Volpone

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1606

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Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

The Epistle-Act I

Act II

Act III

Act IV

Act V

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

The Corrupting Power of Greed

The catalyst for all the action of the play is that Volpone does not have a natural heir for his enormous wealth. Volpone’s fortune gives him immense power and social standing in Venice, so his successor stands to inherit both riches and repute. The play, however, argues that too large an appetite for wealth and power can fully consume a person’s mind, leaving them susceptible to other vices. Volpone’s three main suitors willingly follow along with Mosca and Volpone’s wicked ideas because they think it will get them closer to securing the inheritance. At several points, Volpone expresses amazement at the gullibility of his marks, but Mosca reminds him that “too much light blinds ’em” (5.2.23)—meaning that the shine of all that promised gold prevents them from seeing even obvious deceptions. Mosca convinces Voltore to abuse his vocation as a lawyer and testify falsely to the court. Despite confessing to guilt after this performance, when Voltore learns that Volpone is alive and that he still has a chance at the fortune, he immediately returns to his deceptive ways. Corbaccio is already a wealthy gentleman, but he willingly disinherits his own natural heir in his quest for doubled riches. He claims that “This plot / Did I think on before” (1.4.109-110), demonstrating how his avarice led him to consider this unethical deed previously. Corvino goes against his convictions about a wife’s duties to her husband when he agrees to offer Celia to Volpone for sex, thinking such an act of generosity will secure his position as heir. Despite his profound fear of ruining his reputation, Corvino is willing to announce Celia’s false affair in a public court if it will secure him the inheritance. Regardless of whether Mosca and Volpone’s suggestions are hypocritical, illegal, or just plain ridiculous, the suitors’ greed prevents them from seeing any other path toward their goals.

Volpone’s own greed motivates his and Mosca’s scam and eventually leads to their demise. Volpone boasts that he has no honest profession and uses “no common way” (1.1.33) to grow his fortune. Volpone doesn’t simply con his suitors out of necessity; he enjoys the uniquely wicked intrigue of “playing with their hopes” (1.1.85). Like a mountebank—which Volpone aptly disguises himself as later in the play—Volpone sells his suitors on sham promises of inheritance, all the while knowing that he will never actually leave them any of his money. The play reveals that the scheme has been ongoing for three years. To maintain this deception for so long, Volpone becomes obsessed with keeping up appearances for the sake of the extortion. His malicious scheme is so all-consuming that Volpone cannot leave his house without a disguise for fear of ruining the ruse he has worked so long at. Despite Mosca’s earlier claim that Volpone “[knows] the use of riches” (1.1.62), in his final moments, Volpone latches onto his fortune. He refuses to let Mosca take half, let alone all, of his riches, declaring “First, I’ll be hanged” (5.12.63). Volpone’s greed overrides his fear of exposure, since he’d rather die than let go of his vast wealth.

The play also illustrates the dangers of greed for other earthly pleasures, arguing that greed for one thing easily becomes greed for all things. This quality and its corrupting power radiate primarily from Volpone, whose greedy nature spills over into his desire for Celia. Volpone tells Mosca to use whatever of his fortune is necessary to get Celia to sleep with him, contradicting his own desire to keep and grow his fortune. Volpone attempts to woo Celia with earthly pleasures he has at his disposal:

Our drink shall be prepared 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 (3.7.217-20).

This short excerpt from his speech reveals the kinds of bodily pleasures Volpone seeks, while also illustrating the value he places on these pleasures. The speech produces a wicked contrast with Celia’s pious refusal to entertain “these sensual baits” (3.7.210). Volpone’s desire to quench his lust becomes so extreme that he is willing to commit the crime of rape, demonstrating the total corruption of his soul through vice. His near-constant engagement in immoral and decadent activities demonstrates that greed can corrupt every aspect of life.

The Moral Impact of Performance

Many scenes in Volpone function like plays within the play, highlighting the insincerity of the characters’ actions and the centrality of performance in social life. In the Epistle that precedes the play’s text, Ben Jonson argues that theatre should “inform men on the best reason of living” (Epistle, 96). He critiques his contemporaries’ lewd, profane dramas that only serve to spread vice and filth, and in the play, he affiliates this kind of drama with Mosca and Volpone. The pair uses Volpone’s house as a makeshift theatre for the wicked performances they use to deceive the suitors. Volpone uses elaborate disguises of costuming and makeup as well as exaggerated performances of illness: “Now, my feigned cough, my phthisic and my gout, / My apoplexy, palsy and catarrhs, / Help with your forced functions this my posture” (1.2.126-128). His intricate facade creates a more convincing illusion to gull the suitors. Mosca introduces the arrival of the players—the suitors—who play important if unwitting roles in the drama. Mosca himself plays a variety of characters: the flatterer with Voltore, the obedient servant with Corbaccio, and the disillusioned retainer with Corvino. Jonson also aligns Mosca with the figure of the playwright when Volpone praises Mosca for his “quick fiction” (3.5.25). Unlike the pure theatre Jonson promotes in his Epistle, Volpone and Mosca’s performances don’t serve to instruct the suitors on how to rid themselves of their greed. Rather, they manipulate their vices solely for Volpone and Mosca’s personal gain.

Jonson emphasizes the perverse nature of Volpone’s theatre through the fools’ entertainment. Nano, Androgino, and Castrone perform for Volpone twice over the course of the play. Their skits serve both to dispel tension in the play’s action and reveal Volpone’s affinity for wickedness. The fools discuss the intellectual topic of the transmigration of souls, but in their performance, they mock different religious sects and make sexual innuendos about these pious people for the amusement of their audience:

ANDROGINO. Like one of the reformed, a fool, as you see,

Counting all old doctrine heresy.

