In the spat between Face and Subtle, the alchemist, that opens Jonson's play, Subtle is described as having been very much down on his luck before Face met him:

Piteously costive, with your pinch'd-horn-nose,
And your complexion of the Roman wash,
Stuck full of black and melancholic worms,
Like powder-corns shot at th' artillery-yard. (1.1.28-31)

Glossing "Roman wash," Brooke and Paradise suggest "a wash of alum water" (577n),[1] that is, an emetic. Face apparently returns to this odious metaphor when he calls Subtle "The vomit of all prisons--" (1.1.104). However, the phrase "Piteously costive" introduces the motif of constipation to the passage that seems to point to a conflation of sewer and stomach contents, such as occurs in the Curculio of Jonson's chief comedic model, Plautus.

In Curculio (corn-worm, weevil), Platus uses the word cloaca (a sewer, drain) to describe the stomach of a drunken woman (1.2.29).

Vomit and excrement may be equally offensive to one's "nose," and Face knows, in retrospect, that Subtle was a charlatan waiting to explode. In the spat, Subtle resorts to a kind of halo-effect defense/attack, berating Face as a "scarab" (59), that is, a dung beetle, and "[t]he heat of horse's dung" (84). Jonson's irony here centers on the fact that the scarab held a privileged place in esoteric alchemy, signifying the survival of the stag (Christ) in a world the morality and thought processes of which amounted to little more than vomit and excrement.

In addition to being known as the dung beetle, the scarab is also known as the stag beetle because of the peculiarity of the structure of its antennae. Cervo volante, "the flying stag," is Italian for scarab. Whereas Christ's flying may be linked to resurrection and ascension, comparable to the ascension of the illuminated man in esoteric alchemy, Subtle's "flying" is a swindle, consisting in the "Selling of flies" ("The Argument," 11), that is, familiar spirits, to gullible clients. Consequently, Jonson's parodic irony is positively vitriolic when he has Face exclaim to Dapper, a mark, in reference to Subtle, "Hang him, proud stag, with his broad velvet head" (1.2.61)--velvety like the dung beetle's antennae and broad with relatively enormous pincers.

The element of the cloaca is essential to Jonson's larger satirical meaning. In the passage cited above, it seems clear that Jonson is punningly acknowledging the Curculio (the corn-worm) as his contextual source: "worms" and "corns" point to Plautus. Clyster and emetic combine to produce Subtle's moral character.

1. C. F. Tucker Brooke and Nathaniel Burton Paradise, English Drama 1580-1642 (New York: Heath, 1933). This text is still in print and is the preferred text in college and university Renaissance drama courses.

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By NATHAN CERVO, Franklin Pierce College