Professor Nevill Coghill has usefully demonstrated that two traditions of comedy existed in Elizabethan times, with different antecedents, both stemming from theoretical reversals of Aristotle’s notions of tragedy. Romantic Comedy begins with wretchedness and the threat of danger but ends happily. Satiric Comedy teaches by exposing the errors of city folk. Shakespeare and Jonson, Professor Coghill argues, exemplify the two comic forms:

Compared with the comedies of Shakespeare, those of Ben Jonson are no laughing matter. A harsh ethic in them yokes punishment with derision; foibles are persecuted and vices flayed; the very simpletons are savaged for being what they are. The population… [of] his comedies… is a congeries of cits, parvenus, mountebanks, cozeners, dupes, braggarts, bullies, and bitches. No one loves anyone…

In Shakespeare things are different. Princes and dukes, lords and ladies, jostle with merchants, weavers, joiners, country sluts, friendly rogues, schoolmasters, and village policemen, hardly one of whom is incapable of a generous impulse.1

And of the two traditions Professor Coghill remarks:

Faced by a choice in such matters, a writer is wise if he follows his own temperament. Ben Jonson knotted his cat-o’-nine-tails. Shakespeare reached for his Chaucer.1

The excellencies and the limitations of Jonson’s comedies are closely related to his chosen genre. It is a mistake to regard him as the exemplar of ‘classical’ comic dramaturgy. As Professor Levin reminds us ‘Jonson is commonly conceived as a man who wrote comedies because he had a theory about why comedies ought to be written.’2 In our own day the writer with a sound theoretical basis for his art is somehow suspect, and to brand Jonson as a comic theorist gives his plays a forbidding, pedantic image. The neoclassical views on wide reading, knowledge of rhetoric, constant practice of one’s own style, and imitation of past masters which Jonson set down and refined upon in Discoveries have a pragmatic and very English bent, and remind us of the obiter dicta preserved by William Drummond. While the reader should not too readily assume that Jonson’s dramatic practice squared rigidly with his critical precepts, it still seems both appropriate and meaningful to say that Jonson’s greatest comedies, Volpone and The Alchemist, display ‘classical’ virtues of lucidity and meticulous construction.

The quality of a Jonsonian comedy, however, lies not only in its construction and in its presentation of character as obsession, but also in its language, which often has a positively nourishing quality; it has the ‘feel’ of the life of his time. In fact, Jonson’s evocation of contemporary London low-life is at times so dense, so detailed that for a modern reader it is at first confusing; Volpone, set in Venice, is as a result the most immediately accessible of his comedies.

The master-theme in Jonson’s satirical comedies is human folly, particularly that obsessive human greed which betrays fools into the hands of expert and opportunist manipulators. The action always culminates in exposure and often in punishment. The comedy is harsh, single-minded, and inhospitable to sentiment, pathos, and irrelevance. In the end Jonsonian comedy is more limited than Shakespeare’s great succession of comedies, but the genre is purer. Imitation of past masters and the observance of rules helped Jonson to write well; his own acute observation, moral concern, and mastery of words made him a great comic dramatist. Later, imitation of their master guided ‘the tribe of Ben’ to write less badly, and made Jonson the most celebrated father-figure in English literature.

III

Volpone is Jonson’s greatest and most intense comedy. It is a savage and sardonic satire on human greed and rapacity, but the brilliance of the design and the execution, together with the comments of critics primarily concerned with the literary qualities of the play, should not prevent us from recognizing its perennial vitality as a piece of theatre.

Jonson presents both his characters and their backgrounds with deliberate precision. The people of the play are, through their-names, invested with animal symbolism (Wolf, Fly, Vulture, Raven, and Crow), and linked with the creatures of medieval fabliaux, with Reynard the Fox and his victims. But where animals behaving like human beings, whether in the Fables of Robert Henryson or in the cartoons of Walt Disney, have the charm and fantasy of creatures viewed from a novel perspective, men behaving like animals and predatory birds are seen to be debased and degenerate. Nor is it by chance that these people are Venetians. Venice, already familiar on the Elizabethan stage as the city of Shakespeare’s usurer, Shylock, was famed as the most affluent, acquisitive, glittering, and corrupt city in Renaissance Europe. In the modern theatre one envisages for this play an opulence of production and décors as peculiarly necessary to emphasize the preoccupation with affluence and acquisitiveness which the play exposes.

Several literary critics, approaching the opening scenes of Volpone, have pointed to the thorough reversal of traditional religious and moral values in the play, and demonstrated how the language and imagery reinforce this total reversal. The play opens with a literary convention, with a character waking to greet the dawn:

Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!
Open the shrine, that I may see my saint!

And, as Mosca draws a curtain, to disclose the treasures heaped up behind, Volpone’s speech becomes a perverted act of worship:

Hail the world’s soul, and mine! More glad than is
The teeming earth to see the longed-for sun
Peep through the horns of the celestial Ram,
Am I, to view thy splendour darkening his…

Volpone here uses an image of the earth’s potential richness and fertility as it awaits the life-quickening sun in spring to describe his own expectant state; already within these lines, gold has eclipsed the sun, an idea that is made more explicit a moment later with his apostrophe:

                                         O, thou son of Sol
(But brighter than thy father) let me kiss,
With adoration, thee, and every relic
Of sacred treasure in this blessed room.

Here the reversal of values and the perverse misappropriation of traditional language (‘adoration’, ‘relic’, ‘sacred’, ‘blessèd’) become complete, and the myth that gold is indeed child of Sol, the sun, associates Volpone with alchemists and their pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone. The dehumanizing and debasing aspects of Volpone’s worship of gold are apparent in the lines where the normal, happy lives of others are contemptuously dismissed. And at the end of the first act, Mosca clinches his seductive description of Celia by comparing her beauty, finally, not with living things but with gold itself. Throughout Volpone, religious and erotic language and imagery are perverted and debased, expressing (as their very names do) the inner corruption and animality of the main characters.