See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/275938350

Ben Jonson’s Volpone : An Unconventional and Innovative

Jacobean Comedy

Article  in  IIUC Studies · September 2014

DOI: 10.3329/iiucs.v8i0.20400

CITATIONS READS

0 11,889

1 author:

Sajjadul Karim
International Islamic University Chittagong
9 PUBLICATIONS   5 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Toni Morrison's novel View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Sajjadul Karim on 17 March 2020.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 IIUC STUDIES
ISSN 1813-7733
Vol.- 8, December 2011
(p 27-38)

Ben Jonson’s Volpone : An Unconventional and

Innovative Jacobean Comedy
Sajjadul Karim*

Abstract: Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1605) is the best known,

most performed and most studied of all of his Plays. Volpone,
or The Fox, does not contain the traditional moral and broad
themes of Shakespeare. Volpone, disguised as a didactic
comedy, is actually an intelligent and cynical satire that
compels the audience to rethink their moral expectations. In
Volpone, Jonson was successful in combining three genres in
order to create a new form of comedy. Volpone is a powerful
moral study of human greed, foxy cunning, and goatish lust. It
is not the traditional form of comedy. It is a play that takes on
the form of a comical satire as well as a morality play. It also
adapts the features of a fable, and in that it strives to teach a
moral. This play puts a different twist on what people would
expect from a comedy or morality play. But, more than a satire
on the traditional morality, it is a satire on the type of drama
that was prevalent. This article analyses how Jonson presents
his audience with an unconventional way of approaching the
subjects he is satirizing by creating a new form of comedy that
embodies the aspects of all three genres.

Ben Jonson‟s Volpone has for centuries been acclaimed a

masterpiece.Volpone might fairly be viewed as a turning point in Jonson‟s
work for the public stage. Apart from depicting some of human beings‟
negative attributes, the play also shows the extent of human beings‟
compulsion to make others suffer. Jonson, however, seems to be worried
here not that critics will question the unity of and between character and
structure, but that they will find the plot too darkly didactic for comedy.
Jonson wants his audience to see what the effect of greed has on
traditional values. This drama has been a centre of discussion among the

*
Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, IIUC
IIUC Studies, Vol. 8

critics whether it is a dark comedy, comical satire on human greed, Old

Comedy, beast fable, morality play or anti-Catholic discourse.

Steve Baker in his book, Picturing the Beast: Identity and

Representation, analyses every character of Volpone from the perspective
of animal behavior of human beings. Anne Barton gives a detailed
description of his life and evaluates him as a Jacobean dramatist with
especial reference to Volpone in his book Ben Jonson, Dramatist. In his
book, Jonson’s London and its Theatres, Martin Butler, with reference to
Volpone, gives a very frightful picture of Jacobean society and the
corruption that was devouring the society and its negative effect on the
human mind and how the evil deeds were reflected on the stage. Alan
Dessen focuses on the moral issues of Volpone in his book Jonson’s
Moral Comedy. Ian Donaldson gives a didactic explanation of Volpone in
his book Epistle Dedicatory to Volpone. Robert Watson in his book, Ben
Jonson’s Parodic Strategy, shows Volpone as a parody of human greed.
Ralph A. Cohen in his article “The Setting of Volpone” says that Jonson‟s
handling of setting in Volpone is a departure from his earlier work, a
departure that corresponds with and in part explains the beginning of his
greatest period. P. H. Davison in his article “Volpone and the Old
Comedy” says that Volpone is a comedy: but a special kind of comedy,
the ultimate source of which is to be found in the Old Comedy of Greece.
James D. Redwine, Jr., in his article “Volpone‟s „sport‟ and the structure
of Jonson‟s Volpone” wants to say, with reference to the character Mosca
as „sport‟, that Jonson succeeded in showing how individuals can be so
possessed by their own hopes of dominating others that they resist reason
or even common sense. Dorothy E. Litt in her article “Unity of Theme in
Volpone” says that through the theme of self-deception Ben Jonson
blotted his lines in Volpone most carefully and if the theme of self-
deception as applied here is new in critical terms, it has always been
implicitly understood by audiences. Alizon Brunning‟s article “Jonson‟s
Romish Foxe: Anti-Catholic Discourse in Volpone” argues that the play
can also be read as an overtly Anti-Catholic discourse based around two
key areas; the profanation of the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist and
the allusion to corrupt priesthood through the presentation of the bestiary
fox figure. Laurence Raw‟s article “Revaluating Ben Jonson” investigated
to demonstrate that city comedies could be made applicable to modern
audiences, as long as directors were prepared to employ a degree of
creative vandalism by rewriting the texts significantly, and thereby
rejecting academically-inspired demands of fidelity to the text. Don
Beecher‟s article “The Progress of Trickster in Ben Jonson‟s Volpone”
analyses that Fox is a hero in his own world, not servant, and his tricks are
the central transaction of the story and the tale of the folk trickster
contains, characteristically, the waxing hero exulting in his piracy and the

