Volpone is a satiric fable. Like Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Orwell’s Animal Farm, it is one of the most enduring such works in the language. Fables present fantasy worlds, at one remove from our own, with little people, or flying islands, or (as in all four examples) speaking animals. For Volpone we might more accurately say that what we have are human beings who behave in every way like animals. Robert Shaughnessy speaks of ‘its anthropomorphic endowment of human figures with animal names and characteristics, in which the “metaphor of legacy hunters as carrion eaters” is worked into “an extended beast fable in which the greedy Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino (vulture, raven, and crow) are outwitted by [Jonson’s] Fox”’ (Shaughnessy, 2002, 38; quoting W. D. Kay, 1995, 89).

But the very fact that this is a play keeps the terms of this ‘metaphor’ very fluid. Human actors inevitably ground us in a sense that we are watching people like ourselves. Yet the text never lets us forget for long its animal fable basis, reminding us that the Voltore/vulture is always the first to smell out death, mocking Sir Pol’s parrot-like chatter, or gesturing towards precedents in Aesop and the tales of Reynard the Fox for Volpone’s behaviour. No production can entirely ignore this dimension of the text; some, like Tyrone Guthrie’s 1968 production, for which actors visited the Regent’s Park zoo to develop their roles, make it central. It is critical that the incongruity of animals speaking prompts us to compare them with ordinary speech-users, human beings. This is what generates the primary satire, and makes of Volpone such a mordant study of greed and self-deception.

But it is a satire that, however powerful and imaginative, operates at a very generalized level: it compares human behaviour with the naked rapacity of animals, suggesting a correspondence that is potentially universal. Fables do not commit to the local, the specific, the individual – a discreet quality, which doubtless explains their popularity in classical and medieval times. Without such a commitment, however, some fables have a tendency to become self-contained fantasies, with limited satiric bearings, as Gulliver’s Travels and Animal Farm have, suitably edited, become entertaining children’s cartoons. Volpone has never been in danger of becoming a tale for children. Its gaze is too pitiless, its humour too sardonic for that. Yet the record of its reception over the last century speaks to its fable-like timelessness, a quality which sets it apart from other plays of its era, and indeed from other works of Jonson. As R. G. Noyes observed: ‘Free from the prevailing humours of his other comedies and from the local customs and manners of Elizabethan and Jacobean times, this bitter play has a central theme of permanent moral value, the warping of human character wrought by avarice and the search for gold’ (1935, 39). Much of the critical history of the play is a fleshing out of that perception.

Yet the obverse of the fable’s timelessness, paradoxically, is its tantalizing capacity to accommodate the most localized of readings. Orwell wrote Animal Farm in the wake of the rise of the totalitarian powers in 1930s Europe, and Swift was at least in part addressing the Hanoverian political scene. Chaucer too was glancing slyly at church and royal politics in his tale of a fox in the cabbage-patch. But if the fable accommodates such readings, it does not lightly endorse them. It is far too prudential a form, encouraging inference but eschewing closure, a substitute for free speech in worlds where speech is not free. As the Epistle to Volpone reminds us, such was Jonson’s world. He had been imprisoned for one of the first plays with which we can associate him – The Isle of Dogs, and again for the most recent, Eastward Ho! – and harried for several others in between, notably Poetaster and Sejanus. The adoption of the beast fable is Jonson’s calculated response to that record, and to the even tighter restrictions on free speech that followed in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. The publication of the play in quarto (Q), with its dedication to the two universities, elaborate Epistle, and pages of commendatory verse is a celebration of the success of that strategy. This edition attempts among other things to recapture some of the local readings that were available to alert readers of Q at the time – not to deny the play’s undoubted ‘central theme of permanent moral value’ but to show how, as in all the best fables, that theme was informed at first by very particular circumstances.

Dating and publication

The colophon in the 1616 folio (F1) tells us that Volpone ‘was first acted, in the yeere 1605’, but there is compelling internal evidence that this is Old Style dating and that it was written and first performed in the early months of 1606, New Style. Although Peregrine’s early gossip is full of allusions to events in 1604/5, mention of porpoises and a whale invoke – allowing for a prudential fictional hazing – January 1606 (see 2.1.40, 46–7n.). Porpoises and whales are hardly a dangerous matter, but the time frame they here adumbrate is a peculiarly fraught one.

The whale’s sighting was on the ‘very day’ Peregrine left London, ‘seven weeks’ before (2.1.16). When we cross-reference this with Jonson’s proud boast in the Prologue that ‘two months since’ the concept of the play had not entered his mind (14) and that ‘five weeks fully penned it’, evidently work on the play paralleled Peregrine’s journey to Venice. That is, writing started in the second half of January 1606 and was completed late in February or early in March, in time (with rehearsals) for a first performance before 25 March, New Year’s Day (Old Style). Jonson thus wrote the play in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, at the time the surviving plotters were being tried and executed, and while he and his wife were themselves arraigned as recusants. The tensions surrounding these events are, as we shall see, deeply imprinted in Volpone and flagged in its first publication.

Q is dated by Jonson’s signature of the Epistle as ‘From my house in the Blackfriars, this 11 of February, 1607’. (Again this might be either Old Style [1608] or New Style, but is probably the latter). The Stationers’ Register contains no entry for it. But just as the text was licensed for performance by the King’s Men by the Master of the Revels (as the F1 colophon assures us), it would have been licensed for print in the usual way by Sir George Buc, who had assumed such duties in 1606. The Epistle insists, ‘My works are read, allowed (I speak of those that are entirely mine)’ (41), distinguishing Volpone from Eastward Ho!, which was not so ‘allowed’.

Q was published by Thomas Thorpe, who issued a number of Jonson works around this time; the printer has been identified, on the evidence of a solitary ornament (a chipped initial N on sig. ¶1v), as George Eld, who had worked for Thorpe on quartos of Sejanus and Eastward Ho! and was shortly to print a quarto of the masques of Blackness and of Beauty for him (Lavin, 1970). Doubtless following Jonson’s instructions they produced a text which announced its own importance. It is dedicated to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where audiences evidently responded enthusiastically to performances by the King’s Men. University authorities usually prevented professional performances, and Jonson seizes on this accolade to enhance his personal authority (see Dedication, 9n.). He rewards the universities with the Epistle, his most elaborate published critical treatise to date. In it he presents a studied apologia for his career and for his frequent brushes with authority, dissociating himself from ‘the present trade of the stage’, licentious both in its subject matter and in its disregard for formal structure (Dutton, 2000, 114–31). Protesting his own ‘innocence’ (J. D. Rea, in his 1919 edition of Volpone, finds many parallels in this strategy with Erasmus’s Letter to Martin Dorp), Jonson aligns himself with Horatian values, New Comedy practices, and the ‘needful rule[s]’ (Prologue, 32) of classical criticism, all concurring with the applause of the universities as markers of his own integrity in this play.

