Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Spring 1994 v34 n2 p301(21)

Volpone's "sport" and the structure of Jonson's 'Volpone.' Redwine, James D., Jr.

Abstract: Ben Jonson's play 'Volpone' is a convincing presentation of human greed, fox-like cunning and goatish lust. Aside from depicting some of human beings' negative attributes, the play also shows the extent of human beings' compulsion to make others suffer. This compulsion is referred to by one of the play's characters, Mosca, as 'sport.' Jonson succeeded in showing how individuals can be so possessed by their own hopes of dominating others that they resist reason or even common sense.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1994 Rice University

Save what is in destroying, other joy To me is lost.

Paradise Lost, 9.478-79

Mosca's last speech in Volpone, after which he "never will speak word," is bitterly addressed to Volpone: "Bane to thy wolfish nature."(1) This curse serves as a fitting epitaph for Volpone, and for Mosca, too, perhaps. That Volpone is a powerful moral study of human greed, foxish cunning, and goatish lust has been thoroughly appreciated. It has not been sufficiently emphasized, I think, that it is also a study of man's wolfish compulsion to make others suffer.(2) Mosca calls this compulsion Volpone's "sport." The "sport" consumes Mosca as well as Volpone in the closing scenes of the play, and its source is, as Jonson might have learned from Sir Thomas More, among others, the darkest heart of superbia:

Pride measures her prosperity not by her own goods, but by others' wants. Pride would not deign to be a goddess, if there were no inferiors she could rule over and scoff at. Her happiness shines brightly only in comparison to others' misery, and their poverty binds them and hurts them the more as her wealth is displayed. Pride is the infernal serpent that steals into the hearts of men like a suck fish, thwarting them and holding them back from choosing the better of way of life.(3)

These sobering words comprise, as it were, the peroration of Utopia; More has asked why, given the clearly reasonable alternatives exemplified in Utopia, early capitalist society seems increasingly "a conspiracy of the rich, who pursue their own aggrandizement under the name and title of the Commonwealth." His answer is that man is not merely acquisitive, though he is certainly that; there is at the heart of human pride an insatiable concupiscence that can find "happiness" only in "others' misery"!

More's emphasis, in Utopia, is heavier on the social than the individual side of morality, and Jonson, in Volpone, is more interested in the individual, but Jonson's art, like More's, grows out of a popular tradition that is interested in both.(4) Volpone is almost a morality play on Pride. It is also implicitly a dystopian satire on Renaissance society almost a century after More, and both writers mean to show that the cause of social malaise lies in the perversity of individuals. The cause lies not in our stars, but in our wolfish natures. In Volpone, Jonson takes as his protagonist a rich and potentially powerful clarissimo of Renaissance Venice and, after systematically exposing his hedonism and narcissism, makes it the culminating violation of his individual and social being that he can find power only in seeing and causing (and seeing himself seeing and causing) the pain and misery of others. This is Volpone's "sport," and I wish to argue that it drives his actions and the complex structure of Jonson's first great comedy, especially in its fifth-act conclusion.

The handling of dramatic structure in Volpone has been much admired--from the beginning, one might say, since Jonson himself in the Prologue to the play proclaims (lines 29-32) that it is a "quick comedy," "designed" according to every "needful rule." Dryden later agrees, almost. Speaking of those perfect plays whose unified but varied designs have made them "infinitely pleasing," his spokesman Neander says,

I was going to have named The Fox, but that the unity of design seems not exactly observed in it; for there appear two actions in the play; the first naturally ending with the fourth act; the second forced from it in the fifth: which yet is the less to be condemned in him, because the disguise of Volpone, though it suited not with his character as a crafty or covetous person, agreed well enough with that of a voluptuary; and by it the poet gained the end he aimed at, the punishment of vice, and the reward of virtue, which that disguise produced. So that to judge equally of it, it was an excellent fifth act, but not so naturally proceeding from the former.(5)

As Dryden knew, Jonson had worked out the classical "rules" of the five-act structure based on Horace, Donatus, Scaliger, and others;(6) they required among other things that the fourth act conclude the epitasis (the complication of the plot, ending in a seeming but unsatisfactory resolution), and that the two-pronged fifth act present, first, the catastasis (the "fresh cheat" which complicates the action again) and, second, the comic catastrophe, the happy resolution of all. The "disguise" which seems to be bothering Dryden refers, of course, to the plot at the beginning of the fifth act, when Volpone pretends to die and leave Mosca as his heir in order to observe and later to persecute the thwarted inheritance seekers, the "birds of prey." According to Dryden, Volpone's character has been established in the first four acts; he is crafty, he is covetous, and he is a "voluptuary." In Jonson's fifth-act catastasis, Volpone's "disguise" seems not to grow naturally out of Volpone's craftiness or greed, though it agrees "well enough" with his character as a "voluptuary" to get Jonson to his catastrophe. Dryden is questioning the congruence of character and plot in the fifth act of Volpone, and he raises just the right questions about the "forced" way in which Jonson seems to eke out his five-act structure. Jonson worked harder on the unity of Volpone than Dryden perhaps gives him credit for, and Dryden's provocative, if cryptic, suggestion that in the fifth act Volpone plays the "voluptuary" bears examining. First, though, two other critics' comments on the structure of Volpone.

