Critic: Don Beecher

Source:Cahiers Elisabethains, April, 1985, Vol. 27, pp. 4 3–51.

It was from the Satiricon of Petronius and Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead that Jonson derived the idea of creating Volpone's Venice as a city of dissemblers divided between he who pretended to infirmity in order to attract gifts and those who feigned friendship and generosity in order to attract the legator's consideration. The patterns of the tale of Eumolpos are visible in the play: the shipwrecked wayfarer who gets rich in a foreign land by posing as a childless old man and by speaking only of his wealth and the rewriting of his testament between fits of coughing. But it was from the tale of the death-feigning fox of medieval legend that Jonson drew the mythological substructure of the play. A Latin bestiary from the twelfth century recounts a version of the tale of the hungry fox who besmears himself with red mud to resemble blood, and who then lies on his back holding his breath in order to attract carrion birds which, as soon as they alight, he grabs and devours. Jonson clearly recognized the analogy between this primordial trickster who maintained himself by audacious cunning and the Romans who fraudulently lured gifts from expectant captores. The Roman matter combined with the tradition of Reynard pointed the way towards a more vigorous strain of satiric comedy, such as Jonson had been seeking, one free from the taint of romance and sentimentalism, one which emerged by superimposing the microcosm of the fox upon a portrayal of greed in contemporary society.

Jonson's vision was to see the diverse manifestations of social traffic regulated by a variety of trickster figures who incorporate self-interest and accidental benefaction, who are moral legislators and buffoons, and who, as mischievous masters of ceremony, produce new order through the comic justice in the plays whose intrigues they unwittingly design.

Little remains to be said on the thematic and imagistic implications inherent in the allusions to beast fable in Volpone, but that the crafty fox serves as an appropriate analogy for the kind of trickster protagonist Jonson depicted is worth further notice. The fox is motivated by a cunning which is instinctual and amoral; he seeks to satisfy fundamental appetites rather than to serve, consciously, any moral or humanitarian ends. His craft is a life-style pervading his entire being and not merely adopted disguise. To the extent that he can be said to be aware of his own acts, the art of pulling a clever jest on the less wary is his supreme joy. His world is a narrow one in which knavery is carried out half as play, half in accordance with the logistics of survival. Such a prankster, with his sheer primitive drive, differs markedly from the festal trickster who assumes disguises in order to achieve precalculated ends, the literary intriguer of learned comedy who presides, by licence, over the creation of rites of passage, gentle ridicule and carnival. Fox is hero in his own world, not servant, and his tricks are the central transaction of the story. In keeping with his nature and the tradition of tales which fostered him, the fox is, typically, now the wily hunter, now the hunted one forced back upon his ruseful resources in order to save his own neck. The tale of the folk trickster contains, characteristically, the waxing hero exulting in his piracy and the waning hero who is made to endure mortification. In Volpone, not only is the trickster of folk lore fully accommodated to the English stage as hero, but his rising and falling destiny is redeployed in the context of an intrigue drawn from the conditions of contemporary society. In this lies the substance for a response to Partridge's comment that Volpone is "a drama too complex in nature and unique in effect to be encompassed by the traditional categories." Volpone behaves neither as a romantic hero nor as a tragic one despite his magnificence, the apparent depths of his motivation and his so-called flaw and lamentable catastrophe. But there is a subgenre of comedy implicit in the figure of the trickster hero with its own themes and conventions. The rise of this class of comedy is one of the salient achievements of the English theatre in the Renaissance to which there were notable contributions by several of Jonson's contempories. Yet they were never able to free themselves, as Jonson did, from the established conventions preventing Trickster from arriving at his full dramatic potential. By such a measure Volpone attains a special place in the development of intrigue comedy.

