Return to Park Hall (Part Two): "Volpone"

I decided to reread some books I read as an undergraduate English major at the University of Georgia in the mid-eighties and haven’t read since.  I’ll write about what I remember from 40 years ago and what I noticed this time around.

"Renaissance Drama" might have been called “Plays That Could Have Been Staged at the Globe Theatre but Weren’t Written by Shakespeare (as far as we know).”   We read Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), The Duchess of Malfi (Webster), Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Ford), The Revenger’s Tragedy (Tournier when we read it, Middleton now, thanks to those pesky literary detectives), and Ben Jonson’s Volpone.  Having taken that class has come in handy when I teach Shakespeare.  When I’m trying to persuade high schoolers of Shakespeare’s greatness, I often tell them, “If you doubt it, read the work of his contemporaries.  They’re fine, just fine, but you’ll see the difference.  His plays have something that theirs just don’t.”  I still believe that.  Call it subtlety, call it complexity, call it humanity, I don't know.  I'm just telling you it's there.  

I have chosen Volpone to revisit in part because of my experience of an adaptation of it.  In 1978, when I was in the 9th grade, the National Council of Teachers of English convention was in New York City and for this one time my father brought the whole family along.  How 1978 NYC was it?  Mom got her purse snatched in Times Square and we spent hours in the lobby of our hotel waiting for the police to show up and tell us she’d never see her purse again.  But we did see a couple of adaptations on Broadway – The Wiz and Sly Fox.  The latter was a Larry Gelbart treatment of Volpone, borrowed from a previous adaptation (in German) by Austrian playwright Stefan Zweig (who was the inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel).   I didn’t know all that authorship / adaptation stuff at the time.  All I knew was that I was watching a fun, silly play about a couple of con artists and their ludicrously greedy marks in 19th century San Francisco.  The stars were Robert Preston (The Music Man was 15 years in his past) and Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development was 25 years in his future).  The former Harold Hill and the future George Bluth were playing to their weasel strengths.  To me it was a great show.  I know I liked it enough to go to the merch stand and buy a t-shirt with the play’s logo on it.   That might have been my first experience of buying clothes in a rush of excitement without thinking the purchase through.   I wanted that shirt to say, “I saw this cool play on Broadway!”  But it didn’t.  Because of late seventies meanings of “fox” and the fact that it shrunk to skin-tight size after one wash, what the shirt said instead was, “I have raided my sister’s wardrobe.”   I think I wore it to school exactly once.  It was my Parisian Nightsuit.  

But all that embarrassment was almost a decade in the past when I took up study of Volpone in Dr. Doyle’s Renaissance Drama course.   I had good memories of the adaptation I had seen and as for Ben Jonson, along with Marlowe he was the most household of the not-quite-Shakespeare names.  And Jonson was the one who said of Shakespeare, “He was not of an age, but for all time.”  A good writer to know.  

The story:  well-to-do Venetian Volpone and his valet Mosca have cooked up a scheme whereby already rich people believe they can become richer by becoming Volpone’s sole heir.  He pretends to have one foot in the grave, and the wannabe heirs – Voltore, Corvino, and Corbaccio -  believe the best way to secure his favor is to give him expensive gifts (believing they'll get it all back anyway).  Volpone's pile of loot keeps growing, and Mosca plays the marks against each other during their private visits of "mercy" to the "ailing" Volpone, slickly baiting them into ever more extravagant bribery.  Both the plotters delight in their own genius for deviousness.   I recall enjoying a particular soliloquy of Mosca’s.  He’s boasting about his talent for grift, but to me he was also providing a perfect description of a certain kind of shifty Ultimate player:

But your fine elegant rascal, that can rise,
And stoop, almost together, like an arrow;
Shoot through the air as nimbly as a star;
Turn short as doth a swallow; and be here,
And there, and here, and yonder, all at once . . . 
This is the creature had the art born with him;
Toils not to learn it, but doth practise it
Out of most excellent nature 

While rereading Volpone, the perverse fun of watching scammers at work had me thinking a lot about Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.  Like that story of a super-elaborate big con, in this one things are cooking along beautifully for the tricksters until interest in a woman interferes with their commitment to the scam.  Once Volpone gets the hots for Corbaccio’s wife, the unraveling of his plot begins.  As he says of his own self-sabotaging conduct, "To make a snare for my own neck!  And run my head into it willfully out of mere wantonness!" And the story takes its inevitable turn toward the ruin of the scoundrels and vindication of the virtuous.  That’s how classical comedy goes.  

Speaking of comedy, I did find that Volpone is less hampered than Shakespeare’s comedies by puns and allusions that haven’t been funny in 400 years.  In the Shakespeare sitcom Upstart Crow, David Mitchell’s Shakespeare claims to his skeptical family that he’s actually really good at comedy:  “It just requires lengthy explanation and copious footnotes. If you do your research my stuff is actually really funny.”  Jonson, thank God, doesn't need his readers to know things like the Sicilian city of Hybla's reputation for its honey bees to make his jokes work.  There are lines in Volpone that actually read funny on their own, without a scholarly source to walk you through the so-called "wit".  Stuck in the agony of an endless conversation with a tiresome visitor, Volpone whinges in an aside, "Before I feigned diseases. Now I have one." Good one, Ben!  I got it right away. Some of the comedy hasn't aged well. Most contemporary productions of Volpone try to eliminate or minimize an ultra-cringe subplot about a dwarf, a eunuch, and a hermaphrodite, a storyline that is not only tedious but would get a 2025 Jonson justly cast into the outer darkness of cancellation.

The comedy in Volpone that has endured across the centuries is its satirical mockery of human venality and shamelessness.  As the Volpone of Sly Fox tells his Mosca, “Never think too little of people.  There’s always a little less to be thought.”  In the context of this story and these characters, he’s dead right. The storylines of the greedy, misogynistic, insincere, backstabbing, unprincipled marks are all of the “How low will they go?” variety.  The most striking example may be Corbaccio, who in the span of one scene goes from accusing his utterly virtuous wife of harlotry to pimping her out to Volpone.  I wish I could say that the need for satirical depictions of such monstrous hypocrisy is of an age, but it appears to be for all time.  Tim Parks has written of satire, "Its raison d’ȇtre over the long term is to bring about change through ridicule.”  I suppose that because we’re currently governed by people it seems impossible to think too little of, Volpone's ridicule has not yet gotten the job done.