A comprehensive performance history of Volpone remains to be written. It would be a daunting project, since it was the most performed of all early modern plays in the twentieth century, saving only those of Shakespeare. (See the list of Volpone revivals in the Performance Calendar, Electronic Edition.) We are fortunate that a patchwork of books and articles do trace the major highlights of this history to late in the twentieth century, and what follows owes a good deal to them. The Restoration and eighteenth century are well served by Robert Gale Noyes (1935). Ejner J. Jensen (1985) picks up the story for the middle years of the twentieth century, when Volpone was brought back to the stage after a long interval. R. B. Parker (1978) covers the same period more succinctly and offers a loving account of Sir Donald Wolfit’s legendary performances before and after World War Two (1976b). Arnold P. Hinchliffe (1985) concentrates on some of the other stellar productions after World War Two, with directors like George Levine, Bill Alexander, Peter Hall, and Tyrone Guthrie, and stars including Ralph Richardson, Anthony Quayle, Paul Scofield, and Richard Griffiths. Most recently Rebecca Yearling provides a useful overview of the play’s theatrical history (2011).

But a comprehensive study – looking, for example, at more of the non-metropolitan productions, at productions worldwide, at colleges and universities, in some of the North American regional theatre festivals – would be a most substantial volume. What we offer here is, rather, an account of some of the landmark productions of the play over the last four centuries, highlighting where possible (which means, essentially, in the last hundred years) the ways in which those productions have addressed what experience has shown to be the central interpretive issues in the play, as well as some of the practical concerns. What is the precise nature of the relationship between Volpone and Mosca? What are the implications of the play’s affinity with beast-fable and how it should be rendered on-stage? What should be done with Celia and Bonario? Is the Politic Would-be sub-plot necessary and can it be made to work on the modern stage? Even without it, is the play too long for its own good?

Performances 1606-1785

The 1616 folio text of Volpone tells us that it ‘was first acted, in the yeere 1605’ but there is compelling internal evidence that this is legal rather than calendrical dating and that it was first performed by the King’s Men at the Globe in March 1606. The 1607 quarto text tells us nothing about the staging there, containing no stage directions or mention either of the theatre or of the company. The folio does acknowledge ‘the King’s Majesty’s Servants’ and supplies some 29 stage directions, but these actually tell us little that could not be inferred from the text. It is apparent, however, that nothing in the play makes demands that could not readily be met by what we know of the Globe, with two doors in the rear corners of the stage well able to accommodate most of the flow of action, a small upper acting area where Celia first appears, and perhaps a discovery space across which the ‘traverse’ mentioned by the folio text in 5.3 might have hung, for Volpone to ‘peep’ over. The most prominent property would have been the ‘couch’ on which Volpone lies for much of the early action, a bed of unspecified dimensions.

We do not strictly know who played the original roles, though we are in a position to make some educated guesses. The colophon to the folio text lists the ‘principal comedians’, paired in two columns, as

RIC BURBAGE.	IOH HEMINGS.
HEN CONDEL.	IOH LOWIN.
WILL. SLY.	ALEX. COOKE.

There have been several attempts to ascribe roles to each of these (see e.g. Gifford, 1816, 3.154; Baldwin, 1927, 433-44), but R. B. Parker’s suggestion that the columns of ‘comedians’ replicates the columns of ‘persons of the play’ situated prior to the text is attractive (Parker, rev. ed. 1999, 42-3). This would give us Burbage as Volpone; Condell as Mosca; Sly as Voltore; Heminges as Sir Pol; Lowin as Peregrine; and Cooke as Bonario. This squares with some of what we know of these actors. The great Burbage normally played major roles, such as all of Shakespeare’s great tragic heroes. Condell was another mainstay of the company for many years; the one role we are confident he created is that of the Cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi – a cold, devious figure, which might be appropriate. Heminges is sometimes thought to have specialised in old-men roles, such as Polonius in Hamlet, which is one way of playing Sir Pol. Sly was apparently one of the founder-sharers of the company and figures as a fashionable gallant in the Induction of The Malcontent when it transferred from a boys’ company to the King’s Men. Lowin was not yet the great force in the company that he was to become, only joining as a hired man in 1603; among his relatively early roles was Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi, compared with which the satiric manipulations of Peregrine might be described as prentice-work. Cooke had started out as an apprentice boy-player under Heminges but was married by 1603, so perhaps of an age to play a young would-be hero.

Parker’s castings also square substantially – allowing for developments over time – with what we learn from annotations in a seventeenth-century hand to ‘The Persons of the Play’ in a copy of the folio now in the Huntington Library (# 499986: see Riddell, 1969). These must relate to performances between 1615, when Nathan Field joined the company, and 1619, when Burbage died. They seem to confirm that Burbage still played Volpone and Condell Mosca; Field played Voltore (Sly was dead by then); Heminges is marked as playing Corbaccio (even more emphatically a senex role) while Lowin is Sir Pol, a larger role befitting a man who was now a prominent sharer. (Of course, it is possible these were, except for Field, the roles they played all along.) Corvino is Nicholas Tooley, formerly a boy apprentice under Burbage, and a sharer by 1619; Peregrine is Robert Gough (a sharer by 1619), and Bonario is John Underwood, who joined the King’s Men from the Blackfriars boys after 1608 (Cook died in 1614). Lady Would-be is listed as Richard Birch, presumably the George Birch who was a sharer by 1624. We also know that John Lowin was promoted to the role of Volpone by the 1630s, receiving ‘mighty applause’ (James Wright, Historia Histrionica, 1699, 4

There must be a good chance that the role of the dwarf, Nano (‘a pretty little ape’) was played by Robert Armin, a small man who often played witty, singing fool roles for the King’s Men, such as Feste in Twelfth Night and the Fool in King Lear. While the role might conceivably have been played by a boy actor, hints of unscripted comic business (‘pleasing imitation / Of greater men’s action, in a ridiculous fashion’: 3.3.13-14) suggest a more mature talent. And the creator of Feste could certainly have sung, or shared in the singing of, ‘Fools, they are the only nation’ (1.2) and the two songs during the mountebank scene (2.2), though the text is less than clear that Nano actually does so. In all three instances Mosca might have done it and sometimes does so in modern productions (though they are all too often simply left out.) Some of the original music for the play may well have been written by Alfonso Ferrabosco, with whom Jonson collaborated on The Masque of Blackness (1605) and other masques. A version of ‘Come, my Celia’ was published in his Book of Ayres (1609), and a more complete setting survives in manuscript, BL Add. MS. 15117. (See the discussion in the CWBJ Music Edition.) The effect of that song on stage must depend on its delivery. Willa M. Evans (1929, 65) argues that a trained musician sang backstage while Volpone mouthed the words, a quasi-Brechtian, distancing effect. This would be all the more palpable if Peter Walls is correct that the setting in Ferrabosco’s Ayres is the one used on stage, since it is set for a treble or alto voice (Creaser, ed., Volpone, 289-90; see the Music Edition). It would underline the tension between the superficial attractiveness of the lines and the moral reality they represent.

But L. A. Beaurline’s suggestion may be more compelling: that there was a stage convention of beautiful songs misused by would-be seducers (1973, 64-7). This would be particularly effective if Volpone was played in character as a screeching fox (Topsell, 1607, 223), and sang the song himself. It may tell us something that Shakespeare, the dramatist who knew Richard Burbage best, never seems to have asked him to sing. A croaking Catullus (the Roman original author of Volpone’s seductive lyrics) would steer the scene closer to comedy, to bathos rather than pathos, reminding us of the real limits to Volpone’s Protean ambitions. Modern performances, discussed below, have mirrored these varying possibilities. Wilfred Lawson cut the song altogether. ‘Wolfit tried doing it as recitative, miming to a guitar played offstage’ (Parker, 1978, 159n). Hinchliffe observes that Scofield ‘sang the song to Celia unaccompanied in a strong baritone voice (to music composed by Harrison Birtwistle) – few, if any, Volpones have managed that before’, whereas Richard Griffiths ‘sang to her (just)’ (1985, 76, 82). It should be said that recordings of Scofield singing ‘Come, my Celia’ do not live up to that claim of ‘a strong baritone voice’, though Ben Kingsley is quite effective as a singing Mosca.

After its debut at the Globe, Volpone’s next known performances are those in the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge, which are acknowledged in the dedication of the play. The King’s Men visited Oxford in both July 1606 and September 1607, while there was plague in London. If Jonson’s dating of the Epistle is calendrical, as most scholars assume (i.e. February 1607 as we would understand it) the ‘love and acceptance shown to his poem in the presentation’ would relate to the 1606 visit; if, however, it follows the legal convention (i.e. February 1608) the later date is equally possible. There is no evidence at all for a Cambridge performance, and this has led Alan Nelson seriously to doubt it (Nelson, 1989, 2.984-6). But this ignores not only Jonson’s claim but also the explicit testimony of Edmund Bolton and ‘E. S.’ in their commendatory poems that performances took place at both universities.

Thereafter the play held the stage with remarkable consistency down to the Civil War, as numerous plaudits attest, beginning to acquire classic status. As we have seen, it was revived and recast between 1615 and 1619. It was at least considered for court performance by the Revels Office in 1619 or 1620, and was certainly performed at court in 1624, again in 1630 at the newly converted Cockpit in Whitehall, and (also with a performance at the Blackfriars seen by Sir Humphrey Mildmay) in 1638 (Kawachi, 1986, 180, 196, 206, 232).

The play was first revived after the Restoration 1662 by Thomas Killigrew’s King’s Men company, who owned the exclusive professional performing rights. They initially played at the new theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and John Evelyn saw them at court that October (Evelyn, 1955, 341). From 1663 they transferred to the new Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, by which time we know that Major Michael Mohun had the lead part and Charles Hart was Mosca; they were something of a celebrity pairing, since Mohun had played Iago to Hart’s Othello, and Cassius to his Brutus. This was also the first production known to have had actresses in the female roles: Celia was played by Ann Marshall and Lady Would-be by Katherine Corey, who would become famous for her comic roles, especially as older women. This was the production that Samuel Pepys saw on 14 January 1665; he called it ‘a most excellent play - the best I think I ever saw, and well acted’ (Pepys, 1972, 10). This was also the time of Dryden’s comments on the play in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668: see Literary Record, Electronic Edition).

The later-Restoration fate of the play was tied to an increasing taste for spectacle and music in performances, which almost certainly resulted in changes to Jonson’s text, and to the fortunes of the King’s Company, which ran into financial difficulties. In 1682 they were in effect taken over by their rivals, the Duke’s Company at Dorset Garden, under Thomas Betterton, performing as the United Company. Evidently they took their repertory with them, and Gerard Langbaine reports in his Account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691) that Volpone ‘is still in vogue at the Theatre in Dorset-Garden’ (p. 50). The joint company lasted until 1695, when its best actors formed yet another new company, under Betterton, which performed at a remodeled theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This arrangement lasted until 1705.

