Characters in 'Volpone by Ben Jonson
Volpone (or, the Fox)
A rare villain. Volpone (or the Fox) is one of the two principal charac- ters who play the leading part in this comedy of intrigues. He belongs to the Venetian gentry and enjoys the title of a Magnifico or Clarissimo. He is a "rare" villain, an expert impostor, an unscrupulous schemer, a great voluptuary, an accomplished actor, and a man of considerable wit with an outstanding talent for sarcasm. He is the motivating force of the play, and much of what Mosca does in prompted by his desire to please Volpone.
Crafty and cruel. Volpone is a grandee of Venice whose rank and position are beyond dispute. He is not all impostor. He is really wealthy, and really childless, as he professes. His imposture starts from a foundation of assured respectability. The consideration he enjoys facilitates his fraud and enables him to carry it to further lengths with impunity; it delays his detec- tion, and when detected, it softens the rigour of the law, in favour of one who is "by blood and rank a gentleman" (V, xii, 117). In this case at least Jonson blunted his moral in order to benefit his plot. On the other hand, he has per- haps given his moral scorn for this "Venetian gentleman" too free a rein to be wholly true to the part. He has given him the highest degree of the subtle craft, and the calculated cruelty, for which the patrician government of Venice was famous, but nothing of the high-bred courtesy in speech and manner which prevailed in Venetian society.
An artist in roguery. Volpone is not just an amateur in roguery, but a professional expert rejoicing in his skill. The artist in him is even stronger than the wealth-hunter or the voluptuary. He is not merely a grasping man of brains who cheats with professional coolness for definite practical ends; on the contrary, he takes great pleasure in the tricks he plays for their own sake, glorying.
More in the cunning purchase of my wealth,
Than in the glad possession,
and carries them out when he has everything to lose and nothing to gain. His room, crowded with the costly presents given to him by his victims, is a sort of private box from which he watches the sordid comedy of contending greeds. In the intervals of these tricks he finds entertainment in another hideous spec- tacle the contortions of a dwarf, a eunuch, a hermaphrodite. But Volpone is not content with the role of the looker-on. Like Nero, he leaps upon the stage, recites, assumes characters, compels the plot to move as he wishes. His open ing speech transfigures avarice with the glamour of religion and idealism The sordid taint of usury, the prosaic associations of commerce, fall from this man who boasts
I wound no earth with plough-shares 'fat no beasts
To feed the shambles...
I blow no subtle glass, expose no ships
To threatenings of the furrow-faced sen
I turn no money in the public bank.
His poetic quality. And when the supposed bid-ridden and impotem old man, throwing off the mask, leaps from his couch before the hapless Celia he seems for a moment to have shed with his senility the grossness and brutality of his mind. He is not the Faun gloating over his victim, but the young Antinous whom he once played "for entertainment of the great Valoys", ravishing his lady's ear with Catullian song and besieging her imagination with visions of opulence and magnificence:
A diamond, would have bought Lollia Paulina,
When she came in, like star-light hid with jewels,
That were the spoils of provinces; take these
And wear, and lose them. yet remains an ear-ring
To purchase them again, and this whole state
Thy baths shall be the juice of July-flowers,
Spirit of roses, and of violets,
The milk of unicorns and panthers' breath
Gathered in bags and mixed with Cretan wines.
A perfect actor. Volpone is a perfect actor. It is his misfortune that he is liable to be carried away by the zest of his part. His final ruin is due less to rash and hasty unmaskings such as this than to the daring adventures he un dertakes with the mask on. His passion for taking part, as it were, in his own play, and moving i on towards the goal he has in mind, is the mainspring by which the whole action moves to the goal which he does not desire. He carries his trickery to more and more extravagant lengths. The monstrous jest of the comandatore (V, v-ix) would be unbelievable if it had not been preceded by the gay adventure of the mountebank, as that would be believable if it had not been prepared for by the farce of the sick room. With each fresh success his temper grows more cheerful, his humour more reckless. Hannot bear his fortune soberly. "I must have my crotchets and my comundry.ns" (V. 16). Eventually, he makes a snare for his own neck and runs his head into it wilfully.
