Page 178 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes 15.1 Sources of the Text

Volpone was first performed in 1605. Since there were no reviews, the audience’s exact reaction
cannot be known. But we do know from letters and diaries that Jonson was not popular with
audiences. His plays provided morals and tended to preach to the audience, something they resented.
William Shakespeare’s plays were much more popular, since they set out to entertain, and this fact
was not lost on Jonson, who is credited with being privately annoyed at Shakespeare. Volpone is
considered Jonson’s most popular work, since it is the one most frequently staged.
Jonson was a serious classicist who modeled his plays on classic Roman and Greek tragedies. Jonson
thought that the poet had a moral function to educate, and the purpose of Volpone is to teach lessons
about greed. The topic is quite serious, although this is comedy, and there are many moments of
humor in the play, especially when Volpone is feigning illness and lies disguised. This play is, in
many ways, a play within a play. Volpone and Mosca are actors playing roles throughout, but they
are also directors leading the three fortune hunters, Corvino, Voltore, and Corbaccio, through their
performances. Jonson differed from other playwrights of the period in that he did not use old stories,
fables, or histories as the sources for his plays. Instead, Jonson used a plot “type” as the source for
most of his plays. In Volpone, the plot is the familiar one of a swindle. The action is set in Venice,
which many Englishmen thought was a center of debauchery and sin. Jonson’s characters are not
well defined, nor do they have any depth. Instead, they are “types” familiar to the audience: the
dishonest lawyer, the jealous old husband married to a beautiful young girl, and the miserly old
man who cannot be satisfied until he can amass even more money.

Characters and Summary

This plot closely parallels Horace’s satire on legacy hunters but dramatizes it with characters whose
flattened, comic/satiric personas represent various types of human personality as they are distorted
by greed, lust, and sheer perversity. Jonson alerts us to the symbolic order of the action’s meaning
by means of the names he assigns the primary characters: Volpone (fox—deceiver), Mosca (fly—
parasite), Voltore (vulture—scavenger/lawyer), Corbaccio (crow—wealthy but still greedy man),
and Corvino (raven, another scavenger—the wealthy merchant who can’t get enough). These
characters all seek to be named Volpone’s heir in order to gain his treasure, but they offer him gifts
to achieve that honor, and he (though nowhere near death) strings them along, more in love with
his delight in deceiving them than even his beloved gold. A love plot is attached to this legacy-hunt,
involving Corvino’s wife (Celia) and Corbaccio’s son (Bonario), but one of the play’s puzzles is that
they are such relatively lifeless, though moral, characters. Below these levels, three more sets of
characters populate the stage. Nano (a dwarf), Castrone (an eunuch), and Androgyno (a
hermaphrodite) join Mosca as Volpone’s courtiers, Sir Poltic Would-be and his wife are deceived by
Peregrine (the young English man on the Continental tour), and the elders of Venice alternately try
to profit from and to bring justice to the confusion (Commendatori [sheriffs], Mercatori [merchants],
Avocatori [lawyers, brothers of Corvino], and Notario [the court’s registrar]).

The plot in Volpone is that the conspirators try to deceive Volpone, but he’s really
deceiving them, until his agent (Mosca) deceives him (and them) and they bring him to the
court, which they all try to deceive, until they are unmasked.

15.2 Text as a Classical Fable

There is a “fable” running throughout the play, through the associations the characters’ names
create with animals. It is very simple and tells the tale of a cunning “Fox” (Volponein Italian),

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