Jonson himself worried about the structure of Volpone, or at least its reception by audiences, in the defensive apologia included in the dedicatory Epistle to the play:

And though my catastrophe may in the strict rigor of comic law meet with censure ... it was done of industry.... [M]y special aim being to put the snaffle in their mouths that cry out: We never punish vice in our interludes, &c.

(lines 103-16)

Jonson, however, seems to be worried here not that critics will question the unity of and between character and structure, but that they will find the plot too darkly didactic for comedy. Historically, critics seem to have worried most about precisely that; but Dryden's is the more interesting question: what happens in Act V of Volpone, and why?

According to one of Jonson's latest and ablest editors, Alvin Kernan, the main thing that happens as the fifth act begins is that Volpone disastrously wrests the "directorship" of the play (that is, of all the plays-within-the-play) from Mosca. Mosca's directorial genius has just culminated in his "masterwork," the courtroom drama of Act IV, in which his "prize" has been to hoodwink Justice herself as he and Volpone evaded what seemed to be certain punishment. Kernan observes astutely in his "introduction" to the Yale edition of Volpone:

But Volpone has a savage, satiric streak in him, and the two plays he arranges in Act V expose the inheritance seekers for the arrant fools and corrupt beings they essentially are. The result is disaster for Volpone's plans. The fools strike back in revenge, and all is at last uncovered. (pp. 9-10)

The "two plays" which Volpone directs in Act V (Dryden's "disguise") are, first, in scenes i-v, Volpone's pretending to be dead in order to observe the disappointment of the birds of prey; and second, in scenes vi-ix, Volpone's disguising himself as a commendatore and going forth to harass the dupes further in the streets of Venice. If I read Kernan's analysis correctly, he attributes Volpone's rash usurpation of Mosca's role as director to an overreaching pride in his craftiness: "The end is inevitable, and Volpone seeks it out with his usual pride in his genius for inventing roles. To instrument a final joke on the fortune hunters he pretends to be dead". One recalls that Dryden argued differently, that Volpone's actions in Act V "suited not with his character as a crafty person," though they may have agreed ("well enough") with his character as a "voluptuary." On the face of it, Dryden's choice seems bizarre as against Kernan's, but something more than Volpone's pride in his craftiness does seem to be needed to explain the peculiar unity that Jonson achieves in the last act of Volpone, and Dryden's insight bears scrutiny. Dryden does not explain how Volpone's character as a "voluptuary" accounts for his rash actions in the fifth act, but I wish to argue that what Dryden calls Volpone's "voluptuary" side and what Kernan calls Volpone's "savage, satiric streak" are conflated in Act V of Volpone. If we understand that, we come up with something that seems very true to the complex unity that lies at the heart of its twelve tortuous and torturous scenes. The fifth act does not, pace Dryden, "force" a new, inharmonious action after the "natural" conclusion of Act IV. Rather, it delineates the third and final stage of Volpone's "voluptuary" journey--his metamorphosis from man to wolf. There is much of the narcissist and of the sadist in Volpone, and it seems increasingly emphatic as the play progresses that Jonson is building the structure of his play on some such insight into the character of his protagonist.(7)

The Protasis and Epitasis (Acts I-IV)

Though Volpone's appetite for the suffering of others comes to the fore in Act V, Jonson gives us glimpses of it from the outset. A brief look at the opening scene of the play will indicate how carefully Jonson lays the groundwork for the developments of character and action which will confront us in the last act. Volpone's first, famous boast to Mosca (I.i.30-40) is that it is not "possession" but the "cunning purchase" of wealth that drives him, and he goes on to catalogue and scorn the usual ways of mere capitalistic aggrandizement:

I use no trade, no venture; I wound no earth with ploughshares; fat no beasts To feed the shambles; have no mills for iron, Oil, corn, or men, to grind 'em into powder.

The jolting words "or men" are a brilliant stroke in Jonson's overall attack on the acquisitive society. By giving this violent turn of language to Volpone, Jonson can at once insinuate his own devastating characterization of early capitalism, and at the same time, more importantly, make it satirically ironic at Volpone's expense. The society's usual ways of "purchase" are bad enough--Volpone's and Mosca's ways, Jonson is about to show us, are not better, but worse. To grind men into powder becomes Volpone's fondest compulsion. That Volpone seems to echo the "Utopian" passage in Montaigne's "Of Cannibals" which Shakespeare later gives to Gonzalo in the Tempest (II.i.149-69) perhaps makes Jonson's point here triply ironic.

Mosca continues in Volpone's vein (lines 41-51); he says, "No sir, [nor]"

Tear forth the fathers of poor families Out of their beds, and coffin them alive In some clasping prison, where their bones May be forthcoming, when the flesh is rotten.

Mosca's Dickensian prison sketch is simultaneously damning of the ways of society; ironically self-damning since both Mosca and Volpone are in the process of tearing parents and children, and husbands and wives, from families; and, of course, an ironic foreshadowing of his own and Volpone's imprisonments at the end of the play.

As this first scene concludes, Volpone explains his cozening of the birds of prey in a way that suggests that his victims' pain and frustration are more important to him than their gifts (lines 85-90). He feigns illness, he says, "playing with their hopes":

Letting the cherry knock against their lips, And draw it by their mouths, and back again.

The sadistic games which Volpone plays on his suitors in the fifth act should not surprise us; they grow "naturally" enough out of unnatural tendencies that we perceive quite early in the play.