These themes are then echoed back in an impressive array of ten (in rare texts eleven) poems of commendation, unprecedented in a mere quarto play. In keeping with this extended proem, the text of the play is laid out to resemble humanist editions of the classic Roman comedy of Plautus and Terence, with which it implicitly vies for comparison, down to details like the ‘Argument’ written as an acrostic – an artifice Jonson elsewhere despises. This format reflects almost nothing of playhouse practice. There are no stage directions and the characters in a scene are all listed, continental-style, at its head; we are left to deduce their comings and goings. The text contains some minor confusions in speech-headers and odd misnumberings of scenes (5.5 is given as ‘Act.4. Scene. 5.’), but is on the whole very clean and intelligible. There were, however, several phases of press-correction, affecting some formes (notably B inner, D, E, and M outer) more than others. These were more complex than Herford and Simpson or de Vocht supposed in their editions (the earliest to address the text in such detail). Some passages received attention more than once; other changes involved mis-correction; and it is now apparent that some differences are the result of developing damage rather than of deliberate change. In none of this is Jonson’s own hand clearly apparent.

The 1616 folio text of Volpone appears on sigs. 2O4–2X4 of F1 and reproduces Q with particular fidelity, even down to repeating errors in speech headings and scene numberings. The general format agreed by Jonson and Stansby for the folio resembles that of the Volpone quarto quite closely, and hence there were fewer substantive changes than for most of the other plays. F1 is less lavish in its use of capital letters and italic type, and at times (but only at times) seems more consistent in the use of features such as dashes and question marks. Such differences – see the Textual Essay – are almost certainly matters of shop-practice or compositorial choice, and it is not possible to determine authorial direction behind them. Jonson presumably decided to remove some commendatory poems (transferring others to the head of the volume) and to refer more opaquely in the Epistle (92–4n.) to his unpublished commentary on the Ars Poetica. Occasional arbitrary word-substitutions, like ‘goodness’ for ‘vertue’ (4.5.43) and ‘Fitted’ for ‘Apted’ (5.4.55), may or may not be his work. The same can finally be said for the most distinctive of all the changes, the addition of twenty-nine marginal stage directions. Most of these can be deduced from the text. Only such matters as an embrace (1.5.38) and the identities of whom Mosca addresses at 4.4.15–25 arguably require extrinsic knowledge, while ‘Cestus’ at 5.2.103 (a gloss rather than a stage direction) must surely derive from Jonson but is quirkily redundant. A small number of changes seemingly relate to playhouse practice, and Jonson is unlikely to have been personally responsible for these. In short, while Jonson’s hand is clearly apparent in some changes, it is highly debatable in many, and the failure to correct glaring errors (for example, the misnumbering of 5.5 is replicated) surely indicates that he was not minutely engaged.

F1 has most commonly been used as copy-text for Volpone by modern editors, though there has also been a tendency to mix Q and F1 readings eclectically. The primary argument for using F1 is that it reflects Jonson’s own final thoughts on his play, but as I have suggested there is room for doubt about the level of his personal engagement in its text. My choice of Q as copy-text is based on the conviction that it reflects at least as much of Jonson’s own attention to the text as F1 and indeed rather more. The elaborate paratexts of the volume, including the commendatory poems, constitute a deliberate effort not only to proclaim the significance of the play but also to relate it to the moment of its composition. Much of that is lost in the translation of the text to the uniform format of F1. A principal objective of this edition, based on Q, is to recover something of the moment of the play’s original composition and publication. (For fuller discussion of these matters, see the Textual Essay, Electronic Edition.)

The original moment of the play

In many respects the two early texts of Volpone are very similar, and carry Jonson’s authority in equal measure. But they address readers in subtly different ways at different moments in his career, as becomes more apparent if we approach the play itself, as readers would have in 1607, through the elaborate prefacing of Q. The dedication of the play to the two universities is sui generis for a play of the period and implicitly appeals to an uncontaminated arena of higher judgement. Jonson thanks them for their ‘love and acceptance shown to his poem in the presentation’, but he nowhere else mentions performance, or even the playing company. Unlike F1 (which is oddly two-minded about this: see P. M. Wright, 1991), this is exclusively a text for readers, not for the popular audience of the theatres, who had howled Sejanus off the stage and continued to support ‘ribaldry, profanation, blasphemy’, hallmarks of the ‘misc’line interludes’ (Epistle, 28–9, 66–7) of other writers.

Within this concentration on readers, Jonson implicitly discriminates further, in favour of an exclusive few who will not only applaud his high humanist aspirations but will also see, both in the approbation of the universities and in the subtext of the Epistle, his justification of himself to authorities who had challenged earlier plays. The most recent of these had been the Earl of Northampton’s arraignment of him before the Privy Council over Sejanus, and the imprisonment (with threats of worse) over Eastward Ho! Any such subtexts in the folio have a very different resonance, as signalled in the removal of the playfully truculent ‘There follows an Epistle, if you dare venture on the length.’ In 1616 Jonson is no longer at loggerheads with authority but is a pensioned laureate; his plays share space in the folio with the masques and entertainments which have so regularly graced the court. Two important readers of the 1607 text, who would have read it in the light of those earlier confrontations, his ‘mortal enemy’ Northampton, and his most problematic patron, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, were dead. No one else would have recognized in the Epistle passages from a letter sent to Salisbury when Jonson and Chapman were in serious trouble over Eastward Ho! Indeed, Eastward Ho! itself no longer threatens its authors with judicial mutilation – in 1613 it was performed at court. Conversely, everyone can now see the Epistle’s debt to the ‘Apologetical Dialogue’ to Poetaster, since that is now also printed in the folio, its quarrels being ancient history.

In 1606 and 1607 these and other tensions were still most palpable. Jonson and his wife were arraigned by the Consistory Court of London, charged with recusancy (9 January 1606); he first appeared to answer those charges on 26 April. This was part of the increased repression of Roman Catholics that followed the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605, an event with which Jonson was linked. He dined with many of the plotters a month before its discovery. On 7 November the Privy Council called on him to track down a Catholic priest for interrogation, and Jonson made what proved an unsuccessful attempt via, intriguingly, the chaplain of the Venetian ambassador. (See Letter 9, headnote; Electronic Edition, Life Records, 30; Teague, 1998; Martin and Finnis, 2003.) In all of this, the Gunpowder Plot, by accident or design, helped to fix the religious complexion of the newly united Great Britain for the next two centuries, in ways that severely disadvantaged Roman Catholics. It is apparent that Jonson understood that he was living through historic and traumatic developments.

