seventeenth-century city comedy, such readings
can occlude aspects of the economy of alchemy that offer a differ-
ent genealogy for the figures of the market and the entrepreneur.
This genealogy discloses how alchemy itself constitutes a form of
governmentality that exceeds as much as anticipates the modern
paradigms of the market and late capitalism. This governmen-
tality is the outgrowth of an economy understood in theological
rather than purely materialistic terms. Before it is a matter of the
market, economy is a conceptual apparatus for negotiating the
theological complexities of incarnation and salvation. The concept
of oikonomia originally named the practice of household manage-
ment—the administration of the oikos—in classical philosophy,
most notably in Aristotle’s Politics. In the early Christian era,
the sense of oikonomia evolved to convey a range of theological
concepts, beginning with the Pauline formula of “the oikonomia
of the mystery” of divine activity in the world.9 Patristic writers
subsequently extended this usage of the term, describing the
Trinity as an oikonomia organizing divine plurality into a dynamic
unity, the incarnation as an oikonomia articulating divinity in the
created world, and the pastoral government of the church as an
oikonomia analogically related to these larger economic orders.
These theological elaborations affiliate oikonomia with the concept
and practice of government insofar as the term expresses how the
creaturely world interacts with and is organized by a transcendent
deity.10 Oikonomia, or economy, continued to have a theological
resonance into early modernity, even as it also acquired more
explicit fiscal and scientific meanings. It was notably revived in
Reformation discourses, particularly in covenantal theology, to
express the ordering of salvation history around a series of pacts
between God and humanity.11
This genealogy clarifies how the impulses of a theological
economy structured according to incarnational, salvational, and
eschatological principles may shape the alchemical pursuits and
governmental experiments of Jonson’s comic entrepreneurs.
This analysis shifts the emphasis from the commodity form to
forms of conduct in which spiritual and materialistic motives are
intertwined. The Alchemist represents a hinge between modern
entrepreneurial and premodern pastoral conceptions of economy,
Jennifer R. Rust 99

and alchemy itself exemplifies this hinge, occupying the border

between the pastoral milieu of spiritual government and an
emergent entrepreneurial market. In this context, the entrepre-
neur only partially emerges from the religious radical, and their
underlying affinity is illuminated.
We can trace the inscription of a theological economy in the
play by drawing on Foucault’s analysis of the Christian pastor-
ate as the prehistory of liberal and neoliberal governmentality.
Foucault’s analysis of the upheavals in pastoral government in
the early modern period illuminates the motives and actions of
Jonson’s alchemically obsessed cast. Pastoral government is
concerned with conducting individuals and communities toward
salvation in the next world. The forms of conduct cultivated by
the pastorate are challenged in turn by counterconduct that seeks
salvation through other modes of governance discovered within
the Christian tradition, inspired particularly by communitarian,
ascetic, and eschatological impulses. Foucault’s account of me-
dieval and early modern counterconduct movements, including
the Reformation, which challenged the unity of the institutional
pastorate and intensified alternate forms of spiritual government,
illuminates the unique status of alchemy. The pursuit of alchemy
in Jonson’s play is a practice that vacillates between orthodox
conduct and transgressive counterconduct. The ambivalence of
alchemy is particularly enhanced by the Reformation context that
Jonson’s play continually foregrounds. Alchemy paradoxically
looks backward to medieval monastic conduct at the same time
that it projects forward into the more overtly reformed counter-
conduct current in seventeenth-century London. The Alchemist’s
conspicuous setting and staging in Blackfriars—a former Domini-
can priory and heterodox early modern liberty—activates both of
these dynamics throughout the play.12 While critics have recog-
nized affinities between alchemy and radical Protestantism in the
play, they have yet to develop its correlations with residual and
emergent modes of pastoral government.13 Examining Jonson’s
play in this light contributes to the larger genealogical project of
understanding the theological entanglements of modern economic
and political governmentality.
Jonson’s alchemical satire can be broadly contextualized
within a range of struggles concerning forms of pastoral govern-
ment that encompasses both medieval monasticism and Refor-
mation millenarianism. The relationship between alchemy and
Christianity in premodern Europe is multifaceted and complex.
Alchemical imagery and concepts frequently draw upon analogies
100 Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

to Christian doctrines and narratives, such as the incarnation and

passion of Christ, which are often understood to correspond to
key alchemical processes. However, the influence goes both ways,
and alchemical and religious discourses reciprocally shape each
other. As Tara Nummedal observes, “Spirits, bodies, redemption,
crucifixion, resurrection, and incarnation all resonated deeply
both in alchemical and soteriological or eschatological contexts,
and therefore it is not difficult to find alchemical imagery (rhetori-
cal and visual) in ‘religious’ writings and, conversely, ‘religious’
imagery in alchemical writings.”14 Examples of this reciprocity
can be found in the discourse of prominent theologians through-
out the period. Martin Luther—not only a central figure in the
efflorescence of Reformation counterconduct but also a former
monk—finds in alchemy a pastoral cosmos keyed to Christian
eschatology: “The science of alchemy I like very well … for the
sake of the allegory and secret signification, which is exceedingly
fine, touching the resurrection of the dead at the last day.”15 Lu-
ther’s enthusiasm for alchemical allegory appears less reformed
and more medieval if we consider the larger connection between
alchemy and medieval monasticism. Medieval friars, such as the
Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, were reputed to have written many
of the tracts treated as authoritative by early modern alchemical
enthusiasts.16 Like Luther, Friar Bacon discerns a congruency
between alchemy and Christian doctrine: Bacon’s “alchemy does
not merely exist within the framework of the Christian universe.
Rather, the Christian universe informs his ideas about alchemy—
not by circumscribing them, but by inspiring them.”17 Monastic
alchemists linked their science to a pastoral worldview animated
by resemblances between the material world and spiritual realms
of salvation or damnation. Nonetheless, the church regarded the
practice of alchemy ambivalently, issuing contradictory rulings
about its legitimacy for the religious.18 At times, alchemy appears
to challenge the religious government of the monastic orders;
although it draws from Christian orthodoxy, it always maintains
the potential to go beyond prescribed conduct.19 In this sense, the
vexed status of alchemical practice in the church often parallels
other ongoing struggles within and against the pastorate.
In England, the association between alchemy and monasticism
persisted into the Reformation, even after the dissolution of the
monasteries. Keith Thomas argues that this association lingered
in the early modern English imagination despite, or perhaps even
because of, the dissolution in the 1530s: “Alchemy was associated
with asceticism and contempt for the world. It was no accident
Jennifer R. Rust 101