Jonson also gives us early glimpses of Volpone's narcissism, not least in his attempted seduction of Celia in Act III. Volpone is as narcissistic in his enjoyment of seeing-himself-seen-as-lover as he will be in seeing-himself-seen-as tormentor in Act V. His first anxiety is that Celia will see him as old and ill, and his first recourse in persuading her of his "fresh" ardor is to liken it to the way it appeared to other ladies of another day when

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.

(III.vii.161-64)

"For a narcissistic male," we are told by a modern analyst, Erich Fromm, "the sight of a woman may be sexually exciting because he is excited by the possibility of proving to himself how attractive he is."(8) In his attempted seduction of Celia, Volpone needs to be seen as attractive, as he has seen himself seen earlier. A similar concern for his reflection in the eyes of others soon follows: as he conjures up images of all of the pleasurable kisses to come (III.vii.234-39), he conjures up a suitable (and suitably frustrated) audience, Catallus's "curious" and "envious" onlookers, who will not be able to count them, or who will "be pined" if they do. And when Celia refuses him, Volpone immediately sees himself as shamed in the eyes of others. He asks rhetorically and sarcastically if he is expected to allow his "nation" to "Think me ... impotent and so report me?" (lines 260-61).

Furthermore, after he sees himself seen and spurned as cold and impotent, Volpone's response is aggressive, and becomes a virtual confession that his "love" of Celia is at bottom a sadistic need for "conquest."

I should have done the act, and then have parleyed. Yield, or I'll force thee. [He seizes her.]

(III.vii.265-66)

"Or," Fromm continues, "a sadistic person may be sexually excited by the chance to conquer a woman (or, as the case may be, a man) and to control her or him."(9) Volpone's martial tropes are telling. If wounded narcissism is the most important source of "defensive aggression," and if sadism itself is "transformation of impotence into the experience of omnipotence," then surely Volpone's generalship here is as revealing as it is pathetic, and it, too, foreshadows a "streak" in Volpone that is to become something like an obsession towards the end of the play.

Meanwhile, as Act III concludes, Volpone's fears of being seen as "impotent" are about to be realized in ways that he cannot imagine. Bonario's rescue of Celia and threat to expose all sends Volpone into a panic of cowardice so profound that he becomes contemptible:

I am unmasked, unspirited, undone, Betrayed to beggary, to infamy--

(III.vii.278-79)

[To Mosca] Thou hast made me miserable.

What shall I do?

(III.viii.8-11)

At the end, by Mosca's direction, Volpone literally "lies down," not to be heard from until his opening soliloquy in Act V:

To your couch, sir; you Make that place good, however. [Volpone lies down]

(lines 19-20)

An important element of the sadistic syndrome is "submissiveness and cowardice"--not surprisingly, since the sadist always "feels impotent, unalive, and powerless."(10) This is not a bad description of Volpone's own self-diagnosis as Act V opens.

The Catastasis, Part One (Act V, scenes i-v)

Act V of Volpone, like Act I, opens with Volpone in soliloquy (V.i.1-17): "Well, I am here." He is reflecting emotionally on the action of the preceding two acts (Jonson's epitasis), which included his foiled rape of Corvino's virtuous wife, Celia; Volpone's own cowardly panic in this crisis, his low point; and most importantly Mosca's diverting their defeat by brilliantly duping the Venetian court into condemning not the knaves and fools, but their virtuous accusers. Interestingly, Volpone's soliloquy is not one of happy relief; rather, he is melancholy, depressed, self-doubting as he recalls not Mosca's victory, but his own fear and panic as he lay passive and silent, leg beginning to cramp as he was struck ill by "some power," while others decided his fate. He still feels threatened and decides that extraordinary medicine is needed if "these fears" are not to throw him permanently "into some villainous disease." After downing a glass of wine "to fright/This humor from my heart," he vows:

'Tis almost gone already; I shall conquer. Any device, now, of rare, ingenious knavery That would possess me with a violent laughter, Would make me up again ...

Mosca!

This is, of course, a crucial moment in the structure of the play. Not only does Jonson resurrect his protagonist, virtually absent from the play since falling to his low point in III.viii, but he also seems to be calling attention here and in the next scene to the play's classical plot structure. Volpone points out that he needs to be "possessed" by some "device, now, of rare, ingenious knavery" to cheer him up and restore his sense of self. Jonson, too, needs a device or new twist in order that the catastasis get him from the morally unsatisfactory "conclusion" of his epitasis, the trial scene of Act IV, to his true conclusion or catastrophe, the second trial scene which will restore justice at the end of Act V. The "violent laughter," as Volpone calls it, which both he and Jonson need, will be defined further in the second scene. And Volpone will be "possessed" by it!

As Mosca enters (scene ii), he understandably expects to be congratulated on the "masterpiece" of misprision and misjustice that he, Mosca, has just directed in the fourth act. Volpone's attempts at admiration and praise seem only lukewarm to Mosca:

"You are not taken with it enough, methinks?" Volpone responds warmly and revealingly:

Volpone. O, more than if I had enjoyed the wench. The pleasure of all womankind's not like it. Mosca. Why, now you speak, sir! We must here be fixed.

