There's just really not much to say about The Alchemist.

It has the one-dimensional characters of a morality play. The language is uninteresting; the wordplay is not clever enough to have an enduring quality. The plot is barely worth mentioning: an academic, a bawd, and a butler perpetrate a series of frauds based around the claim they can produce The Philosopher's Stone.

Clearly a base crowd-pleaser that hasn't aged well. Jonson can do so much better. ( )

A wench is a rare bait, with which a man
No sooner's taken, but he straight firks mad.

Funny that firk, it means many things: to both expel and to fuck as well as become or carry. I felt only the fervor of the former in my experience with brother Ben Jonson. Anthony Vacca has noted here on GR that Jonson was the Marty Amis of the Elizabethan underbelly. That might just be correct. It didn't help my flailing. Such wasn't pretty or becoming. ( )

This was an underwhelming play. While it started well, the play did not continue in that fashion. For the amount of effort that is required to read a play that is this old, I do not think it is worth the effort for most readers-- just my opinion. ( )

After many years I've just re-read this lovely play. I'd forgotten most of the trickery and comedy. Loved it. ( )

Despite the title and subject matter, there's nothing much of esoteric interest in this play. (Well, if you take Face as Yesod, Subtle as Hod, and Dol as Netzach ... but, no.) It is a fairly fascinating Elizabethan satire, though. It would be great fun to see it staged, though I can't recall having noted any productions in recent memory. It's probably confined to academic stages these days.

This edition features notes and glosses by English professor John McCollum, who reliably explains the obvious, and leaves the obscure unremarked. Alchemical jargon is called out as "alchemical jargon," without any effort to clarify what it might actually mean in an alchemical context. McCollum also provides some useful biographical notes on Jonson.