Compare and contrast Ben Jonson’s ‘The Alchemist’ and...

The study will encompass the compare and contrast of two great writers’ literary works. It will take comprehensive discussion on â€Å"Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist† and â€Å"William Shakespeare’s The Tempest†. Jonson and Shakespeare were contemporaries with more immediately recognizable common ground between them than difference. They shared the same profession and brought forth their works from the matrix of common intellectual property. They appealed to the same audience and both gained popularity and esteem as accomplished playwrights. At the more social level, they were both struggling artists conscious of the need for patronage and support from their wealthier and more powerful peers. Both Jonson and Shakespeare experienced the trials and†¦show more content†¦The distinction between I and him is emphasized by Jonsons assertion of an answer to Shakespeares way of doing things. The quest for self-knowledge has been integral to the structures and evolution of human society throughout history. During the early modem period, the classical maxim of nosce teipsum operated almost universally, not only as a prompt towards, but also as a goal of, both individual and communal achievement and actualization. At one level, Hamlets tribute may be taken as an adumbration of the Renaissance engagement with the epistemological enquiries into the nature of man, and his place and function in the cosmic chain of being. â€Å"What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?† Jonson explicitly bases their sense of the play’s similarity upon theories of comedy that imply such affirmation. In Volpone and The Alchemist, Jonson sues irony to expose how far short of the ideal is the world of the play, and thus celebrates the ideal indirectly. If the