The collapse of his cunning. The dramatist Cumberland objected to this final mad freak of Volpone's as the weak part of the plot. But that would be to demand that the persons of a drama should never act contrary to a reasonable view of their own interests. Jonson had a very keen eye for the fatuities of the over-weening. The collapse of Volpone's astuteness in the excessive joy of his wanton triumph is imagined with an irony which is more Greek than Elizabethan, While the supposed commandatore is gaily mocking the victims he has disinherited, the audience knows that Mosca, the pretended heir, is quietly preparing behind the scenes to ruin the pretended testator. And it is only by the desperate act of throwing off his own mask that Volpone is able to defeat the superior cunning of his parasite, and send him to a doom yet sterner than his own.
Mosca
The perfect parasite. Mosca's character follows the same pattern as Morose's, though more briefly. As a true parasitet, Mosca has to be ready at all times to satisfy his master's desire for entertainment and to suggest new pleasures. He evidently enjoys his job, and feels proud of his accomplishments. He directs Volpone very much like a theatre-director, making sure that his make-up and costume are right. He is always ready to praise Volpone's performance. He is equally ready to accept Volpone's applause for his own acting skill. (The irony here is that, while Volpone is applauding Mosca's deception of others, he himself is the worst victim of Mosca's pretended loyalty to him. Like Volpone, Mosca becomes infatuated with his own cleverness:
I fear, I shall begin to grow in love
With my dear celf, and my most prosp'rous parts,
They do so spring, and burgeon; I can feel
A whimsey in my blood: (I know not how)
Success hath made me wanton.........(III, 1, 1-5)
His over-confidence. In the end he over-reaches himself, not realising that in the last resort Volpone, who is after all a Magnifico of Venice, will not allow himself to be overcome by a parasite and allow him to take his place. Over-confidence ruins Mosca, as it ruins Volpone, and together they recall Truewit's observation in The Silent Woman: "He that thinks himself the master- wit is the master-fool."
Mosca and Sejanus. Neither this wonderfully contrived catastrophe nor the parasite whom Volpone compels to share it owes much to any earlier model. The hideous sketch of Eumolpius, who at Croton acts as servant to Eumolpius, has only the vaguest resemblance to Mosca. Nor has he much ["Mosca in the chief character in Jonson's The Silent Woman † In view of Mosca's relations with Volpone it is worth remembering that a parasite was not a servant in the crdinary sense of the word, but a "humble friend."] affinity with the ordinary parasite of classic comedy. We must look for a parallel rather to that more potent and terrible parasite of history, whose fall had so recently occupied Jonson's imagination. With certain obvious qualifications, Mosca is a Sejanus of private life. In the history of Sejanus, Jonson found the fundamental situation of his two greatest comedies. The alliance of two able villains, master and servant, ending in a deadly struggle between them, was a theme of immense dramatic possibilities new to the English stage. The finale of Sejamus by no means equals in constructive mastery the unsurpassed catastrophes of Volpone and The Alchemist. But this was not altogether Jonson's fault, and some of the most impressive effects of the two later plays are anticipated, within the limits imposed by the historical facts, in the earlier. Like the Letter of Tiberius, the final confession of Volpone abruptly brings to an end the career and life of the parasite at the moment when his triumph seems complete. But Jonson was now free to punish vice, and he was bent upon punishing it, without reserve. The master therefore, unlike Tiberius, shares, with slight modification, the servant's doom. In The Alchemist, where this zeal was allowed less scope, the issue of the struggle was still further and more ingeniously varied; it being here the parasite who gets the upper hand by a yet more daring and unexpected stroke.
A parasite with a difference. Mosca has thus hardly a closer relation than Sejanus to the parasite of classic comedy, though the title is expressly applied to both. Jonson felt this, and has skilfully forestalled criticism by making Mosca himself explain, in a soliloquy, his points of superiority to the ordinary breeds of the creature. Volpone's parasite will not be confounded with the hungry professional diners-out who "Have your bare town-art/To know, who's fit to feed them", and who offer their bits of news for a precarious invitation, to jest for a dinner, at the risk of summary expulsion if the jest should not please. Nor can we mistake him for one of the low cringing companions "with their court-dog tricks, that can fawn and fleer, echo my lord, and lick away a moth." He is no vulgar parasite in the literal sense, because he enjoys a certain position and authority. Nor yet is he the professional jester. His art makes him, in his own words, a
fine, elegant rascal, that can rise
And stoop (almost together) like an arrow;
Shot through the air as nimbly as a star,
Turn short, as doth a swallow; and be here,
And there, and here, and yonder, all at once.
