Volpone ben jonson pdf

Parker comments that the Reynard tradition, like Volpone , is 'a tug-of-war between an anarchic identification with the fox and a satiric condemnation of the evils he represents'.

Volpone slily congratulates himself on not doing what wicked men do! But we cannot believe him, and if we do Mosca's complimentary speech should warn us. What Mosca says is that Volpone does not hurt anyone who is weak and vulnerable; In other words, Volpone is not concerned with how much people give but with whether he has the power to make them hand over their money.

Both Corbaccio and Volpone are similar in that they belie their old age, for their respective ends. This becomes an interesting phenomenon, as it is commonly believed that women are more inclined to conceal their age than men.

The play portrays the subversion of the common social order, as both Corbaccio and Volpone not only belie their old age, but Volpone also disregards the impotence that sets in with old age.

Volpone like Faustus is an over-reacher. Mephistopheles allures Faustus by offering him Helen of Troy and thus arousing in him sensual pleasures. Similarly, Volpone yearns for Celia while Mosca assumes a Mephistophelean role, acting as an accomplice to Volpone by making attempts at overpowering Celia.

Volpone is ready to philander with Lady Would-be Politic, till Mosca inveigles him into seeing Celia, who is young and pretty. Poonam Arora dilates upon this phenomenon as follows: Devdas initially despises Chandramukhi for her sexual promiscuity and refuses her. Chandramukhi falls in love with Devdas precisely because she idealizes his chastity. Celia is also compared to gold by Volpone.

In return, he asks for her surrender. The mobility of Celia, who is young and pretty, is restricted by a chastity belt, whereas, Volpone who is old and impotent wants to win Celia, by tempting her with the wealth he has gotten hold of through deception. Hence Volpone wants to satisfy his male chauvinistic instinct by winning over Celia.

As Leggat further says, 17 Ibid, Volpone thus wants to reinforce his machismo by forcing Celia to yield. He calls her husband, Corvino, a cheat, for the latter offers Celia to Volpone out of sheer greed. Dutton of Columbia University states: A critical review is made of feminist analyses of wife assault, which postulates that patriarchy is a direct cause of wife assault.

A relationship exists between structural patriarchy and wife assault. It is concluded that patriarchy must interact with psychological variables in order to account for the great variation in power-violence data.

It is suggested that some forms of psychopathology lead to some men adopting patriarchal ideology to justify and rationalize their own pathology. His diction abounds with figures of speech to mask the truth.

No woman ever considered him an eligible bachelor, hence he finds an outlet for his lascivious tendencies in philandering with Lady Would-be Politic or Celia. Apparently, the craving for power, and the loss of virility can cause psychological problems in the male psyche. In the Encyclopedia of Psychology, a quotation by Abraham Maslow highlights the drive for power; the quotation is as follows: Beyond the details of air, water, food… Freud laid out five broader layers: the physiological needs, the needs for safety and security, the needs for love and belonging, the needs for esteem, and the need to actualize the self, in that order The progeny that Volpone had been able to beget through his illicit relations with different women further highlight his profile.

They are ineffectual as 'children', handicapped in one way or the other. As Volpone assumes different roles and guises, they also do so, in order to entertain Volpone.

Mosca takes on the two-fold role of a director-writer, who furthers the enactment of the play before Volpone takes upon himself to act. The one thing in which Volpone is adept is role-playing, and he is termed as a consummate actor by critics. Volpone in the last act candidly says that he never hated his disguise as a sick man. This is a kind of masochistic tendency in him. He also argued that the desire for sado-masochism can arise on its own when a man wants to assume the passive female role, with bondage and beating signifying being "castrated or copulated with, or giving birth He is passive, bed-ridden and weak when posing as a sick man and derives pleasure out of this state.

This shows that he would be everything else but himself. This also shows a lack of faith in his ownself. That is why, Volpone after being interrupted upon by Bonario in his wooing of Celia, conveniently sheds his erotic feelings. He feels greater pleasure in cheating and mocking the candidates who throng his house in the hope of getting hold of his legacy.

This is a pleasure which he thinks no woman can provide him. The subplot of the play is significant as it involves an array of minor characters like Sir Politic, Lady Politic and Peregrine. The sub-plot and the main plot are thematically linked. Greed and gullibility are both evident in the sub-plot. Usually the dramaturgy of the Elizabethan age involved sub- plots in which major characters appeared in a new light. In Volpone, the sub-plot introduces new characters.

The judges administer punishments to the malicious characters. Jonson satirizes the social norms. Judges show respect to Mosca, as he finally wins the entire fortune, so much so that one of the judges is ready to marry his daughter to him. On realizing that he is actually a pauper, he is given ruthless punishment. By Andreas H. Jonson always held Camden in veneration, acknowledging that to him he owed,. It is doubtful whether Jonson ever went to either university, though Fuller says that he was "statutably admitted into St.

