Notesale: Turn your study into money

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VOLPONE AO3/AO4
CRITICS
• “Scoto and Jonson alike scorn their less scholarly competitors”, Scotto trying to flog goods for a cheaper
price, able to do so because he is intelligent and pragmatic
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e
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• Mamet: Court scene, it is not lying it’s a “gift of fiction”
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• “The audience were enjoying the play as a satire upon businessmen” - Essays on Rennaissance literature:
‘Volpone’
• “laughter is good for them [the audience]” - Jonson, audience complicit criticising own society
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• “Villains of the stuff of which tragedy makes use but without the dignity of that genre” - Jonas Barish
• “The limits between man and the world are erased, to a man’s advantage” - Bahktin
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• “Fashioned parts for himself” - Stephen Greenblatt
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• “The danger to subjective well-being is primarily one of boredom” - Oliver Hennessey, on 17th Century
Venice
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Could never be a Volpone
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They are excess
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Watson
• “Dramatises man’s insatiable greed” - Partridge
• “The suitors are solely personifications of greed” - Knights
• “The Advocatori are made of anything but justice” - Miles
• Lady PW demonstrates “In order to achieve some kind of freedom as a woman… she must turn herself
into a commodity available to all” - McEvoy
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• “Nothing is stable and untradeable” - McEvoy
• “Celia, a woman who resists turning into a commodity, has simply become more valuable” - McEvoy
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• “The only religion shown to have any force there is money” - Dutton
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• “Out of control in terms of moral intelligence, but radically in control of amoral situational intelligence” - on
Volpone
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A play of excess
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• “Other people have breakfast; Volpone has gold”
• “He addresses his most appreciated girlfriend” - describing his gold as his “saint”, gold is held over sexual
desire in Volpone in terms of appetite
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Always interrupting each other
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• “An unwitting stooge to Mosca’s darker designs”
• “In Volpone’s world it is no pretence to be a fake” - Volpone is old, and he pretends to be old to hide the
reality
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Volpone is verbose and enjoys the performance
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It is metatheatre throughout
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• “Unrewarding roles in the world of Volpone” - Celia and Bonario’s goodness
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Reflects
attitudes towards women, ought to be quiet and subordinate
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Like Satan
perhaps
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Gillian Tett, Made of Money
• “Financers … dwell in an intellectual echo chamber” - they cannot see the rational world, and are
dominated by their continuously niche social circles, they cannot see that they are irrational or greedy
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• “trapped in a self-enclosed, obsessive world marked by ‘groupthink’”

John J
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Although it is false, it is excellent insofar as it tricks Sir Pol
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• “The gold must be condemned as a positive danger, not a neutral substance”
• “Implicit condemnation [of Venetian lasciviousness] in every line”
• “Venetian justice, then, is not blind but purblind” - purblind, partially blind
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In the play
crime does lead to success immediately but it overflows and then it is punished
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• “Values reverse to the extent that pleasure may give pain, and pain pleasure”

PRODUCTIONS
RSC performance
• Gave Mosca a backplot of being an adopted orphan and thus indebted to Volpone
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• In the round, dividing the stage with doors - see the transformation of Volpone by Mosca behind closed
doors, which makes the audience complicit in their crimes as the visible suitor awaits outside unaware
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Ontario production
• A whore crawls out Volpone’s bed as Mosca wakes him
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• Ralph Richardson and William Hutt - actors portraying Volpone as a bored aristocrat with contempt
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Modern socioeconomics before Elizabethan, Venetian norm
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He is Volpone
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(Mosca)
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Sejenus - Jonson
• Jonson appeared before court for “popery and treason”
The Alchemist - Jonson
• Lovewit returns home and acts as a judge at the end of the play, and forgives the criminal, the butler
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The Epistle - Jonson
Apologising for his works to the Church and universities
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e courts and greedy people
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In the Quarto and Folio versions the running-title was The Fox
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People acting to seduce and sell etc
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Venice
• Corrupt
• Absence of land, economy based entirely on trade
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• Venice as a stage
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Aesop’s Fables, legend of Reynard the Fox
• Reynard tried by corrupt court for attempted rape and abduction of the Crow’s wife
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• Reynard plays dead to trap the crows and birds trying to feed on his carrion

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