Volpone and Other Plays (2 page)

Jonson's great run of comedies consists of
Volpone
(1606),
The Silent Woman
(1609),
The Alchemist
(1610), written, like Shakespeare's plays, for the King's Men, and
Bartholomew Fair
(1614). His two Roman tragedies, correct by classical standards,
Sejanus, his Fall
(1603) and
Catiline, his Conspiracy
(1611) were failures in the theatre, but Professor G. E. Bentley's researches have shown that
Catiline
was the most respected play of the seventeenth century, the tragedy educated people were expected to admire.
¹
Jonson's later plays, which Dryden termed ‘dotages', show a sad falling-off.

In 1616 Jonson published in folio
The Workes of Beniamin Jonson
, a daring act which had important reverberations. The
Workes
included not only epistles, satires, and epigrams (respectable literary
genres)
but also masques and nine play-scripts, edited as meticulously as if they had been philosophical treatises or a Spenserian epic. None of the early hack-work for Henslowe was printed, but the use of the title
Workes
for mere stage-plays was greeted with scorn and derision. Had Jonson not put his plays before the public in this collected edition, the actors Heming and Condell might never have undertaken the great posthumous collection of plays, many not previously printed, by William Shakespeare, the First Folio of 1623. The gossip John Aubrey records, ‘Ben Jonson was never a good Actor, but an excellent Instructor', which suggests that he insisted on supervising rehearsals of his own plays – something in keeping with his finicky and exacting temperament and his (justifiable) pride in his work.

In the year his
Workes
were published in Folio, Jonson was granted a royal pension and made, in effect, Poet Laureate. King James wanted to make him a knight. He was uniquely honoured among Jacobean writers: Cambridge and Oxford gave him honorary degrees, and when he walked to Edinburgh in 1618 he was made an honorary burgess and entertained at a civic banquet costing, £220
6s. 4d
., Scots – the Scots pound being worth
1s. 8d
. He made a long stay with William Drummond of Hawthornden, the Scots poet, who jotted down his table-talk, which was pithy, opinionated, and revealing. His last years in London were unhappy. His library was burned. He became paralysed, and was unable to get out the second volume of his
Workes
. Under King Charles, James's Laureate did not find favour: he quarrelled with Inigo Jones and was replaced as masque-writer at Court by Aurelian Townshend. He died on 6 August 1637, and his burial at Westminster Abbey was attended by ‘all or the greatest part of the nobility and gentry then in town'. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson in their Oxford edition end the biography thus:

Neglected as his later years had been, the passing of Ben was, for the entire world of letters, the passing of its king – a king who had perhaps ceased to govern, but who still reigned.
¹

In 1638 appeared a collection of thirty-three poems,
Jonsonus Virbius, or The Memory of Ben Jonson Revived By The Friends of the Muses
. The projected memorial to him in the Abbey never materialized. Instead, a square of marble was inscribed, at a cost (according to Aubrey) of eighteen-pence: ‘O Rare Ben Jonson.'

Jonson was, in a way that Shakespeare never was, a celebrity and a man of letters. He was a poet, a writer of court-masques, a literary theorist, a grammarian, a dramatist, and a pundit. His theories about composition and rhetoric are easily accessible in
Timber, or Discoveries
, posthumously pieced together from Jonson's commonplace book, or even from lecture-notes, by Sir Kenelm Digby. There is nothing there specifically about the writing of comedies, but Jonson's ideas on this subject would have matched Sir Philip Sidney's definition:

Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he presenteth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be; so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one.

The Prologue to
Every Man in his Humour
tells of the author's ambition to offer models of comedy-writing:

He rather prays, you will be pleased to see
One such, today, as other plays should be.

Jonson promises:

… deeds and language, such as men do use,
And persons, such as Comedy would choose,
When she would show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.