that … many medieval alchemists had been monks, and that the
monasteries retained a reputation for occult learning of this kind
in the century after the Reformation. The numerous stories about
the pots of miraculous tincture found in monastic ruins helped to
create a widespread mythology about the link between magic and
holiness.”20 Given this context, Jonson’s decision to set alchemical
escapades in the former Blackfriars Dominican priory is hardly
incidental.21 Like monastic alchemists and their Reformation
heirs, Jonson’s gulls and their cozeners engage in performances
that are more complex than simply opposing Christian conduct.
Despite its sometimes anarchic aspect in the play, the art of
alchemy has an affinity with what Foucault describes in the lec-
tures of Security, Territory, Population as an “art of government”—a
constellation of strategies and techniques for governing that also
encompasses specific rationalities and mentalities—otherwise
termed “governmentality.”22 Foucault insists that the art of gov-
ernment must be distinguished from the exercise of sovereignty:
while sovereignty dominates according to external principles,
government accommodates by managing intrinsic qualities.
Government “is not a matter of imposing a law on men, but
of the disposition of things … of employing tactics rather than
laws, or … employing laws as tactics; arranging things so that
this or that end may be achieved through a certain number of
means.”23 Government works according to principles “internal”
to the people and things it manages: “the end of government … is
to be sought in the perfection, maximization, or intensification of
the processes it directs,” hence its emphasis on “diverse tactics
rather than laws.”24 The sovereign individual is defined by legal
rights that extrinsically determine the conditions of autonomous
action, while the governed individual is managed with an array of
intrinsic tactics that arrange lived experience. However, govern-
ment precedes and exceeds the legal frameworks that establish
the sovereign individual.
The premodern pastorate defines the “field of intervention”
for its government as an “oikonomia psuchōn,” or “economy of
souls,” as delineated by patristic theology.25 Pastoral govern-
mentality manages the excess and growth of this economy via
the accommodation of human conduct and divine principles: it
corresponds to the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, which
insists on the interpenetration of the divine and human nature.26
This governmentality is equally concerned with the spiritual health
and salvation of the individual and the community.27 While the
governmental arts of the pastorate are ultimately oriented toward
102 Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

salvation, their main focus is shaping conduct in this world.

Pastoral government actively intervenes in the lived experience
of individuals in myriad ways, delving into the soul to govern the
individual conscience, as well as directing the way individuals
relate to others in a social context.
In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault blends the insights
of his earlier archaeology in The Order of Things with a newer em-
phasis on government to argue that the world itself is understood
as “subject to an economy of salvation” in pastoral governmental-
ity.28 The extension of pastoral governmentality to the world at
large has several consequences for forms of knowledge: nature
is understood in “anthropocentric” terms, and it is “peopled with
prodigies, marvels and signs” of divine intervention and “filled
with ciphers to be decoded,” such as signatures, analogies, and
resemblances that link disparate material phenomena.29 The
incarnational logic of pastoral governmentality encompasses an
entire episteme, comprehending both human conduct and the
natural world.
Alchemy is an extension of the pastoral art of government.
It seeks to intensify and perfect what is inherent in people and
things through a variety of tactics and technologies. Just as pas-
toral government strives to accommodate and shape principles,
such as the soul, that are intrinsic to individuals, alchemy aims to
manipulate matter to achieve potentialities inherent to it, such as
the potential for base metal to become gold. Rather than engaging
in sovereign acts of creation ex nihilo, the alchemist attempts to
coax matter toward greater perfection: lower metals can become
gold because they already contain the potential to become the finer
metal within themselves. In the logic of alchemy, inanimate mat-
ter is imagined as analogous to natural life; it operates according
to intrinsic principles of growth and development that represent
sites of intervention for the alchemist’s art. Furthermore, the life
of matter is conceived in anthropomorphic terms: the macrocosm
is persistently modeled on the microcosm of the human being,
and it may therefore be governed accordingly.30 The Alchemist’s
Subtle emphasizes the governmental aspect of alchemical prac-
tice as he describes how lesser metals may be directed toward
greater excellence:

Nature doth first beget th’imperfect, then

Proceeds she to the perfect. Of that airy
And oily water, mercury is engendered;
Sulphur o’ the fat and earthy part: the one
Jennifer R. Rust 103

(Which is the last) supplying the place of male,

The other of the female, in all metals.
Some do believe hermaphrodeity,
That both do act and suffer. But these two
Make the rest ductile, malleable, extensive.
And even in gold they are; for we do find
Seeds of them by our fire, and gold in them;
And can produce the species of each metal
More perfect thence than nature doth in earth.31

The logic of analogy and resemblance clearly informs Subtle’s

“engender[ing]” of material substances. He assigns sexual identi-
ties to the elements according to a common alchemical schema: as
Stanton J. Linden puts it, “Sulphur and mercury are the sexually
differentiated ‘parents’ whose union produces offspring, which are
other metals.”32 This personification of matter corresponds to the
anthropomorphic character of the pastoral cosmos, which can be
governed by the correct alchemical techniques. Alchemists find
the “Seeds” of these parent substances in lower matter “by our
fire.” By technically manipulating the proper substances, they
can “produce” the higher matter of “gold.” Again, this art proceeds
according to a governmental paradigm as it seeks to identify and
direct properties that inhere within these natural substances.
This form of governmentality is also pastoral insofar as an econ-
omy of salvation underlies it. Subtle expresses the final goal as
the achievement of a “More perfect” metal through the careful
governance of the ingredients’ qualities. “An important axiom of
alchemy,” writes Linden, “is that nature always ‘strives’ to make
gold, and the ‘souls’ of base metals continually aspire to this state
of perfection.”33 Subtle clearly draws upon this commonplace
conceit, which casts the alchemist as a pastor: his activities are
conceived as analogous to those of a spiritual director, only his
concern is the salvation of metallic, rather than human, souls.
The pastoral alchemist operates according to the plan of divine
providence that directs nature to “Proceed[ ]” from “th’imperfect”
to “the perfect,” from a state of sin to a state of grace; he merely
quickens the process with appropriate technical expertise.
If alchemy works by the tactical manipulation of intrinsic ele-
ments of matter, personified as analogous to the human world,
then Jonson’s play also adeptly reverses this trope. Alchemy can
also become a metaphor for the governing of the human being, who
may be perfected as his lower qualities are transmuted through
pastoral governance into a higher order of being. Alchemy as a
104 Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

metaphor for the government of the human person is eloquently

articulated, again by Subtle, as the crux of his fierce tirade against
Face at the beginning of the play:

Thou vermin, have I ta’en thee out of dung,

So poor, so wretched, when no living thing
Would keep thee company but a spider, or worse?
Raised thee from brooms, and dust, and wat’ring-pots?
Sublimed thee, and exalted thee, and fixed thee
I’ the third region, called our state of grace?
Wrought thee to spirit, to quintessence, with pains
Would twice have won me the philosopher’s work?
Put thee in words and fashion? made thee fit
For more than ordinary fellowships?
Giv’n thee thy oaths, thy quarrelling dimensions?
Thy rules to cheat at horse-race, cock-pit, cards,
Dice, or whatever gallant tincture else?
Made thee a second in mine own great art?
And have I this for thanks? Do you rebel?
Do you fly out i’ the projection?
Would you be gone now?
(I.i.64–80)

