Volpone and Other Plays Read Online Free

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 hispotential 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:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Nay, fly me not,
Nor let thy false imagination
That I was bed-rid, make thee think I am so:
Thou shalt not find it. I am, now, as fresh,
As hot, as high, and in as jovial plight
As when, in that so celebrated scene,
At recitation of our comedy,
For entertainment of the great Valois,
I acted young Antinous, and attracted
The eyes and ears of all the ladies present,
T’ admire each graceful gesture, note, and footing.
    Typically, Volpone here recalls his past triumph as an actor, and the sex-appeal he had for the ladies of the Court, Typically, too, he links himself, in the pun on ‘jovial’, with Jove, who metamorphosed himself for so many erotic adventures with earthly maidens. And in the song, which originates in Catullus, Volpone presses Celia with the argument, insidious to traditional moralists, that Time is passing, that the only sin is to be found out, and that they are superior beings:
    Cannot
we
delude the eyes
Of a few poor household spies?…
To be taken, to be seen,
These have crimes accounted been.
    His dazzling speech beginning ‘Why droops my Celia?’ is a speech of temptation. Running through it there is an unchallenged assumption that everyone has a price (‘A diamond would have bought Lollia Paulina’). And when, in the next speech, Volpone depicts their future life together, the sensuality becomes more blatant:
    Our drink shall be preparèd gold and amber,
Which we will take until my roof whirl round
With the vertigo; and my dwarf shall dance,
My eunuch sing, my fool make up the antic.
    Whilst we, in changèd shapes, act Ovid’s tales,
Thou like Europa now, and I like Jove,
Then I like Mars, and thou like Erycine;
So of the rest, till we have quite run through,
And wearied all the fables of the gods.
Then will I have thee in more modern forms,
Attirèd like some sprightly dame of France…
Or some quick Negro, or cold Russian…
    The perversity, the artificial stimulation of passion, reminds us (if Mosca is a truthful witness) of the real children of Volpone: the dwarf, the eunuch, the hermaphrodite – the three freaks – and:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Bastards,
Some dozen, or more, that he begot on beggars,
Gypsies, and Jews, and black-moors, when he was drunk.
    It reminds us, too, of Nano’s song, sung while he impersonated the Mountebank’s zany, which vainly promised eternal youth and beauty, and the preservation of the life of the senses. Volpone, the eloquent seducer, fails to move Celia. He resorts to rape. Bonario rushes in, in the nick of time, to save Celia; but Jonson in this play is not much interested in human goodness, and the wronged wife and stalwart young man are minor, unrealized figures in the comedy. Coleridge was not alone in expressing disappointment at this: ‘Bonario and Celia should have been made in some way or other principals in the plot… If it were possible to lessen the paramountcy of Volpone himself, a most delightful comedy might have been produced, by making Celia the ward or niece of Corvino, instead of his wife, and Bonario her lover.’ 1 But there is a sense in which ‘the