(lines 9-13)

Of course, to be "fixed," as opposed to fixated, is exactly what appetites such as Mosca's and Volpone's can never be, but Volpone has revealed, and perhaps discovered, something important about his own desires: the pleasure of making or at least watching Celia suffer is greater than his seduction of her could ever have been. It is a telling confession, one perhaps that Volpone himself could not have formulated until he heard himself saying it. This cruel streak in Volpone comes more and more to the fore as Act V progresses, and Jonson calls attention to it here and repeatedly throughout the rest of the play because it explains how all of the twists and turns of Act V grow, inevitably, as it were, out of Volpone's character. It turns out that the "violent laughter" which Volpone will seek in Act V is violent in more ways than one. Beginning here in V.ii, Jonson is at pains to show that Volpone's "voluptuary" drives become increasingly centered on a perversely "savage, satirical streak" that is fixed on the enjoyment of others' pain. "Torture" becomes literally and figuratively the main image and motif of the play.

Having agreed that the trial scene was their "masterpiece" ("we cannot think to go beyond this"), Mosca and Volpone immediately turn around and agree that Voltore, whose skills as a lawyer have contributed mightily to their masterpiece, is a pompous ass who deserves to be, as Mosca says, "cozened." At this point, Volpone takes charge of the show, Mosca pretending to go along merely. Volpone vows, "At thy entreaty / I will begin e'en now to vex 'em all, / This very instant" (lines 55-57). "To vex 'em all" now becomes Volpone's obsession and the central action of the early scenes (scenes ii-ix) of Jonson's fifth act. Volpone decides (lines 69-87) that his first "device" will be to pretend that he is dead and that Mosca is his heir; the suitors will come and "gape, and find themselves deluded," and Mosca will "use them scurvily."

I'll get up Behind the curtain, on a stool, and hearken; Sometime peep over, see how they do look, With what degree the blood doth leave their faces. O, 'twill afford me a rare meal of laughter!

Mosca helps Volpone imagine the enjoyably painful scene in advance (lines 90-96): the loquacious Voltore will "turn stark dull upon it"; old Corbaccio "Will crump you like a hog-louse with the touch"; and the would-be cuckold Corvino "must run mad" and commit suicide! Volpone (lines 64-68) can hardly wait to see the birds of prey "come flying ... / To peck for carrion." Mosca rejoins rhetorically "And then to have it ravished from their mouths?" Finally (line 113), as scene ii closes, Volpone underscores the theme: "Play the artificer now, [Mosca], torture 'em rarely."

As V.iii opens, news of Volpone's supposed death has reached the inheritance seekers, and while Volpone spies on them ecstatically from behind his curtain, Mosca tortures them, calmly cataloguing what they hope are now their treasures-until they read the will. Then, as they leave in anger and despair, Mosca excoriates each with a brutal reminder of his or her most shameful sin. He reminds Lady Wouldbe "what your ladyship offered me" and advises her, "Go, be melancholic" (lines 39-45). Volpone exclaims delightedly from behind his curtain, "O my fine devil!"

When, next, Corvino speaks up, Mosca turns on him: "Do not you know I know you an ass ... A declared cuckold?" (lines 50-60). Volpone exclaims (line 61), "Rare, Mosca! How his villainy becomes him!" Mosca next dismisses Corbaccio, more violently still:

Are not you he, that filthy, covetous wretch With the three legs, that here, in hope of prey, Have, any time this three year, snuffed about...?

Go home, and die, and stink.

(lines 68-74)

Volpone approves: "Excellent varlet!"

Jonson has saved Voltore for last. How will Mosca torture the lawyer suitor? Even though, or perhaps because, Voltore is a man of some talent who has saved Mosca's and Volpone's lives, he gets the cruelest treatment of all. Voltore assumes that after the others leave, Mosca will reveal that he, Voltore, is the true heir. "Nay, leave off," he says to Mosca, "now they are gone." Mosca's strategy is to kill him with kindness (lines 80-101):

Reverend sir! Good faith, I am grieved for you. That any chance of mine should thus defeat

Your--I must say--most deserving travails.

Marry, my joy is that you need it not; You have a gift, sir--thank your education--

Good faith, you look As you were costive; best go home and purge, sir.

[Exit Voltore.]

Volpone can no longer contain himself:

Bid him eat lettuce well! My witty mischief, [Coming from behind curtain.] Let me embrace thee. O that I could now Transform thee to a Venus--Mosca, go Straight take my habit of clarissimo, And walk the streets; be seen, torment 'em more. We must pursue as well as plot. Who would Have lost this feast?

(lines 102-108)

Once again, Jonson gives Volpone language that suggests a conflation of the "savage" with the "voluptuary." If, earlier, Volpone allowed his aggressive desires to displace his sexual desires, confessing to have enjoyed Celia's misfortunes "more than if I had enjoyed the wench," here something like the opposite process seems to be taking place, though it is rather confusing. Volpone has so enjoyed, voyeuristically, Mosca's sadistic treatment of the suitors that he would now like to "transform" Mosca into a sexual object. That failing, more torture will suffice: "Walk the streets; be seen; torment 'em more. / We must pursue." Volpone's warmth for Mosca after a scene of cruelty is foreshadowed as early as I.iv.134, when Volpone, excited by observing Mosca's cruel gulling of Corbaccio into disinheriting his son, leaps out of his sick bed ("O, I shall burst!") to congratulate Mosca on his baiting of the "hook":

O, but thy working, and thy placing it! I cannot hold; good rascal, let me kiss thee. I never knew thee in so rare a humor.

