Where Volpone Doesn't Get Away With It

Volpone by Ben Jonson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought this was good. Ben Jonson is growing on me. I didn't really enjoy "Every Man in His Humour," but I liked "Sejanus" quite a bit. Volpone (my autocorrect keeps changing it to Vulpine!) was even more entertaining, IMO, and I wonder if that trend will continue.

Scoring it on the "Reading Renaissance Plays at Home Just for Fun" scale, I give it a 5. (I have a lot of scales. On the "Reading Before Bedtime" scale, for instance, this is maybe a 2.) My interest here isn't just in the entertainment value of the story--I would never pick it up if that were the only point. (I can imagine a modern novel based on this story that would be a lot more fun to read.) But there are other benefits besides. Learning things about society and the times is cool. Getting insight into the sensibilities of people living 400 years ago is worth something to me: discovering what they think is justice, and what they think is funny. Getting a feel for a writer I only vaguely know is worth something too.

And to be fair, the story itself is pretty entertaining, even in this format.

Like anything from this era, though, it's a bit of a struggle. Without notes, I don't know what exactly the characters are really trying to say a lot of the time. Irony is hard to pick out when you're struggling with unusual vocabulary. Anything that is understood but left unsaid, especially stuff that relies on familiarity with social structures that don't even exist anymore, can fly right by me as the reader. Tone can be impossible to pick up when looking at the words on the page (rather than seeing it performed, I mean.) But taking those difficulties into account (and applying the "Reading Renaissance Plays at Home Just for Fun"scale), this is a good read.

Volpone is a rich jerk who cons other rich jerks out of their money. The whole play is about him convincing different men to give him expensive gifts so that he will choose them to inherit his wealth, because he's supposedly on death's door. (He's fine.) I wish Jonson had given them all real names, though; Volpone means fox, and his marks are all named versions of crow, raven, and vulture. I would have preferred regular names, allowing us a little more suspension of disbelief. Anyway, with his servant (named Mosca, which means fly) he fleeces those guys and embarrasses them, though he gets caught in the end. They all pay the price.

The only thing I would have liked to see at the end, when everyone gets their punishment, is a scene with the two good characters, Corvino's sweet wife, Celia, and Corbaccio's noble son, Bonario. Corvino is trying to sacrifice his wife to Volpone to win him over, and Corbaccio disinherits his good son to convince Volpone to choose him. Bonario catches Volpone trying to assault Celia and rescues her. Later, all the old guys, covering their tracks, collude in saying that Celia and Bonario have been sleeping together. There are some court scenes at the end straightening all this out, but we never see Bonario and Celia together, which I would have liked. (If Corvino had died, and maybe Corbaccio, too, we could have had that happier ending.)

Despite that little disappointment, I found the story amusing, the plot well constructed, and the verse top notch (even when thorny). I realize that Ben Jonson isn't exactly forgotten, and his work is still taught some and no doubt performed here and there, but it's a shame he isn't a little more prominent in our collective consciousness.

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