Ben Jonson's Volpone - This is our masterpiece; We cannot think to go beyond this.

We last saw brilliant, prickly, ambitious Ben Jonson flop badly with his Roman tragedy Sejanus His Fall (1603).  A couple of years later he found himself in prison along with George Chapman for poking fun at Scots in Eastward Ho! (1605, also written with his old enemy John Marston, who skipped jail somehow), a play I was tempted to include in my Not Shakespeare schedule, except that I remember it as very much a period piece. 

Why not go straight to the good stuff?  Because the next thing Jonson did was to write four great plays in a row, a deft balance of the old Italian (or Roman, or Greek) comic models with the energy of London life and language.  So, Volpone (1606).  The wealthy Fox pretends to be dying to extract valuable gifts from people – or birds, Vulture, Crow and Raven – who want to be his heir.  Volpone’s sudden wave of lust for the wife of one of his victims gives enough twist to the plot to keep it moving past the first act.

Whatever the moral basis of the satire, the edification of watching the greedy cheat the greedy until everyone gets their just punishment in the final scene, the pleasure is in the details of the performance, Volpone on his sick bed and his parasite Mosca stroking the “heirs,” the eagerness of the gulls:

VOLPONE  I cannot now last long –

MOSCA                                                   You are his heir, sir.

VOLTORE  Am I?

VOLPONE            I feel me going; Uh! uh! uh! uh!

I’m sailing to my port, Uh! uh! uh! uh!

And I am glad I am so near my haven.

MOSCA  Alas, kind gentleman!  Well, we all must go –

VOLTORE  But, Mosca –

MOSCA                               Age will conquer.  (Act I, Sc. 3)

The key, though, part of the tendency for sophisticated art to mostly be about art, is that it turns out the real motivation for both Volpone and Mosca is the love of the game, the creation and performance of the perfect scheme.

MOSCA  Why now you speak, sir.  We must here be fixed;

Here we must rest.  This is our masterpiece;

We cannot think to go beyond this.

VOLPONE                                                True,

Thou’st played thy prize, my precious Mosca.  (V.1)

They talk of “how rare a music” they have made.  Volpone of course goes a step too far, putting on a new disguise in the last act just to further torment his victims.

VOLPONE                          But, Mosca,

Play the artificer now, torture them rarely.  (V.2)

They perform, at this point, for the sake of performing.

I should point out Mosca’s remarkable monologue in III.1, in praise of the parasite, which begins with the sensual pleasures of a crazy scheme falling into place – “I could skip / Out of my skin, now, like a subtle snake, / I am so limber” – and ends with a declaration that the trickster role is his vocation – “This is the creature had the art born with him.”

The language of Volpone is on the plain side.  The elaborate, Marston-like joy in strange words is reserved for Act II, when Volpone is in yet another costume, playing a patent medicine salesman:

VOLPONE  These turdy-facy-nasty-paty-lousy-fartical rogues, with one poor groat's-worth of unprepared antimony, finely wrapt up in several scartoccios*, are able, very well, to kill their twenty a week, and play; yet, these meagre, starved spirits, who have half stopped the organs of their minds with earthy oppilations, want not their favorers among your shrivelled  salad-eating artisans, who are overjoyed that they may have their half-p'orth of physic; though it purge them into another world, it makes no matter.

SIR POLITIC WOULD-BE Excellent! have you heard better language, sir?  (II.2)

Now there is an imperfection.  The B-plot, with the blowhard English tourist Sir Politic Would-be, is pretty weak.

The characters are thin, just types, ready for comic actors to fill up.  The language is energetic but not too wild, which is likely good for modern performance.  Perhaps Volpone was a deliberate effort by Jonson to strip down the elements of the comedy.  How little does he need for the play to work?

Quotations are form the Norton Critical Edition of Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques, the good old one edited by Robert M. Adams.

Next up, in a couple of weeks, is The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), attributed to several authors, with Thomas Middleton the consensus author now.  I am agnostic.  As I remember the play, it is an outstanding example of the new cynicism of the Jacobean playwrights, and presumably their audience, and also one of the funniest, most outrageous, of the great revenge tragedies, if you find these things funny.  As the title says, it is the pure revenge tragedy.

 

*  Little paper envelopes for powdered pharmaceuticals.