28
 Ben Jonson’s Volpone : An Unconventional and Innovative Jacobean Comedy

waning hero who is made to endure mortification.In his article “Tradition

and Ben Jonson” L. C. Knights examines the use of literary and cultural
tradition in Jonson's plays, stressing his individuality. Kathleen A.
Prendergast‟s article “Ben Jonson Unmasked” is a study of how Ben
Jonson‟s plays reveal Jonson‟s changing attitude to his fellow
playwrights, the theatre as a medium, and his own role as a dramatist.
Stephen Griffiths in his articles “Ben Jonson‟s Volpone: Black Comedy
from the Dawn of the Modern Era” says that Jonson‟s plays challenged
the audience to examine the impact of a society governed by deceit and
subterfuge. The article “ „In his gold I shine‟ : Jacobean Comedy and the
Art of the Mediating Trickster” of Alizon Brunning explores that
Volpone‟s description of a life without labour would seem to correlate
with the pre-industrial Golden Age of Ovid rather than the folk culture of
Bakhtin or Locke. Clifford Davis in his article “Ben Jonson‟s Beastly
Comedy: „Outfoxing‟ the critics, „gulling‟ the Audience in Volpone” says
that The playwright repeatedly tantalyses the characters and the audience
with the possibility of metamorphosis, but reserves the privilege for
himself and thus Volpone reflects Jonson‟s view of the world and
becomes an elaborate gulling projects design to outwit his persecutors and
critics. Robert Shaughnessy in his article “Twentieth-Century Fox:
Volpone‟s Metamorphosis” says that in performance, the play has given
rise to a critical discourse of vituperation, deviance and excess which
reflects the tensions and contradictions endemic to the cultural vocabulary
of anthropomorphism. Richard Dutton in his article “Ben Jonson,
Volpone and the Gunpowder Plot” says that Volpone was written in the
wake of the Gunpowder Plot (November 1605), a resonant event in
English history and one in which Ben Jonson himself was at least
peripherally involved; that it is informed by the religious politics of the
era, which lay behind the Plot itself and which deeply affected Jonson
personally as a Roman Catholic convert in a Protestant regime. But, I have
focused on the drama, as a whole, and tried to quest the innovations and
the changes Jonson brought in the Jocobean theatre through Volpone.
Eagleton has suggested that Jonson‟s enduring appeal derives from his
work‟s „duality‟, in that it is „learned, judicious, authoritative and neo-
classical, the very type of “high” conservative art‟, but also
„engagingly earthy and boisterous, full of a robust “English” vitality
which disdains metaphysical pretension or frigid formalism‟. (p.vi) In
the conventional play, Volpone would have escaped just as he did at
the end of Act IV. But, instead of fitting the expectations of a comical
satire, Jonson is determined to base this play on morals. Throughout
the comedy, he has satirized both the conventions of his times and the
lack of morals that was beginning to infect London at the time. His
new form of comedy was more like the ancient fables of Aesop than a