(I.iv.136-38)

And later as Corvino tries to compel his wife to go to bed with Volpone ("mere charity, for physic"), Volpone whispers to Mosca, "Thou art mine honor, and my pride! / My joy, my tickling, my delight" (III.vii.68-69). In the early scenes of Act V, the language of sexual "transformation" continues and seems more pointed and insistent as Volpone's obsession with power becomes increasingly an obsession with the near-sexual enjoyment of inflicting pain on others.

We note, too, in the speech just quoted from V.iii.102-108, that Volpone's language moves from desire to torment to another favorite, related trope, that of eating. When Volpone calls Mosca's brilliant torturing of the disappointed birds of prey "this feast" ("Who would / Have lost this feast?"), he echoes his language from earlier in Act V when he first tells Mosca of his plot to torture the birds of prey: "O, 'twill afford me a rare meal of laughter." And, of course, "meal of laughter" echoes Volpone's words in the opening soliloquy of the act when he declares the self-prescribed cure for his malaise to be "violent laughter." Volpone has begun to enjoy his (violent) feast of (violent) laughter. Tropes of eating are frequent throughout the play, and cannibalism is several times referred to as a consumption devoutly to be wished, as when Volpone exclaims in Act I that cozening the birds of prey is "better than rob churches yet / Or fat, by eating once a month a man," or when Volpone's fool Androgyno defines a Puritan as an "illuminate brother, / Of those devour flesh, and sometimes one another" (I.ii.42-44). Here, in Act V, Volpone's "rare meal" has become emphatically, if not the suitors, at least their pain. "Torture," "vex," "torment," "afflict," and "provoke" become Volpone's operative words in Act V, and they emphasize his obsession with the suffering of others. To be sure, some of these terms are traditionally associated with satire, and Kernan's suggestion that Volpone himself becomes something of a satirist in Act V is surely to the point. That Jonson the satirist may be to some extent exorcising his own satiric devils by making Volpone his scapegoat in Act V of Volpone would not be an unheard-of strategy for a satirist. Still, the purpose of the torment that the true satirist inflicts is not his own pleasure, but (as Jonson reminds us often, as in his dedicatory Epistle to Volpone) "the doctrine, which is the principal end of poesie, to inform men in the best reason of living" (lines 99-103). Volpone's ends are neither artistic nor doctrinal, but confessedly and egregiously hedonistic and vicious.

When, towards the end of V.iii, Volpone tells Mosca, "We must pursue as well as plot," his scheme and Jonson's catastasis are about to take their second, final turn. He has enjoyed his voyeuristic peeking at Mosca's rough treatment of the suitors so greatly that he decides that Mosca must now stalk the suitors: "walk the streets; be seen, torment 'em more." Not only that, Volpone himself would join in the torture if he could think of a disguise: "How I would vex 'em at every turn!" (lines 110-12). When Mosca responds sinisterly, "Sir, I can fit you," we are no doubt meant to recall not only the famous words of Kyd's Hieronimo but also the cruel catastrophe which they foreshadow. Volpone hears nothing. Mosca suggests the disguise of a commendatore or sergeant-at-law, and Volpone is enrapt: "O, I will be a sharp disease unto 'em" (line 117). Mosca warns that Volpone will be cursed by his victims, and scene iii closes with Volpone's blindly ironic rejoinder that manages to blend the narcissistic with the sadistic, and both with the masochistic suggestion that he enjoys receiving abuse: "Till they burst; / The fox fares ever best when he is cursed" (lines 119-20).

We do not actually see Volpone himself pursuing his victims until three scenes later. Meanwhile, in V.iv, Sir Politic Wouldbe suffers his comeuppance in the farcical catastrophe of the subplot. The theme of crime and punishment in the subplot predictably parallels the more serious concerns of the main plot;(11) it is not accidental, I think, that the language of the farcical catastrophe at times seems pointedly to parody the tropes of disguise, torture, and suffering which characterize the rest of Act V. The scene opens with Peregrine's "Am I enough disguised?" He has come to punish Sir Pol for having involved him in his and his lady's absurd machinations. In contrast to Mosca and Volpone, Peregrine means no serious harm to his victim, Sir Pol. Though he is being urged by his assistants to "prick his guts," etc., Peregrine announces, "All my ambition is to fright him only." But the language of the scene is nevertheless reminiscent of that of the main plot; Peregrine tells Sir Pol, "They'll put you to the rack; you must be sudden." Sir Pol exclaims, "I shall n'er endure the torture!" and he disguises himself in an "engine" he has dreamed up, a tortoise shell. As Peregrine's accomplices "prod" Sir Pol "to see him creep, to prick his guts," Peregrine is made to urge them not to go too far, warning one of them, "No, good sir, you will hurt him." It is presumably Jonson's point that the sane and temperate Peregrine is not interested in enjoying Sir Pol's "torture" or "hurt," but, like a good satirist, in his "instruction and amendment." He advises Sir Pol in his tortoise shell to placate his tormentors: "Pray you, sir, creep a little" and "Good sir, creep"; and when the creeping is over and the disguises are removed, "Now, Sir Pol, we are even."

