The Devil is an Ass

Ben Jonson's *The Devil is an Ass* (performed 1616) is a city comedy in which Pug, an inexperienced devil, is dispatched to London and discovers that human ingenuity in fraud, fashion, and exploitation exceeds anything practiced in Hell. Through the intertwined schemes of the projector-engineer Fitzdottrel, the predatory broker Merecraft, and the satirically resourceful Wittipol, Jonson anatomizes...