Volpone :: volpone

Volpone Volpone was starting time brought out at the Globe Theatre in 1605 and printed in quarto in 1607, after having been acted with bang-up applause at both Universities, and was republished by Jonson in 1616 without alterations or additions. Volpone is undoubtedly the finest comedy in the slope wording outside the works of Shakespeargon. Daring and forcible in conception, brilliant and innoxious in execution, its extraordinary merits have excited the enthusiasm of all critics. The great French historian of English literature, Henri Taine, has devoted to it some of the most handsome pages of his famous work. Volpone, he exclaims, uvre sublime, la plus vive peinture des murs du sicle, o stale la pleine beaut des convoitises mchantes, o la luxure, la cruaut, lamour de lor, limpudeur de vice, dploient une poesie sinistre et splendide, digne dune bacchanale du Titien. In none other of his plays, not nevertheless in The Alchemist, in Bartholomew Fair, or in The Silent Woman, is Ben Jonsons exceptional(a) intellect and ardent satirical genius so perfectly revealed as in Volpone. The whole of Juvenals satires are not more beneficial of scorn and indignation than this one play, and the portraits which the Latin poet has given us of the letchers, dotards, pimps and parasites of Rome, are not drawn with a more passionate virulence than the English dramatist has displayed in the portrayal of the Venetian magnifico, his creatures and his gulls. Like Le Misanthrope, Le Festin de Pierre, like LAvare, Volpone might more fitly be styled a tragedy, for the pitiless unmasking of the fox at the conclusion of the play is life-threatening rather than sufficient. Volpone is a splendid sinner and compels our admiration by the goody and very excess of his wickedness. We are scarcely shocked by his lust, so magnificent is the vehemence of his passion, and we marvel and are aghast rather than revolt at his cunning and audacity. As Mr. Swinburne observes, there is some thing throughout of the lion as well as the fox in this original and incomparable figure. Volpones capacity for pleasure is even greater than his capacity for crime, and Ben Jonson has added to these two prominent characteristics a third, which is equally dominant in the Italianthe passion for the theatre. Disguise, costume, and the lieu have an irresistible attraction for him, the blood of the mime is in his veins.