The Drury Lane theatre had by this time reopened under the principal control of a lawyer, Christopher Rich, whose tyrannical style of management was to some extent made necessary by the corruption and inefficiency that had gone before. The next recorded performances of Volpone were there in 1700; it is likely that these were embellished with dancing, short comic sketches, and musical interludes – we hear of works by Purcell and Corelli being advertised on theatre bills as part of the entertainment in this time (Avery, 1960, 95, 106). This was also an era when the play resonated with contemporary politics; the prominent minister, Lord Godolphin, was known as ‘Volpone’, and this perhaps helps explain why as many as fifty-eight performances are recorded between 1700 and 1710. R. G. Noyes recounts the details of a notable episode: at Easter 1701 the Drury Lane company were presented to the grand jury for Middlesex, accused of having acted ‘obscene, profane and pernicious comedies’ (PRO, King’s Bench 10-11, London and Middlesex Indictments, Easter 13 William III). Three plays were cited: The Humours of the Age, Sir Courtly Nice, and Volpone. This supposed extract from the dialogue of Volpone was entered in evidence: ‘Pray, Sir, make use of me, pray while you stay make use of me and the oftener you use me I shall take it for granted you have forgotten the injury I have done you. Be damned’. A comparison with 4.3.16-19 shows that the suggestive possibility in Jonson’s text (‘use me’) has been broadened to outright bawdry (‘the oft’ner you use me’), but also that a closing profanity has been added. Unfortunately there is no way of knowing whether it was the actors or the reporter of the offence who embellished the passage in this way. The jury acquitted all the actors bar one, and the case was postponed sine die (Noyes, 1935, 54-5.)

Among the actors acquitted were John Mills and George Powell, both notable Volpones in the era (though Powell was prone to excessive drinking), apparently alternating the role over the years; and Robert Wilks, who was an outstanding Mosca from c. 1701 to shortly before his death in 1732. Richard Steele was impressed by a 1709 Drury Lane production with Powell in the title role and Wilks as Mosca: ‘This night was acted the comedy called The Fox; but I wonder the modern writers do not use their interest in the house to suppress such representations. A man that has been at this will hardly like any other play during the season’ (Steele, 1710, 149). He later described Wilks as playing his role with ‘the officiousness of an artful servant’ (Steele, 1712-15, 310).

Companies continued to fold and change theatres with bewildering regularity. But the play continued to hold the stage about once a year, and was performed for royalty at Hampton Court in 1718 and at Drury Lane in 1722. After 1727 the Drury Lane company lost its proprietary right to Volpone, which thereafter was more often played at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Covent Garden, initially with James Quin (ably supported by Lacy Ryan’s Mosca) and Dennis Delane in the title role at the respective houses. Quin later moved to Drury Lane for a time, and Mills conceded the Volpone role to him, taking on Corvino instead, a role in which Colley Cibber had also made his mark. The play reached a height of popularity in 1733, being performed as often as twelve times by the Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Covent Garden companies in a year, and on 2 January 1734 at both houses simultaneously. One wonders how much this had to do with a continuing awareness of the play’s links with the Gunpowder Plot, an event whose significance was still the stuff of live politics as long as the Jacobite cause (supporting the male successors of James II) lingered on. Such links were recognised at least as late as 1734, when the boys of Bury School staged a performance, with a rousingly patriotic/anti-Papist prologue written for the event, on what the English call Guy Fawkes’ Night, 5 November, the anniversary of the Plot (Noyes, 1935, 72).

After 1750 the play’s popularity began to wane, and it was not played at all between 1754 and 1771, despite the great David Garrick’s twice publicly declared intention himself to play the lead role – which for unknown reasons was never realized. The critical tide which was pulling so strongly for Shakespeare was pulling against Jonson. David Erskine Baker’s reservations about his plays in the 1764 Companion to the Playhouse were symptomatic: ‘there . . . runs through them all an unempassioned coldness in the language, a laboured stiffness in the conduct, and a deficiency of incident and interest in the catastrophe’ (quoted in H. Craig, 1990, 494-5). Concerning Volpone itself, doubts dating from the time of Dryden and Dennis about Sir Politic’s ‘tortoise’ scene and the forced nature of the action in the last act were joined by worries about some of the Jacobean material being dated and other parts of it being in dubious taste.

So when the play was revived in 1771 at Covent Garden, with William Smith in the lead, it was in an adaptation by George Colman: he shortened the text considerably, cut scenes from the Politic Would-be plot, removed archaic references, and expunged most of the bawdy. It was modestly successful, but there were no further performances there after January 1773. There was one last revival, at the Haymarket theatre in 1783, and again Colman was involved, making even more drastic revisions and removing the Would-be plot altogether. John Palmer played Volpone and Robert Bensley Mosca, and their eight performances that year were well reviewed. They reprised their roles when the adaptation moved to Drury Lane in February 1785. But this lasted for only three performances, and the living tradition of Volpone on the stage – interrupted, to be sure, but never passing out of living memory from the time of Burbage at the Globe – came to an end.

Early Twentieth-Century Stage Productions down to Wolfit

After these revivals, Volpone ceased to be adapted or performed for another 136 years. Taking their cue from such fin-de-siecle figures as Algernon Swinburne, Arthur Symons, and Aubrey Beardsley, Modernists in the early twentieth century took a new interest in Jonson (and other neglected Renaissance dramatists, like Webster and Marlowe), who spoke to their fixations with fragmentation, alienation, sexual psychopathology, and the decentering of the human. At the same time there were efforts to rescue Shakespeare from the commercial distortions of Victorian theatre practices and enroll him in the Modernist cause, often paradoxically by trying to relocate him in the theatre of his own day. In this spirit, the neglected plays of his contemporaries were reintroduced to the theatre and introduced to the cinema.

At the forefront of this movement was the Phoenix Society, a group of professional actors founded in 1919 and dedicated to resurrecting forgotten Elizabethan and Jacobean plays in London. The stage life of Volpone in the twentieth century began when the Society gave two performances of the play in 1921 at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith. The production was heavily influenced by William Poel’s (1854-1943) attempts at recreating authentic Renaissance staging practices, décor, and costumes. It featured Baliol Holloway as Volpone and Ion Swinley as Mosca and was ‘energetic as well as intelligent, the ensembles were excellent, and some of the acting most admirable’ (Tarn, The Spectator, 5 February 1923).

Both W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot attended this production and expressed their appreciation of it. In a letter to the Phoenix Society secretary (8 February 1921), Yeats stated that ‘Volpone was even finer than I expected. I could think of nothing else for hours after I left the theatre’ (1954, 665). His response exemplified the rift between nineteenth- and twentieth-century attitudes towards the play. Whereas Coleridge had wished for Celia and Bonario to live happily ever after, Yeats was thrilled by Jonson’s refusal to allow a happy ending, observing that ‘the two young people who have gone through so much suffering together leave in the end for their fathers’ houses with no hint of marriage, and this excites us because it makes us share in Jonson’s cold implacability’ (1939, 32-3).

Yeats was not alone in admiring this revival. According to The Times reviewer, ‘a great deal of thought and care had been expended on the production, and there was some admirable acting’ (2 February 1921). Eliot, writing his ‘London Letter’ for May 1921 in The Dial magazine, describes the revival as ‘the most important theatrical event of the year in London. The play was superbly carried out; the performance gave evidence of Jonson’s consummate skill in stage technique’ (Eliot, 1921). For Eliot, Volpone is the play in which Jonson ‘found his genius’, where he revealed himself as Marlowe’s ‘legitimate heir’ and wrote with a ‘bold, even shocking and terrifying directness’ to create drama with ‘a unity of inspiration that radiates into plot and personages alike’. As David McPherson (1973), 81, has observed, Yeats’s and Eliot’s comments suggest that the significance of Jonson’s works was now being radically reconsidered.

The Phoenix Society revival inaugurated a new phase in Volpone’s stage history, heralding numerous performances and adaptations by amateur and professional companies. Arnold Hinchliffe admirably summarizes the key issues that have faced actors and directors: ‘The problems of any modern production of Volpone are, not surprisingly, the problems that have bedevilled the play since Jonson’s own time: how the play should look and how far the scenery should be allowed to distract from the words; the character of Volpone and his relationship with Mosca; the serious ending of the play; how much of the subplot to retain and how to present Celia and Bonario who, if minor characters, loom large in challenging the credibility of the production’ (Hinchliffe, 1985, 73-4). Yeats, we notice, homes in on the Celia/Bonario question in the Phoenix Society production, which had faithfully staged Jonson’s anti-romantic resolution. Like the other issues listed by Hinchliffe it is, as we shall see, something every production has had to make its mind up about.

Between 1921 and 1938, several productions of Volpone were staged. The Phoenix production was revived in 1923 for a benefit performance for the Stage Society at the Regent Theatre in King’s Cross. As the reviewer from The Times (30 June 1923) commented: ‘Volpone is not as many as other comedies of its period were. It still contains the breath of life and such powers of provoking laughter that, to benefit the funds of the Stage Society, it was selected for repetition out of all the other plays done by the Phoenix’. A review for The Spectator (30 June 1923) commended ‘the tightness of construction and neatness of the language’ which make Volpone ‘a most enjoyable comedy’. However, the reviewer also complained that Volpone ‘puts no strain on the abilities of its actors. The characters represent definite and docketed “humours”. There is no need to get “inside” the words: and the actor’s own personality, modified by the content exhibition of one passion, will suffice to give some life to the figures of the play’.

The Marlowe Society at Cambridge University also staged an amateur production in 1923, directed by Frank Birch, which was generally received with enthusiasm. Some critics, however, expressed doubts about the farcical style. For instance, The New Statesman reviewer remarked that ‘the more serious part of the play, where Volpone takes the leading part, seemed to me as unsuccessful as the farce was consummate and the misreading complete’ (W. J. Turner, 10 March 1923). The reviewer for The Times (5 March 1923) complained about the repetitiveness of the action: ‘Before the three and a half hours have run their course, you are eager for a new theme, a fresh aspect of Volpone, instead of these perpetual variations and repetitions of a single idea’. Yet the play was received favourably by most critics; another comment in The Times on 30 June 1923 is quite telling: ‘Three performances in so short a time is not a bad record for a comedy three hundred years old that did not have the good fortune to be written by Shakespeare.’

After these significant productions, the play’s stage history takes two paths. One is the continual revival, mainly in Britain, of Jonson’s own text, albeit often with cuts and some rescripting; the other is a lively tradition of adaptations of Jonson’s plays, initiated by the most influential of them all, Steven Zweig’s 1926 Volpone: A Loveless Comedy (‘nach Ben Jonson’). While this stage history mainly chronicles revivals of Jonson’s play, it will briefly consider Zweig’s radical adaptation (and some others) in a later section.