The subtext of the Epistle goes well beyond the denunciation of popular drama in its appeal to the ‘learned arbitresses’. When Jonson invokes ‘the impossibility of any man’s being the good poet, without first being a good man’, he obliquely glances at this wider situation as he writes the play, under indictment for recusancy and charged as ‘by fame a seducer of youth to the Popish religion’. (Those charges were never actually dismissed, only ‘stayed’; they would in effect be nullified by his reconversion to the Church of England in 1610.) This is hardly something Jonson could discuss openly in 1607. But he could encourage knowing readers to infer what was at stake in his choice of commendatory verse. One poem (that by Nathan Field) suggests that it was specifically solicited, and the others may well have been too.

These poems have received very little attention. Only three editions have reproduced them as they appear in Q, as precursors to the play: Rea (who had no access to the only two copies containing Field’s), de Vocht, and Parker. Even some who have used Q as copy-text (e.g. Halio) have not included them. Yet they tell us more than their formulaic nature might suggest: they are part of Jonson’s book. Firstly, they pick up the implicit appeal of the Epistle to an elite, initiate readership: they are signed only with initials, so that even today we are not sure of some of the authors. But E. B.’s (Edmund Bolton’s) place of honour among these verses surely spoke volumes to those readers: he and eighteen others had been summoned for recusancy a year earlier, along with Jonson, at the time the play was begun. Sir Politic Would-be’s role in the play more or less openly alludes to the post-Plot paranoia which led to such prosecutions. He ludicrously – and so, from a censor’s perspective, unthreateningly – imports into Venice the world of conspiracy theory, statecraft, and espionage which characterized the England he had so recently left. His fantasies about tinder-boxes in the Arsenale (4.1.86–91) and selling Venice to the Turk (4.1.130) are preposterous, yet clearly echo tales of gunpowder in the Palace of Westminster and Roman Catholic continental conspiracies. His ‘politic’ advice on religion (4.1.22–5) might have stood the recusant Jonson himself in good stead; and while Lady Would-be doesn’t know what she is talking about when she speaks of people fleeing ‘for liberty of conscience’ (4.2.61), many in the audience would understand. Similarly, her modishly new word ‘assassinates’ seems to have had a particular currency in relation to the Gunpowder Plot (3.4.112: cf. ‘assassination’, OED).

By the same token, as everyone on the fringes of the court knew, John Donne was an anguished Anglican convert from a family famous for its Catholic witness. He was a fellow sufferer with his friend Jonson in the war of religious conflict. And Donne’s Latin, which (like Bolton’s) excludes a good part of the readership, treads delicately on delicate topics: ‘Poet, if the counsellors of the laws of men and of God would dare follow and emulate what you have dared here in your art, we should all be wise enough for salvation.’ These ‘counsellors of the laws of men and of God’ are precisely the politicians, clergy, and lawyers who had challenged Jonson’s earlier plays and arraigned him in the Consistory Court. Invoking ideas of ‘salvation’ again directs us to religious issues and the audacity of the play in general, in a context where, like Bolton, Donne is ostensibly praising the (paradoxical) innovation of Jonson’s classicism (Flynn, 2004). In the play itself, Mosca’s ‘entertainment’ (1.2) echoes Donne’s Metempsychosis or ‘The Progress of the Soul’, of which Jonson told Drummond that the ‘general purpose was to have brought in all the bodies of the heretics from the soul of Cain, and at last left it in the body of Calvin’ (Informations, 93–5). Both reflect sardonically on Counter-Reformation antagonisms and the shifting of coats ‘in these days of reformation’ (1.2.30), through the Pythagorean motif of the transmigration of souls, a wry alternative to the Christian search for salvation. As so often, the show-within-the-show points us to essential themes in the wider drama: these themes are often coded, but recur too persistently to be incidental.

No other commendatory poem relates to Jonson’s personal situation so openly, though several talk knowingly about his classicism being not antiquarian but an invigorating new discipline, and others play interestingly on the fox motif. Chapman, for instance, addresses Volpone rather than Jonson, so that praise for one becomes praise for the other: ‘Pole to all wits, believed in for thy craft. / In which the scene’s both mark and mystery / Is hit and sounded’ (12–14). Jonson is praised for both ‘craft’ (cunning / skill) and ‘mystery’ (secret or obscure purpose / trade), which is ‘sounded’ or plumbed to the bottom. Thus, as Chapman praises Jonson’s skill as a dramatist, he contrives also to imply a cunning secret purpose, which needs to be examined deeply. ‘E. S.’ more cryptically concludes that ‘The fox will live, when all his hounds be dead’: the play will outlive all its critics. Yet he also implies that Jonson will outlast all who have pursued him. Like Jonson himself in the Epistle, and like Chapman, he suggests that ‘Volpone’ has, fox-like, outsmarted his critics. The play has met with plaudits from all, including ‘Minerva’s cities’. And, despite its ‘mystery’, it has avoided the censure which has befallen so many of Jonson’s earlier plays. If ‘E. S.’ is, as many suspect, his patron, Esmé Stuart, Lord d’Aubigny, who seems to have been instrumental in effecting Jonson’s and Chapman’s release in the Eastward Ho! affair, such a celebration of ‘the fox’s’ survival is particularly pointed.

The names of Bolton and Beaumont appear in full in the head-matter of F1, but they have very different resonances from those of their Q initials. Bolton is now an eminent Cambridge historian, who will shortly recommend Jonson as a founder member of his proposed Academ Roial. Beaumont has died young and been buried in Westminster Abbey, after a glittering career only flickering into life when he wrote for Volpone. These are now establishment names. Similarly, Donne is a respected member of the Anglican church, on his way to becoming Dean of St Paul’s; his status perhaps required that he retain the semi-anonymity of initials. When Jonson told Drummond about Donne’s Metempsychosis, he added: ‘Of this he never wrote but one sheet, and now, since he was made doctor, repenteth highly’ (Informations, 95–6).

