Volpone and Other Plays (3 page)

                                   Nay, fly me not,
Nor let thy false imagination
That I was bed-rid, make thee think I am so:
Thou shalt not find it. I am, now, as fresh,
As hot, as high, and in as jovial plight
As when, in that so celebrated scene,
At recitation of our comedy,
For entertainment of the great Valois,
I acted young Antinous, and attracted
The eyes and ears of all the ladies present,
T' admire each graceful gesture, note, and footing.

Typically, Volpone here recalls his past triumph as an actor, and the sex-appeal he had for the ladies of the Court, Typically, too, he links himself, in the pun on ‘jovial', with Jove, who metamorphosed himself for so many erotic adventures with earthly maidens. And in the song, which originates in Catullus, Volpone presses Celia with the argument, insidious to traditional moralists, that Time is passing, that the only sin is to be found out, and that they are superior beings:

Cannot
we
delude the eyes
Of a few poor household spies?…
To be taken, to be seen,
These have crimes accounted been.

His dazzling speech beginning ‘Why droops my Celia?' is a speech of temptation. Running through it there is an unchallenged assumption that everyone has a price (‘A diamond would have bought Lollia Paulina'). And when, in the next speech, Volpone depicts their future life together, the sensuality becomes more blatant:

Our drink shall be preparèd gold and amber,
Which we will take until my roof whirl round
With the vertigo; and my dwarf shall dance,
My eunuch sing, my fool make up the antic.

Whilst we, in changèd shapes, act Ovid's tales,
Thou like Europa now, and I like Jove,
Then I like Mars, and thou like Erycine;
So of the rest, till we have quite run through,
And wearied all the fables of the gods.
Then will I have thee in more modern forms,
Attirèd like some sprightly dame of France…
Or some quick Negro, or cold Russian…

The perversity, the artificial stimulation of passion, reminds us (if Mosca is a truthful witness) of the real children of Volpone: the dwarf, the eunuch, the hermaphrodite – the three freaks – and:

                                            Bastards,
Some dozen, or more, that he begot on beggars,
Gypsies, and Jews, and black-moors, when he was drunk.

It reminds us, too, of Nano's song, sung while he impersonated the Mountebank's zany, which vainly promised eternal youth and beauty, and the preservation of the life of the senses. Volpone, the eloquent seducer, fails to move Celia. He resorts to rape. Bonario rushes in, in the nick of time, to save Celia; but Jonson in this play is not much interested in human goodness, and the wronged wife and stalwart young man are minor, unrealized figures in the comedy. Coleridge was not alone in expressing disappointment at this: ‘Bonario and Celia should have been made in some way or other principals in the plot… If it were possible to lessen the paramountcy of Volpone himself, a most delightful comedy might have been produced, by making Celia the ward or niece of Corvino, instead of his wife, and Bonario her lover.'
¹
But there is a sense in which ‘the paramountcy of Volpone'
is
the play; and who would sacrifice the distinctive harsh tone of
Volpone
for yet another ‘most delightful comedy'?

Bonario's intervention momentarily casts Volpone and Mosca down: they even talk of suicide. Soon they start manipulating the changed circumstances to their advantage, and their machinations seem, for a time, likely to triumph. In the end, these over-reachers come tumbling down, but it is not the virtuous Bonario and Celia who prove their undoing, nor the feeble processes of Venetian
law. Volpone's own relish for extemporizing to meet the new complications proves his ruin: for the gleeful experience of watching his clients' discomfiture he feigns his own death, and installs Mosca as his heir. The parasite has learned from the patron; the mutual admiration society is dissolved: they undo each other. The end of the comedy is harsh and punitive: no one 'scapes whipping. And where, in Coleridge's ‘delightful comedy', virtue would triumph and Celia be married at the play's end, the pallid heroine is restored, with her dowry, to her parents.
Volpone
does not end with wedding-bells but with Volpone, the unmasked Fox, speaking the epilogue.