NANO. But not on thine own forbid meats hast thou ventured?

ANDROGINO. On fish, when first a Carthusian I entered (1.2.31-34).

In this passage, the fools mock Protestants (“the reformed”) for the “foolishness” of their beliefs, and they mischievously suggest that the speaker’s Protestant soul once entered the body of a Catholic. Androgino’s second line produces a double-entendre, where “entered” denotes both the soul’s entry into a new body and the act of sexual penetration. Volpone expresses his delight in the fools’ debauchery and calls their play “Very, very pretty” (1.2.63). Mosca claims the act was his “invention,” which again aligns him with Jonson’s immoral playwrights.

Volpone and Mosca’s act extends farther and farther outside the confines of Volpone’s house, showing how the depravity of immoral theatre seeps into the everyday lives of its audience. Not only do Mosca and Volpone take on more roles to keep up with the scale of their deceits, but the unwitting players in their scheme bring the performance into their familial relationships. In the wake of Bonario foiling Volpone’s plan, Corbaccio believes Mosca’s lie about Bonario and becomes firm in his resolve when he says, “This act shall disinherit him indeed” (3.9.8). Corbaccio fragments his relationship with Bonario because of Mosca’s performance, and he goes on to publicly call his son “an utter stranger to my loins” (4.5.109) because of this deception. Mosca and Voltore, who gains a major role in the scheme, turn the court into a makeshift theatre and force the men to perform “a formal tale” (4.4.7) that Mosca devised. The courtroom scenes further expound Jonson’s argument that lewd theatre can only have wicked outcomes, both for the participants and the audience. Rather than the performance bringing about justice and revealing the players’ faults to the onlooking court, the innocent viewers—Celia and Bonario—are punished, the Avvocati are deceived, and the suitors, Mosca, and Volpone walk away as free men. The sentences for the truly guilty men only come when Volpone drops his wicked disguise. In this way, Jonson rights the wrongs of Volpone and Mosca’s performances by reasserting the true purposes of drama: making an example of vice to improve its audience’s lives.

Seeking Justice in a Corrupt Society

Jonson intentionally sets the play in Venice, which English audiences of the Early Modern Period would have stereotypically understood as a city of vice. With this background, Jonson interrogates where justice can be served in such a corrupt society. The play proposes that bad actors easily impede justice with their own agendas and tricks, but faith in God always brings out the truth.

Jonson distinguishes private social justice from public criminal justice. Volpone and Mosca do not see fault in their scams because they are punishing the suitors for their foolishness and greed. When they concoct the plan to make Mosca the heir, the suitors’ anger affords Mosca a rare opportunity to openly mock each suitor’s vices to his face. For example, Mosca calls out Corvino’s insincerity in giving gifts to Volpone, whose health he does not care about: “Why, you think that these good works / May help to hide your bad” (5.3.56-57). Mosca thus punishes the suitors for their attempted exploitation of an old, lonely gentleman and for the nefarious acts they commit to achieve their goals. The play’s subplot also explores private justice. Peregrine seeks retaliation against Sir Politic for a perceived humiliation, but he will only extract a punishment of equal value: “All my ambition is to fright him only” (5.4.2). Peregrine makes Sir Politic confront the absurdity of his behavior through the trick, which Sir Politic knows will make him a laughingstock. In this way, characters achieve private justice in the social realm. Wrongdoers are forced to face their true selves and the realities of their corrupt actions, with punishment coming in the form of humiliation and broken reputations.

However, once the characters commit actual crimes, the play introduces justice in the public, legal sphere. Volpone’s attempted rape of Celia compels Bonario to bring the old man and his underlings to court for criminal prosecution. Bonario wounds Mosca as part of an earlier deal to punish his lies, but he declares he won’t overstep and “snatch thy punishment / Out of the hand of justice” (3.7.270). Despite Bonario’s belief that the courts will expose Volpone’s scheming, the play demonstrates that malicious actors can manipulate the system to hide guilt rather than reveal it. The court, as an impartial body, demands objective proof of any accusation. Knowing this, Voltore and Mosca overwhelm the Avvocati with corroborating witnesses and the physical proof of Mosca’s wound to accuse Bonario and Celia of treachery. Bonario and Celia know that God is a witness of their innocence, but the Avvocati declare “These are no testimonies” (4.6.18) in a court of law. The courts prioritize impartiality to such a degree that they are easily manipulated by skilled performers like Volpone and Mosca. The Avvocati—accustomed to ferreting out performative displays of emotion—interpret Celia’s tears and swooning as evidence of guilt rather than of innocence. The paranoia of treachery that plagues the streets of Venice thus bleeds into the supposedly neutral court, leading both guilty and innocent parties to fall under suspicion of deceit.

The play exposes Volpone’s crimes in the final act, demonstrating Jonson’s argument that the truth will always come out. Each man receives a material punishment in line with his vices, illustrating how public justice takes the social humiliation of private justice a step further: It enacts tangible consequences for misdeeds proportionate to its harm. For example, the Avvocati declare that for Voltore’s defilement of his profession, he will be “banished from their fellowship, and our state” (5.12.128). They strip Voltore of his ability to abuse any other court as he abused theirs. Celia and Bonario attribute both Voltore and Volpone’s confessions to God, and they believe “Heaven could not long let such gross crimes be hid” (5.12.99). However, due to the play’s dramatic irony, the audience knows that Volpone’s ultimate confession did not come from a miraculous change of heart or the urging of a guilty conscience, as the innocent pair supposes. Although the guilty parties are exposed, the play ambiguously recognizes that the outcome of justice in the earthly courts often remains in the hands of the mischievous.