Volpone, and the Modern Sensibility

It has been a tough and interesting semester around the Bloffice. Like most of you, I'd never engaged with Old English poetry before enrolling in this course, and probably never will again (just kidding! Some of this stuff was very inspiring, the Shakesperean sonnets in particular). But, with this wonderful play by Ben Johnson, we nudge ever closer to the "modern" sensibilities that I am far better accustomed to. I have never read Shakespeare's plays (needless to say, I was not what you'd call a "good" student in high school), so Johnson's Volpone is my first introduction to this sort of thing.

The classical referents that have defined the work we've gone over this semester thus far are still most certainly here: in the first few pages alone, the always erudite Norton footnotes point out references to the Latin playwright Plautus, the poet Horace, the Illiad, the Greek philosopher Hermotimus, and so on. The play has one foot in the world we've grown so used to over the last few months, and yet its other foot is firmly lodged in something completely different. Most noticeably, this is a seemingly almost godless world, with sexual inhibitions at an all-time low (need I bring up Volpone's attempted rape? Or the constantly alluded to sexual suggestiveness of Lady Would-Be Politic, who at one point actually says "This band shows not my neck enough" like an old English sorority girl?).

And then there are the characters, who are far from the paragons of moral and civic virtue that we learned quite a bit about in More's Utopia. Everyone's a con man, it would seem (or, put more eloquently by Mosca: "All the wise world is little else in nature/ But parasites or subparasites" (p. 1371). It's hard to empathize with the people being conned when the people being conned are seemingly MORE reprehensible than the con-men themselves. (Take, for example, the scene where Mosca goes through an entire list of terminal (and, of course, made up) illnesses that are plaguing the ailing Volpone. He's saying this Corbaccio, who responds to each new illness saying: "Good," "'Tis good," and, eventually, "Excellent, excellent. Sure I shall outlast him!") It brings to mind, of all things, a TV show like Seinfeld or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia--horrible people doing horrible things to other horrible people, with the creator depicting all of the proceedings with a light comic touch (and, it would seem, with a serious undertone of fear and contempt re: what the Norton Anthology terms the "proto-capitalistic" society of early 17th century Europe).

It's a sensibility that would be honed, refined, and vulgarized (because, really, some of the soliloquies here--particularly those by the hyper-eloquent Mosca, are beautiful in and of themselves) over the next few centuries; luckily, we will always be able to return to this, one of the original sources.