John's College, Cambridge. Jonson was a large and raw-boned lad; he became by his own account in time exceedingly bulky. In chat with his friend William Drummond of Hawthornden, Jonson told how "in his service in the Low Countries he had, in the face of both the camps, killed an enemy, and taken opima spolia from him;" and how "since his coming to England, being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversary which had hurt him in the arm and whose sword was ten inches longer than his.

Obviously Jonson was brave, combative, and not averse to talking of himself and his doings. In , Jonson returned from abroad penniless. Soon after he married, almost as early and quite as imprudently as Shakespeare. He told Drummond curtly that "his wife was a shrew, yet honest"; for some years he lived apart from her in the household of Lord Albany. Yet two touching epitaphs among Jonson's "Epigrams," "On my first daughter," and "On my first son," attest the warmth of the poet's family affections.

The daughter died in infancy, the son of the plague; another son grew up to manhood little credit to his father whom he survived. We know nothing beyond this of Jonson's domestic life.

How soon Jonson drifted into what we now call grandly "the theatrical profession" we do not know. In , Marlowe made his tragic exit from life, and Greene, Shakespeare's other rival on the popular stage, had preceded Marlowe in an equally miserable death the year before. Shakespeare already had the running to himself. Jonson appears first in the employment of Philip Henslowe, the exploiter of several troupes of players, manager, and father-in-law of the famous actor, Edward Alleyn.

From entries in "Henslowe's Diary," a species of theatrical account book which has been handed down to us, we know that Jonson was connected with the Admiral's men; for he borrowed 4 pounds of Henslowe, July 28, , paying back 3s. From allusions in Dekker's play, "Satiromastix," it appears that Jonson, like Shakespeare, began life as an actor, and that he "ambled in a leather pitch by a play-wagon" taking at one time the part of Hieronimo in Kyd's famous play, "The Spanish Tragedy.

Francis Meres—well known for his "Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets," printed in , and for his mention therein of a dozen plays of Shakespeare by title—accords to Ben Jonson a place as one of "our best in tragedy," a matter of some surprise, as no known tragedy of Jonson from so early a date has come down to us.

That Jonson was at work on tragedy, however, is proved by the entries in Henslowe of at least three tragedies, now lost, in which he had a hand. Returning to the autumn of , an event now happened to sever for a time Jonson's relations with Henslowe.

In a letter to Alleyn, dated September 26 of that year, Henslowe writes: "I have lost one of my company that hurteth me greatly; that is Gabriel [Spencer], for he is slain in Hogsden fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer. It is fair to Jonson to remark however, that his adversary appears to have been a notorious fire-eater who had shortly before killed one Feeke in a similar squabble.

Duelling was a frequent occurrence of the time among gentlemen and the nobility; it was an impudent breach of the peace on the part of a player. This duel is the one which Jonson described years after to Drummond, and for it Jonson was duly arraigned at Old Bailey, tried, and convicted.

He was sent to prison and such goods and chattels as he had "were forfeited. The circumstance that the poet could read and write saved him; and he received only a brand of the letter "T," for Tyburn, on his left thumb. While in jail Jonson became a Roman Catholic; but he returned to the faith of the Church of England a dozen years later. On his release, in disgrace with Henslowe and his former associates, Jonson offered his services as a playwright to Henslowe's rivals, the Lord Chamberlain's company, in which Shakespeare was a prominent shareholder.

A tradition of long standing, though not susceptible of proof in a court of law, narrates that Jonson had submitted the manuscript of "Every Man in His Humour" to the Chamberlain's men and had received from the company a refusal; that Shakespeare called him back, read the play himself, and at once accepted it.

Whether this story is true or not, certain it is that "Every Man in His Humour" was accepted by Shakespeare's company and acted for the first time in , with Shakespeare taking a part. The evidence of this is contained in the list of actors prefixed to the comedy in the folio of Jonson's works, But it is a mistake to infer, because Shakespeare's name stands first in the list of actors and the elder Kno'well first in the dramatis personae, that Shakespeare took that particular part.

The order of a list of Elizabethan players was generally that of their importance or priority as shareholders in the company and seldom if ever corresponded to the list of characters.

This could have been by no means Jonson's earliest comedy, and we have just learned that he was already reputed one of "our best in tragedy. The former play may be described as a comedy modelled on the Latin plays of Plautus. It combines, in fact, situations derived from the "Captivi" and the "Aulularia" of that dramatist. But the pretty story of the beggar-maiden, Rachel, and her suitors, Jonson found, not among the classics, but in the ideals of romantic love which Shakespeare had already popularised on the stage.

