'Volpone' in Context

Keith Linley

Description

'Volpone' in Jacobean context.

Duplicity and deception were essential ingredients in a comedy, and though they were not morally acceptable they reflect what happened in real life; the putting of personal obsession and private will before social and Christian responsibilities. But here, the excess of evil is there from the start and simply increases. There is little light-heartedness. It is all one sustained bitter snarl about humanity’s corruption. The tension between what people should do and what they actually do creates dramatic conflicts not just for the characters but also for the audience who may be torn between enjoying the dextrous scamming of Mosca and Volpone yet feeling they ought to be condemned and must be punished in the end. And the questions remain; should they be laughing at any of it and how can they not laugh at such a mad mixture of mistakes, such crass stupidity and such evil greed?

The fox is a creature of the night, a predator, a thief. He is a border raider, crossing from wild nature into man’s domestic domain. Nightstalker, elusive, devious, he is embedded deep in the European psyche as a trickster and deceiver. This persona goes back to ancient Greek times when the various fox fables of Aesop mix with other beast tales. The linking of humans to animal characteristics is part of the language: snake in the grass, wolf in sheep’s clothing, brave as a lion, timid as a mouse, busy as a bee, slimy toad, whoreson dog. At the most practical level, for a world almost entirely rural, he is the enemy of farmers and shepherds and individual poor households rearing just a few chickens; the feared killer who could annihilate a henhouse or ravage a warren. He was thus a food burglar, stealing vital nourishment before it could be put on the table and as such a threat to the family’s economy and perhaps even a threat to its survival.

Tragedy is as old as human misery and comedy is its not-quite-identical twin, for laughter is as old as tears. One mask may smile, the other cry, but the faces are similar and in many respects so are the two genres, though their outcomes are different. Man’s folly, his potential for evil, his potential for good, his ability to misunderstand the true values of life are common to both forms. One achieves correction of mistakes through disaster, pain, misery, the other through tears turning to laughter as folly is mocked and humiliated and order is restored.

Introduction; About this book - What is a context? – Further Reading; Part I. The Inherited Past; Prologue: the setting;1. The historical context; 2. The world order: from divinity to dust; 3. Sin, death and the prince of darkness; 4. The seven cardinal virtues; 5. Kingship; 6. Patriarchy, family authority and gender relationships; 7. Man in his place; 8. Images of disorder: the religious context; Part II. The Jacobean present; 9. Ben in context; 10. Literary context; 11. The political context; 12. The beast fable; 13. Transgressions and sins: the biters bit.14. The venetian context: consumerism and cannibalism; Bibliography

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• English
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 21 novembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783085606
• Langue: English

Extrait

VOLPONE IN CONTEXT
Anthem Perspectives in Literature
Titles in the Anthem Perspectives in Literature series are designed to contextualize classic works of literature for readers today within their original social and cultural environments. The books present historical, biographical, political, artistic, moral, religious and philosophical material from the period that enable readers to understand a text’s meaning as it would have struck the original audience. These approachable but informative books aim to uncover the period and the people for whom the texts were written, their values and views, their anxieties and demons, what made them laugh and cry, their loves and hates. The series is targeted at high-achieving A Level, International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement pupils, undergraduates following Shakespeare and Renaissance drama modules and an intellectually curious audience.
VOLPONE IN CONTEXT
BITERS BITTEN AND FOOLS FOOLED
Keith Linley
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2016
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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Copyright © Keith Linley 2016

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Linley, Keith, author.
Title: Volpone in context: biters bitten and fools fooled / Keith Linley.
Description: New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2016. | Series: Anthem perspectives in literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016032063 | ISBN 9781783085583 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Jonson, Ben, 1573?–1637. Volpone. | Literature and society – England – History – 17th century. | Theater and society – England – History – 17th century. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / General.
Classification: LCC PR2622.L56 2016 | DDC 822/.3–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032063

