He drew directly on ancient mythology in his masques for the royal court. Masques were highly stylised theatrical events performed for and by the members of the aristocracy. With Jonson and his sometime collaborator, architect Inigo Jones, the masque developed from a relatively simplistic entertainment into an elaborate (although rather self indulgent and hugely expensive) art form.
The playwright was also influenced by European theatre, particularly the Italian Commedia dell’arte. Commedia dell’arte troupes had toured London in the late 1590s and a number of the characters in Volpone have their direct counterparts in this Italian theatrical form. Jonson’s Volpone, for example, fits well within the range of the Commedia’s Pantalone, whose character ranged from a miserly and ineffectual old man to an energetic cuckolder with “almost animal ferocity and agility”. In the play, Jonson integrates this influence with classical references, as well as English and European folk mythology and theatrical styles.
Jonson also drew on the English tradition of medieval morality plays, where actors personified human characteristics such as Virtue, Vice, Lechery or Curiosity to illustrate moral lessons. The plots were generally limited, since the moral points were universal rather than specific.
Jonson welded all these influences into a theatre that was purposeful and aimed at playing a critical role in society. His comedies brought a new realism as well as a sharp eye for outlining human character types. As one writer commented, he gave “a new sense of the interdependence of character and society”.
While Volpone was set in Venice, London audiences were well able to recognise its themes. For his realism, Jonson was attacked at the time as “a meere Empyrick, one that gets what he hath by observation”. But four centuries on, his ability to capture social contradictions and present them in a captivating form continues to resonate.
Through the play, considered by some his masterpiece, Jonson portrays with a black humour a society in which the pursuit of wealth and individual self-interest have become primary. Venice was regarded as the epitome of a sophisticated commercial city and virtually all the characters are revealed as corrupt or compromised.
Volpone means “fox” in Italian. Jonson based his story around medieval and Aesopian tales in which a fox pretends to be dead in order to catch the carrion birds that come to feed on its carcass. In the play, Volpone is a single and aging Venetian “magnifico” who has devised a trick to fleece his neighbours while simultaneously nourishing his sense of superiority over his hapless victims. For three years he has pretended to be dying, so as to encourage legacy hunters to bring gifts in the hope of being named as his beneficiary.
With the aid of his servant Mosca, Volpone strings along his suitors—Voltore, Corbaccio and Corvino—extracting their wealth by feeding their avarice. (Voltore Corbaccio and Corvino are the Italian names for vulture, crow and raven.) Voltore, a lawyer, offers Volpone a platter made of precious metal. Corbaccio, a doddering gentleman, is talked into disinheriting his son Bonario in favour of Volpone, while Corvino, a miserly merchant and hugely jealous husband, is driven by greed to offer his young wife Celia to bed and comfort the supposedly dying Volpone.
Here Volpone, a rogue whose victims trap themselves by their own weaknesses (and are therefore deserving of their respective fates) becomes overwhelmed by his own passions. Definitely not at death’s door and completely obsessed, he tries to force himself onto Celia and is only stopped by the lucky appearance of Bonario. The two innocents bring charges in court against the old man. But countercharges of adultery and fornication against Celia and Bonario are laid by the three legacy hunters who are desperate to defend what each considers his own future wealth.
Volpone revels in these ever-widening displays of degradation. He decides to stage his own death so he can witness their frenzy when they see him bequeathing his wealth to Mosca. However, after Mosca begins preparing the elaborate funeral, he ceases to acknowledge his former master. As the heir to Volpone’s great wealth, Mosca is transformed in the eyes of the courtroom judges—who are as self-serving as the rest—from a lowly servant into an eligible young man to whom they might marry their daughters.
Desperate not to be outfoxed by his servant, Volpone reveals himself, thus exposing his own and everyone else’s guilt. He is stripped of his wealth, which is given to charity, and sentenced to prison, while Mosca is condemned to the galleys for passing himself off as a person of breeding. Voltore, the advocate, is debarred from the court and Corbaccio’s wealth is transferred to his son Bonario. Corvino is paraded through Venice as an ass, while his wife Celia is sent home to her family with triple her dowry.
