by Ben Jonson
Had I put an epigraph on the title-page, I should have adapted some words of Jonson’s from the epilogue to Cynthia’s Revels, or The Fountain of Self-Love:
By God ’tis good, and if you lik’t, you may.
Falmer House, M. S. J.
The University of Sussex,
Brighton
St Bartholomew’s Day, 1965
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. BIBLIOGRAPHIES
W. W. GREG. A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols., 1940–59.
S. A. TANNENBAUM. Ben Jonson (A Concise Bibliography), 1938.
S. A. and DOROTHY R. TANNENBAUM. Supplement to Ben Jonson, A Concise Bibliography, 1947
2. SCHOLARLY WORKS OF REFERENCE
G. E. BENTLEY. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols., 1941–68.
E. K. CHAMBERS. The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols., 1923.
3. COLLECTED EDITIONS
The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, 1616.
The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, 2 vols., 1640.
C. H. HERFORD and PERCY and EVELYN SIMPSON, editors. Ben Jonson, 11 vols., 1925–52.
A. B. KERNAN and R. B. YOUNG, general editors. The Yale Ben Jonson, in progress, 1962–.
4. BIOGRAPHICAL, CRITICAL, AND OTHER STUDIES
J. B. BAMBOROUGH. Ben Jonson, 1959.
J. A. BARISH. Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy, 1960.
J. A. BARISH, editor. Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1963.
G. E. BENTLEY. Shakespeare and Jonson, Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared, 2 vols., 1945; The Swan of Avon and the Bricklayer of Westminster, 1946.
M. C. BRADBROOK. The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy, 1955.
O. J. CAMPBELL. Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’, 1938.
MARCHETTE CHUTE. Ben Jonson of Westminster, 1954.
T. S. ELIOT. ‘Ben Jonson’, Selected Essays, 1932; revised edition, 1951; reprinted by J. A. Barish, editor, Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1963.
J. J. ENCK. Jonson and the Comic Truth, 1957.
D.J. ENRIGHT. ‘Poetic Satire and Satire in Verse: A Consideration of Ben Jonson and Philip Massinger’, The Apothecary’s Shop, 1957.
BRIAN GIBBONS. Jacobean city comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton, 1968.
A. B. KERNAN. The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance, 1959.
L. C. KNIGHTS. ‘Ben Jonson, Dramatist’, The Pelican Guide to English Literature, 2, The Age of Shakespeare, Boris Ford, editor, 1955; Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, 1937.
HARRY LEVIN. Introduction to Ben Jonson: Selected Works, n.d. [1938]; reprinted by J. A. Barish, editor, Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1963.
ERIC LINKLATER. Ben Jonson and King James: Biography and Portrait, 1931.
ROBERT GALE NOYES. Ben Jonson on the English Stage, 1660–1776, 1935
JOHN PALMER. Ben Jonson, 1934.
E. B. PARTRIDGE. The Broken Compass: A Study of the Major Comedies of Ben Jonson, 1958.
A. H. SACKTON. Rhetoric as a Dramatic Language in Ben Jonson, 1948.
FREDA L. TOWNSEND. Apologie for Bartholmew Fayre: The Art of Jonson’s Comedies, 1947.
WESLEY TRIMPI. Ben Jonson’s Poems: A Study of the Plain Style, 1962.
EDMUND WILSON. ‘MOROSE BEN JONSON’, The Triple Thinkers, revised edition, 1952; reprinted by J. A. Barish, editor, Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1963.