Subtle adapts the language of alchemy to argue that he has gov-

erned Face to achieve a higher state of art: the base servant has
been wrought to a greater level of excellence in conduct. He has
guided Face “in words and fashion” to go beyond “ordinary fel-
lowships.” Of course, the irony is that this more “exalted” state
of being is really only a greater skill at cozening and deception.
Just as Subtle is a false scientist, he is also a wayward governor.
Nonetheless, Subtle also poses as a spiritual director, a pastor.
He has done his highest work on Face’s “quintessence.” The term
“quintessence” emblematizes the double nature of alchemy as
both technical practice and spiritual pursuit. Quintessence in the
technical practice of alchemy is literally “the pure essence of five
distillations,” or, less glamorously, “alcohol produced by distill-
ing wine.”34 However, it also has a theological significance that
is analogous to Christian conceptions of the soul. Quintessence
is an “ethereal element” that is “incorruptible and immutable.”35
According to Paracelsus, quintessence is “a nature, a force, a
virtue, and a medicine.”36 Indeed, some alchemists conceived of
quintessence as “an extract of theological heaven” that could be
used to “grant certain humans the incorruptibility that they would
Jennifer R. Rust 105

otherwise only obtain after death and resurrection.”37 In this con-

text, accompanied by “spirit” and “state of grace”—technical terms
of alchemy with obvious theological connotations—quintessence
implies a perfect soul, the goal of Christian spiritual direction.38
Subtle simultaneously casts himself as an alchemist and a gov-
ernor of conduct, and in both roles he acts as a pastor.
Subtle’s speech reveals how the alchemical pursuit is also a
mode of governmentality regardless of whether it is pursued in
good faith. It demands and produces certain forms of conduct
among men as well as metals modeled on the pastoral economy
of a Christian universe. It is particularly notable that the cozen-
ers use this alchemical-pastoral governmental discourse to argue
among themselves. The use of this discourse in an internecine
dispute highlights their inability to stand fully outside the epis-
teme of pastoral government. While they may cynically manipulate
the terms of this discourse when targeting their gulls, they are
also compelled to use it to make sense of their own actions and
their relations with others.
Subtle delivers this alchemical-pastoral diatribe in frustra-
tion at Face’s unwillingness to obey his governmental dictates.
In this scenario, a parodic pastor confronts a revolt against the
conduct that he has attempted to instill in his meager flock of one.
Subtle continues his pastoral-alchemical jargon as he exclaims:
“Do you rebel? / Do you fly out i’ the projection?” Just as Subtle
has reached the final stage of the alchemical process—when he
was about to become figuratively golden, to achieve spiritual
salvation, or when Face and Subtle together were about to start
literally making money—Face has risen up against the conduct
prescribed by his mentor. He becomes a figure of counterconduct,
an individual who wishes to be governed in other than pastoral
terms, who seeks salvation in forms of conduct not cultivated by
the pastor. This episode emphasizes the ambivalence of alchemi-
cal government—its ability not only to mimic but also to subvert
pastoral power. Alchemical conduct can turn into counterconduct
when its forms of governance escape from pastoral control. Thus,
the play opens with a miniature portrait of the crisis in pastoral
governmentality that it will proceed to anatomize.
The antagonism between Subtle and Face reflects a wider
struggle over the government of conduct toward salvation that,
according to Foucault, runs throughout the history of Christianity
but becomes particularly acute in the period immediately before
The Alchemist was composed. Foucault claims that the pastor-
ate’s concern with conduct inevitably—from the earliest days of
106 Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

the church, but most urgently in the sixteenth century—spawned

forms of resistance and modes of counterconduct that challenged
the directives established by the orthodox ecclesia. Forms of
counterconduct always “tend to redistribute, reverse, nullify,
and partially or totally discredit pastoral power in the systems of
salvation, obedience, and truth.”39 Forms of counterconduct are
not opposed to Christianity as such; rather, they activate radi-
cal aspects intrinsic to the Christian tradition. Counterconduct
activities may be “taken up by the Church itself” at certain points
in time, just as they may be initiated at other times by those
interested in neutralizing the influence of the hegemonic pastor-
ate.40 The forms of counterconduct that Foucault analyzes are
all intimately intertwined with Christian traditions: “eschatology,
Scripture, mysticism, the community, and ascesis,” and I will re-
turn to several of these categories in relation to alchemy shortly.41
The Reformation is the most prominent and decisive example
of an explosion of counterconduct. While the Reformation was
undertaken in the name of returning to essential forms of conduct
perceived as corrupted by the Catholic pastorate, it ultimately pro-
voked a transformation: the governance of conduct that had been
primarily the concern of the pastorate of the church was gradually
absorbed by the evolving structures of modern governmentality, a
complex regime that is partially public and political, partially pas-
toral in a newly intensified spiritual form, and partially made up
of other, ostensibly nonreligious institutions, such as medicine.42
However, Foucault explicitly resists analyzing this phenomenon
as a process of secularization or of disenchantment. Instead, he
claims that the crises of the sixteenth century actually resulted
in a massive “proliferation” of questions of conduct, absorbed in
part not only by an intensified post-Reformation pastorate, but
also by an emergent “public domain” wherein these questions do
become political: “With the sixteenth century we enter the age of
forms of conducting, directing, and government.”43 This increase
and intensification of discourses of government cannot be cor-
related to a linear process of secularization as it is commonly
understood.44
The anarchic energy of The Alchemist participates in this early
modern proliferation of forms of government. Consistent with
Foucault’s account of governmentality, Jonson’s play resists any
straightforward trajectory of secularization. As illustrated above,
alchemy presupposes a pastoral view of the cosmos. Alchemy
coheres with the art of pastoral governmentality insofar as its
products and processes claim soteriological properties.45 However,
Jennifer R. Rust 107

within the larger episteme of pastoral government, alchemy may

also sometimes emerge as counterconduct coinciding with sev-
eral variations that Foucault identifies, particularly asceticism,
eschatology, and community. The activities of the cozeners and
their hapless customers in The Alchemist may thus be conceived
not so much as a rebellion against the sovereignty of the law, but
rather as forms of counterconduct that challenge existing modes
of government.
The Alchemist’s conspicuous setting in a former monastic
community turned liberty reinforces the play’s preoccupation with
issues of conduct and counterconduct and the forms of collective
life that they inculcate. Monasticism is associated in Foucault’s
account with the early Christian pastorate’s effort to curb the ex-
cesses of asceticism by developing “a communal and hierarchized
life according to a rule imposed in the same way on everyone.”46
However, in the context of Jonson’s Reformation-era play, Black-
friars’s monastic legacy more aptly evokes counterconduct. To go
beyond Foucault on this point, in the context of Reformation-era,
postmonastic England, there is no longer a Catholic pastorate.
The former pastorate has been partially disassembled such that
the communities of religious orders have disappeared, and while
parishes and bishoprics remain, the latter have been absorbed
into a more overtly political order in the sense that the Church
of England is now governed by the sovereign ruler. In this con-
text, forms of conduct associated with monastic community are
dispersed into modes of counterconduct in which their pastoral
legacy is distorted but nonetheless continues to appear, even
if only as an impossible ideal. The Alchemist conveys how the
social and religious government of Protestant England may be
undermined by an ironic return of twisted variants of monastic
community, accompanied by ascetic and eschatological modes
of counterconduct that threaten to dismember the body politic.
Developing this claim requires moving beyond the realm of
theatrical history and metatheatrical allusion to emphasize the
play’s relation to Blackfriars’s fraught religious past and present.
Blackfriars had been the grounds of a Dominican priory from the
late 1270s until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1538. Even
as it passed into royal control, the Blackfriars precinct main-
tained an exemption from the sovereign authority of the City of
London until 1608, shortly before The Alchemist was written.47
This exemption from regulation by the City is surely in part why
the district was considered an attractive location for an indoor
theater, which would be outlawed in districts under the jurisdic-
108 Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