F1 differs from Q in one other critical respect. On the page listing the ‘Persons of the Play’ (rather than ‘Comedy’) F1 announces ‘The Scene: Venice’. Nothing in Q announces the setting at all. Indeed, a 1607 reader had to reach the beginning of Act 2 before he discovered where the action was set. Readers of F1 must have remarked upon the play’s accurate depiction of Venice as one of its characteristic virtues, as so many modern critics have done (see Perkinson, 1940; Praz, 1958; Donaldson, 1972a; Cohen, 1978; McPherson, 1988, 1990, 1993; R. B. Parker, 1991; Salingar, 1993; Mullini, 1993; J. Bate, 1996; Henke, 1997; and Hiscock, 1998). Many features of the city suited Jonson’s story, including its vast mercantile wealth. It led the way in trade and moneylending that London was rapidly following, suggesting parallels which have been the basis of several quasi-Marxist studies (L. C. Knights, 1937; Gottwald, 1969; Harris, 2001). This dimension of the play was given prominence in the most influential of all its adaptations, that by Stefan Zweig (1926), which was further adapted by Jules Romains and used as the basis of Maurice Tourneur’s great French film version (1939). The preface to the English subtitled version of the film claims: ‘Ben Jonson’s purpose in recounting this tale which takes place in the period of [Venice’s] decadence is to caricature and thus show up the malignant evil in the souls of those scoundrels who eventually brought about the downfall of the great Republic.’

Other issues, flagged in Q’s prefatory matter, may have been of equal concern to Jonson. By the standards of the day Venice was remarkably tolerant in matters of religion (‘liberty of conscience’), and of censorship, as repeated references to Pietro Aretino remind us (see 3.4.96–7n., 3.7.60n.): the satirist settled there because of its liberal book trade. The actuality of Venice represented an antithesis of sorts to the world of religious oppression, and of personal and literary surveillance, which Jonson inhabited. Volpone’s Venice, however, is indeed a world of plotting and conspiracy, though different from the one fantasized by the Would-bes. It has clear links with the religious tensions in England, most particularly in the pervasive references to diabolic possession, culminating in Voltore’s graphic ‘possession’ at the height of the trial (see Persons of the Comedy, 2n., ‘Mosca’; 2.6.96; 3.7.46, 277; 5.2.24, 28; 5.9.8; 5.10.10, 5.12.8–10, 24–31, 101–2). Exorcism of possessed souls was identified with claims to spiritual authority, as in Samuel Harsnett’s Anglican exposés of both of puritan and Catholic ‘frauds’ (e.g. A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, 1603). King James took it upon himself to expose impostures, as in the case of Anne Gunter of Windsor, who in October 1605 was ‘strangely possessed and bewitched, so that in her fits she cast out of her nose and mouth pins in great abundance’. Informed members of the audience must have associated Voltore’s ‘fit’ with these matters (Yonge, Diary).

In short, Q is very much of the moment of that signature flourish to the Epistle in February 1607, when the hunted fox Jonson has escaped to a house in fashionable Blackfriars. Its introductory matter, all properly framed in humanist concerns about poetry and the moral purposes of art, contrives to induct the reader into the world of Jonson’s own clashes with authority, religious tensions in these ‘days of reformation’, and (no) ‘liberty of conscience’, and encourages readers to consider the England/ Venice of the play in those lights. Such a reading was of course still possible in 1616, and to subsequent ages. But it was less primed, less foregrounded, less urgent.

The play, then, is thematically alive to Jonson’s concerns as a recusant and a writer. I have argued elsewhere that these also relate to the beast-fable format, with which I began, translated to the stage in Volpone uniquely in that era; it has no parallels in the dramatic works of his contemporaries (Dutton, 2008). Such beast fables in the era were almost invariably political satires, and many of them focused on Elizabeth’s wily Lord Treasurer, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and on his son and successor, Robert, Earl of Salisbury. As the most powerful politicians of their respective generations, they inevitably drew such satiric attention. But there was a special dimension to this for Jonson and English Roman Catholics in general, who widely blamed the Cecils for the harsh recusancy laws which governed them in the second half of Elizabeth’s reign and into the reign of James. The particular accusation was that they promoted these punitive measures not out of religious zeal but in order to secure power and profit for themselves (Verstegen, A Declaration of the True Cause of the Great Troubles, Presupposed to be Intended Against the Realm of England 1592). And that charge surfaced again with international force at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, which Robert Cecil was accused of exploiting, if not actually instigating, for his own purposes. The accusation (‘your daily plotting of so tragical stratagems against recusants’) bit so deeply that Cecil himself responded to it in print with An Answer to Certain Scandalous Papers (1606), from which the quotation is taken (B3v).

In such contexts, it is most likely that Volpone too was received as an anti-Cecil work: not a detailed portrait or roman-à-clef, but a play which was understood to shadow Salisbury’s machinations. The link between Donne’s Metempsychosis and the play is also relevant, since the poem is also in part a satire on Cecil (Van Wyk Smith, 1973). And there is evidence for the association with Cecil in the play’s later reception. In the Restoration, Volpone ‘was the title for a crafty politician, particularly applied, with surprising results, to the Earl of Godolphin’ (Noyes, 1935, 50; Noyes, 1934). The role in the play of Nano the dwarf also supports this: Salisbury was short of stature and hunch-backed, features which his opponents cruelly lampooned. Nano asks of himself and his role: ‘And why a pretty “ape”? But for pleasing imitation / Of greater men’s action, in a ridiculous fashion’ (3.3.13–14). The play thus preserves the role of the ape as satiric impersonator, often associated with fox fables (as in Edmund Spenser’s Mother Hubbard’s Tale: see below). This was not confined to the scripted text: he is silently present throughout the mountebank scene; and Lady Pol pointedly asks ‘I pray you, lend me your dwarf’ (3.5.29), but when they reappear (4.2, 4.3) he has virtually nothing to say.

The Gunpowder Plot confirmed the King’s confidence in Salisbury and allowed him (as in the arraignment of Jonson) to intensify anti-Catholic measures. It thus revived all the earlier accusations of those who resented the regnum Cecilianum: that the Cecils were upstarts who exploited public office for personal gain and repressed the Catholics not out of religious conviction but because they profited from ruined estates and the exploitation of minors placed in their care. To the Cecils’ many enemies this was the real plot, not lurid tales of gunpowder under Parliament.

