Page 219 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

Unit 17: Volpone: Characterization and Plot Construction and Sub-plots

Notes
17.2.4 Plot in Fourth Act

17.2.5 Plot in Fifth Act
17.3 Summary

17.4 Keywords

17.5 Review Questions
17.6 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this unit, you will be able to:
• Enumerate the characterization of the play;
• Illustrate that Volpone is the manesake of the play;
• Explain that play’s title character is its protagonist;
• Examine that the character is first an instrument and then a victim of Jonson’s satire of money-
obssessed society;
• Elaborate the plot and sub-plot construction in each act of the play.

Introduction

Volpone, the play’s title character is its protagonist. His name means ‘The Fox’ in Italian. Jonson
used him as an instrument of satire of money-obsessed society, and he seems to share in Jonson’s
satiric interpretation of the events. He is lustful, raffish, and greedy for pleasure. He is a creature of
passion, continually looking to find and attain new forms of pleasure, whatever the consequences
may be. He is also energetic and has an unusual gift for rhetoric.
Mosca is Volpone’s parasite, a combination of his slave, his servant and his lackey. He is the person
who continually executes Volpone’s ideas and the one who comes up with the necessary lie whenever
needed. Mosca appears to be exactly what he is described as: a clinging, servile parasite, who only
exists for Volpone and through Volpone.
The plot construction in the play 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 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, 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]).

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