tion of the City. Andrew Gurr influentially claims that Jonson’s

play was “explicitly composed” for this space and its well-heeled
audience.48 Other critics have emphasized parallels between the
“venture tripartite” of the play’s cozeners and the innovative finan-
cial arrangements—investments in shares—that finally allowed
the Blackfriars Playhouse to emerge as an adult theater after a
contested process (I.i.135).49 However, at the same time that it
was a site of theatrical innovation, Blackfriars was also a hotbed
of heterodoxy in the early seventeenth century, as the district
included numerous Catholic residents, including Jonson himself,
as well as staunch Puritans. This mixed population came to blows
in the years after Jonson’s comedy, during the catastrophic “fa-
tall vespers” building collapse in Blackfriars in 1623 that elicited
communitarian street violence and a subsequent sectarian media
war.50 The complex religious status of Blackfriars heightens the
possibility that Jonson’s satire alludes to the deeper religious ten-
sions in post-Reformation London. The alchemical plot is essential
to illuminating the interplay between the competing notions of
pastoral government that amplified these tensions.
The questions about government and conduct raised during
the opening quarrel of The Alchemist are deepened when the third
partner in the venture, Dol Common, introduces the figure of the
counterconduct community. The principle of community that Dol
articulates as she franticly attempts to repair the breach between
her male partners can be linked to the communitarian religious
life of the former occupants of the Blackfriars space, formerly an
emblem of pastoral conduct but in a Reformation context a sign
of counterconduct. Dol attempts to intervene in the quarrel in
explicitly governmental terms: “Will you undo yourselves with
civil war?” (I.i.83). She proceeds to lecture the pair on how they
should conduct themselves toward each other, directing them
to “labour kindly in the common work” they have undertaken
(I.i.156): “’Sdeath, you abominable pair of stinkards, / Leave off
your barking, and grow one again” (I.i.117–8). Dol’s insults para-
doxically express an expectation of social unity—when the dogs
cease to “bark[ ]” at each other, they may “grow one.”
The egalitarian nature of the community that Dol seeks to
preserve echoes the forms of community associated with coun-
terconduct, particularly those committed to the principle of “ab-
solute equality”—no private property, with an “egalitarian division
or communal utilization of wealth.”51 Dol castigates the folly of
each individual and corrects his self-importance by asserting an
ideal of common life that resonates with both the monastic past
Jennifer R. Rust 109

of the Blackfriars liberty and the counterconduct communities

of the Reformation:

You must be chief? As if you only had

The powder to project with, and the work
Were not begun out of equality?
The venture tripartite? All things in common?
Without priority? ’Sdeath, you perpetual curs,
Fall to your couples again, and cozen kindly
And heartily and lovingly as you should,
And not lose the beginning of a term,
Or, by this hand, I shall grow factious too,
And take my part, and quit you.
(I.i.132–41)

Dol’s speech is as absurd as it is inspirational in its appeal for

“perpetual curs” to make up and “cozen kindly.” Dol’s final threat,
to “take my part” and quit the venture, surely strikes a meta-
theatrical note, as these cozeners are also a kind of company of
players. Nonetheless, Dol’s radical vision of a “project” undertaken
“out of equality”—one holding “All things in common”—suggests
that the activities of the cozeners may be understood as forms of
counterconduct. Dol comically foregrounds crucial questions of
government and conduct: how should the cozeners conduct them-
selves not only as economic allies but also as individuals within
a community? Dol’s injunction to “cozen kindly / And heartily
and lovingly” hints at a notion of Christian charity, tempering
the sense that only materialistic interests are at stake in this
exchange. Furthermore, Dol’s emphasis on “equality” is congru-
ent with the egalitarian nature of the counterconduct community
that may have “strict economic” as well as “religious” forms: “each
is a pastor, a priest, or a shepherd, which is to say nobody is.”52
The counterconduct dimension of Dol’s speech is heightened
insofar as it draws attention to a point of controversy between
Reformation and Counter Reformation pastorates. It both evokes
and partakes in the general proliferation of discourses about
conduct, government, and salvation characteristic of the era.
The speech has a specific, significant scriptural resonance: it
echoes Acts 2:44–5 on the apostolic community, rendered in the
Catholic Douai Bible (1582): “Al they also that beleeued, vvere
together, and had al things common.”53 The confessional dif-
ference between glosses of these verses goes to the heart of the
problem of Blackfriars in post-Reformation London: it illustrates
110 Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

a conflict between emergent pastorates over how to define coun-

terconduct in its communitarian dimension. While the Calvinist
Geneva Bible (1560) offers a virtually identical translation of this
line, its gloss specifies the interpretation, appealing to “order”:
“Not yt their goods were mingled all together: but suche order
was observed that euerie man frankely relieued anothers neces-
sitie.”54 The Geneva commentary anxiously emphasizes that the
apostolic community lived according to a government despite its
otherwise unworldly common life. The Reformed gloss rejects the
imputation of anarchy, which haunted the early Reformation in
the Peasant’s Revolt and the Münster Anabaptist uprising.55 The
commentary in the Catholic Douai Bible, however, seeks to rein-
force this impression of Protestant disorder while defining its own
specific mode of apostolic government: “This liuing in common is
not a rule or a precept to al Christian men, as the Anabaptistes
falsely pretend: but a life of perfection and counsel, folowed of
our Religious in the Catholike Church.”56 The Catholic polemic
of the gloss associates Dol’s “All things in common” with the life
of monastic orders. In the context of The Alchemist, this potential
echo, made more pertinent by Jonson’s complex Catholic affilia-
tions, reinforces the significance of the monastic background of
Blackfriars.57
The Anabaptists, who wrongly interpret the communitarian
tradition of the early church, are actual characters in Jonson’s
play. Jonson’s Anabaptists adapt some forms of monastic as-
ceticism, but they ultimately maintain a smaller community of
brethren than the Catholic orders. The Anabaptists’ goal of “the
restoring of the silenced saints” requires the medicine of the stone
that transforms all metals to gold (III.i.38): “aurum potabile being /
The only med’cine for the civil magistrate, / T’incline him to a
feeling for the cause” (III.i.41–3). The Anabaptists are driven by
a limited version of orthodox communitarian impulses, and they
resist any sense of a general “economy of souls” or good govern-
ment, as their aptitude for bribery suggests.
Dol’s language carries not only subversive political and eco-
nomic implications, but also allusions to confessional disputes
about spiritual government. The divergent glosses of “al things
common” disclose a crucial Reformation-era question about
conduct: to what extent is this apostolic life a model for current
spiritual and social government? In the Douai gloss, although the
religious life of monasticism is seemingly opposed to Anabaptism,
both are nonetheless brought into a constellation with the Acts
exemplum as two competing ways of working out the apostolic
Jennifer R. Rust 111

