The Alchemist Act 2, Scene 1 Summary

  • Mammon arrives at the house with his buddy (a dude named Surly), in tow.
  • He starts in right away about how excited he is to get a hold of the stone and starts talking about how rich he's going to be when he can turn all the useless metal in the house into gold.
  • Not only that, but when he's got the elixir he's going to run around making old men young and curing sick people of disease.
  • Mammon's pal Surly isn't buying this and cracks a snide joke about how all the prostitutes with STD's will thank him when he cures them with the magic elixir.
  • Now Mammon brags that he's going to use the stone to put an end to the plague.
  • Yep, that's Ben Jonson's way of giving a shout-out to the disease that killed boatloads of people between 1609 and 1610, the year this play was written.
  • This is where Surly comes right out and says that alchemy is total B.S. and that Mammon is being scammed (a.k.a. "gulled") by Subtle.