The Performance Archive lists adaptations of Ben Jonson’s plays since 1900 (see link at head of essay). ‘Adaptation’ has been taken to mean any production that makes substantial alterations to an original Jonson play-text (as it exists in the folios of 1616 or 1640-41), or that uses a play by Jonson as a jumping-off point for a new work. The list also includes major foreign translations, productions of Jonson’s plays on film, television, and radio, and two original works which feature Jonson as a character. It does not include productions that make occasional cuts and modernisations, or that relocate the action to a more recent setting leaving the text largely intact.
The adaptations listed include 27 plays, 16 television productions, seven films, six operas, four musicals and a novel. While Volpone and The Alchemist make up the majority of adaptations, the list also includes reinterpretations of several other works, from a contemporary film of The Devil Is An Ass to Richard Strauss’s operatic version of Epicene.
The sheer variety of adaptations speaks of the rich creative influence Jonson continues to have over modern writers. The robust yet supple nature of the original plays has made them particularly suited to adaptation, and Jonson’s powerful characterizations and intense themes have migrated easily across many periods and styles. Volpone in particular has proved himself a comfortable resident of the twentieth century, and has appeared in locations from a Soho den to a German hospital, a Hollywood studio to an Italian shipyard. The variety of these adaptations is a testament to the power of the original creation – despite these many changes in setting Volpone is recognised wherever he goes.
Jonsonian adaptation is a truly global enterprise, and the listing in the Performance Archive cannot claim to be exhaustive. Entries also vary in detail, as the amount of available background material varies for each production. The archive is intended as an ongoing resource, and will be updated with new adaptations, as well as further information on those already listed. A select discussion of several key adaptations can be found below.
This dramatic reworking of The Alchemist relocates the action of the play to a twenty-four hour chemist shop, and follows the attempts of the protean Faece and his colleague Dol to procure victims for the sorcerer/fortune-teller, Craft. In broad outline the play follows the original, but the characters and plot sequence are realigned. Vance Leech, the shop owner, is a businessman whose political ambitions provide a fertile source for deceit and speculation; Arch is a poet who comes for treatment but is given an injectable drug that leads to torrents of verse comparable to Dol Common’s Broughton-inspired outbursts, and his eventual death; while Germaine (a bra-less Greer caricature), Vance’s wife Edna, and the businessman Ivor people the stage with their own petty prejudices and aspirations.
The language of the play resembles that of the original through the heaping up of seemingly endless objects, ideas and insults, such as the argument between Craft and Faece (‘Punce. Fragrant male tart.’ ‘Dag-bag flatus.’ ‘Pseudo-dago arselicker’), or the echoes of unpleasant bodily physicality (‘Between your teeth is a lacquer of garlic and stale smoke’). Arch’s comment ‘I want to be bigger than Ginsberg’ evokes the post-Beat milieu of the play: just as the 1610 original can be seen as having been pitched in an atmosphere of fragmented idealism and more questionable dreams of the New World, so the latter play can be seen as teetering at the end of the sixties, with space exploration offering a Novo Orbe to inspire Craft’s astrological prognostications.
The new play gives the original text a fierce contemporaneity, while retaining its focus on the brutal but compelling interaction between money and ideas. Faece ends the play by inheriting the chemist shop, and the cast members gradually disperse. At the conclusion Edna’s ghost looks calmly upon the earthly life – one filled, it seems, with hawkers trying to skim off their own gains from the play’s ceaseless ferment of ideas and appetites.
Barnes’s stage adaptation made substantial cuts to the text, shortening the running time and simplifying the complexity of the plot, particularly during the third Act. Occasional words were modernized, ranging from emendations such as ‘woman’ for ‘ribibe’ (1.1.6) to ‘loony’ for ‘moonling’ (1.6.158). While such changes undoubtedly made the language more comprehensible, the technique had its disadvantages: in 1.7, for example, ‘projector’ was altered to ‘promoter’ (lines 5ff.), a change that removes the imaginative energy of the original word and ignores the pains Jonson took to explain the term himself (‘Why sir, one that projects / Ways to enrich men . . .’, ll. 10-17).
Barnes also wrote an additional final scene, as, he explained, ‘one felt the need to see the resolution of the play’s framing device – Pug’s abortive mission to earth’ (Barnes, 1983, 160-1). This ran as follows:
Satan How can they fear hell?
It holds no terrors for ’em.
’Tis their familiar daily, though they do not heed the fires
Or hear the screams from the icy dark outside.
Look on their faces and see what pride and hate’s etched there
They rend their victims with more delight
Than my own legions. [He gestures lights down to spot on him and Pug and on the globe representing earth spinning slowly above stage centre.] This planet earth, this plague-spot of the Cosmos,
I now declare to be out-of-bounds for all my demons.
Stay clear, else we be infected with the air they breathe
And lose the sense of good and evil
And so deprive ourselves of the knowledge
Of who we are and what we do ’gainst God.