This is what links Sir Pol’s conspiracies to the grim comedy of Volpone and Mosca fleecing the legacy-hunters. The former are a fantasy world, full of veritable ‘red herrings’ (4.1.51), all proved ultimately to be ‘Drawn out of playbooks’ (5.4.42). The real threat to the state comes from this ‘magnifico’ and his parasite, defrauding ‘respectable’ citizens in a blasphemous pursuit of gold, subverting the principles of law (Voltore), parenthood (Corbaccio), and marriage (Corvino) in the process. If these dupes may be said to deserve everything they get, this is because Jonson focuses on the collective sickness which allows such rapacity to flourish. This is most apparent in the proceedings of the Avocatori, who not only behave more like English magistrates than Venetian attorneys, but also take an unhealthy interest in the prospect of Mosca as a son-in-law. They ironically fulfil the Epistle’s promise ‘to put the snaffle in their mouths that cry out we never punish vice in our interludes’ (86–8), not in the spirit of justice but spurred by their own ruffled dignity and affronts to the social hierarchy.

Sources and analogues

Such were the concerns that played on Jonson in the five weeks when, as he claims, he wrote the play. The creative challenge was to translate them into appropriate dramatic form, for the ‘delight’ of popular audiences, but also the ‘profit’ of a more select circle of ‘understanders’. Predictably, he drew deeply on his knowledge of the ancients for this, but also on more recent fox-lore, and very probably (for the Venetian material) on the help of his friends. And he wove them seamlessly together, in an apparent furor poeticus, a condition of which he normally spoke sceptically.

No source for the main narrative of Volpone is known to exist. The central theme of duping legacy-hunters is a timeless one, for which Jonson trawled classical precedents. Horace’s Satires 2.5 combines it (the captatio) with the beast fable of the fox and the crow. Several of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead add particular features, and the last chapters of Petronius’s Satyricon show how the subject might be adapted into a swindling operation (Upton, 1749, 18–19; J. Q. Adams, 1904; Holthausen, 1890). Jonson also looked to classical precedents for the form of the distinctive play he was fashioning: see Davison, (1963), Thayer (1963), Gum (1969), Dick (1974) and Park (1981). And he explored much beast lore, classical and medieval, including Aesop, the early Alexandrian Physiologus and the beast epic of Reynard the Fox, first printed by Caxton: these have been examined, notably by Scheve (1950), Knoll (1963), South (1965), R. B. Parker (1976a), Wade (1977), and Dutton (2004).

Two other non-dramatic beast fables, which Jonson certainly knew, deserve attention as analogues of Volpone (Dutton, 2008). Both involve foxes: Thomas North’s translation of Anton Francesco Doni’s Moral Philosophy (1570, 1601) and Edmund Spenser’s Mother Hubbard’s Tale (1591). It is likely that all three works were read as part of the same anti-Cecilian political discourse. The first edition of Spenser’s poem was ‘called in’ and not reprinted until 1612, immediately after Salisbury’s death, strongly suggesting whom it had offended. It concerns two shape-shifting social climbers: an Ape and a Fox. The former, ‘stalk[ing] stately by, / As if he were some great Magnifico’ (Complaints, 1591, sig. O1), usurps the Lion-king, while the latter becomes his chief minister. Their deceits, Volpone/Mosca-like, each depend on those of the other. The Fox acquires vast power and wealth for himself and his family, glancing at Burghley and the preferment he sought for his own sons. Jonson’s own 1617 copy of Spenser’s Works endorses that suggestion. A marginal note to one passage reads ‘Lord Treasurers’ (Riddell and Stewart, 1995, 53). Burghley and Salisbury both held that position, uniquely as father and son.

Doni’s Moral Philosophy figures in an oddly foregrounded joke in Epicene (4.4.68–9). This ancient collection of oriental Fables by Bidpai came into English via Doni’s Italian. It is a long and convoluted work, but a treacherous fox becomes prominent in the last section. He is the King’s ‘chief secretary in court’, who betrays another courtier and causes him to be put to death: ‘So the traitor by another traitor was betrayed’ (1570 edn, trans. Sir Thomas North, p. 180v). When the book was reissued in 1601 the deadly betrayal of one courtier by another must have been associated with Chief Secretary Robert Cecil’s part in the fall of the Earl of Essex, which was long resented by Cecil’s enemies. Some such association must have kept this now obscure work resonant for the audience of Epicene. But neither these tales, nor more demonstrable sources and precedents, provided Jonson with Volpone’s plot outline.

John Aubrey claimed that the character of Volpone was based on Thomas Sutton (1532–1611), a soldier-financier and founder of Charterhouse, but modern scholarship has found little to justify this suggestion (R. C. Evans, 1989d). Many agree, however, that Sir Politic Would-be is based on an actual person or persons. Rea, in his 1919 edition, argued that he is a satiric study of Sir Henry Wotton, then British ambassador in Venice (2.1.17n). Although this outraged H&S – Jonson and Wotton usually got on cordially – details of the portrait must have evoked Wotton to those who knew of him. These include the time he had been in Venice: 4.1.36; inveterate gossiping and diary-keeping; collecting ‘engines’ and inventions; being heavily in debt to the Jews of Venice for furnishing his palazzo: 4.1.40–1. Yet other details better fit the colourful traveller, Sir Anthony Sherley. This extraordinary projector and plotter was first proposed as a model for Sir Pol by Chew (1937, 239). This seems particularly plausible in the scene of his humiliation under the tortoise-shell. A man of colossal self-conceit, Sherley pretended to be an ambassador, dabbled in statecraft, and met with humiliations in Venice (from where he was expelled on pain of death in 1604), Zant, and Aleppo (5.4.4n.) He was kept under surveillance (and, he claimed, attacked) by the British government for plotting against the Turks, and clashed with the merchants of the Levant Company for the same reason; note the Merchants involved in Sir Pol’s humiliation. Sir Pol would be a pale shadow of Sherley, but they do have points in common. (See Persons of the Comedy, 6n; also 2.1.62n. and 4.1.70ff., which reads like a parody of Sherley’s attempts to gain employment with the Venetian state.) James Tulip has even suggested Salisbury as a model for Sir Pol, which perhaps misreads the operation of the play’s undoubted anti-Cecil satire (1996, 94). Such identifications rarely applied point-for-point to a single individual, partly for prudential reasons; Jonson often tantalized informed members of the audience with multiple possibilities (cf. 2.1.56–60). He seems to have subjected friends to rough guying as well as enemies. It was not necessarily malicious, or received as such.

