Page 214 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes 16. Voltore makes a cryptic ......... to Mosca: though he is in summer now.

17. A central motif in the final act is that of the ......... -made-reality.
State whether the following statements are true or false:
18. We can say that it in fact strengthens the moral message of the play that a
sympathetic character gets punished for his vice.
19. After laughing at his expense, Peregrine claims that he and Sir Politic are even, and
apologizes for the burning of the knight’s papers.
20. Sir Pol decides, at Peregrine’s suggestion that he will hide in a wine cask made of
tortoise-shell.

16.7 Summary

• The play is dedicated to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, both of which had recently
awarded Jonson honorary doctorates at the time of the play’s writing.
• Jonson briefly discusses the moral intentions of the play and its debt to classical drama.
• The opening parts of the play, before we are introduced to the action, may seem superfluous.
• The dedication, however, gives us a clue as to Jonson’s intentions in writing Volpone. First of
all, he is intent on writing a “moral” play. By taking to task those “poetasters” who have
disgraced the theatrical profession with their immoral work, Jonson highlights the moral
intentions of his play.
• The scene I of Act 1 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.
• 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.
• The use of irony is almost always a form of attack on a certain viewpoint or way of life, by
showing its inherent contradictions; and if it aims to show us that certain behavior or
viewpoints are present in the thoughts and actions of everyday people in society at large,
then it makes a pointed commentary on contemporary society.
• In Scene II of Act 1 Nano (a dwarf), Castrone (a eunuch), and Androgyno enter.
• The entrance of Volpone’s bizarre “family” of children is the entrance of the grotesque in the
play; all three are”freaks” of one sort or another; Castrone the eunuch, Nano the dwarf, and
Androgyno the hermaphrodite.
• In Scene III, Voltore the lawyer—whose name means “vulture” in Italian—enters with Mosca,
and Mosca assures him that he will be Volpone’s heir.
• Through the device of Volpone’s con, Jonson makes his satiric commentary on greed, using
dramatic irony, situational irony, verbal irony, and repetition. Dramatic irony is a literary
device often used in tragedies; a central character behaves in a certain way in ignorance of
key facts about a situation; we, however, know the behavior is incorrect and feel tension
because of our inability to stop it.
• In scene V the final would-be heir now appears. He is a merchant named Corvino, and his
names mean “crow” in Italian.
• The final scene is in many ways a conclusion of the scenes with Voltore and Corbaccio.
• The scene I of Act 2 introduces us to the Sir Politic Would-be subplot of Volpone. The subplot
is a key component of Elizabethan drama; it is a secondary storyline which, like a variation on
a theme, should take up the themes of the main story, or related themes, and treats them in a

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