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-558-3 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-558-4 (Pbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Introduction
About This Book
What Is a Context?
Further Reading
PART I THE INHERITED PAST
Prologue
1. The Historical Context
1.1 The Jacobean Context: An Overview
2. The Elizabethan World Order: From Divinity to Dust
2.1 Hierarchy
2.2 Cosmology
2.3 The Great Chain of Being
2.4 Human Hierarchy
2.5 The Social Pyramid of Power
2.6 The Better Sort
2.7 The Middling Sort
2.8 The Lower Orders
2.9 The Theory of the Humours
2.10 The Rest of Creation
2.11 Order
3. Sin, Death and the Prince of Darkness
3.1 Sin and Death
4. The Seven Cardinal Virtues
5. Kingship
5.1 Preparation for Rule
5.2 A King’s View of His Office
6. Patriarchy, Family Authority and Gender Relationships
6.1 Patriarchy and a Woman’s Place
6.2 Renaissance Improvements
7. Man in His Place
8. Images of Disorder: The Religious Context
8.1 Unsettling Questions
PART II THE JACOBEAN PRESENT
9. Ben in Context
10. Literary Context
10.1 Genre – the Context of Comedy
10.1.1 The dénouement and the trials
10.2 Sources
10.2.1 The classics
10.2.2 Contemporary carrion
10.2.3 The Golden Age inverted
10.2.4 The Mouse Trap and the fox trap
10.3 Volpone in Jonson’s Oeuvre and the Literature of the Time
10.4 Some Critical Reactions
11. The Political Context
11.1 The Wise Man and the Fool
11.2 New Philosophy, New Men
12. The Beast Fable
13. Transgressions and Sins: The Biters Bit
13.1 Volpone
13.2 Mosca
13.3 The Three Unwise Men
13.4 Sir Politic and Lady Would-Be
14. The Venetian Context: Consumerism and Cannibalism
14.1 The Setting
14.2 Commerce
14.3 Gold Fever
Bibliography
Index
INTRODUCTION
About This Book
This book is not a scene-by-scene guide to Volpone . It concentrates on the contexts from which the play emerges, those characteristics of life and thought in early Jacobean England which are reflected in the values and views Ben Jonson brings to the text and affect how a contemporary audience might have responded to it.
The book is for students preparing assignments and examinations for Renaissance literature modules. The marking criteria at any level explicitly or implicitly require that students show a consistently well-developed and consistently detailed understanding of the significance and influence of contexts in which literary texts are written and understood. This means responding to the play in the ways Jonson’s audience would have done. The following material will enable you to acquire a surer grasp of this cultural context – the social-political conditions from which the play emerged, the literary profile prevailing when it was written, and its religious-moral dimension. The setting is foreign, but this is merely a literary fashion of the time and is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. It is not a dramatized travel guide to Venice, but a warning to London. Furthermore, since the play was written in an age of faith, when the Bible’s teachings and sermons heard in church formed part of every man and woman’s mindset, it is vital to recreate those factors, for the actions of the characters will be assessed by Christian criteria. You may not agree with the values of the time or the views propounded in the play, but you do need to understand how belief mediated the possible responses of the audience that watched the play in 1606. A key concept in this book’s approach is that Volpone is full of sins, transgressions, boundary crossing and rule breaking in the personal world and in the public and political arenas as well. Alerted to the transgressive behaviour of Mosca, Volpone and the predatory legacy hunters in the opening scenes, an audience member, who would not know the story (as it is largely a fabrication of the author), would expect they be punished. Though biblical values would be applied to the action, there is much more going on scene-by-scene than a series of echoes of or allusions to what the Bible says about virtue and vice. Interwoven are concerns about rule of self (a recurrent theme in all the comedies of the time), about the loss of an ethically driven value system, the dangers of appetite unrestrained, about patriarchy and marriage.
What Is a Context?
Cultural historians aim to recover ‘the commonplaces, the unargued presuppositions’, and ‘the imperative need, in any comparative discussions of epochs, [is] first to decide what the norm of the epoch is’. 1 Once the typical and orthodox values are established, it is then essential to register significant divergences from them. Any document – literary or non-literary – comes from an environment and has that environment embedded in it, overtly and covertly. Its context is the conditions which produced it, the biographical, social, political, historical and cultural circumstances which formed it, the values operating within it and affecting the experience of it. A text in isolation is simply an accumulation of words carrying growing, developing meanings as the writing/performance progresses. It is two dimensional: a lexical, grammatical construct and the sum of its literal contents. It has meaning and we can understand what it is about, how the characters interact and the complications they create at a simple storyline level, but context provides a third dimension, making meaning comprehensible within the cultural values of the time. Context is the sum of all the influences the writer brings to the text and all the influences the viewer/reader deploys in experiencing it. This book concentrates on the archaeology of the play, recovering how it would be understood in 1606, recovering the special flavour and prevailing attitudes of the time, and displaying the factors that shaped its meaning for that time and that audience. Volpone in Context offers the views, prejudices, controversies and basic beliefs buried in the play – all the significations of society embedded in the text that added together make it what Jonson intended it to be or as closely as we can be reasonably sure. Recovering the mindset, nuances and values Jonson intentionally or unconsciously works into the play, and how his audience would have interpreted them, means recreating the Jacobean period. ‘Jonson’s art is intimately related to the popular tradition of individual and social morality’. 2 We need therefore to recreate the terms of those two polar expressions of Jacobean morality, the personal and the civic. To achieve that a range of aspects is considered, but two key contextual areas dominate the approach of this book: the religious and the sociopolitical. The multiple transgre