Two scientific manifestos: discourses on science in Jonson's The Alchemist and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

The Alchemist, by Ben Jonson and Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe have weathered considerable critical consideration and have been interpreted through the filters of a wide variety of theoretical approaches. I chose to examine the plays from a New Historical perspective. By discussing how the plays were received, and what milieu they were launched in, I hoped to learn what purpose they had, what function they carried out in their context (besides that of entertaining crowds of paying theatrical patrons). Both these plays were first published and performed in England near the cusp of the seventeenth century. They were presented in an intellectual milieu in which the idea of science was still a work in progress, a matter under consideration. It was a new social, political, and theological power, whose effects were suspiciously and cautiously observed by the authors of these two plays. A great deal of discourse was produced concerning the roles of science in relation to the existing intellectual, political, religious, and social structures, and the mechanisms available for limiting and controlling these roles. The discursive activity surrounding the philosophical and practical integration of science into the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century English social, political, and intellectual milieu was carried out through a variety of media. One of these media was the theatre. These two plays functioned in their milieu as manifestos of sorts, statements of policy and cautionary advice. They advise a sceptical approach to science. They point out its subversive qualities: how it undermines theological thought and function, how it encourages political insubordination, democratic power distribution, and republicanism, and how it inverts established social order. Science, in other words, is functioning as an autonomous and potentially seditious power. Marlowe and Jonson's plays, though distinct in tone and style, are both intensely concerned with science, and both caution against accepting it wholeheartedly into the English renaissance world view.