Rea (1925) first noted the extensive debt of Volpone to Erasmus, both to The Praise of Folly (1511) – through which several of the classical sources Jonson draws upon seem to have been filtered – and to the Letter to Martin Dorp (1515). Phrases from the Letter recur throughout the Epistle, as indicated in the notes of this edition, while the debt to the Praise is at its most intense in Nano’s first song: ‘Fools, they are the only nation’ (see the Appendix, # a). Mosca’s entertainment (1.2.1–62), a travesty of Pythagoras’s doctrine of metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls, is closely modelled on Lucian’s Dream, or The Cock, with details from Diogenes Laertius’s discussion of Pythagoras in Of the Lives of the Philosophers, 2.8. The Dream is an ironic sermon in praise of poverty, taking the form of a dialogue between Micyllus the cobbler and his cock, whose crowing wakes his master from dreams of a luxurious banquet at which he has been celebrating the inheritance of a vast fortune. (Volpone does not tell us this, but Micyllus has not in fact inherited anything: he foreshadows the disappointed suitors in the play.) The cobbler is surprised to hear a bird speak, and the cock confesses that it harbours the reincarnated soul of Pythagoras, offering an account of all its transmigrations hitherto in satiric gibes at other philosophers. Diogenes Laertius recounts anecdotes about Pythagoras and his followers, including the passage of what became his soul from Aethalides, son of Mercury/Hermes, through Euphorbus, Hermotimus, and several plants and animals, down to the fisherman, Pyrrhus, before entering Pythagoras himself. He mentions the myth of the golden thigh, and Pythagoras’s injunctions to his followers to maintain silence, and to eat neither meat nor beans. The Dream plays with much of this material and adds provocative details, such as that the soul also passed through Apasia, a courtesan from Miletus (so ‘Pythagoras’ had once been a woman), and the Cynic, Crates, before lodging in the ironically noisy cock. ‘I am now living with you, laughing at you every day for bewailing and lamenting your poverty and for admiring the rich through ignorance of the troubles that are theirs’ (Loeb edn, 203).

Several satiric set-pieces in the play can be traced to specific sources. Two run parallel with a notoriously cynical work by Cornelius Agrippa von Nettersheim (1530), translated into English by J. Sanford as Of the Vanity and Uncertainty of Arts and Sciences in 1569. The first is Mosca’s ironic praise of lawyers, 1.3.52–66, and the second is the satire on doctors at 1.4.20–36 (see Appendix, # b). Similarly, in the same scene (1.4.144–59), Jonson has Volpone string together a traditional litany of the universal miseries of old age, drawing on Pliny’s Natural History, Juvenal’s Satire 10 and, once more, Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly (see Appendix, # c).

For his knowledge of Venice and its customs Jonson certainly read Lewis Lewkenor’s translation of Gaspare Contarini’s The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599), as Sir Pol claims to have done (4.1.40). But he goes well beyond this to convey aspects of Italian culture in general and of Venetian practices in particular. Details of the language (names, coinage, etc.) and the literature can often be traced to John Florio’s A World of Words (1598). But Jonson may well have derived much of this directly from his friend, the scholar/translator, Florio (see Persons of the Comedy, headnote). He probably also made use of other friends associated with Italy, including his new collaborator, Inigo Jones, and the musician Ferrabosco brothers. Alfonso wrote a setting for ‘Come, My Celia’ (Airs, 1609).

In a self-referential touch Jonson openly alludes to the commedia dell’arte, especially in 2.3, on the traditions of which the Volpone–Celia–Corvino plot seems to be modelled. The standard location for such a play was in a street overlooked by private houses, where much use could be made of windows. Stock types from commedia dell’arte (lover, comic servant, braggart soldier, serving wench, etc.) were familiar to London audiences: a troupe played at court in August 1602. The closest plot-parallel to Volpone is in Flaminio Scala’s Fortuna di Flavio, as noted by Winifred Smith (see Appendix, # d). Jonson’s accuracy in portraying such features as Volpone’s performance as a mountebank and Corvino’s typically Italian treatment of his wife is corroborated by two contemporary English accounts of Venice, by Fynes Moryson and Thomas Coryate. Moryson visited the city in the 1590s, but there is no evidence that Jonson had access to his account. Coryate did not go until after Volpone was staged and printed. They nevertheless attest to the accuracy of the information he received from other sources, and are thus useful analogues to the text. For passages on mountebanks and the treatment of Italian wives: see Appendix, e.

Subsequent reception and performance history

In the century after its first performance the reputation of Volpone was second only to that of Catiline among Jonson’s plays (Bradley and Adams, JAB; G. E. Bentley, 1945). It held the stage with remarkable consistency down to the Civil War, as numerous plaudits attest, many voicing particular admiration for its ingenious plotting. (The original casting of Volpone is discussed in Persons of the Comedy.) It was revived between 1615 and 1619 (Riddell, 1969) and considered for court performance by the Revels Office in 1619 or 1620. It was certainly performed at court in 1624, 1630, and 1638, when a performance at the Blackfriars is also recorded. Its rich stage history from the Restoration down to 1785 has been well documented by R. G. Noyes (1935). From 1663 it was in the repertoire of Killigrew’s King’s Men company, playing at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. This was the time of Dryden’s comments in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), when he was the first to note that ‘there appears two actions in the play; the first, naturally ending with the fourth act; the second forced from it in the fifth’ (Works, ed. Monk, 42). The point was reiterated by John Dennis in his Letter Concerning Humour in Comedy (1695), who further objected that Volpone completely changes character in the last act. Dennis was also the first to regard the Would-bes as expendable. After 1727 the Drury Lane company lost its proprietary right to the play, which thereafter was more often played at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Covent Garden. It reached a height of popularity in 1733, being performed twelve times by the two companies in a year, and on 2 January 1734 at both houses simultaneously. Perhaps this reflects a continuing awareness of the play’s links with the Gunpowder Plot, the stuff of live politics as long as the Jacobite cause lingered on (Noyes, 1935, 72). After 1750 its popularity waned, and it was not played at all between 1753 and 1771. One last revival occurred at the Haymarket in 1783, moving to Drury Lane in 1785.