Finally, in V.v, a brief scene, the first part of the catastasis concludes as Volpone exits in his disguise, and Mosca, who knows immediately that the unthinking Volpone has now put himself in "the fox-trap," is sinister as he soliloquizes about his options (lines 13-18). He can at least torture Volpone, "make him languish," unless Volpone will "come to composition" with him. He even seems to see that he has only to kill the now "dead" Volpone to inherit all, but Jonson makes him hesitate at the prospect of murder:

Since he will needs be dead before his time, I'll bury him, or gain by him. I'm his heir, And so will keep me, till he share at least. To cozen him of all were but a cheat Well placed; no man would construe it a sin. Let his sport pay for't. This is called the fox-trap.

This is cold enough. It is all one to Mosca, whether he bury Volpone or gain by him. There is apparently no reason why Mosca should not kill Volpone, nor is there any Volponean "sport," as Mosca unblinkingly names it, in his not killing Volpone, either. The cold-blooded parasite easily scorns the hot-blooded, if perverted, pleasures of his all-too-human patron. Mosca is in no hurry. He will know how to use his new advantage when the time comes. Meanwhile, he is the heir.

The Catastasis, Part Two (Act V, scenes vi-ix)

In the next four scenes (V.vi-ix), it is Volpone himself who tortures the birds of prey. Disguised as a commendatore, he confronts each of them in turn and pretends garrulously to congratulate each for being the late Volpone's heir. It is his purpose to remind them ad nauseam not only of their biting disappointment at being cozened of Volpone's wealth, but also of the degradations they allowed themselves to suffer in their pursuit of their failed inheritance. Thus, Volpone encounters Corbaccio and Corvino in V.vi and wishes Corbaccio "much joy ... [of] the sudden good / Dropped down upon you" (lines 8-13). Corbaccio is quickly exasperated: "Dost thou mock me?" Volpone twists the knife: "You mock the world, sir; did you not [ex]change wills?" "Out, harlot!" is all that Corbaccio can muster before he flees, to be harassed in the same fashion again by Volpone in the next scene. Meanwhile, Volpone turns on Corvino (lines 14-27). "O! Belike you are the man, / Senior Corvino?" Corvino angrily dismisses him, and Volpone persists, "Troth, your wife has shown / Herself a very woman!" Last but not least comes Voltore, whom Volpone vexes (vii. 1-23), again by pretending to congratulate him--"I e'n rejoice, sir, at your worship's happiness, / And that it fell into so learned hands, / That understand the fingerings"--Voltore, too, is infuriated by Volpone's maddening "mistakings": "Mistaking knave! What, mock'st thou my misfortune?" Voltore flees, and Volpone gleefully plans to repeat the whole painful process in the next scene ("at the next corner").

In the next two scenes, viii and ix, Volpone pretends to have discovered belatedly that it was Mosca who inherited all ("But is this true, sir, of the parasite?") and tortures the suitors all over again, this time through lengthy and insinuatingly intimate condolences. To Corbaccio (viii. 3-8): "I'm heartily grieved a beard of your grave length / Should be so overreached." Volpone next turns to abuse Corvino (lines 9-21). Again, Volpone will have his "feast" of cruel laughter, and he cannot resist reminding his "crow" that he has dropped his "cheese" and that "the Fox" is having the last laugh. Corvino is about to attack him physically when Mosca enters and Corbaccio and Corvino flee. Volpone invites Mosca ("Excellent basilisk!") to turn next upon Voltore. Mosca and Voltore exchange insults (ix. 1-5), Mosca exits, and Volpone (lines 6-20) continues ("doubtless some familiar," some evil spirit, mumbles Voltore) to sting the "learned" Voltore with ironic commiseration for the trick that Mosca has played on him: "I hope you do but jest." As V.ix closes, Voltore seems as deflated and frustrated as Volpone could wish as he cries, "A strange, officious, / Troublesome knave! Thou dost torment me." Volpone pretends not to hear, but hammers on, whispering confidentially to Voltore as they walk off: "I know-- / It cannot be, sir, that you should be cozened; / 'Tis not within the wit of man to do it."

With these words, at the end of the ninth scene, Volpone's sadistic game has reached its climax, and Jonson now must move from catastasis to catastrophe. Volpone's plot to torture Voltore and the others for the sake of his own, he thinks curative, "violent laughter," has run its course.

The Catastrophe (Act V, scenes x-xii)

Thanks in large measure to Volpone's plots and goadings in scenes i-ix, his "sport," Voltore has become by V.x so desperately angry that he is willing, in order to expose the machinations of Mosca, to return to the Scrutineo to confess his own covetousness and his and the others' perjury in the earlier trial scene. Thus, when in the brief tenth scene back in the Scrutineo Voltore begins his confession and Volpone in his guise of commendatore overhears all and whispers "I'm caught / I' my own noose" (line 13), Jonson's transition to the catastrophe has begun.

Out in the street, in V.xi, an alarmed Volpone tries to recall what in the first place motivated his mad impulse to pretend that he was dead and that Mosca was his sole heir. The language of his self-examination at this important juncture of the play is worth some scrutiny, for here, albeit emotionally and disjointedly, Volpone himself is made to discuss the question of the relationship between character and action:

To make a snare of mine own neck! And run My head into it wilfully, with laughter! When I had newly 'scaped, was free and clear! Out of mere wantonness! O, the dull devil Was in this brain of mine when I devised it.

These are my fine conceits! I must be merry, with a mischief to me!

What a vile wretch was I, that could not bear My fortune soberly; I must ha' my crotchets And conundrums!

