by Ben Jonson
Compared with the comedies of Shakespeare, those of Ben Jonson are no laughing matter. A harsh ethic in them yokes punishment with derision; foibles are persecuted and vices flayed; the very simpletons are savaged for being what they are. The population… [of] his comedies… is a congeries of cits, parvenus, mountebanks, cozeners, dupes, braggarts, bullies, and bitches. No one loves anyone…
In Shakespeare things are different. Princes and dukes, lords and ladies, jostle with merchants, weavers, joiners, country sluts, friendly rogues, schoolmasters, and village policemen, hardly one of whom is incapable of a generous impulse.1
And of the two traditions Professor Coghill remarks:
Faced by a choice in such matters, a writer is wise if he follows his own temperament. Ben Jonson knotted his cat-o’-nine-tails. Shakespeare reached for his Chaucer.1
The excellencies and the limitations of Jonson’s comedies are closely related to his chosen genre. It is a mistake to regard him as the exemplar of ‘classical’ comic dramaturgy. As Professor Levin reminds us ‘Jonson is commonly conceived as a man who wrote comedies because he had a theory about why comedies ought to be written.’2 In our own day the writer with a sound theoretical basis for his art is somehow suspect, and to brand Jonson as a comic theorist gives his plays a forbidding, pedantic image. The neoclassical views on wide reading, knowledge of rhetoric, constant practice of one’s own style, and imitation of past masters which Jonson set down and refined upon in Discoveries have a pragmatic and very English bent, and remind us of the obiter dicta preserved by William Drummond. While the reader should not too readily assume that Jonson’s dramatic practice squared rigidly with his critical precepts, it still seems both appropriate and meaningful to say that Jonson’s greatest comedies, Volpone and The Alchemist, display ‘classical’ virtues of lucidity and meticulous construction.
The quality of a Jonsonian comedy, however, lies not only in its construction and in its presentation of character as obsession, but also in its language, which often has a positively nourishing quality; it has the ‘feel’ of the life of his time. In fact, Jonson’s evocation of contemporary London low-life is at times so dense, so detailed that for a modern reader it is at first confusing; Volpone, set in Venice, is as a result the most immediately accessible of his comedies.
The master-theme in Jonson’s satirical comedies is human folly, particularly that obsessive human greed which betrays fools into the hands of expert and opportunist manipulators. The action always culminates in exposure and often in punishment. The comedy is harsh, single-minded, and inhospitable to sentiment, pathos, and irrelevance. In the end Jonsonian comedy is more limited than Shakespeare’s great succession of comedies, but the genre is purer. Imitation of past masters and the observance of rules helped Jonson to write well; his own acute observation, moral concern, and mastery of words made him a great comic dramatist. Later, imitation of their master guided ‘the tribe of Ben’ to write less badly, and made Jonson the most celebrated father-figure in English literature.
III
Volpone is Jonson’s greatest and most intense comedy. It is a savage and sardonic satire on human greed and rapacity, but the brilliance of the design and the execution, together with the comments of critics primarily concerned with the literary qualities of the play, should not prevent us from recognizing its perennial vitality as a piece of theatre.
Jonson presents both his characters and their backgrounds with deliberate precision. The people of the play are, through their-names, invested with animal symbolism (Wolf, Fly, Vulture, Raven, and Crow), and linked with the creatures of medieval fabliaux, with Reynard the Fox and his victims. But where animals behaving like human beings, whether in the Fables of Robert Henryson or in the cartoons of Walt Disney, have the charm and fantasy of creatures viewed from a novel perspective, men behaving like animals and predatory birds are seen to be debased and degenerate. Nor is it by chance that these people are Venetians. Venice, already familiar on the Elizabethan stage as the city of Shakespeare’s usurer, Shylock, was famed as the most affluent, acquisitive, glittering, and corrupt city in Renaissance Europe. In the modern theatre one envisages for this play an opulence of production and décors as peculiarly necessary to emphasize the preoccupation with affluence and acquisitiveness which the play exposes.
Several literary critics, approaching the opening scenes of Volpone, have pointed to the thorough reversal of traditional religious and moral values in the play, and demonstrated how the language and imagery reinforce this total reversal. The play opens with a literary convention, with a character waking to greet the dawn:
Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!