Jonson’s Volpone was not produced again on the public stage until 1930. Evan John directed a production at the Cambridge Festival Theatre with a shortened and simplified text, featuring Roy Malcolm in the title role and Frederick Piper as Mosca. According to The Times (28 April 1930), this ‘aimed at speed and gaiety, and achieved it consistently’. John realized that high energy and careful pacing was essential to the play’s success on stage. The Times reviewer commented favorably on the delivery of the dialogue, the pacing, and the lightness of touch in the characterizations. The playing of Volpone primarily emphasized the humor of the part:

Mr Roy Malcolm played the fox himself with the light touch on which Jonson relied to win the applause for which he asks at the end in order to extricate himself from the muddle of psychology and morals in which he has lightly involved himself in creating his comic situations.

However, the reviewer felt that although ‘we can admire its gaiety’, the play had ‘narrowness and limitations’, particularly when compared to the works of Shakespeare. The Birmingham Repertory Theatre brought a production to the Malvern Festival in the summer of 1935, with the inimitable Wilfrid Lawson as Volpone. It received good notices, with The Manchester Guardian (2 August 1935) claiming that it projected ‘the whole comic spirit of the period at its ugly, coarse, relentless and yet brilliant best’. What particularly stood out was Lawson’s Volpone, foregrounding the character’s cruel, cunning, and sinister streak. As The Times (31 July 1935) commented, ‘Wilfred Lawson saw to it that the farce was dominated by the sulphurous horror of intelligence immensely alert in the pursuit of evil, and there was terror as well as laughter in the play’. According to The London Mercury (32, 1935), ‘[Lawson’s] Volpone seemed to me the best that I had ever seen, for it was Jonsonian as well as Lawsonian, Jonsonian in its suggestion of intellectual power and in its sultry horror and Lawsonian in its creative vitality’.

After 1938 the role of Volpone was dominated by the notable Shakespearean actor Donald Wolfit who, according to Arnold Hinchliffe (1985), 54-5 ‘has some claim to be regarded as the finest Volpone of our time’. In a production directed by Michael MacOwan at the Westminster Theatre in London Wolfit launched his flamboyant, vigorous, and sensual performance of the role, which dominated the stage for almost two decades. The production was the first to rely heavily on bestial imagery and, with variations, it monopolized the market for Volpone for such a long time that it was inevitably an influence (either positive or negative) on everything that followed for some time. A Times review (26 January 1938) illustrates the responses that Wolfit aroused when he first played the part:

The best hope that this courageous, highly talented, and welcome revival may succeed is that Volpone as a character, though utterly lacking in virtue, is something more than a ‘humour’. He has light and shade of an immense intelligence, and Mr Donald Wolfit, delighting in the rogue’s richness of imagery and sultry splendour of thought, is able to suggest not only the foxiness of the fox but the spectacle of a fox endowed with a powerful mind. That the workings of this mind compel our intellectual respect adds a touch of terror to our laughter, a mixing of the emotions which tends, paradoxically, to humanize this comedy of humours.

Claiming the role as his own, Wolfit gave an extravagantly overblown performance that selfishly eclipsed the other members of the cast. He went on to produce his own revivals repeatedly in the 1940s and 1950s (analyzed by R. B. Parker, 1976b), and gave memorable performances on tour in England, in London, Canada, Egypt, and the USA, including Broadway. Wolfit last played the role in 1959 in a television production directed by Stephen Harrison for the BBC ‘World Theatre’ series.

Every time Wolfit revived Volpone, his production differed from the previous ones in certain ways. For the Cambridge Arts Festival in 1940, he mainly restaged MacOwan’s production but, having previously cut the Would-bes, he restored them (in 1947 he would retain Sir Pol but cut Lady Would-be), and played the Avocatori as comic figures, transforming them into owl-like puppets: this change was much criticized, since for some it undermined the effectiveness of the courtroom scenes by turning them into farce (Hinchliffe, 1985, 63). A Times review (23 March 1944) of his production at the Scala Theatre thought this a more general fault: ‘Mr. Wolfit’s production seems often to seek after comic effects properly belonging to farce, and thereby to sacrifice the true force of Jonson’s ferocious satire.’

For good or ill, Wolfit’s performance was the main asset of his productions. Kenneth Tynan claimed that ‘there has never been an actor of greater gusto than Wolfit: he has dynamism, energy, bulk and stature, and he joins these together with a sheer relish for resonant words’ (quoted in Hinchliffe, 1985, 55). To emphasise these qualities, Wolfit often played down the role of Mosca. In MacOwan’s original production Alan Wheatley impressed with a kind of Mephistophelian humour, but later Wolfit demanded greater subservience from his co-actors, cutting some of Mosca’s early lines which hint at Volpone’s less than perfect control of the situation. In such ways his performance became a solo tour de force, turning Volpone into what Rebecca Yearling (2011), 72 calls a ‘one-man show’ rather than a collaborative endeavor between actors. He also developed certain devices and performative technique such as his captivating performance in the ‘seduction’ scene, which John Mayes describes as follows:

His hypnotic, chuckling laugh as he faced Celia was an extraordinarily powerful moment, and an audience waited, completely controlled, not knowing which way the fox would jump, and then came the frightening, slow pacing walk towards his victim followed by another soaring speech of verse splendours.

(Quoted in Harwood, 1971, 156. Harwood scripted the 1983 film of The Dresser, which is a roman à clef of Wolfit.)

Another instance that became a Wolfit staple was his interpretation of the play’s last moments:

the blood-curdling howl after receiving the sentence of the court, followed by the line, ‘This is called the mortifying of the FOX!’ and the holding on to the final hissing sibilant. (Harwood, 1971, 126)

Wolfit was the last of the old-time actor-managers in the tradition of Henry Irving and dominated his stage company , both on-stage and off, as well as his audience. ‘He had a terrifying personal relationship with every member of the audience’ that was crucial for the success of his Volpone (Hinchliffe, 1985, 61). Parker judges that ‘Wolfit’s productions restored Volpone to the modern stage’, and Hinchliffe says that they became ‘the yardstick by which subsequent performances tend to be measured’ (Parker, 1976b, 216; Hinchliffe, 55). Before him, many productions had toned down the satire by not granting Volpone ‘anything more than a sub-human and merely laughable cunning’ (as a Times reviewer noted, 4 March 1942). Wolfit’s performances stamped future adaptations of the role, but not necessarily because his successors wished to imitate him. He made the part so much his own that future actors had no choice but to adhere to, imitate, or react against his interpretation.

Although (as we discuss below) the Stefan Zweig adaptation was well established in the USA by the end of World War Two, Wolfit and his company presented the first Broadway production of Volpone in a version of the original Jonsonian text. They stag ed other plays in the same season, but Volpone was the only one to achieve real success, with Time magazine (10 March 1947) describing how ‘the crowd – or, at any rate, the critics – made an excited grab’ for it, praising both play and performances. Brooks Atkinson gave it a more lukewarm reception (‘generally satisfactory’), noting that Wolfit ‘with a noble pair of legs elegantly clad in yellow tights . . . does not waste time in subtleties’; ‘John Wynyard’s false unction and knavery’ as Mosca ‘animate the entire performance’ (New York Times, 26 February 1947).

Productions since Wolfit

In reaction to Wolfit’s monopoly over Volpone, productions started to appear in which Mosca turned against Volpone earlier and more obviously. In 1952, George Devine directed Ralph Richardson as Volpone and Anthony Quayle as Mosca in one such at Stratford-upon-Avon. The production emphasized some of Volpone’s weaknesses rather than glossing over of them as Wolfit had done (Parker, 1976b, 201, 206). Richardson was an idiosyncratically restrained Volpone to Quayle’s ‘malicious and adroit Mosca’ (Leech, 1952). ‘Oily, sly and smooth, a Zeal-of-the-Land Puritan with a touch of Uriah Heep’, Quayle was ‘at once plausible, comic and sinister’ (T. C. Worsley, The Times, 16 July 1952). ‘Clothed in a shiny black costume (when not rubbing his hands together, he was massaging his legs), buzzing all the time and stressing his sibilants, Quayle looked like a large fly . . . But underneath his comic obsequiousness there was always a sense of menace’ (Hinchliffe, 1985, 66). Richardson played Volpone with restraint, bringing out the comedy rather than the savagery or depravity in the role. Clifford Leech (1952), 357 wrote that ‘With the more overtly poetic parts [Richardson] appears to stand remote from the poetry and the passion, and in Volpone’s opening speech one feels the same reluctance to let the words come forth’. Harold Conway was less charitable: Richardson ‘substituted ponderous flatness for the spirit of glorious, gloating rascality’ (Evening Standard, 16 July 1952). Although the production was widely praised, critics puzzled over its lack of cruelty and cynicism, which they had come to expect from this Jonsonian text.

In this version the Would-bes were restored, despite heavy cuts elsewhere. This fidelity to the text did not win everyone’s approval. In his review of the whole Stratford season, Leech complained:

the scenes are so easily detachable from Volpone that they look like a playwright’s afterthought, inserted to vary the intensity of the satire … The Sir Politick and Lady Would-be scenes were omitted in Mr. Wolfit's admirable production of a few years ago, and the excision seems the more justified in that Mr. Michael Hordern and Miss Rosalind Atkinson could not, with all their talent, fully reconcile us to their presence here. (Leech, 1952, 357)

This production was also remarkable for its full use of the Memorial Theatre’s elaborate stage machinery, and for a spectacular Venetian set designed by Malcolm Pride.

In contrast to Devine’s production, Joan Littlewood – a lifelong Jonson enthusiast – produced Volpone for the Theatre Workshop in Stratford, East London in 1955. She combined a mock eighteenth-century setting with modern dress and props such as ‘an accordion, a telephone, a cocktail shaker, a bath chair, and a frogman’s suit’, to create ‘a strangely disjunctive set of images which emphasized the play’s farcical element’ (Parker, 1978, 164). Maxwell Shaw’s Mosca stole the show as a sly, smooth-talking ‘cigarette-sucking spiv’ (still a potent image in post-War Britain), riding a bicycle whilst carrying pineapples and champagne, his changing fortunes reflected in ever more outlandish costumes (Stephen Williams, Evening News, 4 March 1955). Sir Pol’s tortoise-shell was replaced by a diving suit which allowed him ‘to exit by a dive into the orchestra pit’. The most noteworthy aspect of the production was Littlewood’s quasi-Marxist championing of Mosca as an underdog, which, as The Times noted (4 March 1955), ‘denied [Volpone] his last desperate throw, leaving Mosca in possession of his ill-gotten gains’.

The same year also saw Volpone at the Bristol Old Vic. Directed by John Harrison, this featured Eric Porter, a former member of Wolfit’s company, as Volpone and Alan Dobie as Mosca. Dobie’s performance as a ‘still and settled [. . .] true flesh-fly’ (The Listener, 1955, 126) set the tone as the production skillfully deployed the play’s animal imagery. Dobie’s black-clad Mosca buzzed and darted around the stage like a fly, and the three suitors moved, talked, and acted like birds. Only Eric Porter’s Volpone seemed slightly out of place. As one reviewer remarked, he ‘has a lion’s mane and a lion’s roar that can hardly be reconciled with the sly cunning of a fox’ (Peter Rodford, Plays and Players, January 1956, 30).