29
IIUC Studies, Vol. 8

comedy of the Elizabethan standards. It is not exactly the traditional

fable. In the traditional fable, we have a character that is similar to the
witty character in a comic satire. But, in Volpone, this character is not
as successful as the fable prototype.
Jonson was well acquainted with the comedies of Aristophanes. Some
of the excess of Aristophanic comedy, the savageness of the satire, the
farce, and the burlesque, are to be found in Volpone. But, in Jonson,
one has a greater concern for moral issues than in Aristophanes.
Though Jonson adapts what he takes from the Old Comedy, and is
more concerned with serious issues, one can see how essential the Old
Comedy relationship of Impostor and Ironical Buffoon is to the play; it
is this relationship that makes clear the nature of the drama of Volpone.
Volpone is a comedy, but close in tone and certain aspects of its
technique to Old Comedy, the comedy of Aristophanes.
Jonson is concerned with creating a new sort of comedy. He is creating a
comedy that is at the same time satirical and moral. This new sort of
comedy can best be seen in the sub-plot. The sub-plot is connected with
the moral aspect of the fable. It is in the subplot that we see Jonson
attempting to show his audience the dangers of living like the characters
of the main plot. Barish says, “It is on the thematic level that the presence
of the Would-be‟s can be justified and their antics related to the major
motifs of the play.” (93) Whereas Shakespeare‟s seventeenth century
work in comedy would turn continually toward soft edges, romance, and
the pastoral, mixing both the serious and the humorous, Jonson
established a reputation as one of the major social satirists of the English
dramatic tradition. In fact, Jonson‟s comedies establish the tradition of
social comedy on the English stage. In Volpone, although the satire is
ultimately moral, its immediate aim is mostly social or legal.
Venice was renowned in the English mind for its excesses in wealth, in
beauty, in corruption. The reputation of Venice for licentiousness was
matched by its reputation for harsh justice, and the catastrophe of
Volpone reflects not only Jonson‟s own strenuous morality but also the
fame of a Venetian punishment. But, Jonson was not the first English
dramatist to appreciate the aptness of Venice as a setting for a play
about greed and harsh judgment. What separates the Venice of
Volpone from the Venice of Shylock is Jonson‟s detailed depiction of
that setting. Jonson clearly establishes the Venetian setting of Volpone,
and preserves that setting consistently throughout. The Venice of
Volpone does not grow transparent and reveal, as the play progresses, a
thinly disguised London beneath an Italian setting. The Venice of
Volpone is not meant to be an allegorical London. Nor has Jonson
created a setting which, though true to the Italian model, is carefully

30
 Ben Jonson’s Volpone : An Unconventional and Innovative Jacobean Comedy

drawn to resemble London. Venice is simply the best setting possible

for the play, and throughout Volpone Jonson‟s steady execution of that
setting shows he knew its value. The care with which Jonson draws the
Venetian setting of Volpone anticipates the accuracy and technique of
his finest London comedies, in spite of the fact that Jonson never
visited Venice. Jonson‟s diligence appears in the references to
currency, in allusions to literature and politics, in the language, and in
the imagined topography of the play. Twelve kinds of coins are named
in Volpone, and his use of six denominations of Venetian currency
testifies to his careful research. Nowhere does an errant reference to
English money spoil the consistency of the setting.
The most obvious way in which Jonson has matched the language of
Volpone with its Venetian setting is the occasional Italian term with
which he has seasoned the speech of the play‟s characters. Italian
vocabulary that finds its way into this English play includes: sforzati,
“gallie-slaves”; scartoccios, “a coffin of paper for spice”; canaglia,
“raskalitie, base people, the skum of the earth”; gondole; saffi, “a
catchpole, or sergeant”; clarissimo, a grandee; strappado, a Venetian
torture; and Pomagnia, a popular wine in Venice. Jonson‟s attention to
these Italian touches as well as his care in such details as literary
references and coinage contributes bit by bit to the exotic and foreign
atmosphere of the play as a whole. Indeed, the English subplot is itself
a clever device for separating the Venetian setting from London. The
very presence of two “affectate travelers” is a constant reminder that
London is not the setting of the play.
Although Volpone is a richly multi-layered text which satirises greed
and corruption at a general level, it can also be read as an overtly anti-
Catholic discourse based around two key areas: the profanation of the
Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist and the allusion to corrupt
priesthood through the presentation of the bestiary fox figure. The
presentation of vice and corruption then acquires a resonance which
links to a tradition of anti-Papist Tudor Reformation drama such as
that presented by John Bale and his contemporaries who sought to play
out doctrinal dispute in a dramatic arena.
The analogy between gold and the Eucharist continues throughout the
play where gold is seen to have the restorative properties associated
with the Eucharist in giving new life and restoring health. When
Corbaccio brings Volpone a bag of coins Mosca says, “This is true
physic, this your sacred medicine: / No talk of opiates to this great
elixir” (I iv.71-2). Mosca then pours the coins into a bowl to minister
them to Volpone, calling them “Most blessed cordial” and saying that
they will “recover him” (I.iv.76-77). Later Mosca describes gold as -