Open the shrine, that I may see my saint!
And, as Mosca draws a curtain, to disclose the treasures heaped up behind, Volpone’s speech becomes a perverted act of worship:
Hail the world’s soul, and mine! More glad than is
The teeming earth to see the longed-for sun
Peep through the horns of the celestial Ram,
Am I, to view thy splendour darkening his…
Volpone here uses an image of the earth’s potential richness and fertility as it awaits the life-quickening sun in spring to describe his own expectant state; already within these lines, gold has eclipsed the sun, an idea that is made more explicit a moment later with his apostrophe:
O, thou son of Sol
(But brighter than thy father) let me kiss,
With adoration, thee, and every relic
Of sacred treasure in this blessed room.
Here the reversal of values and the perverse misappropriation of traditional language (‘adoration’, ‘relic’, ‘sacred’, ‘blessèd’) become complete, and the myth that gold is indeed child of Sol, the sun, associates Volpone with alchemists and their pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone. The dehumanizing and debasing aspects of Volpone’s worship of gold are apparent in the lines where the normal, happy lives of others are contemptuously dismissed. And at the end of the first act, Mosca clinches his seductive description of Celia by comparing her beauty, finally, not with living things but with gold itself. Throughout Volpone, religious and erotic language and imagery are perverted and debased, expressing (as their very names do) the inner corruption and animality of the main characters. Jonson also uses language and imagery in such a way that we of the audience are led to make our own moral judgements. Volpone’s speeches are often memorably beautiful, but the poetry is never purely ornamental. Thus although, in his more splendid passages, Volpone’s energy, intelligence, and thrust may seem to link him in our minds with Dr Faustus and Tamburlaine the Great, the Marlovian over-reachers, we see that he has none of their heroic aspirations. Volpone’s habitual disguise as an old man sick unto death, his assumed diseases and senility, ironically point to his own inner sickness; his energy and intelligence shine out in the early scenes of the play principally in contrast to the drab and joyless self-interest and miserliness of his dupes, Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino. He gets more pleasure from manipulating them, and from watching them squirm, than from anything their gold, diamonds, and pearls enable him to do. Volpone’s function in these scenes is almost judicial:
What a rare punishment
Is avarice to itself!
While analysis of the poetry, the imagery, the larger metaphor of animal names, and the like helps to direct and control our moral and emotional responses to Volpone, such a critical approach tends to ignore the vitality of the play as a piece of theatre, and literary commentators have insufficiently stressed the superb theatricalism of Jonson’s great comedy, which stems in part from Volpone’s self-congratulatory acting throughout the play. He is a consummate actor, delighting in impersonation and in the details of make-up and costume; on his virtuosity depend the early scenes of the play. Despite Jonson’s paucity of stage-directions, it is clear that Volpone’s huge bed should dominate the stage. At the very beginning of the play he is discovered there, awakening. Later he lies in bed, receiving the
tributes from his ‘clients’, shamming sickness and senility, and all the while critically eyeing and evaluating their presents and making sardonic comments sotto voce to Mosca. There are wonderful opportunities here for by-play by the actor playing Volpone; in Sir Donald Wolfit’s performance he ‘leered through the curtains and twiddled his toes under the bedclothes for sheer enjoyment as the gifts kept coming in’.1 Similarly, the scene in which Volpone disguises himself as the Mountebank and harangues the crowd provides Volpone (and the actor playing him) with unlimited opportunities. Later, the bed is again the main stage-furniture in the scene in which Corvino eagerly leads his wife to the bedside of the sick Volpone to prostitute her to his potential benefactor. This is the central scene of the play, and it is a great moment in the theatre when, as Celia droops by the bed, Volpone throws off the furs, the caps, the make-up of the senile invalid, and leaps from the bed to stand before her as a Renaissance gallant, glorying in his potency:
Nay, fly me not,
Nor let thy false imagination
That I was bed-rid, make thee think I am so:
Thou shalt not find it. I am, now, as fresh,
As hot, as high, and in as jovial plight
As when, in that so celebrated scene,
At recitation of our comedy,
For entertainment of the great Valois,
I acted young Antinous, and attracted
The eyes and ears of all the ladies present,
T’ admire each graceful gesture, note, and footing.
