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Unit 16: Volpone: Satire and all its Detailed Analysis and Comedy

your pleasure.” In other words, says Jonson, Volpone will be a work that will educate you but also Notes
entertain you at the same time.

16.2 Act I

16.2.1 Scene I

The scene is Volpone’s house, in the Italian city of Venice, in the spring of 1606. It is morning, and
Volpone, whose name in Italian means “the great Fox,” enters. He is a Venetian magnifico, or
nobleman and accompanying him is his parasite Mosca, best thought of as a personal assistant/
manservant/lackey. Volpone asks Mosca to unveil the shrine where Volpone keeps his treasure.
Volpone talks at length about the beauty and ethereal qualities of his gold. Then he and his parasite—
whose name means “Fly”—discuss the way in which he earned his treasure: without hard work,
presumably through cons. They also discuss the liberal way in which Volpone spends his treasure.
He also describes the current con he is running; since he is childless, he has no heirs, and since he is
extremely wealthy (from his previous cons), there is great interest into whom his estate will go to
when he dies. So Volpone is pretending to be gravely ill and near death, prompting three notable
citizens who consider themselves potential heirs to shower him with gifts in the hopes that he will
make one of them his principal heir.

Analysis
The construction of the first scene of the play is straight forward. It reveals the conceit (premise or
situation) of the comedy and firmly establishes Volpone as the protagonist of the play. We find out
that Volpone is rich, adores money, but takes more pleasure in gaining money than in having it,
“Yet I glory/More in the cunning purchase of my wealth/Than in the glad possession.” The
“cunning” here arises from the fact that Volpone has gained his wealth not through honest work
and toil (or, as Mosca adds, through the vicious practices of money-lending), but instead through
cons, such as the one he now plays on his potential heirs. We also learn from Mosca that he is a man
who “knows[s] the use of riches.” Mosca’s description of “Candian wines” and “sumptuous
hangings” imply that Volpone is a hedonist, someone controlled by his animal desires for pleasure,
as does Volpone’s own penchant for hyperbole, or poetic exaggeration, as when he claims that his
gold shines brighter than the sun.

The satire of greed and obsession with money is the play’s main theme, and we are
introduced to it immediately through the first speech.

It is an act of blasphemy, full of religious terms—”sacred,” “relic,” “heaven,” “saint,” and “Hail.”
When Volpone tells the treasure that “even hell is made worth heaven” with it, he explicitly values
the worth of gold as higher than the worth of spiritual redemption and excellence—in short, gold,
not God, has supreme importance for him. The substitution of money for God in the context of a
prayer would have been shocking to an Elizabethan audience, though it has lost much of that
sensational effect today. But the speech still reverses our expectations, by associating sacred, religious
language with money usually thought to be profane. As such, it is an example of situational irony,
where the audience’s expectations in a given situation reversed from the norm; in other words, we
expect prayer to be sacred, but Volpone makes it crass and profane.

Example: In situational irony a pickpocket who, in the act of picking someone’s pocket, has
his pocket picked himself; the thief’s role is reversed from perpetrator to victim, and instead of
gaining from the action, loses by it.

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