VOLPONE,
OR
THE FOX
PRELIMINARY NOTE
1. STAGE-HISTORY AND FIRST PUBLICATION
Volpone was first acted in late 1605 or early 1606 by the leading company of the times, the King’s Men, led by Richard Burbage, who probably played Mosca with John Lowin as Volpone. It was successfully performed by them at Oxford and Cambridge. The play was published in quarto in 1607, prefaced by verse-eulogies from John Donne, George Chapman, Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher, and was dedicated by Jonson ‘To the Most Noble and Most Equal Sisters, the Two Famous Universities for their Love and Acceptance Shown to his Poem in the Presentation’. It was printed in the Folio Workes in 1616 and in the enlarged posthumous Folio of 1640. The play was regularly staged in London throughout the seventeenth and for most of the eighteenth century. After 1785 it does not seem to have been revived until the nineteen-twenties, when it was given two performances by the Phoenix Society and also played by Cambridge undergraduates. Donald Wolfit first appeared as Volpone at the Westminster Theatre in London in 1938, and included the play in several of his annual far-flung provincial tours in the forties. Sir Donald also appeared in the play on B.B.C. television. In 1952 Sir Ralph Richardson played Volpone at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. Peter Woodthorpe was Volpone in the Marlowe Society production at Cambridge in 1955, when Jonathan Miller played Sir Politic Would-be. It was performed in modern dress under the direction of Joan Littlewood (who played Lady Would-be) by Theatre Workshop in 1955, a production more acclaimed in Paris than in London.
In 1926 Stefan Zweig made a German version, which was later translated into French by Jules Romains and played in Paris in 1928 by Charles Dullin in a multiple set by André Barsacq. This script was the basis of the memorable French film with Harry Baur as Volpone and Louis Jouvet as Mosca. Jean-Louis Barrault keeps the Zweig-Romains adaptation in his Parisian repertory. Ruth Langner actually translated Zweig’s version back into English for a Broadway production, with Alfred Lunt as Mosca, in 1928. José Ferrer appeared on Broadway in 1948 in Jonson’s play; but the much-heralded production announced by Orson Welles in 1955 with himself as Mosca to Jackie Gleason’s Volpone did not materialize. In 1964 Volpone was seen at the new Tyrone Guthrie Repertory Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, starring Douglas Cambell. An opera with music by Malcolm Williamson based on Volpone was seen in London in 1964, and in that year Bert Lahr appeared on Broadway in a musical Foxy, set in Alaska during the Gold Rush, and remotely inspired by Jonson’s play. In 1965 John Neville played Mosca in a production at the Nottingham Playhouse. Leo McKern appeared as Volpone in Oxford and London in 1966–67 under the direction of Frank Hauser, a production which won more critical acclaim than Guthrie’s for the National Theatre in 1968, when fussy business and good and bad ideas (animal costumes and movement; animal noises) blurred the lucid story-line.
2. LOCATION AND TIME-SCHEME
The action in Volpone takes place in Volpone’s bedroom, inside and outside Corvino’s house, in Sir Politic’s lodging, in the Scrutineo, and in the street. The action covers one day, from Volpone’s awakening (and Voltore’s ‘early visitation’) to the sentences passed on Volpone and Mosca late in the afternoon.
3. EDITIONS AND CRITICAL COMMENT
Volpone has been reprinted in various collected and selected editions of Jonson, and in many anthologies. It has been edited and annotated by J. D. Rea (1919), by Arthur Sale (1951), by David Cook (1962), and, as the first volume of the new Yale Ben Jonson, by A. B. Kernan (1962). J. J. Enck and E. B. Partridge have chapters on the play (the latter is concerned with imagery and what it tells us); J. A. Barish’s compendium of Jonsonian criticism includes his own demonstration that Sir Politic and Lady Would-be are relevant to the play as a whole; and Professor Harry Levin has contributed a learned analysis of Mosca’s interlude in 1, ii to Philological Quarterly, XXII (1943).
EPISTLE
To the
Most Noble And Most Equal Sisters,
The Two Famous Universities,
For Their
Love and Acceptance Shown to His Poem
In The Presentation;
Ben. Jonson,
The Grateful Acknowledger,
Dedicates Both It And Himself.
10 There follows an Epistle, if
you dare venture on the length.