There are other planets more fitting for us
Jupiter, Neptune, and Saturn with its seven rings.
Earth we leave to the damned
And the pain of living. [Satan walks upstage into the darkness. Spot still on Pug who looks up at the globe and shudders.] Pug Jupiter’s the place for me! [He notices Satan has gone.] Chief? Where are you, Chief?
Send me to Jupiter, Chief.
Chief?! Chief?! [The light slowly fades out. Darkness.]
While it could be argued that this conclusion is a more satisfactory end to the play, both Robert Cushman (The Observer, 5 Sept. 1976) and Nicholas de Jongh (The Guardian, 3 May 1977) felt that this negative assessment by the devils at the end of the play departed from the more ‘genial ending which was a triumph of honesty’ (cited in Happé, ed. Devil, 21-26).
Peter Happé reports that the use of the thrust stage in the Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, produced the most successful performances. Critics generally approved of the clear, efficient and streamlined text; an exception was Bernard Levin, who objected to the adaptation on principal, preferring the original text (The Sunday Times, 8 May 1977, p. 37). In turn, Trevor Nunn, Stuart Burge and Charles Marowitz responded with a letter taking issue with Levin’s ideas on adaptation, Nunn arguing that Jonson's printed text was in any case different from the ‘hacked about playhouse version’ of which Jonson would not have approved (15 May 1977, p. 4; Happé, p. 26).
The subsequent radio production used a cacophony of screams and music to evoke the opening in hell, and added three other personified vices with their own speeches before the entrance of Iniquity (Wrath, Lady Vanity, and Covetousness). Despite the cuts and emendations the action is at times difficult to follow, and an occasional reliance on invisible stage business prevents this from being a wholesale adaptation of the play for a purely aural medium.
Raikes’s adaptation consists of a cast reading of a cut version of Jonson’s text, with minor additions. An introduction begins, ‘The year is 1610, the scene London’, and goes on to describe the setting, with accompanying sound effects, ‘As if the world ran upon wheels ... Witness this hotch-potch of so many noises.’ After introducing Clerimont, however, this narrative disappears, and remaining changes centre on the addition of phrases such as the unobtrusive ‘Are you there, Master Morose’ (2.1.1) in order to establish which speakers are present.
The production stands out for two reasons: the fine score which introduces the play and separates the scenes, combining with the songs and the violin-playing in the play itself; and the conscious attempt to use the medium to deepen some of the complexities of the play. Deprived of the visual image of Epicene, the production uses a hushed voice which augments the mystery of ‘her’ identity, before the revelation of the boy beneath the disguise – a new kind of metatheatrical joke to replace the original unmasking of the boy actor. Similarly, Morose’s insistence upon silence carries a new significance when transferred to the radio medium. The revelations in the closing scene are addressed to a gasping crowd which fills the gap left by the absence of staging, while the ‘Spectators’ of the Epilogue are neatly altered to ‘Listeners’, concluding a production in which the dialogue is allowed to speak for itself, as opposed to being an adjunct to invisible stage business.
Zweig’s hugely influential adaptation has as its central alteration the realignment of Mosca as a ‘rather reluctant villain’ (McPherson, 1973, 82), who admits that the only way to enrich oneself is through villainy but who argues that parasites exist in order to spread the wealth. He promises to restore the loot gained by fraud, and fulfils this by inviting all to a feast at his expense at the close of the play and allowing the gold back into circulation. As such Mosca becomes the hero of the piece, while Volpone flees to Genoa where he has stored a ship full of merchandise, and the rest escape without punishment. Of Zweig’s version, David McPherson (1973) has commented,
Beneath the lively surface there is a Marxist-orientated attack on the greed and corruption of capitalistic society; Volpone and the men he swindles are seen as products of this evil system. Despite this serious undercurrent, however, the main effect is exactly what Zweig intended: a commedia-style romp.
The play was subsequently adapted by Jules Romains and Zweig for the French stage, which in turn formed the basis of Maurice Tourneur’s French film (see below). Ruth Langner’s translation of Zweig’s German version (published by the Viking Press, New York, 1928) was highly successful in the United States, appearing both on Broadway (premiering at the Guild Theatre, 9 April 1928) and in a national tour (New York Times, 11 March 1930, p. 24; McPherson, 1973, 83). Zweig’s version was also translated into English by George Mikes (Billingham Forum Theatre, Teesside, 1963), and Edward Parone (Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, 1972), and forms the basis of Larry Gelbart's play Sly Fox (1976, published by Samuel French, 1978).
Following Zweig’s German version the two writers collaborated on a reworking for the French stage. This adaptation has a cyclic structure, opening with Mosca hurrying the servants of the household, and closing with his:
Ouvrez les fenetres ... Allez a la porte attendre mes invites. De la musique! Et que personne ne nous parle plus d' argent!
