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- Herausgeber: Quickie Classics
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
Ben Jonson's The Devil is an Ass (1616) is a scintillating city comedy in which Pug, a minor devil, descends on Jacobean London only to discover that human projectors, gallants, and gulls outstrip Hell in invention. The action circles the credulous Fitzdottrel, exploited by the patent-monger Meercraft and outmaneuvered by the witty Wittipol, who even cross-dresses as a Spanish lady to test virtue and vanity. Written for the King's Men at Blackfriars, the play blends Jonson's classical architectonics with bustling urban satire, targeting monopolies, fashion, and courtly imposture. A poet-scholar steeped in Camden's Westminster pedagogy, Jonson married learned design to sharp moral purpose. His service as court masque-maker for James I and his experience of London's entrepreneurial "projects," as well as brushes with censorship, inform the play's skepticism toward novelty and privilege. Contemporary with his 1616 folio, The Devil is an Ass displays a laureate claiming the city stage while anatomizing the economies—legal and infernal—of his age. Readers of early modern drama will relish its ingenious plotting, quicksilver prose, and topical bite. Whether approached for performance or study, this play rewards attention with comic exuberance and acute social diagnosis, showcasing Jonson at once urbane, erudite, and unsparingly exact. Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable—distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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The Devil is an Ass (Summarized Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
In The Devil is an Ass, Ben Jonson turns wickedness into a mirror that shows human folly outwitting hell itself. This satiric city comedy, set in bustling early modern London, was written and first staged in the early seventeenth century. Jonson draws on moral allegory and the quicksilver energies of urban life to examine credulity, status, and appetite. The result is a work at once antic and exacting, where the marketplace becomes a laboratory for vice and invention. Its theatrical verve and civic focus align it with the great London comedies, yet its premise gives the moral stakes a slyly supernatural edge.
A junior devil named Pug petitions for a tour on Earth and lands in London, eager to practice temptations among mortals. Expecting easy victories, he instead collides with a swarm of projectors, gallants, and opportunists whose schemes are already humming along without infernal help. He insinuates himself into the household of a credulous gentleman, hoping to steer mischief and reap souls, only to find that human vanity sets the agenda. The play moves with spry changes of scene and a deft mix of taut verse and pointed prose, its tone by turns scathing and playful, always attentive to comic timing.
As a city comedy, the play thrives on topical energies: speculative ventures, legal hairsplitting, theatrical disguises, and the latest fashions in speech and consumption. Jonson arranges these materials with classical clarity, building parallel intrigues that echo one another and expose the same nerve of appetite. Characters are sketched through sharp habits of mind and talk, their linguistic tics as revealing as their plots. Farce-like business collides with cool moral scrutiny, so that laughter and judgment arrive together. The dramaturgy prizes economy and counterpoint, guiding audiences across crowded streets, chambers, and thresholds where business and performance blur into a single urban rhythm.
The central themes pivot on gullibility and invention: the desire to be thought fashionable or powerful makes people easy marks, while the city rewards those who can stage convincing identities. Jonson probes how credit and reputation, rather than truth, grease the workings of exchange, and how legal forms can be bent to private advantage. The supernatural visitor is less a threat than a measuring device, revealing the scale of everyday cunning. Throughout, the play weighs appetite against restraint, spectacle against judgment, and public show against private conscience, asking what it means to keep integrity in a marketplace that prices everything.
For contemporary readers, the satire feels startlingly fresh because the machinery it dissects still hums: speculative bubbles, persuasive branding, confidence tricks, and the porous line between entrepreneurship and exploitation. Jonson’s London anticipates modern circuits of rumor and influence, where a clever story can outpace fact and a costume can pass for authority. The play’s scrutiny of contracts, loopholes, and engineered consent speaks to present debates about accountability in finance, media, and public life. Its comic premise disarms while it instructs, inviting us to examine how we rationalize advantage, how easily we admire imposture, and how complicity spreads through audiences.
Reading the play rewards attentive listening to cadence and idiom, since much of its wit turns on how people talk themselves into traps. Jonson packs topical references to trades, projects, and fashions, yet the thrust of each scene remains clear: who wants what, who pretends, and who believes. Notes can illuminate the period’s jargon without slowing the brisk momentum of entrances, exits, and reversals. The shifts between public spaces and household interiors create a layered social map, while the devil’s presence threads a comic through-line rather than dominating events. The result is an agile performance text that also invites reflection.
Taken together, these features make The Devil is an Ass a bracing meditation on appetite and spectacle, wrapped in laughter that leaves a thoughtful aftertaste. Its London is particular, yet its moral geometry travels well, tracing how cleverness becomes currency and how admiration can be weaponized. By setting a modest fiend against ordinary ambition, Jonson sharpens perspective on our own bargains and blind spots. The comedy’s energy never excuses vice; it exposes the scripts by which vice sells itself. To read or see it now is to encounter a classic that entertains while challenging the stories we tell ourselves.