(xi.1-17)

If my reading of the catastasis is correct, Jonson means us here to understand that the devil, dull or not, did in a sense possess Volpone's brain, for the "wantonness" that drove Volpone's plot was the "conceit" first of enjoying Mosca's torturing the birds of prey, and then of going into the streets to torture them further himself. As Kernan shows, the "savage, satiric streak" in Volpone as he tries to take over in Act V appropriately climaxes the evolving imagery of acting, directing, and even playwriting that runs through the play. I am suggesting that "savage streak" seems also to climax the evolving moral delineation of Volpone's debauchery. It is appropriate that Volpone hang in a noose of his own devising and that noose derive from the "dull devil" of his sadistic "wantonness," his destructive and self-destructive compulsions which he calls "conceits," mere "crotchets" and "conundrums," and which were "merry, with a mischief to me." Volpone's belated and rather pathetic allusion to the stoical bearing of good fortune is doctrinally apt, but here, coming from Volpone, it is a reflex of self-pity merely. There was no real possibility of Volpone's practicing rational self-control under the "trials of prosperity" which were culminating as Act V opened. Nor in the "trials of adversity" which are now upon him is sober reason or stoical self-control ever possible for Volpone. It is precisely Volpone's ignorance of self and his abandonment of reason that Jonson means satirically to demonstrate throughout. As Jonson makes him stumblingly realize here, Volpone is a "humour" character in the serious sense of that term, which is to say that he is a character driven by impulse, appetite, and/or passion, but never "this brain of mine."(12) Volpone cannot believe that his "cunning purchase" has been so--trivial. It has come to a leg of mutton.

It remains only for Jonson, in the last, twelfth scene, to put the snaffle in the mouths of those who say that contemporary dramatists "never punish vice in our interludes." In the last scene, Jonson's true catastrophe reaches its height as neither Mosca nor Voltore is able to bear his good fortune soberly, even after Voltore is persuaded not to expose them. Jonson is intent upon providing, perhaps more rigorously than the comic spirit rightly allows, a straightforward morality-like (some would say almost tragic) punishment of Volpone and Mosca as well as of the birds of prey, and the intricacies of the interplay between plot and character continue to fascinate as the sadistic games go on. Early in the scene, Corvino is trying to convince the judges that Voltore, who has just recanted and told the court the truth, is lying; ironically, he attacks Voltore's sanity in terms of possession and obsession that remind us of Volpone's half-hearted self-searching in the preceding scene:

Grave fathers, he is possessed; again, I say, Possessed. Nay, if there be possession And obsession, he has both.

(lines 8-10)

Volpone now informs Voltore, without revealing his own identity, that Mosca has sent word that "his master lives!" Voltore is immediately ready to recant his recantation, and Volpone advises him, "They said you were possessed: fall down and seem so" (lines 21-32). Voltore goes along, falling down and writhing as Volpone and Corvino describe (and perhaps "direct") his "fit" in colorful detail, until at last "the devil" in Voltore "flies" out of him, in shape, says Volpone, "of a blue toad, with a bat's wings!" Here, as in Volpone's opening soliloquy of the fifth act, the jargon of psychotic obsession and of demonic possession is much truer and more self-revelatory than the speakers conceive. The dramatic irony here reminds us not only of Volpone's wish to be "possessed" by "violent laughter" in his soliloquy, but also of an exchange between Mosca and Volpone earlier in the fifth act. In V.ii.18-28, also, the real power of the satiric language lies in its unconscious relevance to the satirists themselves; Volpone wonders that the suitors have not become suspicious:

Mosca. True, they will not see't. Too much light blinds 'em, I think. Each of 'em Is so possessed and stuffed with his own hopes That anything unto the contrary, Never so true, or never so apparent, Never so palpable, they will resist it-- Volpone. Like a temptation of the devil.

Certainly this describes well the fate of Volpone and Mosca, not least as it is about to unfold in this last scene of Act V; each is so possessed by his own hopes of dominating the other that he resists reason or even common sense as if it were "a temptation of the devil!" The motifs of possession and obsession, like torture and violent laughter, become increasingly important and almost inseparable as Volpone concludes.

As scene V.xii continues (lines 52-77), once he convinces Voltore not to betray them, Volpone expects Mosca to reveal that his master is alive after all, and that all will be well. Mosca coolly refuses, and Volpone begins to see his worst fears coming true. He perceives, not wrongly, that Mosca has the desire, and now perhaps the power, to bury him alive: "Ay quick, and cozen me of all." But when Mosca relents ("Will you gi' me half?"), Volpone's response ("First, I'll be hanged"!) is again visceral and ultimately self-destructive. A moment later, Volpone relents ("Thou shalt have half"), but Mosca, perhaps for the first time in the play, is overcome by his own "wantonness," which is to say "the dull devil" in his brain that wants to enjoy the sheer sadistic pleasure of hurting Volpone: "I cannot now / Afford it you so cheap." If Mosca is thinking at all here, he thinks that Volpone is weak enough to suffer total humiliation without a fight--as contemptible as a Corbaccio, perhaps. But Mosca now does to Volpone what Volpone had done earlier in Act V to Voltore; Mosca's enjoyment of his newfound power to make Volpone suffer compels him to go so far that there is no longer any reason for Volpone not to bring Mosca and the others down with him. As Volpone mutters, just before he throws off his disguise,

Soft, soft. Whipped? And lose all that I have? If I confess, It cannot be much more.

