Customer Reviews

The Devil is an Ass (Drama Classics)

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Ben Jonson's mildly satirical plays abound with unscrupulous characters, con men, and gullible dupes. The Devil is an Ass is no exception. Several subplots involving deceit and trickery are successfully interwoven, creating an enjoyable comedy.

Nick Hern Books (London) publishes an extensive set of plays for students, actors, and theatregoers in their Drama Classics series. The Devil is an Ass is available in a small, slender, good quality, soft cover edition. The introduction by Simon Trussler is quite good. A short glossary of unfamiliar words is provided, but there are no footnotes.

The play begins in Hell. A lesser devil, Pug, desires to demonstrate his value and requests an opportunity to visit London to entrap innocents and ensure their doom. Satan is skeptical. He considers modern 1616 London to be more corrupt and dissolute than Hell itself. Satan reluctantly allows Pug to proceed. In London Pug animates and then inhabits the corpse of a recently hung thief.

Pug renames himself Devil and acquires a position as a servant to Fitzdottrel, an amoral, greedy squire from Norfolk. Almost immediately, both the reader and Devil are amazed to learn that Fitzdottrel is willing to sacrifice his innocent wife's reputation in trade for an expensive cloak for himself. We are amused when Fitzdottrel himself becomes the target of a sophisticated con-man, Merecraft, a specialist (a projector) in developing get-rich schemes that involve monopolies granted by the government of King James. As other interconnected scams emerge, we readers happily observe that the victims are all unscrupulous individuals. The ending is rather different from most plays involving a devil figure.

I have also used the Oxford University Press publication titled The Devil is an Ass and Other Plays by Ben Jonson. The introduction by Margaret Jane Kidnie is quite good. Extensive footnotes are provided.

The Devil is an Ass was first performed in 1616. It was first printed in 1631. Nearly four centuries later I am posting my review on the Internet.