If Jonson's handling of the protagonist is an innovative one, it is set even more in relief by the fact that the dramatic tradition which he held in highest esteem, that of Plautus and Terence (and their followers in Renaissance Italy), offered no precedent for the trickster as hero. In Roman comedy he had reached his nadir, both socially and in terms of his ties with the primordial figure. Classical models dictated a highly conventionalized use of the slave whose wits were in the exclusive employ of his master, a commission which invariably entailed, in the cause of true love, the outwitting of a refractory parent or a threatening rival. Though the writers of the commedia erudita allowed him more novel disguises and a freer range in their well-honed, multifaceted intrigue plots, he remained a low-life character, monodimensional, subservient to his betters and ever restrained by the variables of plotting which led only to happy issue for the lovers accompanied usually by reconciliation and the promise of carnival. Jonson refers to the Italian character types in justifying his handling of Volpone's demise and he mentions the "quick comedy, refined as best critics have designed swerving From no needful rule" as the source of the plotting and general ambiance of the play. These were the conventional utterings of a classicist in action and no doubt Jonson believed he was writing a play directly in the learned tradition. Volpone is, indeed, classical in its sense of economy of plot, the following of the unities and its critical attitudes towards excess in the spirit of the Roman satirists. But there were no models among the ancients, or their Renaissance imitators, for the kind of captains of intrigue in which Jonson specialized.

There is a sense in which the rise of realist satiric comedy in England was synonymous with the emancipation and diversification of the intriguer figure as internal plotter and satiric persona. Marlowe, Chapman, and Marston all laboured towards that end. Each in his own way raised the station and intelligence of the trickster figure in order to broaden his social currency, which in turn accommodated him more naturally to the contemporary settings and, as a satirist, gave him access to folly in high places. Marston devised the duke in disguise whose high station and lofty moral purpose guided him infallibly through a maze of trials and obstacles. Chapman created the urbane, witty Elizabethan gentleman as intriguer. Lemot (An Humorous Day's Mirth) is full of verve which he deploys in wooing the puritanical Florilla from her prayer garden to a lovers' rendezvous. But Chapman's calculated moral programming causes Lemot to teach her a lesson by humiliating and scorning her rather than by seducing her on the spot. The moral design of the trickster-intriguer's role is more veiled in Rinaldo (All Fools) and Lodovico (May Day) who evince greater sense of the primordial trickster's love of freedom, the outsider's pleasure in controlling the destinies of others, the drive for personal expression and the joy of sheer waggery. Yet, they remain subordinate in position to the lovers they serve, they are untainted by material ambitions of their own, and they serve plots which must make the metamorphosis from satire into the neutralized atmosphere of festival. The progress of both writers in relation to the dramatic tradition was marked and both achieved a form of literary trickster drama. But it was Jonson who turned the comic intriguer into a self-serving knave, driven by appetite and greed, who set him up as a rich magnifico and the central protagonist of the play. Volpone harbours no concern either for his victims or the good of his society. He is free from all the restraints of the intriguer compounded of conscious literary attitudes and functions. In his new freedom he becomes synonymous with the ancient prankster who had not died out entirely in the native story-telling tradition.

Volpone has no direct literary forebears in the native theatre, but there are a handful of plays which feature prankster rogues, in some cases even as heroes, from which Jonson no doubt drew certain fundamental lessons. Chapman's Blind Beggar of Alexandria comes to mind as Volpone's closest relative, since the hero is not only a prankster of the first order but styles himself as an oriental magnifico on his way to becoming King of Egypt. In this episodic multi-disguise plot the knave of the Interlude peeks through, without doubt as part of the burlesque of the Marlovian hero Tamburlaine, which Chapman surely intended. Irus sets up a confidence operation in which he poses as a sage clairvoyant who makes prophecies which he is able to fulfil through a series of adopted disguises. His gulls include a nobleman, three beautiful sisters and the Queen herself. His most outrageous achievement is to marry two of the sisters at once, giving the third to his parasite Pego, and then to cuckold himself twice by seducing each wife as the husband of the other. (Of course, by eliminating a disguise he could eliminate a wife, a rather neat trick in any age.) The play has none of Jonson's hard polish or satiric intensity, but it does prefigure the ambitious master trickster in love with power and sheer devilry. A detail of interest is that Pego, like Mosca, reminds his master at the end of the action of all he knows and could reveal about Irus' devious climb to power and so claim a greater share in the spoils. Chapman lets the matter fall because the parody would have collapsed with the mortification of the hero, but he was aware of the dramatic potential in the situation. That this play has so many correspondences with Volpone should be submitted with the caveat that it belonged, at the same time, to a class of multiple-disguise plots, which by 1600 had run its course with such plays as Look About You and The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green and had all but disappeared. More important, Irus is a mono-dimensional figure who lacks those qualities which pertain to the trickster of folklore.