31
IIUC Studies, Vol. 8

...such another medicine, it dries up

All those offensive savours! It transforms
The most deformed, and restores them lovely,
As ‟twere the strange poetical girdle. (V. ii. 99-102)

The play seems to delight in mixing images of the sacred and the
profane. Hedrick argues that “The topic of cannibalism illustrates in a
crucial way the seriousness of the vices in Volpone. Jonson has shaped
cannibalism into a sign for fundamental vice and we see that its horror
is not derived from a threat to human life, but from the desire to
sustain life indefinitely and infinitely and at any cost.”(233) In addition
to a political reading of the characters of the play, the Venice setting
could be seen as significant, as Dutton points out: “Venice was the
middle ground in the struggle between Protestants and Catholics in the
Counter Reformation” (150).
In Volpone, we see an author who is concerned with “conveying an
anatomy of the time‟s deformity through comedy.” (Dessen 75) The
deformity that Jonson is trying to comment on is the overemphasis on the
importance of money. In the rape scene, we see the virtuous character of
Celia crying out to God to be saved. But, unlike the morality play, it is not
God who saves Celia but rather luck that has placed Bonario in a position
to rescue her. But, even in the speech of Bonario when he interrupts
Volpone Jonson is satirizing as well as moralizing:
Forbear, foul ravisher! libidinous swine!
Free the forced lady, or thou diest, impostor.
But that I am loath to snatch thy punishment
Out of the hand of justice, thou shouldst yet
Be made the timely sacrifice of vengeance
Before this altar, and this dross, thy idol.
Lady, let‟s quit this place, it is the den
Of villany. fear naught, you have a guard;
And he ere long shall meet his just reward.
(III. vii. 266-274)

In this tiny speech of Bonario, we see both the satire of conventional

traditions and the vice that infects the drama Volpone. Watson says,
“His speech is meant to be taken as a straight forward assertion of the
play‟s values.” (93) In his dedication Jonson makes it clear that he will
deal justice out in proper manner rather than what was conventional
for the theater at the time. He is trying to “disarm the moral critics of
the theater” (Watson 82).

32
 Ben Jonson’s Volpone : An Unconventional and Innovative Jacobean Comedy

Jonson uses the beast fable in the main plot to satirise the upside down
nature of society. Watson again says:
“ By having the plans of the fox fail Jonson is
violating the tradition of the fable. Volpone tells them
(the audience) that a strictly ethical conclusion in
Jonsonian comedy will take the conventional and
comfortable form . . . because the real world does not
work that way, and Jonson will not yield his realism to
any pleasant literary formula.” (96-97)