paradigm: both seek to emulate and also to contain the charitable

spiritual government of the apostles. This tension corresponds
to the reversibility of conduct and counterconduct in the field
of Christianity: what appears as appropriate apostolic-inspired
conduct for one confession appears as subversive counterconduct
for the other.
The tensions concerning counterconduct and community
that run throughout the first scene are further elaborated in the
subsequent action of the play. Despite evidently self-interested
motives for pursuing alchemy, the most prominent figures in
the play persistently echo Dol’s absurd communitarian vision.
Distorted versions of ideal community particularly preoccupy
the chief gulls. We hear echoes of Dol’s sentiment in the “com-
mon cause” of establishing a free state for the sainted elect that
leads the Anabaptists to dabble in alchemy (III.ii.71), as well as
in the socially beneficent “pious uses” to which the fantastically
impiously named Sir Epicure Mammon claims he will put his
alchemically produced wealth: “Founding of colleges and gram-
mar schools, / Marrying young virgins, building hospitals / And,
now and then, a church” (II.iii.49–52). It is easy enough to note
that these aspirations are exposed as hypocritical and hollow as
the play progresses. It is more interesting that in both cases the
imaginative bounty of literal wealth—the gold to be produced by
the art of the fabled philosopher’s stone—is impressed toward
some communitarian end, such that alchemically generated gold
cannot be created simply for the sake of self-aggrandizing wealth.
While the communitarian counterconduct implicit in Dol’s
speech runs throughout the play, ascetic forms of counterconduct
also become prominently associated with both the alchemists and
their clients. Even Surly, the ultimate skeptic of alchemy in the
play, emphasizes the ascetic conduct expected of the successful
alchemist:

Why, I have heard he must be homo frugi,

A pious, holy and religious man,
One free from mortal sin, a very virgin.
(II.ii.97–9)

In other words, the alchemist must match the ascetic ideal of the
medieval monk. Subtle, of course, is far from this in fact, but he
works hard to engineer the appearance of a “notable, supersti-
tious, good soul [who] / Has worn his knees bare and his slippers
bald / With prayer and fasting” in the service of producing the
112 Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

philosopher’s stone (II.ii.102–4). His customers also adopt this

ascetic posture. Thus, Mammon fitfully swerves from his more
carnal desires to demonstrate that his desire for the stone is not
mere “covetise,” but dedicated to the “public good” (II.iii.28 and
16). Mammon portrays his obsession with alchemy as an act
of immense Christian charity, as he highlights his ambition to
use the stone “to fright the plague / Out o’ the kingdom in three
months” (II.i.68–9). These details reveal the underlying belief that
the alchemical transformation cannot occur if the alchemist and
his clients are not chaste and charitable, holding themselves
above base material desires and selfishness.
As equally prominent patrons of alchemy in the play, the
Anabaptists even more sternly embody asceticism as a form of
counterconduct. Some of the most humorous moments in the play
arise from the Anabaptists’ ascetic counterconduct tendencies.
These are particularly mocked in Ananias’s hyperbolic aversion
to the Spanish costume of the skeptical Surly. Of these “Spanish
slops,” Ananias remarks, “They are profane, / Lewd, supersti-
tious and idolatrous breeches” (IV.vii.48–9). He then proceeds to
attack the rest of the outfit as positively Satanic: “Avoid, Satan! /
Thou art not of the light. That ruff of pride / About thy neck
betrays thee … Thou look’st like Antichrist in that lewd hat” (IV.
vii.50–5). Ananias expresses his asceticism in an absurd critique
of fashion that collapses the difference between clothing and re-
ligious conduct: tasteless “breeches” and “hat[s]” clearly signify
unsound, “idolatrous,” or unscriptural religious practices, and,
of course, anything Spanish immediately suggests papistry. The
double sense of habit, still strong in early modernity, underlies
this Anabaptist outrage: habit as clothing is strongly correlated
to habit as a way of life, a form of conduct with strong religious
implications.58
Ananias’s reference to “Antichrist” is a reminder of the escha-
tological beliefs that drive the Anabaptists to embrace alchemy.
Although eschatology is most clearly a component of the Ana-
baptists’ counterconduct, it is also pertinent to understanding
Mammon. Despite being more overtly worldly, Mammon also has
his messianic moments. At the end of the play, after the folly of
the alchemical scheme has been revealed, Mammon does not
abandon eschatological habits of thought; indeed, he doubles
down on them by declaring that he “will go mount a turnip-cart,
and preach / The end o’ the world within these two months”
(V.v.81–2). As his alchemical fantasy collapses, Mammon suc-
cumbs instead to eschatological obsession. This disintegration
Jennifer R. Rust 113

highlights how his alchemical enthusiasm was rooted all along

in a deep vein of religious counterconduct. The apparent differ-
ence between Mammon’s expansive motives and the narrower
fanaticism of the Anabaptists collapses. In both cases, forms of
conduct that may once have been channeled into monastic com-
munities instead emerge as alchemical delusions and volatile
forms of counterconduct.
While the play’s alchemical counterconduct resonates with
larger scale anxieties about social and religious government in
seventeenth-century England, its focus also narrows to portray
how individuals may be shaped by pastoral government, whether
inspired by orthodox conduct or heterodox counterconduct. The
play illuminates how apparently entrepreneurial subjects remain
gripped by forms of pastoral governance. The entrepreneur ap-
pears to be produced not so much by the rupturing force of an
emergent secular economy, but rather by variations within the
longue durée of pastoral power. This dynamic is highlighted in the
parodic liturgical rites to which Dapper, one of the lesser gulls in
the play, is subjected. Caroline McManus analyzes this episode
as a parody of the political theology of the Elizabethan Maundy
(Holy) Thursday ceremony. McManus’s unique twist on familiar
claims about the play’s involvement with emergent capitalism
emphasizes the episode’s potential burlesque of the sovereign’s
appropriation of sacred liturgy: “Jonson’s comic depiction points
to the gradual secularization of the religious ritual, now rendered
in capitalist terms of gold … Religious and commercial motifs
merge in The Alchemist’s satiric staging of royal benevolence.”59
Acknowledging this insight into the liturgical dimensions of the
sequence while resisting the temptation to secularize it fully, I
argue that Dapper’s travails further develop the play’s preoccupa-
tion with spiritual government and counterconduct.
Dapper’s experience illustrates how pastoral governmentality
is actually intensified, rather than dissipated, in a Reformation
milieu, particularly if we understand the rituals he undergoes as
a mutation of established monastic practice. Agamben’s analysis
of the Franciscans, which implicitly extends Foucault’s account
of monasticism as a form of pastoral power, helps to clarify this
link.60 Agamben’s analysis emphasizes monastic life as a “model
of total communitarian life” rooted in ideals of “common life”—
“cenoby,” from the Greek “koinos bios”—articulated in the earliest
Christian writings.61 Aspects of monasticism that contribute to
its status as a unique form of life include the moralized under-
standing of the monk’s habit as not only a way of dressing but
114 Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