Typically, Volpone here recalls his past triumph as an actor, and the sex-appeal he had for the ladies of the Court, Typically, too, he links himself, in the pun on ‘jovial’, with Jove, who metamorphosed himself for so many erotic adventures with earthly maidens. And in the song, which originates in Catullus, Volpone presses Celia with the argument, insidious to traditional moralists, that Time is passing, that the only sin is to be found out, and that they are superior beings:
Cannot we delude the eyes
Of a few poor household spies?…
To be taken, to be seen,
These have crimes accounted been.
His dazzling speech beginning ‘Why droops my Celia?’ is a speech of temptation. Running through it there is an unchallenged assumption that everyone has a price (‘A diamond would have bought Lollia Paulina’). And when, in the next speech, Volpone depicts their future life together, the sensuality becomes more blatant:
Our drink shall be preparèd gold and amber,
Which we will take until my roof whirl round
With the vertigo; and my dwarf shall dance,
My eunuch sing, my fool make up the antic.
Whilst we, in changèd shapes, act Ovid’s tales,
Thou like Europa now, and I like Jove,
Then I like Mars, and thou like Erycine;
So of the rest, till we have quite run through,
And wearied all the fables of the gods.
Then will I have thee in more modern forms,
Attirèd like some sprightly dame of France…
Or some quick Negro, or cold Russian…
The perversity, the artificial stimulation of passion, reminds us (if Mosca is a truthful witness) of the real children of Volpone: the dwarf, the eunuch, the hermaphrodite – the three freaks – and:
Bastards,
Some dozen, or more, that he begot on beggars,
Gypsies, and Jews, and black-moors, when he was drunk.
It reminds us, too, of Nano’s song, sung while he impersonated the Mountebank’s zany, which vainly promised eternal youth and beauty, and the preservation of the life of the senses. Volpone, the eloquent seducer, fails to move Celia. He resorts to rape. Bonario rushes in, in the nick of time, to save Celia; but Jonson in this play is not much interested in human goodness, and the wronged wife and stalwart young man are minor, unrealized figures in the comedy. Coleridge was not alone in expressing disappointment at this: ‘Bonario and Celia should have been made in some way or other principals in the plot… If it were possible to lessen the paramountcy of Volpone himself, a most delightful comedy might have been produced, by making Celia the ward or niece of Corvino, instead of his wife, and Bonario her lover.’1 But there is a sense in which ‘the paramountcy of Volpone’ is the play; and who would sacrifice the distinctive harsh tone of Volpone for yet another ‘most delightful comedy’?
Bonario’s intervention momentarily casts Volpone and Mosca down: they even talk of suicide. Soon they start manipulating the changed circumstances to their advantage, and their machinations seem, for a time, likely to triumph. In the end, these over-reachers come tumbling down, but it is not the virtuous Bonario and Celia who prove their undoing, nor the feeble processes of Venetian law. Volpone’s own relish for extemporizing to meet the new complications proves his ruin: for the gleeful experience of watching his clients’ discomfiture he feigns his own death, and installs Mosca as his heir. The parasite has learned from the patron; the mutual admiration society is dissolved: they undo each other. The end of the comedy is harsh and punitive: no one ’scapes whipping. And where, in Coleridge’s ‘delightful comedy’, virtue would triumph and Celia be married at the play’s end, the pallid heroine is restored, with her dowry, to her parents. Volpone does not end with wedding-bells but with Volpone, the unmasked Fox, speaking the epilogue.
