The Oscillation of Meaning in Volpone

 

                                   illustration by Aubrey Beardsley

 

     The aesthetic text has a capacity to represent contradictions and ambiguities with great economy, often using figures of speech.  Through devices such as oxymora and  irony, authors may suggest a proposition and its opposite as well, allowing thereby the delineation of logically incongruous complex experience.  This characteristic may appear even in highly conventionalized aesthetic texts.  Though the psychological types of the “comedy of humours” and the social conventions on which the satire of “city comedy” realism rely on values shared by author and audience with the plays reinforcing the expectations of the culture as a whole, this general alignment by no means forecloses the use of equivocal images. 

     Virtually all the pillars of bourgeois society are questioned and ridiculed In Ben Jonson’s most frequently performed play Volpone: lawyers and courts, merchants, and doctors.  Each is presented as driven solely by cupidity.  That unifying theme not only characterizes most of the characters; it seems very nearly their only trait.  Every act in  the drama arises out of self-interest, even (for Corbaccio) to providing euthanasia for a testator who inconveniently continues to live. (III, ix)  This simple, unvarying motivation is consistent with Jonson’s definition of a “humour.” [1]

 

Some one peculiar quality

Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw

All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,

In their confluctions, all to run one way.

 

Marrie ile tell thee what it is (as tis

generally received in these daies) it is a

monster bred in a man by self loue, and „

affectation, and fed by folly.

 (III, i, 156-I58  Every Man in his Humour)

 

 

     The audience knows very little of any of the main male characters beyond their avarice.  The only exceptions are the hermaphrodite, eunuch, and dwarf who are fundamentally ornaments of Volpone’s establishment included only to indicate his affluence and peculiar taste, and the honorable Bonario and Celia to provide contrast and conflict as they are, so far as the reader may judge, perfect in every way.

     Jonson was careful to distinguish such deep-seated over-riding “humours” that dominate an individual’s actions from mere vogues to which any weak-minded person might be susceptible and which may vary over time.

 

 

As when some one peculiar quality

Doth so possesse a man, that it doth draw

All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,

In their confluctions, all to runne one way,

This may be truly said to be a Humour.

But that a rooke, in wearing a pyed feather,

The cable hat-band, or the three-pild ruffe,

A yard of shooetye, or the Switzers knot

On his French garters, should affect a Humour!

0, 'tis more than most ridiculous.

(Every Man out of His Humour, Induction, I05-II4).

 

 

Sir Politic Would-be and his wife are examples of this minor sort of “humour,” a condition which is not deep-seated or permanent but which follows fashion.  Their absurdities (contrasted with Peregrine’s better sense) form a lighter parallel to the primary drama around Volpone’s wealth. They are surely ridiculous, but they are not wicked.

    Greed is associated with black bile and Volpone is clearly consumed with a rapacious selfishness.  This is evident not only in his miserliness, but also in his fondness for spectacle, for pranks that humiliate others while benefiting himself. 

 

 

I glory

More in the cunning purchase of my wealth

Than in the glad possession, since I gain

No common way.

                               (Volpone I,i)

 

 

Later he declares, “I must have my crochets/ And my conundrums!” (V, vii)  His cruel art form consists of arranging for others to make fools of themselves, but he pursues his medium to the point that he is ultimately found out.  Apart from this rather endearing theatricality, though, Volpone is a merciless and unattractive con man.

     This straightforward assignment of values, however, is complicated by ambiguities and contradictions, beginning with the very title.  The central metaphor of the play, of course, is there announced: the foxy man.  Foxes are admired in the folklore of the world, particularly in many trickster stories for their cleverness and sagacity.  During the European Middle Ages stories of Reynard the Fox were circulated throughout Western Europe.  Foxes are, like Odysseus πολύτροπος (“of many turns”), notoriously wily, yet sometimes the tables are turned on them and their adversaries carry the day.  In life the fox is most often seen as a chicken thief hated by farmers.  Oddly, foxes are also traditionally obliged to run for their lives, pursued by great crowds of loud men and dogs.  Volpone may be, as the dramatis personae names him, a “magnifico,” but he is one few would care to emulate not least because his arrogance seems likely to be heading for a fall.