What I Read in August 2026 – what he hopes to gain from all this knowledge

Now and again, Geiser finds himself wondering what he really wants to know, what he hopes to gain from all this knowledge.  (Man in the Holocene, Max Frisch, tr. Geoffrey Skelton, p. 90)

An uncomfortable sentence there.

A reminder that I will return to non-Shakespeare plays any minute now, with Volpone up next Monday and The Revenger’s Tragedy a couple of weeks after that.

 

VICINITY OF SHAKESPEARE

Utopia (1516), Thomas More – Ahead of its time.

Poems (1633), John Donne – Well, I read Donne’s collected poems in a modern edition, so a later, accretive version of the 1633 book, a landmark, the first publication of most of its contents.  How Donne fell out of favor is beyond me.  His emotional, imaginative and formal range is extraordinary.  I meant to read a short selection of his hits but just kept going.

 

FICTION

The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Ernest Hemingway – Late, or really mid, and possibly early, Hemingway has a kitsch or self-parodic tendency.  I got a taste of that early in this famous book, which I last read well over forty years ago, but soon enough Hemingway’s precision overwhelmed any reservations.  How is he going to catch that fish?  A great argument not for simplicity, since by the end the book is plenty complex, but for reduction.  How few elements are needed to tell a great story?

Swords in the Mist (1968), Fritz Leiber – Various Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, particularly the 1947 novella Adept’s Gambit.  Leiber is more playful with language, funnier, than most of his post-pulp peers, and is as good with weird imagery and sublime moments as any of them.

Man in the Holocene (1979), Max Frisch – A Swiss man alone in his own head, the roads blocked and the electricity out.  He obsessively reads about geology and paleohistory, and clips bits out of his encyclopedia to paste on the wall.  In the centerpiece scene, he goes for a long walk.  Very very Swiss.

Margarita (A Memory) (2012), César Aira – Aira at his most sentimental, or simulating the sentimental.  Newly Englished by Chris Andrews in a collection titled Five.

 

ART CRITICISM

The Grand Valley (2025), Morgan Meis – A book about Joan Mitchell and a series of her paintings.  I will write about it soon.

 

POETRY

A Letter from Li Po & Other Poems (1955), Conrad Aiken

Journey to Love (1955), William Carlos Williams

The Boatman (1957) &

Welcoming Disaster (1974), Jay Macpherson – Canadian, quite funny, a bit in the vein of Stevie Smith but more formalist and more referential – lots of myths and old stories here.  Much to my taste.

The Gavin Ewart Show (1971), Gavin Ewart – Some of the heaviest light verse I have ever read.  Man as animal, sexual, mortal.  Also much to my taste.  I was, and am, enjoying his Selected Poems when I thought I would try one of his books as such, which had more of the same, just as good.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

La recherche d l'Absolu (The Search for the Absolute, 1834), Honoré Balzac – This obscure Balzac novel caught my attention a decade ago because it is available in a school edition in France.  The story is about a merchant who is destroying his fortune due to his obsession with the new-fangled science of chemistry, which in his hands is not far removed from alchemy, and his devoted wife and later daughter who do what they can to save the family.  I do not think it is a great novel a Balzac goes, perhaps not even a good one, and I am curious how it is used in French schools.  It seems the history of science angle has pulled it into the curriculum.  I hope the young people on what we would call the STEM track have been enjoying it. This is the 47th Balzac work I have read.

Memorial de Aires (1908), Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis – Long ago, when I had a Portuguese Literature Challenge going, I read four of the last five Machado de Assis novels, the amazing run (the short stories of the period are classics, too) when Machado somehow converted from a Romantic to something more original.  I was nervous about trying this last novel in Portuguese because the earlier novels, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Dom Casmurro and so on, are full of subtle narrative tricks, just the kind of thing I am likely to miss in my clumsy Portuguese reading.  And I did miss them!  Or they are not there.  I think they are not there.  Presented as an authentic diary, digressive and full of ironic comments, occasionally tedious, the narrator tells the story of the romance between a young couple he knows.  On the minor side compared to the earlier masterpieces, but well worth spending more time with Machado.

This and the Raul Brandão novel I read last month are at, or beyond, my reading level, so now I am reading something easier, partly to make sure I can actually “read” Portuguese.