This, like the epistle-dedicatory of
Volpone
, aligns him with the satiric tradition of comedy – where comedy is didactic and offers moral correction. It points also to that classical notion of comedy as concerned, not like tragedy with kings and princes but with people placed low in the social scale, people of the city and the streets. Professor Nevill Coghill has usefully demonstrated that two traditions of comedy existed in Elizabethan times, with different antecedents, both stemming from theoretical reversals of Aristotle's notions of tragedy. Romantic Comedy begins with wretchedness and the threat of danger but ends happily. Satiric Comedy teaches by exposing the errors of city folk. Shakespeare and Jonson, Professor Coghill argues, exemplify the two comic forms:

Compared with the comedies of Shakespeare, those of Ben Jonson are no laughing matter. A harsh ethic in them yokes punishment with derision; foibles are persecuted and vices flayed; the very simpletons are savaged for being what they are. The population… [of] his comedies… is a congeries of cits, parvenus, mountebanks, cozeners, dupes, braggarts, bullies, and bitches. No one loves anyone…

In Shakespeare things are different. Princes and dukes, lords and ladies, jostle with merchants, weavers, joiners, country sluts, friendly rogues, schoolmasters, and village policemen, hardly one of whom is incapable of a generous impulse.
¹

And of the two traditions Professor Coghill remarks:

Faced by a choice in such matters, a writer is wise if he follows his own temperament. Ben Jonson knotted his cat-o'-nine-tails. Shakespeare reached for his Chaucer.
¹

The excellencies and the limitations of Jonson's comedies are closely related to his chosen
genre
. It is a mistake to regard him as
the
exemplar of ‘classical' comic dramaturgy. As Professor Levin reminds us ‘Jonson is commonly conceived as a man who wrote comedies because he had a theory about why comedies ought to be written.'
²
In our own day the writer with a sound theoretical basis for his art is somehow suspect, and to brand Jonson as a comic theorist gives his plays a forbidding, pedantic image. The neoclassical views on wide reading, knowledge of rhetoric, constant practice of one's own style, and imitation of past masters which Jonson set down and refined upon in
Discoveries
have a pragmatic and very English bent, and remind us of the
obiter dicta
preserved by William Drummond. While the reader should not too readily assume that Jonson's dramatic practice squared rigidly with his critical precepts, it still seems both appropriate and meaningful to say that Jonson's greatest comedies,
Volpone
and
The Alchemist
, display ‘classical' virtues of lucidity and meticulous construction.

The quality of a Jonsonian comedy, however, lies not only in its construction and in its presentation of character as obsession, but also in its language, which often has a positively
nourishing
quality; it has the ‘feel' of the life of his time. In fact, Jonson's evocation of contemporary London low-life is at times so dense, so detailed that for a modern reader it is at first confusing;
Volpone
, set in Venice, is as a result the most immediately accessible of his comedies.

The master-theme in Jonson's satirical comedies is human folly, particularly that obsessive human greed which betrays fools into the hands of expert and opportunist manipulators. The action always culminates in exposure and often in punishment. The comedy is harsh, single-minded, and inhospitable to sentiment,
pathos, and irrelevance. In the end Jonsonian comedy
is
more limited than Shakespeare's great succession of comedies, but the
genre
is purer. Imitation of past masters and the observance of rules helped Jonson to write well; his own acute observation, moral concern, and mastery of words made him a great comic dramatist. Later, imitation of their master guided ‘the tribe of Ben' to write less badly, and made Jonson the most celebrated father-figure in English literature.

Volpone
is Jonson's greatest and most intense comedy. It is a savage and sardonic satire on human greed and rapacity, but the brilliance of the design and the execution, together with the comments of critics primarily concerned with the literary qualities of the play, should not prevent us from recognizing its perennial vitality as a piece of theatre.

Jonson presents both his characters and their backgrounds with deliberate precision. The people of the play are, through their-names, invested with animal symbolism (Wolf, Fly, Vulture, Raven, and Crow), and linked with the creatures of medieval
fabliaux
, with Reynard the Fox and his victims. But where animals behaving like human beings, whether in the
Fables
of Robert Henryson or in the cartoons of Walt Disney, have the charm and fantasy of creatures viewed from a novel perspective, men behaving like animals and predatory birds are seen to be debased and degenerate. Nor is it by chance that these people are Venetians. Venice, already familiar on the Elizabethan stage as the city of Shakespeare's usurer, Shylock, was famed as the most affluent, acquisitive, glittering, and corrupt city in Renaissance Europe. In the modern theatre one envisages for this play an opulence of production and
décors
as peculiarly necessary to emphasize the preoccupation with affluence and acquisitiveness which the play exposes.