Never, most equal Sisters, had any man a wit so presently excellent as that it could raise itself; but there must come both matter, occas
ion, commenders, and favourers to it. If this be true, and that the fortune of all writers doth daily prove it, it behooves the careful to provide well toward these accidents, and, having acquired them, to preserve that part of reputation most tenderly wherein the benefit of a friend is also defended. Hence is it that I now render myself grateful and am studious to justify the bounty of
20 your act, to which, though your mere authority were satisfying, yet, it being an age wherein poetry and the professors of it hear so ill on all sides, there will a reason be looked for in the subject. It is certain, nor can it with any forehead be opposed, that the too much licence of poetasters in this time hath much deformed their mistress, that, every day, their manifold and manifest ignorance doth stick unnatural reproaches upon her; but for their petulancy it were an act of the greatest injustice either to let the learned suffer, or so divine a skill (which indeed should not be attempted with unclean hands) to fall under the least contempt. For, if men
30 will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man’s being the good poet without first being a good man. He that is said to be able to inform young men to all good disciplines, inflame grown men to all great virtues, keep old men in their best and supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood, recover them to their first strength; that comes form the interpreter and arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less than human, a master in manners; and can alone, or with a few, effect the business of mankind: this, I take him, is no subject
40 for pride and ignorance to exercise their railing rhetoric upon. But it will here be hastily answered that the writers of these days are other things: that not only their manners, but their natures, are inverted, and nothing remaining with them of the dignity of poet but the abused name, which every scribe usurps; that now, especially in dramatic, or, as they term it, stage poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation, blasphemy, all licence of offence to God and man is practised. I dare not deny a great part of this, and am sorry I dare not, because in some men’s abortive features (and would they had never boasted the light) it is over-true; but that all are
50 embarked in this bold adventure for hell is a most uncharitable thought, and, uttered, a more malicious slander. For my particular, I can, and from a most clear conscience, affirm that I have ever trembled to think toward the least profaneness, have loathed the use of such foul and unwashed bawdry as is now made the food of the scene. And, howsoever I cannot escape, from some, the imputation of sharpness, but that they will say I have taken a pride, or lust, to be bitter, and not my youngest infant but hath, come into the world with all his teeth; I would ask of these supercilious politics, what nation, society, or general order, or state I
60 have provoked? what public person? whether I have not in all these preserved their dignity, as mine own person, safe? My works are read, allowed (I speak of those that are entirely mine); look into them. What broad reproofs have I used? where have I been particular? where personal? except to a mimic, cheater, bawd, or buffoon, creatures for their insolencies worthy to be taxed? Yet to which of these so pointingly as he might not either ingenuously have confessed or wisely dissembled his disease? But it is not rumour can make men guilty, much less entitle me to other men’s crimes. I know that nothing can be so innocently writ or carried,
70 but may be made obnoxious to construction; marry, whilst I bear mine innocence about me, I fear it not. Application is now grown a trade with many, and there are that profess to have a key for the deciphering of everything; but let wise and noble persons take heed how they be too credulous, or give leave to these invading interpreters to be over-familiar with their fames, who cunningly, and often, utter their own virulent malice under other men’s simplest meanings. As for those that will (by faults which charity hath raked up, or common honesty concealed) make themselves a name with the multitude, or (to draw their rude and beastly claps)
80 care not whose living faces they entrench with their petulant styles, may they do it without a rival, for me. I choose rather to lie graved in obscurity than share with them in so preposterous a fame. Nor can I blame the wishes of those severe and wiser patriots, who, providing the hurts these licentious spirits may do in a state, desire rather to see fools and devils, and those antique relics of barbarism retrieved, with all other ridiculous and exploded follies, than behold the wounds of private men, of princes, and nations. For, as Horace makes Trebatius speak, among these:
–Sibi quisque timet, quamquam est intactus, et odit.