After 1785 Volpone was not staged for 136 years, though it remained of interest to writers (Lockwood, 2005). The Phoenix Society revived it in 1921. Since then, it has been performed more often than any other play of its era (except for Shakespeare), with some productions becoming legendary – notably those involving Donald Wolfit between 1938 and 1953 (and recorded by the BBC in 1959), lovingly analysed by R. B. Parker (1976b). Ralph Richardson was an idiosyncratic Volpone in a Stratford production of 1952. Tyrone Guthrie staged two notable productions, at Minneapolis in 1964 and London’s National Theatre in 1968. These years have been well reviewed by R. B. Parker (1978), Ejner Jensen and Arnold Hinchliffe (both 1985). Hinchliffe admirably summarizes the issues repeatedly faced in staging the play: ‘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’ (1985, 73–4). All of the most memorable recent British productions have tried to balance these problems against each other. Of particular note are Peter Hall’s at the National Theatre with Paul Scofield (1977), Bill Alexander’s at The Other Place (Stratford) with Richard Griffiths (1983), the radically modernized English Stage Company touring production with John Woodvine (1990), The National Theatre production with Michael Gambon (1995), the Royal Shakespeare Company production with Malcolm Storry, which premiered at The Swan in March 1999, and that at the Royal Exchange in Manchester (2004), directed by Greg Hersov, with Gerard Murphy in the lead. The annotation of this edition attempts to suggest something of how each production handled these balancing acts.

Modern critical reception

The modern critical reputation of Volpone is almost indistinguishable from that of Jonson himself, so central has it been to constructions of what makes him an important and challenging writer. It begins essentially with T. S. Eliot’s famous 1919 essay on Jonson, reinforced by his review of the Phoenix Society production (Eliot, 1919, 1921). Since then the debate has very largely focused on three main issues: the place of the play in Jonson’s development as an artist; its morality; and its structure. The perception that Volpone marks a major turning point in Jonson’s career is of long standing: ‘Literary critics often point to Volpone as a watershed in Ben Jonson’s development as a dramatist – the play that marks the transition from his moderately successful comedies of humors and the failure of Sejanus to his great middle comedies’ (Chaplin, 2002, 57). He cites Barton (1984), Riggs (1989), and J. Shapiro (1991), each raising an issue – the influence of Aristophanes, psychological maturity, overcoming the anxiety of Marlowe’s precedence – to account for the change. That list might be greatly expanded. As Chaplin observes, ‘To a significant degree, how we read Volpone and how we register its differences from Jonson’s earlier drama determine how we construct Ben Jonson as a dramatist and author’ (2002, 57).

Harry Levin anticipated some of this in ‘Jonson’s Metempsychosis’ (1943). He is mainly concerned to elucidate the role of Mosca’s ‘metempsychosis entertainment’ by reference to its source in Lucian. But then he moves to a wider consideration of the play. ‘Volpone is Jonson’s last experiment in poetic justice . . . As his powers of realistic depiction came into play, he gradually relinquished his loudly proclaimed moral purpose’ (238–9). Metempsychosis becomes a metaphor for this critical moment in Jonson’s career: ‘After Volpone, it may be said that Jonson’s genius underwent a metempsychosis of its own and, having died with a stern satirist, was reborn in a genial observer’ (239). Virtually every account of Jonson’s career since then has included a variation on that theme. Many have challenged the idea that he became ‘a genial observer’, accounting for the differences of later plays by reference to changed satiric tactics, or in terms of Jonson’s difficult relationship with the theatrical public; see Greenblatt (1976), Beaurline (1978), D. Duncan (1979), J. G. Sweeney (1985), and R. C. Jones (1986). Some (particularly pointing to Volpone in the role of a mountebank as an ironic self-portrait) have argued that Jonson gradually recognized more of himself and his commercial art in the rapacious society he satirized. Others have bluntly suggested that he sold out his earlier ideals when he started his regular masque commissions (1605), becoming in effect the court’s creature, and that this blunted his satirical zeal. But hardly anyone has denied that fundamental change occurred. One feature of it is undeniable. The ‘comicall satyres’ revolved around satirist-figures (Asper, Crites, etc.) who were open to identification with Jonson himself and his ‘moral purpose’. But in Volpone he built his plot around rogues and tricksters who were henceforth the mainstay of his comedies, their chicanery at the heart of his most enduring drama.

On the other hand, whatever change precisely occurred was not fully effected within Volpone itself. It may have lost the smug, carping tone of earlier plays (or at least to have relegated it to the minor role of Peregrine) but its moral fervour is, in some respects, stronger than ever. This is most acute in the ending, where not only are Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino dealt with as harshly as they deserve, but their tormentors suffer even more severely. Mosca is condemned to the galleys and Volpone to the Hospital of the Incurabili, virtual death sentences in both cases. Jonson addresses this in the Epistle: ‘my catastrophe may, in the strict rigour of comic law, meet with censure’ but ‘it was done of industry . . . my special aim being to put the snaffle in their mouths that cry out, “We never punish vice in our interludes”, etc.’. He dubiously claims that he has precedent for this among classics, ‘the goings-out of whose comedies are not always joyful, but oft-times the bawds, the servants, the rivals, yea, and the masters are mulcted; and fitly, it being the office of a comic poet to imitate justice and instruct to life’ (81–92). Just how tongue-in-cheek any of this may be has been a matter of some debate: see Enright (1957), S. L. Goldberg (1959), J. Miller (1966), Creaser (1975), Gertmenian (1976), and Hurd (1983).

The issues can hardly be divorced from the dark nature of Volpone and Mosca’s enterprise itself. As Levin recognized, ‘If folly and roguery are the two staples of Jonsonian comedy, then the follies of Volpone are too sinister’ (1943, 239). They hover around the hope or expectation of death, with a morbidity beyond the scope of what we conventionally expect of moral satire. The play plumbs depths of behaviour that we hardly recognize as human to begin with. This relates to the beast-fable format of the play. It was a truism of Christian humanism that man was half-angel, half-beast, capable of wisdom, but commonly diverted from it by his animal instincts. And satire would mock those lapses. This is the theme of much criticism of Volpone during the mid-twentieth century, from Knights (1937) through E. B. Partridge (1958) to Dessen (1964b, 1971), Parfitt (1976), and beyond. These critics implicitly take Jonson at his humanist word in the Epistle and the Preface, where he variously promises to ‘inform men in the best reason of living’ and ‘to mix profit with your pleasure’. Partridge is typical when he observes how Jonson exposes the ways ‘men capable of reason reduce themselves to an animal level by selfishness’ (1958, 82–3). Yet in Volpone the equation has been pushed to an extreme. The characters all behave (barring Celia and Bonario) like animals all the time. It is far from clear what satire can do about this. As one reviewer observed of Tyrone Guthrie’s 1968 production, which heavily stressed the animal nature of the characters: ‘it is difficult to condemn real vultures for behaving like vultures’ (quoted in Shaughnessy, 2002, 46).

