Volpone and Other Plays Read Online Free Page A

paramountcy of Volpone’
is
the play; and who would sacrifice the distinctive harsh tone of
Volpone
for yet another ‘most delightful comedy’?
    Bonario’s intervention momentarily casts Volpone and Mosca down: they even talk of suicide. Soon they start manipulating the changed circumstances to their advantage, and their machinations seem, for a time, likely to triumph. In the end, these over-reachers come tumbling down, but it is not the virtuous Bonario and Celia who prove their undoing, nor the feeble processes of Venetianlaw. Volpone’s own relish for extemporizing to meet the new complications proves his ruin: for the gleeful experience of watching his clients’ discomfiture he feigns his own death, and installs Mosca as his heir. The parasite has learned from the patron; the mutual admiration society is dissolved: they undo each other. The end of the comedy is harsh and punitive: no one ’scapes whipping. And where, in Coleridge’s ‘delightful comedy’, virtue would triumph and Celia be married at the play’s end, the pallid heroine is restored, with her dowry, to her parents.
Volpone
does not end with wedding-bells but with Volpone, the unmasked Fox, speaking the epilogue.
    Throughout the comedy Sir Politic Would-be and his Fine Madame play a secondary, never an essential, part. They remain English visitors in a world of Italianate machinations which they never understand. Lady Would-be is merely a
poseuse
, a minor Mrs Malaprop, a figure of fun – the role has been played, broadly and effectively, as a dame part. Sir Politic is something more. In the theatre he emerges as the befuddled Englishman abroad, secure only in his suspicion of foreigners and his own better understanding of how things are organized by the natives. His ludicrous speculative ventures parallel Volpone’s successful fleecing of his dupes; and are part of the play’s satirical attack upon an irrationally acquisitive, capitalistic society. Sir Pol is a contemporary satirical portrait of the English traveller. He is also, in the play’s bestiary, the parrot, chattering away at second hand, and memorable for his bland stupidity and his vague ‘general notions’. Sir Politic has been excellently played by Michael Hordern and by Jonathan Miller, and it is his essential
Englishness
which makes him funny. The Would-be pair are expendable; but to cut them from a performance of the comedy leaves the Italian dupes and manipulators relatively unfocused. They earn their part in the play.
IV
    The Alchemist
is a humbler, a more domestic
Volpone
. Once more the characters are men dominated and exploited by others through their own desires to get rich quick. A sucker seems to have been born every minute in Jonson’s comic world, and in the Philosopher’s Stone, which was supposed to turn base metals into gold,Jonson found a wonderful correlative for his gulls’ selfish and inordinate desire for wealth, influence, and power. It is by holding out to the gulls the prospect of possessing the Stone, that the triumvirate of confidence-tricksters, Face, Subtle, and Dol Common, manipulate them, and win a living. But their world is very different from the rich, remote world of Volpone’s Venice. Their environment is Jacobean London, vividly and saltily evoked by Jonson; and where Volpone operated in part for the sheer perverse exhilaration of controlling others, these three uneasy allies are desperate chancers living on their wits. The play opens explosively with Face and Subtle quarrelling, and we are early reminded how near the bread-line Subtle has been used to living. Dol Common and Subtle are the under-dogs of the Elizabedian underworld.
    The great
technical
achievement of this comedy is that Jonson was able to compress so much local life, so many special slangs and jargons, within his lively and supple blank verse. The density of the dialogue, the contemporaneity of the comedy to a