Throughout the comedy Sir Politic Would-be and his Fine Madame play a secondary, never an essential, part. They remain English visitors in a world of Italianate machinations which they never understand. Lady Would-be is merely a
poseuse
, a minor Mrs Malaprop, a figure of fun – the role has been played, broadly and effectively, as a dame part. Sir Politic is something more. In the theatre he emerges as the befuddled Englishman abroad, secure only in his suspicion of foreigners and his own better understanding of how things are organized by the natives. His ludicrous speculative ventures parallel Volpone's successful fleecing of his dupes; and are part of the play's satirical attack upon an irrationally acquisitive, capitalistic society. Sir Pol is a contemporary satirical portrait of the English traveller. He is also, in the play's bestiary, the parrot, chattering away at second hand, and memorable for his bland stupidity and his vague ‘general notions'. Sir Politic has been excellently played by Michael Hordern and by Jonathan Miller, and it is his essential
Englishness
which makes him funny. The Would-be pair are expendable; but to cut them from a performance of the comedy leaves the Italian dupes and manipulators relatively unfocused. They earn their part in the play.

The Alchemist
is a humbler, a more domestic
Volpone
. Once more the characters are men dominated and exploited by others through their own desires to get rich quick. A sucker seems to have been born every minute in Jonson's comic world, and in the Philosopher's Stone, which was supposed to turn base metals into gold,
Jonson found a wonderful correlative for his gulls' selfish and inordinate desire for wealth, influence, and power. It is by holding out to the gulls the prospect of possessing the Stone, that the triumvirate of confidence-tricksters, Face, Subtle, and Dol Common, manipulate them, and win a living. But their world is very different from the rich, remote world of Volpone's Venice. Their environment is Jacobean London, vividly and saltily evoked by Jonson; and where Volpone operated in part for the sheer perverse exhilaration of controlling others, these three uneasy allies are desperate chancers living on their wits. The play opens explosively with Face and Subtle quarrelling, and we are early reminded how near the bread-line Subtle has been used to living. Dol Common and Subtle are the under-dogs of the Elizabedian underworld.

The great
technical
achievement of this comedy is that Jonson was able to compress so much local life, so many special slangs and jargons, within his lively and supple blank verse. The density of the dialogue, the contemporaneity of the comedy to a Jacobean audience, makes
The Alchemist
(like
Bartholomew Fair
) more difficult than
Volpone
for readers and playgoers today. While the theme of human greed and gullibility is universal, the types, the references, the vocabularies are Jacobean. The idiom is often obscure, but the dialogue and the pace of the action are fast, and carry the reader with them. The play moves with classical, almost clockwork precision, each act stepping on the heels of the preceding one, and the action is virtually continuous from (according to the Herford-Simpson edition) 9 a.m., when Dapper calls, until 3 p.m., when Lovewit unexpectedly returns home and the coney-catchers are unmasked and dispersed.
The Alchemist
is, in essence, farcical; but its quality lies in the Jonsonian synthesis of two seemingly irreconcilable elements – farce and intellect.

The structure of
The Alchemist
resembles
Volpone
in that, one by one, the principal dupes are introduced to us as they pay their morning calls. Jonson provides a superb array of types – the upstart clerk, Dapper; the shy little tobacconist, Abel Drugger, whom Garrick delighted to act; the elephantine voluptuary, Sir Epicure Mammon; and the insidious kill-joy Puritans, Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome. Each is governed by self-interest, and each is betrayed into the opportunists' hands by a dream of wealth. Even
the card-sharper, Surly, who seems to embody common sense – rather like those reasonable brothers-in-law in Moliere who show up the obsessions of the Miser or the Imaginary Invalid – ends by trying to make a wealthy match with Dame Pliant. For each Jonson creates an appropriate diction and speech-rhythm: Drugger is shy and halting, the Puritans are sanctimonious, and Subtle has a splendid line in alchemical blarney. Sir Epicure's speeches
sound
almost as seductive, Marlovian, and sumptuous as Volpone's, but they are transparently silly and self-deluding. He is closer to Sir Politic Would-be than to Tamburlaine.

The end of
The Alchemist
is more indulgent than that of
Volpone
. Lovewit, the rightful owner, returns suddenly, and is not really surprised at the uses to which his town house has been put. Dol Common and Subtle make their get-away, none the richer for their ingenious cozenings. Captain Face dwindles again to being Jeremy, the butler, and blandly triumphs by helping his master to a rich wife. He remains the complete opportunist. That he dodges retribution is psychologically right, and reminds the audience that con-men, like the poor, are always with us. Like Flatterie at the end of Sir David Lyndsay's great morality
The Three Estates
, Face goes scot-free; the audience must be wary.