also a “way of being or acting” influenced by the classical concept

of “habitus.”62 The habitus of the monk is further defined by the
“temporal scansion of the existence of the monks” in the practice
of praying and singing the Divine Office: “the attention to articu-
lating of life according to hours, to constituting the existence of
the monk as a horologium vitae (‘clock of life’).”63 The cenobitic
community is a collective form of life guided by habit, custom,
and living liturgical forms rather than norms or laws. It is a form
of life defined by government rather than sovereignty.
Although Dapper is driven by more prosaic desires, his mock
monastic experience reveals the persistence of this form of litur-
gical governmentality. On the one hand, Dapper seems to be a
budding entrepreneur insofar as he seeks out risk in the exag-
gerated form of gaming (“cups and horses”) to aspire beyond his
basic income of “forty marks a year” (I.ii.83 and 51). He wants
to win “all games” in order to “leave” the petty business of “the
law” (I.ii.85 and 91). On the other hand, in order to achieve this
advancement, he seeks a supernatural advantage—a “familiar”
(I.ii.80)—for which he is willing to submit himself to the pseu-
dopastoral government of Subtle and Face. Once he has drawn
Dapper into the scheme, Subtle treats the clerk as an acolyte, a
gullible initiate to the mysteries of the Blackfriars house. Subtle
claims that Dapper must undergo “a world of ceremonies” to
obtain his “rifling fly” (I.ii.144 and 84). Subtle again assumes a
pastoral posture in his instructions to Dapper:

Sir, against one o’clock, prepare yourself.

Till when you must be fasting; only, take
Three drops of vinegar in at your nose,
Two at your mouth, and one at either ear;
Then bathe your fingers’ ends and wash your eyes,
To sharpen your five senses; and cry “hum”
Thrice, and then “buzz” as often; and then, come.
Can you remember this?
......................
And put on a clean shirt: you do not know
What her Grace may do you in clean linen.
(I.ii.164–75)

Dapper is instructed to simulate several forms of conduct remi-

niscent of the monastic form of life. He must impose a kind of
“temporal scansion” upon himself insofar as his preparations
are to begin precisely “against one o’clock.” This parody of the
Jennifer R. Rust 115

monastic devotion to the Divine Office is reinforced by Subtle’s

instructions to “cry ‘hum’ / Thrice, and then ‘buzz,’” suggesting
a travesty of liturgical singing. Subtle’s injunction to “put on
a clean shirt” to meet “her Grace” evokes the link between the
monastic habit and the aspiration to sanctify life and labor as
divine work. Finally, the specification that Dapper use “vinegar”
to purify himself links this subplot to the main alchemical plot,
wherein vinegar is also mentioned as an essential ingredient for
alchemical conjuration: when Subtle calls for “the philosopher’s
vinegar,” Surly adds in a comic aside: “We shall have a salad”
(II.iii.100–1). This minor alchemical reference reminds the audi-
ence of the shared pseudoliturgical, mock-pastoral character
of both the scam played on Dapper and the larger alchemical
scheme of the play.
While Subtle’s instructions mimic elements of monastic disci-
pline, they ultimately contradict its spirit as a form of devotional
community. Dapper’s object, a good luck charm for gambling,
is fundamentally self-involved. However, it is Dapper’s entrepre-
neurial spirit that leads him to acquiesce to the ritual, which
culminates in an extended mock liturgy in which Subtle acts as
a “Priest of Fairy” and Dapper is shut up in a privy (III.v.0.1).
Dapper’s participation can also be taken to illuminate the con-
tinuing need for such rituals in a milieu in which the traditional
pastorate has broken apart and the pressure to seek new forms
of government has intensified. In the context of the Blackfriars
Theatre—a dissolved monastery formerly governed according to
liturgical conduct—this scene does not exactly appear to be one
of demystification.64 Monastic rituals appear unmoored from
their original pastoral framework, but paradoxically, this has
actually intensified their hold on the subject. While the episode
does emphasize an ironic gap between Blackfriars’s monastic past
and its Reformation present, it also reveals the persistent, even
exaggerated, dependence of entrepreneurial individuals on the
rituals and rhythms of the older economy of souls emblematized
by the former monastery. These rhythms may be recalibrated to a
new form of economy focused on this world rather than the next,
but the techniques of pastoral government themselves remain
compelling even if wealth replaces salvation as the ultimate end.
In this light, the pursuit of wealth by the entrepreneur does not
appear purely secularized but remains mingled with spiritual
aspirations and assumptions.
The Alchemist’s experiments in governmentality proliferate
in a Blackfriars space that seems immune to the extrinsic au-
116 Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

thority of a sovereign order, the rule of law, or even the stability

of the autonomous sovereign individual. The conclusion of the
comedy, however, appears to mark the reassertion of sovereignty.
The governmental exuberance of the cozeners’ counterconduct
community is seemingly foreclosed by the return of the ultimate
sovereign in the world of the play: the master of the Blackfriars
house, Lovewit. However, the reinstitution of a sovereign order
does not cancel the fact that the majority of the action unfolds
according to the logic of a pastoral universe unleashed from a
coherent pastorate. Indeed, the fact that Lovewit reaps most of
the profits of the alchemical scheme reveals how even this sov-
ereign figure is ultimately dependent on the tactics of a wayward
governmentality that skew his singular and decisive role at the
end of the play. While the counterconduct virtuoso Face must
return to his role as Jeremy the butler, he maintains the strate-
gies of the alchemical pastor to escape more serious penalties.
The pastoral paradigm of alchemy is grafted into a convenient
marriage plot in which the young widow, Dame Pliant, is cast as
the salvific philosopher’s stone who “Will make [Lovewit] seven
years younger, and a rich one” (V.iii.86). The sovereign Lovewit
consents to this scheme, agreeing to be governed by his servant’s
tactics. The normative hierarchy is thus subtly subverted at the
end, as the master himself acknowledges with references to the
“strain / Of his own candour” and the “Stretch” and “crack” of
“age’s truth” that his hasty marriage has entailed (V.v.151–2 and
156). As such, the integrity of Lovewit’s sovereign autonomy is
compromised by the persistent deviance of Face’s governmentality
at the very moment when it appears to have taken full command.