The folk trickster, in his most fully realized state, possesses a double nature which makes him both the hunter and the hunted at once. He is an outsider who is both a marauder and a mocker who shames his victims into conformity. He maintains at once the ways of the prophet and apostate, the benefactor and the bandit. It is this inter-relationship of opposites which is the key to his character. Endemic to trickster is what Herford and Simpson called "the fatuities of the overweening." The more dangerous and thus exhilarating the exploit, the greater the risks in executing it, and thus the greater the risks of being cashiered. Self-confidence blinds and the greatest tricksters invariably precipitate themselves towards error or self-betrayal. This dual nature does not make the character complex in himself, but it provokes complex reactions in those who watch him pass through a society. In Volpone the benefactor's contribution, the satiric exposure of gulls, is a by-product of the trickster's own pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and, above all, the joys of artful intrigue.

I glory

More in the cunning purchase of my wealth,

Then in the glad possession; since I gaine

No common way (I.1.30-3),

declares Volpone. Even when all hope of gain is past, he takes to the streets in another disguise for the sheer delight of further plaguing his victims. The double d�nouement of Volpone is in perfect keeping with the character of the pristine trickster; like Chaucer's Russell the fox in The Nun's Priest's Tale, who now enjoys the victory of his sophistry, now suffers humiliation for his folly, Volpone knows perfect success before he puts his head in the noose.

The Winnabago trickster cycle, which is one of the finest of the Amer-indian literary legacies, offers several examples of this dual nature of the trickster. In a rapid succession of tales the hero demonstrates his remarkable inventiveness and his na�ve stupidty. In one adventure he seduces the chief's daughter across a lake with his infinitely extendible penis; in another he allows it to be whittled down to size by a sharp-toothed wood-chuck while employing it to prod the beast out of a hollow log. In this way trickster forfeits his god-like phallus, yet redeems himself as a benefactor by planting the retrieved pieces which produce edible tubers of great value to his tribe. Trickster stories generically tell how the hero both deceives and is deceived in keeping with his nature; both tales are seen to be equally comic.

Trickster undertakes these adventures merely to express himself, amuse and furnish himself, which he cannot do unless he has a society to sport with, nor can he pass through that society without altering it for better or for worse. Jonson realized that the best story is not that in which the trickster is made to carry the author's moral burden as part of his own psychological outlook and the rationalizing voice behind his every deed, but that story in which he struggles to do his worst and nevertheless produces an unforseen good. Volpone was Jonson's ironic maker who created a well-turned comic artifact which both teaches and delights. As in the earlest trickster tales, Jonson sees how social benefit, cultural development and moral stability come about by accident through the civilizing force of trickster.

Comedy depends for its success on its capacity to regulate the degrees of distance between the action and the observer, between the artifice which feigns the real and the intellectually perceived values and judgements which the play raises. This has to do with the kind and degree of spectator involvement with the actions and characters. The fully realized trickster hero poses certain problems which Jonson renders particularly subtle by superimposing in the plot of Volpone the tales of the fox in the ascendant and the fox in decline. The fox in the ascendant invites a special attachment. Mosca boasts that he can "Shoot through the aire, as nimbly as a starre," which we must admire, in spite of lingering moral reservations. In the combined performance of these two knaves there are brilliant deceptions, a compelling use of verbiage and sheer audacity. Their intrigues are carried out in an atmostphere of serious play. We support their strategies in a context from which we are eager to transfer the joys of the victors to ourselves, the fundamental goal of any spectator sport. Jonson has arranged for our involvement and carries us with them to the pinnacle of success. After extricating themselves from the court scene in Act IV, Mosca gloats and warns at once:

Here, we must rest; this is our master-peece;

We cannot thinke, to goe beyond this (V.2.13-14).

Irony abounds as we discover just how far beyond this they are determined to go. But for a moment we sense the full flush of victory, the satisfaction of having prevailed momentarily in a situation of pure knavery. In a related sense, we also abandon ourselves to the entire topsy-turvy world as to a carnival. L. A. Beaurline suggests in reaction to the overmoralized views of Jonson's comedy, that it should be viewed as having "a more relaxed, playful air, tempting spectators to enjoy and perhaps give tacit assent to decadent but delightful release of inhibitions." Here is therapy through the release of aberrant impulses and through self-projection into the illusions of the comic theatre.

