Page 228 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes 17.3 Summary

• 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.
• Volpone 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.
• In a nutshell, the plot 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.
• Jonson uses all the characters as an instrument of satire of one kind or the other in his play. He
compared all the characters to some animals as using their character.
• Volpone, the Fox, a venetian magnifico is the main character of the play. Delighting in foxlike
trickery, Volpone scorns the easy gain of cheating widows and orphans and the hard gain of
labor.
• Volpone chooses for his victims Venice’s leading crooked advocate, its most greedy and
dishonest merchant, and its most hardened miser. The joy of the chase of gold and jewels
belonging to others is keener to him than the possession.
• Jonson uses the characters to make them instrument of his satire of greed and dishonesty.

17.4 Keywords

Magnifico : A derogatory term for an inferior playwright who have disgraced the
theatrical profession with their immoral work.
Soliloquy : It is a device often used in drama whereby a character relates his or her
thoughts and feeling to him/herself and to the audience without addressing
any of other characters and is delivered often when they are alone or think
they are alone.

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