Throughout the comedy Sir Politic Would-be and his Fine Madame play a secondary, never an essential, part. They remain English visitors in a world of Italianate machinations which they never understand. Lady Would-be is merely a poseuse, a minor Mrs Malaprop, a figure of fun – the role has been played, broadly and effectively, as a dame part. Sir Politic is something more. In the theatre he emerges as the befuddled Englishman abroad, secure only in his suspicion of foreigners and his own better understanding of how things are organized by the natives. His ludicrous speculative ventures parallel Volpone’s successful fleecing of his dupes; and are part of the play’s satirical attack upon an irrationally acquisitive, capitalistic society. Sir Pol is a contemporary satirical portrait of the English traveller. He is also, in the play’s bestiary, the parrot, chattering away at second hand, and memorable for his bland stupidity and his vague ‘general notions’. Sir Politic has been excellently played by Michael Hordern and by Jonathan Miller, and it is his essential Englishness which makes him funny. The Would-be pair are expendable; but to cut them from a performance of the comedy leaves the Italian dupes and manipulators relatively unfocused. They earn their part in the play.
IV
The Alchemist is a humbler, a more domestic Volpone. Once more the characters are men dominated and exploited by others through their own desires to get rich quick. A sucker seems to have been born every minute in Jonson’s comic world, and in the Philosopher’s Stone, which was supposed to turn base metals into gold, Jonson found a wonderful correlative for his gulls’ selfish and inordinate desire for wealth, influence, and power. It is by holding out to the gulls the prospect of possessing the Stone, that the triumvirate of confidence-tricksters, Face, Subtle, and Dol Common, manipulate them, and win a living. But their world is very different from the rich, remote world of Volpone’s Venice. Their environment is Jacobean London, vividly and saltily evoked by Jonson; and where Volpone operated in part for the sheer perverse exhilaration of controlling others, these three uneasy allies are desperate chancers living on their wits. The play opens explosively with Face and Subtle quarrelling, and we are early reminded how near the bread-line Subtle has been used to living. Dol Common and Subtle are the under-dogs of the Elizabedian underworld.
The great technical achievement of this comedy is that Jonson was able to compress so much local life, so many special slangs and jargons, within his lively and supple blank verse. The density of the dialogue, the contemporaneity of the comedy to a Jacobean audience, makes The Alchemist (like Bartholomew Fair) more difficult than Volpone for readers and playgoers today. While the theme of human greed and gullibility is universal, the types,
the references, the vocabularies are Jacobean. The idiom is often obscure, but the dialogue and the pace of the action are fast, and carry the reader with them. The play moves with classical, almost clockwork precision, each act stepping on the heels of the preceding one, and the action is virtually continuous from (according to the Herford-Simpson edition) 9 a.m., when Dapper calls, until 3 p.m., when Lovewit unexpectedly returns home and the coney-catchers are unmasked and dispersed. The Alchemist is, in essence, farcical; but its quality lies in the Jonsonian synthesis of two seemingly irreconcilable elements – farce and intellect.
The structure of The Alchemist resembles Volpone in that, one by one, the principal dupes are introduced to us as they pay their morning calls. Jonson provides a superb array of types – the upstart clerk, Dapper; the shy little tobacconist, Abel Drugger, whom Garrick delighted to act; the elephantine voluptuary, Sir Epicure Mammon; and the insidious kill-joy Puritans, Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome. Each is governed by self-interest, and each is betrayed into the opportunists’ hands by a dream of wealth. Even the card-sharper, Surly, who seems to embody common sense – rather like those reasonable brothers-in-law in Moliere who show up the obsessions of the Miser or the Imaginary Invalid – ends by trying to make a wealthy match with Dame Pliant. For each Jonson creates an appropriate diction and speech-rhythm: Drugger is shy and halting, the Puritans are sanctimonious, and Subtle has a splendid line in alchemical blarney. Sir Epicure’s speeches sound almost as seductive, Marlovian, and sumptuous as Volpone’s, but they are transparently silly and self-deluding. He is closer to Sir Politic Would-be than to Tamburlaine.
The end of The Alchemist is more indulgent than that of Volpone. Lovewit, the rightful owner, returns suddenly, and is not really surprised at the uses to which his town house has been put. Dol Common and Subtle make their get-away, none the richer for their ingenious cozenings. Captain Face dwindles again to being Jeremy, the butler, and blandly triumphs by helping his master to a rich wife. He remains the complete opportunist. That he dodges retribution is psychologically right, and reminds the audience that con-men, like the poor, are always with us. Like Flatterie at the end of Sir David Lyndsay’s great morality The Three Estates, Face goes scot-free; the audience must be wary.