He describes himself as the true parasite and others as "their zanies" Like his master, he has something of the artist's joy in his performance, and he is equally carried away be the zest of the game. In spite of all his astuteness, he falls into a blunder which, combined with Volpone's final adventure, involves the final ruin of both. His blunder is the result of what he himself calls the wantonness of success:
Success hath made me wanton. I could skip
Out of my skin now, like a subtle snake,
I am so limber.
His strategy vis-a-vis Bonario. It is in this reckless wanton mood that he encounters Bonario, the son whom Corbaccio is about to disinherit in Volpone's favour. The surprising boldness of his next move (the communication to Bonario of his father's design) may lead us to think that Jonson has brought about a situation he needed (namely, Bonario's presence in the gallery when Celia is attacked by Volpone) without providing a sufficient motive. But it is part of Mosca's character to take great risks. He has always played a dangerous game, and at this moment in the play he is feeling elated by success. But he is not just courting danger for the love of it. He has a definite plan. Nor is this plan the result of a sudden impulse arising in him from seeing Bonario. "Who's this? Bonario, the person I was bound to seek", he says. Mosca's own subsequent explanations of his motives to Corbaccio and then to Voltore are naturally intended to please them both. But it is not difficult to detect the real policy, now frustrated, which had prompted his act. Corbaccio was attached to his son. Corrupt as he is, he had at first hesitated to disinherit the young man. It is Mosca's attempt to prevent any recurrence of Corbaccio's scruples, and he takes the course which he thinks will promptly alienate father and son. What he meant to happen is substantially what he tells Corbaccio has happened, with a climax which Corbaccio's tardy arrival prevented. Bonario was expected to burst into a fit of rage against his father and threaten his life; Mosca would then have intervened to save Corbaccio, securing thereby the gratitude and confidence of the old man for himself and the inheritance for his master, Volpone. This strategy had certainly its weaknesses, but there are always weaknesses in the strategy of all plotters. In case, this strategy was sufficiently well-grounded to be adopted by an able and bold fellow. The circumstance which upsets it, the premature arrival of Corvino and Celia, is provided with a motive which perfectly accords with Corvino's character; and yet the motive is so extravagant in its wildness that even the depraved imagination of Mosca could not be expected to foresee it or cope with it.
The Other Characters
The three dupes. The three dupes are drawn in less detail than the parasite but with a no less incisive and powerful hand. The three are clearly distinguishable from one another, but they do not differ a bit in the quality or extent of their greed. Raven, crow, vulture they represent but a narrow class even among birds of prey. They differ in their circumstances, but not in the bent of their minds. Voltore is as blinded by greed and as easily deceived as the dull and deaf Corbaccio, and is prepared to change his stand when necessary as shamefully as Corvino, Corvino is portrayed as being pathologically jealous of his wife (so jealous that he will have her bricked up for life merely for looking out of the window) but he none the less persuades himself to prostitute her to Volpone's lust in order to gain his fortune-and, by a supreme example of Jonsonian irony, he is persuaded that there is no "shame" in this, that his "honour" is safe. Corvino shows his vileness in the speeches, and more particularly in the punishments which he envisages for her when she refuses to obey him. Here is a specimen:
Death! I will buy some slave
Whom I will kill, and bind thee to him, alive!
And at my window hand you forth, devising
Some monstrous crime, which I, in capital letters,
Will eat into thy flesh............
The adventures of the three have wonderfully been invented and discriminated by Jonson. And yet the similarity of their decadent and criminal corruption offers a contrast to the diversity of the clients of Subtle* and Facet This contrast is due chiefly to the strong ethical bias which prompted this play, and the comparative absence of realistic stimulus and suggestion from it.
The good and the bad characters. In no other comedy of Jonson are the characters so sharply distinguished as being good or bad. The rogues and the dupes are uniformly depraved, while Celia and Bonario offer a picture of perfect innocence, though these innocent persons are, as characters, almost as insipid as they are innocent. Even the judges fall apart into two corresponding groups the three abstract and colourless administrators of justice, and the fourth who seeks to soften its rigour for the sake of a possible son-in-low. The main plot of this play has nothing in it of the proper and normal material of comedy, namely extravagancies and absurdities. Its nearest approach to humour lies in the ludicrous spectacle presented by the mis-shapen creatures of Volpone's household.