Jonson's own best trick as comedian is to let us align ourselves with the rogues until we too are exposed for our complicity. We are fascinated by the dizzying centrifugal force of the intrigue, the ever more daring ventures and the more spectacular saves. In the spirit of play we want the game to go on and we invite the heroes to greater dangers, seeking for ourselves, as does Volpone, one last "rare meale of laughter." At the same time we are implicated in the moral ambiguities of their behavior. Through the introduction of a code of legal values into this world of criminal schemes, our involvement in the sport is brought up short. We are forced to detach ourselves through sober reflection. But it is not a reflection about the personal destiny of the hero. He is but the animator of a whirligig which carries us along until the scheme explodes from sheer internal pressure.

This brings us to the tale of the trickster in defeat. Trickster out-tricked is never tragic; his foolishness leads him to the absurd which is risible by definition. He never laments his fate and does not ask it of others. As Paul Radin explained, the aboriginal trickster can never be philosophically motivated, for the moment he becomes self-conscious, his powers to act capriciously and ruthlessly are impeded by his own mind. Volpone never reflects upon his deeds; when he goes down he is merely deflated. As Quomodo, the intriguer in Michaelmas Term, says after he is caught out, "for craft, once known, / Does teach fools wit, leaves the deceiver none." The trickster is a born overreacher, engaging in his successes, comic in his defeat. The Lord Admiral's Men kept a bevy of such plays in their repertory, perhaps best characterized by the title of the now lost play, 'Tis No Deceit to Deceive a Deceiver, indicating both the degree of comic justice and the lack of culpability which pertained to the central transaction of the play. Volpone shares in common with such plays the tradition of the rogue repaid in kind.

Una Ellis-Fermor speaks more appropriately of Samson than of Volpone when she says that "with one last terrific gesture, utterly unbefitting a comedy and all but precipitating it into tragedy, Volpone pulls down disaster upon himself and his enemy alike." She goes on to compare him with the Duchess of Malfi who stood so nobly alone in the final hour of her life. But such reflections hail from romantic sensibilities alien to Jonson's comedy. To be sure, with the proper degree of abstraction, a sense of the narrowing sphere of operations and the feigned sickness and death which prevent Volpone from returning to a state of normalcy may be nursed into intimations of tragedy. One may assume that Volpone's desperate rush for the rewards of the game, for wealth and sexual pleasure, reflect a degree of fear, longing, and a suspicion that all is a cheat. Something Faustian can be teased out of the patterns of mutability, the carpe diem images, the grandeur of Volpone's stature and the fact that he loved the sport more than the rewards. Such a Volpone must go down, unfulfilled, a victim to insensitive justice. But Marlowe, himself, saw the other side in Barabas the Jew of Malta, who plays his hand in a serious game with malicious verve and vitality. In the end he, too, is double-crossed and finds himself in a boiling cauldron destined for his enemies, where he continues to shout in a final burst of remorselessness. Like Volpone, this play defies easy categorization and for many of the same reasons, including its parody of tragedy. T. S. Eliot called it a "serious farce." No gull is so comic as he who believes that everyone else is his gull. That irony excites laughter in the cases of Voltore, Corbaccio and Corvino. So it must when Volpone and Mosca follow suit. And where we must laugh at the knave we must also laugh at ourselves if we have been so tender as to take him to our bosom.

In Volpone Jonson achieved, willy-nilly, a resurrection of trickster comedy with his promotion of the comic intriguer to the level of a guileful voluptuory. He recaptured the fundamental antinomies of the trickster nature, the scourge and the buffoon, and he understood the alternating of tales of success and failure. There is one further innovation to Jonson's credit in this play, namely the mechanism required to reveal dramatically these two sides of trickster's nature. Jonson's technique was to develop the conventionally static relationship between master and and servant into a dynamic one in which the parasite uses his inside position to defraud his patron, thereby reversing the fortunes of the protagonists. The concept was available to Jonson in a number of seminal forms, any of which he could have relied upon for triggering his management of the d�nouement in Volpone. The master-servant relationship in drama is at least as old as Aristophanes and no doubt was the substance of comic scenes in the mimes before that. Plautus' Palaestrio in the Miles Gloriosus is perhaps the most outstanding example from the Roman period of the slave whose wit enabled him to abuse his master relentlessly even while he was busy cozening him out of his mistress. So effective is the flattery that he is able to get away with money, the girl (who is restored to her former lover), and his own freedom. A different model, nearer to hand, is the Ithamore-Barabas entente in the The Jew of Malta in which Ithamore tries to blackmail his master and, failing that, manages to confess all of his nefarious deeds before Barabas' poisoned flower was able to silence him. Here is a sequence of double-dealing prefiguring the double betrayals in Volpone. Herford and Simpson argue cogently for an even nearer source in Jonson's own Roman history play Sejanus which deals essentially with "the league of two noble villains, master and servant, ending in a deadly struggle between them." It was through a development of this pattern that Jonson found the means to mortify his fox. Jonson's handling of the d�nouement of Volpone is a variation on the plot of the servant who attempts to usurp his master's wealth and position. Both villains struggle in a contest for supremacy with an uncertain outcome. Such an employment of trickster bears little relation to the witty servant of romance comedy whose success is guaranteed by the sacredness of the cause he espouses. Master and servant, in turning upon one another in active combat, produce a wholly different model of action through which the satirist can indict the follies of greed and ambition.