But, this is intentional because Jonson is concerned with creating a

new sort of comedy. He is creating a comedy that is at the same time
satirical and moral.
In Volpone, not only is the trickster of folk lore fully accommodated to
the English stage as hero, but his rising and falling destiny is redeployed
in the context of an intrigue drawn from the conditions of contemporary
society. Volpone behaves neither as a romantic hero nor as a tragic one
despite his magnificence, the apparent depths of his motivation and his
so called flaw and lamentable catastrophe. But, there is a subgenre of
comedy implicit in the figure of the trickster hero with its own themes
and conventions. The rise of this class of comedy is one of the salient
achievements of the English theatre in the Renaissance to which there
were notable contributions by several of Jonson‟s contemporaries. Yet,
they were never able to free themselves, as Jonson did, from the
established conventions preventing the trickster from arriving at his full
dramatic potential. By such a measure, Volpone attains a special place in
the development of intrigue comedy.
Jonson‟s handling of the protagonist is an innovative one. Plautus and
Terence, and their followers in Renaissance Italy, offered no precedent
for the trickster as hero. Volpone is, indeed, classical in its sense of
economy of plot, the following of the unities and its critical attitudes
towards excess in the spirit of the Roman satirists. But, there were no
models among the ancients, or their Renaissance imitators, for the kind
of captains of intrigue in which Jonson specialized. There is a sense in
which the rise of realist satiric comedy in England was synonymous
with the emancipation and diversification of the intriguer figure as
internal plotter and satiric persona. Marlowe, Chapman, and Marston
all laboured towards that end. But, it was Jonson who turned the comic
intriguer into a self-serving knave, who driven by appetite and greed,
set him up as a rich „magnifico‟ and the central protagonist of the play.

33
IIUC Studies, Vol. 8

Dante‟s Inferno was influential on Jonson‟s Volpone. For one thing

both works portray fraud as the root of all evil, as many other
important works about morality do not. Jonson‟s play is quite
distinctive, not following in this regard his customary Roman models,
and making a special effort “to put the snaffle in their mouths, that cry
out, we never punish vice in our interludes.” (Donaldson 3) His moral
labours in Volpone also required of him “to imitate justice, and instruct
life, as well as purity of language” (Donaldson 3). Jonson‟s satiric
conception of Venice as a locus of corruption, his cast of perverse
characters, and his emphasis upon an appropriate final punishment for
each of the evildoers combine to recall structural and thematic
elements of Dante‟s work. Jonson was a dramatist always sensitive to
the shaping influence of native English morality plays. All of these
considerations made Dante‟s combination of comedy and severe
morality an appealing combination to Jonson and one not easily found
in most other sources available to him.
The Puritans‟ homophobia is also apparent in Volpone. Volpone
claims that he “attracted/ The eyes and ears of all the ladies present”
(III.vii.163). In another reversal of gender, Lady Would-be notices her
husband with someone she believes to be a female prostitute dressed as
a young man. After belittling her husband for this by calling him a
client of a “female devil,” she realizes her mistake and apologizes.
This situation supports the possibility that Jonson believed the Puritans
were making a mistake (like Lady Would-Be) in ignoring permanent,
masculine reality and challenging the temporary, imaginative, and
effeminate role of actors for immorality.
Morality, the main goal of the anti-theatrical movement in the
Renaissance, was both supported and denounced by Jonson in various
ways. However, the general perception is that Jonson, unlike
Shakespeare, fueled the fires of degradation, implying that women were
weak and lacked intelligence. In the annals of theatrical history,
Jonson‟s drama could be said to perpetuate this social stereotype.
Nevertheless, Jonson‟s crossing of the gender line and sexual scenes like
Volpone‟s “flashing” of Celia were enough to have religious, moral, and
social commentators‟ screaming. Barton, on the other hand, while
recognizing that Volpone is not a morality play, contends that “the
ending serves as just, if harsh, punishment for the dissolution of the
characters”(105). Barton also points out that “the final decision rests not
with the Avocatory but with the spectators of the comedy” (109).
Jonson surely wished the audience to learn from what it saw onstage.
In the prologue to Volpone he asserts that the play will educate as well
as entertain – „To mix profit with your pleasure‟(8). In watching actors