Sir Politic Would-be and his wife. However, there is one exception to this predominance of dull virtue and disgusting vice. This exception is the by- plot of Sir Politic Would-be. This strangely refreshing personage and his associates troduce something of the lighter and more wholesome atmosphere of the old humour-comedies. And it is significant that Jonson recovers the normal temper of his comedy precisely where he reverts to his normal topics, when he turns from the Venetians of his erudite invention to the English people of his familiar experience. Sir Politic and his lady are, indeed, as alien to the spirit of the play as they seem to be to the customs of Venice. They are foreigners full of curiosity and enterprise, who thrust themselves into a complicated affair which they do not in the least understand and on which they have not the least effect. The peculiar humour of the picture depends largely on the contrast between the fussy interference and their irrelevance. This humour would not have existed if their absurd contortions had any bearing upon, or any inner relation to, the main plot. Jonson had painted in Puntarvolo the absurdities of English travellers when they are in England. His Venetian scene here has provided him an opportunity for depicting the fantastic tricks which English travellers played in foreign cities, and nowhere more extravagantly than in Venice. Some critics have objected to their loose connection with the plot. If perfect plot construction means that every person should contribute definitely to the development of the action, the objection is sound. But there is also in drama room for the fussy, inefficient people who only blunder round about the real business without affecting it. They might be compared to important buzzing flies upon the engine wheel. If such an ingredient were to be ruled out, a most effective comic role would then have no legitimate place in comedy. Jonson had from the beginning dealt largely in pretentious inefficiencies. An exposure of this kind of comic irrelevance was indeed a part of his finished technique. Master Stephen and Master Matthew may in a sense be said to set the plot of Every Man in His Humour in motion, but through its remaining course the humour of Stephen, in particular, lies precisely in his own uncomprehending irrelevance. Sir Politic does not belong to the highest rank of Jonson's comic characters. But he is a pleasant variation of Jonson's "projector" type, and Lady Would-be is an admirable specimen of the seventeenth century bluestocking, more comic in herself and employed to more genuinely comic purpose than the Collegiate Ladies of the next play, which her merciless talkativeness at the expense of Volpone in another way anticipates.
Sir Politic Would-be sees everything as what it is not. He delves constantly beneath the surface to emerge with the most unlikely set of conjectures. He everywhere detects spies, portents, agents, and wonders. For him nothing is what it appears, but only what it might conceal. His wife survive weakly from Jonson's humour comedies. She volunteers disconnected observations on nearly any subject, always in the manner of the humorists and always incorrectly. For her nothing exists but her own erratic universe. The sole character to regard the scene with detachment is Peregrine. His stability renders him powerless to turn aside the headlong plunge of stupidity.
His standing to one side provides a weak counter-balance to the strong self. dramatizing centres. If he assumes the function of removing Sir Poll from his witch-hunting mania, this does not mean that he could ensure any general improvement. Sir Poll is permitted, after his disgrace, to return home to England to try to reform. The auxiliary business in this play picks up, in reversed fashion the concerns of the chief one.
The fools. (Nano, Androgyno, and Castrone) have a real function to perform. True, that Jonson has not built their roles into the play quite as firmly as he could have done. Nevertheless they have their part, not merely in the general thematic sense of being physical prefigurements of the process of folly and monstrosity which we are witnessing. They touch the business of the play in two vital points: first, in that Mosca tells us that they are the children of Volpone himself. Whether we are to suppose this to be factually true or not, it is symbolically true: these are the monstrous offspring which are born of the sort of life the play presents. Secondly, it is the fools who bring Mosca down in the end. Overconfident of his success, he begins his region as heir by turning them out of doors, and this action first opens Volpone's eyes to Mosca's intentions. In one sense the truest insight remains with the fools, so that they can sing:
Fools, they are the only nation,
Worth men's envy or admiration...........
The fools make Volpone's inner defects external. Their particular function, especially with their songs which Mosca writes and which inordinately amuse Volpone, suggests many overtones. Their presence itself contributes a certain force. They keep before the audience the excesses of folly when carried to a second generation and help sustain the distortions which must at each point inform the drama. Their verses are jangling rhymes, quite at variance with the firmness of the blank verse itself, for, as the main action of the drama demonstrates how desire can inflate itself by vanity, these three underline the level to which thought sinks by total surrender to deformity :for them Pythagoras is merely "that juggler divine". Theirs is the megation of everything, a reduction to babbling imbecility.
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