Jonson never again produced so fresh and lovable a feminine personage as Rachel, although in other respects "The Case is Altered" is not a conspicuous play, and, save for the satirising of Antony Munday in the person of Antonio Balladino and Gabriel Harvey as well, is perhaps the least characteristic of the comedies of Jonson. As to plot, it tells little more than how an intercepted letter enabled a father to follow his supposedly studious son to London, and there observe his life with the gallants of the time.

The real quality of this comedy is in its personages and in the theory upon which they are conceived. Ben Jonson had theories about poetry and the drama, and he was neither chary in talking of them nor in experimenting with them in his plays. This makes Jonson, like Dryden in his time, and Wordsworth much later, an author to reckon with; particularly when we remember that many of Jonson's notions came for a time definitely to prevail and to modify the whole trend of English poetry.

First of all Jonson was a classicist, that is, he believed in restraint and precedent in art in opposition to the prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance spirit. Jonson believed that there was a professional way of doing things which might be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these examples for the most part among the ancients.

To confine our attention to the drama, Jonson objected to the amateurishness and haphazard nature of many contemporary plays, and set himself to do something different; and the first and most striking thing that he evolved was his conception and practice of the comedy of humours.

As Jonson has been much misrepresented in this matter, let us quote his own words as to "humour. Jonson's comedy of humours, in a word, conceived of stage personages on the basis of a ruling trait or passion a notable simplification of actual life be it observed in passing ; and, placing these typified traits in juxtaposition in their conflict and contrast, struck the spark of comedy.

Downright, as his name indicates, is "a plain squire"; Bobadill's humour is that of the braggart who is incidentally, and with delightfully comic effect, a coward; Brainworm's humour is the finding out of things to the end of fooling everybody: of course he is fooled in the end himself.

Jonson was neither in this, his first great comedy nor in any other play that he wrote , a supine classicist, urging that English drama return to a slavish adherence to classical conditions. He says as to the laws of the old comedy meaning by "laws," such matters as the unities of time and place and the use of chorus : "I see not then, but we should enjoy the same licence, or free power to illustrate and heighten our invention as they [the ancients] did; and not be tied to those strict and regular forms which the niceness of a few, who are nothing but form, would thrust upon us.

Even the word "humour" seems to have been employed in the Jonsonian sense by Chapman before Jonson's use of it. Indeed, the comedy of humours itself is only a heightened variety of the comedy of manners which represents life, viewed at a satirical angle, and is the oldest and most persistent species of comedy in the language.

None the less, Jonson's comedy merited its immediate success and marked out a definite course in which comedy long continued to run. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade "the humour: into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard.

There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour. Despite his many real virtues, if there is one feature more than any other that distinguishes Jonson, it is his arrogance; and to this may be added his self-righteousness, especially under criticism or satire. This play as a fabric of plot is a very slight affair; but as a satirical picture of the manners of the time, proceeding by means of vivid caricature, couched in witty and brilliant dialogue and sustained by that righteous indignation which must lie at the heart of all true satire—as a realisation, in short, of the classical ideal of comedy—there had been nothing like Jonson's comedy since the days of Aristophanes.

The method of personal attack by actual caricature of a person on the stage is almost as old as the drama. Aristophanes so lampooned Euripides in "The Acharnians" and Socrates in "The Clouds," to mention no other examples; and in English drama this kind of thing is alluded to again and again.

What Jonson really did, was to raise the dramatic lampoon to an art, and make out of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of literary pretensions and permanency.

With the arrogant attitude mentioned above and his uncommon eloquence in scorn, vituperation, and invective, it is no wonder that Jonson soon involved himself in literary and even personal quarrels with his fellow-authors.

The circumstances of the origin of this 'poetomachia' are far from clear, and those who have written on the topic, except of late, have not helped to make them clearer.

The origin of the "war" has been referred to satirical references, apparently to Jonson, contained in "The Scourge of Villainy," a satire in regular form after the manner of the ancients by John Marston, a fellow playwright, subsequent friend and collaborator of Jonson's. On the other hand, epigrams of Jonson have been discovered 49, 68, and variously charging "playwright" reasonably identified with Marston with scurrility, cowardice, and plagiarism; though the dates of the epigrams cannot be ascertained with certainty.

Jonson's own statement of the matter to Drummond runs: "He had many quarrels with Marston, beat him, and took his pistol from him, wrote his "Poetaster" on him; the beginning[s] of them were that Marston represented him on the stage. Here at least we are on certain ground; and the principals of the quarrel are known.

As to the personages actually ridiculed in "Every Man Out of His Humour," Carlo Buffone was formerly thought certainly to be Marston, as he was described as "a public, scurrilous, and profane jester," and elsewhere as the "grand scourge or second untruss [that is, satirist], of the time" Joseph Hall being by his own boast the first, and Marston's work being entitled "The Scourge of Villainy".

Apparently we must now prefer for Carlo a notorious character named Charles Chester, of whom gossipy and inaccurate Aubrey relates that he was "a bold impertinent fellow So one time at a tavern Sir Walter Raleigh beats him and seals up his mouth that is his upper and nether beard with hard wax. From him Ben Jonson takes his Carlo Buffone ['i.

We have digressed into detail in this particular case to exemplify the difficulties of criticism in its attempts to identify the allusions in these forgotten quarrels. We are on sounder ground of fact in recording other manifestations of Jonson's enmity.

In "The Case is Altered" there is clear ridicule in the character Antonio Balladino of Anthony Munday, pageant-poet of the city, translator of romances and playwright as well. In "Every Man in His Humour" there is certainly a caricature of Samuel Daniel, accepted poet of the court, sonneteer, and companion of men of fashion. These men held recognised positions to which Jonson felt his talents better entitled him; they were hence to him his natural enemies. It seems almost certain that he pursued both in the personages of his satire through "Every Man Out of His Humour," and "Cynthia's Revels," Daniel under the characters Fastidious Brisk and Hedon, Munday as Puntarvolo and Amorphus; but in these last we venture on quagmire once more.

Jonson's literary rivalry of Daniel is traceable again and again, in the entertainments that welcomed King James on his way to London, in the masques at court, and in the pastoral drama. As to Jonson's personal ambitions with respect to these two men, it is notable that he became, not pageant-poet, but chronologer to the City of London; and that, on the accession of the new king, he came soon to triumph over Daniel as the accepted entertainer of royalty.

It adds to our wonder that this difficult drama should have been acted by the Children of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel, among them Nathaniel Field with whom Jonson read Horace and Martial, and whom he taught later how to make plays. Another of these precocious little actors was Salathiel Pavy, who died before he was thirteen, already famed for taking the parts of old men. Him Jonson immortalised in one of the sweetest of his epitaphs.

An interesting sidelight is this on the character of this redoubtable and rugged satirist, that he should thus have befriended and tenderly remembered these little theatrical waifs, some of whom as we know had been literally kidnapped to be pressed into the service of the theatre and whipped to the conning of their difficult parts.

To the caricature of Daniel and Munday in "Cynthia's Revels" must be added Anaides impudence , here assuredly Marston, and Asotus the prodigal , interpreted as Lodge or, more perilously, Raleigh.

Crites, like Asper-Macilente in "Every Man Out of His Humour," is Jonson's self-complaisant portrait of himself, the just, wholly admirable, and judicious scholar, holding his head high above the pack of the yelping curs of envy and detraction, but careless of their puny attacks on his perfections with only too mindful a neglect. The third and last of the "comical satires" is "Poetaster," acted, once more, by the Children of the Chapel in , and Jonson's only avowed contribution to the fray.

According to the author's own account, this play was written in fifteen weeks on a report that his enemies had entrusted to Dekker the preparation of "Satiromastix, the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet," a dramatic attack upon himself. In this attempt to forestall his enemies Jonson succeeded, and "Poetaster" was an immediate and deserved success. While hardly more closely knit in structure than its earlier companion pieces, "Poetaster" is planned to lead up to the ludicrous final scene in which, after a device borrowed from the "Lexiphanes" of Lucian, the offending poetaster, Marston-Crispinus, is made to throw up the difficult words with which he had overburdened his stomach as well as overlarded his vocabulary.

In the end Crispinus with his fellow, Dekker-Demetrius, is bound over to keep the peace and never thenceforward "malign, traduce, or detract the person or writings of Quintus Horatius Flaccus [Jonson] or any other eminent man transcending you in merit. It was this character, Captain Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "an immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception.

This he hurriedly adapted to include the satirical characters suggested by "Poetaster," and fashioned to convey the satire of his reply. The absurdity of placing Horace in the court of a Norman king is the result. But Dekker's play is not without its palpable hits at the arrogance, the literary pride, and self-righteousness of Jonson-Horace, whose "ningle" or pal, the absurd Asinius Bubo, has recently been shown to figure forth, in all likelihood, Jonson's friend, the poet Drayton.

Slight and hastily adapted as is "Satiromastix," especially in a comparison with the better wrought and more significant satire of "Poetaster," the town awarded the palm to Dekker, not to Jonson; and Jonson gave over in consequence his practice of "comical satire. It may be suspected that much of this furious clatter and give-and-take was pure playing to the gallery. The town was agog with the strife, and on no less an authority than Shakespeare "Hamlet," ii.

Several other plays have been thought to bear a greater or less part in the war of the theatres.