Dobie again played an unusually restrained Mosca to stocky Leo McKern’s Volpone in Frank Hauser’s 1966 Volpone at the Oxford Playhouse. This revival, which had ‘raw power’, was a huge success and was received with acclaim (Jensen, 1985, 70). In January 1967, it was transferred to London’s Garrick Theatre with the same cast, except for Zia Mohyeddin,  who replaced Dobie as Mosca and played the role in a more relaxed way. However, some London critics – who by this date increasingly had preconceived notions of how the play ought to be staged – thought there was too much froth and too little bite. Irving Wardle remarked, ‘Mr. McKern, whatever his other qualities, is not a natural patrician – at most he is one of the stage’s wicked squires; nor, on this occasion, does he present Volpone’s appetite in earnest’, adding that he ‘automatically slip[s] into the mock-heroic’ (Irving Wardle, The Times, 1 February 1967). Wardle critiqued McKern’s ‘reliance on mannerism’ and described him as a ‘comic specialist in the extremes of appetite and energy’. As to the rest of the production, Wardle found it ‘breezy, broadly caricatured’. Ultimately, it became ‘undisciplined knockabout’, saved only by the performances of Mohyeddin, ‘whose coldly resourceful Mosca earns his master’s trust’ and Leonard Rossiter’s Corvino, ‘part sadistic schoolmaster, part overweening dandy whose range of energy and double-takes rivals McKern’s’. If Hauser emphasized the slapstick, his attempt to foreground the characters’ psychological motivation resulted in an understated yet real presentation of Corvino’s sadism that modern audiences could recognize and relate to. In a similar vein, he made Bonario idiotic and gave Celia a proclivity to be tempted by Volpone, infusing dramatic life into characters otherwise often seen as one-dimensional. In later productions (notably the National Theatre productions of 1977 and 1995), we will see similar interpretations where the disturbing elements of Jonson’s kaleidoscopic text are highlighted.

Tyrone Guthrie’s two notable productions of Volpone had a good deal in common conceptually and, taken together, constitute another highly influential reading of the play. These were at the new   Tyrone Guthrie   Repertory Theatre in Minneapolis in 1964 and London’s National Theatre in 1968. Guthrie’s American production underscored the play’s cruelty and the ridiculousness of innocence; it exploited the beast fable motif, and was full of extravagant and entertaining stage-business. It was described as ‘bursting with color, movement, and the splendor of words ’, with elaborate animal costumes and performances to match (Richard Christiansen, Chicago Daily News, 18 July 1964). The text was left largely uncut. There were also some exhilarating acrobatics. For example, in the mountebank scene, Douglas Campbell’s Volpone climbed a ladder to Celia’s window, and was met by Corvino who pushed him backwards into the arms of Mosca and others running across the stage to catch him. Volpone’s attempted rape of Celia was a similarly bravura piece of business, which the audience applauded (Parker, 1978, 35). Harold Clurman (in The Nation, 10 August 1964) complained that it was too jovial, with Mosca and Volpone ‘less vividly sinister than they might be’ and the gulls ridiculed as one-dimensional figures of fun.

In 1968, Guthrie   took his production to the London National Theatre at the Old Vic, and again played up the animal imagery, with costumes, stage effects, and sounds reflecting the world of beasts rather than people. The cast were taken to Regent’s Park Zoo to study the animals (Shaughnessy, 2002). The production, starring Colin Blakely as Volpone and Frank Wylie as Mosca, leaned towards energy, movement, light-heartedness, and gutsy humor. Volpone leapt out of bed at the beginning to wash his face in gold coins, bounced up and down on his bed at any mention of gold, and his seduction of Celia ‘was chopped up with comic skirmishings round the room and lascivious wrestling-holds among the pillows’ (Ronald Bryden, The Observer, 21 January 1968). As in the Minneapolis production, he was dressed in red furs, emitting ‘odd foxy yelps (practiced from the tapes of actual foxes)’ (Henry Popkin, The Times, 17 January 1968). Mosca wore a tight and shiny black costume, and the legacy-hunters fully embodied the mannerisms of birds. One reviewer vividly described this feature:

Edward Petherbridge transforming his fingers into Voltore’s vulturely claws … the parrot-like verbal ticks of Graham Crowden as Sir Politick … the ravenly curve of Paul Curran’s back, his whole black-cloaked body semi-circling towards Corbaccio’s beak . . . All these were small masterpieces of interpretation, manifesting a controlled and consistent response towards the play as a moral fable. ( Tribune , 26 January 1968)

The Would-bes’ parrot-like nature was also fully explored. Some critics, like Henry Popkin found the subplot a delight; others, like Martin Esslin, complained about its loose connection to the main plot and general redundancy. Many critics did not approve of the production’s emphasis on the bestial and farcical elements at the expense of text, language, and plot. Its grotesqueries were felt to mask ‘the huge feeling of evil’ (Eric Shorter, Daily Telegraph, 17 January 1968), and placed limits on the play’s satire. As one critic observed, ‘it is difficult to condemn real vultures for behaving like vultures’ (quoted in Shaughnessy, 2002, 46). Another commented:

Some of the National Theatre’s best talents are barely recognizable under their make-up and 6in. vulture beaks. Colin Blakely as an obscenely giggling Volpone leads the gallery of prancing, dancing, feather-rustling Elizabethan grotesques. The production finally goes over the top. The extravagantly costumed freaks who people the stage eventually outstay their first, startled welcome. A circus which had little to offer except its clowns would soon pall (Herbert Kretzmer, Daily Express, 17 January 1968).

Alan Brien (Sunday Telegraph, 21 January 1968) complained that ‘An enormous load of fussy business, obsessive mannerisms and grotesque posturing was plastered across the façade of the play, so that a walled-in plot could be only just heard struggling, with increasing feebleness, to escape’. Sustaining an air of jollity and fast movement throughout, Guthrie was nevertheless faced with the severity of the ending. In Minneapolis he had the cast unite to sing a song, and at the Old Vic he dropped the epilogue in order (so the programme note said) to emphasize ‘the delicious sadism’ of the conclusion.

Reflecting back later, Blakely agreed with the critics who complained about the ‘fussy business’; he accused Guthrie of ‘dressing it up . . . it became beaky and all that; the words went out the window’ (Wardle et al, 1972, 15). Contrasting himself with Wolfit, he commented on his own performance that ‘I failed. I didn’t get it off the ground’ (15). Terry Hands remembered: ‘I saw Wolfit doing Volpone, and it’s one of the greatest performances I’d ever seen’. Blakely: ‘Because he had the courage to be malevolent . . . He wasn’t there to amuse the audience. And we were’ (8, 10). They compared the opening of the two productions. Hands: ‘When Wolfit said “Good morrow to the day and next my gold” it wasn’t funny at all. You were watching a very serious and dangerous man’. Blakely: ‘We got a laugh on that at the National. We wanted one’ (8).

Volpone continued to provoke a rich variety of performances in the late 60s and early 70s, notably from the Birmingham Repertory Company, the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, and the Stratford Festival production in Ontario. Thirty-four years after the Birmingham Rep’s first revival of Volpone, its new version opened in February 1969, offering what a reviewer for the Birmingham Evening Mail (26 February 1969) hailed as ‘a theatrical square meal’, ‘played strongly and busily and with keen intelligence’. J. C. Trewin (Birmingham Post, 26 February 1969) called it a ‘coherent and appreciative’ treatment which achieved an effective balance among the characters, and especially between Volpone and Mosca. The Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival production in Lakewood, Ohio (1970) was thought by some too farcical to do justice to the play’s subtleties, but it played up more of Jonson’s comedy than some earlier, intellectualized versions. It reminded Robert Ornstein (1970) that ‘Volpone is closer to bedroom farce than dramatic homily’ although ‘the slapstick did grow repetitious, and the buffoonery occasionally bordered on mere grossness’.

The 1971 production of Volpone at the Stratford Festival in Ontario was highly praised, especially for its variety of theatrical effects and Art Nouveau style and atmosphere. The production lasted for three and half hours and did not cut the Would-bes, who were played as loud Texans (quite possibly Lyndon Johnson and his wife) visiting an Edwardian Venice. William Hutt’s Volpone was aloof, ‘clad in black pyjamas and smok[ing] a cigarette’, and Douglas Rain’s Mosca – hailed by John Simon (New York Magazine, 23 August 1971) as ‘masterly’ – was innocent-looking and subservient. Throughout the production, director David William emphasized the grotesquerie and perversion. He staged a mimed orgy by monks in black leather and masks in lieu of the ‘Pythagorean’ interlude Mosca devises for Volpone. The mountebank scene was carnivalesque and exuberant, with Hutt performing in the style of Groucho Marx. Elsewhere Hutt suggested alternately Richard Nixon and John Diefenbaker (a former prime minister of Canada). Two female warders attacked Celia and forced her to her knees. As Ejner Jensen observed, the excesses of this production ‘served to define the world of Volpone, a world running over with wealth, with perversions, with ugliness, with greed’ (Jensen, 1985, 77).

Another notable production from this period was the Bristol Old Vic Company directed by John David at the Theatre Royal in 1972. Celebrating the four-hundredth anniversary of Jonson’s birth, the production did not invest in the beast-fable aspect of the play, although the intricate setting of balconies, ramps, and platforms which the gulls used to descend on Volpone provided a visual metaphor for the bestiary element. Lee Montague ‘gave a finely controlled performance as Volpone’, asserting his rank as a nobleman in opposition to Lewis Fiander’s Mosca who was ‘the tough boy from the streets who lived by guile’ (Jensen, 1985, 78). This emphasis on Volpone and Mosca’s class backgrounds was felt to make the action realistic and convincing.

One of the most discussed of all productions was Peter Hall’s for the London National Theatre in 1977 with Paul Scofield in the title role, Ben Kingsley as Mosca – ‘the unctuous image of the Madison Avenue P. R. man’ (Gerald Clarke, Time, October 1977) – and John Gielgud as a charming Sir Politic. This version, in which ‘black comedy prevailed over geniality’ (D. D. Moore, 1978), enjoyed a long, successful run. It was marked by its realism (less grotesquery, farce, or beast-symbolism than many Volpones) and its emphasis on the ‘precision of performance and . . . detail of comic invention’ (Albert Hunt, New Society, 12 May 1977). As Ned Chaillet (Plays and Players, June 1977) remarked:

Peter Hall’s production of Volpone is no symbolic menagerie, no routine animation of the beastly meanings behind the names of the characters, but a fleshing-out of the artifice, a humanising of the fable. The passions, in keeping with the taming of the allegory, are brought down to life-size from the grand caricatures they sometimes appear.

Albert Hunt (New Society, 12 May 1977) said that:

Peter Hall’s Volpone, while not openly trying to grasp for contemporary messages, creates a world that, in its detail and precision, is only too recognizable. Hall has seized on the central theatrical point of the play – that Jonson is showing us a society in which everybody is playing roles with everybody else.