34
 Ben Jonson’s Volpone : An Unconventional and Innovative Jacobean Comedy

imitate characters that are imitating others, the audience will leave the
theatre not only entertained but also transformed by this double level
of role play. Mosca‟s role as sycophant had been seen as the archetypal
„parasite‟, but in his transformation of appearance and presentation
Mosca actually transforms the image of a parasite. While traditionally
perceived as the stock comic and often pathetic character dependent on
the rich, while actually debased, here, the role of Mosca itself takes on
a new meaning: „Almost/All the wise world is little else, in nature,/
But parasites or sub-parasites‟ (III. ii. 11 - 13) .
During the Renaissance, women did not participate in the theatre; hence,
men, dressed in drag, played women‟s roles. This particular
characteristic of Renaissance drama adds many dimensions, erotic and
social, to the spectacle on the stage. The interactions between cross-
dressed boy actors and the adult male actors, by today‟s standards,
would be considered homo-erotic. In Ben Johnson‟s Volpone, the role of
Celia, the main female character, would have been played by a cross-
dressed boy; hence, many inferences about Renaissance eroticism may
be made by exploring the element of cross-dressing and how it
transforms the action on the stage and the audience‟s perception.
Bonario is Celia‟s true love interest, which also has homosexual
overtones. The sexual and intimate interactions between Celia and the
male characters create an interesting dynamic. Celia was obviously
made to be attractive to the male spectators, because she is the main
female love interest in the play. Hence, Celia‟s appeal is twofold.
Volpone’s anthropomorphic endowment of human figures with animal
names and characteristics, in which the „metaphor of legacy hunters as
carrion-eaters‟ is worked into „„an extended beast fable in which the
greedy Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino (vulture, raven, and crow) are
outwitted by his Fox, whose willingness is inspired in part by Caxton‟s
History of Reynard the Fox and by Aesop‟s fables‟‟ (Kay 89).
Modifying the strategies of humours comedy by filtering them through
Aesop Jonson‟s bestiary articulates a fierce denunciation of creatures
whose greed has transformed them into something no longer fully or
legitimately human. Operating within a post-Darwinian framework,
critical tradition has had little difficulty moralising the play and its
dramatis personae, reading the merging of the human figure with the
animal as a degradation or perversion of human potential.
From another perspective, the extremity of Jonson‟s vision simply
exemplifies early modern capitalism in action as Marx and Engels
famously say that it „has left remaining no other nexus between man
and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment” . . . in
one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it

35
IIUC Studies, Vol. 8

has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation‟(82).

Butler summarizes, Jonson is „obsessed with situations in which
business and theatre intersect . ... The plays‟ rogues are also their
greatest entertainers, whose skills at self-enrichment cannot be
disentangled from their theatrical power. …. Their theatrical abilities
implicitly link their criminal gettings to the playhouses‟ own
accumulation of profit‟ (28). In effect, Jonson was helping his
contemporaries to internalise the ideologies of modern urban life. But,
the spectator of Jonson‟s drama, rather than being brought face to face
with sober reality, real conditions, genuine relations of production, is
presented with an endless vista of surfaces, fakery and pretence. In
this, the performative subjectivities of Jonsonian theatre seem
particularly attuned to the milieu of late capitalism, characterized by
Eagleton as „an immense desiring machine, an enormous circuit of
messages and exchanges in which pluralistic idioms proliferate and
random objects, bodies, surfaces come to glow with libidinal
intensity‟; a scenario which is „utopian or unthinkable, depending upon
one‟s perspective‟(394-6).
Watson views “Johnson‟s method in Volpone and the other comedies
as a scrambling of generic plots that surprises not only the audience,
but also the characters themselves. ….. The surprisingly blunt
exposure and punishment in Volpone pits the indulgent conventions of
satiric comedy, in which wit is the sole criterion for success, against
the forces of conventional moralism”(83). His characters are human in
shape, but beasts in their behaviour. The exotic city of Venice is a
place of greed, lust, and corruption, where gold is indeed (as Volpone
says) “the world‟s soul” (I.i.3). On the other hand, Baker says,
“My proposal here is that the visual image of the
animal, however minimal or superficial the degree of
its „animality‟, invariably works as a Derridean
supplement to the narrative. It is apparently exterior to
that narrative, but disturbs the logic and consistency of
the whole. It has the effect of bringing to light the
disruptive potential of the story‟s animal content. It
limits the extent to which the narrative can patrol and
control its own boundaries”.(139)

Frye has called Volpone “a kind of comic imitation of a tragedy” (70).

