Blackfriars
Essay
Jonson’s Odd Masterpiece
He would be the last to admit it, but when Ben Jonson wrote Volpone in 1606, he was making a “comeback” as playwright. In 1598, at the age of 25, he had made a big hit with Every Man in His Humour (Shakespeare was in the cast), and that success prompted, in addition to a colossal self-regard, four more plays, all increasingly disliked. By the time King James came to the throne in 1603, Jonson looked to be a one-trick pony. His prologues and his poetry blamed everyone but himself for the poor reception of his plays and if not for Volpone he might have given up playwriting altogether and stuck to the masques he was writing with Inigo Jones. But Volpone was a thundering triumph and Jonson’s ego would never again be in danger of deflation.
In some ways, no English play is like Volpone. Volpone stands out even from Jonson’s other comedies because of its setting and its tone. Its stringent regard for the classical tradition that the story should take place in one place and one day is so thorough that the events in the play could have happened in real time. (As Jonson complained, all his fellow playwrights, especially Shakespeare, cared nothing about the Classical “unities.”) And unlike his other mature comedies all set in London, Volpone is set in Venice with a scholar ’s attention to detail. (Volpone, for example, has 14 references to specific places in Venice, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice has just one). Not only did Jonson apparently research the geography of a city he hadn’t seen, he seems to have absorbed into his play Venice’s fabled extravagance and worldliness. The details of Volpone’s wealth, the decadence of his entertainments, and the erudition of his language evoke an almost tangible Venice.
The tone, though, is the feature that most separates Volpone from all others on the English stage. In its comic severity, the rigor of its moral and intellectual world, and its refusal of a “happy ending,” the play resembles Moliere’s The Misanthrope. Jonson, himself, comments on the work’s dénouement and defends comedies that “are not always joyful.” He knew that in sticking to his principles and his aesthetic he was taking a chance with his already troubled career as a playwright. How gratified, then, he must have been that the play won such applause – both Cambridge and Oxford publicly honored the work – made him the talk of the town, and guaranteed his continued self-regard.
Ralph Alan Cohen, Director of Mission