Play: Volpone

Overview

Ben Jonson’s 1606 comedy Volpone is a razor-edged satire set in a stylized Venice where avarice, self-delusion, and theatrical deception drive both plot and character. The title means "the fox", announcing a beast fable beneath a city comedy: almost every principal figure bears an animal name that signals predatory appetite. The play exposes a society willing to contort law, marriage, and friendship for inheritance and gain, while reveling in the ingenuity of its tricksters and the ferocity of its dupes.

Premise and Setting

Volpone, a fabulously wealthy, childless gentleman, begins his day by worshiping his gold as a pagan idol. With his parasite-servant Mosca, the “fly”, he feigns mortal illness to lure legacy hunters who shower him with gifts in the hope of being named heir. Venice functions as a mercantile stage where reputation and justice are bought, traded, and theatrically displayed, and where Jonson’s satire can indict corruption under the guise of cosmopolitan refinement.

Plot

Three suitors orbit Volpone’s sickbed: Voltore the vulture, a smooth advocate; Corbaccio the raven, a decrepit miser; and Corvino the crow, a jealous merchant. Mosca promises each the inheritance, playing their rivalries against one another. Corbaccio is induced to disinherit his virtuous son Bonario to curry favor; Corvino, manipulated into paranoid rage, becomes willing to sacrifice his wife Celia’s honor to secure Volpone’s will.

Volpone’s schemes escalate when, disguised as a mountebank, he sees Celia and becomes infatuated. Mosca turns Corvino’s jealousy into credulity, persuading him that offering Celia to the “dying” Volpone will cure him and assure Corvino’s legacy. Volpone attempts to seduce and then assault her; Bonario intervenes and rescues her. The conspirators rush to court, where Voltore’s eloquence and Mosca’s improvisations nearly turn truth upside down: Bonario and Celia are painted as adulterers and conspirators, while Volpone is sanctified as a victim. The judges wobble under the performance, a portrait of a legal system dazzled by rhetoric and status.

Hubris undoes the plot. Exhilarated by his success, Volpone stages his own death and names Mosca sole heir, intending one final jest. Mosca seizes the opportunity, shuts Volpone out, and begins to claim the estate in earnest. To save his fortune, Volpone drops the disguise and confesses in hopes of exposing Mosca’s fraud. The revelation unravels all deceptions; the court sees how every suitor’s greed enabled the masquerade.

Characters

Volpone is brilliant, sensuous, and amoral, a virtuoso of roleplay who delights in duping those whose vices mirror his own. Mosca is the quicksilver engine of the plot, mastering a social world where information is currency. Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino embody different species of avarice, legalistic, senescent, and possessive. Bonario and Celia stand for uncorrupted virtue, while Sir Politic Would-Be, Lady Would-Be, and the exoticized entertainers around Volpone amplify the play’s theatricality and satire of cosmopolitan pretension.

Themes and Style

Jonson fuses city comedy with moral fable. Greed appears as a social disease that infects institutions and intimate bonds alike. The courtroom scenes expose how language can occlude truth, while the play’s pageants and disguises insist that social life is performance. Animal names, sharp classical structure, and dense, eloquent verse frame a world where wit is dazzling but corrosive.

Outcome and Significance

Justice arrives with public penalties: the legacy-hunters are disgraced, Mosca is harshly punished, Volpone’s fortune is confiscated and redirected to civic use, and Bonario and Celia are vindicated. The ending affirms communal order without erasing the play’s mordant pleasure in cunning and spectacle, leaving a comic masterpiece that balances moral clarity with theatrical exuberance.