(lines 81-83)

Here, Volpone "uncases," and he and Mosca and all are doomed.

In the course of the play, Volpone seems to have moved through the three principal forms of pride or concupiscence.(13) If his pride begins in the "cunning purchase" of others' wealth, the pride of the World, it then turns violently to the pride of the Flesh as he lusts "to do the act" with Corvino's wife:

Mosca, take my keys, Gold, plate, and jewels.

nay, coin me too. So thou in this but crown my longings.

(II.iv.21-25)

It culminates in the pride of the Devil, More's "infernal serpent that steals into the hearts of men," when at the beginning of Act V Volpone prescribes "Violent laughter" for himself and devises his "disguising" in order to enjoy the "sport" of inflicting pain on others. Shakespeare's Ulysses gives us the Elizabethan etiology of this disorder, and Moscas's "Bane to thy wolfish nature" marks the point at which Ulysses' paradigmatic prognosis comes true: power into will, will into appetite, appetite ("universal wolf") makes "perforce" "an universal prey," and must "last eat up himself."(14) As the first avocatore pronounces at the close of Volpone, "Mischiefs feed / Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed." Notoriously, the actor playing Volpone now comes forward, after the play is over, as it were, to encourage the audience's applause and even its laughter, but not its "violent laughter." Volpone's own punishment has not been offered as a sadistic "feast," Jonson here reminds us, for Volpone has been punished justly, "by the laws." We in the audience can devour the dramatic repast and feed our "palates" in good conscience. "Fare jovially," the actor concludes, "and clap your hands."

NOTES

1 Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), V.xii. 115. Subsequent citations are to this edition.

2 But see Rosalind Miles, Ben Jonson: His Craft and Art (Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble, 1990), p. 110. Her brief comments on Volpone's "perversion" and "cruel and destructive skills" are very perceptive. David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 138-39, states quite rightly, "The sole purpose of Volpone's device [in the fifth act] is to inflict pain on his former clients," and speaks of Volpone's "instinctive surge of aggression." Whether Jonson himself "sublimates" his own aggressions "by projecting his instinctual drives onto Volpone" is a different question, but an interesting one.

3 Sir Thomas More, Utopia, ed. and trans. H.V.S. Ogden (Northbrook, IL: AHM Publishing Corp., 1949), pp. 81-82. For authoritative Latin text, see The Complete Works, ed. E. Surtz and J.H. Hexter (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 242-45.

4 As L.C. Knights showed some fifty years ago in Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1937). Knights points out that the social criticism implicit in Jonson's great comedies becomes at times explicit in later, lesser plays. He cites Pennyboy Senior's "anti-acquisitive theme" in a passage from The Staple of News; it is adapted from Seneca, and reminds us of Utopia as well as Ecclesiastes:

Who can endure to see The fury of men's gullets and groins? What need hath nature Of silver dishes, or gold chamber-pots?

all this vanisheth. Your bravery was but shown; 'twas not possest: While it did boast itself, it was then perishing.

(III.ii.45-64)

As Hythloday says in Utopia, it is natural when "men and animals are greedy and rapacious from fear of want," but "Only human pride glories in surpassing others in conspicuous consumption [superflua return ostentatione]."

5 John Dryden, "Of Dramatic Poesy, An Essay (1668)," in Essays of John Dryden, vol. 1, ed. W.P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), p. 73.

6 Jonson proudly introduced the classical "laws" of plot structure to Elizabethan drama. For a brief discussion, see James D. Redwine, Jr., Ben Jonson's Literary Criticism (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970), pp. xx-xxiv. In the Restoration, Dryden took the laws for granted: see "Of Dramatic Poesy," pp. 44-45.

7 In using terms such as "narcissism" and "sadism," I do not pretend to clinical accuracy; they are helpful metaphors. Anyone who reads a study such as Erich Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1973), will agree, I think, that his discussions of "narcissism," "sadism," "defensive aggression," etc., point up the usefulness of these terms as vehicles for understanding something important about Volpone's character as Jonson imagined it. I quote a few of Fromm's observations in the course of my discussion. See also pp. 227-28, 322, 326, and 489.

8 Fromm, pp. 97-98.

9 Ibid.

10 Fromm, p. 323.

11 See Jonas Barish, "The Double Plot in Volpone," MP 51, 2 (November 1953): 83-92.

12 Even Lady Politic Wouldbe knows the paradigm, in her fashion. In III.iv.98-112, Volpone, whom she is smothering with chatter, pleads that his mind is "disturbed," and Lady Wouldbe counsels preposterously, "We must cure ourselves" of this "too much settling and fixing upon one object":

And as we find our passions do rebel, Encounter 'em with reason, or divert 'em By giving scope unto some other humor Of lesser danger.

For a discussion of the moral basis of Jonson's humours, see James D. Redwine, Jr., "Beyond Psychology: The Moral Basis of Ben Jonson's Theory of Humour Characterization," ELH 28, 4 (December 1961): 316-34.

13 See Patrick Cullen, Infernal Triad (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), on the "schemata" of the world, the flesh, and the devil in Spenser and Milton.

14 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Virgil K. Whitaker (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1958), I.iii.109-24.

James D. Redwine, Jr., is Professor of English at Bowdoin College.