NOTES

See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of

1 

Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005),

p. 36: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secular-
ized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in
which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby,
for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also
because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary
for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurispru-
dence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this
analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical idea of the
state developed in the last centuries.” See also the famous opening to Political
Theology: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (p. 6).
Jennifer R. Rust 117

2 
See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the
Collège de France, 1977–78, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell
(New York: Picador, 2007).
3 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, pp. 191–2.
4 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 192.
5 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 231.
6 
Katharine Eisaman Maus offers an exemplary interpretation in this vein
that emphasizes how “new social configurations are free to emerge” in the
play’s urban setting—“enterprises and alliances structured not by traditional
bonds of kinship and class hierarchy, but by self-interest and the pursuit
of profit” (introduction to The Alchemist, in English Renaissance Drama: A
Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Maus, and Eric Rasmus-
sen [New York: Norton, 2002], pp. 861–7, 861). While Maus recognizes a
communitarian horizon in Ben Jonson’s other work, this is not extended to
The Alchemist, which she elsewhere portrays as a world given over wholly to
material economies where “social life … is a zero-sum game” (“Satiric and Ideal
Economies in the Jonsonian Imagination,” ELR 19, 1 [Winter 1989]: 42–64,
45). For comparable readings, see Melissa D. Aaron, “‘Beware at what hands
thou receiv’st thy commodity’: The Alchemist and the King’s Men Fleece the
Customers, 1610,” in Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage,
ed. Paul Menzer (Selinsgrove PA: Susquehanna Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 72–9;
and Jonathan Haynes, “Representing the Underworld: The Alchemist,” SP 86,
1 (Winter 1989): 18–41.
7 
Haynes, p. 36.
8 
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes,
3 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1:229. For an excursus on Chaucer’s and
Jonson’s literary treatments of alchemy in this vein, see Peggy A. Knapp,
“The Work of Alchemy,” JMEMSt 30, 3 (Fall 2000): 575–99.
9 
The phrase “the oikonomia of the mystery” appears in St. Paul’s Letter to
the Ephesians 3:9, although in modern translations oikonomia is frequently
rendered as “plan” or “purpose.” For example: “To me … this grace was given,
to preach to the Gentiles the inscrutable riches of Christ, and to bring to
light [for all] what is the plan (oikonomia) of the mystery hidden from ages
past in God who created all things” (Eph. 3:8–9, New American Bible, rev.
edn. [Washington DC: Confraternity of the Christian Doctrine, 2010]). The
translation of oikonomia as “plan” is challenged by Giorgio Agamben in The
Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Govern-
ment (Homo Sacer II, 2), trans. Lorenzo Chiesa with Matteo Mandarini, Merid-
ian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2011); Agamben
favors understanding oikonomia as “activity” or “administration” rather than
“plan” (pp. 22–3). In The Origins of Neoliberalism: Modeling the Economy from
Jesus to Foucault (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2016), Dotan Leshem
defends the idea that some reference to “economy as God’s salvific plan” is
warranted in Ephesians 3:9, although he also emphasizes the broader eco-
nomic implications of the term (p. 26). On the difficult history of Christian
translations of oikonomia, see also Marie-Jose Mondzain, “Oikonomia,” in
Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin,
trans. Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathaniel Stein,
118 Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

and Michael Syrotinski, trans. ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael
Wood (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 728–33.
10 
This theological genealogy of oikonomia is derived from Agamben, The
Kingdom and the Glory, pp. 17–67 and 109–43; and Leshem, pp. 25–79 and
135–51. Both Agamben and Leshem engage significantly with patristic theo-
logians as well as Foucault in their accounts, although Leshem substantially
critiques Agamben’s accounts of Christian oikonomia and the Foucauldian
concepts of governmentality and pastoral power (pp. 6–8).
11 
See Germano Maifreda, From Oikonomia to Political Economy: Construct-
ing Economic Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution
(Farnham UK: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 120–4.
12 
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Blackfriars was a “liberty” in
the strict sense of being “an area of local administration distinct from neigh-
boring territory and possessing a degree of independence” (OED, 2d edn., s.v.
“liberty, n.1,” 6c[a]). Although the precinct was within the walls of the City of
London, it was exempt from the City’s jurisdiction in some significant ways.
13 
On radical religion and alchemy in Jonson’s play, see John S. Mebane,
“Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: Utopianism and Reli-
gious Enthusiasm in The Alchemist,” in “Comedy,” special issue, RenD, n.s.,
10 (1979): 117–39; Gerard H. Cox, “Apocalyptic Projection and the Comic
Plot of The Alchemist,” ELR 13, 1 (Winter 1983): 70–87; Robert M. Schuler,
“Jonson’s Alchemists, Epicures, and Puritans,” MRDE 2 (1985): 171–208;
Richard Harp, “Ben Jonson’s Comic Apocalypse,” Cithara 34, 1 (November
1994): 34–43; Stanton J. Linden, Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English
Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky,
1996), pp. 128–30; and Andrew Moran, “The Apotropaic and Sanctified Mar-
riage of Sulfur and Mercury in The Alchemist,” BJJ 20, 1 (May 2013): 1–19.
14 
Tara Nummedal, “Alchemy and Religion in Christian Europe,” Ambix
60, 4 (November 2013): 311–22, 316.
15 
Martin Luther, The Table Talk of Martin Luther, trans. William Hazlitt
(London: G. Bell, 1902), p. 326.
16 
See Zachary Matus, “Resurrected Bodies and Roger Bacon’s Elixir,”
Ambix 60, 4 (November 2013): 323–40; and Wilfrid Theisen, OSB, “The At-
traction of Alchemy for Monks and Friars in the Thirteenth–Fourteenth
Centuries,” ABR 46, 3 (September 1995): 239–53.
17 
Matus, “Resurrected Bodies,” p. 339.
18 
See Matus, “Alchemy and Christianity in the Middle Ages,” History
Compass 10, 12 (December 2012): 934–45, 939.
19 
On the possible problems with alchemy from an ecclesiastical perspec-
tive, see Theisen, pp. 250–1.
20 
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1971), p. 269.
21 
In an unpublished essay that complements some of my claims, Julia
Kotzur also argues that The Alchemist profoundly engages the monastic
legacy of Blackfriars: “‘A House to Practise in’: Transformations of Religious
and Domestic Space in Jonson’s The Alchemist,” a paper read by Andrew
Gordon during the session “Writing Place: Spatial Construct of Self and Place
in Early Modern Drama” at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society
of America, Chicago, March 2017.
Jennifer R. Rust 119

22 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, pp. 100 and 108. For Fou-
cault’s full formal introduction and definition of governmentality, including
the claim that the 1978 lectures should really be titled a “history of ‘govern-
mentality,’” see Security, Territory, Population, pp. 108–9. The association of
the term with rationality and mentality is not explicitly developed by Foucault
but is suggested by Thomas Lemke in “‘The Birth of Bio-Politics’: Michel
Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmental-
ity,” Economy and Society 30, 2 (May 2001): 190–207, 191. Foucault tends
to speak of governmentality as a phenomenon dating from the eighteenth
century to the present, with the Christian pastorate forming an extensive
“prelude” to “governmentality” proper (Security, Territory, Population, p. 184).
The transition is fluid enough, and the concepts so closely linked, that I refer
to “pastoral governmentality” in the current argument, although that does
not tend to be Foucault’s strict usage.
23 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 99.
24 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 99.
25 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, pp. 95 and 192. See also
Agamben’s discussion of Foucault’s use of the patristic concept of oikonomia
(The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 110).
26 
For an account of the incarnational theology underlying early Christian
formulations of pastoral government, see Leshem, pp. 55–79 and 135–51.
27 
Foucault addresses this aspect of the pastorate most fully in the lecture
of 22 February 1978 (Security, Territory, Population, pp. 163–90, 164–7). For
Foucault’s definition of conduct, see Security, Territory, Population, p. 193.
See also Arnold I. Davidson, introduction to Security, Territory, Population,
pp. xviii–xxxiv, xix–xx; Davidson, “In Praise of Counter-Conduct,” History
of the Human Sciences 24, 4 (October 2011): 25–41; and Matthew Chrulew,
“Pastoral Counter-Conducts: Religious Resistance in Foucault’s Genealogy
of Christianity,” Critical Research on Religion 2, 1 (April 2014): 55–65.
28 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 235. For the medieval and
early modern episteme, see Foucault, “The Prose of the World,” in The Order
of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970),
pp. 17–45. In the later lectures, Foucault revisits this earlier account and
remaps it onto his genealogy of governmentality. The hallmarks of pastoral
governmentality are written on the world at large as a “specific economy of
pastoral power” (Security, Territory, Population, p. 235). For a reflection on
how Foucault’s development of governmentality potentially encompasses both
human and nonhuman agents, see Lemke, “New Materialisms: Foucault and
the ‘Government of Things,’” TCS 32, 4 (July 2015): 3–25.
29 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, pp. 235–6.
30 
On the “macrocosm-microcosm correspondence” characteristic of
alchemical thought, see Linden, pp. 21–3. On the macrocosm-microcosm in
the medieval and Renaissance episteme, see Foucault, The Order of Things,
pp. 30–2.
31 
Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. Brian Woolland, Cambridge Literature, gen.
ed. Judith Baxter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), II.iii.158–70. All
subsequent references to The Alchemist are to this edition and will be cited
parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number. 