Scofield’s Volpone, slipping effortlessly from dying Volpone to rumbustious Fox, was as fascinating as the unfolding of his intricate schemes:

Paul Scofield, as Volpone, picks out these different ‘performances’ with sharpness, clarity, and precision. Alone with his parasite, Mosca, he’s the picture of strength, virility, action; but as soon as there’s a knock on the door, he puts on a nightcap, leaps into a sumptuous bed that glides in majestically through the swing doors that form the set, and adopts a shape and a voice that’s convincing in its frailty.

However, other critics complained that, like Richardson in 1952, Scofield was too restrained. As one reviewer commented: ‘What I missed was the manic Jonsonian tension . . . Perhaps the laughter was too good-humoured, the sensuality too polite, Scofield himself too noble a figure’ (John Barber, Daily Telegraph, 27 April 1977). Kingsley’s Mosca, by contrast, was ‘waxy-skinned, supple, deferential, but with explosions of passionate glee’ (Richard Eder, New York Times, 30 April 1977). In a thoughtful piece of casting against type, Warren Clarke – a stocky northerner – played an unromantic Bonario. Hall’s Volpone took all of three hours and included the Would-be scenes. These were considered by some tedious at times and even Gielgud himself ‘somewhat ruefully’ confessed that it was ‘difficult to see much that was funny in the role’ (quoted in D. D. Moore, 1978,). On the other hand, Richard Eder, writing for an American readership, thought it ‘would almost be worth a trip to London to see Sir John, who plays the irascible and potty English expatriate to perfection’.

Another commended Sir Pol was Peter Collingwood in a 1980 production at the Nimrod Theatre in Sydney, Australia. H. G. Kippax (Sydney Morning Herald, 3 October 1980) remarked on how ‘in a sub-plot that is often cut’ Collingwood ‘bodies out of a Jonsonian “humour” a marvelously comic, sempiternal type of English club bore and know-all, instructing lesser breeds and sniffing conspiracy everywhere’. The production was co-directed by the notable Australian classical actor, John Bell, who himself played Volpone: ‘in intrigue a fox, with rufous wig, slanting eyebrows, and beard, and in lust a Levantine voluptuary, swelling flamboyantly’, though Kippax felt he was let down by Paul Bertram as Mosca: ‘too bland, not volatile, nor dangerous enough’. The set suggested a decayed grandeur: ‘faded art-deco magnificence, all burgundy brocade and marble statuary and candelabra’.

In 1983, Bill Alexander directed a masterly production for the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon. Alexander used a full text, but when the production moved to The Pit in 1984 he shortened the playing time by more than thirty minutes, eliminating or reducing the entertainment put on for Volpone in Act 1, the Scoto of Mantua speeches, and the Would-be sub-plot, in addition to all of Volpone’s taunting of the legacy hunters in the street in Act 5. Richard Griffiths’ Volpone was neither one of nature’s wily and alert foxes nor a leonine aristocrat like Scofield, but lay in bed surrounded by his trio of fantastics whom he showered with tenderness and fatherly love. Several commentators felt that Griffiths, a very bulky actor, lacked force and sensuality. For Irving Wardle (The Times, 6 October 1983), ‘even when he has Celia (Julie Peasgood) at his mercy, arising from the sickbed with a ghastly mummified leer, the great hymn he offers up to the pleasures of the flesh comes over as gently caressing’. Anthony Masters (The Times, 18 April 1984) remarked: ‘Calling matter-of-factly on gout, palsy, and catarrh to aid his impersonation of an invalid, Richard Griffiths (who looks more like Henry VIII than ever in his final disguise as a Venetian official) sacrifices the poetic flights and swelling sensuality, but it is worth the nasty shock of seeing a Volpone so like ourselves’. Less sympathetically, Arnold Hinchliffe (1985), 83 suggested that, although Griffiths was ‘[w]onderful in some effects – particularly when he was lying in bed, like some large baby watching the antics of the world about him – yet he lacked the contrast between invalid and magnifico . . . [It] is an athlete’s role, and here was a perpetually sweaty, breathless Volpone’. Griffiths is not the only actor, however, who has seen the ‘athleticism’ of the role as a figment of Volpone’s imagination, the imagination of a true invalid.

Other members of the cast were praised highly, particularly Miles Anderson’s ‘spivvy, black-haired’ Mosca (Masters), Nigel Cooke’s ‘bookish booby’ of a Bonario, and Bruce Alexander’s Sir Politic, played as an Elizabethan Inspector Clouseau – his pockets crammed with every paper except the one he wants, his eyes ranging the Rialto for spies, and favouring Peregrine with whispered confidences of his master plans (Wardle, The Times, 6 October 1983 ). This production had an effectively comic solution to Sir Pol’s hiding under a tortoise-shell, which is often considered unplayable: ‘When Sir Politick said he had an engine, indeed he had. Pulling a lever at the side of the stage, Bruce Alexander brought down from the ceiling a large tortoise shell’ (Hinchliffe (1985), 82).

If some productions (like that at Stratford in 1952) have allowed the action to unfold against a background of Venetian elegance, Jonathan Petherbridge’s at the Duke’s Playhouse in Lancaster (1986) went to the other extreme. The canals of Venice were converted to dank, running sewers or prison cells. By implication most of the characters were at least part rat. As Corvino, Andy Serkis – the future Gollum – made perhaps his earliest appearance in a half-human/half-animal role.

The 1990s saw several major revivals of Volpone, starting with Nicholas Hytner’s 1990 production at the Almeida Theatre. With only 300 seats and a small budget, Hytner and designer Mark Thompson turned the stage into a magic-box setting, heaped with Volpone’s treasure chests and surrounded by a murky canal. Ian McDiarmid’s Volpone wore

an enormous fur coat and his hair was dyed red: he looks every bit as foxy as he should, effortlessly commanding the stage despite his short stature.  His prostrate scenes on the sick-bed are hilarious. Wearing a ludicrous balaclava, speaking in a croak and wheezing horribly, he cuts a wonderfully grotesque figure and it will be a long time before I forget the sight of his hand closing like a sprung trap on a proffered diamond. (Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 8 April 1990)

Denis Lawson’s much-commended Scottish Mosca was ‘razorsharp, funny and disturbingly attractive’ (Ibid.) and ‘vicious and self-preening’ (Martin Dodsworth, TLS, 13 April 1990). Critics found it particularly striking that Volpone and Mosca should get an explicit erotic excitement out of their trickeries:

Their faces are constantly pressed close together, Mosca lovingly applies a sickly make-up to his master's features and, after their most spectacular coup, Volpone starts to undress his accomplice crying: 'O, that I could now transform thee to a Venus’. This is the first production in which I have seen the sexuality of deceit made so explicit. (Michael Billington, The Guardian, 15 April 1990)

There were no explicit references to bestial imagery, but the carrion-eaters did behave like scavengers. According to Hytner, ‘What happens is that, as the play progresses, their humanity is stripped further and further away from them. At the end of the play you can see them for what they are: vulture, crow, and raven’ (quoted in Lynn Truss, The Independent, 1 April 1990). To emphasize that even the Venetian judges are not exempt from corruption, Hytner showed them scavenging like grave desecrators in Volpone’s treasure casks at the end. He also excised the Would-be subplot, and made Bonario ‘a bone-headed tennis-racket-touting, cricket-capped, white flannelled overgrown teenager, neither lovable nor odious’ (Dodsworth).

Of all recent productions, that directed by Tim Luscombe for the English Shakespeare Company, which toured and then played at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in February/March 1991, most unashamedly renounced its Renaissance origins and Venetian setting. The action took place in a garish modern world, full of circus colour. It was certainly not to everyone’s taste, As Benedict Nightingale (The Times, 7 February 1991) complained, ‘The men wear bowlers, chain-encrusted leathers, clown-hats, grey macs, suits of implausible hues. The women go for red plastic skirts, silk petticoats, kewpie-doll frocks. They blow squeakers, explode party poppers, skip, shimmy, and skitter across a stage crammed with balloons and fairy lights. This is Ben Jonson’s Venice’. [Note for British readers: Kewpie dolls were highly sentimentalized ‘cupid’ dolls, popular in the US in the early twentieth century.] Paul Taylor (The Independent, 8 February 1991) was even more dismissive: ‘Wheeled on in supermarket trolleys, Volpone’s lusted-after treasure is just a pile of the sort of naff trinkets you might win on a coconut shy. This destroys any sense of its compulsive but sterile aesthetic appeal’. Fully aware of the more respectful productions from the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, these reviewers were appalled by the in-your-face music-hall vulgarity of it all, though Nightingale did find some redemption in the central performance:

Yet the evening cannot be so simply summed up. It is stronger at the centre than at points nearer the rim. John Woodvine brings paradoxical weight to the role of Volpone . . . One moment, he is in bed with a drip in his arm, uttering senile bleats and tubercular grunts. The next, he is jubilantly transformed from old sheep to king of the jungle, a figure full of assurance and carnal gusto.

But he could not reconcile himself to the production itself. Taylor objected to virtually everything: ‘The legacy hunters don't look or act like birds of prey. Played as three-headed monsters (two ventriloquist dummy-heads to every real one), the Venetian judges certainly look absurd. What they don't look is corrupt, which is the main point.’ (This is probably the only production ever, by this device, to have more Avocatori than Jonson scripted.)

Perhaps surprisingly, in a production so shockingly modern, Luscombe retained both the Would-bes. But he was not thanked for it: ‘the Sir Politick Would-be subplot … succeeded mainly in proving Nicholas Hytner right to have omitted it when he directed Volpone last year. But by then it was no surprise that Lady Would-be was being played as an American virago coyly passing herself off as a blend of Mae West and Doris Day’ (Nightingale). Yet others were less judgmental. Peter Smith (1991), 76, found rather more to enjoy in it, noting that, as he anticipates congress with Celia, Volpone opened ‘a drawer under the bed and pulls out a basque, a whip and other paraphernalia of sadomasochistic delight’. Smith was also amused by the production’s solution to ‘Politic’s tortoise-shell come-uppance, when he rolled on his back and resignedly smoked a Hamlet cigar with the music of the advert playing over the top’ (77). (Jacques Loussier’s ultra-relaxed jazz version of Bach’s ‘Air on the G String’ was used on a series of British cigar advertisements at the time.) The production was a rare attempt to rescue the play (and Jonson) from the sometimes over-earnest respect it is usually accorded as a ‘classic’.

In 1993, once more at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Bill Alexander set Volpone  in Edwardian Venice, and cast Bernard Horsfall as Volpone and Gerard Murphy as Mosca. Although the production was not received enthusiastically, critics particularly applauded Murphy’s Mosca. According to Elizabeth Schafer (1994), 128-9:

created a Mosca who was greasy and servile but whose affection for Volpone early on was almost child-like. This Mosca did not want to be pushed into the final trick because he knew it would sever the bond with his master forever. Once that point had been passed, however, Murphy's Mosca went for the kill, finally remaining stonily impassive as the final judgments were handed out.