Several literary critics, approaching the opening scenes of
Volpone
, have pointed to the thorough reversal of traditional religious and moral values in the play, and demonstrated how the language and imagery reinforce this total reversal. The play opens
with a literary convention, with a character waking to greet the dawn:

Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!
Open the shrine, that I may see my saint!

And, as Mosca draws a curtain, to disclose the treasures heaped up behind, Volpone's speech becomes a perverted act of worship:

Hail the world's soul, and mine! More glad than is
The teeming earth to see the longed-for sun
Peep through the horns of the celestial Ram,
Am I, to view thy splendour darkening his…

Volpone here uses an image of the earth's potential richness and fertility as it awaits the life-quickening sun in spring to describe his own expectant state; already within these lines, gold has eclipsed the sun, an idea that is made more explicit a moment later with his apostrophe:

                                         O, thou son of Sol
(But brighter than thy father) let me kiss,
With adoration, thee, and every relic
Of sacred treasure in this blessed room.

Here the reversal of values and the perverse misappropriation of traditional language (‘adoration', ‘relic', ‘sacred', ‘blessèd') become complete, and the myth that gold is indeed child of Sol, the sun, associates Volpone with alchemists and their pursuit of the Philosopher's Stone. The dehumanizing and debasing aspects of Volpone's worship of gold are apparent in the lines where the normal, happy lives of others are contemptuously dismissed. And at the end of the first act, Mosca clinches his seductive description of Celia by comparing her beauty, finally, not with living things but with gold itself. Throughout
Volpone
, religious and erotic language and imagery are perverted and debased, expressing (as their very names do) the inner corruption and animality of the main characters. Jonson also uses language and imagery in such a way that we of the audience are led to make our own moral judgements. Volpone's speeches are often memorably beautiful, but the poetry is never purely ornamental. Thus although, in his more splendid passages, Volpone's energy, intelligence, and thrust may seem to link him in our minds with Dr Faustus and Tamburlaine
the Great, the Marlovian over-reachers, we see that he has none of their heroic aspirations. Volpone's habitual disguise as an old man sick unto death, his assumed diseases and senility, ironically point to his own inner sickness; his energy and intelligence shine out in the early scenes of the play principally in contrast to the drab and joyless self-interest and miserliness of his dupes, Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino. He gets more pleasure from manipulating them, and from watching them squirm, than from anything their gold, diamonds, and pearls enable him to do. Volpone's function in these scenes is almost judicial:

                        What a rare punishment
Is avarice to itself!

While analysis of the poetry, the imagery, the larger metaphor of animal names, and the like helps to direct and control our moral and emotional responses to
Volpone
, such a critical approach tends to ignore the vitality of the play as a piece of theatre, and literary commentators have insufficiently stressed the superb
theatricalism
of Jonson's great comedy, which stems in part from Volpone's self-congratulatory acting throughout the play. He is a consummate actor, delighting in impersonation and in the details of make-up and costume; on his virtuosity depend the early scenes of the play. Despite Jonson's paucity of stage-directions, it is clear that Volpone's huge bed should dominate the stage. At the very beginning of the play he is discovered there, awakening. Later he lies in bed, receiving the tributes from his ‘clients', shamming sickness and senility, and all the while critically eyeing and evaluating their presents and making sardonic comments
sotto voce
to Mosca. There are wonderful opportunities here for by-play by the actor playing Volpone; in Sir Donald Wolfit's performance he ‘leered through the curtains and twiddled his toes under the bedclothes for sheer enjoyment as the gifts kept coming in'.
¹
Similarly, the scene in which Volpone disguises himself as the Mountebank and harangues the crowd provides Volpone (and the actor playing him) with unlimited opportunities. Later, the bed is again the main stage-furniture in the scene in which Corvino eagerly leads his wife to the bedside of the sick Volpone to prostitute her to his
potential benefactor. This is the central scene of the play, and it is a great moment in the theatre when, as Celia droops by the bed, Volpone throws off the furs, the caps, the make-up of the senile invalid, and leaps from the bed to stand before her as a Renaissance gallant, glorying in his potency: