Jonson was particularly fond of the Impostor and resorted to such characters on more than the occasion noted above. In The Alchemist, for example, Jonson presents three characters (Subtle, Face, and Doll), all of whom he labels as “impostors.” The greedy figure of Sir Epicure Mammon provides the label toward the end of the play:
Rogues,
Cozeners, impostors, bawds! (V, iii: 9-10)
And Jonson more directly in his Prologue to the play also affixes the label onto his central characters:
Our scene is London, 'cause we would make known No country’s mirth is better than our own.
No clime breeds better matter, for your whore, Baud, squire, impostor, many persons more,
Whose manners, now called humors, feed the stage: And which have still been subject for the rage
Or spleen of comic writers. (5-11)
But although the three main characters all display the characteristics of a roguish or fraudulent impostor, Jonson also does create distinctions among the cozeners. Even though all three figures set themselves up in “a venture tripartite” (I, i: 135) to cheat and swindle the gullible and the foolish, only the character of Subtle, the alchemist, appropriately assumes the dimensions of the comic character type under discussion. That is, Subtle is the only Impostor proper in the play.