Operating within a Klimt-style backdrop with plenty of gold, Horsfall’s Volpone was a more straightforward, less enigmatic creation who was clearly having fun, especially in relation to Celia. Because Celia and Bonario were played in as caricatures – Bonario in particular was a Bible-toting puritan – the sense of menace was partly lost. After his dismay at the English Shakespeare Company revival, Paul Taylor (The Independent, 10 June 1993) praised Alexander’s production, asserting that it has ‘the play’s true measure and pulls off the considerable trick of filling the vast cavern of the Rep’s main stage in ways that are thematically thoughtful as well as eye-catching’. The fin de siècle  set evoked a sense of tedium and lack of creativity, though the space was also rather too full of restaurant tables, which had to be moved repeatedly. In compensation, Alexander played up the comedy but neglected the complexity behind the Volpone-Mosca duo.

In 1995, the Royal National Theatre produced a star-studded revival. This version yoked the talents of Michael Gambon as Volpone and Simon Russell Beale as Mosca, and ultimately won director Matthew Warchus an Olivier award nomination. Critics commended its ‘disciplined excess’ and ‘stylized but acutely recognizable world of rampant immorality’ (Paul Taylor, The Telegraph, 29 July 1995; Benedict Nightingale, The Times, 29 July 1995). The prologue was preceded by a dumb show that staged an invented nightmare sequence reminiscent of a Jonsonian anti-masque: freakish black-caped figures with torches hovered through lintel-decorated doors, paneled rooms, and down swirling corridors courtesy of the Olivier’s revolving stage, and seized Michael Gambon’s ‘raddled, Pagliacci-faced Volpone’ and tore at his clothes (Taylor). Katherine Duncan-Jones (TLS, 18 August 1995) felt that, though this sequence, reminiscent of the film Amadeus, was ‘thrilling in itself, it risks upstaging the two great central performances, Michael Gambon’s richly metaphoric, larger than life Volpone, and Simon Russell Beale’s oleaginous, brilliant Mosca’.

Other critics also felt that, while the nightmarish opening suggested the vulnerability and insecurity behind Volpone’s manic game-playing, it was overly preemptive since Jonson deals less in subtleties of personality and psyche and more in terms of moral caricatures and humors. In his furry bed, Volpone had a look of dejection that heightened the sense of his dissipation: ‘Gambon’s Volpone sits up in bed with a sickly smile, his face powdered white, looking like a granny in a bonnet’ (Tanitch, 1995, 7). Out of bed and wearing a russet robe with fur trimming, Gambon was a larger-than-life figure who, ‘greedy for orgasm as for money, lolled in epicurean luxury while surveying the latest main chance’ (Michael Billington, The Guardian, 29 July 1995). He was like an ‘unbraced, dissolute Mozart’ (Nicholas De Jongh, Evening Standard, 21 December 1995). Beale gave an equally challenging performance as a Mosca for whom ‘manipulation amounts almost to a sexual fetish’ (Billington), a ‘Machiavellian meritocrat’ (Nick Curtis, Evening Standard, 28 July 1995).

A particularly notable aspect of this production was that it played up the homoerotic master-servant relationship between Mosca and Volpone (first openly explored by Hytner in 1990). They delighted in ‘affectionate petting and codpiece-grabbing foreplay’ (Curtis), and, as Robert Tanitch (1995) put it, ‘When Volpone is not groping himself, he is normally groping Mosca, and his parasite always seems ready for a bit of oral sex’. Indeed, as literary critics such as Mario DiGangi have suggested, ‘Mosca is intelligible not as a sexual transgressor who happens to be a servant, but as a transgressive servant who happens to be erotically involved with his master’ (DiGangi, 2007, 136). Some such sense informed Beale’s performance. In Tanitch’s words, ‘Beale (how villainy becomes him!) is no elegant rascal but a low-born and dirty servant, the personification of sly, sweating servility, open-shirted and droopy-drawered’ (1995, 7).

Although none of the three gulls had overt bestiary properties, all gestured towards them. Robin Soans’s Corvino was nasty and violent, and had a high, cawing way of speaking. Stephen Boxer made an ascetic, dry, cold Voltore, beaked and quiffed like a bird of prey, and Trevor Peacock ‘provide[d] riotous comedy’ as a shambling Corbaccio with an ear-trumpet sprouting from his head (Curtis). Matilda Ziegler and Mark Lewis Jones as Celia and Bonario were thought insipid, though perhaps that was the point. However, Cheryl Campbell’s sensuality as Lady Would-be fully chimed with the lead set by Gambon and Beale. In 3.5 her character surprisingly reappears and oddly asks Volpone, ‘I pray you lend me your dwarf’, a comical moment that often stands out in productions: ‘there were great laughs at Stratford 1952, Oxford 1966, and the National Theatre 1968 at her belated “I pray you lend me your dwarf”, when she had already in effect shanghaied him’ (Parker, 1978, 165). In 1995 Campbell delivered the line with ‘unexpected, rapacious innuendo,’ generating much laughter (Tanitch, 1995,, 1995, 7). But the production ended in the mode of its beginning, with the nightmare fulfilled. Volpone and Mosca were sent to their punishments, with nothing to alleviate them. Volpone’s ‘This is called mortifying of a Fox’, in which he ironically distances himself from his character’s fate, was cut, as was the Epilogue in which he resumes centre stage to seek the audience’s applause. Jonson acknowledges in the play’s Epistle that the ‘catastrophe’ may not be in line with ‘the strict rigour of comic law’ – and here it most certainly was not.

One notable production that exploited the element of gender fluidity in the play was Michael Kahn’s Shakespeare Theatre Company revival in Washington DC at the Lansburgh Theatre in 1996. As Volpone, the actress Pat Carroll was felt to be generally convincing enough as a man, but she was less convincing as a sexual threat to Celia. Lloyd Rose (Washington Post, 23 April 1996) commented:

Carroll is a rather sweet Volpone, decent even, and as a result is run over by the more voracious and extreme characters. In this pack of raptors and carnivores, the animal she suggests is a teddy bear.

As Mosca, Wallace Acton, sporting insectoid antennae, played the role with nimbleness and clarity (Nelson Pressley, Washington Times, 23 April 1996). Kahn went straight to the heart of Jonson's conceit and presented the gulls as birds, throwing in touches such as a chandelier shaped like a bird's nest. One of the successes of this production was its costumes, and the overall excess. Kahn added wild cabaret dance numbers and blatant double-entendres were sprinkled throughout, while Volpone’s retinue kept up the decadent cabaret atmosphere of the production. ‘Looking like a giddy gang of Las Vegas rejects’ (Pressley), they performed songs in styles from British music hall to modern Euro-pop musical theater. Kahn also retained the Would-bes.

Kahn’s take on the play might usefully be compared with the Bench Theatre production of 2011 at The Spring, Havant (near Portsmouth, England). In this director Jeff Bone cast actress Francine Huin-Wah as Mosca, opposite Terry Smyth’s Volpone. This converted the sexual tension in the master-servant relationship to a heterosexual one (see http://www.benchtheatre.org.uk/plays10s/volpone.php). James George (The Portsmouth News, 20 May 2011) noted Smyth’s ‘great, gangling, spider-like presence’ and felt that ‘making Mosca a woman adds a sexual frisson to the whole thing that director Jeff Bone makes full use of and Huin-Wah is beautiful enough to carry it off easily’. George was, however, pleased that Bone saw no need for the Would-bes: ‘let's give thanks for the loss of the subplot about the holidaying English couple in Italy’.

Lindsay Posner’s 1999 RSC production   was an intelligent and entertaining staging. It opened at the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon, then transferred to the Playhouse at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the Pit, London, and The Drum, Plymouth. The stage was dominated by a ‘huge cupboard stuffed with gold plate, where innocence is a mummified baby crucified on a golden cross,’ viscerally announcing themes of greed, blasphemy, hedonism, and degeneration (Richard Edmonds, Birmingham Evening Post, 26 March 1999). Malcolm Storry as Volpone and Guy Henry as Mosca turned the play into a riotous two-man show. Storry is a large, rugged, vigorous man; John Gross (1999), 380, noted that he was ‘more virile and stronger-voiced than some actors in the part’. Blending menace with intelligence, he ‘paint[ed] his face green to look ill, pour[ed] drops in his eyes to make them weep slime and then roll[ed] them up to play dead before springing from his bed to plot, ravish and dissemble’ (Patrick Marmion, Evening Standard, 15 December 1999), while his ‘ strained voice d[id] honor to Jonson’s muscular verse’ (Paul Taylor, The Independent, 26 March 1999). Guy Henry brought a sardonic comic ability to Mosca, a ‘mercurial quality and physical strikingness that enable[d] him to play the arrogance and brutality of the role within the framework of high comedy’ (Rex Gibson, Times Educational Supplement, 12 March 1999).

The production as a whole emphasized polymorphous sexuality, from the moment Mosca whipped away the furred bed cover and Volpone ‘is revealed lolling in the gold-leafed arms of his, his eunuch and his dwarf’ (Richard Edmonds), or as John Peter put it, ‘with three catamites of various sexes’ (Sunday Times, 28 March 1999). It was also clear-eyed about motivations: ‘Although the play invites cartoonish characterizations and performances, Posner anchors it in realistic psychology. Malcolm Storry's Volpone is simply a professional thief, going about his trickery methodically. And his gulls are not commedia dell’arte pantaloons, but rapacious businessmen trying to cut corners’ (Gerald Berkowitz, Theatre Guide London, 1999). There were, however, some commedia elements, especially in the mountebank scene (see the images of this production in the Performance Archive). Posner resisted bestial characterizations: although, like Guthrie before him, he had sent his actors to London Zoo to study ‘their’ animals, ‘they will [he said] just use a few gestures at appropriate moments without making it too obvious that a crow or vulture is coming on stage’ (Gibson). He did, however, emphasize the visual richness, using deep colours and luxurious textures which paradoxically enhanced the sensual quality of the production while signaling disintegration and decay (Emma Govan, RORD, 40, 2001). The rich costumes added to this, being dirty at the bottom, ‘as if everyone was trailing through muck’ (Martin Butler, personal communication).

Storry’s physicality (as opposed, say, to the greater passivity of Richardson or Griffiths) made the opening of Act Five – where Volpone shakes as with a palsy and turns to drink – a real turning point; he seemed to lose his earlier nerve and energy. The Would-be subplot was retained but, to some, that, and the Celia-Bonario ordeal, seemed misplaced in such a highly charged atmosphere: ‘the play dissipates this energy with stories including that of a virtuous wife and eccentric English travelers’ (Marmion). Lady Would-be was evidently so out of place that one reviewer was bemused by her ‘I pray you lend me your dwarf’: ‘I’m not sure that the line . . . is to be found in the original’ (C. Eccles, 2000, 16). The possibility that this might be another instance of the play’s interest in uninhibited, polymorphous sexuality seems not to have been appreciated.