Jonson skillfully manipulates the audience so that it identifies with Volpone and his brazen schemes. The old magnifico’s zest is infective and the audience is swept along with his machinations only to find itself, along with the anti-hero, hovering at the edge of criminality. In this way, the author tries to confront us with the dangers of unrestrained self-interest and with what Jonson considers to be a necessary sense of social responsibility.
Genre: Comic drama, but also a satire.
Form: blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) mixed with comic song. Since the "plot" is a low criminal conspiracy (but what was the rebellion against Henry IV or Lear?), the "subplot" is a parody of criminal conspiracy set in Venice but involving an English traveler, an English nobleman and his wife, all of whom are on tour.
Characters and Summary: This plot closely parallels Horace's satire on legacy hunters (Book II.7) 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 (though nowhere near death) 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 (the young English man on the Continental tour), 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]).
So the plot, in brief, 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 (while Peregrine is being deceived by and deceiving Sir and Lady Politic Would-be). Got it?
1. You have seen, in Marlowe and Shakespeare, the strategies of pitting a subplot's comic agenda against that of a tragic main plot.
o How would you discuss sub-plot and main plot in this play?
o What does that tell you about Volpone's basic strategy regarding the play's goals and his manipulation of the audience's sympathies? For instance, compare the characters of Volpone and Henry IV or Lear, and try to argue for which is the more attractive title character.)
2. Jonson argues, elsewhere, that drama should be evaluated with respect to some special forms of truth. For instance, he considers "truth to type" as a good test of characters, asking whether that sort of person would have done what the character did.
o What kinds of normative judgments does this require, and how does that affect the play's socio-political agendas?
3. Jonson parodies many classical lyric forms (see below re: Catullus) but his most outrageous is his first, a satire on the aubade or dawn song usually sung by a lover to the beloved (and answered by her) upon their seeing the first rays of light which end their illicit night of passion.
o Volpone's, which begins Act I.i, praises the beauty of some other phenomenon--what is it, and how does he describe it? His character here is almost a literal transcription of some medieval morality play "vice" figures.
o Where would you go in Shakespeare to find a similar meditation wherein a character reveals his soul, inner nature, strategy, etc.?
4. A typical measure of dramatic structure is the relationship between chaos and order. As the comedy unwinds, chaos increases, and as it approaches its end, the chaos ought either to increase to a catastrophe (duck blows up hunter, dog, hunter's house, doghouse) or to a restoration of order (duck returned to wild, hunter to home, dog to doghouse). Generally speaking, many comedies approach an apex of their disorder around the third act.
o What's happening when Mosca walks on stage in III.i?
o Especially, how does his soliloquy illustrate the dangers of Count Canossa's prescription for a courtier's development in Hoby's translation of The Courtier?
o How might this relate to Jonson's politics in the Jacobean period, especially to the rise of new courtiers to power in James I's reign?
o This play ends with the "Volpone" character coming to the edge of the stage to deliver a curious apology for the play's bad behavior and to ask the audience for forgiving applause. What does this suggest about Jonson's view of the play's "moral center" vs. the astonishing success of immorality for most of the play's acts?
5. The play's content and style draw upon an aesthetic trend called neoclassicism, a set of rules and habits of composition based on imitation of Greek and Roman classical models for literature. You can see this in the prologue's boast about following the so-called "Aristotelian unities" of place, time and action. Volpone's paen to Celia (III.7) is sung in a voice borrowed from Catullus (#5), the song to "Lesbia" which dares her to defy convention and old men's jealousy to seek the plenitude of pleasure her lover promises. Compare the two. To read a Roman poem Jonson may have had in mind re: "legacy hunting," check out Project Perseus's online version of Horace's satire on the topic (Book II, number 5). (Horace imagines a satiric/comic addition to the scene in Homer's Odyssey Book 12 when Odysseus, in the Underworld, asks the spirit of the prophet Teiresias to tell him how to return home to Ithaka where young bachelors are devouring his household while waiting for his wife to choose one of them.)
o What does Catullus offer and how does it differ from Volpone's deal for Celia?
