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.