Probably it is a delusion caused by ignorance, but my impression is that, in the case of this one play, I stand alone like Abdiel against the forces of night. A number of critics have written quite sensibly about Volpone, but in The Alchemist (I suspect they feel) the crude formula becomes too hard to resist. There seems no way of jolting its adherents, making them willing to recognise the actual merits of the play. Hence it is unusual to deny that Jonson hates and despises all the characters in The Alchemist, either for being fools or for being knaves, because he is so moral. And yet the two plays are very alike, in their general tone as well as their electrically geared-up construction – they are the most frequently revived of Jonson's plays, and I agree that they are much the best. The producer of either play, it will be found, never tries to implement our established critical theory about it (not even making it like non-Euclidean geometry), because the audience is sure to reject that. The case is thus rather odd, and might throw some light on the presumptions of Eng. Lit. in general.

The reason for the difference, I think, is that teachers feel The Alchemist to be hiding something worse than Volpone, needing more urgently to be kept from the students.