Synopsis
Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, first performed in 1616 by the King’s Men, is a satirical city comedy that opens in Hell. A junior devil named Pug begs his superior for leave to visit London and prove his talent for mischief. He is warned that the modern city’s frauds outstrip infernal invention, yet he is granted a limited commission to tempt mortals. This premise frames a study of Jacobean credulity, fashion, and speculative schemes, as the play proposes a contest between supernatural knavery and the everyday cunning of Londoners who profit from law, novelty, and appetite without any help from Hell.
Arriving in the city, Pug quickly discovers how little power he truly wields. He attaches himself to a vain, gullible gentleman, Fitzdottrel, who is obsessed with status, novelty, and the proud display of a fashionable life. Fitzdottrel’s household contains a quietly steadfast wife whose dignity contrasts with her husband’s cravings, giving the play a steady moral counterpoint. Pug’s attempts at ordinary temptations are thwarted not by virtue alone but by the sheer busyness of human devices. Servants, brokers, and suitors swarm around opportunities, and the devil’s traditional tricks appear amateurish amid this brisk traffic of self-interest.
Into this bustle steps Wittipol, a witty gallant with a complicated interest in Fitzdottrel’s wife and an evident disdain for the husband’s treatment of her. Wittipol and his companions are quick of mind and fluent in the fashions of the town, and they adopt stratagems that include elaborate disguises and staged encounters. Their gamesmanship lets the play explore performance—how identity, language, and costume enable or restrain desire and power. While Wittipol’s sophistication can look predatory, it also functions as a corrective to boorishness, setting in motion counterplots that aim to protect the woman’s reputation while exposing the husband’s folly.
Parallel to these personal designs, Jonson introduces projectors—schemers who pitch grand “inventions” and monopolies with the promise of public benefit and private enrichment. Meercraft, their most polished spokesman, typifies the opportunist who thrives on paperwork, patronage, and the new language of improvement. They court Fitzdottrel with enticing prospects, dazzling him with technical jargon and the scent of quick profit. Pug hovers around this marketplace of tricks, sometimes trying to assist, sometimes spoiling matters by accident. The satire targets a culture in which contracts and patents are tools of manipulation, and where the hunger for advancement draws victims to sign away more than they comprehend.
Domestic tensions intensify as legal instruments, not open force, become the chief weapons. Deeds, assignments, and settlements are brandished; promises are formalized in terms their signers barely grasp. Fitzdottrel, yearning to climb, will barter anything that can be made to look fashionable or official. His wife strives to preserve her integrity and security, even as others negotiate over her dowry and person. Wittipol’s resourcefulness relies on spectacle—especially a carefully constructed disguise that exploits the city’s infatuation with foreign styles and aristocratic ceremony—thus teaching the gull to desire what undermines him, while maintaining the woman’s impeccable stance.
Jonson layers scenes of social display—coaches, visits, gossip, and the rhetoric of courtly favor—onto the more prosaic world of clerks, tipstaves, and brokers. Pug, seeking mischief, blunders into human procedures that outpace him and frequently suffers for it, encountering punishments that arise not from divine intervention but from the city’s own mechanisms. His experience underscores the play’s governing joke: the devil cannot compete with human contrivance. Meanwhile, the projectors tighten their net, and the gallants refine their theatrics, so that comedy springs from the closeness of fraud to formality and from the ease with which appearances command belief.
As schemes ferment, the stakes crystallize around property, marriage, and reputation. Fitzdottrel’s eagerness for fashionable distinction leaves him vulnerable to offers promising office, precedence, or a new kind of genteel livelihood. Paper trails multiply; witnesses are summoned; time limits pressure decisions. Pug’s limited license prevents him from compelling sin; he can only present opportunities that men are already primed to seize. Wittipol, sensing that straightforward appeals will not prevail, prepares a last, intricate performance meant to redirect the flow of advantage without compromising the woman whose safety motivates his interference.
These threads converge in confrontations where characters must account for their dealings. Masks are lifted, but not all designs are immediately undone, and Jonson keeps the revelations aligned with his themes rather than with melodramatic shocks. What matters is the weighing of wit against greed, of legal craft against honest claim, and of spectacle’s power to both dazzle and disclose. The devil’s presence remains an ironic benchmark: his incompetence throws human agency into sharper relief, as the comedy tests whether cleverness can repair what cupidity has set in motion without trampling the standards it seeks to defend.
The Devil is an Ass endures as a pointed reflection on a society where appearance, paperwork, and enterprise can legitimize exploitation. Jonson’s comedy balances amusement with critique, showing how quickly ideals are recruited to serve appetite, and how easily gullibility becomes policy when dressed in fashionable terms. By making a devil the least effective plotter onstage, the play insists that human systems—commercial, legal, and social—are both the engine of mischief and the means of its remedy. Without disclosing the final outcomes, the work’s lasting message is clear: vigilance, judgment, and integrity are needed where wit alone will not suffice.