120 Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

Linden, p. 23. See also Linden’s comments on the accuracy of Jonson’s

32 

alchemical terminology in this passage and others in the play (p. 122).
33 
Linden, p. 24.
34 
Matilde Battistini, Astrology, Magic, and Alchemy in Art, trans. Rosanna
M. Giammanco Frongia (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2007), p. 292; and
Nummedal, p. 316.
35 
Battistini, p. 292.
36 
Paracelsus, The Archidoxies of Theophrastus Paracelsus, in The Her-
metic and Alchemical Writings of Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast
of Hohenheim, Called Paracelsus the Great, trans. Arthur Edward Waite, 2
vols. (London: James Elliott, 1894), 2:3–93, 22.
37 
Nummedal, p. 316.
38 
Peter Holland and William Sherman gloss the term “spirit” as “[t]he
essence that rises when matter is heated and purified,” and “state of grace”
as “[t]he spiritual purity required of the successful alchemist” (Jonson, The
Alchemist, ed. Holland and Sherman, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works
of Ben Jonson, ed. Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols.
[Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012], 3:541–710, 567n70 and 567n69).
39 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 204.
40 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 215.
41 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 214.
42 
See Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, pp. 229–31 and 215–6.
Foucault identifies modern medicine as one great heir of the pastorate: “In
its modern forms, the pastorate is deployed to a great extent through medical
knowledge, institutions, and practices” (Security, Territory, Population, p. 199).
43 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, pp. 230–1. Foucault’s re-
sistance to the secularizing narrative of transfer is explicit: “So there was
not a transition from the religious pastorate to other forms of conduct … In
fact there was an intensification, increase, and general proliferation of this
question and of these techniques of conduct” (Security, Territory, Population,
p. 231).
44 
On Foucault’s resistance to narratives of secularization in his account
of pastoral power, see Philippe Büttgen, “Théologie Politique et Pouvoir Pas-
toral,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 62, 5 (September–October 2007):
1129–54, 1137–9.
45 
See Nummedal, pp. 316–8; and Linden, pp. 193–223.
46 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 205.
47 
Details of the early history of the Blackfriars site are derived from Irwin
Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse: Its History and Its Design (New
York: New York Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 3–27. For background on the com-
plicated status of the liberties in general and Blackfriars in particular, see
Anthony Paul House, “The City of London and the Problem of the Liberties,
c1540–c1640” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Oxford, 2006). See also, Tiffany Stern,
“‘A Ruinous Monastery’: The Second Blackfriars as a Place of Nostalgia,” in
Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean
Playhouse, ed. Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 97–114.
48 
Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2d edn. (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1996), p. 167. See also Anthony J. Ouellette, “The Alche-
Jennifer R. Rust 121

mist and the Emerging Adult Private Playhouse,” SEL 45, 2 (Spring 2005):
375–99; and R. L. Smallwood, “‘Here, in the Friars’: Immediacy and Theatri-
cality in The Alchemist,” RES, n.s., 32, 126 (May 1981): 142–60.
49 
On the tormented prehistory of the Blackfriars Theatre, see Menzer
and Ralph Alan Cohen, “Introduction: Shakespeare Inside and Out,” in Inside
Shakespeare, pp. 7–16; and Gurr, “London’s Blackfriars Playhouse and the
Chamberlain’s Men,” in Inside Shakespeare, pp. 17–30. For metatheatrical
readings of the play, see Aaron, pp. 74–7; and Haynes, pp. 32–3.
50 
On the 1623 incident, see Alexandra Walsham, “‘The Fatall Vesper’:
Providentialism and Anti-Popery in Late Jacobean London,” Past and Present
144 (August 1994): 36–87.
51 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 211.
52 
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 211.
53 
[Gregory Martin, trans.], The Nevv Testament of Iesus Christ [Douai-
Rheims Bible] (Rhemes: Iohn Fogny, 1582), Acts 2:44–5, p. 295; EEBO STC
(2d edn.) 2884.
54 
[William Whittingham, trans.], The Bible and Holy Scriptures Conteyned
in the Olde and Newe Testament [Geneva Bible] (Geneva: Rouland Hall, 1560),
OO3r, p. 55; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 2093.
55 
For a broad outline of these events, see Patrick Collinson, The Refor-
mation: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2004).
56 
[Martin], p. 296n44.
57 
On Jonson’s shifting religious affiliations, see Julie Maxwell, “Religion,”
in Ben Jonson in Context, ed. Julie Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 2010), pp. 229–36; and Donaldson, Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays
in Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 47–65.
58 
See the discussion of habit in Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass,
Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2000), p. 6. On the moralized understanding of the monk’s habit
as a “way of being or acting,” see Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic
Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics
(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2013), pp. 13–6.
59 
Caroline McManus, “Queen Elizabeth, Dol Common, and the Perfor-
mance of the Royal Maundy,” ELR 32, 2 (Spring 2002): 189–213, 210. On
this episode as an example of the rites of “false religion” in the play, see Alan
C. Dessen, Jonson’s Moral Comedy (Evanston IL: Northwestern Univ. Press,
1971), p. 125.
60 
Although Agamben does not explicitly address Foucault’s analysis
of pastoral power in The Highest Poverty, his attention to the details of the
monastic form of life appears consistent with Foucault’s claims in some
ways. However, Agamben elsewhere expresses skepticism toward Foucault’s
analysis of the pastorate. In The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben claims that
Foucault’s account of the “passage from ecclesiastical pastorate to political
government” is “not terribly convincing” (p. 112).
61 
Agamben, The Highest Poverty, pp. 9 and 11.
62 
Agamben, The Highest Poverty, p. 13.
63 
Agamben, The Highest Poverty, p. 19.
64 
See McManus, p. 212. McManus’s emphasis on this sequence as a
scene of disenchantment overlooks some of the complex ways that ritual
maintains its efficacy in this episode.