Jonson also uses language and imagery in such a way that we of the audience are led to make our own moral judgements. Volpone’s speeches are often memorably beautiful, but the poetry is never purely ornamental. Thus although, in his more splendid passages, Volpone’s energy, intelligence, and thrust may seem to link him in our minds with Dr Faustus and Tamburlaine the Great, the Marlovian over-reachers, we see that he has none of their heroic aspirations. Volpone’s habitual disguise as an old man sick unto death, his assumed diseases and senility, ironically point to his own inner sickness; his energy and intelligence shine out in the early scenes of the play principally in contrast to the drab and joyless self-interest and miserliness of his dupes, Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino. He gets more pleasure from manipulating them, and from watching them squirm, than from anything their gold, diamonds, and pearls enable him to do. Volpone’s function in these scenes is almost judicial:

                        What a rare punishment
Is avarice to itself!

While analysis of the poetry, the imagery, the larger metaphor of animal names, and the like helps to direct and control our moral and emotional responses to Volpone, such a critical approach tends to ignore the vitality of the play as a piece of theatre, and literary commentators have insufficiently stressed the superb theatricalism of Jonson’s great comedy, which stems in part from Volpone’s self-congratulatory acting throughout the play. He is a consummate actor, delighting in impersonation and in the details of make-up and costume; on his virtuosity depend the early scenes of the play. Despite Jonson’s paucity of stage-directions, it is clear that Volpone’s huge bed should dominate the stage. At the very beginning of the play he is discovered there, awakening. Later he lies in bed, receiving the tributes from his ‘clients’, shamming sickness and senility, and all the while critically eyeing and evaluating their presents and making sardonic comments sotto voce to Mosca. There are wonderful opportunities here for by-play by the actor playing Volpone; in Sir Donald Wolfit’s performance he ‘leered through the curtains and twiddled his toes under the bedclothes for sheer enjoyment as the gifts kept coming in’.1 Similarly, the scene in which Volpone disguises himself as the Mountebank and harangues the crowd provides Volpone (and the actor playing him) with unlimited opportunities. Later, the bed is again the main stage-furniture in the scene in which Corvino eagerly leads his wife to the bedside of the sick Volpone to prostitute her to his potential benefactor. This is the central scene of the play, and it is a great moment in the theatre when, as Celia droops by the bed, Volpone throws off the furs, the caps, the make-up of the senile invalid, and leaps from the bed to stand before her as a Renaissance gallant, glorying in his potency:

                                   Nay, fly me not,
Nor let thy false imagination
That I was bed-rid, make thee think I am so:
Thou shalt not find it. I am, now, as fresh,
As hot, as high, and in as jovial plight
As when, in that so celebrated scene,
At recitation of our comedy,
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.

Typically, Volpone here recalls his past triumph as an actor, and the sex-appeal he had for the ladies of the Court, Typically, too, he links himself, in the pun on ‘jovial’, with Jove, who metamorphosed himself for so many erotic adventures with earthly maidens. And in the song, which originates in Catullus, Volpone presses Celia with the argument, insidious to traditional moralists, that Time is passing, that the only sin is to be found out, and that they are superior beings:

Cannot we delude the eyes
Of a few poor household spies?…
To be taken, to be seen,
These have crimes accounted been.

His dazzling speech beginning ‘Why droops my Celia?’ is a speech of temptation. Running through it there is an unchallenged assumption that everyone has a price (‘A diamond would have bought Lollia Paulina’). And when, in the next speech, Volpone depicts their future life together, the sensuality becomes more blatant:

Our drink shall be preparèd gold and amber,
Which we will take until my roof whirl round
With the vertigo; and my dwarf shall dance,
My eunuch sing, my fool make up the antic.

Whilst we, in changèd shapes, act Ovid’s tales,
Thou like Europa now, and I like Jove,
Then I like Mars, and thou like Erycine;
So of the rest, till we have quite run through,
And wearied all the fables of the gods.
Then will I have thee in more modern forms,
Attirèd like some sprightly dame of France…
Or some quick Negro, or cold Russian…

The perversity, the artificial stimulation of passion, reminds us (if Mosca is a truthful witness) of the real children of Volpone: the dwarf, the eunuch, the hermaphrodite – the three freaks – and:

                                            Bastards,
Some dozen, or more, that he begot on beggars,
Gypsies, and Jews, and black-moors, when he was drunk.

It reminds us, too, of Nano’s song, sung while he impersonated the Mountebank’s zany, which vainly promised eternal youth and beauty, and the preservation of the life of the senses. Volpone, the eloquent seducer, fails to move Celia. He resorts to rape. Bonario rushes in, in the nick of time, to save Celia; but Jonson in this play is not much interested in human goodness, and the wronged wife and stalwart young man are minor, unrealized figures in the comedy. Coleridge was not alone in expressing disappointment at this: ‘Bonario and Celia should have been made in some way or other principals in the plot… If it were possible to lessen the paramountcy of Volpone himself, a most delightful comedy might have been produced, by making Celia the ward or niece of Corvino, instead of his wife, and Bonario her lover.’1 But there is a sense in which ‘the paramountcy of Volpone’ is the play; and who would sacrifice the distinctive harsh tone of Volpone for yet another ‘most delightful comedy’?

Bonario’s intervention momentarily casts Volpone and Mosca down: they even talk of suicide. Soon they start manipulating the changed circumstances to their advantage, and their machinations seem, for a time, likely to triumph. In the end, these over-reachers come tumbling down, but it is not the virtuous Bonario and Celia who prove their undoing, nor the feeble processes of Venetian law. Volpone’s own relish for extemporizing to meet the new complications proves his ruin: for the gleeful experience of watching his clients’ discomfiture he feigns his own death, and installs Mosca as his heir. The parasite has learned from the patron; the mutual admiration society is dissolved: they undo each other. The end of the comedy is harsh and punitive: no one ’scapes whipping. And where, in Coleridge’s ‘delightful comedy’, virtue would triumph and Celia be married at the play’s end, the pallid heroine is restored, with her dowry, to her parents. Volpone does not end with wedding-bells but with Volpone, the unmasked Fox, speaking the epilogue.

Throughout the comedy Sir Politic Would-be and his Fine Madame play a secondary, never an essential, part. They remain English visitors in a world of Italianate machinations which they never understand. Lady Would-be is merely a poseuse, a minor Mrs Malaprop, a figure of fun – the role has been played, broadly and effectively, as a dame part.