     Any ambiguity about Volpone’s character is instantly evaporated as he worships his money in the opening scene.  He is clearly in the grip of an obsession that has sunk him in vice and sin.  His servant, his “creature” or “parasite” Mosca, “the fly,” encourages his every move and remains entirely at his service until the end.  Mosca devotes considerable enthusiasm to carrying out his master’s deceptions.  Now a fly is an altogether despicable thing in the common view.  Though Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, was a deity to the ancient Philistines and Canaanites, he became for Jews and Christian a demon, though in Paradise Lost (II) a significant one, "than whom, Satan except, none higher sat."  Flies accumulate about a corpse almost immediately upon death where, as part of the machinery of dissolution, they are regarded with distaste by the living.  Cooks and tired campers and wide-awake front stoop loungers are mightily annoyed by flies.  Mosca lacks perhaps the grand, almost Byronic, defiance of Volpone’s plotting, but he feels the same relish that his master does in deceit.  Mosca is depicted as utterly obedient until the point when he conceives that he might grab Volpone’s wealth for himself, when he feels suddenly no trace of the loyalty that had seemed so central to him

     The three scavenger birds – crow, raven, and vulture – are equally inauspicious in folklore, though the first two are often considered tricksters, for instance among natives of the American Northwest and Australian Aborigines.  While this mythic role is doubtless facilitated by the impressive cognitive skills of corvids, in Jonson’s play Corvino, Carbaccio, and Voltore are ridiculous dupes, blinded by the golden bequest they expect to receive.  They think they are getting the better of each other, while they are only fooling themselves.  In the same way, Volpone and Mosca themselves turn out to be tricked.  Whereas in simpler and more stylized allegories such as Everyman most characters are stable with unambiguous, in Jonson’s more realistic drama, they have a certain equivocal looseness, cunning, yet careless due to greed.

     The same principle applies to metaphors.  When Mosca lures his master to new crimes by describing Corvin’s wife Celia as  “bright as your gold, and lovely as your gold,” (I,1), the qualities shared by tenor and vehicle (to use I. A. Richards’ terms) include beauty, value, and prestige.  Yet in context the viewer knows that Volpone’s greed for gold has made him a selfish and hateful miser, and his appreciation of female beauty has been corrupted into lechery and sexual coercion.  Both passions can only inspire further duplicity and crime.  The love of both wealth and women, each of which might be a factor in a fulfilling life instead drives him toward both practical and moral ruin.  Each is thus presented as a potential evil as well as a positive good.

     When Celia is horrified at her husband’s suggestion that she join Volpone in bed, her husband calls her a “whore” (II, iii) specifically because she is not.  Thinking she might cost him a fortune, his nasty nature generates weird fantasies of degradation for her – the insulting name is less lurid than his threats to oblige her to walk only backwards, or to dissect her body as an anatomical lesson.  A little anxiety throws Corvino into hysterical misogyny. 

     The lovely and often-reprinted lyric, perhaps Jonson’s most well-known lines “Come, my Celia, let us prove,/ While we can, the sports of love” (II, iii), which out of context seems a sweet lover’s seduction plea much like “To His Coy Mistress,” is, in fact, delivered by a vicious predator to a most unwilling lady whose response is to wish herself dead. 

     While the characterization governed by the theory of “humours” might tend toward the reductive, in Jonson’s hands it is fleshed out by secondary traits, such as the gusto both Volpone and Mosca find in cheating others.  The readers’ partial sympathy is more easily engaged due to the fact that the  vulture, raven, and crow have equally low motives and less élan vital.  The clever fox turns out to be outfoxed, the fly can find  no fat corpse on which to feed, and the scavengers go hungry as well. 

     On the level of individual figures of speech terms like gold and whore have doubled ironic use in the play, indicating for the first both a positive good and a potential pitfall and, for the second, a degradation of woman that in fact indicates the degradation of the man uttering the insult.  Yet in the end retributive justice has restored a balance to society.  The play’s final lines appear to be moralizing.

 

1^st lawyer:                              Now you begin,

When crimes are done, and past, and to be punish'd,

To think what your crimes are: away with them.

Let all that see these vices thus rewarded,

Take heart and love to study 'em! Mischiefs feed

Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed.

 

suggesting that the malefactors on stage might make the viewer reflect on morality, but this impulse is soon overrun by the realization that the play was all in fun, causing no real injury, and the audience's high comedic spirits can be expressed only by resounding applause.

Volpone:: The seasoning of a play, is the applause.

Now, though the Fox be punish'd by the laws,

He yet doth hope, there is no suffering due,

For any fact which he hath done 'gainst you;

If there be, censure him; here he doubtful stands:

If not, fare jovially, and clap your hands.  (V, viii)

 

 

. 

1.  George Chapman, Jonson’s friend and sometime collaborator, had introduced the theory of “humours” slightly before Jonson with his plays The Blind Beggar of Alexandria and An Humourous Day's Mirth.