Volpone is different from Jonson‟s other comedies because it straddles
the boundary between comedy and tragedy, its dark tone emphasizes
the playwright‟s desire to defy the expectations of his audience.
Volpone shows the marks of Jonson‟s imprisonment both in his

36
 Ben Jonson’s Volpone : An Unconventional and Innovative Jacobean Comedy

calculated sabotage of critical expectations and in his depiction of an

immoral world inhabited by beasts. It would be simplistic, however, to
interpret the play as merely a petulant manipulation of his detractors.
Jonson‟s incarceration seems to have convinced him that local satire
was too risky; as a preemptive response to further censure, the
playwright retreated into the allegorical non-specificity of fables and
classical allusions. Jonson clearly based his comedy on the Aesopean
beast fable, “The Fox and the Grapes” and its variants, which were
immensely popular during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The
story of Chauntecleer and Pertelote, for example, in Chaucer‟s Nun’s
Priest’s Tale is an imaginative retelling of this Aesopian fable.
The play is not meant to end with a proper moral and a conventional
ending. Jonson uses the fifth act to approach a cynical and satirical
ending mocking those of standard popular Elizabethan plays. All of the
characters receive punishments fitting their crimes. Mosca is sent to
the galleys as a slave, Corvino is rowed around Venice wearing ass
ears, Bonario receives his father‟s inheritance pre-mortem, Celia is
freed to go home to her father with three times her original dowry and
of course Voltore is disbarred. Volpone loses everything and avarice is
its own punishment, the so-called “mortifying of a Fox” (V.xii. 125).
But, this moral is not easily won, nor is it left to rest at that. Jonson
wants to make sure that his satire is not taken lightly. If the series of
coincidences was not easy to come by, Jonson assures that the distance
between audience and play would remain forever broken. Volpone
makes the following speech to the audience:
The seasoning of a play is the applause.
Now, though the Fox be punish‟d by the laws,
He yet doth hope there is no suff‟ring due
For any fact which he hath done „gainst you,
If there be, censure him: here he doubtful stands:
If not, fare jovially, and clap your hands.
(V. xii. 152-7 )

Volpone speaks to the audience directly, and informs them that his
punishment will not cause any suffering provided the audience shows
their praise of him. This moment is both silly and brilliant for Jonson.
He is aware that the audience has been there throughout the play, and
that he has shown himself on the stage as much as any of the
characters. The play is satirising itself as well as the didactic plays of
Shakespeare and other contemporaries in the treatment of its moral.

37
 IIUC Studies, Vol. 8

Marlowe, Chapman, and Marston had already supplied trickster with

new guises and contemporary features, but Jonson freed him from
conventional roles, from socio-moral subservience, rediscovering the
dual nature of the primal folk hero. These alterations had such a
powerful reorienting effect that the standard definitions of comedy must
expand to accommodate them. Jonson was striking at the new spirit of
acquisitiveness abroad in the Renaissance, the failing of the old feudal
certainties before the rising middle-class merchants who made money
and remade themselves simultaneously. And, there is a warning for the
city of London in Jonson‟s magical, wicked picture of Venice. Jonson
warns in Volpone that Londoners wishing for Venice‟s sophistication
may have Venice‟s degradation as well if they do not have it already.

Works Cited
Baker, Steve. „Picturing the Beast: Animals‟, Identity and Representation. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1993.
Barish, Jonas A. Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Prentice-Hall Inc.:
Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1963.
Barton, Anne. Ben Jonson, Dramatist. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Butler, Martin. „Jonson‟s London and its Theatres‟, Cambridge Companion to Ben
Jonson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Dessen, Alan C. Jonson’s Moral Comedy. Northwestern University. Press, 1971.
Donaldson, Ian ed. “Epistle Dedicatory” to Volpone, The Oxford Authors: Ben Jonson.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Dutton, Richard. Ben Jonson to the First Folio. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.
Eagleton, Terry. „Preface‟ to Peter Womack, Ben Jonson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
- - - . „Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism‟, Modern Criticism and
Theory: A Reader. Edited by David Lodge. London: Longman, 1988.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University press, 1971.
Hedrick, Don K. “Cooking for the Anthropology; Jonson and his audience.” Studies in
English Literature 17, 1977.
Kay, W. David. Ben Jonson: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto, edited by A. J. P. Taylor.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
Watson, Robert .Ben Jonson’s Parodic Strategy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1987.

38

View publication stats