Page 184 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes • Jonson’s plays provided morals and tended to preach to the audience, something they resented.

• 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.
• The play Volpone 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.
• The plot on Volpone 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).
• 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),
circled by a mischievous “Fly” (Mosca in Italian), who helps the Fox trick several carrion-birds—
a vulture (Voltore), a crow (Corvino) and a raven (Corbaccio) into losing their feathers (their
wealth).
• Volpone also relies on medieval beast fables, especially one entitled The Fox Who Feigned Death.

• The main plot of Volpone is a fable; each character are each personifications of different animals,
in a story that has a direct moral message.
• Volpone is a classical drama. For his realism, Jonson was attacked at the time as a meere
Empyrick, one that gets what he hath by observation.
• Jonson skillfully manipulates the audience so that it identifies with Volpone and his brazen
schemes.
• The comedy of humours is comedy based on the exaggeration of the greek explantaion for
health—the body was balanced by the four humours black bile, yellow bile/cholor, blood
and phlegm. The instances of humor are Volpone is lustful—sin of meloncholia (too much
black bile) and decietful—sin of sanguine (too much blood) Mosca is covetous—sin of choloric
(too much cholor/yellow bile).

15.6 Keywords

Black Comedy : Comedy that employs morbid, gloomy, grotesque, or calamitous situations in its
plot.
Fable : A short tale to teach a moral lesson, often with animals or inanimate objects as
characters; the fable of the tortoise and the hare; Or a story not founded on fact.
Or a story about supernatural or extraordinary persons or incidents; legend.
Unencumbered : Not impeded, slowed down, or retarded; free to move,advance, or go forward.
Or having few or no burdens or obligations.
Erudition : Knowledge acquired by study, research, etc.

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