This dilemma seems to work its way through the play, finally generating the unsentimental severity of the ending, in which every man/creature gets exactly what he deserves, with no expectation that he will become a better person for it or that the audience will learn how to make the world a better place. That Jonson denies us the comfort of a romantic liaison between Celia and Bonario underscores the play’s unflinching concentration on things as they are, not as they should or might be. Coleridge was (notoriously) the first to lament that Jonson did not contrive to marry them off. Numerous critics since then have attempted to explain their roles: see Hallett (1971a), G. H. Cox (1972), Dean (1976), Ferris (1986), and Andrew (1996).

The fact is that, of all his mature comedies, Volpone most belies Jonson’s promise ‘To sport with human follies, not with crimes’. If it sports, it does so in the spirit of bear-baiting; and while it certainly highlights follies in the mode of Lucian and his imitator, Erasmus (D. Duncan, 1979), it also remorselessly exposes crimes. T. S. Eliot struggled to keep all this within the traditional bounds of comic satire: ‘Satire like Jonson’s is great in the end not by hitting off its object but by creating it’: the moral imagination transcends a simplistic accountancy of punishment and reward (1951, 158–9). Others have defended Volpone as comedy, notably the splendidly iconoclastic William Empson (1968) and Leo Salingar (1977). But Northrop Frye was surely also right in calling the play ‘a kind of comic imitation of a tragedy’, uncomfortable within its self-proposed generic categories and purposes (1957, 165).

As we have seen, two structural issues posed by Volpone have been debated since the late seventeenth century. John Dennis first asked whether the Would-be characters are necessary to the play, being at best tangential to the business of Volpone and Mosca. Jonas Barish addressed this in a seminal article on the play’s double plot (1953), which has been variously responded to by Judd Arnold (1965), Litt (1969), and Leggatt (1997). There is now a wide consensus that the two plots are linked thematically. But strong concerns remain that Sir Pol’s scenes, which never overlap narratively with the plotting of Volpone and Mosca, are an unnecessary distraction in a play which already runs well over three hours in the theatre. In particular, the scene of Sir Pol’s final discomfiture diverts attention from the already complex and protracted ‘catastrophe’. And the significance of tormenting him under the tortoise-shell is lost on modern audiences (see 5.4.0n and 60n).

Dryden first raised a concern about the protracted ‘catastrophe’ itself, which cannot be divorced from the issue of the severity of the ending. He complains that the main action of the play is effectively resolved by the end of Act 4; a separate action has to be forced from it for Act 5. The legacy-hunters have all been shown for what they are, while Volpone and Mosca have barely escaped the exposure which seemed imminent at the end of Act 3. They have, however, ‘gull[ed] the court – And quite divert[ed] the torrent / Upon the innocent’ (5.2.16–17), a balance on which many playwrights would happily have concluded. Moreover, does Volpone’s character change significantly here? He seems to suffer a radical failure of nerve at the start of Act 5, and perhaps manages to continue only by heavy recourse to drink, becoming increasingly reckless as he does so (see 5.1.1–17n. and 11n.). Another obvious question is why Mosca does not agree to settle for half of Volpone’s possessions (see 5.12.69–70), another opportunity to produce something like a conventional New Comedy resolution.

Answers to these questions must in part lie in our understanding of what motivates the two main characters in the first place. Volpone claims to ‘glory / More in the cunning purchase of my wealth / Than in the glad possession’ (1.1.30–2), making the stakes always more psychological than financial. But is he the potent, quasi-Marlovian aspirant that he seems when worshipping his gold, playing Scoto, or attempting to seduce Celia? Or does his role as the dying invalid speak from the start to actual mental/physical weaknesses (which he refuses to recognize in himself) as well as obvious moral ones? Conversely, is Mosca essentially a loyal servant until circumstances confront him with opportunities which he cannot resist? Or is he always frustrated by his subordination to Volpone, always quietly mocking his master’s pretensions and waiting for the moment to demonstrate his own potential? These are the polar interpretative extremes for their characters, and productions have divided between them. Donald Wolfit removed many of the early lines suggesting Mosca’s independent spirit in order to enhance the commanding figure of his own Volpone. Ralph Richardson’s 1952 Volpone, by contrast, cut a rather meek figure, while Anthony Quayle’s Mosca was disturbingly energetic and fly-like.

In some ways the structural issues of the fifth act are easier to resolve with a weaker Volpone and a stronger Mosca. Volpone perhaps never really recovers from Bonario’s puncturing of his dreams of Celia; he spends Act 4 entirely mute, and offstage except when produced in court ‘as impotent’. Mosca is the one who urges that they ‘die like Romans, / Since we have lived like Grecians’ (3.8.14–15), and stirs up new action by suggesting that Voltore deserves to be cozened. Thus perhaps hurt pride generates recklessness in Volpone, while Mosca becomes so intoxicated by his own ability that he cannot settle for half measures. Any final answer to Dryden must recognize that the forces which drive the play into a fifth act are never entirely rational. What is at stake is neither simply roguery nor profit, but a deep spiritual malaise, which the origins of the play help to explain if not define. It is no accident that the last completed action of the play, before Mosca returns to precipitate the endgame, is Voltore’s ‘possession’ by spirits (S. J. Greenblatt, 1986; Dutton, 2005). The mutual betrayal of Volpone and Mosca is the last act in something akin to exorcism.

Volpone remains the most staged of Jonson’s plays, although in the last twenty years more attention has been paid to the revival of less familiar works. At the same time, though widely anthologized and taught, it is no longer as central to Jonsonian scholarship as it was. More critical ink has been spilled over Bartholomew Fair, Epicene, and even the masques, seen as more central to key theoretical debates (Marxist, historicist, and feminist). Jonson himself has been central to studies of the rise of English literary culture, of print and manuscript publication, of censorship, of differing forms of patronage. These have been the subject of the R. Miles (1986), Riggs (1989), and W. D. Kay (1995) biographies, and of many other studies. But Volpone has hardly been central to them, even where its traditional eminence has been recognized.

The emphasis in this edition on the quarto text and the historical forces that helped shape it is an attempt to re-engage with the complex energies of Volpone’s creation. Riggs (1989) notes how the play focuses on perverted patron–client relations, before reading through the play to Jonson’s own psychology at the time. Marchitell (1991) has further explored the perverse psychological energies running through the play. Only Slights (1985) has linked its tensions in any detail to the moment of the Gunpowder Plot. Yet once we perceive those connections, and their ramifications, we can begin to understand why Volpone is not merely a fable about greed. It is about a psychology of power which trades diabolically in men’s souls. Corruption is not merely a personal, social, or economic pathology: it is a spiritual one.