My rating: 4 of 5 stars
With nothing but a few footnotes to help with the language, this is pretty tough going, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit. At 4 stars, I'm going a bit on a limb, with so many other people giving it a 3 or less while comparing it unfavorably with Shakespeare. But I found it witty and amusing. I would like to understand it better, for sure, but the scams and tricks are clever and the action tight enough to amuse a reader, considering always this is a 400 year old play, not a modern novel.
A wealthy homeowner is away for weeks, and while he's out, his servant is using the house to run several scams with a pair of partners: a man posing (pretty convincingly) as a competent alchemist, cooking up potions and pretending to know astrology, and a prostitute posing as a respectable woman. They've got a number of people on the hook, telling them they're getting closer all the time to finishing the long process of making a philosopher's stone, confusing them with fancy alchemical language, putting them off, while making them bring in fabrics, costly metal items (to turn to gold), tobacco, and actual money. The marks will want to get rich and do either good works (so they say) or sleep with lots of women. It's a long scam, and though they're pulling it off, the neighbors notice the strange comings and goings and at a couple people suspect they're being tricked. It looks like they might pull it off despite a whistleblower tricking them, but they get interrupted in their multiple scams when the homeowner comes back weeks early and learns what's happening from his neighbors.
There is a happy ending of sorts, on top of a pretty good skewering of scammers, puritans, ambitious men, and fools of all sorts. This is one I would like to reread with a study guide, and make more sense of it. (Also, I'd like a version that avoids my pet peeve--I hate books that only give the first three letters of character's name at every line. It doesn't work for my brain. I have to rehearse who is who over and over. Doll is 4 letters, but we print Dol? How much room does this save? How many pages? Can't we just put everybody's name?) A more thoroughly annotated copy would also help.
Still, as is, I liked it, and think people looking for other plays from Shakespeare's times would probably also enjoy it.
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