90 And men may justly impute such rages, if continued, to the writer, as his sports. The increase of which lust in liberty, together with the present trade of the stage, in all their misc’ line interludes, what learned or liberal soul doth not already abhor? where nothing but the filth of the time is uttered, and that with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty of solecisms, such dearth of sense, so bold prolepses, so racked metaphors, with brothelry able to violate the ear of a pagan, and blasphemy to turn the blood of a Christian to water. I cannot but be serious in a cause of this nature, wherein my tame and the reputations of divers honest and learned are the
100 question; when a name so full of authority, antiquity, and all great mark, is, through their insolence, become the lowest scorn of the age; and those men subject to the petulancy of every vernaculous orator that were wont to be the care of kings and happiest monarchs. This it is that hath not only rapt me to present indignation, but made me studious heretofore, and by all my actions to stand off from them; which may most appear in this my latest work – which you, most learned Arbitresses, have seen, judged, and, to my crown, approved – wherein I have laboured, for their instruction and amendment, to reduce not only the ancient forms,
110 but manners of the scene: the easiness, the propriety, the innocence, and last, the doctrine, which is the principal end of poesie, to inform men in the best reason of living. And though my catastrophe may in the strict rigour of comic law meet with censure, as turning back to my promise, I desire the learned and charitable critic to have so much faith in me to think it was done of industry: for with what ease I could have varied it nearer his scale (but that I fear to boast my own faculty) I could here insert. But, my special aim being to put the snaffle in their mouths that cry out: We never punish vice in our interludes, &c., I took the
120 more liberty, though not without some lines of example drawn even in the ancients themselves, the goings-out of whose comedies are not always joyful, but oft-times the bawds, the servants, the rivals, yea, and the masters are mulcted, and fitly, it being the office of a comic poet to imitate justice, and instruct to life, as well as purity of language, or stir up gentle affections. To which I shall take the occasion elsewhere to speak. For the present, most reverenced Sisters, as I have cared to be thankful for your affections past, and here made the understanding acquainted with some ground of your favours, let me not despair their continuance, to
130 the maturing of some worthier fruits; wherein, if my muses be true to me, I shall raise the despised head of poetry again, and, stripping her out of those rotten and base rags wherewith the times have adulterated her form, restore her to her primitive habit, feature, and majesty, and render her worthy to be embraced and kissed of all the great and master-spirits of our world. As for the vile and slothful, who never affected an act worthy of celebration or are so inwards with their own vicious natures, as they worthily fear her and think it a high point of policy to keep her in contempt with their declamatory and windy invectives; she shall out of just
140 rage incite her servants (who are genus irritabile) to spout ink in their faces that shall eat, farther than their marrow, into their fames, and not Cinnamus the barber with his art shall be able to take out the brands, but they shall live, and be read, till the wretches the, as things worst deserving of themselves in chief, and then of all mankind.
From my house in the Blackfriars,
this 11th day of Febr
uary, 1607.
THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY
VOLPONE, a Magnifico
MOSCA, his Parasite
VOLTORE, an Advocate
CORBACCIO, an old Gentleman
CORVINO, a Merchant
AVOCATORI, four Magistrates
NOTARIO, the Register
NANO, a Dwarf
CASTRONE, an Eunuch
[SIR] POLITIC WOULD-BE, a Knight
PEREGRINE, a Gentleman-traveller
BONARIO, a young Gentleman, son of Corbaccio
FINE MADAME WOULD-BE, the Knight’s wife
CELIA, the Merchant’s wife
COMMENDATORI, Officers
MERCATORI, three Merchants
ANDROGYNO, a Hermaphrodite
SERVITORE, a servant
GREGE, crowd
WOMEN
The Scene:
VENICE
VOLPONE,
OR
THE FOX
THE ARGUMENT
V olpone, childless, rich, feigns sick, despairs,
O ffers his state to hopes of several heirs,
L ies languishing; his Parasite receives
P resents of all, assures, deludes; then weaves
O ther cross-plots, which ope themselves, are told.
N ew tricks for safety are sought; they thrive; when, bold,
E ach tempts th’other again, and all are sold.
PROLOGUE
Now, luck yet send us, and a little wit
Will serve to make our play hit;
According to the palates of the season,