In Volpone both the patron and the parasite ostensibly work together; both are tricksters wholly dependent upon one another for the advancement of their confidence game. Yet by degrees, the audience comes to appreciate Mosca's burgeoning sense of independence. The high-tide of their confederacy and the height of Mosca's sense of injured merit arrive simultaneously. When the gulling of the others was complete there was no other direction possible except an internecine struggle. The imperturbable Mosca took note of his master's nervous sweating during the court scene and counted it for a weakness. Where he had been wont to say "Alas, sire, I but doe, as I am taught; / Follow your graue instructions" he changed for, "You are not taken with it, enough, me thinkes?" Mosca has not only been in disguise to the gulls, but to Volpone as well, with his camouflage of flattery. Yet if Volpone underestimated his knave for cunning, the latter underestimated his master for pride and stubbornness. This was the final phase of the game by which they had lived and sportsman-like they carried it through to the victory or the defeat which every such context must hold in store. It is in precisely that spirit that Mosca declares his intentions:

To cosen him of all, were but a cheat

Well plac'd; no man would construe it a sinne:

Let his sport pay for't, this is call'd the Foxe-trap.

Mosca had not calculated Volpone's one remaining trump, that one which was furnished by the conventions of comic art. Volpone opted to strip away his mask, preferring a double check-mate to an uncontested victory for his parasite. Justice was ready to serve sentence once the truth was out, but it was the last all-or-nothing toss which brought about that revelation. In this way the two cats of Kilkenny reduced themselves to none.

Trickster is the comic projection of one dimension of human nature, a greater-than-life embodiment of the appetites which he attempts to satisfy through his wits. Success and failure alike bring laughter to those who look on. Such a being delights in imposing his view of the world upon others, who often imagine themselves to be doing the same but who are merely victims of delusions and self-betrayal. This is why the trickster is so valuable to the comic plotter and to the satirist. The essence of the character is unchanging, but individual tricksters are always products of national mentalities and individual geniuses working on the materials of their own times and cultures. Jonas Barish claimed that "the most obvious trait of Jonson's style, its realism, thus brings to a climax a process toward which comedy had been moving for generations, perhaps since its origins." Jonson, in Volpone, was on his way home from his literary peregrinations in the classical world and on the verge of finding comedy in the streets and halls of London. His revival of old forms was partially an archeological enterprise, but he made his forms appear to spring sui generis from the unique circumstances generated in his plays. Jonson's vision was to see the diverse manifestations of social traffic regulated by a variety of trickster figures who incorporate self-interest and accidental benefaction, who are moral legislators and buffoons, and who, as mischievous masters of ceremony, produce new order through the comic justice in the plays whose intrigues they unwittingly design. In keeping with his picture of a society driven by greed and rapaciousness Jonson devised the confidence artist as hero. It was a master stroke, taking the trickster hero to his apogee in Volpone after a long period of development. Marlowe, Chapman, and Marston had already supplied trickster with new guises and contemporary habiliments, but Jonson freed him from conventional roles, from socio-moral subservience, rediscovering the dual nature of the primal folk hero. These alterations had such a powerful reorienting effect that the standard definitions of comedy must expand to accommodate them.

Source: Don Beecher, "The Progress of Trickster in Ben Jonson's Volpone," in Cahiers Elisabethains, April, 1985, Vol. 27, pp. 43-51. Reprinted in Drama for Students, Vol. 10.