About This Book

This book is not a scene- by- scene guide to Volpone. It concentrates on the contexts from which the play emerges, those characteristics of life and thought in early Jacobean England which are reflected in the values and views Ben Jonson brings to the text and affect how a contemporary audience might have responded to it.

The book is for students preparing assignments and examinations for Renaissance literature modules. The marking criteria at any level explicitly or implicitly require that students show a consistently well- developed and consistently detailed understanding of the significance and influence of contexts in which literary texts are written and understood. This means responding to the play in the ways Jonson's audience would have done. The following material will enable you to acquire a surer grasp of this cultural context – the social- political conditions from which the play emerged, the literary profile prevailing when it was written, and its religious- moral dimension. The setting is foreign, but this is merely a literary fashion of the time and is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. It is not a dramatized travel guide to Venice, but a warning to London. Furthermore, since the play was written in an age of faith, when the Bible's teachings and sermons heard in church formed part of every man and woman's mindset, it is vital to recreate those factors, for the actions of the characters will be assessed by Christian criteria. You may not agree with the values of the time or the views propounded in the play, but you do need to understand how belief mediated the possible responses of the audience that watched the play in 1606. A key concept in this book's approach is that Volpone is full of sins, transgressions, boundary crossing and rule breaking in the personal world and in the public and political arenas as well. Alerted to the transgressive behaviour of Mosca, Volpone and the predatory legacy hunters in the opening scenes, an audience member, who would not know the story (as it is largely a fabrication of the author), would expect they be punished.