Those of you who have taken English 215 (Critical Methods) and those who have discovered something of literary criticism's theoretical bases on their own may be ready to start thinking about final papers even now. Imagine how good a paper you could write if you started working on it with six weeks left to go in the semester! Imagine how thoroughly you could think through the argument and polish your own prose. The final paper assignment stipulates only that the topic should be based mainly on one text we've read since the midterm exam and that it also should deal with at least one text from the first half of the semester. (Exceptions might be two sections from a very large work we read after the midterm, like Paradise Lost or Oroonoko.) You can center your analysis on one text, using the other for comparison and contrast, or you can do a balanced analysis of both. You also could refer to more than one subordinate text to help unpack your argument about the main, post-midterm text. Though you may have "hunches" or even full-blown insights about the play that typical audiences would not detect, those hunches and insights all depend on some basic assumptions about how to read plays which you probably have unconsciously absorbed from your previous teachers. Rather than charging at the play's evidence without being aware of your theoretical approach's assumptions, you may benefit from approaching the task of writing with a theory of interpretation in mind. Jonson’s social outlook
Ben Jonson’s realism relates to his view of the role of artist/poet in society. As a child, he had been fortunate to attend Westminster School, where he came under the influence of the noted historian and antiquarian William Camden. There he embraced the humanist outlook of the Renaissance, which emphasised respect for the dignity and rights of man and the idea that knowledge advanced the human condition.
This was a time of political and social convulsion throughout Europe. The humanist ideas of the Renaissance were followed by the Reformation. Within the framework of the day, Jonson was no radical. Like others, he viewed the absolute monarchy, balanced between the old aristocracy and the emerging capitalist class, as a guarantor of culture against the challenge from parliament and the Puritan church. Along with figures like Sir Francis Bacon, he distrusted parliament as a vehicle for the self-interest of landowners, merchants and their agents.
In his posthumously published writings—Timber: or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter: As they have flow’d out of his daily Readings; or had their refluxe to his peculiar Notion of the Times—Jonson wrote: “Suffrages in Parliament are numbred, not weigh’d: nor can it bee otherwise in those publike Councels, where nothing is so unequall, as the equality: for there, how odde soever mens braines, or wisdomes are, their power is alwayes even, and the same.”
In a Europe that was still struggling to reappropriate the intellectual conquests of the classical civilisations, and where the vast majority had little or no education, Jonson’s emphasis on the differing “weight” of people’s opinions was at least understandable. In his view, the monarchy provided an environment in which learning and culture could develop. In turn, that enlightened climate would nurture an enlightened and benevolent monarch.
Jonson wrote in Timber: “Learning needs rest: Soveraignty gives it. Soveraignty needs counsell: Learning affords it. There is such a Consociation of offices, betweene the Prince, and whom his favour breeds, that they may helpe to sustaine his power, as hee their knowledge.” He added further on: “A Prince without Letters, is a Pilot without eyes ... And how can he be counsell’d that cannot see to read the best Counsellors (which are books).”
Jonson conceived his role as providing insight into the problems of the day. Thus, he approached society critically. His works are infused with a refusal to sidestep social contradictions. For Jonson, “Truth is mans proper good; and the onely immortall thing, was given to our mortality to use”. His creative function was to express the complexities of life and truth in a form that could be appreciated by the common man.
Jonson’s plays challenged the audience to examine the impact of a society governed by deceit and subterfuge. His strength lay in his ability to confront those watching with life as he saw it. In his ability to recreate theatrically the contemporary world and identify both general and specific aspects of the human experience, he was opening new ground that would be further explored in the ensuing centuries.
The Alchemist
Having the good fortune of living in NYC where not one, but two Elizabethan plays are being produced within walking distance of our apartment, Stan and I went to see Ben Johnson's The Alchemist on Saturday afternoon.
The Classic Stage Company takes exactly the opposite approach to the staging the classics as does The Pearl, so it was fun to see these two plays on the same weekend. Philosophically, it appears that the CSC wants to bring out the similarities between early 17th century England and early 21st century USA. With The Alchemist they have found the perfect play. The characters in this very funny production are all looking for the quick buck, easy magic to solve the unsolvable, and generally anything that will feed into their insatiable fantasies. And of course, there are the con artists to take advantage of the gullible. Does this sound familiar? Well, apparently it was familiar in the 17th century as well.