Once again Mosca wins over his master, who exits, covering his face. The Judge’s verdict on the gold is that is that ‘L’heritage pourait aller aux pauvres’ (Volpone … d’après Ben Jonson, 1929, p. 76).
Following the frame of Romains and Zweig’s play, Volpone, a trader in Venice, is put in prison for debt, where he befriends an artful Mosca. Determined to avenge himself on his creditors, who flood him with gifts after his release, he pretends to be dying in order to accrue more of their wealth. However, Volpone having feigned actual death, Mosca triumphs by turning his new master out of his house and assuming the inheritance himself, before becoming a philanthropist and scattering money to the crowd. The cast includes Harry Baur (Volpone) and Louis Jouvet (Mosca).
In its opening chapters this novel appears to be a modernisation of Volpone set in mid-twentieth century Venice. An American, Cecil Fox, accompanied by his new servant, the ex-stage manager and actor William Fieramosca, invite three acquaintances to visit his ‘death bed’: Henry Voltor, an English lawyer; Anson Sims, an elderly American; and Mrs Sheridan, an ‘Old Raven’ who arrives with the attractive Celia Johns. However, it soon becomes clear that the relationship between the three ‘heirs’ and that between Celia and Fieramosca are the work's central points of focus, soon to be intensified by the murder of Mrs Sheridan with Fieramosca as the prime suspect. As the novel progresses, references to ‘Elizabethan’ drama, ‘Jonson’, ‘Volpone’ and finally Mosca’s speech ‘the fatness of the flood . . . remember me’ reveal the conscious modelling of events on the original play, Fox himself even acting in his own version of Volpone. At the close, Fox dies before being revealed as the murder, whilst an artful but vindicated Fieramosca gets the inheritance, banishes the dupes, and gains Celia, who chooses to throw in her lot with this questionable hero.
Despite these deviations from the original plot, thematic issues such as the nature of avarice, Fox’s bored indulgence, and the delicate balance of power between master and servant bind the work to Jonson’s play. The scope of the novel also allows new concerns or those hinted at in the original to be pursued, in particular Fox’s consciousness of his relation to a glorious past (‘There was once a race of men...’, p. 13), which appears to include his conception of Jonson’s play itself; and the light thrown on Volpone by the exploration of the solitary past of each of the characters, suggesting that greed leads inevitably to self-loathing, which is the force that the conmen attempt to manipulate. The absence of ‘trust’ between the heirs, and comments such as ‘the personality was stronger than its actions’ (p. 74), tie the work in to the Jonson of The Alchemist and the humour plays, whilst the image of the dead Fox, glutted on actual gold dust and surrounded by broken clocks, starkly highlights the theme of ever-diminishing time which pervades the original play. The novel’s engagement with Volpone, particularly comments such as Fieramosca’s concern for the denouement, ‘it ought to be built up more’ (p. 161), testifies to a work which has taken on the play and emerged with a new reading of the energy that drives the original, even though the novel itself lacks both the character depth and the bitter comedy of its prototype.
Bond’s account of Shakespeare’s final years in Stratford features the apocryphal final ‘merry meeting’ between Shakespeare and Jonson some time before the former’s death in 1616. Jonson’s rambling near-monologue crams in many details of his life – his killing of the actor Gabriel Spencer, his imprisonment, his religious conversion, the death of his son – and is driven by his jealousy of the aloof serenity of his rival. If this antipathy seems a little overplayed, and Jonson’s belief in his own gifts a little underplayed, the portrait of an affectionate but difficult relationship is nonetheless skilfully drawn. Jonson’s final act is to provide the poison with which, in Bond’s imagining, the played-out Shakespeare takes his own life.
Jonson is placed centre-stage in this Hollywood treatment of the Shakespearean authorship debate. In fantastical reworking of the late Elizabethan theatre the playwright is depicted as a second-rate and colourless hack who is called on by the Earl of Oxford to act as a front for the plays actually written by the Earl himself, and then to act as a go-between when this role is taken by the air-headed actor, William Shakespeare. Frustrated by his own failures and jealous of Shakespeare’s success, Jonson betrays the pair to the authorities, leading inadvertently to a public massacre. After Oxford’s death, he is allowed to rehabilitate himself by rescuing the Earl’s manuscripts from the burning Globe theatre, before praising Shakespeare as ‘the soul of the age.’
Sebastian Armesto’s Jonson is not one that readers of contemporary accounts of the playwright will recognise. Slow-witted and humourless, he lacks the edgy brilliance Jonson evidently possessed, and exists merely as a cipher for the film’s plot, which expands out from the familiar claims of the Oxford theory to a vast fantasy on the Elizabethan succession. Beneath the howlers and absurdities there is the occasional glimmer of an idea that has some relation to the period – from the murkiness of collaboration to the question of how Jonson really felt about the dazzling talents of his friend. Yet as a record of the historical Jonson, the film is of interest only as a negative image – it would be harder to get a less accurate picture of the man than Armesto’s lifeless stooge.