The first major revival of Volpone in the twenty-first century was director Greg Hersov’s at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 2004. Reviewers emphasized the play’s portrayal of greed and a money-grasping culture of unrestrained self-interest. In an attempt to make Jonson’s classic ‘accessible’ to modern audiences, Hersov threw in contemporary terms such as VD and HIV, as well as a hilarious attempt at Latin: ‘Hic, haec, hoc, facsimile, Domestos . . .’. However, critics felt that it lacked sophisticated wit and intelligent character interpretation; once the plot turns to rape, adultery and perjury, the cast slid into a routine of buffoonish fooling around, which did not do any favors to the acerbic comedy (Serena Davies, Daily Telegraph, 28 October 2004). Dressed in   voluptuous velvets, Gerard Murphy played Volpne as wily and bullish, with ginger locks and bushy eyebrows, ‘looking like a once-handsome man who had gone to seed and was trying to retain the sexual power which he was conscious of slipping away from him’ (Martin Butler, personal communication). He was accompanied by a busty nurse, a male nun, and a ‘dude’ who looked like ‘characters in a horror show; their physical antics are impressive and funny, but they often seem more like a side-show than part of the play ’ (David Chadderton, British Theatre Guide, 2004). Stephen Noonan, buzzing around elusively and tirelessly, stole the show as Mosca. His soliloquies were eloquently delivered in a variety of humorous accents which ‘barely conceal the steel of his underlying malevolence’ (Ibid.). However, according to Sam Marlowe (The Times, 27 October 2004):

neither they , nor Michael Carter, Stephen Marzella and Gareth Thomas as the flapping, scavenging flock of bird-like money-grubbers, manage quite the right animalistic exuberance. There’s too little urgency to their appetites, and their scheming never delights enough to make us feel complicit in it, or to present sufficient contrast with the play’s later, darker, scenes.

This production did convey a Jonsonian sense of the carnivalesque, but critics agreed that Hersov lacked confidence in the text and found bewildering ways to raise a laugh. Lez Brotherston’s design was impressive, though, a transparent, water-filled stage which located the action in present-day Venice. Hersov cut the secondary plot involving the Would-bes.

European Adaptations and their Anglicization

There has been a notable European tradition of quite radical adaptations of Volpone, including those by Charles de Sainte-Évremond, Sir Politick Would-be: Comédie à la manière des Anglais (Oeuvres, 1740, 2.175-318), Ludwig Tieck, Herr Von Fuchs: Ein Lustspiel in drei Aufzügen, nach dem Volpone des Ben. Jonson, 1793 (Shriften, XII, Berlin, 1929, 1-154), and Émile Zola, Les Héritiers Rabourdin, 1874 (Oeuvres Complètes, XV, ed. H. Mitterand, Paris, 1966). (For these, see Whiting, 1931.) But Stefan Zweig took adaptation to new heights with his German-language version, first staged in Vienna in 1926, Ben Jonson’s ‘Volpone’: Eine lieblose Komödie in drei Akten (A Loveless Comedy in Three Acts). Zweig’s adaptation has taken on a life of its own and has sometimes been more popular than Jonson’s original on the twentieth century stage, especially in Europe but also in the US, where it was staged as early as 1928 by the New York Theatre Guild (a prestigious ensemble, dedicated to bringing the best of foreign drama to Broadway) – well before any professional production of Jonson’s original in North America. At the same time, it was staged in almost every German theatre, and a French translation (1928), by Zweig’s friend, Jules Romains, played for 500 nights at the Thé tre de l’Atelier in Paris. Romains’s translation formed the basis for Maurice Tourneur’s 1939 French-language film Volpone, with Louis Jouvet as Mosca and Harry Baur as Volpone, though it is further adapted, and the film adds an opening sequence that explains the motives behind Volpone’s trickeries.

Zweig’s adaptation was translated into English by Ruth Langner, daughter of the Theatre Guild’s founder, Lawrence Langner, as Ben Jonson’s ‘Volpone’: a Loveless Comedy in Three Acts (1928). It cuts the Jacobean esoterica from Jonson’s original, such as classical references and archaisms, develops new plot and characters, and creates an amoral space where neither virtue is rewarded nor vice punished (Bauland, 1968, 102). Its success can be attributed to its efficient trimming of the plot, the replacement of verse with demotic prose, and the speeding up of the action to quasi-farcical pace. The Would-bes and Peregrine are cut, as are the mountebank scene and Volpone’s ‘family’ and their entertainments. Volpone is given a mistress, Canina, in place of Lady Would-be, and Bonario becomes Leone (the lion) and Celia Columba (the dove); they are so insipid that no one pays attention to them. But much else is also changed, most particularly the relationship between Mosca (who has only been working for his patron for eight weeks) and Volpone. The latter is a Levantine obsessed with gold, rather than a Venetian magnifico, more misanthropic and even more sadistic in his satisfaction at the duping of his would-be heirs, but also more cowardly when challenged by Leone. Mosca is more playful and good-humoured. Zweig especially problematized the ending; Volpone suffers a reversal of fortunes and Mosca becomes the real hero – the underdog who distributes his wealth instead of hoarding it. In the final moments, Volpone becomes a pathetic figure who cannot face up to punishment and flees the city, and Mosca takes command of the situation and feasts the neighbourhood. There is a clear Marxist emphasis in the way that Zweig focuses on the redistribution of wealth rather than justice and punishment. Some critics have applauded what they see as this version’s greater amiability, especially its ending (see McPherson, 1973, 82; Forsyth, 1981, 622, 624) but others are less convinced (Traver, 2008). The English director Terry Hands was particularly scathing about the lack of intellectual challenge: ‘In Paris I saw a dreadful watered-down version by Stefan Zweig and Jules Romains which is wildly popular; very consistent and French, all the sub-plots are out, and that moment of [Volpone’s] defiance at the end is gone; it’s just Mosca’s victory’ (Wardle et al, 1972, 19).

The first production of Zweig’s adaptation in Ruth Langner’s English translation, by the Theatre Guild, opened at the Guild Theatre in on 9 April 1928 with Dudley Digges as Volpone and Alfred Lunt as Mosca. It was well received, went to Boston in January 1929, and returned to New York (the Liberty Theatre) for eight performances in March 1930, with the incomparable Sydney Greenstreet as Volpone (and Clifford Odets in a walk-on role). By contrast, when Zweig’s adaptation was performed in London in 1932, it provoked jingoistic reactions. The Times reviewer (25 January 1932) chastised it in a way that suggested pent-up feelings between Britain and Germany in the early 1930s:

The piece is not without fun of a brutal sort, but one is sick to death of it before the last act; for Ben Jonson’s genius has been pulled down and something pretentious and jerry-built has been erected on its scaffolding. Why on earth does it seem worthwhile to do these things? May not Jonson speak for himself, or be left in peace?

The events of World Wars I and II were changing the way Volpone was performed. Zweig’s adaptation is cued to the political fervor of the period where old world powers clashed and new world powers emerged. More specifically, its cruelty matched modern sensibilities to the extent of excising all love interest – hence the title, Volpone: A Loveless Comedy.

Zweig’s version, adapted by Dr Alphons Silberman, was produced with some success – but also some controversy – by the notable Australian director, Doris Fitton, at the Independent Theatre in North Sydney in 1947. In circumstances that recall the 1701 prosecution of the Drury Lane company, the police were involved. As John Tasker (1970), 39 explains: ‘A letter to the press, objecting to the lewd characters and actions on stage, brought the police, a constable who attempted to read the script and could make neither head nor tail of it. Ignorance, in this case, came to the rescue of the theatre, and . . . the proposed action was dropped’. The Sydney Morning Herald (9 May 1947) reported that ‘Censor Officers attend Criticised Play’. A plain-clothes police officer and two officers of the Chief Secretary’s Department attended a performance, after receiving complaints, but saw nothing untoward. According to Doris Fitton they enjoyed it. Other members of the audience certainly did. In his review for The Australian Quarterly, 19.2 (1947), 124-7 Leslie Rees only complained about Jonson’s name being associated with the Zweig version, but then admitted ‘the play they have made is deliciously and deliriously madcap, a first-rate example of modern farce. I haven’t laughed so much in the theatre in years. For gusto and energy, for sharp theatrical effectiveness, for sustained comic irony, for satire on greed and hypocrisy, the play is a tonic, and a moral tonic as all the best comedy is . . . Doris Fitton deserves the warmest plaudits for her stream-lined zestful production. John Cameron, playing Volpone the Fox with rip-roaring forth-right vigour, all the stops open; and John Fassen playing Mosca, Volpone’s “parasite,” in the blithesome spirit of a talking ballet dancer; this pair could scarcely have been more effectively contrasted. Here was one of those happy flashes of theatre genius seen all too seldom.’

The influence of Zweig’s version was apparent even in what might be regarded as the first American professional production of a version of the Jonson text, following hard on the heels of Wolfit’s 1947 tour. This was by the star-studded New York City Theatre Company, with José Ferrer as Volpone and Richard Whorf as Mosca. Even though Lady Would-be was retained (her husband was not), Volpone had a ‘Concubina’ and the adaptation, credited to the lead actors and director Richard Barr, strained for laughs. Otis L. Guernsey Jr. (New York Times, 10 January 1948) was not greatly impressed: ‘In the melee of roaring voices, Bronx cheers, and fanny kicking, the satire of animalistic human beings clawing away at each other gives way almost completely to burlesque’. He made an exception for John Carradine, whose portrayal of Voltore ‘creates an uproar … His make-up helps – he is tall, gaunt, string-haired, black-clad and wears a vulture’s nose – but the essence of his excellent comedy performance is the manner in which he moves his limbs and features about’.

Zweig’s adaptation was the source of George Antheil’s English language opera (libretto by Alfred Perry), simply entitled Volpone and first staged at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Manhattan in 1953. Other notable productions of the Zweig version include one at the Rooftop Theater, New York, which opened on 7 January 1957, with Howard da Sylva as Volpone and Alfred Ryder as Mosca (later playing Boston with Ian Keith in the lead); one by the Cleveland Play House in its 1959/60 season, which later toured extensively; and one that opened at the Nassau Repertory Theater, Long Island, New York, in October 1984. By a curious coincidence the Rooftop Theater production was in competition with Jules Romains’s adaptation of the Zweig, which opened at the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway on 4 February 1957, presented in French by the Madeleine Renaud/Jean-Louis Barrault Company ‘under the auspices of the Government of the French Republic’.

