Ben Jonson’s Volpone

1927 Words4 Pages

Ben Jonson’s Volpone is highly occupied with the evolving city setting during the early seventeenth century in London where international trade, migration and commercial commotion played the imperative role to shape and reshape people’s attitude to life. This evolving urban panorama entices moral decay of individuals and corruption in institutions. Fraudulence, deception, covetousness, greed, and selfishness become the means of individual existence in the exceedingly cutthroat money-making society. For the Jonson’s people in the play, vocal supremacy comprises the way of devising plots for deceiving the wealth-maniac. Language performance by the characters has presented a cohesive and lacy development of Volpone that is full of complicated assortment of conspiracies by the fraudsters (Freitas1). Jonson furnishes the mind of audience with a pastiche of microplots artistically embroidered to intensify and heighten the social atmosphere in the play and to embody the seditions of a morally decaying society as well. Individuals are shaped by the social world. There is an close connection between individuals and social structures: the nature of the individual’s relation to the broader social system, the ways in which behavior is influenced by social experiences, the genesis of the individual’s social makeup (Turiel 5). Individuals develop conceptual systems for understanding and transforming the social world. Therefore, the role the materialistic world usually plays upon the individuals; the episodes of changing social status among the community; and individuals’ attitude to perception of morality are considered to analyze in the write-up. During the early seventeenth century the social atmosphere of London was shifting into a new statu... ... middle of paper ... ...on. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004. 142-170. Rpt. In Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 158. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 2 Nov. 2012. Jonson, Ben. Volpone, or The Fox. Ed. Brian Parker. New York: Manchester UP, 1999. Stock, Angela, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein. “Our Scene is London…” Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy. Ed. Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. Sydney, Philip. ‘The Defense of Poesy’, English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Sons, 1909–14. Turiel, E. The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and Convention, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Walker, Hugh. English Satire and Satirists. New York: Octagon Books, 1972.

Open Document