The Resources of Characterization in Othello

Summary

At the beginning of the last act of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, Lovewit, returning to his house from the country now that the plague has abated, is met by a crowd of his neighbours. The neighbours are eager to tell him all about the peculiar events that have gone on in the house during his absence. As with great excitement and more than a little credulity - as one might expect in the play that finds credulousness to be a universal feature of the city - the six neighbours trip over each other breathlessly with yet more fragments of gossip and corroborating detail, their comments grow together until they become a chorus of Londoners:

[LOVEWIT] Has there beene such resort, say you?

NEI. 1 Daily, sir.

NEI. 2 And nightly, too.

NEI. 3 I, some as braue as lords.

NEI. 4 Ladies, and gentlewomen.

NEI. 5 Citizens wiues.

NEI. 1 And knights.

NEI. 6 In coches.

NEI. 2 Yes, & oyster-women.

NEI. 1 Beside other gallants.

NEI. 3 Sailors wiues.

NEI. 4 Tabacco-men.

NEI. 4 Another Pimlico

The anonymous group of undifferentiated and undifferentiable voices can only vaguely be defined, even corporately, as a group. They are plainly of a lower social class than Lovewit himself; they keep addressing him as 'sir'. One of them, Neighbour 3, is a tradesman, 'a smith, and't please your worship' (line 43). But they are hardly individualized; their characters are dissolved into their choric function, a credulous chorus and they can claim no greater identity than that.