Other notable adaptations of Volpone – some more indebted to Zweig than others – include Foxy, a musical designed to exploit the talents of the great comedian, Bert Lahr. It has a book by Ian McLellan Hunter and Ring Lardner, Jr., lyrics by Johnny Mercer, and music by Robert Emmett Dolan. It was set in the Canadian Yukon during the Klondike gold rush, and the producers chose the refurbished Palace Grand Theatre in Dawson City, Yukon, for its opening run during the summer of 1962. It did very poor business and was effectively abandoned until the following year, when producer David Merrick arranged for additional songs and a revamped book. It opened on Broadway at the Ziegfeld Theatre in February 1964 and was well received by audiences and critics. Lahr received that year’s Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical, yet it ran for only nine weeks and was one of the few Broadway musicals of the era not to be recorded. When Foxy was revived in a concert version in the Musical Tonight series off-Broadway in 2000 critics were positively impressed by the book and the music, but it remains little known.

Larry Gelbart’s Sly Fox also pursued the gold-rush theme, being set in nineteenth-century San Francisco. Based loosely on the Zweig adaptation, it was designed to be played for laughs (Gelbart is best remembered as the man who adapted M.A.S.H. for TV). It first opened in 1976 at the Broadhurst Theatre, New York with George C. Scott in the lead; the following year Robert Preston took over the lead (a version which Richard Dutton saw) and gave a performance which drew on his famous role as the shyster ‘Professor’ Harold Hill in The Music Man. A revival opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 2004 with Richard Dreyfuss.

The Honey Pot (1967), a movie with Rex Harrison, Susan Hayward, Cliff Robertson, and Maggie Smith, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, has some lineal resemblance to Volpone. Cecil Fox is out to con three former mistresses; he sees a private performance of a portion of the Jonson’s play and declares it his favourite. But the movie as a whole has neither the spirit nor the substance of the original. It is based on the play, Mr Fox of Venice, by one of the screenwriters, Frederick Knott, which was in turn based on Thomas Sterling’s novel, The Evil of the Day.

There have been at least three other operatic adaptations: a Viennese version, with music by Francis Burt and libretto by A. E. Eichmann (1960), an English one with music by Malcolm Williamson (1964), and an American one by the   Wolf Trap Opera Company, of Vienna, Virginia (2004; revived and recorded 2007). The score of the Wolf Trap opera was by John Musto   with libretto by Mark Campbell. There have also been three further cinematic/DVD versions of some note. Il volpone was adapted for Italian cinema by Maurizio Ponzi in 1988; the action is set in modern Liguria and Paolo Villaggio plays Ugo Maria Volpone to Enrico Montesano’s Mosca. The play was rewritten for French television by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt for a production starring Gérard Depardieu as Volpone and Daniel Prévost as Mosca. The extent of the rewriting will be apparent from the ending, in which Volpone and Mosca escape together with Corbaccio’s wife. By far the most faithful screen version of Jonson’s original play (though rather more dutiful than inspired) is that issued on DVD by Stage on Screen (2010). It is a filmed record of their production, Would-bes and all, at the Greenwich Theatre, London. Richard Bremmer plays Volpone, Mark Hadfield is Mosca, and Tim Treolar is Voltore. The director is Elizabeth Freestone. 

Conclusions

We quoted Arnold Hinchliffe earlier about the problems that confront any modern production of Volpone: ‘how the play should look and how far the scenery should be allowed to distract from the words; the character of Volpone and his relationship with Mosca; the serious ending of the play; how much of the subplot to retain and how to present Celia and Bonario’. We have tried to comment on at least some of these in relation to each of the productions we have addressed in any detail. The relationship between Volpone and Mosca is perhaps the single most important variable, in part because it first requires an honest appraisal of whether Volpone is physically and mentally capable (at least in the beginning) of realizing his dreams. If so, the dynamics of Mosca’s betrayal are always very different from those in a performance where Volpone is as much a fantasist as those he seeks to con. And the sexuality in that relationship – which has become so much more overt in performances in recent years – offers a perspective from which we observe other sexual behaviour in the play, notably that of Lady Would-be, of Corvino and Celia, and of Volpone and Celia, all of which in turn speak to the apparent lack of sexual/romantic feelings between Bonario and Celia.

The ‘look’ of the play is somewhat independent of these issues. It is usually driven by one of two considerations, which are not mutually exclusive: whether the intention is to retain, however loosely, a Jacobean and/or Venetian period identity (a question that often bears on whether to retain the Would-bes), and how far the set and the costuming should echo the play’s strong symbolism – predators, scavengers and prey; disease and death; gold. As we have seen, there has been much inventiveness on both these fronts, with sets that evoke anything from early modern Venice to a modern National Health Service hospital (while productions based on the Zweig adaptation have a fondness for gold-rush settings.) A popular compromise has been to evoke a fin-de-siecle Venice, perhaps influenced by Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice or Lucino Visconti’s movie of it, suggesting decadence and sickliness with (sometimes in Art Nouveau décor) touches of gold. In terms of the bestial, the spectrum has run from Colin Blakely in 1968, in red furs and emitting foxy yelps, to Paul Scofield in 1977, in a staging much more marked by realistic human action and psychological precision.

A string of lesser choices follows from these larger ones. One instance is the presentation and even the number of the Avocatori in the courtroom scenes. The text calls for four Avocatori, but several productions have managed with only three – such as the National Theatre in 1995, where they looked ‘as if they were appearing in a parody of Busby Berkeley kitsch’ (Tanitch, 1995, 7) – and Hersov’s 2004 production got by with only two. Conversely, in the radically modernised English Shakespeare Company 1990 production ‘The four avocatori are expanded to twelve, by the use of eight dummies manipulated in unison by the four live actors. Venetian justice thus comes to function automatically; it’s mere puppetry’ (Biggs, 1991, 14). This was a development of Wolfit’s staging in his later performances, where the Avocatori were owl-like and behaved rather like puppets, a farcical diminution which prevented them from overshadowing his own star performance. Volpone is a text of such concentrated imaginative coherence that in the best productions even the most minor details have a telling resonance.

List of Anonymous Reviews (Chronological)

The Times , 2 February 1921.
A.P., The Spectator, 7 July 1923.
‘Volpone: Ben Jonson’s Comedy at Cambridge.’   The Times, 5 March 1923.
The Times, 30 June 1923.
The Times, 28 April 1930.
The Times,   25 January 1932.
The Manchester Guardian, 2 August 1935.
The Times, 31 July 1935.
The London Mercury, 32, 1935.
The Times, 26 January 1938.
The Times, 23 March 1944.
The Times, 4 March, 1942.
‘Shakespeare Outfoxed,’ Time, 10 March 1947.
The Times, 4 March 1955.
The Listener 79 , 1955.
‘ Comedies with Happy Endings,’   Tribune , 26 January 1968 .
W.H.W., ‘Comedy with a Golden Glow,’ Birmingham Evening Mail, 26 February 1969.
Signed but Untitled Reviews (Alphabetic)
Atkinson, Brooks, The New York Times, 26 February 1947.
Barber, John, Daily Telegraph, 27 April 1977
Berkowitz, Gerald, theatreguidelondon RSC archive 1999, http://www.theatreguidelondon.co.uk/reviews/rsc99.htm
Billington, Michael, The Guardian, 15 April 1990.
Chadderton, David, The British Theatre Guide, 2004. http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/volpone-rev.htm
Christiansen, Richard, Chicago Daily News, 18 July 1964.
Clurman, Harold, The Nation, 10 August 1964.
Conway, Harold, Evening Standard, 16 July 1952
Eccles, C., Plays International, 15 (2000), 16
Esslin, Martin, Plays and Players, March 1968.
Govan,   Emma, RORD , 40 (2001)

Gross, John, Sunday Telegraph, reprinted in Theatre Record, 19.6 (1999), 380
Marlowe, Sam, The Times, 27 October 2004.
Masters, Anthony, The Times, 18 April 1984.
Moore, Don D., Educational Theatre Review (1978), 115.
Nightingale, Benedict, The Times, 7 February 1991
Peter, John, Sunday Times, 28 March 1999, reprinted in Theatre Record, 19.6 (1999), 379
Rodford, Peter, Plays and Players, January 1956, 30.
Schafer, Elizabeth,  RORD, 33 (1994), 128-9.  
Shorter, Eric, The Daily Telegraph, 17 January 1968
Smith, Peter, Cahiers Elisabethains, 39 (1991), 75-7
Spencer, Charles, Daily Telegraph, 8 April 1990
Tanitch, Robert, Plays and Players, 497 (1995), 7
Tarn, The Spectator, 5 February 1923.
Taylor, Paul, The Independent, 8 February 1991.
--- The Telegraph, 29 July 1995.
Trewin, J. C., Birmingham Post, 26 February 1969.
Williams, Stephen, Evening News, 4 March 1955.
T. C. Worsley, The Times, 16 July 1952.
Signed and Titled Reviews
Billington, Michael, ‘ Vivid Volpone ,’ The Guardian, 29 July 1995
Brien, Alan, ‘Volpone Gets the Business,’ Sunday Telegraph, 21 January 1968
Bryden, Ronald, ‘View-halloo Volpone,’ The Observer, 21 January 1968
Chaillet, Ned, Volpone ,  Plays and Players,   June 1977, 22-3
Clarke, Gerald, ‘Rare Fox’,  Time , October 1977
Curtis, Nick, ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way to inherit’, Evening Standard, 28 July 1995
Davies, Serena, ‘ Stomping Descent to Vaudeville,’ Daily Telegraph, 28 October 2004
De Jongh, Nicholas, ‘The Year of Living Violently,’ Evening Standard , 21 December 1995
Dodsworth, Martin, ‘Animal Appetites,’ TLS, April 13-19 1990, 397
Duncan-Jones, Katherine, ‘No Exit from Venice’, TLS, 18 August 1995
Eder, Richard, ‘Gielgud and Scofield add Luster to Virtues of London Volpone’, The New York Times, 30 April 1977
Edmonds, Richard, ‘No Silliness, Just Vintage RSC’, The Birmingham Evening Post, 26 March 1999
Eliot, T. S., ‘London Letter’, 70 no. 6, June 1921, 686-91
George, James, ‘Volpone at The Spring, Havant,’ The Portsmouth News, 20 May 2011 http://www.portsmouth.co.uk/lifestyle/the-guide/stage/volpone_at_the_spring_havant_1_2699974
Gibson, Rex, ‘Beasts in a Human Zoo,’ TES, 12 March 1999
Guernsey, Otis L. Jr., ‘The Theatres’, The New York Times, 10 January 1948.
Hunt, Albert, ‘In Jonson’s Mirror.’ New Society, 12 May 1977, 292.
Kippax, H. G., ‘Making the grotesque more grotesque,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 3 October 1980.
Kretzmer, Herbert, ‘Prancing, Dancing, Giggling--Endless,’ Daily Express , 17 January 1968.
Leech, Clifford, ‘Stratford 1952,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 3, 4 (1952), 353-357.
Marmion, Patrick, ‘ Roguish Intent in Venice,’ Evening Standard, 15 December 1999.
Nightingale, Benedict, ‘Tour de force of bite and bile,’ The Times, 29 July 1995.
Ornstein, Robert , ‘The Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970), 475.
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