An Introduction - Volpone by Ben Jonson
The sombrero atmosphere of this comedy.
Volpone is a comedy widely different from all previous works of Jonson in that kind and rather hard to accommodate not merely to the elastic Elizabethan notions of comic art, but to the strict rigor of ancient 'comic law'. In the sternness of the catastrophe as Jonson felt, it approached tragedy. And in its whole conception and conduct, in the lurid atmosphere which pervades it from beginning to end, in the appalling and menacing character of the principal movers of the plot, it approaches not indeed the profound and human- hearted tragedies of Shakespeare but, very obviously and significantly, his own grandiose and terrible tragedy of two years before.
Sejanus opened up to him that new technique in drama of which Volpone was to be the finest fruit. History in the great example of Sejanus's career and fall brought home to him anew the immense value of a continuous and close-knitted plot, with terror and scorn for its ruling motives, it perhaps impressed him also anew, with the wealth in dramatic material of this kind, of the records of imperial Rome still unexplored and un-exploited by his dramatic contemporaries.
The theme of legacy hunting:
Among Roman institutions thus capable of yielding terror and scorn, yet rich too in the grim and sardonic comedy which suited Jonson's present mood, that of legacy hunting or captatio stood in the front rank. The Roman captator who presented his fortune to the legator in the expectation of more than corresponding reward and the prospective legator who played maliciously on the greed of rival candidates for his bequests, might seem to be ready made sources for Jonsonian comedy, so aptly do they fall into his standing categories of the cheated and the chest. His earlier comedy had sported with the comparatively naive follies and pretensions of his day. He later applied its more elaborate technique to organised humbug better fitted perhaps to call into play the energies of Jonson's comic satire than any of these save in the one respect that it was un-English and that his powerful realism was thus deprived of one of its sustaining sources. On the other hand like the career of Sejanus, the institution of legacy- hunting was illuminated by a mass of ancient literature. For the scholar the satire of the first and second centuries had left brilliant and incisive picture of this vice of the early empire: the captator was derided by Horace, Juvenal and Pliny, he provided the theme of an amusing episode in Petronius's Satiricon and in particular, his desires and mortification and the strategy on both sides evolved in this conflict of base interests, provided the material for some of the wittiest of Lucian's Dialogues of the dead.
The ancient classical associations.
It was on this strategical aspect of legacy-hunting, with its rich development of make-believe, of criminal in- vention and resource- that Jonson fastened. He found especially in Lucian amusing pictures of the legator who meets game with counter-game, the laugh being regularly with him, not with his persecutors. A more ambitious use of the legacy-hunting motives was made by Petronius. However, neither Lucian nor Petronius can be said to have provided the plot of Volpone. But to one or both Jonson doubtless owed the fundamental situation of the legator who makes game of the legacy- hunters, and a few details of the execution.
The Venetain setting of the play.
In choosing such a subject as this, Jonson necessarily abandoned one of his surest holds upon the play- going public, his powerful presentment of the London life at their doors. In Jaco- bean London similar concoctions of greed, cunning, and credulity were not perhaps much less rife than in imperial Rome; but this particular variety of them was not yet at home there. Yet the very unfamiliarity of this 'folly' touched the vein of a Jocobean audience at another point. If they enjoyed showing London gallants and prentices, country simpletons and city wives, made sport of, they were at least as accessible to the romantic fascination of strange or exotic crime. This kind of interest, however, would have been much deadened had the plot been laid in a vanished society, known only to the learned and by books. Jonson therefore took a most politic step in transferring his miss en scene from ancient Rome to modern Italy. For the Jacobeans Italy was the classic contemporary land of sensational evil- doing. Among Italian cities Venice, with Florence as the city of Machiavelli, stood in the front rank for this sinister repute. Shylock was but one of those whom the stage had shown plotting monstrous things by the Rialto. To make the Fox a Venetian grandee was thus to give him and his story the best chance of being at once piquant and plausible. English foibles do not indeed wholly escape the lash; but Sir Politic and his lady are introduced only as eccentric English visitors at the house of the Venetain grandee. If the scene, then, is laid in Venice, Venice is no longer merely a transparent cloak for London, as the Florence of the original Every Man in His Humour had been, and as the Rome of The Poet- aster in great part was. But neither does it mean precisely Venice in the literal and realist sense which Jonson attached to London in the revised play.
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