When Sir Tyrone Guthrie directed
The Alchemist
at London's Old Vic in 1962, the play was performed in modern dress. In part this was because the desire for wealth still makes people gullible today, so that the theme of the comedy remains universal. Guthrie gave a further reason in his programme-note: ‘… modern dress gives more point to the frequent disguises and impersonations used by the trio of rogues. In Jacobean dress, who would know when Face was a Captain or a House Servant? Whether Subtle was a Divine or a Doctor?' The point was well taken, and Guthrie's production was fast and farcical and marvellously entertaining, reminding us, perhaps, that of Jonson's three best comedies this one shone longest and brightest on the English stage. But because Jonson used contemporary idiom and place-reference so vividly, some obscurity is nowadays unavoidable, and a director may well want to make cuts. This is not a recent problem. David Garrick's acting version, shortened and with most of the limelight on the Little Tobacconist, had – according to the Jonsonian
stage-historian Robert Gale Noyes – ‘one hundred and fifty four cuts, varying from one line to three pages'
¹
– though not all were made because of obscurity. Two hundred and fifty lines were excised from Sir Epicure Mammon's part, including the one about ‘the swelling unctuous paps of a fat pregnant sow'. The problem the men of the theatre still need to solve – Guthrie no less than Garrick – is how to do justice to Jonson's fusion of farce and intellectual satire. Guthrie certainly did well by Sir Epicure, who emerged in his production as a Jonsonian ‘humour', a monumental caricature, but elsewhere his version, rightly hilarious, missed the moral comment which is implicit in the play's language and structure. Guthrie's
Alchemist
was great fun; Jonson's
Alchemist
is a great comedy. Dryden regarded it as Jonson's highest achievement, although
Volpone
now claims first place. Between them they demonstrate Jonson's variety within the narrow range of satirical comedy.

There remains Jonson's later prose-comedy,
Bartholomew Fair
. When in 1950 the Old Vic Company revived this entertainment on the open stage of the Assembly Hall at Edinburgh and later in London, Mr T. C. Worsley, usually a sympathetic critic, found the play ‘the most crashing old bore'
²
and Mr Kenneth Tynan announced that ‘the play, to stand up, certainly needs crutches'.
³
Part of their dissatisfaction may be attributed to the production by George Devine which, though enjoyable, was insufficiently serious, substituting a riot of false noses and actors laughing at their own stale jokes for Jonson's contemporary realism. The reviewers prompted a critical revaluation of this play. It is, of course, a lesser work than either
Volpone
or
The Alchemist
, although some academic critics rate it more highly.

Bartholomew Fair
is a ‘panoramic' structure, looser and more comprehensive than Jonson's other great comedies. It is a festive entertainment in the literal sense that it dramatizes a popular holiday, and into it Jonson packed a great deal of London life and
London idiom. The first act, which is almost a prologue to the four which follow, is essentially expository. It introduces one segment of the large cast of characters, those people who, though already united through kinship, friendship, business, or Puritanical religious zeal, are really linked by one thing: their desire to go to the Fair. They are presented in ones and twos – an idiosyncratic, well-drawn gallery of types – and the opening act culminates in the entrance of the monstrous, black figure of the Puritan-hypocrite, Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. In the second act we move to the Fair (or rather, in the Elizabethan theatre, the Fair moves to us), where another monstrous, authoritarian figure, Justice Overdo, is disguising himself in order to move, like a good Governor or Magistrate in the Elizabethan drama, unrecognized among the people. But this Justice, so bent on uncovering ‘enormities', learns very little from his experience. The people of the Fair who are introduced in the second act have something in common with the trio in
The Alchemist
– they live by their wits. The prose-pamphlets of Thomas Nashe and others
¹
testify to the Elizabethans' intense interest in the sheer mechanics of roguery, but the moral drift of this festive comedy is that the dupes are no better than the confidence-tricksters and villains. As the comedy progresses, the people of Act One meet and mingle with the folk of the Fair, itself a symbol of the world. There seems little to choose between the fools and the knaves, especially as some of the latter have a touch of the agility and roguish skill of Face, Subtle, and Dol. At the centre of the Fair and of the comedy stands Ursula, the Pig Woman, raucous, sweating, Falstaffian. She seems almost an Earth-Mother figure, but, like the other crooks, she should not be over-romanticized by critics: after all, it is she who, as the unofficial, accommodating lavatory-attendant at the Fair, tries to entice Mistress Littlewit and Mistress Overdo into prostitution.